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On August 13 2011 23:38 graniten wrote:Show nested quote +On August 13 2011 23:33 Demonace34 wrote:On August 13 2011 23:13 graniten wrote:On August 13 2011 23:00 Demonace34 wrote:
Where is the imbalance at? Is it the units? Is it a certain timing? Is it the map? Is one race too strong at a certain point in the game? Is it just the person playing the race being more skilled than everyone else(I'm looking at you Nestea)?
To be honest i dont think its that hard the only thing that sticks out and is imbalanced is emp and fungel. Sure uppgrades marines can be strong but it isnt at that magintute. Everybody was complaining about marines before terran got the ghost buff now marines are like fine compared. Well I still think that is too black and white for an actual discussion. I don't even know how you are comparing magnitudes of an EMP with the DPS of a marine. I think you can chalk it up to more of a meta-game shift where people are realizing the importance of the ghost, the "buff" just helped to initiate that shift. Also, balance is actually a hard thing to figure out, if you don't think so just look at the variables. Map size and structure, number of units, dps, upgrades, macro and micro differences, players, early game to late game. How can you suggest imbalance about something that actually comes down to player skill, EMP vs Feedback. You have no idea how strong emp is, one emp can change the whole game in favor for the terran. And its lowers the shields by 100 should be more like 50 or 25.
One storm can change the game too, one huge viking volley an end the game. It comes down to positioning, splitting up your units and having observers and feedback ready...aka Micro. This thread isn't about what is or isn't imbalanced, it is about why as a community we can't accept that are imbalances in the game. As a community people need to stop complaining and instead figure it out. If blizzard sees the imbalance or thinks something is too strong and ruining competitive play, I'm positive they will patch the game to their liking. If they don't patch, then people just have to adapt and figure the game out.
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You have no idea how strong emp is, one emp can change the whole game in favor for the terran. And its lowers the shields by 100 should be more like 50 or 25.
So can one storm or one fungal growth. Difference? EMP doesn't kill units.
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On August 13 2011 23:57 Demonace34 wrote:Show nested quote +On August 13 2011 23:38 graniten wrote:On August 13 2011 23:33 Demonace34 wrote:On August 13 2011 23:13 graniten wrote:On August 13 2011 23:00 Demonace34 wrote:
Where is the imbalance at? Is it the units? Is it a certain timing? Is it the map? Is one race too strong at a certain point in the game? Is it just the person playing the race being more skilled than everyone else(I'm looking at you Nestea)?
To be honest i dont think its that hard the only thing that sticks out and is imbalanced is emp and fungel. Sure uppgrades marines can be strong but it isnt at that magintute. Everybody was complaining about marines before terran got the ghost buff now marines are like fine compared. Well I still think that is too black and white for an actual discussion. I don't even know how you are comparing magnitudes of an EMP with the DPS of a marine. I think you can chalk it up to more of a meta-game shift where people are realizing the importance of the ghost, the "buff" just helped to initiate that shift. Also, balance is actually a hard thing to figure out, if you don't think so just look at the variables. Map size and structure, number of units, dps, upgrades, macro and micro differences, players, early game to late game. How can you suggest imbalance about something that actually comes down to player skill, EMP vs Feedback. You have no idea how strong emp is, one emp can change the whole game in favor for the terran. And its lowers the shields by 100 should be more like 50 or 25. One storm can change the game too, one huge viking volley an end the game. It comes down to positioning, splitting up your units and having observers and feedback ready...aka Micro. This thread isn't about what is or isn't imbalanced, it is about why as a community we can't accept that are imbalances in the game. As a community people need to stop complaining and instead figure it out. If blizzard sees the imbalance or thinks something is too strong and ruining competitive play, I'm positive they will patch the game to their liking. If they don't patch, then people just have to adapt and figure the game out.
you can still micro out of storm emp is instant. emp > storm all day
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On August 14 2011 00:00 graniten wrote:Show nested quote +On August 13 2011 23:57 Demonace34 wrote:On August 13 2011 23:38 graniten wrote:On August 13 2011 23:33 Demonace34 wrote:On August 13 2011 23:13 graniten wrote:On August 13 2011 23:00 Demonace34 wrote:
Where is the imbalance at? Is it the units? Is it a certain timing? Is it the map? Is one race too strong at a certain point in the game? Is it just the person playing the race being more skilled than everyone else(I'm looking at you Nestea)?
To be honest i dont think its that hard the only thing that sticks out and is imbalanced is emp and fungel. Sure uppgrades marines can be strong but it isnt at that magintute. Everybody was complaining about marines before terran got the ghost buff now marines are like fine compared. Well I still think that is too black and white for an actual discussion. I don't even know how you are comparing magnitudes of an EMP with the DPS of a marine. I think you can chalk it up to more of a meta-game shift where people are realizing the importance of the ghost, the "buff" just helped to initiate that shift. Also, balance is actually a hard thing to figure out, if you don't think so just look at the variables. Map size and structure, number of units, dps, upgrades, macro and micro differences, players, early game to late game. How can you suggest imbalance about something that actually comes down to player skill, EMP vs Feedback. You have no idea how strong emp is, one emp can change the whole game in favor for the terran. And its lowers the shields by 100 should be more like 50 or 25. One storm can change the game too, one huge viking volley an end the game. It comes down to positioning, splitting up your units and having observers and feedback ready...aka Micro. This thread isn't about what is or isn't imbalanced, it is about why as a community we can't accept that are imbalances in the game. As a community people need to stop complaining and instead figure it out. If blizzard sees the imbalance or thinks something is too strong and ruining competitive play, I'm positive they will patch the game to their liking. If they don't patch, then people just have to adapt and figure the game out. you can still micro out of storm emp is instant. emp > storm all day
Although EMP vs storm arguments are retarded, just don't forget that terran units have considerably less health than protoss ones. 100 shield damage is a lot, 80 damage on a bioball is more. Marines have 50 hp marauders have 125.
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On August 13 2011 23:59 BadgerBadger8264 wrote:Show nested quote +You have no idea how strong emp is, one emp can change the whole game in favor for the terran. And its lowers the shields by 100 should be more like 50 or 25. So can one storm or one fungal growth. Difference? EMP doesn't kill units.
Fungal is the worst yes but the units arent as strong as a bio ball is. Everything is connected like i said before you can choose either you have fungal and crap units or you have strong units and weak fungal .
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zergs have zerg runby they have baneling drops they have so much stuff and they have fungal.
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I know nothing about SF4, but I do know about human psyche, so all the below are assumptions.
imbalance is an atrocious thing and has no place in a game where you want the better player to win, the OP mentioned tiers of characters in SF4, well, I'm pretty certain the characters in the lower tiers are played much much less by the competitive players. so essentially the game doesn't actually have 30 imbalanced characters, it just has 10-12 relatively balanced ones, and since the community knows the characters are relatively balanced they are fine with having 18-20 "extra" characters that you can choose if you want a handicap, i.e. underpowered characters.
in SC2 there are only 3 races, so if 1 of them were to be underpowered and "removed" from the equation, the complexity of the game would be reduced from 6(3 mirrored) matchups (XvX, XvY, XvZ, YvY, YvZ, ZvZ) to 3(2 mirrored) matchups (XvX, XvY, YvY), a reduction in complexity of 50%, notice that removing 20 characters from a pool of 30 reduces the complexity from 465(30 mirrored) matchups to 55(10 mirrored) matchups, a reduction of (1-(55/465))*100 which is about 89%, however since there is still 45 unique non-mirrored matchups, I assume its fine with the community. this is not the case if there were to suddenly become only 1 non-mirrored matchups, the game would become boring.
tl:dr. if SC2 would accept imbalance then majorly only the top 2 races would be played by pros and most casuals, which would make it boring unlike SF4, where there are still a multitude of options left even if many characters are too weak to be played competitively.
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United Arab Emirates116 Posts
When people love their games so much, and are deep into it, you can expect them to overreact and be overprotective, to the point of irrationality. Life is like that. 
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There is a common misconception about SC:BW; That it was balanced through "years of patches" which just isn't true. As far as I can remember, there were only 3 major balance patches, 1.04, 1.05 and finally 1.08 (which basically made it the game we have today), the rest were minor bug fixes or various feature updates, and these were released in like what, 2001? BW was "balanced" through years of refinement in overall skill, build orders, micro/macro and most importantly maps. The game itself has never been perfectly balanced in that sense, I'm pretty sure even pro-gamers agreed that in terms of races it was; T>Z>P>T. But again, the tools mentioned earlier would help you overcome any sort of racial/game imbalance, like Bisu who revolutionized the PvZ match-up or Savior in ZvT before him.
