EPTFireCake's opinion on the decline of StarCraft 2 - Page 14
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Korakys
New Zealand272 Posts
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Little-Chimp
Canada949 Posts
On November 29 2016 10:07 MaestroSC wrote: What did they fix? Unit design: nope Bnet 2.0: nope game pacing:not only nope, but they actually made it worse Price/balls of selling 1 game as 3 full price games: nope. Manage to stop their alienation of either/both the hardcore and/or casual crowd: nope. Changed anything regarding the poor design of SC2 units: nope. (if anything they added more terrible units in HotS and LotV. Tell me again what they fixed and what we should focus on fixing moving forward? Also my favorites are the people saying "everyone quit cause the game is too hard" its a PvP game... our opponents are eachother. We didnt quit because the game is hard... we quit because the game is shit, and we wanted to play something better. Ive played BW since release, and was stil playing it up til Sc2 launch, and BW was infinitely harder than SC2. The skill cap has NOTHING to do with why people dont play the game anymore, why it gets no views on twitch, and why the scene is so fucking dead, while it was basically the Flagship of Esports for years. The game is unpopular because Blizzard just took a huge shit on a lot of peoples favorite gaming franchise, and were turned away from it. Bnet is great right now, I'm not sure what more you could ask for other than the arcade stuff that no one will use. They added in the chat rooms, clan shit, separate race per mmr, Co op, archon mode, etc etc Game design and unit design is subjective (I like LOTV more than WOL and especially HOTS). You can buy the entire multiplayer by just buying LOTV right now. I'm not sure if you're just emotional or genuinely not very bright but try to research and think of the facts first before vomiting your "took a shit on the fans" hyperbole all over threads. | ||
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Aron Times
United States312 Posts
On November 29 2016 11:28 Korakys wrote: I stopped playing 1v1 a long time ago (2011) because it was frustratingly difficult to make your units do what you wanted them to do. The future of RTS is low APM games. The APM requirement of Starcraft 2 is not the problem. It's the attention requirement. I lost a game earlier today because I was not looking at my army for two seconds while leapfrogging my tanks and the enemy flanked with zerglings. Two seconds that I went back to my base to macro was all it took for me to lose an entire engagement. Had I been paying attention, the APM required to counter the zergling flank wouldn't have been much. I mean it doesn't take much APM to micro infantry around. The Oracle suffers from the same problem. It doesn't take a lot of APM to counter the Oracle, but it deals such an absurd amount of damage that you have to be already paying attention in order to counter it. There are so many things in Starcraft 2 that are overpowered because they require a lot of attention to counter: 1. Disruptors 2. Widow Mines 3. Oracles 4. Ravagers 5. Liberators 6. Banelings If you paid 100% attention to your army, none of these units would even be overpowered. They'd actually be underpowered since they rely so much on the element of surprise that they would be nothing but bumps in the road for 100% alert opponents. | ||
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Jett.Jack.Alvir
Canada2250 Posts
On November 29 2016 09:15 Thieving Magpie wrote: I find this game has been called dead since year one of its release. Year after year passes with the ever present dead game prophet screaming at the top of his lungs at how certain he is the game is over. And with each passing year I smirk more and more thinking "shouldn't we wait for a game to be dead before we announce it as dead?" I agree with you completely. SC2 isn't as popular, but it is far from dead. Honestly, its not possible to determine what caused the decline of SC2. Sure many of us have our suspicions, and some will tout it as facts, but we cannot possibly know the entire truth. I think the decline is due to many factors, all of which was stated already by many of us. Its a hard game, so not many will pick it up. It wasn't free (I know part of it is now but regardless it wasn't upon release). Arcade sucks, especially compared to War 3 and BW arcade. It lacked social interaction. Other games competed for the attention of gamers. RTS aren't popular anymore. Didn't feel rewarding to win, and losing was a horrible feeling. Team games are more fun to play than 1v1. BW fans expected SC2 to be similar, but was hugely disappointed (i.e. they didn't like the design of SC2). Blizzard's reputation made the hype, but the game didn't completely live up to that hype. SC2 isn't fun. SC2 is frustrating. There are probably even more reasons why. Each one alone probably wouldn't have been such a problem, but all of them combined and you have the decline of SC2. The problem though is some of these things Blizzard can't control. And things they could change might alienate even more players. We can discuss this ad nauseam, and it won't do much good. I'm fairly certain Blizzard already acknowledges the decline of SC2. The good news is that they are trying to do something about it. This patch is actively trying to regain the 'mech players' in an attempt to add depth to terran gameplay/style. They also made vast improvements to Battlenet. Albeit, not great but better than WoL Bnet. I don't think Blizzard is focusing on SC2. It's not their cash cow. They won't pull the plug though, because it's still a franchise that garners a lot of attention. Look at their newest franchise, Overwatch. The game isn't even a year old and they announced a full league with complete support and contracts for players. I'm kind of pissed that Blizzard would give so much attention to their youngest child, but give minimal attention to the middle child. | ||
