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... and eventually dies out soon(TM)*
I think one of SC2 and blizzard biggest strenghts designwise will head us into the death of the game.
What is the biggest strenght of SC2? We all know SC2 is an eSports title and its beeing played by proffesional players, that means there are some, not many, people out there that earn a lot of money because they play this game on a professional basis. Professional literally in a way that they are enabled to finance their everyday living by playing a Game. Maybe I will come back to that point with some analogies to other sports later.
In numberous topics in this forum, reddit and the official it is mentioned from official side, from blizzard that the game is competitive and was and will be balanced on a competitive level, that means for professional players. Let's assume, and put away with this all balance discussions that are out there, that the game is perfecly in balance for the proffessional scene.
Why is this bad? Respectively this is only true for the small group of some professional players in the SC2 community.
Even then the vast majority of players, that is not playing starcraft on the highest skill may face situations in the game that feel imbalanced. And with that experience they become ultimately imbalanced for these players. This is an imbalance by the design of the game, it's mechanics and the unequal skillset of the players who face each others in a melee game.
But because the game consists of 3 races with numberous structures and units which need to be operated differently to play the game, different skillsets of the player are needed to perform certain actions. Some of these actions may feel easier to execute than others, but this perception may vary also from player to player. Only those players who can perform these actions on a near to perfect skill level are able to play the game professionaly and are it the lucky position to play the game on a very balanced state, because they mastered some, maybe all important aspects of the game.
The main part of the community and with that by far the most players out there that are playing the game are not blessed with a perfect skill set to play the game. With that said, the game is not in a good balance for the vast majority of the community.
The last expansion, and with any new balance adjustments that may come, also the necessity to operate the game differently will occur. It's the same with "non-standard" Maps, by the way. And new difficulties and challenges are introduced to the game. While new players and maybe retired players, previous players are attracted by new expansions, balance adjustments or new maps they will face subjective balance issues as soon as they start to play melee, and will be matched with players that have different skill sets. This will make the game unattractive for them as a competitive game. Other games like games of the MOBA Genre, do not have this issue, because they do not have this 1vs1 Situation that individually feels unbalanced. I would argue that the game design team is aware of this and introduced the archon mode to the SC2 Melee and I think it's a good way to even out skill set indifferences, but on the other hand it's less accessible to play archon competitively.
The new players, or new blood for the sc2 Scene are experiencing differences in skill level, more than players that consistently played the game for a long period. Sometimes, or lets say rather often new blood and old stagers are matched in a Melee game. Both experience huge imbalances, but the chances are high, that the more experienced player will win and the less experienced player looses the game and more and more the faith on a balanced state of the game. With these experiences the new blood is less likely going to klick the play again button and may move to other, more accessible games. With a ever shrinking player base, that experiences more and more imbalances by their own capabilities soon(tm) the game dies off. With that also the professional scene is likely to die out, and I hope there is a plan B for them.
In the current state and the official announced things to come I don't see a saving grace at the moment for the game I love most, and I am very sad about that.
In my opinion the game needs to be balanced for the players and not for the professionals I think it's possible but as there is a lot licence money for Blizzard in place, this is probably not going to happen. So SC2 will lose relevance for the players. With less and less relevance for players and less and less viewers of the professional scene, SC2 will be considered, if not is already a cash cow that dies soon(tm).
What do YOU think about that?
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In my opinion the game needs to be balanced for the players
How is this possible? Pros are relatively close to each other in micro,macro.multitasking. scouting and game knowledge. But for players below them there exists massive variety in these categories.
I give a very simple example. Storm. Against a terran who can't split at all it looks broken as ****. But if terran is better at splitting (or toss is worse at storming) storm doesn't do nearly as much damage. In that case storm appears much weaker. You seem to agree with this.
I just don't see how you could have asymmetric rts game balanced for players who aren't good at it.
Though game balance is hardly ever the reason why low level player loses. Both players usually do hundred mistakes that each one had bigger effect to the outcome of the game than balance. Sure balance is the easiest to blame.
Sc2 is a competitive game. Anyone who gets discouraged by couple losses won't play ladder for a long time no matter what.
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your Country52796 Posts
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I give a very simple example. Storm. Against a terran who can't split at all it looks broken as ****. But if terran is better at splitting (or toss is worse at storming) storm doesn't do nearly as much damage. In that case storm appears much weaker. You seem to agree with this.
Of course I do, and I do not consider storm or marines as imbalanced. I would argue that performing marine splitting and psi-storming as different actions that require different skill sets. I mean recognizing a game situation with a lot of clumped up marines and casting a psi-strom could be seen as less difficult than microing an army of marines recognizing a high templar in the Protoss army with enough energy for psi-storm and splitting the marines asap.
And as soon as this situative actions are preceived as not equally difficult to perform, it may be considered imbalanced, although it isn't by numbers. Nice splits and nice storms happen, as terrible splits and terrible storms do on pro level.
I have no solution, but I hope we can create some ideas on that.
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op, broodwar is far more difficult for low level players and far more rewarding for skilled players, yet it still has a larger casual base these many years later.. unsurprisingly, it also has a much bigger and healthier pro scene as well... i dont understand your logic when the easier game is doing worse with regard to both new players and pro players alike.. sc2 just doesnt reward the time commitment, and it doesn't respect its players. thus, it is dying.. korea has complained about not having ways to distinguish themselves in game, foreigners have complained about not having social features that were in WC3. but the tech just wasn't good enough to implement lan mode or clans or tournies or name changes or chat channels or custom ladders or good custom game lobbies or friends lists exogenous to bnet .20.. nor were the 100s of bugs with the sc2 client ever fixed, even when compiled into a massive thread.
on top of that, the campaign, the one thing that casual players should have been able to enjoy on their own as they learned the mechanics, was made into a laughing stock with worse than amateur writing and a complete 180 of narrative tone, alienating anyone into thinking (accurately) that they were playing a kid's game instead of an RTS.
