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Condor Hero United States. August 16 2011 07:00. Posts 917
PM Profile Blog Quote #
The game should be balanced around the absolute HIGHEST level of play.
That's GM Korea because everyone should aspire to be the best therefore it should be balance around that.
No off course not,
balancing the game around the highest lvl of play might make the game completely unbalanced for the 99% of players who dont have the highest lvl of play and no smart gaming company will ever release such a game wich would only apeal to a small niche of customers
Sc is the same, the game should and luckily will be balanced around the average level of play since its the average players that in the end pay for it
Therefore if you like it or not, the average players opinnion about balance is way and way more important then the pros opinnion 
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On August 17 2011 05:05 Truedot wrote:Show nested quote +On August 17 2011 04:44 Toadvine wrote:On August 17 2011 04:19 Olsson wrote:
I think TvZ is abit broken. Both baneling and hellions drops are badly designed. You can deflect four drops but if one gets in and does some damage all those lost drops have been held off. Zerg doesn't have good scouting options and it makes it a coinflip and to make sure that you're safe from the possible scenarios sets you behind ALOT at high level of play - Masters Zerg.
EDIT: I also believe that DT's are badly designed. A zerg can manage to scout the DT shrine in a coinflip or they can't. Even if they do scout it's hard to know how many dt's are being made. You can make one spore and put troops infront of it. The zerg says I need to pressure or secure a third, makes two spines at each base along with spores and moves out with his units. Four DT's get past the defences and manage to take out the spore crawler with only the shield going down on one of them. Overseer takes 17 seconds to morph and four dt's can get down a hatchery and more in that time. I feel that such things as banelings, dt's and hellions make gameplay too volatile and unforgiving even at the highest levels of play and that they need change. I actually disagree. Or rather, I agree with Hellions being too good at killing workers for their cost and accessibility - which makes a hellion drop or runby a relatively small risk with the potential for huge reward. However, baneling drops on mineral lines are fine, imo. You can actually run workers away from a baneling drop, and a cannon in your mineral line also makes it significantly less effective - Banelings are melee, and barely faster than workers, so there's enough space to be able to deflect a baneling drop with good multitasking and a few units. Also, Baneling drops, unlike Hellions, can actually fail and do no damage. Hellions are terrible, because you can actually invest in defending against them, and they'll still do enough damage a lot of the time. But DTs? Banelings? Not nearly in the same ballpark imo. I agree about hellion, however, I tend ot have the same OL that Im dropping with be generating creep too. baneling speed on creep vs workers = good times.
Those workers shouldn't be anywhere close to the overlord. 
One annoying thing I forgot about is the possibility of fake baneling drops. You can basically run an empty overlord into a mineral line, and the Protoss has to either pull probes or snipe the ovie before it gets there. It's practically free in the mid and late game, and almost always forces a reaction from good players.
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On August 17 2011 05:07 Rassy wrote: Condor Hero United States. August 16 2011 07:00. Posts 917 PM Profile Blog Quote # The game should be balanced around the absolute HIGHEST level of play. That's GM Korea because everyone should aspire to be the best therefore it should be balance around that. No off course not, balancing the game around the highest lvl of play might make the game completely unbalanced for the 99% of players who dont have the highest lvl of play and no smart gaming company will ever release such a game wich would only apeal to a small niche of customers Sc is the same, the game should and luckily will be balanced around the average level of play since its the average players that in the end pay for it Therefore if you like it or not, the average players opinnion about balance is way and way more important then the pros opinnion
I guess the NBA should lower the rim to 8 feet so everyone can dunk.
That, clearly, is the best course of action since dunking is fun and a smart company should ensure the most people have fun playing their game.
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On August 17 2011 04:57 Condor Hero wrote:Show nested quote +On August 17 2011 04:44 Truedot wrote:On August 17 2011 02:17 IronDoc wrote:+ Show Spoiler +On August 17 2011 01:52 Truedot wrote:Show nested quote +On August 16 2011 07:00 Condor Hero wrote:
I feel that this thread will have tons of balance whine despite what you say.
The game should be balanced around the absolute HIGHEST level of play.
That's GM Korea because everyone should aspire to be the best therefore it should be balance around that.
As for EU/NA people having problems, that's just a skill thing.
Nobody would ask for a platinum player's opinions on balance right? I will disagree with you on this. You dont make the roof of a house and try to build under it. The game should be balanced at the lowest levels of play so that there is a clear baseline capability to defend or attack againt standard masses like mass VR and other silly nonsense. it takes a LOT more skill to defend against 1 mass unit like mass marines at 8 minutes or mass VRs than it takes to fight a well comp'd unit with your well comp'd unit. You numbers of unit comp and units themselves have to be very precise, not to mention micro control. its alot easier to be a micro aggressor with a Mass X unit thats been proven time and again to be extremely powerful versus sub-optimal unit comps.The level of knowledge and skill required to do :Mass X", therefore, is nothing compared to the level of knowledge and skill required to counter "Mass X". hence why so many people can faceroll into plat or diamond easily by finding a BO for one of these unit types and win 2/3 of their games before someone who can deal with the build from actual game knowledge comes along and keeps them from getting higher in leagues, because they actually don't know or understand the game, and simply picked a BO that has been proven to have a high winning rate vs average players, such as 7RR, 2 rax all in, mass VR, banshee mass vs zerg, etc. My point is that the game, if it were to be truly balanced, would be balanced at the lowest levels of play, so that countering people is a decision of making the proper units, and the proper units are about 20% harder to make and use vs the Mass X function, since winning vs it thereby causes you to gain a lead, so it should rightfully be difficult in some aspect. With this in mind, then you would see at the highest levels of play, timing becomes a more critical factor (not that it isnt already), good unit comps are much more valuable, and real skills like micro and strategic and tactical setups and decisions, all start making a bigger impact than "Mass X because this will insta-win since they cant deal with it". In short, balanced at the lowest levels of play would translate into more tactical play in higher levels and make the game much more exciting and interesting. You don't see chess balanced around highest levels of play. there's a baseline balance, via mirror pieces 1 hit kills, that prevents chess "cheese". All truly compettive non-computer games take this into account. There's either a limited number of pieces, a limited number of powerful pieces, and/or everyone gets the same powers/units. SC2 is in complete opposition to that, and I'm surprised its as balanced as it is, yet from the fact that infestor is the only clear counter to mass VR, which in itself has been whined to death as being OP, and that someone was able to micro stimmed mass marines as their only unit and beat all the supposed protoss counter units and win the game, I think that it would be much more useful to balance it from the bottom up. Starcraft 1 felt like this. of course if they did this, casuals wouldnt faceroll so well anymore and they'd lose revenue from people saying SC2 is a tough game and not for "casuals". The game cannot be balanced at both the highest level and the lowest level. Surely you see that? If you balance it for lower levels, then anything which becomes disproportionately stronger as skill increases will be unbalanced for pros. The only way you can achieve both is by there being the exact same reward for increased micro for every race and this must be true at every level. The only way this can be true is just by making the races fundamentally identical. If one concedes that it can only really be balanced at a certain level, I think most would agree that that level should be the one at which money is riding on matches. I have no idea what you're talking about with chess analogy. In chess, there are only 2 races and they are universally agreed to be imbalanced. chess isnt imbalanced. one is designed to be reactive and the other is designed to have initiative. but they still use all the pieces. in a perfect game the white always wins yes, but the game is meant for the winner to take black afterward. and the true winner would be the person using black and winning, it means they made less mistakes. The game itself is still completely balanced, as both sides have the same options for dealing with everything. On August 17 2011 03:44 Condor Hero wrote:On August 17 2011 01:52 Truedot wrote:On August 16 2011 07:00 Condor Hero wrote:
I feel that this thread will have tons of balance whine despite what you say.
The game should be balanced around the absolute HIGHEST level of play.
That's GM Korea because everyone should aspire to be the best therefore it should be balance around that.
As for EU/NA people having problems, that's just a skill thing.
Nobody would ask for a platinum player's opinions on balance right? I will disagree with you on this. You dont make the roof of a house and try to build under it. The game should be balanced at the lowest levels of play so that there is a clear baseline capability to defend or attack againt standard masses like mass VR and other silly nonsense. it takes a LOT more skill to defend against 1 mass unit like mass marines at 8 minutes or mass VRs than it takes to fight a well comp'd unit with your well comp'd unit. You numbers of unit comp and units themselves have to be very precise, not to mention micro control. its alot easier to be a micro aggressor with a Mass X unit thats been proven time and again to be extremely powerful versus sub-optimal unit comps.The level of knowledge and skill required to do :Mass X", therefore, is nothing compared to the level of knowledge and skill required to counter "Mass X". hence why so many people can faceroll into plat or diamond easily by finding a BO for one of these unit types and win 2/3 of their games before someone who can deal with the build from actual game knowledge comes along and keeps them from getting higher in leagues, because they actually don't know or understand the game, and simply picked a BO that has been proven to have a high winning rate vs average players, such as 7RR, 2 rax all in, mass VR, banshee mass vs zerg, etc. My point is that the game, if it were to be truly balanced, would be balanced at the lowest levels of play, so that countering people is a decision of making the proper units, and the proper units are about 20% harder to make and use vs the Mass X function, since winning vs it thereby causes you to gain a lead, so it should rightfully be difficult in some aspect. With this in mind, then you would see at the highest levels of play, timing becomes a more critical factor (not that it isnt already), good unit comps are much more valuable, and real skills like micro and strategic and tactical setups and decisions, all start making a bigger impact than "Mass X because this will insta-win since they cant deal with it". In short, balanced at the lowest levels of play would translate into more tactical play in higher levels and make the game much more exciting and interesting. You don't see chess balanced around highest levels of play. there's a baseline balance, via mirror pieces 1 hit kills, that prevents chess "cheese". All truly compettive non-computer games take this into account. There's either a limited number of pieces, a limited number of powerful pieces, and/or everyone gets the same powers/units. SC2 is in complete opposition to that, and I'm surprised its as balanced as it is, yet from the fact that infestor is the only clear counter to mass VR, which in itself has been whined to death as being OP, and that someone was able to micro stimmed mass marines as their only unit and beat all the supposed protoss counter units and win the game, I think that it would be much more useful to balance it from the bottom up. Starcraft 1 felt like this. of course if they did this, casuals wouldnt faceroll so well anymore and they'd lose revenue from people saying SC2 is a tough game and not for "casuals". What the hell. My point still stands that every should be trying to get BETTER, not WORSE to get balance. No one tries to get worse. Blizz trying to make it an ESPORT. You think people like watching low level basketball because they like to think they actually have a chance? Idk about you but I get inspired when I see pro players play at a level I never imagined. Since I started out watching BW, I will say there is nothing like watching Bisu multitask, watching Best simply have a ton of units more than his opponent, watching Boxer marine micro vs lurkers, or watching Jaedong muta harass with two control groups. tl;dr: Basically I think your opinion is pure garbage and you got no idea what you're talking about. I played SC1 since before brood war existed. I felt that it was balanced at low levels. counters were clear and had their clear counters, and only a disproportionately large anti-force could kill a counter unit all alone. note here that when I say disproportionately, I mean 16 zerglings to a firebat. firebats were countered by hydra, hydra were countered by tank, tank were countered by queen or muta, queen and muta were countered by marine, marine were countered by ling, ling were countered by firebat. We have similar behaviors in SC2, except that some units stop being countered after a certain critical mass point by their supposed counter parts, and instead counter them, and with upgrades moreso. I've never seen 20 firebats able to kill 10 hydras is all Im saying. even stimmed. And yes, things do look amazing and awe inspiring to people with untrained eyes and who have little to no knowledge of fundamentals inherent in what they're seeing. people from bronze watch my gameplay and go 'omg so awesome this is so amazing", when Im sitting here playing thinking "I just lamed my way to a win with an unbeatable unit comp at this timing, feels like time wasted". On August 17 2011 03:51 Fu[G]u wrote:the game should be balanced at the lowest levels of play so that there is a clear baseline capability to defend or attack againt standard masses like mass VR and other silly nonsense This, Sir, is nonsense and blasphemy. If sc was balanced by the lower levels of play, competitive brood war would never have been what it was, and sc2 would never have been spawned in its current incarnation. The game is so great because it is so difficult. It is so difficult because it is designed to be difficult to master at the very top levels. If lower level players see that the game is balanced even for the top levels, than any balance complaint they have goes out the window when they realize that it is a problem with their play, not with the game. read above. Games are and should be fundamentally balanced at lowest levels. Lets take out all units except T1-T2. balance the game around that. Then reintroduce the T3 units. If balance swings to one race domianting, we know its the fault of T3. thats how you build anything balanced. you start with the bare minimum, and keep adding onto it in a modular fashion. you dont slap a bunch of stuff together and then tweak parts of it to make it balanced in some crazy ad-hoc fashion that isnt true balance. thats why the infestor is how it is now. do you think that infestor buff would'nt have happenedhad it not been for the faltering of zerg at the PRO sscene? they already DO balance the races based on the pros, and look how well thats turning out with things like infestor. Q.E.D. I don't think you really have any further argument at this point. SC1 wasn't balanced at the lower levels as it took high level players years to make Protoss playable vs Zerg. The problem with balancing at low levels is that they will not innovate.It would be like Chess: these are your units and that's what they do. Only high level players using their units really well (or "abusing" as Idra would call it) pushes the limits of their race to the point where you can see how things can be "possible" or "impossible." You think low level players would've discovered stop lurkers, cloning scourge, stacking mutas? It's hard to balance around low levels as high levels will just say "well see if you do that better, then you'd will." Sorry but I just think you're wrong.
prior to brood war, 2 zealot and 1 dragoon dealt with a terran T1-2 army pretty effecrtively. I maintain the position always have, that medics were a horribly out of balance PoS. They didnt have high threat, could wall between you and your enemy, and let people use stim endlessly. These major game changes to terran T1 alone are what caused what you're talking about for protoss. go back to playing SC vanilla and you'll see what I mean. And then what units did protoss get out of it? A AA only air unit that casts a web which stops attacks under it, which you can simply move out of, and a unit that moves relatively slow, is scannable, and attacks slow, and forces terran to build sci vessels, which they do anyway for the EMP and irradiate.
