This was an fun read, as someone who's both a Korean BW player and a speech recognition researcher.
It's interesting to note that the original Korean transcription already has many errors, seemingly (and impressively) corrected by LLMs later on. For example, 12 안마당 빌드 (12 courtyard build) is actually 12 앞마당 빌드 (12 frontyard build), which might have been more understandable to BW players. Similarly 투에처리 빌드 (processing-at-two build? makes no sense lol) should have been transcribed 투해처리 빌드 (two-Hatchery build).
Therefore it may also be helpful to directly feed the slang dictionary into Whisper's inference process using contextual biasing. There are lots of ways to do this, but the simplest would be to increase the probability of slang words in the dictionary in the final prediction layer of Whisper by a constant factor. This is fairly easy to implement, for example by using HuggingFace's library: https://huggingface.co/docs/transformers/en/internal/generat...
I am a StarCraft fan and I have no idea what a courtyard or a frontyard is supposed to be! However I do know that the names of buildings, units, technologies, and strategies are usually heavily abbreviated in English. Perhaps the same is true in Korean? A 12 barracks build would usually just be called "12 rax", a two hatchery mutalisk build would be called "2 hatch muta", and a three hatchery hydralisk timing attack / all-in would be called "3 hatch hydra bust".
Thanks for the added context on the builds! As "foreign" BW player and fellow speech processing researcher, I agree shallow contextual biasing should help. While not difficult to implement, most generally available ASR solutions don't make it easy to use. There's a PR in ctranslate2 implementing the same feature so that it could be exposed in faster-whisper: https://github.com/OpenNMT/CTranslate2/pull/1789
Been a while since I played the game, but in all translations I was confused why you'd want to build 12 spawning pools.
If I remember correctly, that building was for enabling creation of zerglings and other units in hatcheries (and also for researching upgrades) - but one building was enough to unlock those units in all hatcheries; and it did not produce any units itself, so building more of them wouldn't increase your unit output either.
You could in theory built several of them to research multiple upgrades in parallel, but there were only like 3 possible upgrades anyway, so it would make sense to build 12 of them.
The only reason I could think of would be as a sort of redundancy, so you can keep building zerglings even if the enemy destroys some of the pools. But 12 also seems excessive for that.
So what exactly was the motivation here?
Sorry if I'm talking rubbish here, as I said, it's been a while.
Don’t let the title fool you: this is anextremely thorough and creative take on translating and making more approachable the commentary of StarCraft.
As the author rightly points out, in its 27 years of existence, commentary around the game has become a domain specific language. Not just Korean or English.
This approach of automated scripting and using AI to understand roughly what was said and then make it coherent is really cool.
LOL, as a non-native English speaker, reading this reminds me of EXACTLY the same problem of translating many things, but more precisely, computer articles and software development.
There’s a huge amount of terms that are difficult to translate (sharding? Hash?). The only real solution is to adopt them to your language, more or less adapted, which is what happens over time. But it requires a community that, to some degree, is able to cross the gap between the languages. In this case, learning English.
Talking about software development in Spanish (my native language) is a succession of imported terms from English.
I don’t think there’s a good way of doing that, and I’m interested to see how automatic translations deal with it, because the only way this can work is with a process of mixing both language in a social way and see what terms evolve from that process.
And you need, in the terms the post describes, people that know Korean at least in a non-fluent way. And the game itself, of course.
With Spanish we have the added complexity that there are different linguistic traditions around the world. For example, in Mexico I learned "depurar", an existing Spanish word that closely fits the meaning of "debug". However, many Spanish speakers simply say "debuguear", just directly borrowing the English word. In Mexico I also learned "desempeño" to describe the performance of a computer or software, but in Argentina I've heard "el performance" to say the same.
I think the most common thing is to just use English loanwords without trying to find existing Spanish words that fit the meaning.
In some sense, these terms are extremely trivial to adapt: the German term for sharding is just a literal borrow, just say 'sharding'.
