Why do people HATE Brood War when they first join?

On December 17 2015 23:38 Cele wrote:


yeah it's a problem. I know it can be very frustrating if you're just looking for opponents of your skill range and you meet a couple of a lot better players in a row. I recommend looking for pratice partners here in the practice partner thread or ingame. But that doesnt help with laddering.

Some people look down upon it, but i actually don't think it's a bad idea to check the account on ICCup before playing. Some people use it to dodge and farm easy wins, but i think it makes sense for D ranks to sort some opponents out beforehand. But you shouldn't make a bad habit of it and start to only look for easy wins as it won't help you improve in the long run

On December 18 2015 00:03 BisuDagger wrote:
No one hates Brood War. Don't make up lies . Even Mike Morhaime was at VANT SL this morning!

On December 17 2015 23:32 Endymion wrote:
if you're joining a 2v2 and the home team is peruvian and it's a ladder map, and you have to download the map, you can be sure it's a hacked map

On December 18 2015 00:03 BisuDagger wrote:
No one hates Brood War. Don't make up lies . Even Mike Morhaime was at VANT SL this morning!

On December 18 2015 09:01 Mistakes wrote:


He made Kim Carrier cry? :o

On December 18 2015 09:05 lestye wrote:


Woah, he did it because of passion, Starcraft was the game that pushed his company into the big leagues.

And notice he bought EVERYONE in the arena pizza. That's genuine love and passion there.

On December 18 2015 00:27 WrathSCII wrote:


Not looking for easy win. Just looking for games that I have an actual chance of winning. Not playing the best you have or not will end up the same.

On December 18 2015 18:29 lestye wrote:


I don't think he's in a position where he's going to need to bandwagon onto anything. He's in town for business, so he checks out esports related events for the games his company made, while sharing some awesome pizza.

On December 18 2015 21:20 lastshadow wrote:
Can't say it's BroodWar as a whole but ICCup is a huge turn off. After 7years of not playing, I played around 100games on iccup in the past three weeks, and almost every player I met just goes for some huge all-in pre 8minutes if they aren't Korean, so it's pretty depressing to play on there. I was going to try to fund/host some old-school player tournament again (there was something like on here a while back iirc) for a few grand and stream/etc it, but the feeling on that server really turned me off ~_~

On December 18 2015 19:03 ProMeTheus112 wrote:
I think people who come to BW for the first time should first play some 3v3 and make BW friends ^_^ that's how I started!
getting straight into ICCup 1v1 is pretty brutal... even for a SC2 player unless you are Diamond/Master. It's too hard. Or, pick your opponents / go to D-. Or endure and get better but yeah you might not enjoy it too much at first. Well should keep in mind "D" is not really "D". Think of D as "Diamond" haha ; seriously it's just unpredictable the skill level of someone you play at D if you don't pick
personally I think it's a real problem for newcomers or people who are actually D level on Iccup, isn't it? it's the uncomfortable skill level to be at

I remember my friend who had quite a bit of BW experience, about 1000 games of 1v1 (on bnet + Iccup), he only reached D+ and that's not for lack of trying to get C-

you just need a lot of experience and most importantly skill to play at D/D+ level on ICCup.

Lol did I play you yesterday...? --> EleGant[AoV]

On December 18 2015 18:28 ImbaTosS wrote:

Lol did I play you yesterday...? --> EleGant[AoV]

The plain fact is, to get to a higher rank, whether that's C or A, you have to play against lower ranks first. That is literally all your rank means- that you beat all the players below said rank often enough to be promoted. I do resent being moaned at an insulted by angry D-rankers when I jump on to enjoy a game of BW after being totally inactive for months, and they expect me to already have a C+ and respond by insulting me and ranting about my noobhunting ways. It's not my problem, or fault.

Honestly, you also forget that we've all been there. We have all been D, being bashed upon and having a hard time. And even now when we get to our rank it will happen to us still, to varying degrees of course. I know that when I get to C+, there are plenty of B- and above guys who will play me and probably win. And rightly so! How on earth else are they meant to get a game of Starcraft, and get to their rank??

Take it easy, and watch the replay.

On December 19 2015 01:59 c3rberUs wrote:
Maybe it's because people lose in manner that's shocking to them. Guys new to rts might go like "okay i have my 4th marine out, time to make another supply depot *11 mutas appear and massacre him* wtf, how did he do that?". Other rts guys might go like, "okay the guide says zealots are good vs tanks *runs into tank line and dies* but it was supposed to work!?"

On December 17 2015 23:22 WrathSCII wrote:
As a D class, when I make a game 1v1 with the name "D", I expect someone who is "D" level to join not a fucking smurf C hiding behind shady 1000/1000. So how about the likes of you stop smurfing our games?

On December 17 2015 23:22 WrathSCII wrote:
As a D class, when I make a game 1v1 with the name "D", I expect someone who is "D" level to join not a fucking smurf C hiding behind shady 1000/1000. So how about the likes of you stop smurfing our games?

On December 19 2015 07:57 arb wrote:

everyones gotta rank up you know?
no need to whine about it because youre bad

On December 19 2015 09:30 trulojucreathrma.com wrote:
SC2 people naturally hate BW.

On December 19 2015 09:56 Naracs_Duc wrote:
Ladder worries are not an SC2 issue, its a player base issue. Does not matter if its a quick match button or iccup.

On December 19 2015 10:03 trulojucreathrma.com wrote:


Don't agree. In SC2, 98% of the people win and lose exactly 50% of their games. We can't have 51% of the people winning 51% of their games. Let alone 90% winning 70% of their games.

Iccup is something completely different.

On December 19 2015 10:09 11cc wrote:

So where are these stats of yours coming from? Surely not from your ass, right?

