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It has been weighing on my mind a little bit lately to let out my opinion here about this heavily discussed topic lately. I've been reading quite a bit on what peoples thoughts are and so on so I think this would be a good time to share my own. This happened during my stream so you can check out the actual VOD here:
http://www.twitch.tv/morrow/v/10917215
Here's the patch note I'm discussing:
http://us.battle.net/sc2/en/forum/topic/18710641223
However if you don't feel like watching the VOD this essay you're about to read got you covered. Keep in mind the first few minutes was actually muted because of twitch muting videos automatically so unfortunately no way for me to extract that first part. Keep in mind some things (ok, a lot of things) I write here was not actually said in the video ) lastly I want you to take note that this is more of a design discussion than a balance discussion (LotV is not balanced right now, a patch like this doesn't try balancing the game). I try to keep it short here so apologies for not going into too much detail on some things.
Terran Mules being Removed
I like this change overall mostly because I think scanning feels too expensive. Wagering supply drop or a scan feels like a better balance compared to a scan and a mule. More scanning = less random game (good). Keep in mind the difficulty of dropping a supply is arguably harder mechanically than dropping a mule (this change does not make Terran easier in that regard)
Terran will no longer have the possibility of sacrificing all their workers to match up against the other races. Feels good overall to get rid of that unnatural process but I wish Terran was compensated with an army that puts up a good fight rather than being relatively fucked in such situation. Pretty certain the viper bomb and new ultralisk will favor Zerg in late game more so than the new tools Terran get.
Feel sort of indifferent about Terran claiming a new base from mined out to gaining 3000 mineral per minute income from a design perspective. Not mentioned in the video but I feel also pretty indifferent about Terran having the edge most base trades because mules get your income skyrocketing.
Protoss Chronoboost being Removed
Protoss will become more like Terran in their build orders, less extreme and more "watered out" in the sense that you can't go completely in 1 direction or another. The ranges of possibilities go down and will be especially noticed in timing attacks.
There are good and bad parts about chronoboost. The good part is the difficulty and beauty of seeing builds being planned and refined to the extreme (optimizing a build order becomes a lot harder when you have chronoboost than not. Hearing naniwa talk about 2 or 3 chronoboosts on his cybercore throughout the years has really made you respect the complexity this has)
The bad part being that Protoss can naturally become easier or more forgiving in the fact that you can line up build orders and timings as you go along in the game. (pushing out storm in time for a Terran timing with chronoboost is arguably less impressive than pre-planning storm in time for the Terran timing in the first place). Or realizing halfway through you started storm and archives too late for your 1-1 storm timing to finish you start chronoboosting where as without your timing is fucked and you need to wait (punished instead of forgiving)
I like this change but completely removing chronoboost might not be the best move. There are parts about chronoboost I like which I think is reason enough to keep it in the game. The "improvised" chronoboosts to forgive yourself from the original mistakes you've done is the part that I don't like. I think having the best of both worlds might be a possibility just by making chronoboost more exclusive (cooldown, energy cost, resource cost?). Having chronoboost at 25 energy makes it sort of a throw-away ability in the sense you always kind of sit around with a chronoboost to toss at whatever you need (read the earlier examples). However an "expensive" more impactful chronoboost will require more planning to get the most benefit out of it. This is an idea of my own thought on the spot, it might be a terrible idea.
Zerg Inject Larva Being Auto-Cast and Reduced to 2 per Inject
The Protoss and Terran changes both change the way the races operate in a pretty drastic manner, this change doesn't do any of that.
The prior changes are not making their races strictly "easier", where as this change does. I say it with full passion that I believe having every race in a game about as hard to play is more important than the game being actually balanced.
Another note on this topic is dropping mules were never as hard as injecting was, this change alone takes away a big chunk of what a good Zerg player can demonstrate.
Just like with chronoboost I have an idea of my own, however one that I've had in mind for a longer period of time. I think hatcheries should spawn larva quicker and larva inject to be less impactful. This will allow lesser Zerg players to not make their race so centered about hitting every inject while very high level Zergs will still aim to hit all of those injects.
My thoughts on the importance of mechanics in Starcraft
Not only on topic about inject larva but mechanics in general (I'm not talking about your headquarter ability here) is that I think a lot of players are undermining the importance of Starcraft 2 being mechanically demanding.
When people talk about mechanics they make it sound like it is the beast that keeps the casuals from playing it but they don't see our (hardcore players) perspective. mechanics is very important for the better players to win, a strategy can be copied by other players so strategy alone doesn't cut the skill-ceiling that we want Starcraft to have. Mechanics is great in that regard because it allows players to simply "play better" so they can consistently win from even situations or from slightly behind(!), mechanics is the underlying factor which keeps the "worse player" from challenging the "better player" in macro games. This had a much bigger impact in a game like Broodwar and we could see that in the results too of top level players performing.
Simply knowing a game has high mechanics makes it THAT much more impressive and entertaining to watch, whenever you as an observer feel like you could re-act the same fight or game as a progamer could, that's when you know the game isn't hard enough mechanically.
Injects, building supply depots, sending 3 probes into a geyser when it's done are not fun things, they are not very strategical yet we don't want to remove these aspects of the game. When you look at a game like Starcraft you should take it as a whole. While you're moving around with your army dropping here and there, scouting etc you gotta keep in mind to do the underlying mechanics parts, keep the rhythm flowing. THAT'S what make it so fun to play.
One thing that's so beautiful about Starcraft is that you can excel at so many different things. Some people are great at macro, some at micro, some have great mechanics while others make stellar decisions. Dumbing down or "nerfing" any parts of this list of branches you can be good at removes persona from the players. Already today I feel like players are too similar. Maru? Oh well he's a great aggressive Terran who has sick mechanics and multitasking. Cure? Oh well he's a great aggressive Terran who has sick mechanics and multitasking (I see the similarity, do you?). Of course the most the involved people will be able to deviate their styles to differentiate them but in general I feel there is a lack of "personality" in players play. So back to mechanics - making it easier is going to dumb down areas where a player can show who he is.
Devils advocate about mechanics
There is a good counter-argument to why macro mechanics (base management) should be easier in LotV. The reason is that Legacy contains of new complicated units that take a lot of babysitting and a lot of skill to manage. The overall game is faster phased because you have to expand faster you're starting with more workers and so on. Talks about more harassment, medivacs getting drop-upgrades, Zerg dropping warp prisms becoming "a must". This general direction will make Starcraft much harder (possibly more volatile as well but that's another topic for another day)
Final thoughts on Blizzards direction as a whole and other things..
I do like what Blizzard has been doing lately, for the first time in 5 years it actually feels like they are doing their job properly. Starcraft 2 has always been a badly designed game (there - I said it.) with multiple eras where it really shined through (broodlord infestor, swarm host, nothing happening for 15 minutes lets fight and now the game is over kinda games)
the stuff they are talking about these days are not centered about "how to fix this current error right now" rather instead being "how to properly design our game from the ground up so it wont be shit after 2 years" makes me very happy. Keep this up and brainwashed Broodwar nerds like myself wont be be making snarky comments about how its predecessor was so much better.
I think its very important to always question and revisit how hard a race or something is to do. When adding new units that you always ask how difficult is this unit to use and how difficult is this unit to counter-act.
I think mechanics should be the underlying skill in RTS games that keeps in check that the "worse player" is being the one having to act rather than react as a whole.
One of the reasons I love RTS is because of the depth is has. There are so many different things to excel at! Why dumb down skill assets from players forcing them to be great at everything when you can let them wager its importance themselves during the game? (strategy, micro, macro - spend your time wisely during the game ) After all, time should be our out-most important resource and having time to do everything would remove the T from RTS (brilliant send-off)
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Fantastic post, probably the best pro review I've seen on LOTV so far.
I agree with a lot/almost all of it, will add more concrete thoughts once I've digested the whole thing.
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fantastic arguments, agree with everything except
Starcraft 2 has always been a badly designed game
but still a good post
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Brilliant analysis, as a Zerg player it is with a huge amount of trepidation and disappointment that I read about the auto-inject change for Zerg. I would like either dampened injects or none at all. Auto-inject flies in the face of everything SC. Totally with you when you write about the necessity of mechanics when designing SC as a well-balanced RTS game. Mechanical difficulty is my favorite thing about this game, I pray that Blizzard does not dampen their importance anymore. Rather, that they make the game more difficult!
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Zerg will suffer the most in early and mid game. And its a shame you didnt said that.... but you noted the obivous fact that Terran will have difficult time in late game.
This why i cant take your post seriously, its clearly biased.
Not to mention you dont noticed the current era of bad design... the mech cancer that is happening. I guess in your mind SH was the problem yet we still see turtle mech.
Just to be clear, i dont agree with auto-inject... i would rather see Zerg with a strong army and larva spawning faster at hatches.
Also queens having the role of good 1 supply unit maybe without Injects but with decent attack, transfuse, creep spread and a late game upgrade at hive to make them faser.
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Great great points in this post. I agree with everything! Well written
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On August 15 2015 06:52 ZergLingShepherd1 wrote: Zerg will suffer the most in early and mid game. And its a shame you didnt said that.... but you noted the obivous fact that Terran will have difficult time in late game.
This why i cant take your post seriously, its clearly biased.
Not to mention you dont noticed the current era of bad design... the mech cancer that is happening. I guess in your mind SH was the problem yet we still see turtle mech.
Just to be clear, i dont agree with auto-inject... i would rather see Zerg with a strong army and larva spawning faster at hatches.
Also queens having the role of good 1 supply unit maybe without Injects but with decent attack, transfuse, creep spread and a late game upgrade at hive to make them faser. pls go back to battle.net forums. PLS
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On August 15 2015 06:52 ZergLingShepherd1 wrote: Zerg will suffer the most in early and mid game. And its a shame you didnt said that.... but you noted the obivous fact that Terran will have difficult time in late game.
This why i cant take your post seriously, its clearly biased.
Not to mention you dont noticed the current era of bad design... the mech cancer that is happening. I guess in your mind SH was the problem yet we still see turtle mech. youre missing the point, nobody here should care who will "suffer" from the patch. terran not having the dynamic of scv sacrifice to improve their army is not a balance complaint, its an design observation. legacy of the void is not balanced, this patch does not attempt to balance it, my suggestions does not attempt to balance it. zerg having what? 4 less larva per inject cycle in early game has nothing at all to do with this discussion. i tried to make it as clear as possible in what i wrote does not have any hidden nudges about what race needs to be stronger or weaker. think about what im saying here, friend...
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This should be featured, like QXC's posts
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Great post. I like the changes but I can't stand auto inject. I agree that the best solution would be keeping manual injects but nerfing it.
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On August 15 2015 07:00 MorroW wrote:Show nested quote +On August 15 2015 06:52 ZergLingShepherd1 wrote: Zerg will suffer the most in early and mid game. And its a shame you didnt said that.... but you noted the obivous fact that Terran will have difficult time in late game.
This why i cant take your post seriously, its clearly biased.
