On August 14 2012 23:45 jinzougen wrote: I don't post on this forum much, or really at all (as my post count will indicate). I was excited to see this battle report because I am excited for the new expansion. After watching it I decided to come over to the forum and maybe see if there was some interesting discussion going on---again, because I am excited for the new expansion. After reading through the first 20 pages or so and skimming the rest I have a few things I would like to contribute.
Most of you should be ashamed. Not embarrassed, but ashamed. This is the StarCraft community? Really?
To everybody who is whining about the hyped casting: What would you rather have Blizzard do? Release the battle report with casters who are hostile to HotS? What about casters who are apathetic: "Well this player is awful and these units aren't balanced so I don't really know why I'm casting this game...". There is no way the casters could give any true insight; they don't have any. They aren't even casting a competition, they are casting an exhibition. You try doing that and see how you sound to an overly critical know-it-all forum.
To everyone who is whining about design decisions: First of all, most of you probably know jack about game design. There are way more people saying that things are "broken by design" than there can possibly be competent game designers in this forum. Even if you do know something about game design, this is an alpha build, design decisions can still change... a lot.
To everyone whining about the gameplay: Again, they aren't playing a game, they are playing an exhibition. Granted, this battle report was poorly advertised as a glimpse of what TvP will look like in HotS. Obviously that's not what this is. But really, there is no way such a product could be delivered now is there? If that's really what you were expecting, then you only have your own naivete to blame.
To everyone whining about the map: Really? Remember Steppes of War? How about Incineration Zone? There are plenty of competent map makers in the community. HotS will not fail due do to bad maps.
In general, except for its name, there is nothing about HotS which is not uncertain in one way or another at this point. I'm not disenchanted because you are speculating---what else would happen in such a thread?---I'm disenchanted because of the manner in which most of you are doing it. I would hope that uncertainty would result in a _lack_ of conclusions, but most of what I see here is drawing conclusions from really nowhere. Now, in the absence of rational conclusions, the only other things that can constructively be contributed are your reaction on an emotional level, and opinions. Now most of you have chosen to react to the battle report with either fear (e.g. "please don't ruin bio in HotS"), or condescension (e.g. "this play/casting/map/design/idea/unit/... is awful"), or another flavor of negativity. If this is how you react in general to the unknown, I pity you and do not envy the stressful, unfulfilling life you must lead. The way I see it, all of the aspects of HotS which are not yet ironed out are only cause for hope and creativity.
To everyone whining about the warhound aesthetics: Yeah, I'm not really a fan of the warhound model either.
Take your annoyingly pretentious psychoanalytic tripe somewhere else, thanks.
if they keep the warhound they should remove the marauder both seem to have the same role. and battlehellion marauder allin sounds to me damn broken.but yeah i hope the beta goes well
To everyone who is whining about design decisions: First of all, most of you probably know jack about game design. There are way more people saying that things are "broken by design" than there can possibly be competent game designers in this forum. Even if you do know something about game design, this is an alpha build, design decisions can still change... a lot.
game design = making decisions and solving problems. everyone can make decisions and solve problems. i bet everyone can design a game in a genre that they played a lot. and when you don't come up with original ideas do it like blizzard look to the right then look to the left and grab something that looks "cool" put a flair on it and there you go.
I'm not seeing A-move friendly in this preview. Although the warhound in theory is an a-move unit, the widow mine, the oracle and tempest, and mass recall make it so the game will be much more positional.
I dont really care about the warhound. Yeah it doesn't look very cool but its also just kind of a big marauder or a small thor, it doesn't feels "mechy". I do loove the battle hellion, it really seems to give mech the extra help it needed.
The widow mine but don't really like that it can one shot oracles, but I guess there is not much you can do about it. Maybe decrease the dmg of the widow mine and give it an AOE effect? And while you are at it just give us spider mines instead :D
On August 14 2012 23:41 SmackDiablo wrote: Can you people just shut up and stop complaining? Wait till the damn game comes out and a few patches to fix up whatever really needs to be fixed.
Great attitude you have here.
You don't really understand what annoys these people? They don't complain about balance, but about the design of the units and the resulting consequences for the fun of playing or watching the game.
For example, what is there to fix in the collossi? it's balanced and has it's place in the metagame, but it's just awfully designed and is one of the reasons deathballs are so strong in protoss matchups. What is there to balance in PvP? Nothing, right? Everything is fine aside from the fact that the player with more collossi wins a 200/200 battle with +100 supply difference. It's not fun to play and not fun to watch these players mass up an amount of collossi and attack.
Same goes for the deisgn of roach and marauder. People hoped that pvt mech would look like in brood war, with extensive siege lines and terrorizing hellion squads at far away expos, drawing away protoss units. Instead they saw some clumped mech units move around. positioning didn't seem to mean much with the simple control and high dps of the war hound.
