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All right, I have always been cynical about SC2's development when I read about it and saw screenshots of it pre-beta was out, as well as at the start of beta.
There were the MBS arguments, the interface arguments, the skill arguments, the brood war comparisons, etc. All of that was heavily discussed and moaned about or praised, depending on what you as a player wanted more.
Some people wanted SC2 easier than brood war, others wanted the skill cap to remain high like brood war, others held off on opinions.
I always thought they should have kept SC2's mbs/interface closer to brood war's, but that's not even what this blog is about, so I'll get to the point before people start off on that tangent.
Blizzard has just released their new patch list or potential changes for the next patch, and enough is enough for me, so it's time to constructively rant, and point out that blizzard are making huge mistakes, over, and over, and over again in their patching process.
This is what was released today:
"We're increasing roach range. This will allow roaches to be more effective in large groups, giving the zerg more options in the mid to end game.
Fungal Growth will now prevent Blink, which will give zerg a way to stop endlessly Blinking stalkers which can be very challenging to deal with in large numbers.
The Barracks are going to require a Supply Depot, which will impact a lot of early terran reaper pushes.
The reaper speed upgrade will require the Factory, which is meant to weaken a lot of the early terran reaper attacks that dominate so many matches, especially in team games.
We're making a number of increases to the health of zerg buildings, which will make the very vulnerable zerg technology structures more resistant to raids. We don’t expect these hit point changes to have a super significant impact on the game, but the current numbers felt way too low."
Blizzard is making the same mistake that the EALA team for command and conquer made with cnc3, cnc3KW, and red alert3. It's all too easy to see. With every patch that comes out, rather than game balance being the result...the result is a new game.
As well as micromanagement being removed from the previous iteration of the game.
Just a little background reference since not many here are familiar with cnc3/kw/ra3:
command and conquer 3 was supposed to be the "next e-sports game," (sound familiar?) and was even sold with the slogan, "RTS as a sport." Yes, they were trying to do the whole e-sports thing, but they were purposely trying to market the game that way.
So the game releases, after a very short beta with many, many balance issues. The main one being that you could literally mass scorpion tanks, or the other equivilent tanks for each army.
So the first patch comes out. Tanks are not nerfed so much as the RANGE OF MISSILE INFANTRY being buffed. In the original release version, it was all about massing the most scorpion tanks. Infantry were useless because having more tanks meant you could simply crush them all.
So they increased the range on missile infantry, something you'd think would be OK.
What happens next patch? The game flip flops from tank spam, into missile infantry spam. Other units like engineers also became highly used, but previous units became entirely obsolete.
The patch changed the cost effectiveness and utility of some units so much, that those units were no longer used in competitive play because it was impossible to use them at high level.
Now, that was cnc3. It of course has no where near the potential depth that SC/SC2 has and can have.
The next cnc game came out, Kane's wrath. The same thing happened with this game. It was quite good, much better than cnc3.
There was even a unit in the game called the hammerhead that had the same extreme micromanagement potential that clumped mutalisks do in SC1. It was amazing to use, and if you had excellent micro, it was a good unit.
What happened to the unit? Because of massive whining, and balance complaints from bad players, the dev team nerfed the speed of the hammerhead.
In the next patch, hammerheads were obsolete because you no longer could kite with them - if you got within that sweet spot range like you did the previous patch, your unit would ALWAYS DIE.
What this meant was you ALWAYS HAD TO HAVE MORE UNITS! The game lost that tiny bit of abstract micro play and instead shifted towards "I have more units than you do."
I'll leave out the RA3 background, because the cnc3/cnc3KW balance patches are much more similar to what is happening with SC2, and much more relevant.
So now we come to SC2. This game can have INFINITE DEPTH, just like brood war! But the way blizzard is patching...is too slow in some areas, while too illogical in others.
Blizzard knew that the reaper opening was strong versus Zerg. They took forever to patch it, and now it was at the point that I think many would consider balanced. You barely even see mass reaper openings like you did when it was popular.
But with the news of this recent patch, rather than balancing out the reaper/roach and such, blizzard are making a fatal error by increasing roach range.
