Hello! I've decided to venture out from quiet blog land with this latest thread and see how it goes.
Background: It seems that while I've been slowly putting together these videos over the last week or so, several threads have cropped up expressing a similar concerns have cropped up
And there were a whole bunch of Fungal threads, but this the one that pushed me to get a move on organizing my thoughts and planning this next one out:
Also from the latest Browder video, it seems that that they are leaning towards making Fungal a projectile. I think that could probably help. There may be a variety of solutions to the problem. However, I think many of these complaints speak to a far broader problem that underlies the spell system of SC2.
A major underlying problem is that the spells are simply too prevalent in SC2 game-play. Spell casters that can limit the movement on the other side are playing too great a role in SC2's battles.
Before spells were icing on the cake. We had the foundation of a much slower economy (no maxing on a few bases at 12 minutes), units that weren't a-move by design and strong defender's advantage that led to very positional game. And the spells were the icing. The moments of spectacle that stood out from the strong foundations. However, now spells are having to do the heavy lifting to make the game interesting due to an extremely fast maxing and remaxing economy/ macro mechanics and minimized defender's advantage, and sluggish unit handling.
Our cake is made mostly of icing and while icing is good, it's a bit much.
Pretty tasty, but we might just get sick of it.
The domination of these sorts of spells on SC2 game play is due in large part by how easy it is to cast off a whole bunch at once. Think about any spell that is a problem. From Fungals to Force fields, what if there was a way to have a whole lot less of them? Would they be so much of a problem then?
It is time to take another look at Smart Casting. Similar to my Overkill blog, I'd like to make the case that Smart Casting is not truly smart or at the very least that it is a design choice with different implications rather than it simply being the 'smarter' option.
There are many consequences intended and unintended by adding Smart Casting. I will look at three major areas. 1) Spells that do damage 2) Spells that restrict movement 3) View-ability/ Spectating.
I do have Cliff Notes spoiler underneath. There are a couple additional points that I didn't address in my videos. These I'll indicate with red.
A Plead/Caution Please hold off on the "fighting against the game/interface" argument. Just temporarily put it aside and read the OP and if it still applies, then I guess have at it.
The reason why I want you to hold off is because spell-casters are already a conscious choice to make the game more difficult. We don't have to have spell-casters at all in an RTS. Adding spell-casters intentionally adds a unit that does NOT have have an automated attack and REQUIRES you to manually cast or it will be in-effective. We are adding difficulty to the game on purpose simply by designing spell-casters.
If you want to talk about fighting against the interface, start there. Because the question is not whether we are making the game difficult with Smart casting or not, but to what extent? And then what is the consequences on the game-play of adding so-called Smart casting vs not having it?
What is Smart-Casting? Smart-casting disallows simultaneous casting. In BW, if you have a group of casters selected, you hit cast a spell, all will fire off their spells. If they are grouped together, the spells will go off in the same area. If they are selected when spread, the spells will go off spread out. (Magic Box casting.) If some spell casters are further behind, the spells may be staggerd. More on this in my videos.
SC2, if you have a group of casters, you cast only one will go off no matter what. You must click the ground repeatedly to get them to cast. Thus hold 'f' and spam click to get a wall of Force-Fields.
Opening Comparison: -Nukes- If AoE damage is more easily available, the damage will necessarily be decreased per shot/spell.
Smart-casting- by design spells are more easily available. Therefore, damage is nerfed to individual spells. (See original beta EMP and Storm nerfs.) We don't keep the same spell and it's now smarter. The spell itself must be changed (nerfed) in order to be 'smart.'
Four Implications/ Consequences:
1) Smart-casting, not necessarily easier (or not easy enough for that casual player). a) We've simply raised the bar for how many storms must be cast in order to get a similar swing in the battle. The spell has been diluted from a few powerful spells to many weaker spells due to smart-casting. The casting requirement has actually gone up to get equivalent game changing damage. It might be somewhat easier, but probably not for the sort of player that couldn't be bothered to get off one or two storms in BW.
b) Also some incentive lost to learn how to cast spells because individually the damage spells don't feel powerful. Learning how to storm faster is addicting in BW because they're so powerful.
2) Diminished Decision Making -Change from high impact damage, concentrated in limited areas to spells evenly distributed on the screen/ army. -Fewer spells cast overall, need to make the few count. -Uneven unit movement (BW) creates targets. Uniform unit movement (SC2) where you place the spell on the army doesn't matter so much. Just place lots of them.
3) Diminished Harassment Potential -Storm drops/ harassment requires highly concentrated spells in specific locations. With smart-casting, the spell is balanced around the spell easily saturating the entire screen. -Therefore, storm drops don't work as well as in BW. (This is one of the harass units/ non-deathball units that Blizzard is searching for and it's right under their noses.) -Yes there is some players that harass, but it's not as prevalent. -Possibly further issues on how easily warp-prisms can be sniped. Not entirely sure, but smart-casting is a major cause I would argue.
4) Mundane Spell-casting -Anything in LR should be taken with a grain of salt, but as a whole people are far less in awe of spells and can be even derisive of caster hype over good spell casting. People know about the spam clicking. -Smart-casting spell difficulty is a fairly linear increase. -Without spell-casting, the difficulty is exponential. The excitement is comparably exponential because many, many spells casted is a rare, special event. -Spells also retain their damage and are therefore all the more exciting.
Final Thoughts -4 Story House Analogy - Wire-frame casting, Clone casting, and Magic Box casting. -Smart-casting is actually slower than Magic Box casting which is simultaneous casting. (aka it is a feature that actually gets in the way of the better players.) I suppose the closest you can get is shift-click casting, but it's still sequential casting.
Spells on Defence -I actually am starting to think that non-smart-casting allows damage spells to be better for defence. It is far better on defence to have a couple AoE damage spells that immediately knocks out a cluster of the raiders rather than equally damaging the entire raiding force, but killing nothing outright.
It is the same reason why target firing is so effective and why you want to pull back damaged units. Damaging 10 units equally that continue firing is less strong than killing two units completely so there is only 8 firing back. Damaged units do as much units as full health damage, so it is better to kill a few than damage all, but kill none. Smart-casting units are balanced around how easy it is to get off all the spells in a hurry so the individual spell damage is less and it is harder to kill units outright.
Without smart-casting, I'm starting to think, spell-casters would actually operate better outside of the deathball and be able to hold their own behind defensive positions in outlying expansions.
-Unit Design- microbility is limited. (See this blog A-Move By Design if you're unsure what I mean. I now have a tldr version.) In short. The issue is burst damage and how quickly a unit can transition from attacking and moving. -Therefore, to make units interesting, spells and abilities are added to even greater numbers of units.
-Spells/Abilities in Question: Fungal, Forcefield, Graviton Beam, Time Warp, Concussive Shell, and Vortex (although Vortex is unique.) -BW has same sorts of spells, but they do not dominate the game-play near as much because it's harder to use.
-Smart casting creates a compositional imbalance for these sorts of spells where they have too great an impact on the game-play
- Who Controls Your Army? These spells are primarily about you controlling your opponent's units rather than you control your own units better while I control my units better. The more dominant these sorts of spells are in game-play, the more frustrating the game becomes. Too much control of your units goes to your opponent.
-Spell Domination is the Problem The spells themselves may not be bad, but smart-casting makes it too dominant regardless of whether the game has balanced with this in mind. I mean, I guess SC2 could turn into just a game of Casters preventing each others armies from moving. But I feel this would ultimately be dissatisfying.
Concussive Shell I never really talked about the marauder, but a passive slow ability is no good in my opinion. It directly impacts the other players ability to micro without gaining any appreciable micro by the Terran. Yes it's easier to stutter step that way, but a far superior method is to play with burst damage, and the delay between attacking and moving again. This allows the Terran unit to micro better, but allows their opponent to continue micro-ing. Passive slow abilities diminishes micro in one of the worst possible way. Think about it this way- stalker vs marine micro in the early game. How can the Terran counter? Just upgrade a spell and buy your way past the micro war and you can now trap retreating stalkers with a slow. Not much additional micro required.
I briefly mentioned WoW and MOBA games in the problem of clutter. Here it is expanded.
WoW example: Blizzcon 2011 Tourney
There's a lot of spells going down, but it's difficult to discern the individual parts of the battle beyond that there are a lot of spells.
League of Legends example
Specifically Team Fights. I say this as someone who plays League of Legends, but Team Fights are very cluttered due to the number of spells and abilities going down. When I first started, I'd actually lose track of where my character was. Maybe for that reason I, to this day, prefer ranged units that stay on the periphery of the battle. You can tell that spells are going down, but if you sit down and are a casual or have never played, Team Fights are going to look extremely confusing. 30:40 is another Team Fight
In both cases, you can learn what's going on. But it's not as easy to just pick up watching due to the amount of stuff going on. It's just a bit overwhelming.
-Spells are good, but add extra information. Therefore diminishing returns for every extra spells we add. -We could probably add 10 attack-retreat type micro for every 1 spell simply in regards to clarity. -Important for spectating- that spells are obvious what they do, rather than have weird buffs and debuffs. (Devourers and Consume.)
-The number of spells in BW is deceptive as many were not used frequently. This is actually a good thing for view-ability/ clarity. (I used BW spells as non-examples!!!) -Adding more spells to make things more interesting, combined with smart-casting leads to a very cluttered viewing experience.
-Spells that look very similar- Protoss Bubbles (The Disco race according to ) -FF, Graviton, Time Warp, Guardian Shield. -FF, Corruption, and Blinding Cloud- all green spells. Corruption in particular is VERY hard to see. And Corruption spell is very difficult to tell what it does differently from other spells just by watching the screen and having no prior knowledge. Fungal and Storm require no prior knowledge to tell what the spell does.
Storm Comparison I forgot to compare these in my video.
A further thing that adds to the clutter is simply the opaqueness of Psionic Storm. Old as Beta critique. But you simply cannot tell what is underneath. It's a minor issue, but it does contribute to the clutter given how many can be thrown down in a hurry.
Side note on Vortex - I mentioned Vortex is a different category and it really is. + Show Spoiler +
The mothership' problem is not smart-casting. Its problem is it is TOO rare and TOO powerful. This is nothing new as it goes back to the old 'hero unit' complaint. It's bad not due to balance. It's bad because it swings the battle too much one way or the other depending on whether Vortex goes off for the Protoss or whether Neural uses it against the Protoss. Although admittedly, Zerg no longer even needs to counter Neural Vortex the Protoss. But the alternative is almost worse- the game grinding to halt as try to adjust and re-adjust to exactly the right position.
It has become a linchpin unit and its use or misuse swings the battle too far in any direction. This doesn't create an exciting situation because it actually promotes caution and passivity. The players know the power and how fast the battle can swing due to Vortex. Therefore, the engagement is delayed and they reposition. And delay again and reposition. And so on, and so on. You don't want to make a gutsy move with the mother ship. It's slow and there is only one of it and it takes a long time to rebuild and it's expensive. You want to sit there on top of your one army and play it safe and engage only when you have everything just right.
Similarly, as Zerg, you don't want to make a gutsy move. The Vortex could swallow up half your army (or 2-3 Broodlords that Zerg is better at spreading) and have a bunch of Archons thrown into the toilet. So they sit there behind Broodlord-Infestor cautiously poking around, adjusting and re-adjusting their line. The game comes to a grinding halt with a big stand-off.
It's not ballsy unit and it doesn't promote ballsy play. It's a slow unit that promotes passivity. Hero units have no place and Starcraft and should be stricken out or cut apart and divided into multiple ships with with limited power. I'm glad to see Browder wants to nerf it to oblivion, because this unit needs to disappear and fast.
Conclusion:
There are many threads that have recently appeared that critique the dominant role that Fungals and FF's are having on the game-play This critique has little to do with balance and more to do with spell-casters playing too large a role in the battles. They need to be toned down somehow so that they units go back to being a support unit that is unique and not core army composition.
There may be several solutions to this problem.
However, I believe getting rid of smart-cast would go a long way to solving this issue. Smart-casting was added with good intentions: too make spell-casting easier. However, the intended and unintended consequences are such that I don't think it is actually 'smart.'
Adding spell-casters to a game is by design, intentional difficulty. There are good reasons to keep spell-casting difficult and rare(r).
1) Smart-casting dilutes damage spells. i) It spreads out the damage on the assumption that more will be cast. This doesn't necessarily make it all that easy for that casual player we are concerned about. It's easier to cast more, but we also moved the bar so they must cast more. We dropped the damage so the individual spell is less satisfying. ii) Individual spell placement is less important as they are more spread over a wider area. iii) This impacts damage casters as harass units because harassment requires rapid damage in concentrated areas. Not spread out over the screen. iv) And we turn spell casting into a mundane affair rather than a spectacular event.
2) Smart-casting makes locking down armies far to easy. i) This type of spell/ ability is not bad on its own, but smart-casting allows the spell a too dominant position. ii) It becomes more about controlling your enemy's units rather than you controlling your own units better. (Better attack-retreat micro would alleviate this need for so many spells.) iii) The greater role these sorts of spells have on the game-play, the more frustrating the game becomes to play. Otherwise it becomes a game of Casters preventing each others armies from moving.
3) Smart-casting (and adding more and more spells) means that it is much more likely that the screen becomes far too cluttered with many different spells. -I would argue this is one of the reasons that WoW arenas and MOBA team battles are not as good a viewing experience. -SC2 is pushing into this zone with the number of spells and the frequency they are used. -Certain spells are not very obvious what they do and are therefore not good for spectating. -Making similar looking spells is also not ideal.
Well written, though I still don't 100% know what smart casting is, beyond that it makes casting spells easier, somehow. However, I am becoming tired of development threads and deep inner workings of the SC2 interface. They just lead to an endless line of kids who never played BW claiming that the game should be more like BW, even though they would be terrible at BW.
I love your series of threads on these subjects. I mean this in the best way, but occasionally they read more as why BW was great rather than how SC2 needs to change.
Spells are generally less valuable and consequently less interesting because they are easily used and balanced because you feasibly spam 8 HTs. The research for storm finishing is less dramatic because storm isnt necessarily going to help you be aggressive or land some dramatic game changing/saving harass for 300 gas.
The problem is that you can't have Bio in the same game that a few skillfully deployed spells can be dropped. The increased radius would dramatically increase the usefulness of storm/templar in a game that already doesn't really see masses of high templar running about. Dodging storms is just too iffy an issue for units with half the health of BW hydras(*~).
In fact beyond the infestor I don't know if that's an issue. Forcefields just by design are a razors edge. Manual cast is not going to stop ramp shennanigans. It will reduce the usefulness of the spell in more open areas though even with a concievable buff in size.
So if you're going to play a bio-strong game I think you have to go with the smart-cast blanket the screen style storm. Otherwise a lot of these spells designed around easy use just don't make sense and the risk/reward ratio will go out of skew.
Also we talk about casual friendly games. Smart cast gateways definitely has made sc2 a lot more fun for me to take "seriously" than the few games I botched on iccup. Viewing spectacle aside, if we're caring about the fanbase, things like hotkeyable storm puts the 5 hour a week low apm guy playing at a semi-competitive level where the play apes pro-play enough to be interesting and not weird.
I think a side takeaway from this thread would be changing the game yet borrowing certain artifacts from BW. HT design seems out of line with sc2 in terms of cost and utility.
edit: sorry for the edit, didn't phrase my original sentiments well.
There is another way to address these problems without removing "smart" casting: greatly limit the availability of spells and spell casters by increasing energy costs and caster resource costs. Now, you would only get a few Storms; so, you had better make them count.
This shifts the difficulty from a raw mechanical skill to accuracy and decision making. I think this is probably a design preference, though it seems like StarCraft 2 is trying to move away from pure mechanical difficulty; so, this solution might be more likely.
Personally, I prefer accuracy over mechanics, but then my mechanics are terrible.
You could address it by limiting the energy. That takes out a lot of spells from the game. But I think that flattens the skill difference top to bottom even more. Certainly there would be a greater importance on the individual cast. But it now becomes even easier for the top level players to get off all the storms. Therefore storms are even more of a hum-drum affair minus the accuracy part.
Part of the excitement of non-'smart'-casting is there is no such hard cap. There is a lot of potential spells, but it is impossible for a player to be fast enough to get them all off. Therefore the spells are balanced on the assumption that they won't all get off. But then, if a fast enough player comes along- the results are spectacular.
Higher energy cost deals with the clutter, but not necessarily with the fun/skill factor of trying to get more and more of these seemingly OP spells off.
The most extreme example of what I'm talking about is of course the mothership. There is only one of it and only 2? Vortexes at max energy. Therefore the accuracy of those Vortexes are paramount. We've limited the number of spells by energy cost (and unit numbers) But this doesn't quite lead to the excitement of the Jangbi storms.
How much difference would you really see between Hero's Vortex compared to a Bronze league Vortex? Probably its effectiveness is going to be more contingent on their opponent clumping up rather than a most excellent Vortex of pro-league levels.
making the interface worse, making units dumber, is NEVER a good way to balance things; it just annoys people; whatever benefits it might allegedly yield; the drawbacks are far worse. find another way.
On November 21 2012 11:59 zlefin wrote: making the interface worse, making units dumber, is NEVER a good way to balance things; it just annoys people; whatever benefits it might allegedly yield; the drawbacks are far worse. find another way.
Did you read or watch anything in the OP?
Spell-casters are by design a more difficult unit, therefore 'worse interface, making units dumber.' Given that spell casters are designed to be difficult, to what extent should they difficult? What are the draw-backs in terms of game-play that you get when you don't have spell-casting? I've listed a great number of benefits.
Besides- smart-casting is slower than magic-box casting. The interface denies you the possibility of casting spells simultaneously.
On November 21 2012 11:56 Falling wrote: Higher energy cost deals with the clutter, but not necessarily with the fun/skill factor of trying to get more and more of these seemingly OP spells off.
I think it is a matter of preference - the difference between hitting that smooth rhythm of fast casting or making that one money click that turns the tide.
How much difference would you really see between Hero's Vortex compared to a Bronze league Vortex? Probably it's effectiveness is going to be more contingent on their opponent clumping up rather than a most excellent Vortex of pro-league levels.
I did not realize how it would shift the skill burden from the caster to his opponent. It may not be feasible for a player to keep his units constantly space out, but there would definitely be a greater level of skill involved attempting it than in attempting to drop the one big spell. I don't think I like that at all. You're right.
Falling's series on sc2 general, dunno what to expect. I don't know if smartcasting is the main problem but for me the fact one race has to mass a spellcaster in mid/lategame because it's the most efficient way of playing is kinda dumb. And it concerns IT's too...
why not just increase the mechanical difficulty of the spells by shortening their mana cost and durations proportionately
for example, imagine if force fields were only 15 energy but only lasted 5 blizzard seconds
trying to juggle targeting and positioning your army correctly while juggling carving up the enemy with force field walls suddenly requires a lot more dexterity to do
i think this argument is plain and simple wrong for one reason - the spellcasting UI in starcraft 1 was actually a huge oversight caused in starcraft's beta test - spells like psi storm originally behaved very similar to blizzard in warcraft 2 where it stacked endlessly and damaged buildings
so there was a originally an actual reason to throw 12 storms at one target, same with multiple dmatrixes providing an endless shield and multiple plagues resulting in an immediate drop to 1 hp
the change to spells no longer stacking was a last minute tweak right before the game's release and they never stopped to consider the implications it had on the controls
An unintended feature is no problem if the features turns out to be beneficial. (For instance Street Fighter 2's combo system and Quake's Strafe-jumping.)
And yes, this would also affect Infested Terran as well. It would be a pretty big shake-up for the balance. But I think it would be worth it for all the above reasons.
Strafe jumping in Quake 2 was sweet. Stuff like that and patrol microing vultures were a hell of a lot more fun than spamming storm and fungal all over the place.
I'm all for this: higher APM players should be rewarded.. the skill ceiling has to go up . Campaign coudl be smart-casting for the people who don't want an annoying interface,but multiplayer should always try to be more friendly to the ones who are faster and better.
The "sport" would also be better to watch.. it is hard to be amazed by someone's micro right now (multitask, maybe.. but not micro). I feel bad for the casters having to hype those "amazing forcefields" and those "great fungal growths".. This is nothing impressing (and we can extrapolate to SC2 as a whole).
Here's the problem with removing smartcasting: Everything else will still be smart. When you make Forcefields harder to use, and Storms, EMPs and Fungals harder to hit, you're essentially making deathballs and A-moving units better and better.
People need to remember every time they bring up BW: Everything was dumb. Everything. Units had bad pathing, buildings could only be individually selected, attacks would randomly miss, etc. So dumb spellcasters wasn't to balance OP spells, it just put spellcasters on par with everything else.
@WolfintheSheep I'm not sure I would say everything was dumber. In fact some stuff was demonstrably 'smarter'- moving shot and a variety of micro tricks.
I would say there was non-uniform army movement and I think that would certainly be worth looking into. (All those threads wanting to change how army movement works.) The current method of army movement is by no means the 'smartest.' I'm sure more spread out army movement could be accomplished without adding 'dumbness."
But this spell-casting thread comes on the heals of two other blogs:
A-Move By Design which indicates how to change unit behaviours to move away from Death Ball. Burst damage/ and cooldowns between attacking and moving. Basically, hold position micro, moving shot micro and the like. I was comparing how Hellion vs Vulture worked (slight delay on hellion.) And Reaver vs Collosus.
and
Levelling the Playing Field which talks about how to get better defenders advantage and therefore move away from Death Balls and more towards a positional game. Although, ultimately better defenders advantage runs hand in hand with easing off on how quickly money is accumulated and spent. (Economy and macro mechanics need to be fixed to move away from 12 min turtle to max.)
In that context, Spell-Casting is the next thing to look at. One of my videos hypothesizes that the reason for so many new abilities and spells is because of the lack of micro tricks like moving shot. It is perhaps a more minor point in my thread than it ought to be, but simply making spells harder to use is not enough I agree.
A greater focus on attack-retreat micro and a de-emphasis on unit-restricting spells would help move away from deathballs and A-moving.
Such an excellent post. Its interesting to note that some spells in BW were actually smart castable from my memory but most damage dealing ones had to be manually done. I think the shift in emphasis to troop vs troop is what made the game more exciting where spells and abilities later in the game were kind of like the icying on the cake.
It might put casuals off, but if they get it off correctly the rewards would be huge thanks to the spells being more devastating due to this particular "handicap". I think its a win-win situation, and pros will have more legroom to show why they are pros. Many dont know why "STOOORRRMMMS" in BW is met with such an awe because to pull that off during the engagement is crazily impossible for mere mortals like us.
It would be the best solution to the spellcaster overload we have in SC2 especially when it involves infester/ghost/HT spam along with casters becoming the core composition in some armies.
What if a player has the skill to cast efficiently even without smart-casting? Efficient as in with or without smart-casting, his speed/precision/skill in casting is the same? Then it doesn't solve the FF and Fungal problem at all. It may even make the spell too powerful.
I can't really buy the 'The reason why I want you to hold off is because spell-casters are already a conscious choice to make the game more difficult' argument because the basic philosophy for any good unit is one that requires skill to use and 'makes the game more difficult'; i.e they should be doing this for all units.
But making the game more difficult doesn't just make things better by default, otherwise you would still see single building selection and limited unit selection. Ideally you want to make the game more difficult by adding greater scope for control to the units whilst keeping the UI simple and intuitive. I didn't grow up with BW so maybe I'm just 'missing something', but IMO when you have a group of units and you click to storm once in a single place, it is much more natural and intuitive to only have a single templar drop a storm, instead of all of them storming the same place at the same time, in much the same way as it feels more intuitive to be able to select multiple buildings and have no limit on unit selection.
I agree with you that by making casters/spells harder to use you can then buff them which adds more of a 'wow' factor, but I think you are better off making it difficult to use by using concepts like the Reaver, which requires a lot of control to make work because the are so slow. Or just simply changing/removing spells that reduce micro, which IMO makes much more sense than artificially making spells more frustrating and difficult to use, or by increasing damage but also increasing energy costs to solve the problem of too many spells happening at the same time.
Edit: When I say 'difficult to use' I mean difficult to master, not difficult to just pick up and play and have the unit do what you want.
On November 21 2012 15:09 league wrote: What if a player has the skill to cast efficiently even without smart-casting? Efficient as in with or without smart-casting, his speed/precision/skill in casting is the same? Then it doesn't solve the FF and Fungal problem at all. It may even make the spell too powerful.
I'll grant you that. It may be that more changes are needed which is why I mentioned the projectile suggestion. I'm just suggesting that many spells that are too dominant and a large part of this is because of how easy it is to cast so many spells at once.
@YyapSsap I hope you don't mind me lifting the cake-icing analogy. It's a decent comparison that I was searching for.
@Ryder. No making things more difficult, doesn't necessarily make it better. (For instance, the old Entomb spell- people suggested to make it require more 'skill' it should be an individual mineral patch cast rather than AoE. This is harder, but doesn't change the fundamental problem that the Oracle is interacting with the unmoving ground and you will never get the dynamic back and forth micro of storm drop vs storm dodging for instance.)
But based on the game-play implications by getting rid of smart-casting, I think it does make it better. It is for instance way too easy to lockdown or trap entire armies with Fungul or FF with smartcasting. Take that away and suddenly this could potentially become a difficult thing to accomplish. Regardless, movement restricting spells needs to be de-emphasized imo.
I'm not sure why selecting ALL your casters and selecting cast and having only ONE caster fire is more intuitive that selecting ALL your casters and having ALL of them fire when you say so. The unintuitive argument is in the eye of the beyolder on this one I think.
^Unintuitive because there is zero reason you would ever want every HT storming the same place at the same time, which is what the UI encourages. The UI is supposed to facilitate the units acting in the way you want them, and there is never a single reason you would want them to act that way.
Granted I don't really know much about magic box casting so maybe you have a point with that, but I think my previous point about intuition remains (depending on how you want to define intuition I guess)
There is also zero reason you would want to over-kill a unit when focus-firing down units. But once you select and target fire, the UI doesn't have the exact number of marines gun down a tank and the remaining simultaneously choose another target for you. The game allows you the option to target fire the one tank with 40 marines if you so desire (assuming they could all get close enough.)
Yes, there is some initial difficulty to learn, but the skill possibilities is sooo much greater. It goes back to my (imperfect) four story house analogy. We filled in the basement because spells were 'too hard'. But that also knocked off all the top stories and left us with only the ground floor. To get the top stories back, we might need to dig up the basement a bit.
And on top of that, by making spells easier, Casters have overtaken the game to fill too great a role. There is a good reason to keep them hard so that they remain in a support role and do not become the core army composition.
Magic Boxes exist in SC2 as well, but for ground it seems much smaller. It was a crucial tool for being able to separate your units and separate your casters.
^ Actually units without a projectile shot (such as marines) don't overkill IIRC, so they won't all just focus down the same one unit when there are others in range.
I did enjoy the write-up btw, I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree when it comes to what is an intuitive UI.
Nice well thougt out thread. Personally i agree 100 %! The hard focus on Caster not only in the game but also in the comunity is something i disslike also! SC2 is everything about getting spellcaster as fast as possible. There are so many comunity suggestions going into the complete wrong direction things like: "Terran needs a Mechspellcaster support something with 5 different spells". If i want to play a game with spellcasters i can play Dota or LoL.
SC2 is about Army and Controll - LoL and Dota is about Heros with Spells! pretty simple!
This is very well-written. The content is very very good, and in line with many of the thoughts I've been having since smart-casting became a thing.
I normally don't make a post to just write "I agree" so I'll add this:
The quality of your post should serve as an inspiration to others. Unfortunately, there has been a paucity of high-quality argument since star2 came out, and its always nice to read a quality OP like this one. Props.
On November 21 2012 15:31 Ryder. wrote: ^Unintuitive because there is zero reason you would ever want every HT storming the same place at the same time, which is what the UI encourages. The UI is supposed to facilitate the units acting in the way you want them, and there is never a single reason you would want them to act that way.
Granted I don't really know much about magic box casting so maybe you have a point with that, but I think my previous point about intuition remains (depending on how you want to define intuition I guess)
In a way though the UI encourages the exact opposite of what you are describing. You would never want 12 High Templar on a single control group anyways. The reason being that a single miss click and you lose all your very valuable High Templar. In a very perverse way the UI 'clunkiness' promotes more intuitive play by forcing you to split and pick targets.
As Falling stated because of 'smart' casting spells such as storm have to be weakened to compensate for the expectation that you will hit every spell. This thus actually makes it more difficult for newer players to do well because you can no longer do much with little. If we are to assume that newer players have poor mechanics, thus having poor macro, we can also assume that being forced to have more stuff to be effective is more difficult for them to achieve. The biggest strength of Brood War was that Macro and Micro were weighted equally. Clutch storms/plagues/ other spell here could even the game back out if your macro was poor. On the flip side macro based players would have enough stuff back at base to stem the counter attack. And if you could do both great, well holy shit that was impressive.
The biggest problem with Brood War was not the mechanics or the "difficulty" of things. The problem was the game never at any point taught you how the game worked. The game never taught you about control groups or camera hot keys or even unit building shortcuts, never mind more advanced tactics. I feel this is where the most frustration with the game comes in to play. Being good at real time strategy games should never be about knowing the mechanics of the game while your opponent doesn't. The skill should come from being able to execute on those mechanics and coming up with clever strategy's to out wit your opponent.
Real time strategy games naturally and inherently draw people who appreciate challenge. Knowing this more difficulty and more importantly a more progressive skill curve (versus a liner skill curve) would be well received I feel. This is simply one of many ways to increase that.
I will close by simply stating that while I can certainly see where you are coming from I feel that 'smart' casting is the wrong way to approach a problem I think everyone can agree exists and that is getting new players into the scene.