Also, i am disgusted by Day9 somehow. Rob Simpson works for blizzard, so fake-hyping stuff is his work, but the lack of any useful comments from Day9 is disappointing. But oh well he got a lot of views.
Make it so you have to click a button to fire the missile, missile fires whether something is in range or not, maybe uses energy?!?! And maybe some mechanic so the warhound is actually usable vs zerg?! (Maybe the missile could hit any unit?)
A minimum range on the missile would be cool too, so then the terran would have to constantly be repositioning the warhound so it is the right distance away etc... micro!
Obviously change damage and range fire rate energy etc to balance...
Battle Hellion:
In transformer mode it could do friendly fire or something, so again you can't JUST "a move" to gg, you'd have to line em up a little bit anyway... or something.
Maybe you could introduce some mechanic that would enable skilled zerg players to actually be able to run lings just out of range in between each shot...
Widow Mine:
Explode when the unit is killed.
Oracle
This just needs something to make it more micro intensive/demanding (like banshee/muta/helion harass). Making you have to cast the spell on each mineral patch individually would probably be a start... Maybe with a tiny cooldown on the spell so you can't just shift command the entire harass :D Then if it accelerated really slow you might wanna have to keep it moving while you were casting the spell on each mineral patch every x amount of time!! Or something!
Tempest
If you made it so that you can charge up a shot while its moving, and altered its movement speed and acceleration i guess you could do some form of kiting... but idk, its a very strange unit, i don't fully understand its uses (or how it would be used)
Swarm Host
At the very least make it so it doesn't autocast... I also think it would be just as cool if it just made broodlings, more frequently, but then we'd have land gglords XD
Not sure...
Viper
I actually really like this unit :D Seems kinda cool. I don't agree with making the blinding cloud only affecting bio units though... it would have no effect on protoss, which is in a sense saying "hey guys, here's how you play the game". But then who knows how imba it would be ^^ .
Ultralisk Burrowed charge
Why. Why would you charge, underground. And HOW! Ultralisks are like the size of houses...
But i guess it doesn't really impact the actual gameplay that much...
Still prefer the Goliath more the the Warhound.... Don't like the idea of a unit that is worthless in a matchup (TvZ). And the Carrier seems way better then the tempest.
I like the battle-hellion, it is a good addition.
Dunno about the mine, it could be really cool or really bad.
On August 14 2012 20:10 Wildmoon wrote: I recommend people to watch WoL battle report so people could get an idea of what battle report is.:D
This needs to be in the OP so people can actually watch it.
I just want people to keep in mind that the game we will play will likely look nothing like in BR. :D Constructive discussion is always good anyway.:D
That battle report came out way before the other 3 did and way way before the beta started. I don't think there will be as much time between now and the hots beta for big changes to happen from what we see.
A better example would be the later WoL battle reports and it might be even more intersting to look at old bw day9's analysis of battle report 2-4 . (Note he even skipped number 1 due to how old it was). First one would be here.
There is no reason to put the Warhound in the game when you already have Goliaths. Same thing with Tempest, we already have the Carriers that tweaked properly could have the same purpose in a game, break siege lines. Same thing with banelings vs lurkers. Or swarm host vs lurker while we are here.
My point is Blizzard is making new units just for the sake of making new units and not copy BW. Why try to fix or change what's not even broken?...
Can you still build thors in HOTS? i'm just curious because at first they said they were removing it and making it a super unit being able to build 1 only per game, but then i heard they backed off that and just left it in the game as is, but i didn't see him build any thors in that mech composition, which see s like it would have been a good way to help deal with the tempests...
On August 15 2012 00:44 TheOGBlitzKrieg wrote: Can you still build thors in HOTS? i'm just curious because at first they said they were removing it and making it a super unit being able to build 1 only per game, but then i heard they backed off that and just left it in the game as is, but i didn't see him build any thors in that mech composition, which see s like it would have been a good way to help deal with the tempests...
Yes you can build Thors, but they aren't good against Tempests. They may work in large numbers against other air units but the Tempest has way to much range and the Thor is to clunky. They would be even worse against Tempests then they are against BL's.
Acutally in this Batlle Report you can't build Thor. Just the Odin, like in the old HOtS preview. You can see it reading the notes at the 7 minutes mark when the caster check the armory.
Only mech anti-air seems (in this version) to be the Mine. Pretty retarded when you see Air Anti-mech units flowering alongside the olds VR, Broodlords and co.
On August 15 2012 00:50 ref4 wrote: One EASY solution to remove deathball forever: remove infinite unit selection (make maximum selected units to like 20, not 255)
Ta-da!! We have an actual spectator-worthy RTS!
In before 5 people tell you that is INCONCEIVABLE for some inane reason.
