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Casual refers to the mindset of being unfamiliar with Starcraft 2 and simply trying it out. Only to get ROFLstomped.
I think OP has made quite an interesting point, and that it is not a bad idea to think about it from that point of view. However, it has already been pointed out that a "casual" player does not know what is it is that killed them nor do they understand how to stop what killed them.
In Starcraft 1, it took me a good 2-3 months to learn how to play TvZ and not get utterly destroyed by Lurker/Mutalisk/Speedling rushes. A casual player most likely won't possess that level of commitment simply because they don't CARE enough.
In the end, there will always be one thing or another that will utterly destroy the casual player, so there really is no point trying to cater to that audience. The best thing Blizzard can do is to include more "tutorial" type maps/challenges and ease players into the competitive scene, which they have already done to a certain extent.
Meanwhile, I also feel that Blizzard is moving in the wrong direction with the game, and that though it may be balanced, it will never be as good and as EXCITING as Starcraft 1 unless they emphasize positioning through unit design/mechanics and base balance on micro instead of pure numbers/A-move.
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United States5162 Posts
IMO, just because you play 'casually' doesn't exempt your from using your brain to figure out strategy. I am a 'casual' player. I'm not going to be entering any tournaments anytime soon and and certainly won't be top-10 diamond either. However, I still try to get better and understand why I lost. If a player isn't willing to do that than they need to re-evaluate if they want to play competitive multiplayer.
Also, trying to balance something based on improper play is an exercise in futility. People will come up with amazingly dumb ways to do things.
If new players are getting roflstomped that's a problem with the matchmaking, not the balance.
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I disagree with this post.
Just because people lose to cheese a lot doesn't make it unbeatable even if you are casual. I think it is really the will of the player to determine if they want to get better at this game or not. Being cheesed a lot and then rage quiting the game forever is your choice. But, I think people know what the top level of play looks like and if they want to be good like top level players then they have to watch their own replays and critically analyze themselves. I have lost to cheese lots of times but that doesn't make me want to quit. I take the time to try and figure out what I could have done better to have stopped it; whether it be scout better, micro better, or adjust my build to counter it. I would say the most important thing to countering cheese is scouting it to begin with and keeping your cool.
Also you can't say that cheese doesn't work on Pro players. Because if pros were immune to cheese then you wouldn't see all the 8 rax and 5 pools in Professional Broodwar games for example.
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very interesting post, as a newbie myself never playing sc1 i find it had to adapt to the RTS way of thinking. in order to do this i watch streams, pro games, play myself etc. But the point is that losing is the best part of the game, its a complete learning experience. i agree in the sense that Blizzard doesn't or shouldn't make changes in order to accommodate the casual play( to a certain extent). I feel that if a player enjoys the game he/she will watch the replay, see how he/she can alter their build to accommodate this possible cheese. like i said its all about the learning experience. After a few games of being cheesed myself(i like to macro and think cheese is defiantly the newbs way out) i watch the replays and adjust. I think all players should apply this strategy to improve their game play.
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United States22883 Posts
Does anyone, casual or hardcore, want to play a game they don't need to improve at?
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If you don't want to try to become good, you might aswell just quit and play something else.
Much of the enjoyment of games, lies in the fact that you can get better. If you start at a point where you don't need to get better, why play?
In MMO's its the levels and the gear, in FPS its the aiming and the fast pace, in RTS its the strategy and build orders.
All a "casual gamer" needs, is something to hold his hand while he learns how to climb the rope, if he finds the rope to challenging or uninteresting, he will quit, knowing what he quit, if he enjoys it, he will play on and become better.
What you suggest is that the "casual gamer" is to like a game that isn't really the same from what everyone else plays, leaving our "casual gamer" to whine on the forums about his suddenly dropping win % when he actually stats playing the same game as everyone else.
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L2P". They will just leave because they think the game is shit and your game will die. Had they stayed, prehaps they would have become great.
This is the wrong approach.
What made BW so awesome was the fact that it was so hard to begin with. If you started the game in 2009, that you had to man up and take the rapes on iCCup if you want to improve. If you cant take it to play 300 games and go 100-200 and still keep playing, then you deserve my respect and this is why I respect everyone who is good at Broodwar.
