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Picking up the DH project

Blogs > SC2John
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EsportsJohn
Profile Blog Joined June 2012
United States4883 Posts
Last Edited: 2015-06-20 03:34:25
June 14 2015 17:53 GMT
#1
Update: the project was stolen from underneath me, and is now on an express route to seeing how many "No, we definitely don't want this model" responses they can get from Blizzard before they give up and discard the idea.

We also watched show matches, tried games ourselves, and we agree with the majority of you guys that it’s too similar to Heart of the Swarm. But we wanted to comment again on this because it’s still a topic discussed by some.
Just to reiterate once more, we’re not looking to make minor tweaks in this area. We’re looking for a big change that will make sure that players will spread out their expansions at a much faster rate than they do in Heart of the Swarm.
Currently, the resourcing model that we’re testing in the beta is doing a very good job of this.


Sorry guys, I really did want to work on a community model for us to experiment on and enjoy. As it is, DH still belongs to its originators, and they insist on using it in a war against Blizzard rather than a community experiment.

+ Show Spoiler +
So.

Many of you know about the Double Harvest push from TL that we started with this in-depth article. Basically, we pinpointed that the reason SC2 economy seems a little "off" is because workers pair on mineral nodes (2:1 worker to node ratio) and mine perfectly efficiently until ~19 workers on 8 nodes; as a result, a maximum of 24 nodes or three bases was more than enough to support a healthy economy. In comparison to BW and other games, workers don't quite pair on mineral nodes and "bounce around" more often after each mineral node has been taken, and naturally that means that more nodes were needed to mine from in order to get the most efficiency out of the workers. Our goal was to introduce slight inefficiencies to the SC2 economy to break the 2:1 ratio and pressure players to expand more often in order to unlock the full potential of their workers (even a ratio of 1.99:1 creates this effect). Also, in an attempt to keep the game as similar to HotS as possible, we created an income curve that would maintain the same income at 16 workers on one base (with the effect of creating a slightly higher income from workers 1-14). Ultimately, we wanted to create an economy that would pressure players into taking additional bases more often in a more positive way than starvation.

David Kim responded to our economy ideas with a veiled announcement of beta invites, and ultimately proved that he had little understanding of what we were trying to do. In an attempt to correct his misconception that having four bases gave DOUBLE the income of two bases in the DH mod on equal workers, Plexa gave an official reponse.

Moving forward, we decided to continue our work with DH by hosting a TL Open and making continued progress on the mod. Deeming that the DH10 (2x5) model gave slightly too much income, we instead settled on DH9 (3x3), which gave us more balanced results. Zeromus also talked on Lycan's The Late Game show about the mod and explained why we thought DH was worth trying in the LotV beta. After plenty of organization work, we got together the TL Open and had a pretty successful tournament. Bacon_Infinity and Lycan have also hosted several showmatches and tournaments using the DH mod in order to test the viability of such a model.

If you already know the history of the Double Harvesting mod, you can skip to this point

So after the TL Open, Plexa immediately wrote up an evaluation of the tournament to explain how the results met our goals and showed that we are heading in the right direction. This was on May 5th. However, due to the life events for our two main spokespersons (Plexa and Zeromus), they've simply been too busy to follow up on the DH evaluation. On top of that, the lackluster support we've gained from Blizzard as well as a few community members has really helped derail the movement.

However, being one who hates to let a good thing go to waste, I've decided to pick up the project with close coordination with BlackLillium for mod support. We're releasing the evaluation that Plexa wrote over a month ago to explain the ways that we think the mod is successful and facilitate more discussion. On top of this, we'd like to go ahead with perfecting what we have as well as experimenting with hybrid mods in order to explore more drastic changes. In particular, we want to try DH9 with as low as 1000 minerals per patch (8000 total per base compared to LotV's 9000) and a mixture of the half-patch model with DH mechanics (this will probably need to be tested on top of the LotV mod). If we find anything successful, we may even experiment with starting worker counts to see if there is any viability in starting with differing amounts of workers.

In short: I am picking up the DH project and continuing to work on it. Our goal is not to create some magical solution to SC2 or create an entirely different mod like OneGoal or Starbow. We simply just want to explore different economy options and see if we can produce a more positionally-based RTS experience that has lots of expanding and map-wide action. More is coming!

