would this be bannable or frowned upon if used in ladder 1v1 matches?
Of course it's not bannable, Blizzard can no more ban you for using this tool then they can reach through your screen and choke you for using a stopwatch. Frowned upon? Depends who you talk to
I'm surprised there's so much discussion on this. For newer or lower ranked Zerg players, this can be a handy tool to help you develop a habit. But as you develop, this becomes more of a hindrance than anything, for two reasons:
1) Past the 8 minute mark, you're often forced to delay your inject by a few seconds because something more important is happening. So it will fall so far out of sync
2) I'd say most Masters+ Zergs have already played enough games to have the inject timing drilled into their subconscious. More often than not, you'll see the player select their queen at around ~23 energy and start hammering the V key, just in time to inject as the larvae come flying out of the Hatchery.
Most people have their own mechanical queues in place anyway, whether it be via a logic train or otherwise. I think the general flow for most Zerg players every 25 seconds is: scout opponent -> make units -> inject -> spread creep -> rinse, repeat.
Actually that reminds me - at WCG 2001, there was a Brood War player who was banned from listening to his Walkman because he listened to a single song on repeat which he relied upon for audio cues.
I can't remember who it was, all I remember is that he was from clan DAG.
Just an update; they've made a Terran and Protoss version of the timer It essentially does the same thing just has a different artwork and a different default time.
The tool is a nice metronome for SC2 - Im a drummer so I use metronomes for thier musical purpose :P
Its nice to have a program metronome with a sensible hotkey. Having said that, even though I'm a Gold leaguer, I dont think i will benefit from this tool.
I dont think it is sophisticated enought to be a cheat: it does not auto detect if you are late on an inject and correct itself, so you will have to spend attention to "resync" the tool.
I think it would be good for new players to get used to the timing of the larva pop.
I actually have a program like this except it has a seperate timer for creep spreading as well. It gets kinda annoying n stuff tho so i turned it off and my injects are like clockwork hehe .
That being said, I dont think you can have shades of grey, you should either have it allowed in tournaments or not allowed full stop, not have it "aimed at lesser players" and then say "oh but pros in t ourneys" cant use it because its like a cheat then say "It's a stopwatch. It's not synced to the game or reliant on anything from SC2. You could use it to time when you need to check on something in the oven. SC2gears comes WAY closer to breaching the terms and conds but is considered to be fine and used by many".
I think you need to pick 1 or the other but not a lil of both. That being said, you could easy get away with it just on ladder and it would be a good practice tool
It's kind of a useful tool in practice just to get the rhythm of doing larva injects once in a while, but once you miss a couple of injects it gets a little confusing to hear the beep and then go back to see that it's still birthing larva.
What you want to be cultivating is not plain relying on the program to tell you when to larvae inject. You want to be able to do it yourself by constantly checking either 1) your hatcheries 2) your queen and then allowing the program to remind you let's say like in the middle of a battle / drop / when you're busy then you can go "oh snap! gotta larva inject".
If you have your hatcheries grouped up all in one hot key like I do, you can just use the base cam to check the progress and then go back to what ever you were doing. Only takes a split second =)
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