Legacy of the Void Balance Update -- July 6, 2016

Patch next week
After more playtests and more discussions with various people, we believe that it’ll be better to patch the current two changes to the live game sooner than later given the current situation. However, we do also want to point out that we definitely see the foreign community’s concern regarding the Queen buff, and we will definitely make sure to react quick if something breaks. But the two main reasons we would like to hurry up with this update is due to heavy feedback in favor of these changes on the KR pro side, and we also have a major tournament coming up in 2-3 weeks outside of Korea, so we would really love to push the change out to live as quickly as possible so that we can make necessary fixes before the WCS tournament if needed. So looking at this from both regions, it looks to be the right decision to patch quickly.

After the patch next week
We definitely hear your feedback regarding the potential for Ultralisk armor needing nerfs and the Liberator needing nerfs. We would really love to look at the impact of the Spore and Queen changes first before we start testing further changes. For example, if Zerg is performing much better in the early/mid game and are dominating in the late game, we can definitely take a look at the Ultralisk armor nerf, whereas if these changes were steps in the right direction but not enough, we can look at potential Liberator +light damage removal to its AA weapon.

Playing Skill vs. Game Design Skill
It’s been a while since we discussed more design philosophy based topics, and we noticed a topic being very big in the past couple weeks, so we wanted to share our thoughts regarding this. Specifically, we’re seeing a lot of posts discussing the importance of playing at a high skill level in order to be a good game designer.

Our thought is that these two have some overlap, but are different skillsets. We have seen so many examples of every mix of the two: A top player being so bad at game analysis, a top player being so good at game analysis, a bad player being so good at game design, and a bad player being also bad at game design. They’re just separate skills that one person can be good at none, one, or both of them. And the definition of a good player is so opinion based. For example, I’m currently in master league using random and if I say this to a pro player, they would think I’m pretty bad at the game. As compared to if I say this to a silver level player, they would think I’m good at the game.

The same goes for game design skills. Often times, game design skills are more difficult to quantify than say like awesome concept art skills or awesome programming skills. Interestingly, this is an area game designers on our team have a lot of discussions on regarding what an ideal game designer at Blizzard is, which is another fun topic that we can go into if there is desire for it for this in a future weekly update. And going more into detail on this current topic, the important thing for game designers working on SC2 is the ability to analyze game mechanics well. This is clearly a higher priority than playing the game at a pro level.

Just to finish off, we did want to ask a question that we ask ourselves often: In a perfect world scenario, would it be best to aim to have only game designers who are also the very best players at the game? Granted this might be near impossible to achieve, it is an interesting question because we can look at it from many different points of view. For example, I can argue that this is the best because the best player understand more parts of playing the game so he can analyze the game better as well. But I can also argue this isn’t ideal because he would be unable to see the game from a different perspective other than the top skill level, and the more ideal is to have a good mix of every type of gamer who all are good game designers.

We wanted to share our thoughts here because this is a fun topic to discuss, and we’ve also been leaning a bit more towards one way or another over the years on our team as well. Because there necessarily isn’t one, clear, perfect answer to this question, please let us know your thoughts as well and we will look forward to exploring this discussion from a potentially different angle!