Stats vs Dark

Congratulations! Well deserved victory.



wow protoss really has made this game super boring / irrelevant



Blame Blizzard, not the race/people playing the race.

Pro's do this for money, and if Blizzard gives you the means to get it easier a certain way, then they take it. They'd be a fool not to.

If a zergling had 3x more hp and damage are you really going to blame zerg players for making zerglings every time? Of course not, you blame Blizzard instead.

If an oracle all-in, immortal all-in, mass-adepts-all-in gives you the highest winrate, then you use those.


If somehow Terran figures out a certain very high winrate strategy that's super boring/irrelevant, are you really going to blame Innovation, TY, Gumiho, ByuN for using that to win a tournament?


"Wow Innovation, I can't believe you want to make sure you earn 40K and secure Blizzcon this year! HOW BORING!"



First, great series and congrats to the winner.
guys, just watching this finals and comparing them with GSL, I want to absolutely salute Brendan and especially Wolf for their amazing casting. Where they are encyclopaedic with history and spot on with game progress or seeing through where us just viewers are not yet seeing strategy developing.
Now having to watch GSL super tournament with A&T I am utterly annoyed with their thrash talk first few mins of every game and their misses or errors in commenting. I know some guys here were complaining a lot about Rapid, but for me he's even much better than tasteless, which seems to me way over his career as a caster (and dragging Artosis down).
I wonder what's Your view on this...



I don't think Brendan has a lot of quality, at least not one that I can mention he's good at compared to other casters. He seems to be one in the middle with no notable quality.

I think Wolf is the best when it comes to casting from a purely professional point of view. He's almost always on-point when it comes to player history and always, always provides insightful commentary before it happens. "He needs to go for X here or he will not hold out" "Traditionally he always went with this build on this map but because he's playing against Y he is likely to change things up because he's so offensive/defensive".

He's second to none in that regard.

Tasteless really turned into a "I'm here to provide entertainment" caster and almost exclusively only applies "play by play" commentary. "He went for stim now." "The probe is out to scout". --- I am totally fine with that, as long as there's someone else alongside him to back up with insightful commentary (Like Wolf or Artosis). He very rarely predicts things like "He's moving out but is probably not going to work out". While when I compare that with Wolf, that guy is almost always smack dab on the ball with that.

I still see this "unpolished gem quality feel" with Artosis. When I see him cast ASL for SC:BW his insight is really great, at a far higher level than SC2, which is where I feel this "unpolished gem quality feel" is coming from.


But honestly, Wolf is an absolute beast as a caster, always comes in fully prepared and knows exactly (Few exceptions like if he's been sick for a while or casting other games for a while) what the players have been doing and how well they've been performing, well, well into the past. And that's exactly the reason why he's so on-point with predicting build orders and counters and strengths/weaknesses before the matches have even started.



Basically if we had 5 "wolf" casters we'd be looking at the best caster team, while if it were 5 "tasteless" casters, you'd probably learn more about the game by turning the sound off, but his entertainment level can be pretty high (lowered quite a bit lately but probably because of him being sick and injured all the time)

I'd be totally neutral if it came down to 5 "brendan" casters and I'd definitely keep the sound turned off if it were 5 "rapid"s. Artosis just slightly behind Wolf when it comes to SC2 but definitely in first place for SC:BW.


That was a lot more than I initially thought I'd type out, but there you have it.


TL;DR: Basically wolf as a caster is the same as Flash as a SC:BW player, I feel.



Yep, Wolf is a great caster. Artosis is pretty good as well.

Tasteless is okay, but it is obvious he doesn't really keep up with the game any longer. Not in the same way as Wolf and Artosis. His predictions are always wrong, because he goes off of outdated information. For example at the beginning of LoTV he kept going on about Byul being this top Zerg since he had a few good games against mech at the end of HOTS. But as we all know, Byul hasn't done much of anything at all in LoTV. Took Tasteless forever to catch up and "get" what is going on in the scene, because he just kind of shows up, makes some jokes, and goes home. Half the time he doesn't even refer to the players by name, just by race, because even that is too much effort.

No hate by the way, Tasteless has done a ton for e-sports, just saying how it is. If any other caster new on the scene did this, they would get so much criticism, but Tasteless gets a pass since he has been here for so long.

