On March 14 2011 00:21 DoubleReed wrote: If we're talking about Balance and Design, shouldn't we talk about the actual design of some of the units then?
When I see a corruptor, I see a cool looking unit that has the most boring ability in both Starcraft and Starcraft 2. It has good stats and certainly fills a role in the zerg army, but it doesn't do anything more than that. Corruption has absolutely zero strategy in relation to it. It can't be used to harass. It requires absolutely no real micro other than spamming.
How does this affect balance? It's huge. Consider the Viking and the Phoenix both with phenomenal ground-support abilities. Both Lift/Land and Anti-Gravity have tons of uses in actual strategy/tactics. It allows for more dynamic gameplay, harassment etc. etc. Even if one claims that the Corruptor is better AtA than the Viking and Phoenix, the Corruptor is strategically weaker than those two. It means people will only get corruptors when they need that particular unit role in their army, and not incorporating it into any cool or intriguing tactics.
Overmaking Corruptors is a common defense against the colossus. It is expensive and deadly. With Terran its much less of an issue because they can actually support the ground with the lift/land. But a lot of zerg's issues lie with these kind of odd design choices, not with the unit stats and costs.
Lift/land does not have "tons of uses" nor is it a "phenomenal ground support ability". I can count on one hand the times i've seen landed vikings do anything beside fail miserably at GtG combat.
What? You've never seen them land to harass a worker line? You've never seen them kill all the Colossi and then immediately land for ground support? Really? Because it actually works really well.
In competitive play i've never seen that. Vikings landing are 99.9% a act of desperation just before GG'ing.
On March 14 2011 00:21 DoubleReed wrote: If we're talking about Balance and Design, shouldn't we talk about the actual design of some of the units then?
When I see a corruptor, I see a cool looking unit that has the most boring ability in both Starcraft and Starcraft 2. It has good stats and certainly fills a role in the zerg army, but it doesn't do anything more than that. Corruption has absolutely zero strategy in relation to it. It can't be used to harass. It requires absolutely no real micro other than spamming.
How does this affect balance? It's huge. Consider the Viking and the Phoenix both with phenomenal ground-support abilities. Both Lift/Land and Anti-Gravity have tons of uses in actual strategy/tactics. It allows for more dynamic gameplay, harassment etc. etc. Even if one claims that the Corruptor is better AtA than the Viking and Phoenix, the Corruptor is strategically weaker than those two. It means people will only get corruptors when they need that particular unit role in their army, and not incorporating it into any cool or intriguing tactics.
Overmaking Corruptors is a common defense against the colossus. It is expensive and deadly. With Terran its much less of an issue because they can actually support the ground with the lift/land. But a lot of zerg's issues lie with these kind of odd design choices, not with the unit stats and costs.
Lift/land does not have "tons of uses" nor is it a "phenomenal ground support ability". I can count on one hand the times i've seen landed vikings do anything beside fail miserably at GtG combat.
What? You've never seen them land to harass a worker line? You've never seen them kill all the Colossi and then immediately land for ground support? Really? Because it actually works really well.
In competitive play i've never seen that. Vikings landing are 99.9% a act of desperation just before GG'ing.
I mean I think it just happened in the Jinro/Tyler showmatch if I recall correctly...
I think the reason why units in Broodwar could be allowed to deal more damage (be overpowered) was the fact that you could not control them as well as they are controlled in SC2. It took some micro to pack a dozen Dragoons into a tight ball so they could be recalled. It took some micro to pack a bunch of Mutalisks into a tight ball for maximum effect but you couldnt have 50 of them do it but only 12 (or multiple times of that).
So the culprit which makes the units so despiccably OP and gamebreaking is the unlimited unit selection IMO. Does anyone think that the Protoss ball of death would be so bad if the players could not have them in one control group? The unlimited unit selection maximizes the synergy between the units and that is the bad part about it.