On August 14 2012 23:45 jinzougen wrote: I don't post on this forum much, or really at all (as my post count will indicate). I was excited to see this battle report because I am excited for the new expansion. After watching it I decided to come over to the forum and maybe see if there was some interesting discussion going on---again, because I am excited for the new expansion. After reading through the first 20 pages or so and skimming the rest I have a few things I would like to contribute.
Most of you should be ashamed. Not embarrassed, but ashamed. This is the StarCraft community? Really?
To everybody who is whining about the hyped casting: What would you rather have Blizzard do? Release the battle report with casters who are hostile to HotS? What about casters who are apathetic: "Well this player is awful and these units aren't balanced so I don't really know why I'm casting this game...". There is no way the casters could give any true insight; they don't have any. They aren't even casting a competition, they are casting an exhibition. You try doing that and see how you sound to an overly critical know-it-all forum.
To everyone who is whining about design decisions: First of all, most of you probably know jack about game design. There are way more people saying that things are "broken by design" than there can possibly be competent game designers in this forum. Even if you do know something about game design, this is an alpha build, design decisions can still change... a lot.
To everyone whining about the gameplay: Again, they aren't playing a game, they are playing an exhibition. Granted, this battle report was poorly advertised as a glimpse of what TvP will look like in HotS. Obviously that's not what this is. But really, there is no way such a product could be delivered now is there? If that's really what you were expecting, then you only have your own naivete to blame.
To everyone whining about the map: Really? Remember Steppes of War? How about Incineration Zone? There are plenty of competent map makers in the community. HotS will not fail due do to bad maps.
In general, except for its name, there is nothing about HotS which is not uncertain in one way or another at this point. I'm not disenchanted because you are speculating---what else would happen in such a thread?---I'm disenchanted because of the manner in which most of you are doing it. I would hope that uncertainty would result in a _lack_ of conclusions, but most of what I see here is drawing conclusions from really nowhere. Now, in the absence of rational conclusions, the only other things that can constructively be contributed are your reaction on an emotional level, and opinions. Now most of you have chosen to react to the battle report with either fear (e.g. "please don't ruin bio in HotS"), or condescension (e.g. "this play/casting/map/design/idea/unit/... is awful"), or another flavor of negativity. If this is how you react in general to the unknown, I pity you and do not envy the stressful, unfulfilling life you must lead. The way I see it, all of the aspects of HotS which are not yet ironed out are only cause for hope and creativity.
To everyone whining about the warhound aesthetics: Yeah, I'm not really a fan of the warhound model either.
Why ashamed? Blizzard has repeatedly (over the course of the development of this game) described it and hyped it as an "esport," using that word to draw attention to it as a successor to Broodwar and to win the trust of the established esports community.
Any trust that that they may have originally had has been pissed away over time by their actions, which show quite clearly that they either dont know what it takes to make a successful esport or that they have other concerns (i.e for the casual player) that trump the concerns of the competitive community.
While this has its merits, certainly, it ultimately means that Blizzard has failed to address significant issues that have plagued the game since its beginning.
One of these issues is communication. Blizzard is atrocious at communicating with its professional players and the respected members of the community. If they truly cared about the game as an esport, they might have considered the following adjustments:
1) Hire a team of pros to test the game in a closed alpha. They could then have used some of their games as battle reports while also analyzing the game when played by top level players.
2) Hire a team of community mapmakers to design and test maps using the new tilesets. Mapmakers might even have some unique ideas that don't involve destructable/collapsable rocks.
3) Hire community casters to cast battle reports... which they've actually done! It's a start.
I would argue that what was so sickening about the casting in this game (besides my strong dislike of Simpson as a caster) was how phony the tone of their "excitement" was. Actually this is something lots of english casters have problems with IMO. Korean casters always sound excited lol. Even so though, Day9 sounded especially blase. It's actually a sign of (perhaps unintentional) honesty that while he attempted to sound excited, the intellectual in him knew that this battle report was pathetic.
Maybe he would have been more excited if it were a Taeja vs Squirtle match (or better, Bo3) on a respected community mapmaker's map.
4) As for design and gameplay, if blizzard really cared about community feedback, they would have a small team of people reading sites like TL daily and reporting huge issues that have come to the community's attention. Popular threads/issues like FRB, Concerns with Bnet 2.0 (.02), Save the Carrier, Deathball, Unit pathing and other concerns need to have a direct conduit to the minds of the game developers. Blizz doesnt have to agree, but they need to:
a) Seriously discuss and test (or hell, give us the means to test in the PTR, maybe giving PTR players some kind of reward for doing so) these ideas.
On another note, PTR is a great tool. Why fritter it away? Give each balance change at least 1 month to test on PTR before actually being considered, and try to have something always testing, even if no real intention of patching it. (ex: FRB)
And ensure that players want to play on PTR by giving them some kind of reward: maybe points that can be used to "buy" a portrait of their choosing (even Artanis, or whatever), or some kind of achievement.
