EPT[G] 2v2 mineral trading dynamic, thoughts? - Page 2
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zealing
Canada806 Posts
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Markwerf
Netherlands3728 Posts
There are just a couple factors that theoretically make resource sharing better then each player keeping his own: - Take for example the fact that zerg units are generally less effective then protoss ones but zerg tends to have a bit better economy in 1v1. This effectively means that a 'zerg' mineral is worth less then a 'protoss' mineral but in 1v1 this balances out. In 2v2 however it would be favorable for a zerg to transfer his minerals then to the protoss for which they are relatively worth more. - Making most units with 1 player is more efficient with tech and upgrades. 1 player can resort to lowgrade units such as pure bio by a terran and let his ally tech and upgrade and make the bigger part of the army. This effectively saves 1 player the costs and time of teching and upgrading completely. - Zerg has a delicate balance between army production and economic production. This is balanced for 1v1 play but in 2v2 the zerg player can 'outsource' the army making to his ally, who isn't hindered by larvae, so that the zerg can macro without suffering the loss of having no defense. A zerg is theoretically better off feeding his ally and using all drones for eco booming then making stuff himself. The practical issues with resource sharing (no hotkeys, very hard to time stuff) probably prohibit it from coming mainstream, along with the fact that it isn't really fun for the feeding player. Besides the 200 supply cap, which can be avoided by very aggresive play, feeding is better then playing individually. In warcraft 3 feeding was pretty popular in high level 2v2 and led to stupid matchups really. | ||
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Vexx
United States462 Posts
The advantages of resource sharing are not linear. Not only does one player manage to pump out an inordinate amount of units at a particularly timing, but since his ally doesn't invest in infrastructure, there's even more money to invest in units. The dynamic was a bit different in WC3 because your main resource, gold, could only be gathered by 5 workers per gold mine (1 goldmine per expansion). In SC2 terms, minerals were the limiting factor in WC3. Because minerals are NOT the limiting factor in SC2, and that resource trading cannot be done before the 5 minute mark, feeding is going to become extremely strong in sc2 because: You cannot scout feeding because both players are playing standard until the 5 minute mark. Because gas is the limiting factor in SC2 and not minerals, the feeder is able to create a mineral heavy army like mass marines. Feeding was bad in WC3 but it will be 10x worse in SC2 because the feeder will NOT BE VULNERABLE. In WC3, the feeder had nothing but a basic few gathers. In SC2, the feeder will have a fully saturated base and an army and expansions and so forth. If you have not had the displeasure of facing feeding, it is hard to imagine how powerful it is and what "clever" combinations will arise from it. Let me assure you from much experience in WC3, if we do not get in Blizzard's face about this, team play in SC2 is going to TANK because of all the cheese + feeding that will happen. I reached top 20 USeast 3v3 Arranged Team 3 separate seasons. I am not exaggerating when I say that over 70% of the games we played involved some sort of cheese or feeding strategy. It is that bad and it will be worse in SC2. It is not fun when all your game is is figuring out what gay strategy the enemy team is going to perform. You lose the will to play because it is boring. You no longer play starcraft 2 the strategy game. It's a much more dumbed down version where everything you have learned is useless. All you need to know is that you need to find out what gay strategy they are trying and repeat the counter you always use against it. We rarely lost to any of this crap in WC3 but it did always sap our will to play the game anymore. I don't know how else to communicate how bad feeding is in team ladder to people who haven't faced it yet. There NEEDS to be a limit to resource trading such as 1mineral and 1gas allowed per second of game time elapsed. This means that around 10 minutes, you could only trade 600minerals/gas which is enough to help your ally build a few counter units or rebuild a command center but not enough to fuel the 25 mutas in your base at the 6 minute mark bullshit. Trust me. Say no to feeding. If you haven't faced it yet and don't think it will be too bad, please give me the benefit of the doubt and help us all communicate to blizzard that feeding is bullshit that will kill team play. You don't want to quit SC2 8 months in and look back at your time in beta thinking "I can't believe I said feeding was okay". It will RUIN 3v3 and 4v4 and it will partially destroy 2v2. In all cases, fun will be lost. | ||
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fly.stat
United States449 Posts
