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Croatia9535 Posts
On December 31 2015 02:41 EngrishTeacher wrote:Show nested quote +On December 31 2015 02:15 vOdToasT wrote:
For something to be truly popular, it has to be accessible, easy to learn, and hard to master
The first two are correct. The last one is not. World Of WarCraft and The Sims are not hard to master. They were very popular. There have been many The Sims games, so I'm not even going to a talk about it since it's series of games. For WoW, it definitely was "hard" to master in the sense that there was a very strong incentive to keep playing to improve yourself in the game. Sure it was mindless grinding, but it was very hard to acquire the best gear, to be the best of the mundane. Even the insanely addictive RPG leveling mechanic eventually wears one out. I was also unclear with what I meant by truly popular, I should have definitely included the staying power of something in its definition. My point is the 2 outlier examples you provided aren't even really outliers since they still follow the general rule of accessible/easy to learn/hard to master. Apply the rule to pretty much everything else, and you'll find almost perfect correlation. Be it popular sports such as soccer or classical music, you name it and the rule fits well. The hard to master part is necessary to keep participants involved in the long-term, or they will inevitably move onto other things.
Pretty much everything is hard to master, when you bring competition into it.
Then your point is left with "accessible" and "easy to learn", which is kind of an useless metric since there are tons of things that are accessible and easy to learn, and yet they haven't become popular. So it's very easy to conclude that there are about 100 other factors that play a part in deciding if something can become truly popular or not.
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On December 31 2015 02:41 EngrishTeacher wrote:Show nested quote +On December 31 2015 02:15 vOdToasT wrote:
For something to be truly popular, it has to be accessible, easy to learn, and hard to master
The first two are correct. The last one is not. World Of WarCraft and The Sims are not hard to master. They were very popular. There have been many The Sims games, so I'm not even going to a talk about it since it's series of games. For WoW, it definitely was "hard" to master in the sense that there was a very strong incentive to keep playing to improve yourself in the game. Sure it was mindless grinding, but it was very hard to acquire the best gear, to be the best of the mundane. Even the insanely addictive RPG leveling mechanic eventually wears one out.
It wasn't hard to master. It was time consuming to master. Not even that, really, it was time consuming to get the most powerful avatar. But the player did not increase in power, he stayed the same.
Then your point is left with "accessible" and "easy to learn", which is kind of an useless metric since there are tons of things that are accessible and easy to learn, and yet they haven't become popular. So it's very easy to conclude that there are about 100 other factors that play a part in deciding if something can become truly popular or not.
They don't guarantee popularity, but they are prerequisites for it.
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On December 31 2015 01:33 EngrishTeacher wrote:Show nested quote +On December 31 2015 01:17 Chef wrote:On December 31 2015 00:52 SolaR- wrote:On December 31 2015 00:42 EngrishTeacher wrote:
Are we still on apm/strategy or talking about the merits of different games/genres? How is any of that relevant to the discussion at hand?
I guess my response was buried, but really you guys are over analyzing everything and going off on tangents. It always boils down to the difficult and steep learning curve of BW, where "normal" people, who are in the vast majority, derive none or very little pleasure from playing such a difficult and old game. BW could have more strategic depth by a factor of 100, and people still wouldn't play due to the absurd initial investment in time and practice.
For something to be truly popular, it has to be accessible, easy to learn, and hard to master. BW is moderately accessible (pay for b.net or mess around with other servers, which requires some tinkering), hard to learn AND master. So naturally people aren't going to suddenly set aside hours everyday and grind out build orders vs. AI. That's 95% of the discussion, I'll repeat again the fact that it DOESN'T MATTER how good or bad BW actually is, if it's neither easy to pick up nor accessible, it will receive little to no exposure from the public, and newcomers will be put off by the game no matter how much you attempt to convince them otherwise.
