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So as usual for Blizzard rebalancing and updating the game there is a huge debate on what should and should not be done, with the designers getting flak for not listening to the community. Especially TL seems to be a platform for voicing negativity and giving new ideas for radically changing the game. But why are there so many people complaining, and why is Blizzard so unwilling to try the ideas.
I'm not going to hide the fact that I'm a supporter of StarBow and my opinions and analysis is marked by my connection to this mod.
A few hours ago a redditor posted an analysis on a completely different, but strangely related topic: American football vs European Football (soccer). His post made me think that what we see in the dispute between Blizzard and the community is a reflection of two different ways of thinking about "sports".
Link to the post: http://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/32q4fk/length_of_game_vs_actual_gameplayfixed_oc/cqdwped
For those that didn't read it, he basically describes that American sports are more about statistics, methodical strategy and quantifiable improvements. European sports are more about gameflow, unpredictability and displays of great individual skill.
In the case of SC2 the current Blizzard team seems to subscribe to the American model, while a lot of the (TL) community are fans of the European model. Blizzard wants to see statistics, compare supply counts and mineral incomes at a predictable pace, with short bursts of well planned action where strategic brilliance wins out over unpredictable micro (I exagerrate her, but I think the point is valid).
The community (or rather the vocal oposing part) on the other hand want a game more akin to European sports. Unpredictable and dynamic game flow with longer micro intense engagements. Economy that is hard to optimize and gives a lot of options for different gameplans. Units that don't have a specific planned purpose, but requires creativity and skill to utilize in multiple situations.
These models are in direct contrast and nearly impossible to merge. If you want measurable progress, the long unfruitful offenses of soccer is frustrating and boring just as the unpredictable results of removing damage points or introducing stronger high ground mechanics seem to rub Blizzard the wrong way. If you want dynamic free flowing play, the short bursts of action with long strategic pauses of Americal Football or ridgid economy setup of SC2 is frustrating and illogical to you.
The flip side of this is that there are also people outside of Blizzard HQ that like their model for (E)Sports. They like the way you can compare two games and clearly see a difference in skill and achievements. They like that you can take a look at two armies and reasonably estimate who is going to win an engagement. They like that units have a clear purpose, and time to be used. They like all this because it makes the game about strategy and raw skill on a level hard to achieve otherwise. They don't like that one player constantly outthinks the other, wins the engagements, gets the critical expansions and has better macro - only to lose because the other guy pulled out a perfect micro trick or surprise risky drop that ended the game.
What do you guys think. Is this line of thinking silly, or could it help explain the divides we see in the community?
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Strategic brilliance? Like a 4 gate? A 6 pool?
Blizzard seems to think 'strategy' means every unit needs a hard counter. They think 'micro' means every unit needs an active ability.
Maybe blizzard does think game after game of 3 base timing attack is exciting. Or perhaps 40 minutes of nothing into 1 deathball fight.
I don't even know where I'm going with this.
Perhaps you're right about blizzard just wanting something completely different for sc2 than most fans do. What it clear to me, is that blizzard has no clue as to how to adopt any style of design and stick to it. They've been mucking about for years now.
I think blizzard wants to make sc2 the same esports success that brood war was, without making it like brood war. And they just dont know how, simple as that.
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I'm purposefully avoiding too many subjective opinions on what Blizzard should and should not do. I am merely trying to outline what I believe to be a fundemental diffence in design between the SC2 team and the community.
That said, I agree that Blizzard have not made the best decisions so far.
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Personally I'm thus far unmoved by complaints about 'hard counters'
The most exciting situations in SC2 involve the interplay of hard counters. ZvT Bio is almost all hard-counters: Mutas vs Medivacs, Marines vs Mutas, Banelings vs Marines - it doesn't matter if units hard-counter other units when there are several unit types mixed in together. Quite the reverse: it elevates the significance of micro on both sides.
Hard counters help to prevent degenerate "mass one unit" strategies from dominating.
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On April 16 2015 18:29 Umpteen wrote: Personally I'm thus far unmoved by complaints about 'hard counters'
The most exciting situations in SC2 involve the interplay of hard counters. ZvT Bio is almost all hard-counters: Mutas vs Medivacs, Marines vs Mutas, Banelings vs Marines - it doesn't matter if units hard-counter other units when there are several unit types mixed in together. Quite the reverse: it elevates the significance of micro on both sides.
