EPTedit: The thread title should be "Could 4v4..." not "Does 4v4..."
I played BW years ago (2000-01) but recently became interested in competitive SC2 through MLG --- I play Halo and have followed MLG since 2007 --- and there's something I've wondered about for a while.
In Halo, there's a clear differentiation between 1v1 skill and 4v4 skill; some of the players who were best at FFA or 1v1 were not always great at 4v4. In general, I would say that most of the Halo community agreed that being good at 4v4 required more skill, because there are more factors to master. Just as SC2 takes more skill than Checkers because better players have more 'ways' to be better in SC2 (a huge skill gap for build orders, macro, micro, unit control, decision-making ...), 4v4 takes more skill than 1v1, because you have to take into account so many other teamwork-related factors (communication, more complex map positioning, etc.).
Obviously BW and SC2 have had occasional 2v2 leagues, but the community will often refer to this as taking a 'different' sort of skill, but not necessarily 'more' skill. But am I missing something in thinking that a 4v4 in SC2 would take more individual skill AND teamwork-related skill than a 1v1?
A match where IdrA, InControl, Machine, and DeMuslim played against HerO, Ret, Jinro, and TLO would require insane amounts of team strategizing/communication, coordinating pushes, coordinating build orders (maybe two players for each team would go heavy gas while the others didn't, etc.), coordinating units between races (figuring out which P units go well with Z units against an opposing team of T players, etc.); all of the metagame stuff from 1v1 would be even more insanely complex in 4v4, and would require even more skill, if developed.
Some might say that SC2 players don't have time to get good at both, they have to choose 1v1 or 4v4. But in Halo (well, only in Halo 2, when MLG had FFA/1v1 tournaments), a player had to be good at both; you need to learn a whole new set of strategies/skills for 4v4, and play in an FFA/1v1 and 4v4 tournament on the same weekend (usually the FFA/1v1 was on Friday). Obviously an FPS shooter has a lower skill ceiling than SC2, but why couldn't players do this for SC2?
Anyway, obviously this will never happen, lol ... but I'm just curious if I'm missing something. Would 4v4s in SC2 take more skill, or not? Like if maps were bigger, etc?
edit: ... so it turns out that SC2 is balanced around 1v1 and is not meant to be played seriously in 4v4. Is the problem that it's impossible to balance in 4v4? i.e., there are too many factors to control, and it's impossible to avoid imbalance? Or could there be a way to fix 4v4 (larger maps? ...) to make it more balanced? In a perfect world, if 4v4 could be balanced as equally as 1v1, would people consider this to require more skill?
