Hello. This is going to be a discussion on the design of Starcraft 2 as a game. Right now I believe Starcraft 2 is at a very important point right now. Starcraft is getting more attention than ever. People are so focused right now on balancing Starcraft, finding sponsors, bringing money into the game, etc. All this is extremely important, but I believe a equally important aspect of the game is being left behind. Something no one is talking about or seem to care about. I'm talking about design of the game.
Now I recognize this is a competitive game. People are going to be more concerned about balance. What do they care about design as long as everything is balanced? But you have to understand, the lifeblood of an e-sport aren't the competitive players. It's the people watching. It's the spectators. It's the casuals that might play a couple hours a week. While it is extremely important to keep the game balanced, it is even more important to keep the games exciting and fresh for the casual players, the watchers of the Starcraft tournaments. It is super important to keep the game varied for players of all levels.
This week I'm going to point out the pitfalls of on why making balance changes from the competitive community can hurt the game. It is fairly common knowledge that Blizzard takes input from the community, ladder results, in-house testing, and feedback from the competitive player’s community. They also analyze games and replays from the competitive community. + Show Spoiler +
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CMWw6W9IVdw
Now don't get me wrong, pros know the game better than anyone else. If I wanted to change a game with the intent of pure balance, I would do nothing but listen to the pro community. But this brings up several issues. Let's address the easiest and least interesting to understand first: bias. This is fairly simple. Players are biased in favor for their own race. The more of a certain race among the pros, the more biased feedback and analysis comes from the competitive community. If there are more Terran pros, you're going to get more feedback that is Terran biased from the overall community. A simple numbers argument.
The second bigger issue with taking feedback from the competitive community is that you only get data that affects the current metagame. Different pros and different pro replays may differ individually, but overall they create a general shape and feel of the current metagame. Blizzard will not get feedback on possible upcoming strategies and playstyles. As good as pros are, they arent good enough to predict all the specific strategies that appear in the future.
Why is this bad? Well let's use an example from Starcraft 1. Before 2007 in SC1 the PvZ matchup was considered Zerg favored. Zerg dominated Protoss for almost free, and generally considered the hardest to play competitively because of it. Then what happened? Bisu burst onto the scene and completely revolutionized the matchup. In a single season the game went from Zerg favored to balanced. Now imagine if the Starcraft 2 balance team worked on Starcraft 1 with their mindset of forcing it to be an esport. They would've taken feedback from the competitive community. They would've buffed the way pre2007 Protoss were playing so it was balanced. This means Bisu playstyle may never have been found, or if it was found could be proved to be overpowering because of previous buffs.
If a new strategy is never found, it’s bad for spectators because less strategies = worse viewer experience. If a new strategy is found and then it may be overpowering because of earlier buffs, it becomes bad for the players and thus bad for the spectators.
Let's use some specific examples from Starcraft 2. Let us take the SanZenith vs SCFou game http://www.gomtv.net/2011gslsponsors2/vod/62509 SanZenith used defensive storms while expanding to slowly starve the Terran player to death. Is this strategy overpowering? Was the current Terran metagame of using a Bionic army a correct response? No one knows the answers to these questions. The strategy is WAY too new. Yet with the KA removal, we're never going to see this strategy again. The metagame will not shift. The status quo of the metagame will remain. If Blizzard tries to collect data on this series, they are only going to get the perspective from the competive community as bionic vs high templar. Why? Because that is the current metagame. It is standard to use bionic units against Protoss. They are never going to get another perspective. But why should Blizzard care? Protoss have a strategy that is so far proving to be balanced against Terran. Collosus vs Bio. Who cares if we never see High templar again, as long as the Collosus vs Bio + Vikings interaction remains balanced. Blizzard has its balance. Thats enough for the game to be an esport right?
If SC2 is to become a successful e-sport it must remain dynamic. I've seen firsthand how only taking input from the competitive community can destroy a game and a community. I was a competitive player for the Half-Life mod Natural Selection and used to believe that the only input the developers should take for balancing that game should come from the competitive community. And that's exactly what they did. Yet, I also saw that game stagnate and slowly lose popularity. The metagame never changed. Each game played very similiarly with the same strategies used over and over. All because balance changes came from the competitive community which only served to keep the status quo balanced. Slowly, the competitive scene died out and that was its end.
The point of this post is not to say that Blizzard getting feedback from the competitive community is bad. It is necessary to balance this game. However, the only information Blizzard is going to get is the status of the current metagame. You have to check to see if the metagame shifts. Blizzard has to be patient, and has to trust the players to find a metagame shift first. This takes time. It took a full 2 years for Protoss to catch up to Zerg in SC1. Essentially, Blizzard needs to slow down the amount of patches they are releasing. Imbalances need to be seen across multiple seasons of Starcraft 2 before any patching should be done. Any new strategies should be left alone completely until a sufficient time has passed to prove it is imbalanced or not. 1 season is not sufficient time.
This has been some thoughts on design. Please keep it in mind. If you like to read more about other thoughts on design: + Show Spoiler +
Good read, I think Blizzard is taking this mythical view of balance way too far. Balance isn't a case of "and God saw that it was good", it's an equilibrium that develops over time. With the fast rate at which Blizzard is patching the game, we never get to settle on certain standards. They're continuously stirring up the water and wondering why it won't smooth down.
Broodwar wasn't balanced, even back then you had Artosis and Idra complaining about imbalance, they just played Terran back then and Protoss was the disgustingly OP race. In fact, I'd say that units and abilites were far more "overpowered" in Starcraft 1.
Tanks did disgusting amounts of damage, Vultures were cheap, fast, 2 shotted workers and could be upgraded to lay invisible mines that could, on their own, blow up entire armies. Carriers could be microed to victory from a practically lost position, Reavers were basically mineshooting caterpillars that would be happily dropped around the map by shuttles and capable of blowing up entire mineral lines at once, High templar were storming shit up too and morphed Archons were actually damn good. Defilers with Dark Swarm, ranged damage? Nope. Mutalisks that are as mobile as now, but are extremely microable and can actually engage armies one on one, yep.
Part of the charm of BW is that it's balanced on imbalances; instead of complaining about other races' overpowered stuff, players just went to the extreme to (ab)use their own overpowered units. If Blizzard took out Reavers, mines, neutered siege tanks, neutered mutalisks, removed Dark Swarm, removed Plague, neutered Carriers ... so it would all be a tame "fair" game, TeamLiquid might not even have existed until this day because no-one would give a shit about watching that game.
Right now Blizzard is busy taking away all units and abilities that could be construed as "OP", but although the game might become more "fair" that won't matter when no-one is interested watching it anymore.
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 kiting stuff, it's disgusting!
"Now let's have coffee and discuss the bunker build time!"
"I'm still kinda on the fence about it Dustin, we can't make changes like these on a whim"
"Agreed, agreed ... what do you think David?"
"Hmmm what? ... I mean, o yeah, Terran definitely seems to be having trouble holding off early pressure builds these days. Btw, do you want one of these choclates SlayerSBoxer had delivered to my house? They're exquisite!"
"Don't mind if I do"
"Yeah, Terran definitely FEELS a little weak lately"
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.
Great post, and great points even from Saechis. Removal of archon toilet is something that I really don't understand, it was spectacular to see and not overpowered (man, you need tons of gas geysers to do that!).
not true at all that youll only get info on the current metagame some z's have been saying since the beta that immortal ht compositions are just as overpowered pvz as collosus builds, and theyre just now starting to see use and success
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.
The game and the people playing it has changed A LOT from the Beta, anything people have said back then is anecdotal at best
Blizzards hands are tied to a degree when it comes to balance. They can't add new things because that would require artwork and testing and a number of other things they don't want to spend money on till the expansions. So even though it would make more sense to be like, "Oh, storm is crushing bio. Lets give terran a unit that creates an area of immunity to spells" or some other absurd new thing that would make the game more exciting, blizzard can't do that.
The only thing they can do is change numbers or remove things. That's fine by me actually. We shouldn't be worrying about the games exciting BS value until the expansions come out. Think about how much of the exciting stuff in sc1 existed before broodwar. Not nearly as much!
If blizzard fails to make sc2 more exciting with their new stuff in the expansions then we can totally complain. I don't think we should be complaining about this stuff until then.
On March 13 2011 23:22 IdrA wrote: not true at all that youll only get info on the current metagame some z's have been saying since the beta that immortal ht compositions are just as overpowered pvz as collosus builds, and theyre just now starting to see use and success
So I'm waiting for the next "Imbalanced!" episode :-D
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.
You can't say that; sure Zergs were having a hard time dealing with siege tanks and reaper rushes but you could also say that these styles were being figured out rapidly just before they got neutered. Point being that no-one ever got the chance or the inclinination to explore the game as it was, since whining and leaning back was a much more effective way of dealing with it. This is especially sad in light of Blizzard nerfing or blatantly removing spectacular units and abilities in favor of bland things like stimmed marine marauder kiting.
I'm not saying they shouldn't balance the game, I think they should keep their balance design completely indoors and not giving any indication of taking community balance whines into consideration. The fact that Dustin would actually mention in interviews that he finds 2 rax pressure "trash" enforces all the whiners in their whiny whiner ways. Buff Zerg instead of nerfing interesting units away, keep the game interesting to watch, keep the wow-factor, keep the magic of "how the fuck did he come back from that". Don't degrade Starcraft 2 into online checkers + Show Spoiler +
which has LAN I bet.
I don't care whether they hire Michael Bay to blow some stuff up, but the ones making or breaking the game are the audience, not the sponsors or players (unsportsmanlike as it may sound).
