EPTI was following you untill you started explaining how the player "perturbs" a machine ect. personally i dont think its necessary to explain yourself that much. Your initial argument made alot of sense and i just bacame increasingly confused as you microanalyzed starcraft (which by the way is impressive) i'm no programmer or game developer. I understand the gist of what you say, but request that you simplify your posts in future for the less knowlegeable (ie. me). thanks.
[SC2B] A Shot In The Dark - Page 7
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HachiMaki
United Kingdom1 Post
I was following you untill you started explaining how the player "perturbs" a machine ect. personally i dont think its necessary to explain yourself that much. Your initial argument made alot of sense and i just bacame increasingly confused as you microanalyzed starcraft (which by the way is impressive) i'm no programmer or game developer. I understand the gist of what you say, but request that you simplify your posts in future for the less knowlegeable (ie. me). thanks. | ||
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enzym
Germany1034 Posts
On March 10 2010 06:16 Jyxz wrote: yes, i will "trust you", because theres so much reason for it and i didnt try it succesfully myself (im only #7 in eu platinum league 9) and it didnt work for naz either as you can see in this replay http://www.mediafire.com/?zmjfmk4zman (im being sarcastic here).Actually you are 100% wrong, because of the auto focus workers if you do the same strat in your own base you just lost the game. Trust me I've tried. i didnt say it is as easy as having your zealots autoattack the other guys workers (or a freewin even), but it is still easily possible to defend if you know the right bo and micro your stuff well enough. also, to give my view on this a little more cred, heres a quote On March 09 2010 17:54 iNfeRnaL wrote: Seriously? 5 pages of "balance" in PvP? Just because it plays differently from SC1? You lose in PvP? Do the same shit you lost to. You could always just mirror your opponent so the one with better macro and micro wins. Crying because you can't 1-2 gate tech instead is a good solution, eh...? -_- Won't ever get some people... | ||
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Half
United States2554 Posts
Right now, all high level Protoss versus Protoss games will begin with a proxy pylon rush. To counter fast expands, almost all protoss will FP (fake push, without intent to end, only to control) proxy pylon, forcing zerg to go roaches, and countering with immortals. PvT is the most varied, but at least 60% of all platinum games center around a Proxy Pylon. The issue isn't that proxy pylons are too strong. Their really not. The issue is that their too natural. A proxy pylon requires almost no deviation from a standard build. Your literally just delaying your extractors for a bit. It can be canceled at any time should the opponent build base defenses (which absolutely DO counter it, even in PvP...the problem is countering sets your economy back too much while the enemy is free to take this unit and econ advantage to fast expand, while your stuff with a useless early forge and turrets. Against terran, fast tech builds are not possible. You lack early game defenses to counter a MM rush, so the game naturally gravitates you towards going some variation of threegate. Currently, the issue isn't that people are cheesing with proxy pylon. Its that proxy pylon itself isn't a cheese by any classic definition. I'm not the type to term anything in this game completely broken unless you analyze it from all sides. -and- A proxy pylon build requires almost no sacrifices. That means that regardless of whether people will develop a counter (for all those "ZOMG EARLY BETA WAITS people), it will remain broken in sole effect because their isn't a choice not to get warp gates, while three gates is unarguably the most optimal for all except fast tech/expo (which are almost completely undoable against all except zerg) or cheese builds. It doesn't matter if theirs a counter to it. The build is so optimal that you'll be going to use ti regardless. If the build has no alternative, even if people discover some lolamazing way that a protoss, or a terran, or a zerg, can completely negate Proxy pylon, protoss will still open in a way that is almost identical to proxy pylon. That forces their opponent to go the build directly made to counter proxy pylons (which may not exist for protoss). Early game has been completely standardized. The only way this could be false is if protoss discovered a significantly more potent and not risky build that didn't involve making a fast 3 gate + a cybernetics core+upgrading. I don't see that happening. . Marine Marauders will completely decimate you, while even given my limited knowledge, I don't see how it is vaguely possible your going to counter 3gate pylon as protoss WHILE SINKING 400 gold on an early expo. Simply put, Warp Gate research needs to be offset with a sacrifice. An early warpgate needs to made a conscientious choice by the player, 3warpgate needs to be made a choice, not a default. Otherwise, no matter what kind of counter is developed, the metagame will always remain as stale as it is. A rush should not be the natural result of the most optimal early game strategy. As for the fix, it can be done in a bajillion ways, each with their own pros and advantages...my personal favorite is giving warp gates a slower build time then just build units. | ||
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Tiptup
United States133 Posts
