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[Edit: A lot of people seem to be falling into the whole "I'm in Diamond league so he can't possibly be talking about me" attitude. The level to which TvP was imbalanced in BW would probably extend well into Masters league. Would you continue to play the game as a Diamond and below player if you knew you could switch to a specific race and easily catapult into Masters? That's the kind of imbalance at lower levels I'm talking about here and it's basically what exists in BW.
Nor does this thread say that this game needs to have balance changes at the low levels as it currently exists. SC2 is very well balanced at most levels currently. However the skill ceiling will rise and may require balance changes that could have enormous effects upon lower leagues. That's what I'm talking about here.]
This thread will be about whether or not it's wise to only balance for the highest level of play. 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.
"Only balance for the highest level of play" is something I see a lot on balance related threads. There's also somewhat common allusions to the fact that BW took 10 years to balance and that we should be patient and not overreact. What's funny about this is the vast majority of people who post/read on these forums would probably find BW an incredibly imbalanced game if they played it. BW is the epitome of RTS game balance, however for the vast majority of the skill spectrum BW was not a well balanced game at all. In fact it was probably worse than SC2.
The shining example of this is TvP in BW. A personal anecdote: I started playing BW about 3-4 years ago and chose Terran because they were badass. I found iCCup through a friend and played roughly 5-10 games (pretty high for full time eng. student at U of T) per day for several months and studied Liquipedia harder than my calc class before I could even get out of D-. However during that time I decided to take a little Protoss experiment. In a week and without any builds in mind other than a general idea of what I saw from replays I was able to get into C- and almost C. To put that into perspective that would be like a player struggling in Gold league as Terran getting into Masters league in a week by switching to Toss and basically messing around.
Now I stuck with Terran anyways despite my terrible W/L rate because I just found it more fun to die by self destructing than it was to "1a2a3a..." and win. Also it helped when I realized that I was actually better than the D+ toss who were flooring me. What I absolutely DIDN'T think is that there needed to be any balance changes because clearly at the highest level Terran armies were amazing and didn't need any buffs despite the fact that at low levels there was a HUGE discrepancy in skill required to play the respective races.
My basic question is: Would the foreign SC2 scene survive if there was such a huge skill discrepancy at the lower levels of play? (By the way if you've just recently got promoted into Masters league and now when you look in the mirror you've noticed that your balls/tits look bigger than usual, calm down, in BW you would qualify for "the lower level of play" too.) In our NA winning=fun culture I'm really not so sure. Though I decided to stick with Terran and eventually did get much better, when I think of most of my friends I doubt any of them would. While it might be easy to say "W/E I like this game and I'm good so I don't care about your troubles" the fact is that almost every single spectator of SC2 events is also a player. If there's anything that dissuades new players it has a negative affect on new spectators which hurts the feasibility foreign tournaments and therefore the entire foreign scene.
Even though at this point we have a fairly balanced game at most levels of play with SC2 an extremely important thing to consider is that SC2 is absolutely NOWHERE near the skill level that BW has achieved. There's a reason that all the current SC2 pros were BW B team players and players who passed their prime. And while it might comfort our collective souls to think that MVP = Flash that's completely ridiculous. I shudder to think of what somebody with the macro mechanics of Flash could do with the Zerg race. Imagine playing against a Zerg when the Queens NEVER get over 25 energy and creep tumors are re-spawned right after their cool-down finishes. The macro potential of the Zerg race is ridiculous if played perfectly. Someday the skill level might reach a point that most pro Zergs can do that and therefore being able to inject every 25 energy might become an imbalance. They might need to change that one day to once every 40 energy for Toss and Terran to have a chance. How would the larvae restriction affect low-level Zerg play? Chances are someday there will be a necessary change at the highest level which will be crippling change at the low levels. This could seriously undermine the desire for new players and kill the expansion of the foreign scene.
That's why I'm slightly leery of the whole concept of only caring about balance at pro levels. While I don't think anybody can honestly argue that it's possible to balance the game at ALL levels of play I think that there might have to be some other solution if foreign players are going to keep interest. Perhaps different leagues could have different balance settings (i.e. Diamond and below have a different set of rules than Masters and up.) Something like how you have a 19'9" college 3 point shot and a 23'9" NBA 3 pointer. If you're playing between leagues you play by the higher leagues rules. Now I think anybody could spot problems with a system like this, however I'm just putting this out there as my idea of a way to avoid creating huge imbalances at low leagues for the sake of higher leagues.
TL;DR
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I think balance affects all levels of play
I would like to state that balancing the game should purely only consider 1v1 at the pro level; however, there are many imbalances that excist throughout different leagues.
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I recently started a new account as Zerg. I killed my own hatch at the start of the game with 7 workers in all 5 of my placement matches.
At silver level my build was nydus worm worker rush, no lings, no roaches, just workers. It would work regardless of the build my opponent was doing (4gate, reactor hellion etc). This is obviously a joke build, but it worked.
If players can be beaten by a Nydus worker rush balancing the game based on what they think is fucking retarded. End of.
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Creating different rules for different leagues will interfere with the whole learning curve. Awful idea.
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On September 22 2011 06:21 Roxy wrote:
...however, there are many imbalances that excist throughout different leagues.
Do tell.
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your tl dr is missing
User was warned for this post
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It makes absolutely no sense, whatsoever, to balance the game in relation to anything but the highest levels. This thread should be closed.
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You are all making the mistake of thinking that when I was talking about BW imbalance I was talking about the equivalent of Silver league. No this was like huge imbalance at Master's league level players.
Anybody remember that "Gold to Master's Think I can do It?" or whatever thread? If this was BW, the answer would be. "Switch to Toss /thread" I really don't think you're appreciating this.
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It's also clear people are only reading the last paragraph T_T
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On September 22 2011 06:18 YumYumGranola wrote:
the fact is that almost every single spectator of SC2 events is also a player. If there's anything that dissuades new players it has a negative affect on new spectators which hurts the feasibility foreign tournaments and therefore the entire foreign scene.
This is not true.
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I want balance at the highest level. The people who are best at the game and dedicate their entire lives to the game deserve balance more than anyone else.
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On September 22 2011 06:27 Shaetan wrote:Show nested quote +On September 22 2011 06:18 YumYumGranola wrote:
the fact is that almost every single spectator of SC2 events is also a player. If there's anything that dissuades new players it has a negative affect on new spectators which hurts the feasibility foreign tournaments and therefore the entire foreign scene. This is not true.
Well I certainly don't know any...
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Balance at the highest level = Competitive E-Sport.
That's it.
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On September 22 2011 06:29 YumYumGranola wrote:Show nested quote +On September 22 2011 06:27 Shaetan wrote:On September 22 2011 06:18 YumYumGranola wrote:
the fact is that almost every single spectator of SC2 events is also a player. If there's anything that dissuades new players it has a negative affect on new spectators which hurts the feasibility foreign tournaments and therefore the entire foreign scene. This is not true. Well I certainly don't know any...
Well then by jove it must be true!
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I did play BW and I played terran.
Now I was D for a long time and TvP was very difficult, from holding reaver drops and DTs, to just surviving while taking your expansion. Being D is equivalent to High Diamond/Low master, atleast it was two years ago.
Terran had it hard, and I do think it's important to make sure one race isn't just 1a'ing and the other race needs perfect micro to be on even ground. That was the ncie thing about BW, the competition against abilities and micro, they both had a high skill cap, instead of one person watching and one person working his ass off doing perfect macro.
Don't balance for platinum or lower because well, it's silly to do, at that point players play so poorly that a 50% handicap can make them lose games. But I do agree that diamond level players as well as the average masters should have pretty even balance. And right now I don't think it's much of a problem, maybe protoss is a bit stronger when both players have poor multitasking but I dont see any problems.
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On September 22 2011 06:31 Shaetan wrote:Show nested quote +On September 22 2011 06:29 YumYumGranola wrote:On September 22 2011 06:27 Shaetan wrote:On September 22 2011 06:18 YumYumGranola wrote:
the fact is that almost every single spectator of SC2 events is also a player. If there's anything that dissuades new players it has a negative affect on new spectators which hurts the feasibility foreign tournaments and therefore the entire foreign scene. This is not true. Well I certainly don't know any... Well then by jove it must be true!
I think it is more reasonable to assume that most SC2 viewers are also players than it is to assume that most are not players
How would someone understand the game if they do not play it?
Do you regularly view anything you dont understand?
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There is no such thing as balancing for the highest level of play only. All units have a potential power and should be balanced on that potential power.
If there's a unit that is difficult to understand or use properly due to some artificial barrier of usage that is a game design issue not a balance issue.
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On September 22 2011 06:31 Shaetan wrote:Show nested quote +On September 22 2011 06:29 YumYumGranola wrote:On September 22 2011 06:27 Shaetan wrote:On September 22 2011 06:18 YumYumGranola wrote:
the fact is that almost every single spectator of SC2 events is also a player. If there's anything that dissuades new players it has a negative affect on new spectators which hurts the feasibility foreign tournaments and therefore the entire foreign scene. This is not true. Well I certainly don't know any... Well then by jove it must be true!
Lol fair enough, although you're equally guilty unless you have some knowledge or evidence that you're not declaring.
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You picked a rather poor example I think because you're condemning a whole race as 'ezmode' instead of proving that a specific thing is 'more difficult' at a certain level. Also, I think when people consider lower league balance they try to adhere to a false notion of 'equality' instead of thinking about the effort required to improve. A common example is the dynamic you see in low league PvT where players complain about a perception of bio/gateway/colossi/vikings at varying levels of development. Do I think it's 'more difficult' for a bio terran to defeat a roboing protoss? Sure. Do I think the jump the terran has to make in order to incorporate vikings in their play is any more difficult than the jump the protoss had to make to incorporate colossi? Not really.
The reason why low league play can't really be examined for balance reasons is that if either player improved even by the smallest margin, they'd probably demolish their opponent.
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What's an example of an SC2 balance change that was targeted at the lower leagues and had a negative effect on professional play?
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On September 22 2011 06:26 YumYumGranola wrote:
It's also clear people are only reading the last paragraph T_T
I read the whole thing and I can't understand what you're trying to get at with this thread. It's kind of a no brainer that the game should be balanced around perfect play. Not one player yet does everything they should. Serious balance discussions should be accompanied by replays. If you look close at a lot of games, there will always be something that the player can improve upon. This game requires a lot of speed just to make things and not die let alone incorporating grand strategies to get around whatever the flavor of the month balance whine.
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Balancing for lower levels?
You mean listen to balance qq from people who actually dont have a clue about how you should be playing the game correctly ? (i'm talking here about the basics, not the code S caliber play)
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On September 22 2011 06:23 alepov wrote:
Creating different rules for different leagues will interfere with the whole learning curve. Awful idea.
This.
Most people play to improve so they can be good at the next level, not "hey ill play in Gold then relearn it in Platinum."
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On September 22 2011 06:36 Doodsmack wrote:
What's an example of an SC2 balance change that was targeted at the lower leagues and had a negative effect on professional play?
It wouldn't impact it, but it would also be a giant waste of time, there isn't great balance at lower levels because lower level players are awful. Improve and with that comes balance.
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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.
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United States5162 Posts
On September 22 2011 06:33 Roxy wrote:Show nested quote +On September 22 2011 06:31 Shaetan wrote:On September 22 2011 06:29 YumYumGranola wrote:On September 22 2011 06:27 Shaetan wrote:On September 22 2011 06:18 YumYumGranola wrote:
the fact is that almost every single spectator of SC2 events is also a player. If there's anything that dissuades new players it has a negative affect on new spectators which hurts the feasibility foreign tournaments and therefore the entire foreign scene. This is not true. Well I certainly don't know any... Well then by jove it must be true! I think it is more reasonable to assume that most SC2 viewers are also players than it is to assume that most are not players How would someone understand the game if they do not play it? Do you regularly view anything you dont understand?
You don't need to play something to understand it. Most women I know never played American football, but they understand it just fine if they're at all interested in it.
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I'd much rather have low leagues severely imbalanced and have somewhat equal representation in esports, akin to brood war (the perfectly balanced rts). Imagine equal representation and perfect 50% winrates for all races at gold, but 95% of pro games are played by protoss. That's completely awful, and while our current state of the game is skewed towards terran, other races have shown that it's still possible to beat everything that top terrans have thrown out at one point or another.
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On September 22 2011 06:32 FiWiFaKi wrote:
I did play BW and I played terran.
Now I was D for a long time and TvP was very difficult, from holding reaver drops and DTs, to just surviving while taking your expansion. Being D is equivalent to High Diamond/Low master, atleast it was two years ago.
Terran had it hard, and I do think it's important to make sure one race isn't just 1a'ing and the other race needs perfect micro to be on even ground. That was the ncie thing about BW, the competition against abilities and micro, they both had a high skill cap, instead of one person watching and one person working his ass off doing perfect macro.
Don't balance for platinum or lower because well, it's silly to do, at that point players play so poorly that a 50% handicap can make them lose games. But I do agree that diamond level players as well as the average masters should have pretty even balance. And right now I don't think it's much of a problem, maybe protoss is a bit stronger when both players have poor multitasking but I dont see any problems.
I'm glad you gave us a concrete example to work with. Whenever I read things like this though I hear 'I want to play worse than my opponent and still win'.
Your P opponents did reaver drops and you neither stopped them nor did counter harass of your own and you still wanted to win? When you played as P did you do reaver drops? Or, maybe a better question, did you NOT do reaver drops and STILL expect to win? Maybe you should have looked at the point at which Terran stopped getting demolished by reaver drops and emulated them.
The point of lower leagues is that it's full of people adding building blocks to their play. If someone has added a building block, you have to do the same or you should lose.
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On September 22 2011 06:29 YumYumGranola wrote:Show nested quote +On September 22 2011 06:27 Shaetan wrote:On September 22 2011 06:18 YumYumGranola wrote:
the fact is that almost every single spectator of SC2 events is also a player. If there's anything that dissuades new players it has a negative affect on new spectators which hurts the feasibility foreign tournaments and therefore the entire foreign scene. This is not true. Well I certainly don't know any...
Just go ask huskystarcraft...
To some extent though i do agree with you, and this is why:
For the most part, any imbalance at my level (diamond protoss) should be negligible due to the fact that there are a million and one things i can improve in my game. However, with HUGE imbalances this can sometimes still overwhelm that to the point that the fun can be taken out of playing. To use a hot topic example: In the last few weeks or so we have seen the 1-1-1 build being beaten in a decent percentages but before then, as a protoss, if an equally skilled terran used this build against you, you would lose. As it is, watch about 90% more protoss matchups than i do others, and then only because a player i like is playing or it is a final, and that is because i play protoss, so i connect with the player. If all protoss players stop playing, suddenly interest in the scene goes down by close to a third.
Obviously this is an exaggeration, but i think writing off what the OP says is a bad idea. I would like to see the game predominately balanced at the highest level, but if there is a strategy that absolutely breaks the game for low-mid level players (eg plat to low masters) then i think it should be dealt with. Afterall, players like flash haven't been playing SC from the beginning, he was born in 1992, so would have been ~6 when it came out, and if the game had been unplayable for terran when he was young i would not be surprised if he hadn't decided to stick with the game.
Basically what i am trying to say is that we shouldn't write off players who are bad now, and we shouldn't discourage people who are bad if we can do it without damaging pro play.
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On September 22 2011 06:42 Myles wrote:Show nested quote +On September 22 2011 06:33 Roxy wrote:On September 22 2011 06:31 Shaetan wrote:On September 22 2011 06:29 YumYumGranola wrote:On September 22 2011 06:27 Shaetan wrote:On September 22 2011 06:18 YumYumGranola wrote:
the fact is that almost every single spectator of SC2 events is also a player. If there's anything that dissuades new players it has a negative affect on new spectators which hurts the feasibility foreign tournaments and therefore the entire foreign scene. This is not true. Well I certainly don't know any... Well then by jove it must be true! I think it is more reasonable to assume that most SC2 viewers are also players than it is to assume that most are not players How would someone understand the game if they do not play it? Do you regularly view anything you dont understand? You don't need to play something to understand it. Most women I know never played American football, but they understand it just fine if they're at all interested in it.
I'm not saying that it is impossible that some spectators dont play, i'm just saying it is unlikely. Does anyone here know someone who is INTERESTED in watching starcraft 2 who has never played a game of starcraft 2?
its possible.. but I bet you that maybe it will be 1 out of 10,000 viewers
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On September 22 2011 06:33 Roxy wrote:Show nested quote +On September 22 2011 06:31 Shaetan wrote:On September 22 2011 06:29 YumYumGranola wrote:On September 22 2011 06:27 Shaetan wrote:On September 22 2011 06:18 YumYumGranola wrote:
the fact is that almost every single spectator of SC2 events is also a player. If there's anything that dissuades new players it has a negative affect on new spectators which hurts the feasibility foreign tournaments and therefore the entire foreign scene. This is not true. Well I certainly don't know any... Well then by jove it must be true! I think it is more reasonable to assume that most SC2 viewers are also players than it is to assume that most are not players How would someone understand the game if they do not play it? Do you regularly view anything you dont understand?
No I like to understand the stuff I watch but I don't have to play it to understand it. That's why I watch such diverse things as football, basketball, DOTA2, etcetc (none of which I play). The understanding can be imparted by commentators and the like.
It may be incorrect to say that viewers were not players at some point however I remember reading something that most viewers watch SC2 a lot more than they play it. The average person is much more likely to either:
A-purchase game, play it, find it's imbalanced (at their level), stop playing but maybe watch streans
or
B-watch streams, think game is awesome, buy it, find it's imbalanced (at their level), stop playing but continue watching
than
C-watch stream of imbalanced game, buy it, continue watching streams where imbalance exists
The important thing for influx of new players is balance at the highest level to ensure a sellable product.
On September 22 2011 06:34 YumYumGranola wrote:Show nested quote +On September 22 2011 06:31 Shaetan wrote:On September 22 2011 06:29 YumYumGranola wrote:On September 22 2011 06:27 Shaetan wrote:On September 22 2011 06:18 YumYumGranola wrote:
the fact is that almost every single spectator of SC2 events is also a player. If there's anything that dissuades new players it has a negative affect on new spectators which hurts the feasibility foreign tournaments and therefore the entire foreign scene. This is not true. Well I certainly don't know any... Well then by jove it must be true! Lol fair enough, although you're equally guilty unless you have some knowledge or evidence that you're not declaring.
I personally know quite a few people who do not play at all but still enjoy watching, that's just as anecdotal as your evidence though so feel free to ignore it :-p
It's more accurate to say that most viewers primarily watch rather than play SC2 I suppose, I remember reading something about that but don't know where 
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I think balance needs to be where skill is equal. The top level is a decent place to start as there, the differences in skill, feels, less apart. As a lower level (diamond player) I've rolled over masters, and I've gotten killed by platinum, there just isn't that consistency that suggest that the game can be balanced around my play. It is difficult though whether using only the top players can take out the noise in skill level.
In an age of streaming and steal that build, we are also starting to play strategy that look the same across the board. For example, if we looked at ZvP, back in the day it was roach/hydra corruptor vs deathball. Everyone did it, zergs mostly lost, but the solution was not necessarily balance, but innovation in playstyles. Nowaday, it looks like Z is winning, definitely due to the patch, but is it also that Z have been using new strategies?
I would love a world where the game is balanced with respect to pro skill level, but I think it's difficult to be certain that even at the top tier, all skill is equal.
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On September 22 2011 06:33 Roxy wrote:Show nested quote +On September 22 2011 06:31 Shaetan wrote:On September 22 2011 06:29 YumYumGranola wrote:On September 22 2011 06:27 Shaetan wrote:On September 22 2011 06:18 YumYumGranola wrote:
the fact is that almost every single spectator of SC2 events is also a player. If there's anything that dissuades new players it has a negative affect on new spectators which hurts the feasibility foreign tournaments and therefore the entire foreign scene. This is not true. Well I certainly don't know any... Well then by jove it must be true! I think it is more reasonable to assume that most SC2 viewers are also players than it is to assume that most are not players How would someone understand the game if they do not play it? Do you regularly view anything you dont understand?
Maybe they used to play it?
Or just learn and understand it simply by watching.
To be fair SC2 isn't that advanced knowledge-wise, it's mostly the decision making and mechanical skill that's hard and you can have really good game knowledge even if you're awful or not playing.
More on topic; they should of course aim to balance for the pro level, but that doesn't mean they should simply ignore lower levels, certain nerfs/buffs affects all leagues and those fixes should be a higher priority than any other.
(The recent infestor nerf is a great example, noone can say that it didn't have any effect on lower leagues.)
But to be honest I wouldn't mind them just ignoring almost everything up until the release of the last expansion, except game breaking issues (like the old 5rax reaper, or roaches being 1 supply).
I think they should just learn from this and focus on replacing units that doesn't work/works badly in both expansions and not aim for perfect balance this early because it will all break again once the expansions hit.
Like the Roach, it was originally supposed to be a tank-unit that depended on regeneration from burrow, but as it got tested more and more they had to make more and more changes and now it's a really basic and terribly boring unit.
Or Neural Parasite, it's been nerfed and buffed about ~152 times, just realize it's a terrible spell and let it be broken until you replace it in an expansion.
Fungal Growth having a root effect, it's just boring and uninteresting so instead of fine-tuning it over the course of years just replace it with something really cool.
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On September 22 2011 06:36 Jerubaal wrote:
You picked a rather poor example I think because you're condemning a whole race as 'ezmode' instead of proving that a specific thing is 'more difficult' at a certain level. Also, I think when people consider lower league balance they try to adhere to a false notion of 'equality' instead of thinking about the effort required to improve. A common example is the dynamic you see in low league PvT where players complain about a perception of bio/gateway/colossi/vikings at varying levels of development. Do I think it's 'more difficult' for a bio terran to defeat a roboing protoss? Sure. Do I think the jump the terran has to make in order to incorporate vikings in their play is any more difficult than the jump the protoss had to make to incorporate colossi? Not really.
The reason why low league play can't really be examined for balance reasons is that if either player improved even by the smallest margin, they'd probably demolish their opponent.
The reason TvP was significantly imbalanced for Terran in BW has everything to do with the insane splash damage of Terran mech. Engaging a Toss army required seige tanks to be spread properly, and mines to be placed absolutely PERFECTLY so that they were far enough from tanks not to get dragged in and blow your whole army up but close enough that dragoons couldn't clear them before engaging your army. It was a knife-edge balance that was required to successfully engage a toss army that was "1a2a3a..." that simply doesn't exist in SC2. However when you can do it properly Terran mech is monstrous. That's why it doesn't need a buff at higher levels of play.
I was a D level Terran player. The Korean kids in our class were huge gamers, 240+APM and were in the C and into B leagues. I was able to compete as Protoss against C level Terrans. My APM was somewhere around 70 (or 40 in SC2 APM) That's the kind of difference. I'm literally talking about Silver league players beating masters league players simply because of the race they chose.
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On September 22 2011 06:45 Roxy wrote:Show nested quote +On September 22 2011 06:42 Myles wrote:On September 22 2011 06:33 Roxy wrote:On September 22 2011 06:31 Shaetan wrote:On September 22 2011 06:29 YumYumGranola wrote:On September 22 2011 06:27 Shaetan wrote:On September 22 2011 06:18 YumYumGranola wrote:
the fact is that almost every single spectator of SC2 events is also a player. If there's anything that dissuades new players it has a negative affect on new spectators which hurts the feasibility foreign tournaments and therefore the entire foreign scene. This is not true. Well I certainly don't know any... Well then by jove it must be true! I think it is more reasonable to assume that most SC2 viewers are also players than it is to assume that most are not players How would someone understand the game if they do not play it? Do you regularly view anything you dont understand? You don't need to play something to understand it. Most women I know never played American football, but they understand it just fine if they're at all interested in it. I'm not saying that it is impossible that some spectators dont play, i'm just saying it is unlikely. Does anyone here know someone who is INTERESTED in watching starcraft 2 who has never played a game of starcraft 2? its possible.. but I bet you that maybe it will be 1 out of 10,000 viewers
I can make up numbers too! I know precisely 4,376 people that fall into that category! jk
The point is that even if the spectators have played SC2, the game being imbalanced at their level does not cause them to not watch a balanced game at the professional level.
