GBS
- Thread starter VibeBox
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Aoret
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IIRC, finals at things like PTs and Worlds are played 3/5, but yeah, it is kinda weird that they don't do it at lower levels than that.
That's only because timing and guesswork don't take as long in fighting games. For example, MvC3 matches equate to 1 combo, 1 down. With three characters, good pressure and the occasional lucky hit make for very quick matches. Street Fighter and ArcSys games are slower, but they still take half an hour at most to finish a set of 5. You can't take your time to plan like in Magic. Also, no one wants to watch two control decks play draw-go for more than three hours. Even aggro takes a long time compared to the biggest turtles.
What tournaments go 4/7? The tournaments I know of always do 3/5.
Also, jury duty SUCKS. Five hours of sitting on a church pew watching lawyers ask potential jurors the same questions over and over isn't the way I'd like to spend my day. Well, at least I wasn't chosen...
What tournaments go 4/7? The tournaments I know of always do 3/5.
Also, jury duty SUCKS. Five hours of sitting on a church pew watching lawyers ask potential jurors the same questions over and over isn't the way I'd like to spend my day. Well, at least I wasn't chosen...
I've seen Melee do Bo7 on occasion.
4/7 used to be really common. it became a lot less popular because of cvs2. it stayed common in the south through 09 but eventually the southern scene gave in too. The time concerns were a serious problem in fighting games when you had people entering several tournaments at the same time and if one person was in more than one game and then also in cvs2 grand finals the entire tournament got ran slow and everyone was there until 3am. Magic generally doesn't have simultaneous tournaments, so that's not a concern.
I haven't watched SC2 (edit: starcraft 2 not soul calibur 2) at all, but korean broodwar tournaments used to run 3/5, and the amount of time taken is pretty comparable to magic.
Honestly, I don't think the amount of time taken with absolutely nothing happening matters, look at how popular League of Legends is.
Dom Harvey
Contributor
League of Legends' popularity mystifies me. Shitty game, worse community, yet gets hundreds of thousands of viewers and prize pools that dwarf Magic's (though tbh this is mainly Magic's fault).
CML
Contributor
not to harp on the same points over and over again, but most of the issue with MTG coverage has to do (along with the rest of the game) with a lack of resources allocated to it. i can't speak to league's quality as a game but i'm sure it makes better viewing for a casual spectator than a game of MTG, at the very least. this is no excuse for continuing to employ furfuraceous, pediculous, xanthodontous charlatans like Hagon (should i get onto the PT i will do my best to humiliate him and that pilgarlic fustilugs Menery on camera by pointing out that every other game of this magnitude has hot girls conducting the interview, moving from there onto the ad hominem of your choice) but yeah.
you know how when someone is depressed, he'll just act and think unpleasantly and treating the symptoms only goes so far, but when he stops being depressed, then most everything's alright and you harangue yourself for the hours you wasted attempting to go after what wasn't the real problem? ditto economic depressions. throwing money at MTG wouldn't solve everything, just (i suspect) almost everything.
bw grand finals used to be 4/7 iirc. yellow vs boxer? nal_ra's silly carrier stuff? man those were great. BW was a beautiful game. bo7 is ideal but then they'd have to rent out the convention halls for GPs a little longer. i am certain this is their reason.
here is some good magic commentary. they should hire me and osyp
you know how when someone is depressed, he'll just act and think unpleasantly and treating the symptoms only goes so far, but when he stops being depressed, then most everything's alright and you harangue yourself for the hours you wasted attempting to go after what wasn't the real problem? ditto economic depressions. throwing money at MTG wouldn't solve everything, just (i suspect) almost everything.
bw grand finals used to be 4/7 iirc. yellow vs boxer? nal_ra's silly carrier stuff? man those were great. BW was a beautiful game. bo7 is ideal but then they'd have to rent out the convention halls for GPs a little longer. i am certain this is their reason.
