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Hello TL. Before posting, please read the whole post! So many people not reading it 
EDIT: OH MY GOD READ THE WHOLE POST. It's not the usual balance complaint. Excuse the topic name, I couldn't find any better one. And Mods, if there are something you don't like about this post, please help me change it instead of remove it, I spent a pretty long time on this text.
ADDITION: 1. This thread is not about if the game is balanced or not or if there are people who are arguing balance when they don't know anything about the game. This thread is only about the two different approaches the SC2 and Street Fighter 4 community has about balance.
2. I know that it's harder to balance a game to the same level when one game has like 30 characters and the other game only have 3 races, but a big part of the sc2 community was saying that the game was balanced only a few months after release when the street fighter community after years and 2 MAJOR patches (like expansions sized patches) are 100% agreed on that the game isn't balanced. Even if there are differences between the games, there is an (even bigger) difference in how the two communities look at balance. Isn't there another reason than the whole mass character thing?
I've been playing SC2 since Beta, have played TONS of games, but most importantly I have been an active member of this community over a year back. I have pretty much been living in Starcraft2 (and SC1 to some degree as well), and have been active in several SC2-forums on different sites outside of TL. Over the last months I have been searching for a new game with a huge community since I'm not that interested in playing SC2 anymore, which led to me finding the Street Fighter 4 community. After reading on forums and a lot of sites about the game, I have seen a pretty interesting difference between SC2 and SF4: The community's approach to game balance.
I've been visiting a swedish computer forum for a long time, which since SC2 Release has got a sub-forum dedicated 100% to SC2. The majority (9/10?) of the people posting there all agrees on that "the game is pretty much perfectly balanced". If someone says anything else there are immediately people all over him convincing him that he is wrong. Balance complainers are the people you can criticize, they are the minority that cannot speak out loud without being hacked to pieces.
IdrA, the one who is the (as incontrol put it) "Representative for the Zerg Complainers", has been the 'Villain' of SC2 for a long time. People have been criticizing him to the max for his bad manner, but also for his complaints about balance. The first one is of course understandable and could be the main reason IdrA has gotten this role in the SC2 community. I would argue though that it's also because he is one of the very few (If not lone) professional starcrafters who are very active in stating that there is big imbalances in the game on shows like SOTG and Inside The Game and also in interviews. He has gotten A LOT of complaints/comments about this, and you could say he is one of the outsiders of SC2.
One of the first things I heard about Street Fighter 4, was that there were different Tiers. 'Tiers' is essentially a list showing which characters are the strong ones, which one are the weak ones and the ones in the middle (Which ones are OP and not). The most famous SF-player is called Daigo, he has been dominating the scene pretty much, and recently switched his main character to someone high-tier (from a mid-tier character I think?). It's pretty much the equivalent of switching races in SC2 because you think the other race is the stronger one. In chats and forums he is sometimes called a "Tier-whore" (translation to SC2: balance-obsessed), and a lot of people are sad about that he switched because they wanted to see him play his old character instead. They are all accepting his choice though, they know that the new character is stronger.
What SF4 has is an updated list of how the balance in the game looks like. It's concept is pretty much the same as the TL Power Rank, except for that it ranks characters instead of players (Sc2 translation: It ranks Races instead of players). It ranks from 1-10 how big of a chance you have to win a certain matchup (like PvZ = 3/10, PvT = 6/10 = 9 points total for Protoss).
Here's a link to it if you want to check it out:
http://www.eventhubs.com/guides/2008/oct/17/street-fighter-4-tiers-character-rankings/
I found this very interesting. If IdrA would have switched to Terran or Protoss, he would have been called silly and naive. People wouldn't be very sad about that he is switching, I believe most people will think that he finally will understand that the game isn't as imbalanced as he thinks it is. In the Street fighter world, about the same thing happened to Daigo, but his choice was OK for most people since they understood that the new character (race) is easier to win with. The vast majority of the SF4-community agrees on that the game is imbalanced, they just take that for granted.
Pretty much the only balance-discussions in SF4 is about if the "Tier-list" is accurate, people understands that the character Daigo plays with will get a higher rank in the tiers (he will show everybody how strong this and that character is, just like MC showed how strong stargate play can be etc.). However, the SF4-community is almost 100% agreed (At least what I've read) on that the game isn't balanced, while the SC2-community is not.
I would like to hear your opinions on this. Why does the two communities think so different about balance?
Please don't bring up the argument "Because SC2 is balanced while SF4 apparently isn't". Only some months after releasing the game most people have been arguing that the game (SC2) is close to 100% balanced. Starcraft Broodwar was after 1 expansion pack and tons of years finally concidered balanced. Warcraft 3 has been out for a very long time, has gotten an expansion pack and years of patching as well, and is still concidered imbalanced. To say that SC2 isn't balanced only a few months after release isn't stupid. SC2 may very well be balanced, but the possibility that it isn't balanced exists. And please don't say that "The winrate in tournaments is close to 50% for all matchups", because winrate in tournaments is for the most part a very very bad way of measuring balance, even if you would rely purely on statistics to measure balance.
There is not really much statistics proving that "Even though the game is so fresh and new the game is pretty much balanced", there are some statistics showing that some races are having an easier time winning than others. For example, look at GSL code S right now. There are like above 50% terrans. The last season (July) there was two Zergs in the top, one of them who barely lost a game in the whole season. Last season you could both argue that zerg is OP, this season you can argue that Terran is OP. I'm sure you can argue that Protoss is OP in some ways as well (IdrA on Inside the Game for example). My point is that there are no clear evidence of that the game is balanced, and I'm very sure the characters in SF4 isn't fully figured out as well, so the tiers may very well be completely wrong. Saying that the game (SF4) is imbalanced is definitely something not 100% sure either. I want to make sure that before I post I am not here to convince you that SC2 isn't balanced, I'm only interested in why the two communities are taking two completely different approaches to balance in the game, when they are in pretty much the similar spot. Both games are about guessing games. There are hidden information in both games so you have to guess and mindgame the opponent a lot in SF4 as well. Both games also require mechanical skill and tons of gamesense.
I also wanted to note that SF4 isn't a mindless console game without balance patches. The expansion to SF4 (Super Street Fighter 4, SSF4) has changed a lot (the ranks in the tier list were tossed around), and the other "expansion" (Super Street Fighter 4: Arcade Edition, SSF4:AE) also made some significant changes to the game. There is also another patch incoming (just a patch though, no new game, this time it's free), so Capcom is actually updating the balance in the game. The second "balance patch" didn't include new characters (I believe?) but changed the stats of the characters (damage reduced, cooldown increased etc), and the third one will be another pure balance patch, without introducing new chars and without resetting the metagame knowledge, so they are pretty similar to actual balance changes (They have both been pretty big, they are like 5-10 patches each).
EDIT: I KNOW that when practicing, it's best to leave the balance thinking out of it. Otherwise you are crippling yourself. And yes, balance complaints isn't the fun to listen to all the time. But SF4 are still taking a different approach to the whole balance discussion even if these two factors are strong in that game as well.
TL;DR: REMOVED! (forgot I wanted people to read the whole post  )
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You tell us not to say what is really the most appropriate answer...
Starcraft 2 is relatively balanced and there's really no point in complaining about balance on this forum because all it does is take away from the wins of the players.
There's no point in shitting on someone's success by citing imbalance, particularly in a game where imbalance is nowhere near clear cut. Players have been able to adjust to most strategies that have seemed imbalanced at first, unlike Street Fighter, there is a lot more strategy and theory crafting involved in the game and there isn't really any race that overtly more powerful than another race.
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Saying the game is imbalanced implies that you have tried every possible thing, and there is no way to win. This hasn't happened yet. Until it happens, it is not called imbalance and it is called giving up.
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Because this is a STRATEGY game.
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Because admitting theres imbalance just gives losing players a reason to bitch about their losses.
The only place where the slight imbalances sc2 contains come into play are in top8 master, gm, and pro where certain scenarios force a situation where you literally cant win.
But then once this is admitted diamond players come on the forum to spam about their most recent loss and how they played perfectly but lost to imba noob shit
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From the perspective of a more competitive SF player, I'll tell you that in SF the match ups can be so unbearable (ie.Dhalism vs Ryu). The difference is that Daigo switched to one of the best characters in the entire game only because the nerf was too big on zoning that he was forced to switch.
People want a balanced game to prevent messed up match ups where you would have to literally be 10 levels above your opponent to win. That's also why I like playing StarCraft so much better as well.
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On August 13 2011 11:17 AlBundy wrote:
Because this is a STRATEGY game.
You're pretty ignorant if you think there isn't some serious strategy and mind gaming going on in SF4.
With meter management, its essentially a RTS with perfect information as opposed to having a fog of war.
edit : emphasis added to qualifier for people who are dumb enough to take that sentence literally
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There are only 3 races, so if one were simply to weak to be played then the diversity of high level games would be dramatically reduced.
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Fighting games can never be balanced because of how many characters there tends to be, whereas StarCraft has only 3 races. It's also A LOT easier to play a different character than it is to play a different race.
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I somewhat agree with you OP. The TL community is quite "closed-minded" when it comes to balance. Almost all attempts at balance discussions are shot down as "mere whining". While this is better than letting pathetic whiners run rampant I think people need to realize that some discussion of balance can be constructive. As always with masses of people, moderate opinions are hard to adopt as crowds seems to only buy into one extreme or the other.
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On August 13 2011 11:21 HyperLimen wrote:You're pretty ignorant if you think there isn't some serious strategy and mind gaming going on in SF4. With meter management, its essentially a RTS with perfect information as opposed to having a fog of war.
Yeah let's compare Sc2 to SF4. Good idea.
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No matter what anybody tells you, the game is NOT fully balanced. However, like with all new games: with time, balance changes will be made, and players will continue to learn strategies to combat any situation that may be called "imbalanced". Take for example the TvP 1/1/1 marine tank banshee allin. I would define this push as exceedingly difficult to defend, and time will tell if better strategy and positioning can help or if a balance change needs to be made.
On a non-balance related note, there needs to be more units that are microintensive, blink stalkers and stimmed terran bio units are very exciting to watch, and sc1 had many units that could benefit from greater micromanagement.
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On August 13 2011 11:21 HyperLimen wrote:You're pretty ignorant if you think there isn't some serious strategy and mind gaming going on in SF4. With meter management, its essentially a RTS with perfect information as opposed to having a fog of war.
And you're out of your mind if you think that the strategic depth of SF4 is in any way comparable with Starcraft 2. The game is much more mechanical as opposed to strategic, there are mind games and tactics but it's not a strategy game.
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The majority of the community is lower level players and even those in master leagues still have improvements that would affect their play more than, say, a 5% nerf/buff to a certain unit or strategy. The imbalance of the game is so slight right now (except perhaps in Korea) that only those very high in master league, in GM, or pros could really attribute the majority of a loss to a certain imbalance. Pros, who it affects most, are generally professional enough to not whine about it because it makes them and their team look bad. Many people also trust in Blizzard's ability to balance the game and believe that over time it will be balanced out.
TL;DR:
1. It is so balanced that it doesn't majorly affect most of the playerbase
2. Pros are professional enough not to whine about it
3. Trust in blizzard to see the job through
4. Generally the metagame will evolve faster than blizzard would patch an issue, so it is more effective to create a new strategy than try to influence the often non-responsive balance team.
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Not a good idea to bring up fighting games, most people outside of the fighting game community actually think it's just people mashing.
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On August 13 2011 11:21 HyperLimen wrote:You're pretty ignorant if you think there isn't some serious strategy and mind gaming going on in SF4. With meter management, its essentially a RTS with perfect information as opposed to having a fog of war.
That is a pretty big stretch to call SF4 an RTS.
My feelings are in SF4 you have several characters to choose from. However, in a game with only three races, balance is much more important in nature.
StarCraft would never be a successful game if Zerg was at Roll tier.
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look at your street fighter ranking page. even the MOST EXTREME imbalance is a 70-30% split with the majority being 60-40%. i would argue that even in your 'imbalance whining' game the majority of games are solved by someone playing bad or making mistakes.
the logical conclusion to believing you lost due to imbalance is to not play until a patch. which means you cant win anything, and you are out of practice, making your situation worse. if you really just lost because of a mistake you are digging yourself a bigger ditch
the logical conclusion to believing you lost due to bad play is the play more, practice harder and analyse your replays. even if the game is imbalanced you will still improve your chances.
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I think the main difference is that in fighting game tournaments its more accepted to switch your character for a certain match up which your other character would get trashed in. In sc2 how many pro players regularly switch their race based on the matchup? Off the top of my head I can only think of Morrow when he plays against zerg.
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Chess is imbalanced... In a "perfect" world, white is playing for a win, black is playing to draw. White is always ahead a move unless he makes some sort of mistake. However, in order to offset it, people playing black try for, at the time, rather obscure ideas. First time you show a player the Sicilian, they'll look at you as if you are crazy.
I agree with mprs.
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Because Starcraft as a franchise to me has always been about balance and simplicity, it is the allure of the game.
3 Races, each vastly different in appearance, lore, mechanics, and style. This differs from other rts games where you might have 7 or more different races (or countries, factions, etc.) to choose from which are all basically the same on a fundamental level but with different appearances and slight tweaks ( spear throwers instead of archers,etc. ).
The impressive thing about BW (and now SC2) was that there was 3 races, and no one was a direct counter to the other ( much like a rock-paper-scissor affect that other games have had ), you had ( have ) relatively just as good of a chance to beat anyone of equal skill irregardless of race.
I have some experience with fighting games, and if we're being honest, I don't think anyone expects them to be balanced. You have games with dozens of characters, how would you possibly make it so that every character was balanced to every other character. One character could be completely balanced but have a fundamental advantage over a specific character.