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It wouldn't be good if for example race A relied heavily on microed units to win games, while race B didn't have any micro potential at all. Race A might still be 100% balanced with race B at pro level, but race B would be more and more dominant the further down you go from there. Not to mention few people would want to play race A. Basically one race shouldn't have a much higher skill cap and still only come level with the other. Not only will pros shift to the one with the lower skill cap that offers the same success, but that will filter down to all levels of play.
But I'm not 100% sure this problem exists in SC2 atm. Protoss is a *little* more micro intensive, Zerg is a *little* less and Terran is probably somewhere in the middle. But they all have fiddly micro unit opportunities, and unit comps that you can just 1A at your opponent with and win provided you have superior macro.
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Also, for lower levels, there is the chance, that we are where we are, because of imbalance. Not skill. So balancing around that, doesn't necessarily work in my opinion. You might have masters terran player being in a perfectly balanced world, mid diamond, very hard to know.
At higher levels, it is probably less likely that that would be true.
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There is no such thing as imbalance for lesser skilled players if the game is balanced at the top. It's all a l2p issue for lower skilled players.
I do get your point however, some race may take way less skill than another at lower levels of play, and that can be frustrating. I can't come up with any solution to this other than to carefully balance the skill required to play race X at lower levels of skill while not changing anything at the top. I don't think it is possible though.
A difference in skill required to play a race is not a balance issue, it is a game design issue. Balance just means that given the best of the best play currently available, all races have an equal chance of beating each other.
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On September 22 2011 06:36 Doodsmack wrote:
What's an example of an SC2 balance change that was targeted at the lower leagues and had a negative effect on professional play?
The zealot build time increase. It prevented 2 gating from occurring in lower level PvZ, but has also obviously lowered the effectiveness of the gateway/warpgate at the highest levels. I remember at the beginning of the game, every PvZ I would 2 gate and the zerg would fumble around and lose without making a single roach. This worked all the way up to diamond before I started facing people who knew how to stop it. But it was obviously not too strong at that level and above. The question I have is why 2 gating was nerfed so hard, when 2 rax has been even stronger vs zerg and only now just got a small nerf. (rax nerf is much smaller than zealot nerf, since it only delays your build by 5 seconds once, instead of for every zealot)
And then there is void ray speed, which was destroying in low level team games, which has prevented toss from being able to innovate by making speed voids late game. Those are just a few.
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On September 22 2011 06:43 Meta wrote:
I'd much rather have low leagues severely imbalanced and have somewhat equal representation in esports, akin to brood war (the perfectly balanced rts). Imagine equal representation and perfect 50% winrates for all races at gold, but 95% of pro games are played by protoss. That's completely awful, and while our current state of the game is skewed towards terran, other races have shown that it's still possible to beat everything that top terrans have thrown out at one point or another.
Blizzard would be crazy to go the other way with that though, IE 95% of ladder players on one race, if they want players to buy their next two expansions. Maybe years down the line when SC2 is only played by the really dedicated types and there's essentially no more revenue to be made from game sales they could decide to neglect low level balance completely. I don't think it really is an issue though.
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On September 22 2011 06:45 Roxy wrote:
I'm not saying that it is impossible that some spectators dont play, i'm just saying it is unlikely. Does anyone here know someone who is INTERESTED in watching starcraft 2 who has never played a game of starcraft 2?
its possible.. but I bet you that maybe it will be 1 out of 10,000 viewers
I have a number of friends like this who somehow just missed the boat when the game came out and never got into it later. I keep telling them to buy it just for the campaign if nothing else -_-
I'll bet there's plenty of baseball/football/hockey fans who have never played a game before.
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United States5162 Posts
On September 22 2011 06:45 Roxy wrote:Show nested quote +On September 22 2011 06:42 Myles wrote:On September 22 2011 06:33 Roxy wrote:On September 22 2011 06:31 Shaetan wrote:On September 22 2011 06:29 YumYumGranola wrote:On September 22 2011 06:27 Shaetan wrote:On September 22 2011 06:18 YumYumGranola wrote:
the fact is that almost every single spectator of SC2 events is also a player. If there's anything that dissuades new players it has a negative affect on new spectators which hurts the feasibility foreign tournaments and therefore the entire foreign scene. This is not true. Well I certainly don't know any... Well then by jove it must be true! I think it is more reasonable to assume that most SC2 viewers are also players than it is to assume that most are not players How would someone understand the game if they do not play it? Do you regularly view anything you dont understand? You don't need to play something to understand it. Most women I know never played American football, but they understand it just fine if they're at all interested in it. I'm not saying that it is impossible that some spectators dont play, i'm just saying it is unlikely. Does anyone here know someone who is INTERESTED in watching starcraft 2 who has never played a game of starcraft 2? its possible.. but I bet you that maybe it will be 1 out of 10,000 viewers
For esports, no, people who watch were probably introduced by the game itself. Though I'd wager it's more then 1/10,000. People like Husky have introduced a large number of people to SC2 who probably don't play much or ever. Esports is still in a small niche though. If it ever becomes more mainstream it will happen just like in regular sports.
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On September 22 2011 06:45 Roxy wrote:
I'm not saying that it is impossible that some spectators dont play, i'm just saying it is unlikely. Does anyone here know someone who is INTERESTED in watching starcraft 2 who has never played a game of starcraft 2?
its possible.. but I bet you that maybe it will be 1 out of 10,000 viewers
Yes, I know several, who just spectate and don´t play. I for example got into SC trough a youtube video of the famous german caster Homerj, who actually has the goal to get casuals or even non player into esport. The guy has thousands of fans, who just enjoy the game because of the entertainment of spectating. Those people are actually really important to make esport a serious sport, because nearly no sport can survive, if the only viewer are people who actively practice it. You don´t need to play the game to understand it. You can learn the basics in a few days.
I follow the scene now for pretty much a year, but I only got an account in Spring. I was seeded into Silver and got into diamond eventually. At some point however, I needed to choose between playing or spectating, because I just have a limited amount of freetime and eventually I chose to just spectate it, because its more fun for me personally.
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4713 Posts
I believe that, in order to attain balance in a game, or near perfect balance, it needs to be conducted at a level where skill and execution is consistent close to 100% of the time, this happens to be the highest level of play.
I don't think this is a bad thing at all, BW as you have said is harder then SC2, seems more unbalanced at lower level of play. But despite all of the at BW is still tremendously successful in Korea, and it has been for years and it will probably still be so.
People, viewers, don't care about the lower levels of play, they care about seeing their favorite players, the best gamers in the world, duke it out at the highest level, they crave every nuance of their macro, every slight adjustment of their positioning, every little finesse of their micro.
I know for a fact that I'm not the best player in the world, that maybe a certain race would give me more chances for success. I don't care, I play what I want and if there is some racial imbalance at lower levels of play, then it will spur me on to play harder, to practice more and to give it my best so I can reach that top level where all things are equal and skill is the most important factor.
I really don't think the game could ever reach a point where people at the lower levels would complain so much they would quit, they would just admit they aren't good enough and try harder. Even if they don't succeed it won't diminish the game's popularity.
If as you say terran is so difficult at lower levels that a terran in D rank switching to protoss could get to C rank, and it still didn't kill the game, then that just proves my point. No one cares about low level play, its the high level play that counts.
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in what universe was TvP imbalanced in Broodwar?!
i mean seriously?! the game was 100% balanced, and the only thing that affected winrates were maps.
saying TvP was imbalanced in Broodwar is simply wrong.
[B]
If as you say terran is so difficult at lower levels that a terran in D rank switching to protoss could get to C rank, and it still didn't kill the game, then that just proves my point. No one cares about low level play, its the high level play that counts.
that's why i'm so pissed at every low level protoss who's whining.
there's SO MUCH people can improve in order to get better.
sure toss seems to suck at pro level, and it's probably true that something needs to be done.
but why can't all the mediocre players shut up and let the pros discuss the game.
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I feel bad that i even mentioned Huskystarcraft, when the real king of the non-sc2 players has to be the man himself: Totalbiscuit. He has introduced many non-sc2 players to this game. And as for whether i have any friends who don't play but do watch? yes i do. Multiple in fact. Some of them have played the campaign, or maybe have tried out some customs, or even some 1v1s, but they barely play at all (and in some cases not at all), so the balance of the game matters none at all to them. Which is why i feel for levels platinum and up, which at this point people have to want to improve to get to. It is not like in the beta where you would be in platinum just by having played rts games before.
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Is the race distribution not balanced among different levels or did you just make everything up because you're stuck?
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On September 22 2011 06:24 antikk555 wrote:Show nested quote +On September 22 2011 06:21 Roxy wrote:
...however, there are many imbalances that excist throughout different leagues.
Do tell.
ZvT for example is much easier for the Zerg at low levels, because the skill required to micro versus Banelings and setup good tank positions is much harder than A moving Banelings.
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On September 22 2011 06:58 Pelirrojo wrote:Show nested quote +On September 22 2011 06:45 Roxy wrote:
I'm not saying that it is impossible that some spectators dont play, i'm just saying it is unlikely. Does anyone here know someone who is INTERESTED in watching starcraft 2 who has never played a game of starcraft 2?
its possible.. but I bet you that maybe it will be 1 out of 10,000 viewers I have a number of friends like this who somehow just missed the boat when the game came out and never got into it later. I keep telling them to buy it just for the campaign if nothing else -_- I'll bet there's plenty of baseball/football/hockey fans who have never played a game before.
Because watching baseball and SC2 are comparable. As much as you people want to tell yourself SC2 is a real sport you're very delusional.
User was temp banned for this post.
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On September 22 2011 06:36 Doodsmack wrote:
What's an example of an SC2 balance change that was targeted at the lower leagues and had a negative effect on professional play?
Flux vanes completely removed (to prevent mass void ray rushes in team games, ended up fucking with late game p v z harass) and zealot build time nerf to prevent rampant proxy 2 gating in lower leagues. Wasn't really a big deal in the higher leagues.
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I think they should balance both for the top and for the average players. If one race is slightly OP when you have Korean pro level micro but UP when you have average micro, it is bad design and needs to be adjusted.
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On September 22 2011 06:24 oni_link wrote:
your tl dr is missing
User was warned for this post
Would anyone care to explain this warning to me? Seems like a pretty reasonable observation to me since at the end of the post there is "TL;DR" with nothing following.
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On September 22 2011 06:33 Roxy wrote:Show nested quote +On September 22 2011 06:31 Shaetan wrote:On September 22 2011 06:29 YumYumGranola wrote:On September 22 2011 06:27 Shaetan wrote:On September 22 2011 06:18 YumYumGranola wrote:
the fact is that almost every single spectator of SC2 events is also a player. If there's anything that dissuades new players it has a negative affect on new spectators which hurts the feasibility foreign tournaments and therefore the entire foreign scene. This is not true. Well I certainly don't know any... Well then by jove it must be true! I think it is more reasonable to assume that most SC2 viewers are also players than it is to assume that most are not players How would someone understand the game if they do not play it? Do you regularly view anything you dont understand?
Just for the record on this tangent, I do not play or even own a licensed copy of SC:BW or SC2. I've been following the scene and watching regularly for 7+ years now. Why would anyone need to play SC2 to understand it?
On September 22 2011 06:45 Roxy wrote:
I'm not saying that it is impossible that some spectators dont play, i'm just saying it is unlikely. Does anyone here know someone who is INTERESTED in watching starcraft 2 who has never played a game of starcraft 2?
its possible.. but I bet you that maybe it will be 1 out of 10,000 viewers
Your estimate is very low. All of my past girlfriends I've gotten into watching SC:BW and SC2, and a few of my friends. None of us play the game. It's enjoyable to spectate.
For that matter I actively participate in a SC community without even playing the game. I hardly think I'm the only person to do so.
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United States5162 Posts
On September 22 2011 07:10 slam wrote:Show nested quote +On September 22 2011 06:24 oni_link wrote:
your tl dr is missing
User was warned for this post Would anyone care to explain this warning to me? Seems like a pretty reasonable observation to me since at the end of the post there is "TL;DR" with nothing following.
The mod probably thought he was requesting a TL;DR in a smartass way. If it's brought their attention in an appropriate way(as in not PMing them 'Yo, ur totally retarded for giving out that warning') it should be corrected.
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u must always balance for the highest level its like most people cant dunk a basketball so we just lower the hoop from 10 ft to 7 ft. i mean that shit wouldnt fly.
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What skills/abilities are you lacking compared to a pro player, and why must the game be balanced around this lack of yours?
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There is certainly game balance at all levels of play, I just think people on a site with a special interest in competitive gaming only find balance at that level particularly relevant. As such, most think developers should balance the game for that level, as most lower levels that want to be better emulate the best players, though the styles get diluted the further down you go. I think, for instance, protoss is extremely potent at low-mid levels of play, while terran has a high skill cap and does really well at high tier.
As far as balancing both levels, it's possible. I think it's easy to buff or nerf high tier while leaving low tier alone (buff or nerf mechanic that scales with skill well), it's easy to nerf low tier while leaving high tier alone (nerf a-move-ish units, buff something that scales with skill well), it's easy to buff or nerf both (stat tweaks), but it's harder to do something like buffing low tier while trying not to effect or nerf high tier. I'm sure that sounds like a mess, and as such they should probably just try to get it right at the competitive level first, then later maybe worry about the race dynamics at different spots on the learning curve.
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On September 22 2011 06:46 YumYumGranola wrote:Show nested quote +On September 22 2011 06:36 Jerubaal wrote:
You picked a rather poor example I think because you're condemning a whole race as 'ezmode' instead of proving that a specific thing is 'more difficult' at a certain level. Also, I think when people consider lower league balance they try to adhere to a false notion of 'equality' instead of thinking about the effort required to improve. A common example is the dynamic you see in low league PvT where players complain about a perception of bio/gateway/colossi/vikings at varying levels of development. Do I think it's 'more difficult' for a bio terran to defeat a roboing protoss? Sure. Do I think the jump the terran has to make in order to incorporate vikings in their play is any more difficult than the jump the protoss had to make to incorporate colossi? Not really.
The reason why low league play can't really be examined for balance reasons is that if either player improved even by the smallest margin, they'd probably demolish their opponent. The reason TvP was significantly imbalanced for Terran in BW has everything to do with the insane splash damage of Terran mech. Engaging a Toss army required seige tanks to be spread properly, and mines to be placed absolutely PERFECTLY so that they were far enough from tanks not to get dragged in and blow your whole army up but close enough that dragoons couldn't clear them before engaging your army. It was a knife-edge balance that was required to successfully engage a toss army that was "1a2a3a..." that simply doesn't exist in SC2. However when you can do it properly Terran mech is monstrous. That's why it doesn't need a buff at higher levels of play. I was a D level Terran player. The Korean kids in our class were huge gamers, 240+APM and were in the C and into B leagues. I was able to compete as Protoss against C level Terrans. My APM was somewhere around 70 (or 40 in SC2 APM) That's the kind of difference. I'm literally talking about Silver league players beating masters league players simply because of the race they chose.
Ok, well you just made a whole 'nother post saying why you thought it was easier to play Protoss, but your post doesn't really discuss 'balance'. If Iccup was halfway decent, then it should be putting you up against people it thinks you are equal to, regardless of what the 'skill quotient' decides your worth is. So if, as you say, a brainless monkey can get to C as Protoss, then the ones that were still in D with you must have been some kind of godawful. Your job isn't to try to attain some imaginary standard of skill that you think is being unfairly distributed, it's to win by being a little bit less godawful than the person you're playing.
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i think that balance should only take into acount the highest levels of play between the professionals (gm players, not masters or below). if its balanced for the best, it is definitely balanced for the rest, but then again, the lower leagues tend to blame the game before themselves.
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On September 22 2011 06:21 antikk555 wrote:
I recently started a new account as Zerg. I killed my own hatch at the start of the game with 7 workers in all 5 of my placement matches.
At silver level my build was nydus worm worker rush, no lings, no roaches, just workers. It would work regardless of the build my opponent was doing (4gate, reactor hellion etc). This is obviously a joke build, but it worked.
If players can be beaten by a Nydus worker rush balancing the game based on what they think is fucking retarded. End of.
This guy basically destroyed your whole argument. It's usually the player, not the race unless you are talking about the very highest level of play so balancing is pointless unless it's something abused in every single game.
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Broodwar did not move at higher speeds. The game moved perfectly at the right speed unlike Starcraft 2 which seems to move faster then it should and throws off certain players. I wish they would slow it down a little bit to give players more time to make a decision and not just a random jerk motion. It's one of the reasons I don't play often is because I'm given a 2 secs window frame to react to make the right decision if it isn't the right one you lose the battle and possibly the game. To much of the game is based on reaction time and should instead focus on which strategy works better then the other.
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Balance at highest level, lower levels relatively unaffected.
Balance at lower levels, completely changes things at the highest level.
I'm a gold player, small changes here and there don't affect me much.
I think what your trying to say is that the game should be fun at all levels which may be difficult to achieve because some races are harder to play than others so it takes more skill to get to the fun part.
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Part of the appeal of watching pro sc2 is knowing that I'm playing the exact same game as well.
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Blizzard does in fact take a look at lower leagues and also updates the game according to that.
So if something takes over in lower leagues it will be Patched in a way that might "hopefully" not affect high level play ; or at least not damage it greatly.
Overall Blizzard goes with the idea to nerf something so hard to take it more or less out completly if needed, and not all units are really "viable" overall (mostly T3 units) and most important some Upgrades are just retarded useless and others "must have".
Yea, balance wise you "could" give each league a totally different Balance Set ; but that would just require a crap ton more work in Balance and if you go up everything would change ; thats just bad for everyone.
Sc2 will for sure become a E-Sport for the "Pros" , at some point the casual players just get bored and get another game , so Balance should be for the "Pros" , if the game is in fact balanced , you will not lose because imbalances in your low league (you simply lose because of major missplays, or just pure stupid play).
Its true, like someone said in first posts ; a real good player can just Macro up Workers and overwhelm a bad player with workers only ; even after 10 minutes of game time and its totally impossible for this bad players to survive any form of rush as they are not used to it.
So the better players simply wins, its not about balance at all , as the low level players do not have the abilities that are simply fundamentally needed to play the game at all (i would even go as far to say that ~80% of the players still miss very fundamental parts of the game, and just a handful of players really has the passion to play a "real" match of starcraft).
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If players can be beaten by a Nydus worker rush balancing the game based on what they think is fucking retarded. End of.
This guy basically destroyed your whole argument. It's usually the player, not the race unless you are talking about the very highest level of play so balancing is pointless unless it's something abused in every single game.[/QUOTE]
There is an enormous skill range inbetween "losing all 5 placement matches" silver level and this hypothetical perfect level gameplay Blizzard are supposed to be 100% focused on balancing for. But since they do balance for all levels of gameplay already, I'm perfectly happy.
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This OP is so completely wrong it's ridiculous.
I LOVED the snide BW elitist remarks that were snuck in there too.
"I shudder to think what a player like Flash could do in SC2"
"That's why most SC2 pros are old B league BW players past their prime"
I enjoy it how you think Flash could hit every single larvae inject through a game with perfect creep spread while microing his army, scouting, teching, etc. I forgot he had 700 APM. Actually, isn't Flash's APM relatively lower than most top BW pros? Hmm.
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[Plat here]
Personally I feel that lower-level players like me shouldn't really be paid too much attention to, because it doesn't matter whether or not certain units are a little better in some contexts than others, it's the multitask, game sense, and decision-making that win and lose you games.
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It's a choice of whether you want the purest game in terms of skill, or whether you want to cater to the common folk which will damage the higher levels.
Also, many people of all skill levels aren't qualified to talk balance (probably including me and most of the people on TL) yet a small few seem to think that they are still the smartest SC2 player in the world.
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Why would you balance for the players that aren't good enough to seriously be affected by balance? You balance for the absolute highest levels, if players there have tried everything to counter a certain build/style and nothing works, THEN you start tweaking balance. Otherwise you're just fucking with the game and inviting shitty players to bitch and complain.
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Hi Face, my name is Palm
Hi Palm, nice to meet you. Let's be friends.
Okay!
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Because watching baseball and SC2 are comparable. As much as you people want to tell yourself SC2 is a real sport you're very delusional.
It isn´t a "real" sport, yet, atleast outside Korea, but it has potential. Enough potential, that big companies invest thousands of dollars into tournaments or teams. Even at the current state it can fill halls with thousands of people.
SC II or Esport in general would not be the first niche sport, that becomes mainstream. Think back 10 or 15 years. Where were sports like Poker, Darts or Snooker back then? Some of them had a really bad rep and others were followed by only a small amount of people. Now they can entertain millions of viewer.
Gaming in general will gain more respect in the coming years, because the people who will be in charge of things are the ones who grew up with playing computer games. Even now gaming exhibitions like gamescom attract hundreds of thousands of people and it keeps growing and growing.
I´m not saying, that it will reach the stage of Basketball/Baseball in the US or football in Europe, but it is defenitly possible, that it will become a n acknowlegded sport.
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Balance should be mostly focused on the higher levels, but lower levels should be kept in mind as welll.
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On September 22 2011 07:22 DARKHYDRA wrote:
Balance at highest level, lower levels relatively unaffected.
Balance at lower levels, completely changes things at the highest level.
I'm a gold player, small changes here and there don't affect me much.
I think what your trying to say is that the game should be fun at all levels which may be difficult to achieve because some races are harder to play than others so it takes more skill to get to the fun part.
This! A change that makes a big enough difference that it affects the lower levels of play, will have an exponentially greater impact on the highest levels. That is the problem with balancing for the lower levels, it means you have to make drastic changes like taking out whole upgrades from the game (void ray speed)
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I agree that Balance Changes should be made only in reaction to the highest level.
However, I think "Fun" changes or "Design" changes can be made in response to the lower leagues. Of course, much consideration must be made for the top level while making these changes.
I think discussing balance at different levels is still a fun thing to discuss. In real life, when you meet someone who SC2s, do you not talk about balance almost immediately?
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On September 22 2011 06:43 Jerubaal wrote:Show nested quote +On September 22 2011 06:32 FiWiFaKi wrote:
I did play BW and I played terran.
Now I was D for a long time and TvP was very difficult, from holding reaver drops and DTs, to just surviving while taking your expansion. Being D is equivalent to High Diamond/Low master, atleast it was two years ago.
Terran had it hard, and I do think it's important to make sure one race isn't just 1a'ing and the other race needs perfect micro to be on even ground. That was the ncie thing about BW, the competition against abilities and micro, they both had a high skill cap, instead of one person watching and one person working his ass off doing perfect macro.
Don't balance for platinum or lower because well, it's silly to do, at that point players play so poorly that a 50% handicap can make them lose games. But I do agree that diamond level players as well as the average masters should have pretty even balance. And right now I don't think it's much of a problem, maybe protoss is a bit stronger when both players have poor multitasking but I dont see any problems. I'm glad you gave us a concrete example to work with. Whenever I read things like this though I hear 'I want to play worse than my opponent and still win'. Your P opponents did reaver drops and you neither stopped them nor did counter harass of your own and you still wanted to win? When you played as P did you do reaver drops? Or, maybe a better question, did you NOT do reaver drops and STILL expect to win? Maybe you should have looked at the point at which Terran stopped getting demolished by reaver drops and emulated them. The point of lower leagues is that it's full of people adding building blocks to their play. If someone has added a building block, you have to do the same or you should lose.
