Do you think that Preparation based Tournaments require more Strategy than Weekend Tournaments? I'm probably LIVE right now, check me out: →Twitch: / artosis If you want to support Artosis even more, become a member! / @artosistv
Well here is what I think: You totally went off topic here, your title says "StarCraft is more "Real Time" than "Strategy"", but you discussed tournament types and then talked about who can play which one best. My teacher would give me an F for that.
Loving these new "Artosis theorycrafting" sessions. Can you do one where you cover the math and theory behind why BW Zergs don't saturate mineral lines? It's been years and years and I've never heard it well explained.
armchair theory crafting, but i think it's some combination of: cheaper, low supply units, faster production per building, and generally being a base ahead. They don't need as many buildings or overlords to get army, so they don't burn as much resources on non combat stuff. Hatcheries provide production for every unit, add one tech structure and you can mass produce them on the spot. Being a base ahead means with equal workers, your mining is more efficient. Late game Zerg is also more gas limited than minerals, so saturating minerals is less of a priority. If they run out of gas, all they can make are Zerglings, which while high dps, are easily destroyed with splash.
Before watching the video, i'd like to point out that a lot of the "thinking" and "strategizing" we are supposed to do has been done by the pros. We just copy what they do without thinking too much about it. A lot of the things that we know now weren't as obvious when the game first came out, it took years and years of theorizing and experimentation to get to the understanding of the game that we have now.
@@AntiDoctor-cx2jd Well yeah when i started i just wanted to get good at the game so i watched guide after guide build order tutorial after BO tutorial, however now I mostly just play on my own. It can help you get started off but to truly have fun you have to figure out the game out on your own.
@@aaabatteries9948 the main thing is that for pros, microability has a lot more value than it does for non pros. Like stalkers especially, nobody should ever build one who isn't a pro. Maybe 1 to defend against repears
@@AntiDoctor-cx2jd Yeah and they usually wind up doing more damage to you than the opponent, like Congrats you lost 3 stalkers and sniped 4 marines and a maybe a cyclone or a tank while you are floating 2k minerals at home, aren't teching up, probe production has halted ages ago, supply blocked since the brood wars, no upgrades researching etc.. It's not worth it until you get to masters at least.
I love this style of video. No bullshit, no fluff, no filler, just get right to talking about important concepts and ideas. Well thought out, and actually able to speak in front of a camera without requiring 2 jump cuts per sentence.
I wonder what is wrong with the camera Edit: It's called "banding" It's when the shutter speed is too fast for the frequency of the lighting. Slowing down the shutter speed or perhaps getting better quality lights will solve this. Like, "not pro video LED lights" are just going to blink really fast at 60hz, and if your camera is capturing frames very quickly, it catches the lights when they are emerging from princess Peach's mouth. Now Mario was back to his normal size, Mario wiped Peach's saliva out of his eyes, he thanked Peach for the mini mushroom he used...
The title is correct, Starcraft is more about being fast than being strategic. You can know all the best build orders and what to do in every situation, but it doesn't matter if you're not fast enough to maintain production with your opponent. Even basic scouting out at the start being fast enough to micro your worker and keep that vision, while not missing anything in your BO isn't east to do. It's a strategic decision to scout, but how much information you get is dependent on your micro abilities.
And because of this, low elo till like diamond, and even above, is all extremely geared towards quick cheeses or early all-ins Who’s going to bother going with a strategy where you macro up or go for gradual advantages when you get really low ‘returns on investment’ in low elo For most intermediate players, you can’t even manage the resources, bases, army, teching, supply past 2-3 bases properly. The scale gets too high and demanding, way too early and way too easily This is actually why I’m looking forward to Uncapped Games’ RTS, which should be reminiscent of SC2, but with a greater focus on the strategy behind the game, and less on the tedious micromanaging aspects. I think it will find a good balance that will cater RTS to a lot of the more mainstream players that way. I have high hopes
Yeah you see so many players trying to play creatively to counter their opponent, but their build orders are so bad so the strategy doesn't matter much. Like I've seen this one streamer in platinum (trying to get diamond) be legit 30 seconds behind on a build order by 2:10. He makes pretty intelligent plays but the mechanics just aren't there so he doesn't improve
@@Fimbu1vetr good mechanics are valuable in every RTS. People usually mock metal leagues but reaching platinum is already being better than approximately half of the players with plat 1 being around top-30%. So in fact he got carried to that by his strategic mindset. I don't understand what y'all guys complain about. Yes, you need to be good with your mechanics to be good at the game. The only problem I see is that some people like to mock players of intermediate skill like diamond and platinum thus making it seem that players in these leagues are total noobs which is not true.