You're right, at low levels they wont innovate. its the people that innovate at low levels that get higher in levels. derp. If everything was balanced at the lowest level possible, people who figure out better uses for units will go higher. People who have better STRATEGY (omg, a concept in an RTS, which stands for real time STRATEGY), will win out over people who are just average in strategy. How can you say thats bad for the game? It seems like the game is based around the idea of strategy, so why throw it out the window by saying that balancing at low level will be boring, or will not do anything useful? Your entire argument doesn't make any sense.
A strategy game.
balanced around the most basic and fundamental parts of itself.
Average players will play each other and win/lose roughly equally, and no player will advance with a cheese tactic, into divisions they don't belong.
Good players will quickly escape from these lower divisions by use of superior TACTICS, and superior STRATEGY, not by cheesing out of it.
Good players will "innovate", as you put it, to become even better players with the same options available to them.
How are you opposed to this by saying that it should be "balanced at high level of play only", whatever that means? It seems you want flash and wild upsets and craziness, rather than actual gameplay thats balanced. You said it yourself, that it would be boring and you have to "make it balanced where the money and spectators matter.". you mean like "pro" wrestling right? They have a lot of flash and pizazz too. your words are in contradiction to your idea you wish to convey.
It just seems like you want it less fundamentally balanced, and more superficial for entertainment purposes. and that alone means that to follow this ideal would lead to a game that isn't actually balanced but maintains the appearance of balance while wild and crazy thinngs that are actually based on luck keep happening within the game.
On August 17 2011 05:20 Condor Hero wrote:Show nested quote +On August 17 2011 05:07 Rassy wrote: Condor Hero United States. August 16 2011 07:00. Posts 917 PM Profile Blog Quote # The game should be balanced around the absolute HIGHEST level of play. That's GM Korea because everyone should aspire to be the best therefore it should be balance around that. No off course not, balancing the game around the highest lvl of play might make the game completely unbalanced for the 99% of players who dont have the highest lvl of play and no smart gaming company will ever release such a game wich would only apeal to a small niche of customers Sc is the same, the game should and luckily will be balanced around the average level of play since its the average players that in the end pay for it Therefore if you like it or not, the average players opinnion about balance is way and way more important then the pros opinnion I guess the NBA should lower the rim to 8 feet so everyone can dunk. That, clearly, is the best course of action since dunking is fun and a smart company should ensure the most people have fun playing their game.
we've been trolled people.. Because basketball wasnt invented with its regulation height by average size people, and teams dont consistently choose to up the ante of the game by contracting people solely on their height, and steroids isn't an unfair advantage, and the sky is red and the moon is made of cheese.
the game doesn't even need to be "balanced around a level of play". it just needs to be balanced around itself. Level of play will sort out who's better and worse. The balance in itself, the metamechanics, if you will, are what are not balanced. I Cite FF and infestor.
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+ Show Spoiler +On August 17 2011 05:21 Truedot wrote:Show nested quote +On August 17 2011 04:57 Condor Hero wrote:On August 17 2011 04:44 Truedot wrote:On August 17 2011 02:17 IronDoc wrote:+ Show Spoiler +On August 17 2011 01:52 Truedot wrote:Show nested quote +On August 16 2011 07:00 Condor Hero wrote:
I feel that this thread will have tons of balance whine despite what you say.
The game should be balanced around the absolute HIGHEST level of play.
That's GM Korea because everyone should aspire to be the best therefore it should be balance around that.
As for EU/NA people having problems, that's just a skill thing.
Nobody would ask for a platinum player's opinions on balance right? I will disagree with you on this. You dont make the roof of a house and try to build under it. The game should be balanced at the lowest levels of play so that there is a clear baseline capability to defend or attack againt standard masses like mass VR and other silly nonsense. it takes a LOT more skill to defend against 1 mass unit like mass marines at 8 minutes or mass VRs than it takes to fight a well comp'd unit with your well comp'd unit. You numbers of unit comp and units themselves have to be very precise, not to mention micro control. its alot easier to be a micro aggressor with a Mass X unit thats been proven time and again to be extremely powerful versus sub-optimal unit comps.The level of knowledge and skill required to do :Mass X", therefore, is nothing compared to the level of knowledge and skill required to counter "Mass X". hence why so many people can faceroll into plat or diamond easily by finding a BO for one of these unit types and win 2/3 of their games before someone who can deal with the build from actual game knowledge comes along and keeps them from getting higher in leagues, because they actually don't know or understand the game, and simply picked a BO that has been proven to have a high winning rate vs average players, such as 7RR, 2 rax all in, mass VR, banshee mass vs zerg, etc. My point is that the game, if it were to be truly balanced, would be balanced at the lowest levels of play, so that countering people is a decision of making the proper units, and the proper units are about 20% harder to make and use vs the Mass X function, since winning vs it thereby causes you to gain a lead, so it should rightfully be difficult in some aspect. With this in mind, then you would see at the highest levels of play, timing becomes a more critical factor (not that it isnt already), good unit comps are much more valuable, and real skills like micro and strategic and tactical setups and decisions, all start making a bigger impact than "Mass X because this will insta-win since they cant deal with it". In short, balanced at the lowest levels of play would translate into more tactical play in higher levels and make the game much more exciting and interesting. You don't see chess balanced around highest levels of play. there's a baseline balance, via mirror pieces 1 hit kills, that prevents chess "cheese". All truly compettive non-computer games take this into account. There's either a limited number of pieces, a limited number of powerful pieces, and/or everyone gets the same powers/units. SC2 is in complete opposition to that, and I'm surprised its as balanced as it is, yet from the fact that infestor is the only clear counter to mass VR, which in itself has been whined to death as being OP, and that someone was able to micro stimmed mass marines as their only unit and beat all the supposed protoss counter units and win the game, I think that it would be much more useful to balance it from the bottom up. Starcraft 1 felt like this. of course if they did this, casuals wouldnt faceroll so well anymore and they'd lose revenue from people saying SC2 is a tough game and not for "casuals". The game cannot be balanced at both the highest level and the lowest level. Surely you see that? If you balance it for lower levels, then anything which becomes disproportionately stronger as skill increases will be unbalanced for pros. The only way you can achieve both is by there being the exact same reward for increased micro for every race and this must be true at every level. The only way this can be true is just by making the races fundamentally identical. If one concedes that it can only really be balanced at a certain level, I think most would agree that that level should be the one at which money is riding on matches. I have no idea what you're talking about with chess analogy. In chess, there are only 2 races and they are universally agreed to be imbalanced. chess isnt imbalanced. one is designed to be reactive and the other is designed to have initiative. but they still use all the pieces. in a perfect game the white always wins yes, but the game is meant for the winner to take black afterward. and the true winner would be the person using black and winning, it means they made less mistakes. The game itself is still completely balanced, as both sides have the same options for dealing with everything. On August 17 2011 03:44 Condor Hero wrote:On August 17 2011 01:52 Truedot wrote:On August 16 2011 07:00 Condor Hero wrote:
I feel that this thread will have tons of balance whine despite what you say.
The game should be balanced around the absolute HIGHEST level of play.
That's GM Korea because everyone should aspire to be the best therefore it should be balance around that.
As for EU/NA people having problems, that's just a skill thing.