Have you ever played TvP and PvT in Broodwar???
I don't think anyone that has played the game at any marginally competitive level will try to argue that PvT is miles miles miles easier than TvP. You basically have to have at least 200 APM just to play TvP at a D+ level.
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On September 22 2011 06:48 Monkeyballs25 wrote:
It wouldn't be good if for example race A relied heavily on microed units to win games, while race B didn't have any micro potential at all. Race A might still be 100% balanced with race B at pro level, but race B would be more and more dominant the further down you go from there. Not to mention few people would want to play race A. Basically one race shouldn't have a much higher skill cap and still only come level with the other. Not only will pros shift to the one with the lower skill cap that offers the same success, but that will filter down to all levels of play.
But I'm not 100% sure this problem exists in SC2 atm. Protoss is a *little* more micro intensive, Zerg is a *little* less and Terran is probably somewhere in the middle. But they all have fiddly micro unit opportunities, and unit comps that you can just 1A at your opponent with and win provided you have superior macro.
This is wrong, Terran is by far the most micro intense race of all 3, that's also why Terran is the hardest race to play for lower level league players. Zerg and Protoss actually both require very little to no micro compared to terran units.
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I'd say that a game that ist ONLY balanced at the highest level is doomed to fail because if the casual gamers who are the vast majority of the viewers do not have a chance to play fair games they will move on to another game that is better balanced for them.
Needless to say is of course that the main focus of the design have to be the highest level but if the ones who do not dedicate their life to the game are left behind the game would still be poorly designed to be an e-sport.
IMO SC2 ist currently at lower level pretty fair to everyone as long as you get past the 5 minute mark (no game design in the world will remove cheesy strategies).
There is a reason why a simple sport like soccer ist the most popular in the world everyone can get a fair match everywhere.
For me an e-sport has to be competitive at ervery level. Fun tournaments between silver league friends should be possible without eliminating a race because only pros can play it properly.
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On September 22 2011 07:31 Sphaero wrote:Show nested quote +
Because watching baseball and SC2 are comparable. As much as you people want to tell yourself SC2 is a real sport you're very delusional.
It isn´t a "real" sport, yet, atleast outside Korea, but it has potential. Enough potential, that big companies invest thousands of dollars into tournaments or teams. Even at the current state it can fill halls with thousands of people. SC II or Esport in general would not be the first niche sport, that becomes mainstream. Think back 10 or 15 years. Where were sports like Poker, Darts or Snooker back then? Some of them had a really bad rep and others were followed by only a small amount of people. Now they can entertain millions of viewer. Gaming in general will gain more respect in the coming years, because the people who will be in charge of things are the ones who grew up with playing computer games. Even now gaming exhibitions like gamescom attract hundreds of thousands of people and it keeps growing and growing. I´m not saying, that it will reach the stage of Basketball/Baseball in the US or football in Europe, but it is defenitly possible, that it will become a n acknowlegded sport.
I don't need your e-sport speech. His example is wrong, you cannot compare watching baseball/basketball vs SC2. In basketball two teams put a ball through a hoop, it's easy to undersand and pick up on. SC2 isn't like that at all. Hell Terran has like 15 Units and 15 buildings it's self not to mention the endless list of builds/strats ect. Oh now I see how they're comparable.
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On September 22 2011 07:45 Techno wrote:
I agree that Balance Changes should be made only in reaction to the highest level.
However, I think "Fun" changes or "Design" changes can be made in response to the lower leagues. Of course, much consideration must be made for the top level while making these changes.
I think discussing balance at different levels is still a fun thing to discuss. In real life, when you meet someone who SC2s, do you not talk about balance almost immediately?
i think we could have more units like the mothership. something that doesn't affect the balance yet is fun to have. the top level pros really hit the timing very well, so i think some fun units can be incorporated as long as they don't affect the timing push that pros do so well with "standard units"
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I honestly don't know what they are thinking at the Blizzard SC2 balance dept. They have a PTR for testing balance changes, and then decide not to implement what they have been testing (fine) but just implement something they haven't tested.
The meta-game of each match-up is so volatile that huge swings in dominance occur still on a month by month basis, even with no balance changes. On a fundamental level SC2 is full of unit vs unit hard counters, so in theory no combination of units should be unbeatable. Recently the question has been more to do with opportunities for scouting and then having time to make a good response. Many early game aggressive strategies are unbeatable if not scouted, and this turns the game into a coin flip which no-one wants to see.
Blizzard should have a methodical approach to balance that centres around very small changes followed by at least 2 months of post change analysis, and they should actually use their PTR. This much seems obvious. At the moment they seem to be balancing on the basis of how they think players should play the game vs what is actually happening. For example they obviously never wanted infestors to be used en-mass, so they just nerfed them. instead of seeing if the match-ups would settle down in their own time.
High level players are certainly more able to discover if there are solutions within the game to problems with a match-up, but often even at high levels people's ideas on how a matchup should be played stagnate, and it takes inspiration of just 1 person to completely flip the balance on it's head. However if at low levels on match-up is extremely one sided then obviously this would have to be addressed.
More important to me is how interesting the game is to play. ZvZ for me is so stale at the moment, so I really just don't want to play it. They really need to think about how they can introduce variety into the game, rather than allowing 1 strategy to be dominant.
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The match making system should filter out imbalances lower level.
If there was an imbalance lower down the ladder between races A and B (A being the harder race)
Then a player who always plays as A would be matched against people of lower skill level playing B.
Thus the games would be balanced.
It may be considered unfair as two people with the exact same skill would be in different leagues.
But once someone who plays as A improves and gets past the issues causing imbalance, then he will leap upwards.
I'm a gold Terran player. I think the game is balanced at the top leagues, which is how it should be. Lower down the ladder i do think there are a few small imbalances, mainly down to things in one race requiring more multitasking and micro. Remember this is GOLD level multitasking and micro.
At the end of the day I'm getting matched against people where i win 50% of the time. (except today.. where i only won 10% of the time ) So it is enjoyable.
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On September 22 2011 07:57 doko100 wrote:Show nested quote +On September 22 2011 06:48 Monkeyballs25 wrote:
It wouldn't be good if for example race A relied heavily on microed units to win games, while race B didn't have any micro potential at all. Race A might still be 100% balanced with race B at pro level, but race B would be more and more dominant the further down you go from there. Not to mention few people would want to play race A. Basically one race shouldn't have a much higher skill cap and still only come level with the other. Not only will pros shift to the one with the lower skill cap that offers the same success, but that will filter down to all levels of play.
But I'm not 100% sure this problem exists in SC2 atm. Protoss is a *little* more micro intensive, Zerg is a *little* less and Terran is probably somewhere in the middle. But they all have fiddly micro unit opportunities, and unit comps that you can just 1A at your opponent with and win provided you have superior macro. This is wrong, Terran is by far the most micro intense race of all 3, that's also why Terran is the hardest race to play for lower level league players. Zerg and Protoss actually both require very little to no micro compared to terran units.
You are not just wrong, but borderline retarded, roach/ling and marine/marader >>>>> stalker/zealot/sentry by FAR. ESPECIALLY at lower leagues when they cant hit those critical forcefields. There will be more 1a, which favours zerg and terran.
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If they want to get into masters and they believe there race is holding them back. They can easily go look up some builds that are really aggressive and cheesy and be top masters in no time ;D
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On September 22 2011 07:57 doko100 wrote:Show nested quote +On September 22 2011 06:48 Monkeyballs25 wrote:
It wouldn't be good if for example race A relied heavily on microed units to win games, while race B didn't have any micro potential at all. Race A might still be 100% balanced with race B at pro level, but race B would be more and more dominant the further down you go from there. Not to mention few people would want to play race A. Basically one race shouldn't have a much higher skill cap and still only come level with the other. Not only will pros shift to the one with the lower skill cap that offers the same success, but that will filter down to all levels of play.
But I'm not 100% sure this problem exists in SC2 atm. Protoss is a *little* more micro intensive, Zerg is a *little* less and Terran is probably somewhere in the middle. But they all have fiddly micro unit opportunities, and unit comps that you can just 1A at your opponent with and win provided you have superior macro. This is wrong, Terran is by far the most micro intense race of all 3, that's also why Terran is the hardest race to play for lower level league players. Zerg and Protoss actually both require very little to no micro compared to terran units.
Terran from Diamond down is just mass MMM then 1AT. Thats micro intensive? Putting all your barracks on one hot key and spamming Marine/Marauder is not tough. And in lower leauge where worker production isn't great, MULEs are completly game breaking
Protoss have to keep Zealots in front of one of the games fastest units. They have to keep Stalkers near slow clunky Collosus. A sentry away from your army should be the stuff of nightmares for a protossm They MUST make units while looking at the place to warp in.
Zerg. Creep spreading and Larvae injecting are things lower leauge players do not do or barely do. I have killed many full mana queens in gold. Thats alot more micro intensive then your giving credit for.
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I'm a low level player, and I only want blizzard to focus on balancing Professional calibur play.
The alternative is them seeing that bronze league marines die to banelings and nerfing banelings cause bronze can't split, etc. That is not what anyone wants.
Most stupid imba rants can be solved by "just play better". If there ever comes a time where no level of play can win against something, that's the time to balance.
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On September 22 2011 08:08 Orcasgt24 wrote:Show nested quote +On September 22 2011 07:57 doko100 wrote:On September 22 2011 06:48 Monkeyballs25 wrote:
It wouldn't be good if for example race A relied heavily on microed units to win games, while race B didn't have any micro potential at all. Race A might still be 100% balanced with race B at pro level, but race B would be more and more dominant the further down you go from there. Not to mention few people would want to play race A. Basically one race shouldn't have a much higher skill cap and still only come level with the other. Not only will pros shift to the one with the lower skill cap that offers the same success, but that will filter down to all levels of play.
But I'm not 100% sure this problem exists in SC2 atm. Protoss is a *little* more micro intensive, Zerg is a *little* less and Terran is probably somewhere in the middle. But they all have fiddly micro unit opportunities, and unit comps that you can just 1A at your opponent with and win provided you have superior macro. This is wrong, Terran is by far the most micro intense race of all 3, that's also why Terran is the hardest race to play for lower level league players. Zerg and Protoss actually both require very little to no micro compared to terran units. Terran from Diamond down is just mass MMM then 1AT. Thats micro intensive? Putting all your barracks on one hot key and spamming Marine/Marauder is not tough. And in lower leauge where worker production isn't great, MULEs are completly game breaking Protoss have to keep Zealots in front of one of the games fastest units. They have to keep Stalkers near slow clunky Collosus. A sentry away from your army should be the stuff of nightmares for a protossm They MUST make units while looking at the place to warp in. Zerg. Creep spreading and Larvae injecting are things lower leauge players do not do or barely do. I have killed many full mana queens in gold. Thats alot more micro intensive then your giving credit for.
sorry but protoss is the easiest race to play at low level. its very easy for terran and zerg to lose the whole army if you don't take good care of marines/lings . you also need to scout a bit better as a zerg which makes it more difficult than terran. but its much more easy for terran to lose army when it is badly positioned than it is for toss.
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On September 22 2011 06:18 YumYumGranola wrote:
There's also somewhat common allusions to the fact that BW took 10 years to balance and that we should be patient and not overreact.
It took four balance patches. And that's not four since the release of Brood War, but four since the release of vanilla Starcraft. The last of which came out in spring 2001.
10 years? no. not even close.
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I think you should only balance for the highest level, because at the lower levels, those players can't feel those subtle imbalances.
Unless you have really good macro and mechanics, you're not being disadvantaged by tiny advantages.
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On September 22 2011 08:05 izgodlee wrote:Show nested quote +On September 22 2011 07:57 doko100 wrote:On September 22 2011 06:48 Monkeyballs25 wrote:
It wouldn't be good if for example race A relied heavily on microed units to win games, while race B didn't have any micro potential at all. Race A might still be 100% balanced with race B at pro level, but race B would be more and more dominant the further down you go from there. Not to mention few people would want to play race A. Basically one race shouldn't have a much higher skill cap and still only come level with the other. Not only will pros shift to the one with the lower skill cap that offers the same success, but that will filter down to all levels of play.
But I'm not 100% sure this problem exists in SC2 atm. Protoss is a *little* more micro intensive, Zerg is a *little* less and Terran is probably somewhere in the middle. But they all have fiddly micro unit opportunities, and unit comps that you can just 1A at your opponent with and win provided you have superior macro. This is wrong, Terran is by far the most micro intense race of all 3, that's also why Terran is the hardest race to play for lower level league players. Zerg and Protoss actually both require very little to no micro compared to terran units. You are not just wrong, but borderline retarded, roach/ling and marine/marader >>>>> stalker/zealot/sentry by FAR. ESPECIALLY at lower leagues when they cant hit those critical forcefields. There will be more 1a, which favours zerg and terran.
http://sc2ranks.com/stats/league/eu/1/all
Terran has by far the most players in bronze and silver, in gold, platinum, diamond and masters there are alot more zergs and protoss players, which is clear evidence that terran at around that level of play (gold-master) is not only the weakest race, no, it's BY FAR the weakest race.
If it goes from being the most player race (by far) to being the least played race, then this is obviously down to imbalance, I don't think you realize how hard it is for gold or platinum league terrans to not lose all their marines to banelings or collossi. Terran units are extremely fragile and for players with bad control (gold-platinum and even up to masters to some extent) it's extremely hard to not lose their entire army in a split second. That's a problem that is exclusive to terran in the lower leagues. I started off as a silver league player and I'm now in low masters on the EU server and it was extremely hard to beat zerg banelings when I was in silver league, simply because I couldn't split my marines, whereas the zerg only a-moved his banelings.
Same goes for collossus, if a terran bio army a-moves into a collossus deathball it all dies, you need to kite to survive and realistically everyone below platinum can't kite for shit.
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Your comparison to broodwar is completely valid, however I feel that the thing that needs to be put out there is you need to play faster than sjow does to just macro in BW. Not attack, not organize army, not scout, just macro. SC2's UI does away with that, so as a result, bad macro between a gold zerg and a gold terran is pretty equal, and also, while banelings will kill a LOT of marines because the marines sit there, more banelings hit tanks, so as a result the game is still balanced. It's not good gameplay, but it's balanced.
I'd still say balance for the highest level because SC2's UI makes it such that instead of needing 100 apm to macro as protoss and 200 to macro as terran, it might take 40 as one race and 50 as another. The differences are there, but it's nowhere near as pronounced.
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Until you play (nearly) perfectly none of those balances will come into play.
Until you stop playing against yourself (meaning you refine your play to the point of Professional) you cannot be expected or allowed to cry "imbalance!".
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On September 22 2011 06:33 Roxy wrote:Show nested quote +On September 22 2011 06:31 Shaetan wrote:On September 22 2011 06:29 YumYumGranola wrote:On September 22 2011 06:27 Shaetan wrote:On September 22 2011 06:18 YumYumGranola wrote:
the fact is that almost every single spectator of SC2 events is also a player. If there's anything that dissuades new players it has a negative affect on new spectators which hurts the feasibility foreign tournaments and therefore the entire foreign scene. This is not true. Well I certainly don't know any... Well then by jove it must be true! I think it is more reasonable to assume that most SC2 viewers are also players than it is to assume that most are not players How would someone understand the game if they do not play it? Do you regularly view anything you dont understand?
You incorrectly assume this. There are MANY people who are not players anymore who still watch SC2. This is a fact and get over it. Its actually implausible to assume that something that is watched is also played by everyone watching. Just wrong if you look at it all.
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i think blizzard is doing a good job at balancing the game on every level. While zerg might be an a click to victory race in lower leagues, they still have to survive the early game ^.^ . Most changes are either affecting only people that will fight with a click or will not be noticed by people below 150 apm.
Recent fungal is probably a good example, it mostly does the same, got weaker where it had to. But the timings when to cast etc are now changed, so it grants more time to react and other things most players won't even be able to use.
Or in other words, people like me can still spam it like crazy and kill tons of stuff, but at the upper level you might want to be more effective and save yourself a fungal hear and there.
Or even save a drop of marines with your medivac heal.
(I hope to see a cloud of medivacs now saving a giant blob of fungaled marines with stutter step healing, so they target the weaker saving every marine with a few hp left, but since the zerg thought 2 are enough he is just baffled seeing the marines retreat into safety.)
Oh back on topic, so blizzard is not listening to anyone and still doing their thing, and the game gets better and better. (easier and harder to play at the same time  ).
No one liked the immortal, since you have to move and target fire with them. Now with a range of 6 you only have to targetfire with them, they are still messy, just not as bad. And they are still better if you move them along with target fire.
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BW is balanced through maps, not patches. The last important BW patch was in 2001 (3 years after release) and after that the maps dictated the balance. Blizzard needs to let the community play with the maps to see if balance can be achieved that way.
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On September 22 2011 06:25 YumYumGranola wrote:
You are all making the mistake of thinking that when I was talking about BW imbalance I was talking about the equivalent of Silver league. No this was like huge imbalance at Master's league level players.
Anybody remember that "Gold to Master's Think I can do It?" or whatever thread? If this was BW, the answer would be. "Switch to Toss /thread" I really don't think you're appreciating this.
You still cannot balance a game around anything but the top players. First of all, If you did so, all big tournaments would be a complete joke since race X would be winning them all. Furthermore, you don't really need to balance it at lower levels since there are tons of easy trash strategies that can net you a win in the lower leagues, so balance isn't really a concern there.
Your point about BW being imbalanced at lower levels holds some merit since terran required so much more macro than toss that bad players' games were dominated by toss. However, this does not apply to sc2 at all.
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Just because you were a very bad Terran player, doesn't mean TvP was as imbalanced as you say at lower levels. Every C Terran player in the world (sans one; that is you) could beat a D Protoss 95 times out of a hundred.
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On September 22 2011 08:05 izgodlee wrote:Show nested quote +On September 22 2011 07:57 doko100 wrote:On September 22 2011 06:48 Monkeyballs25 wrote:
It wouldn't be good if for example race A relied heavily on microed units to win games, while race B didn't have any micro potential at all. Race A might still be 100% balanced with race B at pro level, but race B would be more and more dominant the further down you go from there. Not to mention few people would want to play race A. Basically one race shouldn't have a much higher skill cap and still only come level with the other. Not only will pros shift to the one with the lower skill cap that offers the same success, but that will filter down to all levels of play.
But I'm not 100% sure this problem exists in SC2 atm. Protoss is a *little* more micro intensive, Zerg is a *little* less and Terran is probably somewhere in the middle. But they all have fiddly micro unit opportunities, and unit comps that you can just 1A at your opponent with and win provided you have superior macro. This is wrong, Terran is by far the most micro intense race of all 3, that's also why Terran is the hardest race to play for lower level league players. Zerg and Protoss actually both require very little to no micro compared to terran units. You are not just wrong, but borderline retarded, roach/ling and marine/marader >>>>> stalker/zealot/sentry by FAR. ESPECIALLY at lower leagues when they cant hit those critical forcefields. There will be more 1a, which favours zerg and terran.
At the ultra low levels stim is good, but players learn to forcefield shittily before they kite worth a shit, and vs Zerg is where Terran micros most.
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Absolutely balance for the top, the reason is that balance at the top maybe not fully will but can trickle down, say if P is balanced in PvZ at the top but Z is OP (THIS IS HYPOTHETICAL) at mid-levels the mid-level gamers can begin to learn what the pros are doing, obviously this won't be 100% as some things the pros do will just be too difficult but it's mitigation. On the other hand if you make it balanced at mid-levels but by connection make P OP at the top then nothing can be done to fix that, the UP Zerg can't learn from the lower levels, the lower level Zergs would be even only because the lower level P would be using non-optimal play.
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What is the highest level of play? Maybe we should just have Automaton 2000 Micro Bot's play 1v1's in all matchups and balance the game around that?
I agree with the OP for the most part. As a spectator of starcraft 2 I feel its very important to keep the game balanced at its highest level. Keeping the game challenging for all skill levels is obviously very important for maintaining the popular growth of SC2, but also extremely difficult.
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is no one reading his post?!..the bigger theme rather than the obvious answers people keep asking is that for all we know, Zerg or some other race may be far OP, and we have no idea because we aren't playing SC2 on the highest level..and I actually agree. I believe Terran is this easiest to play, so perhaps Terran has reached its ceiling already, but if Jaedong came over and showed Zergs how to play properly, who knows what could happen..
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It should always tried to be balanced at the top even if the people in bronze through masters want to complain about it. Making Starcraft II an esport without balancing from the top just would be weird and hard to do.
I also don't want the game dumbed down on lower bronze through masters. I think it would ruin playing SCII casually.
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On September 22 2011 09:04 Lamphead wrote:
is no one reading his post?!..the bigger theme rather than the obvious answers people keep asking is that for all we know, Zerg or some other race may be far OP, and we have no idea because we aren't playing SC2 on the highest level..and I actually agree. I believe Terran is this easiest to play, so perhaps Terran has reached its ceiling already, but if Jaedong came over and showed Zergs how to play properly, who knows what could happen..
In reality terran is the hardest to play and therefore has the highest skill ceiling, I already elaborated why that is the case and it's backed up by numbers. So it's not even debatable.
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Due to Starcraft 2 being a game that has been alot my widespread so far than Brood War was, I think the balancing aspect of this game is very important has the balance team have to take into account what is good for professional gamers AND the general public because, let's face it, the majority of people are not pro gamers probably only around 0.3% and therefore make up the VAST majority of the player base which Blizzard has to make sure to keep happy for them to continue playing this game.
This means that the team has to strike a balance (no pun intended) between keeping the general public satisfied as well as the major gaming circuit in order to have a successful game, and I think Blizzard have done a fine job with this so far.
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I don't particularly understand how you can say On September 22 2011 06:18 YumYumGranola wrote:While I don't think anybody can honestly argue that it's possible to balance the game at ALL levels of play
Either the game is balanced or it isn't. What are you arguing? That the skill requirements for players of any race to overcome their opponents from Bronze to Masters isn't exactly linear? How do you intend on proving this other than saying ( inaccurately) the game isn't 'balanced' (such poor choice of words imo) at all levels?
This really pisses me off:
On September 22 2011 06:18 YumYumGranola wrote:This thread will be about whether or not it's wise to only balance for the highest level of play. 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.
What, you're threatening the scene if shit players aren't kept happy / think the game is balanced for them? How exactly can you prove to shit players that the game is balanced? By them winning? How many variables are there in a game that dictate who wins besides balance? I assume this is what you're alluding to. This wreaks of reinforcing the "I'm not in bronze because I'm bad, must be x reason / shit the game isn't balanced at all levels".
On September 22 2011 06:18 YumYumGranola wrote:In our NA winning=fun culture
Not to mention the false sense of entitlement, the self consciousness about league, ladder anxiety and numerous other fickle mindsets that plague the population. (Not hating on NA exclusively here).
Probably Off Topic: Many Pro players at current will their own individual opinions about balance; some may coincide with other players, some may not. I would be inclined to say a few more changes could possibly be made before the game gets closer to being balanced. However, I can't say what because I don't play at the highest of tiers. I'm not qualified to speak as I don't understand the game like they do and I certainly wouldn't want to fuck it up for them because I can't overcome my own shortcomings.
It is because of them we know there is a way forward. It is they we learn from and they we cheer for.
If you're in bronze / insert shit league here; and you care about your league / rank; then I would advise you to stop reading threads like this. Get out of the strategy section unless you want to piss in the wind. Start playing. Start improving. Do something to help yourself.
