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United States744 Posts
I have never made a thread before and I still don't really know if I did this correctly, so I apologize in advance. I was recently talking to my friend who is in masters on NA and he said that he will probably quit SC2. I, who was drawn into the game by him, was almost traumatized by the thought that, someone whom i not only admired but had befriended because of what would become my favorite game (SC2), could just lose all interest in a game that he was pretty good at (I know you can hate on NA servers all you want, but that is completely irrelevant). Then I told my other friend (also masters on NA) about this, and he said that he also had lost interest and would probably start playing more Chivalry and BF3. I couldn't believe it. So I began to wonder, what could possibly have caused them to want to just stop playing? What had they come to realize or what had they discovered in other games that I hadn't? I asked them, and I got a combination of answers that sort of go together with what I understand is a pretty general sentiment among other semi-serious SC2 players. First, the metagame is broken. I myself am a pretty low-level player so I don't feel like I should be speaking on that matter, but I do watch a lot of pro streams and I do understand pretty well how things work at the higher level. Second, there is a point where you can just stop having fun with StarCraft. This would be better explained in a pretty accurate blog that I found: http://www.reddit.com/r/starcraft/comments/11m21k/starcraft_2_will_be_dead_before_legacy_of_the/
I understand that this is a pretty old post so if you feel that it is completely wrong, feel free to discuss, but I thought this pretty much summed up my views in a better way than I could express. Also I never played Brood War, so that also makes me not qualified to discuss some of that. But I do feel that he is very correct about one thing: HotS still needs some big changes for it to start giving StarCraft the popularity it had with BW back. In conclusion, I hope we can all discuss our thoughts on how StarCraft could die, any suggestions/opinions on what Blizzard should do, in hopes that this will be the one big thing that Blizzard finally looks at and finally realizes what its primary audience wants and realizes how it can save the game before it completely dies. I really like the game despite its numerous issues. It is undoubtedly the best game I have ever played and has, by either watching or playing, gotten me through many stressful nights of schoolwork. I don't want to see the game die, but the clock is ticking.
TL,DR:
-read the link
-discuss
  
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Yeah I feel the same way too (Masters NA), I probably won't be getting HotS  .
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I thought the same, but then i started playing on the kr server and things were a lot more fun with their focus on early aggression.
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Wait until the game averages 500 players max in the day on a pirate server, then you can be concerned.
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It's really a sad story because I'm sure Blizzard wants to do the right things but they somehow don't really understand how their community will react to certain new features and what effects the features will have on players, the same happened in WoW. Also they messed up the Battle.Net in SC2 (and Diablo 3 too for that matter) HARD in my opinion, which is not an easy thing to do if you think about how the Battle.net from 15 years ago would have been completely fine for 99% of people.
But all this doomsaying does nothing productive at all and is the worst thing you can do if you like the Starcraft franchise. In case you want to complain about the product do it on the Blizzard forums, I'm sure they are grateful about every kind of feedback and they are for the most part only measuring their own forums I think. If you don't want to write feedback then just don't play SC2 anymore or don't buy HotS until they add the features that you want.
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Sorry but I don't really know what you mean when you say that the "metagame is broken". If you mean balance, then that's not really an issue now since HOTS is going to shake things up completely and will certainly be patched. Otherwise though, I'm not sure how metagame issues would be detracting from your SC2 experience.
Just because a few of your friends got bored of a game it doesn't mean that everyone else is. In fact I've shown a few of my friends who are SC2 casuals (haven't played in months, usually just played campaign/UMS/team games) the new interface and units and they all seemed excited enough to want to try HOTS when it comes out.
You talk about BW and its popularity needing to come back but SC2 esports is more popular outside of Korea than BW ever was. Even if SC2 is only perceived as about half as "good" as BW was then it doesn't mean that it has to die. esports is not a zero-sum industry and if you check twitch.tv you can see a lot of different games still getting decent viewership. The destiny article you linked was extremely sensational and emotional and he drew some wild conclusions that just don't fit in with where our scene actually is. Everyone was expecting for chaos to ensue but as we gear up for HOTS launch in 2013 we still have a ton of great events lined up. I guess you could point at IPL but their issues are probably more related to the gaming journalism industry (IGN) than the actual state of SC2.
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The metagame is broken and the game became just generally boring to play. But we can't really talk about it in the forums here on TL without being told to shut up or that we're balance whining/complaining.
