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On January 28 2008 11:42 GeneralStan wrote:
My bad Hamer, I didn't see your earlier post. You're an okay poster after all, with a reasonable objection to MBS. Can you forgive me?
Real reason I'm against MBS. Watch Sea v Darkelf at the Proleague Semis. After a game of starcraft both players are sweating! It really is hard work, and if you play harder you win. MIcroing better is good, so is strategically outhinking, but one of the hallmarks of Starcraft in my mind is that you can win games just by playing harder. I fail to see where that is possible with MBS, since the reptition of button pressing is a requirement to get that sort of intensity.
Unlimited Unit selection has to be there, though. I get really sick of watching pros fumble trying to move midgame armies around, not to mention how stilted late-game battles can become.
I've seen people sweat playing WC3 live too.
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On January 29 2008 18:58 BlackSphinx wrote:Show nested quote +On January 28 2008 11:42 GeneralStan wrote:
My bad Hamer, I didn't see your earlier post. You're an okay poster after all, with a reasonable objection to MBS. Can you forgive me?
Real reason I'm against MBS. Watch Sea v Darkelf at the Proleague Semis. After a game of starcraft both players are sweating! It really is hard work, and if you play harder you win. MIcroing better is good, so is strategically outhinking, but one of the hallmarks of Starcraft in my mind is that you can win games just by playing harder. I fail to see where that is possible with MBS, since the reptition of button pressing is a requirement to get that sort of intensity.
Unlimited Unit selection has to be there, though. I get really sick of watching pros fumble trying to move midgame armies around, not to mention how stilted late-game battles can become. I've seen people sweat playing WC3 live too.
I think if I was sitting up on stage, with millions of people watching me, representing my team in the semi finals of a massive tournament worth a LOT of money, I'd be sweating to.
As for the argument.
Its been pointed out before, and im going to point it out again. Time is a resource. A resource that starcraft has balanced out very well. You get into a fight, do you storm his troops, or try to micro your goons? You may not have time to do both, youve got a choice to make and it is that choice, along with how well you execute that choice that determines whether or not your a good player.
The same situation occurs with macro. You get into a fight. You have units that need microing and buildings that need macroing. You have to make a decision, you dont have time to do both. You have to sacrifice some things for others. Add MBS to this mix, and your choice is simple. Do both. Youve effectively destroying a massive area of RTS strategical thinking. Where is my attention required the most? Sometimes there will be a clearcut correct answer, sometimes there will be multiple options, with different people having different responses depending on their playstyle. An important part of starcraft was that your choices were very diverse. The diversities of choices allowed for different playstyles to develop, and also for strategy to evolve.
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MBS does NOT allow you to do both equally good. Thats exactly why I refer to Wrathlings post so often.
MBS removing Macro is debatable, that it makes it less frustrating/easier is not. If you look closely you will notice that Blizzard has added new Macroing aspects into the game already.
Protoss warp-in requires your production buildings to transform - that neesd attention. And depending how much Blizzard feels like it might even break hotkeys. Also there is the issue of the moving Cannons.
Terrans have to fly their buildings between the addons, also deciding what to scrap when is important for effective play.
Yes Blizzard should look what made SC good. That is the amazing balance between the completely different races. Anything else comes after that. Balance between Micro and Macro is nice but a community direction, look at competative games 5 years ago. That is not entirely Blizzards issue especially since Maps play a big role there.
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One could surely argue that the problem with not incorporating MBS is that some players would see that as a way of adding complexity to the game for the sake of complexity.
In fact, many arguments in this very thread use a kind of backward logic for justifying their dislike for MBS. "The interface should be hard to master, because it's good if it's hard to master." While this, in the grand scheme of things, could be what's "best" for the competitive game, it will surely make parts of the player base suspect that some of the lack of additions and refinements to the interface could be explained by a need to make the interface hard for the sake of making it hard (and rightfully so). This in turn, will make this part of the player base feel that they are fighting the UI more than they should have to, had the designers found other, more meaningful, ways of adding complexity to the game.
