I think the real reason why people are upset about the warhound is that it propagates a more bio-like type of play with roaming around the map, instead of the more tank-like type behind fortified positions. And the reason behind that is, in starcraft 1 each race had its characteristic, trademark way of being played (zerg swarmed all around the map, terran sieged up behind fortified lines, and protoss did something in between), and it somehow got lost during the transition to starcraft 2.
Broodlord/Infestor is now prominent in any matchup of the zerg (minus the mirror matchup), in which the zerg basically slowpushes across the map like a terran would in starcraft 1, Marine/Marauder/Medivac is also prominant in all matchups (again minus mirror) where the terran tries to outmultitask his opponent through harass like a zerg in starcraft 1.
So I think there is still a residue of disappointment left, because the races lost their gameplay identity, during the transition from starcraft 1 to starcraft 2, which is now resurfacing again because HotS does nothing to address this "problem". In fact, the addition of the warhound seem to make it even "worse".
On September 11 2012 01:08 Erik.TheRed wrote: I think when it comes down it, Activision/Blizz do not see a big ROI from esports. Sure they will balance the game and promote the pro-scene, but it's more about "building the community", branding and marketing than anything else. If their #1 goal is short-term sales then they want it to be accessible/fun to as many people as possible (doesn't matter if they just play it 3 times). This is evidenced by nearly every other game they release (COD, WoW expos, etc.) so I'm really not surprised if they have the same mentality to SC2 as well.
I really hope I'm wrong, and maybe KESPA and other international esports orgs. rising up will motivate Blizz to step it up in the game design department.
Wouldnt be too sure about this. Blizzard gets his share from every tournament out there with a certain amount of prize money. They basically sell licenses. Its free for small tournaments but its quite a nice cut from big ones.
aye aye. The bronze leaguers have to group together and support this thread! I really do think they agree!!
I wouldnt be too sure about that too. From a viewers perspective its 100% right that we need more micro, more cool stuff ect. But trying to walk a mile in their shoes its already much of "play against the mechanics" instead of "play against your opponent". So I doubt that they would cheer for "more working and less playing"
Warhound = boring a-move unit. Tempest concept so uninteresting compared to carries and interceptors. Oracle = FF minerals, so one dimensional and no room for player creativity =( I think they have their work cut out but will give them the benefit of the doubt till I see a few patches turned out.
hmmm my english is very bad.. but i want disccuss about that i will in french and try to translate, sorry for that
A dire vrai je pense que ce poste ne pose pas les bonnes questions, la question a mon avis, n'est pas de savoir si le Warhound est une A clik unit ou pas, ni de savoir si Blizzard veut casualiser le jeu pour les débutants ou pas ( au vu des investissements émis par Blizzard pour les WCS, j'en doute
L'équilibrage de Starcraft 2 est régie par 3 gros paramètres : le DPS, la vitesse de déplacement, et la capacité a tirer a l'air / voler ou pas. Si on reprend la philosophie de Blizzard, pourquoi le Warhound est la ? parce que le mass tank n'a que peu de solution pour être contré, et les early push gate/ immortal aussi, du coup de mon avis, l'idée du Warhound est bonne, et vu que tank / imo = T2, le Warhound si il passe T3 ou si il devenait une unité a spell, elle serait trop longue a sortir pour contrer les Imo/tank ...
On comprend donc pourquoi le Warhound a un bon dps et une bonne mobilité : c'est le prix a payer pour rendre l'unité viable, car sans ca, elle passe T3 et dans se cas, ne sera pas utilisé, après je suis d'accord pour dire que a ce jour, elle n'est pas encore équilibré mais de la a dire qu'elle ne devrait pas être la, non je ne pense pas
the design ideas of all other new units in HOTS are at least interesting. sometimes very cool sometimes OP(Swarmhost) or useless (Tempest) in it's current state but at least the direction seems legit.
the warhound is just a fucking fast, fucking strong, fucking durable, A-Move unit. when i look at the mass warhound auto-win gameplay which was shown in the last days, i can't really believe that they (blizzard guys) tested shit before.
I wonder if maybe the blandness of the warhound isn't a terran problem, but a zerg/protoss one. Looking back at the goliath and the dragoon, there really isn't anything inspired about their design. What made these units fun to watch was that they had an opponent worthy of micro-ing against rather than just 1a2a3a4a. For the goliath this opponent was the carrier and for the dragoon it was the vulture/spidermine.
Why don't we see this sort of thing in SC2? It isn't because the units are too limited in design. Ground units can split and target fire in SC2 just as they could in BW. It's because there aren't any enough situations for this kind of micro to take place.
