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    Starcraft The HomeStory Cup XX Survival Guide

    November 19, 2019

    Starcraft The HomeStory Cup XX Survival Guide

    The HomeStory Cup XX Survival Guide

    Posted: 18 Nov 2019 10:18 AM PST

    The HomeStory Cup XX Survival Guide

    HomeStory Cup returns this Thursday and celebrates its 20th anniversary!

    Thanks to the amazing support from the community, HomeStory Cup not only continues but is also bigger and better than ever! Join TakeTV, 32 of the world's best players and an incredible line-up of talent at the Tropical Islands Resort in Germany from the 21st to the 24th of November.  

    Some of you probably already packed your swimming trunks, ready to show off your sixpacks, but if you plan to enjoy the show from home, here is everything you need to know:

     

    Prize Pool

    $25,000 SC2 Tournament:

    • 1st: $8,000
    • 2nd: $5,000
    • 3rd: $3,000
    • 4th: $2,000
    • 5th/6th: $1,300
    • 7th/8th: $900
    • 9th-12th: $400
    • 13th-16th: $250

    $1 Water Slide Competition:

    • 1st: $1

     

    Format

    RO32 Group Stage

    • 4 groups with 8 players each
    • BO2, Round Robin
    • Top 2 advance to winner bracket
    • Third and fourth advance to lower bracket

    RO16 Playoffs

    • 16 players from the group stage
    • BO5 double-elimination winner bracket, loser drops downto lower bracket
    • BO5 single-elimination lower bracket
    • Finals are played as a BO7

     

    All games will be played on the new patch, but on the current/old maps.

     

    Players and Groups

    Group A Group B Group C Group D
    Trap Serral Stats Reynor
    Solar TY soO INnoVation
    Elazer ShoWTimE Zest PartinG
    TIME uThermal Lambo HeRoMaRinE
    Cure PtitDrogo Bunny Harstem
    souL Kelazhur Clem Mana
    TLO Bly Zanster SortOf
    Taeja MarineLorD Hellraiser Denver

     

    Casters, Talent and Guests

    And even more!

     

    Schedule and Group Stage Matches

     

    • Thursday Start: 10:30 AM CET | 4:30 AM EST | 6:30 PM KST
    • Friday Start: 10:30 AM CET | 4:30 AM EST | 6:30 PM KST
    • Saturday Start: 11:00 AM CET | 5:00 AM EST | 7:00 PM KST
    • Sunday Start: 11:00 AM CET | 5:00 AM EST | 7:00 PM KST

     

    Day 1:

    • Match 1: Trap vs Cure
    • Match 2: TIME vs Solar
    • Match 3: Trap vs TIME
    • Match 4: Cure vs TIME
    • Match 5: Serral vs TY
    • Match 6: Serral vs ShoWTimE
    • Match 7: PtitDrogo vs TY
    • Match 8: TY vs ShoWTimE

     

    Day 2:

    • Match 1: Stats vs soO
    • Match 2: Stats vs Zest
    • Match 3: Stats vs Lambo
    • Match 4: Bunny vs Lambo
    • Match 5: Reynor vs INoVation
    • Match 5: HeRoMaRinE vs INoVation
    • Match 7: INoVation vs PartinG
    • Match 8: PartinG vs HeRoMaRinE

     

    You will probably see more matches on the main stream than shown here, since conferencing will be used to show you more than one match per round if the games are short.

     

    Streams

     

    YouTube videos with Take

    Social Media

     

    Partners

    Special thanks to:

    For the first time you can get HSC in-game items or merchandise at Matcherino while supporting the next HSC! Get your banners, portraits, hoodies or mugs!

     

    Feel free to ask any questions you have here or on the TakeTV Discord server where you can also discuss the event in the HSC XX channel. Of course you can also check out the Liquipedia page.

     

    That's it, this HSC will be truly special. See you guys in twitch chat and enjoy the show!

    submitted by /u/Musicus
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    HSC XX: Kim Phan, the former esport director of Blizzard, will attend her first HSC as a fan!

    Posted: 18 Nov 2019 01:54 PM PST

    Serral invited to Independence Day reception by the president of Finland.

    Posted: 19 Nov 2019 12:17 AM PST

    Last year Topson and Jerax from Dota 2 were invited, now Serral received the invite. Usually the invites are given to politics, top level athletes and other high level people.

    Wiki article about the Independence Day Reception in English)

    Source in Finnish

    submitted by /u/godxarte
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    Playing other games makes me appreciate how balanced starcraft actually is, for the most part.

    Posted: 18 Nov 2019 09:41 PM PST

    Just wanted to make a quick appreciation post. Amidst all this nydus swarmhost stuff, it's easy to get worked up about the balance of the game (myself included). But like, coming back to starcraft after playing other games is a breath of fresh air.

