Great post, I absolutely agree. I've played GunZ for a while (not enough to get good at the stuff) but I watched the movies a lot. I remember there was one Korean who was absurdly good, much better than everybody else, though I forgot his name. Having very few (or better, one) player dominate like that is always a sign of a great game, where the personal skill of a player is highly significant and can be improved very far. Something that e.g. Wc3 didn't have, but BW still has after 12 years (Flash might be the most dominant player ever).
Yeah, SHAME ON YOU BLIZZARD FOR MAKING THE GAME TOO BUG FREE!
Its a bit ironic though. It's not easy (read: you have to be lucky) to get good bugs that make the game fun and challenging.
Where is the line between a bug thats abusable to such an extend where you have to remove it, and a good bug though? do you balance the game around said bugs?
there is alot of things that could go very very wrong.
How should game developers go on by making their game intentionally very hard for the pros, without making it too unintuitive for the newcomers?
What the RTS community really wants, seems to be some sort of devil child born from RTS and Fighting games, where you make units, and actually have to do "moves" with them (not abilities, but actual tricks) to be fully used.
But where does such moves become too hard?
Does game developers simply have to get lucky to make a good game?
You (and others) are missing the point. It's not necessarily about bugs. Muta stacking is not a bug for example. People always knew that BW keeps unit formations as long as the units are close enough together (the magic box) and selecting a remote units like an overlord breaks those formations, making the units move to the selected point individually. UMS maps where you needed to abuse this for casting mass psi storms and Garimtos (was it him? I can't find any reference to it anymore; maybe somebody remembers this) famous mass disruption web have been known pretty much since the beginning. It's about creating an engine that works on some basic rules, but does not foresee any possible situation. The more modern and complex games become, the more the programmers tend to cover any eventualities and thus have to write out how everything works out in the game. This reduces the possibility of players to find new stuff that they can abuse. Sure, sometimes those things are too easy to abuse, breaking the game. Then they have to be patched (like the reaver shooting right after being dropped in the initial BW). Others are too hard to abuse, or very hard, like goliath+dropship killing sunkens or tanks + dropship killing dragoons (<3 nazgul!). Some are just perfect.
Man I want some company to realize all this and make a good game again.
On May 10 2010 00:56 Vexx wrote: Sadly, I read through the whole OP wondering what exactly it had to do with starcraft. I was thrown a few morsels in the last 2 lines. I think the OP is stupid. For every "great" game that succeeded because of a "glitch", you can pull out 20 awesome games that did it right.
Anyways, the only thing that does concern me of SC2 is that it is pretty boring with the lack of... anything. There's little tactical consideration in the game and I do agree that OP abilities bring magic to the game.
Do you really believe that? Do you know how low level SCBW would be without the glitches that made it what it is today? Understandably, glitches aren't necessary in the development of a competitive community (for example, the game A.V.A on I J J I) however when they are found they raise the skill ceiling dramatically and require a higher level of hand speed, or a better understanding of the game. In sc2, with my pathetic ~120 apm, i often find myself out of resources, with my units being controlled fine, and all my nexii producing... and just sitting there. There's nothing to occupy all of MY hand speed, and i'm only a ~1400 plat player. When i watch vods of really good players, they are often a lot the same, the only difference between them and me is game execution. How many years is it until people have almost perfectly figured out the mental side of the game, and mastered the physical side? 2? 3? and then where does the competitive community go? Games like Starcraft, CS, etc. were and still are so good because they're so freakin' HARD. SC2 is easy, and while i fully support it's development as an e-sport and as a game, it's left me kind of disappointed so far.
Yeah I agree, anyone who's played BW properly knows there are plenty of glitches that enhance the game. And the glitches are only possible because of how sloppy the engine is. Blizzard did well by ignoring the glitches that made the game better and removing the ones that broke it. So it's luck that the glitches appear, but a good decision to keep them in.
It also highlights the importance of listening to complaints carefully. Of course the people who think something is imbalanced will have the loudest voice, but it doesn't mean they're right; the content majority just have no need to kick up a fuss.
The moral of the story? Game producers don't know what it takes to produce a good, competitive game. An e-sport game. To complicate the matter, they get inaccurate feedback from the community. It seems very, very hard to make a good game "on purpose." It only happens by accident. With exploits. Like strafe-jumping in Quake, Korean style in GunZ, and all the things we've learned about the StarCraft engine over the years.
