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i heavily believe this threads so touted "deathball problem" is a non-issue
the deathball is a ""problem"" in PvP (collossi) and ZvZ (roach/infestor) and even LATEGAME TvT
i say ""problem"" because since its a mirror matchup, who cares. I dont think theres deathball problems in TvZ, TvP, and ZvP
sure, sometimes it may SEEM like ZvT and ZvP has a deathball problem, but imo thats just because the matchups havnt been truly mapped out yet. Watching modern ZvP with HERO the last few weeks has shown TONS of harassment around the entire map. Yeah theres a final battle normally with a deathball, but that has a place as well and i dont think its that much of a problem. Normally in the deathball battle there still is harassment around the map as well
the only reason theres no deathballs midgame TvT is because siege tanks unit mechanics make them siege up to hold a position in a powerful manner.
lategame TvT is definitely a deathball. lategame boxer vs rain at mlg or MVP vs some terran in the GSL semi finals (cant remember his name) comes to mind (mass seeker missile / viking / BC deathballs both games)
all of these balance ideas people are making about removing collossi, buffing gateway units, buffing tanks, etc... I think its all hogwash. I think so far what ive seen in the TvP and ZvP and TvZ matchups the deathball problem is something that stems from poor play from players. Watch one of taejas recent TvZ or TvP games and say theres a deathball problem still. i think now finally players are reaching incredibly high levels and really showing what the matchups have to offer
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United Kingdom12022 Posts
player A is twice as fast as his opponent but cannot translate that agility into anything meaningful because of a low skill cap interesting?
When has this ever happened? Nobody has reached the skill ceiling, nobody. There's still so much more the faster players could be doing yet they don't.
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On August 06 2012 07:00 Qikz wrote:Show nested quote + player A is twice as fast as his opponent but cannot translate that agility into anything meaningful because of a low skill cap interesting? When has this ever happened? Nobody has reached the skill ceiling, nobody. There's still so much more the faster players could be doing yet they don't.
The thing is though that those things are not all that beneficial or groundbreaking so even if you could it wouldn't give you a very huge advantage.
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If you want to end deathball syndrome, you need to give every race access to ridiculously strong AoE. Protoss needs a Storm that's potent against Tanks, Zerg needs a Swarm Host that can fire Banelings and the return of Plague, and Terran needs Siege Tanks strong enough that they kill their cost in enemy units before they ever come under fire. AoE like this means that suddenly, players are being punished harshly for clumping their units up into deathballs. If a player tries to deathball their way through a game, then suddenly they'll find their army decimated by 1/5 of the enemy army while the other 4/5 is killing their third. Players become encouraged to split off units, because clumping them up means everything's gonna die.
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On August 06 2012 07:02 Darneck wrote:Show nested quote +On August 06 2012 07:00 Qikz wrote: player A is twice as fast as his opponent but cannot translate that agility into anything meaningful because of a low skill cap interesting? When has this ever happened? Nobody has reached the skill ceiling, nobody. There's still so much more the faster players could be doing yet they don't. The thing is though that those things are not all that beneficial or groundbreaking so even if you could it wouldn't give you a very huge advantage.
but you're wrong, very very wrong.
go back playing or idolizing broodwar, it is getting tired replying to idiots who thinks games like sc2 have low skill ceiling. You got nothing to base your accusation and assumptions on beside personal grudges and misled opinions.
I guess the only difference between MVP, who used to run rampart with over 75% winratein all match ups and maintained over many months during his prime (higher than almost all broodwar pros), and someone like incontrol with not even 40% winrates is just cases of severe good luck.
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What might also be a problem is the mobility. The deathballs, especially in TvP, are so mobile that you can actually defend your bases even if they're spread out.
I wish Blizzard would just create units that are extremely cost efficient in certain positions, like many others have mentioned. Who cares that they'll have to bring some more BW units back? It won't be the "BW 2.0" they're so afraid of.
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On August 06 2012 07:13 iky43210 wrote:Show nested quote +On August 06 2012 07:02 Darneck wrote:On August 06 2012 07:00 Qikz wrote: player A is twice as fast as his opponent but cannot translate that agility into anything meaningful because of a low skill cap interesting? When has this ever happened? Nobody has reached the skill ceiling, nobody. There's still so much more the faster players could be doing yet they don't. The thing is though that those things are not all that beneficial or groundbreaking so even if you could it wouldn't give you a very huge advantage. but you're wrong, very very wrong. go back playing or idolizing broodwar, it is getting tired replying to idiots who thinks games like sc2 have low skill ceiling. You got nothing to base your accusation and assumptions on beside personal grudges and misled opinions. I guess the only difference between MVP, who used to run rampart with over 75% winratein all match ups and maintained over many months during his prime (higher than almost all broodwar pros), and someone like incontrol with not even 40% winrates is just cases of severe good luck.