EDIT: Just wanted to add this and say thank you for being able to have a civil discussion on the matter. Sadly all too often these types of things just break down into flame fests where nothing useful is done.
Double EDIT: When I say "scene" I don't mean eSports specifically, just MP in general.
I dont like how it would influence the game flow, its also too late for changes like that. I just doesnt fit in a faster game like sc2. Sc2 is much more fluid. Microing those units would just feel like a huge car crash. You could make the game have more depth and not feel like a clunky mess of disability.
On November 21 2012 11:59 zlefin wrote: making the interface worse, making units dumber, is NEVER a good way to balance things; it just annoys people; whatever benefits it might allegedly yield; the drawbacks are far worse. find another way.
I share this point of view a lot. This is just summed up what others pointed out in more detail. And yes, I cannot support the idea of making a game more difficult to master by making it unintuitive and annoying to play. The UI is supposed to allow the user to translate his ideas into the game via an interface. I'd love that process to be as smooth as possible and not be much of a obstacle. Because in the end, as a player I want the game to do what I have in mind, do not want to play the interface.
Overall I'm pretty darn sure that Blizzard has the same stance on it. Whether it's a very competitive or very casual game, it should be as enjoyable as possible to control. So I cannot ever see them changing this, not at all.
The idea that when engaging a fight I should now be especially careful just using the UI to not accidentally fuck up fungals/storm etc. is very unappealing. It's play bad gamedesign really. When you told anyone "Hey, so here we make this game harder for the player by denying him better control options, which we could implement without a problem!" they would probably ask you "But why would you do that? That doesn't sound fun at all..."
As zlefin said, "find another way". That's really it. If you think there's currently a problem with that stuff, which I don't really agree with but you know, you may be right, then find other ways to solve this. There seen to be plenty other possibilities that do not make it more annoying to play the game.
Blizzard have already stated that they aren't touching the fundamental way the game is controlled. That they are not purposely gonna make the units harder to control with things like this, so even if this is nicely written, it just seems a little fruitless..
Not having smartcasting would be silly too since I think every game has had it since bw, and I think it could alienate alot of players. Try to explain this to new RTS players: "Oh wow he did so amazing with pulling off all those storms" "Why?" Well you see, you have to select every caster individually to cast the spell.." This just seem like a ridiculous thing having to explain why something that looks simple, and should be simple, isn't because we purposely made the game harder to control by removing something so fundamental in a newer RTS game.
And alot of the time we don't know what is best. Too be honest, there was this whole debate about not making units clump up, which was interesting, but looking back, the fact that units clump up is probably one of the more skill demanding aspects of SC2 unit control today.. If your units were presplit for you, you would have to do so very little going into the fights..
This last part is not to be too harsh, cause I like your thread and the way you wrote it, but in general I just wish people could come up with new ideas instead of looking at an old and outdated game for inspiration...
But the enjoyability you get out of it is a concentrated, raw power damage spells. Spells that feel viscerally powerful because they do tremendous damage. The fun is the power of the few.
This thus actually makes it more difficult for newer players to do well because you can no longer do much with little.
This is a nice summary of my point.
And the problem with most of the unit restricting spells is precisely because it is so fluid. It's really, really easy to lock an army in place and that is bad game design and very frustrating. There's a reason there are so many thread about FF's and Fungals- it's annoying to play against. People are starting to say "That doesn't sound fun at all"
The care in storming is actually a good thing. Good spells that requires thought, not just thoughtlessly spamming spells. But it's worth it due to the sheer power you can unleash. Even as a beginner, one well-placed storm makes you feel powerful.
And again unintuitive in this case is in the eye of the beholder. If you tell all your units to cast, they cast. If you tell your casters to spread their damage in any variety of ways, they do. But smart-casting actually disallows you from firing off spells at the same time even if you want to. (Magic Box casting.) The game doesn't allow me to do what I have in mind.
I'm going to bed soon, so hopefully things don't turn to pots in the mean-time It has been a reasonable discussion so far and I hope it stays that way.
edit Adapting my articles and posting on Blizzard's forums has been a complete waste of time everytime I have tried Hundreds of threads are created and heavy text article with non-embedded videos/pics sinks down pretty quickly.
@Cereb Thing is you don't need to explain that sort of stuff to newbies for them to enjoy the viewing experience. The game becomes much more self-evident. There are less spells needed overall (assuming unit movement becomes more versatile) and less spells are cast over-all. This clears up a lot of the game when most of the micro consists of attack-retreat micro and theoretically multiple front attacks (assuming defender's advantage in combination.)
When the spells are cast it's really obvious what they do because the damage is so powerful and there is not a ton of other similar looking spells. And you can easily tell the difference between a regular game when 4-5 storms/ battle are cast and a truly epic battle when 9! storms are cast. The difference is obvious because you can see the impact on the army.
No-one needed to tell all those Korean fan-girls all the different key-strokes that Jangbi was doing to cast that giant number of storms. The skill was self-evident because it was so rare.
The problem SC2 (especially when all the HotS casters are included) will be running into is needing to explain what all the different, similar looking spells do. (Unless a bunch are nerfed into oblivion, never to be seen again.) I think we're moving even closer to MOBA team fight type battles where the spells are becoming too varied and numerous to truly tell what's going. Beyond- lots of lights and flashing stuff all at once.
I mean, we coul also get rid of casters altogether. We are purposefully making units harder to control simply by having them in the game. Games like SupCom2 have moved away from this almost entirely. So in SC2, we are intentionally keeping in something that is more difficult. Why? Because that extra manual control produces better, more varied gameplay. It allows more power to be at a players fingertips balanced around how well they can use it. So also I would argue, casting with that extra manual control produces better, more varied gameplay. It allows even more power to be at a players fingertips balanced around how well they can use it.
I understand the reasoning presented in the OP, but I still cannot really stand behind any change that makes an interface less intuitive and more frustrating to use. :/
On November 21 2012 17:28 D4V3Z02 wrote: I dont like how it would influence the game flow, its also too late for changes like that. I just doesnt fit in a faster game like sc2. Sc2 is much more fluid. Microing those units would just feel like a huge car crash. You could make the game have more depth and not feel like a clunky mess of disability.
Maybe SC2 is more fluid than BW, but it is also less interesting to watch.
On November 21 2012 15:27 Falling wrote: @YyapSsap I hope you don't mind me lifting the cake-icing analogy. It's a decent comparison that I was searching for.
No problem
Just wonder if the relevant people could catch your thread. I know some people like to play the "fighting against the UI" card but balancing can be done in many ways, where numbers tweaking is just one of them. This is another. SC2 would be a much more interesting game, especially pro games when players start pulling off things deemed impossible.
On November 21 2012 18:42 Xanbatou wrote: I understand the reasoning presented in the OP, but I still cannot really stand behind any change that makes an interface less intuitive and more frustrating to use. :/
There must be a better way.
Without immediately getting involved on the argument at hand I do want to say something about intuitiveness. Certain things may seem intuitive through repetition, but that is not what intuitive means. In this case I believe the sole reason you say it is less intuitive is because you are not used to it, not because it actually is less intuitive. In 10 years of BW I have not heard anyone bring up that they felt it wasn't as intuitive as it could be. That itself is a more convincing argument than intuition based on repetition. If something is genuinely not intuitive people should be able to notice this by being uncomfortable, without awareness of other options.
I feel like in the end this doesn't matter that much on the Pro level, from a viewers perspective it would almost look the same, since they are just so good. But on a more casual level, this just completely ruins game play for them. Generally I'm for smarter interface, smarter units, since in my opinion the player i want to succeed is the player with the more brilliant strategies, compared to having sickest APM. However i do think that for to be successful in Starcraft 2, a rather high APM is needed.
I wonder how easy or difficult it would be to disallow smart casting in the Galaxy Editor. Perhaps a small mod that disables only smart casting to try this out would be a great way to get people used to the idea, perhaps even with a showmatch or two weaved in.
I am all for the removal of smart casting myself, but describing it versus letting people try it out for themselves is going to make quite the difference I feel.
The thing about less intuitive or frustrating is what I liked about BW. So many games I was playing with "okayish macro" but soon as opponent starts to pressure or make fancy moves my mechanics, macro and defiler use drops down as I am too slow to react. This was that inspired me to play more BW and enjoy every win I got but losses I could always blame so many things I did wrong and try to improve. Especially defiler use was so hard as you had to consume occasionally to be effective (that breaks macro cycle so hard) and to use defiler was hard.
Infestor and its spells, meh, I would like infestor to be replaced by lurker but not possible it seems.
I mentioned spellcasting scale-ability long time ago, when the sniper nerf arised. I remember giving an example of Snipe vs Irradiate. (pretty straightforward for anyone who remember terran vs zerg mid/late game from BW, basically irradiate being exhaust-like spell unlike burst-like spell both because it being under dumb-cast and from design, not even mentioning scourge/plague vs sci-ves 'antagonistic relationship')
The problem is, with smarcasting on we will always reach a point in metagame where its optional/easy/favorable to mass those units and abuse THE mechanic (thats different point of view, abusing the smart-cast not the spell).
But wait what?
Remember, zergs, used to terrans? Pro tips: Bind your snipe/IT to mousewheel, abuse it, you will never conveniently click any key on keyboard fast enough to match scroll wheel. (you can queue it but imagine snap situation, which you cannot pre-plan).
It adds additional layer of problems for blizzard.
Does it really makes the game smarter because you can utilize 20 infestor with machinegun-fungals instead of 4 properly placed one with fast reaction ? Does really beach-balling sounds fun? Imho no, it completely drives away hype from the game(just read the SC2 GSL LR), everything is stale and calculated, oh he has 8 infestor so i can expect 16 fungals or 40 beachballs. Instead of maybe due to pressure he won't be able to cast half of them? Or you know actually legitimately command someone from casting a good fungal (HAH).
There is a reason why Jangbi storms vs Nada have god knows how many viewers on youtube, because he managed to TIE the "sure-lost" (from unit composition perspective) engagement with a godlike spellcasting. Occurance of that scale happened once, only once in 10+ years of progaming(correct me if im wrong), few people were close but no one did it like him. Im ok with Zidane being the only Zidane, Ronaldo being the only Ronaldo. Many probably tried to copy them, but thats what makes sports beautiful isn't it?
Im not expecting any change, Blizzard built up the game from the ground with addition of smart casting, Zerg utilizies smart casting in macro (press that Z/D), literally happiest day of SC2 Zerg when he discovers that. Its just pure academic talk.
On November 21 2012 18:42 Xanbatou wrote: I understand the reasoning presented in the OP, but I still cannot really stand behind any change that makes an interface less intuitive and more frustrating to use. :/
There must be a better way.
Without immediately getting involved on the argument at hand I do want to say something about intuitiveness. Certain things may seem intuitive through repetition, but that is not what intuitive means. In this case I believe the sole reason you say it is less intuitive is because you are not used to it, not because it actually is less intuitive. In 10 years of BW I have not heard anyone bring up that they felt it wasn't as intuitive as it could be. That itself is a more convincing argument than intuition based on repetition. If something is genuinely not intuitive people should be able to notice this by being uncomfortable, without awareness of other options.
I don't think the BW comparison is really valid here given the mental evolution of the progamer and the community as well as the possibility of comparison in itself. Raising concerns is in a way a self-fulfilling prophecy that intensifies to the extent that Blizzard decides to engage itself with the concerns of the community.
I dont know, i love the idea of raising the skill cap for players, but at the same time the game is struggling because compared with other games out (read: LoL) the skill cap is already percieved as being too high for the majority to take up, and for this alone i can see blizzard not wanting to implement changes like these, even if they would make the game more interesting from a pro stand point
On November 21 2012 20:28 tsango wrote: I dont know, i love the idea of raising the skill cap for players, but at the same time the game is struggling because compared with other games out (read: LoL) the skill cap is already percieved as being too high for the majority to take up, and for this alone i can see blizzard not wanting to implement changes like these, even if they would make the game more interesting from a pro stand point
What made these games popular among the casuals was the custom games and the interface that was the old battle.net style (war3/bw). But the arcade to me alienated what was already established for the sake of something "new" I suppose? Custom games where you hang out with your friends (+chat channels) were killed off in the last 2 years. Im surprised no one got fired over at blizzard. I mean the occasional ladder is great (the idea of unranked ladder is great too) but casuals most of the time play custom games. A reason why war3 was so popular ala dota/island defense/arenas/etc.
I'd like to see an internal cooldown to forcefields be experimented with. Reduce FF duration to 10 seconds, put a cooldown of 15 seconds. (arbitrary numbers here)
I don't agree with this at all, even though I would like some changes to sc2... Smart casting, just like automining, mbs etc are just modern tools. Its like going back to using a browser without tabs to remove these features. However, I would like to see a slower game (ie nerf macro mechanics or reduce minerals per base) and more dynamic unit movement.
They're not going to make the UI functionality (re: Smart Casting) worse to make the game more difficult. All they are going to do is nerf spells and make them more difficult to use or less effective.
Good thread though and I do miss having to keyclone Templar to get sick Storms off. Ah, BW. What an amazing game.
On November 21 2012 18:42 Xanbatou wrote: I understand the reasoning presented in the OP, but I still cannot really stand behind any change that makes an interface less intuitive and more frustrating to use. :/
There must be a better way.
Without immediately getting involved on the argument at hand I do want to say something about intuitiveness. Certain things may seem intuitive through repetition, but that is not what intuitive means. In this case I believe the sole reason you say it is less intuitive is because you are not used to it, not because it actually is less intuitive. In 10 years of BW I have not heard anyone bring up that they felt it wasn't as intuitive as it could be. That itself is a more convincing argument than intuition based on repetition. If something is genuinely not intuitive people should be able to notice this by being uncomfortable, without awareness of other options.
This. From a purely logical standpoint, every other command (move, attack, patrol, etc) applies to all units in a selected group simultaneously. There is nothing in the graphical UI to indicate otherwise (as far as I could tell) for spells. Thus in BW, it made sense that spells would follow the same rule of grouped unit commands.
Just because the UI doesn't do what you implicitly want doesn't mean that the UI isn't explicitly internally consistent.
This is such an amazing OP and I just wanted to post and let you know that you've done a fantastic job addressing a huge issue with SC2, I got all excited as I read your post and then I remembered that we're dealing with the SC2 community:
On November 21 2012 11:59 zlefin wrote: making the interface worse, making units dumber, is NEVER a good way to balance things; it just annoys people; whatever benefits it might allegedly yield; the drawbacks are far worse. find another way.
On November 21 2012 19:30 Bagi wrote: No.
Having to click more to achieve the same thing isn't what this game needs.
On November 21 2012 21:31 robih wrote: oh yes lets make the interface terrible so that the units arent OP ...
It's seriously so disheartening to read stuff like this, and I have all but given up hope on SC2. The sad reality is that blizzard is more interested in making people "happy" than making a competitive e-sport. After reading countless threads on MBS/Pathing/Deathball/Macro Mechanics/etc during beta and watching absolutely nothing be done about it I honestly feel like SC2 will just fizzle out.
Watching tournaments feels like watching the same set of situations play out over and over and over again, and HoTS looks like more of the same. I don't mean to come across as a downer or anything, because seriously this is one of the best OP's I've read in a long time (and if this was implemented it would be a HUGE step forward), I just have given up dealing with SC2.
Always hated smart casting. It makes super fast player's casts the same as an average player's ones. Also good spell control is a way to score a comeback in a game with no smart casting. Plus smart cast makes the game easier, and easier game = volatile tournament scene, where average players actually have a chance against people who put hours into training. Tho, nothing's gonna change. Wanna know why?
1. Slowpoke pros/homegrown pros wont ever support a change like that, no matter how more enjoyable it would make the game, cause they would just drop out
2. SC2 is a mass game. Call of Duty of the RTS world. If it's too hard to play/emulate what pros do, people will bitch and moan
edit: would be cool if it was like in DoW2, where players could choose the way they want to cast spells with multiple unit selection - either same unit types would use the same spell at the same time sc1 style, or only the first selected one would use it and players would tab between units for individual casts
edit2:
On November 21 2012 15:19 Ryder. wrote: (...) IMO when you have a group of units and you click to storm once in a single place, it is much more natural and intuitive to only have a single templar drop a storm, instead of all of them storming the same place at the same time, in much the same way as it feels more intuitive to be able to select multiple buildings and have no limit on unit selection (...)
*cough* stim *cough*
There is stuff that applies to all units selected. They all attack move, they all patrol move, they all move. They all stim, they all siege, they all land. They all drop units, unless you tell them to do it by selecting them individually. But they cant all drop a spell if you order them to? You have ALL of them selected, so ALL of them should proceed to try and execute the action you gave them. That's the most intuitive thing ever, because that's how all the untis already work. :3 Your argument is invalid.
Intuitively everyone made tanks in SC1, they made a whole screen of tanks and tried to bunch box them up. They were suprised they did not move all at the time. Shocked you may say, well not really if not for WC1/2.
Intuitively they clicked on units instead of a-moving(focus fire) (what a-moving? WTF, DO I HAVE TO CLICK ON KEYBOARD, RTS HELLO?). edit: small correction the first idea, was, why do i click on the ground? I mean to kill his units not attack the GROUND. (the keyobard piece is slightly incorrect because there is mouseover interface afterall). I remember having literally this thoughts, for me it was unintuitive to attack the GROUND, attack the ground where? Behind enemy units? In front of them? 10 pixel or 5 pixel behind? Some of us are too advanced to REMEMBER how total noob thinks, if you cannot do this reverse engineriing this intuivite talk is baseless, because you are already under influence of different mentality.
Those are the first lesson everyone who steps into WC/SC comptetition needs to learn, many people learned a-moving when they were told to.
Im not talking about sc2 bronze(yet this repeats in sc2), im talking about WC2/Starcraft 1. Intuitively these games were already weird, everyone and their mothers played C&C. But the idea broke to their system, slowly, but steadily. Larger not always better, faster not always funnier(talking about armies). At least not when it comes to competition and or fun.
This is the time when Starcraft overshadowed and broke C&C and Westwood style of RTS gaming. Please dont bring intuive / modern/dumb/retro discussion into this. Blizzard made their bucks on implementing retro mechanics as opposed to their competitor who were first to introduce modern mechanics, and we are still talking about 90s.
Talk about ideas, pretend its academic talk if you dont like it in sc2. Dont bring weak arguments like BUT IT WOULD BE UN INTUITIVE. Show us why that would be bad in current pro sc2. If for example tomorrow blizzard would say the implement SOME mechanics that made professional BW great or came up with some cool alternatives and bunched it up in SC2 pro edition. Would you be happy? Would that make you cringe less when you see fungal?
On November 21 2012 21:34 Ryan307 wrote: This is such an amazing OP and I just wanted to post and let you know that you've done a fantastic job addressing a huge issue with SC2, I got all excited as I read your post and then I remembered that we're dealing with the SC2 community:
On November 21 2012 11:59 zlefin wrote: making the interface worse, making units dumber, is NEVER a good way to balance things; it just annoys people; whatever benefits it might allegedly yield; the drawbacks are far worse. find another way.
On November 21 2012 19:30 Bagi wrote: No.
Having to click more to achieve the same thing isn't what this game needs.
On November 21 2012 21:31 robih wrote: oh yes lets make the interface terrible so that the units arent OP ...
It's seriously so disheartening to read stuff like this, and I have all but given up hope on SC2. The sad reality is that blizzard is more interested in making people "happy" than making a competitive e-sport. After reading countless threads on MBS/Pathing/Deathball/Macro Mechanics/etc during beta and watching absolutely nothing be done about it I honestly feel like SC2 will just fizzle out.
Watching tournaments feels like watching the same set of situations play out over and over and over again, and HoTS looks like more of the same. I don't mean to come across as a downer or anything, because seriously this is one of the best OP's I've read in a long time (and if this was implemented it would be a HUGE step forward), I just have given up dealing with SC2.
I agree with everything you said there. I wish there would exist two versions of SC2: one that would be 100% focused on creating an extremely fun, competitive e-sport experience and the other focused on making the casual player base "happy."
It would also be an interesting experiment if the Blizzard gave the TL community a "copy" of SC2 to make their own balance changes while Blizzard keeps the original and continues the same direction as they are. Then see how each game is doing a year or so down the road.
On November 21 2012 11:16 Falling wrote: Adding spell-casters intentionally adds a unit that does NOT have have an automated attack and REQUIRES you to manually cast or it will be in-effective. We are adding difficulty to the game on purpose simply by designing spell-casters.
This part is where I disagree with you. What sets spellcasters apart from other units in the game is not the lack of an automated attack, but that the number of spells casted is limited by energy. Energy functions as an additional resource in the game you have to manage carefully.
Spells like Storm or Fungal are simply too powerful to be an unlimited automated attack. The existence of those spells adds depths to the game because players have to decide on how to spend energy to make the investment worthwhile. I doubt the primary intend of spells is to make the game more difficult.
Before SC2 came out, I basically stopped playing BW. The main reasons were that I was extremely fed up with the absolute idiocy of the user interface and I already knew that with SC2, everything will be better. And it was!
Honestly, if they would to flat out remove smartcasting, I will just stop playing the game. Maybe I will continue to watch tournaments for some time, but I doubt I will be interested for too long if I won't be playing.
The answert to basically everything in the OP is in the post above me: spells are different not by being difficult to cast, but by being a scarce resource due to energy. When this is said, I consider the whole argument "we are already making it difficult introducing spells" invalidated. Yes, spells introduce additional difficulty. But it is primarily the difficulty of choice, when to cast the spells, how to manage the energy. Only by disabling smartcasting, you will start to add unnecessary mechanical difficulty. Thus, the main argument that the OP tries to counter (about not making the interface intentionaly bad) holds.
Now, if there is a spell where the only thing that limits you is your ability to cast it fast enough, not the available energy, then there is something wrong. But that means we have to change the spells, not the way they are cast.
edit: also, it its not true that adding spellcasters necesarily makes the game more mechanicaly difficult, because in many situations you actually need more actions to micro normal units than the spell casters.
On November 21 2012 19:31 ejozl wrote: I feel like in the end this doesn't matter that much on the Pro level, from a viewers perspective it would almost look the same, since they are just so good. But on a more casual level, this just completely ruins game play for them. Generally I'm for smarter interface, smarter units, since in my opinion the player i want to succeed is the player with the more brilliant strategies, compared to having sickest APM. However i do think that for to be successful in Starcraft 2, a rather high APM is needed.
You can't base competetive game mostly on brilliant strategies. It makes for stale, boring game. It's like ZvP in nutshell: some brilliant strategy player finds some good timing and wins with it, other protosses start to use it and got some wins with it, then zergs figure it out and learn how to defend and strategy is used less and less. And another timing attack is discovered. And then zergs learn how to defend it. Same thing happened with teran's 111. There is limited number of viable strategies in game. You can't make them on the fly (we are not talking about tactics), they must be prepered beforehand.
Making game harder adds depth into strategy: ok you know this strategy, now how good can you execute it. Also with high game ceiling it's not binary: either you execute it perfecly or make mistake and die (because it's expected for your opponent to execute it perfectly). You're execution can't be flawless and it's become more about who makes less mistakes. Instead of who makes mistake first.
Also look at other sports. Every sport require a lot of phisical abilities, and they are what makes difference between pros and amateurs. Even ones that require a lot of thinking and planning (snooker come to my mind) also requires executions, and execution in addition to strategy is what makes for most exciting moments.
I tell you now, that is what will happen.
After releasing HotS, Blizzard announces that they change name of last expansion into LotB: Legacy of the Brood. The game features two ladders: amateur and professional. While amateur ladder has some tweaks and new units in comparison to HotS, professional ladder has game mechanics changed to be as close to BW as possible. Also only BW units are availble, so pros play BW back again, only with more appealing graphics.
In other news game is accessible by steam. Blizzard was bought out by Valve, after poor HotS and D3 expansion sales results.
Watched all the videos in the OP, but i think your effort is futile, as are many other related threads as well. I agree with what you said, and I think its a good thing to get this information out just to inform people. There have been so many threads pointing out starcraft 2's flaws, even such simple things like warpgate that remove defenders advantage, will be with starcraft 2 forever because its been with us the last 2 years, we cant remove it now. The amount of change required to fix this game is not possible in just expansions, expansion add or fix relatively minor things. Blizzard is way too scared to make drastic changes and the things that starcraft 2 requires are drastic and that can't really happen at this point in time without calling it starcraft 3.
I think people are clinging to the "Smart"cast, ideally it was an evolution in game play but like someone said before the multiplayer should be no smart cast and the campaign can have an option for that. The skill would rise and seeing 12 storms be dropped in 3 seconds would actually be an impressive feat rather than me spamming T 12 times.
I cannot agree with the conclusion at all, because I think, that smartcasting gets blamed for something that would not change at all if it did not exist:
1) Smart-casting dilutes damage spells. i) It spreads out the damage on the assumption that more will be cast. This doesn't necessarily make it all that easy for that casual player we are concerned about. It's easier to cast more, but we also moved the bar so they must cast more. We dropped the damage so the individual spell is less satisfying. ii) Individual spell placement is less important as they are more spread over a wider area. iii) This impacts damage casters as harass units because harassment requires rapid damage in concentrated areas. Not spread out over the screen.
The conclusions are either not true or not the effect of the existence of smartcasting. The reason that damage spells do not deal as much damage in Starcraft 2 is the effect of unit clumping, not of smartcasting. If you removed smartcasting, then the number of casted spells would not change at all. The removal of smartcasting makes spells more annoying to cast, but it adds no depth. The simple relation here is: If there are more units in a smaller area, then you need to reduce the damage and/or area of the spells.
That crowd control spells have such an impact in Starcraft 2 is not the result of smartcasting either, it is the result of the races protoss and zerg being balanced around forcefield, vortex and fungal. Would you remove smartcasting, then you could remove the protoss race (at least against zerg) altogether, because it is not possible to cast the amounts of forcefield with such a precision which is required to protect yourself against lings and roaches without smartcasting. It would break the game, but not make it better. You would not change the usage of fungal, which is simply the result of the infestor being a) T2, b) not extremely expensive and because of this massable (equivalent to the sentry in the early/midgame). You could create an equal scenario in broodwar by giving similar spells to T1/T2 units and weaken the rest of the units slightly. I do not think that the result would be pretty.
I definitely agree with the premise that spells in sc2 are too strong, too influential and holds too much potential over other things like splitting and getting good arcs. But I don't agree with the conclusion that to solve this the game mechanics needs to be made clumsier. Smart casting is a good thing, it is how a game SHOULD work mechanically. There is no good argument from a design point of view to have it any other way. If Broodwar had not had a terrible cast mechanic the idea of using that system would never occur to anyone as a solution to this. The obvious solution is to not intentionally make the game stupid but to tune spells on all other aspects, strength, upgrades, energy requirements and what they do.
On November 21 2012 13:04 Patate wrote: The "sport" would also be better to watch.. it is hard to be amazed by someone's micro right now (multitask, maybe.. but not micro). I feel bad for the casters having to hype those "amazing forcefields" and those "great fungal growths".. This is nothing impressing (and we can extrapolate to SC2 as a whole).
Exactly! Everytime I see a pro game where the casters go nuts about force fields or storms its 99% just a normal click which everybody else can do.
On November 21 2012 13:44 WolfintheSheep wrote: People need to remember every time they bring up BW: Everything was dumb. Everything. Units had bad pathing, buildings could only be individually selected, attacks would randomly miss, etc. So dumb spellcasters wasn't to balance OP spells, it just put spellcasters on par with everything else.
Everything was "dumb" as you say and therefore more skill was needed. You needed to take care of everything and therefore faster players (better players) got rewared higher.
In SC2 everything is easier. But that's the sad line where gaming is heading to. The average gamer today is too lazy to study a game in order to master it, so games are designed to become easy. Games for the mass. I wondered when I saw that HotS has automine from the start. What comes next? Maybe Blizz introduces a button where you can choose your build order so you can focus on scouting? lol
On November 21 2012 23:21 Anomek wrote: You can't base competetive game mostly on brilliant strategies. It makes for stale, boring game. ...
Also look at other sports. Every sport require a lot of phisical abilities, and they are what makes difference between pros and amateurs. Even ones that require a lot of thinking and planning (snooker come to my mind) also requires executions, and execution in addition to strategy is what makes for most exciting moments.
Do people even read what they are saying here?
Two of the most classic strategy games ever: Chess and Go.
Clearly one-dimensional and stale games there because you only have to "micro" one piece at a time and because you don't have to stand on your head to make the pieces do what you intend them to do. Right? Out-thinking the opponent is so overrated.
I'm not trying to say that they are in any way indicative of SC2, but please stop with the constant sweeping comments about how things are this way or that way as if its some kind of universal truth. There's a lot of it going around lately and its utter garbage. Focus on SC2 because most generalised comments are just not going to work.
On November 21 2012 22:40 Seldentar wrote: It would also be an interesting experiment if the Blizzard gave the TL community a "copy" of SC2 to make their own balance changes while Blizzard keeps the original and continues the same direction as they are. Then see how each game is doing a year or so down the road.
I don't think Blizzard is likely to do that ;P. I do hope though, that someday there will be a kickstarter/open source project with the goal to creating the "perfect" RTS!
On November 21 2012 22:40 Seldentar wrote: It would also be an interesting experiment if the Blizzard gave the TL community a "copy" of SC2 to make their own balance changes while Blizzard keeps the original and continues the same direction as they are. Then see how each game is doing a year or so down the road.
I don't think Blizzard is likely to do that ;P. I do hope though, that someday there will be a kickstarter/open source project with the goal to creating the "perfect" RTS!
Me too and I hope that all these balance and game design experts on TeamLiquid and elsewhere get together for it.
