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On August 22 2012 03:27 Yoduh wrote:
I want to point out how most people making huge complaints and posting all this negativity are only focusing on one or two new units and declaring the whole expansion a dud before the beta is even out. I don't mind complaining, it makes for good feedback, but looking at the bigger picture theres a lot of things being done right with HotS. I haven't seen a single complaint against the viper, hydra speed, ultralist burrow charge or reaper upgrade.
What reaper upgrade ? Being able to heal himself out of combat ? Yeah awesome, a unit that can't kill shit, can now stay withouth killing shit longer. Or am i missing something ?
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On August 22 2012 03:42 boxman22 wrote:Show nested quote +On August 22 2012 03:29 Wombat_NI wrote:On August 22 2012 03:27 Yoduh wrote:
I want to point out how most people making huge complaints and posting all this negativity are only focusing on one or two new units and declaring the whole expansion a dud before the beta is even out. I don't mind complaining, it makes for good feedback, but looking at the bigger picture theres a lot of things being done right with HotS. I haven't seen a single complaint against the viper, hydra speed, ultralist burrow charge or reaper upgrade. A lot of people are cool with the oracle, mothership core, and battle hellion. People are on the fence about tempest, widow mine, and swarm host but only for possibly not being powerful enough. Really the only constant complaints being made are against the warhound and general fears about continued deathball vs. deathball "a-move" gameplay.
Doesn't sound too bad for still being pre-beta! And once beta starts there will probably be a floodgate of changes, and I think a lot of people complaining that Blizzard never listens are gonna get shut up. If you can remember back to SC2:WoL beta Blizzard was making changes all the time. People forget that. Once a game is released it's different, and they become way more hesitant to make big changes, and rightfully so. But beta time is great. I don't know what kind of changes are yet to be made, but in a few months you can bet we won't be looking at the same game we see today. So to nay sayers I simply say continue criticizing and giving feedback, that's good, but the predictions about SC2 and HotS failing are just too premature for this stage of development. Warpgate is still a stupid mechanic and it's been in the game forever. It's also a contributory factor to [i]why[i/] Protoss games largely consist of allins or deathballing. Lol how does warpgate cause deathballs? Warpgate, if anything, would be antideathball. Sure it would increase all-ins, but you can't say deathball at all...
because no warpgate = no squishy gateway units = protoss that works without splash = protoss doesnt play deathBALL and actually _CAN_ spread units and give better games
im masters protoss on EU and i dont want warpgate. there.
i agree with everything Cloud said. i think fanboys and below-diamond-players dont see what he's saying, but most of the people i know that play this game non-casually or are from bw background are literally saying his words for a year now.
and the fact that he wants the game to be harder even though he's not the best among foreigners should even give more meaning to his words, but some people obviously think if you're not naniwa or stephano you can't judge a game (genre) that you've been playing for almost a decade now.
Cloud, please do the post you said you could do with all the wrong stuff in sc2 (and explain it really really slowly), and get opinions from other relevant players you communicate with, and put it as a blog. it will get featured, and maybe, just maybe, it will actually start something and people will start to realize the situation.
sc2 as a long-term rts can't sustain itself if HotS is another WoL. it doesn't have that quality. we need to be loud, for blizzard to do something.
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I think what ClouD said was really interesting, when he said something along the lines of "Instead of making other races harder to play, you just made Terran easier." I think that that is very true. I'm not excited for this game, I'm going to play it, but it's just does not seem like Blizzard is doing a good job any more.
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nice to hear the opinions and especially the no bs answer of cloud
but HotS will be a complete different game by launch anyway...
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Northern Ireland25342 Posts
On August 22 2012 03:50 boxman22 wrote:Show nested quote +On August 22 2012 03:19 Wombat_NI wrote:On August 22 2012 03:09 boxman22 wrote:On August 22 2012 02:58 Wombat_NI wrote:
Well played sir, excellent post. Don't know why you bothered given that people will not even bother to read it in all likelihood and continue to spout inaccuracies based on their assumptions on why people don't like the direction that HoTS appears to be going. His post isn't particularly good at all. It's all based around the assumption that Wings of Liberty is somehow too volatile and has too much randomness, too little skill. I assume this is because he is a BW elitist who thinks everything was better in BW. People never bother to check stats. Wanna guess who has a higher total winrate, Taeja or Fantasy (both at the top of TLPD, Korean Sc2/BW respectively)? Taeja. 4 time winners the OSL? None. GSL? 1 in 2 years. Given SC2 is an INCREDIBLY new game by BW standards, the fact that it's so STABLE is incredible. People just like spouting shit without backing any of it up. To take an extreme example, PvP was never an unfair matchup, or imbalanced in the worst days of 4 gating, but was it optimal in a design sense? Taeja is crazy good, but there's a lot of tournaments where they are no clear favourites, it's 'Here are 15 people who could win if they have a good day' every time. For every Tajea there's 3 Elfis who just shouldn't be beating players who are many levels above them in every aspect of the game. Terran players are the only ones who I've ever really looked at as being able to turn those incremental mechanical edges into consistently dominant play, we need more of that to stabilise the game. There are upsets in all games, but Brood War and even Warcraft 3 were a lot less volatile for a reason. Terran is the race that is actually well designed, with a lot of variance in potential playstyles and cool versatile units, why not take more notice of why that is, and emulate that approach with the other races. You don't necessarily have to sacrifice the identifying characteristics of the races to do this either I didn't even play BW much and was unaware of the pro scene until retroactively looking back and checking out games. It just boggles my mind that at least some of what made it such a good E-sport are overlooked, actively by the designers. Browder has said SC2 is a different game from BW, they're both good games but different, if you want BW, play that. That's fine if it was a new franchise or something, it's a sequel to the bloody original game and ignoring part of what made it great as an E-sport is just refusing to swallow your pride. I have an open mind, and I'm basing my assessment on what I'm seeing. I was actually hopefully with a lot of the interviews from a few months ago, referring to breaking up deathball play and putting more of an emphasis on hard-to-use units. Then now by all accounts the Terran players now have a mech deathball so now all 3 races can have deathball wars? Great stuff! Blizzard in their public utterances appear to acknowledge and be aware of a lot of issue, claim they're designing the game with those in mind, and then when what we're seeing does not correlate with what they said of course people are going to get pissy! The main thing I think is stupid with Sc2 is the lack of the high ground advantage mechanic. If you don't want something that is random just make it so that units on the low ground deal 75% damage to units on the high ground. Bam, larger defenders advantage and positional play. Other than that, people just like to pretend the BW isn't a game where anybody could win on any given day. Did you watch Ace beat KT today? "BW and WC3 were less volatile". Back that up. I've shown you examples that show it was not any less volatile, people just like pretending it is. Guess who won the last two OSLs. JangBi. But wait wasn't Flash dominant? JangBi over Fantasy = OSL finals. Flash over Zero MSL finals. How bout the MSL before that? Hydra over Great. Who? Yea that's right, not volatile in the slightest.