What's almost impossible to translate are everyday words. German Brot has rather different connotations from the nasty stuff Brits call bread, but I don't think there's a better word available, and a straight-up borrow would feel fairly weird in most context. Much weirder than borrowing 'sharding' in a technical context.
> The only real solution is to adopt them to your language, more or less adapted, which is what happens over time.
You can see some good examples of that when you look at railway related terms in German. They used to be all English, because that's where we got the technology from. But over time they have been replaced with mostly German native-looking terms. (Well, native looking, but many of them like Lokomotive re-created from the same borrowing from Greek or Latin as in English. But eg station is now Bahnhof. And train is Zug.)
Kinda funny that in an article about translations, the author gets signal-to-noise completely backwards. A high signal to noise (over 9000) is very good. It means you are getting a lot of signal with very little noise. Decreasing signal to noise means getting more noise.
I was able to understand the Google Translate version well, but I am very familiar with the intricacies of BW and zerg 12hatch openers.
Chatgpt and Claude did an incredible job translating the korean text:
Claude:
Today I'll teach you about the 12 Hatchery build. I'll explain the types of 12 Hatchery builds, their advantages and disadvantages, and the build orders in a simple but detailed way.
Against Protoss, this is the build you use when you want to start with the most economic advantage. Against Terran, there are several builds you can do with 12 Hatchery, so I'll explain some of the most commonly used builds.
The first is the two-hatchery build that starts with 12 Hatchery:
12 Hatchery
11 Spawning Pool
10 Gas
This build uses early gas, and it's often used when you want to quickly transition into a three-hatchery build with three gas bases.
The second build is:
12 Hatchery
12 Pool
12 Gas
This build allows for moderately fast tech tree and moderately fast three-hatchery expansion. This build is commonly known as the "safe three-hatchery" build, and you can think of it as a build that enables both quick Mutalisks and quick third base.
Dumb question from someone who only played money-maps as a kid:
What do the numbers in front of the building mean? 12 Hatcheries seems like… well, 12 seems like a possible but implausible number of hatcheries to build (hypothetically it is possible of course). And 12 spawning pools is obviously not useful. So that makes me think it is the position in the build order list. But, they list other builds, like:
> The second is the 12 Hatch, 12 Pool, 12 Gas
Which doesn’t make a ton of sense in with that parsing. I mean it must not be a straight list. Maybe it is a tree, and 12 is the depth for this building? But that seems late, I can’t think of 11 buildings to build before gas. Maybe they include units too? Or maybe just drones/overlords?
IIRC it started with "4-pooling" which is when, as Zerg, you build a spawning pool while only having 4 workers (it's been years, forget what they're called), rebuild your 4th worker and then start making zerglings to achieve a super-early attack (a "rush").
Then your opponent calls you all sorts of vile names and questions your sexuality, etc.
It denotes how much supply you should have when you start the building. All of your supply at this stage comes from workers, so it's also an indication how many workers you should train.
In the game you build buildings and units. The units take up "supply" which there is a limit on. At the beginning of the game you mostly just building workers (unless you scout your opponent is going for an extremely early attack), who mine resources and construct buildings.
The numbers indicate the supply you should be at when you build the structure.
so a 12 hatch 12 pool 12 gas means you get to 12 workers and then build those 3 buildings in that order as soon as you have the resources for those.
For zerg the workers actually become the building, so I assume you hit 12, build the hatchery, build another worker, build the spawning pool, build another worker, and then build your gas refinery.
People already explained that's it's how much supply you have.
In practice this is easier for people to use than actual clock timings, because it's more robust to delays or interference. If you remember "third rax at 30 supply" then even if you're playing a little slow, you will still know roughly when to build that. But if you memorized exact clock timings and now you might be 20+ seconds behind, it's hard to know when you should fit in the new building.
