EPTMy thoughts on blizzards Macro Mechanics patch - Page 5
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Nuclease
United States1049 Posts
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Nuclease
United States1049 Posts
Completely stripping ANY feature that defines a major part of any game is probably not a good idea. It's in a beta, so the pendulum can still swing the other way, but I feel this will seriously degrade SC2 for a while. If the economy changes don't become incrementally less extreme, the races will need a new balance to give them back their unique identities and balance. For example, from the perspective of a Protoss player, I can say, as MorroW did, I am totally fucked if I forget storm for 15 seconds and get double medivac pushed by a Terran. There will be no way for me to recover that game. Now, I think this is bad because it actually stresses my build order and upgrade timing, etc. MUCH more than with Chronoboost. I don't mind that it's unforgiving because SC2 is unforgiving by nature. But now there will be a ton of Protoss players losing games just because they made a little BO mistake which seems awful for lower levels especially. I don't play Z and T but I imagine similar balance issues (whether they be OP or UP) can be described. On August 17 2015 08:12 Big J wrote: He says the game is balanced around mechanics and an infinite skill ceiling, which implies that races will always be equally hard to play when they are balanced*. I did not assume zerg will not receive any buffs in case my quick assumption is right (which it might not be to begin with obviously). I even said that. The point is that if we take this state as our base for balancing the game it will just turn out equally hard again once the game is balanced. Because balanced again equalls equally difficult to play*. *Why does balanced mean equally difficult if we assume balance around mechanics and infinite skill ceiling? Assume (1) The game scales with mechanical skill (2) The skill ceiling is infinite (3) The game is balanced Then in a game with equally good players (4) there cannot be a player that has it easier than his opponent. Proof: We assume the opposite and will try to find a contradiction. If so, then the above must be true. Assume one race's player has it is easier than the other. Since the skill ceiling is infinite (2) he can still get better until he uses as much skill as the opponent, because he is equally good (4) and the game scales with mechanical skill (1). Hence we reach a contradiction to (3): The game is not balanced anymore, the extra effort makes the player perform better Note that it is also impossible that the game can be balanced and his extra actions were just "useless", or we would reach a contradiction to (2) since we would have found a skill ceiling. Sadly mathematical proofs rarely work in real argument. Your argument claims that one player putting in extra effort and becoming better than the other actually makes the game unbalanced as a contradiction to (3). But, "balance" doesn't mean that, assuming points (1), (2), and (4), one player simply can't defeat the other. "Balance" means that players of equal skill have equal opportunity to win based on their races, and that one cannot lose simply because he chose a race at the beginning of the game that he shouldn't have. There is no contradiction to point (3) in your argument. Rather, you simply just prove that the game is, in fact, equally difficult to play, and that it is practice, not race choice, that determines who will win. I'm not sure I agree with that all the time, but it would certainly be nice. | ||
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Big J
Austria16289 Posts
On August 18 2015 01:50 Nuclease wrote: Sadly mathematical proofs rarely work in real argument. Your argument claims that one player putting in extra effort and becoming better than the other actually makes the game unbalanced as a contradiction to (3). But, "balance" doesn't mean that, assuming points (1), (2), and (4), one player simply can't defeat the other. "Balance" means that players of equal skill have equal opportunity to win based on their races, and that one cannot lose simply because he chose a race at the beginning of the game that he shouldn't have. There is no contradiction to point (3) in your argument. Rather, you simply just prove that the game is, in fact, equally difficult to play, and that it is practice, not race choice, that determines who will win. I'm not sure I agree with that all the time, but it would certainly be nice. It's not what I'm saying. I probably phrased this Assume one race's player has it is easier than the other. Since the skill ceiling is infinite (2) he can still get better until he uses as much skill as the opponent very badly, my apologies.What I meant wasn't that the player actually gets better, but that since he has it easier he isn't putting in the same effort as his opponent when they go toe-to-toe (3). Now the fact that he can put in the difference in effort to raise him to the same effort (4) as his opponent and still get returns (1) & (2) means that they are not going toe-to-toe. Not going toe-to-toe means he has an inherent advantage in an equal-skill scenario, hence the game is not balanced. Not sure if that's better. Second language TT.  Edit: And math always works. Though I wouldn't really call that math, that's just propositional logic. Edit2: Obviously, you can go the route of pure.wasted and doubt that the assumptions (in this case (2) ) hold. Which is a debate in itself that I don't want to go into as I think it goes deeply into hairsplitting whether something is a meaningful optimization or not. | ||
