Although they're many voices supporting the new patch but people who do stop playing because of this awful patch usually do not speak up. According to a survey 19 out of 151 people have uninstalled StarCraft2 following the first ptr.
TL;DR: The larval spawn rate buff scales exponentially because total minerals mined at a given timing is a piecewise quadratic function of time. Buffing the baseline larva rate is a bad idea—it won't encourage early-game aggression, it will just make mid-game macro snowball completely out of control.
We know that in StarCraft II, your overall unit and building count at any given timing is determined by your cumulative income. This makes total resources gathered one of the best metrics for measuring economic impact on a match. Since minerals are harvested by workers tick by tick, total mined wealth is essentially the mathematical integral of your active worker count over time. For simplicity, if we assume worker production is a continuous process—with time on the X-axis and worker count on the Y-axis—the area under the curve represents your total accumulated minerals.
So, what does the Zerg worker-to-time curve look like?
Assuming uninterrupted, peaceful macro:
You start at (0, 8) and climb at a constant linear rate.
Once the Natural expansion finishes, the slope doubles.
Once Queens pop and begin injects, the slope doubles again.
When the 3rd base finishes, the slope jumps by another 1.5x.
Of course, this curve has other variables. Pausing drone production to make army units flattens the curve parallel to the X-axis, and losing workers creates a downward disconnect. However, for the sake of calculating the total mineral area under the curve, it can always be approximated as a piecewise linear function.
The larval spawn rate buff impacts this curve in two major ways:
First, it increases the slope of each individual segment. On its own, this individual slope increase has a relatively limited impact on the total area under the curve (even though it acts as a quadratic function of time), especially since Queen injects dilute the weight of the Hatchery's natural spawn rate.
The terrifying part, however, is how the initial income boost compounds. Because Zerg gets more money earlier, they can drop their next expansions and Queens much sooner (the PTR Queen price reduction to 150 minerals heavily amplifies this). This causes all the steep slope breakpoints on the graph to snowball and shift to the left.
While a simple horizontal shift of a breakpoint might look like a linear economic gain on paper, the catch is that each subsequent breakpoint shifts earlier and earlier. By the time you are macroing on 4 bases, the total economic spike becomes absurd.
To put it intuitively: an extra larva per minute per base sounds like just "one extra drone." But dropping a 3rd base 30 seconds earlier translates to a 6-drone advantage, and dropping a 4th base a full minute earlier instantly cascades into a 12-drone advantage.
I'm very scared after seeing someone who has a huge influence on patching speaking like this. For people who don't know OmniSkeptic is the programmer who helped Blizzard implemented many of the changes in ptr and many of his original ideas actually went into the last patch.
Larva spawning time reduced from 10.7 sec to 9 sec and queen cost reduced by 50. Suppose a Zerg player plans to make 7 queens before 5:00 and expands before 2:00, the reduced cost of queens added together will be 350 and he will have 7 extra larva, which means 7 extra drones. Having 7 extra drones without cutting anything at 5:00? It's 400 more minerals per minute! And remember some of the extra drones are born way before 5:00 so they have produced hundreds of extra minerals by 5:00.
edit: Queen cost is only reduced by 25 so only 175 extra minerals. However the 7 extra workers at 5:00 is still an underestimation cuz there's at least one extra worker born before 3:00 and 2 born before 4:00 so they are able to mine 200 extra minerals before 5:00, which is 375 extra minerals in total.
The 8 worker start is going to make the game slower right?
I'm glad to see that the biggest Protoss streamer is now openly expressing his objections to the new patch. https://youtu.be/8ysWtemEwYY?t=1931&si=nhEi_UloRPfMUQTT My fellow Protoss players, y'all know what's happening right now. The Terran cabal is deleting our race from the game and we can't just let it happen. The only viable aggressive option right now is proxy gate and everything else is dead.(Cannon rush is killed by the 8 worker start) We don't have early game aggression because warpgate sucks and in mid game we are also too weak to put on any aggression. Without a playable early and mid game, late game also becomes unplayable. So what are you waiting for? There's no balance council anymore. We must take action to make Blizzard hear out voice. The dictatorship of some Terran mapmaker must be stopped. I'm going to email Blizzard or even Microsoft regarding the corruption and abuse of power in the Blizzard classic gane team. Upvote if you are willing to join me. Don't let the corrupted shadow balance council ruin our beloved game!