On December 19 2015 10:26 Djzapz wrote:

The SC2 matchmaking system will match you to opponents of your strength. If you win more than 50%, you'll get to play opponents who are better than you until you lose. Essentially, the system makes it so unless you're a top tier player, you'll always have a win rate that'll be around 50%.

On December 19 2015 10:09 11cc wrote:

So where are these stats of yours coming from? Surely not from your ass, right?

On December 19 2015 10:43 trulojucreathrma.com wrote:
How can 51% of the people win 51% of their games?

Point being, this is the thing game devs struggle with. The solution may be to trick people into believing they are playing humans, inflating their winrate. Just have 2 out of 10 people secretly be AI. People talk so little, a game dev can get away with it.
That way, you can get all your customers to be winners. They will all be a lot more satisfied. More cash for your shareholders, surely.


Anyway, this was mostly rhetoric. Surely, most people have a number of games player that doesn't allow for neat stats. If you play only 3 games, no way in hell you can lose 50% of them.

On December 19 2015 11:01 11cc wrote:
You actually believe that blizzard is making people play AI on sc2 ladder? I must be mistaken.

On December 19 2015 11:01 11cc wrote:
That is totally possible btw, unlike 1+1=3

You actually believe that blizzard is making people play AI on sc2 ladder? I must be mistaken.

On December 19 2015 10:32 11cc wrote:

But isn't that how iccup works as well, except it isn't automated?

On December 19 2015 14:24 ProMeTheus112 wrote:
Sometimes I think it would be better if seasons didn't reset so often or not at all
My friend who plays GO (not CS:GO... the game of GO) told me about their ladder system that doesn't reset. The result is that it reflects skill a lot better than ours!

I can see the appeal of having seasonal goals but resetting ladder, for me this has made me stop to want to get higher ranks. I could try to get B to prove my skill is B, but it takes too many games in 3 months for me to achieve Especially since I almost never keep playing daily for 3 months in a row and like to try stuff.

Then there is the frustration for people at D skill level, and some amount of "waste of time" for people who want to play against higher skilled players but have to grind a lot before that...

Yes I think in the end it would be better to have a simple ELO ladder system that doesn't reset.

On December 19 2015 12:02 trulojucreathrma.com wrote:


How can you say that with a straight face?

Obviously, any game is a zero sum game. For every winner you need a loser.
Now that I think about it, I should have realized that a statement like this isn't intuitive to everyone. There's quite some inferior intellects out there, if you are a top intellect yourself.
Only when I tried to write it down I actually realized it is not an easy problem to explain or to offer a proof. Maybe someone will come along that has more patience and can explain it to you.

On December 19 2015 17:38 Thieving Magpie wrote:


Ladder resets were requested by the player base in SC2.

Blizzard did not have resets in SC2 ladder, then players whined so they added resets. Most of the bad stuff in SC2 come from players who think they know better than developers. Its really funny.

On December 19 2015 17:52 ProMeTheus112 wrote:

to be fair I think there has been a lot of bad things in SC2 even before people complain about it or suggest other possibly bad things^^ also there may not have been the most competent picks out of the players suggestions by whoever makes the calls at blizzard to make the game good/better^^ it's their job to do that, and I don't think everyone makes bad suggestions from what I read far from that. Company being focused on financial profit damages its ability to make good choices in creating or modifying games, so it may have gone the "superficially please everyone" road for too long.

On December 21 2015 10:50 KalWarkov wrote:
good foreigners dont even play BW anymore, and yet, ppl are such elitists with their ranks

On December 20 2015 06:56 B-royal wrote:
Really? I think it's just a matter of listening to the wrong people then. There's been plenty of EXCELLENT advice regarding Sc2 such as Lalush' depth of micro or some of the economy analysis threads..

On December 19 2015 12:54 B-royal wrote:
Have 10 people:

9 out of 10 are mediocre players and win 50% against each other. One player (X) is just a mess and loses 100% of his games.

Now you have 9 players (>51% of the population) with higher than 51 win percentage, which can get higher and higher the more they play mister X.


edit: Purely from intuition, this does seem very much possible. Maybe someone can bring some math in here and prove it haha.

On December 21 2015 10:50 KalWarkov wrote:
good foreigners dont even play BW anymore, and yet, ppl are such elitists with their ranks

On December 21 2015 17:51 CaucasianAsian wrote:
no one, and say that item G is better than anyone can hope for, and that it's in development while you release item F

On December 21 2015 13:15 Thieving Magpie wrote:


Let me put it this way.

80% of your paying customers asks for item A
10% asks for item B
5% asks for item C
30 random guys in a Broodwar website asks for item D
Lalush asks for item E

Which one would the CEO listen to?

On December 21 2015 17:51 CaucasianAsian wrote:
no one, and say that item G is better than anyone can hope for, and that it's in development while you release item F

On December 21 2015 17:57 Simberto wrote:


As someone studying to become a math teacher, this is basically 90% of a proof.

If a statement is "x is impossible/always true", the only thing you need to disprove this statement is a counterexample. Because if it isn't true in one single case, it is obviously not always true.

You could make the statement more exact, and formulate your example out a bit more, but basically you have done what needs to be done to disprove that ridiculous statement.

On December 21 2015 13:15 Thieving Magpie wrote:


Let me put it this way.

80% of your paying customers asks for item A
10% asks for item B
5% asks for item C
30 random guys in a Broodwar website asks for item D
Lalush asks for item E

Which one would the CEO listen to?

On December 22 2015 01:20 Miragee wrote:


If you want to go by that logic why aren't companies asking the consumers exactly how the game should look like? Because there are certainly more consumers than there are programmers/CEOs/designers that have a different opinion on what it's best for the game. Sounds like what's best for the game always depends on what the majority of people thinks is best and not what people with superior knowledge think is best.

