EPT![[image loading]](http://i1046.photobucket.com/albums/b461/ImSkeptical/PhilosophyandStarcraft.jpg)
If only you shot up, then Zerg would only have to build 1 unit.
The thing about studying a subject in a casual manner, as I have done with Philosophy, is you never really get to test your knowledge. There’s no end of semester exam, no major essay or project, so you can never really tell if you’ve learnt anything. So I thought I’d try flexing this intellectual muscle on that other intellectual exercise, Starcraft. Hopefully out of the wall of text I create, you’ll find something of interest.
So how does Philosophy relate? I mean, isn’t it supposed to be about the meaning of life and all that jazz? Are you just bringing it up to be all elitist and bourgeois? Well yes, but don’t we all enjoy being pretentious and special, I mean, isn’t that why we’ve all gravitated to this unique hobby? But seriously, the study of philosophy educates us on how we think, allowing us to scrutinize what we value and believe. And why do I think we need to think about this in relation to balance, specifically that of Starcraft 2? Well because talk about it is rampant on this forum, so clarifying what everyone is trying to communicate is of utmost important. By bringing to light underlying assumptions about what we mean by the term balance, we can proceed to critically examine and discuss them.
So right of the bat, balance is good. Everyone agrees that balance leads to fun, and if the game isn’t balanced, we aren’t going to have much fun. Let us examine why. First of all, we are all aware balance does not equate to fun, you can have a balanced game, but have it dead boring, e.g. rock, paper, scissors. But what balance allows for is competition. A perfectly balanced game allows us to attribute the player directly to his performance. Here we find what I think everyone will agree as the core idea of balance; that a win is earned purely from personal commitment. Effort, commitment, practice, inherent skill, positive mindset, these are all seen as the virtues of any player, amateur or professional. This idea, of performance in the game being a direct reflection of your person, I think is the underlying assumption of what we mean by a balanced game. We could use some other dirty definition like, players having equal chance of winning, but I think that introduces a game like playing heads or tails. Clearly not what we want.
But now we have a problem, several in fact. I’ll start with the most pressing matter. These qualities, practice, inherent skill, etc., are subjective, as in there is no way to measure them. Seeing as how that is the foundation of how we would ideally like to define balance, this leaves us with no direct measure of the concept. So does this mean it’s impossible to tell if a game is balanced? Some of you right now might be going, “Oh yeah, Philosophy. Proving the earth doesn’t exist and all manner of nonsense. I know how to tell if a game is balanced”. Well you’re right. We can tell if a game is balanced. Why? Because language doesn’t have any inherent meaning, we as humans just give it meaning after the fact. Just because it is ambiguous what balance actually looks like, doesn’t mean we don’t know it when we see it. We have a general idea of what it’s supposed to look like, and we slap the term balance to it. Perfectly fine, unless we want to go into greater depth, and who doesn’t have time to waste?
So what methods can we employ to identify balance? The most common, and the one given most credence to here on TL is argument from authority. Though a negative sounding term, it’s really not that bad. Essentially, the more experienced the player and the higher the skill level, the more weight we give to their opinion. Once again, not a bad way of going about it, the top players are those that have put in the effort, who have the skill; their opinion is therefore much more likely to be well informed. Furthermore balance at the top level is what is valued most due to all us spectators. However we must be aware of why we put weight behind their views, and thus are able to still remain critical of the views they present. Just because they are a top player, does not mean they are immune to being wrong. They might be seeing the game purely from a closed meta-game, where roaches and hydras are the only effective units. They might be misinformed or ignorant about certain mechanics or strategies that allow for different styles of play. They might be angry after successive losses and be writing out of emotion. He could simply be coming up against better players. All these should be kept in mind in examining any claim, especially your own. In fact I would’ve written more here on personal claims, but the newest forum rules express guidelines more than adequate, and has stoped from posting those beyond help.
![[image loading]](http://i1046.photobucket.com/albums/b461/ImSkeptical/PhilosophyandStarcraft2.jpg)
A post count like that demands respect.
The other method for examining balance is the awesome power of statistics. Here we get to put on our glasses and get down to doing sweet science. We collect our numbers on W/L ratios of top platinum players, of each matchup, of each server. This gives us a wealth of information to judge balance; we can see the numbers right in front of us. If we were Blizzard we could just fiddle till they lined up into a pretty distribution. But of course, anyone who has any familiarity with statistics knows the downfalls of the approach. Maybe the learning curves for all the races are different, so although it seems in the majority of the top players Terran is even, when the Zerg player just gets that much better the game breaks down and Zerg’s completely dominate. Maybe the majority of Protoss players don’t know about this build that would demolish their opponent, so the stats look normal. Maybe a cheese that’s hard to defend is resulting in a high win rate, but with a small number of players able to beat it after a lot of specific practice against it there’s nothing for that race to do. All of these issues need to be examined on an individual game level, or will only appear in more specific analysis, or only after a longer period of time. We thus need to keep these kinds of biases in mind when interpreting statistics.
