Low level play will never be balanced because bad players don't play on balanced maps.
Only Balance for the Highest Level? - Page 13
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SoulWager
United States464 Posts
Low level play will never be balanced because bad players don't play on balanced maps. | ||
chokke
Norway228 Posts
On September 29 2011 20:01 ceaRshaf wrote: Dude, in this world, there will always be more stupid people than intelligent people, but the stupids are the ones that have to rise not the intelligent to lower. This is not an insult to anybody but a fact about the world you and me live in. This is what progress and evolution takes. Seeing how it's much easier to quit playing a game then it is to become smart. I am not saying to pace the balance TO the lower tier of players, but rather KEEP IN MIND how balance-changes can affect them. Let us say that to beat tactic X it requires a minimum of micro to excecute, but to actually do tactic X is significally easier. That means, at lower levels, the bar to execute the tactic is lower then it is to defend it due to lack of micro (there is a reason they are stuck in league A). Which means the player comes to a league higher then deserved and once the tactic X gets defeated they will automaticly lose due to being a worse player. So, whatever a change means, how will it affect bronze-diamond league and not only how it affects Code A/S. | ||
HaXXspetten
Sweden15718 Posts
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VirgilSC2
United States6151 Posts
On September 29 2011 16:55 FrogOfWar wrote: Thank you, quoted for truth. This is what all the master players who look at the lower leagues and casual players with contempt don't seem to get. Consider football - it isn't just the world championships, it's also boys playing in the backyard. Not only do they make it the big cultural phenomenon that it is, they also might become world champions themselves some day. No reason to verbally shit on them all the time. Concerning balance I think Blizzard cares a lot about the masses for marketing reasons, so they definitely won't let the game become too imba at lower levels. As you say, having a perfect balance at all levels is impossible, but Blizz will do their best to come at close as possible because it's in their best interest. People who say the game should be balanced exclusively with regard to the pro level are dreaming. This isn't reality and never will be. Those boys playing in the backyard aren't professional football players. Would you change the rules of football to make them have more fun playing it? | ||
HardMacro
Canada361 Posts
Facts: 1. In Broodwar, if you were anywhere near the C ranks as Terran, you could most likely shoot into B- as Protoss with a week or two of training. There's a fucking reason why there are tosses in bw in the B- ranks with <100 APM. Ultimately, at the C ranks and below, PvT is ridiculously easy and TvP is a nightmare. 2. What blizzard should do is balance the game at the highest level of play simply because that's the only way to ensure the longevity and competitiveness of the game. However, longevity and competitiveness are secondary to making cash, so Blizzard has been balancing the game around lower levels as well, reflective of the zealot and VR nerf mentioned earlier in the thread. 3. The argument of "lower league players are just retardedly bad, therefore ignore them completely because the game should only be balanced on the highest level" expressed by people in this thread is quite short-sighted. OP even explicitly states that in order for the game to survive and thrive, there needs to be a healthy fan/amateur base, which would not exist if the game wasn't fun to play at lower levels. Imagine that SC2 was perfectly balanced only between MC, MKP and Nestea, but gets horribly easy for protoss and hard for zerg as you move down the skill ladder to the point that 95% percent of the people in diamond league and below were protoss. Yah... I'm certain that casual players would keep playing 95% PvPs season after season. Ultimately, SC2 > BW in terms of lower league balance, and BW > SC2 in terms of highest level play balance. So there shouldn't even be any arguments anyway. | ||
secretary bird
447 Posts
For instance Zerg seems easier for me because I when I screw up as terran it s mostly because I wasn t macroing well while harassing or because I screw up my micro. Those things are just easier as Zerg, while Zergs need good game knowledge and macro which I am better at I think. | ||
Kaz_Coaching
United States83 Posts
Let's look at the alternative, we balance SC around entry level players because let's face it, every single player starts out sucking, if they don't stay in the game then the game dies. By this logic we can conclude that the game was at some point balanced for every player who played the game, while only a small percentile will ever reach higher. This gives absolutely no reason to progress or to get better in the game. In essence, why learn to execute better strategies, blink micro your stalkers, when the game is designed to be belanced for the 1A players. Afterall, we wouldn't want to balance around any strategy that might be hard to execute. The alternative we could say is that the rules of the game change the higher the skill cap. Maybe they get fewer minerals a turn and have to mine a lot harder to have equal income, or some other change to the game that changes at different leagues. This again has flaws, for one it prevents players from progressing because they will not be used to the new rule set. The other problem would be trying to adjust it for the current MMR system. MMR fluctuates and swings fairly often and allows players to be matched up against other leagues to find their proper place. If two players of differing leagues played, how would the system pick what ruleset to follow? Wouldn't it be unbalanced against the player who did not have their standard league rules to go with? I've explained some of the problems with trying to balance to certain skillcaps, now if you want an actual discussion please present some ideas you think would be reasonable. | ||
DarkPlasmaBall
United States43517 Posts
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l3iRdMaN
United States72 Posts
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cLutZ
United States19571 Posts
On September 29 2011 23:34 VirgilSC2 wrote: Those boys playing in the backyard aren't professional football players. Would you change the rules of football to make them have more fun playing it? ...Most backyard games are played with different rules. Bad analogy? | ||
