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And hey, if you ever think WoL maps are bad, look at the official maps Starcraft 1 launched with.
Ashrigo
River Styx
Solar Station
Green Valleys
We've come a long way. All the maps have naturals, now!
QFT. Blizzard's official maps have never really been that great, especially compared to community created ones. They have gotten better at mapmaking over the years, though their maps are only decent for the official ladder and early tournaments.
I don't mind most of the maps on the current ladder, especially considering the huge number of casual non-diamond players that Blizzard has to cater to. There isn't really anything that will cause Blizzard to adopt community-created maps onto their ladder. The most we can hope for is the possibility for them to add support for custom ladders, a la iCCup or PGTour.
It's really up to tournament organizers to push the envelope to adopt new maps. I suspect that the majority of people complaining about the lack of macro in games probably reside on TL and are regular spectators of tournaments. It would be great for more tournaments to start adopting more custom maps, thus giving a nice sampling of the types of games that could be played out on these new maps. Once these lights are thrust into the public spotlight, the new chat channels should make it much easier for us to try them out in custom games.
As much as we want Blizzard to officially adopt custom maps, it has historically been the community itself that has caused the adoption of custom maps throughout BW's lifetime. I don't expect the next Destination or Match Point to come from Blizzard. I do expect the community to create and adopt such quality maps for public use.
Anyways, I think the new GSL maps are definitely a step in the right direction. Even if some of them turn out to be terrible for any reason, at least they will be filtered out in favor of other better maps, thus priming the pump for the flow of community-made maps for major tournaments.
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I feel matches on these maps may become somewhat dull with no sides attacking until maxed, though Koreans like to attack so we will see.
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On January 20 2011 16:31 Ulfsark wrote:
I feel matches on these maps may become somewhat dull with no sides attacking until maxed, though Koreans like to attack so we will see.
This is a logical fallacy. If it's advantageous for someone to attack they are likely going to attack.
SC2 is a pretty fast paced game and there will still be ways to keep people "honest" I assure you.
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if blizzard is smart they will let the community evolve the game.
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On January 20 2011 17:58 Phanekim wrote:
if blizzard is smart they will let the community evolve the game.
^After legacy of the void is out.
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Can we stop catering to the casual crowd please, Blizzard?
The game has been out for a sufficiently long time that the people who play a game for a month or two and quit have, the people who just want to play hero arena can, and those of us who want to play a game on destination or fighting spirit would prefer to do it on ladder than a custom game where who you get is a crapshot.
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Trying to give an honest and concise opinion here...as far as balance goes more maps of the nature of xel'naga caverns is really the way blizzard would need to go to fix their current issues.
I don't think it's the size of the maps alone that is leading the GSL to drop paticular maps. Delta for instance is not really a tiny map, it however has positional imbalance regardless of race...so it's basically just a terrible map and why it's in blizzards current pool is beyond me.
Steppes is really the only map that's just flat to small, there is barely any expansions and the rush distance is just ridiculous.
Blistering sands oddly enough is overly difficult for the defender and leads to a lot of cheese tactics which is probably why they are getting rid of it....aditionally much like jungle basin taking a 3rd on the board is way to hard, which just lends even more to cheese.
I can only imagine the fourth mystery map would most likely be jungle basin or lost temple, more likely the former then the later. JB because once again 3rds are incredibly difficult for both protoss and zerg to take, which once again leads to a lot of cheesy strats.
From all apperances GSL wants to elimante extremly cheesy uninteresting games, so they want to play on maps that lend to more games like you see on xel'naga caverns/metal/shakuras which is only a good thing as the best games have come off those boards.
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I don't see how Warp Gate tech would change anything on a new map pool with bigger maps. I mean, some of you guys seem to imply you can warp in anything other gateway units with it.
In the early game it's going to be the same as ever: either they 4gate or they don't. Distance barely matters in this case.
