EPTIf you take out the best strategy, the hardcore gamer will just move to the second best strategy. If you keep doing this, the game will suffer and become a bland tic-tac-toe.
Casual Balance - Updated May 30 - Page 3
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Camila_br
Brazil529 Posts
If you take out the best strategy, the hardcore gamer will just move to the second best strategy. If you keep doing this, the game will suffer and become a bland tic-tac-toe. | ||
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Silan
Denmark198 Posts
On May 26 2010 07:46 Madsquare wrote: however be aware that the SC2 MP is not a casual game just 4 fun. its a very competive, esport oriented one. its just not meant to be fun for everyone. This. When SC1 came out i was a 12 year old casual player. I played maybe a year of 1on1s and then moved on to custom maps ect, mostly because the whole competitive scene didn't attract me. Now it's exactly what turns me on, hence i love SC2 MP cause it's made to be competitive. Besides, I believe matchmaking fixes this pretty well. A bronze player would rarely pull of a good cheese, even 6pool requires you have some idea of what your doing to actually close the game and win. As a bronze player you can also mass voidrays/carriers ect and win, but i also think even bronze player can understand that they lost because of lack of scouting and reacting to information. Dont make the casual players more stupid then they are  .I do agree that a game can become too competitive, but imho sc2 mp is no way close to that point. Hell, these forums is flooded with post suggesting the opposite. | ||
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GiveMeFace
United Kingdom86 Posts
This tiered balance is actually how the game is designed on. The developers think of the counters, upgrades on a ladder as the game progresses. If there is a flaw in a player stopping them from countering strategies this is unfortunate. I understand your underlying intentions but the balance will make no impact in their decision to leave or not as they will complain against the next imbalance. Something will surely get nerfed if only the highest skilled players can counter it. Thankfully this is how I imagine it is. Has nothing to do with being a hardcore sc1 player, balance should be one seesaw not several. | ||
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Failsafe
United States1298 Posts
Competitive players lose to cheese. I get the impression you don't know how the word is used in the TL colloquial or you don't watch much competitive play. Balance Balance concerns should be weighted toward the highest levels of play. Balancing Starcraft II for low level play is impossible. Balancing SC2 only makes sense within a certain restrictive set of assumptions. That set of assumptions is violated by non-competitive players. Non-competitive players are usually non-aggressive, non-expansionary, and tech-oriented. You can't balance the game for that group of players. Examples: 1) If player A goes air, player B probably isn't scouting so player B dies. 2) If player A rushes, then player B probably doesn't know how to wall, doesn't have a build order that prepares him for a rush, and doesn't know any tricks to help himself once the rush arrives. Player B loses. 3) If player A masses basic ground units and attacks at 10 minutes, player B has probably constructed a base with one of each tech structure and has not devoted much money to his army. He also hasn't scouted. Player B dies. And so on. Balancing for these players doesn't work. That said, I think certain allowances should be made for non-competitive players (and the good of the game in general). Proposed Changes The Reaper The Reaper should be removed or completely revamped. In TvT, it's virtually impossible to stop a proxy 8rax Reaper rush without building your own Barracks either before your supply depot or at 10/11. The Reaper serves no combat purpose. In 1v1, you never see good players use more than maybe 1 or 2 Reapers after the game has passed the 6 minute mark. Why? They're simply not worth making. Their only purpose is harassment, and the majority of their usefulness expires before either player hits 20 supply. Reapers are fast enough and do enough damage to workers to be almost unstoppable if you are not correctly prepared before they arrive. Reapers serve no purpose other than to produce a lot of frustrating losses at worst, and require very specific anti-Reaper build orders at best. Air Air is a problem in general. It does too much damage and its range is too long. Both the Void Ray and the Banshee really need to be addressed. One or two of them can be sufficient to end a game, and that's a lot of potential to bestow on a single unit. The Void Ray The Void Ray is very mobile (with its upgrade it is ridiculously mobile). Despite the nerfs, the Void Ray is still very effective. It can easily end the game by destroying the opponent's main building. It also charges up, and once charged deals enough damage to be a threat to all the units in the game that can counter it. New players have slow reaction times so the Void Ray will easily find its full charge against a casual player. That means new players will need more anti-air to destroy the Void Ray. WIthout being able to rule out other possibilities (DTs / Robo + Warp Gate attack / Warp Gate attack) it is very likely that a new player will not have sufficient anti-air to stop even a couple Void Rays once the Void Rays have reached their full charge. The Void Ray at its current timing in its current form represents a lot of autolosses for casual players. Could the Void Ray be pushed back or modified without destroying early and mid-game Protoss? Absolutely. Should it be? Absolutely. The Banshee The Banshee poses an identical problem. It deals ridiculously high damage. 