On November 16 2010 08:48 Djeez wrote: This thread in a nutshell:
NOOBIFIED!
(damn how do we embed on this board)
I'm pretty sure Warcraft 2 had Hotkeys and I'm pretty sure that Starcraft didn't have Auto-Casting... -_-
Just throwing it out there.
Yeah War 2 had hotkeys, but he meant the 1, 2, 3 hotkeys i guess. And the auto-casting is about medics. In War 2 you had to do the deed manually. I think so at least. Haven't played Warcraft 2 in like a decade.
What makes a game good for pro gaming is the amount of skill needed to be the best. BW requires crazy mechanics, nothing like SC2 and that's why its played even now as a pro game. If you dumb down SC2 even more than it already is might as well be pro WoW or pro Halo.
TBH, if you feel the game should be made easier, this forum isn't your place, you're going to get hated on by all the BWers and ex-BWers. IMO, ofc.
Magic boxing Mutalisks takes a certain degree of effort and skill, particularly to do it in time for a fight or in the middle of one and the reward of reducing AoE damage is what you get for investing the time to learn how to do it and practice it, just like not having your bio army absolutely owned by Banelings is the reward for time invested in practicing your Marine spreading skills.
This is all well and good. However, I would like to point out a fundamental difference between Marine spreading and SC1-style Mutalisk stacking/micro.
Marine spreading is something obvious. Everyone can look at the Baneling AoE and the Marine's health/stats. Everyone can conclude that keeping your Marines spread out is a good idea. You do not have to have specialized knowledge of the engine to know that this is a good idea. Now obviously actually spreading your Marines out is quite hard. It requires a lot of micro, and many people won't be able to do it.
That's all well and good.
SC1-style Mutalisk micro doesn't work like that. SC1-style Mutalisk micro is not something you can figure out for yourself, not without months/years of experimentation until you just happen to luck-up on the right combination of patrol/click commands that make it work. In general, people did not discover Mutalisk micro and Patrol micro for themselves; they were told about it by others.
That is not well and good. It is not obvious that the Patrol command should behave so differently from regular attack/move. It is not obvious that using Patrol will cause certain units to "glide," to effectively be able to move while attacking. This is only something that can be derived through complete trial-and-error. It is a quirk of the game's engine and doesn't otherwise make sense.
Compare this to Magic Box. This is something that is fairly obvious. The Hold Position command stops units from moving. Thus, you can use it to stop air units from clumping together. It is intuitively understood by anyone who understands what Hold Position does. It is not easy to do correctly, and it requires upkeep to make units behave the way you want them to, but it is easy to understand why it works.
Unlike Patrol micro. And that's why I consider Patrol micro and other similar glitches (clipping workers through minerals, etc) to be bad mechanics. They do not grow naturally from the expected effects of the game.
In Basketball, it is reasonable to expect someone to be a great 3-point shooter. Maybe he's so good that he never misses unless someone blocks him. That may be beyond human, but it's well understood and possible, if unlikely. It is not reasonable to expect someone to be able to teleport from one end of the court to the other. Or to be able to slam dunk from 30 feet away, by performing an arcane ritual involving incantations and body movement.
No matter how much it raises the skill ceiling or balances the game, magic should not be a part of competitive RTS play. You can raise the skill ceiling or balance the game in other ways.
The trouble with arguing to make it accessible on demand simply because it's possible is that there's no end to that argument. It's theoretically posssible to never miss a Larva injection so should it be set so that you can toggle it to auto-cast? It's possible for good players to spread their creep almost perfectly, so should that be automatic so that Zerg games are more interesting?
Consider this.
Should Chrono Boost be auto-casted? Of course not. There are many different targets you might want to use it on. Sometimes you CB your probes, sometimes you CB your Gateways, other times its CB-ing your Warpgate research, etc. You cannot automate Chrono Boost, because where to cast it is an important player decision.
Should Mules be auto-casted? Hell no. The Terran player might need that energy for Scans.
