EPT[D] MBS Discussion III - Page 15
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maybenexttime
Poland5569 Posts
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Liquid`Jinro
Sweden33719 Posts
On March 16 2008 23:38 eugen1225 wrote: Statements 1) 2) and 3) are not my views, but views i have seen a majority of ppl here have. Seeing how you comment on them, just proves me right.  The only thing you will bring to SC2 from SC1 will be your fundamentals (APM, micro/macro). Learning SC1 fundamentals is very easy. Stating that macro is a hard part to learn in fundamentals, and from that deducting that putting MBS in the game will make this very easy, is flawed as an argument. I love SC. Its the best RTS out there atm, but i have high hopes for SC2, and I'm sure it will surpass it. MBS will not ruin the game, it will not make it 30 times easier like a lot of you think. The pure clicking required to pull Macro off effectively is not that high. I can take any war3 player with an apm higher than 150 and i will teach him to Macro effectively in a week. The raw process is not nearly as complicated as some of you state, hence it cannot hold as an argument of simplifying this as a bad move and a game ruining one. No MBS = normal difficulty; with MBS = easy difficulty. It is not how you would like it to seem: no MBS = nightmare mode; MSB = uber easy mode. Uh you do realize that going from normal difficulty to easy is a HUGE step? IF MBS truly meant that, would be even more opposed to it than I am now. EDIT: Wooooooow, just read your first post. You've played 2 months and you think you macro 'very well'..... Of course macroing when there's nothing else going on isn't hard, putting it all together under pressure is what's hard. Add in MBS and there's a good chance it won't be as hard, as pretty much everyone from here who has played the game has said. No, they probably weren't playing the hardest opponents of all time, but you can't just dismiss their experience either, it has to be considered and tested carefully. | ||
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1esu
United States303 Posts
On March 16 2008 11:18 Fen wrote: A bunch of progamers have been given the special opportunity to play an upcoming blizzard game before everyone else in the world. They are not going to turn around and start baggin it out. That would just be spitting in blizzards face. Someone buys you a chocolate icecream. You would have rathered a vanilla icecream, but you dont complain about that. But if they then ask you "Next time I buy you an ice cream, what flavor would you prefer?", it is NOT a good idea to lie. Sog said that Dustin didn't receive any internal feedback on MBS at all from the progamers. If they really do hate it and think it will ruin the game like Tasteless says, but aren't telling Blizzard when they ask for feedback, then they're useless as testers. Blizzard can't get a good idea of the extent to which MBS needs fixing/removing if the progamers they bring in for testing are withholding information. | ||
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eugen1225
Yugoslavia134 Posts
"7. For the purpose of discussion in this thread, the term "Macro" takes the meaning given to it by StarCraft players. It means "Economy and Production Management", not whatever you think it should mean." This is macro, the raw clicking required to manage unit production and economy, according to the post starter (and his supporters) MBS will affect just this. The raw skill required to do this (only this, cuz we are not debating what we think macro is, OP stated that and wrote it in stone) is not high, its not difficult. Doing it under pressure is another thing entirely, and anyone who has played any rts (and was good) will have no preassure, and will be able to addopt to this outdated concept fairly quickly (i have, and there are a lot more competent and tallented gammers than me out there). when i said difficulty change from normal to easy, i was reffering to Management only, not the entire game. The raw clicking required to manage production and economy is a very small part of SC, denying this, and giving it more meaning would mean spiting on SC, devaluazing every other aspect of this fantastic game, reducing the value of strategies, the invaluability if timing, the importance of surprise, and every other aspect of the game. SC is a very complicated game, it has evolved beyond of its programers intentions, and became something groundbreaking and standard setting in this world. Stating that removing a small part of it (by introducing MBS) will ruin the entire concept, is verry insulting to both the game, its fans, and progamers who have skills beyond what most of us will ever have, and the reason they are so good is not because most of us cant learn to macro like them, its because their entire game is so close to perfection. Throwing all that aside, and stating Macro is most important, and simplifying this will ruin the entire game is just in my opinion wrong and insulting, to everyone. You overrate macro, this is the point i want to make. Its not that hard to pull out. Because from the definition of macro, we can asume that what units you produce is a part of another game ability (situation analyzing, strategy, adaptation to the enemy), macro is just a means to realizing this, an isignificant change. most bad players dont lose because they cant make units, its because they make the wrong amount or the wron unit alltogeather (and from the macro definition in the thread starters post, this is not part of macro). | ||