Nobody would ask for a platinum player's opinions on balance right? I will disagree with you on this. You dont make the roof of a house and try to build under it. The game should be balanced at the lowest levels of play so that there is a clear baseline capability to defend or attack againt standard masses like mass VR and other silly nonsense. it takes a LOT more skill to defend against 1 mass unit like mass marines at 8 minutes or mass VRs than it takes to fight a well comp'd unit with your well comp'd unit. You numbers of unit comp and units themselves have to be very precise, not to mention micro control. its alot easier to be a micro aggressor with a Mass X unit thats been proven time and again to be extremely powerful versus sub-optimal unit comps.The level of knowledge and skill required to do :Mass X", therefore, is nothing compared to the level of knowledge and skill required to counter "Mass X". hence why so many people can faceroll into plat or diamond easily by finding a BO for one of these unit types and win 2/3 of their games before someone who can deal with the build from actual game knowledge comes along and keeps them from getting higher in leagues, because they actually don't know or understand the game, and simply picked a BO that has been proven to have a high winning rate vs average players, such as 7RR, 2 rax all in, mass VR, banshee mass vs zerg, etc. My point is that the game, if it were to be truly balanced, would be balanced at the lowest levels of play, so that countering people is a decision of making the proper units, and the proper units are about 20% harder to make and use vs the Mass X function, since winning vs it thereby causes you to gain a lead, so it should rightfully be difficult in some aspect. With this in mind, then you would see at the highest levels of play, timing becomes a more critical factor (not that it isnt already), good unit comps are much more valuable, and real skills like micro and strategic and tactical setups and decisions, all start making a bigger impact than "Mass X because this will insta-win since they cant deal with it". In short, balanced at the lowest levels of play would translate into more tactical play in higher levels and make the game much more exciting and interesting. You don't see chess balanced around highest levels of play. there's a baseline balance, via mirror pieces 1 hit kills, that prevents chess "cheese". All truly compettive non-computer games take this into account. There's either a limited number of pieces, a limited number of powerful pieces, and/or everyone gets the same powers/units. SC2 is in complete opposition to that, and I'm surprised its as balanced as it is, yet from the fact that infestor is the only clear counter to mass VR, which in itself has been whined to death as being OP, and that someone was able to micro stimmed mass marines as their only unit and beat all the supposed protoss counter units and win the game, I think that it would be much more useful to balance it from the bottom up. Starcraft 1 felt like this. of course if they did this, casuals wouldnt faceroll so well anymore and they'd lose revenue from people saying SC2 is a tough game and not for "casuals". What the hell. My point still stands that every should be trying to get BETTER, not WORSE to get balance. No one tries to get worse. Blizz trying to make it an ESPORT. You think people like watching low level basketball because they like to think they actually have a chance? Idk about you but I get inspired when I see pro players play at a level I never imagined. Since I started out watching BW, I will say there is nothing like watching Bisu multitask, watching Best simply have a ton of units more than his opponent, watching Boxer marine micro vs lurkers, or watching Jaedong muta harass with two control groups. tl;dr: Basically I think your opinion is pure garbage and you got no idea what you're talking about. I played SC1 since before brood war existed. I felt that it was balanced at low levels. counters were clear and had their clear counters, and only a disproportionately large anti-force could kill a counter unit all alone. note here that when I say disproportionately, I mean 16 zerglings to a firebat. firebats were countered by hydra, hydra were countered by tank, tank were countered by queen or muta, queen and muta were countered by marine, marine were countered by ling, ling were countered by firebat. We have similar behaviors in SC2, except that some units stop being countered after a certain critical mass point by their supposed counter parts, and instead counter them, and with upgrades moreso. I've never seen 20 firebats able to kill 10 hydras is all Im saying. even stimmed. And yes, things do look amazing and awe inspiring to people with untrained eyes and who have little to no knowledge of fundamentals inherent in what they're seeing. people from bronze watch my gameplay and go 'omg so awesome this is so amazing", when Im sitting here playing thinking "I just lamed my way to a win with an unbeatable unit comp at this timing, feels like time wasted". On August 17 2011 03:51 Fu[G]u wrote:the game should be balanced at the lowest levels of play so that there is a clear baseline capability to defend or attack againt standard masses like mass VR and other silly nonsense This, Sir, is nonsense and blasphemy. If sc was balanced by the lower levels of play, competitive brood war would never have been what it was, and sc2 would never have been spawned in its current incarnation. The game is so great because it is so difficult. It is so difficult because it is designed to be difficult to master at the very top levels. If lower level players see that the game is balanced even for the top levels, than any balance complaint they have goes out the window when they realize that it is a problem with their play, not with the game. read above. Games are and should be fundamentally balanced at lowest levels. Lets take out all units except T1-T2. balance the game around that. Then reintroduce the T3 units. If balance swings to one race domianting, we know its the fault of T3. thats how you build anything balanced. you start with the bare minimum, and keep adding onto it in a modular fashion. you dont slap a bunch of stuff together and then tweak parts of it to make it balanced in some crazy ad-hoc fashion that isnt true balance. thats why the infestor is how it is now. do you think that infestor buff would'nt have happenedhad it not been for the faltering of zerg at the PRO sscene? they already DO balance the races based on the pros, and look how well thats turning out with things like infestor. Q.E.D. I don't think you really have any further argument at this point. SC1 wasn't balanced at the lower levels as it took high level players years to make Protoss playable vs Zerg. The problem with balancing at low levels is that they will not innovate.It would be like Chess: these are your units and that's what they do. Only high level players using their units really well (or "abusing" as Idra would call it) pushes the limits of their race to the point where you can see how things can be "possible" or "impossible." You think low level players would've discovered stop lurkers, cloning scourge, stacking mutas? It's hard to balance around low levels as high levels will just say "well see if you do that better, then you'd will." Sorry but I just think you're wrong. prior to brood war, 2 zealot and 1 dragoon dealt with a terran T1-2 army pretty effecrtively. I maintain the position always have, that medics were a horribly out of balance PoS. They didnt have high threat, could wall between you and your enemy, and let people use stim endlessly. These major game changes to terran T1 alone are what caused what you're talking about for protoss. go back to playing SC vanilla and you'll see what I mean. And then what units did protoss get out of it? A AA only air unit that casts a web which stops attacks under it, which you can simply move out of, and a unit that moves relatively slow, is scannable, and attacks slow, and forces terran to build sci vessels, which they do anyway for the EMP and irradiate. You're right, at low levels they wont innovate. its the people that innovate at low levels that get higher in levels. derp. If everything was balanced at the lowest level possible, people who figure out better uses for units will go higher. People who have better STRATEGY (omg, a concept in an RTS, which stands for real time STRATEGY), will win out over people who are just average in strategy. How can you say thats bad for the game? It seems like the game is based around the idea of strategy, so why throw it out the window by saying that balancing at low level will be boring, or will not do anything useful? Your entire argument doesn't make any sense. A strategy game. balanced around the most basic and fundamental parts of itself. Average players will play each other and win/lose roughly equally, and no player will advance with a cheese tactic, into divisions they don't belong. Good players will quickly escape from these lower divisions by use of superior TACTICS, and superior STRATEGY, not by cheesing out of it. Good players will "innovate", as you put it, to become even better players with the same options available to them. How are you opposed to this by saying that it should be "balanced at high level of play only", whatever that means? It seems you want flash and wild upsets and craziness, rather than actual gameplay thats balanced. You said it yourself, that it would be boring and you have to "make it balanced where the money and spectators matter.". you mean like "pro" wrestling right? They have a lot of flash and pizazz too. your words are in contradiction to your idea you wish to convey. It just seems like you want it less fundamentally balanced, and more superficial for entertainment purposes. and that alone means that to follow this ideal would lead to a game that isn't actually balanced but maintains the appearance of balance while wild and crazy thinngs that are actually based on luck keep happening within the game.
But SC vanilla wasn't meant to be a competitive game nor was it even complete.
Wings of Liberty has always been branded as both a complete game and the heir to RTS esports so it's only natural to hold it to a different standard.
Besides Blizzard already stated they intend to balance it around the highest levels so I don't see what you're trying to argue.
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On August 17 2011 05:07 Rassy wrote: Condor Hero United States. August 16 2011 07:00. Posts 917 PM Profile Blog Quote # The game should be balanced around the absolute HIGHEST level of play. That's GM Korea because everyone should aspire to be the best therefore it should be balance around that. No off course not, balancing the game around the highest lvl of play might make the game completely unbalanced for the 99% of players who dont have the highest lvl of play and no smart gaming company will ever release such a game wich would only apeal to a small niche of customers Sc is the same, the game should and luckily will be balanced around the average level of play since its the average players that in the end pay for it Therefore if you like it or not, the average players opinnion about balance is way and way more important then the pros opinnion
That's how Blizzard would look at it because it is a business after all. However, that would mean sacrificing the pro scene pretty much entirely, and that's the worst possible decision Blizz could make. Most people don't play SC2 for its compelling Singleplayer campaign....
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On August 17 2011 05:27 Condor Hero wrote:+ Show Spoiler +On August 17 2011 05:21 Truedot wrote:Show nested quote +On August 17 2011 04:57 Condor Hero wrote:On August 17 2011 04:44 Truedot wrote:On August 17 2011 02:17 IronDoc wrote:+ Show Spoiler +On August 17 2011 01:52 Truedot wrote:Show nested quote +On August 16 2011 07:00 Condor Hero wrote:
I feel that this thread will have tons of balance whine despite what you say.
The game should be balanced around the absolute HIGHEST level of play.
That's GM Korea because everyone should aspire to be the best therefore it should be balance around that.
As for EU/NA people having problems, that's just a skill thing.
Nobody would ask for a platinum player's opinions on balance right? I will disagree with you on this. You dont make the roof of a house and try to build under it. The game should be balanced at the lowest levels of play so that there is a clear baseline capability to defend or attack againt standard masses like mass VR and other silly nonsense. it takes a LOT more skill to defend against 1 mass unit like mass marines at 8 minutes or mass VRs than it takes to fight a well comp'd unit with your well comp'd unit. You numbers of unit comp and units themselves have to be very precise, not to mention micro control. its alot easier to be a micro aggressor with a Mass X unit thats been proven time and again to be extremely powerful versus sub-optimal unit comps.The level of knowledge and skill required to do :Mass X", therefore, is nothing compared to the level of knowledge and skill required to counter "Mass X". hence why so many people can faceroll into plat or diamond easily by finding a BO for one of these unit types and win 2/3 of their games before someone who can deal with the build from actual game knowledge comes along and keeps them from getting higher in leagues, because they actually don't know or understand the game, and simply picked a BO that has been proven to have a high winning rate vs average players, such as 7RR, 2 rax all in, mass VR, banshee mass vs zerg, etc. My point is that the game, if it were to be truly balanced, would be balanced at the lowest levels of play, so that countering people is a decision of making the proper units, and the proper units are about 20% harder to make and use vs the Mass X function, since winning vs it thereby causes you to gain a lead, so it should rightfully be difficult in some aspect. With this in mind, then you would see at the highest levels of play, timing becomes a more critical factor (not that it isnt already), good unit comps are much more valuable, and real skills like micro and strategic and tactical setups and decisions, all start making a bigger impact than "Mass X because this will insta-win since they cant deal with it". In short, balanced at the lowest levels of play would translate into more tactical play in higher levels and make the game much more exciting and interesting. You don't see chess balanced around highest levels of play. there's a baseline balance, via mirror pieces 1 hit kills, that prevents chess "cheese". All truly compettive non-computer games take this into account. There's either a limited number of pieces, a limited number of powerful pieces, and/or everyone gets the same powers/units. SC2 is in complete opposition to that, and I'm surprised its as balanced as it is, yet from the fact that infestor is the only clear counter to mass VR, which in itself has been whined to death as being OP, and that someone was able to micro stimmed mass marines as their only unit and beat all the supposed protoss counter units and win the game, I think that it would be much more useful to balance it from the bottom up. Starcraft 1 felt like this. of course if they did this, casuals wouldnt faceroll so well anymore and they'd lose revenue from people saying SC2 is a tough game and not for "casuals". The game cannot be balanced at both the highest level and the lowest level. Surely you see that? If you balance it for lower levels, then anything which becomes disproportionately stronger as skill increases will be unbalanced for pros. The only way you can achieve both is by there being the exact same reward for increased micro for every race and this must be true at every level. The only way this can be true is just by making the races fundamentally identical. If one concedes that it can only really be balanced at a certain level, I think most would agree that that level should be the one at which money is riding on matches. I have no idea what you're talking about with chess analogy. In chess, there are only 2 races and they are universally agreed to be imbalanced. chess isnt imbalanced. one is designed to be reactive and the other is designed to have initiative. but they still use all the pieces. in a perfect game the white always wins yes, but the game is meant for the winner to take black afterward. and the true winner would be the person using black and winning, it means they made less mistakes. The game itself is still completely balanced, as both sides have the same options for dealing with everything. On August 17 2011 03:44 Condor Hero wrote:On August 17 2011 01:52 Truedot wrote:On August 16 2011 07:00 Condor Hero wrote:
I feel that this thread will have tons of balance whine despite what you say.
The game should be balanced around the absolute HIGHEST level of play.
That's GM Korea because everyone should aspire to be the best therefore it should be balance around that.
As for EU/NA people having problems, that's just a skill thing.
