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There will obviously be balance shifts when gameplay values are changed. Nobody is claiming otherwise. This thread is about the effect these changes have on the clarity and spectator-friendliness of SC2. |
On July 05 2012 01:04 Apolo wrote:
Most people that are aggainst this seem to always say the same thing:
"It takes out the skill of splitting units in the middle of a battle"
Which to me is exactly the same as people were saying about automining, rally points, and so on. Watching a player fight aggainst the computer's mechanics is nothing to be amazed at. The units clump automatically independent of the player's skill. It's as cool to watch MKP split marines as it's cool to watch Bisu click on 10 gateways in 1s. Cool trick, but nothing more than just overcoming a handicap of the game.
Nevertheless, with this mod you can still watch splitting. It just is calculated and premeditated. A player can always clump his marines so the zerg makes banelings. But then he splits them in the last minute, to make the banes cost inefective. On the other hand, we can see much more tactical positions with the army. Players would know that they're not wasting actions by spreading units in a specific way like it happens now because they wouldn't disappear by a move command.
Also, this would be good for those that complain the defenders advantage is too small and should be bigger: we see many players making a beautiful concave when they're expecting an attack. Then the attacker baits, the defender clicks in and his units move. Boom. All his work wasted. The units got clumped again and he has to redo it all over if he wants to defend with a concave. At that time the attacker can now go knowing the defender is clumped and his advantage minimized.
For those that complain about balance as well. It's true. It would most likely unbalance the game in unexpected ways. But you can't theorize about it without even seeing it in action. Months ago Idra said Stephano's style would be figured out and he would go back to his place. If even him can be so wrong about a complete style of the race he plays, who are you to come here say this will break the game? And even if it indeed breaks the game, i believe it's in the best interest of Blizzard to see the long term future, and HoTS is a great opportunity to test it, at least in beta. As many people have said it looks and feels more natural and epic with the units spread out. Imagine the amount of tactis pre splitting could bring to pro play. As a spectator that would make me want to watch this game more.
And just as a final request: Mentioning the word BW in any context, question or statement, will only have Blizzard guys' brains flip up and say "Broodwar is a great game, and you can go play it if you want." There's no use to use that word, because apparently they don't want to have anything to do with it, it only seems to put out those premade replies and completely ignore the question.
Well said!! To add to the discussion for all those players talking about MKPs cool micro tricks, there are two more races and many such tricks that need to open up to make the game exciting. If the only good thing to look forward to in a game is that it needs terran and they need to do cool splitting tricks for excitement then the game will grow old fast. Right now the only matchup worth watching is TvZ and TvT. The rest of the matchups are simply ball vs ball and boring. Having only 1/3rd of the matchups watchable is not a good thing. In fact I already skip PvP and ZvZ in GSLs and soon will be skipping PvZ since that game is pretty much two base all ins, since protoss can't take a third, or 30 minute snoozefests where everything hinges on that clutch vortex.
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On July 05 2012 01:58 Stratos_speAr wrote:Show nested quote +On July 05 2012 01:53 hashaki wrote:On July 05 2012 00:49 wcr.4fun wrote:On July 05 2012 00:36 Sated wrote:On July 05 2012 00:27 Darneck wrote:On July 04 2012 23:50 StackerTwo wrote:
I firmly believe that mm, will not change the deathball; nor would limited selection in control groups.
MM would make the death ball easier to presplit, and collapse. but it does not change the NEED to match deathball with deathball;
limited control groups, makes it more difficult to control, but again it does not change the need for deathballs.
12 marines vs 12 stalkers?
12 lings vs 12 hellions?
how many hotkeys do you need to control 100lings, and 50 banes?
would this limitation be imposed on buildings? zerg has what 5-8 base+upgrade buildings, while t&p has 12+ rax/fac/star, gate/robo/star
what could possibly change the death ball would be some way to make any excess unit give reduced return.
example: why do players not make 60 workers on 1 base? because pass the point of full saturation there is no return on investment.
have you ever seen a 20 thor composition? why? because the way thor collision works only a certain number can "fit" in a concave(i assume the warhound will have the same issue), the rest will be walking around until a "parking spot" opens up.
but then again... changing collision would really throw off any balance that we still have. how many of each unit should/could fit in a reduced engagement?