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maybenexttime
Poland5569 Posts
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eugen1225
Yugoslavia134 Posts
On March 17 2008 00:04 maybenexttime wrote: You've just pulled an unsuccessful strawman, sorry. No one's arguing that macro is APM demanding in SC or that it should be like this in SC2... We're talking about attention requirement... Attention requirement eh? Well you need to pay attention at what you should make, this is strategy. Macro is the tool you use to facilitate this, even if you can macro and play without MBS, if you make wrong units, you are still screwed. The attention requirement to make these hard choices, game deciding choices, are still the same. Its like in an martial art, you train and train in the fundamentals, learning proper positioning of the body untill this becomes second nature, so when you lets say fight you dont think is my leg positioned the right way, you dont think about it, its just your normal behavior, a routine. Same with macro, with enough practise (more like getting used to) it becomes something you don't even think about, you just know oh i need hydras here, look at resources, realise you have the cash, and then decide "Time to make hydras" and now macro takes over. if you need to press "4 s H" or "4 s h ; 5 s h" its not that big of a deal. If you are toss, just press F2 or double click 4 to move to your gates and start selecting and pressing, the old way requires a few more clicks, and is a bit harder, but not that much that its groundbreaking. On the other hand lets say we have MBS and you put all gates on one number, you realize you need 2 temps, 2 DT and rest zealots, how will you do this? You will eventually go back to the old way of clicking like in SC, you have to, cuz removing 2 gates from selection (cloning like) and then building will eventually take up more time than just screen to your buildings and press them SC1 style, MBS will not change this. The attention required to make the right units at the right time will be the same MBS or no MBS. I know my posts are long, but i like stating my arguments thoroughly, if my posts are annoying or disturbing, well i thaught i state my oppinion in this debate. An admin can just tell me I am out of line and to fuck off and i will. | ||
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Liquid`Jinro
Sweden33719 Posts
Macroing when there is nothing else going on is not hard. Macroing when you have to micro a couple of battles and expand at the same time, is. With MBS it becomes a lot easier to play 'perfect'. Good? Bad? Dunno until we can beta test it, but it's potentially bad, something the SC2 developers seem very aware of. Also, while the mechanical side of SC certainly isn't everything, why would I want to - possibly - make any aspect of the game worse (from a competitive standpoint)? I'm not die-hard against MBS, as long as it proves to work fine when they beta test it I don't care, but I disagree strongly with your opinion of it being an insignificant change. | ||
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BlackStar
Netherlands3029 Posts
On March 16 2008 20:26 maybenexttime wrote: Koreans will "liek wtf pwn" non-Koreans within couple months. That's because of their training schedules and techniques, because of salaries, and dedication. Gaming (professional for that matter) is not looked down on in Korea like it is in most other countries. Sure. But the game needs to be difficult enough so that 6 hours of practice a day actually pays off. Doesn't Moon practice as much as the SC people? And he loses to an inactive person? Imagine Testie winning WCG, beating the Koreans and everyone else, after a long inactivity. The reason Koreans are so good in SC has nothing, at least not directly, to do with the acceptance of society of esports, of course. | ||
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eugen1225
Yugoslavia134 Posts
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Centric
United States1989 Posts
On March 17 2008 01:32 eugen1225 wrote: Attention requirement eh? Well you need to pay attention at what you should make, this is strategy. Macro is the tool you use to facilitate this, even if you can macro and play without MBS, if you make wrong units, you are still screwed. The attention requirement to make these hard choices, game deciding choices, are still the same. Its like in an martial art, you train and train in the fundamentals, learning proper positioning of the body untill this becomes second nature, so when you lets say fight you dont think is my leg positioned the right way, you dont think about it, its just your normal behavior, a routine. Same with macro, with enough practise (more like getting used to) it becomes something you don't even think about, you just know oh i need hydras here, look at resources, realise you have the cash, and then decide "Time to make hydras" and now macro takes over. if you need to