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Coworker pointed this out to me today. Go ahead an weigh in if you have a SA forum account, but before I link I want to please make this request:
Lets act as cool-headed ambassadors and not as flaming faggots on this one? I think this guy just really doesn't "get it" and wants to; this is an opportunity to bring more people into the fold.
So here is the thread:
Something Awful forum thread: Explain to me why Starcraft still has a large, fanatic, fanbase
Here was my response:
Most of the posts have already pointed out that StarCraft is pretty close to perfectly balanced (at pro level, which is the only level that matters, all three races still trade top spots season to season). Some of the posts have emphasized that StarCraft actually has a pretty deep strategic element to it (which is why the landscape of strategies used in profession play is still shifting after 10 years).
No one has touched on one of the key reasons I feel StarCraft is still popular; why it is one of the only RTS games viable for competitive play. The high skill ceiling brought on by the enormous mechanical demands, aka "Rewarding High APM".
Limited selection size and lack of multiple base selection actually help build a higher skill ceiling due to the mechanical skill required to do good micro and macro with the user interface restrictions. The lack of complex waypointing lends to this as well.
Replies who mention 'click fest' are actually hitting the mark without realizing it.. This is a good thing. 'Click fest' is pretty much just a derogatory way to say that the game rewards a high APM (actions per minute) and this is an essential feature of any RTS.
Rewarding high APM is an essential feature on an RTS because RTS stands for Real Time Strategy game. Being real time it becomes impossible to separate out the speed at which you do things from how well you do: the faster the better, until you reach the mechanical ceiling. The mechanical ceiling is the speed at which additional actions are no longer necessary; the point where you are playing a mechanically perfect game.
In StarCraft that ceiling is beyond the realm of human hand speed. A bot is currently being developed which achieves more then 5000APM doing things like optimizing worker gather patterns and micro-dancing units individually. The fastest players in the world top out at about 500APM bursts; the average for progamers is in the 300APM range.
By having such a high mechanical ceiling StarCraft is able to combine the physical/mental demands of playing fast with the mental demands of knowing the strategy, timing, multi-tasking, etc.
I suggest that anyone who is interested in competitive play that emphasizes ONLY strategy should look into playing turn based games. I mean this without a hint a of disdain: RTS games, by their very nature either will reward speed as well as strategy or they will have low skill ceilings and fail to be viable as a competitive game.
There is a much larger community of people playing Go or Chess then there is people playing StarCraft. I think this is because it is more common for people to want to focus on strategy then speed. So this is great! And there are games for you if you fit this category!
Just understand that if an RTS fails to reward mechanical skills this will result in the skill ceiling being lower and the game being less viable for competitive play. I don't really have any problem with this as again, I think is a small subset of the game-playing population that cares about competitive play.
So for everyone who doesn't really care about competitive play there are ton of fantastic games for you: Supreme Commander, CnC3, Sins of a Solar Empire, etc. I have played these as well and in many ways they are more fun then StarCraft is.
But the reason StarCraft still is around with such a large strong community is because this community enjoys competitive play and StarCraft is able to provide the best platform for competitive RTS play that exists today.
 
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5000apm bot? Is it the one Kovarex posted on TL a while back?
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I would bring righteous TL fury (but nondickery) there if I could figure out how to post without paying.
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Oh man, that temple guy is so retarded it makes me cry, so I'm not gonna post, or else I'll probably end up flaming him.
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Did someone just claim that Flash is responsible for all the arbiters in PvT in that thread? Hahaha...
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On July 03 2008 06:09 B1nary wrote:
5000apm bot? Is it the one Kovarex posted on TL a while back?
Yea
On July 03 2008 06:34 EmeraldSparks wrote:
I would bring righteous TL fury (but nondickery) there if I could figure out how to post without paying.
You can't. SA forums are pay-only and they are ban-happy which incidentally is why the quality level of the forums are so high. Even heavily patrolled free forums with a narrow focus, like TL.net, have more trolls/drama/disruption/groupthink then SA.
Errr.. Sorry (steps off soapbox). 
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that was interesting [read:hilarious] to read through all those posts.
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ughh pay to post forums. wtffff
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United States12607 Posts
Brilliant post Goosey (the quoted one).
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Many things I didn't really notice about SC earlier began to poke out at me and annoy me when I started playing it again. I found siege tanks were not actually tanks in any sense of the word but were rather glass cannons. I was disappointed in the fact that there wasn't a system where certain units were largely ineffective against others. I mean there was, to a degree, because zealots can't bring down air units while marines could. But even so, anything that can shoot at something can kill it fast enough. With enough Zerglings or Hydras you could eventually wipe out a group of siege tanks. I wanted to do something like use siege tanks as actual tanks in the traditional sense of the word, but clearly SC doesn't work that way. I won't blame the game for that, it's just how it's made, but it still ended up bothering me, I felt cheated. Or perhaps I got too used to having a "Rock-Paper-Scissors" system where you needed specific units to make short work of other units.
Guy answered his own question right there. Because StarCraft isn't a stupid game of rock-paper-sissors, and is actually intriguing to play. Formula for a good game is "easy to learn, difficult to master" Which is exactly what SC is. Rock-paper-sissor style games follow the formulae "bitch to learn, low skill cap." SC is deeper than just knowing what unit counters what, but this guy doesn't think it's logical that lings own tanks, and I don't know why... Tanks will own infantry, which makes sense, but why should why own hyper fast claw dogs that tear into the metal of their machines? And why should any unit be invincible another just because it's a counter? I think the things he likes in games are lame, and it's obvious why he quit StarCraft. It wasn't the game for him, and that's fine, but it's easy to see why it's never died out.