I think the game is really close to balanced, and it really didn't take that long at all when you think about it. Hasn't been out for a year yet. Blizzard are patching often yes, but it's not purely to patch balance, it's also to patch the GUI and also add / subtract maps from the pool. I'm happy with them to keep ADDING features, balance wise as well. I feel the more decent options you have as a race, the less chance of having exciting match ups like PvP (Should I 4 gate? He's gonna 4 gate. I better 4 gate.)
In my opinion, this is why Terran felt so incredibly overpowered early in SC2's life. All of their units felt useful, and every combination of unit was useful for something. Not gonna go on a balance rant, just wanted to say I trust in Blizzard and their process.
Took some time to glance through the previous thread before posting. I have to say that I agree with the OP on how Blizzard is going about achieving balance. Rather than going and completely removing particular elements, they should be either altering timings and/or shifting positions in the tech trees.
There was a post in the previous thread that discussed how Zergs suffered from early game pressure because lack of defensive capabilities. Rather than fixing that, Blizzard opted to gradually weed out early game attacks such as the 5 rax reaper and cannon rushes. But this effectively removes cheese that could used in other matches i.e. proxy rax in a TvP. For their focus on one particular elements, those changes have implications on other match ups that aren't considered because of the more pressing issue that people bitch about.
I actually caught the SanZenith vs SCfou series live and was impressed by San's usage of templars. I think that kind of play would encourage more management because of the threat of storms raining down on an army. We saw a lack of focus from SCfou in I believe game 2 and just letting his army sit in storms. Such threats would help to improve player ability because it would force players to have to be actively aware about the battle (and I don't seen why they couldn't since buildings can be bound to hotkeys now). But to remove KA would discourage (or eliminate in San's case) such gameplay and thus cause stagnation into singular strategy gameplay, in this case more Colossus heavy gameplay.
Part of it probably comes down to Blizzard's mentality to making the game "casual player friendly." If you can't play the game without knowing strategies (be it you don't want to be hardcore or don't have the ability to dedicate or whatever), you're not going to want to play cause you're just going to lose every time and that's a blatant dis-motivator to even playing at all. So it would make sense for Blizzard to "cop out" and just remove particularly strong strategies, again such as 5 rax reaper.
Things could be balanced through effort of adjusting values such as build times and other values like in the case of KA starting energy. But such balancing could potentially take months to figure out (I mean come on, how many tries would it take to figure that [hypothetically] it would take KA to add +18 start energy to make the game balanced?) Rather Blizzard wants quick fixes and the easiest manner is to go anything and everything that can break the game. I think Saechiis covers some decent topics so no need for me to go into them.
To say something is broken is pretty damn easy (Imba threads raging rampant on TL should make for clear examples). But to achieve balance through fine tuning rather than elimination is hard. Eliminating the elements that unbalance something are easy. Here's an analogy: you have a scale and one side is obviously heavier than the other. You're only allowed to add on weight or completely remove all the weight on both sides. Thus, you can either balance it by carefully adding on weight ever so carefully and making the most minute adjustments to balance the scale. Or you can just say "fuck this shit" and clear both sides of the scale. Both achieve the same result but it's more rewarding though more difficult to fine tune. To just clear it, I mean, what the hell? Do you just not care OR did you want to do it as fast as possible? The way Blizzard is going right now, they're just trying to go as fast as possible.
The issue though is how do we convince Blizzard to slow the hell down and try to balance the delicate scale that is Starcraft II? That, my fellow TLers, is beyond me to answer.
Very well written, and I honestly have to agree. Blizzard keeps taking things away from us, but they're not putting anything into the game to replace what they are taking away. I understand balance is essential but I think that even higher-tier players want variety and dynamic gameplay.
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"
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.
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.
Are you working for Blizzard or earning money for a SC2-linked activity? This is a serious question.
Because I've checked your post history and this is your third post about the exact same topic, asking for players to "stop talking and to wait". Who has interest to do that kind of thread again and again, seriously?
About the OP: I of course totally disagree, about almost everything. First because you can compare SC1 and SC2 gameplay/epicness but not SC1 and SC2 evolution. The context was not the same (economic, esport developpment/knowledge/community, numbers of casual/pro players, etc ...), at all.
If a new strategy is never found, it’s bad for spectators because less strategies = worse viewer experience. If a new strategy is found and then it may be overpowering because of earlier buffs, it becomes bad for the players and thus bad for the spectators. A new strategy is never found it's bad, a new strategy is found it's bad. Impressive, and now?
If there are more Terran pros, you're going to get more feedback that is Terran biased from the overall community. A simple numbers argument. No. If you ask 10 terrans pro for feedbacks, you'll probably hear the 2-3 same obvious things again and again. Same if you ask 100, 1000, 10000 terrans pro. Bad argument.
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.
@TL Admins: Trolls are doing such a great job on balance/imbalance threads production that we can't talk anymore about this subject. I don't remember which SC2 pro player was saying something like "this is just impossible to talk about imbalances because even if you're pro arguying about that, silver players comes and freely keep saying you're a newb who know nothing about the game, and you have to demonstrate obvious stuff on and on", it sums it up nicely.
So I propose to start a thread only open for pro players to comments/talk about balance/imbalance. Everyone would be of course allowed to read. The Artosis/Idra videos were a good start for that, but it looks dead right now, because of Idra going back to US, idk.
This and your previous thread have been centralized around this supposed issue. While you line of thinking is not "wrong" as such, it is not in line with what the design of the game is and you are looking at from the wrong perspective. KA is mechanic that stagnates, that causes over reliance on a mechanic (warpgates) instead of using a more varied array of styles and more interesting strategies than just warp-in -> storm.
KA is not being removed because it is not balanced (although it can be argued that it is unbalanced, that is not the issue here) who was complaining about it before this? What pros thought it was grievously imbalanced? I would wager there weren't very many who thought KA was the reason they find it difficult to beat Protoss. The KA change, and in fact the "Design" of the game is centred around being fun, entertaining and skilful. Warp-in storm is just a dumb mechanic, dumb as in stupid, not clever. There is no thought, no planing, no strategy, no tension, no skill factor. Where are the intrinsic unit tensions between Ghost and Templar if they are never on the field with enough energy to storm for more than 5 seconds? Where is the multipronged drop harass and skirmished based play if Drops and small attacks that take planning, time and resources to execute are stopped dead by instant warp in? Ling run-bys? The Muta harass? Infestor harass (although HT can still feedback on warp in)? All severely hindered by KA.
KA actually reduces the number of viable strategies and tactics that the game can offer, not the other way around. HT on the other hand do not need to have instant storm on warp in to be viable.
Another example of this similar effect of a nerf making more strategies viable not less. Bunker build time: What pro, or indeed who at all is complaining the bunker builds to fast? Quite a few pros have been quite vocal about being annoyed that blizzard is in their opinion wasting their time making tiny changes such as those to the bunker. The issue is not balance, it's more likely that bunker rushes can too easily end a game and result in that repetitive stagnation that you are keen to avoid. Bunker rushes are so good that they are pretty much always worth doing against zerg. Example July Vs Nada, Nada Bunker rushes every game.
Bunker rushes are not grievously imbalanced, but they are probably too easy and too effective for the cost/risk, making them almost mandatory, like getting siege mode for tanks, it's not overpowered it's just such a good upgrade that it is required if you want to use tanks. A similar parallel can be drawn with the bunker, but while siege mode increases strategic variety, fast, low risk bunkers reduce it by deciding games very quickly or by simply resulting in dull and repetitive strategy.
TLDR You are not wrong, but you are looking at the "issue" from the wrong perspective, even assuming there is an "issue" in the first place negatively colours your thoughts. Most changes are not directly related to the mythical creature "balance" but how the game actually plays.
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.
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.
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.
On March 13 2011 23:22 IdrA wrote: not true at all that youll only get info on the current metagame some z's have been saying since the beta that immortal ht compositions are just as overpowered pvz as collosus builds, and theyre just now starting to see use and success
. Let's address the easiest and least interesting to understand first: bias. This is fairly simple. Players are biased in favor for their own race.
I think most pros are actually biased towards playing a fair game, not tilting balance in their favor. Notice how many pros were terran during the beta and they still managed to nerf 5 rax reaper for example. Despite the QQ in the community and the way we like to bash a lot of pro gamer images, both the pro community and blizzard are looking for a balanced game that gives all players the proper chance of success. You can't just say because pros pick a race, they think their race should by virtue of being the race they like, win 90% of the time.
On March 13 2011 23:22 IdrA wrote: not true at all that youll only get info on the current metagame some z's have been saying since the beta that immortal ht compositions are just as overpowered pvz as collosus builds, and theyre just now starting to see use and success
Yeah, that game is of course proof that the composition is overpowered. It wasn't the zerg that totally screwed up and basically threw the game into huks face.
Even if immortal / ht compositions are "overpowered" , i fail to see why you should nerf this, and not instead buff the units / options of the other races.
I think no zerg would complain about ht / immortal if they get a good hydra, a fast, low cost, medium damage, 1 supply swarmy unit instead of the 2 supply expensive damage dealer.
I agree with some of the guys that said blizzard makes balance patches too often. They should leave people play a bit more before patching just like we did in BW. I mean people thought 5 hatch hydras were imba, but protoss players have found a way to deal with this build order.
The thing is the community act like it knew exactly what the game needs, what unit should be nerfed, etc, to make the game better.
But I think the obvious changes are not what can make the game the best. And in general, we see that the community seek changes that would make the game more reminescent of BW. (bring back lurkers, bring back goliath, bring back the mines, larger macro maps just like in BW, no destructible rocks).
So the community thinks that the game can be fixed by using strategies that were used successfully in the past. What if the game can get better by adding/fixing things that no one even tought about ? That only a experienced creative game designer could come up with ?