Not to mention you dont noticed the current era of bad design... the mech cancer that is happening. I guess in your mind SH was the problem yet we still see turtle mech. youre missing the point, nobody here should care who will "suffer" from the patch. terran not having the dynamic of scv sacrifice to improve their army is not a balance complaint, its an design observation. legacy of the void is not balanced, this patch does not attempt to balance it, my suggestions does not attempt to balance it. zerg having what? 4 less larva per inject cycle in early game has nothing at all to do with this discussion. i tried to make it as clear as possible in what i wrote does not have any hidden nudges about what race needs to be stronger or weaker. think about what im saying here, friend...
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
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Right on Morrow. Right on.
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Thanks for posting your thoughts. I agree with everything you said pretty much except your chrono idea - which seems convoluted to me, but you said it probably wasn't a good idea anyway. I really hate auto inject, and would prefer to remove all macro mechanics and have hatcheries just make larva faster.
I'm really disappointed that they aren't doing more big changes with this beta, and there's so little time left. Zerg still has no 1 supply units, mothership core is still a disgrace of game design, forcefields are still strong and gateway units are still weak. I wish DK would swallow his pride a bit and just give us the Reaver instead of mocking it with the disruptor.
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On August 15 2015 07:06 Little-Chimp wrote: Great post. I like the changes but I can't stand auto inject. I agree that the best solution would be keeping manual injects but nerfing it. Agree. Auto-injects just cross a line.
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Zerglingshepherd; stop focussing on balance. We can balance *AFTER* the design is right.
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On August 15 2015 06:31 MorroW wrote:The prior changes are not making their races strictly "easier", where as this change does. 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?
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On August 15 2015 07:25 xtorn wrote:Show nested quote +On August 15 2015 06:31 MorroW wrote:Zerg Inject Larva Being Auto-Cast and Reduced to 2 per Inject The prior changes are not making their races strictly "easier", where as this change does. 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?
He clearly means in terms of mechanics and multitasking.
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On August 15 2015 07:37 pure.Wasted wrote:Show nested quote +On August 15 2015 07:25 xtorn wrote:On August 15 2015 06:31 MorroW wrote:Zerg Inject Larva Being Auto-Cast and Reduced to 2 per Inject The prior changes are not making their races strictly "easier", where as this change does. 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? He clearly means in terms of mechanics and multitasking. No this mention is not made anywhere, he refers to the change altogether as making it easier, obviously the conclusion is being drawn on the entire quote not just half of it, isnt it? He clearly should read the entire quote that he himself made and think twice before posting.
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On August 15 2015 07:41 xtorn wrote:Show nested quote +On August 15 2015 07:37 pure.Wasted wrote:On August 15 2015 07:25 xtorn wrote:On August 15 2015 06:31 MorroW wrote:Zerg Inject Larva Being Auto-Cast and Reduced to 2 per Inject The prior changes are not making their races strictly "easier", where as this change does. 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? He clearly means in terms of mechanics and multitasking. No this mention is not made anywhere, he refers to the change altogether as making it easier, obviously the conclusion is being drawn on the entire quote not just half of it, isnt it? He clearly should read the entire quote that he himself made and think twice before posting.
It can be inferred. He said his post has nothing to do with balance discussion, that's close enough.
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On August 15 2015 07:41 xtorn wrote:Show nested quote +On August 15 2015 07:37 pure.Wasted wrote:On August 15 2015 07:25 xtorn wrote:On August 15 2015 06:31 MorroW wrote:Zerg Inject Larva Being Auto-Cast and Reduced to 2 per Inject The prior changes are not making their races strictly "easier", where as this change does. 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? He clearly means in terms of mechanics and multitasking. No this mention is not made anywhere, he refers to the change altogether as making it easier, obviously the conclusion is being drawn on the entire quote not just half of it, isnt it? He clearly should read the entire quote that he himself made and think twice before posting.
this is more of a design discussion than a balance discussion (LotV is not balanced right now, a patch like this doesn't try balancing the game)
Perhaps you should take your own advice and make sure you read things carefully before responding.
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On August 15 2015 07:48 pure.Wasted wrote:Show nested quote +On August 15 2015 07:41 xtorn wrote:On August 15 2015 07:37 pure.Wasted wrote:On August 15 2015 07:25 xtorn wrote:On August 15 2015 06:31 MorroW wrote:Zerg Inject Larva Being Auto-Cast and Reduced to 2 per Inject The prior changes are not making their races strictly "easier", where as this change does. 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? He clearly means in terms of mechanics and multitasking. No this mention is not made anywhere, he refers to the change altogether as making it easier, obviously the conclusion is being drawn on the entire quote not just half of it, isnt it? He clearly should read the entire quote that he himself made and think twice before posting. Show nested quote +this is more of a design discussion than a balance discussion (LotV is not balanced right now, a patch like this doesn't try balancing the game) Perhaps you should take your own advice and make sure you read things carefully before responding. i missed that part; in that respect the post is well written (design-wise).
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Your theory that mechanics bring balance of powers and leads to action/reaction patterns is actually brilliant.
"Mechanics is Stategy" there you have it.
Or rather mechanics add deepness to strategy, Inno vs Flash today Inno knew that if he was able to stabilize he'd win. And the awesome part is : Flash knew it too.
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The problem with the "mechanics are important" argument:
Yes, mechanics might be an important part to the game and it being mechanically demanding does give mechanically better players a chance to come back from behind, but you have to keep in mind, that the skill ceiling in this regard is already incredibly huge. I would go out and say that it is physically impossible for a human to have perfect mechanics in SC2. The potential for micro is off the charts and being able to micro each individual unit is nigh impossible.
Even if the macro mechanics are removed and the game gets mechanically less demanding does not mean that the skill ceiling is any lower or that a mechanically worse player can now win against a superior opponent. It means that your APM will simply be used in different places. Instead of using APM for dropping mules or injecting larva you will use your APM to harass or split or expand or something. There is still enough things to do to keep you occupied.
What we have to look at is: What are the more important mechanics and what are the less important mechanics. Macro boosters are, in my opinion, far less important and it is a good thing that these are gone.
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On August 15 2015 08:16 RoomOfMush wrote: Even if the macro mechanics are removed and the game gets mechanically less demanding does not mean that the skill ceiling is any lower or that a mechanically worse player can now win against a superior opponent. It means that your APM will simply be used in different places. Instead of using APM for dropping mules or injecting larva you will use your APM to harass or split or expand or something. There is still enough things to do to keep you occupied.
If this were true, Protoss would have never gained the reputation of being an A+move race because Protoss players would have constantly found things to do. If this were true, Blizzard wouldn't have gone on record saying that Protoss and Zerg were "slightly" easier to play than Terran, because again Protoss and Zerg players would just keep finding new things to do to demonstrate their skill.
And maybe it is true in Gold League. But it's not true at the level balance is built around - the competitive, GSL Code S, level.
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IDEA FOR ALL THREE:
ZERG: Keep spawn larva, but require the spawn larva on the tech building associated with that unit. That larva can now only build that unit. Hatch -> drones, Pool -> lings, Roach Warren -> Roaches, etc ... You get the idea. You keep spawn larva, now it's a strategic choice, and the good players can demonstrate awesome skill. Note: larva spawned at hatches can still build anything, obviously.
TERRAN: Keep the mule, but give it a range around the OC it's called down from. If called down out of range, it cannot mine and can only repair for it's lifecycle.
PROTOSS: Make Chronoboost more expensive, and give it a range around the Nexus. This would require the strategic positioning of buildings, and more care when casting it.
p.s. great OP, MorroW.
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On August 15 2015 06:52 ZergLingShepherd1 wrote:
This why i cant take your post seriously, its clearly biased.
That is some 100% condensed irony right there.
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On August 15 2015 06:31 MorroW wrote: When people talk about mechanics they make it sound like it is the beast that keeps the casuals from playing it but they don't see our (hardcore players) perspective. mechanics is very important for the better players to win, a strategy can be copied by other players so strategy alone doesn't cut the skill-ceiling that we want Starcraft to have. Mechanics is great in that regard because it allows players to simply "play better" so they can consistently win from even situations or from slightly behind(!), mechanics is the underlying factor which keeps the "worse player" from challenging the "better player" in macro games. This had a much bigger impact in a game like Broodwar and we could see that in the results too of top level players performing.
Simply knowing a game has high mechanics makes it THAT much more impressive and entertaining to watch, whenever you as an observer feel like you could re-act the same fight or game as a progamer could, that's when you know the game isn't hard enough mechanically.
Injects, building supply depots, sending 3 probes into a geyser when it's done are not fun things, they are not very strategical yet we don't want to remove these aspects of the game. When you look at a game like Starcraft you should take it as a whole. While you're moving around with your army dropping here and there, scouting etc you gotta keep in mind to do the underlying mechanics parts, keep the rhythm flowing. THAT'S what make it so fun to play.
One thing that's so beautiful about Starcraft is that you can excel at so many different things. Some people are great at macro, some at micro, some have great mechanics while others make stellar decisions. Dumbing down or "nerfing" any parts of this list of branches you can be good at removes persona from the players. Already today I feel like players are too similar. Maru? Oh well he's a great aggressive Terran who has sick mechanics and multitasking. Cure? Oh well he's a great aggressive Terran who has sick mechanics and multitasking (I see the similarity, do you?). Of course the most the involved people will be able to deviate their styles to differentiate them but in general I feel there is a lack of "personality" in players play. So back to mechanics - making it easier is going to dumb down areas where a player can show who he is.
Amen.
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I like what you said about larva spawning faster and simply taking the Queen's 2-larva inject off of auto-cast. That does indeed strike me as a better design move. I've been playing since a few months after release and my injects are still a bit sloppy. This feels like a good way to preserve the overall feel of the race while both allowing players with even less practiced mechanics than me to get a soft boost to overall performance, and also allowing players better than me to distinguish themselves mechanically.
I like what you said about the more impactful chronoboost, but one thing I would've liked for you to touch on is the notion of having a competing spell at the Nexus to give players more of a choice in how and when they elect to use Chronoboost. An idea that I just hit upon was to make each Nexus able to warp in units within a range of 13 in only 2 seconds, as per the patch notes, for a cost of 25 energy each. These units, unlike those warped in by a warp prism, would not suffer the x2 damage upon being attacked while warping in, thus giving it even more utility. They'd still cost resources, obviously.
I'm worried that the complete removal of Mules will make scanning go from feeling too expensive to feeling too cheap. Calldown Supplies is still a bit underwhelming. Maybe a 25 energy Mule that can only be used for repairing units, but it repairs them for only 50% of their normal cost?
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how do you feel morrow about player life quality changes like worker counter, army button, no work worker button, and the many change that make player life easier in new lotv expansion?
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On August 15 2015 08:24 pure.Wasted wrote:Show nested quote +On August 15 2015 08:16 RoomOfMush wrote: Even if the macro mechanics are removed and the game gets mechanically less demanding does not mean that the skill ceiling is any lower or that a mechanically worse player can now win against a superior opponent. It means that your APM will simply be used in different places. Instead of using APM for dropping mules or injecting larva you will use your APM to harass or split or expand or something. There is still enough things to do to keep you occupied. If this were true, Protoss would have never gained the reputation of being an A+move race because Protoss players would have constantly found things to do. If this were true, Blizzard wouldn't have gone on record saying that Protoss and Zerg were "slightly" easier to play than Terran, because again Protoss and Zerg players would just keep finding new things to do to demonstrate their skill. BS. *IF* Protoss is an A-move race it is not because there is nothing to micro, it is because there is no reason to micro. If you have 6 Colossus that vaporize anything on sight why bother doing fancy micro.
