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Disclaimer: I have eaten about 10% of the shirt now. I am actually going to consume it in full, eating too much at the same time however is bad for your health.
You often hear people say 'SC2 doesn't need map variety, chess is played on one map only.', well, yes and no, chess is played on multiple maps, these maps are just called 'chess variants', one map is the most popular but there are definitely chess variants which are subtle alterations to the rules and starting positions of chess. One of these is Chess960, invented by late Grandmaster, world champion and probably the third best player of all time and arguably the most talented, Bobby Fischer. What it does is super simple: It randomizes the starting positions of the pieces in 960's possibilities, hence the name.
Why?
Well, people often talk about chess as if it's this sport with this huge skill ceiling, the opposite is true actually, chess' skill ceiling is fast becoming exhausted, as in, a larger and larger portion of highest level chess games end in draws. The 2012 Anand-Gelfand chess championship produced an astounding 13 draws and only 3 games that were actually a win, one might argue it took 16 games to produce a 2-1 result in favour of the defending champion Anand. This is the reality of high level chess.
Why?
Opening optimization plays a key role. Chess has 'build orders' if you will, opening theory, openers and canonical responses to it which are memorized, not calculated on the spot, but memorized. Fischer saw this problem and decided to advocate randomizing chess starting positions to counteract this. You can't optimize and memorize openers for 960 different starting positions. You have to calculate it on the spot. This makes optimizing play harder, thereby increasing the 'skill ceiling' of chess.
Chess960, despite its apparent gimmicky nature of the pretty bizarre starting positions it can generate enjoys advocacy from many top end grandmasters who call for the game to move to it. It's a return to the golden age of chess. When it was a 1v1 game, not a game where both sides had armies of seconds and advisors helping them out between games, planning openers and what not.
StarCraft
Optimized builds are bad for the skill ceiling of the game. You can argue a lot of subjective stuff about it but you cannot deny that optimized build orders that you can copy from others without having to have invented them makes the skill ceiling of the game lower. It makes it easier to play close to optimally, that is a definition of a lower skill ceiling and it shows in the history of BW and SC2. In the early days of BW the best players were far more removed from the second best players. It wasn't yet a practice of studying and copy each other, the second best didn't copy the best. People may call Flash the greatest player of all time but Flash was far less removed from Jaedong in BW than Oov was in his prime of the second best player, who it is is even arguable. You can make a case for many people back when Oov Reigned or even SaviOr still, it wasn't a case of 'TLBS', no, there was only one best player.
The same happened in SC2. Ever noticed how the amount of repeat champions was higher in the early GSL seasons? How long has it been since we had a repeat GSL champion? The days of the MC's, the Nestea's and the Mvp's are over, almost no one nowadays wins two GSL's in quick succession, hell, even in the first GSL, yeah, FD was lucky, but he dominated. THe first few GSL's were noted for their extremely one sided finals as well, nowadays the top players are all so close together in skill, why? Because the game is _optimized_. Optimization leaves little room for improvement. It's not about creativity, quick decisions, mind games and letting your mechanics show as much as practising a build order over and over again until you've optimized it. And the build needidn't even be your own invention, it can come from your coach or anyone really.
You're not actually suggesting..
I am, randomize the resource layout of bases! not just the amount of patches, but their formation, the amount of gases, anywhere from 1 gas to 1 rich gas, to 3 gas, to 1 rich gas + 1 gas. Randomize a little how far gases are removed even, go anywhere between 6-10 patches, put random gold patches in there, alter the formation to affect mining efficiency even. Anything to make it impossible to optimize builds. This will increase the room for improvement and as an added bonus will stop the game from becoming stale and strategies figured out.
Don't just randomize the main, randomize all the bases, of course keep it mirrored but suddenly the natural might be kind of meh with only 6 patches but the third has 9 and 3 rich gases so people randomly take their third as natural in a daring move.
And yes, you can aruge that it is a bit imbalanced on a race basis but we already accept that, we already accept that cross positions favour zerg and close favour terran a bit more, this is acceptable. Hell, even in chess white has an advantage.
