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First of all, This started as a reply to Ideas' Five Thousand blog ( http://www.teamliquid.net/blogs/viewblog.php?topic_id=138361 ) post, but it got too big and I didn't want to derail his awesome post with my ramblings. I recommend that you read Idea's blog post, it's brilliant. And of course, congratulations Ideas on your 5000 posts! Much respect to you sir.
Second of all, very great post by Ideas (READ IT!), however, I really would like to share my point of view as one of them "New comers to TeamLquid.net", my account was registered less than 5 months ago or so and I didn't even break the 100 posts count. It will be long, but I hope that you read my story so you understand my point of view.
I started my gaming as a little kid playing Mario on my Nintendo, I loved the game so much, I played it over and over and had challenges with my brother how many times we can finish it with 1 life and so on. However, when Mario 2 and Mario 3 were released, I played both, but I had this feeling that this is a rip off a great game, I even traded my Mario 2 and Mario 3 games for Contra and Street Fighter ones, and still played Mario like mad.
Time passed by and I bought Sega, and boy I was hooked to Mortal Kombat 2, I just loved it, I played Shang Tsung cause I knew how to morph to everything and I knew how to play anything, I was that good at it that when I played it at the mall, the owners wouldn't let me in cause they know I will be hogging the machine for 30-40 mins with my single coin. After a while Mortal Kombat 3 was released and I bought it, played it for exactly 1 week, was furious how they removed characters I was fond of (Like Barraka) and added those cheap ass robotic ones (like Sektor or robotic smoke), so I benched it and kept on playing Mortal Kombat 2.
Time went by again and it was due to get a new console. And I got the Playstation 1, and with it I got 10 free games, one of them being a football (Soccer) game being "Winning Eleven 4". It was a very old football game, it was even in Japanese and had only the Japanese league teams, but I learned my way around it and played it like mad. One of my friends told me there's an English version, but I ignored that and kept on playing the Japanese version. Then Winning Eleven 6 was released in English (I didn't even know 5 was released, but I guess 4 that came with the Playstation was already old), I tried it, but it had clunky movement of the players that was even worse than FIFA series. Which made me also ditch it along with the Winning Eleven 7 and 9 that I bought later on.
A lot of time passed since then, I completely got fed up with the consoles and how they accessories are very expensive, I went to Computer gaming mainly RTS games, like Warcraft 2, Commandos to Starcraft, Red Alert, then to Warcraft III, Generals And then after getting really hooked on Warcraft III and TFT, I just loved the Warcraft story and started playing World of Warcraft for 1 goal; Kill Arthas or serve him in death (yeah yeah, I like roleplay. But not the perverted one  ).
And now you see, World of Warcraft is that one game that most likely kill your interest in other games if you enjoy it. I played World of Warcraft since it's release in 2004, I cancelled my subscription for the first time earlier this month. During my time playing World of Warcraft, I bought only 4 other games. I loved the original World of Warcraft (or as we call it, vanilla), it was hard, reaching high level took some time, getting the best items was very hard and took a lot of time, the player versus player gaming was about the fun more than about the reward, to get the very end game content you had to invest time. It felt like you're preparing for something really epic. Then Blizzard decided to jiggle things around in their first expansion, started messing around with the lore, suddenly reviving dead characters and more than once even. It was shortly after Blizzard's first expansion I bought my first game after World of Warcraft. Then came the second expansion "Wrath of the Lich King" which I bought just to finally be able to face Arthas, the one who got me into World of Warcraft. The whole expansion was a joke, an insult to the original World of Warcraft in my eyes, but in the eyes of the majority of other players, they called it a huge
success. I'm still baffled how people could like this expansion. So I saw salvation in Starcraft 2 and I claimed it my hobby.
