|
On May 26 2007 08:23 Manit0u wrote:I was thinking about all of this and I think that I have found a game that could answer many peoples questions, help them get out of doubt and most of all - would provide a great practice for the upcoming SC2 both for BW and TFT players. I'm talking about Armies of Exigo here... Why? BW aspects: - massive armies - numerous expansions - A LOT of macro (in addition you have 3 resources there which makes things even harder) - very fast game pace - hard counters - no heroes - no creeps TFT aspects: - theme (more or less, Fallen are more "zergish" than Undead in TFT but they get some toss aspects aswell - and FvF is played almost exactly like ZvZ in BW) - multiple building selection (and interface in general) - you need more micro in battles than in BW (saving units is important because maybe there are no heroes but every single unit can advance and become a bit stronger) - battles start early on (and there's a lot of harassment options) So basically BW players could see for themselves how more advanced interfaces work while still having the original gameplay aspect while TFT players could learn to fight without heroes/creeps/items and how to control bigger armies that die fast. Just a thought 
Problem beeing that AoX never took off and always remained very unpopular. Just like every other RTS with MBS (But that had some other harder task to take the time building selection didn't)
I posted my fear that that will happen to sc2 as well when it as the 312352345x game tries to implement this feature a couple of pages back I think.
(The only only exeption here is wc3 but thing is wc3 didn't replace the manual building micro with something else, instead it embraced the fact that armies became the only focus of attention and thus created a very different and very succesfull typ of game)
|
AoX never took off mostly because of the supply/demand of RTS games.
The casual gamers don't want intense demanding RTS games like AoX, and they probably bought the LOTR RTS that was released a month later or so.
A large chunk hardcore players are busy with bw, wc3 and don't even try looking at new games.
AoX was shipped a month or two before Dawn of War. It never really got a chance to start with, no matter how good it could be.
|
I think it would get a much fairer chance of taking off if just 2 things would be done with it:
1. Proper advertising (as a matter of fact, it wasn't advertised at all and if it was it was not sufficient).
2. Proper support (screw you EA and GameSpy!!!!).
This game really had everything what people want:
- awesome gameplay
- awesome graphics
- awesome campaign
- awesome cinematics
And now EA has closed their servers for the game so the only way you can play it online is LAN or hamachi.
+ Show Spoiler +
|
On May 27 2007 04:19 KlaCkoN wrote:Show nested quote +On May 26 2007 08:23 Manit0u wrote:I was thinking about all of this and I think that I have found a game that could answer many peoples questions, help them get out of doubt and most of all - would provide a great practice for the upcoming SC2 both for BW and TFT players. I'm talking about Armies of Exigo here... Why? BW aspects: - massive armies - numerous expansions - A LOT of macro (in addition you have 3 resources there which makes things even harder) - very fast game pace - hard counters - no heroes - no creeps TFT aspects: - theme (more or less, Fallen are more "zergish" than Undead in TFT but they get some toss aspects aswell - and FvF is played almost exactly like ZvZ in BW) - multiple building selection (and interface in general) - you need more micro in battles than in BW (saving units is important because maybe there are no heroes but every single unit can advance and become a bit stronger) - battles start early on (and there's a lot of harassment options) So basically BW players could see for themselves how more advanced interfaces work while still having the original gameplay aspect while TFT players could learn to fight without heroes/creeps/items and how to control bigger armies that die fast. Just a thought Problem beeing that AoX never took off and always remained very unpopular. Just like every other RTS with MBS (But that had some other harder task to take the time building selection didn't) I posted my fear that that will happen to sc2 as well when it as the 312352345x game tries to implement this feature a couple of pages back I think. (The only only exeption here is wc3 but thing is wc3 didn't replace the manual building micro with something else, instead it embraced the fact that armies became the only focus of attention and thus created a very different and very succesfull typ of game)
Lol, you seriously think AoX failed because of MBS.. After all the posts for and against it.. you'll say something like that. AoX failed, because it was a borring game, that was only a clone of WC3, WC3 being a better game anyways. Why play a clone when the original thing is better? AoX had crappy multiplayer support and a crappy campaign.. NOTHING to do with MBS. If you're going to say something so offbase like that.. you can just as well say that "If Starcraft or any RTS game never had a stupid map editor, people wouldn't be so destracted to play stupid custom games and competition would be better and more people would play" which is another false statement.
|
On May 27 2007 08:54 yangstuh wrote:
[
Lol, you seriously think AoX failed because of MBS.. After all the posts for and against it.. you'll say something like that. AoX failed, because it was a borring game, that was only a clone of WC3, WC3 being a better game anyways. Why play a clone when the original thing is better? AoX had crappy multiplayer support and a crappy campaign.. NOTHING to do with MBS. If you're going to say something so offbase like that.. you can just as well say that "If Starcraft or any RTS game never had a stupid map editor, people wouldn't be so destracted to play stupid custom games and competition would be better and more people would play" which is another false statement.
No exactely directely because of MBS, but indirectly.
If you include MBS you need to implement something that is as time consuming for the player as individually selecting buildings. In AoX (apparantly) as well as all the Age of xxx games this something was a pretty complex macro managment system, including but not limited to more than 2 types of resources.
This complexity makes the game hard on "causual" gamers and no newbies means no pros means (in a year or 2) dead game.
Starcraft is EASY, hell as a newbie all you have to worry about is clicking those buildings. No need to think reason or learn. Of course the wonderful thing about starcraft is that there is still an almost unlimited amount of game knowledge under the surface, if you decide to become something more than a newbie that is. This simple fact that sc is so very simple to start playing has contributed a LOT to its success imho.
Wc3 on the same take is also easy. Wc3 didn't replace the lack of macro introduced by MBS with a complicated resource managment system. It was simply a game that focused soley on your army heroes etc. And thus the game is easy on a newbie, all you have to worry about is keeping your hero alive. Of course the micro you do has unlimited potential, which makes the game very competetive but a newbie does not need to worry about that. Warcraft 3 is also insanly popular.
The games that does not want the 100% focus on micro that wc3 has becomes way more complex when you add MBS to the equation. If you are new to say any age of xxx game you do not only have to worry about building some troops to survive early game, often you have to tech a bit to even be able to build troops, you also have to get 43t5345 types of resources to build those soldiers and very often you even have to do some pretty difficult micro to get those resources in the first place. (Hunting). etc etc etc. The complexity makes the game competive yes, and fun for those who master it yes, but it has, at least up to today made the game unpopular with the masses past the first few 1000s that buy it due to cool graphics and comercials.
