Skill ceiling is not reached yet folks.
Do We Want the Game Harder? - Page 4
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ZenithM
France15952 Posts
Skill ceiling is not reached yet folks. | ||
aderum
Sweden1459 Posts
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greenknight999
69 Posts
On other games, when you get good you can dominate. This isn't true for SC2 because of the matching system. Often what people proclaim as making the game harder are aspects which increase its complexity, an increasingly complex game rewards those who spend a lot of time researching and playing the game. It rewards practice over inuition and talent. I suspect that is a very popular idea with the ex-bw players as they seem to have a mentality similar to WOW players (more time played = more sound knowledge of the complex game = more "skilled"). The game is complex enough at the top level, anyone who watched MMA play in the last few days at kiev can see that. I would support making the game harder if it rewarded more profound play, but we kind of see that already in tournaments with mindgames between the best players. I'm sure scrubs will rage at MMA's 2 rax proxy but the strategies used over the set in the tournament and the selection of the next strategy is the complexity they are crying out for. The game is already hard and complex, cries for more complexity are really just a whine from sore losers to create a game that grossly over-rewards practice and the people crying for these changes. | ||
nvrs
Greece481 Posts
On January 23 2012 21:42 kazansky wrote: Just this very weekend, we had lots of people blown away by the numbers they read tuning in for IEM on the LoL stream, finding out just because it was the default stream. That game is easy even compared to SC2, yet it fascinates the masses (which eludes me, but it's nice that everybody can find something that makes him happy). The main issue I have with this your approach boiling down the success of Broodwar, or SC2 recently, to one aspect that is hardness. I think this is a way too singleton approach. Yes, Starcraft 2 is way easier to play than Broodwar on the macro side. Yes, it is easier to use than Broodwar is. But we have 2012 and not 1998 anymore. Compare other games around to other games released back then. Halflife Deathmatch players will giggle upon what Quake Live players from now call aiming or movement, the same with MLGs flagship Halo compared to Counterstrike in its beta form. Games don't have to be impossibly hard to entertain people and establish as sport. Poker, of all, displayed that very well. And just because the game is easy to handle as a beginner, it does not mean it can be solved. Your cons point is worded as though some random masters player could beat Code S material players just by luck. Which does not happen. These players, despite not having the work ethics of broodwar pros, practice tons a day to not get beaten by the random masters player. You are, despite not saying it directly, minoring the effort of any pro player on SC2 with your argumentation, saying that if they win, it might aswell be luck, or supplied by an arbitrary low skill cap. I would guess many pro players would strongly disagree. And on a final note, luck does not harm a sport. 50% of all games of football can be assigned to some way of luck (this is an actual statistic of Roland Loy's book about football statistics (german). Yet it is the biggest, most successful sport in the world, keeping alive a huge marketing industry, trumendous player salaries and remains a growing market in a world in crisis. Even in eSports, Counterstrike and Warcraft 3, the two biggest eSports games in the west prior to the Sc2 release, had a significant luck component. It didn't harm their popularity or their competition for a long period. Good post and a very interesting reference. Since i hace read a couple of books about the history of football, i ll search for an English version. | ||
-_-Quails
Australia796 Posts
On January 23 2012 21:11 Blazinghand wrote: The hardness of the game is all that matters to me. Yes, oh, yes.... I want this game to be hard. All I want to be able to feel its hardness. I wish to sense it as I grasp my mouse and feel its sinewy cord and its coarse texture pads. I need to know it's hard as I gently brush my fingertips across my slick black keyboard. I yearn to press against the hardness of the high skill ceiling as I ladder. I love to feel it pushing me down. I need to feel the hardness inside me as I become hard like the game, as it hardens me and makes me a better gamer. I want to feel the hardness pound away at me and make me gosu. I like it hard. I feel unclean. | ||
HiSi
United States68 Posts
On January 23 2012 20:58 Lysenko wrote: That there are GSL Code S players who win two thirds or more of their games tells me there's no skill cap that matters in SC2. Under that logic there must not be a skill cap in BW, last I checked Flash and Jaedong have rather retarded high w/l. | ||