From a somewhat ignorant standpoint, It would be easier for them to balance the ''tiers'' of units. That way competitive players ( which is a small % in fighting games ) can work on playing only the other top tier characters.
I also think this comes from the roots of the games, fighting games have ALWAYS had a couple characters that were clearly abusive, I think now they try harder to make it balanced because people are playing competitively whereas the first Street Fighter, they weren't.
SC2 players are spoiled from the BW days, where everything was balanced and perfect.
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In SF4 there are tons of characters, it would be impossible to get to a state even close to perfect balance for all of them in every matchup (especially not without taking away the uniqueness of all the characters who are, basically, clones of Ryu). In starcraft there are only 3 characters, zerg protoss and terran. It's much easier to balance those three against each other than the over two dozen characters of SF4.
I would also propose that if SF4 only had Ryu, Zangief, and C. Viper then Capcom would be able to put forth a game as well balanced as SC2 is, and that tiers wouldn't exist. With such limited options imbalance is unacceptable, it's the large cast of SF4 that keeps the community from rioting about imbalance.
While it's pretty much impossible to say that the game is balanced or imbalanced one way or the other, one thing is clear: it's pretty damn close. Barring any big shifts in the metagame that reveal previously unknown imbalances I don't see any balance changes incoming until the expansions come out.
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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.
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Because the game is close enough to balanced where saying something is imbalanced without enough evidence takes away from winners in tournament games.
Take for example, last night, when: (IPL SPOILER)
+ Show Spoiler +Idra lost to MaNa. Mana played well and Idra played poorly and still felt the need to say that the game was so fucking stupid and told Mana "Fuck You." In reality, Idra threw roaches at a ball of blink stalkers, colossi, and sentries. He never had enough to do significant damage, never got enough corruptors or any infestors in that game, and lost to decent blink micro, great positioning, and solid force fields. But unsurprisingly, it still led Zerg players to start complaining about Protoss even though statistics don't indicate that Protoss is OP and Idra didn't play well. Mana won and it is foolish to say that he won due to imbalance and we shouldn't take away from him.
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1) I think it's a strawman to say SC2 players don't accept imbalance. There's a heck of a lot of whining about it to my eyes. If in any doubt, I refer you to the battlenet forums.
2) SC2 is a very new game, and a game with a high degree of complexity (many more parameters to explore than SF4). Thus, it makes less sense to cry imbalance when we don't even know what is possible yet.
3) The statistics actually support the idea that SC2 is currently quite well balanced, both at the pro level, and across the ladder.
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Fighting games often have no problem implementing tiers into their match-ups, because they have dozens of characters. It's literally impossible to balance the countless pairings, so they don't even bother trying to do so. Instead, they make sure that no specific combo or character can beat absolutely everything.
In an RTS game with just three huge races, there can be plenty of checks and balances. Overall balance is actually possible (or, at least, close), and so that's the ideal scenario in a competitive scene (or else no one would want to play the "low tier/ underpowered" race, and you would just see mirror match-ups during every tournament).
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cause we want a perfect game gawd
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On August 13 2011 11:21 HyperLimen wrote:You're pretty ignorant if you think there isn't some serious strategy and mind gaming going on in SF4. With meter management, its essentially a RTS with perfect information as opposed to having a fog of war.
No it's not. It's a fighting game. Just because strategy becomes a factor to play on a competent level doesn't throw a game into the strategy genre. I hate it when people make these weak links between vastly different games because you could theoretically make that connection between any two games, which makes the connection a pointless one to make in the first place.
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On August 13 2011 11:17 mprs wrote:
Saying the game is imbalanced implies that you have tried every possible thing, and there is no way to win. This hasn't happened yet. Until it happens, it is not called imbalance and it is called giving up.
Can't be more accurate than this. Take heed OP.
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1. Idra does offrace and play the other races.
2. If somethings broken you fix it (60 dmg smart firing siege tanks sound fun?)
3. I don't worry about balance nearly as much as I do worry about where the game is going to go and where blizzard is going to take it, are they going to make the game require more mechanics as the game goes on or will they modern warfare two it? Will they put more work into the overall game and its design itself or will they continue making bad maps?
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Thanks for all the answers! :D
On August 13 2011 11:32 LegendaryZ wrote:Show nested quote +On August 13 2011 11:21 HyperLimen wrote:On August 13 2011 11:17 AlBundy wrote:
Because this is a STRATEGY game. You're pretty ignorant if you think there isn't some serious strategy and mind gaming going on in SF4. With meter management, its essentially a RTS with perfect information as opposed to having a fog of war. No it's not. It's a fighting game. Just because strategy becomes a factor to play on a competent level doesn't throw a game into the strategy genre. I hate it when people make these weak links between vastly different games because you could theoretically make that connection between any two games, which makes the connection a pointless one to make in the first place.
I pretty much agree with HyperLimen, except for that you actually have "fog of war" in Street Fighter (You cannot see and react to all the opponent moves in time, you have to guess). But there are a LOT of strategy in SF4 as well. I used to believe that it's almost 100% about mechanics, but it really isn't. Sure they are different, and I get your point though.
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Obvious answer is SC2 has the history of the miraciously balanced SC1 while Fighting games have adopted the Tier mentality from its history.
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I think a main difference with your example in the OP, is that SC only has 3 races - vs a larger number of characters or races in other games. It's like all the 3 races are in the top tier from your example, which is possible in these other games too. The more races / characters, the harder it becomes to keep all matchups nearly balanced. But 3 is that sweet number, where it's not boring (like 2, or 1 race), and yet still possible to manage the balances with good precision.
The other difference is in complexity. Even after ten years, people discover new ways to play a race. That makes it very hard to compare with certainty - there is so much unknown. A fighting character is tricky to play well, but can be analyzed fully in theory and compared to another; moreso than a race.
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On August 13 2011 11:42 skirmisheR wrote:Thanks for all the answers! :D Show nested quote +On August 13 2011 11:32 LegendaryZ wrote:On August 13 2011 11:21 HyperLimen wrote:On August 13 2011 11:17 AlBundy wrote:
Because this is a STRATEGY game. You're pretty ignorant if you think there isn't some serious strategy and mind gaming going on in SF4. With meter management, its essentially a RTS with perfect information as opposed to having a fog of war. No it's not. It's a fighting game. Just because strategy becomes a factor to play on a competent level doesn't throw a game into the strategy genre. I hate it when people make these weak links between vastly different games because you could theoretically make that connection between any two games, which makes the connection a pointless one to make in the first place. I pretty much agree with HyperLimen, except for that you actually have "fog of war" in Street Fighter (You cannot see and react to all the opponent moves in time, you have to guess). But there are a LOT of strategy in SF4 as well. I used to believe that it's almost 100% about mechanics, but it really isn't. Sure they are different, and I get your point though.
How can you agree with HyperLime's points if understand his points as well?
Alright, Halo is basically an RTS, also you have fog of war in that as well.
Need for Speed is basically an RTS.
On that note, SC2 is basically a fighting game.
No, they focus on different aspects, the strategic depth of Street Fighter is incomparable to a dedicated strategy game.
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In my opinion, if you look at a game like street fighter, you see that they have many many characters, as compared to a game like Starcraft / BW / Sc2 which only have 3 "Characters" (races)
So yes, they can deal with having "tiers" because there are so many characters to choose from. Just like games like League of Legends and Heroes of Newerth Which both have 60+ Heros/champions to choose from... there are tiers in those games as well.
Everyone knows that an Alistar in League of Legends is One of the better tank/initiator champions so why bother picking a different one?
Everyone knows that Hellbringer in Heroes of Newerth is One of the best initiators in the game, so why bother picking another one?
These games have a theme in common, and that is that in their "hero/champion/character" Selection process they have the ability to "ban" or remove certain units from the pool of selectable ones, in order to make the game more balanced themselves.
What im getting at is, no game is perfect. All Games will have some imbalance in them. It took YEARS and YEARS for Starcraft:BroodWar to get to the point where it is now, and even now i wouldnt go as far to say it is "completely balanced"
There are still matches of sc:bw where you say to yourself "wow i didnt even know someone could lose that quickly, or in that way, or ruin thier lead like that"
All games will have these imbalances, and in a game like starcraft2 Where you cant just decide before the game "ok lets ban the marauder and the zergling to make this fair" Balance will always be a very important and highly discussed topic.
Everyone has different views on the balance of starcraft 2. NO GAME is balanced, at all, unless all of the races/characters/heroes/champions in the game did the EXACT same thing. It is physically impossible to balance a game with different units.
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SF4 has different character tiers just like essentially any other fighter-style game, like SSBM and the like - it doesn't really detract from the quality of the game due to the nature of the game and the large variety of playable characters.
This doesn't translate very well into a strategy game. There's no point in translating anything into "tiers," because these will always change as the game develops and the map pool rotates. A fighting game is fairly static in comparison, as you have your list of maps and moves, and these don't really ever change after the game's release. Starcraft is very dynamic and racial "balance" will change very often.
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On August 13 2011 11:32 LegendaryZ wrote:Show nested quote +On August 13 2011 11:21 HyperLimen wrote:On August 13 2011 11:17 AlBundy wrote:
Because this is a STRATEGY game. You're pretty ignorant if you think there isn't some serious strategy and mind gaming going on in SF4. With meter management, its essentially a RTS with perfect information as opposed to having a fog of war. No it's not. It's a fighting game. Just because strategy becomes a factor to play on a competent level doesn't throw a game into the strategy genre. I hate it when people make these weak links between vastly different games because you could theoretically make that connection between any two games, which makes the connection a pointless one to make in the first place.
I'll just assume you aren't very good at RTS or fighting games to have made this statement. At high levels of play, the genres are extremely similar. The only true difference is mechanics.
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RTS's are fundamentally different from fighting games. You can accept imbalance in fighting games because there are so many characters and the entire point of the game isn't to have diverse races clashing in battles. Balance is required because a huge part of the ability of an RTS to be a spectator sport is watching the different races and the different combinations/conflicts that arise when they are pitted against each other. If Terran was the only race in the game and Blizzard just dedicated all of their effort to making the race really polished, SC2 would fall dead within a month.
I'll just assume you aren't very good at RTS or fighting games to have made this statement. At high levels of play, the genres are extremely similar. The only true difference is mechanics.
And that "only true difference" makes a fucking mountain of difference. It makes them completely different games. You're simply not understanding what an RTS really is. Just because it has the word strategy in it doesn't mean it's the only game to use strategy. It more refers to the overall playstyle and mechanics, which are vastly different.
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On August 13 2011 11:46 Mordiford wrote:Show nested quote +On August 13 2011 11:42 skirmisheR wrote:Thanks for all the answers! :D On August 13 2011 11:32 LegendaryZ wrote:On August 13 2011 11:21 HyperLimen wrote:On August 13 2011 11:17 AlBundy wrote:
Because this is a STRATEGY game. You're pretty ignorant if you think there isn't some serious strategy and mind gaming going on in SF4. With meter management, its essentially a RTS with perfect information as opposed to having a fog of war. No it's not. It's a fighting game. Just because strategy becomes a factor to play on a competent level doesn't throw a game into the strategy genre. I hate it when people make these weak links between vastly different games because you could theoretically make that connection between any two games, which makes the connection a pointless one to make in the first place. I pretty much agree with HyperLimen, except for that you actually have "fog of war" in Street Fighter (You cannot see and react to all the opponent moves in time, you have to guess). But there are a LOT of strategy in SF4 as well. I used to believe that it's almost 100% about mechanics, but it really isn't. Sure they are different, and I get your point though. How can you agree with HyperLime's points if understand his points as well? Alright, Halo is basically an RTS, also you have fog of war in that as well. Need for Speed is basically an RTS. On that note, SC2 is basically a fighting game. No, they focus on different aspects, the strategic depth of Street Fighter is incomparable to a dedicated strategy game.
I understand that just because SF4 and SC2 have similarities they are not the same game, but I think the similarities that they have are enough to excuse my thread.
You misunderstood the FoW. What I meant was that there is things you can't react to in SF4 as well as there are things you cannot react to in SC2. If your opponent hides his build or relies on hidden info the game becomes more of a coinflip. The same applies to SF4, if your opponent blindcounters what you are doing you lose even if you are the better player overall. SC2 is still an RTS and SF4 is still a fighting game, but the FoW in SC2 has a counterpart in SF4. Excuse my english.
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IMO, in order for sc2 to take off (in terms of consistency and longevity), the game must be close to balanced.
As of right now, its pretty darn close to being balanced. No big complaints. But I can certainly understand why a major imbalance would be a problem.
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On August 13 2011 11:53 skirmisheR wrote:Show nested quote +On August 13 2011 11:46 Mordiford wrote:On August 13 2011 11:42 skirmisheR wrote:Thanks for all the answers! :D On August 13 2011 11:32 LegendaryZ wrote:On August 13 2011 11:21 HyperLimen wrote:On August 13 2011 11:17 AlBundy wrote:
Because this is a STRATEGY game. You're pretty ignorant if you think there isn't some serious strategy and mind gaming going on in SF4. With meter management, its essentially a RTS with perfect information as opposed to having a fog of war. No it's not. It's a fighting game. Just because strategy becomes a factor to play on a competent level doesn't throw a game into the strategy genre. I hate it when people make these weak links between vastly different games because you could theoretically make that connection between any two games, which makes the connection a pointless one to make in the first place. I pretty much agree with HyperLimen, except for that you actually have "fog of war" in Street Fighter (You cannot see and react to all the opponent moves in time, you have to guess). But there are a LOT of strategy in SF4 as well. I used to believe that it's almost 100% about mechanics, but it really isn't. Sure they are different, and I get your point though. How can you agree with HyperLime's points if understand his points as well? Alright, Halo is basically an RTS, also you have fog of war in that as well. Need for Speed is basically an RTS. On that note, SC2 is basically a fighting game. No, they focus on different aspects, the strategic depth of Street Fighter is incomparable to a dedicated strategy game. I understand that just because SF4 and SC2 have similarities they are not the same game, but I think the similarities that they have are enough to excuse my thread. You misunderstood the FoW. What I meant was that there is things you can't react to in SF4 as well as there are things you cannot react to in SC2. If your opponent hides his build or relies on hidden info the game becomes more of a coinflip. The same applies to SF4, if your opponent blindcounters what you are doing you lose even if you are the better player overall. SC2 is still an RTS and SF4 is still a fighting game, but the FoW in SC2 has a counterpart in SF4. Excuse my english.
