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On February 15 2013 07:25 Aveng3r wrote:
I agree with the some of the OPs thoughts, especially the point about free seige tech. Somebody please tell me, what problem exactly did that change solve? compare that with the problems that it undoubtedly created for the other races.
You misunderstand. You are thinking on a unit for unit basis.
As I mentioned earlier, the state of balance in RTS game isn't really about the balance of the units towards each other.
The units strength is just to determine which units can counter which other units. The reason for the siege tank research being moved earlier is because it affects the timings of the game. As long as the units base role and functionality are in place, the timings are the most important thing that has to be addressed for balancing the races in matchups.
Look at things from a timing perspective and you will see that it starts to make sense. Even with a harass type opener, you can get the first tank out and in to siege mode around the 7min mark (if you are using the new Hellbat harass with 2 medivacs, slightly later - this is one reason the hellbat harass was problematic before, you used to be able to do the 4 hellbat harass and still get a tank out at 7 mins). 7 mins matches up with the timings of early aggression from the other races (7 Burrow Roaches, 10 non-burrow Roaches, Protoss gateway timing pushes). This allows them a method of defending if they scout the opponent and choose to go a defensive build rather than aggressive.
When looking at TvP there was 2 choices. Either balance the units, or balance the timings. First check if any of the enemy units are causing problems in ALL matchups. This explains the Void ray supply nerf. Then you will look at if any of your own units are lacking in all matchups, in this case if they were to look at Tanks, they are not lacking in the other matchups (in TvZ they completely counter most tech before T3). Then you will look at the timings. In which case tweaks of timings would actually be beneficial for siege tanks in all three matchups.
Now tell me how a hellion transforming into a hellbat gives it biological properties. Its like they took these retarded ideas and forced themselves to create the illusion of balance by constantly tinkering with a broken formula.
Your masking this as a balance complaint but your complaint is about if it's logical or not, rather than a balance complaint. The change was for gameplay reasons, not to make sense from a logical standpoint. As I said in an earlier post, if you really want them to come up with some lore to justify it, they can - this is a sci fi setting you can come up with a justification for nearly anything - in my earlier post I came up with one in seconds.
Also, did they not say that they were going to try to break up the deathballs, make mech viable in tvp, and (i guess they didnt say this, but its a reasonable expectation) and make lategame zerg more than broodlord infestor? What posetive changes have we seen in regard to any of those concepts? absolutely none if you ask me, I think if anything its gotten worse.
Yet another person that indicates they don't even play the beta.
Nearly every new unit (aside from the protoss ones) discourage deathballs. The changes to most existing units discourage deathballs, and most units with non-caster AoE got buffed (which counter deathballs). Mechs received a number of buffs and most of the strong TvP specs involve mech. And most of all, BL/Infestor isn't even an ideal strat anymore. Infestors were the most nerfed unit in HotS, and BL/Infestor isn't nowhere near as viable as other strats.
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Canada11439 Posts
On February 15 2013 09:39 Thieving Magpie wrote:Show nested quote +On February 15 2013 09:25 Falling wrote:
I think although I might agree that some of the changes are kinda weird and perhaps indicative of a patchwork fix, I have a hard time making use of 'elegant' and 'inelegant' design. What do we mean by that? What is our criteria and is an 'elegant' solution truly the best solution? I don't know, but I'm not even sure elegance matters so much as good gameplay changes.
Take a look at some of the BW coding bugs and I'm sure people wouldn't consider it elegant and perhaps a bit of a nightmare, but the result was amazing gameplay. One could argue that the Hellbat solutions aren't resulting in the same sort gameplay as moving shot, but I'm not sure 'elegance' is necessarily the problem. At least not how it has been defined here. Moving shot is not elegant. But neither is move cancels and hit boxes in fighting games. I think people are unhappy and, because its unclear to them how to properly lash out, they lash out at whatever is most visible and recent. For example, the problem with BW having moving shot and SC2 not having moving shot is not that Moving Shot is needed in a videogame; the Moving Shot allowed people to "out-skill" someone with a maneuver that is not gained from planning, but is gained from practice. People miss that they old days when "build order losses" could be salvaged if your opponent forgot to micro since "he's pretty much won anyway" and you overcome the deficit because of mechanics like moving shot, or because the RNG of high ground allowed your tank to survive 6-7 tank shots allowing you to win the fight. Or because your opponent was bad at moving his army and so random dragoons suddenly wandered out to the wilderness to be killed off by your pack of lings slowly whittling down the advancing protoss deathball. The moving shot, the high ground, the cargo size of the Hellion--those are all arbitrary things that people complain about because it seems comforting to attack something that looks present and visible. But its actually a much deeper hurt that is being hidden.