On March 12 2010 07:36 EatThePath wrote: I would talk way too much if I chose to respond with both exhaustive counterexamples and a theoretical rebuttal (as below), and I don't think either of us is looking for a fight to the death, so I'll just list some "soft" counterexamples as something to think about. Thank you for your well spoken response, but I believe you're over-thinking this issue to the degree where you're confusing my argument with irrelevant concerns. In other words, the arguments you're making, whether proven true or false in a debate, don't have direct relevance to the question I proposed or the issue I was discussing. Also, other than a few of the ways you've chosen to word your points and a few slight corrections I would make to your thinking process, I don't really disagree with anything you have to say. I'll try to help clear things up for you with the rest of this post. On March 12 2010 07:36 EatThePath wrote: Is Settlers of Catan predictable? Is it strategic? What about old fashioned marbles? Is Risk predictable, or strategic? I don't think the way you phrased the relationship between predictability and strategic balance is exactly accurate. I think players use predictability to assess strategies. But more fundamentally, your first window on strategies in any game is examining the possible lines of play, and what outcomes may result. Your certainty then plays a role in "scoring" those possibilities, sort of like expected utility. Settlers of Catan and Risk are both games that have precise elements that are predictable and, for a person's realistic ability to keep track of complex possibilities, random. They are both, therefore, strategic and not strategic at the same time (considering human limitations). I believe you're a little confused as to what elements of a game provide strategy and what elements work randomly (and, therefore, outside of strategy). For example, in a completely random universe, where you could define nothing and predict nothing, you'd have nothing for anything to ever be strategic with. Risk management and the "scoring" of possibilities only occurs to the degree we can define and predict risk associated with possibilities and then make choices accordingly. Predicting the risk associated with possibilities relies upon and requires predictable, limited, know-able parameters. It's impossible to ever find any strategy that originates from purely random parameters. By contrast, even a simple game like Tic-Tac-Toe proves that firm strategies can exist in the absence of random variables. Another game that has no random variables (provided by the game's inherent structure) would be Chess, though it's far more complex. While, in both of these examples, the players do provide random elements to the game, again, its not difficult to see that it's the precise limits upon those random variables that allows us to make firm, strategic choices about each different possibility we consider. I can logically prove this assertion with the fact that even a totally predictable game of Chess, played against yourself with every move decided before-hand, still contains strategies that can be analyzed despite the complete absence of any random variables whatsoever. Despite what you said, those strategies are meaningful and real when completely predictable. While those strategies aren't really fun anymore (obviously), that's beside the point (my point concerning where strategy originates from, predictability vs. randomness, is proven). Now, neither Settlers of Catan nor Risk involve infinite, endlessly-open randomness as far as the basic games, in the basic ways they are played, is the concerned. As such, in the game Risk, it is theoretically possible to to define every possible result based upon every starting parameter (like the number of players, army count, and map divisions). Every so-called "random" result that could affect those starting parameters (like player choice, card shuffling, and dice throws) are then limited by the starting parameters (like the limited number of player choices, the limited number of cards that could be shuffled, as well as the limited number of dice and dice sides) and thus can be considered a starting parameter as well (as the game progress, you can decrease the number of results, but never increase them). We can then, as you say, make strategic choices about risk/reward regarding every possible result, and I believe this is the point you are trying to make. You're arguing that we can be strategic in response to randomness, but, unfortunately for the sake of your challenge, I have no quarrel with you there and I believe you should have easily realized that fact. In the very text you quoted from me I said the following: "(At best, a player can only predict random results and strategically embrace or avoid them.)" That is me acknowledging that strategies will exist in particular configurations because of the way they are affected by random variables. Apart from your misconception that strategy can inherently come from such random variables (which I have hopefully corrected with the above paragraphs), this shows that I first stated the point you're making before you made it. More compelling is how you're missing the context in which my point was made. Neither Liquid Nazgul nor Daigomi were talking about game "balance" in terms of what could be defined as random chance. Each were talking about the completely predictable nature of unit combat balance (hit/kill ratios and so on) and how they wanted to preserve that. They were not talking about game balance with unpredictable variables. The fact that this should have been obvious to you makes me doubt your claim that you aren't looking for a "fight" here. The context of this discussion is obvious to everyone and I can't imagine you're too stupid to see it. On March 12 2010 07:36 EatThePath wrote: The coin flip example doesn't translate into a complex game design as cleanly as you say. In your game, it's just a process, not a game. We agree you could also describe Shoots and Ladders this way. You're just flipping coins, so of course there's no interaction. You didn't make that up as you went, did you? Simply put, you're wrong. A purely statistical "process" can be a game and one often is. While this thread was first talking about "balance" in terms of skill-based balance (before you came along), a game can also be based upon what I would call "chance-based balance." Under that system, a game designer works to balance concerns of which players are given how much of a chance