EPTI'll keep it short and sweet. In the HOTS beta, I watched WhiteRa warping in DTs to harass qxc's mineral line just now. As you can see in the screenshot below, WhiteRa was able to see the radius of qxc's scans. This directly contributed to him warping in his next DT just outside the radius of the last scan, possibly saving this DT.
It also will more or less let you know what tech structures have been scanned, and allow cloaked units to get away from scans slightly more easily for those players who are not super gosu at knowing where the range of the scan ends. Like I said, its pretty minor, but there are a ton of these minor "features" in HOTS.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/CAaiB.png)
On September 07 2012 05:16 Grumbels wrote:
Starcraft thrives on vagueness. It's one of the reasons why Brood War was superior to Wings of Liberty, it's because people begged long and hard to make the game more about 'strategy', so all the really difficult mechanics were addressed. Heart of the Swarm simply takes this one step further, information is more clearly defined, easier to understand and utilize. From now on you do not have to get a feel for saturation numbers of for detection radius anymore. Blizzard now provides this information as input for your strategy.
The problem is that strategy is rather boring. If you look at your typical game, then honestly most players play the same popular builds over and over again, since it's so easy to copy what successful players are doing. A lot of match-ups are quite trivial, especially zerg often 'just' has to turtle into brood lords and all the fuzzy feelings-based aspects to this game that allow players with superior game sense to do well are one by one eliminated just so that eventually everyone can execute the same rote strategy at the same level. I honestly think it's bizarre the community is still so obsessed with strategy, it's as if so many have so little respect for all the beauty inherent to paying attention to all the small little details and utilizing them correctly. There is so much more to this game than just strategy and unit control, it really is so much about a certain mystique where frequently you have no solid information and have to depend on visual processing or pattern recognition (i.e. game sense or 'feel'). Making everything clear and streamlined honestly won't make the game any more fun, it will just allow you to better execute your 2 base timing attacks without being bothered by the fact you have little experience with the game and lack essential cognitive skills.
Imagine if during the development of DOTA2 Valve had decided that the game really needed to be about picking hero compositions, item choices and lane divisions. They could remove all skill-intensive abilities of the game (last kills, denying, aimed shots) so that it would again be more about strategy, all to reward the smarter player. But why is someone with knowledge and analytical skills superior to someone with the superior cognitive abilities required to excel at unit control and economy management?
Starcraft thrives on vagueness. It's one of the reasons why Brood War was superior to Wings of Liberty, it's because people begged long and hard to make the game more about 'strategy', so all the really difficult mechanics were addressed. Heart of the Swarm simply takes this one step further, information is more clearly defined, easier to understand and utilize. From now on you do not have to get a feel for saturation numbers of for detection radius anymore. Blizzard now provides this information as input for your strategy.
The problem is that strategy is rather boring. If you look at your typical game, then honestly most players play the same popular builds over and over again, since it's so easy to copy what successful players are doing. A lot of match-ups are quite trivial, especially zerg often 'just' has to turtle into brood lords and all the fuzzy feelings-based aspects to this game that allow players with superior game sense to do well are one by one eliminated just so that eventually everyone can execute the same rote strategy at the same level. I honestly think it's bizarre the community is still so obsessed with strategy, it's as if so many have so little respect for all the beauty inherent to paying attention to all the small little details and utilizing them correctly. There is so much more to this game than just strategy and unit control, it really is so much about a certain mystique where frequently you have no solid information and have to depend on visual processing or pattern recognition (i.e. game sense or 'feel'). Making everything clear and streamlined honestly won't make the game any more fun, it will just allow you to better execute your 2 base timing attacks without being bothered by the fact you have little experience with the game and lack essential cognitive skills.
Imagine if during the development of DOTA2 Valve had decided that the game really needed to be about picking hero compositions, item choices and lane divisions. They could remove all skill-intensive abilities of the game (last kills, denying, aimed shots) so that it would again be more about strategy, all to reward the smarter player. But why is someone with knowledge and analytical skills superior to someone with the superior cognitive abilities required to excel at unit control and economy management?
Well said.
