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On June 05 2016 01:41 Nazara wrote:
Being constantly concious about your approximate total worker count and being fast enough to toggle through your bases to queue new workers are both skills.
One is mental, one is mechanical.
Both have to be earned/learned.
Bringing up the constant "here's your worker count!" or an option to auto-build workers takes those skills away.
One of those skills is vastly more significant then the other (people would uproar if auto-build gone through).
But the fact is, both of those skills, and taking those away will always dumb down the game to a certain degree.
People already say that the game requires too much mechanics but there is not enough strategy. Knowing how many workers you have and need is a mental skill, and mental skills contribute to "strategy".
So why be against one of the changes, and not both?
I think Jack is not really against the worker counter per se. But he is probably worried that the game he loves because of its demanding nature, is getting casualized.
I feel like that's generalizing way too much. They may both require mental skills, but how they effect mental skill is vastly different. One is about "giving information to make decisions" while the other is "making the decision for you". Providing information so a player can make better judgement call in a given situation is what generally allows better strategy to develop.
But let's flip this argument around, "why be against one of the changes and not both?" If someone is against worker count, then why are you not against not showing resources & total/max population. That works exactly in the same vein as showing worker count (though more important). Not showing resources or total/max population would easily raise the supposed "strategic level" by a great significance if showing worker count has enough of an impact to lower it.
On a personal note: I don't really see the appeal of worker count seeing how the information is already given on town homes and gas stations, but if people really care. Ehh.
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If someone is against worker count, then why are you not against not showing resources & total/max population. One of those pushes the game to the verge of being almost unplayable by obfuscating the information (if you have no idea how much resources you have, in what ratio, or are you at 120/120 supply or 120/150), while the other is more like an addition that is not necessary to obtain the information you want in a reasonable amount of time (you can still quickly have a look at your 3 bases and estimate that you have 40 workers, or 20, or 70).
Personally I'm indifferent to worker counter being shown. I just wanted to point out that there is one downside of having it, however small and maybe insignificant for maybe 70% of the playerbase.
One is about "giving information to make decisions" while the other is "making the decision for you" I disagree. If it's a toggle, then nothing is making a decision for me - it was my decision to turn the auto-build on, and I can turn it off as I please.
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If I don't like the part of Blizzard, which came with WCS 2016 and Korean ban from international tournaments, I definitely like David Kim and the part of Blizzard around him!
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United Kingdom20326 Posts
People already say that the game requires too much mechanics but there is not enough strategy. Knowing how many workers you have and need is a mental skill, and mental skills contribute to "strategy".
The choice to check how many workers you have or what you're going to do based on how many workers you have is strategy
Requiring you to take 5-10 actions and do quick math to ballpark your worker count is not
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On June 05 2016 02:24 Nazara wrote:Show nested quote + If someone is against worker count, then why are you not against not showing resources & total/max population. One of those pushes the game to the verge of being almost unplayable by obfuscating the information (if you have no idea how much resources you have, in what ratio, or are you at 120/120 supply or 120/150), while the other is more like an addition that is not necessary to obtain the information you want in a reasonable amount of time (you can still quickly have a look at your 3 bases and estimate that you have 40 workers, or 20, or 70). Personally I'm indifferent to worker counter being shown. I just wanted to point out that there is one downside of having it, however small and maybe insignificant for maybe 70% of the playerbase. Show nested quote +One is about "giving information to make decisions" while the other is "making the decision for you" I disagree. If it's a toggle, then nothing is making a decision for me - it was my decision to turn the auto-build on, and I can turn it off as I please.
And yet that's missing the point of the argument. I'm not arguing that worker count is needed. I'm just arguing that the argument you placed against it is weak and generalizes way too much. For example, I'm now going to use your argument against worker count, to argue against resources & total/max population (because what you said there basically hold true in this situation as well).
Being constantly concious about your approximate resources & total population and being fast enough to toggle through your bases to queue new workers are both skills. One is mental, one is mechanical. Both have to be earned/learned.