They are simultaneously going to be making roaches into "the best unit" for Zerg to produce again (hello scorpion tank spam cnc3, hello SC2 beta roach spam) but they simultaneously are making the reaper, and hellion obsolete versus roaches.
Don't get me wrong - I agree that Zerg definitely needs a few more buffs and tweaks, especially ZvP, in order to be balanced. But when Blizzard are balancing the roach like this, they need to look at what they are doing to the unit interaction they are balancing.
It's not a matter of "oh, now we'll have to be more careful with reapers." Now, no one is ever going to build reapers. You will not be able to kite roaches because of the range, so any money into reapers, is dead money.
Hellions also will not be able to kite reapers, as the ranges of both units already were very close.
The point I am trying to make is with a patch like this, blizzard is continually pushing the game towards a"I have more units than you do" type of game, where there are none of those little complex interactions such as a reaper kiting a roach.
You can argue that SC1 is harder than SC2, and that SC2 is more shallow. Both take a lot of skill...but if patching continues to show this trend of making the gameplay a "i have more units than you do" gameplay, then yes, all the SC2 naysayers are 100% absolutely correct that SC2 is a shallow game.
The previous siege tank change also was a change that subtly pushes SC2 to being a more shallow game. It made marauder bio 10x more effective TvT, and in general pushes Terrans to play bio 1AT because mech is almost no longer effective versus anything.
And yes, i've been rambling long, but another example of how blizzard is slacking on balance is how they are "balancing slowly."
They take forever to patch Zerg balance, but they also, as mentioned earlier, competely ignore whatever is affected by their changes.
Ultralisks are immune to stun right now, but the 250mm cannon was not changed design-wise to be useful at all. Now suddenly there's an ability in SC2 that is utterly useless and could be removed from the game...and it'd be the same game. That is horrible design from Blizzard, and just an example of bad balancing.
It's true they need to not change too many variables at once, but some of these things are so dead obvious it makes you wonder if they care about SC2 balance as much as they say they do or are they too busy already working on Heart of the Swarm.
I'm thinking they're copying EA's mistake on that one too. Starting work so early on the next title, that they leave their last title out to dry.
just to end this...basically, it pains me to see how SC2 is being balanced. It'd be great and I'd LOVE it if they buffed Zerg in a way that helped them out the bit needed to even things up more...but not at the cost of making units in the game completely removeable.
Because if they go through with the patch they are proposing, no one is ever building a reaper again. Even 10 post noobs in the patch thread recognized that already.
 
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also wanted to quote this post from jinro in the patch thread, as I think it expresses pretty succinctly what I was trying to put words on:
On October 08 2010 04:11 Liquid`Jinro wrote:Show nested quote +On October 08 2010 04:09 Bitters wrote:
why are people complaining about how much further roaches now counter hellions? they are suppose to counter them!
should zerg complain about how with extra micro their lings should be able to mess with blue-flame hellions? terrans units which were designed to counter zerg do a great job at their counter... now zerg's counters are being made to measure up Because overcoming counters with micro was a huge part of SC1 and it fucking sucks when that is removed from the game. Thors counter mutas but with magic box, mutas do fine. Lurkers counter marines but with good micro, marines do fine. Are both pretty terrible, and you cant even turbo-newb on like 90% of the map pool.
Overcoming counters with micro...that is spot on. It won't be possible anymore.
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Banelings are the bane of my existence, but with proper micro you can do the "stalife drop" and your marines should be fine.
I approve of this thread, I can see a lot of zerg going for 1 base roach rushes since zerglings+roach will be so strong against ZvT.
Also, the roach just came back to it's holy trinity. Being the most used unit..
BTW, fuck this we can't use hellions to defend against roaches!! I was pretty decent when I fought roaches with hellions but now this sucks.
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agreed, I really hope they are careful with this patch and don't do everything said.
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i had no idea red alert had those problems.
I completely agree with everything you have said in this thread. Basically everything that went through my head after reading the patch notes.
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On October 08 2010 04:33 Licmyobelisk wrote:
Banelings are the bane of my existence, but with proper micro you can do the "stalife drop" and your marines should be fine.