Well the paucity of foreigners winning against Koreans, but then that's also tied in with intangible factors, such as the gaming environments of the Koreans being more conducive to top-level play.
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They should of kept these in
* The Mothership Core's Energize ability will not be able to target Nexuses
* The Mothership with ground only Vortex and Stasis field will be removed and replaced by the Wings of Liberty Mothership
Energize on Nexus would make for more intresting macro mechanics.
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On August 22 2012 04:00 paintfive wrote:
They should of kept these in
* The Mothership Core's Energize ability will not be able to target Nexuses
* The Mothership with ground only Vortex and Stasis field will be removed and replaced by the Wings of Liberty Mothership
Energize on Nexus would make for more intresting macro mechanics.
If by "intresting" macro mechanics you mean retarded unstoppable timings/all-ins thanks to infinite CBs then you are correct. How about they make all the OC abilities cost 5 energy?
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On August 22 2012 03:46 MavivaM wrote:Always nice to hear progamers opinions, they have way more insight than us. And Cloud, as usual, brings up valid points in the worst possible PR manner  I think that there are basically three problems in the balance situation: the first is the warp-in mechanic, since it completely nullifies the concept of map distance and makes PvP what it is. The second is the existence of spells who are able to change the flow of a battle despite whatever your opponent does. Forcefields, fungals, the infamous vortex, EMPs... one could argue that somehow your opponent can prevent some of them like the vortex by splitting everywhere, or luring FFs all day long... but personally I think it relies too much on a single player to make a mistake rather than his opponent doing something geniusThe third one is Blizzard's tendency to never punish a player who makes bad decisions when building his army since they tend to make the some units as well-rounded as possible. Pre-nerf ghost is the epitome of this tendecy, since it was NEVER a bad idea to make ghosts. Not that now making a ghost in TvP can be stupid, since they still hurt any kind of army composition the Protoss has, but they are not the only one. -Infestors are so well rounded that they can answer to absolutely EVERYTHING the opponent makes in all the matchups. -Colossi as well, as long as the opponent doesn't go completely anti-collossi (no... actually it's even better since in the next warp-in cycle the Toss will completely swap the army wherever he wants). -3/3 marines are perfect in every army against every kind of threat. -Broodlors, as long as supported by infestors, are NEVER a bad choice. And it looks like the Warhound will fit in this category as well. Generally a player is punished only because of bad decision making in a battle or due to huge errors with scouting, but the game is pretty generous with army compositions errors at every level of play that isn't the real top. It looks like HoTS won't change this aspect, sadly. That's the current state, I wonder how will it be in a couple of years...
Don't agree on the army composition thing, from multiple views.
Firstly, if Terran has just 2-4 vikings too many or too little vs Col, it's instantly gg. I think that's quite a severe punishment for something you can't really scout properly. Same is true vs zerg techswitches in any direction. It used to be like that for zergs making corruptors vs P in the old style, before they just started to max on roaches instantly or go 12min broods. I guess this is less true for protoss because the colossus is always good, you just need to tech in the right window.
Secondly, I don't even agree that unit compositions should be punished harder. It directly leads to a rock paper scissor style. The game is much more "skilled' if any composition is useful in its own way, so the better player will always win, even with a build order disadvantage.
I do agree that units like col/infestor/brood are too strong and always good, but that's because the col can't be balanced due to its design, and the infestor is just too powerful. And warpgate is obviously stupid in its current form, I can't believe it's still in the game and probably will remain forever.