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MorDka
Poland543 Posts
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CptMarvel
France236 Posts
On August 17 2015 10:21 imBLIND wrote: There is an artificial skill cap in SC2, which is basically how fast can you click and use your mouse. This has always been the physical skill cap of RTS games, more so in SC2 than in any other RTS game ever (even BW, imo). However, this is extraordinarily boring to watch, as MorroW has already pointed out. The easiest fix to a complicated problem such as this one would be to dumb the AI down in order to allow the human player to outplay the computer AI -- not so much that it becomes the same, dumb BW engine, but enough so that the human player can beat the so-called "smart AI and UI" with auto surround, auto cast, auto mine, idle worker tab, multi-unit selection, and multi-building selection. In BW, these were called hacks lol...I do however agree that they should probably be in the game in order to make life easier on everyone, but I think that the human player should be allowed to showcase his skill by doing everything the smart AI does, but better. Haha, seriously? | ||
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imBLIND
United States2626 Posts
As a BW old-timer that has played both games, yeah I seriously think so. SC2 is more demanding as far as pure clicking and mouse speed goes. I think that if you're mechanically faster at SC2, it will clearly show, whereas in BW, it's not so much how fast you're clicking, but how precise your movements are. For example, casting 5 storms in BW requires you knowing how to split your high templars, whereas casting 5 storms in SC2 is clicking 5 times as quickly as you can. It takes precision to split templars -- not speed. It's better if you do it fast, but if you do it wrong, it's useless. I've lost to several people (mostly protoss -_-) that had half as much APM as I did, and I still lost because BW, at its very core, its a game that revolves around timing and precision. Obviously, mouse speed speed and clicking are not the only things that determines how difficult a game, but I think speed is marginally more useful in SC2 than it was in BW. You had a lot more things to worry about in BW than how fast you could click like timings, scouting, map control, strategic thinking, etc. It's good to do all of the aforementioned things quickly, but it was more important to do them well and slowly than to do them fast and poorly. | ||
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TimeSpiral
United States1010 Posts
On August 18 2015 04:41 imBLIND wrote: As a BW old-timer that has played both games, yeah I seriously think so. SC2 is more demanding as far as pure clicking and mouse speed goes. I think that if you're mechanically faster at SC2, it will clearly show, whereas in BW, it's not so much how fast you're clicking, but how precise your movements are. For example, casting 5 storms in BW requires you knowing how to split your high templars, whereas casting 5 storms in SC2 is clicking 5 times as quickly as you can. It takes precision to split templars -- not speed. It's better if you do it fast, but if you do it wrong, it's useless. I've lost to several people (mostly protoss -_-) that had half as much APM as I did, and I still lost because BW, at its very core, its a game that revolves around timing and precision. Obviously, mouse speed speed and clicking are not the only things that determines how difficult a game, but I think speed is marginally more useful in SC2 than it was in BW. You had a lot more things to worry about in BW than how fast you could click like timings, scouting, map control, strategic thinking, etc. It's good to do all of the aforementioned things quickly, but it was more important to do them well and slowly than to do them fast and poorly. Don't know if many watch tennis here, or play tennis, but I will use the analogy anyway. Old-timer tennis players--who mainly commentate now, or write articles, playing in their free time, of course--are constantly talking about the 'Broodwar of the Tennis" days, if you will: wooden rackets, super fast courts, short-shorts, headbands, and button-up shirts. They lament the new, high-powered technology, and are constantly talking about the beauty of the "old game". Technology got better. Players got better. Training got more serious. And so, the metagame in tennis shifted. The strategies that won back in the day, and the requirements you needed to implement those strategies don't really apply to the modern era of tennis, and the modern player. The game got bigger, more powerful, faster, and such, the subtleties were hard to recognize by the old-timers, or if they were, still held in disdain for the glory days. But keep this in mind: the past is rarely as awesome as you think it was. We get it. You liked it the way it was back in the day. That's what ESPN Classic is for. : D Rant over. | ||
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jinjin5000
United States1456 Posts
