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On May 27 2010 11:36 Sentient wrote:Show nested quote +On May 27 2010 09:28 Zurles wrote:
Why worry about balancing the game for a level where balance doesn't even matter? This is really the crux of the matter. At lower levels, players don't lose because of imbalance, they lose because they are bad. They could greatly improve their success through minor changes in play, while at higher levels, it takes a lot of effort for minor improvements so balance problems manifest themselves more. A bad player has never lost because of imbalance -- what fraction of bronze players even saturate their minerals?
It's a very bold statement to say a bad player has never lost because of imbalance... merely roaches being too cost effective in the early days might have had someone lose because of it, etc. Even if they could have played better and easily won, it doesn't mean that the imbalance didn't play a part.
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On May 27 2010 12:20 FabledIntegral wrote:Show nested quote +On May 27 2010 11:36 Sentient wrote:On May 27 2010 09:28 Zurles wrote:
Why worry about balancing the game for a level where balance doesn't even matter? This is really the crux of the matter. At lower levels, players don't lose because of imbalance, they lose because they are bad. They could greatly improve their success through minor changes in play, while at higher levels, it takes a lot of effort for minor improvements so balance problems manifest themselves more. A bad player has never lost because of imbalance -- what fraction of bronze players even saturate their minerals? It's a very bold statement to say a bad player has never lost because of imbalance... merely roaches being too cost effective in the early days might have had someone lose because of it, etc. Even if they could have played better and easily won, it doesn't mean that the imbalance didn't play a part.
Ive lost a huge number of games as zerg (I currently play random) because of the roach patch. Does it need to be fixed? I dunno yet to be honest. I just keep changing and altering my play to figure out how to make it work.
I think a massive number of these balance arguments if applied to chess would fall flat on their face. Someone can 7 move mate me? CHEESE OMG REBALANCE CHESS!
I hate whiners. (note this isnt aimed at who I quoted)
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United States22883 Posts
On May 27 2010 12:20 FabledIntegral wrote:Show nested quote +On May 27 2010 11:36 Sentient wrote:On May 27 2010 09:28 Zurles wrote:
Why worry about balancing the game for a level where balance doesn't even matter? This is really the crux of the matter. At lower levels, players don't lose because of imbalance, they lose because they are bad. They could greatly improve their success through minor changes in play, while at higher levels, it takes a lot of effort for minor improvements so balance problems manifest themselves more. A bad player has never lost because of imbalance -- what fraction of bronze players even saturate their minerals? It's a very bold statement to say a bad player has never lost because of imbalance... merely roaches being too cost effective in the early days might have had someone lose because of it, etc. Even if they could have played better and easily won, it doesn't mean that the imbalance didn't play a part.
There's no way to know, however. It's a lot harder to judge relative skill levels between bad players than it is between players at the top.
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On May 27 2010 12:31 Jibba wrote:Show nested quote +On May 27 2010 12:20 FabledIntegral wrote:On May 27 2010 11:36 Sentient wrote:On May 27 2010 09:28 Zurles wrote:
Why worry about balancing the game for a level where balance doesn't even matter? This is really the crux of the matter. At lower levels, players don't lose because of imbalance, they lose because they are bad. They could greatly improve their success through minor changes in play, while at higher levels, it takes a lot of effort for minor improvements so balance problems manifest themselves more. A bad player has never lost because of imbalance -- what fraction of bronze players even saturate their minerals? It's a very bold statement to say a bad player has never lost because of imbalance... merely roaches being too cost effective in the early days might have had someone lose because of it, etc. Even if they could have played better and easily won, it doesn't mean that the imbalance didn't play a part. There's no way to know, however. It's a lot harder to judge relative skill levels between bad players than it is between players at the top.
True true, I'm just saying, to claim that no one shitty has ever lost from imbalance... even if we don't know, I don't believe you can say that...
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Theres no way you can remove all the cheeses. Cheese is after-all a strategy, it is a tactic that can be implied on starcraft because it is an RTS that requires the construction of buildings. (Dow/Coh does not require any of those, i played a bit of those games but its highly unlikely they have cheese tactics). Of course for casual gamers it will be frustrating to lose to cheese as they dont know the counter for it, but if they want to continue winning games they gotta learn how to counter it via forums/youtube. It doesnt take a player to be a pro to fight off cheese.
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I had never played Starcraft at all when i started playing SC2, and were continually losing to stuff like cloaked banshees, void ray rushes, ion cannon contains, 10pools and all that. I were angry and fuming and basically thinking the game was a cheesy piece of shit.
Enter the actual watching of replays, as well as starting to watch commentaries with tutorials, and lo and behold, I will most of the time be able to defend against that stuff.