It became painfully clear after a while that there are just too many design issues that Blizzard wouldn't budge on which were causing issues with the game. A few small things here and there are tolerable for a while but weeks turned into months, months turned into years without real change or fixes to design flaws which are just fundamentally bad for an RTS game. I can't speak much on the past 2-3 months of HoTS or WoL as I haven't played seriously since November of last year, but the state of WoL was really not in a good spot when I quit and it made thinking about HoTS and the future of SC2 depressing so I distanced myself. I don't have the energy or willpower to even begin to go into it all here. (sometime in the near future I may be inspired to throw it all into my own blog post but that'll be for another day)
I can say that I definitely agree that it's been quite easy for lots of high masters or semi professional players who played purely as a hobby to move on to other things. Of course contracted players on professional teams will continue playing because it's their job. But the real life of the game in my opinion, where you can truly gauge the heartbeat on a day to day basis is the scene one step below that. The scene where people log on every night not to collect a paycheck, not to fulfill some tournament obligation, not to do something for the community. But to play because the game is fucking amazing. To play because there's a sense of accomplishment, a sense of self improvement, a sense of meaning to investing time into the game. If the people who play for the love of the game stop playing, that's when you really have an issue. Once a game stops rewarding you regarding the amount of time you start dedicating, well the guy who is dedicating that time will begin to ask himself, why? Am I playing for fun or something more? Am I even having fun anymore?
Need to stop now but I've now been inspired to go into this topic in more detail in a blog post of my own in the not so distant future.
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United States744 Posts
Erik.TheRed:
I was simply putting their words together about the metagame being broken. I don't mean to say that it's completely imbalanced, since yes HotS is shaking things up. But it was pretty stagnant in WoL, and I guess I should have added this, but they said that HotS was boring because people didn't really know what they were doing. I understand that now the pros are messing with it and it is starting to get some structure, but any perspective about the metagame is really about how you perceived HotS to be. If you expected HotS to be as drastic as the changes from BW to SC2, then no it isn't that. But if you expected something similar to what it actually is, then the metagame could be viewed as "not stagnant" for the lack of a better term.
I understand that just because a few of my friends stopped playing doesn't mean that everyone else has. I know that HotS has gotten some people more interested in playing, but I really do think that it is somewhat of a discouragement if you feel like they do, that it still lacks a lot of structure and understanding. I'm not trying to say that you are a low leaguer, but since they are masters I feel like they are in a better position to speak about things such as the metagame. Also I don't want to bring up the metagame too much, since it is a very very very minor reason StarCraft could potentially "die" as I have titled the post. But when you experience the frustration they had with WoL in its decline, I can understand the deterrent to play HotS.
I totally understand what you say about eSports rising in popularity and SC2's popularity outside Korea. Yes there are tons of games being streamed on Twitch, and that is great. But SC2 itself I still feel is not really at the popularity level it needs to be to maintain a profitable thing for Blizzard. I understand the article is somewhat outdated and was, I guess, radical, but I am inclined to think somewhat radically about this because you can't do marketing or producing without accounting for all the contingencies. Like any other company, Blizzard I'm sure has thought long and hard about what could happen if they did this or that, and some of their thinking had to involve a change being horribly accepted and a major decline in popularity. And no, I agree, that has not happened yet, and I don't necessarily think that it ever will. This build up for the HotS launch is definitely going to help, but it has to be successful. If you think back to BoxeR's popularity and fanbase, or Flash, or MKP or MC or IdrA or the really popular pros, you name them, that is the kind of popularity HotS needs to get to really bring SC2 back to where it needs to be to actually suggest that it will have longevity, not necessarily as great as BW, but longer than WoL before it became what it did for people like my friends.
Again, I know that 2 people is a very small sample for a very large SC2 community, but I think that it really is on a decline, and this is where I take a definitive stand, if the "competitive" nature of the game, as mentioned in the article, is actually what Blizzard was aiming for. Maybe the "Unranked" feature of the recent patch/HotS is the next step to getting people to play more, just playing to play and not feel the pressure of losing points or ranking. The XP system could also be a good way to bring more interest, as was even addressed in the article, but I think it needs to be more rewarding than portraits and decals right now. But, if Blizzard was not aiming for the competitive nature of ladder rankings and the like, then they completely missed their objective, and if they are trying to make it better in HotS, it definitely needs restructuring because it is still largely like WoL if you don't count adjustments to the UI.