I approve of this thread, I can see a lot of zerg going for 1 base roach rushes since zerglings+roach will be so strong against ZvT.
Also, the roach just came back to it's holy trinity. Being the most used unit..
BTW, fuck this we can't use hellions to defend against roaches!! I was pretty decent when I fought roaches with hellions but now this sucks.
You know what else sucked? Having roaches countered by literally every early game terran unit that wasn't a marine.
Marauders? get crushed. Hellions? get kited all the way back to their base. Reapers? even more so. Tanks? huge damage vs armored, sieged or not. Banshee? lol. Obviously we don't know how much this will shift ZvT since we don't even know how much range will even be increased, but roaches were just awful in early game except in very specific circumstances.
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It's just...
Blizzard listens to the noobiest noobs ever. Look at WoW.
Casuals whine whine whine 4 years later everyone is running around in the highest tier, covered in epics.
Do you know how friggin hard it was in vanilla wow to get epics?
Same with SC2. Blizzard gives in to the noobs and fucks up the successor for SC1.
Sigh
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I don't see why the terran player is complaining. No matter how bad you're doing, you pretty much get 3 chances to cheese in the game. If that doesn't work, you can turtle on 2 bases, and hope the zerg flies a bunch of ols filled with ultralisks into your thors.
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On October 08 2010 04:40 sixghost wrote:Show nested quote +On October 08 2010 04:33 Licmyobelisk wrote:
Banelings are the bane of my existence, but with proper micro you can do the "stalife drop" and your marines should be fine.
I approve of this thread, I can see a lot of zerg going for 1 base roach rushes since zerglings+roach will be so strong against ZvT.
Also, the roach just came back to it's holy trinity. Being the most used unit..
BTW, fuck this we can't use hellions to defend against roaches!! I was pretty decent when I fought roaches with hellions but now this sucks. You know what else sucked? Having roaches countered by literally every early game terran unit that wasn't a marine. Marauders? get crushed. Hellions? get kited all the way back to their base. Reapers? even more so. Tanks? huge damage vs armored, sieged or not. Banshee? lol. Obviously we don't know how much this will shift ZvT since we don't even know how much range will even be increased, but roaches were just awful in early game except in very specific circumstances.
What would be a much more elegant solution would be giving roaches a range upgrade, maybe at lair tech. This would allow hellions and reapers to be used against them in the early game when the harass is the focus, but later allow the roach to be more effective in large armies.
3 upgrades for the roach is alot though
EDIT: also, roaches aren't as bad as you seem to think even now, they are cheap as fuck and have quite nice damage and hp, you see them alot in for a reason.
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On October 08 2010 04:47 sob3k wrote:Show nested quote +On October 08 2010 04:40 sixghost wrote:On October 08 2010 04:33 Licmyobelisk wrote:
Banelings are the bane of my existence, but with proper micro you can do the "stalife drop" and your marines should be fine.
I approve of this thread, I can see a lot of zerg going for 1 base roach rushes since zerglings+roach will be so strong against ZvT.
Also, the roach just came back to it's holy trinity. Being the most used unit..
BTW, fuck this we can't use hellions to defend against roaches!! I was pretty decent when I fought roaches with hellions but now this sucks. You know what else sucked? Having roaches countered by literally every early game terran unit that wasn't a marine. Marauders? get crushed. Hellions? get kited all the way back to their base. Reapers? even more so. Tanks? huge damage vs armored, sieged or not. Banshee? lol. Obviously we don't know how much this will shift ZvT since we don't even know how much range will even be increased, but roaches were just awful in early game except in very specific circumstances. What would be a much more elegant solution would be giving roaches a range upgrade, maybe at lair tech. This would allow hellions and reapers to be used against them in the early game when the harass is the focus, but later allow the roach to be more effective in large armies. 3 upgrades for the roach is alot though EDIT: also, roaches aren't as bad as you seem to think even now, they are cheap as fuck and have quite nice damage and hp, you see them alot in for a reason.
I'm just going to reserve judgment on this one, wait and see if roaches are the "old but new unit to come out of the block being used massively"
Or my TvZ sucks hard right now, 50 banelings rape everything ground unit if siege tanks are not properly siege in a good position.
