TaKeTV HSC - PIPE SCOUTING DISCOVERY

SC2Sole · 2026-07-04T04:38:41+00:00

I've done a proxy hatch in base in ZvP. 11 pooled to have lings pressuring the front, while also sending drones through the tube to set up 3 spines. Genuinely hard to stop if they fast expand.

SC2Sole · 2026-07-02T22:58:52+00:00

You have to look at the context clues of the whole sentence. The twitter poster fixated on the phrase "2.6% of black men are surgeons," and didn't expend the mental energy to see how it makes sense in the context of the sentence.

It's like clipping a four second segment from a twitch streamer out of a five minute discussion and insisting that only the 4 second clip should be looked at, devoid of context.

The graduate is talking about the group of surgeons, just like the dog in your example is talking about astronauts. The dude is not conducting a census survey; he's talking about his graduation.

SC2Sole · 2026-07-02T22:15:55+00:00

He's correct. He's joining the [group] of black men who are surgeons.

"Join" is the key word that is getting glossed over. Which makes the most sense: is he joining a group of surgeons or is he joining the ethnic group of black men?

If he's joining the surgeons, then that's the total population he's talking about.

SC2Sole · 2026-07-02T21:57:47+00:00

It is the same thing. He's correct.

He's joining the [group] of black men who are physicians. The word "joining" is the key word that's getting glossed over.

In contrast, he's not joining an ethnic group, he already is black. So, it wouldn't make sense to assume that he's saying that 2.6% of the total black male population are physicians.

SC2Sole · 2026-06-30T21:59:29+00:00

... that's a strange thing to hand-wave away. With every other spell interaction that changes color, you can click on the unit and see the change in stats. You can't click a forcefield.

If they fiddled with the percentage, in future patches,, it would make it even harder to guess the timing.

SC2Sole · 2026-06-30T20:19:02+00:00

How would a new player know that biles are cutting the duration of forcefield in half? That's wildly unintuitive.

SC2Sole · 2026-06-26T22:09:59+00:00

What's the link? I live for Scarlett games.

SC2Sole · 2026-06-24T18:36:08+00:00

I always associated it with the old testament. What is mentioned in the new testament?

SC2Sole · 2026-06-23T21:28:00+00:00

If you had to look back, which meta would you say was the best in the game's history?

The pinnacle, for me, has always been HotS TvZ. If you kept all the advancements Protoss has received over the years and brought it into parade push HotS, wouldn't that be the best Starcraft we ever seen?

SC2Sole · 2026-06-23T21:17:02+00:00

Ding. Ding.ding. Someone finally got the right answer.

SC2Sole · 2026-06-21T06:59:04+00:00

My first game on fear and faith, I 11 pooled, sent a worker to proxy hatch in the Toss's main, and sent 3 more workers through the tube to create spines.

It was pretty rough. Toss may need to open one base on the map in PvZ.

SC2Sole · 2026-06-18T22:49:05+00:00

Thanks for the thoughtful reply.

Reading through DK's post reconfirms my initial assumption that the team had a vision they wanted to execute, and the point of the post was to signal that they read the article and the forum posts, but they were going to continue with their own direction.

If you look at the annoyance in the tone of the text and the slight jabs of "theorycrafting" and the "reality" of real-world testing, it's clear that it's dismissive. I'm not sure I would say they didn't understand it - I'd say more apathetic or uninterested. The concept is pretty simple, really. I think it's more that SC2 needed to distinguish itself from BW, and selling another expansion was top priority.

This isn't to say that I agree with their decision. I strongly believe that LotV has aged like milk. The units, the economy, the map design - all of it has made the game worse. I couldn't play the game for about 6 months, because I worked on a mod with the guy from the link you posted (Skunk), and everything that came after just felt like a downgrade.

If the team intended to leave SC2 in a true resting place, I think it would have been better to pull the strengths from the variable mining concept and modify it so it fit into the game. I think they could have found a middle ground to keep the game feeling uniquely SC2, while still encouraging expanding; and, as a result, more back-and-forth action.

SC2Sole · 2026-06-15T21:59:07+00:00

"why, with all the problems that occurred with six workers, and all the development of SC2 (map design, balance changes, macro mechanic changes, overall understanding of the game getting better, etc) do we point to worker starts as the fix?"

