EPT1. Scout something
2. react to what you scouted
3. If you reacted incorrectly or interpreted incorrectly, you lose, else you win.
I think this is also why there's so many toss doing well in tournaments but underrepresented in ladder.
Why StarCraft II Feels Difficult To Play - Page 2
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Dracover
Australia177 Posts
1. Scout something 2. react to what you scouted 3. If you reacted incorrectly or interpreted incorrectly, you lose, else you win. I think this is also why there's so many toss doing well in tournaments but underrepresented in ladder. | ||
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Hildegard
Germany306 Posts
On November 01 2016 13:03 BronzeKnee wrote: No, it isn't what Blizzard wanted at all. And that is what is so shocking about how SC2 has been designed. They had a game that rewarded aggressive play that had shorter, exciting and explosive games: Wings of Liberty. And lo and behold it was the top E-Sport in the world for a time. But Blizzard decided they needed to remove game ending early aggressive play. But they found out the hard way that led to boring early games, so to create more action throughout the game, they created more harass tools. But it was a misguided goal from the start that put Blizzard on the carousel of harrassment and defensive tools. And often times, the harrassment tools are so strong they can be game ending anyway. We traded actual early game battles between armies with lots of opportunities for micro, for Widow Mine drops and Oracles. And so where is SC2 now in terms of a E-Sport? Proof is always in the pudding. From a viewer-only perspective: I watch BW for over a decade now. I found WoL a lot worse than BW and barely watched games after the beta. I started watching regulary again in HotS after swarm hosts were nerfed and I think LotV is by far the best iteration of SC2. However I early on decided that playing SC2 would require way too much time and played pretty much only the campaigns on the easiest difficulty to see the story after beta. | ||
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[N3O]r3d33m3r
Germany673 Posts
On November 01 2016 09:49 kuzyk wrote: In the comments of the video, he says he is the player Parfait. If it is him, he finished 2nd in wcg 2007, which for AOE3 was basically the only major tournament of note from year to year. So he definitely knows hows his AOE material. Yes, he is Parfait. He was quite a good aoe3 player and was an awesome mentor. Harley14 from my clan was coached by him and he was amazed by the levelheadedness and valuable input he got from Parfait. | ||
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BronzeKnee
United States5217 Posts
On November 01 2016 15:07 Hildegard wrote: From a viewer-only perspective: I watch BW for over a decade now. I found WoL a lot worse than BW and barely watched games after the beta. I started watching regulary again in HotS after swarm hosts were nerfed and I think LotV is by far the best iteration of SC2. However I early on decided that playing SC2 would require way too much time and played pretty much only the campaigns on the easiest difficulty to see the story after beta. Well early WoL was mess, but during 2011-2012 SC2 was awesome in my opinion, to both play and watch. And it was then when the player base and viewership peaked too, so I am not alone in that assessment. Of course my point wasn't about that at all, it was that Blizzard doesn't want a game that rewards aggressive play, because they had that and it didn't work for them, for some odd reason... | ||
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Jae Zedong
407 Posts
On November 01 2016 15:49 BronzeKnee wrote:Of course my point wasn't about that at all, it was that Blizzard doesn't want a game that rewards aggressive play, because they had that and it didn't work for them, for some odd reason... I think Blizzard were trying to combat the BO lottery that was somewhat prevalent in WoL, meaning some BO combinations were just an instant loss for one of the players. I don't think Blizzard applied the correct remedy though. | ||
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phodacbiet
United States1740 Posts
On November 01 2016 13:03 BronzeKnee wrote: No, it isn't what Blizzard wanted at all. And that is what is so shocking about how SC2 has been designed. They had a game that rewarded aggressive play that had shorter, exciting and explosive games: Wings of Liberty. And lo and behold it was the top E-Sport in the world for a time. But Blizzard decided they needed to remove game ending early aggressive play. But they found out the hard way that led to boring early games, so to create more action throughout the game, they created more harass tools. But it was a misguided goal from the start that put Blizzard on the carousel of harrassment and defensive tools. And often times, the harrassment tools are so strong they can be game ending anyway. We traded actual early game battles between armies with lots of opportunities for micro, for Widow Mine drops and Oracles. And so where is SC2 now in terms of a E-Sport? Proof is always in the pudding. Actually, the only reason anyone looked at WoL because it was riding off of BW's success. Not only that, LoL was in its esport infancy at the time, so WoL didn't have any direct competition. If you remembered the WoL forums on TL, a lot of people were calling it a terrible game (remember, this is a game that didn't even come out with chat channels). I mean, a spectator game where people cheered JUST BECAUSE it wasn't close spawn on Lost Temple is a pretty bad foreshadowing for the future.There is nothing exciting, explosive, or shocking about getting 4 gated and then being forcefield at the ramp. The common defense back then for WoL was that BW had 10+ years to grow, while WoL was only in its first year, give it time, there's still 2 more expansion! Well, now that both expansions are out, and Blizzard is pretty much done with sc2, it's time to just see sc2 for what it is. A niche genre that will never be number 1, but it won't go away either. | ||