Nobody would ask for a platinum player's opinions on balance right? I will disagree with you on this. You dont make the roof of a house and try to build under it. The game should be balanced at the lowest levels of play so that there is a clear baseline capability to defend or attack againt standard masses like mass VR and other silly nonsense. it takes a LOT more skill to defend against 1 mass unit like mass marines at 8 minutes or mass VRs than it takes to fight a well comp'd unit with your well comp'd unit. You numbers of unit comp and units themselves have to be very precise, not to mention micro control. its alot easier to be a micro aggressor with a Mass X unit thats been proven time and again to be extremely powerful versus sub-optimal unit comps.The level of knowledge and skill required to do :Mass X", therefore, is nothing compared to the level of knowledge and skill required to counter "Mass X". hence why so many people can faceroll into plat or diamond easily by finding a BO for one of these unit types and win 2/3 of their games before someone who can deal with the build from actual game knowledge comes along and keeps them from getting higher in leagues, because they actually don't know or understand the game, and simply picked a BO that has been proven to have a high winning rate vs average players, such as 7RR, 2 rax all in, mass VR, banshee mass vs zerg, etc. My point is that the game, if it were to be truly balanced, would be balanced at the lowest levels of play, so that countering people is a decision of making the proper units, and the proper units are about 20% harder to make and use vs the Mass X function, since winning vs it thereby causes you to gain a lead, so it should rightfully be difficult in some aspect. With this in mind, then you would see at the highest levels of play, timing becomes a more critical factor (not that it isnt already), good unit comps are much more valuable, and real skills like micro and strategic and tactical setups and decisions, all start making a bigger impact than "Mass X because this will insta-win since they cant deal with it". In short, balanced at the lowest levels of play would translate into more tactical play in higher levels and make the game much more exciting and interesting. You don't see chess balanced around highest levels of play. there's a baseline balance, via mirror pieces 1 hit kills, that prevents chess "cheese". All truly compettive non-computer games take this into account. There's either a limited number of pieces, a limited number of powerful pieces, and/or everyone gets the same powers/units. SC2 is in complete opposition to that, and I'm surprised its as balanced as it is, yet from the fact that infestor is the only clear counter to mass VR, which in itself has been whined to death as being OP, and that someone was able to micro stimmed mass marines as their only unit and beat all the supposed protoss counter units and win the game, I think that it would be much more useful to balance it from the bottom up. Starcraft 1 felt like this. of course if they did this, casuals wouldnt faceroll so well anymore and they'd lose revenue from people saying SC2 is a tough game and not for "casuals". What the hell. My point still stands that every should be trying to get BETTER, not WORSE to get balance. No one tries to get worse. Blizz trying to make it an ESPORT. You think people like watching low level basketball because they like to think they actually have a chance? Idk about you but I get inspired when I see pro players play at a level I never imagined. Since I started out watching BW, I will say there is nothing like watching Bisu multitask, watching Best simply have a ton of units more than his opponent, watching Boxer marine micro vs lurkers, or watching Jaedong muta harass with two control groups. tl;dr: Basically I think your opinion is pure garbage and you got no idea what you're talking about. I played SC1 since before brood war existed. I felt that it was balanced at low levels. counters were clear and had their clear counters, and only a disproportionately large anti-force could kill a counter unit all alone. note here that when I say disproportionately, I mean 16 zerglings to a firebat. firebats were countered by hydra, hydra were countered by tank, tank were countered by queen or muta, queen and muta were countered by marine, marine were countered by ling, ling were countered by firebat. We have similar behaviors in SC2, except that some units stop being countered after a certain critical mass point by their supposed counter parts, and instead counter them, and with upgrades moreso. I've never seen 20 firebats able to kill 10 hydras is all Im saying. even stimmed. And yes, things do look amazing and awe inspiring to people with untrained eyes and who have little to no knowledge of fundamentals inherent in what they're seeing. people from bronze watch my gameplay and go 'omg so awesome this is so amazing", when Im sitting here playing thinking "I just lamed my way to a win with an unbeatable unit comp at this timing, feels like time wasted". On August 17 2011 03:51 Fu[G]u wrote:the game should be balanced at the lowest levels of play so that there is a clear baseline capability to defend or attack againt standard masses like mass VR and other silly nonsense This, Sir, is nonsense and blasphemy. If sc was balanced by the lower levels of play, competitive brood war would never have been what it was, and sc2 would never have been spawned in its current incarnation. The game is so great because it is so difficult. It is so difficult because it is designed to be difficult to master at the very top levels. If lower level players see that the game is balanced even for the top levels, than any balance complaint they have goes out the window when they realize that it is a problem with their play, not with the game. read above. Games are and should be fundamentally balanced at lowest levels. Lets take out all units except T1-T2. balance the game around that. Then reintroduce the T3 units. If balance swings to one race domianting, we know its the fault of T3. thats how you build anything balanced. you start with the bare minimum, and keep adding onto it in a modular fashion. you dont slap a bunch of stuff together and then tweak parts of it to make it balanced in some crazy ad-hoc fashion that isnt true balance. thats why the infestor is how it is now. do you think that infestor buff would'nt have happenedhad it not been for the faltering of zerg at the PRO sscene? they already DO balance the races based on the pros, and look how well thats turning out with things like infestor. Q.E.D. I don't think you really have any further argument at this point. SC1 wasn't balanced at the lower levels as it took high level players years to make Protoss playable vs Zerg. The problem with balancing at low levels is that they will not innovate.It would be like Chess: these are your units and that's what they do. Only high level players using their units really well (or "abusing" as Idra would call it) pushes the limits of their race to the point where you can see how things can be "possible" or "impossible." You think low level players would've discovered stop lurkers, cloning scourge, stacking mutas? It's hard to balance around low levels as high levels will just say "well see if you do that better, then you'd will." Sorry but I just think you're wrong. prior to brood war, 2 zealot and 1 dragoon dealt with a terran T1-2 army pretty effecrtively. I maintain the position always have, that medics were a horribly out of balance PoS. They didnt have high threat, could wall between you and your enemy, and let people use stim endlessly. These major game changes to terran T1 alone are what caused what you're talking about for protoss. go back to playing SC vanilla and you'll see what I mean. And then what units did protoss get out of it? A AA only air unit that casts a web which stops attacks under it, which you can simply move out of, and a unit that moves relatively slow, is scannable, and attacks slow, and forces terran to build sci vessels, which they do anyway for the EMP and irradiate. You're right, at low levels they wont innovate. its the people that innovate at low levels that get higher in levels. derp. If everything was balanced at the lowest level possible, people who figure out better uses for units will go higher. People who have better STRATEGY (omg, a concept in an RTS, which stands for real time STRATEGY), will win out over people who are just average in strategy. How can you say thats bad for the game? It seems like the game is based around the idea of strategy, so why throw it out the window by saying that balancing at low level will be boring, or will not do anything useful? Your entire argument doesn't make any sense. A strategy game. balanced around the most basic and fundamental parts of itself. Average players will play each other and win/lose roughly equally, and no player will advance with a cheese tactic, into divisions they don't belong. Good players will quickly escape from these lower divisions by use of superior TACTICS, and superior STRATEGY, not by cheesing out of it. Good players will "innovate", as you put it, to become even better players with the same options available to them. How are you opposed to this by saying that it should be "balanced at high level of play only", whatever that means? It seems you want flash and wild upsets and craziness, rather than actual gameplay thats balanced. You said it yourself, that it would be boring and you have to "make it balanced where the money and spectators matter.". you mean like "pro" wrestling right? They have a lot of flash and pizazz too. your words are in contradiction to your idea you wish to convey. It just seems like you want it less fundamentally balanced, and more superficial for entertainment purposes. and that alone means that to follow this ideal would lead to a game that isn't actually balanced but maintains the appearance of balance while wild and crazy thinngs that are actually based on luck keep happening within the game. But SC vanilla wasn't meant to be a competitive game nor was it even complete. Wings of Liberty has always been branded as both a complete game and the heir to RTS esports so it's only natural to hold it to a different standard. Besides Blizzard already stated they intend to balance it around the highest levels so I don't see what you're trying to argue.
really? SC wasn't meant to be competitive? It wasn't complete? I guess it had units missing from the armies then. I guess one race compltely dominated 24/7. I guess there was NO counter units built specifically to counter other races units built into the game then. Not competitive my ass.
if you mean in the sense of a "e-sport" competitive, you can make the same argument with SF2, VF, DoA, MC, and all those fighting games,. yet they became a competitive game in your sense of the word through being good games, and VF is the most balanced of them all. Now, if you mean competitive solely on that as any race you can be competitive against another player, yes, it actually was competitive, and complete. I don't know where you get these "facts", but you're quite simply wrong.
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On August 17 2011 05:32 Truedot wrote:Show nested quote +On August 17 2011 05:27 Condor Hero wrote:+ Show Spoiler +On August 17 2011 05:21 Truedot wrote:Show nested quote +On August 17 2011 04:57 Condor Hero wrote:On August 17 2011 04:44 Truedot wrote:On August 17 2011 02:17 IronDoc wrote:+ Show Spoiler +On August 17 2011 01:52 Truedot wrote:Show nested quote +On August 16 2011 07:00 Condor Hero wrote:
I feel that this thread will have tons of balance whine despite what you say.
The game should be balanced around the absolute HIGHEST level of play.
That's GM Korea because everyone should aspire to be the best therefore it should be balance around that.
As for EU/NA people having problems, that's just a skill thing.
Nobody would ask for a platinum player's opinions on balance right? I will disagree with you on this. You dont make the roof of a house and try to build under it. The game should be balanced at the lowest levels of play so that there is a clear baseline capability to defend or attack againt standard masses like mass VR and other silly nonsense. it takes a LOT more skill to defend against 1 mass unit like mass marines at 8 minutes or mass VRs than it takes to fight a well comp'd unit with your well comp'd unit. You numbers of unit comp and units themselves have to be very precise, not to mention micro control. its alot easier to be a micro aggressor with a Mass X unit thats been proven time and again to be extremely powerful versus sub-optimal unit comps.The level of knowledge and skill required to do :Mass X", therefore, is nothing compared to the level of knowledge and skill required to counter "Mass X". hence why so many people can faceroll into plat or diamond easily by finding a BO for one of these unit types and win 2/3 of their games before someone who can deal with the build from actual game knowledge comes along and keeps them from getting higher in leagues, because they actually don't know or understand the game, and simply picked a BO that has been proven to have a high winning rate vs average players, such as 7RR, 2 rax all in, mass VR, banshee mass vs zerg, etc. My point is that the game, if it were to be truly balanced, would be balanced at the lowest levels of play, so that countering people is a decision of making the proper units, and the proper units are about 20% harder to make and use vs the Mass X function, since winning vs it thereby causes you to gain a lead, so it should rightfully be difficult in some aspect. With this in mind, then you would see at the highest levels of play, timing becomes a more critical factor (not that it isnt already), good unit comps are much more valuable, and real skills like micro and strategic and tactical setups and decisions, all start making a bigger impact than "Mass X because this will insta-win since they cant deal with it". In short, balanced at the lowest levels of play would translate into more tactical play in higher levels and make the game much more exciting and interesting. You don't see chess balanced around highest levels of play. there's a baseline balance, via mirror pieces 1 hit kills, that prevents chess "cheese". All truly compettive non-computer games take this into account. There's either a limited number of pieces, a limited number of powerful pieces, and/or everyone gets the same powers/units. SC2 is in complete opposition to that, and I'm surprised its as balanced as it is, yet from the fact that infestor is the only clear counter to mass VR, which in itself has been whined to death as being OP, and that someone was able to micro stimmed mass marines as their only unit and beat all the supposed protoss counter units and win the game, I think that it would be much more useful to balance it from the bottom up. Starcraft 1 felt like this. of course if they did this, casuals wouldnt faceroll so well anymore and they'd lose revenue from people saying SC2 is a tough game and not for "casuals". The game cannot be balanced at both the highest level and the lowest level. Surely you see that? If you balance it for lower levels, then anything which becomes disproportionately stronger as skill increases will be unbalanced for pros. The only way you can achieve both is by there being the exact same reward for increased micro for every race and this must be true at every level. The only way this can be true is just by making the races fundamentally identical. If one concedes that it can only really be balanced at a certain level, I think most would agree that that level should be the one at which money is riding on matches. I have no idea what you're talking about with chess analogy. In chess, there are only 2 races and they are universally agreed to be imbalanced. chess isnt imbalanced. one is designed to be reactive and the other is designed to have initiative. but they still use all the pieces. in a perfect game the white always wins yes, but the game is meant for the winner to take black afterward. and the true winner would be the person using black and winning, it means they made less mistakes. The game itself is still completely balanced, as both sides have the same options for dealing with everything. On August 17 2011 03:44 Condor Hero wrote:On August 17 2011 01:52 Truedot wrote:On August 16 2011 07:00 Condor Hero wrote:
I feel that this thread will have tons of balance whine despite what you say.
The game should be balanced around the absolute HIGHEST level of play.
That's GM Korea because everyone should aspire to be the best therefore it should be balance around that.
As for EU/NA people having problems, that's just a skill thing.