The FoW counterpart exists in just about every game where reaction-time is a factor, the same could be said of Tekken, BlazBlue... almost any fighting game and for some FPSs as well. The point is when you draw comparisons like this, you can make any game comparable to another and it doesn't really work because then what's the point?
This is why I drew the comparison with Halo, what's the difference then...?
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I hate people who say even if the game imbalance it doesn't affect results.
thats why theres a million terrans in Code S and 0 protoss.
At lower levels it doesn't really matter but it sucks to watch GSL and watch every protoss get butt raped.
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iNfeRnaL
Germany1908 Posts
To be honest I don't like the OP much as it seems to make no "final statement" to me.
Other than that, I also don't really agree with the comparison being made because the balance in a RTS is a lot more important than in a fighting game.
Don't get me wrong, I do not intend to say that fighting games are skill less or anything, in fact the mechanical skill required to play them might be harder than SC2 - probably not than SC:BW tho - but it's more like yeah... a RTS with 3 races is really only fun if all 3 races are somewhat balanced.
In a fighting game you have a lot more characters than there's races in SC2 as many already mentioned, it means if one race is unplayable you only have 2 left to play.
If one out of 10 characters has no chance to win that is obviously not as bad as one race being unplayable.
Other than this comparison I generally agree with you that SC2 is yet balanced at all, it is also very much too early to be able to even tell that.
The current "imbalances" are caused by both, new patches and metagame shifts.
Also people seem to forget that theres atleast 2 more expansions coming up that will completely throw off the current balance, let alone all the patches that are soon to come again.
Before all expansions have been released, Blizzard stop to be agressive with the patching and gives the game (and us, the gamers) the time to balance out it self we just can not tell if it is balanced or not - we can only claim it is imbalanced right now - don't forget that NOTHING of what we have in our hands is final yet.
Give it time. Accept there will be imbalance for a few more years.
Or just give the game a break for some time if you don't like that fact.
Just my two cents. 
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On August 13 2011 11:58 Lewan72 wrote:
I hate people who say even if the game imbalance it doesn't affect results.
thats why theres a million terrans in Code S and 0 protoss.
At lower levels it doesn't really matter but it sucks to watch GSL and watch every protoss get butt raped.
There are actually currently 8 Protoss, 17 Terrans and 7 Zergs in Code S. The GSL in general is a very small sample and at the top, each race has had success. There have been 2 Terran champions, with 3 golds, there have been two Zerg champions with 4 golds, there has been one Protoss champion with 2 golds.
In addition, outside Korea you still see a fair bit of success for each race.
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because almost noone is good enough to see all the factors and conclude imbalance, and even then people parrot what the top level say without actually understanding it themselves
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in my opinion there is no imbalance in this game at this point if there is something not beging solved such as maybe infestors a terran player could make quicker ghost to emp and the infestors arent unstopable
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People tend to perceive their own flaws as game imbalance.
If you're willing to lay out a reasoned explanation as to why one race or build is completely imbalanced and needs to be patched, we're willing to listen. But you had better have damn good evidence, because based on match statistics from high-level tournaments and leagues, SC2 is pretty well balanced.
Imbalance is a hundred zergs losing to one terran, not one zerg losing to a hundred terrans.
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Because there are alot of people that think they actually play at a level where they lose because of "imbalance" when in reality they lose cos of bad decisions or a mismanagement. This includes pros who would probably retract their statements a few months later after X strategy with Y units has been solved.
Also the sample size for non-mirror match ups is quite small compared to mirror so it often pushes statistics one way or the other. In korea almost half the games played in gsl are tvt and in the foreigner scene there seems to be more top protoss and terran towards the top. Some people take this as a sign of imbalance itself but if you look on sc2ranks etc there is no 1 race that dominates every region. If the game was truly broken then we would see only 1 race being good in every region.
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Tier-lists are only relevant for their respective stages in the metagame. If SC2 had a tier-list, then we might say T>Z>P at the moment. Then perhaps P will come up with some revolutionary and tilt the balance around. SC2 is so full of options and possibilities that balance up to a certain degree is sufficient/possible, and the players and maps will sort out the rest. In fighting games there are far less options, and accordingly the scale of balance is more concrete and less prone to change.
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In the words of a couple of people from across the pond, "there is no imbalance, just lack of skill."
I'm paraphrasing, but it certainly does hold a lot of truth. Did you see Genius hold that banshee tank timing from ThorZain?
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On August 13 2011 11:53 skirmisheR wrote:You misunderstood the FoW. What I meant was that there is things you can't react to in SF4 as well as there are things you cannot react to in SC2. If your opponent hides his build or relies on hidden info the game becomes more of a coinflip. The same applies to SF4, if your opponent blindcounters what you are doing you lose even if you are the better player overall. SC2 is still an RTS and SF4 is still a fighting game, but the FoW in SC2 has a counterpart in SF4. Excuse my english.
The idea of playing 'standard' in SC2 is to use a build that is resilient to early game pressure/surprises while still developing your economy. Later in the game it is very possible to scout your opponents unit composition and tech buildings. Often times a lack of information(despite several scouting attempts) on your opponent can be very telling as to what they are doing.
Advanced timing knowledge and being able to extrapolate what your opponent is doing from small amounts of information is key to limiting/eliminating "coin flips". E.g. scouting your opponent has x number of sentries at a specific point in the game and knowing that he has too many to be doing a heavy tech build. Another often important piece of information is quick counting drones at Zerg bases and/or noticing what hatches from eggs. Both of those can be very telling as to what a Zerg player is going to do in the short-term.
A lot of people feel that ZvZ can be a coin flip of a match up yet Nestea boasts a powerful 92% win rate, 23-2. Hard to argue against those results.
You don't have to react to everything that happens in StarCraft II. A lot of times preparation is the most important. E.g. getting and evo chamber + a spore or two at the timing of DT's/banshees or an early lair if you feel you need it or can get away with it.
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I think a better discussion to be had would be tiers of builds and not all builds are created equal. For a while I think we would all agree that 4gate in PvP was the highest tier build and 3gate Robo was not on the same level. It's difficult to have tiered rankings as there are so many combinations of what can be happening. It could be argued that in PvT a DT rush could be a variety of levels of tiers depending on what the Terran were to build. If a terran went for a raven rush, or something like that, it would be a very different discussion versus an MMM build. We can discuss the average strengths of builds and perhaps create a tier list of the power of these relative builds. So arguably we can have higher and lower tiered builds for races depending on the match-up, or perhaps in spite of the match-up.
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I actually think you're misinterpreting the anger people in the SC2 community recieve when they cry "imbalance". The community doesn't get annoyed because someone is shattering their idea of a perfectly balanced game. Rather, people get annoyed because balance discussions are unproductive and often distract from meaningful dialogue. Additionally, it marginalizes a winner's achievement if someone says they used an imbalanced strategy or race. People think about balance quite often. We know the game might not be balanced. We just don't want to talk about it on TL, where Blizzard will never hear our opinions.
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To tell you the truth, I'm still pretty angry about PVZ in Broodwar.
Anybody else feel like the Bisu Build Order is really:
1) Fast expo.
2) Build a ton of corsairs and dts.
3) Pray Zerg forgets how to build overlords and spore colonies.
LOL.I'm sick of the balance talk. I don't think I'm going to read any more balance threads period. I just like playing my favorite game :D
(PS: I never had the multitasking required to control either dt sair or dt reaver :p)
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On August 13 2011 11:49 LilClinkin wrote:Show nested quote +On August 13 2011 11:32 LegendaryZ wrote:On August 13 2011 11:21 HyperLimen wrote:On August 13 2011 11:17 AlBundy wrote:
Because this is a STRATEGY game. You're pretty ignorant if you think there isn't some serious strategy and mind gaming going on in SF4. With meter management, its essentially a RTS with perfect information as opposed to having a fog of war. No it's not. It's a fighting game. Just because strategy becomes a factor to play on a competent level doesn't throw a game into the strategy genre. I hate it when people make these weak links between vastly different games because you could theoretically make that connection between any two games, which makes the connection a pointless one to make in the first place. I'll just assume you aren't very good at RTS or fighting games to have made this statement. At high levels of play, the genres are extremely similar. The only true difference is mechanics.
At high levels, strategy plays a big part in NASCAR. The same is true about tennis, Counterstrike, Pac Man, and competitive pistol shooting. But all the genres are extremely similar. The only true difference is the mechanics... -_-
See what I did there?
As for the OP, LOL at saying Daigo switched to a high tier from mid tier. Which mid tier character was that? The character with almost no bad matchups? Daigo always played a high tier character. Maybe not top tier like Yun, but definitely on the higher end of the scale. As for why there's a difference in views on balance, people whine about imbalance in both games. It's just a little bit more accepted in fighting games because it's unreasonable to make every character viable. There's certainly plenty of bitching when there are a select few god tier characters, though.
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You can usually always do something better so why cry imbalance when you could just get better at the game. Unless everyone hits the skill ceiling and does everything perfect I think we should stay away from imbalance talk.
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Due to the nature of SC2 there is no good way to know if the game is balanced or not because so much is left unexplored. With that said, there is a very odd obsession with never taking away from someones win. Whether it is the meta game, or a player chokes from the pressure, or is jet lagged, or balance complaints it seems the default answer is that the person who won played great. The game is highly complex and there is many factors to victory and defeat, the better player doesn't always win. But again, no real way to know how balanced the game actually is, and so far day9 has proven to be pretty correct(refering to when zerg were able to solve their protoss issues).
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The races are different to the point that being really good at one doesn't mean that you'll be any better than "ok" at another. This makes race changing a lot of work. Pair that with the fact that Blizzard is willing to actually patch the game in response to imbalance gives everyone a vested interest in portraying their race as either balanced or underpowered.
This has become so common within the scene that it's recognized as a pointless argument and thus is shunned. It is also how legitimate imbalances can be completely ignored.
The end result is that Blizzard is going to do what they're going to do and whatever they do decide to do won't be based on what happens in a post on the forums. Thus it's better for TL mods to shut down pointless balance arguments before they completely overtake the forums the way they have on the official battle.net ones.
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No game is ever perfectly balanced, despite what fanatical BW fans might say. Blizzard (and KeSPA for BW) just have done a decent job of applying small tweaks, often just map changes, to compensate for shifts in player skill and the metagame.
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On August 13 2011 11:17 mprs wrote:
Saying the game is imbalanced implies that you have tried every possible thing, and there is no way to win. This hasn't happened yet. Until it happens, it is not called imbalance and it is called giving up. No, imbalance is when the rewards of an action far outweighs its risk, and consistently outdoes the standard responses of other races. By your POV we literally should never create a balance patch, ever ever ever ever ever, because we never ever will have tried any and all variations of possible responses.
Please attempt to make logically coherent posts in the future.
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People complain about imbalance because there is only three races, and the game is competitive. We dont want to be narrowed into into one or two races, or accept that were playing with out hands tied behind our back, because of the laziness of developers.
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Never ever listen to Idra. His bitching about terran being weak in brood war ruins anything else he saids.
Saying SC2 isn't balanced shits all over the players who do win.
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I have seen people talking about what they think is unbalanced. But team liquid doesn't allow this. I dont know why we can't talk about it. I thought a fourm was a place where people talk about the game. But it seem like it's just SC2 new's site for me.(With the one fourm like this with i quite enjoy}
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Starcraft 2 has THREE races races where as SF4 and other competitive fighting games like SSBB have a ton of characters. When people buy fighter games they don't expect the game to be perfectly balanced and they don't expect updates. They are still angry that the game isn't balanced (trust me, the SSBB scene is so dominated by Meta Knight with only a few that can hope to compete and people are angry that some characters are so imbalanced) but they know nothing will ever be done on the matter and so it is pointless to prove something. Making a thread about MK being imbalanced do nothing even if people agree with him or not, so people don't do them. On the other hand, in SC2 if a lot of people complain about a particular issue Blizzard WILL work hard at examining the issue and when they have deemed something to be imbalanced they fix it. It takes time but surely in a few years we will have a game that's perfectly balanced.
Finally, imagine if one of the 3 races ended up to be imbalanced, one was balanced, and one was overpower. Would you really want to see tournaments like the GSL or seasons like NASL with 80% Terran, 15% Protoss and 5% Zerg? Of course not TvT can be fun but seeing ONLY that would be sooo boring. In fighters theres always a High Tier that can all somewhat compete with each other so they'll be variety still, at least a lot more that in above example.
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@Koillete: It's because the posts are 99% of the time vitriolic and uneducated, it does nothing but damages the community [and our collective IQ]. Balance should be left to be people who genuinely understand the game.
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As long you are not top20 progamer in the world balance does not affect you in starcraft2. It is right now so good balanced that additional training for every lower player effects his play so much more than any balance change could.
The reason why balance complaints are ignored or are frowned against is because in 99,9999% of all the complaints there wasn't actually an imbalance but the person complaining just played poorly.