On September 11 2012 01:28 red4ce wrote: I wonder if maybe the blandness of the warhound isn't a terran problem, but a zerg/protoss one. Looking back at the goliath and the dragoon, there really isn't anything inspired about their design. What made these units fun to watch was that they had an opponent worthy of micro-ing against rather than just 1a2a3a4a. For the goliath this opponent was the carrier and for the dragoon it was the vulture/spidermine.
Why don't we see this sort of thing in SC2? It isn't because the units are too limited in design. Ground units can split and target fire in SC2 just as they could in BW. It's because there aren't any enough situations for this kind of micro to take place.
i agree.
but what you also can see here: shit is just dying to fast in sc2.
On September 11 2012 01:28 red4ce wrote: I wonder if maybe the blandness of the warhound isn't a terran problem, but a zerg/protoss one. Looking back at the goliath and the dragoon, there really isn't anything inspired about their design. What made these units fun to watch was that they had an opponent worthy of micro-ing against rather than just 1a2a3a4a. For the goliath this opponent was the carrier and for the dragoon it was the vulture/spidermine.
Why don't we see this sort of thing in SC2? It isn't because the units are too limited in design. Ground units can split and target fire in SC2 just as they could in BW. It's because there aren't any enough situations for this kind of micro to take place.
That kind of micro is amazing, but only because of the Spider Mine mechanic. Stalkers/Zealots could easily hold up the Protoss side in that dynamic, but Hellions would be just another a-move unit, completely destroying any unique interaction aside from firing at each other.
Honestly what I would love to see teamliquid appoint of a team of 15 unpaid pros who promise to be as unbiased as possible who come out with balance changes/patches every 2months, then I or any mapper could EASILY create custom maps of each patch with the changes inside within a day for all the current tournament maps.
Then if this teamliquid version of WoL turns out to be more "entertaining" than HOTS due to it being skill based instead of dustin browder A-move unit based, possibly some tournaments will choose to use the more entertaining version.
Then this teamliquid "version" of WoL would hopefully continue the balancing of WoL that blizzard failed to do. I believe the capability is there to improve terran mech, just buff the tanks and boom you have positional play created in terran mech, and if it causes problem in protoss or zerg, put a buff somewhere else in protoss or zerg possibly. I fully support a balance team consisting of nonbiased pros over blizzard
as long as the pros are 5 of each race and they all agree on changes together for the patches I would enjoy those patches much more than blizzard patches.
For example reapers, Im a master protoss player and i can honestly say reapers need to be reduced in buildtime. 45 seconds for 1food? really? marauders are 30seconds for 2food and both require a techlab. the days of 3range queens and roaches are over, zerg has nothing to fear with reapers either, Im sure even idra would support a buildtime reduction on reapers if he was on the balance team
On September 11 2012 01:28 red4ce wrote: I wonder if maybe the blandness of the warhound isn't a terran problem, but a zerg/protoss one. Looking back at the goliath and the dragoon, there really isn't anything inspired about their design. What made these units fun to watch was that they had an opponent worthy of micro-ing against rather than just 1a2a3a4a. For the goliath this opponent was the carrier and for the dragoon it was the vulture/spidermine.
Why don't we see this sort of thing in SC2? It isn't because the units are too limited in design. Ground units can split and target fire in SC2 just as they could in BW. It's because there aren't any enough situations for this kind of micro to take place.
i agree.
but what you also can see here: shit is just dying to fast in sc2.
Yeah I hate unit clumping. You can hardly see shit in a max vs max fight.
On September 10 2012 15:51 yanot wrote: Agree completely. I didn't really like the "easy to learn, hard to master" way of designing. Sports, piano, guitar, are all hard to learn and hard to master. And they have a lot of depth. And I never understood that "casual" is associated as "easy" in the developer mind. One can play 1 hour a day and still want challenge, difficults things to overcome in a video game.
Those examples are all easy to learn, hard to master, especially sports and guitar.
Wow... Mad props to you orb, this is the exact same stuff that has been going on in my head since early beta, but i could never had worded it as perfectly as you just did. AGREE X1000000000
The warhound is more to combat the fact that nobody plays terran anymore. Everybody has switched to zerg because it was dramatically easier to play and so much more forgiving after about the 6th minute. I don't see the warhound as any different from the hydralisk or the immortal, both are units that dont really require micro any more than the warhound does.
They need to do something or nobody is going to play terran anymore besides at really high levels.
Maybe its just me but I like the "strategy" of real time strategy games. Doing a mechanical action well is impressive and that is why we watch sports because its the repitition that goes into it that allows them to perform well and we appreciate that. BUT it has NOTHING to do with strategy. The depth of strategy of an average SC2 game: 1.get good economy to get big army that can kill other guys army. 2. do damage to other guys economy because see 1. So it comes down to the person with better mechanics who win the game. This bores the heck out of me. I want to see smart people make smart decisions and get rewarded for it. I want to see brilliant positioning, abuse of particular advantages over your opponents(such as range and high ground), I want a distraction in order to gain an awesome position. (The tank is by far my favorite unit). This still happens but it is exceedingly rare and I have only really seen it in high level TvT's. Its these brilliant chess-like moves that I want to see and perform in a game and I don't want to have to practice a billions hrs just to be able to do this. Basically I'm saying I want a game where the more clever player wins and not the one with faster fingers. In summary, I absolutely agree that the warhound should be removed but for entirely different reasons.
