I am not part of the OneGoal or StarBow design teams. My goal with this article is to detail some of the ways that the OneGoal, Starbow and other Starcraft mods could possibly be improved. In doing so I would like to start with two points. First, DOTA has been incredibly successful. And second, No that does not mean Starcraft is dieing. Starcraft like the Zerg Swarm is continually growing and adapting. My goal is not to make OneGoal and Starbow into DOTA but rather to make them the next DOTA, an incredibly fun and addicting mod with an adoring community and dedicated developers that may eventually become more popular than the game it is based off of. Apologies if you guys have already discussed some of these ideas and don't feel they fit with your vision of the game or if there is a popular mod out there that already does all of these things.
Back in the golden age of the RTS (1990s) several games (Command and Conquer, Total Annihilation, etc..) fell into the habit of creating games with more and more units. However, the result was a dilution of individual unit identity, difficulty for new players to learn game and balance problems. The games eventually revolved around massing that one best unit. Starcraft countered this trend by choosing to focus on a few units with well developed dynamics. The theme was “Concentrated Coolness”. I believed that this was the best way, and for that time it may have been. However, in the age of continuous updates, and community-generated content this paradigm may no longer be ideal.
Too much
To give an example Heart of the Swarm has been in development for over two years. The result is 7 new units for multiplayer. In contrast DOTA 2 has put out 7 new units in the past five months alone. In addition to limiting new content, this philosophy of few units causes exciting units and abilities to be cut from the game before even making it into the players hands to try out. This leads to dissatisfaction and disagreement among the community. Finally, the worst part may be that developers spend much time and energy on balancing ever more stagnant metagames instead of doing what they do best, creating fun new experiences for their fans.
The Solution
The solution to these problems may be to create a Ban/Pick system and have regularly added new units every couple weeks. Doing so would allow OneGoal and Starbow to accomplish many things. First, it lets the community balance the game for you, freeing the devs to focus on creating new content. It is folly to ignore that a small number of developers balancing a game carries a huge amount of personal bias that can cloud their judgement. At the end of the day it is the community that judges the balance of the game. Lets say, hypothetically that in WoL the Hydralisk is the most powerful unit in the game. However, for whatever reason the community has come to believe that Infestor is really the strongest unit. As a result the Infestor is what will be used in all matchups and for all intents and purposes the Infestor would be the “most overpowered” unit. By this I mean that at the end of the day it is the community’s perception of what is overpowered...and not the developer’s perception, that determines how balanced the game is. By giving the community the tools to balance the game you automatically ensure that that their opinion of what units are over and underpowered match with the metagame. These tools allow balance to be achieved at a much more rapid pace. Imagine what would have happened if players could have banned Infestor/Broodlord rather than months after months of static ZvP. If the developers put a unit in the game that the community feels is overpowered it will be banned frequently. This will be a sign to the developers to lower the stats until it sees the level of play they would like for it.
Dota 2's Captain's Mode
A Ban/Pick draft adds a layer of strategy to the pregame in much the same way that building your deck in magic the gathering or creating a starting line up in baseball does. The near infinite combination of units creates ever evolving strategies and prevents the metagame from ever reaching a steady state. In short, no two games will ever look the same. Finally, every mod maker knows how frustrating it is when there is initial excitement for your mod only to have players drop off. DOTA mitigated this by continually adding new heroes every 2-4 weeks. The Ban/Pick system allows the developers to continually add new content to keep and grow a devoted user base. Followers will return eagerly every few weeks to try out the next new unit. The OneGoal team has already started doing this to a certain extent through their patches.
OneGoal's Patch Updates
Example Draft Pick
Player 1 (Terran) Core Units: SCV Marine Siege Tank Battlecruiser
Player 2 (Protoss) Core Units: Probe Zealot Stalker Mothership Core
First Round Bans Sentry Marauder Voidray Widow Mine Colossus Banshee
In closing, a Ban/Pick system allows OneGoal, Starbow and mods like them to differentiate their mods from the Starcraft 2 base game. The Starcraft 2 base game already has ladder and many other features that these mods lack. However, with the addition of regularly added new units and community-generated balance I believe these mods could overtake Starcraft 2 in popularity in much the same way that the original DOTA did.
On February 24 2013 07:42 nakam wrote: What would happen in the early game if you ban ling/marine/zealot etc?
Great question. I wanted to stick with broad ideas rather then lay out my own mod but it may be better to throw an example Ban/Draft pick into the OP.
In short, you can either provide multiple Tier 1 units so that not all can be banned first pick or you can have a set of base units that are present in every game to compliment the Ban/Pick units.
would be ridicously hard to balance, unless both players are playing as the same race. I guess you could make a game with 1 race, and a ban/pick system.