Now after this boring history of my gaming life, I would like to conclude 4 points:
1. I totally understand your concern about Starcraft 2 killing off Brood War, or how Starcraft 2 community is ruining it for the Brood War fans. I felt the same with Mario, MK2 and WoW, and I still think those precedents are better than their newer versions. And I totally understand and share your concern that Blizzard may kill off Starcraft so they make money out of Starcraft 2 forcing the BW players to buy it. I still play Brood War with my friends (not on b.net, cause I get my ass handed to me every time I play on b.net. Not fun for me) and I don't want BW to be cut off either. But you have to take into account that those who didn't play the original games before their newer versions will probably have a more pure idea how good the game is, they won't have expectations from the game, they will just get to know how things work and judge from there, not compare this new game to an old one. I know two people who absolutely love Mario 3 and consider it the best Mario game they ever played and to my surprise, they never played the original Mario, and considered it very clunky when they did. It's somehow the same experience for SC2 players when they try Brood War for the first time after playing SC2.
2. The claim that Starcraft 2 didn't give as much fun and enjoyment as Brood War I think can be explained in a very good presentation I read on TED ( http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/daniel_kahneman_the_riddle_of_experience_vs_memory.html : I really recommend listening to it). Basically, the experience and memory are two different things, they affect each other however they are distinctive from each other. From what I see in the BW players. Their memory of Brood War is a huge improvement of gaming life compared to before BW, which makes their experience of Brood War a great thing, now this affects their memory of SC2 and their experience. So when Starcraft 2 is released now, there is not much improvement (yet things didn't get worse), but the experience of Starcraft 2 is still affected by the memory of BW.
Or it could be that you've mastered Brood War so much that your play it good, so your last memories of BW is good. While in Starcraft 2 since it's new, you don't know the game inside out and you needed much more refining on your game play, you have bad memories of the game. Now since memories affect the experience, you'd describe your experience with Starcraft 2 as bad, cause your last memories about it is that it wasn't as good as BW, probably misjudging it.
3. I came to TeamLiquid.net for several reasons: The Blizzard forums are terrible, they have a lot of useless thread, there is little room for real discussion with the boards filled with trolling or general nonsense, not to mention Blizzard won't ban players if they act stupid cause "they are paying customers" (Just check the WoW forums, or even if you checked the SC2 beta forums and how much bullshit they have). Also when I played WoW I've always found fan-site forums much better place to share ideas, adopt ideas and discuss the game, specially that I came from ElitistJerks.com, which is a World of Warcraft forums with very strict heavy moderation (in there, you'd get banned for things like bad spelling or grammar or being unclear about your message) which filters the terrible posters out.
4. Me residing here in Egypt limits my interaction with players of the same game. The RTS community is small here, in Egypt most players are into FPS games or MMORPGs. So other than my real life friends to play with, I would have to find some place to meet people who are about my level to befriend and play with (I find playing with people I know more fun than randomly playing ladder. Bragging rights and teasing is fun :D). TeamLiquid.com has a great community and I've met 2 people during beta through TeamLiquid.net that I enjoyed playing with very much. Players like me need TeamLiquid for more than info and discussion.
Lastly, I know I've typed a lot and I know I probably bored all of you with my rambling (I'm usually one of them lurkers that reads and never posts, but when I post I try to cover my opinion/idea completely) but it's just saddens me that I and other TL new-comers get blamed for "ruining" BW for everyone here on TeamLiquid. We came here cause the community is great and the admins know they have a great community and that's why they have many active moderators making TeamLiquid a great place. Thanks to the admins and the moderators for their great job.
And finally as a reward for reading this whole thing, here's a cat expressing my feelings right now.