For creep spread, position and direction matters. You can't just automate it; it has to be spread to specific locations. That means the player needs to decide where he wants his creep spread to. Also, Overlords can be involved; badly positioned Overlords means losing precious food. And you may not want to expand beyond a certain point with Creep Tumors, lest your active tumor is destroyed by a raid and you have to send a Queen out to make another.
In all of these cases, there is a player decision that interferes with potential automation. Even if you did automate it, skilled players wouldn't use that automation.
But look at rally-mining. Skilled players use it. Why? Because it automates the process perfectly. There's no decision interfering with it. You made a worker, and you want a worker to work. Immediately. Always. Without player thought or intervention. Rally-mining directly takes the player's will and makes it reality.
So you cannot simply automate everything without taking choices away from the player. But you can automate anything that doesn't require the player to make a choice.
And that's where Spawn Larva has a real problem. See, Chrono Boost and Mules both are designed to not be automatable. These are mechanics that Blizzard specifically designed to be difficult if not impossible to automate with 100% fidelity. Therefore, it makes sense to not automate them.
Spawn Larva is not. Spawn Larva is something you could automate perfectly with 100% effectiveness. And while this might make you wonder why Blizzard didn't automate Spawn Larva, the more salient question is why Blizzard didn't design a Zerg mechanic like the Protoss/Terran ones that couldn't be automated.
This is the very reason a lot of people feared "noob-friendly" features such as MBS or infinite unit selection. Once you start going down that route, there's no end to it except by drawing some arbitrary line in the sand as to when you stop making things easier in the name of seeing better games.
But there has always been an arbitrary line. Just look at the history of RTS games, or even just SC1.
Why 12 units? Why not 24 or 6? What makes the number 12 special? Zero, one, or infinity; they all have non-arbitrary justifications. So why 12? Wouldn't SC1 have had a higher skill ceiling if the limit had been 6? Would it have had a noticeably lower skill ceiling if the limit had been 18 or 24?
And what of more primitive RTS games where you could only select 1 unit at a time? Were these the epitome of skill?
There was a time before hotkeys. Hotkeys certainly made things easier; did they not also reduce skill?
I can keep going, but I think my point is clear.
My question is this: why are you using the interface to make the game difficult to begin with?
Leading 15 dragoons in a perfect formation through a small choke takes nothing but muscle memory, it is just a repeated action. It doesn't make much effort at all, but practice. Sure, you also practice your strategies in game, but what you actually gain is an experience regarding that strategy, which kind of strengthens the connections in your brain and makes you think. With enough practice, you think nothing when you move those dragoons correctly.
That's an interesting inversion of what most people would expect. Leading 15 units through a small choke is something that, by all rights, ought to be easy, simple, and trivial. Whereas building workers, committing upgrades, building buildings, constructing units, making expansions (ie: macro) ought to be hard.
Macro, by its nature, requires balancing of a lot of elements simultaneously. It requires doing lots of things all at once. It earns being complex and difficult, because it is complex and difficult by its very nature.
Having 15 Dragoons go somewhere is conceptually simple. Therefore, it does not earn being a complex and difficult action. It's not something that earns requiring lots of attention and clicking. It simply does not deserve it.
Now, does this have beneficial effects for overall quality of play? Yes. Because it requires attention, players must be able to give it more attention while still doing other things, or else they aren't as good as those who can. It creates stratification between player skill groups.
That being said, this alone does not justify the presence of such mechanics. Why? Because the ends do not justify the means. If the ends can be achieved in other ways, ways that earn their difficulty the way macro does, then they should.
To put it another way, just because this kind of difficulty helped the game does not mean that you can't help the game in a different way without that interface-based difficulty.
On November 16 2010 07:46 LegendaryZ wrote:Where do you draw the line as to how much is trivial and how much is non-trivial?
And that is the interesting question. The ideal answer is "at the point that makes for the best game". Of course, that's rather vague. However, pointless clicking pretty much by definition of "pointless" is over the line in any case where it could be eliminated without causing greater problems.