I played some HOTS beta. Although I play Zerg in WoL I did around 30-40 games with T (~50 in total) just fooling around with Warhounds. It was cool going with the first 2-3 warhounds early game and raping whatever the oponent was trying to do as it was cool to max 200/200 and A-click to victory. It is not cool anymore - just feels dumb, this unit offers nothing new, nothing interesting, nothing exciting. Rework it!
The inherent problem here is the idea of replayability. When a game is too easy, it is fun the first couple times and then completely loses its charm and gets boring. I love Portal to death, but once you understand the puzzles and what you are supposed to do, it is so easy upon playing a second time through that it is just not fun or worth the time anymore. In order for video games to continue being played for years instead of taking the route of pretty much every single EA title, they need to have some inherent difficulty that is not knowledge based (because anything that's only difficult because you don't know what to do will no longer be difficult once you understand the solution). This is where execution and tactics in Starcraft come in. If the game was only strategy and no tactics, it would get boring extremely quickly and there is no way it would be an esport. It's the simple difficulty of executing a tricky task that makes playing starcraft so fun no matter how many times you have already played it. The problem with Blizzard's design philosophy is that it overestimates the pros of low-difficulty, and underestimates the pros of high-difficulty.
I kinda agree with the rest of the post but i want to make 2 points: 1 the above part about knowledge might sound reasonable but it is obviously false if we think even for a moment about board games(in particular Go and Chess). These games have no "difficulty of executing a tricky task" AND they are extremely difficult to play.
One might argue that these are not good spectator sports(in fact they are not mainstream) but I think the problem is that you need much more knowledge of the games to appreciate them in relation to sports/RTS games, and not that they are bad spectator games.
In a game of Go or Chess you use your general knowledge to come up with fresh solutions to the new positions that you face. This happens because little changes in the position cause great long term changes in the strategy and because after a few moves ( it depends but for chess it's usually 10/15 moves) you always face new positions you don't have "solutions" as you call them.
In RTS this doesn't apply for various reasons: • you have imperfect knowledge. IMHO even if creates some strategy (proxys, all-ins) it kinda makes RTS feel gimmicky sometimes and it could remove higher level strategy. But it would make for a very different game: attacking would become very difficult because your opponent would know way before and could counterattack as soon as you leave(but you could see the conter attack before it happens).It would remove coin-flips.But imagine if in sc2 when you drop you don't drag the enemy army away you would be countered 100% because your opponents knows 30 seconds before that it's coming.
• the game is fast This means you have no time to figure something out, like you could in chess, during the game apart from tactic decisions. "Learning happens between games" Day9
• the game is more "fluid". By that I mean that you can move as many units as you want freely, while in chess you can move only one piece at a time, you have pawns and pieces are pretty immobile. In chess much strategy comes from the fact that you can't move pawns backwards and one of the basic strategic rules is to block a target then attack it; this is almost impossible in sc2 apart from some tactics (FF, FG, Concussive). The only thing similar to chess immobility and slowness to change position I can think of is when choses a tech path and can't transition easily and the terran mech, but it is still way more mobile than a blocked pawn.
• the mechanics are often as important as the strategy This united with point #2 means that the knowledge becomes slowly evolving, so easily assimilable and because you often have few general strategies per MU you end up in the same positions (because of #3 there is less difference between them) doing the same generic moves so you need "the simple difficulty of executing a tricky task".
So in a sense you are right that in RTS you have to have difficult mechanics but I think that this is unfortunate because it means that there is little strategy.(we should call them RTs)
2 This is not strongly related to the post.
I think there are two types of micro and I think SC2 is a good step in removing the bad one*:
•Bad Micro
When you have to manually do something which you would never do differently(meaningless actions) E.g. sending the workers to mine at the start of the game E.g. when in bw you have to babysit the dragoon after you moved it because it's retarded.
•Good Micro When you have to manually do something which you could do differently(meaningful actions) E.g. imagine if blink was automatic, always backwards and only for damaged units(like the AI does). This would obviously reduce strategy(no blink forward/ blink away) even if the IA maybe uses blink better than everybody in engagements(ever seen blink hack in action?).
•So we can also have bad micro design When the games takes automatic decisions(and you can't toggle off) when sometimes it would be better to do otherwise. E.g. the lurker if there was no hold lurker trick it would be bad design because sometimes it's better to not attack immediately something that comes in range. E.g. the widow mine that auto-attacks units that come in range and can't be toggled off.
