On January 13 2025 09:41 Balnazza wrote: Chess ist actually a great example for it. Yes, Chess is inherently imbalanced, White historically has a higher winrate than black (not that much higher, I think it is 55/45?). But it gets balanced out through the way the game is played on the highest level and the advantage is not so great that it could overcome greater skill-differences.
That is practically the way a good RTS should be balanced aswell. There is, especially with different maps, no such thing as "perfect balance". It needs to be balanced enough that the better player and the better play wins. Which has been true for SC2 for years.
This is an argument that started from the conclusion, you just wanted to say that Serral winning everything was justified so you decided it was like chess. It isn't like chess at all, that is nonsense. Nobody in chess only competes with white or with black, so any imbalance that you could declare to be happening, every professional chess player will be on both sides of it at any point in their career.
This is up there with TvT is like chess, no it isn't like chess at all I swear nobody has any idea what chess is like ^.^
Nice to see that Serral lives rent-free in your head? But just to please you: Yes, chess is not like SC2. Because one is played on a PC with high APM and a lot of different units and maps, while the other is played on a board with a very limited set of units and has (in the traditional variant) barely any APM requirement. There is also the fact that chess frequently ends in draws, while SC2 barely ever ends in a draw. Chess is also a lot less volatile, meaning the amount of time the "better player" wins compared to SC2 is tremendously high.
The comparison "xxx is like Chess" doesn't mean "literally every aspects of it are like Chess". It is about certain aspects of it fitting. Spoiler alert: When casters say "Early ZvZ is a knife-fight", they don't mean a literal knife-fight. Rarely do knife-fights in reallife involve walking acid-grenades. And don't get me started on "Rasen-Schach"...
But see this is just nonsense again, because the problem wasn't that I misunderstood you as saying "every aspect of chess is like SC2", which you would get to now accurately counter with this post, the problem was the actual argument that you were making, that there is a similarity between imbalance in SC2 and "imbalance in chess", and that those two topics belong in the same conversation. They do not. At all. For obvious reasons.
Which is funny, considering that you made up a completly different conversation/argument. What I said was "Chess is a great example for it", it being how imbalance doesn't have to be inherently a "no-no". It is also an example how you can work against the imbalance of your game with the way it is played in tournaments. If you play a Bo1 in Chess, it is imbalanced. If you play 12 games to decide the World Champion, it doesn't really matter anymore that White has a slim advantage. Same applies to SC2. You can win a Bo1 because of slight imbalance, but it should be impossible to win a Bo7 because of it. The difference between SC2 and Chess on this aspect is however that SC2 also has the option, but also the problem of map-balance. Which ofc is a difficulty Chess and most traditional sports don't run into.
On January 13 2025 09:41 Balnazza wrote: Chess ist actually a great example for it. Yes, Chess is inherently imbalanced, White historically has a higher winrate than black (not that much higher, I think it is 55/45?). But it gets balanced out through the way the game is played on the highest level and the advantage is not so great that it could overcome greater skill-differences.
That is practically the way a good RTS should be balanced aswell. There is, especially with different maps, no such thing as "perfect balance". It needs to be balanced enough that the better player and the better play wins. Which has been true for SC2 for years.
This is an argument that started from the conclusion, you just wanted to say that Serral winning everything was justified so you decided it was like chess. It isn't like chess at all, that is nonsense. Nobody in chess only competes with white or with black, so any imbalance that you could declare to be happening, every professional chess player will be on both sides of it at any point in their career.
This is up there with TvT is like chess, no it isn't like chess at all I swear nobody has any idea what chess is like ^.^
Nice to see that Serral lives rent-free in your head? But just to please you: Yes, chess is not like SC2. Because one is played on a PC with high APM and a lot of different units and maps, while the other is played on a board with a very limited set of units and has (in the traditional variant) barely any APM requirement. There is also the fact that chess frequently ends in draws, while SC2 barely ever ends in a draw. Chess is also a lot less volatile, meaning the amount of time the "better player" wins compared to SC2 is tremendously high.
