| Forum Index > SC2 General |
|
Xanrae
Belgium53 Posts
Although Blizzard claim to be paying attention to progamer wishes, they just say so to shut them up because they know the game must have MBS. Which is correct - of all possible forms of macro, clicking on buildings is certainly one of the least interesting. The sad thing is that instead of replacing boring macro with interesting macro, they just want to replace it with micro instead. Because after all, War3 has been such a hit that tens of thousands of people each day still play... uh... Dota. | ||
|
OakHill
United States168 Posts
| ||
|
Prodigy[x]
Canada207 Posts
| ||
|
Megrim
Australia60 Posts
On March 31 2008 04:32 Prodigy[x] wrote: I like the idea of MBS even though at first I didn't. Face it people you are not getting any younger. Do you really want it to be like SC where you have to be so focused on multi-tasking to be good? I think it would be a nice change to be able to sit back and leisurely macro before running over noobs with 200 supply. Will be more relaxing than BW that's for sure. It's got little to do with multitasking. It's got to do with playing a game which has an interface more awkward than Command & Conquer, which came out in what, 1994? | ||
|
omgwtfbbq
United States9 Posts
| ||
|
Umbrella
Taiwan936 Posts
This might be a really bad idea, forgive me <<; | ||
|
Prose
Canada314 Posts
On March 29 2008 17:17 Fen wrote: This would make it even worse. Think about it, if you have to press tab, it means the each building is seperate from the other. For the progamer, he will have to manage his hotkeys, so he will click 5t. Then next time he has enough minerals, click 5tabt. Then when he has enough minerals again 5tabtabt. This will of course put a limit on the number of production buildings that would be efficient to have on each hotkey. So the result is like a slightly watered down version of starcraft's macro for them. Lets look at the casual gamers. They want to be able to save up 1500 minerals and then build 15 zealots with 2 buttons. Your method means that they will save up 1500 minerals, and will still require 2 actions per zealot. To build their 15 zealots, even if they are at their base, they will have to click z tab z tab z tab z tab z tab z tab z tab z tab z tab z tab z tab z tab z tab z tab z tab z. The 1 building per hotkey method means that noobs can still go back to their base and build 15 zealots with 2 buttons. But the pros will have to macro like they do in starcraft if they wish to be competative. They don't have to wait for 1500 to build 15 zealots; if they only have 1000, then only 10 zeals; 5 of the gateways will remain inactive. And it's still 2 buttons: holdhotkey+Z; they don't need to tab z. Their screen simply centers to their 15 gateways for... 3.75 seconds. (0.25 seconds times 15). Hmm, the tab makes it worse...so it shall remain 5,z,z,z,z,z,z,z,z to make 8 zealots from hotkey 5. However, it's not wise to spam it because a player may overshoot how much and not have enough minerals to make dragoons from a different hotkey. Sure, it simplifies macro, but it still takes time to press 9 buttons, and this will make SC2 more micro-oriented to facilitate more usage of unit abilities. If applied to SC1, this would mean ghost lockdowns would be feasible as micro counter rather than macro mass goliaths or wraiths vs carriers. | ||
|
Fen
Australia1848 Posts
On March 31 2008 11:21 Prose wrote: They don't have to wait for 1500 to build 15 zealots; if they only have 1000, then only 10 zeals; 5 of the gateways will remain inactive. And it's still 2 buttons: holdhotkey+Z; they don't need to tab z. Their screen simply centers to their 15 gateways for... 3.75 seconds. (0.25 seconds times 15). Hmm, the tab makes it worse...so it shall remain 5,z,z,z,z,z,z,z,z to make 8 zealots from hotkey 5. However, it's not wise to spam it because a player may overshoot how much and not have enough minerals to make dragoons from a different hotkey. Sure, it simplifies macro, but it still takes time to press 9 buttons, and this will make SC2 more micro-oriented to facilitate more usage of unit abilities. If applied to SC1, this would mean ghost lockdowns would be feasible as micro counter rather than macro mass goliaths or wraiths vs carriers. Ok, if you gave a noob a choice, of going back to his base, selecting all his buildings and being able to press z to get 10 zealots. Or if you gave him the choice of going back to base and selecting all his buildings and then holding on z for 4 seconds for the same result. Which one do you think they would choose? This is the difference between single building hotkey MBS and your version of MBS to a noob. Noobs barely ever use hotkeys. And as far as hotkeying buildings, the incidence would be even lower. Your method makes the game unnessecerily hard for a noob, while simplifying the game for the pro compared to the single building hotkey MBS. This is going against what we are trying to do. The pros want the same style as starcraft. The noobs want a simple version where they can mass produce without huge apms. The Single building hotkey MBS satisfys both. | ||
