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On October 18 2012 03:18 rysecake wrote:Show nested quote +On October 18 2012 03:16 SilSol wrote:On October 18 2012 03:06 phodacbiet wrote:
Esport WILL succeed, just not with Starcraft, and blizzard has made damn sure of that with the way things are being run. This post just made me sad  but it really shouldn't. These problems have been there since the game came out and blizzard still hasn't addressed it. The only reason most people bought this game was because of it's name. Sometimes I wonder what those guys do over in California.
yeah i know. But i still want SC2 to get big and get better in the future! Like i want this game to evolve so much.
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On October 18 2012 03:09 IPA wrote:
So much doom and gloom in this thread. Gonna go back to laddering now. I love this game. <3
...and then you get pylon blocked on your ramp by your opponent and proceeds to proxy 2 gate you.
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I agree. Im probably what you would consider pretty casual. I played Broodwar for about 10 years, not playing melee, but playing UMS games. What you say about the feeling about entering each game is true. When I was playing SC2, I felt alone. It felt like a single player game. But when I start up broodwar, I know that Im playing online with a bunch of people.
I think a competitive game needs 1 of 2 things.
1. True Casual Appeal. It needs a side of it that is just fun to play. Even if there really is a UMS side to SC2, it wasnt easy to get to. It used to be just as easy to join a melee match as it was to join a UMS match.
2. A team game. I think thats why LoL and DOTA2 works so well. While they arent the easiest games to get into. Its much easier to do it with a friend. And then your friend has their own friends and those games becomes a much more social event. The anxiety of winning and losing may still exist, but it wont be nearly as bad.
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This doesn't really bother me to be honest. I personally still really enjoy playing and watching SC2, and I think there's going to be a respectable scene surrounding the game for years to come. Hell, there was a thread here the other day about there being too many tournaments. The game isn't exactly in its death throes.
Did the game end up being the global tour de force we were expecting? Perhaps not. But I'm fine with that. The gaming landscape is a lot different now than when BW was king, but that doesn't mean there still isn't room for a classic RTS to succeed.
Also I disagree with the "Blizzard doesn't give a shit" sentiment. Of course Blizzard cares, SC2's success as an eSport translates directly into money for them. You can argue they have made bad decisions along the way but they're still fully invested in the game, especially with HotS coming out soon.
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On October 18 2012 03:32 SilSol wrote:Show nested quote +On October 18 2012 03:18 rysecake wrote:On October 18 2012 03:16 SilSol wrote:On October 18 2012 03:06 phodacbiet wrote:
Esport WILL succeed, just not with Starcraft, and blizzard has made damn sure of that with the way things are being run. This post just made me sad but it really shouldn't. These problems have been there since the game came out and blizzard still hasn't addressed it. The only reason most people bought this game was because of it's name. Sometimes I wonder what those guys do over in California. yeah i know. But i still want SC2 to get big and get better in the future! Like i want this game to evolve so much.
so do i man so do i...
it's so sad how hard they fucked up after having such a great template to build upon. I still have hopes but, they're slim.
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So... Who wants to play some BW? ^^
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I think there are two main reasons why there's not so much action as people desire:
1) Many spells are too radical and disencourage micro and retreat on battles after they're cast:
- got fungal growthed? too bad, now your unit can't do anything;
- got forcefield trapped? wait for it to go away?
- got phoenix lifted? y, not much i can do about that, except kill the phoenix;
- got concussive shelled? yeah, unless you're zerg or a stalker with blink, good luck escaping;
- got emped? well run away and recharge;
- vortex? pre split or put them all in.
The solution to all of them is very one-dimensional: either you do something before it's cast, or you kill the caster or bring units to protect the affected ones...
2) Battles end too quickly
- Reasons: HP too low, damage too high, existence of many retreat disencouraging spells
- with many units and unit compositions, retreating is barely (if) better than just let your units fight to death. Damage per second (DPS) is so high, coupled with 1) micro / retreat disencouraging spells that while you're retreating you suffer so many heavy loses it's almost not worth it. So people fear that big battle, because just those 10s will decide everything.