So yeah, by all means keep an eye on the casuals while balancing, but its important to balance the game mainly after the high level players.
Learn quick or die hard.
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I think many people are misinterpreting the point.
The problem for casual isn't really the balance. It's instant die. All these thing that, if you don't plan them, you'll die instantly. Like cloaked banshee, void ray, etc . . .
I'm not sure this is possible to solve this issue without breaking the game at higher level.
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Its the risk for early death and instant death that seems to make this game great. 
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On May 27 2010 19:43 Ghad wrote:Its the risk for early death and instant death that seems to make this game great.
yes, but we are not casual gamers.
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i think the definition of casual is being defined differently by a lot of different people.
I consider myself a casual gamer meaning that I play a little of a lot of different games and not getting extremely committed to a single game. At the same time, I still come to sites like this and learn some stuff and play a bit.
I will have to agree with the original poster, blizzard doesn't and shouldn't care about people who lose 1 game and quit, they were never going to enjoy it anyway, but its those cheeses that happen like 10 times in a row that make you get upset, especially when you are at the point where changing your strategy doesn't help.
I think when balancing, the designers need to think about every aspect. A minor change like 150/150 stim to 100/100 stim doesn't really affect silver level players, but it drastically affects high level play whereas a change to warpgate build time makes a huge difference to all levels of play.
In the end, I think a lot of newbies will play the campaign and hopefully will increase the average playing level of silver and that this question will become less relevant over time but for launch, it's vitally important that newbies and casuals can play without getting cheesed every game.
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On May 27 2010 19:55 deadalnix wrote:Show nested quote +On May 27 2010 19:43 Ghad wrote:Its the risk for early death and instant death that seems to make this game great. yes, but we are not casual gamers.
Don't quite know what you mean by that?
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On May 27 2010 20:51 Ghad wrote:Show nested quote +On May 27 2010 19:55 deadalnix wrote:On May 27 2010 19:43 Ghad wrote:Its the risk for early death and instant death that seems to make this game great. yes, but we are not casual gamers. Don't quite know what you mean by that?
I mean that we are interested in a game which is challenging, because we are interested in becoming better. Because we sse this challenge as a way to improve ourselve. When you die by something like cloacked banshee, you decide to improve yourself, and adopt a build where you can deal with this threat and you learn how to scout the threat. And next time, when somebody will try to cheese you with a cloaked banshee, you'll be ready and you'll crush him, and more, you'll be happy because you actually improve at the game (Said like that, it seems that we maybe are pretty mentaly insane, but however, this is most of us here handle the game).
But casual game rdon't care about being good. They just want to play. So instant die is really frustrating for them. Nothing more.
So we find great the fact that we can die at any moment and give ourselve 200% to handle everything. But casual don't.
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On May 27 2010 19:33 deadalnix wrote:
The problem for casual isn't really the balance. It's instant die. All these thing that, if you don't plan them, you'll die instantly. Like cloaked banshee, void ray, etc . . .
I'm not sure this is possible to solve this issue without breaking the game at higher level.
Solving the issue doesn't have to mean stopping it happening. It's OK to let players lose, so long as 1) they also know it's OK to lose, 2) the game helps them understand why they lost and what they could do next time, and 3) no strategies are overwhelmingly simpler to execute than to recognise/defend against.
2 and 3 are more or less in Blizzard's hands (I had a couple of ideas in that respect on page 12 of this thread), but the game can help with 1, too. I think it would do wonders for player retention if the realities of the game and the matchmaking were made clear. I'm sure a lot of novice players read about how the matchmaking aims to 'challenge' them and fail to appreciate that means "it's going to try and make me lose 50% of the time, so that's what I should expect. If I'm not, then I'm in for a proper caning in a few games' time."
The moment a player grasps that 50% split is going to happen one way or another, he becomes free to define 'winning' in terms of better play on his part, rather than the outcome of any given matchup. Sure, I lost, but I remembered to use SL all game. Ok, I faltered in the mid-game but I successfully fought off his early push and caused him some problems. Cool! That strategy worked on me last time, but this time I knew he was going VR after cannoning up, and punished him for it with hydras.
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I think people are forgetting that we aren't fully testing SC2 yet, we are only testing Balance and builder (the single player game hasn't even been touched). Only hardcore players will play for balance, discriminating between games based on balance issues where-as casual gamers are in it for: lore, story, friends, variety and the cool factor etc. You should not make balance decisions based on segments of the player population that least represent the group exploring the possibilities. I agree that balance flaws will become exaggerated if you look at them through the casual players eyes and thus when you try to correct it the over-reaction will create new balance issues - something we see very commonly with Blizzard actually. Casuals don't care enough, their opinions are skin deep. You need to focus on the skilled and dedicated "hard-core" gamers to determine what the real boundaries and limitations are hopefully by emergence cause that's always cool. It is when the skilled players are having consistent problems you have to make a change because if the hardcore are frustrated/ having difficulty then you can bet your ass the casuals are running around like chickens with their heads cut off; however it should be noted that casuals spend much of their time in this state anyway. Another issue is that 1v1 battle.net ladder is innately anti casual. It is by definition competitive and if you don't foster that competition through balance at the high end then you are betraying the principles of the system to which you subscribe.
