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I´m sorry Perscienter, but I simply don´t get what you want to tell us with your post.
Do you assume that there is only one possible state in which the game is balanced, and just to be clear with state I mean a specific combination of build times, dmg per sec, etc for every single unit? If that is your opinion, I simply don´t agree with it, because I believe that there are probably several states (each with different strategies of course) in which Starcraft 2 could be balanced. If this is indeed the case, then why not try to approach the state which is most beneficial to all and by "all" I mean players with all kinds of skill. Let me give you an example, you write:
Countering reapers isn't as hard as many people think. Spread the creep carefully. Fly your overlords to key-positions, so that your defence force can welcome the reapers. The queens have to be controlled very tightly, so that they don't run into their doom. You must have some practice and a good countering build order, though. Speed is obligatory but if the enemy accumulates considerable masses of reapers, only roaches will be able to fend them off. If done well, the threat will finally be fully neutralized by hydras, roach speed or mutas. In that case the game transitions into follow-ups and the Zerg might already have an advantage, because the Terran sunk tons of gas into reapers, which possess only a very low amount of hit-points.
There is simply no way, that a bronze, silver or gold player can pull that off. So they will auto-lose every time a terran player opens reapers. Oh and don´t tell me it takes some kind of incredible skill to control reapers, because it doesn´t if your opponent has low apm and has to spread his attention on building up an economy and defending against reapers. The high damage reapers do against buildings makes it even harder to play against a reaper opening, because it negates the most simple way for newbies to defend an early push, ie building defense structures like photon cannons or spine crawler.
So I agree with Blizzard making some small balance changes, that will make live easier for the huge amount of us low to medium skill players out there, while it probably won´t effect high level play that much. You yourself said in your post that The speed at which the style of play is transitioning into new ones, is huge. So why do you think that there is no way balance can be archieved with the changes in the first patch? If anything your post states, that no one, not even a professional starcraft 2 player, can judge at this moment, with the limited information we habe, whether the balance changes proposed by Blizzard will in fact screw up the balance of the game or not.
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On September 08 2010 02:01 gogogadgetflow wrote:
The OP is a little heavy on theory for some people I think. He's trying to advocate that even if the game needs balancing, it shouldn't come at the cost of interesting gameplay. Some units are meant to be "OP" (Spider Mines... and bw tanks, seriously nerf them plz)
This is the only thing worth discussing in this thread imo. The thing is, there should be "Oh shit" units. Frankly a perfect game would have only "oh shit" units. All units should feel overpowered inside a well designed game. Watering down the units (as someone mentioned the WC3 game changes) will only kill it faster.
The problem is actually in the current game, terran has a lot of "oh shit" units. Protoss has less, but they still have potential (dont like the range nerf on the void ray or the weak archons much, neither the fact that the dumb mothership is in the game instead of an arbiter and et-cetera ).
Zerg on the other hand, the only units that seem and feels OP are the Banelings, which are suicidal units hurting the Zerg and pushing him into more passivity.
Where is the Lurker which used to 1 shot an entire ball of Terran infantry? Where are the Defilers which ravaged Terran outposts? Where are the fearsome scourge one shooting drops filled with units? Where is muta micro?
Give the to Zerg (and to Protoss in some extent) the ability to pull "oh shit overpowered" moments and we'll all be fine with the way Terran is designed, because we all get our chance to shine.
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if you think this is too early for a balance patch, what qualifies as a late balance patch?
Reapers are extremely debatable. Their speed is something I don't really mind much but their ability to easily snipe the shit out of buildings is godlike. Super Godlike. They can murder zealot, lings w/o speed and marines (except en massed marines) with proper micro at least.
And there's also the problem where in TvZ, TvP (I don't know the terran mirror match) if the players were to go a bit ling heavy or zealot heavy and terran goes reaper, they can get punished pretty hard. Unless zerg does not have a queen (for some odd reason) or speedlings, he's fucked. If toss doesn't have cannons or stalkers, he's fucked. Even if you scout, your opening can kill you basically and just having the wrong opening of going a bit heavy on zealots instead of stalkers or cannons is being hard-countered. Or at least this is my thought.
And bunker reapers is a problem. personally in ZvT, reaper bunkers can deny zerg it's expo. Yes roaches is a good counter to reapers and bunkers but during that time, terran can pump out marauders.
I wouldn't count on waiting for someone to suddenly bring a crazy strategy to the table. by doing that, I'm putting my hopes on something groundbreaking that may or may not exist.
