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On October 18 2012 09:52 SaintEx wrote:Show nested quote +[On October 18 2012 09:24 Gretorp wrote:
It's so frustrating seeing game after game after game of 9:30 pushes with 3 immortals and warp prisms working time after time. In these battles, we marvel when squirtle does some awesome warp prism micro and it works so well! But isn't that what we should expect? Isn't this what we want to push our progamers to actually master?
Rather we watch progamers focusing of forcefielding, which let's be honest, it's how fast you can accurately left click. Don't get me wrong, that's a skill and it's hard to do sometimes, but that's very different than drop micro or even regular battle micro.
I completely understand the frustration expressed in the post. However, the quoted section seems to clash with another issue that people have been talking about. One of the reasons that SC2 isn't attracting as many players as other games is because of how difficult it can be to play and/or master. Drop micro, while it looks amazing, is something that the average starcraft player either has huge difficulty doing or just can't do at all. It seems that forcefield was designed to accomodate for those players that weren't used to that kind of intense micro. I've talked to plenty of people who just don't feel like playing starcraft because of ladder anxiety and because of the skill it takes to play the game. In my view, there are two polar opposites. On one side, there are people who want to keep starcraft a game that takes great skill to play; they don't want the game to be so easy that it feels like they're not doing much of anything. On the other side, there are people who are just turned off by the steep learning curve and level of skill needed to play SC2. Does anyone else share the same view? disagree?
I have a friends list of about 40-50 people 1 of them plays 1v1 the vast majority of them exclusively play custom games and about 10 of them play team games. The difficulty level is a non issue for game enjoyment the lack of non-ladder games/functionality is. My favourite memories of broodwar were constanly having to rm custom games with the same room of people in an effort to practice and try to beat them or playing fastest nr 20 maps and ramming the giant armies at each other now neither of those features exist.
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On October 18 2012 09:32 Glon wrote:
I think that, more than anything, we should be trying to get blizzard to simply LISTEN more than just propose changes. You're skipping a step -- we can tell blizzard EXACTLY how to balance the game, and they likely wouldn't do shit.
Maybe some kind of weekly "meetings" with blizzard balancers and select people in the community? Pros/casters preferably
they are listening, and any sweeping changes to WOL units will be done further into the beta.
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I think HOTS is a good point of balancing out the said changes. The current sentry FF are necessity to prevent early/mid game all-ins, but with advent of mothership core and hallucination base-research for sentry means that FF can be modified.
Current fungals are extremely strong, but a painful necessity against some mid game Terran/Protoss timing pushes. With advent of swarm hosts, viper blind clouds. Fungal no longer needs to be root/destroy for ground troops (perhaps slow/damage for ground, root/damage for air.)
I agree that instant EMP is really hit or miss right now, and I hope it can instead be modified as a larger AOE shield/energy draining mechanism over time instead that allows some zone control. With widow mines (perhaps reintroduction of warhounds) as backups for such zone control, it'd make both terran and protoss force to micro.
In the beta for HoTS, I think Blizzard has a real opportunity to revamp the game that is not BW, but a game that is more dynamic than WoL. I really think Warhound with modification (modded haywire missile, lower base damage vs non-mechanical, perhaps give them small energy bars so HT lategame helps counter them) would be a good addition to HotS. Terran would be able to be aggressive with Warhounds and hellions, but since mech anti-air is very slow, air play becomes quite viable for protoss due to stronger air units like carrier/tempest. Zergs can be more mobile in late game with hydra speed and viper and infestor, instead of simple brood lord +infestor combo. Protoss can put on micro based pressure with "slow, valuable units" like colossi, immortal, carrier balls due to the mothership core recall.
If Blizzard thinks of fixing the game overall instead of making a patch of few units here and there, then HotS may be the saving grace of SCII eSport scene.
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hey gretorp, big thanks for writing this. you have earned my respect and admiration. You demostrated that you are not one of "those" people that never criticize the game, that their only answer is "give it time" or "trust blizzard", those people can no longer be trusted they are now puppets of Blizzard PR.
We need more people to join the save HOTS movement.
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Great post, Gretorp! I like a lot of what you're saying, especially on Force Field. EMP to Raven would be cool too!
Wow, Artosis is absolutely right.
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Thanks for your post. I hope blizzard designers read it.
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On October 18 2012 11:29 NightOfTheDead wrote:
First thing they need to do is link or integrate tournament streams into starcraft 2 interface.
Blizzard had a direct link to WCS Asia on the launcher and homepage for sc2.
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Amazing post, I like it Gretorp!
