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But don’t expect the game to be perfectly balanced following the 1.2 patch. Balance, explains Chris Sigaty, “is an ongoing process that, honestly, will take a year or longer to do. Even after Brood War was released we still patched and continued to drive towards a really solid final balance.” I regularly read statements like this, not just from Blizzard employees, but also from players. Many of these statements imply that there were tons of balance changes and that it would have been a hard process to balance the game. Personally, I don't think so. I've copied the whole patch log and erased all parts, which didn't have any influence on the balance. It shows that there were only 4 balance patches after the release of Starcraft vanilla. The patches are: 1.02, 1.04 with the release of Brood War, 1.05 and 1.08, which is huge considering that it didn't come with a release. The other patches sometimes included bug fixes, which might have altered the balance in some ways.
So the last real balance patch was 1.08. According to creepcolony.com it was released on 4/18/01. Starcraft was released in March, 1998. Brood War was released in November, 1998. It took 2 and a half years to release the final balance patch for Brood War, but there weren't any balance patches after that, only bug fixes, which might have influenced the balance.
I just wanted to write this down, because balancing Brood War wasn't such a big deal. In fact, they did it in quite an occasional way. It certainly didn't took so much changes as in Frozen Throne and that game isn't balanced at all in the end.
I guess, Blizzard will stay sloppy about the balance and we can only hope for severe changes in the addons, which will probably overthrow a lot.
Here are the down-sized Patch logs. + Show Spoiler + Patch 1.16.1 Patch 1.16 Patch 1.15.3 Patch 1.15.2 Patch 1.15.1 Patch 1.15 Fixed a bug that allowed burrowed units to be stacked: Patch 1.14 Patch 1.13f Patch 1.13e Patch 1.13d Fixed a bug that prevented the training of infested terrans. Patch 1.13c Patch 1.13b Patch 1.13 Patch 1.12b Patch 1.12 Added right-click feature that will set your building rally point. Patch 1.11b Fixed a bug that allowed SCV's to heal Marines. Fixed a bug that allowed Zerg to build without the need for creep. Patch 1.11 Patch 1.10 Fixed a bug involving burrowed units - if a burrowed lurker was attacked by air, it would stop acquiring other targets. Changed so that non-AI lurkers won't unburrow when attacked by air, which is a better idea all around. Patch 1.09b Patch 1.09 Patch 1.08b Patch 1.08 TERRAN: Valkyrie: Damage increase to 6 per missile. Acceleration and velocity increased slightly. Build time decreased. Science Facility: Build time decreased. Irradiate research cost increased to 200 minerals, 200 gas. Yamato Cannon research cost decreased to 100 minerals, 100 gas. Missile Turret: Decreased cost to 75 minerals. Factory: Charon Missile Booster research cost decreased to 100 minerals, 100 gas. Dropship: Increased speed. Goliath: Increased ground attack range. Battle Cruiser: Build time decreased. Supply cost decreased to 6. PROTOSS: Dragoon: Build time increased. Scout: Decreased cost to 275 minerals, 125 gas. Carrier: Supply cost decreased to 6. Templar: Psi Storm Damage reduced. Corsair: Disruption Web spell duration decreased. Zealot: Shields decreased to 60 and hit points increased to 100. ZERG: Queen: Decreased build cost to 100 minerals, 100 gas. Ultralisk: Supply cost decreased to 4. Queen's Nest: Spawn Broodling cost decreased to 100 minerals, 100 gas. Hydralisk Den: Lurker Aspect cost increased to 200 minerals, 200 gas. Hydralisk speed upgrade cost increased to 150 minerals, 150 gas. Spawning Pool: Increased build cost to 200 minerals Sunken Colony: Building armor increased to 2. Hit points decreased to 300. Patch 1.07 Patch 1.06 Exploits Fixed the Nydus Canal cancellation bug that allowed creating a mobile exit. Patch 1.05 Reduced Academy cost to 150 minerals. Reduced Science Facility cost to 100 minerals, 150 gas. Reduced Spider Mine research cost to 100 minerals, 100 gas. Reduced the cooldown for units on unload from a transport. Hallucinated devourers no longer leave acid spores on targeted units. Spider mines are now properly affected by disruption web. Patch 1.04 Changes: StarCraft compatibility with Brood War implemented. You can select all burrowed units of the same type or cloaked units of the same type by using the Ctrl+select method or by double clicking. If you have multiple Carriers or Reavers selected you can build Interceptors and Scarabs for all of them at the same time. Cooldown times of units being dropped out of transports corrected. Stim Pack causing Firebats to fire slowly corrected. Zergling adrenal gland upgrade effects corrected. Balance Changes: Terran: Wraith: Decreased cost to 150 minerals, 100 gas. Increased cooldown rate of ground attack. Increased air to air damage to 20. Dropship: Increased speed slightly. Science Vessel: Decreased cost to 100 minerals, 225 gas. Increased acceleration Increased overall damage of Irradiate Increased sight radius Battlecruiser: Increased starting armor to 3 Increased Yamato Cannon damage to 260 Goliath: Increased ground damage to 12 Increased effectiveness of weapon upgrade on ground to air weapon system Nuke: Nuclear Missiles build faster ComSat: Decreased energy cost to 50 Starport: Decrease cost of Starport to 150 minerals, 100 gas Decreased add-on cost of Control Tower to 50 minerals, 50 gas Decreased build time Protoss: Archon: Increased acceleration Dragoon: Decreased cost to 125 minerals, 50 gas Decreased build time Increased range upgrade (Singularity Charge) by 1 High Templar: Decreased energy cost of Hallucination to 100 Scout: Increased Air to Air damage to 28 Decreased starting armor to 0 Increased shields to 100 and hit points to 150 Increased cooldown rate of ground attack Carrier: Changed build cost to 350 minerals, and 250 gas Increased hit points of Carrier to 300 Increased starting armor of Carrier to 4 Increased Interceptor shields and hitpoints to 40 Increased Interceptor damage to 6 Decreased Interceptor cost to 25 Arbiter: Decreased cost to 100 minerals, 350 gas Shuttle: Increased build time Reaver: Increased build time Templar Archives: Increased cost to 150 minerals, 200 gas. Citadel of Adun: Decreased cost to 150 minerals, 100 gas. Stargate: Decreased cost to 150 minerals, 150 gas Decreased build time Robotics Facility: Increased build time Robotics Support Bay: Increased cost to 150 minerals, 100 gas Observatory: Decreased cost to 50 minerals, 100 gas Forge: Decreased cost to 150 minerals Photon Cannon: Decreased build time Fleet Beacon: Decreased cost of "Increased Carrier capacity" upgrade to 100 minerals, 100 gas Decreased research time of "Increased Carrier capacity" upgrade Shield Battery: Increased starting energy to 100 Increased effective range of “Recharge Shields” ability Zerg: Overlord: Increased speed bonus for "Pneumatized Carapace" upgrade Decreased research time of "Ventral Sacs" upgrade Scourge: Increase hit points to 25 Hydralisk: Increased build time Queen: Increased range of Broodling by 1 Increase energy cost of Parasite to 75 Decreased Parasite casting range to 12 Defiler: Increased cost to 50 minerals, 150 gas Hatchery: Decreased the speed at which the Hatchery/Lair/Hive spawn new larva Decreased build cost to 300 minerals Increased build time Sunken Colony: Decreased cost of Sunken Colony upgrade to 50 minerals Decreased build time Increased attack rate of Sunken Colony Increased damage to 40 Spore Colony: Decreased build time Changed damage type to normal Greater Spire: Increased build time Patch 1.03 Patch 1.02 Changes: Flying units no longer receive 'cover' from terrain features. Fixed the bug when cancelling a guardian in high latency games that killed the Mutalisk and gave multiple refunds. Increased the cost of a Zerg Hatchery from 300 to 350 minerals. Changed the damage type of the Photon Cannon weapon system from explosion to normal. Fixed a bug that could potentially, in high latency games, over-charge zerg players when morphing larva into units. Patch 1.01 Changes: Enemy Science Vessels no longer continually unmask after irradiating units.
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What proof do you have that wc3 is unbalanced? Unsupported statements.
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What are you on about? You outright contradict yourself.
Starcraft was never balanced.
How long did it take for Brood War to get released? How long after that did balance patches come out? 2 and a half years as you said, and then there were still a few patches.
It is perfectly reasonable that SCII isn't flawlessly balanced yet.
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soooo... you're saying that sc2 should be perfectly balanced in about 2 years from now?
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isn't it the general consensus that Orc (specifically Blademaster) is imbalanced?
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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.
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On October 01 2010 07:42 blabber wrote: isn't it the general consensus that Orc (specifically Blademaster) is imbalanced?
yes.
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Well, you have to remember that The Blizzard that made SC and BW is a different Blizzard. Most of those guys have gone and started new companies, like ArenaNet.
So it's probably better to look at the balancing history of WC3, possibly WoW's arenas also. Sloppy, of course.
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o boy..i smell another BW to SC2 balance comparison thread..
but this time WC3 got mixed in somehow so this might be fun
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2 and a half years is still a while compared to how long sc2 has been out. Also, it wasn't as big an issue then because there wasn't such a well established call for extremely competitive gaming when it came out, while sc2 from the BETA has had big money tourneys and a highly competitive scene.
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Osaka27014 Posts
On October 01 2010 07:41 Ndugu wrote: It is perfectly reasonable that SCII isn't flawlessly balanced yet.
On October 01 2010 07:41 lindn wrote: soooo... you're saying that sc2 should be perfectly balanced in about 2 years from now?
Did you guys read the same OP I did? He is simply saying that the statement "BW took a long time to patch" isn't supported by the patch notes.
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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.
And the ingenuity of players. It wasn't until Boxer that people actually took Terran seriously. Or After that July to even out TvZ. BW went though countless stages of innovation.
SC2 on the other hand with its Crappy hard counter system will take way more time to balance. As SCBW was more flexible with its units.
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We have yet to see a patch like 1.04 or 1.08. What is the time between 1.01 and 1.04? and 1.08? I am suspedting there is a long time between these patches. Blizzard said patching was over a long period of time, not that there were alot of patches.
Trying to say that the number of balance patches is equal to time is pretty illogical.
We probably will see balance changes like 1.04 and 1.08, but it will only be released when Blizzard is 100% positive that that is the correct path.
You say you don't think it will take years or longer to balance, and your evidence is the patch history of SC1. But the balance changes took around 3 years to balance completely. Assuming Blizzard learned alot from those balance changes, It is plausable for it to be balanced in a year or longer. They will probably have to have small tweaks once the expansions come out.
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On October 01 2010 07:46 Manifesto7 wrote:Show nested quote +On October 01 2010 07:41 Ndugu wrote: It is perfectly reasonable that SCII isn't flawlessly balanced yet. Show nested quote +On October 01 2010 07:41 lindn wrote: soooo... you're saying that sc2 should be perfectly balanced in about 2 years from now? Did you guys read the same OP I did? He is simply saying that the statement "BW took a long time to patch" isn't supported by the patch notes. Three years is a lot longer than two months.
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On October 01 2010 07:46 Manifesto7 wrote:Show nested quote +On October 01 2010 07:41 Ndugu wrote: It is perfectly reasonable that SCII isn't flawlessly balanced yet. Show nested quote +On October 01 2010 07:41 lindn wrote: soooo... you're saying that sc2 should be perfectly balanced in about 2 years from now? Did you guys read the same OP I did? He is simply saying that the statement "BW took a long time to patch" isn't supported by the patch notes.
what is a long time then? two a half years seems longgggg to me
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What proof do you have that wc3 is unbalanced? Unsupported statements.
Probably the fact undead might as well not be there and no one would notice.
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On October 01 2010 07:42 blabber wrote: isn't it the general consensus that Orc (specifically Blademaster) is imbalanced? vs Undead, yes.
This is a problem not with the unit, but the random drops in WC3. You can stack BM so much that they really become too powerful.
Kind of a inherent problem when you add any random factor to competitive game, which is why they got rid of all randomness in SC2. Even the random hit % when firing uphill in BW was not a good idea.
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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. Yeah, the balance in BW isn't something you can replicate without copying everything about the game. (No new units/mechanics/features, just new graphics). That style of balance is making a whole bunch of OP stuff and ramming them into the tech tree. SC2 is much more reasonable, about weaker units and balancing more by nerfs.
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On October 01 2010 07:48 muzzy wrote: Kind of a inherent problem when you add any random factor to competitive game, which is why they got rid of all randomness in SC2. Even the random hit % when firing uphill in BW was not a good idea.
That was a pretty good idea actually.
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On October 01 2010 07:46 Raiden X wrote:Show nested quote +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. SC2 on the other hand with its Crappy hard counter system will take way more time to balance. As SCBW was more flexible with its units. Hard counter system? have you played more than 5 games of SC2?
I think you forgot get something: a clue.
SC2 countering system is no different from BW. There will be unit compositions that work better against other unit composition that is like basic RTS -_-
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On October 01 2010 07:41 Ndugu wrote: What are you on about? You outright contradict yourself.
Starcraft was never balanced.
How long did it take for Brood War to get released? How long after that did balance patches come out? 2 and a half years as you said, and then there were still a few patches.
It is perfectly reasonable that SCII isn't flawlessly balanced yet.
The main problem is that the changes are so incredibly tentative (as compared to the relatively major SC1 patches) that it'll take forever for them to make it balanced at the current rate. If Blizzard could develop the balls to make many changes across the board, then we could see some real change in the matchups, and balance would go much faster. As-is, I'm expecting HotS to offer about as much content as a single SC1 patch. That's not good news for the pro scene, considering the current state of Zerg and Terran.
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On October 01 2010 07:45 .risingdragoon wrote: Well, you have to remember that The Blizzard that made SC and BW is a different Blizzard. Most of those guys have gone and started new companies, like ArenaNet.
Another common, unsubstantiated claim
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U cant expect blizz to do anything fast =X
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One big thing is that Brood War is the expansion to Starcraft. With HoTS coming out, and then the Toss expansion after that, you can't compare BW patching to WoL.
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A few of the patches here change most of the units in the game. By comparison, SC2's patches change almost nothing (last patch altered 5 or so units?).
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Brood War being as good as it is like the other guy said was a total fluke.
Blizzard had no idea how well it would do and yes, it takes a long process that could drag on forever with each new variable you throw into the mix. There's a good reason you don't see 4 races in SC2.
There are a ridiculous amount of problems with SC2 as it stands. I think if they paid more attention to the Korean Pro Gaming scene they could have learned several ways to improve the game more, but they didn't. They screwed up on a lot of basic principles including soft counters, unit viability and map making.
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On October 01 2010 07:52 hugman wrote:Show nested quote +On October 01 2010 07:45 .risingdragoon wrote: Well, you have to remember that The Blizzard that made SC and BW is a different Blizzard. Most of those guys have gone and started new companies, like ArenaNet. Another common, unsubstantiated claim
I think yours is the unsubstantiated claim.
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On October 01 2010 07:51 Seide wrote:Show nested quote +On October 01 2010 07:46 Raiden X wrote: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. SC2 on the other hand with its Crappy hard counter system will take way more time to balance. As SCBW was more flexible with its units. Hard counter system? have you played more than 5 games of SC2? I think you forgot get something: a clue. SC2 countering system is no different from BW. There will be unit compositions that work better against other unit composition that is like basic RTS -_- Untrue, in brood war, counters could often be overcome by micro or positioning. SC2, not as much so - you always will have to switch to a new unit/composition.
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On October 01 2010 07:46 Raiden X wrote:Show nested quote +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. And the ingenuity of players. It wasn't until Boxer that people actually took Terran seriously. Or After that July to even out TvZ. BW went though countless stages of innovation. SC2 on the other hand with its Crappy hard counter system will take way more time to balance. As SCBW was more flexible with its units.
The bonus damage counter system is stupid.
Strategy should be more than rock/paper/scissors.
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On October 01 2010 07:53 Weasel- wrote: A few of the patches here change most of the units in the game. By comparison, SC2's patches change almost nothing (last patch altered 5 or so units?). And altered them minutely, at that. The BW patches made an IMPACT. What's the impact of the last patch? From the GSL games I've seen, almost nothing shorter of weaker two gate pressure.
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On October 01 2010 07:53 noD wrote: U cant expect blizz to do anything fast =X This is probably why most of the games they released have been major hits. Because they take their time and dont pull Tabula Rasas.
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So your point is that they ONLY took 2 and a half years to balance the game?
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There is no possible comparission between BW and SC2... they are 2 different games...
why? because of the mechanics? no because of the races? no because the community around SC2 at the release compared to the BW community at the release it's completly DIFFERENT. The SC2 community have a HUGE background and knowledge from BW. Things should be faster now compared to Vanilla or BW imo.
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On October 01 2010 07:55 Pokebunny wrote:Show nested quote +On October 01 2010 07:51 Seide wrote:On October 01 2010 07:46 Raiden X wrote: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. SC2 on the other hand with its Crappy hard counter system will take way more time to balance. As SCBW was more flexible with its units. Hard counter system? have you played more than 5 games of SC2? I think you forgot get something: a clue. SC2 countering system is no different from BW. There will be unit compositions that work better against other unit composition that is like basic RTS -_- Untrue, in brood war, counters could often be overcome by micro or positioning. SC2, not as much so - you always will have to switch to a new unit/composition. Correct, or slight change in numbers can turn the tides.
