EPTI would imagine they bump it up to 80-85% though if they put it in SC2, but I agree with incontrol and it needs to go in. High ground is basically useless in SC2.
It's over Anakin! - Page 8
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Whiplash
United States2928 Posts
I would imagine they bump it up to 80-85% though if they put it in SC2, but I agree with incontrol and it needs to go in. High ground is basically useless in SC2. | ||
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Floophead_III
United States1832 Posts
For instance, in counterstrike source, sometimes you can kill a person with 3 deagle shots through armor. Sometimes it only does 99 damage in 3. I would not argue that that variance has anything to do with skill. There is no doubt in my mind that randomness in that game is a massive pain in the ass. Another example: HoN (or DoTA for those of you who haven't migrated yet) has a miss uphill chance. Often fights and ganks and laning come down to a 1 hit difference in that game. I can't even count the number of times I had a great play and launched that beautiful finishing attack to watch it land on the ground with the fat letters "miss" as my enemy just barely escapes. It's clear that I'm getting shafted here as the better player. Often 1 kill can mean the difference of lane control and even game control for the rest of the game. Warcraft III, being the base engine for DoTA, had so many problems with random effects. Critical strikes and bashes are the most bullshit things in the game. To those who have played it, have you ever had a blademaster get a critical strike with his final hit? How about that MK who gets only 1 free hit on your DH but it bashes so you end up getting killed? So much about that game is random luck and it's no good. This high ground mechanic is SO much better than the old one in terms of fairness and predictability. I would say that it does not adequately give an advantage to someone trying to hold a ramp, for instance. I think just making range reduced for units below the cliff might be a big boost. I don't like the idea of a range boost for high ground units, since the way it affects structures and melee units above the ramp is different. You really want everything on the high ground more protected, not things below less protected. I think that'd be a very viable and reasonable change. It'd allow units on high ground to either abuse range (which can be micro heavy which is good) or get free shots (which forces the player attacking to have more units, which is also good) and protect buildings/workers/melee on high ground better (once again, good). Idra's idea is unfortunately not the best answer because we end up with an imbalance between slow attacking and fast attacking units (slow units may simply kill their target in 3 hits, so effective damage reduction is 0, while fast targets will shoot 16-20 times and have nearly ideal reduction). Damage reduction also is not the best answer as it honestly doesn't make a damn bit of sense. It'd be more of a patch up with duct tape than a real solution. TL;DR units below should have reduced range. | ||
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StarBrift
Sweden1761 Posts
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da_head
Canada3350 Posts
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spitball
Australia81 Posts
On March 04 2010 22:09 Audiohelper123 wrote: yeah thats why they need to add those things. the game sucks real hard right now So I guess you're saying that Blizzard needs to add more random things? But only the "good" ones, right? How do we know which ones are "good" (spider mines and scarabs! WOOH  ) and which ones are "bad" (cliff miss chance? :r)? | ||
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LightRailCoyote
United States982 Posts
Secondly, I liked how in Brood War, if a unit fired at you from the high ground, you could see it momentarily through the fog of war. Of course, you'd miss a good part of the time, but it makes sense that a unit in a futuristic world would be able to gauge angle and return fire. Terran and Protoss are full of computers and Zerg were basically bred for war. I think that this should be in the new game as well. It just kind of makes sense. Alternatively, Ewan McGregor should come and cut their legs off and dump them into lava. The advantage of high ground. | ||
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onmach
United States1241 Posts
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Cirn9
1117 Posts
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Zack1900
United States211 Posts
Does anyone have thoughts on this idea? | ||
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LunarC
United States1186 Posts
Getting caught up in randomness and nonrandomness and pseudorandomness makes people lose sight of the bigger picture: positional advantage. | ||
Heyoka
Katowice25012 Posts
On March 05 2010 00:42 LunarC wrote: Getting caught up in randomness and nonrandomness and pseudorandomness makes people lose sight of the bigger picture: positional advantage. I dislike both the "noob friendly" and random arguments as well, but this is huge. This kind of big positional advantage definitely adds depth to the game on both the high and low levels of play. This isn't a case of something being artificially difficult or trying to copy brood war, this is a case of a feature somewhat lacking in the current build. It also makes mapmaking much more stale if high ground is less of an important deal, a lot of BW maps have very interesting play in part because of the use of repeated hills (HBR and chupung come to mind immediately) and with high ground being less important its going to make a map pool less diverse. | ||
