Random Advantage - Page 9
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ChristianS
United States3126 Posts
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ocoini
648 Posts
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Clear World
125 Posts
Both player have their race hidden at the start of the game. The random player still get their much love of having their race hidden and the player who picks their race starts the game on equal footing. Essentially every match is now random vs random, regardless if the player actually chooses random or not. | ||
ChristianS
United States3126 Posts
On August 21 2015 12:16 jinorazi wrote: i did point out you open differently for every race...including random. at a non competitive level, it doesnt matter how you open to be honest. i do stupid shit all the time and still win and im sure many others do the same. if you really want to point out the advantage of the first 2 minutes, please do acknowledge that random players by average must be worse players because they have to learn 9 match ups. a player can choose random for whatever reason, even the reason you mentioned. a player can choose protoss so he can dark templar rush all day, a player can pick zerg to 6pool all day. what difference does it make between random and these choices? nothing. i get the feeling you love to theorycraft and think deeply about sc2 strategies. may i recommend that you focus more on mechanics and dont give a single fck about which build order to use? 14cc every game, mass marines every game. sure you may not be doing your best to win, but you're having fun. if that isn't your kind of fun, dont rub that off to other people because different people have different tastes. claiming as if random advantage is some kind of factor in win/loss...this minuscule factor is eliminated upon scouting. if you want to complain about such detail, do so at a pro level's game, not your average joe's. but hey, pros dont random when they care about all the little details...because its more disadvantageous and advantageous. my point: there are optimal builds but it doesnt matter, like at all, nada, nothing, in your average joe's game. First of all: to reiterate, Random is not a race. It's a random number generator. It doesn't have its own units, buildings, or abilities. WC3 has four races. SC has three. Sure you open differently against random, since you're forced to. The point is, if that opening was good against the race you rolled against the race you rolled, you could do it anyway. If it's not, you're behind. I don't know how much you followed things in WoL, but what do you think was the good opening in PvR back then? Yes, everybody messes up a lot. Even professionals mess up a lot. But if I mess up less than my opponent, I should win more for it. It's not true that it doesn't matter how you open – in HotS TvP, at low levels, practically the only thing that matters is how you open, because the majority of games are decided by whether or not you hold the blink all-in or tempest all-in or oracle all-in or gateway all-in, and that is determined by your opening. It's not just a matter of "playing safe" or having good "crisis management." Your build needs to have six marines, a widow mine, or a turret by the time the oracle shows up. You need to have bunkers or tanks or whatever your tactic is to defend the blink all-in; if you don't, you die. If the random players are less skilled players, they should lose like less skilled players. That's what competition is supposed to be – more skilled players beating less skilled players. Then your MMR will shift until you're playing people that are on the same skill level as you, and you won't need to lean on random advantage to win. That random advantage is a factor in wins and losses is obvious from the fact that you're acknowledging the random player is worse at the matchup than their opponent, and yet they're on the same MMR. That means random advantage must be inflating their MMR and compensating for their inexperience in particular matchups. This isn't about my own skill, it's about whether the game is better or worse with random advantage in the game. Making this personal is called ad hominem, and it's nothing more than an attempt to derail the discussion. | ||
ChristianS
United States3126 Posts
On August 21 2015 12:21 ocoini wrote: Yes, It's a compliment You're colorful i meant Or is it Your? I'm always confused by the proper use.. It's "you're," although don't worry yourself too much about it. Thank you, I suppose? I'm not sure what it means. Am I bright and lively? Am I wearing colorful clothing? Or are you using it as a euphemism for vulgar? That one wouldn't be a compliment at all, would it? | ||
ChristianS
United States3126 Posts