I disagree with this statement. If you look at one common attribute between GunZ, Quake, Starcraft, CS, their is one common feature that is shared among all of them. The degree of control allotted to the player, and an inherently good, complex game ignoring Esports.
If a game is sufficiently complex AND enough control is allotted to the player, I think a basic principal would state that more likely then not, the players would engage in what could be called "emergent" play. If starcraft wants to be an Esport, well, they already got the second part down, all blizzard has to do is increase the amount of control alloted to the player. This doesn't have to be front loaded, IE: Make it really hard to move or mine, but back loaded too, in other words, make a complex ability or unit that requires a lot of micro to use successfully.
On May 09 2010 22:45 Phrujbaz wrote: Let me tell you a little bit about GunZ: The Duel.
It is February 2004. It's been six years since MAIET was founded in South Korea. The name stands for "Team Innovation." It's also been jokingly referred to as "putting the I back in TEAM." As you can see MAIET is team spelled backwards, with the "I" added. MAIET originally started as a team of five researches that wanted to create innovate games.
For the past year, the company has been working very hard on what will later turn out to be MAIET's breakthrough into international fame. The team members are excited. The Project GunZ: The Duel is about to go into beta testing.
GunZ: The Duel is a first person shooter game. MAIET's wanted to give gamers a chance to do the same stylish moves that you can also see in movies. Gun-wielders can shoot while rolling around, run on walls, and perform wall-jumps.
However, true freedom of movement is achieved when you are holding a sword. With a sword, you can dash out of the way with lightning speed like a ninja. You can launch your opponents into the air, where they are sitting ducks. And you can even block bullets with your sword.
The game was rapidly growing in popularity. And then, during beta-test, a critical flaw in the game engine was discovered. MAIET started getting emails. The forums were being flooded with protests.
What had happened? Somebody had discovered that you can switch to your gun instantly during the "slashing" animation of a sword. This led to the development of new moves not in the original game, for example, the aptly named "slash shot." Hit somebody with your sword, then switch to your shotgun and hit them at point blank range while they are stunned by sword hit.
The game had been balanced for sword vs gunfights. Sword-wielders need to get in range to hit, but they also move around much faster than gun-wielders. Now, it had become possible to move around like a sword-wielder and then switch to your gun instantly whenever you need to shoot.
People developed moves like the "half-step:" You jump up into the air holding your sword. Then you do a "dash" to move at lightning speed. During your dash, you slash, switch to your gun, shoot, and switch back to your sword. Here the sword slash is not even intended to hit anyone, you just use it to exploit the game-engine bug.
Now people who did these new moves were practically invincible. They moved around much faster than allowed by the game engine, and they were able to shoot from a distance too. They were impossible to hit and their shotguns and revolvers took your hp off fast.
These moves were very difficult to perform. You need a lot of keypresses in a short amout of time (high apm) and your timing needs to be very good. Most starcraft players would be able to do it, but among the newcomers to GunZ, the beta testers, there were not many that could do it.
The game's playerbase was still expanding fast, but so were the amount of complaints on the forums and in MAIET's email box. MAIET realized that, with such a steep learning curve, the existence of the exploit could potentially turn off new people trying GunZ. They were getting destroyed by the more experienced players that exploited the game engine. And besides, the programmers felt embarrassed that their engine allowed such an exploit.
After enough criticism from the players, MAIET finally decided to listen to the community. MAIET patched GunZ to fix the exploit. And so, they made the biggest mistake of their career. Almost instantly, hundreds of players left GunZ never to come back. And hundreds more were leaving every day. Far from making the game more appealing to new players, GunZ: The Duel almost vanished off the radar.
MAIET hadn't realized that the exploit was what had allowed the game to grow so fast. The exploit turned an otherwise ordinary and boring game into an action-packed, frantic shooting game, where you need to have lightning quick aim in your right hand and very good consistency in your left. One slip-up and you don't complete the move you intended, and you are taking the full damage of a shotgun hit for sure. And with the people moving around so fast, you BETTER have fast and accurate aim.
To their credit, MAIET realized their mistake and immediately published a letter of apology to the community. They promised that the "Korean style," as it was called, was to have a place in the game forever and they'd written code to ensure it would never accidentally be broken in later releases. Their open-mindedness is what allowed MAIET to grow from a small South Korean no-name into a game development company with international fame.
