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On July 11 2014 21:25 Laertes wrote:Show nested quote +On July 11 2014 08:28 VArsovskiSC wrote:I don't like Starbow much.. It relies on Broodwar.. HotS could be a lot better if all of it's new units had a clear idea/design in the purpose/concept behind (some do, but others don't hence why we don't love it as much as we could).. However - the real reason I wanted to write on this thread is - I was SO hoping the VOD would have English CC translations of this  This isn't true. Itwhospeaks the lead designer for OneGoal literally gave up saying "this mess of a game is unworkable". They couldn't do anything with it, it just didn't have a solid foundation.
I don't agree with this, and I dislike the idea of putting someone who "failed" to make a succesful mod's as an authority on the design-field.
Instead, let's actually look at some of the ways OG tried to deal with the bigger isues of Starcraft 2, mainly mech, warptech, Collosus and Swarm Hoost (long post incoming, but this is a neccesity in order to get rid of the notion that Sc2 is "fundamentally" unsound).
@ Mech
OG buffed the Siege Tank and nerfed the hellion/hellbat. This is good if you want more turtly gameplay and less harass, Unfortunately, most of us doesn't like that.
@Collosus
It seemed to me that Onegoal thought they could replicate the Reaver by making the Collosus slower and attack slower, but that totally missed the point of why the Reaver worked. The Reaver worked becasue it had synergy with the Warp-prism which added a ton of micro to the unit.
But by making the Collosus slower while maintaing AA vulnerability your litterraly making it less microable and more deathbally. There exists two types of solutions to the Collosus: 1) Either you create a synergy with it and the Warp Prism or 2) you make it a unit which can go out on the map and do some harass for itsef and synergize with the Stalker in that proces.
@Warptech
I believe that this can be a better mechanic if the battle army strenght of the warptech units are nerfed and instead Robo-tech becomoes more accessible. This gives warptech units more of a supplementary/harass oriented role than the Robo-units. Robo units will then be easier "massable", and thus take up a larger portion of the army which will will increase the defenders advantage of the game and make protoss less rely on "gimmicks".
What did Onegoal do? The exact opposite. They buffed warptech units, put Immortal at warptech and slowed down warptech production speed. By slowing down warptech production by X%, and buffing warptech units strenght by X% as well, the strenght of the all in will roughly be the same, however, late-game protoss deathball turtling is a ton stronger.
Why on earth not just make the Robo-tech the core production facility instead? That seems a ton easier and more effective.
@Forcefields
Further, it seemed Onegoal had difficulties in fixing the issue with Forcefields and moved Sentry to Robo and Immortal to Gateway, and had to put in various new spells to compensate for the lack of Forcefield.
My bet is that the gameplay suffers a ton becasue protoss will never be able to move out against someone going Hydra/ling without a reliable strong microable spell (I am not 100% sure of this, but it seems like a very unsound way of attempting to balance the game). Regardless, protoss has to relearn the whole game and I don't think the solution is very intutive.
Here is a much simpler solution: Focus the Sentry around Guardian Shield instead of Forcefields, by making GS reduce damage from meele and ranged attack by 40-50% damage while reducing the radius of Guardna Shield and increasing the movement speed of Sentries. This way, protoss doesn't rely on Forcefields to surive but Guardian Shield which actually rewards countermicro rather than preventing it (as you can focus fire Sentry). A whole new interesting dynamic could have been created there, and is just one example of lots of opportunities that exists in Sc2.
Forcefields can then be nerfed signifciantly or entirely removed and compensated with something else.
@Hydra/Roach
Check out what Onegoal writes:
Part of the issue with the roach is how hard its counters are, and how there is little choice for an alternative to reduce the effects of these counters. Immortals and marauders are readily available on two-base, but the Hydralisk is an ineffective, anti-micro unit in its WoL form.
If anyone didn't know better, then they would have thought Roaches were useless in early/midgame after reading this since the other races have early access to "hardcounters". However, that totally ignores why Immortals, and Maurauders (and tanks) are easily accessible --> Because zerg production is incredibly fast. In this phase of the game, zerg simply has more stuff then their enemies. The only "hardcounter" to Roaches is turtling untill your maxed. In the early/midgame, however, the Roach is incredibly strong.