If you ask me, he should probably listen to that one person, assuming what he says makes sense. The large majority that cries for something else without deeper understanding what is really wrong will later on realise that they got what the wanted in a better way.

That being said, this depends of what they try to implement. If they want to implement new skins to sell for $$$ the CEO should surely listen to the majority.

On December 22 2015 02:20 Naracs_Duc wrote:


Here's how the Product cycle works in broad strokes.

The PM goes to R&D and sees what they have
The PM goes to Marketing and sees what is popular
The PM goes to finance and sees what is affordable

A concept is birthed from those stats.

That concept is then tested both internally and externally--changes get made based on both internal and external testing. Product gets sent to Design to look pretty, gets sent back to Product to be given a name, brand, etc..

Product is released.

THEN Customer Suggestions gets put into play.

EXAMPLE:

Engineer: "I have sharp pointy thing"
Marketing: "People like stabbing things with pointy things"
Finance: "We can make only this many pointy things"
Test: "We stabbed many things with pointy thing, pointy thing did not break"
Design: "Here's the pointy thing in red"
Company: "Here's our Red Pointy Thing!"
Customer Opinions: "Can we have the pointy thing in blue?"
Expert Opinion: "I wish it had a handle..."
Company: "New Blue Pointy Thing!"

On December 22 2015 02:28 iloveav wrote:



Not really:

the life cycle of a product is far longer and in most cases it has many diverging paths.

I studied marketing and markets for 3 months and I could probably write around 4-5 pages about a products life cycle (but who wants to do that much work, right?) and im quite sure that those who studied for years can do even a better job.

In reality, the hardest part of any product is to identify a need in the market and its spread.

On December 21 2015 19:03 Sero wrote:
There's no American players like that, and I can only think of Trutacz reaching B. I haven't heard of any foreigner reaching A on Fish. Overall play is better now, but not the top tier of players.

On December 22 2015 09:14 Cele wrote:


i think all of these would be better and Idra the least impressive of them, since he is basically overrated

On December 22 2015 09:14 Cele wrote:


i think all of these would be better and Idra the least impressive of them, since he is basically overrated

On December 22 2015 06:39 L_Master wrote:


I dunno, I think there might be a couple exceptions, namely IdrA, that could be better than guys like Trutacz and Sziky are today. Possible Nony /Mondragon could be at the level of Sziky/Trutacz.

Everyone else from 2009 would certainly get wrecked by the top guys now.

On December 22 2015 23:20 Pulimuli wrote:


Pretty sure Idra,Nony,Draco(in his prime),White-Ra,Ret,F91 were better than they are now

Also Lx and PJ

On December whatever, Naracs_Duc wrote:If you find out the public wants red cars, but your science team had spent the last 2 years developing a blue plane--then you are going to sell blue fucking planes because that's what you have.

On December 22 2015 09:14 Cele wrote:


i think all of these would be better and Idra the least impressive of them, since he is basically overrated

On December 22 2015 09:14 Cele wrote:


i think all of these would be better and Idra the least impressive of them, since he is basically overrated

On December 18 2015 19:03 ProMeTheus112 wrote:
I think people who come to BW for the first time should first play some 3v3 and make BW friends ^_^ that's how I started!
getting straight into ICCup 1v1 is pretty brutal... even for a SC2 player unless you are Diamond/Master. It's too hard. Or, pick your opponents / go to D-. Or endure and get better but yeah you might not enjoy it too much at first. Well should keep in mind "D" is not really "D". Think of D as "Diamond" haha ; seriously it's just unpredictable the skill level of someone you play at D if you don't pick
personally I think it's a real problem for newcomers or people who are actually D level on Iccup, isn't it? it's the uncomfortable skill level to be at

I remember my friend who had quite a bit of BW experience, about 1000 games of 1v1 (on bnet + Iccup), he only reached D+ and that's not for lack of trying to get C-

you just need a lot of experience and most importantly skill to play at D/D+ level on ICCup.

On December 24 2015 16:32 Thaniri wrote:
Saying fangay is me being playful because of inconsistent moderation on this forum, nothing to do with this thread really. It's also amusing because you continue to attack me as a person and not what I'm saying, so I like the term here.

WYSISWYG is not just a term for programming, but also for game design. People should understand what is happening immediately after having seen it. Back to the football analogy, when Messi runs through 4 opponents and keeps running at near top speed while having had two attempted tackles and then score a goal is incredible to see. When I played broodwar, I get bothered by trying to micro my marines vs fast zealot + dragoon pressure against my 1 rax expand because it's difficult to tell when I can cancel a zealots attack animation, when the zealots actual damage is actually applied, how long it takes my marine to move given whether or not he has just stopped moving or shooting, and he probably hates that his zealots refuse to chase my marines where he clicks them to go, and his dragoons do a weird diagonal pathing even for straight walks.
There is a tabletop game called Warhammer that stressed WYISWYG. If you saw a particular unit on a field with whatever weapon glued onto it, you could be able to predict how that unit will interact with other pieces on the board.

Now, saying that I don't appreciate the skill/timing/moves of BW is something I'll agree with. I'll go ahead and say that you probably don't either. Games and sports follow an exponential graph of skill vs player population. The top players are orders of magnitudes better than the players even one "rank" below them, and those players are in turn immensely better than those an additional "rank" below them. Unless you're playing at A+ you know nothing of the game. And if you're playing at A+ you've just gotten to the point where you realize just how bad you are at the game. This extends to all games and sports. Regardless of how interesting or not they are.

On December 24 2015 17:06 Thaniri wrote:
arb, Why don't you go take up gladiator fighting if you want a challenge? It's probably harder than bw.

