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I completely disagree that the game needs more difficult things to do. The skill ceiling is so high. No one posting on this thread can probably even take a game off of a Code S player. Players have to knock out thousands of games to get into masters and that is only like the top 5% of players. A lot of people have been complaining that Blizzard is ignoring casual players, and a lot of casual players don't even play on the ladder because of how challenging it is.
People are comparing smart casting to having an "auto-split" button for marines or tanks. Smart casting is a simple interface feature that makes it easy for people to cast spells. Auto-splitting is something that would essentially having the computer AI controlling individual units at a very detailed level. That is one huge step towards having an AI do everything for you.
As a gameplay standpoint removing a feature to make things artificially harder is just really dumb. Tons of lower league players don't even use spells because they think it's too hard as it is.
tldr; Removing smart casting would make a game that is already not very friendly to casuals even less casual friendly, and would add artificial difficulty that would only serve to frustrate players, and does nothing to a game that already has a really high skill cap.
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I think this attitude of trying to make the game more BW like is completely the wrong way to go about it.
Yes some of the archaic controls in BW had huge benefits that improved gameplay. Lack of smart casting makes spells rarer and thus more interesting. 12 unit selection cap automatically forced more flanking and more multitasking in to the game.
However I see those as just beneficial side effects of poor parts of the game. What you fail to mention about not having smart casting is that it would be uttertly frustating and not intuitive for actually playing the game. Becoming good at cloning and casting spells quickly is a mundane exercise which can only be appreciated by the diehard players, even worse without knowing of these ''tricks' a uninformed spectator can't even appreciate those skills. Having it in the game just forces boring mechanical skills to matter most and doesn't increase the fun of the game directly, it's only those indirect benefits which make the game better. However i'm confident that you could have those other benefits just as well without forcing stupid mechanical restrictions on the player.
What I'm trying to say is: you shouldn't try to make spells rarer by removing smart casting. It should be done by making sure mass casters is not a good tactic. Casters should be a support unit and the units/strategies in the game should make mass spells a rarity in other ways. For example mass ht doesn't tend to be good because stoms don't stack anyway and EMP can actually become a problem so you see archon, ht instead.
Only fungal and forcefield are really problematic in this way that they actually get massed a lot. Don't remove smart casting for this, just nerf these abilities or buff some counters to mass sentries/infestor so that you don't actually see this anymore in high level gameplay. That way you retain the vital importance of spells without it becoming a spam fest and individual placement becomes more important if you have less to spam off.
Removing smart casting could solve many of the problems in the game as archaic controls in BW automatically promote smaller groups of units because they are easier to control. However it would introduce many ugly things at the same time by just being a mere frustation. It's like a medicine which side effects are worse than the initial disease, sure it's a cure but at what cost..
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Canada11196 Posts
On November 29 2012 01:10 netherh wrote:Show nested quote +On November 28 2012 03:42 Falling wrote:
This argument amounts to SC2 is not designed this way, therefore it is counter-intuitive. SC2 is not the gold standard for intuition and just because something can be designed differently doesn't make it inherently unintuitive. Different is not unintuitive necessarily.
To me, intuitive and unintuitive have specifically to do with the relation between action and result. Is what you are doing (action) make sense with what results. So as an extreme example to cast you had to select the high-templar, then click on every single Nexus, and then hit storm. That is unintuitive because what does clicking on Nexus having anything to do with with casting storm from high templar. Or to cast storm you had to cast it behind the templar and the storm will actually cast in its mirror opposite. That doesn't make much sense and is unintuitive. Where you click should be where it storms.
Exactly. You never, ever, ever want to cast every single storm at once. Ever. Because storm doesn't stack. It would be inconceivable (...) for the UI to work that way. Idiotic. Madness. Unintuitive. SC2 is much easier to understand (i.e. intuitive) than BW then, in this regard, because it actually does what you want to do when casting spells. Select spellcasters, cast a spell.
If the game was designed around simultaneous casting rather than single casting then there would be situations where you would want to. Magic Box casting is one instance. Selecting two casters where one is significantly behind the other so that by the time the one spell goes off the second comes into range and casts immediately after to finish off the units would be another.