If you have any questions or complaints about the mod, I'd be happy to answer them for you .


****
StrategyAllyssa Grey <3<3
Grumbels
Profile Blog Joined May 2009
Netherlands7031 Posts
June 14 2015 18:47 GMT
#2
You really should just give up, Blizzard won't listen.

Anyway, I think it's difficult to show how DH can improve the game without creating an environment where it can excel. It's similar to suggestions to change the pathfinding, which would all backfire because most unit relationships would continue to behave similarly, while some would be outright broken; and then people would ask what the point is.

Also, what's the point of testing extreme changes like 1000 minerals per patch? I thought the entire idea of DH was not to create the best possible economy system, but to come up with the smallest possible change with the most potential to improve the existing economy, particularly in introducing harsher forms of diminishing returns on workers. If you're going to experiment wildly that might have theoretical interest, but isn't it the case that you're defeating the purpose of advocating for DH?
Well, now I tell you, I never seen good come o' goodness yet. Him as strikes first is my fancy; dead men don't bite; them's my views--amen, so be it.
OtherWorld
Profile Blog Joined October 2013
France17333 Posts
June 14 2015 19:59 GMT
#3
I really like that you're not letting DH die and that you'll try to make something out of it (although at this point the chances of Blizz incorporating it are probably below 1%), but why don't you consider DH8?
Used Sigs - New Sigs - Cheap Sigs - Buy the Best Cheap Sig near You at www.cheapsigforsale.com
EsportsJohn
Profile Blog Joined June 2012
United States4883 Posts
June 15 2015 02:00 GMT
#4
On June 15 2015 03:47 Grumbels wrote:
You really should just give up, Blizzard won't listen.

Anyway, I think it's difficult to show how DH can improve the game without creating an environment where it can excel. It's similar to suggestions to change the pathfinding, which would all backfire because most unit relationships would continue to behave similarly, while some would be outright broken; and then people would ask what the point is.

Also, what's the point of testing extreme changes like 1000 minerals per patch? I thought the entire idea of DH was not to create the best possible economy system, but to come up with the smallest possible change with the most potential to improve the existing economy, particularly in introducing harsher forms of diminishing returns on workers. If you're going to experiment wildly that might have theoretical interest, but isn't it the case that you're defeating the purpose of advocating for DH?


Well, tbh, the movement lost too much momentum in the month of inactivity to be of any real use in terms of specifically targeting a change for Blizzard to implement. And we've learned some lessons too. In my opinion, the primary reason that Blizzard isn't interested in DH is because it doesn't gel with their direction in LotV -- that is, moving away from big macro games with big armies clashing and more towards lots of small skirmishes around the map..."scrappy" play. The DH model in particular focuses on how to make mass expanding rewarding and obviously favors a higher economy type of play, so there really is no interest for Blizzard to go ahead and adopt it and deal with the balancing nightmare of slightly rebalancing everything.

And that's fine. I honestly still think that DH does nothing but improve the game in a positive way. There isn't a ton of data gathered so far, but all evidence points to DH providing for much more dynamic gameplay. For instance, worker counting is very important in DH; if your opponent cuts workers for an all-in, and you don't cut workers as well, it is much more difficult to defend than in HotS. It also provides a solid counter to turtle mech in terms of being able to expand and play aggressively at the same time (instead of just banking tons of gas and remaxing or just counter-turtling with more bases). The interaction of mobile vs immobile compositions also forces players who are taking longer to expand to harass more in order to stay even. And it works, it really does.

That said, we still want to create a better economy for the game, whatever Blizzard's intentions may be. Obviously people are underwhelmed by the "sameness" of the DH economy, particularly the first 10:00 which are largely unchanged, so we want to try to address that area of the game as well . In addition, I think trying out different ideas like FRB and half-patch in addition to the DH economy proves that it is still compatible with other ideas. (Though I said Blizzard is unlikely to adopt the DH model in any form, part of me still believes in proving that both models can coexist in a positive way). I think we're far from an idealized economy which improves SC2 positionally without changing the core gameplay as much as something like Starbow. As much as we believe that DH (and by correlation worker pairing) is the best place to start, we acknowledge that shaking things up via resource scarcity also brings something positive to the game, and the combination of the two could produce something even better.

