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Keep "my game is better than yours"-slapfights out of this. If the discussion devolves into simple bashing, this thread will be closed. | ||
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Plansix
United States60190 Posts
On May 25 2014 02:22 lamprey1 wrote: nice smear job. u brought up LoL and Dota, not me. merely making the arcade bigger would be a nice accomplishment for any game. unfortunately, Zealot Hockey, ain't gonna do that. Ok, it also isn't going to cure cancer or save any lives, since you know, its a mod to a video game. | ||
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lamprey1
Canada919 Posts
no one did. back to reality. Dota as a WC3 MOD became the main reason any one bought the game. Someone stated how great Zealot Hockey was. I am providing an upper limit on its ability to attract new players. There are better free hockey alternatives than Zealot Hockey already out there, namely, NHL '94 Just so we can put some #s behind the decline of SC2.... In September of 2011 SC2's 1v1 player base was > 2.2 Million. now we're around 220,000 instead of 2.2 million. http://www.reddit.com/r/starcraft/comments/26c1bw/ladder_so_far_in_numbers/ | ||
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Plansix
United States60190 Posts
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lamprey1
Canada919 Posts
i gave an example of a free alternative that is better. and i stated it would result in zero growth... which is a stronger comment than "not as popular as DOTA". | ||
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urboss
Austria1223 Posts
On May 19 2014 15:20 ZerG~LegenD wrote: I was one of the best Brood War players in Europe and a SC2 Grandmaster, that said, I think there's more strategic depth in Dota 2 than in any of the StarCraft games. However, the vast majority of it comes out only when you play as a team of five. I quit StarCraft mostly because of the social aspect. Solo grinding against barcodes just gets boring after a while. Dota 2 I can play with my RL friends. I'm quite a lot better than them nowadays, but it still works out and is fun for everyone. The big down side of being a team game is of course that its not as fun to play with randoms and I recently cut back on all my solo gaming in Dota to play more poker. Which by the way is a strategy game that keeps the casuals both playing and paying by having a large element of randomness. I think that the last sentence is a big point! How can there be a pro scene in poker when the core of the game is based on random events? The answer is, because there are a lot of additional factors that give the top players an edge. Those who can deal best with the stochasticity are the better players. And this is true for a lot of other sports, like football, ice hockey or basketball, as well as Dota, LoL or Hearthstone. The important point is that randomness draws in lots of casuals, because from time to time they will score out of pure luck, which keeps them excited for longer. So to come back to our original question: How can we make the RTS genre more popular? By making it more random! | ||
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Cheren
United States2911 Posts
On May 25 2014 05:17 urboss wrote: I think that the last sentence is a big point! How can there be a pro scene in poker when the core of the game is based on random events? The answer is, because there are a lot of additional factors that give the top players an edge. Those who can deal best with the stochasticity are the better players. And this is true for a lot of other sports, like football, ice hockey or basketball, as well as Dota, LoL or Hearthstone. The important point is that randomness draws in lots of casuals, because from time to time they will score out of pure luck, which keeps them excited for longer. So to come back to our original question: How can we make the RTS genre more popular? By making it more random! SC2 has some luck/randomness in choosing opening build orders, not in a "rolling dice" sense but in a "rock/paper/scissors" sense. But out of all the games you mentioned, only Hearthstone and poker have a significant amount of randomness. | ||
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aZealot
New Zealand5447 Posts
The point is that social and fun games exist within SC2. And people play these games. It may not be most of us on TL (or at least within this thread). This may be because we either fixate on 1v1 and the pro scene or are too busy arguing about what SC2 supposedly lacks. But, that's not to say that other parts of the overall SC2 community don't play these games. They do. Will it save SC2? Well, first we have to establish that SC2 needs saving. But, if we mean a big jump in popularity - probably not. But, even so, we have little way of knowing. The numbers we look at are ranked 1v1 placements in HOTS which excludes unranked, vs AI, team, arcade and custom. (But, come to that, I believe from what I read of previous season's ladder numbers report there had been a small increase in the number of people playing 1v1 ranked HOTS ladder.) Personally, I don't give two shits about if SC2 surges back to the hype days of 2011 or surges up to match DOTA/LOL or has a big boost in viewers. Sure, it would be nice, but if there are people out there in SC2 playing the game for its own sake and enjoying whichever iteration of the game they choose (team, arcade, custom, 1v1 etc) then that is more than enough. | ||
