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To begin, I owe susySquark and his article "The Warp Mechanic and How It Broke Protoss" an acknowledgement: this was originally intended to be a post in that thread, but it grew into a much larger beast than that thread had room for.
PLEASE READ THIS THREAD FIRST
Here is the link:
http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=263636
Allow me to argue my case. It will be long. There is no TLDR. I want people to read and understand. That is why it is long, and why I want you to read both threads. I have no doubt most will consider this too long and too dry to bother reading to its conclusion, and it will therefore die a quick death, but since I've already written it, I may as well post it.
Apologia: If a mod is reading this and they find it offensive, please close it. I personally believe that the balance aspect of this thread is merely pedestrian to the larger goal, which attempts to briefly explain my own design philosophy and what I think blizzard ought to work on. It also discusses flaws with suggestions that I see around all the time and attempts to discredit them. I realize that my original purpose, which has shifted several times, may have been enveloped by something close to a balance discussion, but that is not its intent.
Im glad someone decided to write a small article on this troubling mechanic from a design point of view. However, I found the amount of rash suggestions in that thread disturbing, and so I want to address some of them. In order to do so, I had to touch on other things.
Design, Balance and Warpgates
My original point was to pick apart bad suggestions for fixes, to debunk suggestions thrown around on the forums all too frequently and repeated in threads all the time. Then I realized that to do that, I had to explain how I felt about design and balance. Then I wanted to suggest what I thought were good ideas based on those beliefs. Now it is something much larger and more intimidating than I wanted it to be.
My purpose can be summarized as this:
1) To remind people that design influences balance, and that something may be balanced, though not well designed. Balance often takes precedence to design on these forums and its a problem.
2) To give my own conception of design and balance
3) To specifically apply them to warpgates, and what their problems are
4) To discredit bad ideas and suggest what I think are better ideas. More than anything, I want my discussion of design and balance to take paramount importance in the discussion. My specific "fixes" are not meant to be the final word on the subject.
Design and Balance
Most people in threads like this one and susySquark's automatically interpret them as a balance discussion, which it is, but only secondarily. Primarily, it is discussing the design of the warp gate mechanic. As the OP says, this mechanic is flawed, a realization that has been steadily growing within at least part of the community since SC2 beta, but which has suddenly emerged again as a result of poor Protoss performance. The design aspect of SC2 has often been overlooked, in my opinion, due to the constant question of balance.
I want to briefly differentiate between balance and design. A unit may be balanced, though it is poorly designed. If we look at something like the immortal as it is now (before the range buff in the upcoming patch), it is arguably quite balanced and no one really complains about it. It certainly is quite useful. But look at its range: 5 is less than 6, and since it is slower than the stalker, it gets caught behind, making it ineffective as both a tank (intended role), and a damage-dealer (actual role).
I just want to state my view that the game is fairly well balanced and will remain so as long as blizzard continues to patch, but its design, across the board, is weak. I personally attribute this to the huge amount of time and energy spent by blizzard on making only modestly elegant changes to various things. When something is broken, you fix it, but these fixes often do not have only the intended effect, no matter how careful the balance team studies it. I don't really have any data or anything to substantiate this claim, but I have the feeling that Blizzard as done an admirable job of creating balance through shear force of time and resources rather than studied ingenuity.
I know most first time SC2 players wont like this comparison, but if we look at Brood War, specifically the interactions between the first 6 fighting units, we notice that none have special abilities (besides stim and burrow).
Fast-forward to SC2 and zealots have charge, stalkers have blink, roaches have regeneration, marauders have conc shells, and zerg and terran still have burrow and stim. Whether this is "good" or "bad" we can debate, but i think that the simplicity of differentiating the units by size, range, attack speed/power, health, speed, cost and timing is a lot more subtle than admitting the numerous complicating x-factors introduced by individual abilities. The units are different and feel different, not because of an iconic ability, but by how they interact with one another through the same basic features. SC2 has this too, to a lesser extent than Broodwar, I would say, but the abilities really complicate these interactions too.
But let's not get bogged down here, that's just my opinion.
General Assumptions and Beliefs:
1) We assume the one with the least secondary effects will be best, in all parts of the game
2) We assume that the best fixes preserve the health of the rest of the game, not necessitating later hotfixes
3) We assume that the fix preserves and/or enables diversity of strategy while still remaining entertaining.
We have no interest in applying band-aids: we want a fix that will open the game up, preserving as many changes within the game as possible, but also allowing inchoate aspects to suddenly flourish: relationships and mechanics that previously existed in some intangible, potential or unrecognized form, but an aspect that players can now experiment with and develop. We seek to preserve the strengths of the game’s current interactions while also enriching them, or even creating new ones.
Neither should we be afraid of sweeping changes, even ones that require complete rebalancing. We ought to do what is best for the long-term stability of the game, and also more importantly, its future development.
The problem of the Warpgate Mechanic
The warpgate mechanic is flawed and it ought to be fixed. More specifically, it ought to have been fixed in alpha, or at least beta, had blizzard been doing their job properly. But it was not. I don't want that to sound like I'm blaming them, but I do want to put the point on the table: blizzard did not think this one through very well.
Now we are in a situation where people dont really know what the process will be: do they patch it directly? Patch many things all at once? Patch something that counters it? Wait until an expansion to seriously rework it? Ideally, an elegant fix would be best: a simple patch, well tested, that will solve the problem and the problem alone, without introducing others. However, it is possible something more radical may be needed: a redesign.
What do I specifically dislike about warpgates? Why do I think they are poorly designed?
Well, I agree with many points raised in the thread that I linked at the start:
1) How cheap it is vs how powerful it is
2) How it negates the need for gateways (but theres still an option to switch back)
3) How long it takes due to various nerfs
4) How it gives you two effective production cycles of units for one, allowing very powerful pushes (the article talks about this more)
5) How early it comes (early game is the most volatile part)
I will now attempt to explain myself.
1) Warpgate is too early in the game. By pushing it back, we can diminish some of the powerful early game pushes that happen because there is a lack of support units for the other team. If you give the other player a chance to get, for example, medevacs/vikings, mutas or colossi out, warpgate pushes are suddenly a lot less scary, just by changing the timing. This is what Blizzard has been trying to do by increasing the research time. Ive made this point a lot, but I should reiterate: warpgate hits at a particularly vulnerable part of the game.
2) Eliminates the need for gateways. The problem that particularly stands out to me here is that while some people insist that blizzard designed the game with the expectation that warpgates replace gateways, the troubling fact remains that warpgates are still allowed to switch back. If this is undesired, why is it still there? Blizzard has said that they are fine with some units not being used (akin to the scout in BW), but this is not a useless unit: it is a useless building, which is different because while there may be certain situations in which "useless" units, like the BW queen can be used to good effect, this has no utility whatsoever after warpgate research.
But why is this? Well, it is because warpgates are literally better in every way than gateways.
a) They give you the ability to turn minerals into units immediately
b) They do it faster overall, too (the cooldown + warp in time is still faster than a gateway)
c) They allow you to reinforce anywhere on the map, instantly, as long as there is a pylon there (pylons are cheap and build quickly)
d) There is no cost (besides a brief transformation) for transforming individual gateways into warpgates
Why is this a bad thing? Because it eliminates a fundamental aspect of RTS, which is rush distance/travel time. It was exceptionally bold to include this mechanic for that reason alone, not even taking into account the instantaneous nature of it and the buildtime discount. The fact that one race can instantly get reinforcements on the battlefield really influences the rest of the design of the game.
When you consider too the variety of units that can do this (two are basic warriors, one is a cloaked assassin with huge attack, and another is a frail caster with the ability to deal massive AoE damage or instakill other casters), the problems are compounded. You have to ensure that the base units arent so strong that instant reinforcements will overrun the enemy easily, that the cloaked assassin cannot appear *anywhere* too early or for too little cost, and that warp-in storms are not too powerful (which they probably were, but IMO, KA removal was a rushed decision).
In addition, the upgrade itself is cheap (50m/50g) and only really serves to make it so that it isn't present from the beginning of the game. This upgrade should objectively (as probably the best upgrade in the game) be harder to research. If you had never played this game, and I told you the points above, and then I told you the cost/accessibility of the upgrade, you would likely be skeptical and demand to know the downside.
3) With 2) in mind, we have to consider the effect on the rest of the race. Feel free to disagree here, but gateway armies have a lot of trouble engaging similar armies of Z and T at equal cost. Protoss really does rely on their forcefields and AoE to survive and come out evenly. This is the "deathball effect" and I dont really want to talk about it too much. Protoss tends to be very strong when they can get a good amount of sentries, templar/archons/voidrays and colossi supporting a big zealot/stalker ball. It is the powerful lategame units that allow the protoss to strike fear into the hearts of their adversaries, not the gateway units.
The commonly suggested Gateway/Warpgate split allows racial variety in that protoss will still have the ability to make strong pushes, but their overall production will be slowed down if they do so, whereas an all-gateway player will have faster unit producing structures, but will have to walk across the map. There is a lot of potential with this idea: warpgates dont necessarily have to be "second class citizens" to gateways; it would be better for them to be equally good, but for different situations, so that the player has a real and difficult choice to make. That is at the heart of a good macro mechanic, IMO.
Whatever the situation turns out to be, I will suggest what I think are beneficial changes because I value constructive criticism, but first I would like to address some points that I see tossed around too much and with too little thought.
Popular Ideas, Flawed Ideas
It doesnt make sense to heal one part of the game at the expense of others and likewise, it doesnt make sense to suggest blatantly flawed and needlessly complex design changes. I realize that some people will likely call me a hypocrite at this point because I am going to do exactly what I am railing against, but I think the real sin is parroting some idea without considering its effects at all, which many people do. I am aware that the ideas I suggest are flawed, and I am making this thread partly to unravel those flaws, but also to try and argue against some of the more popular ideas that have gained momentum despite their flaws.
1) Change the Warp gate mechanic so that warp in time (or cooldown or whatever) depends on distance from x (nexus, warpgate, whatever)
I really despise all variations of this idea. For starters, its inelegant. For this argument, I am going to assume that simpler changes are better, assuming they get the job done just as well as more complicated changes.
It requires some unintuitive tinkering to implement this fix: we should consider some changes.
a) How is this determined? By land distance? By air distance (straight line)? By hexes? By time it would take the unit to travel there?
b) More importantly, how does the player take this into account? Can it be easily calculated? Can a relatively new player understand this change and account for its effects?
c) This change takes options away from the player. Assuming you can't warp into their base immediately, why is warpgate even necessary at this time?
2) Change Pylons, either by making them lose shields, or be more expensive, or unable to warp units to them, or replacing them with something more expensive, or only allowing warp in to go to warp prisms etc etc.
The game has 2 units that provide power: this is simple and elegant. The interaction between warp prism and pylon is somewhat flawed, I would say, but that is not really important here. Creating a "dark pylon" that enables warp ins but is higher up the tech tree is not only inelegant, but unnecessary, since again, as in part c above, it takes options away from the player. One of the best parts of warp in is its flexibility and availability, and making it more expensive/time intensive/etc in this way is not simple or necessary. Making it so that you cannot warp in near enemy pylon power is also needlessly complicated.
3) Shield battery. While a nice idea, and certainly useful, my main problem with this idea is that it requires a new building, or at least ability. This is not at all elegant or simple and will cause numerous headaches based on calculation, possible interaction with chronoboost, and balance.
Suggestions, Ideas, Constructive Criticism
Let us turn our attention to what I consider good suggestions, but ones that we should explore more deeply.
Some changes will be too specific and will be easily picked apart. Some will be general. They are not meant to be a final draft of the changes I see necessary. They will, however, illustrate my own personal beliefs more specifically than if I had just tried to explain my thoughts without examples.
I do not attempt to trace all of these suggestions to their full conclusions, which would likely require a complete rework of the game. I think that is what it may need, but it is not my intent to enter that territory. compensation is assumed. I don't want to redesign the race myself (I am not blizzard, they wont listen to me anyways), hence why I did not get into that. I am not suggesting breaking the Protoss race (why bother even thinking Im saying that?)
We have to know what to fix first before we suggest changes. My suggestions are very general and not at all meant to be comprehensive or final in any way. I am suggesting ways of thinking about the problem, ones that I find useful and instructive instead of rashly thought out. As it turns out, I think this mechanic needs a major overhaul, which is why it looks like I'm tearing the walls down, but sometimes, it is best to start over from scratch, keeping as many positive aspects as you can (warpgate has several).
Its not really possible to know for sure how to redesign stuff after you make one change because it would require redesign/rebalancing on many many other things, perhaps of the entire game. It probably sounds more dramatic than it is: they are releasing two expansions, so there is an opportunity for radical change if that is what they want. I think it is easier to say what is a generally bad idea, and then try to come up with better ideas.
1) Timing is critical
What I mean by this is that when warpgates come out is essential. Because warpgates allow a player to not only effectively get two production cycles in one (after the research finishes, your gateway cycle ends, you switch to warpgates, you warp in instantly), but also allow instant reinforcements.
Changing the timing of the warpgate research is something to be considered: if you allowed it to come out at a later tech, it would allow more opportunities to stop it. This is actually what Blizzard has been trying to do by increasing the warp in research time repeatedly, but I would argue that it has been ineffective. They are walking a fine line between making it early enough to be interesting to casuals, while also long enough to be balanced. They need to do something different.
a) What they could consider is actually increasing the warp in upgrade research cost, but keeping it in the same tech location. There is no reason for this ability to be so cheap for what it does.
b) Another option is preserving its position on the cyber core, but only allowing it to unlock after a robo, twilight or stargate is built. This is somewhat inelegant, but I consider it more elegant than making the research time ridiculously long, but ridiculously cheap as it is now. By doing this, you enable a certain amount of variability with robo/SG/TC timings, and especially when combined with chronoboost, but you don’t restrict it to a certain tech branch (putting it on the twilight council, for example)
By increasing the time or cost of the warpgate research, you allow more units and more types of units to be out and able to defend. It also increases the ability of pressure to cripple the protoss who doesn’t scout properly. By taking it out of the early game, you are making it simpler to balance because you don’t have to worry as much about it landing a fatal blow too early, but you are also allowing it some versatility in when it can come into effect by not delaying it too much.
2) Warpgates vs Gateways
This is such an obvious mechanic I was shocked when they didn’t include it. There ought to be some kind of interaction between these two structures. Whether that be delaying warpgate tech to make gateways more valuable early game, or allowing for some strategies/reasons for shifting between them, the gateway is a totally useless building after warpgate research, which is terrible design.
Some examples of changes:
a) Make the warpgate cooldown longer and keep the warp-in time the same (5 sec), while keeping the gateway build-times the same
This allows gateways to be the most efficient way of producing units, (less clicks, but also faster in terms of build time) although they still have to walk to their locations. It means that an all-gateway player will always out-macro an all-warpgate player. But the a player with warpgates may be able to out-maneuver his opponent, or administer surgical strikes with a few warpgates while still macroing. It may also lead to delicate calculations about where the proxy pylon has to be in order for the bonus from warpgate to be beneficial and may provide an advantage on specific maps (large, lots of cliffs, etc).
b) Allow the switch from warpgates to gateways and vice-versa to be chrono-boosted, providing an opportunity for a player to differentiate his strategy based on his expenditure of chronoboosts. This will also add a useful element late-game.
c) Increase the time it takes for units to materialize on the battlefield, but keep the overall build time the same.
This allows the enemy greater opportunity to snipe your units as they warp in, providing a clearer defender’s advantage. It also makes scouting and micro more rewarding. This can be combined with any change that increases vulnerability (units take more damage, units have no shields, etc). By increasing the individual units’ vulnerability, gateways suddenly look better: your units aren’t as at risk while building.
Something that goes hand-in-hand with this change is the idea that chronoboost may be used on a warpgate to increase warp-in time, but not cooldown time, giving a player the chance of making their units less vulnerable.
d) This is along the same lines as c), but more extreme: cause the warpgate to not only lose its cooldown, but the player to lose some % of the units’ cost when the pylon warping them in is destroyed. This really punishes the player for messing up and may not be the best choice.
Conclusion:
Primarily, I wanted to address the misconception that people have, which is that balance matters more than balance. I want to draw people's attention to this fact of forum life. The fact that I have to defend this against those who perceive it as a balance whine thread attests to that poisonous mindset. My discussion of design and balance is meant to guide us as we discuss warpgates specifically.
The problems with Warpgate are many and far-reaching and I think that susySquark's article does a great job of explaining some of them. The real question is if blizzard addresses the real issue, and if they do, how they ultimately go about doing it. I am arguing for a solution that elegantly fixes the real problem instead of aggressively patching the perceived problem and causing damage to the rest of the game as a result. It doesn’t surprise me that the 1-1-1 came to prominence after the warpgate nerf: a clear example of a seemingly disastrous and unforeseen effect of one single change. Consider the numerous patches and all the other unintended changes introduced with each patch note. Ideally, a simple, elegant solution can be found (so far, various patches have been ineffective). The real question is, if not, is a more serious redesign necessary?
By really considering and following the best course of action for the game as a whole, you will undoubtedly cause a mess, but no more of a mess than what you will eventually end up with as a result of poorly thought-out patches. A temporary redesign period/beta/PTR in which balance is suspect is better than a game that will forever be flawed because it was patched too much, too quickly and with too little consideration for the health of the game design.
Edited OP with material to clarify my points. I fear it only made it longer 
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I don't know why these threads keep flaring up, but let me tell you something as a Master Protoss. Removing warpgate from the race would break us completely. You should say goodbye to any of our timings, because our ONLY and I repeat: ONLY offensive abilities early game come from forcefields, and our TIMELY reinforcements.
Making any more changes to the offensive capabilities of Protoss warpins would break not only PvP and the entire dynamic of the matchup, but also neuter us offensively versus all the races. There is a reason why Terrans don't really reinforce when doing something like a 2 medivac timing, because if they could reinforce instantly, their cost effectiveness would spiral COMPLETELY out of control. Theres a reason Zerg don't get warpins, because the race uses the larvae mechanic and creep spread for almost instantaneous reinforcement anyway.
If Protoss was to be nerfed in this fashion it would render 3 gate pressure and 4 gate rushes nonviable. As well as timings such as the 5 gate pressure off 2 bases versus Zerg as well as the 6gate. Any kind of early game pressure would be impossible. Essentially what I'm getting at is that ANY change to the offensive capabilities of Protoss would mean a completely disastrous metagame shift, we would be come the turtle race, because we were forced to, and we simply do not have the units and structures to do so.
The fact that the gateway is useless after warpgate is researched isn't a design flaw. Its the way our race works. You can't compare apples and oranges, every race is different, and I am absolutely STUNNED that posts like this are surfacing (and flourishing) in a time when Protoss is doing terribly.
All in all, nerfing warpgate and thereby Protoss is not the answer. There is nothing wrong with the mechanic, as it is a staple of the mechanics of our race. I would love to hear more specific criticism as to why it is actually overpowered (like what rush, for example). In my opinion, it is the only thing that makes Protoss even close to balanced.
Also a quick note: I say "remove" in the first part of this post. Let me clarify that. ANY change. I say again. ANY nerf to the warpgate mechanic will render the fragile Protoss early game units and timings impossible to use and execute, respectively. Warpgate doesn't have to be removed to destroy our race, it just has to be nerfed to destroy our race.
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On September 09 2011 10:47 xlava wrote:
I don't know why these threads keep flaring up, but let me tell you something as a Master Protoss. Removing warpgate from the race would break us completely. You should say goodbye to any of our timings, because our ONLY and I repeat: ONLY offensive abilities early game come from forcefields, and our TIMELY reinforcements.
Making any more changes to the offensive capabilities of Protoss warpins would break not only PvP and the entire dynamic of the matchup, but also neuter us offensively versus all the races. There is a reason why Terrans don't really reinforce when doing something like a 2 medivac timing, because if they could reinforce instantly, their cost effectiveness would spiral COMPLETELY out of control. Theres a reason Zerg don't get warpins, because the race uses the larvae mechanic and creep spread for almost instantaneous reinforcement anyway.