"cast every single storm at once." This line of argument kinda assumes we have 10 spellcasters all on one hotkey. Ideally, this would actually lead to less spell-casters created overall (so we don't have 10-15 infestors) because it's hard to use them all to maximum effect. But when someone is able to use them to maximum effect it is spectacular- and they probably didn't have them all on one hotkey.
Ordering something to happen that is contrary to what you wanted to order does not make the game unintuitive. That's operator error. You may have only wanted to stim 4 marines to chase off a handful of mutas, but you stimmed them all because you still were selecting 40 marines. That just means you need to control better, not that the game is somehow idiotic. The game did exactly as you ordered. 40 marines selected, 40 marines stimmed. Next time you perhaps actually do what you wanted to do in your head. It is a control issue, not intuition.
And maybe you don't want more control over your units, but in my opinion for spell-casting if there is more manual control, the spells are allowed to be more powerful and therefore more fun. If spell-casting is limited by automated single-casting, the power of the spells suffer. (Or alternatively, if they are movement restricting, the gameplay itself becomes dominated by controlling the other player's units.)
@ ckcornflake
As I've said before. Casual gamers benefit from having powerful individual spells rather than being forced to learn to cast tons of spells. A true casual is probably going to forgo spell-casting altogether whether or not it is simultaneous casting or automated single-casting. And Battlenet 0.2 is more what Blizzard needs to focus on to bring in casuals rather than this sort of stuff.
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On November 29 2012 01:10 netherh wrote:Show nested quote +On November 28 2012 03:42 Falling wrote:
This argument amounts to SC2 is not designed this way, therefore it is counter-intuitive. SC2 is not the gold standard for intuition and just because something can be designed differently doesn't make it inherently unintuitive. Different is not unintuitive necessarily.
To me, intuitive and unintuitive have specifically to do with the relation between action and result. Is what you are doing (action) make sense with what results. So as an extreme example to cast you had to select the high-templar, then click on every single Nexus, and then hit storm. That is unintuitive because what does clicking on Nexus having anything to do with with casting storm from high templar. Or to cast storm you had to cast it behind the templar and the storm will actually cast in its mirror opposite. That doesn't make much sense and is unintuitive. Where you click should be where it storms.
Exactly. You never, ever, ever want to cast every single storm at once. Ever. Because storm doesn't stack. It would be inconceivable (...) for the UI to work that way. Idiotic. Madness. Unintuitive. SC2 is much easier to understand (i.e. intuitive) than BW then, in this regard, because it actually does what you want to do when casting spells. Select spellcasters, cast a spell.
The problem arises when people want to attach the word intuitive to explain having a group of casters selected and telling them all to cast a spell but only one casts it, but then in the same situation with a group of marines or stalkers they all perform the action and not just one when asked to stim or blink. This is not intuitive but personal preference. Intuitive would be having everything act the same accross the board so that it is all easily grasped. There is nothing unintuitive about having to single select each caster or magic boxing them when casting in a group. We only know what the game tells us to know and in BW it was intuitive to do it in these manners because it is the only way we ever knew.
Feel free to say that it is a lousy and ridiculous way to play the game because it would force you to play out the game in a way you dont want to, but please lets stop this intuitive vs unintuitive non sense.
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On November 29 2012 03:56 Falling wrote:
If the game was designed around simultaneous casting rather than single casting then there would be situations where you would want to. Magic Box casting is one instance. Selecting two casters where one is significantly behind the other so that by the time the one spell goes off the second comes into range and casts immediately after to finish off the units would be another.
But since it isn't, there aren't.
"cast every single storm at once." This line of argument kinda assumes we have 10 spellcasters all on one hotkey. Ideally, this would actually lead to less spell-casters created overall (so we don't have 10-15 infestors) because it's hard to use them all to maximum effect. But when someone is able to use them to maximum effect it is spectacular- and they probably didn't have them all on one hotkey.
But you would always have a group of spellcasters all on one hotkey, because you want to move them.
Ordering something to happen that is contrary to what you wanted to order does not make the game unintuitive.
Of course it does. If I order my marines to attack something and they start dancing, it's unintuitive. Blizzard have done their best to make sure that what you want to happen happens. In some cases they failed (e.g. scvs stopping repairing something if it goes back to full health, some ai pathing etc.). But mainly they carefully tailored spells / abilities to work as easily as possible.
