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On December 01 2008 15:06 Love.Zelduck wrote:
I'd like to propose that even with MBS and automine in the game, what makes Starcraft truly amazing both to play and to watch isn't how hard it is to macro off of 4 bases, but how hard it is to out-think, out-maneuver, out-tech, out-expand, and golden-mouse-July-style out-mindgame your opponent.
The problem with this is the following: it's too short-term.
The goal of many developers is to create something that has ever-lasting replay value.
SC:BW has been going strong for well over a decade, but what about now?
Pro Gamers practice one standard/strong build per map and until they fully grasp the concept they deviate from it.
It took a long time, but finally we're seeing fewer deviations. Maps like blue storm, rush hour and python don't help the cause. Don't get me wrong, there are maps out there that praise innovation, such as: Hitchhiker, Requiem, etc.
We still need something more challenging.
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Zoler...
nvm
cant risk my tl acc so easy
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eugen1225, the flaws in Sirlin's reasoning have already been pointed out.
- he assumes that execution in SC comes down to "you either are able to pull something off or you don't" like in SF - completely wrong, there's a huge gradient between various level of execution
- he's completely oblivious of the importance of multi-tasking and decision making associated with it, as in knowing when to micro and when to macro - macro is not just "mindless clicking" despite what ignorants like him think - you need to know WHEN to spend your time macroing, time management is an important skill in SC while it's non-existent in SF, and amost non-existent in WC3 (although I agree that things like manualmining could benefit from decision making within itself, vide my and FA's mineral mechanic)
- there are evident differences between the level of execution between the top players as well as what they focus on (micro- or macro-oriented playstyles)
- he ignores the fact that other people may think that physical skills are just as much a part of being a skilled player as decision making skills
- he denounces the necessity of training muscule memory, which is one of the reasons for StarCraft's being the most competitive e-sport up to date and the reason why players not motivated to work hard enough fall behind, and instead advocates "higher accessibility" which allows lazier, not as hard working players to stay competitive
SC in not SF. His arguments may be valid for SF but you can hardly apply them to SC (and SC for that matter).
What's more, better accessibility can be achieved by introducing a macro mechanic that does not alienate newbies but still has a physical element to it - e.g. the mineral mechanic.
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Sweden33719 Posts
On December 01 2008 23:56 eugen1225 wrote:
"There are some players who wrongly believe that this "dumbs the game down." Actually, the opposite is true. Experts can perform special moves already, so the changes listed below have very little effect on them. Experts will care about actual balance changes such as hitboxes, recovery times, new properties for some moves, and so on. Making special moves easier, however, just allows everyone else to play the "real" game without needing to develop hundreds of hours of muscle memory just to perform the moves. It's actually sad to hear that some players think that their ability to execute a 360 command throw is why they are good, as opposed to the actual strategy of getting close enough to the opponent with Zangief to land the throw."
This is the most important part of the analogy, read it 10 times nay-sayers if you must. In short:
- Experts can perform special moves already (SC macro/micro)
- Experts will care about actual balance changes (SC is balanced but SC2 won't be)
- It's actually sad to hear that some players think that their ability to execute a 360 command throw is why they are good (SC as it is, favors mechanics a lot, when you start playing you will do a lot better if you just practice mechanics on 1 build and go with it rather than think about strategies that you can't pull off, leading to required hours spent training for "muscle memory". And its true, you have to spend a lot of time goint through simple mechanics until you reach a level where you can employ strategy effectively. If SC2 will be like this, it will kill new players, and without "noobs" you can't be pros.) The best point of the whole analogy, old SC veterans who spent years learning these mechanics, and they were years, are now pissed to learn that some of the automated (yes automated) skills they aquired are no longer used, and it is from this egoism that they protest, not admitting it ofc.
Without getting into the whole MBS debate again, because frankly I don't give a damn at this point (the game looks good enough, let me play it already!!  ). but I have NEVER protested any of the automations from a selfish perspective.
At my absolute peak in terms of mass gaming, when I was A+ on PGTour or when I played 30 games a day for almost a week vs testie before WCG 2006.. I was never able to rise significantly above 250 apm in long games. I don't have great execution (but it's decent), I don't have great speed (but it's decent) - the changes would favour me. And I still argued against most of them for a long time.
