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This whole thread is pretty much made irrelevant by something blizzard said once.
It was regarding marines; In micro-bot tests that they ran internally, marines could kill any unit comp if micro'd perfectly. There was concern about imbalance even in beta regarding marines, and every patch since release has consistantly been nerfing barracks/bunker/stim/marine play because of the overwhelming advantage you can take through pure micro.
The skill ceiling is 100% related to the units and how much you can do with them. Call that "gimmicky" if you like, but robots can do insane things with stimmed marines, blink stalkers and burrow roaches. Human players have a lot of work to do if they want to reach this true ceiling.
I think the skill ceiling is lowered by units like Colossus and Siege Tank. Siege tanks used to require micro in BW, in SC2 they auto-target with unit priority, so they don't waste shots and they prefer to shoot the correct units (Siege tanks will auto-target infestors over lings for example, if both are in range at the same time). Another example of a bad unit is the brood lord - there are no real micro or positioning opportunities with BLs, you kind of just slowly move them forward and hope you don't get caught off guard.
I don't think anyone can talk about where the skill ceiling is though, Games (all games) take an enormous amount of time to truly master. More than one year, more than five years. We haven't seen shit in starcraft 2 and the expansions are going to shake everything up anyways. Blizzard also seems aware of this too, stating that future units won't be new things to add to our "death balls", rather they will be more like harassment/macro mechanics. I do wish macro was more important than micro, if only to change how the LOW end of the skill spectrum works...
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People sucked at BW after a year. Give it time.
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I pretty much agree with everything you said OP, and I feel its a really bad point to talk about skill ceiling and then pull in what bots with 15000 APM does. This is kinda, to some extent true, but if you bring that in, you might as well bring in bot muta micro in sc bw with 35k APM, bot dragoon micro where they never ever stack or bot goliath micro. The bottom line is that there was way more possibilities for micro in BW, and these possibilities had a major impact on the fight and that has changed as we moved on to SC2 where it matters less.
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This whole skill ceiling story bugs me a bit. I mean:
Lets pretend someone has 400 APM. In a mechanical challenging game he has to put on, idk, lets say 200 APM in the mechanical necessary stuff, then has 200 left for other stuff.
In a mechanical not so challenging game this player still has his 400 APM. But now he doesnt need 200, but lets say 100 APM for the Basic stuff. But he still has 300 APM to spare, so he can put
way much more APM to for example multitasking, as multitasking is an ability with an pretty much open ceiling as long as you got enough troops for it.
The only thing, where less micro is somewhat bad for the game is the first x minutes of the game, where one doesnt have that much troops to command, so that his APM cannot really pay out. But i can live with that  .
As more and more pro's start to slowly "assimilate" the way SC2 plays out, i think we gonna see more and more stuff happening at once in a game. Im pretty optimistic bout that. This is gonna be really hard for the casters...
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Ares[Effort]
DEMACIA6550 Posts
On October 30 2011 07:07 darkscream wrote:
This whole thread is pretty much made irrelevant by something blizzard said once.
It was regarding marines; In micro-bot tests that they ran internally, marines could kill any unit comp if micro'd perfectly. There was concern about imbalance even in beta regarding marines, and every patch since release has consistantly been nerfing barracks/bunker/stim/marine play because of the overwhelming advantage you can take through pure micro.
The skill ceiling is 100% related to the units and how much you can do with them. Call that "gimmicky" if you like, but robots can do insane things with stimmed marines, blink stalkers and burrow roaches. Human players have a lot of work to do if they want to reach this true ceiling.
I think the skill ceiling is lowered by units like Colossus and Siege Tank. Siege tanks used to require micro in BW, in SC2 they auto-target with unit priority, so they don't waste shots and they prefer to shoot the correct units (Siege tanks will auto-target infestors over lings for example, if both are in range at the same time). Another example of a bad unit is the brood lord - there are no real micro or positioning opportunities with BLs, you kind of just slowly move them forward and hope you don't get caught off guard.
I don't think anyone can talk about where the skill ceiling is though, Games (all games) take an enormous amount of time to truly master. More than one year, more than five years. We haven't seen shit in starcraft 2 and the expansions are going to shake everything up anyways. Blizzard also seems aware of this too, stating that future units won't be new things to add to our "death balls", rather they will be more like harassment/macro mechanics. I do wish macro was more important than micro, if only to change how the LOW end of the skill spectrum works...
Nice post, I agree!
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My opinions are:
1. That the skill ceiling in sc2 hasn't nearly been reached yet.
2. That it is kind of pointless to speculate. We just have to wait and see, time will tell.
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On October 29 2011 18:14 LuciferSC wrote:I believe you guys under-estimate the 'skill ceiling' True automining exists, u can group multiple production buildings, yada yada. However on the other side of the mirror, those elements allow for flashier players (like what MMA does). I for one can't wait to see what those BW legends would be able to do once they move into SC2.
I hope you're not serious. Go youtube sauron zerg. When macro wasn't autopilot it WAS what seperated the good from the best.
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MVP was actually a pretty high A-player, I remember him beating Flash.
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I'm not worried.
Right now, any time a player does something that isn't an attack-move, it is surrounded by exclamations of joy, awe, and surprise, at how brilliant and wonderful his move was. In reality, it was dead simple and obvious, but at least it wasn't attack-move. There's a long way for everyone to go.
people still lose games with tons of money on the line by attack-moving with units like ultralisks. The general concensus is that the ultralisk is a bad unit. Instead people should be noticing that the player engaged poorly and let his ultralisks fend for themselves, which is a bad idea.