If Protoss was to be nerfed in this fashion it would render 3 gate pressure and 4 gate rushes nonviable. As well as timings such as the 5 gate pressure off 2 bases versus Zerg as well as the 6gate. Any kind of early game pressure would be impossible. Essentially what I'm getting at is that ANY change to the offensive capabilities of Protoss would mean a completely disastrous metagame shift, we would be come the turtle race, because we were forced to, and we simply do not have the units and structures to do so.
The fact that the gateway is useless after warpgate is researched isn't a design flaw. Its the way our race works. You can't compare apples and oranges, every race is different, and I am absolutely STUNNED that posts like this are surfacing (and flourishing) in a time when Protoss is doing terribly.
All in all, nerfing warpgate and thereby Protoss is not the answer. There is nothing wrong with the mechanic, as it is a staple of the mechanics of our race. I would love to hear more specific criticism as to why it is actually overpowered. In my opinion, it is the only thing that makes Protoss even close to balanced.
These threads always come up, people like to think they know something blizzard doesn't. its just a feeling they get from playing their little sample of games and they feel the need to express it. Forcefield is so annoying though, wish blizzard would buff protoss gateway, remove FF and warp and compensate toss with some ground harras unit,,, but what do I know.
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On September 09 2011 10:53 aka_star wrote:Show nested quote +On September 09 2011 10:47 xlava wrote:
I don't know why these threads keep flaring up, but let me tell you something as a Master Protoss. Removing warpgate from the race would break us completely. You should say goodbye to any of our timings, because our ONLY and I repeat: ONLY offensive abilities early game come from forcefields, and our TIMELY reinforcements.
Making any more changes to the offensive capabilities of Protoss warpins would break not only PvP and the entire dynamic of the matchup, but also neuter us offensively versus all the races. There is a reason why Terrans don't really reinforce when doing something like a 2 medivac timing, because if they could reinforce instantly, their cost effectiveness would spiral COMPLETELY out of control. Theres a reason Zerg don't get warpins, because the race uses the larvae mechanic and creep spread for almost instantaneous reinforcement anyway.
If Protoss was to be nerfed in this fashion it would render 3 gate pressure and 4 gate rushes nonviable. As well as timings such as the 5 gate pressure off 2 bases versus Zerg as well as the 6gate. Any kind of early game pressure would be impossible. Essentially what I'm getting at is that ANY change to the offensive capabilities of Protoss would mean a completely disastrous metagame shift, we would be come the turtle race, because we were forced to, and we simply do not have the units and structures to do so.
The fact that the gateway is useless after warpgate is researched isn't a design flaw. Its the way our race works. You can't compare apples and oranges, every race is different, and I am absolutely STUNNED that posts like this are surfacing (and flourishing) in a time when Protoss is doing terribly.
All in all, nerfing warpgate and thereby Protoss is not the answer. There is nothing wrong with the mechanic, as it is a staple of the mechanics of our race. I would love to hear more specific criticism as to why it is actually overpowered. In my opinion, it is the only thing that makes Protoss even close to balanced. These threads always come up, people like to think they know something blizzard doesn't. its just a feeling they get from playing their little sample of games and they feel the need to express it. Forcefield is so annoying though, wish blizzard would buff protoss gateway, remove FF and warp and compensate toss with some ground harras unit,,, but what do I know.
Nothing apparently. Excuse me for being curt, but really? Forcefield is annoying enough? Try playing a game as Protoss at the master level PvZ or PvT without forcefield. See if you last past the 8 minute mark. Add a Protoss ground based harass and remove warpgate? ...
Please stop. Once again excuse my extreme irritation. But these changes should never even be looked upon by anyone at Blizzard, for fear that they actually get an idea to change anything. Warp gate and forcefields must not be removed. Doing so removes all utility from the early-mid game Protoss and completely destroys any possibility of attacking before deathball status.
You need to at LEAST provide some hard evidence to support how your changes would actually work or nobody (no Protoss at least) will accept the changes.
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On September 09 2011 10:47 xlava wrote:
I don't know why these threads keep flaring up, but let me tell you something as a Master Protoss. Removing warpgate from the race would break us completely. You should say goodbye to any of our timings, because our ONLY and I repeat: ONLY offensive abilities early game come from forcefields, and our TIMELY reinforcements.
Making any more changes to the offensive capabilities of Protoss warpins would break not only PvP and the entire dynamic of the matchup, but also neuter us offensively versus all the races. There is a reason why Terrans don't really reinforce when doing something like a 2 medivac timing, because if they could reinforce instantly, their cost effectiveness would spiral COMPLETELY out of control. Theres a reason Zerg don't get warpins, because the race uses the larvae mechanic and creep spread for almost instantaneous reinforcement anyway.
If Protoss was to be nerfed in this fashion it would render 3 gate pressure and 4 gate rushes nonviable. As well as timings such as the 5 gate pressure off 2 bases versus Zerg as well as the 6gate. Any kind of early game pressure would be impossible. Essentially what I'm getting at is that ANY change to the offensive capabilities of Protoss would mean a completely disastrous metagame shift, we would be come the turtle race, because we were forced to, and we simply do not have the units and structures to do so.
The fact that the gateway is useless after warpgate is researched isn't a design flaw. Its the way our race works. You can't compare apples and oranges, every race is different, and I am absolutely STUNNED that posts like this are surfacing (and flourishing) in a time when Protoss is doing terribly.
All in all, nerfing warpgate and thereby Protoss is not the answer. There is nothing wrong with the mechanic, as it is a staple of the mechanics of our race. I would love to hear more specific criticism as to why it is actually overpowered (like what rush, for example). In my opinion, it is the only thing that makes Protoss even close to balanced.
Also a quick note: I say "remove" in the first part of this post. Let me clarify that. ANY change. I say again. ANY nerf to the warpgate mechanic will render the fragile Protoss early game units and timings impossible to use and execute, respectively. Warpgate doesn't have to be removed to destroy our race, it just has to be nerfed to destroy our race.
Well I dont blame you, it is a huge article, but you missed my point.
I am not suggesting that it is overpowered at all, or underpowered. This is the language of Balance, not Design. I want to move beyond that.
I am suggesting that it is poorly designed, one of the effects of which is that, as you put it, our "ONLY offensive abilities early game come from forcefields, and our TIMELY reinforcements," among other things. I am trying to indicate where I think they went wrong, but also what can be done to fix the problem.
I am not suggesting turning protoss into terran. I am not suggesting nerfing or even removing warpgate as you are accusing me.
I am assuming that any "nerf" as you call it (I would prefer to call it a design change), will be balanced by a "buff," such that if warpgates are moved up the tech tree, something would be done to compensate for that change in the early game.
Sorry to not be clear.
Please re-read and get back to me. :D
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I am also shocked that the Warpgate is faster at producing units than the Gateway and it can warp in, so there is no reason to have a gateway. That's just bad design- they might as well remove gateways and balance the game from that.
In my opinion, they need to make the Gateway have faster build times than warpgates (maybe by like 5-10 seconds) so that gateways are better but can't be used for harass or reinforcements, thus creating a much more interesting dynamic. They might need to do some adjustments to balance early game then, but I doubt it would be a whole lot.
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On September 09 2011 10:56 Knee_of_Justice wrote:Show nested quote +On September 09 2011 10:47 xlava wrote:
I don't know why these threads keep flaring up, but let me tell you something as a Master Protoss. Removing warpgate from the race would break us completely. You should say goodbye to any of our timings, because our ONLY and I repeat: ONLY offensive abilities early game come from forcefields, and our TIMELY reinforcements.
Making any more changes to the offensive capabilities of Protoss warpins would break not only PvP and the entire dynamic of the matchup, but also neuter us offensively versus all the races. There is a reason why Terrans don't really reinforce when doing something like a 2 medivac timing, because if they could reinforce instantly, their cost effectiveness would spiral COMPLETELY out of control. Theres a reason Zerg don't get warpins, because the race uses the larvae mechanic and creep spread for almost instantaneous reinforcement anyway.
If Protoss was to be nerfed in this fashion it would render 3 gate pressure and 4 gate rushes nonviable. As well as timings such as the 5 gate pressure off 2 bases versus Zerg as well as the 6gate. Any kind of early game pressure would be impossible. Essentially what I'm getting at is that ANY change to the offensive capabilities of Protoss would mean a completely disastrous metagame shift, we would be come the turtle race, because we were forced to, and we simply do not have the units and structures to do so.
The fact that the gateway is useless after warpgate is researched isn't a design flaw. Its the way our race works. You can't compare apples and oranges, every race is different, and I am absolutely STUNNED that posts like this are surfacing (and flourishing) in a time when Protoss is doing terribly.
All in all, nerfing warpgate and thereby Protoss is not the answer. There is nothing wrong with the mechanic, as it is a staple of the mechanics of our race. I would love to hear more specific criticism as to why it is actually overpowered (like what rush, for example). In my opinion, it is the only thing that makes Protoss even close to balanced.
Also a quick note: I say "remove" in the first part of this post. Let me clarify that. ANY change. I say again. ANY nerf to the warpgate mechanic will render the fragile Protoss early game units and timings impossible to use and execute, respectively. Warpgate doesn't have to be removed to destroy our race, it just has to be nerfed to destroy our race. Well I dont blame you, it is a huge article, but you missed my point. I am not suggesting that it is overpowered at all, or underpowered. This is the language of Balance, not Design. I want to move beyond that. I am suggesting that it is poorly designed, one of the effects of which is that, as you put it, our "ONLY offensive abilities early game come from forcefields, and our TIMELY reinforcements," among other things. I am trying to indicate where I think they went wrong, but also what can be done to fix the problem. I am not suggesting turning protoss into terran. I am not suggesting nerfing warpgate. I am assuming that any "nerf" as you call it (I would prefer to call it a design change), will be balanced by a "buff," such that if warpgates are moved up the tech tree, something would be done to compensate for that change in the early game. Sorry to not be clear. Please re-read and get back to me. :D
I'm not re-reading it for a reason, sir. My point is in the bold. I am saying that any change, and honestly I don't care what it is, will remove a huge amount of utility from Protoss... Warpgate is a staple of the race. I and no other Protoss wants it removed. The design is genius and very well designed. I don't want to take a chance with any change that could potentially screw up warpgate.
Please, if you don't think its overpowered, why do you think its badly designed? Because in most people's minds "badly designed" equivocates to either OP or UP.
On September 09 2011 10:58 monitor wrote:
I am also shocked that the Warpgate is faster at producing units than the Gateway and it can warp in, so there is no reason to have a gateway. That's just bad design- they might as well remove gateways and balance the game from that.
In my opinion, they need to make the Gateway have faster build times than warpgates (maybe by like 5-10 seconds) so that gateways are better but can't be used for harass or reinforcements, thus creating a much more interesting dynamic. They might need to do some adjustments to balance early game then, but I doubt it would be a whole lot.
What???
Warpgates produce in the same amount of time, roughly, as every other races' main production structures. Are you kidding me???
A more interesting dynamic? You're saying that standard reinforcements is "more dynamic" than warping units into the fray? :O seriously?
Can we please get some high level Protoss in here so that I'm not defending the entire race's sanctity by myself?
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The most annoying thing about these threads is how spur-of-the-moment they are, I remember when there were like 4 threads saying that FORCE FIELD was OP because Idra lost to 1 person because a bunch of roaches were out of position and trapped with force fields, really people if Blizzard listened every time someone was sure that an aspect of the game was totally broken then we probably wouldn't even have the same races from one week to the next.
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On September 09 2011 11:03 Navillus wrote:
The most annoying thing about these threads is how spur-of-the-moment they are, I remember when there were like 4 threads saying that FORCE FIELD was OP because Idra lost to 1 person because a bunch of roaches were out of position and trapped with force fields, really people if Blizzard listened every time someone was sure that an aspect of the game was totally broken then we probably wouldn't even have the same races from one week to the next.
Oh my god a voice of reason... Cruncher versus Idra TSL 3. Yeah I know that game. Everyone cried OP because Cruncher had some sick forcefields.
Are we going to cry op when Demuslim crushes a Protoss @ MLG with a nasty stim timing and nerf stim again?
Are we going to cry op when NesTea comes up with a devastating new ZvT build? Of course not, because this game is balanced. All crying op does is bring needless attention to something that should have never seen the light of day.
But these threads take it a step further, we're talking about changing a MACRO mechanic of a race, which would have HUGE and unfathomable repercussions. Think of Terran without mules (lol ok I could deal with that  jk) or Zerg without injects?
I'm afraid I'm going to get banned for all my ranting, but understand how serious this is that Protoss Warpgate is not nerfed OR changed. Its why most of us play Protoss, and its balanced. No change is necessary. And discussing it only scares the crap out of us.
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On September 09 2011 11:01 xlava wrote:Show nested quote +On September 09 2011 10:56 Knee_of_Justice wrote:On September 09 2011 10:47 xlava wrote:
I don't know why these threads keep flaring up, but let me tell you something as a Master Protoss. Removing warpgate from the race would break us completely. You should say goodbye to any of our timings, because our ONLY and I repeat: ONLY offensive abilities early game come from forcefields, and our TIMELY reinforcements.
Making any more changes to the offensive capabilities of Protoss warpins would break not only PvP and the entire dynamic of the matchup, but also neuter us offensively versus all the races. There is a reason why Terrans don't really reinforce when doing something like a 2 medivac timing, because if they could reinforce instantly, their cost effectiveness would spiral COMPLETELY out of control. Theres a reason Zerg don't get warpins, because the race uses the larvae mechanic and creep spread for almost instantaneous reinforcement anyway.
If Protoss was to be nerfed in this fashion it would render 3 gate pressure and 4 gate rushes nonviable. As well as timings such as the 5 gate pressure off 2 bases versus Zerg as well as the 6gate. Any kind of early game pressure would be impossible. Essentially what I'm getting at is that ANY change to the offensive capabilities of Protoss would mean a completely disastrous metagame shift, we would be come the turtle race, because we were forced to, and we simply do not have the units and structures to do so.
The fact that the gateway is useless after warpgate is researched isn't a design flaw. Its the way our race works. You can't compare apples and oranges, every race is different, and I am absolutely STUNNED that posts like this are surfacing (and flourishing) in a time when Protoss is doing terribly.
All in all, nerfing warpgate and thereby Protoss is not the answer. There is nothing wrong with the mechanic, as it is a staple of the mechanics of our race. I would love to hear more specific criticism as to why it is actually overpowered (like what rush, for example). In my opinion, it is the only thing that makes Protoss even close to balanced.
Also a quick note: I say "remove" in the first part of this post. Let me clarify that. ANY change. I say again. ANY nerf to the warpgate mechanic will render the fragile Protoss early game units and timings impossible to use and execute, respectively. Warpgate doesn't have to be removed to destroy our race, it just has to be nerfed to destroy our race. Well I dont blame you, it is a huge article, but you missed my point. I am not suggesting that it is overpowered at all, or underpowered. This is the language of Balance, not Design. I want to move beyond that. I am suggesting that it is poorly designed, one of the effects of which is that, as you put it, our "ONLY offensive abilities early game come from forcefields, and our TIMELY reinforcements," among other things. I am trying to indicate where I think they went wrong, but also what can be done to fix the problem. I am not suggesting turning protoss into terran. I am not suggesting nerfing warpgate. I am assuming that any "nerf" as you call it (I would prefer to call it a design change), will be balanced by a "buff," such that if warpgates are moved up the tech tree, something would be done to compensate for that change in the early game. Sorry to not be clear. Please re-read and get back to me. :D I'm not re-reading it for a reason, sir. My point is in the bold. b I am saying that any change, and honestly I don't care what it is, will remove a huge amount of utility from Protoss... Warpgate is a staple of the race. I and no other Protoss wants it removed. The design is genius and very well designed. I don't want to take a chance with any change that could potentially screw up warpgate. Please, if you don't think its overpowered, why do you think its badly designed? Because in most people's minds "badly designed" equivocates to either OP or UP. Show nested quote +On September 09 2011 10:58 monitor wrote:
I am also shocked that the Warpgate is faster at producing units than the Gateway and it can warp in, so there is no reason to have a gateway. That's just bad design- they might as well remove gateways and balance the game from that.
In my opinion, they need to make the Gateway have faster build times than warpgates (maybe by like 5-10 seconds) so that gateways are better but can't be used for harass or reinforcements, thus creating a much more interesting dynamic. They might need to do some adjustments to balance early game then, but I doubt it would be a whole lot. What??? Warpgates produce in the same amount of time, roughly, as every other races' main production structures. Are you kidding me??? A more interesting dynamic? You're saying that standard reinforcements is "more dynamic" than warping units into the fray? :O seriously? Can we please get some high level Protoss in here so that I'm not defending the entire race's sanctity by myself?
What? Me thinks she doth protest too much.
They have already changed warp in with the last patch; it didn't break shit.
I know you like to hide behind your "master's level" play excuse, but you are not making an accurate defense of "any" change possible.
Maybe your play is sub par? Maybe you are looking at it wrong? Maybe you can't explain "any" possible change by making blanket statements, I dunno.
Try to have an adult conversation here without throwing everything under the bus based on your "masters level play" (and not your pro level play).
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On September 09 2011 11:01 xlava wrote:Show nested quote +On September 09 2011 10:56 Knee_of_Justice wrote:On September 09 2011 10:47 xlava wrote:
I don't know why these threads keep flaring up, but let me tell you something as a Master Protoss. Removing warpgate from the race would break us completely. You should say goodbye to any of our timings, because our ONLY and I repeat: ONLY offensive abilities early game come from forcefields, and our TIMELY reinforcements.
Making any more changes to the offensive capabilities of Protoss warpins would break not only PvP and the entire dynamic of the matchup, but also neuter us offensively versus all the races. There is a reason why Terrans don't really reinforce when doing something like a 2 medivac timing, because if they could reinforce instantly, their cost effectiveness would spiral COMPLETELY out of control. Theres a reason Zerg don't get warpins, because the race uses the larvae mechanic and creep spread for almost instantaneous reinforcement anyway.
If Protoss was to be nerfed in this fashion it would render 3 gate pressure and 4 gate rushes nonviable. As well as timings such as the 5 gate pressure off 2 bases versus Zerg as well as the 6gate. Any kind of early game pressure would be impossible. Essentially what I'm getting at is that ANY change to the offensive capabilities of Protoss would mean a completely disastrous metagame shift, we would be come the turtle race, because we were forced to, and we simply do not have the units and structures to do so.
The fact that the gateway is useless after warpgate is researched isn't a design flaw. Its the way our race works. You can't compare apples and oranges, every race is different, and I am absolutely STUNNED that posts like this are surfacing (and flourishing) in a time when Protoss is doing terribly.
All in all, nerfing warpgate and thereby Protoss is not the answer. There is nothing wrong with the mechanic, as it is a staple of the mechanics of our race. I would love to hear more specific criticism as to why it is actually overpowered (like what rush, for example). In my opinion, it is the only thing that makes Protoss even close to balanced.
Also a quick note: I say "remove" in the first part of this post. Let me clarify that. ANY change. I say again. ANY nerf to the warpgate mechanic will render the fragile Protoss early game units and timings impossible to use and execute, respectively. Warpgate doesn't have to be removed to destroy our race, it just has to be nerfed to destroy our race. Well I dont blame you, it is a huge article, but you missed my point. I am not suggesting that it is overpowered at all, or underpowered. This is the language of Balance, not Design. I want to move beyond that. I am suggesting that it is poorly designed, one of the effects of which is that, as you put it, our "ONLY offensive abilities early game come from forcefields, and our TIMELY reinforcements," among other things. I am trying to indicate where I think they went wrong, but also what can be done to fix the problem. I am not suggesting turning protoss into terran. I am not suggesting nerfing warpgate. I am assuming that any "nerf" as you call it (I would prefer to call it a design change), will be balanced by a "buff," such that if warpgates are moved up the tech tree, something would be done to compensate for that change in the early game. Sorry to not be clear. Please re-read and get back to me. :D I'm not re-reading it for a reason, sir. My point is in the bold. I am saying that any change, and honestly I don't care what it is, will remove a huge amount of utility from Protoss... Warpgate is a staple of the race. I and no other Protoss wants it removed. The design is genius and very well designed. I don't want to take a chance with any change that could potentially screw up warpgate. Please, if you don't think its overpowered, why do you think its badly designed? Because in most people's minds "badly designed" equivocates to either OP or UP. Show nested quote +On September 09 2011 10:58 monitor wrote:
I am also shocked that the Warpgate is faster at producing units than the Gateway and it can warp in, so there is no reason to have a gateway. That's just bad design- they might as well remove gateways and balance the game from that.