@@Amoeby yeah Im aware that plat 3 is top 50% and that streamer is pretty good overall. Just that he plays a lot and hed do a lot better by learning a build. But yeah definitely not a fan of the elitism in StarCraft where people act like anything below Masters is pretty bad
you need basic mechanics to support your tactics. Pros really play in different planes than us since they are breaking down games in seconds/unit count/reading/unit movement but rest of us that are not pros, even well into masters/GM are doing surface level stuff. And that's fine. IRL sports are like this as well.
Starcraft is like Competitive Chess. Like Chess which is known for "strategy" by most people who don't play it competitively, most people who get into the competitive scene boils down to 70% memorization of moves and 30% actual strategy once they reach the late game where if your opponent hasn't lost yet, game can get real spicy. It's why Bobby Fischer went crazy from Chess, he was at the top and memorized the game to the point he got tired of the same old shit.
it absolutely is more time based. Even amongst other RTS games like Age of Empires 2, the APM requirement for a high-level Brood War player is relatively high. That's not necessarily a good or bad thing, just not for everyone. I enjoy watching SC but not really playing it; meanwhile I have like 5K hours in DOTA. You get to experience a similar game without as much multitasking. Timing is a factor, but generally the team that drafts a better lineup and makes the smarter plays is more important than just being fast. Unfortunately, that also means you have to rely on your teammates. I think in order for an RTS to appeal to as many people as possible, the pace of the game needs to be reasonable for new players or people who may not have a lot of time to dedicate to developing the muscle memory. I'm not saying it needs to be completely catered to casuals, but it shouldn't feel so much like an instant loss when you make a small mistake in execution or just have bad luck with openings. And it's something I see a lot of unnecessary pushback over from Starcraft players in particular. I think what we've seen of Stormgate so far has been pretty great in that regard. Unit production and resource rates are snappy but not so fast they're hard to keep up with, at least not until very late in a match. Spells and creep camp bonuses in particular give a lot of room for players to adapt to what's happening instead of being locked in to their build too much.
I think the real secret sauce of Starcraft's popularity was how interwoven USMs and custom maps were into the game, along with dropping you straight into the chatrooms. Starcraft 1 was a creator platform with a social element to it that happened to come with a really good RTS game.
Ease of play is 💯 what's killing the genre. You may not be great, but compared to SC2 a brand new DOTA player would do ok. A brand new SC2 player would be so confused, it wouldn't even resemble a game.
@@people3865 what? DOTA has a much higher skill floor that SC2 imo. The amount of items, heroes and their skills is immense and that's without macro aspects. Not to mention that you also partially rely on your teammates in every match.
@@bahadirozer You're right. Shutter speed is the proper term. Not sure why I said framerate as I regularly use my mirrorless camera and have to enable anti-flicker for the shutter speed on it.
On the noobie type questions like "what do I use to beat X composition?" it's not just noobs wanting a silver-bullet strategy that's guaranteed to win, but understanding what they should even be doing in such a situation. "Play faster" isn't really useful advice if you don't know where you're going.
Well, the thing with mass Carriers is that it takes ages and a significant investment to reach, so just making an army and attacking earlier, if the P player isn't really harassing you, is what you need to do. Like, if I have only one base 10 minutes in and floating 5000 resources, nothing I do at that point is going to suddenly solve the problem of 4 Carriers waltzing in.