I definitely wouldn't mind a larger collision box for units either and I would even want to get rid of MBS and unlimited unit selection and replace it with a certain amount of max supply per unit group so that you could have more zerglings than 12 but still just 12 zealots for example. Anyway, this would discourage deathballs if it came coupled with an AOE buff which it would have to. If there's a risk of your whole deathball being utterly destroyed by AOE, a lot more than it already is, you wouldn't want to risk clumping it up as much There's this game called Brood War - You might like it. I wish people would stop trying to ruin SC2 by changing it into BW. If you like BW, play BW, it already bloody exists. Or play one of the many BW custom maps that exist in SC2 already. if it were to people like this, we'd be eating shit off the ground just like in the stone ages. Thank you I'll enjoy my molecular cooking because people actually give criticism, try to improve what we currently have and try out new things. Noone here wants bw carbon copy. We want sc2 to be better than it is. If you think sc2 is at it's full potential, you must have one narrow mind. Yeah, you want a game to be better... by being worse? Because removing stuff like MBS, unlimited unitselection is ultimately making the game stupider than what it is supposed to be. And it won't make the actual game better, the same flaws that are in the game now that encourages deathballplay will still be there, but pulling off the deathball mechanicswise will only be harder. I will keep repeating the same thing in these threads, SC2 the way it's been designed is encouraging deathball-play to a certain degree, and that won't change by making the game stupider so a deathball is harder to pull off. What you want is something that encourages fighting on multiple fronts (which will also raise the need for multitasking), encourages faster expansions and in general, punishes big balls of units a-moving their way to victory. How could this be achieved? For one thing, less resources (patches) pr. base is one way to go (imo), which will force players to expand faster and more often. Maybe maps should be tweaked a bit too so a player can't camp one spot with almost all their units and still have a perfectly acceptable response-time to harassment at any of their bases. Also, AOE should be scary as hell in the game. Currently it really isn't as scary as it should be, but you can't just buff AOE in the current state of SC2. There's multiple ways to go about the game to "fix" a deathballproblem instead of going back too stupid shit like BW. Lack of MBS and unlimited unitselection was NOT what made the game what it was/is. You're making the assumption that clumping = objectively smarter AI. It doesn't. The effect of clumping was caused by a subjective number value that Blizzard put in the game. It is in no way "smarter" to have the AI auto-clump units. MBS and unlimited selection are dead topics. Stop bringing them up. This is about unit boxes and clumping.
But... but.. but.. It IS smarter AI.
You select a bunch of units and you tell them all to move to the same spot. Ofcourse they're gonna clump together as tight as possible, because they can't all fit in the spot you told them to move, so they'll just try and get as close as possible.
Maybe they should implement multiple move-commands? For instance, rightclick = move to spot, rightclick+drag in a direction, makes units move in formation and line up in the direction you dragged? (Company of Heroes anyone?)
Also, i'm not the one bringing up MBS and unlimited selection, I'm just talking back to those who do 
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I tried MMdaybreak, honestly it doesn't change things nearly as much as one would think watching the video. With all the ramps units tend to clump up quite a bit.
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On July 05 2012 02:03 hashaki wrote:Show nested quote +On July 05 2012 01:58 Stratos_speAr wrote:On July 05 2012 01:53 hashaki wrote:On July 05 2012 00:49 wcr.4fun wrote:On July 05 2012 00:36 Sated wrote:On July 05 2012 00:27 Darneck wrote:On July 04 2012 23:50 StackerTwo wrote:
I firmly believe that mm, will not change the deathball; nor would limited selection in control groups.
MM would make the death ball easier to presplit, and collapse. but it does not change the NEED to match deathball with deathball;
limited control groups, makes it more difficult to control, but again it does not change the need for deathballs.
12 marines vs 12 stalkers?
