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Excellent post grimmr, having the same train of thought, but could never express it in a way you did.
I would also like to add another critical fact with the balance part, it's scouting.
The power of Terran early game is their ability to shut down nearly every scout (wall-off, concussive marauders etc.), while granting absolutely knowledge through scans.
At most of the current maps, by the time you scouted his actually build, it may be already to late, for instance Steppes of War. You don't even have the chance to react, sometimes it's a guessing game.
If i play Protoss on SOW against zerg, i'm blind after the first zerglings hatch.
Watch should i do to gain scouting information? Robotics with observers, or halluzination.
Now if he decides to do a bling bust, and i chose the wrong techway / unit composition, i'm dead.
Nothing i could do, lost due to guessing game, because by the time the needed scouting information arrives, i'm pretty owned or luck countered it.
I would love if they would remove concussive, and lowering the speed of zerglings, or improving the basic worker speed, so you actually have the chance to stay a bit longer in the zerg base (bisu probe any1?).
Before we continue to change units in drastics way or tweek the numbers, change the maps.
It's senseless to talk about balance if maps like SOW, BS etc. are contributing statistics / points of view.
Personally, most of the Metaloplis games i experience are awsome, you have easy accessable 3rd, travel distance are longer etc, more possible scouting possibilities, and a bigger time window to counter his strats.
I seriously hope Blizzard while wipe out 90% of the current mappool, and change them with maybe some of the Iccup or selfmade maps, and watch how the game progress.
My 2 cents ~
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On October 01 2010 18:59 Terakahn wrote:
Something to note that Day9 mentioned rather recently.. They're releasing the game in 3 parts. This allows for a ton of easy fixes to the balance of the game. This is a very long term project, I can really see things being very very balanced by the time the last expansion hits. I'd rather they make slow changes, than to rush it and end up completely changing parts of the game that are fine as is.
Let's assume there is a Zerg problem atm.
Blizzard knows this and will introduce a new unit/mechanic in HotS which will fix that Zerg problem.
What should they do? Try to fix the problem _now_ which they will know will unbalance Zerg in HotS? Try to find another option right _now_ and scrap the new unit/mechanic (which will mean the time invested would be wasted)?
I think we really have to wait until all 3 expansions are out until the real balance issues can be adressed. I cannot see Blizzard making balance changes to issues they know to be void when the expansion hits.
Of course this sucks for us players who live in the "now" 
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On October 01 2010 20:43 abrasion wrote:Show nested quote +On October 01 2010 20:29 GIGAR wrote:On October 01 2010 20:04 abrasion wrote:Ultimately I can completely see how Dustin said (and I quote what I recall) "we just threw units in there to be cool and worked around balance from there" - doesn't sound well thought out to me in the slightest. Tweaking numbers doesn't help when there's fundamental design flaws. If you could find a source for that, it would be great. It would also explain the current state of SC2, and why (especially Zerg) have evolved so much. I can't produce a link but I recall the outrage well - someone here will find the quote, no doubt - it was about 4 to 6 months ago. EDIT: Found it http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=119391This shows a lack of real genuine game design, I wish I could explain where genius game design exists and provide examples but nothing springs to mind. Ultimately it shows no proper in depth planning of how X and Y works, this totally explains Zergs terrible unit variety and early game  and yet Terran has some absoloutely amazing options and is only going to get better (Artosis says this, I believe him)
0neder's post is awesome:
So the siege tank is now more unique because it's totally useless?
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Right, in 1.0 I experienced win rates between 20% and 80%, depending on the matchup and the map. Maps introduce a lot of volatility to the balance.
My proposed direction for Blizzard in order to balance the game would look like this:
- Fix the phoenix.
- Fix broken creep distances on Scrap Station, Xel'Naga Caverns et al.
- Record all win percentages for every matchup on every map and make them retrievable in statistics tables on the website (and btw shut down those comments sections).
- Develop and implement a system, which allows new maps to be introduced into the ladder pool.
- Kick out or patch maps with a bad balance.
That would be the setup, I'd like to see. Then, let this run for a few months and continue the usual patch scheme afterwards.
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On October 01 2010 21:05 tofucake wrote:
I dunno...I think 2.5 years is a decently long time. It's not 12 years like some people are saying, but still....
This is a regular misconception of when SC/BW became balanced. There is a difference between when the game actually became balanced and when we that played SC/BW back in 98 and further believed it was balanced. I would like to emphasize the later statement as the most important one. And make no mistake - after 1.05 in particular, I would say that the general conception was that the game was fairly balanced in a sense that the more skilled player would always win unless the lesser one did something fancy and unpredicted. If there is a general believe that the game is balanced the game will not attract this amount of flame regardless of the actual balance which was the case of SC/BW after 1.04/1.05. And that's the main problem here - it seems as if weaker players are taking wins from better ones because of race/gameplay imbalances rather than out skilling them. And let me remind you - this game isn't new - it as been out since February if we count in the Beta - which we should in my opinion.
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I would actually say that SC2:s main problem is some parts of the gameplay which affects the balance. In early SC/BW there were rather balance issues that affected the gameplay. What do i mean by this? For instance back in early SC1 the Reaver pops were heavily overpowered and so was the hatchery which affected the balance.
In SC2 i think lalush made a very good point in a post - when he talks about zerg scouting issue - he later says in that post:
I don't believe in giving zerg better scouting as a solution. I think the game needs to be redesigned for HotS and all timings be delayed. This game will just keep sucking and be random as hell as long as its as fast paced as it is now. A game needs some "dead air" and build up time for good playhers to be able to adapt.
These are just some examples - i think some aspects of this game needs to be tweaked. Redesigned is a quite strong word - which is applyable on what TFT did for WC3. This game needs less than that but more than the treat SC/BW got with its expansion and patches. Redesigning the maps is a good start - a treat that SC/BW got - which this game needs badly. Thats the first step, when that happens - Blizzard has to see how to take it from there.
On October 01 2010 07:43 csfield wrote:
It's well-established that BW is only balanced through a miracle (and excellent map-makers), and not through Blizzard's foresight or understanding.
They had little to no idea how strategy would evolve.
Also i must say that this guy might be right. I've played the SC1 beta some and it was a miracle that the final product turned out to be so good. Could be luck, could be skills, who knows but it was quite amazing. I'd say it was it was a bit of both :D
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There are a lot of things I would like to see "redesigned" though.
First up, LaLush is right, the pace of early game is way too fast. Early harassment is both too devastating and too useless at the same time. This could be made better by both making early aggression harder and reducing the speed at which workers are made.
-Static defenses need to have their range addressed in some way. I would hate to see 9 range spore crawlers, but the fact that they are basically useless against all air units (except the mutalisk, and we all know how useful air defenses are vs them) is terrible, terrible design.
-Void Rays are useless unless they have considerable numbers and are charged, then they're basically unstoppable. This is bad design.
-Carriers probably need a numbers adjustment, they do huge DPS on paper, but are useless in-game.
-Mothership needs something.
-Zerg is 20%-40% slower than they should be when off creep. The units were all designed assuming creep is a given and its not. Creep either needs to be significantly easier to get in contested areas, or the bonus needs to be non-movement related.
-Spawn Larva is unnecessarily restrictive. (This mechanic alone probably makes up 50% of the Zerg macro routine)
-The Zerg tech-tree as a whole needs to be looked at, drops for instance come almost a minute later than other races. As well as T2 requiring a much greater investment when compared to the other races. These thing by themselves are fine, but T1 is restricted to lings, slow roaches, and a kamikaze style unit.
-Terran doesn't really need a redesign as much as number tweaks. Everything they have sounds good on paper, but proves to be way too effective in-game. The only unit I have a problem with in the Terran army is the Reaper. It just doesn't fit.
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Game feels good to me... really fun, challenging, but not impossible... I dunno if I can participate in the balance discussion because I don't have perfect macro. To all of you in the past ten pages discussing how imbalanced SC2 is... I'm assuming you are Godly players with perfect macro right? None of the reasons you, personally, aren't winning could be due to deficiencies in how you play or the fact that your opponents might be better players? Lemme guess, the same is true for idra and dimaga? They are the best players in the world so therefore if they think zerg is underpowered it must be 100% true?
I am comfortable with the way blizzard has approached balance in all of their products to date. It doesn't matter if its the exact same people who made BW that are working on SC2. Good balance is not exclusive to those people. Good balance is the result of small changes and you have to give ample time for players to explore the current state of the game. If they make changes too fast, the game will never develop
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I'm tired of this falacy that perfect macro is required before one can note imbalances and that I must be losing to something for me to call it imbalanced.
My ZvT is fine if you look at win/loss record. If I live past the first 10 minutes, 90% of the Terrans at my level have no clue how to pressure me and then its gg. The other 40% of my ZvT games are lost because I made incorrect assumptions based on partial knowledge that I gained through imperfect scouting.
I have yet to see the person who scouts at the perfect time and sees everything when he does, even at the highest levels.
So, me being the mediocre player that I am can note that Terrans at my rating level have terrible mechanics in 90% of what they do, but they know 2 or 3 of their 15+ available openings that end the game unless perfectly countered.
I, on the other hand, am playing the game with clear goals in mind for every thing I do, adjusting my play to the map as well as race and style of my opponent, not perfect, but solid macro and micro, and I still lose 40% of my ZvT games to straight up scrubs.
My macro is imperfect, and I am saying SC2 has balance issues.
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These BW comparisons make no sense. It's like the op is trying to make the point that "Blizzard handled BW so much better and they fail with SC2", but you are comparing a game + expansion pack to a game by itself that is only a few months old. If you want to compare the two, you should at least hold your breath until HotS is released.
It's really getting hard to take all the talk of imbalance seriously, I'm sure there is still some but people are majorly exaggerating it. We have a zerg in the GSL finals and he pwned his way through several terrans to get there. For all the complaining Idra has done about balance, he got knocked out pretty early, I have to think that if he focused on working with zerg as is instead of complaining he would have done better and been more prepared.
So is fruitdealer really just that much better than all the terrans he has defeated or is the game closer to being balanced than people are giving it credit for?
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On October 02 2010 03:21 Jermstuddog wrote:
I'm tired of this falacy that perfect macro is required before one can note imbalances and that I must be losing to something for me to call it imbalanced.
My ZvT is fine if you look at win/loss record. If I live past the first 10 minutes, 90% of the Terrans at my level have no clue how to pressure me and then its gg. The other 40% of my ZvT games are lost because I made incorrect assumptions based on partial knowledge that I gained through imperfect scouting.
I have yet to see the person who scouts at the perfect time and sees everything when he does, even at the highest levels.
So, me being the mediocre player that I am can note that Terrans at my rating level have terrible mechanics in 90% of what they do, but they know 2 or 3 of their 15+ available openings that end the game unless perfectly countered.
I, on the other hand, am playing the game with clear goals in mind for every thing I do, adjusting my play to the map as well as race and style of my opponent, not perfect, but solid macro and micro, and I still lose 40% of my ZvT games to straight up scrubs.
My macro is imperfect, and I am saying SC2 has balance issues.
I agree with most of what you said, but getting beaten by an all in you weren't prepared for that was done by a "lesser" player is not something that happenes only to zerg. It happens to everyone.
Do you really think of all the games you have won that none of your defeated opponents watched the replay and thought the same thing as you? "omg, I can't believe I let this scrub beat me"
Honestly?
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No I don't, nor do I think that every person who banshee rushes me is a scrub. It is a perfectly viable tactic that a good player can use to transition into many other builds.
Its hard to say that and not sound self-contradicting when talking about the bullshit coin-flip situation that is early-game SC2 (not just Zerg).
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nobody thinks that maps are a decisive factor in all this
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try some maps with no chokes, just free space and base spots
now balance TvZ
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if Blizzard would think outside the box, they would identify which map characteristics favor each race and make maps accordingly
this will come with time, eventually, i hope
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Fact: SC1 had 4 balance patches in a 2 year span
Fact: SC2 beta had 14 patches over a 5 month period.
Question:
How can Blizzard believe that a player pool of only several thousand players can correctly evaluate game balance enough to have so many patches (read: major balance changes) in such a short period of time, whereas a player pool of millions warrants such an extremely slower process?
I find it utterly confusing, illogical, counter-intuitive, and nonsensical at the methodology Blizzard takes with SC2, especially considering the state of the game and its relationship to esports.
But considering what I hear of Frozen Throne and WoW, I can't say I'm all that surprised. I just think people shouldn't be so quick and blind to defend Blizzard.
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On October 02 2010 04:42 MindRush wrote:
nobody thinks that maps are a decisive factor in all this
..........................................
try some maps with no chokes, just free space and base spots
now balance TvZ
...........................................
if Blizzard would think outside the box, they would identify which map characteristics favor each race and make maps accordingly
this will come with time, eventually, i hope
You also have to realize that this is an unrealistic map and nobody wants to play or watch this game.
It is safe to assume you will have 8 mineral fields, 2 gas, and a modest choke point at your main base with a relatively close expansion.
This isn't to say that maps aren't a huge issue (every Blizzard map favors Terran right now, the only question is "by how much?"). The thing is, that a lot of these issues either aren't map related, or further hinder map variance due to artificially limiting options through necessary map mechanics.
If we played all our games on Newbie Steppes of War, Terran would have half the viable options, but then its just not entertaining to watch.
Maps DO need to be addressed, this doesn't mean many of the things people complain about aren't valid. Zerg early game is so bad, it doesn't matter how you change protoss, terran, or maps. Something will always pop up that is unstoppable until you've nerfed everything. Or... you could fix the problem...
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The reason people are asking for immediate balance change, is because veterans have played an almost perfectly balanced game in SC1. To them it's pretty obvious what needs to be addressed. If this new Blizzard was as well informed as the players are, the game wouldn't be so out of wack.
SCBW wasn't immediately an E-Sport, so balancing it early wasn't as relevant. It was just like any other competitive game. SC2 has already opened up as an E-Sport, it demands balance immediately, an unbalanced game makes the history and culture of E-Sports seem like a joke.
The majority favors a game where all things are fair and skill and talent are the deciding factor. No one enjoys spectating anything where the odds are skewed for one side.
Because of the history of Starcraft, SC2 better not take two damn freaking years to balance for crying out loud, that is absurd. It's not like SC2 really has any new interesting mechanics that justify slow and painful balance patches.
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To them it's pretty obvious what needs to be addressed.
Its funny, people say this, and then nobody can agree what actual fixes need to be made. Ask 10 players, even pros, what need to be changed and you'll get 10 different answers.
And this thread is stupid. So the OP would rather wait 2 years, and then get one bigass patch, rather than having periodic smaller ones? Why? How would that be better in any way?
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This is one of the most contradictory threads that I've ever seen on TL, and is done with the intent of proving something that isn't true.
The OP tries to say that Starcraft was more or less balanced from the get go and only took a few balance patches in order to make the game perfect, which is contrary to the concept that Blizzard is currently stating, saying that it will take years to properly balance the game.
However, the data the OP has shown proves Blizzards point. Even 2 and a half years after Starcrafts expansion came out, they were still making balance patches. Each of these patches was a long period of time apart, meaning extensive testing was done between each patch.
What the OP's data shows is that by the same design process, Starcraft 2 will be well balanced somewhere around 2 years after the final expansion comes out.
A lot of people seem to think that Brood War is perfectly balanced and was always perfectly balanced, and that this was by some convenient accident and had nothing to do with Blizzard. This line of thinking is ridiculous, just as ridiculous as the thought that Starcraft 2 should already be perfect, and that Blizzard has failed and is a terrible company because it isn't.
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On October 01 2010 20:24 Nightfall.589 wrote:That is over several seasons - not all in a particular season, or even the most recent one. Prot warriors, Prot paladins, two specs of DKs, Surv (?) hunters, Arcane Mages, Sub/Combat rogues are not viable in the current season, mostly due to nerfs.
http://www.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Destromath&n=Geodude
Glad cutoff on Rampage is 42, his 3s team is 33rd.
Again, I prefaced "is viable" with "is able to get Gladiator", not that it's the optimal way to get it. There's a hundred Arms warriors to that one Prot. That people can pull this off on so many specs (while their specs are also viable in PvE) is a testament to the fact that Blizzard can actually balance pretty damn well.
I don't want to go too off topic with this WoW stuff, but I think it illustrates the point that Blizzard is not as terrible at balance as people make it sound. Of course SC2 isn't perfect yet, and you'd have to be blind to not see that Zerg is highly limited in the early game, but asymmetry is incredibly important to Starcraft as a whole and that's why sweeping changes made simply to get the top 200 to be a three-way split in representation would be a bad idea.
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On October 02 2010 05:36 KingAce wrote:
Because of the history of Starcraft, SC2 better not take two damn freaking years to balance for crying out loud, that is absurd. It's not like SC2 really has any new interesting mechanics that justify slow and painful balance patches.
Brood War had Cliff Walk, Chronoboost, Warp-in, Inject Larvae, increased movement speed on creep, Add-on switching, and Mules? Well damn, I never knew that.
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On October 02 2010 04:55 a176 wrote:
How can Blizzard believe that a player pool of only several thousand players can correctly evaluate game balance enough to have so many patches (read: major balance changes) in such a short period of time, whereas a player pool of millions warrants such an extremely slower process?
How do you think the game is designed in the first place? They don't receive stone tablets from the heavens, giving them the framework for some perfectly balanced game. In alpha they ironed out the major themes and most of the units. Beta included thousands of players, including the vast majority of progamers, who took this raw game and started playing in it. Of course there were many major changes, and frequently so. By the end of the beta, the game was far more stable and balanced than at the beginning.
Once the game went live, imbalances crept in, but those can't be dealt with in the same shotgun approach. And the balance issues are far more subtle than those in beta. Nothing of the "Roaches are now 2 food and not 1" variety will ever hit SC2 retail, at least not until the expansion.
Also, the player pool size is irrelevant. No one cares about the majority of those millions (including myself), because the skill level is so low that it trumps any perceived imbalances. The people whose opinions matter, and whose results matter, they were all in the beta as well.
But considering what I hear of Frozen Throne and WoW, I can't say I'm all that surprised. I just think people shouldn't be so quick and blind to defend Blizzard.
If you honestly take second-hand information about balance as gospel, then you're really bad at figuring out when people hold biased opinions. If you've played online games for any amount of time, you'd know that the vast majority of players like to jump on the Underpowered bandwagon because it's such a convenient cover for their own inadequacies.
Look at low level zerg vs high level zerg complaints about Terran. Low levels complain about marauders, because attack moving a bioball against a single control group of zerg ground units ends in death. High level zergs complain about far different things. How much of the low level complaining is really about balance, and how much of it is a basic inability to understand that Z just don't work the same way as T by design? There's even complaints about not being able to wall in your ramps, for chrissakes (what are the lings gonna do behind a wall?).
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