On August 21 2015 12:23 Clear World wrote: I purpose a different solution. Both player have their race hidden at the start of the game. The random player still get their much love of having their race hidden and the player who picks their race starts the game on equal footing. Essentially every match is now random vs random, regardless if the player actually chooses random or not. This hasn't been discussed much, but I did include it in the poll in the OP. It doesn't have the issue of players not starting on equal footing, so I don't object hugely to it. My only objection is that ladder games really ought to be able to mirror the games people see on the pro scene, and a system like that can't work in the pro scene. So if Innovation brings out some sweet TvP build and people wanna copy it, they can't do it on ladder because unlike Innovation, they don't know their opponent's race at the beginning of the game. | ||
jinorazi
Korea (South)4948 Posts
On August 21 2015 12:32 ChristianS wrote: First of all: to reiterate, Random is not a race. It's a random number generator. It doesn't have its own units, buildings, or abilities. WC3 has four races. SC has three. Sure you open differently against random, since you're forced to. The point is, if that opening was good against the race you rolled against the race you rolled, you could do it anyway. If it's not, you're behind. I don't know how much you followed things in WoL, but what do you think was the good opening in PvR back then? Yes, everybody messes up a lot. Even professionals mess up a lot. But if I mess up less than my opponent, I should win more for it. It's not true that it doesn't matter how you open – in HotS TvP, at low levels, practically the only thing that matters is how you open, because the majority of games are decided by whether or not you hold the blink all-in or tempest all-in or oracle all-in or gateway all-in, and that is determined by your opening. It's not just a matter of "playing safe" or having good "crisis management." Your build needs to have six marines, a widow mine, or a turret by the time the oracle shows up. You need to have bunkers or tanks or whatever your tactic is to defend the blink all-in; if you don't, you die. If the random players are less skilled players, they should lose like less skilled players. That's what competition is supposed to be – more skilled players beating less skilled players. Then your MMR will shift until you're playing people that are on the same skill level as you, and you won't need to lean on random advantage to win. That random advantage is a factor in wins and losses is obvious from the fact that you're acknowledging the random player is worse at the matchup than their opponent, and yet they're on the same MMR. That means random advantage must be inflating their MMR and compensating for their inexperience in particular matchups. This isn't about my own skill, it's about whether the game is better or worse with random advantage in the game. Making this personal is called ad hominem, and it's nothing more than an attempt to derail the discussion. to note, i wasnt attacking you, "you" was just a generalization. opening is important to all-ins...sigh. where are the details between the "opening" and the "all-in"? you open one way or another, you have to but after scouting you do what you have to do. you talk as if random player has an advantage until the moment of the attack! MMR doesnt care if you pick a race or not, if you lose to a random player, that random player was better than you in that game, or some lucky BO, and when i say lucky BO, this applies to any race vs race. stop taking random being 4th race so literally, i said its LIKE a 4th race because it does indeed for your opening like any other race. but again, your opening isnt important because you still adapt to whatever your opponent is doing before the "all-in" comes. its like you think protoss will do this, terran will do this, zerg will do this, so i must open with this. this is not the case. | ||
ChristianS
United States3126 Posts
On August 21 2015 12:39 jinorazi wrote: to note, i wasnt attacking you, "you" was just a generalization. opening is important to all-ins...sigh. where are the details between the "opening" and the "all-in"? you open one way or another, you have to but after scouting you do what you do. you talk as if random player has an advantage until the moment of the attack! MMR doesnt care if you pick a race or not, if you lose to a random player, that random player was better than you in that game, or some lucky BO, and when i say lucky BO, this applies to any race vs race. stop taking random being 4th race so literally, i said its LIKE a 4th race because it does indeed for your opening like any other race. but again, your opening isnt important because you still adapt to whatever your opponent is doing before the "all-in" comes. You said, and I quote: i get the feeling you love to theorycraft and think deeply about sc2 strategies. may i recommend that you focus more on mechanics and dont give a single fck about which build order to use? That's making it about me, specifically, not using "you" as a generic pronoun. The opening informs what you do after you scout. If I open 1 rax expand, and