[SC2B] A Shot In The Dark

It’s been nearly 3 weeks since I played my first game on battle.net and lots of things have happened since. Blizzard came out with three patches and strategies were evolving on a daily basis. In the first week of ladder the matchmaking seemed intent on finding opponents quickly rather than appropriately and high platinums were often matched up with players of lower rankings resulting in a lot of +2 and -30 games with not too much to learn from. In one of the patches, I don’t exactly know which one since I haven’t seen Blizzard make a statement about this at all, it seemed things changed and the search now often takes up to a few minutes. But when it’s done it will have found an opponent for you around your own level. I can’t stress enough how important this is for testing as tons of people are laddering to improve nowhere is the balance tested better than at the highest levels.

Before Garimto even made a blog post, I was sitting on MSN when Smuft brought up the possibility of a warp-gate strategy he was using. We brainstormed a little bit and it didn’t take long before people were dying to it left and right at the Platinum ranks. Some took their losses better than others but in the end it should be your goal to find strategies that win you the game. That should be your goal when playing and it should be your goal when Beta testing so that in their game-statistics Blizzard can find what is being used, what works and what doesn’t work.

Auto-proxy
I’ll use this opportunity to address a recent PvP trend. As most of you following the Beta have noticed a warp-gate rush has been popularized and is seemingly unstoppable. It was after the post about Garimto’s blog and the recent PlayXP and Zotac tournaments that it really became the norm. Before this some people used it effectively but for the most part people didn’t know about it. Seeing it in high level play at these tournaments and be so successful quickly spread the strategy like a virus throughout the ladder. You can’t find a game at Platinum anymore where the game doesn’t revolve around warp-gate rushing. There is an instant-win counter to it and that’s proxy gating. This leads to some hilarious games where both guys will be proxy gating trying to out-micro each other in the middle of the map. I’m having fun with the way PvP is right now because short as it may be, as the strategy is still new it feels very dynamic, high pressure and you absolutely cannot make mistakes. At the same time it is clear that this is no way for PvP to be long-term. No one wants to solely be proxy gating and warp-gate rushing for the rest of their SC careers.


So far it seems no counter has been found that allows you to tech without dying. Most likely this will never be found either. If you are thinking “I wish these guys would just stfu and look for counters instead of complaining” you are in the wrong newspost. I won’t say it’s impossible to counter properly because SC is still a dynamic game and it would be foolish to think I have gotten to the bottom of it. However the time-span and unit combination at which this strategy is happening is so early in the game that your options are limited. Most good players now have a solid understanding of the earliest moments in the game and no one has been able to come up with a realistic counter that is not proxy gating. If Blizzard takes these games and opinions as a reason to change something they really need to pull something new out of their wizard hat, as warp-gates are so important for Protoss in the other matchups that you can’t just take them out of the game or drastically change something about their tech-route and timing. It might be Blizzard have to come up with some ‘dumb’ rule that allows them to take care of this problem for PvP but leave the other matchups the way they want them to be. Throughout the many slightly-different topics on this issue there have been many solutions that might work.

1) When two enemy pylon fields meet the warp function ceases to work.
2) The further away from the Nexus the longer your warp-in takes.
3) Warp-gates higher in tech.

I probably missed a few, but these stuck out more than others. In the first situation whenever you build a pylon in someone’s base he can just build one next to it; cancelling the warp-in while the pylon of the defender completes. This would have little implications for the matchup as a whole since you can still warp-in stuff mid-game to almost any spot on the map. If anything the slight implication of building a pylon next to your opponents somewhere in the middle of the game sounds like strategic fun to me.

The second one speaks for itself. It would have a slight implication for other matchups as your units get to places to defend slower, however if it’s say a max of 10 seconds delay to do it all the way in your opponents base, which is huge for a rush, it would be somewhere between 0-10 for most mid-game locations. It is still a large advantage compared to actually walking to the spot.

The last one feels like it is going to have implications for all the matchups throughout. It is more risky and would actually in itself possibly need weeks for a thorough test.