The comparison "xxx is like Chess" doesn't mean "literally every aspects of it are like Chess". It is about certain aspects of it fitting. Spoiler alert: When casters say "Early ZvZ is a knife-fight", they don't mean a literal knife-fight. Rarely do knife-fights in reallife involve walking acid-grenades. And don't get me started on "Rasen-Schach"...
But see this is just nonsense again, because the problem wasn't that I misunderstood you as saying "every aspect of chess is like SC2", which you would get to now accurately counter with this post, the problem was the actual argument that you were making, that there is a similarity between imbalance in SC2 and "imbalance in chess", and that those two topics belong in the same conversation. They do not. At all. For obvious reasons.
Which is funny, considering that you made up a completly different conversation/argument. What I said was "Chess is a great example for it", it being how imbalance doesn't have to be inherently a "no-no". It is also an example how you can work against the imbalance of your game with the way it is played in tournaments. If you play a Bo1 in Chess, it is imbalanced. If you play 12 games to decide the World Champion, it doesn't really matter anymore that White has a slim advantage. Same applies to SC2. You can win a Bo1 because of slight imbalance, but it should be impossible to win a Bo7 because of it. The difference between SC2 and Chess on this aspect is however that SC2 also has the option, but also the problem of map-balance. Which ofc is a difficulty Chess and most traditional sports don't run into.
The idea that white is imbalanced doesn't really work. But more importantly, white and black in chess don't need to be balanced because, and I don't know why I keep having to repeat this, everyone plays both black and white. The way chess dealt with "imbalance" is more similar to how 100-meter dash dealt with imbalance: by making sure everyone would have to run the same distance: 100 meters. There are no different factions competing, so there is nothing to balance. There is nothing on the other scale of the balance. In contrast, in SC2 you can put one race in one scale, and another race on the other, and if that's uneven then the professional players on the lighter scale are screwed. And until every pro player is equally skilled in all three races and every match is random vs random, that will continue to matter.
The way imbalance works in SC2 is absolutely not that you can win a Bo1 but not a Bo7. If your race is overpowered, you have a greater advantage against someone of similar skill to you in a Bo7 than in a Bo1, because variance is increased in a Bo1: you might get tricked or make a crucial mistake that causes you to lose that one game, but ultimately your race has an advantage so it's more likely that you prevail when a longer match is played.
On January 07 2025 15:51 Blargh wrote: The problem isn't just the fact that we'd have to be paying $50-100 a year just to keep it around. It's that what we'd be paying for is like... the last 25 remaining competitive players... If I was paying $50-100 a year back in prime GSL (2011-2017) days, I wouldn't mind at all. But now it's hard to even justify...
Considering how the question is worded...I don't see the problem? If you subscribe to two streamers on Twitch for a year and don't use any boni for it, you are already paying almost a 100 bucks.
Well I simply wouldn't feel like I'm making a meaningful investment when the scene is weak. I understand if some people love SC2 unconditionally, but my passion for SC2 has unfortunately faded with the number of players. And for what it's worth, I'm plenty used to supporting smaller esports scenes. I have followed Melee for literally 20 years now, and will frequently subscribe/donate to my favorite players, but the Melee scene makes SC2's look like a shriveled up corpse. There's just a lot of energy in that scene (and there always has been), and it doesn't feel like there's much energy in the SC2 scene.
Yeah, I vibe with this. I've watched SC2 since the beginning and have enjoyed the 15 years. If now is its rightful time to sleep, that isn't such an awful thing. 15 years is a great run and, as others have put it, we are many years removed from the golden age when the scene was roiling.
People also sometimes forget that the players might want to move on, too. Would the actors on Game of Thrones really want to do that show for 20 years, even if it's good? As a viewer, it's not always easy to see that. Existing SC2 players, and SC2 talent in general, may want to move on to other RTS, other games, or other things altogether unrelated to gaming at this point. Just speculating but it wouldn't come as a huge surprise.
It's cheesy but every beginning comes from another beginning's end, like that song said.
I think this discussion would look very different if at least one new RTS really captured the SC2 scene's attention but, from my vantage point at least, none of them have quite yet. I'm not sure if any of them will, or if there will be a bit of a dry period until something really grabs people again. Maybe for a future discussion.
