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Intuitively everyone made tanks in SC1, they made a whole screen of tanks and tried to bunch box them up. They were suprised they did not move all at the time. Shocked you may say, well not really if not for WC1/2.
Intuitively they clicked on units instead of a-moving(focus fire) (what a-moving? WTF, DO I HAVE TO CLICK ON KEYBOARD, RTS HELLO?). edit: small correction the first idea, was, why do i click on the ground? I mean to kill his units not attack the GROUND. (the keyobard piece is slightly incorrect because there is mouseover interface afterall). I remember having literally this thoughts, for me it was unintuitive to attack the GROUND, attack the ground where? Behind enemy units? In front of them? 10 pixel or 5 pixel behind? Some of us are too advanced to REMEMBER how total noob thinks, if you cannot do this reverse engineriing this intuivite talk is baseless, because you are already under influence of different mentality.
Those are the first lesson everyone who steps into WC/SC comptetition needs to learn, many people learned a-moving when they were told to.
Im not talking about sc2 bronze(yet this repeats in sc2), im talking about WC2/Starcraft 1. Intuitively these games were already weird, everyone and their mothers played C&C. But the idea broke to their system, slowly, but steadily. Larger not always better, faster not always funnier(talking about armies). At least not when it comes to competition and or fun.
This is the time when Starcraft overshadowed and broke C&C and Westwood style of RTS gaming. Please dont bring intuive / modern/dumb/retro discussion into this. Blizzard made their bucks on implementing retro mechanics as opposed to their competitor who were first to introduce modern mechanics, and we are still talking about 90s.
Talk about ideas, pretend its academic talk if you dont like it in sc2. Dont bring weak arguments like BUT IT WOULD BE UN INTUITIVE. Show us why that would be bad in current pro sc2. If for example tomorrow blizzard would say the implement SOME mechanics that made professional BW great or came up with some cool alternatives and bunched it up in SC2 pro edition. Would you be happy? Would that make you cringe less when you see fungal?
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On November 21 2012 21:34 Ryan307  wrote:This is such an amazing OP and I just wanted to post and let you know that you've done a fantastic job addressing a huge issue with SC2, I got all excited as I read your post and then I remembered that we're dealing with the SC2 community: + Show Spoiler +On November 21 2012 11:59 zlefin wrote:
making the interface worse, making units dumber, is NEVER a good way to balance things; it just annoys people; whatever benefits it might allegedly yield; the drawbacks are far worse. find another way. On November 21 2012 19:30 Bagi wrote:
No.
Having to click more to achieve the same thing isn't what this game needs. On November 21 2012 21:31 robih wrote:
oh yes lets make the interface terrible so that the units arent OP ...
It's seriously so disheartening to read stuff like this, and I have all but given up hope on SC2. The sad reality is that blizzard is more interested in making people "happy" than making a competitive e-sport. After reading countless threads on MBS/Pathing/Deathball/Macro Mechanics/etc during beta and watching absolutely nothing be done about it I honestly feel like SC2 will just fizzle out. Watching tournaments feels like watching the same set of situations play out over and over and over again, and HoTS looks like more of the same. I don't mean to come across as a downer or anything, because seriously this is one of the best OP's I've read in a long time (and if this was implemented it would be a HUGE step forward), I just have given up dealing with SC2.
I agree with everything you said there. I wish there would exist two versions of SC2: one that would be 100% focused on creating an extremely fun, competitive e-sport experience and the other focused on making the casual player base "happy."
It would also be an interesting experiment if the Blizzard gave the TL community a "copy" of SC2 to make their own balance changes while Blizzard keeps the original and continues the same direction as they are. Then see how each game is doing a year or so down the road.
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On November 21 2012 11:16 Falling wrote:
Adding spell-casters intentionally adds a unit that does NOT have have an automated attack and REQUIRES you to manually cast or it will be in-effective. We are adding difficulty to the game on purpose simply by designing spell-casters.
This part is where I disagree with you.
What sets spellcasters apart from other units in the game is not the lack of an automated attack, but that the number of spells casted is limited by energy. Energy functions as an additional resource in the game you have to manage carefully.
Spells like Storm or Fungal are simply too powerful to be an unlimited automated attack. The existence of those spells adds depths to the game because players have to decide on how to spend energy to make the investment worthwhile. I doubt the primary intend of spells is to make the game more difficult.