Shockk
Germany2269 Posts
On January 23 2012 21:11 Blazinghand wrote: The hardness of the game is all that matters to me. Yes, oh, yes.... I want this game to be hard. All I want to be able to feel its hardness. I wish to sense it as I grasp my mouse and feel its sinewy cord and its coarse texture pads. I need to know it's hard as I gently brush my fingertips across my slick black keyboard. I yearn to press against the hardness of the high skill ceiling as I ladder. I love to feel it pushing me down. I need to feel the hardness inside me as I become hard like the game, as it hardens me and makes me a better gamer. I want to feel the hardness pound away at me and make me gosu. I like it hard. I think nothing can be added, this topic is through. Refer to this post for all further questions. | ||
Apolo
Portugal1259 Posts
On this thread people came to the conclusion that indeed things compared to BW die too fast. Either time should be slowed down, or bonus reduced. The time one has to micro during battle is very little. Also considering how it's ball vs ball, there are even more stuff than in BW to micro for a shorter period of time, and most likely the game will be decided then. Automaton showed us time and time again how hard it is for a human to micro well in SC2. Tell me you can do that, and i'll agree then you reached SC2 skill ceiling and it needs to be higher, otherwise, no, in this regard SC2 needs to be easier. What needs to change, however, is the design of the units themselves and the gameplay, not to make this game harder but for it to be hard in the right places. On the one hand I think it's stupid to have to do monkey like actions like the ones required on BW, that makes it harder but also more boring, and less appealing to other people, and also makes it indeed look like a nerd game for those who care. In that regard it's a very good thing that SC2 has automatized a lot of that boring mechanical stuff. Without it, for sure a lot of newcomers would just label it as stupidly hard and quit, and your favourite game wouldn't have an audience and neither would it grow. On the other hand we could have for instance, like argumented on this thread, better defending options so players don't need to focus on balls, and turtling but constant multi-pronged attacks, which will kill two birds in one shot, making it harder and more intersting at the same time, which is want we want. As another change, luck should be less of a factor on openings, making games decided based on blind counters, which i feel is also related to the previous point, because the defender's advantage is so little, a player that had bad luck on his opening, can't really do anything to protect himself, and the game is decided before it really got interesting. | ||
Talin
Montenegro10532 Posts
On January 23 2012 22:00 Sated wrote: BW is hard to play because getting units to do what you want is a struggle with the AI/UI. This struggle shouldn't exist. People in 2012 don't want to be fighting against the AI/UI of a game in order to do what they want to do, they want to be fighting against their opponent, and if I am watching a pro-level game then I want to see two players competing with each other - not with the AI/UI Competition without difficulty of control is absolutely meaningless. It would come down only to strategy and decision making. Some of the best games historically have been games that are difficult to control. It doesn't need to be Brood War, or even an RTS game. Take platformers or fighting games or old FPS games, any game that is worth competing in will make it extremely difficult for you to execute something you want to do. Good games will either make it so that you have to hit an extremely tight timings, have almost pixel-perfect accuracy, be extremely fast and have great reflexes, have a great memory under pressure, multitasking, etc. In other words, good games must stress one (and preferably more) of general human skills. RTS's only way of accomplishing this level of difficulty is to make it so that you have to put in A LOT of physical actions to do what you want to do, and make it so that how good you are in a game depends on your speed and multitasking. There is no way to make an RTS game challenging other than limiting the level of control you have over your in-game assets, and keeping them very basic. It's all about design. An RTS game where you can only have ONE thing (one building or one unit) selected at any point in time wouldn't necessarily be worse than SC2 because of that specific feature. Things like this don't make a game better or worse, they make games different. Higher level of control reduces human factor in gameplay. For a game designed to be competitive, it only makes sense to keep the controls as low level as possible. Problem with Blizzard is that they also want to sell the game as a casual title, but that's a whole different topic. | ||
