Hi there. So I've been reading how Brood War teams are already practicing Starcraft 2 and are likely to switch to SC2 at least to some degree, possibly fully and we are going to see an influx of A team, top of the line players like Flash, Bisu, Jaedong, Stork, Leta, etc... start playing SC2.
And I'm really worried that the skill ceiling is going to be reached or at the very least came very, very close to it in that skill is going to play less factor in games and its going to be more luck based like trying to catch your opponent off guard with say a build like 1-1-1 or mass roach and hydra like Stephano is doing against protoss.
I feel like the macro mechanics as much as they provide something to do, they also in a way help with your bad macro.
For example as Zerg you can have 50 larva all at once and produce 100 zerglings all at once and it doesn't force you to build units all the time and pressure your opponent, it creates this cushion where even if you weren't macroing all that well the past minute you can just fall back to your 20 or 50 larvae from before when nothing was happening.
Same goes for Terran as I feel as much as it makes them do something, dropping mules actually closes the gap from someone who macroed great all the time and someone who didn't macro as well, but just dropped few mules that that he forgot to drop earlier and have 4x the income.
The current game where there is still a lot of skill ceiling left is micro as we are talking about hundreds of units on screen, but on the negative side there aren't that many micro opportunities.
I mean sure we have micro opportunities, we have the marine micro, we have the stalker micro, hellion micro and baneling micro, viking micro, phoenix micro and battlecruisers micro but other than that the possibilities are really limited. Yes you can somewhat micro your brood lord or roaches or zealots or void rays but its just one of those low reward microes that its much more beneficial to just A move, rather than try and micro and just focus on building more units.
And for example if we compared say the reaver/shuttle micro of SC1 with Colossus micro in SC2 it doesn't even begin to compare. SC1 micro was much more challenging, but also had much bigger rewards.
We are now seeing something along those lines with the warp prism/high templars and this is actually great, but compared to SC1 micro you are quite limited.
But my point is that I'm really worried about the skill ceiling and is it big enough and hard enough never to master or this one of those easy to learn, not that hard to master?
What are your thoughts?
EDIT: Nestea and MVP were both mid B level players in Brood War. Now imagine the high B level players and their skill, then imagine A level players and then imagine S level players like Bisu, Jaedong, Flash, Stork, etc... They are going to rip apart the game I feel and all possible things to improve would be small and insignificant sort of gimmicky things that don't really make you an advantage no matter how good you do them.
So my point is about diminishing returns. I mean microing 10 stalkers against 40 roaches is never going to work no matter how good you micro the 10 stalkers with blink. So my point is if you think the game will come to that level where yes you can do more things, but they are so gimmicky and do not represent real skill.
Another diminishing return example: Mircoing zealots against marine and marauders.
But ultimately I'm looking of how many high level micro/high level reward do we have in SC2?
In SC1 we had lurkers vs marines vs tanks vs dark swarm vs irradiate vs scourge, then you had firebats coming in late vs lurkers and zerglings, etc.... in SC1 we had shuttle/reaver vs terran or zerg either mineral line or armies, we had corsairs with disruption web in support of reaver/shuttle vs say in zerg hydralisks, zerglings and scourge.
In SC2 I can only think of marines and tanks vs zerglings and balenings vs fungal. And we see more tanks to counter infestors. Other is hellions vs zerglings and mutalisks vs marines, but notice how things stop within 3 to 4 units?
But again this is me and I'd like to hear your opinions and what you think of this!?
i am thinking the same way you are. a team bw progamers skill is pretty much wasted in sc2 because of how easy builds are to pull off.. there arent any builds that require such multi tasking and use of scouting information and star sense like bisus pvz.
Imo the Zerg skill ceiling is not nearly reached yet, whereas Terran and Protoss are much closer. I think we are nearing the point where skill can still be vastly improved upon, but the rewards for such skill have probably mostly passed the point of diminishing returns.
Right now I agree with you, but there is still two more expansions to go and the game will change, new units will be added. ( more spellcasters, increasing the skill cap )
The true skill ceiling of SC2 is humanly impossible to reach. To achieve the skill ceiling you need to macro perfectly and micro invidual units through the whole game. You can't play that fast you'd need thousands of APM.
There may not be a bigger skill gap between a Godly player like Flash vs. A class players. (whereas Flash is S class) Flash, as he showed over and over again, maintained 60-80% win rate vs. those A class players.
However, I will guarantee that once players like Flash, Leta, Bisu, Jaedong, etc comes into SC2, within 2-4 months they will clean out existing top SC2 players such as Nestea, MMA, etc.
Those players will simply have to work harder to stay in the playing field.
SC2's skill ceiling is much higher than what most of u guys think - imagine those players controlling 2-4 groups with near-perfect micro while maintaining perfect macro. (MMA comes close to that, but he falls short of what those LEGENDS could do)
On October 29 2011 17:59 Dodgin wrote: Right now I agree with you, but there is still two more expansions to go and the game will change, new units will be added. ( more spellcasters, increasing the skill cap )
Spellcasters are actually easier to micro than normal units to get the maximum use out of them. For instance, marines have to be babysit because they are so fragile, yet they have amazing mobility and dps. On the other hand, a spellcaster like an infestor will already be worth its cost once you smart cast a few fungals off. No amount of micro will make a spellcaster more efficient once it's run out of energy.
Of course, they may decide to add in more combat-spellcasters, which would have the best of both worlds.
For example as Zerg you can have 50 larva all at once and produce 100 zerglings all at once and it doesn't force you to build units all the time and pressure your opponent, it creates this cushion where even if you weren't macroing all that well the past minute you can just fall back to your 20 or 50 larvae from before when nothing was happening.
I'm sorry but I don not understand this example at all.
The mark of a good macroing zerg is keeping his larvae injects up. Thus, having a cushion of 50 larvae (which very rarely happens unless you're in late game) is a mark of a good zerg. You are punished by the game for not keeping up with your injects, as you will not be able to reinforce fast enough or with enough numbers and will be crushed by either a larger or more powerful army. I do not see how the larvae management system is forgiving of bad players at all.
You do realise that each hatchery has a maximum of 3 larvae spawned right? It doesn't keep making larvae for bad players because they can't keep up. Nestea told yellow, if your queen energy ever goes above 25 energy, consider the game lost. And yet how many zergs have you seen with queens well over 100 energy? Obviously the skill ceiling has not been reached for larvae management or creep spreading, and to claim otherwise would be baseless.
The skill ceiling in SC2 has not been reached, and I don't believe its close to being reached yet.
Unfortunately, it is good on one end and bad on another. Lower skill cap? of course, we have automine and boxes with more than 12 workers for @#$ sake!
Is it better.......................i say yes. Why? look at us. Look at all of these people on TL, 2000 logged in atm, all revolving around this game because, even Jimmy in bronze league can make the build that MVP did and feel a little like him. The ease of starcraft 2 (relative to BW) allows for lesser skilled players to enjoy builds and strats popularised by the pros, so it is good on that side, something we would never change because we would never have this mainstream audience again
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.
no worried at all. currently there's noone with perfect mechanics. there's so many tricks we don't know about yet, and a new expansion is coming that is gonna reset most of the stuff (builds, timings) we know.
Nope . Pros will always find something to improve on , just like in BW . I am excited and waiting to find what the human limits can do with SC 2 , but i hope this doesn't kill BW , because i still enjoy watching it more then SC2 .
Now, I don't think we're going to be seeing that in the near future, nor do I think we realistically ever will. However, that is the skill ceiling for Zergling micro. You could make more videos about the other skill ceilings for mutli-tasking, spell casting, Colossus control - whatever, and these can all be done in conjunction, theoretically. That's the skill ceiling in SC2.
The question is, are these skill ceilings even remotely attainable? I'd say no, but then you look at what people would have thought when talking about BW in 1998 and I don't think anyone would have expected the ridiculous ability of people 13 years down the line. The ceiling is high, the question is how high people can get to it. Certainly, the game is not the limiting factor here.
The SQ thread provides some interesting context for this, and the answer is even among pro-gamers there's still quite a bit of variance in macro ability.
As for micro, I'll just post this:
Now it may be that improving your skill leads to dimishing returns beyond a certain point, I could completely buy that. And it could be that the point of diminishing returns is too low to separate the very best players from the merely very good. But as for actually reaching the ceiling? That will never happen. It cannot be done by any human being.
If this skill ceiling were reached, we wouldn't see as many mistakes made by the pros. There are many instances of games even between the best players that I can see that there are possibilities to do better - showing that they will have a fair way to go.
Yes. I am worried. I'm afraid there will never be dominant players, long standing solid build orders, and with those the epic shifts in meta game that define eras and breakthroughs in the game.
People may think, well- its a good thing if one player doesn't dominate the scene for years because of the game design, that is not fair. Though, this is what makes the game exciting. If MVP loses every other GSL in the ro4 or ro8 to random players, and can ever be dominant, you will never have the huge upsets that define eras and revolutions.
A dominant BO, like 1 rax expand or 3 hatch muta or even 1-1-1 can be a good thing- because when with NO balance changes, a hero appears with a brilliant BO that can stop it 90% of the time, a legend is born. I am worried that long term, SC2 will not produce these legacies and hence will always be subject to a restricted skill ceiling that doesn't allow for separation of the top 1% into distinct .001%, .002% brackets that define Pro's and TRUE S-Class players. If the top 1% is just a big jumble that can take games off each other, and best of 3's at any given time. You wont have legacies like Savior, or even the 49'ers of late 80's in football, or the Yankee's of baseball, that when a team takes a series off of them- it really matters. It is legendary. Right now it just seems like anything is possible all the time.
I don't get how you can type so openly about the skill ceiling when it's plainly obvious that the 'skill ceiling' is inherently above your level of understanding about the game(s).
If there was a low skill-ceiling, MVP and Nestea would not have 3 GSL's each to their names.
This post is really, really negative and I detest such threads greatly because 101% of it is heresay.
No I am not worried at all that the skill ceiling in SC2 will be reached. This ceiling is infinte in height and we are barely off the ground. If you have 300APM in Brood war you spend 80%+ of it macroing. Macro was way harder. In Sc2 you don't ned 250+APM to macro perfectly. That surplus APM can be used for harrassment, tighter unit control, general micro, flanking and whatever other uses for it you can find.
The truly good players can macro exellent, control their units perfectly and always engauge well, harrass, scout and expand.
Oh and when players start doing these things guess what gets added to the list? Defend harrass. Its an infinte circle that insures SC2's skill has no ceiling.
so the reward for microing a single unit in bw is bigger then in sc2 ... and the reward for perfect macro is less good then in bw. Sounds to me like you have to play even better to win in sc2 then in bw. I like their approach, while bw you had a granted your units are 60% better in defense bonus resulting in what bw is today. Blizzard in sc2 tried to give the units the ability to get 60% better if microed correctly and since micro should become an important factor and because they wanted to renew the mechanics they had to adjust the game. I don't want to write a 10 page article about sc2 micro. But i think its rewarding enough and the skill ceiling micro wise is really high and unreachable by a human imo, and not about microing 1 unit good while everything else a moves (micro in bw looks awesome yes, but if you look at the units that are unmicroed you just want to facepalm to what they die, just send out to hope there is nothing to defend). Sc2 is about controlling your army in multiple areas, to maximize the effect of the attacks. If you can micro at two areas at once you can beat every opponent with ease that only can micro their deathball. And even in battle most units have skills if you use them your army is way better, while microing one unit is worth nothing. Best example might be the marine, that is worthless unmicroed. So macro is easy, and more people can micro well, but that means the people that did that before can now micro in 4 places instead of in 2 and that is an huge awesome to look if you have multiple cameras advantage :p.
So i wouldn't worry about the skill ceiling its not reachable just like it is in bw. And easy to learn hard to master applies to sc2 as well even more then it did to broodwar. And A teamers won't switch to fast to sc2, kespa would need to pay money to blizzard, which means the salaries would be smaller then bw. Micro wise i think sc2 is harder then bw by far, atleast i find it easier to micro a reaver shuttle then to blink micro my 30 stalkers hehe. And a few people already start to play sc2 as if it wasn't bw, where you only had to macro and a move, and since they win alot i guess they do something right.
No i am not worried. You people just have to start thinking for yourself.
You are comparing collosus micro to reaver micro ? Well, yah you can't do that.
Lets start with macro. We are no where near the ceiling . Terrans are queuing units like crazy! Zergs are missing injects, missing tumors, stacking thousands of minerals in mid/late game...
Micro is so horrible right now. What is stopping terrans from microing reapers up/down the cliffs on 1 expo, while doing blue flame medivacs (watch lucifron's medivac shooting micro). What is stopping protos players from manually using charge ? What is stopping HSM and people splitting only 1 unit to escape it rather then running the whole flock of "mutas" from it?
People complaing so much about clamping. Yet, we see Protoss using 1 hotkey, terran's not using hotkeys at all other then for drops and early game, zergs using up to 3 hotkeys... What is stopping you to use ~7 hotkeys, to split your army. To avoid those fungals, spread your army across entire map, etc etc.
How about doing something like focus void ray on each ultralisk (for example...) so they can charge up, instead of focus targeting ?
Can't wait for BW pros to switch. They might be able to use all that 50% extra speed they have (that they don't use on macro in sc2) on actual micro all around the map. Lets see what will happen to this game with 7 unit control groups....
Also, if you look at the units we are getting in HoTs this game will become harder to micro. All in builds are getting weaker. Maps are getting bigger...
Macro in SC2 can be more forgiving. Yes, if you have 75 energy, you can drop the 50 energy mule. You didn't lose it. BUT, the guy who dropped it at 50 energy will have another rax made before you. He will have an expansion earlier. A missile turret to kill one of your drops earlier.
Forgiving means that you are not totally screwed if your mechanics are not absurdly good. Goody should not be top GM and we all know it. BUT, is a guy like this is never going to be able to compete toe to toe with one that has his perfect macro. And to have perfect macro, is nothing that SC2 players are even close to at the moment (just see what MVP or NesTea do with their obviously imperfect macro, to all other players whose macro "sucks" compared to them).
Another example is this: Take the standard muta/ling/bling. What is the difference between DRG and all the other zergs? Just watch one of his games. DRG is constantly using his mutas. There is no period in time, larger than 10 sec, where his mutas stop actively harassing the opponent. The other zergs stay much less active. Sure the mutas are flying around to find another point of entry, but they are not being constantly actively harassing with them. With the, by a large margin, better mechanics of the BW pros, this "dead muta" period can be 3 or even less seconds of inactivity while macroing. Don't you think this would give them a clear edge over the competition??
Now guys I think you are really joking. Who said the micro skill cap in SC2 is close to be reached?
When every protoss out there uses his HTs in one bloody hotkey, begging for a "game over" EMP?? When every zerg out there has just now started splitting his army while attacking to minimize tank splash losses?? When the HT warp prism while in a big engagement usually fails because of low APM?? When every terran has medivacs and MM in one hotkey so the medivacs are always further back when retreating and they get sniped all the time by stalkers?? (When with HOTS there will be a LOT more opportunities to micro -viper, moveburrowbanes, slow hellion positioning, etc-)
These are only examples. But you have to remember that we are used to seing stuff like that happen all the time. This could NOT be standard. A 400 APM BW pro could at some point of refinement be able to spread all his HTs at the same time while microing the whole army. He could increase the effectiveness of his engagements by a lot when attacking with lings. He could say "fuck you ghosts" with an active HT-prism.
Somewhat incorrect analogy, trying to explain my point of view:
In BW you had to fight against the UI as well as the other player. Let's create a unit of measurement. I will call it the Flash, which represents the skill in both macro and micro of Flash.
Let's say we have a player X playing BW at 0,5 Flash. This guy can play the game and achieve a 50% of what Flash does.
The same guy playing at SC2 plays at 0,5 Flash. This guy can achieve a 80% of what Flash does. (because the game is more Forgiving)
But when someone plays at 1 Flash, will he not be able to play better than the 0,5 Flash guy??
At the moment most of the players are still relatively low in the Skill Capped scale, that's why the game is so volatile.
TL;DR: SC2 is more forgiving. The scene is made of players of lower calibre. Macro/micro flaws are not so devastating to a player, when both players have those flaws. If someone is definately better than someone else, he WILL win both in BW and in SC2.
On October 29 2011 18:29 hehe wrote: those control videos are impossible for a human to do those are pretty much TAS videos i can post the same thing for broodwar. + Show Spoiler +
we will never see anybody being able to pull off things like this
Agreed, and these videos are also completely beside the point I feel. As I see it, the question is whether or not the game allows for total domination. I think it's hard to tell man, but it does seem like the game is way way way easier to master due to: Clean way points Multible building selection Smart casting (Almost) unlimited control groups Queue up buildings Double rally for zergs
This is literally what I'm asking to make me have faith in SC2: Remove everything I just mentioned. And remove the artificial macro mechanics and the unit ball pathing aswell. Afterwards, Browder go nuts! I don't care which units you put in the game. It doesn't have to be a copy of bw for me to like it, but I do have a certain way I've come to expect a game named StarCraft to function. Now this is just my stupid opinion of what would make me play the game, and how it would allow the players who should dominate to dominate.
Completely irrelevant thread based on incorrect assumptions. The skill ceiling is incredibly high in StarCraft II. The reason that BW is harder is because the better RTS players are playing this game. This means that the level of competition and skill required to compete with the best is higher. The macro mechanics, lack of smart casting, all that, is related to this, but it is not the over-arching factor related to this topic. It is, that the better RTS players, are playing BW.
With the oncoming switch, these players will set the standard for play. They will go beyond that of your average SC2 professional and surpass that of MVP. Just the sheer fact alone that they will go beyond the already mighty skills of people like MVP, Nestea, shows that the skill ceiling is high in StarCraft II. If it wasn't, MVP would already be invincible.
For example as Zerg you can have 50 larva all at once and produce 100 zerglings all at once and it doesn't force you to build units all the time and pressure your opponent, it creates this cushion where even if you weren't macroing all that well the past minute you can just fall back to your 20 or 50 larvae from before when nothing was happening.
This is completely wrong any way you put it.
If you aren't maxed, there are limits to how much the game "forgives" your bad macro. For terran, it kinda doesn't forgive not building units, but it heavily forgives not using mules (up to 200 energy). For protoss it doesn't forgive not building units, and it sorta forgives not spending chrono boost up to 200 energy. For zerg, it does not forgive forgetting injects (macro wise. Sure you can dump that energy on transfusions/creep tumors, but the production capacity you lose when you don't inject will never return), and it does not forgive having more than 2 larvae at one hatchery.
Here a little calculation about zerg: Larva build time: 15 seconds Inject time: 40 seconds (producing 4 larva)
Queens get 25 energy (needed for injection) every 44.64 seconds. So assuming you macro perfectly with your Queens (as in keeping their energy to 0 all the time), you miss out on 3 larvae your hatchery would produce every time you inject so you basically lose little more than 40% of your production capacity even though you macro perfectly with your Queens. This could be 40% more Zerglings! Not very forgiving, is it? Now imagine missing every second injection cycle and having 3+ larvae at each hatch half the time. Suddenly you don't have 7 larvae every 45 seconds but 3.5 larvae each 45 seconds. And i bet on low diamond and lower league players to be way worse than this when they leave their comfort zone of the first 5-8 minutes where they play as practised and suddenly have to start playing and not just repeating.
On October 29 2011 18:58 GettinMyFill wrote: Completely irrelevant thread based on incorrect assumptions. The skill ceiling is incredibly high in StarCraft II. The reason that BW is harder is because the better RTS players are playing this game. This means that the level of competition and skill required to compete with the best is higher. The macro mechanics, lack of smart casting, all that, is related to this, but it is not the over-arching factor related to this topic. It is, that the better RTS players, are playing BW.
With the oncoming switch, these players will set the standard for play. They will go beyond that of your average SC2 professional and surpass that of MVP. Just the sheer fact alone that they will go beyond the already mighty skills of people like MVP, Nestea, shows that the skill ceiling is high in StarCraft II. If it wasn't, MVP would already be invincible.
You're trying to predict an unknown future here, but I hope you're right.
On October 29 2011 18:58 GettinMyFill wrote: Completely irrelevant thread based on incorrect assumptions. The skill ceiling is incredibly high in StarCraft II. The reason that BW is harder is because the better RTS players are playing this game. This means that the level of competition and skill required to compete with the best is higher. The macro mechanics, lack of smart casting, all that, is related to this, but it is not the over-arching factor related to this topic. It is, that the better RTS players, are playing BW.
With the oncoming switch, these players will set the standard for play. They will go beyond that of your average SC2 professional and surpass that of MVP. Just the sheer fact alone that they will go beyond the already mighty skills of people like MVP, Nestea, shows that the skill ceiling is high in StarCraft II. If it wasn't, MVP would already be invincible.
You're trying to predict an unknown future here, but I hope you're right.
Is it actually possible for it not to come true? MVP, while great in BW, was not at the same level as Flash, Jaedong, and probably 10 more current BW professionals. He is dominant in this game, but there is definitely skill gap between someone like MVP, and let's say Nada or MC. The fact that MVP is has moved higher towards the skill ceiling than others, shows that there is some level of difficulty here.