Then they write:
So, we’ve edited hydralisks to enable micro (their spines launch earlier in the attack animation and the delay between attacks is higher with damage increased to compensate, allowing for kiting and basic stutter-stepping). We’ve reduced their health, given them medium armor class so they are soft countered but not hard countered, and redefine the role of the roach from the stable 1.5 to more specialized unit.
At 1 supply, the Hydralisk offers more degrees of success for both players: instead of having to kill an entire roach before it ceases dealing damage, you can kill or save a much flimsier Hydralisk twice as often, allowing the game state to more equally reflect the player skill.
The part I highlighted here is just nonsense. Does the game reflects skills more when we replace a unit that has lots of health and lows DPS with a unit that has less health and more DPS?
If you wanna have a tier 1 unit at 1 supply that can kite well, why not just give those attributes to the Roach? There is no unique reason for why the Hydralisks is a bitter fit. Rather, this seems to be a huge change to the gameplay that is only likely to result in huge balance problems without actually making the game better in any actual way.
@Swarm Hosts
I would argue that the issue with this unit relative to the Lurker is that it's effective range is too long (Locusts can go like 30 range away from the Swarm Host) while it is too bad at closer distances. That creates the whole dynamic of defensive Swarm Hosts where you just sit back with them and opponent can never attack into them. Further, Swarm Hosts are almost never actually used offensively.
Let's look at what variables Onegoal team tweaked;
Swarm Host
-Total cost reduced to 150/75 from 200/100. (Morphed from Hydralisk)
-Supply reduced to 2 from 3.
-Health reduced to 120 from 160.
-Morph time is 20 Seconds.
-HP reduced to 140 from 160.
-New Upgrade: Potent Broods (Adds an additional Locust to each spawn.)
Locust:
Passive: Accelerating Biomass: Locusts attack (20%) and move (40%) faster on creep.
-Attack damage reduced to 10 from 12.
-Reduced HP to 60 from 75.
-Enduring Locusts upgrade removed.
-Locust attack speed decreased to 1.25.
They made Locusts better off-creep thus making them even worse offensively while even more impossible to ever actually attack into. It seems to me that Onegoal team has a misunderstanding of how the defenders advantage ideally works. Ideally, you have a defenders mechanicsm that doens't prevent battles from occuring, but let's the defender have an advantage during the engagement. Lurkers do that, Reavers do that and Siege Tanks as well.
Lurkers are good even when your close to them. Swarm Hosts, however are designed in such a way that you can never get close to them, but when you do, they are really really bad.
How do you fix the Swarm Host? Here is my approach: You give it a an effective range that outranges Tanks in tank-mode but not Siege Tanks and instead balances the Swarm Host around that range. That bascially measn the Swarm Host can be extremely cost-effective in close engagements. But a tank-player can actually attack into it without critical mass (as long as he sieges up well).
Now, this isn't a criticism of Onegoal's lack of creativity, however it's more a criticism of the lack of attention to rewarding more harass and smaller micro-engagements (and instead disencouraging it in some ways) while not spending the proper amount of time understanding why the more popular units in BW (lurker, reaver) were microintensive and fun to play against compared to their Sc2 counterparts.
But it doesn't help ofc when the leaddesignteamer had a huge bias in favor of units that are good "lore"-wise instead of whether they are fun or not.
And the whole lack of selfcriticism didn't hurt as well. Say what you want about Kabel (Starbow-lead designer), however he was brutally honest about which parts of Starbow he didn't like and was willing to change his beliefs. Itwhospeaks on the other said that the (terrible) showmatch between Harstem and Goswer was really fun. When I told him I thought mech was boring to play TvP becasue you couldn't harass at all, his response was like "Well that's just how it is" and thus implied he wasn't interested in trying to make mech harass-stronger.
Today, it seems he admits that the mod wasn't fun, but when you underway have showed such a high level of bias, it is IMO no wonder Onegoal never succeded (and here I am thinking gamequality wise, not popularitywise).
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Northern Ireland26532 Posts
Much love to whoever transcribed this, wish we saw more of Suzie at events too she has a palpable passion for the game which is great.
I don't know how one does it, but make the other races function more like Terran in terms of mechanical difficulty, especially the micro and you go a way to raising the skill floor quite a bit. Don't read this as a whine at the other races, I'm talking for the fun of watching as a spectator.