here is some good magic commentary. they should hire me and osyp
CML
Contributor
addendum: i fired up coverage because one of our guys is gonna kill it!! in dublin!! and i was gonna get PUMPED THE FUCK UP but then i immediately muted the circle-jerk that is zac hill's narcissistic gesticulations and rich hagon's sham joviality. poor marshall, he's awfully kind (seen around these parts quite often) but restraining himself from breaking zac's hipster prescriptions over hagon's ronald-mcdonald coiffure must take SUPERHUMAN EFFORT
"girlfriend-friendly" is a term that gets thrown around a lot, but i think "something you wouldn't be totally embarrassed to be seen watching" is a good baseline for mtg coverage to aspire to
edit: everyone retweet and favorite this https://twitter.com/CMLisawesome/status/388581052790210560/photo/1 even though it's kinda lame
"girlfriend-friendly" is a term that gets thrown around a lot, but i think "something you wouldn't be totally embarrassed to be seen watching" is a good baseline for mtg coverage to aspire to
edit: everyone retweet and favorite this https://twitter.com/CMLisawesome/status/388581052790210560/photo/1 even though it's kinda lame
I believe GOMTV still runs Best of 7.
Regardless of all that you said, Magic's biggest flaw as a spectator sport is that it's Magic. When I'm not an active player / follower of the scene, I have no interest whatsoever in the tournaments. Have you ever tried to watch a Limited GP for a set you haven't even read the Visual Spoiler for?
Regardless of all that you said, Magic's biggest flaw as a spectator sport is that it's Magic. When I'm not an active player / follower of the scene, I have no interest whatsoever in the tournaments. Have you ever tried to watch a Limited GP for a set you haven't even read the Visual Spoiler for?
Dom Harvey
Contributor
The official Magic coverage is like an elementary school play. Even the HoF ceremony has a tone of awkward amateurishness.
Let's not forget that the flagship Magic event had no video coverage for the first two days of play until 2012. 2012. Even Grand Prix had video coverage (though this was provided independently by ggslive, which explains why it managed to be more compelling, entertaining, and professional despite costing far less)! Tune into a larger fighting game tournament or any major LoL/DotA/SC2 stream and you'll usually hear competent, engaging commentary; Magic, a cerebral game that attracts a lot of smart and articulate people, somehow gets landed with the likes of Hagon. The sad fact is that they look at the game's commercial success and conclude that they must be 'doing it right' when it comes to all areas of its marketing and delivery, as if MODO/the official website/the commentary are worthy of anything other than shame.
Let's not forget that the flagship Magic event had no video coverage for the first two days of play until 2012. 2012. Even Grand Prix had video coverage (though this was provided independently by ggslive, which explains why it managed to be more compelling, entertaining, and professional despite costing far less)! Tune into a larger fighting game tournament or any major LoL/DotA/SC2 stream and you'll usually hear competent, engaging commentary; Magic, a cerebral game that attracts a lot of smart and articulate people, somehow gets landed with the likes of Hagon. The sad fact is that they look at the game's commercial success and conclude that they must be 'doing it right' when it comes to all areas of its marketing and delivery, as if MODO/the official website/the commentary are worthy of anything other than shame.
Well the fact that there is so much money in the second-hand Magic market means that sites like CFB and SCG (lol, RTL) can do a great job of promoting the game to the hardcore. That's not really true of most other games.
Dom Harvey
Contributor
like, how absurd is it that Cedric Phillips is AT THE EVENT SITE DOING COVERAGE and yet all we'll have to listen to for the weekend is Zac Hill and Rich Hagon...
CML
Contributor
pretty ridic, i agree that the 3p sites do all the work in terms of content and commentary. ceddy p is an absurd character but damned if he isn't good at commentary (even as the readability of SCG content nose-dives, in spite of his being far better at line-edits than lauren 'stupid people go to caltech, too' lee).
the SCG commentary is something to be proud of. that they're able to put on a series of tournaments comparable to the mothership while existing on the secondary market is nothing short of staggering.
edit: the line about the elementary school play made me laugh because a friend once characterized melissa detora's 'writing' as 'reading like a fifth-grader's report on abraham lincoln'
the SCG commentary is something to be proud of. that they're able to put on a series of tournaments comparable to the mothership while existing on the secondary market is nothing short of staggering.
edit: the line about the elementary school play made me laugh because a friend once characterized melissa detora's 'writing' as 'reading like a fifth-grader's report on abraham lincoln'
There's far far far more money thrown at magic events than any fighting game event. Most fighting game events are mostly run out of the community's pocket.