I think it's inevitable that many people will check out of StarCraft II if it isn't being played at a certain scale—that basically happened to me with BW when KeSPA made the official switch. I'm not going to be judgmental about people choosing to walk away with good memories. Still, a lot of other people stuck around to support grassroots BW, even before the rise of AfreecaTV made it really lucrative to stream.
Again, I'm confident SC2 would develop a pretty stable independent scene that supports a handful of full-time pros/streamers + a lot of part-timers, akin to WarCraft 3 or Fighting Games. It won't be everyone's cup of tea, but it will develop its own, new culture and stories over time. One thing I really hope develops is more LAN/paid-entry tournaments at a local level, which has helped keep fighting games healthy over the long term. I don't know if people have an appetite for it right now, but it feels necessary going forward (even if there's an EPT season in 2025, you have to take an even longer view).
On January 10 2025 09:50 deacon.frost wrote: I do not see a reason why spend on a game I think is boring, stale and long term inbalanced. The scene is so small maybe it is time to let it die.
I do not pay for streams. (to be fair, I do not watch any streams so why would I pay )
During the SC2 peak I wouldnt have a problem. Nowadays big nope. Every now and then I check the games and... they are boring. The thrill is long gone.
boring? serral, clem, maxpax, etc are playing incredible games! not boring at all, the things those can do are amazing.
I was watching since beta. I doubt they do something that I would call incredible and not boring.
On January 13 2025 08:24 JimmyJRaynor wrote: I give Wardi $60/year and I'll keep doing that. I view it as a $5/month competitive live event streaming service.
On January 10 2025 09:50 deacon.frost wrote: I do not see a reason why spend on a game I think is boring, stale and long term inbalanced. The scene is so small maybe it is time to let it die.
meh, Imbalance is part of diverse team games like this. Super Tecmo Bowl came out in 1991 , EA NHL '94 came out in September '93 ... both games are imbalanced. People play the games because the fun is worth tolerating imbalance. Both games have competitive communities just rolling along in 2025.
Chess is imbalanced. I'll play black and tolerate the imbalance because I enjoy the competition. If I'm 1% better than my opponent and lose due to imba game set up ... I don't care. Rarely are people motivated to play some 10 game "balanced series" to "prove themselves". They just play one game and let the chips fall where they may.
Imbalance is a problem when it affects the race you want to see win. It is a reason why I stopped watching in the first place. That and the community around SC2
[QUOTE]On January 14 2025 03:19 deacon.frost wrote: [QUOTE]On January 13 2025 06:03 spirit76 wrote: [QUOTE]On January 10 2025 09:50 deacon.frost wrote: I do not see a reason why spend on a game I think is boring, stale and long term inbalanced. The scene is so small maybe it is time to let it die.
I do not pay for streams. (to be fair, I do not watch any streams so why would I pay )
During the SC2 peak I wouldnt have a problem. Nowadays big nope. Every now and then I check the games and... they are boring. The thrill is long gone.[/QUOTE]
boring? serral, clem, maxpax, etc are playing incredible games! not boring at all, the things those can do are amazing.[/QUOTE] I was watching since beta. I doubt they do something that I would call incredible and not boring.[QUOTE]
im here since early beta too. what do u expect to see?? what would be fun for you?? there are a lot of very exciting games, back and forth, nonstop action, etc. and players like serral, clem, hero, maxpax, etc, show a level of skill we have never seen before.
On January 13 2025 09:41 Balnazza wrote: Chess ist actually a great example for it. Yes, Chess is inherently imbalanced, White historically has a higher winrate than black (not that much higher, I think it is 55/45?). But it gets balanced out through the way the game is played on the highest level and the advantage is not so great that it could overcome greater skill-differences.
That is practically the way a good RTS should be balanced aswell. There is, especially with different maps, no such thing as "perfect balance". It needs to be balanced enough that the better player and the better play wins. Which has been true for SC2 for years.