Nobody would ask for a platinum player's opinions on balance right? I will disagree with you on this. You dont make the roof of a house and try to build under it. The game should be balanced at the lowest levels of play so that there is a clear baseline capability to defend or attack againt standard masses like mass VR and other silly nonsense. it takes a LOT more skill to defend against 1 mass unit like mass marines at 8 minutes or mass VRs than it takes to fight a well comp'd unit with your well comp'd unit. You numbers of unit comp and units themselves have to be very precise, not to mention micro control. its alot easier to be a micro aggressor with a Mass X unit thats been proven time and again to be extremely powerful versus sub-optimal unit comps.The level of knowledge and skill required to do :Mass X", therefore, is nothing compared to the level of knowledge and skill required to counter "Mass X". hence why so many people can faceroll into plat or diamond easily by finding a BO for one of these unit types and win 2/3 of their games before someone who can deal with the build from actual game knowledge comes along and keeps them from getting higher in leagues, because they actually don't know or understand the game, and simply picked a BO that has been proven to have a high winning rate vs average players, such as 7RR, 2 rax all in, mass VR, banshee mass vs zerg, etc. My point is that the game, if it were to be truly balanced, would be balanced at the lowest levels of play, so that countering people is a decision of making the proper units, and the proper units are about 20% harder to make and use vs the Mass X function, since winning vs it thereby causes you to gain a lead, so it should rightfully be difficult in some aspect. With this in mind, then you would see at the highest levels of play, timing becomes a more critical factor (not that it isnt already), good unit comps are much more valuable, and real skills like micro and strategic and tactical setups and decisions, all start making a bigger impact than "Mass X because this will insta-win since they cant deal with it". In short, balanced at the lowest levels of play would translate into more tactical play in higher levels and make the game much more exciting and interesting. You don't see chess balanced around highest levels of play. there's a baseline balance, via mirror pieces 1 hit kills, that prevents chess "cheese". All truly compettive non-computer games take this into account. There's either a limited number of pieces, a limited number of powerful pieces, and/or everyone gets the same powers/units. SC2 is in complete opposition to that, and I'm surprised its as balanced as it is, yet from the fact that infestor is the only clear counter to mass VR, which in itself has been whined to death as being OP, and that someone was able to micro stimmed mass marines as their only unit and beat all the supposed protoss counter units and win the game, I think that it would be much more useful to balance it from the bottom up. Starcraft 1 felt like this. of course if they did this, casuals wouldnt faceroll so well anymore and they'd lose revenue from people saying SC2 is a tough game and not for "casuals". What the hell. My point still stands that every should be trying to get BETTER, not WORSE to get balance. No one tries to get worse. Blizz trying to make it an ESPORT. You think people like watching low level basketball because they like to think they actually have a chance? Idk about you but I get inspired when I see pro players play at a level I never imagined. Since I started out watching BW, I will say there is nothing like watching Bisu multitask, watching Best simply have a ton of units more than his opponent, watching Boxer marine micro vs lurkers, or watching Jaedong muta harass with two control groups. tl;dr: Basically I think your opinion is pure garbage and you got no idea what you're talking about. I played SC1 since before brood war existed. I felt that it was balanced at low levels. counters were clear and had their clear counters, and only a disproportionately large anti-force could kill a counter unit all alone. note here that when I say disproportionately, I mean 16 zerglings to a firebat. firebats were countered by hydra, hydra were countered by tank, tank were countered by queen or muta, queen and muta were countered by marine, marine were countered by ling, ling were countered by firebat. We have similar behaviors in SC2, except that some units stop being countered after a certain critical mass point by their supposed counter parts, and instead counter them, and with upgrades moreso. I've never seen 20 firebats able to kill 10 hydras is all Im saying. even stimmed. And yes, things do look amazing and awe inspiring to people with untrained eyes and who have little to no knowledge of fundamentals inherent in what they're seeing. people from bronze watch my gameplay and go 'omg so awesome this is so amazing", when Im sitting here playing thinking "I just lamed my way to a win with an unbeatable unit comp at this timing, feels like time wasted". On August 17 2011 03:51 Fu[G]u wrote:the game should be balanced at the lowest levels of play so that there is a clear baseline capability to defend or attack againt standard masses like mass VR and other silly nonsense This, Sir, is nonsense and blasphemy. If sc was balanced by the lower levels of play, competitive brood war would never have been what it was, and sc2 would never have been spawned in its current incarnation. The game is so great because it is so difficult. It is so difficult because it is designed to be difficult to master at the very top levels. If lower level players see that the game is balanced even for the top levels, than any balance complaint they have goes out the window when they realize that it is a problem with their play, not with the game. read above. Games are and should be fundamentally balanced at lowest levels. Lets take out all units except T1-T2. balance the game around that. Then reintroduce the T3 units. If balance swings to one race domianting, we know its the fault of T3. thats how you build anything balanced. you start with the bare minimum, and keep adding onto it in a modular fashion. you dont slap a bunch of stuff together and then tweak parts of it to make it balanced in some crazy ad-hoc fashion that isnt true balance. thats why the infestor is how it is now. do you think that infestor buff would'nt have happenedhad it not been for the faltering of zerg at the PRO sscene? they already DO balance the races based on the pros, and look how well thats turning out with things like infestor. Q.E.D. I don't think you really have any further argument at this point. SC1 wasn't balanced at the lower levels as it took high level players years to make Protoss playable vs Zerg. The problem with balancing at low levels is that they will not innovate.It would be like Chess: these are your units and that's what they do. Only high level players using their units really well (or "abusing" as Idra would call it) pushes the limits of their race to the point where you can see how things can be "possible" or "impossible." You think low level players would've discovered stop lurkers, cloning scourge, stacking mutas? It's hard to balance around low levels as high levels will just say "well see if you do that better, then you'd will." Sorry but I just think you're wrong. prior to brood war, 2 zealot and 1 dragoon dealt with a terran T1-2 army pretty effecrtively. I maintain the position always have, that medics were a horribly out of balance PoS. They didnt have high threat, could wall between you and your enemy, and let people use stim endlessly. These major game changes to terran T1 alone are what caused what you're talking about for protoss. go back to playing SC vanilla and you'll see what I mean. And then what units did protoss get out of it? A AA only air unit that casts a web which stops attacks under it, which you can simply move out of, and a unit that moves relatively slow, is scannable, and attacks slow, and forces terran to build sci vessels, which they do anyway for the EMP and irradiate. You're right, at low levels they wont innovate. its the people that innovate at low levels that get higher in levels. derp. If everything was balanced at the lowest level possible, people who figure out better uses for units will go higher. People who have better STRATEGY (omg, a concept in an RTS, which stands for real time STRATEGY), will win out over people who are just average in strategy. How can you say thats bad for the game? It seems like the game is based around the idea of strategy, so why throw it out the window by saying that balancing at low level will be boring, or will not do anything useful? Your entire argument doesn't make any sense. A strategy game. balanced around the most basic and fundamental parts of itself. Average players will play each other and win/lose roughly equally, and no player will advance with a cheese tactic, into divisions they don't belong. Good players will quickly escape from these lower divisions by use of superior TACTICS, and superior STRATEGY, not by cheesing out of it. Good players will "innovate", as you put it, to become even better players with the same options available to them. How are you opposed to this by saying that it should be "balanced at high level of play only", whatever that means? It seems you want flash and wild upsets and craziness, rather than actual gameplay thats balanced. You said it yourself, that it would be boring and you have to "make it balanced where the money and spectators matter.". you mean like "pro" wrestling right? They have a lot of flash and pizazz too. your words are in contradiction to your idea you wish to convey. It just seems like you want it less fundamentally balanced, and more superficial for entertainment purposes. and that alone means that to follow this ideal would lead to a game that isn't actually balanced but maintains the appearance of balance while wild and crazy thinngs that are actually based on luck keep happening within the game. But SC vanilla wasn't meant to be a competitive game nor was it even complete. Wings of Liberty has always been branded as both a complete game and the heir to RTS esports so it's only natural to hold it to a different standard. Besides Blizzard already stated they intend to balance it around the highest levels so I don't see what you're trying to argue. really? SC wasn't meant to be competitive? It wasn't complete? I guess it had units missing from the armies then. I guess one race compltely dominated 24/7. I guess there was NO counter units built specifically to counter other races units built into the game then. Not competitive my ass. if you mean in the sense of a "e-sport" competitive, you can make the same argument with SF2, VF, DoA, MC, and all those fighting games,. yet they became a competitive game in your sense of the word through being good games, and VF is the most balanced of them all. Now, if you mean competitive solely on that as any race you can be competitive against another player, yes, it actually was competitive, and complete. I don't know where you get these "facts", but you're quite simply wrong.
Yeah it did have units missing... like 2 of each race was added to BW.
It certainly wasn't meant to be a competitive Esport.
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On August 17 2011 05:34 Condor Hero wrote:Show nested quote +On August 17 2011 05:32 Truedot wrote:On August 17 2011 05:27 Condor Hero wrote:+ Show Spoiler +On August 17 2011 05:21 Truedot wrote:Show nested quote +On August 17 2011 04:57 Condor Hero wrote:On August 17 2011 04:44 Truedot wrote:On August 17 2011 02:17 IronDoc wrote:+ Show Spoiler +On August 17 2011 01:52 Truedot wrote:Show nested quote +On August 16 2011 07:00 Condor Hero wrote:
I feel that this thread will have tons of balance whine despite what you say.
The game should be balanced around the absolute HIGHEST level of play.
That's GM Korea because everyone should aspire to be the best therefore it should be balance around that.
As for EU/NA people having problems, that's just a skill thing.
Nobody would ask for a platinum player's opinions on balance right? I will disagree with you on this. You dont make the roof of a house and try to build under it. The game should be balanced at the lowest levels of play so that there is a clear baseline capability to defend or attack againt standard masses like mass VR and other silly nonsense. it takes a LOT more skill to defend against 1 mass unit like mass marines at 8 minutes or mass VRs than it takes to fight a well comp'd unit with your well comp'd unit. You numbers of unit comp and units themselves have to be very precise, not to mention micro control. its alot easier to be a micro aggressor with a Mass X unit thats been proven time and again to be extremely powerful versus sub-optimal unit comps.The level of knowledge and skill required to do :Mass X", therefore, is nothing compared to the level of knowledge and skill required to counter "Mass X". hence why so many people can faceroll into plat or diamond easily by finding a BO for one of these unit types and win 2/3 of their games before someone who can deal with the build from actual game knowledge comes along and keeps them from getting higher in leagues, because they actually don't know or understand the game, and simply picked a BO that has been proven to have a high winning rate vs average players, such as 7RR, 2 rax all in, mass VR, banshee mass vs zerg, etc. My point is that the game, if it were to be truly balanced, would be balanced at the lowest levels of play, so that countering people is a decision of making the proper units, and the proper units are about 20% harder to make and use vs the Mass X function, since winning vs it thereby causes you to gain a lead, so it should rightfully be difficult in some aspect. With this in mind, then you would see at the highest levels of play, timing becomes a more critical factor (not that it isnt already), good unit comps are much more valuable, and real skills like micro and strategic and tactical setups and decisions, all start making a bigger impact than "Mass X because this will insta-win since they cant deal with it". In short, balanced at the lowest levels of play would translate into more tactical play in higher levels and make the game much more exciting and interesting. You don't see chess balanced around highest levels of play. there's a baseline balance, via mirror pieces 1 hit kills, that prevents chess "cheese". All truly compettive non-computer games take this into account. There's either a limited number of pieces, a limited number of powerful pieces, and/or everyone gets the same powers/units. SC2 is in complete opposition to that, and I'm surprised its as balanced as it is, yet from the fact that infestor is the only clear counter to mass VR, which in itself has been whined to death as being OP, and that someone was able to micro stimmed mass marines as their only unit and beat all the supposed protoss counter units and win the game, I think that it would be much more useful to balance it from the bottom up. Starcraft 1 felt like this. of course if they did this, casuals wouldnt faceroll so well anymore and they'd lose revenue from people saying SC2 is a tough game and not for "casuals". The game cannot be balanced at both the highest level and the lowest level. Surely you see that? If you balance it for lower levels, then anything which becomes disproportionately stronger as skill increases will be unbalanced for pros. The only way you can achieve both is by there being the exact same reward for increased micro for every race and this must be true at every level. The only way this can be true is just by making the races fundamentally identical. If one concedes that it can only really be balanced at a certain level, I think most would agree that that level should be the one at which money is riding on matches. I have no idea what you're talking about with chess analogy. In chess, there are only 2 races and they are universally agreed to be imbalanced. chess isnt imbalanced. one is designed to be reactive and the other is designed to have initiative. but they still use all the pieces. in a perfect game the white always wins yes, but the game is meant for the winner to take black afterward. and the true winner would be the person using black and winning, it means they made less mistakes. The game itself is still completely balanced, as both sides have the same options for dealing with everything. On August 17 2011 03:44 Condor Hero wrote:On August 17 2011 01:52 Truedot wrote:On August 16 2011 07:00 Condor Hero wrote:
I feel that this thread will have tons of balance whine despite what you say.
The game should be balanced around the absolute HIGHEST level of play.
That's GM Korea because everyone should aspire to be the best therefore it should be balance around that.
As for EU/NA people having problems, that's just a skill thing.
