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I think what the OP is getting at is that if there are too many "hurdles" for new players (casuals, people lacking RTS experience, whatever you want to call them) to jump over, then they will be quickly discouraged and quit.
There are countless ways in which you can "autolose" a game of SC2, the most common of which are probably not building detection, not building anti-air and not scouting proxies or hidden buildings.
This makes it difficult for new players, because instead of learning one skill at a time, they have to learn a LOT of things at once simply to avoid losing the game instantly. "Ok I got proxied, now I need to remember to scout around my base". "Ok this time I scouted around my base, but he rushed me with DTs, now I need to remember to get detection". "This time I scouted properly, and built detection, but he expanded three times and teched to mass air, FML."
The point is that there is a pretty steep learning curve for new players before they can even begin to play the "actual" game. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but I agree it's something which the game designer should keep in mind when working on a game.
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On May 26 2010 07:46 Madsquare wrote:
your points are correct in what you are trying to say.
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
its fun for the winners.
Except that it is meant to be fun for everyone, lol.
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Noobcakes can always eat a custom game pie.
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On May 26 2010 19:35 FuRong wrote:
There are countless ways in which you can "autolose" a game of SC2, the most common of which are probably not building detection, not building anti-air and not scouting proxies or hidden buildings.
This makes it difficult for new players, because instead of learning one skill at a time, they have to learn a LOT of things at once simply to avoid losing the game instantly. "Ok I got proxied, now I need to remember to scout around my base". "Ok this time I scouted around my base, but he rushed me with DTs, now I need to remember to get detection". "This time I scouted properly, and built detection, but he expanded three times and teched to mass air, FML."
The point is that there is a pretty steep learning curve for new players before they can even begin to play the "actual" game. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but I agree it's something which the game designer should keep in mind when working on a game.
The argument for this is, because of the league system, the opponents are in exactly the same situation and although some hurdles are great over coming them in noob friendly leagues like Bronze/Silver isn't that difficult because neither side is very good.
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Well, Blizzard did mention that there will be A LOT of tutorials and stuff in the release of the game and that beta is not a demo, like some people may think.
Beta can be a double-edged sword in that respect, cause if a casual guy plays the beta and gets stomped hard over and over again, he may not even buy the game, thinking it's too hard.
As for the point OP made, I can't agree too much..
Casual players will most likely just play against other casual players, given that matchmaking isn't a fail.
So for them, there really isn't that much difference if some strats can be considered hard to beat.
Catering to the true casuals (by true casuals I mean those guys who do not care about the game and just use it to spend some time and have fun) helps sales, but it's just not a cool idea for a competitive game.
On May 26 2010 15:11 sadyque wrote:
I dont get what are you people are talking about. In your examples there are no casuals. There are just stupid players.
Look at chess!
How many times you can beat a guy using the exact same tactic in lets say 15 moves (i suck at chess)?
a) everytime = a dumbass with an IQ<100
b) 2-3 times till the dude gets the hang of it and its able to defend = a good player
c) 1 time and the dude gets ur tactic and is able not only to defend but to also outsmart your strategy and beat you = a very smart person
Same thing is applied to starcraft. If you get beat every time by a bancheese cloak rush and in the 3rd game (at most) it still hasnt occured to you that you should build a turret then you sir are pretty much an idiot....
Im proud to say im a casual gamer. For me casual doesnt mean idiot as some people on these forums suggest in their posts. Im casual because i play 5 games a week cuz i dont have time for more. That doesnt mean im retarded and lost 30 consecutive games to cannon/proxy gate/reaper/6pool whatever rush. That also doesnt mean Blizz has to fix any of those cheeses. Blizz must cater to the Intelligent player not the Retarded player - that would be a good way to put it.
Also to the OP. Any winning strategy done against a casual is also by a casual player. I really dont think whitera is still in bronze and proxy gates casual players.... So if you nerf the strat you win the retarded player who lost to it but lose the intelligent player who did it and can defend to it in the first place.
This post sums it up pretty well.
If player can't figure out how to beat something over and over again, he's most likely just cannot get the idea behind the game at all.
Use of word "retarded" is pretty harsh in that post, but I guess it's necessary 
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To some extent I agree with the OP, and ideally, a game would be relatively balanced and very fun to play on the lower levels AND extremely balanced and fun to play at the higher levels.
However, his example with the Overlord exposes one problem: it makes units bland.
When you have a cool unit with a cool powerful ability, that makes for fun gameplay.One Reaver could make a difference in SC1 because it was just so powerful. DT's are fun because you can completely abuse a player if they don't have detection ready. Naturally, matches involving these units then were fun to play - the opponent had equally powerful and unique counters.
Good players know these units and counters and have the skills to use them. They can cope with 'overpowered' units because they have a slew of their own and know how to do damage with them.