I don't think I was saying moving shot was elegant- or at least the coding that allowed it probably wasn't. Although, if you ignored the 'under the hood' it was certainly amazing to execute and amazing to observe. I'm not sure I would put cargo size the same category with how a unit behaves at the movement level. When we're breaking down burst shot vs extended dps, time between attacking and moving, cooldown between attacks, etc we're getting pretty deep. To go deeper I guess you could look at economics- how quickly income is accumulated and spent. Speed of max and remax relative to the distances between bases and number of bases. But I guess that's a bit of a tangent.
But certainly the size that a unit takes up in a medivac is pretty periphery unless all we are doing is tweaking the game.
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I'd honestly rather everything in the game be imba.
also I didn't really feel hellbats were all that imba anyways (it also hasn't been 3months+)
as for "elegant or inelegant" design/balance, idk I don't really care as long as the game itself becomes "balanced", but it takes awhile to know if it is or not.
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On February 15 2013 05:11 Spyridon wrote:Show nested quote +On February 15 2013 04:06 Rabiator wrote:On February 15 2013 03:20 Spyridon wrote:
The fact that you need someone else to post it on the Blizzard forums basically proves what I was saying earlier... that you don't even play the beta yet are complaining about balance. Why is that even allowed on these forums? Because you only need functioning brains combined with the willpower to use them + Show Spoiler +compared to "saving them for later" while not using them to analyze the game and find the really big flaws in the whole design philosophy behind SC2. Obviously you must be open minded enough to allow yourself to think about such things ... Everyone knows that things play on different in-game than they do on paper. To really understand a problem with the balance OR the design of the game, you have to have experience with it. Especially in an RTS game, because RTS games are not based unit-for-unit, instead they are balanced upon timings and counters. By your logic, then the lead balance and lead game designers of SC2 don't even have to play the game, and that's completely illogical to say the least.
It is NOT illogical, because you havent understood the point of this thread. Its about "too complicated design" versus "elegant and streamlined design making things easier". Its not about "is this unit balanced?" but rather about "is this method they employ to make it balanced too complicated or not?" To figure out if something is balanced you kinda need to play the game, but to see that they needlessly complicate things you dont.
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On February 15 2013 13:51 Rabiator wrote:Show nested quote +On February 15 2013 05:11 Spyridon wrote:On February 15 2013 04:06 Rabiator wrote:On February 15 2013 03:20 Spyridon wrote:
The fact that you need someone else to post it on the Blizzard forums basically proves what I was saying earlier... that you don't even play the beta yet are complaining about balance. Why is that even allowed on these forums? Because you only need functioning brains combined with the willpower to use them + Show Spoiler +compared to "saving them for later" while not using them to analyze the game and find the really big flaws in the whole design philosophy behind SC2. Obviously you must be open minded enough to allow yourself to think about such things ... Everyone knows that things play on different in-game than they do on paper. To really understand a problem with the balance OR the design of the game, you have to have experience with it. Especially in an RTS game, because RTS games are not based unit-for-unit, instead they are balanced upon timings and counters. By your logic, then the lead balance and lead game designers of SC2 don't even have to play the game, and that's completely illogical to say the least. It is NOT illogical, because you havent understood the point of this thread. Its about "too complicated design" versus "elegant and streamlined design making things easier". Its not about "is this unit balanced?" but rather about "is this method they employ to make it balanced too complicated or not?" To figure out if something is balanced you kinda need to play the game, but to see that they needlessly complicate things you dont.
Your last sentence sums things up exactly.
To figure out if its balanced you need to play the game, and you have been one of the loudest screamers on the HotS forum about balance. And you don't play the game.
And you talk about needless complicated. You have stated on this forum that you would have designed SC2 like BW with just 3 or so new units for each race (if youd like I can search through and quote it, but I don't want to waste the time). Meanwhile, BW's damage system was more complicated than this one (see above discussion in this topic for why).
It seems in the end you just want to complain about every aspect of SC2's design, and you switch up topic as it suits you, no matter how much it contradicts your earlier statements.