Of course that is always contreversial, usually the changes that no one tought about get heavily criticized and denied by the community. Take a look a the old patch notes, the most criticized changes are usually those which probably did the best to the game.
So my point is that we should stop pretending that the community knows better than Blizzard how the make this game good, because the community has many preconceived ideas about how SC2 should be.
Just because you play an individual race doesn't mean your feedback will be biased in favour of such a race. Do you not think feedback is obtained from more than one player playing one race? Do you not think it natural that a Terran player will voice concerns for Terran game play, and so on and so forth? There is no good reason to suspect bias in advice given; as I'm sure feedback is obtained from multiple players playing multiple races.
I agree that patches should be rolled out more slowly and carefully. Ignore the whining kids and be patient I say.
On March 14 2011 01:50 SecondChance wrote: Just because you play an individual race doesn't mean your feedback will be biased in favour of such a race. Do you not think feedback is obtained from more than one player playing one race? Do you not think it natural that a Terran player will voice concerns for Terran game play, and so on and so forth? There is no good reason to suspect bias in advice given; as I'm sure feedback is obtained from multiple players playing multiple races.
I agree that patches should be rolled out more slowly and carefully. Ignore the whining kids and be patient I say.
I hate your ID cause I play black ops in spare time. But this argument is quite on the point.
well my view of vortex. Taking a nice position preparing to destroy everything that comes out of the vortex, pretty awesome. Have archons move into the vortex and move along, and just see a 0.1 second long fight, pretty boring.
Trying to save your whole army in an vortex still is a death sentence, but now it looks more awesome and the opponent can't destroy your base while you are at 200 supply waiting to die to 5 archons. (but yet again this is another good sort out change, people that post they want a harder game and complain about this change = troll)
And yeah immortal ht is the way to go, in pvz ^^ but a good zerg would go old school so he can micro his hydras better and dodge storm. But they are used to roaches that don't have to dodge it, but with immortals they are one shot afterwards hehe.
about the biased pro thing, it can happen that the pro scene considers something imbalanced, and alot of people stop any effort into this direction (see the mass reaper thing or the thor drop on lt). I don't know if there was some effort put into contering it (as i don't think pros normaly try out new stuff in public), but on streams or tournaments, i rarely saw anything special against those strats.
But anyway before it was oh cool some new pro strat lets look for ways to beat it and spread the word, and now it is oh new cool strat lets wait till its nerfed.
PS: stop wanting to change my cute hydra it is so lovely the way it is ;(
On March 14 2011 01:50 SecondChance wrote: Just because you play an individual race doesn't mean your feedback will be biased in favour of such a race.
Do you not think it natural that a Terran player will voice concerns for Terran game play, and so on and so forth?
You refuted his point and then backed it up 2 lines later :|
I like your post but I find your choice of using SanZenith as an example to defend Khaydarin Amulet a bit odd. occasionally people would warp prism HTs in the late game and storm a mineral line, but you still had to get the prism in place, and then get it out in time. My point being, instant on demand defensive storms are exactly what they were trying to get rid of when they nerfed it, at least when I read the patch notes weeks before the aforementioned game it is what came to mind for me. in an offensive push the HT will have had to be warped in ahead of time and moved up into battle unless you have a hidden pylon or a prism, both of which are already your opponents mistake that should give you an advantage.
I still think almost every problem in SC2 can be traced back to bad decisions in the concept stage. "I have this cool idea for a new unit/mechanic! Let's throw it in the alpha/beta and tweak the numbers to make it balanced!" just doesn't make for a good foundation for a competitive game. Say hello to Colossus, Void Ray, Reaper, Sentry, the macro mechanics, and so forth.
The reason they have to remove things now, is because they've added a bunch of volatile units into the game for the "cool factor", and didn't foresee players taking advantage of their bad design.
This and your previous thread have been centralized around this supposed issue. While you line of thinking is not "wrong" as such, it is not in line with what the design of the game is and you are looking at from the wrong perspective. KA is mechanic that stagnates, that causes over reliance on a mechanic (warpgates) instead of using a more varied array of styles and more interesting strategies than just warp-in -> storm.
KA is not being removed because it is not balanced (although it can be argued that it is unbalanced, that is not the issue here) who was complaining about it before this? What pros thought it was grievously imbalanced? I would wager there weren't very many who thought KA was the reason they find it difficult to beat Protoss. The KA change, and in fact the "Design" of the game is centred around being fun, entertaining and skilful. Warp-in storm is just a dumb mechanic, dumb as in stupid, not clever. There is no thought, no planing, no strategy, no tension, no skill factor. Where are the intrinsic unit tensions between Ghost and Templar if they are never on the field with enough energy to storm for more than 5 seconds? Where is the multipronged drop harass and skirmished based play if Drops and small attacks that take planning, time and resources to execute are stopped dead by instant warp in? Ling run-bys? The Muta harass? Infestor harass (although HT can still feedback on warp in)? All severely hindered by KA.
KA actually reduces the number of viable strategies and tactics that the game can offer, not the other way around. HT on the other hand do not need to have instant storm on warp in to be viable.
Another example of this similar effect of a nerf making more strategies viable not less. Bunker build time: What pro, or indeed who at all is complaining the bunker builds to fast? Quite a few pros have been quite vocal about being annoyed that blizzard is in their opinion wasting their time making tiny changes such as those to the bunker. The issue is not balance, it's more likely that bunker rushes can too easily end a game and result in that repetitive stagnation that you are keen to avoid. Bunker rushes are so good that they are pretty much always worth doing against zerg. Example July Vs Nada, Nada Bunker rushes every game.
Bunker rushes are not grievously imbalanced, but they are probably too easy and too effective for the cost/risk, making them almost mandatory, like getting siege mode for tanks, it's not overpowered it's just such a good upgrade that it is required if you want to use tanks. A similar parallel can be drawn with the bunker, but while siege mode increases strategic variety, fast, low risk bunkers reduce it by deciding games very quickly or by simply resulting in dull and repetitive strategy.
TLDR You are not wrong, but you are looking at the "issue" from the wrong perspective, even assuming there is an "issue" in the first place negatively colours your thoughts. Most changes are not directly related to the mythical creature "balance" but how the game actually plays.
Absolutely disagree. At the very least, removing KA does limit Protoss gameplay. If this were BW Protoss, you'd be correct, but SC2 Protoss is such an unbalanced mess, that all this is going to accomplish is shoehorn everyone into Colossus play.
IF the KA removal had been accompanied by a Colossus nerf, and a bunch of buffs to other units, we would probably see some more innovative gameplay. Or even, merge the dark shrine back with templar archive while removing KA, that would be an interesting change.
I can sort of sympathize with the notion that HTs with KA were too good of an anti-harassment unit. And I would wholeheartedly support anything that made harassment better, if it had been relatively equally distributed among the different races. As of now, Terrans have a million different harassment options, most of them fairly easy to utilize; Zerg have some options, but they're either very situational (runbys), or a huge strategy-defining commitment (mutalisks); Protoss have DTs and Phoenix, both of which are expensive and situational.
I think the way blizzard makes changes is not allways right. more buffing underused units, less nerfing stuff (and taking out strategies) should be the way to go. this way you change the metagame because people start using buffed units and experiment with them... if they seem to become too strong with new tactics, you can still nerf but at least people start to explore the game, instead of being forced into a streamlined metagame. there are cases where you have too nerf though. all in all blizzard should slow down the balancing/patching process and complete the introduction of the larger maps (like the gsl ones) on ladder to get more data.
It`s true that pros have to find solution instead of waiting for changes, but at the same time, there is real issues concerning the balance of the game. Most of the army compositions have a solution. The void ray-collossus ball is not invincible, but it did appeared to be.
Even if there is a solution to every problem, it doesnt mean that, for example, the Collossus doesn`t need to be nerfed. Its not because of July`s style that render marines abit weak, that it doesnt mean marines needs to be nerfed.
Yes, Brood War isnt balanced per say, and it forced the players to find better solution, but right now, for example, there`s no sollution to Mechs or even the Bisu build. Blizzard isnt patching BW anymore, its interesting to note.
But i absolutly disagree that we shouldnt listen to pro, or even semi pro`s opinions. They make the shifts in the metagame. They know a little better.
Interesting read. Balancing a game like starcraft is tricky business because it's difficult to tell where to stop the game balancing and let map balancing/meta game take over. However, you neglected to mention that in bw, pvz shifted back to the zerg's favor when they started sniping hts with mutas (though i dont know what's the current state).
Hello. This is going to be a discussion on the design of Starcraft 2 as a game. Right now I believe Starcraft 2 is at a very important point right now. Starcraft is getting more attention than ever. People are so focused right now on balancing Starcraft, finding sponsors, bringing money into the game, etc. All this is extremely important, but I believe a equally important aspect of the game is being left behind. Something no one is talking about or seem to care about. I'm talking about design of the game.
Now I recognize this is a competitive game. People are going to be more concerned about balance. What do they care about design as long as everything is balanced? But you have to understand, the lifeblood of an e-sport aren't the competitive players. It's the people watching. It's the spectators. It's the casuals that might play a couple hours a week. While it is extremely important to keep the game balanced, it is even more important to keep the games exciting and fresh for the casual players, the watchers of the Starcraft tournaments. It is super important to keep the game varied for players of all levels.
I know relatively little about BW. I absolutely suck at BW multiplayer. However, out of curiosity I went to check out Day9's earlyer dailies about BW and it was really fun to look at. BW games are just really fun to watch even though I know little about the game.SC2 games are really quite boring to watch, I only watch them to learn from them. SC2 is a fun game, but it isn't quite e-sport material imo.
. Let's address the easiest and least interesting to understand first: bias. This is fairly simple. Players are biased in favor for their own race.
