David Kim's Current Balance Thoughts - Page 39

On January 13 2014 08:40 SC2Toastie wrote:

The only armored ground unit tanks struggle with is the Immortal, which is not gonna be fixed by +damage v armored.

On January 13 2014 08:03 Squat wrote:
The game would not be better because foreigners won stuff. You cannot build the game on personalities, esports careers are short and often highly unstable. They will retire, and then your flaccid product will simply collapse. The game HAS to be good enough on its own to survive, it has to be bigger than any player. Koreans will be the dominant country for the lifespan of this game, that's something we knew before WoL beta was relased. BW was dominated by Koreans for 10+ years, but foreigners watched anyway, because the game was so incredibly good. SC2 has to have that allure too, but it just doesn't.

I know that for my part, I watch mostly because of some players, mostly ex BW guys whose careers I've followed for 6-7 years, and one or two newcomers I found to be cool and/or endearing. When those guys quit, my interest in this game goes with them. If a majority of the fan base has that attitude, that is not a sustainable product.

And did you seriously suggest match fixing?

On January 13 2014 09:24 Squat wrote:
Constantly upsetting the parameters of the game is a horrible way to achieve good gameplay or parity between players. Again, BW was pretty much the exact same for 10 years, it works if the game is good enough. The odds that you will continuously end up with a good enough product and won't scare players and viewers away who can't adjust to multiple massive re-iterations of the game are astronomically small.

There is no changing the fact that Koreans are just better. Instead of trying to concoct half-baked schemes to try and break the Korean dominance, the objective should be to have a product that is good enough that people will watch and play even if foreigners are being shat on.

Players retiring is neither good or bad, it's a natural process that needs to happen. Incontrol was absolutely right when he said that, the current total pool of money available in the scene simply cannot support what we currently have. Fat has to be cut. The Korean scene is pretty much imploding as we watch. People move on with their lives, their is no long term future in esports and it does not translate into anything in the real world. Of all the pro gamers, Polt has it right. We should be happy when people make sensible decisions for their lives.

LoL begs to differ. I know it's a team-oriented game, but Riot will COMPLETELY redesign items and champions on a regular basis, and they have completely changed the way the support role is played and how vision items function with this latest season. These are huge changes. Bigger than the queen buff IMO. And they happen relatively frequently.

If you are competent at balancing and designing your own game, you absolutely 100% CAN make consistent, big changes without negatively impacting the game. I couldn't disagree with you more on this subject, and it has been proven time and time again by a multitude of games.

I guess the best argument could be: do you trust BLIZZARD to make the appropriate changes, on a regular basis, to keep this game fresh and interesting without damaging the competitive side of things. I can see that being a legit concern.

On January 13 2014 10:09 Squat wrote:

The difference between changing items and champions in a moba and changing basic gameplay in a tightly tuned RTS with multiple unique factions is immense, there is no comparison. Everything in an RTS is inextricably connected, changing something fundamental, odds are you have to change almost all of it. There is also the matter of the sheer amount of time needed to properly play-test the changes each time. You'd need months of beta testing with hundreds of people for each iteration. It's not a reasonable process for a company trying to make money(i.e. all of them).

As for the rest, I'm a realist, I have very little patience for irrationality or wishful thinking in any form. SC2 is what it is. The RTS market is more or less a wasteland outside of this game. Blizzard has one expo worth 40 or so dollars left to sell, then they are out of ways to monetize the product. Where is the incentive to do all the things you talk about? We can argue all day about what should be done, what we would like to see, but in the end we are arguing with math, and I've never seen anyone win that argument. If this game is going to have any significant changes it will have to come from the community.

On January 13 2014 13:33 plogamer wrote:


Blizz patched (though much less frequently later on) Diablo 2 for years and years. It is a big reason I support their products because of the love they showed for their games and the reputation they have accrued.

It's an incentive that people are not discussing enough. Having a game over a decade old still having players is a sort of an advertisement. Keeps you in the scene and in the consumer's view.

I understand when people say the expansion model is outdated. But it's a model in which Blizzard showed such excellence - perhaps leading to their continued success to this day.

On January 13 2014 09:24 Squat wrote:
Constantly upsetting the parameters of the game is a horrible way to achieve good gameplay or parity between players. Again, BW was pretty much the exact same for 10 years, it works if the game is good enough. The odds that you will continuously end up with a good enough product and won't scare players and viewers away who can't adjust to multiple massive re-iterations of the game are astronomically small.

There is no changing the fact that Koreans are just better. Instead of trying to concoct half-baked schemes to try and break the Korean dominance, the objective should be to have a product that is good enough that people will watch and play even if foreigners are being shat on.