Tester already mentioned this.
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On October 01 2010 07:38 Perscienter wrote: Many of these statements imply that there were tons of balance changes
+ Show Spoiler + TERRAN: Valkyrie: Damage increase to 6 per missile. Acceleration and velocity increased slightly. Build time decreased. Science Facility: Build time decreased. Irradiate research cost increased to 200 minerals, 200 gas. Yamato Cannon research cost decreased to 100 minerals, 100 gas. Missile Turret: Decreased cost to 75 minerals. Factory: Charon Missile Booster research cost decreased to 100 minerals, 100 gas. Dropship: Increased speed. Goliath: Increased ground attack range. Battle Cruiser: Build time decreased. Supply cost decreased to 6. PROTOSS: Dragoon: Build time increased. Scout: Decreased cost to 275 minerals, 125 gas. Carrier: Supply cost decreased to 6. Templar: Psi Storm Damage reduced. Corsair: Disruption Web spell duration decreased. Zealot: Shields decreased to 60 and hit points increased to 100. ZERG: Queen: Decreased build cost to 100 minerals, 100 gas. Ultralisk: Supply cost decreased to 4. Queen's Nest: Spawn Broodling cost decreased to 100 minerals, 100 gas. Hydralisk Den: Lurker Aspect cost increased to 200 minerals, 200 gas. Hydralisk speed upgrade cost increased to 150 minerals, 150 gas. Spawning Pool: Increased build cost to 200 minerals Sunken Colony: Building armor increased to 2. Hit points decreased to 300. Patch 1.07 Patch 1.06 Exploits Fixed the Nydus Canal cancellation bug that allowed creating a mobile exit. Patch 1.05 Reduced Academy cost to 150 minerals. Reduced Science Facility cost to 100 minerals, 150 gas. Reduced Spider Mine research cost to 100 minerals, 100 gas. Reduced the cooldown for units on unload from a transport. Hallucinated devourers no longer leave acid spores on targeted units. Spider mines are now properly affected by disruption web. Patch 1.04 Changes: StarCraft compatibility with Brood War implemented. You can select all burrowed units of the same type or cloaked units of the same type by using the Ctrl+select method or by double clicking. If you have multiple Carriers or Reavers selected you can build Interceptors and Scarabs for all of them at the same time. Cooldown times of units being dropped out of transports corrected. Stim Pack causing Firebats to fire slowly corrected. Zergling adrenal gland upgrade effects corrected. Balance Changes: Terran: Wraith: Decreased cost to 150 minerals, 100 gas. Increased cooldown rate of ground attack. Increased air to air damage to 20. Dropship: Increased speed slightly. Science Vessel: Decreased cost to 100 minerals, 225 gas. Increased acceleration Increased overall damage of Irradiate Increased sight radius Battlecruiser: Increased starting armor to 3 Increased Yamato Cannon damage to 260 Goliath: Increased ground damage to 12 Increased effectiveness of weapon upgrade on ground to air weapon system Nuke: Nuclear Missiles build faster ComSat: Decreased energy cost to 50 Starport: Decrease cost of Starport to 150 minerals, 100 gas Decreased add-on cost of Control Tower to 50 minerals, 50 gas Decreased build time Protoss: Archon: Increased acceleration Dragoon: Decreased cost to 125 minerals, 50 gas Decreased build time Increased range upgrade (Singularity Charge) by 1 High Templar: Decreased energy cost of Hallucination to 100 Scout: Increased Air to Air damage to 28 Decreased starting armor to 0 Increased shields to 100 and hit points to 150 Increased cooldown rate of ground attack Carrier: Changed build cost to 350 minerals, and 250 gas Increased hit points of Carrier to 300 Increased starting armor of Carrier to 4 Increased Interceptor shields and hitpoints to 40 Increased Interceptor damage to 6 Decreased Interceptor cost to 25 Arbiter: Decreased cost to 100 minerals, 350 gas Shuttle: Increased build time Reaver: Increased build time Templar Archives: Increased cost to 150 minerals, 200 gas. Citadel of Adun: Decreased cost to 150 minerals, 100 gas. Stargate: Decreased cost to 150 minerals, 150 gas Decreased build time Robotics Facility: Increased build time Robotics Support Bay: Increased cost to 150 minerals, 100 gas Observatory: Decreased cost to 50 minerals, 100 gas Forge: Decreased cost to 150 minerals Photon Cannon: Decreased build time Fleet Beacon: Decreased cost of "Increased Carrier capacity" upgrade to 100 minerals, 100 gas Decreased research time of "Increased Carrier capacity" upgrade Shield Battery: Increased starting energy to 100 Increased effective range of “Recharge Shields” ability Zerg: Overlord: Increased speed bonus for "Pneumatized Carapace" upgrade Decreased research time of "Ventral Sacs" upgrade Scourge: Increase hit points to 25 Hydralisk: Increased build time Queen: Increased range of Broodling by 1 Increase energy cost of Parasite to 75 Decreased Parasite casting range to 12 Defiler: Increased cost to 50 minerals, 150 gas Hatchery: Decreased the speed at which the Hatchery/Lair/Hive spawn new larva Decreased build cost to 300 minerals Increased build time Sunken Colony: Decreased cost of Sunken Colony upgrade to 50 minerals Decreased build time Increased attack rate of Sunken Colony Increased damage to 40 Spore Colony: Decreased build time Changed damage type to normal Greater Spire: Increased build time Patch 1.03 Patch 1.02 Changes: Flying units no longer receive 'cover' from terrain features. Fixed the bug when cancelling a guardian in high latency games that killed the Mutalisk and gave multiple refunds. Increased the cost of a Zerg Hatchery from 300 to 350 minerals. Changed the damage type of the Photon Cannon weapon system from explosion to normal. Fixed a bug that could potentially, in high latency games, over-charge zerg players when morphing larva into units. Patch 1.01 Changes: Enemy Science Vessels no longer continually unmask after irradiating units.
and that it would have been a hard process to balance the game.
It took 2 and a half years to release the final balance patch for Brood War
I'm sorry, I don't understand your argument.
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The biggest factor is that the state of computer gaming in general is vastly different from BW. The people of us that are 21+ remember the days when patches were released on PcGamer mags and we had to beg our parents to buy them because our 56k modems would spend all day otherwise.
Now days we live in a culture of patches, look at the youtube and blogger scene surrounding WoW, and other games.
In two years time or so, we will see the release of the final expansion, and shortly after the inevitable balance patch that will hopefully set SC2 up for a long competitive history, but the number of patches between here and there will mostly depend upon the amount of of time Blizzard is willing to put into it while we wait for more expos.
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I'm confused.
You claim blizzard is being slow w/ patching, that patching Starcraft was easy so, therefore, SC2 should be easy.
However, you present the fact that the major changes happened 6months+ after the game release, including the 4/18/01 Starcraft patch (3 years after release). I played Starcraft and Starcraft:Broodwar hardcore from the day they came out. 1.04 and 1.08 changed gigantic aspects of the game that deeply affected the way people played the game. They were awesome!
The length of time it took to balance Starcraft: Broodwar is EXACTLY why I'm not concerned about SC2 at this point. Starcraft 2 has been out for 2 months. I wouldn't be surprised if a gigantic balance patch came out 6-8 months after release.
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On October 01 2010 07:48 muzzy wrote:Show nested quote +On October 01 2010 07:42 blabber wrote: isn't it the general consensus that Orc (specifically Blademaster) is imbalanced? vs Undead, yes. This is a problem not with the unit, but the random drops in WC3. You can stack BM so much that they really become too powerful. Kind of a inherent problem when you add any random factor to competitive game, which is why they got rid of all randomness in SC2. Even the random hit % when firing uphill in BW was not a good idea.
i disagree, random firing % uphill means it is a tactical move to take a hold of the ramp. There should be a disadvantage when trying to atk upwards. It is a common real war strategy, whoever has the high ground usually has the upper hand.
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Oh boy another thread to cry about game balance that won't amount to anything.
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On October 01 2010 07:55 .risingdragoon wrote:Show nested quote +On October 01 2010 07:52 hugman wrote:On October 01 2010 07:45 .risingdragoon wrote: Well, you have to remember that The Blizzard that made SC and BW is a different Blizzard. Most of those guys have gone and started new companies, like ArenaNet. Another common, unsubstantiated claim I think yours is the unsubstantiated claim.
Regardless if whether it is or not, it is plain wrong.
1 - The people from SC/BW working on this are different people than they were 10 years ago. Shit happens, they think differently, they design games differently after learning and improving at what they do over time.
2 - There are many people who did not work on SC/BW that did work on SC2. This adds in new ideas the original team would not have had, good or bad.
Different times, different developers, different games. This is a different Blizzard.
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On October 01 2010 07:59 Raz0r wrote:Show nested quote +On October 01 2010 07:48 muzzy wrote:On October 01 2010 07:42 blabber wrote: isn't it the general consensus that Orc (specifically Blademaster) is imbalanced? vs Undead, yes. This is a problem not with the unit, but the random drops in WC3. You can stack BM so much that they really become too powerful. Kind of a inherent problem when you add any random factor to competitive game, which is why they got rid of all randomness in SC2. Even the random hit % when firing uphill in BW was not a good idea. i disagree, random firing % uphill means it is a tactical move to take a hold of the ramp. There should be a disadvantage when trying to atk upwards. It is a common real war strategy, whoever has the high ground usually has the upper hand. The idea is that that being RANDOM is a bad idea. A %damage decrease would be better, so that it would be consistent.
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On October 01 2010 07:41 Pawshter wrote: What proof do you have that wc3 is unbalanced? Unsupported statements. Orc vs Undead is considered to be quite imbalanced.
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On October 01 2010 08:00 Bair wrote:Show nested quote +On October 01 2010 07:55 .risingdragoon wrote:On October 01 2010 07:52 hugman wrote:On October 01 2010 07:45 .risingdragoon wrote: Well, you have to remember that The Blizzard that made SC and BW is a different Blizzard. Most of those guys have gone and started new companies, like ArenaNet. Another common, unsubstantiated claim I think yours is the unsubstantiated claim. Regardless if whether it is or not, it is plain wrong. 1 - The people from SC/BW working on this are different people than they were 10 years ago. Shit happens, they think differently, they design games differently after learning and improving at what they do over time. 2 - There are many people who did not work on SC/BW that did work on SC2. This adds in new ideas the original team would not have had, good or bad. Different times, different developers, different games. This is a different Blizzard. Well, you can say that for anything. It doesn't MEAN anything. If say, you could name CORE developers that had left, you might have a point. Otherwise, it's just like saying "Well the Nintendo that made Super Mario World is different than the Nintendo that made Super Mario Galaxy."
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It seems ridiculous that people have been begging for balance changes super fast, when the game everyone praises - SC:BW had very long times between balance patches. It takes a long time to really understand what changes need to be made and how they affect the game.
I think the beta made everyone crazy - they think they are entitled to making whatever race they play more powerful right, now, and in the exact way they want. Don't get me wrong, I think the beta was a great idea, but people wrongly expect that attitude to continue after release, which is a horrible idea.
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On October 01 2010 08:00 MythicalMage wrote:Show nested quote +On October 01 2010 07:59 Raz0r wrote:On October 01 2010 07:48 muzzy wrote:On October 01 2010 07:42 blabber wrote: isn't it the general consensus that Orc (specifically Blademaster) is imbalanced? vs Undead, yes. This is a problem not with the unit, but the random drops in WC3. You can stack BM so much that they really become too powerful. Kind of a inherent problem when you add any random factor to competitive game, which is why they got rid of all randomness in SC2. Even the random hit % when firing uphill in BW was not a good idea. i disagree, random firing % uphill means it is a tactical move to take a hold of the ramp. There should be a disadvantage when trying to atk upwards. It is a common real war strategy, whoever has the high ground usually has the upper hand. The idea is that that being RANDOM is a bad idea. A %damage decrease would be better, so that it would be consistent.
Adding a bit to Mystical's point. Since it is random, what if for an entire battle that 30% never kicked in? You just went through the trouble of getting the high ground for nothing.
Or what if it kicked in every time? Suddenly an army that would have otherwise lost terribly wins just because they had the high ground.
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On October 01 2010 07:45 .risingdragoon wrote: Well, you have to remember that The Blizzard that made SC and BW is a different Blizzard. Most of those guys have gone and started new companies, like ArenaNet.
So it's probably better to look at the balancing history of WC3, possibly WoW's arenas also. Sloppy, of course.
u cant be serious in comparing WOW arena balance too what the balance team for sc2 is going to do. wow had to balance single player and multiplayer at the same time. that is why they had so many difficulties... terrible example... not to even mention trying to balance 8 races or whatever compared too 3
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If Blizzard somehow managed to make SC2 perfectly balanced the majority of players would still complain about balance constantly.
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On October 01 2010 08:02 MythicalMage wrote:Show nested quote +On October 01 2010 08:00 Bair wrote:On October 01 2010 07:55 .risingdragoon wrote:On October 01 2010 07:52 hugman wrote:On October 01 2010 07:45 .risingdragoon wrote: Well, you have to remember that The Blizzard that made SC and BW is a different Blizzard. Most of those guys have gone and started new companies, like ArenaNet. Another common, unsubstantiated claim I think yours is the unsubstantiated claim. Regardless if whether it is or not, it is plain wrong. 1 - The people from SC/BW working on this are different people than they were 10 years ago. Shit happens, they think differently, they design games differently after learning and improving at what they do over time. 2 - There are many people who did not work on SC/BW that did work on SC2. This adds in new ideas the original team would not have had, good or bad. Different times, different developers, different games. This is a different Blizzard. Well, you can say that for anything. It doesn't MEAN anything. If say, you could name CORE developers that had left, you might have a point. Otherwise, it's just like saying "Well the Nintendo that made Super Mario World is different than the Nintendo that made Super Mario Galaxy."
Why do I have to name the core developers? The ones who left still left regardless of if I know who they are.
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If anything, this shows that if it is necessary Blizzard is not afraid to make game sweeping changes to a game that has been out for a substatial amout of time.
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On October 01 2010 07:59 Raz0r wrote:Show nested quote +On October 01 2010 07:48 muzzy wrote:On October 01 2010 07:42 blabber wrote: isn't it the general consensus that Orc (specifically Blademaster) is imbalanced? vs Undead, yes. This is a problem not with the unit, but the random drops in WC3. You can stack BM so much that they really become too powerful. Kind of a inherent problem when you add any random factor to competitive game, which is why they got rid of all randomness in SC2. Even the random hit % when firing uphill in BW was not a good idea. i disagree, random firing % uphill means it is a tactical move to take a hold of the ramp. There should be a disadvantage when trying to atk upwards. It is a common real war strategy, whoever has the high ground usually has the upper hand. I'm not saying the idea of high ground advantage is bad. I'm saying randomness is bad.
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On October 01 2010 08:04 Bair wrote:Show nested quote +On October 01 2010 08:02 MythicalMage wrote:On October 01 2010 08:00 Bair wrote:On October 01 2010 07:55 .risingdragoon wrote:On October 01 2010 07:52 hugman wrote:On October 01 2010 07:45 .risingdragoon wrote: Well, you have to remember that The Blizzard that made SC and BW is a different Blizzard. Most of those guys have gone and started new companies, like ArenaNet. Another common, unsubstantiated claim I think yours is the unsubstantiated claim. Regardless if whether it is or not, it is plain wrong. 1 - The people from SC/BW working on this are different people than they were 10 years ago. Shit happens, they think differently, they design games differently after learning and improving at what they do over time. 2 - There are many people who did not work on SC/BW that did work on SC2. This adds in new ideas the original team would not have had, good or bad. Different times, different developers, different games. This is a different Blizzard. Well, you can say that for anything. It doesn't MEAN anything. If say, you could name CORE developers that had left, you might have a point. Otherwise, it's just like saying "Well the Nintendo that made Super Mario World is different than the Nintendo that made Super Mario Galaxy." Why do I have to name the core developers? The ones who left still left regardless of if I know who they are. There's no proof that they left, if you can't name or find an article that says "Core BW developers leave Blizzard." Otherwise, we don't know the significance of the people that left. It could be interns in terms of importance, or it could be the lead designers.
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Actually there is. Look at the game manuals, or the credits. There is a shortlist of guys who stuck around with Blizzard.
Bill Roper led the SC:BW team. Now we have Dustin. That's just a starting point.
Stop trolling. You aren't contributing anything.
