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Question is obvious: Are maps supposed to be balanced?
There are some opinions on this:
1- "Maps are not balanced, and in fact, they shouldn't be. Some maps should favor some race or some strategy.". This opinion is stated one more time by Artosis on GSL S3 Ro64 Day 1.
My view on this: Yes, this is true to some extent: Maps with all that funky stuff is not that bad. I mean destructible rocks on nat, 300 degree wide open nats, cliffs on nats, 20 meters of air distance etc. make the game funnier. But definitely this sure isn't true if we're talking about an individual tournament. Does anyone think about why Central Plains is not in the map pool of OSL/MSL (btw Central Plains is a map that favors protoss so hard that that more than %50 of the games on this map are PvPs)? Yes, if there was a Proleague type of tournament where teams compete, not individual players, some imbalanced maps wouldn't hurt. Because when you have a team, you have the option of not sending a zerg player on LT against a possible Terran opponent but in an individual tournament (with a ridiculous amount of prize pool) you don't have the option to off-race on LT instead of playing Zerg which is your main race.
2- "Problem is about races, not maps"
My view on this: I don't know about racial imbalances. I'm a silver zerg player and I did beat a protoss with mass infestors without NP upgrade on the ladder. But this does not mean that Protoss is UP (especially if toss had no colossi, HT or Archon). I don't give a fuck to QQers like Genius or the ones on PlayXP JingJing poll. QQers just QQ about anything. But yeah, races are not as balanced as BW. In BW, all races had equal chances on macro games. Zerg wasn't auto-win on lategame, Terran infantry wasn't this ridiculous even though Firebats (yes, firebats were the closest unit to that level) and they didn't have this many ezpz builds that could end the game before 7th minute mark, Protoss had more effective gateway units. But Thors with a range of 9 are just too good to be true when you have a cliff right next to the mineral patches at your natural expansion even though they are not that effective (still effective, but not that kind of joke) in other situations. In other words: Maps don't create imbalances, they boost it.
3- "Maps are too stupid to be true, and too not funny to be a joke, they are the awful truth"
My view on this: Not every single map actually, but yeah. Some maps are just a joke and they are not even funny. I don't want to see DQ cliffs or nats or Desert Oasis or Scrap Station techsnipes any more (even though those maps "favor" zerg with huge distance and nothing else) or Jungle Basin (I laugh at every single time I even imagine that map, is Zerg supposed to win games on it?!). And there are maps like Metalopolis and Shakuras Plateu, where you still can drop, techsnipe, early-rush with marines or roaches, baneling bust, be greedy, play macro, use back entrance etc. But the map doesn't favor one strategy to another. So you just don't need to prepare for techsnipes, take precautions for your backdoor, finish the game in less than 15 minutes (because macro games is not even an option on certain maps) regardless of your strategy or play style. But for example, when you play on LT as a Zerg, you're just too uncomfortable against Terran because he can Thordrop your nat and abuse the stupidest cliff ever whereas you neither have units to abuse that particular cliff nor take down 2 thors on a cliff with 6 SCVs repairing them and surrendering is the best option for you if you somehow built your lair at your nat. Sure you can veto that map on ladder but at an individual tournament with ridiculous amount of prize pool where vetoing a map is out of the question, maps like LT or Steppes can be a stage of skilled players being roflstomped by noobz (even though there are none once the prelims are over, so I use it in the place of inferior players) but when you go to a map like Metalopolis, a skilled player will mostly win.
And there is a poll for you:
Poll: What's your opinionMaps are the awful truth (125) 62% Maps are not balanced and they are not supposed to be (60) 30% Races are the problem, not maps (18) 9% 203 total votes Your vote: What's your opinion (Vote): Maps are not balanced and they are not supposed to be
(Vote): Races are the problem, not maps
(Vote): Maps are the awful truth
So, what do you think?
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Canada3139 Posts
.. I don't see the logic in having imbalanced maps? There is no reason for them not to balance maps, it doesn't make sense. obviously is 4 expansions are beside a main base on the map it's zerg favored.
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Maps should attempt to be perfectly balanced race v. race, but they do not HAVE to be perfectly balanced race v. race, because the maps are organized for ladder or tournament as a pool, and as long as the pool is balanced as a whole, the individual maps do not necessarily have to be.
IMO, it is okay to have a slight imbalance on a map if that will create more interesting and entertaining play, as long as the imbalance is not insurmountable.
The map pool as a whole however, must be perfectly balanced racially.
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Calgary25979 Posts
I think they should be close, but I find it interesting when a certain map favours a style and a race - It's arbitrarily forces a change in playstyle from game to game, which I enjoy seeing.
I don't know if it's "right" so to speak, but I enjoy seeing it.
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Well, in my eyes the only reason there was a large portion of maps that favored races in Broodwar was because the game wasn't balanced, therefore with the high level of play maps became a place where you could tamper with the balance of the game without blizzard actually doing anything since they had lets face it, given up on the game after the 10++years that it had been out.