Indeed, this problem seems to be what Blizzard trying to solve with the new concepts for Terrans and Protoss. With the increased importance of Addons for the Terrans, they have begun exploring tactics of increasing complexity for the advanced players, while simultaneously catering to newcomers with additions like MBS. Same could be said about the Protoss new warp-in technology. Granted, neither of these things in their current form add enough complexity to the game to offset the macro that was lost - but they do hint at some potential.
Blizzard has always had the mantra "a minute to learn, a lifetime to master", and they seem to be aiming at enhancing this in StarCraft 2. With refinements to the UI, they are aiming to lower the barrier of entry for newcomers, while the addition of complexity for advanced players will try to insure that the game remains "hard" enough for the competitive scene.
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On January 29 2008 20:48 Unentschieden wrote:
MBS does NOT allow you to do both equally good. Thats exactly why I refer to Wrathlings post so often.
MBS removing Macro is debatable, that it makes it less frustrating/easier is not. If you look closely you will notice that Blizzard has added new Macroing aspects into the game already.
Protoss warp-in requires your production buildings to transform - that neesd attention. And depending how much Blizzard feels like it might even break hotkeys. Also there is the issue of the moving Cannons.
Terrans have to fly their buildings between the addons, also deciding what to scrap when is important for effective play.
Yes Blizzard should look what made SC good. That is the amazing balance between the completely different races. Anything else comes after that. Balance between Micro and Macro is nice but a community direction, look at competative games 5 years ago. That is not entirely Blizzards issue especially since Maps play a big role there.
Sigh, It seems that your deluding yourself just to justify your opinion. These features will help, but will not come close to what is going to be lost with MBS and Automine. MBS DOES allow you to do both, it takes almost no time and no attention to hit 6m throughout a battle.
As for macro not being important for spectators, havent you watched a game where armies clash, most units die, then the observer looks towards the remaining armies only to see one guy already pushing forward with a new group of troops. The crowds love that, and that is the essence of macro.
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Macro isnt hitting 6m.
Macro is remebering to hit 6m while focusing on your army, building a new command center, directing the newly built units, scanning the enemy base and building a new upgrade. Macro is multitasking, not hitting buttons fast (this is the argument of the anti-mbs not the pro-mbs), therefore it doesnt matter if you hit 6m or 1m2m3m4m5m6m, what matters is that you had to stop what you were doing to build units.
If you want to argue about time you are back to arguing that macro is nothing more than how fast you can hit 1m2m3m4m5m6m.
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On January 29 2008 21:59 Fen wrote:Show nested quote +On January 29 2008 20:48 Unentschieden wrote:
MBS does NOT allow you to do both equally good. Thats exactly why I refer to Wrathlings post so often.
MBS removing Macro is debatable, that it makes it less frustrating/easier is not. If you look closely you will notice that Blizzard has added new Macroing aspects into the game already.
Protoss warp-in requires your production buildings to transform - that neesd attention. And depending how much Blizzard feels like it might even break hotkeys. Also there is the issue of the moving Cannons.
Terrans have to fly their buildings between the addons, also deciding what to scrap when is important for effective play.
Yes Blizzard should look what made SC good. That is the amazing balance between the completely different races. Anything else comes after that. Balance between Micro and Macro is nice but a community direction, look at competative games 5 years ago. That is not entirely Blizzards issue especially since Maps play a big role there. Sigh, It seems that your deluding yourself just to justify your opinion. These features will help, but will not come close to what is going to be lost with MBS and Automine. MBS DOES allow you to do both, it takes almost no time and no attention to hit 6m throughout a battle.
I don´t demand that you agree with MBS but you should at least discuss it. Thats what the [D] means. You don´t give any reasons why MBS would destroy Macroing.
You said: "These features will help, but will not come close to what is going to be lost with MBS and Automine." WHY? and here: "MBS DOES allow you to do both, it takes almost no time and no attention to hit 6m throughout a battle." You still have not shown any flaws in Wrathlings post about Hotkey/MBS interaction outside of "delusion".
Hitting a hotkey during the battle is easy shure and hardly takes time. But you need to remember the context. Even with MBS it takes more than that.
You need to have hotkeyed exactly the number of buildings you need at the right position (unless all your production is in your starting base).
If you have 5 Barracks on the Hotkey but want 2 Marines (example!) you have a problem. Also there is no automatic production so you have to spend the same ammount of attention on production as before - you just can do it faster IF you predicted your needs correctly.
