StarCraft II and Brood War Belong to Different Genres - Pa…

On January 03 2017 23:21 Euphorbus wrote:

And in fact, going along with your argument, you can. You give a weight to both personality and looks. Then you calculate a weighted average. The one with the highest weighted average is 'better'. And they can only be equal if they score exactly the same value.

You wouldn't measure how hard a game is on a person by person basis.

On January 03 2017 23:38 Euphorbus wrote:
Yes, you can add weights to personality and looks, but those weights will be different from person to person, hence the weighted average will be subjective

On January 03 2017 22:41 Laurens wrote:


Is Nony not B level on Iccup, or are you just ignoring his post to defend your narrative?

Some things are harder in BW, some things are harder in SC2, no game is strictly harder than the other.

On January 04 2017 03:42 NonY wrote:
Ok let's say you're a runner and you can run a series of races on flat courses or you can run a series of races on hilly courses. Which one is harder? Whichever one your opponents are better at. The whole thing about how it's harder to run up a hill than run on a flat surface is just trivia. The important question for the competitor is which one they're relatively better at. The question for the designer is which one is more fun and more fulfilling for people to do. The question for the competition director is which one yields a better competition, both for the competitors and for the viewers.

A mapmaker can make a map "objectively more difficult" by making it "more difficult" to expand. Does this really make the map more difficult to play? Probably not. People play differently on it. The change will suit some people and not others, some races and not others. It may even make the game easier because no even tries to expand anymore so it's just a 1 base all-in map. There's just no point in looking at one little detail of a very complex thing, seeing that it is more challenging in some way, and concluding that the whole thing is therefore more challenging. It's not simply additive like that.

If you had nearly perfect players who had to do everything nearly perfectly in order to stand a chance competitively at all, then challenges would be virtually additive like that. But playing SC2 presents a player with far more things than can be done perfectly, so playing it is already a matter of prioritizing attention and effort. When something becomes more challenging, in SC2 or in BW, it triggers the player to reevaluate the amount of value they get out of devoting their attention to it. This doesn't affect how hard the game is to play overall. Their attention is already over-burdened.

So to explain some of SC2's UI changes, let's look at macro and micro. Macro was changed so that multiple buildings could be selected at once to reduce the amount of time a player has to spend on production. Why? Because it's not one of the more fun things to do in the game and it's not fun to watch. Change the UI so players spend less time doing that and more time harassing, engaged in skirmishes, etc. Micro was changed so that an unlimited number of units can be selected at once. Why? Because giving your whole army move and attack move commands is not one of the more fun things to do in a battle. Controlling individual units, casting spells, working on more specific positioning with drag selections, etc, are the more fun things to do. So make it easy to give basic commands to the whole army but provide incentives for doing other kinds of unit control.

Now, WoL ended up being not very good for a bunch of other reasons which really muddled our ability to judge these UI changes. And at the same time, these UI changes proved trickier than originally thought, because many people (myself included) spent a lot of time developing those skills in BW and learned to love them. Blizzard also discovered that having too many spellcasting units ends up having its own pitfalls. The way they're working on LotV now is showing their continued ability to tweak how players use their attention to yield the most fun game to play and watch.

You could keep simplifying and simplifying and removing challenges so much that it's inevitable that the whole does become insufficiently challenging. Has anyone made that argument successfully about mechanics in SC2? I've never seen someone come close. I've only seen people not even understand the task before them, thinking they've already proven it when they haven't even started. The more interesting discussion is about what kind of mechanical challenges players face and whether the ones in BW or the ones in SC2 are better for competitive play. And that's something this article's author addressed in a different article and a lot of people have been discussing for years. And it's something that Blizzard was concerned about ever since they started working on SC2's multiplayer.

On January 04 2017 04:50 Euphorbus wrote:
I can't believe you are making that argument, Nony.

There are several problems with your line of reasoning.

First off, you define how hard a game is by the odds of winning at that game. That is absurd for the following reason. Compare me winning a coin flip competition against the entire world population against me winning at some RTS game against the existing player base.

The odds of me winning the coin flip population is basically zero, yet the only skill I need is to throw a coin and have it not land on it's edge. As long as I get one side up, all I need is for luck to give me the right result.

Now in an RTS game, I will also have very low chance to actually win, but a way better chance of winning than winning the coin flipping, which is basically zero.
You cannot say flipping a coin is harder than the RTS game just because my chance of winning is lower.


You cannot possibly think that the only difference between Starcraft and SC2 is what skills it tests for. They also differ in how and how much they are tested.

So you need to define the difficulty of a game by how well the game is able to differentiate the skills of the player, whatever those skills are. When there is a very tiny skill gap between two players, the game has to be able to 'measure' which one is better and let that player win. And for any game that is not a game of pure chance, if you play enough times, the outcome will not be 50-50. A difficult game will be a game where that percentage is bigger.