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Yeah, if Artosis is telling everyone to calm down I think we should listen. He's a smart guy. I trust his word more than any other person in the community, and if he's saying SC2 still has a bright future then I believe him.
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I love the idea of having ghosts plant widow mines,
I would be completely fine if they buffed the hell out of every single Protoss unit, as long as they get rid of warp gate. It's pretty neat the first time you see it, but completely negating defender's advantage breaks the game for me. Getting a hidden pylon in someone's base is just as boring to watch as the instant losses caused by spell casters IMO. I think that removing warp gate would allow the gateway units to be buffed to the point where sentries aren't as important.
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On October 18 2012 12:07 MichaelDonovan wrote:Yeah, if Artosis is telling everyone to calm down I think we should listen. He's a smart guy. I trust his word more than any other person in the community, and if he's saying SC2 still has a bright future then I believe him.
He is just one person. Even though he has a lot of experience and influence, that doesn't mean his opinion is a be all end all. There are many people that disagree with him.
Very solid post Gretorp. The community needs more big names voicing their concerns for how broken protoss is (among other issues you listed) in order for blizzard to listen. Blizzard WILL listen if enough people consistently complain about something. The important thing is to remain vigilant, keep bringing up good discussion points, and raise awareness.
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Brazil1429 Posts
Hi Gretorp, thank you for your thoughts. I speak here as someone who played a lot of SC:BW, watches a lot of SC2 and plays a lot of Dota 2.
I don't feel I'm much knowledgeable to discuss metagame and how or if the current metagame is killing HOTS, so I'll avoid talking much about it. I think the root of the problem is less about the metagame, and more about 'eSports.' I'll try to explain my point.
Even if you have a perfectly balanced game, you can have completely shitty and non-entertaining games coming from it. If you want an example, think on chess, you can play it poorly and like a coward, or you can play offensive, aggressive chess. Ultimately, it's the players who decide which kind of game we're watching. This is very clear in Dota. There was an era where ganks weren't as profitable as just playing safe and farming gold aiming the late game, but even so there was a handful of teams that kept using the ganking style and losing. When I asked them why are they still playing with this style, and not the other one who has been more successful, the answer was 'because ganking doto is best doto'. It's the players who decide how the game is being played. The proof of this right now is League of Legends, whose balance decisions are the complete opposite from Dota, but whose metagame is exactly the same that existed on Dota four or five years ago. It's actually amazing to see the old Dota metagame happening on LoL. So, even if the game is perfectly balanced, you can still have shitty games. That's why I don't think the most part of the problem lies in balance/metagame discussions.
I think the problems are two: Blizzard doesn't seem to understand what their clients wants, and they don't seem to understand that their game is a sport for a lot of people, and the difference between managing a sport and a game.
I'll start for the later point. If you look at every sport in the world, their rules change to adapt to their players circumstances. For example, the change from 30 to 24 seconds on basketball and several other changes on football, soccer, volleyball, etc. While we can say that these small changes completely modified their games, at the same time, the changes didn't violate the tradition built by their games. This happens in Dota 2. When a new hero or a new item is added, the game changes completely, but it's still the same game. What Blizzard did with Starcraft is very different from this (please, I'm not trying to start a BW vs SC2 discussion). They decided to ignore the tradition built by the players and arbitrarily created a completely different game. It's like passing a rule that using hands on basketball is now a violation, and you can now only play with your feets. They didn't add depth and new things to the base that was built after long years, they simply created everything from scratch. The reason for this is simple: they build the game with the single player campaign in mind. The multiplayer is just a detail. This choice really hurt Starcraft as a whole, divided the community, etc.
(Based on this idea, I think that it's a mistake to remove sentries now. Lots of my favorite moments in SC2 had sentries on it. You can't simply erase it's existance, they must find a way to make it work)
And this leads us to the former point: Blizzard doesn't understand what their clients want. Sure, there's a lot of people who'll buy HOTS only for the single player, but they can't deny that their game is a sport. Their clients wants Blizzard to treat it like a sport. How do they do that? They do that by allowing their clients to do what people who practice sports do. If you're a player, you'll want to watch replays together without having so synchronize it all the time, from any point of view you want (caster, players, youself controlling the camera); you'll want to watch other players live from inside the client; if you're a tournament organizer, you want the opportunity to sell tickets from inside the game to watch competitive tournaments, which gives your tournament visibility and an income; you'll want the ability to feature your sponsors on the client. On the last Dota patch, they just created a highlight system that shows you only the highlight moments of a game. I can easily create a highlight series ESPN-style with just some clicks. See, the game invites me to produce value, and I can do it inside the game. To produce value in Starcraft, I need to go outside. SC2 cost 60 dollars, and it doesn't have 1/10 of the features that Dota, a to-be F2P game, And it simply doesn't make any sense.
