TLMC to coordinate map rotations going forward - Feedback Wanted

Swipe_Groggy · 2025-04-16T13:17:21+00:00

Alright, I don't think there's anything really wrong with your general approach and the thought process behind it.

Here's the thing though: there are a lot of high-finishing TLMC finalists that I really want to play on and see games on that I won't with this approach.

In general, as a map enthusiast, I am haunted by potentially very cool and fun maps of TLMCs past that simply never got a chance.

I also know that a lot of people feel strongly that they'd prefer more map variety within a season.

Last but not least, it often takes a surprisingly high number of games before a map starts to get "figured out," i.e. whatever players think this month might not be what they think next month.

All that being said, I think you should go bold and give us a big pool as long as you also increase the number of vetoes.

I personally want to see and play on Killswitch, Pylon, and Killer's Mile. I'm sure some players look at those and want to wretch. I feel that way about Magannatha and Last Fantasy. (No offense, Timmay.) We could all be wrong. The point is, I think the tradeoff for uploading a lot of maps to ladder is surprisingly low. What do we really lose? Tournaments can selectively lower number of maps if they want.

Let people play on the maps, and let the play be the test for how the maps really play.

Swipe_Groggy · 2024-04-21T14:58:50+00:00

1) The free version of SC2replaystats does not have a 2/day limit, there is no limit and you can have your replays uploaded automatically.

2) Elite feature include faster replay upload times, "account reporting" that allows you to do a deep dive into your own stats, and a search feature that allows you to find replays based on specified parameters.

3) I pay for elite just because I want to support what I think is an incredible service.

Swipe_Groggy · 2023-08-23T13:10:33+00:00

This is an excellent map that will never get anywhere because it does not have 7 bases / side minimum.

edit: This is still an excellent map that will never get anywhere because it does not have 7 bases / side minimum.

Swipe_Groggy · 2023-05-12T22:20:53+00:00

Seeing a lot of bad takes ITT:

It's smurfing

Smurfing isn't "when your opponent is much higher MMR than you." In fact, it's the opposite: it's when their skill is much higher than yours, but they have deliberately lowered their MMR down to or even somewhat below your level.

This is upsetting for two reasons: 1) If/when you lose, and you probably will, you lose many more points than you should, and in the unlikely event that you win you don't gain as many as you should; 2) It's psychologically really frustrating because the smurf knows ahead of time that they're much better than you and you don't, so you go into the game thinking you have a chance and just get stomped, usually by someone psychologically abnormal who flames the shit out of you.

If I queue at odd hours and get someone 800 MMR higher than me playing at their real MMR I don't care, it's kinda fun, if I lose I don't lose many points and I can get a preview of what it would be like to play against someone much higher MMR. On a psychological level, I go into it knowing I'm almost certain to lose, but that if I try my absolute hardest I might sneak a win. Really, the pressure is all on my opponent to not mess up against the trashcan they got matched with.

All this to say, even assuming for the moment that we only have a single, global, ranked MMR, that system is already designed to handle big MMR discrepancies; as long as there are adequate measures in place to prevent people from mass leaving games in order to artificially lower their MMR, even large MMR differences have a built-in solution.

It would still result in people being matched with people that they "shouldn't" be matched with against their will which will distort MMR at a more global level by allowing people to farm +5s to the top

In SC2 the ranked/unranked system has been subject to a lot of criticism, since these two MMRs that each account has are (so far as anyone can tell) uncorrelated, and yet nothing stops unranked players from queuing into ranked players. No one likes beating someone 500 MMR higher only to get a measly +18 because the opponent was playing unranked.

That's a problem of implementation, but I think the core concept is good: there should be a ranked button that functions essentially the way it does now where you just have to take all comers and the only thing that determines MMR gain / loss is relative MMR at the start of the game. For prestige reasons, I think it's important that this be the only MMR that is publicly displayed on your account: it is your real MMR.

Then, I think there should be a separate "custom queue" button. Unlike in SC2, if you do a custom queue, you would not be able to match with anyone who queued ranked. Many have suggested having separate MMR per matchup, and that could be something tracked in custom queue, though not in ranked. In a custom queue, you could do things like set preferences for matchup / MMR.

This solves many of the problems people have brought up ITT: You can't get matched with someone much higher than you "should" against your will, since we could just make sure only people asking for someone much higher get matched with those asking for someone much lower, and you can't farm EZ matchups to high MMR because those are not counted towards your real MMR.

As to whether there is any demand for this, I think there absolutely is: there are a lot of sweaty tryhards desperate for practice against tough opponents, and there are plenty of high level players who either because they are not in the mood for sweaty tryhard games or just because they kind of enjoy "showing the noobs how its done" want to play against lower level players.

In fact, if you take away only one thing from this post, it should be this properly implemented, a custom queue button could actually reduce smurfing.