This is an argument that started from the conclusion, you just wanted to say that Serral winning everything was justified so you decided it was like chess. It isn't like chess at all, that is nonsense. Nobody in chess only competes with white or with black, so any imbalance that you could declare to be happening, every professional chess player will be on both sides of it at any point in their career.
This is up there with TvT is like chess, no it isn't like chess at all I swear nobody has any idea what chess is like ^.^
Nice to see that Serral lives rent-free in your head? But just to please you: Yes, chess is not like SC2. Because one is played on a PC with high APM and a lot of different units and maps, while the other is played on a board with a very limited set of units and has (in the traditional variant) barely any APM requirement. There is also the fact that chess frequently ends in draws, while SC2 barely ever ends in a draw. Chess is also a lot less volatile, meaning the amount of time the "better player" wins compared to SC2 is tremendously high.
The comparison "xxx is like Chess" doesn't mean "literally every aspects of it are like Chess". It is about certain aspects of it fitting. Spoiler alert: When casters say "Early ZvZ is a knife-fight", they don't mean a literal knife-fight. Rarely do knife-fights in reallife involve walking acid-grenades. And don't get me started on "Rasen-Schach"...
But see this is just nonsense again, because the problem wasn't that I misunderstood you as saying "every aspect of chess is like SC2", which you would get to now accurately counter with this post, the problem was the actual argument that you were making, that there is a similarity between imbalance in SC2 and "imbalance in chess", and that those two topics belong in the same conversation. They do not. At all. For obvious reasons.
Which is funny, considering that you made up a completly different conversation/argument. What I said was "Chess is a great example for it", it being how imbalance doesn't have to be inherently a "no-no". It is also an example how you can work against the imbalance of your game with the way it is played in tournaments. If you play a Bo1 in Chess, it is imbalanced. If you play 12 games to decide the World Champion, it doesn't really matter anymore that White has a slim advantage. Same applies to SC2. You can win a Bo1 because of slight imbalance, but it should be impossible to win a Bo7 because of it. The difference between SC2 and Chess on this aspect is however that SC2 also has the option, but also the problem of map-balance. Which ofc is a difficulty Chess and most traditional sports don't run into.
The idea that white is imbalanced doesn't really work. But more importantly, white and black in chess don't need to be balanced because, and I don't know why I keep having to repeat this, everyone plays both black and white. The way chess dealt with "imbalance" is more similar to how 100-meter dash dealt with imbalance: by making sure everyone would have to run the same distance: 100 meters. There are no different factions competing, so there is nothing to balance. There is nothing on the other scale of the balance. In contrast, in SC2 you can put one race in one scale, and another race on the other, and if that's uneven then the professional players on the lighter scale are screwed. And until every pro player is equally skilled in all three races and every match is random vs random, that will continue to matter.
But the fact that you have to play both sides is exactly what I meant with working against inherent imbalance. If you just play a Bo1 of Chess, nothing balances out the imbalance of White. Which is an example of things we do in SC2 (or Esports in general) aswell.
The way imbalance works in SC2 is absolutely not that you can win a Bo1 but not a Bo7. If your race is overpowered, you have a greater advantage against someone of similar skill to you in a Bo7 than in a Bo1, because variance is increased in a Bo1: you might get tricked or make a crucial mistake that causes you to lose that one game, but ultimately your race has an advantage so it's more likely that you prevail when a longer match is played.
At some point, imbalance can't be canceled out, that is true. If White had a lets say 80%-Winrate against Black, the current Chess-Format couldn't compensate that. Same with SC2, if one race is so imbalanced against all the others, you cannot compensate that with format or maps. However, in its current state (or actually its state for many years), SC2 didn't really have that problem. However, even a decently to perfectly balanced game does not ensure equal distribution of success for all players. That would be a terrible idea, since it completly cancels out personal skill.
On January 14 2025 09:16 Balnazza wrote: But the fact that you have to play both sides is exactly what I meant with working against inherent imbalance. If you just play a Bo1 of Chess, nothing balances out the imbalance of White. Which is an example of things we do in SC2 (or Esports in general) aswell.