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opisska
Poland8852 Posts
On November 02 2016 01:35 phodacbiet wrote: Actually, the only reason anyone looked at WoL because it was riding off of BW's success. Not only that, LoL was in its esport infancy at the time, so WoL didn't have any direct competition. If you remembered the WoL forums on TL, a lot of people were calling it a terrible game (remember, this is a game that didn't even come out with chat channels). I mean, a spectator game where people cheered JUST BECAUSE it wasn't close spawn on Lost Temple is a pretty bad foreshadowing for the future.There is nothing exciting, explosive, or shocking about getting 4 gated and then being forcefield at the ramp. The common defense back then for WoL was that BW had 10+ years to grow, while WoL was only in its first year, give it time, there's still 2 more expansion! Well, now that both expansions are out, and Blizzard is pretty much done with sc2, it's time to just see sc2 for what it is. A niche genre that will never be number 1, but it won't go away either. I hear this line of argument a lot, but it doesn't make it less false. Maybe the group of people who watched SC2 because of BW's success was significant, but it wasn't "anyone". I personally never watched BW, although I played it for many years - but after those years, my interest in it significantly faded and last two years I was mostly just waiting for SC2 to come out. SC2 was a godsend and I started playing it and following it because of all the things it finally improved upon, such as - UI improvements making playing the game not making me want to throw my keyboard out of the window - matchmaking giving me finally more than three people to play against - English-language scene to follow and accessible streams Moreover, know that most of my irl gaming friends had roughly the same evolution. Most importantly, none of the people I talk to about SC2 irl ever followed the BW e-sports scene. And yeah, many people called it a terrible game back then and it was already annoying. Just try to imagine how annoying it is six years later. | ||
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Big J
Austria16289 Posts
1) Most of the power mechanics in sc2 are not very interactive, which is not a problem for soloplayer games and might even be acceptable for a viewer if it provides a comparison and narrative. However, it feels repetitive and introduces buffer actions that lead you away from trying to interact. A lowlevel zerg player that parks his mutas in a corner to inject some rounds and spread some creep simply experiences less variety and interaction than one, that attacks with them and takes a hit in the macro. That however is many times worse than the idle-muta decision. It's one of the reasons why players frequently try to break out of the macro-game corset, as cheesy plays make your interaction matter more than the repetitive tasks you just don't want to focus on for once. 2) The shift towards more hard tasks, as the author calls it, is not inherently bad in my opinion. The game simply is a mess in its mixture of hard and easy tasks. Especially when such a hard task kills many simple tasks, like said mine drop into a mineral line, the gameplay becomes too punishing. I'd say that a main problem with this is that the hard task here is only as hard as the opponent makes it. And making opponent's hard tasks actually hard is not that easy in a game in when your reaction time is so limited due to unit speed, vision range, zoom level, your general occupation with easy tasks and the lack of safety net game features. | ||
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The_Red_Viper
19533 Posts
On November 02 2016 04:20 Big J wrote: What the article is missing out on in my view is: 1) Most of the power mechanics in sc2 are not very interactive, which is not a problem for soloplayer games and might even be acceptable for a viewer if it provides a comparison and narrative. However, it feels repetitive and introduces buffer actions that lead you away from trying to interact. A lowlevel zerg player that parks his mutas in a corner to inject some rounds and spread some creep simply experiences less variety and interaction than one, that attacks with them and takes a hit in the macro. That however is many times worse than the idle-muta decision. It's one of the reasons why players frequently try to break out of the macro-game corset, as cheesy plays make your interaction matter more than the repetitive tasks you just don't want to focus on for once. 2) The shift towards more hard tasks, as the author calls it, is not inherently bad in my opinion. The game simply is a mess in its mixture of hard and easy tasks. Especially when such a hard task kills many simple tasks, like said mine drop into a mineral line, the gameplay becomes too punishing. I'd say that a main problem with this is that the hard task here is only as hard as the opponent makes it. And making opponent's hard tasks actually hard is not that easy in a game in when your reaction time is so limited due to unit speed, vision range, zoom level, your general occupation with easy tasks and the lack of safety net game features. Regarding one: I actually don't think that this problem of player interaction is due to "power mechanics" or "easy tasks". RTS games have this problem in general, why would you want to interact with the enemy if nothing really forces you to do so? That can be a strength (in my experience low lvl players like to just build stuff, build an army and every time player interactions are forced upon them they are stressed), but it also can be a bad thing because at the end of the day it should be pvp. So yeah, the pvp then should be enjoyable. Why is it not? Because oftentimes games are decided because of only a few "wrong decisions" (hard tasks) like: i decided to look away from my army for a few seconds to scout with another unit and now my main army is dead because the enemy attacked and focused solely on that. It's frustrating that everything i have done until this point is basically meaningless. It is also really hard / impossible to fix some of these things because you cannot make perfect decisions in a game based around imperfect information. | ||