If you want to stim 4 marines, you select them and stim them. You can't say that taking away the ability to stim every marine would give you more control.
And maybe you don't want more control over your units, but in my opinion for spell-casting if there is more manual control, the spells are allowed to be more powerful and therefore more fun. If spell-casting is limited by automated single-casting, the power of the spells suffer.
Likewise, making every caster cast at once for AOE spells takes away control - you can't use your control groups, and you can't do what you want easily (cast one storm, or storms in different areas at once). You give people less control over their other units too. You're making them take 5 or 10 times as long to cast a spell, and make it far more difficult, and they have less time to control their other units properly.
You're trying to make it harder. More difficult. Less intuitive. So that (AFAICT) people use fewer spells. There're still better ways to make people use fewer spells (make them cost more energy / make the units more expensive / more fragile etc.)
On November 29 2012 04:16 Elairec wrote:
The problem arises when people want to attach the word intuitive to explain having a group of casters selected and telling them all to cast a spell but only one casts it, but then in the same situation with a group of marines or stalkers they all perform the action and not just one when asked to stim or blink. This is not intuitive but personal preference. Intuitive would be having everything act the same accross the board so that it is all easily grasped. There is nothing unintuitive about having to single select each caster or magic boxing them when casting in a group. We only know what the game tells us to know and in BW it was intuitive to do it in these manners because it is the only way we ever knew.
Meh? If you want to blink one unit, or a subset of units, you select them and blink them. The ability to blink them all at once, is pretty darned important though.
Blizzard have done their best to make sure that the spell for each unit makes sense in terms of what it applies to. They've tried to make it easy to use... intuitive.
If stim worked only for individual units, it would be unintuitive. If every templar stormed at once it would be unintuitive.
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On November 29 2012 01:56 Treehead wrote:+ Show Spoiler +I can appreciate why the lack of smartcasting made for a better experience in BW, but I have difficulty imagining that this would be a good add to SC2. The main reason is also something a lot of people want to be rid of (but Blizzard seems not to want to do it): Forcefield. I just can't imagine needing sentries to FF a ramp in PvP (in order to hold back early gateway aggression) without smartcasting. Heck, it wasn't all that long ago that no one was able to properly hold off the 12-minute maxxed roach push with smartcasting in the game. I'm sure you would mean to simultaneously remove things like fungal/FF if it were your game to design, but as they've said they are not removing FF, I can't see how making it harder to use would be beneficial.
I can understand and appreciate why blanketting storms and FF clutters things up, makes it harder to spectate and harder to actually be good at it (since the mechanics of it are simpler), and I accept your basic premise that without the need a lot of simultaneous spells for defense, smartcasting makes things harder to watch and easier to execute. I just don't think SC2 is ever going to be a game of scattered small numbers of spells (if only because of the resource differences between SC2 and BW) - and therefore, I doubt the removal of smartcasting would be good for SC2.
Now, if you were to add difficulty another way for a type of ability which was less mandatory and more powerful, I'd be all for it being harder to use. But when it's necessary to use forcefield every 15 seconds to hold off a 4-gater, I can't say that I'm for making the act of casting FF mechanically harder.
Here's one potential method of arguing the case for smartcasting: If you have a spell that you know you will need to use 3 times over the course of the early game, and you can execute it properly 80% of the time individually - over the course of the game, you know that you can execute properly a little more than half the time (51.2%). But change that 3 times to 5 times (32.8%) or 8 times (16.8%), and your chance to complete a game properly dwindles. This means one of two things:
1. You get better execution; or
2. The spell gets easier to cast.
If we're moving from 3 executions to 8, you'd need to up your execution from 80% to 92% (a drastic reduction in failure rate). Especially when someone else is trying to mess you up, this very well might be close to impossible to accomplish. But in general, the theory is just that when you have to do a larger number of things (or in this case, cast a larger number of spells), they need to be easier to cast.
Whether more spells is better or not, you may have a point - but there are more spells being used. So, they kind of do need to be easier to use.
The thing about this kind of argument is that it assumes two things:
1. that to remove smart casting from some spells means it must be removed from all spells (I have mentioned already that this assumption is untrue)
2. that the removal of smart casting would be done in a bubble, with no other changes made to accommodate for the increased difficulty to perfectly spread/time the casting of spells.
