haha back then I didn't know anything about patches. I only remember those painfully slow orange bars that appeared when I entered battlenet. One day, I discovered spawning pool costs 200 minerals and was baffled because I was under the impression that it costs 150min. Another day, I watched over my own replay and its contents were completely different from what I remembered making me quite confused and rather scared. Also back then you needed to download a certain program in order to write/read korean and one day you no longer had to and I didn't even notice that. Those stuff remained as unsolvable mysteries to me for a while and it is only recently that I discovered they were all due to patches that I never cared about XD
On September 20 2010 09:18 Klive5ive wrote: Brood War still isn't balanced now. Realistically it's not possible to get 100% balance. At lot of it was fluke too. When they finished patching there was a lot of stuff they didn't even predict happening, like muta micro.
SC2 has so much hype at the moment you would think that they would be focusing heavily on balance to get the pro-scene up and running.
The current balance is quite frankly shocking. Blizzard has failed epicly. It's not just bad... it's dreadful. Dawn of War2 was a lot better balanced from day1... and that had FOUR races.
However as has been said many times on these forums. Blizzard might make mistakes, but they will throw so much time and money at it that eventually it'll turn out ok. I'm sure pretty soon after the third expansion we'll have a beautifully balanced game.
What kind of strange sc2-hating universe do you come from?
DoW2 had some of the worst balance/bug issues EVER. Did you even play? Tyranids literally dominated everything and rippers took zero damage and capped the entire map. Then subsequent balance patches changed the entire game over and all the races are totally unrecognizable from launch. If you're complaining about SC2 balance, you're either delusional or have too little experience with other games. The balance in this game is far from "shocking". Plenty of RTS's launch with unplayable races, glaring exploits and bugs up the wazoo.
On September 20 2010 10:01 Trap wrote: Not to take anything away from the developers but Brood War being fairly balanced at a professional level has always been something of a fluke. I don't think Blizzard was years ahead of the players strategically or imagined the game would be mapped out to the scope that it was in Korea, though they did remove some potentially game breaking things like the 150mineral 4 pool and shuttle insta-drop.
Also BW is so mechanically demanding that among foreigners the question of race balance is almost irrelevant in why one player lost, and among Korean pros, the greatest players tend to defy racial imbalances and maps.
It's hard to extrapolate from BW what will happen to SC2 in patches, because from what I know they are not the same development team. You'd probably be better off analyzing how they patched Beta and reading Dustin Browder interviews.
Yeah, i definitely agree 100%. And there's also the fact that RTS games were played at a much much lower level at the time of Brood Wars release than now during sc2s release. And by making sc2 much less mechanically demanding then brood war, blizzard has made it so any balance issues become much much more obvious and important and as a result, difficult to fix.
In sc1 if you're talking about anyone outside of professional korean teams, if you lose a game it isn't because of imbalance its because you didn't play well enough.
Aspects of races get proportionally harder/easier to deal with as you move up and down ranks (i.e. D level pvt >>> tvp, and in pro kroean sc there is a small but signifigantly higher percentage of T players vs Z and P players b/c apparently T gets easier when ur mechanics are mad pro), but at the end of the day if you lost its generally your own fault. In sc2 the gap between pros and amateurs is much smaller and the mechanics are much less demanding so it isn't as much the case that you lose games because you played bad.
i.e. in sc1 a good amateur playing really good and getting really lucky still gets owned by a pro 9 times out of 10. in sc2 its maybe only 5 times out of 10.
I agree that BW's balance is more of a fluke, but I'm pretty sure SC2 will reach its balance faster than BW because of the hype, competition, and knowledge of players.
BW's 1.08 patch came after 2 years it was out, whereas SC2 has only been out for a few months.
Broodwar's balance is not a fluke. It's all up to the mapmakers, who constantly tweak maps to balance the game at the pro level even today. I'm pretty sure one could take almost any semi-balanced RTS game and tweak the maps to balance it as well as BW at the highest levels.
According to http://www.creepcolony.com/official.shtml patch 1.08 was released on 4/18/01, which was the last balance patch. So Blizzard balanced the game through patching in 3 years.
i agree with chill, that the players balanced the game through strategies in 9 years, different era had their own "bonjwa". but not only the players balanced the game, the maps as well, and yeah, some maps turns out to be quite imbalanced for a few mu's, but the maps were still a keypoint in term of balancing the game
What people seem to forget is that 1.08 also included replay support for the first time. One of the reasons the BW balancing process went so slow was because without replays, streams or any other accurate sources, the 'overpowered' strategies take a long time to develop.
You just need to check at the record, Terran has been dominating since Boxer. Only sAviOr and Jaedong made it look like the other way. It seems very difficult for a protoss to maintain highest level for longtime. I believe player such as Jaedong exploit more potential of zerg than Flash can exploit from Terran, but talking about longevity, Terran got tank siege mode in a manner that I believe is imbalanced.
On September 20 2010 09:09 wiesel wrote: sc2 will take A LOT more time.. cause they will add new unit in every expansion. And you know what happens when a new unit is added don't you ? It's the same with every Blizzard expansion. Blizzard didn't help Broodwar much to be a balanced game it was rather the maps.
a lot of the bw added units are somewhat useless. sometimes a cool concept like the DA doesnt add much to the gameplay. SC2 doesnt have the same problems as the original Starcraft thou. Maybe it was Idra, I'm not sure about it' who said that the sair made PvZ possible
On September 20 2010 09:06 IceCube wrote: I think sc2 will take ALOT less time to be balanced becouse all the hype and previous experiance with sc:bw in both players and Blizz...except maybe if they want to earn more $$ with expansions then it could take a while to get it done becouse time is money...
How can SC2 take less time to balance out if it will have an expansion 2 years later?
I wish there had been another small patch just to make Dark Archon's, Scouts, Queens and ghosts slightly more viable as I always though it was a shame these units were so under-utilized.
You can't compare how long the two will take to balance. BW balance was extremely lucky, and a fluke... And that's very rare to happen. Balance took 2 years or so, but even then Zerg was op, until better Terran strategies were created. Enough said.
EPT
It's the same with every Blizzard expansion.