In my opinion, they need to make the Gateway have faster build times than warpgates (maybe by like 5-10 seconds) so that gateways are better but can't be used for harass or reinforcements, thus creating a much more interesting dynamic. They might need to do some adjustments to balance early game then, but I doubt it would be a whole lot. What??? Warpgates produce in the same amount of time, roughly, as every other races' main production structures. Are you kidding me??? A more interesting dynamic? You're saying that standard reinforcements is "more dynamic" than warping units into the fray? :O seriously? Can we please get some high level Protoss in here so that I'm not defending the entire race's sanctity by myself?
That's fine, but I think that is a bit conservative. We have 2 expansions coming up with opportunities for SOME change and we have a PTR that has been very underused so far. There are ways to test changes before implementing them you know.
With regards to this:
Please, if you don't think its overpowered, why do you think its badly designed? Because in most people's minds "badly designed" equivocates to either OP or UP.
I think there are numerous reasons why it is badly designed, starting with the thread I linked to at the top. I can add a few points such as how cheap it is vs how powerful it is, how it negates the need for gateways (but theres still an option to switch back), how long it takes due to various nerfs, how it gives you two effective production cycles of units for one, allowing massive pushes (article talks about this more), how early it comes (volatile early game).
As I said, I think the balance is quite good overall, but the design clearly leaves something to be desired. The two dont have to necessarily be equated: as with the immortal, you can have good balance, but bad design.
There's no need to get upset. I have always played protoss and will never switch, but I think that there are some design flaws that can and should be addressed. If you please, explain why you think it is well designed, if that is what you think?
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On September 09 2011 11:07 xlava wrote:Show nested quote +On September 09 2011 11:03 Navillus wrote:
The most annoying thing about these threads is how spur-of-the-moment they are, I remember when there were like 4 threads saying that FORCE FIELD was OP because Idra lost to 1 person because a bunch of roaches were out of position and trapped with force fields, really people if Blizzard listened every time someone was sure that an aspect of the game was totally broken then we probably wouldn't even have the same races from one week to the next. Oh my god a voice of reason... Cruncher versus Idra TSL 3. Yeah I know that game. Everyone cried OP because Cruncher had some sick forcefields. Are we going to cry op when Demuslim crushes a Protoss @ MLG with a nasty stim timing and nerf stim again? Are we going to cry op when NesTea comes up with a devastating new ZvT build? Of course not, because this game is balanced. All crying op does is bring needless attention to something that should have never seen the light of day. I'm afraid I'm going to get banned for all my ranting, but understand how serious this is that Protoss Warpgate is not nerfed OR changed. Its why most of us play Protoss, and its balanced. No change is necessary.
You are just being shortsighted. The point is not about if it's balanced, but if it offers good game play. Balance is totally irrelevant to that, since Blizzard is actively seeking balance(and map makers too).
The question shouldn't be "Will toss be to weak if we change WG mechanic" but rather "Is there a reason to change WG mechanic, is it going to make the game better?"(and if so, is it going to make it better enough to warrant the change in the first place).
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On September 09 2011 11:14 Zarahtra wrote:Show nested quote +On September 09 2011 11:07 xlava wrote:On September 09 2011 11:03 Navillus wrote:
The most annoying thing about these threads is how spur-of-the-moment they are, I remember when there were like 4 threads saying that FORCE FIELD was OP because Idra lost to 1 person because a bunch of roaches were out of position and trapped with force fields, really people if Blizzard listened every time someone was sure that an aspect of the game was totally broken then we probably wouldn't even have the same races from one week to the next. Oh my god a voice of reason... Cruncher versus Idra TSL 3. Yeah I know that game. Everyone cried OP because Cruncher had some sick forcefields. Are we going to cry op when Demuslim crushes a Protoss @ MLG with a nasty stim timing and nerf stim again? Are we going to cry op when NesTea comes up with a devastating new ZvT build? Of course not, because this game is balanced. All crying op does is bring needless attention to something that should have never seen the light of day. I'm afraid I'm going to get banned for all my ranting, but understand how serious this is that Protoss Warpgate is not nerfed OR changed. Its why most of us play Protoss, and its balanced. No change is necessary. You are just being shortsighted. The point is not about if it's balanced, but if it offers good game play. Balance is totally irrelevant to that, since Blizzard is actively seeking balance(and map makers too). The question shouldn't be "Will toss be to weak if we change WG mechanic" but rather "Is there a reason to change WG mechanic, is it going to make the game better?"(and if so, is it going to make it better enough to warrant the change in the first place).
How does "it is why most of us play Protoss" not equivocate to "it offering good gameplay"? -_-
I was saying there is no reason to change it...
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On September 09 2011 10:58 monitor wrote:
I am also shocked that the Warpgate is faster at producing units than the Gateway and it can warp in, so there is no reason to have a gateway. That's just bad design- they might as well remove gateways and balance the game from that.
In my opinion, they need to make the Gateway have faster build times than warpgates (maybe by like 5-10 seconds) so that gateways are better but can't be used for harass or reinforcements, thus creating a much more interesting dynamic. They might need to do some adjustments to balance early game then, but I doubt it would be a whole lot.
seriously? remove gateways? :|
numerous people can continue to suggest things but without definite testing (eg numerous games etc) we can't effectively say without bias that these suggestions would work.
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On September 09 2011 11:14 Zarahtra wrote:Show nested quote +On September 09 2011 11:07 xlava wrote:On September 09 2011 11:03 Navillus wrote:
The most annoying thing about these threads is how spur-of-the-moment they are, I remember when there were like 4 threads saying that FORCE FIELD was OP because Idra lost to 1 person because a bunch of roaches were out of position and trapped with force fields, really people if Blizzard listened every time someone was sure that an aspect of the game was totally broken then we probably wouldn't even have the same races from one week to the next. Oh my god a voice of reason... Cruncher versus Idra TSL 3. Yeah I know that game. Everyone cried OP because Cruncher had some sick forcefields. Are we going to cry op when Demuslim crushes a Protoss @ MLG with a nasty stim timing and nerf stim again? Are we going to cry op when NesTea comes up with a devastating new ZvT build? Of course not, because this game is balanced. All crying op does is bring needless attention to something that should have never seen the light of day. I'm afraid I'm going to get banned for all my ranting, but understand how serious this is that Protoss Warpgate is not nerfed OR changed. Its why most of us play Protoss, and its balanced. No change is necessary. You are just being shortsighted. The point is not about if it's balanced, but if it offers good game play. Balance is totally irrelevant to that, since Blizzard is actively seeking balance(and map makers too). The question shouldn't be "Will toss be to weak if we change WG mechanic" but rather "Is there a reason to change WG mechanic, is it going to make the game better?"(and if so, is it going to make it better enough to warrant the change in the first place).
Right, balance is not the issue here. Balance is a mindset that has infected this forum, taking the discussion away from design, which is equally as important. It is what made Broodwar so successful: each unit fit into a larger puzzle, so effectively that with few balance patches, it was relatively "balanced." It has its flaws, to be sure, but it also allowed the game to remain decently balanced, even through accidental "tricks" like muta stacking. Of course there are other factors, like maps. SC2 has a difficult job of emulating the predecessor while also striking out on its own. I think theyve done quite well but not perfectly.
As Zarahtra says, design and balance combine to influence gameplay: we want to maintain balance, but change design so that it improves gameplay. People act like the way the game is *now* is the only way the game can or should be and that Blizzard is some omnipotent god who created SC2 from the swirling mists of chaos. They are a company composed of individuals who are just as flawed as everybody on these forums, including me.
They created the game, they can fix it. This thread will be quickly lost, but the game will not be, especially if they take care to improve the game where it stands to be improved.
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Read the OP guys, this is NOT a balance discussion. It's a design discussion, and one I agree with. What I think is that the way warpgates are implemented into the game isn't a good piece of design, and that Starcraft II would be a more dynamic game if changes were made to how it operates.
Personally I would like to see unit cooldowns slower in warpgates compared to building them in un-upgraded gateways, that way there's a trade-off between mobility and army size.
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On September 09 2011 11:18 xlava wrote:Show nested quote +On September 09 2011 11:14 Zarahtra wrote:On September 09 2011 11:07 xlava wrote:On September 09 2011 11:03 Navillus wrote:
The most annoying thing about these threads is how spur-of-the-moment they are, I remember when there were like 4 threads saying that FORCE FIELD was OP because Idra lost to 1 person because a bunch of roaches were out of position and trapped with force fields, really people if Blizzard listened every time someone was sure that an aspect of the game was totally broken then we probably wouldn't even have the same races from one week to the next. Oh my god a voice of reason... Cruncher versus Idra TSL 3. Yeah I know that game. Everyone cried OP because Cruncher had some sick forcefields. Are we going to cry op when Demuslim crushes a Protoss @ MLG with a nasty stim timing and nerf stim again? Are we going to cry op when NesTea comes up with a devastating new ZvT build? Of course not, because this game is balanced. All crying op does is bring needless attention to something that should have never seen the light of day. I'm afraid I'm going to get banned for all my ranting, but understand how serious this is that Protoss Warpgate is not nerfed OR changed. Its why most of us play Protoss, and its balanced. No change is necessary. You are just being shortsighted. The point is not about if it's balanced, but if it offers good game play. Balance is totally irrelevant to that, since Blizzard is actively seeking balance(and map makers too). The question shouldn't be "Will toss be to weak if we change WG mechanic" but rather "Is there a reason to change WG mechanic, is it going to make the game better?"(and if so, is it going to make it better enough to warrant the change in the first place). How does "it is why most of us play Protoss" not equivocate to "it offering good gameplay"? -_- I was saying there is no reason to change it...
Sorry I should've bolded the last sentence too. There are more than 1 view on this issue and saying "look me and my friends think its fun, no change needed" does make you come off pretty shortsighted. First thing to do would be to explain why you believe it creates good gameplay.
I personally think WG is one of the key parts of not making T/P to similar, so I'm iffy on changing it. It creates interesting dynamic for PvZ and PvT(and certainly frustrating as a T player), but PvP is pretty fucked up, like this guy explains a lot better than myself could ever do. I think a shield battery would be a pretty interesting change to combat the 4gate issue personally.
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Nerfing warpgates would totally break the protoss metagame in half, it would remove all early offensive capabilities and would only reinforce the 'turtle till deathball' mentality.
Most protoss units are slow, things like pheonix and blink stalker being the only real exceptions, what creates the illusion of speed and gives protoss effective mobility is being able to warp in units around the map on the fly. If it were significantly more efficient to produce units without warpgates, you'd get turtletoss everywhere, because all units would be created and left at home - in addition, due to the low cost efficiency, rarely would units be leaving home untill you were close to food capped.
If your talking about wanting warpgates fixed, (and really insinuating it being nerfed to make gateways more attractive) your suggesting a change that would destroy the race. I think you'll find the design philosophy from the beginning was to have the warpgate upgrade serve to increase the buildings utility, in the same way that terran has addons e.g. tech labs/reactors (keep in mind these dont take 160seconds to build), and zerg buildings can morph e.g. spire/greater spire. What i believe the design philosophy intends from this is to create a situation where players must determine the most efficient timing to have particular upgrades completed to that they can utilise those enabled unit mechanics at specific timings in their plays.
IMO the only thing really broken about warpgates is that the upgrade time increase really only served to force protoss to spend even more nexus energy chronoboosting it which harms the protoss economy because your chrono'ing fewer probes.
just my 2c. <3
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The problem is... I love the solution that you are giving... Gateway/warpgate would open up a whole new WORLD of possibilities and new things to figure out for Protoss.... However, the flaw in this is that Protoss will be so far behind the other races in terms of understanding their race, and so most likely until HotS where all the races have to restart or heavily tweak their knowledge of the game, Protoss will not be competitive. (Off topic, but I'm kinda scared for HotS, because I don't want to see a whole new lineup of pros take the top spots, but back to the topic).
Additionally, Gateway units still have the underlying problem of being too weak to have to account for WG... Timing pushes with 4 gate would be nigh impossible to stop if they were buffed to account for the Hybrid WG/gate play (because of the fact that 4 gate relies on that burst of production, not on continued production), but at the same time, not buffing them at all still puts us at the perennial Ghost/Viking V Protoss Splash stalemate that Protoss always seems to be on the losing end of.
TO address the "non-balance discussion" thing. Blizzard balances this game mainly because it wants it to be successful as an Esport (and keep player base, but that is less big here). If one race suddenly became extinct at the top levels of play because of this (Imo brilliant) design change, the esport would decline by so much. Additionally, they would lose playerbase, as dedicated Protoss player watched their league drop and quit. Blizzard gains nothing from changing game design until AT LEAST HotS if not LotV, and so unless we can think of a way that changes design without demolishing metagame, and making us stronger (at first) as we learn the new changes, Blizzard has no reason (and the esport has no motivation) to make a change.
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Ok. So, currently, toss is really struggling in GSL. Supposedly, it's the best of the best, the pinnacle of performance, the land of champions. Based on past results, Korean trends are always a few months ahead of the foreign trends.
Some of the "top" protoss players in GSL:
+ Show Spoiler +MC to code A, Huk 0-3 MVP, Alicia to code A
However, we cannot conclude that toss needs a buff or a design change just yet. Keep in mind that GSL is only ~2,3 weeks. This could very well just be a transitional period, and once the next awesome build/revolutionary usage comes out, it'll be Zerg/Terran whine about how toss op. Now, it could also just be the skill of the Korean Terrans, and how they outclass the Toss/Zerg competition and faceroll them most of the games.
Now, I won't say that any major changes are needed(on a KA/WG scale), but if this trend continues throughout GSL November, etc. then we have more solid proof that balance changes are needed. I urge you to refrain from balance whine about then, but we can all cry together as another top-tier protoss falls to 1/1/1.
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On September 09 2011 10:47 xlava wrote:
I don't know why these threads keep flaring up, but let me tell you something as a Master Protoss. Removing warpgate from the race would break us completely. You should say goodbye to any of our timings, because our ONLY and I repeat: ONLY offensive abilities early game come from forcefields, and our TIMELY reinforcements.
Making any more changes to the offensive capabilities of Protoss warpins would break not only PvP and the entire dynamic of the matchup, but also neuter us offensively versus all the races. There is a reason why Terrans don't really reinforce when doing something like a 2 medivac timing, because if they could reinforce instantly, their cost effectiveness would spiral COMPLETELY out of control. Theres a reason Zerg don't get warpins, because the race uses the larvae mechanic and creep spread for almost instantaneous reinforcement anyway.
If Protoss was to be nerfed in this fashion it would render 3 gate pressure and 4 gate rushes nonviable. As well as timings such as the 5 gate pressure off 2 bases versus Zerg as well as the 6gate. Any kind of early game pressure would be impossible. Essentially what I'm getting at is that ANY change to the offensive capabilities of Protoss would mean a completely disastrous metagame shift, we would be come the turtle race, because we were forced to, and we simply do not have the units and structures to do so.
The fact that the gateway is useless after warpgate is researched isn't a design flaw. Its the way our race works. You can't compare apples and oranges, every race is different, and I am absolutely STUNNED that posts like this are surfacing (and flourishing) in a time when Protoss is doing terribly.
All in all, nerfing warpgate and thereby Protoss is not the answer. There is nothing wrong with the mechanic, as it is a staple of the mechanics of our race. I would love to hear more specific criticism as to why it is actually overpowered (like what rush, for example). In my opinion, it is the only thing that makes Protoss even close to balanced.
Also a quick note: I say "remove" in the first part of this post. Let me clarify that. ANY change. I say again. ANY nerf to the warpgate mechanic will render the fragile Protoss early game units and timings impossible to use and execute, respectively. Warpgate doesn't have to be removed to destroy our race, it just has to be nerfed to destroy our race.
QFT
I can't believe what it is that is popular in the Starcraft 2 forums.PvP can't be imbalanced and expansions are more likely, PvZ and PvT need some figuring out but they're definitely not impossible.
So it can't really be imbalance. At least, I think.
The problem is that everyone likes to whine all day about SC2. GSL isnt good enough NASL doesnt give advantages to #1 spot MLG incontrol is still in pool play ETC,
Everyone needs to relax.
Blizzard did a fine job balancing the races and I want to see a substantial example that shows how warpgates directly lose the game for protoss because of the way they work.
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On September 09 2011 11:39 Bippzy wrote:Show nested quote +On September 09 2011 10:47 xlava wrote:
I don't know why these threads keep flaring up, but let me tell you something as a Master Protoss. Removing warpgate from the race would break us completely. You should say goodbye to any of our timings, because our ONLY and I repeat: ONLY offensive abilities early game come from forcefields, and our TIMELY reinforcements.
Making any more changes to the offensive capabilities of Protoss warpins would break not only PvP and the entire dynamic of the matchup, but also neuter us offensively versus all the races. There is a reason why Terrans don't really reinforce when doing something like a 2 medivac timing, because if they could reinforce instantly, their cost effectiveness would spiral COMPLETELY out of control. Theres a reason Zerg don't get warpins, because the race uses the larvae mechanic and creep spread for almost instantaneous reinforcement anyway.
If Protoss was to be nerfed in this fashion it would render 3 gate pressure and 4 gate rushes nonviable. As well as timings such as the 5 gate pressure off 2 bases versus Zerg as well as the 6gate. Any kind of early game pressure would be impossible. Essentially what I'm getting at is that ANY change to the offensive capabilities of Protoss would mean a completely disastrous metagame shift, we would be come the turtle race, because we were forced to, and we simply do not have the units and structures to do so.
The fact that the gateway is useless after warpgate is researched isn't a design flaw. Its the way our race works. You can't compare apples and oranges, every race is different, and I am absolutely STUNNED that posts like this are surfacing (and flourishing) in a time when Protoss is doing terribly.
All in all, nerfing warpgate and thereby Protoss is not the answer. There is nothing wrong with the mechanic, as it is a staple of the mechanics of our race. I would love to hear more specific criticism as to why it is actually overpowered (like what rush, for example). In my opinion, it is the only thing that makes Protoss even close to balanced.
Also a quick note: I say "remove" in the first part of this post. Let me clarify that. ANY change. I say again. ANY nerf to the warpgate mechanic will render the fragile Protoss early game units and timings impossible to use and execute, respectively. Warpgate doesn't have to be removed to destroy our race, it just has to be nerfed to destroy our race. QFT I can't believe what it is that is popular in the Starcraft 2 forums.PvP can't be imbalanced and expansions are more likely, PvZ and PvT need some figuring out but they're definitely not impossible. So it can't really be imbalance. At least, I think. The problem is that everyone likes to whine all day about SC2. GSL isnt good enough NASL doesnt give advantages to #1 spot MLG incontrol is still in pool play ETC, Everyone needs to relax. Blizzard did a fine job balancing the races and I want to see a substantial example that shows how warpgates directly lose the game for protoss because of the way they work.
You miss the point. This is not about how good Protoss is. It is about how well WG was designed. Read OP Pl0x
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I actually read the whole thing, good post by OP. I like the idea about the warpgates and gateways switch. I also thought gateways should have some kind of advantage when compared to warpgates. This would open up new plays for protoss. For example, players who would use gateways will be able to produce units quickly while warpgates are more for mobility.
Blizzard can actually play around with this idea though of course it will take some time and a lot of testing. Warpgates doesn't need to be changed but at least give a player some reason to use gateways instead of warpgates.
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On September 09 2011 11:39 Bippzy wrote:Show nested quote +On September 09 2011 10:47 xlava wrote:
I don't know why these threads keep flaring up, but let me tell you something as a Master Protoss. Removing warpgate from the race would break us completely. You should say goodbye to any of our timings, because our ONLY and I repeat: ONLY offensive abilities early game come from forcefields, and our TIMELY reinforcements.
