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Can the development of a new meta-game really make the game more fun?
I've only played BW since the end of 2010, so I can't exactly say that I've been a competitive BW player since the beginning of BW's development. I wasn't around when Flash started his reign of destruction, or when Mutalisks became standard in ZvT. I often wonder what it was like to only be able to 2 base timing attack in TvP, or what PvZ was without corsairs. But I imagine that, even at that level, BW was still fun even at that level.
I played SC2 at the very beginning of retail, when everyone was 4 gating, 5 roach rushing, and 2 raxing their way to diamond. Of course, times have changed since then. Nowadays, Progamers (and I suppose your average person laddering?) are trying to play longer macro games, and slowly WoL is being more figured out.
But it seems like a lot of the developments progamers make outside of build orders/strategies cannot be replicated by the average gamer. Need to win TvZ? Split marines better. Need to win PvT? Have better storms. Need to win a PvZ? Get a Mothership, hope that your vortex gets most of their brood lords, and then Archon toilet. At the moment, a lot of the matchups seem extremely volatile, and it's hard to see the brilliance of the progamers.
I mean, pardon my bias, but I was told that in competitive gaming, you almost never just win the game. You keep making small jabs and pokes until eventually you topple down your opponent. Of course there are your all-ins and your cheeses, but in macro games, there are usually times when you can recover from something going drastically wrong. You just try to gain what Day 9 calls a Marginal Advantage and just try to keep it. It just doesn't really seem that games in SC2 are won/lost by a marginal advantage at all.
People claim that with the KeSPA players switching over, that SC2 would be elevated to new heights. People were actually claiming that the game was young, and that we should “give it more time”, even before they switched. The thing is, even so, BW was actually still very popular, and I reckon still fun as hell to play competitively 8/9 years ago. The evolutions in strategy just made it more fresh and kept it from going stale. (There's a final edit out there talking about when two players with strong styles clash, the audience wins)
It really makes me wonder if Progamers can start to make the game more towards patient and multitasking-style play rather than this Han-Bang style that we are seeing (I'm using that term really loosely, but basically it means that games are won/lost over a single engagement). Perhaps SC2 was just designed to be like that, perhaps time will tell...
Give me an honest answer, has SC2 gotten more fun over the past year? Or has it actually been a really rough ride with all that has happened?
+ Show Spoiler +BTW, this isn't "meta-game", right?
 
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I would *like* progamers to be doing things that average gamers can't replicate. Mutalisk micro separated the excellent Zergs from the godly Zergs in BW - put two of them in the exact situation against a Corsair fleet, and it wasn't an issue of builds and strategies, it came down to execution.
Builds certainly kept on evolving in BW many years after the last balance patches, and I'd like to think this will be the case in SC2 once Blizzard is finished milking the money out of the franchise with these expansions. Sometimes, you just have to let the best players in the world figure things out. It took... what, 7, 8 years for Protoss players to finally start using the Arbiter in PvT?
That isn't to say it's *all* up to the gamers. For example, put Bisu against some random A-class Zerg on any of the older maps where it wasn't possible for the P to FE, and he'd probably lose a significantly higher percentage of the games. So of course improvements can and should be made, but maybe it's not on Blizzard to do it.
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But it seems like a lot of the developments progamers make outside of build orders/strategies cannot be replicated by the average gamer. Need to win TvZ? Split marines better. Need to win PvT? Have better storms. Need to win a PvZ? Get a Mothership, hope that your vortex gets most of their brood lords, and then Archon toilet. At the moment, a lot of the matchups seem extremely volatile, and it's hard to see the brilliance of the progamers.
The opposite is actually my biggest pet peeve with watching Starcraft 2. Every game I am like, meh I can do that aswell. Combined with the fact that I know like 5 minutes before the end who is going to win made it so I never watch Starcraft anymore.
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Honestly? For me personally, SC2 is getting less fun to watch.
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SC2 has definitely increased in fun to watch. If you want to see pros seperating themselves from the rest, in SC2 its less about insane micro and more about people like Stephano being so good at macro and "flash sense," that micro doesn't even matter. You could also watch people like NSHS.Sage play with 3 control groups of all different units attacking in 3 different places as protoss, completely outmicro-ing the other Korean GM. Then there is ViOlet's Double Nydus where he completely out did the other protoss in every single way. They pros do set themselves apart, but the difference is that there are so many good players now, but the game is still evovling quite heavily due to patches so player skill will only go up.
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Sc2 has remained interesting, but I think its mostly due to the constant patches put out by blizzard that end up creating changes in the so-called "meta-game", even though that's the wrong word and the correct description is popular or standard strategy. If you want the real definition, it refers to a game played at a level that affects the actual game. Kind of like how metadata refers to data that gives information about other data. So more technically its a game played at a level that goes beyond the rule set that defines Sc2; typically this involves reacting to a player's tendencies (i.e. preferred play styles) or that plays on their mental state to gain advantage in the actual game of SC2. Just like inception; its a game about a game; although to be honest I think even the term metagame with refernece to Sc2 is stretching it a bit, there isn't really a game being played out on that level, just the usage of information.
I would like to see builds evolving...but in a game where nothing changes (assuming blizzard doesn't patch anymore), experimental builds and unit compositions are going to be increasingly viewed as ineffective or gimmicky compared to a standard play style. So things will inevitably become more boring with time...and just looking at how the game is played today, you see a lot of that. Thankfully Heart of the Swarm is coming out, so I think there will be quite a lot of variability for some time to come.
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On June 19 2012 00:10 Recognizable wrote:Show nested quote +But it seems like a lot of the developments progamers make outside of build orders/strategies cannot be replicated by the average gamer. Need to win TvZ? Split marines better. Need to win PvT? Have better storms. Need to win a PvZ? Get a Mothership, hope that your vortex gets most of their brood lords, and then Archon toilet. At the moment, a lot of the matchups seem extremely volatile, and it's hard to see the brilliance of the progamers. The opposite is actually my biggest pet peeve with watching Starcraft 2. Every game I am like, meh I can do that aswell. Combined with the fact that I know like 5 minutes before the end who is going to win made it so I never watch Starcraft anymore.
The biggest gripe I have with that is not that it can be easily replicated, but it doesn't seem fun to play against or as. There should be more to starcraft than one engagement, and pulling off the "sickest storms". Granted, it's extremely satisfying for a player when you pull off something like that (depends what kind of player you are, I am the kind of player who actually doesn't feel that great when I win very easily).
I've been watching Proleague a bit, and there's been stuff like Immortal Drops in PvP that are really fun to watch, but as a player you also wonder about its viability. I would prefer that games shift towards this sort of multitasking style of play, but I feel like atm, it would be easier just to make a timing attack.
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EPT