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On November 29 2012 04:49 netherh wrote:Show nested quote +On November 29 2012 03:56 Falling wrote:
If the game was designed around simultaneous casting rather than single casting then there would be situations where you would want to. Magic Box casting is one instance. Selecting two casters where one is significantly behind the other so that by the time the one spell goes off the second comes into range and casts immediately after to finish off the units would be another.
But since it isn't, there aren't.
That doesn't seem like a very productive response.
On November 29 2012 04:49 netherh wrote:Show nested quote +
"cast every single storm at once." This line of argument kinda assumes we have 10 spellcasters all on one hotkey. Ideally, this would actually lead to less spell-casters created overall (so we don't have 10-15 infestors) because it's hard to use them all to maximum effect. But when someone is able to use them to maximum effect it is spectacular- and they probably didn't have them all on one hotkey.
But you would always have a group of spellcasters all on one hotkey, because you want to move them.
Assuming a lack of smart casting for the spell caster in question, this isn't necessarily an absolute truth. For example, right now players will place spell casters in a separate hotkey from their main army for easier control. You can take that a step further and say that for easier control without smart casting, they could have casters spread across a couple of hotkeys for easier spreading and piecemeal selection.
On November 29 2012 04:49 netherh wrote:Show nested quote +
Ordering something to happen that is contrary to what you wanted to order does not make the game unintuitive.
Of course it does. If I order my marines to attack something and they start dancing, it's unintuitive. Blizzard have done their best to make sure that what you want to happen happens. In some cases they failed (e.g. scvs stopping repairing something if it goes back to full health, some ai pathing etc.). But mainly they carefully tailored spells / abilities to work as easily as possible. If you want to stim 4 marines, you select them and stim them. You can't say that taking away the ability to stim every marine would give you more control.
This seems like a silly argument to me, from both sides. If we want to talk about intuition, consider this: why do some abilities (stim, blink, etc.) get executed by all selected units, but others (forcefield, storm, snipe, etc.) only have a single unit in my selection perform the task? Are you really trying to argue that this is more intuitive than all abilities functioning the same way?
It "feels" intuitive because you've simply gotten used to which abilities act one way and which act the other way. If I only want one marine to stim, I select only one marine. If I want a group of marines to stim, I select the group. Replace "marine" with "templar" and "stim" with "storm", and you have what templar storm control would be like without smart casting.
On November 29 2012 04:49 netherh wrote:Show nested quote +
And maybe you don't want more control over your units, but in my opinion for spell-casting if there is more manual control, the spells are allowed to be more powerful and therefore more fun. If spell-casting is limited by automated single-casting, the power of the spells suffer.
Likewise, making every caster cast at once takes away control - you can't use your control groups, and you can't do what you want easily (cast one storm, or storms in different areas at once). You give people less control over their other units too. You're making them take 5 or 10 times as long to cast a spell, and make it far more difficult, and they have less time to control their other units properly. You're trying to make it harder. More difficult. Less intuitive. So that (AFAICT) people use fewer spells. There're still better ways to make people use fewer spells (make them cost more energy / make the units more expensive / more fragile etc.)
It actually gives more true control. Telling a group of templar to storm will cause the group of templar to storm. Does that make precise execution harder to do? Yes. I'll use an FPS analogy to demonstrate this point: auto-targeting. Even if you're awful at the game and can't aim straight to save your life, the game will take over and say, "It's ok, even though you'd normally be shooting at a wall right now, I know that your real intention is to shoot the enemy on your screen, so I'll just adjust the angle of your shots to aim for him instead." In much the same way, smart casting is simply the game taking over and saying, "Don't worry, I know you'd normally be awful at trying to blanket his army with storm/fungal/EMP, so just select a big group of spell casters and click; I'll choose the best one to do the job for you! Now you too have the execution and accuracy of Jangbi, isn't that great?"
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Would SmartMagicBox be better or worse? If you select 7 templar and all tell them to storm the same spot, should they throw down a perfectly spaced patchwork quilt of storms radiating from the point selected?
Magic boxed templar rarely, rarely ever came up in BW.
Really: less of a blanket and more of a fat arc, because you'd usually be telling them to storm at something at the edge of their casting range.