(Of course, there is a point where battles just become chaotic. Imagine if storm was instakill vs bio, and then Terran used 50-range Tanks, etc. That would just be a completely random clickfest - taking it too far.)
What this meant in practice is that you had very varied army clashes. Taking out a reaverdrop was a significantly different experience from taking down DT's or just taking down a Zealot rush. You could say that the specific combination of units facing off would decide what kind of 'style' that battle would be.
Now to the bad players. If you do what you did to the Overlord to all the units, you are removing or chipping away at the essence of what makes these units cool, or at least face the risk of doing so.
One could say Reavers are hard to counter for bad players, so let's make their splash smaller and prevent them from being used in conjunction with Shuttles so easily. Result: Bad player not so often destroyed by Reaver drop, Reaver loses significant amount of coolness/fun factor.
Also, DT's are impossible to stop if you haven't got any detection. Most bad players won't have any, because they lack proper scouting. Therefore, permanently cloaked DT's are too strong against them, so let's make their cloaking a spell or duration effect, possibly researched.
Result: DT's no longer a killing unit vs bad players. DT's lose almost all of their coolness/fun factor.
You can see where I'm going with this. Naturally, the two above examples are a bit exaggerated, but like the OP stated, it's hard to put things like this into subtle terms and still have them make sense.
If you continue this trend, what will happen is that you'll end up with a unit roster that is no more varied than melee/ranged/spells. The fights will just be "Melee in front, Ranged behind, Casters in range" and the game will be perfectly balanced yet lack any sort of fun at all. Look to the state of SC2 Zerg for an example.
My opinion, as a casual player who still regularly forgets his macro while being rushed, is that new players just need to suck it up and learn. I might be one of the few that still have that competitive mindset around my ranks, but SC2 should be no different from others games in this regard.
If you pick up Quake 3, you're going to get demolished until your aim improves and you learn map control and strafejumping, period. If you start playing Counterstrike, you'd better learn where all the common defense positions are, else you get sniped over and over.
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I don't understand alot of players (from both high and low tiers) and their incessant whining about cheese and other "unstoppable" strategies. If the strategy is so unstoppable, try putting yourself in the other player's shoes and see how unstoppable it is. Thats how I found 90% to my counters to "unstoppable" stuff. When I get stopped using it, I know its stoppable. If I don't pull it off perfectly, then I obviously have something to work on in my game.
Remember Orb's infamous thread on "how to stop reaper rush"? Did we not all point and laugh at him when he was still posting there 3 months later when people already posted a solution within 3 hours of the thread being erected? Remember when he moaned about mass marauders only to find out (wait did he find out?) that one voidray could beat pure marauder rush?
Remember the week of Void Rays? Where a ton of protoss players would go fast Void Ray (b/c 90% of Terran's went mass marauders) only to fall victim to mass marine viking exactly 1 week later? Did Terran's not find like 3+ different counters to void cheese? (Reactor starport, engineering bay turrets, reactor barracks marine with stim and shield upg... etc)
Remember when roaches were imba and we found a counter to those... Oh wait Blizzard nerfed those...
Remember sentry forcefield abuse and many players just went siege tanks or air or anything that wasn't mass gateway/barracks/tier1?
Yeah... I remember all those now useless, past "unstoppable" strategies... Seriously guys. If you find something so imba that you can't beat it. Try playing with it for a while and get raped a couple times, who knows.. maybe you'll have alot of fun raping face with it. You'll figure things out alot faster that way. Instead of posting a 10 page response about shit not being balanced.
Nobody is going to help you watch replays for you and do your homework for you. You are on your own.
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Some people just want to play the game in their own pre-conceived way, and I think up to a certain point that could be encouraged. If you, say, like nukes then having a strategy where you make some marines/marauders and then get ghosts that should be a viable way to play at lower-level games. It might not be the best ever, but that's not too important.
The problem comes that your MM->Ghost strategy might never work because you'll be unable to hold off some early game zergling rush without teching to hellions (made-up example), and because the zergling rush strategy is a very popular cheese you'll lose so many games before you had the chance to use your own strategy. I think at this point Blizzard might say that while the zergling rush strategy is not overpowered, the fact it will always beat a ghost strategy, or even the fact it might be easy to pull off and hard to stop by terran in general though it could always end up failing versus a good player, is enough to justify buffing terran early-game defense, or nerfing the zergling rush.
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On May 26 2010 20:22 Mothxal wrote:
Some people just want to play the game in their own pre-conceived way, and I think up to a certain point that could be encouraged. If you, say, like nukes then having a strategy where you make some marines/marauders and then get ghosts that should be a viable way to play at lower-level games. It might not be the best ever, but that's not too important.