On January 29 2008 21:59 Fen wrote:
As for macro not being important for spectators, havent you watched a game where armies clash, most units die, then the observer looks towards the remaining armies only to see one guy already pushing forward with a new group of troops. The crowds love that, and that is the essence of macro.
You state the obvious and make it sound as if I said something different. I never argued anything about spectators.
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On January 29 2008 14:31 Phyre wrote:
Didn't read everything, just read a few pages and saw someone make the analogy about old school FPS games taking more skill than new school FPS games due to mouse aim. First thing that came to my mind was this:
How many people still play FPS games that don't support mouse look? Practically none, at least competitively. As far as I know there was no outcry about the new games "noobifying" the game. Now how many people still play Starcraft despite it's non-MBS UI and the existence of hundreds of newer, prettier, RTS games with very "smart" UIs? Tons of people still play Starcraft with it's older UI and many regard it as the only true "perfect" RTS game or at least the closest.
In both cases, the gaming community voted what they wanted with their participation. The days of non-mouse look FPS games are long gone but Starcraft is still alive and well. Better than simply "well", we joke about Starcraft being the national sport of an entire country. How many other video games can boast this? Very few. No other RTS and very few other games can claim the immortality that Starcraft can so Blizzard would do well to examine it closely for what makes it special.
Haven't you heard? Starcraft is a macro game now, nobody cares about micro since all tournaments are won by macro since its safer to play that way than to go with risky and fun micro strats, and since thats the winning strats now people think that thats all there is to sc progaming.
So, most current sc better gamers think that everyone using spells like boxer is fine since its not a big part of the game, but everyone building units like Iloveoov is not since it's the major game winner today.
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I think an intresting point was brougth up in the "repair science vessel thread". Why doesn't Terran players use restoration on their science vessels? It's a very logical thing to do since you are likely to have the medic and the energy and it would save you a lot of very important units.
Instead it was answered with: if you want to attack sacrifice the vessels, if your not going to attack shift-click scvs to repair them fully because just reparing a bit takes to much time and so does restoration.
I'd say keeping your units at full health is as much macro as building new ones is.
BW is full of these situations where units are simply not utilized because no one have time to use them properly. A spell caster has to be extremly powerfull to be usable, otherwise the time is better spent on other things.
Now look at the new units:
Immortal: Will require micro to figth against.
Stalker: Very micro intense unit.
Pheonix: Micro intense unit with very high demands for timing.
Warp Ray: Will require a lot of micro to use and to figth against.
Warp Gate: More macro intense version of the gateway.
Even pretty basic protoss units are getting more features, buildings and base managment is getting more features.
If players can't use some pretty solid spells features that are in bw (DA's feedback is a very good ability, so is parasite and ensare as well as restoration) because of time constraints how on earth are they going to be able to step it up and use all the new stuff in SC?
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What's the difference between attack move and blink move?
One is A + click, the other B + click, right?
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On January 30 2008 03:53 Klockan3 wrote:Show nested quote +On January 29 2008 14:31 Phyre wrote:
Didn't read everything, just read a few pages and saw someone make the analogy about old school FPS games taking more skill than new school FPS games due to mouse aim. First thing that came to my mind was this:
How many people still play FPS games that don't support mouse look? Practically none, at least competitively. As far as I know there was no outcry about the new games "noobifying" the game. Now how many people still play Starcraft despite it's non-MBS UI and the existence of hundreds of newer, prettier, RTS games with very "smart" UIs? Tons of people still play Starcraft with it's older UI and many regard it as the only true "perfect" RTS game or at least the closest.
In both cases, the gaming community voted what they wanted with their participation. The days of non-mouse look FPS games are long gone but Starcraft is still alive and well. Better than simply "well", we joke about Starcraft being the national sport of an entire country. How many other video games can boast this? Very few. No other RTS and very few other games can claim the immortality that Starcraft can so Blizzard would do well to examine it closely for what makes it special. Haven't you heard? Starcraft is a macro game now, nobody cares about micro since all tournaments are won by macro since its safer to play that way than to go with risky and fun micro strats, and since thats the winning strats now people think that thats all there is to sc progaming. So, most current sc better gamers think that everyone using spells like boxer is fine since its not a big part of the game, but everyone building units like Iloveoov is not since it's the major game winner today.