This at least is how I view it, I may have understood things wrong and in a way I hope I have but ultimatly all I want is for sc2 to be both fun, and POPULAR. (probably the only reason I still play bw is due to the progaming scence....)
|
On May 27 2007 09:22 KlaCkoN wrote:Show nested quote +On May 27 2007 08:54 yangstuh wrote:
[
Lol, you seriously think AoX failed because of MBS.. After all the posts for and against it.. you'll say something like that. AoX failed, because it was a borring game, that was only a clone of WC3, WC3 being a better game anyways. Why play a clone when the original thing is better? AoX had crappy multiplayer support and a crappy campaign.. NOTHING to do with MBS. If you're going to say something so offbase like that.. you can just as well say that "If Starcraft or any RTS game never had a stupid map editor, people wouldn't be so destracted to play stupid custom games and competition would be better and more people would play" which is another false statement. No exactely directely because of MBS, but indirectly. If you include MBS you need to implement something that is as time consuming for the player as individually selecting buildings. In AoX (apparantly) as well as all the Age of xxx games this something was a pretty complex macro managment system, including but not limited to more than 2 types of resources. This complexity makes the game hard on "causual" gamers and no newbies means no pros means (in a year or 2) dead game. Starcraft is EASY, hell as a newbie all you have to worry about is clicking those buildings. No need to think reason or learn. Of course the wonderful thing about starcraft is that there is still an almost unlimited amount of game knowledge under the surface, if you decide to become something more than a newbie that is. This simple fact that sc is so very simple to start playing has contributed a LOT to its success imho. Wc3 on the same take is also easy. Wc3 didn't replace the lack of macro introduced by MBS with a complicated resource managment system. It was simply a game that focused soley on your army heroes etc. And thus the game is easy on a newbie, all you have to worry about is keeping your hero alive. Of course the micro you do has unlimited potential, which makes the game very competetive but a newbie does not need to worry about that. Warcraft 3 is also insanly popular. The games that does not want the 100% focus on micro that wc3 has becomes way more complex when you add MBS to the equation. If you are new to say any age of xxx game you do not only have to worry about building some troops to survive early game, often you have to tech a bit to even be able to build troops, you also have to get 43t5345 types of resources to build those soldiers and very often you even have to do some pretty difficult micro to get those resources in the first place. (Hunting). etc etc etc. The complexity makes the game competive yes, and fun for those who master it yes, but it has, at least up to today made the game unpopular with the masses past the first few 1000s that buy it due to cool graphics and comercials. This at least is how I view it, I may have understood things wrong and in a way I hope I have but ultimatly all I want is for sc2 to be both fun, and POPULAR. (probably the only reason I still play bw is due to the progaming scence....)
I posted this earlier, but I think everyone missed it. This is a reply to people saying that MBS levels the competitive playing field, which I say it does not... among other things.
The range from pro to newb will always be the same, granted there is the same amount of people playing.. millions in blizzard's case. What I think most people here are missing is that the huge divide between newb players and pro players is because the SC game is so balanced and so popular and has been played to hell and back again. It is through this process of intense hours, months, and years of playing that pro tactics and strategies develope to utilize the gameplay to its utmost maximum potential. Games that arn't popular and have smaller population don't grow to this level, because it doesn't get played as much. Competition is dependant on the population that plays it. The more people there are, the more chances of people figuring out new/better strategies and tactics.
If Starcraft were to only be played by 10 competitive players, do you think it'd still have all the strategies/tactics today? Do you think that the micro and macro portions of the game would be scrutinized at such a high level? Do you think all these factors would be the same as opposed to 1000 competitive players.. 10,000? What makes a game competitive is the game being so freaking fun, addictive, and balanced that it attracts millions of players.. in which case it gets played to hell and back again.. and you get what happened to Starcraft.
MBS does nothing to lower the competitive playing field, focus goes elsewhere on the battlefield.. it doesn't dissappear. I think I explained why it wouldn't ruin competition.. this factor is unrelated to it. It might be more newb friendly, but that just attracts a larger audience and increases competition.
Now that I explained that, lets talk about.. whether it gives newbs an advantage. I'm going to be short, it does not give them an advantage. A pro player always wins against a newb. Newbs don't account for scouting, they don't account for micro, they don't understand flanking, they don't understand counters, they don't understand econ management, they don't understand when to push or when to pull, they don't understand adaptation, and they don't understand a ton of small and big things that make it really impossible for them to win against a pro. How does allowing MBS change any of that, except for making their experience a little less frustrating? Why should the game come down to where a few less clicks jeopordizes everything that it now stands for, that is competition? Why does streamling the building/training process have to = less skill. Manualy selecting individual buildings doesn't mean skill, it purely is just more monotonous work. It isn't like recourse management, and manualy placing buildings.
Should a Student Bob be graded higher for manually typing in every letter of his research website addresses into his source page as opposed to Student John who copy pasted the addresses into his source page? Of course not, the student who wrote a better paper gets a higher grade. The same is true for Starcraft, the better player wins the game. Individual building selection versus multiple building selection.. is not what Starcraft is about. Because we've played it so many damn times, and so many of us did.. that we've lost track of what made Starcraft 1 of the best/competitive games ever. We've forgotten that Starcraft too was once a new, reovutionary, and innovative game. Things like MBS is just furthering the evolution of the game. It cuts out unneccessary 'manual address typing' that doesn't do anything for the game in the first place.
|
I don't know if the was directed to me =p you quoted me but your post has nothing to do with what I wrote, I didn't say that a more complex macro game including MBS makes for a less competetive game, on the contrary I said that it makes the game very competetive. What I did say was that up until know such complex games has always been very unpopular. Opposite to BW and TFT which are although very different both very very easy to play and understand at newb level.
Games with very complex macro are not. Which is why I think, they have always had very small comunities.
|
I think you're absolutely insane if you think that MBS is what killed AoX, directly or indirectly.
It doesn't make a 'newb' that good at all. There's sooooo many other factors in a game that someone can be better at.
I honestly can't believe you think like that >_< It's just so illogical and irrational to think that it affects the game THAT much... to say that it newbifies the game so much that people can't be 'pros'...
Think about how easy chess or checkers is to play... there's pros in that. There's pros in ANYTHING that can be played competitvely. Having MBS doesn't kill that, ever. In any way shape or form.
|
|
|
On May 27 2007 10:13 KlaCkoN wrote:
I don't know if the was directed to me =p you quoted me but your post has nothing to do with what I wrote, I didn't say that a more complex macro game including MBS makes for a less competetive game, on the contrary I said that it makes the game very competetive. What I did say was that up until know such complex games has always been very unpopular. Opposite to BW and TFT which are although very different both very very easy to play and understand at newb level.
Games with very complex macro are not. Which is why I think, they have always had very small comunities.
It was more about for opposers of MBS in general, it does touch light on what you were saying. It explains how MBS is such a tiny part of RTS gameplay and does nothing else but streamlines processes. I'm just surprised you think MBS has anything to do with any game failing.
Here is an example.. Supreme Commander (Starcraft 2 will not even be close to the macro level of this game, nor does it need to be) was a block buster hit. I didn't like the game personally because it was too slow, no map editor, so-so multiplayer service, and such.. MBS however is hardly a reason.
|
On May 26 2007 14:02 MyLostTemple wrote:Show nested quote +On May 25 2007 18:26 Blacklizard wrote:
Part 2
To decide whether MBS is bad you have to weigh the pros and cons. Where does MBS fit in exactly... and I mean in the SC world, not the War3 world?
1. Does it hurt Micro and Macro both... equally? Hard to say.
2. Does it benefit the newb only? Don\\\'t think so.
3. Does it actually make the game more battle and maneuver based? Probably.
4. Would being more battle and maneuver based mean all the players that rely on APM would become much worse players? I seriously doubt it.
5. Would some pro players be hurt by MBS? Probably... but only those that didn\\\'t master every aspect of the game.
6. Does MBS take away from the beauty of the game of SC2? We can\\\'t answer this, because there may be so much more to do... we won\\\'t know till we play. And really play... not just 1 month of alpha testing.