Dota is a lesser version of soccer, and SC2 is akin to gymnastics. Someone prove me wrong in that there's actually much more to the discussion or how it would be relevant to what OP was asking. pay for bnet since when? Why are people even involving themselves in this argument when they do not have even have a clue about the game. jesus.. I'm sure he means you pay for the valid CD key to be allowed to log into bnet. Third party servers don't always require valid CD key (I'm genuinely not sure how they would check). Moderately accessible is an overstatement though. None of the stuff about 'how hard BW is' really matters, even to so called casuals. They just need other casuals to play with, and boom it's a pretty fun game. It's all the tinkering necessary to get it running even with a legitimate copy, that is basically the only problem. There's no necessity at all to learn build orders or practice against the AI. You just need to get appropriately matched to players of similar strength. The update / remake will eventually happen and make that possible, and you'll probably see a moderate resurgence of interest in BW. Good point, accessibility even precedes how easy/hard it is to get into something. However, I'd argue that to a good portion of PC gamers, BW is not as inaccessible as you think. A legit copy will often run with no problems even on 64 bit windows 7/8, although many experience the color glitch in menus which isn't game breaking anyway. Furthermore, the computer literacy required to set up Fish/Iccup does prevent quite a few people from playing, but in the end is undeniably quite basic. These people who can't or won't even spend a few minutes googling a guide probably wouldn't stick around with the game for long anyway. More significantly, it's the outdated graphics and mechanics that are probably more off putting. Combine this factor with the overwhelming praise and elitism that inevitably comes with the existing fans of the game, all of this probably fosters an intimidating and disappointing environment for newcomers.
The answer to any tech question or how to do x with computer is a google search and 20 minutes of reading away. But still people are hired to answer such questions, and are asked these questions even by people's whose ability to do their job depends on the software they are using.
A google search is too much; browsing weird websites and guides that may be many years old is not the first thing that comes to anyone's mind. Installing third party software for a game and community you know barely anything about is an unsafe practice.
Many people cannot get the aspect ratio correct regardless of OS (because of the way their monitor works). It's been years since I got it working on my win7, but as I recall I had to configure many properties in the executable to get it working. That's way too much to ask of most people. Even famous players like Boxer are computer illiterate; not knowing how to do this kind of thing does not mean not being able to have fun with StarCraft or be good.
If you wanna play with friends in the above situation, what happens when 3 out of 6 encounter problems and give up? Or your friends use Mac, or Linux? Have you read what it takes to get SC running on OSX, it's ridiculous. Everyone who has a Mac is cut off.
I really don't think it's the graphics and mechanics that are off putting. Games of that generation have their own aesthetic, and sprite art has never gone out of fashion. The interface is super smooth and responsive, which is something you don't always get even with modern games.
I'm also pretty sure the iccup launcher and etc have never worked for Mac users, though I could be wrong. I think their response has always been 'get a PC.' When the whole community is on these third party servers and their launchers, it makes normal B.net kind of useless. Even foreign community and Korean community being split on different servers is kind of bad for the game. And you got on Bnet and half the features are broken; no ladder, two fields in the profile are disabled, creating games that people can join requires you to go into your router (and the error message other users get is not going to inform that they need to do that, and you as the creator just sit there wondering why no one wants to join your game). Like holy moly it's a mess, and that's all before you get banned for not having the map already downloaded, because for some reason in BW it takes 3 minutes to download a 10 kb (or whatever sub 1mb it actually is) file from another player.
I am a huge nerd and I would give up after like 10 minutes of that if I had never played BW before, or only remembered it from playing it a few times 10 years ago. I kinda give up even now because I don't like booting up my old win pc to just to play BW, and I don't necessarily always want to have games with people on iccup. It is a humongous wall. Of the people who go to the trouble to climb it, even they are going to be discouraged when they can't find anyone their level to play with, or anyone who wants to be social and actually play more than one game / talk to you.
Or you could play a new game that just works and still has new players coming in that you can enjoy playing with. Hard choice lol.
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On December 31 2015 03:58 vOdToasT wrote:Show nested quote +On December 31 2015 02:41 EngrishTeacher wrote:On December 31 2015 02:15 vOdToasT wrote:
For something to be truly popular, it has to be accessible, easy to learn, and hard to master
The first two are correct. The last one is not. World Of WarCraft and The Sims are not hard to master. They were very popular. There have been many The Sims games, so I'm not even going to a talk about it since it's series of games. For WoW, it definitely was "hard" to master in the sense that there was a very strong incentive to keep playing to improve yourself in the game. Sure it was mindless grinding, but it was very hard to acquire the best gear, to be the best of the mundane. Even the insanely addictive RPG leveling mechanic eventually wears one out. It wasn't hard to master. It was time consuming to master. Not even that, really, it was time consuming to get the most powerful avatar. But the player did not increase in power, he stayed the same. Show nested quote +Then your point is left with "accessible" and "easy to learn", which is kind of an useless metric since there are tons of things that are accessible and easy to learn, and yet they haven't become popular. So it's very easy to conclude that there are about 100 other factors that play a part in deciding if something can become truly popular or not. They don't guarantee popularity, but they are prerequisites for it.
