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Northern Ireland20509 Posts
I’ve had quite a boring day so got to wondering this earlier. As a veteran since ye olden days and a player of other RTS classics, primarily a lot of WC3 we’ve really come a long way baby!
Stuff like Archon mode, Co-Op, the Gameheart overlay and resuming from replay are all features we take for granted now but are marked improvements on what we had before.
The recent map editor overhaul for the anniversary looks really promising too in terms of another positive change in ensuring longevity and Blizz being invested in the game.
As someone whose gaming tastes are similar to his whiskey ones, I don’t really touch anything less than a decade old so I’m sure my fellow TLers have access to a lot of more recent innovations that I’d be unaware of.
Here are a few of my suggested QoL improvements:
UI Customisation Options With any changes I am attempting to make things easier for either new players, or veterans. But without growing the gap between veterans and newbies, so the level of tweaking I’d maybe keep relatively limited. However, especially in an era where people are getting larger and larger monitors, it is pretty silly that your resources and supply are at the furthest distance possible from your minimap, with the actual controllable game in the middle.
Being able to move your resource/supply tab just above your minimap would just be a net QoL improvement. It wouldn’t make the game easier, just more smooth to play.
Revamped Hotkey Section I feel this needs an overhaul. Maybe bring in tutorials and explanations for new players, or you could bring in players submitting templates in the client, with the ability to add explanations and players could browse popular ones.
Third parties like Jakatak do a great job here, but I imagine a lot of new players don’t stumble across things like that, or the Core.
The potency of say, rapid fire hotkeys could be included within the game client, and bridge that knowledge gap in the playerbase. Even myself who has a disproportionate obsession with hotkeys over how I much I play was unaware of how you could use rapid fire to build more than one type of structure until I saw Scarlett explain it in an In-Depth
Dedicated Observer Controls Yes you can rebind things. Done my share of casting/observing over the years and this could be much better. Aside from having to learn another set of hotkey commands, some things could just be made easier and some options made more easily available. For example following hotkeyed units. Say player 1 being hotkey 1 (incidentally isn’t always the top on the overlay which is annoying), and his main army is hotkey 1 for him, his harassment units are 3. It would be nice to just hit 1 for player 1, then hold 1 or 3 to follow those groups of units.
I only have to do the casting/observing combo once or twice a year and rarely as a solo caster so I imagine improvements here would be more impactful for people who do it on the regular.
Adjustable Unit Priority People have their preferences here, but I’d like some more control here. I keep units split across multiple hotkeys but sometimes when shit hits the fan I’m just boxing units and trying to order them around. I don’t want the single ghost I’ve accidentally selected to take priority when I want to stim and split. Or a stray Templar when what I want to do is get the forcefields down and then storm.
The intent of this thread is for basically all suggestions outside of balance. Although it’s obviously important too balance discussions can degenerate pretty quickly.
Interested to see what you folks all come up with!
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Some nice ideas here. I like adjustable unit priority most. It's always so annoying for me when a stray queen gets into my army group and takes priority over all the casters.
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I guess UI customization might be more doable if you limit to just the default skin? That might be a decent compromise.
Given the prevalence of rapid fire these days, which usually requires registry edits to do correctly, do you think maybe adding a "keyboard repeat rate multiplier" in the UI would be useful? It seems to provide the same features (high repeat rates for SC2), just with fewer steps, and maybe less invasiveness. It might depend on the game engine, but I can imagine this being doable.
I also kinda wish we could disable double click to select all; I get really nervous when I play and end up double clicking a lot more than I intend. I only control click to select all on screen. That's a really small request though haha, and probably doesn't matter for most people`
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Bisutopia18993 Posts
Watching GSL through the BNET Client: I remember 5 years ago watching a DOTA2 match through the steam client. I could toggle which announcers I wanted to listen to and have the freedom to move around in the game or follow the caster camera. That was a mind blowing experience. If we could have a more intimate experience with a live SC2 game it would be awesome.
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On August 07 2020 01:13 yubo56 wrote: I guess UI customization might be more doable if you limit to just the default skin? That might be a decent compromise.
Given the prevalence of rapid fire these days, which usually requires registry edits to do correctly, do you think maybe adding a "keyboard repeat rate multiplier" in the UI would be useful? It seems to provide the same features (high repeat rates for SC2), just with fewer steps, and maybe less invasiveness. It might depend on the game engine, but I can imagine this being doable.
