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On August 22 2010 07:01 Zekke wrote:
I agree with blizz nerfing units when they do something not originally intended. Takes away some creativity. Imagine if they fixed muta stacking in SC1, that would be awful
that is a contradicting statement, is it not? you said you like it when blizzard nerfs things that had unexpected outcomes, then you say muta stacking was good.
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I hated roaches more than any other unit in the game from the reveal to now. They're still by leagues the worst unit in the game. It's not even close. However, I don't think the roach has much to do with the problems facing the game itself. Sure, changing the roach could fix some problems, but Starcraft 2 has far worse problems than the poor unit design it's full of. But this is purely opinion. hi5
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On August 22 2010 10:40 Baguette wrote:
Why is everyone here (besides a few exceptions) being so damn literal?
This post isn't about the roach, the Mutalisk or any spells, this post is about the deeper concept of forcing dynamism in SC2 by Blizzard. THe OP is suggesting that by deliberately making spells interact with each other, Blizzard should let SC2 naturally evolve and let strategies emerge as the game matures.
However, i think that is complete bullcrap. The OP doesn't offer any reason to why this is a better approach than to force interrelationships of units and buildings upon this game. I just don't see the so called "one-dimensionalism" of all these spells, and I think they are all quite brilliant, making SC2 not quite as boring as SC, while giving it an amazing potential to mature on its own.
I'll give you a reason why forced balance is worse than natural balance. WoW. Blizzard has been trying to "balance" that game for years and it has failed utterly. The same one combination has been dominating for years and years.
Ultimately, mapmakers know best. Blizzard needs to open up the map system and have mapmakers do the balancing. Getting rid of cliffs, reducing mineral patches, moving to a more open terrain, shrinking bases all are options that deal with balance. This has worked in the Korean scene and races are balanced not by Blizzard's design but by mapmaker design.
We've seen what Blizzard can do when it tries to balance(WoW) and we've seen what mapmakers can do when they balance(BW). I'll take BW balance over WoW balance any day.
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I only see the Roach as a flawed design because its not fun to play with.
But for the sake of argument, you can consider this:
The Roach is a tier 1 tank, which is just silly to begin with because obviously any tier 1 tank is going to be overpowered (which the roach was) unless serious provisions are made to stifle some aspect of the unit - The Queen's mobility is a good example of how a strong unit can be balanced out like that. The concept behind the Roach is awkward considering Zerg is the race that has a racial attribute of being quick, cheap, and weak. This contradiction of racial attribution is comparable to the Reaper for Terran - a fragile, hyper-aggressive tier 1 harasser in a race that is regarded as the slow and lumbering defensive race.
The Roach has its limitation in the early meta because of its two food count, but it also has a hard time in the mid/late meta because it just doesn't scale with the power of other units. It has three upgrades, which exhibit tautology with many other evolutions (there are three speed upgrades for Zerg in tier 1 - Roach, Ling, Bling) and the strangely codependent Tunneling Claws evolution that does nothing without the Burrow evolution, either of which you don't get until Lair (my point here is that is you need to upgrade your Roaches ASAP, you'll have to wait way too long). That is too much of an investment for a unit that won't hold up well in combat later in the game.
It seems like there were a lot of different ways to include the Roach in the Zerg tech tree without sacrificing its usefulness. A tier 2 Roach would probably have been an easier fix for scaling purposes. Making it stronger would have made players gladly pay the two food. Anyways, I really hate the Roach. I find it to be a unit whose usefulness comes in small doses.
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They didn't nerf things because they weren't working as intended. They nerfed them because they were breaking the game. Fazing made voidrays way too strong. Queens moving off-creep quickly and spine crawlers made certain strategies unstoppable. It does matter how overpowered something is, especially when it's fairly easy to use.
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The more and more I play, the more I start to go away from the roach again.
It's just such a 'wrong' unit, especially in ZvZ.
I want zerg to be about low hp, fairly high-dmg fast and swarming units, but they have really lost that, the roach is basicly like a zealot/dragoon equivalent for Zerg.
I want ZvZ to be a micro-intensive matchup with lots of movement, and where making micro-mistakes could cost you the game.
To bad that on ladder the other guy goes roaches 99% of the time, in my last let's say 25 ZvZ's I only had one game were it was ling/bling/muta.
I just don't want it to be focused around this mini-dragoon, it's just so retarded.
In other MU's the roach had atleast some "flavour" to it in the beginning stages of the beta, this sort of wolverine guy that regenerated health, could burrow and so on, it was OP they nerfed it.
What we now have left is just a bland 2food high-hp auto-attacker.
With some expensive upgrades to make it atleast do something interesting, but that is fairly easy shut down.
This together with hydra speed, are just examples of how blizzard just completely lost control of the idea of where to go with Zerg in overall gameplay/units.