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On November 29 2012 04:57 iamcaustic wrote:
The thing about this kind of argument is that it assumes two things:
1. that to remove smart casting from some spells means it must be removed from all spells (I have mentioned already that this assumption is untrue)
2. that the removal of smart casting would be done in a bubble, with no other changes made to accommodate for the increased difficulty to perfectly spread/time the casting of spells.
1. Absolutely. You can definitely have spells which are easy to use and others which are harder to use - but given that you can balance the relative power of spells to a point where they can have relatively similar impacts (per energy cost/gas expenditure, or whatever other metric you wish to use) is it a good idea from a standpoint of game design to make some spells cast some ways and other spells cast other ways? Look at the Mothership - how many protoss when they were new to the game fundamentally did not understand why their MShip never cast vortex before they figured out that it had to stop? It's probably better to have this balance-wise (and it may be the solution to some problems), but across the board is out.
2. That's a bit of a silly argument. Smartcasting has no problems in a game with no context to it. Neither does removing smartcasting. If we had concrete "other changes" to accomodate the removal of smartcasting, we could assess whether it's removal was a good thing. In a vacuum though, removing smartcasting is neither good nor bad. It's just something you can do.
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On November 29 2012 07:10 Treehead wrote:Show nested quote +On November 29 2012 04:57 iamcaustic wrote:
The thing about this kind of argument is that it assumes two things:
1. that to remove smart casting from some spells means it must be removed from all spells (I have mentioned already that this assumption is untrue)
2. that the removal of smart casting would be done in a bubble, with no other changes made to accommodate for the increased difficulty to perfectly spread/time the casting of spells.
1. Absolutely. You can definitely have spells which are easy to use and others which are harder to use - but given that you can balance the relative power of spells to a point where they can have relatively similar impacts (per energy cost/gas expenditure, or whatever other metric you wish to use) is it a good idea from a standpoint of game design to make some spells cast some ways and other spells cast other ways? Look at the Mothership - how many protoss when they were new to the game fundamentally did not understand why their MShip never cast vortex before they figured out that it had to stop? It's probably better to have this balance-wise (and it may be the solution to some problems), but across the board is out. 2. That's a bit of a silly argument. Smartcasting has no problems in a game with no context to it. Neither does removing smartcasting. If we had concrete "other changes" to accomodate the removal of smartcasting, we could assess whether it's removal was a good thing. In a vacuum though, removing smartcasting is neither good nor bad. It's just something you can do.
When asking whether it's a good idea from a standpoint of game design to make some spells cast some ways and other spells cast differently, this reality is already present in StarCraft II. Compare abilities like stim, blink, burrow, baneling detonate, etc. to abilities like storm, forcefield, snipe, etc.
Arguing against having more spells work one (traditional) way rather than the other (new "best unit" or "smart casting" AI) actually runs contrary to your worries about having spells that are executed differently.
I'm also not buying your response to the second point. The entire premise of the OP is making changes to the game. Your argument revolved around giving examples in the current game why smart casting needs to remain. In other words, your argument is assuming a lack of change -- or rather, the only change being made would be having smart cast removed from these examples. Trying to paint this point as a philosophical cop out isn't very convincing, because the real issue is you making arguments on a micro level to an idea that's more macro in scale.
Putting it in simpler terms: adding or removing smart casting is a matter of altering AI execution to adjust the skill ceiling of the game, not a matter of number tweaking to make sure the game's balanced. You're focusing too much on "how would these spells, with their current numbers/stats, possibly be any good/balanced without smart casting? I'd have to have the execution of a god just to stay alive in early game PvP, for example!"
With smart casting added to the powerful AoE spells in SC2, we've seen the balance numbers tweaked to accommodate the lowered skill ceiling -- namely, the nerfing of these abilities. Since everyone can storm like Jangbi, storm can't be as powerful as it was. It also puts a damper on the spectator value of the game, since now Jangbi-quality storms are no longer impressive to see. If you're super concerned about force fielding in PvP, there are plenty of answers:
1. Adjust the balance numbers of FF
2. Alter the design of FF
3. Adjust other aspects of Protoss to reduce reliance on FF to defend 4gate and other scenarios
4. Simply keep FF as a smart cast spell
Any one of those options could be picked while still and removing smart casting from and adjusting the stats of the powerful AoE spells of all the races.