The goal here is no longer to convince Blizzard to adopt the model outright. Instead, we feel a commitment to the community. Tired of playing a HotS turtlefest? Dislike the way LotV feels? Try something in between ^^.


On June 15 2015 04:59 OtherWorld wrote:
I really like that you're not letting DH die and that you'll try to make something out of it (although at this point the chances of Blizz incorporating it are probably below 1%), but why don't you consider DH8?


We have definitely considered DH8. The issue before was that we felt DH9 was more in line with getting Blizzard to adopt the model because at 16 workers per base, income was the same as HotS. DH8 on the other hand, falls a bit short, and would require significant rebalancing from Blizzard in order to fix the new mineral:gas ratios as well as the apparent slower economy. Obviously, Blizzard is now much less of a concern, but it's probably counterproductive to attempt to rebalance the game at this point when we have a model that already works. It also doesn't much fit our vision of creating a game state which closely resembles HotS.

It's definitely possible that the project may take a turn for DH8 at some point if we reason that it will produce something better. But at the moment, the focus is still on DH9.
StrategyAllyssa Grey <3<3
Captain Peabody
Profile Blog Joined May 2009
United States3099 Posts
June 16 2015 03:31 GMT
#5
I'm glad you're still continuing to work on this. I do think there's more work to be done "solving" the economy for SC2, and that it would benefit from more work and more testing. Once you do figure things out more, there's probably still some chance to get at least some of the stuff you figure out adopted by Blizzard before the end of LotV.

I do think that working more to try to get to what you feel confident is a great and functional version of the economy is worth the effort, and is probably is more beneficial at this point than just lobbying to get Blizzard to adopt what you have right now.

Onward!
Dies Irae venit. youtube.com/SnobbinsFilms
Korakys
Profile Blog Joined November 2014
New Zealand272 Posts
June 17 2015 08:02 GMT
#6
BlackLillium really should have been brought up to the helm from the start of when this thing grabbed the TL staffs attention.

I'd like you guys to push on and I'm hopeful that something will come from this eventually, even if it's not what we all want. Getting a response from David Kim was quite big and now I am fairly certain his team is merely clueless and not malevolent.
Swing away sOs, swing away.
EsportsJohn
Profile Blog Joined June 2012
United States4883 Posts
June 20 2015 03:34 GMT
#7
Update: the project was stolen from underneath me, and is now on an express route to seeing how many "No, we definitely don't want this model" responses they can get from Blizzard before they give up and discard the idea.

We also watched show matches, tried games ourselves, and we agree with the majority of you guys that it’s too similar to Heart of the Swarm. But we wanted to comment again on this because it’s still a topic discussed by some.
Just to reiterate once more, we’re not looking to make minor tweaks in this area. We’re looking for a big change that will make sure that players will spread out their expansions at a much faster rate than they do in Heart of the Swarm.
Currently, the resourcing model that we’re testing in the beta is doing a very good job of this.


Sorry guys, I really did want to work on a community model for us to experiment on and enjoy. As it is, DH still belongs to its originators, and they insist on using it in a war against Blizzard rather than a community experiment.
StrategyAllyssa Grey <3<3
ShambhalaWar
Profile Joined August 2013
United States930 Posts
June 20 2015 18:57 GMT
#8
Please keep up the work on this, I'm backing your 100% (at least on posts ).

I think the three base cap is more of an artifact of design, than a true intention of design by Blizzard. I don't think there is anyway Blizzard would say they intended for a three base cap, but maybe they did?

To me it feels like an artifact/flaw, unintended, whatever you want to call it result of design. Seems to me that they wanted to design a game with more expansion and this achieves that, so lets fix the artifact. LOTV eco doesn't do that, unless you add DH to it. I'm with you, add DH to LOTV eco.

I like the early higher worker count of LOTV, it makes games shorter, which I also like. I don't want to play a 60 min game.
Just add DH to LOTV eco and it would enhance it by leaps imo. Only one way to find out is to try.

I def don't see the point of experimenting with it in a low worker count at the start scenario, because blizzard clearly wants to include the high worker start in LOTV, and I am happy they do (because I like it). But lets not end up with another starbow, I don't want to, nor would I play a mod... I want to play this new economy with a good ladder and archon mode and tourneys as a core mechanic of the game.
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