Heck, just constantly making marines and running them in is enough dps to win a lot of low level games, if you keep spending your income. Same with Zealots/Stalkers or Zergling/Roach
"... than strategy. Now, why am I bringing this up?" it would be a perfect video if it segued into "Well, I wanted to talk about why Rogue is the GOAT of SC2".
It has always seemed to me that the difficulty of the mechanics of bw is precisely what makes many strategies interesting and possible. It's part of why we can have tension in the game because it is not just rock paper sissors. As mechanics improved over the history of the game maps had to change and strategies had to change. At a smaller timescale people get mechanically very good at one meta and it opens a window to strategically exploiting that with an interesting tradeoff between what you're mechanically best at and what will give you an edge in a different way. I don't know if that makes sense to anyone else but I think if you take away the mechanics you get chess's 40 opening moves of theory, which we never get in BW because skill is dynamic and changes depending on game circumstances.
we saw with Snow vs Bisu Game 3 on ASL S17 on this really on big stage on current trend of metagame in BW - age old question of macro vs micro has slipped into micro territory for past year or so and it showed up really hard in this ASL. Bisu and snow did same build, but Bisu chose to focus on his macro and at points in game, was 20+ supply ahead, 4 reaver vs 2 reaver ect, but Snow was able to wiggle out of it by focusing wholely on his micro/army positioning against a much bigger army (while having 5 probes qued on nexus and 5 idle workers) Everyone thought Bisu was winning until he just wasnt and started trading really badly vs superior micro and positioning.
Starcraft 2 isn't "more real time than strategy". SC2 baits people into thinking the units "countering" each others is the "strategy" aspect, but this is just a rock paper scissor type game and the optimal "strategy" in that respect is whatever is the nash equilibrium. In fact, all the actual strategy, if there is any, revolve around where you spend your limited attention. So who are the best players in the game? those who can juggle the best & those who better understand where the nash equilibrium actually is, and punish their opponent for being far from it.
It really is mostly a juggling simulator, knowing when to have AA ready versus knowing when NOT to build it because the opponent is doing a ground offensive instead of air harassment could be called ''basic strategy/knowledge''. Being able to manage basic units on 2 or 3 fronts usually is more effective than having a super complex composition or formation of units. It's probably closer to a binomial distribution for the ''outcomes of optimal countering strategies'' where in most cases the ''middle ground choices fare better than either cheese or greed extreme'' than a game theory equilibrium since it's usually not just a simplistic ''choice A beats B unless'' because physical ability has such a huge influence on the outcome of clashes.
It absolutely is. There were 2 videos where uThermal played a team game with a silver league player vs. opponents of each rank, one of the videos was with a silver league player doing all of the macro (ie. the silver league player builds all the units with no instruction or preparation and uThermal just controls the army without communicating with his teammate). He beat a grandmaster player in that video. Then later he had a 2nd video where he was doing all of the macro and the silver league player was controlling the army.. the video ended with him losing to a diamond league player. Now, you could argue that that's not necessarily exactly the same thing as strategy vs. mechanics because not all micro is mechanics and not all macro is strategy.. but still, it clearly shows that how you control your units is overwhelmingly more important than what strategy you're using.
I'm glad you're making a video about this because I think a lot of people put way too much emphasis on the "strategy" part of RTS. Strategy alone being the deciding factor would make for an incredibly boring game to both play and watch. Execution and adaptation in real time is what makes these games so interesting. If people want a game that is primarily about strategy they should be playing chess, not RTS.
Execution and adaptation in real time is also what made fast formats like Blitz and Bullet rise in popularity in chess. It is just more interesting and thrilling to play for most people
How do I stop a maxed army of carriers? Arty: make Goliaths the whole time and let them get whittled down over 15 minutes then rage 😂. Love you arty :)))
It's not really a competition at all between Maru and Rogue for the best preparation tournament player. Rogue: 4x GSL Maru: 8x GSL + OSL + SSL + 3x GSL 2nd place + Proleague MVP
Really enjoyed the insights but the argument wasn’t clear how does it translate to a real time Game if you meant reactive for StarCraft in its entirety ? It seems like there are two types of StarCraft and the more weekend tournaments the more reactive/real time the gameplay style?