For every "normal" post about balance you can read in the forums you get 1000 complaints in almost every thread from bronze-masters players who complain about balance just because they play poorly.
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As I am big in the fighting game community myself, I think that fighting game fans avoid balance discussion because you are always in an avoidable situation. Matchups can easily be predicted and generally if you get hit...its your own fault.
Now look at SC. Meta game shifts according to what a popular strategy is at the time. Something may not even look imbalanced until months down the road. For example, everyone and their mother thought BFH were shit a few months ago. Now people are calling them imbalanced due to strong timings that can be had with them.
Also, meta game shifts in Street Fighter seemingly happen over night (if ever because the Japanese figure the game out incredibly fast) where in SC 2 a shift could take MONTHS.
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On August 13 2011 11:56 Mordiford wrote:Show nested quote +On August 13 2011 11:53 skirmisheR wrote:On August 13 2011 11:46 Mordiford wrote:On August 13 2011 11:42 skirmisheR wrote:Thanks for all the answers! :D On August 13 2011 11:32 LegendaryZ wrote:On August 13 2011 11:21 HyperLimen wrote:On August 13 2011 11:17 AlBundy wrote:
Because this is a STRATEGY game. You're pretty ignorant if you think there isn't some serious strategy and mind gaming going on in SF4. With meter management, its essentially a RTS with perfect information as opposed to having a fog of war. No it's not. It's a fighting game. Just because strategy becomes a factor to play on a competent level doesn't throw a game into the strategy genre. I hate it when people make these weak links between vastly different games because you could theoretically make that connection between any two games, which makes the connection a pointless one to make in the first place. I pretty much agree with HyperLimen, except for that you actually have "fog of war" in Street Fighter (You cannot see and react to all the opponent moves in time, you have to guess). But there are a LOT of strategy in SF4 as well. I used to believe that it's almost 100% about mechanics, but it really isn't. Sure they are different, and I get your point though. How can you agree with HyperLime's points if understand his points as well? Alright, Halo is basically an RTS, also you have fog of war in that as well. Need for Speed is basically an RTS. On that note, SC2 is basically a fighting game. No, they focus on different aspects, the strategic depth of Street Fighter is incomparable to a dedicated strategy game. I understand that just because SF4 and SC2 have similarities they are not the same game, but I think the similarities that they have are enough to excuse my thread. You misunderstood the FoW. What I meant was that there is things you can't react to in SF4 as well as there are things you cannot react to in SC2. If your opponent hides his build or relies on hidden info the game becomes more of a coinflip. The same applies to SF4, if your opponent blindcounters what you are doing you lose even if you are the better player overall. SC2 is still an RTS and SF4 is still a fighting game, but the FoW in SC2 has a counterpart in SF4. Excuse my english. The FoW counterpart exists in just about every game where reaction-time is a factor, the same could be said of Tekken, BlazBlue... almost any fighting game and for some FPSs as well. The point is when you draw comparisons like this, you can make any game comparable to another and it doesn't really work because then what's the point? This is why I drew the comparison with Halo, what's the difference then...?
I think this is a misunderstanding, sorry, what I meant was:
1. I believe that SF4 is essentially an RTS when it comes to what I wrote in the first long post. I don't understand why the two communities looks on balance so differently, and the fact that SC2 is an RTS and SF4 is a fighting game doesn't explain why, because there are enough similarities to say that "The communities shouldn't react differently to balance just because of this". What I agreed on was that I know that you cannot just make weak links between two games and say that they are similar. But I argue that the links between these games are enough to nullify the argument "but this is an RTS and this is a fighting game". I hope you get my point?
2 Second point, has nothing to do with first point, I just wanted to state that there ARE fog of war in fighting games as well. This doesnt make the two games similar, this was just a criticizm to HyperLimez post. There are FoW in every game (well, depends what you count as FoW).
So: I agree on that clumping two games together with weak links are bad. But I believe that these links between these games are enough to be able to say that "There should be another reason why people look on balance so differently than the "This is an RTS and this is a fighting game" argument, because the similarities between the games are enough to say that there should be another reason for the different reactions to balance.
FoW, yes it exists in every game. HyperlimeZ said fighting games had none, and I just disagreed, had nothing to do with the other things we were discussing.
Agreed?
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Why cannot the SC community accept that people have varying opinions none of which are remotely worth listening to unless the person is in a position to change things at which point they're just as likely to be stubborn morons obsessed with their own narcissistic ideas because they believe that only they know what's right because those are the kind of people who become successful community figures.
In short, no one cares stop polluting forums with these endless bullshit threads complaining about other people complaining.
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On August 13 2011 12:30 lizzard_warish wrote:
@Koillete: It's because the posts are 99% of the time vitriolic and uneducated, it does nothing but damages the community [and our collective IQ]. Balance should be left to be people who genuinely understand the game.
I don't see how it damages the community and our collective IQ. Balance affect alot more NON-pros then pro. More non-pros. I hate these, Only pro's can talk about balance?
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The game is supposed to be balanced.
A fighting game doesn't have to be, because even if one character is superior to every other, every player could use that character and it would be fair. And there are so many characters that they can just disregard the terrible ones and still have plenty of viable ones.
In Starcraft, there are only 3 races. If one turns out to be inferior, that means you've got to play one of the other 2. And if one is superior, that means everyone has to play that one race, and it just becomes extremely boring.
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On August 13 2011 12:31 skirmisheR wrote:Show nested quote +On August 13 2011 11:56 Mordiford wrote:On August 13 2011 11:53 skirmisheR wrote:On August 13 2011 11:46 Mordiford wrote:On August 13 2011 11:42 skirmisheR wrote:Thanks for all the answers! :D On August 13 2011 11:32 LegendaryZ wrote:On August 13 2011 11:21 HyperLimen wrote:On August 13 2011 11:17 AlBundy wrote:
Because this is a STRATEGY game. You're pretty ignorant if you think there isn't some serious strategy and mind gaming going on in SF4. With meter management, its essentially a RTS with perfect information as opposed to having a fog of war. No it's not. It's a fighting game. Just because strategy becomes a factor to play on a competent level doesn't throw a game into the strategy genre. I hate it when people make these weak links between vastly different games because you could theoretically make that connection between any two games, which makes the connection a pointless one to make in the first place. I pretty much agree with HyperLimen, except for that you actually have "fog of war" in Street Fighter (You cannot see and react to all the opponent moves in time, you have to guess). But there are a LOT of strategy in SF4 as well. I used to believe that it's almost 100% about mechanics, but it really isn't. Sure they are different, and I get your point though. How can you agree with HyperLime's points if understand his points as well? Alright, Halo is basically an RTS, also you have fog of war in that as well. Need for Speed is basically an RTS. On that note, SC2 is basically a fighting game. No, they focus on different aspects, the strategic depth of Street Fighter is incomparable to a dedicated strategy game. I understand that just because SF4 and SC2 have similarities they are not the same game, but I think the similarities that they have are enough to excuse my thread. You misunderstood the FoW. What I meant was that there is things you can't react to in SF4 as well as there are things you cannot react to in SC2. If your opponent hides his build or relies on hidden info the game becomes more of a coinflip. The same applies to SF4, if your opponent blindcounters what you are doing you lose even if you are the better player overall. SC2 is still an RTS and SF4 is still a fighting game, but the FoW in SC2 has a counterpart in SF4. Excuse my english. The FoW counterpart exists in just about every game where reaction-time is a factor, the same could be said of Tekken, BlazBlue... almost any fighting game and for some FPSs as well. The point is when you draw comparisons like this, you can make any game comparable to another and it doesn't really work because then what's the point? This is why I drew the comparison with Halo, what's the difference then...? I think this is a misunderstanding, sorry, what I meant was: 1. I believe that SF4 is essentially an RTS when it comes to what I wrote in the first long post. I don't understand why the two communities looks on balance so differently, and the fact that SC2 is an RTS and SF4 is a fighting game doesn't explain why, because there are enough similarities to say that "The communities shouldn't react differently to balance just because of this". What I agreed on was that I know that you cannot just make weak links between two games and say that they are similar. But I argue that the links between these games are enough to nullify the argument "but this is an RTS and this is a fighting game". I hope you get my point? 2 Second point, has nothing to do with first point, I just wanted to state that there ARE fog of war in fighting games as well. This doesnt make the two games similar, this was just a criticizm to HyperLimez post. There are FoW in every game (well, depends what you count as FoW). So: I agree on that clumping two games together with weak links are bad. But I believe that these links between these games are enough to be able to say that "There should be another reason why people look on balance so differently than the "This is an RTS and this is a fighting game" argument, because the similarities between the games are enough to say that there should be another reason for the different reactions to balance. FoW, yes it exists in every game. HyperlimeZ said fighting games had none, and I just disagreed, had nothing to do with the other things we were discussing. Agreed?
I think we're on the same page here, more or less.
As for the outlook on balance being different, I addressed that in regards to TL specifically and to the game in general, there's a lot more theory-crafting to be done in regards to countering a particular strategy and since there are only three races as opposed to a large roster of characters there isn't much to go around in that regard.
When it comes to Street Fighter, some characters have very clearly observable advantages in regards to their good matchups and potentially safer movesets, there isn't really a case of, "Well you should try countering that with a Shoryuken" as far as theory-crafting goes because it's so clear-cut. In Starcraft, there is a lot more to explore in regards to finding the counter to something. Many strategies have gone out of style because people realized ways to identify and shut them down.
On August 13 2011 12:34 Koillette wrote:Show nested quote +On August 13 2011 12:30 lizzard_warish wrote:
@Koillete: It's because the posts are 99% of the time vitriolic and uneducated, it does nothing but damages the community [and our collective IQ]. Balance should be left to be people who genuinely understand the game. I don't see how it damages the community and our collective IQ. Balance affect alot more NON-pros then pro. More non-pros. I hate these, Only pro's can talk about balance?
No, not only pros can talk about balance, but only pros really have something worthwhile in regards to experience at high levels of play. If your "balance issue" can be overcome by simply playing better, then there's nothing that needs changing other than your skill and play.
It's not productive to talk about balance because everyone is talking from a level of play that is largely irrelevant and the people who have the required experience to discuss it have so much invested in their own race for the success of their career as a pro that it's a little difficult to expect them to be objective and for them to disregard racial bias.
Furthermore, all balance discussions on TL does is take away from the success of players, particularly in LR thread. If you wish to discuss balance, do it on Blizzard's forums, it doesn't do anything here.
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I think it's because in the brood war days, we observed all of this innovation and progression of strategies and the overall metagame. What people sometimes fail to realize is that the map pool was shifting far more frequently in the BW days and the shifts were more drastic so you had a wider and more diverse set of maps which helped spur that innovation.
The popular answer to anything is that people will have some sort of epiphany and new strats will come out which make a perceived imbalance much less severe or non-existent. T
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On August 13 2011 12:36 TedJustice wrote:
In Starcraft, there are only 3 races. If one turns out to be inferior, that means you've got to play one of the other 2. And if one is superior, that means everyone has to play that one race, and it just becomes extremely boring.
This is what makes starcraft such a great game. It's not about the units, or even your race, it's about how you use them to make YOUR play superior.
Do you remember when everyone thought the muta was imba in SC1? Neither do I, but after the medic came along, everything was peachy.
The QQers will die out, as 4 gates and banshee's go out of style.
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There's so many more factors to an RTS game than a Fighting game. There's never any lag, all the characters have fixed frames and range of moves. Also, maps don't play a role at all in SF4, whereas Maps are a huge component of Starcraft 2
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IMO, imbalance whines are pointless. As seen from Broodwar, people can overcome this so called "imbalance" by innovating new strategies, not from patches nerfing or buffing whatnot.
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On August 13 2011 12:34 Koillette wrote:Show nested quote +On August 13 2011 12:30 lizzard_warish wrote:
@Koillete: It's because the posts are 99% of the time vitriolic and uneducated, it does nothing but damages the community [and our collective IQ]. Balance should be left to be people who genuinely understand the game. I don't see how it damages the community and our collective IQ. Balance affect alot more NON-pros then pro. More non-pros. I hate these, Only pro's can talk about balance? Not pros, good players. Outside of that its whining ignorantly when the response that will get you out of the situation is always akin to: Its not imbalanced your doing it wrong, heres an example, or, its not imbalanced, you just floated 3 grand, mistimed your gates, etc etc etc.
It damages the community by spreading falsehoods, creating a culture of defeat [I cant get out of silver zerg is UP against protoss waahhh], will result in disseminating inferior ideas and strategies rather than improvement, etc etc.
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On August 13 2011 12:48 SkimGuy wrote:
There's so many more factors to an RTS game than a Fighting game. There's never any lag, all the characters have fixed frames and range of moves. Also, maps don't play a role at all in SF4, whereas Maps are a huge component of Starcraft 2
While levels don't play an actual role in the game for SF, there is a CLEAR psychological change when you get a level that you LIKE.
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Won't read the whole thing.
Biggest issue is that there are too many builds, match ups, strategies, timings, skill levels to just balance the game at a the though of imbalance. That was this mistake when blizzard started listening to bronze players and kept changing the game to fit their needs. The game needs to be balanced at the VERY top, because if you're not playing your A game then it really isn't about balance, you could have macro'd better, micro'd better, used different units, hit a better timing. All sorts of things are to be contributed and comparing this game to a fighting game where most of the time similar moves to used regularly which leads to imbalance being easily noticed in one character isn't the easiest way to make an argument.
Also on a side note there are two more games coming out if you couldn't figure out how you were supposed to win in SC2 then HoTS might be where you shine. When the last game comes through then you can worry about imbalance and hopefully make a more even maps and matchups.
