Situation Report: August 31, 2012 by David Kim - Page 48

On September 05 2012 09:16 RyLai wrote:
If you look at things objectively, it is impossible to say that this is anything other than unfair. The game has achieved relative balance a long time ago. They made so many changes that were unnecessary unless you inherently favored the other 2 races.

Warp Prism's never needed to be buffed. It was fine before. Does it really matter at this point? It's a little more annoying, but negligible. But the reasoning that they wanted players to use Warp Prisms more was just bad. Players were already using them.

The Barracks build time didn't really need the nerf. Zergs had already gotten good at defending 2 rax, making proxy rax the only thing to worry about on these larger maps.

The Raven buff was nice, but still insufficient. There were MANY Terrans practicing Raven styles (with mediocre success). At the end, they deemed the standard Hellion into Marine/Tank/Medivac play to be much better. They need more buffs to be truly competitive. The current round of buffs might've helped, but still likely not to be enough.

Protoss upgrade costs (aside from Shields) did not need the reduction that they got. They already had the ability to speed up their upgrades, so what rationale could you have for giving them the cheapest upgrades across all 3 races? Even considering that they have the most dangerous deathball. It's like they WANTED to fuck Zergs over with this and make sure that at the very least they maintained an upgrade advantage over Terrans all game lone.

Changing Snipe modified an ability that had a RIDICULOUSLY high skill cap compared to anything else in the game. 6 Snipes to kill a Broodlord and 11 Snipes to kill an Ultralisk. Even considering you do things perfectly, how many people can fully utilize snipe in the same way Mvp did? Maybe taking away 10 damage, but taking away 20 was pretty extreme (44% of it's damage output, how many times do you see a nerf this extreme?).

With the larger maps, the Overlord change was warranted, but the Queen range buff? They said they were happy with the balance of the game and they do something that would drastically change the game. So clearly, they weren't happy with the work that the best Terrans had to do in order to get the results they did. They wanted more.

With the issue of the 1-1-1, Blizzard took a while, but at the very least they threw in a bunch of arbitrary buffs for Protoss and nerfs for Terran. In the end, I agree with the buff to Immortals (a bit borderline, but still agree). And now, long after these changes, the methods behind defending the 1-1-1 has been discovered. Even though they took a long time and didn't even need to do anything, they intervened for Protoss.

With the issue of the deathball, Infestors were buffed, and it destroyed the deathball as we knew it (then). It took a while, but it happened.

With the issue of Infestors, they got nerfed twice. It took a lot of EVERYONE saying that Infestors were broke, but it happened.

With the issue of the Zerg deathball (Infestor/Broodlord) against Terran, they said they would wait and give Terrans a time to figure something out. Terrans got better at Viking timings and experimented with Snipe. It took FOREVER before Blizzard ever did anything about the Zerg deathball. And guess what they did? THEY NERFED SNIPE! YEAH! They didn't help Terrans when they asked for help, they stabbed them in the back. They didn't get ANY buffs leading up to this. Instead, they got nerfs to the Barracks, blue flame, EMP radius, and Zerg got a buff to the Ultralisk. WTF?!

With the issue of the game being balanced, Blizzard complained to themselves that they felt the game was balanced, spectators complained that TvZ was too awesome to look at (until the player they liked lost). So what do they do? They throw in a 100% unnecessary and excessive buff to Queens. Not +1 range, but +2 range.

After 3 months, they declared that they would implement changes to help fix the game. A few weeks after, they say, "NOPE! You guys are fine! The game is balanced! Moving on!" We waited patiently everytime. We took the abuse up the ass. We adapted EVERY DAMN TIME. And what does Blizzard do? They nerf us. They ignore us. We don't usually ask for buffs. We've dealt with nerfs (some cried when mech TvT became weaker, but we realized that blue flame was too much against Zerg). We just kept playing the damn game.

And there's the issue that many diamond and masters Zergs go for the Roach/Bane bust and comment that they win nearly every game, if not every game, using that same build. Terrans have not complained about it (they might've quit the game because of it, given that I hardly see Terrans on the ladder anymore). Should something be done about it? If you gave a damn about 1-1-1, then yes. Will something be done about it? Probably not.

This shit didn't really happen in Broodwar. Something is broken? Let the players figure it out themselves. Something is broken in SC2? Does it involve Terran? NERF TERRAN! But it's the Terrans that need help? NERF THEM ANYWAY! Maybe they should've spent more time in the beta phase. Maybe they should've waited a longer time before they made the changes they constantly make. It's like they've gotten so used to intervening that they just got bored with patch 1.4.3 and decided to just throw something in.

I just wish that if they insist on constantly changing the game that they be fair about it. If not, then avoid changing the game altogether and let the players decide the metagame. Did they screw up with SC2? Yes. Was it as bad as everyone thought it was? Yes and no. Marauders weren't as insanely broke as many people thought they were, but the fact is Terran has more micro opportunity and it has a large affect on how games play out. Maybe we would've gotten to the same place if we just let the game be developed by the players. Yes, some things NEEDED to be changed (Stim timing, Archons to massive, and Warp Gate timing off the top of my head), but you can do that all at once when it's been globally deemed that these changes NEED to be made after the game becomes fully (or near fully) explored.