Anyway, we should all agree that it's best that SC 2 doesn't fail hard like what avilo discussed regarding CnC3
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On October 08 2010 04:38 CheAse wrote:
i had no idea red alert had those problems.
I completely agree with everything you have said in this thread. Basically everything that went through my head after reading the patch notes.
well, cnc3/cnc3kw/ra3 all had the same problem. They were actually quite good games and had "potential" to have a lot of depth.
cnc3 was shallow. And got even more so after patches, with each balance patch changing the entire game completely.
kanes wrath had a ton of depth to it, but the EA dev team systematically removed from the game anything abstract or anything that was able to counter something else through good micro. That was because "noobs wouldn't be able to understand it. That's a similar philosophy for using a hard counter system.
RA3 was the best of the last cnc RTS balance-wise, and the development team did a great job on it, but at that point, they'd already burned up their RTS community from EA shinanigans. Their development cycles were cut short to work on the "next cnc title."
So yah...the last titles of the command and conquer series were plagued with huge balance problems and design problems, and EA basically gave up with cnc4 and threw away everything good design-wise because they didn't wanna compete with SC2.
On October 08 2010 04:40 KeKeZergRush wrote:
I don't see why the terran player is complaining. No matter how bad you're doing, you pretty much get 3 chances to cheese in the game. If that doesn't work, you can turtle on 2 bases, and hope the zerg flies a bunch of ols filled with ultralisks into your thors.
I'm not complaining. I'm pointing out the direction that blizzard SC2 patches are headed. I'm sorry if you're a Zerg player and are mad at current balance, but this blog is just my thoughts on the direction of patches.
I'm very happy if SC2 ends up perfectly balanced, because then everyone on earth would gladly accept that perhaps they needed to get better at the game instead of blaming their losses on their own perceived imbalances.
If you were not so quick to QQ you'd realize me, like many other people, do not want to see SC2 end up as that game that "had a lot of potential" but fell short.
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United States7166 Posts
On October 08 2010 04:16 avilo wrote:also wanted to quote this post from jinro in the patch thread, as I think it expresses pretty succinctly what I was trying to put words on: Show nested quote +On October 08 2010 04:11 Liquid`Jinro wrote:On October 08 2010 04:09 Bitters wrote:
why are people complaining about how much further roaches now counter hellions? they are suppose to counter them!
should zerg complain about how with extra micro their lings should be able to mess with blue-flame hellions? terrans units which were designed to counter zerg do a great job at their counter... now zerg's counters are being made to measure up Because overcoming counters with micro was a huge part of SC1 and it fucking sucks when that is removed from the game. Thors counter mutas but with magic box, mutas do fine. Lurkers counter marines but with good micro, marines do fine. fast viking
turbo-newb (tank drop on cliff)
Are both pretty terrible, and you cant even turbo-newb on like 90% of the map pool. Overcoming counters with micro...that is spot on. It won't be possible anymore.
i think everyone including jinro is really overreacting
he's stated hellion builds are useless. what? hellion drops, blue flame hellions, blue flame hellion drops, marauder hellion all-ins..all still going to rape? (the first 3 still going to rape drones, roach change hardly changes that)
the main thing it changes (and were not even sure yet, perhaps hellions can still outmicro roaches w/ longer range) is that hellions cant kite roaches to kill/defend their attack on their base. that hardly qualifies as making all hellion builds useless
as for "overcoming counters with good micro" argument..i'd been feeling this a problem with sc2 in general, but as for this patch it's really not that huge at all. hellions can still counter speedlings with good micro, and we dont even know yet if hellions cant outmicro slow roaches, it's very well possible they will. although in general i agree blizzard really does not seem to care about having good micro being able to overcome "hard counters." prime example is phoenixes, god i cannot understand that change "lets just remove movement-micro completely and have them auotmatically kill everything while moving!" as for reapers..well they need to do something completely different from what theyve been doing ..make them useful in the later parts of game or as an addition to your main army composition..