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On September 22 2011 09:04 Lamphead wrote:
is no one reading his post?!..the bigger theme rather than the obvious answers people keep asking is that for all we know, Zerg or some other race may be far OP, and we have no idea because we aren't playing SC2 on the highest level..and I actually agree. I believe Terran is this easiest to play, so perhaps Terran has reached its ceiling already, but if Jaedong came over and showed Zergs how to play properly, who knows what could happen..
zergs learned how to play properly with nydus worms then people whined and blizz nerfed it into the ground.
zergs learned how to play properly after MONTHS of getting demolished with infestors and then people whined and blizz nerfed infestors pretty badly.
For real for real, the basic argument is to make it easy to play so people will be interested in it and keep playing = keep money in the game / sport scene etc. If the game is too hard then people will give up and not want to play anymore and then nobody will watch anymore and then there wont be money floating in the scene.
I disagree with the premise. I know of quite a few people who don't play and watch GSL or MLG. I know of a bunch of people who played, quit, but still watch day9 and MLG, TSL, etc.
I think if the premise was true, iccup wouldn't ever have any players in it other then korean pros because at the beginning of every season when ladder got reset you had to play against the super gosu people and get stomped by them. But people didn't quit because of that. People played harder because they wanted a taste of being that godly.
If you make the game easy to play, then what the pros do doesn't seem awesome anymore. When they can micro 2 muta attacks at once while macroing then you know they are fucking godlike and you keep playing because they are your hero and you want to be like them. BW was a hard game. It was a popular game because you had to play so hard and so much to get one level up. And then you were still only D-. And then you had to play so much and so hard to get to C.
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On September 22 2011 08:27 Gamegene wrote:
Until you play (nearly) perfectly none of those balances will come into play.
Until you stop playing against yourself (meaning you refine your play to the point of Professional) you cannot be expected or allowed to cry "imbalance!".
Isn't his point that each level of play should have their own concept of balance, and that you can't just point to the high levels and say "Well at grandmaster Zerg have the control necessary to neural/fungal the entire protoss army without losing all his shit therefore infestors are imba @ gold league"?
...and if imbalances are dictated per level of play, you could entirely have imbalances that would affect your own personal ladder experience, even though you're not anywhere near refined to the point of professionalism.
Take, for example, marines vs banelings. At a really low level, marines are "easier" to make and use than banelings as they require less tech and come out of a building at a consistent rate, not dependant on either gas or larva or the existence of other units. Banelings, being harder to make, are less likely to be made in enough number, and because they're "harder to use", the zerg is likely to make a ton of mistakes in trying to use them, such as running them in single-file without any ling support. It wouldn't be hard to argue that at this level, TvZ is imbalanced in T's favour.
However, move a level up where the Zerg now has a better understanding of how to manage his gas economy, and suddenly the zerg is capable of making enough banelings so that even despite terrible control, he'll win the absolutely-no-micro battle because he actually got beyond the critical number of banelings necessary to win.
Move up a level again and the zerg has now also figured out that if you send zerglings in with banelings against marines, the victory is even more pronounced. It wouldn't be hard to argue that at this level, ZvT is harshly imbalanced in Zerg's favour, as essentially he has to do nothing but make units, then attack with them to win, because the Terran's next steps up are more difficult than the zergs last few steps have been.
I could continue, but I'm sure you get the point. I don't think you -can- or -should- try balance for all levels of play, and as someone before wisely pointed out, the matchmaking system should even out the race imbalances, and no-one will be the wiser.
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Well if the game is balance around the lvl, how do you know you are getting better? You are only good at that X lvl because you are playing by X rules. While people who are up a league above you play by X+Y rule.
A better example, I will be borrowing from your example, is college basketball and NBA. What happen if a person has ONLY been trained to shoot to shoot 19'9. What happen if he transferred over to NBA? He will never be able to make the 23'9 3 pointer in NBA. What I am trying to say is that if people learn to play the game with different set of rules, it hard to tell if they are good or not. People will also complain, "WOW YOU ONLY WON CAUSE YOU CAN DO 'X' CAUSE WERE IN GOLD! IF WE WERE IN PLAT THIS WOULD NEVER HAPPEN CAUSE I COULD DO 'Y'." Or something along this line.
Only way, I can think of that wont effect anything, is the map. If we have map that can balance lower lvl of play then it fine. But even still, people who abuse the map to their advantage, do they truly deserve to move up?
TLDR: It a terrible idea, and too many flaws. I dont believe their really any other way to solve this other than learning to play and moving up.
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This has just turned into typical race bickering, this time about who's race is the easiest for new players.
I propose: who gives a shit, you're way off topic.
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The answer to the problem is maps.
Blizzard should balance for the typical players and their map pool.
If this leads to imbalance at the highest levels then tournament organizers can fix it with map design. Just drop the maps that favor the race that is winning too much and keep maps that favor the race losing too much.
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As a former mass 4v4 RT player I could have told you last September 2010 that hellions needed a nerf. But it's not until IdrA gets beat infront of 100k MLG viewers by Boxer that it gets nerfed.
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I'm not exactly sure why everyone is shitting on this guy's thread.
I think it's an absolutely great idea to have different game settings per league
EDIT: Or a completely different game mode all together (i.e. Novice mode or Pro mode)
In fact, Blizzard ALREADY DOES THIS. Any new player is allowed to play 50 "practice" games where he/she plays at slower speeds and rocks are positioned at the entrance to each base.
The question really isn't whether or not Blizzard should do this. To make the best game for everyone to enjoy, the answer is "absolutely yes". The question, is what exactly would have to change from league to league that doesn't stifle a players growth and still keeps the game interesting. And also, does Blizzard have the time/resources to design and implement such a system.
Maybe Master players don't have maps like searing crater in the map pool and only have GSL maps?
Maybe bronze league players still have rocks at the front of their base?
Maybe certain units/abilities cannot be built at lower leauges (like no DT or Banshees cannot cloak)?
Maybe queens auto cast larva inject?
Maybe SCVs and Probe production can be put on auto-cast?
I honestly don't know what should change and I don't know what is acceptable or not, but I agree with the OP in that if you are going to make a game that is desirable across all levels of play, you need to consider what is going to be fun for everyone and not just high level players.
Master Zerg fyi
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If you don't play at a top level, there is no such thing as balances or imbalances. You are not playing to your race's fullest potential, and therefore, you only have yourself to blame for shortcomings.
On September 22 2011 10:07 RodYan wrote:
I'm not exactly sure why everyone is shitting on this guy's thread.
I think it's an absolutely great idea to have different game settings per league.
In fact, Blizzard ALREADY DOES THIS. Any new player is allowed to play 50 "practice" games where he/she plays at slower speeds and rocks are positioned at the entrance to each base.
The question really isn't whether or not Blizzard should do this. To make the best game for everyone to enjoy, the answer is "absolutely yes". The question, is what exactly would have to change from league to league that doesn't stifle a players growth and still keeps the game interesting. And also, does Blizzard have the time/resources to design and implement such a system.
Maybe Master players don't have maps like searing crater in the map pool and only have GSL maps?
Maybe bronze league players still have rocks at the front of their base?
Maybe certain units/abilities cannot be built at lower leauges (like no DT or Banshees cannot cloak)?
Maybe queens auto cast larva inject?
Maybe SCVs and Probe production can be put on auto-cast?
I honestly don't know what should change and I don't know what is acceptable or not, but I agree with the OP in that if you are going to make a game that is desirable across all levels of play, you need to consider what is going to be fun for everyone and not just high level players.
Master Zerg fyi
No! Dear to ****ing god, no! The things you suggest, hell, anything you would potentially suggest will screw over "player growth" and mess up the nature of the competitive ladder. You do not change the way a competitive game is played for any level of play and I shudder that you proclaim yourself master's league and think it would be better that way.
You don't have stuff done for you automatically in earlier RTSs, SC1, War2, War3, C&C, etc. just because you're a lower calibur player. You don't get auto-aim and an infinite rocket launcher in Quake, CS, CoD, etc. because you're a bad player. You don't get more lenient input windows than other players in fighting games because you haven't bothered to spend the time practicing and mastering your character. No, no, no!
I'm all for encouraging newbie players to improve themselves in a competitive game, but it should be done the old-fashioned way: through actual practice, watching pro replays, and reading expert guides and discussions. It shouldn't be done through cheap artificial gimmicks that limit gameplay options just because players are low-ranked.
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On September 22 2011 10:07 RodYan wrote:
I'm not exactly sure why everyone is shitting on this guy's thread.
I think it's an absolutely great idea to have different game settings per league
EDIT: Or a completely different game mode all together (i.e. Novice mode or Pro mode)
In fact, Blizzard ALREADY DOES THIS. Any new player is allowed to play 50 "practice" games where he/she plays at slower speeds and rocks are positioned at the entrance to each base.
The question really isn't whether or not Blizzard should do this. To make the best game for everyone to enjoy, the answer is "absolutely yes". The question, is what exactly would have to change from league to league that doesn't stifle a players growth and still keeps the game interesting. And also, does Blizzard have the time/resources to design and implement such a system.
Maybe Master players don't have maps like searing crater in the map pool and only have GSL maps?
Maybe bronze league players still have rocks at the front of their base?
Maybe certain units/abilities cannot be built at lower leauges (like no DT or Banshees cannot cloak)?
Maybe queens auto cast larva inject?
Maybe SCVs and Probe production can be put on auto-cast?
I honestly don't know what should change and I don't know what is acceptable or not, but I agree with the OP in that if you are going to make a game that is desirable across all levels of play, you need to consider what is going to be fun for everyone and not just high level players.
Master Zerg fyi
The only suggestion that would be somewhat okay, is slightly different map pool variations from league to league. If you are playing in a league where larva/worker production is autocast, when you get promoted to the level where it isn't, you will have learned nothing and promptly get hammered back down to a place where you'll continue to learn nothing about it. Unit restrictions wouldn't be as harsh an eye opener, but still aren't a fantastic idea; new players need to see the whole puzzle and start problem solving early on; they aren't necessarily children that need to be babied, and can figure it out just like you did.
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Think of it like this: what if every pro terran would be able to perfectly (I'm talking bot-like) split his marines so banelings would NEVER hit more than 1 marine at the same time (unless that was somehow perceived as optimal)... would you make banelings much cheaper and/or stronger, knowing that it would fix pro-level issues but totally break ZvT at lower levels?
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I believe you're wrongly setting two extremes here. One, balanced play at high levels, but completely imbalanced at lower levels (your BW example). Two, balanced at low levels, not so much at high levels. It does not have to be this way, especially if you've seen the race discrepancies in SC2 so far and how Blizzard has gone about patching.
First, look at SC2 in its current state. Some could argue that zerg may be harder to play at lower levels (note: it is), but it is nowhere near the BW tvp discrepancy you noted. This is quite important because the crux of your argument is that you don't want noobs to abandon the game like they would have in BW. In furtherance of this point, the difference in mechanics required to properly play each race, even at a low level, has become significantly smaller in SC2. Protoss could 1a2a3a in BW, but each race can do the same in SC2, especially when you consider the strategies in lower levels, which is what we are talking about.
What would make each race as easy to play as the next, in the lower levels, is a similar mechanical requirement for proficiency. In SC2's current state, there isn't such a significant difference that would merit changing the balance philosophy of the game designers.
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On September 22 2011 12:14 the p00n wrote:
Think of it like this: what if every pro terran would be able to perfectly (I'm talking bot-like) split his marines so banelings would NEVER hit more than 1 marine at the same time (unless that was somehow perceived as optimal)... would you make banelings much cheaper and/or stronger, knowing that it would fix pro-level issues but totally break ZvT at lower levels?
Thank you, this is exactly the kind of balance change I had in mind that would absolutely destroy ZvT at lower levels. Who would want to learn how to play Terran if you need to essentially be gosu before you could play a fair game against a zerg player?
I don't know why people have such an issue with the idea of tiered rules. Maybe it doesn't happen in RTS games so much but in basically every single competitive sport in existence the rules/field are different for beginners than they are for pros. In fact most of these rules are how they are because no beginners would be able to play pro-style rules. Having tiered rules is a foundation of competitive development in our current society.
Now most sports are balanced by default because teams have the same number of players/rules etc. which makes it difficult to understand in the context of an RTS like SC. It would be like teams playing by different rules for the same goal (i.e. Basketball: Team A can only dunk the ball for 2 points but can dribble, team B can only shoot 3's but can pass the ball). Now for arguments sake imagine that the height of the rim was such that just about anybody could dunk the ball. This game would be HORRIBLY unbalanced at low levels of play, but you might imagine a scenario that at high levels this game might be balanced. HOWEVER, who as a beginner would want to learn how to play the game for the 3 point team if it was staggeringly easier to win playing for the dunk team? That's the primary problem that exists for BW. If any of you made an account right now on ICCup and picked Terran or Zerg you'd probably play 50 games before your first win and would start out in Bronze League. However those who picked Toss would get into the iccup equivalent of Master's league. Can nobody seriously see how this would negatively affect the game's appeal to new players?
I honestly didn't expect many SC2 players to quite grasp this concept. (The funny thing is many of the people who claim that balance should only affect the higher level also probably post on balance discussions and include personal anecdotes/replays etc. despite the fact that they're only in Masters league). We're lucky now that the game is relatively balanced at low levels (primarily because the "high" levels aren't all that high) but if it was like BW most players would either a) play Toss, or b) derp derp play a different game.
People care about being able to wn games. If they didn't cheese wouldn't exist. The vast majority of players don't differentiate winning with improving (again why cheese exists) so looking at the cross section on the ladder I have serious doubts about whether most of these players would continue to play.
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Balance should be targeted at the highest level of play, such that stupid blunders are not considered. High level of play minimizes this.
But balance also affects lower levels of play, when 2 players are playing correctly, and one seems to have a disproportionately easier time achieving better results. This happens less often than at high level play, because a low level player might not be dealing with something correctly.
I've written a bunch of posts on this in previous threads, and I realized that it's not a good idea to overcomplicate things. Just note that "I'm in diamond bro, so that 1-1-1 was fair" is wrong. It probably wasn't fair, and you should probably be complaining. You probably didn't deserve to lose so lopsidedly.
But that doesn't mean that Blizzard should tone down 1-1-1 specifically for lower level players. Rather, the game should be robust enough at high levels, such that lower levels can at least know what they were supposed to be doing.
Moral of the story: balance it for the high levels, and the low levels can (attempt to) follow (at varying derees of success).
Addendum: Even a low level player can identify something that's imbalanced, as a spectator. 1-1-1 is such a strategy, I'd say.
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as long as they are buffing Protoss I am fine with this
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If you want to complain about balance, why not go post it on the blizzard forums? Yeah the only people that reply to your posts will be the trolls that got perma banned from everything else on several accounts, but its also the only place where blizzard will read your feedback.
Plus, do you really think blizzard cares what the general masses say about the balance of the game? Probably to a much lesser extent than they do when pro's talk about balance. Pro players are the ones that understand this game to the highest and deepest level. The chances of them sending out surveys to pro teams before making major balance changes is probably pretty high, I would imagine. I havent heard of any pro players working for their sc2 R&D department (if such a thing exists...lol) so if that is true, then it would be obvious that they get their information from outside sources, and that does not include the casual (non-professional) side of the community.
Making threads about stratagy to try and get around an "overpowered" build or unit is fine, but making balance threads is unacceptable. On what grounds does anyone, except pro players and blizzard r&d, speak about the balance of this game? Post your balance complaints on blizzard forums, or prepared to get trolled into the ground on these forums. your choice.
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I don't really see how blizzard can balance around anything but top level play. Less skilled players make so many mistakes in their mechanics and strategy that their losses have nothing to do with balance.
If 1000 low league players posted replays where they lost I would bet fewer than 1% of the losses would be able to be attributed to balance and not mistakes made by the player.
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On September 29 2011 01:23 ishyishy wrote:
If you want to complain about balance, why not go post it on the blizzard forums? Yeah the only people that reply to your posts will be the trolls that got perma banned from everything else on several accounts, but its also the only place where blizzard will read your feedback.
Plus, do you really think blizzard cares what the general masses say about the balance of the game? Probably to a much lesser extent than they do when pro's talk about balance. Pro players are the ones that understand this game to the highest and deepest level. The chances of them sending out surveys to pro teams before making major balance changes is probably pretty high, I would imagine. I havent heard of any pro players working for their sc2 R&D department (if such a thing exists...lol) so if that is true, then it would be obvious that they get their information from outside sources, and that does not include the casual (non-professional) side of the community.
Making threads about stratagy to try and get around an "overpowered" build or unit is fine, but making balance threads is unacceptable. On what grounds does anyone, except pro players and blizzard r&d, speak about the balance of this game? Post your balance complaints on blizzard forums, or prepared to get trolled into the ground on these forums. your choice.
I don't want to complain about balance (read the OP)
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This very week I saw a Korean pro have his zealots uselessly dancing behind his stalkers and immortals and lose the game because of it. No one's playing at "the highest levels" yet.
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PvT in BW is easier for 99.99% of P's who ever played it probably. Yet; it's balanced. Just means you gotta maybe play a P player with lower skills as a close opponent. Or just keep playing people at your level and improve faster anyway... i feel like this kind of thing just makes you raise your game and improve.
If Blizzard tried to balance BW, current day, you can bet PvT would be ripped apart immediately and ruined. Thank fuck they've let it alone for so long.
Edit: I see other people mentioned PvT, but seriously it is easier for P, so much easier and i play both sides of it - in PvT i can keep up with a C+ T even though im probably like D+ overall, other way around and any average P can probably have a decent chance in a macro game
Infact T is harder all the way up to just below prolevel really, look at the amount of foreigner P/Z compared to T. That's fine though as long as it's balanced... it isn't a big deal. But i'm also of the opinion everyone should be random or at least rotating between races, T is what i like to play when i want the most mechanical challenge. If you are a low level not serious player why not really.
Just offtopic but it makes me laugh seeing all these new guys come in, desperately looking for builds making post-it notes of supply counts and trying to practice just to follow the builds down correctly. You guys are just ruining some of the fun of the game turning into this. Just learn the general stuff and then play your way through games, keeping resources and supply correct and building tech in the order you feel is right. You'll honestly have more fun and it will feel more rewarding that way. Personally i've never followed a build order, if i see something like 2hatch muta i just build what i think would be correct and change to make it better. And sometimes i do a lot of random little tactics i think up that others don't do.
This is the fun of the game! Seriously fuck ranks and everything just go out there and play on the fly, cause it's awesome. This applies to most people since i think D+ is supposedly like masters on SC2. Above that you need to play refined to win games but if you are not at the level, who cares have some fun.
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Ask any bronze player - 6pool is imbalanced
Ask HuK - don't scout or prepare for it against Moon, win anyway.
Balancing for anything other than the best is retarded.
Frankly, balancing much at all now is foolish anyway, because as you said, there is still a huge skill ceiling to be discovered. Liquid`Tyler is one of the big promoters of the "let it be, and see what happens in time", and I totally think this is a way forward. e.g. There are big complaints about 1/1/1 at the moment, but I think in time Protoss will find a way to rape it, and make it a bad move from Terran.
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I really like when it's balanced at pro levels because it means that the closer to the highest skill level I become, the more I will win, and until I get to that level (never in my case ,i dont play enough) it means the less I have to care about balance in order to beat my opponent.
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Some points made in the op made me think:
While it might be easy to say "W/E I like this game and I'm good so I don't care about your troubles" the fact is that almost every single spectator of SC2 events is also a player. If there's anything that dissuades new players it has a negative affect on new spectators which hurts the feasibility foreign tournaments and therefore the entire foreign scene.
From my personal experience, I would think that to cheer for someone like Naniwa (^_^) at a tournament you don't need to worry about whether "Terran is OP" or "Protoss is UP". The reason for this is that many people realize that their thoughts don't really matter, because it is in fact Naniwa who is playing at the moment and not them. So you can't possibly say "Oh Naniwa lost this game because he plays Protoss, and from my own games I feel that PvZ is in favor of the Zerg race."
That's just silly.
...if the general SC2 scene dies down you'll end up just being the person who's really good at something nobody cares about.
From what I said above, this argument seems to implode in on itself: How can the general scene die down if people are still watching pros play even though they themselves might struggle? Also, this point assumes that most people do in fact lose interest in the game because of some perceived imbalance and not something else (ex. university, job, other games, unwillingness to spend more time in order to get better).
Or, on the other hand, what if the people who complain instead of trying to get better, even though they might feel something is imbalanced, leave? Then what?
You'll be left with the majority of the community who do want to improve, even though they sometimes feel that some race is 'too strong'. Even the fact that people believe different races are 'too strong' solidifies the point that people just like to complain about a race they have difficulty beating, which is different for different people (Ex. I myself just can't seem to beat Zergs as easily as I can beat Terrans and Protoss, but I won't say that Zerg is 'too strong' just because of that fact)
So to sum this up, yes, I strongly believe that the game should only be re-balanced based on results at the very top. In my opinion this will result in much less trouble than trying to balance the game for every level of play.
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On September 29 2011 01:32 infinity2k9 wrote:
PvT in BW is easier for 99.99% of P's who ever played it probably. Yet; it's balanced. Just means you gotta maybe play a P player with lower skills as a close opponent. Or just keep playing people at your level and improve faster anyway... i feel like this kind of thing just makes you raise your game and improve.
If Blizzard tried to balance BW, current day, you can bet PvT would be ripped apart immediately and ruined. Thank fuck they've let it alone for so long.
Exactly, but a big part of that is because the BW ladder system and leagues like iccup don't really have the infrastructure to have different rules at different levels, which SC2 might be able to do with it's leagues and matchmaking system. You're absolutely right, it is balanced, but only for top players and if it was subjected to SC2 style balance discussions it would be destroyed. That's the problem I see. There's a reason BW fell out (in fact I'm not sure it was ever played seriously by the masses outside of Korea, most people were too intimidated) in most foreign scenes. I think one of the major reasons why SC2 has been so successful in the foreign scene is BECAUSE it is balanced at low levels (at least enough). But as the person above pointed out SC2 is not played at "high" levels in the same sense that BW is. SC2 is still extremely young and a lot can change. I wouldn't expect most SC2 players to play more than 3 or 4 PvTs before giving up and going back to SC2 where they can win games.
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On September 29 2011 01:34 NorthernIrelandGlob wrote:
Ask any bronze player - 6pool is imbalanced
Ask HuK - don't scout or prepare for it against Moon, win anyway.
Balancing for anything other than the best is retarded.
Frankly, balancing much at all now is foolish anyway, because as you said, there is still a huge skill ceiling to be discovered. Liquid`Tyler is one of the big promoters of the "let it be, and see what happens in time", and I totally think this is a way forward. e.g. There are big complaints about 1/1/1 at the moment, but I think in time Protoss will find a way to rape it, and make it a bad move from Terran.
While I agree with the main body of your post, if I recall, HuK actually scouted Moon first on that final game on Taldarim giving him JUST enough time to get the Forge and Cannons up. Funnily enough, if he hadn't scouted that way it would've been a flat out loss. Talk about coin flips!
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On September 29 2011 01:41 branflakes14 wrote:Show nested quote +On September 29 2011 01:34 NorthernIrelandGlob wrote:
Ask any bronze player - 6pool is imbalanced
Ask HuK - don't scout or prepare for it against Moon, win anyway.
Balancing for anything other than the best is retarded.
Frankly, balancing much at all now is foolish anyway, because as you said, there is still a huge skill ceiling to be discovered. Liquid`Tyler is one of the big promoters of the "let it be, and see what happens in time", and I totally think this is a way forward. e.g. There are big complaints about 1/1/1 at the moment, but I think in time Protoss will find a way to rape it, and make it a bad move from Terran. While I agree with the main body of your post, if I recall, HuK actually scouted Moon first on that final game on Taldarim giving him JUST enough time to get the Forge and Cannons up. Funnily enough, if he hadn't scouted that way it would've been a flat out loss. Talk about coin flips!