I do agree on map balance.
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On September 08 2010 00:30 VanGarde wrote:
The problem with ANY balance changes is that player balance, that is when the community balances the game by evolving the metagame, devising new strategies, finding new timings etc etc, is such a complex process.
Some timings are very very hard to find, and it could take a long time before they are discovered but when you change the game balance you erase all the work that has already been done because all timings change. If the balance of the game is constantly changing through blizzard meddling that will actually result in an inability for players to balance the game out since you can never get the really deep timings that you got in broodwar that were the result of a long long time of metagame evolution. Yep, but at the same time modern BW doesn't really balance its tech trees too well. In most matchups / maps, there are so specific plays already established that a large part of the game complexity is never used, except for bm and ownage demonstration. That extremity isn't something good about BW, and from the way Blizzard works on SC2 it shows that they would like to minimize this effect in SC2 as much as they can. This may sound preposterous right now, but I think if they keep working on that, closely with the best players in the world, they may eventually achieve a more balanced tech tree usage in SC2 than BW, which means more game variety, and hence more interesting gameplay. It's early to tell, of course, but since it's still a work in development, why not try to improve upon the previous version at least; that's what they try.
Also, the final multiplayer of SC2 will inevitably be different from how it looks in WoL, because no matter how small, or big, there will be some major enough changes around the next coming game expansions. New units etc. Even just the smallest stupidest new unit would change almost all timings in the game, except matchups that don't involve it, and based on how Blizzard treats the new units so far, they'll probably insist on making every new unit actually count. So, we better face it, none of the strats used today will be alive, with the same timings, in a couple of years. They are all temporary.
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You contradict yourself. When you talk about
Evolution in strategies and tactics
The speed at which the style of play is transitioning into new ones, is huge
and
A few units are already underused and don't serve a particular purpose in some match-ups
With the evolution of strategies and tactics how do you know that some units in their current state do not serve a purpose in a MU? They might, ppl might simply not have discovered their use yet.
why do you think that your perception of the balance issue is more correct then blizzards who have a lot more statistics at their disposal? You also hardly bring any arguments for why blizzards changes are unwarranted or why your suggested changes are.
Not saying I do not agree with you on some points. Just that I think your arguments are a bit flawed
I also think that a change that is much more interesting for the game to handle the issues in balance we have is to introduce a new unit for Z. Gives Z more choices which we want. Can give us a unit that is as OP as the tank or similar. I'd prefer this over a mix of bland units. If this be lurker or scourge or something all new I do not care. Give Z something more interesting to work with that can change the balance of the game a bit.
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On September 08 2010 03:31 okrane wrote:Show nested quote +On September 08 2010 02:01 gogogadgetflow wrote:
The OP is a little heavy on theory for some people I think. He's trying to advocate that even if the game needs balancing, it shouldn't come at the cost of interesting gameplay. Some units are meant to be "OP" (Spider Mines... and bw tanks, seriously nerf them plz)
This is the only thing worth discussing in this thread imo. The thing is, there should be "Oh shit" units. Frankly a perfect game would have only "oh shit" units. All units should feel overpowered inside a well designed game. Watering down the units (as someone mentioned the WC3 game changes) will only kill it faster. The problem is actually in the current game, terran has a lot of "oh shit" units. Protoss has less, but they still have potential (dont like the range nerf on the void ray or the weak archons much, neither the fact that the dumb mothership is in the game instead of an arbiter and et-cetera ). Zerg on the other hand, the only units that seem and feels OP are the Banelings, which are suicidal units hurting the Zerg and pushing him into more passivity. Where is the Lurker which used to 1 shot an entire ball of Terran infantry? Where are the Defilers which ravaged Terran outposts? Where are the fearsome scourge one shooting drops filled with units? Where is muta micro? Give the to Zerg (and to Protoss in some extent) the ability to pull "oh shit overpowered" moments and we'll all be fine with the way Terran is designed, because we all get our chance to shine.
Indeed. This is usually what makes Blizzard games fun to play and fun to watch. Somebody pulls some clutch move out of their ass at the last second and swings the game around.
Protoss get Force Field, Psi Storm (+Khaydarin Amulet) and Vortex
Zerg get Muta harass, Burrowed Ultralisks, Nydus Worms and Banelings.