2 shots kill a worker. 2 shots kill a marine. Not only does it deal high damage, it has really long range. The Banshee is mobile, aerial and can cloak. Cloak is another huge problem for new players. Again, they only have so much money to spend. A lot of their resources will probably go into building ground-to-ground units like the Marauder. Then Banshees show up. They try to get anti-air but then they can't see the Banshee to shoot it. Unlike its BW counterpart, the Wraith, the Banshee in SC2 (equally priced) will tear through workers at a ridiculously fast pace. If you aren't at least somewhat prepared when a Banshee arrives, you've probably already lost the game. Wraiths could cloak, too, but it took them so long to destroy workers and army units that a cloaked Wraith or two couldn't end the game on its own. Two cloaked Banshees, unmolested, can do mortal damage really fast. Again, can Terran do without the Banshee rush possibility - or at least have the game-ending potential of a Banshee rush somewhat mitigated? Absolutely. Long story short, there are too many game-ending options that are too quickly available in the current SC2. It makes the game a casual player's worse nightmare and doesn't benefit the competitive player at all. Starcraft 2 would be as good or better not only for casual players but for everyone if some of the quick finishing moves were removed. Bear in mind before you respond how many other ways there are to end a Starcraft 2 game at roughly the same timing of the Void Ray / Banshee rush and how those alternatives require a completely different response. Also bear in mind that "scout" is not a sufficient reply because tech paths can easily be concealed up until the point when Banshees and Void Rays are available. | ||
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crate
United States2474 Posts
I don't think that having the game balanced at low levels matters. It's certainly a bonus if you pull it off, because it's certainly a bit of a turn-off if, say, switching from Terran to Protoss makes most low-level players win twice as often against the same competition. But the game will survive with imbalances like that (Brood War did); some players will find T more fun than P even when they win more as P. Some players will still be better as T anyway, etc. The changes that have had the most effect on low-level play have been to make strategies that are simply not-fun for worse players to play against (voidrays and cannon rushes, and probably DTs also) not as prevalent. (And from my experience playing with my bronze league friends, voidrays were a big problem at their level. The one game I went DTs against them in an FFA, I instantly won and it was no fun for anyone involved. There are ten players like my friends for every one like me, I'd wager). High level balance is certainly a bonus for Blizz--they won't lose any sales by making it better balanced at a high level (most of their changes do very little for how fun the game is at lower levels, except those which are clearly aimed there, like voidray range change and the forge change), and they do stand to gain by making it more even: it makes the game better for that group of players, who are then more likely to buy future Blizz products etc. I think Blizz has done well enough for the game to be good competitively for at least some time anyway; we see all three races doing well at high levels. | ||
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LunarC
United States1186 Posts
On May 26 2010 08:30 GiveMeFace wrote: Its true that there are a lot of die hard SC1 guys out there who want a copy and paste job on the sequel (for the record I never played sc1). However as stated in previous posts the impact of speed and strategy doesn't compute to some players. Mass any unit at any time A move and that player will die. This tiered balance is actually how the game is designed on. The developers think of the counters, upgrades on a ladder as the game progresses. If there is a flaw in a player stopping them from countering strategies this is unfortunate. I understand your underlying intentions but the balance will make no impact in their decision to leave or not as they will complain against the next imbalance. Something will surely get nerfed if only the highest skilled players can counter it. Thankfully this is how I imagine it is. Has nothing to do with being a hardcore sc1 player, balance should be one seesaw not several. You should really at least watch a couple VODs in the VODs tab just to ensure that you have an idea of where all of the "sc1 fanboys" are striving for Starcraft 2 to achieve. | ||
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Legofchair
United States6 Posts
