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On August 25 2015 03:03 NonY wrote:Show nested quote +On August 25 2015 02:34 Ensiferum8 wrote:On August 25 2015 02:29 gillon wrote:On August 25 2015 01:20 Tenks wrote:
The DDR analogy is perfect. Macro mechanics don't show how good you are at the game it just shows how much you've played it. What does that even mean. How is having good macro NOT being good at the game? because qxc's macro is bad, so for him, only micro and strategy is what you need to be qualified a good player. But of course, if something in which he was really good was made way easier, he would complain much more. Hes just bias Even if you're correctly classifying qxc's playstyle, I think a selfish competitive player with that style would want obvious macro tasks to stay in the game because they're the lowest hanging fruit for improving win rate. If he loses games because he spends too much time trying to harass with 10 reapers at the 30 minute mark, then I think that's a rather easy adjustment to make in order to turn losses into wins. You can argue that people who have mastered a skill want it to stay in because their mastery of it wins them games. You can argue that people who are bad at a skill want it to stay in the game because it's the lowest hanging fruit. And that seems like a draw where you go nowhere. However, you can rate skills based on their complexity, with the macro mechanics currently being discussed being conspicuously NOT complex, as opposed to something like the skill of improvising timing attacks, which is really complex. So you put skills on a spectrum of complexity. If it is really complex, then the people who already mastered it would want it to stay relevant to competitive play. The less complex, the more it favors people who haven't taken advantage of it yet. So competitive players who currently suck at macro should actually want it more because they've already mastered the more complex parts of the game and it'd only take some disciplined practice of the basics to reach the next level of play. But the way a lot of top players approach the game isn't really competitive. Most pros don't behave in a way to maximize win rate. They have ways that they like to play the game and they limit themselves by these "stylistic" choices and then proceed to try to maximize the win rate of the handicapped form of themselves. If a micro and harass-oriented player watches a replay of a loss and sees a micro mistake that, if corrected, could have won the game, but also sees a macro mistake that could be corrected to win the game, they don't even stop to think which mistake is easier to more consistently correct and therefore result in a higher win rate overall, they just focus on the thing they want to focus on, micro. Once upon a time when I was good at StarCraft and was really hard pressed to figure out how to increase my win rate, when looking at a loss I always asked myself "what was the thing that is easiest to change to turn this loss into a win?" and worked on that. But other players have a vision of how to win games and they see losses as the result of not perfectly living up to what was envisioned. So there's no change in focus from a loss. Sometimes there isn't time to go back to the drawing board, like when you have a Proleague game coming up, so it's understandable. You've already made your plan and you're scrambling to execute it as well as possible by the deadline. But as a general rule there's widespread misbehavior by pros in their practice.
Thank you for your insight.
Part of how many pros create their best interesting new plays are based of macro though. sOs' crazy builds involve huge amounts of specific scouting and unusual building placement and saving this and that. His macro is immaculately controlled to a degree that I honestly do not see in most players, even in Code S. I don't see this at all in WCS. Fundamentally, I think macro is just not understood by most players, even by most professionals. Its a much more interesting and hard to master skill than micro and should stay in. It has wayy more repercussion than micro and "decision-making" (that ambiguous thing that lesser players believe they have better to assuage their egos).
Commonly in Code S, you hear the casters talk about how on point Soo's macro is. or Life's. Or Innovation or sOs. Guess what? Those are the most reliably top16 players.
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I really think people should stop making LoL/Moba comparisons... the games are really nothing alike nor are they moving closer together with these kind of changes.
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I agreed so much with you qxc.
Thanks to share your thought.
glhf♪
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lava inject was one of , if not the worst, mechanics of the game for me
it was such an artificial and unnecessary way to inflate macro reqs
- bw player who never 'played' sc2
- not sure about that grammar
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This is the first article on this side of the argument that has been explained well enough for me to appreciate the points made. I still think i prefer the original mechanics, but this definitely pushes me closer to the fence.
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SoCal8914 Posts
On August 25 2015 04:46 FFGenerations wrote:
lava inject was one of , if not the worst, mechanics of the game for me
it was such an artificial and unnecessary way to inflate macro reqs
- bw player who never 'played' sc2
- not sure about that grammar
it was definitely a construct imposed by blizzard on zergs as a way to keep their apm up so that they wouldn't just creep the entire map and infinitely have their eyes on their army. on the surface, people might argue, "well then why did they make injects autocast bc that's what blizz is promoting right now?"
yeah that might be true, now zerg does have a ton of attention to devote to their units. however keeping an eye on their army is even more of a necessity in the beta with the various levels of harassment and pressure that you can place on a zerg's attention and the reciprocation that's required from the zerg in order to stay relevant because there is less larva in the game for them at every point in the game after the first inject occurs.
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I don't know what game Qxc have been playing lately but what he wrote is not about SC2 post macro mechanics removal. Everything resumes to "who kills as many workers as fast as possible wins". No micro needed, no skill involved, only thing needed is to just suicide units in the opponent worker line, repeatedly.
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I love this quote.
I want Starcraft to be a game that is more about strategy, micro, map control and positioning rather than about performing the same repetitive actions perfectly in order to eke out the biggest army possible.
I didn't even realize I agreed with this until he said it; I appreciate amazing macro in games, but I watch SC2 for the micro and decision making a lot more. If this change pushes the players to work more on the latter aspect of LOTV, I'm on board.
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On August 25 2015 05:44 HomeWorld wrote:
I don't know what game Qxc have been playing lately but what he wrote is not about SC2 post macro mechanics removal. Everything resumes to "who kills as many workers as fast as possible wins". No micro needed, no skill involved, only thing needed is to just suicide units in the opponent worker line, repeatedly.