Making any more changes to the offensive capabilities of Protoss warpins would break not only PvP and the entire dynamic of the matchup, but also neuter us offensively versus all the races. There is a reason why Terrans don't really reinforce when doing something like a 2 medivac timing, because if they could reinforce instantly, their cost effectiveness would spiral COMPLETELY out of control. Theres a reason Zerg don't get warpins, because the race uses the larvae mechanic and creep spread for almost instantaneous reinforcement anyway.
If Protoss was to be nerfed in this fashion it would render 3 gate pressure and 4 gate rushes nonviable. As well as timings such as the 5 gate pressure off 2 bases versus Zerg as well as the 6gate. Any kind of early game pressure would be impossible. Essentially what I'm getting at is that ANY change to the offensive capabilities of Protoss would mean a completely disastrous metagame shift, we would be come the turtle race, because we were forced to, and we simply do not have the units and structures to do so.
The fact that the gateway is useless after warpgate is researched isn't a design flaw. Its the way our race works. You can't compare apples and oranges, every race is different, and I am absolutely STUNNED that posts like this are surfacing (and flourishing) in a time when Protoss is doing terribly.
All in all, nerfing warpgate and thereby Protoss is not the answer. There is nothing wrong with the mechanic, as it is a staple of the mechanics of our race. I would love to hear more specific criticism as to why it is actually overpowered (like what rush, for example). In my opinion, it is the only thing that makes Protoss even close to balanced.
Also a quick note: I say "remove" in the first part of this post. Let me clarify that. ANY change. I say again. ANY nerf to the warpgate mechanic will render the fragile Protoss early game units and timings impossible to use and execute, respectively. Warpgate doesn't have to be removed to destroy our race, it just has to be nerfed to destroy our race. QFT I can't believe what it is that is popular in the Starcraft 2 forums.PvP can't be imbalanced and expansions are more likely, PvZ and PvT need some figuring out but they're definitely not impossible. So it can't really be imbalance. At least, I think. The problem is that everyone likes to whine all day about SC2. GSL isnt good enough NASL doesnt give advantages to #1 spot MLG incontrol is still in pool play ETC, Everyone needs to relax. Blizzard did a fine job balancing the races and I want to see a substantial example that shows how warpgates directly lose the game for protoss because of the way they work.
Posts like this one show how ingrained the mindset of balance is in these forums. I dont intend to be rude, or call you out, but the quick, hotheaded responses that you and others have made (that seem to make clear that someone either didn't read the original post, or misread it) only indicates that people have been deluded into thinking that balance is the only important thing to consider when thinking about this game.
Yes, balance is important. No, it is not of paramount importance: I would argue that design influences balance. If there were 2 Blizzards, one in a parallel universe, with the same quality of resources and time etc, we might see two completely different SC2s, but both fairly decently balanced. One might be more fun to play, more deep and rich strategically and mechanically. That is what Blizzard ought to strive for.
They have given themselves 2 "pit stops:" two expansions at which they can assess their car, hop out, change the tires, put in some new gas and change the oil. Lets hope they make these changes where they are needed.
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I think the only thing wrong is that there should be a reason why you should use Warpgates and Gateways. For example Gateways should be for better defense and Warpgates for better offence that is how they should be designed but, sadly it is not. how they are used is that Gateways are for proxies and 1st to 2nd unit at the start of the game and Warpgates are for everything else (defense and offence). I think that Gateway unit should get a buff of building 5 seconds faster or warpgates cooldown should be 5 seconds longer.
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This thread is a waste of space on the front page....
WG needs some work but this post is horrible...
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On September 09 2011 11:50 Rorschach wrote:
This thread is a waste of space on the front page....
WG needs some work but this post is horrible...
Given that I like the OP's idea ALOT and would just like him to answer my post with his thoughts (PLZ OPPP), what makes you say this??
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On September 09 2011 10:47 xlava wrote:
I don't know why these threads keep flaring up, but let me tell you something as a Master Protoss. Removing warpgate from the race would break us completely. You should say goodbye to any of our timings, because our ONLY and I repeat: ONLY offensive abilities early game come from forcefields, and our TIMELY reinforcements.
Making any more changes to the offensive capabilities of Protoss warpins would break not only PvP and the entire dynamic of the matchup, but also neuter us offensively versus all the races. There is a reason why Terrans don't really reinforce when doing something like a 2 medivac timing, because if they could reinforce instantly, their cost effectiveness would spiral COMPLETELY out of control. Theres a reason Zerg don't get warpins, because the race uses the larvae mechanic and creep spread for almost instantaneous reinforcement anyway.
If Protoss was to be nerfed in this fashion it would render 3 gate pressure and 4 gate rushes nonviable. As well as timings such as the 5 gate pressure off 2 bases versus Zerg as well as the 6gate. Any kind of early game pressure would be impossible. Essentially what I'm getting at is that ANY change to the offensive capabilities of Protoss would mean a completely disastrous metagame shift, we would be come the turtle race, because we were forced to, and we simply do not have the units and structures to do so.
The fact that the gateway is useless after warpgate is researched isn't a design flaw. Its the way our race works. You can't compare apples and oranges, every race is different, and I am absolutely STUNNED that posts like this are surfacing (and flourishing) in a time when Protoss is doing terribly.
All in all, nerfing warpgate and thereby Protoss is not the answer. There is nothing wrong with the mechanic, as it is a staple of the mechanics of our race. I would love to hear more specific criticism as to why it is actually overpowered (like what rush, for example). In my opinion, it is the only thing that makes Protoss even close to balanced.
Also a quick note: I say "remove" in the first part of this post. Let me clarify that. ANY change. I say again. ANY nerf to the warpgate mechanic will render the fragile Protoss early game units and timings impossible to use and execute, respectively. Warpgate doesn't have to be removed to destroy our race, it just has to be nerfed to destroy our race.
My friend, you clearly have not read properly what the OP said. At no point did the OP suggests 'removing' or 'nerfing' the warpgate or protoss. In fact, his disagreement with this standpoint is vivid in the conclusion:
The problems with Warpgate are many and far-reaching and I think that the OP’s article does a great job of explaining some of them. The real question is if blizzard addresses the real issue, and if they do, how they ultimately go about doing it. I am arguing for a solution that elegantly fixes the real problem instead of aggressively patching the perceived problem and causing damage to the rest of the game as a result. It doesn’t surprise me that the 1-1-1 came to prominence after the warpgate nerf: a clear example of a seemingly disastrous and unforeseen effect of one single change. Consider the numerous patches and all the other unintended changes introduced with each patch note.
He is against nerfs to the warpgate, but voicing problems that may warrant redesign. I think it would be good to understand the article properly first before crticising it
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I'm beside myself reading suggestions to nerf protoss while they are currently getting steamrolled in competitive play and high level ladder. If you took out WG, you'd HAVE to buff zeal/stalks and it would drastically change P's gameplay. Then a I'm sure we'd get another long-winded thread about how toss early units are too strong and Blizzard didn't think it through when they removed WG.
Really confusing thread.
Maybe you guys are frustrated because you aren't able to scout for pylons properly. Are you seeing a lot of OP pushes from P's in high-level play that only work because of forward pylons? Have you asked yourself if the pylon had been denied, would the push have worked? Would the P have lost? Are you now considering how risky big pylon-dependent pushes are? Have you also considered how hard it is for toss to come back from failed early-pushes?
Yea, maybe warp would be OP if pylons had like 400 hp and the range was longer or didnt need highground vision but as is i have no idea where you're getting the problem from. Link some high-level games where WG appears OP in non-mirror matches and then maybe we can discuss it.
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+ Show Spoiler +On September 09 2011 10:47 xlava wrote:
I don't know why these threads keep flaring up, but let me tell you something as a Master Protoss. Removing warpgate from the race would break us completely. You should say goodbye to any of our timings, because our ONLY and I repeat: ONLY offensive abilities early game come from forcefields, and our TIMELY reinforcements.
Making any more changes to the offensive capabilities of Protoss warpins would break not only PvP and the entire dynamic of the matchup, but also neuter us offensively versus all the races. There is a reason why Terrans don't really reinforce when doing something like a 2 medivac timing, because if they could reinforce instantly, their cost effectiveness would spiral COMPLETELY out of control. Theres a reason Zerg don't get warpins, because the race uses the larvae mechanic and creep spread for almost instantaneous reinforcement anyway.
If Protoss was to be nerfed in this fashion it would render 3 gate pressure and 4 gate rushes nonviable. As well as timings such as the 5 gate pressure off 2 bases versus Zerg as well as the 6gate. Any kind of early game pressure would be impossible. Essentially what I'm getting at is that ANY change to the offensive capabilities of Protoss would mean a completely disastrous metagame shift, we would be come the turtle race, because we were forced to, and we simply do not have the units and structures to do so.
The fact that the gateway is useless after warpgate is researched isn't a design flaw. Its the way our race works. You can't compare apples and oranges, every race is different, and I am absolutely STUNNED that posts like this are surfacing (and flourishing) in a time when Protoss is doing terribly.
All in all, nerfing warpgate and thereby Protoss is not the answer. There is nothing wrong with the mechanic, as it is a staple of the mechanics of our race. I would love to hear more specific criticism as to why it is actually overpowered (like what rush, for example). In my opinion, it is the only thing that makes Protoss even close to balanced.
Also a quick note: I say "remove" in the first part of this post. Let me clarify that. ANY change. I say again. ANY nerf to the warpgate mechanic will render the fragile Protoss early game units and timings impossible to use and execute, respectively. Warpgate doesn't have to be removed to destroy our race, it just has to be nerfed to destroy our race.
So you are saying you were able to read the OP and then respond in the fashion you did in a grand total of 8 minutes? Seems like you are missing the point...
Well mapped out, I do somewhat see the problem you are implying but True Balance...just a myth : |
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On September 09 2011 10:39 Knee_of_Justice wrote:
b) Allow the switch from warpgates to gateways and vice-versa to be chrono-boosted, providing an opportunity for a player to differentiate his strategy based on his expenditure of chronoboosts. This will also add a useful element late-game.
FWIW chronoboost does speed up the switch to and from warp gate. In the past it was actually more efficient to warp-in high templars switch to gateways and build a zealot then switch back and warp-in again as the warp-gate cooldown still ticked while in gateway form. They patched this out obviously intending the warpgate transformation to be a one way street for whatever reason.
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The warpgate mechanic is flawed and it ought to be fixed. More specifically, it ought to have been fixed in alpha, or at least beta, had blizzard been doing their job properly. But it was not. I don't want that to sound like I'm blaming them, but I do want to put the point on the table: blizzard did not think this one through very well.
Now we are in a situation where people dont really know what the process will be: do they patch it directly? Patch many things all at once? Patch something that counters it? Wait until an expansion to seriously rework it?
Whatever the situation turns out to be, I will suggest what I think are beneficial changes because I value constructive criticism, but first I would like to address some points that I see tossed around too much and with too little thought.
This portion is supposed to describe why it's broken. Instead you just state simply that it is and go on to ramble about who's fault it is or isn't and a long transition into the next topic.
Can you please just fucking say what is broken about it? Nowhere do you lay this out in plain terms. Were you alluding to it being different than the other races and therefore poor-design/unbalanced?
WTF is going on
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On September 09 2011 12:02 NewteN wrote:Show nested quote +The warpgate mechanic is flawed and it ought to be fixed. More specifically, it ought to have been fixed in alpha, or at least beta, had blizzard been doing their job properly. But it was not. I don't want that to sound like I'm blaming them, but I do want to put the point on the table: blizzard did not think this one through very well.
Now we are in a situation where people dont really know what the process will be: do they patch it directly? Patch many things all at once? Patch something that counters it? Wait until an expansion to seriously rework it?
Whatever the situation turns out to be, I will suggest what I think are beneficial changes because I value constructive criticism, but first I would like to address some points that I see tossed around too much and with too little thought. This portion is supposed to describe why it's broken. Instead you just state simply that it is and go on to ramble about who's fault it is or isn't and a long transition into the next topic. Can you please just fucking say what is broken about it? Nowhere do you lay this out in plain terms. Were you alluding to it being different than the other races and therefore poor-design/unbalanced? WTF is going on
It's pretty obviously a continuation of the thread he linked at the start of his post which does just that.
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On September 09 2011 12:03 Jaeger wrote:Show nested quote +On September 09 2011 12:02 NewteN wrote:The warpgate mechanic is flawed and it ought to be fixed. More specifically, it ought to have been fixed in alpha, or at least beta, had blizzard been doing their job properly. But it was not. I don't want that to sound like I'm blaming them, but I do want to put the point on the table: blizzard did not think this one through very well.
Now we are in a situation where people dont really know what the process will be: do they patch it directly? Patch many things all at once? Patch something that counters it? Wait until an expansion to seriously rework it?
Whatever the situation turns out to be, I will suggest what I think are beneficial changes because I value constructive criticism, but first I would like to address some points that I see tossed around too much and with too little thought. This portion is supposed to describe why it's broken. Instead you just state simply that it is and go on to ramble about who's fault it is or isn't and a long transition into the next topic. Can you please just fucking say what is broken about it? Nowhere do you lay this out in plain terms. Were you alluding to it being different than the other races and therefore poor-design/unbalanced? WTF is going on It's pretty obviously a continuation of the thread he linked at the start of his post which does just that.
So instead of restating the original thread's conclusion simply and then giving some un-seen prospective and addition information we essentially get something totally meaningless unless you read both novels? Is this OP producing some sort of insight that hasn't been introduced in the original thread addressing this 'problem'?
Holy shit.
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Warpgates are so integral to Protoss play that at this point messing with it would simply kill the race as a whole.
That said, warpgates were a terrible idea. Who thought it would be okay to put this into multiplayer? It's stupidly difficult to balance and feels out of place in Protoss lore.
The fact that they made it possible to switch back and forth from Warpgate to Gateway, instead of making the upgrade simply change all Gateways into Warpgates, convinces me this idea wasn't thought completely through.
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On September 09 2011 11:32 ImmortalTofu wrote:
The problem is... I love the solution that you are giving... Gateway/warpgate would open up a whole new WORLD of possibilities and new things to figure out for Protoss.... However, the flaw in this is that Protoss will be so far behind the other races in terms of understanding their race, and so most likely until HotS where all the races have to restart or heavily tweak their knowledge of the game, Protoss will not be competitive. (Off topic, but I'm kinda scared for HotS, because I don't want to see a whole new lineup of pros take the top spots, but back to the topic).
Additionally, Gateway units still have the underlying problem of being too weak to have to account for WG... Timing pushes with 4 gate would be nigh impossible to stop if they were buffed to account for the Hybrid WG/gate play (because of the fact that 4 gate relies on that burst of production, not on continued production), but at the same time, not buffing them at all still puts us at the perennial Ghost/Viking V Protoss Splash stalemate that Protoss always seems to be on the losing end of.
TO address the "non-balance discussion" thing. Blizzard balances this game mainly because it wants it to be successful as an Esport (and keep player base, but that is less big here). If one race suddenly became extinct at the top levels of play because of this (Imo brilliant) design change, the esport would decline by so much. Additionally, they would lose playerbase, as dedicated Protoss player watched their league drop and quit. Blizzard gains nothing from changing game design until AT LEAST HotS if not LotV, and so unless we can think of a way that changes design without demolishing metagame, and making us stronger (at first) as we learn the new changes, Blizzard has no reason (and the esport has no motivation) to make a change.
Yes, that is a good point, about being behind in terms of understanding their race. We have to assume that any radical changes (which I personally think are rather unlikely) would not be thrown into the game without careful testing, first in Blizzard's design meetings, then in a type of Beta or PTR, finally culminating in release. There will be a moderate version of this problem anyways, with the expansions, as you said, but I am inclined to favor long term development over short term tournament successes. Obviously, an ideal situation would be no balance changes, only metagame shifts.
Gateway unit strength is a very important thing to consider when making any changes. Very generally, I think that some protoss lategame strength should be redistributed towards gateway units. If you want my (uninformed, non-terran) opinion of terran, i think that some MM power should be redistributed to make mech more viable. Protoss has the tools for success, I think, but it needs to be carefully redesigned and rebalanced, Ex: vikings are good against colossi, warp prism/HT and Carriers.
The thing with your last point is, I dont think that Blizzard is making any effort towards using individual balance changes to gradually implement a grander vision, shifting balance and design slowly rather than monumentally. They are just fixing things that are a perceived problem now.
Think of renovating a house: you dont just rip up the foundations and start from scratch, you carefully do the roof and exterior, then move inside and take out the (non-weight bearing) walls etc etc. It is a gradual process and the structural integrity of the whole is at no point in danger. But changes are being made. The residents will experience discomfort, not only during the building phase, but afterwards too. However, in the long run, the result is worth it.
Blizzard is just fixing the roof when it leaks, which leads to a patchwork of fixes instead of the unified changes that we should want.
You have good points. My response is a very general: "long term over short term" and "gradual over abrupt, where possible." Hope you find that useful.
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United Kingdom20285 Posts
On September 09 2011 10:58 monitor wrote:
I am also shocked that the Warpgate is faster at producing units than the Gateway and it can warp in, so there is no reason to have a gateway. That's just bad design- they might as well remove gateways and balance the game from that.
In my opinion, they need to make the Gateway have faster build times than warpgates (maybe by like 5-10 seconds) so that gateways are better but can't be used for harass or reinforcements, thus creating a much more interesting dynamic. They might need to do some adjustments to balance early game then, but I doubt it would be a whole lot.
I think people are forgetting something...
With the original 40 second warpgate timing nerf, before blizzard lowered it to 20 seconds, they made zealots and stalkers build 5-10 seconds faster from non-warpgates as compensation. The result was protoss going 15 nexus vs both zerg AND terran and being completely safe from everything in the game, even 6pool/proxy, from what i heard from the ptr forums. The change was reverted in mere hours.
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On September 09 2011 12:02 NewteN wrote:Show nested quote +The warpgate mechanic is flawed and it ought to be fixed. More specifically, it ought to have been fixed in alpha, or at least beta, had blizzard been doing their job properly. But it was not. I don't want that to sound like I'm blaming them, but I do want to put the point on the table: blizzard did not think this one through very well.
Now we are in a situation where people dont really know what the process will be: do they patch it directly? Patch many things all at once? Patch something that counters it? Wait until an expansion to seriously rework it?
Whatever the situation turns out to be, I will suggest what I think are beneficial changes because I value constructive criticism, but first I would like to address some points that I see tossed around too much and with too little thought. This portion is supposed to describe why it's broken. Instead you just state simply that it is and go on to ramble about who's fault it is or isn't and a long transition into the next topic. Can you please just fucking say what is broken about it? Nowhere do you lay this out in plain terms. Were you alluding to it being different than the other races and therefore poor-design/unbalanced? WTF is going on
This, seriously and please OP if you are going to question the design of the game state your credentials. basically the OP boils down to:
"Hey, I don't like the WG mechanic, I think its badly designed. I will say that it was badly designed and poorly tested even though I don't have any proof beside it not being fixed because I think its badly designed. Some guys have presented a fix, I think its inelegant so... here is my fix"
And seriously, your fix is seriously more inelegant, badly designed(Hey, lets make a relatively simple mechanic into something complicated, that is good design right? Complicating stuff?)
Seriously, if you don't like the WG mechanic say it. Don't try to hide behind big words and long OPs that hide your lack of analysis. You don't provide a reasoning of why it is badly designed. If your proof of bad design is that protoss are doing badly you are just trying to boil down something pretty complex with many factors just to one.
Sorry if I come off as hostile, I am just tired of people endlessly complaining about stuff all day long and basically something pointless. If you think you can do a good suggestion e mail it to blizzard, or post it on their official forums, Or ask a job there, seriously the game is out, warpgate won't be changed radically until the expansion(if they change it at all).
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Edit: nvm I see it!
I agree with one thing: There should be a reason to use gateways. Whether it's simply a reason to wait to get warp a little later than the instant your core goes down, or a strategy which benefits from not even researching at all, it would be good.
Where I don't agree with you is where you think that the design of warpgates is inherently broken. There is no reason this mechanic cannot be balanced appropriately through cost, research time (which blizzard has already adjusted), implementation restrictions (reduced range on pylons) and the balance of gateway units to be warped in.