Casual players are casual for a reason. They give up when things get rough. They quit, and move on to something that entertains them for much less work. There is NOTHING wrong with this. I've moved on from a number of games myself because it's just to much "work" for me. It's the people who dedicate their time, resources, and knowledge to a game that makes them good. Their ability to meld everything together from little quirks, to statistical balance, and use them in their strategies. To balance a game from the bottom up is a quick way to lose the people who have done their time, taken their bumps and learned the game because the love it. It will become a diluted mess, where you will have no variation in strategies as there will end up only being a few cookie cutter ways to play because all the "cheese" was taken out. Cheese is risky, cheese is a gamble, and unless it's horribly broken, if it fails will usually put the initiator in a losing situation. Cheese is also what makes the game dynamic, it's the unpredictable, it's what defines if you have done your homework or not. Though no one likes it, it's part of the hook of these types of games, to get better, to strive for improvement, and become better than than your opponents. | ||
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Galleon.frigate
Canada721 Posts
this thread is asking people to open there minds.. when you look at something and go 'thats stupid' it's prob not. It may well be wrong but try to understand WHY someone would think it was a good choice... I'm glad he posted this. | ||
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CowGoMoo
United States428 Posts
One thing I want to add in response to several comments here about "if you remove X, casuals just lose to Y" is that the way a player loses matters a lot. Nobody wants to lose to a tower rush. Losing to Battlecruisers and Thors 20 minutes into the game is a far more dignified defeat and is less likely to scare people away than losing a 2 minute game to a Cannon rush 10 times in a row. | ||
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Bibdy
United States3481 Posts
I certainly agree that cheese is going to be VERY off-putting for casuals, as will good players intentionally getting themselves thrown into Bronze to farm some noobs, but what can you do? They already offer practice games with rush-preventing rocks (although, hilariously, it doesn't stop Reapers on literally ANY of the maps). Casuals are going to end up playing against the AI, or playing with their friends, very soon after picking up the game. The ladder is most certainly not going to be their playground. If they decide to get better and work their way up? They're now graduated beyond casual gamer status. So all of the casual gamers will gravitate to the least-competitive areas of the game (AI, with friends and/or custom maps) purely because the competitive environment is frustrating, not because they're not competitive. They want to play for 20 minutes, blow shit up and feel satisfied. Not play for 20 minutes and get pissed they lost because some 'douche' attacked before the 5-minute mark. Therefore, I don't see why on earth Blizzard are trying their damndest to create a ladder system that tries to convince people that don't want to lose, that its okay to lose. The ladder is for every type of gamer BUT casuals. | ||
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GiveMeFace
United Kingdom86 Posts
Not every player who wants to balance properly was solely from SC1 that is what I was trying to convey. Clearly if anything is at fault here is that if you want to jump in the deep end (competitive/lader games). Matchmaking you with too difficult opponents is clearly the area of the system which is failing. | ||
NonY
8748 Posts
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Edmon
United Kingdom259 Posts
I wouldn't really want to argue the samantics of what "cheese" is. I mean, it's pretty much a made up term that means different things to different people. Generally speaking, a cheese is usually a strategy (usually very early in the game) whos only counter is to know that it is coming. If it's happening before you see it (or if you simply don't know how to deal with it) the game is terminated at that point. It's not like "you take a load of damage and limp on for 5 more minutes", I mean "the game is over, right now, you lost." So if I were to have a cheese list I would say it would have to be: 1) Very early play. 2) Instantly fatal. 3) Only "counter" is to know it is coming, very early on. Any kind of cloaked cheese is the perfect example. If a cloaked unit is in your base and you've not gotten any detection, you have lost instantly. One way to mitigate this cheese is with energy, you can only stay cloaked for so long, so you can do some damage but not "instantly, fatally win". But Bancheese and Wraiths differ here. Wraiths didn't do the sort of damage to allow for that instant "cheese" win, but bancheese does. Even though both may result in a loss, a prolonged loss where you limp on for 5 minutes can be quite fun for a "casual" player. An instant trip back to the score screen is not. It creates a "wtf" or "is that it?" moment. I suppose the main point here is that you should balance cheese such that is does damage, it gives you an advantage, but it shouldn't be instantly fatal. Top players will get all these smaller advantages and still turn it into a win (with more margin for a comeback by the other player). Casuals will get to play for longer amounts of time and explore the game more, even though they lost long ago economically. I personnally do not think anything that occurs after 10-20 minutes could be considered a rush or cheese. There has been plenty of time by this point to have most/all of the tools you have as race and to have reacted and/or attacked to change the outcome. "Overpowered" strategies are a different topic altogether and I would feel are out of the scope of what I was trying to convey. | ||