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On October 01 2010 08:06 MythicalMage wrote:Show nested quote +On October 01 2010 08:04 Bair wrote:On October 01 2010 08:02 MythicalMage wrote:On October 01 2010 08:00 Bair wrote:On October 01 2010 07:55 .risingdragoon wrote:On October 01 2010 07:52 hugman wrote:On October 01 2010 07:45 .risingdragoon wrote: Well, you have to remember that The Blizzard that made SC and BW is a different Blizzard. Most of those guys have gone and started new companies, like ArenaNet. Another common, unsubstantiated claim I think yours is the unsubstantiated claim. Regardless if whether it is or not, it is plain wrong. 1 - The people from SC/BW working on this are different people than they were 10 years ago. Shit happens, they think differently, they design games differently after learning and improving at what they do over time. 2 - There are many people who did not work on SC/BW that did work on SC2. This adds in new ideas the original team would not have had, good or bad. Different times, different developers, different games. This is a different Blizzard. Well, you can say that for anything. It doesn't MEAN anything. If say, you could name CORE developers that had left, you might have a point. Otherwise, it's just like saying "Well the Nintendo that made Super Mario World is different than the Nintendo that made Super Mario Galaxy." Why do I have to name the core developers? The ones who left still left regardless of if I know who they are. There's no proof that they left, if you can't name or find an article that says "Core BW developers leave Blizzard." Otherwise, we don't know the significance of the people that left. It could be interns in terms of importance, or it could be the lead designers.
And you'd know them by name, right?
I remember reading an article on BW's balance, about how they had a formula for balancing tech trees. This was later used for Guild Wars at ArenaNet. So yeah, I do consider the people behind SC2 a different group.
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On October 01 2010 08:06 MythicalMage wrote:Show nested quote +On October 01 2010 08:04 Bair wrote:On October 01 2010 08:02 MythicalMage wrote:On October 01 2010 08:00 Bair wrote:On October 01 2010 07:55 .risingdragoon wrote:On October 01 2010 07:52 hugman wrote:On October 01 2010 07:45 .risingdragoon wrote: Well, you have to remember that The Blizzard that made SC and BW is a different Blizzard. Most of those guys have gone and started new companies, like ArenaNet. Another common, unsubstantiated claim I think yours is the unsubstantiated claim. Regardless if whether it is or not, it is plain wrong. 1 - The people from SC/BW working on this are different people than they were 10 years ago. Shit happens, they think differently, they design games differently after learning and improving at what they do over time. 2 - There are many people who did not work on SC/BW that did work on SC2. This adds in new ideas the original team would not have had, good or bad. Different times, different developers, different games. This is a different Blizzard. Well, you can say that for anything. It doesn't MEAN anything. If say, you could name CORE developers that had left, you might have a point. Otherwise, it's just like saying "Well the Nintendo that made Super Mario World is different than the Nintendo that made Super Mario Galaxy." Why do I have to name the core developers? The ones who left still left regardless of if I know who they are. There's no proof that they left, if you can't name or find an article that says "Core BW developers leave Blizzard." Otherwise, we don't know the significance of the people that left. It could be interns in terms of importance, or it could be the lead designers.
Additionally, there is no proof that they stayed. Since you seem to be attempting to shoot down what I have to say, I will leave the burden of proof to you.
Even with names, we would not know the significance. We do not know who contributed what to the overall creation of SC/BW. And Dustin Browder jokes aside, we do not know who contributed what to the overall creation of SC2. For all we know, one guy had all the good ideas, and the rest just supported him. Or everyone had a fair share of ideas.
You seem to be missing the point as to why this is not the same Blizzard. New people have arrived, senior people have left, new management is pulling the strings, and 10 years has changed everything in the gaming industry.
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On October 01 2010 08:03 EnderCN wrote: If Blizzard somehow managed to make SC2 perfectly balanced the majority of players would still complain about balance constantly. ahahahah this is so sad but true -____-
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I think we should drop the comparisons already. For bw players sc2 will never measure up because it's more or less another random 3d rts with the exception of having an already established pro-scene in its beta due to bw. For sc2 players bw is old and ugly, and they'd be 10 years behind everyone else if they ever attempted it.
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It's kind of sad once you think about it. I hate mental blocks and barriers.
My message to all the complainers is this: "You aren't trying hard enough."
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we just need players like jaedong and Flash that can ignore the balance...so people can stfu about balance...constantly complaining about the balance instead of trying to explore different options is not gonna get u anywhere.
yea some noname bw progamer who became known in early stage of sc2 complains about balance...big deal.
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While the quantity of changes SC underwent is actually even smaller than the sum of changes we've seen in SC2 since beta began, we should note that most balance patches were major and spaced far apart. We may assume that the time between balance changes allowed for much deliberation.
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SC2's balancing is kindava urgent issue, things learned through BW isn't just unlearned.
SC2 needs desperately be balanced fast. When SC came out there was not nearly the expectation of it being balanced.
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I daubt anyone's discussing pre-BW game balance and we didn't even see the first expansion yet.
Complain all you want, Blizzard will just let the game play out and then add a bunch of units that might fix it or might break it even more. All they care is that it's not completely broken and people still play. We're a while after release and no needed changes have been made, nor do we see any on the horizon, Blizzard just moved to Heart of the Swarm.
By your logic we'll see balance 2 years after Legacy of the Void which might aswell be in 5 years, i wouldn't be suprised if that was the case.
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L'annee de l'orc. I've gotta start reading my esports news in french.
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On October 01 2010 08:17 Bair wrote:Show nested quote +On October 01 2010 08:06 MythicalMage wrote:On October 01 2010 08:04 Bair wrote:On October 01 2010 08:02 MythicalMage wrote:On October 01 2010 08:00 Bair wrote:On October 01 2010 07:55 .risingdragoon wrote:On October 01 2010 07:52 hugman wrote:On October 01 2010 07:45 .risingdragoon wrote: Well, you have to remember that The Blizzard that made SC and BW is a different Blizzard. Most of those guys have gone and started new companies, like ArenaNet. Another common, unsubstantiated claim I think yours is the unsubstantiated claim. Regardless if whether it is or not, it is plain wrong. 1 - The people from SC/BW working on this are different people than they were 10 years ago. Shit happens, they think differently, they design games differently after learning and improving at what they do over time. 2 - There are many people who did not work on SC/BW that did work on SC2. This adds in new ideas the original team would not have had, good or bad. Different times, different developers, different games. This is a different Blizzard. Well, you can say that for anything. It doesn't MEAN anything. If say, you could name CORE developers that had left, you might have a point. Otherwise, it's just like saying "Well the Nintendo that made Super Mario World is different than the Nintendo that made Super Mario Galaxy." Why do I have to name the core developers? The ones who left still left regardless of if I know who they are. There's no proof that they left, if you can't name or find an article that says "Core BW developers leave Blizzard." Otherwise, we don't know the significance of the people that left. It could be interns in terms of importance, or it could be the lead designers. Additionally, there is no proof that they stayed. Since you seem to be attempting to shoot down what I have to say, I will leave the burden of proof to you. Even with names, we would not know the significance. We do not know who contributed what to the overall creation of SC/BW. And Dustin Browder jokes aside, we do not know who contributed what to the overall creation of SC2. For all we know, one guy had all the good ideas, and the rest just supported him. Or everyone had a fair share of ideas. You seem to be missing the point as to why this is not the same Blizzard. New people have arrived, senior people have left, new management is pulling the strings, and 10 years has changed everything in the gaming industry.
If you really want you can go compare the developers in SC1/BW's credits:
http://www.mobygames.com/game/windows/starcraft-brood-war/credits http://www.mobygames.com/game/windows/starcraft/credits
Versus the credits of SC2: (warning, the link skips ahead to the credits but if you click earlier in the video there's some of the ending cinematics) + Show Spoiler +
There's a lot of the design staff changed, and of course the original was made with a far smaller team, so it is a fair statement that the developers changed significantly between the two.
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On October 01 2010 07:57 yomi wrote:Show nested quote + It took 2 and a half years to release the final balance patch for Brood War I'm sorry, I don't understand your argument. It probably took so long, because they weren't in a hurry. I don't think that it was their priority to balance the Brood War. They didn't pursue it as a main goal, but only released a patch once in a while.
The situation has changed, esports are more popular and everyone is expecting the game to be balanced out by Blizzard. It should be one of their main goals by now, because they want it to be established just as its predecessor.
On October 01 2010 07:58 Day[9] wrote: I'm confused.
You claim blizzard is being slow w/ patching, that patching Starcraft was easy so, therefore, SC2 should be easy.
However, you present the fact that the major changes happened 6months+ after the game release, including the 4/18/01 Starcraft patch (3 years after release). I played Starcraft and Starcraft:Broodwar hardcore from the day they came out. 1.04 and 1.08 changed gigantic aspects of the game that deeply affected the way people played the game. They were awesome!
The length of time it took to balance Starcraft: Broodwar is EXACTLY why I'm not concerned about SC2 at this point. Starcraft 2 has been out for 2 months. I wouldn't be surprised if a gigantic balance patch came out 6-8 months after release. They should have a much larger pool of tools at hand atm. They should be able to run through the balance process much more swiftly than in previous games. I don't want to wait 6 months after every addon, especially considering the huge amount of work, which is to be done (map imbas, position imbas, bugs, Zerg, underused units, lack of statistics etc.).
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On October 01 2010 08:33 Trap wrote:Show nested quote +On October 01 2010 08:17 Bair wrote:On October 01 2010 08:06 MythicalMage wrote:On October 01 2010 08:04 Bair wrote:On October 01 2010 08:02 MythicalMage wrote:On October 01 2010 08:00 Bair wrote:On October 01 2010 07:55 .risingdragoon wrote:On October 01 2010 07:52 hugman wrote:On October 01 2010 07:45 .risingdragoon wrote: Well, you have to remember that The Blizzard that made SC and BW is a different Blizzard. Most of those guys have gone and started new companies, like ArenaNet. Another common, unsubstantiated claim I think yours is the unsubstantiated claim. Regardless if whether it is or not, it is plain wrong. 1 - The people from SC/BW working on this are different people than they were 10 years ago. Shit happens, they think differently, they design games differently after learning and improving at what they do over time. 2 - There are many people who did not work on SC/BW that did work on SC2. This adds in new ideas the original team would not have had, good or bad. Different times, different developers, different games. This is a different Blizzard. Well, you can say that for anything. It doesn't MEAN anything. If say, you could name CORE developers that had left, you might have a point. Otherwise, it's just like saying "Well the Nintendo that made Super Mario World is different than the Nintendo that made Super Mario Galaxy." Why do I have to name the core developers? The ones who left still left regardless of if I know who they are. There's no proof that they left, if you can't name or find an article that says "Core BW developers leave Blizzard." Otherwise, we don't know the significance of the people that left. It could be interns in terms of importance, or it could be the lead designers. Additionally, there is no proof that they stayed. Since you seem to be attempting to shoot down what I have to say, I will leave the burden of proof to you. Even with names, we would not know the significance. We do not know who contributed what to the overall creation of SC/BW. And Dustin Browder jokes aside, we do not know who contributed what to the overall creation of SC2. For all we know, one guy had all the good ideas, and the rest just supported him. Or everyone had a fair share of ideas. You seem to be missing the point as to why this is not the same Blizzard. New people have arrived, senior people have left, new management is pulling the strings, and 10 years has changed everything in the gaming industry. If you really want you can go compare the developers in SC1/BW's credits: http://www.mobygames.com/game/windows/starcraft-brood-war/creditshttp://www.mobygames.com/game/windows/starcraft/creditsVersus the credits of SC2: (warning, the link skips ahead to the credits but if you click earlier in the video there's some of the ending cinematics) + Show Spoiler +http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32Pu_j9yHCg#t=3m50s
There's a lot of the design staff changed, and of course the original was made with a far smaller team, so it is a fair statement that the developers changed significantly between the two.
Thank you for finding this, since I was admittedly too lazy to do so myself
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On October 01 2010 07:56 csfield wrote:Show nested quote +On October 01 2010 07:46 Raiden X wrote: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. And the ingenuity of players. It wasn't until Boxer that people actually took Terran seriously. Or After that July to even out TvZ. BW went though countless stages of innovation. SC2 on the other hand with its Crappy hard counter system will take way more time to balance. As SCBW was more flexible with its units. The bonus damage counter system is stupid. Strategy should be more than rock/paper/scissors.
ur an idiot. there also was dmg reduction in bw do you not remember explosive dmg from vultures tanks and dragoons. bw also revolved around abusing very powerful units (reaver, lurker, siege tank) these units werent hard countered by single units and by standards of starcraft 2 would be nerfed into a former shadow of themselves (the siege tank stands as a great example). armored and bonus vs armor etc. doesnt work much differently from the bw dmg functions
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On October 01 2010 08:21 The6357 wrote: we just need players like jaedong and Flash that can ignore the balance...so people can stfu about balance...constantly complaining about the balance instead of trying to explore different options is not gonna get u anywhere.
yea some noname bw progamer who became known in early stage of sc2 complains about balance...big deal.
sorry but millions of players dont have all day to sit there and explore different ways to get past obvious imbalances.
newsflash, lots of progamers have spoken out about imbalances. you seem to have some sort of anger towards the one who did it first for some reason.
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There's a huge myth out there that Blizzard have perfectly balanced Broodwar
Yet, Broodwar, when played on the original Blizzard ladder maps, is not particularly balanced.
The actual balancing of the game is done almost 100% by the mapmakers and has been since 2001.
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On October 01 2010 08:47 tacrats wrote:Show nested quote +On October 01 2010 08:21 The6357 wrote: we just need players like jaedong and Flash that can ignore the balance...so people can stfu about balance...constantly complaining about the balance instead of trying to explore different options is not gonna get u anywhere.
yea some noname bw progamer who became known in early stage of sc2 complains about balance...big deal. sorry but millions of players dont have all day to sit there and explore different ways to get past obvious imbalances. newsflash, lots of progamers have spoken out about imbalances. you seem to have some sort of anger towards the one who did it first for some reason.
Don't need to invent the wheel, just wait for better players to figure it out and imitate them, just like what happened in BW with all terran matchups, and then with PvZ and ZvT.
Anyways, blizzard has announced intent to patch every few months so it's a moot point..
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The OP doesnt consider 2.5 years a long time? wtf. The patch notes that someone posted on page 2 show that there were a TON of changes made in a small number of patches over a LONG period of time.
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On October 01 2010 07:46 Manifesto7 wrote:Show nested quote +On October 01 2010 07:41 Ndugu wrote: It is perfectly reasonable that SCII isn't flawlessly balanced yet. Show nested quote +On October 01 2010 07:41 lindn wrote: soooo... you're saying that sc2 should be perfectly balanced in about 2 years from now? Did you guys read the same OP I did? He is simply saying that the statement "BW took a long time to patch" isn't supported by the patch notes.
Yeah, he's saying that, in an effort to suggest that SCII needing time to be balanced isn't a reasonable excuse. Did you read the same OP I did?
The argument he's making is completely, 100% invalid. Borderline trolling flame-bait thread attempting to start a Brood War vs Starcraft II battle. He says himself it took 2.5 years... well, I imagine Starcraft II will be vastly different in 2.5 years.
If anything, the better argument would be that Blizzard doesn't do serous balance changes until expansions. Which makes some sense based on SC---> Brood War.
But really, that's all ancient and barely relevant.
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On October 01 2010 07:55 Pokebunny wrote:Show nested quote +On October 01 2010 07:51 Seide wrote:On October 01 2010 07:46 Raiden X wrote: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. SC2 on the other hand with its Crappy hard counter system will take way more time to balance. As SCBW was more flexible with its units. Hard counter system? have you played more than 5 games of SC2? I think you forgot get something: a clue. SC2 countering system is no different from BW. There will be unit compositions that work better against other unit composition that is like basic RTS -_- Untrue, in brood war, counters could often be overcome by micro or positioning. SC2, not as much so - you always will have to switch to a new unit/composition.
Roaches counter hellions, but pre-speed on open ground a roach will never kill a hellion with perfect micro.
Countless examples of things like this, just like in BW.
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The game will never be perfectly balanced... balance shifts with time and trends... When Zerg gets fixed , if it does get fixed, there will be another issue to balance.
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On October 01 2010 08:39 johngalt90 wrote:Show nested quote +On October 01 2010 07:56 csfield wrote:On October 01 2010 07:46 Raiden X wrote: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. And the ingenuity of players. It wasn't until Boxer that people actually took Terran seriously. Or After that July to even out TvZ. BW went though countless stages of innovation. SC2 on the other hand with its Crappy hard counter system will take way more time to balance. As SCBW was more flexible with its units. The bonus damage counter system is stupid. Strategy should be more than rock/paper/scissors. ur an idiot. there also was dmg reduction in bw do you not remember explosive dmg from vultures tanks and dragoons. bw also revolved around abusing very powerful units (reaver, lurker, siege tank) these units werent hard countered by single units and by standards of starcraft 2 would be nerfed into a former shadow of themselves (the siege tank stands as a great example). armored and bonus vs armor etc. doesnt work much differently from the bw dmg functions
You're joking, right? In BW, there were only 3 damage types. Normal did 100% against everything, explosive did 100% to large, 75% to medium and 50% to small, concussive did 25% to large, 50% to medium and 100% to small. Doing it the SC2 way, you could say that concussive had a 4x bonus to small compared to large.
There are only 3 units I recall with concussive (vulture, firebat and ghost). 2 of these are rarely used in normal play. That means BW has virtually no units with more than a 2x damage modifier. How many units in SC2 deal more than 2x the damage against one type of armor compared to other types? Way too freaking many.
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whats your point? i dont see one at all.
you also entirely neglected the fact that BW took several years to become balanced even after the last balance patch, which is a HUGE variable
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On October 01 2010 08:28 soultwister wrote: Complain all you want, Blizzard will just let the game play out and then add a bunch of units that might fix it or might break it even more. All they care is that it's not completely broken and people still play. We're a while after release and no needed changes have been made, nor do we see any on the horizon, Blizzard just moved to Heart of the Swarm. What?!
They made an attempt to fix reaper and proxy-gate imbalance. They also recognized that Terran had no real late game answer to ultralisks and reduced their damage. The game's only been out for 2 months and already they're patching for balance's sake.
No changes on the horizon either? Considering how quickly they fixed the ultralisk splash bug on buildings arising from the headbutt removal, I'd say they're actively watching how balance is unfolding.
Broodwar is balanced. War3 TFT is pretty well balanced (it's harder with 4 races!). SC2 is their e-sport flagship. I'd be surprised if they left it unbalanced for no good reason after LotV hits.
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On October 01 2010 07:56 csfield wrote:Show nested quote +On October 01 2010 07:46 Raiden X wrote: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. And the ingenuity of players. It wasn't until Boxer that people actually took Terran seriously. Or After that July to even out TvZ. BW went though countless stages of innovation. SC2 on the other hand with its Crappy hard counter system will take way more time to balance. As SCBW was more flexible with its units. The bonus damage counter system is stupid. Strategy should be more than rock/paper/scissors.
I agree with this completely. I know bonus damage is essentially the same as taking damage away in bw, but the way the game is set up pisses me off . Unit positioning doesnt seem to matter much anymore. Instead its manual targeting and hard counters. That and you have tons of units that dont shoot air AND ground as opposed to in bw. Seems like most only shoot one or the other.
Getting rid of moving shots sucks too.
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On October 01 2010 09:25 andrewlt wrote:Show nested quote +On October 01 2010 08:39 johngalt90 wrote:On October 01 2010 07:56 csfield wrote:On October 01 2010 07:46 Raiden X wrote: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. And the ingenuity of players. It wasn't until Boxer that people actually took Terran seriously. Or After that July to even out TvZ. BW went though countless stages of innovation. SC2 on the other hand with its Crappy hard counter system will take way more time to balance. As SCBW was more flexible with its units. The bonus damage counter system is stupid. Strategy should be more than rock/paper/scissors. ur an idiot. there also was dmg reduction in bw do you not remember explosive dmg from vultures tanks and dragoons. bw also revolved around abusing very powerful units (reaver, lurker, siege tank) these units werent hard countered by single units and by standards of starcraft 2 would be nerfed into a former shadow of themselves (the siege tank stands as a great example). armored and bonus vs armor etc. doesnt work much differently from the bw dmg functions You're joking, right? In BW, there were only 3 damage types. Normal did 100% against everything, explosive did 100% to large, 75% to medium and 50% to small, concussive did 25% to large, 50% to medium and 100% to small. Doing it the SC2 way, you could say that concussive had a 4x bonus to small compared to large. There are only 3 units I recall with concussive (vulture, firebat and ghost). 2 of these are rarely used in normal play. That means BW has virtually no units with more than a 2x damage modifier. How many units in SC2 deal more than 2x the damage against one type of armor compared to other types? Way too freaking many.
Agree. Starcraft 2 has way to many hard Counters. Units seem to die very quickly. The current system of Light and Armored makes the game dynamics to limited. To solve this i think blizzard should not label every unit Armored or light. For example the hydra. This way things aren't overly owned. And Blue flame is way strong. Especially against lings. Roasting 50 lings is absurd. Every see a vulture mine even do that?
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i dont get it.
chris sigaty says "a year or longer"
patch 1.8 came after 2 and a half years.
whats your point?
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On October 01 2010 09:25 andrewlt wrote:Show nested quote +On October 01 2010 08:39 johngalt90 wrote:On October 01 2010 07:56 csfield wrote:On October 01 2010 07:46 Raiden X wrote: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. And the ingenuity of players. It wasn't until Boxer that people actually took Terran seriously. Or After that July to even out TvZ. BW went though countless stages of innovation. SC2 on the other hand with its Crappy hard counter system will take way more time to balance. As SCBW was more flexible with its units. The bonus damage counter system is stupid. Strategy should be more than rock/paper/scissors. ur an idiot. there also was dmg reduction in bw do you not remember explosive dmg from vultures tanks and dragoons. bw also revolved around abusing very powerful units (reaver, lurker, siege tank) these units werent hard countered by single units and by standards of starcraft 2 would be nerfed into a former shadow of themselves (the siege tank stands as a great example). armored and bonus vs armor etc. doesnt work much differently from the bw dmg functions You're joking, right? In BW, there were only 3 damage types. Normal did 100% against everything, explosive did 100% to large, 75% to medium and 50% to small, concussive did 25% to large, 50% to medium and 100% to small. Doing it the SC2 way, you could say that concussive had a 4x bonus to small compared to large. There are only 3 units I recall with concussive (vulture, firebat and ghost). 2 of these are rarely used in normal play. That means BW has virtually no units with more than a 2x damage modifier. How many units in SC2 deal more than 2x the damage against one type of armor compared to other types? Way too freaking many. Reaper, Immortal, Ultralisk.
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On October 01 2010 08:13 StarStruck wrote: Actually there is. Look at the game manuals, or the credits. There is a shortlist of guys who stuck around with Blizzard.
Bill Roper led the SC:BW team. Now we have Dustin. That's just a starting point.
Stop trolling. You aren't contributing anything.
I wasn't going to respond to this thread because it is filled by misinformation from the start, but this really took the cake. Bill Roper didn't lead the SC:BW team, Rob Pardo did.
Rob Pardo is VP for game design at Blizzard today, in other words Dustin Browder's boss.
Bill Roper started out helping out with the sound with Warcraft 1, then later on he became a producer and director at Blizzard. He never did any actual game design, he was a glorified PR person. Just look how successful his career was after leaving Blizzard.
Regarding the rest of the garbage you posted, you are also wrong there. Around half of those that worked on Starcraft is still at Blizzard today. 50% turnover after 12 years is a really low number in the game industry.
Not to mention most of the key people behind Brood War are still there, like the previous mentioned Rob Pardo, that was the lead designer for Brood War.
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On October 01 2010 09:36 Teddyman wrote:Show nested quote +On October 01 2010 09:25 andrewlt wrote:On October 01 2010 08:39 johngalt90 wrote:On October 01 2010 07:56 csfield wrote:On October 01 2010 07:46 Raiden X wrote: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. And the ingenuity of players. It wasn't until Boxer that people actually took Terran seriously. Or After that July to even out TvZ. BW went though countless stages of innovation. SC2 on the other hand with its Crappy hard counter system will take way more time to balance. As SCBW was more flexible with its units. The bonus damage counter system is stupid. Strategy should be more than rock/paper/scissors. ur an idiot. there also was dmg reduction in bw do you not remember explosive dmg from vultures tanks and dragoons. bw also revolved around abusing very powerful units (reaver, lurker, siege tank) these units werent hard countered by single units and by standards of starcraft 2 would be nerfed into a former shadow of themselves (the siege tank stands as a great example). armored and bonus vs armor etc. doesnt work much differently from the bw dmg functions You're joking, right? In BW, there were only 3 damage types. Normal did 100% against everything, explosive did 100% to large, 75% to medium and 50% to small, concussive did 25% to large, 50% to medium and 100% to small. Doing it the SC2 way, you could say that concussive had a 4x bonus to small compared to large. There are only 3 units I recall with concussive (vulture, firebat and ghost). 2 of these are rarely used in normal play. That means BW has virtually no units with more than a 2x damage modifier. How many units in SC2 deal more than 2x the damage against one type of armor compared to other types? Way too freaking many. Reaper, Immortal, Ultralisk.
How about hellion, marauders, ghosts, phoenixes, banelings, thors(air), voidrays?
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On October 01 2010 07:52 Acritter wrote:Show nested quote +On October 01 2010 07:41 Ndugu wrote: What are you on about? You outright contradict yourself.
Starcraft was never balanced.
How long did it take for Brood War to get released? How long after that did balance patches come out? 2 and a half years as you said, and then there were still a few patches.
It is perfectly reasonable that SCII isn't flawlessly balanced yet. The main problem is that the changes are so incredibly tentative (as compared to the relatively major SC1 patches) that it'll take forever for them to make it balanced at the current rate. If Blizzard could develop the balls to make many changes across the board, then we could see some real change in the matchups, and balance would go much faster. As-is, I'm expecting HotS to offer about as much content as a single SC1 patch. That's not good news for the pro scene, considering the current state of Zerg and Terran.
Its been stated by browder that the change to multiplayer seen from SC to BW will be analogous to whats coming with the zerg release.
Some of the posts in this thread are absurd.
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On October 01 2010 08:02 NATO wrote: It seems ridiculous that people have been begging for balance changes super fast, when the game everyone praises - SC:BW had very long times between balance patches. Which is exactly why they should be able to do things quicker now since they have had over a decade of experience of balancing a very similar game.
But I guess not much learning happened.
On October 01 2010 08:02 NATO wrote:I think the beta made everyone crazy - they think they are entitled to making whatever race they play more powerful right, now, and in the exact way they want. Says Terran.
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And Blue flame is way strong. Especially against lings. Roasting 50 lings is absurd. Every see a vulture mine even do that?
In a word: yes.
I can't even imagine the QQing if T had spider mine instead of blue flame. That ability was absurdly OP beyond anything in SC2 (like many BW abilities like dark swarm, irradiate, BW psi storm, BW stimpacks....)
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This whole Old Blizzard vs. New Blizzard argument that's going on is retarded.
Anybody who follows the BW scene knows that the community did more for balance than Blizzard did, and a lot of what made BW great was a mostly a fluke. The "Old" Blizzard didn't design SC1 with e-sports in mind because it never existed back then, so I find it strange when people God-worship the old employees when for the most part everything that made BW e-sports worthy was by accident. Blizzard still helped out a lot, but the "old" Blizzard did just as much as the "new" Blizzard is doing right now.
In two years I can guarantee that there will be FAR more changes to SC2 than Blizzard ever made to SC1. There's a lot more invested in this game than any other.
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On October 01 2010 09:43 AssuredVacancy wrote:Show nested quote +On October 01 2010 09:36 Teddyman wrote:On October 01 2010 09:25 andrewlt wrote:On October 01 2010 08:39 johngalt90 wrote:On October 01 2010 07:56 csfield wrote:On October 01 2010 07:46 Raiden X wrote: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. And the ingenuity of players. It wasn't until Boxer that people actually took Terran seriously. Or After that July to even out TvZ. BW went though countless stages of innovation. SC2 on the other hand with its Crappy hard counter system will take way more time to balance. As SCBW was more flexible with its units. The bonus damage counter system is stupid. Strategy should be more than rock/paper/scissors. ur an idiot. there also was dmg reduction in bw do you not remember explosive dmg from vultures tanks and dragoons. bw also revolved around abusing very powerful units (reaver, lurker, siege tank) these units werent hard countered by single units and by standards of starcraft 2 would be nerfed into a former shadow of themselves (the siege tank stands as a great example). armored and bonus vs armor etc. doesnt work much differently from the bw dmg functions You're joking, right? In BW, there were only 3 damage types. Normal did 100% against everything, explosive did 100% to large, 75% to medium and 50% to small, concussive did 25% to large, 50% to medium and 100% to small. Doing it the SC2 way, you could say that concussive had a 4x bonus to small compared to large. There are only 3 units I recall with concussive (vulture, firebat and ghost). 2 of these are rarely used in normal play. That means BW has virtually no units with more than a 2x damage modifier. How many units in SC2 deal more than 2x the damage against one type of armor compared to other types? Way too freaking many. Reaper, Immortal, Ultralisk. How about hellion, marauders, ghosts, phoenixes, banelings, thors(air), voidrays? Marauders, ghosts, phoenixs banelings, thors do more than 2x the damage now? Need to update my patch, gogogo! The problem with SC2, battle speed is not because of the damage system. It's because marines, zealots or any other unit (besides zlings) got attack speed boost, marines 1->0.86 and so on. Units attack much faster. Another reason is there are less tactics that stops battles (Lurker, plague, large AOE emp). Another reason is that now units clump up, dealing more DPS at the same time. Another reason is Marauders are do same damage as dragoons but with stim! with stim! They are two different games, SC2 is more fast paced, get over it. Blizzard will help the game, metagame/maps should help too (Plz don't let blizzard maps be primary maps T-T). Only reason Blizzard is constantly patching sc2 is that, SC2 has high expectations. SC2 need to be balanced quick so SC1 pro players looks at SC2 as a good esport. That's how it is.
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On October 01 2010 07:58 Day[9] wrote: I'm confused.
You claim blizzard is being slow w/ patching, that patching Starcraft was easy so, therefore, SC2 should be easy.
However, you present the fact that the major changes happened 6months+ after the game release, including the 4/18/01 Starcraft patch (3 years after release). I played Starcraft and Starcraft:Broodwar hardcore from the day they came out. 1.04 and 1.08 changed gigantic aspects of the game that deeply affected the way people played the game. They were awesome!
The length of time it took to balance Starcraft: Broodwar is EXACTLY why I'm not concerned about SC2 at this point. Starcraft 2 has been out for 2 months. I wouldn't be surprised if a gigantic balance patch came out 6-8 months after release.
Perhaps you should read the OP before acting confused? He claims that Blizzard is implying that balancing SC2 will take many many patches with many changes to get everything just right. Then he moves on to state that Starcraft and BW(which ended up with good balance) had a small number of patches with big changes, which is different from the model that Blizzard intends for SC2.
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On October 01 2010 10:10 hacpee wrote:Show nested quote +On October 01 2010 07:58 Day[9] wrote: I'm confused.
You claim blizzard is being slow w/ patching, that patching Starcraft was easy so, therefore, SC2 should be easy.
However, you present the fact that the major changes happened 6months+ after the game release, including the 4/18/01 Starcraft patch (3 years after release). I played Starcraft and Starcraft:Broodwar hardcore from the day they came out. 1.04 and 1.08 changed gigantic aspects of the game that deeply affected the way people played the game. They were awesome!
The length of time it took to balance Starcraft: Broodwar is EXACTLY why I'm not concerned about SC2 at this point. Starcraft 2 has been out for 2 months. I wouldn't be surprised if a gigantic balance patch came out 6-8 months after release. Perhaps you should read the OP before acting confused? He claims that Blizzard is implying that balancing SC2 will take many many patches with many changes to get everything just right. Then he moves on to state that Starcraft and BW(which ended up with good balance) had a small number of patches with big changes, which is different from the model that Blizzard intends for SC2.
Would you rather have blizzard patch the game intermittently for the next two years or leave the game in its current state, wait two years and then release a massive patch. The only difference between the two is that the game gets better and better over time instead of staying the same until way down the road it is perfect.
People really need to calm down. The games have been made in completely different times. Back when brood war was released do you think everyone was this concerned over balance? Probably not. But now that we have televised tournaments this quickly after release, Blizzard has to balance frequently (read: less than 6 months in between each) and carefully so that they can make the game more and more balance without causing huge game changing problems (talking about balance not bugs) that can ruin a tournament.
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I can honestly tell u most ppl QQ-ing nowdays weren't even around when SC1 started, nor know the real history of SC1. Peopls should know that in SC1 Blizzard didn't do the balancing , the community did , and the players. They just QQ for the sake of QQ-ing every time they lose a match or w/e.
Even back then those "ProGamers" were constantly complaining about balance (much like it is right now) until some really really good players came along brought in some totally innovative play that brought various matchups to the balance.
Edit: The only difference is back then there weren't so many community forums to QQ on. And nowdays u can see everyone from the Progamers all the way to the Bronze Leagers posting threads and stuff for the sake of QQ-ing.
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You guys need to calm down, a big patch is coming up in 2011. That's no more than 4 months from now.
For now you just have to live with the fact that TvZ and PvZ are imbalanced, and that TvP is slightly favored towards terran.
EDIT: Balanced in BW came about through map designs. Just look at Battle Royale and Dreamliner.
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I like how blizzard went about making the balance changes in BW by increasing or decreasing costs and build times by smaller incraments rather than the larger damage nerfs they are doing now. Just my 2 cents.
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On October 01 2010 09:36 Subversion wrote: i dont get it.
chris sigaty says "a year or longer"
patch 1.8 came after 2 and a half years.
whats your point?
I'm also lost as to what the point of the post is. I saw the mod post on the first page but that still doesn't answer the question for me.
The OP seems to be implying that Brood War didn't take a long time to patch, and then saying it took 2.5 years.
That statement is pure opinion, as 2.5 years is "a long time" to a lot of people.
Additionally, if you look at it from another angle, the game was balanced about 2 years after the release of Brood War. By that metric, SC2 should be balanced 2 years after the release of Legacy of the Void.
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On October 01 2010 08:47 tacrats wrote:Show nested quote +On October 01 2010 08:21 The6357 wrote: we just need players like jaedong and Flash that can ignore the balance...so people can stfu about balance...constantly complaining about the balance instead of trying to explore different options is not gonna get u anywhere.
yea some noname bw progamer who became known in early stage of sc2 complains about balance...big deal. sorry but millions of players dont have all day to sit there and explore different ways to get past obvious imbalances. newsflash, lots of progamers have spoken out about imbalances. you seem to have some sort of anger towards the one who did it first for some reason.
exactly...I, for one don't have all day to sit in front of my comp to find new ways to play this game. and I don't understand this "obvious" imbalances you mention here...when the guy who cried about it first is in the GSL finals after beating countless terrans. I have no answer for you if you say "he has superior micro and mechanics than the other contestants" to ignore so called 'obvious' imbalances u mention.
I might be just ignorant to say "wait until flah/jaedong to figure out the ways to play" or something to that extent but i just think there are too many people QQing about the balance rather than playing with their precious time. If there is obvious imbalances, it will get fixed by the company that made this game. It's not end of the day because it takes them a few months to correct the problems.
P.S. i don't have anger toward Cool...although i want him to lose in the final, so the Fire Bears can get some nerfs.
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On October 01 2010 09:27 Raiden X wrote:Show nested quote +On October 01 2010 09:05 Wargizmo wrote:
There's a huge myth out there that Blizzard have perfectly balanced Broodwar
Yet, Broodwar, when played on the original Blizzard ladder maps, is not particularly balanced.
The actual balancing of the game is done almost 100% by the mapmakers and has been since 2001.
Blizzard Maps suck and always will suck. ICCUP Starcraft 2 FTW
Exactly, you could even argue that given the right maps SC2 is perfectly balanced right now.
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Brood wars main balancing feature was based off new strategies being made and better players.
who remembers when the 5 hatch hydra came into play? that helped zerg significantly.
as starcraft II develops we can expect new strategies and new patches to balance the game.
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On October 01 2010 07:47 maliceee wrote:Show nested quote +On October 01 2010 07:46 Manifesto7 wrote:On October 01 2010 07:41 Ndugu wrote: It is perfectly reasonable that SCII isn't flawlessly balanced yet. On October 01 2010 07:41 lindn wrote: soooo... you're saying that sc2 should be perfectly balanced in about 2 years from now? Did you guys read the same OP I did? He is simply saying that the statement "BW took a long time to patch" isn't supported by the patch notes. what is a long time then? two a half years seems longgggg to me Hello? Are you actually reading the posts? Not supported by the patch notes, as in, it did not take very many patches.
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While this is good and everything what I've been wanting to look for is a patchlog for not BW but the original game before BW. If someone has a link for such please link as that might be a better way to compare the two. We might find out that the BW patches end up be more closely mirrored by HOTS patch changes.
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I still dont like the idea of paying 150+ dollars for the same title ..
i dont care if it has 10 expansion as long as its not EXPENSIVE ..
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On October 01 2010 08:39 johngalt90 wrote:Show nested quote +On October 01 2010 07:56 csfield wrote:On October 01 2010 07:46 Raiden X wrote: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. And the ingenuity of players. It wasn't until Boxer that people actually took Terran seriously. Or After that July to even out TvZ. BW went though countless stages of innovation. SC2 on the other hand with its Crappy hard counter system will take way more time to balance. As SCBW was more flexible with its units. The bonus damage counter system is stupid. Strategy should be more than rock/paper/scissors. ur an idiot. there also was dmg reduction in bw do you not remember explosive dmg from vultures tanks and dragoons. bw also revolved around abusing very powerful units (reaver, lurker, siege tank) these units werent hard countered by single units and by standards of starcraft 2 would be nerfed into a former shadow of themselves (the siege tank stands as a great example). armored and bonus vs armor etc. doesnt work much differently from the bw dmg functions
Maybe you should use real sentences and punctuation if you want to call someone an idiot.
And then you make statements that support my point (i.e. those powerful units didn't have hard counters). Seriously, get a clue.
Learn to read. Learn to think. Learn to express yourself intelligently.
edit: lol, I just replied to a Randian. Maybe I am an idiot
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On October 01 2010 07:41 Pawshter wrote: What proof do you have that wc3 is unbalanced? Unsupported statements. WC3 is not balanced. WC3 is plagued with imbalanced matchups and even flawed race design (undead.)
Orc is overpowered because ensnare counters micro and the blademaster scales too well. Prior to this tactic orc was considered one of the weakest races because they are vulnerable to timing pushes and borrow harassment. Their units are vulnerable to many abilities/heros as well.
Undead have ridiculously strong units/heros but are useless 1v1 because they must defend their base and can't expand so the other races can all exploit that to win no matter how badly they would get slaughtered in an upfront fight.
Night Elf are reasonably balanced, if not a little subdued at times because competitively they were the top race due to having no bad matchup. They were considered imbalanced solely because human was too weak/easily faultered and because they could beat any race.
Human are like zerg. You can lose in a thousand different ways and some times it isn't even your fault. Competitively they've seen success for two reasons. One, they have towers which are crazy overpowered and allow them to macro up and get experience for their strong late game heros and build replacable armies. Two, they had strong timing pushes due to the archmage's strength early game. In TFT timing pushes aren't all-in because you have a get out of jail free card for any attack so this allowed Sky to dominate for a short while. Then people adapted.
The following spoiler is a matchup breakdown as of a year and a half ago, maybe two years now. + Show Spoiler + Orc vs UD has always been a literal 7-3 matchup in orc's favor. You can literally off-race Orc vs a top UD and probably win a bo5 series or come close to it.
Hu vs Orc has been near broodwar balanced for the most part. It was a lot more difficult for the orc player to learn the matchup and orc struggled when sorceress first hit the field. Late game was considered in human favor due to gryphons (despite it almost never getting to that point), but since ensnare+blademaster abuse began and people wisened up about speed scroll usage and unit choice it has been in orc's favor. There is no answer to ensnare+blademaster abuse because ensnare counters micro and once the blademaster is beefy he can tear through any non-hero unit in the game and practically ignore or slay hero units when backed up by raiders and decent micro. I don't know the matchup percentage these days, but we can call it close to broodwar even just to give WC3 some credit.
Ne vs UD was considered even when I played. I doubt it deviates by more than any racial matchup percentage in brood war (55% or less in one race's favor.)
Ud vs Hu was considered 7-3 for UD for a long time because their heroes rape your heros until very late in the game, their units horribly destroy your units, and fast destroyers beats everything because their counters are mowed down by the UD heroes. Then humans started massing towers and abusing UD's universal weakness. UD has no real answer to the towers.
Ne vs Orc was considered 7-3 or 8-2 in NE's favor during the dott abuse days. Then ensnsare+blademaster became popular. I don't know the state of the matchup today, but when I quit it was considered amazing when moon beat any top orc player.
NE vs Hu was considered 6-4 NE favor, some times even 7-3. Strong timing pushes came out against the popular fast tech build order, the matchup evolved a bit, and for a while it was 5.5-4.5 NE favor. I don't know what it is today.
The trend is the game had some really bad matchups for every race but NE but then people realized ensnare+blademaster counters everything.
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On October 01 2010 09:50 Oleksandr wrote:Show nested quote +On October 01 2010 08:02 NATO wrote: It seems ridiculous that people have been begging for balance changes super fast, when the game everyone praises - SC:BW had very long times between balance patches. Which is exactly why they should be able to do things quicker now since they have had over a decade of experience of balancing a very similar game. But I guess not much learning happened. Show nested quote +On October 01 2010 08:02 NATO wrote:I think the beta made everyone crazy - they think they are entitled to making whatever race they play more powerful right, now, and in the exact way they want. Says Terran.
Lol, Olex, do you just follow all my posts?
Seriously though, you should know I was saying the same thing when Terran players where whining in the beta. I haven't changed my position, no matter who was whining. (Although I did change my race!)
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On October 01 2010 09:58 ooni wrote:Show nested quote +On October 01 2010 09:43 AssuredVacancy wrote:On October 01 2010 09:36 Teddyman wrote:On October 01 2010 09:25 andrewlt wrote:On October 01 2010 08:39 johngalt90 wrote:On October 01 2010 07:56 csfield wrote:On October 01 2010 07:46 Raiden X wrote: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. And the ingenuity of players. It wasn't until Boxer that people actually took Terran seriously. Or After that July to even out TvZ. BW went though countless stages of innovation. SC2 on the other hand with its Crappy hard counter system will take way more time to balance. As SCBW was more flexible with its units. The bonus damage counter system is stupid. Strategy should be more than rock/paper/scissors. ur an idiot. there also was dmg reduction in bw do you not remember explosive dmg from vultures tanks and dragoons. bw also revolved around abusing very powerful units (reaver, lurker, siege tank) these units werent hard countered by single units and by standards of starcraft 2 would be nerfed into a former shadow of themselves (the siege tank stands as a great example). armored and bonus vs armor etc. doesnt work much differently from the bw dmg functions You're joking, right? In BW, there were only 3 damage types. Normal did 100% against everything, explosive did 100% to large, 75% to medium and 50% to small, concussive did 25% to large, 50% to medium and 100% to small. Doing it the SC2 way, you could say that concussive had a 4x bonus to small compared to large. There are only 3 units I recall with concussive (vulture, firebat and ghost). 2 of these are rarely used in normal play. That means BW has virtually no units with more than a 2x damage modifier. How many units in SC2 deal more than 2x the damage against one type of armor compared to other types? Way too freaking many. Reaper, Immortal, Ultralisk. How about hellion, marauders, ghosts, phoenixes, banelings, thors(air), voidrays? Marauders, ghosts, phoenixs banelings, thors do more than 2x the damage now? Need to update my patch, gogogo! The problem with SC2, battle speed is not because of the damage system. It's because marines, zealots or any other unit (besides zlings) got attack speed boost, marines 1->0.86 and so on. Units attack much faster. Another reason is there are less tactics that stops battles (Lurker, plague, large AOE emp). Another reason is that now units clump up, dealing more DPS at the same time. Another reason is Marauders are do same damage as dragoons but with stim! with stim! They are two different games, SC2 is more fast paced, get over it. Blizzard will help the game, metagame/maps should help too (Plz don't let blizzard maps be primary maps T-T). Only reason Blizzard is constantly patching sc2 is that, SC2 has high expectations. SC2 need to be balanced quick so SC1 pro players looks at SC2 as a good esport. That's how it is.
Marauders are 10+10, 2x vs armored, ghosts are 10+10, 2x vs light, phoenixes are 5+5, 2x vs light, banelings are 20+15, almost 2x, thors do 6+6 air damage, 2x vs light.
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United States47024 Posts
On October 01 2010 09:25 andrewlt wrote: There are only 3 units I recall with concussive (vulture, firebat and ghost). 2 of these are rarely used in normal play. That means BW has virtually no units with more than a 2x damage modifier. How many units in SC2 deal more than 2x the damage against one type of armor compared to other types? Way too freaking many.
Hellion Reaper Immortal Ultralisk
One per race, plus one more for Terran, is "way too freaking many"?
Also, lol @ vultures "rarely used in normal play".
On October 01 2010 11:34 AssuredVacancy wrote: Marauders are 10+10, 2x vs armored, ghosts are 10+10, 2x vs light, phoenixes are 5+5, 2x vs light, banelings are 20+15, almost 2x, thors do 6+6 air damage, 2x vs light. The discussion was about units with more than a 2x bonus, seeing as units that do explosive damage are extremely common in BW.
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1.08 patch was the game changer without it bw wouldn't have become what it is now..
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On October 01 2010 11:41 TheYango wrote:Show nested quote +On October 01 2010 09:25 andrewlt wrote: There are only 3 units I recall with concussive (vulture, firebat and ghost). 2 of these are rarely used in normal play. That means BW has virtually no units with more than a 2x damage modifier. How many units in SC2 deal more than 2x the damage against one type of armor compared to other types? Way too freaking many.
Hellion Reaper Immortal Ultralisk One per race, plus one more for Terran, is "way too freaking many"? Also, lol @ vultures "rarely used in normal play".
Ghosts and Firebats are two units not used that often, although Firebats see TvZ play. He said two, I assume he meant those.
A previous poster mentioned maps. Honestly that should be the NEXT step here. All the unit stats and things DO NOT MATTER if the level design is shoddy. Level design is actually a big part of balancing and making a good game, I'm thinking here soon that's where Blizzard needs to invest some extra time in. And hopefully the community is too (and I think they are) because I don't really trust Blizzard to get that done.
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United States47024 Posts
On October 01 2010 08:27 .risingdragoon wrote: SC2's balancing is kindava urgent issue, things learned through BW isn't just unlearned.
SC2 needs desperately be balanced fast. When SC came out there was not nearly the expectation of it being balanced. I'm sort of curious what lessons everyone thinks Blizzard is supposed to have learned from balancing SC:BW, because no one seems to suggest anything other than "they should have learned something."
They can improve their methodology (which, seeing as they're doing frequent minor patches instead of sparse, major ones, I would argue they have), but honestly, short of a direct clone, balancing is still shooting at a target in the dark. I'm not sure how the fact that zealots should be 100 HP 60 Shields instead of 80 HP 80 Shields is in any way relevant to balancing SC2.
Never mind the fact that so many elements of balance were completely independent of anything Blizzard might have intended (e.g. muta stacking).
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On October 01 2010 11:52 TheYango wrote:Show nested quote +On October 01 2010 08:27 .risingdragoon wrote: SC2's balancing is kindava urgent issue, things learned through BW isn't just unlearned.
SC2 needs desperately be balanced fast. When SC came out there was not nearly the expectation of it being balanced. I'm not sure how the fact that zealots should be 100 HP 60 Shields instead of 80 HP 80 Shields is in any way relevant to balancing SC2. Ghosts.. Shield also take full damage from all dmg types I believe.
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On October 01 2010 11:52 TheYango wrote:Show nested quote +On October 01 2010 08:27 .risingdragoon wrote: SC2's balancing is kindava urgent issue, things learned through BW isn't just unlearned.
SC2 needs desperately be balanced fast. When SC came out there was not nearly the expectation of it being balanced. I'm sort of curious what lessons everyone thinks Blizzard is supposed to have learned from balancing SC:BW, because no one seems to suggest anything other than "they should have learned something." They can improve their methodology (which, seeing as they're doing frequent minor patches instead of sparse, major ones, I would argue they have), but honestly, short of a direct clone, balancing is still shooting at a target in the dark. I'm not sure how the fact that zealots should be 100 HP 60 Shields instead of 80 HP 80 Shields is in any way relevant to balancing SC2. Never mind the fact that so many elements of balance were completely independent of anything Blizzard might have intended (e.g. muta stacking).
Although I agree with you the most part, I still feel that Blizzard could have carried away a few lessons from previous games, not so much balance but rather the design itself.
Two things that are important to learn in general:
1: Maps should be left to the community to balance. Blizzard keeps trying to take the helm when it comes to RTS maps, and it never works. It didn't work in SC1, it didn't work in WC3, and it's not working now.
2: Units and abilities should be designed in ways so that they can be countered with micro. JustPlay's post on WC3 balance brought up a very important point regarding game design. Raiders in WC3 basically took over the game because they had an incredible ability that essentially had no counter. One of the reasons the Marauder gets so much hate is precisely because it's concussive shell is like the Raider's ensnare: incredibly strong, counters micro, can't be stopped. Then of course you have the fact that Blizzard is making several abilities (EMP, Fungal Growth) fire off instantly, rather than in BW where the projectiles could be dodged, which led to deeper micro. The hard counter-y feel of the combat in SC2 doesn't help much either.
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Likewise a lot of people seem to think BW just got to a magically balanced state and remained static. Not so; just read the histories of the most famous pro gamers on Liquidpedia. Before Bisu brought the fall of Savior, PvZ was considered an imbalanced matchup for example. Before Boxer, Terrans were considered weaker. JulyZerg changed the way Zerg was played.
Now imagine if Blizzard had patched every time people thought a matchup was imbalanced. Right now people are crying about Zerg imbalance when Cool has clearly shown it isn't as bad as people think.