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On August 22 2012 04:09 speknek wrote:+ Show Spoiler +On August 22 2012 03:46 MavivaM wrote:Always nice to hear progamers opinions, they have way more insight than us. And Cloud, as usual, brings up valid points in the worst possible PR manner I think that there are basically three problems in the balance situation: the first is the warp-in mechanic, since it completely nullifies the concept of map distance and makes PvP what it is. The second is the existence of spells who are able to change the flow of a battle despite whatever your opponent does. Forcefields, fungals, the infamous vortex, EMPs... one could argue that somehow your opponent can prevent some of them like the vortex by splitting everywhere, or luring FFs all day long... but personally I think it relies too much on a single player to make a mistake rather than his opponent doing something geniusThe third one is Blizzard's tendency to never punish a player who makes bad decisions when building his army since they tend to make the some units as well-rounded as possible. Pre-nerf ghost is the epitome of this tendecy, since it was NEVER a bad idea to make ghosts. Not that now making a ghost in TvP can be stupid, since they still hurt any kind of army composition the Protoss has, but they are not the only one. -Infestors are so well rounded that they can answer to absolutely EVERYTHING the opponent makes in all the matchups. -Colossi as well, as long as the opponent doesn't go completely anti-collossi (no... actually it's even better since in the next warp-in cycle the Toss will completely swap the army wherever he wants). -3/3 marines are perfect in every army against every kind of threat. -Broodlors, as long as supported by infestors, are NEVER a bad choice. And it looks like the Warhound will fit in this category as well. Generally a player is punished only because of bad decision making in a battle or due to huge errors with scouting, but the game is pretty generous with army compositions errors at every level of play that isn't the real top. It looks like HoTS won't change this aspect, sadly. That's the current state, I wonder how will it be in a couple of years... Don't agree on the army composition thing, from multiple views. Firstly, if Terran has just 2-4 vikings too many or too little vs Col, it's instantly gg. I think that's quite a severe punishment for something you can't really scout properly. Same is true vs zerg techswitches in any direction. It used to be like that for zergs making corruptors vs P in the old style, before they just started to max on roaches instantly or go 12min broods. I guess this is less true for protoss because the colossus is always good, you just need to tech in the right window. Secondly, I don't even agree that unit compositions should be punished harder. It directly leads to a rock paper scissor style. The game is much more "skilled' if any composition is useful in its own way, so the better player will always win, even with a build order disadvantage. I do agree that units like col/infestor/brood are too strong and always good, but that's because the col can't be balanced due to its design, and the infestor is just too powerful. And warpgate is obviously stupid in its current form, I can't believe it's still in the game and probably will remain forever.
+ Show Spoiler +
As for the viking example I don't think the same way because I believe that scouting should be vital in every minute of every game.
More than a rock-paper-scissor I think of a situation when player1 takes a decision and it's up to player2 to scout properly and come out with an answer.
And then it's up to player2 to scout and realise he has to adjust his plan.
At the current moment it's like that to some extent, but since there are some too well rounded units a player needs to make less, minor corrections or just attack anyways.
As for your last paragraph, yes.
The game has a flaw (or at least that's my 2 cents) in his core design that cannot be completely corrected.
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The Mothership Core's Energize ability will not be able to target Nexuses
This makes me sad. I know it would be a lot of work to balance and re-tweak build times so that they work with almost infinite chronoboost, but having more emphasis placed on chronoboost and making it a larger part of protoss macro is a functional and interesting way to make protoss macro more difficult. It's something that would significantly raise the skill gap between good protoss players and great protoss players which is something I would be very interested to see happen. It also raises the skill ceiling immensely. I pretty much stopped playing Starcraft 2 when my macro became good enough to where I was never floating over 600 minerals and didn't get supply blocked. I ran out of room to improve my macro and the games I won/lost came down to foul army positioning and decision making. Unlike working on those two things, I really enjoyed improving my macro. It's the only thing I really enjoyed improving. I would love to be able to have to work harder to macro better. I'm in Master league but I suck at the game, I'm just really good at protoss macro which could be harder imo. This is a good way to do that 
Also, having to make the decision between increasing the efficiency of your build and saving enough energy for recall is what makes having recall as a spell interesting to me. It's something with a palpable opportunity cost. It's a choice you make. "should i slow down my build to pressure?" I know it's only alpha, I just really hope that this is direction things go in
TLDR: They shouldn't remove this, they should rework protoss macro around this.
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On August 22 2012 03:50 boxman22 wrote:Show nested quote +On August 22 2012 03:19 Wombat_NI wrote:On August 22 2012 03:09 boxman22 wrote:On August 22 2012 02:58 Wombat_NI wrote:
Well played sir, excellent post. Don't know why you bothered given that people will not even bother to read it in all likelihood and continue to spout inaccuracies based on their assumptions on why people don't like the direction that HoTS appears to be going. His post isn't particularly good at all. It's all based around the assumption that Wings of Liberty is somehow too volatile and has too much randomness, too little skill. I assume this is because he is a BW elitist who thinks everything was better in BW. People never bother to check stats. Wanna guess who has a higher total winrate, Taeja or Fantasy (both at the top of TLPD, Korean Sc2/BW respectively)? Taeja. 4 time winners the OSL? None. GSL? 1 in 2 years. Given SC2 is an INCREDIBLY new game by BW standards, the fact that it's so STABLE is incredible. People just like spouting shit without backing any of it up. To take an extreme example, PvP was never an unfair matchup, or imbalanced in the worst days of 4 gating, but was it optimal in a design sense? Taeja is crazy good, but there's a lot of tournaments where they are no clear favourites, it's 'Here are 15 people who could win if they have a good day' every time. For every Tajea there's 3 Elfis who just shouldn't be beating players who are many levels above them in every aspect of the game. Terran players are the only ones who I've ever really looked at as being able to turn those incremental mechanical edges into consistently dominant play, we need more of that to stabilise the game. There are upsets in all games, but Brood War and even Warcraft 3 were a lot less volatile for a reason. Terran is the race that is actually well designed, with a lot of variance in potential playstyles and cool versatile units, why not take more notice of why that is, and emulate that approach with the other races. You don't necessarily have to sacrifice the identifying characteristics of the races to do this either I didn't even play BW much and was unaware of the pro scene until retroactively looking back and checking out games. It just boggles my mind that at least some of what made it such a good E-sport are overlooked, actively by the designers. Browder has said SC2 is a different game from BW, they're both good games but different, if you want BW, play that. That's fine if it was a new franchise or something, it's a sequel to the bloody original game and ignoring part of what made it great as an E-sport is just refusing to swallow your pride. I have an open mind, and I'm basing my assessment on what I'm seeing. I was actually hopefully with a lot of the interviews from a few months ago, referring to breaking up deathball play and putting more of an emphasis on hard-to-use units. Then now by all accounts the Terran players now have a mech deathball so now all 3 races can have deathball wars? Great stuff! Blizzard in their public utterances appear to acknowledge and be aware of a lot of issue, claim they're designing the game with those in mind, and then when what we're seeing does not correlate with what they said of course people are going to get pissy! The main thing I think is stupid with Sc2 is the lack of the high ground advantage mechanic. If you don't want something that is random just make it so that units on the low ground deal 75% damage to units on the high ground. Bam, larger defenders advantage and positional play. Other than that, people just like to pretend the BW isn't a game where anybody could win on any given day. Did you watch Ace beat KT today? "BW and WC3 were less volatile". Back that up. I've shown you examples that show it was not any less volatile, people just like pretending it is. Guess who won the last two OSLs . JangBi. But wait wasn't Flash dominant? JangBi over Fantasy = OSL finals. Flash over Zero MSL finals. How bout the MSL before that? Hydra over Great. Who? Yea that's right, not volatile in the slightest.