I also kinda wish we could disable double click to select all; I get really nervous when I play and end up double clicking a lot more than I intend. I only control click to select all on screen. That's a really small request though haha, and probably doesn't matter for most people`
I feel you with the double click man, happens to me sometimes as well :D
Another silly thing that happens to me often is that I would either accidentally shift-hotkey or ctrl-hotkey my army into my hatchery group and then lose a game because I stopped macroing during the fight. So having a way to somehow "lock" a hotkey group would be nice or add an option to disallow hotkeying units and building together.
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disable rapid fire entirely esports tab in the game, maybe with hosting copies of the lobbies of big tournaments that play the live replay file of the game that is played so you can watch in client kind of like CSGO (no idea if this is technically feasible at all) more warchests
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On August 07 2020 01:15 BisuDagger wrote: Watching GSL through the BNET Client: I remember 5 years ago watching a DOTA2 match through the steam client. I could toggle which announcers I wanted to listen to and have the freedom to move around in the game or follow the caster camera. That was a mind blowing experience. If we could have a more intimate experience with a live SC2 game it would be awesome.
this, at the moment i cannot stand the :
Right? <- this being something which over the last year is making my blood boil I mean Yeah but seriously / yeah but no Literally This is . . .'disgusting'
its a bingo card at this point or a very very irresponsible drinking game.
I have to mute nearly all casts of the game as im not sure why it sets me off so much. They all do it and they all seem to copy each others traits.
Yes, i would very much like to choose the least offending caster OR just listen to it all in korean, no harm no foul!
Anyways, what would i like to see.
SALT working again would be nice or a method to quickly jump back to the start oif the game without having to remake for practice sake.
Ability to view the game like a caster on official events, but i am well aware of how this may impact the lag of the game so the mechanism would have to be new developmnent using some kind of slaved instancing system which doesnt tie direcdtly to the performance of the master
Build of the week. You have to create a build and time an attack and get points for it and other metrics like how fast can you . . .
Choose WOL, HOTS, LOTV versions as part of the game creation in custom games, silly i know but could spark a few novel community comps
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More frequent and significant patches. This has always been one of the biggest flaws of SC2, no doubt influenced by the aura of BW which had a near-perfectly balanced game despite never having any patches. But that's an incredible rarety and I think both players and especially commentators would benefit immensely from having frequent balance patches that shake up the meta. Turns out something is imbalanced? No worries, it can be fixed quickly too!
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Unit formations - On the most recent Pylon show, Blizzard devs mentioned that custom games now support unit formations, and it could shake up multiplayer - I think this would be a breath of fresh air the game needs.
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Make it so jumping to a point in a replay doesn't take as long as just watching the entire replay in 8x speed would be a great quality of life change, but actually adding multithreading support would dramatically improve performance of the game. When the SC2 engine was built CPU's only had 1 or 2 cores, compared to now where 6 cores is the bare minimum.
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Northern Ireland20509 Posts
On August 07 2020 05:08 Solar424 wrote: Make it so jumping to a point in a replay doesn't take as long as just watching the entire replay in 8x speed would be a great quality of life change, but actually adding multithreading support would dramatically improve performance of the game. When the SC2 engine was built CPU's only had 1 or 2 cores, compared to now where 6 cores is the bare minimum. That would be rather nice. Adding bookmarks so you could jump to specific points in a replay with friends would be nice.
I’m not an expert and given my decade old rig runs the game well I’m not sure how much gain could be had from multithreadeding support in merely playing the game. I’d assume some benefit and of course it would further modernise the game.
I wonder if you could use the common extra cores people have nowadays and the extra overhead there to do more specific tasks. For example rendering a replay in the background so the player could jump around quicker?
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Northern Ireland20509 Posts
On August 07 2020 01:15 BisuDagger wrote: Watching GSL through the BNET Client: I remember 5 years ago watching a DOTA2 match through the steam client. I could toggle which announcers I wanted to listen to and have the freedom to move around in the game or follow the caster camera. That was a mind blowing experience. If we could have a more intimate experience with a live SC2 game it would be awesome. It would be a huge improvement. On the other hand my only concern would be how it would affect community casters and their Twitch revenue etc. That would be my only reservation though.
I’m currently working on trying to make some dual FPVoDs of the top games of GSL/ST and aside from not knowing how to rip direct FPVoDs off Afreeca, my experiments are really fun to watch.
Actually being able to see the players‘ speed and what they’re doing while listening to Tastosis over the top, it’s glorious.