I would add to the list of things that are over the line any easily removable obstacle that is completely irrelevant to expert play, but can make things difficult for other players. I can't think of a concrete example off hand, but I can make a hypothetical. Starting your initial 6 peons mining is pretty much a trivial thing for experts, but suppose it took the average rank amateur 30 seconds to get started. I would then consider that a strong candidate for being automated.
(Honestly, I think it should be automated anyways. But it's an irrelevant enough of a thing that I don't really care)
The fact is that we like a certain amount of pointless clicking and mundane repetition.
Quite honestly, it doesn't look that way to me. What I see is a vocal minority resisting change, and general acceptance of every ease of use feature Blizzard managed to get into the game without causing a riot.
I don't watch games casted very often, but I have never seen anyone celebrate a Zerg player's consistency with Inject Larvae, or gush over a Protoss player's ability to keep his ground force together.
A lot of what has driven Starcraft is really the fact that it isn't easy or accessible. Elitist as that may sound, that's just something that has become part of Starcraft's identity.
This is already true without adding artificial obstacles to gameplay.
The interface and its limitations are part of the challenge of playing the game.
A fact, but it doesn't prove that the interface should be laden with unnecessary limitations.
By separating the interface itself from the game, you're separating a large part of the game experience that the developers purposely designed for you to have.
Of course, there is also the philosophy that the best interfaces are the ones that are completely transparent so that they don't detract from the game experience.
but it's really a requirement in any game that's not turn-based from Puzzle Bobble to Street Fighter.
Street Fighter is actually quite a relevant example. When Street Fighter HD Remix was being made, it got a lot of criticism for simplifying many of the commands -- they're dumbing down the game. The end result? The developers stuck to their guns and made a great game that was pretty much liked by everyone. The "dumbing down" didn't detract from expert play, and yet made the strategic and tactical elements of the game accessible to a wider audience.
I think the "Strategy" part of Real-Time Strategy tends to skew peoples' impression of what the game should be or what it's intended to be and leads them to think that strategy alone should decide the winner when that's clearly not the case.
"Real-Time Strategy Game" means a game where you have to make strategic decisions under time pressure, whose consequences unfold in real time. The title has nothing to do with whether or not the game requires feats of dexterity.
The particular type of RTS Starcraft is naturally lends itself to feats of dexterity being relevant. But it seems very silly to deliberately push the game away from being a strategy game and more towards being Guitar Hero.
This must be one of the weirdest threads on TL for a while now. Why is everybody making normative statements about what RTS games are "supposed" to reward and what they are not supposed to reward. Knowing and being able to execute things like the magic box just adds yet another dimension to the game. If you choose to call that dimension shallow is not up to me but you cannot simply state that it doesn't exist. Remembering to use it when it is necessary and having the APM to do so while also doing other things and thinking about other stuff is part of playing StarCraft.
This whole discussion is just so ridiculous in that everyone seems to have an opinion what what a game should have, is supposed to reward and how it should be made. The bottom line is that StarCraft games do not have formations, other games do, StarCraft does not. I think everyone would agree that watching Foxer play at the GSL would not be as impressive if he had a button which said "spread marines perfectly" and just a-moved in the back of the opponents base.
Another point is that with everything else equal these tiny little nonsense "muscular memory" tricks can decide a game. However, my point is: The fact that you have to do these things by hand just adds another dimension to the game, regardless of "right or wrong" or good or bad. For all I care, next time you describe StarCraft to a friend just say its about macro, micro and splitting units.
This would reduce the need for microing, which in turns lowers the need for apm, which in turn lowers the skill cap which is something that is far from necessary. Not to mention from a spectator's viewpoint how awesome it is to see sick micro. Foxer's marines anyone?
This is a good point. Would those games against Kyrix be as badass if there was simply a button to push and your marines spread themselves out?! I think not. He really got to shine there and with having to manually spread them out it was that much more awesome to witness.
On November 16 2010 04:16 IamSooty wrote: 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?