If anything, bigger maps forces a 4gating player to either: send their probe earlier or have a smaller timing window for it to be effective. If the player doesn't go 4gate (which more or less means they go for a mid/late game), robo tech still has to walk to reinforce.
To me, it just seems as if Protoss will simply suffer the least changes in gameplay when talking about map sizes. Unless they begin to use more warp prisms. But then that means that your robo isn't pumping: a) collosus , b) immortals.
EDIT:
To expend on the last point: protoss' scary units are more or less robo units + templars.
If you want to use warp prisms, you lose some of the robo units. If you want the same ammount of these units, you need to go something like 2robo. If you do that, you have less warpgates, which in turn makes the whole Warp Gate Tech thing not matter as much.
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IMO there are a lot of T players who either don't know how or choose not to play the "right" way. I think if the maps are all the size of Shakuras T players will need to adapt their play style but once they do, I think the game will be balanced fine. I see T winning all kinds of games on Shakuras in the GSL so... if you try to play a macro game instead of SCV all-inning on huge maps I think T will end up fine.
But back to the OP's point, I pray Blizzard does something... but I'm not sure this GSL thing is going to be the deciding thing. Blizz knows that "we" (the elitist TL community) hate their map pool and they haven't done anything yet so I'm not too optimistic.
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If Blizzard doesn't update the Ladder map pool after the GSL switches maps, I'm afraid that SC2 might lose a lot of players, or at the very least, the Ladder will become deserted. Part of the appeal of the ladder for me, is that I have a chance to play against the pros. If the pros stop playing ladder, I'll be sad.
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On January 10 2011 07:40 monitor wrote:Show nested quote +On January 10 2011 07:38 link0 wrote:
The bigger the map, the more likely Protoss will win because warp-gates ignore the defender's advantage. Protoss has warp gates, but Zerg has the advantage of expanding and rebuilding their army MUCH faster from larvae. Overall, I feel like Terran is at a loss.
Terran has Dropships and a very strong maxed out Army... Ppl just need to play more Macro-oriented with Terran I guess... And even if it turns out Terran is going to be weaker, sth. could be done about that with balance-patches - that's way better than playing on horrible Maps IMHO.
On January 20 2011 23:00 Huragius wrote:Show nested quote +On January 10 2011 09:04 StephenS wrote:On January 10 2011 07:40 monitor wrote:On January 10 2011 07:38 link0 wrote:
The bigger the map, the more likely Protoss will win because warp-gates ignore the defender's advantage. Protoss has warp gates, but Zerg has the advantage of expanding and rebuilding their army MUCH faster from larvae. Overall, I feel like Terran is at a loss. Uhm.. You have flying dt's with range. Marauders poop on everything that is ground.. Concusive 50+50 = HOLY OP BATMAN Stim packs, lol. Please shut up. User was warned for this post Pathetic. About the maps, I don't think it's a good idea to make them so big at current state of the game.We will see quite big imbalances after few weeks of playing on them.
But isn't that a good thing? Seeing imbalances that occur on bigger Maps? I mean - sooner or later the Game has to be more or less balanced on bigger Maps anyways, so why not now(ish)?
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On January 10 2011 09:07 link0 wrote:
It's really simple really. Protoss has the most to benefit from large map size. Zerg second. Terran is most disadvantaged. It's just obvious fact. It's the same reason why Terran > Zerg on steppes of war.
We'll see how it plays out though.
You're oversimplifying it. Warpgates ignore distance if a probe can place a pylon ahead of time. It's tough for Terran to prevent that, but speedlings shut down probes moving around the map pretty effectively.
Currently, longer distances are considered to favor Zerg against Terran, Zerg against Protoss, and Protoss against Terran. Chokes favor Protoss against Zerg, Protoss against Terran and Terran against Zerg.
