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ref4
2933 Posts
On December 20 2012 01:17 Snowbear wrote: I understand you would do this when this is the release version, but we still got 3 months... We all know from Blizzard's past actions that they will stop changes 3 months before actual release and release a broken game (see Diablo III) and stop caring and patching the game once they get our money. | ||
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blooming_flower
4 Posts
It's also silly to assume that the alternatives to infestors are necessarily any better. Mutalisks are only a pale shadow of the beloved Brood War unit. Hydralisks are a clumsy attack move unit the community mostly only likes because of their iconic status, I swear I've read suggestions to essentially turn the hydralisk into a roach for the sole purpose of using the model. And of course swarm hosts are not meant to be a core option. I hope all of you will be content in a world of mass roach/hydra/corruptor every game in vP, vZ. Talk of good and bad design is silly also. The development of a game is an evolutionary process: you come up with things, then you test them and you keep what works. There is no need to even bother with design at all for a workable game. If it ends up being fun, what does it matter you didn't consciously build it this way? If the infestor doesn't work out, replace it with something superior - although Blizzard evidently missed their window, suggesting they think the unit was salvageable. There is nothing about 'blah blah fungal bad design'. I've read arguments about why warpgates are bad design that are exactly applicable to speedy zergling reinforcements. I've read why reapers are badly designed, even if medivacs do about the same thing. That's the way it works, you create a unit that deviates from standard RTS play with the idea of diversifying gameplay, sometimes it fails and you go back to the drawing board, sometimes it works out okay. Having some units that break the rules is oftentimes exciting, as long as you're lucky with the exact balance. Where I would question Blizzard's design methodology is that they didn't actually do anything with warpgates, forcefield etc. Not bad design, but questionable nevertheless. | ||
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plogamer
Canada3132 Posts
On December 20 2012 00:40 JDub wrote: And what happens when next week they nerf fungal again? These kinds of posts just make me laugh, really. I understand being angry/depressed/etc. about the balance update, but come on now, we're still ~3 months from release, anything can still change. Nothing happens when they nerf fungal again. SC:BW was a fluke. As it stands, there's no reason to play Starcraft 2 more than any other game. I'll spend my money or something else since I'm no longer caught up in the BW's legacy. Maybe, once they release Legacy of the Void, and then rebalance everything again, and end with a finished product, I can revisit whether I want to purchase the game. A bit like the stock market, too volatile for me to invest my money and time into. | ||
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urashimakt
United States1591 Posts
On December 20 2012 01:16 Cyrak wrote: Do these guys just get high all day, eat donuts and make random ass nonsensical changes to the game? No, they're a team of individuals whose job it is to say what if? and then make changes to a beta. If they were getting high and eating donuts all day they'd probably be on an internet forum complaining from day 0 about any new changes put to the test that they might disagree with for whatever reason. | ||
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ref4
2933 Posts
On December 20 2012 01:27 urashimakt wrote: No, they're a team of individuals whose job it is to say what if? and then make changes to a beta. If they were getting high and eating donuts all day they'd probably be on an internet forum complaining from day 0 about any new changes put to the test that they might disagree with for whatever reason. They are making changes that I don't like. Surely they must not be doing their jobs and instead indulge themselves on junk food. | ||
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[F_]aths
Germany3947 Posts
On December 20 2012 01:16 Cyrak wrote: Do these guys just get high all day, eat donuts and make random ass nonsensical changes to the game? No, they are professional game developers who have a ton of data to look on and massive playing experience. They discuss a lot of options internally and try the most promising ones out. When they are convinced they have a good solution, they include it in a patch. | ||
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mongoose22
174 Posts
On December 19 2012 07:01 Raisa wrote: I saw a vid from before which showed fungal compared to EMP. EMP was about twice as fast. The buff (10->15) would imply fungal is about 75% of the speed of EMP. If this hasn't been answered yet, in the map editor the EMP max speed is 30, so 15 would make fungals half the speed of an EMP projectile. | ||
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XXXSmOke
United States1333 Posts
Whyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy TT they should know how risky this is and that they are playing with fire. | ||
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Lorch
Germany3684 Posts
On December 20 2012 01:29 [F_]aths wrote: No, they are professional game developers who have a ton of data to look on and massive playing experience. They discuss a lot of options internally and try the most promising ones out. When they are convinced they have a good solution, they include it in a patch. I lol'd, please tell me you aren't serious. There are 5 people working on starcraft balance that randomly try shit, if you read the hots patch history, especially the first couple patches, you can tell that they have no idea what they are doing. | ||
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urashimakt
United States1591 Posts
On December 20 2012 01:39 Lorch wrote: I lol'd, please tell me you aren't serious. There are 5 people working on starcraft balance that randomly try shit, if you read the hots patch history, especially the first couple patches, you can tell that they have no idea what they are doing. Sounds to me like you just described a beta test. | ||