![[image loading]](http://icanhascheezburger.files.wordpress.com/2010/07/funny-pictures-cat-hates-monday.jpg)
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tbh, brood war's "clunkiness" isn't going to scare off people who could be interested in the first place anyways, when compared to sc2.
i've played wc3, i've played ra2, ra3, and got through them and felt bored really quickly simply because they weren't interesting. yet all of them were comparatively easier than bw. jump into bw, and i found that while obviously much, much harder to play, it was fun. i might have went ahead and lost my first 20 or so games on iccup, but i recognized the depth and skill i could improve and stuff.
this wasn't my first attempt to get competitive at a game. i've been at gunz and cs 1.6 before semi-competitively, and never quite got there. i would attain half, sometimes nearly all of the skill necessary to be competitive, then quit because i was completely bored.
why bw attracted me was that there was so much crap you could do that was completely different from each other, and yet there was another strat or something that could completely destroy what you're doing. win rates of 60% were considered GOOD. that's not something many other sports or games have.
sc2, the community is to me pretty much those graphics whores or rpg gamers who pretty much just want to watch a movie that they have a little bit of control over. also included are people who just want to see their names up on a high score board, and sc2 is a new battleground where this is possible.
i know not all newcomers are bad (i mean, we were all at the peon stage before), but the vast majority of the sc2 threads i've read made me want to punch many, many posters in the face. hard.
w/e, have fun with sc2.
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Just let us old grumpy bw players whine for a bit, it's going to pass eventually ^_^
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On July 26 2010 19:37 seRapH wrote:
sc2, the community is to me pretty much those graphics whores or rpg gamers who pretty much just want to watch a movie that they have a little bit of control over. also included are people who just want to see their names up on a high score board, and sc2 is a new battleground where this is possible.
i know not all newcomers are bad (i mean, we were all at the peon stage before), but the vast majority of the sc2 threads i've read made me want to punch many, many posters in the face. hard.
w/e, have fun with sc2.
My point is not to bash BW. My point is that your judgment of SC2 is based on comparison to BW, while those who didn't play BW and went straight to SC2 will find the game very attractive cause of the basic Starcraft ideas in it.
Let's assume you never played BW, and you stumbled upon SC2 without knowing there's such thing as BW. You'll find that things like Macro'ing, Micro'ing and teching attractive and give a very creative way of play, specially that this game has 3 races in it with each one having different mechanics than the other. You'll become a fan of this game cause of those mechanics. And as a result taking things like auto mining or auto cast as something normal and accepted.
However, the old BW players are not impressed by those things, cause they have experienced them in BW over and over in the past 12 years, and they will be angry about things like auto mine or auto cast as they make the game a lot easier.
Starcraft 2 does have "shiny graphics" and does have stupid ranking system (seriously, I don't like the brackets design, but that's a different story), and does have stupid regional locking or any other problem that may be mentioned, but to someone who didn't play BW, it's a great game for the mechanics that were imported from BW, maybe it was made easier, but it's still relatively the same game.
I really understand why BW players are not happy with the SC2 community, but judging people without really understanding their point of view is shallow and unfair.
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I wouldn't feel too bad about the anti-new comer rhetoric, just the annoying ones :D. Just so happens a lot are (and a lot arent) but thats just the consequence of a ton new people overall.
I don't agree on point 2 personally. I might concede that some people fall into that trap though. I think I'm pretty objective on this, but I still feel BW has a sizzle SC2 doesnt. Even as a spectator, some elements are just "OOOH!!". Conversely SC2 improves on bw in a lot of areas. Just saying that a lot of the criticisms and comparisons are justified and not just nostalgia + Show Spoiler +speaking of BW, anyone remake that map yet?
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On July 26 2010 21:59 ironchef wrote:I wouldn't feel too bad about the anti-new comer rhetoric, just the annoying ones :D. Just so happens a lot are (and a lot arent) but thats just the consequence of a ton new people overall. I don't agree on point 2 personally. I might concede that some people fall into that trap though. I think I'm pretty objective on this, but I still feel BW has a sizzle SC2 doesnt. Even as a spectator, some elements are just "OOOH!!". Conversely SC2 improves on bw in a lot of areas. Just saying that a lot of the criticisms and comparisons are justified and not just nostalgia + Show Spoiler +speaking of BW, anyone remake that map yet? .