Players retiring is neither good or bad, it's a natural process that needs to happen. Incontrol was absolutely right when he said that, the current total pool of money available in the scene simply cannot support what we currently have. Fat has to be cut. The Korean scene is pretty much imploding as we watch. People move on with their lives, their is no long term future in esports and it does not translate into anything in the real world. Of all the pro gamers, Polt has it right. We should be happy when people make sensible decisions for their lives.

On January 13 2014 10:09 Squat wrote:

The difference between changing items and champions in a moba and changing basic gameplay in a tightly tuned RTS with multiple unique factions is immense, there is no comparison. Everything in an RTS is inextricably connected, changing something fundamental, odds are you have to change almost all of it. There is also the matter of the sheer amount of time needed to properly play-test the changes each time. You'd need months of beta testing with hundreds of people for each iteration. It's not a reasonable process for a company trying to make money(i.e. all of them).

As for the rest, I'm a realist, I have very little patience for irrationality or wishful thinking in any form. SC2 is what it is. The RTS market is more or less a wasteland outside of this game. Blizzard has one expo worth 40 or so dollars left to sell, then they are out of ways to monetize the product. Where is the incentive to do all the things you talk about? We can argue all day about what should be done, what we would like to see, but in the end we are arguing with math, and I've never seen anyone win that argument. If this game is going to have any significant changes it will have to come from the community.

On January 13 2014 13:33 plogamer wrote:


Blizz patched (though much less frequently later on) Diablo 2 for years and years. It is a big reason I support their products because of the love they showed for their games and the reputation they have accrued.

It's an incentive that people are not discussing enough. Having a game over a decade old still having players is a sort of an advertisement. Keeps you in the scene and in the consumer's view.

I understand when people say the expansion model is outdated. But it's a model in which Blizzard showed such excellence - perhaps leading to their continued success to this day.

On January 13 2014 14:20 z0rz wrote:

MOBA and RTS are actually quite similar when it boils down to basic design elements -- unit movement/pathing, positioning, spellcasting, attack range, attack damage versus defensive stats, etc. If you buff a champions range in a MOBA, the same benefits translate directly to RTS: easier to play defensively, more damage output to retreating targets, etc etc.

I mean, if you think about it, changing one champion's stats or spells in LoL effectively changes the way 100+ other champions interact with said champion. At the very least, you have to directly compare champions of the same role: you can't safely buff Caitlyn's damage without comparing her damage to Ezreal, Vayne, Corki, etc. But those champions' damage output varies greatly depending on skill level/matchup/itemization, just like a unit's role can change depending on the matchup in an RTS. And buffing certain items has varying effects on champions that may or may not be able to make optimal use of that item.

Both games are balanced on a razor's edge and could easily be thrown off with a simple change, as we saw with the Queen range buff in WoL. But, as IdrA mentioned earlier in this thread, breaking the game isn't a problem if you're capable of identifying the problem and willing to correct it in a timely fashion.

I understand the realist part though. I definitely agree that the community will have to step up and finish the work Blizzard started. Fortunately, Blizzard gave us the tools we need to fix their mess. We just need to make better use of them.


This is funny to me. I don't know how long you played D2 or how involved you were with the game, but it was incredibly broken and the community waited literally YEARS for patches that were discussed but never implemented. Of course, most of the D2 team had gone on to greener pastures and I'm sure the remaining team had little to work with, but D2 was a giant mess of a game.

Fortunately, much like BW, the massive flaws actually made it a pretty interesting game. I'm too lazy to research the names of everything and their respective bugs, but I recall those lightning wisp things unintentionally applying their melee damage to their ranged lightning damage, making them do far too much damage overall. Hammerdins were never supposed to be able to damage magic immune enemies, which was documented for YEARS (not sure if it was ever fixed). And let's not forget about the amount of bots, dupes, and maphacks.

I LOVED the game, but it's a terrible example of a diligent/competent dev team IMO.

On January 13 2014 14:26 SniXSniPe wrote:


Diablo 2 was fun the entire way. The only thing messed up was:

1.08 LoD had some items that were overpowered, skill imbalances.
1.09 Had some classes that obviously excelled in ways over other classes--- for example, Sorc/Amazon were the two best characters for doing cow runs.
1.10 Runewords being "too strong", but had duping not been around those items would have been exceptionally rare. However this patch brought a breath of fresh air, every class had relevance again in PvP and PvM.


Although 1.10 took a ridiculous length of time before it was released.....