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Ramiz1989
12124 Posts
On December 20 2012 01:07 sagefreke wrote: What other unit does Zerg have that has better AA than the Hydra? The corruptor which is almost 100% useless in ZvZ and is universally regarded as the most boring unit on the game? Decendos already said it, if we look at the cost-efficient way of dealing with Air, Queens, Infestors and Corruptors are better. Even if you say that the Corruptors are the most boring units in the game(which I kind of agree), they are still very effective. On December 20 2012 01:39 Lorch wrote: I lol'd, please tell me you aren't serious. There are 5 people working on starcraft balance that randomly try shit, if you read the hots patch history, especially the first couple patches, you can tell that they have no idea what they are doing. "I don't know the reason behind these changes, so hell, there must be no reason!" Great logic. | ||
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Zorgaz
Sweden2951 Posts
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SuperYo1000
United States880 Posts
On December 20 2012 01:39 Lorch wrote: I lol'd, please tell me you aren't serious. There are 5 people working on starcraft balance that randomly try shit, if you read the hots patch history, especially the first couple patches, you can tell that they have no idea what they are doing. Actually I thought it was only 2 people. Wasnt that established like a year ago? If its 5 now, well, I guess thats better then 2 | ||
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Barbiero
Brazil5259 Posts
On December 20 2012 01:39 Lorch wrote: I lol'd, please tell me you aren't serious. There are 5 people working on starcraft balance that randomly try shit, if you read the hots patch history, especially the first couple patches, you can tell that they have no idea what they are doing. If you think like that, why don't you apply to a job as a dev and try to fix it up? | ||
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Big J
Austria16289 Posts
On December 20 2012 00:16 TSORG wrote: a game is badly designed when it is contraproductive in reaching its goal, being a fun game (it is entertainment after all). A multiplayer game is not fun when it is unbalanced (because both sides should have fun for it to be a fun game, unless its sp you dont play a game by yourself.) hence an unbalanced game is bad game design. or if the game just is boring, so a boring game is badly designed. what makes something boring? small input for big output, aka low skill needed to achieve many different things or victories. FG mostly but spell casting in general falls under that category the way it is now. someone wrote a nice piece about how easy spellcasting was not good for this game, and frankly it is one of the things i dislike about sc2 (perhaps because coming from a different rts tradition, it is new for me and i still suck badly at it even though it is easy, i simply just forget i have it at my disposal  )Well, yeah I agree that this is quite a reasonable explanation for what we want to achieve with game design. However, there are many, many things that are really easy to do and have a huge impact. Like, it is really not hard to build a Dark Shrine and send 3 DTs to 3 different locations or queue two dropships and then move out and you only have to concentrate on your main army, while your opponent has to concentrate on both drops as well. The question is not, how easy it is as an action. The question is, how does it behave in the whole picture. Like, fungaling a bio army is really easy if you have 10infestors. But if you only have 3 and have to make each of that count? Not so much. The fungal itself isn't a problem. Like it is a really bad choice to use fungals for a lot of things (like against Tanklines, or Capital Ships). The Infestor in WoL is kind of badly designed, because the end all Zerg composition is nearly Infestor only, as it is hard to counter. With things like Tempests in the picture and the huge IT nerf, Infestors get way more strategical, as it suddenly is a bad choice against many compositions. But that doesn't mean at all that fungal is badly designed. Things are meant to be good against something, e.g. fungal against clumped bio forces. That's the course of a strategy game, one player builds something, and the other one builds something that is better than that, and the the first one tries to get something better etc. Like, let's assume for a moment that Infestors only had Fungal growth as a spell. Would we see that many Infestors? It would probably be that rare caster, that you get a few off if your opponent has like mass, mass marines and if you built too many of them, tanks would probably just stomp you. But since the Infestor also has ITs to combat tanks (and other things against which fungal is really costinefficient), there is no big strategical choice anymore (bad design). And so you can just mass Infestors and then spam fungal if the opponent has the one, or spam ITs if he has the other composition. So I disagree that fungal is badly designed. I think it is actually very well designed (bad against many things, like Huge units that only lose like 10% of their HP from it and take a huge part of the AoE radiues) - that's not to say I agree with the new buffs. I actually think the Infestor was in a really good spot before the patch. | ||
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RyF
Austria508 Posts
hf zergys | ||
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Esk23
United States447 Posts
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convention
United States622 Posts