But, with sc2 I think the maps should all be balanced.. gives a better feedback on how the races are balanced against each other. Hopefully the actual game will be balanced more in SC2 and there will be less focus on favoring races in maps as there was in BW(not to say that BW was not close to being balanced)
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Positional imbalance is just plain retarded.
Why would one have to pray for God so he is lucky enough to not get a bad position in DQ? Thats the best example of how lame Blizzard maps are in its majority.
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Anybody who is interested on fixing the positional imbalances with Blizzards maps should totally support my thread here: http://us.battle.net/sc2/en/forum/topic/1083320648
It needs to be bumped, the B.net crowd is too scared of all the pictures to reply on it.
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Always had the opinion that maps were never supposed to be balanced. Every race should have a map that they do well on. Though it brings the question, what exactly is a Protoss favored map in PvT?
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On November 23 2010 08:21 Dommk wrote:
Always had the opinion that maps were never supposed to be balanced. Every race should have a map that they do well on. Though it brings the question, what exactly is a Protoss favored map in PvT?
One with really good warp in spots and the ability to expand away from your opponent. It's a little tricky because good warp in spots are also usually good tank spots.
I'd call Blistering Sands Protoss favored in PvT.
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I do think that some positioning if you spawn on the upper or lower side on scrap station.. that it is wrong, because the map is intentionally made imbalanced. So that a guy on the lower spawn, can block his expands destructible rocks with just a pylon when it takes 2 on the upper side and so on...
But if they map "just are imbalanced" for example jungle basin. That is maybe a more protoss oriented map, I think it is ok..
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Maps don't create imbalances, they boost it.
That's not true at all.
There's nothing imbalanced about a siege tank. There's something imbalanced about a siege tank on the LT cliff.
You can take a perfectly balanced game, and easily create maps for it which will create imbalances.
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On November 23 2010 08:08 Metalwing wrote:
Question is obvious: Are maps supposed to be balanced?
There are some opinions on this:
1- "Maps are not balanced, and in fact, they shouldn't be. Some maps should favor some race or some strategy.". This opinion is stated one more time by Artosis on GSL S3 Ro64 Day 1.
My view on this: Yes, this is true to some extent: Maps with all that funky stuff is not that bad. I mean destructible rocks on nat, 300 degree wide open nats, cliffs on nats, 20 meters of air distance etc. make the game funnier. But definitely this sure isn't true if we're talking about an individual tournament. Does anyone think about why Central Plains is not in the map pool of OSL/MSL (btw Central Plains is a map that favors protoss so hard that that more than %50 of the games on this map are PvPs)? Yes, if there was a Proleague type of tournament where teams compete, not individual players, some imbalanced maps wouldn't hurt. Because when you have a team, you have the option of not sending a zerg player on LT against a possible Terran opponent but in an individual tournament (with a ridiculous amount of prize pool) you don't have the option to off-race on LT instead of playing Zerg which is your main race.
Harshly imbalanced maps shouldn't be allowed. In BW, the races are balanced through maps. I think maps should be balanced as much as possible while having an interesting feature or concept. Sometimes we get failures like Demon's Forest, but...moderation, lol.
2- "Problem is about races, not maps"
My view on this: I don't know about racial imbalances. I'm a silver zerg player and I did beat a protoss with mass infestors without NP upgrade on the ladder. But this does not mean that Protoss is UP (especially if toss had no colossi, HT or Archon). I don't give a fuck to QQers like Genius or the ones on PlayXP JingJing poll. QQers just QQ about anything. But yeah, races are not as balanced as BW. In BW, all races had equal chances on macro games. Zerg wasn't auto-win on lategame, Terran infantry wasn't this ridiculous even though Firebats (yes, firebats were the closest unit to that level) and they didn't have this many ezpz builds that could end the game before 7th minute mark, Protoss had more effective gateway units. But Thors with a range of 9 are just too good to be true when you have a cliff right next to the mineral patches at your natural expansion even though they are not that effective (still effective, but not that kind of joke) in other situations. In other words: Maps don't create imbalances, they boost it.
In BW, late game is actually where imbalances are most apparent. It is so horrendously difficult for P to penetrate a well-upgraded 200/200 T mech army. In addition, there's nearly nothing Z can do against mass archon in the late game. The imbalances are ultimately there, but usually factors in the midgame can be seen that lead to such situations.
SC2 isn't mature enough a game yet for purely macro games to take over. For one, I think that's a good thing. Macro SC2 games are boring as hell to watch. Additionally, this may be by design. SC2's pace is much faster than BW's. Also, BW was a bit more forgiving in army trading and losses. Even if a P wiped out your first push, T generally had a chance to crawl back into the game with some careful defense. You don't see that in SC2 as much. Games start up more quickly and games end more quickly in SC2.
Given time, we'll see if SC2 starts heading towards a macro direction. It'll be a while, though. Even early BW had one-base cheeses abound.