Bringing up the constant "here's your resources & total population!" or an option to auto-build workers takes those skills away.
One of those skills is vastly more significant then the other. But the fact is, both of those skills, and taking those away will always dumb down the game to a certain degree.
People already say that the game requires too much mechanics but there is not enough strategy. Knowing how many resources & population you have and need is a mental skill, and mental skills contribute to "strategy".
So why be against one of the changes, and not both?
Now I'm going to use your own words when you defended resource & total/max population, not wanting worker count to be shown is just obfuscating the information. In comparison to having the option to auto-build, auto-build isn't information being given. It's just making things easier for the sake of not doing repetitive actions. They are different in how it affects players and why saying being against 1 and not the other doesn't really hold much merit.
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On June 05 2016 02:24 Nazara wrote:Show nested quote + If someone is against worker count, then why are you not against not showing resources & total/max population. One of those pushes the game to the verge of being almost unplayable by obfuscating the information (if you have no idea how much resources you have, in what ratio, or are you at 120/120 supply or 120/150), while the other is more like an addition that is not necessary to obtain the information you want in a reasonable amount of time (you can still quickly have a look at your 3 bases and estimate that you have 40 workers, or 20, or 70). .
you can estimate total/max population by the number of units and the number of supply structures/townhalls you have.
you can also estimate your ressources by counting the number of mineral patches your workers mine.
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Being constantly concious about your approximate total worker count and being fast enough to toggle through your bases to queue new workers are both skills.
It's a skillset that is only really relevant for players below masters since the skillcap is limited. Experienced players have a very good sense of their actual worker count at any given point in time.
So unless its an interesting skillset that lower level players enjoys, there is no reason not to add it to the UI.
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On June 05 2016 02:51 Cyro wrote:Show nested quote +People already say that the game requires too much mechanics but there is not enough strategy. Knowing how many workers you have and need is a mental skill, and mental skills contribute to "strategy". The choice to check how many workers you have or what you're going to do based on how many workers you have is strategy Requiring you to take 5-10 actions and do quick math to ballpark your worker count is not
okay so choosing to make 10 marines or 5 marauders is strategy so you should have to press only 1 button to do so ?
or choosing to inject your hatcheries so there should be 1 button to do all of them ?
its not like the game is unplayable without telling you exactly how many workers you have and (imo) this change makes more of a difference at gm level than below
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On June 05 2016 03:28 Clear World wrote:Being constantly concious about your approximate resources & total population and being fast enough to toggle through your bases to queue new workers are both skills. One is mental, one is mechanical. Both have to be earned/learned.
Bringing up the constant "here's your resources & total population!" or an option to auto-build workers takes those skills away.
One of those skills is vastly more significant then the other. But the fact is, both of those skills, and taking those away will always dumb down the game to a certain degree. Yes, I agree that this argument can be used against resource tab or population. It is a mistake on my part for not including the later bit as well:
obtain the information you want in a reasonable amount of time
Without resource tab you have no way of obtaining semi-accurate information about your resource count.
Without supply tab you have no way of obtaining semi-accurate information about your supply or how far away are you from being supply blocked in a reasonable amount of time.
Without a "Worker count: X" add-on you have a semi-accurate way of obtaining information about your worker count - 1 base, around 24 workers, 2.5 base saturated? K, I'm around 55-65.
On June 05 2016 03:31 Charoisaur wrote:you can estimate total/max population by the number of units and the number of supply structures/townhalls you have.
you can also estimate your ressources by counting the number of mineral patches your workers mine.
In less then 2-5 seconds? Better start practising for some game show 
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why is there no word about further balance changes? o0 zerg larva buff still discussed?
btw, would have a rly nice idea, how to give zerg a little bit more power, but not overpower them.
hatches should give 3 larva per inject. liars should give 4 larva per inject and hive should give 5 larva per inject.
zerg would rly benifit from upgrading more hatches to alteast liars, while it doesnt have any effect to the early game. also, zerg tech wouldnt be that vulnerable. for me, this sound WAY better, than giving zerg back the 4 larva per inject.