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GGTeMpLaR
United States7226 Posts
+ Show Spoiler + + Show Spoiler + I'm not sure what to make of high ground in SC2 yet though. Without vision, it seems much more powerful than it was in SC1, but with vision, it becomes entirely useless by itself (holding your ramp is still important, but that's due to the fact that your enemy is funneled through a choke, not fighting against high ground) | ||
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ROOTslush
Canada170 Posts
On March 04 2010 20:15 {88}iNcontroL wrote: You couldn't show me a situation where 20 goons shoot 3 volleys to kill 1 tank. I get your point but the exaggeration detracts from what is being discussed here. Random is an integral part of the game.. I know for you greg this doesn't compute. I'm sorry but "every 4th shot" is garbage. What if they shoot 3? Does the 4th shot from "anything" MISS 100% for the span of the rest of the game? Is there a clock on the miss? How do you calculate the 4th shot when everything is firing at once? Where is the reward in that anyways? Random has to be a part of this game greg. Sorry. It has to. If it isn't you will be left with an inferior version of the game. I Agree completly. We need more strategic positioning in the game. | ||
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LunarC
United States1186 Posts
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GGTeMpLaR
United States7226 Posts
On March 05 2010 01:07 LunarC wrote: Was it 30% chance of miss for uphill attacks in Starcraft 1? Why not just stick with what already works? They didn't want competitive matches being decided by RNG. | ||
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Tom Phoenix
1114 Posts
On one hand, I can understand the logic behind the arguments that there has to be some sort of advantage other then vision for holding the high ground. This would promote positional play and create strategic points on the map. On the other, however, I always felt that the high ground advantage in Brood War was perhaps a bit too generous. This greatly favoured positional warfare units, which ended up limiting gameplay options (particularly as far as Terrans were concerned). So while I do understand the concern and agree that something must be done about it, I do not think the Brood War way is necessarilly the best. Just beacuse something "worked" does not mean it cannot be better or be improved upon. | ||
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LunarC
United States1186 Posts
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Rickilicious
United States220 Posts
That being said, randomness does not belong in video games. Yes teehee, Reavers Scarabs were completely random, but I can remember my first Reaver shot, it got stuck behind my gateway and I was like wtf. Everyone got used to it, it doesn't mean it's a good thing. | ||
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aRod
United States758 Posts
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DefMatrixUltra
Canada1992 Posts
On March 05 2010 00:10 Floophead_III wrote: Random or pseudo-random events in games are AWFUL. I've played many other games than starcraft, and starcraft is actually probably my worst. In all the games I've played there's a little element of luck and it drives players insane because sometimes little things can spiral out of control and turn the tide of a game. For instance, in counterstrike source, sometimes you can kill a person with 3 deagle shots through armor. Sometimes it only does 99 damage in 3. I would not argue that that variance has anything to do with skill. There is no doubt in my mind that randomness in that game is a massive pain in the ass. Another example: HoN (or DoTA for those of you who haven't migrated yet) has a miss uphill chance. Often fights and ganks and laning come down to a 1 hit difference in that game. I can't even count the number of times I had a great play and launched that beautiful finishing attack to watch it land on the ground with the fat letters "miss" as my enemy just barely escapes. It's clear that I'm getting shafted here as the better player. Often 1 kill can mean the difference of lane control and even game control for the rest of the game. Warcraft III, being the base engine for DoTA, had so many problems with random effects. Critical strikes and bashes are the most bullshit things in the game. To those who have played it, have you ever had a blademaster get a critical strike with his final hit? How about that MK who gets only 1 free hit on your DH but it bashes so you end up getting killed? So much about that game is random luck and it's no good. This high ground mechanic is SO much better than the old one in terms of fairness and predictability. I would say that it does not adequately give an advantage to someone trying to hold a ramp, for instance. I think just making range reduced for units below the cliff might be