Also, I see no reason why protoss can't be balanced offensively (instant reinforcement) if zerg is going to be balanced defensively (mass units on demand).
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On September 09 2011 11:01 xlava wrote:I'm not re-reading it for a reason, sir. My point is in the bold. I am saying that any change, and honestly I don't care what it is, will remove a huge amount of utility from Protoss... Warpgate is a staple of the race. I and no other Protoss wants it removed. The design is genius and very well designed. I don't want to take a chance with any change that could potentially screw up warpgate. Please, if you don't think its overpowered, why do you think its badly designed? Because in most people's minds "badly designed" equivocates to either OP or UP. Show nested quote +On September 09 2011 10:58 monitor wrote:
I am also shocked that the Warpgate is faster at producing units than the Gateway and it can warp in, so there is no reason to have a gateway. That's just bad design- they might as well remove gateways and balance the game from that.
In my opinion, they need to make the Gateway have faster build times than warpgates (maybe by like 5-10 seconds) so that gateways are better but can't be used for harass or reinforcements, thus creating a much more interesting dynamic. They might need to do some adjustments to balance early game then, but I doubt it would be a whole lot. What??? Warpgates produce in the same amount of time, roughly, as every other races' main production structures. Are you kidding me??? A more interesting dynamic? You're saying that standard reinforcements is "more dynamic" than warping units into the fray? :O seriously? Can we please get some high level Protoss in here so that I'm not defending the entire race's sanctity by myself?
You're talking about balance, which is mostly the tweaking of numbers. The OP is talking about design, which is how the races work and how their mechanics are put together.
The design is genius , please do elaborate, we would all be very interested in your thoughts.
I and no other protoss wants it removed, I don't know where you read this, but this is nowhere mentioned. Also you cannot represent the wishes of every protoss.
in most people's minds "badly designed" equivocates to either OP or UP. Please do not attempt to represent any other person than yourself. Badly designed does not, in anyway, mean OP or UP.
You don't seem to see how warp gates are badly designed, I'll attempt to explain it to you:
1. Gateways weren't meant to exist in SC2, the only reason they do is because if warp gates are available right away P would be OP. This makes gateways obsolete past the 5 min mark (something like that). You know this is bad design if you also imagine that marines become completely useless past the 7 min mark in every game.
2. Warp gates are strong at reinforcing, which makes weak gateway units necessary, especially the stalker. Compared to the dragoon, it has much less hp and less damage. Sentries are good, but only with the help of multiple sentries can P hold off pushes from Z and T. Protoss heavily dependent on one unit = less options = bad design. Take a look at the bajillion openings T has.
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It seems to me that half of you didn't even read the op and just assumed it was a "WG OP, nerf plz" post. Nowhere does he ask for a nerf to Warpgate or even removing it. He is not even talking about balance but about design, which are two entirely different things.
You might also read the other Thread where problems with the warpgate mechanic are explained in detail and wether you agree with that or not, you could at least explain your opinions instead of just being hostile to the op.
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At least 3 distinct posters who replied to this thread seems to have just seen "warpgate broken. make gateways better." and just assumed the OP was thinking warpgates imbalanced and start defending it like their child, with either no attention to the design standpoint or having the wrong impression of believing design = balance.
Since this is about design, I would also like to say that how good of a player you are does not influence the credibility of your opinions.
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Its quite simple to justify why SC2’s design is bad.
Example 1: PvT.
- Protoss is a-move race.
- Terran is difficult to control, but more rewarding if you manage to play properly.
So we have Dilemma:
- If you make terran stronger, PvT is ok on casual level but Terran-favored on pro level.
- If you make protoss stronger, PvT is ok on pro level but Protoss-favored on casual level.
Game doesn't work with casuals and pro-scene at the same time.
Example 2: Early game favors terran, late game favors Zerg and Protoss.
Game is asymmetrical. It forces terran to cheese or allin.
Example 3: Blizzard designs units according to rock-paper-scissors principle, then puts a unit which literally counters 90% of units in the game (marines). Thats just bad.
And these are only obvious flaws.
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I thought the OP's point is that there is no point to using Gateways, and I find this to be true.
Once Warpgate is researched, there is no benefit to having Gateways at all.
If Gateways offered some sort of advantage, then they wouldn't just be seen as the prerequisite of Warpgates anymore.
On September 09 2011 12:54 bokeevboke wrote:
Its quite simple to justify why SC2’s design is bad.
Example 1: PvT.
- Protoss is a-move race.
- Terran is difficult to control, but more rewarding if you manage to play properly.
So we have Dilemma:
- If you make terran stronger, PvT is ok on casual level but Terran-favored on pro level.
- If you make protoss stronger, PvT is ok on pro level but Protoss-favored on casual level.
Game doesn't work with casuals and pro-scene at the same time.
Example 2: Early game favors terran, late game favors Zerg and Protoss.
Game is asymmetrical. It forces terran to cheese or allin.
Example 3: Blizzard designs units according to rock-paper-scissors principle, then puts a unit which literally counters 90% of units in the game (marines). Thats just bad.
And these are only obvious flaws.
We really don't need balance discussion in here. We're talking about the Design of Gateways/Warpgates.
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On September 09 2011 12:09 Knee_of_Justice wrote:Show nested quote +On September 09 2011 11:32 ImmortalTofu wrote:
The problem is... I love the solution that you are giving... Gateway/warpgate would open up a whole new WORLD of possibilities and new things to figure out for Protoss.... However, the flaw in this is that Protoss will be so far behind the other races in terms of understanding their race, and so most likely until HotS where all the races have to restart or heavily tweak their knowledge of the game, Protoss will not be competitive. (Off topic, but I'm kinda scared for HotS, because I don't want to see a whole new lineup of pros take the top spots, but back to the topic).
Additionally, Gateway units still have the underlying problem of being too weak to have to account for WG... Timing pushes with 4 gate would be nigh impossible to stop if they were buffed to account for the Hybrid WG/gate play (because of the fact that 4 gate relies on that burst of production, not on continued production), but at the same time, not buffing them at all still puts us at the perennial Ghost/Viking V Protoss Splash stalemate that Protoss always seems to be on the losing end of.
TO address the "non-balance discussion" thing. Blizzard balances this game mainly because it wants it to be successful as an Esport (and keep player base, but that is less big here). If one race suddenly became extinct at the top levels of play because of this (Imo brilliant) design change, the esport would decline by so much. Additionally, they would lose playerbase, as dedicated Protoss player watched their league drop and quit. Blizzard gains nothing from changing game design until AT LEAST HotS if not LotV, and so unless we can think of a way that changes design without demolishing metagame, and making us stronger (at first) as we learn the new changes, Blizzard has no reason (and the esport has no motivation) to make a change. Yes, that is a good point, about being behind in terms of understanding their race. We have to assume that any radical changes (which I personally think are rather unlikely) would not be thrown into the game without careful testing, first in Blizzard's design meetings, then in a type of Beta or PTR, finally culminating in release. There will be a moderate version of this problem anyways, with the expansions, as you said, but I am inclined to favor long term development over short term tournament successes. Obviously, an ideal situation would be no balance changes, only metagame shifts. Gateway unit strength is a very important thing to consider when making any changes. Very generally, I think that some protoss lategame strength should be redistributed towards gateway units. If you want my (uninformed, non-terran) opinion of terran, i think that some MM power should be redistributed to make mech more viable. Protoss has the tools for success, I think, but it needs to be carefully redesigned and rebalanced, Ex: vikings are good against colossi, warp prism/HT and Carriers. The thing with your last point is, I dont think that Blizzard is making any effort towards using individual balance changes to gradually implement a grander vision, shifting balance and design slowly rather than monumentally. They are just fixing things that are a perceived problem now. Think of renovating a house: you dont just rip up the foundations and start from scratch, you carefully do the roof and exterior, then move inside and take out the (non-weight bearing) walls etc etc. It is a gradual process and the structural integrity of the whole is at no point in danger. But changes are being made. The residents will experience discomfort, not only during the building phase, but afterwards too. However, in the long run, the result is worth it. Blizzard is just fixing the roof when it leaks, which leads to a patchwork of fixes instead of the unified changes that we should want. You have good points. My response is a very general: "long term over short term" and "gradual over abrupt, where possible." Hope you find that useful.
Thank you for that explanation of your point. It is a very good explanation, but I still would like to ask one thing. What do you think a change like this would do to Esports, and would THAT be worth it? Because esports is the main reason I've played SC as long as I have.
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Does anyone remember that thread comparing the ghost to HT, about the warpgate/barrack unit cycles, and how it is just reversed, how the Protoss gets their units at the beginning instead of the end of the build cycle, but the cool down is the same, where as the terran/zerg get their unit at the end of their cycle? I guess what I'm trying to say is that I feel that people don't understand that, which is why they are always wailing on how the warpgate is broken (regardless of design/balance wise) when it isn't. I personally feel that the design is fine as it is and if one extra warp in cycle can kill you within 30-40 seconds, something was seriously wrong with your macro, rather than the game being broken. As said before in another post, Zerg gets basically instant reinforcements with creep/larvae, Protoss gets warp-ins, Terran get stim, seems a bit fair in my opinion, (I'm talking about gateway units, because anything higher than that has to walk the distance, basically tier 1-1.5 units). Protoss can warp in your face, but let's be honest, you can kill everything while it's being warped in. If you guys are talking about how we can instantly reinforce inside your base, I think your problem is more of how the pylon got in there, rather than warpgates being not fair.
Edit// I guess I'm just wondering if anyone actually read that thread which talked about the design of the warpgate compared to the production facilities of the Terran/Zerg. It actually makes perfect sense design wise. I'd just like to emphasis, because of the offensive warp-ins, that is the reason why Protoss gateway units are so much more flimsy in comparison to others. (That is, when facing units of equal value with proper micro.)
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It's hard enough being a protoss. Seriously....
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So I've read the entire OP and I don't see any part of it that described WHY he/she believes that the warpgate is flawed. The OP asserts that it is flawed and proposes, then argues against, solutions to the problem that I don't see articulated.
For the OP: (I know there's no TL;DR)
What do you believe is flawed about the warpgate design?
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On September 09 2011 10:47 xlava wrote:
I don't know why these threads keep flaring up, but let me tell you something as a Master Protoss. Removing warpgate from the race would break us completely. You should say goodbye to any of our timings, because our ONLY and I repeat: ONLY offensive abilities early game come from forcefields, and our TIMELY reinforcements.
Making any more changes to the offensive capabilities of Protoss warpins would break not only PvP and the entire dynamic of the matchup, but also neuter us offensively versus all the races. There is a reason why Terrans don't really reinforce when doing something like a 2 medivac timing, because if they could reinforce instantly, their cost effectiveness would spiral COMPLETELY out of control. Theres a reason Zerg don't get warpins, because the race uses the larvae mechanic and creep spread for almost instantaneous reinforcement anyway.
If Protoss was to be nerfed in this fashion it would render 3 gate pressure and 4 gate rushes nonviable. As well as timings such as the 5 gate pressure off 2 bases versus Zerg as well as the 6gate. Any kind of early game pressure would be impossible. Essentially what I'm getting at is that ANY change to the offensive capabilities of Protoss would mean a completely disastrous metagame shift, we would be come the turtle race, because we were forced to, and we simply do not have the units and structures to do so.
The fact that the gateway is useless after warpgate is researched isn't a design flaw. Its the way our race works. You can't compare apples and oranges, every race is different, and I am absolutely STUNNED that posts like this are surfacing (and flourishing) in a time when Protoss is doing terribly.
All in all, nerfing warpgate and thereby Protoss is not the answer. There is nothing wrong with the mechanic, as it is a staple of the mechanics of our race. I would love to hear more specific criticism as to why it is actually overpowered (like what rush, for example). In my opinion, it is the only thing that makes Protoss even close to balanced.
Also a quick note: I say "remove" in the first part of this post. Let me clarify that. ANY change. I say again. ANY nerf to the warpgate mechanic will render the fragile Protoss early game units and timings impossible to use and execute, respectively. Warpgate doesn't have to be removed to destroy our race, it just has to be nerfed to destroy our race.
The problem isn't just that Warp-in is too powerful. The problem is that Warp-in is so powerful that basically every other aspect of the Protoss game had to suffer significantly for it to be balanced, and it's left the race in a pretty pitiful state.
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On September 09 2011 13:12 Zorkmid wrote:
So I've read the entire OP and I don't see any part of it that described WHY he/she believes that the warpgate is flawed. The OP asserts that it is flawed and proposes, then argues against, solutions to the problem that I don't see articulated.
For the OP: (I know there's no TL;DR)
What do you believe is flawed about the warpgate design?
I thought that at first too, but if you read the article linked at the top, you can assume the OP follows the same conclusion that the first author does.
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On September 09 2011 13:12 Zorkmid wrote:
So I've read the entire OP and I don't see any part of it that described WHY he/she believes that the warpgate is flawed. The OP asserts that it is flawed and proposes, then argues against, solutions to the problem that I don't see articulated.
For the OP: (I know there's no TL;DR)
What do you believe is flawed about the warpgate design?
This was what I saw as his in-depth discussion of why the warp gate was poorly designed:
2) Warpgates vs Gateways
This is such an obvious mechanic I was shocked when they didn’t include it. There ought to be some kind of interaction between these two structures. Whether that be delaying warpgate tech to make gateways more valuable early game, or allowing for some strategies/reasons for shifting between them, the gateway is a totally useless building after warpgate research, which is terrible design.
... and then talks about his ideas piece by piece. Seemed pretty clear to me.
As has already been pointed out, I think a lot of people are missing the point of his thread. If the thought running through your head right now is "OMG I'M UNDER ATTACK HE WANTS TO STEAL MY WINS", then you have not read enough of the OP or thread.
To OP:
This is a recreation of of the conversation I had when I first learned about Warp Gate tech in beta:
Friend: "Ya so, like, you can warp in units anywhere there is pylon power"
Me: "Oh sick! Like anywhere?"
Friend: "Ya, you can build pylons across the map and warp in straight there."
Me: "Holy crap that's awesome. So like, units take longer to warp in than build from gateways, right?"
Friend: "No"
Me: "Oh, well they cost more to warp-in, though, right?"
Friend: "No"
Me: "Uhhh..."
I chose protoss.
I completely agree with you about the confusion on this. It seems so ripe for interesting game play. I can imagine a protoss who leaves a bunch of his gateways to macro up an army at home, while microing around the map with just a few warp gates to reinforce for harassment. The game would feel so much more dynamic, IMO. The best part is it just creates a new set of decisions without taking any choices away.
A few posts ago someone mentioned the decreased build time for gateway units, and talked about how it failed in PTR because of too safe expansions behind solid pressure. I'm curious how this tension could be ultimately balanced after the design change. What do you think? I know the adjusting of cool down/build time was just one of your ideas, but I think it's the one that seemed the most intuitive and interesting to me, which is why I'm asking specifically about that one.
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I will never get why when you destroy the pylon that warping in unit, the protoss does not get penalized. This make NO SENSE....there should seriously be a penalty to such thing. It make sense in every logical aspect but yet protoss get a total refund....it doesnt make sense lore or from a logical perspective. You see the units die when the pylon destroyed/corpse...I always thought this would of been implemented.
Well to defend blizzard, I would say that they never intended for map to be big as they are now compared to blistering sands and steps of war. So honestly, it was never made to be as powerful as it is on small map as well as big maps.
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On September 09 2011 13:12 Zorkmid wrote:
So I've read the entire OP and I don't see any part of it that described WHY he/she believes that the warpgate is flawed. The OP asserts that it is flawed and proposes, then argues against, solutions to the problem that I don't see articulated.
For the OP: (I know there's no TL;DR)
What do you believe is flawed about the warpgate design?
This. I do not recall seeing a definition of what the OP thinks is actually flawed about the warp gate design -- I just skimmed it again to make sure -- please point me to this if it is there.
What I do remember seeing is a list of likes and dislikes for fixes to the problem. That is fine, and I find it useful in itself as a discussion point especially since it is a list after all and makes it easy to point to all of the different opinions on how to fix the warp gate design in the other thread. But it only hints at what the OP thinks might be wrong with the design -- I'm not sure he knows what he thinks IS actually wrong with it.
The thread accredited as the starting point for this thread outlines some symptoms of the problem of the warp gate design. I think that a definition of the problem of the design could be stated something like the following: "the problem with the warp gate design is that allows for overwhelming offensive capability too early in the game." Then the symptoms of units being weakened, the warp gate upgrade being lengthened, the lack of defenders advantage in an attempt to balance, etc. can all hint at how to fix the design problem, but the core problem itself needs to be identified first.
In my response to the thread accredited in the OP ( http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewpost.php?post_id=11296125 ), I talk about how the warp gate mechanic is not flawed in design per se, but rather a dumbed down, bastardization of the recall mechanic in Broodwar. Recall, however, was a tippy top tier ability (and still is in the form of mass recall from the mothership). With this in mind Blizzard has already designed weaknesses into the dumbed down version: requiring the power field, having the money to spend, having enough supply, waiting for cooldown, limited to number of warpgates, requiring an upgrade... did I get them all?
It may be in all of this that the ability is still too powerful despite the best efforts to balance it with other parts of the game and other parts of the game around it. That I cannot say. What I can say is that I do not think warp tech needs to be removed from the game as some sort of imbalanced mechanic. The mechanic is there in the game's history all the way back to pre-broodwar. It does however need to be balanced somehow and to have its place be justified as a tier 1.5 ability in such a way that does not make it overpowered, yet makes it the trademark Protoss mechanic it is. And so, I think your "design" argument at this point really boils down to balance, particularly, how do we make sure that its power scales properly as the game goes on.
If this is true ( http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewpost.php?post_id=11296230 ), then it really doesn't matter what we think about whether warp gate "should" be in the game. It is, Blizzard wants it there, AND there is still the historical precedent.
So simply trying to say this isn't a balance issue is silly and you are fooling yourself. Balance IS the issue. The *design* of the balance is the issue. The mechanic was not design, it was recycled from a game changing ability to a staple macro mechanic. Fine. What are you going to do about it to not be a game changer/closer? This is balance at this point. Sure you are "designing" the balance, but the mechanic of instant transport is already there.
Anyway, onto the OP's lists.
1) I too dislike the warp time as a function of distance. It is too complicated and not "Protoss" enough.
2) I dislike most of the extra limitations involving changes to pylons, or lack of unit shields on warp in, etc. The only one I do like, but not in a way that anyone has mentioned to my knowledge, involves tying the ability to warp prisms. But I think if this were to happen (and if Blizzard were to have their way about it remaining a core mechanic) then warp prisms would need to become more like overlords, and that too wouldn't feel very "Protoss". (or warp prisms would just have to become weird like my idea for them, but I think you might say it is not "elegant").
3) I do very much like the idea of a Shield Battery, either in its historical form, my revised suggested form, or some other similar form (like some cross between my idea and the original like having just a ton of shields like 500 and then just taking the shield damage of units in range. Hey! another idea!). This is *NOT* inelegant. This *IS* a simple solution that does not involve changing a ton of other things. And it is *NOT* a "new" building, it is simply recovering a building. Also, what calculation headaches could there possibly be? You plant it, it regens shields. Chrono? When does chrono effect energy? The original shield battery used energy to recharge shields. Chrono affects building shield regeneration, sure, but not energy. No headache.
4) Even with a Shield Battery I think there is room to tweak the timing/cost of the tech. Though I think that with something like a Shield Battery, having to do so becomes less of an issue, and might even allow the tech to go back to being an earlier upgrade (just the way Blizz wants).
5) I also think that it is silly to allow the gateway to simply be something that is upgraded permenantly, or at least something that has no advantage vanilla. While I don't want to make Protoss to Terran-y by making them have to mix and match and morph all over the place, I don't want to make them to Zerg-y either by having them only upgrade to something different (and "better"). I think there is room to make warp-in 5-10 seconds slower than gateway (and also to make P gateway units a bit stronger once again). One morphable building (that probably still won't be used in it's original form once upgraded) seems about right to remain Protoss-y.
While I don't think Shield Battery is necessarily the only fix, I think it is the key fix.