Elegant in this sense is silly to argue about. Everyone on this forum is going to have a different idea to what "elegant game design" is. And apparently you have misread the topic, because it's clearly stated where its balance vs design. Which is a perfect example of what I just said - your definition of elegant is different from others here.
And when it comes to game design, most the people here don't even know what that means... Especailly with how people here are tossing the words around. A games design, and a games design theories, are two very different things, and 90% of the peoples design complaints are actually balance complaints that has nothing to do with the design.
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Canada11439 Posts
@Spyridon the damage systems may be six of one and half dozen of the other, but you have to admit that hellbat has turned into one odd duck. The only equivalent I can think of is if Tanks in attack mode were bio and could be healed and you could fit 2 in a drop ship and in siege mode they couldn't be healed, but instead could be repaired and now you could only air lift one of them with a drop ship.
Granted they can change the game however they want, give labels however they want. But of all the ways to balance out a unit... it becomes exceedingly odd. The two modes are diverging so much as to be two separate units in one. A sort of Clark Kent-Superman thing. It would be fun if in the next step, you could buy the vehicles at different prices. Hellions cost mineral, but buy them in hellbat mode and they're cheaper on minerals and more gas heavy. Or maybe they cost different supply depending on what mode you were in- bump up to 220/200 by switching modes  You could do it, but why? Surely there is a better solution.
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On February 15 2013 19:12 Falling wrote:@Spyridon the damage systems may be six of one and half dozen of the other, but you have to admit that hellbat has turned into one odd duck. The only equivalent I can think of is if Tanks in attack mode were bio and could be healed and you could fit 2 in a drop ship and in siege mode they couldn't be healed, but instead could be repaired and now you could only air lift one of them with a drop ship. Granted they can change the game however they want, give labels however they want. But of all the ways to balance out a unit... it becomes exceedingly odd. The two modes are diverging so much as to be two separate units in one. A sort of Clark Kent-Superman thing. It would be fun if in the next step, you could buy the vehicles at different prices. Hellions cost mineral, but buy them in hellbat mode and they're cheaper on minerals and more gas heavy. Or maybe they cost different supply depending on what mode you were in- bump up to 220/200 by switching modes You could do it, but why? Surely there is a better solution.
Well, but isn't that what they have been going for?
I mean, just because the transformation does not cost any resources and is reversable - they are two different units with different stats and roles.
Seems like the "Hellbats are not a new unit" - whiner-propaganda was very succesful.
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Why is there always a huge wave of QQ with each new feature and how it applies to mineral line raiding?
Why don't they just boost worker HP and reduce worker damage to fix this forever?
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On February 15 2013 03:20 Spyridon wrote:
TLDR
People are allowed to disagree on aspects of design and how they're implemented to achieve balance, but frankly you've done nothing but disagree as opposed to offering anything thoughtful or constructutive. I never once mentioned Reapers as a point of design or balance in my OP other than to say you have to choose between Proxy Reapers or keeping your Barracks at home in order to build a Reactor for 2xMedivacs, other than that I don't see anything else in your rant worthy of addressing.
And yes I've played the Beta, it's just not on my account.
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On February 15 2013 09:25 Falling wrote:
I think although I might agree that some of the changes are kinda weird and perhaps indicative of a patchwork fix, I have a hard time making use of 'elegant' and 'inelegant' design. What do we mean by that? What is our criteria and is an 'elegant' solution truly the best solution? I don't know, but I'm not even sure elegance matters so much as good gameplay changes.
Take a look at some of the BW coding bugs and I'm sure people wouldn't consider it elegant and perhaps a bit of a nightmare, but the result was amazing gameplay. One could argue that the Hellbat solutions aren't resulting in the same sort gameplay as moving shot, but I'm not sure 'elegance' is necessarily the problem. At least not how it has been defined here.
Elegance is subjective and it's not something easily defined within the context of game design, I'd define it as having simplicity of form and complexity of play. There are just certain things that I personally feel are ugly as a game designer and as a player, a unit that has two separate cargo values in two different forms for the sole purpose of game balance just seems unnecessarily confusing and more of a "band aid" fix.
Maybe some people think it's a clever nerf because it only affects Hellbat drops, and that's all they wanted it to affect, but I have a suspcion the unit in and of itself is still imbalanced based on its power level or how its accessed inside of the Terran tech tree. Time will tell on that I suppose.