Sorry, I must have got the details wrong! but even there, it's not a flat out loss! he still has more workers than lings, and by the time the next round of lings get there, his cannon SHOULD be done. But anyway, this isn't the 6pool discussion thread, you get my point =p
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I think balance should exist at all or at least most levels. However, you have to start at the top in order to at least balance the potential of each race before looking lower to talk about the ease of achieving that potential.
Also, I don't particularly like your bw example. I played protoss for a while and wound up getting into C/C+. I never did play terran, so I can't say you are certainly wrong in stating that mu was imbalanced. Still, I decided to mess around with zerg for a couple seasons and got into C with that as well after some practice, so it seemed that skill measured between those two races was reasonably equal.
I would also point out that the sc2 match making system makes all this kind of unimportant anyway as you are going to be matched against people that are pretty close to your skill no matter what.
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^
Removing hellion speed upgrade
Blue flame hellion nerf.
Not making fungal have a lag animation (from a PTR)
Not making EMP have a lag animation
Just to name a few.
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Void Rays and Reapers were ruined because of "balancing for lower levels"...so I'm against it.
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Balancing a game on any level but the absolute top (i'm talking KR grandmasters/code S) is kinda pointless, given that SC II is trying to become an e-sport.
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On September 29 2011 01:40 YumYumGranola wrote:Show nested quote +On September 29 2011 01:32 infinity2k9 wrote:
PvT in BW is easier for 99.99% of P's who ever played it probably. Yet; it's balanced. Just means you gotta maybe play a P player with lower skills as a close opponent. Or just keep playing people at your level and improve faster anyway... i feel like this kind of thing just makes you raise your game and improve.
If Blizzard tried to balance BW, current day, you can bet PvT would be ripped apart immediately and ruined. Thank fuck they've let it alone for so long. Exactly, but a big part of that is because the BW ladder system and leagues like iccup don't really have the infrastructure to have different rules at different levels, which SC2 might be able to do with it's leagues and matchmaking system. You're absolutely right, it is balanced, but only for top players and if it was subjected to SC2 style balance discussions it would be destroyed. That's the problem I see. There's a reason BW fell out (in fact I'm not sure it was ever played seriously by the masses outside of Korea, most people were too intimidated) in most foreign scenes. I think one of the major reasons why SC2 has been so successful in the foreign scene is BECAUSE it is balanced at low levels (at least enough). But as the person above pointed out SC2 is not played at "high" levels in the same sense that BW is. SC2 is still extremely young and a lot can change. I wouldn't expect most SC2 players to play more than 3 or 4 PvTs before giving up and going back to SC2 where they can win games.
You could make a strong argument for that but keep in mind i am not saying it was wildly out of balance you can still win games. The reason it never took off in my eyes is simply because 1v1 was never particularly popular and Blizzard's ladder sucked, pushed everyone off to casual BGH and Fastest games. And it's a very harsh unforgiving hard game regardless of the balance. All this together means nah of course it's not going to have a big western 1v1 scene. These are guys that talk about fucking ladder anxiety and being unable to press 'find match'.
So of course when shiny SC2 comes in with lasers and explosions and is much simplified people will enjoy it. For a while at least... but 1v1 will still drop off because the casual people will move onto the next game, the people inhabiting the lower levels that is. And because of how the game is designed a lot of them are not enjoying it anymore than they would a BW game anyway, ie: losing straight up to timing attacks and stuff like that. Plus ironically with the new APM system, even if PvT was easier for P you wouldn't notice if the players you randomly played were better than you or not or if you are being matched against objectively inferior players.
Just my thoughts anyway but i kinda think so many changes aimed solely at the lower level player won't help anything, just remove features like showing losses - a ridiculous babying change. If they can't tell if it's balanced or not anyway with matchmaking, who cares? I say ignore those numbers from lower leagues totally.
Make the balance for the eSport vehicle we have here.. cause that is the long term future, not these guys who are likely to quit at some point anyway. Ignore what happens as a result of GM balancing lower down; and a better game will be made i think. Also it's never going to go waaay out in the lower leagues or anything unless they introduce a unit which needs 100 APM to operate it alone and is totally vital.
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On September 29 2011 01:54 cLutZ wrote:
Void Rays and Reapers were ruined because of "balancing for lower levels"...so I'm against it.
An unbiased person would argue they were fixed. This is why balance discussions are so pointless. Everyone has an opinion and noone will budget.
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This is interesting, but look at it this way, for the sake of winning $50,000, I bloody hope it's balanced at the highest level.
I still see mistakes happening and no-one has played the perfect game just yet. So it's not going to happen any time soon. I had wonder this myself, in a sense where what if one pro can create an anomoly. Say a race is actually imbalanced for everyone else except this one guy with god like skill, reflexes and ability, that no one else can learn to acheive or copy.
The race shouldn't be nerfed, it's the player itself.
Interesting again, in what you suggest, that there could be different leagues with different set of rules to achieve 'balance' among lower levels. I like the idea of leagues with easier/crazy/'more fun' rule sets. However, this is a competitive game unfortunately, it's about skill and knowledge. If Blizzard were to create other types of leagues that are more forgiving, will these players ever move on to the next level. It could undermine the competitive nature of the game.
Think of it like this: what if every pro terran would be able to perfectly (I'm talking bot-like) split his marines so banelings would NEVER hit more than 1 marine at the same time (unless that was somehow perceived as optimal)... would you make banelings much cheaper and/or stronger, knowing that it would fix pro-level issues but totally break ZvT at lower levels?
This example is interesting. However, I think if every pro terran is able to do this then I suppose yes then you would need to adjust the balance, if only one pro terran is able to do this then you shouldn't. Majority of players mean that the skill can be achieved. Although even if this was actually the case, is it even necessary to adjust balance?
Is the baneling really the correct counter to use on marines in the first place. Can something else be used differently, or conjunctively, say a fungal, ling surround. A new unit? Design can be adjusted rather than balance.
If a race is actually imbalanced due to a higher difficulty curve, it's not really a balance problem it's a design problem. You have tiers, which comes up in many competitive games.
The best solution is still to adjust balance according to top level play/top level strategies used etc, because it will naturally adjust down to the lower levels. Learn to play comes with the territory. Everyone and I mean everyone are on the same playing field, no buts.
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There is a major flaw in the way you are presenting your initial arguement, by pushing all race differences, strength and weaknesses alike under the balance rug. The current mindset that is polluting these forums is that if one "lesser skilled" player (whatever that might mean) is able to defeat a more skilled player by picking race x against race y the XvY match-up is imbalanced.
There are two sides of the story:
Race Understanding
The above definition of imbalance is pretty narrow because it assumes that "skill" is something that is interchangeable between the two races and measurable in some way.
This is not true. In fact I believe that for each race the definition of skill is different.
Simple example: would you say that hitting your larva injects and spreading your creep while scouting is of the same nature as building marines, tanks and pressuring? I don't think the two are comparable. The easiest way to see this is that when a pro player switches from a race to another he sucks horribly at first. Basically when switching to a new race, you are learning the skillset of that new race.
This is basically the first flaw of your argument: the fact that different races require different understanding and nothing says that the understanding is reached at the same level of play (especially for the lower levels)
Simple Example: If a Zerg going for a defensive 6pool is beating a Terran rushing a Planetary Fortress at his first Command Center, what can you say about balance?
This makes the needed skill compete completely different from one race to another. Race understanding only comes at the highest of levels and thus lower down you can't really predict the result and understand which way balance is shifting.
Mechanics
Secondly there are mechanics. This raises an entirely different observation: in order to quantify race balance in terms of comparing the worth of two players we should take only comparable mechanics components into consideration.
For example:
* multitasking
* macro ability
* micro ability
These are comparable skills, and players who excel on one race will, after of course learning the race-specific skill set, dominate with any race.
Now that I have narrowed it down to more tangible variables, let's look at the initial question. We might define balance as the following: if two players with reasonably similar multitasking, macro and micro play a lot of games, the win ratio of each one of the players will converge to 50%. This seems reasonable.
However there are two problems with this.
1) There is no conversion rate between any to different skillsets
What do I mean by that? You cannot compare in any way a guy who has say 70% from perfect multitasking and 80% from perfect micro, with another who has 80% multitasking and 70% micro. It's just impossible. What this will create is a different skew in race wins in function of the race design and especially of how rewarding is for a race to master one of the skill sets.
More concretely: if in platinum league, a Zerg with 2000 minerals in the bank dies to a stim drop from a Terran with 3000 minerals in the bank can you state anything about the game's balance?
This means unless all players have a decent enough mastery of all the needed skill sets you cannot really measure balance.
2) Skill ceilings
When talking about the common skillets between different races, because of their differences one race can reward a skill more than another. As players are perfecting themselves, when reaching good mechanics some races can cap faster than others.
Example for Micro. A Zergling, no matter how much you micro it, is still a zergling. There is not much to gain from doing anything different than attack moving with it. Marines for example are a whole different issue: they have stim, studder step, one can split them against banelings, drop them, put them next to walls, etc.
What does this mean: two things:
- at low level of play when both players basically attack move the zergling vs marine fight might seem balanced.
- at high level of play it will mean that as the players get more experience and their micro reaches 100% efficiency, the marine user will find himself winning more and more because of the added depth of the unit.
This mechanics section proves two things:
a) When dealing with players with sub-par mechanics, you cannot assert anything about game balance as the game is not played at maximum efficiency. You might state that if two players have exactly the same flaws in mechanics they should be equally matched, but this is at first impossible to quantify, as point 1 proves, and secondly even we might somehow imagine such a scale, having balance at all levels of imperfection would require a much harder effort than balancing at the perfect-play level.
b) Because of the differences between races, things that seem balanced at low levels can become problematic at high levels because of the way rewards scale with the improvement of the players.
Conclusions:
I) Race balance should be looked at only from the perspective of the best play.
II) Race design should be such as all races scale in efficiency similarly with the increase in skill of different players.
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On September 22 2011 06:33 Roxy wrote:Show nested quote +On September 22 2011 06:31 Shaetan wrote:On September 22 2011 06:29 YumYumGranola wrote:On September 22 2011 06:27 Shaetan wrote:On September 22 2011 06:18 YumYumGranola wrote:
the fact is that almost every single spectator of SC2 events is also a player. If there's anything that dissuades new players it has a negative affect on new spectators which hurts the feasibility foreign tournaments and therefore the entire foreign scene. This is not true. Well I certainly don't know any... Well then by jove it must be true! I think it is more reasonable to assume that most SC2 viewers are also players than it is to assume that most are not players How would someone understand the game if they do not play it? Do you regularly view anything you dont understand?
Why do you need to play something to understand it?
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Balance in my opinion should only be considered on the highest level. Like other people said, a lot of them are making a living from this, and they deserve the fairest level of play. I don't see it being a good thing if a bronze league game was balanced over a GM game.
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On September 29 2011 01:34 NorthernIrelandGlob wrote:
Ask any bronze player - 6pool is imbalanced
Ask HuK - don't scout or prepare for it against Moon, win anyway.
Balancing for anything other than the best is retarded.
There is a GIGANTIC difference between letting a bronze player dictate how to balance the game, and balancing the game to be fair for everyone.
If a race is easier than another race regardless of whether a high level player will know to play the harder race then an imbalance exists and it should be dealt with.
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On September 29 2011 02:19 Selentic wrote:Show nested quote +On September 29 2011 01:34 NorthernIrelandGlob wrote:
Ask any bronze player - 6pool is imbalanced
Ask HuK - don't scout or prepare for it against Moon, win anyway.
Balancing for anything other than the best is retarded.
There is a GIGANTIC difference between letting a bronze player dictate how to balance the game, and balancing the game to be fair for everyone. If a race is easier than another race regardless of whether a high level player will know to play the harder race then an imbalance exists and it should be dealt with.
A game with a large skill gap like Starcraft is realistically impossible to balance at every level of play, plain and simple.
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On September 22 2011 06:40 Ubes wrote:Show nested quote +On September 22 2011 06:36 Doodsmack wrote:
What's an example of an SC2 balance change that was targeted at the lower leagues and had a negative effect on professional play? It wouldn't impact it, but it would also be a giant waste of time, there isn't great balance at lower levels because lower level players are awful. Improve and with that comes balance.
Sure. But there is also this phenomoenon of people being very good at one matchup but struggling hard at another matchup. And that even happens at lower leagues.
The basic mechanics of mining and production and army control are the same in all matchups. That means if there are major differences in your win rates in different matchups, there must be a strategic problem. Something that this race you have problems against can do that is very hard to deal with for someone of approximately equal skill level.
Few people would say that the skill cap of SCII is even close to reached. That means if you say "just get better" to players struggling with a build or matchup in lower leagues, you must say the same to the top pro players, or admit that it is impossible to get any better at the game.
The better solution of course would be to wait long times to see how the game develops.
Zerg strugghled with the protoss death ball since the game came out. It took a whole year for enough zerg players to learn infestor micro and NP usage well enough to be able to deal with it. And 2-3 weeks after it became clear that this is actually a viable way to deal with colossus death balls it was taken out of the game and protoss got some buffs on top of it.
Now at the top level in korea protoss struggle with zerg, mainly because they can't keep up with the economy. Well, get better at harassing then. Zerg can't keep up with your army. That isn't any better or worse of a problem, it is just a different problem.
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If you are not at the highest level....then there is no need to worry about balance or whine about it. Look for areas you can imrove on, and work at it. There's a reason why you are not playing at the highest level and it has nothing to do with balance.
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I think its important to realise that if a bronze player finds tvp is imballanced at bronze, he has the option to practice, and eventually he will reach the skill level where it is balanced. At the top tier, this isn't really an option anymore
The idea of changing the game in lower leagues is (imo) really bad, i wouldnt ever go further then mabye making the lowest leagues have an option to play on a lower gamespeed for their first x games or something. The main interest alot of people have in watching pro games is to see how the matchup should be played or how to defend a certain all in. If they play a different version of the game then none of this applies, and pro games become essentially irrelevant.
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I don't think the lower levels need a different balance structure from the higher levels- cheese already exists, will always exist, and is inevitable. And at low-level play the skill factor is huge as mentioned before my post here. Also, regarding losing players, players will always hold misconceptions about gameplay- Eg. I go mass stalker and win- other guy says "stalker IMBA" when it was just his macro, then I go mass stalker again and lose so I say "stalker needs buff" when really I'm just being an idiot. So this may be much ado about nothing? At this point anyway. I acknowledge the possibility of drastic change affecting lower level play but until it happens why worry? Blow the whistle when there's a problem. Still an interesting topic though.
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On September 29 2011 02:51 ArEgHollow wrote:
If you are not at the highest level....then there is no need to worry about balance or whine about it. Look for areas you can imrove on, and work at it. There's a reason why you are not playing at the highest level and it has nothing to do with balance.
I just quoted this post not to insult you, but because I read the underlying opinion over and over again and it just couldn't be more wrong.
If a gold player could get to masters in a day just by switching from zerg/toss to terran, then of course he should worry about balance. The game would be terribly, terribly imbalanced then.
To put a more realistical example: if I could boost my MMR from low masters to mid-master by switching to terran, then, again, blizzard should worry about balance. Even though balance should be geared towards the highest level of play, if the imbalance is too severe in lower levels then everyone will be dissatisfied.
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I don't care how imbalanced the game is at the lower level as long as it's balanced at the top. Knowing that it's balanced at the peak gives me something to strive towards and also lets me learn from the top players of my race.
It's much worse in my opinion to feel despair because the players you look up to lose to the same shit as you and there is nowhere to get inspiration or ideas. That's the kind of situation that makes competitive people quit games.
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Ok but the difference will never be that big, be realistic. How could it be balanced at prolevel but T far far better, gold to masters jump in skill, at lower level? No changes will do that.
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Every non-masters league player has the opportunity to balance their own league by getting better.
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Balance changes should be first and foremost aimed at the spectators.
Since spectators don't want to see things such as a terran-filled GSL, that shouldn't conflict with the highest level of play. On the contrary, the more spectators, the more motivation for the pros.
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After reading this closer I come to understand now what you are truly mean. It an interesting concept but I dont think blizzard would change the game to make it soo balance one sided.
An example used before about marine and blings if marine micro were perfected. Obvious blizzard would have to nerf marine or buff blings to solve this problem because bling are one of the main choices to deal with marine. I personally think it better to keep the game balance at the high lvl simply because it will give weaker player something to stride for. It an interesting concept but obviously there should be some balance at the lower lvl of play too otherwise the game would be consider broken and it would not be fun to play for newer player.
Using another game as an example is Super Smash Brawl. In this game, it can be consider balance at low lvl but at high lvl of play.....Meta Knight simply rapes everything. Sure there could be a few good Solid Snake here and there but simply put, Meta Knight rapes everything. This is what I fear for sc2 because right now terran is up. But it was the same for broodwar as well considering that most bonjiwa were Terran. There was a point in time during iloveoov reign of dominance, Terran was considered imbalanced too. This was of course over his bonjiwa period so it was a good year or so that people considered terran imba. I still think starcraft 2 is to early to tell though.
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Well, let's face it:
a) if we want esports to grow, balance should aim towards professional play
b) SC:BW and SC2 will both always be extremly imbalanced from a theoretical point of "if player A does X, player B can do Y and beat it", as there will always be things that will be "uncounterable". (perfect marine micro against banelings of creep); but as those games are limited by player's limits and by chance (fog of war, build order losses), the only way to usefully approach balance is by statistics. Even though this might theoretically lead to nerfs/buffs towards a race that is only superior due to superior players.
So in my eyes it is a great thing, that blizzard is and hopefully stays active with their balancing. It's argueable that some patches (have) come to fast, yet if it leads to all races competing in Code S (and winning it), I guess we should respect that as reasonable balancing.
(f.e. In 5years we might see 500 APM blink micro by Bisu that makes stalkers beat stimmed marauders, but right now we can't know and therefore there is no "stalker problem", although theoretical imbalance might be out there)
on a last note: if stuff gets out of hand in lower leagues, or matchups get disgustingly "easy to master" or hit a "point of no return" for one race (unbeatable compositions), this should be patched out, even if the matches are statistically balanced ("early game wins" vs "lategame dominance")
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On September 29 2011 03:34 Tyrant0 wrote:
Every non-masters league player has the opportunity to balance their own league by getting better.
And as I have stated above, since the skill ceiling isn't nearly reached for SCII yet, this also is true for the top players.
So either no one is allowed to complain about balance, or everyone.
If a lot of players have difficulties over a long period of time with one matchup but not with the others, then this is a a balance question, no matter how you cut it, no matter the skill level. The basic mechanics are the same for one race in every matchup.
If there is a big discrepancy in success in different matchups this is a strategic problem in this matchup. And if this big discrepancy persists over a longer time of several months then it is pretty sure that this is not a question of a lack of knowledge about the matchup but because of a problem within the game.
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On September 29 2011 03:50 imbecile wrote:Show nested quote +On September 29 2011 03:34 Tyrant0 wrote:
Every non-masters league player has the opportunity to balance their own league by getting better. And as I have stated above, since the skill ceiling isn't nearly reached for SCII yet, this also is true for the top players. So either no one is allowed to complain about balance, or everyone. If a lot of players have difficulties over a long period of time with one matchup but not with the others, then this is a a balance question, no matter how you cut it, no matter the skill level. The basic mechanics are the same for one race in every matchup. If there is a big discrepancy in success in different matchups this is a strategic problem in this matchup. And if this big discrepancy persists over a longer time of several months then it is pretty sure that this is not a question of a lack of knowledge about the matchup but because of a problem within the game.
I'm not complaining about balance, and you're right; it's equally true for pros at this stage. And it's actually happened, too. I'd rather Blizzard get their hands out of balance and stop neutering a race as they reach the cusp of a solution and shutting down any ingenuity that will always, and normally imbalance a match-up for a while.
You can't treat every 'perceived' match-up imbalance the same and declare it an issue in the game. They're unique and should be treated case by case. It takes a very, very intelligent/creative player to break through the meta game and change it.You can only assume so given the length of some of the imbalances in match-ups that exist.
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On September 22 2011 06:46 YumYumGranola wrote:Show nested quote +On September 22 2011 06:36 Jerubaal wrote:
You picked a rather poor example I think because you're condemning a whole race as 'ezmode' instead of proving that a specific thing is 'more difficult' at a certain level. Also, I think when people consider lower league balance they try to adhere to a false notion of 'equality' instead of thinking about the effort required to improve. A common example is the dynamic you see in low league PvT where players complain about a perception of bio/gateway/colossi/vikings at varying levels of development. Do I think it's 'more difficult' for a bio terran to defeat a roboing protoss? Sure. Do I think the jump the terran has to make in order to incorporate vikings in their play is any more difficult than the jump the protoss had to make to incorporate colossi? Not really.
The reason why low league play can't really be examined for balance reasons is that if either player improved even by the smallest margin, they'd probably demolish their opponent. The reason TvP was significantly imbalanced for Terran in BW has everything to do with the insane splash damage of Terran mech. Engaging a Toss army required seige tanks to be spread properly, and mines to be placed absolutely PERFECTLY so that they were far enough from tanks not to get dragged in and blow your whole army up but close enough that dragoons couldn't clear them before engaging your army. It was a knife-edge balance that was required to successfully engage a toss army that was "1a2a3a..." that simply doesn't exist in SC2. However when you can do it properly Terran mech is monstrous. That's why it doesn't need a buff at higher levels of play. I was a D level Terran player. The Korean kids in our class were huge gamers, 240+APM and were in the C and into B leagues. I was able to compete as Protoss against C level Terrans. My APM was somewhere around 70 (or 40 in SC2 APM) That's the kind of difference. I'm literally talking about Silver league players beating masters league players simply because of the race they chose.
Okay, I agree with your point. I absolutely believe the game should be balanced at the highest levels only. It doesn't even effect lower levels unless your literally the worst player. Otherwise even if matchup XvY becomes harder to win as X players of X race will get matched against slightly weaker players of Y race to compensate.
Morever, at any level other than a very top level, your not losing because of any imbalance, your losing because of flaws in your play. A plat player that loses to 1/1/1 isn't losing because of "imba" he is losing because he isn't playing well enough. A diamond/master skill level player will have no difficulty crushing a gold players 1/1/1.
What I dislike though, is how much your absurdly overstating the TvP balance in BW. Yes, except for the very top, TvP has always been P favored over T. T has more stuff to do, and little mistakes can serve significantly more costly. Siege bad as terran and your whole army gets obliterated. Engage in a bad spot/formation as protoss, 1234 your way out and lose 6 dragoons. I don't think anyone is going to argue that T has alot more stuff to worry about it, is mechanically more demanding, and is generally more punished for small mistakes. However a well played terran is extremely strong, probably borderline imba. Its just doesn't happen that people play at that level often for an entire game, let alone an entire series.
Anyway, T->P switch being like a silver -> masters switch is just not correct at all. More like mid/high diamond -> Low masters. I don't know how the heck you switched from terran at D/D+ and suddenly made C as protoss but I'm quite certain your a major outlier. As a D+ protoss, I can offrace as T and still maintain D rank, and I don't even really know what I am doing. The only thing I can possibly imagine is that your playstyle was just plain too slow to do the stuff terran needed to do, but you had developed a really solid grasp on the game so with the less demanding mechanics of P were able to be much more significantly successful as P.
But it still doesn't make sense really. Your saying as a D- terran you were able to switch, not knowing what your doing hardly, and get C as protoss. I'm sorry if your D- its purely because your mechanics, macro and builds are awful. I just can't see someone with awful macro, mechanics, and as stated not knowing builds well. Unless you were doing the most absolutely abusive builds you could possible come up with. D- players don't suddenly become C players, regardless of ANY racial switch.