 
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I am afraid that SC is too fast for that. It would probably lead to a lot of very boring games, when one of the players just hugely misjudges the situation and loses stupidly. I don't know much about chess, but at least there you have time and space to calculate, think, analyse, while in SC you have to play without hesitation, otherwise you are already losing.
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Well, did you feel early WoL before build orders came out was like that? It didn't feel to me like that at all, it felt rather exciting actually, same with early WoL. Every Rush a surprise.
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Randomisation removes skill.
If, at the skill ceiling, the very top, it's anything other than the solved outcome, then something is wrong.
There's too much randomness in SC2 already for me. Firing randomness is ridiculous and should be removed, in my eyes.
Adding randomness adds excitement to the spectators, but removes wins based purely on skill.
For example: Critical Hits in DotA2. Take Phantom Assassin. Has a passive ability that gives her attacks a 15% chance to do up to 450% damage.
It looks great when you see an attack do 1.5K damage to someone and kill them instantly. However, in a fight, it's entirely luck based whether you'll win it or not. Do you get 2 crits in succession and win, or none at all and lose? It's out of your hands.
Anything that's out of your hands suddenly stops being about who is the better player.
Chess may have a random variant, but you don't hide your half of the board. Maybe that will help chess.
Your first 4 moves are done behind a board, then it is removed and you go from there.
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Just thinking about Jaedong and Flash in BW makes me miss seeing them play a lot. You really have no idea how much better they were than other players. I think Hiya said once in an interview that people try to use Flash's strategies, but only he can do them. Flash was way more than good build orders. Everything he did accounted for the situation perfectly, and little by little he became out of reach.
Your evidence is really unconvincing. I don't think there only being one top player says much about the game, nor having a few top players. BW just got harder and harder and no one ever played utterly perfect games, even the bonjwas. Bonjwas were simply people of personality, people who could endure 10 hour practice days and not get burnt out and still play as hard as they could every game and try to invent new strats to throw their opponents off. That as BW grew we found more of those players I don't think is surprising. They were still miles above players who battled with confidence, endurance, and other psychological aspects of BW.
I can't comment on what you say about Chess or SC2.
I think your idea about randomizing bases is kind of bad. I have played series of games where my friend and I just pick random maps out of a folder and games where we play a set of maps we know, or sometimes the same map again and again. The really interesting parts of Brood War happen because the maps get so well figured out and the strategy is able to get complex. If you just play completely randomized games you can't prepare for, you end up just taking the middle road of things that work in all situations. You play one base because you don't want to play guessing games with the rest of the map. The shape of the game that the players make together gives them opportunity to innovate in unique scenarios that don't come up in practice, but the players have to be fighting against each other and playing that psychological battle, not fighting against an RNG map generator which has no logic or predictability (or if it is predictable, it fails your purpose and players can prepare for it).
If SC2 is failing at this, or Chess fails at this (according to you), then it is because players don't have enough ability to shape the game and their choices are too limited. Maybe that's kind of what you're saying, but then I think the solution is to make the choices on those same maps more interesting, not to make the game impossible to prepare for.
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Johto4954 Posts
I think this idea is very good. Being a chess player and having played in quite some Chess960 tournaments, i can relate to your blogpost and i would love to see the concept in SC2 =)
Maybe someone could make a SC2 mod with this change?
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Like Chef says, there was a big skill gap between the top BW pros and the rest right up until the end. That's especially true for Terran, where Flash and Fantasy were far stronger than the 3rd best Terran, and their styles were quite different so they obviously weren't just ripping builds from each other. The difference was less extreme for Zerg and Protoss but there was still a significant range of skill and play styles.
I feel that non-randomized game setup is an asset for a spectator eSport. Part of what makes BW so watchable is that you can play the same matchups on the same maps and get a feel for how hard it is to play. Then you can watch pros play the same setup but do it better in every way. With randomized game setup, it's harder to directly relate to what the players are doing.