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Solar424
United States4001 Posts
On November 29 2016 09:15 Thieving Magpie wrote: I find this game has been called dead since year one of its release. Year after year passes with the ever present dead game prophet screaming at the top of his lungs at how certain he is the game is over. And with each passing year I smirk more and more thinking "shouldn't we wait for a game to be dead before we announce it as dead?" The game isn't dead, but it's basically on life support at this point. If Blizzard pulled out of WCS the scene would disappear overnight. As of now there are no offline tournaments that exist without Blizzard support aside from small tournaments now that Proleague is dead. It's no secret that IEM and DH would drop this game in a heartbeat if Blizzard wasn't paying them. | ||
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Oreo7
United States1647 Posts
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Oreo7
United States1647 Posts
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JimmyJRaynor
Canada17477 Posts
On November 29 2016 12:43 Jett.Jack.Alvir wrote: RTS aren't popular anymore. Didn't feel rewarding to win, and losing was a horrible feeling. Team games are more fun to play than 1v1. .... .... I don't think Blizzard is focusing on SC2. It's not their cash cow. They won't pull the plug though, because it's still a franchise that garners a lot of attention. Look at their newest franchise, Overwatch. The game isn't even a year old and they announced a full league with complete support and contracts for players. I'm kind of pissed that Blizzard would give so much attention to their youngest child, but give minimal attention to the middle child. back when RTS peaked in the 90s and early 2000s the only way to watch massive army engagements was on a giant desktop PC with a massive monitor sitting on your desk. the big army engagements are the payoff in any RTS game for the general player. now we have Clash of Clans and a plethora of other Tablet and Smartphone games that provide that "slow build up" feeling culminating in the giant army engagement. increased consumer choices brought about by improving technology pushed the PC-RTS out of the market. this has happened to many genres starting with Pong games the mid 1970s. Tech will keep improving and it will keep giving consumers more choices which will marginalize certain genres that at one time had a huge influence and sway. 1970s - Space Invaders ( Gallery Shooter ) 1980s - PacMan ( Dot Eating Maze Game ) 1990s - Monkey Island ( point and click adventure ) 2000s - C&C/SC/AoE ( RTS ) do all these genres still exist? sure they do. Their best revenue days are behind them. and if its 1 thing ATVI is good at.. its generating revenue. they know how to do that. ATVI and Bilzzard upper management's guys aer in their 40s. They know all this stuff 10000X better than we do. They're all over it. people claiming every company that makes RTS games "got stupid" and all of these companies simultaneously started making crap games lose their me via Reductio Ad Absurdum. Their perspective is ridiculous. | ||
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cutler
Germany609 Posts
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Charoisaur
Germany16062 Posts
On November 29 2016 14:32 cutler wrote: after reading this thread my head hurts...what is going on here?!? Why is this Thread so famous? threads like this allow all the wannabe game-designers to come out of their holes. unfortunately there are a lot of them on TL. | ||
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starkiller123
United States4030 Posts
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JimmyJRaynor
Canada17477 Posts
On November 29 2016 14:35 Charoisaur wrote: threads like this allow all the wannabe game-designers to come out of their holes. unfortunately there are a lot of them on TL. plus there is nothing wrong with being part of an active community around an existing great game and just playing that game forever. the community keeps playing it forever. problem solved. examples: Super Tecmo Bowl (1988). NHL '94 (1993), Brood War ( 1999) , Red Alert 2 (2000). it looks to me like RA2 is going to be the "last C&C game standing" in that giant RTS series. Guess who the designer was?  | ||
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ETisME
12704 Posts
The worker change is good, it fast forward all the inactive early games while still keeping early game harass opptunity. Relearning the game isn't bad considering the game needed a big overhaul after all the SH games. Not having new tutorial is because there's just not that many content makers targeting new players. Strategy videos do still get posted. I was hoping a huge overhaul game every few years with minor patches in between in order to keep the game fresh and exciting. But nothing ever changes significantly until the most recent patch. Hopefully blizzard can read this tl thread and do more and take an active attitude going into this | ||
