EPTBeen thinking that balance whine / nerf hammer have been way too strong in sc2, with lots of old nerfed strats and units really just needed to be figured out by the metagame.
Is Terran UP? Does It Matter? - Page 2
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BreakfastBurrito
United States893 Posts
Been thinking that balance whine / nerf hammer have been way too strong in sc2, with lots of old nerfed strats and units really just needed to be figured out by the metagame. | ||
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Carson
Canada820 Posts
5/5 Less nerf, more play | ||
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dragoon
United States695 Posts
good read 5/5 | ||
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ReketSomething
United States6012 Posts
And OSL protoss two time consecutive winner incoming? + Show Spoiler + jangbi > fantasy | ||
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TylerThaCreator
United States906 Posts
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avilo
United States4100 Posts
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9-BiT
United States1089 Posts
On August 01 2012 15:07 avilo wrote: You don't seem to have a lot of your history anywhere near right. Mech not being viable TvZ for 9-10 years? Uh what are you talking about? ![[image loading]](http://www.captainsblog.info/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/jack20heres_johnny.jpg) Heeeeeeeeeeeres avilo! | ||
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Angel_
United States1617 Posts
In all honesty Terran depend on bio so much that they are terrified of really exploring straight mech comps. People will immediately say UH THEY HAVE AND AKSDJFLKSDF HER DER IF IT WORKED DONT YOU THINK THEY KNOW MORE THAN YOU...but really they haven't much. To be fair though it's hard and bio we know works and when it comes down to it there isn't an easy be-all-end-all mech deathball like protoss has that's just come up naturally. The issue to me is that the way terran are designed there are basic pass-fail systems where you can either do something or you cant, and there's no good way around it. You can either split well enough to deal with banelings or you can't. If you can't you're just not going to win against banelings. Same with snipe and templar, or splitting for storm, or a lot of other things. They're just mechanical tests that you win, or fail miserably. There is no half doing okay. But is that fixable? Well, if you do somehow...it's actually a massive buff to the terrans that already COULD do those things because theyll still be able to do those things in addition. So idk. TLDR: I think terran are okay. If they aren't okay I don't think terran have actually explored their other options enough to really say they aren't okay to begin with. I feel bad for lower league players and players who can't practice a lot (myself included at the moment for the latter) who mechanically just can't DO what they need to do. | ||
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Zanno
United States1484 Posts
remember some of the hilariously T favored maps like dual sight and xelnaga fortress from last year now we've swung so far in the other direction that daybreak feels kind of small compared to a map like atlanis spaceship and remember these maps were getting added because T was doing so good, so you have implicit nerfs in the map pool on top of explicit buffs to creep spread, and suddenly the pendulum swings a bit too far i think we need to see what they do with the map pool for gsl season 4 before we can say there's a legitimate imbalance issue | ||
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Zombo Joe
Canada850 Posts
' The nerf also made goody stop going mech in TvP  | ||
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SnipedSoul
Canada2158 Posts
On August 01 2012 16:41 Zanno wrote: it's really just a map pool issue remember some of the hilariously T favored maps like dual sight and xelnaga fortress from last year now we've swung so far in the other direction that daybreak feels kind of small compared to a map like atlanis spaceship and remember these maps were getting added because T was doing so good, so you have implicit nerfs in the map pool on top of explicit buffs to creep spread, and suddenly the pendulum swings a bit too far i think we need to see what they do with the map pool for gsl season 4 before we can say there's a legitimate imbalance issue This is a good point. Maps were used to "balance" BW for years. We need some maps where taking a 3rd base requires a committed strategy. Free 3rd bases lead to boring games. Remember calm before the storm? Holy fuck that map was terrible. | ||
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JacobShock
Denmark2485 Posts
5/5 I really hope it gets featured. To me it's a positive message for a pretty negative community as of late. | ||
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JonIrenicus
Italy602 Posts
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sevia
United States954 Posts
I think a great deal of the noise surrounding the queen patch is due to the fact that unlike in BW, SC2 has a very large base of middle-tier pros that are quite good relative to their peers (think NA grandmasters), but are still miles away from real top-tier players in Korea. We also have this huge casual playerbase that essentially acts as an echo chamber for the voices of those semi-pros, so the ones with the loudest voices get heard the most. Even before the patch, how many thousands of times had you seen both "TvZ is completely imbalanced" and "ZvT is unwinnable" in stream chats and forum posts? When the masses see a random NA/EU grandmaster claim the same thing, it 'proves' their theory, and they get on TL and Bnet demanding that Blizzard fix the obvious imbalance. This might be the biggest 'balance-crisis' we've had so far, but just like every other time, the top 1% of pros are changing their playstyles and the matchup is starting to balance out again. By the time HotS is coming out, the whiners will just look ridiculous. | ||
