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!
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?
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.
If you have ever shot a gun or thrown a basketball you will realize that humans lack the fine tuning to have perfect aim every single time. So by having units with imperfect aim you basically mimic real life. Humans can compensate for imperfect aim, so that the better players will most often win.
And again, we are not trying to turn chess into monopoly. SC2 is perfect as it is. What we are looking for is a new game that increases the popularity of RTS. You do that by giving the casuals more luck factors.
On May 25 2014 05:44 aZealot wrote: Did anyone actually claim that Zealot Hockey would lead to higher numbers? I know I posted Zealot Hockey up earlier, but as an example of the kind of social and cooperative game that people think SC2 needs but already exists within the game. The same applies to the custom maps and arcade mods within SC2 (such as BGH, which I can tell you, is a lot of fun).
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.
+1
Whenever I play arcade games I check the profiles of those who I play with. It is very rare to find one who has even a single game on ladder be it 1v1, 2v2, 3v3 or 4v4. I believe there is a respectable number of players who only play arcade and custom games that go unnoticed by those who are bothered by the decline of SC2 multiplayer.
To those saying that the play MOBA games because they can play with friends, I would like to pose the question of why can't you play SC2 with friends? You can play 1v1, 2v2, and arcade games where as MOBA is only one mode. I don't see why SC2 ladder numbers have to match those of a free multiplayer game. TF2 is also quite popular and free, let's beat ourselves over an FPS being popular.
Finally, for those who want an RTS of grand scale, that is more macro focused with battles taking place over whole planets you should check out Planetary Annihilation.
For what its worth, my season 1 2v2 partner and another friend of mine from Kali who is 4 seasons Grandmaster are on SC2 almost every day and neither of them have played a single ladder game. One has like 1000 FFAs and the other plays customer maps. I don't know what that says about SC2, but I think there is this unrealistic idea of what computer games are like
Chess - Played forever "Football" - the name referred to all sports not played on horseback at one point in time has almost 200 years in various forms and is still evolving in various professional leagues in rugby, football, and futbol. Computer games - Change every few years with most people not playing a game for more than a few months although they may go back to it several times.
For some reason, the sky is falling when StarCraft 2 isn't chess or isn't like established team sports. I just think that's missing the point of computer games. They are constantly evolving with technology and aren't things that people make careers out of (they just work there for a time somewhat similar to a college job).
RTS as a genre is going to continue to exist in different forms and evolve. LotV will come out probably 3 years to the month after HotS came out. And probably 3-4 years after LotV you will see blizzard come up with either another StarCraft themed game or another Warcraft RTS.
On May 25 2014 05:44 aZealot wrote: 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.
i'm having fun playing SC2, its great. i'm probably just going to stop playing SC2 because i have other things to do long before the game actually dies. so on a personal level the decline of the genre probably won't personally impact me.
my concern is all the RTS studios going down and in its place we get stuff like Airmech and Rome2... built on a shoestring budget.
its kind of sad that we won't see much cutting edge graphics on the best-in-class engine with top-notch cinematics any longer.
its a similar issue with the decline in the NHL Sim niche genre going down. it leaves people who love hockey video games with few options. its sad watching EA butcher the genre with a never ending sequence of not fully tested games where the best way to score is discovering the easiest glitch goals.
Dumbing down an RTS or really doing anything to make it more appealing to casuals I think is a bad idea. I see no need for RTS to go mainstream. It will still exist and SC2 and its community will still exist in a smaller form, and that is okay because we preserve the hardcore-ness of it.
On May 25 2014 23:42 Doodsmack wrote: Dumbing down an RTS or really doing anything to make it more appealing to casuals I think is a bad idea. I see no need for RTS to go mainstream. It will still exist and SC2 and its community will still exist in a smaller form, and that is okay because we preserve the hardcore-ness of it.
i'd like to see a range of complexity in various RTS titles.
on one extreme end you have RA3 in terms of simplicity of economy. and on another extreme end is a theoretical RTS with n-resource types with x different collection methods.
On May 25 2014 23:42 Doodsmack wrote: Dumbing down an RTS or really doing anything to make it more appealing to casuals I think is a bad idea. I see no need for RTS to go mainstream. It will still exist and SC2 and its community will still exist in a smaller form, and that is okay because we preserve the hardcore-ness of it.
I want to see PROFESSIONAL gaming to persist.
That you are able to make a LIVING off from RTS games as long as you are at the top 5% of the player pool.
On May 25 2014 23:42 Doodsmack wrote: Dumbing down an RTS or really doing anything to make it more appealing to casuals I think is a bad idea. I see no need for RTS to go mainstream. It will still exist and SC2 and its community will still exist in a smaller form, and that is okay because we preserve the hardcore-ness of it.