12 lings vs 12 hellions?
how many hotkeys do you need to control 100lings, and 50 banes?
would this limitation be imposed on buildings? zerg has what 5-8 base+upgrade buildings, while t&p has 12+ rax/fac/star, gate/robo/star
what could possibly change the death ball would be some way to make any excess unit give reduced return.
example: why do players not make 60 workers on 1 base? because pass the point of full saturation there is no return on investment.
have you ever seen a 20 thor composition? why? because the way thor collision works only a certain number can "fit" in a concave(i assume the warhound will have the same issue), the rest will be walking around until a "parking spot" opens up.
but then again... changing collision would really throw off any balance that we still have. how many of each unit should/could fit in a reduced engagement?
I definitely wouldn't mind a larger collision box for units either and I would even want to get rid of MBS and unlimited unit selection and replace it with a certain amount of max supply per unit group so that you could have more zerglings than 12 but still just 12 zealots for example. Anyway, this would discourage deathballs if it came coupled with an AOE buff which it would have to. If there's a risk of your whole deathball being utterly destroyed by AOE, a lot more than it already is, you wouldn't want to risk clumping it up as much There's this game called Brood War - You might like it. I wish people would stop trying to ruin SC2 by changing it into BW. If you like BW, play BW, it already bloody exists. Or play one of the many BW custom maps that exist in SC2 already. if it were to people like this, we'd be eating shit off the ground just like in the stone ages. Thank you I'll enjoy my molecular cooking because people actually give criticism, try to improve what we currently have and try out new things. Noone here wants bw carbon copy. We want sc2 to be better than it is. If you think sc2 is at it's full potential, you must have one narrow mind. Yeah, you want a game to be better... by being worse? Because removing stuff like MBS, unlimited unitselection is ultimately making the game stupider than what it is supposed to be. And it won't make the actual game better, the same flaws that are in the game now that encourages deathballplay will still be there, but pulling off the deathball mechanicswise will only be harder. I will keep repeating the same thing in these threads, SC2 the way it's been designed is encouraging deathball-play to a certain degree, and that won't change by making the game stupider so a deathball is harder to pull off. What you want is something that encourages fighting on multiple fronts (which will also raise the need for multitasking), encourages faster expansions and in general, punishes big balls of units a-moving their way to victory. How could this be achieved? For one thing, less resources (patches) pr. base is one way to go (imo), which will force players to expand faster and more often. Maybe maps should be tweaked a bit too so a player can't camp one spot with almost all their units and still have a perfectly acceptable response-time to harassment at any of their bases. Also, AOE should be scary as hell in the game. Currently it really isn't as scary as it should be, but you can't just buff AOE in the current state of SC2. There's multiple ways to go about the game to "fix" a deathballproblem instead of going back too stupid shit like BW. Lack of MBS and unlimited unitselection was NOT what made the game what it was/is. You're making the assumption that clumping = objectively smarter AI. It doesn't. The effect of clumping was caused by a subjective number value that Blizzard put in the game. It is in no way "smarter" to have the AI auto-clump units. MBS and unlimited selection are dead topics. Stop bringing them up. This is about unit boxes and clumping. But... but.. but.. It IS smarter AI. You select a bunch of units and you tell them all to move to the same spot. Ofcourse they're gonna clump together as tight as possible, because they can't all fit in the spot you told them to move, so they'll just try and get as close as possible. Maybe they should implement multiple move-commands? For instance, rightclick = move to spot, rightclick+drag in a direction, makes units move in formation and line up in the direction you dragged? (Company of Heroes anyone?) Also, i'm not the one bringing up MBS and unlimited selection, I'm just talking back to those who do
I take it you meant me responding to it but that however had nothing to do with the topic at hand, I just expressed my own opinions about it.
And then what if you have this "smarter" AI and you make the smarter AI give you the choice not clump up any longer, that would mean that you further improve on the AI making it even smarter. And we love smart AI's right?
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On July 05 2012 02:05 Jetaap wrote:
I tried MMdaybreak, honestly it doesn't change things nearly as much as one would think watching the video. With all the ramps units tend to clump up quite a bit.
