EPTDestiny on where he thinks SC2 is heading. - Page 54
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Doodsmack
United States7224 Posts
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Hider
Denmark9377 Posts
On October 18 2012 07:00 DerNebel wrote: Well, Wings of Liberty did explode the scene, at least in the west. At least in the west. That sounds a bit hollow doesn't it? The largest Brood War tournaments could fill entire football stadiums, and here we have MLG struggling to make money about the "successor" that was supposed to explode the scene. A ton of A-teamers in BW had their own, dedicated fanclub that turned up live, stress that word, live to cheer for their favorite progamers. If you hung around since the early beta days you may remember the BW coverage always being covered in fangirl screams when huge plays happened. This was the spirit, a football stadium's worth of people watching Brood War live, and at the forefront the most dedicated fans, cheering for their fans with extreme hyperbole. Starcraft 2 does have these things, don't get me wrong here, but the scale is so minute, so tiny that it's simply insignificant. That Starcraft 2 is less played in PC bangs in Korea than Brood War, that it isn't even in top 10 is way more significant than you might think if you don't know Korean gaming culture. The PC bang, the net café, is very important in Korea, it is the place eSports started. In the wild early years of Brood War, it was people playing in the PC bangs all over the nation that sparked the first tournaments, hosted in PC bangs, that led to the first, terrible, unhealthy gaming houses, which eventually led to the OSLs and the nationwide eSport. I am not sure how many people go play there today, but I would guess that the number is still quite big, and it is in places like these that eSports are born. Not in a lab, concocted with equal parts artificial skill ceiling and spectator appeal, but through people playing a good game and then going on to playing tournaments in it. RIOT showed us that you can kick your game forward, you can make an eSport out of the really fun game you've made. Everybody has heard of the huge viewerships at League of Legends tournaments, but few remember the baby steps they took when the game was relatively small, like the travesty of the lorebased showmatch, an agony to watch so don't do it. RIOT and Valve have two amazingly fun games, and they both organize amazing tournaments for them, with RIOT taking the reins far more than Valve, but both promoting the game as a really fun game to play and to watch. Blizzard tried to explicitly make an eSports game. That was a mistake. I am not going to make any concessions here, making Starcraft 2 a "competitive" experience was a mistake. They forgot everything most people really find fun about gaming: community. Community, communication, playing stupid shit with friends, if you want it in english. 1v1, online, versus strangers is just not fun in the long haul for the vast majority of players. LoL kept its players coming back and DOTA has loads of 6+ year veterans plus swathes of new players coming in, while Starcraft 2 is facing lower and lower ladder numbers by the season. Its just not fun enough, that's my point. Blizzard needs to make the game more fun, they need to be brilliant, to simultaneously cater to the casual and the hardcore. If they keep up the hamfisted approach to game design, map design and balance they have had until now, then I predict a lot of disillusioned posts on the front page about an heir that failed its heritage when the third expansion comes out. And I'm not talking about DOTA2. No they didn't. It was a pr-stunt. They never tried. They didn't even study what had made the predessor (BW) an esports-success. Blizzard likes to talk about esports and korea to its shareholders and give them the impression that sc2 is big. But it's not. Sc2 failed in terms of esports becasue blizzard had no incentivize to actually make a great esports game. THey had an incentivie however to just talk about it. Sc2 failed in terms of popularity because developers were hopelessly incompetent, as Destinity argued in his post. | ||
ImbaTosS
United Kingdom1688 Posts
On October 18 2012 06:53 EnNaNo wrote: First off lets not act like SC2 is a hopeless title ESPECIALLY for competitive play. Name me ONE other RTS that has a more competitive edge? BroodWar. That was difficult.. | ||
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gnatinator
Canada169 Posts
SC2 could have built on top of the success of BW, but it ended up just tearing it down and starting anew. | ||
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Leru
Romania257 Posts
I mean, even when watching the GSL, the only games were I felt there was some strategy ( yes the S from RTS ) involved were the ones played by MVP and Rain . Also Life was entertaining because he didn't just macro every game like most zergs. So, what's next ? The expansion seems just awfull; they're just trowing stuff in and out of the game hoping to get some random magic solution . Also , fewer tournaments are ok with me; there are way too many now, so nothing gets to be really special . Oh, so you've won OSL ? Ok let me go watch the GSL or Dreamhack next .. | ||
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envyYaegz
United States68 Posts
Blizz just needs to regain its casual gamer base by pushing the custom games of BW that made it so fun for even non serious gamers. Adding a non ranked ladder will help, but they need to embrace other custom games more than they do. Also considering making sc2 free to play would help greatly. Although, they would need to make up for lost revenue by installing a bunch of micro transactions. I also like the idea of having casual gamers work towards something that goes beyond ladder rank or portraits. Changing the skins of units could be one motivation for people to pick the game up again, but probably not the sole factor. | ||