a big boost. I don't like the idea of a range boost for high ground units, since the way it affects structures and melee units above the ramp is different. You really want everything on the high ground more protected, not things below less protected. I think that'd be a very viable and reasonable change. It'd allow units on high ground to either abuse range (which can be micro heavy which is good) or get free shots (which forces the player attacking to have more units, which is also good) and protect buildings/workers/melee on high ground better (once again, good). Idra's idea is unfortunately not the best answer because we end up with an imbalance between slow attacking and fast attacking units (slow units may simply kill their target in 3 hits, so effective damage reduction is 0, while fast targets will shoot 16-20 times and have nearly ideal reduction). Damage reduction also is not the best answer as it honestly doesn't make a damn bit of sense. It'd be more of a patch up with duct tape than a real solution. TL;DR units below should have reduced range. Unfortunately, this thread has now become a discussion about 'randomness' instead of a discussion about how high ground needs to have a clear advantage over low ground. Also I think there is a lot of misunderstanding in this thread as far as what 'randomness' means. Saying that something is 'random' can mean a LOT of things. + Show Spoiler [Randomness] + I am a physicist, and we deal with the idea of randomness all the time. When you physically roll a die, the outcome is actually NOT random - it is 100% predetermined by the initial conditions of the throw (discounting effects from quantum mechanics, which have a negligible effect here). So why can't you reproduce the same roll every time? It's because the motion is something called chaotic - a very small change in the initial conditions can result in a drastic difference in the outcome. So for a die-throwing robot with 16 digits of precision, throwing a die is not random. But for a human, throwing a die is random. The other thing about randomness is the perception of the outcome of random events. For a single random event (a hydralisk fires one shot uphill), you cannot accurately predict the outcome. However, for a large number of random events, you can accurately predict the outcome with a great deal of certainty. So let's say that firing at high ground causes 33% of shots to miss (I just grabbed this number because the math is easy to do). a) If 1 hydralisk fires one shot, you cannot accurately predict what will happen (you only know the probability of the outcomes). Any prediction you make will come with a huge uncertainty. b) If 1 hydralisk fires 900 shots up the ramp, you can very accurately (within a small error) predict that 600 shots will hit, and 300 will miss. In fact, you can show that hitting more than 650 times or less than 550 times is almost 0%. Those higher and lower numbers are only 8% different than your prediction. c) If 10 hydralisks fire 30 shots (so 3 totaly volleys equalling 300 total shots), you can still accurately predict that they will hit 200 times and miss 100 times, with hitting over 230 times or under 170 times approaching 0%. These numbers are only 10% different than your prediction - so you can almost bet your life that (if the RNG actually works) you will hit 200 shots plus or minus 10% (so plus or minus 30 shots). This is the kind of calculation that experienced BW players do without realizing it. The fact is that, given a strong force on top of a ramp, any good BW player can tell you the numbers you need to break it with some certainty (but more importantly, they'd probably tell you not to try). So yes, in CS and WC3 and HoN and other games that deal with very small numbers of random events, randomness is a mechanic that is averse to skill (I'm gonna toss 2v2 WoW arena in here as well). In these games, randomness can be the difference between winning and losing. In SC, it just isn't the case. There's not an 11% chance that your CC is gonna implode while you're building it, instantly costing you the match. There's not a 14% chance that a scouting probe's attack will disable your hatchery for 30 seconds, instantly costing you the game. The randomness is used ONLY as a mechanism to make high ground stronger - that is it! It's also predictably random - you can bet your life on the outcome plus or minus a few percent. The only 'randomness' that really makes a somewhat negative difference in SC is reaver scarab AI. And this is not something that the developers were like 'oh hay guys let's make scarabs random' this is just poor pathing - it's not intentionally random, it's just effectively random. For those of you that care, I just did these numbers at a glance. Also, arguing over the mechanism used to make high ground strong is in some cases silly. No disrespect to anyone's profession or skills, but this game is not a Marine sniper simulation. Any way that they make high ground stronger will be unrealistic. Having a random miss chance or reduced damage will effectively be the same thing within a few percent. Messing with ranges and so on might be a way to discourage people from attacking ramps, but we know for a fact that miss chances and reduced damage will work as expected (from BW). | ||
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