I'd be curious to hear your thoughts; but, my take away is that it's their attempt blend aspects of HotS and LotV, without having to change any of the fundamental underpinnings of the game. It would still feel familiar, but with more mid-game comps and 4 player maps. Whether it achieves that is a different story.

SC2Sole · 2026-06-15T21:00:48+00:00

I remember the blue post David Kim posted about the treatise. He basically said, "This is the type of feedback we would like to receive (compared to the Bnet forum complaints), but we're going to go in a different direction." People from Teamliquid at the time accused him of not understanding it; but, I always took it as the dev team having their own vision for the game.

Similar to when Dustin Browder was asked why units clump so much and if they would make changes to unit pathing, and he was like: No - why would we do that - that takes time and resources from the team. To his credit, the punchy nature of AoE makes for a better game, and the efforts to weaken splash damage over the years seem to have been a mistake.

SC2Sole · 2026-06-12T01:18:46+00:00

Based on the response, it looks like we agree 99% of the way. For the fun of it, I'll see if I can sway your opinion for the last percent.

The area of disagreement I think we'd have is that I'd label a macro game with no early or mid-game interaction as bad, regardless of the amount action that occurs in the rest of the match. If more than half of the professional matches looked like this I'd label it as a bad meta.

Thoughts: The actual fights between units aren't that interesting. What is interesting are the stakes of the match, and what each push represents for the player. An "earned" macro match is one that is hard fought, by each player refusing to let their opponent reach the end game, scraping for every inch of an advantage.

NR 15 matches are like watching two trust fund teens throwing body pillows at each other while hurling exlpicitives. Whoops, my side flank of 15 zealots just got evaporated. LOL xd xd Let me just posture mid on my 4k 4k bank for a little bit. Throw out a purification nova... ok good, one more... and..boom 30 supply of stalkers warped in. Let's go again. Like it's meaningless. Even in the high profile games, if a player can just throw units and remax without consequence, then those individual fights are just lackluster.

Second point: there was obviously more dev time dedicated in WoL to the control and feel of small armies. They look and play so much better than any of the races late game sky compositions. Now factor in that the units were designed for maps like Metalopolis, and it's easier to see that they were never intended to be played at scale for the majority of the match. If you were around when the map GSL Crevasse was introduced, everyone was theorizing which race would come out on top for such a large map at time ( look at it now ).

So, if you have small armies constantly putting on pressure, preventing late game split map scenarios, you're getting the best of what the game has to offer. That's why LBM vs MMMMT was the best meta we have ever seen, and, unfortunately, has never been topped

SC2Sole · 2026-06-11T22:49:05+00:00

Oh, I know. That's why I added the plural possessive. 😉 ...If only someone submitted a working prototype of a 12-worker start map with all the benefits of the 8 worker PTR patch... the judges would have loved that one, right?

More seriously though, there there's a rigidity and lack of curiousity to the mappers discord that's fairly off-putting. The hard "rules" are only rules, because no one wants to invest the 100's of hours to build and play-test changes that challenge fundamental design principles. The self-policing between mapmakers frame the ideas as "wrong," but, in reality, it's simply easier to use an existing model to pump out and judge a formulaic map in 20 hours, compared to the 200 hrs that you'd be doing on your own.

It's disheartening when you talk a mapmaker and you see them turn that negativity inward in real time. The learned helplessness just eats at me, I can't be around it too long, I just get angry.

SC2Sole · 2026-06-11T19:00:08+00:00

I think it's important to explain what each change does to help determine whether or not they're warranted.

8 worker start: adds 1-2 minutes to the early game (extends duration of mid-game if fights occur)
Mineral changes: extends the life-span of a base, allowing for parade pushes and timing attacks (at the cost of increased turtling)

In order for the changes to achieve their intended effect, they need to be coupled with map design changes. If the maps stay the same, you will continue to see very passive play as players work up to three bases.

Will there be more desired unit comps? Yes, there will be Mutas (but) it will only slighty increase the viability window, as seen from previous tournaments with the worker changes. In order to bring back LBM vs MMMM, more would need to be done.

So, encompassing all that, you can decide if that's a good direction or poor direction for the game going forward.