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On August 13 2011 11:29 Lurker87 wrote:
Chess is imbalanced... In a "perfect" world, white is playing for a win, black is playing to draw. White is always ahead a move unless he makes some sort of mistake. However, in order to offset it, people playing black try for, at the time, rather obscure ideas. First time you show a player the Sicilian, they'll look at you as if you are crazy.
I agree with mprs.
There is no proof that this is the case. Most grandmasters throughout history have actually believed that a perfectly played game of chess results in a tie. There's not even any existing proof that a perfectly played game doesn't result in a win for black.
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Agree with the OP. At higher levels (pros), the slightest imbalance changes the tide of a game, and imbalance exists. It can be an amazing topic for a proper debate. Too bad that there is people not prepared for that kind of debate, maybe for lack of game knowledge (for example some people who think that understand the game and is in diamond or something) or for incapacity to argue in a discusion (some poeple just can't sustain their words with facts, they like to trash talk). As the OP said, i have no clue why the hell some people reacts to the imbalance fact like a woman during the period.
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On August 13 2011 12:56 NoobSkills wrote:
Won't read the whole thing.
Biggest issue is that there are too many builds, match ups, strategies, timings, skill levels to just balance the game at a the though of imbalance. That was this mistake when blizzard started listening to bronze players and kept changing the game to fit their needs. The game needs to be balanced at the VERY top, because if you're not playing your A game then it really isn't about balance, you could have macro'd better, micro'd better, used different units, hit a better timing. All sorts of things are to be contributed and comparing this game to a fighting game where most of the time similar moves to used regularly which leads to imbalance being easily noticed in one character isn't the easiest way to make an argument.
Also on a side note there are two more games coming out if you couldn't figure out how you were supposed to win in SC2 then HoTS might be where you shine. When the last game comes through then you can worry about imbalance and hopefully make a more even maps and matchups.
I think you should read the whole thing. Are there really more builds/matchups/strategies/timings and skill levels at SC2 than SF4?
I agree on that the game should be balanced at the very top rather than around anything else, but I also think that it's important to think about mistakes when balancing as well. If one race lost if they made a mistake while another race one could still win even if they made a mistake, then that is something to balance around as well, right? Nobody is playing perfectly or will ever do. But I think you agree with me here, just wanted to add this
Your other point is good. You shouldn't worry that much about imbalances until the game have been figured out a bit and the dust is gone. But it's still important to have balance in mind, right? Otherwise we will have WC3 all over again where the game never got balanced, and since developers can't patch a game forever we should take care of the time we have? But yes, I see your point.
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On August 13 2011 12:34 Koillette wrote:Show nested quote +On August 13 2011 12:30 lizzard_warish wrote:
@Koillete: It's because the posts are 99% of the time vitriolic and uneducated, it does nothing but damages the community [and our collective IQ]. Balance should be left to be people who genuinely understand the game. I don't see how it damages the community and our collective IQ. Balance affect alot more NON-pros then pro. More non-pros. I hate these, Only pro's can talk about balance?
This statement is wrong. Can you show me any examples of where a non-pro or even pro genuinely loses a game because of imbalance and not because of their bad decision making or mechanics?
Its a bait but ideally . .. yes, balance should be focused at the top. In lower levels players might not have the mechanics or multitasking to play a race to its potential so balance shouldnt be based around them.
For example if a player has poor larva injects then it will affect his economy and unit production so they cant stop a seemingly unstoppable push from P or T and they cry imba!. When in reality it might be because their queen has 50 energy and another 4 roaches or lings would of wont that battle. You could argue that its easier to queue units to create that push than it is to defend it but then thats player error and not really the games fault.
Its not like this is a radically new idea that races have a different requirement of skill to be able to play well. Look at BW and the ridiculous number of foreigner protoss pros compared to Z or T. Then look at korea.
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I know that I'm simplifying here, and I may sound ignorant, but it takes thousands of matches to even kind of determine if something is imba, or underpowered in SC2. It doesn't take that many matches to determine that Hakan is a terrible character who will never be able to compete with a competent Yun. Or that Q is terrible, and can't beat a good Chun or Urien without having a massive amount of skill on the other guy. There's a slight difference between the two games, in that respect. Alot of the top-tier characters in SF are found rather quickly. Not so much with SC2, since there's a lot more variables than SF has. Builds are found over thousands of hours of play, and their counters are found with that same effort.
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On August 13 2011 12:30 Steel wrote:
Starcraft 2 has THREE races races where as SF4 and other competitive fighting games like SSBB have a ton of characters. When people buy fighter games they don't expect the game to be perfectly balanced and they don't expect updates. They are still angry that the game isn't balanced (trust me, the SSBB scene is so dominated by Meta Knight with only a few that can hope to compete and people are angry that some characters are so imbalanced) but they know nothing will ever be done on the matter and so it is pointless to prove something. Making a thread about MK being imbalanced do nothing even if people agree with him or not, so people don't do them. On the other hand, in SC2 if a lot of people complain about a particular issue Blizzard WILL work hard at examining the issue and when they have deemed something to be imbalanced they fix it. It takes time but surely in a few years we will have a game that's perfectly balanced.
This time though the SF4-creator reacted to the issue about imbalance and are going to patch the game once again (this time for free) because of the reactions from the community. The SSBB creator on the other hand doesn't care, but as for SF4 there are people caring and doing something about the imbalances.
On August 13 2011 12:30 Steel wrote:Finally, imagine if one of the 3 races ended up to be imbalanced, one was balanced, and one was overpower. Would you really want to see tournaments like the GSL or seasons like NASL with 80% Terran, 15% Protoss and 5% Zerg? Of course not TvT can be fun but seeing ONLY that would be sooo boring. In fighters theres always a High Tier that can all somewhat compete with each other so they'll be variety still, at least a lot more that in above example.
Was this a reaction to my post? I haven't said the countrary. And if you put it that way (that there are high tiers with SEVERAL characters in fighting games but the high tier of SC2 only is one race) then it sounds even more important to balance SC2 than SF4, and therefore the SC2-community should comment on balance even more than the SF4-community (rather than how it is right now)
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On August 13 2011 13:03 T0fuuu wrote:Show nested quote +On August 13 2011 12:34 Koillette wrote:On August 13 2011 12:30 lizzard_warish wrote:
@Koillete: It's because the posts are 99% of the time vitriolic and uneducated, it does nothing but damages the community [and our collective IQ]. Balance should be left to be people who genuinely understand the game. I don't see how it damages the community and our collective IQ. Balance affect alot more NON-pros then pro. More non-pros. I hate these, Only pro's can talk about balance? This statement is wrong. Can you show me any examples of where a non-pro or even pro genuinely loses a game because of imbalance and not because of their bad decision making or mechanics? Its a bait but ideally . .. yes, balance should be focused at the top. In lower levels players might not have the mechanics or multitasking to play a race to its potential so balance shouldnt be based around them. For example if a player has poor larva injects then it will affect his economy and unit production so they cant stop a seemingly unstoppable push from P or T and they cry imba!. When in reality it might be because their queen has 50 energy and another 4 roaches or lings would of wont that battle. You could argue that its easier to queue units to create that push than it is to defend it but then thats player error and not really the games fault. Its not like this is a radically new idea that races have a different requirement of skill to be able to play well. Look at BW and the ridiculous number of foreigner protoss pros compared to Z or T. Then look at korea.
Yes, It's important to not see every loss/win as imbalance. But if it's easier to win with race X than Y, doesn't that mean that the game is imbalanced? If zerg misses 2 larva injects and faces a protoss who misses only one chronoboost/whatever, and the protoss wins, doesn't that mean that the game is imbalanced EVEN if zerg made a mistake which solely lost him the game? I don't agree with people saying "If it's not 100% impossible to win a matchup then the game is balanced", because it's about balancing the game so that the skill levels always (or as often as possible) determine who wins, not which race you play.
I agree with your response though, I don't see why silver players should argue balance (unless the game is being balanced at low level, but that would KILL ESPORTS), because they will say "Hydras OP" just because they got outmacroed one game, which only shows that they don't know very much about the game.
Oh god I sound like an elitist sorry
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On August 13 2011 13:02 skirmisheR wrote:Show nested quote +On August 13 2011 12:56 NoobSkills wrote:
Won't read the whole thing.
Biggest issue is that there are too many builds, match ups, strategies, timings, skill levels to just balance the game at a the though of imbalance. That was this mistake when blizzard started listening to bronze players and kept changing the game to fit their needs. The game needs to be balanced at the VERY top, because if you're not playing your A game then it really isn't about balance, you could have macro'd better, micro'd better, used different units, hit a better timing. All sorts of things are to be contributed and comparing this game to a fighting game where most of the time similar moves to used regularly which leads to imbalance being easily noticed in one character isn't the easiest way to make an argument.
Also on a side note there are two more games coming out if you couldn't figure out how you were supposed to win in SC2 then HoTS might be where you shine. When the last game comes through then you can worry about imbalance and hopefully make a more even maps and matchups. I think you should read the whole thing. Are there really more builds/matchups/strategies/timings and skill levels at SC2 than SF4? I agree on that the game should be balanced at the very top rather than around anything else, but I also think that it's important to think about mistakes when balancing as well. If one race lost if they made a mistake while another race one could still win even if they made a mistake, then that is something to balance around as well, right? Nobody is playing perfectly or will ever do. But I think you agree with me here, just wanted to add this Your other point is good. You shouldn't worry that much about imbalances until the game have been figured out a bit and the dust is gone. But it's still important to have balance in mind, right? Otherwise we will have WC3 all over again where the game never got balanced, and since developers can't patch a game forever we should take care of the time we have? But yes, I see your point.
If you care about it now a game that will soon be obsolete will be balanced and not the next game. I'd rather have the players hash it out and then we could determine what is up, but then again didn't Bisu invent the DT corsair gameplay late in BW which means there is always an opening for change anyways.
Now, we can take a simple nonfactual example Terran can turtle with 1 rax and make 3 command centers and bunkers and be safe. Zerg can choose to Nydus, 4 Hatch, Muta, bust, but until every response is tested on every map by the best players (which there are few of) 100's of times we won't know what actually needs to be changed. There are certain things that were obvious as far as early game timings where your opponent really wouldn't be given a chance to succeed such as the reaper build.
SF4 fighters have a limited set of moves, but the fighter can do whatever they please at any time while starcraft has not only an unlimited amount of moves, but no moves that are dictated either all are chosen and then with those moves the player can do whatever they please. That is why balance is a bit hard to come by.
Do you by chance happen to have a list of patch notes from BW? Because I already thing 1 patch for SC2 > every change from BW
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TL; DR
User was temp banned for this post.
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What do we gain by claiming there -is- an imbalance? Does that mean that Protoss are now "forgiven" of 14% of their overall losses versus terran because of a "matchup imbalance"? Do Zerg now get more money for winning tournaments, because they're statistically not favoured to do so? Do Terran now get to play best-of-fours versus Zerg where tie goes to the Terran?
I don't think it's a question of why the SC community can't accept imbalance, its a question of how you'd determine an imbalance in the first place, and what you'd do with that information when you got it. I'd think a vast, vast majority of the SC community would struggle to even come up with a solid definition for the concept of balance. To think that most of us have any deep insight or clear vision of what the imbalances of SC2 are is a little nuts.
I guess the final answer I'm willing to give is that the SC community is unwilling to accept imbalance because the SC community realizes there's no hard metric from which to gauge imbalance. Basically, it's got sweet parallels to arguing the existence/absence of god.
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In fighting games, it's universal to have Tiers. Especially in the Street Fighter and SSB community. Everyone knows Metaknight is imba, and when over half the people who sign up for major tournaments are playing him there isn't much anyone can do about it except ban him in tournaments.
The nice thing, is that in SC2 Blizzard is actively working on balance issues around the clock. Most of us know that Protoss has been much MUCH against Zerg since the Roach and Infestor buff, and Blizzard will see this and make fixes.
What I do disagree with, and what should really stay out of the forums, is the high ammount of 'Idra balance QQ'. Dispite being a high level player, he doesn't complain about balance in a reasonable way. All he simply says is that "I lose, therefor any race I'm not playing is unbalanced", which is not acceptable at all and does not help the game progress.
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I think that the culture of crying imba is very different in fighter vs. RTS games. RTS games are only for the computer. They all require internet connection to play. Therefore, balance patches are always possible, and there complaining about imbalance might lead to a change in the game. Until very recently however, it was impossible to patch most fighting games. It is impossible to update arcade games, N64 games, etc. by releasing a patch. Until the newest generation of consoles, fighting games did not recieve balance tweaks. So there was literally no point in complaining about imbalance. Perhaps this has lead to a general acceptance of imbalance in fighting games, but not in RTS games.
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Part of the difference in attitude towards balance between the two communities is also where they come from. The RTS community has developed in an environment where games were patched to fix balance issues so there was always a lot of discussion and argument over it. The fighting game community developed primarily around arcade cabinets and old school consoles, which weren't patched for balance. The balance at release was pretty much what you were stuck with and you had to just suck it up and deal with it. While the situation has changed with fighting games now being patched for balance regularly, the general attitude of sucking it up and just playing the game has largely remained for those who came up in that environment. That might be some of the attitude you're seeing.
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But if it's easier to win with race X than Y, doesn't that mean that the game is imbalanced? If zerg misses 2 larva injects and faces a protoss who misses only one chronoboost/whatever, and the protoss wins, doesn't that mean that the game is imbalanced EVEN if zerg made a mistake which solely lost him the game? I don't agree with people saying "If it's not 100% impossible to win a matchup then the game is balanced", because it's about balancing the game so that the skill levels always (or as often as possible) determine who wins, not which race you play.
Skill levels are irrelevant when both are at the ceiling. Top level players won't miss injects or chronoboosts either, so that's not actually imbalance, just a difference of difficulty. Also, chronoboosts aren't nearly as important to protoss as injects are to zerg, and protoss have other mechanics that zerg don't have to deal with; Not the greatest comparison in the world.