This point is also related to deathballs. In the extreme, if units took infinite amounts of time to deliver finite amouts of damage, one should never make a death ball. Player 1 attacks player 2 with many small groups, player 2 decides to go for player 1's base. Since DPS is low, it gives Player 1 time to go back and defend without major loses. He can attack on multiple places without fear of leaving the base because he knows he could always go back and defend without having lost the game already. He can also gain time with those small groups. Even a big deathball must be careful of a few units that survive long enough. Multiple pronged attacks actually do more damage than a big head on attack, because they can be more precise and strategic, to the economy or key buildings than just brute force through the player's base.
And this is very bad spectator-wise. Who wants to watch a build up of tension for 15 minutes, while to see it ended in 5s? Well you could compare that to an orgasm and foreplay, but well i don't think the battle is remotely as good, and really not worth the hassle. Also i could compare it to football, only the most popular sport in the world, which has tension from beginning to end (unless its 3-0 and the final minutes of the game or some boring *cough Real Madrid* teams). When one team keeps defending and defending and the other attack and attacking almost on the verge of scoring a goal, and everyone is on the edge of their seats all the time. If only SC2 could manage that, but right now it's far from it. A good comeback in SC2 is a very rare thing to see, and generally it's because one player made serious mistakes. As soon as we see that supply drop a bit and see the direction the game is heading, the result is defined for the next 15 minutes and one might as well turn off the stream "What you do when you're ahead? you get more ahead" expresses this very well.
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It's really sad how, in my eyes, sc2 has the best esports community, as in everyone tries to make something for it yet nothing happens, and games like LoL have esports granted by Riot, with nowhere near interest buy it's community compared to this of SC2. Blizzard shows no support, only this one damned WCS, yet we have the most events going on out of all other esports, with probably the smallest of all population. In an ideal world Blizzard would care and SC2 would be massive.
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Everyone who played BW and WC3 in their heyday knew that the UMS maps were where it was at, of course you knew the real game existed, but in this one the EXACT SAME FUCKING MAPS are always on the UMS page and no one really tries out the new ones because they can't get a full game to start. Even though it turned into random bots starting games in wc3, I would still prefer to get new content every once in a while while playing games made on one of the most sophisticated map editors any game ever.....Thank you Destiny for this post.
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Blizz needs to focus on making units have micro tricks. The new units being introduced like swarm host and tempest have interesting strategical use, but once the most popular strategies are ironed out for these units, you'll see the exact same thing out of them every game.
It's not interesting to see what a unit can do. It IS interesting to see what a player can do with a unit. If the efficiency of my swarm hosts is about the same as the efficiency of DRG's swarm hosts, that's a failed unit.
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On October 18 2012 03:33 rysecake wrote:Show nested quote +On October 18 2012 03:32 SilSol wrote:On October 18 2012 03:18 rysecake wrote:On October 18 2012 03:16 SilSol wrote:On October 18 2012 03:06 phodacbiet wrote:
Esport WILL succeed, just not with Starcraft, and blizzard has made damn sure of that with the way things are being run. This post just made me sad but it really shouldn't. These problems have been there since the game came out and blizzard still hasn't addressed it. The only reason most people bought this game was because of it's name. Sometimes I wonder what those guys do over in California. yeah i know. But i still want SC2 to get big and get better in the future! Like i want this game to evolve so much. so do i man so do i... it's so sad how hard they fucked up after having such a great template to build upon. I still have hopes but, they're slim.
yeah that's why i think that Blizzard should me part of the community than they actually are. Just look at Riot answering random questions on their general forums etc. Communicate with the community is a big part of making a good game imo.
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So, I want to take this chance to give a great big I Told You So to all the morons who 2 years ago responded to every criticism of SC2 with "It took BW 9879479534 years to become and esport, give SC2 time and it'll be the best thing since apple pie!!!"
Game wasn't good enough then, it's not good enough now. Hype and speculative sponsorship can only prop it up for so long, now the training wheels are off and we'll watch it collapse under its own weight.
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i really don't think its in the game so much, just make it free to play. active players = viewers. you cannot compete against free software on the long run, as other areasof software industry shows, people tend to use free software evenif it is worse. One never knows if a game makes fun, so an initial investment of 50 bucks is a hurdle for a lot of potential gamers.there are tons of good free games out there ..