I didn't mention broodwar in my post, I didn't mention him talking about the skill cap being low either, I don't think it's low, it's already very high.
I wouldn't mind it being higher and not only through theoretical inhuman actions like perfect micro which will never happen because it will never be worth focusing 100% of your time on that when you could be macroing and other more beneficial things even if you could humanly do it.
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On August 06 2012 06:51 Meatloaf wrote:
Infestor , colossus , roach , marauder are the problem of this game IMO.
the additions proposed for HOTS look nice and im happy with them besides the warhound (that is a mech marauder...).
I play protoss and god knows i hate the colossus the most , fckin boring unit as spectator and player.
Don't forget the sentry.
So much is designed around the sentry making all protoss units too weak to handle roaches or marauders making FFs a must or else you die. At first you might go "WAIT THAT IS SKILLFUL", albeit while that might be true is it necessary to take units out of the battle? Doesn't that mean the game is imbalanced? If a strategy is reliant on taking units out of the battle, is that not based on hope?
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On August 06 2012 07:00 Qikz wrote:Show nested quote + player A is twice as fast as his opponent but cannot translate that agility into anything meaningful because of a low skill cap interesting? When has this ever happened? Nobody has reached the skill ceiling, nobody. There's still so much more the faster players could be doing yet they don't.
Just because someone hasn't reached the skill ceiling doesn't mean the skill vs reward graph doesn't flatten out greatly as skill increases. In BW, the opposite was true.
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On August 06 2012 07:13 iky43210 wrote:Show nested quote +On August 06 2012 07:02 Darneck wrote:On August 06 2012 07:00 Qikz wrote: player A is twice as fast as his opponent but cannot translate that agility into anything meaningful because of a low skill cap interesting? When has this ever happened? Nobody has reached the skill ceiling, nobody. There's still so much more the faster players could be doing yet they don't. The thing is though that those things are not all that beneficial or groundbreaking so even if you could it wouldn't give you a very huge advantage. but you're wrong, very very wrong. go back playing or idolizing broodwar, it is getting tired replying to idiots who thinks games like sc2 have low skill ceiling. You got nothing to base your accusation and assumptions on beside personal grudges and misled opinions. I guess the only difference between MVP, who used to run rampart with over 75% winratein all match ups and maintained over many months during his prime (higher than almost all broodwar pros), and someone like incontrol with not even 40% winrates is just cases of severe good luck.
any game that doesn't have turn based play has an unlimited skillcap.
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Always find it amusing how people go on about limited unit selection as if it would magically fix the game. Methinks some people are lost in a haze of nostalgia here rather than thinking it through. The most likely thing to happen is instead of one control group with all the marines in and the army all in one lump there'll be four or five control groups with marines in and the army all in one lump. Control groups aren't going to change how the units move and ball up and certainly isn't going to change the fact that a huge ball of marines is the most effective formation of them because of the INSANE DPS output of it. As the game currently stands if you want to you can do the same spreading with one control group as you can with multiple control groups...people just don't have a reason to do so. So instead they'll be deliberately balling up rather than the game doing it for them and I don't think thats what we're aiming for.
I'm in the "AoE isn't strong enough" camp myself. AoE units aren't strong enough to zone out areas of the map sufficiently well by themselves and to act as defensive positions. If you look at RTS on slightly different game engines like CoH or DoW2 you are able to effectively lock-down specific positions on the map with bunkers, turrets, set up teams, artillery, etc etc. This allows you to hold onto areas of the map by reinforcing them with defences which are obscenely cost-efficient, meaning if your opponent tries to take it in a frontal assault they're going to take enough losses to put you way ahead. This allows you to take most of your forces elsewhere whilst still holding ground with a smaller force which will make an enemy pay dearly if they try to take it in a direct confrontation.
In SC2 you don't have that. A couple of tanks and a dozen marines aren't cost-efficient enough to take down their own supply in upgraded chargelots if they're defending a base, leaving a Colossus to defend a base is just throwing away resources considering how vulnerable they are, and so on. About the only things approaching the necessary cost-efficiency are HTs and moreso Infestors. But frankly storms don't deal enough damage to get scared about unless you're marching stimmed marines or zerglings into them and fungal is only really good because you can chain it or hit them with banelings too. And because they're caster units you're just as likely to lose them before they can even do damage because they'll get sniped. Defending positions and zoning out is something balanced on a knife-edge as a result of this meaning defending in small groups is essentially more risky than attacking.