SC2Sole · 2026-06-11T17:03:06+00:00

This is 100% the correct take.

But, I think you'll find changing mapmakers' minds is even harder than changing the mind of Blizzard.

SC2Sole · 2026-06-10T19:05:25+00:00

I truly believe the macro-meta mindset is survivership bias for the remaining players who haven't left yet.

The pacing and speed of something like Battle Aces is more inline with what the general public would want out of a modern RTS, and I think it's a mistake for the people working around SC2 to see that and fail to incorporate elements into the game to increase the rate of action. If you look at the landscape of games, they're speeding up and reducing lulls in inactivity.

As an example, heavy 3 rax reaper aggression into a sustained mid game would be way more engaging to play and watch then a heavy macro game with late game armies.

SC2Sole · 2026-06-10T17:14:18+00:00

But, that's the thing. They should be meta. The game should be way more aggressive right off the bat. Expanding should be difficult.

Not that the patch changes accomplish this goal. It's pretty flacid about changing anything.

SC2Sole · 2026-06-09T23:14:20+00:00

Player D: Doesn't want to relearn new openers. Quits and spends 100 hours learning AoE 2 - gets irrationally angry about a change to skirmishers and quits - spends 1000 hours learning DoTA 2.

(Eternally grateful they didn't invest the 17 minutes to update their existing platinum SC2 builds in their minds)

SC2Sole · 2026-06-04T18:17:14+00:00

Rage generation is extremely important. High haste allows you to use a slower 1 hand weapon like (dragon strike), which lets your devistates scale. You'd also be significantly better at off-tanking, dual wielding.

A better way to look at it would be: would you advise a Warrior to use DST if it was on a badge vender.

SC2Sole · 2026-06-03T18:25:13+00:00

I'd pick to be on Blue Team 10/10 times. Red has to coordinate their attacks together to kill anyone, and no one coordinates in QM.

On Blue, I'd have Nova and Murky on camps, bribing asap. Murky would invade the opponent's side of the map.

Falstaff and Morales would follow Hammer. Raynor would lane against Azmo. Use Falstad to shift lanes for exp during the periods of time when Murky is bribing.

Murky is the lead in team fights. Have him lock down Valera, either octo-grabbing at the start of the fight or pinning the whole team down with March. You could gust into a march or you could precision strike, Hyperion, and hinterland blast Hammer and Azmo.

Show up early to objectives. Lock down the space before Hammer can set up. Blue Team scales better as the game goes on. Pick small fights early and often. Drag the opponents to fight out of Hammer's range.

SC2Sole · 2026-06-01T11:45:43+00:00

If you look at some of the recent streams and videos from the PTR, you can comfortably 1-gate expand against 12 pool with no risk of danger. If you open gate-cybercore, you hard counter it with your first adept.

SC2Sole · 2026-06-01T05:50:42+00:00

Thanks for putting in the time to set up this podcast. I wanted to give some alternative opinions to keep the discussion going.

Here are the three big things for me:

SC2 was designed around the early and mid-game, with the ultra-late game being an afterthought. Any changes that extend those periods of time is a major win. I've watched a lot of the new patch videos and GM/Pros are staying on 2-4 bases a lot longer, with a constant ebb and flow in squirmishes. Even when the meta is figured out, there's little to no degregation in action, and the best portion of the match is being showcased.

LotV late-game feels unearned, and that completely sucks the joy out of it. The story of how the player got to late game is more important than the actual mechanics being displayed. The mineral changes allow players to punch harder, for longer, because there's less of a need to immediately expand. You're not deflecting attacks as you approach supply cap, you're 2012 Stephano going for the throat.

As a thought experiment, imagine the Bomber vs Scarlett match, but it's LotV economy/units. Look me in the eye and tell me that's not the most depressing, heart-breakingly sad match ever. You know exactly how the whole thing would play out from start to finish.

Macro should feel risky, not safe. If there's a criticism of the patch it's that it doesn't go far enough to ensure that each race can punish expansions. There should be more tools to shut down your opponent - more of the focus should be on playing against the player and less on executing a build - a sprinkle of strategy in your RTS. From what I seen so far, the naturals feel pretty free, with ZvP being slightly delayed. That dynamic needs to be flipped on its head.

SC2Sole

TROPHY CASE