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On February 14 2013 21:39 MoonCricket wrote:
Terrans can still circumvent the nerf by building a Reactor on the Barracks, exchanging the Reactor with the Factory for 4 Hellions and then exchanging the Reactor with the Starport for 2 Medivacs and have an equivalent drop
Yeah, no. Stopped reading there. Sorry, but you have no idea what you're talking about.
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On February 15 2013 22:40 Grapefruit wrote:Show nested quote +On February 14 2013 21:39 MoonCricket wrote:
Terrans can still circumvent the nerf by building a Reactor on the Barracks, exchanging the Reactor with the Factory for 4 Hellions and then exchanging the Reactor with the Starport for 2 Medivacs and have an equivalent drop
Yeah, no. Stopped reading there. Sorry, but you have no idea what you're talking about.
I get it comes 40 seconds later in exchange for the 2nd Medivac, my point is the drop still exists in a timing that's precarious. If the drop completely falls out of favor as a result of the nerf so be it, I'm still seeing people try the 4x Hellbat drop on the ladder as of now.
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On February 15 2013 22:47 MoonCricket wrote:Show nested quote +On February 15 2013 22:40 Grapefruit wrote:On February 14 2013 21:39 MoonCricket wrote:
Terrans can still circumvent the nerf by building a Reactor on the Barracks, exchanging the Reactor with the Factory for 4 Hellions and then exchanging the Reactor with the Starport for 2 Medivacs and have an equivalent drop
Yeah, no. Stopped reading there. Sorry, but you have no idea what you're talking about. I get it comes 40 seconds later in exchange for the 2nd Medivac, my point is the drop still exists in a timing that's precarious. If the drop completely falls out of favor as a result of the nerf so be it, I'm still seeing people try the 4x Hellbat drop on the ladder as of now.
You miss the important things:
1) The Hellbat drop could be played of 1 gas. This isn't possible if you need 2 Medivacs. 2 Gas highly limits your mineral income, which results in being unable to get a CC behind it.
2) Even before the Hellbat drop was very all-in in the sense that you could do heavy economic damage, but at the same time were VERY weak to counter attacks and your units lacked the ability to outright kill your opponent in a way a Roach/Gateway all-in could. Trust me, I lost countless games in which I killed 20+ workers but lost to MS Core + Gate units or Roach/Ling a minute later.
3) Switching the reactor to the Starport leaves you with even less production. You would have literally nothing but your drop and a naked Rax and Factory. Almost any amount of units would be able to kill you and despite being a 1/1/1 build the transition possibilities are very awkward due to the lack of add-ons.
Really, at this point playing a Hellbat drop is simply retarded.
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Elegant or not, they need to fix the problems in the beta. It's too expensive and time consuming to make elegant redesigns, in order to please wanna be game designers in the community. HOTS is fun to play, but maybe it will have a lot of problems when it comes out. You can hate and theorycraft all day, but it's still too early to tell how good HOTS will be design-wise. The game has to be released and cannot remain in beta for another year. Not to mention the unit overhauls and UI changes that were made in the last few months. I think Browder's team are doing the best they can given the circumstances and I believe that HOTS will be a very good game. Chill and enjoy the game.
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On February 15 2013 23:30 Inex wrote:
Elegant or not, they need to fix the problems in the beta. It's too expensive and time consuming to make elegant redesigns, in order to please wanna be game designers in the community. HOTS is fun to play, but maybe it will have a lot of problems when it comes out. You can hate and theorycraft all day, but it's still too early to tell how good HOTS will be design-wise. The game has to be released and cannot remain in beta for another year. Not to mention the unit overhauls and UI changes that were made in the last few months. I think Browder's team are doing the best they can given the circumstances and I believe that HOTS will be a very good game. Chill and enjoy the game.
I am with this guy. This entire discussion is based on style over substance, which I don’t agree with in a practical topic like balance. If people want to talk about a more streamlined user inter face, curser labels that better show what changes you are making during game play(ie a + sign when added units to a control group, - sign when removing), graphs that show during replays and other awesome stuff, I am all about it. However, these discussions of “could there be a better solution to balance” are self indulgent and detract from the general discussion of HotS itself. I like talking about game theory and design as much as the next guy, but these discussions have dominated the forums for way to long.