That's more a problem with the lack of defender's advantage coupled with the ridiculous strength of harassment rather than any relation to macro mechanics.
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While the economies increase a bit slower than before, the game doesn’t feel slower. There is just a heavier emphasis on harass and smaller squad movements rather than just big army on army fights.
I strongly disagree with this. Before I thought it felt maybe a little too hectic, but this is a huge swing in the other direction. While it all isn't like 6 worker downtime, getting up infrastructure takes so long (especially as terran) that the game feels like it's moving at a snail's pace thanks to the strength of harass and the necessity of getting so much defense for that harass. The pacing of Wings and HotS after getting up some workers feels much better than the slog that is legacy's early and mid game.
I don't want StarCraft's macro to become like Supreme Commander/Planetary Annihilation either. If I wanted to play that style of game, they're already there.
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I like the removal of macro mechanics, but I disagree with QXCs reasons completely. How does removing the ability to call-down a mule make terrans more aggressive and able to micro better? I just don't see the correlation. It not like larva inject which has to be done at very specific times or you can just die.
I love the removal of macro mechanics because it slows down the game, removes some of the ridiculous volatility, and weakens cheese builds. To me, Starcraft 2 is awesome to me because there is a certain logic to everything. These macro mechanics defied that logic and made the game too unpredictable.
No longer will terrans pull all their SCVs to kill their opponent, fail, and then still have the better economy off the backs of mules. No longer will terrans sacrifice all their SCVs late game for mass orbitals, so they can have 40 more army supply. No longer will a protoss build a bunch of gateways and walk across the map aggressively, then just walk back home and have an eco lead because all his chrono was going into probes. You won't scout a protoss expanding and then die to a stalker immediately after because you didn't see that all their chrono was going to their gateways. Blizzard's only mistake was not removing inject also.
These are by far the best reason for removing the macro mechanics in my opinion, not what QXC said. But now, apparently harass is too strong. So the next step is to change to the double mining economy model. Then this game might be saved.
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as a person whose favorite part of starcraft is macro, i can't say i really like the patch, but my opinion doesn't really matter since all i play is arcade these days. The removal of mules effects the game more than just economy. Mules can repair and be used to trigger tank fire in late game TvT. Also, chronoboost is no where near as significant as larvae inject and mules.
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I can't ever see how taking out macro element would help sc2 it would only hurt the core parts of the game. It's only going to make the game easier. Ask Flash how he would feel about removing macro? When alot of players are known for There solid macro. I don't think that change is one we need. First You need to Balance the Races. So much talk about Terran and Zerg. Why are we not addressing protoss equally. There is way to many changes going on at the same time So you can't expect the new expansion to be good. It would take a Long time... And they are just now Discussing these core elements? or the removal of them. It's Bizarre Blizzard.
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I think one of the biggest issues I have with the removal of 'Macro Mechanics' is that I don't agree that the 3 of them are really that similar to begin with.
Zerg injections were really a liability - It was rarely decision-based except at the very beginning (tumor vs inject). You either did it well and got all the larvae, or you missed some and got less.
Terran MULEs were actually a choice between abilities - You could MULE, scan, drop supply, or you could make a PF or not transform a CC at all. There was actually a fairly complex series of decisions and strategy here that even extended into the very late game when workers may have been replaced by MULEs. You could bank energy and use it later, so it wasn't the liability Zerg injects were.
Protoss Chronoboost was essentially a pure asset - It was decision based on what you would choose to accelerate, but there was no alternative choice, there's Chrono or nothing, the energy didn't do anything else. It also could be banked, like the Terran ability, you could save energy and Chrono 12 gates at once or something.
So Zerg is simply made 'easier', Terran is changed in a much, much more complex way, and for Protoss its a straight nerf with no decrease in difficulty or any alternative being introduced.
So while i'm not necessarily opposed to changing these mechanics, especially the zerg inject one, I do very much object to the concept that these 3 things be treated as 'Macro Mechanics' collectively.
They should be evaluated for nerfs, changes or removals completely separately, not as a blanket decision, because the impacts and role they play simply are not the same.
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This post seems like it's more talking about agreeing with Blizzard's high level goals for the patch than what the patch actually accomplished. Does anyone actually find Terran or Protoss macro any easier since the patch? It's pretty much the same difficulty wise. It's only Zerg that really benefited here in that it got its macro pretty much completely optimized automatically. I feel like it's super odd to talk about how great this patch is because it's making macro easier, when all it really did was create a massive asymmetry in the races where Zerg never gets punished for missing production rounds (which inject used to basically take the place of). Meanwhile Terran and Protoss gain nothing really except they lose key, but low apm tools that really have no relation to inject besides being labeled "macro mechanics."
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A famous pro once said "If you're not attacking, you're probably losing". This patch allows us to focus more on attacking.
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Really nice post. I strongly agree with qxc here. The whole debate reminds me of similar controversies in Street Fighter 4's release, where players worried that input shortcuts would "make the game too easy." Instead, the game turned out great, and the community now has swung the other way and is excited for the removal of 1-frame links.
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QXC i don't know why, but somehow i always agree with you 
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On August 25 2015 06:56 EnderSword wrote:
I think one of the biggest issues I have with the removal of 'Macro Mechanics' is that I don't agree that the 3 of them are really that similar to begin with.
True, but this is a difference between balance en game design, first you remove this, balance and tweaking comes later renember its a beta
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On August 24 2015 23:55 myRZeth wrote:
I DO want Starcraft to be a game about "who can make more stuff".
This is what Starcraft is to me. If I wanted more micro I could be playing Warcraft 3.
you are playing the wrong game dude
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EPT
