I think it's great to have changes that make the game more accessible for all levels and types of players. Have you ever been frustrated with how the number people who have discovered go is so small? The only area where go is lacking as a game is in its accessibility to new players. Imagine how many more people would play if the first few games weren't so confusing and the level of difficulty off-putting. Starcraft will never be as elegant as go. But it can attract a wider range of people.

At the top level, the game needs to be well balanced and have a large variety of plausible strategies and styles. I'm not convinced that this patch makes anything worse in this regard. The supply depot change appears to only limit the number of options but I don't think it is going to make too much of a difference. If anything, the patch will skew things slightly towards longer, more macro orientated games which should make games contain more decision making.

How does removing a rax first build entirely add to decision making and options in high level games? Also, macro games != more decision making.

Macro games tend to be longer which means there's more room for decision making.

Thats not true. If anything, it may be untrue. Macro games can just as easily degenerate to a set predetermined path. Look at the current state of BW PvT for example, its hard to argue that the current Terran turtle fest produces more decision making that the 1 base play of earlier years.

This is especially true of the lower levels. Whereas at high level play there is a lot of thinking going on behind the scenes of a long, relatively peaceful game, in lower levels that's more indicative of a a turtle fest where both players are in their comfort zone and with insufficient scouting. Getting in this comfort zone makes games boring. What shorter, cheesier and more micro intensive games lack for in time they make up for in intensity and forcing you to think on the fly.

Yeah, I see your point (though I've no idea about BW).
I think we look at the depot/barracks thing from different perspectives. If it's an indicator that the way Blizzard are going to patch the game is to continually take away more and more options as time goes on then it's obviously a bad thing. I'm hoping that it will just mean the rest of the game will have to become more interesting and exciting to compensate. Maybe I'm too optimistic. I've never played an RTS before so I don't have much idea of how it's likely to change over time. I guess the only thing is to wait and see.

Incidentally, the very popular fast orbital command build (10 rax, 11 depot, 12 orbital) is now dead. It wasn't even a rush build, more of a fast tech build. A great example of high level options being shutdown due to low level players whining about something completely unrelated.

Just came back from the hand surgeon, he told me to wait 3 more weeks for the nerves in my finger to heal fully T__T. Guess I'll have to play more Sentry Scramble (which is an awesome UMS) and team games =/.

I won't even get to play, I'm in Palo Alto for the next 6 weeks and my laptop as well as internet connection are both fail. Playing gets me so frustrated I don't even want to try.

Wow, I wasn't expecting this patch to come so soon. I have to say I was quite alarmed by the Nexus buff and especially the Void Ray changes. It will be interesting to see how VRs are used in the upcoming GSL, because they now seem like they might be a lot better as part of your main army (or maybe worse, it's hard to tell).

Ultimately, though, I'm not too moved by any of these changes. It's still the same game, and I still love playing it.

VRs no longer need to charge on meaningless buildings to be useful, which is awesome. I don't use VRs in my play, but I'm looking forward to seeing how top players use them now since the cheese factor is pretty dulled.

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I think the bigger question now is will Voidrays be useful at all.

Apparently the reason why Zerg buildings and the Nexus were buffed is because the marauder programmer used Intercal and then fled the country.

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KGS 4 kyu - Game Archive - Keyboard Otaku

Holy crap, void rays had a speed buff?

I guess you can tell who never techs anything but their collosus.

Honestly, the damage buff is nice on them, but yeah, the speed drop is a bit of a pain.
EDIT: Just read the patch notes more clearly. Looks like second level took a hit first level got upped, and third level remained untouched? Well. that's.. odd. Now the 2nd level is only really useful against armour, since it only gives the slightest of increases against normal stuff. Blizzard, you're crazy.

On the other hand, I've been on a winning streak ever since the patch, I guess mass stalkers somehow got better.

Still can't beat a 6pool. Anyone want to give me some tips, I'd be all for it, but they can get zerglings over there before my 12gate even finishes building. Maybe I should 10forge against zerg?

Things I've done well in the last day:
Push early. Push again at about 10 minutes. Build a couple collosi or voids depending on your opponent's build in order to have a backup, but push, just to see how they're doing on their build.
Remember to expand: At some point, I have to make cash for it, even if things are tight.