And then I'll watch the project burn down in flames. Because suddenly it'll turn out it's actually pretty fucking difficult to create the game that they seek after.
On November 21 2012 22:40 Seldentar wrote: It would also be an interesting experiment if the Blizzard gave the TL community a "copy" of SC2 to make their own balance changes while Blizzard keeps the original and continues the same direction as they are. Then see how each game is doing a year or so down the road.
I don't think Blizzard is likely to do that ;P. I do hope though, that someday there will be a kickstarter/open source project with the goal to creating the "perfect" RTS!
Yea probably not! The idea of an open source project like that would be interesting and wayyy more likely
The argument of fighting against the interface is complete crap. As Brood War proves having everything automated DOES have an effect on the skill cap. The results of Brood War like the domination of TBLS, the domination of Korea in general, the domination of Ex-BW players in SCII and, most importantly, the interviews with Kespa players, prove that Brood War is the hardest game out there. Despite the argument that players supposedly could spend their actions on different things than producing building-by-building or getting workers to mine this argument can not be true because otherwise SCII would be just as hard to play as Brood War. I´d like to explain my argument in this little graph: You see, although all games have technically no skill cap as none of these functions stagnate, Brood War players can reach a higher amount of skill compared to lesser skilled players than in SCII and LoL. So although, as Catz pointed out in one of the descision-making shows, you cannot play any of these games perfectly (reach infinite skill), practice is much more rewarding in Brood War. Thus the difference to the skill of casual players is bigger.
This is very very important. Humans are naturally interested in unusual, unknown stuff. Spectators are much more entertained if they see something they never imagined was possible than watching stuff they could potentially do themselves.
Sorry for being slightly off-topic but i think it fits some of the points mentioned in the OP.
On November 22 2012 02:37 Aunvilgod wrote: The argument of fighting against the interface is complete crap. As Brood War proves having everything automated DOES have an effect on the skill cap. The results of Brood War like the domination of TBLS, the domination of Korea in general, the domination of Ex-BW players in SCII and, most importantly, the interviews with Kespa players, prove that Brood War is the hardest game out there. Despite the argument that players supposedly could spend their actions on different things than producing building-by-building or getting workers to mine this argument can not be true because otherwise SCII would be just as hard to play as Brood War. I´d like to explain my argument in this little graph: You see, although all games have technically no skill cap as none of them stagnate, Brood War players can reach a higher amount of skill compared to lesser skilled players than in SCII and LoL. So although, as Catz pointed out in one of the descision-making shows, you cannot play any of these games perfectly (reach infinite skill), practice is much more rewarding in Brood War. Thus the difference to the skill of casual players is bigger.
This is very very important. Humans are naturally interested in unusual, unknown stuff. Spectators are much more entertained if they see something they never imagined was possible than watching stuff they could potentially do themselves.
Sorry for being slightly off-topic but i think it fits some of the points mentioned in the OP.
After viewing this all, wouldnt you say that changing smart casting, will not be a proper solution, unless a game does not have clumping (especially the clumping seen in sc2).
On November 22 2012 03:02 Deckkie wrote: After viewing this all, wouldnt you say that changing smart casting, will not be a proper solution, unless a game does not have clumping (especially the clumping seen in sc2).
Of course since I don't play SC2 competitively, I could careless whether or not lesser skilled players struggle with the mechanics. I want difficult mechanics because it's entertaining for me as a spectator. I want powerful spells for the same reasons.
I want to be impressed. So with that said, I want the most difficult game, even if it's less friendly to casual gamers.
Designing a competitive game to cater to casual gamers is a wasted effort...this has been attempted in other genres of video games as well. The casual gamer doesn't dedicate himself to one game...so even if the game is easier, he still won't put in the time to be great at it.
That's why we played fastest map possible.
Smart casting might be easier but it doesn't add anything of value to Esports. And to me, that's the bottom line. It's where all the value for this game is.
This would be quite an interesting change. It would definitely take some getting used to. As a toss player, I have some misgivings about it. For one, storms would be a lot harder to pull off, given the way battles look with armies clashing, and how slow they move to get in to position. It might really force the union of HT/WP. On the other hand, I would love to get rid of smart casting for ghosts. A quick scan and just clicking from miles away and autokilling HT's is frustrating to say the least. I'd love to see a test map with this on it to see how it works out.
On November 22 2012 03:02 Deckkie wrote: After viewing this all, wouldnt you say that changing smart casting, will not be a proper solution, unless a game does not have clumping (especially the clumping seen in sc2).
What do you think would be the problem?
One of his arguments is that smart casting increases decision making. I wonder how that would turn out in sc2 where everything is kinda clumped to begin with.
He also makes an argument about smart casting creating higher damage, how would this work in a game where everything is clumped.
i think taking away smart casting (whilst obviously correcting for any imbalance between races introduced) would make the game more fun to watch and play. Great thread, shame blizzard will probably never remove it.
also, if casters are too strong, there's a simple solution: BETTER ANTI-CASTERS. people need to stop being so closeminded and look more to other games that have had problems and have dealt with them. I used to play wc3 at a high level; there was a time when casters were very dominant, when armies of mostly casters were common. Partly that was solved with the armor-type changes giving casters some vulnerabilities to archer type units; but alot of it was also that in TfT they added powerful anti-casters to the game: spellbreaker, destroyer, faerie dragon; they also gave orcs an aoe dispel with the tauren shaman. (humans already had an aoe dispel, which made them much more resistant to mass casters spells).
there's a lot of other possible solutions to the various issues with current sc2.
On November 22 2012 03:02 Deckkie wrote: After viewing this all, wouldnt you say that changing smart casting, will not be a proper solution, unless a game does not have clumping (especially the clumping seen in sc2).
There is no one magic bullet that will fix all. I agree that unit movement also needs to be looked at- I did glance over it when I talked about uniform vs non-uniform movement that non-uniform movement (non-clumped) actually creates targets. I think in Overkill is anti-Deathball blog I also talked about the need to change some of the movement.
In a nut shell- a slight increase in spacing between units just for viewability purposes (get rid of unit clipping and units occupying less space on the move), have army movement spread out into a long column more on longer marches so that harass an army on the march becomes easier (Should be a difference between an army on the march and one that is ready for battle.) And increasing the effectiveness of the current ground magic box system for unit spread.
Which I think was Irotor's point. So, yes the current unit movement I don't think is ideal or the most 'smart.' There are smarter ways of implementing spread out units without introducing bugged out goons. (Which only existed because the unit was larger than it had been programmed to think it was. So it kept on trying to fit into too small spaces and buggying out.)
I don't really want to go down the tangent on whether this also is 'unintuitive,' but I do want to acknowledge, that yes unit movement needs to be looked at.
On November 21 2012 11:16 Falling wrote: Adding spell-casters intentionally adds a unit that does NOT have have an automated attack and REQUIRES you to manually cast or it will be in-effective. We are adding difficulty to the game on purpose simply by designing spell-casters.
This part is where I disagree with you. What sets spellcasters apart from other units in the game is not the lack of an automated attack, but that the number of spells casted is limited by energy. Energy functions as an additional resource in the game you have to manage carefully.
Spells like Storm or Fungal are simply too powerful to be an unlimited automated attack. The existence of those spells adds depths to the game because players have to decide on how to spend energy to make the investment worthwhile. I doubt the primary intend of spells is to make the game more difficult.
But managing energy is harder. Harder than simply sending your units into attack. You have to manage energy and manually cast for your unit to do anything at all. That is by definition a more difficult thing. It might even be unintuitive that when you send your unit to battle, it doesn't attack. It might even be 'fighting the interface' because it forces you to "click more." But the gameplay it produces is worth it.
And it really isn't that unintuitive that if you order your units to fire at a target, they fire. All of them because you had all of them selected. That stim example is a good one. You may have only intended to stim 4 to scare away the Mutalisks. That was your intention, but the game didn't hold your hand and decide for you what the ideal number of marines to stim was. You selected 40 marines to stim and 40 marines stimmed. You told 15 Templars on one hotkey to storm one spot. 15 Templars on one hotkey stormed one spot. That's pretty straight forward.
The power is in your hands, not the computer to succeed like a champion or mess up with wasted potential. There is just a crazy amount of potential power that can be tucked away in a game when we hand more of the decision making back to the player.
Great post, Falling. I love your threads! I really hope Blizzard at least sees this thread; if not a change for HotS, at least to plant the seed.
It looks to me like none of these haters have a leg to stand on. You bring compelling arguments with convincing evidence yet all they can say is "DON'T MAKE US FIGHT THE UI"
All I want are powerful, game changing spells that are actually a treat to watch and execute
Really well written. I agree with a lot of what OP said. I really miss the dynamics of individual micro and it being genuinely important vs casting a bunch of spells and that being the main focus. Not saying that spells can't or shouldn't be a focus point, I'm all for a clutch defensive matrix or godlike series of storms, but I think being able to slip in those spells while devoting a lot of energy to unit movement control should occur instead of static unit movement (1A) with all remaining focus devoted to spamming abilities.
Do players enjoy going A *click and then spending their next 15 clicks on dropping FF while the rest of their units just march up and shoot? Or hitting their mouse 32 times spamming IT vs using that APM to control their units? I'm not saying when and where to throw FF or IT isn't a skill because it is. It just doesn't seem like the skill ceiling is that high relatively speaking. It's like quality has been watered down by quantity.
I remember how excited I felt when I learned and performed muta or vulture micro in BW, it was amazing! I felt like I could dance around killing other units and there was nothing my opponent could do about it. It wasn't easy among everything else that you had to do but it sure was rewarding, especially when you could macro behind something like that. That was pure ecstasy, especially when it was a result of practice. If I was going to use a spell, it was almost like they were something I cast in order to improve the control of my own units (ie cast dark swarm and then run under it towards the enemy) or at least I didn't expect the spell to result in the death of my opponents entire army without significant work on my part. It was utilizing the finite number of spells I had and was able to cast to the best of my ability. Now it seems too easy to kill a disproportionate number of units with the use of spells. The dynamic of acquiring a skill and implementing it doesn't feel quite the same and like OP suggestion, the way spells and casting has been implemented might be hindering the style of gameplay community members are crying out for more than helping.
Terran, for example, has the smallest number of 'useful' spell casting units (eg 250mm cannon or Yamato = not useful). Maybe you have some ghosts or maybe you have some ravens in late game, probably not both and they have quite limited use (snipe and EMP nerfs, time taken for HSM energy). To compensate, Terran has some of the most dynamic unit movement out of all three races since the bulk of their army are attacking units. Splitting and constant movement vs banelings, storm, colossus and fungal is exciting and difficult to do! Protoss, on the other hand, gets a tier 1.5 caster that is often massed and as a result, a lot of the emphasis is placed on use of FF vs controlling unit movement (I realize this occurs in more than these situations, those were examples only).
I'm guessing this point has been brought up already, but if FF was harder to use than it is now, toss could basically never take a 3rd in ZvP, and immo/sentry would die immediately.
Basically toss is so reliant on FF in the early/midgame that making it harder to use would imbalance the game.
On November 22 2012 07:18 Defenestrator wrote: I'm guessing this point has been brought up already, but if FF was harder to use than it is now, toss could basically never take a 3rd in ZvP, and immo/sentry would die immediately.
Basically toss is so reliant on FF in the early/midgame that making it harder to use would imbalance the game.
I think that the basis of the thread is less about balance, and more about the design the game is balanced around.
Another great read. Falling, you always have solid, quality analysis and every one of your threads thus far has been great.
However, I think smart-casting is not the main reason that spells were nerfed in SC2. It is a reason, for sure but I just think that unit clumping is a much greater reason. You really can't have a "game-changing" storm when a single storm can hit your opponent's entire army. In BW, shit made a huge congo line when moving across the map and even the battles were spread out over large areas. In SC2, everything is more condensed. This is why you can't really have "game-changing" AoE spells because they could kill your whole army. This is one of the reasons fungal is such an issue right now. For other reasons too, but also because of the quantity of shit it can hit.
But, yes, I agree. Smart-casting can definitely be used to "soft-balance" AoE in SC2. But we'll never see it.
On November 21 2012 22:10 necrimanci wrote: Always hated smart casting. It makes super fast player's casts the same as an average player's ones. Also good spell control is a way to score a comeback in a game with no smart casting. Plus smart cast makes the game easier, and easier game = volatile tournament scene, where average players actually have a chance against people who put hours into training. Tho, nothing's gonna change. Wanna know why?
1. Slowpoke pros/homegrown pros wont ever support a change like that, no matter how more enjoyable it would make the game, cause they would just drop out
2. SC2 is a mass game. Call of Duty of the RTS world. If it's too hard to play/emulate what pros do, people will bitch and moan
edit: would be cool if it was like in DoW2, where players could choose the way they want to cast spells with multiple unit selection - either same unit types would use the same spell at the same time sc1 style, or only the first selected one would use it and players would tab between units for individual casts
On November 21 2012 15:19 Ryder. wrote: (...) IMO when you have a group of units and you click to storm once in a single place, it is much more natural and intuitive to only have a single templar drop a storm, instead of all of them storming the same place at the same time, in much the same way as it feels more intuitive to be able to select multiple buildings and have no limit on unit selection (...)
*cough* stim *cough*
There is stuff that applies to all units selected. They all attack move, they all patrol move, they all move. They all stim, they all siege, they all land. They all drop units, unless you tell them to do it by selecting them individually. But they cant all drop a spell if you order them to? You have ALL of them selected, so ALL of them should proceed to try and execute the action you gave them. That's the most intuitive thing ever, because that's how all the untis already work. :3 Your argument is invalid.
What? Did you even read what I said about intuition? If you select all units to stim then they should all stim because that is what the player wants. I mean the intuitive thing is for them all to stim because that's what the player wants...it makes it easy for the player to do what he wants to do.
Why would any player EVER want to have every templar storm in the same place at the same time?
The UI should facilitate the game doing what the player wants. He is never going to want every templar to storm at the same place at the same time so why would the UI encourage it?
You can make the 'its impressive to see these players land storms knowing how hard it is' argument for anything. I mean hell why let units auto target a new unit after its finished killing the old one? Wouldn't it be much more impressive to make it so you need to individually tell units to retarget after they finish killing the old unit? Then we could all get excited over how amazing these players are ('knowing how hard it is to actually pull off') in that they can manage to individually re-target new units at the same time as having impeccable macro. That would really sort the fast, fluid players from those with poor multi-tasking 'average' wouldn't it?
Removing smart-casting is not the way to solve this. The game is inaccessible enough as it is to the casual players, and taking away smart-cast will only serve to drive them further away.
The only way to fix ff/fungal is to replace them with better spells that do not hinder micro and re-balance the races accordingly. Spells like irradiate and dark swarm were awesome because they were both powerful yet allowed the opposing player to use micro to mitigate them.
Forcefield is extremely difficult to tweak as Protoss is so heavily reliant on it because of the "weakness" of the gateway units. Yet because of the warpgate mechanic, buffing gateway units would make all-ins a lot stronger. I'm not a fan of warpgates in general. I believe they are the core of all Protoss's problems and removing them would make it easier to balance Protoss.
I think smart-casting is not a problem but rather the uniform-movement, I agree with you here, and the fact that spells don't do what they should be doing. I believe spells should not be mandatory for a race to stay alive though survivable buffs for units like defensive matrix are fine. The sentry is supposed to keep Protoss alive which it does extremely well given big enough numbers and the full attention of the player as is evident in the dreaded immortal-sentry-all-in and a bunch of other situations. Same with Infestors.
In my opinion spells should be the death-ball-breaker. Broodwar has a lot of spells that do exactly this and force a lot of micro on both sides. Company of Heroes does too. If we look at Company of Heroes we'll see that a lot of the abilities, units and directional cover heavily punish death-ball-play (grenades, artillery strikes, mines, tanks being able to run over infantry, flamethrower, bombing/strafe runs, mg nests,...) and encourage multitasking through splitting up your units and flanking the opponent.
Removing forcefield for a unit buff or autoturret-like spell because the terrain should be sacred, changing fungal to have a higher drawback like being a channeled ability which would force focus firing and tweaking existing AoE spells and maybe adding a few more would really help the game. Also positional units would be nice too.
I agree that the skill cap should be raised in SC2, but I do not think this (or any reversion to clunky interfaces) is the right way to go about it. Controls are supposed to work as an outlet for the player to translate his/her ideas into the game, not as a hindrance to what he actually wants his/her units to do. Adding difficult controls to raise the skill cap is simply a sloppy way to design a harder game. Instead, the design of the actual game (not its controls) should reward players who are more skilled.
I think there are several reasons for this. First of all, its more fun. While I don't doubt that the people here arguing for the removal of smart-casting sincerely think the game would be more fun without it, I'd have trouble believing they would prefer clicking each HT individually to storm than having smart casting and, say, having an extra battle to manage somewhere. Why? Because while both require additional APM, one is APM that is actually related to playing the game as its intended, while the other is simply an arbitrary hurdle in an attempt to raise the skill cap.
Second of all, it makes for a better viewing experience. If we want viewers, especially those new to Starcraft, to understand how fast players are playing, than APM should be maximally correlated with effects on the viewing screen(effects like, as mentioned before, more multitasking and micro). Disabling smartcasting kills that action to effect-on-screen ratio. If players aren't wasting APM on fighting controls to perform what should be simple tasks, it frees up APM to perform actions that have a more obvious impact on what's showing on the screen, like battling in more locations or awesome micro feats.
Third, and lastly, it comes off as a much less "elitist" approach to solving the problem. I honestly don't think anyone here actually means to be elitist and I know that everyone's intention is here is just to create a better game, but a community that's asking for it's controls to be harder so that the "skill gap" between players is more apparent certainly does not sound inviting to players who are thinking about getting into the game. If eSports is going to grow and be big, we need to come off as a friendlier and more welcoming community than that in my humble opinion.
As for my opinion to solve the problem of the skill gap, I think that most of the solutions that TL already has floating around are good ideas that will achieve the effect that most supporters of removing smart casting seem to want. As for a short list: replacing anti-micro spells like ff and fungal, changing unit clumping mechanics, increasing the incentive to expand past 3-4 mining bases (and thus promoting strategic, positional play, as well as multi-pronged attacks), increasing micro potential of units, nerfing macro mechanics, etc. Of course, its highly unlikely Blizzard will do such a redesign of their game, but a) I'm making a theoretical argument here anyway , and b) I also think (for better or for worse) its highly unlikely Blizzard will revert to BW mechanics as well.
By the way, the argument that says we shouldn't worry about making spells difficult to use because we are "already adding difficulty by putting spells in" is simply not a good argument, and you actually acknowledge the flaw of the argument at the beginning of your own post. Adding more of a good thing (as with your icing example) doesn't always make for a better thing than you started with. As with nearly everything, there is a "goldilocks zone" of how much icing/difficulty/whatever else that makes for an optimal product. If we're already in the right place, in terms of spell difficulty, adding more of it would still be a bad thing. I'm not necessarily saying that we're certainly in that zone right now, or that definitely we shouldn't make spells more difficult to use in some way, but I think you have a further burden of proof (to show us that we aren't in that zone yet) in order for the argument to hold water.
On November 22 2012 08:56 zlefin wrote: on the general topic falling; how do you find wc3 gameplay re smartcast?
To be honest, I couldn't give you a fair shake to that question. I only got the game in the last year in a bargain bin. Some games are easy to determine the quality of the battles after a couple play throughs- and for me this is usually the unit handling (how sluggish they are responding to precise orders.) SupCom2, Empire at War 2, and Battle for MiddleEarth 2 all have this problem. (As well as passive income gathering which eliminates dynamic worker vs harass unit micro.)
WC3 I never felt like played enough to get a handle of it. Obviously there was a competive scene that developed. But WC3 seems a very different animal, balanced around far less units, with more hitpoints, and with special ability heroes as their center-piece. I still maintain, that adding even more spells (in this case, anti-spells) will just further add to the clutter. Except now we have spells that do stuff and spells that undo that stuff. So we have a whole lot of animations going down very fast (due to smart-casting), but even less stuff actually happening as we are now undoing the effects of the first set of spells. It worked in WC3 and I definitely see the direct line between that and MOBA games, but it seems like it would add a lot of clutter to battles that are already pretty heavy in the flashing lights, fireworks, and strobe light department.
On November 22 2012 07:18 Defenestrator wrote: I'm guessing this point has been brought up already, but if FF was harder to use than it is now, toss could basically never take a 3rd in ZvP, and immo/sentry would die immediately.
Basically toss is so reliant on FF in the early/midgame that making it harder to use would imbalance the game.
I think that the basis of the thread is less about balance, and more about the design the game is balanced around.
Exactly this. Actually, the added benefit theoretically is that Protoss could be balanced around NOT being so reliant on forcefields. This could potentially allow for more varied maps because you do not need to build maps around Protoss's FF dependency. But we still have warp-gates at Tier 1 so there's a limit too how much gateway units can be buffed.
On November 22 2012 09:40 nonsequitur wrote: Removing smart-casting is not the way to solve this. The game is inaccessible enough as it is to the casual players, and taking away smart-cast will only serve to drive them further away.
The only way to fix ff/fungal is to replace them with better spells that do not hinder micro and re-balance the races accordingly. Spells like irradiate and dark swarm were awesome because they were both powerful yet allowed the opposing player to use micro to mitigate them.
Forcefield is extremely difficult to tweak as Protoss is so heavily reliant on it because of the "weakness" of the gateway units. Yet because of the warpgate mechanic, buffing gateway units would make all-ins a lot stronger. I'm not a fan of warpgates in general. I believe they are the core of all Protoss's problems and removing them would make it easier to balance Protoss.
As for accessibility. I don't think smart-casting/ no smart-casting is the place to look for bringing in casual players. That goes back to the condition of Battlenet 0.2, the custom map situation, and the current empty feel of Battlenet. There were entire communities of people that just played Fastest Possible or Big Game Hunter. BGH actually became quite skillful and developed its own set of strategies. There was a BGH strategy guide I was going to link, but I couldn't find it it- 2Pacalypse would probably know better.
But all the random UMS and community based, hang-out feel is really what is needed for casuals. Battlenet was built around getting casuals to ladder more often. This was probably the wrong approach- community and fun maps would've been the better focus while keeping the ranked match-up for the more competive people (And actually rank the ladder and show win-loss.) Plus shared replays. C'mon Blizzard
As I said before, Smart-casting actually raises the expectation for the casual to cast even more than they would in BW just to have an equivalent, discernable effect on the battlefield (for damage spells.)
The sort of player that will be thrown off by this sort of thing, in my opinion is going to be the same sort of player that casts one storm on a group of roaches, sees the paltry damage it does and thinks "that sucks." Then you tell them, "you need to cover the screen with storms. They won't actually kill many units outright. But they'll all be damaged somewhat and that's good." And at that point, they're going to just switch to Collosus.
It's just not a very exciting spell when it gets diluted so much. And now you're supposed cast a whole ton of them.
And FF and Fungal is just frustrating to play against no matter what rank you are. They are just far too prevalent in locking down army movement.
First of all, nice first post. I wish more first time posters were as thoughtful.
On November 22 2012 11:35 mozoku wrote: I agree that the skill cap should be raised in SC2, but I do not think this (or any reversion to clunky interfaces) is the right way to go about it. Controls are supposed to work as an outlet for the player to translate his/her ideas into the game, not as a hindrance to what he actually wants his/her units to do. Adding difficult controls to raise the skill cap is simply a sloppy way to design a harder game. Instead, the design of the actual game (not its controls) should reward players who are more skilled.
Well what exactly are your ideas that you want translated into the game? What if my idea I want translated into the game is to take three casters, spread them out and storm at the exact same time? SC2 is a hinderance to that. It literally disallows this action.
Or is it more broad? You want your units to attack a certain place on the map. We simply by adding spell-casters into the game, we have added more difficult controls to rais the skill cap. All the other units move to location and fight upon arrival. Casters insist on doing nothing until you tell them to do something. This is much harder.
On November 22 2012 11:35 mozoku wrote: I think there are several reasons for this. First of all, its more fun. While I don't doubt that the people here arguing for the removal of smart-casting sincerely think the game would be more fun without it, I'd have trouble believing they would prefer clicking each HT individually to storm than having smart casting and, say, having an extra battle to manage somewhere. Why? Because while both require additional APM, one is APM that is actually related to playing the game as its intended, while the other is simply an arbitrary hurdle in an attempt to raise the skill cap.
What are you saving your APM for? We saved the APM with MBS and the like-- so that we could have more time for things like casting. Better casting is the thing we want to spend apm on. And now we have more time to do it. (Well actually we don't if we're Zerg because of larvae injects and creep spread, but anyways.) If keep the old method of casting, our spells are awesomely powered and we have more time to do it. But instead the spells get diluted.
On November 22 2012 11:35 mozoku wrote: Second of all, it makes for a better viewing experience. If we want viewers, especially those new to Starcraft, to understand how fast players are playing, than APM should be maximally correlated with effects on the viewing screen(effects like, as mentioned before, more multitasking and micro). Disabling smartcasting kills that action to effect-on-screen ratio. If players aren't wasting APM on fighting controls to perform what should be simple tasks, it frees up APM to perform actions that have a more obvious impact on what's showing on the screen, like battling in more locations or awesome micro feats.
There's a couple assumptions here. First, should casting be simple? This isn't necessarily the case. And a large scope of my OP was arguing why it should not be simple. It negatively impacts the gameplay when it is simple. Second does APM correlation actually hinder viewing experience? I argue too many spells hinders viewing experience- look at WoW battle arena and MOBA team fights. Also, when you see old style casting- given how rare a Jangbi storm is. It's pretty obvious that he's going pretty fast.
When a high number of spells cast is rare, it demonstrates how fast a person is going because it is rare. A high number of spells cast all the time makes it not a big deal and I think there is less of appreciation for what's going on. Why do the Koreans scream over plaguuu and stormuu while Team Liquid moans about casters calling 'amazing fungal'? You do see "fungal, fungal, fungal, fungal" posted but they aren't typically posting because they are excited.
On November 22 2012 11:35 mozoku wrote: Third, and lastly, it comes off as a much less "elitist" approach to solving the problem. I honestly don't think anyone here actually means to be elitist and I know that everyone's intention is here is just to create a better game, but a community that's asking for it's controls to be harder so that the "skill gap" between players is more apparent certainly does not sound inviting to players who are thinking about getting into the game. If eSports is going to grow and be big, we need to come off as a friendlier and more welcoming community than that in my humble opinion.
To me this is better solved by Battlenet, then by trying to appeal to casuals to the detriment of our pro-scene. Besides, powerful spells are fun to play even if it is hard to do many of them. One storm that melts a portion of the Zerg army is fun. And it's the hook for learning to do more. A 'meh' spell that you have to do a whole bunch is more of a chore in my opinion then an AWESOME spell that it's a little harder to do.
I do agree there are a lot of things that could be looked at to help the game. I think this is one of them.
On November 22 2012 11:35 mozoku wrote: Adding more of a good thing (as with your icing example) doesn't always make for a better thing than you started with. As with nearly everything, there is a "goldilocks zone" of how much icing/difficulty/whatever else that makes for an optimal product. If we're already in the right place, in terms of spell difficulty, adding more of it would still be a bad thing. I'm not necessarily saying that we're certainly in that zone right now, or that definitely we shouldn't make spells more difficult to use in some way, but I think you have a further burden of proof (to show us that we aren't in that zone yet) in order for the argument to hold water.
True to some extent, but who knows where the right place is for spell difficulty? It's all about design choice. But that's rather what the rest of my post is about. Yes, this will make it harder. But here are all the benefits. In my opinion, there are so many that it far outweighs the small sacrifice of in the case of clone casting- two extra clicks (assuming shift-click, smart-casting)
And actually magic-box casting is less clicks than smart-casting... who is fighting the interface now???
Both my super posts just finished talking about that
Battlenet 0.2 ->> 2.0 /UMS /better community integration is the key to attracting and keeping casuals. Powerful spells are fun for casual even if you only get one off. Diluted spells are not as fun for casuals too.
On November 21 2012 23:21 Anomek wrote: You can't base competetive game mostly on brilliant strategies. It makes for stale, boring game. ...
Also look at other sports. Every sport require a lot of phisical abilities, and they are what makes difference between pros and amateurs. Even ones that require a lot of thinking and planning (snooker come to my mind) also requires executions, and execution in addition to strategy is what makes for most exciting moments.
Do people even read what they are saying here?
Two of the most classic strategy games ever: Chess and Go.
Clearly one-dimensional and stale games there because you only have to "micro" one piece at a time and because you don't have to stand on your head to make the pieces do what you intend them to do. Right? Out-thinking the opponent is so overrated.
I'm not trying to say that they are in any way indicative of SC2, but please stop with the constant sweeping comments about how things are this way or that way as if its some kind of universal truth. There's a lot of it going around lately and its utter garbage. Focus on SC2 because most generalised comments are just not going to work.
And how many people watch pro go and pro chess compared to pro-football?
BW = Football SC2 = Chess a.k.a not that fun to watch
If you guys want chess then that's fine, but just realise that SC2 will die as an esport trying to become that.
Note that there is still a shitload of strategy in football, so hardcore spectators can admire it, but the amateurs can still really enjoy it too without having to understand the management aspect. Analogous to BW.
I've always been curious to see how things would look without smart casting. I've never liked that SC2 can make my storms look as good as Jangbi's.
That being said, a lot of the game right now sort of hinges on spells being as easy to cast as they are, force field in particular being the easiest to point out as Protoss would never make it 10 minutes into a game without them. Changing the way spellcasting works would necessarily lead to changes in unit design and would likely lead to changes in the spells themselves, and perhaps unit movement as well. Of course, I don't have any problem with these things being addressed if the end result is a better game, but Blizzard has indicated on a number of occasions that for whatever reason, they're happy with the way the game's AI functions now.