I think most pros are actually biased towards playing a fair game, not tilting balance in their favor. Notice how many pros were terran during the beta and they still managed to nerf 5 rax reaper for example. Despite the QQ in the community and the way we like to bash a lot of pro gamer images, both the pro community and blizzard are looking for a balanced game that gives all players the proper chance of success. You can't just say because pros pick a race, they think their race should by virtue of being the race they like, win 90% of the time.
The reason pros are biased isn't because they want their race to be stronger; it's because they understand their own race so much better than they understand the other races. No one is saying pros have bad intentions when suggesting their ideas.
I'm not saying all suggestions by pros are bad either. I think for the most part they are good. But obviously a pro isn't going to seriously suggest stuff for other races, because they just don't understand them as well.
It's not a matter of Blizzard balancing the game too often, it's that they are trying to balance the game by limiting the options you have, which makes the game very dull to play and watch.
Instead of saying what can we nerf to make the MU balanced, they should be saying what can we buff?
The huge ball mechanics of SC2 kind of kill a lot of it I think. It feels like, watching battles in BW, that fights were way more dynamic and exciting. You had far sicker micro it seems (omg rine splits against blings! vs. rotating rines against lurkers). Now a lot of the game is just big, tightly packed balls, that make melee suck and put so much of winning on AOE. The fighting just seems clunkier and more boring.
Besides that though, blizzard should be buffing, not nerfing. And they often take things to an extreme (when they first nerfed the roach, when reaper went bye, etc.). Also notice that zerg doesn't have any of the seemingly "overpowered" units; except maybe banelings en masse or through drops. Even then, you compare it to bio, HT, tanks, etc. the only thing zerg has is spammability/large numbers...which it should.
Meanwhile, they are overnerfing templar. If they instead it made it 63 energy for HT, they could add a huge tension aspect to the game. The audience sees a drop coming "Oh no!" Templar slowly warps in, slowly gathers energy. The drop makes it in, starts shooting stuff, the templar's energy slowly ticks up and up....till it hits 75. Instead, they chose instead of "oh herp derp warp in templar storm instantly" to say "herp derp drop warp in templar does absolutely nothing drop does huge damage".
Blizzard just sometimes has very questionable ideas on balance and design.
Mainly from a Terran perspective I think Pro input sucks because pretty much all Terrans are marine marauder fanatics and Terran is basically being balanced on how good MMM with occasional support handles in the late game.
A ton of my posts are about promoting Mech but I also don't want Mech only Terran I like variation and especially love watching bio vs Zerg but I think entertainment wise seeing a Metal Terran vs Terran or Terran vs Protoss just gets super exciting to me. But I also don't want MMM to die completely I just hate seeing it be more potent than Higher Teched Terran units.
You can't say that; sure Zergs were having a hard time dealing with siege tanks and reaper rushes but you could also say that these styles were being figured out rapidly just before they got neutered. Point being that no-one ever got the chance or the inclinination to explore the game as it was, since whining and leaning back was a much more effective way of dealing with it.
You could say that it was being figured out, but were you right? Are you certain that it would have been "figured out" at all?
See, it's easy to look at something like a 50-damage Marine and call that imbalanced. It's much harder to say that a 7-damage Marine instead of 6 would be imbalanced. Or a 5-damage one instead of 6.
Sure, people might come up with a way to deal with it. Then again, they might not. Or it might take years, during which time people will leave the game in droves due to the "obvious" imbalance. Or people might leave a race. Or whatever.
StarCraft 2 is a young game; unlike SC1, it's future is not ensured. Any appearance of imbalance, particularly in its early days, will be seen as a legitimate reason to drop the game like a bad habit. When SC2 gets a few years under its belt, then we can talk about letting the community "find a way" to deal with something. Until then, any appearance of imbalance must be rectified.
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.
I don't see the problem. It is the nature of the Zerg, even in SC1. If the enemy doesn't get air units, you won't see Scourge. There's a reason that Scourge and Corruptors come from the Spire, which gives the Zerg access to Mutalisks as well. Namely, Zerg are probably going to get Mutas, so give them some anti-air at the same time.
But I also don't want MMM to die completely I just hate seeing it be more potent than Higher Teched Terran units.
What you want is impossible. Because if MMM is not as good as "Higher Teched Terran units," then they will not be used.
The only reason M&M were used against Zerg in SC1 is because Zerg didn't have as good AoE as Protoss or Terrans. STs murdered M&M by the dozens, and a single Reaver could slaughter M&M with ease (not to mention Storm). Lurkers were effective against M&M, but not nearly as much as STs or Reavers. The M&M could at least shoot back before dying, though they needed detection to do so.
Personally, I'm tired of Terran Mech. I would have been happy to see the Siege Tank go away entirely, but Blizzard wouldn't do that. Seeing MMM work better than Mech in a lot of cases is a good thing to me.
It should be clear to anyone reading the interviews that Browder's team never set out with a specific design philosophy. SC1 was successful because they intended to build a balanced game. Browder is trying to do this after the fact. He has mismanaged the biggest release in Blizz history. SC2 needs a complete overhaul, including repairing the ball mechanics and addressing the cool but useless units. The best thing they could do is fire Browder and bring someone in who actually understands game theory.
SC2 is hella boring right now. They should make more things viable instead of remove options for each race. Its sad how overpowered some units are on a cost/value basis and how that combined with a lot of techs being so slow in relation to other things makes entire unit compositions or a lot of more aggressive possibilities totally irrelevant in competitive play.
On March 14 2011 03:41 BanelingXD wrote: It should be clear to anyone reading the interviews that Browder's team never set out with a specific design philosophy. SC1 was successful because they intended to build a balanced game. Browder is trying to do this after the fact. He has mismanaged the biggest release in Blizz history. SC2 needs a complete overhaul, including repairing the ball mechanics and addressing the cool but useless units. The best thing they could do is fire Browder and bring someone in who actually understands game theory.
SC2 design philosophy is implied by the success of SC1. Their goal was to create a similar experience, but improve upon many of the shortcomings of the original game. They've done that. SC2 is an awesome game, and imo, overall better than SC1. Obviously thats my personal point of view, but I think overall blizz has done a great job... created a good game... and I agree with the OP that Blizzard should be a little more patient with the changes.
On March 14 2011 03:41 BanelingXD wrote: It should be clear to anyone reading the interviews that Browder's team never set out with a specific design philosophy. SC1 was successful because they intended to build a balanced game. Browder is trying to do this after the fact. He has mismanaged the biggest release in Blizz history. SC2 needs a complete overhaul, including repairing the ball mechanics and addressing the cool but useless units. The best thing they could do is fire Browder and bring someone in who actually understands game theory.
Browder did a better job than you or anyone that slanders him could even dream of doing. Being head of the biggest release in RTS history comes with its challenges and he handled them better than anyone could have. As for the balance of the game, things seem pretty good to me, not perfect, but taking the GSL into account, the games we see there are enjoyable and the currently the most mechanically sound players are winning. You can't ask for much more than that.
The only problem is that they allowed ball mechanics because of the unit abilities involved. In SC1 ball mechanics were gone because a good dark swarm means you can run right in and destroy it, a reaver scarab could kill 20000 units, and tanks just killed everything. In SC2 they nerfed the tanks, put collosi/templar in instead, and gave no anti-ball to Zerg (except maybe BLs). Well, now late game TvP is kinda going in the same direction, but there is no reason not to just ball up vs Zerg because there is no way for them to have an advantage from you doing so.
As someone who played at the highest levels in Age of Empires III I can attest that instant use abilities/building units will ruin the game as it did in AoE III. I am glad they got rid of KA not because it isn't balanced (I believe it to be balanced), but because the mechanic takes no thought and allows you to defend positions without any thought. It essentially takes a lot of skill out of the game.
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...
Really? What do you have to back this claim? I haven't even seen a single lick of QQ about immortal Templar being overpowered till now. When the Roach change happened, Immortal Templar was THE build to go and no one even complained, but all of a sudden it is "impenetrable"? Aside from Idra saying it is just as good as Colossus builds, I have never seen anyone else even suggest that it is even remotely overpowered...
good players know what works for them, what seems to be both easy and difficult to deal with. there are plenty of players of all races.
you only get data that affects the current metagame... As good as pros are, they arent good enough to predict all the specific strategies that appear in the future.
okay, no one can predict the future though? if anyone will be able to predict that unconventional unit compositions are actually overpowered it's going to be professional players who spend 8 hr/day trying to push the game to its limits. the only consequence of this observation is that changes should be done cautiously, which, as you note, has been the case.
dynamic blah blah blah competitive community sux
and here people were complaining blizzard was catering to the casuals too much...
On March 14 2011 03:50 Jayrod wrote: SC2 design philosophy is implied by the success of SC1. Their goal was to create a similar experience, but improve upon many of the shortcomings of the original game. They've done that. SC2 is an awesome game, and imo, overall better than SC1. Obviously thats my personal point of view, but I think overall blizz has done a great job... created a good game... and I agree with the OP that Blizzard should be a little more patient with the changes.
Thing is, the game doesn't feel very similar to BW, to me at least. It's difficult to say if it's better or worse, but it's certainly different. Race design has shifted dramatically - the SC2 Terran is more like the BW Protoss, and SC2 Protoss is a little bit like BW Terran, but it's not a pronounced similarity. SC2 Zerg is a lot different than any of the BW races.
Sometimes I have the feeling that it's the community that's sort of remodelling SC2 into being more like BW, with all the calls for macro maps, disdain for 1 base aggression, and so forth. Because if you look at SC2 mechanics as a whole, it certainly feels like 1 base all-ins is something they wanted to have a lot of.