Things I've done poorly:
Don't suicide on the ramp. If your whole unit is stuck humping a pair of stalkers who are sparring with a banshee, back them all up so that they can all get some shots in. It's much better.
I need to remember that things A) have upgrades and B) there are general upgrades like shields that I should invest in in the midgame. I got my butt smashed by a guy who teched his hydralisks up to level 2 while I was spamming out stalkers and vrs.

Remember:
The slower void ray upgrade doesn't hurt your feelings if you never remembered to upgrade them in the first place!

When they say "level 2" they mean fully charged. The first and second stages do the same damage ("level 1"). Apparently in the early Beta it actually had 3 damage levels.

Erf. Ugh. That sucks. I wondered why my VRs were taking so much longer to burn through buildings. Still, the best response I've got for a cannon builder involves early void rays back dooring his pylons.

Well.. I guess I'll.. just.. build.. some.. other air unit? I hear phoenixes are good if you can actually micro, I guess?

ugh.

10 forge is overdoing it. You should be able to fend off a 6-pool with a 12-gate although it can be difficult and micro-intensive. If you're really that concerned, consider 10 pylon 10 gate. If you see the 6-pool, the most important thing is to narrow the choke as much as you can and save chrono-boosting for zealots. Don't be afraid to take probes out of the mineral line, but handle them with care cause the more of them you lose, the closer the (huge) economy gap gets. And with all cheese play, it's vital that you don't panic. If you lose, you lose; don't feel bad about losing to a 6-pool when HuK, Inca, and other top Protoss players have lost to to 6/7-pools as well. Even Flash, greatest BW Terran player in the world, has lost to a 4-pool before.

Also, whatever they did to reorg the matchmaking and points, I've gone from 24 points, and unable to get much farther, to 198 in the course of the day. This is awesome. Of course, I also went on a 10 out of 12 winning streak due to pushing out earlier, but.. hey, I'm now 17 in my league. I'm sure I'll go down if a few more of my league become active again, but it's nice to have a positive point flow even when I lose a game or two.


Link to my failure: what am I doing wrong? They attacked with 6 zerglings before I even had my gateway built. Before I could get a zealot out, they'd destroyed my pylon. Yeah, I panicked a little, because I forgot to build my second pylon as I was pushing out zealots, but I was a bit short on minerals, and when the next 4 zerglings appeared, I didn't have much to deal with them.
I've stopped slower 6 pools before, but this one.. it was just too fast. It doesn't hurt my feelings as much any more, since not many people are doing it, but if protoss just got nerfed, and terrans got nerfed.. soon all the cheap players will be 6pooling since it's the best rush remaining, so I'd better learn to deal with it, right?

You scouted the six pool and there was a large window of time between seeing the zerglings pop out and them getting to your base. In that time you had the minerals to just build a second gateway at your choke completely walling it off. If the zerglings can't get into your base they can't do much. By the time the zerglings break through you should have more than enough zealots to hold them off.

There are some other little things you can do. You can rally your nexus to the empty mineral patches first. You can also send your pylon probe out on around 50 minerals so that you have exactly 100 at the point you want to build it.

CSamurai, a little hint about about dealing with cannons:

Imagine you went pylon, gateway, and opponent went pylon, forge. So far cost is identical. Around the time his forge is half done, you should have scouted him. Perhaps you have your gas up at that point. So you have spent 100 more minerals than him.

Then he throws down 3 cannons. He has spent 350 minerals more than you now, and with no investment in additional tech or production. For that amount, you can almost get a free nexus. And you have gateway and assimilator already built, so your cybernetics core and subsequent tech (stargate, robo, warpgate) will be much faster. And you have a free nexus on top of it. Now just imagine if you mirror whatever he is doing from this point on, just with more. Who wins?

Its just like in Go, you try to make your opponent's stones ineffective. Against a cannon noob, if you render his cannons ineffective, you win

Watching the MLG in DC which is ongoing until the end of this weekend. Pretty sad that fellow Go player Patrick couldn't go very far this time, but there's always a next time. IdrA is in this tournament (flew all the way from Korea) and doing very well, already in the finals and waiting for the winner of the loser's bracket. Not too surprised that he's absolutely ecstatic about the roach buff and he's been using them accordingly. Also, someone posted an image comparing the size of IdrA and fellow EG member iNcontroL when they were getting interviewed that I found hilarious: