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On January 12 2011 22:04 Adeeler wrote:
The thing thats so stupid about the don't cry imbalance threads that come along so often is that they all ignore that this isn't the dark ages of BW where we didn't have youtube, day9 dailies, easy access to replays, large online connected community, a million years of BW experience and knowledge.
We have all those things now and strats take hours instead of months to spread about and be understood. The speed at which we are able to see a strat in all its nooks and crannies is ridiculously short now. We see the possibilities and can cry imbalance quickly when we know all the variables and together go through them at such a speed like has never been seen before.
Practice is greater then a seemingly imbalanced strategy to a degree; but we know when something is imbalanced faster then ever before.
While I do see where you are coming from I respectfully disagree.
We have come up with very "solid" builds in a short(ish) period of time, if you watch a replay of a progamer, or anyone really, we are all still really bad. Despite how good they might be (if that makes sense). As in that most people have tons of room to improve despite how good they are. Look at the energy on queens/OC/Nexus and the food count. Many pros forget to use those macro techniques and many also get supply blocked, as well as large micro faults and huge holes in play. It's come a long way but we have a long way to go
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Yeah I don't see how knowing about strategies sooner leads directly to being able to make definitive statements about balance. When most players try to do a strategy, especially a non-cheese one, they're not really doing the strategy exactly, they're just doing the closest approximation they can given their speed of play and precision. That includes the aggressor and the defender.
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On January 13 2011 00:16 Ursad0n wrote:
Many pros forget to use those macro techniques and many also get supply blocked, as well as large micro faults and huge holes in play. It's come a long way but we have a long way to go
Correction, most pros forget to use their chrono and OC energy. No pro zerg ever forgets to inject, because they will never get to pro. That in itself should say something.
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On January 12 2011 20:51 PiRate647 wrote:
Yup , losing caused by imbalance is in other words stating that you did all the rest perfectly; a claim only few in the world are authorised to make.
Not quite. Someone who claims they lost because of imbalance is claiming that they made less and/or less important mistakes than their opponent. That is to say, a person claiming imbalance isn't necessarily claiming that they didn't make mistakes, but that their opponent spent as much or more time supply blocked, accidentally cutting workers, not producing units, or whatever as they did.
In reference to to what pwadoc said about pros and larvae inject, that is an example of an imbalance in how forgiving the three macro mechanics are. A zerg player does have a valid point when he points to a dozen replays where his queens accumulated half as much excess energy as his opponent's town centers, but his opponent was able to call down multiple MULEs at once or Chrono Boost several buildings for a while to burn that extra energy. In the context solely of forgiveness, there is an imbalance in the macro mechanics. Thus, someone who just lost a ZvT could justifiably point to the fact that while he only accumulated 100 energy across 2 queens over the course of a 20 minute game, his opponent never called down less than 2 MULEs at a time from any single Orbital Command past the 8 minute mark, and from there, claim imbalance.
In theory, specific imbalances are what differentiate the races from each other, and they should be tied into other specific imbalances in such a way that the races in general are balanced, even though they're not specifically balanced for a specific aspect. For example, Zerg's unforgiving macro mechanic compared to Protoss is slightly counterbalanced by the fact that Zerg don't lose production so long as they get larvae injects performed on time and spend all their larvae at least once per every 3 larvae spawning naturally from their hatcheries, give or take, while Protoss using warp-gates lose a little bit of production time every time they don't immediately warp units in when a warp-gate is cooled down.
As an aside, probably one of the reasons that people seem to pick on Terran as being the easy race the most is that, between no cooldown on MULEs, all their units being on build queues that allow unit production to take place slightly ahead of the units finishing, and supply calldown, Terran is a rather forgiving race compared to Protoss and Zerg when players are at the level of "build a big army and a-move it at the enemy."
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On January 07 2011 10:43 Black Gun wrote:
well, in general i agree with you, great overall message. but its still blatantly obvious that there are certain things in the game which are clearly broken. like e.g. a thor surrounded by scvs vs zealots and their bugging out AI.....
Well, now thats not gonna happen coz in 1.2 scvs repairing thors have a higher threat rate than the thor itself, meaing zealots will attack the scvs rather than madlessly runnign around :p
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Nice Thread. I agree.
I play random and although i'm pretty sure that there is quite some balancing to be done, it seems safe to say that blizzard is doing pretty well.
Currently I find it hard to see anything, which I would call rly imbalanced.
it helps ur perspective a lot if u can instantly adapt and use a strat that u previously lost against... thus you learn very fast that there are indeed counters for most builds/strats 
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New user here.