![[image loading]](http://i1046.photobucket.com/albums/b461/ImSkeptical/PhilosophyandStarcraft3.jpg)
Dare we argue with Science???
So these two sources can’t give us a definitive hold on the elusive concept of balance. It seems like we’re never going to get there. And now I bring up the mindset on balance promoted by people like the much respected Day [9]. We should stop caring so damn much. With so many variables it is ridiculously hard to claim the game is imbalanced or balanced, let alone a single unit. The article “Power Overwhelming” I was a huge fan of, as it makes a point I don’t think emphasised enough. Overpowered units are fun to watch and play. It’s that game that needs to be balanced. The fact that half the balance of Starcraft isn’t amongst units but amongst the timings those units can come out, something that is contingent upon when people build them in their builds, and thus is something that will shift and shift from paradigm to paradigm as Starcraft 1 is still doing, holy crap.
![[image loading]](http://i1046.photobucket.com/albums/b461/ImSkeptical/PhilosophyandStarcraft4.jpg)
How did we ever come to think 200 supply, fully upgraded Terran mech was balanced?
This does not mean I want discussion on the forum to stop in relation to balance. It would just be nice if instead another mindset was taken, one focusing on what we as a player can actually do to deal with a problem. First make the assumption that the game is already balanced. Instead of “Force fields should be destructible”, I would prefer the discussion to be “Force fields are super badass. What should I do in order to be extra badass in order to beat someone who can force field good”. This kind of discussion actually gets us somewhere because we are not Blizzard. We are the players. We can’t change the game by changing the game; we change the game by playing it. We can make the game balanced by putting in the effort, the practice, and the skill.
Unless every single Protoss only rushes Motherships for more than a month, then we might have issues.
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The Responding Walls of Text You Might Enjoy
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On April 23 2010 22:33 Prog wrote:
It might seem at first glance, that we can't change the game sc2, but we might change the language game by speaking of "x should be F" or "y is P" and part of the language game will be Blizzard. The point of judgements in a language game like "sc2 balance" is not to give precise statements about the current balance, is about (re)defining the rules of the language game by creating rules of using terms in that language game intersubjectivly. The rules of language games are not private (as Wittgenstein showed in the Philosophical Investigations), they are found while playing the language game together. You can see that in every balance discussion in every game: Someone caims x is too strong/too weak/whatever and others react to that statement. In the long run there will be eventually a point in which the community (or the biggest part of it) agrees on how to judge about the balance of x. But what happened here is not, that x is so-and-so balanced and some people had been wrong seeing x's balance differently, while others were right. The community decided on how to use the term "balanced so-and-so" by seting a rule of the term "balance so-and-so" to be used for x via the discussion. The time needed to set up such rules together obviously differs, but the way the discussing and developing the language game in principle stays the same.
Now bringing Blizzard (or developers in general) into the language game: Developers are part of the same language game insofar as that language game is their only source for balance. If the whole community agrees that something x is too strong, Blizzard can't just say "you are wrong" - how should they? On what basis would a developer be able to judge in contradiction to what the players agreed on? When there is a sufficiant agreement, developers are bound by the players. When there is no clear agreement in the community, developers take part in that developement of the language game themselves. They are the ones comparing arguments and databases, but they are not independently deciding - they just play a certain role in the balance-game. Thus balance discussions are highly important for us players and for developers.
It might seem at first glance, that we can't change the game sc2, but we might change the language game by speaking of "x should be F" or "y is P" and part of the language game will be Blizzard. The point of judgements in a language game like "sc2 balance" is not to give precise statements about the current balance, is about (re)defining the rules of the language game by creating rules of using terms in that language game intersubjectivly. The rules of language games are not private (as Wittgenstein showed in the Philosophical Investigations), they are found while playing the language game together. You can see that in every balance discussion in every game: Someone caims x is too strong/too weak/whatever and others react to that statement. In the long run there will be eventually a point in which the community (or the biggest part of it) agrees on how to judge about the balance of x. But what happened here is not, that x is so-and-so balanced and some people had been wrong seeing x's balance differently, while others were right. The community decided on how to use the term "balanced so-and-so" by seting a rule of the term "balance so-and-so" to be used for x via the discussion. The time needed to set up such rules together obviously differs, but the way the discussing and developing the language game in principle stays the same.