But pure Blink Stalker is pretty micro intensive and two players who both go Blink Stalker can show off their skill and beat their opponent with superior micro. This is interesting mechanical skill. This is important mechanical skill. Nobody will know you for having the greatest Chrono Boost micro. But having the best Blink Stalker micro is a nice achievement.
On August 15 2015 08:24 pure.Wasted wrote: And maybe it is true in Gold League. But it's not true at the level balance is built around - the competitive, GSL Code S, level. You are talking about balance, not about game design.
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On August 15 2015 09:35 RoomOfMush wrote:Show nested quote +On August 15 2015 08:24 pure.Wasted wrote:On August 15 2015 08:16 RoomOfMush wrote: Even if the macro mechanics are removed and the game gets mechanically less demanding does not mean that the skill ceiling is any lower or that a mechanically worse player can now win against a superior opponent. It means that your APM will simply be used in different places. Instead of using APM for dropping mules or injecting larva you will use your APM to harass or split or expand or something. There is still enough things to do to keep you occupied. If this were true, Protoss would have never gained the reputation of being an A+move race because Protoss players would have constantly found things to do. If this were true, Blizzard wouldn't have gone on record saying that Protoss and Zerg were "slightly" easier to play than Terran, because again Protoss and Zerg players would just keep finding new things to do to demonstrate their skill. BS. *IF* Protoss is an A-move race it is not because there is nothing to micro, it is because there is no reason to micro. If you have 6 Colossus that vaporize anything on sight why bother doing fancy micro.
Because as we all know, Protoss players with 6 Colossus never lose high stakes games, and would therefore never, not under any circumstances, want their 6 Colossus to perform even better than they already are.
Show nested quote +On August 15 2015 08:24 pure.Wasted wrote: And maybe it is true in Gold League. But it's not true at the level balance is built around - the competitive, GSL Code S, level. You are talking about balance, not about game design.
"Some races are designed very poorly" may be a balance concern, but it's a game design concern first and foremost.
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I just wanted to get into this thread before it inevitably gets derailed by the peanut gallery. I really like the mentality that morrow is approaching this with and I think and open mindset (with regards to the competitive / pro players) is the way to move forward here.
The one thing I wish you had delved deeper into in your post is the "Devil's Advocate" argument you mentioned, because I think if you are to really approach this discussion from a design based perspective as opposed to a balance based one, this is in my opinion a cornerstone of that discussion.
I think that people fail to realize that even if they were to completely remove macro mechanics entirely, it does not mean that the game will be less mechanically demanding, because it signifies a shift in the design philosophy of what the mechanics in starcraft 2 actually are. You briefly alluded to it but the idea could be that they would make more "micro" based mechanics which could theoretically maintain the skill ceiling where it is OR possibly even raise the skill ceiling higher then it is. (which you also mentioned)
One important aspect of this change is pretty simple : (opinion statements incoming) Micro mechanics are WAY more interesting than macro mechanics. This is a lesson that I'm sure Blizzard has learned from the MOBA explosion, which is that watching someone utilize 5 different units with 3 spells each in a large battle while strategically engaging in an intelligent manner is WAY more exciting than watching someone inject their hatcheries every minute. Not only is it more fun to watch but it is more fun to execute. ( end opinion statements) So this shift in design philosophy COULD potentially keep SC2's difficulty in execution right where it is at BUT also make it more fun to play and watch.
Just as an aside to what I feel like is a central them of your post Morrow, I understand that the changes on the surface could remove more difficulty in execution from zerg than the other races, keep in mind that the specifics of the changes are part of a more "balance" oriented discussion. While altering these macro mechanics may lower the skillcap more, the point is Blizzard changing their design philosophy, so they could easily compensate for that difference in some other way that is more in line with their current vision for the future of SC2, which for the first time in a long time, I am actually excited about.
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On August 15 2015 11:13 Communism wrote: While altering these macro mechanics may lower the skillcap more, the point is Blizzard changing their design philosophy, so they could easily compensate for that difference in some other way that is more in line with their current vision for the future of SC2, which for the first time in a long time, I am actually excited about.
The problem is they just said they'd like to be done with design tweaks in a month's time. And they've traditionally taken about three weeks to a month between patches during this beta. And this patch isn't even live yet.
It's hard to imagine where the "make Zerg more mechanically demanding" patch is supposed to fit into the schedule, especially considering they haven't even brought up the need to make any changes in this area.
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I really like the proposed macro changes/removals. I might actually play again when the expansion comes out. Get rid of all the artificial chore-like tasks. Let us focus on more decision based tasks.
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I'm a little on the fence about the whole removing the macro mechanic situation altogether. It would have been much easier to just balance mules, which were the only real problem. Instead, we wound up with this trademark blizzard botching of what could have been an okay idea.
Mules, the most blatant offender, have been removed. However, this is just going to lead to more scans, which don't cost enough as it is. Also, I think everyone's forgetting that terrans will still have supply drop, which is still going to put them ahead of the other races, particularly now that protoss doesn't have a macro mechanic at all. Supply drop is something like half a mule worth of minerals, instantly. It's going to be pretty overpowered.
Queen auto inject is also going to create problems. AI is already weird enough, and having to code a hierarchy of how queens should react when X happens won't be easy. A much better change would have been to just buff the rate of larva spawning. This allows players to choose how many queens they want, when they want, etc. More choice and less AI is always better for a game like SC2.
The part that boggles my mind the most is that chronoboost, the most interesting macro mechanic, is the one that just got straight up removed, without a second thought. Chrono should have been the goal, not the only one to get properly axed.
This doesn't even touch on how much more devastating harassment is going to be. Things like widow mines were designed to be as overpowered as they are partially because macro mechanics existed.
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The viewpoint that strategy isn't enough in a strategy game is imo unneeded, if u want a technical game there are non real time strategy games out there.
Also want to add that the viewpoint that skilled players that practiced their macro mechanics will be closer in skill to other players also assume that players will arrive at the skill ceiling at some point and without this macro mechanics they will become indistinguishable. That's assuming a lot. And since no one knows when that will happen the whole viewpoint becomes nonsensical.
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I agree with almost everything, and I think mb. making chronoboost cost 50 energy with the same effectiveness as the 25 energy one might be a good way to work around it. Other than that, I think you could make the spell regenerate shields faster without the macro aspect. ;p
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Just trowing it out there how about make chronoboost take sheld energy from the nexus instead ? making it a sacrifice to use it but it still regen
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On August 15 2015 07:41 xtorn wrote:Show nested quote +On August 15 2015 07:37 pure.Wasted wrote:On August 15 2015 07:25 xtorn wrote:On August 15 2015 06:31 MorroW wrote:Zerg Inject Larva Being Auto-Cast and Reduced to 2 per Inject The prior changes are not making their races strictly "easier", where as this change does. 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? He clearly means in terms of mechanics and multitasking. No this mention is not made anywhere, he refers to the change altogether as making it easier, obviously the conclusion is being drawn on the entire quote not just half of it, isnt it? He clearly should read the entire quote that he himself made and think twice before posting. It will make it easier for zerg without mules and chrono protoss and terran builds are slowed down enough that you can just afford macro hatches without too much hassle to boost your production. It makes a bigger difference between builds like 3 hatch pool and pool first now. Auto inject is such a big deal imo zerg only has to look at their base to defend or build a tech build now so they can spend 100% if the time they aren't fighting on creep and spreading overlords.
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On August 15 2015 15:17 Kazien_ wrote: Just trowing it out there how about make chronoboost take sheld energy from the nexus instead ? making it a sacrifice to use it but it still regen
Hmm this proposal is interesting. Or anything that would have the same idea as viper consuming building hp for energy.
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Thank you "relevant" sir, always a pleasure.
On August 15 2015 07:04 Johan-ae wrote: This should be featured, like QXC's posts Seconded. I do agree that qxc tries to be more of a "global" typist while morrow is more terran centric on discussing/sharing his gamer feelings, but morrow is getting there (love to see qxc catz morrow... play random!).
#keep the mule, keep the inject, keep chrono boost.. never surrender never give up! that is starcraft. Obviously rework them all "collectively" (so much untapped potential in how abilities can be "set"/edited/nerfed/buffed/limited/expanded) so the game itself is improved (and yes that means "listen" to the people heavily involved in it, ergo people like morrow qxc catz nony .. the list is endless.. "trying out their ideas").
I personally thought/think that the design should have been done by the end of hots so that lotv would only be about adding while balancing (there are several other mechanics not present in sc that will never get in because of the state it is in), and that is what really kills me!). Such is not the case, we have an obfuscated and disenfranchised community with no clear headway made besides from tl and a few tournaments.
Gamers are playing this, pro gamers are playing this.. and yet it is a shallow version of what it is, what it will once again be when blizzard leaves it after a year or so after lotv retail, .. sc will prevail then. I am puzzled that after 5 years of sc 2°, just how much (just because there are 200 or so things to be mindful of/resolve/synch so that the game is "almost perfect) all of this is still in such a s#i##y state..?!
Yes yes, activision, dollars, beaucoup bucks selling another game, etc.. of course! But what about us?
This community (sc2) has not stand together! Ever. This community will dictate what sc2 is*.. when it decides to do it united.. how do you people not see that?
Hash tag sigh, too old for this.
*: for the better or worse! Edit: Just like having "less" gamers "on" sc2 isn't such a bad thing, quantity of players isn't that good for the game itself.
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Very good post. I agree on nearly every suggestion. I hope blizzard reads this carefully and considers the thoughts.
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Great article!
my personal opinion is that mechanics are fun because making your macro flow like running water and being able to rely on mechanics and multitasking to outplay your opponent is a great way to enjoy the game. Mechanics are something you have to work on and cant just copy somebody elses.
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Morrow is smart, and therefore still relevant.
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Thanks for the post! And thanks for keeping it short enough to be read in a decently short time. You don't to go more in detail than this, or people will jsut not read, and you'll get less information across anyway. I'm thinking more or less like you regarding this, but I want to highlight this part, that is at the heart of why I dislike this direction:
On August 15 2015 06:31 MorroW wrote: One thing that's so beautiful about Starcraft is that you can excel at so many different things. Some people are great at macro, some at micro, some have great mechanics while others make stellar decisions. Dumbing down or "nerfing" any parts of this list of branches you can be good at removes persona from the players. Already today I feel like players are too similar. Maru? Oh well he's a great aggressive Terran who has sick mechanics and multitasking. Cure? Oh well he's a great aggressive Terran who has sick mechanics and multitasking (I see the similarity, do you?). Of course the most the involved people will be able to deviate their styles to differentiate them but in general I feel there is a lack of "personality" in players play. So back to mechanics - making it easier is going to dumb down areas where a player can show who he is. I regard myself as a macro player, in that I try to harass the other player enough so that they lose focus on their macro rather than doing actual damage, and I can get ahead by nailing my injects (yes, the injects) perfectly in the meanwhile, or well enough to get ahead (which isn't very perfect at all in gold it turns out ). It may very well be possible to play that style without manual injects in gold, but a bit less so, and I assume much less so in higher leagues.