On August 17 2015 17:52 SeeDs.pt wrote: there's clearly parts in the OP that are a balance thing, not a design thing although it feels it started that way. that being an example. It's just a matter of balancing terran's late game isn't it? so that seems to me to fall under balance. I agree with Morrow that it feels good to get rid of that unnatural process, even if it stayed this new way the remaining mechanics will need tuning in energy costs and/or cooldowns regardless of every other balance aspect. protoss and zerg will be the ones losing the most mechanically in my weak based opinion... personally i'd like to see the idea (mentioned in a post i can't find atm) about having manually injected casts being superior due to timing differences. basically if an autocast is more costly, then it pays off to manually cast but it only compensates if you're on top of it. actually think all autocasts need to have a disadvantage to it, else you might as well just make it a passive and don't even have the option to turn it off. Be either loss of control or weaker efficiency... one of the problems i see, including in myself, is for people to make up their minds about what they want regarding impactful mechanics. Because i don't see an impactful mechanic not having a punishment on some area, that's kinda of what makes it impactful/meaningful isn't it? edit: ufff.. 4 pages have gone by... probably a pointless post by now :p Zerg definately has most to gain from it and considering if every race is equal, Terran has least to gain from econmic wise and lategame wise- I haven't really seen much scv sacking lategame in lotv due to scarcity of mineral though. Mech or not. I dont know how blizzard is going to tackle chronoboost-less protoss when a lot of things were balanced around chronoboost based builds. Its going to be iffy. | ||
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imBLIND
United States2626 Posts
On August 18 2015 05:00 TimeSpiral wrote: Don't know if many watch tennis here, or play tennis, but I will use the analogy anyway. Old-timer tennis players--who mainly commentate now, or write articles, playing in their free time, of course--are constantly talking about the 'Broodwar of the Tennis" days, if you will: wooden rackets, super fast courts, short-shorts, headbands, and button-up shirts. They lament the new, high-powered technology, and are constantly talking about the beauty of the "old game". Technology got better. Players got better. Training got more serious. And so, the metagame in tennis shifted. The strategies that won back in the day, and the requirements you needed to implement those strategies don't really apply to the modern era of tennis, and the modern player. The game got bigger, more powerful, faster, and such, the subtleties were hard to recognize by the old-timers, or if they were, still held in disdain for the glory days. But keep this in mind: the past is rarely as awesome as you think it was. We get it. You liked it the way it was back in the day. That's what ESPN Classic is for. : D Rant over. I wasn't saying BW was better than SC2 or that I liked it better; my opinion was that mechanical speed matters more in SC2 than it does in BW, and from that, I also mentioned that I thought BW required more precision than SC2 does. It's not "oh BW was so much better than SC2 because of X,Y, and Z"; I think most people can agree that certain things are more important in BW than they are in SC2 and vice versa, and I happen to believe it is more important to be faster in SC2 than in BW. Unfortunately, speed isn't really that impressive to watch in SC2, nor is it really something people enjoy aiming to improve...As Morrow and many others have pointed out, it's kind of boring to watch SC2 since all the players are just all fast and good at multitasking because there isn't much else going on besides the speed at which they are playing at. I think activision is aware of this problem and on the right track towards fixing this problem with the experimental removal/change of the macro mechanics, and I hope they stay on this track in the future. | ||
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tokinho
United States792 Posts
On August 15 2015 07:10 ZergLingShepherd1 wrote: I did, and you have some good points on design, but i said what i didnt like... the fact that you sprinkled some words on a problem, the fact that terrans will have problems in late game, i agree sure... but you didnt said anything about the early and mid game of zerg having problems with this changes. You also talk about bad design like SH, BL/Infestor but nothing on the current complains of mech. And the forums and reddit is full of mech complains. This is what bugged me. Also i dont think a Zerg should mindless click once every 40 sec. They could easily make larvas spawn faster and give Zerg another macro mechanic to choose between creep spread. Maybe like starbow.... queens could speed up the makeing of a buliding Which other pros are you going to disagree with? How are you not banned yet? | ||
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crazedrat
272 Posts
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Superbanana
2369 Posts
On August 18 2015 16:04 crazedrat wrote: The Queen has become a pretty pointless unit now. You could easily increase the hatchery larvae spawn time and just forget about the Queen. What they provide is creep tumors and an odd defense. But the real reason to build them was inject. Now a hatchery is worth building over a queen. A Queen costs 2 supply.. a hatch provides 6 supply. 100 mineral difference and a larvae with that. Then you factor in a hatch now actually supplies more larvae per second, and gives a larvae boom (smaller though now) when queens are added. ... it adds up a hatch is more worthwhile investment than a queen at this point. 3 hatch 1 queen should be the new standard build. Wow, for the first time i think this change creates an interesting dinamic. When you have enough active tumors you can start injecting! So you make macro hatches for efficient larvae production, get a queen for creep only, and after that you have extra larvae. Until you must replace the tumors. | ||
