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your Country52797 Posts
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Our StarCraft II Multiplayer Panel just wrapped up at BlizzCon 2015! This panel covered our goals for StarCraft II multiplayer going forward, and also discussed how community feedback has helped shape many of the upcoming changes we have planned.
Below, we’ve included a complete breakdown on everything we discussed in the panel.
Reviewing Multiplayer
Lead Multiplayer Designer David Kim opened up the panel by discussing 1v1 StarCraft II multiplayer and what makes it unique among other game modes like Campaign, Co-op Missions, Archon Mode, and the Arcade. Whereas these other modes are meant to be more accessible to players, 1v1 multiplayer has one of the highest skill-ceilings, if not the highest, of any current game. While we’ve added new game modes that are either collaborative or team-based experiences and serve as excellent areas for more casual players to begin playing StarCraft II, the panel focused more on our goals for improving certain mechanical aspects of the game particularly as it relates to 1v1 multiplayer.
Throughout our multiplayer redesign, we’ve had five major goals:
-More action
-Faster pacing with less downtime
-A balance of micro needs across the races
-Variety in types of micro
-Major redesigns to existing core mechanics
Five Goals for the Future
More action was a core pillar that aimed to promote skirmishes, harassment, and attacks regardless of a player’s unit composition. A great example of this is the new Protoss unit Adept. These units can be built very early on, have the Psionic Transfer ability to quickly move in and disrupt mineral lines of opponents, and can two-shot workers – making them great units to go on the offense from the start of the game. More action is also reflected throughout Legacy of the Void in economic changes, macro changes, and new unit additions.
Faster Pacing birthed the concept of starting with more workers. We wanted to remove periods of the game where players had little opportunity to exert their prowess, and the economic build-up time from 6 to 12 workers was a perfect example of that.
Another desire is for Legacy of the Void to be less about the size of your army and more about engaging frequently and effectively. For this to happen, micro needs to be a vital aspect of all army compositions. To promote this dynamic, we designed units like the Ravager, Disruptor, Adept, and Cyclone. As we added more opportunities to micro with each of the three races, it was important that we made sure the types of micro joining StarCraft II were different enough, while remaining true to the feel of each race.
In addition, we redesigned core aspects of the game. Such changes included revamps to the game’s economy, racial macro mechanics, and all-in strategies. For example, in Legacy of the Void, when a player intends to win solely on the back of a warp-in strategy, it will require a greater investment to achieve the same levels of aggression as in Heart of the Swarm.
While we’ve made many changes in Legacy of the Void, we haven’t made them alone. As Senior Technical Designer Aron Kirkpatrick explained, we’ve had one of the most passionate gaming communities helping us.
The Feedback Process
At the start of our long beta for Legacy of the Void, we began regularly asking players for more feedback. As Kirkpatrick explained during the panel, this made a huge difference in the quality of improvements we made to the game as the beta progressed.
Out of all the games out there, StarCraft II’s community isn’t just passionate—this community pioneered eSports as we know it. Highlighting the competitive aspects of StarCraft II is deeply engrained into the community, and that passion for excellent gameplay was utilized in creating Legacy of the Void through consistently seeking input from our players.
We’re very proud of how our passionate community focuses on constructive feedback and we want to involve them more closely in our development process. With this in mind, Kirkpatrick asked our audience: “how do you get everyone involved in a process as complex as game development?”
Community Informed Design
In designing Legacy of the Void, we became much more transparent. Through sharing our internal design discussions and having more two-way communication, more valuable discussions emerged which significantly improved our development process.
We’ve also held several community summits that have been very helpful in gathering thoughts and sentiments from the personalities and players who represent and advocate for the community.
Harnessing Player Feedback
After gathering and listening to feedback, we began to implement it. The Disruptor, for instance, received a lot of feedback early-on that it was “too binary”; it wildly wiped out an opponent’s army with its attack, or failed spectacularly.
We mentioned in a post that we wanted the unit to survive more but deal less damage, and the community gave amazing feedback resulting in changes. This approach occurred with many other units—even yielding a new unit altogether: the Terran Liberator. As a result of the feedback we received, we feel the Liberator is currently one of the most interesting units in the game.