I'm not sure I understand how your post is answering mine, but I'll respond anyway.
You're saying that SC has evolved to the point where everyone values macro over micro as that is how you can most consistently win games correct? So if SC has survived so long with such great popularity and longevity perhaps that means that the fanbase wants a game that offers this sort of macro. There are plenty of other games that tried to push micro over macro and they failed to achieve what SC did.
As it stands, I believe SC offers a great balance between the influence macro and micro can have on a game. The constant demand of macro makes displays of micro while macroing that much more impressive to me.
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I think Blizzard should just add a 'cheat' in single player (like "Black Sheep Wall" or "Operation CWAL") that gave you MBS and smart casting and take them out of regular play. I know there are a lot of casual players who only played single player Starcraft anyway.
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On January 30 2008 04:38 BlackStar wrote:
What's the difference between attack move and blink move?
One is A + click, the other B + click, right?
You do 1 attack move and that's pretty much it but you make several blinks. Not to mention you have to be more specific in where you blink to, make sure all stalkers are in range and you will probably want to blink as much as possible while moving back during the cooldowns as well if your trying to outmicro something in a running figth. It's also likely that you'd want to blink stalkers individually a lot of the time like if your trying to blink up to siege tanks.
Also stalkers seems to be far weaker than dragoons are and have a sligthly lower cooldown time which means that they need to be microed more.
Regardless stalkers are more micro intensive than the unit they replace. I'd argue that Immortals would be as well since a key thing to figthing them will probably be to not use the tanks and similar stuff to shoot at the Immortals and instead target the things hiding behind them.
Well that or no one is going to be able to do that because no one have the required 1000 APM to pull something like that off and it goes down to just selecting the correct hard counter instead.
I'd much prefer if that was the norm and there was some extreme micro players out there who could target individual units instead.
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MBS Makes the game easier. People who are for MBS say that it helps them concentrate on micro but if players are truely good enough to micro/macro at same time then they should have the advantage where as the players who are for MBS that cannot do both simultaniously are at a dissadvantage.
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We are already very close to being able to achieve MBS without the feature being actually in the game. So we gain a couple seconds every time we queue up units... is that so terrible? I am neither pro nor anti MBS, I just do not think it will be much of a change.
Automining, however, is just lazy.
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On January 30 2008 06:48 Machine[USA] wrote:
MBS Makes the game easier. People who are for MBS say that it helps them concentrate on micro but if players are truely good enough to micro/macro at same time then they should have the advantage where as the players who are for MBS that cannot do both simultaniously are at a dissadvantage.
I want to see pro players restore vessels after a plauge. If players aren't good enough to have that kind of micro/macro at the same time they should be at a disadvantage.
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On January 30 2008 06:34 CuddlyCuteKitten wrote:
You do 1 attack move and that's pretty much it but you make several blinks.
How do you have to use only one attack move and several blinks?
Blink is just another way to move your units.
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Shure. I don´t see a problem there though. It only gets intense when you try to conserve the stalkers nonrepairable armor. It was in a battlereport from http://www.battlereports.com/, it was called the "rolling retreat".
MBS makes Macroing less frustrating/easier, nothing more. There is no real advantage over SBS, actuall performance/mental strain will be equall. I still found that on the MBS/hotkey example.
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On January 30 2008 04:59 Phyre wrote:
As it stands, I believe SC offers a great balance between the influence macro and micro can have on a game. The constant demand of macro makes displays of micro while macroing that much more impressive to me.
That's true, but, as Cuddly... wrote, there are disadvantages to the current SC UI.
These disadvantages are what pro MBS tries to get rid of, while anti MBS only cares about SBS's advantages.
The problem is that there exist several features in the game, like the Dark Archon abilities, the Queen abilities, or D-Web, or repairing vessels or units, or restoring units, which are very "hard to micro". This is just a nice way of saying the true fact: the players can't use these abilities because they have to invest so much time into macroing.
Do you see the problem here? Even the top gamers cannot use some of the game's features because they have to keep up with their macro.