Perfect control does not allow for mistakes on the side of the opponent, but if the units are controlled less than optimal mistakes are not as bad. Thus I would think making it harder to control the units (maybe limiting the number of units per control group to one page) and dumbing down the movement AI for certain units (small swarmy units like Zerglings, Marines, Stalkers) so they have a chance to "make mistakes", could be methods to make the game less volatile and thus less dependant upon "perfect balance"(*1) to provide entertainment with flashy and overpowered units.
If you could advance a dozen Reavers side by side and their "missiles" would hit smart targets they could be totally dominating BW for example. Since they dont do that and are "less than perfect" in their movement and the missile AI they are ok.
(*1) Perfect balance for such a complex game doesnt exist and thus it has to be less volatile. "Less volatile" means there cant be any overpowered / flashy / strong unit but sadly it is exactly these units which make the game exciting to watch.
I think OP is making some very bad assumptions. The one I see way off is his example of the KA turtle HT playstyle. It's been around for months now, but the sanszenith game was a showcasing of it as we haven't seen it much in progames. It's not new.
And also comparisons to BW balance are sort of moot, as there was no pro scene back then, and everyone now has 10+ years of RTS experience under their belt. IT's an entirely different scenario than looking at BW balance during bw's active time.
On March 14 2011 00:50 avilo wrote: I think OP is making some very bad assumptions. The one I see way off is his example of the KA turtle HT playstyle. It's been around for months now, but the sanszenith game was a showcasing of it as we haven't seen it much in progames.
In your BW comparison you kinda ignore the entire maps part of it. PvZ changes heavily based on that.
On March 14 2011 00:28 parn wrote: I'll stop here, because those pro-blizzard arguments are the same we're hearing since the release of the game, some kind of copy/past argues: "let's wait", "game still young", "sc1 tooks years ...", "new strategies are to come". This could last for years.
I agree with this it's just annoying at this point. Especially the SC1 part considering we are not starting from scratch in regards to RTS knowledge and balance issues. It's irrelevant what was happening 10 years ago.
I think there is a lot more pressure by blizzard to patch the game into balance. I mean let's face it, SC2 has a large competitive following from the start, where Brood War didn't even pick up steam for a while and that took something like a year before it had it's first balance change.
The problem with SCII's asymmetrical balance is that you can't just "fix" a problem with key units in one matchup because it'll most definitely cause problems in another.
I hope they don't really remove the Archon Toilet. That was one of the most amazing moves from a spectator's pov.
I think SC2 has some WOW-factor abilities. Neural Parasite, HSM, Mothership Abilities. The only issue is that they're either not viable due to limitations (HSM), or due to current meta game (Neural Parasite, Mothership).
I'm actually not too worried about stuff being removed from SC2 right now. Why's that? Well, because we still have two expansions coming up. I figure that at least a couple of the abilities that have been removed so far will come back before we're done.
Besides that I do agree that (large) balance changes are coming pretty fast and thick. However the only change that I've strongly disagreed with so far has been the supply before barracks requirement (and I play Zerg!)... I would have preferred to just say "deal with it" to Zergs who complain.
On March 14 2011 00:21 DoubleReed wrote: If we're talking about Balance and Design, shouldn't we talk about the actual design of some of the units then?
When I see a corruptor, I see a cool looking unit that has the most boring ability in both Starcraft and Starcraft 2. It has good stats and certainly fills a role in the zerg army, but it doesn't do anything more than that. Corruption has absolutely zero strategy in relation to it. It can't be used to harass. It requires absolutely no real micro other than spamming.
How does this affect balance? It's huge. Consider the Viking and the Phoenix both with phenomenal ground-support abilities. Both Lift/Land and Anti-Gravity have tons of uses in actual strategy/tactics. It allows for more dynamic gameplay, harassment etc. etc. Even if one claims that the Corruptor is better AtA than the Viking and Phoenix, the Corruptor is strategically weaker than those two. It means people will only get corruptors when they need that particular unit role in their army, and not incorporating it into any cool or intriguing tactics.
Overmaking Corruptors is a common defense against the colossus. It is expensive and deadly. With Terran its much less of an issue because they can actually support the ground with the lift/land. But a lot of zerg's issues lie with these kind of odd design choices, not with the unit stats and costs.