On May 08 2010 13:43 Vexx wrote: You guys must be out of your fucking minds if you think resource sharing is good or even adds the slightest depth to 2v2. I have played plenty of team ladder on WC3 and let me tell you that there is nothing good that will come out of resource sharing. It just another kind of cheesy tactic that dumbs down the game. The advantages of resource sharing are not linear. Not only does one player manage to pump out an inordinate amount of units at a particularly timing, but since his ally doesn't invest in infrastructure, there's even more money to invest in units. The dynamic was a bit different in WC3 because your main resource, gold, could only be gathered by 5 workers per gold mine (1 goldmine per expansion). In SC2 terms, minerals were the limiting factor in WC3. Because minerals are NOT the limiting factor in SC2, and that resource trading cannot be done before the 5 minute mark, feeding is going to become extremely strong in sc2 because: You cannot scout feeding because both players are playing standard until the 5 minute mark. Because gas is the limiting factor in SC2 and not minerals, the feeder is able to create a mineral heavy army like mass marines. Feeding was bad in WC3 but it will be 10x worse in SC2 because the feeder will NOT BE VULNERABLE. In WC3, the feeder had nothing but a basic few gathers. In SC2, the feeder will have a fully saturated base and an army and expansions and so forth. If you have not had the displeasure of facing feeding, it is hard to imagine how powerful it is and what "clever" combinations will arise from it. Let me assure you from much experience in WC3, if we do not get in Blizzard's face about this, team play in SC2 is going to TANK because of all the cheese + feeding that will happen. I reached top 20 USeast 3v3 Arranged Team 3 separate seasons. I am not exaggerating when I say that over 70% of the games we played involved some sort of cheese or feeding strategy. It is that bad and it will be worse in SC2. It is not fun when all your game is is figuring out what gay strategy the enemy team is going to perform. You lose the will to play because it is boring. You no longer play starcraft 2 the strategy game. It's a much more dumbed down version where everything you have learned is useless. All you need to know is that you need to find out what gay strategy they are trying and repeat the counter you always use against it. We rarely lost to any of this crap in WC3 but it did always sap our will to play the game anymore. I don't know how else to communicate how bad feeding is in team ladder to people who haven't faced it yet. There NEEDS to be a limit to resource trading such as 1mineral and 1gas allowed per second of game time elapsed. This means that around 10 minutes, you could only trade 600minerals/gas which is enough to help your ally build a few counter units or rebuild a command center but not enough to fuel the 25 mutas in your base at the 6 minute mark bullshit. Trust me. Say no to feeding. If you haven't faced it yet and don't think it will be too bad, please give me the benefit of the doubt and help us all communicate to blizzard that feeding is bullshit that will kill team play. You don't want to quit SC2 8 months in and look back at your time in beta thinking "I can't believe I said feeding was okay". It will RUIN 3v3 and 4v4 and it will partially destroy 2v2. In all cases, fun will be lost. /salute My team is facing these stupid unscoutable tech switches/masses. | ||
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Alsn
Sweden995 Posts
The problem arises when your team mate only made a few cannons and massed probes. All of a sudden you can build 10-15 mutalisks the second you get that spire up(since your ally wasted no resources at all on tech buildings) and reinforce them twice as fast as normal. This creates problems such as the enemy having an army looking like maybe 3-4 zealots, 2 sentries and 2 stalkers or something like 6-7 marauders and 10-15 marines. Even if you combine those armies 15 mutalisks will absolutely obliterate them with basically no effort. So now, the only way to actually counter those mutalisks are to feed someone else to build a counter unit(such as phoenix) but the problem arises where you just have no way of predicting *which* unit will be made by the feedee(is that a word? :D). This basically turns 2v2 into roulette where you have to guess which unit to make and hope for the best. Or I suppose everyone can play PZ and we can have a jolly old time spamming mutalisks. Edit: Also, don't even get me started on the sheer ridiculousness of having your mate purposefully disconnect at the start. You get to use his resources that way even though there normally is a 5 minute limit on resource trading and as such you can do a 6 pool with zerg except you start out with 12 workers and as such can afford a queen(for mass production) and ling speed based off of those 12 starting workers. | ||
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foxmeep
Australia2337 Posts
Most people don't use these features yet, or probably even know they exist. But once people start seriously abusing them I can see 2v2 becoming really really shit. Edit: The ramifications for 3v3/4v4 are even worse. Imagine you scout players A B C D and they all have different tech. Now you have to prepare for either a combination of A B C D, or A A A A, or A A B B, or B B B B and so on, which is pretty much going to be impossible. | ||
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roemy
Germany432 Posts
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Bro
Canada16 Posts
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ViLLaiN