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United Kingdom20326 Posts
On June 05 2016 03:59 Scarlett` wrote:Show nested quote +On June 05 2016 02:51 Cyro wrote:People already say that the game requires too much mechanics but there is not enough strategy. Knowing how many workers you have and need is a mental skill, and mental skills contribute to "strategy". The choice to check how many workers you have or what you're going to do based on how many workers you have is strategy Requiring you to take 5-10 actions and do quick math to ballpark your worker count is not okay so choosing to make 10 marines or 5 marauders is strategy so you should have to press only 1 button to do so ? or choosing to inject your hatcheries so there should be 1 button to do all of them ? its not like the game is unplayable without telling you exactly how many workers you have and (imo) this change makes more of a difference at gm level than below
Those are all examples of mechanical difficulties that you have to go through to make the game do what you want it to do after you've already made all of the important decisions.
There's a place for mechanical difficulty but it doesn't have to be everywhere by default. One of the biggest changes made in sc2 over BW was to make multiple buildings selectable and make buildings effectively hotkeyable, this does not change what you can do in the game and it does not change strategy at all but it massively lowers the amount of "effort" that it takes to do what you want to do while you're playing the game.
If you make mechanics very hard, they start to overshadow everything else. Two different strategies or great micro won't matter because the person with better mechanics will win. People will spend a larger % of their time dealing with neccesary mechanics instead of allocating those seconds, actions and brainpower to other things like strategy and unit control; mechanical difficulty has a lot of impact on the skill ceiling and skill floor of the game, but all of this other stuff is very important too IMO.
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The worker ui will especially effect Zerg it will make it more straight forward for Zerg to build the correct number of workers after taking dmg. I'm not sure if that's a good thing tbh.
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On June 05 2016 04:45 DalaiiLameR wrote:
why is there no word about further balance changes? o0 zerg larva buff still discussed?
btw, would have a rly nice idea, how to give zerg a little bit more power, but not overpower them.
hatches should give 3 larva per inject. liars should give 4 larva per inject and hive should give 5 larva per inject.
zerg would rly benifit from upgrading more hatches to alteast liars, while it doesnt have any effect to the early game. also, zerg tech wouldnt be that vulnerable. for me, this sound WAY better, than giving zerg back the 4 larva per inject.
Why would you ever morph a Lair to gain 1 larva instead of building another hatch for 3?
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On June 05 2016 03:59 Scarlett` wrote:Show nested quote +On June 05 2016 02:51 Cyro wrote:People already say that the game requires too much mechanics but there is not enough strategy. Knowing how many workers you have and need is a mental skill, and mental skills contribute to "strategy". The choice to check how many workers you have or what you're going to do based on how many workers you have is strategy Requiring you to take 5-10 actions and do quick math to ballpark your worker count is not okay so choosing to make 10 marines or 5 marauders is strategy so you should have to press only 1 button to do so ? or choosing to inject your hatcheries so there should be 1 button to do all of them ? its not like the game is unplayable without telling you exactly how many workers you have and (imo) this change makes more of a difference at gm level than below
As a diamond player, it will help me a lot.
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On June 05 2016 03:59 Scarlett` wrote:Show nested quote +On June 05 2016 02:51 Cyro wrote:People already say that the game requires too much mechanics but there is not enough strategy. Knowing how many workers you have and need is a mental skill, and mental skills contribute to "strategy". The choice to check how many workers you have or what you're going to do based on how many workers you have is strategy Requiring you to take 5-10 actions and do quick math to ballpark your worker count is not okay so choosing to make 10 marines or 5 marauders is strategy so you should have to press only 1 button to do so ? or choosing to inject your hatcheries so there should be 1 button to do all of them ? its not like the game is unplayable without telling you exactly how many workers you have and (imo) this change makes more of a difference at gm level than below
Game-design wise, I would say a game should have the easiest controls possible for all basic "atomic-actions", or action singletons, which you could define as actions that cannot be divided further into several basic actions. These actions ideally would be linked to a single strategical decision singleton. Mechanical complexity should emerge from combining multiple basic actions, but when a game is well-made those combinations all create semantically different strategic decisions. Everything else is artificial complexity added for the sake of making a game more difficult in a bad sense, hence bad game design (think of all early 80' computer games where you just had to die 10 times before learning where all ennemies were before you can complete a level, pure developper laziness).