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ProMeTheus112
France2027 Posts
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Kingsky
Singapore298 Posts
On November 02 2016 09:28 ProMeTheus112 wrote: I believe a solution is to generally let battles evolve slowly enough and damage distributed slowly enough, so that if you're not looking at something for a few seconds it's never a game-ending problem. so like back to SC1?... | ||
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AssyrianKing
Australia2114 Posts
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ProMeTheus112
France2027 Posts
yeah though SC1 still has things that sometimes can deal game ending damage very quickly, things like storm drops or irradiate on a stack of muta and such. but yes SC1 is the best so far ofc . . . . . . . | ||
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aQuaSC
717 Posts
Terran: - Stimpack redesign - one click ability giving a big maneuverability boost and highest dps in the game - not sure what to do with dps, but I'd tone down the speed units get (Banelings should be adjusted for that), stim stutter-step is a problem in my opinion - Medivac afterburners redesign - afterburners are a very nice thing letting Medivacs live for longer, but afterburners with constant uncertainty of how many of Medivacs full of units can come to your base is a problem due to the surprise element that can cost games if you are not 100% sure on where the entirety of opponent's army is. You can prevent Zerg or Protoss drops with a handful of units, but to deflect a Terran drop you either need to be constantly aware of the possibility, have a lot of vision, or in case Terran manages to unload - often more units than the drop has. This ability was never needed nor asked for - Siege Tank pick-up - I just hope the removal of it comes through in the coming patch, it existing just for the sake of how exciting is to see TY or other Koreans use them is not enough of a reason to keep it in the game, very frustrating for beginners Zerg: - Zergling redesign or Metabolic Boost redesign - Zerglings most of the time are used to prevent movement, being too far out on the map with main army often led to a straight-up loss for years since the beginning of SC2, looking at a line of 30 lings running through your base to mineral lines just because you didn't put a unit in the wall/did not put buildings correctly (you have to learn how to do it on every different map) is really frustrating as well, especially to beginners. I have nothing against idea of zerg being a swarm-like race that wins big fights by hugging enemy army, but what if Zerglings for example did not prevent movement (could be pushed by enemy units) and/or had slightly bigger collision size (to prevent "impossible" slips through walls)? Protoss: - Blink is an amazing control-based ability when used in straight-up engagements and smaller skirmishes, but it was too often an issue when it was used to outmaneuver the opponent. It should keep it's battle micro side, but the outmaneuvering part should be looked upon - Adept's Psionic Transfer should not give vision as the present one does, I hope the change comes through - Disruptor model should be changed, I don't like it that much, especially when many of them are close together :/ - Mothership Core Time Warp - compared to other abilities it's 100% a waste of energy, for a time warp you can have two recalls/overcharges. Also it is very easy to lose it and therefore it should not react to attacks like an attacking unit, it should move away when attacked like any other non-combat flying unit so attacking with MSC could be entirely player's choice (its attack is only relevant in the very early game anyway) EDIT: funny, thread goes inactive when I put some thoughts into it, though it's not the first time I put time into joining a discussion on tl and it's completely ignored lol | ||
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AndreasHeideman
Sweden30 Posts
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AndreasHeideman
Sweden30 Posts
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c0sm0naut
United States1229 Posts
people complain about the deathball when i play protoss all the time (i play random), and what i say is this: if i split up my army and you see that, you are instantly going to box everything and try to kill part of my army for virtually nothing. i honestly dont understand how the devs seriously launched the game with the current stalker/current zealot. where the zealot without charge does nothing, but if you get +1 armor on it and combine it with a guardian shield it takes a marine a full minute gametime of shooting to kill it. and this is why TvP looks exactly the way it does. so thats the problem zero incentive to split units off from main army because AI is really good, units are way too mobile, u instantly get punished for sending a ten zealot hitsquad to roam the map, they will just kill these units for free or kill ur now gamelosing army size because everything is so razors edge. it feels like you are never rewarded for these kind of plays unless u are terran and by design need to be rewarded for these kind of plays | ||
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dragoon
United States695 Posts
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