Nobody would ask for a platinum player's opinions on balance right? I will disagree with you on this. You dont make the roof of a house and try to build under it. The game should be balanced at the lowest levels of play so that there is a clear baseline capability to defend or attack againt standard masses like mass VR and other silly nonsense. it takes a LOT more skill to defend against 1 mass unit like mass marines at 8 minutes or mass VRs than it takes to fight a well comp'd unit with your well comp'd unit. You numbers of unit comp and units themselves have to be very precise, not to mention micro control. its alot easier to be a micro aggressor with a Mass X unit thats been proven time and again to be extremely powerful versus sub-optimal unit comps.The level of knowledge and skill required to do :Mass X", therefore, is nothing compared to the level of knowledge and skill required to counter "Mass X". hence why so many people can faceroll into plat or diamond easily by finding a BO for one of these unit types and win 2/3 of their games before someone who can deal with the build from actual game knowledge comes along and keeps them from getting higher in leagues, because they actually don't know or understand the game, and simply picked a BO that has been proven to have a high winning rate vs average players, such as 7RR, 2 rax all in, mass VR, banshee mass vs zerg, etc. My point is that the game, if it were to be truly balanced, would be balanced at the lowest levels of play, so that countering people is a decision of making the proper units, and the proper units are about 20% harder to make and use vs the Mass X function, since winning vs it thereby causes you to gain a lead, so it should rightfully be difficult in some aspect. With this in mind, then you would see at the highest levels of play, timing becomes a more critical factor (not that it isnt already), good unit comps are much more valuable, and real skills like micro and strategic and tactical setups and decisions, all start making a bigger impact than "Mass X because this will insta-win since they cant deal with it". In short, balanced at the lowest levels of play would translate into more tactical play in higher levels and make the game much more exciting and interesting. You don't see chess balanced around highest levels of play. there's a baseline balance, via mirror pieces 1 hit kills, that prevents chess "cheese". All truly compettive non-computer games take this into account. There's either a limited number of pieces, a limited number of powerful pieces, and/or everyone gets the same powers/units. SC2 is in complete opposition to that, and I'm surprised its as balanced as it is, yet from the fact that infestor is the only clear counter to mass VR, which in itself has been whined to death as being OP, and that someone was able to micro stimmed mass marines as their only unit and beat all the supposed protoss counter units and win the game, I think that it would be much more useful to balance it from the bottom up. Starcraft 1 felt like this. of course if they did this, casuals wouldnt faceroll so well anymore and they'd lose revenue from people saying SC2 is a tough game and not for "casuals". What the hell. My point still stands that every should be trying to get BETTER, not WORSE to get balance. No one tries to get worse. Blizz trying to make it an ESPORT. You think people like watching low level basketball because they like to think they actually have a chance? Idk about you but I get inspired when I see pro players play at a level I never imagined. Since I started out watching BW, I will say there is nothing like watching Bisu multitask, watching Best simply have a ton of units more than his opponent, watching Boxer marine micro vs lurkers, or watching Jaedong muta harass with two control groups. tl;dr: Basically I think your opinion is pure garbage and you got no idea what you're talking about. I played SC1 since before brood war existed. I felt that it was balanced at low levels. counters were clear and had their clear counters, and only a disproportionately large anti-force could kill a counter unit all alone. note here that when I say disproportionately, I mean 16 zerglings to a firebat. firebats were countered by hydra, hydra were countered by tank, tank were countered by queen or muta, queen and muta were countered by marine, marine were countered by ling, ling were countered by firebat. We have similar behaviors in SC2, except that some units stop being countered after a certain critical mass point by their supposed counter parts, and instead counter them, and with upgrades moreso. I've never seen 20 firebats able to kill 10 hydras is all Im saying. even stimmed. And yes, things do look amazing and awe inspiring to people with untrained eyes and who have little to no knowledge of fundamentals inherent in what they're seeing. people from bronze watch my gameplay and go 'omg so awesome this is so amazing", when Im sitting here playing thinking "I just lamed my way to a win with an unbeatable unit comp at this timing, feels like time wasted". On August 17 2011 03:51 Fu[G]u wrote:the game should be balanced at the lowest levels of play so that there is a clear baseline capability to defend or attack againt standard masses like mass VR and other silly nonsense This, Sir, is nonsense and blasphemy. If sc was balanced by the lower levels of play, competitive brood war would never have been what it was, and sc2 would never have been spawned in its current incarnation. The game is so great because it is so difficult. It is so difficult because it is designed to be difficult to master at the very top levels. If lower level players see that the game is balanced even for the top levels, than any balance complaint they have goes out the window when they realize that it is a problem with their play, not with the game. read above. Games are and should be fundamentally balanced at lowest levels. Lets take out all units except T1-T2. balance the game around that. Then reintroduce the T3 units. If balance swings to one race domianting, we know its the fault of T3. thats how you build anything balanced. you start with the bare minimum, and keep adding onto it in a modular fashion. you dont slap a bunch of stuff together and then tweak parts of it to make it balanced in some crazy ad-hoc fashion that isnt true balance. thats why the infestor is how it is now. do you think that infestor buff would'nt have happenedhad it not been for the faltering of zerg at the PRO sscene? they already DO balance the races based on the pros, and look how well thats turning out with things like infestor. Q.E.D. I don't think you really have any further argument at this point. SC1 wasn't balanced at the lower levels as it took high level players years to make Protoss playable vs Zerg. The problem with balancing at low levels is that they will not innovate.It would be like Chess: these are your units and that's what they do. Only high level players using their units really well (or "abusing" as Idra would call it) pushes the limits of their race to the point where you can see how things can be "possible" or "impossible." You think low level players would've discovered stop lurkers, cloning scourge, stacking mutas? It's hard to balance around low levels as high levels will just say "well see if you do that better, then you'd will." Sorry but I just think you're wrong. prior to brood war, 2 zealot and 1 dragoon dealt with a terran T1-2 army pretty effecrtively. I maintain the position always have, that medics were a horribly out of balance PoS. They didnt have high threat, could wall between you and your enemy, and let people use stim endlessly. These major game changes to terran T1 alone are what caused what you're talking about for protoss. go back to playing SC vanilla and you'll see what I mean. And then what units did protoss get out of it? A AA only air unit that casts a web which stops attacks under it, which you can simply move out of, and a unit that moves relatively slow, is scannable, and attacks slow, and forces terran to build sci vessels, which they do anyway for the EMP and irradiate. You're right, at low levels they wont innovate. its the people that innovate at low levels that get higher in levels. derp. If everything was balanced at the lowest level possible, people who figure out better uses for units will go higher. People who have better STRATEGY (omg, a concept in an RTS, which stands for real time STRATEGY), will win out over people who are just average in strategy. How can you say thats bad for the game? It seems like the game is based around the idea of strategy, so why throw it out the window by saying that balancing at low level will be boring, or will not do anything useful? Your entire argument doesn't make any sense. A strategy game. balanced around the most basic and fundamental parts of itself. Average players will play each other and win/lose roughly equally, and no player will advance with a cheese tactic, into divisions they don't belong. Good players will quickly escape from these lower divisions by use of superior TACTICS, and superior STRATEGY, not by cheesing out of it. Good players will "innovate", as you put it, to become even better players with the same options available to them. How are you opposed to this by saying that it should be "balanced at high level of play only", whatever that means? It seems you want flash and wild upsets and craziness, rather than actual gameplay thats balanced. You said it yourself, that it would be boring and you have to "make it balanced where the money and spectators matter.". you mean like "pro" wrestling right? They have a lot of flash and pizazz too. your words are in contradiction to your idea you wish to convey. It just seems like you want it less fundamentally balanced, and more superficial for entertainment purposes. and that alone means that to follow this ideal would lead to a game that isn't actually balanced but maintains the appearance of balance while wild and crazy thinngs that are actually based on luck keep happening within the game. But SC vanilla wasn't meant to be a competitive game nor was it even complete. Wings of Liberty has always been branded as both a complete game and the heir to RTS esports so it's only natural to hold it to a different standard. Besides Blizzard already stated they intend to balance it around the highest levels so I don't see what you're trying to argue. really? SC wasn't meant to be competitive? It wasn't complete? I guess it had units missing from the armies then. I guess one race compltely dominated 24/7. I guess there was NO counter units built specifically to counter other races units built into the game then. Not competitive my ass. if you mean in the sense of a "e-sport" competitive, you can make the same argument with SF2, VF, DoA, MC, and all those fighting games,. yet they became a competitive game in your sense of the word through being good games, and VF is the most balanced of them all. Now, if you mean competitive solely on that as any race you can be competitive against another player, yes, it actually was competitive, and complete. I don't know where you get these "facts", but you're quite simply wrong. Yeah it did have units missing... like 2 of each race was added to BW. It certainly wasn't meant to be a competitive Esport.
you're talking about the same company that produced Warcraft AND warcraft 2, both of which I own and played since they were created. You're saying that they dropped the ball on Starcraft, when they've already established how to create a game? You're saying that expansions were simply to put the new units in, when WC2 had expansion too? Adding units != those units were "missing". I bought the original SC in the original package, it never stated "we will soon add an expansion to put in units we couldn't add in immediately as we wanted".
I'm not going to respond to your posts anymore. neither should anyone else.
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On August 17 2011 05:38 Truedot wrote:Show nested quote +On August 17 2011 05:34 Condor Hero wrote:On August 17 2011 05:32 Truedot wrote:On August 17 2011 05:27 Condor Hero wrote:+ Show Spoiler +On August 17 2011 05:21 Truedot wrote:Show nested quote +On August 17 2011 04:57 Condor Hero wrote:On August 17 2011 04:44 Truedot wrote:On August 17 2011 02:17 IronDoc wrote:+ Show Spoiler +On August 17 2011 01:52 Truedot wrote:Show nested quote +On August 16 2011 07:00 Condor Hero wrote:
I feel that this thread will have tons of balance whine despite what you say.
The game should be balanced around the absolute HIGHEST level of play.
That's GM Korea because everyone should aspire to be the best therefore it should be balance around that.
As for EU/NA people having problems, that's just a skill thing.
Nobody would ask for a platinum player's opinions on balance right? I will disagree with you on this. You dont make the roof of a house and try to build under it. The game should be balanced at the lowest levels of play so that there is a clear baseline capability to defend or attack againt standard masses like mass VR and other silly nonsense. it takes a LOT more skill to defend against 1 mass unit like mass marines at 8 minutes or mass VRs than it takes to fight a well comp'd unit with your well comp'd unit. You numbers of unit comp and units themselves have to be very precise, not to mention micro control. its alot easier to be a micro aggressor with a Mass X unit thats been proven time and again to be extremely powerful versus sub-optimal unit comps.The level of knowledge and skill required to do :Mass X", therefore, is nothing compared to the level of knowledge and skill required to counter "Mass X". hence why so many people can faceroll into plat or diamond easily by finding a BO for one of these unit types and win 2/3 of their games before someone who can deal with the build from actual game knowledge comes along and keeps them from getting higher in leagues, because they actually don't know or understand the game, and simply picked a BO that has been proven to have a high winning rate vs average players, such as 7RR, 2 rax all in, mass VR, banshee mass vs zerg, etc. My point is that the game, if it were to be truly balanced, would be balanced at the lowest levels of play, so that countering people is a decision of making the proper units, and the proper units are about 20% harder to make and use vs the Mass X function, since winning vs it thereby causes you to gain a lead, so it should rightfully be difficult in some aspect. With this in mind, then you would see at the highest levels of play, timing becomes a more critical factor (not that it isnt already), good unit comps are much more valuable, and real skills like micro and strategic and tactical setups and decisions, all start making a bigger impact than "Mass X because this will insta-win since they cant deal with it". In short, balanced at the lowest levels of play would translate into more tactical play in higher levels and make the game much more exciting and interesting. You don't see chess balanced around highest levels of play. there's a baseline balance, via mirror pieces 1 hit kills, that prevents chess "cheese". All truly compettive non-computer games take this into account. There's either a limited number of pieces, a limited number of powerful pieces, and/or everyone gets the same powers/units. SC2 is in complete opposition to that, and I'm surprised its as balanced as it is, yet from the fact that infestor is the only clear counter to mass VR, which in itself has been whined to death as being OP, and that someone was able to micro stimmed mass marines as their only unit and beat all the supposed protoss counter units and win the game, I think that it would be much more useful to balance it from the bottom up. Starcraft 1 felt like this. of course if they did this, casuals wouldnt faceroll so well anymore and they'd lose revenue from people saying SC2 is a tough game and not for "casuals". The game cannot be balanced at both the highest level and the lowest level. Surely you see that? If you balance it for lower levels, then anything which becomes disproportionately stronger as skill increases will be unbalanced for pros. The only way you can achieve both is by there being the exact same reward for increased micro for every race and this must be true at every level. The only way this can be true is just by making the races fundamentally identical. If one concedes that it can only really be balanced at a certain level, I think most would agree that that level should be the one at which money is riding on matches. I have no idea what you're talking about with chess analogy. In chess, there are only 2 races and they are universally agreed to be imbalanced. chess isnt imbalanced. one is designed to be reactive and the other is designed to have initiative. but they still use all the pieces. in a perfect game the white always wins yes, but the game is meant for the winner to take black afterward. and the true winner would be the person using black and winning, it means they made less mistakes. The game itself is still completely balanced, as both sides have the same options for dealing with everything. On August 17 2011 03:44 Condor Hero wrote:On August 17 2011 01:52 Truedot wrote:On August 16 2011 07:00 Condor Hero wrote:
I feel that this thread will have tons of balance whine despite what you say.