It's not perfect of course, and if you get cheesed and the game goes weird then you'll have to start improvising rather than relying on just supply timings, a lot of times after a cheese where neither side definitely wins, the balance between tech and economy is now very non-standard and you can't rely on conventional rules of thumb anymore.
Even when Google Translate got pretty good I was not really able to effectively translate Chinese or Japanese text about Go (the game). I had similar issues to the ones mentioned in this post. Many Chinese and Japanese words (e.g., "ko") have a very specific meaning in the context of Go, but they also have regular meanings (e.g., "robbery") in more normal contexts, so Google Translate would translate text in a generic way, which made everything unintelligible. With modern LLMs, I can now preface my translation requests with instructions such as "I am going to ask you to translate some Chinese text accompanying weiqi diagrams. Your translations should be idiomatic and not shy away from Go jargon. For example, 拆 = extension, 夹 = pincer, 刺 and 觑 = peep.", and it does a fantastic job, enough for me to basically read anything I want. It was lucky for me that evidently enough Go material already existed in the training set that I didn't have to do anything more special.
(Some chess corrections, in case the author is reading: the moves at the start of chess games are called openings in English, not openers; there are not distinct white-piece and black-piece openings, although of course an individual player will probably study a given opening from the point of view of one side or the other; their study is considered fundamental all the way up to the highest level, in fact more so as you increase in skill; and the Sicilian variation in question is the Najdorf, not Najdork.)
I attempted playing a few world cyber game US regional matches and I was always amazed how much faster everyone else was. Then I remember when they live streamed it from Korea and I saw how fast they played and I was blown away. From a strategy point of view, something so basic about the game that I missed was when a blog introduced me to some math for a protoss zealot power up that defeated a zergling in 2 hits rather than 3. That's when I realized this is a chess game and I got hooked.
I like "front yard", it makes sense for SC2 where some recent maps do have a back base (usually with fewer minerals and/or gas).
These "backyard bases" are also often encountered on team maps; deciding which player takes the front is strategic. P&T can build batteries and bunkers together, but Z gets a buff on creep and can spread it forward much faster.
I really wish someone with the resources and connections could get in touch with South Korean broadcasters in order to get access to their archives so that more historical games could get uploaded and re-commentated for a western audience.
My favorite Brood War slang term is Ee Han Timing [0]: basically when you take a risky build that has to do damage in a small timing window. A ton of exciting Brood War moments come from exploiting tiny timing windows.
That's much of the game in a nutshell, in varying degrees. If one player makes many units and the other is instead collecting resources, the first player has to do damage to equalize or else the other player got away with it and the first is way behind. At the top levels, smaller actions like making one or two early attack units applies the same to a smaller degree, but early game differences compound thus matter more than the same later on.
I was a reasonably competitive BW player until the Korean teams arrived on the scene. I'll always appreciate how they elevated the level of gameplay. Really nice guys, too, I learned a lot from playing with them, and it was fun talking strategy via chat to the best of our mutual linguistic abilities. Good memories. I would have absolutely loved something like this project back in the day.
Artosis (the person who is the English speaking commentator in the video) is in general quite technical - especially when it comes to the Terran fraction (one of the three fractions in the game; the other is Protoss - that you see in the video, and third is Zerg).
However Korea had a much bigger scene, with lots of players, coaches, teams - so they probably have more institutional knowledge.
So the suspicion, or assumption is that Artois can be the high-school coach level, but there are university coaches and professional coaches, who perhaps are even better. And they are better since in Korea Brood War had much bigger monetary backing - and social backing too.
If everyone in your highschool played the same game, there would be more players. Then if there were around 12 (or more) professional teams, they would find more talent, but also better coaches.
And it's not that Koreans dominated completely, players from other countries could win against them too, but usually they would not, especially as a whole match consisted often of few games (usually: best of 3 (so you need to win two games to proceed), best of 5 for finals).