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Before SC2 came out, I basically stopped playing BW. The main reasons were that I was extremely fed up with the absolute idiocy of the user interface and I already knew that with SC2, everything will be better. And it was!
Honestly, if they would to flat out remove smartcasting, I will just stop playing the game. Maybe I will continue to watch tournaments for some time, but I doubt I will be interested for too long if I won't be playing.
The answert to basically everything in the OP is in the post above me: spells are different not by being difficult to cast, but by being a scarce resource due to energy. When this is said, I consider the whole argument "we are already making it difficult introducing spells" invalidated. Yes, spells introduce additional difficulty. But it is primarily the difficulty of choice, when to cast the spells, how to manage the energy. Only by disabling smartcasting, you will start to add unnecessary mechanical difficulty. Thus, the main argument that the OP tries to counter (about not making the interface intentionaly bad) holds.
Now, if there is a spell where the only thing that limits you is your ability to cast it fast enough, not the available energy, then there is something wrong. But that means we have to change the spells, not the way they are cast.
edit: also, it its not true that adding spellcasters necesarily makes the game more mechanicaly difficult, because in many situations you actually need more actions to micro normal units than the spell casters.
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Well dissected explanation of out situation.
Should be featured.
!
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On November 21 2012 19:31 ejozl wrote:
I feel like in the end this doesn't matter that much on the Pro level, from a viewers perspective it would almost look the same, since they are just so good. But on a more casual level, this just completely ruins game play for them.
Generally I'm for smarter interface, smarter units, since in my opinion the player i want to succeed is the player with the more brilliant strategies, compared to having sickest APM.
However i do think that for to be successful in Starcraft 2, a rather high APM is needed.
You can't base competetive game mostly on brilliant strategies. It makes for stale, boring game. It's like ZvP in nutshell: some brilliant strategy player finds some good timing and wins with it, other protosses start to use it and got some wins with it, then zergs figure it out and learn how to defend and strategy is used less and less. And another timing attack is discovered. And then zergs learn how to defend it.
Same thing happened with teran's 111.
There is limited number of viable strategies in game. You can't make them on the fly (we are not talking about tactics), they must be prepered beforehand.
Making game harder adds depth into strategy: ok you know this strategy, now how good can you execute it. Also with high game ceiling it's not binary: either you execute it perfecly or make mistake and die (because it's expected for your opponent to execute it perfectly). You're execution can't be flawless and it's become more about who makes less mistakes. Instead of who makes mistake first.
Also look at other sports. Every sport require a lot of phisical abilities, and they are what makes difference between pros and amateurs. Even ones that require a lot of thinking and planning (snooker come to my mind) also requires executions, and execution in addition to strategy is what makes for most exciting moments.
I tell you now, that is what will happen.
After releasing HotS, Blizzard announces that they change name of last expansion into LotB: Legacy of the Brood. The game features two ladders: amateur and professional. While amateur ladder has some tweaks and new units in comparison to HotS, professional ladder has game mechanics changed to be as close to BW as possible. Also only BW units are availble, so pros play BW back again, only with more appealing graphics.
In other news game is accessible by steam. Blizzard was bought out by Valve, after poor HotS and D3 expansion sales results.
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Watched all the videos in the OP, but i think your effort is futile, as are many other related threads as well. I agree with what you said, and I think its a good thing to get this information out just to inform people. There have been so many threads pointing out starcraft 2's flaws, even such simple things like warpgate that remove defenders advantage, will be with starcraft 2 forever because its been with us the last 2 years, we cant remove it now. The amount of change required to fix this game is not possible in just expansions, expansion add or fix relatively minor things. Blizzard is way too scared to make drastic changes and the things that starcraft 2 requires are drastic and that can't really happen at this point in time without calling it starcraft 3.
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I think people are clinging to the "Smart"cast, ideally it was an evolution in game play but like someone said before the multiplayer should be no smart cast and the campaign can have an option for that. The skill would rise and seeing 12 storms be dropped in 3 seconds would actually be an impressive feat rather than me spamming T 12 times.