On January 13 2014 15:15 RJ231 wrote:
Blizzard has been notoriously brutal when it comes to fixing their RTS games, anyone who played Warcraft 3 can testify how much of a slap in the face the balancing in that game was for years. I remember the very best undead players in the world retiring simply because their tournament success would almost be completely dependent on dodging certain match ups. It even got to the point where the very best players in the world played more than 1 race so they could abuse the broken match ups and dodge the bad ones.

On January 13 2014 15:15 RJ231 wrote:


The community at large seems to always feel like the game is "close" to being balanced, even from early on in WoL this attitude prevailed. I'd like to see the list of straight up nerfs to terran bio and protoss AoE since the beginning, it's pretty clear this game has a long way to go before it can be considered balanced. League of Legends is a much more appealing game than SC2 in my mind because they continue to shake things up and constantly evolve their balance, they aren't afraid to get it wrong and have to fix something. Blizzard takes the approach that they are so afraid to make any changes because it will break the game, all this does in my mind is slow down the process of getting it right. It is further frustrating when they hide behind their ladder statistics as proof things are close, the MMR system has you matching people at your apparent skill level - if your race selection alone elevates your skill level the match ups aren't truly balanced in my mind even if they come out at 50% (this is likely why GM is full of protoss).

On January 13 2014 15:15 RJ231 wrote:
Blizzard has been notoriously brutal when it comes to fixing their RTS games, anyone who played Warcraft 3 can testify how much of a slap in the face the balancing in that game was for years. I remember the very best undead players in the world retiring simply because their tournament success would almost be completely dependent on dodging certain match ups. It even got to the point where the very best players in the world played more than 1 race so they could abuse the broken match ups and dodge the bad ones.

The community at large seems to always feel like the game is "close" to being balanced, even from early on in WoL this attitude prevailed. I'd like to see the list of straight up nerfs to terran bio and protoss AoE since the beginning, it's pretty clear this game has a long way to go before it can be considered balanced. League of Legends is a much more appealing game than SC2 in my mind because they continue to shake things up and constantly evolve their balance, they aren't afraid to get it wrong and have to fix something. Blizzard takes the approach that they are so afraid to make any changes because it will break the game, all this does in my mind is slow down the process of getting it right. It is further frustrating when they hide behind their ladder statistics as proof things are close, the MMR system has you matching people at your apparent skill level - if your race selection alone elevates your skill level the match ups aren't truly balanced in my mind even if they come out at 50% (this is likely why GM is full of protoss).

Another big issue is certain armies in SC2 are just good vs everything, hard counters aren't very hard at all so people just play it safe and make big balls of the more safe unit compositions which are incredibly boring to watch for the masses.

On January 13 2014 15:55 BronzeKnee wrote:


Very well said. How long did it take Blizzard to fix the 4 Gate? How bout the 1-1-1? Roach max versus Protoss? Actually, they never really fixed the 1-1-1 and Roach max in WOL, the map pool did.

On January 13 2014 14:06 saddaromma wrote:

I'm pretty sure BW was never "really balanced". The game UI is so hard that most players spent 70% of their effort to fight UI rather than the opponent. Therefore players had infinite room to overcome any imbalance. In SC2 everything is simplified to the point that bronze league players can abuse imbalances quite easily.

On January 12 2014 03:38 Tyrhanius wrote:

You suppose they have equal skill cause they are in the same league, but if a 80 APM toss have a 50% winrate vs a 200 APM terran you can't call it balance but the stats will say the winrate is normal. And the 200 APM Terran will have 50% winrate vs 200 APM T/Z, so you can say he has pretty the same winrates vs P/T/Z, so he plays vs equal skill opponent (ofc APM is not all but it's an example).
And what about the 200 APM toss ? He is in GM league, so you don't see his 80% winrates vs 200 APM terran. You can see this if you look for the GM repartition but if you choose to ignore this... But if you look is win rate he will have 52% vs 300 APM kor T so it's ok...

Of course i have no idea what's the reality because this statistics done are not enough to interpret anything. You can't ignore variable such difficulty of playing/reach a level while playing one race when you speak about balance. Moreover, when you use stats you should calculate if the difference is signifiant or not, you can't just pretend it's close to 50% so it's OK.

On January 13 2014 05:42 Wombat_NI wrote:
Its never just been about the game being balanced, Blizz want their game to be entertaining both to play and watch and have frequently said as such.

Ideally these all go hand-in-hand, but I'd trade 50/50 parity for a more enjoyable experience in a heartbeat

On January 13 2014 14:06 saddaromma wrote:

I'm pretty sure BW was never "really balanced". The game UI is so hard that most players spent 70% of their effort to fight UI rather than the opponent. Therefore players had infinite room to overcome any imbalance. In SC2 everything is simplified to the point that bronze league players can abuse imbalances quite easily.