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Can a game cater to casuals, and at the same time cater to (more hardcore) gamers? If there is no thin line to walk, the game will not be as thrilling. If there is a thin line to walk, the game will be too punishing. Balance only is about getting that line to be as straight between the territories of race choice, not about the thickness of that line that needs to be walked.
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There are countless examples of games that can cater to casuals and hardcore gamers, imho.
As long as a game is easy to learn but hard to master, there should be no problem achieving that, and I think sc2 is well underway to achieving this goal.
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On May 27 2010 22:53 Ghad wrote:
There are countless examples of games that can cater to casuals and hardcore gamers, imho.
As long as a game is easy to learn but hard to master, there should be no problem achieving that, and I think sc2 is well underway to achieving this goal.
It is easy to learn basic unit stuff and that in single player. That does not mean that multiplayer won't be frustrating and unforgiving. Of course auto matchmaking should help with that to some degree, but you got to realize what the 'casual' is like and how soft the walls of their asylum cells must be.
In my opinion, custom maps an coop against computer opponents is the only way a casual can be served with a proper version of SC2.
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Perhaps blizzard should just make a seperate casual game mode that players can choose. In this game mode the player starts with some static defense.
For example, there could be 2-3 custom static defenses already laid down when the game starts, and make all of them the equal of protoss cannons for example, and for casuals who enjoy this type of play that would remove the vast majority of early game rush threats. And everyone else would just not play this mode and not worry about this change affecting their games at all.
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On May 27 2010 10:38 FabledIntegral wrote:Show nested quote +On May 27 2010 07:24 InRaged wrote:On May 27 2010 06:50 CowGoMoo wrote:On May 27 2010 06:41 FabledIntegral wrote:
For example, a Protoss can play a Terran in SC1 without DTs the entire game, but the looming threat of a DT forces Terran to buy an ebay, etc. when it could be getting something else. So merely the threat of something being there has many consequences on the balance of the game and removing things for casuals will have tons of unforeseen (and seen) negative consequences. This is 1 of the many reasons why balance is so difficult. Related specifically to the DT example, most detectors in SC2 have a larger detect radius than they did in SC. This doesn't really hurt competitive play but it helps the noobs. /casual balance And how does it helps noobs specifically? Are they misplacing their turrets/scanner sweeps so horribly that increased range fixes their mistake? I just can't imagine scenario where this change helps noob more than good player. It makes it easier to deal with cloaked stuff for everyone. How do you not see it? Constantly moving your overseer to stay within banshees is hard even for me, I can't imagine for the casual player. The increased range def would help.
Yes, it's significantly harder for the horrible player than for the average one IF both of them face same opponent. In reality though, thanks to the AMM horrible player will face another horrible player, you know, that kind who charge bunch of banshees into static defense and lose every single one of them.
You can't say that it's much harder for the worser player than for you, when you both face opponents of your own skill level, because the whole damn point of the AMM is to avoid that. That's why I don't see how this increased range is more helpful for lesser player than for skilled one.
Concerning turrets, it's obviously exactly that, they don't need optimal placement to fend off shit, while in SC1 you literally used a single turret to prevent DT's and had to put it in a very good spot (enough to defend but not enough that it could get sniped).
Once again, if optimal placement is less important in SC2 because of this change, than it's less important for everyone, not just for bad player. It's unavoidable.
You can take call down supply as a more obvious and realistic example. Yes this shit does occasionally help player who has zero Supply Timing sense (when he realizes that he can actually use it and has enough energy to fix his mistake), but at the same time it makes this skill much less important for the top player too, as a result dumbing down game for everybody.
That's because you can not take something that matters for both good and bad player, that affects gameplay for both players, and make a change to this thing that affects only one of them.
karazax, they are gonna have similar stuff - coop against computers, tutorials, practice mode with non-rushable maps e.t.c.
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I guess the best way to solve this issue is actually to listen to people complaining about micro and how it have to be improved :D
If the units are powerfull only if driven properly casual playing against casuals will not havo trouble with them.
Remeber reaver ? lurker ? vulture's mines ?
Remember when tank where actually dealing more damage in siege mode ?
These stuff cannot be used esaily and prevent from a freewin against a non skilled person.
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EPT