Making everyone a winner maybe works for Hello Kitty's Fun Island, but this is Starcraft that is supposed to be competitive. If you can't take a loss than go play a game for pussies.
Balancing the game for high level play is better than taking all the fun out of it by making everyone a winner.
A good example of this seems to be the roach. At least at the armor change everyone with half a brain was fine with it. But because of the whining scrubs the roach got raped so hard that it's not longer viable in high level play. And what did we get? No roach rushes in Copper. Great.
And I know that the only reason to make it so noob friendly is money. This is kinda what your post tells me, knowing you are talking from a view of a game designer. Nobody who has the potential to become great is gonna get sick of the game because he lost to some cheese. The only reason for casual balance is money. Blizzard needs to sell the expansion packs after all.
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Yeah, OP doesn't really talk like a designer, but more like a marketer or CEO who want to sell his product to as many as possible
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this is what the placement matches are for. starcraft 2 is being made with esports in mind, and the different divisions are custom made to allow those "casual" players time to improve until they reach the level where they stop dying to nooby gimmicks.
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Somebody with that kind of attitude will find reasons not to play regardless if you balance for them or not. Also someone with that attitude certainly will never be a top player in that game.
If you are truly terrible at the game, the only motivation to keep you putting the effort in will be yourself. These so called 'casual players' (super noobs) want to play ghosts/nuke only or mass marines on their own. Its exactly because they don't want to conform to proper build orders and tactics that these 'imbalances' appear more often to them.
A game developer can only patch so much. If you balance for noobs you open the floodgates to many more problems. In my honest opinion if you like the game that much you will either find game modes your happy in or you will quit. Multiplayer balance is just a complete non issue, you balance one strategy that beats them every game if they were that terrible in the first place everything is potentially imbalanced.
Edit: What LunarC said. If your destined to get owned and quit that is the only path available to you.
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Not to mention the part that undoubtedly newer players now will rise to the top but not because they didn't bust their nuts learning the game.
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Though I do agree to lighten up on the L2P, I have to admit that anybody who quits a game after a few cheese losses, probably didn't have much a future with the game regardless, and are likely just the kind of people that hate losing. And to your example in the OP, you mentioned that with the overlord energy, they'd be able to be feedbacked, and from what we are informed, the overlord would hypothetically have 1 spell that can only be used on a terran command center, and costs 200 energy. Now protoss can 1 shot overlords with feedback. I think that even as slight a change as that 200 energy requirement might seem, it would probably change PvZ significantly in that protoss would now opt for more templar knowing they can 1 shot many overlords in sight with feedback.
Edit: unclear wording
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On May 26 2010 07:56 Myles wrote:
IMO, just because you play 'casually' doesn't exempt your from using your brain to figure out strategy. I am a 'casual' player. I'm not going to be entering any tournaments anytime soon and and certainly won't be top-10 diamond either. However, I still try to get better and understand why I lost. If a player isn't willing to do that than they need to re-evaluate if they want to play competitive multiplayer.
Also, trying to balance something based on improper play is an exercise in futility. People will come up with amazingly dumb ways to do things.
If new players are getting roflstomped that's a problem with the matchmaking, not the balance.
This is why auto-matchmaker is currently a flawed interface that only serves to separate players from interacting with other players and being forced to be slaves to its decisions. Auto-matchmaker should be an OPTION alongside making choosing your own games, imo.
You are in a good place. The goal should be to ease "casual"-minded players into more competitive mindsets and form them into players that develop their own strategies and figure out why they lost.
The kind of player you're talking about and the kind of player you are is not what we are talking about when we say "casual". We're talking about the average gamer that has never touched Starcraft 2 before and tries out competitive multiplayer without the mindset you described.
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The only reason that there even was a brood war scene in 2009 was that the game was so fun.
This is what frustrates me. People seem to believe that 'fun' and 'competitiveness' are somehow separated, with casuals on one side and hardcore on another.