prplhz
Denmark8045 Posts
Everybody can play tennis, it should be the same with computer games. | ||
joopajoo
Finland67 Posts
I feel like every second post in this thread is like this, just a little bit more vague. e.g "I'd like this game to be harder, more fun and more entertaining than it is now but i actually have no idea what i mean with this sentence so i'll just leave this here. SC2 is for noobs!!" | ||
greenknight999
69 Posts
On January 23 2012 22:14 Apolo wrote: As another change, luck should be less of a factor on openings, making games decided based on blind counters, which i feel is also related to the previous point, because the defender's advantage is so little, a player that had bad luck on his opening, can't really do anything to protect himself, and the game is decided before it really got interesting. An early scouting unit from the CC/Nexus/Hatchery would be a good development. Make it easily countered by tier 1.5, but able to get past the wall-offs from terrans/protoss. | ||
Whitewing
United States7483 Posts
On January 23 2012 22:15 Talin wrote: Competition without difficulty of control is absolutely meaningless. It would come down only to strategy and decision making. Some of the best games historically have been games that are difficult to control. It doesn't need to be Brood War, or even an RTS game. Take platformers or fighting games or old FPS games, any game that is worth competing in will make it extremely difficult for you to execute something you want to do. Good games will either make it so that you have to hit an extremely tight timings, have almost pixel-perfect accuracy, be extremely fast and have great reflexes, have a great memory under pressure, multitasking, etc. In other words, good games must stress one (and preferably more) of general human skills. RTS's only way of accomplishing this level of difficulty is to make it so that you have to put in A LOT of physical actions to do what you want to do, and make it so that how good you are in a game depends on your speed and multitasking. There is no way to make an RTS game challenging other than limiting the level of control you have over your in-game assets, and keeping them very basic. That wasn't his point at all. He wasn't saying it shouldn't be hard to control your army perfectly or that it shouldn't matter what your control is like compared to your opponents, he was saying that the user interface and artificial intelligence of the units shouldn't make the control artificially difficult, like the dragoon AI. If I right click somewhere for a unit to move there, and there's an open pathway to that location, I should expect the unit to actually move there, not dance in circles like a chicken with its head cut off. If I'm micro'ing a reaver to get a shot off at the enemy mineral line in such a way as to have it fire and hit about 6 scv's, it would suck really hard to have all that effort go to waste because the scarab bugs out and misfires. The difficulty shouldn't come from bugs and bad game design. If we look at the state of gameplay at the moment, how many players are splitting marines vs. siege tanks in TvT like Thorzain does? How about MMA's play: how many people can keep up with his multitasking and control, and don't even act like he's hit the so called 'skill cap' yet. Any time you watch a pro game, if you know what you're doing you can probably point out at least half a dozen mistakes over the course of the match. | ||
Bagi
Germany6799 Posts
On January 23 2012 22:20 greenknight999 wrote: An early scouting unit from the CC/Nexus/Hatchery would be a good development. Make it easily countered by tier 1.5, but able to get past the wall-offs from terrans/protoss. How about we remove the fog of war entirely so the players have always perfect information? New convoluted ways of scouting are not needed. Just make the defenders advantage more meaningful, for example by returning the cliff advantage from BW. | ||
Animostas
United States568 Posts
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Lysenko
Iceland2128 Posts
On January 23 2012 22:13 HiSi wrote: Under that logic there must not be a skill cap in BW, last I checked Flash and Jaedong have rather retarded high w/l. Exactly. Point being: if only a few people worldwide can achieve those kinds of win rates at the very top level, why does the game need to be made any harder? | ||
deadmau
960 Posts