It's clear that you don't know all that much about BW...why try to use BW in your argument? BW was less volatile, anyone watching it for years could tell you that. Btw, Jangbi is fucken good. So is Hydra. And yes, Flash was fucken dominant, that's why it's a HUGE shock whenever he did lose in those major tournements. He'll be pretty much invincible the whole season and just lose one boX. He was so dominant that if he ever dared to lose twice in his last 30 games, people said he was "slumping." This doesn't take anything away from Fantasy or Jangbi thought, those two are sick good.
Btw, about ace beating KT...KT was always a team that could be beat. Esp. in the past where Flash could only carry in winners-league.
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On August 22 2012 00:49 Wombat_NI wrote:Show nested quote +On August 22 2012 00:39 Na_Dann_Ma_GoGo wrote:On August 22 2012 00:32 Wombat_NI wrote:On August 22 2012 00:26 Plansix wrote:On August 22 2012 00:10 Wombat_NI wrote:On August 21 2012 23:49 Mauldo wrote:
Cloud just proves once again that he belongs on the battle.net forums. Blaming Blizzard for losing a game in an imbalanced HOTS alpha is plain sad. Add that to his long track record of shitting on other people for no reason, and (my personal favorite) constantly claiming that the skill ceiling is too low and anyone can win when the guy can't even qualify for WCS Italy or remain even kinda relevant and I'm starting to get annoyed with him even being there. He's about as bad as TT1 at his worst or avilo at his best. The shot at David Kim was really something special, and proved his maturity.
Of course Terran are being given two a-move units. There race is the hardest to play micro wise. Ever wonder why it's taken Terran as a whole (barring people like Taeja) longer than most would think to find a solution to their problems when they have people like QXC on the case? The race is just plain harder and more intensive. So they gave them a few units to maybe even out the odds while giving Zerg/Protoss more micro-centric/thought-provoking units to use. The Viper and Swarm Host, for example, are perfect examples of a anti-a-move unit. You have to think about how to use them, and they add a level of difficult up toward the Terran level, while Terran will hopefully be bumped down a smidge by the Warhound and Battle Hellion.
My favorite parts of this thread are the people who are still trying to shit on HOTS units before they're even in beta stage, and the people who are seriously taking Cloud as banner carrier to try and proclaim that the max skill level in SC2 is already almost met.
Are you kidding me guys? Seriously. You have to be. Maybe read the thread and the posts contained within before pre-judging. People are referencing the difference between a skill ceiling which isn't yet reached, but a skill floor where people with mediocre mechanics are still able to compete. Cloud was not fucking butthurt about losing a game in the alpha build, but is pointing out the direction that HoTS is going after having played the game, played around with the design etc. Also Cloud plays Terran, and is saying that the 1A mentality of which the warhound is the chief 'offender' is something that he doesn't want, even though it would improve his own race's ease of play. Why might that be? Despite this I'm sure he's just a butthurt balance whiner who wants easy results though...... I don’t think anyone is even attempting to argue that Cloud is upset that he lost a game in a test build of HotS. I personally don’t like that fact that he asserts that Blizzard is designing the game for bad player based off of that single experience. People, as a whole, are responding to the over all negative tone of his interview and his attitude toward the game designers. Calling someone an idiot because you don’t agree with them is pretty unprofessional. Also, its kind of lazy, since there are so many other words that could be used. But most I think people are getting tired of the complaining, negativity and over all bitchyness toward this expansion and the game. The game is so clearly in alpha and not even fully released in beta. Stuff will change and Blizzard is clearly willing to try things out and people really need to start treating the changes as such. There is a metric fuckton of community feedback out there that is being patently ignored with the direction HoTS looks to be going at this current juncture. It is subject to change yes, but maybe that process can be sped along with feedback?
When the balance team professed recently that they were unaware that the mothership was popular in lategame PvZ, when they claim to watch all the big tournaments your faith in Blizzard takes a knock. They can't claim to be clued into the current trends of pro play, and have a gap in their knowledge that big! Where did they say that? As far as I'm aware there was some awkward Interview by Kennigit where he asked a weird question about PvZ lategame problems. However Browder did not say they don't know that the mothership is/was popular in PvZ. So, can you link to that statement? If not - no comment. Ah, fair point. I tend to read transcripts/TL comments as I zone out quite quickly when it comes to big interviews. I've made the mistake of listening to TL posters too much The interview in question appears to be him saying 'I wasn't aware that was an issue' in response to a question from Kenningit specifically regarding neural parasite, as opposed to general mothership useage. This got misconstrued by many of the viewers as being him saying he wasn't aware motherships were prevalent in lategame PvZ, so apologies to Browder. EDIT - In my defence he also goes on to say that the vortex/archon toilet vs infestor/BL is good as a spectacle so, I think he's a bit off with the community on that one
My take on Dustin's opinion (over the course of a few interviews, etc. that I recall) is that
a. Having to rely on the vortex, on a unit that you can build only one of, was not the perfect design.
