Community Feedback Update - September 18 - Page 5

On September 19 2015 08:03 Garemie wrote:
"First of all, we would like to point out that we saw the poll and posts relating to macro mechanics this week, and we'd like to thank you for the discussions. We don't agree with the idea that macro mechanics should be completely removed."


Blizzard. We've tried all three options now. Now that we've seen all of them, we (majority) agree that NO macro boosters was the best option. Going back to a previous idea isn't necessarily a bad idea. Please give it another chance.

On September 19 2015 06:38 TimeSpiral wrote:


David Kim is a senior game designer, at the top of his industry, working for one of the most prestigious outfits in the world. He and his team are much, much more sophisticated than everyone on this forum. If that does not apply to you, immediately submit your resume/CV to Blizzard and see what happens.

We're fortunate to be members of the beta, and our thoughts and experience and valuable to them, but this entitled grandiosity that we're somehow a better game designer than Kim and his team is utterly delusional.

On September 19 2015 08:54 Garemie wrote:



But its their own fault time is running out. The game doesn't need to launch next month.

On September 19 2015 08:21 Ansibled wrote:

I somehow doubt that the secret to the success of LotV lies in macro boosters vs no macro boosters.

On September 19 2015 08:42 CheRRyKiTTy wrote:


No, no and no.

The difference here is that Blizzard Dev team is much more capable of building a working game out of someone's vision than the average team liquid posters. There is no way to guarantee the vision they have chosen to pursue is better than the vision the community has. When you create art it maybe years of your lifeblood poured into the project and most of the people want to create something unique. The community on the other hand wanted a game that would be a spiritual successor to Broodwar. Instead we got a great RTS, but very different from what people would have visioned.

-Macro boosters make the game a race to 200/200, an issue that the original Starcraft did not really have. This was really an unforeseen issue when the game first released. The maps were too small and the metagame was far too primitive to make any conclusions about the effect of the macro mechanics on the actual gameplay. Currently the game is balanced around the macro mechanics so removing them proved to be too much work for the dev team.

-Space control has traditionally been very weak. Tanks were nerfed, Lurker did not exist for a long time, instead the game was centered around more fluid unit movement, this combined with the 200/200 race creates deathball metagame which probably nobody likes. The problem yet again is the fact the game was designed on maps like Metalopolis, Steppes of war, Scrap Station. If you have to make a game that works on these maps, the area control units can't be very strong. However, when you are creating a game for larger maps like the modern Starcraft maps which actually have a rush distance more than 20 seconds you need slow/stationary units that are capable of controlling the space against larger forces.

-Protoss units and abilities that prevent micro, Force fields, colossi, latest offender adepts all prevent opponent from doing counter micro in large battles. Force field and colossus are such god damn cool ideas that I can understand why a developer who came up with them would want to keep them in the game. Yeah, the idea is cool, it's not good, but force field was of course the protoss way of defending the base when the rush distances were ridiculously short. Colossus deathball on the other hand proved to be a lot less efficient when both players were doing builds that would be considered all-ins or even cheeses in the modern metagame. When people finally figured out how problematic they were... Well, too late.

Blizzard development team is much better at building a game than any of us on the forum, but I would argue that their game design is not in this situation the best. I don't really fault them for the WoL design, I might have fallen into the exactly same traps. I feel in HotS they made pretty good job of improving upon WoL. Now in LotV they had a chance to correct the mistakes they made when they really did not know how exactly the game would play out. They even faked an interest in doing dramatic changes to make the game better. Then, they reverted everything, told us the game would be released in 2 months and gave us community feedback which completely lacks any depth.

So don't tell me the Blizzard Dev team is absolutely the best development team working on the game.

On September 19 2015 08:42 CheRRyKiTTy wrote:
So don't tell me the Blizzard Dev team is absolutely the best development team working on the game.

We're now leaning towards the fact that auto inject might not be the direction we want to go in the long-term. The primary reason is we've seen, and will continue to see, perception issues that diminish great Zerg players with arguments such as, "Zerg has no macro to do," or "every Zerg, no matter the skill level, can macro well because it's just all automatic." What it boils down to is we think the gain of having auto inject does not outweigh this negative perception that the change creates.

On September 19 2015 11:44 xTJx wrote:
LotV = HotS with 12 workers start. Nice "new" game blizzard.