I love preparation tournaments and agree with your points about them. What I care very little about as a viewer is whether a tournament is live or online. It's tough when you're like "all that really counts is live preparation tournaments" because that functionally means you've got to live in South Korea, and I don't know if that's a viable way forward for the SC2 scene. I'd like to see online preparation tournaments with the motivational drive and prestige of a substantial prize pool. It would be great if all SC2 players lived in the same area and could get together regularly for live preparation tournaments, but I don't think it's totally fair to define living in Korea as the sole path to compete in SC2 as a strategy game at the highest level.
I think "strategy" as a whole is overhyped. Like, you look at the Ukrainian war right now, and it's basically every match of TvT ever, just without the BCs, and the reason is that basically every strategy boils down to who has the longer stick. If the sticks are equal, then it becomes who can hit harder. If that doesn't work, then it's who can hit faster, and it just goes on and on... So really I don't think it should be called "RTS", because there's not really a whole lot of strategy that goes into warfare anyway. Even with Sun Tsu's Art of War, a lot of it is just common sense stuff. I think it would be better if they were just called "real time wargames", but I guess RTW doesn't have quite the same ring to it.
There's reason people say macro to masters and other stuff like that. In end of the day, to play the game, you need sufficient mechanical skill (like real sports) to "really" play the sports. You aren't going to go deep in positioning/off the ball movement, mind games on attacker vs defender in sports without having basic skills. Same way in SC. You can make up for lack of mechanics (on-the-ball talent) w/ game reading/maneuvering, but in end of the day, easiest way to "improve" your overall skill level is to work on your basic mechanics and skills, hence people tell you to macro. Once you hit a wall where improving your macro isn't as easy to improve as other stuff, you can move on, but you aren't really hitting that til high masters. It's much, MUCH easier to just practice mechanics vs ai as it is repeatable fast paced than learn to recognize scouting/patterns/incomplete information. Hence only really tiny % of people can really start playing the game for real, and even then, it's long long way from pro level (GMPro is way higher skill gap than from bronze to GM, ect - not win%, but all the cumulative knowledge/skill/tightness in timing ect)
I mean. What else can I say but THANK YOU. Always appreciate validation when we share a position, but you bring in the unassailable points, when I only have time for them hottake soundbytes. Redirecting the argument from player advantages from a racial characteristics of strategic and unit robustness perspective, to the more broadly PLAYSTYLE based argument for individual success in particular tournament styles, *Chefs Kiss. GuMiHo as clear specific example highlighting his switching preference switching between Mech and Bio, was so money. And contrasting Stats vs Her0 was excellent to show it's not purely a racial (Zerg, Protoss, Terran) bias as well I can't wait til Trap and Rogue get back into form, but I'll miss Dark when he's up for service, He was the epitome of Zerg flipping a switch, JD is of course the historical standard, but Dark has larval inject.
Can't wait to see what the r/starcraft sub reaction to this. I bet that Arty saw the success of his other controversial video and is hitting the gold mine. Smart move.
It's only strategy when you can hit pro level APM, optimize your build tailored to the map and survive the harassment and all-ins. Even then the "strategic" decisions are a distant second to game mechanics.
if you go command center first and they double proxy gateway it doesn't matter how fast your APM is, your ass is dead. flash could lose to my grandma in a situation like that, and there's quite a few of those in starcraft and RTS in general.
Nope the idea was that it's strategy when you you get the time to prepare for your opponents and not when you play the same opening and defensive setup as the best defensive race 30 times in a row. Didn't you listen to the video?
@@no_nameyouknow Compared to complete information games the ''strategy'' in RTS games in general and SC specifically is basicb!tch level ''scout air, get anti air, scout AOE dmg, split''.
