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- With the increase in map size are there any plans to increase overlord speed?
They're 0.47 unupgraded 1.88 upgraded. It takes about 6 minutes to get your overlord to cross positions on the biggest maps.
They shouldn't be too fast, scouting isn't supposed to be very easy. Terran loses a mule to scan and toss has to make observers/hallucinations. However I think they could be buffed to 0.70 or something without being overpowered and you should be able to barely see the an all in before it hits.
(reference: flying barracks is 0.94)
- Any plans for in-game clan and tournament systems?
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Many people seem to be of the opinion that the warp gate is a failed mechanic: the original intent seemed to be giving protoss a variety of harassment options and to keep up with the added production capabilities of the reactor and Inject Larvae, but for the sake of balancing early aggression, gateway units were made incredibly weak unless together in large numbers.
This forced protoss to rely on their higher tier units, namely the colossus and high templar while at the same time limiting aggression due to how weak the units produced at the warp gate are. Despite this, the highter tier units have been nerfed constantly, and Mr. Browder implied a while ago that you had plans for the colossus as well, while not having any intention of buffing the zealot or stalker to compensate. At this point, would it not be better to simply remove the warp gate?
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Are there any practical applications behind allowing players to change their warpgates back to gateways? If there aren't any, why allow this option to exist?
Have the designers ever considered lowering gateway unit production timings while the buiding is in the "gateway" form and increasing timings for warping in (as a warpgate), hence allowing greater flexibility over redesigning the stats of protoss gateway units?
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Why do you hate Protoss and Zerg so mutch?
When will you ever concider to balance things like Marines Ghosts MULEs ?
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will you remove mothership for the new upcoming unit of Protoss which may be arbiter?
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Does Blizzard think its normal for cheaper units like roaches and marauders to be so cost-effective against 125/50 resources stalkers?Doesnt Blizzard think emp and snipe round are too hard of a counter to high templar tech since they outrange the slow high templar?Does Blizzard think that 50 gas for a tech structure (Ghost Academy) is enough?The whole metagame in PvT revolves around mmball against heavy tech units,does blizzard think that a few armed soldiers with a couple of ghosts should be able to go toe to toe with heavy-tech units requiring tons of gas?
/nerdragequit
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Unabridged List of Questions (both mine and those compiled from various threads)
Battlenet
1) Where are Clan Support, customizable (e.g. with a ban function) chat channels, and shared replay features? There is, as far as I can tell, absolutely no reason not to have included these features. They bring more people to the game and give functionality that pretty much all of the player base wants. Your traditional stance on this issue has been that it isn't needed and that we'd like the way Bnet 2.0 handled things. We gave it a shot. We want this stuff back. It won't hurt anything about Sc2 and won't require any current features from Bnet 2.0 to be wiped. Please, listen to 99% of the player base on this one  .
2) Name changes. Why aren't these implemented yet, be they paid or free? I really don't understand this one. Clearly the backend work is already done, since everyone gets a single name change with each account. All that would need to be done is for a fee to be implemented for forthcoming name changes. Simple, and it would probably even make Blizzard money.
3) LAN support. I think I *sort of* understand where Blizzard is coming from on this one, but have you guys thought about compromising with the vast number of players who dearly want this feature, particularly for tournaments? Perhaps something which requires logging into Bnet but then allows you to use your LAN connection. I'm just spitballing here, but clearly the sort of delays we've had at tournaments warrant some kind of response. I think your players would love you for it and buy all upcoming expansions if they saw you do this. I understand that you don't want an influx of piracy, but to be frank, it's already going to happen anyway, and your responsibility is to the customer first.
Maps
1) Why is close positions on small maps still on ladder? Clearly tournament organizers and pro players in general have seen fit to exclude it from professional play on the grounds that it inevitably skews winrates towards Terran and pretty much always results in allins or cheeses. When it comes to ladder, I've heard responses that Blizzard wants to keep the game interesting. Fine, I agree. However, I'm not advocating the removal of close positions period, but rather its removal on maps where it clearly doesn't work (ST, to name one such example). I don't think it's particularly honest to suggest that a close positions ZvT on Shattered Temple has ever amounted to an exciting, back and forth game.
2) Weird wall off positions. I was playing a game on Abyssal Caverns a few days ago as Protoss and I happened to spawn in the top left position. Bizarrely, the ramp is made in such a way that one needs to wall off in a rather unorthodox manner. May I ask why? It doesn't add anything to the game and probably slightly skews the map against Protoss (since Terran can reposition a failed wall off). What's stranger is that the issue only figures in to this one particular spawning location.