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On October 01 2010 11:34 AssuredVacancy wrote:Show nested quote +On October 01 2010 09:58 ooni wrote:On October 01 2010 09:43 AssuredVacancy wrote:On October 01 2010 09:36 Teddyman wrote:On October 01 2010 09:25 andrewlt wrote:On October 01 2010 08:39 johngalt90 wrote:On October 01 2010 07:56 csfield wrote:On October 01 2010 07:46 Raiden X wrote: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. And the ingenuity of players. It wasn't until Boxer that people actually took Terran seriously. Or After that July to even out TvZ. BW went though countless stages of innovation. SC2 on the other hand with its Crappy hard counter system will take way more time to balance. As SCBW was more flexible with its units. The bonus damage counter system is stupid. Strategy should be more than rock/paper/scissors. ur an idiot. there also was dmg reduction in bw do you not remember explosive dmg from vultures tanks and dragoons. bw also revolved around abusing very powerful units (reaver, lurker, siege tank) these units werent hard countered by single units and by standards of starcraft 2 would be nerfed into a former shadow of themselves (the siege tank stands as a great example). armored and bonus vs armor etc. doesnt work much differently from the bw dmg functions You're joking, right? In BW, there were only 3 damage types. Normal did 100% against everything, explosive did 100% to large, 75% to medium and 50% to small, concussive did 25% to large, 50% to medium and 100% to small. Doing it the SC2 way, you could say that concussive had a 4x bonus to small compared to large. There are only 3 units I recall with concussive (vulture, firebat and ghost). 2 of these are rarely used in normal play. That means BW has virtually no units with more than a 2x damage modifier. How many units in SC2 deal more than 2x the damage against one type of armor compared to other types? Way too freaking many. Reaper, Immortal, Ultralisk. How about hellion, marauders, ghosts, phoenixes, banelings, thors(air), voidrays? Marauders, ghosts, phoenixs banelings, thors do more than 2x the damage now? Need to update my patch, gogogo! The problem with SC2, battle speed is not because of the damage system. It's because marines, zealots or any other unit (besides zlings) got attack speed boost, marines 1->0.86 and so on. Units attack much faster. Another reason is there are less tactics that stops battles (Lurker, plague, large AOE emp). Another reason is that now units clump up, dealing more DPS at the same time. Another reason is Marauders are do same damage as dragoons but with stim! with stim! They are two different games, SC2 is more fast paced, get over it. Blizzard will help the game, metagame/maps should help too (Plz don't let blizzard maps be primary maps T-T). Only reason Blizzard is constantly patching sc2 is that, SC2 has high expectations. SC2 need to be balanced quick so SC1 pro players looks at SC2 as a good esport. That's how it is. Marauders are 10+10, 2x vs armored, ghosts are 10+10, 2x vs light, phoenixes are 5+5, 2x vs light, banelings are 20+15, almost 2x, thors do 6+6 air damage, 2x vs light. umm dude? Read what you wrote, MORE THAN 2x sighz, also look at what you are complaining about... gosh ppl these days
Back to what you were asking~~ How many units in SC2 deal more than 2x the damage against one type of armor compared to other types? Way too freaking many. Not many... count them, you can count right?
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SC:BW is balanced because of the maps. The same thing is going to work for Sc2. There will be a few minor changes to create as balanced of a game as possible, and then it will all be down to the maps.
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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.
quoted to emphasize truth.
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On October 01 2010 09:52 SiegeMode wrote:Show nested quote +And Blue flame is way strong. Especially against lings. Roasting 50 lings is absurd. Every see a vulture mine even do that?
In a word: yes. I can't even imagine the QQing if T had spider mine instead of blue flame. That ability was absurdly OP beyond anything in SC2 (like many BW abilities like dark swarm, irradiate, BW psi storm, BW stimpacks....)
Please please please tell me you're not saying Dark Swarm Irradiate the old Psi Storm and stimpacks(They do the same thing in SC2) are OP.......or you just worded that badly
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How can we balance through maps if Blizzard will most likely not implement community maps into the ladder pool?
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On October 01 2010 12:48 fAnTaCy wrote:Show nested quote +On October 01 2010 09:52 SiegeMode wrote:And Blue flame is way strong. Especially against lings. Roasting 50 lings is absurd. Every see a vulture mine even do that?
In a word: yes. I can't even imagine the QQing if T had spider mine instead of blue flame. That ability was absurdly OP beyond anything in SC2 (like many BW abilities like dark swarm, irradiate, BW psi storm, BW stimpacks....) Please please please tell me you're not saying Dark Swarm Irradiate the old Psi Storm and stimpacks(They do the same thing in SC2) are OP.......or you just worded that badly Not really Dark Swarm: PDD, limited by Energy and does not stop ranged attacks that are not missiles also no consume to spam dark Swarm Psi Storm: tiny radius compared to BW, BW does more Damage over time, Although SC1 storm has higher DPS Stimpacks: 1.5 tier healers by your side after u stim
EDIT: However this actually added joy and balance to the game Read the old article: http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=120471
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Brood War came out 6 months after Starcraft. Balance went from pretty bad to quite good. Importantly it had a different lead designer. In addition to all the new units, which made a huge difference, the biggest change was larvae spawn time was decreased significantly and Sunkens were made much stronger. What I heard at the time was Rob Pardo made it how he wanted and not many people at Blizzard agreed with him. Second hand info so it may not be accurate but I think it's somewhat accurate. If true it could mean it could take far longer for SC 2 to be balanced than it took with Brood War if they don't have someone with the vision and will that they did back then.
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On October 01 2010 12:54 ooni wrote:Show nested quote +On October 01 2010 12:48 fAnTaCy wrote:On October 01 2010 09:52 SiegeMode wrote:And Blue flame is way strong. Especially against lings. Roasting 50 lings is absurd. Every see a vulture mine even do that?
In a word: yes. I can't even imagine the QQing if T had spider mine instead of blue flame. That ability was absurdly OP beyond anything in SC2 (like many BW abilities like dark swarm, irradiate, BW psi storm, BW stimpacks....) Please please please tell me you're not saying Dark Swarm Irradiate the old Psi Storm and stimpacks(They do the same thing in SC2) are OP.......or you just worded that badly Not really Dark Swarm: PDD, limited by Energy and does not stop ranged attacks that are not missiles also no consume to spam dark Swarm Psi Storm: tiny radius compared to BW, BW does more Damage over time, Although SC1 storm has higher DPS Stimpacks: 1.5 tier healers by your side after u stim EDIT: However this actually added joy and balance to the game Read the old article: http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=120471
O.o.....are you agreeing with me or disagreeing with me bcause I'm still confused as to whether or not that other guy was saying those spells are OP or not
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On October 01 2010 13:52 fAnTaCy wrote:Show nested quote +On October 01 2010 12:54 ooni wrote:On October 01 2010 12:48 fAnTaCy wrote:On October 01 2010 09:52 SiegeMode wrote:And Blue flame is way strong. Especially against lings. Roasting 50 lings is absurd. Every see a vulture mine even do that?
In a word: yes. I can't even imagine the QQing if T had spider mine instead of blue flame. That ability was absurdly OP beyond anything in SC2 (like many BW abilities like dark swarm, irradiate, BW psi storm, BW stimpacks....) Please please please tell me you're not saying Dark Swarm Irradiate the old Psi Storm and stimpacks(They do the same thing in SC2) are OP.......or you just worded that badly Not really Dark Swarm: PDD, limited by Energy and does not stop ranged attacks that are not missiles also no consume to spam dark Swarm Psi Storm: tiny radius compared to BW, BW does more Damage over time, Although SC1 storm has higher DPS Stimpacks: 1.5 tier healers by your side after u stim EDIT: However this actually added joy and balance to the game Read the old article: http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=120471 O.o.....are you agreeing with me or disagreeing with me bcause I'm still confused as to whether or not that other guy was saying those spells are OP or not I'm guessing he's not saying OP in terms of balance but OP as in it's very very powerful compared to unit attacks and etc. Each race had powerful spells, which made the game interesting and not neccessarily imbalanced.
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Sweden33719 Posts
On October 01 2010 07:41 Pawshter wrote: What proof do you have that wc3 is unbalanced? Unsupported statements. Well, Undead has an extremely difficult matchup vs Orcs... I think that counts as unbalanced.
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wc3 was balanced for a long time, after patch 1.14 in 2004 UD vs ORC was essentially blanaced, (before that UD had an advatage but 1.14 nerfed destroyers a bit)
its only lately when the top UD players started retiring, and Orcs players started stacking BM and really abusing his critical strike and WW that things got a bit unblanced.
With the BW comparison thats a bit unfair, at the start of BW the pros werent playing all that well (i remember listening to day9s daily about his BW experiences and it seemed that the first year or so everyone was a noob). so as the game strats hadnt eveolved to the way they are today, or at least similar, the game couldnt be balanced until the changes in strategy finally slowed down.
however for sc2 the best strats and the best way to play the game are being discovered a lot faster, and therefore it will be a lot easier to balance the game. so 2 and a half years is a lot longer than is needed, however if new units are introduced with each expansion it may take till half a year after the last expansion or something
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I think the OP is completely contradicting himself, the patch notes he added had tons and tons of balance changes, to a wide variety of units, we've had one doing very very very minor change with the exception of tanks. 5 seconds is not a significant change, so hes saying Bw took 2.5 yrs to balance and then say it didn't take a long time? hello most games aren't even played after 2.5 years
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BW was "balanced" because of players ..
SC2 needs good players .. Right now, I think there are some but still needs more in order to get a decent data to being heavy balancing stuff. But Blizzard, it seems to me and based how they tend to listen more to casual gamers (saw many post about it), wont balance it for E-sport but for the newbies to have a competitive edge against higher skilled players.
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wow. I didn't know they changed so little in sc with patches. Looks like a miracle to me.
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I think it does ultimately come down to maps as others have said...all the tournaments are still using Blizzard maps. No one in their right mind would say BW was balanced on Blizzard maps. In fact I'd venture to say SC2 is more balanced on Blizz maps than its predecessor cause Blizz maps in SC were simply atrocious.
When was the last time you saw lost temple in a BW tourney? But its still a flagship map in all SC2 tourneys. Of course with everyone playing Blizz maps on ladder it will be harder to incorporate more balanced maps which is an issue that has to be looked at. However until I see tournaments using maps created strictly by the community (as it is in BW) I will never say that the game is completely unbalanced.
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This is a pointless argument. We all perfectly know that Blizzard is planning two more expansion for the game. Balance will shift entirely with each of these expansions. We don't need a thread arguing whether it will take too long to achieve perfect balance when we know the schedule for these expansions; 1,5 years each. Be patient, people. Time is relative.
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On October 01 2010 15:12 Tdelamay wrote: This is a pointless argument. We all perfectly know that Blizzard is planning two more expansion for the game. Balance will shift entirely with each of these expansions. We don't need a thread arguing whether it will take too long to achieve perfect balance when we know the schedule for these expansions; 1,5 years each. Be patient, people. Time is relative.
I really dont think that is necessary .. they could just heavy patch it on the 2nd and leave the 3rd for campaign and other new feature that wasn't present in the old patches
- OR -
SC2 will get really unlucky and will take more many months to balance the gameplay even if the 3rd expansion was released.
i think people here assume that when the last expansion is out, the game will be balanced 100% guaranteed .. but i think not likely to happen, it may happen, but maybe a 30% chance ..
so many factors are needed to for games to be balanced. not just time ..
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On October 01 2010 07:41 Pawshter wrote: What proof do you have that wc3 is unbalanced? Unsupported statements.
Uhm wc3 is pretty unbalanced. Races are radically favored based on the map (moreso than starcraft), and some heroes are a lot better than others, while a race's unit comp is just plain bad vs another race... It's basically impossible to balance well because there are 4 races. It's pretty much a widel accepted fact, so he's not making baseless statements.
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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.
This.
imo Blizzard got extremely lucky with how BW turned out, I doubt they could do it again.
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OP is correct. however its a different blizzard now and esports is different now.
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I was not so much the patches as the maps and the players that evolved.
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On October 01 2010 07:42 blabber wrote: isn't it the general consensus that Orc (specifically Blademaster) is imbalanced?
There have been some small patches (such as the repair rate of towers changed etc) but pretty much this same patch, balance wise, Orc was considered the weakest race and often you'd see tournaments with like 1 or 2 Orcs competing against a ton of humans, night elves and a few undeads. The game evolved, and I haven't played the game much the last 3-4 years, but mainly due to the fact that Orc players now sell their teleport scroll to buy some circlets in the store which gives blademasters a huge edge in early game which they can expand upon.
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On October 01 2010 15:36 Osmoses wrote: I was not so much the patches as the maps and the players that evolved.
Some truth to that but a lot of people are forgetting that the difference between Starcraft and Brood War was night and day. Maps and players would not have mattered if not for the huge change in Brood War. The key will be Blizzard will have to stop the approach of randomly buffing or nerfing a stat if a unit is too strong or too weak and start looking at the bigger picture. At the very least when adjusting a unit you have to also look at the units that it closely interacts with. For example if you are going to nerf the Roach you also need to take a close look at the Marauder at the same time.
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On October 01 2010 07:38 Perscienter wrote:
I just wanted to write this down, because balancing Brood War wasn't such a big deal. In fact, they did it in quite an occasional way. It certainly didn't took so much changes as in Frozen Throne and that game isn't balanced at all in the end.
I guess, Blizzard will stay sloppy about the balance and we can only hope for severe changes in the addons, which will probably overthrow a lot.
I just want to point out that you heavily exagerate the balance of the current state of WC3:TFT. Sure it might need some tweeks here n there but its really not as bad as you put it, and this I can stand as someone who has played and followed the pro league since 04, and still do. Blademaster certainly needs a nerf (damage stacking with crit) and Tome of exp needs to be removed and some new Maps would do good (not that ALL the current are unbalanced, but some are, and with new maps its very important that they're balanced as well) but thats about it. Maybe steam tanks could need some increase of the given experience points as well and Ancient Protectors have an tier3 upgrade that switches their Damage type to siege (Just a little fantasy of mine that'd give Night Elves an easier way of dealing with Siege tanks).
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Isn`t SC BW seem a little unbalanced in areas such as darkswarm? But it was players using interesting strategies in battles to over come this and make it fair? I think games will always have imbalances but good players learn to balance them. Who knows in 4 years time zerg will be OP and T the weakest race in the pro circuit. The history of SC BW has shown all sorts of races hit the top mostly because of the players.
I really think micro tricks are missing in SC2 that existed in SC BW that helped players balance the game, a weak unit could become unkillable with the right micro trick, such as vulture patrol move shot but thats one example of many.
Also the entire game isn`t out until HOTS and the protoss campaign are released. So it seems to me terran being the stronger race since this is its campaign makes sense. Once the games complete then it may be fairer hopefully. Remember in the original SC1 the mutalisk was seen as OP until BW arrived with the corsair,medic. valkarie tho hardly used etc..
Just my views among many :D
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On October 01 2010 08:03 Fizbin wrote:Show nested quote +On October 01 2010 07:45 .risingdragoon wrote: Well, you have to remember that The Blizzard that made SC and BW is a different Blizzard. Most of those guys have gone and started new companies, like ArenaNet.
So it's probably better to look at the balancing history of WC3, possibly WoW's arenas also. Sloppy, of course. u cant be serious in comparing WOW arena balance too what the balance team for sc2 is going to do. wow had to balance single player and multiplayer at the same time. that is why they had so many difficulties... terrible example... not to even mention trying to balance 8 races or whatever compared too 3
30 really, since it's 10 classes with 3 specs each. Plus they balance around 3v3, and yeah, with the same exact ruleset for PvE and PvP. The fact that most of those 30 specs are more or less viable in both 2v2 and 3v3 is actually a testament to how good Blizzard is at this sort of thing.
Of course anyone stuck with the "less" part of that "more or less" thinks their balancing team consists of a single blind, retarded spider monkey who spends his days masturbating and huffing paint thinner.
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On October 01 2010 17:18 kojinshugi wrote:Show nested quote +On October 01 2010 08:03 Fizbin wrote:On October 01 2010 07:45 .risingdragoon wrote: Well, you have to remember that The Blizzard that made SC and BW is a different Blizzard. Most of those guys have gone and started new companies, like ArenaNet.
So it's probably better to look at the balancing history of WC3, possibly WoW's arenas also. Sloppy, of course. u cant be serious in comparing WOW arena balance too what the balance team for sc2 is going to do. wow had to balance single player and multiplayer at the same time. that is why they had so many difficulties... terrible example... not to even mention trying to balance 8 races or whatever compared too 3 30 really, since it's 10 classes with 3 specs each. Plus they balance around 3v3, and yeah, with the same exact ruleset for PvE and PvP. The fact that most of those 30 specs are more or less viable in both 2v2 and 3v3 is actually a testament to how good Blizzard is at this sort of thing. Of course anyone stuck with the "less" part of that "more or less" thinks their balancing team consists of a single blind, retarded spider monkey who spends his days masturbating and huffing paint thinner.
One, with hybrids, 2 specs per class are PvP viable.
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On October 01 2010 16:17 Grond wrote: For example if you are going to nerf the Roach you also need to take a close look at the Marauder at the same time.
What, like make it 2 supply?
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Notice that the pro-scene in Korea was established after the final big balance patch.
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On October 01 2010 17:20 Nightfall.589 wrote: One, with hybrids, 2 specs per class are PvP viable.
Pally - Ret, Holy, Protret Shammy - Resto, ele, enhance Warr - Arms, Prot Rogue - mut, sub Mage - Frost, arcane (in wizardcleaves) Hunter - all 3 specs in various comps Lock - destro, afflic Druid - all 3 specs currently viable Priest - shadow, disc DK - pick a season, pick a spec du jour
By "viable" I mean "several people have made Glad running that spec".
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What? Are you expecting them to make a patch with similar effect as the 1.04 or 1.08 of SC this soon after SC2 has come out? It's literally been 2 months. I would guess it would be another 4-6 months before a huge balance changing patch came out and even then all the changes wouldn't be fully understood until months after that.
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What bugs me is that people claim that Blizzard balanced Broodwar, they helped but it was the maps that did the most legwork. People give Blizzard too much credit. Blizzard did come up with Steppes of War remember.
