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United States7483 Posts
On January 24 2012 02:27 orangesunglasses wrote:Show nested quote +On January 24 2012 00:27 Whitewing wrote:On January 24 2012 00:23 Sawamura wrote:On January 24 2012 00:18 Whitewing wrote:
When players are playing perfectly you can complain about skill caps being too low and the game being too easy. For a so called 'easy' game, people sure make a lot of mistakes. I see  firebathero and Flash getting supply block in the middle phase of the game . Bw must be easy because they do make a lot of mistakes too. That was exactly my point -_-. Neither game is 'easy', they're just 'different'. no sc2 is easy compared to BW its a simple fact of math. macro in sc2 is easier so is micro. strats the same so we have a 2-0 in favor of BW
Are you that dense?
Easier =/= easy. Knocking down the CN tower with one punch is easier than breaking the entire planet in half with one punch, that doesn't mean it's easy.
And it's not clear that micro is easier in SC2 than it is in Brood War. Simpler? Yes. It is much simpler, unit control isn't nearly as complex. But complexity and difficulty are not the same thing, units die much faster in SC2 and move faster as well, which means controlling them properly requires more speed and accuracy, as well as much more caution since the slightest mistake can mean a dead army. In Brood War, units died a bit slower and didn't move nearly as fast on the whole, so controlling them was more a question of know-how than a question of raw speed and accuracy. That said, due to the slower movement speed and dying rate in BW, you were able to properly control more units at once.
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On January 23 2012 21:12 DeepBlu2 wrote:
Adding things like automine and smartcast significantly lower the skillcap, yet don't make the game more fun, so I can't understand why they would add it.
I don't think removing automine overly raises the skill gap. Sure, it adds another element of multitasking, but at the highest levels of BW, who has ever lost by not being good at put workers to mine?
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On January 24 2012 01:24 thesums wrote:Show nested quote +On January 24 2012 01:16 perestain wrote:
The whole SC2 is easier than BW talk is nothing more than the whining of people who are butthurt that their skills in one game dont transfer completely to another game.
Sorry to break it to you, but you actually never lose on ladder to someone "obviously below your skill level". Your skill is your ability to win in this game, nothing more, nothing less. If you lose, the other guy was better, at least for that one game, everything else is delusional. Disagree, I never played much SC1, I play much more SC2 because it is easier.
easier to do what?
to win? That is not dependent on the game, but on your opponent.
and there is no success otherwise to be had in sc2, so the term easy doesnt have any meaning in this context.
Is basketball easier than volleyball?
sentences like these dont mean anything, if you take a closer look. grammar wise they're correct, but there are no semantics.
Many people feel that as well.
Feelings are irrational. Most people feel that their opponent is a faggot noob after they lost to someone. So most sc2 players are faggot noobs or what?
Why is it a lot of foreigners play SC2? When SC1 started foreigners also participated (in Korea), but soon the majority left and why is that? The mechanics of the game is harder.
What? that doesnt make any sense either. They left because the competition eventually got too fierce to actually win something with their talent/practice regimen. Its a numbers game, for every foreigner leaving there were multiple koreans leaving too for the same reasons.
And what the hell do you mean with the mechanics being harder? They may be less comfortable, but winning is exactly as hard (or easy) in both games, since the other player has to deal with the same situation.
I wish it was not, but the fact is it really is... And the skills really transfer because the more successful BW players (not counting old players that already retired) are more successful here. MVP was an A teamer and he is the best player atm, too good to be a coincidence right? Even with carpel tunnel syndrome
You think one player is a large enough sample size to draw a conclusion? Really? That he is the best player atm is a matter of opinion also btw. Top foreigners are mostly Ex-WC3 players. Picking random bits of information is not conlusive.
Evidence in general will not help you with proving a proposition that logically can not be true since it does not even have a meaning upon taking a closer look.
Under the assumption that both games cannot be played perfectly, and both players play under the same conditions, game A can not be harder to win than game B. It can only require a different skillset to win and thus favor one player over the other.
No blabla about this korean or that match or whatever people come up with to mistake their feelings for facts is going to change that. Its logic, it works. Myths dont.
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I think harder and having a higher skill ceiling are two different things and shouldn't be viewed as the same. Should this game be harder for the average player? Probably not, but should it have a higher skill ceiling? Hard to say, because no pro's have hit the ceiling yet, but I'm going to go ahead and assume that the higher the ceiling the better.