Terrans get ... you name it. Cloaked Banshee harass, Hellion drops, M&M drops, Nukes, bombardment from Tanks on high-ground, Thors getting repaired, EMP, Stimmed blobs of death, PDD, Yamato Cannoning essential anti-air units, COMSAT...what am I forgetting?
Terran are very, very solid defensively and don't have to worry about these game-flipping moments quite so much. You can't surprise drop a Terran with a Sensor Tower up. You can't obliterate his army or expansion with DTs anywhere close to as easily as you can against a Zerg or Protoss by quickly sniping their only field-detection in the area, thanks to COMSAT and EMP.
I think that's why it always feels safer and more relaxed when I play Terran. There's really nothing that blind-sides you when you know what you're doing.
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So I can't agree with you more. I see new tactics from players everyday. If it were say, all reapers all the time every game on every map, and perhaps the zerg literally couldn't win/suffered too much damage after playing near flawlessly, then perhaps a change would be in order. Just feels like if they nerf the Powerful strategy of the week, they're going to be a lot of nerfing. Roach push? Roaches now have +5 build time. Stalker timing attack? Stalkers now deal two less damage. Mass hellion too strong? Hellions now cost 25 gas.
This mentality can only end up with a bad game.
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On September 08 2010 07:21 MythicalMage wrote:
So I can't agree with you more. I see new tactics from players everyday. If it were say, all reapers all the time every game on every map, and perhaps the zerg literally couldn't win/suffered too much damage after playing near flawlessly, then perhaps a change would be in order. Just feels like if they nerf the Powerful strategy of the week, they're going to be a lot of nerfing. Roach push? Roaches now have +5 build time. Stalker timing attack? Stalkers now deal two less damage. Mass hellion too strong? Hellions now cost 25 gas.
This mentality can only end up with a bad game.
You are assuming that strategies that are too strong can only be balanced by nerfing them to the ground. And yes, that WOULD result in a bland game. However there are more creative ways of balancing, such as making it easier to scout a particular timing attack and/or buffing a unit to make it usable as a counter. This would have the added benefit of making lesser used units more viable, and possibly open up strategies involving them.
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Your balance changes seem more geared towards TvP which doesn't seem to be the major problem atm.
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It is not too early to make changes.
Remember that Starcraft 1 didn't even have replays until several patches after its release. Strategies back then took forever to equilibrate because it was harder or impossible to copy what someone did. With constant streams every day of pro players, and an ample supply of top level replays, that isn't the case anymore. The mechanics learned in Starcraft 1, which took years to learn, carry over in just a few days to Starcraft 2. The current state of play is where it was 2 or 3 years after Starcraft 1's release.
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On September 08 2010 10:41 Sentient wrote:
It is not too early to make changes.
Remember that Starcraft 1 didn't even have replays until several patches after its release. Strategies back then took forever to equilibrate because it was harder or impossible to copy what someone did. With constant streams every day of pro players, and an ample supply of top level replays, that isn't the case anymore. The mechanics learned in Starcraft 1, which took years to learn, carry over in just a few days to Starcraft 2. The current state of play is where it was 2 or 3 years after Starcraft 1's release.
Yeah, I agree with this completely.
A lot of people seem to say: "Just wait a year, the metagame will evolve". No it won't. At least not in the Zerg matchups. Zerg simply has too few tools to use, and the result of that we can see already, and nothing's going to change about that.I guarantee you that if there are no big changes made, one year from now Terran will still run around with the same strategies and Zerg will still mostly sit in his base all game long and react to what the opponent does. Toss will still do a lot of 4gate /3gate+robo pushes with follow ups.
The only thing that's going to change is stuff that requires multi tasking and focus on gimmicks. Terran will do a lot more drops and backstabbing, as will Protoss. Zerg won't, as there's nothing we can effectively backstab with. Toss will abuse small squads of blinking stalkers more, Terran will abuse bunkers all over the map more etc.
I'm willing to bet $100 with anyone in here that, if there are no major reworks made to Zerg (like burrow to tier 1 or something like that), one year from now, you won't see a single Zerg get to the Ro4 in any tournament anymore.
The problem with the other 2 races and Zerg are not some kind of overpowered unit, or that a unit comes too fast, no, it's the fact that both Terran and Protoss have good tools to heavily abuse their race if they're playing really really good, and Zerg simply doesn't.
Zerg is the only race which was downgraded from BW to SC2.
The thing is though, Zerg will most certainly get a lot better with HotS, so we just have to hold out 2 years or so until it's released. Then we can finally play some even-footed games.