Hard counters help to prevent degenerate "mass one unit" strategies from dominating. You're right that it can create interesting plays. The thing is, blizzard designs every unit for a specific purpose. Someone mentioned this in the lotv patch thread and I couldn't agree more. Every time they change a unit their reasoning is; we want lurkers to be used against roaches or we want adeps to be an early game harrass unit. Instead of just making units which are well designed on their own, they think everything should fit a specific role.
Let the players figure out the role, I say.
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On April 16 2015 18:29 Umpteen wrote: Personally I'm thus far unmoved by complaints about 'hard counters'
The most exciting situations in SC2 involve the interplay of hard counters. ZvT Bio is almost all hard-counters: Mutas vs Medivacs, Marines vs Mutas, Banelings vs Marines - it doesn't matter if units hard-counter other units when there are several unit types mixed in together. Quite the reverse: it elevates the significance of micro on both sides.
Hard counters help to prevent degenerate "mass one unit" strategies from dominating.
Imo hard counters make it so that you have to build a certain unit to counter something, if you have multiple soft counters you can be more flexible in your builds and units compositions making the game more diverse.
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On April 16 2015 18:29 Umpteen wrote: Personally I'm thus far unmoved by complaints about 'hard counters'
The most exciting situations in SC2 involve the interplay of hard counters. ZvT Bio is almost all hard-counters: Mutas vs Medivacs, Marines vs Mutas, Banelings vs Marines - it doesn't matter if units hard-counter other units when there are several unit types mixed in together. Quite the reverse: it elevates the significance of micro on both sides.
Hard counters help to prevent degenerate "mass one unit" strategies from dominating. Except there's precisely no hardcounter system in bio TvZ...
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On April 16 2015 18:29 Umpteen wrote: Personally I'm thus far unmoved by complaints about 'hard counters'
The most exciting situations in SC2 involve the interplay of hard counters. ZvT Bio is almost all hard-counters: Mutas vs Medivacs, Marines vs Mutas, Banelings vs Marines - it doesn't matter if units hard-counter other units when there are several unit types mixed in together. Quite the reverse: it elevates the significance of micro on both sides.
Hard counters help to prevent degenerate "mass one unit" strategies from dominating.
Except nothing you mentioned is a hard counter. In fact, Marine vs Baneling is one of the prime examples of 'not a hard counter' because marines can be split to mitigate the damage of banelings, and banelings can be controlled to target groups of marines.
Hard counters are more like the dynamic between Gateway + Collosi and MMM + Vikings. Gateway units wreck Marine / Maurader until Stim + Medivacs are out to the extent that Terran is typically forced to turtle until that point in time, then MMM wrecks Gateway units so bad that Protoss has to turtle until they have a sufficient number of Collosi, then Gateway + Collosi wrecks MMM so bad that Terran has essentially no choice but to make vikings to counter the Collosi. There's micro involved, but it isn't fun, interesting or dynamic.
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I see where you're going with this but I think the analysis is a bit off. A crucial concept is that of control but I mean something like the broader TheDWF version, rather than micro-only control.
On the one side, if you crunch numbers and probabilities, you can become a player that wins 51-75% of the time through "strategic brilliance", i.e., rolling the die in such a way that your cheeses and timings are more likely to succeed than fail. This is how I understand why Artosis, the long lost fan of macro, says something like that Rain is not playing Protoss correctly because he doesn't mix up enough Protoss BS into his builds. And at the same time sOs is one of the most successful Protosses. The opposite to this is a game that is mechanically more demanding where each interaction has limited potential to sway the outcome of the match. Calculating the probability of each engagement becomes exponentially more difficult the more there are, as each is dependent on the prior ones (and the mechanical skill requirement being higher, your execution isn't guaranteed before the engagement). The beauty of the latter idea is that it (at least seems to) reward the more gifted player. The downside is that it removes a great deal of the predictability and structure from games, opening up a vast number of different branching lines of outcomes (while seemingly reducing the number of strategies, as cheeses and timings have a reduced role).