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Klonere
Ireland4123 Posts
From a spectator point of view however, I'd don't think I'd be wrong in stating that the top three matchups in SC2 from a spectator point of view are all Terran, TvZ being the undisputed best matchup to watch, then TvP and then more contentiously TvT. For me as a Terran/Zerg player, when I see tons of ZvP, I just turn off as it is a broken, silly matchup. | ||
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Grumbels
Netherlands7032 Posts
On August 01 2012 15:51 Angel_ wrote: To me there isn't an issue of terran being overpowered or not. I think they're in a really tough place when it comes to their design. In all honesty Terran depend on bio so much that they are terrified of really exploring straight mech comps. People will immediately say UH THEY HAVE AND AKSDJFLKSDF HER DER IF IT WORKED DONT YOU THINK THEY KNOW MORE THAN YOU...but really they haven't much. To be fair though it's hard and bio we know works and when it comes down to it there isn't an easy be-all-end-all mech deathball like protoss has that's just come up naturally. The issue to me is that the way terran are designed there are basic pass-fail systems where you can either do something or you cant, and there's no good way around it. You can either split well enough to deal with banelings or you can't. If you can't you're just not going to win against banelings. Same with snipe and templar, or splitting for storm, or a lot of other things. They're just mechanical tests that you win, or fail miserably. There is no half doing okay. But is that fixable? Well, if you do somehow...it's actually a massive buff to the terrans that already COULD do those things because theyll still be able to do those things in addition. So idk. TLDR: I think terran are okay. If they aren't okay I don't think terran have actually explored their other options enough to really say they aren't okay to begin with. I feel bad for lower league players and players who can't practice a lot (myself included at the moment for the latter) who mechanically just can't DO what they need to do. I'm happy you don't design the game, how is marine splitting a pass-fail system when you have such a range of execution? What you call mechanical tests is actually called 'micro'. | ||
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Kaeru
Sweden552 Posts
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Stratos_speAr
United States6959 Posts
On August 01 2012 09:53 tombigbimbom wrote: There have been many posts like these and they usually aren't popular, but I feel the urge to try to put things around here in perspective a little bit. Stick around with a nostalgic lurker who spent the last 14 years of his life with StarCraft, will ya? Brood War take on terran being UP This isn't the first time we rally about a race being UP and unplayable. For those of us who haven't been around here when Brood War was in its prime and only heard about it. BW has been considered perfectly balanced and been used as one of the main arguments in our community for good 3-4 years now, right? Let's go into some relevant "facts" in how I recall them with some help of Liquipedia: - OSL and MSL pretty much never had more than a 20-25% protoss representation on average. Try to imagine GSL with 2-8 terrans/protoss/zerg on average for 11 years (or make it ~7 based on the number of GSL seasons per year). - There were a few periods of time when no protoss would win an OSL/MSL. Think not a few weeks. Think 3 years. Fun facts: between 2004 and 2011 there were only 2 protoss OSL winners... and 18 terran/zerg winners. In 9 years of MSL only two protoss players managed to squeeze in a win: Nal_rA and Bisu with 4 titles between them... and 13 terran/zerg players who in total took 22 championships. - There was a time (good 4-5 years according to my memory) where zerg was considered unbeatable in ZvP. Zerg players would tell protoss players to be innovative and stop going certain strats (like 2gate openings) and get bashed relentlessly for "not having a clue" and playing the obviously "OP race". One day Bisu came around and turned the matchup upside down with the unlikely FE/FFE style into corsair/dt harass. That gained him the nickname "The Revolutionist". It happened 8 years after the game was released (how do those ravens sound now, for example). - And while I'm at it. There is this SCII "mech not viable in TvP" argument: it was also considered not viable in TvZ (with bio being the only accepted standard and non-gimmicky choice), but for ~9-10 years. Then it was figured out, just like that. Are we getting this right? Does it even matter? I could put in more examples, but the point I'm trying to make is that balance (especially when it's so tight in SCII) matters very little in comparison to how much we can do with the game and how much we have to explore to make things work. Sure it's easy to come and complain about every subtle "obvious sign of OP/UP". Blizzard will buff to do the job for us, right? To me the point of a complex and competitive strategy game is to put thought into things and be creative. It may be different for you, of course, but that's how I see it and how I feel most of us used to see it in the Brood War community. It's pretty apparent that the "issues" we like to blow out of proportion in SCII are not as big as we make them out to be. Why is he talking about BW? We are much smarter and experienced now! You could also say those examples don't