Magic is pretty hard to follow if you don't play, but the same could be said of nearly any other competitive game. People who have obviously 0 idea what is happening onscreen tune in and watch them and I'm not sure what they get out of it other than pretty colors. But maybe pretty colors is all it needs. I don't see the spectator appeal of UMVC3, which is a game I've put hours and hours and hours into playing at or in preparation for tournaments. I have no understanding how someone who doesn't play the game at a tournament level can even follow what's happening. Well, they don't actually. But still they leave happy after watching. I really don't get it.
There's huge group of magic players who watch streams of other games but don't watch magic streams for one reason or another. I don't get this.
edit: you know, the original reason i brought up the 3/5 thing was watching the finals of SCG worchester standard where the UW deck spent game 1 with white cards in hand and only islands, and game 2 with blue cards in hand and only plains. the other deck played solitaire in what was theoretically a losing matchup and it wasnt even a particularly fast game either time. I felt sort of cheated out of a good experience just watching
Magic is pretty hard to follow if you don't play, but the same could be said of nearly any other competitive game. People who have obviously 0 idea what is happening onscreen tune in and watch them and I'm not sure what they get out of it other than pretty colors. But maybe pretty colors is all it needs. I don't see the spectator appeal of UMVC3, which is a game I've put hours and hours and hours into playing at or in preparation for tournaments. I have no understanding how someone who doesn't play the game at a tournament level can even follow what's happening. Well, they don't actually. But still they leave happy after watching. I really don't get it.
There's huge group of magic players who watch streams of other games but don't watch magic streams for one reason or another. I don't get this.
edit: you know, the original reason i brought up the 3/5 thing was watching the finals of SCG worchester standard where the UW deck spent game 1 with white cards in hand and only islands, and game 2 with blue cards in hand and only plains. the other deck played solitaire in what was theoretically a losing matchup and it wasnt even a particularly fast game either time. I felt sort of cheated out of a good experience just watching
CML
Contributor
time to gush about starcraft!
terrific article that captures the feeling of starcraft from an outsider's perspective. i played brood war for nearly a decade, among my scalps were tasteless, artosis, and this fat and quiet kid who also played HS chess in the Seattle area, not as well as he played BW, by the name of iNControl.
i don't think any game will ever be as important to me as that one. the odd thing is i stopped playing SC2 because i just wanted to play MTG when i was playing games. the competitive fire for 1v1s was not there anymore. the worst aspect of SC games is something jason by indirection touches upon in that article, the slippery slope thing, but the tech tree provides a tension with that, as do the ideas of mobility, spatial and resource advantage, the supply cap, a concept the koreans call 'timing' and card players call 'psychology,' and a dozen other dialectics that somehow just work.
original BW's numinous quality -- the game's longevity, lasting until SC2 (which came out five years late in a possibly-failed attempt to do justice to its beautiful predecessor), was astonishing, given how utterly unsuited every other RTS was for competitive play (beyond a very short timeframe, the format would be solved) -- and this includes WC3, of course. my best guess is that it was a miracle; once blizzard realized they'd chanced upon a masterpiece, they clung like hell to it. but could it ever be replicated?
you can also bet on SC2 matches on Pinny if you're not in the Land of the Free. very profitable if you're a decent player who follows the Korean scene, or so i hear.
terrific article that captures the feeling of starcraft from an outsider's perspective. i played brood war for nearly a decade, among my scalps were tasteless, artosis, and this fat and quiet kid who also played HS chess in the Seattle area, not as well as he played BW, by the name of iNControl.