The hydra getting moved to t2 for the roach, etc.
But in blizzards eye it's fine, because in their eyes we have this cool unit that can "infiltrate" enemy lines, that can pop up at unforseen places, and so on.
But that is not the issue or thing we like, we don't want more buttons to press, we don't want cool spells, we want zerg to be zerg again. And let micro evolve from there.
I mean when Idra did his muta stop thing over Tarson thor's that got a lot of reaction, a lot of people were going fairly crazy over it, it was good to see, and these are the things that make playing fun, or dimaga's amazing control with muta/bling/ling/infestor,
not some roaches where you press R when he walks over you.
Anyway, that was my little rant concerning some points that were brought up in this topic.
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You clearly underestimate the power of blinking stalkers.
It's one of the greatest new abilities in the game. I would seriously reconsider your argument there.
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On August 22 2010 06:46 Sentient wrote:
Blizzard is taking a different route than in Starcraft 1. The "wait and see" approach to balance isn't working, because when something new and interesting arises that falls outside of Blizzard's specifications, they change it.
There hasn't been any patch yet for game balance since release. So you're "omg they nerfed everything good" approach doesn't apply (yet). Quick changes happened in beta because well... it was beta.
Sentient wrote:
They want the gameplay to conform to their original intentions for each unit.
I'm not sure what is wrong with that
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On August 22 2010 15:15 junemermaid wrote:
You clearly underestimate the power of blinking stalkers.
It's one of the greatest new abilities in the game. I would seriously reconsider your argument there.
I said that blink works better than the other abilities. I agree that it's one of the best new abilities, but it's still clear that they designed it to be micro-intensive from start. It worked well for blink, but failed for other abilities.
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Zerg units, including the Roach, take up too much PSI and are too strong.
They are also too slow.
So in this respect, the Roach is indeed a representative of the fail in design with Zerg.
Most everything is 2 food or more- when you compare the masses of Zerg in SC1 its very annoying.
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SC/BW was the way it was because of a bunch of random bugs. You can't recreate buggy behavior and expect it to work properly. Secondly, a lot of the cool micro tricks are only cool because of the limitation of the UI. The game should be about player vs player, not player vs player vs UI. Finally, Blizzard never intended SC/BW to be e-sports viable. Hell, esports didn't even exist when SC/BW was first coming out. It was just a cool game with some random tournaments, not this gigantic power with sponsors and people who make their livings playing the game.
It's kind of like the leaning tower of Pisa being so popular. If it was just a normal tower, it would be cool and all, but probably not world famous. However, because the tower leans and is still stable (which was not intended by the architect), it has somehow become a worldwide phenomenon.
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The problem that Blizzard is doing is that when there is a balance issue, their solution is to nerf that unit, instead of buffing other races. This is the wrong approach to creating a dynamic and balanced game.
By nerfing the "imba" unit, Blizzard is limiting the roles of the unit while allowing the other two races to still do their same push but to a greater success rate since said "imba" unit is not as strong anymore. This encourages a smaller and slower change in the meta-game and thus is not something we want for an e-sport.
Blizzard should take the buff approach by giving other races. Sure, you may create matchup problems in the other matchups, but that's how the meta game changes and does not stagnate the evolution of the game. Buffing just creates opportunity rather than limit.
Blizzard was also lazy in terms of designing this game in this beginning stages. Almost everything in this game is "unit A counters unit B because unit A has a bonus damage to unit B or unit A will completely outrange unit B". This is how the holy roach-marauder-immortal business came up. These units completely wrecked the spirit of Starcraft of how even soft countered units can micro their way to victory. It's not as clear cut as rock paper scissors. Mass hydras get destroyed by storm and reavers in BW, but with great micro, you can overcome it. Now storm and colossus destroy hydras, and there's almost nothing you can do about it. Everything does too much damage too quickly and don't even allow the opportunity to effectively micro.
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Aotearoa39261 Posts
On August 22 2010 15:36 0mar wrote:
SC/BW was the way it was because of a bunch of random bugs. You can't recreate buggy behavior and expect it to work properly. Secondly, a lot of the cool micro tricks are only cool because of the limitation of the UI. The game should be about player vs player, not player vs player vs UI. Finally, Blizzard never intended SC/BW to be e-sports viable. Hell, esports didn't even exist when SC/BW was first coming out. It was just a cool game with some random tournaments, not this gigantic power with sponsors and people who make their livings playing the game.
It's kind of like the leaning tower of Pisa being so popular. If it was just a normal tower, it would be cool and all, but probably not world famous. However, because the tower leans and is still stable (which was not intended by the architect), it has somehow become a worldwide phenomenon.