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On October 30 2011 07:07 darkscream wrote:
I think the skill ceiling is lowered by units like Colossus and Siege Tank. Siege tanks used to require micro in BW, in SC2 they auto-target with unit priority, so they don't waste shots and they prefer to shoot the correct units (Siege tanks will auto-target infestors over lings for example, if both are in range at the same time). Another example of a bad unit is the brood lord - there are no real micro or positioning opportunities with BLs, you kind of just slowly move them forward and hope you don't get caught off guard.
Err, I'm pretty sure you have to target fire Infestors and Banelings. And all units in SC2 automatically target the unit closest to them. http://wiki.teamliquid.net/starcraft2/Attack_Target_Priority
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On October 30 2011 07:55 MrMercuG wrote:
MVP was actually a pretty high A-player, I remember him beating Flash.
one game out of 5 lol
mvp's team old bw team is famous for having bad terrans and he was one of them so no, he was never close to A class
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There is a difference between a skill ceiling and a mechanics ceiling. The mechanics ceiling is what everyone is talking about being reached. The SC2 skill ceiling will never be reached because of the change in the metagame and new strategies emerge. The metagame is going to change DRASTICALLY at least 2 additional times with the addition of new units from the expansions so no I am not worried about it.
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Banelings yes, infestors no. Unless i'm grossly misinformed, spellcasters are targeted with higher priority than other units, although that wiki doesn't seem to reflect that.
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On October 30 2011 07:24 arfyron wrote:
People sucked at BW after a year. Give it time.
I mean no one ever played an RTS before SC2 came out! People had 150apm! Just like BW!
It's sad to see what some people believe. They try oh so hard to not compare it to BW, but then they just compare it to BW in another way (such as skill, saying that people were bad when BW came out so that must mean people were bad at SC2!)
It's irrational to think this way. It's like saying the engineering of the very first satellite was pretty shitty, so the next generation of satellites will also be shit since the new technology will take the same amount of time to master. Sorry the world doesn't work that way, neither does Starcraft. Which is ANOTHER reason why BW pros rape shit up in SC2, because THEY'VE BEEN THERE DONE THAT!
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Hey, the Thread is titled with a question, so why not make a poll with said question?
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On October 30 2011 06:23 Akta wrote:Show nested quote +On October 30 2011 06:10 JudicatorHammurabi wrote:
The skill ceiling is seeming a level or two lower than in BW. My concern is that it actually too low and people can become only negligibly better past a certain point. How would you rank the "skill ceiling" in sc2 compared to games like quake or cs 1.6?
It's very difficult to compare FPS and RTS because they have quite different skill sets.
To say the least though, I have played all of these games (including Quake games, but I will assume by Quake, you mean Quake 3 which was dedicated multiplayer), and I'd have to go with SC2 easily as having a higher skill ceiling. I mean, Fatal1ty practicing like an average SC2 pro was consistently one of the top players in something like 7 FPS games. You get to a point in shooter games where you know the maps and strategies and movements like the back of your hand and you can aim and shoot anything that moves. If you really work at it, it's not hard to get to this level.
That's where the game of chance comes into play. Power weapons, positioning at some given time, weapon/item respawns, where the opponent is, etc. There's also just human errors, like moving the mouse a half a cm too far and missing a shot. This is the determining factor, and the players who are more consistent with getting the power weapons and with their hand movements are the ones who are going to win.
Another big thing is the difficulty of getting kills or achieving objectives. It's not anywhere near as easy to nab a kill in Quake 3 or CS as it is in CoD, where you can smoke noobs while half drunk and watching a movie at the same time just running and gunning, especially with akimbo shotties or the set of overpowered rifles and perks.
High-skill team FPS games like CS are a bit different in that the strategies and movements relate to more than 1 character, but otherwise it's generally the same in the other regards.
Meanwhile, in any RTS, you just have a thousand more things you have to manage all at once and you have to be great at all of them in order to do well. That's just mechanics. Strategy, scouting, micro, adaptation, and many other skills just make the mountain larger and larger, and it's very difficult to get good. It takes a good amount of time, effort, and serious focus to be even a decent amateur at SC2. At the pro level, a lot of the Korean players are practicing 10 hours a day and in the same manner as the BW teams, which is ridiculously hardcore. Despite this, you still see overwhelming gaps in skill among these players. I could go on for a couple hours, but yes, I really do think SC2 has a higher skill ceiling than CS or Quake 3, as much I as love and played those games.
Just my take on it.
MVP was A
On a team that for a long time was infamous for not having a good Terran player, until they got Light. "Woongjin Terrans" inherently carried the message of the joke that was the overall low-skill of the team's Terran players. Seriously, Woongjin Stars was so famous for having bad Terran players, that mentioning Woongjin Terrans was a joke.
In other words, MVP being an A-team Terran on a team like that doesn't mean a lot. He was A-team because they needed a couple Terrans as A-team players, and they didn't have anything better :S.
On October 30 2011 08:01 XIII wrote:Show nested quote +On October 30 2011 07:55 MrMercuG wrote:
MVP was actually a pretty high A-player, I remember him beating Flash. one game out of 5 lol mvp's team old bw team is famous for having bad terrans and he was one of them so no, he was never close to A class
Yep, you said it right.
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On October 30 2011 08:12 darkscream wrote:Banelings yes, infestors no. Unless i'm grossly misinformed, spellcasters are targeted with higher priority than other units, although that wiki doesn't seem to reflect that.
yes you are grossly misinformed. Banelings and casters does not have a higher priority, they have exactly the same as other units
this thread is silly. No one in this game is even close to reaching the skill ceiling. Most pros can't even micro marines or HT correctly
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well in Heart of the Swarm blizzard has decided to lower the skill level EVEN MORE to gain viewers. So if anything, you should be enjoying SC2 while it lasts
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EPT