I've been thinking about how to do a P/B system for core starcraft for a while now. I think it would fundamentally change the feel of how starcraft played, probably for the better, taking it away from a game where people practice stagnant builds to millisecond perfection and towards one where strategy is more continually evolving or at least evoluting. I'm not honestly sure whether you could call this inherently better, as SC has always had a fetish for execution over strategy, but there's nothing stopping both systems from running in parallel
I don't think you'd have a full roster pick and ban, for example, you could have all the WoL units always available (perhaps trimming some of the more niche ones like ghosts, ultras and carriers) and pick and ban from a pool of, for example, all the brood war and new units that there are in the campaign. 2 bans, 3 picks or something. I could go on at length as to the various effects this would have, but fundamentally it would force the balance mentality away from 'optimisation' and towards targeted strategies. It would also allow for a more streamlined development process alongside pro-play as we see in mobas where the P/B phase causes a completely imbalanced game without that process to remain quite fresh, interesting and competitive.
You can't use bans in a game where single units fullfill highly specialized roles. It can work in DotA style games where you have multiple, somewhat similar heroes overlapping in a single role, but without it banning even a single unit leads to imbalance.
Imagine banning corruptors vs Z, medivacs vs T, or stalkers vs P. All of those create imbalances that cannot be overcome, and it limits the amount of strategies that can be viably used before the game even starts. It's a horrible idea because every ban combination has to be balanced, instead of a single combination.
It seems really wierd to add bans in the game since some units feel niche roles. However I'm instead thinking of options in game. Maybe you could choose to either build X unit or Y unit but not both, where the X and Y unit serve similiar roles but in different way. (Like a Hellion/Vulture, Thor/Goliath or Swarmhost/Lurker.)
Anyway this could relate to your idea since you could maybe implement that you could ban one of the units (X or Y) which makes the player unable to do certain builds but still lets him have a unit that can fulfill the banned units niche.
It's a bad idea because heroes in dota are redundant and can fulfill multiple roles, while SC2 units are purposely not redundant and each have a different use. A colossus is protoss' splash that doesn't cost energy, an infestor is the only zerg caster(until HotS, but vipers don't necessarily replace infestors), and ghosts are the only anti-caster unit terran has.
On February 24 2013 08:17 Derez wrote: You can't use bans in a game where single units fullfill highly specialized roles
...unless there are other units that can fill those roles.
which is not the case in the current unit selection.
Yes, i agree. I probably didnt do a great job explaining but the idea would be that these mods could add new units in frequent intervals.
I understand what you want but the problem is that the balance of an RTS is simply a lot more delicate then dota and such. A tiny change can have drastic effects Just look at a couple changes in the Starcraft 2 lifespawn that looked tiny (roach range upgrade, immortal range upgrade) but at their huge effect. In Dota and such unless you got a hero so OP its hilarious you will never have that effect.
This can't be done in sc2 (and thus onegoal either) simply due to the way the game is designed. There are barely any overlapping roles. If you ban units, you're banning strategies and integral game components. Removing tanks from terran would be more like playing street fighter with a joystick that can't point left. It's not just a part of the game, it is an integral core. No medivacs = no drops, no hellions = no factory openings, etc etc. Banning works in DotA because any hero can still do what they were designed to do. You cannot ban Enigma's black Hole. You can ban Enigma, but not black hole. You can't ban jungling, you shouldn't be able to ban turtling, you cannot ban ganks, you shouldn't be able to ban drops. There's a big difference.
Banning in DotA is more akin to race-picking. You 'ban' ZvZ by playing TvZ instead, but you can't ban Zerg.
Don't know why this is targetted at Starbow or Onegoal though. They for the most part have the same minimalistic conservative design philosophy as blizzard.
I wonder if banning / picking map features or something not involving units might be a possibility. Plus DB would love it if there was a minigame / microstrategy that involved destructible rocks...
I would rather see a system where you could pick your line up, say 15, from an infinite number of units. Those units would have to be constructed from a credit based system where you could trade speed for health, range for attack damage and other stat trades. The stat credits would be determined by the resource cost time + minerals + gas so a higher cost unit has more stats to tweak around with compared with a lower cost unit. I would suggest some stat limitations like speed and unit size. An aspect that makes starcraft cool is the different mechanics for each race and I would say that you could tinker with those stats as well for making your own race. A problem with such a game would be that the opposing players have no knowledge about each others game mechanics, tech tree or unit structure. Pre game identifying stats would be key as well as for players to have good scouting units.
Keep in mind this isn't talking about changing the base game of StarCraft 2, but changes for custom maps. StarCraft 2 would still be StarCraft 2, and this would be for UMS like Starbow. The goal being to make Starbow more interesting and keep it fresh and in time it may be the SC2 equivalent of WC3's Dota mod in terms of popularity.
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