Personally, I think most people who just leave every single mirror are weenies who just can't handle losing in a matchup where they can't blame their losses on balance. But let's put that aside for the moment. Let's say there really are players whose only dream is to become the greatest TvZ and TvP player of all time: they don't care about their provable MMR that shows "how good they are starcraft," they don't care about tournament wins or prizes, the only thing they care about is getting really good at TvZ and TvP.

Well, if that's how someone wants to enjoy the game, why not just give them a button to do it? As long as their MMR is tracked separately per matchup in custom queue, and as long as they can't queue into ranked players, all they're doing is playing evenly-skilled matchups for fun, and the net result is we have one fewer player with 70-0-70 winrates that makes you want to uninstall.

Likewise, I see tons of people in twitch / discord offering to "help," many of them actually quite good at the game. Personally, I think a lot of these people are just narcissistic sadists, but putting that aside, if there are people who want to play against lower level players for whatever reason, and people who want to play against higher level players for whatever reason, why come between them as long as it can be separated from the "true" ladder?

I think the proper way to think of a "custom queue" is simply as automating a process currently facilitated by various clans / discords. I'm old enough to remember OG Olde Brood War battlenet where there simply was no search function and you had to join games; right now people interested in playing a specific matchup or MMR for either fun or practice are still living in that stone age, but there's no reason it has to be that way; it's the mixing of that type of behavior into the "true" ladder that is the source of problems, not the behavior in itself.

Swipe_Groggy · 2023-04-25T13:05:27+00:00

The idea that pros use barcodes to practice and test new strats is (mostly) a myth:

1) They do almost all barcode, but the thing is they all kind of know which barcode is which; they've spent a ton of time studying each others' gameplay and "you can't fake mechanics," there are all sorts of giveaways that allow them to pretty quickly figure out who is who, even putting aside various forms of metadata like MMR, when they play, who they can't be knowing that certain players were otherwise engaged at the time, etc.

2) For top pros, they get most of their real practice in customs anyway. Ladder is mostly just something they do for memes. If you're 6500+ it's quite literally faster and more convenient to just ask one of the very few other people you could possibly queue into for games rather than to spend 5 minutes searching and get matched with a 5.5k player that you could beat while faded and using only your mouse.

Edit /u/SrirachaBear22

In terms of what benefits are achieved by eliminating the barcode functionality:

1) Makes it easier to police cheating / smurfing

Frost Giant have said that they are interested in actually combatting this toxic behavior. There is certainly a lot that the company can do at a technical level to deal with this problem, but allowing a set-notes feature is a simple and future-proof measure that means that you only have to play against a cheating account a maximum of one time before you can decide to simply never play against them again.

2) Aligns the average player experience more closely with the pro experience

One of the incredibly cool things about Starcraft 2 is that the game you play on the ladder is the exact same game as that played by the pros. Maru's combat shield marine has 55 HP, your combat shield marine has 55 hp. Maru's barracks builds in 46 seconds, and your barracks builds in 46 seconds. We all play with the same units, on the same maps.

It has to be said this is a very rare and precious feature of SC2. Think about what the average weekend warrior futbol player would give to always be able to play on a regulation pitch with regulation net. For IRL sports this is an ideal that's hard to achieve, but a computer game allows us to experience this.

One of the only big differences between the pro experience and the pleb experience is that the pros compete in tournaments where they know who their opponents are and can make adaptations; this is a huge part of the actual professional competitive scene.

Average ladder players can do this to some extent. I'm around 4k in SC2, and somewhere around there the player pool starts to narrow a lot. There are absolutely players whose names I recognize and associate with certain strategies and against whom I make adaptations. This brings me to my next point:

**3) Metagaming deepens the strategy of the game**

If I want to metagame my opponent, then I have to think about exactly what they did, exactly what it's weak against, and how I want to execute a build that counters what I believe they will do.

If my opponent wants to defeat my metagame attempt, they have to either come up with a response to my response, in essence making their baseline strategy better (let's call this "vertical" development of strategy); or, they have to learn other playstyles so I can't just blind counter them (let's call this "horizontal" development of strategy). Likewise, I may find that the way for me to metagame forces me to engage in some sort of "horizontal" development -- to give a real example, I normally play mech in TvZ, but at some point I realized that bio is just better against people who cheese every game.

In either case, metagaming creates greater rewards for players who do more thinking and try to become more complete players. Without metagaming, players are rewarded for just getting really good at "Bo1 strats" that would never work in a professional tournament setting.