That said, I like playing games with randomized game setup. Although I enjoy watching BW, I don't enjoy playing the same build repeatedly, so that prevents me from fully enjoying competitive 1v1, where repeating a build is how to improve. So I'm not opposed to imagining an RTS with random setup.
I'm not sure randomized maps are the right way to go about it, though. For one thing, it'll tend to have racial imbalance. But also, map doesn't make that huge a difference to opening builds, so players would just tend to play flexible builds that don't depend on the map much, actually reducing the range of strategy.
Instead I'd advocate having a large pool of units types and randomly selecting a small number to play with each game. This is the direct RTS analogue of Dominion (where you have a large card type pool and pick a small number to play with each game). Of course, multiple races wouldn't work in such a game--imagine a ZvP with hydras and no high templar. The variety of the unit pool makes having the variety of multiple races less important. You'll hopefully often have each player choose a different strategy to play, so mirror matches won't be as common as you might fear.
Such a game would probably need to be slower-paced than BW/SC2 too, to allow for figuring out strategy on the fly. Either that or maybe allow a minute-or-two grace period to formulate strategy before the game starts. In any case, it wouldn't resemble Starcraft very much, but it could be a fun game in its own right.
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On November 29 2013 02:53 blueblimp wrote:
Like Chef says, there was a big skill gap between the top BW pros and the rest right up until the end. That's especially true for Terran, where Flash and Fantasy were far stronger than the 3rd best Terran, and their styles were quite different so they obviously weren't just ripping builds from each other. The difference was less extreme for Zerg and Protoss but there was still a significant range of skill and play styles. May be, but the difference was considerably smaller than earlier in BW, at the times of Boxer and Oov the difference was far more profound.
I feel that non-randomized game setup is an asset for a spectator eSport. Part of what makes BW so watchable is that you can play the same matchups on the same maps and get a feel for how hard it is to play. Then you can watch pros play the same setup but do it better in every way. With randomized game setup, it's harder to directly relate to what the players are doing. So why not do away with different maps altogether then? The map pool is essentially random.
That said, I like playing games with randomized game setup. Although I enjoy watching BW, I don't enjoy playing the same build repeatedly, so that prevents me from fully enjoying competitive 1v1, where repeating a build is how to improve. So I'm not opposed to imagining an RTS with random setup.
I'm not sure randomized maps are the right way to go about it, though. For one thing, it'll tend to have racial imbalance. But also, map doesn't make that huge a difference to opening builds, so players would just tend to play flexible builds that don't depend on the map much, actually reducing the range of strategy.
Instead I'd advocate having a large pool of units types and randomly selecting a small number to play with each game. This is the direct RTS analogue of Dominion (where you have a large card type pool and pick a small number to play with each game). Of course, multiple races wouldn't work in such a game--imagine a ZvP with hydras and no high templar. The variety of the unit pool makes having the variety of multiple races less important. You'll hopefully often have each player choose a different strategy to play, so mirror matches won't be as common as you might fear. Surely racial imbalances would be even more profound with randomizing the units you can pick and balancing the game in general is more difficult if the unit range is randomized?
Such a game would probably need to be slower-paced than BW/SC2 too, to allow for figuring out strategy on the fly. Either that or maybe allow a minute-or-two grace period to formulate strategy before the game starts. In any case, it wouldn't resemble Starcraft very much, but it could be a fun game in its own right. I wouldn't be opposed to people getting to know the mineral setup in advance, many Chess960 tournaments give people the positions a day in advance even. It's mostly to stop opening memorization and if people take advantage of positions via a planned theoretical novelty to ensure that it is their own work.
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A completely unnecessary change. That won't add any skill to the game at all, it'll just add a stupendously large dice roll at the start of the game. SC2 barely has any draws at all and the skill ceiling is high enough for top-level players to get the series win rate they deserve.
Also, patches and expansion packs are already fulfilling the role of fixing stagnation.