I want to see PROFESSIONAL gaming to persist.
That you are able to make a LIVING off from RTS games as long as you are at the top 5% of the player pool.
Is that too hard to ask?
there can always be "playing the game at the top level". that can exist forever. it still exists with stuff like "Tecmo Bowl" and "NHL '94" but, making it into a full time job; that is a tall order man.
in a way i think it makes the game better when no one can be a full time pro. this "Tecmo Bowl" tourney is more like the Olympics than the Olympics.... these are true amateurs playing only for the love of the game.
I figured MOBAs typically have something of a "building" phase too, under normal circumstances. Usually, for the first couple of minutes there isn't any real aggression and players have something of a Mexican standoff while they farm up their first few levels. Sure, there's always the opportunity for an early gank or a mistake, but you can't push towers and win for at least another 10 or 15 minutes. That's why I feel the "instant action" ball is actually in RTS's court. You can decide very quickly whether or not you want a game to last long. MOBAs don't have that element. Since we use Starcraft as our base example for RTS, I will point out that it was Blizzard who made it harder / impossible to end a game early. It's not like RTS as a genre is entirely represented in Starcraft. There are many things that could be done to make it a more exciting game and a little more variety of builds and compositions is really all the game needs to stay entertaining.
Casual players are nice, but they come and go.
MOBAs are cute, but they are nothing more than the offspring of an RTS engine masquerading as a different genre to RTS because they lack the strategic depth to be called RTS. In short, they deliver the feel of RTS gameplay, while taking all of the work and strategy out of actually playing. Instead, the focus of a MOBA game is to have enemies at the end of your sword at all times. I find it boring that most of the time they're just mindless creeps. To me the genre that lacks staying power is actually the MOBA, because they kinda bubbled up and were born of RTS.
MOBAs have a tendency of being free games; free games have inflated player-bases that don't represent the actual quality of the game. People will download and play it even if it's a shit game just to find out. The same isn't true for things that cost money; people will probably put more effort into finding reasons not to spend the money. I wouldn't waste my energy comparing the popularity of something given for free to something that costs about $60-$100. The free game will usually be more played, but it will also have the flakiest fans and a certain "traffic" of casual players just moving through seeing what the hype is about.
I moved through MOBAs for about 300 hours, and that was it. I got it. They're just as much about intrinsic game knowledge as RTS, if not more so. I found the energy I spent on each match was substantially less than a game of Starcraft (the MOBA matches also last 2-3 times as long). Also, the worst thing about them is having to rely on others to not fuck you over; that isn't as much of an issue in Starcraft since the competitive emphasis is on 1v1. If you choose to play teamgames in Starcraft, you're opening up the possibility of having to play 200 supply vs 800 supply. That's about it. I don't expect MOBA to replace RTS for these reasons. I don't even think they should be used as a comparison or benchmark of Starcraft or RTS's popularity.
starcraft economy is very straightforward. only one way to get resources, one way only. expanding is about the best you can do in terms of resource income. add in easy macro with SC2 and games don't come down to economy management at all. it's just make depot, make units, be quick about it. to some that may seem like "economy" but in reality it's just mechanics. "economy" is stuff like aoe, where you have to spend brain power on managing your eco
Professional gaming will most certainly persist. If it will be professional gaming with RTS games is another question.
How is the SC2 scene going to look like 5-10 years from now? Will Blizzard continue to push money into e-sports? Their 10-year experiment in e-sports with SC2 will most likely end.
If you want to stay a professional gamer, that is if you want to earn a living from gaming, you are gonna need to go where the money is.
Unless a new RTS title is released in the meantime that is good enough for competitive gaming, there will be no more RTS games played professionally.
On May 26 2014 00:59 urboss wrote: Professional gaming will most certainly persist. If it will be professional gaming with RTS games is another question.
How is the SC2 scene going to look like 5-10 years from now? Will Blizzard continue to push money into e-sports? Their 10-year experiment in e-sports with SC2 will most likely end.
If you want to stay a professional gamer, that is if you want to earn a living from gaming, you are gonna need to go where the money is.
Unless a new RTS title is released in the meantime that is good enough for competitive gaming, there will be no more RTS games played professionally.
Hopefully, some other developer makes a better RTS.
I'd hate to think that the game industry lacks creativity to such an extent that the only RTS for another decade is SC2. Seriously...
On May 26 2014 00:59 urboss wrote: Professional gaming will most certainly persist. If it will be professional gaming with RTS games is another question.
How is the SC2 scene going to look like 5-10 years from now? Will Blizzard continue to push money into e-sports? Their 10-year experiment in e-sports with SC2 will most likely end.
If you want to stay a professional gamer, that is if you want to earn a living from gaming, you are gonna need to go where the money is.