Being able to pick and choose elements like that would be fantastic, 100% agreed.
I’m not sure how they do it in DoTA etc to avoid lagging out games but it obviously works from what you’re saying.
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On August 07 2020 06:26 Wombat_NI wrote:Show nested quote +On August 07 2020 05:08 Solar424 wrote: Make it so jumping to a point in a replay doesn't take as long as just watching the entire replay in 8x speed would be a great quality of life change, but actually adding multithreading support would dramatically improve performance of the game. When the SC2 engine was built CPU's only had 1 or 2 cores, compared to now where 6 cores is the bare minimum. That would be rather nice. Adding bookmarks so you could jump to specific points in a replay with friends would be nice. I’m not an expert and given my decade old rig runs the game well I’m not sure how much gain could be had from multithreadeding support in merely playing the game. I’d assume some benefit and of course it would further modernise the game. I wonder if you could use the common extra cores people have nowadays and the extra overhead there to do more specific tasks. For example rendering a replay in the background so the player could jump around quicker? Afaik the replay stores only the series of give commands. That s the reason why the replay takes so long to render, it has to actually Re-play the entire game and every click. That s why you actually can resume from replay and the reason the files are so small
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On August 07 2020 03:33 112StaminaX wrote:Show nested quote +On August 07 2020 01:15 BisuDagger wrote: Watching GSL through the BNET Client: I remember 5 years ago watching a DOTA2 match through the steam client. I could toggle which announcers I wanted to listen to and have the freedom to move around in the game or follow the caster camera. That was a mind blowing experience. If we could have a more intimate experience with a live SC2 game it would be awesome. this, at the moment i cannot stand the : Right? <- this being something which over the last year is making my blood boil I mean Yeah but seriously / yeah but no Literally This is . . .'disgusting' + Show Spoiler +its a bingo card at this point or a very very irresponsible drinking game.
I have to mute nearly all casts of the game as im not sure why it sets me off so much. They all do it and they all seem to copy each others traits.
Yes, i would very much like to choose the least offending caster OR just listen to it all in korean, no harm no foul!
Anyways, what would i like to see.
SALT working again would be nice or a method to quickly jump back to the start oif the game without having to remake for practice sake.
Ability to view the game like a caster on official events, but i am well aware of how this may impact the lag of the game so the mechanism would have to be new developmnent using some kind of slaved instancing system which doesnt tie direcdtly to the performance of the master
Build of the week. You have to create a build and time an attack and get points for it and other metrics like how fast can you . . .
Choose WOL, HOTS, LOTV versions as part of the game creation in custom games, silly i know but could spark a few novel community comps
Yeah, but seriously, I mean, this is literally disgusting... right?
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Northern Ireland20509 Posts
On August 08 2020 21:22 dbRic1203 wrote:Show nested quote +On August 07 2020 06:26 Wombat_NI wrote:On August 07 2020 05:08 Solar424 wrote: Make it so jumping to a point in a replay doesn't take as long as just watching the entire replay in 8x speed would be a great quality of life change, but actually adding multithreading support would dramatically improve performance of the game. When the SC2 engine was built CPU's only had 1 or 2 cores, compared to now where 6 cores is the bare minimum. That would be rather nice. Adding bookmarks so you could jump to specific points in a replay with friends would be nice. I’m not an expert and given my decade old rig runs the game well I’m not sure how much gain could be had from multithreadeding support in merely playing the game. I’d assume some benefit and of course it would further modernise the game. I wonder if you could use the common extra cores people have nowadays and the extra overhead there to do more specific tasks. For example rendering a replay in the background so the player could jump around quicker? Afaik the replay stores only the series of give commands. That s the reason why the replay takes so long to render, it has to actually Re-play the entire game and every click. That s why you actually can resume from replay and the reason the files are so small How do other games store their replays I wonder? I don’t play enough other games these days alas.
Surely there’s some kind of workaround with modern consumer hardware? If we all have 29 core CPUs, the majority aren’t being used by this beautiful game, couldn’t they be brought into play in rendering replays much faster? I’m assuming now that pre-rendering the entire replay probably has negative consequences in terms of storing it temporarily in RAM or something.
I mean at this stage it’s a relatively small QoL change and we’re used to cycling through replays as we always have.
I don’t think they need to build anything new for this functionality though, some variant of it surely must exist otherwise AlphaStar couldn’t have played as many simulated games right?
I’m happy/hoping for someone who knows their stuff to come and smack down my gibberish by the way.
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