Brendan is pretty weak caster to be honest. His best quality is he doesn't drag down casts. When he is with Wolf, he does okay because Wolf is a good caster. But when you put him with Rapid, he doesn't do as well because Rapid is not a good caster. Brendan is just kind of this neutral in-the-middle who needs a stronger half to compensate.


ANNNNDDDDD also. This format is just brutal. I don't know how I feel about it. Dark needing to win 3 best of 7's against Protoss in a row while Stats just needs to win 1. Yeah part of it is because of how the players finished in ranking during the season, but still brutal. You have one bad day and another player has one good day, you could end up in 4th and get an uphill battle just to get to the finals.



Agree about Tasteless & Brendan.

About the format --- If you need favorable odds against races to win a championship, are you really the best candidate for it in the first place? He wasn't the only one with unfavorable matchups.

It's as much "luck of the draw" when to comes to things like these just as it is with build orders or scouting patterns. If you scout 1 cell too far off the opponent's proxy it's an almost guaranteed loss (Assuming equal strength).

I'm just saying, you need to be able to persist through the odds thrown at you, and this is just one of them, sucky or lucky as one might be.


The higher level of a player you are, the less these odds make a difference. Look at SC1's Flash, you can throw any oddball at him that you want or go with a strategy that'd work against 99% of all Terrans, but if you do that against a player so vastly outskilling everyone, it doesn't matter.

Reminds me of 2015's (or was it 2014? Time flies) Zest that could do pretty much any build against any counter and still win.

Or 2013's (Rip) Life whose Zerglings defied everything.



Sure, need to persist through the odds. If the "better player" won according to long-term statistics then Innovation should be winning far more tourneys than he does (his stats tend to be higher than his finishes). That is more what I meant by "luck". Luck as in getting your wins on the days when it counts, not luck in the sense like players are making it to the finals when they shouldn't. I mean nobody would say Stats waiting in the finals wasn't justified, he definitely deserved to be there.

But I mean compared to say the standard GSL format. And it isn't just the gauntlet finals. The second half of the season seems a bit cheapened. Yeah, yeah, the casters will go on to say something like "This player has zero chance to make it to finals anymore, but trust us he is going to play his best here because of pride and blah blah". Just seems like there is more room for... that "luck" factor (again, not the best word here). With the GSL double elim bracket, players who move on need to constantly play their best as the series moves on and the number of total games seems more evenly spread out.

Like I said, just dunno how I feel about it. Overall it is fine of course, SC2 is SC2 and without Proleague any longer (RIP) this is kind of similar in spirit. But say if GSL Code S decided to permanently switch to this format I'd be like... ehhhh no. As a second tourney it works for now, but I'm not sure I like it more than the standard format.



Maybe to explain it better, take two scenarios: In this format player 1 goes up against current form "Byul, Zest, $o$" etc. at the end of the season. Player 2 goes up against the usual monsters at the end of the season (Inno, Soo until finals, Dark, Stats, etc.). If Player 1's competition towards the end gets easier due to killed motivation, they get a better seed and less games to play in the finals. Who has the harder road? Would you rather go up against an Alive when he is on a massive lose streak at the end, or go up against a Soo who doesn't lose in the quarters and semi's? It isn't always the case since some players will play better if they have nothing to lose, but would anyone argue a spirit-crushed Byul is a worthy opponent towards the end of a season?

GSL of course has a similar "luck" factor. If you make it into a group of death, you could get knocked out early. Some roads are more challenging than others. Still, with double elim and with the current in-form players making it towards the end, the competition overall seems more equal as the tourney progresses. A player like a Byul or Alive wouldn't make it to the second half of the season. You are always going up against in-form players at the end. Nor do you get a seed spot at the end to avoid going out early in the post-season.



What you'd like (And something we've had in the past and I really liked this myself as well) is a round-robin tournament. I think the sole reason for not doing that is just because there isn't enough money involved anymore these days.

I think it was last year's SSL or something that did that and it seemed far more fair compared to elim/double-elim. Even though the round robin was still split in 4 groups or so (And you could still end up in the group of death that way).

It wasn't a true round-robin which would have been 100% fair, but it definitely felt much more fair than anything else up till then.

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