Life In 19x19

I can't believe Moon and JulyZerg didn't make it out of qualifiers for GSL S2 . However, there is a particularly well-known BW pro who did make it past qualifiers to ro64:



You can find a list of all qualified players here: http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmes ... _id=159470

So far IdrA is the only foreigner who's made it through :/.

If you can't wait for Monday to see some humorous Funday Monday entries, the ICCup guys recorded a bunch, and banter included, they're pretty funny.

CSamurai wrote:I'm really getting tired of the league ranking system though.

I gain about 8-10 points for a win. Less if I were out of my bonus pool
I lose 16-20 points for a loss. WHAT THE HELL?
I have to maintain a 2/3 win rate to /maintain/ my rank? What the hell is that?
Can anyone explain this crap to me?

There are some theories out there that this means your hidden MMR (Match Making Rating) is lower than the anchor point for Zero points on the Bronze ladder. There are some Blizzard Blue posts responding to someone in the same situation as you -- stuck at or near Bronze zero, and they called it a bug and said they will create new special Bronze divisions to put people in.

So I guess if you keep losing points and stay near zero, you would get put into a new division where your points would go up more easily.

Blizzard Blue post: http://us.battle.net/sc2/en/forum/topic ... ?page=2#29

yoyoma wrote:

CSamurai wrote:I'm really getting tired of the league ranking system though.

I gain about 8-10 points for a win. Less if I were out of my bonus pool
I lose 16-20 points for a loss. WHAT THE HELL?
I have to maintain a 2/3 win rate to /maintain/ my rank? What the hell is that?
Can anyone explain this crap to me?

There are some theories out there that this means your hidden MMR (Match Making Rating) is lower than the anchor point for Zero points on the Bronze ladder. There are some Blizzard Blue posts responding to someone in the same situation as you -- stuck at or near Bronze zero, and they called it a bug and said they will create new special Bronze divisions to put people in.

So I guess if you keep losing points and stay near zero, you would get put into a new division where your points would go up more easily.

There's an interesting analysis that's pretty heavy on the math (for analyzing a game in this fashion at least ) on the system that you can read here: http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmes ... _id=142211

Also, Tester got eliminated in the qualifiers...I AM DISAPPOINT.

Araban wrote:Also, Tester got eliminated in the qualifiers...I AM DISAPPOINT.

Yeah... It almost seems like there should be some way for the top players to get a guaranteed spot, but I don't know what that would be, since using the top ranked people from the ladder doesn't seem like a very good idea.

Thanks to all who've linked to stuff about the ranking system, I'll try to read that when I'm not at work. We have a filter, blocking me from many 'games' websites, whether they are actual game sites or forums. I can't complain too much, GD and L19 both are unblocked.

Which kinda brings me to my next question.

Given that this is the single most popular Non go related thread, and given that it generates plenty of content during tourneys.. How do the admin feel about having an off topic subforum for SC2/Other Strategy games?
Just a thought.

By the way, good grief, Thors are nasty. I didn't realize, but literally the only way to kill them is to outnumber them with immortals. They hit like seige tanks, and knock void rays out of the sky like flyswatters. I led an entire 70food army of stalkers and void rays to their doom attacking a /pair/ of Thors. Wow. Then I splatted a whole 100 food army against a group of 6 or 7 of them. Sheesh. Note to self: Build more immortals. They're better than I think. (Also, does it seem unfair that phoenixes can destroy Collosi, but not Thors?)

Thors counter most air units pretty hard, and void rays are fragile. Immortals can take them on though, and colossi outrange, outrun and outmaneuver them. Thors also have trouble against hordes of weenie units like zerglings.

CSamurai wrote:Which kinda brings me to my next question.

Given that this is the single most popular Non go related thread, and given that it generates plenty of content during tourneys.. How do the admin feel about having an off topic subforum for SC2/Other Strategy games?
Just a thought.

I disagree with this suggestion. Let this thread go far, and just keep all comments about SC2 in this thread. Simple rules like not to spoil any sort of SC related results, and discussing tournament rounds in spoilers is easy to follow. I dislike the idea of a sub-forum, and we are not that enough people to justify it. A total count of our active members at any given time is around 3-4 I believe. I'd rather just keep things in this thread, until it becomes something like twenty people posting at random times, and each one with a different topic.

You guys forgot the most obvious counter as P - templar feedback.

Feedback, IIRC, does 1 point of damage for each energy drained. Thor has 200 energy, and uh, 450 health? Not exactly a glowing counter on its own, and a mass of thors will likely chew through your templars pretttty quickly.

CSamurai wrote:By the way, good grief, Thors are nasty. I didn't realize, but literally the only way to kill them is to outnumber them with immortals. They hit like seige tanks, and knock void rays out of the sky like flyswatters. I led an entire 70food army of stalkers and void rays to their doom attacking a /pair/ of Thors. Wow. Then I splatted a whole 100 food army against a group of 6 or 7 of them. Sheesh. Note to self: Build more immortals. They're better than I think. (Also, does it seem unfair that phoenixes can destroy Collosi, but not Thors?)