If a Colossus and three or four zealots was a genuinely scary thing to try to do a zergling runby against...if two tanks and a small group of marines and marauders was enough to deal heavy casualties to a frontal zealot attack...if a couple of banelings and roaches made anything short of a triple drop a risky prospect...then you'd see more units split out from their "safety ball". But as it stands trying any of that is basically just donating units for free, because the AoE isn't scary enough to make the opponent think anything other than "oh look...free gas units!"
TL;DR: It should be riskier, require more effort and more of a unit commitment to attack into an entrenched position than to defend one. This isn't currently the case due to weak AoE. Hence making breaking off units to defend areas largely pointless. Change this and the Deathball gets smaller as people find it more useful to break their army up to defend positions.
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i appreciate the points raised by the OP.
personally, i'd wish that high-ground positions were just more valuable.. but i'm very unsure about that.
there are always builds and strategies that require less of a person in terms of skill or practice in order to perform.
i would like for there to be good options against those strategies--many of which have yet to be discovered.
sometimes it really just comes down to your scouting ability. it is very, very difficult to punish different openers in sc2 without committing a good amount.
the new units so far in HotS are mostly higher tech (especially for protoss). protoss' situation will probably not change, but their options are increased even more for the mid-to-late game. i'm interested in how terran will look months after the expansion's release.
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You know, something moderately thread worthy I thought of was... Why do they try to make RTS games "FUN" anymore?
I mean, in terms of ESPORTS value, actual normal player fun value shouldn't be much of a priority in the traditional game theory sense. Instead of creating a feeling of wide eyed fun in the play, they should instead be attempting to create gratification from success in level of play.
I know that's what I feel when I get a good win, the feeling of "Hot damn I just SMOKED that guy with my point field + storm" or "I just thought a step ahead of him"... not really eye popping smile inducing fun, more the "tilt your head back and sigh a sigh that felt like it took a full 40 minutes of PvZ to release".
Now that I look back on my post I realize that... double entendre.
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On August 06 2012 11:05 ShatterZer0 wrote:
You know, something moderately thread worthy I thought of was... Why do they try to make RTS games "FUN" anymore?
I mean, in terms of ESPORTS value, actual normal player fun value shouldn't be much of a priority in the traditional game theory sense. Instead of creating a feeling of wide eyed fun in the play, they should instead be attempting to create gratification from success in level of play.
I know that's what I feel when I get a good win, the feeling of "Hot damn I just SMOKED that guy with my point field + storm" or "I just thought a step ahead of him"... not really eye popping smile inducing fun, more the "tilt your head back and sigh a sigh that felt like it took a full 40 minutes of PvZ to release".
Now that I look back on my post I realize that... double entendre.
because if the game is not fun, players won't play it. I sure hope that any games that have set to capture the long term success in professional gaming, the basic 'fun'dation would have to be that players first enjoy the toy at hand and then innovate its usage for appeasement of the audience.
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I Still think that theorizing about HOTS a game not even in beta yet is kind of pointless
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the deathball will not be broken up until either a bw player abuses the fact that they know how to harass in multiple locations effectively, or players figure out on their own that they can do small attacks at certain locations without doing a lame all in. As it stands, most of the players that play sc2 only have the mechanics needed to make an army and not really have to do anything outside of that. The way that sc2 is built allows this. Im trying to become a player that knows how to use small armies to do multiple things all over the map rather than build a ball of units and hope that I can micro my MMM ball well enough to not die to aoe.
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Seriously? The "Deathball" is still a thing? At this point in professional play I dont even think about the deathball concept anymore. I never see an army and think to myself, "My god that's unbeatable!", or "wow what a boring/skilless strategy" Granted sometimes people get one A'd after being behind all game and down 50+ supply etc. That happens to me in my own games. But in those situations I lost the game before the army became a "deathball". Those of you still actively talking about this topic as a serious concern of the game, please show me the pro-level game where a player doesn't micro his 200/200 army at all and still wins.
The only thing I agree with about the OP is that armies move in large balls. That doesn't really bother me though. A Protoss can walk around in his big ball all day but if he doesn't micro properly against my Infestor Broodlord then he's gonna lose. What is the point in talking about this concept still. Give me a reason to care about unit pathing and unlimited unit selection, barring the BW nostalgia and balance whines/people who can't analyze the real factors behind their losses.
All that said, I think the new units in HOTS will further diversify the type of strategies and gameplay we see utilized by pros and casual players alike. But talking about the new units and game changes through the frame of reference of the "death ball" is in my mind, an outdated and useless way of thinking about the game.