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On November 29 2013 03:16 SiskosGoatee wrote:Show nested quote +On November 29 2013 02:53 blueblimp wrote:
Like Chef says, there was a big skill gap between the top BW pros and the rest right up until the end. That's especially true for Terran, where Flash and Fantasy were far stronger than the 3rd best Terran, and their styles were quite different so they obviously weren't just ripping builds from each other. The difference was less extreme for Zerg and Protoss but there was still a significant range of skill and play styles. May be, but the difference was considerably smaller than earlier in BW, at the times of Boxer and Oov the difference was far more profound.
This is largely subjective, so we might just need to agree to disagree. All I can say is that, subjectively, the only matchups where it seemed there wasn't enough skill gap between pros at the end were mirrors, although even for those you'd still have a player dominate once in a while.
Show nested quote +I feel that non-randomized game setup is an asset for a spectator eSport. Part of what makes BW so watchable is that you can play the same matchups on the same maps and get a feel for how hard it is to play. Then you can watch pros play the same setup but do it better in every way. With randomized game setup, it's harder to directly relate to what the players are doing. So why not do away with different maps altogether then? The map pool is essentially random.
Map pools aren't random at all in tournaments, They're specified up front, and players will often prepare special builds for the maps they expect to play on. As a casual player, you can download the same maps and play on them yourself. So, I guess I'm not understanding what you're saying here.
Show nested quote +That said, I like playing games with randomized game setup. Although I enjoy watching BW, I don't enjoy playing the same build repeatedly, so that prevents me from fully enjoying competitive 1v1, where repeating a build is how to improve. So I'm not opposed to imagining an RTS with random setup.
I'm not sure randomized maps are the right way to go about it, though. For one thing, it'll tend to have racial imbalance. But also, map doesn't make that huge a difference to opening builds, so players would just tend to play flexible builds that don't depend on the map much, actually reducing the range of strategy.
Instead I'd advocate having a large pool of units types and randomly selecting a small number to play with each game. This is the direct RTS analogue of Dominion (where you have a large card type pool and pick a small number to play with each game). Of course, multiple races wouldn't work in such a game--imagine a ZvP with hydras and no high templar. The variety of the unit pool makes having the variety of multiple races less important. You'll hopefully often have each player choose a different strategy to play, so mirror matches won't be as common as you might fear. Surely racial imbalances would be even more profound with randomizing the units you can pick and balancing the game in general is more difficult if the unit range is randomized?
Sorry that I wasn't clear. I meant that a game with random unit pools would necessarily need to have just a single race because otherwise racial balance would be impossible. If both players are the same race and have access the same (but randomly selected) unit pool, balance is automatic. Luckily, even if there's only one race, players may disagree on the best strategy for the given unit pool and play different strategies, so the games won't only be boring mirrors.
Show nested quote +Such a game would probably need to be slower-paced than BW/SC2 too, to allow for figuring out strategy on the fly. Either that or maybe allow a minute-or-two grace period to formulate strategy before the game starts. In any case, it wouldn't resemble Starcraft very much, but it could be a fun game in its own right. I wouldn't be opposed to people getting to know the mineral setup in advance, many Chess960 tournaments give people the positions a day in advance even. It's mostly to stop opening memorization and if people take advantage of positions via a planned theoretical novelty to ensure that it is their own work.
That sounds interesting.
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On November 29 2013 04:01 blueblimp wrote:Show nested quote +Such a game would probably need to be slower-paced than BW/SC2 too, to allow for figuring out strategy on the fly. Either that or maybe allow a minute-or-two grace period to formulate strategy before the game starts. In any case, it wouldn't resemble Starcraft very much, but it could be a fun game in its own right. I wouldn't be opposed to people getting to know the mineral setup in advance, many Chess960 tournaments give people the positions a day in advance even. It's mostly to stop opening memorization and if people take advantage of positions via a planned theoretical novelty to ensure that it is their own work.
That sounds interesting.[/QUOTE]Well, as much as I'd not have a problem with it, I wouldn't particularly like it either. I'm not a fan of 'planned strategies' in StarCraft and I think the games turn out less spectacular as a rule, planned strategies seem to more come down to people playing build order poker rather than reacting to each other because they both have a plan rather than both going in it not knowing what they are going to do.