I will say this. Don\\\'t be so sure of why you didn\\\'t enjoy Warcraft 3. The design sounded like it\\\'d be fun for me, but for whatever reason I just couldnt stick with it. It wasn\\\'t as fun as SC. So i won\\\'t take a hard stance on MBS. The situation for SC2 and MBS isn\\\'t clear until the game is played. It could be for the better... it could be for the worse. But I will stand by my distinct preference that sloppy micro, when you are trying to micro, is just a travesty to see.
------
MBS would take away from one large luck factor in SC. Those every so present moments at fastest play games (it wasn\\\'t always fastest in the old days) where you decide to go back to your base to build men during a battle... and then because of that 2 second delay, you lost half of your force due to something that you totally could have prevented if you had watched the battle. Sometimes you are able to avoid these simply due to good scouting and not being surprised... but sometimes you don\\\'t know what\\\'s in the back of that tank push because you don\\\'t have a comstat (toss/zerg) to get past the turrets, tanks, and mines. Well, perhaps you can\\\'t take your eyes off a tank push, but late game that means death. With MBS, you could keep fighting when you knew it was important and not take your eyes off the battle at that point in time.
MBS frees up more hotkeys and will allow for more hotkeying of groups of units... for fancier flanks and attacking more areas at once.
As some have pointed out, for maximum mechnical and dexterity you could actually take away some of the UI features like hotkeying units, etc. There is a balance to be made, for sure. I don\\\'t think anyone would argue that being able to hotkey units is a bad thing... yet in the old days of RTS you couldn\\\'t do it and it required more actions to do the same thing you can do in Starcraft. This hardly makes Starcraft a less skillful game.
MBS would fix something that would make me happy. A pet peeve of mine is rallying production facilities one at a time. it\\\'s fine when you have two gates. When you have 10+ gates it\\\'s more than a little annoying to do them one at a time without hotkeys and just about impossible to have all 10+ of them hotkeyed.
-Realizations-
Realization: After thinking on this more, I\\\'m actually leaning to MBS being a good thing.
Realization2 (slightly off topic, but while we\\\'re on design): Going back to the \\\"fast speed\\\" vs \\\"fastest speed\\\"... gamers will gravitate to fastest, but I think fast speed games typically emphasize early game balance, whereas fastest speed games typically emphasize late game balance. Early game balance being more critical in design so that late game can even be achieved. I hope to see fast speed (or faster) played in the SC2 beta.
Realization 3: i take back what i said in other post a little. Perhaps not all races in SC are micro/macro equal. Terran must be more macro friendly despite Boxer\\\'s micro fame. i say this because (correct me if i\\\'m wrong) there are more terran pros making it to higher levels of tournaments and more of their styles usually revolve around late game macro. And Terran, perhaps, has the easiest chance to defend against early aggressive micro/harrass and even late game harrass... early vs. zerg is probably the trickiest but that\\\'s 1 out of 3 matches (or 1 out of 4 now with Terran\\\'s large presence).
Conclusion?
Blizzard will do what they think is right. They are smart, lucky, and stubborn. I think they\\\'ll get it right.
What you said was quite good. I read all these posts last night and then got in my bed. I couldn't sleep. I just stared at the celling thinking about what we have talked about. I thought about all the starcraft games I've casted. I thought about the games that were fun to cast and the games that weren't. I thought about the games that enlightened my understanding of Starcraft and the ones that confused me. One game was stuck in my mind. WCG 2006 Iloveoov versus white-ra. White-ra has always been one of my favorite players. He's sneaky and creative. His builds are also brilliant. But i feel he shines more in his creative builds and daring moves than in his ability to follow a linear path to get maxed out. When he faced the mighty iloveoov white-ra played with no fear in his eyes. He wasn't afraid to leave his base. He wasn't afraid to take some risks while the world was watching. He wasn't afraid to keep trying new strategic moves after the first one failed. When i was watching the game i thought iloveoov was losing. But white ra fumbled and made one or two simple mistakes. Even though Iloveoov lost so many scvs he grew faster than his opponent. He knew the song to play and he played it quite well. Although White-ra made the game more exciting, he was penalized for taking risks. I remember wishing that White-ra had won that game because i thought he was playing in a much more fun way watch. Esports can only grow if people can watch--and what they're watching must be exciting. From reading this thread several times i am starting to see what my opponents are trying to tell me. I'm going to articulate this through some basic starcraft logic. Koreans have mastered the art of setting themselves up in macro positions. Fast expoing and then syncing up their gateways or hatches or barracks. That's a good technique, the problem is it that this technique is SO powerful that taking a big risk and trying to do something new and sexy can lose easily if it's not executed in a perfect manner. And even then, why would one bother attempting to try a crazy strategy if he or she knows that defending and macroing is more likely to win? Is this what you guys are trying to explain to me? Perhaps i never thought about it this way. GG, you have made an excellent point, and it seems like you are getting mine. Just know I'm also not in love with 'mashing' the keyboard. I cheese often, ask any of the other american starcraft players who i play with. Protoss has the coolest cheese in my opinion. quick wins when done in a cool way are tight. I like both the macro massing up and getting a lot of units concept just as much as i like the risky micro parts. However it seems that the player can get punished too easily in starcraft for taking risks. The player is also more easily rewarded for sitting back and massing... especially if he is a musician. We need is a new game where macro is important, but not so important that a the best players are the ones who played the safest. I don't generally enjoy watching savior play, don't get me wrong he's terrifyingly good, just not like sexy like nal ra or boxer. Does anyone know what i mean? What Starcraft 2 needs is to balance this. And balance it carefully. I did try playing those notes (the revised MBS method). I like it. It feels good on my hands. And with no PSI limit... hm... this could get insane in the late game. It also seems less prone to patterns (but i don't know that for sure because i haven't started playing the actual game yet.) Here's some of my thoughts on how we could combine these two features in a cool way. a) Let the game music go with the the macroing patterns. I'm talking about the actual game music, not the notes that you play on the keyboard. Let it get more dramatic as the game picks up (more and more units). Maybe the music could change in battles too. And give the races tons of songs to play along with. b) Make the tech tree a little bit different from starcrafts original one. I tend to make all of the same type of units at once: 4d5d6d7d8d9d0d. Then I'll make another wave with a different variation: 4z5z6z7z8z9t0t. Now i have a healthy mix of units. Maybe after i do 4z5z6z7z8z9t0t again I'll more those templars into an archon (because they have less energy). But I'm only getting to make these combinations late game because i finished the tech tree. Perhaps we could setup an earlier tech tree system so that we can get different units out early. This would allow for more openings for the player. The hard part would be balancing all those units. c) Slow down the macroing part at the start. I think so many people get confused on how to play starcraft because things need to happen so fast right at the start. If there's no psi limit it will get very fast in the late game. d) pay close attention to the ways units are used in starcraft. There are so many different ways to abuse their size, speed, and special abilities. Give us more ways to do this. e) maybe give the mineral patches less minerals?... i'm not sure but it seems like if there were less minerals in each patch i would be forced to expand faster. This would keep it like starcraft and not like warcraft. But then again i have no control over these things. Blizzard does.
My respect for you just skyrocketed :=)
a) Advanced ingame music would indeed be an awesome feature.
b) Blizzard have stated that they want to give the players an opportunity to choose different build orders instead of being locked into a single "supreme" version.
"Pardo highlighted a number of bullet points for design goals in the new game, mainly speed, saying the longest a StarCraft 2 match should take is around 20 minutes. Blizzard is emphasizing each races significantly different play styles, though they won't yet reveal how the Terran and Zerg can hope to counter the impressively powerful abilities of the Protoss' Mothership. Specific attention was paid to low-level tech tree abilities, as Pardo explained Blizzard has taken steps to expand the available options and make early-game mechanics more varied."