I hope this made any sense. And my apologies for the bad english, it's not my natural language.
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I always thought it would be cooler to have ghosts act more like (and dont yell at me for saying this) the Sniper squads in C&C. Permacloaked units that sit around the map and pick off stray units, or the key targets within the army.
Your army would walk around, suddenly pew pew. Suddenly your scared to walk in the direction, and scout ahead to find them at risk of having your expensive guys just picked off.
It could be similar in sc2, remove the ghosts standard attack, give them permanent cloaking (and obviously because of this, put them farther down in the tech tree, like make acadamy req fact or even armory), and let them roam around, spot army movements, fire off some snipes or EMP rounds when the time is right.
The damage would be small, but critical enough that bad movements don't lose your whole army, but still has a large enough impact to encourage forward scouting with detection.
just a possible alternative to giving them mines x) great post Gretorp
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United States7483 Posts
All of the arguments for the difficulty of play with regards to non-pros is silly. The game is only as difficult to play as your opponent makes it for you. The ladder system is designed to match you to players where you play with an approximate 1-1 win/loss ratio. Therefore, given enough ladder games, everyone will always be playing opponents of around the same skill level. If you can't do warp prism micro during an immortal/sentry push, odds are pretty good your opponent can't either.
Therefore, the only question of difficulty of play is at what point should the skill cap be set, the skill cap being defined as perfect play (all decisions are the best possible decision, all control is flawless and achieved with 100% efficiency, and no opportunity is missed out on: no mistakes of any kind).
What most people seem to be talking about isn't difficulty of play, but rather the difficulty of executing something flashy. They want to see something cool that the pros can do that they can't, with the hopes that they can one day do it. That's tactical difficulty, not strategic difficulty, and people tend to confuse the two.
The game would be helped if blizzard would stop trying to create units for specific roles, and instead design units with a given theme in mind and allow them to fill a role (like harass or powerhouse), but without pigeon-holing them by hobbling their ability to do other things. The oracle is an example of a terrible unit: it can literally only harass. Even worse, it can't even do that spectacularly well. It can't win games instantly like hellions, making it very forgiving to your opponent. It can't threaten tech, only the mineral line, which means your opponent has only 1 precise location per base that can be threatened by it. Unlike mutalisks, which can threaten buildings, units that defend against them in small numbers, and workers, the oracle can't be much of a threat. That means it won't be taken seriously and the unit has little to no function: you can't use it to scare your opponent, you can't do real damage so forcing a pin is hard, and it has no use outside of that role. Sure, you can do some mineral gain damage (but not gas, which is arguably more important, since to the protoss, who needs a tech advantage to really fight, delaying enemy tech is super strong), but you aren't taking away minerals from the opponent, merely delaying his gain of them. He'll still mine out the base eventually. Unless you can continuously entomb over and over again (which no good player would allow), expect to accomplish nothing. Hell, terran gets a building (planetary fortress) that stops the oracle at an entire base almost guaranteed. Void siphon is a step in the right direction, but it doesn't really do damage and can't seriously threaten an opponent either. It also has no function outside of harass.
The stalker is an example of a better designed unit (not stats or balance, but design). It can harass, it can fight, it serves an anti-air role, it is powerful when micro'd and weak when not controlled, and it can fill other purposes (like blocking ramps to prevent hellion run-bys by virtue of it's size, etc.)
Like Gretorp said, and this is a little hard to understand because he skipped a few steps when explaining his reasoning, but the fact that the sentry is so necessary for protoss early game means every other unit is forced to be pigeon-holed into a specific role apart from the other couple of core units.
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9:30 push with ff is too strong atm imo
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Artosis always brings a glimmer of hope to my heart.
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On October 18 2012 12:24 Erik.TheRed wrote:Artosis always brings a glimmer of hope to my heart.
As he should. Artosis is the guy that Blizzard should be listening to, not the band wagon.
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i agree except for the increase in power to immortals, they already destroy roaches.
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I feel that spell casters that have the ability to lock units in place is a fairly silly idea. Although they might sound great on paper, but just the sheer power that the sentry and infestor gives to the protoss and zerg respectively, is just way too much. No game should be focused on a single set of FF's or a single set of fungals.
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I would've loved to read this article in its entirety, Gretorp. But...
Sometimes, less is more >_<
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EPT