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Eliezar
United States481 Posts
On May 25 2014 01:09 Thieving Magpie wrote: bazinga! But seriously though, BW ladder was dead pretty fast. The BW UMS scene kept going though, so its not fair to say that BW was dead, but it pretty much was held together by people who didn't give a damn about 1v1. I'll never understand why so many people think they can get away with saying that StarCraft 2 failed to keep attention where BW did. Literally, after Broodwar came out the competitive scene was almost dead within 6 months (2 ladder seasons). To give you an idea of how bad it was...Clan X-17 was a massive noob channel on bnet where very few good players ever went during seasons 3 and 4, but by the end of season 5 it was almost the only place to go find a good game. This wasn't because X-17 was growing it was because the channels that featured collections of good gamers were going dry and X-17 ended up being one of the few places that stayed alive. Broodwar was mostly played after that time by UMS, 4v4 BGH, and fastest map ever games. What really took away from StarCraft though was the rise of the MMO. Some of the best starcraft players around left to support themselves by Everquest (wait, what? Yeah that's right...as an example {PH}Dim-Mack made over $50k playing EQ full time by selling one power leveled character per week). Etc. | ||
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frajen86
168 Posts
On May 25 2014 04:30 lamprey1 wrote: Just so we can put some #s behind the decline of SC2.... In September of 2011 SC2's 1v1 player base was > 2.2 Million. now we're around 220,000 instead of 2.2 million. http://www.reddit.com/r/starcraft/comments/26c1bw/ladder_so_far_in_numbers/ Where did you get the 2.2 million number? There's a lot more to SC2 than 1v1 ladder. That being said, the 220,000 number is just for total players, not even "active" players. So there are even less than 220,000 active players on 1v1 ladder But... the truth is there's no way you can quantify "the decline" of SC2 unless you work for Blizzard. We have very little or no information about: * how many people play just the single player campaign * how many people play unranked or vs. AI * how many people play arcade or custom maps/campaigns But again this isn't necessary "RTS" decline so much as SC2. For this topic I think it's better to focus on RTS gameplay as a whole instead of harping on SC2, which is much more than 1v1 RTS... thanks to the map editor | ||
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imJealous
United States1382 Posts
On May 25 2014 07:14 Eliezar wrote: I'll never understand why so many people think they can get away with saying that StarCraft 2 failed to keep attention where BW did. Literally, after Broodwar came out the competitive scene was almost dead within 6 months (2 ladder seasons). To give you an idea of how bad it was...Clan X-17 was a massive noob channel on bnet where very few good players ever went during seasons 3 and 4, but by the end of season 5 it was almost the only place to go find a good game. This wasn't because X-17 was growing it was because the channels that featured collections of good gamers were going dry and X-17 ended up being one of the few places that stayed alive. Broodwar was mostly played after that time by UMS, 4v4 BGH, and fastest map ever games. What really took away from StarCraft though was the rise of the MMO. Some of the best starcraft players around left to support themselves by Everquest (wait, what? Yeah that's right...as an example {PH}Dim-Mack made over $50k playing EQ full time by selling one power leveled character per week). Etc. You're only considering the competitive element of the game though, and yes from that limited point of view you are correct that starcraft 2 has far outperformed BW in the size and scale of competitive community. But the original starcraft and broodwar was a cultural phenomenon among gamers because of those custom games and BGH team games, not because of the competitive esports phenomenon that took off only in South Korea. We sometimes lose sight of that around here because this is TL and we are all here because we love starcraft esports. Starcraft 2 has done a fantastic job of focusing on and supporting our favorite part of the game, but it hasn't done a very good job of supporting the larger audience of people who want to play the game just to have fun rather than for competition. | ||