xlava
United States676 Posts
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Baarn
United States2702 Posts
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rd
United States2586 Posts
On September 30 2011 00:10 HardMacro wrote: Going through this thread it's so easy to see who's actually played broodwar and who's just making shit up. Facts: 1. In Broodwar, if you were anywhere near the C ranks as Terran, you could most likely shoot into B- as Protoss with a week or two of training. There's a fucking reason why there are tosses in bw in the B- ranks with <100 APM. Ultimately, at the C ranks and below, PvT is ridiculously easy and TvP is a nightmare. 2. What blizzard should do is balance the game at the highest level of play simply because that's the only way to ensure the longevity and competitiveness of the game. However, longevity and competitiveness are secondary to making cash, so Blizzard has been balancing the game around lower levels as well, reflective of the zealot and VR nerf mentioned earlier in the thread. 3. The argument of "lower league players are just retardedly bad, therefore ignore them completely because the game should only be balanced on the highest level" expressed by people in this thread is quite short-sighted. OP even explicitly states that in order for the game to survive and thrive, there needs to be a healthy fan/amateur base, which would not exist if the game wasn't fun to play at lower levels. Imagine that SC2 was perfectly balanced only between MC, MKP and Nestea, but gets horribly easy for protoss and hard for zerg as you move down the skill ladder to the point that 95% percent of the people in diamond league and below were protoss. Yah... I'm certain that casual players would keep playing 95% PvPs season after season. Ultimately, SC2 > BW in terms of lower league balance, and BW > SC2 in terms of highest level play balance. So there shouldn't even be any arguments anyway. You're citing a scenario that doesn't exist, has never existed, and will likely never exist. It's a horrible straw man that discredits the argument entirely. The bias towards protoss seems credible, though. | ||
antilyon
Brazil2546 Posts
On September 29 2011 17:50 Lysenko wrote: WTF are you talking about? Low level terrans doing that build was just a joke. It was Insanely strong but you needed at least a good grasp at macro/micro and multitask to perform it. | ||
Dalavita
Sweden1113 Posts
On September 29 2011 23:30 chokke wrote: Seeing how it's much easier to quit playing a game then it is to become smart. I am not saying to pace the balance TO the lower tier of players, but rather KEEP IN MIND how balance-changes can affect them. Let us say that to beat tactic X it requires a minimum of micro to excecute, but to actually do tactic X is significally easier. That means, at lower levels, the bar to execute the tactic is lower then it is to defend it due to lack of micro (there is a reason they are stuck in league A). Which means the player comes to a league higher then deserved and once the tactic X gets defeated they will automaticly lose due to being a worse player. So, whatever a change means, how will it affect bronze-diamond league and not only how it affects Code A/S. If one tactic is easy to pull off while it's harder to defend (up to a point of skill level, where it becomes easy to defend) the baddies will simply fail at defending it until they learn. There is no point in catering to balance for bad players when they can improve to the level required to defend something literally in a couple of days if they actually want to. | ||
Slusher
United States19143 Posts
By contrast if you take the best of each race in the world, for the sake of this argument we'll say it's MVP, Nestea and MC(I know protoss is largely up for debate). If a situation were to arrive, and some say it has where T>Z>P then what option does MC have? You could simply make the argument that MC(or the Protoss hero of your choice) just isn't as good as Nestea and MVP, and while that may be true, there is no basis, unlike the ladder player, to believe that if MC improved he could win. Those are the facts, I'm going to shift to opinion to paint a picture that to me is true. Do you want to know why Terran is so good vZ and vP in the pro leagues right now, because Bio is balanced around ladder play. If you think marine stats are based on the studder step and spreading that we see today, you are kidding yourself. This is an opinion, but I think you'd be hard pressed to disagree. And that is why the game should be balanced ONLY around the top. | ||
Dalavita
Sweden1113 Posts
On September 30 2011 06:11 Slusher wrote: If you think marine stats are based on the studder step and spreading that we see today, you are kidding yourself. This is an opinion, but I think you'd be hard pressed to disagree. And that is why the game should be balanced ONLY around the top. I disagree. Both marine splitting and stutter stepping are things we can see done by anyone at diamond or above level. It's not that hard to pull off, and all that was required was for someone to show how it was done, i.e MKP. | ||
kineSiS-
Korea (South)1068 Posts
On September 22 2011 06:41 SeRenExZerg wrote: if the game is balanced at the highest level, IT IS BALANCED. plain and simple. yes, it is frustrating that one person might be able to do better with a race than their skill might suggest, but so long as all races have equal chance of winning when played perfectly, the game is exactly how it should be. Doubt this game is balanced at the highest level. | ||
Slusher
United States19143 Posts
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Guard
Canada43 Posts
1. Balance races based on units that use NO abilities (blink, stim, force field, etc.). That should generally satisfy your casual player. It should be possible by simply changing unit stats. 2. Balance races based on units with those abilities. That should make pro's happy. Now the actual mechanics and APM are definitely important still but all of that can be tweaked to make things more or less even. For me personally (a platinum player) I don't care much about the game being perfectly 100 % balanced and being as good as possible myself simply because I have other things going on. However, I want to see pro's duking it out at a level playing field. | ||
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