EPTgive it a rest.
Thoughts on Design - Removing Gameplay for Balance - Page 2
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HorsetraineR
Norway5 Posts
give it a rest. | ||
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SilverPotato
United States560 Posts
On March 06 2011 00:01 Tef wrote: I think the OP is over analyse the situation. The reason why we never saw any tech tree changes in SC:BW was because it was more tedious to implement and test for programmers. I doubt it was because they didn't want to, you have to consider multiplayer and singleplayer was a single game in SC:BW but are two seperate games in SC2. With the new editor and test environment for SC2 changing tech trees are super easy for Blizzard. Yeah but adding or removing even just one unit can break the game | ||
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derpzzz
20 Posts
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RascaL.253
United States15 Posts
•Loss counts are no longer displayed in Profile and Ladder pages for players below Master League...like really tho? Anyway...I also don't like how they remove abilities from the game. I believe they should be "nerfing" the KA not totally removing it....I mean the game thrives on diversity so don't completely remove abilities.... | ||
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Toadvine
Poland2234 Posts
As far as I'm concerned, Reapers were just a badly designed unit, not really cohesive with the rest of the Terran race. In the early game they overlap with hellions, and in the mid to late games, drops are significantly better than reaper harass. Void Rays have been significantly nerfed at least 4 times since beta, and they still create problems in PvZ. And Warp-in Storm is but another artifact of the inherently unbalanced nature of Warpgates. Nothing that comes out of Warpgates can be any good by itself, or the mobility advantage would cause immediate balance problems. Somewhat resigned to some sort of Sentry nerf in the future, to be completely honest. On March 05 2011 22:50 Rabiator wrote: Starcraft 2 and its abilities are much more volatile compared to BW. Back then you had no MBS or even unlimited unit selection and the unit movement AI was terrible. You lost a huge amount of efficiency to that complicated control. Thus it wasnt really that necessary to take out any ability in BW because none of them were able to remove an entire army like the "Archon toilet" is able in SC2. If you want to blame anything then blame the "unlimited unit selection" and the macro mechanics which make the game much faster compared to BW. Sure they were also put in by Blizzard, but the dev team has to live with them now and a complete redesign on the macro mechanics seems very unlikely. Personally I would think it entirely reasonable to cut the efficiency of MULE, spawn larva and chronoboost in half and that would make the game much more stable. I wouldn't blame unlimited unit selection. Macro mechanics, sure, those definitely contribute (although Chronoboost could probably be fine if you couldn't chrono Warpgate Research in the early game). But honestly, you could probably put MBS, automining, and unlimited unit selection in BW, and still have an awesome game (definitely not smartcasting though). An easier game with MUCH easier macro, of course, but a great game still. Unlimited unit selection wouldn't change that much in BW, imo, because it was the collision size and pathing that made moving large armies difficult. In SC2, I can oftentimes have a 100 food stalker/sentry/Colossus ball all attacking at the same time, which is retarded. In BW, chokes gave you a huge defensive advantage, simply because there was no way to fit a lot of units in a small space. I really do wonder how SC2 would play with a bigger collision radius for units and more open maps. Can you change that in the editor? | ||
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Sixxor
United States14 Posts
On March 06 2011 00:20 RascaL.253 wrote: I love blizzard, but some of the stuff they do puzzles me. I do not like how they balance to lower level "casual" players. •Loss counts are no longer displayed in Profile and Ladder pages for players below Master League...like really tho? Anyway...I also don't like how they remove abilities from the game. I believe they should be "nerfing" the KA not totally removing it....I mean the game thrives on diversity so don't completely remove abilities.... that's not a balance change it's just a change to make the casuals feel better about themselves, and in the end it doesn't actually change anything cause you can still figure out your losses really easy with some simple math. | ||
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surraymb
Austria114 Posts