    At the VERY WORST, matchup's favor 1 race with like 55-45 odds, on the extreme end. Sure, maybe some of you have been playing since the beta, and I'm sure there were more extreme cases. But in the past few years at least, I'm fairly sure there haven't been any super egregious win-rate imbalances.

    The point of this post isn't to be like "LOL GUYS STOP WHINING ABOUT BALANCE IT DOESN'T MATTER", I just wanted to appreciate that sc2 is always going to be a "fair" game. It's nice knowing that here in diamond league, balance is rarely/never going to be a factor that actually affects my winrate. I can practice, and expect to climb. I get better, my MMR increases. I don't have to worry about OP strats because my losses are ALWAYS my own fault. It's 1% balance, and 99% my macro/micro/execution etc. It's refreshing knowing that my losses are 100% on me, and so are my wins.

    I got pretty serious about league of legends for awhile, and we all know that can take a toll. Even when you improve, you're only 20% of your team. A 55-60% winrate is fantastic in league. This goes for all team games. With starcraft, I can start a new account, and shoot up to diamond 1 with a 98% winrate.

    I got pretty into the dark souls series for awhile, did a lot of PvP. You always have to contend with lag, overpowered weapons, and glitch exploits (granted, it isn't meant to be a competitive PvP game, so maybe a bad example). Sc2 lag is negligible, unless you're playing on an overseas server, and are super high level where split-second micro decisions can decide a game.

    Of course, not like these games are anything like sc2, these are just my experiences with other games I've gotten competitive with.

    The result is that I basically never tilt or get salty when I lose a sc2 game. Sure, I get frustrated, but it's not frustration AT starcraft, it's frustration with myself for not being better at the game. It drives improvement, it makes me want to play MORE. This is in direct contrast with losing to lag, blatant exploits, or teammates intentionally ruining games, which makes me want to put the game down and never pick it up again.

    Kind of rambling here, not exactly sure what my point is, it's just refreshing to come back to starcraft and not have to worry about any shannanigans, crossing my fingers that I get good team-mates, or a good connection, find a good weapon, don't run into hackers, and what-have-you. It's just me and my sweaty ass palms grinding the grind. Wins make me want to improve and keep playing, and so do losses. That's something that I haven't been able to find with any other game. Glhf lads

    submitted by /u/w3nch
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    Boxer joins T1 (ex-SKT T1) as content creator/streamer!

    Posted: 18 Nov 2019 09:37 PM PST

    MrBitter will be @ HSC XX

    Posted: 18 Nov 2019 07:10 AM PST

    just Puck things

    Posted: 18 Nov 2019 07:09 PM PST

    AlphaStar vs Serral - Replay Analysis by Artosis

    Posted: 18 Nov 2019 06:03 AM PST

    Puck learning about the new beam micro bug

    Posted: 18 Nov 2019 05:51 PM PST

    The Tasteless Podcast Episode 19 with guest James "Kaelaris" Carrol

    Posted: 18 Nov 2019 04:26 PM PST

    Artist Brian Sousa leaves Blizzard Entertainment

    Posted: 18 Nov 2019 10:00 AM PST

    Brian Sousa announced on his Linked-In account that he is leaving Blizzard Entertainment. He was lead artist on Warcraft III Reforged and worked on the original Starcraft, Starcraft II, and Starcraft Remastered. That's a pretty high profile departure and he's leaving right before Warcraft III Reforged gets released. There are some rumors going around of other senior RTS developers also quietly leaving but no official word or anything that's made its way to the gaming new sites.

    submitted by /u/CounterfeitDLC
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    Shout out to how great Rotterdam and ToD cast together.

    Posted: 18 Nov 2019 09:09 AM PST

    I rarely get a chance to watch anything live, but I actively seek out vods that Rotterdam and Todd are casting together. At the very least my enjoyment level is upped when I realize they're the commentators to the game I'm watching on youtube or twitch vod. i would love it if they became a standard pairing for casting tournaments. Them together works so well. Keep it up bois.

    #RotterToD.

    #ToDerdam.

    submitted by /u/sage_006
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    Sigil of the Storm (Heroes of the Storm) Art tribute. I made sure Starcraft characters had some representation here!

    Posted: 18 Nov 2019 06:39 PM PST

    JinAirGW SC2 Head Coach Cha JiHoon is now the new League of Legends team coach.

    Posted: 18 Nov 2019 11:36 PM PST

    Guys, I have bad news :( Zerg is underpowered and next WCS will only have 2,000 viewers :(.