The first GSL was still the most exciting to me because FD clearly didn't go itno games with a plan, you could see his genius and on the fly thinking shine.
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Randomizing works in chess because it's a mirror matchup.
In Starcraft balancie is everything and your randomized mineral patches will lead to imbalances and therefor become a luck based game, which lowers the skill ceiling.
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On November 29 2013 05:29 Geiko wrote:
Randomizing works in chess because it's a mirror matchup.
In Starcraft balancie is everything and your randomized mineral patches will lead to imbalances and therefor become a luck based game, which lowers the skill ceiling. So what, we already accept different spawn positions, we already accept that cross spawn favours Zerg. We already accept maps like Yeonsu in the map pool with 65% TvZ. We accept fog of war.
Luck has always been an element of StarCraft, and as any poker or D&D player knows, luck can enhance the strategic depth of a game. A random factor means that calculating the future becomse infinitely more complicated. All skill would be gone from poker if the game did not have any luck in it, imagine poker with everyone having the same hand and everyone plays open. Many games like Poker or many trading card games _derive_ their skill from luck and it comes as no surprise that many top end SC players are also top end Poker or Top end trading card game players. Artosis won the Hearthstone world championship/ You think that's a coincidence?
No, poker, Hearthstone, Magic: The Gathering, StarCraft, they all have one thing in common, a good player takes calculated risks. Furthermore, white has an advantage in chess, that's not so bad because players switch colour every game. It tests your ability to play from a disadvantage or an advantage, just like a good poker player is able to win the most out of a good hand and lose the least out of a bad hand. Part of the skill of StarCraft is still ocassionally being able to grab that win with the ods against you.
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In Poker you play tens of thousands of hands, therefore you have just as much luck as the next guy. In a starcraft tournament you play maximum 20-30 games.
Your analogy to poker would only work if you're comapring to those ultra fast poker tournament where you start the tournament with 10 BB. (Meaning you only get to play 20 or so hands before you're forced to get lucky or go all-in). Funny enough, you don't see many pros playing these.
There are very few maps left with random imbalanced spans, and players hate them as much as spectators.
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On November 29 2013 06:14 Geiko wrote:
In Poker you play tens of thousands of hands, therefore you have just as much luck as the next guy. In a starcraft tournament you play maximum 20-30 games.
Your analogy to poker would only work if you're comapring to those ultra fast poker tournament where you start the tournament with 10 BB. (Meaning you only get to play 20 or so hands before you're forced to get lucky or go all-in). Funny enough, you don't see many pros playing these.
There are very few maps left with random imbalanced spans, and players hate them as much as spectators. This analogy would only make sense if the advantage/disadvantage of a race spawning with a mineral layout that doesn't favour them was comparable to being given suited aces vs a 2 and an 8.
The amount of luck in one hand of poker is way higher than what can be derived from simple mineral layouts, both players get the same layout anyway, the advantage a race might get from this is very minimal and certainly comparable to the spawn advantagse that already exist in StarCraft.
I doubt mineral randomization is going to give a 65% advantage in TvZ and Yeonsu currently has that and is in tournament and ladder pools so yeah.
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This is silly. Flash had the most dominant year in the history of Starcraft, including beating Jaedong in three straight finals. He had nearly an 80% win rate for over two years. But because Jaedong was also very good at the time, that somehow means that the skill ceiling was lower? Seriously?
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Actually, an increasing percentage of champions does not mean a lower skill ceiling. It means a more mature game with higher level play.
You cannot compare a quantized game to a non-quantized game. The two are not comparable at all.
Incidentally, no one on the planet is anywhere near Starcraft 2's mechanical skill ceiling and no one on the planet will ever reach SC2s strategic skill ceiling. As long as there are AIs that can micro and macro incomparably better than the best of pro players, that will never be reached. You remind me of those people who thought the four minute mile was the apex of human endeavour.
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