SC Weekly News is back, sorry about the missing weeks in there, the camera broke, and then I got very sick.
Also sorry about the semi-poor quality via coughs + editing, I've been very sick lately, should be much better + longer next week.
Part 1:
Part 2:
EnjoY~
P.S., the twitter questions portion will be back starting next show, so send me over some "hey @Artosis"s and ill do my best to cater the news to what people wanna see.
Very glad you're not dead, Artosis; hope that continues! Very interesting news...Aozora, for the love of God? I suppose next we'll be seeing the return of Agent 911 and Maynard to the Starcraft universe? O_O
I remember when replays first became available for Starcraft 1 and I hated it because suddenly all the cheese builds which I used to do all became known. Now though I'm definitely of the opinion that the more replays become available the better off it will be for the game and community, for pretty much exactly the reasons stated in the article.
A couple of examples:
Firstly have a look at pro sports and how they have evolved over the last 50 years. Few people would argue that greater coverage of sports and being able to view matches from multiple camera angles with high definition pictures is a bad thing. Not only has it improved the quality of play and standard of players, but it has given the public more ways to consume the product.
Second example is have a look at the game chess, it's been around for 100s of years and effectively "replays" have been available in the form of move lists for every pro-game for as long as the game itself. Yet despite this transparency, new chess strategies are coming out every year and the game still experiences paradigm shifts as players constantly evolve.
If you were talking about the PvP side of Guild wars then you had it right..but to compare Guild Wars & Starcraft 2 isn't a very good idea imo. I am a GvG player from Guild Wars. I play a monk mainly..Though I will play ele or mes as needed for my team...the skills are different. While its tactics based its not nearly as similar as you try to make it sound or try to compare it in the article..So if that offends you..but I am a fickler about getting information right. -_- (Btw if you don't believe me about my guild wars interactions just look up: Dj Telsa or Tesla on the Guild wars wiki sometime)
"The top 100 guilds in the ladder had all of their matches broadcasted live on a 15 minute delay so that everyone logged into the game could see their matches. The great advantage of this was that everyone could see the builds, classes and strategy that the teams used. This advanced Guild Wars's metagame extremely fast."
No..there is more than a delay and some of those guilds wait up to over an hour to get a match and then their match stays in the observer mode for at least an hour unless their is alot of activity...But such activity is normally from the European guys. You also have to remember that there is more PvP to Guild wars besides just the GvG...There is also HA...which there are a lot of debates on all of that. So I will just skip saying anything for that.
"The other side effect of this was that Arenanet could better balance the game by seeing which strategies and builds were dominating and tweaking them so that other lesser used skills would be. The game was patched literally every few weeks for years."
Anet does work on balancing and takes the community into account. Have you not heard of Test Krewe?
Btw in a GvG match this doesnt include the vent or skype call where the whole team is communicating and everyone is doing micro of each other XD. Mainly the warriors or callers do it though...and everyone just follows their lead. In Starcraft if you do something wrong its your fault...In Guild Wars for GvG if your team mate does something wrong (just in like 2v2) it can cost you the whole game. Rather annoying to be honest. One last thing to say on this topic is that sadly all the really great players for Guild wars (GvG) have left or don't play. EviL (Korean Guild) retired and doesnt play anymore. Even the American Guilds like Rawr don't really play much anymore. So...Its really not as competitive as it use to be. The last really big competitive tournament for Guild wars GvG: http://www.guildwars.com/competitive/funseason/tseries2007/rules.php
If you were talking about the PvP side of Guild wars then you had it right..but to compare Guild Wars & Starcraft 2 isn't a very good idea imo. I am a GvG player from Guild Wars. I play a monk mainly..Though I will play ele or mes as needed for my team...the skills are different. While its tactics based its not nearly as similar as you try to make it sound or try to compare it in the article..So if that offends you..but I am a fickler about getting information right. -_- (Btw if you don't believe me about my guild wars interactions just look up: Dj Telsa or Tesla on the Guild wars wiki sometime)
"The top 100 guilds in the ladder had all of their matches broadcasted live on a 15 minute delay so that everyone logged into the game could see their matches. The great advantage of this was that everyone could see the builds, classes and strategy that the teams used. This advanced Guild Wars's metagame extremely fast."