Lift/land does not have "tons of uses" nor is it a "phenomenal ground support ability". I can count on one hand the times i've seen landed vikings do anything beside fail miserably at GtG combat.
What? You've never seen them land to harass a worker line? You've never seen them kill all the Colossi and then immediately land for ground support? Really? Because it actually works really well.
That's not exciting at all. I missing shuttle/reaver micro. Now, THAT was exciting.
Dark swarm push Spawn broodling on tanks (and ultras at hive tech ZvZ lol) Clutch storms/plague Irradiate erasers Scourge cloning Yamato cloning Mine drags. Marine v lurker micro (sooooooo much more entertaining than "micro" vs banelings)
It was even better knowing how damn HARD it is to do most of these things without the easymode AI automation that we get now in SC2.
The approach Blizzard is taking when it comes to balancing the game seems to be (comparatively) aggressive. This isn't necessarily a bad thing. It's a tight line to walk between waiting to see if difficult scenarios resolve themselves through shifts in gameplay and deciding how long you leave the game in a state that seems broken. There's really no perfect answer. In one case, you may make a change that, once the metagame begins to shift later, turns out to be a bit too strong, and you wind up having to make an additional change to compensate. That's frustrating for players, because it results in having to re-learn how to deal with different timings, compositions, etc. On the other hand, if there is a situation where a legitimate balance issue does exist and you leave it in the game waiting to see if it will work itself out, it's also frustrating for the players, because they're playing a game with serious balance issues for a protracted period of time. In the absence of a correct answer, Blizzard's approach seems as valid as any other.
Having quantified Blizzard's overall balance approach, I find that I disagree with the assertion that their aggressive balancing absolutely prevents the meta-game from shifting. In a lot of ways, balance patches have the potential to allow for new and exciting meta-game environments that were previously impossible. To use an extraordinarily relevant example, changing the function (and thus role) of an Infestor has the potential to allow it to be used in new ways and has the potential to create an interesting shift in the meta-game. Whether this potential is realized depends on the quality of the actual change, but the point remains: balance does not explicitly prevent meta-game shifts, and a good balance change can even cause a shift in the meta-game.
As for the actual content of Blizzard's balance patches, I think Selth makes an excellent point above. It's kind of sad to see that the predominant way this aggressive balancing has been accomplished is through the complete and utter removal of certain strategies, rather than through more delicate and nuanced changes. It's also a shame that while a number of strategies have been eliminated systematically, the changes that are being made tend not to be overly encouraging of new strategies. The point remains that the quickest and easiest way to obtain balance now is to aggressively eliminate things that seem too powerful, and slowly (and incrementally) try to add things back in once some semblance of balance has been achieved. It's a shame, because it means it might take a while before the game really gets back the depth of strategy it needs to shake things up too much. At the same time, I'm not thrilled at the prospect of playing a heavily imbalanced game while Blizzard tried to figure out exactly how much damage a unit needs to do and exactly at what time you should be able to have a certain number of them. It's a bad situation to be in. Of course, the easy answer is to just release a game that's perfectly balanced, but it's kind of difficult to balance something as complex as Starcraft without an extensive amount of data from high-level gameplay.
Given the difficult situation Blizzard finds themselves in, I think they're doing the best they can. There's no way to make everyone happy, and their approach seems as good as any. I'd like to see them testing ways to make new strategies viable, or re-distribute the strength in some existing ones, but that's tough to do until you've got a sound base of balance to iterate on top of.
On March 14 2011 00:21 DoubleReed wrote: If we're talking about Balance and Design, shouldn't we talk about the actual design of some of the units then?
When I see a corruptor, I see a cool looking unit that has the most boring ability in both Starcraft and Starcraft 2. It has good stats and certainly fills a role in the zerg army, but it doesn't do anything more than that. Corruption has absolutely zero strategy in relation to it. It can't be used to harass. It requires absolutely no real micro other than spamming.