(I am not angry, but the more I think about this the more I'm convinced the answer is not in the warp gate mechanic itself but in the lack of the shield battery which actually makes a ton more sense in SC2 than it did in BW.)
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Canada11349 Posts
On September 09 2011 13:15 Stratos_speAr wrote:Show nested quote +On September 09 2011 10:47 xlava wrote:
I don't know why these threads keep flaring up, but let me tell you something as a Master Protoss. Removing warpgate from the race would break us completely. You should say goodbye to any of our timings, because our ONLY and I repeat: ONLY offensive abilities early game come from forcefields, and our TIMELY reinforcements.
Making any more changes to the offensive capabilities of Protoss warpins would break not only PvP and the entire dynamic of the matchup, but also neuter us offensively versus all the races. There is a reason why Terrans don't really reinforce when doing something like a 2 medivac timing, because if they could reinforce instantly, their cost effectiveness would spiral COMPLETELY out of control. Theres a reason Zerg don't get warpins, because the race uses the larvae mechanic and creep spread for almost instantaneous reinforcement anyway.
If Protoss was to be nerfed in this fashion it would render 3 gate pressure and 4 gate rushes nonviable. As well as timings such as the 5 gate pressure off 2 bases versus Zerg as well as the 6gate. Any kind of early game pressure would be impossible. Essentially what I'm getting at is that ANY change to the offensive capabilities of Protoss would mean a completely disastrous metagame shift, we would be come the turtle race, because we were forced to, and we simply do not have the units and structures to do so.
The fact that the gateway is useless after warpgate is researched isn't a design flaw. Its the way our race works. You can't compare apples and oranges, every race is different, and I am absolutely STUNNED that posts like this are surfacing (and flourishing) in a time when Protoss is doing terribly.
All in all, nerfing warpgate and thereby Protoss is not the answer. There is nothing wrong with the mechanic, as it is a staple of the mechanics of our race. I would love to hear more specific criticism as to why it is actually overpowered (like what rush, for example). In my opinion, it is the only thing that makes Protoss even close to balanced.
Also a quick note: I say "remove" in the first part of this post. Let me clarify that. ANY change. I say again. ANY nerf to the warpgate mechanic will render the fragile Protoss early game units and timings impossible to use and execute, respectively. Warpgate doesn't have to be removed to destroy our race, it just has to be nerfed to destroy our race. The problem isn't just that Warp-in is too powerful. The problem is that Warp-in is so powerful that basically every other aspect of the Protoss game had to suffer significantly for it to be balanced, and it's left the race in a pretty pitiful state.
This is what I find attractive about any sort of proposed changes to the warpgate. If you can no longer warp-in early game, then that helps Blizzard's balance problems with really early warp-in shenanigans. However, without warp-in, it gives justification to bump up the power of protoss gateway units, which in turn would allow scaling back some late game units like the Collossus (or maybe even early game sentry.)
Furthermore, I've always liked the concept of fast production gateways vs strategic warp-in reinforcements. It certainly could lead to a whole new aspect of play. (Commentators: "and Huk's changing all his gateways to warpgates! (as 15-20 gateways switch to warpgate.) He's going for the attack! Huk Waaarpiiing!)
Edit
Of course, the biggest issue I can see with these sorts of changes is how bad it'll mess up current Protoss strategies. As such, it would probably be better to change it for HoTS where everyone is going to have to relearn a bunch of things.
Second Edit.
I also disagree with the notion that getting rid of Warp Gate (or delaying it) makes Protoss too similar to Terran. BW Protoss was significantly different without wg.
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I honestly disagree with the concept that warp-gate is bad design(admittedly the lack of benefits for a gateway is somewhat weak.) I think that part of why SC2 is so interesting is the fact that all 3 races have interesting, non-standard mechanics. I think that, design-wise, giving one race the ability to negate defenders advantage, but also giving that race weak "Tier 1" units, is an amazingly complex and fascinating design concept. I think this is what you are unhappy with, but you don't really explain what the problem is in the section about "The problem of warp-gate mechanic".
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What you're talking about is major changes to the race and basically all of it's builds. I doubt something like this will be done before the expansion, also, making warpgate more expensive would make you have less defense doing a 1gate FE, so I suppose you also want to add gateways making units faster then warpgates, this , I feel, would mean that protoss zealot rush in PvP would be extremely hard to stop ( also hard in any other matchup)
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Here's my (slightly modified) idea to promote synergy and strategic variety between Gateways and Warp Gates.
-Warp Gate upgrade cost bumped up slightly to 75/75, and maintains the same research time.
-Warp Gate upgrade retains all current features, AND decreases Gateway unit build time by ~25% at Gateways (but not Warp Gates).
-Morphing a Gateway into Warp Gate: still 10 seconds
-Morphing a Warp Gate into Gateway: change to 5 seconds
In a sense, it would be like putting a permanent Chrono Boost on your Gateways (but not Warp Gates). In situations when you are playing defensively, the Gateway would clearly be your best choice and allow you to have a more significant defender's advantage. Since the Gateway build times still default at their normal times prior to the upgrade, it prevents super-early Gateway pushes from being overpowered (ex. 2 Gate Zealots vs Z), but allows for better and more efficient production post-upgrade, at the cost of not being able to warp in at a given location. This improved Gateway production time, coupled with Chrono Boosts, not only makes for a better defender's advantage but could potentially unlock some cool new timings for massing up on Gateways, morphing to Warp Gate and attacking to get the best of both worlds.
Granted, Protoss is my off race so my understanding of all the timings that you can be hit with in the early-mid game is not that great.
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The reason people think this is a sealth "WG OP" whine is that the suggestions given are all WG nerfs, and there is no mention of any compensation.
The OP linked a former discussion which talks about the variable of gateway unit viability, as related to WG design. The OP completely ignores this point, and only talks about toning down WG design.
Honestly, this does sound to me like a stealth whine thread. I read it and I'm still unclear on what the purpose of the discussion is. The OP seems to only mention a series of nerfs, disregarding the intent of the source material which he linked. The key variable - gateway unit balance - is not included in the OP's reasoning, and yet all the points are about WG being toned down.
I don't understand how he can fail to address that variable.
The OP seems like a discussion of the various flavors of WarpGate nerfs. It just conveniently bypasses the entire meat of the discussion of how to fix WarpGates while keeping Protoss viable.
The argumentation in this thread is platitudinous. It sounds deep, but it's ignoring the elephant in the room.
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My head might explode:
1) Are you certain Protoss gateway units are 'weaker' than their off-race counterparts because of WG tech? I don't remember I time when a nerf to gateway units was introduced because of of Protoss being too strong early, though I may be wrong. I DO remember a gateway/buildtime nerf.
2) The fact that WG allegedly make P harder to balance doesn't inherently mean the design is poor. Easy doesn't mean it's better. The design, frankly, adds significant depth to gameplay and is quite good.
3) I still see no direct link to P being underpowered do to WG existing (the inference being that gateway units are designed weaker b/c they can be warped). It's a pretty god damn sweeping generalization to say otherwise unless you start supplying builds that are impossible to stop and the direct reason is weak gateway units.
4) Kind of baffled that anybody thinks Blizzard was lazy/sloppy over balance. You know you're talking about Blizz right?
Also, f this thread I have no idea why i'm even bothering. Why the hell did you post this without any kind of new information than the other thread.
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BW:
Terran and Protoss both produce units from buildings, Zerg hatch units from a universal larva at the hatchery. The game is balanced around "cool shit, and then make the cool shit work" rather than "lets take out all the cool shit and make Age of Empires instead."
SC2 design team:
Browder: Hey I know, lets give all 3 races different macro rather than terran and protoss being the same like in BW!
Kim: Yeah! sweet idea! terran are humans and train in the barracks, and protoss are the super aliens, lets give them some different form of macro.
Browder: How about the ability to warp in anywhere? keeps up with their theme that they aren't "in" the base pre se, they're being teleported in.
Kim: Sounds cool, but its stupidly broken.
Browder: Ok, so how about if we only let them warp in next to a pylon like the buildings do. That both makes sense and it means you can't warp in right on top of your opponent.
Kim: But what if they cheese with like their initial probe and build a pylon before the enemy can build a barracks or spawning pool?
Browder: Hmmm, dunno, we might have to make it a research then so that you can't get it TOO early, put it in like the cyber core or something.
Kim: That sucks though because now people will whine about how gateways are strictly worse than warp gates when we didn't want them to exist at all, it was just a necessary evil to delay warp gates.
Some form of the above conversation almost certainly happened early in SC2 design. I don't think its poor design at all. If we could all stop whining about gateways and shield batteries now that would be nice.
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I agree with OP and I'm protoss. Having gateway unit costs 10% cheaper than warp ins or 10% faster would make for a more entertaining early game for toss. Right now zergs have different openers, terrans have different openers. But for toss the first 4 minutes is getting cybercore to start wg research. 9 pylon, 12 or 13 gate, 1st assimilator on 14 or 15, cyber on 17 or 18.
Other than avoiding cheese, an early zerg/terran worker scout is almost useless, cause we have to do pretty much the same thing every time until we spend our first 100 gas on wg research and a stalker.
This isn't about nerfing protoss. It's about having more than one attractive option. Right now warpgates have the advantage in build time, the same cost, and you can warp in anywhere. It forces every protoss to make the same choice, limiting creativity.
It's like if colossus had 3 times the dps and twice the health. They would have to balance the game around this by nerfing other protoss aspects, and we would be forced to go collo every time - it would make for a limited, boring race.
This design flaw isn't a huge deal. Protoss is still a fun race, and there are a lot of things we can play around with. The wg mechanic doesn't 'break' protoss. It's just something that could be improved on.
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I think Warpgate is too deeply ingrained in SC2 to ever be taken out or significantly changed. It's not necessarily a bad design choice - its just that the full set of consequences have not been accounted for. I wrote my article in the hopes of addressing the problems it creates so those can be balanced instead.
I don't have a firm opinion on whether or not warp is good for the game, since I haven't seen what happens with the alternative (a defensive option).
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The way I see the warpgate research being in an ideal world is this.
It should be researched purely when people need mobility and are willing to pay for it. It should not affect build times, it should not be a bargain upgrade that you can always take up, it should be an investment in the same way blink, robo tech or upgrades are. Currently there are no downside to getting warpgates, so there is no reason why anyone would decide not to get them, can you think of any other upgrade that is so guaranteed to be researched within a game, and always as soon as is technically possible?
My suggestion would be for the warpgate to have its cost changed to 200/200 and have no effect on build times, this way it would usually be researched around the mid-game after robo or twilight. Only if the player needs that extra mobility in the early game will they be willing to get the upgrade sooner due to its cost. It would no longer be the dumb-fire automatic upgrade to get after core, in that the player will have to choose whether they want to sacrifice a small part of their army & economy for a purely mobility-based upgrade.
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I always have a problem with the idea of "wait until an expansion to seriously rework it".
If they'd done their job right in the first place it wouldn't need reworking. Paying someone more money for making mistakes? That sounds like the banking bailout. They can make a patch that reworks it 'seriously' and give it to us. Why would you pay for something again when you should've gotten it before? Why would you pay for something when they have shown they have the proclivity to mess it up?
In short, why reward people for their mistakes? Why not withhold rewards UNTIL they fix their mistakes at no cost to the consumer? This is what allows shit to happen. Remember when games had to be as perfect as possible BEFORE they were released because patching didnt exist? What happened to consumers that they are willing to trade good money for a sketchy product, and sometimes even a downright crappy one, for their "fix" right now. Sounds like drug addiction to me.
I like the idea of pylons having energy on them though, and this energy is depleted by 50 per unit, has a 200 max, and as it is being built, starts with full energy.
thats a pretty simple and elegant solution. would require pylon spam, which would thus directly lower the amount of units the protoss can produce, or they can play with fewer to one proxy, and thus not have enough throughput.
And Warp Prisms still requiring no energy to spam units under with thus become a preference.
Fixes everything.
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On September 09 2011 11:01 xlava wrote:Show nested quote +On September 09 2011 10:56 Knee_of_Justice wrote:On September 09 2011 10:47 xlava wrote:
I don't know why these threads keep flaring up, but let me tell you something as a Master Protoss. Removing warpgate from the race would break us completely. You should say goodbye to any of our timings, because our ONLY and I repeat: ONLY offensive abilities early game come from forcefields, and our TIMELY reinforcements.
Making any more changes to the offensive capabilities of Protoss warpins would break not only PvP and the entire dynamic of the matchup, but also neuter us offensively versus all the races. There is a reason why Terrans don't really reinforce when doing something like a 2 medivac timing, because if they could reinforce instantly, their cost effectiveness would spiral COMPLETELY out of control. Theres a reason Zerg don't get warpins, because the race uses the larvae mechanic and creep spread for almost instantaneous reinforcement anyway.
If Protoss was to be nerfed in this fashion it would render 3 gate pressure and 4 gate rushes nonviable. As well as timings such as the 5 gate pressure off 2 bases versus Zerg as well as the 6gate. Any kind of early game pressure would be impossible. Essentially what I'm getting at is that ANY change to the offensive capabilities of Protoss would mean a completely disastrous metagame shift, we would be come the turtle race, because we were forced to, and we simply do not have the units and structures to do so.
The fact that the gateway is useless after warpgate is researched isn't a design flaw. Its the way our race works. You can't compare apples and oranges, every race is different, and I am absolutely STUNNED that posts like this are surfacing (and flourishing) in a time when Protoss is doing terribly.
All in all, nerfing warpgate and thereby Protoss is not the answer. There is nothing wrong with the mechanic, as it is a staple of the mechanics of our race. I would love to hear more specific criticism as to why it is actually overpowered (like what rush, for example). In my opinion, it is the only thing that makes Protoss even close to balanced.
Also a quick note: I say "remove" in the first part of this post. Let me clarify that. ANY change. I say again. ANY nerf to the warpgate mechanic will render the fragile Protoss early game units and timings impossible to use and execute, respectively. Warpgate doesn't have to be removed to destroy our race, it just has to be nerfed to destroy our race. Well I dont blame you, it is a huge article, but you missed my point. I am not suggesting that it is overpowered at all, or underpowered. This is the language of Balance, not Design. I want to move beyond that. I am suggesting that it is poorly designed, one of the effects of which is that, as you put it, our "ONLY offensive abilities early game come from forcefields, and our TIMELY reinforcements," among other things. I am trying to indicate where I think they went wrong, but also what can be done to fix the problem. I am not suggesting turning protoss into terran. I am not suggesting nerfing warpgate. I am assuming that any "nerf" as you call it (I would prefer to call it a design change), will be balanced by a "buff," such that if warpgates are moved up the tech tree, something would be done to compensate for that change in the early game. Sorry to not be clear. Please re-read and get back to me. :D I'm not re-reading it for a reason, sir. My point is in the bold. I am saying that any change, and honestly I don't care what it is, will remove a huge amount of utility from Protoss... Warpgate is a staple of the race. I and no other Protoss wants it removed. The design is genius and very well designed. I don't want to take a chance with any change that could potentially screw up warpgate. Please, if you don't think its overpowered, why do you think its badly designed? Because in most people's minds "badly designed" equivocates to either OP or UP. Show nested quote +On September 09 2011 10:58 monitor wrote:
I am also shocked that the Warpgate is faster at producing units than the Gateway and it can warp in, so there is no reason to have a gateway. That's just bad design- they might as well remove gateways and balance the game from that.
In my opinion, they need to make the Gateway have faster build times than warpgates (maybe by like 5-10 seconds) so that gateways are better but can't be used for harass or reinforcements, thus creating a much more interesting dynamic. They might need to do some adjustments to balance early game then, but I doubt it would be a whole lot. What??? Warpgates produce in the same amount of time, roughly, as every other races' main production structures. Are you kidding me??? A more interesting dynamic? You're saying that standard reinforcements is "more dynamic" than warping units into the fray? :O seriously? Can we please get some high level Protoss in here so that I'm not defending the entire race's sanctity by myself?
Warp gates produce units only slightly slower than Zerg units before adding larva production rate. Add larva production rate, and warp gates produce units FASTER than Zerg.
2 hatcheries of injected larva produces the same number of roach or hydra Or Higher tech unit as 4 warp gates. Add on chronoboost which halves the cooldown time, and in two production cycles, a Protoss creates units twice as fast. it takes 40 seconds to create 4 larvae, or 13 seconds for one to be created by the hatch. 40/4 = 10 per larva. so an ultralisk is actually 70+10. an infestor is actually 50+10. a roach is actually 27+10 (which turns out to thus take longer than non chronoboosted stalkers).
On September 09 2011 10:58 monitor wrote:
I am also shocked that the Warpgate is faster at producing units than the Gateway and it can warp in, so there is no reason to have a gateway. That's just bad design- they might as well remove gateways and balance the game from that.
In my opinion, they need to make the Gateway have faster build times than warpgates (maybe by like 5-10 seconds) so that gateways are better but can't be used for harass or reinforcements, thus creating a much more interesting dynamic. They might need to do some adjustments to balance early game then, but I doubt it would be a whole lot.
The warp gate was the intended end result, the lengthening of the research for it was a process to stop some very early overpowering all-ins, because the production speed of warp gates is better than the other two races. If it wasn't, the timing wouldn't have been nerfed. However, you also cant remove the higher rate Or warpgates without making protoss obsolete and weak. Its a gimmick the race relies on until deathball status.
if its lengthened again, protoss will start complaining that they cant perform any viable standard push in the early game, and then they'll know what its like to be zerg.
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Simple fix for warpgates: make them build units slightly slower than gateways. Warpgates will still be advantageous in many situations, or in general because of the "get units at the beginning of the production cycle instead of the end" system that a cooldown creates.
It would be nice to see players switch between gateways/warpgates depending on the situation, which is a nice tactical thing to see from a spectator's point of view.
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i think warp gates are messy design. it feels like a lot of units had to suffer because warp gate was so damn good. Tech times also had to be increased for warp gate units because warp gate allows you to get the thing immediately when the tech was done.
The reason the shrine takes 100 seconds is because the instant the shrine is done you can get DT's. Warp gate gets the feel like the inhibit the race from being more "full". Gateway based armies feel like they can't throw their weight around. It also removes the lovely aspect of catching reinforcements. Warp gates just feel like they allow toss to do so many things but have a really tough strong aggressive units. Warp gate allow you to reinforce instantly, but are often really bad in small engagements. They allow you to defend a far away location or a location without units instantly. It allows toss to skimp on things like defense. But even with all these advantages that warp gate allows it still feels "bleh"
without warp gate perhaps stalkers could have more range, or be stronger, perhaps zealots could be faster with more health. I don't know what is needed for warp gates to work. but i feel warp gate takes out a lot of the dynamic movement and positioning of armies.
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The value of the first page of posts combined doesn't even start to match up to the OP's post. Everyone replying with "you can't remove warp gate, it will BREAK THE GAME" obviously did not read the post; they just saw "warpgates" and "balance" and did a kneejerk reply. I'm a protoss player, and I think that warp gates have been a consistent excuse to make gateway units other than the sentry garbage for their cost.
The sentry and warp gates are the only two things that let protoss pressure in the early game, and guess what? They're getting figured out. They don't promote standard, stable play; they're just crutches designed to hold up the terrible stalker and mediocre zealot. Forcefield (all micro denying spells, for that matter: fungal stun removal and concussive shell nerf) needs to be removed, gateway build times should match warp gate build times (be made faster), warp gate requirements should move up the tech tree and protoss gateway should be BUFFED ACCORDINGLY.
Give us increased stalker damage/attack rate, with PROPER upgrade scaling, and maybe a slightly faster zealot, so that we'll finally be able to do timing attacks based on something other than warp gates and sentries (because really, find me an early pressure build that doesn't rely on one, or both, of these mechanics, ignoring cheese like DTs and cannon rushes). Then maybe we can come up with other cool stuff, like making manner pylons mid-battle in place of forcefield.
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On September 09 2011 10:39 Knee_of_Justice wrote:2) Warpgates vs Gateways
This is such an obvious mechanic I was shocked when they didn’t include it. There ought to be some kind of interaction between these two structures. Whether that be delaying warpgate tech to make gateways more valuable early game, or allowing for some strategies/reasons for shifting between them, the gateway is a totally useless building after warpgate research, which is terrible design.