The moral of the story? Game producers don't know what it takes to produce a good, competitive game. An e-sport game. To complicate the matter, they get inaccurate feedback from the community. It seems very, very hard to make a good game "on purpose." It only happens by accident. With exploits. Like strafe-jumping in Quake, Korean style in GunZ, and all the things we've learned about the StarCraft engine over the years.
Deliberately programmed in stuff like "blink" simply isn't as amazing as discovered tricks like "muta stack."
Nice comparison, brings a refreshing perspective. Very good post, keep up the good work Phrujbaz.
On May 10 2010 00:56 Vexx wrote: Sadly, I read through the whole OP wondering what exactly it had to do with starcraft. I was thrown a few morsels in the last 2 lines. I think the OP is stupid. For every "great" game that succeeded because of a "glitch", you can pull out 20 awesome games that did it right.
Anyways, the only thing that does concern me of SC2 is that it is pretty boring with the lack of... anything. There's little tactical consideration in the game and I do agree that OP abilities bring magic to the game.
Care to name a few games as such with the success of BW? I'd be hard-pressed to find 20, or even a handful.
But yeah, I think SC2 is pretty much lacking any substance that would be needed to make it a success.
I'm sorry to say but.. broodwar didn't exactly succeed outside of Korea. And if the 9.5 million sales figure for starcraft over 12 years is accurate, let's be honest... who didn't buy starcraft or diablo 7 times because they lost their cds over the years?
In terms of just RTS, WC3 had comparable sales figures but age of empires, red alert, and command and conquer (to name a few) all did better than SC despite the lack of popular multiplayer.
Civ, warhammer....
SC was just lucky enough to be korea's driving product (I joke). Truth be told, I would have preferred an age of empires game succeeding. Now that was a deep, diverse and strategic game (and not because of the bugs or glitches =p).
Nice read. Brings back memories of that game and really highlights the point that sometimes a small mistake in how the game operates can become a new feature. GunZ really was a frantic shooter.
On May 09 2010 22:45 Phrujbaz wrote: Let me tell you a little bit about GunZ: The Duel.
It is February 2004. It's been six years since MAIET was founded in South Korea. The name stands for "Team Innovation." It's also been jokingly referred to as "putting the I back in TEAM." As you can see MAIET is team spelled backwards, with the "I" added. MAIET originally started as a team of five researches that wanted to create innovate games.
For the past year, the company has been working very hard on what will later turn out to be MAIET's breakthrough into international fame. The team members are excited. The Project GunZ: The Duel is about to go into beta testing.
GunZ: The Duel is a first person shooter game. MAIET's wanted to give gamers a chance to do the same stylish moves that you can also see in movies. Gun-wielders can shoot while rolling around, run on walls, and perform wall-jumps.
However, true freedom of movement is achieved when you are holding a sword. With a sword, you can dash out of the way with lightning speed like a ninja. You can launch your opponents into the air, where they are sitting ducks. And you can even block bullets with your sword.
The game was rapidly growing in popularity. And then, during beta-test, a critical flaw in the game engine was discovered. MAIET started getting emails. The forums were being flooded with protests.
What had happened? Somebody had discovered that you can switch to your gun instantly during the "slashing" animation of a sword. This led to the development of new moves not in the original game, for example, the aptly named "slash shot." Hit somebody with your sword, then switch to your shotgun and hit them at point blank range while they are stunned by sword hit.
The game had been balanced for sword vs gunfights. Sword-wielders need to get in range to hit, but they also move around much faster than gun-wielders. Now, it had become possible to move around like a sword-wielder and then switch to your gun instantly whenever you need to shoot.
People developed moves like the "half-step:" You jump up into the air holding your sword. Then you do a "dash" to move at lightning speed. During your dash, you slash, switch to your gun, shoot, and switch back to your sword. Here the sword slash is not even intended to hit anyone, you just use it to exploit the game-engine bug.
Now people who did these new moves were practically invincible. They moved around much faster than allowed by the game engine, and they were able to shoot from a distance too. They were impossible to hit and their shotguns and revolvers took your hp off fast.