Is it still not obvious to everyone that the problem is with the zerg race, and not so much Fungal Growth?
A simple point to give is that infestor is pretty much the only way zerg can reliably deal with both air and ground at any stage of the game (aside from the early game), particularly dealing with any units in the late game.
The problem's cause pretty much boils down the fact hydralisks suck, and the fact zerg have only one true spellcaster. On top of that, they have a lack of useful/commonly-used special abilities compared to other races.
It's a massive funnel forcing zergs to play a certain way.
Falling wrote: and strong defender's advantage
I disagree with that part. I do think there's many diferences from brood war which may have contributed to various issues in SC2, but SC2 has very big defenders advantages with the improved siege tank mechanic, force fields, burrowed banelings, creep, easier walling. Particularly I find zerg is much less able to perform sneaky high aggression builds such as involving lurkers, sending only 4-6 mutalisks, or rushing zergling speed and flat-out killing the opponent (sounds absurd to an SC2 player, probably even those who've played BW). Even terran had great offense with vultures or cliff drop, wraith, or something else.
It's been a while since I've ever said to myself "wow, great FFs/fungal/storms" etc, because they're just really easy to spam on top of armies. The instant nature of fungal and FF being able to be casted on top of units also kinda reduces the drama of it all. If I hear one more commentator say "great FFs" when someone FFs a one FF size space on a ramp with 5 or so full energy sentries where the margin of error is incredibly large...I feel like I'll scream. Spells in general feel too low on the tech tree and too easy to cast quickly. Don't know if removing smart casting would be the best solution but it IS a solution at least.
I read many post about the idea that the new casting is more intuitive (maybe not all in those words), or that the new casting is better because it would otherwhise just restrict skills/apm that could be used better in another place.
From my understanding, casting in BW works the same as blinkstalkers in sc2. So imagine a game where, if you blink, you always blink one stalker at a time. It would make blinking back significantly easier, and people wouldnt be impressed by blink micro all that much.
Maybe you can consider this comparison when saying that it wouldnt be good/fun/interesting.
On November 22 2012 16:30 Deckkie wrote: I would like to add something.
I read many post about the idea that the new casting is more intuitive (maybe not all in those words), or that the new casting is better because it would otherwhise just restrict skills/apm that could be used better in another place.
From my understanding, casting in BW works the same as blinkstalkers in sc2. So imagine a game where, if you blink, you always blink one stalker at a time. It would make blinking back significantly easier, and people wouldnt be impressed by blink micro all that much.
Maybe you can consider this comparison when saying that it wouldnt be good/fun/interesting.
It requires more skill in the BW-way, thats the whole point.
And if it would only blink stalkers one by one it would randomly select the blinked stalkers which would ultimately make it quite useless. If all infestors in your group would cast fungal at the enemy at once it would be a gigantic waste of energy and thus you would need to select them individually which again would increase the skill required by a huge amount.
You should totally watch the new Extra Credits video if you think about stuff like Fungals and Force Fields. It captures a lot of what has been said the past few weeks. Link
This post is, if a very well written one, still a "let's dumb down the controls/ui interface". The problem is with Force fields, fungals and warpin mechanics and they are bad game design. I don't even understand how you (even after reading this) can relate this to smart casting. It only makes sense if you for some reason before hand thought that Smart casting was bad.
On November 22 2012 16:30 Deckkie wrote: I would like to add something.
I read many post about the idea that the new casting is more intuitive (maybe not all in those words), or that the new casting is better because it would otherwhise just restrict skills/apm that could be used better in another place.
From my understanding, casting in BW works the same as blinkstalkers in sc2. So imagine a game where, if you blink, you always blink one stalker at a time. It would make blinking back significantly easier, and people wouldnt be impressed by blink micro all that much.
Maybe you can consider this comparison when saying that it wouldnt be good/fun/interesting.
People in here might argue with you that why would the interface not help you blink better so you could make better strategical decision, after all, isn't what SC2 is about? I would argue that it's not.
I don't want a game that rewards only thinking. I want a game that rewards thinking AND being able to put in practice what you think.
Also, who says that having 4 templars selected should allow a storm cast one by one is intuitive? It's counter intuitive. I have a SELECTION of units and you don't think it's natural that they all cast TOGETHER their common ability?
From this Smart Cast position we are in we could make it a Perfect Cast where each templar will know where are more marines to do the storm there, and you will only give the command to start the storm. How about that?
What if instead of removing it, you could use modifier keys to modify behavior. It would still default to smart casting(because whether you like it or not, casuals are 95+% of the player base), but a ctrl(example) cast would cause broodwar-esque casting. You would probably also need an AI/pathing change to make this a real, viable option as well though. Increase AoE of spells by a certain amount, and spread everything out by the same so that actually spreading casters(right now people really only spread casters to dodge counterspells, not really due to range) to reach everything is necessary for the top end. That way if you have 3 spread out sentries in a battle for example, you could press ctrl+g to pop all your shields, rather than gx3.
I think it's a good idea to give more options for how to utilize what is given to you. If you have 2 HT's that happen to be in good formation against a bioball, you could save one click by using BW style casting. Doesn't matter for 99%+ of players. But the small number that can recognize it and save a click have that extra time to do something else.
On November 22 2012 16:30 Deckkie wrote: I would like to add something.
I read many post about the idea that the new casting is more intuitive (maybe not all in those words), or that the new casting is better because it would otherwhise just restrict skills/apm that could be used better in another place.
From my understanding, casting in BW works the same as blinkstalkers in sc2. So imagine a game where, if you blink, you always blink one stalker at a time. It would make blinking back significantly easier, and people wouldnt be impressed by blink micro all that much.
Maybe you can consider this comparison when saying that it wouldnt be good/fun/interesting.
People in here might argue with you that why would the interface not help you blink better so you could make better strategical decision, after all, isn't what SC2 is about? I would argue that it's not.
I don't want a game that rewards only thinking. I want a game that rewards thinking AND being able to put in practice what you think.
Also, who says that having 4 templars selected should allow a storm cast one by one is intuitive? It's counter intuitive. I have a SELECTION of units and you don't think it's natural that they all cast TOGETHER their common ability?
From this Smart Cast position we are in we could make it a Perfect Cast where each templar will know where are more marines to do the storm there, and you will only give the command to start the storm. How about that?
On November 22 2012 16:30 Deckkie wrote: I would like to add something.
I read many post about the idea that the new casting is more intuitive (maybe not all in those words), or that the new casting is better because it would otherwhise just restrict skills/apm that could be used better in another place.
From my understanding, casting in BW works the same as blinkstalkers in sc2. So imagine a game where, if you blink, you always blink one stalker at a time. It would make blinking back significantly easier, and people wouldnt be impressed by blink micro all that much.
Maybe you can consider this comparison when saying that it wouldnt be good/fun/interesting.
It requires more skill in the BW-way, thats the whole point.
And if it would only blink stalkers one by one it would randomly select the blinked stalkers which would ultimately make it quite useless. If all infestors in your group would cast fungal at the enemy at once it would be a gigantic waste of energy and thus you would need to select them individually which again would increase the skill required by a huge amount.
I am nut sure, but I feel misunderstood. I agree with the OP. I am trying to create awerness to people that would say that the new casting system is better may also enjoy blink stalker micro. I try to make a comparison that makes it easier to understand why the BW casting system can be considered better.
I understand that it is not a perfect comparison, but I think that blink micro is most comparable to the BW casting system. And I link that to the idea that most people find blink micro some of the more fun aspect of sc2. Both while playing and while watching.
Your idea is very well presented. However, I disagree that adding spell is intentionally making the game "harder/more difficult". Since you did not define "hard", I will go ahead and assume you mean "ordering units as you wish" (cuz you mention fighting the interface)
Yes, you need to cast the spell manually to benefit from it. However, you need not get a spell caster at all. E.g. a protoss can play with colossi only, without high templars. The conscious choice is made by the player, not the game designer. Spell casters did not make the game "harder". Instead, it gives player more ways to play the game.
In SC2, casters allow players with better micro to shine brighter in late games. They allow a player to simply "outmicro the opponent's macro". Or, at least that is the original concept. Smart-casting makes less micro skill is required to "outmicro" someone.
so just a thought (havent thought deeply about this/dont play too intensely anymore), but what about making spells like storm and fungal etc have a slight delay (im talking less than a second). It makes them more planned out, they can still be absurdly strong without being overpowered (since there is time to move units around), certainly more entertaining from a observer standpoint. Other things like range etc would probably have to be tweaked (again, i dunno if any of this would work), but it seems like it would help
On November 21 2012 23:21 Anomek wrote: You can't base competetive game mostly on brilliant strategies. It makes for stale, boring game. ...
Also look at other sports. Every sport require a lot of phisical abilities, and they are what makes difference between pros and amateurs. Even ones that require a lot of thinking and planning (snooker come to my mind) also requires executions, and execution in addition to strategy is what makes for most exciting moments.
Do people even read what they are saying here?
Two of the most classic strategy games ever: Chess and Go.
Clearly one-dimensional and stale games there because you only have to "micro" one piece at a time and because you don't have to stand on your head to make the pieces do what you intend them to do. Right? Out-thinking the opponent is so overrated.
I'm not trying to say that they are in any way indicative of SC2, but please stop with the constant sweeping comments about how things are this way or that way as if its some kind of universal truth. There's a lot of it going around lately and its utter garbage. Focus on SC2 because most generalised comments are just not going to work.
And how many people watch pro go and pro chess compared to pro-football?
BW = Football SC2 = Chess a.k.a not that fun to watch
If you guys want chess then that's fine, but just realise that SC2 will die as an esport trying to become that.
Note that there is still a shitload of strategy in football, so hardcore spectators can admire it, but the amateurs can still really enjoy it too without having to understand the management aspect. Analogous to BW.
People seriously need to learn that game mechanics was one of the last reasons that BW became popular as an eSport. BW was in a perfect storm situation where there was simply no other alternative, and Korea as a nation became obsessed with it.
Making SC2 like BW will not create instant viewers.
On November 21 2012 23:21 Anomek wrote: You can't base competetive game mostly on brilliant strategies. It makes for stale, boring game. ...
Also look at other sports. Every sport require a lot of phisical abilities, and they are what makes difference between pros and amateurs. Even ones that require a lot of thinking and planning (snooker come to my mind) also requires executions, and execution in addition to strategy is what makes for most exciting moments.
Do people even read what they are saying here?
Two of the most classic strategy games ever: Chess and Go.
Clearly one-dimensional and stale games there because you only have to "micro" one piece at a time and because you don't have to stand on your head to make the pieces do what you intend them to do. Right? Out-thinking the opponent is so overrated.
I'm not trying to say that they are in any way indicative of SC2, but please stop with the constant sweeping comments about how things are this way or that way as if its some kind of universal truth. There's a lot of it going around lately and its utter garbage. Focus on SC2 because most generalised comments are just not going to work.
And how many people watch pro go and pro chess compared to pro-football?
BW = Football SC2 = Chess a.k.a not that fun to watch
If you guys want chess then that's fine, but just realise that SC2 will die as an esport trying to become that.
Note that there is still a shitload of strategy in football, so hardcore spectators can admire it, but the amateurs can still really enjoy it too without having to understand the management aspect. Analogous to BW.
People seriously need to learn that game mechanics was one of the last reasons that BW became popular as an eSport. BW was in a perfect storm situation where there was simply no other alternative, and Korea as a nation became obsessed with it.
Making SC2 like BW will not create instant viewers.
that downplays a lot of BW strengths that makes it appeal to viewers. BW's unit voices were good, units were distinctive, units less cluttered, action everywhere...
On November 21 2012 23:21 Anomek wrote: You can't base competetive game mostly on brilliant strategies. It makes for stale, boring game. ...
Also look at other sports. Every sport require a lot of phisical abilities, and they are what makes difference between pros and amateurs. Even ones that require a lot of thinking and planning (snooker come to my mind) also requires executions, and execution in addition to strategy is what makes for most exciting moments.
Do people even read what they are saying here?
Two of the most classic strategy games ever: Chess and Go.
Clearly one-dimensional and stale games there because you only have to "micro" one piece at a time and because you don't have to stand on your head to make the pieces do what you intend them to do. Right? Out-thinking the opponent is so overrated.
I'm not trying to say that they are in any way indicative of SC2, but please stop with the constant sweeping comments about how things are this way or that way as if its some kind of universal truth. There's a lot of it going around lately and its utter garbage. Focus on SC2 because most generalised comments are just not going to work.
And how many people watch pro go and pro chess compared to pro-football?
BW = Football SC2 = Chess a.k.a not that fun to watch
If you guys want chess then that's fine, but just realise that SC2 will die as an esport trying to become that.
Note that there is still a shitload of strategy in football, so hardcore spectators can admire it, but the amateurs can still really enjoy it too without having to understand the management aspect. Analogous to BW.
People seriously need to learn that game mechanics was one of the last reasons that BW became popular as an eSport. BW was in a perfect storm situation where there was simply no other alternative, and Korea as a nation became obsessed with it.
Making SC2 like BW will not create instant viewers.
that downplays a lot of BW strengths that makes it appeal to viewers. BW's unit voices were good, units were distinctive, units less cluttered, action everywhere...
No, he is right. BW hit at a literally perfect moment. That is a fact, and completely unarguable. Too many factors came together to make BW as big as it was.
On November 21 2012 23:21 Anomek wrote: You can't base competetive game mostly on brilliant strategies. It makes for stale, boring game. ...
Also look at other sports. Every sport require a lot of phisical abilities, and they are what makes difference between pros and amateurs. Even ones that require a lot of thinking and planning (snooker come to my mind) also requires executions, and execution in addition to strategy is what makes for most exciting moments.
Do people even read what they are saying here?
Two of the most classic strategy games ever: Chess and Go.
Clearly one-dimensional and stale games there because you only have to "micro" one piece at a time and because you don't have to stand on your head to make the pieces do what you intend them to do. Right? Out-thinking the opponent is so overrated.
I'm not trying to say that they are in any way indicative of SC2, but please stop with the constant sweeping comments about how things are this way or that way as if its some kind of universal truth. There's a lot of it going around lately and its utter garbage. Focus on SC2 because most generalised comments are just not going to work.
And how many people watch pro go and pro chess compared to pro-football?
BW = Football SC2 = Chess a.k.a not that fun to watch
If you guys want chess then that's fine, but just realise that SC2 will die as an esport trying to become that.
Note that there is still a shitload of strategy in football, so hardcore spectators can admire it, but the amateurs can still really enjoy it too without having to understand the management aspect. Analogous to BW.
People seriously need to learn that game mechanics was one of the last reasons that BW became popular as an eSport. BW was in a perfect storm situation where there was simply no other alternative, and Korea as a nation became obsessed with it.
Making SC2 like BW will not create instant viewers.
that downplays a lot of BW strengths that makes it appeal to viewers. BW's unit voices were good, units were distinctive, units less cluttered, action everywhere...
No, he is right. BW hit at a literally perfect moment. That is a fact, and completely unarguable. Too many factors came together to make BW as big as it was.
Probably true, yet, that doesn't explain how it survived for 14 years after the fact when so many newer RTS games were coming out.
On November 22 2012 22:32 Waxangel wrote: I dislike how your posts have gone from interesting to forced BW > SC2 diatribes
Where do you think I jumped the shark? Because in my mind, these articles have all been born out of the same thing. What are some current issues in SC2. Either that other people are complaining about or that nobody is really expressing. And then what can be learned from BW. FF/Fungal has been complained about for some time, but has been increasing in the last couple months. So people perceive a problem.
But often in debates, other people immediately point to stasis and Ensare as though they were present to the same extent.
My mech play blog relied very heavily on using BW to explain what mech play was because I felt people did not really understand what it was and bio-play in another skin was getting passed off as 'mech.' But it was very much: this is the current design and its implications. Here are possible changes and its implications.
On November 22 2012 18:40 Integra wrote: This post is, if a very well written one, still a "let's dumb down the controls/ui interface". The problem is with Force fields, fungals and warpin mechanics and they are bad game design. I don't even understand how you (even after reading this) can relate this to smart casting. It only makes sense if you for some reason before hand thought that Smart casting was bad.
This could very well be. The tech might be too low, just plain bad for the game. Any number of things. But it imight simply be because it is too easy. People like to point out the existence of Stasis, Ensare, Lockdown, and Maelstrom. But the lack of smart-casting is one of the things that keeps theses abilities in check.
This could very well be. The tech might be too low, just plain bad for the game. Any number of things. But it imight simply be because it is too easy. People like to point out the existence of Stasis, Ensare, Lockdown, and Maelstrom. But the lack of smart-casting is one of the things that keeps theses abilities in check.
Maybe. But when you look at the spells and the costs of the units, there is a simpler reason: costs and versatility. Maelstrom only affects biological units (so the usage would be limited to PvZ mostly). You need to research it, the dark archon costs 250 minerals, 200 gas and 4 supply. It has no auto-attack and feedback and mind control are very situational. You need to decide when it is really worth it to use this unit.
Stasis: The arbiter costs 350 gas, this limits the usage of this unit automatically until you get many gas bases. Stasis deals prevents damage dealt, so you need to use the ability intelligently. The cloaking ability does not stack, so the use of more arbiters decreases with the numbers of arbiters present. Arbiters used for recall do not have the energy for stasis available (at least not immediately, except it has full energy with upgrade), so you need to decide for what you use your arbiters.
Lockdown and Ensnare have a big downside (single target and only slowing ability) that limits its usage. I would say these are much bigger factors than smartcasting.
Great thread, really well put and structured by the OP. I think smartcast is a problem aswell and the game would be so much better without it in every way, and this can be changed. The thing that really ruined SC2 to me was that units clump so much and so the aoe destroys them. If the aoe had a smaller radius or the units clumped less the game would still be more enjoyable to watch even with smartcast. Anyway I hope this reaches Blizzard attention as it has been one of the most constructive threads I've seen so far.
On November 23 2012 01:51 aTnClouD wrote: Great thread, really well put and structured by the OP. I think smartcast is a problem aswell and the game would be so much better without it in every way, and this can be changed. The thing that really ruined SC2 to me was that units clump so much and so the aoe destroys them. If the aoe had a smaller radius or the units clumped less the game would still be more enjoyable to watch even with smartcast. Anyway I hope this reaches Blizzard attention as it has been one of the most constructive threads I've seen so far.
Agreed, but if something like this is to reach Blizzard's attention it's going to take more than just a TL thread, however detailed and well thought out.
On November 23 2012 01:51 aTnClouD wrote: Great thread, really well put and structured by the OP. I think smartcast is a problem aswell and the game would be so much better without it in every way, and this can be changed. The thing that really ruined SC2 to me was that units clump so much and so the aoe destroys them. If the aoe had a smaller radius or the units clumped less the game would still be more enjoyable to watch even with smartcast. Anyway I hope this reaches Blizzard attention as it has been one of the most constructive threads I've seen so far.
Well I agree increasing collision radius would actually improve the game. I even made a thread about it back in the beta both here (got like 95% approval rate) and on b.net forums. But arguing smartcasting to be shut down is just pointless, it would never happen. The only way to get it back is to make a pro-mod of sc2.
I have never played a game without smart-casting (WC3 and SC2 are my two big rts games), but it sounds like a good idea and I definately like the idea of storm being buffed so I can actually defend against drops without leaving Stalker armadas to deal with medivacs. However shouldn't it apply to all casting units and spells (ie. snipe, infested terrans, EMP, etc), with the problems this introduce*. As a minimum EMP should also lose smart-casting, it is AOE damage against protoss (quite sick AOE if you look at the numbers :o)
* Obvious problem 1: Sniping 10 times with one click on a marine in low leagues to waste all ghost energy. Sniping 10 times with one click on a blord in high league to kill said blord quickly.
Obvious problem 2: Infested terrans can be spawned even faster if all infestors throw one egg per click. Currently I can only beat IT busts because my opponents fail to throw all eggs at the same time.
On November 21 2012 23:21 Anomek wrote: You can't base competetive game mostly on brilliant strategies. It makes for stale, boring game. ...
Also look at other sports. Every sport require a lot of phisical abilities, and they are what makes difference between pros and amateurs. Even ones that require a lot of thinking and planning (snooker come to my mind) also requires executions, and execution in addition to strategy is what makes for most exciting moments.
Do people even read what they are saying here?
Two of the most classic strategy games ever: Chess and Go.
Clearly one-dimensional and stale games there because you only have to "micro" one piece at a time and because you don't have to stand on your head to make the pieces do what you intend them to do. Right? Out-thinking the opponent is so overrated.
I'm not trying to say that they are in any way indicative of SC2, but please stop with the constant sweeping comments about how things are this way or that way as if its some kind of universal truth. There's a lot of it going around lately and its utter garbage. Focus on SC2 because most generalised comments are just not going to work.
And how many people watch pro go and pro chess compared to pro-football?
BW = Football SC2 = Chess a.k.a not that fun to watch
If you guys want chess then that's fine, but just realise that SC2 will die as an esport trying to become that.
Note that there is still a shitload of strategy in football, so hardcore spectators can admire it, but the amateurs can still really enjoy it too without having to understand the management aspect. Analogous to BW.
People seriously need to learn that game mechanics was one of the last reasons that BW became popular as an eSport. BW was in a perfect storm situation where there was simply no other alternative, and Korea as a nation became obsessed with it.
Making SC2 like BW will not create instant viewers.
that downplays a lot of BW strengths that makes it appeal to viewers. BW's unit voices were good, units were distinctive, units less cluttered, action everywhere...
No, he is right. BW hit at a literally perfect moment. That is a fact, and completely unarguable. Too many factors came together to make BW as big as it was.
Probably true, yet, that doesn't explain how it survived for 14 years after the fact when so many newer RTS games were coming out.
It's called momentum. There are various games that are actually much more entertaining to watch than SC:BW from a casual standpoint (for example, CoH 2v2 is fucking non-stop action from like minute 1), or have vastly different mechanics that I thought were actually better (as did many others), however SC:BW remained on top due to both being a good game, and having hit the correct timing. AoE 2 in alot of respects is actually extremely competitive, and was right up there with BW, but never got anywhere because it didn't hit the correct timing window.
The problem with removing smartcasting is that Dustin Browder and co. would say that removing smart casting would be a step backwards for the casual community. And unfourtanately, I'm almost 100% positive that no matter what the pro community says, it's not going to be removed.
Could you maybe talk a little more about how the new units and balance-changes in HotS and the change or lack thereof they will have in terms of improving the game mechanics?
Spells are prevalent in most of today's popular multiplayer games. Having an abundance of spells doesn't necessarily make the game easier, or more difficult to watch*. I agree with spells and spellcasters being for too important in SC2. They should not be the backbone of an army (like the Infestor). Spellcasters in RTS games should be support units.
Change the AoE, change the supply costs, whatever. Just make it clear that having too many of a particular spellcaster has diminishing returns. I don't think that will be fixed by changing smart casting, and I know Blizzard will not change the way casting functions in SC2.
*BW's spells were not as intuitive to understand as you make them out to be. No casual viewer could ever watch a game and understand what Dark Swarm or many other spells were. Now, having more spells may be difficult for casual viewers to understand when watching, but that ultimately depends on the design, animation, and effect of the spell. There will always be things that non-player spectators will not understand, but the game should not be designed to cater to them.
After reading much debate I have come to the conclusion that only one option (I have several in mind) can satisfy both the casual and pro scene. There has to be a "mode type" -- Beginner Mode -- which is the current state of the game that allows autocasting, selecting all your units and buildings under one hotkey, etc and -- Pro Mode -- which will have the same set up as Brood War, where everything is manually done. Such as 12 units per hotkey, no autocast, no selecting all your buildings at once, etc. Tournaments will use "Pro Mode". The way to divide the modes on ladder will be --There will be divisions all the way up to Grand Master with the Beginner Mode set up and divisions up to Grand Master with the Pro Mode set up. That way the Beginner Mode player won't have the advantage against the Pro Mode player. BM (Beginner Mode) players will only play BM players and PM (Pro Mode) players will only play PM players. The mode their using will show up next to the which ladder season they use it. In my opinion this is the only logical way to satisfy both groups of players. It gives both groups the option of how they would like to play the game. You can have casual tournaments and pro tournaments -- all depending on which mode you use.
On November 23 2012 04:03 Analytical Genius wrote: After reading much debate I have come to the conclusion that only one option (I have several in mind) can satisfy both the casual and pro scene. There has to be a "mode type" -- Beginner Mode -- which is the current state of the game that allows autocasting, selecting all your units and buildings under one hotkey, etc and -- Pro Mode -- which will have the same set up as Brood War, where everything is manually done. Such as 12 units per hotkey, no autocast, no selecting all your buildings at once, etc. Tournaments will use "Pro Mode". The way to divide the modes on ladder will be --There will be divisions all the way up to Grand Master with the Beginner Mode set up and divisions up to Grand Master with the Pro Mode set up. That way the Beginner Mode player won't have the advantage against the Pro Mode player. BM (Beginner Mode) players will only play BM players and PM (Pro Mode) players will only play PM players. The mode their using will show up next to the which ladder season they use it. In my opinion this is the only logical way to satisfy both groups of players. It gives both groups the option of how they would like to play the game. You can have casual tournaments and pro tournaments -- all depending on which mode you use.
I agree with this and was thinking something very similar. I don't see any reason this shouldn't be implemented.
On November 23 2012 04:03 Analytical Genius wrote: After reading much debate I have come to the conclusion that only one option (I have several in mind) can satisfy both the casual and pro scene. There has to be a "mode type" -- Beginner Mode -- which is the current state of the game that allows autocasting, selecting all your units and buildings under one hotkey, etc and -- Pro Mode -- which will have the same set up as Brood War, where everything is manually done. Such as 12 units per hotkey, no autocast, no selecting all your buildings at once, etc. Tournaments will use "Pro Mode". The way to divide the modes on ladder will be --There will be divisions all the way up to Grand Master with the Beginner Mode set up and divisions up to Grand Master with the Pro Mode set up. That way the Beginner Mode player won't have the advantage against the Pro Mode player. BM (Beginner Mode) players will only play BM players and PM (Pro Mode) players will only play PM players. The mode their using will show up next to the which ladder season they use it. In my opinion this is the only logical way to satisfy both groups of players. It gives both groups the option of how they would like to play the game. You can have casual tournaments and pro tournaments -- all depending on which mode you use.
I've done a lot of thinking about this particular proposal... and at the end of it all, I concluded that its not a very good idea.
One of the things that awesome about golf, is that I can grab my sticks and go out and play the exact same game that the pros play, but I shoot 85 from a short tee and they shoot 65 from the tips. I can really appreciate how incredible their accomplishments are because I'm playing by the same rules, swinging the same stick at the same ball over the same grass.... I just know I'll never, EVER be as superhuman as they are. Same for every other game, pretty much.
I can more easily appreciate what pro gamers are able to do because I have all the same exact buttons to push and I can't push them like they do. I don't think its good for esport to change the rules at the pro level. In addition, how the hell can anyone ever progress to that level if there is some new, awful, learning curve going from amateur to pro?
Also, even assuming your premise wasn't something I disagreed with, your cutoff is horrible. There are CODE S players who are not GM on KR. They're stuck at rank 1 masters or whatever. Any change you implement for pro play MUST effect master league, as there are always some pros there, and some top level amateurs as well. Also, as a top 8 masters player, I very much do not want a different game than the one played at the pro level.
On November 23 2012 04:20 Seldentar wrote: I agree with this and was thinking something very similar. I don't see any reason this shouldn't be implemented.
The same reason that MANY diamond/platinum/ and even gold league players got insulted and angry when you took away their losses on the ladder stats page. Some of us play the game BECAUSE we want to play a challenging game where we are working to emulate the miraculous feats at the pro level. If you make the game different for the masses, then there will be out-cry. That's just not what starcraft is about. One set of rules for everyone.
This is the only good analysis of smartcasting I've ever read. You are right on the mark this time; nice work falling. I'd be really interested in trying SC2 without smartcasting to see what it feels like. Obviously you'd have to buff some things here and there to make it balanced but it'd still be interesting to try right out of the box.
You can't just take away smart casting. Protoss early and midgame relies so much on spammed forcefields that if you took away smart casting protoss would be fucked.
On November 23 2012 04:03 Analytical Genius wrote: After reading much debate I have come to the conclusion that only one option (I have several in mind) can satisfy both the casual and pro scene. There has to be a "mode type" -- Beginner Mode -- which is the current state of the game that allows autocasting, selecting all your units and buildings under one hotkey, etc and -- Pro Mode -- which will have the same set up as Brood War, where everything is manually done. Such as 12 units per hotkey, no autocast, no selecting all your buildings at once, etc. Tournaments will use "Pro Mode". The way to divide the modes on ladder will be --There will be divisions all the way up to Grand Master with the Beginner Mode set up and divisions up to Grand Master with the Pro Mode set up. That way the Beginner Mode player won't have the advantage against the Pro Mode player. BM (Beginner Mode) players will only play BM players and PM (Pro Mode) players will only play PM players. The mode their using will show up next to the which ladder season they use it. In my opinion this is the only logical way to satisfy both groups of players. It gives both groups the option of how they would like to play the game. You can have casual tournaments and pro tournaments -- all depending on which mode you use.
I've done a lot of thinking about this particular proposal... and at the end of it all, I concluded that its not a very good idea.
One of the things that awesome about golf, is that I can grab my sticks and go out and play the exact same game that the pros play, but I shoot 85 from a short tee and they shoot 65 from the tips. I can really appreciate how incredible their accomplishments are because I'm playing by the same rules, swinging the same stick at the same ball over the same grass.... I just know I'll never, EVER be as superhuman as they are. Same for every other game, pretty much.