So let's say someone better than MVP comes along, considering the facts they should attain the height in the skill ceiling that MVP holds (using MVP for consistency now). If they actually are better, which they are, they will move higher than MVP, if MVP does not have the same amount of skill or doesn't improve.
The better players will move advance the skill ceiling. The macro mechanics of StarCraft II allow for deaths of units, faster money, gold basis, means armies can be recreated. Sustained harassment and multi-tasking limits options for your opponant. Being able to have multiple queues, automatic rallies for armies, one button, means that you can, well, multi-task more, at the same time.
This is not necessarily an option BW players have.
without reading all comments : you compare a game which is 12 years old, with one which is 1 1/2 years old. for sure in the near futuer there will be more options to control your units and micro them better. but we shouldnt forget, that BW and SC2 are 2 different games and i think its hard to compare these games right now in this very sensible way.
And I'm really worried that the skill ceiling is going to be reached or at the very least came very, very close to it in that skill is going to play less factor in games and its going to be more luck based like trying to catch your opponent off guard with say a build like 1-1-1 or mass roach and hydra like Stephano is doing against protoss.
This is stupid. There are so many variables that determine who turns out the winner: decision making, multi-tasking, army control and execution. You name it.
For example as Zerg you can have 50 larva all at once and produce 100 zerglings all at once and it doesn't force you to build units all the time and pressure your opponent, it creates this cushion where even if you weren't macroing all that well the past minute you can just fall back to your 20 or 50 larvae from before when nothing was happening.
That means you have to constantly inject to get that many larva, which in itself takes macro skills. And try produce 100 Zerglings against a bunch of stimmed marines and sieged tanks. It'll be bloody inefficient. And I'd like to see how a 3 base Zerg with that many larva fights off a Terran or Protoss who realizes that larva inefficiency and just takes 2-3 extra bases and then macros his butt off properly and just kills you. There are no rewards for leaving that many larva and not pressuring.
a lot of are talking about reaching perfect play, that of course is impossible for human, but reaching nearly perfect is much easier in sc2 than in BW.
On October 29 2011 18:29 hehe wrote: those control videos are impossible for a human to do those are pretty much TAS videos i can post the same thing for broodwar. + Show Spoiler +
we will never see anybody being able to pull off things like this
Agreed, and these videos are also completely beside the point I feel. As I see it, the question is whether or not the game allows for total domination. I think it's hard to tell man, but it does seem like the game is way way way easier to master due to: Clean way points Multible building selection Smart casting (Almost) unlimited control groups Queue up buildings Double rally for zergs
This is literally what I'm asking to make me have faith in SC2: Remove everything I just mentioned. And remove the artificial macro mechanics and the unit ball pathing aswell. Afterwards, Browder go nuts! I don't care which units you put in the game. It doesn't have to be a copy of bw for me to like it, but I do have a certain way I've come to expect a game named StarCraft to function. Now this is just my stupid opinion of what would make me play the game, and how it would allow the players who should dominate to dominate.
I am very happy that all the points you want to remove are in the game. I know many of the BW players like it when a player trains hard to do tasks that can easily be automated, but I and many others do not get excited by this. You are used to the BW mechanics, but would BW be a more exciting game for you if the macro mechanics were even harder? If the control groups were smaller? I didn't play BW, but I know that certain ai features are in it, like the ability to attack move or that once a worker is given the order to mine he continues to mine, you do not have to order him to go to the mineral patch every time. Do you think this features make the game worse or are you happy that they allow the players to spend their APM to other tasks?
the skill ceiling has already been reached, theres not much that top players can do to differentiate themselves, also there is no player who is outright indestructable
The micro skill ceiling for SC2 will never be reached. If you watch any of the micro AI videos, you'll see the capabilities of just a few units to absolutely destroy things. It's way way way to early to talk about mechanical skill ceilings, people can barely micro now as it is, let alone micro, macro and have the required multitasking. No. I'm not worried at all.
On October 29 2011 19:28 Fym wrote: the skill ceiling has already been reached, theres not much that top players can do to differentiate themselves, also there is no player who is outright indestructable
When I watch the mathces I see top player making mistakes all the time. I raraleyy have the feeling that somebody made everything perfect and lost. And only if no mistakes where made, then the skill ceiling would be rached. The automaton2000 bot videos are a good example, that large improvements can still be made. And yes top players (MVP, Nestea) differentiate themselves quite strongly already.
On October 29 2011 18:41 Gotmog wrote: No i am not worried. You people just have to start thinking for yourself.
You are comparing collosus micro to reaver micro ? Well, yah you can't do that.
Lets start with macro. We are no where near the ceiling . Terrans are queuing units like crazy! Zergs are missing injects, missing tumors, stacking thousands of minerals in mid/late game...
Micro is so horrible right now. What is stopping terrans from microing reapers up/down the cliffs on 1 expo, while doing blue flame medivacs (watch lucifron's medivac shooting micro). What is stopping protos players from manually using charge ? What is stopping HSM and people splitting only 1 unit to escape it rather then running the whole flock of "mutas" from it?
People complaing so much about clamping. Yet, we see Protoss using 1 hotkey, terran's not using hotkeys at all other then for drops and early game, zergs using up to 3 hotkeys... What is stopping you to use ~7 hotkeys, to split your army. To avoid those fungals, spread your army across entire map, etc etc.
How about doing something like focus void ray on each ultralisk (for example...) so they can charge up, instead of focus targeting ?
Can't wait for BW pros to switch. They might be able to use all that 50% extra speed they have (that they don't use on macro in sc2) on actual micro all around the map. Lets see what will happen to this game with 7 unit control groups....
Also, if you look at the units we are getting in HoTs this game will become harder to micro. All in builds are getting weaker. Maps are getting bigger...
Spot on IMO. There is still so much room for refinement in the current play that I can't believe people are seriously discussing this.
I am worried indeed, the sad thing is, even though Blizzard raised what was possible by getting rid of some macro squicks like no MBS or automine, they didn't raise the micro ceiling with it. They designed units that would work in Broodwar, but are pretty meh in SC2 pathing like the Collosus. That unit would work great since the pathing didn't automatically make every unit line up, but as of right now it is just designed to easily stand toe to toe with other armies to the point where micro on both the collosus end or the opponents end is minimalized.
I hope they will add more units that benefit from attackign from an angle or rotation like the hellion.
I can't remember who said it, but someone raised a good point saying that how often did you see a foreigner beat a Korean back in BW? Very rarely... In SC2 however, you actually see it quite often. Perhaps you can say that foreigners have just gotten better an have been practicing a lot more then they used to, you may be able to say that, but perhaps it could be said that the skill ceiling isn't that high.
Perhaps you shouldn't look at it as "If you are a better player than someone else, you should close to 100% of your matches". Rather look at it as "If I'm slightly better than you, I will win 55% of my matches against you", which in my opinion is better than the old philosophy. It's not so different than a lot of real life sports... It's seldom rare where you see soccer teams win 100% of their matches even though they have better players, they do win perhaps 75% of their matches but even occasionally someone who is a lot worse will luck out.
This is better for E-Sports imo, who the hell wants to see some terran who is slightly better than some other terran win 100% of there matches against them? It adds an element of surprise to catch your opponent of guard, Which brings me to another argument... Perhaps the game has turned into a game of intelligence more so than your ability to spam buttons really fast?
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.
but the thing is, higher skill ceilings would STILL allow for players to do flashy stuff that MMA currently does, only it would require higher skills to do the same thing, hence the definition of higher skill ceilings.
And I agree with OP completely. It is simply a fact that SC2 has lower skill ceiling than BW, there is just no question about that with automated mining, rally points, grouping more than 12 units, building and production grouping, etc etc.
In BW, a player that can manually do all of the above while still executing the right strategy and making the right decisions will be better than a player who can't do those (assuming all else equal). But in SC2, there is no difference between those two players as long as their strategical choices are equal.
But all that being said, I don't see a simple solution for Blizzard to fix this without hurting the game for the masses. There are more non-pro players than pros, and these things are clearly better for the masses.
This thread is stupidly knee-jerk with no evidence to back it up. This is why so many SC2 players think BW players are asses. Thinly veiled MBS/automine bitching imo
On October 29 2011 19:28 Fym wrote: the skill ceiling has already been reached, theres not much that top players can do to differentiate themselves, also there is no player who is outright indestructable
I watch the best players lose rallied units for absolutly nothing. I watch the best players a-move their units into forcefields while Stalkers stand safely behind and fire freely. I watch top players lose multiple bases to light harrassment. I watch top players run units away into forcefields while protoss destroy them for no damage taken. I watch top players float 10000 minerals 6000 gas and not have all relevant unit upgrades done or researching. I watch top level players attack with the ranged units infront of the melee units. I watch top level players clump up all their spellcasters in one small area. I watch top level players ddestroy their own Orbital due to lack of focus.
If this is the top of the skill ceiling SC2 is screwed. We are barly off the floor
we cant even compare the amount of time invested into BW and Sc2 to start seeing revolutionizing plays and micro, although the warp prism+HT to counter emp's had a nice flavour to it.
oh and to answer op, of course we havent reached the skill ceiling yet, what are you talking about.
oh of course not, bw's skill ceiling was lower back way back i mean people thought nada was perfect in his play, and we have come so far since then that I think in the next few years we will see a HUGE jump in the skill ceiling and sc2 will become quite hard (not quite as hard as bw yet but still very hard)
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.
but the thing is, higher skill ceilings would STILL allow for players to do flashy stuff that MMA currently does, only it would require higher skills to do the same thing, hence the definition of higher skill ceilings.
And I agree with OP completely. It is simply a fact that SC2 has lower skill ceiling than BW, there is just no question about that with automated mining, rally points, grouping more than 12 units, building and production grouping, etc etc.
In BW, a player that can manually do all of the above while still executing the right strategy and making the right decisions will be better than a player who can't do those (assuming all else equal). But in SC2, there is no difference between those two players as long as their strategical choices are equal.
But all that being said, I don't see a simple solution for Blizzard to fix this without hurting the game for the masses. There are more non-pro players than pros, and these things are clearly better for the masses.
"but the thing is, higher skill ceilings would STILL allow for players to do flashy stuff that MMA currently does, only it would require higher skills to do the same thing, hence the definition of higher skill ceilings" (I do not know how I can cite only a part of a posting) If you have this hgher skill to do the same thing with a worse UI, you might do even better things once you have a good UI. The fact that the skill ceiling cannot be reached means that you can always improve. A better UI will mean that the way your overall army behaves will be much better, given a better user interface.
The skill cap is definitely not reachable, but there won't be big differences between S class and A class gamers, which i dislike. I feel like this is almost already the case, and when many of those talented BW beasts switch it will be even more the case.
Though as HotS will change the strategies everything will be reset and we'll have to see what happens.
You can still see the skill celling being pushed on the MVP vs Bomber on Taldarim you could see a lot of amazing play and a lot of blunders (not just bomber).
People that say that SC2 have a lower skill ceiling makes no sense. Its not needed to have more than 200 apm to be a top player in SC2. But is APM really the best measurement for skill ceiling? In that case Beatmania has an insane skill ceiling compared to BW.
On October 29 2011 19:53 HolydaKing wrote: The skill cap is definitely not reachable, but there won't be big differences between S class and A class gamers, which i dislike. I feel like this is almost already the case, and when many of those talented BW beasts switch it will be even more the case.
Though as HotS will change the strategies everything will be reset and we'll have to see what happens.
Nestea and MVP are so the only S class players in SC2 currently. I mean Flash still loses games to lesser players does not mean he is not a step above them.
On October 29 2011 19:51 Sega92 wrote: oh of course not, bw's skill ceiling was lower back way back i mean people thought nada was perfect in his play, and we have come so far since then that I think in the next few years we will see a HUGE jump in the skill ceiling and sc2 will become quite hard (not quite as hard as bw yet but still very hard)
I think the definition of skill ceiling is the "best possible play that cannot be improved anymore". This means the skill ceiling cannot increase or decrease. Only what people think where the skill ceiling is can actually change, but most people know that nobody is even close to the skill ceiling currently.
Fair enough, although I missed my point a little bit in that of course you can never reach the full ceiling its humanly impossible, but what I was thinking more is along the lines of diminishing returns.
Sure blinking 10 stalkers perfectly vs blinking only 5 perfectly is going to gain you an advantage over the zerg's 30 roaches, but its not something really of importance and you could use that time instead of microing just building more units and thus you are limited in the micro opportunities you have !
Even the simplest actions can have extremely high "skill ceilings", we will never see someone hit the skill ceiling in sc2 because it's impossible. The thing with an easier game like sc2 is that you won't see as much difference between a good player and an amazing one like you will in broodwar.
On October 29 2011 19:56 TheBomb wrote: Fair enough, although I missed my point a little bit in that of course you can never reach the full ceiling its humanly impossible, but what I was thinking more is along the lines of diminishing returns.
Sure blinking 10 stalkers perfectly vs blinking only 5 perfectly is going to gain you an advantage over the zerg's 30 roaches, but its not something really of importance and you could use that time instead of microing just building more units and thus you are limited in the micro opportunities you have !
If you look at cycles in SC2 ----micro----------------- ------macro------ In BW ------micro------ -----------macro------------
In BW your macro limits your micro more In SC2 macro limits your micro less.
Your definition of skill is kind of wrong, to be frank. Let's say we got a skilled-ceiled player A which encounters a 1-1-1 build. If the player is skilled ceiled, he should then know what to do against a 1-1-1 to hold it? If not, then he is not skilled ceiled since he could not hold it. This obviously mean that skilled players take the luck factors out of there games and makes wins happens, bad players don't take such elements out of their play. So a big flux of cheesy build that requires luck is not comming, and relying on cheesy builds will just get you to code b.
I think Best example imo is if you look at the Chess game. This game is around for centuries and grandmasters still find ways and variables to their openings and strategies even after that long so if you compare it to starcraft that requires some physical skills, it will never stop to elvolve and get better.
My thoughts on this is that this thread adds nothing new to the endless amount of discussions on the same topic that's been going on for more than a year. Beside that your macro mechanic examples are very flawed.
On October 29 2011 20:08 karpo wrote: My thoughts on this is that this thread adds nothing new to the endless amount of discussions on the same topic that's been going on for more than a year. Beside that your macro mechanic examples are very flawed.
This should be the end of the thread. Pointless discussion.
The fact that things that cry for automating are automated in SC2 doesnt take away any possibility. If i dont have to click every building for training units i can use those clicks to make 2-3 FOCUSED attacks at the same time. In a complex game there is no such thing as skill ceiling.
i dont think the skill ceiling can ever be reached in sc2. the engine and mechanics are just too robotic and computer-like to be perfected by a human being
On October 29 2011 18:29 hehe wrote: those control videos are impossible for a human to do those are pretty much TAS videos i can post the same thing for broodwar. + Show Spoiler +
we will never see anybody being able to pull off things like this
Agreed, and these videos are also completely beside the point I feel. As I see it, the question is whether or not the game allows for total domination. I think it's hard to tell man, but it does seem like the game is way way way easier to master due to: Clean way points Multible building selection Smart casting (Almost) unlimited control groups Queue up buildings Double rally for zergs
This is literally what I'm asking to make me have faith in SC2: Remove everything I just mentioned. And remove the artificial macro mechanics and the unit ball pathing aswell. Afterwards, Browder go nuts! I don't care which units you put in the game. It doesn't have to be a copy of bw for me to like it, but I do have a certain way I've come to expect a game named StarCraft to function. Now this is just my stupid opinion of what would make me play the game, and how it would allow the players who should dominate to dominate.
I am very happy that all the points you want to remove are in the game. I know many of the BW players like it when a player trains hard to do tasks that can easily be automated, but I and many others do not get excited by this. You are used to the BW mechanics, but would BW be a more exciting game for you if the macro mechanics were even harder? If the control groups were smaller? I didn't play BW, but I know that certain ai features are in it, like the ability to attack move or that once a worker is given the order to mine he continues to mine, you do not have to order him to go to the mineral patch every time. Do you think this features make the game worse or are you happy that they allow the players to spend their APM to other tasks?
It is all about finding a balance between what's automated or easy and what's not. I feel bw did just that damn near perfect to get an easily playable and understandable game, while still maintaining a very pure expression of human conduct through the game. Taking automated features out of the game doesn't make it a worse game. SC2 isn't completely automated either, though it would be easy to make it that way. So does that mean blizzard made it worse? No, they also tried to find that perfect balance to the game when it comes to automated or easy functions. The max 12 unit/control group isn't a technological problem. It's a limit. Hacks were made in bw for terrible player to overcome this. However, blizzard is trying to serv a very wide audience with this game. As do most companies with their games these days. They make their games easier for them to appeal to a wider audience. You ask "Do you think this features make the game worse or are you happy that they allow the players to spend their APM to other tasks?". I've already answered the first part of that question, but I'm not sure as to what "other tasks" you're referring to. No matter how hard macroing is, you can still lose everything with a bad engagement. Microing isn't all of a sudden a more important aspect of the game.
I'm not worried one bit about skill ceiling. Top tier players are consistent enough. Players slumping like MC a few weeks ago can't blame anyone but themselves. He really was playing terrible at one time and got punished for his mediocre play. Now that he got his shit back together he is competing at the highest level again. All the top tier player have very good macro (but still not perfect) and there are a few different styles represented althouth these differences might not be as strong as in BW's.
Huk and his micro management, MVP and his systematic safety, Bomber/Idra's heavy macro and multitask, Stephano's 6th sense for efficient engagements... Each player still have a lot to learn from their fellow pro gamers. We will see how the best RTS player pool of korean BW will do in SC2 but I can't imagine anyone perfecting every aspects of a game with as many variables as SC2. SC2 design is still at its early stages. Let's wait for a bit, I'm sure we will see true S-class player emerge in the next few month. Most top tier players are still showing improvement over time and the game, as "easy" as it looks for BW fans, haven't been figured out at all.
This antagonism between BW and SC2 is getting tiresome. As a fan of both, I really don't think it helps each community teach the exciting aspect of "the other" game to each other...
This just sounds like nostalgia to me. Whether or not SC2 has the same height of skill ceiling, I don't know. But I don't see any evidence that we are actually anywhere near capping out on this game.
But my point is that I'm really worried about the skill ceiling and is it big enough and hard enough never to master or this one of those easy to learn, not that hard to master?
Name a sport or esport which is not too hard to reach the skillcap. Right, there is no such sport. In competitive play, the endless variability and the chance that someone will outcraft you is the very nature of why it's so fun to watch the games. No footballer knows all the moves, no chess-player will always remain unbeaten. The question is; is that a bad thing?
Since already 90% of the SC2 community is unable to reach the skillcap, and most players are still enjoying it anyway (because they fight people who are around the same level of skill) I don't see any problem with adding new and deeper properties to make the game's ultimate skillcap rise. In fact, I think it's a good thing.
Also, there will always be a little bit of luck involved, but that's just how fog of war and vision range work by nature.
By definition, the skill cap can never be reached. You could always be a little faster, a litte more precise, a little smarter. For example I've seen marine micro bots with around 10 000 apm still losing marines, so clearly the skill cap is not something a human being can accomplish.
On October 29 2011 18:41 Gotmog wrote: No i am not worried. You people just have to start thinking for yourself.
You are comparing collosus micro to reaver micro ? Well, yah you can't do that.
Lets start with macro. We are no where near the ceiling . Terrans are queuing units like crazy! Zergs are missing injects, missing tumors, stacking thousands of minerals in mid/late game...
Micro is so horrible right now. What is stopping terrans from microing reapers up/down the cliffs on 1 expo, while doing blue flame medivacs (watch lucifron's medivac shooting micro). What is stopping protos players from manually using charge ? What is stopping HSM and people splitting only 1 unit to escape it rather then running the whole flock of "mutas" from it?
People complaing so much about clamping. Yet, we see Protoss using 1 hotkey, terran's not using hotkeys at all other then for drops and early game, zergs using up to 3 hotkeys... What is stopping you to use ~7 hotkeys, to split your army. To avoid those fungals, spread your army across entire map, etc etc.
How about doing something like focus void ray on each ultralisk (for example...) so they can charge up, instead of focus targeting ?
Can't wait for BW pros to switch. They might be able to use all that 50% extra speed they have (that they don't use on macro in sc2) on actual micro all around the map. Lets see what will happen to this game with 7 unit control groups....
Also, if you look at the units we are getting in HoTs this game will become harder to micro. All in builds are getting weaker. Maps are getting bigger...
I agree whole heartedly with this. Every big engagement has so many instances of poor unit control. Immortals shooting Zealots, zealots trapped behind stalkers, roaches too far away for the entire group to shoot...
My biggest pet peeve is casters with no mana being sent to their death because they were in the same control group as fighting units that got a-moved in (and the player is relying on the caster casting spells to override the a-move command).
Multi-prong harass is also an obvious area where people just don't have the APM to do everything they want. How many players have a dropship just sitting behind a mineral line fully loaded because they were too busy micro-ing elsewhere? How often to players lost an expansion because they couldn't defend two places at once?
There's a long way to go skill wise before anyone should worry about the skill cap.
No, i really dont get this question. We already have super dominant players like MVP and NesTea, who still think they can play better. I really exited for the SC1 to SC2 switch but i wont worry about skill cap till i see it reached or someone comes really damn close consistently.
