EPTEdit: I agree it is important to make each unit powerful in it's own right. It becomes a question of how you want the unit to be overpowered. Which is why I agree I s'pose with the armor reduction on the roach but am dissapointed by the burrowed movement speed reduction.
[SC2B] Power Overwhelming - Page 4
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MarioMD
United States22 Posts
Edit: I agree it is important to make each unit powerful in it's own right. It becomes a question of how you want the unit to be overpowered. Which is why I agree I s'pose with the armor reduction on the roach but am dissapointed by the burrowed movement speed reduction. | ||
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brocoli
Brazil264 Posts
Have been waiting for this one for some time =) | ||
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sLiniss
United States849 Posts
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TAD[nnilf]
United States191 Posts
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Seikhor
Canada116 Posts
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Singularity
Sweden142 Posts
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nillenkaese
Germany12 Posts
On April 20 2010 23:23 Liquid`Drone wrote: [ It's certainly hard to replicate, but we must avoid balancing SC2 by making everything suck equally hard. Watching the current nerf-trend, I am certain that an equivalent of dark swarm and burrowed lurker would not have had the slightest chance of making it out of the SC2 beta, and that this fear of the overpowered could eventually end up hurting the game. i think this is the whole point of what he was trying to say. and i think he is right with that. how many games have we seen where one thing got nerfed because everybody cried about it. only so a few updates later it would get buffed to the state it was before or even better. as he said things need time to develop. u cant balance a game when ppl just start to understand the game. having said that. like always there are things that need to be fixed and i feel blizzard did that. overall i think blizz is doing a darn good job on updating and balancing atm. so just wait for them to make their magic happen and we all will be happy in the end. well not all because some ppl were born unhappy but hey we cant save everybody. | ||
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MarKoNiO
Peru888 Posts
Cheers | ||
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Lucon
United States2 Posts
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FuDDx
United States5018 Posts
Great article.Thank you. You still do any clowning drone? | ||
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Clearout
Norway1060 Posts
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Obstikal
616 Posts
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Ideas
United States8178 Posts
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PikaFoO
Australia38 Posts
well done | ||
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KOFgokuon
United States14912 Posts
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Mapzter
Denmark11 Posts
I agree with the idea that over-nerfing everything could cause SC2 to be a less interesting game. One point comes to mind: Blizzard are not balance gods. Look at WC3. But there's one thing we shouldn't forget. We, as players and mapmakers also have tools to help swing the balance, if Blizzard has swung it too far in one direction. Innovative strategies are the player's tool, and one of the factors that has made BW worth watching and playing for so long. And as the mapmakers learn the strengths and weaknesses of each race, it'll be possible to make maps more favourable for the "weak" race. Overall, I think that in time, the community will achieve a very playable balance and still have an interesting game to spectate, without a lot of further balancing from Blizzard.. | ||
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mcneebs
Canada391 Posts
On April 20 2010 23:59 Rabiator wrote: Great writeup, but I think you forgot two things: Map size and "damage density". Many of the current (or even pre-patch-X) problems with certain units are a direct consequence of the size of the maps. Marauder rushes pre Patch 8 would probably not have such huge success on a larger map, because the defender has more time to prepare and consequently more troops. The same might be true for Immortals if you walk them over to the opponents base. Some mechanics will affect the gameplay severely on a larger map and the biggest "offender" here is probably Warp Gate. In itself it might not be such a problem, but because the cooldown can be Chrono boosted it seems "too flexible". Another thing is the Nydus network, which only needs sight to connect to its target location. You will not be able to cover all your base in the few seconds it needs to spawn and move troops over there to kill it. These two "distance does not matter for deployment" mechanics are extremely flexible and might make the whole game unstable on larger maps. We will have to wait and see what happens after the content patch this month though. One comparison between SC2 and BW is obvious: Unit movement allows for "tight ball formations" and I dont think that is a good thing, because it means you cant defend a large open spaces. Psi Storm and EMP already had their radius reduced and this favors the tight ball even more; that was a mistake IMO. Due to this "high damage density" defensive structures and any building usually fall in a matter of seconds and hardly seem worth the effort. This is another big concern I have atm, which does not have anything to do with the actual units themselves. Sometimes "you've got to be one to know one" is true and sometimes the opposite works better. With constant immersion in the game designing the Blizzard employees arent really objective enough to judge things in a good light. They have already acknowledged that players came up with a lot more creative strategies than they themselves thought possible. So "trusting your government to do it right" is bad in this case and the people need to have a voice in the decision making. My post was aimed at players new to the game. Experts (read A level players) can obviously exploit potential holes better than blizzard, but I see so many >200 post users claiming that "x" is imbalanced that it makes me want to cry. | ||
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Niten
United States598 Posts
I'm looking forward to more. | ||
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zaldinfox
Canada60 Posts