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Putting it in simpler terms: adding or removing smart casting is a matter of altering AI execution to adjust the skill ceiling of the game, not a matter of number tweaking to make sure the game's balanced.
You can imagine some really stupid ways to raise the skill ceiling by making the UI harder to use. The idea has to stand on its own merits when there might be other ideas that don't come with an inherent downside. Why not come up with better ways to balance this stuff and make it interesting?
For that matter come up with ideas that aren't going to make the design team roll their eyes.
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Blizzard and a lot of other people dont realize that the skill it takes to do something can actually be factored into the balance of the game.
If everyone can cast 6 near perfect storms off of one hotkey, then the balance has to take that into account.
Whereas with BW style casting, it is difficult, which means that those spells can become very powerful because only the best players will be able to exploit that ability well enough. Assuming that there are ways to avoid the negative effects of spells (dodging, sniping, etc) or that the spell itself isnt too all purpose for its cost/position on tech tree, then suddenly the spells become very interesting to play with and against because it is so hard to exploit them, yet they can be extremely deadly when used properly.
What would be truly innovative would be blizzard finding a way or at least developing a philosophy to reconcile the need for difficulty and skill with the realization that casual players just want their army to fight.
The macro mechanics were a step in the right direction, although poorly executed.
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Good read but, I'm not really onboard with your ideas tbh.
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On November 29 2012 11:37 Resistentialism wrote:Show nested quote +Putting it in simpler terms: adding or removing smart casting is a matter of altering AI execution to adjust the skill ceiling of the game, not a matter of number tweaking to make sure the game's balanced. You can imagine some really stupid ways to raise the skill ceiling by making the UI harder to use. The idea has to stand on its own merits when there might be other ideas that don't come with an inherent downside. Why not come up with better ways to balance this stuff and make it interesting? For that matter come up with ideas that aren't going to make the design team roll their eyes.
This is a silly response. What we're talking about is already built into SC2. It's a simple matter of unchecking the "Best Unit" flag for whatever ability you don't want to smart cast in the data editor.
It's also important to realize that smart casting is a welcome addition in certain cases, such as with snipe or infested terran. By requiring the player to re-execute these abilities multiple times, a higher skill ceiling is achieved to fully utilize the ability's potential. Compare having to babysit sniping ghosts to make sure they get their target in contrast to selecting a couple, clicking once on a target to snipe, and insta-gibbing them. It's easy to see the difference between an amateur trying to expend the remainder of his infestor energy throwing down IT eggs (haphazard) in comparison to a pro (makes it look like the ability doesn't even have smart cast). This kind of "fighting the UI", if you really want to call it that, is still present in SC2.
As for the idea standing on its own merits, there's already been plenty of discussion outlining the merits of removing smart casting from powerful AoE spells. We also have a clear precedent in Brood War for demonstrating those merits. If you don't think something like Jangbi storms are interesting (hate re-using an example over and over, but it's the most relevant and clear example on my mind), then I question why you even watch StarCraft.
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You can trivialize smart casting not being ideal for snipe and ITs by using any mouse made in the past decade. Anyone can do this and it's not particularly virtuously inspiring to see it done.
The thing is, there are situations where you don't want to blow all your IT eggs in one go, there are also (rare) situations where you don't want to use up snipe energy where one or two snipes and other sources of damage together would be more efficient. There need to be situations where the on screen effect of your actions could be interpreted as something you actually wanted to do, or it's just the albatross of a clunky UI. The reasons you might want to cast a bunch of storms on the same spot all from one action are so incredibly trivial that I'm not going to give them away by mentioning them. Maybe we can come up with some balance change that encourages stacking storms, but I don't really even feel that that's the direction the game needs to go in.
And of course there are going to be people who say, "well what we really need to do is get rid of custom keymappings and make pros play on standardized mice".
There are a lot of things that I like from broodwar that I think SC2 needs to learn from and emulate more, but the ship has sailed on this one. The BW esports scene really was a child of circumstance, and its creators really had no business ending up with such an enduringly balanced game. If the map editor hadn't been so good at controlling the game balance and the gameplay it never would have gotten there.
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Nice article, congratulations.
I also get the feel that smart casting has limited unit ability to the extent that other parts of the game has to be balanced around it.
