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Only Balance for the Highest Level? - Page 13

Forum Index > SC2 General
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SoulWager
Profile Joined August 2010
United States464 Posts
September 29 2011 14:25 GMT
#241
Many of the most important balance decisions aren't even in blizzard's hands, but rather in the selection and creation of a tournament map pool. You make the basic unit balance as entertaining as you can, fix any huge problems, then let the scene figure out what types of strategies are broken, whether it can be fixed with map design, and what other impacts those changes to map design have.

Low level play will never be balanced because bad players don't play on balanced maps.
chokke
Profile Joined August 2010
Norway228 Posts
September 29 2011 14:30 GMT
#242
On September 29 2011 20:01 ceaRshaf wrote:
Show nested quote +
On September 29 2011 18:48 chokke wrote:

You always have to bear in min that there are more players to the gaem then top 200,



Dude, in this world, there will always be more stupid people than intelligent people, but the stupids are the ones that have to rise not the intelligent to lower. This is not an insult to anybody but a fact about the world you and me live in.

This is what progress and evolution takes.

Seeing how it's much easier to quit playing a game then it is to become smart. I am not saying to pace the balance TO the lower tier of players, but rather KEEP IN MIND how balance-changes can affect them.
Let us say that to beat tactic X it requires a minimum of micro to excecute, but to actually do tactic X is significally easier. That means, at lower levels, the bar to execute the tactic is lower then it is to defend it due to lack of micro (there is a reason they are stuck in league A). Which means the player comes to a league higher then deserved and once the tactic X gets defeated they will automaticly lose due to being a worse player.
So, whatever a change means, how will it affect bronze-diamond league and not only how it affects Code A/S.
HaXXspetten
Profile Blog Joined October 2009
Sweden15718 Posts
September 29 2011 14:31 GMT
#243
SC2 can only be balanced around pro level 1v1. End of story. Don't really get the point of trying to argue against that...
VirgilSC2
Profile Blog Joined June 2011
United States6151 Posts
September 29 2011 14:34 GMT
#244
On September 29 2011 16:55 FrogOfWar wrote:
Show nested quote +
On September 22 2011 06:18 YumYumGranola wrote:Now I'm sure higher level players will read this and roll eyes and angrily think " l2p n00bs", but please keep this in mind while you read this, if the general SC2 scene dies down you'll end up just being the person who's really good at something nobody cares about.


Thank you, quoted for truth. This is what all the master players who look at the lower leagues and casual players with contempt don't seem to get. Consider football - it isn't just the world championships, it's also boys playing in the backyard. Not only do they make it the big cultural phenomenon that it is, they also might become world champions themselves some day. No reason to verbally shit on them all the time.

Concerning balance I think Blizzard cares a lot about the masses for marketing reasons, so they definitely won't let the game become too imba at lower levels. As you say, having a perfect balance at all levels is impossible, but Blizz will do their best to come at close as possible because it's in their best interest. People who say the game should be balanced exclusively with regard to the pro level are dreaming. This isn't reality and never will be.

Those boys playing in the backyard aren't professional football players. Would you change the rules of football to make them have more fun playing it?
Clarity Gaming #1 Fan | Avid MTG Grinder | @VirgilSC2
HardMacro
Profile Blog Joined September 2011
Canada361 Posts
September 29 2011 15:10 GMT
#245
Going through this thread it's so easy to see who's actually played broodwar and who's just making shit up.

Facts:

1. In Broodwar, if you were anywhere near the C ranks as Terran, you could most likely shoot into B- as Protoss with a week or two of training. There's a fucking reason why there are tosses in bw in the B- ranks with <100 APM. Ultimately, at the C ranks and below, PvT is ridiculously easy and TvP is a nightmare.

2. What blizzard should do is balance the game at the highest level of play simply because that's the only way to ensure the longevity and competitiveness of the game. However, longevity and competitiveness are secondary to making cash, so Blizzard has been balancing the game around lower levels as well, reflective of the zealot and VR nerf mentioned earlier in the thread.

3. The argument of "lower league players are just retardedly bad, therefore ignore them completely because the game should only be balanced on the highest level" expressed by people in this thread is quite short-sighted. OP even explicitly states that in order for the game to survive and thrive, there needs to be a healthy fan/amateur base, which would not exist if the game wasn't fun to play at lower levels. Imagine that SC2 was perfectly balanced only between MC, MKP and Nestea, but gets horribly easy for protoss and hard for zerg as you move down the skill ladder to the point that 95% percent of the people in diamond league and below were protoss. Yah... I'm certain that casual players would keep playing 95% PvPs season after season.