The problem comes that your MM->Ghost strategy might never work because you'll be unable to hold off some early game zergling rush without teching to hellions (made-up example), and because the zergling rush strategy is a very popular cheese you'll lose so many games before you had the chance to use your own strategy. I think at this point Blizzard might say that while the zergling rush strategy is not overpowered, the fact it will always beat a ghost strategy, or even the fact it might be easy to pull off and hard to stop by terran in general though it could always end up failing versus a good player, is enough to justify buffing terran early-game defense, or nerfing the zergling rush.
That is absolutely insane.. That's like saying if the Terran player always wanted to use his fast battlecruiser build and goes straight to battle cruisers but loses to zergling rushes really easily they should make battlecruisers build faster and their tech buildings build faster too... wait.. oh yeah they did that...
But that is also saying... if some noob wants to build nothing but mass probes or scvs to try and win and it always loses to zerglings they should buff probes so that its a viable strat. That type of thinking is just wacked. No offense.
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A lot of you guys are arguing semantics here. Usually in a game design sense the definition of a casual player goes something along the lines of someone who buys a game and plays it, but the level of interaction ends there.
They will never become part of an online community, at most they might look up a walkthrough or something.
In a starcraft context, these people won't even have build orders. They will in all likelihood switch over to custom maps very rapidly or only play with friends. The competitive ladder environment just isn't designed for them and will likely never make them happy.
You can convert from a casual gamer to a ladder player, but saying that such a player will ever become top of a diamond league division (not as amazing as some of the feats people are claiming they are capable of ) is pretty unrealistic, especially if they aren't willing to take a few hard knocks at the start of their learning experience.
A few people have said things along the lines of "Well this is a highly competitive e-sport, casuals should GTFO!"
This is suicide for a gaming company. End of the day, Blizzard wants to make money. A huge proportion of their profits will come from casual players, a large percentage of whom will never even log in to battlenet.
Casual gamers need to be considered in game design if a company wants to make serious profit, we've all seen how the Wii has performed. They won't take the time to learn how to play, they won't come here to learn how to beat 6 rax proxy reapers, they won't even know what the term 6 rax proxy means. If you are here and reading this, I am sorry, but you are no longer a casual gamer. That doesn't mean you don't play Starcraft 2 casually, but you are beta testing a game that isn't released yet, you have to have preordered it, registered for the beta or entered a contest somewhere to win a key. You care about this game past the moment you are playing it.
I believe this is the kind of definition the original poster was using, although we may differ on a couple of specifics.
I agree and disagree with the original post.
I agree casual gamers need to be considered overall. I disagree that they should make up a major component of any decision relating purely to ladder play.
I agree that techniques that work in low level play but are immediately shut down and punished heavily in higher level play have no place in a game competitive or not. They encourage a play style that leads to no improvement, are usually very frustrating to lose to and don't really add anything to the game, but you have to be very careful not to adversely affect higher level play. I personally think reapers are very poorly designed because they only really have any use for the first 5 minutes of the game and could use a rework. That being said 10 rax reaper -> transition to whatever is one of my favourite openings. It forces actions out of your opponent without being instant loss when they do eventually counter you. Interestingly, fast reapers work on the practice maps and are in fact more effective because you cannot be punished for getting it wrong.
I feel a bit like the original poster was using the aforementioned definition of a casual gamer, while trying to apply it to bronze league players. The two groups do not have perfect overlap and I would argue that the current casual player base would be less than 1% (maybe some non-casual gamers gave keys to casual gamers). The final casual player base will be much, much higher, but you will likely never meet any of them.
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On May 26 2010 07:44 Snowfield wrote:
I think i misunderstood the thread, i re-read it now and i still dont really understand what he says
He says that something can be balanced for good players, but really anoying for beigginers. And all good players were begginers before being good.
So having mecanism balanced for good players, but really annoying for begginers isn't a good thing.
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On May 26 2010 20:44 deadalnix wrote:Show nested quote +On May 26 2010 07:44 Snowfield wrote:
I think i misunderstood the thread, i re-read it now and i still dont really understand what he says He says that something can be balanced for good players, but really anoying for beigginers. And all good players were begginers before being good. So having mecanism balanced for good players, but really annoying for begginers isn't a good thing.
that isn't what I took from it at all
what I took from it was that at low levels certain things that have no effect at higher levels from play can be wildly imbalanced when you're not very good
as such, you can change those things and have absolutely no effect on high level play, but greatly improve the experience of people who are playing at copper level
and I think the forge change is a perfect example of this, cannon rush is super imba when you're copper but sucks balls when you're actually good at the game
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Anything that detracts from the variety of strategies available in the game as well as lowers the skill ceiling, for the benefit of people who are not willing to suck it up and get better, is a bad thing. We saw what it did to WoW, there is literally no excuse to do it here, particularly when you're not trying to keep subscribers.