I understand what you're doing, you're trying to single out a game and declare it to be imbalanced because in this game you're white and I'm black. The two issues are that, 1), it's not a very powerful idea to single out a game of chess like this. If you just play a Bo1 of chess, you have an experience of one game, which means that you're not very good at chess and balance won't have an impact on your result. In order to be very good at chess, you need to play a lot of games, and it's impossible to play a lot of games without playing both black and white, which is why everyone does it. As such, everyone will have a bunch of Bo1s against a bunch of people where they'll have white, and a bunch of Bo1s against a bunch of people where they'll have black, and any advantage that they gained against the first group is cancelled out by the disadvantage that they received against the second group. There was no inherent problem to solve. 2), white isn't actually imbalanced. Chess isn't mechanically demanding, there can't be a strategy that wins but is too hard for people to pull it off. If white was imbalanced then you would ask the machine what moves to play to win from the starting position, and everyone would play those moves. The advantage of white is more that it gets to play with initiative, which can translate to creating a position where the best move is easier to find for white than it is for black. But it doesn't reach the level of imbalance, because if black does find those harder to find moves, then they get to draw.
On January 14 2025 09:16 Balnazza wrote: However, in its current state (or actually its state for many years), SC2 didn't really have that problem. However, even a decently to perfectly balanced game does not ensure equal distribution of success for all players. That would be a terrible idea, since it completly cancels out personal skill.
Not really, no. There are balanced games where skill is cancelled out or mostly cancelled out, like rock-paper-scissors or no limit hold'em. And then there are balanced games where skill is not cancelled out at all, like chess or just about any physical sport but tennis for example. This has to do with the game's design rather than the game's balance, it's a different issue. Some games just require a lot of skill and others don't; if you decided to introduce a slight imbalance in rock-paper-scissors, it wouldn't suddenly allow your skill as a player to shine. If imbalance does anything, it's create more situations where your skill can be put into question, and that's it.
On January 14 2025 09:16 Balnazza wrote: But the fact that you have to play both sides is exactly what I meant with working against inherent imbalance. If you just play a Bo1 of Chess, nothing balances out the imbalance of White. Which is an example of things we do in SC2 (or Esports in general) aswell.
white isn't actually imbalanced. Chess isn't mechanically demanding, there can't be a strategy that wins but is too hard for people to pull it off. If white was imbalanced then you would ask the machine what moves to play to win from the starting position, and everyone would play those moves. The advantage of white is more that it gets to play with initiative, which can translate to creating a position where the best move is easier to find for white than it is for black. But it doesn't reach the level of imbalance, because if black does find those harder to find moves, then they get to draw.
Imbalance does not entail that one side is unbeatable, still less that it invariably has a theoretical win or even a forcing line to that win at its disposal. It just means that the power levels of the two sides, all things considered, are not equal, as is the case in chess. Otherwise, nothing would have ever been imbalanced in StarCraft.
Homestory Cup: People generously give money, enjoy the games, the atmosphere, the content.
TL.net: A shocking amount of "0 Dollars!!!" (which is totally ok in itself of course), because imba, boring games, blizz sucks, same players, blabla. also, let´s discuss imbalance of chess.
PS. yes, yes, opinion of man with <10 posts is irrelevant, is he even GM?
On January 14 2025 09:16 Balnazza wrote: But the fact that you have to play both sides is exactly what I meant with working against inherent imbalance. If you just play a Bo1 of Chess, nothing balances out the imbalance of White. Which is an example of things we do in SC2 (or Esports in general) aswell.
white isn't actually imbalanced. Chess isn't mechanically demanding, there can't be a strategy that wins but is too hard for people to pull it off. If white was imbalanced then you would ask the machine what moves to play to win from the starting position, and everyone would play those moves. The advantage of white is more that it gets to play with initiative, which can translate to creating a position where the best move is easier to find for white than it is for black. But it doesn't reach the level of imbalance, because if black does find those harder to find moves, then they get to draw.
Imbalance does not entail that one side is unbeatable, still less that it invariably has a theoretical win or even a forcing line to that win at its disposal. It just means that the power levels of the two sides, all things considered, are not equal, as is the case in chess. Otherwise, nothing would have ever been imbalanced in StarCraft.