i don't think any game will ever be as important to me as that one. the odd thing is i stopped playing SC2 because i just wanted to play MTG when i was playing games. the competitive fire for 1v1s was not there anymore. the worst aspect of SC games is something jason by indirection touches upon in that article, the slippery slope thing, but the tech tree provides a tension with that, as do the ideas of mobility, spatial and resource advantage, the supply cap, a concept the koreans call 'timing' and card players call 'psychology,' and a dozen other dialectics that somehow just work.
original BW's numinous quality -- the game's longevity, lasting until SC2 (which came out five years late in a possibly-failed attempt to do justice to its beautiful predecessor), was astonishing, given how utterly unsuited every other RTS was for competitive play (beyond a very short timeframe, the format would be solved) -- and this includes WC3, of course. my best guess is that it was a miracle; once blizzard realized they'd chanced upon a masterpiece, they clung like hell to it. but could it ever be replicated?
you can also bet on SC2 matches on Pinny if you're not in the Land of the Free. very profitable if you're a decent player who follows the Korean scene, or so i hear.
I played bw nearly everyday from 2006 pretty much until mid 2008 as my main competitive game. I wasn't very good, on ICCUP the best I ever got and kept was D+, never managed to even peak at C-. I quit because I was frustrated with nobody local wanting to play it and improve. We'd have LANs like once a semester with a starcraft tournament and everyone just 'knew' I was going to win and didn't bother trying. It was really annoying because I wanted to improve instead of just playing against the broodwar equivalents of whatever the kids are saying at fnm about "my standard monoblue mill deck would've won but i didn't draw any creatures" and cry about build orders/netdecks. But the game itself was by far one of my favorite competitive games (despite me being a lot worse at it than I am at fighting games). I didn't like SC2 at all, I don't like a lot of stuff in it. I didn't play it much after the beta though, just played about 10 games in gold league where it placed me, and felt that it didn't have the same magic.
Broodwar is one of the easiest games to process for a spectator. it is very visually clear but it flows at a rate where it is comprehensible for a commentator to explain things without also being a massive borefest. SC2 is similar, but the visual clarity is a slighty worse, for the sake of graphical realism.
The slippery slope effect is bigger in SC2 because large armies/bases are easier to not mess up with, and in my experience makes the game less fun and less entertaining to watch. Although, I like the effect as long as it isn't too much, my two favorite fighting games are MvC2 and 3, and they have some of the strongest slopes of any fighting game (despite any effort capcom tried by putting in xfactor in the 3rd game, it still isn't worth losing a character ever. even the downhill situation from blocking the wrong thing can be very harsh).
But that does allow for moments like this:
btw, have you ever seen competitive WC2? it's like a mini-ZvZ without fliers but with tight wallins. grunts grunts grunts then ogres ogres ogres
its the closest non-SC game to SC I can think of. Though quite a bit less varied.
Broodwar is one of the easiest games to process for a spectator. it is very visually clear but it flows at a rate where it is comprehensible for a commentator to explain things without also being a massive borefest. SC2 is similar, but the visual clarity is a slighty worse, for the sake of graphical realism.
The slippery slope effect is bigger in SC2 because large armies/bases are easier to not mess up with, and in my experience makes the game less fun and less entertaining to watch. Although, I like the effect as long as it isn't too much, my two favorite fighting games are MvC2 and 3, and they have some of the strongest slopes of any fighting game (despite any effort capcom tried by putting in xfactor in the 3rd game, it still isn't worth losing a character ever. even the downhill situation from blocking the wrong thing can be very harsh).
But that does allow for moments like this:
I feel like most of the other RTSes post-BW took the lessons that made it so successful and decided to throw them in the garbage. Before SC2 there was a strongly spoken group of people that seemed to either overlap w/ developers of RTSes or have strong influence with them that were the voice of "BW is just a clickfest with no strategy" "real time STRATEGY not real time TACTICS" "we don't want our game to be about zergrushes and spamming" and so on. It's like reading Sirlin talking about APM, it absolutely shows he just doesn't get whole genre. To me this is the only thing that explains garbage like Supreme Commander and Company of Heroes. I cannot think of a single non-SC2 game that tries to recapture the same kind of gameplay that BW had. Even WC3 was just not at all about the same kinds of things, even though it was closer than those games. I can't imagine what fighting games would be like if designers in the 90s had decided that Street Fighter 2 was a crock of shit instead of mostly copying it over and over and adding a thing for the next person to copy.
btw, have you ever seen competitive WC2? it's like a mini-ZvZ without fliers but with tight wallins. grunts grunts grunts then ogres ogres ogres
its the closest non-SC game to SC I can think of. Though quite a bit less varied.