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I just think its ridiculous that we have to wait 2 years for zerg to be playable. Why even release them? At the current balance stage, TvT is really the only truly balanced match-up...
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Well, shut up about reapers. Dimaga and IdrA both had crazyh issues with it at IEM.
Also, go watch the GSL and tell me BC's shouldn't be nerfed.
Specifically Spunky's game as well as Torch's.
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Clearly these balance changes were considered by Blizzard carefully. They were mistakenly released during Phase II of Beta as back then Blizzard realized that there was an issue with the units before players really became aware of how to exploit the imbalance.
What ended up happening was a 5 second build time nerf for a few units, and lower DPS on ultras and BCs. The biggest nerf was to tanks, which I think both Terran and Zerg realize that was clearly required. The concept is that tanks shouldn't be impossible to engage, which they are now unless the Zerg completely outplays the Terran.
If this "breaks" the game, Blizzard will fix it. Have no fear. We can't sit around not balancing the game for fear that we might break it. What we need is carefully considered and playtested changes, which is what Blizzard is doing.
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On September 08 2010 03:31 okrane wrote:Show nested quote +On September 08 2010 02:01 gogogadgetflow wrote:
The OP is a little heavy on theory for some people I think. He's trying to advocate that even if the game needs balancing, it shouldn't come at the cost of interesting gameplay. Some units are meant to be "OP" (Spider Mines... and bw tanks, seriously nerf them plz)
This is the only thing worth discussing in this thread imo. The thing is, there should be "Oh shit" units. Frankly a perfect game would have only "oh shit" units. All units should feel overpowered inside a well designed game. Watering down the units (as someone mentioned the WC3 game changes) will only kill it faster. The problem is actually in the current game, terran has a lot of "oh shit" units. Protoss has less, but they still have potential (dont like the range nerf on the void ray or the weak archons much, neither the fact that the dumb mothership is in the game instead of an arbiter and et-cetera ). Zerg on the other hand, the only units that seem and feels OP are the Banelings, which are suicidal units hurting the Zerg and pushing him into more passivity. Where is the Lurker which used to 1 shot an entire ball of Terran infantry? Where are the Defilers which ravaged Terran outposts? Where are the fearsome scourge one shooting drops filled with units? Where is muta micro? Give the to Zerg (and to Protoss in some extent) the ability to pull "oh shit overpowered" moments and we'll all be fine with the way Terran is designed, because we all get our chance to shine.
I was bored and read the whole post. It has been 99.9% ramblings and rubbish but this is the crux of the problem. It is simply because of the lack of OP-ed units that toss and zerg have that allows the terran player to not worry about being punished for what he does.
I mean how many times has a terran player lost his army only to bounce back magically while negating that supposedly dangerous muta harass with nothing but a thor and 2 missile towers? And lets not get started on Mules.
The 2nd thing I find that contributes to this problem is the fact that terrans have the relatively cheapest upgrades they have to invest in to have their units function at full potential. It really irks me everytime some random terran scrub brushes off the current discussion with "get HT's PLZZ. One STORM = GG BIOBALL L2P!!" Reason? Because the two main killers of so called bioballs - the collosus and HT require expensive, time consuming upgrades to be viable. A collosus without range and a HT without kaydharin(?) is relatively useless. Going either path commits the toss player for a significant amount of the game. And because of this commitment. the toss player can be punished if the appropriate counters are made. Can the same be said of a terran player? Does a terran player ever "commit"?
But yes, give the carrier, hydra etc some OP-ness and maybe we'll see the game dynamics improve. Until then, I'll always cheer for the underdog I.E toss/zerg players =P
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I'm no diamond player,so I guess my thoughts doesn't count.
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A 5-second build time increase to reapers is not a severe balance change. I bet you plenty of Terran players will still be using them after the patch.
It's interesting before the news of the patch when people suggested changes to fix ZvT balance others (usually terran players) would be like 'no, trust Blizzard, they know what they're doing' etc. Now that Blizzard is finally doing something and releasing a patch now the tone is changing somewhat from these people- 'OMG, Blizzard don't know what they're doing!' etc. 
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On September 08 2010 10:12 Zerker wrote:
Your balance changes seem more geared towards TvP which doesn't seem to be the major problem atm.
TvP is still imbalanced in favor of Terrans, it's just less so.
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LOL. You do realize that they made balance changes before the game was released right?
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i still trust blizzard. they always know what they doing.
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EPT