People who claim WoW wasn't hard to master have never been involved in anything complicated in WoW. Sure, the pure mechanical skill of controlling your character isn't hard. A trained monkey could do that in most cases.
What is hard is the organisation and social part. Try getting 40 competent people of a working class setup to be online at the correct time, for multiple hours at at time, have an emergency plan when three of them don't show up, while still keeping all of them motivated, including those that are only on emergency spots. Set up a complex routine where all 40 people know what they should do, know how to react and salvage when one of the other people inevitable fucks up something incredibly simple, how to deal with people getting pissed off when someone repeatedly fucks up (this requires some amazing social engineering). Then manage to set this up in such a robust way, find a satisfactory way to handle loot distribution that minimizes drama and maximises the efffectiveness of the raid (spoiler: such a thing doesn't exist), then manage to keep the whole thing afloat when suddenly 5 important members of the raid don't talk to each other anymore because they figured out that they all slept with the same woman.
That shit isn't easy. Achieving anything high end in WoW requires incredible management skills from at least one, usually multiple persons. Sure, some of the people are just there for the ride, but someone someone is doing something really hard to get all that stuff working.
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On December 31 2015 05:41 Simberto wrote:Show nested quote +On December 31 2015 03:58 vOdToasT wrote:On December 31 2015 02:41 EngrishTeacher wrote:On December 31 2015 02:15 vOdToasT wrote:
For something to be truly popular, it has to be accessible, easy to learn, and hard to master
The first two are correct. The last one is not. World Of WarCraft and The Sims are not hard to master. They were very popular. There have been many The Sims games, so I'm not even going to a talk about it since it's series of games. For WoW, it definitely was "hard" to master in the sense that there was a very strong incentive to keep playing to improve yourself in the game. Sure it was mindless grinding, but it was very hard to acquire the best gear, to be the best of the mundane. Even the insanely addictive RPG leveling mechanic eventually wears one out. It wasn't hard to master. It was time consuming to master. Not even that, really, it was time consuming to get the most powerful avatar. But the player did not increase in power, he stayed the same. Then your point is left with "accessible" and "easy to learn", which is kind of an useless metric since there are tons of things that are accessible and easy to learn, and yet they haven't become popular. So it's very easy to conclude that there are about 100 other factors that play a part in deciding if something can become truly popular or not. They don't guarantee popularity, but they are prerequisites for it. People who claim WoW wasn't hard to master have never been involved in anything complicated in WoW. Sure, the pure mechanical skill of controlling your character isn't hard. A trained monkey could do that in most cases. What is hard is the organisation and social part. Try getting 40 competent people of a working class setup to be online at the correct time, for multiple hours at at time, have an emergency plan when three of them don't show up, while still keeping all of them motivated, including those that are only on emergency spots. Set up a complex routine where all 40 people know what they should do, know how to react and salvage when one of the other people inevitable fucks up something incredibly simple, how to deal with people getting pissed off when someone repeatedly fucks up (this requires some amazing social engineering). Then manage to set this up in such a robust way, find a satisfactory way to handle loot distribution that minimizes drama and maximises the efffectiveness of the raid (spoiler: such a thing doesn't exist), then manage to keep the whole thing afloat when suddenly 5 important members of the raid don't talk to each other anymore because they figured out that they all slept with the same woman. That shit isn't easy. Achieving anything high end in WoW requires incredible management skills from at least one, usually multiple persons. Sure, some of the people are just there for the ride, but someone someone is doing something really hard to get all that stuff working.
People pay for wow BECAUSE the mechanics were easy enough for anyone to master but still had a skill ceiling that separated top ranked players and lower ranked players.
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On December 31 2015 01:21 EngrishTeacher wrote:Show nested quote +On December 31 2015 00:52 SolaR- wrote:On December 31 2015 00:42 EngrishTeacher wrote:
Are we still on apm/strategy or talking about the merits of different games/genres? How is any of that relevant to the discussion at hand?