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Northern Ireland23952 Posts
On July 02 2012 01:58 Stratos_speAr wrote:Show nested quote +On July 02 2012 01:53 Zrana wrote:
Imo the best way of splitting up the deathball is increasing AoE damage.http:/www.teamliquid.net/forum/smilies.php
If you have a lot of single targeting units (e.g. marines) you want them clumped up so that more can fire at the same time.
However if powerful AoE is on the field the best players will split their army up and spread it out. This already happens quite a lot in SC2.
What i would like to see is yet more firepower given to aoe units so that moving around a big army becomes extremely dangerous due to the way units naturally clump up and so the metagame of strategies and tactics will change to reflect the danger of having a big ball of units.
This would be good for the game because spectators could watch either multiple small engagements around the map, or one big battle which would be lengthened by the fact that players couldnt keep their whole army together and it would become more of a running battle with constant reinforcing. This makes micro more apparent and more important (as there would simply be more of it to do).
There's been a huge amount of discussion over how sc:bw is better than sc2 or bw has a higher skill ceiling and similar topics. A large amount of that is down to how in BW you had to do a whole lot of babysitting of your units or they'd be unable to cross a bridge or something. In BW the units had a tendency to spread out, when a lot of the time you wanted them clumped up for the single-target dps to be higher. There's no reason why SC2 can't require the same sort of control but in the opposite direction; splitting up units and avoiding aoe.
This happens a lot already i know, but i reckon storm, fungal and siege tanks should all have an increased damage radius in HotS
This is incorrect. In BW, they didn't tend to spread apart; there was an AI "box" that was made whenever you moved your units. Your units would keep the same formation that they had when they were standing still and you selected them (as far as this was possible, considering obstacles/change of direction). This is exactly what SC2 needs. In SC2, if I manually spread units out, then select them in one group and right click to a location, they will immediately clump together to move there, which is terrible and incredibly annoying.
Pretty much what you said, good post. The amount of times I spread all my gateway units out perfectly in anticipation of a 1/1/1 or other tank push, and the second I move in to attack they all RECLUMP is incredibly irritating.
Anyway, my 50 cents on this issue is that I've always thought, from the Protoss PoV the problem is that the units within the deathball move at a very similar speed. It'd be a small but significant change to slow down collosi by a lot for example, make moving with such a ball require repositioning on the like.
If that doesn't work I'd certainly be interested to see Blizz implement some of the UI and pathing changes others have mentioned before me
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unlimited unit selection is here to stay, the game must be designed so that using multiple hotkeys for units are significantly rewarding. Right now we just arent seeing that, who wants to 1ta2ta3ta4ta5ta when you can prespread and 1ta , get it done with with a lower risk of error and faster speed.
Doubt sc2 will ever reach that with the current balance team though
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On August 06 2012 11:15 DashedHopes wrote:
I Still think that theorizing about HOTS a game not even in beta yet is kind of pointless
And it's been stated multiple times in many threads like this to people who respond like you did, its's better to say something about potential problems now to raise awareness than it is to get the game and have it be crap. The whole reason beta and alpha builds are shown to the public is for them to be critique so that things can be tweaked. It doesn't do anyone any good to no talk about HOTS.
On August 06 2012 11:20 Sporadic44 wrote:
Seriously? The "Deathball" is still a thing? At this point in professional play I dont even think about the deathball concept anymore. I never see an army and think to myself, "My god that's unbeatable!", or "wow what a boring/skilless strategy" Granted sometimes people get one A'd after being behind all game and down 50+ supply etc. That happens to me in my own games. But in those situations I lost the game before the army became a "deathball". Those of you still actively talking about this topic as a serious concern of the game, please show me the pro-level game where a player doesn't micro his 200/200 army at all and still wins.
The only thing I agree with about the OP is that armies move in large balls. That doesn't really bother me though. A Protoss can walk around in his big ball all day but if he doesn't micro properly against my Infestor Broodlord then he's gonna lose. What is the point in talking about this concept still. Give me a reason to care about unit pathing and unlimited unit selection, barring the BW nostalgia and balance whines/people who can't analyze the real factors behind their losses.
All that said, I think the new units in HOTS will further diversify the type of strategies and gameplay we see utilized by pros and casual players alike. But talking about the new units and game changes through the frame of reference of the "death ball" is in my mind, an outdated and useless way of thinking about the game.
No one is arguing that "Deathballs" don't need to be microed. People are saying that there are no incentives, through unit design, the dps of units, game speed etc, to ever separate your units. For example, the protoss ball, in sc2's current form, will stay as a 200/200 army always defending or attacking in 1 location and has no reason to ever separate itself because if half of the army were to attack and the other player were to his whole army vs half of the protoss player he will almost always lose.
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EPT