Now on SC2, it's still in a development phase, Blizzard is still holding our hands and handing out balance patches now and then and on top of that, we have 2 expansions to come so we expect future changes to come both in gameplay and balance. People will discuss it and cry about it since they know, or rather expect there to be change. In the end it may not be the change they specifically wanted though, so they will continue to complain about what he or she conceives as an imbalance, because from what we've experienced since the release of SC2, it may be patched.
Never has a game received as much continuous care from Blizzard before, except maybe WoW.
Heavy discussions about balance/imbalance will always be there until at least all expansions are out, and they have been out for some time. There will always be cries of imbalance but I don't think nearly as much as it has been for the past year and half.
Edit: I almost forgot wtf the thread was about midway, so sorry if it is messy.
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I have an idea they dont even need to touch the emp or fungal just increase the storm acceleration :D Everybody is happy yay!
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Fighting games are a whole different story. The SF community understand that a game with 39 characters will never be perfectly balanced and are satisfied if everyone characters are at least viable. That's not to say that they don't care about balance. Ask them about 3rd Strike and they'll complain about Chun li and Ken placing in too many tournaments. SF4 is actually quite balanced for a fighting game. Even though Yun is considered top tier, we saw Daigo lose to a Seth and a C. Viper player. Tiers still mean something but not nearly as much as they were in 3rd Strike or MvC2.
SC2 has 3 races and you will only be seeing 6 matchups. If the game is hugely imbalanced then people would eventually lean towards one race and the variety of match ups in pro games would be reduced. No one would want to see TvT all day. So even though perfect balance still cannot be achieved, the expectation for balance in this game is much higher because there are only 3 races as opposed to 39 characters.
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I'm not taking any sides here, but would like to bring something up.
Everyone keeps mentioning how it's harder to balance a fighting game because of so many characters, and much easier in this game because it's only 3 races?
It's not like you've got some zergs hot-keyed that you 1a into a protoss ball while terran does the standard all terran build. There's a ton of crap that needs to be balanced in an rts, on scale with a fighting game.
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I don't really understand what the purpose of this post is. Imbalance is bad for competition in a game with only three races to play. In a fighting game where you have over 20? characters you can easily not play some characters, but it doesn't work like that in SC2.
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To be honest I think the SCII community does come across as being very immature and unlogical about balance. It's like their emotions get the better of them and not impersonal, critical logic. It feels like that the majority of the community thinks/feels that game imbalance is the single most deciding factor of the outcome of games. I think we all should take a shot of ice cold water and calm down. Skills like mechanics, decision making, creativity and consistency, ect, should be regarded as the most important factors in this game. Also, time and patience is key here. Time for the players to get better and ajust to new types of situations, ect, and enough time for the game to mature in general. How much time then? More then less, for sure. The more time equals more solid data, simply.
I'm also dissappoint in many of the pro players that should serve as a good example through professionalism, but for some pros this is, alas, not true. It's most commonly the pros that doesn't do too well ATM or overall. It strikes me as a bad attitude that doesn't command as much respect as a player that doesn't cave into such this 'feel good' reasoning.
But as is proof in this thread, many are sick of people bitching about balace to no end, taking focus off more important aspects of the game.
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France12894 Posts
I also played a fighting game (SSBM) and of course the game will not be balanced and this is why there are tiers lists of characters.
But for an RTS with 3 races it's easier to balance and thus it should be meant to be balanced as much as possible.
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My reasons for not acknowledging a possible imbalance in SC2:
If I truly believed that there was a imbalance in the game this would severely damage the way i practised cause if i lost to a hellion run by that destroyed 3/4 of my drones and rage quit i would blame it on a imbalance and this would
A) not encourage me to fix my mistakes that caused the hellions destroying my drone line because i would assume blizzard is going to obviously fix this imbalance, and
B) I wouldn't want to practise because i would think, whats the point in practising a imbalanced game when i know blizzards going to patch the game and only after its "balanced" should i try get better.
C) Gives you a negative mindset when you go to ladder, or after a game where you lost due to a game mechanic or unit that YOU feel is imbalanced.
Now, if I play the game and tell my self that the game is balanced or at very least its not going to change in a very long time, or the changes are not going to affect the way i play, then i can
A) Play with more certainty and find ways to solve the problems rather than blame it on imbalance.
B) Start each game with a Positive mindset knowing I'm playing a game I WANT to get better at regardless to any "possible" imbalances in the game that could be changed in the future.
TL:DR: Your mindset about the game trickles through to your game play, with a positive mindset about the games balance you will want to play more and become better at the CURRENT game regardless to changes that may or may not occur.