I could make a perfect competitive game right now. It would rely only on skill, there would be no luck, no imbalance. Actually, someone already did; it's called Rock Paper Scissors.
All great competitive games are fun. Soccer is fun. Football is fun. Starcraft is fun.
All great competitive games take skill. Soccer takes skill. Football takes skill. Starcraft takes skill.
Ever since SC2 beta came out, I've seen otherwise reasonable people turn into fanatics. Some rage uncontrollably each time something occurs that seems to cater to the 'casual' crowd; divisions, MBS, Facebook. They see these decisions, and they feel in their hearts an attempt to take their game away from them, towards people who had never even played Brood War. They hold the old Starcraft concepts on a golden pedestal: the old micro, the old macro, the old strategic game-flow -- each change was a dagger to the heart. Then you have the new players, the WoW players, the non-gamers, the ex-gamers, who could not understand this backlash, who see in the hardcore only bitterness and malice, who characterize the complainers as inflexible cretins.
When I read these forums, it feels like I'm watching two opposing factions, dressed in the same colors, dash themselves against the rocks where they could have built a castle. I see people who have forgotten what made the original Starcraft so great -- that combination of fun and skill which took unsuspecting button-mashers, unwashed masses who had never even heard of the term 'RTS', and held them in its grip for twelve long years. But that's not what Starcraft is anymore, I guess. Instead of a joy, the game is a chore; that which Boxer played as a passion, Savior played as a job.
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I'm really tired of people using "this is just beta" as any form of argument. Despite the fact that the beta is really, really far along and the game is due to be released shortly, these people seem to be missing the whole point of a beta.
It's to find mistakes. It's to balance the game. How can you bring the "this is just beta" argument into a balance discussion, when that is EXACTLY what a beta is for?
As to the OP, thanks for an excellent and interesting read. I think you've raised a really good point. Balance does need to focus on 2 tiers of players.
I've always thought of balance as being purely for competitive play - but does Blizzard think the same way? The idea of tiered balance appeals to me, but I'm not entirely convinced Blizzard thinks this way.
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You make a good point with your overlord infestation example. It works because as you said, the use of the ability is useless in high level play. But if you look at starcraft 1, you can't touch the cheese without affecting the matchup as a whole. You can't do anything about the 4 pool rush without changing all zerg plays that involve a pool and zerglings, so pretty much all of them.
You seem to mostly bring up the element of cheese, which I absolutely think play an important part in any RTS game. As you become better and better at the game, one of the first advancements you do skillwise is learning how to deal with the simplest cheese plays. That knowledge and experience carries with you and will give you more pride than any "You have 50 victories on your account" trophy. It's a hurdle for you to overcome.
I am, however, open to the idea of making balance changes in order to cater to the lower tier of players as long as it does not affect higher tiers. It would require manyfold times more work from the balance crew, and maybe in the end risk the balance and fun of the game at the competitive level. Creating a game that is fairly balanced at all levels of skill may be too ambitious a goal.
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On May 26 2010 07:56 Myles wrote:
IMO, just because you play 'casually' doesn't exempt your from using your brain to figure out strategy. I am a 'casual' player. I'm not going to be entering any tournaments anytime soon and and certainly won't be top-10 diamond either. However, I still try to get better and understand why I lost. If a player isn't willing to do that than they need to re-evaluate if they want to play competitive multiplayer.
Also, trying to balance something based on improper play is an exercise in futility. People will come up with amazingly dumb ways to do things.
If new players are getting roflstomped that's a problem with the matchmaking, not the balance.
The fact that you're even posting here pretty much excludes you as a casual gamer.
Casual and hardcore are two extremes of the range, like left-wing and right-wing. Except its not a 50:50 split across the middle. Its more like 90% of the video game consumer-base is casual (or extremist right-wing nutjackets) and the other 10% are spread across the remainder.
I know you put quotations around the word casual, I just want to be clear. A lot of people seem to have these odd definitions of casual gamers. Like they're just gamers who can play well, but don't have the time to invest in the game. Casuals aren't even INTERESTED in playing the game well and they probably never will. They just want to blow shit up for 20 minutes, then find something else to do.