Unless a new RTS title is released in the meantime that is good enough for competitive gaming, there will be no more RTS games played professionally.
Hopefully, some other developer makes a better RTS.
I'd hate to think that the game industry lacks creativity to such an extent that the only RTS for another decade is SC2. Seriously...
i think lots of other RTS games will be made and released. will they have the scale of viewers and players to warrant its players being full time pros as we've seen in other games?
i doubt it very much.
i think SC2 and WC3 are the final 2 RTS games to have a pro scene of any significance.
On May 26 2014 00:59 urboss wrote: Professional gaming will most certainly persist. If it will be professional gaming with RTS games is another question.
How is the SC2 scene going to look like 5-10 years from now? Will Blizzard continue to push money into e-sports? Their 10-year experiment in e-sports with SC2 will most likely end.
If you want to stay a professional gamer, that is if you want to earn a living from gaming, you are gonna need to go where the money is.
Unless a new RTS title is released in the meantime that is good enough for competitive gaming, there will be no more RTS games played professionally.
Hopefully, some other developer makes a better RTS.
I'd hate to think that the game industry lacks creativity to such an extent that the only RTS for another decade is SC2. Seriously...
i think lots of other RTS games will be made and released. will they have the scale of viewers and players to warrant its players being full time pros as we've seen in other games?
i doubt it very much.
i think SC2 and WC3 are the final 2 RTS games to have a pro scene of any significance.
I don't think so. If people can play MOBAs, FPS, Fighting and Sports Games, etc. etc. professionally, then I'm fairly certain that there will be a market for professional RTS. It's still the very highest level of skill and speed represented in PC gaming. Perhaps, when things move away from mouse and keyboard, many of our beloved genres will become fossils. Everything will just be first-person (X).
On May 26 2014 00:56 dUTtrOACh wrote: I figured MOBAs typically have something of a "building" phase too, under normal circumstances. Usually, for the first couple of minutes there isn't any real aggression and players have something of a Mexican standoff while they farm up their first few levels. Sure, there's always the opportunity for an early gank or a mistake, but you can't push towers and win for at least another 10 or 15 minutes. That's why I feel the "instant action" ball is actually in RTS's court. You can decide very quickly whether or not you want a game to last long. MOBAs don't have that element. Since we use Starcraft as our base example for RTS, I will point out that it was Blizzard who made it harder / impossible to end a game early. It's not like RTS as a genre is entirely represented in Starcraft. There are many things that could be done to make it a more exciting game and a little more variety of builds and compositions is really all the game needs to stay entertaining.
Casual players are nice, but they come and go.
MOBAs are cute, but they are nothing more than the offspring of an RTS engine masquerading as a different genre to RTS because they lack the strategic depth to be called RTS. In short, they deliver the feel of RTS gameplay, while taking all of the work and strategy out of actually playing. Instead, the focus of a MOBA game is to have enemies at the end of your sword at all times. I find it boring that most of the time they're just mindless creeps. To me the genre that lacks staying power is actually the MOBA, because they kinda bubbled up and were born of RTS.
MOBAs have a tendency of being free games; free games have inflated player-bases that don't represent the actual quality of the game. People will download and play it even if it's a shit game just to find out. The same isn't true for things that cost money; people will probably put more effort into finding reasons not to spend the money. I wouldn't waste my energy comparing the popularity of something given for free to something that costs about $60-$100. The free game will usually be more played, but it will also have the flakiest fans and a certain "traffic" of casual players just moving through seeing what the hype is about.
I moved through MOBAs for about 300 hours, and that was it. I got it. They're just as much about intrinsic game knowledge as RTS, if not more so. I found the energy I spent on each match was substantially less than a game of Starcraft (the MOBA matches also last 2-3 times as long). Also, the worst thing about them is having to rely on others to not fuck you over; that isn't as much of an issue in Starcraft since the competitive emphasis is on 1v1. If you choose to play teamgames in Starcraft, you're opening up the possibility of having to play 200 supply vs 800 supply. That's about it. I don't expect MOBA to replace RTS for these reasons. I don't even think they should be used as a comparison or benchmark of Starcraft or RTS's popularity.
Strategically, MOBAs *do* have the same "build up" before engaging actual targets phase. But what most people are talking about is the perception of a noob playing said game.
The build up stage of an RTS is the sequencing of income distribution with tech tree advancement while being limited by logistical necessities such as supply, scouting, and troop/worker production. All of which has to be managed in a specific way in order to transition into a proper midgame/timing attack. MOBAs on the other hand have you fighting low level minions for a while, until you level up and fight low level players, until you level up and fight high level players. The action is that even in the beginning of the game you can "fight things" even if those things have no real strategic value other than as a gold source. I mean, yeah, last hitting is a skill set and top players can differentiate each other based on proper last hitting tactics. But the thing people mean by immediate action is you get to hit things early on without having to know much about the game. (Worker rushing is not generally suggested in an RTS game)
On May 26 2014 00:59 urboss wrote: Professional gaming will most certainly persist. If it will be professional gaming with RTS games is another question.