To rephrase this differently, the two main English speaking comentators nowadays seem to be Artosis, who is technical and the second is "Falcon Paladin" channel, who is entertaining and commentary is often "what he sees on the screen" (with no, or sometimes even bad takes about strategy - or explanations "why we see what we see").
If Korea has 50 such commentators, then probably some will be entertaining and some will be very technical.
On a side note, Starcraft Brood War is not only very well balanced for play and entertaining to play - it is also very entertaining to watch, since units are relatively distinct and it at least partially avoids the "unit blob" problem (where one group of units attacks another group of units) due to existence of various units that make area damage (for example.. tanks). And yes I know that in big battles there are blobs, but at pro level they generally work really hard to spread the units across the battlefield - even if the units are primitive and have bad pathing. I digress, just wanted to say that the game is simply pleasant to watch - because it has a certain clarity.
I've been watching BW out of Korea since 2007. Previously also played but it's been many years. This is really cool, thanks for sharing!
There are two YouTube channels I wanted to take the opportunity to shout out, the first one does English translations of Korean BW content, and the second one provides commentary on recent tournaments like the ASL with a little bit more depth then Tasteless and Artosis (no hate but to me their commentary is too off topic and they miss basic things about build orders).
Warms my heart to see effort put into a beloved game. Just this week I watched a YT video of a sc custom game where the players were discussing whether its worth the effort to translate in-game korean-language content. Its an old game that is played by a niche community in north america. The majority of custom games are created in korean and never get to translated for the small number of north american players that would be interested.
How far off are we from local immidiate voice translation? Something on my computer that translates all spoken words by my computer, keeping tone and intonation?
Reminds me, many years ago someone paid me to translate a Korean wiki article about some League of Legends pro player to English. No idea why, most of it was random trivia, it didn't contain any notable insights. But it was decent money as a side job so I didn't bother asking. Possibly similar motives to this article?
> Very few of members of the foreigner community are fluent in Korean. Foreigner access to Korean BW discourse is a contradicting concept: if you speak Korean fluently, you have no reason to be in the foreigner community, as it only has access to material that is strictly inferior and more limited. For this reason, Korean-speaking members in the foreigner community are exceedingly rare.
I can vouch for this in general - after becoming fluent I've stopped looking up anything related to Korea in English because the quality of information is much worse. I'm sure the same holds for other languages and places.
As a side note, I have gotten into watching a "foreigner" BW channel everyday called ArtosisCasts. The videos are very strategic and high level commentaries on games as they are watched for the first time, with some after-match highlights for especially interesting maneuvers. It has really made me appreciate the depth of the game, as well as explain how I was so bad at it in high school. It has actually made me think a lot about startups, economic optimization, and how you approach the "meta" of any activity you're undertaking.
FWIW, I asked Claude to translate and compare its translation to this as well as Google Translate. I then pasted top threads from this page, and asked it to retranslate the original.
First:
Hello, today I'll be teaching you about the 12 Inner Base build. I'll explain the types of 12 Inner Base builds, their advantages and disadvantages, and give you a detailed but simple breakdown of the build order.
Against Protoss, this is a build you use when you want to start with a more economical opening. Against Terran, there are several builds you can do with a 12 Inner Base. I'll explain some of the most commonly used builds.
The first is the Two Hatchery build that starts with 12 Inner Base. The order is:
- 12 Inner Base
- 11 Spawning Pool
- 10 Gas
This build utilizes early gas. It's commonly used when you want to quickly transition into Three Hatchery play with three gas bases.
The second build is:
- 12 Inner Base
- 12 Pool
- 12 Gas
This gives you moderately fast tech tree progression and moderately fast Three Hatchery expansion. This build is commonly referred to as the 'Safe Three Hatch.' You can think of it as a build that gives you both fast Mutalisks and fast three base play.
>>> Then, post HN comments:
Hello, today I'll teach you about the 12 Natural build [note: actually 앞마당/frontyard in Korean StarCraft terminology, seemingly transcribed as 안마당]. I'll explain the types of 12 Natural builds, their advantages and disadvantages, and give you a simple but detailed breakdown of the build order.
