Posted by Rondrian @ 14:59 CST, 25 February 2010 - iMsg
Today ESL TV hosted the first ever StarCarft 2 Beta tournament. It was a small four player tournament, each match best of three and double elimination. The ESL was the first company to receive the Blizzard Tournament license to hold such tournaments and broadcast them. So expect many more to come in the following weeks. The tournament featured two StarCraft 1 players and also two Warcraft 3 players.
soz thought i fixed it every time, my keyboard is a bit broken and rt are mixed up from time to time, i never know which letter comes out when i press ir :)
they are decent, and HasuObs was playing live in the studio and commenting on the other games, but it was completely in german. That's why I didn't post a news before, thought the replays are more interesting than german casting.
ESL TV will look into english casters for RTS after Cebit and I'm pretty sure we will see some english SC2 shows pretty soon.
Haven't you heard? GOM aren't be able to do any SC tournaments now because of some monopoly broadcasting rights shit with KeSPA being the money grubbing culprit that they are. Dunno about SC2 though.
new units & abilities are there only for kids & nerdz, or are they really useful ? I mean do they give something interesting to the gameplay (competitive gameplay) ?
Edited by He4rTL3sS at 07:47 CST, 26 February 2010
"- Gameplay is impressively balanced. When it first came out, there were a LOT of complaints, but now that there are working builds, almost every "X IS OP" cry is gone. There are a few units that could use improvement, but there isn't anything that is really overpowered right now. It's actually impressive how balanced this is for a beta. The game itself feels very much like SC, but somewhat different. Overall, the speed of the game feels 25-50% faster than SC. =X"
hehe yeah, already read it. But you know, i would have prefered something like "this newunit is a good replacement for lurker, it's especially good against X, but can easily be contered by Y, and it adds something really interesting to the game, like blablaba"
;D
Edited by He4rTL3sS at 08:52 CST, 27 February 2010
zerg feel a little bit stronger atm, but it's really hard to say, especially with tactics just starting to develope. I think protoss started today to develope anti tactics with phoenix air units supported by some basic ground units, but only time will tell.
Also the beta is going offline in like 2minutes and i guess they will patch some stuff.
yea,tactics just starting to develop,its a fun process to witness ,btw. do you know if a new patch means i have to find the new version of sc2 beta and uninstall the current one? jeez,hope not :)
hm,you might be right,lately i see T fail with medivec + ground ,about zerg ,ye sure david kim has been playin it for 3 years and with out being 1 up on expension its quite hard to win :)
I've seen this in most of the few sc tournaments that use double elimination. I guess two bo5s is considered to take too long, so they just grant the guy in wb a map-win as a head start.
Commentary was bad as per usual with those guys.. They can't stick to a naming theme seemingly (english/german names for the units), their tactical insight is pityful and - even tho they say they each played like 140-160 matches - i doubt any of them has played more than 10 or even bothered to test out all the races and/or units, get some proper info which units counter which, what they cost individually or what you need to build them... Really unprofessional imho... Only positive point I can see about them is that they're talking in german and that <10% of the viewers understand what they're saying so the humiliation is less global.
their badness transcends the mere barrier of language. :-[
i can also appreciate that if you aren't as skilled a player as tasteless/artosis/day9 etcetc, then the casting in general would be trivial and of low quality. in sc1 it was the same story with esl's commentators so i am going on that too. :)
in sc1 their ability as observers wasn't hot at all, they didn't shift f2f3f4 and they didn't use the arrow keys, always scrolling with the mouse making it look messy. they always missed the key timings of various plays where a korean observer or someone like artosis or tasteless wouldn't. as a viewer who can not understand german that's a pretty big deal to me because even if i do have somewhat of a clue, i'm being denied a lot of information because of their inability to observe.
one example of this being some ret idra game some time ago where there were drops going on. i can see it on the minimap! but they are just bumming around in rets main or watching idras stationary army etc.
they both have about 200 games and take has quite a high level, also hasuobs co-commentated, i guess he also has no clue about whatsoever? Of course it's not perfect and yes, they should learn the prizes and english unit names for everything and stick to it, but the game is out one week, so give them sometime, it's not that its like a IEM Finals after one year of sc2.
the last time i played sc was back in '98/99 yet i still love to watch sc vods. go have look at the averatec intel classic seasons at gomtv ( http://www.gomtv.net/videos/ ) for a start.
scbw is at least spectatorfriendly... if you know the game and what unit does what
sc2 with its pumped up gfx is really bad for streams - at least with the quality free streams offer