b. They realized that if Zerg could reliably get to late game, Protoss was on a timer. While back in the Alpha... around the time of the old extreme air AOE tempest, before it became the long range version....
c. And then they realized pros were good enough or desperate enough to force the vortex role of the mothership to work well enough. This was after a mothership movement buff.
d. In comes the phoenix range upgrade... and maybe internally it was impossible to balance and make fun the AOE tempests... mothership doing "OK". Hmmm... seems time to rearrange things and maybe mothership can stay, but it doesn't have to be the only solution. Long range tempests have a shot of working late game PvZ if Protoss is ahead. If Protoss is even or behind, vortexing has a shot if the Zerg doesn't pay close attention to unit stacking.
So yeah, they are aware of all of the concerns. Their problem is they need to make the game fun, easy to pick up, harder to get decent at, and hard to master. All while being perfectly balanced. Not easy.
I also think it is the job of pros and avid fans like teamliquid posters to give criticisms. Hopefully, after the beta things will be much more balanced. I do understand and also hold fears named in many recent posts on the designs. Like...
-Protoss getting no real attack units. Sucks.
-Too much a-move friendly stuff for Terran.
-Oracle too annoying to deal with.
-Viper potential.
Still, I see potential in widow-mines, self-healing reapers, MotherShip Core, swarm hosts, and the long range tempest. I'm glad the Oracle at least has some other support role abilities now, so it's not one dimensional. Maybe the viper will also work since it can be tweaked for cost or whatnot if it proves to be too strong. HotS is looking pretty good in my eyes... can't wait to sink my teeth into the beta.
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On August 22 2012 04:35 LuckyMacro wrote:Show nested quote +On August 22 2012 03:50 boxman22 wrote:On August 22 2012 03:19 Wombat_NI wrote:On August 22 2012 03:09 boxman22 wrote:On August 22 2012 02:58 Wombat_NI wrote:
Well played sir, excellent post. Don't know why you bothered given that people will not even bother to read it in all likelihood and continue to spout inaccuracies based on their assumptions on why people don't like the direction that HoTS appears to be going. His post isn't particularly good at all. It's all based around the assumption that Wings of Liberty is somehow too volatile and has too much randomness, too little skill. I assume this is because he is a BW elitist who thinks everything was better in BW. People never bother to check stats. Wanna guess who has a higher total winrate, Taeja or Fantasy (both at the top of TLPD, Korean Sc2/BW respectively)? Taeja. 4 time winners the OSL? None. GSL? 1 in 2 years. Given SC2 is an INCREDIBLY new game by BW standards, the fact that it's so STABLE is incredible. People just like spouting shit without backing any of it up. To take an extreme example, PvP was never an unfair matchup, or imbalanced in the worst days of 4 gating, but was it optimal in a design sense? Taeja is crazy good, but there's a lot of tournaments where they are no clear favourites, it's 'Here are 15 people who could win if they have a good day' every time. For every Tajea there's 3 Elfis who just shouldn't be beating players who are many levels above them in every aspect of the game. Terran players are the only ones who I've ever really looked at as being able to turn those incremental mechanical edges into consistently dominant play, we need more of that to stabilise the game. There are upsets in all games, but Brood War and even Warcraft 3 were a lot less volatile for a reason. Terran is the race that is actually well designed, with a lot of variance in potential playstyles and cool versatile units, why not take more notice of why that is, and emulate that approach with the other races. You don't necessarily have to sacrifice the identifying characteristics of the races to do this either I didn't even play BW much and was unaware of the pro scene until retroactively looking back and checking out games. It just boggles my mind that at least some of what made it such a good E-sport are overlooked, actively by the designers. Browder has said SC2 is a different game from BW, they're both good games but different, if you want BW, play that. That's fine if it was a new franchise or something, it's a sequel to the bloody original game and ignoring part of what made it great as an E-sport is just refusing to swallow your pride. I have an open mind, and I'm basing my assessment on what I'm seeing. I was actually hopefully with a lot of the interviews from a few months ago, referring to breaking up deathball play and putting more of an emphasis on hard-to-use units. Then now by all accounts the Terran players now have a mech deathball so now all 3 races can have deathball wars? Great stuff! Blizzard in their public utterances appear to acknowledge and be aware of a lot of issue, claim they're designing the game with those in mind, and then when what we're seeing does not correlate with what they said of course people are going to get pissy! The main thing I think is stupid with Sc2 is the lack of the high ground advantage mechanic. If you don't want something that is random just make it so that units on the low ground deal 75% damage to units on the high ground. Bam, larger defenders advantage and positional play. Other than that, people just like to pretend the BW isn't a game where anybody could win on any given day. Did you watch Ace beat KT today? "BW and WC3 were less volatile". Back that up. I've shown you examples that show it was not any less volatile, people just like pretending it is. Guess who won the last two OSLs . JangBi. But wait wasn't Flash dominant? JangBi over Fantasy = OSL finals. Flash over Zero MSL finals. How bout the MSL before that? Hydra over Great. Who? Yea that's right, not volatile in the slightest. It's clear that you don't know all that much about BW...why try to use BW in your argument? BW was less volatile, anyone watching it for years could tell you that. Btw, Jangbi is fucken good. So is Hydra. And yes, Flash was fucken dominant, that's why it's a HUGE shock whenever he did lose in those major tournements. He'll be pretty much invincible the whole season and just lose one boX. He was so dominant that if he ever dared to lose twice in his last 30 games, people said he was "slumping." This doesn't take anything away from Fantasy or Jangbi thought, those two are sick good. Btw, about ace beating KT...KT was always a team that could be beat. Esp. in the past where Flash could only carry in winners-league.
no point arguing with a sc2 fanboy there, anyone who questions brood war's skill ceiling has obviously never been good at it at any point, or know anything about it at all.
i dont know if people are deliberately misunderstanding cloud's point because he put it across in a aggressive way, but i dont see how anyone with who wants sc2 to be a great game would disagree that instead of making terran more A move friendly, they should make zerg and protoss less A move friendly(cloud's point). half the people just rage at him instead of addressing the valid points he is actually making.