So maybe the conclusion we have come to is that StarCraft will only die if Blizzard does not effectively produce their goals for the game, fails to impress and interest more people in the game with HotS, does not maintain a fanbase for whatever reason, be it an overall decline and therefore a lack of new pros or viewership, and does not, obviously, whatever they do in the future, please the majority of the StarCraft community.
I hope this has cleared up my lack of thoroughness or maybe apparent ignorance in the original post.
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First of all, I don't think you are using the term "metagame" properly at all. I'm not trying to nitpick but it's making your argument confusing for me to understand since metagame literally means "beyond the game", such as a player six pooling his enemy because he knows that his enemy plays extremely greedy in most games. So the "metagame" can never really be broken, it's influence can just be stronger or weaker depending on the circumstances. And obviously games with more random/blind elements (poker) have greater metagame influences. When it comes to SC2 we traditionally found this kind of blind randomness in matchups like pvp where there was a large degree of units countering each other in different tech trees that were not easy to scout before the tech investments were made. I can't really speak for the non-protoss matchups but as a high masters player I really do feel like HOTS will reduce the randomness in the long run because the scouting is better for all races (reaper buff, free hallucinate, ovie speed, oracles, etc). Also there are better defensive options for all races (spore doesn't require evo, faster burrow, nexus cannon, widow mines/free siege) that reduces the chance of a dumb quick ending for a game like someone missing 1 forcefield vs a 2 rax. Sure not everything has been balanced yet but it seems like across the board the changes are a step in the right direction.
And I'm not sure I agree with your sentiments on SC2 not being financially profitable for Blizzard... the tournaments that they host are more like marketing events than independent ventures and honestly they could probably sell plenty of copies on just the single-player alone. I've never heard them say that they require the esports scene around for their business model to work, but rather it's something they never anticipated but want the community to maintain independently.
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Aotearoa39261 Posts
On March 10 2013 16:04 LuckyFool wrote:
The metagame is broken and the game became just generally boring to play. But we can't really talk about it in the forums here on TL without being told to shut up or that we're balance whining/complaining. Well we certainly don't want the average user to do this, but I'm sure we'd let you because of your experience in the scene....
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Yup, the term metagame is more about the fashion of the actual state of the game. For Example: Queens got buffed > 4 Queen Openers will be played (safe opening) > terran plays 3 cc opener to counter that (greedy opening) > zerg assumes he plays greedy, does a roach ling push (aggressive opener), basically rock paper scissor. The metagame was never broken, its stagnant (Did you mean that with broken?). HotS will fix that I guess, because you can play alot different kind of builds as each race. I also see the argument that starcraft dies because of 2 friends leaving it as quite biased and not that significant. Starcraft has still plenty of depth, maybe your friends dont see it or are kinda saturated of the game and want to do something else till hots (even day9 is playing simcity, lol).
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One point the post misses that I think is very important:
StarCraft II displaced a large number of Brood War fans and replaced them with grassroots fans. Sure, numbers right after launch looked great and everyone was playing the game, but it's quite apparent that Brood War was massive not because of growth, but because of retention.
I anticipate HoTS will bring a similar wave of grassroots followers that will go back to other games (LoL, DoTA, etc.) in less than 18 months.
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There are not many games, which lived for more than 10+ years. Only Counterstrike and Broodwar, right?
What other games were there?
Warcraft III (started 2003 or so?), DotA (2005), Quake 3 (2005?). All dead now.
Maybe one other?
It's natural, that games lose their attraction over time. Wheat can scream "ESPORTS GROWGROWGROW OMG DO IT - NO HURT ESPORTS" as much as he wants on his shows, but it doesn't change the fact, that a huge portion of gamers move on to other games, given enough time. Now even more than in recent years. Old school gamers value games in a different way than younger people, who grow up in a huge pool of games. Look at how much TL has grown since the SC2 release. I also came here only around the SC2 release, because BW was of no interest to me. I'm still here, others are gone. That's the way it is.
Even the legends of competitive gaming are dead now, so why would anyone think SC2 was immortal?
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This whole discussion Is kinda funny actually.
It Feels like the Starcraft community is a growing child who previously had no concept of that everything one day could end, and now when SC2 HOTs is about to come out and the community has grown a bit older it finally realizes it's own mortality and by this shocking insight is trying to come with terms with it by questioning everything. I swear to god, you could apply a classical development model and all its various acting out stages would correlate perfectly with the responses of this community. 
EDIT: I should had seen this before, it's damn obvious now in retrospect.