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The fact that you compared a game that has 3 "characters" vs. a game that has 39(?) characters is not fair. It's obvious that a game that has 6 potential non-mirror matchups is obviously much closer to balanced than a game that has 39! amount of matchups. When I played Melee, there were only about 6-7 characters that were tournament viable. You'd rarely see any characters winning outside of those. Now if you made a game with only those characters, then the game would technically be a closer to balanced. Hell, take the best 3 characters in a fighting game and only have those characters. Probably be pretty damn balanced.
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SC2 is so complex that the chance of something overpowering the game is lessened. In a fighting game, if 1 move is too fast it can bring all competition to a crashing halt.
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We want every race to have players, and we want every matchup to be based on one players skill vs anothers, with no player given a free advantage.
Street Fighter has so many characters of course they cant expect each matchup to be balanced. Their tier system cannot apply to our system. If terran is better than zerg but equal to protoss, we have no zerg.
We cannot accept imbalance because we want every matchup between every race to be a dynamic test of skill.
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I'm not sure if I really like this direct correlation you're presenting about a Fighting game and an RTS.
The reason why fighting tiers exist, in practically (if not every) fighting game, is because some characters have a wider variety of usable moves (usable as in you can enact them quickly or powerfully at the cost of a slower speed, or being unblock-able.) Most characters have similar moves, but some characters have more, and some of their moves are more potent for the cost of mobility, or strength.
Since there are three races, and three entirely different tiers that benefit each individual race differently, it's not quite so easy to make hard-line decisions about balance.
I'm not all too familiar with the fighter scene, but this is what I've taken away from it after playing SSBB for a while.
Overall, I think that balance discussion at this point in SC2 is rather irrelevant. Take the latest shift from "Protoss, op," to "why does Protoss have the lowest success rate in tournaments?"
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? I don't hang out in the strategy forum all that much, but I thought it was pretty much generally accepted that sc2 ISN'T balanced. There is a difference between saying "X unit is imbalanced" and "The game is imbalanced". The first implies that you have tried all counters to it, which people obviously hasn't. The second one is just a statistically sound belief, not to mention something which experience (results) have pointed towards, not to mention something that most, if not all, pros agree with.
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RTS games are just so complex that it really needs to be balanced at high levels. Justin Wong can move to whoever is overpowered and crush with them. However a player chooses a race in SC and puts in a lot of time as the race, expecting it to be balanced becuase blizzard is still putting out patches and it turns out to not be, they are at an automatic disadvantage because they chose the wrong race at the beginning by chance.
This with consideration as to how much time it takes to master a race, you just have to expect nothing less than balance (even if through maps or an indirect way), or the game cannot be successful.
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On August 13 2011 11:32 LegendaryZ wrote:Show nested quote +On August 13 2011 11:21 HyperLimen wrote:On August 13 2011 11:17 AlBundy wrote:
Because this is a STRATEGY game. You're pretty ignorant if you think there isn't some serious strategy and mind gaming going on in SF4. With meter management, its essentially a RTS with perfect information as opposed to having a fog of war. No it's not. It's a fighting game. Just because strategy becomes a factor to play on a competent level doesn't throw a game into the strategy genre. I hate it when people make these weak links between vastly different games because you could theoretically make that connection between any two games, which makes the connection a pointless one to make in the first place.
I agree. Its almost as bad as comparing starcraft and chess. Though in all fairness the argument that the way we approach balance should be different just because sc2 is a strategy game is pretty shitty. The argument needs to be elaborated, to say the least.
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I'm sure that this has been pointed out but these two types of games are not comparable, no one has ever expected a fighting game to be perfectly balanced because it would be impossible to balance 20+ characters and keep it interesting but as you pointed out tier lists are made and people can know who the best competitive fighters are. In addition it's much easier to switch characters in fighting games than races in SC2 especially because in fighting games you can clearly trade up as diego did while SC2 is close enough to balanced that the loss in experience with your race will be a bigger problem than the slight advantage you might gain.
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I have no experience with the Street-Fighter scene, but I am pretty sure I understand the SC2 scene's preoccupation with balance. When two players start a game, there is the assumption that the winner will be the one who has put in more practice hours, thinks more fluidly, and plays more solidly. If the winner is the other player, there is a feeling of falseness to the competition. We feel cheated. That is the whole (theoretically) reason for balance debate in the first place. In theory we do not care about equal win-rates between the races so much as we care about the best player winning. If you doubt the desire of spectators and players to see the competitor(s) win that desire it most, just note that almost all major tournaments for chess, hockey, baseball, and even SC2 all use several game series. If one side wins because it got lucky, then the victory means nothing. Basically, we strive for balance because we want our wins to have meaning.
EDIT:
I just thought of why balance debate is met with so much anger by the SC2 scene. If someone claims that race X is overpowered, then they are basically claiming that all of the wins by that race are hollow. That is, if IdrA says that P is imbalanced right now, that means that Huk's victory in Dreamhack means nothing because he did not deserve his wins. That sucks, so we say IdrA is stupid and needs to grow up and that there are things that Z isn't trying and whatever, but I think the underlying reason is that we want to love Huk for being a gosu nerd baller. (That was just an example, Huk and IdrA are both amazing.)
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Although there are only 3 races, there are much more units, and unit combinations in SC2 (especially factoring in upgrades/maps) than in SF4. Which makes it impossibly hard to be truly balanced, but also extremely difficult to tell whats really imba. IMO we don't discuss balance because (as has been stated) it is such a slight margin that player skill in macro/micro, and all of the million other variables in a single match plays a much larger role in determining who wins. One unit may be OP but it still has a counter, so with good scouting and the proper counter even an OP unit wouldn't guarantee a win. If any unit was OP to the extent that it changed the outcome of games often, it would be extremely obvious by now.
Though in light of the topic, I do wish we could at least entertain the idea that, on certain maps, in certain match-ups (for example the 1/1/1 TvP push which has had great success lately ) some unit/unit compositions etc... are OP in the sense that they put an unfair amount of pressure on a player and force them into a certain unique position - usually to get a very specific comp to counter their opponents comp. And it may be that it is a much greater commitment to counter their opponents comp than for their opponent to even have it in the first place. To me that is OP.
I believe that in a conversation about these unique positions, while discussing all the possible options to handle them, it doesn't hurt to consider that they are perhaps 'Overly Powerful' positions for a race to be able to put another race into. However that is not an excuse for a race to just give up, because SC2 just has too many variables, there is no doubt 'Overly Powerful' positions - in the sense that I have defined them - for each race to impose upon other races, that have not been discovered. (personally I'm rooting for the nydus worm play)
tl;dr SC2 is too complicated to say that one entire race is OP. If we entertain the idea that some very specific comps, in certain match-ups, on certain maps, are in some sense OP, we can then begin to discuss how it would/could be possible to avoid getting ourselves into these specific situations. Shifting the metagame/evolving new strategies
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Starcraft 2 is an extremely complex game. There are thousands of different ways match-ups can unfold and I have yet to see 1 game resemble another.
Solid game-play for a vast majority of players, regardless of race, will win you games.
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IMO I just don't think this is an apple-to-apple comparison. SC2 with SF4? SC2 community with SF4 community? The point is that they don't need to be the same.
Edit: Balance in SC2 is not something that is constant. For example, last June (based on TL stats) SC2 seemed balanced. But in July, based on the stats, it seems SC2 is not yet balanced even though the latest patch couldn't have affected the balance. SC2 is a game that has so many things to explore and discover that until all those things have been discovered there will always be times when the game is balanced and then not and then balanced and so on. SF4 is small (few characters, etc.) compared to SC2 that's why it is very easy to see when the game is balanced and not.
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From liquidpedia:
Overpowered (often abbreviated to OP) - a unit or ability that is the best choice in a disproportionate number of situations (marginalising other choices) and/or excessively hard to counter by the opponent compared to the effort required to use it. For example, the 1 supply/2 armor/15hp regen Roach from early Beta was overpowered in many ZvT and ZvP scenarios.
It's like a UFC figher beating up some child on the street. Or a heavyweight beating on a lightweight. What's challenge in that? They wouldn't sell any tickets thats for sure since most of us don't like imbalance. We like a challenge and evenly matched pieces where better moves/player shows it. SC2 works the same way. See above. If it's no challenge for one tactic and almost impossible to defend that's imba and bad for sport. Bad for esport as well.
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I would say the answer lies in the difference between the games and what they are trying to accomplish. Some of this has already been mentioned in the thread, but sometimes obliquely:
Players can accept the fact of imbalance in SF4 because it's roster is so large. It does not need for every one-on-one pairing of the 30 something characters to be balanced to provide players and spectators with exciting matches, strategic depth and variety. Also, no one would believe them if they claimed that they could achieve that balance and would ridicule them for being insane if they tried. Even if they could somehow achieve that balance, it might very well be detrimental to players and spectators both: how do you get good at a game in which you have to prepare against 30 some odd match ups, each of which is different and each just as hard as every other one and is it worth your time to try? is a spectator willing to put in the time to get a decent grasp of that many matchups so they can actually understand (and as a result, enjoy) what's going on?
Starcraft needs the perception of balance much more badly than SF4. It only has 3 races, if one race were perceived to be weak and people played it less, fully half of the matchups would be at risk (e.g. zerg is weak, then of the 6 matchups, ZvZ, ZvP, and ZvT would fall in frequency). Starcraft is also at the forefront of e-sports, and desires to achieve the kind of prestige that is normally associated with traditional athletic sports. However, those sports are symmetric (the court or field is mirrored, or the 2 sides take turns) whereas one of the selling points of starcraft is 3 distinct sides. Thus starcraft 2 and it's fans are much more sensitive to perceptions of balance or imbalance; not only is balance more important to the game, but because that game has an entire social movement behind it yearning for legitimacy.
Short version: SF4 does not need the perception of balance because it's roster is so large. Sc2 needs the perception of balance because its roster is small and because it desires the prestige of traditional sports.
edit: grammar
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Wow, you people are wasting your time to begin with.
Anyone can say the game is imbalanced, it's not going to prove that it is or isn't unless you use some hardcore science.
Where did you even begin to compair a fighting game to an RTS, why, and why about it's "community," what's the point in thinking about it in depth and writing a wall of text about it...?
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I am not familiar with SF4, but I do play a lot of SSBM, and we have our own ideas of balance which might be similar to other fighting games.
Believe it or not, most Melee players consider the game, which has more than 25 characters, is balanced. Obviously, in the sense that balance is defined in starcraft (every race has an equal chance of beating ever other race) is impossible. Here, 'balance' means that a relatively large percentage of the cast has a reasonable chance of winning tournaments. A tier lists of course exists for Melee, as one does for any fighting game, and the top 5-10 members are considered to be tournament viable. The reason that this many are viable, and not just 1 or 2, is because the characters 'counter' each other in specific matchups, so no one character is always favored against every other. For example, Fox get pillared nonstop by Falco, who is extremely vulnerable to the edge game and rest combos of Jigglypuff, who cannot easily get inside the extreme range of Marth, who is quickly smashed off the stage by knee combos from Captain Falcon, who finds difficulty dealing with the speed and power of Fox. Any tourney-goer needs to pick two or three characters to master to ensure that they cannot just get countered by the right person, yet none of these matchups is unwinnable by any means. Each character has its own strengths and weaknesses and is as such considered balanced.
Balance means something entirely different in starcraft, that EVERY matchup is 50/50. In a game with only 3 cast members, this is clearly a necessity, since a rock-paper-scissors setup would just be silly and devolve into endless counterpicking in a tight circle. Yet we have seen how hard it is to truly achieve balance in a game with just 3 races, and warcraft 3, with its 4 selections, never got there. It is absurd to expect that all 45 non-mirror matchups in a game with 10 characters be 50/50, and that comes nowhere near the cast size of most fighters. So we define balance differently because it is the only reasonable solution for a game like starcraft, while the definiton of balance in ssbm is used because it makes sense in that context. If starcraft 2 had 15 races it would look a whole lot more like sf4.
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On August 13 2011 11:17 mprs wrote:
Saying the game is imbalanced implies that you have tried every possible thing, and there is no way to win. This hasn't happened yet. Until it happens, it is not called imbalance and it is called giving up.
THIS. EXACTLY THIS.
Seriously. There are a HUGE number of options for early / mid / lategame, so it is hardly possible to say "this unit is imbalanced" When there about 1000 other openings you could do to defend against it. There are also tons of styles to play with, tons of unit compositions, so it's really really hard to call imbalance.
It's the metagame, new styles arising, new builds. This month, Zerg might do great against Protoss because of Destiny's ling/Infestor style, and next month, it might be fine, but no patch was made. This sort of thing has been happening since release, and even in SC1.
And if the optimal build order, unit positioning, building positioning and micro have not been found or executed, then how can someone say X race can't beat X unit composition? Does that make sense? I dunno.
I think Blizzard has taken care of the things in this game that just sway outcomes really stupidly like HT Amulet upgrade. That was straight up wrong.
But people discard Idra's claims because he's known to be like that. If you go to BW threads (EX. TSL2 Map Imbalance thread) you can see that he has always claimed imbalance. I mean, he can certainly justify it, and I don't blaim him for getting angry or calling imbalance, but he's known for being such a 1 way street player. He is a macro player now, he was a macro player in BW, so there are ways to exploit him and metagame him, which will affect the balance for playing against him (lol?).
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6 pages and no one mentioned the double negative.
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My skills and experience lie neither in RTS or fighting games (though I have played both), so I can't offer any particulars about why balance is regarded differently in their respective communities, but I think it is worth thinking about with more fighting games than just SF4, even if it is the biggest one right now.