I think the slippery slope makes SC2 a great game, because people can cock it up at any point in time. At any moment it's possible to blow the entire game. That's pretty exciting.
I played the game for about 6 months, got to Masters League as Protoss then promptly dropped it like a bad habbit.
Sirlin... I must be one of the only people who owns a physical copy of "Playing to Win"
I played the game for about 6 months, got to Masters League as Protoss then promptly dropped it like a bad habbit.
Sirlin... I must be one of the only people who owns a physical copy of "Playing to Win"
He's generally a really smart guy about the stuff he's knowledgeable about, but he has some ideas that are a little bit insane. As far as I remember the stuff in that book is all good though. He's also really awful at taking criticism, he takes constructive criticism as an insult so that's the source of a lot of people's problems with him.
CML
Contributor
the eternal witness -- unearth loop is almost as glorious as the witness / reveillark thing
ano -- let's type some more stuff, i'm obsessed with the connection between games (having played all the best ones, or so i tell myself!) and i'm guessing it's a topic dear to you too, as well as jason. (wadds, feel free to take any or all of this for the front page if you like)
SC2 comments -- i came away from SC2 with the understanding that army composition was somewhat more important than in SC (due to less micro, in part) but the 'counters' or 'checks and balances' system seemed at once more artificial and less cut-and-dry. I stopped playing bw in, uhhh, late 2007, so i could ask a bunch of dumb questions about what happened between then and the 'death' of the game but i'll content myself with one: did the mutalisk micro thing make it impossible to go scourge after ling in ZvZ? -- beyond that i should have preferred sc2, as strong macro was my one asset as a competitive BW player (aside from hyper-acute 'timing' that earned the admiring epithet 'maphacker,' when, in fact, i was playing on a macintosh), but i ended up feeling the same way as you did. that's part of why i say BW was a miracle.
now i suppose all of you are wondering how i got this nice eMac as a whiny tween mathlete dork. so you get more reminiscing!! i had this 'friend' who wanted to be, quite desperately and in vain, as cool as my best friend and me. every saturday he would call my friend's house, inducing dread when the caller ID was discerned, to invite himself over in a way that almost demands the adjective 'aspie.' neither of us liked this, but at that age especially one tends to accept that kind of thing as naturally as getting up way too early and being pissy and tired all the time, as either a middle-schooler or MTG grinder. one weekend we don't get the call and note with relief and pleasure the other kid's absence. at school the next day he shows up with a massive band-aid over his stomach; apparently his bicycle, which is in my humble only a reasonable alternative to a car when you're 14, had been mirror'ed by a passing truck. the end result was injuries that were inconsequential enough that he was fine, but frightening and gruesome enough that (we hypothesize) his parents forbade him from re-creating his ludicrous stunt. i remember feeling like a prick when i realized how perfect circumstances had worked out in my favor, but this was still a net pleasure, of course. the metagame exists, kids!