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So now i see lots of people defending SC2 against broodwar. Yes it may be easier, but i see the skill cap widening and hightening majorly within the next 2 expansions. The fact that the AI is smarter should not make it seem worse on the player side. There is evidence that luck plays a factor in BO wins, but there were those in Broodwar too, Kiante wrote in his post that team 8 had been falling to these unluckily to the other teams. Basically SC2 has the chance to become just as good as broodwar, in different ways because they are very different, if we as a community make it thay (along with blizzards help). Just because its not hard now doesn't mean it won't be later. now onto discussing the OP, Yes Sc2 should be harder. It should happen gradually, BW is a great game, but the fact that it was so hard made it a niche thing making the masses not love it and a small group love it. Compared to all other major games and especially to SC2, the BW scene is small and its because of how much you have to know to play the game. The game should become very difficult through complex tactics, larger maps etc. but in a couple years so that the community can develop.
EDIT: i should be clear, my point is that, yay people defending sc2, and that it needs to be harder, but slowly and in a way that widens the skill gap in a way that does not compromise the ability of new players to join the fray even if they are in bronze, you need to be able to gain rank somehow or else the scene will die.
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On January 23 2012 21:03 CecilSunkure wrote:
SC2 is more accessible than BW for sure, but I don't think the skill cap is as low as everyone makes it out to be. Not at all.
agree with this. also, adding mindless key-mashing so that you have to 1a2a3a4a instead of 1a, or re-hotkeying buildings individually, doesnt make the game more enjoyable; it just makes mechanical abilities more important than strategies...
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The whole luck based play argument is really starting to fall apart. More and more we are seeing individual players who are able to consistently win their games against lesser opponents. However this probably doesn't apply to PVP since it is arguably the least developed match-up. MVP for example is almost invincible, he simply doesnt lose Bo3's unless he is outplayed because his strategies are superior.
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I don't think you should look at this as just "easier" and "harder". Think of it as a "skill ceiling" and a "skill floor". What Blizzard may be trying to do is raise the skill floor (make noobs better) without lowering the skill ceiling.
Take unit selection. Unlimited unit selection makes the game significantly easier for new players (raises the skill floor), but only slightly affects the skill ceiling (by freeing up some APM).
Imagine if you could auto-build workers (like carrier interceptors). TL would be outraged, because the game would be significantly easier. But, this would only raise the skill floor. Every Silver League player would be instantly better, and pros would be all but unaffected.
Now, some changes Blizzard made have (probably inadventantly) lowered the skill ceiling. Specifically pathfinding (it's been talked about plenty).
In BW, if you don't micro your units, less than half of them will be attacking at the same time. So, spending APM to keep your units together is always good, and significantly so.
In SC2, units are great at pathfinding. They can almost always stay together even without micro. It's easy to get 80%+ of your units attacking with minimal control. What's hard is spreading your units vs AoE damage.
The thing is, it's not an even trade. Keeping your units together is always good, spreading your units is only good vs AoE. So I think you get some net lowering of the skill ceiling.
I believe SC2 uses steering behaviors to achieve its silky smooth unit movement. I wish Blizz would try putting in an avoidance behavior for all friendly units. This would basically cause units to stay farther apart from each other (as though they "think" they're 2x and big as they really are), unless specifically ordered to move closer. They probably tried it and found it negatively affected pathfinding too much. Oh well. Too bad it's not something you can do with Galaxy scripting, or I'd implement it myself. Can't wait for someone to release a bwapi for SC2 
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On January 23 2012 20:54 firehand101 wrote:
All please read: this thread was supposed to be arguing the fact that it is the ease of the game that draws the large crowds, and without it it would be a game for the minority, not the masses. It is not really a discussion on whether or not it should be harder, that is for another thread
The entire basis upon stating that, basically the harder the game is the less viewers it has is entirely retarded. It's BECAUSE of how hard a game is that makes it more interesting. It's simply THAT MUCH more amazing to see it witnessed at high levels, feats which very few people in this world are capable of. And only viewers who have a good understanding of the game can appreciate this, which generally makes up VERY little of them. ANY game that is interesting and engaging to a viewer will draw a huge fan base.
SC2 is popular for a myriad of reasons, and being easy to play is definitely not one of them. It gave them a larger player base which to become viewers, but that doesn't actually make the game any more interesting to watch.
It's an interesting discussion that's tagged along with BW vs SC2 and SC2's difficulty, but the opening post is just horrible.
On January 23 2012 22:15 Talin wrote:Show nested quote +On January 23 2012 22:00 Sated wrote:
BW is hard to play because getting units to do what you want is a struggle with the AI/UI. This struggle shouldn't exist. People in 2012 don't want to be fighting against the AI/UI of a game in order to do what they want to do, they want to be fighting against their opponent, and if I am watching a pro-level game then I want to see two players competing with each other - not with the AI/UI + Show Spoiler +
Competition without difficulty of control is absolutely meaningless. It would come down only to strategy and decision making.
Some of the best games historically have been games that are difficult to control. It doesn't need to be Brood War, or even an RTS game.