8 worker start killed cannon in rush. Before I could cope and fight against 12 pool/13 gate/proxy rax but now it's just impossible to win against these blank counters. Thank you for bringing me to Master my lovely cannons. Now it's time to retire and stay at home. Proxy gate, however, has become the superior opener for any one base agression. There's no penalty for proxying the first pylon and gate even if it gets scouted. In pvt you are guaranteed to take control of Terran nat with a single proxy gate and there's no way to stop it. In pvz and pvp proxy 2 gate zealots are way stronger than before and you cannot really punish it. I'm proxy gating every game now and the only loss so far was against another toss doing the same build. Embrace the new cheese, before Blizzard nerf it and destroy everything fun in the game.
The host of KUNG FU cup just asked Blizzard about the upcoming patch and the Blizzard guy said the patch will go live no matter what.
Zerg need 40 seconds to drone to 12 and will be missing 3 larva compared to live. However, the first adept/reaper is only delayed by 20 seconds with a normal opening, which means there's an extra 20 seconds window for t/p to deal damage. Therefore, Zerg are forced to make units earlier. In addition, proxying Zerg feels much safer cuz ling speed is giga delayed, not to mention early pool aggression becomes a meme with lower starting workers.
4 wins in a row. No matter how Zerg opens I can always make something happen. Go tempest versus hatch first and voidray against pool first. Early pool is shit. Zerg are poor as hell. Adepts are godlike cuz speed is delayed and queens are just unaffordable.
Let's be realistic. Map hacking and draw hacking have been around for years and Blizzard hasn't done and isn't going to do anything about it. Small bugs like cyclone being unable to target friendly cloaked units can stay for months. The programming behind the ptr is also SHIT. (Changelings deal splash damgae to everything around them when killed is hilarious)
When starting workers increased from 6 to 12 we had new patch every 2 or 3 months. Now it's very clear that Blizzard can only afford to patch the game twice a year, which means op things will stay for much longer and players will suffer much harder.
After dying to this build myself, I decided to do it against my fellow toss player and they got destroyed. Basically it's gasless 14/13/12 (13/12/11 on smaller maps) and you build your first hatch somewhere near your opponent's third. The timing of nat and pool is only 5 seconds late so nobody will notice. Floating larva before starting the pool is sus but again toss doesn't know what does it mean. By the way most toss literally cannot count so missing 5 drones doesn't matter.
When 6 lings exit Zerg nat there are already 6 lings in toss base and the first adept is just about to finish. Surround the adept when it pops or kill the pylon = win.
Tvp is unplayable right now. I can't win when I am 3 base ahead. Terran just sit behind pf and wall.
Usually when toss open robo it's going to be a two base ground allin. Are there any exceptions?
The build start from a normal nexus into core. Single chrono adept into stalker. Robo asap and tc when the immo(chrono) is on the way. 2nd gate around 3:20 and grab 2 gas after making the prism(chrono). Templar archive asap. Take your third after the prism flies out carrying the immo. Warp in 2 HT to morph an archon and try to get some damage.
Here is the idea: open robo and make immortal prism. Expand after 4:30. From Zerg's perspective this looks exactly like an 8 gate zealot immortal allin which hits around 4:40. (Though you are missing 6 gates and the gas in your natural are taken.) To defend this allin Zerg need to stop making drones around 4:00 but this is only an immortal archon drop with a late third. If Zerg counter attacks with roach and lings, immortal archon will hold it with battery and prism support. The build is a weird variant of archon drop: instead of forcing spores with an orcacle before dropping archons you force early drone cut with a fake allin. One archon is replaced by an immortal to make the build smoother, which means you cannot clear ovies very fast but you can kill roaches. Also the drop hits 30 seconds faster.