Protoss players and Zerg players can micro like gods when they need to, especially in PvP and ZvZ early game. The benefit they get from micro just scales noticeably badly as their armies grow bigger
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On July 11 2014 22:50 Laertes wrote:
@hider
Obviously I can't argue with such a solid post, it's airtight. The one thing I will say is that Itwhospeaks probably didn't enjoy working on OneGoal very much. If you were the lead designer of OneGoal maybe things would have gone differently,
But it seems in hindsight that their heart wasn't in it so maybe you are right. I still don't think hots could ever have worked, it's just not the RTS that people need. It doesn't hit that sweet spot for a lot
Of fans.
To be fair, I used the word "in retrorespect" becasue 1-1½ year ago I couldn't really specificy the design issues of OG/come up with good suggestions, but it just felt boring to play. But that was my first experience with game-design and since then I have learned a lot, and now it's so obvious in so many ways why it never really felt fun.
But again, the reason I made this post was simply becasue I don't like the lack of selfresponsibility. Your mod wasn't fun to play, despite you being willing to make huge changes (like switching Hydras --> Roaches, Immortal at gateway etc.) and yet you still have the courage to blame Blizzard on Sc2 being bad.... That's just such a bad attitude in my opinion and I don't like it being shared on TL. As much as we all think David Kim isn't good enough, he still knows a ton more than the average Starcraft fan.
Kabel on the other hand wasn't shy to admit he wasn't a good enough game-designer and thus took resposnbiliity for Starbow not being fun due to his own lack of skill (though I know a lot of people disagrees with that).
When I digged into the SC2-editor I found countless opportunies in the game and in my opinion there is an extremely good creative foundation from the developers of SC2, but.... a lot of the actual numbers of the stats variables are poorly decided upon. Thus, I feel like an sc2-based mod has a lot more potential than a BW/SBOW mod as the latter tbh feels more restricited in what you can do. Let me give a few examples thereof:
The bio issue in Starbow/BW vs mech in Sc2
Making bio viable in a "fun way" is really complicated in Starbow. Siege tanks and Reavers absolutely hardcounter Marines and the way the current dev-team of Starbow is trying to "fix" this is by giving the Ghost a hardcounter spell against Siege Tanks and Reavers, which IMO isn't gonna create fun gameplay.
In sc2, however, I don't believe that it's actually challenging to make TvP mech fun to play. Just remove hardened shield and compensate Immortal in a different way.
To make it fun = Buff harass by focussing on the Hellbat/hellion harass efifciency vs core protoss units. For TvZ, the matchup will also benefit from stronger Hellion/hellbat harass, and that means tanks can actually be nerfed!!! Yes, the desired way to get rid of turtlemech, and give mech more aggresisve options isn't through imbalanced Tanks, but through decent tanks and "imbalanced" Hellion/hellbats
Swarm Hosts can then be given a more Lurker'ish role instead. Thors + Vikings should be able to deal better with Mutalisks, Raven PDD gets redeisgned/nerfed and suddenly Mech and Zerg can actually have an interesting battle that doesn't rely on lame stuff like Swarm Hosts and PDD's. Can Tanks be 2 supply? Yes, it can, but only if Roaches (and other core protoss/zerg) units gets a supply reduction as well.
It's true you cannot make Tanks viable vs bling/Mutas, but with the new Swarm Hosts, Sc2 can actually replciate the lurker ling vs bio + tank gameplay from BW.
Making harass-based stronger for mech in Sbow TvZ
Another example: Vultures have 4 damages more damage to shield, which makes them capable of taking out Cannons. Further, Mines are good vs Dragoons becasue Dragoons shoots slow. This makes Vulture harass good vs toss. However, vs zerg, offensive Mines sucks vs Hydras and Spines hardcounters Vultures. How on earth do you encourage harassbased mech play without getting rid of the full damage to shield for all terran mech units? That just seems like such a complicated situation. Sc2 on the other hand has rightly decided not to go for full damage against shield, which means it doens't have a fundamental assymetry here.
Zerg early game vulnerability in Starbow/BW
Starbow has tried multiple things, but zerg is really vulnerable in this phase of the game - everything just escalates/snowballs so easily. Then various units needs to be nerfed which makes them useless/bad in the other matchups.
In Sc2, however, no race has this extreme vulnerable early game issue, which IMO gives devs more room for creativity in Sc2 than in Starbow/BW
Mech battle micro
Tbh, each time I play mech in Starbow I just feel like it lacks a ton of battle-micro. The optimal strategy seems to be turtlebased, and then it's just about making good decisions instead of having good unit control/mechanics.