This paragraph has not garnered the attention it deserves. The OP responded to the rest of IamSooty's post, but notably not this paragraph, which happens to be the one which unequivocally rebuts the OP's argument (note: his argument, not his idea).
Anyway, this really is a pointless discussion. It reminds me of the one which was held over supply in SC2 in the blogs section recently - whether or not there was any merit to an individual argument came completely down to preference, and thus no conclusion was ever or could ever be reached.
On November 16 2010 09:27 NicolBolas wrote: Consider this.
Should Chrono Boost be auto-casted? Of course not. There are many different targets you might want to use it on. Sometimes you CB your probes, sometimes you CB your Gateways, other times its CB-ing your Warpgate research, etc. You cannot automate Chrono Boost, because where to cast it is an important player decision.
Should Mules be auto-casted? Hell no. The Terran player might need that energy for Scans.
For creep spread, position and direction matters. You can't just automate it; it has to be spread to specific locations. That means the player needs to decide where he wants his creep spread to. Also, Overlords can be involved; badly positioned Overlords means losing precious food. And you may not want to expand beyond a certain point with Creep Tumors, lest your active tumor is destroyed by a raid and you have to send a Queen out to make another.
In all of these cases, there is a player decision that interferes with potential automation. Even if you did automate it, skilled players wouldn't use that automation.
But look at rally-mining. Skilled players use it. Why? Because it automates the process perfectly. There's no decision interfering with it. You made a worker, and you want a worker to work. Immediately. Always. Without player thought or intervention. Rally-mining directly takes the player's will and makes it reality.
So you cannot simply automate everything without taking choices away from the player. But you can automate anything that doesn't require the player to make a choice.
And that's where Spawn Larva has a real problem. See, Chrono Boost and Mules both are designed to not be automatable. These are mechanics that Blizzard specifically designed to be difficult if not impossible to automate with 100% fidelity. Therefore, it makes sense to not automate them.
Spawn Larva is not. Spawn Larva is something you could automate perfectly with 100% effectiveness. And while this might make you wonder why Blizzard didn't automate Spawn Larva, the more salient question is why Blizzard didn't design a Zerg mechanic like the Protoss/Terran ones that couldn't be automated.
This is the very reason a lot of people feared "noob-friendly" features such as MBS or infinite unit selection. Once you start going down that route, there's no end to it except by drawing some arbitrary line in the sand as to when you stop making things easier in the name of seeing better games.
But there has always been an arbitrary line. Just look at the history of RTS games, or even just SC1.
Why 12 units? Why not 24 or 6? What makes the number 12 special? Zero, one, or infinity; they all have non-arbitrary justifications. So why 12? Wouldn't SC1 have had a higher skill ceiling if the limit had been 6? Would it have had a noticeably lower skill ceiling if the limit had been 18 or 24?
And what of more primitive RTS games where you could only select 1 unit at a time? Were these the epitome of skill?
There was a time before hotkeys. Hotkeys certainly made things easier; did they not also reduce skill?
I can keep going, but I think my point is clear.
My question is this: why are you using the interface to make the game difficult to begin with?
Leading 15 dragoons in a perfect formation through a small choke takes nothing but muscle memory, it is just a repeated action. It doesn't make much effort at all, but practice. Sure, you also practice your strategies in game, but what you actually gain is an experience regarding that strategy, which kind of strengthens the connections in your brain and makes you think. With enough practice, you think nothing when you move those dragoons correctly.
That's an interesting inversion of what most people would expect. Leading 15 units through a small choke is something that, by all rights, ought to be easy, simple, and trivial. Whereas building workers, committing upgrades, building buildings, constructing units, making expansions (ie: macro) ought to be hard.
Macro, by its nature, requires balancing of a lot of elements simultaneously. It requires doing lots of things all at once. It earns being complex and difficult, because it is complex and difficult by its very nature.
Having 15 Dragoons go somewhere is conceptually simple. Therefore, it does not earn being a complex and difficult action. It's not something that earns requiring lots of attention and clicking. It simply does not deserve it.
