The perception of formations vs. the "magic box". - Page 6

On November 16 2010 04:50 MichaelJLowell wrote:
Because all of the assumes being thrown my way assume the game couldn't have been designed in a way that would increase the amount of available routes and options for employing mechanical skill. I'm going to end up repeating myself to death on this, but "it wouldn't fit in the current state of the game" is not an option because people would be opposed to these mechanics if the game was years from release.

On November 16 2010 04:16 IamSooty wrote:
Hey OP, as a philosopher and (self-considered) game designer I appreciate your penchance for consistency, but I don't think you're being fair in saying that everyone who supports "magic box" is a hypocrite if they also don't support "formations" (i.e. one-click buttons that automatically change the way your units space out). Don't mind me as I attempt to systematically pick your argument apart.

Game design is much more than making consistency decisions, sometimes consistency has to be broken for practical reasons. There are real costs to weigh, and people have already highlighted the costs of the inclusion of formation or the exclusion of the magic box to the skill ceiling of the game. And yes, I do think that it is at least plausible to say that the magic box, which requires APM and some foresight to pull off, as a substitute for having to individually spread mutas out. (It's not as if they automatically spread out in a fashion such that it is the best spread for every possible situation).

People are calling you out for this, and so will I. You betray a huge bias in your postings. Even though it seems like you're arguing for consistency across the board, you pick a very specific unit interaction - the mutalisk and the thor. Why? Individual unit balance is ultimately arbitrary, the game could very well be balanced around mutas who cannot magic box, or mutas who can magic box. Or the game could be balanced around marines who auto spread with a command, or it could be balanced around marines who don't. What isn't arbitrary is that the three races should be in general balanced in the various matchups as a matter of game design principle, but the mutalisk/thor/magicbox situation by no means decide the balance of the game.

If you weigh things differently and think that "magic box" should be removed, or simply nerfed from having substantive effects on gameplay (mutas vs thors), so be it, but your judgements are as subjective as those of others. You're in no better position to call others out for bad supporting bad game design or bad balance, not even those who simply defer to blizzard's decisions (people who simply say "they probably have their reasons" without understanding those reasons themselves).

If Blizzard wanted to balance that one particular unit interaction they could - just as they introduced the hotfix for Thors vs Medivacs, they could very well increase the splash radius of Thors SLIGHTLY just to hit more than one mutas in a magic box, but make them fire a teenie bit slower to compensate. But why don't they? Well, because magic box can be justified precisely because it could help balance TvZ, and if it breaks TvZ other changes can be made, not necessarily to muta/thor/magicbox.

Your insistence at thinking that there are important similarities between magic box and formation buttons that make the inclusion of the former and exclusion of the latter in some sense inconsistent... to pull some philosophical jargon, I'd say your argument is too strong.

Here's a list of other game mechanics of unit control which could be construed as being similar to both magic box and formations, all of which have substantive effects which make them either better or worse depending on context:
- Vikings patrolling two very close points. PROS: Allows the vikings to take out the first air unit in their large attack range without giving a chance to escape them, since vikings are slow. CONS: More vulnerable to splash
- Workers made to all mine a single mineral patch. PROS: Makes them better fighters in some situations. CONS: More vulnerable to splash.
- Ground units patrol moving. PROS: Spreads them out, making them less vulnerable to spread damage as they are moving. CONS: It's essentially an attack move, and the hotkey for patrol is quite far (unless you're on the grid formation).
- Unburrowed ground units form a single line when they're asked to move (rather than patrol) to a location. PROS: They can hug cliffs better, allowing you to avoid the detection radius of the enemy, especially against sensor towers. CONS: They might end up being lambs to slaughter when they march one by one into enemy attack range.

Why is your argument too strong? Firstly, because almost any of the above game mechanics, and possibility others, can be considered to be similar to formations in that they also have substantive effects on the gameplay as a result of how they move and space out given particular commands. Secondly, because units have to move in some way or another in any case, and so they're always in some sort of formation anyway. If consistency were somehow valuable in itself, and the game design had to maximize consistency, then we would have to make it so that every unit moves in exactly the same way no matter what you ask them to do. No more difference between burrowed/unburrowed/air/worker units. Are you willing to bite the bullet on this?

On November 16 2010 04:55 Uncultured wrote:
I am dumbfounded at how asinine some people in this thread are.

If you can't read both the original post, my post, and his singular response to my post and not immediately come to the conclusion that he's a troll, then I've really lost faith in this community.

On November 16 2010 04:11 Hurkyl wrote:

You know what would give players more time to think strategically in a battle? If they didn't have to spend those precious seconds fighting with the interface to make sure their Mutalisks remain spread out, that their Immortals are in front of their Stalkers, that their infantry are alternating between moving and firing, that they started this round of Inject Larvae....

You do see plenty of things going on in a battle. Some players are really good at making holes for Hellions to run by. Others are good at maneuvering Zerglings and Banelings to take out juicy targets. Some people can analyze the field of battle and discern a good place to set up a line of Forcefields. Others will engage on multiple battle fronts. Sometimes people try to drag battles away from enemy Siege Tanks, or towards friendly Spine Crawlers.


One of the main hypotheses is that if the interface helped you do mundane, repetitive things rather than being neutral (Inject Larvae) or even an outright obstacle (unit clumping, minimap unusable for warpgate), this would give people more time to manage the more interesting aspects of gameplay.