They can't keep this up, variety is already lacking and from what they've said in interviews they aren't even planning to add new units in the addons so that's another addition of complexity down the drain. On March 06 2011 00:06 HorsetraineR wrote: This game is not even a year old and you start discussing balance, wait another year or two, then start discussing wether or not blizzard needs to take a drastic turn in their game design, as of right now, the game is too fresh to even be balanced. it took 4-5 years before SC even became close to balanced, still isnt in my opinion. isn't it Blizzard that keeps screwing with this? If they just gave things more time and made less insane changes people could figure things out, but as it stands everyone is just waiting for the next patch where we'll be playing a different game all over again. | ||
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IamBach
United States1059 Posts
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Xanatoss
Germany539 Posts
Each Round of SC2 has an average amount of spent ressources. The more ("useless") Stuff Blizzard kicks out to free up these ressources, the easier it will be to implement ("better fitting") Stuff with future Addons. | ||
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GriMeR
United States148 Posts
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hugman
Sweden4644 Posts
On March 05 2011 21:04 lunar3force wrote: I agree with op. While I like playing SC2 as it is nice and fun game, watching it is pretty boring and uninteresting compared to BW. Units themself lack any excited abilities and its ussually just clash of mass a-move in centar of map with sligh simple micro.Just compare anything in SC2 to late game mayhem between Terran vs Zerg in BW. Hope Hots will bring same interesting twists is game dynamics. I think unit spacing / clumping is the issue. You can get too many units into too small of an area. | ||
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IamBach
United States1059 Posts
On March 06 2011 01:33 veE wrote: I love how people think they honestly dont know what they are doing... they made the damn game haha, your obviously just not seeing the whole picture The fact that they made the game makes me think that they don't know what they are doing. O.o | ||
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GhostFall
United States830 Posts
On March 06 2011 01:33 veE wrote: I love how people think they honestly dont know what they are doing... they made the damn game haha, your obviously just not seeing the whole picture We don't see the whole picture because they don't give us any information. And Blizzards recent track record has not been that great. A lot of people are alluding to the 5 rax reaper and how overpowering it was. I'm not saying it wasn't imbalanced. It was incredibly hard for zergs to deal with. However, was the the correct solution just flat out removing the reaper strategy. The Blizzard of Starcraft 1 would've just adjusted the values of the reaper rush. It would not have remained so strong, but the basic strategy is still there. However in starcraft 2, the upgrade was completely moved to another tier and the strategy completely gone. Again, I'm not saying it is necessarily a bad thing this way of balancing . I am saying from a design perspective people should be worried that blizzard is removing strategies to balance the game. It is on these particular changes when they appear in the patch notes, that they should make extra special care to keep an eye out for. | ||
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Schnullerbacke13
Germany1199 Posts
Imho I think the core problem is the lack of scouting possibilities especially in mid-early game. The scouting scheme (which is mostly similar to BW) was ok in BW, because BW had a slower macro, so a scouting miss was not that fatal. In SC2 it is quite easy to do some little fake (proxy tech/production) cut drones and booom. Z as beeing the reactonary race suffers most from that. You are forced to gamble. E.g. an unscouted 4 gate is deadly, however it is easy to fake a FE, cancel and 4 gate or build 2 gates and proxy 2 other gates .. or vice versa fake a 4 gate but do an FE once you are unscouted .. you'll be miles ahead in eco. Zerg start doing similar things meanwhile (early rushes, proxy hatch, all in timing pushes). In SC2 you can have decent success with: cut drones at minute X, pump unit Y and Z when reaching XX supply => A-Move. In BW this works as well, but since macro is slower, the enemy has more time to find out .. | ||
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JustPlay
United States211 Posts
