I do agree with you on many points. But I also think that stim should have a central role in this discussion. That said, im gonna leave out all the "how many units should do what I tell them to do" stim/storm -debate"
My problem is: If you make it harder/more challanging to use spells like fungals or storms, maybe FF aswell, then will any casual player be able to beat MMM-balls mid/late game? It's hard to hit those bastard as it is with todays smartcasting.
That's acutally no problem with zerglings, they are weak, melee, and doesnt have a flying escort of healers/dropships. They should be hard to hit. But when you do, baaaaam theyre dead.
On November 23 2012 04:57 Analytical Genius wrote: The same reason that MANY diamond/platinum/ and even gold league players got insulted and angry when you took away their losses on the ladder stats page.
And they eventually got over it. Along with a lot of other complaints.
people are still mad about that... no one who cared "got over it"... they're just using SC2 gears or notebooks or spreadsheets instead of being able to see it in the damn client. Also, they brought it back in HotS, and people are thrilled.
Anyway, this is sort of an irrellevant argument anyway... but I just wanted to point out that no, they didn't get over it, and people shouldn't be playing a different game from the pros.
And it really isn't that unintuitive that if you order your units to fire at a target, they fire. All of them because you had all of them selected. That stim example is a good one. You may have only intended to stim 4 to scare away the Mutalisks. That was your intention, but the game didn't hold your hand and decide for you what the ideal number of marines to stim was. You selected 40 marines to stim and 40 marines stimmed. You told 15 Templars on one hotkey to storm one spot. 15 Templars on one hotkey stormed one spot. That's pretty straight forward.
player.
I haven't read all posts yet and don't know if i'll have time for a long while. So replying while i can and remember , especially since this argument is used twice already in the few posts i read.
Seen somewhere in previous posts about spells stacking before and how strong that was, being the reason it was changed in sc1. Stim stacks, it's not a capped speed increase based on how many units you had selected at the same time. Same with other spells like that. The same way you can't bunch up all spellcasters and say all should be cast in one place and others not without having to change a whole lot more than just the spells themselves. Unless damaging aoe spells start to stack also you can't really compare, it's different spells with different purposes for different types of units, the "intuitive" thing depends on all of that as well.
A small cooldown be added on multiselection could be similar and wouldnt deplete the energy of all units either. It would still be nicer to non pro players and still make it harder to pull off blanket damaging/lockdown spells. Basically it would trigger a cooldown on all selected casters that didn't use their storm, small like maybe 1-3 (ingame) seconds at most. That idea however shouldn't be for all spells, like forcefields... Much because the units or whatever is being protected by forcefields wouldn't be covered in time regardless of how fast the player was, with the current state of protoss units survivability.
Won't go much into the spell themselves, roles and purposes, nor army movement. those are different arguments... think they just sidetrack this thread from its original purpose
Thanks for the post, man. Really nice arguments which make for some very strong points. Should be pretty hard to argue with any of them
Sadly, your presentation as far as those videos go is pretty weak. I bet there were quite some viewers who didnt finish watching them all despite being very interested in the matter.
Its not only that there are too many breaks and "erhms" and stuff like that. You shouldn't have done commentating and playing at the same time. Honestly, I would even go as far as to say that it would have been possible to fit all 3 videos in just one, 5 minute video. I think if you had done that, this thread would be at 20 pages intead of 10 at this point.
The problem with these sort of changes is that they pretty much have no chance of being implemented. Even if it did I'm not sure it would work out the way you think in SC2. SC2 is much faster paced game than BW. In BW it was very possible to 'prep' your spellcasting and engagements usually lasted longer leaving plenty of time to micro your army and continue spellcasting. SC2 doesn't have that luxury.
While I will agree that the things you talk about were great spectacles to behold in BW getting them implemented into SC2 goes beyond just removing smartcasting. You would also need BW unit pathing, BW game speed, BW balance and probably more.
SC2 has it's own great spectacles but it could definitely benefit from more. How to do it? I'm not entirely sure, making spells like fungal/FF less prevalent definitely seems like a good place to start but removing smartcasting is not the solution.
Perhaps just giving the spells some counters. Forcefields could maybe be broken by a Zerg unit unburrowing under one. Maybe Ghost EMP could dispel Fungal. I know those seem silly but just some ideas off the top of my head, obviously balance would need to be achieved in addition to making sure the added counters actually make the game more interesting.