apply, cause we are so much smarter now, SCII is not much different from BW, and we have years of experience in competitive RTS. Are we and do we though? Looking at how SCII is currently played, in reality, are we actually that much smarter? Have we reached the skill cap? Have we explored all strategies and options we have at our disposal? We've been wrong so much in the past with the metagame predictions and how certain changes would affect the game. Think roach 4 range buff and protoss FFE "not being viable anymore". Think vortex nerf that "killed" the archon toilet. Think khaydarin amulet nerf that made high templars "dead and unusable" and storm "impossible to use". Think barracks after supply nerf that made terran "early aggression impossible" (11/11 *cough*). Think EMP nerfs that were supposed to kill this ability's effectiveness forever. Think void ray nerfs that were supposed to make this unit worthless. And the phoenix gliding shot buff that was going to effectively deny any muta play. And so many other changes where we would overreact to and where we would rally with our pitchforks up high, while in retrospect we see those changes as fine and good. We even laugh at how some of those things used to work, don't we? Why did I even write this? I felt the urge to speak up. I might not be a pro, but I've played for many years. I was an "A" zerg player on ICCup, I play SCII casually in high master, (made GM a few seasons ago \o/ <shameless brag>) with all three races. I've been a lurker for years, but I love our community and identify myself with it. As a community we are awesome and very special. We get things right, we bring up concerns, we get stuff done for our beloved game. Hey, we don't even hurt eSports; we actually grow it. But while we like to always believe that we are perfect, we get a lot of things wrong and forget about them instead of taking notes and learning from them. Blizzard makes mistakes too, just like we do, but they are more open to admitting them than we are. As it's our duty, how about we become more constructive to help make the game even more amazing, if they are willing to listen? TL;DR: Look at BW history and SCII history, get perspective and be honest with ourselves. Less QQ, more Pew Pew. In BW, it was not accepted that the game was perfectly balanced. It was more commonly accepted that there were slight imbalances that resulted in T>Z>P>T. Furthermore, T was the hardest to learn and the easiest to master; Protoss was the easiest to learn and hardest to master, and Zerg was in the middle. Finally, Terran had the highest skill ceiling and Protoss the lowest. The results you cite show this quite well. All of this said, there's a big difference between the SC2 scene and the BW scene; the SC2 scene is full of a bunch of whiners. Yes, there are legitimate ways to talk about balance, but by and large, we've seen knee-jerk reactions throughout SC2's lifetime and knee-jerk balance changes by Blizzard. In BW, when there was a powerful metagame shift (Think Bisu's PvZ), it may have lasted months, but we saw players adapt. In SC2, we see a build that's powerful for a few weeks, and the community practically has a heart attack and whines until it's fixed. Things lack of late-game viability can be talked about, but the small individual complaints (Hellion harass is too powerful! Reapers are too powerful! Archon toilet is too powerful! etc etc etc) are just ridiculous and have diluted this game way too much. So all in all, yes, I agree with the OP. We have too much whining and micromanagement by Blizzard and less innovation and creativity. I agree with your logic but I disagree with the way you present them. Yes you learn a game and it evolves with you but comparing BW and SC2 is not a good thing. Especially because they're way more different than people believe. BW was less balanced than SC2 imo. This is because, when they started balancing BW and designing it, they didn't have a huge fan community expressing their opinions and Blizzard didn't even take any input from them. And the game evolved so much from the way BW was balanced. For example, I can bet you the original BW developers never predicted that in TvZ, Terran can secure 3 base with MnM and then switch to Mech, max out at 200/200 with mines, turrets, tanks, and slowly choke the Zerg to death. Any imbalance that you will ever see in BW is only shown at a far, far, far higher skill level than we've ever seen in SC2, so I don't see how you could ever argue that BW is less balanced than SC2. | ||
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Murlox
France1699 Posts
On August 02 2012 00:59 Stratos_speAr wrote: T was the [...] easiest to master; Protoss was the [...] hardest to master. Finally, Terran had the highest skill ceiling and Protoss the lowest. I don't understand? | ||
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Stratos_speAr
United States6959 Posts
It essentially means the same thing (I was being redundant). Terran's gameplay style was such that improvements in mechanics gave you massive improvements in performance, even at high levels. Protoss units in BW didn't have the mechanical ceiling to take advantage of ridiculously awesome mechanics (there's a reason that people joked about 1a2a3a Protoss in BW; there wasn't any real benefit to microing Protoss units as much as there was Terran units). Protoss also relied on spells/abilities far more than Terran, and had less harrassment/mobility options. All of this combined gives Terran the highest skill ceiling and Protoss the lowest; the best BW player ever would probably be able to perform better as Terran than as Protoss over a long period of time because of the subtle advantages of the race. SC2 seems to be the same way. | ||
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