You will have the opportunity to "play by the same rules" if that's your choice -- you will have that option.
I can more easily appreciate what pro gamers are able to do because I have all the same exact buttons to push and I can't push them like they do. I don't think its good for esport to change the rules at the pro level.
So, you're basically agreeing that Blizzard dumbing down the mechanics of BW for the SC2 pro scene wasn't a good thing. Particularly because Brood War not only came first, it also shaped and gave SC2 the popularity it has received today.
In addition, how the hell can anyone ever progress to that level if there is some new, awful, learning curve going from amateur to pro?
Hard work is how you progress to that level. I can use Brood War as an example. There was a distinct learning curve going from amateur to pro in that game. However, people were able to do it. There was a marginal difference from somebody who was amateur and somebody who was pro in BW. The same cannot be said in SC2.
Also, even assuming your premise wasn't something I disagreed with, your cutoff is horrible. There are CODE S players who are not GM on KR. They're stuck at rank 1 masters or whatever. Any change you implement for pro play MUST effect master league, as there are always some pros there, and some top level amateurs as well. Also, as a top 8 masters player, I very much do not want a different game than the one played at the pro level.
Of course the system will be affected. However, StarCraft 2 is still in it's "development stage" and won't be finalized until it's last expansion is released. If this change is implemented in HotS then everybody won't have a choice but to get used to the set up. Also, from what I have read -- the pros encourage this change. If a player wants to play the game casually he will have that option and if they want to take it to the next level -- he will have that option as well.
The same reason that MANY diamond/platinum/ and even gold league players got insulted and angry when you took away their losses on the ladder stats page.
And they eventually got over it. Along with a lot of other complaints.
Some of us play the game BECAUSE we want to play a challenging game where we are working to emulate the miraculous feats at the pro level. If you make the game different for the masses, then there will be out-cry. That's just not what starcraft is about. One set of rules for everyone.
If that's the case then start out on the Pro Mode and work your way up. If you are a casual gamer that doesn't have any intentions on becoming a Pro then why would you want to play a harder game? The moment you want to "emulate the miraculous feats at the "PRO LEVEL" means that you are no longer a casual but a competitive gamer. Also, it appears that "not making the game different for the masses" has already created the out-cry.
On November 23 2012 04:03 Analytical Genius wrote: After reading much debate I have come to the conclusion that only one option (I have several in mind) can satisfy both the casual and pro scene. There has to be a "mode type" -- Beginner Mode -- which is the current state of the game that allows autocasting, selecting all your units and buildings under one hotkey, etc and -- Pro Mode -- which will have the same set up as Brood War, where everything is manually done. Such as 12 units per hotkey, no autocast, no selecting all your buildings at once, etc. Tournaments will use "Pro Mode". The way to divide the modes on ladder will be --There will be divisions all the way up to Grand Master with the Beginner Mode set up and divisions up to Grand Master with the Pro Mode set up. That way the Beginner Mode player won't have the advantage against the Pro Mode player. BM (Beginner Mode) players will only play BM players and PM (Pro Mode) players will only play PM players. The mode their using will show up next to the which ladder season they use it. In my opinion this is the only logical way to satisfy both groups of players. It gives both groups the option of how they would like to play the game. You can have casual tournaments and pro tournaments -- all depending on which mode you use.
I've done a lot of thinking about this particular proposal... and at the end of it all, I concluded that its not a very good idea.
One of the things that awesome about golf, is that I can grab my sticks and go out and play the exact same game that the pros play, but I shoot 85 from a short tee and they shoot 65 from the tips. I can really appreciate how incredible their accomplishments are because I'm playing by the same rules, swinging the same stick at the same ball over the same grass.... I just know I'll never, EVER be as superhuman as they are. Same for every other game, pretty much.
I can more easily appreciate what pro gamers are able to do because I have all the same exact buttons to push and I can't push them like they do. I don't think its good for esport to change the rules at the pro level. In addition, how the hell can anyone ever progress to that level if there is some new, awful, learning curve going from amateur to pro?
Also, even assuming your premise wasn't something I disagreed with, your cutoff is horrible. There are CODE S players who are not GM on KR. They're stuck at rank 1 masters or whatever. Any change you implement for pro play MUST effect master league, as there are always some pros there, and some top level amateurs as well. Also, as a top 8 masters player, I very much do not want a different game than the one played at the pro level.
On November 23 2012 04:20 Seldentar wrote: I agree with this and was thinking something very similar. I don't see any reason this shouldn't be implemented.
The same reason that MANY diamond/platinum/ and even gold league players got insulted and angry when you took away their losses on the ladder stats page. Some of us play the game BECAUSE we want to play a challenging game where we are working to emulate the miraculous feats at the pro level. If you make the game different for the masses, then there will be out-cry. That's just not what starcraft is about. One set of rules for everyone.
Nice, you've obviously thought about this a lot more than I have. This is the response I was looking for. I figured someone would pop in and counter with some valid reason for not implementing the idea.
With there being so many people with different wants, expectations, and reasons for playing/watching the game it's very challenging to satisfy all of them. I personally don't like the fact that I am able to do any individual thing a pro can do in this game. For me it takes away from the mystique where I wonder how the hell the pro was able to do something incredible. In SC2 storms and fungals are so easy to use that I'm never impressed by them when I watch pro games, for example. For me, the skill cap isn't high enough and I wish there were more things making the pros really stand out from everybody else in extraordinary ways.
That being said, this clearly doesn't appeal to everyone. It almost seems like to meet everyone's wants and expectations there would need to be two separate games instead of dividing SC2 into 2 groups. Perhaps the current SC2 and a remade BW for more "hardcore" players. I don't see that happening though.
Maybe a mod like the above poster suggested would be much more viable.
I agree, spells in SC2 are much nerfed when compared to their SC1 counterparts, and you've covered many of the reasons They are just a lot less fun to use and watch.
But smart Casting isn't going away. Neither is Multiple building selection, or unlimited unit selection. They makes the game less frustrating to play, as your units are able to do what you want. And I don't believe artificially making the game harder to play is what makes a game fun, or what made sc1 great.
Just because I was much more impressed with seeing good storm placement from pros in SC1 (due to the much high relative difficulty) doesn't mean it will be fun for me to try the same thing in game and mess up, only to be punished by having all my templar waste their energy by casting on the same spot as well. Neither do I think if smart casting were to be in SC1 now, would it break the game in such a way as to be unplayable (from my experience with SC2BW, the SC1 remake in SC2).
But you do bring up a good point about spells and their relative 'boring' nature to watch and use. So perhaps, what we need to do is work with smart casting: if blanketing area of effect spells are too easy to cast, perhaps we should encourage more single target spells. Off the top of my head, an example I can think of that fits this criteria comes from the starcraft master training map; the ghost sniping banelings. I would be HUGELY impressed if a pro were to pull that off in a game, yet at least I wouldn't be punished if I attempted to try doing so in a game.
On November 21 2012 11:59 zlefin wrote: making the interface worse, making units dumber, is NEVER a good way to balance things; it just annoys people; whatever benefits it might allegedly yield; the drawbacks are far worse. find another way.
Did you read or watch anything in the OP?
Spell-casters are by design a more difficult unit, therefore 'worse interface, making units dumber.' Given that spell casters are designed to be difficult, to what extent should they difficult? What are the draw-backs in terms of game-play that you get when you don't have spell-casting? I've listed a great number of benefits.
Besides- smart-casting is slower than magic-box casting. The interface denies you the possibility of casting spells simultaneously.
Look, this poster is correct. By the same logic as you're using, we should go back to 12 units in a control group. This forces players to do things a different and more difficult way and set up their armies in advance instead of just using big sweeping clicks. It's harder.
I agree with a few of the points on balance, like the Mothership, but making the game harder is really just an arbitrary preference that makes it harder for people to enjoy the game.
Thinking about it again, I feel it is better the way it is than it was in Broodwar.
Maybe fewer, stronger storms were more exciting than carpet-storming in SC2, and maybe if you sink large amounts of time into playing the game and perfecting you micro the harder mechanics are more rewarding.
But from a player's perspective, I don't want a single slip-up or a half-second's inattention to decided the game, neither in my nor my opponent's favour. And as a spectator, I want the smarter player to win, not the one who can click really fast.
On November 23 2012 04:48 Sephiren wrote: I would say that I completely agree with you, but I don't think anyone can NOT agree, since it's mostly a layout of cause and effect.
So well done, now convince David Kim and Browder and this franchise might redeem itself.
I completely disagree with the OP. Smart casting is a good thing in Starcraft 2, and if it were completely taken out, it would destroy the game and push it into mediocrity.
Please stop trying to make Starcraft 2 into Broodwar.
People need to stop making threads about changing sc2...
Do you think blizzard come on here and look at every balance/design change thread and think to themselve's "lets take a random person's thought process for changing our game and apply it to the game we have created!"? no.
Blizzard are changing things that we are not suggesting to be changed and therefore blizzard are not looking at all of your threads about what YOU guys think should be changed. If anybody has a say in what they think should be changed its the pro players so just stop with these silly pointless threads. You can theorycraft all you like about how you wish the game should be changed but it makes no difference apart from spread negativity and give people false hope of what can happen.
On November 23 2012 07:03 kafkaesque wrote: Thinking about it again, I feel it is better the way it is than it was in Broodwar.
Maybe fewer, stronger storms were more exciting than carpet-storming in SC2, and maybe if you sink large amounts of time into playing the game and perfecting you micro the harder mechanics are more rewarding.
But from a player's perspective, I don't want a single slip-up or a half-second's inattention to decided the game, neither in my nor my opponent's favour. And as a spectator, I want the smarter player to win, not the one who can click really fast.
Isn't that kinda what happens now? A single slip up in FF's or a half-second's delay on spamming out spells and the game is decided. SC2 even more so then BW? Isn't that people talk about with Protoss- nothing dies and then suddenly everything dies. And balancing the game around tons of spells is also about who can click really fast. That's really hard to get away from unless it is turn-based strategy or your actions just don't matter too much due to un-responsive units.
On November 23 2012 07:58 Finnz wrote: People need to stop making threads about changing sc2...
Do you think blizzard come on here and look at every balance/design change thread and think to themselve's "lets take a random person's thought process for changing our game and apply it to the game we have created!"? no.
Well HotS is kinda all about change now isn't? So then the question is then is all the new change good and is the change too much or is it too little? An expansion without change... seems rather pointless.
And furthermore, the number of threads, while tiresome over time, should be an indicator that there is at least a perceived problem. This is my analysis as to what is a significant underlying cause.
Browder at least was quite supportive of people making these sorts of threads. Having said that, I suffer no illusions as to the probability of this being implemented. But unlikely or not as this is being used as a solution, I still think it would be a powerful solution to a significant problem. And perhaps all I can do is (maybe) help move the conversation away from saving ourselves two extra clicks per cast is inherently 'smarter' to look instead at the actual impact that each type of casting has on gameplay and viewability. (Plus magic-box casting has actually less clicking then 'smart-casting.)
On November 23 2012 07:58 Finnz wrote: People need to stop making threads about changing sc2...
Do you think blizzard come on here and look at every balance/design change thread and think to themselve's "lets take a random person's thought process for changing our game and apply it to the game we have created!"? no.
Blizzard are changing things that we are not suggesting to be changed and therefore blizzard are not looking at all of your threads about what YOU guys think should be changed. If anybody has a say in what they think should be changed its the pro players so just stop with these silly pointless threads. You can theorycraft all you like about how you wish the game should be changed but it makes no difference apart from spread negativity and give people false hope of what can happen.
Well, they said that they come here and look for a feedback from the community.
But yeah, I would say a lot of times they would read on the suggestion and take them with a grain of salt because I do not really think we know what goes behind the door at Blizzard, nor we have enough data to really suggest the game design change. People here sometimes is just too passionate and forget that there's a lot of influence that make developers design a game in a certain way.
On November 23 2012 07:58 Finnz wrote: People need to stop making threads about changing sc2...
Do you think blizzard come on here and look at every balance/design change thread and think to themselve's "lets take a random person's thought process for changing our game and apply it to the game we have created!"? no.
Blizzard are changing things that we are not suggesting to be changed and therefore blizzard are not looking at all of your threads about what YOU guys think should be changed. If anybody has a say in what they think should be changed its the pro players so just stop with these silly pointless threads. You can theorycraft all you like about how you wish the game should be changed but it makes no difference apart from spread negativity and give people false hope of what can happen.
So theorycrafting and suggesting balancechanges spreads negativity? Besides, Dustin Browder just encouraged those discussions in his last interview and confirmed "blizzard is watching us/teamliquid". Of course Blizzard looks at the premiere site of their core audience for the game and depending on how good your ideas actually are the attention and focus on a thread/idea can give it the bump for blizzard.
If you have a problem with the function of a forum here is your time to log out. But making these false claims and debbiedowning an elaborate balance discussions sounds kinda counterproductive to me.
I actually disagree with the notion that spells are added to make the game more difficult. They are added to make combat more diverse and to give players more options on how to change the outcome of a fight. Put in another way, their goal isn't to make micro more difficult but to make forming strategies more difficult (and also more interesting) because there are more variables to consider.
On November 23 2012 08:17 blarkh wrote: I actually disagree with the notion that spells are added to make the game more difficult. They are added to make combat more diverse and to give players more options on how to change the outcome of a fight. Put in another way, their goal isn't to make micro more difficult but to make forming strategies more difficult (and also more interesting) because there are more variables to consider.
In any RTS game, executing a strategy is impossible if you don't have the required mechanics to do so. Strategy and mechanical skill go hand in hand - you can't have one without the other.
"As someone who watched BW and even WC3 a lot, SC2 is a somewhat problematic game compared to the two.
I'm not a "BW elitist" but some things done in BW were done right. In WC3 (which is probably an easier game to play than SC2), a lot of things were done right compared to SC2. And WC3 had smart casting, formation movement (you can make it so the fastest unit in your control group is slowed down to the slowest, to make microing easier), MBS, etc... it wasn't a "fighting the interface" game but yet WC3 has less problems than SC2.
WC3 and BW (IMO) are much better than SC2. SC2 has all sorts of problems right now. Throwing out ideas on how to potentially fix it is a good thing. We definitely want SC2 to succeed. Right now, SC2 has design problems and a lot of problems that both BW and WarCraft III did better (and again, WC3 wasn't a "fighting the interface game"... WC3 has everything SC2 has besides unlimited unit selection).
So it's not me (or others) wanting SC2 to be like BW (or wanting SC2 to be WC3).
Also I don't think that removing smart casting would make battles more of a "knife's edge". Currently, battles are a knife's edge because mainly of positioning and how easy it is to be in the wrong position and how spell casters can change everything all in an instant (force fields and fungal for example).
Removing smart casting or going the WC3 route of not making OMG WTF OP would lessen the "knife's edge" effect and make games more gradual instead of you make 1 mistake you lose and you can't come back from the game.
Edit - Of course I'm not saying removing smart casting automatically fixers everything. As I said earlier, positioning (being out of position) or deathball syndrome (basically, how splitting your army is really discouraged in the game, thus making being out of position even more of a threat) is a detrimental to the game.
Some things:
1. Since being out of position (which unlike both WC3 and BW) is such a huge factor in whether you win or lose games (unlike both BW and WC3, splitting up your army for long periods of time is discouraged), something has to be done with that.
2. Deathball syndrome - Splitting up your army means that if you're hit by a deathball, your split up army loses (due to how easy it is to mass a death ball, unlike both BW and WC3).
3. Things die a lot faster (thanks to deathball syndrome, in BW the armies sort of came in waves after wave which meant that your army died gradually instead of all at once... in WC3, units have a large enough health that it takes like a minute for any unit to die). Also, take note units actually do more damage (even outside of deathballs) in SC2 than BW. Hydralisks for example do a ton of damage in SC2 compared to BW. Marauders (didn't exist in BW) also did a ton of damage. The only thing that did more damage in BW are spell casters (which is countered by BW's mechanics), possibly Marines (stim doubled the attack rate instead of just increasing it by 50%) and maybe Carriers.
4. Spells that root (fungal) or impede movement (forcefield) in general heightens the above two negative issues. If this was WC3 (units died slowly) or if this was BW (units weren't all in a clump and splitting up your army was encouraged in most match ups), then fungal or force field wouldn't be as much of a problem.
In fact, Stasis Field is probably a more powerful and stronger ability than both Forcefield and Fungal combined (if it was in the game, you could easily split your opponent's army in half) but yet due to BW's overall gameplay, it wasn't OP.
Not that I'm saying SC2 isn't a great game but that SC2 could have the potential to be a better game. It doesn't have to be like BW or WC3 but if you look at those games, I'd much rather everything not be a "knife's edge" or you mess up once, you lose and can't come back."
tl;dr - The problem isn't the easy interface or whatever exactly. It's the fact that the game is way too much of a knife's edge where you make one mistake or get caught out of position one time, you can lose the entire game.
If SC2 games didn't revolve around losing "entire" armies in seconds (in BW "and" WC3, it was all gradual), then spells like fungal, etc wouldn't be a problem.
On November 23 2012 12:56 TheFish7 wrote: Hatcheries (larva) have smart-casting now as well. I'm wondering if the OP would advocate getting rid of that as well?
Why don't we just dumb down the game back to Warcraft2, (before BattleNet edition) and remove everything UI improvement including building ques and auto-attack. It would, without a doubt, solve practically every problem we have in SC2 and really distinct the good from the best.
Nah. Remove the "knife's edge" problem from SC2, and the game is fixed.
Though really though, while WC2 was more fighting the UI than BW, BW was definitely a harder game to play. Things like muta micro, shuttle + reaver micro, move shotting, etc required precision micro (though you had enough time to do "precision micro", unlike SC2 where it's like you get your hand off of your army for 1 second to do "micro"... then you find your army is already gone.
In WC2, it was just mindlessly clicking fast (not that WC2 is bad but the "micro" in WC2 compared to BW is mindlessly clicking fast).
ACTUALLY yet another reason for SC2 to be less "knife's edgy". If the game was less of a knife's edge, players would have more time to actually micro and macro units.
In BW, smart casting wasn't needed at all because it was a more gradual game. You could select individually multiple ghosts to lock down those 8 battlecruisers or multiple corsairs to disruption web multiple areas (inb4 who wastes 500/500 [Fleet Beacon + Spell Upgrade] on Disruption Web) because you didn't worry about all your units dying in seconds.
BW was fast paced, a lot more than WC3 (which some people dislike because it's too slow) but yet it was still gradual.
SC2 is fast paced too but it's a lot less gradual and more "one small mistake, you lose".
Also, again WC3 (which has the same SC2 "interface help", minus unlimited group selection but "PLUS' the fact you can set your entire control group to move at the same speed [which reduced the need to micro]) was arguably an easier game to play than SC2.
WC3, the better player usually won (there are a lot more consistent players in high level WC3 than SC2 right now, though that's not a good argument considering WC3 is kind of low) but the point is, even with the easy interface, WC3 had consistent top players.
What matters is that the game isn't too random (random in the sense that one mistake or one BO can win/lose you the game so easily). And again, this applies to BW too (the game was gradual and not too random).
dont forget that the move-restricting spells are NEEDED by zerg and protoss because otherwise a stimmed bioball would amove the shit out of them. removing fungal and forcefield after you removed stim. stim is the real problem.
Bit of a side note, but I don't think stim is a problem so much as stim on maruaders/ maruaders in general . Marines vs Banelings is actually an interesting dynamic. I suspect it is more m&m together is at issue. But this isn't a suggestion to get rid of any of the spells. Just to push them back into a supporting role rather than them being the main thing.
Holy fuck so many people in this thread are so fucking scared of change.
Can't you guys at least be open to new ideas that are only trying to help make the game better with their intentions? People freak the fuck out over these threads all the time simply because someone wants to improve the game. Do you honestly want SC2 to be exactly how it is now forever? Because I sure as fuck don't.
On November 23 2012 10:36 Angra wrote: Holy fuck so many people in this thread are so fucking scared of change.
Can't you guys at least be open to new ideas that are only trying to help make the game better with their intentions? People freak the fuck out over these threads all the time simply because someone wants to improve the game. Do you honestly want SC2 to be exactly how it is now forever? Because I sure as fuck don't.
This.
Thankfully, I think those guys are by far the minority though. It's just they stand out more and tend to be more vocal IMO.
Most people DO want change, but many disagree about what type of change is needed.
Extra Credits just posted a great video that discusses some of the stuff brought up in this thread, most notably relating to spells that restrict unit movement.
Also, speaking as a BW fan who has basically given up on SC2 after giving it numerous chances, the ideas in this thread, if implemented, would make me come back.
If change is for the better many would have embraced the change but so far it has brought nothing better on the table . So you can have the change while I stick with what has been tried and tested .
Well what exactly are your ideas that you want translated into the game? What if my idea I want translated into the game is to take three casters, spread them out and storm at the exact same time? SC2 is a hinderance to that. It literally disallows this action.
It is true that SC2 disallows this action, but taking away smartcasting shouldn't be the only solution to this. Why can't both option exist in the game? Reintroducing magic-box cast is a great idea, but smartcasting isn't really in the way for the game developers to implement it.
What are you saving your APM for? We saved the APM with MBS and the like-- so that we could have more time for things like casting. Better casting is the thing we want to spend apm on. And now we have more time to do it. (Well actually we don't if we're Zerg because of larvae injects and creep spread, but anyways.) If keep the old method of casting, our spells are awesomely powered and we have more time to do it. But instead the spells get diluted.
Smartcasting is not designed to "save APM for players". That is a consequence of the intended goal, which is to not frustrate players. Same goes for all the MBS, rally mining and new path-finding. It was all designed to be more accessible to new players(in my case, old players too). It has always been the philosophy of Blizzard, and the sign of a good game, to be easily learnt, difficult to master. SC2 brings the easy to learn and play to another level. The problems we see now are a consequence of that. However, taking smartcasting away is akin to taking one step forward and one step back. The real goal for spell casting should be "easy to cast, difficult to cast right". It should feel powerful, and convey the players skill to the spectator when a spell hits, not when cast. For a start, Fungal with a projectile is a step to the right direction. Likewise, EMP should have a projectile speed of the old EMP of BW Science Vessel. Consequences of smartcasting can be reduced with these changes.
To me this is better solved by Battlenet, then by trying to appeal to casuals to the detriment of our pro-scene.
Appeal to the casuals, as well as not being a detriment to the pro-scene, is what the game should strive for. Instead of the removal of smartcasting, we should look at the game at its current state and introduce ideas that will broaden and deepen the gameplay and enhance the viewing experience. There is more to be done and better ideas to be explored. Discarding mechanics that are not in BW because BW is the perfect example of a successful competitive game does not change the fact that BW has clumsy controls that most people would unlikely want to experience to have fun or be good at, especially to those who have no idea why BW was a success, or was successful. Battlenet definitely needs improvement, but it is equally important to the game to achieve the same effect within the game itself.
Unfortunately, Smart Casting is here to stay, and the argument that we shouldn't be fighting the interface is completely valid. Instead of arguing why doing anything should be harder, you should be discussing how game DESIGN (not execution) should be changed to make the game more interesting.
For example? The issue with players maxing at 12 minutes could be fairly well addressed by giving each race access to very powerful worker harassment (think Reavers or Vulture Drops), so that people would have to devote much more attention to economy. That's a design solution to a design problem, and is many times better than your poorly conceived notion that inherent problems with the game's design can be solved just by breaking parts of the interface.
On November 23 2012 12:21 Acritter wrote: Unfortunately, Smart Casting is here to stay, and the argument that we shouldn't be fighting the interface is completely valid. Instead of arguing why doing anything should be harder, you should be discussing how game DESIGN (not execution) should be changed to make the game more interesting.
For example? The issue with players maxing at 12 minutes could be fairly well addressed by giving each race access to very powerful worker harassment (think Reavers or Vulture Drops), so that people would have to devote much more attention to economy. That's a design solution to a design problem, and is many times better than your poorly conceived notion that inherent problems with the game's design can be solved just by breaking parts of the interface.
There should always be an execution barrier. You don't just draw up strategies on a white board and get to execute them easily. That's boring and not nearly difficult enough to sustain a pro scene. I hate this mindset that we should continually lower the bar for execution, that's a huge part of what separates pro plays from scrubs like me. Execution barriers in BW are what made macro monster players so scary and a completely valid way to win. You could simply outproduce other players when you focused on overwhelming them with units because you were more refined mechanically. That doesn't really happen in SC 2 the same way. "Making the game dumber" is just an oversimplification meant to attack the change to make casting very very powerful spells harder. They are too impactful on the game to just be spammed so easily.
The problem with the game is it has issues like smart casting AND stuff like high ground, clumping, death balls, your aforementioned issue with maxing out quickly and not stressing space control because you don't need to expand enough. Lots of stuff that comes together to make any flashy new units irrelevant in a small sense because they will always be operating within a space that has these problems.
On November 23 2012 12:21 Acritter wrote: Unfortunately, Smart Casting is here to stay, and the argument that we shouldn't be fighting the interface is completely valid. Instead of arguing why doing anything should be harder, you should be discussing how game DESIGN (not execution) should be changed to make the game more interesting.
For example? The issue with players maxing at 12 minutes could be fairly well addressed by giving each race access to very powerful worker harassment (think Reavers or Vulture Drops), so that people would have to devote much more attention to economy. That's a design solution to a design problem, and is many times better than your poorly conceived notion that inherent problems with the game's design can be solved just by breaking parts of the interface.
There should always be an execution barrier. You don't just draw up strategies on a white board and get to execute them easily. That's boring and not nearly difficult enough to sustain a pro scene. I hate this mindset that we should continually lower the bar for execution, that's a huge part of what separates pro plays from scrubs like me. Execution barriers in BW are what made macro monster players so scary and a completely valid way to win. You could simply outproduce other players when you focused on overwhelming them with units because you were more refined mechanically. That doesn't really happen in SC 2 the same way. "Making the game dumber" is just an oversimplification meant to attack the change to make casting very very powerful spells harder. They are too impactful on the game to just be spammed so easily.
People like to say "making the game dumber" a lot. It's not about being dumber, it's about being intuitive. When you tell a unit to go somewhere, it should take the obvious path. When you click once to perform an action, it should happen once. When you try to select multiple units, there shouldn't be an arbitrary limit stopping you.
We could make that hardest game ever, where AI is garbage without constant babysitting, every button needs perfect press timing or else it does nothing, every action needs 100% precision...and it would be an absolutely terrible game.
Let's be clear here, no smart-casting, limited hotkey groups, bad pathing AI, none of them are needed to increase the skill cap. People only bring them up because BW had a high skill bar, and they wrongly associate everything BW with everything complex. Flawed UI is not a necessity, it's a crutch.
On November 23 2012 10:50 Revelatus wrote: I don't think "smart casting" is a good description if this mechanic. It seems a lot less "smart" than the current way.
You misunderstand. The SC2 mechanic where you can have multiple spell casters selected and they will all cast spells one at a time is called *cough* "smart casting." The mechanic Falling describes from Brood War was not called "smart casting." Falling is just trying to make a point that it was overall more beneficial for the game even though at first glance *cough* "smart casting" seems like a superior mechanic.
On November 23 2012 12:21 Acritter wrote: Unfortunately, Smart Casting is here to stay, and the argument that we shouldn't be fighting the interface is completely valid. Instead of arguing why doing anything should be harder, you should be discussing how game DESIGN (not execution) should be changed to make the game more interesting.
For example? The issue with players maxing at 12 minutes could be fairly well addressed by giving each race access to very powerful worker harassment (think Reavers or Vulture Drops), so that people would have to devote much more attention to economy. That's a design solution to a design problem, and is many times better than your poorly conceived notion that inherent problems with the game's design can be solved just by breaking parts of the interface.
There should always be an execution barrier. You don't just draw up strategies on a white board and get to execute them easily. That's boring and not nearly difficult enough to sustain a pro scene. I hate this mindset that we should continually lower the bar for execution, that's a huge part of what separates pro plays from scrubs like me. Execution barriers in BW are what made macro monster players so scary and a completely valid way to win. You could simply outproduce other players when you focused on overwhelming them with units because you were more refined mechanically. That doesn't really happen in SC 2 the same way. "Making the game dumber" is just an oversimplification meant to attack the change to make casting very very powerful spells harder. They are too impactful on the game to just be spammed so easily.
People like to say "making the game dumber" a lot. It's not about being dumber, it's about being intuitive. When you tell a unit to go somewhere, it should take the obvious path. When you click once to perform an action, it should happen once. When you try to select multiple units, there shouldn't be an arbitrary limit stopping you.
We could make that hardest game ever, where AI is garbage without constant babysitting, every button needs perfect press timing or else it does nothing, every action needs 100% precision...and it would be an absolutely terrible game.
Let's be clear here, no smart-casting, limited hotkey groups, bad pathing AI, none of them are needed to increase the skill cap. People only bring them up because BW had a high skill bar, and they wrongly associate everything BW with everything complex. Flawed UI is not a necessity, it's a crutch.
It's not even close to a flaw or a crutch. I have no idea how making something harder is a crutch when blizzard has proven they can't make the game more interesting through their unit design. Obviously BW was doing something right. You keep associating things that aren't even related. Smart casting is not intuitive, it's plain easy.
On November 23 2012 12:56 TheFish7 wrote: Hatcheries (larva) have smart-casting now as well. I'm wondering if the OP would advocate getting rid of that as well?
I'm not sure that macro-mechanics is smart-casting.
But how do you define smart? Even with MBS you are actually clicking more buttons with this so-called 'smart-casting.' 5sh6sh would make 6 hydralisks vs 5shhhhhh. It's pretty much a non-issue as it is the proverbial six of one, half dozen of the other. Day9 has talked about missing the rhythm of BW hatches and there definitely is a rhythm to it, but that really has no significant impact on the battles or viewability so I really don't care that much to make a thread on it.
