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We've finally got a professionally employed English caster. GOMTV is currently running the GOMTV Star Invitational, with sixteen of the best or most influential Starcraft players. On top of that, they are broadcasting a separate ENGLISH stream online with the hopes of capitalizing on the foreign market. Tasteless (the commentator who has done Blizzcon, WWI, and WCG) will be doing solo commentary for the entire tournament, and is in the talks to begin commentating on further tournaments.
I'm posting this hear because GOM is gauging their future actions based on the response and traffic that this project generates from foreign sources. I know some people enjoy casually watching Starcraft, and this is fairly easy way to watch professional games with english commentary.
You can watch the recorded games here: http://gsi.gomtv.com/vod/
When the live games are up, you can watch by clicking the VIEW LIVE link here: http://gsi.gomtv.com/
To see the schedule for the game, you can refer to TeamLiquid's Calendar: http://teamliquid.net/calendar/month_details.php?calendar_year=2008&calendar_month=2#day_19
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I'm super excited for the new competition, the viability of new strategies and how new units and abilities will inject new live into the community.
I (along with most competitive foreigners and all Koreans) am very scared of what it will do to the competitive community. The balance achieved in Starcraft was a fluke, so we can just give up on Starcraft 2 being as balanced. Hoepfully it will be close enough that all races are viable.
The balance team has a pretty good relationship with most Starcraft sites, and they have mentioned that they read teamliquid to gauge reactions from changes. The major problem we have is with MBS (multiple building selection). If you have hours to kill, there's two huge threads on it:
http://teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=62216
http://teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=63848
In Starcraft, you have to select each building individually. To most casual gamers, this seems like a silly UI limitation, especially when newer games allow you to select mulitple buildings and tell them all to make units simultaneously. The thing they are not seeing is the balance between unit control and unit production that this limiation forces. You simply cannot hotkey all your production buildings to hotkeys and have enough left over to hotkey your army. Thus you must make a choice; will you play based on unit production (macro) or unit control (micro)?
This choice isn't evident to lower level gamers. I don't want to sound condescending, but they often play too slowly to have either good macro or good micro. But when a strong player makes the choice, it is evident. SlayerS_`BoxeR` became famous for being able to kill Zergs with simply a Dropship and 7 Marines and a Medic. His micro was so strong that he didn't need troop numbers to win, even against professionals. His one student, ILoveOov, did the exact opposite. He became known as the cheater Terran, because he would lose battle after battle and still have more units than his opponent. So in a medium sized battle, do you spend your time controlling your troops to have a decisive victory, or do you return to your base and produce a new round of troops at the cost of a few more losses in the current battle?
Now back to MBS. If you allow a player to, while looking at his army, press "5 d" and make a Dragoon in every Gateway, you have eliminated macro altogether. Every player will now have professional macro because they don't have to sacrifice anything to achieve it. And you have killed the decision of micro or macro. There is now no excuse not to do both.
Now, the argument is that this allows more time for strategy and better unit control. This is a hard argument to discuss without getting a dialogue going, but I'll basically say that it doesn't. Unit control is about hand speed, not time spent looking at an army. Similarly you aren't going to recognize some huge flaw in your opponents' gameplay but having more time sitting around.
When brought up to the balance team, they didn't udnerstand why MBS could ever be a bad thing. I remember members of teamliquid explaining this argument and them replying "why is that a bad thing?" That truly scares me. The only person who understood it was Pillars, but I believe he is no longer part of that team.
I mean if it comes out and there's no competitive scene, I'll be a little disappointed, but I'll play it awhile and then move on. It will destroy the competitive Starcraft scene, both amatuer and professional, despite how bad it may be. So it will be little sad to see our community die, but there's no other way to keep it together once the sequel is out.
Not sure if anyone will read this, but hey, those are my thoughts.
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