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On August 22 2012 02:01 Zelniq wrote:
i have to agree with Violet on the swarm host..and it confuses me how one of the major ideas behind such a unit is to help with zerg's weakness in their ability to end games by attacking when they're ahead.. like vs marine/medivac such a unit is borderline useless.. in their current state spending resources on swarm hosts to try to finish a terran off would be counterproductive. well if I'm correct and this is an issue, I'm sure it'll be resolved after the game's played enough, just surprised still that this idea is the one that survived all the cuts.
Bad vs. Terran, but maybe good vs. P. If P does a 2 base all-in, swarm hosts with proper protection could be good if tweaked correctly. Sort of the old lurker role - worse for killing but better for tying up units so you can produce more lings/etc? If Protoss has to burn forcefields on the swarmlings, and immortals are terrible vs them... yeah. Maybe that could change a lot if people go lair earlier.
I have only slept 2 hours last night so if I'm talking out of my ass just say so.
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On August 22 2012 04:35 LuckyMacro wrote:Show nested quote +On August 22 2012 03:50 boxman22 wrote:On August 22 2012 03:19 Wombat_NI wrote:On August 22 2012 03:09 boxman22 wrote:On August 22 2012 02:58 Wombat_NI wrote:
Well played sir, excellent post. Don't know why you bothered given that people will not even bother to read it in all likelihood and continue to spout inaccuracies based on their assumptions on why people don't like the direction that HoTS appears to be going. His post isn't particularly good at all. It's all based around the assumption that Wings of Liberty is somehow too volatile and has too much randomness, too little skill. I assume this is because he is a BW elitist who thinks everything was better in BW. People never bother to check stats. Wanna guess who has a higher total winrate, Taeja or Fantasy (both at the top of TLPD, Korean Sc2/BW respectively)? Taeja. 4 time winners the OSL? None. GSL? 1 in 2 years. Given SC2 is an INCREDIBLY new game by BW standards, the fact that it's so STABLE is incredible. People just like spouting shit without backing any of it up. To take an extreme example, PvP was never an unfair matchup, or imbalanced in the worst days of 4 gating, but was it optimal in a design sense? Taeja is crazy good, but there's a lot of tournaments where they are no clear favourites, it's 'Here are 15 people who could win if they have a good day' every time. For every Tajea there's 3 Elfis who just shouldn't be beating players who are many levels above them in every aspect of the game. Terran players are the only ones who I've ever really looked at as being able to turn those incremental mechanical edges into consistently dominant play, we need more of that to stabilise the game. There are upsets in all games, but Brood War and even Warcraft 3 were a lot less volatile for a reason. Terran is the race that is actually well designed, with a lot of variance in potential playstyles and cool versatile units, why not take more notice of why that is, and emulate that approach with the other races. You don't necessarily have to sacrifice the identifying characteristics of the races to do this either I didn't even play BW much and was unaware of the pro scene until retroactively looking back and checking out games. It just boggles my mind that at least some of what made it such a good E-sport are overlooked, actively by the designers. Browder has said SC2 is a different game from BW, they're both good games but different, if you want BW, play that. That's fine if it was a new franchise or something, it's a sequel to the bloody original game and ignoring part of what made it great as an E-sport is just refusing to swallow your pride. I have an open mind, and I'm basing my assessment on what I'm seeing. I was actually hopefully with a lot of the interviews from a few months ago, referring to breaking up deathball play and putting more of an emphasis on hard-to-use units. Then now by all accounts the Terran players now have a mech deathball so now all 3 races can have deathball wars? Great stuff! Blizzard in their public utterances appear to acknowledge and be aware of a lot of issue, claim they're designing the game with those in mind, and then when what we're seeing does not correlate with what they said of course people are going to get pissy! The main thing I think is stupid with Sc2 is the lack of the high ground advantage mechanic. If you don't want something that is random just make it so that units on the low ground deal 75% damage to units on the high ground. Bam, larger defenders advantage and positional play. Other than that, people just like to pretend the BW isn't a game where anybody could win on any given day. Did you watch Ace beat KT today? "BW and WC3 were less volatile". Back that up. I've shown you examples that show it was not any less volatile, people just like pretending it is. Guess who won the last two OSLs . JangBi. But wait wasn't Flash dominant? JangBi over Fantasy = OSL finals. Flash over Zero MSL finals. How bout the MSL before that? Hydra over Great. Who? Yea that's right, not volatile in the slightest. It's clear that you don't know all that much about BW...why try to use BW in your argument? BW was less volatile, anyone watching it for years could tell you that. Btw, Jangbi is fucken good. So is Hydra. And yes, Flash was fucken dominant, that's why it's a HUGE shock whenever he did lose in those major tournements. He'll be pretty much invincible the whole season and just lose one boX. He was so dominant that if he ever dared to lose twice in his last 30 games, people said he was "slumping." This doesn't take anything away from Fantasy or Jangbi thought, those two are sick good. Btw, about ace beating KT...KT was always a team that could be beat. Esp. in the past where Flash could only carry in winners-league.