Posting Automaton 2000 videos in response to allegations of a low skill cap in SC2 is completely missing the point. In truth, I wonder if the people doing really believe it's a real counterargument.
The point isn't whether you can make fast units do better with a level of control completely unattainable by humans. This will always be true no matter what. But how useful is that? How useful is a pro separately controlling his Zerglings by running into Tanks? Does it make sense to allocate his APM there, instead of on other tasks? To me, it very clearly seems useless, it will do nearly nothing and they will have wasted all their effort.
To say that "Zergling micro against Tanks has a very high skill-cap", while technically true, is misleading and stupid. It cannot be done by a human to any noticable effect, period. In BW, sending a few Lings forward by themselves to soak up the first volley was the extent of it, but Tanks don't overkill in SC2...
Now, if you take something like multi-dropping as Terran, then you have a situation where spending more time and attention on controlling your multiple drops will always give you real benefits, while still having an enormously high skill-cap - like that Corsair/Reaver video of Bisu people were posting in the other thread. This is something SC2 needs more of. Well, that, and bio units being a little worse, so not controlling the drop can actually be punished...
On topic though, I do think that it's not unfeasible to reach the realistic skill-crap of Protoss in the near future. There's simply not enough opportunities for a Protoss player to show amazing play.
Of course, everyone is worried. Because if the skill ceiling is too "low" or that the benefits of better mechanics are too small that a blind "counter" still can win the game, Blizzard really destroyed Starcraft.
But, we have to think positively, right? No one wants to sit and just think about the possible outcome instead of seeing it happen right there in front of your eyes. When these BW pros switch to SC2 we will see where the skill ceiling truly stands and hopefully it will make Starcraft better than it already is.
I highly doubt we'll ever reach the skill ceiling. You still have to make decisions. Sure the mechanics are easier, however what good is mechanics if you don't have good decision making.
The world's best players do not have enough APM at the moment to perform the most micro intensive battles while maintaining macro. Additionally, for as long as there are "deathballs", the players of the game are nowhere near the skill ceiling. BW was nowhere near its skill ceiling, and while SC2 starts players higher up than BW did, we're also nowhere near SC2's skill ceiling. Don't confuse a young game still being "figured" out for people hitting the skill ceiling. It's not the same thing. Look at how far the community and the metagame comes in just a couple months. The game is growing and developing exponentially. Yet, there's still tons of room to grow and refine.
On October 29 2011 21:17 Toadvine wrote: Posting Automaton 2000 videos in response to allegations of a low skill cap in SC2 is completely missing the point. In truth, I wonder if the people doing really believe it's a real counterargument.
The point isn't whether you can make fast units do better with a level of control completely unattainable by humans. This will always be true no matter what. But how useful is that? How useful is a pro separately controlling his Zerglings by running into Tanks? Does it make sense to allocate his APM there, instead of on other tasks? To me, it very clearly seems useless, it will do nearly nothing and they will have wasted all their effort.
To say that "Zergling micro against Tanks has a very high skill-cap", while technically true, is misleading and stupid. It cannot be done by a human to any noticable effect, period. In BW, sending a few Lings forward by themselves to soak up the first volley was the extent of it, but Tanks don't overkill in SC2...
Now, if you take something like multi-dropping as Terran, then you have a situation where spending more time and attention on controlling your multiple drops will always give you real benefits, while still having an enormously high skill-cap - like that Corsair/Reaver video of Bisu people were posting in the other thread. This is something SC2 needs more of. Well, that, and bio units being a little worse, so not controlling the drop can actually be punished...
On topic though, I do think that it's not unfeasible to reach the realistic skill-crap of Protoss in the near future. There's simply not enough opportunities for a Protoss player to show amazing play.
This exactly. People are taking the skill ceiling concept too literally. It's obvious that nobody has achieved or will ever achieve the literal skill ceiling. The real problem is that lesser players can achieve almost the same efficiency doing far less then a greater player. The zergling example mentioned illustrates exactly this. That is also the reason why a Plat player with 80 apm can take a Master player with 160 by doing an 1-base all in.
On October 29 2011 18:07 Mise wrote: The true skill ceiling of SC2 is humanly impossible to reach. To achieve the skill ceiling you need to macro perfectly and micro invidual units through the whole game. You can't play that fast you'd need thousands of APM.
I agree completely. Even with vanilla SC2 the skill ceiling will be impossible to reach by any human, including the gods of BW. Perhaps a well-programmed machine, 20 years from now, can reach it. Today's AI is simply not good enough.
On October 29 2011 21:17 Toadvine wrote: Posting Automaton 2000 videos in response to allegations of a low skill cap in SC2 is completely missing the point. In truth, I wonder if the people doing really believe it's a real counterargument.
The point isn't whether you can make fast units do better with a level of control completely unattainable by humans. This will always be true no matter what. But how useful is that? How useful is a pro separately controlling his Zerglings by running into Tanks? Does it make sense to allocate his APM there, instead of on other tasks? To me, it very clearly seems useless, it will do nearly nothing and they will have wasted all their effort.
To say that "Zergling micro against Tanks has a very high skill-cap", while technically true, is misleading and stupid. It cannot be done by a human to any noticable effect, period. In BW, sending a few Lings forward by themselves to soak up the first volley was the extent of it, but Tanks don't overkill in SC2...
Now, if you take something like multi-dropping as Terran, then you have a situation where spending more time and attention on controlling your multiple drops will always give you real benefits, while still having an enormously high skill-cap - like that Corsair/Reaver video of Bisu people were posting in the other thread. This is something SC2 needs more of. Well, that, and bio units being a little worse, so not controlling the drop can actually be punished...
On topic though, I do think that it's not unfeasible to reach the realistic skill-crap of Protoss in the near future. There's simply not enough opportunities for a Protoss player to show amazing play.
This exactly. People are taking the skill ceiling concept too literally. It's obvious that nobody has achieved or will ever achieve the literal skill ceiling. The real problem is that lesser players can achieve almost the same efficiency doing far less then a greater player. The zergling example mentioned illustrates exactly this. That is also the reason why a Plat player with 80 apm can take a Master player with 160 by doing an 1-base all in.
No true Platinum player would regularly beat a true Master, only the rare surprise win is possible and that'd be only because the Master didn't scout properly which would be a rare thing for a Master to do.
No. just no. mules havent lowered the roof, the fact that youd even cite mules as something that lowers the skill cap shows you dont really know what you're talking about. Citing having 50 larva at once? If you let a zerg sit on 50 larva you already lost, and it wasnt because of cheap macro mechanics.
There's no way to ever reach the cap. Sure players will dominate for awhile, but thats the nature of competition. It doesn't mean they've unlocked god mode.
My hope is people will be pleasantly surprised as the competitive scene continues to grow, the meta-game continues to shift, etc.
On October 29 2011 17:59 Dodgin wrote: Right now I agree with you, but there is still two more expansions to go and the game will change, new units will be added. ( more spellcasters, increasing the skill cap )
Spellcasters are actually easier to micro than normal units to get the maximum use out of them. For instance, marines have to be babysit because they are so fragile, yet they have amazing mobility and dps. On the other hand, a spellcaster like an infestor will already be worth its cost once you smart cast a few fungals off. No amount of micro will make a spellcaster more efficient once it's run out of energy.
Of course, they may decide to add in more combat-spellcasters, which would have the best of both worlds.
I think spellcasters just add to the volatility of the game. Your concentration slipped once or you were just paying attention to something else? Then you'll lose your whole army and no amount of great macro can save you.
Starcraft 2 doesnt have the same shitty UI and possibilities brood war did, making it 10x harder to do simple things (8 units to a control group, etc)
That doesnt mean that its easy, it means the players arent working hard enough or finding the things they are capable of doing now that they dont have to worry about that brood war stuff.
300 APM in brood war -> able to micro/macro effectively
300 APM in SC2 -> that and limitless potential.
You havent seen whats to be had in SC2 yet because its so young, broodwar didnt fucking turn up yesterday you know.
In RTS, the things with a skill ceiling are you vs the game. Anything where the opponent comes into play, such as the micro and strategy aspects, has no skill ceiling. By lowering the skill ceiling of macro, and making the controls easier in sc2 than sc1, players can still use their APM for other things like micro and being managing many groups of units at once.
Most aspects of the game still have no skill ceiling. IMO it's better to lower the skill ceiling on the things that have one rather than raise it, so the focus of the game can actually be on the things which have no skill ceiling. I'd imagine in sc2 it's possible every player in a tournament could have %100 perfect macro one day, and seeing who comes out on top in that situation and why is really exciting to me.
On October 29 2011 21:17 Toadvine wrote: Posting Automaton 2000 videos in response to allegations of a low skill cap in SC2 is completely missing the point. In truth, I wonder if the people doing really believe it's a real counterargument.
The point isn't whether you can make fast units do better with a level of control completely unattainable by humans. This will always be true no matter what. But how useful is that? How useful is a pro separately controlling his Zerglings by running into Tanks? Does it make sense to allocate his APM there, instead of on other tasks? To me, it very clearly seems useless, it will do nearly nothing and they will have wasted all their effort.
To say that "Zergling micro against Tanks has a very high skill-cap", while technically true, is misleading and stupid. It cannot be done by a human to any noticable effect, period. In BW, sending a few Lings forward by themselves to soak up the first volley was the extent of it, but Tanks don't overkill in SC2...
Now, if you take something like multi-dropping as Terran, then you have a situation where spending more time and attention on controlling your multiple drops will always give you real benefits, while still having an enormously high skill-cap - like that Corsair/Reaver video of Bisu people were posting in the other thread. This is something SC2 needs more of. Well, that, and bio units being a little worse, so not controlling the drop can actually be punished...
On topic though, I do think that it's not unfeasible to reach the realistic skill-crap of Protoss in the near future. There's simply not enough opportunities for a Protoss player to show amazing play.
This exactly. People are taking the skill ceiling concept too literally. It's obvious that nobody has achieved or will ever achieve the literal skill ceiling. The real problem is that lesser players can achieve almost the same efficiency doing far less then a greater player. The zergling example mentioned illustrates exactly this. That is also the reason why a Plat player with 80 apm can take a Master player with 160 by doing an 1-base all in.
well right now MVP has been dominating every single player in the world except losing to MMA 1 series.... so I'm pretty sure Flash etc. will be just as dominant .... not worried
I don't understand why people act like anyone is close to MVP because no one really is
I am going to lol if Flash/Bis/Jaedong come out and says the skill gap is fine and no one is playing correctly yet.
Sc2 doesn't offer as much as BW does in differentiating skill between players. And unfortunately even the micro side of it isn't as skill based as it was in BW.
SC2 was designed to be noob friendly, that's not an esports mentality at all.
I am a little worried, and it seems soon my worries will either be proven right or wrong when BW pros play SC2. If there's no clear S class separation of players, then I think it is evidence that the game is just simply too easy in general.
You have to consider other factors, such as maps, balance changes.
For example, if you're a chef, and you can cook meal for 5 people at the same time. If each of them only order 1 or 2 dishes the number of 5 remain the same, you will reach your skill ceiling, and so is the next guy, and the next next guy. But if there're 50 people you need to cook for, and each of them order even 1,2 meal, you will need much more skill to cook for those, while the next guy will fail off. So although you two can cook the same menu, the same food, and keep up with each other for a while, the difference will show clearly later on.
Talk about BW, in some of the earliest days, the map didn't even have naturals, how much skill ceiling you think you can have with just one base? In the early days of competitive BW, players didn't even make bunker, cannon, colonies because their army can cover both base just fine, but later on, you see how boat loads of cannon and colonies Zerg and Protoss have to make in each base? The game will evolve because of outside factors.Your skill will go up because there's a demand of it to go up.
On October 29 2011 18:07 Mise wrote: The true skill ceiling of SC2 is humanly impossible to reach. To achieve the skill ceiling you need to macro perfectly and micro invidual units through the whole game. You can't play that fast you'd need thousands of APM.
I agree completely. Even with vanilla SC2 the skill ceiling will be impossible to reach by any human, including the gods of BW. Perhaps a well-programmed machine, 20 years from now, can reach it. Today's AI is simply not good enough.
You totally don't get the point. Of course you can't be perfect, but if the skill ceiling isn't very high, you don't benefit a lot from being better than your opponent if you only can use your additional skill to micro some marines and have some seconds of less production downtime. Than the winner will most likely be determined by "luck" (build order wins, timings, catching units, etc.). Only in some matches the actual skill difference will matter.
I think the concerns are valid, but so far I still see a lot of potential.
On October 29 2011 17:54 TheBomb wrote:And for example if we compared say the reaver/shuttle micro of SC1 with Colossus micro in SC2 it doesn't even begin to compare. SC1 micro was much more challenging, but also had much bigger rewards.
We are now seeing something along those lines with the warp prism/high templars and this is actually great, but compared to SC1 micro you are quite limited.
I don't want to insult you for having pointless arguments and a less than useful point of view, so I'm just going to ask you not to compare BW and SC 2. You were not the first and you won't be the last and all of you have nothing to add to the discussion except trying to undermine SC 2 each time you can.
The whole notion of the skill cap being too low has always seemed laughable to me. After all, what is a skill cap? It is the idea that there is a point where a player being faster and making better decisions no longer yields any reward. Do you all remember the computer controlled zergling split video that let them beat a huge terran siege line easily and all it took was thousands of APM. So until I see perfect ling splits with perfect macro and perfect decision making becoming a standard the skill ceiling is fine and we should worry way more about balance. The 1-1-1 is an example of a highly imbalanced strategy but no player who has ever played the game, even in such tough times, has ever stopped being rewarded for being better. They just may not be getting rewarded enough to win under these severe circumstances.
one problem is that there is a gsl every month. this way the hole metagame evolves faster because there are more games (=more possibilities to show and analyze new strategies), so that a player may only dominate like 3 months instead of maybe 9 months, as he would in sc:bw
In these arguments, mechanical skill tends to be way too much of a focus. Games have more skill to them than the speed of which you press buttons. Take games like Street Fighter - they have incredibly simple mechanics, yet seemingly no skill cap.
So instead of mechanical skill, why don't we discuss tactical skill? In a game like Starcraft, tactical skill has virtually no skill-cap.
Those micro videos are a terrible example. You CANT do that. You would have to be psychic and know which zergling the tank was going to fire at and split it. The point is lesser skilled players beat more skilled opponents in SC2. How often do 'progamers' who practice 12 hours a day lost to people on the ladder? All the time. How often would average joe beat a BW progamer? Probably never. If your playing the game for 12 hours a day there needs to be a significant difference between you and someone playing it for fun. I don't see how that fact doesn't bother people who watch SC2.
I have no idea why you would ever compare micro of reaver/shuttle drops to colossus. They aren't even remotely related, of course comparing those two aspects is going to make sc2 look like shit.
On October 29 2011 23:08 KingAce wrote: Sc2 doesn't offer as much as BW does in differentiating skill between players. And unfortunately even the micro side of it isn't as skill based as it was in BW.
SC2 was designed to be noob friendly, that's not an esports mentality at all.
No, it was designed to have a high skill ceiling and be appropriate for competitive play (which it is), while also being accessible for lower skilled players so that, you know, people actually buy and play the game. I'm sure the hardcore BW enthusiasts would have loved the sequel to have 8 bit graphics and an antiquated UI but the game would have bombed everywhere outside of Korea (and maybe there too).
As for there not being enough to separate top players in SC2, the win ratios between the elite in that game and BW are similar, as are the frequency of upsets. If there is enough in the game for guys like MVP and NesTea to separate themselves from the pack, why couldn't Flash, Jaedong and co. separate themselves even further?
SC2 may have a lower skill ceiling than BW but it's one that will never be reached by any human being. The game has existed as an esport for well over a year now and we still see even the best players' play littered with mistakes, which will continue to be the case if/when we see the top BW players switch over.
A simple way to increase the skill cap is to increase the food cap, which is lower than in BW because of less mining from harvesters & more food cost from units. Then I'd like to see more powerful AoE so pros have to split their armies as balls are not that great to see, at least to me.
Those micro videos are a terrible example. You CANT do that. You would have to be psychic and know which zergling the tank was going to fire at and split it. The point is lesser skilled players beat more skilled opponents in SC2. How often do 'progamers' who practice 12 hours a day lost to people on the ladder? All the time. How often would average joe beat a BW progamer? Probably never. If your playing the game for 12 hours a day there needs to be a significant difference between you and someone playing it for fun. I don't see how that fact doesn't bother people who watch SC2.
as much as I agree with this, the game isn't as old as BW. I feel like Sc2 is a lot like poker, the person with the most experience usually wins the hand but isn't invincible.
On October 29 2011 23:33 sh4w wrote: Those micro videos are a terrible example. You CANT do that. You would have to be psychic and know which zergling the tank was going to fire at and split it. The point is lesser skilled players beat more skilled opponents in SC2. How often do 'progamers' who practice 12 hours a day lost to people on the ladder? All the time. How often would average joe beat a BW progamer? Probably never. If your playing the game for 12 hours a day there needs to be a significant difference between you and someone playing it for fun. I don't see how that fact doesn't bother people who watch SC2.
But what you say has nothing o do with a skill ceiling. The fact that you CANT do that means that the skill ceiling is unreachable, and you can always practice to get closer to that. You never run out of room for improvement. By the way, stephano was once like 60-1 on the ladder, so really good players can differentiate themselves on the ladder.
I'm not worried at all. The game is still very new not everything has been figured out. Plus there are still two more expansions to come out. I think its to soon to worried about reaching the skill cap.
Sc2 has no skill ceiling It's still very young, just around 2.5 years I believe Sc2 is a long way away from reaching anywhere near the skill ceiling There's just too much potential
But if you were to assume the perfect player, capable of dominating anyone (Nestea, MVP, MC, Naniwa, Stephano) He will need a large pool of builds and tactics to counter every single style there is possible in Sc2 (lets face it that seems impossible) If that were to occur.. well then we have witnessed the ceiling
On October 29 2011 23:33 sh4w wrote: Those micro videos are a terrible example. You CANT do that. You would have to be psychic and know which zergling the tank was going to fire at and split it. The point is lesser skilled players beat more skilled opponents in SC2. How often do 'progamers' who practice 12 hours a day lost to people on the ladder? All the time. How often would average joe beat a BW progamer? Probably never. If your playing the game for 12 hours a day there needs to be a significant difference between you and someone playing it for fun. I don't see how that fact doesn't bother people who watch SC2.
On October 29 2011 23:33 sh4w wrote: Those micro videos are a terrible example. You CANT do that. You would have to be psychic and know which zergling the tank was going to fire at and split it. The point is lesser skilled players beat more skilled opponents in SC2. How often do 'progamers' who practice 12 hours a day lost to people on the ladder? All the time. How often would average joe beat a BW progamer? Probably never. If your playing the game for 12 hours a day there needs to be a significant difference between you and someone playing it for fun. I don't see how that fact doesn't bother people who watch SC2.
Surely you understand people use ladder most of the time to test things and hone builds so they lose a lot while testing if something is viable etc. I see top players mostly losing to other top players if they play seriously.
Also there is so much stuff pro players still aren't doing that they should be doing and they eventually will be doing. For example
I've never seen pro's do that even though it increases efficiency ridiculously. There are so many places for improvement and even pro's will say this is true.
On October 29 2011 21:11 AudionovA wrote: No, i really dont get this question. We already have super dominant players like MVP and NesTea, who still think they can play better. I really exited for the SC1 to SC2 switch but i wont worry about skill cap till i see it reached or someone comes really damn close consistently.
Yeah and Nestea and MVP were both mid B level players in Brood War. Now imagine the high B level players and their skill, then imagine A level players and then imagine S level players like Bisu, Jaedong, Flash, Stork, etc... They are going to rip apart the game I feel and all possible things to improve would be small and insignificant sort of gimmicky things that don't really make you an advantage no matter how good you do them.
So my point is about diminishing returns. I mean microing 10 stalkers against 40 roaches is never going to work no matter how good you micro the 10 stalkers with blink. So my point is if you think the game will come to that level where yes you can do more things, but they are so gimmicky and do not represent real skill.
Another diminishing return example: Mircoing zealots against marine and marauders.
But ultimately I'm looking of how many high level micro/high level reward do we have in SC2?
In SC1 we had lurkers vs marines vs tanks vs dark swarm vs irradiate vs scourge, then you had firebats coming in late vs lurkers and zerglings, etc.... in SC1 we had shuttle/reaver vs terran or zerg either mineral line or armies, we had corsairs with disruption web in support of reaver/shuttle vs say in zerg hydralisks, zerglings and scourge.
In SC2 I can only think of marines and tanks vs zerglings and balenings vs fungal. And we see more tanks to counter infestors. Other is hellions vs zerglings and mutalisks vs marines, but notice how things stop within 3 to 4 units?
I think a lot of fair points have been brought forward. Yet I'd like you to turn your attention to HuK, who right now, is doing incredibly well due to his insanely good micro. Yes, there might, like someone posted earlier, a diminishing return higher than in BW when it comes to pure micro, simply due to units not being retarded (looking at you, dragoon).
However, day9 put it well with this: apm not spent on stupid units is apm you can spend elsewhere.