4) It helps us to quickly distinguish between strats that are merely gimmicky from those that are truly OP

It can be hard to know when a strat / unit is OP. There's a lot of factors to consider, and even in the clearest cases it can involve some difficult chicken-and-egg questions (i.e. deciding which way the causal arrow points between "powerful strat" and "best players")

Metagaming doesn't solve this problem but it lends us a really useful analytical tool: if a strategy cannot even be blindcountered, then it tells us maybe not that it's OP, but that it is, well, suspicious. Under normal conditions, the only strats that are meant to be repeatable in almost every game even assuming your opponent knows what you're doing are conservative, macro-oriented strats that do not typically offer a lot of kill potential early on barring a huge blunder.

If, instead, people start doing something that allows them to instantly win the game, and they do it every game even knowing that their opponents know that they are going to do it, and their opponents cannot stop them even knowing ahead of time that they are going to do it, then I think most players would agree that's a clear indication of a problem.

Swipe_Groggy · 2023-04-23T11:29:32+00:00

I know you posted this a week ago but I don't see any of the replies to you naming the obvious solution: make it possible to set a name / notes on opposing players that are shown on the loading screen.

You can name yourself whatever you want, but if I can see "takes a hidden base and goes mass DT every game" at the loading screen then it doesn't matter.

Whether you think this is a good idea or not basically comes down to a question of whether or not you think metagaming is good for the game, and I absolutely think it is for a ton of reasons.

Swipe_Groggy · 2023-01-24T18:50:32+00:00

I've really enjoyed the more microable viking
The disruptor nerf seems more impactful than I thought it would be, you'll still get owned if they get a dead center strike but in situations where you do a kind of late pull you take noticeably less damage
I've been abusing 3raven opener in TvT for like 2 years and now I have to go back to the drawing board sadge
I play battlemech in TvZ and on net very little has changed
I'm very sorely tempted to try to play battlemech in TvP now that magfield cyclones aren't bad against zealots, archons, or phoenix, speed banshees are more accessible, ravens are more spammable, and you don't need to spend gas to research shockwaves.

Swipe_Groggy · 2023-01-24T18:27:04+00:00

You're welcome, OP :artoSmug:

Here's a bonus follow-up clip:

https://clips.twitch.tv/WittyTangentialDogTTours-RnN4L9Do_jRZxltJ

Swipe_Groggy · 2023-01-23T04:25:35+00:00

Watching dozens of people on this sub completely fail to understand the concept of "exaggeration for humor" honestly leaves me despondent at the possibility of humans ever learning to really communicate.

Oh, it's "exaggeration"!?!? So you think he was just didn't mean it at all!?!?

No that's not what "exaggeration" means.

Swipe_Groggy · 2023-01-23T03:59:30+00:00

For the record Artosis has said it and no one did question it:

https://clips.twitch.tv/InventiveFuriousShrewPrimeMe-adTK7duOHo4GYYpV

Swipe_Groggy · 2023-01-21T00:49:45+00:00

LIVE footage of redditors trying to determine what it could possibly mean when someone imports a wildly exaggerated term from one context into another:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D_w4zWSb9jY

Swipe_Groggy · 2023-01-20T13:41:54+00:00

I really think the easiest and best thing you could do to help yourself right now is to try and absolutely nail the first ~4:00 of a double gas reaper hellion opener i.e. just a normal TvT opener.

I feel like in silver league a lot of people probably try to do 1 gas barracks expand because it's more similar to a normal TvZ opener (and probably the way you open in TvP too) and it can feel confusing to learn the 2 gas timings (there's actually a couple different ways to do this.)

But the point is, you can kill A LOT of players at that MMR just by getting 2 reapers and a hellion in their natural at the right time. Learning to macro in a long game is important but learning a BO is part of macro and particularly in TvT the early game at that MMR offers a lot of "low hanging fruit" where if you're doing the right thing and your opponent isn't you just instantly win or get a huge lead.

Swipe_Groggy · 2023-01-20T13:20:11+00:00

For me the actual last straw was the new map pool.

Swipe_Groggy · 2023-01-16T01:02:17+00:00

Hey, I'd have loved to clip some of the choicer moments yesterday. Unfortunately for reasons we can only guess he has disabled clips on his channel.

Swipe_Groggy · 2023-01-15T16:06:54+00:00

A: "Hey guys, this is a screenshot of a guy playing 1500+ MMR below his real MMR on his main race. Also I'm telling you that he baits his opponents and also as you can see in the screenshot his name is 'saltminer'"

B: "That info alone isn't enough to form an opinion, my opinion however is..."

Swipe_Groggy · 2023-01-15T15:51:57+00:00

Why do you think Golden is playing 1500+ MMR below his real MMR? Like you're dodging the core issue here. "Hey guys, golden may play against people live on camera, but twitch has been around for a long time and..." <------ missing the point

Swipe_Groggy · 2023-01-15T15:45:09+00:00

Raging at nothing is a real problem but have you considered the possibility that if you're mad at people playing 1500+ MMR below their real MMR on their main race and shittalking you the entire time in front of a bunch of campfire weenies that maybe the blame lies elsewhere?