On November 23 2012 12:56 TheFish7 wrote: Hatcheries (larva) have smart-casting now as well. I'm wondering if the OP would advocate getting rid of that as well?
Why don't we just dumb down the game back to Warcraft2, (before BattleNet edition) and remove everything UI improvement including building ques and auto-attack. It would, without a doubt, solve practically every problem we have in SC2 and really distinct the good from the best.
The only way to fix this is to revert back to original BW style controls, revert everything... No 1a attack, multiple building select etc... The entire SC2 control makes OP spells even more OP. At least revert it for the pro level, have the option to enable/disable the change in the options before game starts.
#ReviveBW2013 Let's tweet this to Blizzard and Mike Morhaime! I am sure we can do it! SC2 is a dead game anyway!
Port BW to 3d! This way all the actual non-casual can then play the real game!
If not lets get Valve to do it since Valve is like super awesome! If not Valve, I am sure all the geniuses on TL can do it! From reading many threads on TL, we have like super businessmen, millionaires, game designers, GM players and professional game balancers in abundance!
#ReviveBW2013 Let's do this guys! BW is not the game we deserved but not the one we need!
BW interface isn't coming back. If you really think the problem with SC2 is the interface you may was well just abandon it. Blizzard isn't going to make the game harder to play. I don't disagree that it would make the game better, it just isn't going to happen.
IMO the problem is that, given the spells as they are now and an interface that isn't going to change, infestors and sentries are just too cheap to build. That's why they get massed, that's why we're seeing such tiresome play at the pro level. If ravens cost 50/150 and could be built with a reactor every terran would just mass ravens. We'd be complaining about mass turrets and pdds locking down opposing armies completely and how bad it was to watch.
Really great and articulate post. I particularly liked the point you made about SC2 pathing detracting from spell-casting decision making. Very well thought out. Thanks.
On November 21 2012 15:31 Ryder. wrote: ^Unintuitive because there is zero reason you would ever want every HT storming the same place at the same time, which is what the UI encourages. The UI is supposed to facilitate the units acting in the way you want them, and there is never a single reason you would want them to act that way.
Granted I don't really know much about magic box casting so maybe you have a point with that, but I think my previous point about intuition remains (depending on how you want to define intuition I guess)
yeah man. when i box dragged over my units and left clicked elsewhere on the map. They all moved instead of just a single unit like i wanted. DAFAQ????????????
I do agree with you on many points. But I also think that stim should have a central role in this discussion. That said, im gonna leave out all the "how many units should do what I tell them to do" stim/storm -debate"
My problem is: If you make it harder/more challanging to use spells like fungals or storms, maybe FF aswell, then will any casual player be able to beat MMM-balls mid/late game? It's hard to hit those bastard as it is with todays smartcasting.
That's acutally no problem with zerglings, they are weak, melee, and doesnt have a flying escort of healers/dropships. They should be hard to hit. But when you do, baaaaam theyre dead.
On November 23 2012 04:57 Analytical Genius wrote: The same reason that MANY diamond/platinum/ and even gold league players got insulted and angry when you took away their losses on the ladder stats page.
And they eventually got over it. Along with a lot of other complaints.
people are still mad about that... no one who cared "got over it"... they're just using SC2 gears or notebooks or spreadsheets instead of being able to see it in the damn client. Also, they brought it back in HotS, and people are thrilled.
Anyway, this is sort of an irrellevant argument anyway... but I just wanted to point out that no, they didn't get over it, and people shouldn't be playing a different game from the pros.
And it really isn't that unintuitive that if you order your units to fire at a target, they fire. All of them because you had all of them selected. That stim example is a good one. You may have only intended to stim 4 to scare away the Mutalisks. That was your intention, but the game didn't hold your hand and decide for you what the ideal number of marines to stim was. You selected 40 marines to stim and 40 marines stimmed. You told 15 Templars on one hotkey to storm one spot. 15 Templars on one hotkey stormed one spot. That's pretty straight forward.
player.
I haven't read all posts yet and don't know if i'll have time for a long while. So replying while i can and remember , especially since this argument is used twice already in the few posts i read.
Seen somewhere in previous posts about spells stacking before and how strong that was, being the reason it was changed in sc1. Stim stacks, it's not a capped speed increase based on how many units you had selected at the same time. Same with other spells like that. The same way you can't bunch up all spellcasters and say all should be cast in one place and others not without having to change a whole lot more than just the spells themselves. Unless damaging aoe spells start to stack also you can't really compare, it's different spells with different purposes for different types of units, the "intuitive" thing depends on all of that as well.
A small cooldown be added on multiselection could be similar and wouldnt deplete the energy of all units either. It would still be nicer to non pro players and still make it harder to pull off blanket damaging/lockdown spells. Basically it would trigger a cooldown on all selected casters that didn't use their storm, small like maybe 1-3 (ingame) seconds at most. That idea however shouldn't be for all spells, like forcefields... Much because the units or whatever is being protected by forcefields wouldn't be covered in time regardless of how fast the player was, with the current state of protoss units survivability.
Won't go much into the spell themselves, roles and purposes, nor army movement. those are different arguments... think they just sidetrack this thread from its original purpose
Thanks for the post, man. Really nice arguments which make for some very strong points. Should be pretty hard to argue with any of them
Sadly, your presentation as far as those videos go is pretty weak. I bet there were quite some viewers who didnt finish watching them all despite being very interested in the matter.
Its not only that there are too many breaks and "erhms" and stuff like that. You shouldn't have done commentating and playing at the same time. Honestly, I would even go as far as to say that it would have been possible to fit all 3 videos in just one, 5 minute video. I think if you had done that, this thread would be at 20 pages intead of 10 at this point.
The problem with these sort of changes is that they pretty much have no chance of being implemented. Even if it did I'm not sure it would work out the way you think in SC2. SC2 is much faster paced game than BW. In BW it was very possible to 'prep' your spellcasting and engagements usually lasted longer leaving plenty of time to micro your army and continue spellcasting. SC2 doesn't have that luxury.
While I will agree that the things you talk about were great spectacles to behold in BW getting them implemented into SC2 goes beyond just removing smartcasting. You would also need BW unit pathing, BW game speed, BW balance and probably more.
SC2 has it's own great spectacles but it could definitely benefit from more. How to do it? I'm not entirely sure, making spells like fungal/FF less prevalent definitely seems like a good place to start but removing smartcasting is not the solution.
Perhaps just giving the spells some counters. Forcefields could maybe be broken by a Zerg unit unburrowing under one. Maybe Ghost EMP could dispel Fungal. I know those seem silly but just some ideas off the top of my head, obviously balance would need to be achieved in addition to making sure the added counters actually make the game more interesting.
On November 23 2012 20:26 iNviSible.yunO wrote: Thanks for the post, man. Really nice arguments which make for some very strong points. Should be pretty hard to argue with any of them
Sadly, your presentation as far as those videos go is pretty weak. I bet there were quite some viewers who didnt finish watching them all despite being very interested in the matter.
Its not only that there are too many breaks and "erhms" and stuff like that. You shouldn't have done commentating and playing at the same time. Honestly, I would even go as far as to say that it would have been possible to fit all 3 videos in just one, 5 minute video. I think if you had done that, this thread would be at 20 pages intead of 10 at this point.
Thanks for the feedback and youtube analytics backs you up as I have a 38% retention rate.
Assuming some other issue rankles enough to create another thread, I'll probably not commentate and play at the same time. Much respect to those that can. All those pauses are even with a point form overview beside me. I started the both at the same time as it is very easy to match what I'm doing on the screen with what I'm talking about. And I began on the assumption of a one take because I don't have a good editor- only recently did I notice the youtube editor which is admittedly pretty spare.
I've got a better handle on what I can use now and a better I idea of how to use it. This is a bit of a learning curve especially as in my previous blogs, the videos supported the text whereas with this one, I tried to have the text support the video. I certainly wasn't happy with the length of any of these, but my retakes where just getting longer so I just cut out the big pauses and redid the worst section. (I was talking about "raising the bar of expectation" which is super redundant.) If there is a next time (these are only call them as I see them planning), then I will certainly try to pick up the pacing.
getting rid of smartcasting does very little to change the game at high levels with the exception of FF the other spells don't really need to be cast 7 times in a short sequence, you can be super effective with 1 to 3 storms or fungals and at most you are going to be throwing out 4 in a short time frame, whereas with FF you sometimes need to use twice as many in half the time, which would be impossible without smart casting, so essentially you are just nerfing the shit out of sentries while leaving the other spell casters with basically the same capabilities.
What confuses me about certain arguments in favor of smart casting isn't the logic behind them. The logic is fine. A school of thought says that good design is minimizing the disconnect between player input and game output, and lacking some kind of neural device that taps into thoughts the reality is that the keyboard and mouse are imprecise instruments. So from that point of view a tool like smartcasting makes sense. It greases the gears of the player/computer machine. Maybe it's only "smart" because of how uniform the design of offensive spells is in SC2 - it would actually make something like Vulture Spider Mines a bit harder to use - but I get wanting to lessen the role of the keyboard and mouse middlemen. I still disagree, but respectfully so. They're just different ways of seeing the value of the game, as purely intellectual vs. partly kinesthetic.
The confusing thing is that basically nobody sees the game as purely intellectual anymore, not even Blizzard. The argument in favor of SC2's blob pathing was once about it being easier and emphasizing strategy rather than control. Now it's that it makes the game harder and that unit splitting is a vital part of skill differentiation. A retain formation move key would be shot down by many as trivializing this element. So maybe it's time Blizzard fully embraced that the demanding nature of control in SC is part of what makes it compelling (to watch and play), not something that needed to be fixed.
I agree with most of your assessment of smart-casting, the one main issue is that none of it would really work as well with the game as it is in its current state. It's a package issue of clumping, A-move units, etc. Over all, I maintain that the game itself is fundamentally flawed in some way that prevents bandaging with tweaks like this from being impact-full.
BW was a fluke because of how well it all worked out. A beautiful fluke that I'm not sure you can replicate.
Despite the problems with length, I liked how all your video demonstrations have gone. Between the uhms and pauses, the actual bits illustrating the point were pretty good in my opinion.
To those saying forcing execution/making it mechincally more difficult is bad, while I agree to some extent with things like MBS/automine, I personally would rather learn to use spellcasters efficiently than larva injecting on cooldown or creep spreading. One of them actually involves conscious decision making.
Possibly the dumbest idea I've heard in my life, and yet another example of the denizens of this forum going along with an idea for the sole reason that they think it makes them look intelligent.
Can you imagine? Terran stims in with a bioball to bring down the colossus. In the blink of an eye, the Protoss player selects 5 sentries separately, placing individual force fields in the way of the bioball.
Or even better, let's imagine A-move with roaches or lings. Nothing but spam and A-move. On a decently wide map, the Protoss might need up to 10 force fields to block this off. And he's supposed to select each one of the sentries separately before the roaches and lings get through.
Hey, while we're at it, let's take away smart-casting for stimpack. To use stim you need to select each one of the marines separately and press T.
It would be interesting to see this put to work in SC2BW mod, with smart casting enabled and some strong broodwar players, and put your theory to the test
On November 25 2012 07:37 Rossie wrote: Possibly the dumbest idea I've heard in my life, and yet another example of the denizens of this forum going along with an idea for the sole reason that they think it makes them look intelligent.
Can you imagine? Terran stims in with a bioball to bring down the colossus. In the blink of an eye, the Protoss player selects 5 sentries separately, placing individual force fields in the way of the bioball.
Or even better, let's imagine A-move with roaches or lings. Nothing but spam and A-move. On a decently wide map, the Protoss might need up to 10 force fields to block this off. And he's supposed to select each one of the sentries separately before the roaches and lings get through.
Hey, while we're at it, let's take away smart-casting for stimpack. To use stim you need to select each one of the marines separately and press T.
Obviously there would need to be balance changes to address the lack of smart cast so the situations that you've suggested would not be as one sided as you'd think.
I think the key points to take away from this is not that smartcasting is bad, but that the prevalence of spellcaster ez pz micro vs attack retreat/positioning micro is a bit skewed.
This is caused by the fundamental problem with having spells that are easily attainable in the early mid game that disable opponent micro in mass such as force field and fungal growth as well as the soon to come time warp. The OP point about observer difficulty as spells of similar colors and aesthetics are spammed is valid as well.
Removing smart casting is only one proposed way of balancing this out. I am opposed to this as it would require such a drastic change in low level games in terms of unit balance that the game will just be screwed.
I think blizzard is better off just removing force fields on sentries and adding it to a high tech unit that can make a force field wall with one click instead of a force field block. This of course would require buffing gateway units, which would in turn require a nerf on warp gate tech.
Fungal should just be rampantly redesigned. Projectile, more DOT instead of so instantly, and does not root. I think people are generally pretty happy with the design of terran other than emp. To remedy this, make EMP a researchable spell for ravens and add lockdown back to ghosts.
On November 25 2012 07:37 Rossie wrote: Possibly the dumbest idea I've heard in my life, and yet another example of the denizens of this forum going along with an idea for the sole reason that they think it makes them look intelligent.
Can you imagine? Terran stims in with a bioball to bring down the colossus. In the blink of an eye, the Protoss player selects 5 sentries separately, placing individual force fields in the way of the bioball.
Or even better, let's imagine A-move with roaches or lings. Nothing but spam and A-move. On a decently wide map, the Protoss might need up to 10 force fields to block this off. And he's supposed to select each one of the sentries separately before the roaches and lings get through.
Hey, while we're at it, let's take away smart-casting for stimpack. To use stim you need to select each one of the marines separately and press T.
Obviously there would need to be balance changes to address the lack of smart cast so the situations that you've suggested would not be as one sided as you'd think.
I think the key points to take away from this is not that smartcasting is bad, but that the prevalence of spellcaster ez pz micro vs attack retreat/positioning micro is a bit skewed.
This is caused by the fundamental problem with having spells that are easily attainable in the early mid game that disable opponent micro in mass such as force field and fungal growth as well as the soon to come time warp. The OP point about observer difficulty as spells of similar colors and aesthetics are spammed is valid as well.
Removing smart casting is only one proposed way of balancing this out. I am opposed to this as it would require such a drastic change in low level games in terms of unit balance that the game will just be screwed.
I think blizzard is better off just removing force fields on sentries and adding it to a high tech unit that can make a force field wall with one click instead of a force field block. This of course would require buffing gateway units, which would in turn require a nerf on warp gate tech.
Fungal should just be rampantly redesigned. Projectile, more DOT instead of so instantly, and does not root. I think people are generally pretty happy with the design of terran other than emp. To remedy this, make EMP a researchable spell for ravens and add lockdown back to ghosts.
Some of this just sounds like more "bring back BW!" stuff. We get it, BW was a good game that you enjoyed watching quite a bit. Almost all of us have issues with SC2 as well, but don't conflate the 2 together. Making SC2 into a better looking BW expansion won't make it more enjoyable.
There is no issue with smart casting, just like there is no issue with unit clumping, at least when you weigh the alternatives next to them. They take different design challenges and tactical approaches in implementation. Smart casting brings the game to everybody. Even a bronze league player can feel like a pro by blanket storming an undefended mineral line, without having to spend 20 minutes practicing it.
People also misplace their anger with forcefields and fungal. What those abilities represent is a trap scenario, where one player has forced the engagement of another by making retreat impossible or very costly. There are definitely issues with these abilities in this regard, mainly that a player might be able to "see" the trap but have no options to avoid it even in an optimal scenario.
At the end, however, it must be understood that Blizzard will not DOWNGRADE their game or engine to make the game deliberately harder for everybody. That is ridiculous to consider as a solution.
I'm a casual (but frequent) viewer and occasionally a bad player. I was very late to watching pro Brood War, but I had played it extremely terribly in my youth (BGH and UMS and not understanding what macro was) and it was pretty easy to follow what was going on while watching Sayle cast the last few seasons of proleague. (And I even managed to win a few games as Terran at the very bottom of the iccup ladder in 2011.)
While I like a lot of the things that I read in the OP, my very humble opinion is that I'm not sure that the best solution is reverting to Brood War style spellcasting controls. Or at least, there may be a better way. As at least one guy mentioned, without smartcasting forcefield would be drastically affected in the most common usages that people don't find very problematic, and yet it would be nearly unchanged when used to block a main ramp in a way which many do find problematic-- correctly placing one forcefield isn't significantly easier or harder with or without smartcasting. It is difficult to conceive of a way to make forcefield useful for anything other than blocking narrow ramps without making it completely ridiculous when narrow ramps are involved if smartcasting is removed. Perhaps it would be better to totally remove it in such a case. Maybe in any case. I don't know.
I do know that I enjoy watching careful positioning and repositioning, poking and retreating, and if the existence of a spell encourages that, then I like that spell. Spells that are used more outside of or preliminary to the direct engagement are ones that I like more: harassing mineral lines with storm, using irradiate on defilers or lurkers (and then running the hell away from scourge), or using EMP to prevent an arbiter from making a recall. Those were great.
I loved watching the interaction of lurkers and defilers and scourge with science vessels and tanks and marines/medics. I really liked the balance of irradiate: it was never completely devastating unless used on a giant cloud of mutas or to erase a drone line, but it was very useful to chip away at the more costly zerg units-- but not in a way that was supremely powerful. It was worth using if you could escape with the science vessel, but by itself wasn't enough to create an insurmountable advantage. In the same way, scourges were never completely devastating in the same way that fungal growth on everything (or banelings against unmicroed marines) can be. It was undoubtedly worth it if you could get it to hit one target without much overkill, but just a few scourge hits were not likely to end a game that wasn't already very close to being won. (Scourge overkill and cloning micro is in the same vein as dumb vs smartcasting, I think.) Masterful scourge usage could definitely tilt a game one way or the other, just not to the extremes of an explosion of whatever on clumped units-- because it would only ever do 110 damage. It was that or 0. It was not 0, 35, 350, or 700 depending on enemy positioning.
I think we could stand to have more interesting spell design-- things that are more interesting than "well, I clicked on their clumped units." For example, would dark swarm be significantly more powerful with smartcasting? Maybe the biggest thing is having interesting continuations from spell usages: less "well now he's just dead" and more "now both players can micro around that new feature of the battlefield." More limiting the opponent's options and less eliminating all of his options. Area effect damage seems like one of those things that gets more powerful the more you have of it-- even if it doesn't stack in the same place at the same time, it can blanket everything-- and yet spellcasters are not supposed to be the bulk of an army. Why not have more spells that are more useful in small numbers cast infrequently and, if overused, can be responded to in a fairly simple way? Given the design of the SC2 UI, it seems that spells should drop in effectiveness given many uses in close proximity and succession. Instead, they often increase: chain fungals, blanket storms or EMPs, huge amounts of infested terrans to overwhelm a position. Even PDD encourages using more than one because there is (effectively) a cap on how many projectiles each can block. Imagine if you could reverse that tendency, though.
I don't know exactly how best to do so; as I said, I'm terrible.
On November 25 2012 07:37 Rossie wrote: Possibly the dumbest idea I've heard in my life, and yet another example of the denizens of this forum going along with an idea for the sole reason that they think it makes them look intelligent.
Can you imagine? Terran stims in with a bioball to bring down the colossus. In the blink of an eye, the Protoss player selects 5 sentries separately, placing individual force fields in the way of the bioball.
Or even better, let's imagine A-move with roaches or lings. Nothing but spam and A-move. On a decently wide map, the Protoss might need up to 10 force fields to block this off. And he's supposed to select each one of the sentries separately before the roaches and lings get through.
Hey, while we're at it, let's take away smart-casting for stimpack. To use stim you need to select each one of the marines separately and press T.
Obviously there would need to be balance changes to address the lack of smart cast so the situations that you've suggested would not be as one sided as you'd think.
I think the key points to take away from this is not that smartcasting is bad, but that the prevalence of spellcaster ez pz micro vs attack retreat/positioning micro is a bit skewed.
This is caused by the fundamental problem with having spells that are easily attainable in the early mid game that disable opponent micro in mass such as force field and fungal growth as well as the soon to come time warp. The OP point about observer difficulty as spells of similar colors and aesthetics are spammed is valid as well.
Removing smart casting is only one proposed way of balancing this out. I am opposed to this as it would require such a drastic change in low level games in terms of unit balance that the game will just be screwed.
I think blizzard is better off just removing force fields on sentries and adding it to a high tech unit that can make a force field wall with one click instead of a force field block. This of course would require buffing gateway units, which would in turn require a nerf on warp gate tech.
Fungal should just be rampantly redesigned. Projectile, more DOT instead of so instantly, and does not root. I think people are generally pretty happy with the design of terran other than emp. To remedy this, make EMP a researchable spell for ravens and add lockdown back to ghosts.
Some of this just sounds like more "bring back BW!" stuff. We get it, BW was a good game that you enjoyed watching quite a bit. Almost all of us have issues with SC2 as well, but don't conflate the 2 together. Making SC2 into a better looking BW expansion won't make it more enjoyable.
There is no issue with smart casting, just like there is no issue with unit clumping, at least when you weigh the alternatives next to them. They take different design challenges and tactical approaches in implementation. Smart casting brings the game to everybody. Even a bronze league player can feel like a pro by blanket storming an undefended mineral line, without having to spend 20 minutes practicing it.
People also misplace their anger with forcefields and fungal. What those abilities represent is a trap scenario, where one player has forced the engagement of another by making retreat impossible or very costly. There are definitely issues with these abilities in this regard, mainly that a player might be able to "see" the trap but have no options to avoid it even in an optimal scenario.
At the end, however, it must be understood that Blizzard will not DOWNGRADE their game or engine to make the game deliberately harder for everybody. That is ridiculous to consider as a solution.
I'm almost entirely sure that you didn't read anything that I said past the first sentence.
I only played broodwar casually, and never watched pro games. I actually stated in my post that removing smartcast was not the way to balance the game. Please take the time to read what people post when they are actually trying to add something constructive.
I think it should be rather obvious that the game would have to be re-balanced if this was implemented. Not only that, but the current domination of spells (needing 10 force-fields) would be scaled back like crazy. The goal is not to re-create the current game-play only using more clicks. That would indeed be fighting against the game or whatever else this gets accused of.
The goal is to change the role of spell-casting entirely and with it the gameplay. To dethrone spell-casting from its current rule. Granted there are a lot of other changes that would contribute to making better gameplay. This couldn't be done in isolation. But the goal is certainly not to mimic what we see now. That is what people perceive to be the problem (hence all those threads) and that is what I would hope this would change (as highly improbable that this would be applied.)
I see a few, 'there must be another way.' And undoubtably there is though someone may have to put it forward. I do not claim this is the only way. But I'm not sure I've heard a satisfactory alternative as of yet. I do claim that this is one way to fix the problem and one that has proven to work in a very successful way.
Obviously there would need to be balance changes to address the lack of smart cast so the situations that you've suggested would not be as one sided as you'd think.
Not just "balance changes". They would need to be MAJOR and FUNDAMENTAL balance changes. Already Protoss players have trouble landing good storms and force fields to counter A-move units -- as Morrow highlighted in his recent essay. So you have nothing but a pipe dream. A fantasy about a game which isn't Starcraft 2.
That leads me to speculate about your motive. HOW could the community be so supportive of such an utterly dumb idea which fails at the first hurdle?
Spells? Spells? I thought I was playing a futuristic space-based game. What are these "spellcasters?" Have the settled planets devolved into the realm of magic and superstition?
If you wanna make it so people can do w/e they think of, why not have a "split marine button"? isn't it "intuitive" to be able to tell your marines to spread apart? but because there isn't one, but we all know it's good, we went nuts when MKP did that fantastically and consistently well against banelings. Or why not "spread tank then siege" button? or "kite" button? or why not have a lot of terran units (such as hellions/tanks/other units who by looking at them should be able to move and shoot at the same time) behave like pheonix? why not have "form X" such as "for concave button" so you can form a concave easier at your choke? that's also intuitive. We are manually required to do these other small micro that essentially blizzard can just put a button on. It's not a hassle/get in the way. It's what makes the difference. Small things such as spreading tanks, or kiting with certain units is what separates the good players from the mediocre players. Removing smart-casting will just be adding a skill-set that separates the top 5% of players even more finely. It's a game, it's not necessarily supposed to be "as intuitive as possible".
I think its important to note that some spells would actually be much stronger and require less skill if smart casting was removed. I have included 2 examples below.
Snipe: SC2 does not perform overkill damage on instant attacks/spells. For example, if you calldown a mule in the center of a ball of 100 enemy marines you will notice that only enough marines to 1 shot the mule will shoot. The rest will just stand there. If you had enough ghosts, snipe would insta kill any enemy and perform no overkill damage, wasting no energy in the process.
Infested Terran: Spamming out your entire group of infested terrans energy pools as Infested Terrans is a tactic used quite commonly in a few different situations. This change would allow players with 12 Infestors to release 96 Infested Terrans in 9 clicks.
It's kind of a tough call. This game is designed around having a very intuitive and easy to use and understand interface. Smart casting makes good sense in this game specifically because of its reliance on support units and the ability of the player to get a LOT of them. In Broodwar, yes, you had no smart casting. One miss-click and you could be quadruple storming one spot. I'm not sure if this generation of gamers is willing to take a step backward in ease of use to satisfy an elevation of the skill cap. The folks at Blizzard obviously think that the game is hard enough without having to actually micro or units like the infestor and colossus wouldn't exist. Smart casting works perfectly for what it needs to do, which is make players look like they're microing their units like gods when they're actually entering about 4 commands and then macroing up back at home.
On November 25 2012 07:37 Rossie wrote: Possibly the dumbest idea I've heard in my life, and yet another example of the denizens of this forum going along with an idea for the sole reason that they think it makes them look intelligent.
Can you imagine? Terran stims in with a bioball to bring down the colossus. In the blink of an eye, the Protoss player selects 5 sentries separately, placing individual force fields in the way of the bioball.
Or even better, let's imagine A-move with roaches or lings. Nothing but spam and A-move. On a decently wide map, the Protoss might need up to 10 force fields to block this off. And he's supposed to select each one of the sentries separately before the roaches and lings get through.
Hey, while we're at it, let's take away smart-casting for stimpack. To use stim you need to select each one of the marines separately and press T.
Obviously there would need to be balance changes to address the lack of smart cast so the situations that you've suggested would not be as one sided as you'd think.
I think the key points to take away from this is not that smartcasting is bad, but that the prevalence of spellcaster ez pz micro vs attack retreat/positioning micro is a bit skewed.
This is caused by the fundamental problem with having spells that are easily attainable in the early mid game that disable opponent micro in mass such as force field and fungal growth as well as the soon to come time warp. The OP point about observer difficulty as spells of similar colors and aesthetics are spammed is valid as well.
Removing smart casting is only one proposed way of balancing this out. I am opposed to this as it would require such a drastic change in low level games in terms of unit balance that the game will just be screwed.
I think blizzard is better off just removing force fields on sentries and adding it to a high tech unit that can make a force field wall with one click instead of a force field block. This of course would require buffing gateway units, which would in turn require a nerf on warp gate tech.
Fungal should just be rampantly redesigned. Projectile, more DOT instead of so instantly, and does not root. I think people are generally pretty happy with the design of terran other than emp. To remedy this, make EMP a researchable spell for ravens and add lockdown back to ghosts.
Some of this just sounds like more "bring back BW!" stuff. We get it, BW was a good game that you enjoyed watching quite a bit. Almost all of us have issues with SC2 as well, but don't conflate the 2 together. Making SC2 into a better looking BW expansion won't make it more enjoyable.
There is no issue with smart casting, just like there is no issue with unit clumping, at least when you weigh the alternatives next to them. They take different design challenges and tactical approaches in implementation. Smart casting brings the game to everybody. Even a bronze league player can feel like a pro by blanket storming an undefended mineral line, without having to spend 20 minutes practicing it.
People also misplace their anger with forcefields and fungal. What those abilities represent is a trap scenario, where one player has forced the engagement of another by making retreat impossible or very costly. There are definitely issues with these abilities in this regard, mainly that a player might be able to "see" the trap but have no options to avoid it even in an optimal scenario.
At the end, however, it must be understood that Blizzard will not DOWNGRADE their game or engine to make the game deliberately harder for everybody. That is ridiculous to consider as a solution.
I'm almost entirely sure that you didn't read anything that I said past the first sentence.
I only played broodwar casually, and never watched pro games. I actually stated in my post that removing smartcast was not the way to balance the game. Please take the time to read what people post when they are actually trying to add something constructive.
Sorry, I was mainly talking about the posts in general, but yours was the most relevant and recent.
On November 26 2012 04:16 Mirror0423 wrote: If you wanna make it so people can do w/e they think of, why not have a "split marine button"? isn't it "intuitive" to be able to tell your marines to spread apart? but because there isn't one, but we all know it's good, we went nuts when MKP did that fantastically and consistently well against banelings. Or why not "spread tank then siege" button? or "kite" button? or why not have a lot of terran units (such as hellions/tanks/other units who by looking at them should be able to move and shoot at the same time) behave like pheonix? why not have "form X" such as "for concave button" so you can form a concave easier at your choke? that's also intuitive. We are manually required to do these other small micro that essentially blizzard can just put a button on. It's not a hassle/get in the way. It's what makes the difference. Small things such as spreading tanks, or kiting with certain units is what separates the good players from the mediocre players. Removing smart-casting will just be adding a skill-set that separates the top 5% of players even more finely. It's a game, it's not necessarily supposed to be "as intuitive as possible".
The UI should facilitate in letting the player do what he/she wants to do, it shouldn't do it for them.
There is a clear difference, stop trying to make dumb comparisons.