Some examples of changes:
a) Make the warpgate cooldown longer and keep the warp-in time the same (5 sec), while keeping the gateway build-times the same
This allows gateways to be the most efficient way of producing units, (less clicks, but also faster in terms of build time) although they still have to walk to their locations. It means that an all-gateway player will always out-macro an all-warpgate player. But the a player with warpgates may be able to out-maneuver his opponent, or administer surgical strikes with a few warpgates while still macroing. It may also lead to delicate calculations about where the proxy pylon has to be in order for the bonus from warpgate to be beneficial and may provide an advantage on specific maps (large, lots of cliffs, etc).
This is the elegant solution, surrounded by the (bolded) supporting reasons. One of suzy's main points was that the warpgate leads to a surrendering of the defender's advantage (rally distance). By encouraging players to keep their gates standard, you can regain that strategic edge.
The PTR showed everyone that this was entirely true, and that it was actually too true. Such a change in mechanics must be re-balanced with the appropriate adjustments to unit strength or training time, or whatever. Blizzard had found the solution, but didn't seem to understand just how big a change it was.
On September 09 2011 15:40 Falling wrote:
Furthermore, I've always liked the concept of fast production gateways vs strategic warp-in reinforcements. It certainly could lead to a whole new aspect of play. (Commentators: "and Huk's changing all his gateways to warpgates! (as 15-20 gateways switch to warpgate.) He's going for the attack! Huk Waaarpiiing!)
This is a staggeringly awesome scenario. Adds so much strategic decisiveness to the offensive warp-in.
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Sorry, you forgot the most popular and best suggestion:
Switch and/or adjust warpgate and gateway cooldown times to increase strategic variety and make warping in an actual tradeoff choice (you sacrifice a little cooldown for its benefit).
Would you address that suggestion?
I am a professional designer and I do not think the warp gate mechanic is fundamentally flawed. The above suggestion would fix the issue.
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As I mentioned in the other thread, I think pylons should have energy that is consumed when a unit is warped in its power grid. I think 25 energy per unit would be good (pylon would start with 25 or 50). This will preserve the defender's advantage of faster reinforcement while not completely destroying the proxy warp-in.
On top of this, why not give an upgrade (maybe researchable at cyber?) that will give pylon the ability to cast the shield battery regen skill using its new found energy.
I think this idea makes the most sense really. You keep the warp-in attack advantage while allowing the defender to have an advantage without needing to do some clumsy build order incorporating early forge.
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On September 10 2011 03:06 Truedot wrote:
Add on chronoboost which halves the cooldown time
Chronoboost does not halve the cooldown time.
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Okay, went back, re-read it a few more times. I don't get it. Are you saying that the very mechanic of warpgate is flawed from a design standpoint? If that's true, is it UP or OP? Or neither? If it's neither, then I don't understand the problem.
"We have infestors puking up Infested Terrans in ZvP, I don't like that because it doesn't make sense." Is essentially what I'm getting out of this. You don't like the way it works because...it doesn't make sense?
O_o?
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I still cannot believe blizzard designed protoss as it is. Why the fuck does the gateway even exist? It's such a useless building and it makes me angry that they didn't think the warpgate/gateway relationship through.
REALLY poor design.
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On September 10 2011 05:46 mapthesoul wrote:
I still cannot believe blizzard designed protoss as it is. Why the fuck does the gateway even exist? It's such a useless building and it makes me angry that they didn't think the warpgate/gateway relationship through.
REALLY poor design.
Flipping cooldowns would fix this. Plain and simple.
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On September 10 2011 05:40 Kimaker wrote:
Okay, went back, re-read it a few more times. I don't get it. Are you saying that the very mechanic of warpgate is flawed from a design standpoint? If that's true, is it UP or OP? Or neither? If it's neither, then I don't understand the problem.
This thread's argument is predicated on the truth that you can have flawed design and be balanced. The OP is not making any statement about balance, and calling warpgate bad design.
If applied to, say, buildings, you can certainly see how something can be ugly as sin and still function just fine. Bad design, acceptable function.
The thread linked at the start of the OP goes further to say that warpgates are a balance problem as well (if i remember correctly).
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The basis for this and the original thread is the idea that warp ins mess with the concept of defenders advantage. I have to question that though, because proxy buildings for Terran do the same. If Protoss were able to automatically warp in anywhere (without a pylon) then of course there would be a problem. But there is some sacrifice required - Protoss needs to safely build and maintain a pylon somewhere far outside of their base. Of course, this is not equal to the sacrific involved in making proxy buildings, but I feel it's an important point.
Having said that, I agree that in practice the warp-in mechanic largely erodes the defenders advantage. Whether this is actually a problem or just a situation that is unusual for an RTS is open to debate.
I do however like the suggestion of gateways remaining valuable after warp gate research. I remember running some tests just after the game came out and coming to the surprising conclusion that there was no scenario where it was worth delaying warpgate in preference of pumping out of gateways. It shocked me - why not just put gateways on a timer whereby they switch over to warpgates automatically two and a half minutes after cybercore? That is essentially the scenario that the game design has created.
I also think increasing the warpgate cost is sensible. It would indirectly delay research time, while providing the player with the additional choice of whether to make the sacrifice of teching to warpgate early. Presently it's a no brainer (investing 50 minerals and 50 gas is not really 'teching').
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mmm i want to play protoss, but i overlook the cute button telling me i can warp in again all the time. Damn i want to que up like terran, or atleast like zerg, lets make a thread and tell everyone that warpgate tech breaks the game and should be removed. Thats what those threads sound like to me.
Anyway there is no need for discussing this, if you think about it for a minute you will realize that blizzard will never remove this mechanic or make it more complicated.
And warp gate mechanics switched from the alpha (remembers the time where warpin had no cooldown, the limit where the ressources) so imo they played it out enough to know what works, and taking away the offensiv part will take out the whole sense of the warp mechanics.
PS: this dark pylon thingie didn't make it past the alpha, you know what you want atm pylon with energy .
and to the ops bw comparsion, you seem to have forgotten marine range, medic energy, dragoon range, and zealot speed, hydra range and hydra speed. You can compare that to charge and blink and all the other nice things, since sc2 is easier to control, they could add more interesting micro abilities to the units, to shift the game away from pure mechanics to in battle tactics.
Which would have made bw to hard. (remember the units added with bw, having total awesome skills, but only the best of the best could use them to perfection without stacking up 5k ressources, and mostly they were unused, because macroing took to much time)
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On September 09 2011 10:58 monitor wrote:
I am also shocked that the Warpgate is faster at producing units than the Gateway and it can warp in, so there is no reason to have a gateway. That's just bad design- they might as well remove gateways and balance the game from that.
In my opinion, they need to make the Gateway have faster build times than warpgates (maybe by like 5-10 seconds) so that gateways are better but can't be used for harass or reinforcements, thus creating a much more interesting dynamic. They might need to do some adjustments to balance early game then, but I doubt it would be a whole lot.
not a bad idea tbh, would make early game gateway more able to hold stupid all in cheeses.
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As a protoss player, the fundamental problem I have with warp gate is the fact that it removes defender's advantage too early into the game. Defender's advantage has been a crucial component of RTS forever, and is instrumental in surviving early aggression and all-ins. Because warp gate allows protoss to create units right outside the opponents base and remove reinforcement distance, gateway units cannot be too strong otherwise early game would be broken. Hence the creation of the sentry and, more importantly, the forcefield to supplement the protoss army to not getting beat to shit by all other tier 1 units. This has resulted in the dependence on AoE in the form of colossus, psionic storm, and archons and the deathball becoming the "optimal" way to engage as protoss.
What I would change:
I would make warp gate a late game upgrade. Being able to traverse the map instantly should not be available at the 6 minute mark, that is just ridiculous.
Early gateway units, zealot, stalker, and sentry would obviously have to be buffed slightly, and I seriously mean slightly, to compensate for the decrease in production time.
As an opponent to anti-micro abilities, I think that forcefield should be replaced with another sentry spell, I personally would like shield recharge, much like the shield battery of brood war.
In order to not make warp gate too good when it arrives, I think the change from gateway to warp gate should cost minerals and/or gas, and the cooldown should remain the same as the build time, with the additional 5 second warp in being a cost for producing units on the other side of the map.
This would then also remove the dependence on the colossus, which could allow Blizzard to fix a large portion of the game considering the colossus has been the bane of all races since the beta.
Obviously, abilities such as blink and charge would have to be tweaked as well, but that's just a numbers game.
Not that any of this would ever happen, but I personally think it would improve the overall state of the game, though it would unsettle it while protoss is being refigured out.
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On September 09 2011 15:49 mordanis wrote:
I honestly disagree with the concept that warp-gate is bad design(admittedly the lack of benefits for a gateway is somewhat weak.) I think that part of why SC2 is so interesting is the fact that all 3 races have interesting, non-standard mechanics. I think that, design-wise, giving one race the ability to negate defenders advantage, but also giving that race weak "Tier 1" units, is an amazingly complex and fascinating design concept. I think this is what you are unhappy with, but you don't really explain what the problem is in the section about "The problem of warp-gate mechanic".
It's a problem because negating defender's advantage screws with the basic principles of RTS gameplay, with the basic principles of any strategy game even. You need to be really clever if you want to play around with that, and the SC2 designers clearly weren't clever enough. Brood War wasn't revolutionary, and neither is SC2, they're both fairly conservative games. Except for a few stupid decisions, like Warpgate or Spawn Larvae. If you're going to design a game as a prospective e-sport, you don't put in weird, experimental stuff, and try to balance it by tweaking numbers.
This is something a lot of SC2-only people, with no BW experience, simply do not understand. BW was such a good game because it had extremely conservative core gameplay mechanics. On a very basic level, the races are surprisingly similar, their production costs the same, their core units are equally effective in any given matchup, their economy grows at a similar pace. Everyone can do good drops, everyone has units that force detection, everyone has late-game spellcasters with area damage, everyone has a siege unit, and so forth. That's why the game is so good, because everyone has tons of options which interact with each other in cool ways.
On the other hand, it feels like SC2 designers looked at the races as if they were WoW classes or something. Classes in WoW have pronounced strenghts and weaknesses, and this is fine, because in any important situation you have a lot of them present, so they complement each other. In an RTS, it makes for terrible design. For example:
1. Terran is the harass race. Let's give them Hellions, Reapers, Dropships that heal, Banshees, you name it. Other races don't too much of that, cause they're not harass races.
2. Zerg is the macro race. Let's give them infinite larvae.
3. Protoss is the race with cool tech, and they already warp buildings in from somewhere else. Warpgates!
And so forth. It's cosmetics over substance. I would be shocked if anyone actually thought whether these would make for good gameplay in practice.
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I will try to address some of the main themes I've been seeing in your comments:
1) What is the point of this thread (a really good question, as it turns out, since I really didnt do a good job of explaining my main thesis)? This is just an OP whine thread in disguise.
2) Just what do I think is wrong with warpgates?
3) How will it affect esports?
4) If we redesign warpgates ("nerf") the game will be broken! Warpgate is too essential to the game to change.The Protoss will be too much like Terran. Too many changes!
Ill address 1) first.
My original point was to pick apart bad suggestions for fixes, to debunk suggestions thrown around on the forums all too frequently and repeated in threads all the time. Then I realized that to do that, I had to explain how I felt about design and balance. Then I wanted to suggest what I thought were good ideas based on those beliefs. Now it is something much larger and more intimidating than I wanted it to be.
My purpose can be summarized as this:
1) To remind people that design influences balance, and that something may be balanced, though not well designed. Balance often takes precedence to design on these forums and its a problem.
2) To give my own conception of design and balance
3) To specifically apply them to warpgates, and what their problems are
4) To discredit bad ideas and suggest what I think are better ideas. More than anything, I want my discussion of design and balance to take paramount importance in the discussion. My specific "fixes" are not meant to be the final word on the subject.
Let me try to address some of the other points by responding to various comments. I will also try to edit the OP for posterity's sake. This thread is reminding me how difficult it is to make a good post online: its like writing an essay, but unfortunately, my essay got too bloated and I guess I rushed it too.
On September 09 2011 15:11 HypertonicHydroponic wrote:This. I do not recall seeing a definition of what the OP thinks is actually flawed about the warp gate design -- I just skimmed it again to make sure -- please point me to this if it is there. What I do remember seeing is a list of likes and dislikes for fixes to the problem. That is fine, and I find it useful in itself as a discussion point especially since it is a list after all and makes it easy to point to all of the different opinions on how to fix the warp gate design in the other thread. But it only hints at what the OP thinks might be wrong with the design -- I'm not sure he knows what he thinks IS actually wrong with it. The thread accredited as the starting point for this thread outlines some symptoms of the problem of the warp gate design. I think that a definition of the problem of the design could be stated something like the following: "the problem with the warp gate design is that allows for overwhelming offensive capability too early in the game." Then the symptoms of units being weakened, the warp gate upgrade being lengthened, the lack of defenders advantage in an attempt to balance, etc. can all hint at how to fix the design problem, but the core problem itself needs to be identified first. In my response to the thread accredited in the OP ( http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewpost.php?post_id=11296125 ), I talk about how the warp gate mechanic is not flawed in design per se, but rather a dumbed down, bastardization of the recall mechanic in Broodwar. Recall, however, was a tippy top tier ability (and still is in the form of mass recall from the mothership). With this in mind Blizzard has already designed weaknesses into the dumbed down version: requiring the power field, having the money to spend, having enough supply, waiting for cooldown, limited to number of warpgates, requiring an upgrade... did I get them all? It may be in all of this that the ability is still too powerful despite the best efforts to balance it with other parts of the game and other parts of the game around it. That I cannot say. What I can say is that I do not think warp tech needs to be removed from the game as some sort of imbalanced mechanic. The mechanic is there in the game's history all the way back to pre-broodwar. It does however need to be balanced somehow and to have its place be justified as a tier 1.5 ability in such a way that does not make it overpowered, yet makes it the trademark Protoss mechanic it is. And so, I think your "design" argument at this point really boils down to balance, particularly, how do we make sure that its power scales properly as the game goes on.
What do I specifically dislike about warpgates? Why do I think they are poorly designed?
Well, I agree with many points raised in the thread that I linked at the start:
1) How cheap it is vs how powerful it is
2) How it negates the need for gateways (but theres still an option to switch back)
3) How long it takes due to various nerfs
4) How it gives you two effective production cycles of units for one, allowing very powerful pushes (the article talks about this more)
5) How early it comes (early game is the most volatile part)
As HypertonicHydroponic points out, I dont actually do a good job of explaining why it is poorly designed, not just what the symptoms of this poor design are. I will now attempt to explain myself.
1) Warpgate is too early in the game. By pushing it back, we can diminish some of the powerful early game pushes that happen because there is a lack of support units for the other team. If you give the other player a chance to get, for example, medevacs/vikings, mutas or colossi out, warpgate pushes are suddenly a lot less scary, just by changing the timing. This is what Blizzard has been trying to do by increasing the research time. Ive made this point a lot, but I should reiterate: warpgate hits at a particularly vulnerable part of the game.
2) Eliminates the need for gateways. The problem that particularly stands out to me here is that while some people insist that blizzard designed the game with the expectation that warpgates replace gateways, the troubling fact remains that warpgates are still allowed to switch back. If this is undesired, why is it still there? Blizzard has said that they are fine with some units not being used (akin to the scout in BW), but this is not a useless unit: it is a useless building, which is different because while there may be certain situations in which "useless" units, like the BW queen can be used to good effect, this has no utility whatsoever after warpgate research.
But why is this? Well, it is because warpgates are literally better in every way than gateways.
a) They give you the ability to turn minerals into units immediately
b) They do it faster overall, too (the cooldown + warp in time is still faster than a gateway)
c) They allow you to reinforce anywhere on the map, instantly, as long as there is a pylon there (pylons are cheap and build quickly)
d) There is no cost (besides a brief transformation) for transforming individual gateways into warpgates
Why is this a bad thing? Because it eliminates a fundamental aspect of RTS, which is rush distance/travel time. It was exceptionally bold to include this mechanic for that reason alone, not even taking into account the instantaneous nature of it and the buildtime discount. The fact that one race can instantly get reinforcements on the battlefield really influences the rest of the design of the game.
When you consider too the variety of units that can do this (two are basic warriors, one is a cloaked assassin with huge attack, and another is a frail caster with the ability to deal massive AoE damage or instakill other casters), the problems are compounded. You have to ensure that the base units arent so strong that instant reinforcements will overrun the enemy easily, that the cloaked assassin cannot appear *anywhere* too early or for too little cost, and that warp-in storms are not too powerful (which they probably were, but IMO, KA removal was a rushed decision).
In addition, the upgrade itself is cheap (50m/50g) and only really serves to make it so that it isn't present from the beginning of the game. This upgrade should objectively (as probably the best upgrade in the game) be harder to research. If you had never played this game, and I told you the points above, and then I told you the cost/accessibility of the upgrade, you would likely be skeptical and demand to know the downside.
3) With 2) in mind, we have to consider the effect on the rest of the race. Feel free to disagree here, but gateway armies have a lot of trouble engaging similar armies of Z and T at equal cost. Protoss really does rely on their forcefields and AoE to survive and come out evenly. This is the "deathball effect" and I dont really want to talk about it too much. Protoss tends to be very strong when they can get a good amount of sentries, templar/archons/voidrays and colossi supporting a big zealot/stalker ball. It is the powerful lategame units that allow the protoss to strike fear into the hearts of their adversaries, not the gateway units.
The commonly suggested Gateway/Warpgate split allows racial variety in that protoss will still have the ability to make strong pushes, but their overall production will be slowed down if they do so, whereas an all-gateway player will have faster unit producing structures, but will have to walk across the map. There is a lot of potential with this idea: warpgates dont necessarily have to be "second class citizens" to gateways; it would be better for them to be equally good, but for different situations, so that the player has a real and difficult choice to make. That is at the heart of a good macro mechanic, IMO.
If this is true ( http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewpost.php?post_id=11296230 ), then it really doesn't matter what we think about whether warp gate "should" be in the game. It is, Blizzard wants it there, AND there is still the historical precedent. So simply trying to say this isn't a balance issue is silly and you are fooling yourself. Balance IS the issue. The *design* of the balance is the issue. The mechanic was not design, it was recycled from a game changing ability to a staple macro mechanic. Fine. What are you going to do about it to not be a game changer/closer? This is balance at this point. Sure you are "designing" the balance, but the mechanic of instant transport is already there.
Lets look at a simple example: rock, paper, scissors is balanced: each faction has an equal chance to win. But there is little (if any) skill. It isn't that fun or interesting to watch either. We want to maximize these two things, and part of that process is ensuring that the person with more skill, practice and the better strategy comes out on top. We also want to maintain the balance. The opportunity for many viable strategies is important: just because there are a few viable strategies doesn't mean it's well designed. There should be a relationship between the various strategies that any race can do, such that one strategy/build may be inappropriate in "x" circumstance, but very powerful against the opponents "y" build. As I said, something can be balanced, but not well designed (ex: immortal). RPS is actually fairly well "designed," but it doesnt have the same responsibilities as an esport, so it isnt the best example.
Anyway, onto the OP's lists.
1) I too dislike the warp time as a function of distance. It is too complicated and not "Protoss" enough.
2) I dislike most of the extra limitations involving changes to pylons, or lack of unit shields on warp in, etc. The only one I do like, but not in a way that anyone has mentioned to my knowledge, involves tying the ability to warp prisms. But I think if this were to happen (and if Blizzard were to have their way about it remaining a core mechanic) then warp prisms would need to become more like overlords, and that too wouldn't feel very "Protoss". (or warp prisms would just have to become weird like my idea for them, but I think you might say it is not "elegant").
3) I do very much like the idea of a Shield Battery, either in its historical form, my revised suggested form, or some other similar form (like some cross between my idea and the original like having just a ton of shields like 500 and then just taking the shield damage of units in range. Hey! another idea!). This is *NOT* inelegant. This *IS* a simple solution that does not involve changing a ton of other things. And it is *NOT* a "new" building, it is simply recovering a building. Also, what calculation headaches could there possibly be? You plant it, it regens shields. Chrono? When does chrono effect energy? The original shield battery used energy to recharge shields. Chrono affects building shield regeneration, sure, but not energy. No headache.
