Idra: 'Match history is an awful feature'

It has been a while since we heard from Greg ‘Idra’ Fields. Thus, it is good that Shaun ‘dApollo’ Clark had the chance to sit with him and have a chit-chat about Team EG, the games at the GSL, some SC2 features and the future in front of the solid Zerg.

Idra happily answers the questions about his new team, EG. The Zerg player seems really glad to be back in an American team with players that he has known for a long time. It seems that for the time being, the only real disadvantage is that Idra cannot practice with his teammates normally due to lag issues.

The main part of the interview is comprised with comments about Idra’s performance in the GSL. He comments both his series against the terran JiTaeHun in the Ro64 and the ones against LotzePrime in the Ro32 which he, much to everyone’s surprise, lost 1-2. Idra readily admits his mistakes but also takes the time to explain some match-up fragilities.

It was a mistake on my part, lack of scouting, caused by how strong that mid game protoss army is. Collosus' range and mobility allows protoss to sit there poking at the zerg army the entire game, and you can never punish them since you cant engage off creep and forcefields cut off your army anyway. This means zerg is constantly having to react to protoss' aggression, makes it very hard to do anything else.”

Apollo and Idra also take time to discuss the Match History feature, something that has been, as it turns out, excessively used around the GSL for figuring out players’ styles on the fly – something that bothers Greg a lot.

[Match history] is an awful feature that absolutely needs to be removed. SC2 is a strategy game that relies in large part on denying your opponent information, trickery and mind games. The match lists turn everything into a silly guessing game.”

While still riding the GSL topic, Apollo tries to find out Idra’s opinion about progamers such as July and Nada that has decided to transition to StarCraft 2 and to participate in the second season of the GOMTV Global StarLeague.

Originally I expected that any decent SC1 progamer to switch over would immediately dominate, but after seeing the performance of some SC1 progamers who have switched I am not particularly worried. Though if the likes of flash, jaedong, stork switched it would be a different story.”

You can read the whole interview with Idra by following the link below.

Links
Team-Dignitas.net - Complete interview