Large-scale economic changes, as well as changes to Protoss warp-in tactics, were also a result of listening to community feedback. With the community's help, we made additional changes to stabilize the game and make it more fun for everyone.
More Communication Helps
Our macro-mechanics changes were met with mixed-response, yet the community provided consistent feedback as we made adjustments to our approach. We hope the changes we landed on feel more fair as a result of this feedback, and preserve what people like about macro and its importance to high-level play.
Open communication also helped with feedback on early-game army scaling. When we reduced the effectiveness of macro mechanics, this created a more lengthy early game for skirmishes to take place. Most of the feedback we got showed that people enjoyed when skirmishes were frequent but brief, and that this created a better flow through the stages of the game—so we value the feedback we received on this topic.
Aron Kirkpatrick closed by saying that open communication will still continue after launch, but will be focused more on balance than design. Concerning the beta, we achieved a lot thanks to the proactive discussions that took place with the community.
Upcoming Ladder Changes
Next, Game Designer Aaron Larson took the mic to discuss upcoming changes that we’re exploring for the ladder system. He first highlighted how we saw huge benefits from collaborating with the community in the beta, so we want to keep that collaboration going as we develop post-launch features for Legacy of the Void. Right now, we believe we’re in a place where we have a concept that we’d like to reveal and hear your feedback on.
In the past, we’ve seen consistent feedback that players desire more transparency on the ladder. With that in mind, we’re aiming to help players better understand how they stack up against others. For example, the medal system easily lets you compare your Gold rank against someone else’s Silver rank. However, within the same league, the skill of a rank 54 Gold may be vastly different than a rank 60 Gold in a different division.
More Descriptive Ranking
Our goal is to have a system that accommodates a broad variety in skill levels while being more descriptive. A Masters player will often want to know exactly where they’re ranked in the region, so the system should provide a lot of meaning and context. However, if someone is ranked in a much lower division, like a Bronze player, what they really want to know is “Am I getting better at the game?”
With our goals clearly laid out, Senior Game Designer Alex Sun then went on to talk about the ideas we’ve developed to improve the ladder system.
When you think about player rank, he said, it’s helpful to think of the player population in terms of top, middle, and lower tiers. About 80 percent of players fall in the middle tier, with another 10 percent falling into Grandmaster and Master, and the remaining 10 percent in Bronze.
The way we’ve divided these players has been somewhat problematic. The Grandmaster league, for instance, doesn’t necessarily have the most skilled players. More egregiously, once players have been placed into a league, promotions or demotions are extremely rare, making improvements extremely difficult to recognize.
Addressing Ladder Issues
To solve the above issues, we’re making changes to how the leagues function. Currently, we plan on combining all of the Grandmaster and Master league divisions into one. In this new large division, the top 200 player are Grandmaster players. However, if you make it to the top, you can't rest on your laurels, because those below you can easily bump you out! This will allow the competitive experience to remain active in this tier of players.
Players in the middle and lower tiers want to know how close they are to advancing, and so our current solution is for each league to have 10 subdivisions to more clearly define a player’s skill. This means that if you’re a Gold 1 player, you’re among the best Gold players in the world and are close to reaching the Platinum tier. Divisions also won’t have a player cap – so if you’re ranked as Silver 5, you know you belong there because of your skill level, and not simply because another division has filled up. Finally, since rank isn’t currently indicative of skill, we’re looking at different ways of awarding points so that participation matters less than skill.
Breaking Out of Bronze
For players in the lowest league, improving is inevitable with practice and we want those improvements to be quickly reflected in your rank. In Wings of Liberty, about 20 percent of players were Bronze, so even if you were drastically improving in your skill you were still stuck in the lowest division. With ten subdivisions, it should become clear that you’re improving because you’ll begin moving up through subdivisions that have clear meaning.
We also plan to reduce the overall size of Bronze, since the difference in skill between someone at the bottom versus the top of Bronze is comparable to the difference in skill between the bottom of Silver and the top of Platinum.
That concludes our recap of our Multiplayer Panel. Are you looking forward to the changes above? What did you think of the philosophies presented by the team? Let us know in the comments!
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Bisutopia19152 Posts
Great work guys. Such a kick ass sc2 staff for getting this together.