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On October 08 2010 05:02 Zelniq wrote:Show nested quote +On October 08 2010 04:16 avilo wrote:also wanted to quote this post from jinro in the patch thread, as I think it expresses pretty succinctly what I was trying to put words on: On October 08 2010 04:11 Liquid`Jinro wrote:On October 08 2010 04:09 Bitters wrote:
why are people complaining about how much further roaches now counter hellions? they are suppose to counter them!
should zerg complain about how with extra micro their lings should be able to mess with blue-flame hellions? terrans units which were designed to counter zerg do a great job at their counter... now zerg's counters are being made to measure up Because overcoming counters with micro was a huge part of SC1 and it fucking sucks when that is removed from the game. Thors counter mutas but with magic box, mutas do fine. Lurkers counter marines but with good micro, marines do fine. fast viking
turbo-newb (tank drop on cliff)
Are both pretty terrible, and you cant even turbo-newb on like 90% of the map pool. Overcoming counters with micro...that is spot on. It won't be possible anymore. i think everyone including jinro is really overreacting he's stated hellion builds are useless. what? hellion drops, blue flame hellions, blue flame hellion drops, marauder hellion all-ins..all still going to rape? (the first 3 still going to rape drones, roach change hardly changes that) the main thing it changes (and were not even sure yet, perhaps hellions can still outmicro roaches w/ longer range) is that hellions cant kite roaches to kill/defend their attack on their base. that hardly qualifies as making all hellion builds useless as for "overcoming counters with good micro" argument..i'd been feeling this a problem with sc2 in general, but as for this patch it's really not that huge at all. hellions can still counter speedlings with good micro, and we dont even know yet if hellions cant outmicro slow roaches, it's very well possible they will. although in general i agree blizzard really does not seem to care about having good micro being able to overcome "hard counters." prime example is phoenixes, god i cannot understand that change "lets just remove movement-micro completely and have them auotmatically kill everything while moving!" as for reapers..well they need to do something completely different from what theyve been doing ..make them useful in the later parts of game or as an addition to your main army composition..
well, yah...hellions won't be useless. I think he was probably talking more or less about that one specific build where your hellions are meant to hold off roaches with micro as they are headed towards your base. That build will be dead, but hellions will be as useful as they are now I am sure.
Reapers though...R.I.P. Speedlings already countered reapers and I cannot imagine anyone ever building reapers if the speed upgrade is at factory too. And like you mentioned, since they have no use in your army composition, no good Terran will ever build them.
It's like blizzard thought, "Reapers are too strong...so let's buff roaches so now reapers can't kite them, but let's also make reapers speed take longer to get! That'll help balance!"
sounds like...."Ultras are too weak...so let's buff them making them immune to stun, but let's also make it so the 250mm cannon requires research too!"
in both cases, we all know what is going to end up not being used ever again. =/
It should probably be noted too, the reason why we're seeing such crazy, almost comedical, patch notes from blizzard are because of this bullshit:
The reaper speed upgrade will require the Factory, which is meant to weaken a lot of the early terran reaper attacks that dominate so many matches, especially in team games.
Every good RTS developer that is worth a damn (or was worth a damn in blizzard's case) knows that you never are supposed to ever mess with 1v1 unit statistics based off of 2v2 balance.
No one gives a shit about 2v2 balance. What the hell is wrong with blizzard that they would change 1v1 balance in a game they want to be a successful e-sport based off of scrub 2v2s on battlenet? This is mind boggling to me.
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You should post this on b.net boards, maybe get some real blizzard attention from it.
You're pretty spot on though.
Remember how everyone was freaking out pre-beta on how SC2 would just be another wc3 with close to no emphasis on macro and all on micro?
Its actually turned out to be the other way around. Not that macro is hard in SC2, its just that its only macro that is truly emphasized in SC2 and that makes me sad.
Its all about creating a huge ball of units - the right type of units - and sending them to go kill your opponent. If your opponent has less of a ball, it will die, no micro tricks will save it. There are very few micro tricks to keep you in a game, or to give you an advantage.
Its this X factor, the dynamic and everchanging micromanagement of units that is slowly but surely taken away from us because it creates "imbalance", I mean come on! Ofcourse mutas are going to be imbalanced in the hands of Julyzerg and not Skaterboy92 on US West. That is how it should be.