Blizzard try to fix the balance the wrong way in my opinion. What all theses stats showed me is that the game is unstable. It's more about "how to survive this timings so that i crush my opponent in this timing" rather than a strategy game, and that's why every pro think their race is weak, because they all face timing attack that hardcounter their strategies once in a while and get crushed like noobies.
On March 14 2011 03:41 BanelingXD wrote: It should be clear to anyone reading the interviews that Browder's team never set out with a specific design philosophy. SC1 was successful because they intended to build a balanced game. Browder is trying to do this after the fact. He has mismanaged the biggest release in Blizz history. SC2 needs a complete overhaul, including repairing the ball mechanics and addressing the cool but useless units. The best thing they could do is fire Browder and bring someone in who actually understands game theory.
Agree with most of what you said, but firing Browder won't change anything imo, I think it's more about Blizzard global commercial policy. There's a lot of conflicts between making a game interesting, and making the most benefits from a game.
That's why not so many people really play chess while it's the best strategy game ever "made".
On March 14 2011 03:41 BanelingXD wrote: It should be clear to anyone reading the interviews that Browder's team never set out with a specific design philosophy. SC1 was successful because they intended to build a balanced game. Browder is trying to do this after the fact. He has mismanaged the biggest release in Blizz history. SC2 needs a complete overhaul, including repairing the ball mechanics and addressing the cool but useless units. The best thing they could do is fire Browder and bring someone in who actually understands game theory.
lol, SC1 didn't have any design philosophy either except make the three races as distinct as possible. Blizzard didn't want to make "WarCraft in Space." I still have the '97 PCGamer where StarCraft was revealed. RTS balance wasn't even on the radar because no one knew what that term actually meant. Before Bnet, most people just played with their own group of (real-life) friends or on fairly small servers like Kali. Bnet was the first system with mass appeal for online gaming. Bnet was what allowed people to actually play thousands of other people readily and without hassle.
Remember, SC/BW being an esport is basically 100% fluke. Blizzard never had the intention of making SC/BW an esport; the entire concept of esport didn't even exist. It's all just a happy coincidence that BW made it big. It's even more of a fluke that SC/BW was balanced. Blizzard didn't have any intention of doing so; they wanted a fun game that appealed to people. Half of the balance comes from engine bugs/tricks/flaws that were never intended to work in that manner.
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.
Agree wholeheartedly with this: the issue is that the corruptors are next to useless when the colossi die, whereas the vikings can at least do something even if it's not that strong (it shouldn't be, they aren't made for that).
I think that if corruption became a small AoE spell which had much less effect, we wouldn't have the trouble with the corruptor vs hydroach balance because if you made too many corruptors they wouldn't be flying wastes of supply.
Also, I don't think that phoenixes fall in the same category as corruptors and vikings: phoenixes, mutalisks and banshees are more harassment-oriented while void rays, corruptors and vikings are your more beefy air force which you use in your standing army. Obviously, overmaking void rays still helps against the ground army because void rays shoot down ^^.
Now don't get me wrong, pros know the game better than anyone else. If I wanted to change a game with the intent of pure balance, I would do nothing but listen to the pro community. But this brings up several issues. Let's address the easiest and least interesting to understand first: bias. This is fairly simple. Players are biased in favor for their own race. The more of a certain race among the pros, the more biased feedback and analysis comes from the competitive community. If there are more Terran pros, you're going to get more feedback that is Terran biased from the overall community. A simple numbers argument.
I don't know about you but whenever I read or hear an interview or just any comment about balance from a pro, it is usually completely unbiased. Players like Jinro openly stating that they realize terran needs a little nerf, the toss players saying end game toss vs zerg is EXTREMLY hard to beat, as a zerg.
On March 14 2011 03:41 BanelingXD wrote: It should be clear to anyone reading the interviews that Browder's team never set out with a specific design philosophy. SC1 was successful because they intended to build a balanced game. Browder is trying to do this after the fact. He has mismanaged the biggest release in Blizz history. SC2 needs a complete overhaul, including repairing the ball mechanics and addressing the cool but useless units. The best thing they could do is fire Browder and bring someone in who actually understands game theory.
This is wrong on so many accounts.
-All the interviews with Browder actually show a really tight design philosophy. I'm not sure where you're getting this from at all. You may disagree with his design philosophy, but it's certainly there. -That is not why SC1 was successful. That may be one reason, but it is FAR from the best reason. -Trying to balance after what fact? What are you talking about? Do people expect that the game should have been balanced before the first expansion? None of the Blizzard games have ever been like that. Look at the ridiculously massive changes that happened with The Frozen Throne. -Game Theory. *facepalm* What does this have to do with game theory? Do you know what game theory is? Because it's more about financial strategy and economics than it is about designing a game. I'm just going to assume you meant game design.
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.
Dark swarm push - Pioneered largely by Savior ~2005 Spawn broodling on tanks (and ultras at hive tech ZvZ lol) - Only popped up within last couple years Clutch storms/plague - Can still happen in SC2 Irradiate erasers - Looks cool, but isn't hard to do at all Scourge cloning - Only cool because it's "difficult", not visually impressive Yamato cloning - Only cool because it's "difficult", not visually impressive Mine drags. - Def. cool, wish there were mines in SC2 Marine v lurker micro (sooooooo much more entertaining than "micro" vs banelings) - Really only started becoming common after Oov's dominance
Most of the stuff you listed only popped up like almost a decade into the game, so I'd just give it some time, and hope the expansions add some cool units/abilities.
I'd say reapers are the pinnacle of horrible design. It was seeing good use by morrow, then bam! Blizzard completely rapes the reaper to death with the following nerfs: Supply b4 rax +5 build time Reaper speed requires factory Roach +1 range (a buff but effectually nerfed the reaper)
Why would you need a factory to get reaper speed? Especially when the hellion is so much better for harassing anyways since it builds and moves so much faster, and is cheaper too? Any one of those nerfs would suffice, but all of them? This is like the mothership: see archon vortex, have it killed.
Instead of adapting, players are crying. This crying->nerfs, narrowing the game down to bioball vs colossi ball every game. Instead of trying to feedback motherships, instead of engaging reapers on creep, just nerf 'em to hell, that works too. I guess this goes with blizzard's goal to simplify the game. After all, a hacker with 60 apm can beat pros with 300+ apm in SC2 (see iGware thread). Wouldn't happen in BW, as hackers would get out-multitasked to death.
Then again, why bother with balance when there are expansions coming out with units that will surely break the game? Starcraft vanilla wasn't balanced for sure, then came BW, then more patches, then balance.
I hate to say it, but I think SC2 is artificially competitive.
On March 13 2011 23:03 Saechiis wrote: Good read, I think Blizzard is taking this mythical view of balance way too far. Balance isn't a case of "and God saw that it was good", it's an equilibrium that develops over time. With the fast rate at which Blizzard is patching the game, we never get to settle on certain standards. They're continuously stirring up the water and wondering why it won't smooth down.
Broodwar wasn't balanced, even back then you had Artosis and Idra complaining about imbalance, they just played Terran back then and Protoss was the disgustingly OP race. In fact, I'd say that units and abilites were far more "overpowered" in Starcraft 1.
Tanks did disgusting amounts of damage, Vultures were cheap, fast, 2 shotted workers and could be upgraded to lay invisible mines that could, on their own, blow up entire armies. Carriers could be microed to victory from a practically lost position, Reavers were basically mineshooting caterpillars that would be happily dropped around the map by shuttles and capable of blowing up entire mineral lines at once, High templar were storming shit up too and morphed Archons were actually damn good. Defilers with Dark Swarm, ranged damage? Nope. Mutalisks that are as mobile as now, but are extremely microable and can actually engage armies one on one, yep.
Part of the charm of BW is that it's balanced on imbalances; instead of complaining about other races' overpowered stuff, players just went to the extreme to (ab)use their own overpowered units. If Blizzard took out Reavers, mines, neutered siege tanks, neutered mutalisks, removed Dark Swarm, removed Plague, neutered Carriers ... so it would all be a tame "fair" game, TeamLiquid might not even have existed until this day because no-one would give a shit about watching that game.
Right now Blizzard is busy taking away all units and abilities that could be construed as "OP", but although the game might become more "fair" that won't matter when no-one is interested watching it anymore.
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 kiting stuff, it's disgusting!
"Now let's have coffee and discuss the bunker build time!"
"I'm still kinda on the fence about it Dustin, we can't make changes like these on a whim"
"Agreed, agreed ... what do you think David?"
"Hmmm what? ... I mean, o yeah, Terran definitely seems to be having trouble holding off early pressure builds these days. Btw, do you want one of these choclates SlayerSBoxer had delivered to my house? They're exquisite!"
"Don't mind if I do"
"Yeah, Terran definitely FEELS a little weak lately"
You basically laid out what I think is wrong with SC2 the most. I agree completely with this. Almost all the awesome units you described in BW are the high-skill, high-micro type of units that players have to take good care to use.
Terran:
Players can't A-move siege tanks. They have to be positioned and sieged up properly. Siege tanks were nerfed in SC2.
Players can't A-move spider mines. They have to be planted individually and each vulture only gets 3. Proper placement of mines could obliterate the opposing army. Improper placement of mines could let your opponent drag your mines to your units and kill them instead. This ability was removed in SC2.
Players can't A-move science vessels. They have to cast the spells manually. This unit was replaced by the raven, which has much weaker spells and is only really built as a detector in most pro games.
To compensate for the nerfs, Blizzard buffed the hitpoints and attack speed of marines, the most vanilla and easiest unit to use in the entire Terran arsenal. And they added marauders, a brainless A-move unit.
Zerg:
Players can't A-move lurkers. They are vulnerable when not burrowed and can only attack when burrowed. This unit was removed in SC2.