Ultimately, SC2 > BW in terms of lower league balance, and BW > SC2 in terms of highest level play balance. So there shouldn't even be any arguments anyway.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯ saving this here because I use it, don't know how to make it, and don't know it's name
secretary bird
Profile Joined September 2011
447 Posts
September 29 2011 15:14 GMT
#246
If you think another race is easier at your level it could also be because that race suits you better.

For instance Zerg seems easier for me because I when I screw up as terran it s mostly because I wasn t macroing well while harassing or because I screw up my micro. Those things are just easier
as Zerg, while Zergs need good game knowledge and macro which I am better at I think.
Kaz_Coaching
Profile Joined October 2010
United States83 Posts
September 29 2011 15:36 GMT
#247
I'm sorry but I don't understand the point of this thread. Your relating that different skill levels exist and that some strategies are harder to execute or play then others. Some races may be inherently easier by default. What you aren't suggesting is any way to fix it, only stating that it's a problem.

Let's look at the alternative, we balance SC around entry level players because let's face it, every single player starts out sucking, if they don't stay in the game then the game dies. By this logic we can conclude that the game was at some point balanced for every player who played the game, while only a small percentile will ever reach higher.

This gives absolutely no reason to progress or to get better in the game. In essence, why learn to execute better strategies, blink micro your stalkers, when the game is designed to be belanced for the 1A players. Afterall, we wouldn't want to balance around any strategy that might be hard to execute.

The alternative we could say is that the rules of the game change the higher the skill cap. Maybe they get fewer minerals a turn and have to mine a lot harder to have equal income, or some other change to the game that changes at different leagues. This again has flaws, for one it prevents players from progressing because they will not be used to the new rule set. The other problem would be trying to adjust it for the current MMR system. MMR fluctuates and swings fairly often and allows players to be matched up against other leagues to find their proper place. If two players of differing leagues played, how would the system pick what ruleset to follow? Wouldn't it be unbalanced against the player who did not have their standard league rules to go with?

I've explained some of the problems with trying to balance to certain skillcaps, now if you want an actual discussion please present some ideas you think would be reasonable.

DarkPlasmaBall
Profile Blog Joined March 2010
United States46279 Posts
September 29 2011 15:39 GMT
#248
Balance affects all levels of play, but it's easier to look at pro-gamers because ability levels are generally more even. There's far fewer errors in the GM league than the gold league, and so it's easier to determine whether a match-up win percentage is truly due to imbalance or just normal human error.
"There is nothing more satisfying than looking at a crowd of people and helping them get what I love." ~Day[9] Daily #100
l3iRdMaN
Profile Joined February 2004
United States72 Posts
September 29 2011 15:41 GMT
#249
OP is extremely vague with his suggestion and gives no examples on how to "balance at the lower levels." ALL lower league players who think something is imbalanced are just going along with something they heard on TL and raging to feel better about themselves.They'd be better off spending more time working on their game and taking responsibility for their losses, rather than worrying about balance at the gold level.
cLutZ
Profile Joined November 2010
United States19574 Posts
September 29 2011 19:48 GMT
#250
On September 29 2011 23:34 VirgilSC2 wrote:
Show nested quote +
On September 29 2011 16:55 FrogOfWar wrote:
On September 22 2011 06:18 YumYumGranola wrote:Now I'm sure higher level players will read this and roll eyes and angrily think " l2p n00bs", but please keep this in mind while you read this, if the general SC2 scene dies down you'll end up just being the person who's really good at something nobody cares about.


Thank you, quoted for truth. This is what all the master players who look at the lower leagues and casual players with contempt don't seem to get. Consider football - it isn't just the world championships, it's also boys playing in the backyard. Not only do they make it the big cultural phenomenon that it is, they also might become world champions themselves some day. No reason to verbally shit on them all the time.

Concerning balance I think Blizzard cares a lot about the masses for marketing reasons, so they definitely won't let the game become too imba at lower levels. As you say, having a perfect balance at all levels is impossible, but Blizz will do their best to come at close as possible because it's in their best interest. People who say the game should be balanced exclusively with regard to the pro level are dreaming. This isn't reality and never will be.

Those boys playing in the backyard aren't professional football players. Would you change the rules of football to make them have more fun playing it?