But an Sc2-based mod can solve that if the game was balanced around fast switching back and fourth between the various modes of Vikings, Thors, Hellion/hellbats/Siege Tanks/Widow Mines. And then ofcourse the Medivac is always there to create a lot of synergy for drop-based play or pickup micro.
Protoss early game air harass vs terran
In Starbow, I think every terran just hates playing against a Sentinel opening as it just mean you cannot move out but have to turtle. Sentinel prevents Vultures from harassing and makes dropship play kinda bad. As bad as the deisgn of the Oracle is, a protoss ATG air-unit actually fits into Sc2. Why? Because you can harass with Medivacs + Marines or Widow Mines against an Oracle opening in Sc2.
Starbow terran simply isn't fundamentally set up to make TvP interesting against a Sentinel opening, and there is no easy fix here.
So I simply do not buy the whole SC2 is more unsound than Starbow. I think the contrary is more true. The only advantage Starbow has is the econ. You have some people like Lalush argue that econ is basically everything, but I disagree with that statement. I think it's one of many variables which impacts the gameplay, but even the effect of the econ is actually possible to replicate into an Sc2-based mod (though it's kinda complicated - thus I won't spend time in this post to discuss how that can be done).
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The last episode was very good. Someone should translate it; it's too good to not share with the rest of you. It's almost a two hour discussion about what went wrong with the SC2 launch in Korea. Various sub topics were discussed to include both internal and external factors. One of the failures was the never-ending comparison of the game with BW, when in fact SC2 is nothing like BW. I also found it very surprising that most Koreans, including casual gamers, casters and progamers alike, found the game to be "too hard" to play, which ended up increasing the negative perception of the game even more.
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On July 25 2014 11:57 jellyjello wrote:
The last episode was very good. Someone should translate it; it's too good to not share with the rest of you. It's almost a two hour discussion about what went wrong with the SC2 launch in Korea. Various sub topics were discussed to include both internal and external factors. One of the failures was the never-ending comparison of the game with BW, when in fact SC2 is nothing like BW. I also found it very surprising that most Koreans, including casual gamers, casters and progamers alike, found the game to be "too hard" to play, which ended up increasing the negative perception of the game even more.
Do they talk about what they want/expect from LotV in terms of 'external' factors?
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On July 25 2014 12:09 ZAiNs wrote:Show nested quote +On July 25 2014 11:57 jellyjello wrote:
The last episode was very good. Someone should translate it; it's too good to not share with the rest of you. It's almost a two hour discussion about what went wrong with the SC2 launch in Korea. Various sub topics were discussed to include both internal and external factors. One of the failures was the never-ending comparison of the game with BW, when in fact SC2 is nothing like BW. I also found it very surprising that most Koreans, including casual gamers, casters and progamers alike, found the game to be "too hard" to play, which ended up increasing the negative perception of the game even more. Do they talk about what they want/expect from LotV in terms of 'external' factors?
That will be discussed in the next show.
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On July 12 2014 00:07 Hider wrote:
The bio issue in Starbow/BW vs mech in Sc2
Making bio viable in a "fun way" is really complicated in Starbow. Siege tanks and Reavers absolutely hardcounter Marines and the way the current dev-team of Starbow is trying to "fix" this is by giving the Ghost a hardcounter spell against Siege Tanks and Reavers, which IMO isn't gonna create fun gameplay.
In sc2, however, I don't believe that it's actually challenging to make TvP mech fun to play. Just remove hardened shield and compensate Immortal in a different way.
I'm a Starcraft 2 spectator and not a player, but your post made me wonder if it would make sense for the Immortal's hardened shield to have an "upper limit?"
Currently, the way hardened shield works is that it reduces all high-damage attacks down to 10, but what if hardened shield was set up such that the rules were that its active range was, say, 10-30 damage?
I don't know what exact numbers would work, but this would give units like the Siege Tank and the Ultralisk the ability to attack the Immortal more efficiently without having to create all these weird exceptions like "Siege Tank should do bonus damage to shields!" but potentially still maintaining the role of the Immortal as being able to tank a lot of hits and demolish lower-tier units like the Roach, and it still has the bonus damage to armored which means that it would still fight Ultras and Tanks pretty effectively. Also, depending on where the upper limit is, this could influence the race for upgrades.
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Does someone have the link to the OGN channel where the English subtitled broadcast will be available at?
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EPT