Dodging my complaints doesn't make them go away.

edit: Unless I looked it up, I wouldn't know that Jaedong hotkeyed an overlord to his muta control group in order to stack them. I only need a pair of eyes to see a sportsman pull off an impressive feat. This is what I mean by intuition. The only video game genre that I think achieves this is FPS.

On December 24 2015 17:19 Thaniri wrote:
Why are you so bad at arguing?

On December 24 2015 18:27 Jealous wrote:

Maybe I'm misunderstanding the concept, but how does this not fall under "what you see is what you get?" If we can bring it back to BW with a relevant example, Zerg players thought for a while that going 1 base 1 Hatch play for like 8 minutes was a solid strategy. Nowadays we know that is absolutely retarded unless you are cheesing hard, but we are still using the same Hatchery and the same tech that we had back then*, but we realized that Zerg can get away with making a second Hatchery pretty damn early in the game most of the time unless THEY aren't being cheesed. This is just a development in skill and understanding of the tools given to us by the game, tools that have been unchanged, just like in your Civ example. What you see is what you get: those 1 Hatch Lurkers didn't get any weaker, they just became strategically obsolete as people figured out how to counter them. They did this with tools that were also in the game back when 1 Hatch Lurkers worked, just people weren't good enough to use the tools they had access to. That takes time, as you said.


* Let's ignore the minor balance changes from patches.

To expand on this point, there will always be a certain demographic that is attracted to unnecessarily difficult feats, but because esports as a whole is entirely uninspiring visually unless the people watching also have played the game

On December 24 2015 15:11 Thaniri wrote:


I'm masters SC2 and I don't think BW is that great. If I was 14 I might have fallen in love with the game just as much as I loved SC2 when I was a teen. I have beaten some D/D+ players without ever watching a full BW vod and using liquipedia for build orders that were likely 5 years out of date.

Here are my two gripes with BW:

• Lack of WYSIWYG. This is objectively bad game design regardless of medium, be it videogames, tabletop, or some other game. BW, by being the first RTS of its kind, has poor attack animations, unintuitive movement patterns, and seems to like to lose my building hotkeys. edit: It's also difficult to tell apart high and low ground at first/no-one tells you about high ground advantage.
  
• Hard to learn, hard to master, and little reward outside of the intrinsic reward of being really good at something. It isn't hard to kick a football, it's hard to be Messi. The easy to learn, hard to master concept is something BW misses. Again though, if I was 14 I'd probably love it because I spent 8 hours a day playing games at that age.
  
  • To expand on this point, there will always be a certain demographic that is attracted to unnecessarily difficult feats, but because esports as a whole is entirely uninspiring visually unless the people watching also have played the game, BW will lack that thrill of being able to pull off some difficult play and have people notice. The type of person who played broodwar religiously would have also played battletoads had bw not existed for the sake of mastering it in private. Perhaps the only esports that get the intuition right are FPS games like quake and cs because they are war simulations.
    
  
  

On December 24 2015 15:11 Thaniri wrote:
Perhaps the only esports that get the intuition right are FPS games like quake and cs because they are war simulations.

On December 24 2015 16:20 Probemicro wrote:
why are you so obsessed with the need for WYSIWYG? this is gaming not programming.
besides like i said game developers have pretty much make games these days as easy and accessible as can be, and the gamers lap them up happily. You will never see games of the likes of Brood War being successful on the market again in this sort of industry, thats nice isn't it?

about intricacies, the main reason why people are so wowed by BW is because of the insane mechanical skill required to pull off feats at the highest level. I think anyone that actually played BW extensively for a decent amount of time (not someone who just copied 2fact all-in from liquipedia and just use that all the way to C, which i think you did) will be able to appreciate the kind of skill/timing/moves, at every point of the game, needed to excel at the highest level. Players will adopt different strategies for different maps, there are feats of micro/macro that not any random amateur can also do as well. in sc2 theres hardly any difference between reaper micro of a diamond/master and that of a pro. in BW there are outliers that simply outclasses even their professional peers, Flash/JD/Bisu are basically the equivalent of messi/CR7 of BW.

All i see in sc2 is just accumulate blob, blobs fight each other, large blob wins, person with large blob therefore wins.
game is mechanically easier so skill ceiling is lower, one day a Korean wins code S and be top of the world, next month he crashes out of code A like a noob, no real legends to speak of because game is too volatile. anyone can win anyone on a good day.
I actually find it ok to play with, just that game is boring as hell to watch. In korea it is said that only gamblers and people who support the old Kespa pros still watch sc2

also labelling yourself as sc2 "fangay" (is that another new childish meme) helps no-one either.

On December 24 2015 16:32 Thaniri wrote:
When I played broodwar, I get bothered by trying to micro my marines vs fast zealot + dragoon pressure against my 1 rax expand because it's difficult to tell when I can cancel a zealots attack animation, when the zealots actual damage is actually applied, how long it takes my marine to move given whether or not he has just stopped moving or shooting, and he probably hates that his zealots refuse to chase my marines where he clicks them to go, and his dragoons do a weird diagonal pathing even for straight walks.

On December 24 2015 17:44 Thaniri wrote:
I still think though that the average viewer can't even remotely comprehend what a progamer is doing. As such, the argument of appreciating higher skill diminishes until it's essentially zero.

On December 24 2015 17:44 Thaniri wrote:Here are my two gripes with BW:

Lack of WYSIWYG. This is objectively bad game design regardless of medium, be it videogames, tabletop, or some other game. BW, by being the first RTS of its kind, has poor attack animations, unintuitive movement patterns, and seems to like to lose my building hotkeys. edit: It's also difficult to tell apart high and low ground at first/no-one tells you about high ground advantage.