Example: in BW you cannot select more than 12 units so it takes a lot of actions to move your whole army from one place to another, whereas it is a single semantic decision that could be described as "move all units from X to Y". Game is made "artificially" complicated (however in this case it was more a technical limitation, but it does not matter). Splitting your army in 3 different parts to move to 3 different locations cannot be defined simply, and would involve too much of different single actions combination to describe well (how many units do I allocate to each third split of my army, etc.), so it is an "advanced" strategy (think of a molecule) that combines singletons in a smart way to create new semantics.
In your exemple, pressing 1 game button to make 10 marines and 5 marauders would be having 1 basic control to make a complex strategic move (what if I only need 8 marines and 6 marauders instead, should I press another button for that?), so it would be a bad macro to implement.
Choosing to inject all your hatcheries is a simple strategical decision so yes, in a vacuum, it should take only one action to do so, as it is not a basic decision to inject only one of them but rather a strategical "mistake" as there is no added value to do so whatsoever; however, in this specific case, inject mechanic was purposefully implemented to add "artificial" complexity to the game because designers felt that the game would be "too easy" without it probably, but game design wise it is a bad call. The T and P counterparts are a little smarter as it allows for strategical decision though (to a small degree), so it might just be that they wanted to even out the difficulty for all races and could not come up with a "smart" macro mechanic for Zerg.
I would say that if you choose to link all single actions to 1 element of the interface (or display important game information that does not involve strategical thinking to figure out by adding a couple of digits on the screen) and the game is made too easy for the pros or lowers the skill ceiling of your game to a point its becomes not interesting enough to play anymore, that would just means the game fundamentals are broken and developers must rework their copy or find better sets of single actions that create a nice "natural" complexity instead. Adding artificial levels of it is always a sign of failure from a developer's standpoint.
The fact that you could very easily define a singleton such as "inject all hatcheries" and argue that it would break the game if it was actually linked to a single interface action, sheds some light on the poor quality of this mechanic, rather than justifying its necessity.
Source: The Art of Game Design, Jesse Schell, 2008
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On June 05 2016 17:46 DjayEl wrote:Show nested quote +On June 05 2016 03:59 Scarlett` wrote:On June 05 2016 02:51 Cyro wrote:People already say that the game requires too much mechanics but there is not enough strategy. Knowing how many workers you have and need is a mental skill, and mental skills contribute to "strategy". The choice to check how many workers you have or what you're going to do based on how many workers you have is strategy Requiring you to take 5-10 actions and do quick math to ballpark your worker count is not okay so choosing to make 10 marines or 5 marauders is strategy so you should have to press only 1 button to do so ? or choosing to inject your hatcheries so there should be 1 button to do all of them ? its not like the game is unplayable without telling you exactly how many workers you have and (imo) this change makes more of a difference at gm level than below Game-design wise, I would say a game should have the easiest controls possible for all basic "atomic-actions", or action singletons, which you could define as actions that cannot be divided further into several basic actions. These actions ideally would be linked to a single strategical decision singleton. Mechanical complexity should emerge from combining multiple basic actions, but when a game is well-made those combinations all create semantically different strategic decisions. Everything else is artificial complexity added for the sake of making a game more difficult in a bad sense, hence bad game design (think of all early 80' computer games where you just had to die 10 times before learning where all ennemies were before you can complete a level, pure developper laziness). Example: in BW you cannot select more than 12 units so it takes a lot of actions to move your whole army from one place to another, whereas it is a single semantic decision that could be described as "move all units from X to Y". Game is made "artificially" complicated (however in this case it was more a technical limitation, but it does not matter). Splitting your army in 3 different parts to move to 3 different locations cannot be defined simply, and would involve too much of different single actions combination to describe well (how many units do I