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Jett.Jack.Alvir
Canada2250 Posts
On November 29 2016 14:29 JimmyJRaynor wrote: back when RTS peaked in the 90s and early 2000s the only way to watch massive army engagements was on a giant desktop PC with a massive monitor sitting on your desk. the big army engagements are the payoff in any RTS game for the general player. now we have Clash of Clans and a plethora of other Tablet and Smartphone games that provide that "slow build up" feeling culminating in the giant army engagement. increased consumer choices brought about by improving technology pushed the PC-RTS out of the market. this has happened to many genres starting with Pong games the mid 1970s. Tech will keep improving and it will keep giving consumers more choices which will marginalize certain genres that at one time had a huge influence and sway. 1970s - Space Invaders ( Gallery Shooter ) 1980s - PacMan ( Dot Eating Maze Game ) 1990s - Monkey Island ( point and click adventure ) 2000s - C&C/SC/AoE ( RTS ) do all these genres still exist? sure they do. Their best revenue days are behind them. and if its 1 thing ATVI is good at.. its generating revenue. they know how to do that. ATVI and Bilzzard upper management's guys aer in their 40s. They know all this stuff 10000X better than we do. They're all over it. people claiming every company that makes RTS games "got stupid" and all of these companies simultaneously started making crap games lose their me via Reductio Ad Absurdum. Their perspective is ridiculous. I agree Blizzard knows their shit. I don't think they will let SC2 just die a slow death. They aren't shipping SC2 off to a retirement home so that it can be left to collect dust and have no family visit. However, I'm pissed that they didn't actively support the tournaments right from the get go. It makes me appreciate Riot starting the LCS. Riot knew it will take active involvement to push a game towards longevity. Instead it seemed like Blizzard relied on the grassroots to keep SC2 alive. Only when they realized it needed support did they decide to step in. I feel like Blizzard wanted to see how far can passion from the community keep the game from declining in popularity. It worked for BW, but obviously didn't for SC2. | ||
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BaronVonOwn
299 Posts
On November 29 2016 12:29 Eternal Dalek wrote: The APM requirement of Starcraft 2 is not the problem. It's the attention requirement. I lost a game earlier today because I was not looking at my army for two seconds while leapfrogging my tanks and the enemy flanked with zerglings. Two seconds that I went back to my base to macro was all it took for me to lose an entire engagement. Had I been paying attention, the APM required to counter the zergling flank wouldn't have been much. I mean it doesn't take much APM to micro infantry around. The Oracle suffers from the same problem. It doesn't take a lot of APM to counter the Oracle, but it deals such an absurd amount of damage that you have to be already paying attention in order to counter it. There are so many things in Starcraft 2 that are overpowered because they require a lot of attention to counter: 1. Disruptors 2. Widow Mines 3. Oracles 4. Ravagers 5. Liberators 6. Banelings If you paid 100% attention to your army, none of these units would even be overpowered. They'd actually be underpowered since they rely so much on the element of surprise that they would be nothing but bumps in the road for 100% alert opponents. This is why I stopped playing. HOTS added too many anti-fun units and LOTV continued the trend. I'm one of the people who think SC2 is too fast and this is what I mean. It's BS that someone can fly an oracle into your base at the 5 minute mark or whatever and win the whole game for a 125/125 early game investment. SC2 is full of frustrating, unsatisfying ways to lose and that turns off players of all skill levels but especially new players. | ||
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Jett.Jack.Alvir
Canada2250 Posts
On November 29 2016 15:14 BaronVonOwn wrote: This is why I stopped playing. HOTS added too many anti-fun units and LOTV continued the trend. I'm one of the people who think SC2 is too fast and this is what I mean. It's BS that someone can fly an oracle into your base at the 5 minute mark or whatever and win the whole game for a 125/125 early game investment. SC2 is full of frustrating, unsatisfying ways to lose and that turns off players of all skill levels but especially new players. I didn't like the way XYZ units are designed, that is why I quit SC2. | ||
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FireCake
151 Posts
On November 29 2016 14:21 Oreo7 wrote: I agree with the spirit, if not all the details, of Firecake's video. I do however think online tournaments can easily continue to exist into the foreseeable future. But yea: we are pretty much looking at something like the end of big triple-A production international tournaments. We have to adapt. Highlighting Deepmind is an interesting way of thinking about it, but for me personally, it is the brutal depth and challenge of sc2 that will always keep me playing and watching. For most e-sport games it will be ok to have only good online tournaments. But Starcraft 2 was once a game with my many full time players and insanely big tournaments. I think it is too depressing for most of the community to have "only" online tournaments. Co op and deepmind is an alternative way of keep promoting Starcraft but on an other field since 1v1 failed. Remember archon mod last year ? In my opinion it was the first attemp to move people away from 1v1 | ||