In SC2 all units are designed to fill a role and hard counter or be hard countered. That is why flux vanes was removed, and it's why amulet is being removed. This will hopefully change in an expansion, but who knows if it ever will. The most used units right now transcend their role or are inefficiently hard countered and it's why some matchups are pretty dumb. Examples of units like this currently: Mutalisk - despite how fragile it is, it transcends its role because its counters don't really counter it in either matchup due to its move speed and consistent damage output Banelings - Meant to kill light units, instead they are massed because zerg units die too fast to do any real damage most of the time. The saturation based economy that punishes you for expanding quickly and doesn't jive well with 200 supply cap doesn't help encourage zerg to use other units either. Colossus - PvZ - I really doubt 5 were supposed to effortlessly kill 600 supply of zerg ground units even if the zerg gets some corruptors Marine - TvX - It is so cheap and efficient at dealing damage to air and ground that its weaknesses are irrelevant. Tank - TvX - With smart fire getting more helps more and you aren't forced to split your tanks much. Way too effective against ground units because of this. Sentry - PvX - If you didn't read FF before beta came out and go "holy shit protoss will be viable if zealots carry around wifflebats and stalkers squirt water" then you aren't very smart. Note that the units above aren't necessarily imbalanced. They just completely break the SC2 hard counter style game design, which was a terrible design choice to begin with. Until they bring other units on par individually with the above units the game will continue to be mediocre and they will continue making silly balance changes that avoid addressing the real issue. | ||
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MuTT
United States398 Posts
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Backpack
United States1776 Posts
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navy
Canada197 Posts
you may be right in principle. but a game where every match is a mirror would also be boring to watch. | ||
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infinity2k9
United Kingdom2397 Posts
On March 06 2011 00:20 Toadvine wrote: Totally in agreement with the OP. I sort of think that the SC2 development team have sort of designed themselves into a corner, and are now merely trying to salvage whatever balanced gameplay they can. In a sense, they're treating the symptoms, rather than the illness. Anyone can look at 5RR and yell "nerf reapers!", as anyone can see how overpowered warp-in storms or speedrays can feel in any given game. Thing is, these are just symptoms of some bad core design decisions. As far as I'm concerned, Reapers were just a badly designed unit, not really cohesive with the rest of the Terran race. In the early game they overlap with hellions, and in the mid to late games, drops are significantly better than reaper harass. Void Rays have been significantly nerfed at least 4 times since beta, and they still create problems in PvZ. And Warp-in Storm is but another artifact of the inherently unbalanced nature of Warpgates. Nothing that comes out of Warpgates can be any good by itself, or the mobility advantage would cause immediate balance problems. Somewhat resigned to some sort of Sentry nerf in the future, to be completely honest. I wouldn't blame unlimited unit selection. Macro mechanics, sure, those definitely contribute (although Chronoboost could probably be fine if you couldn't chrono Warpgate Research in the early game). But honestly, you could probably put MBS, automining, and unlimited unit selection in BW, and still have an awesome game (definitely not smartcasting though). An easier game with MUCH easier macro, of course, but a great game still. Unlimited unit selection wouldn't change that much in BW, imo, because it was the collision size and pathing that made moving large armies difficult. In SC2, I can oftentimes have a 100 food stalker/sentry/Colossus ball all attacking at the same time, which is retarded. In BW, chokes gave you a huge defensive advantage, simply because there was no way to fit a lot of units in a small space. I really do wonder how SC2 would play with a bigger collision radius for units and more open maps. Can you change that in the editor? This is a good post, i feel Terran in particular in SC2 they seemed to add units to just because it sounded cool regardless of its affect to the balance of the game. The reaper is clearly a really badly designed unit that doesn't fit in with what T is supposed to be in the first place. They are no longer the immobile fragile force that had to push it's way across the map cause mobility is barely an issue. But yet they also got upgraded defensively with the PF... Then there's warping in units for P which makes mobility and race distances a complete non-issue. That's obviously going to cause issues. Plus the point about chokes is really important for defenders advantage, no wonder rush strategies are so popular now. Chokepoints and ramps were 100% vital in team games in BW.. plus firing up cliffs having 50% miss. Now missing is gone and chokes are easier. | ||
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simme123
Sweden810 Posts
Also I think they're realizing that they tried to implement a bit much of the "cool" stuff in this game. For instant the amulet nerf would be quite unexplainable if it hadn't been for the warp in and so on, the flux vanes helped void rays keep their charge and so on. It's all about the new gameplay elements they implemented which made some abilities too strong. | ||
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