press "4 s H" or "4 s h ; 5 s h" its not that big of a deal. If you are toss, just press F2 or double click 4 to move to your gates and start selecting and pressing, the old way requires a few more clicks, and is a bit harder, but not that much that its groundbreaking. On the other hand lets say we have MBS and you put all gates on one number, you realize you need 2 temps, 2 DT and rest zealots, how will you do this? You will eventually go back to the old way of clicking like in SC, you have to, cuz removing 2 gates from selection (cloning like) and then building will eventually take up more time than just screen to your buildings and press them SC1 style, MBS will not change this. The attention required to make the right units at the right time will be the same MBS or no MBS. I know my posts are long, but i like stating my arguments thoroughly, if my posts are annoying or disturbing, well i thaught i state my oppinion in this debate. An admin can just tell me I am out of line and to fuck off and i will. Your argument doesn't hold. If I decide that I need two temps, two DT, and two zealots, with MBS you never even have to double-tap 4 for hit F2. You can keep your screen with the battle while maintaining production, due to the ability to bind buildings to a hotkey. Also, the fact is that although unit combinations matter, there are many points in the game where it is simply better to have ten units than no units at all. In SC, it is difficult (though apparently you do not think so) to micro your army while maintaining production at the same time. One of the biggest parts of SC is the micro/macro trade-off. You must sacrifice one for the other. You cannot have perfect micro with perfect macro. Do not even attempt to argue this. The incorporation of MBS helps to eliminate that trade-off, allowing you to always be producing (even if it's not the right unit combinations) while you're fighting. As for your martial arts example, as I said my post above, in any competitive sport, you still need to have the strength and endurance in your body to carry out the moves you want. I could have the greatest martial mind in the world, but without muscles, I would get my ass handed to me every time. The strength, speed, and endurance is what separates the top from the bottom, in any sport. I'm sure I could think of ways to break a zone defense in basketball, but unless I actually have the speed, strength, and height of someone like Kobe or LeBron, there's no way I'm going to be able to do that. Part of the concern about MBS is that it closes the gap. A competitive game or sport should not have the gap closed - it needs to be kept wide. Gap closers do the same thing to e-sports and sports alike, they just have different names. In SC we call it MBS. In sports we call it steroids. | ||
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BlackStar
Netherlands3029 Posts
On March 17 2008 02:07 eugen1225 wrote: I am trying to say that the game will be difficult regardless of MBS. Practice will still pay off, Sure. But it's about professional practice. Not about practice in the usual sense of the word. And professional practice is very unusual even in competitive gaming in general. SC2 should not just be a cool competitive game that requires practice to become good at. It should be progaming-viable. Mechanically it should be as hard as SC and strategically/decisionmaking-wise it should be more difficult. | ||
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BlackStar
Netherlands3029 Posts
On March 17 2008 01:32 eugen1225 wrote: ... you realize you need 2 temps, 2 DT and rest zealots, how will you do this? I made a post on this. With MBS the game has several ways to get a balanced army while being a lot quicker, multitasking friendly and easier than before. But remember, more units>balanced army. Not to mention that often you just need to reinforce your army rather than replace it. Or follow up the main attack. Therefore, you often need the fastest unit. If you can press 9z during a 200 vs 200 battle to produce 24 zealots rallied at the location of the fight, then this is A LOT better than not producing them and producing a balanced army by going back to your base after the battle. There isn't just one way to use MBS; the stupid way. You can use MBS intelligently. Sometimes you have a lot of time to macro, relatively speaking. Sometimes you have none. The reason SC is so macro heavy is because 'more units' are so much more helpful than 'good micro' in many situations. Not using MBS is like not using hotkeys. So go back and read my post. So all the units may be set up so that you need to mix them for the best army. But if the macro mechanics still force you to mass produce one or two, then what's the point? Then if you are going to add MBS, because it's such a good idea, then maybe add an additional feature to it that just makes you produce the preset unit on each production building. You can set a default unit for each production building. And if it's selected you can press 'b' to build it. You can even queue it if you don't have the resources for it. You put all your production buildings under a hotkey and then you just press 'b' for a full perfect macro cycle. I mean, we don't want a stupid interface improvement, right? We want an intelligent one. MBS is powerful but stupid. Shouldn't it be smart as well if it's so great? | ||