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On November 29 2012 12:47 Resistentialism wrote:
You can trivialize smart casting not being ideal for snipe and ITs by using any mouse made in the past decade. Anyone can do this and it's not particularly virtuously inspiring to see it done.
You mean binding the abilities to a scroll wheel, which most people don't do and is banned from professional play in any premiere tournament? Yeah, okay.
On November 29 2012 12:47 Resistentialism wrote:
The thing is, there are situations where you don't want to blow all your IT eggs in one go, there are also (rare) situations where you don't want to use up snipe energy where one or two snipes and other sources of damage together would be more efficient. There need to be situations where the on screen effect of your actions could be interpreted as something you actually wanted to do, or it's just the albatross of a clunky UI. The reasons you might want to cast a bunch of storms on the same spot all from one action are so incredibly trivial that I'm not going to give them away by mentioning them. Maybe we can come up with some balance change that encourages stacking storms, but I don't really even feel that that's the direction the game needs to go in.
It's almost like you can accidentally over-stim and waste a tonne of health when you didn't really want to. Why does the game let me stim units that are still under the influence of stim? Aaahhhh! We wouldn't want mis-clicks that can have a huge impact on a game, now would we?
Mistakes are part of any competitive game. If we're talking about direction, I don't think a game that fool-proofs things for you is what a competitive game needs.
On November 29 2012 12:47 Resistentialism wrote:
And of course there are going to be people who say, "well what we really need to do is get rid of custom keymappings and make pros play on standardized mice".
If you can find these people, I'd be intrigued.
On November 29 2012 12:47 Resistentialism wrote:
There are a lot of things that I like from broodwar that I think SC2 needs to learn from and emulate more, but the ship has sailed on this one. The BW esports scene really was a child of circumstance, and its creators really had no business ending up with such an enduringly balanced game. If the map editor hadn't been so good at controlling the game balance and the gameplay it never would have gotten there.
We're talking about a checkbox in the data editor, in a game where the developers are considering altering an ability like fungal growth to be a dodge-able projectile, rather than instant cast. Why is turning off a checkbox off the table, but fundamentally altering the ability's design is a-okay? Instead of pretending like you are the decision maker over at Blizzard, why not find something more productive to do?
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On November 29 2012 13:31 iamcaustic wrote:
It's almost like you can accidentally over-stim and waste a tonne of health when you didn't really want to. Why does the game let me stim units that are still under the influence of stim? Aaahhhh! We wouldn't want mis-clicks that can have a huge impact on a game, now would we?
Mistakes are part of any competitive game. If we're talking about direction, I don't think a game that fool-proofs things for you is what a competitive game needs.
There are actually situations where you want to stim 40 marines and not 5, though. There aren't situations where you want 7 identically placed and simultaneous storms or forcefields. I'm saying it's not the same thing. The game can't read your mind, but that doesn't mean the game designers can't make the minimum effort to anticipate your intentions. Especially when that minimum effort simply involves not programing in a useless pitfall they already removed. If a smartcastless-like gameplay would happen to improve the gameplay, find another way to get to the same end result. There are lots of them being discussed, most of them are balance or engine (not negative UI) tweaks.
On November 29 2012 13:31 iamcaustic wrote:
You mean binding the abilities to a scroll wheel, which most people don't do and is banned from professional play in any premiere tournament? Yeah, okay.
On November 29 2012 12:47 Resistentialism wrote:
And of course there are going to be people who say, "well what we really need to do is get rid of custom keymappings and make pros play on standardized mice".
On November 29 2012 13:31 iamcaustic wrote:
If you can find these people, I'd be intrigued.
no comment
On November 29 2012 13:31 iamcaustic wrote:
We're talking about a checkbox in the data editor, in a game where the developers are considering altering an ability like fungal growth to be a dodge-able projectile, rather than instant cast. Why is turning off a checkbox off the table, but fundamentally altering the ability's design is a-okay? Instead of pretending like you are the decision maker over at Blizzard, why not find something more productive to do?
What I meant is that the maps actually mattered, because terrain ignoring units and mechanics were generally less powerful. Except for mutas, which gave you BW's only commonly maligned matchup: ZvZ.