Yes, that`s what it is. That something that`s "lacking" in SC2. Not one serious individual complained about MBS or automining since probably about 2 years. However I have no idea how could people expect SC2 to have that something after a couple months of beta, the game just now comes out. Seems like every BW player expects SC2 to be as fun to watch at top level and as complex and as diverse as BW. Look at BW games from 2000-2001 for comparison. If SC2 gameplay won`t change in a year or two, then it will be a good time to worry and whine.
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not angry about auto-mine or auto-cast. i'm not angry about how much easier it is to macro as zerg or toss. i'm not angry about unit pathing, or how artificial the phoenix moving shot is.
i'm angry about the pure strategy behind sc2. i gave it a shot for 3 weeks. i got bored the fuck over, but maybe that's just because i played terran and terran was completely imbalanced.
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you say that the new community is impressed by things in bw that are in sc2 that they've never experienced. i say that pretty much everything that matters is better exemplified in bw than it is in sc2, and that people who truly appreciate that more than graphics or crap would generally like bw more.
Macro: MBS. end of story.
Micro: i suppose micro in sc2 consists of kiting and spellcasting and spreading units. in bw, not babysitting your unit positining will give you absolutely zero arc, as opposed to the arc that forms within 3 seconds in sc2. kiting with vultures and mutas is completely different and requires actual amounts of skill. more that i just dont want to go through listing.
Teching and Build Order strategy: I'll just give a one mu example. In bw, three basic build openings are used in PvX: 12/14nex, 1gatecore, 2gate. In PvT, 2gate gets generally neutralized by terran wall-offs. In sc2, 12/14nex, 1gatecore, 2gate. In PvT, fast nex gets destroyed by basically everything standard. 2gate gets owned by a terran wall. leaving you with 1gate core, and so the branches become 3/4gate, robo, or stargate. all of which are perfectly viable in bw (though to varying degrees)
to your final point, i tried to deal with our newcomers. the majority of them think they're amazing and right. they pissed me off, i'm not going back to be nice to the few of them that may be decent people.
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I have no idea what could be missing from SC2 that would give it the same excitement as BW, but I certainly enjoy watching replays of both. I agree that there's more to BW than nostalgia.
But I think barth has a really solid point. The game is not released yet (19 hours to go!), give it some time.
And seRapH:
SC2 strategy still didn't reach that point where builds get more and more refined, I think there will be a lot of adjustments to the strategy when more and more people get into it, specially the Korean Progamers.
And with the points about micro/macro and teching. Well, it's known to everyone that BW learning curve is waaaaaay more steep than SC2, I mean, I can get to Platinum League in SC2 (due to the horrible brackets ranking and the relatively easy gameplay, not causes I'm good), while on BW I won 2 games out of 30+ I played, simply because of things like auto mine, MBS and the more difficult micro management. Not to mention everything in SC1 is much slower than SC2 like buildings and upgrades.
Blizzard made SC2 more easy and more casual friendly so they sell more copies, it's basically the same as they did with WoW recently, they just made it more casual friendly. A casual would prefer a game with a faster pace than a slow one (I know that the slower upgrades/buildings makes time management very important, but for a casual gamer they probably not concerned enough to learn all sorts of timings and how to play around time). I think you're approaching the game from a hardcore gamer perspective and that's why BW is more appealing to you, it's harder to play and harder to master.
I'd compare it to Eve Online and any other MMORPGs. Basically the more casual gamers tend to avoid Eve simply cause it's hard to play and hard to master, while other MMORPGs are easy to play and hard to master.
And I can't really change your opinion about the new comers. I'm just merely explaining how is it from our point of view, it's all up to you to judge us as long as you know why we're here.
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What's really different between BW and SC2:
BW ZvP: Sim cities and forge-walls make it difficult to attack and easy to defend, and allows easy expanding. Army strengths shift with tech choices, from zerglings > zealots to zealots > zerglings to hydra > zealot to zeal/ht > hydra to hydralurk > zeal/ht and i could go on but i won't because the matchup has other things like the presence of corsairs to bring battle onto a completely different plane and mutalisks that can change army compositions, win a game instantly, or be a complete waste of resources and lose a game instantly based on scouting and micro and the harassment that happens at every stage of the game.