How does this affect balance? It's huge. Consider the Viking and the Phoenix both with phenomenal ground-support abilities. Both Lift/Land and Anti-Gravity have tons of uses in actual strategy/tactics. It allows for more dynamic gameplay, harassment etc. etc. Even if one claims that the Corruptor is better AtA than the Viking and Phoenix, the Corruptor is strategically weaker than those two. It means people will only get corruptors when they need that particular unit role in their army, and not incorporating it into any cool or intriguing tactics.
Overmaking Corruptors is a common defense against the colossus. It is expensive and deadly. With Terran its much less of an issue because they can actually support the ground with the lift/land. But a lot of zerg's issues lie with these kind of odd design choices, not with the unit stats and costs.
Lift/land does not have "tons of uses" nor is it a "phenomenal ground support ability". I can count on one hand the times i've seen landed vikings do anything beside fail miserably at GtG combat.
Vikings are actually relatively efficient in ground combat. They're roughly comparable to stalkers, with lower speed and hp but much higher DPS (their dps/health ratio is about the same). You can take that as either vikings are good or stalkers are bad, but in either case it's legitimate to drop 20+ on somebody.
On March 13 2011 23:22 Dommk wrote: Dayvi was talking to HuK on his stream and said something along the lines of "every pro thinks their race is the weakest race, I think that is a sign that we are doing a good job with balance"
Kind of is really
some z's have been saying since the beta that immortal ht compositions are just as overpowered pvz as collosus builds
And same T's have been saying that the only way they can beat Zerg is by doing lame shit like Bunker rushing to block early hatcheries, or 2rax, but that isn't exactly the case either.
results back one up and not the other
Don't see any results for Immo/Templar being overpowered. Even then, the style is only now picking up again, how many months did people think Roaches were overpowered after the range buff? It took quite a long time to realize that range 4 roaches weren't anything special.
I think Blizzard is doing a different kind of balance. They are balancing among how to deal with current players, to attract potential players for Wings of Liberty, to keep things interesting till the coming expansions, and to make money. With the events happening right now, Blizzard is just patching things up(sorry for the pun). They can't tinker the game too much because the expansions may have new units that could affect the metagame.
On March 13 2011 23:22 Dommk wrote: Dayvi was talking to HuK on his stream and said something along the lines of "every pro thinks their race is the weakest race, I think that is a sign that we are doing a good job with balance"
Kind of is really
some z's have been saying since the beta that immortal ht compositions are just as overpowered pvz as collosus builds
And same T's have been saying that the only way they can beat Zerg is by doing lame shit like Bunker rushing to block early hatcheries, or 2rax, but that isn't exactly the case either.
results back one up and not the other
Don't see any results for Immo/Templar being overpowered. Even then, the style is only now picking up again, how many months did people think Roaches were overpowered after the range buff? It took quite a long time to realize that range 4 roaches weren't anything special.
Nobody thought 4 range roaches were OP except bad protoss who wanted to forge FE every game for free.
On March 13 2011 23:22 Dommk wrote: Dayvi was talking to HuK on his stream and said something along the lines of "every pro thinks their race is the weakest race, I think that is a sign that we are doing a good job with balance"
Kind of is really
some z's have been saying since the beta that immortal ht compositions are just as overpowered pvz as collosus builds
And same T's have been saying that the only way they can beat Zerg is by doing lame shit like Bunker rushing to block early hatcheries, or 2rax, but that isn't exactly the case either.
results back one up and not the other
Don't see any results for Immo/Templar being overpowered. Even then, the style is only now picking up again, how many months did people think Roaches were overpowered after the range buff? It took quite a long time to realize that range 4 roaches weren't anything special.
Why are people saying things like this? You have no experience with it so you think you can judge it? I don't understand this logic, because you seem to be admitting that you don't know what you're talking about. People are starting to use it because of how impenetrable it is. I don't know if that will remain after the KA removal though...
That last statement is a little weird considering how mass roach is pretty much the grand ol' strategy vs. toss right now...
On March 14 2011 01:04 tarpman wrote: I'm actually not too worried about stuff being removed from SC2 right now. Why's that? Well, because we still have two expansions coming up. I figure that at least a couple of the abilities that have been removed so far will come back before we're done.
