The Curious Case of soO's Macro Mechanics - Page 17

On August 05 2015 01:37 Big J wrote:


That's of course a valid concern. I don't believe the game would be "too easy" or something, but it would definitely change a bit. Though less than people pretend. There is neither infinitely more to do that you could spend the extra attention on, nor are the macro mechanics that taxing - assuming you learned the right tricks like backspace inject-cycles - that professionals would suddenly play that much better due to that change. From a gameplay perspective I think this change gets more and more subtle (as this article shows, the difference is very subtle if even adressable towards soO's great injects at all) the higher you get. While a missed inject or 200stored energy on your CC are probably some of the bigger reasons why people lose games, aka "learn to macro".

On August 05 2015 01:53 PulcoAgrumes wrote:
What about dividing the gameplay based on the race?

If you play Zerg, mechanics are favored against strategy
If you play Protoss, strategy is more important than mechanics

It is already the case imo and maybe it just needs to be assumed like this.

On August 05 2015 03:15 mishimaBeef wrote:
Wow, rifkin said at The International, they have lightning effects go off in the crowd whenever Zeus, the lightning guy does his global ultimate spell!

Now that's epic!

On August 04 2015 23:52 weikor wrote:
noones asking to remove the running from soccer, this is just a heavily biased article that picks away at quotes with arguments that dont even make sense at times. Ill give you some examples of doing the same thing.

I actually thought about this exact parallel with soccer. Only I realized that it is flawed. Because you just can't remove running from soccer. The game would not make sense. Like would you not be allowed to run faster than X km/h, or you would have to stay completely still? Anyway, the point is that all the other rules of the game would not make sense if you "removed" running. You would have to change literally every rule for that to work, and it would probably end up as a board game or something .
The thing with StarCraft is that you can change the macro mechanics (notice I did not write "remove," although I think you could remove most of the macro aspects) and the game would still make sense. It would be different, depending on the magnitude of the changes, but it would still work.

On August 05 2015 03:26 Heat_023 wrote:

Nony's argument wasn't not a reduction to absurdity, it was an analogy or even merely an image, and therefore it does not rely on the statement "you should remove running from soccer" to actually be held true by anybody.


On top of being an analogy, Nony's point is an abstract one, he's not drawing a parallel between 'running in soccer' and 'macro in starcraft' because they are the same thing, but because they share some characteristics :
- they are somewhat separate from strategy and tactics, although they feed into those
- they require repetition training since they heavily involve muscle memory
- to most people they are not fun in themselves
- instead of involving decisions, they are mostly quantitative, it's a matter of being faster, more precise, more endurant etc., there's no two ways about it

In short, 'running in soccer' and 'macro in SC2' represent the crude physical components of their respective games, and the more rewarding and the more relevant this component is in a game, the more a player can count on the effectiveness of going for this material advantage. In a game like chess, truly materialistic advantage doesn't exist as you can only gain "material advantage" through tactics and strategies, you can't flex your muscles to generate an additional pawn, for example.

However, in soccer as in starcraft, you may theorycraft as much as you want with your Os and your Xs on a drawing board, you may know the perfect ideal answer to every situation, you are going no where if your opponent has you beat in the material department, if you're not competing in terms of execution.

To me the debate is between people who like to win by going for the raw material advantage and more cerebral people who like games won by mind blowing strategical moves and decision-making.

I like to think that SC2 has both and should keep having both­.

On July 09 2015 01:02 Liquid`Ret wrote:
It's the macro mechanics that speed up the game immensely. Which it why it feels much more fast-paced and if you disregard the aspect of how hard it was to control your shit properly in BW mechanically, it's actually a harder game because you make decisions much faster and there is 0 room for error.

On August 05 2015 03:14 LSN wrote:
You should at least agree on that high mechanical demands is something that holds alot of players back from playing Sc2 and not the other way round. Cause that is common sense. Therefore it is an entry barrier.

You can go and research yourself why coh or the companies behind it don't have the means or will to push it further e.g. with big tournaments and what other reasons there are in the game itself for why it is not as successful.

Sc2 and blizzard has everything that is needed. It is in one league with other tripple A multiplayer games like CS or Dota so that I would rather search to compare it with these games.

On August 05 2015 04:12 bITt.mAN wrote:
Chronoboost drops off in utility as the game progresses. The effort/attention cost of casting it starts to outweight the benefits. Once you're far enough in the game (e.g. all upgrades done) it's a fair trade to chose "doing other things", since "doing macro mechanics" wouldn't give you as much benefit.