On December 20 2012 01:58 Big J wrote: Well, yeah I agree that this is quite a reasonable explanation for what we want to achieve with game design. However, there are many, many things that are really easy to do and have a huge impact. Like, it is really not hard to build a Dark Shrine and send 3 DTs to 3 different locations or queue two dropships and then move out and you only have to concentrate on your main army, while your opponent has to concentrate on both drops as well. The question is not, how easy it is as an action. The question is, how does it behave in the whole picture. Like, fungaling a bio army is really easy if you have 10infestors. But if you only have 3 and have to make each of that count? Not so much. The fungal itself isn't a problem. Like it is a really bad choice to use fungals for a lot of things (like against Tanklines, or Capital Ships). The Infestor in WoL is kind of badly designed, because the end all Zerg composition is nearly Infestor only, as it is hard to counter. With things like Tempests in the picture and the huge IT nerf, Infestors get way more strategical, as it suddenly is a bad choice against many compositions. But that doesn't mean at all that fungal is badly designed. Things are meant to be good against something, e.g. fungal against clumped bio forces. That's the course of a strategy game, one player builds something, and the other one builds something that is better than that, and the the first one tries to get something better etc. Like, let's assume for a moment that Infestors only had Fungal growth as a spell. Would we see that many Infestors? It would probably be that rare caster, that you get a few off if your opponent has like mass, mass marines and if you built too many of them, tanks would probably just stomp you. But since the Infestor also has ITs to combat tanks (and other things against which fungal is really costinefficient), there is no big strategical choice anymore (bad design). And so you can just mass Infestors and then spam fungal if the opponent has the one, or spam ITs if he has the other composition. So I disagree that fungal is badly designed. I think it is actually very well designed (bad against many things, like Huge units that only lose like 10% of their HP from it and take a huge part of the AoE radiues) - that's not to say I agree with the new buffs. I actually think the Infestor was in a really good spot before the patch. I completely agree with you on this. I've always felt that fungal as a spell is fine, as could be seen in the early stages of the game when people would get 3 or 4 infestors to lock down your army, and that was it. It was exciting to see, because zerg needed that fungal to land to combat the bio/tank composition. Very powerful spells that limit micro are fine and can be exciting, however there has to be some drawback to the unit. For example, HT are very slow but storm is incredibly powerful. That makes it exciting to see if the slow HT can make it without getting sniped to land a good storm, and it becomes about positioning. Infestors however have IT, burrow, and a pretty fast movespeed on creep. They are incredibly hard to kill and very very strong when massed. My biggest problem with the infestor, is it removes the choice on what to build. If you design a unit composition with terran and tell it to me, I can then design a perfect protoss composition to fight your composition. What I design depends entirely on what you have. And vice versa, if protoss creates an army, the perfect terran army depends on what the protoss created. With zerg it is different. No matter what you say, I can always say mass infestors. | ||
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bearhug
United States999 Posts
On December 20 2012 01:29 [F_]aths wrote: No, they are professional game developers who have a ton of data to look on and massive playing experience. They discuss a lot of options internally and try the most promising ones out. When they are convinced they have a good solution, they include it in a patch. What a beautiful defense. But not even a three year old kid would believe you. | ||
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Gimmeurladderpoints
Germany372 Posts
So, I take it that you know about this thing too. So please explain the term "badly designed" for me (of course without using tautologies). Oh of course. I can only have a meaningful opinion about game design if I studied it. By that logic, only people who studied politics should be allowed to vote. No I did not study game design. But I don't have to, I easily get bored by the endless fungal spam without a degree in game design. In a good RTS you want that the skill of the player matters as much as possible, and you want, that the game exciting to watch. The Infestor goes against both these fundamentals. And I can explain you how it does that, no problem. The problem with fungal growth and the infestor in general is, that it's a one size-fits all spell. Zerg relies on the infestor in every matchup in every composition. But not only that, the spell is also boring as fuck to watch. Why? Because after it's casted, (now from 10 range) the skill part is over. There is literally NOTHING that the opponnent can do, cause it stuns you but also causes a lot of damage and in most cases the infestor player will have more fungals at his disposal to chainfungal. The projectile part does help a bit in the boring department, but since the infestors can cast fungal from ten range(most units have 9 vision range) it won't make that big of a diffrence. Now that wouldn't be sooooooooooo bad, if the units in Starcraft would not clump up so much, so that it's virtually impossible too avoid "naaaiiiiiiiiiiiice fungal" every once in a while. Even on the highest level it happens ALL THE TIME. It will become a bit better with the projectile, but it stil is going to frustrating and boring to watch. Take storm as a comparison. Storm does more damage, but it does not stun you, also it does damage over time, so you can micro out of it. Now that's competent game design right there. A added problem is the fact, that the fungal growth has very good synergy with the broodlords, cuz u want to go beneath those to kill them, but the infestors either will not let you, or kill you when you do it, also the stun of the FG makes it so that the Zerg can buy precious seconds to buy time for the broodlords, when they are not already out. You don't want to see a game where one side outplayes the other side, but the other side scrambles together 1 big army which is unbeatable. If it happens it should be considerd an upset and the player who lost to it should have to make mistakes. The Infestor makes it so that it happens on a regular basis, and that loosing your base, to get even more infestors is a viable strategy. Minor stat changes or making it a projectile won't change that. It will stay boring. | ||
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