On November 23 2012 20:26 iNviSible.yunO wrote: Thanks for the post, man. Really nice arguments which make for some very strong points. Should be pretty hard to argue with any of them
Sadly, your presentation as far as those videos go is pretty weak. I bet there were quite some viewers who didnt finish watching them all despite being very interested in the matter.
Its not only that there are too many breaks and "erhms" and stuff like that. You shouldn't have done commentating and playing at the same time. Honestly, I would even go as far as to say that it would have been possible to fit all 3 videos in just one, 5 minute video. I think if you had done that, this thread would be at 20 pages intead of 10 at this point.
Thanks for the feedback and youtube analytics backs you up as I have a 38% retention rate.
Assuming some other issue rankles enough to create another thread, I'll probably not commentate and play at the same time. Much respect to those that can. All those pauses are even with a point form overview beside me. I started the both at the same time as it is very easy to match what I'm doing on the screen with what I'm talking about. And I began on the assumption of a one take because I don't have a good editor- only recently did I notice the youtube editor which is admittedly pretty spare.
I've got a better handle on what I can use now and a better I idea of how to use it. This is a bit of a learning curve especially as in my previous blogs, the videos supported the text whereas with this one, I tried to have the text support the video. I certainly wasn't happy with the length of any of these, but my retakes where just getting longer so I just cut out the big pauses and redid the worst section. (I was talking about "raising the bar of expectation" which is super redundant.) If there is a next time (these are only call them as I see them planning), then I will certainly try to pick up the pacing.
getting rid of smartcasting does very little to change the game at high levels with the exception of FF the other spells don't really need to be cast 7 times in a short sequence, you can be super effective with 1 to 3 storms or fungals and at most you are going to be throwing out 4 in a short time frame, whereas with FF you sometimes need to use twice as many in half the time, which would be impossible without smart casting, so essentially you are just nerfing the shit out of sentries while leaving the other spell casters with basically the same capabilities.
What confuses me about certain arguments in favor of smart casting isn't the logic behind them. The logic is fine. A school of thought says that good design is minimizing the disconnect between player input and game output, and lacking some kind of neural device that taps into thoughts the reality is that the keyboard and mouse are imprecise instruments. So from that point of view a tool like smartcasting makes sense. It greases the gears of the player/computer machine. Maybe it's only "smart" because of how uniform the design of offensive spells is in SC2 - it would actually make something like Vulture Spider Mines a bit harder to use - but I get wanting to lessen the role of the keyboard and mouse middlemen. I still disagree, but respectfully so. They're just different ways of seeing the value of the game, as purely intellectual vs. partly kinesthetic.
The confusing thing is that basically nobody sees the game as purely intellectual anymore, not even Blizzard. The argument in favor of SC2's blob pathing was once about it being easier and emphasizing strategy rather than control. Now it's that it makes the game harder and that unit splitting is a vital part of skill differentiation. A retain formation move key would be shot down by many as trivializing this element. So maybe it's time Blizzard fully embraced that the demanding nature of control in SC is part of what makes it compelling (to watch and play), not something that needed to be fixed.
I agree with most of your assessment of smart-casting, the one main issue is that none of it would really work as well with the game as it is in its current state. It's a package issue of clumping, A-move units, etc. Over all, I maintain that the game itself is fundamentally flawed in some way that prevents bandaging with tweaks like this from being impact-full.
BW was a fluke because of how well it all worked out. A beautiful fluke that I'm not sure you can replicate.
Despite the problems with length, I liked how all your video demonstrations have gone. Between the uhms and pauses, the actual bits illustrating the point were pretty good in my opinion.
To those saying forcing execution/making it mechincally more difficult is bad, while I agree to some extent with things like MBS/automine, I personally would rather learn to use spellcasters efficiently than larva injecting on cooldown or creep spreading. One of them actually involves conscious decision making.
Possibly the dumbest idea I've heard in my life, and yet another example of the denizens of this forum going along with an idea for the sole reason that they think it makes them look intelligent.
Can you imagine? Terran stims in with a bioball to bring down the colossus. In the blink of an eye, the Protoss player selects 5 sentries separately, placing individual force fields in the way of the bioball.
Or even better, let's imagine A-move with roaches or lings. Nothing but spam and A-move. On a decently wide map, the Protoss might need up to 10 force fields to block this off. And he's supposed to select each one of the sentries separately before the roaches and lings get through.