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The_Red_Viper
19533 Posts
On November 29 2016 14:35 Charoisaur wrote: threads like this allow all the wannabe game-designers to come out of their holes. unfortunately there are a lot of them on TL. Why not attack the arguments instead of the authors? Let me ask you this question: What do you want starcraft to look like? What should be key elements to its design and gameplay? Do you think Blizzard does the best job possible achieving this result? As i said quite often in the last few years, it's obvious that not everybody wants the same from the game but i also think that pleasing the more competitive people is the way to go because casuals won't see the difference anyway unless you make the game as beginner friendly as possible. It wouldn't be starcraft anymore at that point though (automatic macro, less focus on multitasking, extreme defenders advantage so there is no way to lose the game in the first few minutes, etc) | ||
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alexanderzero
United States659 Posts
Firecake: be glad that you could even be a pro gamer and play your favorite game for any amount of time. That's something many of the people on this forum wish they could have experienced. I don't really think the balance of the game has ever been that big of a problem. There were occasionally some shitty styles that had to be patched out but overall that never really seemed to affect viewership numbers. I think people just got tired of the game and moved on. The Korean scene in particular has had some serious issues that never had anything to do with game design. From Day 1 there was the feud between Blizzard and Kespa, later the hybrid proleague that gave SC2 a bad reputation with viewers and brood war pros alike because they were forced to play it. The whole transition from BW to SC2 was just forced and never should have been done that way. Players should have been free to choose what game they wanted to play without being banned from Kespa. Besides Tastosis, the quality of the English casting in Korea has always been lower than tournaments abroad and held to absolutely no professional standards, as well as recruiting totally random people to cast that nobody had ever heard of and who weren't really charismatic or knowledgeable about the game. Guess who was running tournaments with lazy casting and poor production value? It was Kespa. And now we have the revelation that the SC2 teams were secretly colluding to price-fix their players' salaries. So in my opinion Kespa is both incompetent and corrupt. That organization has done more damage to SC2 than Blizzard ever did. The GSL and the WCS system (ran by Blizzard) have always produced the greatest tournaments and attracted the most viewers. And that also happens to be the part of the scene that was grown organically and is still being supported to this day. Just let the SC2 scene shrink in peace for gods sake. People will still keep having tournaments for this game for years to come, whether or not they have big prize pools. | ||
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FireCake
151 Posts
On November 29 2016 15:59 alexanderzero wrote: Firecake: be glad that you could even be a pro gamer and play your favorite game for any amount of time. That's something many of the people on this forum wish they could have experienced. Pro gamer is far from an ideal job where you play video games and get enough money to do whatever you want. It is a terrible choice in the long term, you have to work in a very stressful environment and there are many shady tournaments/organizers/teams you have to deal with. People will praise you when you succeed, insult you when you fail and forget you when you leave. You also have to ask for your money from tournaments all the times else you are sure you will never get it. I don't regret my choice (I think I would have regret more not to try being a progamer). But I believe the true winners are tournaments organizers and Blizzard who should be really glad that they had pro gamers to use for their business. Look at where the previous progamers (like Idra, Naniwa..) are compared to the organizations (like DH, ESL...) On November 29 2016 15:59 alexanderzero wrote: Just let the SC2 scene shrink in peace for gods sake. People will still keep having tournaments for this game for years to come, whether or not they have big prize pools. I think it is good to acknowledge the mistakes of the situation to have a britghter future for us and the next generations : This is what I mention in the end of my video, in my opinion e-sport in sc2 is over (unless a gigantic WCS announcement), if you want a future for Starcraft 2 the scene has to changed somehow. For the next generations I am thinking about the new progamers, the new teams, the new games. I think they should watch what happenned on previous "e-sport" games to takes the good decisions for their future | ||
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