The game should be balanced around the absolute HIGHEST level of play.
That's GM Korea because everyone should aspire to be the best therefore it should be balance around that.
As for EU/NA people having problems, that's just a skill thing.
Nobody would ask for a platinum player's opinions on balance right? I will disagree with you on this. You dont make the roof of a house and try to build under it. The game should be balanced at the lowest levels of play so that there is a clear baseline capability to defend or attack againt standard masses like mass VR and other silly nonsense. it takes a LOT more skill to defend against 1 mass unit like mass marines at 8 minutes or mass VRs than it takes to fight a well comp'd unit with your well comp'd unit. You numbers of unit comp and units themselves have to be very precise, not to mention micro control. its alot easier to be a micro aggressor with a Mass X unit thats been proven time and again to be extremely powerful versus sub-optimal unit comps.The level of knowledge and skill required to do :Mass X", therefore, is nothing compared to the level of knowledge and skill required to counter "Mass X". hence why so many people can faceroll into plat or diamond easily by finding a BO for one of these unit types and win 2/3 of their games before someone who can deal with the build from actual game knowledge comes along and keeps them from getting higher in leagues, because they actually don't know or understand the game, and simply picked a BO that has been proven to have a high winning rate vs average players, such as 7RR, 2 rax all in, mass VR, banshee mass vs zerg, etc. My point is that the game, if it were to be truly balanced, would be balanced at the lowest levels of play, so that countering people is a decision of making the proper units, and the proper units are about 20% harder to make and use vs the Mass X function, since winning vs it thereby causes you to gain a lead, so it should rightfully be difficult in some aspect. With this in mind, then you would see at the highest levels of play, timing becomes a more critical factor (not that it isnt already), good unit comps are much more valuable, and real skills like micro and strategic and tactical setups and decisions, all start making a bigger impact than "Mass X because this will insta-win since they cant deal with it". In short, balanced at the lowest levels of play would translate into more tactical play in higher levels and make the game much more exciting and interesting. You don't see chess balanced around highest levels of play. there's a baseline balance, via mirror pieces 1 hit kills, that prevents chess "cheese". All truly compettive non-computer games take this into account. There's either a limited number of pieces, a limited number of powerful pieces, and/or everyone gets the same powers/units. SC2 is in complete opposition to that, and I'm surprised its as balanced as it is, yet from the fact that infestor is the only clear counter to mass VR, which in itself has been whined to death as being OP, and that someone was able to micro stimmed mass marines as their only unit and beat all the supposed protoss counter units and win the game, I think that it would be much more useful to balance it from the bottom up. Starcraft 1 felt like this. of course if they did this, casuals wouldnt faceroll so well anymore and they'd lose revenue from people saying SC2 is a tough game and not for "casuals". What the hell. My point still stands that every should be trying to get BETTER, not WORSE to get balance. No one tries to get worse. Blizz trying to make it an ESPORT. You think people like watching low level basketball because they like to think they actually have a chance? Idk about you but I get inspired when I see pro players play at a level I never imagined. Since I started out watching BW, I will say there is nothing like watching Bisu multitask, watching Best simply have a ton of units more than his opponent, watching Boxer marine micro vs lurkers, or watching Jaedong muta harass with two control groups. tl;dr: Basically I think your opinion is pure garbage and you got no idea what you're talking about. I played SC1 since before brood war existed. I felt that it was balanced at low levels. counters were clear and had their clear counters, and only a disproportionately large anti-force could kill a counter unit all alone. note here that when I say disproportionately, I mean 16 zerglings to a firebat. firebats were countered by hydra, hydra were countered by tank, tank were countered by queen or muta, queen and muta were countered by marine, marine were countered by ling, ling were countered by firebat. We have similar behaviors in SC2, except that some units stop being countered after a certain critical mass point by their supposed counter parts, and instead counter them, and with upgrades moreso. I've never seen 20 firebats able to kill 10 hydras is all Im saying. even stimmed. And yes, things do look amazing and awe inspiring to people with untrained eyes and who have little to no knowledge of fundamentals inherent in what they're seeing. people from bronze watch my gameplay and go 'omg so awesome this is so amazing", when Im sitting here playing thinking "I just lamed my way to a win with an unbeatable unit comp at this timing, feels like time wasted". On August 17 2011 03:51 Fu[G]u wrote:the game should be balanced at the lowest levels of play so that there is a clear baseline capability to defend or attack againt standard masses like mass VR and other silly nonsense This, Sir, is nonsense and blasphemy. If sc was balanced by the lower levels of play, competitive brood war would never have been what it was, and sc2 would never have been spawned in its current incarnation. The game is so great because it is so difficult. It is so difficult because it is designed to be difficult to master at the very top levels. If lower level players see that the game is balanced even for the top levels, than any balance complaint they have goes out the window when they realize that it is a problem with their play, not with the game. read above. Games are and should be fundamentally balanced at lowest levels. Lets take out all units except T1-T2. balance the game around that. Then reintroduce the T3 units. If balance swings to one race domianting, we know its the fault of T3. thats how you build anything balanced. you start with the bare minimum, and keep adding onto it in a modular fashion. you dont slap a bunch of stuff together and then tweak parts of it to make it balanced in some crazy ad-hoc fashion that isnt true balance. thats why the infestor is how it is now. do you think that infestor buff would'nt have happenedhad it not been for the faltering of zerg at the PRO sscene? they already DO balance the races based on the pros, and look how well thats turning out with things like infestor. Q.E.D. I don't think you really have any further argument at this point. SC1 wasn't balanced at the lower levels as it took high level players years to make Protoss playable vs Zerg. The problem with balancing at low levels is that they will not innovate.It would be like Chess: these are your units and that's what they do. Only high level players using their units really well (or "abusing" as Idra would call it) pushes the limits of their race to the point where you can see how things can be "possible" or "impossible." You think low level players would've discovered stop lurkers, cloning scourge, stacking mutas? It's hard to balance around low levels as high levels will just say "well see if you do that better, then you'd will." Sorry but I just think you're wrong. prior to brood war, 2 zealot and 1 dragoon dealt with a terran T1-2 army pretty effecrtively. I maintain the position always have, that medics were a horribly out of balance PoS. They didnt have high threat, could wall between you and your enemy, and let people use stim endlessly. These major game changes to terran T1 alone are what caused what you're talking about for protoss. go back to playing SC vanilla and you'll see what I mean. And then what units did protoss get out of it? A AA only air unit that casts a web which stops attacks under it, which you can simply move out of, and a unit that moves relatively slow, is scannable, and attacks slow, and forces terran to build sci vessels, which they do anyway for the EMP and irradiate. You're right, at low levels they wont innovate. its the people that innovate at low levels that get higher in levels. derp. If everything was balanced at the lowest level possible, people who figure out better uses for units will go higher. People who have better STRATEGY (omg, a concept in an RTS, which stands for real time STRATEGY), will win out over people who are just average in strategy. How can you say thats bad for the game? It seems like the game is based around the idea of strategy, so why throw it out the window by saying that balancing at low level will be boring, or will not do anything useful? Your entire argument doesn't make any sense. A strategy game. balanced around the most basic and fundamental parts of itself. Average players will play each other and win/lose roughly equally, and no player will advance with a cheese tactic, into divisions they don't belong. Good players will quickly escape from these lower divisions by use of superior TACTICS, and superior STRATEGY, not by cheesing out of it. Good players will "innovate", as you put it, to become even better players with the same options available to them. How are you opposed to this by saying that it should be "balanced at high level of play only", whatever that means? It seems you want flash and wild upsets and craziness, rather than actual gameplay thats balanced. You said it yourself, that it would be boring and you have to "make it balanced where the money and spectators matter.". you mean like "pro" wrestling right? They have a lot of flash and pizazz too. your words are in contradiction to your idea you wish to convey. It just seems like you want it less fundamentally balanced, and more superficial for entertainment purposes. and that alone means that to follow this ideal would lead to a game that isn't actually balanced but maintains the appearance of balance while wild and crazy thinngs that are actually based on luck keep happening within the game. But SC vanilla wasn't meant to be a competitive game nor was it even complete. Wings of Liberty has always been branded as both a complete game and the heir to RTS esports so it's only natural to hold it to a different standard. Besides Blizzard already stated they intend to balance it around the highest levels so I don't see what you're trying to argue. really? SC wasn't meant to be competitive? It wasn't complete? I guess it had units missing from the armies then. I guess one race compltely dominated 24/7. I guess there was NO counter units built specifically to counter other races units built into the game then. Not competitive my ass. if you mean in the sense of a "e-sport" competitive, you can make the same argument with SF2, VF, DoA, MC, and all those fighting games,. yet they became a competitive game in your sense of the word through being good games, and VF is the most balanced of them all. Now, if you mean competitive solely on that as any race you can be competitive against another player, yes, it actually was competitive, and complete. I don't know where you get these "facts", but you're quite simply wrong. Yeah it did have units missing... like 2 of each race was added to BW. It certainly wasn't meant to be a competitive Esport. you're talking about the same company that produced Warcraft AND warcraft 2, both of which I own and played since they were created. You're saying that they dropped the ball on Starcraft, when they've already established how to create a game? You're saying that expansions were simply to put the new units in, when WC2 had expansion too? Adding units != those units were "missing". I bought the original SC in the original package, it never stated "we will soon add an expansion to put in units we couldn't add in immediately as we wanted". I'm not going to respond to your posts anymore. neither should anyone else.
I don't even... seeing as how every single expansion had new units yeah I'd say that's a big part of their selling point on expansions.
I don't know how many people buy Blizz expansions for the campaign but Dustin Browder even said that it's been a longstanding Blizz philosophy to add new units so people feel like they get their money's worth.
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On August 17 2011 04:24 DragonDefonce wrote:Show nested quote +On August 17 2011 03:41 BUfels wrote:On August 17 2011 03:13 xlava wrote:On August 17 2011 03:10 Aletheia27 wrote:
With regard to infestors being overpowered, I feel like the argument goes along the same lines as how forcefields were considered overpowered for toss players. I think people just haven't learened to adapt to them yet and adjust their play. Just my 2 cents. Kind of. Except that Zerg doesn't depend on infestors for surviving. Without sentries Protoss dies to every early game aggression. Zerg can live without infestors. Forcefields aren't overpowered, they're a necessity. Yes, they definitely do. You can't beat turtle protoss 200/200 deathball without them. The deathball is already good enough(and turtle protoss is getting popular again), it does not need a buff. Neither zerg nor terran is supposed to beat toss in 200/200 fight. Like ever. Zerg loses the initial fight but takes out as much of the deathball as it can and win by resupplying. If zerg is even with protoss in a 200/200 fight, something is wrong. And the current state of the game is so that with hive tech and infestors, zerg can beat protoss deathball. If you break even in a max army fight as protoss, you are as good as dead. And this "turtle toss" doesn't work on a fundamental level because of broodlords. The only thing more ridiculous than turtling against broodlords would be to turtle against tanks
this would be true if ur macro sux and the protoss army is so good that ppl who have bad macro can still win just by turtling to a 200 max army. so many times i play a masters toss who floats 2k minerals but still only have 7-8 gates LOL? if ur actually good u can remax just as fast with mass gateways.
so NO 200 army shuld be even across all races if composition is good. the reason protoss usually wins is cus zerg is going a tier 2 army comp of roach corruptor in order to get ahead in bases and get map control. if the zerg has tier 3 units, it should be even or ahead of toss since zerg tier 3 is more inaccessible.
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I must say in TvP the ghost versus templar still seems to be a bit off:
EMP energy drain vs feedback:
This favors Terran a bit. Mostly due to the fact 6 ghost means 6 feedbacks. 6 templar can mean 1 EMP. You see top protosses strugling with the position while terran can just make 1 or 2 control groups and walk forward, way way less micro intensive.
Solution: It would be maybe better that snipe would drain energy and not EMP. Then we would really see the better micro player winning the templar vs ghost battle.