10:50 - 11:10 The thing that would help anyone here would be map vision of what your opponent is doing. And that exact thing is EXACTLY what EGIdra was complaining about (concerning zerg). Having vision of your opponent and being able to see unit composition causes a calculated reaction that can help someone make a unit composition to counter an opponent’s choices. The part where strategy comes in is a unit composition that can perform well over various terrain and overtake an opposing force with units that would have been considered inferior and the actual place of engagement, but that same composition absolutely wrecks infrastructure - with such an idea, the person making these things will be taking two steps for every one their opponent makes, and gains an advantage in time management. There are ways to supplement time management with available resources and army size, but being able to see what your opponent is doing and then making a move that not only secures your position but also attacks/threatens your opposition’s stance is obviously ideal.
I think that you are downplaying the amount of strategy that goes into high level starcraft in absolute terms. You don't need to be a strategic mastermind to be successful at high level starcraft because you can copy strategies; You can't copy real time speed. Imagine a situation where all of the unit stats and numbers get significantly jumbled and mixed up, making it basically a new game: Put a 300 apm player with no strategic knowledge against an 80 apm player who has perfected an optimized build order and army composition... the 80 apm player will absolutely CRUSH the 300 apm player, even a 50 apm player probably could in SC2 (depending on the strat you could even do 30.) You don't need much apm to do basic production and unit sending, and the high APM player wouldnt have enough stuff to even use their actions on because they would be riddled with bottlenecks everywhere. I think that it is clear that SC is a VERY strategic game, but a game that is never or barely patched will naturally stop having significant strategic advancements.
From my experience on the ladder, everybody plays the same build-older over and over again and they advance in silver-gold-platinum simply because they perfect that build-order by doing it faster and faster. It's just braindead strategy. It means that they use their focus simply on their build-order, because multi-tasking like macro, scout, react is too hard. That's it. End of story. In Diamond they start to go for variations of the same build-order. For e.g. zergs in the metal leagues go for lings into mutas into lurkers, while in diamond they go for lings into banelings or roaches into mutas into lurkers. Yes, every player has his own Strategy, his own braindead build-order, and that makes the ladder very interesting and hard to advance, but the idea is that 99% of the games are just cheeses/allins. So where is the actual Strategy? It's just making your build-order faster, tighter. For a player at my lavel, if you focus on scout and react, you are definitely missing some things at home, or focus at home, no scout, no react. Just hit that timing and let's go. I see people enjoying watching Starcraft, but if they actually play on the ladder, its just the same sh.t over and over again. I have to play like 100 games to find an opponent who is actually going for the late game and actually enjoys a 15-20 minute match. I see people talk a lot about APM. The fact is that everyone below Diamond plays the same BO over and over again and they increase (or not) their APM the more they play. What I actually fail to understand is how is this fun? I read the commnets compating SC2 to chess. Well, at least in chess even a 6 year old doesn't open the same and plays the same over and over again for like 10.000 matches.
ALSO in addition to weekend tournaments and prep tournaments there used to be another (insanely popular) format in TEAM LEAGUES. Proleague was by far the most popular league in Starcraft for a long time, and it was yet another format wherein you knew which team you were facing but not always which player, which maps, or how many times you may have to play. Some players (like her0) overperformed in team leagues vs GSL whereas with other players like Life it was the other way around. And yes, Maru was also, by far, the greatest team format player of all time.
I'd look at this outside of the realm of pros. Think about this this way: In SC2, what would benefit you more: Having +25% APM or having a 25% better strategy? The problem is that the former guarantees you are better if you pursue standard builds, while the latter still leaves you vulnerable to worker harassment, surprises that require you to react in
I enjoy these discussions about these lesser discussed variables in StarCraft. We often see build vs build, race vs race, or player vs player discussions. But I've never heard this weekend tournament vs long form tournament discussions before. Quite interesting.
I feel like the title wanted to address one topic, while the video mostly talked about a completely different topic. Yeah preparation and build order you bring is a part of it, but the discussion should've been about APM/Reaction Time VS Good Strategic Depth
Very true! Ive been saying it for a while. Glad someone who people actually listen to, is saying it now 😂 Id go farther and compare it to a Cookie Clicker game basically. Its just an APM clicker game 😢
I've been writing this for ages now on every single forum. Although RTS, it's more of RT than S. It's the curse of pro gaming. If you want views, community and korean gods do their magic, you have to give them the option to use their APM.