that kid and my best friend, having respectively parents of wealthier and more negligent character, were able to purchase WC3 and play it immediately; my red iMac, which was to be fair a massive upgrade from the psychiatric-problem-laden 486, was not equal to the task, and thus it was necessary for 14-yo CML to blubber his way into a new processor. when i got the game, i quickly became as addicted as i had been to brood war, having less taste then i do now, but the ulterior motive was to rip that kid a new one. he still does little but condescend to people while smirking in an insufferable, childish way (he's a physics phd student, too, something which one imagines he's quite good at) so envisage him as you would the creator of XKCD and you can't be too far off -- you won't even have to sprain your brain too hard to turn him into a rising HS freshman, informing me with the annoying relentlessness of a Melee partisan's combo that i sucked, was terrible, etc. one afternoon i throw down the gauntlet on AIM, and he snap-accepts; and so it occurred that we were playing UD vs UD (though i'd later pioneer the AoW strategy with NE, and ascend to the lofty, pointless heights of 17th on the USEast latter while doing so) on that stupid fucking big map with enough bridges and creeps to make a PTQ look both easily accessible and psychologically rich. it's giving me pleasure now to imagine what was going through his head both prior to and during the game, but all i knew then was that he had made a lich, which was then the crappiest hero by far, and that it proved pretty easy to surround that lich and kill it. the next day he refused to bow down at school, so i waited until that summer, impersonated a girl who had gone to our MS / left only for 9th grade, got him to say a bunch of hilarious stuff on AIM, then printed it out and passed it around the school. it was utterly reprehensible and yet i am proud of it and not all that into pretending i find jokes of that type anything but magnificent, so long as they're on me sometimes.
ahhhhh good times
addendum: i now remember the reason i typed out this story. this kid was, contemporaneous with the era of starcraft, a vocal advocate of games like TotalAnnihilation Abortion 'because it had more units' or something. people like that are idiots. that memory makes me even prouder of my (literally) sophomoric prank.
addendum #2: the whole debate over the DQ is making me want to claw my eyes out, but what has been seen can't be unseen, right Dom?
ano -- let's type some more stuff, i'm obsessed with the connection between games (having played all the best ones, or so i tell myself!) and i'm guessing it's a topic dear to you too, as well as jason. (wadds, feel free to take any or all of this for the front page if you like)
SC2 comments -- i came away from SC2 with the understanding that army composition was somewhat more important than in SC (due to less micro, in part) but the 'counters' or 'checks and balances' system seemed at once more artificial and less cut-and-dry. I stopped playing bw in, uhhh, late 2007, so i could ask a bunch of dumb questions about what happened between then and the 'death' of the game but i'll content myself with one: did the mutalisk micro thing make it impossible to go scourge after ling in ZvZ? -- beyond that i should have preferred sc2, as strong macro was my one asset as a competitive BW player (aside from hyper-acute 'timing' that earned the admiring epithet 'maphacker,' when, in fact, i was playing on a macintosh), but i ended up feeling the same way as you did. that's part of why i say BW was a miracle.
now i suppose all of you are wondering how i got this nice eMac as a whiny tween mathlete dork. so you get more reminiscing!! i had this 'friend' who wanted to be, quite desperately and in vain, as cool as my best friend and me. every saturday he would call my friend's house, inducing dread when the caller ID was discerned, to invite himself over in a way that almost demands the adjective 'aspie.' neither of us liked this, but at that age especially one tends to accept that kind of thing as naturally as getting up way too early and being pissy and tired all the time, as either a middle-schooler or MTG grinder. one weekend we don't get the call and note with relief and pleasure the other kid's absence. at school the next day he shows up with a massive band-aid over his stomach; apparently his bicycle, which is in my humble only a reasonable alternative to a car when you're 14, had been mirror'ed by a passing truck. the end result was injuries that were inconsequential enough that he was fine, but frightening and gruesome enough that (we hypothesize) his parents forbade him from re-creating his ludicrous stunt. i remember feeling like a prick when i realized how perfect circumstances had worked out in my favor, but this was still a net pleasure, of course. the metagame exists, kids!