On October 29 2011 23:33 sh4w wrote: Those micro videos are a terrible example. You CANT do that. You would have to be psychic and know which zergling the tank was going to fire at and split it. The point is lesser skilled players beat more skilled opponents in SC2. How often do 'progamers' who practice 12 hours a day lost to people on the ladder? All the time. How often would average joe beat a BW progamer? Probably never. If your playing the game for 12 hours a day there needs to be a significant difference between you and someone playing it for fun. I don't see how that fact doesn't bother people who watch SC2.
But what you say has nothing o do with a skill ceiling. The fact that you CANT do that means that the skill ceiling is unreachable, and you can always practice to get closer to that. You never run out of room for improvement. By the way, stephano was once like 60-1 on the ladder, so really good players can differentiate themselves on the ladder.
Well the arbitrary question floating around is how reach the USEFUL skill cealing is. Microing individual zerglings is ofcourse impossible for a human - thus an unreachable skill cealing. However this isn't really useful. Even though you have perfect ling micro against siege tanks - if you're basically that good, a player like Nestea can still beat you 50/50 as that micro isn't really enough to differentiate yourself from another great player..
I think that's the theory behind SC2 skill cealing being low.
While some macro mechanics may be more forgiving than others, they don't provide a cushion the way you think.
Bad zerg players miss injections. It's not the MAKING units that's hard for zerg per se, but more the retaining an availability of larva. It was the same in BW, in that you needed to make sure you had the right amount of hatches at the right time and you were also constantly producing out of them.
While terran can miss mules and just cast two at a time in the future, that may seem forgiving, but you have to consider that professional terran players base their infrastructure around their total income, so casting mules at the appropriate time is crucial to executing a build correctly
Same thing with protoss. You could argue that if you build up too much energy, you could simply chrono two things, but a lot of protoss builds have their chrono boosts planned all the way up to the 20's or 30's, knowing for sure when and where they need to cast each one as a means to execute their timing properly.
Something people also don't consider with "skill ceilings' is that yes, one could argue that eventually every pro player is expected to macro perfectly all game every game or he instantly loses. But also, what about professional players moving over who have 400+ apm?
Supposing they only need a fraction of their true potential hand speed to macro perfectly, then as strategies shift and tactics evolve, you'll be seeing quad pronged drops, players using three seperate armies with casters and microing them extremely well. They'll find a way to stress their opponent's mechanics regardless of the game's limitations.
The OP, and seemingly all of the discussion (unless I missed something looking through it) are entirely about mechanics. Will anyone get perfect mechanics in SC2? No, microing 3 or 4 simultaneous drops is still going to be insanely hard. What is true is that the marginal advantage you get from better mechanics will be a little lower than it was in BW. But that's not the only kind of skill. There is watching your opponents games and figuring out exactly what timing they're usually weak at. Or figuring out what timings they don't use very much to attack, and cutting corners right at that time to get ahead. Or seeing a small army being in a weird place, getting suspicious, and sacrificing an overlord to see the weird tech incoming. In short, there is strategy. It's too early to tell, but my bet is that the skill ceiling for the strategy part of the game will never even be close to reached. And frankly, if it is, that means (for me, at least) that the game design isn't good enough and that it's not interesting to watch. Adding harder mechanics wouldn't fix that.
While it is true that is true that Broodwar at the moment requires more skill but you seem to forget a couple things. You are comparing a not 2year old game compared to a decade+ one. You are comparing a fully expanded game to a game that still has 2expansions to go so there is still a lot of stuff that can be added. You are saying that a lot of stuff is automated but ever thought about the fact that you now have spare "clicks" left to do other stuff? It's not like you lose that crazy APM, instead of doing tasks like manually clicking your workers to mineral patches you can do stuff like creep spread.
There are still a lot mistakes in pro-gamers their play so we are not even near the skillcap. Remember, pre gsl open season 2 people thought using marines vs banelings was suicide, then came MKP. It just takes time for all this stuff to be discovered. I doubt those awesome micro vids are from when sc1 was less then 2year old.
I'm not worried at all because , you are forgetting that there's only a small percentage of UBER PLAYERS , remember that the back bone of the community are normal skill players, like you and me.
So by making an impossible game worthy of legends, it just wouldn't click, why do you think SC2 iis EXPLOTING right now?.
I feel the skillcap of all races has not been hit yet, but when if blizz dosen't do anything the,,,
Protoss will be the first race to hit skill cap and that will cause a huge collapse in protoss play since they cannot improve anymore.
Terran i think will be the first to hit to skill cap after that since the mule is so noob friendly, there would need to be a call down cd like inject or else it will crush Terran in the long run. The micro of terran will surpass zerg and protoss but i think there will be a limit to how much the human body can do.
Zerg should be the last to hit the skill cap. With injects and creep spread begin much harder than mules and chrono that will take a while to perfect.
Terran i think will be the first to hit to skill cap after that since the mule is so noob friendly, there would need to be a call down cd like inject or else it will crush Terran in the long run. The micro of terran will surpass zerg and protoss but i think there will be a limit to how much the human body can do.
See, now I don't really think a cooldown on mules is a good idea, we need to save energy for scans and if we come to the point where we don't need the scans anymore, we can use the energy.
The difference between inject and mules is light and day. Mules gives you minerals sure, but then you mine out quicker, Inject has a cooldown as the ability has to happen over time. Instantly getting like what, 9 new larva would be hella OP late game, you could just reinforce your whole army in seconds and crush whatever opponent as they wouldn't be able to build up as fast as you.
Heck, look at late game zerg now, lose most of your army and reinforce with 100 lings from all that larva you have saved up. Then you go and win as long as you had a favourable engagement beforehand. Also, queens have Tranfuse which too many pros still don't use late game (especially Transfuse on fighting ultras/broods/mutas etc) so it could be favourable to save energy for that late game when your larva pools up anyways.
The game is still largely undiscovered, especially on the protoss side of things.
Actually it's not that hard to inject and spread creep perfectly. All you have to do is look the timer and it tells you when to spread creep and when to inject again.
The thing is, smarts has no skill ceiling. And in a strategy game, i don't really care if i see a player with surperior mechanics losing to one with inferior ones. I actually get happy, cuz that means outwitting, is more of a factor, than tapping your toes. The one good thing hard mechanics does offer though, is consistency.
Like other people have already posted: there's nothing stopping T, P, or Z from using more effective harassment and more effective engagements, as the APM required for perfect macro in this game is not very high, especially early or late game.
yes. because micro in this game is pretty much solely devoted to splitting up units and target firing. anyone care to give any more examples because those are pretty much the ONLY thing. flanking doesn't count because that is not micro.
On October 30 2011 00:25 ejozl wrote: The thing is, smarts has no skill ceiling. And in a strategy game, i don't really care if i see a player with surperior mechanics losing to one with inferior ones. I actually get happy, cuz that means outwitting, is more of a factor, than tapping your toes. The one good thing hard mechanics does offer though, is consistency.
There is a limit actually because it's a strategy game with limited information (like poker). At some point just the random luck of choosing the correct the build order against the other player could outweigh the "smarts" of the player. Not saying it's headed that way yet, but there is a ceiling.
Nope, the skill ceiling is already reaching out to infinity. I don't think it's possible for any human to reach the skill ceiling; there is always something to improve on.
Anyway, I really wouldn't worry about skill ceilings until we actually get there.
In the meantime just enjoy watching/playing sc2. You might not enjoy it as much as bw but for me it seems entirely fair and entertaining that a player can win by outwitting, outmacroing or outmicroing his/her opponent in sc2.
On October 30 2011 00:25 ejozl wrote: The thing is, smarts has no skill ceiling. And in a strategy game, i don't really care if i see a player with surperior mechanics losing to one with inferior ones. I actually get happy, cuz that means outwitting, is more of a factor, than tapping your toes. The one good thing hard mechanics does offer though, is consistency.
There is a limit actually because it's a strategy game with limited information (like poker). At some point just the random luck of choosing the correct the build order against the other player could outweigh the "smarts" of the player. Not saying it's headed that way yet, but there is a ceiling.
Well, I guess the information was also limited in BW. The question is how much you can read out of your scouting information. Edit: Ok I answered a little bit away from your posting. Regarding the skill ceiling. It is also not sure if the skill ceiling in scouting can be reached.
On October 30 2011 00:25 ejozl wrote: The thing is, smarts has no skill ceiling. And in a strategy game, i don't really care if i see a player with surperior mechanics losing to one with inferior ones. I actually get happy, cuz that means outwitting, is more of a factor, than tapping your toes. The one good thing hard mechanics does offer though, is consistency.
There is a limit actually because it's a strategy game with limited information (like poker). At some point just the random luck of choosing the correct the build order against the other player could outweigh the "smarts" of the player. Not saying it's headed that way yet, but there is a ceiling.
...And yet we see the same people winning poker tournaments again and again.
I'm not worried at all... We have two expansions coming up and when it comes to Z we dont know the full potential of the race untill people fully lands the inject and macro properly.
There's plenty of room for more skill in SC2. The surface has not even been scratched. Watch games with the best current players in SC2, even at the highest levels between MVP and Nestea, and a casual observer can point out many, many, many small mistakes, and big ones as well.
Code 'A' games are often laughably bad with blunder after blunder being traded between opponents - and these are among the best players in the world!
Once the game gets past the opening builds and into the decision making phase, human beings, even the best trained pro-gamers, do not have the multitasking of managing multiple bases, engagements, scouting, macro, micro, harass, planning, anticipation - everything needed to play "Perfectly."
At any moment there's 20 things to do yet pro-gamers have micro-seconds to evaluate and decide. Under those constraints the most well trained mind WILL make mistakes, lots of them. Put money on the line, and for many of these players their livelihoods - and highly trained pros make mistakes that even gold players would not make in the comfort of their living room. Its the nature of sports or E-sports.
The idea of a skill ceiling is in itself, flawed. There's no such thing. We're not playing pong. There's so many decisions needed, so much to do, in so little time, 300 APM is necessary just to cover the simple acts of producing units and microing your army in battle.
The drop I had planned? Too busy right now. Expanding? No time, maybe later. Oh crap, I have 10 SCV's doing nothing. I just lost 4 ghosts!! ARGGHHHHHH I need a tech lab - have to start making vikings - Need another starport - Does he have Hive? Oh CRAAAAAAP, He's GOT BROOD LORDS!!!!!
Skill ceiling? The best players in the world have their hands full managing the simple second to second decisions to keep up with the action. For all the blunders and mistakes they make, we're amazed at how much better they are than us. So have no fear. Until humans develop well past where we are, there will be no skill ceiling reached.
The problem in the back of my mind with most of these "Sc2 skill ceiling" ideas, is that they assume there is nothing to be discovered. It's a false assumption in my opinion. This is also the same problem with peoples concepts of balance in the games current state. It's all about efficiency. So I'll pose a question.
Do you believe 100% efficiency has been achieved?
I don't think anyone has come close. For example (and these are all directed at the highest level of play)
Do we see zerg players using overseers to delay key production whenever they have extra money or are maxed and can't produce more units? They should be doing this every game, in every match up. Contaminating robo facilities, factories, starports, or enemy hatcheries.
Do we see crono being used as soon as possible all the time? No, not even close. Keep in mind chrono is time, time can't be made up.
Do we see OC energy being used ASAP all the time? No, sure a terran can drop 4 mules at a time, but unless they are about to take a new base (gold), that money could already be made and spent.
Do we see terrans making scouting reapers throughout the game, no, instead of spending 50/50 they drop a scan that could be 270 from a mule.
Do we see Protoss hitting all of their warp cycles and making plenty of obs, and using warp in harrass throughout the game? Sometimes, much more recently.
Do we see zergs using overlords to spread creep throughout the game (even in the edges of their own bases)? No, we see overlords sitting idle in groups as early as midgame.
Do we see zergs using nydus to get good positioning and help defend spread out bases? No, not often, it's common in BW though.
Are hallucinations getting used enough? No, but we'll see a flock of sentries sitting idle with full energy.
Do we see units clearing destructible rocks early when they are sitting idle? Sometimes.
Do we see protoss always having proxy pylons around the map? Sometimes
Do we see zergs using burrow almost every game, to delay expansions and keep map vision, or burrow banelings? Sometimes
Do we see spellcasters being babied and players making sure they get the most value possible? No, I constantly see Templar getting wasted and not turning into archons when they could have, Infestors running around pointlessly dying after fungals, I think terrans are a little bit better about ghosts.
Do we still see medevacs sitting idle waiting to die after a drop instead of returning home when the drop is cleaned up? yes
Do we always see army's getting spread out, using flanking and the best positioning possible? Sometimes.
Do we see zergs using transfuse, or doing burrow micro with roaches (blink style) to get the most out of every unit? Sometimes
Do we see sensor towers getting used to always be in position to defend harassment? No, (some might argue this, but I doubt loosing workers or addons isn't worth the cost of the tower)
Do we see terrans getting +2 building armor or pf/turret range upgrade when they are getting muta harrassed? Rarely
Have gas timings been nearly as refined for all the races as they were in BW? Nope
My hypothesis is that when we see more top BW players enter sc2, and the game has more time to evolve, most of the answers to these questions will change. I don't know how different things will be in HOTS, and legacy of the void. But when you really think about all the things I've pointed out, and the possibility of things no one has even thought of yet, do you still think anyone has come anywhere near the absolute skill ceiling in sc2?
On October 29 2011 23:33 sh4w wrote: Those micro videos are a terrible example. You CANT do that. You would have to be psychic and know which zergling the tank was going to fire at and split it. The point is lesser skilled players beat more skilled opponents in SC2. How often do 'progamers' who practice 12 hours a day lost to people on the ladder? All the time. How often would average joe beat a BW progamer? Probably never. If your playing the game for 12 hours a day there needs to be a significant difference between you and someone playing it for fun. I don't see how that fact doesn't bother people who watch SC2.
But what you say has nothing o do with a skill ceiling. The fact that you CANT do that means that the skill ceiling is unreachable, and you can always practice to get closer to that. You never run out of room for improvement. By the way, stephano was once like 60-1 on the ladder, so really good players can differentiate themselves on the ladder.
Your post makes no sense whatsoever. So CAN'T get closer to those examples, because you CAN'T control two or more groups of units simultaneously. And those examples require you to control dozens of units individually, all at the same time. Not only is a human being incapable of mimicking them, but he's also not capable of making his imperfect effort give him any sort of advantage as as soon as he shifts his attention to another unit of his, his other units start clumping again. Not to mention he's limited by the input speed of the game...
In a year we will all realize that we were macroing, microing, etc wrong right now. Peoples macro isnt perfect or near it and peoples micro is far from perfect. I have a feeling we still arent using our abilities right
On October 29 2011 23:33 sh4w wrote: Those micro videos are a terrible example. You CANT do that. You would have to be psychic and know which zergling the tank was going to fire at and split it. The point is lesser skilled players beat more skilled opponents in SC2. How often do 'progamers' who practice 12 hours a day lost to people on the ladder? All the time. How often would average joe beat a BW progamer? Probably never. If your playing the game for 12 hours a day there needs to be a significant difference between you and someone playing it for fun. I don't see how that fact doesn't bother people who watch SC2.
But what you say has nothing o do with a skill ceiling. The fact that you CANT do that means that the skill ceiling is unreachable, and you can always practice to get closer to that. You never run out of room for improvement. By the way, stephano was once like 60-1 on the ladder, so really good players can differentiate themselves on the ladder.
Your post makes no sense whatsoever. So CAN'T get closer to those examples, because you CAN'T control two or more groups of units simultaneously. And those examples require you to control dozens of units individually, all at the same time. Not only is a human being incapable of mimicking them, but he's also not capable of making his imperfect effort give him any sort of advantage as as soon as he shifts his attention to another unit of his, his other units start clumping again. Not to mention he's limited by the input speed of the game...
This "argument" is stupid beyond reason... ;/
The faster he can shift his attention between his units and issue commands onto them, the better he gets.
On October 30 2011 00:25 ejozl wrote: The thing is, smarts has no skill ceiling. And in a strategy game, i don't really care if i see a player with surperior mechanics losing to one with inferior ones. I actually get happy, cuz that means outwitting, is more of a factor, than tapping your toes. The one good thing hard mechanics does offer though, is consistency.
There is a limit actually because it's a strategy game with limited information (like poker). At some point just the random luck of choosing the correct the build order against the other player could outweigh the "smarts" of the player. Not saying it's headed that way yet, but there is a ceiling.
...And yet we see the same people winning poker tournaments again and again.
Because they play many, many hands, so the superior player will win games that the pure card values say he shouldn't more than he loses, enough to give him the victory. If SC2 battles become constant skirmishes as opposed to 1a death balling, this applies.
The quicker it becomes a game of strategy instead of a game of mechanics the better. Personally I find the idea of mechanical skill being impressive somewhat ridiculous. Yes it's difficult, but it's a rather rote exercise.
Strategical and tactical thinking will make the difference when many players have hit the "skill ceiling", and that's where the game actually gets interesting and engaging.
Terran i think will be the first to hit to skill cap after that since the mule is so noob friendly, there would need to be a call down cd like inject or else it will crush Terran in the long run. The micro of terran will surpass zerg and protoss but i think there will be a limit to how much the human body can do.
See, now I don't really think a cooldown on mules is a good idea, we need to save energy for scans and if we come to the point where we don't need the scans anymore, we can use the energy.
The difference between inject and mules is light and day. Mules gives you minerals sure, but then you mine out quicker, Inject has a cooldown as the ability has to happen over time. Instantly getting like what, 9 new larva would be hella OP late game, you could just reinforce your whole army in seconds and crush whatever opponent as they wouldn't be able to build up as fast as you.
Heck, look at late game zerg now, lose most of your army and reinforce with 100 lings from all that larva you have saved up. Then you go and win as long as you had a favourable engagement beforehand. Also, queens have Tranfuse which too many pros still don't use late game (especially Transfuse on fighting ultras/broods/mutas etc) so it could be favourable to save energy for that late game when your larva pools up anyways.
The game is still largely undiscovered, especially on the protoss side of things.
Honestly there is just as much decision making in where to scan and saving up energy to scan many bases at once later in the game (for carrier switches, etc).
Blizzard decided instead to make scan really freaking huge because it competed with mule. I would rather mule had a cooldown, and make scan a lot smaller, then you can use scan more frequently and we probably wouldn't see as many coin-flips either. Also it allows the ability to take down expansions quicker so you won't have uber long TvT's.
On October 30 2011 00:10 Rafael wrote: I'm not worried at all because , you are forgetting that there's only a small percentage of UBER PLAYERS , remember that the back bone of the community are normal skill players, like you and me.
So by making an impossible game worthy of legends, it just wouldn't click, why do you think SC2 iis EXPLOTING right now?.
Just because is accesible dude.
Easy to get into, really hard to master.
That's the way I like it.
I never really got this point.
BW is easier to learn and harder to master than SC2.
How do you explain macro mechanics, vikings vs colossi, PDD, etc. In BW everything is so simple, simple units, simple mechanics, simple spells, builds that can defend everything, etc.
In BW, you wanna macro better? make more bases, click your buildings faster and more often, keep your money low.
In SC2, you wanna macro better? Okay expand, now get a queen, make sure to have 1 queen per hatchery at least, then inject larva for each queen on each hatchery, but don't spend your money yet, you have to saves some up if some shit happens and you need to tech switch. Oh yeah wait don't inject! hes going banshees! you need to save up for transfuse! ok this time the queen should drop a creep tumor instead of inject. Ok now you have done injects, you can use this larva to make units.
The only thing im worried about is the snowball effect in sc2. If you lose one trade its hard to recover and it seems like sc2 is really BO wars. The blob vs blob thing still exists too.
Yeah i think Sc2 is to easy and if you practice a couple of hours in one month you can basically perfect ur macro completely. Theres only so much you can do in sc2 in bw since the macro was way harder that problem never occured. As an example in sc2 if a protoss FFE's vs Z all he has to do is 4eeF1cF1c and build some buildings thats it. In a year or so if blizzard doesnt remove automining and maybe multiple building selections etc sc2 will be completely mastered. P.S If they shall remove multiple building selection they have to remove warpgates yaaaay
On October 30 2011 00:53 alexhard wrote: The quicker it becomes a game of strategy instead of a game of mechanics the better. Personally I find the idea of mechanical skill being impressive somewhat ridiculous. Yes it's difficult, but it's a rather rote exercise.
This. People bash games because they are not mechanically demanding... well, if you want a demanding game, you shouldnt play a STRATEGY game. Strategy games should be about strategy, my old favorite SupCom, here everyone bashed it ("it has no micro" (it has, just people too dumb to look for), automining, command queuing, units have smart AI), for stupid things, but man, that was strategy! The scale was so large, you had to outsmart your opponent, outmaneuver him, and not one slip of attention won you the game. Ofc EVERY game becomes mechanically demanding if you play high enough lvl, but the less automatizable stuff you have to do manually, the more emphasis on strategy.
On October 29 2011 21:11 AudionovA wrote: No, i really dont get this question. We already have super dominant players like MVP and NesTea, who still think they can play better. I really exited for the SC1 to SC2 switch but i wont worry about skill cap till i see it reached or someone comes really damn close consistently.