3- "Maps are too stupid to be true, and too not funny to be a joke, they are the awful truth"
My view on this: Not every single map actually, but yeah. Some maps are just a joke and they are not even funny. I don't want to see DQ cliffs or nats or Desert Oasis or Scrap Station techsnipes any more (even though those maps "favor" zerg with huge distance and nothing else) or Jungle Basin (I laugh at every single time I even imagine that map, is Zerg supposed to win games on it?!). And there are maps like Metalopolis and Shakuras Plateu, where you still can drop, techsnipe, early-rush with marines or roaches, baneling bust, be greedy, play macro, use back entrance etc. But the map doesn't favor one strategy to another. So you just don't need to prepare for techsnipes, take precautions for your backdoor, finish the game in less than 15 minutes (because macro games is not even an option on certain maps) regardless of your strategy or play style. But for example, when you play on LT as a Zerg, you're just too uncomfortable against Terran because he can Thordrop your nat and abuse the stupidest cliff ever whereas you neither have units to abuse that particular cliff nor take down 2 thors on a cliff with 6 SCVs repairing them and surrendering is the best option for you if you somehow built your lair at your nat. Sure you can veto that map on ladder but at an individual tournament with ridiculous amount of prize pool where vetoing a map is out of the question, maps like LT or Steppes can be a stage of skilled players being roflstomped by noobz (even though there are none once the prelims are over, so I use it in the place of inferior players) but when you go to a map like Metalopolis, a skilled player will mostly win.
I think there are better maps, but I still think they're all bad. They're all too small and too tight. I have to agree with Artosis there.
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It is practically impossible to balance a map for all match ups so that each race has the same win percentage all the time. Things that make one match up balanced throw other match ups off. Even if you did make such a map balance changes over time as people learn new things. What was OP one week because of a cliff is balanced the next.
People just need to realize that map balance and game balance are separate things but still affect each other.
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Maps should encourage a certain playstyle but they obviously shouldn't give one race a sizable advantage over another. I personally love maps that encourage creative play, like Outsider from BW. That map led to so many awesome games but it really wasn't imbalanced. I think there should be some funky maps like Outsider, and some super standard maps like Metalopolis or Python from BW, but no really imbalanced maps.
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positional imbalance is bad (aka, spawn A has a more accessable ramp then Spawn B, or say the minerals are siegeable on one side and not the other
strategical differences imo, should be varied. aka, having a more open map vs one with cliffs, or multiple attack paths vs some with single attack paths. These types of differences which may or may not cause "imbalances" racially, imo are good to a map pool provided that there are no positional differences.
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Well I like the fact that some maps are not balanced, because for example in a Bo7 setting like the current SPL, you can actually adapt the matchups depending on the maps, and that leads to interesting strategies like Snipes and Aces matches.
Having a map like Central Plains in the map pool is a good thing when it comes down to strategy and "metagame" (I don't know if this is the right word).
In sc2 I like the imbalanced maps from a spectator's point of view, however as a player thats quite painful. From the start of the game you have to elaborate extreme BOs and good defense / pressure in order to stay in the game, and even then the victory is far from guaranteed.
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Maps themselves don't have to be perfectly balanced. What's important is that in a set there is enough maps to have a balanced BoX. Although maps shouldn't be too imbalanced, merely have features that might favour races and spice things up
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The problem exists even in mirror matches, where there are imbalances in creep spread/drone spawn in ZvZ, add-on placement in TvT and pylon wall-ins in PvP.
It would be hard to find or make a perfectly balanced map for mirror matches alone, so I can't imagine what it would take to balance a map around the other three potential match-ups.
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On November 23 2010 08:14 Chill wrote:
I think they should be close, but I find it interesting when a certain map favours a style and a race - It's arbitrarily forces a change in playstyle from game to game, which I enjoy seeing.
I don't know if it's "right" so to speak, but I enjoy seeing it.
I'd agree with this and even go so far as to say it's right. If you have the exact same game on every map, then there's no way that the game can survive at a competitive level because it would be too damn boring. Imagine BW if it were played on Python every single game. Despite Python being an excellent map that allows a large variety of playstyles, before long people would get sick of it and long for the good old days of playing on Blood Bath and The Small Divide. There needs to be some variance in the map pool, or the game just won't be worth playing.
I don't necessarily think maps should be build with the intent of being race-favored, though, only strategy-favored. Say, allowing a really easy fast expansion: that happens to be heavily weighted against Zerg, but other features can be put in to compensate like a really open center. I also think that quirks are being a little underrated. Sure, they can be horrible if they favor one race but none of the others (LT cliffs being the classic example), but if done right they add new depth to gameplay. Blistering Sands, for example, is a promising map that was badly executed by making it tougher to move units into defensive positions by the two entrances to your base than for your opponent to move into threatening positions. If it were changed to be harder to attack and easier to defend, things would be much, much better and the map might (just might!) get past the midgame push.
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Well blizzard is releasing new versions of maps quite often, for example Shakuras now you can use reapers on the back door to go down and then up, before they could not do that and that was rather annoying ( was really confused why not considering that i was a normal ramp ). Now i can finally scout without wasting my precious scans
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