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I really think they should consider a weaker change first, by keeping macro mechanics but making them less strong. For instance, a less long chrono, inject that provide less larvae while normal hatcheries provide more, or increasing the mana requirement.
Or cut them altogether but don't cross the autocast line. Please. And you know it's going to be forbidden in Proleague. I mean they forbid automatic drone rallying at the start, so I can only imagine what they think about autocast injects.
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People generally don't like auto-inject mechanic but think it this way, 1) opponent would still have the option to snipe a queen to slow down zerg, 2) a queen auto injecting constantly won't have spare energy to transfuse or creep, so that will create a strategic decision, especially early game when there's only couple of them
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Fiddler's Green42661 Posts
Happy to hear my pro thoughs on the patch
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Spot on. Old school people in Dota 2 call it the 'lolification' of dota, I feel like in SC2 is the kiddification of SC. Basically making it easier and easier so that basically even a 10yo can play it at a very high level as long as they spend 10 hours per week playing it.
automatic larva inject is pure bullshit, this needs to be removed completely. Increase the hatchery larva to 5 or increase the spawn time of larva.
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I'm just a casual but great points, forgot about SCV sacrifices and such.
I will really miss the macro mechanics if they are removed. I'm just so used to Heart of the Swarm. It doesn't seem so bad for Terran, since they have scan + supply drop and I suppose Queens just sit there anyway. I don't know, haha. I really like Chronoboost though, that's an awesome idea.
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Really love this post, thx Morrow. You are my hero on TLG.
I also agree with basically everything you said about mechanics being the base for skill. Just great post.
Music has some similar qualities, in that creativity is highly valued and anyone can participate in that way. Some musicians (most) make careers off creative expression, but the most revered people couple the creativity with mechanical talent.
Yo Yo Ma, for example.
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Interesting article.
While I agree with many of the points, it lacks general direction and the conclusion seems to contradict many of the conclusions for each section. Rather than try to explain both sides (which most people know), I'd rather see a professional player take a strong stand and explain why one side is better than the other.
I really get the feeling that QXC and Morrow are sugar coating things when they talk about LOTV.
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Why dumb down skill assets from players forcing them to be great at everything when you can let them wager its importance themselves during the game?
This and thousand times this!
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Something like MULE and Chrono hardly take any skill or mechanic. The only problem here is larvae inject.
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On August 15 2015 06:52 ZergLingShepherd1 wrote: Zerg will suffer the most in early and mid game. And its a shame you didnt said that.... but you noted the obivous fact that Terran will have difficult time in late game.
This why i cant take your post seriously, its clearly biased.
Not to mention you dont noticed the current era of bad design... the mech cancer that is happening. I guess in your mind SH was the problem yet we still see turtle mech.
Just to be clear, i dont agree with auto-inject... i would rather see Zerg with a strong army and larva spawning faster at hatches.
Also queens having the role of good 1 supply unit maybe without Injects but with decent attack, transfuse, creep spread and a late game upgrade at hive to make them faser.
Just wanna say, I would personally "like" for larvae to spawn faster at hatches... but to be honest with how the game mechanics are, I could see why they want to keep the queen. Making hatcheries spawn faster would be a HUGE HUGE buff!!!!
If it were the hatches directly, then queens would have much more energy which would become problematic, as well as queens can actually be a target to try to shut down some of Zergs production, without actually having to take out an entire hatchery. It's much harder to take out a hatchery! Especially with queens having all that extra mana to heal the hatcheries...
It would be quite a bit more of changes and balancing, for effectively the same thing in the end. It might be a silly mechanic, but as a player, the only difference of it being queens is you will have to protect your queen and try to keep one near your hatch's. You have to be more protective and use more skill to keep that production where it is.
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Amazing, simply amazing post. I agree wholeheartedly with everything written here, and it is really nice to see such a well in depth analysis of the situation at hand from an EX BW Player as good as yourself, who clearly undestands the problem.
Thanks MorroW!
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For terran, just make mules gather minerals at the same rate as an SCV. No need to completely remove it, since it is one of the now traditional values of the game.
This makes it so that they still benefit you, but at a lower rate, meaning scans become used more, and mules less.
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Mechanics are good when they allow players to make interesting decisions about how to use their APM best. Given the pace of SC2 fights, it's sort of boom or bust, more about not being caught off guard than maintaining rhythm. The more mechanics the better, because it gives players opportunity to recover from the devastatingly quick and decisive battles we see quite often.
But since this is most relevant in the asymmetric matchups, there needs to be similar level of mechanics dependencies, which is not really born out in the current HotS world (see protossimba qq).
Anyway good writeup, I disagree strongly about giving blizzard the salute because they're fucking up unit design and econ design horribly, but not all their choices are bad.
On August 16 2015 15:29 Tosster wrote: Why dumb down skill assets from players forcing them to be great at everything when you can let them wager its importance themselves during the game?
This and thousand times this! Yes, this is depth!
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I would like to see if nexus energy could be used to convert normal pylons into ones with the faster warp in times
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thanks for the interesting read.
SC2's lead designers keep moving onto greener pastures giving SC2 a schizophrenic design lineage. Pardo and Browder did not get the Jay Wilson treatment.. They got promoted to something deemed more strategically lucrative. SC2 is on its 3rd design lead now.
On August 15 2015 06:31 MorroW wrote: After all, time should be our out-most important resource
Peter Drucker could not have said it any better.
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Feels so good, after five years, to finally see pros say straight up that SC2 has always been a badly designed game. Cause it has, it really has. The only reason it still has its audience is because of the total absence of competition. I hope LOTV makes at least a half successful attempt at making the sequel to Brood War (love love love) the game it should have been.
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On August 16 2015 22:22 JimmyJRaynor wrote:thanks for the interesting read. SC2's lead designers keep moving onto greener pastures giving SC2 a schizophrenic design lineage. Pardo and Browder did not get the Jay Wilson treatment.. They got promoted to something deemed more strategically lucrative. SC2 is on its 3rd design lead now. Show nested quote +On August 15 2015 06:31 MorroW wrote: After all, time should be our out-most important resource Peter Drucker could not have said it any better.
New warcraft?
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On August 17 2015 02:33 CptMarvel wrote: Feels so good, after five years, to finally see pros say straight up that SC2 has always been a badly designed game. Cause it has, it really has. The only reason it still has its audience is because of the total absence of competition. I hope LOTV makes at least a half successful attempt at making the sequel to Brood War (love love love) the game it should have been.
Actually this is a bit backwards, SC2 isn't a badly designed game, it is too good a designed game. By that I mean the imperfections that existed(a lot of it the creators didn't even know when making the game) are what made BW what it was. Their was so little knowledge of unit design and micro etc. when the game was made, that it allowed BW to become what it was almost organically.
With SC2 I think they essentially tried too hard. Instead of just creating awesome units and fun units, and letting the players figure out what potential existed and self balance the game, they have forced certain things down our throats. Forced certain builds and counters, always trying to provide a solution to everything. The best part of BW was the players figuring how the game and creating their own balance. Evidence with that is how few patches there were over time yet the game never was "broken" for any long periods.
I think they are starting to get back to that though, and why LOTV has a chance to be better. Simplify the game, and let the players make it complicated, instead of trying to make a complicated game that the players have to figure out what the creators what us to do.
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Wish it would just tone down, rather than remove. Have mules mine 15 minerals instead of 30! I like the fact Terran can land a new base and start mining a lot, it feels unique to them.
I do dislike the huge camping or orbitals though with mech style lategame
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@MorroW: I think you are not really consistent in your argumentation. You say things along the lines of the game being balanced around mechanics, which I think everyone can agree with.
But then you say things like "the game will be easier for zergs than for terrans". Well, if it is balanced around mechanics that's just the same as "zerg is overpowered against terran". Since balance for LotV has not been found yet but will be achieved eventually, there is no argument here. It's going to be balanced around non-existant injects, nothing more or less.
Since I believe the patch is a huge buff for Terran against Zerg, I believe the game will be "much easier for Terran" in ZvT anyways. Or in other words, Zergs losing 30% production early in comparison to losing 12.5% mineral income early will make it so that Terran can play very sloppily against Zerg and the Zerg really has to work his ass of with top-notch micro and creep spreading and crisp production and so on and so on to have a chance. Which I fear won't be enough, but the game will be balanced around those players that play Zerg as well as possible after the patch and who work their asses off mechanically, so the endresult will be that Zerg is just as mechanically demanding and as powerful as Terran or any other balanced race.
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On August 17 2015 04:08 Big J wrote: @MorroW: I think you are not really consistent in your argumentation. You say things along the lines of the game being balanced around mechanics, which I think everyone can agree with.
But then you say things like "the game will be easier for zergs than for terrans". Well, if it is balanced around mechanics that's just the same as "zerg is overpowered against terran". Since balance for LotV has not been found yet but will be achieved eventually, there is no argument here. It's going to be balanced around non-existant injects, nothing more or less.
Since I believe the patch is a huge buff for Terran against Zerg, I believe the game will be "much easier for Terran" in ZvT anyways. Or in other words, Zergs losing 30% production early in comparison to losing 12.5% mineral income early will make it so that Terran can play very sloppily against Zerg and the Zerg really has to work his ass of with top-notch micro and creep spreading and crisp production and so on and so on to have a chance. Which I fear won't be enough, but the game will be balanced around those players that play Zerg as well as possible after the patch and who work their asses off mechanically, so the endresult will be that Zerg is just as mechanically demanding and as powerful as Terran or any other balanced race.
He had good arguments on design but he complained that terran will have a hard time when zerg will have an even harder time.
Mentioned the carcer of BL/Infetor and SH but nothing about mech...
This is what i dont like about most terran players... double standards.
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On August 17 2015 03:13 FLuE wrote: Actually this is a bit backwards, SC2 isn't a badly designed game, it is too good a designed game. By that I mean the imperfections that existed(a lot of it the creators didn't even know when making the game) are what made BW what it was. Their was so little knowledge of unit design and micro etc. when the game was made, that it allowed BW to become what it was almost organically.
they locked Bob Fitch in a room for 6 weeks and he made the SC1 engine.... its your classic lone-wolf-coder as project saviour story.
On August 17 2015 02:33 CptMarvel wrote: Feels so good, after five years, to finally see pros say straight up that SC2 has always been a badly designed game. Cause it has, it really has. The only reason it still has its audience is because of the total absence of competition. I hope LOTV makes at least a half successful attempt at making the sequel to Brood War (love love love) the game it should have been.
if i run MS or EA .. i'm shutting down EALA, Victory Games and Ensemble every time. smart moves by both publishers. what is MS doing for Halo Wars 2? are they opening a new studio. no. t hey are renting CA for a year.
there should be no competition because there are lots of other genres of entertainment software that offer superior ROI.
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I'm into the idea behind removing the macro mechanics because I think it indicates that Blizzard is up for trying more drastic measures than I previously thought they would. I think the queen autoinject is absolutely awful, and would prefer hatcheries just spawned larvae slightly faster but would need to be present in higher numbers. Obviously the game would need to then be balanced around that change but I think the design would be solid.