|
MyLostTemple
United States2921 Posts
On March 31 2008 08:12 omgwtfbbq wrote: MBS will ruin Starcraft II the same way unit que's ruined Starcraft I. It's time for people to get over it. MBS is a basic requirement for any modern RTS. unit ques ruined starcraft 1?... what? good gamers were spending their money elsewhere anyways. | ||
|
1esu
United States303 Posts
Introduction MBS is NOT primarily included to reduce the multitasking to make the game easier for new players. In fact, the multitasking reduction is a balance issue that results from the inclusion of MBS in a vacuum, not a reason for inclusion. There are two major reasons to include MBS in SC2, and I'll use this post (previously quoted by BlackStar) from David Sirlin, regarding Rob Pardo's GDC talk: As one example, he talked about how in Starcraft you can only select 12 units at a time. On Starcraft 2 they argued a lot about whether you should be able to select unlimited, or keep it at 12. Keeping it at 12 gives the player one more thing to master because it's much easier to manage a large group of units if you can select them all at once. In the end, they decided to allow unlimited selection even though it goes against the "support skill differentiation" rule-of-thumb because players thought the restriction was arbitrary and felt like broken Ui. I'm personally surprised they would even consider keeping the 12 unit selection limit because it tests a skill I find irrelevant. Fighting with the UI shouldn't be valued skill. And, in my opinion, neither should a whole lot of other twitch things. There's plenty in the realm of strategy, timing, and knowledge that differentiates players without needing arbitrary walls like 12 unit selection limits or 8 frame windows for recognizing Dragon Punches. While I'm interested in eliminating a lot of pointless skill tests, Pardo seemed in favor of providing a whole lot of these. He *did* make Starcraft, Warcraft, and World of Warcraft though, so what do I know? 1) Helps transition new players and players from other RTSs There is an issue that is unique to e-sports as compared to other sports, due to their nature as commercial products; a game must be a successful multiplayer game with a strong, active community before it can become a successful e-sport. There are two major components to a successful multiplayer game: competitiveness and accessibility. Both are equally important in making a successful e-sport. One of the major challenges in making SC2 accessible is making the transition to SC2 melee, whether for low-skilled new RTS players or high-skilled players of other RTSs, as smooth as possible. Every player lost in the transition phase, regardless of whether they give up SC2 entirely or go to other game modes or UMSs, is one less player in the SC2 community in terms of its e-sports potential outside of its established markets. MBS makes this transition smoother in at least four ways. First, MBS is a UI feature common to almost all contemporary RTSs, and even if its implementation makes it ultimately less efficient than SBS it still provides a common base to ease migrating players into the game. Second, it helps avoid player confusion over an inconsistent interface; the game isn't going to stop and explain why it's necessary that the player cannot select multiple buildings (or group those multiple buildings to a hotkey) like they can with units. Without MBS, Blizzard would have to put a serious investment into teaching the player how to macro in the single-player or in a multiplayer tutorial, effort that won't be spent on balancing the game. Third, increasing the game's skill differentiation by limiting the player through the UI is very dangerous in terms of player retention. You're basically giving them an excuse to blame the game rather than themselves for their failures, and if they do they will not only quit your game, they're going to go tell all their friends that the GAME sucks, and now you've lost potential players before they've even played. Word-of-mouth is very influential in this market, especially in the long-term perspective which is crucial to SC2's e-sport success. Fourth, MBS reduces one of the