3) Impossible-to-take-thirds. I understand that rush maps are something Blizzard wants to keep, and that's fine, but when it comes time to expand to a third base, it shouldn't be impossible to defend that base from some sort of central choke point. Again, to pick on Abyssal Caverns once again, it seems like the map is actually designed to aid your opponent in taking out your third. First, you start with rocks on your side of the path to your third. This makes it impossible to cut your opponent off or flank him until the rocks have been destroyed. What's the point? 3base play is arguably Sc2 at its most exciting. Can we please have fewer maps that bestow such bizarre advantages to the attacking player? A rush generally comes before the 12 minute mark (when people get their third, generally, unless they're Zerg) so once the game reaches that stage, is it not fair to suggest that rushing is no longer an issue?
Race Dynamics
1) Why have the archetypes which found each race been utterly disregarded? Zerg is supposed to be a swarm of (generally) weak units. Terran is supposed to be a medium-number of rag-tag bandits with ingenious strategies. Protoss is supposed to be a hyper-advanced alien race with powerful technology. This hasn't translated well into the game. Zerg seems to fare the best when it comes to sticking to their archetype, except in the later stages of the game when they get some of the most powerful and versatile compositions in the game. Terran seems to have gone completely overboard and become the race with not only the cheapest units, but also the most-efficient and versatile ones. They also have the best scaling in that their basic units remain effective in large-scale engagements all throughout the game. Protoss has been gutted into having the most expensive units which are also weaker than their cheaper counterparts from other races.
2) Pro Players. Why doesn't Blizzard ask them about their opinions more? I recall in one interview DB said that pros don't necessarily know much about balance. Well, okay, sure, but when pros are coming out in droves and condemning a specific unit or strategy, I think it would be smart to listen, especially when said pros represent players from every ladder. It's not an attack on your ability to ask pros for their thoughts, you know. Sure, some pros (Idra) have chips on their shoulder in general, but there are a lot of level-headed ones too. When they ALL come out voicing concerns about, say, the ghost, I think it warrants another look into it.
Balance
1) Why was the game made with such a reliance on hard counters but the patches made to improve soft counters? This one requires a bit of explanation on my part. When the game was released, we were introduced to units like the Marauder, which hard counters pretty much any low-tiered armored unit with admirable speed, and which remains useful against pretty much every ground composition there is. Okay, fine. Why, then, when it inevitably became clear that this unit (and units like it--the Marauder is merely an example of a hard counter) was too good, did Blizzard opt to slightly buff the Marauders soft counters (e.g. the +1 range to the immortal)? If the buffs and nerfs are going to remain slight (+5 seconds to rax build time, for example) why in the world are the advantages that counters have over their prey so huge? Shouldn't the two be closer together? To draw an example from BW, we had an amazing dynamic between the Lurker and the Marine. In unmicroed combat, the Lurker wins, but with good micro, the marines could actually mitigate the damage. But that's not all. Skilled Zerg players used the hold fire command to compensate for the marine micro. It came down to who had the better micro. The Terran player had very little room to make a mistake, but he was rewarded for not making any. Turning back to Sc2, we have the situation that properly microed stimmed marines should never lose to banelings (even with speed). This has been proven by pro replays and even AI simulations of perfect splitting. If we consider a Marauder versus a Blink Stalker, we have the same scenario. Even if the Protoss player has the Blink micro of a god, he's still going to lose to the Marauders. Why?
2) Casters. Why are the casters so unbelievably powerful without having any obvious weaknesses, except in the case of the HT? I'm talking about the infestor's ability to burrow, freeze units, and throw down an array of ITs to slow down attackers, or the ghosts ability to cloak and run away. Why are these things in the game? They merely encourage players to take risks that they shouldn't be able to take without suffering some sort of recourse should they mess up. As it stands, a bunch of cloaked ghosts might take one or two casualties even if the Terran player accidentally micros them into the vision of an observer.
3) Why is Protoss so weak? I know this is a very specific question, but in light of what is perceived by the community as the death of the race, I think it deserves its own question. Why are Protoss units
a) the weakest cost-cost?
b) countered so incredibly hard by easily accessible units from other races?
c) awful at scaling?
d) not actually hard counters to anything?
I actually think all of this stems from d). It's not really a problem in itself that Protoss units don't hard counter anything. I actually think that's the way the game should be, since it encourages strategy rather than mindlessly build order countering. However, when the other races (particularly Terran) have a plethora of accessible hard counters, it puts Protoss at a disadvantage to have nothing but soft composition counters.