to win and which actions are given how much a chance to go one way or another. A common kind of gameplay (historically speaking) can involve having fun just seeing the outcome of a random variable because we human beings often enjoy the uniqueness of where things just happen to go. Therefore, the "play" in coin flipping would be us saying that one person supposedly "wins" and the other person supposedly "loses" based on the flips results (or any other sort of "play" you can imagine). Of course that play doesn't produce an intellectually satisfying game that requires any skill, but that's never been a requirement for a game to actually be a game. On March 12 2010 07:36 EatThePath wrote: But in Starcraft, if high ground provides chance to miss, the players, mostly the attacking player, choose whether to engage in "coin flipping", and how much and in what manner, which is a world of difference. More than that, once a battle begins, the tactics of cycling low health units out and in, and focus firing, etc, are modified to accommodate the miss chance. It's just one element of a much larger field of interactions. Players have tons of room to participate skillfully in that situation. Obviously players can often choose to reduce or increase their risk in games that allow such action. Such a process involves skill and is often very fun. However, after those choices have been made, there is no skill involved in the actual parameters that yield the random result. In fact, the outcome of any random variables "chosen" in this way does not matter to anyone's skill, at all. For instance, a person who's going to lose a game of StarCraft 2 (anyways) could go for the "cliff-attack coin flip," win that coin flip, and suddenly be in a position to win the entire game, not because he was skilled at analyzing or controlling his risk, but because a random, miss chance went in his favor. In that instance there's nothing interesting or compelling that this player was gambling with because he, in actuality, had nothing else to lose (and would have lost had the average statistical result been what occurred); all that's left is our simple interest in "how things happened." The only time that the set of chance-based game balance can sort of be seen to overlap the set of skill-based game balance is when we consider a large body of outcome samples. In other words, a player's skill can rely upon an average statistical result when each individual outcome of the underlying action must occur many times before that action becomes "game changing." In a game that works with chance-based attacks on that scale, "cycling low-health units out and in" and "focus firing" can be quite viable (and fun) as you say. What you don't seem to realize, however, is that the reason for this is because an average statistic becomes a reasonable prediction (on the scale I'm talking about) and not because of anything inherently strategic in the basic existence of random chance. Plus, even in a game that gives us the HP levels to reasonably expect average combat damage (like WarCraft 3), that reasonable prediction is still not perfect. Though extremely rare, it is conceivable for a highly skilled player to get a string of really bad luck (a string of below or above average results) and lose because of it. And, sure, as in coin flipping, that's part of the game and can easily be fun (after all, it's not like anyone was forced to play the game). But, in the end, let's still be clear about what that result actually is: it's not one that comes from any player's skill. Now, as I labored to say in my original post, I believe that "cycling low health units out and in" is very difficult in a game with StarCraft's skill-based balance: many hit/kill ratios are very close to even (1:1). This is actually the kind of unit balance I would prefer StarCraft to have because I find it very fun. However, if that's how StarCraft 2 is going to be, you can't reasonably predict an average result for combat damage to be the actual combat damage that most affects the end result of the game. I'm guessing that often, in a single outcome of "hit or miss," you'll get a game changing affect on the outcome of the entire game that varies from the average hit or miss chance in StarCraft 2. On March 12 2010 07:36 EatThePath wrote: As others have pointed out, when you have high ground damage reduction, the decision (given an informed attacker) comes down to "whose army wins?" which seems to limit decision making. I'm sorry, as I pointed out in my post, that's simply wrong. There is no limit on the decision making process for fixed damage reduction. All a game designer needs to do is make the parameters producing that end effect too complex for people to gauge properly. For instance, do you think the game of Chess is "too limiting" in terms of decision making? You don't roll dice and yet people still manage to make mistakes with it. Does that fact confuse you? On March 12 2010 07:36 EatThePath wrote: But miss chance vs damage reduction aside, my main point is that random processes can be used to specific ends in design, to modify the strategic topography, if you will. Often you can use analogues, like damage reduction, and often the differences are subtle. But competitive play highlights subtlety, which is why we're arguing now.  