//
http://pc.ign.com/articles/790/790186p1.html
The last part of this paragraph seems to hint so anyhow.
c) I havn't played Starcraft seriously for years but I know that in Warcraft 3 you have to send away 3 workers to gold, 1 to wood and 1 to build a building and then tell your town hall to build another worked within a few sec. If you do any mistake during those first few minutes you're completly screwed when the enemy rush comes. Making the start itself a bit less intensive I suppose could be good, would have to be carefully balanced though because well played rushes have to be viable.
d) From what I've understood they want to make each unit in Starcraft 2 very important. They don't want any units like the Dark Archon that are only used in very few games.
e) I think it would be nice with options for minerals. Maybe when you host a game you can choose between mineral poor, mineral average, mineral rich and mineral unlimited? I think a somewhat low amount is better for the aggresive style that is better for ladder and e-sport play.
|
|
|
On May 27 2007 12:12 Zironic wrote:Show nested quote +On May 26 2007 14:02 MyLostTemple wrote:On May 25 2007 18:26 Blacklizard wrote:
Part 2
To decide whether MBS is bad you have to weigh the pros and cons. Where does MBS fit in exactly... and I mean in the SC world, not the War3 world?
1. Does it hurt Micro and Macro both... equally? Hard to say.
2. Does it benefit the newb only? Don\\\'t think so.
3. Does it actually make the game more battle and maneuver based? Probably.
4. Would being more battle and maneuver based mean all the players that rely on APM would become much worse players? I seriously doubt it.
5. Would some pro players be hurt by MBS? Probably... but only those that didn\\\'t master every aspect of the game.
6. Does MBS take away from the beauty of the game of SC2? We can\\\'t answer this, because there may be so much more to do... we won\\\'t know till we play. And really play... not just 1 month of alpha testing.
I will say this. Don\\\'t be so sure of why you didn\\\'t enjoy Warcraft 3. The design sounded like it\\\'d be fun for me, but for whatever reason I just couldnt stick with it. It wasn\\\'t as fun as SC. So i won\\\'t take a hard stance on MBS. The situation for SC2 and MBS isn\\\'t clear until the game is played. It could be for the better... it could be for the worse. But I will stand by my distinct preference that sloppy micro, when you are trying to micro, is just a travesty to see.
------
MBS would take away from one large luck factor in SC. Those every so present moments at fastest play games (it wasn\\\'t always fastest in the old days) where you decide to go back to your base to build men during a battle... and then because of that 2 second delay, you lost half of your force due to something that you totally could have prevented if you had watched the battle. Sometimes you are able to avoid these simply due to good scouting and not being surprised... but sometimes you don\\\'t know what\\\'s in the back of that tank push because you don\\\'t have a comstat (toss/zerg) to get past the turrets, tanks, and mines. Well, perhaps you can\\\'t take your eyes off a tank push, but late game that means death. With MBS, you could keep fighting when you knew it was important and not take your eyes off the battle at that point in time.
MBS frees up more hotkeys and will allow for more hotkeying of groups of units... for fancier flanks and attacking more areas at once.
As some have pointed out, for maximum mechnical and dexterity you could actually take away some of the UI features like hotkeying units, etc. There is a balance to be made, for sure. I don\\\'t think anyone would argue that being able to hotkey units is a bad thing... yet in the old days of RTS you couldn\\\'t do it and it required more actions to do the same thing you can do in Starcraft. This hardly makes Starcraft a less skillful game.
MBS would fix something that would make me happy. A pet peeve of mine is rallying production facilities one at a time. it\\\'s fine when you have two gates. When you have 10+ gates it\\\'s more than a little annoying to do them one at a time without hotkeys and just about impossible to have all 10+ of them hotkeyed.
-Realizations-
Realization: After thinking on this more, I\\\'m actually leaning to MBS being a good thing.
Realization2 (slightly off topic, but while we\\\'re on design): Going back to the \\\"fast speed\\\" vs \\\"fastest speed\\\"... gamers will gravitate to fastest, but I think fast speed games typically emphasize early game balance, whereas fastest speed games typically emphasize late game balance. Early game balance being more critical in design so that late game can even be achieved. I hope to see fast speed (or faster) played in the SC2 beta.
Realization 3: i take back what i said in other post a little. Perhaps not all races in SC are micro/macro equal. Terran must be more macro friendly despite Boxer\\\'s micro fame. i say this because (correct me if i\\\'m wrong) there are more terran pros making it to higher levels of tournaments and more of their styles usually revolve around late game macro. And Terran, perhaps, has the easiest chance to defend against early aggressive micro/harrass and even late game harrass... early vs. zerg is probably the trickiest but that\\\'s 1 out of 3 matches (or 1 out of 4 now with Terran\\\'s large presence).
Conclusion?
Blizzard will do what they think is right. They are smart, lucky, and stubborn. I think they\\\'ll get it right.
What you said was quite good. I read all these posts last night and then got in my bed. I couldn't sleep. I just stared at the celling thinking about what we have talked about. I thought about all the starcraft games I've casted. I thought about the games that were fun to cast and the games that weren't. I thought about the games that enlightened my understanding of Starcraft and the ones that confused me. One game was stuck in my mind. WCG 2006 Iloveoov versus white-ra. White-ra has always been one of my favorite players. He's sneaky and creative. His builds are also brilliant. But i feel he shines more in his creative builds and daring moves than in his ability to follow a linear path to get maxed out. When he faced the mighty iloveoov white-ra played with no fear in his eyes. He wasn't afraid to leave his base. He wasn't afraid to take some risks while the world was watching. He wasn't afraid to keep trying new strategic moves after the first one failed. When i was watching the game i thought iloveoov was losing. But white ra fumbled and made one or two simple mistakes. Even though Iloveoov lost so many scvs he grew faster than his opponent. He knew the song to play and he played it quite well. Although White-ra made the game more exciting, he was penalized for taking risks. I remember wishing that White-ra had won that game because i thought he was playing in a much more fun way watch. Esports can only grow if people can watch--and what they're watching must be exciting. From reading this thread several times i am starting to see what my opponents are trying to tell me. I'm going to articulate this through some basic starcraft logic. Koreans have mastered the art of setting themselves up in macro positions. Fast expoing and then syncing up their gateways or hatches or barracks. That's a good technique, the problem is it that this technique is SO powerful that taking a big risk and trying to do something new and sexy can lose easily if it's not executed in a perfect manner. And even then, why would one bother attempting to try a crazy strategy if he or she knows that defending and macroing is more likely to win? Is this what you guys are trying to explain to me? Perhaps i never thought about it this way. GG, you have made an excellent point, and it seems like you are getting mine. Just know I'm also not in love with 'mashing' the keyboard. I cheese often, ask any of the other american starcraft players who i play with. Protoss has the coolest cheese in my opinion. quick wins when done in a cool way are tight. I like both the macro massing up and getting a lot of units concept just as much as i like the risky micro parts. However it seems that the player can get punished too easily in starcraft for taking risks. The player is also more easily rewarded for sitting back and massing... especially if he is a musician. We need is a new game where macro is important, but not so important that a the best players are the ones who played the safest. I don't generally enjoy watching savior play, don't get me wrong he's terrifyingly good, just not like sexy like nal ra or boxer. Does anyone know what i mean? What Starcraft 2 needs is to balance this. And balance it carefully. I did try playing those notes (the revised MBS method). I like