Now bringing Blizzard (or developers in general) into the language game: Developers are part of the same language game insofar as that language game is their only source for balance. If the whole community agrees that something x is too strong, Blizzard can't just say "you are wrong" - how should they? On what basis would a developer be able to judge in contradiction to what the players agreed on? When there is a sufficiant agreement, developers are bound by the players. When there is no clear agreement in the community, developers take part in that developement of the language game themselves. They are the ones comparing arguments and databases, but they are not independently deciding - they just play a certain role in the balance-game. Thus balance discussions are highly important for us players and for developers.
Here comes someone who has actually read Wittgenstein and not just synopsises and interpretations of, showing me for the ignorant fool I am xD. As is the plight of the lazy layman.
And yes, there is a good point to be had in the fact that by making suggestions, we can inform Blizzard on changes that may very well be good. The last 2 paragraphs are more opinion that I was trying to sneak in with the rest being about critical examination of argument which everyone can agree on.
Essentially, I feel that the time spent thinking of how the game should be to be balanced be better put to use working out the game, not only because we are not developers, but because I feel it will lead to a more "balanced game". But yes, suggestions by the community on direct changes will always be valid in the sense you discuss.
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On April 23 2010 22:58 Black Octopi wrote:
Translation: Blah blah... Intro: I like philosophy
Translation: I want to use philosophy to make a argument here.
Translation: Blah blah... Intro: I like philosophy
Translation: I want to use philosophy to make a argument here.
Yes I like to use words, its fun, uses time that would've been spent doing nothing, and is fun for the whole family.
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On April 24 2010 01:55 Failsafe wrote:
My novice opinion is that there's a lot of support for testing by playing. We've solved tic tac toe and checkers, but we can't solve chess (at least not by brute force). And if we can't solve a simple game like chess, how can we solve a much more complicated game like SC2?
A favorite professor of mine gave a little aside about solving chess by brute force which I'm reproducing in the spoiler below. If you've got any interest in game theory or chess or any intellectual curiosity whatsoever you should check it out because it's pretty interesting.
+ Show Spoiler +
Chess is finite and deals with discrete variables. SC2 is not clearly finite nor discrete, nor can I imagine any finite and discrete approximation of SC2 that would be as simple as chess and yet still resemble SC2. If even a relatively simple game like chess can't be solved by brute force, how can we expect to solve the much more complex game of SC2?
This seems to imply that we can never be certain of an optimal strategy/strategies for SC2, and without mathematically optimal strategies, it seems weird to talk about "balance" in a game theoretic sense. If we had optimal strategies, then we could observe the outcomes of those strategies, and then balance so that each race had multiple optimal strategies and all optimal strategies ended in a tie (or something like that). We could evaluate how deviations from optimal strategies affected our expectations. We could probably come up with some pretty good stuff like: suppose player A only has 350 APM instead of the optimal infinity, and player B only has 300 APM instead of the optimal infinity, then how does the game go if the APM distribution is like this?
On the one hand, this all seems academically interesting but on the other hand it's also sorta dry and never gonna happen. It also seems like it's not really the SC that we know. What's lacking?
Well, what about "metagame" equillibrium? Since matches in SC2 are often repeated games, repetition totally changes equillibria and optimal strategies.
Moreover, SC2, unlike chess, is a game of incomplete information. Together with the fact that SC2 is often played as a repeated game, we have to adjust for the "mind games." I think most good SC1 players would agree that having a grasp on the mind games is as important if not more important than any other single element of gameplay. Consider how many good SC1 foreigners also turned out to be huge poker successes. I'm sure that if you used statistical regression, being a top SC1 player would be a great predictor of poker success.
Consider SC1. It's possible that if we had optimal strategies for SC1 assuming complete information (allied vision without the ability to shoot cloaked units unless you had a detector) and assuming that the game would not be repeated, and then we had perfect players to carry out these optimal strategies, SC1 might be "balanced" something like: Z > T, P > Z, T > P. And these outcomes would occur 100% of the time on all maps (for the sake of argument). However, even if this was the case, and it could well be, we will probably never actually know.