Besides that I do agree that (large) balance changes are coming pretty fast and thick. However the only change that I've strongly disagreed with so far has been the supply before barracks requirement (and I play Zerg!)... I would have preferred to just say "deal with it" to Zergs who complain.
But HotS isn't even going to be this year, and eSports and the game is running now. Why would you be happy with a game that's only going to one day potentially have what you want. It's a bit sad gaming as a whole is to a point where people are happy with something with just the promise it may or may not change one day.
Storms: visually pleasing? Yes. Wow-factor: Yes! Overpowered? Probably! Nerfed, making Colossus pretty much the better choice always.
Colossus; visually pleasing? Nope (tripods with lasers, derp). Wow-factor: No. Overpowered? Maybe ... but definitely not gamebreaking ... or interesting for that matter.
Siege Tanks: visually pleasing? Yes. Wow-factor: YES! Overpowered? Sure, why not!? Nerfed until bio was the best and easiest option in all MU's.
Bio; visually pleasing? No. Wow-factor: Yawn. Overpowered? Not enough. "Let's lower infantry upgrade cost and reaper speed so we can increase stim research time and move reaper speed to the factory when people start actually using these units. Requiring Supply Depot as a prerequisite for the Barracks also seems like a good non-random idea, that way we don't have to wrap our heads around Terran rushes or deal with the reaper. I mean, they're actually using it like some sort of .. of.. harassing unit, that pops into bases sniping light units and buildings and kitings stuff, it's ridic!
"Now let's have coffee and discuss the bunker build time!"
"I'm still kinda the fence about it Dustin, we can't make changes like these on a whim"
"Agreed, agreed ... what do you think David?"
"Hmmm what? ... O yeah, Terran definitely seems to be having trouble holding off pressure builds from Toss. Btw, do you want one of these choclates SlayerSBoxer had delivered to my house? They're excuisite!"
"Don't mind if I do"
"Yeah, Terran definitely FEELS a little weak lately"
The problem is that every "Overpowered' unit you list belongs to either Terran or Protoss. The result, of course, was the complete domination of Zerg--especially by siege tanks and reapers--that lasted until their nerf. Even now, Zergs still recognize that if T could 5-rax reaper at will with tanks that did 60 damage to everything, they'd never win. Some units actually were overpowered, and did break the game. And you forget the new "wow factors" that were added, including, the new damaging FG, or the potential for phoenix micro or mass baneling usage added in the late beta.
Defiler Plague ( ignores shields / does up to 300 damage to all units in a 3x3 matrix over time ) Dark Swarm ( shields units from ranged attacks, doesn't ignore spells, reduces splash in a 6x6 matrix ) Consume ( kills fellow zerg unit for mana and zerglings = cheap mana regen for the defiler )
the guy you quoted from stated the defiler near the top... and it's one of the best units in the game...
and science vessels > ravens... hsm almost never hits, but irradiate would always guarantee 250 damage vs bio
dark archons/maelstorm could stun zerg/biological units ( does no damage, but they couldn't move or fight back AoE ) archons/psionic storm could kill them...
8 lurkers could kill hundreds of marines... if they aren't microed against them+ you can give them the stop command to prevent them from firing... much cooler than burrowed banelings
queen parasite ( gives zerg permanent vision of the unit unless a medic casts restoration.. ensnare(slows units down) spawn broodling spell on a target unit... ( instantly kills whatever ground target it casts + creates two broodlings ) +infest command center ( 0 mana cost ) on a 50% damaged CC gives the zerg control of it+create 500 damage AoE /60 HP suicide units
While I do agree in general, as long as incredibly drastic balance changes are not made I think the "biased" input is okay. Why? Legends are born that way and eventually drags the game to a relatively balanced state. When the entire SC or SC2 community thinks a certain race/playstyle/matchup is bad or must be played a certain way and someone comes and crushes all of that, now that is what makes Boxer, Julyzerg, Bisu, etc etc especially incredible.
EPT