    Posted: 18 Nov 2019 09:12 AM PST

    Clearing up misconceptions about AlphaStar

    Posted: 18 Nov 2019 03:37 AM PST

    I see a lot of uniformed assumptions about ML and running algorithms so I'll clear it up for y'all as someone who does a lot of work in ML.

    First off Alphastar doesn't have a tree search, its just a recurrent neural network with a lot of enhancements... meaning it is much less computationally expensive than running a AlphaZero on chess and Go. In fact, the paper claims that a single desktop GPU could run Alphastar.

    Secondly, Training a NN is by far more computationally expensive than just running the agent. This is a Deep Reinforcement Learning algorithm that doesn't have any planning algorithms/experts to assist it during training. Meaning, the NN of alphastar must be really, really well trained to surpass human play. To put it into perspective, AlphaZero without tree search would definitely not beat humans.... it most likely wouldn't even take a particularly strong one at that. This fact alone that Alphastar plays sc2 without ANY planning algorithms to assist it (Like MCTS for AlphaZero) makes training not sample efficient at all, this is why a significant contribution of the paper is that they introduced their alphastar league to ensure robust agents that could play against a multitude of builds. Also, Alphastar league is huge population of agents playing in parallel, whereas during inference (say when you are playing it on ladder) it's running a single agent and doesn't have to compute the derivatives for each weight in the NN...

    Finally, Alphastar is the very first AI that plays sc2 with the constraints that it does, it's basically the Deep Blue but for sc2. Deepmind's objective was to train an AI that beats a vast majority of humans and it does... games like montezumas revenge still aren't solved by our current state of the art methods... so I highly doubt they care much to push forward more on this project. I mean they didn't even release the weights for AlphaZero.... and AlphaZero is one of the first super-human engines in Go! Moreover, Deepmind isn't a software company, they actually won't bother to convert their research rig for alphastar to some pretty app, and that's perfectly fine they are researchers that want to spend their time working on protein folding and other domains that could save lives. Our best hope for having a personal AI for sc2 like stockfish is for chess (you literally click analyze game on some chess websites and it tells you what you should have done at every step imagine that for sc2!!) is to hope some other company or researchers with lots of resources can train another AI. Leela Zero is a community-built clone of AlphaZero that is trained exactly as the paper entails with some improvements and it relies on people donating GPU time for training, maybe SC2 could have this one day!

    submitted by /u/smashMaster3000
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    Spellcasters for Terran?

    Posted: 19 Nov 2019 12:40 AM PST

    I was thinking about just how much spellcasters matter in the game at the moment, and how it seems that terran really lack any good spellcasters. All of their units are just damage dealers with nothing that interesting about them.

    Protoss has stuff like High Templars, with storm being a game changer at the right time, Sentries to help with the ground army, and Oracles to help harass with their spells.

    Zerg has a ton, such as Queens, Infestors, and Vipers, which have huge prominence in the meta (well, the former two).

    Terran has... Ravens, which are hardly used at all as their spells aren't really that good, and Ghosts which are used even less. I feel like that's something that's really lacking, especially since most of terran's units are just damage-dealers with some abilities that deal a bit more damage.

    I think it would be really cool if there was a Ghost/Raven rework or just adding another unit, maybe even the Science Vessel, to give Terran some cool spells. Maybe some new ones, such as drop pods with limited timed units (which cost minerals and supply, have a cooldown, sort of like the mercaneries in the WoL campaign), I feel like it would make Terran more interesting and fun, what are your guy's opinion?

    submitted by /u/Maguc
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    Game feels extremelly difficult

    Posted: 18 Nov 2019 12:28 PM PST

    I finished it on Normal and tryed Hard but couldnt get past the Zerg Swarm. It feels impossible. And i got demolished on multiplayer. It seems i just cant find how to play it, feels complex and that you have to be very precise at multitasking. I as a newbie would like tips to get better. I loved the normal campaign but the rest feels overly frustraiting and i cant figure it out

    EDIT: i just wanna thank for so many answers. Other subreddits treated me very disgustingly, but this one was cool. It seems Bronze to GM is a must. Btw that Zerg Swarm level was "Zero Hour"

    submitted by /u/lendacerda
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    PartinG joins Dragon Phoenix Gaming

    Posted: 18 Nov 2019 05:34 AM PST

    PartinG leaves Pixel 1 and joins DRG for the next seasons oft China Team Championship!

    Parting joins DPG

    submitted by /u/KuBa_PS
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    The Cheeseadelphia XI Prize Distribution has been Unveiled! Check it out and sign up today!

    Posted: 18 Nov 2019 07:34 AM PST

    I wonder were this trophy is right now...

    Posted: 18 Nov 2019 05:28 AM PST

    StarCraft tattoo by Vasilii Suvorov

    Posted: 18 Nov 2019 06:25 AM PST
    Read more
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