biggest, and potentially most irritating, advantages SC veterans will have over new or migrating players - familiarity with the hotkey controls. The hotkey combinations required by SBS are very awkward, and take time to get used to, time that players are more likely to blame the game's UI than their lack of skill. Now, good matchmaking and customizable hotkeys reduce the impact of this advantage and reduce the learning curve, but shift-clicking MBS has the added bonus of encouraging player to learn the hotkey interface. This encouragement is key to player retention, now that the hotkey system is the standard in SC rather than the expert option it was originally. In summary, MBS helps transition new/migrating players into SC2 melee by providing a common base with other RTSs, by providing a consistent interface that avoids player confusion and frustration, and by encouraging players to incorporate hotkeys into their play. 2) Reduces the importance of a skill which is not only unvalued, but unfun The skill of clicking on buildings fast (and the related skill of hotkey-clicking on buildings fast) is an important skill in SC, both because the game rewards macro more than micro and because it makes prioritization decisions easier. Unfortunately, this skill is not valued by many non-SC gamers, including highly-skilled competitive gamers such as Grubby and David Sirlin, because it's considered as "fighting against the UI" rather than the other player. The mechanics of SC unit production are viewed as "fighting against the UI" because they are static, i.e. the mechanics are performed the same way regardless of what opponent the player is facing. Dynamic skills, those skills which are performed in a variety of ways depending on their opponent and their opponent's reactions, are valued much higher than static skills, and are much more visible and understandable. The situation is made worse by the fact that the mechanics of unit production are not inherently fun. There are popular UMSs that focus on just micro mechanics by pitting one group of units against another, but there aren't any popular UMSs that simply focus on creating more units than your opponent in x time given y buildings and infinite minerals. That's because unit production mechanics are static; once you learn how to do them, there's no further depth. So we have a design problem, where one of the most frequently used and important skills in the game is not valued by most players, and is not interesting or fun to do due to its static nature. No wonder it's not people's instinct to macro, as mahnini says; it's natural for people to want to continue doing something interesting, rather than stop doing something interesting for something that is uninteresting. The solution is to change the focus of skill onto the dynamic skill of unit production strategy, the decision of units to build and in what ratio, which is a more interesting and valued skill. Ideally, MBS does this by requiring the player to invest time and attention into setting up this strategy (shift-clicking and grouping buildings to hotkeys), and then make the execution easier to diminish its impact on the player's enjoyment of the game. Of course, if the player needs to adapt the strategy to new conditions on the battlefield, they should have to take time out from other tasks to do so (going back to the base to readjust hotkey groups). Conclusion These are two major reasons MBS should be included in SC2. Now, including MBS by itself creates balance issues, and these balance issues need solutions, but GS and I have covered these in our recent posts in this thread at the bottoms of page 2 and 3 respectively. We should be focusing on solutions that resolve these balance issues, not pointlessly arguing about why SC2 should/should not include MBS in the first place. There are good reasons to include MBS from accessibility and game design standpoints, now it's up to us to discuss how it can operate within SC2 while keeping the game highly competitive. | ||
|
Bub
United States3518 Posts
On March 22 2008 08:06 Famehunter wrote: By all means please do. This debate is not going anywhere... Ye what he said. It disguists me to see another MBS thread popped up. Starcraft with MBS is Not Starcraft. | ||
|
0xDEADBEEF
Germany1235 Posts
On April 01 2008 05:05 Bub wrote: Ye what he said. It disguists me to see another MBS thread popped up. Starcraft with MBS is Not Starcraft. Starcraft with different units, 3D graphics and so on is also Not Starcraft... Not Starcraft 1. | ||
|
ggfobster
United States298 Posts
| ||
|
RaiZ
2813 Posts