While I don't have any problem with the original post, do some of you guys really propose banning all of those of talk about imbalance? That'd be a bad idea on a website that's supposed to be the largest Starcraft community on the internet. Besides, if you don't like people talking about imbalances, just ignore them. Forcefully stopping these discussions is, at best, unhealthy.
Yes, mindless complaining is bad. But legit complaints exist. Take maps for exemple. As said in the iCCup January Map Pool thread, there are quite a few problems with the current blizzard map pool. For the sake of getting away from racial imbalances, we'll simply assume a mirror matchup. Again, for the sake of the argument, let's suppose that both player are of the same skill level and execute the same build in roughly the same manner.
So, same races, same build, same skill. At this point, you'd expect the whole thing to be equal, yet in some cases it isn't, because of a factor of luck, which is out of the player's control. Sometimes it isn't even because of rush distances or anything like that. Hell, maybe it's just one more creep tumor than in another position. No matter how small it is, that player starts at a disadvantage regardless of his, or even his opponant's, choices.
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My take on balance problems/issues/complaints/QQ's is that they do indeed need to be carefully analysed, casting them off to one extreme "OBVIOUSLY IMBAAA!11111" / "Anyone who says it's imba is a moron" etc is the wrong way to go about looking at these things, but it's the most commone view because it takes the least effort, and the least amount of self-analysis.
Something which has long been true in all competitive communities is that if a game is not balanced, has awkward or bad controls, or game mechanics not conducive to competitive play then the game is badly designed (or incompatible with competitive play) and will be promptly left behind. Which we see quite often with new games (just look at all those Xbox FPS games with pointless multiplayer, servers devoid of players for years)
Talk of balance can be somewhat more level-headed when there is a much smaller pool of possibilities to look at, for example with Street Fighter the stage makes no difference (unless a player is colourblind) and so all that needs to be weighed up is how the two character stack up against each other. Not that this is easy to determine either because the mistake a huge number of people make is failing to look at things in context.
"Oh Marauders are OP" or "Fireballs are OP" is a statement that cannot possibly be held true in all situations. What if you have a bunch of Banshees? Bye Bye Marauders, Balrog's EX Armor Dashes (or numerous other tricks and moves that many SF characters have) fireballs suddenly not a problem.
This is where it gets complicated however, it's only just possible to do this for something like Street Fighter (only juuuust) but in reality, to determine whether or not something is truly balanced overall, every single context that can occur must be looked at and weighed against each other. Are fireballs as effective in close range? Well, no, but low-forward kick is, so is that OP now? Well, no, because it has quite a short range. What about vs a jump-in? Well, neither of those options are good. So is Dragon Punch overpowered now? etc etc.
When presented with such a vast array of situations that can occur it's almost impossible to determine whether or not something is imbalanced, even more so once you factor in personal play styles, mechanical issues (miss-clicks) versus strategical issues (repeatedly jumping in against someone with a strong anti-air? Dumb...)
With an RTS game, you now have to factor in tens of different unit types, terrain advantages, upgrades, tech trees, building placement, oh god just so many things that I am of the opinion it is literally impossible to actually flat out say "yes" or "no" to the question "Is X overpowered?" because there is always always always going to be an advantage you can gain over your opponent whether through macro, positioning, unit composition, even map choice will effect which builds and units are advantageous for your race.
It's not even a discussion which should really be happening, the game is successful, very successful so based on that fact alone lesser players need to step back and think for a moment "Well, actually, people who know FAR MORE about this game than I will likely ever know are not complaining about imbalances... So, either I have seen something they haven't, or, I simply haven't opened my mind up to the potential responses to situations I consider to be imbalanced" and more often than not, the second part of that will be true, especially in a game with so many different potential situations as StarCraft 2 and other RTS games versus an FPS or a Fighter where occasionally you can indeed sometimes say "Oh well, X is better than Y, why would you ever use Y?"
Instead of complaining that something is imbalanced, what should be happening is that you are thinking "I did not have the advantage in that situation, why was that?", and working toward solving the problem.
Did you lose to Marauders because they are too powerful? Yes? Oh, ok then. Why were they too powerful? I'll give you a clue, the answer is not "because the developers made them too powerful", it's going to be more along the lines of "Well, I built the wrong units for the situation" or "I wasn't expecting them, therefore I was not prepared to deal with them"
One important thing to remember about balance issues, actually is that all games are imbalanced in some way or another. It's how you deal with these balance issues, and the options you are given in order to deal with them that determine the competitive merit of the game.