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lamprey1
Canada919 Posts
On May 25 2014 07:56 frajen86 wrote: Where did you get the 2.2 million number? There's a lot more to SC2 than 1v1 ladder. That being said, the 220,000 number is just for total players, not even "active" players. So there are even less than 220,000 active players on 1v1 ladder But... the truth is there's no way you can quantify "the decline" of SC2 unless you work for Blizzard. We have very little or no information about: * how many people play just the single player campaign * how many people play unranked or vs. AI * how many people play arcade or custom maps/campaigns But again this isn't necessary "RTS" decline so much as SC2. For this topic I think it's better to focus on RTS gameplay as a whole instead of harping on SC2, which is much more than 1v1 RTS... thanks to the map editor Blizzard's own actions tell you all you need to know about what priorities they have. what we have here is the "we know that we know nothing" defense.  we know Starcraft is Blizzard's lowest revenue generator by a wide margin. the evidence of the decline in the RTS genre has already been outlined extensively in this thread. big publishers closing RTS studios etc... major RTS franchises like C&C and AoE with no new games and no new franchises replacing them. Blizzard themselves halting development on LotV to focus on a MOBA. there has been quite of a bit of back and forth throughout the thread on these topics in earlier pages and there is probably no point in revisiting all of it. | ||
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frajen86
168 Posts
On May 25 2014 10:10 lamprey1 wrote: Blizzard's own actions tell you all you need to know about what priorities they have. what we have here is the "we know that we know nothing" defense. we know Starcraft is Blizzard's lowest revenue generator by a wide margin. the evidence of the decline in the RTS genre has already been outlined extensively in this thread. big publishers closing RTS studios etc... major RTS franchises like C&C and AoE with no new games and no new franchises replacing them. Blizzard themselves halting development on LotV to focus on a MOBA. there has been quite of a bit of back and forth throughout the thread on these topics in earlier pages and there is probably no point in revisiting all of it. There is no "defense" I am not even disagreeing with the "RTS genre decline" I just noticed that you said you have "numbers behind the decline" - but the truth is, no one has the full SC2 playerbase numbers. It's not necessarily wrong to use other signs to say SC2 is declining but it is misleading to just say "look at these numbers" - when the numbers themselves present an incomplete picture I'm a numbers person so this stuff catches my attention : ) you could prove me wrong showing me something that says 2.2 million people were on 1v1 ladder in 2011 tho | ||
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Roswell
United States250 Posts
That was the first time I knew SC2 was something special. A top down real time strategy game replaces the first person shooter which had basically grown MLG from the start, hell MLG basically was Halo. Sad times we live in now, dark times. | ||
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Xiphos
Canada7507 Posts
On May 25 2014 14:18 Roswell wrote: I remember the day Halo was kicked off the main stage at MLG, and replaced with StarCraft 2. That was the first time I knew SC2 was something special. A top down real time strategy game replaces the first person shooter which had basically grown MLG from the start, hell MLG basically was Halo. Sad times we live in now, dark times. Then I learned that MLG is just another corporate machine jumping on the next big thing in hoping to make a quick buck. | ||
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ETisME
12386 Posts
On May 25 2014 14:23 Xiphos wrote: Then I learned that MLG is just another corporate machine jumping on the next big thing in hoping to make a quick buck. I guess all the fuss was because people thought MLG is a charity not for profit event | ||
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lamprey1
Canada919 Posts
It has been noted that Blizzard's RTS team is working on a MOBA. It has been speculated that work on LotV won't begin until the MOBA is done. Just to add some #s to that speculation. Heroes is in what Blizzard describes as a "pre-alpha" stage and the # of people working on the MOBA has grown from 85 (in 2013) to 140 this year. All this points to Blizzard going full steam ahead with the MOBA. I'd be shocked to see Blizz break any momentum they have with making the MOBA to pump out LotV. Don't expect any major head way on LotV until after the MOBA is done. Source: http://www.polygon.com/2014/5/21/5723572/heroes-of-the-storm-making-of-blizzard | ||