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iloveav
Poland1478 Posts
Na obs or an overseer can be shut down to prevent vision or scouting but there a scan is going to go down if you have the landed orbital with energy. I always thought that in this regard, Terran was Imbalanced. Taking away the mule I agree that its good for balancing late game economy, in regards to armies... hard to say at this stage. I dont actually even play sc2 so chrono I dont even know, but inject does seem like a huge help. | ||
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MapleLeafSirup
Germany950 Posts
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Isarios
United States153 Posts
You do not want macro mechanics removed. | ||
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imBLIND
United States2626 Posts
"Outplaying" someone with macro isn't something that should be easy, and I will go one further and say that macro shouldn't be necessary either. If macro was easy and absolutely necessary, then you end up with the "boring" games that you mentioned where the logical course of action is to just macro more. | ||
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Blacklizard
United States1194 Posts
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jinjin5000
United States1456 Posts
On August 19 2015 05:15 Blacklizard wrote: To put it bluntly, I think SC2 through HotS was just leaning further away from micro and further to macro in terms of winrates. LotV is Blizzard's wise attempt to shift the focus more towards micro, towards small battles and harassment and Area of Affect abilities, and less in terms of simple turtling and amassing an army. This shift could bring back a ton of players who simply like the micro aspects more. Anything and everything they do to shake up the game and go in that direction is a good direction to try out. Make the game more fun... go David Kim! Dont delude yourself into beleiving that. Nothing on the unit statistics and damaged has changed. They are going to adjust the time for upgrades on protoss and all. | ||
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B-royal
Belgium1330 Posts
On August 18 2015 04:41 imBLIND wrote: As a BW old-timer that has played both games, yeah I seriously think so. SC2 is more demanding as far as pure clicking and mouse speed goes. I think that if you're mechanically faster at SC2, it will clearly show, whereas in BW, it's not so much how fast you're clicking, but how precise your movements are. For example, casting 5 storms in BW requires you knowing how to split your high templars, whereas casting 5 storms in SC2 is clicking 5 times as quickly as you can. It takes precision to split templars -- not speed. It's better if you do it fast, but if you do it wrong, it's useless. I've lost to several people (mostly protoss -_-) that had half as much APM as I did, and I still lost because BW, at its very core, its a game that revolves around timing and precision. Obviously, mouse speed speed and clicking are not the only things that determines how difficult a game, but I think speed is marginally more useful in SC2 than it was in BW. You had a lot more things to worry about in BW than how fast you could click like timings, scouting, map control, strategic thinking, etc. It's good to do all of the aforementioned things quickly, but it was more important to do them well and slowly than to do them fast and poorly. Doesn't sound like you really know much about brood war at all. You list one scenario but don't even explain it properly. You act as if clicking 5 times with your mouse is difficult at all. Casting 5 storms in brood war requires you to be A LOT faster than just clicking 5 times with your mouse. You have to select individual high templars, move them in the correct position (or select the correct high templar immediately) and cast all storms individually unless you somehow magic box them perfectly, which is highly unlikely. Finally, you list one scenario. How should that go about proving your point? Maybe take a look at a player like Bisu or Effort playing who are playing at 400+ apm with perfect micro and macro. Brood war requires SPEED and PRECISENESS to extents that Sc2 players could only dream off. You lost vs a protoss with half your apm because he knew what the fuck he was doing. You can have triple the APM but be doing all the wrong actions. This doesn't say anything about the game's speed requirements. I can't even believe that you are trying to assume the position that the mechanics of starcraft 2 are harder than those of brood war. Starcraft 2 has SMART casting, AUTO mining, MULTIPLE building selection, EASY pathing, UNLIMITED unit selection and you try to argue that it requires you to be faster? | ||
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SC2Towelie
United States561 Posts
On August 15 2015 07:25 xtorn wrote: Wow, what?! You're a progamer, right? By what thought process do you reach the conclusion that providing less larva in the early game will make things "easier" for zerg? I think you missed the point. This has NOTHING to do with balance. We're talking about mechanics/design here. Auto-casting an ability is easier than having to manually cast an ability. What is difficult to understand about that? | ||
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