Yeah and Nestea and MVP were both mid B level players in Brood War. Now imagine the high B level players and their skill, then imagine A level players and then imagine S level players like Bisu, Jaedong, Flash, Stork, etc... They are going to rip apart the game I feel and all possible things to improve would be small and insignificant sort of gimmicky things that don't really make you an advantage no matter how good you do them.
So my point is about diminishing returns. I mean microing 10 stalkers against 40 roaches is never going to work no matter how good you micro the 10 stalkers with blink. So my point is if you think the game will come to that level where yes you can do more things, but they are so gimmicky and do not represent real skill.
Another diminishing return example: Mircoing zealots against marine and marauders.
But ultimately I'm looking of how many high level micro/high level reward do we have in SC2?
In SC1 we had lurkers vs marines vs tanks vs dark swarm vs irradiate vs scourge, then you had firebats coming in late vs lurkers and zerglings, etc.... in SC1 we had shuttle/reaver vs terran or zerg either mineral line or armies, we had corsairs with disruption web in support of reaver/shuttle vs say in zerg hydralisks, zerglings and scourge.
In SC2 I can only think of marines and tanks vs zerglings and balenings vs fungal. And we see more tanks to counter infestors. Other is hellions vs zerglings and mutalisks vs marines, but notice how things stop within 3 to 4 units?
Fascinating. Since in SC2 it's zerglings vs marines vs banelings vs tanks vs mutalisks vs marines vs infestors vs ghosts vs banelings. Oh and then you've got to deal with creep spread.
SC2 looks a lot more complicated when you're actually honest about how it works.
Automining also does not remove any complexity, it simply removes a list of things you have to do. It gets rid of the boring part of the game that's pointlessly difficult (like the idea that to keep a car running you have to pump the pedal constantly instead of holding it down) and allows pros to focus on strategy and micro rather than just macro mechanics, which has always been and always will be a memory game.
If Brood War is a better game it is because it is an older game. You say 300 APM to get your micro/macro right. Yeah, okay. So macro is suddenly easier in SC2. Makes lower level games more interesting. Has no real effect on higher level games.
the skill ceiling will be hardly reached, as in extreme you might micro each single unit individually. the only problem might be the strong all in's. a well designed all in/timing push has a good chance to win you a game against standard play even if you are good.
On October 30 2011 00:42 Reborn8u wrote: The problem in the back of my mind with most of these "Sc2 skill ceiling" ideas, is that they assume there is nothing to be discovered. It's a false assumption in my opinion. This is also the same problem with peoples concepts of balance in the games current state. It's all about efficiency. So I'll pose a question.
Do you believe 100% efficiency has been achieved?
I don't think anyone has come close. For example (and these are all directed at the highest level of play)
Do we see zerg players using overseers to delay key production whenever they have extra money or are maxed and can't produce more units? They should be doing this every game, in every match up. Contaminating robo facilities, factories, starports, or enemy hatcheries.
Do we see crono being used as soon as possible all the time? No, not even close. Keep in mind chrono is time, time can't be made up.
Do we see OC energy being used ASAP all the time? No, sure a terran can drop 4 mules at a time, but unless they are about to take a new base (gold), that money could already be made and spent.
Do we see terrans making scouting reapers throughout the game, no, instead of spending 50/50 they drop a scan that could be 270 from a mule.
Do we see Protoss hitting all of their warp cycles and making plenty of obs, and using warp in harrass throughout the game? Sometimes, much more recently.
Do we see zergs using overlords to spread creep throughout the game (even in the edges of their own bases)? No, we see overlords sitting idle in groups as early as midgame.
Do we see zergs using nydus to get good positioning and help defend spread out bases? No, not often, it's common in BW though.
Are hallucinations getting used enough? No, but we'll see a flock of sentries sitting idle with full energy.
Do we see units clearing destructible rocks early when they are sitting idle? Sometimes.
Do we see protoss always having proxy pylons around the map? Sometimes
Do we see zergs using burrow almost every game, to delay expansions and keep map vision, or burrow banelings? Sometimes
Do we see spellcasters being babied and players making sure they get the most value possible? No, I constantly see Templar getting wasted and not turning into archons when they could have, Infestors running around pointlessly dying after fungals, I think terrans are a little bit better about ghosts.
Do we still see medevacs sitting idle waiting to die after a drop instead of returning home when the drop is cleaned up? yes
Do we always see army's getting spread out, using flanking and the best positioning possible? Sometimes.
Do we see zergs using transfuse, or doing burrow micro with roaches (blink style) to get the most out of every unit? Sometimes
Do we see sensor towers getting used to always be in position to defend harassment? No, (some might argue this, but I doubt loosing workers or addons isn't worth the cost of the tower)
Do we see terrans getting +2 building armor or pf/turret range upgrade when they are getting muta harrassed? Rarely
Have gas timings been nearly as refined for all the races as they were in BW? Nope
My hypothesis is that when we see more top BW players enter sc2, and the game has more time to evolve, most of the answers to these questions will change. I don't know how different things will be in HOTS, and legacy of the void. But when you really think about all the things I've pointed out, and the possibility of things no one has even thought of yet, do you still think anyone has come anywhere near the absolute skill ceiling in sc2?
A shit load of things you posted are based on STRATEGY. I'm not going to chrono as soon as it's up because I'M SAVING IT! Same goes for terran OC's. Many terrans use Sensor Towers.
Things you are posting are from LOW TIER players. Show me how many times MVP left a medivac to die, for example.
Those are solely based upon APM.
You think there are more things to "discover" because you're relating this to BW. Sorry this game was made for the entire reason that BW was hard to pick up and play, and took years to even become a C or B player on ICCUP and many wouldn't even get that far. There are not many things to discover in this game because THEY MADE IT THAT WAY. It's not like BW.
New units will create new builds and timings. What they are we can only imagine atm but i really, really do hope it raises the bar by a large amount. Just thinking of units like the replicator with hundreds of combos (not going to discuss weather or not the unit is good or bad, just think of the possibilities it can have). Will we see strategies like they were in brood war? We can only hope =/
If you seriously think the skill ceiling in sc2 is reached or close to be reached I think you have problems with you imagination and grasp of how wast and how many different options and possible outcomes vs actions this game actually has. Like many others have said previously. And I dont mean to be rude, just think about it. And compare to a game like chess for example, witch no doubt has less options than sc2 if you think of limited moves. The game isnt ALL about macroing and build orders, and if it was, I still dont see people with perfect build orders or macro or even close to it.
On October 30 2011 00:42 Reborn8u wrote: The problem in the back of my mind with most of these "Sc2 skill ceiling" ideas, is that they assume there is nothing to be discovered. It's a false assumption in my opinion. This is also the same problem with peoples concepts of balance in the games current state. It's all about efficiency. So I'll pose a question.
Do you believe 100% efficiency has been achieved?
I don't think anyone has come close. For example (and these are all directed at the highest level of play)
Do we see zerg players using overseers to delay key production whenever they have extra money or are maxed and can't produce more units? They should be doing this every game, in every match up. Contaminating robo facilities, factories, starports, or enemy hatcheries.
Do we see crono being used as soon as possible all the time? No, not even close. Keep in mind chrono is time, time can't be made up.
Do we see OC energy being used ASAP all the time? No, sure a terran can drop 4 mules at a time, but unless they are about to take a new base (gold), that money could already be made and spent.
Do we see terrans making scouting reapers throughout the game, no, instead of spending 50/50 they drop a scan that could be 270 from a mule.
Do we see Protoss hitting all of their warp cycles and making plenty of obs, and using warp in harrass throughout the game? Sometimes, much more recently.
Do we see zergs using overlords to spread creep throughout the game (even in the edges of their own bases)? No, we see overlords sitting idle in groups as early as midgame.
Do we see zergs using nydus to get good positioning and help defend spread out bases? No, not often, it's common in BW though.
Are hallucinations getting used enough? No, but we'll see a flock of sentries sitting idle with full energy.
Do we see units clearing destructible rocks early when they are sitting idle? Sometimes.
Do we see protoss always having proxy pylons around the map? Sometimes
Do we see zergs using burrow almost every game, to delay expansions and keep map vision, or burrow banelings? Sometimes
Do we see spellcasters being babied and players making sure they get the most value possible? No, I constantly see Templar getting wasted and not turning into archons when they could have, Infestors running around pointlessly dying after fungals, I think terrans are a little bit better about ghosts.
Do we still see medevacs sitting idle waiting to die after a drop instead of returning home when the drop is cleaned up? yes
Do we always see army's getting spread out, using flanking and the best positioning possible? Sometimes.
Do we see zergs using transfuse, or doing burrow micro with roaches (blink style) to get the most out of every unit? Sometimes
Do we see sensor towers getting used to always be in position to defend harassment? No, (some might argue this, but I doubt loosing workers or addons isn't worth the cost of the tower)
Do we see terrans getting +2 building armor or pf/turret range upgrade when they are getting muta harrassed? Rarely
Have gas timings been nearly as refined for all the races as they were in BW? Nope
My hypothesis is that when we see more top BW players enter sc2, and the game has more time to evolve, most of the answers to these questions will change. I don't know how different things will be in HOTS, and legacy of the void. But when you really think about all the things I've pointed out, and the possibility of things no one has even thought of yet, do you still think anyone has come anywhere near the absolute skill ceiling in sc2?
A shit load of things you posted are based on STRATEGY. I'm not going to chrono as soon as it's up because I'M SAVING IT! Same goes for terran OC's. Many terrans use Sensor Towers.
Things you are posting are from LOW TIER players. Show me how many times MVP left a medivac to die, for example.
Those are solely based upon APM.
You think there are more things to "discover" because you're relating this to BW. Sorry this game was made for the entire reason that BW was hard to pick up and play, and took years to even become a C or B player on ICCUP and many wouldn't even get that far. There are not many things to discover in this game because THEY MADE IT THAT WAY. It's not like BW.
In the GSL finals i saw both MVP and MMA throw away several medivacs and other units due to miscontrol and attacking at the wrong times. There's alot to improve upon in both the micro and macro department but i guess people like you want to downplay it so you can keep crying. The guy posted loads of examples of stuff to improve and you just disregard all of it and keep on trucking with the "it's not BW" bs.
I consistently see extremely high level terran players such as boxer, MVP, MKP, etc queue up all their barracks and factories with 5 marines and 5 tanks, i know this is because with terran the race is very much fixated on micro but we will soon see this never ever happen. Just this example proves that we are sooo incredibly far from "perfect macro" or "perfect micro". Once Flash comes i hope to see these flaws diminish.
If you compare SC2 to other Esports like DotA, Quake or whatever, it's pretty safe to say that none of those games is even close to being as hard mechanically as SC2. Yet, the skill ceiling isn't reached in any of those games.
I actually like that SC2 has "easy" macro. I don't want to watch machines playing, but smart people.
On October 30 2011 01:15 KulterBaun wrote: Yeah i think Sc2 is to easy and if you practice a couple of hours in one month you can basically perfect ur macro completely. Theres only so much you can do in sc2 in bw since the macro was way harder that problem never occured. As an example in sc2 if a protoss FFE's vs Z all he has to do is 4eeF1cF1c and build some buildings thats it. In a year or so if blizzard doesnt remove automining and maybe multiple building selections etc sc2 will be completely mastered. P.S If they shall remove multiple building selection they have to remove warpgates yaaaay
Yeah man playing 5 hours a month will easily get your macro to a PERFECT level. And you're so right, sc2's skill ceiling is so low that the entire game will be completely mastered within a year. Unfortunately then we'll all be sitting around waiting for sc3.
worried? no since if we are honest its well known since the release of beta.
the only difference is that by now ive given up all hope that this will ever change.sc2 just rarely has that wow effect. in most games you see the same stuff and the caster hype/environment makes the excitement instead of the game/players.
also i think "skill ceiling" is not really the right term. esp in a game like starcraft you wont see "perfect" play. but what is the real problem is that people cant use and show their true skill since the game limits them and where it doesnt limit them it helps the player so much that the skill needed is very small. which is bad for competition, fun and viewing pleasure.
this is one of the main reasons i nowadays dont play sc2 anymore(atleast till hots), barely watch anymore and absolutely cannot watch any match without topnotch casters.
On October 30 2011 01:33 Chise wrote: If you compare SC2 to other Esports like DotA, Quake or whatever, it's pretty safe to say that none of those games is even close to being as hard mechanically as SC2. Yet, the skill ceiling isn't reached in any of those games.
I actually like that SC2 has "easy" macro. I don't want to watch machines playing, but smart people.
dota is a joke as esport. the ONLY reason its succesful is because the game attracts masses, not because its a good esport game in ANY way.a one handed monkey could play that game well. quake i would argue. beeing good at quake (with movement,timing and all) is one of the hardest.games to learn nowadays.
anyways that doesnt even matter. as i said, skill ceiling is a bad word for the problem. since we dont and wont see "perfect" play in the bigger picture(perfect execution yes. def.). the problem is that the game is build for very simple play and actually has mechanics AGAINST microing on many units (muta & hellion for example). and because of that players cant use their full potential and the difference between players gets smaller and smaller.
Go back to the BW forum, if people kept going to the BW forum and making these kinds of posts they would be temped, so why do people keep making them in the sc2 thread?
On October 30 2011 01:33 Chise wrote: If you compare SC2 to other Esports like DotA, Quake or whatever, it's pretty safe to say that none of those games is even close to being as hard mechanically as SC2. Yet, the skill ceiling isn't reached in any of those games.
I actually like that SC2 has "easy" macro. I don't want to watch machines playing, but smart people.
Have you ever played Quake? DotA sure, its not a "hard" game if you watch only mechanics, but its not a coincidence that that german guy fatality was THE best consistently. He was better than everyone else, so you cant say it was an easy game mechanically.
On October 30 2011 01:35 BeMannerDuPenner wrote: worried? no since if we are honest its well known since the release of beta.
the only difference is that by now ive given up all hope that this will ever change.sc2 just rarely has that wow effect. in most games you see the same stuff and the caster hype/environment makes the excitement instead of the game/players.
also i think "skill ceiling" is not really the right term. esp in a game like starcraft you wont see "perfect" play. but what is the real problem is that people cant use and show their true skill since the game limits them and where it doesnt limit them it helps the player so much that the skill needed is very small. which is bad for competition, fun and viewing pleasure.
this is one of the main reasons i nowadays dont play sc2 anymore(atleast till hots), barely watch anymore and absolutely cannot watch any match without topnotch casters.
On October 30 2011 01:33 Chise wrote: If you compare SC2 to other Esports like DotA, Quake or whatever, it's pretty safe to say that none of those games is even close to being as hard mechanically as SC2. Yet, the skill ceiling isn't reached in any of those games.
I actually like that SC2 has "easy" macro. I don't want to watch machines playing, but smart people.
dota is a joke as esport. the ONLY reason its succesful is because the game attracts masses, not because its a good esport game in ANY way.a one handed monkey could play that game well. quake i would argue. beeing good at quake (with movement,timing and all) is one of the hardest.games to learn nowadays.
anyways that doesnt even matter. as i said, skill ceiling is a bad word for the problem. since we dont and wont see "perfect" play in the bigger picture(perfect execution yes. def.). the problem is that the game is build for very simple play and actually has mechanics AGAINST microing on many units (muta & hellion for example). and because of that players cant use their full potential and the difference between players gets smaller and smaller.
hots will remove one more spectator friendly tactic / general building placement for effitiency . that is to remove powering with pylon low / highground. i cant imagine protoss without that.
Anyone who thinks we will ever even begin to approach a skill ceiling is completely delusional. There will always be room to do more, and to do it faster.
On October 29 2011 18:21 Optimism wrote: The SQ thread provides some interesting context for this, and the answer is even among pro-gamers there's still quite a bit of variance in macro ability.
Now it may be that improving your skill leads to dimishing returns beyond a certain point, I could completely buy that. And it could be that the point of diminishing returns is too low to separate the very best players from the merely very good. But as for actually reaching the ceiling? That will never happen. It cannot be done by any human being.
edit: haha, beaten to it I see.
This is the closest thing for humans to hit automaton micro as of now
On October 29 2011 23:33 sh4w wrote: Those micro videos are a terrible example. You CANT do that. You would have to be psychic and know which zergling the tank was going to fire at and split it. The point is lesser skilled players beat more skilled opponents in SC2. How often do 'progamers' who practice 12 hours a day lost to people on the ladder? All the time. How often would average joe beat a BW progamer? Probably never. If your playing the game for 12 hours a day there needs to be a significant difference between you and someone playing it for fun. I don't see how that fact doesn't bother people who watch SC2.
But what you say has nothing o do with a skill ceiling. The fact that you CANT do that means that the skill ceiling is unreachable, and you can always practice to get closer to that. You never run out of room for improvement. By the way, stephano was once like 60-1 on the ladder, so really good players can differentiate themselves on the ladder.
Your post makes no sense whatsoever. So CAN'T get closer to those examples, because you CAN'T control two or more groups of units simultaneously. And those examples require you to control dozens of units individually, all at the same time. Not only is a human being incapable of mimicking them, but he's also not capable of making his imperfect effort give him any sort of advantage as as soon as he shifts his attention to another unit of his, his other units start clumping again. Not to mention he's limited by the input speed of the game...
This "argument" is stupid beyond reason... ;/
The faster he can shift his attention between his units and issue commands onto them, the better he gets.
The thing is, you can't be fast enough for it to be productive at all, not only because it's not humanly impossible (APM in range of 1000-3000 or such), but also because the input speed of the peripherals (and most likely the game itself) doesn't allow for that.
It's the same with microing units in several different places at the same time or doing dropship micro with a bunch of dropships simultaneously - it's possible in theory, AI can do it, but it's physically impossible (you can't issue several commands at the same time, and even if you could, you wouldn't be able to make your screen show several different locations at the same time because the game doesn't allow for that).
So those examples are completely irrelevant and it's pointless to bring them up.
I'm only now beginning to realize that me focusing on micro up to diamond was a huuuuuge mistake, since this is a macro game.
Micro does not play a huge part in SC2, at least that's what I beginning to realize now. So far, I've seen pro-games being decided by the question "WHO CAN REMAX FIRST?" with Upgrades and greate unit control only playing a decent part when it comes to PvX, because Protoss cannot remax as quickly as the other 2 races, nor is it economy as forgiving as Terran economy, or Zerg economy, like OP pointed out.
I am, in fact, very worried about the state of this game and what it will become once the Big Guys switch over.
It may sound biased, but I see Protoss having the hardest of times from now on.
On October 29 2011 18:07 Mise wrote: The true skill ceiling of SC2 is humanly impossible to reach. To achieve the skill ceiling you need to macro perfectly and micro invidual units through the whole game. You can't play that fast you'd need thousands of APM.
I think this is kind of the OP's idea. We can never truly reach the skill cap, but will we hit the point where the builds we picked, the map choice, and slight imbalances will dictate the game MORE than the remaining micro/macro nuances some might have over others.
On October 30 2011 01:57 Avan wrote: I agree with OP.
I'm only now beginning to realize that me focusing on micro up to diamond was a huuuuuge mistake, since this is a macro game.
Micro does not play a huge part in SC2, at least that's what I beginning to realize now. So far, I've seen pro-games being decided by the question "WHO CAN REMAX FIRST?" with Upgrades and greate unit control only playing a decent part when it comes to PvX, because Protoss cannot remax as quickly as the other 2 races, nor is it economy as forgiving as Terran economy, or Zerg economy, like OP pointed out.
I am, in fact, very worried about the state of this game and what it will become once the Big Guys switch over.
It may sound biased, but I see Protoss having the hardest of times from now on.
Not sure what you're going on about, Protoss has the quickest remax of all the races. While the zerglings are still hatching, Stalkers are on the field.
On October 30 2011 01:57 Avan wrote: I agree with OP.
I'm only now beginning to realize that me focusing on micro up to diamond was a huuuuuge mistake, since this is a macro game.
Micro does not play a huge part in SC2, at least that's what I beginning to realize now. So far, I've seen pro-games being decided by the question "WHO CAN REMAX FIRST?" with Upgrades and greate unit control only playing a decent part when it comes to PvX, because Protoss cannot remax as quickly as the other 2 races, nor is it economy as forgiving as Terran economy, or Zerg economy, like OP pointed out.
I am, in fact, very worried about the state of this game and what it will become once the Big Guys switch over.
It may sound biased, but I see Protoss having the hardest of times from now on.
Not sure what you're going on about, Protoss has the quickest remax of all the races. While the zerglings are still hatching, Stalkers are on the field.
You are kidding, right?
For a Protoss to remax with gateway units, he needs at least 50 Gateways (each unit costing 2-supply, warping in 50 units stands for 100 supply, is that right?), whereas a Zerg player needs... Hatcheries?
So, for a Protoss to be able to keep up with a remax, he needs to spend minerals on expansions AND on structures. You can't even begin to compare how easy it is to remax as Zerg.
I for one am happy that some of the amazing BW players could switch over soon. This will push the game closer to the limits and might answer some of our questions. HOPEFULLY, if a lot of our predictions are true, this will force blizzard to change things up and make this game a lot harder. We can only hope, this is really what I'm pulling for.
On October 30 2011 01:57 Avan wrote: I agree with OP.