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The idea of 10 sub-divisions is fantastic!!! The ladder system, that once seemed amazing, has become outdated. This should be much more accurate and encouraging for players. Will it be as before, that you can't move down ranks in season? I worry the easier movement among ranks will add ladder anxiety to some players if that is the case. However, I can already tell that this will be more fun for me  )
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ALLEYCAT BLUES49496 Posts
On a tangent...
I always wondered if they should do separate balance for 1v1 and 2v2+above, like team games be their own separate game altogether you know, but then it'd be like learning 2 different games and nobody likes that but it would be an interesting approach.
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United States12224 Posts
So what this is going to mean is a ladder that looks very much like Heroes of the Storm, in my estimation. However, instead of 50 ranks of equal size, the size of the LotV subdivisions would depend on the targets for each league. If we were to apply the existing Heart of the Swarm distribution to this new layout, we would see something like this:
Bronze 1-10 (0.8% per subdivision)
Silver 1-10 (2% per subdivision)
Gold 1-10 (3.2% per subdivision)
Platinum 1-10 (2% per subdivision)
Diamond 1-10 (1.8% per subdivision)
Then Master+GM at the top, covering the rest.
Now obviously, we're not gonna have the same distribution since Master+GM is going to be the top 10% with Bronze being "smaller" (does that mean the 10% they used as a bucket example, which would be smaller than WoL?) to some degree.
What's interesting about this is that in the current ladder, we know roughly what the rating ranges for each league are. Each league covered roughly 200-250 rating, and each game against a same-skill opponent nets 16 rating. If we were to subdivide by 10, that would mean a promotion into a new subdivision almost every game (for reference, this is roughly the pace at which ranks increase in Heroes of the Storm).
What that also means is that there is no way that the current points system will remain intact. The current division system is organized by points, but points are a little weird. Early in a season when the bonus pool is low, most of your points will come from just winning games. Late in a season, bonus pool can compose 75-80% of your points, and bonus pool is primarily an activity measurement. Points also only carry over your bonus pool when you get promoted, and that could affect how rankings appear after a promotion. They mentioned in the post that they want to change the proportion of activity to skill, which either means a change to the accrual rate of the bonus pool, how the bonus pool is applied to points, or possibly the removal of bonus pool altogether in favor of a different activity system.
I'm going to make a further prediction here and say that demotions will return, at least for subdivisions.
Overall, some very cool stuff and I'm really excited about it. This is labeled "post-launch" content which means it will probably be patched in a little later, but hopefully that happens soon.
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On November 07 2015 12:45 BLinD-RawR wrote:
On a tangent...
I always wondered if they should do separate balance for 1v1 and 2v2+above, like team games be their own separate game altogether you know, but then it'd be like learning 2 different games and nobody likes that but it would be an interesting approach.
No, Don't think that's a good way to do it. You could have army A beating army B handily in 1on1 mode, but the exact same fight go the other way around in 2on2... What a mess if you play a bit of both.
I think 2on2 balance can be achieved by maps.
In the 1on1 mapmaking scene, there is a pretty strong consensus in how you need to have the main, natural and third laid out in terms of distance and defendability. People have understood how 1on1 maps can look and still make for good balanced games. In 2on2 maps, it's hugely variable... Sometimes you get a completely safe natural and easily defended third, sometimes one of the players will have to take a 180 degrees open base towards the opponents as natural, and a third base is also a third base of your opponents. Sometimes your natural is a gold base, sometimes you get rocks blocking you from your opponents like the old beginners maps. It's completely random, and I didn't even mention 3on3 or 4on4 maps. I think this variability is due to the 2on2 mapmakers not understanding what layouts make for good and balanced 2on2 games. If only the top 2on2(+) competitive players could stop with their childish bickering (that's all I hear from them on TL) and team up with the mapmakers to actually figure out how a good balanced 2on2 map should look like, I think 2on2 would be in a great state.
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On November 07 2015 11:55 The_Templar wrote:
-More action
-Faster pacing with less downtime
-A balance of micro needs across the races
-Variety in types of micro
-Major redesigns to existing core mechanics
Five Goals for the Future
...
You know what really pisses me off? Is that they came up with these crappy goals after they changed stuff! We didn't know these were the goals clearly before the LOTV Beta, we all thought the goals were here: http://us.battle.net/sc2/en/blog/16654945/legacy-of-the-void-multiplayer-preview-11-8-2014.