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On August 17 2015 03:13 FLuE wrote:Show nested quote +On August 17 2015 02:33 CptMarvel wrote: Feels so good, after five years, to finally see pros say straight up that SC2 has always been a badly designed game. Cause it has, it really has. The only reason it still has its audience is because of the total absence of competition. I hope LOTV makes at least a half successful attempt at making the sequel to Brood War (love love love) the game it should have been. Actually this is a bit backwards, SC2 isn't a badly designed game, it is too good a designed game. By that I mean the imperfections that existed(a lot of it the creators didn't even know when making the game) are what made BW what it was. Their was so little knowledge of unit design and micro etc. when the game was made, that it allowed BW to become what it was almost organically. With SC2 I think they essentially tried too hard. Instead of just creating awesome units and fun units, and letting the players figure out what potential existed and self balance the game, they have forced certain things down our throats. Forced certain builds and counters, always trying to provide a solution to everything. The best part of BW was the players figuring how the game and creating their own balance. Evidence with that is how few patches there were over time yet the game never was "broken" for any long periods. I think they are starting to get back to that though, and why LOTV has a chance to be better. Simplify the game, and let the players make it complicated, instead of trying to make a complicated game that the players have to figure out what the creators what us to do.
+1 to this
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On August 17 2015 03:13 FLuE wrote:Show nested quote +On August 17 2015 02:33 CptMarvel wrote: Feels so good, after five years, to finally see pros say straight up that SC2 has always been a badly designed game. Cause it has, it really has. The only reason it still has its audience is because of the total absence of competition. I hope LOTV makes at least a half successful attempt at making the sequel to Brood War (love love love) the game it should have been. Actually this is a bit backwards, SC2 isn't a badly designed game, it is too good a designed game. By that I mean the imperfections that existed(a lot of it the creators didn't even know when making the game) are what made BW what it was. Their was so little knowledge of unit design and micro etc. when the game was made, that it allowed BW to become what it was almost organically. With SC2 I think they essentially tried too hard. Instead of just creating awesome units and fun units, and letting the players figure out what potential existed and self balance the game, they have forced certain things down our throats. Forced certain builds and counters, always trying to provide a solution to everything. The best part of BW was the players figuring how the game and creating their own balance. Evidence with that is how few patches there were over time yet the game never was "broken" for any long periods. I think they are starting to get back to that though, and why LOTV has a chance to be better. Simplify the game, and let the players make it complicated, instead of trying to make a complicated game that the players have to figure out what the creators what us to do.
I can agree with that for sure. You don't have to "try" to make a game complicated! That makes it artificially challenging. All the resources the player spends on trying to keep up with the complexities would be better spent focusing on places where the game design encourages player vs player interaction. The REAL challenge should be against the OPPONENT, not the game mechanics themselves.
Gameplay focused on game mechanics instead of competing with the other player, is basically a different wording for bad controls... Competing against the game to do what you want. That should be the easy part... the hard part should be outsmarting and defeating your opponent!
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if blizzard changed hatcheries to produce more larva, and inject giving only 2 - the game would become unbalanced again.
Players would opt to make macro hatcheries instead of queens (1 macro hatch 350, to queen 150) Im personally on board with that, but i would like to see inject removed completely and force zerg to make more hatcheries.
I also think its wrong to judge a new system without playing it at all. In one sentence you say starcraft has always been a bad game, in the next youre trying to keep it the way it is arguing about fundamental changes.
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On August 17 2015 04:08 Big J wrote: @MorroW: I think you are not really consistent in your argumentation. You say things along the lines of the game being balanced around mechanics, which I think everyone can agree with.
But then you say things like "the game will be easier for zergs than for terrans". Well, if it is balanced around mechanics that's just the same as "zerg is overpowered against terran". Since balance for LotV has not been found yet but will be achieved eventually, there is no argument here. It's going to be balanced around non-existant injects, nothing more or less.
MorroW isn't being inconsistent, he's simply talking about a very complex issue. Balance and design are not always strictly divisible, and sometimes talking about one necessitates implicating the other. The bad design of a race can make achieving true balance very difficult or even impossible.
Or in other words, Zergs losing 30% production early in comparison to losing 12.5% mineral income early will make it so that Terran can play very sloppily against Zerg and the Zerg really has to work his ass of with top-notch micro and creep spreading and crisp production and so on and so on to have a chance.
Why do you assume that Zerg will not receive any buffs to compensate for the loss in production...? Blizzard has made it explicitly clear that their intention with removing macro mechanics is to 1) lower the barrier for entry and 2) remove invisible plays from the equation, so that we always know why someone is winning. Changing the metagame has never come up as a priority for this change. I would argue that it is only logical to assume that they will change balance to keep the metagame as similar as possible to what it would have otherwise been.
We already have an indication that this is happening with DKim saying Creep Tumors will be changed to keep their optimal use in line with HOTS expectations.
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On August 17 2015 07:42 pure.Wasted wrote:Show nested quote +On August 17 2015 04:08 Big J wrote: @MorroW: I think you are not really consistent in your argumentation. You say things along the lines of the game being balanced around mechanics, which I think everyone can agree with.
But then you say things like "the game will be easier for zergs than for terrans". Well, if it is balanced around mechanics that's just the same as "zerg is overpowered against terran". Since balance for LotV has not been found yet but will be achieved eventually, there is no argument here. It's going to be balanced around non-existant injects, nothing more or less. MorroW isn't being inconsistent, he's simply talking about a very complex issue. Balance and design are not always strictly divisible, and sometimes talking about one necessitates implicating the other. The bad design of a race can make achieving true balance very difficult or even impossible. 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*.
On August 17 2015 07:42 pure.Wasted wrote:Show nested quote +Or in other words, Zergs losing 30% production early in comparison to losing 12.5% mineral income early will make it so that Terran can play very sloppily against Zerg and the Zerg really has to work his ass of with top-notch micro and creep spreading and crisp production and so on and so on to have a chance. Why do you assume that Zerg will not receive any buffs to compensate for the loss in production...? Blizzard has made it explicitly clear that their intention with removing macro mechanics is to 1) lower the barrier for entry and 2) remove invisible plays from the equation, so that we always know why someone is winning. Changing the metagame has never come up as a priority for this change. I would argue that it is only logical to assume that they will change balance to keep the metagame as similar as possible to what it would have otherwise been. We already have an indication that this is happening with DKim saying Creep Tumors will be changed to keep their optimal use in line with HOTS expectations. 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.
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But SC2 very clearly does not have an infinite skill ceiling (or, more strictly accurate: realistic gains taper off significantly past a certain point, making a theoretically infinite skill ceiling very finite in practice). There is not a meaningful difference in how Rain would hold an SCV all in from how Zest would hold it given that they possess the same number of Zealots and Colossi, or how INno and Cure would execute the all in. And it is difficult to imagine them ever getting much better at it than they are already.
Are you saying that MorroW insists that SC2 has an infinite skill ceiling right here and now? Because that would be inconsistent with how I read his OP, but I can't find a statement like that anywhere.
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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.
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Bisutopia19033 Posts
On August 17 2015 02:33 CptMarvel wrote: Feels so good, after five years, to finally see pros say straight up that SC2 has always been a badly designed game. Cause it has, it really has. The only reason it still has its audience is because of the total absence of competition. I hope LOTV makes at least a half successful attempt at making the sequel to Brood War (love love love) the game it should have been. Pros did speak up. They were very vocal when the game came out. Sadly people just said "it's Idra being Idra" or something of that sort.
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Back to the micro debate? Many people ponted out ways to make the micro harder and more meaningful in SC2 without some dumb AI. The MOBA-ish abilities are also a way, but not one i really like.
about the macro: I don't think meaningless APM sinks to increase the skill ceilling are necessary, but i do think controlable macro mechanics is something i would miss a lot in SC2.
Macro mechanics are one full skill set that makes SC2 what it is. Right now the number of larvae the zerg has is unpredictable after the early game, since few people in the world do it almost optimally. Same goes for creep. Chrono opens possibilities for protoss and mules are a crucial part of terran gameplay. Yes, sometimes it simply mean more money, but SCV pulls, ninja bases, and marine conga lines are only possible because terran has mules. Removing them won't necessarily add a new gameplay, specially for protoss it might only mean loss of complexity and depth.
Changing the macro mechanics into something less automatic and more meaningful is a better way to go. loss of complexity won't make the game be perceived as much easier, since the skill ceiling is high enough without them (still easier tho), but loss of complexity dumbs down the game.
about balance: i think the biggest problem might be the balance between same race units. After years of maturing the game balance we start from zero. Changing the larvae production also changes the value of larvae, breaking balance zergwide. But terran will be completely different without their unique mineral gas ratio. Get ready to buff marines somehow, all we know about terran will be a lie. Not saying its so hard to balance that blizzard shoudn't try, but they should consider a fix that won't break the rest.
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On August 17 2015 04:25 ZergLingShepherd1 wrote:Show nested quote +On August 17 2015 04:08 Big J wrote: @MorroW: I think you are not really consistent in your argumentation. You say things along the lines of the game being balanced around mechanics, which I think everyone can agree with.
But then you say things like "the game will be easier for zergs than for terrans". Well, if it is balanced around mechanics that's just the same as "zerg is overpowered against terran". Since balance for LotV has not been found yet but will be achieved eventually, there is no argument here. It's going to be balanced around non-existant injects, nothing more or less.
Since I believe the patch is a huge buff for Terran against Zerg, I believe the game will be "much easier for Terran" in ZvT anyways. Or in other words, Zergs losing 30% production early in comparison to losing 12.5% mineral income early will make it so that Terran can play very sloppily against Zerg and the Zerg really has to work his ass of with top-notch micro and creep spreading and crisp production and so on and so on to have a chance. Which I fear won't be enough, but the game will be balanced around those players that play Zerg as well as possible after the patch and who work their asses off mechanically, so the endresult will be that Zerg is just as mechanically demanding and as powerful as Terran or any other balanced race. He had good arguments on design but he complained that terran will have a hard time when zerg will have an even harder time. Mentioned the carcer of BL/Infetor and SH but nothing about mech... This is what i dont like about most terran players... double standards.
Ok, first of all - stop calling mech a cancer. Stop using that word altogether. Not only it shows you are heavily biased and immature, but it can be very offensive towards people in real life who have experience with this terrible disease.
Next, mech is not even close being as bad as BL/Infestor. Comparing BL/Infestor to general "mech play" makes it pretty clear you are biased Zerg player hating on mech, most probably because you feel comfortable having the ultimate composition that can 1a into your opponent while you shield yourself with the cliche of "you let me get there, now you diserve to lose the game".
Really, you are acting like a textbook hypocrite. You are throwing around moral enlightenments that you are not following yourself in the first place.
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On August 17 2015 03:13 FLuE wrote: Actually this is a bit backwards, SC2 isn't a badly designed game, it is too good a designed game. By that I mean the imperfections that existed(a lot of it the creators didn't even know when making the game) are what made BW what it was. Their was so little knowledge of unit design and micro etc. when the game was made, that it allowed BW to become what it was almost organically.
With SC2 I think they essentially tried too hard. Instead of just creating awesome units and fun units, and letting the players figure out what potential existed and self balance the game, they have forced certain things down our throats. Forced certain builds and counters, always trying to provide a solution to everything. The best part of BW was the players figuring how the game and creating their own balance. Evidence with that is how few patches there were over time yet the game never was "broken" for any long periods.