Hey, while we're at it, let's take away smart-casting for stimpack. To use stim you need to select each one of the marines separately and press T.
It would be interesting to see this put to work in SC2BW mod, with smart casting enabled and some strong broodwar players, and put your theory to the test
On November 25 2012 07:37 Rossie wrote: Possibly the dumbest idea I've heard in my life, and yet another example of the denizens of this forum going along with an idea for the sole reason that they think it makes them look intelligent.
Can you imagine? Terran stims in with a bioball to bring down the colossus. In the blink of an eye, the Protoss player selects 5 sentries separately, placing individual force fields in the way of the bioball.
Or even better, let's imagine A-move with roaches or lings. Nothing but spam and A-move. On a decently wide map, the Protoss might need up to 10 force fields to block this off. And he's supposed to select each one of the sentries separately before the roaches and lings get through.
Hey, while we're at it, let's take away smart-casting for stimpack. To use stim you need to select each one of the marines separately and press T.
Obviously there would need to be balance changes to address the lack of smart cast so the situations that you've suggested would not be as one sided as you'd think.
I think the key points to take away from this is not that smartcasting is bad, but that the prevalence of spellcaster ez pz micro vs attack retreat/positioning micro is a bit skewed.
This is caused by the fundamental problem with having spells that are easily attainable in the early mid game that disable opponent micro in mass such as force field and fungal growth as well as the soon to come time warp. The OP point about observer difficulty as spells of similar colors and aesthetics are spammed is valid as well.
Removing smart casting is only one proposed way of balancing this out. I am opposed to this as it would require such a drastic change in low level games in terms of unit balance that the game will just be screwed.
I think blizzard is better off just removing force fields on sentries and adding it to a high tech unit that can make a force field wall with one click instead of a force field block. This of course would require buffing gateway units, which would in turn require a nerf on warp gate tech.
Fungal should just be rampantly redesigned. Projectile, more DOT instead of so instantly, and does not root. I think people are generally pretty happy with the design of terran other than emp. To remedy this, make EMP a researchable spell for ravens and add lockdown back to ghosts.
On November 25 2012 07:37 Rossie wrote: Possibly the dumbest idea I've heard in my life, and yet another example of the denizens of this forum going along with an idea for the sole reason that they think it makes them look intelligent.
Can you imagine? Terran stims in with a bioball to bring down the colossus. In the blink of an eye, the Protoss player selects 5 sentries separately, placing individual force fields in the way of the bioball.
Or even better, let's imagine A-move with roaches or lings. Nothing but spam and A-move. On a decently wide map, the Protoss might need up to 10 force fields to block this off. And he's supposed to select each one of the sentries separately before the roaches and lings get through.
Hey, while we're at it, let's take away smart-casting for stimpack. To use stim you need to select each one of the marines separately and press T.
Obviously there would need to be balance changes to address the lack of smart cast so the situations that you've suggested would not be as one sided as you'd think.
I think the key points to take away from this is not that smartcasting is bad, but that the prevalence of spellcaster ez pz micro vs attack retreat/positioning micro is a bit skewed.
This is caused by the fundamental problem with having spells that are easily attainable in the early mid game that disable opponent micro in mass such as force field and fungal growth as well as the soon to come time warp. The OP point about observer difficulty as spells of similar colors and aesthetics are spammed is valid as well.
Removing smart casting is only one proposed way of balancing this out. I am opposed to this as it would require such a drastic change in low level games in terms of unit balance that the game will just be screwed.
I think blizzard is better off just removing force fields on sentries and adding it to a high tech unit that can make a force field wall with one click instead of a force field block. This of course would require buffing gateway units, which would in turn require a nerf on warp gate tech.
Fungal should just be rampantly redesigned. Projectile, more DOT instead of so instantly, and does not root. I think people are generally pretty happy with the design of terran other than emp. To remedy this, make EMP a researchable spell for ravens and add lockdown back to ghosts.
Some of this just sounds like more "bring back BW!" stuff. We get it, BW was a good game that you enjoyed watching quite a bit. Almost all of us have issues with SC2 as well, but don't conflate the 2 together. Making SC2 into a better looking BW expansion won't make it more enjoyable.
