EPT
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.
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
.
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
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