it. It feels good on my hands. And with no PSI limit... hm... this could get insane in the late game. It also seems less prone to patterns (but i don't know that for sure because i haven't started playing the actual game yet.) Here's some of my thoughts on how we could combine these two features in a cool way. a) Let the game music go with the the macroing patterns. I'm talking about the actual game music, not the notes that you play on the keyboard. Let it get more dramatic as the game picks up (more and more units). Maybe the music could change in battles too. And give the races tons of songs to play along with. b) Make the tech tree a little bit different from starcrafts original one. I tend to make all of the same type of units at once: 4d5d6d7d8d9d0d. Then I'll make another wave with a different variation: 4z5z6z7z8z9t0t. Now i have a healthy mix of units. Maybe after i do 4z5z6z7z8z9t0t again I'll more those templars into an archon (because they have less energy). But I'm only getting to make these combinations late game because i finished the tech tree. Perhaps we could setup an earlier tech tree system so that we can get different units out early. This would allow for more openings for the player. The hard part would be balancing all those units. c) Slow down the macroing part at the start. I think so many people get confused on how to play starcraft because things need to happen so fast right at the start. If there's no psi limit it will get very fast in the late game. d) pay close attention to the ways units are used in starcraft. There are so many different ways to abuse their size, speed, and special abilities. Give us more ways to do this. e) maybe give the mineral patches less minerals?... i'm not sure but it seems like if there were less minerals in each patch i would be forced to expand faster. This would keep it like starcraft and not like warcraft. But then again i have no control over these things. Blizzard does. My respect for you just skyrocketed :=) a) Advanced ingame music would indeed be an awesome feature. b) Blizzard have stated that they want to give the players an opportunity to choose different build orders instead of being locked into a single "supreme" version. "Pardo highlighted a number of bullet points for design goals in the new game, mainly speed, saying the longest a StarCraft 2 match should take is around 20 minutes. Blizzard is emphasizing each races significantly different play styles, though they won't yet reveal how the Terran and Zerg can hope to counter the impressively powerful abilities of the Protoss' Mothership. Specific attention was paid to low-level tech tree abilities, as Pardo explained Blizzard has taken steps to expand the available options and make early-game mechanics more varied." // http://pc.ign.com/articles/790/790186p1.htmlThe last part of this paragraph seems to hint so anyhow. c) I havn't played Starcraft seriously for years but I know that in Warcraft 3 you have to send away 3 workers to gold, 1 to wood and 1 to build a building and then tell your town hall to build another worked within a few sec. If you do any mistake during those first few minutes you're completly screwed when the enemy rush comes. Making the start itself a bit less intensive I suppose could be good, would have to be carefully balanced though because well played rushes have to be viable. d) From what I've understood they want to make each unit in Starcraft 2 very important. They don't want any units like the Dark Archon that are only used in very few games. e) I think it would be nice with options for minerals. Maybe when you host a game you can choose between mineral poor, mineral average, mineral rich and mineral unlimited? I think a somewhat low amount is better for the aggresive style that is better for ladder and e-sport play.
In war3 when you start with 5 workers, you send 3 to gold and 2 to build buildings. 1 to build a farm/zig/mw/borrow and the other to build a rax/aow/crypt. And then build 2 workers from your main.
At least that's how i played it... i;ve never heard about sending 1 to wood >_>
|
On May 27 2007 12:15 KlaCkoN wrote:Show nested quote +On May 27 2007 11:25 SoleSteeler wrote:
I think you're absolutely insane if you think that MBS is what killed AoX, directly or indirectly.
It doesn't make a 'newb' that good at all. There's sooooo many other factors in a game that someone can be better at.
I honestly can't believe you think like that >_< It's just so illogical and irrational to think that it affects the game THAT much... to say that it newbifies the game so much that people can't be 'pros'...
Think about how easy chess or checkers is to play... there's pros in that. There's pros in ANYTHING that can be played competitvely. Having MBS doesn't kill that, ever. In any way shape or form.  please... I realize my english isn't exactely good on the contrary it has been pretty awful these posts, but if you don't understand what I am typing please ask me to clarify rather than asume things I definetly didn't write. I said nothing implying the fact that AoX failed because MBS made the game so easy that people couldn't be pros. I said that games that want to be macro focused with MBS has to make the macro rather complicated. And that complexity turns newbs away from the game after the first year or so. Which means that the game dies online after say 2-3 years. At least this is how it has been historically whenever a complex macro RTS has been launched. As for Surpreme commander beeing a huge hit. If it has an online community of 500 000+ (small figure...) 2 years after it's release then i shall gladly admit I was wrong. (And smile when doing so because that would make me happy)
Supreme Commander will survive for a long long time. Not because it has a huge community (it has a tiny one), but because the community it has are atleast as hardcore as the Starcraft one. The Supreme Commander community is full of people that have been playing Total Anhilation until the release of Supreme Commander and that game is even older then Starcraft. They kept playing the game even after the online servers for the game went offline :O.
The failure of games like Supreme Commander to become large hits is because they tend to lack any soul. If we take Supreme Commander as an example. You might build 100 T3 units and send them against your opponent but you don't CARE about any of them. They don't speak any cool quotes when you select them, they don't fight in any particularly cool way. They're just disposable junk that you mostly observe as dots from the Strategical Map.
AoX failed I think because it didn't get any support from EA because EA was releasing Battle of Middle Earth at the same time and prefered focusing on that. Also AoX didn't really have anything that distinguished it from other games at the time. For anyone playing WC3 at the time there just wasn't enough in AoX to change game. It didn't help that the Campaign in AoX wasn't all that good and from my understanding it didn't have any good map editor to grow a modding community out of.
When it coems to the Age of XXX games, I used to love the first ones but I didn't like Age of Empires III, now why I don't like that game I have no idea. I think games have this hard to define quality that just makes you like them. Blizzards games all have that quality but alot of the other games out there lack it.
It might be as you say that most of the games that have had MBS have been very macro oriented games and inheritly hostile to new players. However Starcraft 2 is supposed to be a micro/macro hybrid that anyone can pick up and play for fun but where the pros can demonstrate infinatly higher levels of skill. The game will be complex but in a deeper more meaningfull way.
Examples could be that with the protoss new Warp Gate production system it becomes very important what kind of areas you have covered in psi field. While the newb might only have covered his base a pro might have a sneaky Warp Prism projecting a field over the cliff looking over the entrence to his base ready to Warp in some heavy ranged units to high ground as suprise.
I think generally Starcraft 2 will be full of abilities that in a new players hand won't be very usefull but in the hands of a pro will be terrifying.
|
On May 27 2007 12:15 KlaCkoN wrote:Show nested quote +On May 27 2007 11:25 SoleSteeler wrote:
I think you're absolutely insane if you think that MBS is what killed AoX, directly or indirectly.
It doesn't make a 'newb' that good at all. There's sooooo many other factors in a game that someone can be better at.
I honestly can't believe you think like that >_< It's just so illogical and irrational to think that it affects the game THAT much... to say that it newbifies the game so much that people can't be 'pros'...