How is the SC2 scene going to look like 5-10 years from now? Will Blizzard continue to push money into e-sports? Their 10-year experiment in e-sports with SC2 will most likely end.
If you want to stay a professional gamer, that is if you want to earn a living from gaming, you are gonna need to go where the money is.
Unless a new RTS title is released in the meantime that is good enough for competitive gaming, there will be no more RTS games played professionally.
Hopefully, some other developer makes a better RTS.
I'd hate to think that the game industry lacks creativity to such an extent that the only RTS for another decade is SC2. Seriously...
i think lots of other RTS games will be made and released. will they have the scale of viewers and players to warrant its players being full time pros as we've seen in other games?
i doubt it very much.
i think SC2 and WC3 are the final 2 RTS games to have a pro scene of any significance.
I don't think so. If people can play MOBAs, FPS, Fighting and Sports Games, etc. etc. professionally, then I'm fairly certain that there will be a market for professional RTS. It's still the very highest level of skill and speed represented in PC gaming. Perhaps, when things move away from mouse and keyboard, many of our beloved genres will become fossils. Everything will just be first-person (X).
i hope i'm wrong... i hope all 26,000 people at Blizzcon are hardcore RTS fans and they blow the roof off of the Anaheim Convention Centre during hte WCS tournament.
On May 26 2014 00:59 urboss wrote: Professional gaming will most certainly persist. If it will be professional gaming with RTS games is another question.
How is the SC2 scene going to look like 5-10 years from now? Will Blizzard continue to push money into e-sports? Their 10-year experiment in e-sports with SC2 will most likely end.
If you want to stay a professional gamer, that is if you want to earn a living from gaming, you are gonna need to go where the money is.
Unless a new RTS title is released in the meantime that is good enough for competitive gaming, there will be no more RTS games played professionally.
Hopefully, some other developer makes a better RTS.
I'd hate to think that the game industry lacks creativity to such an extent that the only RTS for another decade is SC2. Seriously...
i think lots of other RTS games will be made and released. will they have the scale of viewers and players to warrant its players being full time pros as we've seen in other games?
i doubt it very much.
i think SC2 and WC3 are the final 2 RTS games to have a pro scene of any significance.
I don't think so. If people can play MOBAs, FPS, Fighting and Sports Games, etc. etc. professionally, then I'm fairly certain that there will be a market for professional RTS. It's still the very highest level of skill and speed represented in PC gaming. Perhaps, when things move away from mouse and keyboard, many of our beloved genres will become fossils. Everything will just be first-person (X).
i hope i'm wrong... i hope all 26,000 people at Blizzcon are hardcore RTS fans and they blow the roof off of the Anaheim Convention Centre during hte WCS tournament.
Even if they're not hardcore RTS fans, they're hardcore enough into Blizzard products that, from a developer standpoint, it is better than being into a specific genre. Personally, I have a similar hope, that they're all at Blizzcon for the love of RTS. From what I've seen of Hearthstone, D3, Heroes & WoW, I would be at Blizzcon for the RTS alone and the fanfare as a plus (I'm talking the gamer girls).
On May 26 2014 00:59 urboss wrote: Professional gaming will most certainly persist. If it will be professional gaming with RTS games is another question.
How is the SC2 scene going to look like 5-10 years from now? Will Blizzard continue to push money into e-sports? Their 10-year experiment in e-sports with SC2 will most likely end.
If you want to stay a professional gamer, that is if you want to earn a living from gaming, you are gonna need to go where the money is.
Unless a new RTS title is released in the meantime that is good enough for competitive gaming, there will be no more RTS games played professionally.
Hopefully, some other developer makes a better RTS.
I'd hate to think that the game industry lacks creativity to such an extent that the only RTS for another decade is SC2. Seriously...
i think lots of other RTS games will be made and released. will they have the scale of viewers and players to warrant its players being full time pros as we've seen in other games?
i doubt it very much.
i think SC2 and WC3 are the final 2 RTS games to have a pro scene of any significance.
I don't think so. If people can play MOBAs, FPS, Fighting and Sports Games, etc. etc. professionally, then I'm fairly certain that there will be a market for professional RTS.
There used to be a big market for professional twitch-shooters and look what happened to that genre. Sadly any pro-scene is driven by money and for that you need popularity. Since RTS games failed to transition to consoles or adapt to free2play model there is no obvious way to make them more appealing.
EPT