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1esu
United States303 Posts
On March 16 2008 02:49 Fen wrote: Yes I understand this and I do know that MBS will be part of starcraft 2. Now we move to the next part of the argument. If MBS is added for the purpose of helping the low-skill players, then we can implement the 1 unit producing building per hotkey limitation. Using hotkeys to build units from the battlefield is something that low-skill players generally do not do and will therefore not affect their game. However to the better players, the Starcraft style of having to go back to base to macro will be preserved. This is a win-win situation. Lesser-skilled players can build large armies with a few clicks, while as the skill level increases, this ability becomes less useful as hotkeying production buildings is required. Three problems with one-building-per-hotkey: 1) It's inconsistent. Considering that the main reason Blizzard implemented MBS in the first place was that it was standard enough that focus players were confused when they couldn't do it (according to Rob Pardo's GDC talk), what is the use of putting it in with an even more specific restriction on hotkeying that only applies to unit-producing buildings? SBS would make it harder for players of other RTSs to transition to SC2, but at least its self-consistent. 2) Which method of selecting buildings are you going to use? If you stick with shift-clicking, it will still take many clicks for lesser-skilled players to use MBS, undermining the point of including MBS in the first place in your words. If you change to double-clicking/ctrl-clicking, players will have to resort to SBS if they want to produce more than one type of unit out of the same type of building, which hardly helps lesser-skilled players. Plus, it will make post-hotkey unit production easy, as the player just needs to hotkey back to their base, ctrl-click a gateway, and press 'z' to order zealots out of all their gateways. Assuming the player always organizes their buildings in the same positions, this could probably be done fast enough that the break in attention becomes a non-issue. 3) It makes forward bases non-effective. One of the strategic pluses of MBS is that it allows the player to effectively produce from buildings at non-main locations (such as proxies or forward bases) in the late-game, thus making them viable strategic options. Making forward bases viable makes expansions more valuable, as it lets you build closer to the enemy, but losing the expansion becomes a loss in both economic production and productive capacity instead of just the former. | ||
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Seelys
France104 Posts
Neither do MBS or hotkey concern real noobs, it's a matter for people playing on a regular base. Of course these people won't rant on SC2 if SMS remains the norm. But they'll definitively feel something's outdated. It's not MBS only, it's the whole philosophy behind the UI at stake. Because the norm is presenting new features of rts UI, allowing more and more intuitive and transpartent control. Having the UI willingly hindered, won't be understood as a good choice, ever. It may be the most neutral, or cautious choice, but not the real satisfying one. And the next step should be ? The people catering most for the pro scene certainly foresee their favorite game in a distant future. But if for the second iteration of SC, the move is to stick with outdated UI format, what will be the third, the fourth releases? The same questions will arise, and if a proper answer hasn't been found, I doubt further evolution may possible, with now 15 + years of BW and SC2 behind us, and even more acute belief on what defines the perfect rts. The conservative vision of starcraft will be stronger as ever. When we think of a game like chess, we can argue that the rules are engraved in stone and don't need any, any alteration. People don't rant because there is no novelty involved in chess or other games. But these have been refined for centuries, travelled through various civilizations. Isn't thinking that after 10 years and some light fixes the perfect formula for SCish RTS is before our very eyes quite audacious ? Meh, I know that arguing for or against won't do any good, since the final decision is more of a gamble than anything else, theoricraft is like this. So let's propose for positive macro evolutions I'll take the SC definition of macro : "all actions required to build armies, gathering ressources included".My definition of "good" addition would be : "alternative actions enhancing macro objectives without strict necessity." Necessity will come of course from competitive environment. Existing : By making alternate patchs of blue/yellow minerals, map makers may force players to manually dispatch their drone on yellow for an early boost. Casual player won't have do this, and may rely on auto gather. There are some reports of manual upgrade system for the zerg. A good move. Pro will carefully use the options they need, casual won't have to, unless they want an edge. Propositions : Vespene eruption. On a regular basis, a geyser may enter eruption