Against Protoss [토스/Toss in Korean], this is a build you use when you want the most economic opening. Against Terran, there are several builds possible with a 12 Natural. I'll explain some of the most commonly used ones.
The first is the Two-Hatchery build [투에처리, should be 투해처리] that starts with 12 Natural. The order is:
- 12 supply: Natural expansion
- 11 supply: Spawning Pool
- 10 supply: Gas
This build utilizes early gas. It's commonly used when you want to quickly transition into a Three-Hatchery build with three gas bases.
The second build timing is:
- 12 supply: Natural
- 12 supply: Pool
- 12 supply: Gas
This gives you a moderately fast tech tree and moderately fast Three-Hatchery expansion. This build is commonly known as the 'Safe Three-Hatch' [안 3에처리 in Korean], and you can think of it as a build that enables both fast Mutalisks and fast third base.
This is great work, but really it seems that anyone who is a truly dedicated Brood War amateur should knuckle under and learn Korean. It really isn’t that unapproachable: with a decent approach (try https://refold.la ) you should be able to get somewhere useful in maybe “just” 3000 hours.
[+] [-] jaeyounkg|1 year ago|reply
It's interesting to note that the original Korean transcription already has many errors, seemingly (and impressively) corrected by LLMs later on. For example, 12 안마당 빌드 (12 courtyard build) is actually 12 앞마당 빌드 (12 frontyard build), which might have been more understandable to BW players. Similarly 투에처리 빌드 (processing-at-two build? makes no sense lol) should have been transcribed 투해처리 빌드 (two-Hatchery build).
Therefore it may also be helpful to directly feed the slang dictionary into Whisper's inference process using contextual biasing. There are lots of ways to do this, but the simplest would be to increase the probability of slang words in the dictionary in the final prediction layer of Whisper by a constant factor. This is fairly easy to implement, for example by using HuggingFace's library: https://huggingface.co/docs/transformers/en/internal/generat...
[+] [-] chongli|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] woodson|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] bee_rider|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] xg15|1 year ago|reply
If I remember correctly, that building was for enabling creation of zerglings and other units in hatcheries (and also for researching upgrades) - but one building was enough to unlock those units in all hatcheries; and it did not produce any units itself, so building more of them wouldn't increase your unit output either.
You could in theory built several of them to research multiple upgrades in parallel, but there were only like 3 possible upgrades anyway, so it would make sense to build 12 of them.
The only reason I could think of would be as a sort of redundancy, so you can keep building zerglings even if the enemy destroys some of the pools. But 12 also seems excessive for that.
So what exactly was the motivation here?
Sorry if I'm talking rubbish here, as I said, it's been a while.
[+] [-] unknown|1 year ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] tetrisgm|1 year ago|reply
As the author rightly points out, in its 27 years of existence, commentary around the game has become a domain specific language. Not just Korean or English.
This approach of automated scripting and using AI to understand roughly what was said and then make it coherent is really cool.
[+] [-] jaimebuelta|1 year ago|reply
There’s a huge amount of terms that are difficult to translate (sharding? Hash?). The only real solution is to adopt them to your language, more or less adapted, which is what happens over time. But it requires a community that, to some degree, is able to cross the gap between the languages. In this case, learning English.
Talking about software development in Spanish (my native language) is a succession of imported terms from English.
I don’t think there’s a good way of doing that, and I’m interested to see how automatic translations deal with it, because the only way this can work is with a process of mixing both language in a social way and see what terms evolve from that process.
And you need, in the terms the post describes, people that know Korean at least in a non-fluent way. And the game itself, of course.
[+] [-] jordigh|1 year ago|reply
I think the most common thing is to just use English loanwords without trying to find existing Spanish words that fit the meaning.