I'm only now beginning to realize that me focusing on micro up to diamond was a huuuuuge mistake, since this is a macro game.
Micro does not play a huge part in SC2, at least that's what I beginning to realize now. So far, I've seen pro-games being decided by the question "WHO CAN REMAX FIRST?" with Upgrades and greate unit control only playing a decent part when it comes to PvX, because Protoss cannot remax as quickly as the other 2 races, nor is it economy as forgiving as Terran economy, or Zerg economy, like OP pointed out.
I am, in fact, very worried about the state of this game and what it will become once the Big Guys switch over.
It may sound biased, but I see Protoss having the hardest of times from now on.
Not sure what you're going on about, Protoss has the quickest remax of all the races. While the zerglings are still hatching, Stalkers are on the field.
Yeah, it's too bad I can make 10 immortals at once like you can make 30 mutalisks.
On October 30 2011 01:57 Avan wrote: I agree with OP.
I'm only now beginning to realize that me focusing on micro up to diamond was a huuuuuge mistake, since this is a macro game.
Micro does not play a huge part in SC2, at least that's what I beginning to realize now. So far, I've seen pro-games being decided by the question "WHO CAN REMAX FIRST?" with Upgrades and greate unit control only playing a decent part when it comes to PvX, because Protoss cannot remax as quickly as the other 2 races, nor is it economy as forgiving as Terran economy, or Zerg economy, like OP pointed out.
I am, in fact, very worried about the state of this game and what it will become once the Big Guys switch over.
It may sound biased, but I see Protoss having the hardest of times from now on.
Not sure what you're going on about, Protoss has the quickest remax of all the races. While the zerglings are still hatching, Stalkers are on the field.
You're a fool if you think Protoss can remax quicker than Zerg.
On October 29 2011 19:04 iky43210 wrote: I guess the skill ceiling is so low that championships are consistently won by nobodies.
wait, no. MVP and Nestea is clearly dominating sc2 scene consistently. There goes your skill ceiling theory
LOL this is so true... how can you even say that the skill ceiling is reached when these two guys enter a tournament and are almost guaranteed to win it
On October 29 2011 17:54 TheBomb wrote: Hi there. So I've been reading how Brood War teams are already practicing Starcraft 2 and are likely to switch to SC2 at least to some degree, possibly fully and we are going to see an influx of A team, top of the line players like Flash, Bisu, Jaedong, Stork, Leta, etc... start playing SC2.
And I'm really worried that the skill ceiling is going to be reached or at the very least came very, very close to it in that skill is going to play less factor in games and its going to be more luck based like trying to catch your opponent off guard with say a build like 1-1-1 or mass roach and hydra like Stephano is doing against protoss.
I feel like the macro mechanics as much as they provide something to do, they also in a way help with your bad macro.
For example as Zerg you can have 50 larva all at once and produce 100 zerglings all at once and it doesn't force you to build units all the time and pressure your opponent, it creates this cushion where even if you weren't macroing all that well the past minute you can just fall back to your 20 or 50 larvae from before when nothing was happening.
Same goes for Terran as I feel as much as it makes them do something, dropping mules actually closes the gap from someone who macroed great all the time and someone who didn't macro as well, but just dropped few mules that that he forgot to drop earlier and have 4x the income.
The current game where there is still a lot of skill ceiling left is micro as we are talking about hundreds of units on screen, but on the negative side there aren't that many micro opportunities.
I mean sure we have micro opportunities, we have the marine micro, we have the stalker micro, hellion micro and baneling micro, viking micro, phoenix micro and battlecruisers micro but other than that the possibilities are really limited. Yes you can somewhat micro your brood lord or roaches or zealots or void rays but its just one of those low reward microes that its much more beneficial to just A move, rather than try and micro and just focus on building more units.
And for example if we compared say the reaver/shuttle micro of SC1 with Colossus micro in SC2 it doesn't even begin to compare. SC1 micro was much more challenging, but also had much bigger rewards.
We are now seeing something along those lines with the warp prism/high templars and this is actually great, but compared to SC1 micro you are quite limited.
But my point is that I'm really worried about the skill ceiling and is it big enough and hard enough never to master or this one of those easy to learn, not that hard to master?
What are your thoughts?
Untill you see a game when player that lost could not possibly have done anything better, it's a useless conversation.
The only worry I have is that a lot of the delicate things you can improve upon won't be AS significant as in BW, but the true skill ceiling can obviously not be reached.
Not at all. A game like this will always have an optimal way to be played, and just because we haven't seen it doesn't mean we wont . Every indication suggests you get better the more things you can do and the higher your skill is.
In brood war my tactics and all that might be top notch but you have superior mechanics so much so that you make up for your inferior tactics ... i lose.
I said quickest remax, not strongest. 50 Warpgates is a little out there, but 25 is quite feasible in 3+ base scenarios. That allows for a double round of warp-ins that give 100 supply in the space of 20 seconds, i.e. before zerglings have even hatched, let alone higher tech units.
On October 29 2011 19:04 iky43210 wrote: I guess the skill ceiling is so low that championships are consistently won by nobodies.
wait, no. MVP and Nestea is clearly dominating sc2 scene consistently. There goes your skill ceiling theory
LOL this is so true... how can you even say that the skill ceiling is reached when these two guys enter a tournament and are almost guaranteed to win it
And their macro isn't even that good either, they still queue a lot. A teamers from BW will be a lot better in both macro and micro.
On October 30 2011 01:57 Avan wrote: I agree with OP.
I'm only now beginning to realize that me focusing on micro up to diamond was a huuuuuge mistake, since this is a macro game.
Micro does not play a huge part in SC2, at least that's what I beginning to realize now. So far, I've seen pro-games being decided by the question "WHO CAN REMAX FIRST?" with Upgrades and greate unit control only playing a decent part when it comes to PvX, because Protoss cannot remax as quickly as the other 2 races, nor is it economy as forgiving as Terran economy, or Zerg economy, like OP pointed out.
I am, in fact, very worried about the state of this game and what it will become once the Big Guys switch over.
It may sound biased, but I see Protoss having the hardest of times from now on.
Not sure what you're going on about, Protoss has the quickest remax of all the races. While the zerglings are still hatching, Stalkers are on the field.
You're a fool if you think Protoss can remax quicker than Zerg.
It can remax faster in the sense that protoss supply cost per unit is higher :o
On October 30 2011 02:15 Alzadar wrote: I said quickest remax, not strongest. 50 Warpgates is a little out there, but 25 is quite feasible in 3+ base scenarios. That allows for a double round of warp-ins that give 100 supply in the space of 20 seconds, i.e. before zerglings have even hatched, let alone higher tech units.
Not worried in the slightest. I think there's a chance that if these BW pros come accross, they may not be as dominant, as there is quite a bit of randomness in this game, and it's supposedly not as hard as BW ( I never played it), but if they're as good as everyone says they are, then there is limitless potential, as a terran player some of the micro you can do is insane, so I have no doubt that once that near perfect player comes along, it'll look really beautiful.
On October 30 2011 02:15 Alzadar wrote: I said quickest remax, not strongest. 50 Warpgates is a little out there, but 25 is quite feasible in 3+ base scenarios. That allows for a double round of warp-ins that give 100 supply in the space of 20 seconds, i.e. before zerglings have even hatched, let alone higher tech units.
25 warpgates out of 3 bases?
I don't think we play the same game, sir.
As soon as you hit 200 supply, you need to start building more warpgates. 25 is a bit of an exaggerated number, but it's not absurd. By the time you've taken your 4th (especially if there's a gold base involved), you want to be approaching that number.
On October 30 2011 02:15 Alzadar wrote: I said quickest remax, not strongest. 50 Warpgates is a little out there, but 25 is quite feasible in 3+ base scenarios. That allows for a double round of warp-ins that give 100 supply in the space of 20 seconds, i.e. before zerglings have even hatched, let alone higher tech units.
25 warpgates out of 3 bases?
I don't think we play the same game, sir.
As soon as you hit 200 supply, you need to start building more warpgates. 25 is a bit of an exaggerated number, but it's not absurd. By the time you've taken your 4th (especially if there's a gold base involved), you want to be approaching that number.
Okay, I get it, you are trolling. I'm sorry for taking you seriously.
On October 30 2011 02:15 Alzadar wrote: I said quickest remax, not strongest. 50 Warpgates is a little out there, but 25 is quite feasible in 3+ base scenarios. That allows for a double round of warp-ins that give 100 supply in the space of 20 seconds, i.e. before zerglings have even hatched, let alone higher tech units.
25 warpgates out of 3 bases?
I don't think we play the same game, sir.
As soon as you hit 200 supply, you need to start building more warpgates. 25 is a bit of an exaggerated number, but it's not absurd. By the time you've taken your 4th (especially if there's a gold base involved), you want to be approaching that number.
Okay, I get it, you are trolling. I'm sorry for taking you seriously.
Sorry, how is this trolling? If you stay on 10ish gates when ur maxed and ur army dies ull remax so slowly :s. 25 is like a huge number but not unthinkable late-late-game toss.
On October 30 2011 02:15 Alzadar wrote: I said quickest remax, not strongest. 50 Warpgates is a little out there, but 25 is quite feasible in 3+ base scenarios. That allows for a double round of warp-ins that give 100 supply in the space of 20 seconds, i.e. before zerglings have even hatched, let alone higher tech units.
25 warpgates out of 3 bases?
I don't think we play the same game, sir.
As soon as you hit 200 supply, you need to start building more warpgates. 25 is a bit of an exaggerated number, but it's not absurd. By the time you've taken your 4th (especially if there's a gold base involved), you want to be approaching that number.
Okay, I get it, you are trolling. I'm sorry for taking you seriously.
Sorry, how is this trolling? If you stay on 10ish gates when ur maxed and ur army dies ull remax so slowly :s. 25 is like a huge number but not unthinkable late-late-game toss.
Forgive me. I'm not saying it's unthinkable. I'm only stating it is pretty impossible to keep 25 gates producing out of 3/4 bases like Alzadar said.
Unless you have no tech, but even so...... 25 gateways out of 3 or 4 bases? Sounds pretty troll-ish to me.
And I don't think 3 bases is "late late game".
Well, not that it matters. I'm sorry for polluting the forums. See you guys around ~\o
On October 30 2011 02:15 Alzadar wrote: I said quickest remax, not strongest. 50 Warpgates is a little out there, but 25 is quite feasible in 3+ base scenarios. That allows for a double round of warp-ins that give 100 supply in the space of 20 seconds, i.e. before zerglings have even hatched, let alone higher tech units.
25 warpgates out of 3 bases?
I don't think we play the same game, sir.
As soon as you hit 200 supply, you need to start building more warpgates. 25 is a bit of an exaggerated number, but it's not absurd. By the time you've taken your 4th (especially if there's a gold base involved), you want to be approaching that number.
Okay, I get it, you are trolling. I'm sorry for taking you seriously.
Sorry, how is this trolling? If you stay on 10ish gates when ur maxed and ur army dies ull remax so slowly :s. 25 is like a huge number but not unthinkable late-late-game toss.
Forgive me. I'm not saying it's unthinkable. I'm only stating it is pretty impossible to keep 25 gates producing out of 3/4 bases like Alzadar said.
Unless you have no tech, but even so...... 25 gateways out of 3 or 4 bases? Sounds pretty troll-ish to me.
And I don't think 3 bases is "late late game".
Well, not that it matters. I'm sorry for polluting the forums. See you guys around ~\o
Of course you're not going to be able to build out of all of them for a long amount of time. But when you're banking resources it's better to remax faster than slower and lose.
On October 30 2011 02:15 Alzadar wrote: I said quickest remax, not strongest. 50 Warpgates is a little out there, but 25 is quite feasible in 3+ base scenarios. That allows for a double round of warp-ins that give 100 supply in the space of 20 seconds, i.e. before zerglings have even hatched, let alone higher tech units.
25 warpgates out of 3 bases?
I don't think we play the same game, sir.
As soon as you hit 200 supply, you need to start building more warpgates. 25 is a bit of an exaggerated number, but it's not absurd. By the time you've taken your 4th (especially if there's a gold base involved), you want to be approaching that number.
Okay, I get it, you are trolling. I'm sorry for taking you seriously.
Sorry, how is this trolling? If you stay on 10ish gates when ur maxed and ur army dies ull remax so slowly :s. 25 is like a huge number but not unthinkable late-late-game toss.
Forgive me. I'm not saying it's unthinkable. I'm only stating it is pretty impossible to keep 25 gates producing out of 3/4 bases like Alzadar said.
Unless you have no tech, but even so...... 25 gateways out of 3 or 4 bases? Sounds pretty troll-ish to me.
And I don't think 3 bases is "late late game".
Well, not that it matters. I'm sorry for polluting the forums. See you guys around ~\o
Who is suggesting constant production? We're talking about when you're maxed or approaching max, and resources begin to stockpile.
Not worried at all. Terran seems to be close to their max potential, but the other races aren't nearly there. Eventually we'll see a Zerg god who doesn't miss injects, spreads creep effortlessly, and pulls off re-max tech switches that seem to make his end game unbeatable.
People act like the game has been out for 3 years. It's barely been one, jesus.
You know that paradox where you have to reach a door but before you can get there you have to get halfway there, but before you can get halfway there you have to get a quarter way there, And before a quarter, one-eighth, etc, etc. I feel the skill ceiling is the door and the steps are your progress. You will never reach the skill ceiling, only get closer and closer.
On October 29 2011 18:21 Optimism wrote: The SQ thread provides some interesting context for this, and the answer is even among pro-gamers there's still quite a bit of variance in macro ability.
Now it may be that improving your skill leads to dimishing returns beyond a certain point, I could completely buy that. And it could be that the point of diminishing returns is too low to separate the very best players from the merely very good. But as for actually reaching the ceiling? That will never happen. It cannot be done by any human being.
edit: haha, beaten to it I see.
Thanks for introducing me to this youtube channel. This is also such a great argument to the OP.
Give me nerd chills thinking about the future of this game.
I don't think we'll ever reach the 'skill' ceiling. Every time you think we're at a 'skill ceiling', someone will come out with something new and the skill ceiling goes up.
What is 'skill' anyways? is it having perfect macro/micro, 90% win rate, high APM? There are too many things that could fall under 'skill' to think that someone would ever reach the ceiling.
On October 29 2011 17:57 EtherealDeath wrote: Imo the Zerg skill ceiling is not nearly reached yet, whereas Terran and Protoss are much closer. I think we are nearing the point where skill can still be vastly improved upon, but the rewards for such skill have probably mostly passed the point of diminishing returns.
I agree with OP and this has also been a thought of mine and why I think zerg has the biggest potential as race.
The reason is because there will always be a winner and loser in a game. Thus the winner is better than the loser for some kind of reason such as skills (not luck).
If both players play perfectly, assuming if the game is balanced, both players should not lose right away. So it becomes a situation where its about WHO makes the first mistake. The first one to make the mistake loses.
So i believe at this point, its about avoiding who makes that mistake first in order to win. (Weither its engagement or descision making)
imo the skill ceiling is higher than most people care to admit, that said you make a decent point. I guess we'll have to just wait and see how the BW pros go.
For me this is all big bullshit. SC2 in comparison to BW in terms of mechanics is easier, but that means pros can spend their apm elsewhere. What do you think their apm will disappear upon transitioning? It's easier to macro so it's more noob friendly, but in the end the best players will be on the top. If BW was about players dominating and SC2 is more like a king of the hill (like one of the articles said) then I don't understand why MVP and Nestea won so much, guess they were lucky... Yes BW is more balanced as of now, but there were tons of imbalances when the game was 1 year old and they continued to patch it long time after. BW players are living in the cave and are hating on SC2 players and vice versa. We are supposed to be family 'cus those games are similar. People are fighting over some bullshit and if SC2 is a farce then those BW players that feel they are so much better should come and show how much better they are, for now this is almost pure theory crafting.
NOTE: We got few top BW pros in SC2, they are all past their prime or aren't training enough. By the time they switched from BW they weren't winning there and in SC2 ( so much easier game for such a pros from BW universe) they are not winning either.
On October 30 2011 02:15 Alzadar wrote: I said quickest remax, not strongest. 50 Warpgates is a little out there, but 25 is quite feasible in 3+ base scenarios. That allows for a double round of warp-ins that give 100 supply in the space of 20 seconds, i.e. before zerglings have even hatched, let alone higher tech units.
25 warpgates out of 3 bases?
I don't think we play the same game, sir.
As soon as you hit 200 supply, you need to start building more warpgates. 25 is a bit of an exaggerated number, but it's not absurd. By the time you've taken your 4th (especially if there's a gold base involved), you want to be approaching that number.
Okay, I get it, you are trolling. I'm sorry for taking you seriously.
Sorry, how is this trolling? If you stay on 10ish gates when ur maxed and ur army dies ull remax so slowly :s. 25 is like a huge number but not unthinkable late-late-game toss.
Yes it is actually unthinkable, that is why no one does it.
On October 29 2011 18:21 Optimism wrote: The SQ thread provides some interesting context for this, and the answer is even among pro-gamers there's still quite a bit of variance in macro ability.
Now it may be that improving your skill leads to dimishing returns beyond a certain point, I could completely buy that. And it could be that the point of diminishing returns is too low to separate the very best players from the merely very good. But as for actually reaching the ceiling? That will never happen. It cannot be done by any human being.
edit: haha, beaten to it I see.
Thanks for introducing me to this youtube channel. This is also such a great argument to the OP.
Give me nerd chills thinking about the future of this game.
It's actually humanly impossible, not sure why this is a good video to show the micro capabilities of the game, but some people aren't very realistic in this world it seems.
On October 30 2011 02:15 Alzadar wrote: I said quickest remax, not strongest. 50 Warpgates is a little out there, but 25 is quite feasible in 3+ base scenarios. That allows for a double round of warp-ins that give 100 supply in the space of 20 seconds, i.e. before zerglings have even hatched, let alone higher tech units.
25 warpgates out of 3 bases?
I don't think we play the same game, sir.
As soon as you hit 200 supply, you need to start building more warpgates. 25 is a bit of an exaggerated number, but it's not absurd. By the time you've taken your 4th (especially if there's a gold base involved), you want to be approaching that number.
Okay, I get it, you are trolling. I'm sorry for taking you seriously.
Sorry, how is this trolling? If you stay on 10ish gates when ur maxed and ur army dies ull remax so slowly :s. 25 is like a huge number but not unthinkable late-late-game toss.
Yes it is actually unthinkable, that is why no one does it.
On October 29 2011 18:21 Optimism wrote: The SQ thread provides some interesting context for this, and the answer is even among pro-gamers there's still quite a bit of variance in macro ability.
Now it may be that improving your skill leads to dimishing returns beyond a certain point, I could completely buy that. And it could be that the point of diminishing returns is too low to separate the very best players from the merely very good. But as for actually reaching the ceiling? That will never happen. It cannot be done by any human being.
edit: haha, beaten to it I see.
Thanks for introducing me to this youtube channel. This is also such a great argument to the OP.
Give me nerd chills thinking about the future of this game.
It's actually humanly impossible, not sure why this is a good video to show the micro capabilities of the game, but some people aren't very realistic in this world it seems.
I would've think happy's micro is automated if husky didn't cast it. I have never seen any Korean reach that level of micro yet
On October 29 2011 19:51 Sega92 wrote: oh of course not, bw's skill ceiling was lower back way back i mean people thought nada was perfect in his play, and we have come so far since then that I think in the next few years we will see a HUGE jump in the skill ceiling and sc2 will become quite hard (not quite as hard as bw yet but still very hard)
I think the definition of skill ceiling is the "best possible play that cannot be improved anymore". This means the skill ceiling cannot increase or decrease. Only what people think where the skill ceiling is can actually change, but most people know that nobody is even close to the skill ceiling currently.
This. The skill ceiling is where you play absolutely flawlessly. In starcraft it is more of a theoretical thing because it's not humanly possible to ever reach it. No matter how good you are, you will always forget a probe, get supply blocked sometimes or set a bad rally.
It cannot and will not be reached in SC2 and BW alike.
On October 29 2011 18:07 Mise wrote: The true skill ceiling of SC2 is humanly impossible to reach. To achieve the skill ceiling you need to macro perfectly and micro invidual units through the whole game. You can't play that fast you'd need thousands of APM.
Basically this. There is obviously a skill ceiling to Sc2, but it is unattainable. For example, as good as players like MarineKingPrime are at microing Marines, they aren't even anywhere close to this, much less being able to macro perfectly at the same time.
I think when people talk about the skill ceiling being lower in sc2 they mean that the skill required to compete with the best isn`t very high. Not talking about literally the absolute highest flawless level of play.
Yes it is actually unthinkable, that is why no one does it.
Tell that MouzHasuObs, one of the strongest EU Protoss, who is mostly known for his extreme strong late game. At a certain point in the late game, he builds mass gateways. In a long game (Over 30 ingame minutes), he has often around 20 gateways, I have even seen matches, where the count went beyond 30.
According to himself (casts, interviews), the ability to reinforce armies via mass gateways is one of Protoss` biggest strengths. I would even go as far and say, that mass gateways are common in super late game, atleast if you play gateway heavy.