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I think Blizzard should start hosting tournaments a la Wc3 with different map pools to find out how those maps fare in the balance. Battlenet tournaments, in-game, could be an awesome way to get new data, feedback, and test out maps without affecting 1v1 ladder ranks. Prizes wouldn't even have to be monetary; it could be icons or different ranks or mousepads or something. ICCup / other map makers could sponsor the tournaments and include their maps, maybe even free for the sponsor (just community hosted but in-game) that way the community gets exposure to the maps and there is incentive for all players to participate, not just the people that are aware/willing to do come to TL and signup for a specific time/date map contest. Blizzard can get the data from tournaments and implement the maps they feel are the most balanced into the ladder.
I doubt blizzard will add the GSL maps to the ladder pool without sufficient testing or any time soon, but it is a possibility given how strongly they support the GSL.
Should they add the maps to the ladder pool? Personally, I think the Aiur Garden and Tal'Darim Altar are massively Zerg favored (long rush distances by land and air, way farther than Shakuras at the farthest spawning positions, even with the closest positions on these two GSL maps). I would like to see Blizzard add new maps, though. Some of the ICCUp maps are brilliant, others are just WTF (Attack Canyon comes to mind).
I think map making is difficult, because even if we want every map to be as balanced as Xel'Naga and Shakuras, it's difficult to emulate that balance without making every map exactly the same. Map makers (and Blizzard) should be looking at the aspects that cater to balance:
- Land rush distance
- Air rush distance
- Use of destructible rocks
- Number of expansions
- Accessibility of expansions
- Number of chokes
- Position of chokes
- Ability to defend naturals
- Natural-to-natural distance
- position of cliffs
- dynamic of spawn locations
- layout of the main base
- fog / watchtowers
I'm probably missing a lot, but as you can see, there is much more that goes into a map than it's size, and every aspect of a map CAN be exploited, and so probably will, therefore it is very difficult to come up with new maps that reflect balance for every MU but aren't all exactly the same.
I DO believe that Blizzard should be more advantageous in probing the community with new maps and cycling out the established bad ones. Hell, they can look at which maps people most often downvote and get rid of those. The more liberal map-pool of battle.net tournaments and / or custom ladders are the most promising options Blizzard has for getting new maps into ladder.
Edit: Clarity
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I was watching gisado's stream the other day where he tested the new maps, and saw quite a few things that are both expected and unexpected:
1) zerg won alot more games than you would expect on blizzard maps, which is not suprising
2) Protoss, dispite everyone saying warp will be OP, they didnt get that much wins (didnt count, but im sure they won less than zerg)
3) Terran did alright, not UP as people were claiming. 1 base play was made completely useless in one of the maps (some terran player did 1 base and it failed badly, some of the other terran players that played went for a FE which proved to be stable, also saw a flash build
(cc b4 rax) but a mistake in the wall-in cost him the game).
Can't be certain about how balanced it is, but even if the new maps prove to be abit imba, it seems that the problem would be better than the one we have right now (steppes of war, DQ, etc)
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It's really up to the community to make maps from this point on imo. It's false hope that Blizzard will add in some new maps(good maps at that) because their history in this field is so damn bad. WC3, they basically kept the same set of maps for the entirety of the game. Imagine having to play on xel naga for your 2000th time in three years. In WoW, as far as I recall, they've kept the same arena stages for the past four or so years.
ActiBlizzard is LAZY and money hungry, it's not the same Blizzard that gave us BW. We will probably get a new set of maps per expansion and then have to stick with that until the protoss expansion. For Esports, that's basically a death sentence unless the community takes over. It's amazing to see GSL taking action. SC2 is incredibly lucky to have GSL driving the Esports scene as much as they have.
As far as race balance goes, who cares? The metagame will shift and new strategies will evolve on these bigger maps. It's better to see the game evolve under these conditions than a crapshoot based on random positioning presented by the current Blizzard maps. Weak races will be forced to change. It's basically a survival of the fittest SC2 style on these bigger maps, which is possible because the game still hasn't been fully explored!
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EPT