Mules keep a pretty constant utility, maybe even increasing once you get many OC's. Since Mules can stack, it seems that using them gets EASIER as the game progresses, since you can be busy "dong other things", come back for a second to do 6x"macro mechanics" then move on.

Creep spread only ever gets harder, due to more surface area. There will never be a point in the game where a ready supply of larva isn't essential. Larva injection is always crucial, but worst of al, its difficulty scales (6 hatches are much harder to inject than 2). I don't think its fair, and its certainly grind-y as hell, to have to always inject into the lategame, especially when that's when you want to be doing just about everything else.


So, I think they should change injects, so that their difficulty or "effort required" stops scaling at some point. I think the best way to cap this difficulty would be to make "Autocast Inject Larva" upgradable at Hive tier, for a fair amount of money.

Where: You could get it from the Hive itself, or, if Blizzard really want you to use some obscure spell-caster, they could give the upgrade from that unit's building instead. Having it auto-cast outright would make it too easy. Putting it near the end of the game caps the added effort, but doesn't give everyone a cop-out at the earlier stages.

Cost: I'm thinking 500/500. If you're really pro and really dying, you can forgo it and just inject manually. But, if you can't spend all your money fast enough already, why not be allowed to purchase "Zerg Macro - Easy Mode Upgrade"? It's important to give it a cost as a dis-incentive. I for one would always research it, because I'm sick of being at risk of dying simply because I didn't perfectly hit my timings.


Or you could even make it researchable AND upgradable, where you'd have to pay extra to morph specific queens into "Hive Queen"s with auto-inject, and a different look (adding an extra harassment priority) but otherwise identical stats as normal queens.

On August 05 2015 04:05 nTzzzz wrote:


I think everyone understands the analogy, you don't need to explain it.

The reason that analogy has no value is you couldn't remove running from soccer even if you wanted to. Therefore the fact that it is still a part of soccer (despite not being a strategic element) doesn't give us any insight about whether we should keep macro mechanics or not.

On top of that, soccer isn't primarily labeled as a strategy game so it only makes sense that it would include a lot of non strategic elements. The fact that Starcraft is 90% mechanics and 10% strategy is a bit more worrisome.

On August 05 2015 04:46 Dazed_Spy wrote:
The nature of an RTS is an intellectually and physically challenging game, thats what draws people away from the genre. Like, for fuck sakes, people are condemning MULTITASKING now as a thing thats dooming the game. Does this have to be spelt out? RTS is a niche genre, it appeals to a small demographic. To the degree you move the game away from that niche demographic, is the degree to which you lose players. Because there isnt a demographic sitting out there that would "really like rts if only it was as easy to pick up as cod". Its moronic to suggest there is, and pointless too. If you personally dont like RTS' macro and multitasking functions, you dont like the game, so be gone. If you do, on the other hand, your potentially (lets be honest: certainly) supporting something that destroys a game you do like, for nothing.

This also is the wrong question, the right question would be "is this more fun for the group of people we actually wanna reach"
"More fun" is a concept which loses its meaning completely if we don't define the target group.

I would much rather play a game where both styles are viable and ewach person can decide if they wanna be a 'macro player' or a 'micro player' or anything in between.

IMO games are at its best when developers know perfectly which group of people they wanna reach with it, the more you 'play safe' (hey there is something in it for anybody!) the more the actual quality of the game suffers. (there are exceptions, but imo they are rare and thus shouldn't be considered in most cases)

On August 05 2015 05:16 Heat_023 wrote:

Despite what you say, you are misconstruing Nony's analogy (and other people too) when you argue as if he meant : "soccer has it, starcraft should have it too". He's not saying that at all. The analogy is here to say : macro mechanics is the "sport" element in starcraft. By underlining this, he's framing the debate between pure gamers who want SC2 to look more like a game like chess and other gamers who appreciate the sport/game hybrid nature of SC2. He then argues that SC2's identity as an e-sports, according to him, is exactly that sports component.

Now you can disagree with his conclusion, but you can't throw away what he says by objecting to his analogy the way that you did it, because the fact that you couldn't possibly remove running from soccer is irrelevant to what Nony meant to say.

On August 04 2015 23:41 NonY wrote:
Do you want to remove the running from soccer? Is it unfair that only people with time to extensively train their bodies to be able to run get to enjoy soccer at a competitive level? Why not let people only train ball skills and teamwork, which are the fun parts of soccer, and remove all the running?