Glossary

Short definitions for the terms this site uses precisely. Each links onward to the article that treats it properly.

Study and analysis#

Archetype: a build-order family clustered out of pro replays, the unit of the Build Library. An archetype carries its win rate, timings, variations, and reference games. See The Build tab.

Benchmark: the corpus-derived timing for a step (median and the middle-half window across pro games), used to grade whether your Barracks was on time or late.

Consensus: the shared spine of steps that games in an archetype agree on; the build order a card shows is the consensus of its cluster, with per-step frequency bars.

Decision tree: the per-matchup tree of build decisions mined from the corpus, the raw material behind the build guides.

Grades (OVR, MACRO, MICRO, SCOUT): per-game skill scores from replay analysis, plotted on the performance graph. See The performance graph.

Turning point: the moment analysis judges a lost game slipped away; a loss opened from the study desk starts right at it. See The study desk.

Verdict: a ranked "fix this" finding distilled from your recent games, with its evidence, shown on the study desk's Today view. See Where the Dashboard went.

Study desk: STUDY › DESK, the one workspace for studying your own play: your focus, quests, form, grades, games, opponents, intel, openings, notes and progress, with the AI coach beside them. See The study desk.

Quest: a goal built from your own games that pays vespene and XP when you clear it. Dailies are improvement targets (+5 vespene, three at a time), weeklies are consistency goals (+25 vespene, three a week). See Quests, XP, streaks, and achievements.

Intel cut: one slice of your history (an opponent, a matchup, a map, or a build) that notes and stats attach to. See Intel and notes.

Practice build: the one build per matchup you are drilling, set from the build editor, your library, a replay or a Match Summary. See Practice builds.

SALT: the community's compact build-order encoding (SpawningTool lineage); Vespene stores practice builds with it under the hood.

Playing and competing#

Patch Clash: the community balance mod Vespene's ranked queue is played on. The name often stands in for the whole ranked system. See Ranked ladder (Patch Clash).

Elo vs MMR: MMR is Blizzard's ladder rating from your replays; Elo is Vespene's own rating for the ranked queue, one book per race. They never mix, though a new ranked rating is seeded from a third of your MMR. See Ratings, placement and leagues.

League (ranked ladder): your share of the ranked field, from Grandmaster (top 2%) to Bronze, with every league below Grandmaster split into sub-ranks 1 to 3. Not the Blizzard league.

Placement: the first ten games on each race book, with bigger rating swings and a walking shown rating.

Unranked (queue mode): ranked matchmaking on a hidden rating with no number or league on show. See Queueing and matchmaking.

Mirror shield: the ranked ladder's backup race, which switches one player off a mirror matchup when that keeps the game fair.

Clash XP: a balance-mod ladder's progression (separate from Retail XP), paid for its games and its quests, filling an uncapped level track per ladder. See Clash XP and the season prize pool.

PCE: Patch Clash Edition, the mod's own version of a map. Host the exact PCE map when one is drafted.

Blind bans: the ranked map draft, where both players ban up to four maps at once without seeing each other's picks, then a roulette picks from the survivors. See Match found and the map draft.

Shot clock: a per-turn timer in turn-based map drafts. On the ranked ladder it only appears in the rare fallback draft; the normal ranked draft is one shared window. Tournament drafts pace themselves; their only clock is the ready-up deadline.

Held for review: a result whose replay looked suspicious and waits for a moderator instead of being guessed at. See Fair play: voids, strikes, AFK and disputes.

Void: a match that counts for nothing: no rating change, no XP.

Walkover: a match awarded without games because the opponent never showed inside the ready window.

Embargo (results): an organizer setting that hides completed results until published, keeping brackets spoiler-safe.

Replays and data#

Casted: a replay you uploaded but did not play in (or chose to exclude); kept in the study desk's Games view, excluded from your stats and quests. There it wears a broadcast icon where your own games wear a bar chart. See Uploading replays, privacy, and ownership.

Community pool: the public replay collection your shared uploads join, feeding the front page and the archive.

HQ observation: ground-truth unit position data extracted by running the actual SC2 engine over a replay, used by the viewer when available; games without it fall back to a simulator approximation. See The replay viewer.

Master player: one real person in the player database, aggregating all their Battle.net accounts (smurfs and barcodes included). Leaderboards rank masters, not names. See Ranks and the leaderboard.

Barcode: an account named a string of l's and I's; matched to a person only through real identity signals, never by the name.

Money#

Vespene: the spendable site currency, one cent each; earned by clearing quests, spent on coaching and prize pools. See Vespene (the currency).

Minerals: the cash-out-only prize currency, one cent each; won in events, withdrawn to PayPal or Stripe. See Minerals and prize payouts.

Supporter: the one-off ten dollar purchase that grants 500 vespene and funds the site; not a subscription, gates nothing.