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On September 29 2011 03:28 sleepingdog wrote:Show nested quote +On September 29 2011 02:51 ArEgHollow wrote:
If you are not at the highest level....then there is no need to worry about balance or whine about it. Look for areas you can imrove on, and work at it. There's a reason why you are not playing at the highest level and it has nothing to do with balance. I just quoted this post not to insult you, but because I read the underlying opinion over and over again and it just couldn't be more wrong. If a gold player could get to masters in a day just by switching from zerg/toss to terran, then of course he should worry about balance. The game would be terribly, terribly imbalanced then. To put a more realistical example: if I could boost my MMR from low masters to mid-master by switching to terran, then, again, blizzard should worry about balance. Even though balance should be geared towards the highest level of play, if the imbalance is too severe in lower levels then everyone will be dissatisfied.
Once again. This is an example of confusing balance with ease of play. You will perform differently with the races depending on your personal strengths and weaknesses as a player. I micro better than macro. So I don't 1v1 well with Z. Whereas I can be successful in team games as Z by making use of early game ling/bling harrassment. Ending most games before the heavy Z macro comes into full effect.
Many such examples exist regardless of which race change you do. Ultimately I switched from Terran to Toss and have done better since. Drop play and sentries capitalize on my micro. And i find toss macro to be more manageable than T or Z. So I just perform better. Has nothing to do with balance.
TL:DR
Sounds like you should play terran. I think you are better with them. That's all there is to it.
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On September 22 2011 06:36 Doodsmack wrote:
What's an example of an SC2 balance change that was targeted at the lower leagues and had a negative effect on professional play?
The reaper nerf. And before anyone says that the reaper is a crap unit that should be removed; exactly.
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On September 29 2011 04:05 Valeranth wrote:Show nested quote +On September 22 2011 06:36 Doodsmack wrote:
What's an example of an SC2 balance change that was targeted at the lower leagues and had a negative effect on professional play? The reaper nerf. And before anyone says that the reaper is a crap unit that should be removed; exactly.
Flux Vanes Removal. Unless you honestly think that Void Ray Harass was affecting high level play...even when it was never seen in Code A/S/MLG before the nerf happened.
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Honestly it should stay for highest level of play imo. The things that are OP in bronze league seem much less OP (or more OP depending on things) then things would be in GM/masters. I can't think of a good example, but if we balance around the lowest level of play where players float 1k+ minerals/gas or don't have enough production or a zerg trying to take like 4 bases without saturating them etc. then everything would seem OP.
Also the reaper nerf was basicly because of morrow 5 raxing vs zerg, and how stupid it was to watch.I mean now roachs have more range now, but it was still ridiculous at the time to watch.
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On September 29 2011 02:08 okrane wrote:
There is a major flaw in the way you are presenting your initial arguement, by pushing all race differences, strength and weaknesses alike under the balance rug. The current mindset that is polluting these forums is that if one "lesser skilled" player (whatever that might mean) is able to defeat a more skilled player by picking race x against race y the XvY match-up is imbalanced.
There are two sides of the story:
Race Understanding
The above definition of imbalance is pretty narrow because it assumes that "skill" is something that is interchangeable between the two races and measurable in some way.
This is not true. In fact I believe that for each race the definition of skill is different.
Simple example: would you say that hitting your larva injects and spreading your creep while scouting is of the same nature as building marines, tanks and pressuring? I don't think the two are comparable. The easiest way to see this is that when a pro player switches from a race to another he sucks horribly at first. Basically when switching to a new race, you are learning the skillset of that new race.
This is basically the first flaw of your argument: the fact that different races require different understanding and nothing says that the understanding is reached at the same level of play (especially for the lower levels)
Simple Example: If a Zerg going for a defensive 6pool is beating a Terran rushing a Planetary Fortress at his first Command Center, what can you say about balance?
This makes the needed skill compete completely different from one race to another. Race understanding only comes at the highest of levels and thus lower down you can't really predict the result and understand which way balance is shifting.
Mechanics
Secondly there are mechanics. This raises an entirely different observation: in order to quantify race balance in terms of comparing the worth of two players we should take only comparable mechanics components into consideration.
For example:
* multitasking
* macro ability
* micro ability
These are comparable skills, and players who excel on one race will, after of course learning the race-specific skill set, dominate with any race.
Now that I have narrowed it down to more tangible variables, let's look at the initial question. We might define balance as the following: if two players with reasonably similar multitasking, macro and micro play a lot of games, the win ratio of each one of the players will converge to 50%. This seems reasonable.
However there are two problems with this.
1) There is no conversion rate between any to different skillsets
What do I mean by that? You cannot compare in any way a guy who has say 70% from perfect multitasking and 80% from perfect micro, with another who has 80% multitasking and 70% micro. It's just impossible. What this will create is a different skew in race wins in function of the race design and especially of how rewarding is for a race to master one of the skill sets.
More concretely: if in platinum league, a Zerg with 2000 minerals in the bank dies to a stim drop from a Terran with 3000 minerals in the bank can you state anything about the game's balance?
This means unless all players have a decent enough mastery of all the needed skill sets you cannot really measure balance.
2) Skill ceilings
When talking about the common skillets between different races, because of their differences one race can reward a skill more than another. As players are perfecting themselves, when reaching good mechanics some races can cap faster than others.
Example for Micro. A Zergling, no matter how much you micro it, is still a zergling. There is not much to gain from doing anything different than attack moving with it. Marines for example are a whole different issue: they have stim, studder step, one can split them against banelings, drop them, put them next to walls, etc.
What does this mean: two things:
- at low level of play when both players basically attack move the zergling vs marine fight might seem balanced.
- at high level of play it will mean that as the players get more experience and their micro reaches 100% efficiency, the marine user will find himself winning more and more because of the added depth of the unit.
This mechanics section proves two things:
a) When dealing with players with sub-par mechanics, you cannot assert anything about game balance as the game is not played at maximum efficiency. You might state that if two players have exactly the same flaws in mechanics they should be equally matched, but this is at first impossible to quantify, as point 1 proves, and secondly even we might somehow imagine such a scale, having balance at all levels of imperfection would require a much harder effort than balancing at the perfect-play level.
b) Because of the differences between races, things that seem balanced at low levels can become problematic at high levels because of the way rewards scale with the improvement of the players.
Conclusions:
I) Race balance should be looked at only from the perspective of the best play.
II) Race design should be such as all races scale in efficiency similarly with the increase in skill of different players.
This was a really great analysis. It is really important to incorporate the concept of skill ceilings, which I believe accounts for the prevalence of Terrans at the highest level.
I think Terran has the highest skill ceiling for micro. For example: in the lower leagues, if the opponent went extremely Marine-heavy in TvZ, banelings would hard-counter and the Terran would lose. However, at the highest level of play, high-APM marine-splitting makes banelings much less effective. Zerg could have equivalently good micro, it just doesn't pay off in the same way.
However, from Blizzard's point of view, they simply can't balance the game just from the highest level of play. Take this as a thought experiment: what if there were some balance change that made Grandmaster's league completely balanced, but made Terran lose 80% of their matches in the lower leagues.
That would make all the pro-players and Esports community happy, but it would make the game unenjoyable for a large portion of their user base, and that's where Blizzard makes most of their money.
I agree that Blizzard should heavily bias their balancing towards the highest level of play, but as a principle, that cannot be their only goal.
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The problem with lower level balance is that it is hard to differentiate between disparity in the power of the race at whatever level(plat or gold or low masters) and the disparity in skill of the players. I recently played a PvZ where Z felt that P is too strong, but when I watched through the replay, I had +3 weapons, +3 armor and even shields coming. He had +2 ranged attacks, and that's it. In my opinion, this huge upgrade advantage negated any balance issues in platinum PvZ, but I'm not sure there is any way to prove this.
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I don't think the game is unbalanced at lower level play. When I see my replays both me and my enemy have so much things to do better to win the game - which are perfectly in grasp - I can't see subtle balance differences really matter, while on pro level play they may.
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Personally I think in lower leagues its about race mechanics. Some races are easier to pick up than others to people without/limited RTS experience. I saw this also when I used to play random..personally I would win almost every game as zerg in lower levels and seemed to lose to the stupidest things as terran and toss. Now I won't make this into a zerg is easy post, but think about the mechanics of zerg... you build all your units in 1 building, there is very little to micro and a good (lucky) engagement can turn the whole tide of the game in your favor. Unless toss/terran really knows good timings or how to abuse theres really no way to stop a zerg in those lower levels...they can 13/14 or 15 hatch all the way to plat easy..Now it may just depend on the person as well, but this is what i see in general having played Terran for majority of my 1v1 and having a zerg practice acct. (My win ratio as zerg is way better...which is sad )
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Zerg strugghled with the protoss death ball since the game came out. It took a whole year for enough zerg players to learn infestor micro and NP usage well enough to be able to deal with it. And 2-3 weeks after it became clear that this is actually a viable way to deal with colossus death balls it was taken out of the game and protoss got some buffs on top of it.
Now at the top level in korea protoss struggle with zerg, mainly because they can't keep up with the economy. Well, get better at harassing then. Zerg can't keep up with your army. That isn't any better or worse of a problem, it is just a different problem.
Actually, fungal growth got buffed to be good vs armoured units. That's what happened.
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If a game is perfectly balanced then it will be balanced in all leagues and in all team sizes.
This is obviously what they are aiming for.
I believe what you are referring to is if something is powerful and easy to do then it is powerful in early leagues. This is irrelevant.
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The reason to target the highest level of play is quite simple. At the lower level of play, it is easy to compensate for lack of balance by practicing a bit more, as your own skill has a much greater influence on the outcome than balance will ever have.
However, at the very highest level of play there is little you can do to compensate, you already practice as hard as you can and do everything in your power to become the best. Not to mention that a lot of peoples careers are on the line and a lack of balance can ruin them.
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In lower leagues its all about limiting your mistakes. Sure, the immortal range increase makes it a tougher unit even in the lower leagues, but such minor balance buffs/nerfs won't make any difference compared to the mistakes a player makes during a game.
Only at the highest level the consequences of the mistakes are overshadowed by the actual balance issues. When you play near-flawlessly, balance can be the deciding factor in some cases.
That's just my opinion. I'm in silver league, I don't whine about balance since I know that it won't really matter at my level of play.
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On September 29 2011 04:33 mordanis wrote:
The problem with lower level balance is that it is hard to differentiate between disparity in the power of the race at whatever level(plat or gold or low masters) and the disparity in skill of the players. I recently played a PvZ where Z felt that P is too strong, but when I watched through the replay, I had +3 weapons, +3 armor and even shields coming. He had +2 ranged attacks, and that's it. In my opinion, this huge upgrade advantage negated any balance issues in platinum PvZ, but I'm not sure there is any way to prove this.
You are absolutely 100 percent right. You don't need to prove it with any data, it's there in what you said. Your +3 weapons will shred any army with no armor upgrades, and your +3 armor negates his +2 ranged. Any number of factors can lead to an upgrade disparity like this, whether you had good harrassment and made him spend the money/time on other things or just applied constant pressure from the early game that put him behind, it doesn't matter. But most likely, he wasn't doing his job of getting his upgrades. In which case, no amount of 'balance changes' will help this player win, unless a nerf comes to Protoss that makes it a necessity for them to be +3/+3 just to survive a fight with a 0/0 zerg. And that's why you balance only for the top.
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On September 29 2011 04:42 vOdToasT wrote:Show nested quote +Zerg strugghled with the protoss death ball since the game came out. It took a whole year for enough zerg players to learn infestor micro and NP usage well enough to be able to deal with it. And 2-3 weeks after it became clear that this is actually a viable way to deal with colossus death balls it was taken out of the game and protoss got some buffs on top of it.
Now at the top level in korea protoss struggle with zerg, mainly because they can't keep up with the economy. Well, get better at harassing then. Zerg can't keep up with your army. That isn't any better or worse of a problem, it is just a different problem. Actually, fungal growth got buffed to be good vs armoured units. That's what happened.
And I think that had less of an impact on the game than the Archon range buff. Against protoss, you don't use Fungal for damage. The DPS and health is far too high to rely on fungals for damage.
You use fungals for pinning. But even that isn't enough, because that means you still need to attack with roaches and lings or hydras into a colossus/void ray/stalker/sentry ball that one shots them by the dozen before they even can get off one attack, if they are lucky enough to not run into force fields.
This is where the neurals used to come in: to reduce the DPS long enough temporarily to actually be able to engage. Not possible anymore. Which means we are back to corruptor, which is auto lose if you make just two too much or too few, or baneling drops, which is a pretty high level skill and quite volatile.
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On September 29 2011 05:01 imbecile wrote:Show nested quote +On September 29 2011 04:42 vOdToasT wrote:Zerg strugghled with the protoss death ball since the game came out. It took a whole year for enough zerg players to learn infestor micro and NP usage well enough to be able to deal with it. And 2-3 weeks after it became clear that this is actually a viable way to deal with colossus death balls it was taken out of the game and protoss got some buffs on top of it.
Now at the top level in korea protoss struggle with zerg, mainly because they can't keep up with the economy. Well, get better at harassing then. Zerg can't keep up with your army. That isn't any better or worse of a problem, it is just a different problem. Actually, fungal growth got buffed to be good vs armoured units. That's what happened. And I think that had less of an impact on the game as the Archon range buff. Against protoss, you don't use Fungal for damage. The DPS and health is far too high to rely on fungals for damage. You use fungals for pinning. But even that isn't enough, because that means you still need to attack with roaches and lings or hydras into a colossus/void ray/stalker/sentry ball that one shots them by the dozen before they even can get off one attack, if they are lucky enough to not run into fore fields. This is where the neurals used to come in: to reduce the DPS long enough temporarily to actually be able to engage. Not possible anymore. Which means we are back to corruptor, which is auto lose if you make just two too much or too few, or baneling drops, which is a pretty high level skill and quite volatile.
You know, except all those pushes I see over and over that just get chain fungaled to death, without involving any other units.
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IMO the game should be balance for the highest level of competative play. I'm mostly a spectator and GSL code S isn't attractive to me at the moment.
That being said, i actually believe there is still room in the game to tweak it in such a way that the game will be more balanced on the highest level, while not changing too much for casual players. For instance by changing stuff like rotation speed & acceleration. Changing those kind of attributes will have a completely different impact on the A-move level then on the top3-micro-in-the-world level. After increasing/balancing the "impact of player skill" of a unit (redesign) everything should be re-balanced for the highest level of play.
Something like this (not saying it's easy):
![[image loading]](http://img844.imageshack.us/img844/5730/balanceordesign.png)
* gap = cap
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These are interesting arguments. In my humble opinion balance should be specified to 1v1 pro gameplay. Even at lower leagues those people are in the starcraft 2 community as well and should be aware of the pro scene and any renditions they have of what they see. When skill in the game is similar the balances do not effect only pro players.
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Ok guys FIRST DONT BANN ME FOR MY COMMENT i would like to say that blizzard Are balancing the game AT ALL LEVELS because if u balance it at TOP all brnze silver and low league players will quit and thus making blizzard poorer by not buying HoTS or LOTV..ITS A marketing trick nothing else
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The games has silly ways to balance itself at low level as far as i see
For example:
- terran are chees proof even in lower leagues and pretty easy to A-move with MM which with no micro in early game and toss can't hold it with no micro due to there units being worse dps/hp wise.
-Zerg can roll rines with bling since T have bad rine micro but it equals out since zerg will get free tank shoots on there army and won't target fire rines with banelings/ he won't be able to micro his mutas vs stimed rines
.... just examples i can think of
Im not sure if its intended but it seems to work... balance stats from blizzard says so at least.
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On September 29 2011 05:03 VirgilSC2 wrote:Show nested quote +On September 29 2011 05:01 imbecile wrote:On September 29 2011 04:42 vOdToasT wrote:Zerg strugghled with the protoss death ball since the game came out. It took a whole year for enough zerg players to learn infestor micro and NP usage well enough to be able to deal with it. And 2-3 weeks after it became clear that this is actually a viable way to deal with colossus death balls it was taken out of the game and protoss got some buffs on top of it.
Now at the top level in korea protoss struggle with zerg, mainly because they can't keep up with the economy. Well, get better at harassing then. Zerg can't keep up with your army. That isn't any better or worse of a problem, it is just a different problem. Actually, fungal growth got buffed to be good vs armoured units. That's what happened. And I think that had less of an impact on the game as the Archon range buff. Against protoss, you don't use Fungal for damage. The DPS and health is far too high to rely on fungals for damage. You use fungals for pinning. But even that isn't enough, because that means you still need to attack with roaches and lings or hydras into a colossus/void ray/stalker/sentry ball that one shots them by the dozen before they even can get off one attack, if they are lucky enough to not run into fore fields. This is where the neurals used to come in: to reduce the DPS long enough temporarily to actually be able to engage. Not possible anymore. Which means we are back to corruptor, which is auto lose if you make just two too much or too few, or baneling drops, which is a pretty high level skill and quite volatile. You know, except all those pushes I see over and over that just get chain fungaled to death, without involving any other units.
Yep, not being to a-move is hard. I get it.
I manage to do that maybe once every 20 games, and only with small armies that have 2 colossus at most and he wasn't really looking and even then not without help. Killing a colossus based army with fungal takes 9 of them, 36 seconds. That is if you manage to catch the whole army with every single one of them, which is only possible with the smallest and no reinforcements come.
Basically, if you lose an army to pure fungal, you deserve to lose it. Just as a zerg that loses 10 mutas to 12 marines deserves to lose them. And that happens a lot easier.
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On September 29 2011 05:34 imbecile wrote:Show nested quote +On September 29 2011 05:03 VirgilSC2 wrote:On September 29 2011 05:01 imbecile wrote:On September 29 2011 04:42 vOdToasT wrote:Zerg strugghled with the protoss death ball since the game came out. It took a whole year for enough zerg players to learn infestor micro and NP usage well enough to be able to deal with it. And 2-3 weeks after it became clear that this is actually a viable way to deal with colossus death balls it was taken out of the game and protoss got some buffs on top of it.
Now at the top level in korea protoss struggle with zerg, mainly because they can't keep up with the economy. Well, get better at harassing then. Zerg can't keep up with your army. That isn't any better or worse of a problem, it is just a different problem. Actually, fungal growth got buffed to be good vs armoured units. That's what happened. And I think that had less of an impact on the game as the Archon range buff. Against protoss, you don't use Fungal for damage. The DPS and health is far too high to rely on fungals for damage. You use fungals for pinning. But even that isn't enough, because that means you still need to attack with roaches and lings or hydras into a colossus/void ray/stalker/sentry ball that one shots them by the dozen before they even can get off one attack, if they are lucky enough to not run into fore fields. This is where the neurals used to come in: to reduce the DPS long enough temporarily to actually be able to engage. Not possible anymore. Which means we are back to corruptor, which is auto lose if you make just two too much or too few, or baneling drops, which is a pretty high level skill and quite volatile. You know, except all those pushes I see over and over that just get chain fungaled to death, without involving any other units. Yep, not being to a-move is hard. I get it. I manage to do that maybe once every 20 games, and only with small armies that have 2 colossus at most and he wasn't really looking and even then not without help. Killing a colossus based army with fungal takes 9 of them, 36 seconds. That is if you manage to catch the whole army with every single one of them, which is only possible with the smallest and no reinforcements come. Basically, if you lose an army to pure fungal, you deserve to lose it. Just as a zerg that loses 10 mutas to 12 marines deserves to lose them. And that happens a lot easier.
Right, because EVERY Protoss army ever has Colossi in it. That makes total sense. It's not like Protoss uses units other than Colossi. No amount of micro can save your Zealots/Sentries/Stalkers/High Templar from chain-fungals. I'm not talking about my mid-diamond pushes here, I'm talking about at the pro level. Stop comparing your games to pro level balance, that's the whole point of this thread.
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Why are we starting to see so many threads like this, people saying basically that bronze league should play with rush-proof maps because they don't know how to stop a 7 pool, or people in gold should play without the fungal nerf because they have no idea how to use baneling drops.
To the OP, what I'm saying is that the people in lower leagues have to learn the same game as the people in masters and GM. Learning StarCraft is a process, and it kinda fucks with the process if Blizzard were to decide that the game is imba only on lower leagues, because that's almost inpossible. Sure, if there was something that you need 120 APM to counter an a-move, that's a problem. But otherwise, it's fine as it is.
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I believe sc2 is nowhere near the skill ceiling, so "balancing for the pros" at the moment is not what it sounds like. For example, just look at any BW pro game from 2001, I am sure many of you are playing at that level if not better. Nowadays, it seems BW is much closer to the skill ceiling, so by balancing around flash/jaedong/bisu we can assure ourselves that they are playing their race at the highest threshold, and imbalances only correctable by patches to the game.
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if balance only occured in the highest level then there's a problem what if you started in bronze and went to high master in a couple weeks. All of a sudden you have to relearn the game cuz the units act differently. Dumb idea is dumb.
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Russian Federation43 Posts
Practice league already does what you're suggesting. And MMR already works to pair people of equal skill.
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On September 29 2011 05:57 gfever wrote:
if balance only occured in the highest level then there's a problem what if you started in bronze and went to high master in a couple weeks. All of a sudden you have to relearn the game cuz the units act differently. Dumb idea is dumb.
Reading comprehension failure is reading comprehension failure.
This thread is talking about balancing the units based around how the interact in the highest level of play, rather than how the interact down in Bronze league.
The concept isn't to balance units for pros, but have bronze league units act differently for easier players.
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On September 29 2011 05:48 VirgilSC2 wrote:
Stop comparing your games to pro level balance, that's the whole point of this thread.
And my point was, that if there are vastly different success rates in the different matchups, that is a sign of imbalance on any level.
Because I'm not suddenly a worse player when I'm playing against another race. The macro and mechanics, which are supposedly the predominant factors of player skill, are the same. If my skill is more than enough for ZvZ and ZvT, but not nearly enough for ZvP in my league, then I consider that an imbalance. Either I'm stupid and use builds that are just flat out bad, which could be the case, but they are not that different from pro builds that I see on streams, and at the lower levels it is just mechanics that matters anyway. Or we indeed have an imbalance at that level. How else would you call it?
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On September 29 2011 04:42 vOdToasT wrote:Show nested quote +Zerg strugghled with the protoss death ball since the game came out. It took a whole year for enough zerg players to learn infestor micro and NP usage well enough to be able to deal with it. And 2-3 weeks after it became clear that this is actually a viable way to deal with colossus death balls it was taken out of the game and protoss got some buffs on top of it.
Now at the top level in korea protoss struggle with zerg, mainly because they can't keep up with the economy. Well, get better at harassing then. Zerg can't keep up with your army. That isn't any better or worse of a problem, it is just a different problem. Actually, fungal growth got buffed to be good vs armoured units. That's what happened.
Yeah, it started dealing 11 more damage. Huge buff, isn't it?
Zerg just figured out the fact that they can drop banelings on fungal'd clump of units.
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On September 29 2011 06:14 imbecile wrote:Show nested quote +On September 29 2011 05:48 VirgilSC2 wrote:
Stop comparing your games to pro level balance, that's the whole point of this thread. And my point was, that if there are vastly different success rates in the different matchups, that is a sign of imbalance on any level. Because I'm not suddenly a worse player when I'm playing against another race. The macro and mechanics, which are supposedly the predominant factors of player skill, are the same. If my skill is more than enough for ZvZ and ZvT, but not nearly enough for ZvP in my league, then I consider that an imbalance. Either I'm stupid and use builds that are just flat out bad, which could be the case, but they are not that different from pro builds that I see on streams, and at the lower levels it is just mechanics that matters anyway. Or we indeed have an imbalance at that level. How else would you call it?
This thread is not here to discuss whether the game is currently balanced or not, take your complaints elsewhere.
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they should balance around the highest level, because thats what everyone is striving for, but they can't have things that just ruin the experience for their huge casual fan base, ie Reapers.
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there's only one reality. Blizzard doesn't want ESPORTS like we do.
Because a game should last 2/3 years so we can buy the next game after that.