Take platformers or fighting games or old FPS games, any game that is worth competing in will make it extremely difficult for you to execute something you want to do. Good games will either make it so that you have to hit an extremely tight timings, have almost pixel-perfect accuracy, be extremely fast and have great reflexes, have a great memory under pressure, multitasking, etc. In other words, good games must stress one (and preferably more) of general human skills.
RTS's only way of accomplishing this level of difficulty is to make it so that you have to put in A LOT of physical actions to do what you want to do, and make it so that how good you are in a game depends on your speed and multitasking. There is no way to make an RTS game challenging other than limiting the level of control you have over your in-game assets, and keeping them very basic.
It's all about design. An RTS game where you can only have ONE thing (one building or one unit) selected at any point in time wouldn't necessarily be worse than SC2 because of that specific feature. Things like this don't make a game better or worse, they make games different. Higher level of control reduces human factor in gameplay. For a game designed to be competitive, it only makes sense to keep the controls as low level as possible. Problem with Blizzard is that they also want to sell the game as a casual title, but that's a whole different topic.
Game difficulty doesn't really matter as long as the player has some way to bear upon an opponent with superior raw skill. Games could be playable by a four year old but still be extremely competitive if two players are rewarded in the correct way when exerting all their skill. Given, easy games generally have the low skill 'ceilings' which doesn't allow this.
But this entire post is extremely over-exaggerated. There is no need to begin an argument by saying games with ABSOLUTELY no difficulty = meaningless competition. What does that even have to do with SC2? SC2 clearly takes a fuck ton of skill; Not as much as BW, but a fuck ton. And Blizzard has never stated they intended to remove all difficulty. It just derails any legitimate comparison.
Also, you can reward a player who has superior mechanics without the requirement of repetitive, draconian gameplay features. Blizzard is already trying by throwing in units which can provide additional utility to any strat. Take the oracle. Whether you agree with it or not (I personally despise it) or whether it will be useful enough to really add that much utility, it's one extra unit to control that a player with higher APM can simply abuse a worse player with. One avenue of increasing difficulty definitely lies along giving players more simultaneous options (new units, new roles) in game that require faster decisions and more APM.
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Sc2 is still one of the hardest games, probably not compared to broodwar but compared to most other games. Thats why alot of my friends stopped playing it. I also dont think a "skill cap" has been reched yet. Theres alot of stuff which just cant be done perfectly.
However, adding new Units to the game is the right way imo, since it makes the game harder for progamers, because they need better decisionmaking and there will be alot of new strats, but it doesnt make the game more stressful for casuals.
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On January 24 2012 02:34 Whitewing wrote:Show nested quote +On January 24 2012 02:27 orangesunglasses wrote:On January 24 2012 00:27 Whitewing wrote:On January 24 2012 00:23 Sawamura wrote:On January 24 2012 00:18 Whitewing wrote:
When players are playing perfectly you can complain about skill caps being too low and the game being too easy. For a so called 'easy' game, people sure make a lot of mistakes. I see firebathero and Flash getting supply block in the middle phase of the game . Bw must be easy because they do make a lot of mistakes too. That was exactly my point -_-. Neither game is 'easy', they're just 'different'. no sc2 is easy compared to BW its a simple fact of math. macro in sc2 is easier so is micro. strats the same so we have a 2-0 in favor of BW Are you that dense? Easier =/= easy. Knocking down the CN tower with one punch is easier than breaking the entire planet in half with one punch, that doesn't mean it's easy. And it's not clear that micro is easier in SC2 than it is in Brood War. Simpler? Yes. It is much simpler, unit control isn't nearly as complex. But complexity and difficulty are not the same thing, units die much faster in SC2 and move faster as well, which means controlling them properly requires more speed and accuracy, as well as much more caution since the slightest mistake can mean a dead army. In Brood War, units died a bit slower and didn't move nearly as fast on the whole, so controlling them was more a question of know-how than a question of raw speed and accuracy. That said, due to the slower movement speed and dying rate in BW, you were able to properly control more units at once.
Why would it require MORE speed and accuracy? There's only a max amount of speed someone could even feasibly put into the game. Besides that i think you are missing the point. Look at the new units. Collossus. Reaver. Hrm can't quite put my finger on the difference..
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Do We want the game harder? Depends..
Do we want artificial barriers which are illogical? Take for example unit selection. You could make game uber hard at capping group selection with 2 units. Is it logical? No it makes no sense whatsoever, however you would argue it. We dont want this, it's terrible idea.
Do we want increase in micro encouraging stuff, brilliant unit design, that could seriously impact battles with flawless execution? Yes, please.
Basically, as long as it is not artificial and stupid self-impairment, but rather gameplay/design mechanics, definetely, we need game harder.
