BLIZZCON 2014

The valiant underdog came from behind and left the world stunned. I could drag out the election metaphor a bit or I could just congratulate Life on a series of balls-out amazing plays.

While I do think he was a bit overeager with his proxy hatches - they never paid off and he had to spend most of the rest of those games on the back foot before landing a few incredibly lucky engagements - I do think he was hands-down the best tactician on the field.  I think it was his RO8 game on Overwatch where, with a massive enemy army marching north against him, he just swung completely around, decided not to take an engagement against an enemy on the high ground, and went straight for his opponent's base.

You know, kinda what Longstreet told Lee he should have done at Gettysburg.

Does this mean that zerg is imba? Hardly.  There was one zerg in the final eight. And zerg requires more mechanical skill than the other races do. No, shut up, it's true.  Your APM will go up when you play zerg because you have to do more stuff.  Note that after his proxy hatch plays, Life should have been much further ahead than he wound up being. One of those games lingered on for an entire hour.  This isn't a cheese-fail situation where your play screws up and you have nothing behind it; Life did economic damage, but because terrans have MULEs and protoss is just OP - no, shut up, it is - it didn't give him a significant advantage.

Elsewhere, there was Hearthstone and WOW stuff, neither of which you'll read much about ever on this blog.  Heroes had a few showmatches, yay. Diablo panels talked about how they changed up the game because their initial roll-out was so ill-conceived. (Seriously, it's like the guys who were originally in charge didn't know what "fun" is.)

The Starcraft tournament kept having technical issues. Dear Blizzard: blah blah your MMO and your virtual card game, Starcraft is eSports, and those issues were just embarrassing. As was your non-apology at the closing ceremony. Of course, shortly after that non-apology you obliterated us with a thorough application of Metallica, so I suppose all is forgiven.

Legacy of the Void was announced and there are a lot of cool new things to look at and abuse, half of which probably won't make it into the final game, alas. Just from watching one showmatch it was obvious that the ability to drop Siege Tanks already in siege mode is never going to be balanced. (Unless you bring back the siege tech upgrade.)

It seems like the entire mindset now is "faster games with more micro." I get that this means seriously overhauling terran - the master turtle - but, crikey, the other changes aren't great. The Immortals got nerfed - this is unforgivable - and the one new zerg unit (Lurkers don't count) won't ever be able to accomplish anything.

My suggestion is that you don't switch to terran in anticipation of the next expansion (or whatever it is), because it's going to get nerfed.