Looking at the previous conversations on the discussion page, it seems like people have debated the definition of this trope before without necessarily reaching a consensus. I’ll be the first to admit that the Starcraft II fandom has at best stretched the definition of cheese pretty far by using it to mean "unorthodox and surprising" more than "cheap and hated", and that some of the multiplayer examples that I and a few others added may not qualify (I’m pretty sure the campaign mode ones are legit, except perhaps the Kerrigan example which I question the actual effectiveness of).
But I put it to you that how easy the strat is to win with, or how frustrating it feels to lose to it, depends a lot on both players' skill level. SC II is a high-difficulty game in general, and so-called cheese strategies usually require a non-trivial amount of skill and practice to perform in any practical way. On one hand, your typical silver league player is going to be much less capable at defending against a halfway-decent cannon rush than someone in master league. On the other hand, a grandmaster-level cannon rush can be so much more effective that even a fellow grandmaster would struggle to defend. The importance of skill is probably best illustrated by the fact that even a player who is literally cheating by turning off the fog of war or spying on their opponent’s production queue can still lose if their macro or multitasking mechanics are not up to par. This is a game which lacks one silver bullet to kill your opponent, so to a certain degree the sheer variety of strategies which can be used against you—both orthodox and unorthodox—is what makes any one strategy potentially viable.
In general, the skill of the SC II player base has increased over time, so that a player is unlikely to get to Diamond League (generally considered to be the beginning of the upper skill levels) if they only know how to do one cheesy build. A cheese build generally has some kind of counter if it gets scouted in time, and could even be blind-countered if the opponent's choice of strategy just happens to prepare them for it. Nevertheless, somebody who has cheese in their Arsenal but can also play orthodox macro pretty well should be considered dangerous.
At this point Starcraft II has been around for more than ten years, and multiplayer mode has been subjected to numerous balance patches. Upon launch it was really possible to argue that Terran was overpowered or the map designs gave them an unfair advantage, but by now the Competitive Balance is pretty darn refined. Furthermore, the older cheese strategies have been around long enough that they’ve basically been accepted as a legitimate part of the meta of the game, or else are well-understood enough for anyone who’s decent at scouting and knows the counter to have a decent chance of defending. Despite this, the game still has quirks, and Blizzard's recent lack of interest in patching the game has left it in a state where certain things can still be abused. The last couple of years have seen strats that were never common before—such as the Battlecruiser rush and the Queen March—proliferate and temporarily upset the competitive balance that had been reached before ways of dealing with them were figured out. What strategies were considered cheap or abusive depended a lot on the historical moment in which they occurred.
That’s a lot of rambling that does not directly answer your criticisms, and I will need to follow up with some more specific arguments regarding the validity of the bullets, but it gives you an idea of where I’m coming from.
Continuing my thoughts, I’m willing to consider that the Battlecruiser rush is not cheese so much as a more committed version of the economic damage tactic usually performed with banshees, hellions, or widow mines. The fast Nydus is maybe not a cheese in and of itself, even if it synergies with composition and tactics that I do consider cheese. I have never seen a fast Thor actually used in a game, so it can’t be considered common or reliable. The proxy Planetary Fortress is just silly, and definitely not worth the cost. On the other hand, offensive use of static defense buildings such as photon cannons or spine crawlers pretty much needs to be considered cheese, and proxy shield batteries with Void rays and/or tempests are undoubtably cheese. There’s kind of an "I know it when I see it" thing going on. If you look at pro players Serral (Zerg), HeroMarine (Terran), or Stats (Protoss), you’re going to see orthodox tactics most of the time. If you watch Bly (Zerg), Has (Protoss), or Florencio (any), you’re going to see what 99% of Starcraft players consider cheese.
Edited by TheBigBopper
Curly Goddess
Spark 9 keeps removing examples that he claims "require high skill" or are not easy enough to qualify for the trope. At present, he's probably removed HALF of the examples from the page. At first, I didn't want to say anything about it, but I now I feel I have to.
To be honest, from the beginning, I've had a problem with the "the strategy must be easy" stipulation for the trope, because ease is subjective and contextual. For example, the Overwatch example that was erased greatly depends on the map, enemy team composition and current meta. Removing the Mario Maker examples makes even LESS sense because how easy the cheese (and this is one strat that is LITERALLY called cheese by its fan community) is depends greatly on how the map is made.
The Devil May Cry 3 removal also makes no sense — that strategy just involves jumping up and down in one corner of a room. How much easier is it supposed to be?