This nebulous idea of the 'casual' player being one that simply isn't willing to learn how to not suck and then goes and cries to Blizzard to change the game for his benefit, is one that's disgusted me for years as a WoW player and has no business infecting a non-MMO title. Hell it didn't belong in WoW in the first place but at least you can see the misguided business reasons behind appeasing such people in a subscription based game.
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On May 26 2010 21:19 TotalBiscuit wrote:
Anything that detracts from the variety of strategies available in the game as well as lowers the skill ceiling, for the benefit of people who are not willing to suck it up and get better, is a bad thing. We saw what it did to WoW, there is literally no excuse to do it here, particularly when you're not trying to keep subscribers.
This nebulous idea of the 'casual' player being one that simply isn't willing to learn how to not suck and then goes and cries to Blizzard to change the game for his benefit, is one that's disgusted me for years as a WoW player and has no business infecting a non-MMO title. Hell it didn't belong in WoW in the first place but at least you can see the misguided business reasons behind appeasing such people in a subscription based game.
TotalBiscuit sums it up pretty well (just like other posts in this thread). If you want a game to be competitive you dont make it carebear.
Competition is tough. It should be tough.
Why are we constanly moving towards leftist views? Is the new generation swifting towards communism or smth?
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Thats why I feel any strong maneuvers should be heavily execution/timing/skill based(not saying this is the case)and not just some autowin 1a unit that does tons of damage. So if you die to it, it means they had better micro or just are generally better than you.
That said, the beauty of rts is you can improve. If you care that much about losing, then get better and win. If its not worth the effort, then oh well just a loss, doesnt mean your penis is small(or does it??). It's kind of a terribly spot to be in.. if you have enough pride that losing hurts, but not enough to want to win.
I think if you casually play with people your level, they shouldnt really smash you to the point its not fun, but thats my experience of sc2 so far. Other than that, theres gonna be coop vs ai and custom maps,so I think theres plenty outside of competitive laddering for casual interests.
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excellent points. it's sad to see people even in this thread confused about that concept when you laid it out so simply.
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I strongly disagree with most of OP's point. Point isn't to balance the game for everyone but to make it fun for everyone. Balance isn't equal to fun.
Anyone who played SC1 knows that from game 1 you start having fun.
And your argument is quite flawed as you think anybody can have / wants a shot at becoming good.
What's important isn't balancing the game for the noobs, but rather make sure they have alot of fun. Balance can come into that on many accounts, but if you don't balance the game for top level then you fail. If balancing the game for top level makes lower levels not having fun, then your game is shit.
Simple as that.
Jeezzz.
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If you join the game, you have to face the consequences of the game. If you join 1v1, all the other player does all game is try to eliminate you. There is no way around that. Now of course casual players play 1v1 too, but if you are not commited to try to find out the best way to eliminate your opponent, what are you doing?
Of course many people will play 4v4 and custom games too, which is awesome. There is something for everybody.
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The OP confuses casual players with lazy players. In fact lots of people do. Its completely possible to be casual and not be a moron who loses to the same thing over and over. Lots of casual players are smart people who have rigorous jobs and just don't have time to play a lot. For them, starcraft still has a lot to offer. The amazing campaign with its huge cool factor. The occasional game with friends. The once in a while ladder challenge. The value of watching pros plays. The custom games.
The lazy player SHOULD NOT be the target of any designer. In fact this is downright disgusting. This is the whole point of your post. Person X is lazy, lets change the game so he doesnt have to learn it. "Cheese" is not cheese bc its unstoppable, its very wrongly used in this context. Cheese is a strategy that deviates from normal play in an effort to win quickly. Just like other tactical games, once you lose to it, provided you aren't lazy, you think critically about it and can beat it. Why should the lazy player NOT be the target of the designer? Because they will buy the game anyway, and they will play it for hours (even at a hardcore level, WOW is FILLED with these players) and then they will complain. Thats what they do... they complain. Just throw them achievements and downloadable content of costumes they can buy. If you want to cater to these people, fill your game with carrots on a stick... they will chase forever.
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On May 26 2010 21:00 Tropics wrote:Show nested quote +On May 26 2010 20:44 deadalnix wrote:On May 26 2010 07:44 Snowfield wrote:
I think i misunderstood the thread, i re-read it now and i still dont really understand what he says He says that something can be balanced for good players, but really anoying for beigginers. And all good players were begginers before being good. So having mecanism balanced for good players, but really annoying for begginers isn't a good thing. that isn't what I took from it at all what I took from it was that at low levels certain things that have no effect at higher levels from play can be wildly imbalanced when you're not very good as such, you can change those things and have absolutely no effect on high level play, but greatly improve the experience of people who are playing at copper level and I think the forge change is a perfect example of this, cannon rush is super imba when you're copper but sucks balls when you're actually good at the game
The forge rush was actually used to great effect in high levels on the asian server.
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EPT