No..there is more than a delay and some of those guilds wait up to over an hour to get a match and then their match stays in the observer mode for at least an hour unless their is alot of activity...But such activity is normally from the European guys. You also have to remember that there is more PvP to Guild wars besides just the GvG...There is also HA...which there are a lot of debates on all of that. So I will just skip saying anything for that.
"The other side effect of this was that Arenanet could better balance the game by seeing which strategies and builds were dominating and tweaking them so that other lesser used skills would be. The game was patched literally every few weeks for years."
Anet does work on balancing and takes the community into account. Have you not heard of Test Krewe?
Btw in a GvG match this doesnt include the vent or skype call where the whole team is communicating and everyone is doing micro of each other XD. Mainly the warriors or callers do it though...and everyone just follows their lead. In Starcraft if you do something wrong its your fault...In Guild Wars for GvG if your team mate does something wrong (just in like 2v2) it can cost you the whole game. Rather annoying to be honest. One last thing to say on this topic is that sadly all the really great players for Guild wars (GvG) have left or don't play. EviL (Korean Guild) retired and doesnt play anymore. Even the American Guilds like Rawr don't really play much anymore. So...Its really not as competitive as it use to be. The last really big competitive tournament for Guild wars GvG: http://www.guildwars.com/competitive/funseason/tseries2007/rules.php
With that...I am done posting on this for now XD.
As a former competitive GW player, I've gotta disagree with you, and lean more towards the article's perspective.
I think the author gets it right that having the transparency provided by Observer Mode is something that made the game 100x better than it would have been otherwise. Before OM, single teams would simply dominate the ladder by having a build which no one could figure out the mechanics of properly. Koreans are the exception to this because they raped everyone regardless. By the way, you mentioned EvIL but not War Machine - a far more menacing opponent in my opinion (-instant- loss in every game we played them).
It wasn't until iQ came around and decided to basically open up to the community about every aspect of competitive GvG that the metagame really came into existence. Before that, no one really knew what to do, and progress (in the metagame sense) was very slow. When observer mode came out, it was incredible. You could see all the nuances of play that made builds work. This paved the way for more 'standard' strategies to be played because weaker 'gotcha' strategies would get found out pretty soon after they became popular.
People might bitch and whine about this, but it made the games a lot better. You didn't have some situation where you load up into the match and realize that it's practically an autoloss. People that played risky builds got booted down to sub-100 rank lightning fast.
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I will give you some ground, however, with the exact effect of this on SC2. In GW, transparency was a 100% good thing. When you've got 8 people taking hours of their day in order to meet all at the same time and do something very difficult in a team-oriented fashion, you do not want to meet up with 'creative' teams that made up some utterly retarded build (they would auto-lose versus a large number of teams) that you happen to have minimal defense against (because of the metagame). You want to pit your team and your skills against their team and their skills.
But SC2 I feel would benefit from extreme cheese every now and then. I would make the argument that transparency is not going to hold back anyone's creativity or ingenuity when it comes to BoX's, but it's a tough argument to make.
In GW, creativity was rewarded a little differently since the patches came like a flood after OM came out. The creative types would craft builds for the team that made use of something the designers did not have in mind. I personally really enjoyed this aspect of the game, and in fact wasted far too many hours just watching OM and designing builds. Perhaps a similar phenomenon could happen with SC2, though the concept of patch floods is a bit alien to the "the game should be balanced"-oriented thinking of BW players.
Thanks. It was getting a bit overwhelming keeping up with all of the competitions that have been sprouting in sc2 but you basically took care of that in 10 minutes.