Our feedback could have been better and more focused if we knew the goals they said were the goals weren't the real goals, and that these five goals were the real goals.
And what are these Five Goals for the Future? They wrote this heading and then... nothing... they talked about how great the Adept is, and then forgot about the heading and their blog wandered aimlessly. I can't even make this up.
My guess is the conversation that led to this blog went something like this:
"Uhh David we should do some goals. Pick things that we know the community will like, like the LoL developers do, and then work toward those goals and report on the progress"
"But we have no idea what we are doing Aron. We made some goals, then we forgot about them."
"You're right David, so we should setup some retroactive goals, then say we have Five Goals for the Future. People probably forgot about those old goals like we did anyway."
"But we don't have any goals for the future Aron."
"Well David, we don't have to clearly outline what those five goals are to make people think we have new goals. Just write the heading in a blog and after we've randomly changed a bunch things, we can talk about how we met five goals with community help! And we'll blame any miscommunication on the fact is was just a blog..."
Do people really still buy the BS they try to sell?
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On November 07 2015 14:18 BronzeKnee wrote:Show nested quote +On November 07 2015 11:55 The_Templar wrote:
-More action
-Faster pacing with less downtime
-A balance of micro needs across the races
-Variety in types of micro
-Major redesigns to existing core mechanics
Five Goals for the Future
... You know what really pisses me off? Is that they came up with these crappy goals after they changed stuff! We didn't know these were the goals clearly before the LOTV Beta, we all thought the goals were here: http://us.battle.net/sc2/en/blog/16654945/legacy-of-the-void-multiplayer-preview-11-8-2014. Our feedback could have been better and more focused if we knew the goals they said were the goals weren't the goals, and the these five goals were the goals. And what are these Five Goals for the Future? They wrote this heading and then... nothing... they talked about how great the Adept is, and then forgot about the heading and their blog wandered aimlessly. My guess is the conversation that led to this blog went something like this:"Uhh David we should do some goals. Pick things that we know the community will like, like the LoL developers do, and then work toward those goals and report on the progress" "But we have no idea what we are doing Aron." "You're right David, so we should setup some retroactive goals, then say we have Five Goals for the Future" "But we don't have any goals for the future Aron." "Well David, we don't have to clearly outline what those five goals are to make people think we have new goals. Just write the heading in a blog and after we've randomly changed a bunch things, we can talk about how we met five goals with community help! And we'll blame any miscommunication on the fact is was just a blog..." Do people really still buy the BS they try to sell?
Yeah, I reacted the same way a bit... If they indeed had these goal all along, why not tell the community that is supposed to help meet these goals? I have been thinking the same a few times during the beta in general, that if they only had been more clear with their large-scale goals, people could put their efforts to much more targeted solutions. I don't necessarily think that they made them up now afterwards though, even though they may not have been as pronounced all the way from the start.
Well, I'm sure they'll let us know what the new five goals are for the first content patch.
+ Show Spoiler +3 days before the content patch is out.
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I'm taking this "panel" talk with a grain of salt . After all , it's blizzcon and he must look good.
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On November 07 2015 14:43 Cascade wrote:
I don't necessarily think that they made them up now afterwards though, even though they may not have been as pronounced all the way from the start.
]
Well, either they made them up now and the other goals were lies, or they communicated nothing in roughly a year from originally setting the goals I linked in my post above to these goals.
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Happy with what I heard about ladder transparency, and the LoL/CSGO style divisions, but where was this years ago?
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I am excited for lotv a little bit more after these announcements.
Edit: Wrong thread with abathur quotes
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On November 07 2015 15:18 BronzeKnee wrote:Show nested quote +On November 07 2015 14:43 Cascade wrote:
I don't necessarily think that they made them up now afterwards though, even though they may not have been as pronounced all the way from the start.
] Well, either they made them up now and the other goals were lies, or they communicated nothing in roughly a year from originally setting the goals I linked in my post above to these goals.
To be fair, they've been talking about more action, interesting micro, less downtime and things on that list in their comments and patch notes. I think many people would have guessed a similar list from the official blizzard posts. So yeah, I do think that that the things on the list have been guiding their process, whether it was explicitly written down on their whiteboard or not. I wish they had made the list known to the community earlier though.