If a game goes on indefinitely they don't make money from it.
that's why they want to kill BW and that's why they will kill SC2 when it will be time for SC3 and so on.
They don't want something perfect because if it's already perfect why buying the next chapter ?
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Seeker
Where dat snitch at?37025 Posts
On September 29 2011 06:34 dragonsuper wrote:
there's only one reality. Blizzard doesn't want ESPORTS like we do.
Because a game should last 2/3 years so we can buy the next game after that.
If a game goes on indefinitely they don't make money from it.
that's why they want to kill BW and that's why they will kill SC2 when it will be time for SC3 and so on.
They don't want something perfect because if it's already perfect why buying the next chapter ?
If this is true, that Blizzard is fucking evil/selfish as fuck.....
Wow....
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The only balance we should care about is the upper levels [masters to gm] as literally by virtue of what it is, all other balances are as a result of incompetence not the reality of unit design, quality, etc. Nor is it really like "at silver, terran cant do x". Not at all. At the lower leagues people play random styles and arbitrary builds. Skill sets are erratic. We just cant account for incompetence.
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I'm sure in 10 years we're going to see threads saying that 'everyone knew that PvT was imbalanced in gold league'.
The Catch-22 of all this is that in order for you to have the perspective to make a judgment on this, you also have to lack the knowledge to make the judgment. For all the OP knows, the 'balance' of TvP might be exactly the same in SC2 as in BW, but he sucked back then and doesn't now so it appears balanced to him.
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On September 29 2011 06:34 dragonsuper wrote:
there's only one reality. Blizzard doesn't want ESPORTS like we do.
Because a game should last 2/3 years so we can buy the next game after that.
If a game goes on indefinitely they don't make money from it.
that's why they want to kill BW and that's why they will kill SC2 when it will be time for SC3 and so on.
They don't want something perfect because if it's already perfect why buying the next chapter ?
That's why we should rally around Valve. Cuz they have such a great record in Esports.
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On September 29 2011 06:34 dragonsuper wrote:
there's only one reality. Blizzard doesn't want ESPORTS like we do.
Because a game should last 2/3 years so we can buy the next game after that.
If a game goes on indefinitely they don't make money from it.
that's why they want to kill BW and that's why they will kill SC2 when it will be time for SC3 and so on.
They don't want something perfect because if it's already perfect why buying the next chapter ?
Your tinfoil hat is malfunctioning again man.
Blizzard is well known for releasing new games for their franchises every single year, am I right ?
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For example look at 1/1/1 vs Toss before. I mean all you need is a build order and follow it on time. No way you could lose it even you're diamond or gold league. Just need to hit it on time. I think lower league need balance too.
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On September 29 2011 06:26 VirgilSC2 wrote:Show nested quote +On September 29 2011 06:14 imbecile wrote:On September 29 2011 05:48 VirgilSC2 wrote:
Stop comparing your games to pro level balance, that's the whole point of this thread. And my point was, that if there are vastly different success rates in the different matchups, that is a sign of imbalance on any level. Because I'm not suddenly a worse player when I'm playing against another race. The macro and mechanics, which are supposedly the predominant factors of player skill, are the same. If my skill is more than enough for ZvZ and ZvT, but not nearly enough for ZvP in my league, then I consider that an imbalance. Either I'm stupid and use builds that are just flat out bad, which could be the case, but they are not that different from pro builds that I see on streams, and at the lower levels it is just mechanics that matters anyway. Or we indeed have an imbalance at that level. How else would you call it? This thread is not here to discuss whether the game is currently balanced or not, take your complaints elsewhere.
Discussing balance without examples seem kinda pointless to me. Could have used any other combination of matchups to show you that balance is a valid concept on all levels. I just find it more honest to use personal experiences as examples.
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Game should be balanced in high levels to be competetive. I don't care about low level and i hope blizz doesn't care also.
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The game has to be balanced at the highest level of play, and that's the end of it. They can't take anything from the lower levels due to not playing a perfect game.
I'm not saying at the moment that pro sc2 players play the perfect game, we know they don't...they are nothing like BW pros yet. BUT they play at the best level, where you can see true strengths and timings. This is where balance must come from.
It's when people see something strong and take it to the lower levels and smash everyone with it, people then cry about it. It's not over powered its only because the people they play dont scout or have good macro etc.
If they balanced an RTS for all levels, it would NEVER make it as a competitive game cause it would be broken.
EDIT* Also team games in the same way, just cause and strat is INCREDIBLY strong in a team game..they can't do anything really or it *could* completely fuck 1v1 which is where its at.
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On September 29 2011 06:47 imbecile wrote:Show nested quote +On September 29 2011 06:26 VirgilSC2 wrote:On September 29 2011 06:14 imbecile wrote:On September 29 2011 05:48 VirgilSC2 wrote:
Stop comparing your games to pro level balance, that's the whole point of this thread. And my point was, that if there are vastly different success rates in the different matchups, that is a sign of imbalance on any level. Because I'm not suddenly a worse player when I'm playing against another race. The macro and mechanics, which are supposedly the predominant factors of player skill, are the same. If my skill is more than enough for ZvZ and ZvT, but not nearly enough for ZvP in my league, then I consider that an imbalance. Either I'm stupid and use builds that are just flat out bad, which could be the case, but they are not that different from pro builds that I see on streams, and at the lower levels it is just mechanics that matters anyway. Or we indeed have an imbalance at that level. How else would you call it? This thread is not here to discuss whether the game is currently balanced or not, take your complaints elsewhere. Discussing balance without examples seem kinda pointless to me. Could have used any other combination of matchups to show you that balance is a valid concept on all levels. I just find it more honest to use personal experiences as examples.
This thread is not to discuss whether the game is currently balanced or not, take your complaints elsewhere.
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On September 22 2011 06:21 Roxy wrote:
I think balance affects all levels of play
I would like to state that balancing the game should purely only consider 1v1 at the pro level; however, there are many imbalances that excist throughout different leagues.
Thats is what is ruining this game you want the balance all league where it should only matter in the highest lvls. Taking in part someone who doesn't know how to play the game and making it better for them instead of forcing them to learn how to play is a stupid idea. You don't play chess like checkers because people are morons......... if people want to play an easy game then they should go play something else and let people who are willing to learn and play right continue to play sc2.
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this thread should have died after
"If players can be beaten by a Nydus worker rush balancing the game based on what they think is fucking retarded. End of."
odd example, but the point stands. people at lower levels could EASILY solve their problems by sucking less.
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On September 29 2011 06:37 Seeker wrote:Show nested quote +On September 29 2011 06:34 dragonsuper wrote:
there's only one reality. Blizzard doesn't want ESPORTS like we do.
Because a game should last 2/3 years so we can buy the next game after that.
If a game goes on indefinitely they don't make money from it.
that's why they want to kill BW and that's why they will kill SC2 when it will be time for SC3 and so on.
They don't want something perfect because if it's already perfect why buying the next chapter ? If this is true, that Blizzard is fucking evil/selfish as fuck..... Wow....
You do understand this is basically Activisions business model?
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On September 29 2011 06:34 dragonsuper wrote:
there's only one reality. Blizzard doesn't want ESPORTS like we do.
Because a game should last 2/3 years so we can buy the next game after that.
If a game goes on indefinitely they don't make money from it.
that's why they want to kill BW and that's why they will kill SC2 when it will be time for SC3 and so on.
They don't want something perfect because if it's already perfect why buying the next chapter ?
Nope. The fact is, Blizzard is heavily invested in esports, and realizes they can make more profit from it than from selling games. It is the reason why they fought so hard with Icefrog for DotA as well as with kespa, iccup, and the like.
Blizzard helped start up the star2 esports scene by funding the GSL Opens, and it's own invitational tourney, but but now are asking for a percentage of profits from all star2 tourneys. it's a genius move that can bring them as much profit as WoW, for an equal period of time, if not longer.
Blizzard has already sold the game to the low league players. Players of higher caliber are the loyal sheep that is the esports mob, and that's where the continued profit resides, not in the one time exchange that the casual gamer provides.
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On September 29 2011 06:46 tuho12345 wrote:
For example look at 1/1/1 vs Toss before. I mean all you need is a build order and follow it on time. No way you could lose it even you're diamond or gold league. Just need to hit it on time. I think lower league need balance too.
Lower leagues balance themselves by getting better. 3 roach rush had a small period where it crushed any and all 3 gate expanding toss on the ladder. A solution was found, and it just as quickly disappeared.
The marine/tank/banshee all-in is a more complicated problem. An obvious, feasible solution hasn't been found yet. It'll continue to dominate until it's found. It's how the ladder works. You can still crush it by executing at a superior level than your opponent.
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It's difficult to balance a game for players who are lacking in knowledge, mechanics, game sense, or even just skill. A game company like Blizzard can't possibly take into account every potential reason for meta-imbalance at the lower levels, so attempting to balance a game like StarCraft II at this level of play is impractical.
You cannot balance a game at a medium / low skill level because there are simply too many variables to balance.
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On September 29 2011 06:58 VirgilSC2 wrote:Show nested quote +On September 29 2011 06:47 imbecile wrote:On September 29 2011 06:26 VirgilSC2 wrote:On September 29 2011 06:14 imbecile wrote:On September 29 2011 05:48 VirgilSC2 wrote:
Stop comparing your games to pro level balance, that's the whole point of this thread. And my point was, that if there are vastly different success rates in the different matchups, that is a sign of imbalance on any level. Because I'm not suddenly a worse player when I'm playing against another race. The macro and mechanics, which are supposedly the predominant factors of player skill, are the same. If my skill is more than enough for ZvZ and ZvT, but not nearly enough for ZvP in my league, then I consider that an imbalance. Either I'm stupid and use builds that are just flat out bad, which could be the case, but they are not that different from pro builds that I see on streams, and at the lower levels it is just mechanics that matters anyway. Or we indeed have an imbalance at that level. How else would you call it? This thread is not here to discuss whether the game is currently balanced or not, take your complaints elsewhere. Discussing balance without examples seem kinda pointless to me. Could have used any other combination of matchups to show you that balance is a valid concept on all levels. I just find it more honest to use personal experiences as examples. This thread is not to discuss whether the game is currently balanced or not, take your complaints elsewhere.
Apparently you didn't understand what I'm writing. This was not at all about whether the game is balanced or not. It is about what that concept of balance means in this game and in the context of laddering.
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On September 22 2011 06:34 YumYumGranola wrote:Show nested quote +On September 22 2011 06:31 Shaetan wrote:On September 22 2011 06:29 YumYumGranola wrote:On September 22 2011 06:27 Shaetan wrote:On September 22 2011 06:18 YumYumGranola wrote:
the fact is that almost every single spectator of SC2 events is also a player. If there's anything that dissuades new players it has a negative affect on new spectators which hurts the feasibility foreign tournaments and therefore the entire foreign scene. This is not true. Well I certainly don't know any... Well then by jove it must be true! Lol fair enough, although you're equally guilty unless you have some knowledge or evidence that you're not declaring.
There's this place called korea....they have 2 tv stations devoted to....something. Can't quite think of it.
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On September 29 2011 06:14 imbecile wrote:Show nested quote +On September 29 2011 05:48 VirgilSC2 wrote:
Stop comparing your games to pro level balance, that's the whole point of this thread. And my point was, that if there are vastly different success rates in the different matchups, that is a sign of imbalance on any level. Because I'm not suddenly a worse player when I'm playing against another race. The macro and mechanics, which are supposedly the predominant factors of player skill, are the same. If my skill is more than enough for ZvZ and ZvT, but not nearly enough for ZvP in my league, then I consider that an imbalance. Either I'm stupid and use builds that are just flat out bad, which could be the case, but they are not that different from pro builds that I see on streams, and at the lower levels it is just mechanics that matters anyway. Or we indeed have an imbalance at that level. How else would you call it?
I see where you're going but still don't agree. Macro and mechanics may be (some of the) predominant factors in determining player skill but yours is so far behind say, Nestea, that the same limitations do not apply. Even if the mechanics for zerg are harder than for protoss at your level, Nestea would not be able to switch to protoss and suddenly literally never lose.
The question of the OP seems to be basically would we accept it if a race was provably easier at lower levels of play (like so many fucking pissed off zergs are when they die to my hellion push...), to which I say yes I would accept that completely.
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In my opinion it is already the case that SC2 is only (quite) balanced at Pro Level. It just doesn't get noticed too much because of Blizzard's matchmaking system. Most people don't bother trying out every race in ladder I'd assume and thus take the league they're in as their "skill level".
Some examples of more or less heavy imbalances on lower levels IMHO:
- Extremely low level players(Bronze/Silver/Gold) struggle with the basic mechanics of the zerg race and thus get rolled by protoss and terrans who might be 'worse' players in comparison.
- However, once you have mastered the basic mechanics of the zerg race, you have a luxury other races don't have - you don't need very refined builds. You can basically go forever with one opening for each matchup. Furthermore you can get very far in certain matchups by just building a single unit. Roach only vs Protoss comes to my mind. You could say that once you've gotten the hang of the mechanics the strategic aspect doesn't become a burden as quickly as with the other races. The result is that you might win against 'better' terran or protoss players by simply outmacroing them.
- Extremely low level terrans regularly steamroll arguably 'better' protoss players with early stim pushes. There are certain scenarios where you basically can't do anything about it if you cannot use force fields efficiently.
- However, once protoss players have reached a level where they control sentries well enough to defend against early stim aggression, the tables turn. Suddenly the terran players faces an extremely strong 3 colossi attack, which can be basically a-moved by protoss. The result is that terrans might lose to 'worse' protoss players.
So far this has led to a lot of whining, but I don't know of any cases that caused someone to lose his interest in the game entirely all of a sudden. Even most low level players are probably aware that some of the balance issues they face only affect their level of play. Maybe you are a bit too concerned about this whole "different level balance" dilemma?
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On September 29 2011 07:51 The KY wrote:
The question of the OP seems to be basically would we accept it if a race was provably easier at lower levels of play (like so many fucking pissed off zergs are when they die to my hellion push...), to which I say yes I would accept that completely.
I accept that too ... to a degree. Blizzard have their range of win percentages at which they consider a matchup balanced. They don't want to exceed 60% basically. I wouldn't even have a problem with losing 70-80% of a matchup for a while and also would be ok if that was the case throughout the board.
It's just that I have won exactly one ZvP in the last 3 weeks, and that win was a messy close affair. All the while I rarely lose in the other two matchups and only if I really make big blatant mistakes early. This is something I consider a problem. Something I need to fix primarily myself for sure. But I got the impression that this experience is not that uncommon in the lower leagues.
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On September 29 2011 06:14 imbecile wrote:Show nested quote +On September 29 2011 05:48 VirgilSC2 wrote:
Stop comparing your games to pro level balance, that's the whole point of this thread. And my point was, that if there are vastly different success rates in the different matchups, that is a sign of imbalance on any level. Because I'm not suddenly a worse player when I'm playing against another race. The macro and mechanics, which are supposedly the predominant factors of player skill, are the same. If my skill is more than enough for ZvZ and ZvT, but not nearly enough for ZvP in my league, then I consider that an imbalance. Either I'm stupid and use builds that are just flat out bad, which could be the case, but they are not that different from pro builds that I see on streams, and at the lower levels it is just mechanics that matters anyway. Or we indeed have an imbalance at that level. How else would you call it?
I would disagree, good mechanics is definitely important but if i don't fully grasp the subtleties of a MU, such as the way the different units interact, how their relationships change over time with upgrades, army size, or adding in other units to the comp. If i don't know the timings of how these relationship's change, or how i can take advantages, or mitigate disadvantages like through micro techniques or tactics. I believe that each MU is complicated enough and distinct enough that you can be bad at 1 MU and good at others. I believe this carries for all leagues as well, just the mistakes get fewer and become over smaller things the higher you get.
Like im a pretty defensive minded Z player, as such I'm good at vT since i can take a macro advantage and win in the late game. but i sucked horribly at vP since i just felt really uncomfortable attacking a P, usually letting em get up a deathball freely and kill me in the late game or doing a really bad attack and killing myself. learning more of the timings aspect of P army size and tech has help immensely with this. while my mechanics are still improving it was not the main reason i started to do better in that MU, ironing out my game plan did.
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On September 29 2011 10:29 TangJuice wrote:
I would disagree, good mechanics is definitely important but if i don't fully grasp the subtleties of a MU, such as the way the different units interact, how their relationships change over time with upgrades, army size, or adding in other units to the comp. If i don't know the timings of how these relationship's change, or how i can take advantages, or mitigate disadvantages like through micro techniques or tactics. I believe that each MU is complicated enough and distinct enough that you can be bad at 1 MU and good at others. I believe this carries for all leagues as well, just the mistakes get fewer and become over smaller things the higher you get.
Like im a pretty defensive minded Z player, as such I'm good at vT since i can take a macro advantage and win in the late game. but i sucked horribly at vP since i just felt really uncomfortable attacking a P, usually letting em get up a deathball freely and kill me in the late game or doing a really bad attack and killing myself. learning more of the timings aspect of P army size and tech has help immensely with this. while my mechanics are still improving it was not the main reason i started to do better in that MU, ironing out my game plan did.
There is some truth to that. I know how to engage a terran army of any composition, sometimes I screw it up, but my macro is good enough to pull me out again. I also know how to outmaneuver and harass zergs if I happen to be behind after the early game.
I simply don't know how to fight a protoss army of any composition. I scout lots of stalkers and go infestor ling with some spine crawlers ... and he still just walks right over me. The first attack of a protoss player usually ends the game or at least decides it. Doesn't matter when and with what composition, but most of the time it is the 2 base colossus ball. And because I don't know how to engage I can't put on any pressure either.
Now how is that relevant to this thread? It just seems to me that Zergs need to learn how to react to different builds and the different timings of protoss a lot earlier than protoss need to do that for zerg. It is supposed to be the reactive race after all. If a zerg wants to get past platinum he has to learn this. But there are quite a few protoss that got into GM without having to do that, just having 2-3 builds, picking one in the early game and executing it well. And it seems now at the very top level in Korea (where picking a build and executing it well is the way of life, almost the only way of life) protoss players seem to have arrived at the bump that zergs need to overcome much earlier.
That means how the balance plays out at the lower levels has actually quite a bit of influence on how it plays out at the higher levels. Because the balance dynamics in the lower levels determine to a major part how the different races learn and improve and play their game.
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It astounds me people waste such large amounts of time to write novels like the OP here. You want Blizzard to balance each league individually? You really think that's a good idea? You sound like a BW elitist who prefers BW to SC2 but still plays SC2.
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On September 29 2011 06:46 Zaphid wrote:Show nested quote +On September 29 2011 06:34 dragonsuper wrote:
there's only one reality. Blizzard doesn't want ESPORTS like we do.
Because a game should last 2/3 years so we can buy the next game after that.
If a game goes on indefinitely they don't make money from it.
that's why they want to kill BW and that's why they will kill SC2 when it will be time for SC3 and so on.
They don't want something perfect because if it's already perfect why buying the next chapter ? Your tinfoil hat is malfunctioning again man. Blizzard is well known for releasing new games for their franchises every single year, am I right ?
Hi and welcome to Blizzard post-Activision. Google anything involving World of Warcraft and Bobby Kotick and you will find ample raging from that community on this subject.
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On September 29 2011 01:54 cLutZ wrote:
Void Rays and Reapers were ruined because of "balancing for lower levels"...so I'm against it.
Void Rays were nerfed because of MakaPrime, Reapers were nerfed due to Five Rax Reaper.
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TLADT24920 Posts
On September 29 2011 13:42 l3iRdMaN wrote:
It astounds me people waste such large amounts of time to write novels like the OP here. You want Blizzard to balance each league individually? You really think that's a good idea? You sound like a BW elitist who prefers BW to SC2 but still plays SC2.
Wait what? I read the OP a while back and just scanned it again now and he doesn't say that. He mostly presented an idea of how balancing can be done so that lower level players don't have to deal with any imbalances at their level. He cited BW as evidence to show how the imbalance at the lowest level affected the game(much easier time and higher level with P than T).
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This thread is stupid and I am not afraid to tell it out loud.
StarCraft is like a skyscraper where each individual floor is a skill level. If the building designers plan the building with the goal to make it as high as they can without it falling down then they will make one tall functional building (= extremely high level of play). Also, if the building has the 100th floor that means it also has the 99 rest.
BUT, if the designers plan the building with the goal to make each individual floor stand on it's own and have a different construction plan just to make attendants happy then the building will most likely fall before it reaches the 100th floor and nobody will be happy.
SO, to translate for the slow people and/or terrans following this thread:
If the game is perfectly balanced at the highest level of play (100th floor) than non of you (99 other floors) can complain about the game instability. So shut up and learn to play because there is not one thing that a bronze player can whine about and others can't correct for him.
If you lose in lower leagues it's you, not the game. If you lose in GSL you have the right to question the game, and still.
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If the game is balanced at the highest level of play it's balanced at the lowest level. Nobody should determine balance in the lower leagues because their play is very flawed.
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People saying that bw is a balanced and sc2 is imbalanced need to take a long hard look at bw. Jangbi gets a starleague individual title, the first protoss in what? 3 years and nobody bats an eye cos they just assume the game is balanced since protoss can win sometimes. Now we have had 10 gsls in a space of a year with 2 protoss victories and now protoss winrates are down for (OMG) 60 days. And all of a sudden browder is the devil and doesnt know what the fuck he is doing so SC2 is doomed proffessionally.
Let the game develop before we start running off about imbalance. Honestly if in 5 years it turns out that terran has won the most gsls and tourneys are people going to mouth off that sc2 terran is just imbalanced? Cos it wont be that different to scbw where terran still has the most individual title leagues and numbers at 26-13.
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If you look at the SQ thread you can see the fairly big skill gap between Masters and GM. There's even a skill gap between GM and Idra. (lol) Any changes for balance should be directed at and tested by the pros. I honestly can't see how a bunch of plat noobs like myself playing on ptr helps at all.
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I think most people on TL will say balance for the highest level because most people who come to this site either watch a lot of pro games or aim to get there themselves or both.
Player A and Player B are about the same skill level but A plays zerg and B plays protoss, protoss is easier to play so B is one league above A. Does it matter? I can't see how it does because they're both playing close games and trying to improve, the game doesn't get more fun because you're in a higher league.
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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.
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for me. if balance exists at the top. then it is entertaining to watch.
i don't have much time to play much. so as a spectator. i just enjoy watching the beauty of the pros.
so i think that balance should at least exist for the top.
On September 29 2011 15:35 T0fuuu wrote:
People saying that bw is a balanced and sc2 is imbalanced need to take a long hard look at bw. Jangbi gets a starleague individual title, the first protoss in what? 3 years and nobody bats an eye cos they just assume the game is balanced since protoss can win sometimes. Now we have had 10 gsls in a space of a year with 2 protoss victories and now protoss winrates are down for (OMG) 60 days. And all of a sudden browder is the devil and doesnt know what the fuck he is doing so SC2 is doomed proffessionally.
Let the game develop before we start running off about imbalance. Honestly if in 5 years it turns out that terran has won the most gsls and tourneys are people going to mouth off that sc2 terran is just imbalanced? Cos it wont be that different to scbw where terran still has the most individual title leagues and numbers at 26-13.
hm. interesting for me cause my friends always tease me for playing protoss, "the easy race".
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balancing everything else than the highest level is a joke and should _never_ be done. this would only lead to something like: "oh ghosts are a bad unit in the platin league, lets make them better"
only the best players are really affected by balance anyway, the others are just bad and need to realise that
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I think its fine that some race are "easier" is easier than another. It doesnt really matter at the pro level. If you only play to have a high ladder standing I dont think you will play for very long either way. I think its great that that there are varaiety and that people with different ways to play the game can find the race that fints them. Its only good for the game.