Think about how easy chess or checkers is to play... there's pros in that. There's pros in ANYTHING that can be played competitvely. Having MBS doesn't kill that, ever. In any way shape or form. please... I realize my english isn't exactely good on the contrary it has been pretty awful these posts, but if you don't understand what I am typing please ask me to clarify rather than asume things I definetly didn't write. I said nothing implying the fact that AoX failed because MBS made the game so easy that people couldn't be pros. I said that games that want to be macro focused with MBS has to make the macro rather complicated. And that complexity turns newbs away from the game after the first year or so. Which means that the game dies online after say 2-3 years. At least this is how it has been historically whenever a complex macro RTS has been launched. As for Surpreme commander beeing a huge hit. If it has an online community of 500 000+ (small figure...) 2 years after it's release then i shall gladly admit I was wrong. (And smile when doing so because that would make me happy)
Macro in AoX wansn't very complicated. Sure you had 3 resources but one of them you basically needed only for advanced units/upgrades and it was easy to gather since you could have only certain amount of workers assigned to the mine (it was the only resource that had mine in AoX).
I told you before what killed the game, the fact that nobody knew it was there and the complete shitness of the GameSpy supported online play (only 1 account per game copy allowed? please...).
|
On May 27 2007 12:25 Vin{MBL} wrote:Show nested quote +On May 27 2007 12:12 Zironic wrote:On May 26 2007 14:02 MyLostTemple wrote:On May 25 2007 18:26 Blacklizard wrote:
Part 2
To decide whether MBS is bad you have to weigh the pros and cons. Where does MBS fit in exactly... and I mean in the SC world, not the War3 world?
1. Does it hurt Micro and Macro both... equally? Hard to say.
2. Does it benefit the newb only? Don\\\'t think so.
3. Does it actually make the game more battle and maneuver based? Probably.
4. Would being more battle and maneuver based mean all the players that rely on APM would become much worse players? I seriously doubt it.
5. Would some pro players be hurt by MBS? Probably... but only those that didn\\\'t master every aspect of the game.
6. Does MBS take away from the beauty of the game of SC2? We can\\\'t answer this, because there may be so much more to do... we won\\\'t know till we play. And really play... not just 1 month of alpha testing.
I will say this. Don\\\'t be so sure of why you didn\\\'t enjoy Warcraft 3. The design sounded like it\\\'d be fun for me, but for whatever reason I just couldnt stick with it. It wasn\\\'t as fun as SC. So i won\\\'t take a hard stance on MBS. The situation for SC2 and MBS isn\\\'t clear until the game is played. It could be for the better... it could be for the worse. But I will stand by my distinct preference that sloppy micro, when you are trying to micro, is just a travesty to see.
------
MBS would take away from one large luck factor in SC. Those every so present moments at fastest play games (it wasn\\\'t always fastest in the old days) where you decide to go back to your base to build men during a battle... and then because of that 2 second delay, you lost half of your force due to something that you totally could have prevented if you had watched the battle. Sometimes you are able to avoid these simply due to good scouting and not being surprised... but sometimes you don\\\'t know what\\\'s in the back of that tank push because you don\\\'t have a comstat (toss/zerg) to get past the turrets, tanks, and mines. Well, perhaps you can\\\'t take your eyes off a tank push, but late game that means death. With MBS, you could keep fighting when you knew it was important and not take your eyes off the battle at that point in time.
MBS frees up more hotkeys and will allow for more hotkeying of groups of units... for fancier flanks and attacking more areas at once.
As some have pointed out, for maximum mechnical and dexterity you could actually take away some of the UI features like hotkeying units, etc. There is a balance to be made, for sure. I don\\\'t think anyone would argue that being able to hotkey units is a bad thing... yet in the old days of RTS you couldn\\\'t do it and it required more actions to do the same thing you can do in Starcraft. This hardly makes Starcraft a less skillful game.
MBS would fix something that would make me happy. A pet peeve of mine is rallying production facilities one at a time. it\\\'s fine when you have two gates. When you have 10+ gates it\\\'s more than a little annoying to do them one at a time without hotkeys and just about impossible to have all 10+ of them hotkeyed.
-Realizations-
Realization: After thinking on this more, I\\\'m actually leaning to MBS being a good thing.
Realization2 (slightly off topic, but while we\\\'re on design): Going back to the \\\"fast speed\\\" vs \\\"fastest speed\\\"... gamers will gravitate to fastest, but I think fast speed games typically emphasize early game balance, whereas fastest speed games typically emphasize late game balance. Early game balance being more critical in design so that late game can even be achieved. I hope to see fast speed (or faster) played in the SC2 beta.
Realization 3: i take back what i said in other post a little. Perhaps not all races in SC are micro/macro equal. Terran must be more macro friendly despite Boxer\\\'s micro fame. i say this because (correct me if i\\\'m wrong) there are more terran pros making it to higher levels of tournaments and more of their styles usually revolve around late game macro. And Terran, perhaps, has the easiest chance to defend against early aggressive micro/harrass and even late game harrass... early vs. zerg is probably the trickiest but that\\\'s 1 out of 3 matches (or 1 out of 4 now with Terran\\\'s large presence).
Conclusion?
Blizzard will do what they think is right. They are smart, lucky, and stubborn. I think they\\\'ll get it right.
What you said was quite good. I read all these posts last night and then got in my bed. I couldn't sleep. I just stared at the celling thinking about what we have talked about. I thought about all the starcraft games I've casted. I thought about the games that were fun to cast and the games that weren't. I thought about the games that enlightened my understanding of Starcraft and the ones that confused me. One game was stuck in my mind. WCG 2006 Iloveoov versus white-ra. White-ra has always been one of my favorite players. He's sneaky and creative. His builds are also brilliant. But i feel he shines more in his creative builds and daring moves than in his ability to follow a linear path to get maxed out. When he faced the mighty iloveoov white-ra played with no fear in his eyes. He wasn't afraid to leave his base. He wasn't afraid to take some risks while the world was watching. He wasn't afraid to keep trying new strategic moves after the first one failed. When i was watching the game i thought iloveoov was losing. But white ra fumbled and made one or two simple mistakes. Even though Iloveoov lost so many scvs he grew faster than his opponent. He knew the song to play and he played it quite well. Although White-ra made the game more exciting, he was penalized for taking risks. I remember wishing that White-ra had won that game because i thought he was playing in a much more fun way watch. Esports can only grow if people can watch--and what they're watching must be exciting. From reading this thread several times i am starting to see what my opponents are trying to tell me. I'm going to articulate this through some basic starcraft logic. Koreans have mastered the art of setting themselves up in macro positions. Fast expoing and then syncing up their gateways or hatches or barracks. That's a good technique, the problem is it that this technique is SO powerful that taking a big risk and trying to do something new and sexy can lose easily if it's not executed in a perfect manner. And even then, why would one bother attempting to try a crazy strategy if he or she knows that defending and macroing is more likely to win? Is this what you guys are trying to explain to me? Perhaps i never thought about it this way. GG, you have made an excellent point, and it seems like you are getting mine. Just know I'm also not in love with 'mashing' the keyboard. I cheese often, ask any of the other american starcraft players who i play with. Protoss has the coolest cheese in my opinion. quick wins when done in a cool way are tight. I like both the macro massing up and getting a lot of units concept just as much as i like the risky micro parts. However it seems that the player can get punished too easily in starcraft for taking risks. The player is also more easily rewarded for sitting back and massing... especially if he is a musician. We need is a new game where macro is important, but not so important that a the best players are the ones who