I think SC2 will end up a lot like WC3 in retrospect. Right now, the game seems to be relying on promises of content in patches and expansions from Blizzard to keep a fresh metagame. Can't see the game keeping an evolving metagame for over a decade like BW.
On October 30 2011 03:56 mango_destroyer wrote: I think when people talk about the skill ceiling being lower in sc2 they mean that the skill required to compete with the best isn`t very high. Not talking about literally the absolute highest flawless level of play.
This. It takes too little skill to be able to play with the best and because of this, high level matches get decided by luck rather than skill.
Isn't a major complaint that battles end too quickly in sc2? Doesn't that translate directly into a higher skill ceiling, as it makes unit control way more difficult because everything happens faster?
I've just never understood the idea that sc2 has a lower skill ceiling. Everyone admits that units are doing more damage and everything, and yet that RAISES the skill ceiling in terms of micro. Maybe macro-wise, but there are extremely few players at the moment with perfect macro, now that they added in the macro mechanics.
And the fact that there really aren't any no-name players winning a lot of stuff makes me think there really is a pretty high skill ceiling. The evidence just isn't there.
On October 30 2011 04:01 DoubleReed wrote: Isn't a major complaint that battles end too quickly in sc2? Doesn't that translate directly into a higher skill ceiling, as it makes unit control way more difficult because everything happens faster?
I've just never understood the idea that sc2 has a lower skill ceiling. Everyone admits that units are doing more damage and everything, and yet that RAISES the skill ceiling in terms of micro. Maybe macro-wise, but there are extremely few players at the moment with perfect macro, now that they added in the macro mechanics.
And the fact that there really aren't any no-name players winning a lot of stuff makes me think there really is a pretty high skill ceiling. The evidence just isn't there.
In my Opinion SC2 probably is in the top 5 highest skill ceilings of any game of all time. BW is probably a clear #1 then there are some others like WC3 Quake and Cs1.6 ... whether SC2 falls 1st 2nd or 5th we won't know for a long long time
Yes it is actually unthinkable, that is why no one does it.
Tell that MouzHasuObs, one of the strongest EU Protoss, who is mostly known for his extreme strong late game. At a certain point in the late game, he builds mass gateways. In a long game (Over 30 ingame minutes), he has often around 20 gateways, I have even seen matches, where the count went beyond 30.
According to himself (casts, interviews), the ability to reinforce armies via mass gateways is one of Protoss` biggest strengths. I would even go as far and say, that mass gateways are common in super late game, atleast if you play gateway heavy.
So I guess 30+ minute games is the same thing as having 25 gates on 3 bases. What game are we playing again?
I also enjoy how you didn't include my quote that was referring to the 3 bases with 25 gates comment so further support your argument.
Yes it is actually unthinkable, that is why no one does it.
Tell that MouzHasuObs, one of the strongest EU Protoss, who is mostly known for his extreme strong late game. At a certain point in the late game, he builds mass gateways. In a long game (Over 30 ingame minutes), he has often around 20 gateways, I have even seen matches, where the count went beyond 30.
According to himself (casts, interviews), the ability to reinforce armies via mass gateways is one of Protoss` biggest strengths. I would even go as far and say, that mass gateways are common in super late game, atleast if you play gateway heavy.
So I guess 30+ minute games is the same thing as having 25 gates on 3 bases. What game are we playing again?
I also enjoy how you didn't include my quote that was referring to the 3 bases with 25 gates comment so further support your argument.
What have you got shoved up your ass? :\
I've seen many protoss get like 15 gates off of 3 base when they're maxed. 25 gates is a bit of an exaggeration as stated before in YOUR quote. Protoss' strength is a late game never ending protoss gateway army, they become like marines & marauders with medivacs.
On October 29 2011 18:21 Optimism wrote: The SQ thread provides some interesting context for this, and the answer is even among pro-gamers there's still quite a bit of variance in macro ability.
Now it may be that improving your skill leads to dimishing returns beyond a certain point, I could completely buy that. And it could be that the point of diminishing returns is too low to separate the very best players from the merely very good. But as for actually reaching the ceiling? That will never happen. It cannot be done by any human being.
edit: haha, beaten to it I see.
You can do what he's doing by patrol moving away. I do it all the time and I'm just average joe mid masters level player. I'm not trying to take anything away from it, but if you're trying to compare that to any of the amazing micro such as the mass lockdown + nukes by boxer vs bcs I think you're falling MUCH shorter.
I think the sc2 expansions will be very good for sc2 and hopefully up that ceiling, but to me marine splitting vs banelings isn't all too impressive in comparison (for me).
Yes it is actually unthinkable, that is why no one does it.
Tell that MouzHasuObs, one of the strongest EU Protoss, who is mostly known for his extreme strong late game. At a certain point in the late game, he builds mass gateways. In a long game (Over 30 ingame minutes), he has often around 20 gateways, I have even seen matches, where the count went beyond 30.
According to himself (casts, interviews), the ability to reinforce armies via mass gateways is one of Protoss` biggest strengths. I would even go as far and say, that mass gateways are common in super late game, atleast if you play gateway heavy.
So I guess 30+ minute games is the same thing as having 25 gates on 3 bases. What game are we playing again?
I also enjoy how you didn't include my quote that was referring to the 3 bases with 25 gates comment so further support your argument.
Man, you're so obsessed with that one number. I didn't say "when you are on 3 bases you should have 25 gates", I said that it's feasible to have that many when in 3+ base scenarios. 25 on 3 base is a little much most the time, but it can happen. If you're on 4 base with a gold and maxed, you should absolutely be close to that many. If you're still sitting on like 12 gates, you're going to get overwhelmed after a battle.
We still have another 2 expansions to come to increase the skill ceiling in this game. I wouldn't be so worried. We've barley seen the limits of WOL after a year.
On October 30 2011 00:24 SiaBBo wrote: Actually it's not that hard to inject and spread creep perfectly. All you have to do is look the timer and it tells you when to spread creep and when to inject again.
That's laughable, you ever played zerg? Try harassing with mutas while terrans are drop harassing, and keep up with the injects plus spreading your creep all at the same time. NOT EASY, even the today's top zergs don't do it perfectly.
On October 30 2011 04:22 Talack wrote: We still have another 2 expansions to come to increase the skill ceiling in this game. I wouldn't be so worried. We've barley seen the limits of WOL after a year.
Valid point you are making there. I believe as well that the skill cap is far from being reached, and with the upcoming expansions it should increase the limits furthermore. There are obviously quite a few gosu players out there, but I do not think that they even have come to understand all there is to the game. There is still a lot to improve on. I am not worried that much about anything, because there should still be a lot to be discovered and improved upon as pathces and new expansions are released.
people saying how the skill ceeling is microing 60 marines individualy while macroing while harassing with 3 drops while upgrading and nuking at the same time with 900 effective apm, but in reality the skill celing is more what humans can actualy achive with the limited maximum apm that we have and even though we are still far away from it I dont think you are thinking about it the right way
I am worried about the skill ceiling in SC2, because I think the aspect of the game that determines the height of the ceiling is mechanics, like many others I assume. I agree it was also the mechanics in BW, but the ceiling for BW mechanics was virtually limitless because of how much more difficult effective multitasking was, wherease SC2 it's generally much easier to multitask effectively. I don't mean to bash SC2 in that regard, but my point is just more valid when it is compared, and to my knowledge it is pretty well accepted that good mechanics in BW were harder to come by.
On October 30 2011 04:48 Grobyc wrote: I am worried about the skill ceiling in SC2, because I think the aspect of the game that determines the height of the ceiling is mechanics, like many others I assume. I agree it was also the mechanics in BW, but the ceiling for BW mechanics was virtually limitless because of how much more difficult effective multitasking was, wherease SC2 it's generally much easier to multitask effectively. I don't mean to bash SC2 in that regard, but my point is just more valid when it is compared, and to my knowledge it is pretty well accepted that good mechanics in BW were harder to come by.
By allocating APM away from mechanics by simplifying it, it allows better exploration of the game itself in other areas,
as long as you can distinguish mvp's play from a 2nd tier code S korean terran, there isn't a problem. players are playing way better than they were just months ago and they're still not playing perfectly by any means. just give it time
People like to say that Flash, Jaedong "mastered" BW, but they actually didnt, nobody mastered that game. They had a few games which they played perfectly, or as close to perfect as humanly possible. But that was rare, they still made mistakes like every other progamer before them
SC2 is barely a year old, it is nowhere near mastered, you can see mistakes left and right and soon enough the game is getting changed with HotS, 1 year, then another massive change plus with.
Imagine SC2 basically sitting on a rollercoaster, no matter how good the players are they will never get to the skill ceiling. It will only happen once the game is no longer updated by even balance patches where you will have couple of years of uninterrupted competition and finally you might see a few select bonjwas get close to some kind of perfection of the game.
On October 30 2011 04:48 Grobyc wrote: I am worried about the skill ceiling in SC2, because I think the aspect of the game that determines the height of the ceiling is mechanics, like many others I assume. I agree it was also the mechanics in BW, but the ceiling for BW mechanics was virtually limitless because of how much more difficult effective multitasking was, wherease SC2 it's generally much easier to multitask effectively. I don't mean to bash SC2 in that regard, but my point is just more valid when it is compared, and to my knowledge it is pretty well accepted that good mechanics in BW were harder to come by.
By allocating APM away from mechanics by simplifying it, it allows better exploration of the game itself in other areas,
You guys keep talking about allocating APM differently but never give any specifics. As of now, there's simply less to do in SC2, be it macro or micro. When blizzard dumbed down macro, everyone said people will focus on micro more. It then turned out that micro is even more dumbed down (to the point people are calling moving Mutas over a Thor and pressing 'h' a "micro technique", for god's sake...). Now people are saying players will eventually allocate their APM/whatever elsewhere - but where?
I'd be content if SC2 allowed players to allocate their APM/skill elsewhere, but currently it does not. There's less macro AND micro than in BW. And even though the mechanics are easier than in BW, top SC2 players are showcasing worse multi-tasking, micro and macro than the top BW players.
Show me where that supposed potential is. I really do not see it. There are things like Marine vs. Baneling micro or Baneling landmines, but those are exception, whereas such things were the rule in BW. Blizzard is not going to fix the game. They openly say they won't fix certain flaws. And if anything, they are moving it more towards the WC3 model of micro - who uses the abilities to the fullest. I find that boring compared to BW micro. ;;
edit: And don't tell me I'm a mindless hater or something. I used to be one of the biggest SC2 enthusiasts. I took part in several SC2 related contests (together with FA for third place in SCLegacy macro mechanics contest), worked in the BW/SC2 section of GameReplays.org and discussed SC2 on three different sites like crazy. It's just that blizzard gradually made me lose all my hope that sc2 will ever live up to its name. One blunder after another.
I am a gold level terran player... Obviously I am not good at all..
I do feel however that sc2 is easier to play than bw for obvious reasons, such as the new macro system etc.
Things that I could make this game better, these are just ideas and please take them with a grain of salt (I personally would like for a harder game so the best players will always shine through)
1. For terran (only race I play and can say things that would make it harder to play) Put a time limit for how many mules can be called down. 1 per every minute or something like that, that way I can't just call down two mules if I forget to call them down at 50 energy. 2. Get rid of scan and make ravens cheaper. 3. Get rid of being able to que units
4. For all races, if somehow blizzard could cut down on the ball of death, make it so a certain amount of food can be in a control group. I personally feel micro is not as important because it is so easy to put units in a huge ball and attack. Granted pros still do great mircro with these balls with spits and ect, it would make a higher skill gap to be made to have multiple armies instead of one big army.
All these ideas could suck but the community needs to come up with ideas if they want things changed and propose them to blizzard.
Have you seen a 15 minute game where zerg doesn't miss an injection? What about Terran never losing a marine to banelings? How about Protoss never going above 50 chronoboost on any nexus?
I think the skill ceiling is still a far way off. Playing perfect (hitting the ceiling) is extremely difficult.
as artosis says everyone still sucks hardcore at sc2 just chill people and relax. Until like 20 marines can even spread and take out like 4 colosus so only 1 marine can be hit at a time then we havent hit a skill ceiling :D
I think the skill ceiling is limitless Even if the macro mechanics were easier (which imo they can and should be), people would never reach a spot where this is no room for improvement.
I am all in favor of people spending their micro skills doing decision oriented actions (rather than compulsory actions - such as making sure probes as split properly between gas and minerals)
On October 30 2011 05:25 Achilles306 wrote: Have you seen a 15 minute game where zerg doesn't miss an injection? What about Terran never losing a marine to banelings? How about Protoss never going above 50 chronoboost on any nexus?
I think the skill ceiling is still a far way off. Playing perfect (hitting the ceiling) is extremely difficult.
Going above 50 chronoboost on a nexus is not a bad thing. It is very useful to have stockpiles chrono in the case of getting dropped (the same as zerg having unspent larva in case of emergencies).
As long as they are keeping their money low, you cant fault anyone for having high chronoboost (unless they have upgrades going and are not chronoing them)
I remember a stork game in Brood War against a zerg that went something like this: Used dragoons and carriers to snipe off units with storm when zerg units came closer and red archon maelstorming units that come closer. On the other hand we had zerg sitting above stork with hydras, queens, scourge, devourer and defiler. Using dark swarm to protect the hydras from interceptors and dragoons bellow and using queens at the same time to slow down carriers and get devourers to hit them so they go down easier by scourge and hydras all at the same time when dodging malestorm and storm on top of it.
The closest I'm seeing in SC2 is with broodlords with infestors vs marines, tanks and vikings. Of course the fact that vikings hard counter broodlords is a weak link and the fact that infestors hard couter marines is a weak link and the fact that sieged tanks hard counter infestors in a weak link. And while its quite interesting, its still way bellow what Brood War has!
MVP was actually a very strong A-teamer, and made it to the round of 8 of a recent BW starleague before losing to Flash. Nestea also was no pushover either, as he and Reach (possibly Kingdom, not 100% sure) were a very strong 2v2 team. Yet both of these players still make mistakes and are not invincible.
If Flash, JD, Bisu were to come to SC2, the skill level would likely increase, but there should always be room for improvement. I think that it will all come down to strategy, micro and gamesense, as all pros will have macro to near perfect levels. After all, simply seeing one pro outmacro the other does not make for an exciting match either.
i'm not too worried about it. the game is mechanically easier because of the smarter AI for sure (as well as some better UI), but i feel like that frees up APM to do other things, like micro more. what i'm actually afraid of is that ridiculous builds can't be balanced out of the game basically because of how much damage units do to each other in this game, and that will kill the cost/benefit ratio of very attentive micro. i can't guess at how the dev team will address that problem. i'm optimistic but we'll see. i'm also afraid the devs will act too soon before someone solves a 'broken' build through micro or some other means.
On October 29 2011 18:12 Lightswarm wrote: Are you winning all your games? If so, the skill ceiling has been reached. If not, stop posting and start practicing
I think you completely missed the point of the thread lol
On October 30 2011 04:48 Grobyc wrote: I am worried about the skill ceiling in SC2, because I think the aspect of the game that determines the height of the ceiling is mechanics, like many others I assume. I agree it was also the mechanics in BW, but the ceiling for BW mechanics was virtually limitless because of how much more difficult effective multitasking was, wherease SC2 it's generally much easier to multitask effectively. I don't mean to bash SC2 in that regard, but my point is just more valid when it is compared, and to my knowledge it is pretty well accepted that good mechanics in BW were harder to come by.
By allocating APM away from mechanics by simplifying it, it allows better exploration of the game itself in other areas,
You guys keep talking about allocating APM differently but never give any specifics. As of now, there's simply less to do in SC2, be it macro or micro. When blizzard dumbed down macro, everyone said people will focus on micro more. It then turned out that micro is even more dumbed down (to the point people are calling moving Mutas over a Thor and pressing 'h' a "micro technique", for god's sake...). Now people are saying players will eventually allocate their APM/whatever elsewhere - but where?
I'd be content if SC2 allowed players to allocate their APM/skill elsewhere, but currently it does not. There's less macro AND micro than in BW. And even though the mechanics are easier than in BW, top SC2 players are showcasing worse multi-tasking, micro and macro than the top BW players.
Show me where that supposed potential is. I really do not see it. There are things like Marine vs. Baneling micro or Baneling landmines, but those are exception, whereas such things were the rule in BW. Blizzard is not going to fix the game. They openly say they won't fix certain flaws. And if anything, they are moving it more towards the WC3 model of micro - who uses the abilities to the fullest. I find that boring compared to BW micro. ;;
edit: And don't tell me I'm a mindless hater or something. I used to be one of the biggest SC2 enthusiasts. I took part in several SC2 related contests (together with FA for third place in SCLegacy macro mechanics contest), worked in the BW/SC2 section of GameReplays.org and discussed SC2 on three different sites like crazy. It's just that blizzard gradually made me lose all my hope that sc2 will ever live up to its name. One blunder after another.
It's hard to try to explain without sounding rude since thinking there is some form of skill cap that can be reached means the person has a very low understanding of the game and to be blunt, low understanding of RTS games in general.
We can take basic multitasking. If your multitasking and speed is better than your opponents you can force battles at 2 spots at the same time, or 3, or 4, or 5, or 6, or 20.
We can take micro. People post those bot videos to show glimpses of what can be achieved in theory. That "no human can do it" doesn't make it a bad argument, it just illustrates that the more skilled players will always come out ahead of a less skilled player in the same situation. You could make videos like that of anything, marines vs marines, zerglings vs zerglings, stalkers vs hydras, VR's vs queens, probes vs marines ....
And so on. A perfected bot would probably hit tens of thousands apm for example. And on top of the humanly impossible to reach speed caps the strategical possibilities probably go way beyond things like chess.
Games like these are so extremely complex that people would probably easily be able to compete in it if 99% of the current game was automated and each race only had 1 battle unit..
On October 30 2011 05:42 TheBomb wrote: I remember a stork game in Brood War against a zerg that went something like this: Used dragoons and carriers to snipe off units with storm when zerg units came closer and red archon maelstorming units that come closer. On the other hand we had zerg sitting above stork with hydras, queens, scourge, devourer and defiler. Using dark swarm to protect the hydras from interceptors and dragoons bellow and using queens at the same time to slow down carriers and get devourers to hit them so they go down easier by scourge and hydras all at the same time when dodging malestorm and storm on top of it.
The closest I'm seeing in SC2 is with broodlords with infestors vs marines, tanks and vikings. Of course the fact that vikings hard counter broodlords is a weak link and the fact that infestors hard couter marines is a weak link and the fact that sieged tanks hard counter infestors in a weak link. And while its quite interesting, its still way bellow what Brood War has!
It's only different in your mind. You can just as easily say "Defilers hard counter Marines, Science Vessels hard counter Defilers, Scourge hard counter Science Vessels, Marines hard counter Scourge".
Rome wasnt build in a day man. Neither was Brood War. Just give them time to play and in few years, we will see some gosu stuff as well. But i think this process might be accelerated if some of the BW super pros turned to the dark side and switched to SC2, and if he won everything as everybody thinks, it would make recent SC2ers work much much harder which would result in better matches
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.
Even if the skill ceiling in SC2 is lower than BW, it is still humanly impossible to reach so I'm not worried about it at all. I've also seen it posted that because the macro mechanics in SC2 are less demanding, the deciding factor in games might revert more to creative and powerful strategy instead of mechanical prowess. I don't know if this is true, but it is an interesting thing to consider.
How many Zergs get an overseer and leave it camped at their base with 200 energy for the rest of the game? Once you get an overseer for detection anyway, scouting with changlings should be part of your macro cycle (since you're not using that energy for anything, it's literally free. Scout his army composition. Scout for hidden expos. Have them look for drops. There's literally nothing worse than not making it). We don't see Zergs even try. We see Zerg's sacrifice overseers without dropping changings to scout another direction, too (yes, success rate of that is abysmal, but it's free and there's literally no reason not to).
When's the last time you even saw a Protoss P-move his zealots to minimize tank splash?
I don't know how you can look at where pro-level play in SC2 was at release and compare it to today and see anything but an amazing difference.
The threads OP mentions (particularly elephant in the room - which is severely flawed in many respects) do nothing to establish that players are nearing skill cap in SC2. If anything, the skill gap between players who take the game seriously and practice diligently and everyone else is widening.
On October 29 2011 17:56 hehe wrote: i am thinking the same way you are. a team bw progamers skill is pretty much wasted in sc2 because of how easy builds are to pull off.. there arent any builds that require such multi tasking and use of scouting information and star sense like bisus pvz.
yet, SC2 is still harder than anything that any ladder noob is ever going to play. A quality strategy game is too difficult to play, so why make it harder?
On October 29 2011 18:07 Mise wrote: The true skill ceiling of SC2 is humanly impossible to reach. To achieve the skill ceiling you need to macro perfectly and micro invidual units through the whole game. You can't play that fast you'd need thousands of APM.
you are a fucking retard. have you even read the OP or even know what we are discussing here? get out.
Now, I don't think we're going to be seeing that in the near future, nor do I think we realistically ever will. However, that is the skill ceiling for Zergling micro. You could make more videos about the other skill ceilings for mutli-tasking, spell casting, Colossus control - whatever, and these can all be done in conjunction, theoretically. That's the skill ceiling in SC2.