Blizzard has leaned towards the former concept in SC2, while a great deal of the criticism comes from the perceived lack of control, where build win percentage calculations tend to be more important, reducing the amount of control in a game.
I probably haven't been entirely clear on my thinking, so here's an illustrating example: a BO win (DT v no-detection) removes control during a game. All the control occurred before the game when the players chose their respective builds. But if the game-ending attack happens before the first point of deviation from the build, the game was basically decided before it started (assuming half-competent execution, something that's the norm these days).
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On April 16 2015 18:29 Umpteen wrote: Personally I'm thus far unmoved by complaints about 'hard counters'
The most exciting situations in SC2 involve the interplay of hard counters. ZvT Bio is almost all hard-counters: Mutas vs Medivacs, Marines vs Mutas, Banelings vs Marines - it doesn't matter if units hard-counter other units when there are several unit types mixed in together. Quite the reverse: it elevates the significance of micro on both sides.
Hard counters help to prevent degenerate "mass one unit" strategies from dominating.
That's not exact . Banelings hardcounter marines,yes. But marauders softcounter Zerglings and Banes, just like Wmines, and mutas are more than a Medivac hardcounter, being reciprocal counteers with marines until upgrades hit the field early mutas>early marines, lategame marines>lategame mutas.... So probably banes are the only true hardcounters there. Mines can cause friendly fire and can get good connections or not. The game is full of subtle nuances.
I think the "hardcoutner issue" is something that was pointing more at Hellbats, Marauder strength, Immos, Tempests,and possibly the new terran unit, since they have destructive unit interactions, aka they can easily own. Immos owned Tanks and Thors (ownage of mech), Tempests made BL unplayable, and Marauders(MMM) have always been really really strong, specially vs P.
For now, Immos, Tempests and Marauders have been nerfed or tweaked to adapt to a less hardcountering design. Marauders are far weaker against Protoss with guardian shield and Ultras, Tempests no longer break BL and BC's in straight fights, and Immortals are specially weaker against Siege tanks.
And I'm almost sure that Hellbats are going to need some rework, specially now that Protoss is going to play heavy on light units (Adept, Zealot, Disruptor, Templars) since their utility and movement is quite limited, and they destroy the already poor SH (locusts). Also Parasitic Bomb from Viper and possibly Abduct are going to need some tuning.
So I agree with you, and I think that is not the "hardcountering" mechanics what's really an issue, but how broken some unit interactions can be.
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Hard counter units allow for change of pace in the game. It makes the unit a "key unit", the one to protect. Immortals in soul train for example, it helps to make it the unit to look for.
There is hard counter available in SC2 but so long you can avoid the hard counter aspect by having more numbers and interesting micro to take them out, it's completely OK.
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On April 16 2015 20:10 ETisME wrote: Hard counter units allow for change of pace in the game. It makes the unit a "key unit", the one to protect. Immortals in soul train for example, it helps to make it the unit to look for.
There is hard counter available in SC2 but so long you can avoid the hard counter aspect by having more numbers and interesting micro to take them out, it's completely OK.
I disagree. Immortal is the main reason why Terran can't go mech. You can't beat Immortals by going "more" mech and with interesting micro.
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similar to "big inning" versus small ball in baseball
SC2 has too much terrible, terrible damage (big inning). ;;
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This thread is a mess.
First, it tries to compare how people view the game into two camps, American and European, based on differing definitions of football. I don't know what that tries to accomplish except divide people.
In the end, we all want the same thing: We want a game with a diverse strategy game with a very high skill ceiling that is fun to play.
Let's work toward that by increasing the strategic diversity. Doing that will naturally raise the skill ceiling and variation of gameplay makes the game more fun.
Second, despite carefully labeling how people view the game, the term "hard counter" is not defined. And now people are confusing counters with hard counters.
Counters are good, in the way that Marines counter Mutalisks. Due the characteristic of Marines and Mutalisks, the Terran player simply having Marines doesn't make Mutalisks obsolete. Mutalisks obviously can fly and with micro have opportunities to find weak points and harass that makes them useful even if large numbers of Marines are on the field.