Although this post was originally about these next two issues, the proxy gate discussion just had to be brought up, especially in light of the recent PvPs I played. Anyway, let's jump right in and look at the main focus of this post - the problem with fighting units auto-targeting workers in battle, and the fact that with vision units shoot up a choke with 100% damage.

In every great RTS you need to have a balance between economy, rushing and teching. We all know this and it’s nothing new. Currently the way it is in SC2 is that because your high ground is barely an advantage, and your workers get slaughtered when defending (except for scvs somewhat because they’re mighty strong), games are often more about massing than teching.

Zen and the Art of Defense
The defenders advantage exists so that a battle (both in-game and mind) between rushing and teching is created with both routes being optional. Currently the defenders advantage is not playing a big enough role. Once Zerglings or Zealots get into your base you're doomed and no amount of workers will help you overcome the numbers. People need to be able to fight for their tech and economic advantages with defense, while others try to do damage to an opponent’s economy to offset the initial investment of their rush. Both of these options need to be viable in order to enlarge the creative spectrum of the game.


The workers being auto-target while attacking will have you end up with very few of them if you don’t match his combat units in numbers when fighting. Basically if units get into your base you’re screwed, which is also part of the reason why the warp-gate rush is so strong. They will eat your peons alive and leave nothing behind.


I’m trying to think of an advantage of workers becoming auto-targets in battle. The only thing it does is quickly sway a game in the favor of those entering the opponent’s base. It doesn’t add anything to the game except making mass/rushing your opponent more viable and end games more quickly where you can hold off attacks in other games. By doing this the balance between defense and offense feels disturbed and moves the game towards the favor of the offensive player in matchups where a rush might get you into your opponents main. To counter this you need units; which in turn leads to a game that promotes early and mid-game massing over strategy. I’ve asked around among top players for their opinion on this and so far I haven’t found a single player who was in favor of keeping this auto-targeting of workers in the game. It could be we are all nostalgic and need to look at SC2 as if it’s a new game as some of you will no doubt yell in this thread, or it could be that there is actually a valid point to be made.

A Moral Highground
The other one is doing damage to high ground as long as you have vision. If you are rushing an opponent you will obviously have vision of his high ground and do 100% damage. This negates the effect you want the chokes to have. On the other hand if you have a mass of units dropped on your cliff: tanks, marines, maybe a few vikings, it is very hard to get vision of this. If you can't see units that are firing at you, how do you counter? Let's look at a game from the PlayXP invitational between hyo and kkong. With the Colossus killed, all that stands in the way of complete cliff domination is one scan and obs snipe. In the game itself it never happens, but it's easily foreseeable in future TvP cliff drops.


With 100% hits on vision, the games get pushed to extremes; chokes become less of a factor when rushing (it's not hard to get vision of a choke early game) and cliffs become immensely strong. Basically, it's all or nothing, and this becomes really hard to balance, especially when it comes to maps. If cliffs on LT were tough in Broodwar, in SC2, they're golden ground - get there, setup and you literally cant be budged.

So, what am I saying? Both rushing, attacking and cliff drops need to be viable, but tech, defending and actually maintaining your expansion need to be viable as well so it becomes a battle of who does what better and smarter. A solution to this could be just have units do X% less damage or miss X% of the time when shooting up the high-ground and let units that are being fired at from a cliff have vision of the unit that is hitting it. These simple fixes will go a long way in making cliffs and chokes serve their purpose better and place more emphasis on good reaction time, positioning and micro. In fact, just so we're clear about the details, here's a TL stats nerd with a number crunch.


Try it out, Blizzard!
Having played this game for a few weeks, I strongly believe that fixing these three things will greatly improve the reach and longevity of the game. Of course, you don't just need to take my word for it - read TL, read other sites, and see what top players have to say. Based on the many, many discussions I have had over the past few weeks, 9/10 dentists agree - we need solutions for these problems.

So, over to you, Blizzard. This is the Beta afterall, so why not just change it and see if it improves the quality of the game? If it doesn’t you can always go back to the way it was, but I think you will see it does.


Resources
- Liquid`Nazgul PvP replay pack