[+] [-] eru|1 year ago|reply
What's almost impossible to translate are everyday words. German Brot has rather different connotations from the nasty stuff Brits call bread, but I don't think there's a better word available, and a straight-up borrow would feel fairly weird in most context. Much weirder than borrowing 'sharding' in a technical context.
> The only real solution is to adopt them to your language, more or less adapted, which is what happens over time.
You can see some good examples of that when you look at railway related terms in German. They used to be all English, because that's where we got the technology from. But over time they have been replaced with mostly German native-looking terms. (Well, native looking, but many of them like Lokomotive re-created from the same borrowing from Greek or Latin as in English. But eg station is now Bahnhof. And train is Zug.)
[+] [-] BlueTemplar|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] _dark_matter_|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] jfim|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] gavindean90|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] flerchin|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] diziet|1 year ago|reply
Chatgpt and Claude did an incredible job translating the korean text:
Claude:
[+] [-] amatecha|1 year ago|reply
That will download up to 720p quality.
[+] [-] doctor_phil|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] bee_rider|1 year ago|reply
What do the numbers in front of the building mean? 12 Hatcheries seems like… well, 12 seems like a possible but implausible number of hatcheries to build (hypothetically it is possible of course). And 12 spawning pools is obviously not useful. So that makes me think it is the position in the build order list. But, they list other builds, like:
> The second is the 12 Hatch, 12 Pool, 12 Gas
Which doesn’t make a ton of sense in with that parsing. I mean it must not be a straight list. Maybe it is a tree, and 12 is the depth for this building? But that seems late, I can’t think of 11 buildings to build before gas. Maybe they include units too? Or maybe just drones/overlords?
[+] [-] stackghost|1 year ago|reply
Then your opponent calls you all sorts of vile names and questions your sexuality, etc.
[+] [-] SynasterBeiter|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] gs17|1 year ago|reply
I vaguely remember a Husky video where he actually did a "9 pool" with building 9 spawning pools.
[+] [-] narcindin|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] LegitShady|1 year ago|reply
The numbers indicate the supply you should be at when you build the structure.
so a 12 hatch 12 pool 12 gas means you get to 12 workers and then build those 3 buildings in that order as soon as you have the resources for those.
For zerg the workers actually become the building, so I assume you hit 12, build the hatchery, build another worker, build the spawning pool, build another worker, and then build your gas refinery.
[+] [-] TulliusCicero|1 year ago|reply
In practice this is easier for people to use than actual clock timings, because it's more robust to delays or interference. If you remember "third rax at 30 supply" then even if you're playing a little slow, you will still know roughly when to build that. But if you memorized exact clock timings and now you might be 20+ seconds behind, it's hard to know when you should fit in the new building.
It's not perfect of course, and if you get cheesed and the game goes weird then you'll have to start improvising rather than relying on just supply timings, a lot of times after a cheese where neither side definitely wins, the balance between tech and economy is now very non-standard and you can't rely on conventional rules of thumb anymore.
[+] [-] zzlk|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] Reason077|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|1 year ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] dfan|1 year ago|reply
(Some chess corrections, in case the author is reading: the moves at the start of chess games are called openings in English, not openers; there are not distinct white-piece and black-piece openings, although of course an individual player will probably study a given opening from the point of view of one side or the other; their study is considered fundamental all the way up to the highest level, in fact more so as you increase in skill; and the Sicilian variation in question is the Najdorf, not Najdork.)
[+] [-] Sesse__|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] allcentury|1 year ago|reply
I attempted playing a few world cyber game US regional matches and I was always amazed how much faster everyone else was. Then I remember when they live streamed it from Korea and I saw how fast they played and I was blown away. From a strategy point of view, something so basic about the game that I missed was when a blog introduced me to some math for a protoss zealot power up that defeated a zergling in 2 hits rather than 3. That's when I realized this is a chess game and I got hooked.