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They're probably also saving massive changes to Zerg for the Zerg expansion. Remember, there's going to be two Brood Wars for this one. There's really no reason for massive rebalancing for such a nascent game. They'll do small nerfs/buffs every few months, improving balance in baby steps.
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On October 01 2010 17:37 Ordained wrote: What bugs me is that people claim that Blizzard balanced Broodwar, they helped but it was the maps that did the most legwork. People give Blizzard too much credit. Blizzard did come up with Steppes of War remember.
What's wrong with Steppes of War? Yeah, it has a short rush distance but the natural is incredibly easy to take, drops are easy to guard against if you take your third, and the line of sight variations in the middle make for interesting fights.
The rush distance is longer than Metalopolis close ground positions.
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Katowice25012 Posts
On October 01 2010 14:18 Liquid`Jinro wrote:Show nested quote +On October 01 2010 07:41 Pawshter wrote: What proof do you have that wc3 is unbalanced? Unsupported statements. Well, Undead has an extremely difficult matchup vs Orcs... I think that counts as unbalanced.
The last time I saw pro stats on War3 there was more than one matchup that was at 60% but I forget where I saw those numbers
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On October 01 2010 17:40 kojinshugi wrote:Show nested quote +On October 01 2010 17:37 Ordained wrote: What bugs me is that people claim that Blizzard balanced Broodwar, they helped but it was the maps that did the most legwork. People give Blizzard too much credit. Blizzard did come up with Steppes of War remember. What's wrong with Steppes of War? Yeah, it has a short rush distance but the natural is incredibly easy to take, drops are easy to guard against if you take your third, and the line of sight variations in the middle make for interesting fights. The rush distance is longer than Metalopolis close ground positions. Well to me Steppes of War just feels like this + Show Spoiler +
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On October 01 2010 17:40 kojinshugi wrote:Show nested quote +On October 01 2010 17:37 Ordained wrote: What bugs me is that people claim that Blizzard balanced Broodwar, they helped but it was the maps that did the most legwork. People give Blizzard too much credit. Blizzard did come up with Steppes of War remember. What's wrong with Steppes of War? Yeah, it has a short rush distance but the natural is incredibly easy to take, drops are easy to guard against if you take your third, and the line of sight variations in the middle make for interesting fights. The rush distance is longer than Metalopolis close ground positions.
Have you seen the thread about how imbalanced it is just design wise, Tanks can sit at the bottom and shoot in further against someone on the bottom. If you are on the bottom your nat can be walked up on by Colloxen but top can not. (Talking right by the minerals.)
Metalopolis is the best map Blizzard has for sc2, but that is not saying much. Yes, the rush distance is faster on Metalopolis close positions, but at least you have to scout.
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SO, whats the timestamps on the patch that turned scbw from slightly unbalanced to balanced?
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..and yet SC:BW still isn't "balanced" by Blizzard standards today.
Scouts are a joke. Carriers aren't "viable" Battlecruisers aren't "viable" Queen.. lol queen.
Blizzard right now is working towards a "sweet spot" of perfect balance with everything.
The majority of SC:BW balance happened by complete chance on Blizzard's part, so they left it that way and were afraid to touch it.
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On October 01 2010 18:03 Snowfield wrote: SO, whats the timestamps on the patch that turned scbw from slightly unbalanced to balanced? It wasn't a patch, it was the metagame and kespa maps.
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It's obvious that major sweeping changes are needed and we're not getting them. Extrapolating from the OP, it's easy to tell that Blizzard needs to realize that BW was not balanced by slowly tweaking little things. Nevermind that it took 2 1/2 years to make the big balance patch (the game evolution was very slow back then, and people didn't have a good grasp of RTS.)
In addition, SC BW is much much much more limited by what you as a player can do because of the interface and AI. The skill cap to executing basically any strategy is very high. In SC2 the skill cap to executing earlygame builds is extremely low by comparison.
It's actually a boon that SC2 is easier to play, because it becomes much easier to say "this is imbalanced" rather than "you can play better here."
Blizzard needs to get the ball rollin on balance. I think once a month is reasonable.
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On October 01 2010 17:27 kojinshugi wrote:Show nested quote +On October 01 2010 17:20 Nightfall.589 wrote: One, with hybrids, 2 specs per class are PvP viable. Pally - Ret, Holy, Protret Shammy - Resto, ele, enhance Warr - Arms, Prot Rogue - mut, sub Mage - Frost, arcane (in wizardcleaves) Hunter - all 3 specs in various comps Lock - destro, afflic Druid - all 3 specs currently viable Priest - shadow, disc DK - pick a season, pick a spec du jour By "viable" I mean "several people have made Glad running that spec".
Gladiator in wow arena is relative to the battlegroup and the season. The balance in WOTLK is atrocious.
Some classes have 3 viable specs in certain comps, then there are other classes that were extremely op and then had like 1% representation on sk100 despite being the most played class.
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I think the OP's argument would be made viable in a year or so.
Of course times have changed, technology is better, the game's understanding has become a lot more common, but that doesn't mean the volatility of player skills and ingenuity is the same at all. Blizzard and the community will have to wait a while before we see things that are blatantly imbalanced. People may yell terran imbalance and zerg UP all they want, but only time will tell if they truly are.
It took 2 1/2 years to balance starcraft AFTER BW came out. Doesn't this only imply that it will take some amount of time after the last expansion of SC2 for this game to be balanced?
Lets stop these threads and just be patient
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On October 01 2010 18:37 MusiK wrote: I think the OP's argument would be made viable in a year or so.
Of course times have changed, technology is better, the game's understanding has become a lot more common, but that doesn't mean the volatility of player skills and ingenuity is the same at all. Blizzard and the community will have to wait a while before we see things that are blatantly imbalanced. People may yell terran imbalance and zerg UP all they want, but only time will tell if they truly are.
It took 2 1/2 years to balance starcraft AFTER BW came out. Doesn't this only imply that it will take some amount of time after the last expansion of SC2 for this game to be balanced?
Lets stop these threads and just be patient No ones asking for perfect balance.
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I forgot how many buffs Terran got over the patches in SC1.
It's a bit like reading the sc2 beta notes.
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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.
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On October 01 2010 07:41 Pawshter wrote: What proof do you have that wc3 is unbalanced? Unsupported statements.
http://www.sk-gaming.com/wc3/ Note the Undead vs Orc win / loss ratio on the right hand side - it's been like that for 2 years and people have been screaming - no one gives a shit.
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I've been wanting to write up a big post on all the things that bug me but they take so much effort.
Here's the gist: if you could put the skill of a player in to a single number between 0 and 100, it's my belief that say a 25/100 skill Terran player, can beat a 30/100 skill Protoss and a 35/100 Zerg player. That of course sounds a bit silly but that's the best way I can put it. (For reference I'm a scrub - but I can and do recognise good play when I see it - I'm a good spectator)
Which race has an expansion with it's own built in defence? Ok cool. Which race is the only race where all the workers at the expansion can repair it if it gets in trouble? Oh Which race can get supply blocked and solve the problem instantly? Which race can get it's workers all raped and temorarily solve the economic problem instantly? Which race can not have detection and solve the problem instantly? Which race pays so little for it's tier 1 upgrades? Which race gets free healing on it's transport? Which race has the longest range on it's air to air unit?
Now if you step back for a moment and don't look at the lore and you don't think of it as Terran, Protoss and Zerg - you simply look at the actual gameplay design from a pure design perspective You have things like - invisible units for each team flying units for each team detection units for each team economic macro abilities for each team etc etc and so on - now if you think from that pure design perspective angle only and think - ok what would be best in X situation or Y situation, I seriously have a hard time not thinking of Terran each and every time. Why is the thor and marine and viking so good at anti air? Do the other teams have such variety? Why does marauder slow down every god damn thing in the game?
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.
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By "viable" I mean "several people have made Glad running that spec".
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.
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This thread has derailed to balance/whine about War3 and WoW? Pretty pathetic ;/
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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. Look in the protoss demo done a few years ago; Terrans till have Repears, Siege Tanks and the SCV CC deployment ability. Zealots still have charge and warp in, as well as Immortals, Collosi and Phoenixes (although the latter changed a lot), plus Mothership (lol) Zerg still have... Zerglings and Banelings?
To me, it seems like Blizzard had awesome ideas for P and T, and practically none for Z. Z didn't end up with anything really awesome, anycase :/
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There's just a big culture of bitching around Blizzard games for the last few years. At worst any matchup in SC2 is 6:4 in favor of one race. If you look at the fighting game scene, even 7:3 matchups aren't that rare, yet almost nobody blames balance if they lose. Once someone gets a firm belief in the idea that something is imbalanced, no amount of convincing will get them to think otherwise (insert Inception quote here). That just gets amplified in forum shitstorms until it's impossible to post otherwise without getting flamed.
SC2 only needs to get to a point where the game can be balanced with maps. We might actually already be at that stage. Hell, even by eliminating a couple of the worst offenders from the ladder map pool and giving each player a map or two to thumbs down, you usually end up with a couple of somewhat balanced maps for each matchup.
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On October 01 2010 20:29 GIGAR wrote:Show nested quote +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=119391
This 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)
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No one expect fast big balance patches, they need quite alot time to figure out and do tests. I think SC after release was more balanced than current situation. We all saw the game development process with the information on the official web site, How blizzard created SC2 this is the main problem. They created terran race first, all the ideas are great I bet everyone agree that Terran race has so many options,builds,strats,so many good units, give me 1 terran unit that is bad and useless? Terran mechanics are also pretty good so close to SC:BW, no one playing terran in SC2 miss units from SC:BW (maybe the goliath but thors) After finishing terran blizzard started protoss they had few good ideas the mother ship collosi warp prism the warp gate mechanic, they balanced it as much as they could vs terran. Then they had to make zerg they were out of ideas, and the result is very poor zerg mechanics very little options and rendering zerg pretty imbalance the tight schedule to make the whole zerg race lead to the current situation. The new things for zerg compared to BW are the need for creep to stay on even foot with terran and protoss, the need for constant larva inject, the lack for early mobile anti-air. the lack of early agression, the lack of mobility out of creep, the lack of creativity that zerg offer overall. I don't belive expansions will solve this things at all, nor any balance patch, you cannot balance things that are faulty by design.TvP can be balanced with minor changes, Zerg need to be redesign.
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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) Terran (and Protoss) will continue to develop new, interesting strategies. Zerg will not. A lot of people seem to be like "give the game some time, Zerg will learn new epic strats". Okay, like what? Speed teching to Mutas aren't going to prevent a Reaper from harassing or destroying your base, for instance - Since Zerg is such an reactoinary race, there's no "zerg can just do this and amove and win!" tactics anymore.
Tbh, right now, every time I think of SC2 Zerg, I just get pissed off. Like, literally. It's starting to affect my RL, since I'm almost constantly pissed off with all this garbage.
Blizzard even openly states that Zerg isn't fun to play. Blizzard also said that they didn't really know what they wanted the Ultralisk to do. What does that mean for the rest of the race? If you don't know what a T3 unit is supposed to do, then wth is the other things supposed to do?
Collosus are a pretty nice "raep all non-huge ground units". Carriers are some kind of lol-unit, that's practically unbeatable when massed. Battlecruisers are like Carriers. Thors are just completely insane at destroying light Air units, and have a decent ground attack. Okay, Mothership is lol, but those are all useful T3 units to a varying degree - We KNOW what they can do, and what they're supposed to do (kinda).
Zerg is just "lol sup lets make some units" - "k"
I'm a sad Zerg now *goes to punch wall*
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Hyrule18827 Posts
I dunno...I think 2.5 years is a decently long time. It's not 12 years like some people are saying, but still....
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As much as it's always stated to be the most balanced game ever, SC1 shouldn't deserve so much praise.
The main point between back then and today is that you've got bunch of people whining today about balance, it's like a trend that i believe started with WoW and is now everywhere.
Certain periods of time in SC1 could be considered as highly favoring a certain race, due to maps, dominance etc. I ask you, is SC1 balanced so good that every race has a chance to dominate, or are the players just so damn skilled that they make BALANCE look like it's not a factor?
I'm quite sure if we take the current SC2 and don't patch it for 10 years we'll have bisus/jaedongs/flashes.
Nothing can trully be balanced imo :X
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The last balance patch for BW was the one that introduced replays. The whole time they balanced the game they didn't even have replays, and the game also evolved slower, because of that.
Nowadays they have the BW history to learn from, replays, a huge amount of statistics from their ladder and a lot of different tournaments.
These are all things they didn't have at the time, so doing things a lot faster should definitely be expected.
The expansions will also affect balance, and if they continue balancing the game the same way, then it will not be balanced at all between the expansions, so we can expect the game to be in a balanced state for the first time after no less than 4 years(and that's a very optimistic estimate), which is much more than in took SC and will drive a large amount of players from the game, as well as having a big effect on the competitive scene as well.
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On October 01 2010 21:00 GIGAR wrote:Show nested quote +On October 01 2010 20:43 abrasion wrote: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) Terran (and Protoss) will continue to develop new, interesting strategies. Zerg will not. A lot of people seem to be like "give the game some time, Zerg will learn new epic strats". Okay, like what? Speed teching to Mutas aren't going to prevent a Reaper from harassing or destroying your base, for instance - Since Zerg is such an reactoinary race, there's no "zerg can just do this and amove and win!" tactics anymore. Tbh, right now, every time I think of SC2 Zerg, I just get pissed off. Like, literally. It's starting to affect my RL, since I'm almost constantly pissed off with all this garbage. Blizzard even openly states that Zerg isn't fun to play. Blizzard also said that they didn't really know what they wanted the Ultralisk to do. What does that mean for the rest of the race? If you don't know what a T3 unit is supposed to do, then wth is the other things supposed to do?
Dude, I play Protoss and I feel sorry for Zerg. There's a reason people at the high level are complaining. Zerg first 10 minutes suck, there's like no options, none! If you're a grand master at the game, you get the 'right' to continue and maybe, just maybe now diversify and try some different stuff. However those first 10 minutes are about performing the perfect opening and surviving - on the backfoot.
Someone showed a picture recently from a chart they drew, showing up the Terran advantage in the early game, then curving slowly as the game progresses until the end, where I think Zerg can really shine with some sweet variety. None the less that opening sucks and the units are boring - I'm glad I chose P to be honest.
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Mayn arguments here against the original post not aim on his main statement: the ballance history of SC1 is much smaller than many people suggest. That's all he's basically saying.
Also, do not forget the changed marketing strategy: while SC1 operated with three playable races at the same time, Blizzard introduces the races via singleplayer in SC2 step by step. Result of this, if Blizzard wants it ro not, will be that Zerg and Protoss will first come to the gameplay focus after the second and third add-on. For the multiplayer ballance it can only mean, that the chance to hit a good ballance for all three reaces by making campaings for them was just much higher.
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You're saying that it took very few patches to balance SC, but it will take way more patches to balance SC2?
What's the difference? If you measure it in time it will probably be the same. I dont like the big patches anyways, i'd rather get 10 small ones than 1 big one.
I've asked this in other balance threads aswell, but could anyone tell me 1 game that has been balanced in its first 3 months? or even 5 months? Like any competitive game.
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I remember reading an interview where one of the developers (I will let him remain anonymous) said they wanted to bring units that looked cool into the mix and then try balancing/tweaking them after. Keep in mind, he also said they would try to work around it as much as possible to make sure it actually works, if all else fails they would scratch the unit.
I'm just confirming the fact their ideas were based on look rather than game-play first, which is a big issue in game developing nowadays. Just wanted to point that out.
Cyuss, right on. That's leads me to another notable quote. To paraphrase Dustin unconsciously told us where the emphasis on the units were placed (Terran, Protoss, Zerg) through the Single Player campaign. Zerg are the predominant nemesis in the game. Likewise they got the short-end of the stick. Hence, at launch there were more Terran players than not, so these numbers are a little askew. This is why it was silly for them to skip parts of production. The product could have been a lot better if they focused on all 3 campaigns at the same time. They skipped a lot of steps because they wanted the game to hit shelves and rake in money, but then again the game would probably be in develop for another 1-2 years and this would cost millions and millions of dollars. Can we blame them? :/
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Reading all this all I could think about was "Wow, Blizzard gives customers a bone and like all good crowds they go for the whole bloody arm". The company which atm has the best game update/balancing response times, the best community relations management and that actively tries to get customers opinions when creating games and they still get shouted at and yelled and whined.
How can you even expect a company to listen to all the requests of everyone playing. Sure, in beta it was one thing, nothing was set in stone but doing "massive changes" now, on the live game? LOOOOLLL!!! You people are really crazy.
Go read up on what development means and see it's not exactly push 2 buttons and voila you have some software. No wonder most of the idiots actually believe they have a right to try cracked games and software, you know nothing of the work that goes into making something like SC2, time wise it's longer than building sky scrapers and you expect stuff to change at the community's whim?
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That's the thing. They shouldn't be listening to everyone. A more realistic number would be less than one percent. In fact, it would be something like 0.0035 percent of their client base.
There is no denying Blizzard rushed the product. They put more emphasis on appeasing the casual consumers and unfortunately the game-play had to take the bullet. There have been several interviews conducted based on their process for developing SC2. Perhaps you should read them. Many of them have been posted on this website. A search might suffice. I know I'm well aware of the work that goes into any project Blizzard does because I've been following them ever since I was about 12 and I'm almost 30 now.