then I scout and see he's gonna have an oracle in my mineral line at 5 minutes, I'm probably dead. Therefore I don't open 1 rax expand TvP. If I did for some reason, yes, I would try to "adapt" when I saw his build, but I would be in pretty desperate straits at that point. Strictly speaking, the random player might not have been better. They started at an advantage, and they didn't lose it. In many matchups the advantage is small, so I wouldn't have had to play much better to beat that advantage, but the advantage is there. It's true that MMR doesn't care how they won, but that doesn't mean it was balanced; if Blizzard patched in 22-range marines tomorrow, my MMR would shoot up versus P and Z, but I wouldn't be a more skilled player. I never did get an answer from you: what was the good answer to WoL PvR? in PvZ, they're behind if they don't FFE. In PvP and PvT, they die if they do. | ||
Clear World
125 Posts
On August 21 2015 12:38 ChristianS wrote: This hasn't been discussed much, but I did include it in the poll in the OP. It doesn't have the issue of players not starting on equal footing, so I don't object hugely to it. My only objection is that ladder games really ought to be able to mirror the games people see on the pro scene, and a system like that can't work in the pro scene. So if Innovation brings out some sweet TvP build and people wanna copy it, they can't do it on ladder because unlike Innovation, they don't know their opponent's race at the beginning of the game. I only bring up this because this is proof of how much a 'non-race' random is. As I write, by simply hiding the information, all games essentially becomes random vs random, regardless if a person chooses random or not. That is a fact that you can use in your argument. Secondly, the people who argue for the advantage tends to focus on 'balance' concerns rather than 'design'. The random advantage is not game breaking or overpowered, completely disappearing once they are scouted. But they ignore that the advantage given by choosing random only incentives the player to perform a cheese, hence the issue. That is the only benefit, therefore, the opponent who did not choose random has to play against the cheeses. It's essentially the same in how people refer the Protoss race as a 'All-In' or 'Deathball' race, even though both Terran and Zerg can also perform both 'All-in' or 'Deathball' themselves. The important fact is the advantages that exist and what it promotes. No player has to use the advantages if they don't want to, but as long as they exist, the opponent has to always prepare against it because they don't know what the player will do. And the 'honor-system' is really stupid. It's like asking the Protoss player to not do an 'All-in' or make a 'Deathball', and just see how well that goes. Therefore, it just creates a natural disdain for 'Random Players' since the advantages of choosing random is just performing cheeses. | ||
ChristianS
United States3126 Posts
On August 21 2015 12:51 Clear World wrote: I only bring up this because this is proof of how much a 'non-race' random is. As I write, by simply hiding the information, all games essentially becomes random vs random, regardless if a person chooses random or not. That is a fact that you can use in your argument. Secondly, the people who argue for the advantage tends to focus on 'balance' concerns rather than 'design'. The random advantage is not game breaking or overpowered, but they ignore that the advantage given by choosing random only incentives the player to perform a cheese. That is the only benefit, therefore, the opponent who did not choose random has to play against the cheeses. It's essentially the same in how people refer the Protoss race as a 'All-In' or 'Deathball' race, even though both Terran and Zerg can also perform both 'All-in' or 'Deathball' themselves. The important fact is the advantages that exist and what it promotes. No one has to use the advantages, if they don't want to. And the 'honor-system' is really stupid. It's like asking the Protoss player to not do an 'All-in' or make a 'Deathball'. Therefore, it just creates a natural disdain since the advantages of choosing random is just performing cheeses. Ah, I misunderstood. Well I think most players would be pretty upset about it if they took away race information at the beginning of the game, and it'd be worth talking about why. When you don't know your opponent's race, it removes strategy from the game. The whole point of most strategies in Starcraft 2 is to exploit some circumstance in which your race is strong and theirs is weak. That's a big part of why mirror matches are always weird – you don't have different strengths and weaknesses. That means there's not really very clear "timing attacks," since if there's a moment when your army is particularly strong, your opponent's army will be particularly strong at that moment, too. If you go for different compositions or something, then it kind of simulates asymmetric design – mech might have particular timings where it's strong or weak versus bio, because for all intents and purposes, it's almost like the players are playing different races. Without information about what race your opponent is playing, until you have that information, you can't plan on exploiting any particular weakness. Should you go for fast 1-base reactor hellions? Versus Zerg that might be a strong strategy, and it was a common opening in WoL. Versus Terran or Protoss, though, 1-base hellion is shit. Every opening has to have a deviation that's strong versus every race, or else you're accepting a loss if your opponent is that race. So if you cut SCVs for a moment at 10 supply to get a faster gas, instantly build a factory after rax and start a reactor, and then scout your opponent, you'd better have a plan for if your opponent's not Zerg, or else a perfectly good opening is dead. Why is that a good thing? | ||
jinorazi
Korea (South)4948 Posts
On August 21 2015 12:50 ChristianS wrote: You said, and I quote: That's making it about me, specifically, not using "you" as a generic pronoun. The opening informs what you do after you scout. If I open 1 rax expand, and then I scout and see he's gonna have an oracle in my mineral line at 5 minutes, I'm probably dead. Therefore I don't open 1 rax expand TvP. If I did for some reason, yes, I would try to "adapt" when I saw his build, but I would be in pretty desperate straits at that point. Strictly speaking, the random player might not have been better. They started at an advantage, and they didn't lose it. In many matchups the advantage is small, so I wouldn't have had to play much better to beat that advantage, but the advantage is there. It's true that MMR doesn't care how they won, but that doesn't mean it was balanced; if Blizzard patched in 22-range marines tomorrow, my MMR would shoot up versus P and Z, but I wouldn't be a more skilled player. I never did get an answer from you: what was the good answer to WoL PvR? in PvZ, they're behind if they don't FFE. In PvP and PvT, they die if they do. whoa sorry if that looked like an attack to you, i was merely suggesting something that seems to be the opposite of what you'd prefer. you like details, what i suggested did not, it was in suggestion to broaden your perspective: i dislike strict builds, looks like you do. so you would not do 1rax exp against protoss...why would you 1rax exp against random if that matters to you? i personally wouldnt care and would 1rax exp again vR. if you're asking me what i did vs what race, you're asking the wrong person. i honestly dont remember what i did in RvR or PvR, as you can tell, i'm not picky with builds. i'm the type that would open 14cc then move onto next game when i get 6pooled. with that said i probably nexus first or ffe vR in wol. albeit, i play random, i guess this is the type of advantage you speak of? i wouldnt play any different if i picked a race and wouldnt care how opponent react to it. why should your opening matter so much when there are so many variables after it? when i say opening i mean the first couple of buildings, i'd consider expanding in this situation to be greedy. | ||
Pursuit_
United States1329 Posts
On August 21 2015 12:51 Clear World wrote: Secondly, the people who argue for the advantage tends to focus on 'balance' concerns rather than 'design'. The random advantage is not game breaking or overpowered, completely disappearing once they are scouted. But they ignore that the advantage given by choosing random only incentives the player to perform a cheese, hence the issue. That is the only benefit, therefore, the opponent who did not choose random has to play against the cheeses. It's essentially the same in how people refer the Protoss race as a 'All-In' or 'Deathball' race, even though both Terran and Zerg can also perform both 'All-in' or 'Deathball' themselves. The important fact is the advantages that exist and what it promotes. No player has to use the advantages if they don't want to, but as long as they exist, the opponent has to always prepare against it because they don't know what the player will do. And the 'honor-system' is really stupid. It's like asking the Protoss player to not do an 'All-in' or make a 'Deathball', and just see how well that goes. Therefore, it just creates a natural disdain for 'Random Players' since the advantages of choosing random is just performing cheeses. It's actually pretty untrue that the advantage of playing random only incentivizes cheese. A counterexample would be Random Z vs P in WoL, the Protoss player was forced into going gateway expand (since forge wasn't viable vT or vP), so the Random Z could safely hatch first (whereas normal Z couldn't since FFE was the norm). You can also avoid race specific cheese (to an extent) by playing random since your opponent would be taking a huge gamble. Like a Random T v P doesn't need to worry about proxy 1 gate since proxy one gate is really only viable vT, so the opposing P only has a 1/3 