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Finally they're adding together the master divisions into one. It never made sense to me why they would hide your global rank with the division system.
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It's going to be awkward to release new ranked not at the start of LotV, how will the seasons function then, will MMR change or it will be the same?
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On November 07 2015 17:18 TheScriptan wrote:
It's going to be awkward to release new ranked not at the start of LotV, how will the seasons function then, will MMR change or it will be the same?
I guess the MMR will stay unchanged. The hidden ranking and matchmaking has been working really well throughout sc2 imo, except for that messup with MMR-decay. I think this is just a slightly different layer of cosmetics on top of the true MMR.
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More action, faster pacing... Always more and faster... Haven't they understood yet that the More & Faster mentality is what hindered SC2's success?
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Fixing ladder doesn't help if it is based on a broken game right now
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I really really like the changes to the ladder system. 5 years to late but still great.
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On November 07 2015 13:32 Excalibur_Z wrote:
So what this is going to mean is a ladder that looks very much like Heroes of the Storm, in my estimation. However, instead of 50 ranks of equal size, the size of the LotV subdivisions would depend on the targets for each league. If we were to apply the existing Heart of the Swarm distribution to this new layout, we would see something like this:
Bronze 1-10 (0.8% per subdivision)
Silver 1-10 (2% per subdivision)
Gold 1-10 (3.2% per subdivision)
Platinum 1-10 (2% per subdivision)
Diamond 1-10 (1.8% per subdivision)
Then Master+GM at the top, covering the rest.
Now obviously, we're not gonna have the same distribution since Master+GM is going to be the top 10% with Bronze being "smaller" (does that mean the 10% they used as a bucket example, which would be smaller than WoL?) to some degree.
What's interesting about this is that in the current ladder, we know roughly what the rating ranges for each league are. Each league covered roughly 200-250 rating, and each game against a same-skill opponent nets 16 rating. If we were to subdivide by 10, that would mean a promotion into a new subdivision almost every game (for reference, this is roughly the pace at which ranks increase in Heroes of the Storm).
What that also means is that there is no way that the current points system will remain intact. The current division system is organized by points, but points are a little weird. Early in a season when the bonus pool is low, most of your points will come from just winning games. Late in a season, bonus pool can compose 75-80% of your points, and bonus pool is primarily an activity measurement. Points also only carry over your bonus pool when you get promoted, and that could affect how rankings appear after a promotion. They mentioned in the post that they want to change the proportion of activity to skill, which either means a change to the accrual rate of the bonus pool, how the bonus pool is applied to points, or possibly the removal of bonus pool altogether in favor of a different activity system.
I'm going to make a further prediction here and say that demotions will return, at least for subdivisions.
Overall, some very cool stuff and I'm really excited about it. This is labeled "post-launch" content which means it will probably be patched in a little later, but hopefully that happens soon.
Having sub-leagues representing different percentages of players depending on the league is kind of weird. They should probably make them equal with the exception of possibly Bronze and Master.
The bonus pool should be removed, and inactivity should be dealt with in another way. One idea is to kick inactive players off the ladder so that your sub-league tends towards the MMR measure for % of active players only, while maintaining the inactive player's rank on both their profile page and a filtered view of the division list (which now lists everyone in the sub-league into 1 big division) and marked as inactive.
As you've pointed out, not having demotions can lead to people jumping up several sub-leagues in a small number of games. So it's easily possible for people to fluke out higher sub-leagues than they deserve and be locked in. This means that there should be demotions, it doesn't necessarily mean that Blizzard won't keep the points system unchanged.
There is still the question of how promotion and demotions will actually work under the proposed ladder revamp, and whether or not they are symmetric as opposed to being biased against demotions. Will it change? The smaller each sub-league is, the more likely it is that players flip-flop between sub-leagues, leading to erratic promotion and demotion (which is one reason why a continuous rating is superior, it avoids the fanfare associated with promotions and demotions). How will Blizzard deal with this? One possibility is instead of using MMR to determine the sub-league, use a moving average of MMR (this filters out short-run fluctuations), or even a moving average of the 20% (say) quantile of the MMR distribution (that is the point where there's a 80% chance that your MMR is greater than it).
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EPT