*but a lot the good one was removed too like moving shot (see Micro, Where art thou?) and also zone control and in HotS it's being added to and "removed" to in a sense (warhound should deny siege tank in TvT and tanks are now replaced by warhounds in mech TvP)
I'm curious how a perfect information sc2 game or in general RTS would be. BTW The warhound isn't 100% 1-A because you can engage then run, wait for the hayware missile to recharge then engage again doing more damage and taking more damage than just 1-A. Also you can kite zealots, slow roaches marines without stim ecc... But It has no positional value
Your argument could apply to roaches, yet they're still in the game. Hell, you can even argue theres more micro involved with warhounds since you should selectively target mechanical units with them aka stalkers instead of just a moving them into zealots.
On September 11 2012 01:26 SC2Kerri wrote: hmmm my english is very bad.. but i want disccuss about that i will in french and try to translate, sorry for that
A dire vrai je pense que ce poste ne pose pas les bonnes questions, la question a mon avis, n'est pas de savoir si le Warhound est une A clik unit ou pas, ni de savoir si Blizzard veut casualiser le jeu pour les débutants ou pas ( au vu des investissements émis par Blizzard pour les WCS, j'en doute
L'équilibrage de Starcraft 2 est régie par 3 gros paramètres : le DPS, la vitesse de déplacement, et la capacité a tirer a l'air / voler ou pas. Si on reprend la philosophie de Blizzard, pourquoi le Warhound est la ? parce que le mass tank n'a que peu de solution pour être contré, et les early push gate/ immortal aussi, du coup de mon avis, l'idée du Warhound est bonne, et vu que tank / imo = T2, le Warhound si il passe T3 ou si il devenait une unité a spell, elle serait trop longue a sortir pour contrer les Imo/tank ...
On comprend donc pourquoi le Warhound a un bon dps et une bonne mobilité : c'est le prix a payer pour rendre l'unité viable, car sans ca, elle passe T3 et dans se cas, ne sera pas utilisé, après je suis d'accord pour dire que a ce jour, elle n'est pas encore équilibré mais de la a dire qu'elle ne devrait pas être la, non je ne pense pas
Truthfully I think this post isn't asking the right questions. The question from my perspective isn't whether or not the Warhound is an a move unit or not nor to know if Blizzard wants to make the game more accessible to casual players (I doubt it based on their investments in WCS)
Balance in SC2 is based on 3 parameters: DPS, Movement Speed, and the ability to shoot up or fly. From Blizzard's Perspective, why is the Warhound there? Because Mass Tank only has a few counters, same for early gate immortal pushes. In my opinion the idea is good and seeing as Tank and Immortals are tier two units, if the Warhound were made a tier 3 unit it would take too long to counter Immortal/Tank pushes.
We understand then why the Warhound has such DPS and mobility: It is the price to pay to make a unit viable, without which it would be unusable at tier 3. I do agree that it isn't balanced at the moment but I don't think it should be removed.
English is official language, but thanks for the help remembering some of my french. ♥
Why are people ignoring the fact that warhounds need to be focus firing mechanical units to be effective? That fact alone makes them more micro intensive than many other units in the game.
On September 11 2012 01:54 jackdavis486 wrote: Maybe its just me but I like the "strategy" of real time strategy games. Doing a mechanical action well is impressive and that is why we watch sports because its the repitition that goes into it that allows them to perform well and we appreciate that. BUT it has NOTHING to do with strategy. The depth of strategy of an average SC2 game: 1.get good economy to get big army that can kill other guys army. 2. do damage to other guys economy because see 1. So it comes down to the person with better mechanics who win the game. This bores the heck out of me. I want to see smart people make smart decisions and get rewarded for it. I want to see brilliant positioning, abuse of particular advantages over your opponents(such as range and high ground), I want a distraction in order to gain an awesome position. (The tank is by far my favorite unit). This still happens but it is exceedingly rare and I have only really seen it in high level TvT's. Its these brilliant chess-like moves that I want to see and perform in a game and I don't want to have to practice a billions hrs just to be able to do this. Basically I'm saying I want a game where the more clever player wins and not the one with faster fingers. In summary, I absolutely agree that the warhound should be removed but for entirely different reasons.
Even in a game like Broodwar which was like super hard on the mechanics the very good players who are flash, jaedong or older ones like boxer usually won everything because they were the smartest guys out there. Also they have beastly mechanics...so there is NO reason not to have both sides to this game. Thats why its a REALTIME strategy game...it will and has to have a strong mechanical component.
If you only want strategy in there you have to play a turnbased strategy game.
EPT
i will in french and try to translate, sorry for that
choses a tech path and can't transition easily and the terran mech, but it is still way more mobile than a blocked pawn.
and "removed" to 