The more difficult the game, the more skill plateau's between a beginner and the best player of the world. You can also express it in terms of Elo, as long as the Elo model is actually accurate (which I suspect it often isn't). So many difference in points means a certain odds. Like 100 points difference means the player with 100 more Elo has a 76% to win. The more of an Elo gap between the very best and the average player, the more difficult the game.


In your example, you describe a game like bingo where the 'difficulty' of the game comes down to holding the right lot/number ie having the right skills and talents for the right game/track. Yes, if you run up a slope, run on a flat, run on a forest trail, different people will win, unless one is just much much better than anyone else. And yes, this is also what happens in different games. All you need to do is have the right skill for the right game. That's like a lottery/bingo. But even SC2 is much much more than just that.

As for the running analogy specifically, in running your performance is basically independent of your competitors as you compete against the clock, not against your opponent. Yes, there is race tactics and drafting, but that is completely different from pressuring your opponent, outthinking your opponent, in a game where you 'fight' against your opponent, be it chess, an RTS, some 1vs1 duel in a teamsport, or martial arts.
One reason why such games have such big skill differentiation is exactly because better players can exploit their opponent's weakness, anticipate their moves, or trick or out-think them.

It is actually ironic that you changed position on this. When you were still a Starcraft player you argued for a SC2 more similar to Starcraft. Why? Maybe because it would help you as more of your skills would transition.
And now that you and many other players aren't haven't achieved in SC2 what they hoped out to achieve, now it becomes more convenient to claim that SC2 is really difficult.

in sc2 the skill cieling was already reached by many poeple but snce many reached it, it's hard to prevel this is how i see it, what prove this is that there was never a single progamer in sc2 who lasted many years like in BW

On January 05 2017 00:05 Euphorbus wrote:
It is possible to test if Starcraft is harder than SC2, in the way I kind of have proposed. But it should also be possible to 'do the experiment' by sampling data from past games played databases. At least for SC2, Blizzard sits on that data for sure. I don't know if iccup data would be able to provide the same. As there will be a lot of variance, you need sufficiently large numbers of games played. And no, I am not going to try to analyze the data myself. I have other more important experiments to do.

Elo works for SC2? I don't know what that means. Elo is just a way to quantify how large the skill spectrum over players of different ability is. And in a sense it is a measure of how much a game is luck-based vs skill-based.

Fact remains my position is not just an opinion or a vague statement. And even without definite proof, there certainly is evidence. Yes, counter-intuitive things may be going on, but if you make the game easier to play, you would expect the spectrum of skill to shrink, ie the game being less difficult. It's not a law of nature, but the evidence definitely points that way. And, if you are convinced this is not the case, you can actually analyze the data and show it to be false.


There has been some work published on this. So if you don't find my convincing, you can read up on the literature. Most of it was based or motivated on poker, and trying to 'prove' that it was a game of skill instead of a game of luck, so it could bypass the gambling regulations in some countries.

On December 30 2016 22:49 Charoisaur wrote:

I think what the article means isn't that sc2 offers more strategy but that strategy is more important and decides more games.
in BW a lot of games just get decided by mechanics, there's a lot of strategic decisions you can make but I feel it doesn't make the difference between win and loss as often as in sc2.
In sc2 when I analyze a replay of me or a pro-level game it's most of the time a few errors in decision-making that made the difference between win and loss. Of course it also happens that you lose just because your opponent has better mechanics but I feel it's not as often as in BW.

On January 05 2017 02:24 Euphorbus wrote:
Well, the line of reasoning is that we as a Starcraft community knew why our game was harder than C&C or DoW or AoE (and even WC3). That was the multitasking involved.
We, and that includes you as I seem to remember better than you, argued that MBS would be an integral part of what made Starcraft different from all other RTS games.

While I do indeed remember you had a nuanced opinion, you did say here on TL things like:

"Simplifying the interface with MBS and automining takes an enormous chunk out of the macro variable and will make it so close to a constant because all the top players will be doing it nearly perfectly."

"Why can't manual macro be a definitive aspect of SC? Every RTS has to have unique aspects that separate it somehow and why can't SC be set apart by not hopping on the MBS/automining bandwagon?"

"The catch is that MBS/automining might not be good for StarCraft's formula for a long-term competitive game."


I just find it strange that a time where old Nony is actually vindicated, new Nony suddenly doesn't even recognize the arguments made by old Nony, but also does not see reality now agrees with the predictions of old Nony.

I guess you see things differently than me and than old Nony. But I just find it strange that at a time where I feel vindicated about my old opinions, you reject those old opinions on the basis of the same evidence that I feel vindicates me.


I understand that all you top players had to accept SC2 the way it was to be able to perform, and that for some (Idra?) that was a struggle. I recognize that transitioning from Starcraft to SC2 required some double think. I mean, I can't imagine how I would be passionate about a game I didn't fully believe in. And back then, people were vocal. But the moment they realized they had to accept SC2 the way it was, because it wouldn't change, they shut up about it, for understandable reasons.