Now, does this have beneficial effects for overall quality of play? Yes. Because it requires attention, players must be able to give it more attention while still doing other things, or else they aren't as good as those who can. It creates stratification between player skill groups.
That being said, this alone does not justify the presence of such mechanics. Why? Because the ends do not justify the means. If the ends can be achieved in other ways, ways that earn their difficulty the way macro does, then they should.
To put it another way, just because this kind of difficulty helped the game does not mean that you can't help the game in a different way without that interface-based difficulty.
I agree 100%. Though some people seem to find having players doing mindless yet hard to master techniques is a pleasure to watch, and in that regard, even though i find it boring for the same reason, we can't say anything because that's subjective.
First, let me say that I stink at Starcraft 2. I'm not a very good player. However, despite my inability to play like a progamer I can "magic box" mutas. Click, wait, click, stop, done. Doesn't require epic speed nor impeccable timing.
I think a lot of players would have a differing opinion on "magic box"ing units if other units had this ability. Magic Box is only applicable in very narrow circumstances. If "Magic Box" worked for Marines player's opinions would be vastly different. If one could select a bunch of marines, click a location, and watch the marines spread out and then move the marines while roughly keeping that formation Starcraft 2 and players opinions of "magic box" would be different. I can't micro marines at all. Once again, I stink at Starcraft. One match from the GSL had Banelings rolling in at SCVs. Somehow the Terran player split his 16 SCVs into something like 8 pairs and spread them out nigh instantly. My mind couldn't even comprehend doing all that and I don't think my mouse skills are capable of splitting them into two piles. It was quite impressive. However, if "magic box" worked for other units I might, in my terrible starcraft ability, have a chance to spread out my SCVs with a simple click and waiting a few seconds.
I think the point is that "Magic Box" is essentially a formation. I personally don't have a strong opinion whether formations should or shouldn't be in the game. However, I do strongly feel that one direction OR the other should be taken. Mutas essentially do have formations. I think starcraft needs to either get rid of "Magic Box" or let other units be easily set in formations. I think my opinion is similar to the Original poster's, please correct me if I'm wrong, in that one shouldn't really support having both "Magic Box" in the game but have formations kept out of the game.
On November 16 2010 10:04 Smurphy wrote: First, let me say that I stink at Starcraft 2. I'm not a very good player. However, despite my inability to play like a progamer I can "magic box" mutas. Click, wait, click, stop, done. Doesn't require epic speed nor impeccable timing.
I think a lot of players would have a differing opinion on "magic box"ing units if other units had this ability. Magic Box is only applicable in very narrow circumstances. If "Magic Box" worked for Marines player's opinions would be vastly different. If one could select a bunch of marines, click a location, and watch the marines spread out and then move the marines while roughly keeping that formation Starcraft 2 and players opinions of "magic box" would be different. I can't micro marines at all. Once again, I stink at Starcraft. One match from the GSL had Banelings rolling in at SCVs. Somehow the Terran player split his 16 SCVs into something like 8 pairs and spread them out nigh instantly. My mind couldn't even comprehend doing all that and I don't think my mouse skills are capable of splitting them into two piles. It was quite impressive. However, if "magic box" worked for other units I might, in my terrible starcraft ability, have a chance to spread out my SCVs with a simple click and waiting a few seconds.
I think the point is that "Magic Box" is essentially a formation. I personally don't have a strong opinion whether formations should or shouldn't be in the game. However, I do strongly feel that one direction OR the other should be taken. Mutas essentially do have formations. I think starcraft needs to either get rid of "Magic Box" or let other units be easily set in formations. I think my opinion is similar to the Original poster's, please correct me if I'm wrong, in that one shouldn't really support having both "Magic Box" in the game but have formations kept out of the game.
I don't understand this post.
Magic box DOES work on marines. It works for every unit in the game. It's a fundamental mechanic.