played the safest. I don't generally enjoy watching savior play, don't get me wrong he's terrifyingly good, just not like sexy like nal ra or boxer. Does anyone know what i mean? What Starcraft 2 needs is to balance this. And balance it carefully. I did try playing those notes (the revised MBS method). I like it. It feels good on my hands. And with no PSI limit... hm... this could get insane in the late game. It also seems less prone to patterns (but i don't know that for sure because i haven't started playing the actual game yet.) Here's some of my thoughts on how we could combine these two features in a cool way. a) Let the game music go with the the macroing patterns. I'm talking about the actual game music, not the notes that you play on the keyboard. Let it get more dramatic as the game picks up (more and more units). Maybe the music could change in battles too. And give the races tons of songs to play along with. b) Make the tech tree a little bit different from starcrafts original one. I tend to make all of the same type of units at once: 4d5d6d7d8d9d0d. Then I'll make another wave with a different variation: 4z5z6z7z8z9t0t. Now i have a healthy mix of units. Maybe after i do 4z5z6z7z8z9t0t again I'll more those templars into an archon (because they have less energy). But I'm only getting to make these combinations late game because i finished the tech tree. Perhaps we could setup an earlier tech tree system so that we can get different units out early. This would allow for more openings for the player. The hard part would be balancing all those units. c) Slow down the macroing part at the start. I think so many people get confused on how to play starcraft because things need to happen so fast right at the start. If there's no psi limit it will get very fast in the late game. d) pay close attention to the ways units are used in starcraft. There are so many different ways to abuse their size, speed, and special abilities. Give us more ways to do this. e) maybe give the mineral patches less minerals?... i'm not sure but it seems like if there were less minerals in each patch i would be forced to expand faster. This would keep it like starcraft and not like warcraft. But then again i have no control over these things. Blizzard does. My respect for you just skyrocketed :=) a) Advanced ingame music would indeed be an awesome feature. b) Blizzard have stated that they want to give the players an opportunity to choose different build orders instead of being locked into a single "supreme" version. "Pardo highlighted a number of bullet points for design goals in the new game, mainly speed, saying the longest a StarCraft 2 match should take is around 20 minutes. Blizzard is emphasizing each races significantly different play styles, though they won't yet reveal how the Terran and Zerg can hope to counter the impressively powerful abilities of the Protoss' Mothership. Specific attention was paid to low-level tech tree abilities, as Pardo explained Blizzard has taken steps to expand the available options and make early-game mechanics more varied." // http://pc.ign.com/articles/790/790186p1.htmlThe last part of this paragraph seems to hint so anyhow. c) I havn't played Starcraft seriously for years but I know that in Warcraft 3 you have to send away 3 workers to gold, 1 to wood and 1 to build a building and then tell your town hall to build another worked within a few sec. If you do any mistake during those first few minutes you're completly screwed when the enemy rush comes. Making the start itself a bit less intensive I suppose could be good, would have to be carefully balanced though because well played rushes have to be viable. d) From what I've understood they want to make each unit in Starcraft 2 very important. They don't want any units like the Dark Archon that are only used in very few games. e) I think it would be nice with options for minerals. Maybe when you host a game you can choose between mineral poor, mineral average, mineral rich and mineral unlimited? I think a somewhat low amount is better for the aggresive style that is better for ladder and e-sport play. In war3 when you start with 5 workers, you send 3 to gold and 2 to build buildings. 1 to build a farm/zig/mw/borrow and the other to build a rax/aow/crypt. And then build 2 workers from your main. At least that's how i played it... i;ve never heard about sending 1 to wood >_>
I was just a bit confused, it's 4 to gold, 1 altar, then next one build builds a barracks then you pull a worker from the mine to build a farm etc etc. Point being that it's alot of micro to be done in not much time.
|
Russian Federation4235 Posts
On May 27 2007 12:25 Vin{MBL} wrote:Show nested quote +On May 27 2007 12:12 Zironic wrote:On May 26 2007 14:02 MyLostTemple wrote:On May 25 2007 18:26 Blacklizard wrote:
Part 2
To decide whether MBS is bad you have to weigh the pros and cons. Where does MBS fit in exactly... and I mean in the SC world, not the War3 world?
1. Does it hurt Micro and Macro both... equally? Hard to say.
2. Does it benefit the newb only? Don\\\'t think so.
3. Does it actually make the game more battle and maneuver based? Probably.
4. Would being more battle and maneuver based mean all the players that rely on APM would become much worse players? I seriously doubt it.
5. Would some pro players be hurt by MBS? Probably... but only those that didn\\\'t master every aspect of the game.
6. Does MBS take away from the beauty of the game of SC2? We can\\\'t answer this, because there may be so much more to do... we won\\\'t know till we play. And really play... not just 1 month of alpha testing.
I will say this. Don\\\'t be so sure of why you didn\\\'t enjoy Warcraft 3. The design sounded like it\\\'d be fun for me, but for whatever reason I just couldnt stick with it. It wasn\\\'t as fun as SC. So i won\\\'t take a hard stance on MBS. The situation for SC2 and MBS isn\\\'t clear until the game is played. It could be for the better... it could be for the worse. But I will stand by my distinct preference that sloppy micro, when you are trying to micro, is just a travesty to see.
------
MBS would take away from one large luck factor in SC. Those every so present moments at fastest play games (it wasn\\\'t always fastest in the old days) where you decide to go back to your base to build men during a battle... and then because of that 2 second delay, you lost half of your force due to something that you totally could have prevented if you had watched the battle. Sometimes you are able to avoid these simply due to good scouting and not being surprised... but sometimes you don\\\'t know what\\\'s in the back of that tank push because you don\\\'t have a comstat (toss/zerg) to get past the turrets, tanks, and mines. Well, perhaps you can\\\'t take your eyes off a tank push, but late game that means death. With MBS, you could keep fighting when you knew it was important and not take your eyes off the battle at that point in time.
MBS frees up more hotkeys and will allow for more hotkeying of groups of units... for fancier flanks and attacking more areas at once.
As some have pointed out, for maximum mechnical and dexterity you could actually take away some of the UI features like hotkeying units, etc. There is a balance to be made, for sure. I don\\\'t think anyone would argue that being able to hotkey units is a bad thing... yet in the old days of RTS you couldn\\\'t do it and it required more actions to do the same thing you can do in Starcraft. This hardly makes Starcraft a less skillful game.
MBS would fix something that would make me happy. A pet peeve of mine is rallying production facilities one at a time. it\\\'s fine when you have two gates. When you have 10+ gates it\\\'s more than a little annoying to do them one at a time without hotkeys and just about impossible to have all 10+ of them hotkeyed.
-Realizations-
Realization: After thinking on this more, I\\\'m actually leaning to MBS being a good thing.
Realization2 (slightly off topic, but while we\\\'re on design): Going back to the \\\"fast speed\\\" vs \\\"fastest speed\\\"... gamers will gravitate to fastest, but I think fast speed games typically emphasize early game balance, whereas fastest speed games typically emphasize late game balance. Early game balance being more critical in design so that late game can even be achieved. I hope to see fast speed (or faster) played in the SC2 beta.
Realization 3: i take back what i said in other post a little. Perhaps not all races in SC are micro/macro equal. Terran must be more macro friendly despite Boxer\\\'s micro fame. i say this because (correct me if i\\\'m wrong) there are more terran pros making it to higher levels of tournaments and more of their styles usually revolve around late game macro. And Terran, perhaps, has the easiest chance to defend against early aggressive micro/harrass and even late game harrass... early vs. zerg is probably the trickiest but that\\\'s 1 out of 3 matches (or 1 out of 4 now with Terran\\\'s large presence).