There is no issue with smart casting, just like there is no issue with unit clumping, at least when you weigh the alternatives next to them. They take different design challenges and tactical approaches in implementation. Smart casting brings the game to everybody. Even a bronze league player can feel like a pro by blanket storming an undefended mineral line, without having to spend 20 minutes practicing it.
People also misplace their anger with forcefields and fungal. What those abilities represent is a trap scenario, where one player has forced the engagement of another by making retreat impossible or very costly. There are definitely issues with these abilities in this regard, mainly that a player might be able to "see" the trap but have no options to avoid it even in an optimal scenario.
At the end, however, it must be understood that Blizzard will not DOWNGRADE their game or engine to make the game deliberately harder for everybody. That is ridiculous to consider as a solution.
I'm a casual (but frequent) viewer and occasionally a bad player. I was very late to watching pro Brood War, but I had played it extremely terribly in my youth (BGH and UMS and not understanding what macro was) and it was pretty easy to follow what was going on while watching Sayle cast the last few seasons of proleague. (And I even managed to win a few games as Terran at the very bottom of the iccup ladder in 2011.)
While I like a lot of the things that I read in the OP, my very humble opinion is that I'm not sure that the best solution is reverting to Brood War style spellcasting controls. Or at least, there may be a better way. As at least one guy mentioned, without smartcasting forcefield would be drastically affected in the most common usages that people don't find very problematic, and yet it would be nearly unchanged when used to block a main ramp in a way which many do find problematic-- correctly placing one forcefield isn't significantly easier or harder with or without smartcasting. It is difficult to conceive of a way to make forcefield useful for anything other than blocking narrow ramps without making it completely ridiculous when narrow ramps are involved if smartcasting is removed. Perhaps it would be better to totally remove it in such a case. Maybe in any case. I don't know.
I do know that I enjoy watching careful positioning and repositioning, poking and retreating, and if the existence of a spell encourages that, then I like that spell. Spells that are used more outside of or preliminary to the direct engagement are ones that I like more: harassing mineral lines with storm, using irradiate on defilers or lurkers (and then running the hell away from scourge), or using EMP to prevent an arbiter from making a recall. Those were great.
I loved watching the interaction of lurkers and defilers and scourge with science vessels and tanks and marines/medics. I really liked the balance of irradiate: it was never completely devastating unless used on a giant cloud of mutas or to erase a drone line, but it was very useful to chip away at the more costly zerg units-- but not in a way that was supremely powerful. It was worth using if you could escape with the science vessel, but by itself wasn't enough to create an insurmountable advantage. In the same way, scourges were never completely devastating in the same way that fungal growth on everything (or banelings against unmicroed marines) can be. It was undoubtedly worth it if you could get it to hit one target without much overkill, but just a few scourge hits were not likely to end a game that wasn't already very close to being won. (Scourge overkill and cloning micro is in the same vein as dumb vs smartcasting, I think.) Masterful scourge usage could definitely tilt a game one way or the other, just not to the extremes of an explosion of whatever on clumped units-- because it would only ever do 110 damage. It was that or 0. It was not 0, 35, 350, or 700 depending on enemy positioning.
I think we could stand to have more interesting spell design-- things that are more interesting than "well, I clicked on their clumped units." For example, would dark swarm be significantly more powerful with smartcasting? Maybe the biggest thing is having interesting continuations from spell usages: less "well now he's just dead" and more "now both players can micro around that new feature of the battlefield." More limiting the opponent's options and less eliminating all of his options. Area effect damage seems like one of those things that gets more powerful the more you have of it-- even if it doesn't stack in the same place at the same time, it can blanket everything-- and yet spellcasters are not supposed to be the bulk of an army. Why not have more spells that are more useful in small numbers cast infrequently and, if overused, can be responded to in a fairly simple way? Given the design of the SC2 UI, it seems that spells should drop in effectiveness given many uses in close proximity and succession. Instead, they often increase: chain fungals, blanket storms or EMPs, huge amounts of infested terrans to overwhelm a position. Even PDD encourages using more than one because there is (effectively) a cap on how many projectiles each can block. Imagine if you could reverse that tendency, though.
I don't know exactly how best to do so; as I said, I'm terrible.
On November 25 2012 07:37 Rossie wrote: Possibly the dumbest idea I've heard in my life, and yet another example of the denizens of this forum going along with an idea for the sole reason that they think it makes them look intelligent.