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finaly somebody started to realize and made a thread about it.
thxs tt1^_^
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On October 18 2012 03:38 Savant wrote:
So, I want to take this chance to give a great big I Told You So to all the morons who 2 years ago responded to every criticism of SC2 with "It took BW 9879479534 years to become and esport, give SC2 time and it'll be the best thing since apple pie!!!"
Game wasn't good enough then, it's not good enough now. Hype and speculative sponsorship can only prop it up for so long, now the training wheels are off and we'll watch it collapse under its own weight.
100% this. Inflated expectations are finally facing the harsh truth.
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On October 18 2012 02:46 VanGarde wrote:Show nested quote +On October 18 2012 02:42 Akta wrote:On October 18 2012 02:17 VanGarde wrote:On October 18 2012 01:58 Akta wrote:On October 18 2012 01:10 VanGarde wrote:On October 18 2012 01:09 Basique wrote:On October 18 2012 01:02 VanGarde wrote:
It is kind of interesting to see that there are so many people here who hold complete opposite visions of sc2 agree with each other without realizing that their visions are mutually exclusive. There is one group of people who feel that sc2 needs to be more mechanically demanding, allow for more early aggression and that hots is just dumbing it down too much. Most pro-gamers fall into this category. These people think that the failure of sc2 in Korea is because it is not as hard as Broodwar. Then there is the group of people who think that the problem is the opposite that sc2 is not tuned enough to the casual market and that it in fact should be MORE dumbed down. Both of these groups are writing in this thread about how they agree with Destiny, each seemingly thinking that he is talking about their method of reviving sc2.
The dilemma here is that a lot of the people who think Broodwar was a great game, would never play sc2 if it tried to be more like LoL. I belong to this group, in fact in my experience most people in this category feels that the problem with hots is in fact that it is trying to be more like LoL.
Either sc2 tries to be like LoL and Dota and take that market share, in which case we get hots, but then don't complain about how hots is dumbing the game down to attract more casual gamers. You didn't understand anything at all, and you are not the only one. NOWHERE it was state that there was a need for a casualized gameplay. Destiny talked about what is outside the game, so the lobby, the UI, the interface. Nor did you seem to understand my post. I was not saying that Destiny suggests the game should be easier. I am saying that a whole bunch of the people who are going "oooh aaaah! He is right!" Think that is what he is saying and that THEY see the solution as the game being more appealing to casuals. Quite sure even most pro gamers want the game to be more appealing to casuals, who wants to be the best at a game almost no one cares about? And it's hard to be a pro gamer without something that generates money, like the game being popular for example. Also, to be honest I don't think things like displaying worker saturation really matters for the pro scene, if they added 10 more things like that the best players will probably be same people as if they didn't change anything etc. Sure, everything matters to a degree but almost irrelevant changes will gets blown out of proportions by some people that will claim that, usually for unclear reasons, change X will be really bad for the game because something might be easier. But let's not assume "being more appealing to casuals" is same thing as making the game easier(whatever easier might mean). Sometimes it could equal to that but the only thing that should really matter is how fun the game is. And yet worker saturation and auto-mining is precisely the first thing that pro's complained about when they got their hands on the hots beta. The problem is psychological. Starcraft 2 is doing fine, there are now more games on the esports market that are also doing fine, this is a good thing, not the death of Starcraft. Starcraft does not even need to be the biggest esports game as long as games can coexist which I am certain that they can. People are afraid, and going with the knee jerk reaction to this and there is a danger in being too eager to just get the game more popular. I am convinced that it is way more important for games to define a niche and a personality than to be so broad that they appeal to all gamers. If dota and lol can coexist while being almost the same game, then surely starcraft can coexist with moba games too. I can't help but draw similarities between this issue and Microsoft / Apple. Apple was a huge innovator in the early days of the Macintosh then the company almost went out of business, after returning to the company Steve Jobs correctly identified that the problem had been a culture at Apple where the people who ran the company ran it under the assumption that for Apple to win Microsoft had to lose, not only that they also spread themselves too thin, having products in every market as a means to compete with Microsoft. They changed their mentality with a focus on defining a more personalized image and instead of going after every market they cut all products but their best and focused only on those and today the company is prosperous again. Starcraft 2's existence in esports is not