Do We Want the Game Harder? - Page 18

On January 24 2012 05:54 Falling wrote:
I don't really see why this needs to be mutually exclusive. The sorts of things I would like added would keep the skill the same for bronzies, but allow for greater levels of skill for pro's. For instance- muta micro, wraith micro, vulture micro. The mechanics to do those sorts of micro tricks while macroing at the same time is insane. But those same units can be 1a just the same (or move command with the mouse if you don't even know about attack move.) They just weren't nearly as effective when in the hands of the pro's. But mutalisks are pretty straightforward. Grab 12, move them forward to attack, grab the next 12, rinse repeat. But to take away the rapid reflex, muta control that could dart into a base to pick up stray units at will- why would we ever take that away when nothing better replaces it?

Carrier micro too- noobs would use them just the same as 1a, but pro's could attack retreat and hover across cliffs. Reavers were actually easy to use- they just weren't very effective without micro. But you could send them on their poky way or leave them for defence.

Ok, so maybe getting rid of smart casting would make things harder for noobs. But honestly, real newbs don't really use those sorts of units anyways. And if they did, I'm sure they would be just as happy to fire off one really awesome spell that killed stuff than to spam 't' with little discernible difference to the marauders, tanks or roaches.

Or take Dark Swarm- zerg was easy to use as newb. Make banks of hatcheries so you can select 12 larvae at a time and build 200 zerglings and send them at a base. True newbs with their 12-40 apm aren't going to use Dark Swarm anyways. But it's a tool that can be used by even D- or E players going on iCCup.


And that's why I don't really see it as mutually exclusive. Newbs will gravitate to the easier to use units and experiment with the cool ones. (I taught one guy to macro, but then he just made masses of goliaths so that he could have 6 control groups to 1a2a3a4a5a6a across the map. He eventually learned that straight goliaths is a bad strategy.) But you don't take away tools for the pro's to use.

And if we're talking about problems of making the game harder- Blizzard kinda already did that with the arbitrary macro mechanics. Consider, if Protoss didn't have chronoboost, how would it be balanced? Why the build times would be sped up. What about inject larvae? Larvae would spawn faster or Zerg units would become tougher. They've pulled out some pretty straight forward stuff to make the game harder and rebalanced the timings and cost based on that. When really it could have been buried in adjusting the numbers a bit and forget about the macro mechanics altogether.

On January 24 2012 07:27 mango_destroyer wrote:
Definitely needs a higher skill cap to reduce some of the luck factor. Hard work should be rewarded more, but instead I still see upsets a lot more often than BW ever did. I seen countless number of pros asking for more micro units in interviews.

On January 24 2012 07:32 JDub wrote:

Upsets, for one, aren't a bad thing. It would be pretty boring to watch if there wasn't much doubt in the outcome about the result of a match, especially given how young SC2 still is. Secondly, hard work is and has been rewarded (why do we see the same top players each season in GSL, with a small bit of turnover?). Why do Koreans continue to dominate when they come to foreign tournaments (hint: hard work)?

Pros are still super far from the skill ceiling. I don't see how you could possibly argue otherwise.

On January 24 2012 07:27 mango_destroyer wrote:
Definitely needs a higher skill cap to reduce some of the luck factor. Hard work should be rewarded more, but instead I still see upsets a lot more often than BW ever did. I seen countless number of pros asking for more micro units in interviews.