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Roswell
United States250 Posts
On May 25 2014 14:23 Xiphos wrote: Then I learned that MLG is just another corporate machine jumping on the next big thing in hoping to make a quick buck. But to see FPS console fans cheer for a RTS game so soon was a highlight for me. Non gamers with the right casters could grab on to SC2, or at least appreciate the skill it takes. Think it was MLG Dallas maybe. | ||
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urboss
Austria1223 Posts
On May 25 2014 05:33 Cheren wrote: SC2 has some luck/randomness in choosing opening build orders, not in a "rolling dice" sense but in a "rock/paper/scissors" sense. But out of all the games you mentioned, only Hearthstone and poker have a significant amount of randomness. Every team sport is inherently random. The actions of every player combined make a team sport "random". There are many situations in team sports where you as an individual have no control over the action. Your team mates can fuck up or score big time and so can the other team. The team that manages to deal best with the randomness is the best team. How can we make an RTS more random? - Focus on team games - Have more hero units / spell casters - Allow random terrain/weather transformations - Let units have imperfect aim, not every shot is a hit - Imperfect formations, let units spread out / lag behind while in movement - Imperfect pathfinding, let the player decide which is the best path Life is also inherently random. Why not make an RTS more like real life? | ||
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Roswell
United States250 Posts
On May 25 2014 14:47 urboss wrote: Every team sport is inherently random. The actions of every player combined make a team sport "random". There are many situations in team sports where you as an individual have no control over the action. Your team mates can fuck up or score big time and so can the other team. The team that manages to deal best with the randomness is the best team. How can we make an RTS more random? - Focus on team games - Have more hero units / spell casters - Allow random terrain/weather transformations - Let units have imperfect aim, not every shot is a hit - Imperfect formations, let units spread out / lag behind while in movement - Imperfect pathfinding, let the player decide which is the best path Life is also inherently random. Why not make an RTS more like real life? Those ideas are cute, but not hot. Randomness is one of the best things about real sports because teams work to perfect their game as good as it can be, that's where skill comes into play. Just artificially making the basketball bounce in a random direction isnt adding anything to the game, as would be having every single unit shot be random. Broodwar worked with the highground advantage, because it was a risk to engage a high ground, making it a risk everytime is pointless. RTS's should be about the better player(s) gaining advantages as the game progresses rather than simply being random because it looks more natural or something cute. Select units having a random attack, (reavers,) can make the game more exciting for sure, but you can only have so many of those. Like many people have said, there is no game better than SC when it comes to the gameplay aspect, its not perfect, but the other games have a better sense of community and just overall being more social, BarCrafts can only do so much, but stuff like that is great. | ||
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lamprey1
Canada919 Posts
On May 25 2014 05:33 Cheren wrote: SC2 has some luck/randomness in choosing opening build orders, not in a "rolling dice" sense but in a "rock/paper/scissors" sense. But out of all the games you mentioned, only Hearthstone and poker have a significant amount of randomness. wrong, hockey has a huge, monstruous random/chaos element. when i hear people claim hockey lacks randomness or chaos i ask myself, "can this guy even skate?" every puck that slides along the ice in hockey can hit a rut or divot and going spinning, bouncing or rolling in any direction. there is a small chance any player taking a sharp turn can hit a soft spot or rut in the ice and end up on his ass. u ever shot a rolling puck? holy fuck talk about random. in 2002 Belarus beat Sweden in the OLympics, in 1980 US College players beat the perennial Gold Medal Winners USSR. in 2006 Sweden's women beat the USA women. This year the gold medal, undefeated Canadian team that did not trail the entire Olympics only beat Latvia 2-1. Is Belarus better than Sweden? hardly, Was the 1980 USA team better than the USSR? ha, not even close. Is Latvia better than Team Canada this year? no , not even close. is Sweden's female team even anything close to as good as the USA women's team? ha! should hockey be removed from the olympics because it is too random? | ||
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