A lot of Koreans are benching their Zerg players in the Global StarCraft Team League (GSTL) right now in favor of Protoss and Terran. Do you think the new maps will help balance Zerg? Are there plans to balance Zerg anytime soon?
Dustin: We get a lot of feedback all the time about race balance. We've had private discussions with a number of pros who tell us the balance is almost perfect 50/50 across all three races. At the same time, we're not seeing a lot of strong Zerg players like we did in some of the earlier seasons. So, we're not entirely sure at this point whether there's a balance problem with Zerg or we're just not seeing the strong players choosing that race.
Now, we are planning on some fixes for Terran (read: nerfs) in the near future which may have a pretty significant impact on the relationship with Zerg. But I haven't had a chance to really study those maps enough to really know if it's going to "fix" Zerg. I'd have to agree that they're broken first before I would know, but I guess I don't know what the impact of the new maps are going to be yet. We'll just have to wait and see. From what I've gathered, and what I've seen, they are going with more macro heavy maps which will obviously tend to favor Zerg strategies. In the beta we found with macro heavy maps that Zerg was just way overpowered and unstoppable. But that was the beta, what, six months ago?
Things have changed so much since then, both in terms of the balance but, more importantly, in terms of community and how they've learned to play. When those maps are so powerful, Terran was not nearly as dominant as it is now. The drops weren't as effective, people didn't know how to use the units nearly as well as they do now, so it's kind of hard to say but we'll just have to wait and see.
The reality is, is that the tournament results have often flopped around and gone in unexpected ways without us making any fixes. We've seen unexpected wins all the time So there's usually a dominant race or a perception of a dominant race there or a perception of a weak race but sometimes the players will surprise us so we'll just have to wait and see what happens with this one. It could very easily have an impact and that's obviously cool and fun to watch them do that stuff. It's pretty neat to see people tinkering with the balance and map pool. It's always very exciting.
Dustin: We get a lot of feedback all the time about race balance. We've had private discussions with a number of pros who tell us the balance is almost perfect 50/50 across all three races. At the same time, we're not seeing a lot of strong Zerg players like we did in some of the earlier seasons. So, we're not entirely sure at this point whether there's a balance problem with Zerg or we're just not seeing the strong players choosing that race.
Now, we are planning on some fixes for Terran (read: nerfs) in the near future which may have a pretty significant impact on the relationship with Zerg. But I haven't had a chance to really study those maps enough to really know if it's going to "fix" Zerg. I'd have to agree that they're broken first before I would know, but I guess I don't know what the impact of the new maps are going to be yet. We'll just have to wait and see. From what I've gathered, and what I've seen, they are going with more macro heavy maps which will obviously tend to favor Zerg strategies. In the beta we found with macro heavy maps that Zerg was just way overpowered and unstoppable. But that was the beta, what, six months ago?
Things have changed so much since then, both in terms of the balance but, more importantly, in terms of community and how they've learned to play. When those maps are so powerful, Terran was not nearly as dominant as it is now. The drops weren't as effective, people didn't know how to use the units nearly as well as they do now, so it's kind of hard to say but we'll just have to wait and see.
The reality is, is that the tournament results have often flopped around and gone in unexpected ways without us making any fixes. We've seen unexpected wins all the time So there's usually a dominant race or a perception of a dominant race there or a perception of a weak race but sometimes the players will surprise us so we'll just have to wait and see what happens with this one. It could very easily have an impact and that's obviously cool and fun to watch them do that stuff. It's pretty neat to see people tinkering with the balance and map pool. It's always very exciting.
Read more: http://www.g4tv.com/thefeed/blog/post/710301/eSports-Interview-with-StarCraft-2-Director-Dustin-Browder-and-Senior-eSports-Manager-Joong-King.html#ixzz1DVKGksfp