I appreciate this article for the way it extends the "balance" dialogue in a fairly even-handed manner. However, I'm not sure if you got to where you wanted to go with it (to use a vague idiom!). Here is what I mean: Your main argument is that the phrase "OP" is a misnomer; in SC, there is actually an excess of OP units, which is what causes the game to have such a distinct and challenging flavour. "Everything was too good." There is a sense in which I agree with you, especially your last sentence: "the best balancing happens when players come up with a way to counter units, not when Blizzard just makes that unit or ability less powerful." I contend that the whole idea of OP is misunderstood. There are some players who have likely logged over one thousand games of Beta since its inception. Lots of time, we might think, to develop strategies, understand unit composition and play, and comment persuasively about what parts of the game are imbalanced. However, there seem to be three ways in which the idea of OP is misunderstood. Approach to Beta Due to the competitive nature of Starcraft, players are pushed to play with a certain perspective toward each game: win. This is exacerbated by the Beta itself, which provides a select group of players the opportunity to be the "first" to get to the top of a ladder, etc. The "gold rush" effect is wearing off a little bit as new ranking wipes occur and people have to redo their placement. However, there is a fairly strong trend of victory-minded play styles. This is by no means a bad thing! SC2 is a competitive game capable of audience-level entertainment. But, what this does mean is that less attention is given to the generation of new strategies for the sake of defeating "OP" builds. People don't want to "waste" games attempting to overcome a Protoss ball with 10+ sentries. So we QQ and move on to another game. Eventually a competitive approach develops strategies more organically, but this is often after a large number of games and a great deal of frustration. Collective RTS Consciousness This approach to Beta is, in part, built up by a strange phenomenon within gaming that I will call the "RTS Consciousness." What I mean is that the (short) history of competition-generating RTS games has developed an awareness of and expectations to the way a game like SC2 "should" work. We can trace through games like SC1, Warcraft III, II, I, C+C, Total Annihilation, and a few others, the presence of a collective attempt to make a truly "competitive" RTS. I do not believe SC would have been quite so successful if the collective consciousness of a country like Korea was not present to carry it along. You make a great point that, in many ways, SC has some areas of severe imbalance (cost of Vultures with spider mines). And yet, the collective consciousness of players in Korea pushed past these barriers and helped to develop crazy strategies based on game glitches (worker through minerals, muta micro). Players like Boxer, Nal_Ra, Yellow, and others worked with SC like a potter kneads hard clay, until the game was putty in their hands. Marine micro? No problem. However, what has this collective consciousness done for SC2? With the weight of RTS games contributing their voices, and the weight of an entire e-sports industry overshadowing this new release, players begin to have expectations of what a game should be like instead of what it is like. This is the key shift. It is a shift in the power dynamic of how a game is created. Betas are longer, the “community” has more input and power in decisions about the game. Generally speaking, we use a mob-mentality approach of QQing in order to attempt to alter the way the game operates. But for SC, none of this took place. Rather, the players worked with what they had. Perhaps they complained a little, but battle.net was nothing like it is today (remember LAN parties?). Instead players were left to be creative in their own ways – left to puzzle out counter-strategies when most of us would have said, “that unit is OP, or IMBA.” Imminence The shift to a completely online game adds an additional layer of consideration when discussing imbalance within SC2. Imminence means “nearness,” and in this sense, I want to extend the idea that Blizzard will likely have much more trouble “patching” SC2 in the realm of balancing than any other game before. More than WoW? Yes. Why? The online nature of the game means that everything is too close. Players, developers, commentators, math majors (for all those handy-dandy stats) all exist in a tight dialogue of power relations. Consider the example of WoW. How many sights are there devoted to quest help, walkthroughs, class spec guides, and (in the recent past) gear/raid check. Blizzard itself provides a powerful database in the Armory. But all of these factors affect the way the game is designed, balanced, and played. It is impossible, in many ways, for an initiate of WoW who is part of the collective consciousness of gamers and internet users, to experience the game apart from these other websites. In fact, in higher level raiding it is an absolute necessity for players to have proper UI configuration, Skype/Vent, and Gearscore awareness (entirely foreign to WoW itself). I am arguing that SC2 is similar. There is a “nearness” in livestreams, casting, blogging, math analyses, and forum discussions that actually affects the way the game is perceived and balanced. When Orb complains, many other Protoss complain (of course, Orb is actually fairly even-handed as far as I have seen – especially in his praise/criticism during his review show). When Day9 says jump, 2000k+ viewers obey. The effect is a community-wide attitude toward the game. Conclusion This is why I like the Goatrope show. A little wild sometimes, but Goat generally tries strange builds (4 rax/4 queen anyone?). It is that kind of an emphasis which I would encourage across the board. We are still in Beta, and there are likely to be changes that someone loves and another hates. But we need to look past this and recognize that the power to develop creative builds is the real value of participating in a Beta. Climbing the ladder is great – go for it! But try to contribute as well. Take a current “problem” and attempt to work out an interesting solution. For instance, work out a solution to Zerg FE that does not involve an early timing push. Most games I have seen, if the timing push fails, or if the Protoss or Terran attempt to play catch-up with their own expansion, the Zerg will out-macro and win. Is their another solution? These kinds of questions are all over the place in SC2 if you care to look. This is why I propose a “suppositional approach” to Beta play. This means, playing to work out a problem. For a while, in PvT (and still to a certain extent), mass Marauder/Marine with Ghosts supporting was a formidable strategy. Work out a solution. One obvious objection is that it doesn’t work that way. When you are in game you have no idea what your opponent is going to do. My contention is that a suppositional approach means that you are prepared to work out solutions when the opportunity presents itself, and you are attempting to develop your own questions when there is no opportunity. What about working out strategies for some of the upper tier units? This is where the mastery of SC players came from. Pressing on a unit to do what no one else expects it to do. Find a use for the Ultralisk or Infestor. Plan some convincing Siege Tank/Ghost play that is sustainable. The key to understanding the idea of “OP” is the recognition that the way we view RTS games is much different than in the past. But to continue to claim “OP” or “IMBA” shows that we are not serious about the challenge of creativity presented to us. By complaining to Blizzard as a community (world-wide), we effectively ask them to spoon-feed us strategies, much in the same way that the Roach/Immortal/Marauder dynamic was spoon-fed and summarily rejected by the community. Can we show Blizzard that SC2 can support such creativity? Can we be patient? | ||
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iamtenninja
United States162 Posts
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