Ultimately, what we do know is: players are not perfect (they cannot flawlessly execute a strategy; they cannot even consistently execute the same strategy); most major tournaments depend on repetition; and players' information is not complete. We cannot solve even the simple case where we assume complete information and no repetition. But suppose we could. Suppose we could even solve the case of incomplete information and repetition. How would we account for imperfections in the players?
We would completely have to retool our models to consider the marginal value of each action. Suppose for our optimal strategies we have "balanced" PvT. That is, P = T where both players' perfectly execute their optimal strategies. But now suppose we have imperfect players. Suppose that one equillibrium, that is the result is again P = T occurs where P's APM is 5,000 and P's APM is 300? The equillibrium isn't feasible.
What about burst APM? Suppose that an equillibrium occurs where P's APM is 200 and T's APM is 250, but in order for it to occur P must be able to have an APM burst of 3,000 at a crucial moment where he's required to build and chrono boost an observer, a probe, a dark templar, a mothership, and an air weapons upgrade in whatever fraction of a second 3,000 APM implies. That's another non-feasible equillibrium.
It would be nice to type a conclusion to this wall of text but whatever
My novice opinion is that there's a lot of support for testing by playing. We've solved tic tac toe and checkers, but we can't solve chess (at least not by brute force). And if we can't solve a simple game like chess, how can we solve a much more complicated game like SC2?
A favorite professor of mine gave a little aside about solving chess by brute force which I'm reproducing in the spoiler below. If you've got any interest in game theory or chess or any intellectual curiosity whatsoever you should check it out because it's pretty interesting.
+ Show Spoiler +
In chess there is a finite upper limit of turns per single game (~6,000). However, a single game can only represent a single chain of events, and all the other possible chains of events go unobserved.
So let's say you see that there are only 6,000 possible moves per game, and since 6,000 is finite, you decide to work through them all (or get a computer to do it). How would that go?
One way of looking at it is to identify all of the moves you can make to open the game (assuming you're white). I think there's 20. Each of eight pawns can move either one space or two spaces, and there are two moves for each of the two knights. Then you can consider all your opponent's possible first moves (also 20, I think). Then you can consider all of your moves for turn 2, and all of your opponent's moves for turn 2, and so on. That's pretty much the foundation of the brute force method. But the problem is: you run out of atoms. The possibilities grow so rapidly that within the first 20 turns there are more possibilities than there are atoms in the universe.
This probably means that we can't solve chess by brute force. Maybe there's some smaller stuff we could manipulate, or maybe we could break down our diagnosis into separate trees where each tree grows out of a single first move and then represents all the actions that may follow. Then we could prune the trees and eliminate strategies that deadend...
In any case, it looks hard to solve chess by brute force, if it can be done at all.
So let's say you see that there are only 6,000 possible moves per game, and since 6,000 is finite, you decide to work through them all (or get a computer to do it). How would that go?
One way of looking at it is to identify all of the moves you can make to open the game (assuming you're white). I think there's 20. Each of eight pawns can move either one space or two spaces, and there are two moves for each of the two knights. Then you can consider all your opponent's possible first moves (also 20, I think). Then you can consider all of your moves for turn 2, and all of your opponent's moves for turn 2, and so on. That's pretty much the foundation of the brute force method. But the problem is: you run out of atoms. The possibilities grow so rapidly that within the first 20 turns there are more possibilities than there are atoms in the universe.
This probably means that we can't solve chess by brute force. Maybe there's some smaller stuff we could manipulate, or maybe we could break down our diagnosis into separate trees where each tree grows out of a single first move and then represents all the actions that may follow. Then we could prune the trees and eliminate strategies that deadend...
In any case, it looks hard to solve chess by brute force, if it can be done at all.
Chess is finite and deals with discrete variables. SC2 is not clearly finite nor discrete, nor can I imagine any finite and discrete approximation of SC2 that would be as simple as chess and yet still resemble SC2. If even a relatively simple game like chess can't be solved by brute force, how can we expect to solve the much more complex game of SC2?
This seems to imply that we can never be certain of an optimal strategy/strategies for SC2, and without mathematically optimal strategies, it seems weird to talk about "balance" in a game theoretic sense. If we had optimal strategies, then we could observe the outcomes of those strategies, and then balance so that each race had multiple optimal strategies and all optimal strategies ended in a tie (or something like that). We could evaluate how deviations from optimal strategies affected our expectations. We could probably come up with some pretty good stuff like: suppose player A only has 350 APM instead of the optimal infinity, and player B only has 300 APM instead of the optimal infinity, then how does the game go if the APM distribution is like this?
On the one hand, this all seems academically interesting but on the other hand it's also sorta dry and never gonna happen. It also seems like it's not really the SC that we know. What's lacking?
