Option to Disable Replay Saving - Page 6

On October 08 2009 14:48 zgl wrote:
In poker, you don't get to see your opponents hands after you lost your money

On October 08 2009 13:41 Lysdexia wrote:
I've posted my opinion already, but it wasn't a very detailed explanation so here's a better one:

Open information is always good for a competitive game, and for starcraft replays are essential to open information.

Open information increases the quality of play as a whole by incentivizing preparation and increasing general knowledge about the game. The reason there's a higher incentive for preparation is pretty simple: more accessible information lets players know what to prepare for. Without replays it would be much more difficult to analyze a build and come up with a response. This is magnified in a game like starcraft where a strategy can have a huge number of small nuances that would be near impossible to discover without a replay.

People who say open information decreases strategy are very myopic. The players who came up with counters to boxer's shenanigans were just as "creative". In fact they were employing more strategy because they had to create something to beat a specific build, not a generic strategy that could work against anything if it wasn't properly dealt with. There's a name for this process. It's called the strategic evolution of the game. People analyze things that other people are doing and come up with ways to beat them, and as a result our collective knowledge of the game increases, as does the quality of games at all levels (as spectators we care about the quality of pro games).

All of the sweet strats people marvel over don't just materialize out of thin air. Someone analyzed what other people were doing and tried to come up with a way to beat it. This is only possible through openly accessible information.

Lack of information is what drives people towards generic strategies. Without information there's no incentive to prepare specific strategies because there's no way of knowing 1. if people are actually using the strategy you're preparing against and 2. all of the little nuances and tricks that could fuck up your prepared strat. The really exiting, high quality games played in the pro scene are frequently the ones where players prepared strategies specifically for that game, on that map, against that player. Without the ability to create such strategies, generic strats (either standard play or a universally applicable cheese) would be the only option.

I mean, just think about it. If before playing someone you had the opportunity to analyze their last 20 games to see what they did, and you had pro level knowledge to figure out what to do against that, would you do that or just roll with whatever standard thing you would do absent that information? This is magnified at the pro level where people know who they're playing farther in advance and have more time to sit around (with their coaches) and create strategies.

If after looking at all this information it turns out the player thinks playing standard is the best option then obviously that's what people will do, but having the information there dramatically increases the possibility for a new or unique strategy. And quality of play will still be higher just by virtue of the fact that everyone knows more about the game generally as well as more about the current metagame.

The other problem with the claim that open information decreases strategy is it relies on a flawed view of what strategy is and how strategy actually affects the outcomes of games.

Creating a strategy in starcraft is basically figuring out a goal then looking at what stuff you have available and deciding how best to use it to achieve that goal i.e. I want to kill my opponent fast so I'll build gateways in their main. This is obviously strategy, but not all or even most aspects of strategy can be reduced to this. In fact this process is very far removed from how most games are actually decided.

In order to understand how strategy is actually applied to real games, we need to take a step back in terms of what we think of when we think of "what stuff you have available". In the example I gave the stuff was gateways and the fact that you can build them in your opponent's main. In actual games this stuff is the range of strategies a player can use. Instead of saying "I want to kill my opponent fast" and then looking at all the potential choices they could make with regards to units and buildings and the placement of those buildings and arriving at building gateways in your opponent's main as a good way to achieve that goal, players say "I want to kill my opponent fast, so I will use the strategy of proxying gateways".

The difference may seem subtle but it's very important. When a player is deciding what to do in a particular game the set of "stuff" is NOT all of the units and buildings and various things you can do with them, it's the set of strategies you know. The buildings and units and such are of course the building blocks of those strategies, but that is unimportant to how players make strategic decisions in actual games.

So the strategic decision is not "I am going to build gateways in my opponents main", the strategic decision is "I am going to (use the strategy called) proxy 9/9 gate". In terms of it's relevance to actual games and deciding their outcomes, strategy is the decisions you make about your build (drawn from a set of builds you have previously learned, not created out of thin air) before the game and how you adapt in the game.

Once we start looking at strategy from this perspective it's obvious that more accessible information is essential for strategy. With more information players will have a wider range of potential builds, have more knowledge about when to use what build, and have more knowledge about how to adapt that build in a game.

Players knowing more builds from having watched replays of them or from creating a build to counter one they studied a replay of increases the number of strategic options players have, increasing the strategic depth of the game and the amount of strategic knowledge necessary to compete at a high level.

On October 05 2009 22:27 ProoM wrote:
what about hackers, I really REALLY doubt there will be any, since you can only have 1 account per cd and theres no lan, so there wont be any other servers, just 1, b.net 2.0. That means if u hack and get cough you lose the money you spend on cd. I don't think anyone could risk like that.

On October 08 2009 14:48 zgl wrote:
In poker, you don't get to see your opponents hands after you lost your money

On October 08 2009 19:04 Manit0u wrote:


It's up to them. Sometimes they will show you their hand and sometimes they won't.

On October 08 2009 20:12 Suc wrote:

Annddd that's the whole point of the thread and the replay disabling option, sometimes you get to see it, sometimes you don't!

Players knowing more builds from having watched replays of them or from creating a build to counter one they studied a replay of increases the number of strategic options players have, increasing the strategic depth of the game and the amount of strategic knowledge necessary to compete at a high level.

On October 05 2009 22:02 DN2perfectionGM wrote:
Boxer: ...For a strategic player like me, it’s the worst feature ever...

On October 09 2009 12:09 DN2perfectionGM wrote:
again, the topic is not removing replays.

i don't know if you actually mean it that way, but it creates confusion.

On October 09 2009 03:03 Cloak wrote:
Well, my biggest qualm with censoring games is that it stifles the strategic development of the community. I'd rather the whole community have access to the most diverse repertoire of strategies and tactics, rather than benefit the few who think they're too good to be countered.

The point of motivation on the innovator's part is moot. SC1 already has the replay feature and players like Boxer are still innovating regardless of its existence. Their motivation comes from a lot of things, and that competitive edge is still there. So, it seems like there is no real disadvantage to making all games savable, but plenty to lose if we allow censorship of games.