On December 24 2015 17:44 Thaniri wrote:
Hard to learn, hard to master, and little reward outside of the intrinsic reward of being really good at something. It isn't hard to kick a football, it's hard to be Messi. The easy to learn, hard to master concept is something BW misses. Again though, if I was 14 I'd probably love it because I spent 8 hours a day playing games at that age.

On December 24 2015 17:44 Thaniri wrote:
but because esports as a whole is entirely uninspiring visually unless the people watching also have played the game, BW will lack that thrill of being able to pull off some difficult play and have people notice.

On December 25 2015 12:13 ggsimida wrote:
all i see is a sc2 person crying because of bad micro
Then giving very funny excuses and insult game, and not learn to play proper.
no need to argue with people with such bad mental, they never learn ^ ^

On December 26 2015 01:00 Thieving Magpie wrote:


How often you win does not determine whether the game is fun or not. Guy did not like BW, gave his reasons. You don't get to tell him that he actually should like BW. How people feel about something is not something decided by other people.

On December 26 2015 02:10 hugitout wrote:
I loved bw since day 1.

On December 26 2015 12:55 BigFan wrote:
Silly thread imo. My philosophy is if you don't like a game, don't play it. If you feel that you'll like it with more time, give it more time then quit afterwards if you still don't like it. It's simple really. If you are passionate about something, you'll improve a lot more than the other guy who's only forcing himself to play it.

I enjoyed BW from day one and the game has never felt it was a chore. I mostly played FMP games after trying several ladder games back in 2000 and losing them all and never had fun problems or hated the game. Even nowadays after losing a really close TvZ due to a macro or micro mistake, I place the blame squarely on myself for it because I forgot to macro, I chose to engage that way, I made the wrong decision, etc...

On December 26 2015 10:24 ggsimida wrote:


of course BW is not for every person
but who do i believe, a person that ragequit after fail simple marine micro, make excuse and blame system with wrong reasons
or many people in the past who played show their love and praise for this game?

i see people above say earlier, new generation gamer prefer easy game, thus i no blame him. They are used to easy games

instead make funny reason excuses he can post rep, ask for help on marine micro and 1rax expand, but he choose not to and would rather whine and cry. i believe hard work and persist is key to success not just in game but in real life, not whine and cry. quit he rather give funny excuses and blame system which has work proper for 15 years than leave silently. This not only insult the game but also players who have work hard and try improve in this game they like.

if u supprt his kind of mental, gl to you in life too you need it

On December 26 2015 14:51 Thieving Magpie wrote:


Once again. Data points should be taken individually.

Person A liking the game does not counteract person B disliking the game.

It's not about believing one or the other, but being accepting on both opinions being valid. In the end, games are not our lives. If you treat games like you treat your life then most likely you're treating the game too seriously.

On December 27 2015 03:50 EatingBomber wrote:
In addition, I do agree that the attack animations are bad; I play video games with sound off, so I can't really see whether my units were attacking or being attacked. Zealots, when attacking, simply do a jiggle with their arms, Marines don't distinctly hold up their rifle and start shooting, and there is no flash from the guns, and I really can't tell what Medics are doing, and it doesn't help when all my Marines are dead and they just run around in circles -_-. Also, some aspects are just sheer bullshit; when I expend so much effort sneaking 2 shuttles to do 2 Reaver drops, amongst other things, I expect to get at a minimum 2 SCVs, and not have the scarab get stuck between the minerals WTF

I played against a D level Protoss in SC2:BW as Terran. I even made Turrets. It doesn't matter though, because even if he loses the Shuttle and drops only 1 Reaver, it's worth it, because in 2 shots he will kill at least 10 SCVs, and if I run them away it might actually make it worse because they stack even more when they are running.

On December 27 2015 06:02 ProMeTheus112 wrote:
so people do disagree about the scarab being a little broken!
personally, if it was up to me I would make a change like this to the scarab :
let it go through units,
as soon as it collides with a ennemy unit, explode
smaller AoE

because even if you can manipulate it and overcome its defects etc, there is still quite a bit of luck involved in how big of a hit you get / whether you get a hit at all, and I personally don't like that. Also I think when it gets really good hits it is sometimes too strong. just my opinion though, still like them reavers!

On December 27 2015 06:02 ProMeTheus112 wrote:
so people do disagree about the scarab being a little broken!
personally, if it was up to me I would make a change like this to the scarab :
let it go through units and move towards center of target,
as soon as it collides with any ennemy unit, explode
slightly smaller AoE

because even if you can manipulate it and overcome its defects etc, there is still quite a bit of luck involved in how big of a hit you get / whether you get a hit at all, and I personally don't like that. Also I think when it gets really good hits it is sometimes too strong. just my opinion though, still like them reavers!

so people do disagree about the scarab being a little broken!
personally, if it was up to me I would make a change like this to the scarab :
let it go through units and move towards center of target,
as soon as it collides with any ennemy unit, explode
slightly smaller AoE

On December 27 2015 06:02 ProMeTheus112 wrote:
so people do disagree about the scarab being a little broken!
personally, if it was up to me I would make a change like this to the scarab :
let it go through units and move towards center of target,
as soon as it collides with any ennemy unit, explode
slightly smaller AoE

because even if you can manipulate it and overcome its defects etc, there is still quite a bit of luck involved in how big of a hit you get / whether you get a hit at all, and I personally don't like that. Also I think when it gets really good hits it is sometimes too strong. just my opinion though, still like them reavers!

On December 27 2015 17:32 Wray92 wrote:

When in doubt, don't change anything. This is exactly what was so good about BW, and what's caused problems in SC2. Blizzard wouldn't come out to nerf flavor-of-the-month strategies, even if they looked unbeatable (like the Bisu build and Fantasy's mech TvZ did for a while. There were others, but they were all before I started watching). There were patches, but they were very infrequent and usually very minor.