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SilSol
Sweden2744 Posts
On October 18 2012 08:03 Doodsmack wrote: Yeah this thread is definitely attracting the SC2 haters like moths to a flame lol. I hope people don't get a wrong impression of the community's sentiment by reading all this. I don't think you have to worry about that. | ||
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summerloud
Austria1201 Posts
its time to lose faith in blizzard | ||
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jax1492
United States1632 Posts
edit: my take on the decline of sc2 is the Korean scene ... i HOPE once the kespa players get situated in code s etc. its going to make watching sc2 fun again. | ||
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Antylamon
United States1981 Posts
On October 18 2012 08:01 Pwnographics wrote: Um... It got better because people figured stuff out. I think there were only ever 2 balance patches for SC:BW and they were tiny. Like one of them was just a bunker build time. SC1, not BW. | ||
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Antylamon
United States1981 Posts
On October 18 2012 08:03 ChoiSulli wrote: SCII isnt fun to watch. I will expand on this but it will probably turn out to be an incoherent emotionally fueld ramble that will lead to a ban. That's called martyr. You'll get a warning just for that. The rest of your post was fine, imo, even if I disagreed with every point. | ||
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-Celestial-
United Kingdom3867 Posts
From a personal perspective I find SC2 stressful to play. I'm a PhD science student and I generally don't have the time to play five hours of 1v1s a day for practice which is probably what I need to get a decent level of progress; and when I do have time I have absolutely no inclination to do so because its simply exhausting. Its fun (sometimes) but its also mentally destructive having to be so super-focussed and hyped up to simply play. But the environment is set up so that there is no such thing as real "casual play" in SC2. All that seems to matter is 1v1 since Blizzard designed the entire game around it; keep climbing that ladder, keep practicing your macro games. If you're not naturally amazing at 1v1 your choices are to practice over and over (which again, time and inclination) or to just...stop playing. That's not fun. I've been very slowly grinding up in spurts of activity (I generally play one or two seasons at a time, then break for a couple) and am approaching plat. Who cares about plat? I don't; not really. I might reach masters eventually, maybe not. If I do that'd be great but that's all I'm really interested in, achieving it, largely to kill off the asshole attitude of "this lower ranked noob has nothing worthwhile to say" you see every single day. Not to play at that level or to think "hey I'm pretty good", just to deal with the crap attitude people in chat channels have. If I ever actually reach it I will literally probably stop playing outright. Unless I give up way before then in frustration. There's no inherent entertainment in playing in and of itself and the awful chat system means there is little sense of community. There's just the big "find match" button of 1v1 ladder beckoning. I persist because I like watching and following and because I have a reasonable understanding of the game (even if I can't execute it myself) so I can appreciate the skill and interplay of tactics involved. For more casual gamers who aren't going to get OCD (like I am a bit) about build orders and micro tricks and other stuff like that and who don't follow tournaments because they don't know about them...what is there? There's a stressful game with a massive focus on the hugely competitive 1v1 system and a community which is hard to access and when you do access it, they are by and large incredibly obsessive about your 1v1 ranking and are assholes to you if you dare to not have the time to practice to be as good as they are. The reason for the community being like that is because its hard to access. That isn't enjoyable, that isn't entertaining and that isn't going to make them want to stay. There is NOTHING here for a casual audience, nothing to make it easy to get involved or interesting or anything like that and without that casual audience being interested in some way then they're not going to stay and they're certainly not going to want to watch anything. I know Nazgul said earlier about BW being founded on competition and Counter Strike and DOTA and he's right; but he's also right that you absolutely have to serve the casual audience in some way otherwise you lose them since people expect more now. Blizzard can take a large part of the blame for this, the community is a contributing factor. I'd argue its BECAUSE of what Blizzard has done that the community is the way it is (i.e. super-elitist and full of self-entitled assholes). But honestly I know from experience that puts people off even trying because its effected me. I've considered casting but decided against it because of that, I went to a barcraft and felt rather uncomfortable, hell I even considered flying out to Korea this weekend to catch the finals but ruled that out too. All because you get treated like you've got a sub-50 IQ unless you're a masters player. And that's Blizzard's fault for making the community so hard to access that if you manage to do so you're either already heavily involved or just want to show off to people. There's no way for people to just "fall in" to the SC2 community, you have to make a huge effort. In contrast I've been playing a lot of DOTA2 recently. There's no immediately obvious ranking system there. The game in itself is fun to play even if you suck at some part of it since you can always find a role that you can fit into eventually (maybe you can't carry but make a great support, maybe you suck with junglers but always get