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On July 03 2008 07:11 jwd241224 wrote:
Brilliant post Goosey (the quoted one).
Thanks I was kind of proud of it. I have been struggling to express why requiring APM is a good thing in RTS games without sounding snobbish for a while now.
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there is anything that can provide more fun than sc?
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Some guy said Age of Empires II dethroned Starcraft......holy shit.
I played AoEII before I played Starcraft, and I realized that it was absolutely horrible as an RTS game.
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I find most of the answers in the thread incredibly bad. But that in itself made it worth reading. I'm not saying I would be able to explain why starcraft is so good myself. The OP is obviously someone with only a casual experience with RTS, and from such a standpoint newer RTS games will seem better. They are probably more fun for him. Use of RTS terminology will not be understood because he has little experience with strategy and tactics involved to win a competitive game. Also making references to units in the game is useless. He doesn't know the same vulture that you know. He knows the attack moving vulture that dies to just about everything.
I think it would be better to point out what it is about the experience of playing Starcraft than to point out technical qualities about the game dynamics. For me, when I play Starcraft, I am constantly thinking and constantly active on so many levels. I am not just following a plan.
The activity of the community also contributes to me staying with the game. At any given time I can play a game at any given skill level because of the sheer amount of people playing. The devotion of the players also means that I can play the exact same people I am playing with now 6 months later, meaning I will probably get something social out of the experience as well.
Progaming is an added bonus.
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1.
Strategies and tactics change, but only slightly so (we're talking about slight variations of known builds. Every build has been tried, nothing is new. Not even Bisu's "revolutionary" PvZ build. He just played it better than Nal_rA for example who did the exact same build several years earlier already, and this was possible because Bisu is faster than rA).
Constantly changing maps also allow for slight variations in strategies. They're really small though.
One flaw of SC here is also that some unit combinations are universally strong against EVERYTHING the other race does. M&M&Vessels against Zerg for example. All Terran has to do is spam these, regardless of what the Zerg is doing. And then micro them somewhat carefully. It's hard to do because of the game speed, only progamers will be able to play it well enough, but it's far from strategically deep. Just because you (and me, and almost everyone else) suck in comparison to the Korean pros, doesn't mean it's a "deep" game. It just means we're too slow.
PvT is also simple, main factor is your macro/speed. The mirrors are even simpler.
PvZ is the only not-so-shallow matchup, and this is directly related to the big amount of viable units. In no other matchup you can use so many different units to great effect. The other two matchups are like playing chess with several figures missing because they're suddenly worthless. This obviously reduces the strategical depth.
2.
Speed should be rewarded, but you have to be reasonable. You can't just include silly stuff just to force the player to have more APM.
Imagine that you couldn't select more than 1 unit at a time. It would probably annoy you. Some people think the same about the inability to select more than 1 building at a time, yet in that case you defend it because it forces the player to be faster.
The ideal solution would be a UI that doesn't feel annoying but still a fast enough gameplay which requires you to have lots of APM to play well. Then, a 400 APM player would still have advantages over a 200 APM player but the game wouldn't be considered a clickfest because there's nothing annoying about it.
There's also the problem that SC values almost all tasks equally. Microing your army in the heat of a battle is just as important as switching to your base, clicking on the new worker, and rightclicking on the mineral patch. Some people would love to see more emphasis on the battles.
3.
For many other RTS games we don't really know where the skill ceiling is and how skilled or fast one has to become to master it. A little SC history here:
From 1998-2000 or so, the highest APM value for SC was around 200, and Boxer and YellOw thought they were the best, that no one could play the game better than they do.
Now we have players who are probably twice as good/fast.
The game survived for 10 years so we've seen player skill and speed evolve constantly. This could happen with other games too, but they're typically far less popular than Blizzard games and thus die relatively fast. Or the developers ruin it over time (DoW for example now has 3 expansions and 9 races. Totally silly. The game started off quite promising but now it's only good for fun, not for competitive play).
The "skill ceiling" is almost impossible to predict for a game. It has to be played for several YEARS until you might be able to tell if the game is too shallow or if players can still improve. Again I have to mention popularity because it is SO damn important: if almost no one plays the game, there will be almost no competition. The best player might be a goddamn newb but the others are even worse, and there won't ever appear someone who is able to beat the best player. So this "best" player remains the best player, and soon the game dies because of low popularity, and almost everyone not involved with the game will think the game was shallow and sucked and deserved death.
I think this simple response is most fitting btw:
"It has become the standard. For better or worst, it is the standard and will always be popular."
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Hey, it's DapperDan! Anyone remember him from that PCGamer article?
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Oh, yeah, everyone named Dan is a PCGamer editor.
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It doesn't matter what they think...
It matters that SC kicks butt and their silly turn based game can be at best advanced war 2.
So let them whine that they have wood hands, why bother argueing w/ the weaksause, they won't understand.
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Yes, because all people named Dan put Dapper in front of all their online handles.
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Rofl, the comments on that thread , people who don't know barely anything about starcraft except for what seems to be <2 weeks of game play are commenting on the over balance/strategy of the game
its like of of the threads on the sc2 forum; only theres no flaming whatsoever
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EPT