They could even try to rope in some pros on a private PTR.
edit: Or allow the community to have a say on what gets tested through direct means, like a poll, or even a blizzard sanctioned/supported system for up-voting community made "test maps" like those FRB maps. Just to be clear, Ive always been a bit skeptical of FRB but it doesnt hurt to test it. There just needs to be an organized and more "official" way of doing it. Blizz could say, "This has caught our attention: go forth and test this guys map for us!"
b) Engage the community. Random blue posts is not sufficient communication. A weekly/bimonthly update of what they perceive to be major issues in the community would be great. TL might even be able to help with this by creating some kind of "trending" section for threads that have been repeatedly bumped for a certain (substantial) amount of time. Blizzard could even appoint a TL staff member or two to report to them what the major topics have been that deserve serious consideration.
Why should the community be ashamed? Of course TL has its problems, but TL also continues to make the most of a game that has failed to live up to what many thought it would be. Blizzard has failed to harness the power of the community to better its own product. That's a mistake.
I really dislike what Terran is getting in HotS. Warhound and Battle Hellion are both rather lazy designs to give Mech some bulky units that it doesn't really need. If you want mech to be viable, make Siege Tanks more powerful to incentivize factory play. My biggest concern is the Widow Mine though, which is a very strangely designed unit from the get go. It seems like Blizzard wants to combine the Spider Mine and the feeling of Irradiate on a group of clumped Mutas, but since units don't clump like in BW, it's not going to work like that. I also don't think it will even maintain it's anti-air capability, leaving Terran with the same meager AA units as WoL. All in all, it's a big mess by Blizzard, one I didn't think they could make after having two years to study the game at the highest level.
Protoss and Zerg fare a bit better on the new units front, although they seem to want to make Protoss even more reliant on weird gimmicks. The Oracle could be interesting, but it's not going to have nearly the same feeling as something like a Reaver Drop. Mothership Core is one of the strangest design decisions in the game, Mass Recall seems way too powerful even if it takes so much energy. The key problem is that nothing on the Core is worth using energy on besides Mass Recall, so all you have to do is wait for 150 and enjoy your attack that is virtually without risk. Besides the Swarm Host, Zerg actually seems to get the most interesting units in their titular expansion, even if Hydra speed is probably the most important change to the race.
Another thing is that I feel Blizzard is being way too conservative with this expansion, WoL is a great game, but it has some pretty glaring flaws that need to be addressed. SC2 needs way more emphasis on Positioning and Micro than it has right now, I don't think anything in HotS even attempts to change this. Keeping supply off "The Death Ball" isn't what people are talking about when discussing the dumb blobs, yet Blizzard seems to think that's the only thing they need to do.
Overall, I really wish they'd just release the Beta already. Battle Reports are useless in the long run and show that Blizzard is perhaps too attached to the new units when in reality, they should be ready to cut any of them in an instant if they don't work out.
On August 15 2012 00:44 TheOGBlitzKrieg wrote: Can you still build thors in HOTS? i'm just curious because at first they said they were removing it and making it a super unit being able to build 1 only per game, but then i heard they backed off that and just left it in the game as is, but i didn't see him build any thors in that mech composition, which see s like it would have been a good way to help deal with the tempests...
Yes you can build Thors, but they aren't good against Tempests. They may work in large numbers against other air units but the Tempest has way to much range and the Thor is to clunky. They would be even worse against Tempests then they are against BL's.
no unit in the game has more range than the tempest, i understand the thor is an anti light air unit, however thors have a decent range, 1 or 2 coupled with the vikings would be better than none with the vikings... and they are good vs ground as well, just thought mixing in 1 or 2 couldn't hurt since he had 0 ground to air... but that's good that they are still in the game, i just wasn't sure because i didn't see him make any when he should have.
On August 15 2012 00:29 baba1 wrote: There is no reason to put the Warhound in the game when you already have Goliaths. Same thing with Tempest, we already have the Carriers that tweaked properly could have the same purpose in a game, break siege lines. Same thing with banelings vs lurkers. Or swarm host vs lurker while we are here.
My point is Blizzard is making new units just for the sake of making new units and not copy BW. Why try to fix or change what's not even broken?...
I played this game before on the forum. The moment you add anything like you just did just to have your favorite unit in you have to change EVERYTHING. It is honestly not as easy as just replacing said units. These unit are design for SC2 and you want SC2 designed for your units.
On August 15 2012 00:50 ref4 wrote: One EASY solution to remove deathball forever: remove infinite unit selection (make maximum selected units to like 20, not 255)
Ta-da!! We have an actual spectator-worthy RTS!
In before 5 people tell you that is INCONCEIVABLE for some inane reason.
Didn't patch 1.5 increase it to 500 or something? lol
Wait for the Kinect integration: "select all; a move to opponent army"
EPT
!