dependent on other games failing, nor is it necessary or even desirable for sc2 to appeal to all gamers. Starcraft 2 already has build a loyal following of players, instead of chasing after new ones the game should keep polishing on it's own personality to retain it's viewer base. Starcraft doesn't need to "win" but unlike what you say a lot of people seem to argue that the sc2 esports scene is not doing fine. Like Destiny stated, most event organizers appear to be losing money while probably hoping esports will attract larger audiences "soon", most teams seem to be quite poor and so on. All which could be fine if the general interest was increasing but by the looks of things, it's been decreasing. Perhaps that is so, but if that is the case it is either because A) Sc2 grew too much and is now shrinking back to the actual capacity of the esports scene or B) there is no actual capacity for an esports scene in the long term. Neither of these are any different for LoL or dota or sc2. If that is the case then the sad reality is that there is not enough of an esports market to uphold any game to the point we want it to be and both LoL and dota will suffer the exact same thing. I have a hard time believing that teams for those games have any better chance of turning a profit than sc2 teams have. There are many more potential reasons than A and B plus they both assume other parameters been optimized, which is basically never anywhere close to true. Can take Apple as example, even if Apple is doing well they arguably could be doing better. Apple could have Microsofts market shares as well. And Googles, and IBM's, and Intell's, and Samsung's, and Blizzard's, and Rebull's, and <insert any potentially profitable market here>.
Personally I don't see why sc2-like RTS games could not, in theory, be popular enough to be able to support a healthy esports scene. I'd even go as far as saying sc2 like games are better suited as spectator esports than moba games like lol and dota2 because the concept is more simple(players make armies to kill opponents armies) and it's visually much easier to understand what's going on. Have someone that never played dota2 and sc2 watch some pro games or streams. Most people like that appear to be able to understand the basics of the sc2 games while usually having no idea wtf is going on in the dota2 games they are watching.
On the other hand, compared to lol and dota2 almost no one seem to actually want to play sc2.
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I have to agree with destiny here. I mean I played age of empires 3 for years just because I liked being in a clan (on the server) and for chats with players in the pre- and post game chat channels. It was also really easy to make "online" friends in aoe. If you play 1s or random team matches you have to seriously go way out of the way to buddy up with them. Also the freaking custom games just start! I mean half the fun of aoe3 was having arguments in the in game chats.
I think blizzard is treating this way too much like a console game. They have to realize that when most people play they are sitting alone by a computer. And battle.net is practically autistic. Even though playing a computer game by yourself is by definition a lonely experience, I think most casual sc2 gamers would like it to be a social one, even if it is pseudo-social.
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On October 18 2012 03:45 sabas123 wrote:
finaly somebody started to realize and made a thread about it.
thxs tt1^_^
well it was destiny who made the actual thread.
But yeh well i was quite lazy making one. I've been thinking about this for quite some time now.
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One cannot simply compete with Koreans at Sc2
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there are lots of reasons for sc2s lack of growth.the hugely split tournament base ( yeah oversaturation did happen. 185 tournaments a year for 1k are much much worse for the viewer then 3 tournaments for 60k,if i just look at the sidebar now there are 7 or 8 things running that split the viewers and interest), lack of community and just technical features (bnet is the saddest place to be online, reconnect,ingame obsing etc), the game itself just lacking the genius spark that made bw what it is (and it beeing highly frustrating in many situations), a engine that makes the once super popular ffa games just not enjoyable for many,the cost of the game, unfriendly ladder/online modes etc etc.
the game not beeing casualfriendly enough is the least of all of that. since lol was brought up lol like evry dota clone is SUPER HARD to get into and esp for viewers its way way harder to understand things then 2 armies running into each other and one winning. i really think this focuses on a minor problem when so many bigger ones are evrywhere.
ofc alot is blizzards fault. their total lack of support and care hurts. and while starcraft2 did hugely get carried by its name, that wont last forever.
look at me, im registered here since 04. im a starcraft guy. i played and watched thousands of bw games and played over 800 games during the beta of sc2 alone(bought the betakey for 30ish$). but even i got turned off by evrything that went wrong with sc2 and at this point im not even sure if ill get hots. if they cant keep someone like me enjoying the game, how they gonna get and keep new people.
/errr doublepost delete one pls
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EPT