The question is, are these skill ceilings even remotely attainable? I'd say no, but then you look at what people would have thought when talking about BW in 1998 and I don't think anyone would have expected the ridiculous ability of people 13 years down the line. The ceiling is high, the question is how high people can get to it. Certainly, the game is not the limiting factor here.
example of SC1 ability: stim pack (lots of micro and emergent properties that affect the game) example of SC2 ability: charge (no micro. gets pwned by stim pack any time.)
actually, charge will negate stim pack, so charge actually has a negative "emergent property" value.
it's like if SC2 gave zerg an upgrade that prevents terrans from kiting. that would benefit zerg. it would also be a rock/paper/scissor thing. but would utterly destroy the game. blizzard just doesn't know what they are doing when it comes to emergent properties.
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?
On October 30 2011 05:20 opdomo wrote: I am a gold level terran player... Obviously I am not good at all..
I do feel however that sc2 is easier to play than bw for obvious reasons, such as the new macro system etc.
Things that I could make this game better, these are just ideas and please take them with a grain of salt (I personally would like for a harder game so the best players will always shine through)
1. For terran (only race I play and can say things that would make it harder to play) Put a time limit for how many mules can be called down. 1 per every minute or something like that, that way I can't just call down two mules if I forget to call them down at 50 energy. 2. Get rid of scan and make ravens cheaper. 3. Get rid of being able to que units
4. For all races, if somehow blizzard could cut down on the ball of death, make it so a certain amount of food can be in a control group. I personally feel micro is not as important because it is so easy to put units in a huge ball and attack. Granted pros still do great mircro with these balls with spits and ect, it would make a higher skill gap to be made to have multiple armies instead of one big army.
All these ideas could suck but the community needs to come up with ideas if they want things changed and propose them to blizzard.
retarded solutions from a retarded player. do you have enough experience with bw to even know what the discussion is about?
nah when the game distills down. It took people 10 years to figure out bw until it is stable. SC2 is hardly old enough. That's part of the reason why people don't want to switch because it is not yet stable so why risk it.
The automation bot proves the ceiling will never be reached by a human.
The fact that builds and scouting is so "easy" means that the pro players can spend their time multitasking and doing insane micro like the automation bot. The fact that they are not proves that the game is harder than people make it out to be and this "worry" is unfounded.
Now, I don't think we're going to be seeing that in the near future, nor do I think we realistically ever will. However, that is the skill ceiling for Zergling micro. You could make more videos about the other skill ceilings for mutli-tasking, spell casting, Colossus control - whatever, and these can all be done in conjunction, theoretically. That's the skill ceiling in SC2.
The question is, are these skill ceilings even remotely attainable? I'd say no, but then you look at what people would have thought when talking about BW in 1998 and I don't think anyone would have expected the ridiculous ability of people 13 years down the line. The ceiling is high, the question is how high people can get to it. Certainly, the game is not the limiting factor here.
example of SC1 ability: stim pack (lots of micro and emergent properties that affect the game) example of SC2 ability: charge (no micro. gets pwned by stim pack any time.)
actually, charge will negate stim pack, so charge actually has a negative "emergent property" value.
it's like if SC2 gave zerg an upgrade that prevents terrans from kiting. that would benefit zerg. it would also be a rock/paper/scissor thing. but would utterly destroy the game. blizzard just doesn't know what they are doing when it comes to emergent properties.
Umm, why wouldn't you compare stim pack with itself, instead of a completely different ability? Your comparison is useless.
Example of SC1 ability: Stim pack (lots of micro and emergent properties that affect the game) Example of SC2 ability: Stim pack (lots of micro and emergent properties that affect the game)
Example of SC1 ability: Leg Enhancements (no micro) Example of SC2 ability: Charge (potential for micro, albeit small)
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?
I think the main difference in comparing rts to fps games is that its easier to do something consistently well in rts games. For example, you can practice marine splits until you consistently split your marines nearly perfectly. In fps you can practice shooting the rl or rail all day, but sometimes you'll just miss a few rails in a row or you'll be on fire and nail 10 in a row. In other words, a lot of the skill ceiling in fps games is due to how hard it is to consistently perform well. In rts a lot of the skill ceiling comes from how many different tasks you have to complete in a short amount of time.
Even tho they were great in BW war and undoubtfully will be great players in SC2 the unts micro and in a way macro is diffrent and I don't think it will come to them that easy and they'll be the best as there is ALWAYS chance to improve imo.
Horrible op, just another ridiculous sc1bw trio fanboy.
I don't even understand what he's saying. If low reward is better than a-moving, it should be done in every possible situation. Microing 10 stalkers vs 40 roaches actually does work, since stalkers have faster move speed and have blink. How is winning a battle so heavily in favor of zerg (theoretically) a gimmick and not representative of skill? If a protoss player can use 10 stalkers to kill even 20 roaches, i'd say he was pretty skilled. Because of the "easy" mechanics, it's absolutely possible.
OP hasn't even considered the possibilities of micro opportunity in sc2, and just writes it off. Tank/medivac micro, kiting with marines/marauders on separate control groups, hellion/medivac harass, i could go on for quite a while.
Skill ceiling sc2 are so insanely far away it's unfathomable.
I think all this theorycrafting about the importance of macro and micro, and it's influence on a skill ceiling point to one key point. That the best progamers and champions of BW AND SC2 in both their respective histories so far, have one thing in common. Their decision making. Decision making is a common element and I think that you can't put a ceiling on that.
I think that death balls of units + a-move is too effective sometimes and keeping in mind that units tend to clump up in sc2 and nothing can be done about this at all we should have a much stronger AOE spells/dmg and ofc on bigger radius so that way instantly we will see difference between bad players (1a - all units on one control group) and good players (perfect spread all the time on 5 control groups). Any ideas of limiting number of units on one control group are just bad and unfair for zerg since they rely so much on zerglings and banelings, so somehow there are limited options to force players to use more than 1-2 control groups, one of them is a stronger aoe. There are still two expansions coming up so new units could make game more complicated and make sc2 much harder to play but we will see how things will turn out. I don't think that sc2 skill ceiling is reached but there are still some units missing for each race making this game sometimes limited and predictable, and ofc there is too much deathball vs deathball stuff going on.
On October 30 2011 01:35 BeMannerDuPenner wrote: worried? no since if we are honest its well known since the release of beta.
the only difference is that by now ive given up all hope that this will ever change.sc2 just rarely has that wow effect. in most games you see the same stuff and the caster hype/environment makes the excitement instead of the game/players.
also i think "skill ceiling" is not really the right term. esp in a game like starcraft you wont see "perfect" play. but what is the real problem is that people cant use and show their true skill since the game limits them and where it doesnt limit them it helps the player so much that the skill needed is very small. which is bad for competition, fun and viewing pleasure.
this is one of the main reasons i nowadays dont play sc2 anymore(atleast till hots), barely watch anymore and absolutely cannot watch any match without topnotch casters.
Hm, maybe your right that skill ceiling it the right term, but I'm not sure what the right word would be. Because the counter to a lower skill ceiling seems to be that until we individually control each unit as though we were playing DOTA or WoW, then there is still a higher ceiling. However, I don't think that's what is meant by low skill ceiling.
It's more do the units have the responsiveness/ robustness to be handled in skillful and unique ways that produces amazing viewing experiences. And yes SC2 does have some of those moments, marine split vs banelings comes to mind. There other examples and I guess low skill ceiling arguments suggest that there aren't enough of them. Moments like vulture micro, muta stack and harass, reaver dropping and mine dragging.
Blizzard's been rather all over the place with this. On one hand they put in auto rally/mine and multibase selection, but on the otherhand they put in larva inject, mules and chronoboost. The first were taken out because they were boring apm sinks, but I don't really so how the new macro mechanics are all that different. (Although creep spread accomplishes what I always thought Zerg's should be doing if not for the horrendous waste of resources for no benefit in BW.)
The biggest question to answer is SC2 frees up apm to do other things (debatable on Zerg's part quite frankly between larvae injects and creep spread), but what exactly are these new things?
Again Blizzard's been all over the place with places to spend this freed up apm. The phoenix moveshot was a half attempt, but doesn't really function the same way and they've patched out potential micro moments like the old voidray faze. It's too bad they didn't balance the voidray around the faze and kept it in.
Spell Caster problem I think the best place to look is spell casters however. Because a lot of the micro potential is on the basic units, particularly marines and stalkers. Roaches aren't very tricky and chargelots are countermicro and there's not much to collosi. But one of the biggest mistakes was to make spell casters ez with smart casting. The immediate counter is that you still see pro's missing spells cast, but that's not really the point.
The problem is that the spells are then balanced based on the assumption that every single spell will go off covering the screen with storms or fungals. This necessarily means the spells MUST be nerfed or it will be just a caster war. The problem then is the spell casting is not very exciting except for the shiny lights part. It's expected that the pro is going to cover the screen with spells, grab you high templar and spam 't'. When spells are balanced on the assumption the player will only have enough time to get a few off, then the spells can be more powerful. And then when a player is able to master firing off a whole bunch at once, it's an amazing moment because it's unique and SO powerful.
So part of the 'low ceiling' for lack of a better term is that Blizzard tried to make casters in particular much more available to everyone as part of their 'easy to learn, hard to master' philosophy. The problem is in BW newbies had just as much fun without casters and had fun incorporating a couple of them and getting off a couple storms, then they could feel awesome. And they could be in awe of when Jangbi covers the screen with storms. That's part of what's missing. Latency One thing I've been wondering recently is latency. Maybe it's just me, but I played one game of SC2 and then switched to iCCup and was amazed at the difference in feel. Unit movement/ responsiveness on SC2 always feels a little sluggish to me while BW has a quick, crisp feel to it. Is it just me? Because a lot of BW micro tricks didn't work on Battlenet 1.0, but needed LAN latency to work. Is this possibly hindering micro potential, but we have no way of knowing?
Edit They also should add in ground magic boxes. It could possibly deal with the death ball and at the very least give players one more tool to use.
Yes, im am quite worried that it will happen sooner than in bw but i think its better for the current bw pros to switch because bw isnt really developing anymore. Im excited for a possible sc2 switch
EDIT: meant that the game will get figured out alot sooner than broodwar. A skill-ceiling will never be reached
theres always space to improve on somethink just a little example you always will see some marines dieing to banelings right?so someone still can improve micro close to automaton
On October 30 2011 06:54 Thebbeuttiffulland wrote: theres always space to improve on somethink just a little example you always will see some marines dieing to banelings right?so someone still can improve micro close to automaton
But is the goal to be able to control each unit individually like in DOTA or WoW simultaneously? I'm still wondering how to describe the issue. Because while you're right that people are not playing like an AI with unlimited apm, I don't think that's what the question is about.
On October 29 2011 17:57 EtherealDeath wrote: Imo the Zerg skill ceiling is not nearly reached yet, whereas Terran and Protoss are much closer.
I think this. As a terran player I shutter at the thought of a zerg hitting every inject, spending all their larvae, spreading creep constantly with an extra queen, spreading overlords everywhere, spotting and picking off every drop, and mutalisk harrassing constantly.
What more can terrans do? Control drops better and drop more, Marine and maurader micro better.
Protoss though I don't feel has much more to do without harrassment, I think phoenix will see more use.
I think that all of the above shows that multitasking is the key to a high skill ceiling and the giant deathballs of SC2 are the problem. They have said many units for HOTS are aimed at combatting this so I hope this improves.
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...
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.
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...
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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
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
On October 29 2011 19:40 blug wrote: I can't remember who said it, but someone raised a good point saying that how often did you see a foreigner beat a Korean back in BW? Very rarely... In SC2 however, you actually see it quite often. Perhaps you can say that foreigners have just gotten better an have been practicing a lot more then they used to, you may be able to say that, but perhaps it could be said that the skill ceiling isn't that high.
While South Korean culture and its infatuation with StarCraft is inevitably going to yield more real-time strategy talent than the Western scene and its infatuation with first-person shooters, I believe that (and anyone can correct me if I'm wrong) KeSPA required some rather obscene requirements for the mere privilege of getting the pro-gaming license that would allow you to compete against the best players in Korea. This meant that any foreigner worth a damn had to make a huge investment if he even wanted a chance to have a shot at getting into the apparatus that was the best StarCraft training facilities in the world. He had to go overseas (to an unfamiliar country) and compete against highly-trained players just to get a chance to earn the training that could offer him the chance to stand with the best. The segregation played a huge part in it.
As it stands right now, you have Korean dominance of StarCraft II that's roughly on-par with what people saw in Warcraft III, where Koreans routinely claim the top of the standings but Western players (mostly Europeans) can give any player a run for their money at any time. However, that may very-well change if the KeSPA teams make a permanent switch. At which point, it will probably have more in common with the American dominance of basketball during the period prior to the mid-to-late nineties: Few standout "foreigners" and utter domination by a single country...roughly what you had during the Brood War days.
On October 30 2011 08:18 Glon wrote: 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
how does adding more casters and harass units lowering the skill level. That's counter-intuitive.
Smart casting allows for much more forgiving caster control, but we'll see. People who argue that BW pros who have much more APM can now allocate APM that used to be reserved for mechanics toward multitasking and micro need to consider that game design changes may limit this advantage. Really though, until we see someone approach this sort of level, it's not really relevant.
On October 30 2011 05:25 Achilles306 wrote: Have you seen a 15 minute game where zerg doesn't miss an injection? What about Terran never losing a marine to banelings? How about Protoss never going above 50 chronoboost on any nexus?
I think the skill ceiling is still a far way off. Playing perfect (hitting the ceiling) is extremely difficult.
This is so dumb. A zerg player can miss an injection or two without it having a severe impact. Chronoboost just shifts timing windows for upgrades a bit that aren't too important as long as your opponent doesn't hit at that exact time etc. You're just naming things that have some benefit, but that don't really disprove the notion that past a certain point pretty much everyone is playing the same skill-wise. For instance, in your world macro and scouting could disappear and you'd still say: "skillcap not reached! you can still use micro!", which pretty much means that either the word skillcap or skillceiling is useless or that you're trying to deliberately misinterpret it.
To put it another way: back during the PvP 4gate era there were still players that could win consistently through better micro. Yet there was still a low 'skillceiling' on that type of play.
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.
I have to agree with most of what you wrote but what comes to mind is how bad the skill ceiling term is for things like this. The most logical meaning is probably that a non specific skill ceiling means solved in all aspects which will never happen in any of these games. Discussing it like it's a realistic problem from that perspective wont exactly be on a high intellectual level to put it nicely.
So people should probably try explain what they mean(I don't even understand what the OP is possibly worried about personally) so there is something to actually discuss.
On October 30 2011 08:18 Glon wrote: 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
how does adding more casters and harass units lowering the skill level. That's counter-intuitive.
You can argue that not forcing players to use their standard units efficiently and flexibly, rather than spamming specialized units, takes away from skill.
Lot easier to just spam storm on stuff than control large zealot/goon armies (or zealot/stalker for sc2) effectively.
i just wanted to say 1 thing... you say that the only micro tricks worth focusing on are marine/tank vs. zerglings + the 2 or whatever other things you listed... but are those honestly the ONLY tricks worth doing?
your logic is quite flawed... let me break this down:
1. If you are doing ANY micro trick at all while your opponent isn't, it's giving you an edge, No? Yes. 2. ANY edge on your opponent is worth it, No? Yes. 3. During the course of a match, if you are doing little things here and there to gain an edge, you GAIN AN EDGE, NO? Yes. 4. Unless you CONSTANTLY macro/micro in EVERY given situation, you have room for improvement, No? Yes.
If you aren't doing 1-4 ALL THE TIME then you haven't reached the skill ceiling. There are a few people right now who seem to just be the best players on the planet. Yes, some of these people are quite good at using these tricks as much as possible, but there is NOBODY who is doing it so close to flawlessly that the BW pro's have had 11 years to master.
What I'm saying is... it takes A LONG TIME before ANY ONE PERSON in the WORLD will be anywhere NEAR this level of gameplay, and when they do, they will be long standing SuperStars. These will be the Flash / Bisu / Jaedong of the SC2 era. There won't be many true bonjwa's...
This is where I will draw my conclusion. Even in BW, there are so few people who can be considered at this level of gameplay.... Do you really think that in SC2 after 1 year, we need to worry about a skill ceiling? I really don't think so. If you do, that's your prerogative... but be realistic with your claims and don't sensationalize the skill ceiling for SC2 like it's already reaching it's peak, because TRUST ME when I say we have a LONG road ahead of us.
Because you are the best at one thing doesn't mean you will be the best at everything.
Although there are similarities in the game genres and team, the metagame is much more different in SC2 and the match ups are so volatile it can shift at any time.
- Huk won MLG and Dreamhack as protoss which is the race listed as the lowest odds of winning. - MMA defeated MVP - Tails defeated Nestea
I see people say terran and zerg mechanics still have room to develop but I disagree. WHen I see terrans and zergs geams, pretty much all games will end in smilar fashion and they will use all of their units most of the time. I feel like it is protoss that needs some groundbreaking advancement right now. It is easy to that with the 1.4.2 patch coming, the protoss will most likely have the upgrade advantage and with the improved immortals and underused warp prism, I think something good will come out.
In my opinion, the martest move for the BW progamers looking to switch will be to wait for HotS since they will not have to learn 2 different game mechanics since it is easy to see HotS will add different playstyles to the game!
No, not very concerned. I still believe that it's a different game, and that even high level bw talent won't be as dominant as people think they will be.
On October 29 2011 18:12 firehand101 wrote: Unfortunately, it is good on one end and bad on another. Lower skill cap? of course, we have automine and boxes with more than 12 workers for @#$ sake!
Is it better.......................i say yes. Why? look at us. Look at all of these people on TL, 2000 logged in atm, all revolving around this game because, even Jimmy in bronze league can make the build that MVP did and feel a little like him. The ease of starcraft 2 (relative to BW) allows for lesser skilled players to enjoy builds and strats popularised by the pros, so it is good on that side, something we would never change because we would never have this mainstream audience again
On October 30 2011 08:18 Glon wrote: 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
how does adding more casters and harass units lowering the skill level. That's counter-intuitive.
You can argue that not forcing players to use their standard units efficiently and flexibly, rather than spamming specialized units, takes away from skill.
Lot easier to just spam storm on stuff than control large zealot/goon armies (or zealot/stalker for sc2) effectively.
Controlling your army while casting storm at the right spots is a lot harder than you make it sound. Bring in ghosts in the mix and it becomes incredibly hard.
However, I will guarantee that once players like Flash, Leta, Bisu, Jaedong, etc comes into SC2, within 2-4 months they will clean out existing top SC2 players such as Nestea, MMA, etc.
With the game doing everything for the player I bet players like Flash end up having their strengths given to others and its a MUCH more even playing ground. smart cast, MBS, automine are things he can do in SC1. But those are things the game does in SC2 hence Flash and others will not maintain 80% W:L. Infact I imagine they will underperform since the requirement about of mechanics for sc2 is much much lower than sc1 and the community will be confused and angry
On October 30 2011 08:18 Glon wrote: 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
how does adding more casters and harass units lowering the skill level. That's counter-intuitive.
You can argue that not forcing players to use their standard units efficiently and flexibly, rather than spamming specialized units, takes away from skill.
Lot easier to just spam storm on stuff than control large zealot/goon armies (or zealot/stalker for sc2) effectively.
Controlling your army while casting storm at the right spots is a lot harder than you make it sound. Bring in ghosts in the mix and it becomes incredibly hard.
When you put more focus on controlling individual key units and less on the main body, it can reduce the amount of actual control needed. It can depend on other stuff, too, so this is kinda hypothetical. What I don't necessarily want to see is a battle determined by casters with the 'core' units diminished in importance. On the other hand, they might just increase necessary battle micro.
Another issue is that some of the units being added seem pretty simple. 1A deathball tempests, for instance.
I would say yes because I think there is too many moment where the battle is over way too fast and seems like brute force that any casual can do, and seems a bit disappointing (especially when both party turtles for like 20 minute then battle is done in 10 second). I find it least interesting when 2 giant death balls fights each other and is over in a few seconds...lower damage and instantaneous aoe and make big engagement take longer which would make micro become more important would be a great move IMO.
I am not worried at all. I think that we are still long ways from the still cap. I think about Brood War - the macro gods were so tight and seeing those SQ stats tells me that the current "best players" are so far from tightening their build orders and macro that we are far from the cap.
If people are not spending near top-notch level, then that means inefficiency. Over the next couple years, especially after the final SC2 comes out, then we will really start seeing people getting closer and closer to where things are in Brood War. We have many years before players are really great.
Not to mention, people still don't seems to use all of their units correctly. Timings are always changing, pushes are changing, and everything else keeps evolving and changing as these players evolve and change. Macro and expanding are the keys to great RTS play and those are two of the worst things in SC2 players still. We are far far away from a skill cap.
I'm not worried at all.Starcraft didn't have an actual e-sports scene until broodwar hit the shelves.I'm sure the new expansion will set it even further,also (most messed up paragraph ever),you have to remember that broodwar talent doesnt mean instant SC2 sucess,its a game where the more hours of pratice you put into it the better you get,subsequently we're far from hitting the fans.
EPT