Players can't A-move defilers. They have to cast the spells manually. This unit was replaced by the infestor, a unit with much, much weaker spells. So much weaker that the unit is barely used.
Blizzard instead added the roach, which is an A-move unit. Sure, players can move them while burrowed to create ambushes but let's not kid ourselves. Roaches don't require close to the micro that lurkers needed and isn't as potent when used properly.
Protoss:
Players can't A-move high templars. They have to cast the spells manually. That's why psionic storm's damage has been nerfed.
Players can't A-move reavers. They are too slow. They have to be moved by a shuttle almost all the time. This unit was essentially replaced by the colossus, a unit that is not as powerful but can be mindlessly A-moved with a player's deathball. The colossus also essentially replaces the high templar, because more micro-intensive units can't be better than simple A-move units in SC2.
Players can't A-move arbiters. They have to cast the spells manually. This unit was replaced by the mothership, a really slow unit that players can only have one of at any given time, thus almost completely defeating the point of having the recall ability. At least the cloaking field is still as potent, since you should have all your units in one single deathball in SC2 anyway. Splitting some units off from your main army to form small harassing squads is so last millennium.
I'm really hoping that every unit they add in Heart of the Swarm is a devastating unit that needs to be planted, positioned carefully, completely babysat, could wreck your own army if not carefully used, relatively immobile or have some other drawback. But those unit could be insanely cost effective in the right hands. SC2 is severely missing those type of units.
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.
Dark swarm push - Pioneered largely by Savior ~2005 Spawn broodling on tanks (and ultras at hive tech ZvZ lol) - Only popped up within last couple years Clutch storms/plague - Can still happen in SC2 Irradiate erasers - Looks cool, but isn't hard to do at all Scourge cloning - Only cool because it's "difficult", not visually impressive Yamato cloning - Only cool because it's "difficult", not visually impressive Mine drags. - Def. cool, wish there were mines in SC2 Marine v lurker micro (sooooooo much more entertaining than "micro" vs banelings) - Really only started becoming common after Oov's dominance
Most of the stuff you listed only popped up like almost a decade into the game, so I'd just give it some time, and hope the expansions add some cool units/abilities.
Yeah, SC without BW was not that cool if you think about it. Lurker/dt/corsair/medic gave a whole different feeling to the game. WC3 was the same: without TFT units, the game was very one dimensional. SC2 needs the heart of the swarm.
It's just a very hard task for blizzard to create an esports game from the getgo. SC1 and BW had years to develop, so that real opness could be patched and strategies could be established. There was no esports scene, so real balance wasn't so immediately necessary.
Now Blizzard needs it to be balanced, at the same time it should have dynamic and interesting units. This is very difficult to do, and the fact that bugs were part of BW's balance was only another issue. The inability to have time to develop counter-strategies because balance is needed only adds to the problems.
Trying to replicate the Brood War success is just so hard, I'm not sure quite how they can achieve it.
Firstly, kudos on starting a thread on balance that has some intellectual (albeit theoretical) substance to it.
But I would perhaps like to press you on one of the points you made concerning bias stemming from consulting the pros. Do you have any evidence to show that the level of input blizzard receives is actually linked to the race representation percentages of the pros? It seems like this would be a classic case of a self-selection problem: the input they would receive would be linked to those who are most vocal, and it's not immediately clear that the most vocal subset of pros would have a clear link to the overall race breakdown.
I agree a lot with what you said.. It's a shame that it's in the current state we have.
You know, I've been playing protoss since the very very early days of SC1. In SC2, its pretty much impossible to lose if you keep your observers alive. May sound really arrogant to say it like that, but I know how OP my race currently is. 1gate robo >obs every matchup here, I barely lose. The only time I lose is if its PvT and he pops my early observer... It's as simple as that. Protoss is currently way overpowered late game especially.
I have been playing a lot of zerg recently because I find it more fun. I also get rage when I see how truly impossible it is to beat someone going colossi voidray.
My Counter argument to this would be, that the meta-game is going to stay similar to how it is now because this is starcraft 2. People were playing Starcraft 1 for 10 years. yes it took them a while to figure it out (mainly because eSports was up and coming). But now we have those players / coaches / and more who dedicate 6 - 12 hours a day figuring out / playing this game. The game is for the most part figured out. Compared to Starcraft 1 when it was in this stage it was about 10% figured out. Starcraft 2 is probably close to 90% figured out. And even if its not, if something like Muta stacking comes up or something that Blizzard did not intend on then they will patch it.
Blizzard has 2 more expansions coming out about a year apart. So its important to Blizzard that every pro stays happy with the current balance. Instead of just waiting it out. Money is on the line and a majority of the pros agreed that 1- Zerg is the weakest race 2- That warping in a storm gave protoss too much of a advantage (GSL Stats and BNET 2.0 Stats proved that much) Especially on bigger maps when you can get stormed a bunch from just walking from your base to theirs. I would also like to point out the fact that SC could not look away for a SECOND to macro up or multi task even after EMP'ing.
Now I would be fine with letting the Meta - Game sort itself out balance wise after the 2 expansions but we have new units that will come up and change up the meta - game anyway. So i actually agree to blizzards approach of balancing the game ASAP and at least doing testing like they do now.
I don't understand a good chunk of the OP's point. You claim that Blizzard's balancing technique will result in a metagame stagnation, I think, but also acknowledge they've greatly altered the way several matchups are played. It's resulted in a very dynamic metagame! Why is an "artificial" shift any worse than an "organic" one?
Moreover, this:
"Tanks did disgusting amounts of damage, Vultures were cheap, fast, 2 shotted workers and could be upgraded to lay invisible mines that could, on their own, blow up entire armies. Carriers could be microed to victory from a practically lost position, Reavers were basically mineshooting caterpillars that would be happily dropped around the map by shuttles and capable of blowing up entire mineral lines at once, High templar were storming shit up too and morphed Archons were actually damn good. Defilers with Dark Swarm, ranged damage? Nope. Mutalisks that are as mobile as now, but are extremely microable and can actually engage armies one on one, yep."
is overly nostalgic and highly subjective at best. Tanks are still a spectacular unit in every matchup but TvP, where they're seeing more play as time goes on due to their great splash damage. Hellions are fast, cheap, 4 shot workers and can be upgraded to do double damage. Reavers were the dumbest units and had to go in my opinion, not because of any qualities but because their behavior was not reliable or controlled by players. Can you imagine them with upgraded AI in the new engine? No doubt they would have been neutered.
HT still storm stuff up and now have an actually useful second ability. Archons were pretty bad in BW except vs. Z as far as I can recall, maybe in PvP, because their shields took full damage from everything. The change in damage calculation necessitated some form of weakening. And mutalisks never engaged one on one until a deathball formed, just like in SC2. And defilers? I think new fungal (balanced based on player feedback, my god!) will be the new swarm and necessary for late game ZvT. And it will have fantastic spectator value.
On March 14 2011 01:06 Dominator1370 wrote: 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.
This sums the issue up perfectly, in my opinion, anyway.
Obviously there are significant problems sourcing any form of data; especially balance data; from one singular avenue.. In your first paragraph you say
It is fairly common knowledge that Blizzard takes input from the community, ladder results, in-house testing, and feedback from the competitive player’s community. They also analyze games and replays from the competitive community.
So there is an issue with ONLY using professional player's feedback when balancing the game.. Yet you concede that they use community input, ladder results and in-house testing in conjunction with competitive player's feedback. So essentially there is no problem because they are not relying solely on competitive player's feedback?
You make a fair point that professional players compete in the "now" so that any shift in the game is hard to come by; but i don't really see the point if they aren't only relying on this feedback?
Unless i am missing something hehe i did just wake up?
On March 14 2011 00:31 karpo wrote: 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.
Sjow did it against Socke in IEM on Delta Quadrant, he had a bunch of vikings and his army was dead, so he landed his vikings and kept reinforcing with only vikings from 2x reactor starports straight from his base to Sockes until Socke GG'd.
That was sick to see.
On March 14 2011 03:41 BanelingXD wrote: It should be clear to anyone reading the interviews that Browder's team never set out with a specific design philosophy. SC1 was successful because they intended to build a balanced game. Browder is trying to do this after the fact. He has mismanaged the biggest release in Blizz history. SC2 needs a complete overhaul, including repairing the ball mechanics and addressing the cool but useless units. The best thing they could do is fire Browder and bring someone in who actually understands game theory.
What a trash post. Stating that SC2 needs a complete overhaul. Cute.
On March 14 2011 04:04 rackdude wrote:, but there is no reason not to just ball up vs Zerg because there is no way for them to have an advantage from you doing so.
I like your post and I think that your point is completely valid. I think that sometimes people are too eager to patch the game to success, especially since the two expansions will throw in some completely new elements to game-play. If there were zero balance patches until the next expansion was published I think we would see many natural balance shifts among the races.
On March 14 2011 00:30 Kazang wrote: Removing KA does not remove gameplay.
This and your previous thread have been centralized around this supposed issue. While you line of thinking is not "wrong" as such, it is not in line with what the design of the game is and you are looking at from the wrong perspective. KA is mechanic that stagnates, that causes over reliance on a mechanic (warpgates) instead of using a more varied array of styles and more interesting strategies than just warp-in -> storm.