status, with output doubled, and 6/9 workers allowing perfect rotation. Eruption start is signaled to players and end occurs within a minute or two. Competitive players may want to shift they drones to havest more vespene and don't forget to send them to minerals when time has come. A la SupCom, production enhancement. VCS may be used to accellerate production rate with a sensible additional cost (+20% speed, +20% cost)Players in need will have to dispatch them among their factories, without forgetting to remove them depending of context. I don't have yet other ideas. But it's for the sake of presenting them. Of course , interratial additions are more welcome because they make balance simpler. But here's the idea : allowing people to do more to enhance their macro, keeping simplicity for the basic tasks. People should feel that they are outmacroed because they did'nt get enough attention to various specific additions, not because they couldn't keep the the pressure on a tedious limitation. In order to works, all these additions must be rewarding and somewhat risky : attention is a ressource that should wisely spent. | ||
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Bob123
Korea (North)259 Posts
 ) After all, it makes the game easier! | ||
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maybenexttime
Poland5569 Posts
On March 17 2008 06:28 Bob123 wrote: Maybe we shouldn't have multiple unit selection either ) After all, it makes the game easier!Maybe we should ban trolls... | ||
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yangstuh
United States120 Posts
On March 17 2008 02:32 BlackStar wrote: Sure. But it's about professional practice. Not about practice in the usual sense of the word. And professional practice is very unusual even in competitive gaming in general. SC2 should not just be a cool competitive game that requires practice to become good at. It should be progaming-viable. Mechanically it should be as hard as SC and strategically/decisionmaking-wise it should be more difficult. Why not make it mechanically easier than SC, but strategically/decisionmaking-wise harder than SC? That is if it is possible.. but it would seem that it would be with the new units/buildings/abilities in SC2? | ||
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BlackStar
Netherlands3029 Posts
It's the same as adding auto aim to Counterstrike 2. Computer games have traditionally been mainly about execution. Even more so in the case of RTS games, real time was added so that execution would be added as well. The execution difficulty of SC made it progaming worthy. Now, SC2 aims to do the same with the decision making, hopefully. I don't see why execution has to be easier. There is not a single good argument for that. You may argue that you want to replace one type of execution with a more appropriate one. But that's another issue. And we all know that micro can't replace macro. Even Blizzard realizes that now, while they didn't do at first. Not denying that maybe a purely decision making game would theoretically be better. But competitive games haven't advanced enough for that. And that's why I also play chess. There will always be RTS-like games where execution is tested. There may also be competitive turn based strategy games in the future. Or probably another genre of games somewhat related. But I just don't understand why one would add execution to the skills tested by a game that's supposed to be competitive and then level the playing field. If SC2 is going to test execution, then A+ progamers need to get an advantage over B- progamers. And that means it needs to be difficult enough. And that will 'hurt' those 60 APM players who played SC 8 years ago and never got into multiplayer but want to in SC2. But that can't be helped. | ||
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1esu
United States303 Posts
On March 17 2008 08:40 BlackStar wrote: Because decision making doesn't have enough depth to it to support a competitive game. It's the same as adding auto aim to Counterstrike 2. Computer games have traditionally been mainly about execution. Even more so in the case of RTS games, real time was added so that execution would be added as well. The execution difficulty of SC made it progaming worthy. Now, SC2 aims to do the same with the decision making, hopefully. I don't see why execution has to be easier. There is not a single good argument for that. The problem is, there's a certain limit to how well the human brain can multitask, and SC on fastest comes very close to that limit. You could model it like this: Time = Decision-making + Execution If you want to add more time-intensive decision-making features, you're going to have to simplify something else, or you run the risk of people ignoring those features because they don't have enough time to effectively use them. | ||
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BlackStar
Netherlands3029 Posts
Making decisions doesn't take time. Well, it doesn't take time away from playing. You don't stop playing to think about something. Adding more decision making skill or depth to the game doesn't mean you have to make something else easier. Let alone just to compensate. | ||
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