I think it might be good to take a look at a couple of fighting games whose tiers are considered to be relatively balanced in two rather different ways. The first is the Virtua Fighter series, a game with a Brood War-like (outside of Korea) reputation, a very difficult game that is considered by its proponents to be more exquisitely refined than any other fighting game out there. According to this, the tier list for the latest iteration, VF5: Final Showdown comes out as the following:
“S: Akira
A: Lau, Jacky, Taka, Lion
B: Everyone else
That's quite close! Even if one character is considered by far the best, no one is considered to have anything close to a "failing grade." The message from this tier list is indeed "Imbalances exist in this game but it's close enough that anybody can win with anyone." Also perhaps important to note is that VF is considered a series where you do not have time to master more than one character because of how complex they can be. This might mean that, like SC2, switching characters/races is considered to be too time-consuming to be worth it.
Let's look at another game's tier list: Hokuto no Ken (Fist of the North Star).
S++ : Rei
S+ : Toki - Juda
S : Raoh
A : Kenshiro / Thouther / Shin / Mamiya / Heart
B : Jagi
While there are now 5 ranks instead of 3, rather than call Jagi "D" tier and Rei "S" tier, they give the distinction of having them be "B" and "S++." The distinction here is that while some characters are good, others are GREAT. The reason why HnK's tiers are the way they are is that every character in this game has 100% combos and infinites. In any other fighting game, they would be brutally S-rank. However, in HnK, the top characters simply have more 100% combos and more ways to successfully land them. It is considered so imbalanced that it is balanced.
When talking to people who have played both of those games, I find that the main thing they have in common for why they are considered to be as balanced as they are is that all of the characters always have a good amount of options at any point in the fight. There is always more than one way to win. In a fighting game then, a character with consistently few options is always at a distinct disadvantage unless there is something else to greatly counterbalance that.
I think that the key difference between the Real Time Strategy and the Fighting Game, and why in the former the community is quick to say "things are unexplored" and in the latter people are eager to immediately lock in "tier lists," is how time factors into the strength of your race/character. Consider that, outside of super meter, in SF4 a character's strengths and weaknesses at 1 second into the match are about the same as in 50 seconds into the match. A character still has the same tools no matter where you place them in time. In SC2 however, time plays an enormous factor. Building your 10th SCV earlier rather than later does different things to the strength of your army. Losing a single SCV early on is much more detrimental than losing a single SCV in the mid or late game. Building particular units at different times affects the strength of a race tremendously, as does attacking with them. Options fluctuate tremendously based on when decisions are made, and an early disadvantage can ripple forward in time. This is often referred to as a "slippery slope," where once one starts falling behind it becomes tremendously difficult to make it back.All the same though, that disadvantage can be potentially mitigated by a different timing altogether.
So the difference between having a constant, unchanging set of options and one that changes over time based on your own decisions are why I think that "balance" is approached differently by the fighting game community and the RTS community. Fighting game players can look at the tools a character has and determine how they will do at any point in the fight, and from there they can determine tiers and even be comfortable with the idea of imbalance, even early on in the game's life. RTS players though have to factor in the timing of their decisions affecting the very strength of their army itself (and the ability to sustain that army), and that added variable is what makes the game feel so "unexplored" and difficult to determine the balance of.
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Take a statistic math and you will see how many composition you can put together for each race. Combine all 3 races we could have so many builds and composition. That's the beauty of RTS and SC. You can't compare them with 1v1 fighting game, it's just 1v1, which is much easier to nerf one character.
In SC, you nerf 1 single unit it could affect the whole match up, ie. you nerf colossus badly, it make the entire protoss composition unreliable cuz storms could die to EMPs easily and too slow + immobilize.
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Guns are overpowered in a knife fight.
On an serious note, imbalance implies that there is no way around a certain problem; that you literally look at a unit or combination of units and go "Yep I've done literally every way of engagement, unit combination, etc. to try and deal with this, and I still can't." This, unless you spend 12+ hours a day on the game, isn't true.
Figure it out, stop whining. (I play Protoss, and I know that my race isn't underpowered, I just play like shit)
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I think it because in SF4 its widely accepted how strong something is while in SC2 everyone thinks their own race is UP and everything else is OP.
Also I think that for example if someone has atrocious PvZ like me, which probably holds down your ranking, and better PvT and PvP, it seems like PvT and PvP is balanced but PvZ is imbalanced.
Also there is the metagame..
I know for myself I can find a huge mistake which led to me losing in every losing replay of mine, and progamers can probably see it in their replays.
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On August 13 2011 16:36 Mortal wrote:
Guns are overpowered in a knife fight.
On an serious note, imbalance implies that there is no way around a certain problem; that you literally look at a unit or combination of units and go "Yep I've done literally every way of engagement, unit combination, etc. to try and deal with this, and I still can't." This, unless you spend 12+ hours a day on the game, isn't true.
Figure it out, stop whining. (I play Protoss, and I know that my race isn't underpowered, I just play like shit)
As someone who plays both, there's an important aspect of tiers the OP left out:
Tier lists in fighting games are never taken as 100% fact. As long as there is a competitive community, the tier least is still changeable, because new strategies and information could be found out. Saying ZvP is imbalanced or that it tends to favor zerg right now does not mean that the matchup has been solved and will never change.
Another important distinction that not many people here are getting is that "imbalanced" doesn't mean one character or race wins 100% of the time. If Protoss wins 70% of the time on a map, that map is imbalanced, but it doesn't mean other races can't win or that a better player can't succeed.
Really interesting to see the current gsl / tournament trends of mass terran with this in mind.
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Tier rankings are only about the real top players. I'm a Gen player and crush soooo many ppl online because they dont know the match up. in street fighter are a lot of important factors to win a match. Its probably easier to win with a good character like Yun now or sagat in vanilla but if you play against someone who knows how to zone em etc. you will win for sure.
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"it's not the game that is imbalanced, it's the maps"
when in doubt - repeat it like a mantra
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You're absolutely right. The game is not balanced. It never will be and we shouldn't want it to be. We want it to be somewhat fair in a competetive sense. But never perfectly balanced. The goal for blizzard should be to give all the races several tools to deal with each other and then make it up to map makers to balance maps after current trends and with those tools in mind.
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I guess it actually is the number of playable characters/races more than anything. There are two thoughts I have about this.
When you have three races, you expect them to be balanced in a certain way. At least you'd expect a balance of rock/paper/scissors. For 30+ characters there is obviously no way you can make every single character play exactly the same way, so balance is out of question -- some matchups will be much harder than others.
Also, with fighting games it's easier to switch characters when needed. Fighting games are much more about general game sense and execution than about practicing very tight builds and timings for hundreds of hours. So an imbalanced matchup just means you have the opportunity to counterpick your opponent with a character that HE would have trouble dealing with, if you learned that character beforehand. You see EGJustinWong for example counterpick at some times, he plays several characters at a very high level. It helps that most characters have a similar move set, too.
This is obviously not possible for SC2, as learning a new race involves learning new hotkeys, new units, new unit placements, new unit skills, and spend hundreds of hours learning the builds and timings.
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??? am i the only one who laughed at the thread title?
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EDIT: new page, so it doesnt matter anymore. Please read the OP, it's a very good question and he explains what he means in detail.
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it doesn't matter what idra says because it's all only a personal oppinion. when asked on SOTG what the weakest race in BW was, he answered "terran".
i think there are things that can be considered imbalanced - beta 7 range voidray rushes, 5rax reaper etc. but those were early/mid game scenarios very hard to beat. the only equivalent of that right now seems to be 1/1/1 allin vs protoss (is it imbalanced? i don't know). if there is a scenario in late game supposedly "imba" then i can't do anything but laugh.
infestors, hellions, banshees, broodlords - all these things are strong if you don't know how to deal with them. but imbalanced? come on
i strongly believe the maps set the trends and make "op" strategies - fe. thor drop on LT. in BW, the maps were tailored to accomodate FE toss and make FE zerg safer. i can't say we have such maps in sc2 (besides some obviously), all we have are fucking rocks everywhere, thats why fast 3rd for zerg to counter FE of toss is very hard because you cant expo close to your base and then voidrays kill you etc.
last thing: it's so funny seeing people complain about balance when they just fucking SUCK. LEARN TO PLAY
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Man, I play KOF, and understand your whole post
Even Pokemon is a strategy game (I play it also at competitive level)
However, in those games it's normal to have a tier list and play about it, because the game developers made it that fashion
But SC2 is a game where there SHOULD be Balance, because it is not designed to get "tiers" between races
Also, the game is near to be perfectly balanced, but the mechanics of the game generate many abusable things, like ForceFields, Stim, Fungal, etc, while they are NO OP, they are "abusable" and change drastically the matches and the metagame
Then, because there is not actually something REALLY OP, and all races have something abusable at some point, we can say the game is +95% balanced, and the complaints some times are not well argued
Anyways this game benefits the All In gameplay, and the strong timing pushes, making it change the match in seconds, and requesting more skill to stop more things than the needed to execute them
SC BW had different mechanics, really different ones, so SC2 can not be "as same balanced as BW" , and it IS so close to the perfect balance on the way it is designed, even if it feels "unfair" on many situations
The nerf/buff to units can help like it did actually from the Beta, but the other things can't change unitill the game is remade similar to BW
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In a strategy game, you try to create imbalances through your play such that it'll favour you and bring you to victory.
In other words, discussion about imbalances is actually important strategically, whether it's considered whining or not. For example, everybody understands that the Protoss late game composition is strong, possibly OP, and as a result, the opposing player will develop strategies that prevents this imbalance from hurting him. i.e, drop plays to split, timing attacks etc. Or that the BFH are ridiculously good at killing workers, and so players are now developing strategies to defend themselves against that through sim cities.
It's possible that sometimes, certain strategies are too overpowering for the game to be enjoyable, but the point is not that it creates balance whines (and that such things requires fixing). Rather, when people say a race is overpowered, it's usually referring to a certain strategy that can be employed by that specific race, and caution and countermeasures are to be exercised against that.
Understanding the imbalances in different situations is intrinsic to the gameplay itself. This will probably explain why race switching does not seem to be as acceptable, simply because the understanding of the game comes first. The lack of acceptance over imbalances is simply a reflection of the competitive nature of the game, and that people are trying to overturn such disadvantages themselves.
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Imbalance = not fair... easy answer to a weird question.
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Protoss, Terran, Zerg
yunryuchunliaajefnkwefnwkfnwjfnkjafnfnrfn...
There are so many more options to choose from in SF4. Therefor it is THAT much harder to balance and the expectations much lower.
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Because around 2/3 the players are playing a different race.
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At the start of SC2, the mentality from Brood War was brought over from former BW players, thinking that they could influence the newer players who just got into SC2
The major issue with that is that SC2 was not and is not balanced like BW was after so many years and so many patches, their intentions were good, they wanted people to relax and not focus so much on them, but it was impossible.
It is very important to remember that knowing and realizing the game is not balanced is not the same as bitching about balance issues in every thread, chat, game, Bnet, TL, reddit etc.
Whether people like it or not the balance will take a huge swing again with HotS whatever unit and changes Blizzard implents will simply make the game even unbalanced in whatever direction it goes.
Again appriciate the people from BW who are trying to put a lid on the fire but they also sometimes sound naive or simply trying to turn their backs to something that is pretty obvious to everyone. Reminds me of Idra talking to Day9, i dislike Idra very much but his points on Zerg and Zerg scouting for example were 100% right, yet Day9 just basically acted like a politician and tried everything to avoid answering anything directly. Again i love Day9 but in this discussion i was let down.
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Because the game is impossible to balance perfectly.
It's not just the units that counts, the map attributes hugely onto the whole balance issue.
engagement location's open areas, bases' distance, rush distance etc
Even if we place the race onto open field with nothing but minerals and gas, then have a game there would be good for one race (I am thinking Zerg) and bad for another.
Whereas on SF4, there is no such things, it is all about the characters.
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This is a pretty long post to compare two completely different games and there is no obvious payoff as a result of doing as the OP says - its completely pointless
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I figure if you think a race is imbalanced, you switch, quit, or shut up. Anything else is just obnoxious. Game balance is for the developers.
That being said, idle complaints are a way to relieve stress associated with losing; So it's the individual's decision to tolerate that or not.
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Imbalance can't be accepted because the Vulture was once considered useless. You just can't arrogantly assume that you've exhausted every possibility.
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Wouldn't it be easier comparing the unit tiers and matchups to the SF4 characters.
Like Maurder > Stalker and roach but loses to immortal? rather than the game outright?
Also Capcom went on record and said they don't balance some of their games, they just keep throwing different things and more overpowered stuff in, and the game ends up so broken it kind of balances itself out eventually. (I think this was more specifically about the MvC series tho)
Where Blizzard does try and keep an active balance on everything rather than fix it's problems by just throwing more stuff at it.
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edit : Wrong thread -_______-
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I'm really confused why anyone would make this thread to begin with.
The reason that the SC-community can't accept imbalance is because there are 3 races, where as in a fighting game there are many characters. Each race is a world of difference, and if one of them was shit tier (I.E. Zerg at release) we would only see tvp, pvp, and tvt.
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the basic premise is that balance = 50% win against all characters/races
balance is also on average having a 50% win rate against all characters ... ie 40:60 is ok if there is another with 60:40
the same should be true in sc2 and in both games it is the idea of a hard counter.
There shoudl also be no redundancy in characters / units when all matchups are considered.
I dont think most people understand how subtle and delicate a concept like balance is.
Its like randomness, a perfectly random situation can rip you off many times in a row, and it can appear to have patterns.