The UI actually is kinda doing it for them. You selected all the casters and told them all to cast a spell. But the UI holds your hand and does the splitting for you so you don't need to learn how to grab your casters individually to cast. The UI disallows you from telling all selected casters to fire both when it would be a bad thing (overlap) or a really good thing (magic box.) The UI is making the decision for you and doing it for you.
But the easiness of spell-casting is part of allows spells to dominate so hard.
@DeCoup. There might be a couple spells that would benefit from this the other way and would have to be toned back. If we had spider mines in SC2, this would be a buff to them as it would be easier to lay more of them down faster.
Really good point in how the accessibility of smart casting causes spells to dominate the match-up, compounding the usage of movement restricting spells like fungal and eliminating a lot of micro. Fungal really needs to go and be replaced with plague and smart casting needs to be removed.Too bad Blizzard will never read this.
True that "homes". I really agree with essentially everything you've said, though I doubt blizzard will ever act in a way that they feel diminishes the experience for less skilled players.
I definitely feel like the non-smart cast micro is better from a lower level player perspective as well, because it gives you something OBVIOUS to improve on. You can watch a replay and say, "Hey! I would've won this battle and been able to hold my fourth if I had just gotten off 2 more storms, I'll need to practice my micro." Where as it can be slightly un-clear if you were outmicroed by an opponent, failed to micro sufficiently, or if your build/other factors in the game were the real is a real issue.
I especially agree with the saturating the screen aspect of sc2 storms. I don't think I've been impressed more than once or twice by a pro gamers storms because I can basically accomplish the same goal and I am not anywhere near as skilled a player.
Even if it's never altered in SC2, it was still an interesting listen/read. Great post.
I don't think it's that much harder to grab a templar and drop a storm because of lack of smart casting. I think it is hard because of the pathing of friendly units. The jerky pathing and bulkier units make it harder to get that templar into position to storm, where as in sc2 it's a much more fluid process.
I thought casting force fields and Fungal Growths and targeting infestors and sentries was micro? Like focused manipulation of units/abilities to gain an advantage that might not otherwise exist?
On November 26 2012 10:40 Falling wrote: You selected all the casters and told them all to cast a spell. But the UI holds your hand and does the splitting for you so you don't need to learn how to grab your casters individually to cast. The UI disallows you from telling all selected casters to fire both when it would be a bad thing (overlap) or a really good thing (magic box.) The UI is making the decision for you and doing it for you.
But that's not what happened. I selected all the casters, and told the nearest one to cast a spell. That's just how spells work in SC2. You're saying the interface should do something completely different by default, then pretending like that's already the default and the UI is doing something else.
It's designed to have "smart-casting". Yes, you could design it not to, but that's never going to happen as it would be hideously counter-intuitive , and involve so much more apm that you'd never see any caster use at lower levels.
If spells are so much of a problem, why not just nerf / change the spells. Make storm have a slightly smaller area and do less damage, but over a longer period of time, so it can be used for zoning, for example. I don't think completely changing the way the interface works is ever going to be a practical solution.
On November 26 2012 10:40 Falling wrote: You selected all the casters and told them all to cast a spell. But the UI holds your hand and does the splitting for you so you don't need to learn how to grab your casters individually to cast. The UI disallows you from telling all selected casters to fire both when it would be a bad thing (overlap) or a really good thing (magic box.) The UI is making the decision for you and doing it for you.
But that's not what happened. I selected all the casters, and told the nearest one to cast a spell. That's just how spells work in SC2. You're saying the interface should do something completely different by default, then pretending like that's already the default and the UI is doing something else.
It's designed to have "smart-casting". Yes, you could design it not to, but that's never going to happen as it would be hideously counter-intuitive , and involve so much more apm that you'd never see any caster use at lower levels.
This argument amounts to SC2 is not designed this way, therefore it is counter-intuitive. SC2 is not the gold standard for intuition and just because something can be designed differently doesn't make it inherently unintuitive. Different is not unintuitive necessarily.
To me, intuitive and unintuitive have specifically to do with the relation between action and result. Is what you are doing (action) make sense with what results. So as an extreme example to cast you had to select the high-templar, then click on every single Nexus, and then hit storm. That is unintuitive because what does clicking on Nexus having anything to do with with casting storm from high templar. Or to cast storm you had to cast it behind the templar and the storm will actually cast in its mirror opposite. That doesn't make much sense and is unintuitive. Where you click should be where it storms.
But BW casting has its own logic to it. You select 5 templar, 5 templar are selected. You tell 5 templar to move to location A, 5 templar go to location A. You tell 5 templar to storm location B, 5 templar storm location B. It is very straight forward and very easy to understand.
So then there is a skill to learn how to storm not just location B, but also C, D, E, and F. That is harder, but not unintuitive. It is different, but not unintuitive. Unintuitive gets thrown around a lot by a lot of people in these debates and
On November 27 2012 23:15 netherh wrote: If spells are so much of a problem, why not just nerf / change the spells. Make storm have a slightly smaller area and do less damage, but over a longer period of time, so it can be used for zoning, for example.
That's rather the point. When spells dominate too much, the immediate push is to nerf the spell so it sucks individually. We just dilute the spells so we can have a lot of them all the time. I'd rather see it require a lot of skill and speed to get out a lot of spells so that the spells can remain really powerful, but not dominate the gameplay so much, and let spells remain in a support role and remain a spectacle rather turn it mundane.
There's a lot of good stuff in the OP but I can't get past some of the premises.
I want to like you ideas Falling but they're so wrapped up in assuming BW was the only good RTS and dismissing anything else any other RTS has tried since it's release. Much as you have been quick to point out that SC2's design is not the golden standard, BW is not the golden standard of design either.
Ok so I have two things hopefully you can clarify:
1) I'm struggling with understanding is how you keep saying how casters are in the game to make the game harder or less simplistic at least. I disagree whole-heartedly (particularly with Terran). Most spellcasters in SC2 are easier to use to than the T1/T2 armies that they "support." You want to tell me that it's harder to fungal groups of units and/or spam infested terrans than it is to properly control ling/bane/muta? That it's more complicated to storm or vortex units than it is to properly use phoenixes or blink stalkers? Is anything a Raven or Ghost can pull off harder than properly controlling a MMM, Marine-Tank, or pure mech army?
When it comes right down to it, spellcasters would be the easiest to use units in the game if the poorly designed group of SC2's massive units didn't exist.
2) It is NOT intuitive to magic box or clone or do any micro trick that was exclusive to Brood War. You can argue until you're blue in the face but I can guarantee no one at Blizzard designed the game with all of the many things that were discovered in mind. The average RTS player who didn't play BW is never going to find any of that intuitive. Heck, the reaver was only supposed to be used for defense according to Blizzard but I digress...
BW may not be the gold standard, but that's irrelevant. The point isn't that it should be one way or the other because it is in one game or the other. The point is what one game does, doesn't make alternate ways of doing things 'unintuitive.' Different from status quo doesn't equal "unintuitive." Harder to accomplish doesn't equal "unintuitive." Something can be very, very hard to accomplish and yet be very intuitive as to what you must do.
re: 1) No I am not saying spell-casting is harder than controlling marines splits for instance. If you take a look how RTS units can be designed, generally speaking you could put them into three categories. (Maybe more, but that's all I can think of right now.)
1) Basic a-move units. This is especially true for units that have really sluggish handling- SupCom2, Battle for Middle Earth 2, or Empire at War 2. All you really do is direct the right units to attack at the other right units and maybe click a special ability like cover fire or something. Yeah cavalry can over-run archers, but by and large the units are very unresponsive and not given to micro. You select your units and move them in.
A variant on this are units whose rate of fire is so fast that the tiny cooldown makes the unit difficult to micro without losing damage. Collosus being an example.
2) This is where spell-casting comes in. Spell-casting is deliberately more difficult than a-move units. It's more than directing the right composition to attack the right units in rock paper scissors. The unit does not rely on auto attack to be effective, but relies on manual control.
3) Rapid response unit command. Attack-retreat micro, moving shot, patrol micro. Take your pick, this sort of micro relies on burst damage, (usually) cooldown in-between, and speed. And if they are not speedy, they rely on another unit that compensates for it- some sort of transport ship. The best version of this has very little delay in the transition between attacking and then moving again. This is where your ling/bane/muta control kinda comes in (although there is a slight sluggishness either due to Battlenet latency, unit design or both.) No, I don't think spell-casting is necessarily harder than this. But it is difficult to do both at the same time, but we have more time to do so due to MBS (at least in theory.)
The behind the scenes argument, is we need more of 3). 3) doesn't clutter the screen with information and giant light show. 3) is very spectator friendly. 3) requires tremendous amounts of skill and rewards better players. 3) doesn't get in the way of newbies that don't want to learn micro tricks. But because we have less of 3) overall, Blizzard is compensating by adding more of 2) and making 2) easier. This is negatively impacting the gameplay in a variety of ways. But 3) is where we need to see more, much, much more.
re: 2) You misunderstand what I am arguing, but that's partly my fault because I wanted to avoid using "non-smart-casting." I'll change that to be more clear. I'm not saying cloning/magic boxing itself is necessarily the intuitive part. Though I'm not sure what makes it un-intuitive. They're just techniques to separate your casters. That could be any technique.
But BW casting has its own logic to it. You select 5 templar, 5 templar are selected. You tell 5 templar to move to location A, 5 templar go to location A. You tell 5 templar to storm location B, 5 templar storm location B. It is very straight forward and very easy to understand.
THIS is the part that I am arguing is just as intuitive as smart-casting. It's a very clear, logical outcome based on the commands you gave. It's different than SC2, but not 'counter-intuitive.'
With a little bit of mucking around in the editor, I've come to discover that the magical "smart casting" is actually a flag set in the data editor. It's the Stats > Flags > Best Unit checkbox. When "Best Unit" is checked, only the closest caster with sufficient requirements (enough energy, no cooldown) will go to cast the spell. When disabled, all selected spell casters that meet the spell requirements will go to the target to cast.
This also means that smart casting can be enabled/disabled on a case by case basis, rather than the idea of a fundamentally hard-coded AI mechanic being stripped out of the game. You can still have your smart casting for things like infested terrans, feedback and snipe, but disabled for storm, EMP and fungal. :0
I made this little "discovery" (I'm sure a number of people in the business of mucking in the data editor already knew about it) because I wondered how Blizzard had abilities like stim and blink affect all selected units, but not these AoE spells. Anywho, if anyone wants to test what it's like to have smart casting removed from some of the more powerful abilities in SC2, that's how you go about doing it. You could also go about buffing the strength of said abilities in compensation for the loss of smart casting while you're at it, since you'd be in the data editor anyway.
EDIT: I'm going to bed, but I might make a video or something demonstrating the thing in action tomorrow, if someone doesn't beat me to the punch.
Huh. I didn't think it would be that simple as enable/disable nor that it would be so precise to have it for some and not for others. I personally would want to combine it some of the SC2 modified movements that people have developed. I'm not sure if anyone has expanded the range of ground magic box though.
On November 28 2012 03:42 Falling wrote: This argument amounts to SC2 is not designed this way, therefore it is counter-intuitive. SC2 is not the gold standard for intuition and just because something can be designed differently doesn't make it inherently unintuitive. Different is not unintuitive necessarily.
To me, intuitive and unintuitive have specifically to do with the relation between action and result. Is what you are doing (action) make sense with what results. So as an extreme example to cast you had to select the high-templar, then click on every single Nexus, and then hit storm. That is unintuitive because what does clicking on Nexus having anything to do with with casting storm from high templar. Or to cast storm you had to cast it behind the templar and the storm will actually cast in its mirror opposite. That doesn't make much sense and is unintuitive. Where you click should be where it storms.
Exactly. You never, ever, ever want to cast every single storm at once. Ever. Because storm doesn't stack. It would be inconceivable (...) for the UI to work that way. Idiotic. Madness. Unintuitive.
SC2 is much easier to understand (i.e. intuitive) than BW then, in this regard, because it actually does what you want to do when casting spells. Select spellcasters, cast a spell.
I can appreciate why the lack of smartcasting made for a better experience in BW, but I have difficulty imagining that this would be a good add to SC2. The main reason is also something a lot of people want to be rid of (but Blizzard seems not to want to do it): Forcefield. I just can't imagine needing sentries to FF a ramp in PvP (in order to hold back early gateway aggression) without smartcasting. Heck, it wasn't all that long ago that no one was able to properly hold off the 12-minute maxxed roach push with smartcasting in the game. I'm sure you would mean to simultaneously remove things like fungal/FF if it were your game to design, but as they've said they are not removing FF, I can't see how making it harder to use would be beneficial.
I can understand and appreciate why blanketting storms and FF clutters things up, makes it harder to spectate and harder to actually be good at it (since the mechanics of it are simpler), and I accept your basic premise that without the need a lot of simultaneous spells for defense, smartcasting makes things harder to watch and easier to execute. I just don't think SC2 is ever going to be a game of scattered small numbers of spells (if only because of the resource differences between SC2 and BW) - and therefore, I doubt the removal of smartcasting would be good for SC2.
Now, if you were to add difficulty another way for a type of ability which was less mandatory and more powerful, I'd be all for it being harder to use. But when it's necessary to use forcefield every 15 seconds to hold off a 4-gater, I can't say that I'm for making the act of casting FF mechanically harder.
Here's one potential method of arguing the case for smartcasting: If you have a spell that you know you will need to use 3 times over the course of the early game, and you can execute it properly 80% of the time individually - over the course of the game, you know that you can execute properly a little more than half the time (51.2%). But change that 3 times to 5 times (32.8%) or 8 times (16.8%), and your chance to complete a game properly dwindles. This means one of two things:
1. You get better execution; or 2. The spell gets easier to cast.
If we're moving from 3 executions to 8, you'd need to up your execution from 80% to 92% (a drastic reduction in failure rate). Especially when someone else is trying to mess you up, this very well might be close to impossible to accomplish. But in general, the theory is just that when you have to do a larger number of things (or in this case, cast a larger number of spells), they need to be easier to cast.
Whether more spells is better or not, you may have a point - but there are more spells being used. So, they kind of do need to be easier to use.
I completely disagree that the game needs more difficult things to do. The skill ceiling is so high. No one posting on this thread can probably even take a game off of a Code S player. Players have to knock out thousands of games to get into masters and that is only like the top 5% of players. A lot of people have been complaining that Blizzard is ignoring casual players, and a lot of casual players don't even play on the ladder because of how challenging it is.
People are comparing smart casting to having an "auto-split" button for marines or tanks. Smart casting is a simple interface feature that makes it easy for people to cast spells. Auto-splitting is something that would essentially having the computer AI controlling individual units at a very detailed level. That is one huge step towards having an AI do everything for you.
As a gameplay standpoint removing a feature to make things artificially harder is just really dumb. Tons of lower league players don't even use spells because they think it's too hard as it is.
tldr; Removing smart casting would make a game that is already not very friendly to casuals even less casual friendly, and would add artificial difficulty that would only serve to frustrate players, and does nothing to a game that already has a really high skill cap.
I think this attitude of trying to make the game more BW like is completely the wrong way to go about it.
Yes some of the archaic controls in BW had huge benefits that improved gameplay. Lack of smart casting makes spells rarer and thus more interesting. 12 unit selection cap automatically forced more flanking and more multitasking in to the game. However I see those as just beneficial side effects of poor parts of the game. What you fail to mention about not having smart casting is that it would be uttertly frustating and not intuitive for actually playing the game. Becoming good at cloning and casting spells quickly is a mundane exercise which can only be appreciated by the diehard players, even worse without knowing of these ''tricks' a uninformed spectator can't even appreciate those skills. Having it in the game just forces boring mechanical skills to matter most and doesn't increase the fun of the game directly, it's only those indirect benefits which make the game better. However i'm confident that you could have those other benefits just as well without forcing stupid mechanical restrictions on the player.
What I'm trying to say is: you shouldn't try to make spells rarer by removing smart casting. It should be done by making sure mass casters is not a good tactic. Casters should be a support unit and the units/strategies in the game should make mass spells a rarity in other ways. For example mass ht doesn't tend to be good because stoms don't stack anyway and EMP can actually become a problem so you see archon, ht instead. Only fungal and forcefield are really problematic in this way that they actually get massed a lot. Don't remove smart casting for this, just nerf these abilities or buff some counters to mass sentries/infestor so that you don't actually see this anymore in high level gameplay. That way you retain the vital importance of spells without it becoming a spam fest and individual placement becomes more important if you have less to spam off.
Removing smart casting could solve many of the problems in the game as archaic controls in BW automatically promote smaller groups of units because they are easier to control. However it would introduce many ugly things at the same time by just being a mere frustation. It's like a medicine which side effects are worse than the initial disease, sure it's a cure but at what cost..
On November 28 2012 03:42 Falling wrote: This argument amounts to SC2 is not designed this way, therefore it is counter-intuitive. SC2 is not the gold standard for intuition and just because something can be designed differently doesn't make it inherently unintuitive. Different is not unintuitive necessarily.
To me, intuitive and unintuitive have specifically to do with the relation between action and result. Is what you are doing (action) make sense with what results. So as an extreme example to cast you had to select the high-templar, then click on every single Nexus, and then hit storm. That is unintuitive because what does clicking on Nexus having anything to do with with casting storm from high templar. Or to cast storm you had to cast it behind the templar and the storm will actually cast in its mirror opposite. That doesn't make much sense and is unintuitive. Where you click should be where it storms.
Exactly. You never, ever, ever want to cast every single storm at once. Ever. Because storm doesn't stack. It would be inconceivable (...) for the UI to work that way. Idiotic. Madness. Unintuitive.
SC2 is much easier to understand (i.e. intuitive) than BW then, in this regard, because it actually does what you want to do when casting spells. Select spellcasters, cast a spell.
If the game was designed around simultaneous casting rather than single casting then there would be situations where you would want to. Magic Box casting is one instance. Selecting two casters where one is significantly behind the other so that by the time the one spell goes off the second comes into range and casts immediately after to finish off the units would be another.
"cast every single storm at once." This line of argument kinda assumes we have 10 spellcasters all on one hotkey. Ideally, this would actually lead to less spell-casters created overall (so we don't have 10-15 infestors) because it's hard to use them all to maximum effect. But when someone is able to use them to maximum effect it is spectacular- and they probably didn't have them all on one hotkey.
Ordering something to happen that is contrary to what you wanted to order does not make the game unintuitive. That's operator error. You may have only wanted to stim 4 marines to chase off a handful of mutas, but you stimmed them all because you still were selecting 40 marines. That just means you need to control better, not that the game is somehow idiotic. The game did exactly as you ordered. 40 marines selected, 40 marines stimmed. Next time you perhaps actually do what you wanted to do in your head. It is a control issue, not intuition.
And maybe you don't want more control over your units, but in my opinion for spell-casting if there is more manual control, the spells are allowed to be more powerful and therefore more fun. If spell-casting is limited by automated single-casting, the power of the spells suffer. (Or alternatively, if they are movement restricting, the gameplay itself becomes dominated by controlling the other player's units.)
@ ckcornflake As I've said before. Casual gamers benefit from having powerful individual spells rather than being forced to learn to cast tons of spells. A true casual is probably going to forgo spell-casting altogether whether or not it is simultaneous casting or automated single-casting. And Battlenet 0.2 is more what Blizzard needs to focus on to bring in casuals rather than this sort of stuff.
On November 28 2012 03:42 Falling wrote: This argument amounts to SC2 is not designed this way, therefore it is counter-intuitive. SC2 is not the gold standard for intuition and just because something can be designed differently doesn't make it inherently unintuitive. Different is not unintuitive necessarily.
To me, intuitive and unintuitive have specifically to do with the relation between action and result. Is what you are doing (action) make sense with what results. So as an extreme example to cast you had to select the high-templar, then click on every single Nexus, and then hit storm. That is unintuitive because what does clicking on Nexus having anything to do with with casting storm from high templar. Or to cast storm you had to cast it behind the templar and the storm will actually cast in its mirror opposite. That doesn't make much sense and is unintuitive. Where you click should be where it storms.
Exactly. You never, ever, ever want to cast every single storm at once. Ever. Because storm doesn't stack. It would be inconceivable (...) for the UI to work that way. Idiotic. Madness. Unintuitive.
SC2 is much easier to understand (i.e. intuitive) than BW then, in this regard, because it actually does what you want to do when casting spells. Select spellcasters, cast a spell.
The problem arises when people want to attach the word intuitive to explain having a group of casters selected and telling them all to cast a spell but only one casts it, but then in the same situation with a group of marines or stalkers they all perform the action and not just one when asked to stim or blink. This is not intuitive but personal preference. Intuitive would be having everything act the same accross the board so that it is all easily grasped. There is nothing unintuitive about having to single select each caster or magic boxing them when casting in a group. We only know what the game tells us to know and in BW it was intuitive to do it in these manners because it is the only way we ever knew.
Feel free to say that it is a lousy and ridiculous way to play the game because it would force you to play out the game in a way you dont want to, but please lets stop this intuitive vs unintuitive non sense.
On November 29 2012 03:56 Falling wrote: If the game was designed around simultaneous casting rather than single casting then there would be situations where you would want to. Magic Box casting is one instance. Selecting two casters where one is significantly behind the other so that by the time the one spell goes off the second comes into range and casts immediately after to finish off the units would be another.
But since it isn't, there aren't.
"cast every single storm at once." This line of argument kinda assumes we have 10 spellcasters all on one hotkey. Ideally, this would actually lead to less spell-casters created overall (so we don't have 10-15 infestors) because it's hard to use them all to maximum effect. But when someone is able to use them to maximum effect it is spectacular- and they probably didn't have them all on one hotkey.
But you would always have a group of spellcasters all on one hotkey, because you want to move them.
Ordering something to happen that is contrary to what you wanted to order does not make the game unintuitive.
Of course it does. If I order my marines to attack something and they start dancing, it's unintuitive. Blizzard have done their best to make sure that what you want to happen happens. In some cases they failed (e.g. scvs stopping repairing something if it goes back to full health, some ai pathing etc.). But mainly they carefully tailored spells / abilities to work as easily as possible.
If you want to stim 4 marines, you select them and stim them. You can't say that taking away the ability to stim every marine would give you more control.
And maybe you don't want more control over your units, but in my opinion for spell-casting if there is more manual control, the spells are allowed to be more powerful and therefore more fun. If spell-casting is limited by automated single-casting, the power of the spells suffer.
Likewise, making every caster cast at once for AOE spells takes away control - you can't use your control groups, and you can't do what you want easily (cast one storm, or storms in different areas at once). You give people less control over their other units too. You're making them take 5 or 10 times as long to cast a spell, and make it far more difficult, and they have less time to control their other units properly.
You're trying to make it harder. More difficult. Less intuitive. So that (AFAICT) people use fewer spells. There're still better ways to make people use fewer spells (make them cost more energy / make the units more expensive / more fragile etc.)
On November 29 2012 04:16 Elairec wrote: The problem arises when people want to attach the word intuitive to explain having a group of casters selected and telling them all to cast a spell but only one casts it, but then in the same situation with a group of marines or stalkers they all perform the action and not just one when asked to stim or blink. This is not intuitive but personal preference. Intuitive would be having everything act the same accross the board so that it is all easily grasped. There is nothing unintuitive about having to single select each caster or magic boxing them when casting in a group. We only know what the game tells us to know and in BW it was intuitive to do it in these manners because it is the only way we ever knew.
Meh? If you want to blink one unit, or a subset of units, you select them and blink them. The ability to blink them all at once, is pretty darned important though.
Blizzard have done their best to make sure that the spell for each unit makes sense in terms of what it applies to. They've tried to make it easy to use... intuitive.
If stim worked only for individual units, it would be unintuitive. If every templar stormed at once it would be unintuitive.
I can appreciate why the lack of smartcasting made for a better experience in BW, but I have difficulty imagining that this would be a good add to SC2. The main reason is also something a lot of people want to be rid of (but Blizzard seems not to want to do it): Forcefield. I just can't imagine needing sentries to FF a ramp in PvP (in order to hold back early gateway aggression) without smartcasting. Heck, it wasn't all that long ago that no one was able to properly hold off the 12-minute maxxed roach push with smartcasting in the game. I'm sure you would mean to simultaneously remove things like fungal/FF if it were your game to design, but as they've said they are not removing FF, I can't see how making it harder to use would be beneficial.
I can understand and appreciate why blanketting storms and FF clutters things up, makes it harder to spectate and harder to actually be good at it (since the mechanics of it are simpler), and I accept your basic premise that without the need a lot of simultaneous spells for defense, smartcasting makes things harder to watch and easier to execute. I just don't think SC2 is ever going to be a game of scattered small numbers of spells (if only because of the resource differences between SC2 and BW) - and therefore, I doubt the removal of smartcasting would be good for SC2.
Now, if you were to add difficulty another way for a type of ability which was less mandatory and more powerful, I'd be all for it being harder to use. But when it's necessary to use forcefield every 15 seconds to hold off a 4-gater, I can't say that I'm for making the act of casting FF mechanically harder.
Here's one potential method of arguing the case for smartcasting: If you have a spell that you know you will need to use 3 times over the course of the early game, and you can execute it properly 80% of the time individually - over the course of the game, you know that you can execute properly a little more than half the time (51.2%). But change that 3 times to 5 times (32.8%) or 8 times (16.8%), and your chance to complete a game properly dwindles. This means one of two things:
1. You get better execution; or 2. The spell gets easier to cast.
If we're moving from 3 executions to 8, you'd need to up your execution from 80% to 92% (a drastic reduction in failure rate). Especially when someone else is trying to mess you up, this very well might be close to impossible to accomplish. But in general, the theory is just that when you have to do a larger number of things (or in this case, cast a larger number of spells), they need to be easier to cast.
Whether more spells is better or not, you may have a point - but there are more spells being used. So, they kind of do need to be easier to use.
The thing about this kind of argument is that it assumes two things:
1. that to remove smart casting from some spells means it must be removed from all spells (I have mentioned already that this assumption is untrue) 2. that the removal of smart casting would be done in a bubble, with no other changes made to accommodate for the increased difficulty to perfectly spread/time the casting of spells.
On November 29 2012 03:56 Falling wrote: If the game was designed around simultaneous casting rather than single casting then there would be situations where you would want to. Magic Box casting is one instance. Selecting two casters where one is significantly behind the other so that by the time the one spell goes off the second comes into range and casts immediately after to finish off the units would be another.
But since it isn't, there aren't.
That doesn't seem like a very productive response.
"cast every single storm at once." This line of argument kinda assumes we have 10 spellcasters all on one hotkey. Ideally, this would actually lead to less spell-casters created overall (so we don't have 10-15 infestors) because it's hard to use them all to maximum effect. But when someone is able to use them to maximum effect it is spectacular- and they probably didn't have them all on one hotkey.
But you would always have a group of spellcasters all on one hotkey, because you want to move them.
Assuming a lack of smart casting for the spell caster in question, this isn't necessarily an absolute truth. For example, right now players will place spell casters in a separate hotkey from their main army for easier control. You can take that a step further and say that for easier control without smart casting, they could have casters spread across a couple of hotkeys for easier spreading and piecemeal selection.
Ordering something to happen that is contrary to what you wanted to order does not make the game unintuitive.
Of course it does. If I order my marines to attack something and they start dancing, it's unintuitive. Blizzard have done their best to make sure that what you want to happen happens. In some cases they failed (e.g. scvs stopping repairing something if it goes back to full health, some ai pathing etc.). But mainly they carefully tailored spells / abilities to work as easily as possible.
If you want to stim 4 marines, you select them and stim them. You can't say that taking away the ability to stim every marine would give you more control.
This seems like a silly argument to me, from both sides. If we want to talk about intuition, consider this: why do some abilities (stim, blink, etc.) get executed by all selected units, but others (forcefield, storm, snipe, etc.) only have a single unit in my selection perform the task? Are you really trying to argue that this is more intuitive than all abilities functioning the same way?
It "feels" intuitive because you've simply gotten used to which abilities act one way and which act the other way. If I only want one marine to stim, I select only one marine. If I want a group of marines to stim, I select the group. Replace "marine" with "templar" and "stim" with "storm", and you have what templar storm control would be like without smart casting.
And maybe you don't want more control over your units, but in my opinion for spell-casting if there is more manual control, the spells are allowed to be more powerful and therefore more fun. If spell-casting is limited by automated single-casting, the power of the spells suffer.
Likewise, making every caster cast at once takes away control - you can't use your control groups, and you can't do what you want easily (cast one storm, or storms in different areas at once). You give people less control over their other units too. You're making them take 5 or 10 times as long to cast a spell, and make it far more difficult, and they have less time to control their other units properly.
You're trying to make it harder. More difficult. Less intuitive. So that (AFAICT) people use fewer spells. There're still better ways to make people use fewer spells (make them cost more energy / make the units more expensive / more fragile etc.)
It actually gives more true control. Telling a group of templar to storm will cause the group of templar to storm. Does that make precise execution harder to do? Yes. I'll use an FPS analogy to demonstrate this point: auto-targeting. Even if you're awful at the game and can't aim straight to save your life, the game will take over and say, "It's ok, even though you'd normally be shooting at a wall right now, I know that your real intention is to shoot the enemy on your screen, so I'll just adjust the angle of your shots to aim for him instead." In much the same way, smart casting is simply the game taking over and saying, "Don't worry, I know you'd normally be awful at trying to blanket his army with storm/fungal/EMP, so just select a big group of spell casters and click; I'll choose the best one to do the job for you! Now you too have the execution and accuracy of Jangbi, isn't that great?"
Would SmartMagicBox be better or worse? If you select 7 templar and all tell them to storm the same spot, should they throw down a perfectly spaced patchwork quilt of storms radiating from the point selected?