I guess my response was buried, but really you guys are over analyzing everything and going off on tangents. It always boils down to the difficult and steep learning curve of BW, where "normal" people, who are in the vast majority, derive none or very little pleasure from playing such a difficult and old game. BW could have more strategic depth by a factor of 100, and people still wouldn't play due to the absurd initial investment in time and practice.
For something to be truly popular, it has to be accessible, easy to learn, and hard to master. BW is moderately accessible (pay for b.net or mess around with other servers, which requires some tinkering), hard to learn AND master. So naturally people aren't going to suddenly set aside hours everyday and grind out build orders vs. AI. That's 95% of the discussion, I'll repeat again the fact that it DOESN'T MATTER how good or bad BW actually is, if it's neither easy to pick up nor accessible, it will receive little to no exposure from the public, and newcomers will be put off by the game no matter how much you attempt to convince them otherwise.
Dota is a lesser version of soccer, and SC2 is akin to gymnastics. Someone prove me wrong in that there's actually much more to the discussion or how it would be relevant to what OP was asking. pay for bnet since when? Why are people even involving themselves in this argument when they do not have even have a clue about the game. jesus.. BW elitism is probably a pretty big factor too. It's a pretty powerful and blinding feeling/attitude that wards off casuals faster than bear mace. FYI, I've been with BW since I was 13 or so, so over 10 years of experience with it. I was there for all its UMS and fastest maps glory, watched pro games religiously and later on peaked at C+/C on iccup with toss. Also, yes, you still pay for access to bnet for BW, since... release. What a shit post on your part, throwing such a specific and wrongly interpreted strawman at me, ignoring all my other points, so typical when one becomes defensive due to the presentation of an unpleasant truth. I don't blame you though, like I said, BW elitism is very good at clouding one's judgment and making one defensive, so thank you for proving my point.
lol all of your points are wrong. You don't pay for battle.net. You pay for the game with a valid cd key. Sorry it's not a free game. Brood war is not a hard game to learn, it is in fact very easy. It's just that the there is not a larger player pool any more since so many people quit. The people that have stayed in the active community(i.e. iccup) are above average in skill and understanding of the game, so the few newcomers have difficultly catching up. I think this would be true of any old game. Also, yes it is very hard for newcomers coming straight to iccup, but they could fair much easier playing on public servers for awhile. Iccup and fish represent the top 1% of skill. New players should start on east, and play money maps until they understand the basics of the game.
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For something to be truly popular, it has to be accessible, easy to learn, and hard to master
That's something important to keep in mind. You could theoretically make a more balanced, more strategic, more skillful, less bullshit, RTS on the planet, but at the end of the day if only 5 people play it, how competitive can it really be?
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I have several gamer friends. They love a wide variety of games online and offline.
When they try sc2, despite being the types of players who play in 4-6 hour stretches several sessions a week and at least 2-3 hours a night. They can't even get to 40-50 APM on SC2 usually hovering in the 20-30 range if they practice for a few days.
Majority if people would call them hard core gamers, people with no lives, the opposite of casual. So when people on TL talk about how hard mechanics are and try to talk about how "APM doesn't matter" please understand that only a small percentage of hardcore gamers can even play Starcraft (either version) let alone expect the actual "casual market" to be able to keep up with the mechanics of Starcraft.
And when those hardcore players get told to stop being casual noobs when every other game they are the ones being told to stop being so hardcore--it becomes an obvious community issue.
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They haven't practiced and played enough! 
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On December 31 2015 12:43 J-dawg wrote:They haven't practiced and played enough!
I'm the guy usually asking "up for some BW comp stomps?" Followed by "SC2 comp stomps is much easier?" And then we eventually play either heroes of the storm, LoL, or decide to just meet up somewhere and play board games because no one else wants to take the time to struggle with the mechanics of the game.
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Japan11286 Posts
Interesting to hear that. I've had some friends try BW who play other games hardcore too. They get to about the 90 APM range despite playing with no mouse (we did it on laptops lol) with the slowest guys having around 40.
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On December 31 2015 17:35 c3rberUs wrote:
Interesting to hear that. I've had some friends try BW who play other games hardcore too. They get to about the 90 APM range despite playing with no mouse (we did it on laptops lol) with the slowest guys having around 40.
Quick question--were they laddering when doing this?
My friends get much faster playing UMS games compared to ladder.
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EPT