chance of it working if they use it. So SCV scout before barracks isn't essential like it would be for a 'Real' T v P. So basically random players can get an advantage from playing greedy or aggressive, and therefor they're disincentivized to play 'safe'. But a lot of people just cheese vs random players, which means playing random usually involves a lot of playing safe anyway. I actually find it pretty hypocritical how many people complain about random players just cheesing as if cheesing is somehting bad, then just cheese vs random players all the time anyway. And again, yes the random player's advantage promotes them to cheese, but everyone also knows random players are more likely to cheese, so they're more likely to scout / play defensive. Having to deviate from your normal build orders isn't a bad thing IMO. | ||
Cascade
Australia5405 Posts
On August 21 2015 02:30 ChristianS wrote: @Cascade: Saying it doesn't affect very many games or that Blizzard should be happy if this is the only issue isn't really an argument against. It's a question that's worth discussing, and if we're going to discuss it, it should be along the lines of "why should this be the way it is, or why should it change?" It shouldn't be along the lines of "well sure it's a problem, but how often does it really matter?" As for the "random players like it" argument: Back in middle school I used to play SSBM quite a bit. My friend's little sister liked playing, but she was a lot worse than me, so we turned on handicap mode. I would hit her a lot more often than she hit me, but her hits would have way more impact so it wound up being a kind of even fight. She liked that mode because it let her compete evenly with people better than her. But it would be horribly contrary to the spirit of competition to bring something like that into, say, a tournament. The player who plays better is supposed to win more often, and when things like racial imbalance or map imbalance get in the way of that, we tend to think those are bad things that should be adjusted. Well ladder, like a tournament, is a competitive venue in which the player that plays better is supposed to win more often, and random advantage changes that. I acknowledge that scouting a random last is annoying. (As is scouting anyone last for that matter.) But it happens rarely, so it is a small problem. Random players presumably like to play random. That is 10% of the players. Changing the way random works will impact many, and can be a larger problem. So that is why I feel that the benefits or removing hidden random (less annoying when you scout last) isn't worth the cost (the decently large fraction of randoms that want their race to stay hidden). Is that clear enough for you? I don't have any personal interest in this as I don't play random and I don't mind playing them, so no win or loss for me either way. There is no discussion that playing random will give you a lower MMR than picking your best race. Even if you play someone in a single game, you will have a smaller chance of winning if you press "random" rather than your best race, unless your three races are extremely similar in skill. There is plenty of data supporting that, sc2ranks and GSL to start with. I am trying my best to give you the benefit of the doubt here, and I try to read your post as if it is not contradicting the previous paragraph. Your comparison with a handicap doesn't hold, as the handicap increases the chance of winning, but playing random doesn't. You are talking about playing random as if they get to have the secret race AND play their main race in every game. So well, if you indeed don't agree with the previous paragraph, I will leave you to your own world, and my part of the discussion ends here. Otherwise, can you please explain a bit better what your point is, without using that analogy that doesn't fit for me. | ||
ChristianS
United States3126 Posts
On August 21 2015 13:16 jinorazi wrote: whoa sorry if that looked like an attack to you, i was merely suggesting something that seems to be the opposite of what you'd prefer. you like details, what i suggested did not, it was in suggestion to broaden your perspective: i dislike strict builds, looks like you do. so you would not do 1rax exp against protoss...why would you 1rax exp against random if that matters to you? i personally wouldnt care and would 1rax exp again vR. if you're asking me what i did vs what race, you're asking the wrong person. i honestly dont remember what i did in RvR or PvR, as you can tell, i'm not picky with builds. i'm the type that would open 14cc then move onto next game when i get 6pooled. with that said i probably nexus first or ffe vR in wol. albeit, i play random, i guess this is the type of advantage you speak of? i wouldnt play any different if i picked a race and wouldnt care how opponent react to it. why should your opening matter so much when there are so many variables after it? Ad hominem just means you're making it about the person instead of the