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On August 17 2011 05:07 Rassy wrote: Condor Hero United States. August 16 2011 07:00. Posts 917 PM Profile Blog Quote # The game should be balanced around the absolute HIGHEST level of play. That's GM Korea because everyone should aspire to be the best therefore it should be balance around that. No off course not, balancing the game around the highest lvl of play might make the game completely unbalanced for the 99% of players who dont have the highest lvl of play and no smart gaming company will ever release such a game wich would only apeal to a small niche of customers Sc is the same, the game should and luckily will be balanced around the average level of play since its the average players that in the end pay for it Therefore if you like it or not, the average players opinnion about balance is way and way more important then the pros opinnion
In almost all cases, balancing for the top level of play will "trickle down" to lower levels. The only exception are cases where ridiculous micro is required to stop a strategy that requires no micro at all (arguably the 1-1-1 against Protoss).
The reason you can't balance with 99% of the player base in mind is because if a Bronze Protoss loses to MMM from a Bronze Terran, comes on here with his replay and blames imbalance, he's going to get about 100 replies in 10 minutes that will tell him he needs to position better and macro better. "Imbalance" can only be seen at the level of play where the fewest mistakes are made.
Don't get me wrong, pro players still make plenty of mistakes, and often don't control their units optimally, but a game imbalance only exists when both players play perfectly and one wins because a particular unit or strategy is too strong. Since this is obviously a hypothetical scenario, the next best option is to balance based on the pro players we watch every day, as well as statistical data Blizzard can get from the higher leagues.
There is no imbalance at the average level of play. You lost because you could have played better.
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On August 17 2011 05:07 Rassy wrote:
No off course not,
balancing the game around the highest lvl of play might make the game completely unbalanced for the 99% of players who dont have the highest lvl of play and no smart gaming company will ever release such a game wich would only apeal to a small niche of customers
Most people realize that no matter how much they may whine when they lose, its challenge that makes a game fun.
Balancing according to average players would take away from the challenge, therefore would take away from the fun.
Sc is the same, the game should and luckily will be balanced around the average level of play since its the average players that in the end pay for it
The average players will pay for it regardless. They need to buy it before they can find out they're average, afterall.
Therefore if you like it or not, the average players opinnion about balance is way and way more important then the pros opinnion
I sincerely hope no one at Blizzard thinks that way. I doubt they do since they seem to care about promoting StarCraft II as an E-sport, and balancing according to average players would severely damage that.
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On August 16 2011 14:02 KingAce wrote:Show nested quote +On August 16 2011 13:28 mrKamiya wrote:On August 16 2011 13:09 KingAce wrote:
Harassment in this game isn't very balanced at all. Considering how important it is as a tactic.
Terran harassment is obviously that most powerful since they have so many options. In BFHellions, Banshees, MMM drops, Reapers, even vikings are all very viable options.
And the only reason I believe people overlook this is because chrono boosting, larva inject and mules in the game. Make recovery some what possible.
But considering the amount of damage that comes off Hellions, Banshees and MMM drops. Right now I question if terran needs the Blue flame upgrade especially so early. Actually for the longest time I have been questioning the tech lab...since having so many early game options makes terran very unpredictable and makes scouting even more important, in a game where scouting overall sucks.
I think terrans should have their tech more spread out, like zerg and protoss. The 1-1-1 build is good example of this. These easy to access tech routes make the early game very unpredictable which produce various amounts of build order losses.
Mid to late game I really believe the problem terran has is that, the thor and vikings aren't really a good substitute for the Goliath. It's cheaper more efficient at complimenting mech and bio builds and easier to mass produce. In comparison the thor and vikings are almost gimmicks. Options doesn't mean all of them are very good, any harass can be very good if you haven't scouted good enough, and don't react correctly/at all. Reaper harass earlygame is easily cleaned up by early roaches, or queens, or just spines. Vikings can only be effective if you let them. A ling runby can also be just as devastating as a terran drop if a terran's army is in the middle of the map, so can a drop. Reapers are very fragile, if you go fast blue flame hellions a roach push can easily kill you or contain you for a while. I could do a queen drop and do damage if you let me or didnt react fast enough. You're kidding right? Reapers come out before roaches. And you're viking rebuttal is very lacking. One viking can shut down a good amount of overloads around the map. A ling run by isn't a harass, it's a lucky break...and lings don't have the dps of MMM drops. Really that's what happens when terran goes for hellion harass? They get contain by roaches? I would love to see a pro harass with a queen drop, sounds very efficient.
Reapers can be easily cleaned up by queens. A ling runby is indeed harass, not sure what you're thinking. I'm saying reactor hellions can be easily be contained by roaches, not saying that "they get contained by roaches", what are you thinking? My point was not that queen drops are efficient, its that if you let harass do damage/ dont react properly, any sort of harass can do damage in some way.
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On August 17 2011 07:43 Spitfire wrote:Show nested quote +On August 17 2011 05:07 Rassy wrote:
No off course not,
balancing the game around the highest lvl of play might make the game completely unbalanced for the 99% of players who dont have the highest lvl of play and no smart gaming company will ever release such a game wich would only apeal to a small niche of customers Most people realize that no matter how much they may whine when they lose, its challenge that makes a game fun. Balancing according to average players would take away from the challenge, therefore would take away from the fun.
this argument doesnt hold water.
lets say that if you balance for the average player its even harder for a player to be good enough to get out of the average zone than when there is imbalance in the form of easy to execute cheeses that completely stomp certain races and boost a player that is "just average" but performing a far superior build order and unit abuse/timing to rocket up the leagues and actual good oplayers will struggle to oust said player because their cheese technique is so good.
+ Show Spoiler +A cheese isnt a cheese solely on the basis of before 5 minutes pass or something else. A cheese is something that makes it almost too easy to win/achieve. [sic: baldurs gate 2 CHEESE techniques in the player guide mag]. performing unlimited repeats of an unstoppable attack with a character until you win is cheese regardless of what time you execute it. The important part is that its unstoppable. this can translate to "very very hard to stop unless you counter perfectly".
for instance, I consider late game base trading terrans cheese. It doesn't matter if you kill off all their SCVs if you dont also get their production. they can just mule calldown 10 times and you are now stuck with trying to compete with a 4000 resource rate leader while your base trade lowered you to spending minerals to try to pump workers, none of which can compete with the mass mule to compensate for no scvs. Just like a 2 rax all in. do enough damage and mules will crutch your eco well enough to do a follow up kill. No other race can afford those types of ridiculously all in positions that are certain death to the other races, or at least an even enough trade that you both have to spend 5 minuite rebuilding eco to fight again. its cheesy because its a certain victory that no other race is allowed, a strategy thats wholly unique to terran and easy to abuse as an average player.
would more balance make it harder to get out of the average pile? If anyone can competently pull off unit comps and counters and simple strategies that beat what I like to call "face value opposition", and in that I mean an opposing force who's strategies and tactics are simplistic (like 1-1-1) and not in depth or having deeper tactical or strategic genius underlying what they're doing, then wouldn't THAT mean that pros beat these people by actually being better in skills like tactician and strategist, as well as good micro/macro/unit comp counter discernment?
Thus, wouldn't a well balanced game where its harder to escape from mediocrity make pro players even better? isnt skill all relative anyway? On the other hand, lets say you leave it imbalanced. It still takes better skill and pro ability to get away from those average players anyway.
So really, the end result is that balance is neither GOOD nor BAD for the pro scene to be balanced at average, it doesn't help or hurt anyone in terms of true abilities, what it does do, is inflates the zone of people with average skills who compete with people of good skills simply by having a spammable FOTM autowin build. these kinds of people don't understand the underlying mechanics and fundamentals of the game, they simple parrot a procedure that leads to them winning without understanding why its so good. And thus you get people who say "balance is fine" because they don't understand why their win rate is only 50/50 when they have this "sweet BO" that seems to win them many games. So they assume their getting crushed every so often implies balance, when really it means someone had far superior skill to school their lazy asses for being a one trick pony.
More balance is better for the game, not worse. I don't understand how you can make that claim.
i think all I have to do to make my argument sound is cite CombatEX cheesing into GM. he's pro because of good game balance, clearly.
On August 17 2011 08:28 mrKamiya wrote:Show nested quote +On August 16 2011 14:02 KingAce wrote:On August 16 2011 13:28 mrKamiya wrote:On August 16 2011 13:09 KingAce wrote:
Harassment in this game isn't very balanced at all. Considering how important it is as a tactic.
Terran harassment is obviously that most powerful since they have so many options. In BFHellions, Banshees, MMM drops, Reapers, even vikings are all very viable options.
And the only reason I believe people overlook this is because chrono boosting, larva inject and mules in the game. Make recovery some what possible.
But considering the amount of damage that comes off Hellions, Banshees and MMM drops. Right now I question if terran needs the Blue flame upgrade especially so early. Actually for the longest time I have been questioning the tech lab...since having so many early game options makes terran very unpredictable and makes scouting even more important, in a game where scouting overall sucks.
I think terrans should have their tech more spread out, like zerg and protoss. The 1-1-1 build is good example of this. These easy to access tech routes make the early game very unpredictable which produce various amounts of build order losses.
Mid to late game I really believe the problem terran has is that, the thor and vikings aren't really a good substitute for the Goliath. It's cheaper more efficient at complimenting mech and bio builds and easier to mass produce. In comparison the thor and vikings are almost gimmicks. Options doesn't mean all of them are very good, any harass can be very good if you haven't scouted good enough, and don't react correctly/at all. Reaper harass earlygame is easily cleaned up by early roaches, or queens, or just spines. Vikings can only be effective if you let them. A ling runby can also be just as devastating as a terran drop if a terran's army is in the middle of the map, so can a drop. Reapers are very fragile, if you go fast blue flame hellions a roach push can easily kill you or contain you for a while. I could do a queen drop and do damage if you let me or didnt react fast enough. You're kidding right? Reapers come out before roaches. And you're viking rebuttal is very lacking. One viking can shut down a good amount of overloads around the map. A ling run by isn't a harass, it's a lucky break...and lings don't have the dps of MMM drops. Really that's what happens when terran goes for hellion harass? They get contain by roaches? I would love to see a pro harass with a queen drop, sounds very efficient. Reapers can be easily cleaned up by queens. A ling runby is indeed harass, not sure what you're thinking. I'm saying reactor hellions can be easily be contained by roaches, not saying that "they get contained by roaches", what are you thinking? My point was not that queen drops are efficient, its that if you let harass do damage/ dont react properly, any sort of harass can do damage in some way.
queens are slow as marines, and thats on creep. how can that clean up a fast moving cliff jumper? also reapers outrange queens. they outrange roaches too, which also outrange queens. hummmm.
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first day playing protoss, i expected to drop down to silver but i've been rolling zergs so far.
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On August 17 2011 09:11 latan wrote:
first day playing protoss, i expected to drop down to silver but i've been rolling zergs so far.
first day playing zerg, I lost all 5 placement matches. I played terran exclusively in brood war until the last year of it and then went all zerg. played since SC1 before brood war expo. And yet lost 5 placements and my first two bronze matches.
ofc, once I started winning I hit gold in 3 days and plat in a week.
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Good thread, good discussion. Keep it up.
re: the marine "shoot up" upgrade above. Could be similar to acquiring the Overlord's generate creep ability - Once you have Lair, you have it. Options includ it coming from just having OC/Engi/Fact/or TechLab with no research required. Balance concern: That structure getting sniped.
Balance-wise, the most exciting thing for me is additional units from HOTS. I'd love to see some other early unit options for Z and P to round out some of the issues discussed in this thread (reliance on FF, fewer Z options). Terran has most of the units/ structures to cover its bases, though I'd like to see a high risk/ high reward Terran melee unit.
Variety raises the skillcap and makes for a more interesting game. Add more units and then adjust accordingly.
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On August 17 2011 03:20 Serashin wrote:
Is there even a way to reasonably get into contact with designer and balance team ?.
Its not like its official as a link or something like a adress to get your points straight and explain the way that overall improvements are a big + for the game , the vievers and the higher chances of longlivety in e-sports like that.
On the other hand its understandable that they dont wanna people play arround with their product where some already get paid for it.
All i can do is offer my help , and no i dont wanna make 2-3 years study in designer area it just makes me sad that this game gets in this state that much attention .
And i hope someone can PM me with a legit E-Mail adress or something to get things rolling !
Disscussion = no benefits
Getting in contact with Blizzard balance team = worth of spending time for solutions
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EPT