This only works in a game that is mechanically demanding. For something like chess there would be no reason why an imbalance wouldn't lead to a theoretical win.
On January 14 2025 09:16 Balnazza wrote: But the fact that you have to play both sides is exactly what I meant with working against inherent imbalance. If you just play a Bo1 of Chess, nothing balances out the imbalance of White. Which is an example of things we do in SC2 (or Esports in general) aswell.
white isn't actually imbalanced. Chess isn't mechanically demanding, there can't be a strategy that wins but is too hard for people to pull it off. If white was imbalanced then you would ask the machine what moves to play to win from the starting position, and everyone would play those moves. The advantage of white is more that it gets to play with initiative, which can translate to creating a position where the best move is easier to find for white than it is for black. But it doesn't reach the level of imbalance, because if black does find those harder to find moves, then they get to draw.
Imbalance does not entail that one side is unbeatable, still less that it invariably has a theoretical win or even a forcing line to that win at its disposal. It just means that the power levels of the two sides, all things considered, are not equal, as is the case in chess. Otherwise, nothing would have ever been imbalanced in StarCraft.
This only works in a game that is mechanically demanding. For something like chess there would be no reason why an imbalance wouldn't lead to a theoretical win.
Aight now that you guys have derailed half the thread, I'm going to point you to the chess thread and say you guys can be finished with it here
i would support an informatic team of programmer instead of give money for organizing tournaments.
there is a ton of work to keep the game alive, 7 years ago since blizzard has been bought and that s now common, when a licence is dying, the community will slowly lose interest for the genre and those who ask you if you could probably give your money are sometimes the same that those who led you into this mess.
0$. The game is good enough / has enough potential to be funded through Blizzard/M$, so if they don’t want to keep it alive I prefer it over than pure grassroots. It has been an awesome run already, 15 years.
I pretty much agree 100% with this. I ain't paying any money so that Clem can remain one of like 5 people who can make a living off of SC2. Also, unfortunately, as the game declined, the best presenting/casting talent also left, and while I truly and wholeheartedly appreciate and respect Wardi for what he is doing for the community, I just can't bring myself to listen to his poorly informed and unentertaining commentary.
I'll always love SC2, but the current scene is just not appealing to me anymore.
There is many more casters/content creators then Wardi tough: CrankyDucklings, Pig, Winter, Harstem, Steadfast, Lowko....
Overall my apporach is to not overthink it: if you like the game, and spend time watching it, and can afford it, supporting the scene with money seems nice and prolly well- received at this point. If its all artficial and overtought" which game will be next rts" " is it worht it for an old game" can lead to artifical results. Either poeple like enough SC2 to still play/watch it and support the community with money (those that can afford it) or it wont work. Same for those new RTS titles, pumping artifically money into one of those titles just for the hope of "next RTS" imho wont achieve much. Either they will be fun enough to attract poeple and keep them, or it wont work.
Like i already wrote before, for me SC2 is fun enough to support it, but I respect those that dont deem it so.
But I'd prefer if the pro scene falls apart and we get a bunch of an amateur tournaments. Frankly, those are just as much fun to watch and would be fun to play in too. Combined with some balance changes (IE remove Widow Mines, Abduct, etc...) I would come back to playing.
On January 13 2025 23:11 Balnazza wrote: You can win a Bo1 because of slight imbalance, but it should be impossible to win a Bo7 because of it.
i don't think close to perfect balance and conclusively deciding who is better is that big a deal. Any NHL, NBA, MLB series that goes 7 games and into OT does not conclusively prove who the better team was. The entertainment value of the entire series is what matters.
was the winning team better? who knows. the final shot looked like travelling to me.
I play all kinds of diverse faction competitive games that are all imbalanced. The diversity of the factions and the fun that it creates is worth the cost of never really knowing for 100% certain who the better player is. Its just a silly, meaningless video game.
On February 17 2025 07:04 BronzeKnee wrote: But I'd prefer if the pro scene falls apart and we get a bunch of an amateur tournaments. Frankly, those are just as much fun to watch and would be fun to play in too.
EPT
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