I think they are starting to get back to that though, and why LOTV has a chance to be better. Simplify the game, and let the players make it complicated, instead of trying to make a complicated game that the players have to figure out what the creators what us to do.
This is exactly what I think since wol. The way blizzard is handling sc2 is like they are reverse engineering an imaginary perfect game. Or said differently, its a top down design style where they are designing the games we will play, the meta, and not the game ! Designing the game would be a bottom up design style. At the end, their way of doing this leave us with not enough space to players imagination and creativity. When David Kim says something like "we want the game to be more action oriented", this is exactly this.
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there's clearly parts in the OP that are a balance thing, not a design thing although it feels it started that way.
Terran will no longer have the possibility of sacrificing all their workers to match up against the other races. Feels good overall to get rid of that unnatural process but I wish Terran was compensated with an army that puts up a good fight rather than being relatively fucked in such situation. Pretty certain the viper bomb and new ultralisk will favor Zerg in late game more so than the new tools Terran get.
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
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I agree with most everything being said in MorroW's post.
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:Show nested quote +On August 17 2015 07:42 pure.Wasted wrote:On August 17 2015 04:08 Big J wrote: @MorroW: I think you are not really consistent in your argumentation. You say things along the lines of the game being balanced around mechanics, which I think everyone can agree with.
But then you say things like "the game will be easier for zergs than for terrans". Well, if it is balanced around mechanics that's just the same as "zerg is overpowered against terran". Since balance for LotV has not been found yet but will be achieved eventually, there is no argument here. It's going to be balanced around non-existant injects, nothing more or less. MorroW isn't being inconsistent, he's simply talking about a very complex issue. Balance and design are not always strictly divisible, and sometimes talking about one necessitates implicating the other. The bad design of a race can make achieving true balance very difficult or even impossible. 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*. Show nested quote +On August 17 2015 07:42 pure.Wasted wrote:Or in other words, Zergs losing 30% production early in comparison to losing 12.5% mineral income early will make it so that Terran can play very sloppily against Zerg and the Zerg really has to work his ass of with top-notch micro and creep spreading and crisp production and so on and so on to have a chance. Why do you assume that Zerg will not receive any buffs to compensate for the loss in production...? Blizzard has made it explicitly clear that their intention with removing macro mechanics is to 1) lower the barrier for entry and 2) remove invisible plays from the equation, so that we always know why someone is winning. Changing the metagame has never come up as a priority for this change. I would argue that it is only logical to assume that they will change balance to keep the metagame as similar as possible to what it would have otherwise been. We already have an indication that this is happening with DKim saying Creep Tumors will be changed to keep their optimal use in line with HOTS expectations. 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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On August 18 2015 01:50 Nuclease wrote:Show nested quote +On August 17 2015 08:12 Big J wrote:On August 17 2015 07:42 pure.Wasted wrote:On August 17 2015 04:08 Big J wrote: @MorroW: I think you are not really consistent in your argumentation. You say things along the lines of the game being balanced around mechanics, which I think everyone can agree with.
But then you say things like "the game will be easier for zergs than for terrans". Well, if it is balanced around mechanics that's just the same as "zerg is overpowered against terran". Since balance for LotV has not been found yet but will be achieved eventually, there is no argument here. It's going to be balanced around non-existant injects, nothing more or less. MorroW isn't being inconsistent, he's simply talking about a very complex issue. Balance and design are not always strictly divisible, and sometimes talking about one necessitates implicating the other. The bad design of a race can make achieving true balance very difficult or even impossible. 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*. On August 17 2015 07:42 pure.Wasted wrote:Or in other words, Zergs losing 30% production early in comparison to losing 12.5% mineral income early will make it so that Terran can play very sloppily against Zerg and the Zerg really has to work his ass of with top-notch micro and creep spreading and crisp production and so on and so on to have a chance. Why do you assume that Zerg will not receive any buffs to compensate for the loss in production...? Blizzard has made it explicitly clear that their intention with removing macro mechanics is to 1) lower the barrier for entry and 2) remove invisible plays from the equation, so that we always know why someone is winning. Changing the metagame has never come up as a priority for this change. I would argue that it is only logical to assume that they will change balance to keep the metagame as similar as possible to what it would have otherwise been. We already have an indication that this is happening with DKim saying Creep Tumors will be changed to keep their optimal use in line with HOTS expectations. 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. 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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they should leave chrono boost protoss is struggling anyway in lotv ;p
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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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On August 18 2015 03:15 CptMarvel wrote:Show nested quote +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?
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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On August 18 2015 04:41 imBLIND wrote:Show nested quote +On August 18 2015 03:15 CptMarvel wrote: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? 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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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. Show nested quote +Terran will no longer have the possibility of sacrificing all their workers to match up against the other races. Feels good overall to get rid of that unnatural process but I wish Terran was compensated with an army that puts up a good fight rather than being relatively fucked in such situation. Pretty certain the viper bomb and new ultralisk will favor Zerg in late game more so than the new tools Terran get.
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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On August 18 2015 05:00 TimeSpiral wrote:Show nested quote +On August 18 2015 04:41 imBLIND wrote:On August 18 2015 03:15 CptMarvel wrote: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? 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.
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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On August 15 2015 07:10 ZergLingShepherd1 wrote:Show nested quote +On August 15 2015 07:00 MorroW wrote:On August 15 2015 06:52 ZergLingShepherd1 wrote: Zerg will suffer the most in early and mid game. And its a shame you didnt said that.... but you noted the obivous fact that Terran will have difficult time in late game.
This why i cant take your post seriously, its clearly biased.
Not to mention you dont noticed the current era of bad design... the mech cancer that is happening. I guess in your mind SH was the problem yet we still see turtle mech. youre missing the point, nobody here should care who will "suffer" from the patch. terran not having the dynamic of scv sacrifice to improve their army is not a balance complaint, its an design observation. legacy of the void is not balanced, this patch does not attempt to balance it, my suggestions does not attempt to balance it. zerg having what? 4 less larva per inject cycle in early game has nothing at all to do with this discussion. i tried to make it as clear as possible in what i wrote does not have any hidden nudges about what race needs to be stronger or weaker. think about what im saying here, friend... 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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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.
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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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One thing that always bothered me in both Broodwar and SC2 was that terrna scans are guaranteed. 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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But if an observer manages to sneak inside your base, it can see everything, while a scan only reveals a certain area. It think it is ok. Zerg had very bad scouting abilites in WOL but after the increase in overlord speed it is ok too.
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absolutely do not agree with removing an macro mechanics. some mechanical difficulty should stay in the game. the ability to outplay should exist in an easy way. the most boring games are the ones you can't outplay someone and following logical course is an obvious winner. there isnt even that much luck in this game to balance out a strict build order counter.
You do not want macro mechanics removed.
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It's just an experimental removal of some macro mechanics; if it works better it'll stay, and if it doesn't, it won't. They're not removing all of the macro mechanics, and the game is by no means mechanically easier just because they removed a portion of the game.
"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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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!
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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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On August 18 2015 04:41 imBLIND wrote:Show nested quote +On August 18 2015 03:15 CptMarvel wrote: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? 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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On August 15 2015 07:25 xtorn wrote:Show nested quote +On August 15 2015 06:31 MorroW wrote:Zerg Inject Larva Being Auto-Cast and Reduced to 2 per Inject The prior changes are not making their races strictly "easier", where as this change does. 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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good ideas love the zerg inject one. mechanical players will still shine while low league players will still have larva
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You wanna know a game with basically no macro mechanics and a FUCKTON of m,icro mechanics? Warcraft 3. And now Starcraft 2 LotV.
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This is a very well explained and written post, MorroW. While I don't have particularly strong feelings towards the Terran and Protoss changes, I am very passionate about not making injects auto-cast. Like you (and many others), I agree that it cheapens an area of skill where a play can excel. I don't want SC2 to be a game where everyone is good at the same things; rather, it adds personality to players and the scene as a whole when players have a different skill sets.
I think one part of the complaint against manual injects is that it is often considered a more "unforgiving" mechanic than that of the other races. This results in newer zergs having to focus much of their attention in a game to simply not missing injects, since it really is that important in the early and midgame. I also understand the concern that LotV is faster-paced, making injects more difficult to maintain. However, I think both of these concerns can be accounted for by your suggestion; simply make injects give less larva, but have hatcheries produce larva at a greater rate. In this way, missing injects for whatever reason likely won't flat out lose you the game (as is often the case now), but skilled players are still rewarded for nailing their injects properly. It is a win-win for all parties involved, I think.
Regardless of my thoughts on the matter, it means a lot to see someone of such prestige within the community as yourself make a post voicing what many of us are thinking; keep manual injects in the game. Tweak it perhaps, but let there be room for skillful players to shine.
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I love what Morrow has to say. I agree with just about all of it.
A bit off topic, but it sometimes feels like protoss has one of the easiest times producing units. A know that some people believe that gateways should build units faster as opposed to warp gateways to increase the home-field advantage a bit more.
One thing I thought of which is almost definitely too hard to execute is to make it so gateways are the only way to build gateway units. The warp gate functions differently, acting more of a teleportation building: store a unit inside the warpgate and teleport it in somewhere else. What can be cool about this is that the warpgate might now be also able to warp in immortals or any other large units from across the map. But of course, this would be almost too hard and unecessary. Just a thought.
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On August 19 2015 07:04 B-royal wrote:Show nested quote +On August 18 2015 04:41 imBLIND wrote:On August 18 2015 03:15 CptMarvel wrote: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? 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 don't exactly plan out an hour out of my day detailing and writing out every facet of my opinion and corresponding examples to go along with those points, so I'm sorry if you don't understand my shortened post.
To reply to your actual post, I don't think you read what I wrote correctly at all -- I realize that it's best to do things quickly and precisely, but if I had to choose between only one, I would value being faster in SC2 and being more precise in BW. You can't say to me with a straight face that it is better to cast 5 storms in 1 spot quickly than it is to take 2 extra seconds to cast the storms properly. And to clarify, "fast" and "slow" are separated by less than 5 seconds, in case you didn't infer that already.
It takes precision to cast storms in BW, not speed. In SC2, because of autocast, there is no point in doing anything precisely, so the limiting factor is basically how quickly can you cast 5 storms.
If a task in BW has 25 actions that needs to be done in 5 seconds, and the same task in SC2 requires only 5 actions in 1s, it does not mean that BW must be the game that requires the most hand speed. What it means is: "I have to do more things correctly in BW than in SC2 in order to have the same intended outcome." If you were in a BW game, and you accidentally selected a zealot with your high templar, you have to redo the action before you can cast a storm. I hope that you would agree that the best way to avoid this would be to do the task correctly the first time instead of messing up 2 or 3 times before doing it correctly? Of course there are individuals that could maybe move their hands 2 or 3 times as quickly as their opponents and afford to make these mistakes, but wouldn't you agree that is just wasted energy expended on a task that could have been done with less effort?
And then lets take the same thing, but in SC2. You don't have to be precise at all; you can group your entire army in 2 hot keys, and still be able to and 5 storms in 5 places. Waypoints, smartcasting, smart Ai, everything helps you to do the action quicker. There is no need for clicking individual templars, nor is there any (significant) need to position your templars correctly. Since there is very little/no precision required here, it simply boils down to how quickly can you complete the task.