Bugs like what? Seriously, you people have no idea about what makes SC:BW so good. Muta stacking isn't a bug, it's working exactly as the game intended (read up on magic boxes if you don't know what I'm talking about). Muta micro still takes a lot of skill AND it existed before muta stacking.
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Never liked the roach. In my eyes it is suppose to shift zerg somewhere i think isn't really interesting to play with / against. The lurker + zergling, muta + zergling were some of the best and most interesting synergies to watch and play with. It encouraged and required flanking. Anything lategame zerg was a whole different control game that had units that had to work together every attack / flank or the weakness of the individual unit would bring down the whole chain. Strong togheter, weak and countered easily if alone. Every bw zerg will tell you that once they started to understand and master these synergies and flanking tactics zerg was sooo much fun to play with.
Now everything is all over the place. And by looking at the big picture i just dont see why anyone would like the roach, in terms of gameplay you zergs got the bad end of the stick in my opinion. And i dont see how any bw zerg could argue against it.
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On August 22 2010 16:00 Plexa wrote:Show nested quote +On August 22 2010 15:36 0mar wrote:
SC/BW was the way it was because of a bunch of random bugs. You can't recreate buggy behavior and expect it to work properly. Secondly, a lot of the cool micro tricks are only cool because of the limitation of the UI. The game should be about player vs player, not player vs player vs UI. Finally, Blizzard never intended SC/BW to be e-sports viable. Hell, esports didn't even exist when SC/BW was first coming out. It was just a cool game with some random tournaments, not this gigantic power with sponsors and people who make their livings playing the game.
It's kind of like the leaning tower of Pisa being so popular. If it was just a normal tower, it would be cool and all, but probably not world famous. However, because the tower leans and is still stable (which was not intended by the architect), it has somehow become a worldwide phenomenon. Bugs like what? Seriously, you people have no idea about what makes SC:BW so good. Muta stacking isn't a bug, it's working exactly as the game intended (read up on magic boxes if you don't know what I'm talking about). Muta micro still takes a lot of skill AND it existed before muta stacking.
Muta stacking was a side effect of how air units stacked. Things like patrol micro, lurkers being dodgable, "magic box" are things that are basically exploits/bugs in the engine. I'm pretty sure Blizzard never sat down and whiteboarded those features. They just happen to be unintentional side effects of how the engine was coded and interacted with the player.
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As a zerg player, I disagree.
The Marauder is the epitome of everything wrong about sc2.
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On August 22 2010 17:40 0mar wrote:Show nested quote +On August 22 2010 16:00 Plexa wrote:On August 22 2010 15:36 0mar wrote:
SC/BW was the way it was because of a bunch of random bugs. You can't recreate buggy behavior and expect it to work properly. Secondly, a lot of the cool micro tricks are only cool because of the limitation of the UI. The game should be about player vs player, not player vs player vs UI. Finally, Blizzard never intended SC/BW to be e-sports viable. Hell, esports didn't even exist when SC/BW was first coming out. It was just a cool game with some random tournaments, not this gigantic power with sponsors and people who make their livings playing the game.
It's kind of like the leaning tower of Pisa being so popular. If it was just a normal tower, it would be cool and all, but probably not world famous. However, because the tower leans and is still stable (which was not intended by the architect), it has somehow become a worldwide phenomenon. Bugs like what? Seriously, you people have no idea about what makes SC:BW so good. Muta stacking isn't a bug, it's working exactly as the game intended (read up on magic boxes if you don't know what I'm talking about). Muta micro still takes a lot of skill AND it existed before muta stacking. Muta stacking was a side effect of how air units stacked. Things like patrol micro, lurkers being dodgable, "magic box" are things that are basically exploits/bugs in the engine. I'm pretty sure Blizzard never sat down and whiteboarded those features. They just happen to be unintentional side effects of how the engine was coded and interacted with the player.
Don't get the word exploit and bug/glitch mixed up. Exploit is a technique available in the game used in a different fashion to create an advantage for the player (muta stacking, lurker hold) while bug/glitch is the game itself having errors in the coding (drone floating anyone?).
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I agree with you about spine crawlers the 13sec burrow time feels like a bad way to 'fix' offensive spine crawlers
but about roaches, I don't think they're nearly as one-dimensional as you make them out to be, sure they function as a 'tank' for hydra line but really I think there's loads of ways to use the burrow regen/move on roaches that have not yet been discovered
the fact that you consider a unit one-dimensional now doesn't mean it'll be one-dimensional a month from now
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GOD I HATE THE ROACH! GO AWAY!
No but seriously I play zerg to zerg stuff. If I wanted a tier one unit with 145 hp, 16 damage and taking 2 psi I would play protoss. Seriously, roach is a fucking protoss unit with an identity crisis and I refuse to use it. Also please give me my 1 pop hydra back with whatever nerfs necessary.
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EPT