The game was what it was, and if there was some ridiculous strategy that looked imbalanced, it was the players' job to figure it out.

On December 27 2015 18:31 Scarbo wrote:


This man speaks the truth. Nowadays developers are too eager to patch (because community crying). Anyone who played LoL knows how the music goes: pros start abusing a champ = champ gets nerfed = pros find the next champ to abuse. No depth can develop because the game changes so fast people are still figuring things out. Altough that's not why SC2 is bad, it sure is a bad trend in e-sports.

On December 28 2015 05:15 nanaoei wrote:
i am primarily a solo ladder player in sc:bw, though i haven't picked it up in the last year or more.
when i hear people saying that they dislike the game (which i haven't, personally) i think about the idea and consequently think about the current influx of players.

perhaps the current playerbase is older.
expectations created from word of mouth and recommendations to play whether they're direct or indirect.
they're small but important committments of figuring out how to make things work. resolution, fixes, connecting to servers, finding games (like the OP mentions).
i would have worries that it's difficult to find chill players to talk and play with. people who are relatable (skill or otherwise) and truthfully won't find you overbearing to play/chat with.
actually, i'm projecting some of my own concerns despite having played the game for many many years and being on iccup practice teams, ladder fiending on fish, and all that fine jazz.

if i were a newbie, it'd be very daunting and i haven't even stepped into the game yet at this point.

but for people to absolutely detest the game. like within your gut you hate it. burn it with fire, w/e.
i don't understand.

but my advice is to find a mentor who you like listening to and become an open vessel for advice, because there's a lot you can gain (enjoyment incl.) from playing a storied game like sc:bw.
i remember going into all sorts of freestyle presentations deciding to share all things starcraft with a class that probably had no idea that it was the title to a game. it was embarassing but fulfilling. it was like a product i believed in, even if it was all a little naive.
in my opinion (although i don't do it currently) you need to find people to laugh and play with. you know, people who -get- it. this is last generation's game and it shows sometimes, but there are a lot of hidden charms--especially for people who love clutch stuff and min/maxing.

On December 28 2015 13:56 BLinD-RawR wrote:


to be fair, the reaver/scarabs are easily one of the most complex unit/mechanic in the game compared to a lot of other units which are pretty straight forward to understand how they work.

On December 19 2015 12:02 trulojucreathrma.com wrote:


How can you say that with a straight face?

Obviously, any game is a zero sum game. For every winner you need a loser.
Now that I think about it, I should have realized that a statement like this isn't intuitive to everyone. There's quite some inferior intellects out there, if you are a top intellect yourself.
Only when I tried to write it down I actually realized it is not an easy problem to explain or to offer a proof. Maybe someone will come along that has more patience and can explain it to you.

On December 27 2015 19:39 ProMeTheus112 wrote:

I actually strongly/completely agree with this. I just happen to have this fantasy in my head, or this question, because it seems to be "impossible" to make a better game than BW, can BW itself be improved ? What are its flaws or limitations ? With more than a decade of play since the last patch, can we not think of how to make the game even deeper and more diverse with a bunch of changes ? I think they are interesting questions, even if the answers can be dangerous and bad. I believe that, if you give BW a bunch of changes mainly to some numbers, it should be possible to make more different strategies viable and to see units/upgrades we almost never see in game being used.

On December 29 2015 13:15 Jealous wrote:
^ Hard to call it a "successor" to Brood War when it is so drastically different. I can't envision that stuff in Brood War at all. As you said, it'd just be a completely different game, no need to tie it with Brood War in any way besides genre. Some of the stuff you proposed sounds interesting, and some I'd never ever want to see in an RTS. That just goes to show how hard it is to make a game like Brood War.

On December 29 2015 05:22 Jealous wrote:

Telling people they have to read a forum in order to get better at a game is no different than getting a teacher/coach/training partner in real life. No one picks up a soccer ball and instantly understands team dynamics, how to apply curve to the ball, or how to do a rainbow. No one picks up a football and understands the hundreds of possible team plays, how to throw or kick the football properly. No one goes to the first day of class ready to take the final, they have to read a book, listen to lectures, etc. I could go on but you get the idea.

The reason SC1 and BW are good is because the dice fell in such a manner that near-perfect racial balance was achieved between non-homogenous races. Compare this to WC2 where the two races are practically identical but everyone knows Orcs are stronger than Humans because of Bloodlust. This unique equilibrium, combined with the mechanical demands of macro and micro that have an impossibly high ceiling, and with the burgeoning Korean tech and economic scene in the 90's/00's led this game to become highly competitive and therefore thoroughly explored and understood. Because of this, the amount of information gathered and the reasons behind the perfection and viability of certain builds can only be understood through research. No one plays the campaign and comes up with Forge Fast Expand vs. Zerg. However, this is not a matter of transparency. All of the elements of pro play can be explained in a clear way that utilizes knowledge you get in the campaign, or can pull from single player play. A Forge under a Gateway makes a tight wall (this is the only place where I will admit there is a requirement for trial-and-error, because without that or research you will not know that buildings leave a certain amount of space on either side despite being forced into a box grid). Cannons are good against Zerglings, but only when they aren't exposed. Corsairs do AoE damage and are good against air units, and they move fast. When Zealots get +1, they can kill Zerglings who have 0 carapace in 1 hit less. That's simple math. All of these things are intuitive, or at least can be learned from basic play or logic. Combining them all into one cohesive build that has been perfected through thousands of hours of play and explained in a single A4 sheet is no different than hiring a tutor to explain to you how to solve a calculus problem. You know what math is, but you need someone to explain to you the higher echelons of it. Because let's face it, people aren't complaining about not being able to complete the campaign (although I get the impression that many of the people in this thread haven't even touched it, because they think that Marines don't have a shooting animation or whatever). They are complaining about not being able to compete with people who have some of this knowledge, from being taught by VODs, replays, and forums. A trained athlete will beat your average chump in his sport of choice the majority of the time.