I'm just saying how far can you define "dominant" players until it doesn't mean shit? There have been multiple patches during which the same players have managed to dominate in SC2. The very very top is a little more dominated by one person lately in BW, but even that isn't entirely true. There have been 7 different winners since 2009 in the OSL and MSL (15 events). In the 13 total GSLs, there have been.................. 7 different winners!!!! WHOA CRAZY. HOW MUCH MORE VOLATILE CAN YOU GET??????
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On August 22 2012 03:42 boxman22 wrote:Show nested quote +On August 22 2012 03:29 Wombat_NI wrote:On August 22 2012 03:27 Yoduh wrote:
I want to point out how most people making huge complaints and posting all this negativity are only focusing on one or two new units and declaring the whole expansion a dud before the beta is even out. I don't mind complaining, it makes for good feedback, but looking at the bigger picture theres a lot of things being done right with HotS. I haven't seen a single complaint against the viper, hydra speed, ultralist burrow charge or reaper upgrade. A lot of people are cool with the oracle, mothership core, and battle hellion. People are on the fence about tempest, widow mine, and swarm host but only for possibly not being powerful enough. Really the only constant complaints being made are against the warhound and general fears about continued deathball vs. deathball "a-move" gameplay.
Doesn't sound too bad for still being pre-beta! And once beta starts there will probably be a floodgate of changes, and I think a lot of people complaining that Blizzard never listens are gonna get shut up. If you can remember back to SC2:WoL beta Blizzard was making changes all the time. People forget that. Once a game is released it's different, and they become way more hesitant to make big changes, and rightfully so. But beta time is great. I don't know what kind of changes are yet to be made, but in a few months you can bet we won't be looking at the same game we see today. So to nay sayers I simply say continue criticizing and giving feedback, that's good, but the predictions about SC2 and HotS failing are just too premature for this stage of development. Warpgate is still a stupid mechanic and it's been in the game forever. It's also a contributory factor to [i]why[i/] Protoss games largely consist of allins or deathballing. Lol how does warpgate cause deathballs? Warpgate, if anything, would be antideathball. Sure it would increase all-ins, but you can't say deathball at all...
Either do your research on the topic or think for yourself. Warp Gate is THE contributing factor to why Protoss needs to play a deathball style. It's the root cause of all things bad with the race. Let me see if I can make a concise diagram.
Warp Gate -> Gateway units have to be weak due to Warp In's strength -> Gateway units suck -> majority of the Protoss army sucks as lone units -> Protoss units need to mesh very well or Protoss as a race will fail -> Deathball play is born.
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On August 22 2012 01:31 nam nam wrote:Show nested quote +On August 22 2012 01:21 Klipsys wrote:
Who really cares what cloud thinks? Has he even won anything ever? That isn't relevant to the discussion. You can't have a valid opinion without being the best player in the world? Why are you even reading this forum if you don't care about opinions of people that have never won anything, because that's probably close to 99,9 % of the community?
Because he's just one pro out of hundreds and who really cares what he thinks about a game in beta that isn't out yet? The fact that he hasn't won anything in WOL means he hasn't even mastered that yet, and he's commenting on a game in beta? I don't think anyone should care what someone says about an unfinished game, even if they are the best player in the world. I care even less when they're not even top 100
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On August 22 2012 05:04 DougJDempsey wrote:Show nested quote +On August 22 2012 04:35 LuckyMacro wrote:On August 22 2012 03:50 boxman22 wrote:On August 22 2012 03:19 Wombat_NI wrote:On August 22 2012 03:09 boxman22 wrote:On August 22 2012 02:58 Wombat_NI wrote:
Well played sir, excellent post. Don't know why you bothered given that people will not even bother to read it in all likelihood and continue to spout inaccuracies based on their assumptions on why people don't like the direction that HoTS appears to be going. His post isn't particularly good at all. It's all based around the assumption that Wings of Liberty is somehow too volatile and has too much randomness, too little skill. I assume this is because he is a BW elitist who thinks everything was better in BW. People never bother to check stats. Wanna guess who has a higher total winrate, Taeja or Fantasy (both at the top of TLPD, Korean Sc2/BW respectively)? Taeja. 4 time winners the OSL? None. GSL? 1 in 2 years. Given SC2 is an INCREDIBLY new game by BW standards, the fact that it's so STABLE is incredible. People just like spouting shit without backing any of it up. To take an extreme example, PvP was never an unfair matchup, or imbalanced in the worst days of 4 gating, but was it optimal in a design sense? Taeja is crazy good, but there's a lot of tournaments where they are no clear favourites, it's 'Here are 15 people who could win if they have a good day' every time. For every Tajea there's 3 Elfis who just shouldn't be beating players who are many levels above them in every aspect of the game. Terran players are the only ones who I've ever really looked at as being able to turn those incremental mechanical edges into consistently dominant play, we need more of that to stabilise the game. There are upsets in all games, but Brood War and even Warcraft 3 were a lot less volatile for a reason. Terran is the race that is actually well designed, with a lot of variance in potential playstyles and cool versatile units, why not take more notice of why that is, and emulate that approach with the other races. You don't necessarily have to sacrifice the identifying characteristics of the races to do this either I didn't even play BW much and was unaware of the pro scene until retroactively looking back and checking out games. It just boggles my mind that at least some of what made it such a good E-sport are overlooked, actively by the designers. Browder has said SC2 is a different game from BW, they're both good games but different, if you want BW, play that. That's fine if it was a new franchise or something, it's a sequel to the bloody original game and ignoring part of what made it great as an E-sport is just refusing to swallow your pride. I have an open mind, and I'm basing my assessment on what I'm seeing. I was actually hopefully with a lot of the interviews from a few months ago, referring to breaking up deathball play and