KA is not being removed because it is not balanced (although it can be argued that it is unbalanced, that is not the issue here) who was complaining about it before this? What pros thought it was grievously imbalanced? I would wager there weren't very many who thought KA was the reason they find it difficult to beat Protoss. The KA change, and in fact the "Design" of the game is centred around being fun, entertaining and skilful. Warp-in storm is just a dumb mechanic, dumb as in stupid, not clever. There is no thought, no planing, no strategy, no tension, no skill factor. Where are the intrinsic unit tensions between Ghost and Templar if they are never on the field with enough energy to storm for more than 5 seconds? Where is the multipronged drop harass and skirmished based play if Drops and small attacks that take planning, time and resources to execute are stopped dead by instant warp in? Ling run-bys? The Muta harass? Infestor harass (although HT can still feedback on warp in)? All severely hindered by KA.
KA actually reduces the number of viable strategies and tactics that the game can offer, not the other way around. HT on the other hand do not need to have instant storm on warp in to be viable.
Another example of this similar effect of a nerf making more strategies viable not less. Bunker build time: What pro, or indeed who at all is complaining the bunker builds to fast? Quite a few pros have been quite vocal about being annoyed that blizzard is in their opinion wasting their time making tiny changes such as those to the bunker. The issue is not balance, it's more likely that bunker rushes can too easily end a game and result in that repetitive stagnation that you are keen to avoid. Bunker rushes are so good that they are pretty much always worth doing against zerg. Example July Vs Nada, Nada Bunker rushes every game.
Bunker rushes are not grievously imbalanced, but they are probably too easy and too effective for the cost/risk, making them almost mandatory, like getting siege mode for tanks, it's not overpowered it's just such a good upgrade that it is required if you want to use tanks. A similar parallel can be drawn with the bunker, but while siege mode increases strategic variety, fast, low risk bunkers reduce it by deciding games very quickly or by simply resulting in dull and repetitive strategy.
TLDR You are not wrong, but you are looking at the "issue" from the wrong perspective, even assuming there is an "issue" in the first place negatively colours your thoughts. Most changes are not directly related to the mythical creature "balance" but how the game actually plays.
wise words. I have a feeling that you actually work for blizzard, lol.
On March 14 2011 07:12 BetterFasterStronger wrote: Good read, and Valid Point.
My Counter argument to this would be, that the meta-game is going to stay similar to how it is now because this is starcraft 2. People were playing Starcraft 1 for 10 years. yes it took them a while to figure it out (mainly because eSports was up and coming). But now we have those players / coaches / and more who dedicate 6 - 12 hours a day figuring out / playing this game. The game is for the most part figured out. Compared to Starcraft 1 when it was in this stage it was about 10% figured out. Starcraft 2 is probably close to 90% figured out. And even if its not, if something like Muta stacking comes up or something that Blizzard did not intend on then they will patch it.
Blizzard has 2 more expansions coming out about a year apart. So its important to Blizzard that every pro stays happy with the current balance. Instead of just waiting it out. Money is on the line and a majority of the pros agreed that 1- Zerg is the weakest race 2- That warping in a storm gave protoss too much of a advantage (GSL Stats and BNET 2.0 Stats proved that much) Especially on bigger maps when you can get stormed a bunch from just walking from your base to theirs. I would also like to point out the fact that SC could not look away for a SECOND to macro up or multi task even after EMP'ing.
Now I would be fine with letting the Meta - Game sort itself out balance wise after the 2 expansions but we have new units that will come up and change up the meta - game anyway. So i actually agree to blizzards approach of balancing the game ASAP and at least doing testing like they do now.
You're making a lot of assumptions there, namely that SC2 is indeed figured out, and that Blizzard would patch anything unexpected that appears. (Muta magic boxing for instance hasn't gotten fixed, whereas Thor aoe was intended to combat the Mutas, clearly not intended).
On March 14 2011 07:12 BetterFasterStronger wrote: Good read, and Valid Point.
My Counter argument to this would be, that the meta-game is going to stay similar to how it is now because this is starcraft 2. People were playing Starcraft 1 for 10 years. yes it took them a while to figure it out (mainly because eSports was up and coming). But now we have those players / coaches / and more who dedicate 6 - 12 hours a day figuring out / playing this game. The game is for the most part figured out. Compared to Starcraft 1 when it was in this stage it was about 10% figured out. Starcraft 2 is probably close to 90% figured out. And even if its not, if something like Muta stacking comes up or something that Blizzard did not intend on then they will patch it.
Blizzard has 2 more expansions coming out about a year apart. So its important to Blizzard that every pro stays happy with the current balance. Instead of just waiting it out. Money is on the line and a majority of the pros agreed that 1- Zerg is the weakest race 2- That warping in a storm gave protoss too much of a advantage (GSL Stats and BNET 2.0 Stats proved that much) Especially on bigger maps when you can get stormed a bunch from just walking from your base to theirs. I would also like to point out the fact that SC could not look away for a SECOND to macro up or multi task even after EMP'ing.
Now I would be fine with letting the Meta - Game sort itself out balance wise after the 2 expansions but we have new units that will come up and change up the meta - game anyway. So i actually agree to blizzards approach of balancing the game ASAP and at least doing testing like they do now.
You're making a lot of assumptions there, namely that SC2 is indeed figured out, and that Blizzard would patch anything unexpected that appears. (Muta magic boxing for instance hasn't gotten fixed, whereas Thor aoe was intended to combat the Mutas, clearly not intended).
True, and also i believe that they were planning to nerf thors splash to mutas before the magic boxing came out. So figuring that out changed ZvT lotz (kind of shoots my opinion even more in the foot)
But i still think that blizzard should keep balancing the game as they are now until the expansions come out. waiting for the meta game to shift can take anywhere from a day to a year and you might as well just keep the game balanced for entertainment value simply because the meta game is guaranteed to change after a expansion.
Supply b4 rax +5 build time Reaper speed requires factory Roach +1 range (a buff but effectually nerfed the reaper)
Why would you need a factory to get reaper speed? Especially when the hellion is so much better for harassing anyways since it builds and moves so much faster, and is cheaper too? Any one of those nerfs would suffice, but all of them? This is like the mothership: see archon vortex, have it killed.
I completely disagree. +5 build time wasn't that big a deal. Supply depot before rax imo was a general nerf to terran because everything was coming out too fast, and there wasn't any downside to 10raxing every game (faster MULEs after all). If we took those two then the ridiculous 5rax reaper crap would still be containing zergs all friggin' day.
While its true that hellions do seem generally better. Reapers do have cliffjumping and building-destroying at their side. Personally I think the real reason that reapers aren't used is because terran has no reason to experiment just because they're doing so well. Nothing is giving them any issues with MMM and Marine/Tank, so why change what you're doing?
This is an excellent post. I also feel we are seeing changes so fast that the meta game doesn't really have a chance to develop and change. I want to see these strats play out and then see what counters fall out of the game. If we keep calling everything OP and nurfing everything, we might as well be playing Warcraft 1 where every unit is identical.
On March 14 2011 01:50 SecondChance wrote: Just because you play an individual race doesn't mean your feedback will be biased in favour of such a race.
Do you not think it natural that a Terran player will voice concerns for Terran game play, and so on and so forth?
You refuted his point and then backed it up 2 lines later :|
The point I was trying to make was:
1. You shouldn't be concerned with a Terran player giving feedback from a Terran perspective.
2. You shouldn't assume that a Terran player's feedback will be unfairly biased towards his race.
It wasn't backtracking, I was trying to make a distinction between the two. How does x player giving feedback for x race imply that it will be unfairly biased towards x race?
(i.e, How does point 2 contradict point 1 in your view?)
On March 14 2011 08:53 Sanguinarius wrote: This is an excellent post. I also feel we are seeing changes so fast that the meta game doesn't really have a chance to develop and change. I want to see these strats play out and then see what counters fall out of the game. If we keep calling everything OP and nurfing everything, we might as well be playing Warcraft 1 where every unit is identical.
I don't think the problem is that the meta game has not the time to develop so much as it will not develop. It maybe just me, but I get the vibe that the general community has never moved beyond the Beta mentality. So long as the game is not widely beloved by upper tier old school legends, the fault is squarely on the Blizzard's shoulders. So its up to them to complain the loudest to get favorable patch results, rather then do the best with what they got.
This is not say some tweaking is needed, but I think one of the biggest Tweaks SC2 needs is in the mentalities of 90% of the playing community. If you lose a lot to something, make a note of it sure, but spending more time creating work arounds. I get the feeling though, that if a pro comments on balance, it trickles down to the average player and legitimizes mechanical complaints rather then blaming your own self for being bad.
Notice if a pro comments, it is usually after many many hours of grinding out games against top players, and it is usually a comment on a specific timing window that is being heavily abused in some fashion, where unit compositions and economic management align to create an extremely unfavorable and "imbalanced" situation. They may be able to beat it, but the resulting positions are compromised to such a degree that a similar high level opponent could easily exploit the vulnerability and earn a "cheap" win.
Contrast this to the majority of balance complaints that flatly call a whole unit imbalanced, or worse, and entire race. It is clearly more or less players venting frustration at their own faults, but the act of blaming it on Blizzard rather then the player is far too legitimized in the eyes of the community to allow for a stable meta game to develop. At least on the broad scale of things.
To the above poster I'd just comment that even if units were :useless" in BW they all had a role. the same cant be said about SC2. What is the purpose of the reaper? To explot badly designed Blizzard terrain and look cool. What a waste! The Mothership? The carrier? Sensor towers? Ridiculous deathball pathing? They serve no purpose. This is bad design and that falls squarely on the developers who followed the flawed philosophy of a designer of bad games. And ultimately the blame lay with Blizz who I suspect is just milking SC2 for a giant name-based money grab.
On March 13 2011 23:22 IdrA wrote: not true at all that youll only get info on the current metagame some z's have been saying since the beta that immortal ht compositions are just as overpowered pvz as collosus builds, and theyre just now starting to see use and success
blizzard gets 2 things from the competitive community, feedback and replays. if the standard metagame are collosus builds, for sure you're going to get more info on the standard builds than immortal/ht. as you said, only some zergs comment on immortal/ht, but every zerg will comment on collosus.
zerg issues with collosus are one of the few things i think has been out long enough for blizzard to make changes. we've gone through 5 seasons. immortal/ht has not been as widespread, and thus not as much data.