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On August 13 2011 11:30 Netsky wrote:
Please don't compared SF4 and SC2 it's apples and oranges.
BW had some pretty "imbalanced" units, compared to BW however after only one year of release the game is much more balanced (of there are also many more people playing and therefore more "testing" has been conducted). Over many years players learned to adapt. For example, consider the defiler - this unit is completely imba but T (and to a lesser extent P) learned to adapt.
One of the biggest problem at the moment that I don't think gets enough attention is Blizzard horrible map making ability. Using ladder statistics as a balance "input" (refer many interviews with DB and DK) is indicative, but certainly not conclusive when the maps are designed to "cater" for all skill levels, not just pro-play. I think they are making a fundamental mistake considering non-professional level of play in their maps and balance decisions.
Probably the second biggest factor is making balance changes with team games in mind. This refers back a little to considering not only professional play, as many non-skilled players play team games. The change that comes to mind is removing reapers from the game, but there are others as well.
Word.
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I agree with most people :p
It's not really worth it to talk about whether or not the game is balanced because it's just so complex.
It's not that you have to balance 3 races, which in itself is almost impossible (short of giving them all the same units with different looks/names), you have to balance 9 matchups .... well 6 since the mirror matchups are obviously balanced.
And the races are obviously not balanced at all. if you play zerg like you play protoss you probably get your ass handed to you, same as vice versa. All 3 races have advantages and disadvantages, zerg obviously doesn't have any early units that can attack air except for queens. Terrans have a very cheap unit that attacks air.
Long story short, even if the races have 50% winrate each, it doesn't mean that they're balanced. if Zerg wins 100% of the time against protoss and loses 100% of the time against terran they have 50% winrate when obviously things aren't balanced. There also is no good way of finding out whether or not the matchups are balanced. protoss might have quite a problem dealing with 50 early lings, while zerg might have quite a problem dealing with a maxed protoss army. but that alone doesn't mean that it's not balanced, as zerg you have the option of not letting him get maxed, as protoss you have the option of walling yourself in, making canons, making stalkers....
knowing where your edge is in any given matchup is far more crucial than the little imbalances that naturally occur.
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First off lets point out saying the sc2 community feels the game is balanced would be a stretch. Forums like TL just frown upon balance discussion and therefore it isn't here. Go to the sc2 forum and it's chalked full of balance discussion, most of which is mindless dribble but it's still there.
The reason why balance discussion is somewhat frowned upon, is because unlike a fighter game in an RTS style game you can take risks in order to make up for deficits in balance. Just due to the ability to hide information from your opponent. This is why many of times you see some of the players with the best results be the most willing to take risks, and then play there way using skill out of bad situations as a result of those risks, many of time by taking more risks until one pays off.
Now that's not to say playing solidly can't garner wins, just that if your opponent takes a large enough risk and gets away with it, that can in some cases lead to the player just trying to play solid lossing.
Examples
Hiding tech, hiding an expansion, going for an early game all in, proxying buildings, etc.
Now is that to say the game should function where there can be high rewards for risks, versus just playing extremely solidly. Well no of course not, I'm sure everyone would rather have risks be extremely risky, and extremely good solid play be extremely rewarding.
2 Polar opposite examples of players and the results...
MC and Nestea in my opinion are great examples of polar opposites on the risk taking versus solid play spectrum.
MC many of times in games takes huge risks that many of times pay off for him, be it rushing proxy buildings, hiding tech, So on and so forth.
Nestea tends to try and play a solid reactive macro style of game, and out think his opponent and out play his opponent long term in a game.
Both styles have seen nearly equal results, MC has been knocked down to up and downs, Nestea has been knocked down to up and downs. Both have won multiple GSL's, and both are considered some of the best players of their race.
The question becomes as the game progresses what is the right amount of reward for taking risks or just playing solidly. If you look at brood war typically really solid play > risk taking. Players who played extremely risky were rarely as rewarded for playing that way then players who were just really solid in their play style.
The real question for SC2 becomes should risk taking be just as viable as solid play. Should both these styles of play yield consistent results to the same degree. My personal bias would be no, just for the sake of stability in the esports scene. Where a player with far less skill then another player could knock someone out of a tournament just by taking huge risks and getting away with them. Which is a luck based system rather then a player skill based system.
That goes to what Sen said to DB in their interview about all ins and the like being to strong in SC2, to which DB essentially said well this isn't BW.
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EPT