So I take issue with people saying we only protest out of selfish reasons, because it's totally untrue - the changes would benefit every single player on this site when playing against a professional gamer.
There's a good chance the game will be fine with these UI additions tho, and I'm gonna wait and see if that's the case before I decide if they are for good or for bad.
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i only hope that ppl will not change its oppinions based off in that "fresh air" that a new game into a beautiful colorful box provides.
Nor in that starcraft beatiful letters written in the top of the box.
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Blizz should have made another expansion for SC and make SC into HD. SC2 is made by inferior designers, unless they can get all the people who made SC back into the team, I doubt SC2 will be as successful as SC.
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Sindril maybe a smart guy... But he is also a carebear.
He does not like hard games.
He does not like games that give you a penalty for losing/dying/failing.
He does not like controlls that you have to learn.
This mindset works for *some* genres but totally fails in others.
The problem is, if you think a bit about that I come to the following:
At first i thought:
Penalty needs to be there to make the game exciting.
Then I came up with this:
You don't need a penalty, the game just has to be exciting.
And now I think I cracked the issue:
Whitout a proper difficulty/penalty the game will lose a lot of replay value and in the long run it won't animate you to *replay* the game. This is not the issue for a casual gamer, he will play a game 1 time and then throw it away. But if you want to make a game for the *hardcore* audience then you want to have a hard difficult and the with that coming penaltys for *failing*. See... Sindril actually hates Ninja-Gaiden for the exact reason many people absoluetly love it and carebears hate it (unforgiving, hard but exciting).
It's the same with *to easy* mechanics. If you don't see yourself improving, you will lose interest. Starcraft lives that long because everyone is constantly improving his game the more he plays, it drags you in because you feel that you can get better and you actually see how you are getting better... Be it due to sheer Mechanics, better strategy or just being able to freestyle your game more and more and actually faring better with it than following Build Order X like a lemming.. Your never really *there*...
That last part is something that I think Sindril don't gets. He has the noble thought that games should be decided on a strategic level alone but if this would be the case he should develop some round based Street Fighter or RTS. Then you can talk about pure strategy.
Mechanics are VERY important to games. Being *fast* is a key aspect to SC/BW, it also is to WC3, it also is to Street Fighter, Smash Brothers or whatever game you play competetive. If you take away this the game will end up being very accesible and also very boring. You end up with some game that does not have the strategic dept of a pure round based game and totally lacks the speed/controll-focus of games like Starcraft/Street Fighter/Tekken whatever...
I was never a *fast* player... I hated and still hate spam clicking, I was and I am the epitome of the player you would call *efficient* clicker. I for sure won most of my games due to strategy, tactics and gamesense, not due to my Mechanics (they weren't that bad, but it really showed in my ZvT were Mechanics/Micro is really, really important. My ZvP on the other side was really good because that MU does require not exactly the same skillset).
I could wrap up top 100 WC3 Classic just due to gamesense until the strategys got *standartisized* (Masscaster vs Massdryads vs Guhls) and I lost interest. I never had a real standart Strategy I just seemed to knew better what will work than most of the other *news* because that’s what I was:
A newb that just understood the game a little better than 99% of the others... But replays crush such an advantage in a few weaks/months (boy, I havte replays :p).
The changes in Macro from SC2 will benefit my style of play, I probably will be the better SC2 player than I ever was at SC/BW (if I play enough)... BUT I don't know if these changes will make the game better or worse. Speed is totally underrated by most players, it's one of the deciding factors when it comes to an RTS... REAL-TIME !!!! Strategy.. It's not.. Strategy Whitout Rounds/Turns.
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Easy to learn hard to master.
ok
The evolution should not be:
Even easier to learn, hard to master.