Hence, I'd rather do something precisely but slower in BW, and I would value doing the same task in SC2 quicker. If you were playing in BW, Would you rather do these actions quickly and incorrectly, or slowly and correctly? How about in SC2?
If your response is to do it both quickly and correctly, my reply to that is, "No Shit Sherlock." Of course the prolevel gamers will do it quickly and correctly, but we are not them. In BW, the focus is doing something correctly, and then speeding up your actions, not the other way around. In SC2, everything is more or less done "correctly" for you with multi unit selection, smart cast, smart AI, etc. The only limiting factor left in SC2, then, is speed.
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?
I didn't say anything about SC2 being a more difficult game than BW. And I'm not arguing that you have to be faster in SC2 than if you were to play BW. I'm arguing that the skill ceiling in SC2 is limited by how quickly your hands move, whereas the skill ceiling BW is limited firstly by the precision of your moves and the knowledge of your movements, not the speed at which you move. "Requires" and "limited by" means two different things in this context.
Also, please refrain from posting in a manner that could be misconstrued as condescending or rude.
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On August 15 2015 08:24 pure.Wasted wrote:Show nested quote +On August 15 2015 08:16 RoomOfMush wrote: Even if the macro mechanics are removed and the game gets mechanically less demanding does not mean that the skill ceiling is any lower or that a mechanically worse player can now win against a superior opponent. It means that your APM will simply be used in different places. Instead of using APM for dropping mules or injecting larva you will use your APM to harass or split or expand or something. There is still enough things to do to keep you occupied. If this were true, Protoss would have never gained the reputation of being an A+move race because Protoss players would have constantly found things to do. If this were true, Blizzard wouldn't have gone on record saying that Protoss and Zerg were "slightly" easier to play than Terran, because again Protoss and Zerg players would just keep finding new things to do to demonstrate their skill. And maybe it is true in Gold League. But it's not true at the level balance is built around - the competitive, GSL Code S, level.
They have gone on record saying that protoss is slightly easier than zerg and terran recently. Do you have a citation for a recent time they've said zerg is easier?
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On August 19 2015 10:12 AlphaPancake wrote:Show nested quote +On August 15 2015 08:24 pure.Wasted wrote:On August 15 2015 08:16 RoomOfMush wrote: Even if the macro mechanics are removed and the game gets mechanically less demanding does not mean that the skill ceiling is any lower or that a mechanically worse player can now win against a superior opponent. It means that your APM will simply be used in different places. Instead of using APM for dropping mules or injecting larva you will use your APM to harass or split or expand or something. There is still enough things to do to keep you occupied. If this were true, Protoss would have never gained the reputation of being an A+move race because Protoss players would have constantly found things to do. If this were true, Blizzard wouldn't have gone on record saying that Protoss and Zerg were "slightly" easier to play than Terran, because again Protoss and Zerg players would just keep finding new things to do to demonstrate their skill. And maybe it is true in Gold League. But it's not true at the level balance is built around - the competitive, GSL Code S, level. They have gone on record saying that protoss is slightly easier than zerg and terran recently. Do you have a citation for a recent time they've said zerg is easier?
No, I don't, because they never did. I thought I edited that out of my post but I see that I did not. Apologies.
That was a bit of wishful thinking sneaking in as fact.
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really great post man! i definitely agree
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The more harder this game and need more attention with fast hand click will reduce number of player. Compare to Dota and LoL, the game more slightly light and no pressure like sc2. I believe every player especially in gold rank above will feel warm and sweat after 1 game. To much micro and every unit need have special ability to control make it harder. In BW, less unit have special ability to control make player spam all mineral and make as much as army and micro it. However the game still the best among strategy game but when get older ,i play a relaxing game like HOTS and Heartstone.
-sorry for bad english-
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On August 19 2015 07:41 monomo wrote: You wanna know a game with basically no macro mechanics and a FUCKTON of m,icro mechanics? Warcraft 3. And now Starcraft 2 LotV. Except SC2 still has 23032191902189345248389342308788'237823984 times the macro wc3 has.
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United Kingdom20157 Posts
I believe every player especially in gold rank above will feel warm and sweat after 1 game. To much micro and every unit need have special ability to control make it harder. In BW, less unit have special ability to control
Brood War is full of more simplistic difficult tasks, though i can see that sc2 requires a lot of focus and multitasking ability to play effectively it was always much easier for me than BW (for lack of having to do a constant list of basic reptitive actions to stay on top of a bad UI)
There's a lot of stuff to do in sc2 LOTV because there's a lot of stuff to do, not because it takes you 15 clicks to move your army from point A to B.
nor is there any (significant) need to position your templars correctly
Storm range is overrated, the combination of somewhat limited range (when trying to land the middle of the storm in a clump of units which requires moving closer) and templar being some of the slowest ass units in the whole game unless you speedprism them around like royalty actually makes that one of the more annoying things about playing protoss IMO :D
Trying not to die to HT's feels awfully like trying not to die to an alligator that only has one leg. Just walk backwards at a moderate speed and you'll be completely fine - many of the units vulnerable to storms are as much as 2 to 3 times faster than templar - so yes, templar positioning is important in sc2.
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On August 19 2015 16:55 Cyro wrote: Trying not to die to HT's feels awfully like trying not to die to an alligator that only has one leg. Just walk backwards at a moderate speed and you'll be completely fine - many of the units vulnerable to storms are as much as 2 to 3 times faster than templar - so yes, templar positioning is important in sc2.
This was very true in 2014 when bio and HT were playing cat and mouse. Unfortunately, the far more likely scenario throughout SC2's history is that Terran attempts to break a Protoss before he can assemble his Colossus deathfleet, which means desperately running up into a choke where HTs are lying in wait and don't have to move an inch, and walking backwards completely stops being an option.
Obviously with the Colossus all but gone and the game's tempo otherwise completely upheaved, none of these timings are relevant in LOTV. I'm speaking strictly about the past.
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United Kingdom20157 Posts
Unfortunately, the far more likely scenario throughout SC2's history is that Terran attempts to break a Protoss before he can assemble his Colossus deathfleet, which means desperately running up into a choke where HTs are lying in wait and don't have to move an inch, and walking backwards completely stops being an option.
Plenty of room to drop and expand if he can't leave his ramp and needs 6 gasses to do what he's trying to do. Ghosts are also a thing if you have extended warning of that situation - i see where you're coming from, but playing with what you're trying to beat at any kind of comparable level really shows you how awkward and shit it feels half of the time
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I already wrote that in another thread: Instead of those game-damaging super ultra macro mechanics like chrono boost, the players should be challenged in other ways. Make harassment more difficult is the best approach imo.
Compare hellion to vulture harass. Compare a reaver drop to an oracle. Compare shuttle drops in general with pylon warp-ins
What I want to say is: Harassing the ecolines is MUCH more difficult in BW than it is in SC2. If you don't micro well and have a great multitasking you will either not kill anything or fall behind in macro. In the current state of SC2 you have unkillable harass units (like the oracle) that just kill a lot of stuff super fast and are microed super easily. This is the stuff that Blizzard should focus on.
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United Kingdom20157 Posts
What I want to say is: Harassing the ecolines is MUCH more difficult in BW than it is in SC2. If you don't micro well and have a great multitasking you will either not kill anything or fall behind in macro. In the current state of SC2 you have unkillable harass units (like the oracle) that just kill a lot of stuff super fast and are microed super easily.
I'm not seeing the difference here, really.
People don't want sc2 to be harder mechanically so that you have much threat of falling behind in macro, this thread topic is aboutit being pushed the other way
as for harass being harder/easier and units being unkillable, reavers and vultures are very effective at killing workers. Oracles literally die in one widow mine hit.
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As a zerg player the auto-inject injects idea blizzard has has me planning on switching races and ive played zerg since broodwar. i feel like making the most one of the most difficult and rewarding mechanics for zerg an autocast is a giant slap in the face to a zerg player who has worked hard on making sure the hit all their injects when they need to. good post i agree with almost all of the points in it.
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On August 19 2015 09:22 imBLIND wrote:Show nested quote +On August 19 2015 07:04 B-royal wrote:On August 18 2015 04:41 imBLIND wrote:On August 18 2015 03:15 CptMarvel wrote: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? 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 don't exactly plan out an hour out of my day detailing and writing out every facet of my opinion and corresponding examples to go along with those points, so I'm sorry if you don't understand my shortened post.
Your shortened post is not understandable because it's flawed at its core. Your example was not suitable at all for the claims that you were trying to prove. You aren't clicking any faster in sc2 than people are in brood war. The only argument you have is that it in the respective games themselves it is relatively more important to be faster in Sc2 because there's nothing else to be bothered with. This however says NOTHING about the absolute speed requirements, which is what you were trying to prove as seen from your next statement.
Maybe I need to quote you again? "Sc2 is more demanding as far as pure clicking and mouse speed go."
You tried to reduce an entire game to a single false interaction. In real games, you want to cast your storms as fast as you can unless you don't care about your templars getting sniped. Furthermore, I'll counter your example with sending in a zerg army against a terran mech army. If you aren't doing this as fast as you can, all your units will just run in a line and die in a line.
Also, please refrain from posting in a manner that could be misconstrued as condescending or rude.
PS: I was about to reply to your entire post, but unless you realize the extent of your statement (Sc2 is more demanding as far as pure clicking and mouse speed go) and its erroneousness, there is no point.
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SoCal8898 Posts
On August 19 2015 18:58 MapleLeafSirup wrote: I already wrote that in another thread: Instead of those game-damaging super ultra macro mechanics like chrono boost, the players should be challenged in other ways. Make harassment more difficult is the best approach imo.
Compare hellion to vulture harass. Compare a reaver drop to an oracle. Compare shuttle drops in general with pylon warp-ins
What I want to say is: Harassing the ecolines is MUCH more difficult in BW than it is in SC2. If you don't micro well and have a great multitasking you will either not kill anything or fall behind in macro. In the current state of SC2 you have unkillable harass units (like the oracle) that just kill a lot of stuff super fast and are microed super easily. This is the stuff that Blizzard should focus on.
you also have to realize that these are not the only facets of micro that exist in the game anymore, too. adept micro, ravagers, liberators moving in and out of defender mode, siege tank/medivac micro, stronger nydus, etc. there are plenty of ways to harass.
i think that harassment is also challenging in a different way, given static d is also really good in sc2. you have things like photon overcharge, zerg players always have queens and terran have sensor towers that alert them that harassment is incoming.
there are a lot of units that also place the burden more on the person being harassed than the person doing the harassing because of the volatile nature of the harassment (or what you're saying is 'easier') and i think this is why blizzard is opting to try out macro mechanics being removed..they feel that the burden of harassment in lotv can wear down the attention of the person being harassed. from there we'll see what they come up with to challenge players further.
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Thanks for your thoughts Morrow, I only caught a portion of this on the stream, really appreciate the insight you bring!