MBS will ruin Starcraft. I say it again and again : It doesn't belong to starcraft and i've already said my argument 10000 times. | ||
|
omgwtfbbq
United States9 Posts
On March 31 2008 15:59 MyLostTemple wrote: unit ques ruined starcraft 1?... what? good gamers were spending their money elsewhere anyways. Sarcasm fails you... Good players already spend the majority of their time on micro in SC 1. If you've watched the video of the pros setting rally points for 6+ buildings in 1 second you realize pros have already pushed macro down to less than 10% of their game. Oh wow, MBS will make it 5%. | ||
|
maybenexttime
Poland5558 Posts
MBS emphisizes speed and "clicking" even more than SBS, it puts them before the above mentioned decision making. This is a direct result of being able to hotkey all your production structures, which makes spending your resources on the go (i.e. you make a Marine when you've got 50 minerals, you make another one when you've got 50 more, etc.) the most optimal option instead of having macro cycles like you do in SC1. There are UMS games focused on static elements of gameplay by the way, and they're actually very popular in both SC and WC3 - they're called tower defence. Normally, you'd deem them "unfun", but somehow plenty of people consider them fun... | ||
|
Unentschieden
Germany1471 Posts
"I'm not even talking in terms of the difficulty level, but more like in terms of interface management." The point isn´t to make the game easier but the interface. As you pointed it out sourself, dynamic "cycles" are much harer to manage - if you have to. The player should have the feeling that he is underutilizing the interface instead of being hindered by it, therefore encouraging improvement. Tower Defenses are a issue all on themselves imho. You might notice that there are boatloads of them but actually very few that get constantly replayed. These often include "interesting" elements like coop/war mode, "races" randomness... I´d like to hear from a TD that is both succsessfull AND static. | ||
|
1esu
United States303 Posts
On April 03 2008 03:45 maybenexttime wrote: 1esu, you've totally refused to mention that it's not "fast clicking" that requires the most skill in unit production but the decision making as far spending your attention on either unit production or controlling your army/armies goes. Except you've just defined prioritization, which is a multitasking skill, not a macro-mechanical skill. As I said in my post about balance issues, it is affected by the mechanics of unit production, as the faster a player can build a wave of units the easier prioritization becomes. Obviously, I value prioritization (and multitasking, for that matter) as an important skill, which is why I view its devaluing as an MBS balance issue which needs to be fixed. MBS emphisizes speed and "clicking" even more than SBS, it puts them before the above mentioned decision making. This is a direct result of being able to hotkey all your production structures, which makes spending your resources on the go (i.e. you make a Marine when you've got 50 minerals, you make another one when you've got 50 more, etc.) the most optimal option instead of having macro cycles like you do in SC1. Actually, if you've got proof that you can currently spend resources on the go with MBS, I'd be worried about that. My personal favorite, "messy" MBS, only allows the player to build one unit each from a group of buildings when they have all the resources to do so; otherwise, the unit queues in the first building. There are UMS games focused on static elements of gameplay by the way, and they're actually very popular in both SC and WC3 - they're called tower defence. Normally, you'd deem them "unfun", but somehow plenty of people consider them fun... Tower defense is essentially base management, which is a dynamic skill. Just because they're static structures doesn't mean placing them in the optimal locations to kill incoming enemies is a static skill. ^_^ | ||
|
Bub
United States3518 Posts
On April 01 2008 07:42 0xDEADBEEF wrote: Starcraft with different units, 3D graphics and so on is also Not Starcraft... Not Starcraft 1. lol, Obviously you don't understand. Instead of here shouldn't you be posting at GG.net? | ||
|
0xDEADBEEF
Germany1235 Posts
On April 03 2008 05:30 Bub wrote: lol, Obviously you don't understand. Instead of here shouldn't you be posting at GG.net? I could say the same about you. | ||
| ||
StarCraft 2 StarCraft: Brood War Stormgate Dota 2 Counter-Strike Super Smash Bros Other Games |
|
The PondCast
WardiTV Summer Champion…
Replay Cast
LiuLi Cup
uThermal 2v2 Circuit
RSL Revival
RSL Revival
uThermal 2v2 Circuit
CSO Cup
Sparkling Tuna Cup
[ Show More ] |
|
|
EPT