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I'm not convinced that anyone has offered a coherent definition of "elegant" beyond "something I like", nor am I convinced that there is any correlation between so-called "elegance" and a game being well balanced and fun to play.
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The relationship between elegant balance and elegant design is not zero-sum. You can have both, obviously.
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I really cant understand how the hell people freak out about changes that will only effect a specific situation. This is A GAME. you make ARBITRARY rules so that things are fair. If the game is fair then why do you give a shit at all?
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On February 16 2013 00:31 arcHoniC wrote:
I really cant understand how the hell people freak out about changes that will only effect a specific situation. This is A GAME. you make ARBITRARY rules so that things are fair. If the game is fair then why do you give a shit at all?
Because people want things to "make sense" in a game where 20 dudes on the ground with machine guns can somehow bring down a fully armed battlecruiser larger than a city block, where emps drain away ancient alien psychic crystal energy, and where alien bug monsters eat gas to transform into different kinds of alien bug monsters.
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On February 16 2013 00:31 arcHoniC wrote:
I really cant understand how the hell people freak out about changes that will only effect a specific situation. This is A GAME. you make ARBITRARY rules so that things are fair. If the game is fair then why do you give a shit at all?
The whole point of "elegant game design" is that it does NOT have "balancing adjustments for specific situations" ... because it doesnt need it. Such a game is far easier to balance.
As an example you might want to think about how the unit size and the tight clumping affects the balance between Marines and Stalkers for example. Since the Marine is much smaller you can clump more of them in the same area and this increases their "dps density" for the area occupied by the units and gives the Marines a clear advantage. In small numbers it is the Stalker which has the advantage. To "cover up" this bad design Blizzard had to add the Forcefield and Blink to make Stalkers - with their current stats - viable and any better stats would clearly make them too strong in a "few vs few" situation. The tight unit clumping and massive numbers of units which are easily produced is a clear example where bad design makes balancing harder.
How do you "figure in" stuff like Forcefield and Blink in a balance equation? That is a pretty hard one, because playing skill affects the outcome and thus shifts the balance with your rank on the ladder ... which is kinda bad. Thus simpler game design which is streamlined to be equally hard for all levels of skill is better AND far easier to balance. Just look at how many balance adjustments the game had until now (in WoL) and it still isnt stable ... because balance hangs on a knife's edge all the time instead of being robust.
Elegant game design = simple and robust balancing
Complicated-situation specific game design = precarious knife's edge balance that is hard to achieve
With robust balancing the map makers have far more freedom to be creative. An example: super narrow paths close to the main base or between bases two and three are kinda "impossible" because Protoss can easily abuse them with Forcefield. Without that spell it wouldnt be a problem to have such features on a map.
On February 15 2013 19:12 Falling wrote:@Spyridon the damage systems may be six of one and half dozen of the other, but you have to admit that hellbat has turned into one odd duck. The only equivalent I can think of is if Tanks in attack mode were bio and could be healed and you could fit 2 in a drop ship and in siege mode they couldn't be healed, but instead could be repaired and now you could only air lift one of them with a drop ship. Granted they can change the game however they want, give labels however they want. But of all the ways to balance out a unit... it becomes exceedingly odd. The two modes are diverging so much as to be two separate units in one. A sort of Clark Kent-Superman thing. It would be fun if in the next step, you could buy the vehicles at different prices. Hellions cost mineral, but buy them in hellbat mode and they're cheaper on minerals and more gas heavy. Or maybe they cost different supply depending on what mode you were in- bump up to 220/200 by switching modes You could do it, but why? Surely there is a better solution.
I had the idea of a "Warcraft 3 solution" where you could buy a Hippogriff and then mount an archer on it to get a whole new unit.
Hellion + Marine = ???
Hellion + Marauder = ???
Hellions are powerful, but they have one weakness: their attack is shaped in a line, which means they get maximum efficiency when they flank OR when the opponent runs away. Battle Hellions dont have that "weakness" and combining them with the drop potential makes them rather powerful for dropping right into a clump. Theoretically they have the weakness of being slow, but Medivacs neutralize that one.
The whole problem started with a few "special goodies" like the turbo boost for the Medivac and the ability to heal Battle Hellions. The last one is rather illogical, because the driver is the same in Hellion mode too. Sure they can decide to put into the game whatever they want, but that these things will cause problems was clear from the start.
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