Hard counters are bad, for example the way that Tempest counter Broodlords. There is nothing the Broodlords can do in combat to make themselves useful versus Tempests, no special micro, no fancy tricks. Having Tempest simply removes Broodlords from the game, which in turn makes Tempests less likely to be fielded (the same interaction existed between Immortals and Thors/Tanks in WOL, we rarely saw Immortals because they were so good against Tanks and Thors, and no one build Tanks or Thors because Immortals were so good against them). And that is terrible game design because it literally removes units from the game.
If a good Zerg player sees Tempests, they won't be building Broodlords. But if they see Marines, they'll could still be making Mutalisks.
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On April 17 2015 02:01 BronzeKnee wrote:
Hard counters are bad, for example the way that Tempest counter Broodlords. There is nothing the Broodlords can do in combat to make themselves useful versus Tempests, no special micro, no fancy tricks. Having Tempest simply removes Broodlords from the game, which in turn makes Tempests less likely to be fielded (the same interaction existed between Immortals and Thors/Tanks in WOL, we rarely saw Immortals because they were so good against Tanks and Thors, and no one build Tanks or Thors because Immortals were so good against them). And that is terrible game design because it literally removes units from the game.
If a good Zerg player sees Tempests, they won't be building Broodlords. But if they see Marines, they'll could still be making Mutalisks.
Zerg player can win vs Tempest.. he builds AA with his broodlords...
Thors used to be somewhat competitive vs immortals before they nerfed strike cannons to the ground
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i prefer a game of flow with bursts of individual micro brilliance.
to your point about US Football versus Euro Football. i want a game that feels more "arcadey" and less "sim-y".
however, this is a minor, and subtle complaint that i have. overall, SC2 is hella fun.
On April 16 2015 23:33 purakushi wrote: similar "big inning" versus small ball in baseball
SC2 has too much terrible, terrible damage (big inning). ;;
baseball offense #s are plummeting...i guess its time to start testing those banelings for illegal steroid usage
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OP post is stupid. The real desing philosofy difference is that blizzard wants that units are used only in certain roles, when the community wants that units can be used with many different styles.
Lile if there is a strategy gaining any popularity that is not broken or OP in any way, blizzard always will change something to have it removed for the one and only reason of "this was not our intented usage for the unit." See mech vs protoss in WoL. See voidray speed buff. See what it currently being done with the adept. Etc. Blizzard wants to be in charge of metagame, instead of letting the community.
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I don't think the analogy about American and European approaches to sports applies at all to the Blizzard approach to designing RTS vs the community's ideas about designing RTS. It's an entirely different conflict of approaches.
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I cringe when a new spell is introduced, it's more akin to dota rather micro worthy unit interaction. Unit micro can be impressive, plopping spells never will be.
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On April 17 2015 02:01 BronzeKnee wrote: This thread is a mess.
First, it tries to compare how people view the game into two camps, American and European, based on differing definitions of football. I don't know what that tries to accomplish except divide people.
In the end, we all want the same thing: We want a game with a diverse strategy game with a very high skill ceiling that is fun to play.
Let's work toward that by increasing the strategic diversity. Doing that will naturally raise the skill ceiling and variation of gameplay makes the game more fun.
Second, despite carefully labeling how people view the game, the term "hard counter" is not defined. And now people are confusing counters with hard counters.
Counters are good, in the way that Marines counter Mutalisks. Due the characteristic of Marines and Mutalisks, the Terran player simply having Marines doesn't make Mutalisks obsolete. Mutalisks obviously can fly and with micro have opportunities to find weak points and harass that makes them useful even if large numbers of Marines are on the field.
Hard counters are bad, for example the way that Tempest counter Broodlords. There is nothing the Broodlords can do in combat to make themselves useful versus Tempests, no special micro, no fancy tricks. Having Tempest simply removes Broodlords from the game, which in turn makes Tempests less likely to be fielded (the same interaction existed between Immortals and Thors/Tanks in WOL, we rarely saw Immortals because they were so good against Tanks and Thors, and no one build Tanks or Thors because Immortals were so good against them). And that is terrible game design because it literally removes units from the game.
If a good Zerg player sees Tempests, they won't be building Broodlords. But if they see Marines, they'll could still be making Mutalisks.
BornKnee always such a clear voice
Hard counters discouraging both itself and the countered is a very good point
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