4) Why is the balancing process so secretive and opaque? Take a look at minecraft, a non-competitive but hugely popular game. The developer of that game pretty much makes a diary out of the changes that are going to be implemented in upcoming versions. If people deride them en masse, they are reconsidered. Why doesn't Blizzard do the same? We have a huge number of users playing this game and a very accessible PTR. There should almost always be patches being tested on this PTR, with the intent that when the patch finally does come out, many many weeks of testing various changes will have been done. I'm talking about the players being involved from the start. Blizzard should be putting ideas on the table at least every month and letting testers play around with them. I don't mean to say that patches should come out more frequently, but PTR patches definitely should, because Blizzard needs to be experimenting with the metagame versus balance dynamic, and the PTR enables you to do that in a very efficient, risk-free way. It also makes you look honest.
Specific and Immediate Balance Complaints
1) The Ghost. I think everyone saw this coming. This unit is extremely effective against both Protoss and Zerg, has no hard counter, and soft counters pretty much every non-Terran unit. EMP is already very useful against Zerg, but is actually broken against Protoss. Why does this spell have such effectiveness that players don't even need to aim it, knowing that whatever they hit it will still do immense damage? It should just drain (all) energy like it used to, but shouldn't affect shields. It's pretty unreasonable that the Ghost should have an inherent advantage against one particular race when it's already so good in general.
2) Terran tech & basic units. Why don't Terrans have tiers? Pretty much every (or is it actually every?) unit that Terran makes comes from the three building that they need to get every game: Barracks, Factory, Starport. Combined with the Tech Lab, which isn't specific to any structure (consider if there were a Barracks TL, a Factory TL, and a Starport TL) Terran pretty much has access to their entire tech tree with just these three structures. Compare Protoss and Zerg. Protoss has three completely disjointed tech trees which have essentially no overlap whatsoever, and a bunch of purely research structures to unlock new units (Twilight, Robo Bay, Fleet Beacon, Cyber Core, etc) whereas Zerg needs to build a structure to unlock each unit on its tech tree. Zerg tech choices are further limited by the state of their Hatchery (Lair/Hive tech etc). It should be pretty clear that Terran is at a huge advantage here, since they can't really be BO countered but are capable of BO countering other races, sheerly because they're able to swap TL with a Reactor from a completely different class of structure and begin pumping out the required counter that they already have access to.
Next we have the Marine. Not much to say here. I've already touched on the Marauder (why does it have stim, anyway?). The Marine scales too well, does too much DPS, doesn't lose to any tier one composition for cost, gets T1 upgrades that are hands-down better than the P/Z T2 and T3 equivalent upgrades for T1 units and can be exploited with good micro by use of MKP style stutter stepping (NOTE: I am not talking about conventional stutter fire, I'm talking about the kind that players with amazing micro can do whereby the marine barely even lifts his rifle and the damage is dealt). While it's good to reward micro, the other T1 units have no such option available, and, to be quite honest, the advantage here gained is far too good for the effort which goes into it. Stutter stepping isn't exactly difficult, and I'm sure a lot of pros could, with practice, learn to do it as well as MKP does (some already do *coughMVPcough*). The advantage is just way too big and makes the unit insanely cost efficient against everything, even against its "hard" counters.
3) Warp in Mechanic. In brief: it needs to go. If you philosophy is going to continue to be that Protoss units, which are already the least cost efficient, should have to be not only more expensive, but also least supply efficient and the weakest simply because they can be warped in anywhere, then I think I speak for all Protoss players when I say that you should remove the Warp mechanic so that we can get T1 that is capable of going toe to toe with roaches and marines properly and not just through abusive use of forcefield.
Conclusion
1) Where is HotS, when will the BETA start, who will be invited (masters players and above would be a good idea) and why does this need to be such a secret, especially when some players are clinging to what they perceive as an imbalanced game in the hope that HotS will fix it?
Thanks for your time Mr. Browder. While some of my criticism may seem harsh, I will be the first to say that you've put together an extremely fun game. Clearly a lot of work went into making this game. I just want to ensure that it gets the attention it deserves, and I'm doing my part to help by giving suggestions of things I (and many others) feel need to be addressed. I wouldn't be doing this if I didn't love the game, so please don't take it personally.
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Can we please have a BO3 ladder? At least a toggle that allows us to play BO3 on the current ladder?
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oh sry forgot about this one :
Doesnt blizzard think that maps with unprotected gold are absurd?for example Antiga Shityard
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Will players who purchase Heart of the Swarm Still be able to play with players who only own wings of Liberty.