clutch initiations). One mistake is unlikely to cost you the game so its nowhere near as stressful. You can sit back and relax. Also there is a tournament viewing system prominently built into the UI and its awesome. I've bought passes to four or five tournaments through there (admittedly cheaper than most SC2 ones) no problem and I can just grab a game to watch whenever one is on or pull up a replay if not; for SC2 I have a GSL subscription and don't find the inclination to watch all of the VODs for all of that (usually in work for it being live), let alone find the time to watch any other tournaments at all. Plus the assumption in the community isn't that you have to be a progamer to understand what is going on. Perhaps more importantly when I'm watching a game through the client I can happily chat away with other viewers about what is going on, there's much more a sense of community. Plus because its a team game you develop natural contacts with people, in contrast the SC2 focus on 1v1 means everyone you encounter is (in effect) a mortal enemy. Suffice to say, from my personal view DOTA2 is succeeding where SC2 is failing. And unless Blizzard does something that trend is just going to get worse for them. | ||
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hitpoint
United States1511 Posts
On October 18 2012 08:03 ChoiSulli wrote: SCII isnt fun to watch. I will expand on this but it will probably turn out to be an incoherent emotionally fueld ramble that will lead to a ban. I just wish that someoen would just force BW mechanics on SCII. I want to see if we would still see that fucking giant army move across the screen in 15 seconds and enter a guys base and destory his shit. Do you know what % of BW game reached 200/200 I would say less then 20%. It would happen in TVT because of how fucking hard it is to kill the other person. Yes Flash would also do his insane 200/200 mech push in TVP. But you know how fucking magical that shit is in BW, its an art to see someoen control an entire army in BW and the best part was that you knew that nobody else could do it like him. In SCII man you move across the map in 15 sec on top of that u like instantly reinforce so obviously its 1 giant battle and GG. In BW even if you won a battle. You could ahve 4 control groups of MNM infront of the zergs natural and you couldnt touch them because of 2 lurkers and a defiler. In BW to reinforce took fuckign time adn by the time u did and then advanced to the guys base he would be able to defend most of the time. In BW managing bases and territory was important, actual fucking strategy planning on securing crucial locations on the map. Like people dont seem to know this but BW was like constant fighting and almost never two maxed armies. It was just hard to control so youd have shit happening all over the map. ZvP in BW was fuckign sexy constant engagements, trading armies, reinforcing. In BW you can fucking making zerglings vs toss in the late game and win. Or hydras. Or ultras. No units was off limits. In SCII ur forced to make the fucking gay units and in mass them. Has anyone ever massed guardians unless it was BGH?? I honestly can write pages and pages of shit I hate about SCII and I have watched SCII from the begining. At first because it was obviously new and I hoped it to be like BW. Also you had many community figures switch like Artosis, Day9 etc. LIke you see kids complain about commentary in SCII they cant enjoy it because of bad commentary. Isnt that the ultimate sign that hey maybe this shit isnt that fun to watch. BW was fun to watch and we had no english casters. I actually prefer to watch BW with kroean commentary. Cause you dont need to fucking have people make it exciting what you are seeing wiht your eyes is just that damn beautiful. There is fucking nothing in SCII that does that to me. No Flashes macro does not impress me. There is no muta micro that amazes me. There are no godly storms (lol). There is no insane bio control. I say all that because everything is easy to fucking copy. Yes flashes macro is still good but its so much easier to duplicate, he is selecting all the raxes fuckign holding down a key. I can duplicate in BW to if I use oblivion but then I dont feel good about myself and its not impressive to anyone. See what I ment by rambing. To get back to why I do watch SCII. After the novelty of all the TL members switching left me, I watchedc casue there were all these new kids on TL talking about foreigners beating koreans. (im white) So I would just get pleasure out of seeing their heroes get raped, and reading their disapointing comments. i dont know if that makes me a dick or a bad person but thats just how I felt. Now I just watch cause of the Gom/Kespa rivlary and cause of the acutaly Kespa guys that I love. Cause all these guys tell me that BW B-teamers are better then BW A-teamers at SCII. So I just want to get to that point where they are all proven wrong. After that I will probably only stick around if Flash is raping the scene like in BW. Im passionate about starcraft and TL, but I honestly wish SCII had never come out, yes it allowed some people in our community to make a good living and im happy for them but it did nothing for me but ruin one of the joys of my life. This makes me want to just watch BW vods now. | ||
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bgx
Poland6595 Posts
Also RTS Esports venture is incredibly risky one and only Blizzard has the tools to make it sell (which are Starcraft and Blizzard labels). So ye its shitty position we are in, Blizzard can only screw up themselves(Battle net) or RTS boarderline titles can claim some of their casual playerbase. | ||
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elimzkE
Australia92 Posts
idk unless HotS pulls some magical rabbit out of the hat, I'm done with SC2 and done with Blizzard. I'm having a blast playing DotA 2 with my friends and joking around or playing seriously and still enjoying the victory or the loss with my friends. Having the whole cosmetics factor for each hero is pretty cool as well, although I don't really focus on this. | ||