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From my point of view it would be stupid to make this game a lot harder all of the sudden. Guess what, the key to the huge success starcraft has is it's accessibility for newer players, who can try this game out and don't be instantly overwhelmed by it like in bw, but still I don't believe in any skill caps out there, sc2 is still a new game and people love to make it look like a lot of things are decided by randomness, however the fact that players like mc, mvp and nestea can win games and therefore tournaments over and over again shows that simply the best players can win on a consistent basis.
Though, I would like to see more units that don't revolve about simple attack-moving, but not because "they're easy" or something but because they're simply boring and add this deathball mentality to the game. All in all, I am quite happy about the state of SC2 right now, although some more units that can be effectively use by newbs, yet still can be used even more effectively in the hands of the pro with sick multitasking skill and stuff would be some really nice additions to the game over all. =)
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AS a first time rts player i would just like to say that this game is great and hard enough as is right know. but as a competitive person i would love to see the game get harder and better. you also have to understand the SC2 is still young and BW in like 10 years old its going to take some time for sc2 to even come close to BW if it ever does.(i hope nobody takes that wrong, i hope sc2 becomes as great of a game as BW if not better but as of right now we are still trying to learn the game builds and timings and the metagame. I love sc2 and wish i had gotten in to bw a long time ago and only hope that sc2 goes as far as it can like BW
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On January 24 2012 02:42 infinity2k9 wrote:Show nested quote +On January 24 2012 02:34 Whitewing wrote:On January 24 2012 02:27 orangesunglasses wrote:On January 24 2012 00:27 Whitewing wrote:On January 24 2012 00:23 Sawamura wrote:On January 24 2012 00:18 Whitewing wrote:
When players are playing perfectly you can complain about skill caps being too low and the game being too easy. For a so called 'easy' game, people sure make a lot of mistakes. I see firebathero and Flash getting supply block in the middle phase of the game . Bw must be easy because they do make a lot of mistakes too. That was exactly my point -_-. Neither game is 'easy', they're just 'different'. no sc2 is easy compared to BW its a simple fact of math. macro in sc2 is easier so is micro. strats the same so we have a 2-0 in favor of BW Are you that dense? Easier =/= easy. Knocking down the CN tower with one punch is easier than breaking the entire planet in half with one punch, that doesn't mean it's easy. And it's not clear that micro is easier in SC2 than it is in Brood War. Simpler? Yes. It is much simpler, unit control isn't nearly as complex. But complexity and difficulty are not the same thing, units die much faster in SC2 and move faster as well, which means controlling them properly requires more speed and accuracy, as well as much more caution since the slightest mistake can mean a dead army. In Brood War, units died a bit slower and didn't move nearly as fast on the whole, so controlling them was more a question of know-how than a question of raw speed and accuracy. That said, due to the slower movement speed and dying rate in BW, you were able to properly control more units at once. Why would it require MORE speed and accuracy? There's only a max amount of speed someone could even feasibly put into the game. Besides that i think you are missing the point. Look at the new units. Collossus. Reaver. Hrm can't quite put my finger on the difference..
And now put them both in the same enviroments and do your little comparison again...
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I play random with no rts background at all and I 6 pooled and cannon rushed and mass raxed my way into top 20 diamond. I think that's pretty easy.
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I would like to see more interesting units that reward micro more (compare reaver to the collosi for example).
But i actually SC2 is at a kinda good place right now, the better player wins most of the time. It can only become better :D
From the competitive point of view i guess some stuff can feel to easy at times.
But we can't forget the newbs. Would rather see SC2 grow then only contain a small amount of hardcore gamers 
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On January 24 2012 02:49 devPLEASE wrote:
I play random with no rts background at all and I 6 pooled and cannon rushed and mass raxed my way into top 20 diamond. I think that's pretty easy.
A game's difficulty is totally decided by how hard it is to achieve top 20 diamond.
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SoCal, USA3955 Posts
People need to stop thinking BW is harder than SC2. SC2 is an IMPROVEMENT of BW. Same as how WC3 was an IMPROVEMENT of WC2. Groups are not mean to just clump up all armies into one hotkey and A-1. Players need to separate armies themselves and micro armies for survival. The game has improved mechanics to allow you to do more in-between. If this game was easy everyone would be in GSL or MLG winning, but I don't think that is the case cause nobodies don't come through the open bracket (MLG) and winning a tournament. I believe blizzard know what they are doing they already want to try to break the deathball problem, only such few players don't play like that. Blizzard is the one who probably make the best RTS games atm and their games live for several years than most other RTS have. We still have to wait for the next two expansion to really consider the game is a more of a complete form then wait a year or two to see the game level out (along with patches and such). This game is still young compared to BW, I find it just not right atm to call anything out on this game, it needs time. It's not like SC was magically awesome when it came out, it took time to improve it.
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EPT