Advantage in SC2 is mainly made through macro and since macro is so heavily based on the hard-counter balance Blizzard is going for, its bound to make for a lack-luster experience 
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United States7166 Posts
On October 08 2010 05:09 avilo wrote:It's like blizzard thought, "Reapers are too strong...so let's buff roaches so now reapers can't kite them, but let's also make reapers speed take longer to get! That'll help balance!" sounds like...."Ultras are too weak...so let's buff them making them immune to stun, but let's also make it so the 250mm cannon requires research too!" in both cases, we all know what is going to end up not being used ever again. =/ It should probably be noted too, the reason why we're seeing such crazy, almost comedical, patch notes from blizzard are because of this bullshit: Show nested quote +The reaper speed upgrade will require the Factory, which is meant to weaken a lot of the early terran reaper attacks that dominate so many matches, especially in team games. Every good RTS developer that is worth a damn (or was worth a damn in blizzard's case) knows that you never are supposed to ever mess with 1v1 unit statistics based off of 2v2 balance. No one gives a shit about 2v2 balance. What the hell is wrong with blizzard that they would change 1v1 balance in a game they want to be a successful e-sport based off of scrub 2v2s on battlenet? This is mind boggling to me.
oh come now blizzard is fully aware +range on roaches changes the roach vs everything in the game, not reapers. i really doubt they increased roach range to deal with reapers, that makes no sense, especially when not only do you need a ton of reapers to be effective, but soon after or by that time roaches can have speed which pretty much denies reaper micro anyway.
the roach range increase is going to effect zvt zvz zvp in every way you can imagine and more, im excited by it
as for the 2v2 balancing, yea everyone agrees that is fucking retarded if it effects 1v1 which it does in this case
i really agree with day9's approach to balance that he's stated several times, like in the SotG podcast. rather than trying to make little tweaks here and there to achieve some kind of 'perfect balance' just make everything in the game feel imbalanced and fun, that's the way it was in brood war. he explains it pretty well, i actually really like that approach, i recommend you check out that state of the game podcast, think it was "SotG - 9.28.10" if you havent heard them, cus you're too elitist or w/e, i recommend you check it out cus it's probably the most fun thing ive encountered related to sc2 so far, hilarious, interesting, etc.
edit: ya it was that podcast, at around 24 mins tho i recommend you start earlier to hear the context and other conversation on that topic
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Russian Federation4235 Posts
As much as I dislike the changes, reapers are (were) horrendously broken in team games. Like more broken than medivacs, and that's alot.
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Another reason why I miss the orginal. The fun micro just isn't there and what is there is taking another hit like this. Kinda sad.
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Agree with everything in the op. NOBODY is going to make reapers anymore. At all. Not only are they delaying any possible proxy with forcing a depot before rax, they are making speed upgrade a factory upgrade. Are you kidding me? LOL.
Also why on earth are they requiring you need a supply depot for a rax? This will eliminate any element of proxy rax cheese terran has and will also eliminate any rax/gas first for quicker orbital and tech.
Protoss requires a pylon before gateway but their workers dont have to build the buildings. So it was perfectly fine in broodwar giving terran the option to rax before depot.
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While i completely agree with your points on the roach range i do think that people are way over reacting in saying hellions/reapers are useless now....Reapers where used for scouting before people discovered how power massing them was and people didnt even get speed. Also Terrain has the most Viable openings out of any race. Its retarded. Dont cry because 1 opening isnt viable now.
What is wrong with terrains having 1-2 openings? Hell if you want to make comparisons to starcraft Tvp openings were 1 Fact seige expand and 2Fact.
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On October 08 2010 05:40 BluzMan wrote:
As much as I dislike the changes, reapers are (were) horrendously broken in team games. Like more broken than medivacs, and that's alot.
While I disagree with you, even if we accept your statement, the game should not be balanced around a disparity in the 2v2 game since the current pro scene revolves around 1v1. Everything is "imba" in 2v2, that's why everyone just mass spams tier 1 units.
These changes disgust me. Jinro is right, and hellion reactor FE build is useless now.
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EPT
