Yea, everything he said was basicly just excuses. He may experience that, but the game definitely doesn't boil down to that for most especially not people good at the game.
Excuses or not, that was my experience with SC. Rush, rush, more rush. New patch? New build order and/or new counter. Zerg were the dominant rush early on, but later patches added zealot rushes and even a viable marine rush. I gave up versus not long after that. As I keep re-iterating, there is less strategy and more rote memorization in SC. It's hard to enjoy a RTS game when your first 10 minutes are spent executing or breaking a rush and the last 10 minutes are spent mopping up what's left.
From what I remember of the late patches, the shift went from rushing with cheap early units to rushing with midrange units. There was never a point where fielding multiple unit types was even a consideration. New balancing patches meant a bit of time finding the hole in the tech trees, then exploiting it until the next patch.
100% agree. Every post Sahakiel has made is complete fud.
It's not fud when it's true. Whether or not you agree doesn't determine whether it's fud. Maybe you had a different experience. Maybe you had different expectations. Or maybe you just don't pay attention to the same details. I'm pretty damn sure I didn't experience the same events as every other gamer who played SC. Everything I posted is from my personal experience, plus or minus 8 years. None of it is made up, and as far as I can tell, nothing exaggerated to a significant degree.
My posts I based on memory, not through reading some random site somewhere.
Translation: He likes an RTS where he can press a button to magically warp in 1000+ unit armies that he can just attack move.
Actually, no, but thanks for trying. I like games that require actual thinking. I don't like games where strategy boils down memorizing counters. I don't like games that have rote build orders you have to follow just to have a chance. I like flexibility. I like having units that last longer than 10 seconds.
For once, it would be nice to have a competitive RTS where all units are available from the beginning and your "tech" tree is only used for armor/weapon upgrades. You have a choice of building powerful units, large numbers of weak units, upgrading units, scrapping units, etc from beginning to end. Instead of simply peeking at your enemy's base to see what he's building and then building the counter for it, you peak to see what he's building to guess (not know, like SC allows) the kind of advance he will be making and either shift defenses along the projected route or attack early to force his hand or organize a number of small forces to dig in and keep him occupied while you hit his base or reorganize your army to attack head on, or any other number of possible responses. That's the type of strategy I would prefer.
Most of your claims are exactly the opposite of how SC1 is actually played at a competitive level. For instance, you assert that scouting gets you killed against rush tactics. The most glaring counterexample is PvZ early game, where scouting is absolutely crucial for P - to the point where being able to keep your scouting probe alive inside Z's base is considered a fundamental skill. Under your theory, scouting in PvZ would be suicidal given Z's supposedly strong rush capability, but reality is in fact exactly the opposite: rushes are easy (trivial, even) to stop, but Z's unparalleled ability to quickly shift unit production is almost impossible to counter without adequate scouting.
That said, SC2 looks like a poorer game than SC1 from a competitive standpoint.
What you posted is essentially what I posted. The rush is still the first strategy out the gate. If that fails, or is anticipated to fail, the player switches to a counter. That still doesn't change the fact that a rush is the first expectation.
It's still a system of rote memorization and executing predetermined actions based on what you see. It still doesn't change the system of hard counters for units. It still doesn't change the emphasis on quick fights.
For me, there's no fun involved with quick fights. Beating on weaker opponents with overwhelming force is no different than decimating a larger force because you have the right unit counter.
I admit I don't have personal experience with the later ladder/national/international competitions. When I saw that in order to even reach the high end I had to spend time memorizing build orders, counters, set strats, counters for set strats, and so on for each and every race combination just to even have a chance to break even, I simply walked away. From my perspective, it wasn't worth sinking the time and effort just so I could be bored with a sub-par strategy game. I started looking at custom maps, found a few that were enjoyable or interesting, but never again played any type of strategy map with SC. I think the last patch I played was 1.08 or so. The game had reached its limits on what it could do.
I like long fights and few players have the same mentality. SC was repeatedly patched to cater to the larger majority. The hardcore diehards will always figure out a few I-Win combinations for various matchups, Blizzard won't do much more than mitigate the more obvious overmatches, and the ladder matches boil down to who spent the most time reading, memorizing, and executing the same sequences of 10-50 steps each. That's why I stopped playing versus maps. They got boring as hell. If I want quick action, I play a FPS.
Others like versus, and judging by the numbers, a large majority will take part. I make no excuses for the game or for myself and I place no blame on how the game works. The game simply went one way I didn't like, so I said goodbye and went elsewhere. SC2 didn't really change that significantly regardless of whether my win/loss was higher or lower than 50/50, it was still an incredibly boring, though prettier, game of memory. Out of about a hundred matches I really only enjoyed the first few, and that was because everything was a learning experience. Therefore I'll play single for the story, and check out what people can do with the new map editor.