that kid and my best friend, having respectively parents of wealthier and more negligent character, were able to purchase WC3 and play it immediately; my red iMac, which was to be fair a massive upgrade from the psychiatric-problem-laden 486, was not equal to the task, and thus it was necessary for 14-yo CML to blubber his way into a new processor. when i got the game, i quickly became as addicted as i had been to brood war, having less taste then i do now, but the ulterior motive was to rip that kid a new one. he still does little but condescend to people while smirking in an insufferable, childish way (he's a physics phd student, too, something which one imagines he's quite good at) so envisage him as you would the creator of XKCD and you can't be too far off -- you won't even have to sprain your brain too hard to turn him into a rising HS freshman, informing me with the annoying relentlessness of a Melee partisan's combo that i sucked, was terrible, etc. one afternoon i throw down the gauntlet on AIM, and he snap-accepts; and so it occurred that we were playing UD vs UD (though i'd later pioneer the AoW strategy with NE, and ascend to the lofty, pointless heights of 17th on the USEast latter while doing so) on that stupid fucking big map with enough bridges and creeps to make a PTQ look both easily accessible and psychologically rich. it's giving me pleasure now to imagine what was going through his head both prior to and during the game, but all i knew then was that he had made a lich, which was then the crappiest hero by far, and that it proved pretty easy to surround that lich and kill it. the next day he refused to bow down at school, so i waited until that summer, impersonated a girl who had gone to our MS / left only for 9th grade, got him to say a bunch of hilarious stuff on AIM, then printed it out and passed it around the school. it was utterly reprehensible and yet i am proud of it and not all that into pretending i find jokes of that type anything but magnificent, so long as they're on me sometimes.
ahhhhh good times
addendum: i now remember the reason i typed out this story. this kid was, contemporaneous with the era of starcraft, a vocal advocate of games like Total
addendum #2: the whole debate over the DQ is making me want to claw my eyes out, but what has been seen can't be unseen, right Dom?
Dom Harvey
Contributor
...eh?
I tuned out when you mocked TA and thereby undermined my entire childhood and existence
I tuned out when you mocked TA and thereby undermined my entire childhood and existence
total annihilation was really fun to mess around in, but to my admittedly limited understanding, as a competitive game it has approximately like 5 practical units. the main one being the flash tank.
loved messing around with that game as a kid, and while it was a worse game than starcraft it was a whole lot better than the rts games that came after that time period.
I played it at the LANs I mentioned too. They tried a ton of different RTSes try to force me, the "spammer" starcraft player, to use "real strategy". I crushed them anyway. In TA, the last straw for them was I did that hilarious gimmick where you rush to a transport aircraft and use it to pick up their commander (who creates a nuke-sized explosion if he dies). It was a 3 player game on an island map. So I took opponent A's commander and self-destructed him over opponent B's commander, ending the game.
This reminds me, I've never played Tiberian Sun in multiplayer but this videolooks a lot cooler than I expected:
the mk2 + air transport thingy looks very much like reaver + shuttle
I suspect the biggest reason I sucked at the game was that I didn't know how to practice smart, just practice a lot. I didn't really have anyone to teach me though other than replays, and my online friends who were at best C- iccup players. To those of you that weren't familiar with these ranks, that means that they were basically bottom of the barrel and I was somewhere under the barrel. Their advice was very unhelpful like "practice micro" and "keep your apm up". Not like how it was learning fighting games from a very good players where there were specific statements about "when you do thing X you're doing aspect Y horribly wrong". Much rather have local players who also are trying to improve so you can point out unobvious errors in each other's play.
side story about unhelpful advice:
I played competitive Soldat, weird little 2d shooter that was really great before patches sort of ruined the balance and the fun of the game (patched out fun bugs, changed things for 'realism', nerfed things that were already bad because of scrubs crying). I was in one of the best competitive clans for that game's tiny scene. So shooter prediction and knowing item respawn times and controlling the map were things that I understood and came natural to me. 3D shooter movement and aiming didn't come natural.
When Quake Live was coming out, I hadn't ever played competitive Quake, but I was in the beta somehow or another (don't remember if it was public or invites). At first I played against bots to figure out the maps and get a feel for the weapons and respawn times and whatnot. In my approximately 2nd game against humans, I played against Zero4. I found out later he is one of the top level players in the world. The score was something like 35 to -5, he managed to get me to kill myself with splash damage a few times if I remember right. The round started and I went to the closest important item, and he was already there with a rocket launcher.