Maybe collision size also needs to be tweaked. Currently all units are touching one another when standing. I have yet to see military squad standing like that unless they are protecting themselves from the cold .
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People in this thread misunderstand why BW units didn't clump up. BW units could only move in 8 directions, while SC2 units can move in all directions. In BW, units would all travel, say, west, and then travel southwest when they needed to get to their destination. In SC2, units can travel 20 degrees to the south of west, and so go in a straight line. When all units do this, they all tend to converge on the destination. If you truly don't want your units clumping, move (on the minimap) to a destination behind your target, and units will clump up a lot less (just like magic boxing Mutalisks).
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Maybe i'm totally wrong, but I feel that MM would actually not only make it more beautiful to watch, but also help the state of the micro-limited SC2 that we have right now.
Slow units (Like, Hydras for example) would actually become good in more situations, because they would be pre-split a bit and would not always get os by every AoE, because they are too slow to be manually splitted on the spot.
That would also help the ZvZ case : the threat of every single lings being killed by one or two banelings would not be that great and really good lings micro would still be possible.
Protoss could set a wall of zealot in front to tank lings, while microing stalkers and sentry behind it all in a split formation. If roaches, mutas or banes are able to form a breach in the zealot walls, then forcefield could be used to block it if positioned correctly. If the zealot wall get stomped, then Stalkers would have to blink micro to avoid being completly annihilated by lings (splitted stalkers suck hard against lings) or actually get clumped if they are enough. But, if they clump, they have to watch out for the fungals.
Infestor with a fungals a little bit buffed would actually become way more fun, too... they would probably be used for positional advantage, preventing you from clumping all your units together to own lings or preventing you from going into a tiny ramp or into a narrow passage with all your units at once, or else, fungals. They could also be used to send infested terrans into the ennemy formations, screwing it all : having a shit tons of infested terrans between your zealot wall and your stalkers would be bad. Hell, even having infested terran in your splitted up marine/tank formation would be harsh.
Neural parasite would be useful too, since it would be possible to sneak some infestors around a tank or two, or even against some immortals or achons that are a bit splitted up. Against an army splitted a bit too much, the infestor would not be insta-killed as soon as he NP.
On July 05 2012 02:09 Omegalisk wrote:
People in this thread misunderstand why BW units didn't clump up. BW units could only move in 8 directions, while SC2 units can move in all directions. In BW, units would all travel, say, west, and then travel southwest when they needed to get to their destination. In SC2, units can travel 20 degrees to the south of west, and so go in a straight line. When all units do this, they all tend to converge on the destination. If you truly don't want your units clumping, move (on the minimap) to a destination behind your target, and units will clump up a lot less (just like magic boxing Mutalisks).
While it's true, That's not the only reason. In BW, if you moved your unit from point A to point B, they would all go AROUND point A, staying somewhat in the same formation that they were before. They would not always try to go EXACTLY on the destination that you clicked, clumping them up around it, like they do on SC2.
At least, that's how I remember it.
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I agree I feel like this is how the units should move instead.
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People are so anti BW, but HOTS is filled with BW ideas...ideas that people love. This is a good thing.
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Canada11466 Posts
On July 05 2012 02:03 hashaki wrote:Show nested quote +On July 05 2012 01:58 Stratos_speAr wrote:On July 05 2012 01:53 hashaki wrote:On July 05 2012 00:49 wcr.4fun wrote:On July 05 2012 00:36 Sated wrote:On July 05 2012 00:27 Darneck wrote:On July 04 2012 23:50 StackerTwo wrote:
I firmly believe that mm, will not change the deathball; nor would limited selection in control groups.
MM would make the death ball easier to presplit, and collapse. but it does not change the NEED to match deathball with deathball;
limited control groups, makes it more difficult to control, but again it does not change the need for deathballs.
12 marines vs 12 stalkers?