ideas. I didn't take it as an attack, I'm just trying to keep the discussion relevant. If you were opening FFE in PvP in WoL, I can't imagine that went very well for you. For the record, the problem in PvR was that opening gateway, most pros thought it wasn't possible to expand fast enough and safe enough PvZ. So you had to FFE. But Terrans could just kill FFE. And in PvP, if you weren't doing 1-base builds you were doing it wrong. Until the ramp vision change you absolutely had to 4-gate, and even after the change you still couldn't expand. Now maybe your opponents were bad and didn't know how to punish. Or maybe because you were random yourself, you never found yourself on the bad end of that (although you probably at least noticed at the time that when you played random, you tended to get 4-gated a lot). But that situation was broken. The only reason it wasn't a big enough issue to get changed then was because Blizzard didn't care, because random players are so rare that it didn't affect very many games, and none on the top level. The variables after your opening are all affected by your opening. If you opened 2-rax, you can't very well play a macro game. If you opened one gate expand, you couldn't very well try to rush DTs before he got detection. Openings obviously matter in SC2, and a lot of the strategy in the game is modulated by what opening you choose. You seem to be trying to argue that it doesn't matter because there's a lot of other variables that matter, too, but that's kind of beside the point. If someone complains that they got a build order disadvantage because their opponent was playing random, it's not a cogent response to say "yeah, but macroing is important to winning, too!" | ||
jinorazi
Korea (South)4948 Posts
I consider openings vs random no different than disadvantages and advantages caused in regular race picked games as they can vary too depending on how players open. You can't pick cheerypick scenarios argue, same examples can exist in regular games. 2rax to expand? Fe to dt rush before detection? Cmon | ||
ChristianS
United States3126 Posts
Those examples were just to prove that the rest of the game is going to play out differently depending on your opening. The whole point was that those examples are absurd. You can't play a macro game starting with a 2-rax opening, because the opening prevents it. You can't rush tech with a gasless expand because the opening prevents it. Thus your opening is very important in determining how the game plays out. Given that, it seems silly to try and argue that opening doesn't matter that much really. And even if it were true, it doesn't address the original question: why should random players have an advantage in the opening anyway? | ||
BluemoonSC
SoCal8899 Posts
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jinorazi
Korea (South)4948 Posts
lotv really changed that much?? Stop saying advantage, all it does is influence your opening like any other 3 races. And you continue doing whatever it is you need to do after you scout. You're talking around this fact, as if this is unfair, using very specifics situations when the things you say can apply to any race vs race. You dislike the unordinary that doesn't go by each 9 match up standards, I get that and it is knwon. However there is nothing wrong with that; being forced not to go by match up standards. | ||
ChristianS
United States3126 Posts
On August 21 2015 13:27 Cascade wrote: I acknowledge that scouting a random last is annoying. (As is scouting anyone last for that matter.) But it happens rarely, so it is a small problem. Random players presumably like to play random. That is 10% of the players. Changing the way random works will impact many, and can be a larger problem. So that is why I feel that the benefits or removing hidden random (less annoying when you scout last) isn't worth the cost (the decently large fraction of randoms that want their race to stay hidden). Is that clear enough for you? I don't have any personal interest in this as I don't play random and I don't mind playing them, so no win or loss for me either way. There is no discussion that playing random will give you a lower MMR than picking your best race. Even if you play someone in a single game, you will have a smaller chance of winning if you press "random" rather than your best race, unless your three races are extremely similar in skill. There is plenty of data supporting that, sc2ranks and GSL to start with. I am trying my best to give you the benefit of the doubt here, and I try to read your post as if it is not contradicting the previous paragraph. Your comparison with a handicap doesn't hold, as the handicap increases the chance of winning, but playing random doesn't. You are talking about playing random as if they get to have the secret race AND play their main race in every game. So well, if you indeed don't agree with the previous paragraph, I will leave you to your own world, and my part of the discussion ends here. Otherwise, can