Conclusion?
Blizzard will do what they think is right. They are smart, lucky, and stubborn. I think they\\\'ll get it right.
What you said was quite good. I read all these posts last night and then got in my bed. I couldn't sleep. I just stared at the celling thinking about what we have talked about. I thought about all the starcraft games I've casted. I thought about the games that were fun to cast and the games that weren't. I thought about the games that enlightened my understanding of Starcraft and the ones that confused me. One game was stuck in my mind. WCG 2006 Iloveoov versus white-ra. White-ra has always been one of my favorite players. He's sneaky and creative. His builds are also brilliant. But i feel he shines more in his creative builds and daring moves than in his ability to follow a linear path to get maxed out. When he faced the mighty iloveoov white-ra played with no fear in his eyes. He wasn't afraid to leave his base. He wasn't afraid to take some risks while the world was watching. He wasn't afraid to keep trying new strategic moves after the first one failed. When i was watching the game i thought iloveoov was losing. But white ra fumbled and made one or two simple mistakes. Even though Iloveoov lost so many scvs he grew faster than his opponent. He knew the song to play and he played it quite well. Although White-ra made the game more exciting, he was penalized for taking risks. I remember wishing that White-ra had won that game because i thought he was playing in a much more fun way watch. Esports can only grow if people can watch--and what they're watching must be exciting. From reading this thread several times i am starting to see what my opponents are trying to tell me. I'm going to articulate this through some basic starcraft logic. Koreans have mastered the art of setting themselves up in macro positions. Fast expoing and then syncing up their gateways or hatches or barracks. That's a good technique, the problem is it that this technique is SO powerful that taking a big risk and trying to do something new and sexy can lose easily if it's not executed in a perfect manner. And even then, why would one bother attempting to try a crazy strategy if he or she knows that defending and macroing is more likely to win? Is this what you guys are trying to explain to me? Perhaps i never thought about it this way. GG, you have made an excellent point, and it seems like you are getting mine. Just know I'm also not in love with 'mashing' the keyboard. I cheese often, ask any of the other american starcraft players who i play with. Protoss has the coolest cheese in my opinion. quick wins when done in a cool way are tight. I like both the macro massing up and getting a lot of units concept just as much as i like the risky micro parts. However it seems that the player can get punished too easily in starcraft for taking risks. The player is also more easily rewarded for sitting back and massing... especially if he is a musician. We need is a new game where macro is important, but not so important that a the best players are the ones who played the safest. I don't generally enjoy watching savior play, don't get me wrong he's terrifyingly good, just not like sexy like nal ra or boxer. Does anyone know what i mean? What Starcraft 2 needs is to balance this. And balance it carefully. I did try playing those notes (the revised MBS method). I like it. It feels good on my hands. And with no PSI limit... hm... this could get insane in the late game. It also seems less prone to patterns (but i don't know that for sure because i haven't started playing the actual game yet.) Here's some of my thoughts on how we could combine these two features in a cool way. a) Let the game music go with the the macroing patterns. I'm talking about the actual game music, not the notes that you play on the keyboard. Let it get more dramatic as the game picks up (more and more units). Maybe the music could change in battles too. And give the races tons of songs to play along with. b) Make the tech tree a little bit different from starcrafts original one. I tend to make all of the same type of units at once: 4d5d6d7d8d9d0d. Then I'll make another wave with a different variation: 4z5z6z7z8z9t0t. Now i have a healthy mix of units. Maybe after i do 4z5z6z7z8z9t0t again I'll more those templars into an archon (because they have less energy). But I'm only getting to make these combinations late game because i finished the tech tree. Perhaps we could setup an earlier tech tree system so that we can get different units out early. This would allow for more openings for the player. The hard part would be balancing all those units. c) Slow down the macroing part at the start. I think so many people get confused on how to play starcraft because things need to happen so fast right at the start. If there's no psi limit it will get very fast in the late game. d) pay close attention to the ways units are used in starcraft. There are so many different ways to abuse their size, speed, and special abilities. Give us more ways to do this. e) maybe give the mineral patches less minerals?... i'm not sure but it seems like if there were less minerals in each patch i would be forced to expand faster. This would keep it like starcraft and not like warcraft. But then again i have no control over these things. Blizzard does. My respect for you just skyrocketed :=) a) Advanced ingame music would indeed be an awesome feature. b) Blizzard have stated that they want to give the players an opportunity to choose different build orders instead of being locked into a single "supreme" version. "Pardo highlighted a number of bullet points for design goals in the new game, mainly speed, saying the longest a StarCraft 2 match should take is around 20 minutes. Blizzard is emphasizing each races significantly different play styles, though they won't yet reveal how the Terran and Zerg can hope to counter the impressively powerful abilities of the Protoss' Mothership. Specific attention was paid to low-level tech tree abilities, as Pardo explained Blizzard has taken steps to expand the available options and make early-game mechanics more varied." // http://pc.ign.com/articles/790/790186p1.htmlThe last part of this paragraph seems to hint so anyhow. c) I havn't played Starcraft seriously for years but I know that in Warcraft 3 you have to send away 3 workers to gold, 1 to wood and 1 to build a building and then tell your town hall to build another worked within a few sec. If you do any mistake during those first few minutes you're completly screwed when the enemy rush comes. Making the start itself a bit less intensive I suppose could be good, would have to be carefully balanced though because well played rushes have to be viable. d) From what I've understood they want to make each unit in Starcraft 2 very important. They don't want any units like the Dark Archon that are only used in very few games. e) I think it would be nice with options for minerals. Maybe when you host a game you can choose between mineral poor, mineral average, mineral rich and mineral unlimited? I think a somewhat low amount is better for the aggresive style that is better for ladder and e-sport play. In war3 when you start with 5 workers, you send 3 to gold and 2 to build buildings. 1 to build a farm/zig/mw/borrow and the other to build a rax/aow/crypt. And then build 2 workers from your main. At least that's how i played it... i;ve never heard about sending 1 to wood >_>
Some Night Elf builds include 1 wisp to wood. You don't need a fast altar when you use a Beastmaster or Dark Ranger (or a Goblin Tinker, but these guys are very map-specific) and the moonwell is built abit later. Ancient of War can be skipped at all in some matchups (NE v HU, NE v ORC).
Actually, the debut phase was quite entertaining in WarCraft III, it's the endgame with all it's flashlights, uber items and limit armies that limited the potential of War3.
|
actually, i was pretty nub in warcraft3, i used the same starting build/ units for nearly every matchup ;/
yet i still retained a 50% win ratio >_>
|
The outdated UI in starcraft is a nuisance and is a step backwards if they decide to keep it old school. It is tedious, boring and most of all not needed to add "skills" in a game. Not everyone ejoys that but I understand some do so striking a balance between the two would be nice. Less time masturbating through "factories" leaves more room for some tricky cool micro.
I think it's quite silly that some players want the game be about mashing the keyboard like a robot because it adds more "skills" to the game. Although Blizzard is sticking to it's SC roots to a certain extent, they are also trying to move forward to expand upon what they are basing their game on (SC1)
|
On May 27 2007 14:36 Vin{MBL} wrote:
actually, i was pretty nub in warcraft3, i used the same starting build/ units for nearly every matchup ;/
yet i still retained a 50% win ratio >_>
50% means nothing unless you mention your level and realm.
|
|
|
|
|
|
EPT