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I cannot agree with the conclusion at all, because I think, that smartcasting gets blamed for something that would not change at all if it did not exist:
1) Smart-casting dilutes damage spells.
i) It spreads out the damage on the assumption that more will be cast. This doesn't necessarily make it all that easy for that casual player we are concerned about. It's easier to cast more, but we also moved the bar so they must cast more. We dropped the damage so the individual spell is less satisfying.
ii) Individual spell placement is less important as they are more spread over a wider area.
iii) This impacts damage casters as harass units because harassment requires rapid damage in concentrated areas. Not spread out over the screen.
The conclusions are either not true or not the effect of the existence of smartcasting. The reason that damage spells do not deal as much damage in Starcraft 2 is the effect of unit clumping, not of smartcasting. If you removed smartcasting, then the number of casted spells would not change at all. The removal of smartcasting makes spells more annoying to cast, but it adds no depth. The simple relation here is: If there are more units in a smaller area, then you need to reduce the damage and/or area of the spells.
That crowd control spells have such an impact in Starcraft 2 is not the result of smartcasting either, it is the result of the races protoss and zerg being balanced around forcefield, vortex and fungal. Would you remove smartcasting, then you could remove the protoss race (at least against zerg) altogether, because it is not possible to cast the amounts of forcefield with such a precision which is required to protect yourself against lings and roaches without smartcasting. It would break the game, but not make it better. You would not change the usage of fungal, which is simply the result of the infestor being a) T2, b) not extremely expensive and because of this massable (equivalent to the sentry in the early/midgame). You could create an equal scenario in broodwar by giving similar spells to T1/T2 units and weaken the rest of the units slightly. I do not think that the result would be pretty.
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I definitely agree with the premise that spells in sc2 are too strong, too influential and holds too much potential over other things like splitting and getting good arcs. But I don't agree with the conclusion that to solve this the game mechanics needs to be made clumsier. Smart casting is a good thing, it is how a game SHOULD work mechanically. There is no good argument from a design point of view to have it any other way. If Broodwar had not had a terrible cast mechanic the idea of using that system would never occur to anyone as a solution to this. The obvious solution is to not intentionally make the game stupid but to tune spells on all other aspects, strength, upgrades, energy requirements and what they do.
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On November 21 2012 13:04 Patate wrote:
The "sport" would also be better to watch.. it is hard to be amazed by someone's micro right now (multitask, maybe.. but not micro). I feel bad for the casters having to hype those "amazing forcefields" and those "great fungal growths".. This is nothing impressing (and we can extrapolate to SC2 as a whole).
Exactly! Everytime I see a pro game where the casters go nuts about force fields or storms its 99% just a normal click which everybody else can do.
On November 21 2012 13:44 WolfintheSheep wrote:
People need to remember every time they bring up BW: Everything was dumb. Everything. Units had bad pathing, buildings could only be individually selected, attacks would randomly miss, etc. So dumb spellcasters wasn't to balance OP spells, it just put spellcasters on par with everything else.
Everything was "dumb" as you say and therefore more skill was needed. You needed to take care of everything and therefore faster players (better players) got rewared higher.
In SC2 everything is easier.
But that's the sad line where gaming is heading to. The average gamer today is too lazy to study a game in order to master it, so games are designed to become easy. Games for the mass. I wondered when I saw that HotS has automine from the start. What comes next? Maybe Blizz introduces a button where you can choose your build order so you can focus on scouting? lol
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On November 21 2012 23:21 Anomek wrote:
You can't base competetive game mostly on brilliant strategies. It makes for stale, boring game.
...
Also look at other sports. Every sport require a lot of phisical abilities, and they are what makes difference between pros and amateurs. Even ones that require a lot of thinking and planning (snooker come to my mind) also requires executions, and execution in addition to strategy is what makes for most exciting moments.
Do people even read what they are saying here?
Two of the most classic strategy games ever: Chess and Go.
Clearly one-dimensional and stale games there because you only have to "micro" one piece at a time and because you don't have to stand on your head to make the pieces do what you intend them to do. Right? Out-thinking the opponent is so overrated.
I'm not trying to say that they are in any way indicative of SC2, but please stop with the constant sweeping comments about how things are this way or that way as if its some kind of universal truth. There's a lot of it going around lately and its utter garbage. Focus on SC2 because most generalised comments are just not going to work.
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On November 21 2012 22:40 Seldentar wrote:
It would also be an interesting experiment if the Blizzard gave the TL community a "copy" of SC2 to make their own balance changes while Blizzard keeps the original and continues the same direction as they are. Then see how each game is doing a year or so down the road.