putting more of an emphasis on hard-to-use units. Then now by all accounts the Terran players now have a mech deathball so now all 3 races can have deathball wars? Great stuff! Blizzard in their public utterances appear to acknowledge and be aware of a lot of issue, claim they're designing the game with those in mind, and then when what we're seeing does not correlate with what they said of course people are going to get pissy! The main thing I think is stupid with Sc2 is the lack of the high ground advantage mechanic. If you don't want something that is random just make it so that units on the low ground deal 75% damage to units on the high ground. Bam, larger defenders advantage and positional play. Other than that, people just like to pretend the BW isn't a game where anybody could win on any given day. Did you watch Ace beat KT today? "BW and WC3 were less volatile". Back that up. I've shown you examples that show it was not any less volatile, people just like pretending it is. Guess who won the last two OSLs . JangBi. But wait wasn't Flash dominant? JangBi over Fantasy = OSL finals. Flash over Zero MSL finals. How bout the MSL before that? Hydra over Great. Who? Yea that's right, not volatile in the slightest. It's clear that you don't know all that much about BW...why try to use BW in your argument? BW was less volatile, anyone watching it for years could tell you that. Btw, Jangbi is fucken good. So is Hydra. And yes, Flash was fucken dominant, that's why it's a HUGE shock whenever he did lose in those major tournements. He'll be pretty much invincible the whole season and just lose one boX. He was so dominant that if he ever dared to lose twice in his last 30 games, people said he was "slumping." This doesn't take anything away from Fantasy or Jangbi thought, those two are sick good. Btw, about ace beating KT...KT was always a team that could be beat. Esp. in the past where Flash could only carry in winners-league. no point arguing with a sc2 fanboy there, anyone who questions brood war's skill ceiling has obviously never been good at it at any point, or know anything about it at all. i dont know if people are deliberately misunderstanding cloud's point because he put it across in a aggressive way, but i dont see how anyone with who wants sc2 to be a great game would disagree that instead of making terran more A move friendly, they should make zerg and protoss less A move friendly(cloud's point). half the people just rage at him instead of addressing the valid points he is actually making.
I'm not questioning BW's skill ceiling. I'm just saying no one has been anywhere near either SC2 or BW's skill ceilings.
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On August 22 2012 05:18 Klipsys wrote:Show nested quote +On August 22 2012 01:31 nam nam wrote:On August 22 2012 01:21 Klipsys wrote:
Who really cares what cloud thinks? Has he even won anything ever? That isn't relevant to the discussion. You can't have a valid opinion without being the best player in the world? Why are you even reading this forum if you don't care about opinions of people that have never won anything, because that's probably close to 99,9 % of the community? Because he's just one pro out of hundreds and who really cares what he thinks about a game in beta that isn't out yet? The fact that he hasn't won anything in WOL means he hasn't even mastered that yet, and he's commenting on a game in beta? I don't think anyone should care what someone says about an unfinished game, even if they are the best player in the world. I care even less when they're not even top 100
Then you're a fool. If criticism was only valid after a game was finished, then bad ideas would hit the scene all the time and we wouldn't see them removed because you can't just remove entire units or fundamentally change units in an e-sport game after it is released. That is what the time before the game is finished is for.
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On August 22 2012 05:16 Stratos_speAr wrote:Show nested quote +On August 22 2012 03:42 boxman22 wrote:On August 22 2012 03:29 Wombat_NI wrote:On August 22 2012 03:27 Yoduh wrote:
I want to point out how most people making huge complaints and posting all this negativity are only focusing on one or two new units and declaring the whole expansion a dud before the beta is even out. I don't mind complaining, it makes for good feedback, but looking at the bigger picture theres a lot of things being done right with HotS. I haven't seen a single complaint against the viper, hydra speed, ultralist burrow charge or reaper upgrade. A lot of people are cool with the oracle, mothership core, and battle hellion. People are on the fence about tempest, widow mine, and swarm host but only for possibly not being powerful enough. Really the only constant complaints being made are against the warhound and general fears about continued deathball vs. deathball "a-move" gameplay.
Doesn't sound too bad for still being pre-beta! And once beta starts there will probably be a floodgate of changes, and I think a lot of people complaining that Blizzard never listens are gonna get shut up. If you can remember back to SC2:WoL beta Blizzard was making changes all the time. People forget that. Once a game is released it's different, and they become way more hesitant to make big changes, and rightfully so. But beta time is great. I don't know what kind of changes are yet to be made, but in a few months you can bet we won't be looking at the same game we see today. So to nay sayers I simply say continue criticizing and giving feedback, that's good, but the predictions about SC2 and HotS failing are just too premature for this stage of development. Warpgate is still a stupid mechanic and it's been in the game forever. It's also a contributory factor to [i]why[i/] Protoss games largely consist of allins or deathballing. Lol how does warpgate cause deathballs? Warpgate, if anything, would be antideathball. Sure it would increase all-ins, but you can't say deathball at all... Either do your research on the topic or think for yourself. Warp Gate is THE contributing factor to why Protoss needs to play a deathball style. It's the root cause of all things bad with the race. Let me see if I can make a concise diagram. Warp Gate -> Gateway units have to be weak due to Warp In's strength -> Gateway units suck -> majority of the Protoss army sucks as lone units -> Protoss units need to mesh very well or Protoss as a race will fail -> Deathball play is born.
That's a gross oversimplification. In really low numbers they can beat similar cost terran or zerg armies, either through kiting or sentries. Then in the midgame they get weak till colossi. That's not a case of being weak in small groups. Plus if you've ever watched blink stalkers v. zerg I don't think you can make a general statement that gateway units are weak.
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