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On August 13 2011 17:45 PredY wrote:
last thing: it's so funny seeing people complain about balance when they just fucking SUCK. LEARN TO PLAY
I agree with this the most. Some things are imbalanced at low levels just because everyone can't play do everything that the pros can do. That doesn't mean it's imbalanced, it just means they suck.
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It's as simple as the fact that there are only three races. Fighting games have enough characters lying around that they can afford to have some be redundant or snipe picks only.
You can't do that when you have three races. Imagine if toss was plainly stronger than the other two, and the last few rounds of every tournament was PvPvPvP.
Did you imagine that?
Good. Once you've arisen from the foetal position, you'll know why starcraft shoots for equality.
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I found this stupid when I read, "SC2 only has three races, and SF4 has thirty characters."
SC2 has around 15 units per race x 3 = 45. You're counting each race as one thing to balance, when it is actually a lot more.
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I think if anyone's really honest with themselves they can see that SC2 has imbalances, but that it is not *useful* to think in those terms. For the SC community, the nature of imbalance has so changed over the years--if you're not familiar with BW, please take the time to read when PvZ was impossible for P--that veterans are, largely, going to adopt the principle of "wait and see" and things like that. So, it is perhaps a better view to get better at the game, refine timings and things like that *rather* than complaining about something. You may even have a good point--remember 1 supply roaches?--but these things will likely be meted out in time.
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Its hard to balance a game like street figher when you have 20 characters its not impossible to balance a game with 3 races. The game isnt balanced now but i will be in the future. Six month ago nobody complained about ghosts now ghosts are like the most important unit, the game evolves all the time.
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Starcraft 2 isn't 'perfectly' balanced, but it doesn't need to be. BW wasn't perfectly balanced either. But BW (and SC2 imo) is balanced enough so that map makers can basically dramatically sway the favor towards any race that they wanted.
So discussing balance is kind of iffy when the maps being played are such a huge role in the game.
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The major problem with balance is that it isn't easy to find out what is balanced because of all the variables. Trying to pinpoint something when you can't have identically skilled players playing every match just makes it near impossible.
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)?
Anyway, that is my thoughts on balance, but my thoughts on attitude about balance are a bit different.
From a player perspective, I think imbalance is shitty and it makes me rage. As a spectator though, I like imbalance...I want to see people overcome insurmountable odds to beat an "imbalance" in the game. I want to see Huk use superior skill to beat a BO3 with all 1/1/1 all in builds against him and then do a ceremony. I want to see Fruitdealer win Open Season 1 of the GSL when everyone said a Zerg couldn't win to Terran and Protoss all-ins. Rooting for an underdog is awesome and makes it entertaining for me.
My only problem with "imbalance" is the people that it brings out of the woodwork. Just some quality examples:
On August 12 2011 01:50 sunman1g wrote:
i absolutely hate Zerg players from the bottom of my heart.
they can just play so abusively and can't get punished at all.
all they did was crying for months and months and now that they realized how to play their race it's showing.
On August 12 2011 02:53 Kammalleri wrote:
It takes a lot of control, macro and an inane strategic mind to make marines tank and banshees on 1 base and push across the map as a ball to siege the natural.
On August 10 2011 16:18 Xeanrot wrote:
Check played better, Check played Zerg, Naniwa played shit race, GG
This is just from 2 or 3 pages of the Automated Ban List, and tons of this shit goes by unnoticed each and every day.
Instead of actually complaining, people should be out there making specific builds and getting better. Finding weird timings to try and stop imbalance in its tracks. Waiting around with your hands in your pockets hoping that blizzard magically takes all the imbalances out of the game just reminds me of a little kid giving up because they didn't get what they wanted. If you want to complain, be reasonable about it. I don't think the mods have a problem with people suggesting something is "strong" and that X race needs to find a solution to it, but thinking of solutions is better than "BLIZZARD FIX PL0X".
I guess this turned into a rant, I just hope that someday I can go into an LR thread without seeing all the complaining and whining.
P.S. I hope most of these people complaining go to google and look up courage wolf meme and just enjoy the game.
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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.
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The community cannot accept imbalance because we cannot agree on it, it's not obvious at all when there is an imbalance because of the multitude of options that haven't been explored. When T/P/Z dominates for a brief period of time, we don't all immediately jump on the balance wagon because the nature of the meta game means that it is inevitable that races will have their ups and downs, even in a perfectly balanced game. Even in such a balanced game, there will not be 50% win rates in all match ups for all time, because people are discovering new things all the time.
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Because it is easy to say the game is imbalanced but extremelly hard to say how and why the game is imbalanced.
This means it is easy to shut down people who discuss imbalance as whiners.
Balance is helluva complicated. I guess therefore a lot of people like to defer to authority about it... whether that is the opinions of high-profile players, or forum moderators, or Blizzard.
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On August 13 2011 22:47 graniten wrote:
Its hard to balance a game like street figher when you have 20 characters its not impossible to balance a game with 3 races. The game isnt balanced now but i will be in the future. Six month ago nobody complained about ghosts now ghosts are like the most important unit, the game evolves all the time.
Don't really accept the logic of points like this because SC2 has a lot more units than 3 races.
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Honestly, there is a pretentious position that people take in this community for trying to be 'cool' and politically correct in denying clear imbalances in this game. Its like they are above everyone else and forward thinkers for denying clear imbalance due to insufficient data, when clearly the data is sufficient.
The biggest argument I laugh at is that Terrans are more skilled and have found ways to do this and that where as other races have not put the same amount of thought into it LOL little kids trying to pretend to think. Its ridiculous. As if an entire population playing protoss or zerg havent tested out new strategies to try to adapt? Only Terran players have the foresight to test new strategies right?
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We'll figure out if Starcraft 2 is actually imbalanced in about 10 years or more, until then it's just baseless whining.
Honestly, there is a pretentious position that people take in this community for trying to be 'cool' and politically correct in denying clear imbalances in this game. Its like they are above everyone else and forward thinkers for denying clear imbalance due to insufficient data, when clearly the data is sufficient.
Name one "clear" imbalance, please. What would it be? Forcefields, that aren't as strong now as they were a couple of months ago because people adapt, infestors that get weaker as more terran/protoss players learn to use EMP/feedback or the all time favorite EMP that you can get "so early on", yet is completely useless before the 10 minute mark.
The reason people don't talk about imbalance here is that "finding imbalances" is impossible. If you think you know what exactly is "imbalanced", stop fooling yourself. There is so much that influences imbalances. It's not street fighter where it's pretty obvious what's imbalanced and what is not, where there's only ONE CHAMPION against ONE CHAMPION at a time, in the same area every time. Starcraft is balanced enough to the point where any imbalances are not obvious (except for in your own head, which is more clouded by bias than fox news).
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On August 13 2011 23:22 Liudo wrote:Show nested quote +On August 13 2011 22:47 graniten wrote:
Its hard to balance a game like street figher when you have 20 characters its not impossible to balance a game with 3 races. The game isnt balanced now but i will be in the future. Six month ago nobody complained about ghosts now ghosts are like the most important unit, the game evolves all the time. Don't really accept the logic of points like this because SC2 has a lot more units than 3 races.
And some of those units are more worthwhile in more situations than others (see: Hydralisks underusage) but because we have an economy-based strategy game on our hands, you can avoid situations that are awful.
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On August 13 2011 23:22 Liudo wrote:Show nested quote +On August 13 2011 22:47 graniten wrote:
Its hard to balance a game like street figher when you have 20 characters its not impossible to balance a game with 3 races. The game isnt balanced now but i will be in the future. Six month ago nobody complained about ghosts now ghosts are like the most important unit, the game evolves all the time. Don't really accept the logic of points like this because SC2 has a lot more units than 3 races.
You have to see the big picture. se a race like a fighter you can do different moves. If we say you can do 40 moves with a fighter in street fighter every move is like a unit in sc. And in the end those moves have to be balanced when they all are used. Its harder than 3 characters in street fighter but i think its easier than 20 characters.
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On August 13 2011 23:13 graniten wrote:Show nested quote +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.
On August 13 2011 23:23 Cartel wrote:
Honestly, there is a pretentious position that people take in this community for trying to be 'cool' and politically correct in denying clear imbalances in this game. Its like they are above everyone else and forward thinkers for denying clear imbalance due to insufficient data, when clearly the data is sufficient.
The biggest argument I laugh at is that Terrans are more skilled and have found ways to do this and that where as other races have not put the same amount of thought into it LOL little kids trying to pretend to think. Its ridiculous. As if an entire population playing protoss or zerg havent tested out new strategies to try to adapt? Only Terran players have the foresight to test new strategies right?
Well they actually found a strong 1/1/1 push that they made up on 1 base that works well, and it took time to figure out all the ins and outs of the build. I don't think people are saying Terran is more skilled, it is just that when refining a build they found a certain one that does well against Protoss. It is just a meta-game shift.
I'm actually ignorant of most of BW history, but I'm sure there were people complaining about Zerg in the days of SAviOr being a bonjwa thought there wasn't a way to beat him until the http://wiki.teamliquid.net/starcraft/Bisu_Build came along. Guess what, no patches to the game, just someone who innovated and found a better build. It takes longer than many people would like to think, and there are probably different builds that could make a match-up "imbalanced" that are never found.
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people cant accept skill gap and talk about imbaness
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On August 13 2011 23:33 Demonace34 wrote:Show nested quote +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.
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As a VS fighter players, I think this is a very good example. I used to play real fighting games (read : not SF4) before switching to SC2 and imbalance is nearly the core of the games.
Let's take the most imbalanced AND balanced game at the same time : Guilty Gear XX Accent Core. On paper, the tier list is just cruel : Eddie has positive match-ups on the whole cast except 1 character which is quite useless against the rest of the cast. Slayer and Millia can rape you for free. But in the end it's considered the most balanced game of all times. Why ? Because skill can make for ANYTHING in this game.
If you're playing perfectly, there cannot be any imbalance in Guilty Gear, because of really hardcore mechanics, like Slashback or 1f jumps.
And the players moved their ass off to master this as well as to find viable tournaments formats : all GGXXAC is played 3v3 now, there aren't solo tournaments anymore.
The problem is that in SC2 there are very few things you'll be able to catch up through skill. If we find a really unbeatable unit composition, there will be no solution. Point.
It's very hard to realize this and quite heart-breacking. If SC2 is proved imbalanced, it will be just be a huge piece of s*** competitively, and nobody here wants that.
This is the reason why people don't want to talk of imbalance in SC2, to me.
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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.
well everything is connected, if you lower the dps for marines you maybe can reach balance that way. I just think its better to lower the emp, because everything is goning to be decided about if the terran got hes emp off in the future maybe thats fun idk.
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On August 13 2011 23:28 BadgerBadger8264 wrote:We'll figure out if Starcraft 2 is actually imbalanced in about 10 years or more, until then it's just baseless whining. Show nested quote +Honestly, there is a pretentious position that people take in this community for trying to be 'cool' and politically correct in denying clear imbalances in this game. Its like they are above everyone else and forward thinkers for denying clear imbalance due to insufficient data, when clearly the data is sufficient. Name one "clear" imbalance, please. What would it be? Forcefields, that aren't as strong now as they were a couple of months ago because people adapt, infestors that get weaker as more terran/protoss players learn to use EMP/feedback or the all time favorite marauder that gets less and less used as people adapt? Show nested quote +The biggest argument I laugh at is that Terrans are more skilled and have found ways to do this and that where as other races have not put the same amount of thought into it LOL little kids trying to pretend to think. Its ridiculous. As if an entire population playing protoss or zerg havent tested out new strategies to try to adapt? Only Terran players have the foresight to test new strategies right? Is terran doing better than other races at this point? Not really, in fact, if you correct for population, they're doing the worst of all three in Korea. There are just flat out more terran players at a top level, especially in Korea, mainly because of the balance state at the beginning of the game. That means that, on average, yes, there are more better terran players than protoss or zerg players, so in a way, they are correct.
The problem is that different beople in the community had different opinions on what imbalance even means. The discussion is itself imbalanced because people have different perspectives.
Right now, SC2 is very hard countery, so it makes it even harder to make a good judgement. Banelings? Look broken as hell against infantry. BFH? Same, give or take, with added screams of IMBA when let loose on resource lines. Collossi and Broods? Ridiculous against anything on the ground.
But put them against things they aren't designed specifically to ROFLstomp and they look sub-par, even silly.
Given the way SC2 is designed, imbalance is more going to be found in build orders and timings rather than specific units. The current 1-1-1 T v P build may well be imbalanced. It's not an all-in, it's supremely hard to stop, can win flat out and is guaranteed to do significant damage. Right now there seems to be no reason NOT to do it. If in three months toss still can't find a way to counter it that's not dependent on the map, that's surely a fair argument that the build is imbalanced?
Maps play a ridiculous amount in these discussions, though, and few people seem to realize that.
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Because imbalance sucks
well... at least most of the time it does
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IdRa imbalance and imbalance thinking of other players/viewers exists mostly because people cannot lose or cannot see their beloved player lose.
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I admit that I haven't been actively participating in the western fighting scene for some years, but I seem to recall that the same discussions about balance have been found everywhere.
Vanilla SF4 tiers were moving quite a lot the first year after release (Rufus and Gief dominating most MUs in the first months which slowly transitioned into Sagat/Ryu/Gouki).
And people complained. Maybe with less cussing, but there were indeed complaints in both the westener scene (SRK) and the japanese scene. Saying anything else would be looking at the past with rose tinted glasses.
On a side note, I'd like to repeat the argument that the average fighter has tens of characters whereas SC2's predecessor had 3 decently balanced races.
SF4's equivalent had 80% of the cast rendered useless because they stood no real chance against the most popular and "easiest" character. It's easier to ignore the worthless characters when you still have 5-10 viable choices left.
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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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France12761 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