I felt pretty similar to the first time I played BW on ICCUP or fighting games against a tournament player. So I typed "GG" and he tells me "GG". I guess he felt like he should be helpful, so he tells me something to the effect of "you have to know when the items spawn and where". That made me feel bad that it seemed to him like I didn't even know that much. I thanked him anyway even though that wasn't even close to any of the quadrillion reasons why he demolished me. Well intentioned, I guess.
re: addendum #2: not familiar with the DQ debate other than some guy was accidentally had 8 cards in his opener or something which sounds like the rules cover that and they followed the rules which have to be enforced regardless of intent. didn't realize there was a debate.
loved messing around with that game as a kid, and while it was a worse game than starcraft it was a whole lot better than the rts games that came after that time period.
I played it at the LANs I mentioned too. They tried a ton of different RTSes try to force me, the "spammer" starcraft player, to use "real strategy". I crushed them anyway. In TA, the last straw for them was I did that hilarious gimmick where you rush to a transport aircraft and use it to pick up their commander (who creates a nuke-sized explosion if he dies). It was a 3 player game on an island map. So I took opponent A's commander and self-destructed him over opponent B's commander, ending the game.
This reminds me, I've never played Tiberian Sun in multiplayer but this videolooks a lot cooler than I expected:
bw stuff: ZvZ scourge were worse last I checked but were still very viable. but I played Terran so I could be off here. you know, I missed some stuff near the very end. Some really strange things started happening near the end after I quit, my friend was claiming to me that hydra/ling vs mech terran became really common in 2010 for some very bizarre reason. Had to be weird maps or something, I have no idea. Or maybe I got horribly trolled. Wraiths became a strategy vs Zerg too allegedly. Well I definitely do remember the 'fantasy build' on Medusa (always hated this map tvp) where you get mine vultures in a dropship and poop mines onto their larva to ruin the larva timing for mutas. I dunno. He did send me some vids at the time though. ahh, I had one favorited on youtube but I guess it got deleted or something, did find this related thing:
I suspect the biggest reason I sucked at the game was that I didn't know how to practice smart, just practice a lot. I didn't really have anyone to teach me though other than replays, and my online friends who were at best C- iccup players. To those of you that weren't familiar with these ranks, that means that they were basically bottom of the barrel and I was somewhere under the barrel. Their advice was very unhelpful like "practice micro" and "keep your apm up". Not like how it was learning fighting games from a very good players where there were specific statements about "when you do thing X you're doing aspect Y horribly wrong". Much rather have local players who also are trying to improve so you can point out unobvious errors in each other's play.
side story about unhelpful advice:
I played competitive Soldat, weird little 2d shooter that was really great before patches sort of ruined the balance and the fun of the game (patched out fun bugs, changed things for 'realism', nerfed things that were already bad because of scrubs crying). I was in one of the best competitive clans for that game's tiny scene. So shooter prediction and knowing item respawn times and controlling the map were things that I understood and came natural to me. 3D shooter movement and aiming didn't come natural.
When Quake Live was coming out, I hadn't ever played competitive Quake, but I was in the beta somehow or another (don't remember if it was public or invites). At first I played against bots to figure out the maps and get a feel for the weapons and respawn times and whatnot. In my approximately 2nd game against humans, I played against Zero4. I found out later he is one of the top level players in the world. The score was something like 35 to -5, he managed to get me to kill myself with splash damage a few times if I remember right. The round started and I went to the closest important item, and he was already there with a rocket launcher.
I felt pretty similar to the first time I played BW on ICCUP or fighting games against a tournament player. So I typed "GG" and he tells me "GG". I guess he felt like he should be helpful, so he tells me something to the effect of "you have to know when the items spawn and where". That made me feel bad that it seemed to him like I didn't even know that much. I thanked him anyway even though that wasn't even close to any of the quadrillion reasons why he demolished me. Well intentioned, I guess.
re: addendum #2: not familiar with the DQ debate other than some guy was accidentally had 8 cards in his opener or something which sounds like the rules cover that and they followed the rules which have to be enforced regardless of intent. didn't realize there was a debate.
Hahahah we used to cube with echo tracer, but it was always on the fence. You'd be happy you had it, but everyone always just referred to it as bad trick, and that was when combat damage stacked.