I don't have to go through paragraphs to explain how a Scarab works. I go through paragraphs of hypothetical situations to illustrate how to use Scarabs effectively, why this is effective, and why they were doing it wrong in the past. I can explain how Scarabs work in one sentence:

Reavers fire Scarabs which home in on their ground-based enemy if they are readily accessible, dealing AoE damage on impact or expiring if they do not connect with their target after x time.

This seems like common sense to me. Seems like something you'd learn in the campaign. However, some people don't understand why shooting a Scarab at a wall might make the Scarab not work, or why a Scarab has a hard time hitting a moving target, despite all of these things being logical and potentially understood through playing the campaign, as you said. Show me a game where shooting a homing missile at a wall still nets you a kill, and I'll show you a bad/unrealistic game.

The reason I proffer defense is because these people make complaints about aspects of the game as if they are game-breaking, as if they are the reason these people quit playing this game. What's more hilarious is that they make these complaints on the very forum that they can search and read to get answers to their qualms. Instead of spending 2 minutes writing a post about how Scarabs are stupid, they could spend those 2 minutes searching and realize that in fact it is them as a player that is lacking, not the Scarab. I see it as a cop-out, an excuse to give up when the going gets tough. If people meet a wall, a problem, and say "fuck that, that's bullshit," and quit without putting any effort into investigating the issue or improving their understanding/play, those people aren't credible sources on what is or what is not in this game. Hundreds of thousands of people have overcome Scarab gripes, because they had a different attitude about it. I'm not here to give pats on the backs of quitters and tell them that they are right, that it is bullshit, that it is unfair. Because it isn't.



This is the truth. People are too used to having their diapers changed throughout a videogame nowadays. For example:

+ Show Spoiler +

It tells you what buttons to press, in a fighting game. Granted this is a "cutscene" of sorts, but look at how COOL it is. Just pressing 3-4 buttons every 15 seconds makes it look like you've accomplished insanely complex combinations when really this guy doesn't even 4 star every exchange (and he died earlier in the video, btw; still gets 2.3 million views on YouTube and feels like a champ). In order to win the final exchange all he had to do was spam B faster than the computer's ~100 BPM. Congratulations, you beat Sasuke on hard mode.

This is similar to certain FPS games where dogs jump on your neck and the game tells you to spam E or whatever in order to get it off. You're being baby-sat through the experience. They don't want anyone to die not knowing why they died or how to not die. The dog is more or less irrelevant as a result, maybe does 5% damage when you don't shoot it in time.

This concept is further extrapolated to SC2 where units move fluidly and unrealistically over terrain and ergonomically in large balls. This is part of the reason why people have such a hard time moving from SC2 to BW; they have gotten pampered with unrealistically good AI/army movement, and now they expect it in other games as well.

Obviously, casual gaming is the biggest criminal here. Having oversaturated the gaming market with easy, low-risk low-skill high-reward games, it has diluted people's willingness to struggle, suffer, and study a game. My mom said once, "Why does it have to be so hard? Games are supposed to be fun," about a different game. This is the mentality.

Basically, people are casuals and tried a game that is not intended for casual players, got crushed and then complain about it on forums without knowing hardly anything about the game. That's why I defend.



Kicking a ball is intuitive. But if you've only kicked a ball and have had no outside influences, as you seem to desire, and decided to join your local soccer club, you will look like a fool. You have to know how to pass, leading pass, cross, not be off-sides, not pass off-sides, to stay in your area and not just chase the ball but at the same time know when to move up and back, when to pick a man, so on and so forth. Nothing at a competitive level is intuitive, until you train it to be so through practice and experience. Why should competitive StarCraft be any different?

If they want to play 1v1 computer, they probably have the luxury of placing their Reaver wherever they goddamn well please. If they want to play 1v1 ICCup, they need to realize they have to learn something about the game before trying to be competitive at it, not complain on forums that it's bugged or whatever. Imagine if you joined a high school team and had that mentality. Let's assume that due to the circumstances you are allowed to be on the field (small school, let's say). You play against the enemy team, but for 10 minutes all you do is chase the ball down, because all you've ever done is play with yourself and kick the ball so that is what you will do. Coach takes you off and tells you you're playing like an idiot. "But I don't understand, I'm supposed to kick the ball! This is stupid, I quit," vs. "Coach, what can I do to get better?"

It's the mentality.

EDIT: The goal of golf, Nascar, and sprinting might be intuitive, but its acquisition is not. Have you ever tried to do a line drive in golf? You're not Happy Gilmore, you won't get it on your first or tenth or hundredth try; that number might decrease if someone teaches you proper form. Nascar? Tell me when constantly switching gears, pumping the brakes, navigating a track with a dozen other cars, knowing when to take a pitstop, and a multitude of other factors become intuitive. Surely it's not on your first practice lap. Sprints are close, but have you ever used a starting block? Granted I was young when I ran track, but jumping off the blocks was not the easiest thing in the world to grasp; it felt clumsy and forced. Then you get into breathing patterns, knee height, stride length vs. speed. As I said, nothing at a competitive level is intuitive until you've learned it and practiced it.

On December 30 2015 01:26 Simberto wrote:
+ Show Spoiler +

Ok, i guess in that case the main problem (for me) is that that concept simply does not appeal to me. I dislike the idea of artificial mechanical barriers, to me the ideal interface is one where i think about what i want to happen, and then it happens, making the whole thing about the quality of the decisions as opposed of my trained capability of not fucking up large amounts of different things at once. I hate being in a situation where i know what the correct response to a given situation is, but i can't make the game do it in time due to interface constraints.