allocate to each third split of my army, etc.), so it is an "advanced" strategy (think of a molecule) that combines singletons in a smart way to create new semantics. In your exemple, pressing 1 game button to make 10 marines and 5 marauders would be having 1 basic control to make a complex strategic move (what if I only need 8 marines and 6 marauders instead, should I press another button for that?), so it would b a bad macro to implement. Choosing to inject all your hatcheries is a simple strategical decision so yes, in a vacuum, it should take only one action to do so, as it is not a basic decision to inject only one of them but rather a strategical "mistake" as there is no added value to do so whatsoever; however, in this specific case, inject mechanic was purposefully implemented to add "artificial" complexity to the game because designers felt that the game would be "too easy" without it probably, but game design wise it is a bad call. The T and P counterparts are a little smarter as it allows for strategical decision though (to a small degree), so it might just be that they wanted to even out the difficulty for all races and could not come up with a "smart" macro mechanic for Zerg. I would say that if you choose to link all single actions to 1 elements of the interface (or display important game information that does not involve strategical thinking to figure out by adding a couple of digits on the screen) and the game is made too easy for the pros or lowers the skill ceiling of your game to a point its becomes not interesting enough to play anymore, that would just means the game fundamentals are broken and developers must rework their copy or find better sets of single actions that create a nice "natural" complexity instead. Adding artificial levels of it is always a sign of failure from a developer's standpoint. The fact that you could very easily define a singleton such as "inject all hatcheries" and argue that it would break the game it it was actually linked to a single interface action, sheds some light on the poor quality of this mechanic, rather than justifying its necessity. Source: The Art of Game Design, Jesse Schell, 2008
good read, really well written gj
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On June 05 2016 04:45 DalaiiLameR wrote:
why is there no word about further balance changes? o0 zerg larva buff still discussed?
btw, would have a rly nice idea, how to give zerg a little bit more power, but not overpower them.
hatches should give 3 larva per inject. liars should give 4 larva per inject and hive should give 5 larva per inject.
zerg would rly benifit from upgrading more hatches to alteast liars, while it doesnt have any effect to the early game. also, zerg tech wouldnt be that vulnerable. for me, this sound WAY better, than giving zerg back the 4 larva per inject.
Could actually be pretty cool, sounds very Warcraft 3 like.
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United Kingdom20326 Posts
On June 05 2016 10:25 rockslave wrote:Show nested quote +On June 05 2016 04:45 DalaiiLameR wrote:
why is there no word about further balance changes? o0 zerg larva buff still discussed?
btw, would have a rly nice idea, how to give zerg a little bit more power, but not overpower them.
hatches should give 3 larva per inject. liars should give 4 larva per inject and hive should give 5 larva per inject.
zerg would rly benifit from upgrading more hatches to alteast liars, while it doesnt have any effect to the early game. also, zerg tech wouldnt be that vulnerable. for me, this sound WAY better, than giving zerg back the 4 larva per inject. Why would you ever morph a Lair to gain 1 larva instead of building another hatch for 3?
Because you naturally get at least one lair and hive throughout the game anyway (so a change like that would be throwing a few free larvae at you) and because lairs have 1.334x the HP of hatcheries at a 150/100 cost.
It's not particularly great but players have already used the hatchery to lair upgrade in the past to make a specific base harder to kill or to restore some HP after it took damage. I wouldn't expect people to build lairs everywhere instead of just building a 5'th hatch as macro hatch but it has some utility especially with extra larvae
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I dont think worker count should be added to the UI. As it is, it adds another variable to juggle that is part of starcraft. The less auto-pilot the game is the better it is for it's long term playability imho.
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On June 05 2016 20:47 Parcelleus wrote:
I dont think worker count should be added to the UI. As it is, it adds another variable to juggle that is part of starcraft. The less auto-pilot the game is the better it is for it's long term playability imho.
People said the same thing before ingame clock was added.
It was a terrible argument back then and still is a terrible argument today.
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EPT