This basically means that some game features are completely ignored and unused in general. If you are really ahead of your opponent, you can of course toy around a bit. But if it's a hard game with almost equally skilled players, you can't use them.
An addition like MBS will allow the gamers to use the whole array of potential strategies and tactics. This makes the game deeper.
Which is interesting, because anti MBS seem to be of the firm opinion that MBS will make the game more shallow, no matter what, no exceptions. What they don't seem to realize is the unused potential in the game. Which will probably remain unused simply because macroing takes so much time and effort that it's not viable enough to make use of it.
It might be used if you have 700 APM or more. But let's face it, no one is going to be that fast. I don't believe this is possible for humans. Which means that some features can't be used at all.
Which is different from sports or other games. Players should be able to use all features of the game. It doesn't really make sense to think of a competitive soccer player unable to do a header, or a basketball player unable to do a dunk.
It's not about IF, it's about HOW you can use these features. That's what makes you a good or bad player. In current SC, however, there are a lot of features completely off-limits to players. Just because of the enormous effort it takes to macro.
Yes, if you have less macroing to do, it could mean that the first few minutes of the game might be more boring and that games might take slightly longer. But with Battlenet enhancements like auto match making or how it's called you probably won't have to waste 10-15 minutes raping some noob, because you can avoid them more easily. You don't have to create "1v1 no noob" games only to have 10 noobs joining and waste 30-60 minutes of your time.
But less macro to do means also that you can spend more time in micro. And this time can be used for all those "too hard to micro" situations. There are quite a lot of them. Impossible tasks will be made possible (they will become very hard instead of impossible. They won't miraculously become easy, mind you. This sort of micro will be totally off-limits to noobs, and rightfully so).
Things will just shift a bit. Situations which are impossible to micro will become possible, but still VERY hard and only doable by pro gamers. "Hard to micro" will become "moderately hard to micro". "Easy to micro" will become "very easy to micro", this is the category I would suggest noobs benefit the most from, while pros won't have to care.
So nothing of this will affect the skill ceiling, because pros will just be able to do more things.
Anti MBS likes to say that "every noob will be able to show Boxer like micro". I think that this is an exaggeration. It's better to say that noobs will be able to do more things than they could previously. This might be seen as a disadvantage. But, my point is, that pros will be able to do more micro things too.
So, in the ideal case, this simply balances out. Pros will be able to do previously impossible micro tasks in the late game, while noobs will be able to do slightly better than just sending in their whole army to get slaughtered in 1 second, then being frustrated by the crude controls and so on.
Basically, the game might become more enjoyable for everyone.
Also, remember that things like maps, "game sense", timing and strategy are extremely important too. I would imagine that these skills are essentially that which makes the Korean pros so much better than the rest of the world. Several good gamers outside Korea have a lot of APM too, and can macro and micro pretty well. But they still lose against them.
The world doesn't consist of only micro and macro. These other skills are really important, and they are what sets truly great gamers ahead of the rest.
And let's definately not forget that MBS is, on the whole, just a minor issue. The pro players, who represent just a TINY percentage of the whole player base, are the only ones where it could be dangerous. But this danger is unlikely (IMHO) and has to show itself in testing the feature-complete version.
For almost all players, including basically all of teamliquid.net, MBS will be a non-issue, because we're all way too bad in macro and micro anyway!
Auto-mining is far more dangerous IMHO, because with it, the player doesn't even make the decision to send each worker to mine, the computer does that decision for the player and also executes it.
I, however, think that decision making should be left to the player. MBS doesn't interfere with decision making, the player rather makes the decision to "build 10 marines" 1 time rather than make the decision "build 1 marine" 10 times. It's just a useful improvement in my opinion. So MBS is an improvement rather than an extreme automation which plays the game for you.
The player must make all decisions, and must execute them. Executing these decisions should be as easy as possible though, which is why I'm generally pro MBS unless it's proven to be harmful.
Auto-casting would be the same as auto-mining, bullshit, but this won't be in (except for medics).
Smartcasting is something different and I think it's nothing bad. Although I don't know yet how it works exactly.
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Beef <3
Good post  I want you to make a Phantom Ums map for Sc2 when it will be released  !
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EPT