SC2 ZvP: roaches and auto-surround make toss FE impossible. zerg sim cities are much harder to craft since every thing against anything else is everything tight. army shifts still occur, but force field can practically negate it if forcefields start wrecking your ramp, and mutalisks are disgustingly good, and will never disappear without making up for their worth. harassment cannot happen on the same level, since there are fewer expos and phase prisms are horrible and colossi cannot 1-hit a trillion workers and you need storm for the army much much more than their worker line. i could go on, but you'll find something in this argument to rebuff whether or not i do, so i'll just wait and rebut that instead.
i am not a hardcore gamer. i'm a D+ protoss, peaking at 3070~, and am regularly destroyed by D level zergs. but its just much more satisfying to wreck 90 food of army while losing only 30 of yours, or wrecking and wearing down a maxed 3/3 mech army terran by macroing well than it is in sc2. it feels good because you work for it, not just won because your opponent is horrible and didn't build observers when he saw your freaking starport with lab.
bw is the definite spectator sport. you can watch 5 colossi melt an army in sc2, but its nothing compared to watching beautiful storms land on 30 hydras and have them all die, barely saving your nat. its nothing compared to watching a reaver land behind a mineral line and firing a shot, wondering if it'll even get a single kill. nothing compared to watching an mnm ball wander close to a hold lurker trap, unsure if 20 food will disappear right in front of the terran's eyes. what part of sc2 compares to that?
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On July 26 2010 20:59 Deyster wrote:Show nested quote +On July 26 2010 19:37 seRapH wrote:
sc2, the community is to me pretty much those graphics whores or rpg gamers who pretty much just want to watch a movie that they have a little bit of control over. also included are people who just want to see their names up on a high score board, and sc2 is a new battleground where this is possible.
i know not all newcomers are bad (i mean, we were all at the peon stage before), but the vast majority of the sc2 threads i've read made me want to punch many, many posters in the face. hard.
w/e, have fun with sc2. My point is not to bash BW. My point is that your judgment of SC2 is based on comparison to BW, while those who didn't play BW and went straight to SC2 will find the game very attractive cause of the basic Starcraft ideas in it. Let's assume you never played BW, and you stumbled upon SC2 without knowing there's such thing as BW. You'll find that things like Macro'ing, Micro'ing and teching attractive and give a very creative way of play, specially that this game has 3 races in it with each one having different mechanics than the other. You'll become a fan of this game cause of those mechanics. And as a result taking things like auto mining or auto cast as something normal and accepted. However, the old BW players are not impressed by those things, cause they have experienced them in BW over and over in the past 12 years, and they will be angry about things like auto mine or auto cast as they make the game a lot easier. Starcraft 2 does have "shiny graphics" and does have stupid ranking system (seriously, I don't like the brackets design, but that's a different story), and does have stupid regional locking or any other problem that may be mentioned, but to someone who didn't play BW, it's a great game for the mechanics that were imported from BW, maybe it was made easier, but it's still relatively the same game. I really understand why BW players are not happy with the SC2 community, but judging people without really understanding their point of view is shallow and unfair.
In my opinion, unless auto cast and auto mine have a clear cut advantage for one player over the other, why is this a big deal to some players. I think its more of a veterans player fear that more noobs will be able to learn this game easier then BW and perhaps even become a better player then them. It's more of an ego thing. People think because they learned the hard way that the noobs should have to also.
This is the same thing the "Hardcore" Wow players were bitching about when the new xpax came out. It wasn't that people had advantages over eachother. It was the mere fact that people spent a lot of time investing and raiding to aquire the epic shit and distinguish themselves from the rest of everybody. Then Blizzard drops the Xpacs, and within weeks everybody is running around with the same gear on. Again, it doesn't affect the veteran player at all, Its all about EGO.