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On March 10 2013 18:16 Inori wrote:
Been playing on and off since very early WoL beta. I swear I see these topics every 2-3 months... It's our destiny... 
What does "die" even mean. The "something of the void" will come out, no matter how many fans are left - there will still be enough for it to be viable to produce. Heck, BW with 500 people on private servers does not really constitute as dead either.
Gameplay improvements in HotS aside, even just the technical improvements - like replay restart from any point - can bring a whole new world of having fun with the game. For LotV, they could, for example, finally make something like DotaTV, where you can watch matches directly in the client and listen to casters from there, and follow the games of your favorite progamers live as they play them on the ladder etc. Even such tech improvements can bring a lot of new interest to the game.
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United States744 Posts
On March 10 2013 17:14 Erik.TheRed wrote:
First of all, I don't think you are using the term "metagame" properly at all. I'm not trying to nitpick but it's making your argument confusing for me to understand since metagame literally means "beyond the game", such as a player six pooling his enemy because he knows that his enemy plays extremely greedy in most games. So the "metagame" can never really be broken, it's influence can just be stronger or weaker depending on the circumstances. And obviously games with more random/blind elements (poker) have greater metagame influences. When it comes to SC2 we traditionally found this kind of blind randomness in matchups like pvp where there was a large degree of units countering each other in different tech trees that were not easy to scout before the tech investments were made. I can't really speak for the non-protoss matchups but as a high masters player I really do feel like HOTS will reduce the randomness in the long run because the scouting is better for all races (reaper buff, free hallucinate, ovie speed, oracles, etc). Also there are better defensive options for all races (spore doesn't require evo, faster burrow, nexus cannon, widow mines/free siege) that reduces the chance of a dumb quick ending for a game like someone missing 1 forcefield vs a 2 rax. Sure not everything has been balanced yet but it seems like across the board the changes are a step in the right direction.
And I'm not sure I agree with your sentiments on SC2 not being financially profitable for Blizzard... the tournaments that they host are more like marketing events than independent ventures and honestly they could probably sell plenty of copies on just the single-player alone. I've never heard them say that they require the esports scene around for their business model to work, but rather it's something they never anticipated but want the community to maintain independently.
Ok. I admit that i made a horrible mistake in saying "broken" instead of "stagnant". It is a far better term that has already been mentioned. As for the second part, we have very different views of this whole situation and I don't want to turn this into a drawn-out argument. So there. Also to anyone who may have criticized this: I know my story is biased. I honestly thought I would get more people who understood what I was trying to say. But that's ok. Anyone who feels the desire to start another forum like this one but maybe better, I support you.
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On March 10 2013 15:43 ninazerg wrote:
Wait until the game averages 500 players max in the day on a pirate server, then you can be concerned.
Fish is pretty active...
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I was a high master/gm terran on EU. I quit in early 2012 due to school, gym, etc. (I had to play a lot of sc2 to stay at the level I was playing at). However, I felt already at that time the game was becoming stagnant. The last entertaining TvZ for me was Blizzard cup finals end of 2011, DRG vs MMA. TvP and TvT and even PvP was fine though.
Although I quit playing, I bought a 1 year pass for the GSL on GOMTV. After the first half of 2012, I just stopped watching. Every zerg match up was boring to watch. So predictable, so little going on. PvZ was a joke as well.
Another problem was of course the maps, but I don't wanna get into that..
So from my personal perspective as a viewer in WoL, from most enjoyable to least, I'd say:
TvP (lots of action, so many openings for both races) > TvT (so many strategies, high potential for action) > PvP (OK amount of strategies, micro-intensive, unpredictable) > TvZ (predictable, but different strats available for terran, mech or bio) > ZvP (no action for 10 minutes, predictable, stupid late game) > ZvZ (action and micro-intensive yes, but too much of the same).
That's not to say that I didn't see some amazing games with all the zerg match ups. I definitely did, but for the most part, the level of entertainment did not even compare to 2011.
HotS is going to make SC2 way more interesting though, especially as it gets more balanced 
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I started to loose interest in SC2 over the last year or so (some of the balance changes played a big part by making the game more boring to spectate)
I had a lot of hopes for HOTS and, well, i canceled my pre-order. None of the fundamental problems with WOL were touched on like economy scaling, death balls, terrible units like colossus, etc.
It's still a good game don't get me wrong, but it does feel like it will never reach it's potential. It also feels like the community has to fight the developers for their own game...and this is very weird lol. It's not dyeing, it's on life support.
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EPT