...Most backyard games are played with different rules. Bad analogy?
Freeeeeeedom
xlava
Profile Blog Joined March 2011
United States676 Posts
September 29 2011 20:09 GMT
#251
You can't balance for the lower leagues, even master league. I would speculate you can't even balance for any GM league either. Only GSL quality players should be the ones to argue about balance. Everyone else can improve upon a variety of other things before complaining about balance.
Baarn
Profile Joined April 2010
United States2702 Posts
September 29 2011 20:33 GMT
#252
I disagree with this OP. Just because you could exploit the same mistakes terran at your level were making to win doesn't mean it's a balance issue. You just had fundamental problems with your execution at playing terran just like the same people you beat as playing protoss. Star 2 on the other hand isn't really defined so much by what league you got in. You got a lot of people in gm that are really terrible but the fact they keep active keeps them there.
There's no S in KT. :P
rd
Profile Blog Joined July 2010
United States2586 Posts
September 29 2011 20:49 GMT
#253
On September 30 2011 00:10 HardMacro wrote:
Going through this thread it's so easy to see who's actually played broodwar and who's just making shit up.

Facts:

1. In Broodwar, if you were anywhere near the C ranks as Terran, you could most likely shoot into B- as Protoss with a week or two of training. There's a fucking reason why there are tosses in bw in the B- ranks with <100 APM. Ultimately, at the C ranks and below, PvT is ridiculously easy and TvP is a nightmare.

2. What blizzard should do is balance the game at the highest level of play simply because that's the only way to ensure the longevity and competitiveness of the game. However, longevity and competitiveness are secondary to making cash, so Blizzard has been balancing the game around lower levels as well, reflective of the zealot and VR nerf mentioned earlier in the thread.

3. The argument of "lower league players are just retardedly bad, therefore ignore them completely because the game should only be balanced on the highest level" expressed by people in this thread is quite short-sighted. OP even explicitly states that in order for the game to survive and thrive, there needs to be a healthy fan/amateur base, which would not exist if the game wasn't fun to play at lower levels. Imagine that SC2 was perfectly balanced only between MC, MKP and Nestea, but gets horribly easy for protoss and hard for zerg as you move down the skill ladder to the point that 95% percent of the people in diamond league and below were protoss. Yah... I'm certain that casual players would keep playing 95% PvPs season after season.

Ultimately, SC2 > BW in terms of lower league balance, and BW > SC2 in terms of highest level play balance. So there shouldn't even be any arguments anyway.


You're citing a scenario that doesn't exist, has never existed, and will likely never exist. It's a horrible straw man that discredits the argument entirely. The bias towards protoss seems credible, though.
antilyon
Profile Blog Joined February 2011
Brazil2546 Posts
Last Edited: 2011-09-29 21:02:18
September 29 2011 21:00 GMT
#254
On September 29 2011 17:50 Lysenko wrote:
Show nested quote +
On September 29 2011 17:17 Tofugrinder wrote:
In practice, Blizzard's concept of a game that's balanced in lower leagues is basically one where there aren't specific strategies that allow players of one particular race to win large numbers of games easily simply by switching to that strategy and doing it 100% of the time, without regard to basic macro or micro skills. All-in rushes like 6 pools are an exception to this philosophy because they want the risk of such a rush to be part of the game. A better example is the fast mass-reaper all-in that became popular for a short time right after release -- which they patched out because they were seeing that it was nearly unbeatable for lower-league Zerg players. In other words, the skill level needed to defend it was way out of whack with the skill level needed to execute it, at the low end.


WTF are you talking about? Low level terrans doing that build was just a joke. It was Insanely strong but you needed at least a good grasp at macro/micro and multitask to perform it.
Dalavita
Profile Joined August 2010
Sweden1113 Posts
September 29 2011 21:01 GMT
#255
On September 29 2011 23:30 chokke wrote:
Show nested quote +
On September 29 2011 20:01 ceaRshaf wrote:
On September 29 2011 18:48 chokke wrote:

You always have to bear in min that there are more players to the gaem then top 200,



Dude, in this world, there will always be more stupid people than intelligent people, but the stupids are the ones that have to rise not the intelligent to lower. This is not an insult to anybody but a fact about the world you and me live in.

This is what progress and evolution takes.