Well, what about "metagame" equillibrium? Since matches in SC2 are often repeated games, repetition totally changes equillibria and optimal strategies.
Moreover, SC2, unlike chess, is a game of incomplete information. Together with the fact that SC2 is often played as a repeated game, we have to adjust for the "mind games." I think most good SC1 players would agree that having a grasp on the mind games is as important if not more important than any other single element of gameplay. Consider how many good SC1 foreigners also turned out to be huge poker successes. I'm sure that if you used statistical regression, being a top SC1 player would be a great predictor of poker success.
Consider SC1. It's possible that if we had optimal strategies for SC1 assuming complete information (allied vision without the ability to shoot cloaked units unless you had a detector) and assuming that the game would not be repeated, and then we had perfect players to carry out these optimal strategies, SC1 might be "balanced" something like: Z > T, P > Z, T > P. And these outcomes would occur 100% of the time on all maps (for the sake of argument). However, even if this was the case, and it could well be, we will probably never actually know.
Ultimately, what we do know is: players are not perfect (they cannot flawlessly execute a strategy; they cannot even consistently execute the same strategy); most major tournaments depend on repetition; and players' information is not complete. We cannot solve even the simple case where we assume complete information and no repetition. But suppose we could. Suppose we could even solve the case of incomplete information and repetition. How would we account for imperfections in the players?
We would completely have to retool our models to consider the marginal value of each action. Suppose for our optimal strategies we have "balanced" PvT. That is, P = T where both players' perfectly execute their optimal strategies. But now suppose we have imperfect players. Suppose that one equillibrium, that is the result is again P = T occurs where P's APM is 5,000 and P's APM is 300? The equillibrium isn't feasible.
What about burst APM? Suppose that an equillibrium occurs where P's APM is 200 and T's APM is 250, but in order for it to occur P must be able to have an APM burst of 3,000 at a crucial moment where he's required to build and chrono boost an observer, a probe, a dark templar, a mothership, and an air weapons upgrade in whatever fraction of a second 3,000 APM implies. That's another non-feasible equillibrium.
It would be nice to type a conclusion to this wall of text but whatever
You could conclude, even though SC1 has such a developed metagame, its impractical to the point of impossible to abstract it in a way we could claim it balanced in a clean game-theory sense because of the complexities of realtime, intricate games of imperfect misinformation. We have simply accepted it as 'balanced', because it seems that way after such extensive play, so Mr. Skeptical is awesome xD. Hope I followed what you said properly :D
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On April 25 2010 05:48 Funchucks wrote:
+ Show Spoiler +
It is a stated goal of the Starcraft 2 design team to balance the game at ALL skill levels, from the first-time player to the obsessive who plays like it's his job, so this argument goes out the window.
You can philosowank all you like about what "true balance" is, but having roughly equal win rates for each race in each tier on the ladder is required to meet their own goals.
The other key goals are appeal, fun, and relevance of skill (such that in a platinum vs. bronze match, you don't get the bronze player winning 49% of the time). These can all be considered types of balance, but they're not what people are normally talking about when they say "balance".
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On April 23 2010 21:14 ImSkeptical wrote:
The other method for examining balance is the awesome power of statistics. Here we get to put on our glasses and get down to doing sweet science. We collect our numbers on W/L ratios of top platinum players, of each matchup, of each server. This gives us a wealth of information to judge balance; we can see the numbers right in front of us. If we were Blizzard we could just fiddle till they lined up into a pretty distribution. But of course, anyone who has any familiarity with statistics knows the downfalls of the approach. Maybe the learning curves for all the races are different
The other method for examining balance is the awesome power of statistics. Here we get to put on our glasses and get down to doing sweet science. We collect our numbers on W/L ratios of top platinum players, of each matchup, of each server. This gives us a wealth of information to judge balance; we can see the numbers right in front of us. If we were Blizzard we could just fiddle till they lined up into a pretty distribution. But of course, anyone who has any familiarity with statistics knows the downfalls of the approach. Maybe the learning curves for all the races are different
It is a stated goal of the Starcraft 2 design team to balance the game at ALL skill levels, from the first-time player to the obsessive who plays like it's his job, so this argument goes out the window.
You can philosowank all you like about what "true balance" is, but having roughly equal win rates for each race in each tier on the ladder is required to meet their own goals.
The other key goals are appeal, fun, and relevance of skill (such that in a platinum vs. bronze match, you don't get the bronze player winning 49% of the time). These can all be considered types of balance, but they're not what people are normally talking about when they say "balance".