12 lings vs 12 hellions?
how many hotkeys do you need to control 100lings, and 50 banes?
would this limitation be imposed on buildings? zerg has what 5-8 base+upgrade buildings, while t&p has 12+ rax/fac/star, gate/robo/star
what could possibly change the death ball would be some way to make any excess unit give reduced return.
example: why do players not make 60 workers on 1 base? because pass the point of full saturation there is no return on investment.
have you ever seen a 20 thor composition? why? because the way thor collision works only a certain number can "fit" in a concave(i assume the warhound will have the same issue), the rest will be walking around until a "parking spot" opens up.
but then again... changing collision would really throw off any balance that we still have. how many of each unit should/could fit in a reduced engagement?
I definitely wouldn't mind a larger collision box for units either and I would even want to get rid of MBS and unlimited unit selection and replace it with a certain amount of max supply per unit group so that you could have more zerglings than 12 but still just 12 zealots for example. Anyway, this would discourage deathballs if it came coupled with an AOE buff which it would have to. If there's a risk of your whole deathball being utterly destroyed by AOE, a lot more than it already is, you wouldn't want to risk clumping it up as much There's this game called Brood War - You might like it. I wish people would stop trying to ruin SC2 by changing it into BW. If you like BW, play BW, it already bloody exists. Or play one of the many BW custom maps that exist in SC2 already. if it were to people like this, we'd be eating shit off the ground just like in the stone ages. Thank you I'll enjoy my molecular cooking because people actually give criticism, try to improve what we currently have and try out new things. Noone here wants bw carbon copy. We want sc2 to be better than it is. If you think sc2 is at it's full potential, you must have one narrow mind. Yeah, you want a game to be better... by being worse? Because removing stuff like MBS, unlimited unitselection is ultimately making the game stupider than what it is supposed to be. And it won't make the actual game better, the same flaws that are in the game now that encourages deathballplay will still be there, but pulling off the deathball mechanicswise will only be harder. I will keep repeating the same thing in these threads, SC2 the way it's been designed is encouraging deathball-play to a certain degree, and that won't change by making the game stupider so a deathball is harder to pull off. What you want is something that encourages fighting on multiple fronts (which will also raise the need for multitasking), encourages faster expansions and in general, punishes big balls of units a-moving their way to victory. How could this be achieved? For one thing, less resources (patches) pr. base is one way to go (imo), which will force players to expand faster and more often. Maybe maps should be tweaked a bit too so a player can't camp one spot with almost all their units and still have a perfectly acceptable response-time to harassment at any of their bases. Also, AOE should be scary as hell in the game. Currently it really isn't as scary as it should be, but you can't just buff AOE in the current state of SC2. There's multiple ways to go about the game to "fix" a deathballproblem instead of going back too stupid shit like BW. Lack of MBS and unlimited unitselection was NOT what made the game what it was/is. You're making the assumption that clumping = objectively smarter AI. It doesn't. The effect of clumping was caused by a subjective number value that Blizzard put in the game. It is in no way "smarter" to have the AI auto-clump units. MBS and unlimited selection are dead topics. Stop bringing them up. This is about unit boxes and clumping. But... but.. but.. It IS smarter AI. You select a bunch of units and you tell them all to move to the same spot. Ofcourse they're gonna clump together as tight as possible, because they can't all fit in the spot you told them to move, so they'll just try and get as close as possible. Maybe they should implement multiple move-commands? For instance, rightclick = move to spot, rightclick+drag in a direction, makes units move in formation and line up in the direction you dragged? (Company of Heroes anyone?) Also, i'm not the one bringing up MBS and unlimited selection, I'm just talking back to those who do
It's not smart ai at all. For all it's bugginess, BW had much more options for the players. Sure clumping was harder to do, but it could clump all the same if you wanted to. But if I wanted to move forward in formation, the much larger magic box allowed me that option. Or if I wanted to create a giant zealot train, I could right click forward on a perpindicular flank to the tank line and then a-move forward towards the tanks in a giant wave.
So you had 3 options (possibly more) on how to move BW units. Move them in a ball, move them in formation, move them in a line (and then attack). Current SC2 line is stupid because the units want to go to the same spot every single time. Even when you split the units, those individual members of the smaller groups want to go to the same spot every single time. There's no proper option of moving spread out, in formation. And that's what makes it stupid ai. Apparently ground magic box exists, but it's so small I have a hard time discerning it.