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On September 29 2011 15:04 BigFan wrote:Show nested quote +On September 29 2011 13:42 l3iRdMaN wrote:
It astounds me people waste such large amounts of time to write novels like the OP here. You want Blizzard to balance each league individually? You really think that's a good idea? You sound like a BW elitist who prefers BW to SC2 but still plays SC2. Wait what? I read the OP a while back and just scanned it again now and he doesn't say that. He mostly presented an idea of how balancing can be done so that lower level players don't have to deal with any imbalances at their level. He cited BW as evidence to show how the imbalance at the lowest level affected the game(much easier time and higher level with P than T).
I think he just came from the mindset that you have to have balance at the highest level, and the OP is suggesting to consider balance at lower levels aswell. I kind of thought like that for a couple of minutes aswell because it makes no sense to me to take balance away from the pros and give it to the lower levels of play. (well thats what I think they are saying)
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I think Blizzard should only balance in accordance with what makes sense to them under their own ideal conditions, provided they've put enough thought into it (I'm looking at you, 5rax Reapers with speed). You can't balance a game like this around what players are doing or will be doing a year from now. Sadly they've already deviated from this path, so for me the future of Starcraft 2's balance looks hazey and full of knee jerk reactions to flavour-of-the-month strategies.
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Hmm..
I think the game needs to be balanced for the skill-levels of the competetive e-sports arena (pro's), and I would concur that if it is balanced for them, the game could be considered "balanced".
HOWEVER, to say that it does not affect the lower leagues is just plain false. On the contrary, a worse player (like me) have a much more difficult time to adjust to things that might be a minor inconvenience to pros. Given that the game is balanced for people with much better APM, descision-making, and micro+macro, it's hardly surprising that we at lower levels find some changes difficult to deal with. (For example, I just can't use infestors vs toss now. It requires such good micro +positioning + apm to be able to get an NP off now that it's just not feasible for me anymore. A pro will surely (relatively) find it harder too, but have an easier time adjusting and coping)
Playing Zerg as main, but dabbling as protoss, I can honestly say that protoss is MUCH more forgiving of mistakes one might make (again, at my skill-levels) that Zerg, and how forgiving a race is is for such mistakes are MUUUUUUCH more important in lower levels than higher, where such mistakes tend to be much fewer and further apart.
Does that mean that it is imbalanced? No, I don't think so. It's not just balanced to cater to my inabilities as a player. It can still be frustrating as hell though.
TL:DR
Game is balanced around pro's, with their abilities in mind. OFC this will impact the lower brackets where there are much mistakes and lower APM, worse descisionmaking and worse micro-macro. Doesn't mean the game needs to be balanced to cater to the inabilities of these lower players though.
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If blizzard wants there game to stay popular, then they should only balance for masters and up levels, because anyone that puts in the time and practices right should at least be in masters.
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On September 29 2011 17:17 Tofugrinder wrote:
balancing everything else than the highest level is a joke and should _never_ be done. this would only lead to something like: "oh ghosts are a bad unit in the platin league, lets make them better
I think people in this thread are getting kind of the wrong idea about what it means to "balance for lower levels," as well as what Blizzard actually did in the couple of changes they made for that reason.
It's certainly not a matter of responding to low-level player complaints as such. Nor is it particularly searching for near-perfect balance at all levels, at the expense of highest-level play.
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.
Fixing the more extreme such examples that come up helps ensure that when someone encounters a strategy they don't know how to beat, they can reasonably acquire the skills to beat it, at least against similarly-skilled opponents, as opposed to having no option but to switch races. This makes the game more fun for those players and keeps them interested longer, which is ultimately to Blizzard's benefit because they'd like to sell them sequels. No matter how much one waves around a philosophical argument that only perfect play should matter, that is a significant interest for Blizzard, if not the people in this forum.
I'd note that there haven't been many such changes since SC2's release, so there's not much to worry about with respect to Blizzard systematically sacrificing high-end play to make low-end play balanced.
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On September 29 2011 17:46 Yung wrote:
If blizzard wants there game to stay popular, then they should only balance for masters and up levels, because anyone that puts in the time and practices right should at least be in masters.
Only 2% of the players of the game can be in master league, so while you might argue that "anyone" can be in master league, they're an extreme minority of players, and ignoring those who aren't there and won't ever be isn't a good way to ensure the game's popularity.
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I so see what you are talking about.
I usually win easier with T or P against my level of people than zerg WHEN I'm having some sort of problem in my playstyle for example hellion opening or when I make mistakes god knows why.
Add that I play 6+ games as zerg per day, watch streams and vods and try to discuss about it. I play 4 to 7 times a week offrace, yet still I see how easily I crush my opponents with funny stuff I lose myself to.
If I open doubleport banshee, execute BO well which I found not hard, manage to kill flying OL, I have huge chance of winning. This also comes to macro - I don't get supplyblocked as T, I have nearly 100% production and low resources which leads to continous timing pushes with my army and then take third, there isn't as much thinking process in my T style where I macro up a army, do timing pushes until my enemy dies.
As a Zerg I have to play it like poker(react to what your opponent CAN do and try to close his available paths as much as possible, and maybe bluff too  ).
TL:DR;
To certain point, as T I can just macro up army and do timing push until my enemy dies. Goes up to diamond - master level. Listen radio talk and macro then basically a-move.
I can't do this as Zerg and I think that maybe you have to "outsmart your opponent, not outplay" like Idra says. (I don't say it's true or even my opinion).
+ Show Spoiler +I love playing Zerg and wouldn't ever change race to get into master. There is always someone better than you so league doesn't matter as long as I'm not considering joining a team and going semi-pr
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How would balance in the lower leagues work though?
Because if you was rank 1 in the bronze league owning all the bronzes, are you forced to be promoted? Do you still get to play against lower silver league players? How are these games balanced to get promotion? If you're given the choice, how many would choose being the best of a league or take the step up.
If you say bronze league players can stay happy being in their bronze league and silver league players can stay happy being the silver league. They can decide for themselves to take the step up.
There is a danger of segregation, how will this encourage and promote competitive gameplay and achievement for improvement?
Plus you're still going to have to learn a skill set to be able to compete in the silver league. The question would be, will there be a big shift in the mechanics/units/balances and you'd have to change your style and gameplay to compete. Is that good design?
Learning a different style for each league I say is bad design.
Custom games are there for a reason, 4v4, 3v3 and 2v2 are great ways to have fun still. 1v1 is designed to be competitive and for high level play so that there is the same level of competitiveness through out regardless if there are disportionate difficulties in races.
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ActiBlizzard's Blizzard's (remember, they've made pains to make sure everyone knows they're still their own company, so they want all the bad stuff too =P) business model dictates that they are going to have to balance somewhat for the lower levels as well.
While top level -should- get the majority of the microscope-level balance tweaks, they cannot leave lower levels too unbalanced, for risk of having an "I'm race A, I only seem to play race A, occasionally B, and the only C I ever see are the new accounts passing through" situation.
Now obviously, with the way the MMR system works, it doesn't have to be perfectly balanced, only somewhat balanced. But it can't be too unbalanced either, they do still have 2/3 of the game to sell, after all, and Sub-Masters is 98% of the game's population.
As an aside, if balance really became a problem, a tournament could tweak things to match how they think it should be, also.
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i think the game should be balanced in a way that if both players play absolutely perfectly nobody should ever lose. right now that isn't the case. will it ever be? because of the differences in the races i don't think so. in mirrors it should definitely become like that though i think.
and the player who makes more mistakes should lose. right now that isn't the case. certain races forgive mistakes much more than others.
in a world where you can pull all scvs and lose everything and be in fine shape to play a 30 min macro game or just do the same thing again 2 minutes later and on the other hand misplacing a forcefield by 1 hex or making 1 drone too many instantly loses you the game it's pretty ludicrous to talk about balance.
on lower levels that doesn't matter. because, on lower levels players aren't good enough to (as an example) realize mistakes their opponent made quick enough and instantly punish it, therefore allowing you to get away with stuff you shouldn't. even on highest level of play right now you see those kinds of things all the time and certain perceived imbalances result directly from
players getting away with things they shouldn't.
so a nice balancing move by blizzard i feel would be giving better tools for scouting at certain points in the game.
so no i don't think balance is much of an issue at lower levels.
however, as the game gets older and the general level of skill rises it will be, and it will have the same balance issues that exist in highest level of play so hopefully those will get sorted out.
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there was a thread like this some time ago, propably the discussion even went exactly the same. As we can see, Blizzard does different sorts of balancing. They make units easier/harder to use, so they don't affect high level but low level of play (or only highlevel etc and the typical both affecter).
Example immortal range 6. Before they walked around like a crab behind the army doing nothing. Now if it would be an aclick vs aclick. The marines are actually in range of the immortal, which is atleast a bit of damage. If you want to poke marauders you still have to do the same thing with your immortal. So its basically just became better for newbies.
Staying with the recent patch there is fungal. Before stacking fungal to kill stuff was easy, and there was almost no time to react before the second deadly fungal came. For lower levels nothing will change except one fungal more is needed and they get a bit more damage (units of the opponent survive a bit longer). But once you proceed into high level the fungals can be beastly again were the zerg suddenly needs one fungal less to kill everything. But the important change is probably that the opponents were given a slight increase in reaction time. allowing to outmicro fungal a bit better, no one in master would be able to use that buff against fungal though.
Just a few examples that made units easier or harder to use or added micro abilities etc.
So blizzard is balancing the game for every level of play. And that is true balance Mastery imo. If they keep on with it, a click vs a click will be totally balanced, while every lil micro move brings you ahead. Until you play with 400 apm and will still fight on a balanced basis against other 400 apm people.
Lets see if blizzard got the stamina for it. But so far they made the sc2 multiplayer way more fun to play, with all the micro added, while maintaining the newbie mode.
But i agree that races have a different difficult level. But thats due to the problem that there are 10000 levels of play not only low and high. Balancing them all would probably end up in 1 race with 3 different skins lol.
Still funny that so many say blizzard should never balance anything else then high level, while blizzard already does the opposite since the sc2 release.
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Still funny that so many say blizzard should never balance anything else then high level, while blizzard already does the opposite since the sc2 release.
Maybe that's why at high level of play the game is boring to watch and imbalanced to play.
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Seeing that the majority of players are infact not at a high level, it should be taken in mind when they release a patch.
Small balance-fixes, such as a cooldown on Mules wouldn't affect the highest level that use them regurarely, but for the silver hero it would lead to his bad macro not be forgiven by throwing down three mules while his front door is protected by a bunker vs the silver zerg on the other side that misses a ton of injects but has no mechanics that can forgive him.
You always have to bear in min that there are more players to the gaem then top 200,
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BW is imbalanced? Are you serious?
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The game is balenced right now, expect maybe ghosts
If when people get better some new balence issue comes up for example Protoss is suddenly unstopable unless you are twice as good as them then Blizzard will step in and change something to try are solve the issue. Yes Blizzard look mostly at the 'highest level of play' but they also look at the win rates between the races across the leagues and on all the servers.
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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.
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On September 29 2011 18:53 Black[CAT] wrote:
BW is imbalanced? Are you serious?
What? It is? If you looked at it the same way as people do as sc2 Im sure people would also say terran is OP since they have won the most tournaments and protoss is UP cos they lose alot. Im sure a sc2 statistics style of matchup winrates would be pretty skewed as well because of the relatively low number of games played and also because flash and fantasy have been tearing it up lately. Its just that nobody is ever going to say that a pro is undeserving of a win in scbw because of how much effort they put into practice and learning the game. Its a form of respect and something that some current sc2 pros could learn from.
Some people could use the argument that terran isnt overpowered in both sc2 and bw, and that the players with the best mechanics and understanding of the game just happened to be terran but thats entirely hypothetical that they would get the same results playing zerg or protoss.
People just need to accept that games multiracial games like starcraft will inherently be imbalanced but as long as games can still be won the game isnt broken. If you wanted a perfectly balanced game you could play mirror.
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Great, well-thought-out post!
In response, I believe what you're saying to be true, especially the part about the viewers also being players. The thing is though, that if you're, like me, in platinum, the only reason I'm not getting into diamond is my skill. Theoretically, balance really only should be discussed when two perfect players clash. What you're saying about Flash is really spot-on and until we get that level of play, the balance will constantly change, with or without patches.
However, who wants to watch a GSL with 32 Terrans or 32 Zergs or 32 Protosses, noone, that's not as fun as watching races fight eachother with equal success. If to achieve this, Blizzard has to change things that in five years will seem ridiculously unbalanced simply because with higher level play, the game isn't balanced. Though, since none is playing at the highest level possible at the moment, the balance needs to be tweaked to make the top players in the world compete with equal success no matter race. That's the reason balancefixes are great. To increase the viewer value.
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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.
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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.
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SC2 can only be balanced around pro level 1v1. End of story. Don't really get the point of trying to argue against that...
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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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Well, if there is a change at the lower levels only and you end up getting to masters( not from the change) then you may have change your strats.
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I think balance inherently only affects higher level players. Lower level players will just look at it and go "thats nice", while higher level players will notice that it somewhat screws their build over. So in a way, balances have only been affecting higher levels of play
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I think it's dang near impossible to balance the game at all leagues (because different races have a different skill floor).
However, I also think that the most important thing to balance is the highest level of play, because that's what people watch, and because one not at the highest level of play can practice to get there.
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If it's balanced at the highest level then it is inherently balanced at all levels. Whether or not people know how to play at lower levels doesn't mean it's not balanced. It means they have things to learn...
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On September 30 2011 06:11 Slusher wrote:
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.
yeah, people should know why blizz ladder stats does not mean shit.
"Only Balance for the Highest Level?"
yes.
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I would just try to balance SC2 at the highest league. Creating different balance adjustments at different leagues is just way to complicated of a system to work and would interfere with the learning curve (You know that strat that worked in silver? Well, to balance gold, we nerfed it significantly. Once you get into diamond though it will work again).
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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.
The problem with balancing anything but the highest levels is that you don't know if the imba comes from the unit or the lack of skill of the person using it.
Balance at all levels can't be done without everything becoming the same.
But I do understand that the OP wishes there was some way to take a greater number of skill levels into consideration when balancing. Serious casuals or above or something
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the reason the game is balanced for the highest level is that balancing the game for anything lower commonly creates imbalance at lower levels. Obviously, it's ideal to balance both-- but very difficult.
The simple truth is balance matters less at lower levels. Players will mimic what they see at the highest levels, so strategies "trickle down" to lower leagues. Some silver league player sees a blue flame hellion marine push with medivacs on a ledge in tvz do well in one MLG, boom it lasts as a strat in lower leagues for months. SOTG says unit X is overpowered 2 months ago? Silver league player still thinks this because it is still viable in lower leagues.
Balance is almost irrelevant until you get to such a level where skill is super high, and every angle of the game is explored. Until you hit that level, strategies are not executes at such a level that "imbalance" comes into play-- each can be avoided with creativity of simply better mechanics. Even in masters, if your mechanics are good enough, none of the balance everyone bitches about matter. Stop worrying about what;s supposed to be imbalanced and worry about how to get better.
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I hate to say it, but trying to balance a game 'below top level' is incredibly stupid.
Lets have some examples:
Thor (strike cannons) against protoss: Mana > Cooldown > Mana.
- Diamond+: He would know that HTs will have feedback to use against them if they are mana based and knows that it can reduce it's health by 1/2 if full mana/health. Pros may use a warp prism with a HT or 2 to drop HT+Feedback+Pickup+Profit.
- Plat and below: Some may immediately think to use HTs feedback, many of them may not have the reaction to use them. Some may end up scratching their head as to what difference does it make to them.
- Specifically, (IMO), Thors did not have a second 'soft' counter to them, general gateway units were not effective, going Void Rays would be easily countered via tech shift(Vikings). (I'm not 100% right, but I reckon I'm on the right track with this).
Barracks build time up by 5 seconds:
- Diamond+: Maybe the difference between having 4 lings and 8 lings to defend a specific rush, ie: live or die change. (Might be a lil overboard, but you get the idea)
- Plat and below: 5 seconds.... so what?
By balancing at the top level, we assume perfect skill from both subjects with the basis of 'how the game is meant to be played' mentality. There is no imbalance from lack of skill, because IT JUST DOESN'T MAKE SENSE. If you try to argue this point then......... /facepalm.
Balancing adjustments already trickle down the league path even to the platinum league easily, the actual effect may not be felt immediately.
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isnt it impossible to balance a game around lower level players?
like how can you possibly predict what massive holes they have in their play that need patching
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First i'd like to say that the last balance patch was in 2001. 10 years? Not even close. But its been balanced for a decade now with few balance patches in its history. BW's game design was brilliant.
Balancing the game at all levels is an illusion with the current match making system that Blizzard has. If they balanced the game to the highest level of play then their system would flesh everything out. Doesn't make much sense to me. What really blows my mind is balancing a game based on terrible play.
Also in bw each match up was significantly different from each other and required their own separate skill sets as well as understanding of the match up. Not to mention the mechanics required to play bw was outrageous and nothing short of astounding to be successful. It was actually something to marvel over when you saw someone play well because it was seemingly impossible. Because of this your skill in each match up would vary significantly. Typically a player on iccup would lose over and over and over until something just clicked and then they would start winning consistently game after game until you hit the next rank where you would hit a wall and the cycle would start over.
On September 22 2011 07:10 slam wrote:Show nested quote +On September 22 2011 06:24 oni_link wrote:
your tl dr is missing
User was warned for this post Would anyone care to explain this warning to me? Seems like a pretty reasonable observation to me since at the end of the post there is "TL;DR" with nothing following.
He could have pm'd it. That post didn't contribute anything.
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On September 22 2011 06:29 QTIP. wrote:
Balance at the highest level = Competitive E-Sport.
That's it.
Truest words. This game cant reach its potential until bliz realizes it cant be as close to balanced as possible without acknowledging that it needs balancing from the top. Dont balance an esport potential game for noobs.
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The only way a game thats balanced at the highest level of play isn't at lower levels is if races require overly different levels of skill. You can't realistically have perfectly equal races as far as required skill but I feel the difference in complexity between for example zerg and protoss at low level is way too large in sc2.
In other words I agree that the game should be balanced for pro-level play but changes to the races skill requirements are vital as well to keep casual players AND attract more players.
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On September 30 2011 13:04 P3rytt wrote:
The only way a game thats balanced at the highest level of play isn't at lower levels is if races require overly different levels of skill. You can't realistically have perfectly equal races as far as required skill but I feel the difference in complexity between for example zerg and protoss at low level is way too large in sc2.
This is true, but to the (very limited) extent that Blizzard talks about balancing for lower leagues, it's been to address specific strategies that create huge imbalances for weaker players and that aren't key to high level play.
Regarding the comment I made earlier about reaper rushes -- I'm pretty sure that's the one change that Blizzard called out as somehow being relevant to lower league balance. However, I might have misremembered, and I can't find the blog I was thinking of. It's been a long time.
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On September 22 2011 06:29 YumYumGranola wrote:Show nested quote +On September 22 2011 06:27 Shaetan wrote:On September 22 2011 06:18 YumYumGranola wrote:
the fact is that almost every single spectator of SC2 events is also a player. If there's anything that dissuades new players it has a negative affect on new spectators which hurts the feasibility foreign tournaments and therefore the entire foreign scene. This is not true. Well I certainly don't know any...
I'm one of those people...I spend so much time working and watching BW/SC2, I have absolutely no time to get good at the game myself
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On September 30 2011 13:18 Lysenko wrote:Show nested quote +On September 30 2011 13:04 P3rytt wrote:
The only way a game thats balanced at the highest level of play isn't at lower levels is if races require overly different levels of skill. You can't realistically have perfectly equal races as far as required skill but I feel the difference in complexity between for example zerg and protoss at low level is way too large in sc2. This is true, but to the (very limited) extent that Blizzard talks about balancing for lower leagues, it's been to address specific strategies that create huge imbalances for weaker players and that aren't key to high level play. Regarding the comment I made earlier about reaper rushes -- I'm pretty sure that's the one change that Blizzard called out as somehow being relevant to lower league balance. However, I might have misremembered, and I can't find the blog I was thinking of. It's been a long time.
There was a Zealot build time nerf a while back due to Zealot rushes at "various skill levels" as the official notes say. I've heard that apparently at the last Blizzcon this was confirmed to be Silver league, but I don't have a link to any confirmation of that.
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If it's balanced at the top then surely a supposed 'imbalance' will just be you not playing well enough?
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4713 Posts
Depends on a lot of factors, and it is difficult to quantify.
For me, balance would be, assuming equal skill level, 0 or close to 0 lag, that any unit combination and/or strategy/push would have a counter that can be executed equally as efficient as the said unit combination/strategy/push.
This means that, it is equally important how easy it is to counter something, not only if it can be countered in theory.
For example, I posted a lot on the subject of balance last week and specifically in the regarding TvP match up. What I basically boiled it down to was that not only was Protoss UP because their GW units are UP compared to what they cost, but also because Protoss has to put in a lot more effort to win in a situation of equal armies/tech.
Take for example the 1/1/1, the first innate flaw is that, if you prepare for it, you open your self to other harass/pressure or build dangers.
Protoss don't have a safe build, however assuming you did guess correctly and your opponent does go 1/1/1 it is still incredibly hard to hold compared to how easy it is for the terran to execute, on top of that there is a flaw in that the terran can stay on 1 base and at the 12 min mark still be equal on supply to a Protoss that was on 2 bases for 66% of the game.
Last example, late game army trades.
While Colossus do theoretically counter bio, and stalkers do theoretically counter vikings, in practice it is much more easy for the terran to pick off colossus, and then for his army to stim, kite zealots and destroy the remaining stalker army.
Also, while HT theoretically counter both bio and Ghosts, in practice the slow speed of HT coupled with the higher range of Ghost's abilities means that Ghosts will always win in the hands of an expert assuming all else is equal. The Protoss is forced to rely on gimiky micro tricks like Warp Prism+HT to even win. So the Protoss is putting in a lot more delicate micro work then the terran, however terran still wins and/or has a higher chance to win.
So in my humble opinion Protoss needs to be looked at, it is disturbing to see players like Naniwa and Sase come forward and speak about how Protoss gets demolished in Korea, on how, even if you play perfectly, the terran still wins. It is unbalanced if a race has to rely on the other race to make mistakes in order to win, it is unbalanced if you have to put in significantly more work with a race to win compared to or against another race.
I think we have reached a point where we are smart enough to figure out when a "imbalance" is either a learn to play issue or truly and imbalance, and we do have numbers and a lot of smart people that can figure it out.
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Lower level players shouldn't even think about imbalance at all. The skill cap is at least high enough for players that know what to do to just outright own players that don't know what to do all day long. Yeah because of imbalance X race of equal skill will lose a game he would have won but didn't because of imbalance but what does a casual player lose? -1 on his winlose record?
On the other hand top level players are reaching the current skill cap/time passed limit so even a small balance change meant for lower level players has overreaching consequences at higher level play, IE zealot gateway/warpgate -10 shield nerf and -5 second on build time nerf, void ray nerf etc.
All of these changes were made because Protoss is too strong at low level play, increase the skill level and all of a sudden Protoss isnt very competitive at all with players keeping their current status by getting lucky all in and cheeses off and the not so lucky ones getting demoted from where their true skill level belongs.
So I think when everything is considered a 20% winrate disparity among professionals is disastrous from the game but a 20% winrate disparity in diamond league is ok because on the professional level players are already doing everything they can to fix it while diamonds are doing a fraction of the effort etc.
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The toss being ezmode in BW analogy doesn't really work when in SC2, all the races are ezmode. The mechanics required of terrans & zergs when compared to toss in BW at a high level is ridiculous, but there's no way you can say the same in SC2 when everythings so easy to control, so the rest of your points are pretty much moot.
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