Jibba
United States22883 Posts
On May 26 2010 08:34 CowGoMoo wrote: Cool thread. One thing I want to add in response to several comments here about "if you remove X, casuals just lose to Y" is that the way a player loses matters a lot. Nobody wants to lose to a tower rush. Losing to Battlecruisers and Thors 20 minutes into the game is a far more dignified defeat and is less likely to scare people away than losing a 2 minute game to a Cannon rush 10 times in a row. Isn't that why novice maps exist? Because that's the segment of gamers we're talking about. Casual in this context is a euphemism for novice. Is Blizzard finally willing to come out and say they're thinking about going down the same path that led to welfare epics in WoW? Because from the business stand point, it was brilliant. It brought in over 10 million subscribers, and they can rake in a million dollars a day just by releasing non-achievement pets. So far, thankfully, they haven't gone that route but patch 13 is beginning to worry me. I hope it's just the overreliance on obsolete data that's responsible, and not a shift in philosophy. | ||
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Opinion
United States236 Posts
The only thing that really bothers me about Cheese is that it restricts your BO, you are now confined to counter cheese and most of the time if you do counter it the game still ends too fast to be fun. | ||
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Bibdy
United States3481 Posts
On May 26 2010 09:03 Jibba wrote: Isn't that why novice maps exist? Because that's the segment of gamers we're talking about. Casual in this context is a euphemism for novice. Ehh not really. We were all novices the day we got the beta invite. But, we weren't casuals. I don't think casuals are the kinds of players who want to spend an hour building a gigantic army and commencing steam-rollage. Novices to the RTS genre might want to see that, but casuals typically have like 20-30 minutes spare at any given time. They'd probably be more satisfied with quicker, faster games. They're more likely to be the 6-Pooler, than the 6-Poolee. | ||
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Dracid
United States280 Posts
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Jibba
United States22883 Posts
On May 26 2010 09:09 Bibdy wrote: Well, I think that's what he's talking about.Ehh not really. We were all novices the day we got the beta invite. But, we weren't casuals. I don't think casuals are the kinds of players who want to spend an hour building a gigantic army and commencing steam-rollage. Novices to the RTS genre might want to see that, but casuals typically have like 20-30 minutes spare at any given time. They'd probably be more satisfied with quicker, faster games. They're more likely to be the 6-Pooler, than the 6-Poolee. TBH, if you're a casual, you might as well give 3/4 gate a try. You'll cruise through lower matchups and find that the winning is addictive, especially when you roll over your opponent. It's like AWPing in CS. Most (not all) of the people that complain about it do so because they suck with it. If they could use it, they'd learn to love abusing it like the people who do. | ||
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MeruFM
United States167 Posts
After playing this set of preliminaries and somehow getting into gold division despite playing 5-0 (or I guess the old silver), I have noticed that the VAST VAST majority of people cheese at that level. I think that's a much bigger problem than the division between "casual" and "hardcore". I was always a macro player, coming from the roots of C&C, I loved massing units and doing large flanks instead of funky single unit play. I feel like if I didn't have the ability to counter the lower division cheeses most of the time, I would be permanently stuck in the lower tiers and thus be constantly cheesed. Being put into that kind of situation would be extremely off putting and probably stop me from wanting to become better. It's difficult though because cheese will always be easier to execute than long-term play. Just ask Idra. Even if you don't like him, you can't disagree that long games are harder to become proficient at compared to super early games where a couple units make all the difference. Coupled with the fact that countering cheese is all about game sense (knowing if/when/where they're cheesing) along with a good mouse hand to micro your weak little workers vs their couple fighting units, less skilled (but still competitive) players will realize that cheese gives them a much better win average than trying to play standard. This will just discourage people who enjoy playing macro, map control, and large army clashes when they don't have the APM to counter a 7 rax reaper rush. | ||
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TheYango
United States47024 Posts
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