These moves were very difficult to perform. You need a lot of keypresses in a short amout of time (high apm) and your timing needs to be very good. Most starcraft players would be able to do it, but among the newcomers to GunZ, the beta testers, there were not many that could do it.
The game's playerbase was still expanding fast, but so were the amount of complaints on the forums and in MAIET's email box. MAIET realized that, with such a steep learning curve, the existence of the exploit could potentially turn off new people trying GunZ. They were getting destroyed by the more experienced players that exploited the game engine. And besides, the programmers felt embarrassed that their engine allowed such an exploit.
After enough criticism from the players, MAIET finally decided to listen to the community. MAIET patched GunZ to fix the exploit. And so, they made the biggest mistake of their career. Almost instantly, hundreds of players left GunZ never to come back. And hundreds more were leaving every day. Far from making the game more appealing to new players, GunZ: The Duel almost vanished off the radar.
MAIET hadn't realized that the exploit was what had allowed the game to grow so fast. The exploit turned an otherwise ordinary and boring game into an action-packed, frantic shooting game, where you need to have lightning quick aim in your right hand and very good consistency in your left. One slip-up and you don't complete the move you intended, and you are taking the full damage of a shotgun hit for sure. And with the people moving around so fast, you BETTER have fast and accurate aim.
To their credit, MAIET realized their mistake and immediately published a letter of apology to the community. They promised that the "Korean style," as it was called, was to have a place in the game forever and they'd written code to ensure it would never accidentally be broken in later releases. Their open-mindedness is what allowed MAIET to grow from a small South Korean no-name into a game development company with international fame.
The moral of the story? Game producers don't know what it takes to produce a good, competitive game. An e-sport game. To complicate the matter, they get inaccurate feedback from the community. It seems very, very hard to make a good game "on purpose." It only happens by accident. With exploits. Like strafe-jumping in Quake, Korean style in GunZ, and all the things we've learned about the StarCraft engine over the years.
Deliberately programmed in stuff like "blink" simply isn't as amazing as discovered tricks like "muta stack."
Nice comparison, brings a refreshing perspective. Very good post, keep up the good work Phrujbaz.
On May 10 2010 00:56 Vexx wrote: Sadly, I read through the whole OP wondering what exactly it had to do with starcraft. I was thrown a few morsels in the last 2 lines. I think the OP is stupid. For every "great" game that succeeded because of a "glitch", you can pull out 20 awesome games that did it right.
Anyways, the only thing that does concern me of SC2 is that it is pretty boring with the lack of... anything. There's little tactical consideration in the game and I do agree that OP abilities bring magic to the game.
Care to name a few games as such with the success of BW? I'd be hard-pressed to find 20, or even a handful.
But yeah, I think SC2 is pretty much lacking any substance that would be needed to make it a success.
I'm sorry to say but.. broodwar didn't exactly succeed outside of Korea. And if the 9.5 million sales figure for starcraft over 12 years is accurate, let's be honest... who didn't buy starcraft or diablo 7 times because they lost their cds over the years?
In terms of just RTS, WC3 had comparable sales figures but age of empires, red alert, and command and conquer (to name a few) all did better than SC despite the lack of popular multiplayer.
Civ, warhammer....
SC was just lucky enough to be korea's driving product (I joke). Truth be told, I would have preferred an age of empires game succeeding. Now that was a deep, diverse and strategic game (and not because of the bugs or glitches =p).
I'll shut up now before I get banned.
Doing better in terms of sales does not equal a better game. Starcraft grew far more competitive than command and conquer, and its online players stuck around far longer. If you log on to command and conquer, you will probably see zero people online, but starcraft still has fans.
On May 10 2010 00:56 Vexx wrote: Sadly, I read through the whole OP wondering what exactly it had to do with starcraft. I was thrown a few morsels in the last 2 lines. I think the OP is stupid. For every "great" game that succeeded because of a "glitch", you can pull out 20 awesome games that did it right.
Anyways, the only thing that does concern me of SC2 is that it is pretty boring with the lack of... anything. There's little tactical consideration in the game and I do agree that OP abilities bring magic to the game.
Care to name a few games as such with the success of BW? I'd be hard-pressed to find 20, or even a handful.
But yeah, I think SC2 is pretty much lacking any substance that would be needed to make it a success.