But:
Easy to Learn, Even Harder to master
if things follow this way "Even easier to learn, hard to master."
it will get so fucking easy to master the games that,
warning same old argument again
+ Show Spoiler +sc3,sc4,sc5 will be about voice commands , tactical action only, maybe without buildings but with reinforcements onlyT.T, or maybe u download it to ur brain and think about it to play, or auto-everything from an infinite queue of everything to automatic unit movement to give u time to overview ur strategies again, and much much more shit to make things even easier and take out tension from the game
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And as for Sirlins point about mechanical players winning more than they should - they same will happen if you deemphisize mechanic: cookie-cutter strategies will allow players to win more than they should...
He also shows his hypocrisy by saying "Furthermore, there's no shortage of nuance for experts. Does Cammy's dragon punch beat Fei Longs? It depends on exactly who did it first, which means that 1/60th of a second timing is just as important as ever."
First he says execution is not a valid skill and then talks as if good timing was still required. Good timing is execution too. You can easily learn when you need to pull something off, especially in a game like SF, where there are few factors compared to SC, but it's still not easy to pull it off in terms of execution, even with dumbed down physical skills Sirlin style.
edit: He's also delusional in thinking that making mechanics easier to learn will somehow make slow players (i.e. players with bad mechanic) competitive. They still won't be able to pull off certain things in specific timing windows...
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To be fair, some of my fighting game friends criticize Sirlin heavily for being a player with terrible mechanics and winning primarily based on 1-time tricks (low strong)... that doesn't make him a worse player, but this approach shows in his gameplay and his ideas about game design. He's the type of player who wins on shenanigans, much like a Street Fighter Upmagic. He doesn't understand that a lot of Starcraft's strategic depth is based on the limited time available to the players.
Seriously though, for Starcraft 2 to be competitive I advocate bringing in some kind of game mechanic that would allow for some level of Yomi (mindgame, like rock paper scissors but much more complex), Starcraft lacks that type of gameplay heavily, and with decreased mechanics there must be some way to increase competitiveness...
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Better map design (like Arkanoid's island vs. semi-island vs. land approach, etc.) and my & FA's mineral mechanic should do.
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I have thought about this for a long time, I was totally pro-MBS because I believed that the bar would never be reached, even if some weight was removed of its base.
Then after watching a million replays of pros I started leaning anti-mbs, because it was indeed wonderfull, magnific, what they could do, art if I may, and something in all that automation didnt felt like it would kick in.
But now, reading more reports of players who actually played the game, I think MBS will do fine, not because its the best, but because this game is not BW in the end, and therefore they have the chance to try to balance it around creating that same level of always having more things to do than you can with the current easier base mechanics so that begginers are not driven away from the game.
Blizzard is all about creating more than a game, creating a hobbies, and if you want the pro to be followed, you need te base to understand whats going on, and always be able to hope they can play hard and go pro.
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On December 02 2008 01:14 Ki_Do wrote:Easy to learn hard to master. ok The evolution should not be: Even easier to learn, hard to master. But: Easy to Learn, Even Harder to master if things follow this way "Even easier to learn, hard to master." it will get so fucking easy to master the games that, warning same old argument again + Show Spoiler +sc3,sc4,sc5 will be about voice commands , tactical action only, maybe without buildings but with reinforcements onlyT.T, or maybe u download it to ur brain and think about it to play, or auto-everything from an infinite queue of everything to automatic unit movement to give u time to overview ur strategies again, and much much more shit to make things even easier and take out tension from the game
How does "even easier to learn" ="less hard to master"?
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I knew Sirlin, and he openly admits that he has never really played SC competitively (if much at all). His perspective on RTS I think is certainly more limited.
People who don't play SC at a high level have no sense on how deep/shallow the game actually is - they look at the things going on, and it's just a black box. You might think it's more complex than it actually is, when in fact, there may only be 2-3 key strategic decisions in a game, and far more tactical/unit control ones.
Giving people more time doesn't somehow magically inject more strategy.
If instead of having say a minute to make a move in chess, you gave people 2 minutes, does that mean you would see more strategy in chess? No, of course not - the strategy potential in the game is inherent.
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Sweden33719 Posts
On December 02 2008 02:24 anotak wrote:
To be fair, some of my fighting game friends criticize Sirlin heavily for being a player with terrible mechanics and winning primarily based on 1-time tricks (low strong)... that doesn't make him a worse player, but this approach shows in his gameplay and his ideas about game design. He's the type of player who wins on shenanigans, much like a Street Fighter Upmagic. He doesn't understand that a lot of Starcraft's strategic depth is based on the limited time available to the players.