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United States5162 Posts
On May 26 2010 08:16 LunarC wrote:Show nested quote +On May 26 2010 07:56 Myles wrote:
IMO, just because you play 'casually' doesn't exempt your from using your brain to figure out strategy. I am a 'casual' player. I'm not going to be entering any tournaments anytime soon and and certainly won't be top-10 diamond either. However, I still try to get better and understand why I lost. If a player isn't willing to do that than they need to re-evaluate if they want to play competitive multiplayer.
Also, trying to balance something based on improper play is an exercise in futility. People will come up with amazingly dumb ways to do things.
If new players are getting roflstomped that's a problem with the matchmaking, not the balance. This is why auto-matchmaker is currently a flawed interface that only serves to separate players from interacting with other players and being forced to be slaves to its decisions. Auto-matchmaker should be an OPTION alongside making choosing your own games, imo. You are in a good place. The goal should be to ease "casual"-minded players into more competitive mindsets and form them into players that develop their own strategies and figure out why they lost. The kind of player you're talking about and the kind of player you are is not what we are talking about when we say "casual". We're talking about the average gamer that has never touched Starcraft 2 before and tries out competitive multiplayer without the mindset you described.
Come again? How are you supposed to play competitive ladder with auto-matchmaking? Or are you talking about a non-ladder matchmaker? I think an auto-matchmaker for non-ladder games would be great actually.
Also, I think you should stop calling newbies 'casual players'. Casual players are ones who don't play all the time and might not use the very best strategies. Being a casual player doesn't make you a newb, and being a newb doesn't make you a casual player.
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QUOTING: "Casual gamers, by their very industry-made definition, aren't interested in learning game mechanics and intricacies at all, so the idea that one could be the next WhiteRa or Sen is quite a stretch."
How can someone who quits because he lost to a cheese be of the mindset of a champion. Champions have one thing they share across all disciplines: mental fortitude and the will to not give up. Hence, I disagree with the OP and I completely agree with the above quote.
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On May 26 2010 08:19 Redmark wrote:
The only reason that there even was a brood war scene in 2009 was that the game was so fun.
This is what frustrates me. People seem to believe that 'fun' and 'competitiveness' are somehow separated, with casuals on one side and hardcore on another.
I could make a perfect competitive game right now. It would rely only on skill, there would be no luck, no imbalance. Actually, someone already did; it's called Rock Paper Scissors.
All great competitive games are fun. Soccer is fun. Football is fun. Starcraft is fun.
All great competitive games take skill. Soccer takes skill. Football takes skill. Starcraft takes skill.
Ever since SC2 beta came out, I've seen otherwise reasonable people turn into fanatics. Some rage uncontrollably each time something occurs that seems to cater to the 'casual' crowd; divisions, MBS, Facebook. They see these decisions, and they feel in their hearts an attempt to take their game away from them, towards people who had never even played Brood War. They hold the old Starcraft concepts on a golden pedestal: the old micro, the old macro, the old strategic game-flow -- each change was a dagger to the heart. Then you have the new players, the WoW players, the non-gamers, the ex-gamers, who could not understand this backlash, who see in the hardcore only bitterness and malice, who characterize the complainers as inflexible cretins.
When I read these forums, it feels like I'm watching two opposing factions, dressed in the same colors, dash themselves against the rocks where they could have built a castle. I see people who have forgotten what made the original Starcraft so great -- that combination of fun and skill which took unsuspecting button-mashers, unwashed masses who had never even heard of the term 'RTS', and held them in its grip for twelve long years. But that's not what Starcraft is anymore, I guess. Instead of a joy, the game is a chore; that which Boxer played as a passion, Savior played as a job.
We are complaining because Blizzard's work is indication of their overall direction, which, given the changes that they have made, does not indicate that they are making the game any more exciting than Rock/Paper/Scissors. Hopefully they can develop the MECHANICS of units further, instead of having everything move similarly, and hopefully they can emphasize positioning and include more high-risk high-reward units to diversify army control. After all, it's diverse army control that really made Starcraft Brood War shine, on top of cool micro opportunities.
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