I suppose it's possible that there is no game-play remaining to be found once you get past these things, but in my estimation, Starcraft 2 isn't anywhere near that shallow of a game.

On November 16 2010 04:57 Risen wrote:


What does this mean? O_0

I never argued that it wouldn't fit. I'm telling you point blank... people do not want it because it lessens the amount of focus required from a player.

On November 16 2010 05:18 MichaelJLowell wrote:
I'll try to add something new to the conversation. If I can't, I'm gonna move on. Repeating myself isn't going to do anybody any good at this point.


If it comes down to a matter of the Blizzard design team having to design a set of physics that inadvertently allows for Mutalisks to move the way they do and for players to manipulate Mutalisks in a way that allows them to spread the way that they do, I'm okay with that. I'll live with it. I do not have a problem with the current physics/pathing/artificial-intelligence system in Starcraft II.

I guess what it ultimately comes down to is that looking from the outside-in on the Brood War community for a number of years, the community picks-and-chooses with no consistency which exploits and glitches should be part of competitive play. You may disagree with that, that's what I see. Players have to make a decision on mechanics, fine. But the use of these mechanics and whether they should be in the game are more often supported or opposed because they "increase the amount of skill required to play the game" or "it makes the game more balanced". Not "whether or not the use of those game mechanics is fun or not". I'm not of the opinion that more skill equals more fun. If the manipulation of the magic box is really that great of a mechanic and leads to interesting gameplay, it should be streamlined so everybody can use it. And that doesn't mean "dumb it down so a noob can use it easily". It means "presenting the mechanic in a way that everybody knows its there and it doesn't become insider knowledge for a group of hardcore players on TeamLiquid".

I hope that answers your question, though I'm pretty tired right now. If you need me to elaborate, I'll try to get around to doing it.


Despite the internet's best attempts to mold the definition elsewise, trolling is not "I disagree with you."

On November 16 2010 05:18 MichaelJLowell wrote:If the manipulation of the magic box is really that great of a mechanic and leads to interesting gameplay, it should be streamlined so everybody can use it. And that doesn't mean "dumb it down so a noob can use it easily". It means "presenting the mechanic in a way that everybody knows its there and it doesn't become insider knowledge for a group of hardcore players on TeamLiquid".

On November 16 2010 05:25 MichaelJLowell wrote:

That exists on the premise that "Starcraft II" plus "Formations" equals "less mechanical skill". That may be true. But it assumes a good developer or a good team of game designers would not say "Okay, what input will the user counter these formations with? And how can we design the game so playing off of that user input makes the game more entertaining?"

On November 16 2010 05:21 LegendaryZ wrote:If you start getting as specific as a formation that keeps Immortals in front of Stalkers, it would make the UI much more complicated than any player could handle in a fast-paced environment.

What if you suddenly needed to move the Immortals to the back because of a pincer attack? You'd have to manually control them anyway, making the intial formation command pointless.

Formations are only useful leading up to a battle. Once a battle begins, a player needs to manually control their units to fit the situation they find themselves in.

As for the point about removing mundane tasks to allow players to focus on the more "interesting" aspects of the game, what would these interesting aspects be?

The most basic functionality that would be widely useful is also very simple -- you just want a button press that makes everything move at the same speed when out of combat.

The same logic would keep your Roaches in front of your Hydralisks, and your Zealots in a protective arc around your Stalkers, or your Hellions with your Thors or whatever arrangement you like to keep your army in, but have to fight with the user interface to keep units with different movement rates from splitting into separate groups.

On November 16 2010 06:00 Hurkyl wrote:

The most basic functionality that would be widely useful is also very simple -- you just want a button press that makes everything move at the same speed when out of combat.

The same logic would keep your Roaches in front of your Hydralisks, and your Zealots in a protective arc around your Stalkers, or your Hellions with your Thors or whatever arrangement you like to keep your army in, but have to fight with the user interface to keep units with different movement rates from splitting into separate groups.


Two reasons why it wasn't pointless:

• At the beginning of the engagement, the Immortals were taking fire instead of Stalkers, just like I wanted
  
• I wasn't wasting my time babysitting my Immortal / Stalker in the time leading up to the engagement and during its first moments

And, of course, in the majority of battles I'm not walking into a pincer attack.


That's fine, because they were useful leading up to the battle!


As an example, manually controlling units to scout the enemy position and making last minute positional adjustments is more interesting than click spam to make sure your Stalkers don't outrun your Immortals as you approach the battle site.

On November 16 2010 02:03 TzTz wrote:
I don't even get why you call it magic box anyway. It's a term from Broodwar where it made sense. Now it's just not make your mutas clump up. Every airunit takes space and if you don't give commands they will spread out evenly. Now you just control your air units so that they don't clump up. If you directly attack a unit all your units will stop once in range, thus clumping up. So you fly up until every unit is in range to attack and THEN attack, leaving every unit where it is. I really don't understand why people call that magic box... THIS is a magic box

+ Show Spoiler +

So what you do with mutas versus Thors has nothing to do with formations... When you order units to move it's just natural (for air units especially) that they stay roughly in place to each other as long as they have same speed and acceleration etc.

On November 16 2010 06:10 LegendaryZ wrote:
And if someone said that designing the AI to ignore those Immortals and attack the Stalkers first by being able to assign priority to them rather than having to manually click on them would make the game more interesting because it would remove the redundant and mundane task of having to babysit your units and free time up to focus on harassment or their production because that's what they find more interesting, what would your argument be?