This is also the first time if have heard of BW being talked about like that, usually the discussions are about the depth of strategy and so on, with the mechanics basically being something you need to deal with to reach that juicy core of strategy below it, as opposed to the main meat of the game being the mechanics and the struggle with a computer just reacting very weirdly to inputs so you have to learn many very specific things to do at once in an "inefficiency engine"

I still think that it is possible to have a game that is based on real time decision making and adapting your strategy to the changing situation without putting artifical APM wasters in the way of it to fuel your "inefficiency engine". To me, a lot of the BW style mechanics are something that is in the way of the fun of the game, which would be thinking about strategies, but apparently to you those (to me) annoying useless interface complexities are what you actually want.

On December 30 2015 02:08 2Pacalypse- wrote:

You throw the word "artificial" around like there's some other kind of "APM wasters". Everything is artificial; it's a scale that can be balanced based on what kind of a game you want. On one side you have turn-based games, which don't require any mechanical skill and on other side, you have something like Warcraft 2, which have a lot of mechanical demands (and yes, there are still people who play and enjoy Warcraft 2). Saying you prefer one kind of an "APM waster" (larva injection in SC2) over another (telling workers to mine minerals manually in BW) is pretty much meaningless. BW has a good balance between mechanical demands and "wanting things to happen, and then they happen", which millions of people have enjoyed and loved. It's obvious you prefer something that's leaning more towards the turn-based games and with less mechanical demands, but that is highly subjective matter and doesn't answer the question "which way is better?".

On December 30 2015 01:58 Thieving Magpie wrote:
Workers don't mine when they're made--why?
You can select many units, but only one building--why?
Etc...

Those aren't "bad" aspects of the game--but it's definitely a question I've had to answer and argue over when introducing the game to others.

Why is my unit stuck between pylons? "He only gets out on that side of the gateway, you should have put your pylons somewhere else"

What does creep do? "Nothing"
But it's everywhere. "I know, ignore it"

Etc...

People don't really ask these questions in SC2. Because a lot of what other games do, SC2 does as well. The questions in SC2 is "what unit does well against that? What should I make? Etc..."

Could SC2 be more user friendly? Yeah, it could be clash of clans. The point is, you don't have to defend BW's honor if people don't like it.

On December 30 2015 02:24 Miragee wrote:


I'm just cherry-picking here but not all your examples are true. Workers don't mine when they are made is true for every unit and pretty intuitive: No unit does anything without your command. It's as easy as that. Creep does let you build buildings as a zerg and prevents the enemy from building buildings so it does something. It even teaches you that in the campaign if I remember correctly.

Not arguing against anything you said, just correcting a few things.

On December 30 2015 02:08 2Pacalypse- wrote:

You throw the word "artificial" around like there's some other kind of "APM wasters". Everything is artificial; it's a scale that can be balanced based on what kind of a game you want. On one side you have turn-based games, which don't require any mechanical skill and on other side, you have something like Warcraft 2, which have a lot of mechanical demands (and yes, there are still people who play and enjoy Warcraft 2). Saying you prefer one kind of an "APM waster" (larva injection in SC2) over another (telling workers to mine minerals manually in BW) is pretty much meaningless. BW has a good balance between mechanical demands and "wanting things to happen, and then they happen", which millions of people have enjoyed and loved. It's obvious you prefer something that's leaning more towards the turn-based games and with less mechanical demands, but that is highly subjective matter and doesn't answer the question "which way is better?".

On December 30 2015 03:11 Simberto wrote:

I guess i might have a slight problem with the mislabelling here, because with such a focus on the mechanics BW according to your explanation BW is (for everyone but a few people at the very top) less of a "strategy" game and more of an "APM game", while most of the discussion is about strategy, and few people talk about the mechanical parts of the game. I still wonder how many people really enjoy the APM part of the game, and how many just see it as something they have to deal with to get to the "strategy" part.

On December 30 2015 03:56 Simberto wrote:
@ 2pacalypse

But what would the advice be that you give to beginners? Probably something along the lines of "build pylons, build probes, keep your money low", not "think about your strategy, figure out what your opponent is doing, then think of a good way to exploit it".

I am not talking about the people at the top, but about people beginning to play the game. And there is a large hurdle of mechanics you have to step over before thinking about strategy becomes a worthwile investment. Thus, for a beginner, the game is very much only about mechanics, and not really about strategy for a very long while. And even then it will for a very long time only be learning other peoples strategies, not coming up with your own, simply because you still don't understand the mechanics well enough to be able to do that reasonably well.

So BW is at least from my perspective an APM game, until you become very good at the APM part, at which point i have no idea but it appears to have some large part of strategy involved, but also still has APM as a very relevant part of the game.

On December 30 2015 03:56 Simberto wrote:
@ 2pacalypse

But what would the advice be that you give to beginners? Probably something along the lines of "build pylons, build probes, keep your money low", not "think about your strategy, figure out what your opponent is doing, then think of a good way to exploit it".

I am not talking about the people at the top, but about people beginning to play the game. And there is a large hurdle of mechanics you have to step over before thinking about strategy becomes a worthwile investment. Thus, for a beginner, the game is very much only about mechanics, and not really about strategy for a very long while. And even then it will for a very long time only be learning other peoples strategies, not coming up with your own, simply because you still don't understand the mechanics well enough to be able to do that reasonably well.

So BW is at least from my perspective an APM game, until you become very good at the APM part, at which point i have no idea but it appears to have some large part of strategy involved, but also still has APM as a very relevant part of the game.