Seriously though, for Starcraft 2 to be competitive I advocate bringing in some kind of game mechanic that would allow for some level of Yomi (mindgame, like rock paper scissors but much more complex), Starcraft lacks that type of gameplay heavily, and with decreased mechanics there must be some way to increase competitiveness...
Hum, I think starcraft already has some fashion of mindgames in the choice of build orders, no?
Maybe not as apparent in random games but I'm sure it's there in tournaments, when players prepare before hand.
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Sc does have maindgames but they are deemphatised when strategic advantages can be negated by awesome micro (which doesn´t have to be bad per se), like loosing your units to a suicide Zealot+Spidermine.
I´m really annoyed how basically every naysayer here claims that Blizzard wouldn´t be able to make SC2 strategicly appealing. SC wasn´t shallow and there ARE games being won by gutsy unortodox aproaches. I´m once again refering to the Mind over Mechanics article.
Obviously it´s reduced to APMbattles if everyone uses the same BOs, but that is something Blizzard should avoid not emphatise.
It´s telling how no one claims that the "mechanical challenge" is enriching but rather "necessary".
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I strongly believe that these ideas are ruining the future of competitive gaming. When games focus too much on the mindgame aspect it puts all the players in the same boat. The better players are simply those that have better mindgame skills. But how long will that last when everyone and their grandma have the capabilities to pull the moves off and just need meta game experience? I enjoy games with tons of longevity, and as someone else mentioned, games that give you that sense of "I'm improving every day." You don't see this in the 'easy to learn, hard to master' games. In halo 3, for example, you strongly improve the first month or two you play, and then you completely flatline. You are now as good as everyone else. Now all that matters is taking the time to grab that regenerator or power drain, or knowing exactly how to place that nade in this exact location. None of this is skill as far as I'm concerned. When I play games I want the winner to be based almost entirely on a player's mechanical precision and speed. Strategy and mindgames shouldn't matter much because anyone can watch a youtube video or replay and instantly improve.
Imho games should NOT be easy to learn and hard to master. They should be difficult to learn and impossible to master. Starcraft follows this formula nicely. You cannot be "perfect" at the game because you are always being forced to do multiple tasks at once. Imagine if this developer's Street Fighter dream were to be implemented into something like real martial arts competitions. The competitor's no longer have to train their moves over and over, perfecting their muscle memory. They no longer have to run miles to build endurance and stamina, and lift weights to get stronger. Everyone is in the same boat. The big names in MMA would change every month or so as a flood of randoms learn their tricks and pull off the exact same tactics. I am convinced that there absolutely must be a hardcore entrance level for a game to be truly competitive, and it must outright exclude people who are too slow or stubborn to devote their time into it. The casual market is killing video games. We may not even be 'playing' games in the near future. The video game as we once knew it is on the path to being completely redefined for the casual 4 hour a week game player who doesn't spend more than a month on any one game, let alone thinks about improving.
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I don't want to read comments to a grand SC2-competition quarterfinal thread where a third of ending posts are about how someone failed or choked horribly. I want to read posts how someone played brillianly.
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Sweden33719 Posts
On December 02 2008 03:21 Unentschieden wrote:
Sc does have maindgames but they are deemphatised when strategic advantages can be negated by awesome micro (which doesn´t have to be bad per se), like loosing your units to a suicide Zealot+Spidermine.
I´m really annoyed how basically every naysayer here claims that Blizzard wouldn´t be able to make SC2 strategicly appealing. SC wasn´t shallow and there ARE games being won by gutsy unortodox aproaches. I´m once again refering to the Mind over Mechanics article.
Obviously it´s reduced to APMbattles if everyone uses the same BOs, but that is something Blizzard should avoid not emphatise.
It´s telling how no one claims that the "mechanical challenge" is enriching but rather "necessary".
I've always maintained that I enjoy the mechanical side of Starcraft, even if it's not my forte.
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EPT