Yes, it is more real time than strategy because if your macro/build is efficient and fast, you can easily win just by having way more units, even if the trades aren't efficient. There's a reason why every super popular strategy game in history is turn based. I'm talking about Chess, Go, Shogi, etc. When you play Speed Chess, weaker strategies become way more viable entirely because the opponent has less time to analyze strategy.
I actually disagree - Starcraft is a game that relies very heavily on both at the same time. Ever wonder how F ranks have 200 APM? Because they do not understand the strategic aspects of the game. With 200 APM people make it into S rank if they know what to do. The very foundation getting out of the early game is build order and game knowledge which is a purely strategical aspect. Of course, you need some mechanics to execute it, but overall that is not a hard to reach threshold. So the strategical aspect seems to be more important than the real time aspect (nothing much to do in the early game, too). Generally, the game gets more strategical the better players become. At the pro level, I think the game is actually leaning more towards an emphasis on strategy because everybody has roughly the same level of mechanical skill and speed. Save for some outliers like Snow and his Reavers. If nobody knows what they are supposed to do in the game: Yes, the real time aspect tends to be more important. For intermediate level games, let's say C and B rank, I think the balance between strategic and real time emphasis is very balanced; a lot of games can be won by very strategic approaches to the game, but also there is room to play long drawn out macro games with more of a mechanical emphasis.
Ya completely disagree. If you know the strategy, then it becomes a real time competition sure, but that's not what the experience is for most players. But if you know nothing about the game and are just a quick player, you are going to lose. You need to know the balance between macro and micro and which units are good vs what races for example. You've been playing this game for basically 30 years so you just see the strategy as second nature. Take a game like call of duty, that is a game where you can pick up any gun, and play in any style, and be pretty good if you are just good at aiming and shooting (ie. The real time). You can hop between lots of FPS games and compete decently. You cannot hop into a StarCraft game for the first time and be decent. You need to know basic strategy because you have near infinite decision points at all points in the game.
But what about SOS. One could argue that he was the most sucessfull protoss ever because he won two blizzcons. No one else achieved that. And he won through strategy.
Its not even a descussion for a long time. Up to diamond and everything above is more about execution then about strategy. Pros do reads of builds by amount af gasses/units/timings. There is barely any surpise elements in sc2. P and T is more about tight execution. Z dont really have any timing that works consistently, so they forced into defensive macro games around scouting and defending and still u have preety much few responses to everything so u need to how to execute it properly. It wasnt a secret for a long time already.
I definitely agree. It feels bad to lose because the other guy can click faster. Rts needs more strategy and less apm to be popularized again. People generally don't want to invest 6 months of practice just to be proficient.
I remember once when I were in silver league, my opponent was mostly massing vikings. I responded to this by building pylons and cannons at his third expo to bait him into landing his vikings. The moment he inevitably took the bait, I jumped on the vulnerable vikings with void rays. You almost never see traps set like that in SC.
He thinks hes smart but he is full of it. Its only now seemingly more real time than strategy cause we eliminated a lot of strategy on top level ,but the game itself has many strategic options. Look at guys like Shine,for example. Its not games problem that artosis only copies builds from others and has trouble executing them.
And just like that, Arty silenced the Rogue haters. Preparation tournaments are perhaps among the most important types of tournaments to test one's true ability, Serral just falls flat.
I do agree. too dependant on build orders than strategy. There aren't enough dynamics to make you plan around, you pretty much know the enemies timings and if you go late enough you pretty much know if you're going to win or lose based entirely on who mined more minerals.
The Reynor example I really dont think is a good one as generally even for weekend tournaments opening groups are announced way ahead of time. And he's dropped super early from the few tournaments.
I've been rrally liking these prerecorded videos you've been doing lately. A lot better than the stream content (though there's certainly a lot of gold in those, too).
but thats just the thing just seeing who can click faster and make less mistakes isnt fun id rather play aoe supcom or kanes wrath or bfme2 not apm the game
every single game ever is a game of speed. even chess, literally a turn based game, is often decided by the timer. skill is being able to do the same stuff as other people, just faster and more accurately. thinking that speed is not part of a game is pure delusion and cope of people who are bad at games and too lazy to practice.