Obviously chance alters "strategic topography." (Nowhere did I say otherwise.) The question is which strategic topography we're altering. If the concern of Liquid Nazgul, Daigomi, and myself is to preserve predictable hit/kill results (which is something I agree with) for combat units when switching to high/low ground battles, isn't it self defeating to have the method for preserving that predictable balance be, in fact, something which makes that predictable balance unpredictable?! It really doesn't make sense to even talk about what you're describing in the context of the "unit balance" we were discussing. Again, as I said earlier, while we can make strategic choices in relation to random chance, we cannot say that "skill-based balance" comes from the presence of random chance, and that's what I'm trying to preserve in this instance. Random variables that exist alongside that balance are fine, but mixing random variables into that balance work against what I want. In other words, every time a Siege Tank faces a marine, in the exact same starting conditions, it should should take the same amount of hits for the Tank to kill that Marine, or else that's NOT preserving the predictable unit hit/kill ratios that Daigomi or I want. If the balance is based on a statistic, that can only be said to be "balanced" on the larger scale and that was the thrust of my point to Daigomi. In other words, you're arguing for something that's outside of what I or Daigomi were discussing! On March 12 2010 07:36 EatThePath wrote: The predictability is the result of the design; it's arbitrary. Yes, predictability is the result of the design. And? I don't know what you think you were answering in that quote from me since that's exactly what I was saying. However, what do you mean by "it's arbitrary"? You believe predictability is arbitrary? (Huh?) Game design is arbitrary? Well, I guess it's possible to design the predictable parameters of a game in an arbitrary fashion, but I see no reason why you'd ever want to. Do you believe Blizzard is such a successful company because they just casually slap their games together arbitrarily? A good game is balanced for fun, not arbitrary whim. My point in that quote was to say that a game's predictable parameters are often more enjoyable when they're too complex for each player to ever fully keep track of. This gives an endless learning curve for players to always make slightly better judgments with (and always make mistakes with). It's another way to measure skill. It's just smart design. What are you disagreeing with? On March 12 2010 07:36 EatThePath wrote: There's another thing I'd like to point out. There are two substantial ways in which Starcraft has functionally random processes, discarding high ground things. Consider that when you play, there are things you want to do but which you can only approximately do--your control of the game elements is imperfect. That's why I used marbles, a dexterity game, as an example. You can't exactly perform the strategy you've crafted, and the keen player will even factor that into his or her strategy. This means that when a battle occurs, for instance, the incremental mistakes or brilliances that determined the outcome were in part accidental. Even with two equally very skilled players the unit control is imperfect, which you can imagine results in "lucky" good breaks and "unlucky" bad breaks. I'm talking things as incremental as a zergling here or splash damage on your goons there. We conceptualize these incremental things as part of the melee of an engagement and write it off. But you can view it as strategic event whose outcome relies partially on random elements. Beyond enumerating all possible outcomes, which is roughly how chess theory has proceeded, you can't count on predictability. So our army positioning, the timing of our teching, our choices of when and how to attack and harass, are all informed by the gamestate as we perceive it, but that gamestate could have been wildly different depending a minor change here or there. Of course the general flow of our games is understandable and repeateable; that's the result of how the system operates, how the game was designed. It would be a bad game if it didn't operate the way we roughly expect it too. But again, the subtleties are where the skillful player captures advantage, and the most subtle things are unpredictable, which appears random to the observer. And both players are observers of the system, though they also are giving it inputs. I'm not going to go over everything you say here. I'm just going to say that your argument at this point is common knowledge. Obviously StarCraft is filled with random variables that nobody can predict. The most obvious random variables are what THE PLAYERS choose to do! This discussion was not about getting rid of everything unpredictable (a predictable game is boring). I prefer games that don't introduce random chance in their basic design. Two human beings, presented with uncountable choices, is interesting and exciting enough for me. As such, in StarCraft 2, I'd like it if the random parameters were limited to just that. However, I know that's not perfectly possible and I'll be okay with other random variables simply being limited. Otherwise, if they aren't being limited then they will be reducing the effect that skill (intellectual skill or skill with speed) will have on the game. That said, a lot of the randomness you discuss above involves variables that can be known and predicted to an experienced player (they aren't purely random). Sure, it's still mostly unknown and random to us; you can't predict the affect of a butterfly wing on the weather 100 years later and yada yada yada. But, a good player can at least progress SLIGHTLY in his awareness of highly complex variables in at least THE SHORT TERM. These affects are not completely hidden from his view and therefore can be strategically predicted to at least some degree. This then allows one player to always get a little better at the game than another. This involves SKILL. By comparison, an intentionally random "hit or miss" chance involves hidden variables that players can't even PARTIALLY observe. It just "rolls the dice" behind the scenes and players only see the result. We can choose to embrace or avoid situations with more or less risk of this kind, but we can't ever get better at predicting where it will go. This involves NO SKILL. On March 12 2010 07:36 EatThePath wrote: No, call ME crazy! Yes, more than one way to skin a cat. (What a terrible idiom.) I think random elements are no less skill-testing, and often make for more interesting strategic landscapes and game play. Uh-huh. Yeah, crazy you. Random elements are "no less skill testing" than potentially predictable elements, eh? Right. | ||
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