This and your previous thread have been centralized around this supposed issue. While you line of thinking is not "wrong" as such, it is not in line with what the design of the game is and you are looking at from the wrong perspective. KA is mechanic that stagnates, that causes over reliance on a mechanic (warpgates) instead of using a more varied array of styles and more interesting strategies than just warp-in -> storm.
KA is not being removed because it is not balanced (although it can be argued that it is unbalanced, that is not the issue here) who was complaining about it before this? What pros thought it was grievously imbalanced? I would wager there weren't very many who thought KA was the reason they find it difficult to beat Protoss. The KA change, and in fact the "Design" of the game is centred around being fun, entertaining and skilful. Warp-in storm is just a dumb mechanic, dumb as in stupid, not clever. There is no thought, no planing, no strategy, no tension, no skill factor. Where are the intrinsic unit tensions between Ghost and Templar if they are never on the field with enough energy to storm for more than 5 seconds? Where is the multipronged drop harass and skirmished based play if Drops and small attacks that take planning, time and resources to execute are stopped dead by instant warp in? Ling run-bys? The Muta harass? Infestor harass (although HT can still feedback on warp in)? All severely hindered by KA.
KA actually reduces the number of viable strategies and tactics that the game can offer, not the other way around. HT on the other hand do not need to have instant storm on warp in to be viable.
Another example of this similar effect of a nerf making more strategies viable not less. Bunker build time: What pro, or indeed who at all is complaining the bunker builds to fast? Quite a few pros have been quite vocal about being annoyed that blizzard is in their opinion wasting their time making tiny changes such as those to the bunker. The issue is not balance, it's more likely that bunker rushes can too easily end a game and result in that repetitive stagnation that you are keen to avoid. Bunker rushes are so good that they are pretty much always worth doing against zerg. Example July Vs Nada, Nada Bunker rushes every game.
Bunker rushes are not grievously imbalanced, but they are probably too easy and too effective for the cost/risk, making them almost mandatory, like getting siege mode for tanks, it's not overpowered it's just such a good upgrade that it is required if you want to use tanks. A similar parallel can be drawn with the bunker, but while siege mode increases strategic variety, fast, low risk bunkers reduce it by deciding games very quickly or by simply resulting in dull and repetitive strategy.
TLDR You are not wrong, but you are looking at the "issue" from the wrong perspective, even assuming there is an "issue" in the first place negatively colours your thoughts. Most changes are not directly related to the mythical creature "balance" but how the game actually plays.
this is a good point, but how do you know that KA is restrictive on strategies. We don't know yet because its such a new strategy. Furthermore, aren't there considerably less drastic changes that can be done instead of completely removing said strategy. You could increase the wrap-in time, or take incontrols idea of adding a cooldown to storm. so many different alternatives.
On March 13 2011 23:22 Dommk wrote: 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.
Probably because they haven't tried anything besides that, and when it fails or they attempt a poor unit combination which is easily countered (I don't think this exists in TvZ now that I think about it) they give up.
The fact that Terrans still do extremely well against Zerg yet have never even bothered incorporating units such as Ghosts or Ravens into their composition is pretty disgusting. Snipe, PDD, Seeker Missile are all insanely powerful yet I almost always see the same 3 units in every one of my ZvTs, because that's all they need to bother to make to win most of the time.
The same could be said for the Zerg side of the fence, but on a much smaller scale. Hydralisks are the only unit I absolutely never see in a ZvT, but for good reason. They are just awful for their cost.
Someone was actually telling me about a ZvT they saw on Idra's stream where the guy loaded up ghosts in medivacs and sent them around the map killing his Queens, drones, Overlords, and Mutas repeatedly. I honestly don't think that we are seeing even close to the full potential of how much Terran can do in the TvZ matchup. I blame it on Blizzard, because if winning TvZ wasn't as easy as making marines, tanks, and medivacs for the first 15-20 minutes of a game then the innovative Terran players would have found more creative ways to evolve this matchup. As it stands I feel like it's the most stagnant, because there are so few things that actually work for Zerg right now, which makes it extremely predictable.
On March 14 2011 06:03 teamsolid wrote: Most of the stuff you listed only popped up like almost a decade into the game, so I'd just give it some time, and hope the expansions add some cool units/abilities.
All of the stuff you quoted was most definitely common knowledge well before 2008/2009 (a decade into the game). I remember doing almost every single thing listed by ~2003 (when I quit playing) because I had seen it done somewhere else or heard about it from a friend, not because I was a genius. If it was really never done until 2008 then there is no way I would have ever known about it, much less done it myself.
I watched a random broodwar game yesterday (I suggest if you haven't, do so). The timings windows seemed to be a lot more frequent and shifted favor back and forth. Not to mention for Solid 30 minutes there was always a fight going on. Literally zero downtime for pure macro.
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
You mean like how no terrans in either GSL ro4 OR IEM top 6? Yeah zerg is OP as shit these days. Good call IdrA.
On March 14 2011 14:08 BanelingXD wrote: To the above poster I'd just comment that even if units were :useless" in BW they all had a role. the same cant be said about SC2. What is the purpose of the reaper? To explot badly designed Blizzard terrain and look cool. What a waste! The Mothership? The carrier? Sensor towers? Ridiculous deathball pathing? They serve no purpose. This is bad design and that falls squarely on the developers who followed the flawed philosophy of a designer of bad games. And ultimately the blame lay with Blizz who I suspect is just milking SC2 for a giant name-based money grab.
I'm pretty sure that I have seen every unit in SC2 used more frequently and to better effect than the Dark Archon, Devourer, Scout, and Valkyrie were in BW. I could count the games I've seen any of them in on one hand. Motherships are currently used a lot in PvZ lategame. Carriers are pretty rare, yes, but there were stretches they were rare in BW too (unless you're Stork). Sensor towers are great lategame as well. Part of it is the lack of macro maps that's finally being addressed.
On March 14 2011 14:08 BanelingXD wrote: To the above poster I'd just comment that even if units were :useless" in BW they all had a role. the same cant be said about SC2. What is the purpose of the reaper? To explot badly designed Blizzard terrain and look cool. What a waste! The Mothership? The carrier? Sensor towers? Ridiculous deathball pathing? They serve no purpose. This is bad design and that falls squarely on the developers who followed the flawed philosophy of a designer of bad games. And ultimately the blame lay with Blizz who I suspect is just milking SC2 for a giant name-based money grab.
Kinda hard to take this seriously as 50% of the things you listed have seen use in the GSL and other big tournaments. Sensor towers and motherships DO serve a purpose, reapers and carriers less so.
Also Blizzard milking SC2 for a quick money grab doesn't go well with the fact that they provide a large part of the price money of the GSL and other large tournaments.
TLDR: You seem mad about SC2 not being BW, something that's colouding you argument to the point where it's just a rant.
How do you guys feel about the cartoonish graphics of sc2? I personally hate it. Infact every blizzard game now is going in the cartoonish direction and i cant understand why. WHY is cartoonish graphics better than real life ones? Personally i like more BW graphics (the feel of it) even tho i never played BW and just watched the proscene
On March 15 2011 09:51 NukeD wrote: How do you guys feel about the cartoonish graphics of sc2? I personally hate it. Infact every blizzard game now is going in the cartoonish direction and i cant understand why. WHY is cartoonish graphics better than real life ones? Personally i like more BW graphics (the feel of it) even tho i never played BW and just watched the proscene
Warcraft 1+2+3, SC and BW ALL look cartoony to me. They are sprite based so they obviously look drawn, just like every old sprite based 8-16 bit console game.
^^ Warcraft 3 is not sprite based but of course it does look cartoony ^^
On March 15 2011 09:51 NukeD wrote: How do you guys feel about the cartoonish graphics of sc2? I personally hate it. Infact every blizzard game now is going in the cartoonish direction and i cant understand why. WHY is cartoonish graphics better than real life ones? Personally i like more BW graphics (the feel of it) even tho i never played BW and just watched the proscene
Personally I think SC2 looks amazing in comparison to brood war. Sprites are sprites no matter how "gritty." SC2 looks kind of crappy on low graphical settings, but there's no way around that.
I don't really know why people think it looks cartoony like warcraft 3 or WoW because I don't think it does (with higher graphical settings anyway). I guess it's similar to all those complaints about Diablo 3 when they announced that they were using colors other than brown and grey.
In my opinion there's not gonna be much change in how Zerg is played. Zerg is based around defending what your opponents are throwing at you and you're limited to 9 combat units doing so. The fact that some units hardcounter other units so hard makes it impossible to vary your playstyle - you will get destroyed if you try to. Zerg will be all about defending the one big 2 base timing push your opponent is setting up and then remaxing and attacking asap. Zerg doesn't really have anything left to be figured out. You're always reacting and only got 9 combat units. The only thing we're about to see is T and P changing their playstyles. If the vray colossi build in ZvP wasn't so extremely easy to pull of and so hard to defend then we would see the Immortal HT (Blink)Stalker build way more often. It absolutely demolishes Zerg and has no counter. Bad news: You will have to play as good as the zerg to make to it work though. The fact that some things are so strong really hurts other stuff, that will never be found out, because people refuse to play an appearently worse build.
I also think IdrA and Artosis said it very well when they said that the current trend so far has been nerfing stuff instead of buffing other stuff. I think nerfing things is bad. You will lose a lot of variety (reapers come in mind) and the game will get more and more fragile.
EPT