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On August 19 2015 21:31 B-royal wrote:Show nested quote +On August 19 2015 09:22 imBLIND wrote:On August 19 2015 07:04 B-royal wrote:On August 18 2015 04:41 imBLIND wrote:On August 18 2015 03:15 CptMarvel wrote: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? 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 don't exactly plan out an hour out of my day detailing and writing out every facet of my opinion and corresponding examples to go along with those points, so I'm sorry if you don't understand my shortened post. Your shortened post is not understandable because it's flawed at its core. Your example was not suitable at all for the claims that you were trying to prove. You aren't clicking any faster in sc2 than people are in brood war. The only argument you have is that it in the respective games themselves it is relatively more important to be faster in Sc2 because there's nothing else to be bothered with. This however says NOTHING about the absolute speed requirements, which is what you were trying to prove as seen from your next statement. Maybe I need to quote you again? "Sc2 is more demanding as far as pure clicking and mouse speed go." You tried to reduce an entire game to a single false interaction. In real games, you want to cast your storms as fast as you can unless you don't care about your templars getting sniped. Furthermore, I'll counter your example with sending in a zerg army against a terran mech army. If you aren't doing this as fast as you can, all your units will just run in a line and die in a line. Also, please refrain from posting in a manner that could be misconstrued as condescending or rude. PS: I was about to reply to your entire post, but unless you realize the extent of your statement (Sc2 is more demanding as far as pure clicking and mouse speed go) and its erroneousness, there is no point.
...again, you're talking about something different than I am. You're talking about how much speed the game requires, and I'm talking about if speed is more of a limiting factor than precision is. I'm not talking about how much faster you need to be at one game or another, I'm comparing speed to precision, not fast to slow or "what is the minimum speed requirement for both games. "Sc2 is more demanding as far as pure clicking and mouse speed goes" is with reference to the precision of the game, not to the speed of BW and SC2. If you're going to quote, don't quote out of context. I never brought up anything about "absolute speed." It is pointless to continue debating if we're going to debate about different subjects.
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For my money, I'm glad the macro mechanics are being looked at. They are nothing more than a tax that you have to pay in order to play the game at a decent level. They are uninteresting as both a player and a viewer.
I think auto-inject is a lame way of handling the larva needs for Zerg. They should have instead just increased larva spawn rate to whatever they want Zerg to have and give the Queen some interesting mechanics that define her role a the base's babysitter. That would have been interesting. In any case, auto-inject is still more preferable to the alternative of status quo.
I think there will be heavy opposition to it by people who put in the time to get good at the mechanic, trust me... I get it. Putting time into shit that is made easier or obsolete is frustrating, but if it is for the long term health, suck it up.
Also, balance concerns should be put aside for right now. Balance is a matter of adjusting levers. If Zerg spirals out of control because of the ability to out-micro, then Blizz can add micro-taxes where it is interesting (combat is the first place to start). Similarly, Terran is going to have a rough go of things at first with literally every timing they have completely blown to hell, but that's a matter of time and potentially mineral adjustments.
On the positive side, this has made base harass an infinitely more interesting prospect, especially against Zerg. Having fewer larva means they are definitely going to feel each drone they have to replace.
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On August 21 2015 15:39 QSpec wrote: For my money, I'm glad the macro mechanics are being looked at. They are nothing more than a tax that you have to pay in order to play the game at a decent level. They are uninteresting as both a player and a viewer.
I think auto-inject is a lame way of handling the larva needs for Zerg. They should have instead just increased larva spawn rate to whatever they want Zerg to have and give the Queen some interesting mechanics that define her role a the base's babysitter. That would have been interesting. In any case, auto-inject is still more preferable to the alternative of status quo.
I think there will be heavy opposition to it by people who put in the time to get good at the mechanic, trust me... I get it. Putting time into shit that is made easier or obsolete is frustrating, but if it is for the long term health, suck it up.
Also, balance concerns should be put aside for right now. Balance is a matter of adjusting levers. If Zerg spirals out of control because of the ability to out-micro, then Blizz can add micro-taxes where it is interesting (combat is the first place to start). Similarly, Terran is going to have a rough go of things at first with literally every timing they have completely blown to hell, but that's a matter of time and potentially mineral adjustments.
On the positive side, this has made base harass an infinitely more interesting prospect, especially against Zerg. Having fewer larva means they are definitely going to feel each drone they have to replace. Have you anything to say about this post; a big counterargument to "it's nothing more than a tax?"
Original poster also restated that he wasn't going to address balance.
I want to know your opinion on this specific take on macro mechanics, not your general views from having read the title. I mostly agreed with his take on differentiating skills between players. It is nice having mr clutch decision maker (for me, Taeja's performance through many patches is the first name taking defensive play to success, MVP in earlier eras), it's also great having the mechanical gods that you fear their wrath when they first get ahead (whose names you already know).
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Simply knowing a game has high mechanics makes it THAT much more impressive and entertaining to watch, whenever you as an observer feel like you could re-act the same fight or game as a progamer could, that's when you know the game isn't hard enough mechanically.
I think this misses the mark. The problem with the mechanics is commercial viability. Blizzard is not going to grow revenue by making a game that only progamers can play. Blizzard doesn't make a significant amount of its' revenue from observers. IMO the mechanics are too demanding for someone to play the game casually 5 to 10 games a week. Seems to me they are trying to find ways to make the game appeal to a larger playing audience.
Maybe they make difference game modes where in one mode certain mechanics are automatic or removed or different and in a pro-game mode where they are more intricate.
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On August 21 2015 17:30 Danglars wrote:Have you anything to say about this post; a big counterargument to "it's nothing more than a tax?"
Original poster also restated that he wasn't going to address balance.
I want to know your opinion on this specific take on macro mechanics, not your general views from having read the title. I mostly agreed with his take on differentiating skills between players. It is nice having mr clutch decision maker (for me, Taeja's performance through many patches is the first name taking defensive play to success, MVP in earlier eras), it's also great having the mechanical gods that you fear their wrath when they first get ahead (whose names you already know).
You miss the mark. Morrow's post confirms, not denies, that inject is simply an APM tax. And while he had good justification for keeping it, he doubled down on it being a 'tax'. And if Zerg needs the tax, then add it interestingly (with combat units) or meaningfully (two equal ways to spend the Queen energy so that Inject isn't always the right choice). But Inject is the worst of all possible worlds. It is tedious base management which is both boring to do and to watch.
I also think Morrow misses the mark on his idea about making Larva Injects less meaningful (his proposed change). He said himself, pros will still aim to hit each inject meaning that the ideal situation is still hitting each inject. You might make it easier for newer players (raise the floor), but I don't see that as the aim for the macro removal (though it is definitely an effect). I see these changes as ways to revitalize a game by cutting out the unnecessary bullshit... which the macro mechanics were. And, I'd argue that the Zerg injects were the worst example of it. Protoss was well designed in that it gave meaningful choice. Terran was poorly designed but still better than Zerg because it gave a choice (though many false choices). Zerg's was simply, "try to do this thing 100% of the time". Like I said last paragraph, if something is needed to add something to Zerg's macro, then just please make it interesting.
I also want to address the "mechanics god" bit of your post and talked about as well by Morrow. If the only thing that differentiates whether Morrow defeats Hydra is whether Hydra hit 99% of his injects or 97% of his injects then 1) SC2 is a dumb, dumb game, and 2) Zerg is definitely overtuned and should probably be cleaned up a bit. Mechanics should absolutely play a role in who wins (and they do), but there are the good kinds of mechanics (Marine splits or WM baits or what have you), and bad ones (Inject for example). And while there is always some tedium built in (building depots/OL)... why intentionally build in more?
I also thinks that this change affects the high level play that Morrow was talking about a lot less than we think. I don't have numbers, but really... what's the average percent that Hydra vs Life vs Jaedong are hitting their injects? Let me make a bold claim... there's not one single pro Zerg who isn't hitting their injects more than 90% of the time.
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(broodlord infestor, swarm host, nothing happening for 15 minutes lets fight and now the game is over kinda games) The main reason for this IS THE MACRO BOOSTERS.
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I will note that at its core the difference between auto-inject and higher Hatchery larva spawn rate is that the opponent has a say in your larva spawn rate -- that is, they can kill the Queen.
This basically creates a small strategy point centered around going for the Queen, Drones, or Hatchery on the opposing site, and whether or not to have an extra Queen and/or invest resources or a portion of the army in defending the Queen on the Zerg side. It's not really a mechanical difference more than a strategic difference. unless you want to count microing to kill/save the Queen as a mechanical difference.
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Morrow, since you've played a good amount of Starbow, and Starbow has heavily nerfed the macro boosters, are you of the opinion that Starbow is too mechanically easy?
They essentially made inject larva irrelevant. Making a hatchery instead of a queen is pretty much just as good of a choice.
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United Kingdom20157 Posts
On September 05 2015 12:55 MaximilianKohler wrote:Show nested quote +(broodlord infestor, swarm host, nothing happening for 15 minutes lets fight and now the game is over kinda games) The main reason for this IS THE MACRO BOOSTERS.
Never had so many games ending in the midgame until they removed macro boosters and took a quarter of the money out of every base - people had consistently less income, had to expand more, were more vulnerable to harassment (both easier to do and more damaging when it happened) so generally games have lower supply and a lot more skirmishes.
Especially since we basically start with 2 bases in legacy, having macro boosters would mean accelerating the exponential economy/scaling up to supply cap. It means cutting down the early and midgame and rushing to lategame - and i don't particularly enjoy the default game state being max supply standoffs with cookie cutter armies like it was for PvZ at the end of WOL.
The current state of the game even with weakened macro boosters is far from that - but i preferred no mule, chrono and weaker inject to what we have now.
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On August 15 2015 07:00 MorroW wrote:Show nested quote +On August 15 2015 06:52 ZergLingShepherd1 wrote: Zerg will suffer the most in early and mid game. And its a shame you didnt said that.... but you noted the obivous fact that Terran will have difficult time in late game.
This why i cant take your post seriously, its clearly biased.
Not to mention you dont noticed the current era of bad design... the mech cancer that is happening. I guess in your mind SH was the problem yet we still see turtle mech. youre missing the point, nobody here should care who will "suffer" from the patch. terran not having the dynamic of scv sacrifice to improve their army is not a balance complaint, its an design observation. legacy of the void is not balanced, this patch does not attempt to balance it, my suggestions does not attempt to balance it. zerg having what? 4 less larva per inject cycle in early game has nothing at all to do with this discussion. i tried to make it as clear as possible in what i wrote does not have any hidden nudges about what race needs to be stronger or weaker. think about what im saying here, friend...
Just want to point out that, you DID mention about how "every race should be equally hard to play"... You may have intended that as a design statement but that is directly related to balance as well.
And that is my complaint about Larvae actually. As you mentioned, Larvae was always harder than Mules, and also the terran/protoss abilities change the way the whole way the races are being played, but not Larvae. Those are 2 major issues from both design and balance...
Following the logic presented... Shouldn't that mean both the end result of races being equally hard to play, but also have the Zerg macro mechanics be equally rewarding/game changing?
My beef with Larvae: It is badly designed and was a bad idea to implement from the beginning. I would rather it be removed, and if Zerg is easier to play than the other races, give them something both making them equivalently difficult, but also something actually REWARDING or FUN to play...
It's simply not fun to have to go back to your base every 40 seconds, just to be able to compete...
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