No fix to clumpy unit movement

Which problem are we trying to solve here?

A) Pros can't split their units so esports looks bad.
B) Ladder players can't split their units and it should be easier to split your units.

If "A" then I would say the problem is solved. They should split their units. Pros who do so will win games, Pros who do not will lose games. Should we make the game easier for Pros? The impression I have gotten from the community and the Pros themselves on this subject is a resounding "No."

If "B" then I'm not sure we want to solve this? If it's a game of skill, then you need to learn to split your units. In Broodwar you had to learn to move your units. With a limited unit selection it was difficult to move a large army. Now it is easy to move your army, but harder to use them correctly in a big fight.

Sounds like a better experience for a newer user to me? It's certainly what I would want as a player. If I'm going to be challenged I don't want it to be "how can I get my units into the fight." I would rather it be "my units got to the fight, how do I optimize their positions."

You can easily test this yourself using the editor. I don't think you will find it makes much of a difference. We had multiple groups of people play and we could not tell that anything had actually happened. We were not trying to manipulate the units in any unusual way, we just played normally.

Since clumping is beneficial in many situations I don't think this will change the way the game is played unless you are about to fight Banelings, Fungal, Psi Storm, etc. Only then should you split. In that case I don't think we want splitting to be automated. We want avoiding splash to be a skill thing. Right?

We have already decided it's not useful, that's why we didn't put it in a patch. I'm not going to waste time, energy and resources testing something that doesn't do anything positive for the game. A change like this will require extensive testing and take a lot of effort to make sure it didn't break anything in campaign or anywhere else in the game.

If you don't agree, that is totally cool. Go test it now. You have an editor. I'm not stopping you. =)

Frodan: I also want to follow up on a post you made a while ago. It was on the forums, I'm not sure if you can recall. But you talked about changing maybe the unit pathing AI, maybe tweaking some of the dynamic movement. Can you explain exactly what you guys did, maybe the results, and maybe some of your concerns because you said it wasn't that different.

Browder: We saw some videos that our fans put together, which is awesome. A variable which they were tweaking within the path finder, it would basically cause units to keep their position until they got to their target point, and they would still cluster up again. A lot of our players have felt that the spreading out would be something beneficial for E-sports, that it would cause the armies to look bigger, it would be a little easier to read what's going on in some of the bigger armies. So we tested this variable in our game, we tested it for a couple of days, playing tons and tons of games and it didn't make much of a difference because the reality is the test they were showing on a map was all these units spread out with a single right click across the map so the units will all spread out, so it look great. But nobody plays that way. They click rapidly in very short spaces so the units are always clustered. The other thing too that's typical about this is the fact of the matter that players want their units clustered. They don't want them spread out. It's more cool for E-sports perspective but not if you want to win a game. If you want to win a game, you want to cluster. You especially want to cluster when you are fighting with Marines and Maruaders, say against Zealots. You want to be in a tight ball and murdering them. You do want to split when you want to fight Banelings. So there's sometimes you want to split, and sometimes want to cluster. So it's really about what's the default and for us it felt like the smarter answer is look most of the time, especially for new users, clustering is correct. If the pros want to split up their units, they should split up their units and that's something they can do. We're seeing more and more and more pros who want to win games are spreading out their armies at the appropriate moment and gaining an advantage for it. But at the end of the day, we didn't put that one in beta because it didn't do that much. I wouldn't be ashamed to try something else at some point to see how that feels but that one did not do sort of what we all thought it would. It was actually almost no change to the game at all, so at that point what's the point of introducing all that work on us, all the testing, and all the uncertainty of that if it doesn't actually change much.