United States2 Posts
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CheAse
Canada919 Posts
We have had lots of success trading our minerals for lots of strats. So far its been most usable for us when: Giving mins for more cannons Giving gas for tech, for example 2 port banshees with researching cloak immediately | ||
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spinesheath
Germany8679 Posts
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Vexx
United States462 Posts
On May 08 2010 16:39 Bro wrote: Resource sharing is fine. It's the maps. When both spawns are so close, one player can often protect both players but if spawns are far(say, LT), the opposing team can easily eliminate the feeder. This isn't WC3. The feeder can actually have an army just fine for reasons I covered above in my previous post. Or static defense or both. | ||
Liquid`Jinro
Sweden33719 Posts
 Ally picks T, I pick P. Most of the 2v2 maps are semi-shared bases so ally T double expos while I fast warp-gates for some 8-warp gate zealot/sentry/stalker action. The timer to give money expires at right around the time you start adding gateways anyway so... it's pretty awesome. | ||
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Garrl
Scotland1978 Posts
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Genesis128
Norway103 Posts
But consider the case which frozenarbiter mentioned: On May 09 2010 00:16 FrozenArbiter wrote: Haven't lost a 2v2 yet doing this strat Ally picks T, I pick P. Most of the 2v2 maps are semi-shared bases so ally T double expos while I fast warp-gates for some 8-warp gate zealot/sentry/stalker action. The timer to give money expires at right around the time you start adding gateways anyway so... it's pretty awesome. I don't see how this is really a great cheesy strategy. With the terran player not producing anything but cash for the protoss player, the protoss player would still be needing to create the production buildings and farms for the units. And once the units start popping out they will basically be created twice as fast as if he was alone, but with no team-mate army to back him up then it will effectively be no gain at all. This is especially true when only producing gateway-units since you don't need any tech to get there (150 minerals for core + 50/50 for warp-gate is really not a gamebreaking difference). You could just have two regular protoss making 4 gates each and they would produce exactly the same army with no resource trading whatsoever. The main issue with resource trading, I guess, is that you can skip tech buildings. But really, the tech buildings themselves don't make up for the majority of spending. Most of the spending goes into the actual units themselves and the production buildings and farms. All of these 3 things will need to be doubled by the non-feeding player, effectively ruining any potential gain from using this on a large-scale basis. Of course, there still are some really cheesy things which you can do, but they are not at all very many. The ally-disconnect followed by a 6pool is one of these and the sheer amount of mutas you can get once the spire first finishes. But past the timing-point where this is really inbalanced effective (any late-game muta production for instance), then it really wouldn't be worth the effort and one player acting as a feeder all game long is just a bad strategy. There's probably just a handfull of such critical game-ruining instances (most of which involve zerg I guess due to their multi production capabilites) and they can all be taken care of by some minor changes in a comming patch. | ||
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Xiphiasar
United States78 Posts
Bliz needs to address it somehow though. | ||
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BigDatez
Canada434 Posts
It doesnt work if the opponent plays smart, and scouts, cause if he scouts such early teching, they will get enough units out to defend instead of focusing on tech/econ. | ||
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Clearout
Norway1060 Posts
Because the sentiment behind mineral transfer is good. Say your partner loses his only CC (otherwise his base is fine) and lacks 100 minerals to build a new one. Then it would only seem fair to be able to transfer enough money so he can make a new one. | ||
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katzenkoenig
Germany32 Posts
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Markwerf
Netherlands3728 Posts
Strategies relying on feeding are just dumb and will inevitably be the result of having sharing without penalty in the game. Zerg would probably be the best race as 'feeder' as they can eco boom the hardest and benefit the most from not having to make fighting units, as they can use larvae strictly for drone's then and don't lose drones by making 'military' buildings such as the roach warren. Protoss is probably the best as the one being fed then as they can mass produce from gateways easily and probably have the most cost effective units (which is balanced in 1v1 by having the most trouble expoing and having the most 'tech' costs). Gateway armies are very versatile in what they can beat as well and can be replenish all over the map which is very convenient in 2v2. It seems to me that P+Z is the ideal combo to abuse this. | ||
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