I'll try to clarify my conclusion. It doesn't matter what Blizzard does it some sense. They can keep 'balancing' to keep statistics even, which doesn't seem like a good design philosophy, but hypothetically say they do this. What difference does this make as a player? Nothing. You're still going to try an win as much as you can. My point is that 'true balance' isn't a concept worth looking into, and we should get on with moving discussion from 'balancing a unit' to 'strategizing against a race'. Especially in the early stages of a beta, because I see it might be harmful if changes that are pushed for the community are simply a reflection of the meta-game. Because it just means the patches are changing the game, not individual players. Someone like sAviOr may have just caused Blizzard to increase the time it takes to get hive if this kind of attitude was taken, cutting off us seeing Bisu and his creativity.
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On April 27 2010 11:42 Half wrote:
I never focused on the word balance, I utilized it. The post starts by claiming that balance is not the end goal, and then elaborates on the irrelevant point on how balance can never be determined in such a brief amount of time.
The SC2 siege tank is weaker then the SC1 siege tank. This represents a move away from positional play. As a player, I can find positional play to be entertaining, and thus, I could posit a argument for the buffing of siege tanks despite the fact that terran are not objectively underpowered, because as you said, despite the fact that siege tanks a weak, they do not exist in a vacuum. Despite this, I can still advocate buffing siege tanks in order to shift the gameplay in a direction I find fun, a balance suggestion that does not depend on a absolute, logistical, non-meta understanding of the actual balance.
I meant individual player, as in "If I'm the only guy who likes siege tanks, and nobody else does, my opinion is irrelevant". I agree with your analysis on the Sentry, but its completely irrelevant to the segment you quoted and actually supports my point o.o.
In fact, it is my point in its entirety. We seem to be in agreement lols. I'm saying the same thing. I can't determine all the intrinsic ways the Sentry interacts with the game and all the complex relationships and as I result I don't truly understand the balance of the sentry or the balance of the protoss. Nobody does, there are too many variables, even blizzard doesn't, they just have a lot more experience and data to make intelligent guesses off of.
However, I can determine that the force field perma blocking of ramps is just no fun at all. And thus, I can suggest a change made to balance to discourage this practice, backing it up with replays of pro games, and most people would agree that it isn't fun. Thus, I've made a legitimate contributory suggestion towards balance without truly understanding its intricacies because balance isn't the core goal, fun and dynamic play are.
The OP takes the idea of "we know nothing" too far. While we can't disagree with the balance of the siege tank in relationship to balance, we can easily do so in relationship to fun, or rather, the units effect on the direction of gameplay in relationship to fun, and make a valid point out of it.
I never focused on the word balance, I utilized it. The post starts by claiming that balance is not the end goal, and then elaborates on the irrelevant point on how balance can never be determined in such a brief amount of time.
The SC2 siege tank is weaker then the SC1 siege tank. This represents a move away from positional play. As a player, I can find positional play to be entertaining, and thus, I could posit a argument for the buffing of siege tanks despite the fact that terran are not objectively underpowered, because as you said, despite the fact that siege tanks a weak, they do not exist in a vacuum. Despite this, I can still advocate buffing siege tanks in order to shift the gameplay in a direction I find fun, a balance suggestion that does not depend on a absolute, logistical, non-meta understanding of the actual balance.
I meant individual player, as in "If I'm the only guy who likes siege tanks, and nobody else does, my opinion is irrelevant". I agree with your analysis on the Sentry, but its completely irrelevant to the segment you quoted and actually supports my point o.o.
In fact, it is my point in its entirety. We seem to be in agreement lols. I'm saying the same thing. I can't determine all the intrinsic ways the Sentry interacts with the game and all the complex relationships and as I result I don't truly understand the balance of the sentry or the balance of the protoss. Nobody does, there are too many variables, even blizzard doesn't, they just have a lot more experience and data to make intelligent guesses off of.
However, I can determine that the force field perma blocking of ramps is just no fun at all. And thus, I can suggest a change made to balance to discourage this practice, backing it up with replays of pro games, and most people would agree that it isn't fun. Thus, I've made a legitimate contributory suggestion towards balance without truly understanding its intricacies because balance isn't the core goal, fun and dynamic play are.
The OP takes the idea of "we know nothing" too far. While we can't disagree with the balance of the siege tank in relationship to balance, we can easily do so in relationship to fun, or rather, the units effect on the direction of gameplay in relationship to fun, and make a valid point out of it.