Can you imagine? Terran stims in with a bioball to bring down the colossus. In the blink of an eye, the Protoss player selects 5 sentries separately, placing individual force fields in the way of the bioball.
Or even better, let's imagine A-move with roaches or lings. Nothing but spam and A-move. On a decently wide map, the Protoss might need up to 10 force fields to block this off. And he's supposed to select each one of the sentries separately before the roaches and lings get through.
Hey, while we're at it, let's take away smart-casting for stimpack. To use stim you need to select each one of the marines separately and press T.
Obviously there would need to be balance changes to address the lack of smart cast so the situations that you've suggested would not be as one sided as you'd think.
I think the key points to take away from this is not that smartcasting is bad, but that the prevalence of spellcaster ez pz micro vs attack retreat/positioning micro is a bit skewed.
This is caused by the fundamental problem with having spells that are easily attainable in the early mid game that disable opponent micro in mass such as force field and fungal growth as well as the soon to come time warp. The OP point about observer difficulty as spells of similar colors and aesthetics are spammed is valid as well.
Removing smart casting is only one proposed way of balancing this out. I am opposed to this as it would require such a drastic change in low level games in terms of unit balance that the game will just be screwed.
I think blizzard is better off just removing force fields on sentries and adding it to a high tech unit that can make a force field wall with one click instead of a force field block. This of course would require buffing gateway units, which would in turn require a nerf on warp gate tech.
Fungal should just be rampantly redesigned. Projectile, more DOT instead of so instantly, and does not root. I think people are generally pretty happy with the design of terran other than emp. To remedy this, make EMP a researchable spell for ravens and add lockdown back to ghosts.
Some of this just sounds like more "bring back BW!" stuff. We get it, BW was a good game that you enjoyed watching quite a bit. Almost all of us have issues with SC2 as well, but don't conflate the 2 together. Making SC2 into a better looking BW expansion won't make it more enjoyable.
There is no issue with smart casting, just like there is no issue with unit clumping, at least when you weigh the alternatives next to them. They take different design challenges and tactical approaches in implementation. Smart casting brings the game to everybody. Even a bronze league player can feel like a pro by blanket storming an undefended mineral line, without having to spend 20 minutes practicing it.
People also misplace their anger with forcefields and fungal. What those abilities represent is a trap scenario, where one player has forced the engagement of another by making retreat impossible or very costly. There are definitely issues with these abilities in this regard, mainly that a player might be able to "see" the trap but have no options to avoid it even in an optimal scenario.
At the end, however, it must be understood that Blizzard will not DOWNGRADE their game or engine to make the game deliberately harder for everybody. That is ridiculous to consider as a solution.
I'm almost entirely sure that you didn't read anything that I said past the first sentence.
I only played broodwar casually, and never watched pro games. I actually stated in my post that removing smartcast was not the way to balance the game. Please take the time to read what people post when they are actually trying to add something constructive.
I think it should be rather obvious that the game would have to be re-balanced if this was implemented. Not only that, but the current domination of spells (needing 10 force-fields) would be scaled back like crazy. The goal is not to re-create the current game-play only using more clicks. That would indeed be fighting against the game or whatever else this gets accused of.
The goal is to change the role of spell-casting entirely and with it the gameplay. To dethrone spell-casting from its current rule. Granted there are a lot of other changes that would contribute to making better gameplay. This couldn't be done in isolation. But the goal is certainly not to mimic what we see now. That is what people perceive to be the problem (hence all those threads) and that is what I would hope this would change (as highly improbable that this would be applied.)
I see a few, 'there must be another way.' And undoubtably there is though someone may have to put it forward. I do not claim this is the only way. But I'm not sure I've heard a satisfactory alternative as of yet. I do claim that this is one way to fix the problem and one that has proven to work in a very successful way.
Obviously there would need to be balance changes to address the lack of smart cast so the situations that you've suggested would not be as one sided as you'd think.
Not just "balance changes". They would need to be MAJOR and FUNDAMENTAL balance changes. Already Protoss players have trouble landing good storms and force fields to counter A-move units -- as Morrow highlighted in his recent essay. So you have nothing but a pipe dream. A fantasy about a game which isn't Starcraft 2.
That leads me to speculate about your motive. HOW could the community be so supportive of such an utterly dumb idea which fails at the first hurdle?
EPT
, especially since this argument is used twice already in the few posts i read.