Thors are nasty, but not that nasty... . For instance, I find it unbelievably hard to believe that a 70 supply of stalkers and VRs would get taken out to a pair of Thors, replay or it never happened. Immortals are good yeah, and as Aphelion suggested feedback is great (and I notice a lot of people seem to forget that you can feedback Thors). You need to take advantage of the fact that Thors are slow...and I mean really slow. Chargelots, for instance, can rip apart Thors. And HTs do counter Thors...you need to take into account how much a Thor costs and the supply they take up versus an HT.

Gotta wait till I get home, and review the game myself. I may be recalling incorrectly (I was a little tired when I was playing. Maybe I didn't attack with everything I thought I did, but I swear, if it was much less than 70, and more than 2 thors and some MM ball, I was dreaming). I had 3 void rays when the battle started, and when the 2 thors showed up, I suddenly had 1. It was.. upsetting.

I'm curious about HT counter to Thors. Let's say you have a collection of 6 thors. You build.. 12 hts. You manage to feedback each thor. Now he has 6 thors with more health each than your entire 12 ht group. What next? Run away and hope he doesn't own an SCV? or is this HT counter in addition to a massive amount of immortals?

CSamurai wrote:I'm curious about HT counter to Thors. Let's say you have a collection of 6 thors. You build.. 12 hts. You manage to feedback each thor. Now he has 6 thors with more health each than your entire 12 ht group. What next? Run
away and hope he doesn't own an SCV? or is this HT counter in addition to a massive amount of immortals?

You're not really looking at this from the right perspective, you don't see people going mass HTs against mass Thors for obvious reasons. Furthermore, the HP comparison is not correct either. But even if I were to go along with this, it's not a fair comparison anyways:

6 Thors: 300m, 200g, 6 supply * 6 = 1800m, 1200g, 36 supply
12 HTs: 50m, 150g, 2 supply * 12 = 600m, 1800g, 24 supply

And this is not even taking build order time into consideration. Furthermore, you're also not considering the fact that after you drain the energy from 12 HTs, you can merge them to get 6 Archons with a total shield/HP of 360 * 6 = 2160 vs. 6 feedbacked Thors with a total of (400 - 200) * 6 = 1200, and 2160 >> 1200. But again, this is not a correct comparison because it doesn't take into account things like damage, armor, etc. etc. It's just not that simple.

Araban wrote:

CSamurai wrote:I'm curious about HT counter to Thors. Let's say you have a collection of 6 thors. You build.. 12 hts. You manage to feedback each thor. Now he has 6 thors with more health each than your entire 12 ht group. What next? Run
away and hope he doesn't own an SCV? or is this HT counter in addition to a massive amount of immortals?

You're not really looking at this from the right perspective, you don't see people going mass HTs against mass Thors for obvious reasons. Furthermore, the HP comparison is not correct either. But even if I were to go along with this, it's not a fair comparison anyways:

6 Thors: 300m, 200g, 6 supply * 6 = 1800m, 1200g, 36 supply
12 HTs: 50m, 150g, 2 supply * 12 = 600m, 1800g, 24 supply

And this is not even taking build order time into consideration. Furthermore, you're also not considering the fact that after you drain the energy from 12 HTs, you can merge them to get 6 Archons with a total shield/HP of 360 * 6 = 2160 vs. 6 feedbacked Thors with a total of (400 - 200) * 6 = 1200, and 2160 >> 1200. But again, this is not a correct comparison because it doesn't take into account things like damage, armor, etc. etc. It's just not that simple.

Ok, I'm sorry, I'm being a bit snarky because I didn't get enough sleep. You're right, HP isn't a fair comparison, but 6 half health thors, vs 6 archons alone, assuming none of your hts get splatted doing feedback, it just seems like this counter would be.. pretty tough to execute.

You're right, they're cheaper, and a couple HTs feedbacking the group would have prbably made a decent dent in it, but I wasn't thinking clearly about any of that. I had never really fought a thor before, and I thought my stalkers would, you know, make a dent. They bounced off like rocks on a tank.

I'll try not to be so snarky, but including details about how to use HTs to beat thors, since it's not exactly an easy counter strategy, is better than just saying 'hts counter thors'.

Of course, maybe I'm just too dumb for words at the moment, since I am a bronze player consistantly maintaining about 20 points.

Sadly, this is enough to get me to 34 in my league. Weep for us, the cursed weaklings.

Oddly, I seem to be 'slightly favoured' against /everyone/. I think I've played a couple even games and about 2 games that I was not favoured in, out of my 50 or so games. I'm favoured against people with /much/ better win records, who cheese and stomp me into the ground. I know they do this every game, so I have to assume, their 2/3 win rating would make them slightly favoured.

Does that TL post include how Skill is calculated? I will have to read it when I get home today.

A templar starts with enough energy for 1 feedback, with the energy upgrade normally you only need about 4 templar to feedback 6 thors. The other templars, you can storm the repairing scvs and other parts of the terran army to hell. Templar are gas intensive, meaning you have a lot of minerals for chargelots to clean up.

I am loathe to call things hard counters, but templar certainly look effective on paper, and I have great experience in game with them as well.