I don't think that is true , by comparison. Name 10 games that are more strategy than Starcraft. You can't , that's why starcraft is more strategy than any other game.
This feels more addressed at SC2 than brood war right? Flash made an entire career out of just defending everything even with people preparing forever for him. And yes, he was also known to throw in timing attacks and cheeses, and yes I'm talking about flash here who is just on a completely different level, but I do think players can find success with that style even in preparation tournaments.
I think I'm just a little confused by this video because brood war is so much more mechanically demanding than SC2 and this thesis makes more sense applied there but we're just talking about SC2...
I agree - but I think that the weekend tournament has to be the truly global tournament. While it's true that preparation tourneys can offer a different feed (and one that I personally really enjoy) the logistics of having to live within 2 hours of each other in the same place makes them extremely limited. The only truly global tournament format is one where the best players in the world can come together in a short space of time. It is similar to correspondence chess - you can get better games than over the board because players have essentially as long as they like for every move, but as a tournament format it is simply too impractical to be used to determine the world champion.
I wrote a longass text but who cares so Tldr In chess it is practical to determine the world champ through classical, bc that's the game. BUT there is also a Blitz world champion. So it is important to differ. And since it's two different formats, you can say X is the best classical and Y the best Blitz player. Is the classical Player a better chess player? In classical, yes. In Blitz, no. And I haven't thought everything through to say if it has any meaning to argue which format is "worth more".
There could be online prep tournaments. If the prize pool large enough we could just watch Maru and Serral do a best of 7 once a year. The main reason chess is still done OTB in the post covid world is anti cheating measures.
@@sanctuarygaming4984 Good point, latency is a thing nonetheless. When online preps are held (which would be nice and all, won't happen bc who puts money in pricepools) they are followed by the latency arguments along the line "X won/lost because latency" and whether or not players can show their true skill playing on higher latency, which is why offline tourneys are so important for Esports
So when you look at games/sports/pretty much anything, there's a rule that if you slow things down, that introduces more opportunity for strategy (and there are very few exceptions to this). A great example is American football. This probably won't play well to people not from the US, but to those intimate with multiple sports they know that American football is actually the most strategically complex sport by a wide margin - no other major sport comes even *remotely* close. There's a few reasons for this, but the biggest is that play isn't continuous. You have plays that stop and then the guys have to line up again and you have a small break which allows the coaches and players to have small chess matches between each other. If you don't believe me, go listen to any NFL QB or coordinator or safety/linebacker talk in-depth about the game and its strategies. It will absolutely blow your mind how complex it is. But anyway, without the break in action that American football has, it would be way less complex and more like rugby (which isn't completely mindless, of course, but has much less strategy) because there's simply no time to plan and consider all the different moves. I believe this rule can be applied to Starcraft as well. The game is moving SO fast and has so many things going on all at once that inevitably it becomes way more about speed and less about strategy. Strategy can win the day in some situations given two players of relatively equal speed but if one guy has 3x the APM of the opponent he probably isn't dropping many games. I think if you made a simple change and made everyone play Starcraft on 0.5x speed it would absolutely make it more strategic. I'm not saying that we should do this, but I do think it would have that effect. Rule can be applied to chess as well. Unless you consider some of the absolute gods like Carlsen/etc. you're not seeing 3 piece sacrifices that somehow lead to a magical mate very often in blitz chess, but it does happen in standard where there's more time to think. Blitz is more about just having very solid fundamentals/endgame and not making mistakes. So clearly I agree that prep-based tourneys require more strategy than weekend tourneys, since it's a similar concept. You have time to consider more factors and prepare all sorts of different strategies, whereas weekend tourneys you're just trying to have a handful of general good builds and not make mechanical mistakes. That isn't to say that weekend tourneys don't require skill, but it's a more mechanical/consistency-based skillset.