I don't think Blizzard is likely to do that ;P. I do hope though, that someday there will be a kickstarter/open source project with the goal to creating the "perfect" RTS!
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On November 22 2012 02:16 IPS.Blue wrote:Show nested quote +On November 21 2012 22:40 Seldentar wrote:
It would also be an interesting experiment if the Blizzard gave the TL community a "copy" of SC2 to make their own balance changes while Blizzard keeps the original and continues the same direction as they are. Then see how each game is doing a year or so down the road. I don't think Blizzard is likely to do that ;P. I do hope though, that someday there will be a kickstarter/open source project with the goal to creating the "perfect" RTS!
Me too and I hope that all these balance and game design experts on TeamLiquid and elsewhere get together for it.
And then I'll watch the project burn down in flames. Because suddenly it'll turn out it's actually pretty fucking difficult to create the game that they seek after.
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On November 22 2012 02:16 IPS.Blue wrote:Show nested quote +On November 21 2012 22:40 Seldentar wrote:
It would also be an interesting experiment if the Blizzard gave the TL community a "copy" of SC2 to make their own balance changes while Blizzard keeps the original and continues the same direction as they are. Then see how each game is doing a year or so down the road. I don't think Blizzard is likely to do that ;P. I do hope though, that someday there will be a kickstarter/open source project with the goal to creating the "perfect" RTS!
Yea probably not! The idea of an open source project like that would be interesting and wayyy more likely 
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The argument of fighting against the interface is complete crap. As Brood War proves having everything automated DOES have an effect on the skill cap. The results of Brood War like the domination of TBLS, the domination of Korea in general, the domination of Ex-BW players in SCII and, most importantly, the interviews with Kespa players, prove that Brood War is the hardest game out there. Despite the argument that players supposedly could spend their actions on different things than producing building-by-building or getting workers to mine this argument can not be true because otherwise SCII would be just as hard to play as Brood War. I´d like to explain my argument in this little graph:
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/DA1Dp.jpg)
You see, although all games have technically no skill cap as none of these functions stagnate, Brood War players
can reach a higher amount of skill compared to lesser skilled players than in SCII and LoL. So although, as Catz pointed out in one of the descision-making shows, you cannot play any of these games perfectly (reach infinite skill), practice is much more rewarding in Brood War. Thus the difference to the skill of casual players is bigger.
This is very very important. Humans are naturally interested in unusual, unknown stuff. Spectators are much more entertained if they see something they never imagined was possible than watching stuff they could potentially do themselves.
Sorry for being slightly off-topic but i think it fits some of the points mentioned in the OP.
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On November 22 2012 02:37 Aunvilgod wrote:The argument of fighting against the interface is complete crap. As Brood War proves having everything automated DOES have an effect on the skill cap. The results of Brood War like the domination of TBLS, the domination of Korea in general, the domination of Ex-BW players in SCII and, most importantly, the interviews with Kespa players, prove that Brood War is the hardest game out there. Despite the argument that players supposedly could spend their actions on different things than producing building-by-building or getting workers to mine this argument can not be true because otherwise SCII would be just as hard to play as Brood War. I´d like to explain my argument in this little graph: You see, although all games have technically no skill cap as none of them stagnate, Brood War players can reach a higher amount of skill compared to lesser skilled players than in SCII and LoL. So although, as Catz pointed out in one of the descision-making shows, you cannot play any of these games perfectly (reach infinite skill), practice is much more rewarding in Brood War. Thus the difference to the skill of casual players is bigger. This is very very important. Humans are naturally interested in unusual, unknown stuff. Spectators are much more entertained if they see something they never imagined was possible than watching stuff they could potentially do themselves.Sorry for being slightly off-topic but i think it fits some of the points mentioned in the OP.
This.
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After viewing this all, wouldnt you say that changing smart casting, will not be a proper solution, unless a game does not have clumping (especially the clumping seen in sc2).
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Long long long analisys, but i think i will read it all, the beginning sounds very promising.
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On November 22 2012 03:02 Deckkie wrote:
After viewing this all, wouldnt you say that changing smart casting, will not be a proper solution, unless a game does not have clumping (especially the clumping seen in sc2).
What do you think would be the problem?
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EPT