No game can be truly balanced unless both sides have exactly the same options at all times. And this isn't static, either. As soon as that first player moves his pawn in chess, the game becomes imbalanced in some fashion. The moment a TvT game where one player builds two barracks, and the other player builds a barracks and a factory, the balance shifts in favor of one player or another.
What's important is how you respond to these issues, not being prepared will cause you to lose, but being over prepared is just as bad. It comes down to knowing the matchups, knowing your units and how well they stack up against your opponents units, and making decisions that you feel are right for the current situation.
If a tactic is truly overpowered, it tends to ruin a game before people can even get to their computers to QQ about it, and before you know it, nobody cares to listen to your QQ'ing because the forum is empty, everyone has abandoned the game in favour of a better one. That clearly hasn't happened with StarCraft 2. Even as a player who has only been playing for 2 weeks, I can see that yes, some units perform better than other units, but every single unit/building/ability has it's place and has a legitimate use. I would say that is testament to an incredibly well balanced design.
Edit: I do also want to add here that talking about imbalance is, in my opinion, a good thing. At the very least what happens is that a new player who is perhaps frustrated with a certain tactic can be armed with information that helps him overcome it (and in turn, hopefully, his beliefs about imbalance)
But, just occasionally, something really is a legitimate cause for concern, perhaps a new tactic needs to be discussed in order to find an appropriate counter, or maybe a patch change shook things up a little for a particular build order. While QQ threads are an annoying part of any competitive game forum, outright banning them, or shunning any talk about balance issues at all is a bad thing and fosters resentment from new players and can actually hinder discussion.
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to be fair, Blizzard needs to know about these so called imbalances in the game, so they can analyze them and see if it really needs to be change or not, if no one complained they wouldnt know what to improve.
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I dont think the posters really want to ban all guys who talk over imbalanced.
its just that this topic is 50% of all threads and post on this website in the sc2 section (general / strategie more 90%) .
A own section" Balance", where they all can discuss this topic would be nice.
Than the mods must only warn/ban all people who post in the other forums over balance because they post on wrong forum. At the moment the admins close like 30% of them with the argument that only badpost and "trash" will come out of it. and the other 70%?
Look at the Strategie section: Are there really people left who are intrested in strategie and not balance talk, who read this?
So the people who like the balance talk can talk over it the hole day and night and all the other are perhaps able to give this sc2 forum some quality back.
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I agree with the OP ... except for the last paragraph on maps. There are some pretty obvious problems in the game (mostly involving early pressure against Zerg) and these are influenced by the maps. The maps and the spawn positions on them do affect the way you have to play, because spawning close positions on Metalopolis plays totally different to spawning cross positions and close position really puts Zerg at a disadvantage. All of this should be obvious from Steppes of War and its close rush distance, but on Metalopolis it is "cloaked" by the randomness of the spawn positions and the "ok-ish" state of a cross spawn.
All of this is pretty obvious and doesnt require a lot of thinking about specific map features. Just make maps where the distances between the mains is more equal, where you have large areas for Zerg to outflank the opponent (we learned that from Kulas Ravine), but which also includes some cliffs to drop tanks on (except right next to the natural). Saying "dont blame the maps" doesnt really help, because maps do affect the gameplay A LOT. Analyzing maps and their effects on the races just involves a lot of common sense and just a bit of math to figure out good distances between bases.
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OPs posts cured my cancer and gave Idra a fleeting moment of the strange emotion called happiness.
Seriously, this post is awesome, and needs to be sticked most ASAPly.
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Colossi is still OP , Idra says so , it must be true!
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everytime someone say like imba race etc. against me I'm just "imba imba world" nothing else.  xD
+ that it's so flavour of the game to whine about balance <3
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Please can it be necessary that forum members here read this topic before being allowed to post...
Use you brain and stop posting about balance in every thread or every time someone loses.
It's not the game, it's the players.
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I was actually thinking about posting something quite like this, glad someone bumped this before I could make that hideous mistake.
For whatever reason, imbalance seems to have become a lot more prevalent recently (the last month or so). Like the OP said, it really isn't in anyone's best interest to argue imbalance. Foremost, if you are convinced something is OP, and you convince others it's OP, then it becomes OP because no one is willing to look for a solution, and instead convinces themselves that it cannot be beaten, so there is no reason to try for a solution.
The other one that annoys me is the "X race is harder (for whatever reason)" Those ones are just insulting to anyone who doesn't play race X, as it basically says that no one can be skilled unless they play "X".
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EPT