Seeing how it's much easier to quit playing a game then it is to become smart. I am not saying to pace the balance TO the lower tier of players, but rather KEEP IN MIND how balance-changes can affect them.
Let us say that to beat tactic X it requires a minimum of micro to excecute, but to actually do tactic X is significally easier. That means, at lower levels, the bar to execute the tactic is lower then it is to defend it due to lack of micro (there is a reason they are stuck in league A). Which means the player comes to a league higher then deserved and once the tactic X gets defeated they will automaticly lose due to being a worse player.
So, whatever a change means, how will it affect bronze-diamond league and not only how it affects Code A/S.


If one tactic is easy to pull off while it's harder to defend (up to a point of skill level, where it becomes easy to defend) the baddies will simply fail at defending it until they learn. There is no point in catering to balance for bad players when they can improve to the level required to defend something literally in a couple of days if they actually want to.
Slusher
Profile Blog Joined December 2010
United States19143 Posts
September 29 2011 21:11 GMT
#256
The point the people supporting "ladder balance" are missing is that the ladder will always be artificially balanced by your mmr, this is why when Bliz releases ladder numbers it always reflects balance being withing an error margin of 50%. The cold harsh reality of it is, if you aren't a pro nobody cares what your ladder rank is, so the fact that you are being denied diamond because you play Zerg isn't really a big deal. Your going to say, "But I like to see myself improve" this isn't impaired by the system I have described, if it's balanced at the top level, improvement can always overcome your precived 'imbalance' at your level

By contrast if you take the best of each race in the world, for the sake of this argument we'll say it's MVP, Nestea and MC(I know protoss is largely up for debate). If a situation were to arrive, and some say it has where T>Z>P then what option does MC have? You could simply make the argument that MC(or the Protoss hero of your choice) just isn't as good as Nestea and MVP, and while that may be true, there is no basis, unlike the ladder player, to believe that if MC improved he could win.

Those are the facts, I'm going to shift to opinion to paint a picture that to me is true.

Do you want to know why Terran is so good vZ and vP in the pro leagues right now, because Bio is balanced around ladder play. If you think marine stats are based on the studder step and spreading that we see today, you are kidding yourself. This is an opinion, but I think you'd be hard pressed to disagree. And that is why the game should be balanced ONLY around the top.
Carrilord has arrived.
Dalavita
Profile Joined August 2010
Sweden1113 Posts
September 29 2011 21:18 GMT
#257
On September 30 2011 06:11 Slusher wrote: If you think marine stats are based on the studder step and spreading that we see today, you are kidding yourself. This is an opinion, but I think you'd be hard pressed to disagree. And that is why the game should be balanced ONLY around the top.


I disagree.

Both marine splitting and stutter stepping are things we can see done by anyone at diamond or above level.

It's not that hard to pull off, and all that was required was for someone to show how it was done, i.e MKP.
kineSiS-
Profile Blog Joined September 2009
Korea (South)1068 Posts
September 29 2011 21:22 GMT
#258
On September 22 2011 06:41 SeRenExZerg wrote:
if the game is balanced at the highest level, IT IS BALANCED. plain and simple.

yes, it is frustrating that one person might be able to do better with a race than their skill might suggest, but so long as all races have equal chance of winning when played perfectly, the game is exactly how it should be.


Doubt this game is balanced at the highest level.
Slusher
Profile Blog Joined December 2010
United States19143 Posts
September 29 2011 21:23 GMT
#259
well I don't agree that diamond level studder + split is the exact same thing as mkp or Polt I still think stimmed marine damage was intended for a-moving
Carrilord has arrived.
Guard
Profile Joined August 2010
Canada43 Posts
September 29 2011 21:35 GMT
#260
Didn't Browder say that using "special" abilities is what's going to separate casual players from Pro's from the beginning. As it stands right now, I don't see anything challenging in using some of the abilities in the game, while others are CLEARLY more difficult to use. Sorry to be pooping on T here but the bioball has NOTHING special about it unlike blink stalkers or burrowing roaches for P and Z respectively. So taking that into account why not balance the game by doing the following:
1. Balance races based on units that use NO abilities (blink, stim, force field, etc.). That should generally satisfy your casual player. It should be possible by simply changing unit stats.
2. Balance races based on units with those abilities. That should make pro's happy.
Now the actual mechanics and APM are definitely important still but all of that can be tweaked to make things more or less even.

For me personally (a platinum player) I don't care much about the game being perfectly 100 % balanced and being as good as possible myself simply because I have other things going on. However, I want to see pro's duking it out at a level playing field.
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