In short, I find a twofold problem here: one is Spark 9 being way too heavyhanded and self-absorbed with what they consider "difficult". But they are only able to do that because of the second problem: the unnecessary ease-of-use requirement in the first place.
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Then maybe the description could use a rework to make it more clear. The reason I made it a YMMV page was because the definition of what constitutes cheese varies from game to game, and from community to community. Like, in Melee, Ice Climbers using Wobbling is considered cheese by the competitive community, but casual players probably don't know much about it. It depends entirely on the "entry-gate" so to speak. High tier players would all know about how to Wobble, and so would look down on it.
Qui odoratus est qui fecit.
And that is the problem: "ease" is based on context. A lot of context. I think a far better wording is to say that the strategy is looked down upon or seen as not the "correct" way of playing the game. Personally, I'd argue that whether a strategy is easy or not is irrelevant except when said ease is considered "the wrong way to play".
Well, you know you have a problem when you use a common term ("cheese") and define the page as something different from what the term usually means.
That said, if we leave out the "ease" part, then this page becomes Complaining About Strategies You Dont Like, which is not a trope. So we essentially have the choice between removing all examples that don't fit our non-standard definition of cheese, or cutlisting.
Rhetorical, eh? ... Eight!
You're strawmanning. "Cheese" is a subjective perjorative that has many uses in gaming. The Liquipedia wiki defines it as:
- "Cheese is a pejorative expression which refers to a strategy that is highly unconventional and designed to take one's opponent by surprise. In general, cheese is hard to beat if not scouted but easy to defeat if it is scouted."
Know Your Meme defines "Cheeser" as:
- "in the gaming world, a person who repeatedly performs the same moves in fighting games (such as in Soul Caliber, Street Fighter, etc) in order to win
The same article quotes MIT a saying:
"...a practice of exploit that is largely stigmatized by the online gaming community as it diverges from the norms and conventions of gameplay".
So you're wrong on two levels: one, removing the ease portion of the definition does NOT completely define the page as something different from what the term usually means, and two, that does NOT reduce our options to removing examples or cutlisting.
You deleted examples that are 100% considered "cheese" within the gaming communities they belong to, such as the Super Mario Maker, Smash Melee, and Overwatch examples. Hell, you even removed a Devil May Cry example that actually FITS the "ease" definition you are defending.
Edited by NubianSatyress
As I said, the definition of cheese varies from game to game, and from community to community. The wording regarding those definitions should probably change (which I wrote it to begin with, so any confusion is on me), because of the fact that cheese is often defined by the community, not by some scientific formula. The definitions are general guidelines at best, because, as Nubian has mentioned, what constitutes "ease" is relative. That's why the trope is YMMV. What is basic and easy to one player could be difficult to another, and because gameplay mechanics are not uniform across all of gaming, what constitutes cheese will inevitably vary wildly from game/community to game/community.
That's why I'm advocating that if a game community has a general consensus on what is cheese, then it is cheese.
As a way of keeping it from being "Complaining about strategies you don't like", there's already an editing note in place informing users to keep examples well-known and not to complain.
"EDITING NOTE: This page is NOT the place to complain about strategies you do not like. It is merely here to offer a definition for the term and provide some WELL-KNOWN examples in relevant games. If you want to add an example, make sure it is a well-known example, and keep the Rule of Cautious Editing Judgement in mind."
Qui odoratus est qui fecit.
^ That sounds like a good reason to start a TRS thread on this. The page is currently "a strategy that's easy to pull off (and may or may not be reviled by the fanbase)" and you want to change it to essentially "a strategy that is reviled by the fanbase (and may or not be easy to pull off)".
Rhetorical, eh? ... Eight!
^ This isn't an objective trope. It's a subjective trope, and is entirely based on what the community/fanbase of a game thinks about it. In that sense, it's no different than Tier Based Scrappy.
If anything, your actions thus far have really twisted what the trope was meant to be from the start into something that doesn't make sense. For example, I've brought up TWICE now why you saw fit to delete the Devil May Cry 3 example, which is as "easy" as a cheese strategy gets, and you've ignored me both times.
There are about TWENTY examples of "cheese" for Starcraft, a game that has barely more than twice that number of buildable units in its current iteration. The list stretches the definition so far as to make it meaningless. Is there a process for making a section of a page hidden while people pare down the cruft to make it meaningful again, or steps to go through before removing a large amount of cruft in a page? The bulk of the list has got to go, but I don't want to break any rules trying to fix it and I am not quite familiar enough to know which of those examples are legitimate and which are just examples of strategies that work pretty well.
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