4) Even with a Shield Battery I think there is room to tweak the timing/cost of the tech. Though I think that with something like a Shield Battery, having to do so becomes less of an issue, and might even allow the tech to go back to being an earlier upgrade (just the way Blizz wants).
5) I also think that it is silly to allow the gateway to simply be something that is upgraded permenantly, or at least something that has no advantage vanilla. While I don't want to make Protoss to Terran-y by making them have to mix and match and morph all over the place, I don't want to make them to Zerg-y either by having them only upgrade to something different (and "better"). I think there is room to make warp-in 5-10 seconds slower than gateway (and also to make P gateway units a bit stronger once again). One morphable building (that probably still won't be used in it's original form once upgraded) seems about right to remain Protoss-y.
While I don't think Shield Battery is necessarily the only fix, I think it is the key fix.
(I am not angry, but the more I think about this the more I'm convinced the answer is not in the warp gate mechanic itself but in the lack of the shield battery which actually makes a ton more sense in SC2 than it did in BW.)
Shield battery actually makes the most sense of all the "bad" ideas, IMO. What I was referring to with chronoboost was if you made it an ability on the nexus (thereby sharing energy with chrono). Im not inherently opposed to shield batteries (ie, in the expansions), it just seems like a temporary fix that overlooks the greater flaws of the warpgate mechanic.
On September 09 2011 16:15 Brotocol wrote:
The reason people think this is a sealth "WG OP" whine is that the suggestions given are all WG nerfs, and there is no mention of any compensation.
The OP linked a former discussion which talks about the variable of gateway unit viability, as related to WG design. The OP completely ignores this point, and only talks about toning down WG design.
Honestly, this does sound to me like a stealth whine thread. I read it and I'm still unclear on what the purpose of the discussion is. The OP seems to only mention a series of nerfs, disregarding the intent of the source material which he linked. The key variable - gateway unit balance - is not included in the OP's reasoning, and yet all the points are about WG being toned down.
I don't understand how he can fail to address that variable.
The OP seems like a discussion of the various flavors of WarpGate nerfs. It just conveniently bypasses the entire meat of the discussion of how to fix WarpGates while keeping Protoss viable.
The argumentation in this thread is platitudinous. It sounds deep, but it's ignoring the elephant in the room.
As I said, compensation is assumed. I don't want to redesign the race myself (I am not blizzard, they wont listen to me anyways), hence why I did not get into that. I am not suggesting breaking the Protoss race (why bother even thinking Im saying that?)
We have to know what to fix first before we suggest changes. My suggestions are very general and not at all meant to be comprehensive or final in any way. I am suggesting ways of thinking about the problem, ones that I find useful and instructive instead of rashly thought out. As it turns out, I think this mechanic needs a major overhaul, which is why it looks like I'm tearing the walls down, but sometimes, it is best to start over from scratch, keeping as many positive aspects as you can (warpgate has several).
Its not really possible to know for sure how to redesign stuff after you make one change because it would require redesign/rebalancing on many many other things, perhaps of the entire game. It probably sounds more dramatic than it is: they are releasing two expansions, so there is an opportunity for radical change if that is what they want. I think it is easier to say what is a generally bad idea, and then try to come up with better ideas.
On September 09 2011 17:37 susySquark wrote:
I think Warpgate is too deeply ingrained in SC2 to ever be taken out or significantly changed. It's not necessarily a bad design choice - its just that the full set of consequences have not been accounted for. I wrote my article in the hopes of addressing the problems it creates so those can be balanced instead.
I don't have a firm opinion on whether or not warp is good for the game, since I haven't seen what happens with the alternative (a defensive option).
Yes, I think that is a superb point. They are too ingrained in the game to be redesigned without major overhauls. I think they did have quite a few unforeseen consequences, or at least unforeseen since beta warpgate pushes. I think your general ideas are good, and probably the safest for Blizzard and esports: ideas like the shield battery (if it is tested and works). Again though, this is merely a band-aid solution, for without a true redesign, the problems that warpgates have now will always be present, possibly muted by balance patches, but possibly not. I think they have a few chances to get to the root of the problem and fix it, but if they dont take these opportunities, the weaknesses of the warpgate mechanic may cause problems later down the road.
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On September 09 2011 11:23 Knee_of_Justice wrote:Show nested quote +On September 09 2011 11:14 Zarahtra wrote:On September 09 2011 11:07 xlava wrote:On September 09 2011 11:03 Navillus wrote:
The most annoying thing about these threads is how spur-of-the-moment they are, I remember when there were like 4 threads saying that FORCE FIELD was OP because Idra lost to 1 person because a bunch of roaches were out of position and trapped with force fields, really people if Blizzard listened every time someone was sure that an aspect of the game was totally broken then we probably wouldn't even have the same races from one week to the next. Oh my god a voice of reason... Cruncher versus Idra TSL 3. Yeah I know that game. Everyone cried OP because Cruncher had some sick forcefields. Are we going to cry op when Demuslim crushes a Protoss @ MLG with a nasty stim timing and nerf stim again? Are we going to cry op when NesTea comes up with a devastating new ZvT build? Of course not, because this game is balanced. All crying op does is bring needless attention to something that should have never seen the light of day. I'm afraid I'm going to get banned for all my ranting, but understand how serious this is that Protoss Warpgate is not nerfed OR changed. Its why most of us play Protoss, and its balanced. No change is necessary. You are just being shortsighted. The point is not about if it's balanced, but if it offers good game play. Balance is totally irrelevant to that, since Blizzard is actively seeking balance(and map makers too). The question shouldn't be "Will toss be to weak if we change WG mechanic" but rather "Is there a reason to change WG mechanic, is it going to make the game better?"(and if so, is it going to make it better enough to warrant the change in the first place). Right, balance is not the issue here. Balance is a mindset that has infected this forum, taking the discussion away from design, which is equally as important. It is what made Broodwar so successful: each unit fit into a larger puzzle, so effectively that with few balance patches, it was relatively "balanced." It has its flaws, to be sure, but it also allowed the game to remain decently balanced, even through accidental "tricks" like muta stacking. Of course there are other factors, like maps. SC2 has a difficult job of emulating the predecessor while also striking out on its own. I think theyve done quite well but not perfectly. As Zarahtra says, design and balance combine to influence gameplay: we want to maintain balance, but change design so that it improves gameplay. People act like the way the game is *now* is the only way the game can or should be and that Blizzard is some omnipotent god who created SC2 from the swirling mists of chaos. They are a company composed of individuals who are just as flawed as everybody on these forums, including me. They created the game, they can fix it. This thread will be quickly lost, but the game will not be, especially if they take care to improve the game where it stands to be improved.
I, too, see this kind of attitude/belief. blizzard can do no wrong. IT messed up the game and needs more money for its expansion to fix what it failed to do in the first place? Well suuuure, here you go bliz, no need to actually produce quality the first time around, just make it flashy and we'll buy it. market it as the successor to brood war and we'll buy it, hype it like crazy and we'll buy it.
this is why Thomas Jefferson and other people warned against monetary giants.
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On September 10 2011 09:13 Truedot wrote:Show nested quote +On September 09 2011 11:23 Knee_of_Justice wrote:On September 09 2011 11:14 Zarahtra wrote:On September 09 2011 11:07 xlava wrote:On September 09 2011 11:03 Navillus wrote:
The most annoying thing about these threads is how spur-of-the-moment they are, I remember when there were like 4 threads saying that FORCE FIELD was OP because Idra lost to 1 person because a bunch of roaches were out of position and trapped with force fields, really people if Blizzard listened every time someone was sure that an aspect of the game was totally broken then we probably wouldn't even have the same races from one week to the next. Oh my god a voice of reason... Cruncher versus Idra TSL 3. Yeah I know that game. Everyone cried OP because Cruncher had some sick forcefields. Are we going to cry op when Demuslim crushes a Protoss @ MLG with a nasty stim timing and nerf stim again? Are we going to cry op when NesTea comes up with a devastating new ZvT build? Of course not, because this game is balanced. All crying op does is bring needless attention to something that should have never seen the light of day. I'm afraid I'm going to get banned for all my ranting, but understand how serious this is that Protoss Warpgate is not nerfed OR changed. Its why most of us play Protoss, and its balanced. No change is necessary. You are just being shortsighted. The point is not about if it's balanced, but if it offers good game play. Balance is totally irrelevant to that, since Blizzard is actively seeking balance(and map makers too). The question shouldn't be "Will toss be to weak if we change WG mechanic" but rather "Is there a reason to change WG mechanic, is it going to make the game better?"(and if so, is it going to make it better enough to warrant the change in the first place). Right, balance is not the issue here. Balance is a mindset that has infected this forum, taking the discussion away from design, which is equally as important. It is what made Broodwar so successful: each unit fit into a larger puzzle, so effectively that with few balance patches, it was relatively "balanced." It has its flaws, to be sure, but it also allowed the game to remain decently balanced, even through accidental "tricks" like muta stacking. Of course there are other factors, like maps. SC2 has a difficult job of emulating the predecessor while also striking out on its own. I think theyve done quite well but not perfectly. As Zarahtra says, design and balance combine to influence gameplay: we want to maintain balance, but change design so that it improves gameplay. People act like the way the game is *now* is the only way the game can or should be and that Blizzard is some omnipotent god who created SC2 from the swirling mists of chaos. They are a company composed of individuals who are just as flawed as everybody on these forums, including me. They created the game, they can fix it. This thread will be quickly lost, but the game will not be, especially if they take care to improve the game where it stands to be improved. I, too, see this kind of attitude/belief. blizzard can do no wrong. IT messed up the game and needs more money for its expansion to fix what it failed to do in the first place? Well suuuure, here you go bliz, no need to actually produce quality the first time around, just make it flashy and we'll buy it. market it as the successor to brood war and we'll buy it, hype it like crazy and we'll buy it. this is why Thomas Jefferson and other people warned against monetary giants.
Hey man, that's the optimistic scenario, where they've actually learned something from making SC2 and then patching it for a year. I'll gladly pay for an expansion that makes the game significantly better.
The alternative is that they've learned nothing, the expansion adds more unbalanced crap, and we spend the first 6 months of HotS watching Zerg win everything, and the new stuff they got slowly getting patched out and nerfed.
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On September 10 2011 06:38 Knee_of_Justice wrote:Show nested quote +If this is true ( http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewpost.php?post_id=11296230 ), then it really doesn't matter what we think about whether warp gate "should" be in the game. It is, Blizzard wants it there, AND there is still the historical precedent. So simply trying to say this isn't a balance issue is silly and you are fooling yourself. Balance IS the issue. The *design* of the balance is the issue. The mechanic was not design, it was recycled from a game changing ability to a staple macro mechanic. Fine. What are you going to do about it to not be a game changer/closer? This is balance at this point. Sure you are "designing" the balance, but the mechanic of instant transport is already there. Lets look at a simple example: rock, paper, scissors is balanced: each faction has an equal chance to win. But there is little (if any) skill. It isn't that fun or interesting to watch either. We want to maximize these two things, and part of that process is ensuring that the person with more skill, practice and the better strategy comes out on top. We also want to maintain the balance. The opportunity for many viable strategies is important: just because there are a few viable strategies doesn't mean it's well designed. There should be a relationship between the various strategies that any race can do, such that one strategy/build may be inappropriate in "x" circumstance, but very powerful against the opponents "y" build. As I said, something can be balanced, but not well designed (ex: immortal). RPS is actually fairly well "designed," but it doesnt have the same responsibilities as an esport, so it isnt the best example.
I feel like there is an important point here that you wanted me to get, but I'm stuggling to see how what you said responds to the quoted section. I'm going to give it my best shot though. I think you want me to see that the design of warp gate is flawed. You want me to see that by saying that in its current *form* it causes problems (like causing less strategy, etc.). What I was saying is that the "design" as you rightly want to separate from "balance" (to a degree, since at a certain point it becomes semantics), is not flawed. The "design" is simply: we want units to go from here to there instantly. Call it recall, call it warp gate tech, call it mass recall, call it drop pods, the design of the ability is not flawed. It is just an ability. And it has appeared in other games besides SC2, whether or not they were implemented well. What you are talking about being flawed, is really the implentation or the "balance" based around a certain goal. What I was saying, and maybe I didn't say clearly enough, is that you still "design" that balance part, and this is where you start to get semantics confusing the issue. All of the parts that I think have been rightly pointed out as symptoms of the problem with the "warp gate" implementation of the "here to there quick" ability can be dealt with in such a way as to preserve the goal of having a more accessible, less powerful version of BW's Recall. The implementation may look different after tweaking it to be balanced and clear up the issues generated, but that does not make the design of the "here to there quick" ability in its essence a flawed design. Are you saying that you do not think the "here to there quick" ability is at all possible to make more accessible and less powerful than a game changing(/ending) ability like in BW? I don't think you are. I think you are saying that the _insert semantic word here_ of the current implementation is flawed, to which I agree. Now the question is, what do we do to fix it.
I like the idea of having warpgate/gateway serve different tactical purposes, and I am all for having warpgate have some cost associated with it besides research time and cost like a greater cooldown, but I think that warpgate tech should still be better and *almost* always used over gateway with some perhaps important exceptions. The reason I say this, and do not see this as the most important point to fuss over when considering the flaws of the implementation is the fact that there really are no other upgrades in the game that you would want to revert back from. Once you have an orbital, would you not want to use it? Once you have Hive, would you just want a Lair? Once you have storm, would you not want to use it? I agree that it does not make much sense to have gateways be able to flip back and forth if there is no advantage in doing both at different times for different reasons (and maybe this is simply what needs to be changed, removing the gateway after warpgate tech), but neither does it make much sense to me to say that you would want to research a tech not to use it as much as possible.
On September 10 2011 06:38 Knee_of_Justice wrote:Show nested quote +Anyway, onto the OP's lists.
1) I too dislike the warp time as a function of distance. It is too complicated and not "Protoss" enough.
2) I dislike most of the extra limitations involving changes to pylons, or lack of unit shields on warp in, etc. The only one I do like, but not in a way that anyone has mentioned to my knowledge, involves tying the ability to warp prisms. But I think if this were to happen (and if Blizzard were to have their way about it remaining a core mechanic) then warp prisms would need to become more like overlords, and that too wouldn't feel very "Protoss". (or warp prisms would just have to become weird like my idea for them, but I think you might say it is not "elegant").
3) I do very much like the idea of a Shield Battery, either in its historical form, my revised suggested form, or some other similar form (like some cross between my idea and the original like having just a ton of shields like 500 and then just taking the shield damage of units in range. Hey! another idea!). This is *NOT* inelegant. This *IS* a simple solution that does not involve changing a ton of other things. And it is *NOT* a "new" building, it is simply recovering a building. Also, what calculation headaches could there possibly be? You plant it, it regens shields. Chrono? When does chrono effect energy? The original shield battery used energy to recharge shields. Chrono affects building shield regeneration, sure, but not energy. No headache.
4) Even with a Shield Battery I think there is room to tweak the timing/cost of the tech. Though I think that with something like a Shield Battery, having to do so becomes less of an issue, and might even allow the tech to go back to being an earlier upgrade (just the way Blizz wants).
5) I also think that it is silly to allow the gateway to simply be something that is upgraded permenantly, or at least something that has no advantage vanilla. While I don't want to make Protoss to Terran-y by making them have to mix and match and morph all over the place, I don't want to make them to Zerg-y either by having them only upgrade to something different (and "better"). I think there is room to make warp-in 5-10 seconds slower than gateway (and also to make P gateway units a bit stronger once again). One morphable building (that probably still won't be used in it's original form once upgraded) seems about right to remain Protoss-y.
While I don't think Shield Battery is necessarily the only fix, I think it is the key fix.
(I am not angry, but the more I think about this the more I'm convinced the answer is not in the warp gate mechanic itself but in the lack of the shield battery which actually makes a ton more sense in SC2 than it did in BW.) Shield battery actually makes the most sense of all the "bad" ideas, IMO. What I was referring to with chronoboost was if you made it an ability on the nexus (thereby sharing energy with chrono). Im not inherently opposed to shield batteries (ie, in the expansions), it just seems like a temporary fix that overlooks the greater flaws of the warpgate mechanic.
I do not like the shield battery at the nexus idea. I think if they want to SC2ize the shield battery and not port it directly, they should do something else with it.
I do not think that the shield battery is the fix for warp gates, and I never meant it to sound that way. It is hard to be clear about what one means when dealing with a multifaceted issue like this one. While I think we both agree there is a relationship between the trouble with balancing warp gate tech and a certain lack of defender's advantage for the protoss race, saying I think that shield battery is the "key fix" was meant as a fix to the protoss not having a defender's advantage part of the equation -- NOT the key to fix the warp gate implementation.
And yes, I get that warp gates allow two rounds of units in 35 seconds or whatever instead of the one round that T/Z would have similarly gotten, yadda yadda, but I do not think a few extra units are an adequate justification for a lack of a defensive structure like the Shield Battery, which, being a gateway tech building in BW could make a lot of sense SC2 to fill the defender's advantage void. Let's be fair -- while an extra round of units is great and while this is *one* of the elements of the defenders advantage, is that really a substitute for a repaired bunker or a transfused spinecrawler? It's not *just* about the units.
That said, while I'm fairly convinced that that will fix the defender's advantage part of the equation. I'm not sure exactly what is appropriate to fix warp gate tech. I would like to see stronger protoss gateway units (really just stalker to be more like dragoon in terms of firepower vs. armored since to me this is the real glaring change, but blink is also a factor in this balance issue, not just warpgate), and some resolution to the gateway/warpgate issue, but one thing that should be realized is that if you push back the warpgate implementation too much, then it becomes redundant with mass recall. At that point, you might as well just bring the arbiter back, and forget the "nerfed" gateway units only implementation of the "here to there quick" ability. So yeah, I don't necessarily want to see it pushed to robo or some other tech, but I think there needs to be some drawback to the current warp gate implementation. I don't know what that is, but I would agree that most of the solutions real or speculated to date are either silly or somewhat inadequate. I will think more about what the solution should be.
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On September 10 2011 05:40 Kimaker wrote:
Okay, went back, re-read it a few more times. I don't get it. Are you saying that the very mechanic of warpgate is flawed from a design standpoint? If that's true, is it UP or OP? Or neither? If it's neither, then I don't understand the problem.
This is exactly the problem that the OP talks about - people conflate balance with good design, and assume that if something is balanced, there must be nothing wrong with it. Imagine a scenario where every race had just 1 unit, and each race's unit had the same stats as the other race's units. The game would be boring as hell. It would be poorly designed, even though it were perfectly balanced.
The linked thread in the OP talks about how the warpgate mechanic was a major reason for the prevalence of 4-gate strategies in PvP, with the lack of defenders' advantage tipping the scales in favour of 1-base pressure builds. The OP makes the point that choosing to make warpgates is a complete no-brainer - if you don't research warpgates and convert your gateways as soon as you can, you are simply underperforming.
The argument being made is that changing the dynamic between gateways and warpgates, for example by simply making warpgates train units more slowly than gateways, would allow for far more strategic decisions (do I macro hard and produce units in my base, or do I macro fast, and have units in the field, right now?), which would make the game more interesting.
The same argument can be (and has been) applied to the colossus. Many people have complained at length about the fact that the reaver was replaced by an a-move herpaderp unit, but very few people think the colossus is imbalanced. They're complaining about the feel of the game, which is all down to design.
Any number-tweaking in terms of the power/cost/defence/build times of units and structures can be worked out after implementing the new design until things are properly balanced again. It might take a while to get the number right, but it's not a difficult process.
Actually because of how long it could take, I think HotS would be the perfect time to implement any changes like this. Every race will be undergoing changes at that time, simply due to new units, so if you're going to make players learn a slightly new mechanic, that seems an appropriate time to do it. Implementing warpgate changes during HotS beta would give people a long time to get used to them and to see how they play out.
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Aotearoa39261 Posts
"This is how I would change the game" thread.
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EPT