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1. In terms of designing/balancing the gameplay of SC2, does Blizzard focus primarily on unit design and leave the standardisation of particular matchups up to players? Or do the designers have an idea in mind of how they would like the matchups to play out, (primary unit compositions/general strategy) and create/edit units around those ideas.
2. What are some of their primary balance concerns at the moment?
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Please explain the marine, and its dominance from beginning to end of every matchup involving T, especially considering how soon into the tech path they get every important upgrade, and their amazing synergy with MULES.
Basically every matchup with T(even TvT) revolves around effectively killing marines fast enough so you don't get dps'ed to death while you take out their actually normal units(siege tanks/thors/banshees/hellions/etc). Reactors and MULES are a big part of this. 8 reactored raxes can pump out more marines than pure caster units can really deal with very efficiently, considering costs and limited mana. Then, MULES provide mechanics free, massive mineral boosts to T that can be hoarded and are supply independent. A T can be 100% mined out, and on their last legs, but have 4 orbitals. Float one to a gold base, drop 16 MULES, and then can pump out an incredible 144 marines from that 1.5 minutes of mining. That is an example of an "interesting" game mechanic.
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On October 21 2011 00:53 Ulfsark wrote:
Will players who purchase Heart of the Swarm Still be able to play with players who only own wings of Liberty.
They said that there will be separate ladders back when they first announced the expansions, iirc.
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which race do you play for fun? what level a player are you in the game? what are your favourite strategies to execute when playing?
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why are there only terran rocks?? they all have terran armor, why no zerg or protoss rocks?? if you like the rocks so much, why no create different kinds of rocks like zerg goo or a pile of sad zealots?? this is completely imbalanced towards - gasp - terran and needs to be fixed asap!
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Map Related:
- Would it be possible to simply increase the size of the map pool, while also increasing the amount of vetoes to compensate for this? This way there would be more variety for everyone, and perhaps both the hardcore and casual could be satisfied with your map selection?
- Alternatively, perhaps there could be a changing map pool depending on league. Bronze-Gold, Platinum-Diamond, and Masters-Grandmasters could all have their own respective pools.
- Will we ever see a map with Snow/Ice tile?
- Are there any plans to possibly implement more than one gsl map into the pool? Or at the very least, rotate Tal'Darim out for another gsl map?
Balance/Racial Design Related:
- In the past you've spoken of removing older units as the new HotS units are implemented. Do you have an estimate on how many units for each race will be cut? Specifically, have you locked down which units will be on the chopping block for each?
- In addition to new units in HotS, can we also expect any new upgrades for the older units?
- Ultralisks, Hydralisks, and Corruptors....what are you going to do with them?
- What is the rationale for not having to research EMP, despite how powerful a spell it is for the ghost?
- Can we expect new/updated animations? For example, Dark Templars vary slightly in appearance and Zerglings grow wings when they have the speed upgrade. Can we expect, say, a female ghost, or perhaps a more robust ultralisk when upgraded with Chitinous Plating?
That's all I got for now..
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Ignoring the impact of mirrors in this conversation and the fact that I play Zerg: it seems like most every Protoss opener is very fragile and subject to instantly losing if they make a mistake with a single stalker or sentry. I know I've seen and played in many games where the limited number of units available means that something like attacking when the Protoss player is not watching means they instantly lose the game because they lost 1 - 2 sentries. On the other hand, it seems like Terran and Protoss players have more flexibility in terms of losing early-game units without being instantly out of the game with some minor exceptions. It's really disappointing, both playing and watching, to see a player instantly lose because their sentry ball got surrounded and the forcefields were a second late.
Is there any concern in the balance team about how the Zealot matches up against marines, zerglings, marauders, and roaches in the early to mid game? Also, have you guys considered modifying the Stalker to help curb some of these early-game opener woes for Protoss players (and viewers!)?
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Ask him why the balance designers don't listen to the PTR forums at all.
Long before 1.3 I proposed that instead of nerfing WG research time, they remove the ability to warp in units on ramps. http://us.battle.net/sc2/en/forum/topic/2416114960
And then they nerfed the WG research time because the 4 gate was overpowered in PvP in their eyes, and it did nothing in PvP to stop 4 gating, but ruined all the timings for PvZ and PvT. And then in 1.4 they finally decided to remove the ability to warp in on ramps.
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On October 21 2011 00:52 VforValdes wrote:
Can we please have a BO3 ladder? At least a toggle that allows us to play BO3 on the current ladder?
This is the best idea.
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EPT