Mutas are capable of moving over top of each other. Their natural tendency when attacking a target or moving to a location is to clump together. Magic boxing makes them stand shoulder to shoulder. Their shoulder to shoulder length is rather large and allows aoes to miss them.
If Marines "magic boxed" similar to mutas and spread out, even slightly, it would be to great advantage and vast game change.
This paragraph has not garnered the attention it deserves. The OP responded to the rest of IamSooty's post, but notably not this paragraph, which happens to be the one which unequivocally rebuts the OP's argument (note: his argument, not his idea).
"The magic box is the ultimate compromise for how everything in the game works and thus singling out a single application and comparing it to formations" doesn't refute anything, because I never said I was opposed to the magic box. Not that at it matters at this point. Everybody already made up their opinion on this thread before they clicked it. And rather than actually discuss the point that I was trying to make (the similarities between the application of the magic box for Mutalisks and the general design of formation commands in real-time strategy games), the thread's become a general referendum on whether real-time strategy games should be designed to deliberately reward mechanical skill or not. The multiple-building selection catfight has risen from the dead and taken a dump in this thread. There's no longer any reason to post in this thread unless you want to relive the flame wars of late 2007.
I don't see the problem with either Magic Box or Formations. The only problem I have is that some units are much easier to effectively magicbox than others.
Alot if people seem to not understand magic box in sc2. Magic box does not spread out units. Mutas and all other air units stack if told to attack. All magic box does to mutas is make them not stack because if you move them with this technique they maintain their normal formation. This works with ALL UNITS. Put marines in an L shape and move them in this manner. They are still an L. There are your formations, any formation you can imagine is already possable. It seems to me that you are asking for a trivial feature that doesn't add any functionality to the game. It doesn't even really make the game easier because you would need to hit a button for a probably bad premade formation when you could just set up an infinate variety yourself in a few mouse clicks. And if you are not asking for the feature and are just trying to stir shit up then this thread should be closed. Also, to whoever said it, spawn larva is a choice just as cb and mules. There are creep tumors and transfusion. Your point made no sense.
OP and a lot of posters in this thread don't understand what magic boxing really is.
It is NOT a magic technique/button that automatically spreads your units (eg. mutas). It IS a by-product of the game's engine that allows you to keep your units in a formation that you created.
Plenty of people have explained before me how magic boxing works, I won't reiterate what has already been said. However, I have to clarify the muta v. thor issue.
ALL air units have a natural tendency to clump when attacking and to spread when not attacking. This is a function of the game engine itself, not of magic boxing or anything else. What the muta v. thor trick does is it causes the mutas to spread via the stop command so that they don't automatically clump when attacking.
Magic boxing can be done with ANYthing and EVERYthing. It's only most visible and useful (at this stage of the game) with air units, especially in muta v thor battles. In short, magic boxing and auto-formations are two completely different things. It's like comparing cloning from BW with MBS from SC2.
Magic boxing can be done with ANYthing and EVERYthing. It's only most visible and useful (at this stage of the game) with air units, especially in muta v thor battles. In short, magic boxing and auto-formations are two completely different things. It's like comparing cloning from BW with MBS from SC2.
Which is why people should question it. Why should 1 race be able to EASILY abuse a mechanic, when another has to use 30-40 actions to get equivalent use out of the magic boxing mechanic.
Magic boxing can be done with ANYthing and EVERYthing. It's only most visible and useful (at this stage of the game) with air units, especially in muta v thor battles. In short, magic boxing and auto-formations are two completely different things. It's like comparing cloning from BW with MBS from SC2.
Which is why people should question it. Why should 1 race be able to EASILY abuse a mechanic, when another has to use 30-40 actions to get equivalent use out of the magic boxing mechanic.
It is not one race that can abuse it. It works equally well with everything. The reason it is prevalent in this scenario is because of the small aoe radius of thors. It has nothing to do with zerg. It just works well against thors. If for some reason you flew phoenixes above thors it would be the same. Or banshees against thors. If you space out zealots with it they will be more effective against tanks, but its really the mechanic of the thor that makes it effective.
EPT