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On November 29 2012 10:28 iamcaustic wrote:
When asking whether it's a good idea from a standpoint of game design to make some spells cast some ways and other spells cast differently, this reality is already present in StarCraft II. Compare abilities like stim, blink, burrow, baneling detonate, etc. to abilities like storm, forcefield, snipe, etc.
For the record, I agree that removing smartcasting for some units and not other has definite potential (hence why I started my reply with "absolutely"). I would point out that the comparison of blink to stim only ever adds one more click (plus movement of the mouse) regardless of the number of marines and stalkers involved. In comparison, removal of smartcasting for AE casters adds additional commands per number of casters. In theory, I think you have something with different smartcasting for different units, though.
On November 29 2012 10:28 iamcaustic wrote:
I'm also not buying your response to the second point. The entire premise of the OP is making changes to the game. Your argument revolved around giving examples in the current game why smart casting needs to remain. In other words, your argument is assuming a lack of change -- or rather, the only change being made would be having smart cast removed from these examples. Trying to paint this point as a philosophical cop out isn't very convincing, because the real issue is you making arguments on a micro level to an idea that's more macro in scale.
Putting it in simpler terms: adding or removing smart casting is a matter of altering AI execution to adjust the skill ceiling of the game, not a matter of number tweaking to make sure the game's balanced. You're focusing too much on "how would these spells, with their current numbers/stats, possibly be any good/balanced without smart casting? I'd have to have the execution of a god just to stay alive in early game PvP, for example!"
With smart casting added to the powerful AoE spells in SC2, we've seen the balance numbers tweaked to accommodate the lowered skill ceiling -- namely, the nerfing of these abilities. Since everyone can storm like Jangbi, storm can't be as powerful as it was. It also puts a damper on the spectator value of the game, since now Jangbi-quality storms are no longer impressive to see. If you're super concerned about force fielding in PvP, there are plenty of answers:
1. Adjust the balance numbers of FF
2. Alter the design of FF
3. Adjust other aspects of Protoss to reduce reliance on FF to defend 4gate and other scenarios
4. Simply keep FF as a smart cast spell
Any one of those options could be picked while still and removing smart casting from and adjusting the stats of the powerful AoE spells of all the races.
My argument wasn't that we need smartcasting, and that any RTS without smartcasting is terrible because of sentries. My argument was that this is a different game with different balance and you can't just change things as large as smartcasting without doing a ton of work. Sure you can find a way to balance non-smartcasting and FF(or you can leave it as smartcasting) but that doing so changes the balance of a lot of things (FF placement and storming effectiveness effects all matchups FWIW - not just pvp). On the theory end, making these or other changes regarding the way in which spells are cast mechanically *may* result in a better end - but as long as we're talking theory, we'd need to first define "better" to know if this were true ("rewarding skill" is great as a concept, unless a person needs skill so high they'd never achieve it in order to see the reward - some amount of flaw in play must be acceptable - where is the line?).
On the practical end of things, it presses a big reset button on game balance. Have you seen the way matchups change with roaches (and later immortals) got +1 range added - or what about when fungal got changed to deal damage? The changes you're describing are vastly more game-impacting than the ones we've seen so far. Is EMP worth anything when casters are split up? Without a big group of infestors with smartcasting, does zerg have any options for moving into the lategame (it sure didn't feel like it before)? What about pheonixes - what the heck do we do about them? And for all AE casters, if the AE is harder to use, how much more damage should it deal (it still can't be BW storm for much the same reason siege tanks are weaker in WoL)? I'd be willing to bet that removal of smartcasting would be the largest game change we've seen since some point early in the design phase - is it worth rebalancing everything with this notion in mind? Will people be patient enough to see it through? Is it something we can even convince Blizzard is a good change?
My point had nothing to do with specific circumstances in specific matchups and everything to do with changing from a theory mindset to one of practicality. A lot of testing went into getting this game as good as it is - and if we're going to give that up - even just for some units - I personally think we should have a really gamebreakingly good reason for doing so.
On the constructive end of things, if we're looking to add more potential for skill - why is everyone looking to change what we have instead of trying to come up with something new that we don't have yet? Why change sentries (and all the balance implications that go along with that), when you can add a new type of unit, a new type of spell or resource or action or something? Is this not the point of expansions (even if HotS is closed to new units, which is unconfirmed, there's still LotV if an idea has enough support)?
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