Basically SC2 ai is good at one thing. Getting all the units to a given spot, no matter how much jockying and pushing it requires. It does that job fantastically. But we used to have more options than that. And to turn old arguments on their head Not everyone want to "fight against the ai" to recreate those options. If people are afraid of disappearing micro- petition for moving shot for more units. THAT will create more micro. Not constantly spreading out your units to avoid the clump.
Interestingly, with bigger magic boxes and non "smart" casting, you could actually get simultameous, spread out storms. That it was possible to cover the screen with storms faster without "smart" casting. The difficulty was only selecting ht in you magic box and not other units.
Even that Happy replay of marine spread I imagine people would use to show that deathball is not a problem because the marines spread in midst of the attack. But I look at the opening of the battle and both armies are giant clump of units that are impossible to discern what the individual units are. Particularly because the healthbars are up. That is the primary importance of what I hope this mod or something like it (adjusted magic boxes) would fix. AoE can always be scaled up to be super awesome. (Bring back OP tanks.)
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When I tried it, it felt incredibly natural to me, in heavy contrast to the immediate clumping of all my split units when I try to move them even a small distance. Clumping again also was no problem at all, one click and it's done. I also felt like it only added more strategical depth to the game, while it did hardly take any skill away and even added new opportunities for showing skill in micro. Of course it requires a buff in aoe, but that should be no problem at all to fix in the beta.
And the armies seemed huge o.O
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Seriously, we just need to keep that topic in the high one, to spread the word. Maybe if even some pros try it for a game or two and find it absolutly wonderful, blizzard will consider it... in time for like... LoV... lol
Someone have to do a map with this and OP Tank, OP Storm and OP Fungals, could probably even scale up the HSM speed and make the banelings splash a tiny little bit bigger.
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I tried the DM unit tester and see what happen if we add ramp. The result is very good.
If you tell your units to go up a ramp, they will clump up again very naturally and smoothly just like the current sc2. They will all go up the ramp if click anywhere in the high ground. If you click on the ramp itself, the units will clump up at the ramp. It's very natural and predictable behavior.
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I have the feeling that on the last pages more and more feedback is genuinely positive. Also from more and more people that tested it themselves. Thats quite a good sign I would say. There are always the nay-sayers on the internet and I'm not saying they dont argue at all but I think every point against mm they made in this thread was already countered with a pro-argument that made sense, at least to me.
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Could people who have had positive experiences post some of their games on youtube? The one in the OP still shows DeathBall vs DeathBall action.
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Ah yes, this will totally catch on, much like the fewer resources per base thing.
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On July 05 2012 04:16 Calis5 wrote:
Ah yes, this will totally catch on, much like the fewer resources per base thing.
Those are the dreams that will never come true.
When I have money after 10 years, I will organize a modified movement + fewer resources per base tournament featuring $1,000,000 prize pool.
Talking about the dreams that will never come true. LOL
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On July 05 2012 04:08 Archerofaiur wrote:
Could people who have had positive experiences post some of their games on youtube? The one in the OP still shows DeathBall vs DeathBall action.
Yeah, that video basically just shows how mm doesn't break the game if you play regularly, units can go up ramps and avoid obstacles ect. But yeah, more replays please. Especially on MMTaldarim since that's where you'll see big differences. If there are big problems with MM, MMTaldarim is where they'll be found.
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On July 05 2012 04:21 larse wrote:Show nested quote +On July 05 2012 04:16 Calis5 wrote:
Ah yes, this will totally catch on, much like the fewer resources per base thing. Those are the dreams that will never come true. When I have money after 10 years, I will organize a modified movement + fewer resources per base tournament featuring $1,000,000 prize pool. Talking about the dreams that will never come true. LOL
man I wanna watch that :/
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I just uploaded a map where i did the same thing as OP on the EU server.
It's name is MM Cloud Kingdom! Try it out!
Also if anyone wants to play with me on it PM me
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EPT
