@phong My general take is less that it levels the playing field between low and high rated players and more that it somewhat lowers the amount of skill expression available at high level play. And when I say high level, I mean higher level than me. There's zero chance that this magically makes me beat, say, Bully, let alone lets me beat Farms with any meaningful level of consistency. Also goes the other way, there's zero chance it would mean a random 1500 is going to start outplaying me. Consistently at least, flukes happen and I'm rather inconsistent.
Anyway, what this does mean is that in high level tournaments for example there's simply one less avenue for someone like Yudi to flex his apm vs Nexus or whoever you want. It lowers volatility in a way that I don't think I like, for example early aggression is made weaker because if it fails then perhaps you at least canceled a bunch of reclaim orders or something like that. You can argue that early aggression is too strong, and you might be right. I disagree with this as a fix though.
Right now you have to make a tradeoff with your attention, and it's a tradeoff that only truly exists at a very high level. There are decisions they have to make - Can I spare the apm/attention to manual reclaim? Is it going to result in me getting the mass too quickly so I actually can't spend it? Do I need the mass asap or can I just attack move vaguely in the right direction and move on?
I'm making too many mistakes in my play for those choices to really matter 99% of the time. I have never in my thousands of games played lost a game because I didn't manual reclaim enough and my opponent did it more than I did. It simply hasn't happened. I've probably lost because I didn't attack move reclaim enough, but that's different. In those cases I'd probably still attack move reclaim and not area reclaim anyway.
Really I think I will largely ignore area reclaim if it goes live. The scenarios I'll choose to use it are relatively niche and mostly involve getting a bit more mass from a hotly contested reclaim field with my acu when I'm lacking apm. I think anyway, I haven't yet played with it much. Otherwise I find clicking rocks kinda fun, sue me. The other issue is the huge nerf to rock reclaim that's apparently associated with the area reclaim and seems depressing to say the least. I can't ignore that one like I can area reclaim.