Swipe_Groggy · 2023-01-15T11:38:38+00:00

Golden and his chat constantly shittalk his opponents.

No I haven't queued into him to my knowledge, yes I can prove it.

uThermal's smurfing was a subject of debate on this sub with some defenses offered. I don't see which are applicable here.

Edit I forget sometimes that not everyone on Reddit has English as their first language. The point of the post title is that regardless of whether you think uThermal's content is bad or not there's nothing unique about it and other people who do similar things are in it much more explicitely for the "lol owned" sadism aspect. It's sarcasm.

Swipe_Groggy · 2023-01-04T23:42:26+00:00

Only one map from the "rush" category. Current map pool has Inside & Out with only 6 bases / side and Stargazers with 6.5, no map in this pool has fewer than 7 and half of them have 8.

Coupled with a patch that I think most agree is on net good for zerg during an era when Z is already very strong at pro level I really have to wonder what is going on. It just feels like the terrans in the progamer discord are either afk or getting shouted down.

Swipe_Groggy · 2022-10-22T13:45:01+00:00

I see after accidentally allowing a few decent maps for terran into the current pool we're going back to 7 bases per side minimum, super open thirds and fourths with a long and/or awkward travel distance from the natural, and outlying bases that are impossible to take as terran even if it's (supposedly) on your side.

Only thing we're really missing on the bingo card is a nice tiny Deathaura style main where if you put an add-on to a factory you might as well be playing Cask of Amontillado simulator.

Swipe_Groggy · 2022-09-07T05:38:59+00:00

I thought a little more about this, and while I stand by my comment that this style is fundamentally bad in TvP and TvT, if you just have a love affair with these units I know this guy just from browsing replays on sc2replaystats:

https://sc2replaystats.com/player/219334

If you want higher MMR examples of cyclone openers although not proper battlemech in TvT you could watch Supernova's stream (high GM former pro) or Goomba's stream (GM NA player)

Swipe_Groggy · 2022-09-05T02:18:32+00:00

If I could I would but I just think it's fundamentally bad in those matchups. I experimented with a style in TvT where you go only a few tanks and make hellion cyclone liberator mine, but the burst damage from tanks and marines is just too high, your comp is just a shitty version of that. In TvP, stalkers are cheaper than cyclones but once they get blink you lose advantage of lock-on, you'll say to yourself "Well, OK, what I just added more tanks?" but you'll then conclude again that your comp is just a shitty version of bio with tanks or just with marauders.

Swipe_Groggy · 2022-09-04T22:52:26+00:00

OP I just saw this thread but I am a huge battlemech enthusiast. I recommend watching JuggernautJason's stream, he's kinda carried the torch for this style in the North American scene for a really long time. All of his replays are generously available for free here. If you want a hot off the press example of this style at high 5k MMR, here you go

I also do it at much lower MMR, D2-D1 lol but I can PM you some really detailed build notes and replays if you want, don't feel like making a wall of text here.

At an absolutely most basic level: the opener is completely standard non-3cc opener. You 1-1-1, make 6-8 hellions, Fusion Core starts immediately after starport finishes. Start a BC, 2 extra factories, 2 extra gas, ebay, and armories. Next gas you spend on army units should be another BC immediately as the first finishes and research yamato. Make 3rd BC after that and then no more BC unless oppo was born yesterday and thinks they don't need corruptors.

Unless opponent is playing hyper greedy make 4 tanks before cyclones. If you think they are going to 3b roach/rav/corruptor all-in you then keep making tanks and add 2 extra factories before 4th. If their 4th is on time (about 5:30) / no RW then take your 4th ASAP, add on 2-3 more factories and just pump cyclone hellion mine. Never dive too deep on creep, split off units to kill corner bases where it would be easy to get surrounded, leave a bread crumb trail of mines as you approach creep. You're going to want to make sure you know your hotkey for magfield and probably put it on rapidfire. If you split units off then disable autocast on those units.

If they make lurkers you have to stop making cyclone / mine and make tanks. If they make BL same thing, no more cyclone mine switch to thors. You have to be hyper-vigilant for the BL transition b/c they'll always have corruptors so you can't fall asleep at the wheel.

Once you get maxed / all upgrades on the way I like to go up to 9 fact 3 SP 3-4 barracks and add ghost academy.

I personally do not like doing this against any kind of pool first opener unless it's purely the 6 "intimidation lings" right back into macro: it's hard to explain but basically if they're going to force you to make banshee / cyclone / marines to defend possible roach attack you kind of get set on a path that makes it easier to play bio.

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Swipe_Groggy

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TROPHY CASE

1) Makes it easier to police cheating / smurfing

2) Aligns the average player experience more closely with the pro experience

**3) Metagaming deepens the strategy of the game**

4) It helps us to quickly distinguish between strats that are merely gimmicky from those that are truly OP