I'm sorry to say but.. broodwar didn't exactly succeed outside of Korea. And if the 9.5 million sales figure for starcraft over 12 years is accurate, let's be honest... who didn't buy starcraft or diablo 7 times because they lost their cds over the years?
In terms of just RTS, WC3 had comparable sales figures but age of empires, red alert, and command and conquer (to name a few) all did better than SC despite the lack of popular multiplayer.
Civ, warhammer....
SC was just lucky enough to be korea's driving product (I joke). Truth be told, I would have preferred an age of empires game succeeding. Now that was a deep, diverse and strategic game (and not because of the bugs or glitches =p).
I'll shut up now before I get banned.
Starcraft sold 11 million sales by 2004.
As of May 08, Starcraft was STILL occasionally in the top 10 PC games sold AT THE CURRENT MOMENT
GunZ was the prime example of how you mess up a game.
I started playing in 2005 and was a member gk, unique and agent error in 2005 and part of basic/anathema from early 2006 onwards until we quit playing as them and then played with polse. For those of you who played, you might understand what that means in terms of where I was skill wise within that community.
Anyway, the game was ruined by maiet heavily shifting the balance between damage and armor/health to the armor side. By the time I quit playing for good (because I quit like 6 or 8 times lol) your effective health was nearly 3 times greater than it was in the beginning. And that armor, and especially the med kits, cost you money. That's right, you payed extra money to get a HUGE advantage. Think about in SC if you could pay money to have your workers not take up any food.
And AFAIK, they never fixed it. Really a shame, because all that health took away much of the advantage of positioning and instead devolved the game into who could shoot the fastest (since the lag was so terrible you cant really aim like the korean players could). Gunz was p2p, and having the balanced skewed so much made everyone able to tank massive amounts of shots if your ping was over about 35.
When I started playing I was in highschool. Most people who played the game were much younger. That meant that by the time exited beta I had some money but most of these kids didnt. Did I ever feel bad that these kids had literally zero chance? A little. But did it stop me from buying everythnig under the sun? Nope.
This doesnt include the cheating. There was sooooo sooo much. In late 2005 approximately 24 thousand characters were deleted in the span of about 2 days. Why? Because even though MAIET had been told EXACTLY which part of their game code was allowing people to delete characters (you could send admin delete requests to the server database from any account) they did nothing. Oh, and there was the whole thing about them constantly lying to those of us playing about when the final version would be released. Not delaying it, just flat out lying.
Gunz was an accident. An accident that created the best movement in any game imo. But the company that ran it is THE model on how you screw up something great.
The pattern I see blizzard taking for sc2 is more trying to get people to play strategically as opposed to controlling units well. Kind of the opposite of war3 imo.
While you do bring up an interesting point, it is also somewhat invalid as GunZ was pretty much built around these game mechanics, and unlike Starcraft, was the entire game. While I am not entitled to speaking about aspects such as Mutalisk stack in Starcraft as I was never into the multiplayer community, it is just a small part of the game, an aspect unlike the game mechanic of GunZ. So when MAIET decided to remove this aspect, they took away the core of the game, while Blizzard, by removing Mutalisk stack only removes an aspect they do not wish to be in Starcraft 2, but this does not influence the core of the Starcraft 2 mechanics if you see where I am trying to get.
That being said, Blizzard must exercise caution when fixing micro intensive bugs such as the Mutalisk stack, while it does balance the play a lot more, the game might loose some of its 2 mechanics if you see where I am trying to get.
That being said, Blizzard must exercise caution when fixing micro intensive bugs such as the Mutalisk stack, while it does balance the play a lot more, the game might loose some of its unique aspects, as was the case with GunZ, thus making the game un-appealing to its player base, but I do not think this is likely to happen with Starcraft 2 due to the game's nature, balance and wide variety of strategies.
On May 10 2010 02:40 Sakkosekken wrote: While I am not entitled to speaking about aspects such as Mutalisk stack in Starcraft as I was never into the multiplayer community, it is just a small part of the game...
Let me assure you that fine unit control, sometimes manifest in what some would call glitchy behavior, was pivotal to the evolution of BW and will always remain paramount to the depth of choices in any single BW game.
EPT![[image loading]](http://www.maiet.co.kr/images/company/maiet_3.jpg)
![[image loading]](http://www.maiet.co.kr/images/gunz_image.jpg)