On January 23 2012 20:54 firehand101 wrote: Ease of gameplay and just being able to '1A' to victory, rather than selecting 12 units at a time to attack, has sparked a universal debate that will most likely go on for a long time still. Another thread that starts off with some failed perception of what BW-players want to improve about SC2. What the fuck are you thinking OP?? You are making SC2 only players think we want to go back to max 12-unit control to make the game artificially harder, but we BW ARE NOT TRYING TO SAY THIS FOR THE LOVE OF GOD. This is the exact fucking reason we always get into these threads where the SC2 only generation players think we BW players want SC2 to be artificially harder. Seriously cut this shit out you are misleading the fuck outta people. No one fucking wants SC2 to be exactly like BW, we want certain aspects of the game of BW to improve SC2 (zone control units, less extreme-hardcounter units, more microable units, and keep the addition of new spells to a minimum [spamming spells vs spells is not micro, this is wow]). Watching BW was epic because of the level of micro involved, the battles that weren's just deathball vs deathball, it made things dynamic and epic to WATCH. We don't need to have 12-unit max control to achieve this. BW was a great fucking game, but NOBODY wants SC2 to be BW2.0, we want less 1a vs 1a deathballs, but not by making it 12-unit max control. IDIOT. P.S. mod please lock this stupid ass thread for causing more misperception from the new generation of SC2-only players that don't understand what BW-players want to change about SC2. I will accept the ban, cause im directly insulting the OP for starting this bull shit, and off on a totally incorrect note. User was temp banned for this post. | ||
Facultyadjutant
Sweden1876 Posts
They take mechanics when it isn't really that different. Besides automining (Which is just such a shitty argument) you have added mechanics to sc2 like mules/larva etc. AND NOT ONE is really close to perfection in this part. People even at the highest level still miss larva injects, tumors, mules, supply blockage. You think this game is close to perfection in execution? The gameplay we have seen is terrible. But in time it will mature. Everyone have apm to burn, and everyone can do things betters. There are players who are dominating the scene like mvp's tvt or nesteas zvz, or polts zvp. However the problem people are losing is also that everyone is contending for first place. There are tons of incredible players in both code b, code a and code s. Jaedong just recently lost to flash in like 7 minutes because he made a mistake and didn't get sunkens. That happens all the time in broodwar. Flash wether or not you like it, still loses games. The reason you don't feel the hardships is because you don't feel it til you get to top 50 grandmasters mmr. Then more and more everygame feels epic and very multitasking consuming, especially on korean server. I love destiny's quote on it when he talked about his ladder experience on stream and how everygame feels like one has to work for it. To not get started on MICRO, stuff had firepower in broodwar aswell - SIEGE TANKS JUST KILLED EVERYTHING - Reavers just demolished shit. etc. etc. People say shit balls up too easily and everything just dies. Well for the first, battles finished quickly in broodwar, it was just the insane macro behind it. DRG vs MMA is a good example of bw esque feeling with battles going on constantly. But to go back to balling up. There is insane aoe in this game, you think its GOOD for stuff to ball up constantly? Its a fucking nightmare to micro and get perfection. Sc2 will be when the game has evolved enough, in maps, strategies, execution, tactics, macro, micro, builds - just as hard as broodwar. People just have assumptions. | ||
Eppa!
Sweden4641 Posts
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greenknight999
69 Posts
On January 23 2012 22:24 Bagi wrote: How about we remove the fog of war entirely so the players have always perfect information? New convoluted ways of scouting are not needed. Just make the defenders advantage more meaningful, for example by returning the cliff advantage from BW. There's nothing wrong with fog of war, but there either needs to be a way to keep tabs on your opponent early game or building restrictions (i.e. only x many tiles from a command center or nexus with proxy pylons being an upgrade from the nexus). I've personally come close to quitting this game several times because of the sheer retardness of being able to build in your opponents backyard. Imagine it, it's 1942 and Hitler receives a phone call from his chief nuclear scientist "herr hitler, we cannot build the nuclear research facility in Hanover because the British have built an engineering bay there. Our project is delayed by 1 minute". I don't mind early game harass but proxy building and denying scouting so easily are broken mechanics. The game is made artifically hard by the very strong paper/scissors/rock play and lack of scouting. Scouting needs to be improved early game and then cut off mid-game to allow players to surprise each other without insta-gg'ing the game. Poor scouting mechanics and very hard counter units lead to poor gameplay. | ||
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