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hai2u
688 Posts
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Atrbyg
United States513 Posts
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Chrispy
Canada5878 Posts
LoL and Dota 2 are in a neck to neck fight and struggle to out do eachother at every turn. This makes for a better product & better scene for the players and the viewers. Blizzard on the other hand, is a lazy behemoth grown fat over the years of WoW success. Perhaps they need a new RTS to come in and kick their asses in gear and get them involved. | ||
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Tonttu
Finland606 Posts
I don't get it. Blizzard is trying to make SC2 "Cool", but for me it comes plain boring. I don't see anything cool in Colossus, fungal growths that you can do nothing against when it hits you, force fields that block choke points/ramps for insanely long amount of time, instant warp-ins anywhere in map in lategame giving protoss like 300 supply in battles. Sure warp-in is cool and different, but in its current state it is just boringly strong. HotS is trying to make SC2 better by bringing some again "cool" units and abilities. Some of them are remarkably similar to BW counterparts. Widow Mines, Battle Hellions, Blinding cloud etc. But they are done in a boring way. At least for me. They are adding way too many funky units there. Battle hellion is kind of cool, but Widow mines are just basically spider mines made out of Factory when having somekind of random ability. Protoss' Mothership core and mothership in general are just stupid designs.. I don't need to talk much about Battle.net 0.2 here, because it is fairly obvious that Blizzard has failed Battle.net for SC2 horribly. They released Bnet 2.0 without it's core elements at least for me. Having no Chat channels from start, forcing people that play together to IRC or other places where to chat. Having no clan support it made clan managing pretty hard. Having a stable clan from WC3 it helped, but there were some rough times. Having only one account/name without name changes was pretty sad thing considering clan/team changes people were making. People with tags were forced to live with that tag until another free name change came. Custom Games are also a thing Blizzard failed horribly. Can't even imagine what SC2 would be if there was proper Custom Game section like in Wc3. (Can't talk much about BW, because I didn't play it that much. But I understand it was pretty big like in Wc3) I just don't understand what was so hard for Blizzard not do those things when they could've just copy pasted them from WC3 and polished it for bnet 2.0 afterwards and then release it. SC2 was fun when it came out. Played it a lot during beta, after release and so on. But my activity started to decline when time passed by. There was nothing besides ladder really. I've got HotS beta, but I've played only 7 games. Partly because there is some lag issues, but more because I've started playing Dota2 a lot more and that is because I find Dota2 more fun than SC2 now. Dota2 with 5man team > SC2 anyday. I'm still watching SC2 sometimes, mainly when Finn's are playing. But not that much of them either. I used to watch a lot of SC2. Rushing from school to watch last games of GSL because it usually started like 1 hour before school ended. Now I just watch scores from liquipedia.. Also there are way too many tournaments going on same time. Having GSL, MLG, IPL, NASL, Dreamhack, ASUS ROG, IEM, WCS, ESWC, WCG and other smaller tournaments. There could be like 10 "big" tournaments happening in such a small time span like 1 month. Watching that much of SC2 may cause you get bored of SC2. Has surely happened to me. Doesn't help when game design is again such stupidly unforgivable that games end in 5 seconds when you do one little mistake. Pretty sad that SC2 can't keep up keeping players interested in the game longer than like 2-3 years. And it is only the first part of the game. HotS and LotV to come. Comparing to WC3 which I played actively from TFT release. There are many reasons for that. Playing casually 2v2, 3v3 and 4v4 while making friends when playing the game. Playing FFA's with mates and laughing when someone did something crazy. Playing custom games like Footman Frenzy, Tower defence.. Ironically.. I wasn't that much into DotA in WC3.. I actually hated it. TL;DR Having such a badly made Battle.net paired with stupid game designs that end up making games boring when they are supposed to be "cool" make people turn off from SC2 to more relaxing games such as LoL and Dota2. HotS isn't helping SC2 either in its current state, making the game even more retarded that it was before. Oh, and I pretty much agree with Destiny. Pretty messy post..  I'm not even sure if my TL;DR is a TL;DR.. :D | ||
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Serp87
Israel57 Posts
make SC2 F2P but (!!!) only the arcade + custom games part of it. the arcade would act like a game libary that every week limited amount of games (lets say the top 10+ 5 random ) are opened to play ( think the LoL weekly hero system). the custom games will be open only with the blizzard maps. also at any point in time you can upgrade the game online to the full version with all the features open for 10-30$ (lets be real here no one will pay 50$ for half a 2 year old game) by doing this you gain 2 things : 1. you make the casuals happy and the player base bigger. 2. you dont ruin the competitive aspect of the game (the ladder). to this basic idea you can add achievement points spenders (buying maps for custom game , new arcade games etc..) what do you think about my idea? does it have any holes I didnt see ? | ||
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