you please explain a bit better what your point is, without using that analogy that doesn't fit for me. So what's wrong with the following solution: -Give each race on a ladder account a separate MMR -take away random advantage Other than "random players like their advantage," to which the obvious response is "yeah, and their opponents don't," it doesn't seem to create any problems. If you roll Z and you're bad with Z, you'll be playing bad opponents because your Z has a worse MMR. I acknowledge that playing random is harder for the majority of players because they have worse off-races than their main race. The result is that in the average game the random player has less experience in the matchup. But we don't give handicaps to people if they're inexperienced in a matchup for any other reason. Imagine a friend just started playing Starcraft, and they start on ladder. They play three placement matches – one TvZ, one TvP, and one TvT. Then they hit a TvR. You're friend asks you, "hey what the hell, why don't I get to see his race? He gets to see mine, right?" You can respond "well yeah, but since he's playing random he'll have less experience than you in... wait..." The fact is your friend has no advantage in that game, he's just starting off at a disadvantage and he'll have to play better than his opponent just to get on even ground. @BluemoonSC: They can close it if they want. At this point I don't think the discussion is particularly heated or anything, so I don't really see the problem, but if you don't think the discussion is productive any more you don't have to keep contributing. Thanks for your contributions so far, anyway, and sorry again for getting a bit more hostile than I meant to. @Jinorazi: I guess I was unclear. Let me clarify: The 1 rax fe vs. oracle example was just a response to you claiming that openings don't matter very much, particularly on low levels. In TvP the opening determines whether you can defend the numerous cheeses Protoss throws at you, and that's a majority of what happens, at least in my experience coming back to the game and fighting through gold and platinum league. And to be clear, that example was from HotS. Yes, you can scout the Protoss to figure out if he's going oracle, but not until you've already had to decide whether to open gasless or not. To justify the term advantage, I just need to refer you an argument from a while back in the thread. If I queue on ladder and go into a TvT, we're on even ground. If instead I queue on ladder as random, roll T, and get placed in the same TvT, I have an advantage over the previous situation. The game isn't just 'different,' because the only differences are things that hurt him and help me. Do I have to worry about proxy marauder? Nope! Does he? You betcha. As a matter of fact even has to worry about proxy gate and early pool, too, until he scouts. Can I go for a gas first into 1-base banshee build (an extremely standard build in TvT)? Sure! Can he? Not unless he wants to find himself 1-basing against Zerg, which is usually a losing prospect. Maybe the advantage is small in some matchups, but it isn't just 'different play.' I love different play! I like going for crazy builds that throw the game off its tracks and send us in a whole different direction. My standard TvZ for a very long time involved an engi bay hatch block. But throwing someone off their normal play is great if you actually did something to force it, or if something crazy happened and you're both forced off of normal play. But you didn't do anything to throw them off, and you're not equally thrown off. They just start with that disadvantage already in play, and they have to try to make it up somehow. @Pursuit_: It's true, there's a whole mind game that goes into whether or not the random player cheeses. In my experience they still usually just do, because even if you know they're going to do some gimmicky cheese you have to figure out which cheese to defend against. I'm surprised you used WoL PvZ as an example though. Yeah, the Protoss has to go gateway first, and most people think that automatically put him behind. A gateway first expands too slowly to stay competitive in WoL, or else you expand quickly and can't defend it. Z's advantage isn't just getting to go hatch first, that was possible even with FFE (you just had to be good at defending cannon rushes with workers). Z's advantage was that by disallowing his opponent's safe economic opening, he forces his opponent to either play safe and fall behind, or play greedy and risk straight-up dying. He's having to flip a coin, but even if he wins the coin flip he's on even ground, not ahead. If you want to force someone off their standard build order, just do a non-standard build order yourself so they have to react. | ||
Ignorant prodigy
United States385 Posts
+ Show Spoiler + My standard TvZ for a very long time involved an engi bay hatch block. and there we finally have it | ||
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