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On July 27 2010 00:30 ShabbySalami wrote:Show nested quote +On July 26 2010 20:59 Deyster wrote:On July 26 2010 19:37 seRapH wrote:
sc2, the community is to me pretty much those graphics whores or rpg gamers who pretty much just want to watch a movie that they have a little bit of control over. also included are people who just want to see their names up on a high score board, and sc2 is a new battleground where this is possible.
i know not all newcomers are bad (i mean, we were all at the peon stage before), but the vast majority of the sc2 threads i've read made me want to punch many, many posters in the face. hard.
w/e, have fun with sc2. My point is not to bash BW. My point is that your judgment of SC2 is based on comparison to BW, while those who didn't play BW and went straight to SC2 will find the game very attractive cause of the basic Starcraft ideas in it. Let's assume you never played BW, and you stumbled upon SC2 without knowing there's such thing as BW. You'll find that things like Macro'ing, Micro'ing and teching attractive and give a very creative way of play, specially that this game has 3 races in it with each one having different mechanics than the other. You'll become a fan of this game cause of those mechanics. And as a result taking things like auto mining or auto cast as something normal and accepted. However, the old BW players are not impressed by those things, cause they have experienced them in BW over and over in the past 12 years, and they will be angry about things like auto mine or auto cast as they make the game a lot easier. Starcraft 2 does have "shiny graphics" and does have stupid ranking system (seriously, I don't like the brackets design, but that's a different story), and does have stupid regional locking or any other problem that may be mentioned, but to someone who didn't play BW, it's a great game for the mechanics that were imported from BW, maybe it was made easier, but it's still relatively the same game. I really understand why BW players are not happy with the SC2 community, but judging people without really understanding their point of view is shallow and unfair. In my opinion, unless auto cast and auto mine have a clear cut advantage for one player over the other, why is this a big deal to some players. I think its more of a veterans player fear that more noobs will be able to learn this game easier then BW and perhaps even become a better player then them. It's more of an ego thing. People think because they learned the hard way that the noobs should have to also. This is the same thing the "Hardcore" Wow players were bitching about when the new xpac came out. It wasn't that people had advantages over eachother. It was the mere fact that people spent a lot of time investing and raiding to aquire the epic shit and distinguish themselves from the rest of everybody. Then Blizzard drops the Xpacs, and within weeks everybody is running around with the same gear on. Again, it doesn't affect the veteran player at all, Its all about EGO.
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Braavos36362 Posts
I think you just need to keep in mind that the vast majority of TL likes SC2 and loves that our community is growing. There's just a few outspoken haters who like to bash anything new, whether it's SC2 or new users. Try not to let the vocal minority get to you 
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I'm also a new user but I've been following the SC1 pro scene and lurking TL for years now. I wasn't that interested in SC2 until the beta came out, and even then I only played a handful of games and followed the major tournaments.
I think all of this SC:BW v SC2 debate is kind of pointless. I love BW and consider it to be the best strategy game of all time. I'm still staying up until 5 AM to catch Proleague/MSL/OSL livestreams. Starcraft 1 is no doubt the most cherished game of all time, so many people have put their hearts into the game and the pure nostalgia of remembering your first time playing SC1 is magical.
Just because SC1 is the perfect RTS game doesn't mean SC2 isn't a good game. I enjoyed SC2 while playing the beta, but obviously I'm not going to put the same passion into SC2 as I did playing Brood War. It is a new game and it will earn the hearts of the players in time (or it won't if it turns out being bad). Being a SC1 fan obviously influences my decision of buying and playing SC2, but it is not instantly a masterpiece like Brood War - to treat it as such would just be setting myself up for disappointment.
From what I've seen, most of the SC2 bashers are Brood War fans who are sad to see their game (our game) get pushed under the rug by the sequel. I think they will get over it in time. It doesn't matter how much you loved BW or how many all-nighters you pulled listening to Diggity's soothing voice over some MSL finals stream... SC1 is still just a game, and it would have died eventually regardless of SC2.
Anyway, welcome to TL from one new user to another.
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EPT