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On October 01 2010 07:51 Seide wrote:Show nested quote +On October 01 2010 07:46 Raiden X wrote: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. SC2 on the other hand with its Crappy hard counter system will take way more time to balance. As SCBW was more flexible with its units. Hard counter system? have you played more than 5 games of SC2? I think you forgot get something: a clue. SC2 countering system is no different from BW. There will be unit compositions that work better against other unit composition that is like basic RTS -_-
Took me a while to get this post. I understand now. Its a joke, not good one, but a joke nonetheless
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On October 01 2010 21:14 lololol wrote: The last balance patch for BW was the one that introduced replays. The whole time they balanced the game they didn't even have replays, and the game also evolved slower, because of that.
Nowadays they have the BW history to learn from, replays, a huge amount of statistics from their ladder and a lot of different tournaments.
These are all things they didn't have at the time, so doing things a lot faster should definitely be expected.
The expansions will also affect balance, and if they continue balancing the game the same way, then it will not be balanced at all between the expansions, so we can expect the game to be in a balanced state for the first time after no less than 4 years(and that's a very optimistic estimate), which is much more than in took SC and will drive a large amount of players from the game, as well as having a big effect on the competitive scene as well.
Pretty much nailed it. SC2 now after a beta and a few months is already at a level that BW was at only a few years ago. People are really good at SC2 already, and the core understanding of macro, timings, expanding, unit compositions, and overall RTS is SO much higher than in the early life of BW.
The problem is simple: Blizzard wants SC2 to be an esport like its predecessor. They don't want to balance it quickly and aggressively. Therefore, players can't afford to wait around for their race to be balanced, so everyone switches to the imbalanced race and the game loses depth and starts to die.
Blizz better pick it up.
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Being a math guy and an avid poker player, i tend to look at things from a quantitative perspective.
That being said, ask yourself, does 100% balance really matter that much right now?
I'll do an example. Let's say for instance for the sake of argument that zerglings are deemed too powerful and blizz decides to nerf their build time by 15 seconds. (yes it is extreme and that is why I chose it).
For that to matter, you would need to play against a Zerg player and play in a way that is supposedly strong against zerglings but their build time is too short so you end up losing.
The "odds" that you will play a Zerg player is 33%(again, for the sake of argument) and the odds that he played zerglings in a way that blizzard deems too powerful, say 25%, and the odds that you played in such a way that is suppose to defeat the strategy, say 33%.
Taking all of that into consideration you would lose 2 to 3 games out of 100 because of the imbalance assuming you and your opponent played equally well.
Also take into effect that you may play a race and strategy that blizz deems too powerful and you win about 2 to 3 games out of 100 that you otherwise should have lost.
My point? As the great Paul McCartney wrote, "let it be".
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Comparing Brood War to SC2 is always unstable ground, the unit compositions, statistics, resources, all have changed. And I'm aware that many of the people posting in the SC2 forums never played Brood War, much less followed the Korean competitive scene. But, I think there are a few things that do apply, especially in regard to the current discourse around TvZ in SC2.
For one thing, Brood War was NEVER BALANCED.
That is, Broodwar was never balanced in the sense that people seem to expect from Starcraft 2.
In a game where the races have fundamentally different mechanics, it's ridiculous to expect that each matches up perfectly in all stages of the game, on any map. But the Brood War competitive scene made up for this with map design, for the most part. For example, PvZ was very lopsided unless the Protoss was given a protected Natural expansion. Maps like Andromeda, Medusa, and Outsider were favorable ZvT (around 60-40) because of the wide open center and ease of taking extra gas. Other maps like Othello were just as favored TvZ because of the lack of these things. But overall, the Kespa mapmakers were able to produce maps with consistent enough design to keep the matchups even.
Now, one could look at Starcraft 2 and see (hypothetically), that TvZ is 65-35% right now between roughly equally skilled players. How Blizzard is thinking right now, and what the community expects from them in general, is the premise that "Okay, Terran is obviously too strong right now, what kind of numbers can we tweak downwards to bring the matchup to 50%". It would be MUCH healthier for the game if instead, the train of thought went "Okay, Terran simply has too many options in the early game that prevent a Zerg from being able to match the Terran economy. If we made the maps bigger and less cliff heavy, it might allow them to stabilize into the midgame better."
But the problem with that, is that Blizzard is trying to run the "esports" aspect of Starcraft 2. Which is good in many ways, but it also means that by setting the ladder maps in stone, it discourages experimenting with new maps at the highest levels of play; players will favor the familiar maps as they're the primary means through which to practice. Which makes things harder to change. Maps like Battle Royal and Tears of the Moon were badly balanced in Brood War; but it was alright - they lasted a season or less of Proleague or a Starleague, then were removed once the problems with the map were acknowledged. I don't see the current set of ladder maps going away anytime soon; and even if they do, I don't expect Blizzard to depart from its current philosophy regarding mapmaking as long as the primary balance concerns by the community are focused around units. (Main + Natural with no easy third base, Gold in the Center, Too many cliffs, air or rush distances that are stupidly short )
In my opinion, the using the idea of patch philosophy to address "balance" is only detrimental to the game in the long run. Some things need to be addressed (Mostly the Mule, but that's a post for a different time), but really, most of the glaring problems with the game have already been worked out through beta. Continually tweaking numbers and units devalues practicing specific builds, and hinders the creation of a standard model for a matchup, something which broodwar hinged on. For example, the standard TvZ - Marine Medic into Marine Tank Vessel against Mutalisk into Lurker Defiler into Ultra; that could describe hundreds of games, yet still managed to be entertaining, both in the player's execution, micro, and situational deviations from it. And for me at least, that's much more entertaining than playing "see what sort of random harass the Terran will do this game" Changing statistics also bears the risk of moving units toward Roach territory; an overreactive, crippling change that addressed the balance problem only taking one supply, but went a step too far, as well as making the unit impressively boring and soulless.
Blizzard has half of the pieces to the puzzle right now; they don't want to do kneejerk balance changes to Terran because they've shown a good deal of success in a few community run tournaments and have a larger popularity on ladder. But, on the other hand, they eventually need to acknowledge that the map is just as much a part of the game as the race is. And the community needs to do much the same if they ever want to see the competitive scene grow to rival Brood War.
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It still took several patches, an expansion (which addressed specific issues as well) and another several patches to get to the current balance of BW. this over the course of 2,5 years. That's still a long ways ahead for SC2, so I don't really get the point of this thread.
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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 .......................................... 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
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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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On October 02 2010 06:37 kojinshugi wrote: 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?).
This comes down to intuitive, streamlined gameplay on the one hand and quantity of options on the other. If one is easier to play and has fewer options, and you put it up against a race that has more options but is harder to play, that is a form of separate but equal. If one is easier to play AND has more options versus a faction that is harder to play and has less options... how is that not unbalanced, regardless of how those different options affect gameplay? Take your wall in example and think about it in depth. When Zerg players are annoyed that they can't wall in, they're annoyed by the fact that not being able to wall in has no obvious corresponding advantages. Does walling in hamper a race's aggression? No. Does walling in put you at a severe economic disadvantage? No. Where's the give and take? If they ask for wall in capability, it's because it's easier to just ask for what everyone else already has than to make up some random nonexistent new ability to make up for not being able to wall in.
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On October 01 2010 22:52 dakalro wrote: Reading all this all I could think about was "Wow, Blizzard gives customers a bone and like all good crowds they go for the whole bloody arm". The company which atm has the best game update/balancing response times, the best community relations management and that actively tries to get customers opinions when creating games and they still get shouted at and yelled and whined.
How can you even expect a company to listen to all the requests of everyone playing. Sure, in beta it was one thing, nothing was set in stone but doing "massive changes" now, on the live game? LOOOOLLL!!! You people are really crazy.
Go read up on what development means and see it's not exactly push 2 buttons and voila you have some software. No wonder most of the idiots actually believe they have a right to try cracked games and software, you know nothing of the work that goes into making something like SC2, time wise it's longer than building sky scrapers and you expect stuff to change at the community's whim?
+1
That said, the, "I don't like playing Zerg but it's fine" comment was pretty atrocious, and not really supporting your claim that they actively try to get customers' opinions. It's obvious that Zerg are broken and need help, but they do not seem to be addressing it. (I play Protoss.)
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On October 02 2010 06:37 kojinshugi wrote: Once the game went live, imbalances crept in, but those can't be dealt with in the same shotgun approach.
Why not?
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On October 02 2010 07:27 a176 wrote:Show nested quote +On October 02 2010 06:37 kojinshugi wrote: Once the game went live, imbalances crept in, but those can't be dealt with in the same shotgun approach. Why not?
Because these are paying customers, not to mention the progamers who are making a living off this.
A game that is constantly going through massive balance changes is going to fail. A good analogy is WoW (or any MMO) and gear resets - if they happen too often, players won't be motivated to play at all because there's no stability. Why do all this work if it's going to be null and void in 6 weeks?
Imagine being a progamer, practicing your strategies for hundreds of hours, and suddenly the game goes through a massive change, making all those strategies useless. Why do all this work if halfway through the GSL all that practice goes down the drain?
Is that a price worth paying to introduce an artificial threeway split in representation? Is one race being the perceived underdog such a terrible thing that it needs to be fixed, no matter the cost?
I hate to bring this up, because I don't intend it to be an argument for "Zerg is fine, l2p", but look at who's playing the GSL finals tomorrow. As long as that can happen, the game is doing well enough for its first two months in retail. Yes, there's imbalances. Terran is too strong. But not so overwhelmingly that it would justify upending the current state of the game completely.
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On October 01 2010 07:44 maliceee wrote:Show nested quote +On October 01 2010 07:42 blabber wrote: isn't it the general consensus that Orc (specifically Blademaster) is imbalanced? yes. No. That is not the general consensus in WC3 at all.
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On October 02 2010 08:21 kojinshugi wrote:Show nested quote +On October 02 2010 07:27 a176 wrote:On October 02 2010 06:37 kojinshugi wrote: Once the game went live, imbalances crept in, but those can't be dealt with in the same shotgun approach. Why not? Because these are paying customers, not to mention the progamers who are making a living off this. A game that is constantly going through massive balance changes is going to fail. A good analogy is WoW (or any MMO) and gear resets - if they happen too often, players won't be motivated to play at all because there's no stability. Why do all this work if it's going to be null and void in 6 weeks? Imagine being a progamer, practicing your strategies for hundreds of hours, and suddenly the game goes through a massive change, making all those strategies useless. Why do all this work if halfway through the GSL all that practice goes down the drain? Is that a price worth paying to introduce an artificial threeway split in representation? Is one race being the perceived underdog such a terrible thing that it needs to be fixed, no matter the cost? I hate to bring this up, because I don't intend it to be an argument for "Zerg is fine, l2p", but look at who's playing the GSL finals tomorrow. As long as that can happen, the game is doing well enough for its first two months in retail. Yes, there's imbalances. Terran is too strong. But not so overwhelmingly that it would justify upending the current state of the game completely.
No one is still able to tell me why one methodology is acceptable in one situation but not in the other. Beta, retail, two different words, but the players are the same, the game is the same. There were tournaments then, there are tournaments now. There are even bigger, more high profile tournaments now. The need to have a balanced game is far more important now.
So again, why the need for a slow approach? Whats worse - would you rather take their 'hours of practice' and turn that into weeks, or months?
ps,
I hate to bring this up, because I don't intend it to be an argument for "Zerg is fine, l2p", but look at who's playing the GSL finals tomorrow
Yes, 2 ex-bw progamers who breezed through a tournament of stage-frightened kids. Very convincing of the current balancing of the game.
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On October 02 2010 08:24 Lefnui wrote:Show nested quote +On October 01 2010 07:44 maliceee wrote:On October 01 2010 07:42 blabber wrote: isn't it the general consensus that Orc (specifically Blademaster) is imbalanced? yes. No. That is not the general consensus in WC3 at all.
Did you actually read through this thread and take note of all the other people who agree with that statement? Did you see anyone disagreeing? There's a reason for that. Don't be argumentative just to be argumentative. The sky is blue.
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On October 02 2010 07:26 darkwing.Huzow wrote:Show nested quote +On October 01 2010 22:52 dakalro wrote: Reading all this all I could think about was "Wow, Blizzard gives customers a bone and like all good crowds they go for the whole bloody arm". The company which atm has the best game update/balancing response times, the best community relations management and that actively tries to get customers opinions when creating games and they still get shouted at and yelled and whined.
How can you even expect a company to listen to all the requests of everyone playing. Sure, in beta it was one thing, nothing was set in stone but doing "massive changes" now, on the live game? LOOOOLLL!!! You people are really crazy.
Go read up on what development means and see it's not exactly push 2 buttons and voila you have some software. No wonder most of the idiots actually believe they have a right to try cracked games and software, you know nothing of the work that goes into making something like SC2, time wise it's longer than building sky scrapers and you expect stuff to change at the community's whim? +1 That said, the, "I don't like playing Zerg but it's fine" comment was pretty atrocious, and not really supporting your claim that they actively try to get customers' opinions. It's obvious that Zerg are broken and need help, but they do not seem to be addressing it. (I play Protoss.)
They may try to actively get opinions on stuff, but they're VERY bad at it. Or all of their balance designers are really bad so they disagree with everything said in the community 100%.
I mean wtf is this shit? I almost thought it was a bad joke, when Chris Sigaty said that Zerg is actually fine at the highest levels. Yeah right. That's why they've been winning tournaments everywhere isn't it?
I mean of course they only look at their ladder, but even they must be smart enough to realize that a player who has >50% winrate and playes 1500 games will be higher than a random toss/terran that has the same winrate but only 750 games. I mean look at the korean top ladder, which is probably what they're referring to when they say high level Zerg is fine. OK, there is a good amount of Zergs on there, but all of them play many many many more games on the ladder than their Terran and Toss counterparts, no wonder they have the rank they do.
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I have a gag reflux every time I read someone saying "it's going to take a long time to balance...", sounds too much like a politician.
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On October 02 2010 08:24 Lefnui wrote:Show nested quote +On October 01 2010 07:44 maliceee wrote:On October 01 2010 07:42 blabber wrote: isn't it the general consensus that Orc (specifically Blademaster) is imbalanced? yes. No. That is not the general consensus in WC3 at all.
Orc is imbalanced vs undead only, specific unit imbalance is irrelevant. Wc3 is pretty balanced except for orc vs undead.
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On October 02 2010 08:43 a176 wrote: So again, why the need for a slow approach?
I explained why, in great detail. I can't really do anything about your inability to read what I actually wrote instead of responding to strawmen.
Let me make it very black and white for you - an irrational desire for some progamers to play an underpowered race even though they can't be successful with it is not valid grounds for massive, frequent balance changes that upset the game for every single player.
Car analogy incoming!
Beta is prototyping. Retail is a production vehicle. If you're designing a car, you can go through tons of iterations, switch out parts, redesign the engine, what have you.
Once the car is on the market, you can't recall it every 3 weeks to swap out the drive train.
Whats worse - would you rather take their 'hours of practice' and turn that into weeks, or months?
I said hundreds of hours, which, oddly enough, can also be expressed as weeks and months. If the game is massively rebalanced every year or two, when the expacs come out, people can deal with that. Again, you missed my point, which was that beta-style gatling gun patching is far too frequent. Major changes aren't inherently bad. They can fix imbalance and also reinvigorate the game.
Show nested quote +I hate to bring this up, because I don't intend it to be an argument for "Zerg is fine, l2p", but look at who's playing the GSL finals tomorrow Yes, 2 ex-bw progamers who breezed through a tournament of stage-frightened kids. Very convincing of the current balancing of the game.
Putting aside the fact that they weren't the only two, that wasn't my point. I specifically said that I don't think that this is proof of amazing balance, just barely adequate balance. Zerg aren't completely unable to compete at high level tournaments. Of course the ultimate goal is to have everyone on equal footing.
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900 Gold here, (as though what level you play at really matters in balance debates)
This is what I think.
Of course it's gonna take more time and effort to balance out sc2 than BW. There's more features to it than BW. With the addition of warpgates and techlabs/reactors Terran and Protoss produce units more differently than before. You can get more larva not only by making more hatches but by making more queens. Creep spread is actually useful. Et cetera.
Starcraft 2 is for the most part, pretty balanced. It needs a few tweaks but as mentioned above it's more complicated and the tweaks can have a larger effect on the way the game is played. Goddamn it I hate void rays (even though I now favor toss whereas I used to play zerg) but I find that in all of my games thus far when I lose to things like void rays or 6pools it's mostly my fault for not scouting or adapting correctly to cheesey play.
Before screaming IMBA!!!! just watch your replays and see what happened. 99% of the time it's your fault. And if you're below platinum level, 99% of the time out of that it's your macro. After watching husky, crota, sahara, and day9 since the beta days, I have yet to watch a game where it could be said that one side won because of game imbalance (post-beta).
These debates are pretty stupid in my opinion. But like everyone else I feel the need to pitch in for no real reason.
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