rebinding hotkeys in broodwar - Page 4

I would argue that it does make sense to believe that making hotkeys customizable is a step away from a core value of BW mechanics. At lower levels it would probably not make any significant difference with regards to racial balance, but what I think most people are arguing about is the top tier levels of play.

Now we know how far mechanically progamers can go when it comes to multitasking,apm,etc. Now think of an analogy of BW being a musical score, where players have to hit the keys at the right times, so by letting people customize their own keys, that changes the musical score to what they are playing and could therefore play a much easier song to master than a much more complex due to the finger distance of the keys. I think that's what people that are against customizing hotkeys are getting at. When you are a progamer who is moving 350-400+ apm with fingers tapping their keyboards fast and furiously, you think that letting them compose their own key notes is not going to make a difference? I think it will. Progamers even look like they are playing the piano with their keyboard.

If in BW we could select unlimited amount of units, which race do you think that will benefit the most? Obviously Zerg, then terran, and then Protoss. There isn't a progamer that fully maximizes a zerg army bc of limited hotkeys and the physical limitations of that, so it isn't much of a leap to compare and say to redefine the physical limitations of even shorter distances between keys or positions even if it improves a split second faster for certain actions, could definitely influence the balance.

Also I can point out logically how redefining the hotkeys will affect balance, based on your own preferences. Here's a dialogue.

Why do you guys want to redefine the hotkeys to w/e custom you want?
-Your Answer: To make it easier on myself.

If it is easier to redefine the hotkeys does that not imply that it makes your tasks much easier and therefore affect balance? (Premise being apm affects balance) And if you are saying you want customizable hotkeys just because you are used to another hotkey, than you can just learn the proper hotkeys, saying you are used to one hotkey isn't a good argument anyways when it could potentially harm the balance of the game. The risk is not worth the reward in this scenario, risk being the balance, and the reward being your convenience of learning the game which isn't so hard to learn the old hotkeys.

-Your answer: Well everyone else can do it, so it's balanced!

Well just because all races can have unlimited unit selection doesn't mean each race benefits equally from that same standpoint, therefore redefining hotkeys for everyone to customize doesn't necessarily benefit all races equally, because some are meant to be more mechanically taxing otherwise that race would be more OP.

If blizzard wants to keep the spirit of keeping BW core values the same, they should not hamper with the hotkeys, because like my argument above I believe it can make an impact. Hotkeys I believe isn't such a big deal for new gamers but the reverse wouldn't be true. New gamers to BW can just learn, but to sacrifice possibly the balance of the game just to appease the new gamers is greedy of blizzard and short sighted imo. When you first learned of BW, I don't think anyone complained about any hotkeys, they just accepted the hotkeys and learned.

I agree with the notion that balance in BW was a great fluke so the hotkeys in question shouldn't necessarily be considered the most optimal for balance. I can accept this as a valid argument, because I too believe this game isn't necessarily the most balanced it could be, it is merely the closest racial balance we accept, so if you can come up with a theory that makes a certain new hotkeys that everyone must follow to balance the races even further than before than I'm open for that, but for now, let's not fix what isn't broken, it is nearly perfect in balance, so unless you have something better in mind and can prove it, let's keep it the way it is.

For those arguing that rehotkeys in SC2 didn't make a difference, I think it's a bad comparison to talk about SC2 rehotkeys with broodwar because sc2 is much less mechanically demanding with the MBS,etc.

Unless Blizzard gets a lot of heat for making hotkeys customizable, I believe we are going to get this change whether we like it or not because the majority of fans aren't complaining enough. So if it comes to pass, I predict Protoss will fall off the map slightly more than they are now. Protoss are the least mechanically inclined race, they are the race that is less apm spam with keyboards and more of precision spells like storm, stasis, positioning,etc. For this reason I believe Protoss will be more of a disadvantage because their skill ceiling is slightly lower.

You can even observe this in all the match ups. PvT is pretty even because both races have to have good positioning, and can't just mechanically spam their keyboard and win like zerg does. Now when it's ZvT, the roles are reversed and Terran is the one that can just mechanically spam and Zerg has to be more precise with their swarm, plague positioning, flanks,etc. ZvP you see protoss struggling because Zerg if they increase their apm ceiling a bit more, they can control more units a little better, they can overwhelm protoss, because protoss all they have is a big ball of units that can't really have much more return of investment of their apm time focused on their army vs a zerg army. You see zealots dying to lings more effectively, lings can be microed so much more than a zealot can ever hope to be microed. A ling's speed just increases their potential ceiling against zealots, bc of ling dps and microing away dmged lings with a fresh one in early game, and when it comes down to numbers, zealots have less in numbers so there is much less to micro and take adv of. In late game yes, lings become a pool of blood against zealot archon ht/reaver army. But I'd argue that is just inefficiency with the Zerg player, if they were microing their units to their max potential and tested their physical constraints/limits of how many zerg units they could control at a time, even if slightly to improve their speed and accuracy and flanking, or spreading out to dodge storms or splash dmg, zerg has more room to grow in a skill ceiling vs whereas protoss doesn't have that same opportunity of growth, all they can do is try to predict and position their units well.

Think of this way as well, if you see a zerg player succumbing to zealot pressure that kills drones when lings were there to defend, do you think that progamer thought "wow that protoss player just outplayed me and I literally couldn't do anything!" OR do you think he's saying to himself "WHY didn't I MICRO my LINGS and DRONES BETTER?" He instinctively knows that zerg has room to micro and deal with zealots unless he got caught by surprise by a strategy he didn't expect which shame on him he should have all the scouting he could want early game with ol, lings, and then later scourge,etc.

How does protoss lose almost every PvZ? They didn't position zealots to block ramp/choke point,etc. They didn't predict zerg's movements or strategy/drop or defend bases fast enough against cracklings. That's why again Protoss has to predict, anticipate, and position well, while zerg has the initiative almost all the time if the zerg isn't passive.