[+] [-] sharkjacobs|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] rollcat|1 year ago|reply
These "backyard bases" are also often encountered on team maps; deciding which player takes the front is strategic. P&T can build batteries and bunkers together, but Z gets a buff on creep and can spread it forward much faster.
[+] [-] TheAceOfHearts|1 year ago|reply
My favorite Brood War slang term is Ee Han Timing [0]: basically when you take a risky build that has to do damage in a small timing window. A ton of exciting Brood War moments come from exploiting tiny timing windows.
[0] https://liquipedia.net/starcraft/Ee_Han_Timing
[+] [-] karmakaze|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] debo_|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] Baeocystin|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] Unearned5161|1 year ago|reply
https://youtu.be/Nm-PXmOELAw?si=Z-RXbdqNzkSF3cqx
my brief search didn't show me any more obscure Korean only strategy videos, so maybe this one is just for the lowly foreigners :(
[+] [-] rvba|1 year ago|reply
However Korea had a much bigger scene, with lots of players, coaches, teams - so they probably have more institutional knowledge. So the suspicion, or assumption is that Artois can be the high-school coach level, but there are university coaches and professional coaches, who perhaps are even better. And they are better since in Korea Brood War had much bigger monetary backing - and social backing too. If everyone in your highschool played the same game, there would be more players. Then if there were around 12 (or more) professional teams, they would find more talent, but also better coaches.
And it's not that Koreans dominated completely, players from other countries could win against them too, but usually they would not, especially as a whole match consisted often of few games (usually: best of 3 (so you need to win two games to proceed), best of 5 for finals).
To rephrase this differently, the two main English speaking comentators nowadays seem to be Artosis, who is technical and the second is "Falcon Paladin" channel, who is entertaining and commentary is often "what he sees on the screen" (with no, or sometimes even bad takes about strategy - or explanations "why we see what we see").
If Korea has 50 such commentators, then probably some will be entertaining and some will be very technical.
On a side note, Starcraft Brood War is not only very well balanced for play and entertaining to play - it is also very entertaining to watch, since units are relatively distinct and it at least partially avoids the "unit blob" problem (where one group of units attacks another group of units) due to existence of various units that make area damage (for example.. tanks). And yes I know that in big battles there are blobs, but at pro level they generally work really hard to spread the units across the battlefield - even if the units are primitive and have bad pathing. I digress, just wanted to say that the game is simply pleasant to watch - because it has a certain clarity.
[+] [-] starcraftgamer|1 year ago|reply
There are two YouTube channels I wanted to take the opportunity to shout out, the first one does English translations of Korean BW content, and the second one provides commentary on recent tournaments like the ASL with a little bit more depth then Tasteless and Artosis (no hate but to me their commentary is too off topic and they miss basic things about build orders).
https://www.youtube.com/@jinjinBW
https://m.youtube.com/@StarCastTVENG
[+] [-] egurns|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] navane|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] maeil|1 year ago|reply
> Very few of members of the foreigner community are fluent in Korean. Foreigner access to Korean BW discourse is a contradicting concept: if you speak Korean fluently, you have no reason to be in the foreigner community, as it only has access to material that is strictly inferior and more limited. For this reason, Korean-speaking members in the foreigner community are exceedingly rare.
I can vouch for this in general - after becoming fluent I've stopped looking up anything related to Korea in English because the quality of information is much worse. I'm sure the same holds for other languages and places.
[+] [-] unknown|1 year ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] jboggan|1 year ago|reply
As a side note, I have gotten into watching a "foreigner" BW channel everyday called ArtosisCasts. The videos are very strategic and high level commentaries on games as they are watched for the first time, with some after-match highlights for especially interesting maneuvers. It has really made me appreciate the depth of the game, as well as explain how I was so bad at it in high school. It has actually made me think a lot about startups, economic optimization, and how you approach the "meta" of any activity you're undertaking.
[+] [-] ynniv|1 year ago|reply
First:
>>> Then, post HN comments:[+] [-] leoc|1 year ago|reply