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On May 01 2016 04:04 Endymion wrote: yet it still has a larger casual base these many years later...
how many people play bw?
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broodwar is far more difficult for low level players and far more rewarding for skilled players, yet it still has a larger casual base these many years later.. unsurprisingly, it also has a much bigger and healthier pro scene as well...
I don't know enough about BW to comment on this statement. What I see is that there are nowadays some more players that have featured streams on TL with more viewers than the current SC2 Streams have. When I check Twitch.tv though, there are far more streams and viewers on the SC2 section than on BW.
i dont understand your logic when the easier game is doing worse with regard to both new players and pro players alike.
I'm not sure what you mean with that. I tried to not mention that SC2 is more difficult than other games or whatsoever. I agree SC2 is a diffcult game to learn and to play.
If I would have to make an ultimate statement, I would argue that SC2 is a game that is well balanced (not perfect balanced) by numbers. With that I mean the pure math and the figures around damage health and energy of units and structures.
I would not agree on a statememt that the mechanics necessary to perform the actions necessary to operate the different races, their base management and their unit management are well balanced. This happens to be true maybe only for the very high end players of the professional scene.
An imbalance that is perceived by the players, is in my opinion not because of an inferior math. I think it is perceived because of inferior abilities of ther players to operate their race at the right level. This ultimately will be considered as not fair and may disencourage the players to continue to play an in their eyes unfair game.
Let me give an analogy of sports. Let's consider a tennis match. For both players are the same rules in place. But both players may not have the same rackets. One player may have a wooden racket which is big heavy and long like the ones used in the 60ies the other player may have to use a very modern fiberglass racked. Lets consider these rackets are the races you can pick in a meele game of starcraft. On a pro level the shorter player with the stronger arms and the right armtechnique for this racket may compete with the other player that fits better to the modern racket. In reality this would never happen because all tennis players do agree that the 60ies rackets are outdated and do not fit the modern style of tennis. But if on an amteur level of tennis a player would be forced to play with the 60ies racket, he probably would consider this as unfair and ultimately he would consider discontinuing playing tennis because he would never be able to compete with other amateur players which have other tools to play the tennis match. Although one could argue that the player just needs to adapt better on his racket.
One issue I could see, is that there is no way to find out which race fits the own skillset most, and there is no official support on mastering certain skills and ultimatley give players the opportunity to train the right skills for improvement in the game. Coming back to the comparison of SC2 and BW. I think that the differences of the engine of BW, lead to less imbalances of the skillset necessary to play the three races in a game of BW. In other words I think that the three races in BW need more similar skills to operate than the three races in SC2 do. This can lead to the impression that BW is in better balance than SC2, although at the end of the day both games are almost equally well balanced by the math.
When I say that I think the game shall be balanced for the players and not the professionals. I do not want to create in imbalance on the professional scene. The game needs to get more accessible and rewarding for casual players, maybe by giving them unique rewards for playing the game on a casual level which are not or much less valuable for pro players.
Something else I was thinking about was to create more randomness in the earlygame. By still having the 3 races but create some more degree of uncertainty. For example by introducing sub-factions with unique units to the races that are not revealed until certain coreunits are out on the map, rather than everso increase the pace of the game with ever faster and more dangerous harass units.
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I didn't win because the game is imbalanced. The game will die because Blizzard doesn't listen to me. I represent the opinions of most people.
Actually, in BW there were lots of players who would hear a race was harder than the others, and play it on purpose because of the ego cushion it provided by making victories sweeter and losses less painful, because they perceived the game as an uphill struggle.
What really kept BW alive was cool strategies in pro games that inspired people to want to boot up the game again. Lots of times people uninstall the game because they got bored or they found it took up too much time, only to reinstall it a few months later because of a really awesome game they saw. That's how a game that niche and difficult to play can survive. Just unending novelty. BW was always perceived by most people, even strong players, to not have perfect balance, but very influential and charismatic people would say that for the amount of variety BW offers, it's a total fluke how balanced it is, and that there's never a situation when the better player isn't going to be more favoured, and it's hard to take away from the victories of truly skilled players regardless of the match up. Sometimes the very interest some players garnered was due to their success in what were perceived to be uphill struggles. That aspect of BW really resonates with people, because it has parallels to your real life where things are often unfair, but you can still succeed with a lot of will power.
I don't think balance is terrifically important to a sport being popular. I mean, looking at physical sports, the teams with more money and ability to pay better players and staff clearly have a huge advantage, right? The guy with genetics more suited to the sport he plays has an advantage over you at the local football field, right? We play games for all kinds of reasons, and although we almost always want to win, winning isn't the only pleasure we get from competition.
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Japan11285 Posts
You know what keeps people playing a game? It is the simple fact that a game is interesting to play on any level. If you look at other successful games like BW, DotA, CS etc you'll see that whether you are a complete novice or a seasoned professional, a guy who plays custom/arcade games or a guy who plays in professional maps, the game can offer you interesting, fun stuff to do.
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You know what keeps people playing a game? It is the simple fact that a game is interesting to play on any level. If you look at other successful games like BW, DotA, CS etc
I wonder wether this is the case for other games that are played competitively 1vs1? Let's cross off BW from a list of other successful eSports titles. Which games are out there that are played 1vs1 on a competitve basis and do better than SC2.
Any Fighting games? TCG like Hearthstone or Magic the Gathering?
In the aspect of the game mechanics I would argue that Fighting games or TGC are far more accessible and balanced than a non-symetric RTS. Is this something that makes this games more competitive or less "unfair" in this aspect compared to SC2?
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