Magic boxed templar rarely, rarely ever came up in BW.
Really: less of a blanket and more of a fat arc, because you'd usually be telling them to storm at something at the edge of their casting range.
The thing about this kind of argument is that it assumes two things:
1. that to remove smart casting from some spells means it must be removed from all spells (I have mentioned already that this assumption is untrue) 2. that the removal of smart casting would be done in a bubble, with no other changes made to accommodate for the increased difficulty to perfectly spread/time the casting of spells.
1. Absolutely. You can definitely have spells which are easy to use and others which are harder to use - but given that you can balance the relative power of spells to a point where they can have relatively similar impacts (per energy cost/gas expenditure, or whatever other metric you wish to use) is it a good idea from a standpoint of game design to make some spells cast some ways and other spells cast other ways? Look at the Mothership - how many protoss when they were new to the game fundamentally did not understand why their MShip never cast vortex before they figured out that it had to stop? It's probably better to have this balance-wise (and it may be the solution to some problems), but across the board is out.
2. That's a bit of a silly argument. Smartcasting has no problems in a game with no context to it. Neither does removing smartcasting. If we had concrete "other changes" to accomodate the removal of smartcasting, we could assess whether it's removal was a good thing. In a vacuum though, removing smartcasting is neither good nor bad. It's just something you can do.
The thing about this kind of argument is that it assumes two things:
1. that to remove smart casting from some spells means it must be removed from all spells (I have mentioned already that this assumption is untrue) 2. that the removal of smart casting would be done in a bubble, with no other changes made to accommodate for the increased difficulty to perfectly spread/time the casting of spells.
1. Absolutely. You can definitely have spells which are easy to use and others which are harder to use - but given that you can balance the relative power of spells to a point where they can have relatively similar impacts (per energy cost/gas expenditure, or whatever other metric you wish to use) is it a good idea from a standpoint of game design to make some spells cast some ways and other spells cast other ways? Look at the Mothership - how many protoss when they were new to the game fundamentally did not understand why their MShip never cast vortex before they figured out that it had to stop? It's probably better to have this balance-wise (and it may be the solution to some problems), but across the board is out.
2. That's a bit of a silly argument. Smartcasting has no problems in a game with no context to it. Neither does removing smartcasting. If we had concrete "other changes" to accomodate the removal of smartcasting, we could assess whether it's removal was a good thing. In a vacuum though, removing smartcasting is neither good nor bad. It's just something you can do.
When asking whether it's a good idea from a standpoint of game design to make some spells cast some ways and other spells cast differently, this reality is already present in StarCraft II. Compare abilities like stim, blink, burrow, baneling detonate, etc. to abilities like storm, forcefield, snipe, etc.
Arguing against having more spells work one (traditional) way rather than the other (new "best unit" or "smart casting" AI) actually runs contrary to your worries about having spells that are executed differently.
I'm also not buying your response to the second point. The entire premise of the OP is making changes to the game. Your argument revolved around giving examples in the current game why smart casting needs to remain. In other words, your argument is assuming a lack of change -- or rather, the only change being made would be having smart cast removed from these examples. Trying to paint this point as a philosophical cop out isn't very convincing, because the real issue is you making arguments on a micro level to an idea that's more macro in scale.
Putting it in simpler terms: adding or removing smart casting is a matter of altering AI execution to adjust the skill ceiling of the game, not a matter of number tweaking to make sure the game's balanced. You're focusing too much on "how would these spells, with their current numbers/stats, possibly be any good/balanced without smart casting? I'd have to have the execution of a god just to stay alive in early game PvP, for example!"
With smart casting added to the powerful AoE spells in SC2, we've seen the balance numbers tweaked to accommodate the lowered skill ceiling -- namely, the nerfing of these abilities. Since everyone can storm like Jangbi, storm can't be as powerful as it was. It also puts a damper on the spectator value of the game, since now Jangbi-quality storms are no longer impressive to see. If you're super concerned about force fielding in PvP, there are plenty of answers:
1. Adjust the balance numbers of FF 2. Alter the design of FF 3. Adjust other aspects of Protoss to reduce reliance on FF to defend 4gate and other scenarios 4. Simply keep FF as a smart cast spell
Any one of those options could be picked while still and removing smart casting from and adjusting the stats of the powerful AoE spells of all the races.
Putting it in simpler terms: adding or removing smart casting is a matter of altering AI execution to adjust the skill ceiling of the game, not a matter of number tweaking to make sure the game's balanced.
You can imagine some really stupid ways to raise the skill ceiling by making the UI harder to use. The idea has to stand on its own merits when there might be other ideas that don't come with an inherent downside. Why not come up with better ways to balance this stuff and make it interesting?
For that matter come up with ideas that aren't going to make the design team roll their eyes.
Blizzard and a lot of other people dont realize that the skill it takes to do something can actually be factored into the balance of the game.
If everyone can cast 6 near perfect storms off of one hotkey, then the balance has to take that into account.
Whereas with BW style casting, it is difficult, which means that those spells can become very powerful because only the best players will be able to exploit that ability well enough. Assuming that there are ways to avoid the negative effects of spells (dodging, sniping, etc) or that the spell itself isnt too all purpose for its cost/position on tech tree, then suddenly the spells become very interesting to play with and against because it is so hard to exploit them, yet they can be extremely deadly when used properly.
What would be truly innovative would be blizzard finding a way or at least developing a philosophy to reconcile the need for difficulty and skill with the realization that casual players just want their army to fight.
The macro mechanics were a step in the right direction, although poorly executed.
Putting it in simpler terms: adding or removing smart casting is a matter of altering AI execution to adjust the skill ceiling of the game, not a matter of number tweaking to make sure the game's balanced.
You can imagine some really stupid ways to raise the skill ceiling by making the UI harder to use. The idea has to stand on its own merits when there might be other ideas that don't come with an inherent downside. Why not come up with better ways to balance this stuff and make it interesting?
For that matter come up with ideas that aren't going to make the design team roll their eyes.
This is a silly response. What we're talking about is already built into SC2. It's a simple matter of unchecking the "Best Unit" flag for whatever ability you don't want to smart cast in the data editor.
It's also important to realize that smart casting is a welcome addition in certain cases, such as with snipe or infested terran. By requiring the player to re-execute these abilities multiple times, a higher skill ceiling is achieved to fully utilize the ability's potential. Compare having to babysit sniping ghosts to make sure they get their target in contrast to selecting a couple, clicking once on a target to snipe, and insta-gibbing them. It's easy to see the difference between an amateur trying to expend the remainder of his infestor energy throwing down IT eggs (haphazard) in comparison to a pro (makes it look like the ability doesn't even have smart cast). This kind of "fighting the UI", if you really want to call it that, is still present in SC2.
As for the idea standing on its own merits, there's already been plenty of discussion outlining the merits of removing smart casting from powerful AoE spells. We also have a clear precedent in Brood War for demonstrating those merits. If you don't think something like Jangbi storms are interesting (hate re-using an example over and over, but it's the most relevant and clear example on my mind), then I question why you even watch StarCraft.
You can trivialize smart casting not being ideal for snipe and ITs by using any mouse made in the past decade. Anyone can do this and it's not particularly virtuously inspiring to see it done.
The thing is, there are situations where you don't want to blow all your IT eggs in one go, there are also (rare) situations where you don't want to use up snipe energy where one or two snipes and other sources of damage together would be more efficient. There need to be situations where the on screen effect of your actions could be interpreted as something you actually wanted to do, or it's just the albatross of a clunky UI. The reasons you might want to cast a bunch of storms on the same spot all from one action are so incredibly trivial that I'm not going to give them away by mentioning them. Maybe we can come up with some balance change that encourages stacking storms, but I don't really even feel that that's the direction the game needs to go in.
And of course there are going to be people who say, "well what we really need to do is get rid of custom keymappings and make pros play on standardized mice".
There are a lot of things that I like from broodwar that I think SC2 needs to learn from and emulate more, but the ship has sailed on this one. The BW esports scene really was a child of circumstance, and its creators really had no business ending up with such an enduringly balanced game. If the map editor hadn't been so good at controlling the game balance and the gameplay it never would have gotten there.
Nice article, congratulations. I also get the feel that smart casting has limited unit ability to the extent that other parts of the game has to be balanced around it.
On November 29 2012 12:47 Resistentialism wrote: You can trivialize smart casting not being ideal for snipe and ITs by using any mouse made in the past decade. Anyone can do this and it's not particularly virtuously inspiring to see it done.
You mean binding the abilities to a scroll wheel, which most people don't do and is banned from professional play in any premiere tournament? Yeah, okay.
On November 29 2012 12:47 Resistentialism wrote: The thing is, there are situations where you don't want to blow all your IT eggs in one go, there are also (rare) situations where you don't want to use up snipe energy where one or two snipes and other sources of damage together would be more efficient. There need to be situations where the on screen effect of your actions could be interpreted as something you actually wanted to do, or it's just the albatross of a clunky UI. The reasons you might want to cast a bunch of storms on the same spot all from one action are so incredibly trivial that I'm not going to give them away by mentioning them. Maybe we can come up with some balance change that encourages stacking storms, but I don't really even feel that that's the direction the game needs to go in.
It's almost like you can accidentally over-stim and waste a tonne of health when you didn't really want to. Why does the game let me stim units that are still under the influence of stim? Aaahhhh! We wouldn't want mis-clicks that can have a huge impact on a game, now would we?
Mistakes are part of any competitive game. If we're talking about direction, I don't think a game that fool-proofs things for you is what a competitive game needs.
On November 29 2012 12:47 Resistentialism wrote: And of course there are going to be people who say, "well what we really need to do is get rid of custom keymappings and make pros play on standardized mice".
If you can find these people, I'd be intrigued.
On November 29 2012 12:47 Resistentialism wrote: There are a lot of things that I like from broodwar that I think SC2 needs to learn from and emulate more, but the ship has sailed on this one. The BW esports scene really was a child of circumstance, and its creators really had no business ending up with such an enduringly balanced game. If the map editor hadn't been so good at controlling the game balance and the gameplay it never would have gotten there.
We're talking about a checkbox in the data editor, in a game where the developers are considering altering an ability like fungal growth to be a dodge-able projectile, rather than instant cast. Why is turning off a checkbox off the table, but fundamentally altering the ability's design is a-okay? Instead of pretending like you are the decision maker over at Blizzard, why not find something more productive to do?
On November 29 2012 13:31 iamcaustic wrote: It's almost like you can accidentally over-stim and waste a tonne of health when you didn't really want to. Why does the game let me stim units that are still under the influence of stim? Aaahhhh! We wouldn't want mis-clicks that can have a huge impact on a game, now would we?
Mistakes are part of any competitive game. If we're talking about direction, I don't think a game that fool-proofs things for you is what a competitive game needs.
There are actually situations where you want to stim 40 marines and not 5, though. There aren't situations where you want 7 identically placed and simultaneous storms or forcefields. I'm saying it's not the same thing. The game can't read your mind, but that doesn't mean the game designers can't make the minimum effort to anticipate your intentions. Especially when that minimum effort simply involves not programing in a useless pitfall they already removed. If a smartcastless-like gameplay would happen to improve the gameplay, find another way to get to the same end result. There are lots of them being discussed, most of them are balance or engine (not negative UI) tweaks.
On November 29 2012 13:31 iamcaustic wrote: You mean binding the abilities to a scroll wheel, which most people don't do and is banned from professional play in any premiere tournament? Yeah, okay.
On November 29 2012 12:47 Resistentialism wrote: And of course there are going to be people who say, "well what we really need to do is get rid of custom keymappings and make pros play on standardized mice".
On November 29 2012 13:31 iamcaustic wrote: If you can find these people, I'd be intrigued.
no comment
On November 29 2012 13:31 iamcaustic wrote: We're talking about a checkbox in the data editor, in a game where the developers are considering altering an ability like fungal growth to be a dodge-able projectile, rather than instant cast. Why is turning off a checkbox off the table, but fundamentally altering the ability's design is a-okay? Instead of pretending like you are the decision maker over at Blizzard, why not find something more productive to do?
What I meant is that the maps actually mattered, because terrain ignoring units and mechanics were generally less powerful. Except for mutas, which gave you BW's only commonly maligned matchup: ZvZ.
On November 29 2012 10:28 iamcaustic wrote: When asking whether it's a good idea from a standpoint of game design to make some spells cast some ways and other spells cast differently, this reality is already present in StarCraft II. Compare abilities like stim, blink, burrow, baneling detonate, etc. to abilities like storm, forcefield, snipe, etc.
For the record, I agree that removing smartcasting for some units and not other has definite potential (hence why I started my reply with "absolutely"). I would point out that the comparison of blink to stim only ever adds one more click (plus movement of the mouse) regardless of the number of marines and stalkers involved. In comparison, removal of smartcasting for AE casters adds additional commands per number of casters. In theory, I think you have something with different smartcasting for different units, though.
On November 29 2012 10:28 iamcaustic wrote: I'm also not buying your response to the second point. The entire premise of the OP is making changes to the game. Your argument revolved around giving examples in the current game why smart casting needs to remain. In other words, your argument is assuming a lack of change -- or rather, the only change being made would be having smart cast removed from these examples. Trying to paint this point as a philosophical cop out isn't very convincing, because the real issue is you making arguments on a micro level to an idea that's more macro in scale.
Putting it in simpler terms: adding or removing smart casting is a matter of altering AI execution to adjust the skill ceiling of the game, not a matter of number tweaking to make sure the game's balanced. You're focusing too much on "how would these spells, with their current numbers/stats, possibly be any good/balanced without smart casting? I'd have to have the execution of a god just to stay alive in early game PvP, for example!"
With smart casting added to the powerful AoE spells in SC2, we've seen the balance numbers tweaked to accommodate the lowered skill ceiling -- namely, the nerfing of these abilities. Since everyone can storm like Jangbi, storm can't be as powerful as it was. It also puts a damper on the spectator value of the game, since now Jangbi-quality storms are no longer impressive to see. If you're super concerned about force fielding in PvP, there are plenty of answers:
1. Adjust the balance numbers of FF 2. Alter the design of FF 3. Adjust other aspects of Protoss to reduce reliance on FF to defend 4gate and other scenarios 4. Simply keep FF as a smart cast spell
Any one of those options could be picked while still and removing smart casting from and adjusting the stats of the powerful AoE spells of all the races.
My argument wasn't that we need smartcasting, and that any RTS without smartcasting is terrible because of sentries. My argument was that this is a different game with different balance and you can't just change things as large as smartcasting without doing a ton of work. Sure you can find a way to balance non-smartcasting and FF(or you can leave it as smartcasting) but that doing so changes the balance of a lot of things (FF placement and storming effectiveness effects all matchups FWIW - not just pvp). On the theory end, making these or other changes regarding the way in which spells are cast mechanically *may* result in a better end - but as long as we're talking theory, we'd need to first define "better" to know if this were true ("rewarding skill" is great as a concept, unless a person needs skill so high they'd never achieve it in order to see the reward - some amount of flaw in play must be acceptable - where is the line?).
On the practical end of things, it presses a big reset button on game balance. Have you seen the way matchups change with roaches (and later immortals) got +1 range added - or what about when fungal got changed to deal damage? The changes you're describing are vastly more game-impacting than the ones we've seen so far. Is EMP worth anything when casters are split up? Without a big group of infestors with smartcasting, does zerg have any options for moving into the lategame (it sure didn't feel like it before)? What about pheonixes - what the heck do we do about them? And for all AE casters, if the AE is harder to use, how much more damage should it deal (it still can't be BW storm for much the same reason siege tanks are weaker in WoL)? I'd be willing to bet that removal of smartcasting would be the largest game change we've seen since some point early in the design phase - is it worth rebalancing everything with this notion in mind? Will people be patient enough to see it through? Is it something we can even convince Blizzard is a good change?
My point had nothing to do with specific circumstances in specific matchups and everything to do with changing from a theory mindset to one of practicality. A lot of testing went into getting this game as good as it is - and if we're going to give that up - even just for some units - I personally think we should have a really gamebreakingly good reason for doing so.
On the constructive end of things, if we're looking to add more potential for skill - why is everyone looking to change what we have instead of trying to come up with something new that we don't have yet? Why change sentries (and all the balance implications that go along with that), when you can add a new type of unit, a new type of spell or resource or action or something? Is this not the point of expansions (even if HotS is closed to new units, which is unconfirmed, there's still LotV if an idea has enough support)?
On November 29 2012 13:31 iamcaustic wrote: It's almost like you can accidentally over-stim and waste a tonne of health when you didn't really want to. Why does the game let me stim units that are still under the influence of stim? Aaahhhh! We wouldn't want mis-clicks that can have a huge impact on a game, now would we?
Mistakes are part of any competitive game. If we're talking about direction, I don't think a game that fool-proofs things for you is what a competitive game needs.
There are actually situations where you want to stim 40 marines and not 5, though. There aren't situations where you want 7 identically placed and simultaneous storms or forcefields. I'm saying it's not the same thing. The game can't read your mind, but that doesn't mean the game designers can't make the minimum effort to anticipate your intentions. Especially when that minimum effort simply involves not programing in a useless pitfall they already removed. If a smartcastless-like gameplay would happen to improve the gameplay, find another way to get to the same end result. There are lots of them being discussed, most of them are balance or engine (not negative UI) tweaks.
Not sure if you're accidentally or deliberately misunderstanding what I said. I'm talking about when you accidentally stim more than once in quick succession, wasting the health on the units you wanted to stim. There is not a single situation when you actually want to do that. These "negative UI" aspects, as you call them, are still in SC2. Allowing for mistakes to happen is a key part of what makes the game great.
On November 29 2012 13:31 iamcaustic wrote: You mean binding the abilities to a scroll wheel, which most people don't do and is banned from professional play in any premiere tournament? Yeah, okay.
On November 29 2012 12:47 Resistentialism wrote: And of course there are going to be people who say, "well what we really need to do is get rid of custom keymappings and make pros play on standardized mice".
On November 29 2012 13:31 iamcaustic wrote: If you can find these people, I'd be intrigued.
no comment
Not sure if you're trying to accuse me as one of these people you're talking about, but if you are you're being disingenuous. I was stating simple realities, not personal opinion. Furthermore, disallowing a particular key mapping exploit isn't even close to the same as getting rid of custom key mappings altogether, nor is it the same as forcing pros to play on standardized mice -- in fact, it's completely unrelated.
I'll say it again: if you can find the people that would say such a thing, I'd be intrigued.
On November 29 2012 13:31 iamcaustic wrote: We're talking about a checkbox in the data editor, in a game where the developers are considering altering an ability like fungal growth to be a dodge-able projectile, rather than instant cast. Why is turning off a checkbox off the table, but fundamentally altering the ability's design is a-okay? Instead of pretending like you are the decision maker over at Blizzard, why not find something more productive to do?
What I meant is that the maps actually mattered, because terrain ignoring units and mechanics were generally less powerful. Except for mutas, which gave you BW's only commonly maligned matchup: ZvZ.
Maps also matter in SC2. That's also not what you meant at all, and you know it. You specifically said "the ship has sailed on this one". You and I both know you were saying that removing smart casting from SC2 AoE spells is out of the question. Instead of being nothing but dishonest in your entire response, make an argument worth posting.
On November 29 2012 10:28 iamcaustic wrote: When asking whether it's a good idea from a standpoint of game design to make some spells cast some ways and other spells cast differently, this reality is already present in StarCraft II. Compare abilities like stim, blink, burrow, baneling detonate, etc. to abilities like storm, forcefield, snipe, etc.
For the record, I agree that removing smartcasting for some units and not other has definite potential (hence why I started my reply with "absolutely"). I would point out that the comparison of blink to stim only ever adds one more click (plus movement of the mouse) regardless of the number of marines and stalkers involved. In comparison, removal of smartcasting for AE casters adds additional commands per number of casters. In theory, I think you have something with different smartcasting for different units, though.
On November 29 2012 10:28 iamcaustic wrote: I'm also not buying your response to the second point. The entire premise of the OP is making changes to the game. Your argument revolved around giving examples in the current game why smart casting needs to remain. In other words, your argument is assuming a lack of change -- or rather, the only change being made would be having smart cast removed from these examples. Trying to paint this point as a philosophical cop out isn't very convincing, because the real issue is you making arguments on a micro level to an idea that's more macro in scale.
Putting it in simpler terms: adding or removing smart casting is a matter of altering AI execution to adjust the skill ceiling of the game, not a matter of number tweaking to make sure the game's balanced. You're focusing too much on "how would these spells, with their current numbers/stats, possibly be any good/balanced without smart casting? I'd have to have the execution of a god just to stay alive in early game PvP, for example!"
With smart casting added to the powerful AoE spells in SC2, we've seen the balance numbers tweaked to accommodate the lowered skill ceiling -- namely, the nerfing of these abilities. Since everyone can storm like Jangbi, storm can't be as powerful as it was. It also puts a damper on the spectator value of the game, since now Jangbi-quality storms are no longer impressive to see. If you're super concerned about force fielding in PvP, there are plenty of answers:
1. Adjust the balance numbers of FF 2. Alter the design of FF 3. Adjust other aspects of Protoss to reduce reliance on FF to defend 4gate and other scenarios 4. Simply keep FF as a smart cast spell
Any one of those options could be picked while still and removing smart casting from and adjusting the stats of the powerful AoE spells of all the races.
My argument wasn't that we need smartcasting, and that any RTS without smartcasting is terrible because of sentries. My argument was that this is a different game with different balance and you can't just change things as large as smartcasting without doing a ton of work. Sure you can find a way to balance non-smartcasting and FF(or you can leave it as smartcasting) but that doing so changes the balance of a lot of things (FF placement and storming effectiveness effects all matchups FWIW - not just pvp). On the theory end, making these or other changes regarding the way in which spells are cast mechanically *may* result in a better end - but as long as we're talking theory, we'd need to first define "better" to know if this were true ("rewarding skill" is great as a concept, unless a person needs skill so high they'd never achieve it in order to see the reward - some amount of flaw in play must be acceptable - where is the line?).
On the practical end of things, it presses a big reset button on game balance. Have you seen the way matchups change with roaches (and later immortals) got +1 range added - or what about when fungal got changed to deal damage? The changes you're describing are vastly more game-impacting than the ones we've seen so far. Is EMP worth anything when casters are split up? Without a big group of infestors with smartcasting, does zerg have any options for moving into the lategame (it sure didn't feel like it before)? What about pheonixes - what the heck do we do about them? And for all AE casters, if the AE is harder to use, how much more damage should it deal (it still can't be BW storm for much the same reason siege tanks are weaker in WoL)? I'd be willing to bet that removal of smartcasting would be the largest game change we've seen since some point early in the design phase - is it worth rebalancing everything with this notion in mind? Will people be patient enough to see it through? Is it something we can even convince Blizzard is a good change?
My point had nothing to do with specific circumstances in specific matchups and everything to do with changing from a theory mindset to one of practicality. A lot of testing went into getting this game as good as it is - and if we're going to give that up - even just for some units - I personally think we should have a really gamebreakingly good reason for doing so.
On the constructive end of things, if we're looking to add more potential for skill - why is everyone looking to change what we have instead of trying to come up with something new that we don't have yet? Why change sentries (and all the balance implications that go along with that), when you can add a new type of unit, a new type of spell or resource or action or something? Is this not the point of expansions (even if HotS is closed to new units, which is unconfirmed, there's still LotV if an idea has enough support)?
Of course the removal of smart casting from certain abilities causes change in balance. That was one of the core points in the OP: because of smart casting, these powerful AoE spells have had to be nerfed significantly to compensate. If smart casting was removed from them, then we'd be looking at re-buffing them to their former strength (or whatever balance numbers make sense).
In terms of defining "better", I think the difference has already been clarified, but let's summarize it here:
The relationship between spell strength and landing perfect spells is an intertwined one.
With smart casting on AoE/area-target spells, anyone can cast perfect spells (e.g. Jangbi-level) with minimal effort. As a result, these spells have had to be nerfed accordingly. These necessary nerfs also mean that you need perfect casting for these spells to have the kind of impact necessary to make them useful (e.g. missed FFs = GG yo). It also makes it very hard for pros to differentiate themselves from an average player in this area.
Without smart casting on AoE/area-target spells, it becomes very hard to get a perfect result. Consequently, the spells can be more powerful because most people won't have 100% efficiency. It also means you don't need perfect casting, because the damage you do manage to inflict will still generally be sufficient enough thanks to the increased strength. This also opens a huge opportunity for pros to differentiate themselves from an average player, as their spell casting will be much more efficient.
What the OP (and myself) consider "better" is the one that allows for a greater range of skill. In this case, it would be the latter of the two. Now, targeting some specific quotes:
On November 30 2012 01:54 Treehead wrote: Is EMP worth anything when casters are split up?
Yes. It's still an incredibly valuable spell in TvP regardless. As for ghosts vs. casters in general, against a clumped group of casters you might want to EMP, while against a split up number of them, snipe would be more useful. It's situational, but the ghost has answers to both.
On November 30 2012 01:54 Treehead wrote: Without a big group of infestors with smartcasting, does zerg have any options for moving into the lategame (it sure didn't feel like it before)?
Blizzard never designed the game for Zerg to mass infestors. This style of play is exactly why Blizz is looking to nerf fungal growth -- something they might not have to look at if they instead just removed smart casting from the ability. The best of the best Zergs might still be able to get a similar result that any random ladder player can currently get today, but for most people the ability would be appropriately "nerfed" without actually having to muck with the balance numbers and/or design.
On November 30 2012 01:54 Treehead wrote: What about pheonixes - what the heck do we do about them?
What about them? Graviton beam is fine as a smart cast ability. I don't think single-target abilities should lack smart casting -- it'd be too much to try and select a single caster then try and select a single target as well. There should be a good balance between precise and imprecise selection, I think.
On November 30 2012 01:54 Treehead wrote: And for all AE casters, if the AE is harder to use, how much more damage should it deal (it still can't be BW storm for much the same reason siege tanks are weaker in WoL)?
This question is a clear lack of understanding of the game. Siege tanks don't do as much damage because of some changes to the AI. In Brood War, siege tanks would waste their shots on units that were already killed by another tank; that doesn't happen in SC2, making tank damage much more efficient. Due to increased efficiency, the damage had to be reduced. Sound similar to what I was just saying regarding AoE spells? If you reduce the ease of efficiency with AoE spells, then their strength can very well be returned to BW levels (theoretically).
Browder on why they can't remove tank overkill: "To help with perfomance, units do not fire all at once. There is a tiny offset between different units firing their weapons. From the users perspective it is almost simultaenous, but the shots are actually 1/8-1/16th of a second apart. Since units cannot target units that are already dead and since Siege Tanks hit their targets instantly, this creates the situation you are describing, where Siege Tanks waste fewer shots."
On November 30 2012 01:54 Treehead wrote: I'd be willing to bet that removal of smartcasting would be the largest game change we've seen since some point early in the design phase - is it worth rebalancing everything with this notion in mind? Will people be patient enough to see it through? Is it something we can even convince Blizzard is a good change?
Heart of the Swarm and Legacy of the Void. I bring them up because they are, by their very nature, rebalancing everything. Blizzard has also mentioned that they'll be looking at WoL units for the sake of redesigning/rebalancing them to be better during the HotS beta. And, finally, in terms of the community convincing Blizzard to implement changes through discussion and implementation, look no further than the new unbuildable rocks/debris in HotS. They're the result of the community discussing the ramp block strategy (namely, how to get rid of it because it's stupid) and implementing a band-aid solution in the form of neutral supply depots.
On November 30 2012 01:54 Treehead wrote: A lot of testing went into getting this game as good as it is - and if we're going to give that up - even just for some units - I personally think we should have a really gamebreakingly good reason for doing so.
A much more powerful and skill-oriented spell casting experience, which opens opportunities to have much cooler/more powerful spells and a better professional scene where top level players have another outlet to differentiate themselves from the pack. I think that's a pretty good reason.
On November 30 2012 01:54 Treehead wrote: On the constructive end of things, if we're looking to add more potential for skill - why is everyone looking to change what we have instead of trying to come up with something new that we don't have yet?
This is simple: without addressing how AoE spells work in SC2, even if you add new units and spells, they'll still be restricted from a balance standpoint in terms of what they can do. It really hinders the "cool"-factor that spells could have, as well as the professional scene to a lesser degree. At the end of the day, it's all about wanting SC2 to be the most awesome game it can be. Nothing more, nothing less.
Fitzy's max was interesting and very difficult if you ever tried it. The fungals had to be cast, then the ultras un-retarded, and then everything had to be transfused and fungals refreshed. I really like that sort of thing, and I think the idea of multiple casters in one comp is great at raising the skill cap and creating an effective army, while not being neccessary.
Not sure if you're accidentally or deliberately misunderstanding what I said. I'm talking about when you accidentally stim more than once in quick succession, wasting the health on the units you wanted to stim. There is not a single situation when you actually want to do that. These "negative UI" aspects, as you call them, are still in SC2. Allowing for mistakes to happen is a key part of what makes the game great.
You can double tap storm too, that's already in the game. If you cast stim before it's finished it refreshes the duration. If you cast a storm, wait two seconds, and then cast another storm in the same spot, it also refreshes the duration. There are logical reasons for performing both of these actions.* It's just that stimming is a one press hotkey so it's easier to cock up with stim. What might be more comparable would be if you selected 40 marines and 8 of them stimmed 5 times. Wholly nonsensical! Just like seven storms from seven templar right on the same spot.
But apparently everything I say is disingenuous, so you know.
*Well, a logical reason for imperfect humans. Robots can restim and restorm exactly as the duration ends, I imagine.
Blizzard might rationalize this by arguing that there is no benefit to having spells all hit one place if they don't stack, so why make the interface less new player friendly, or slow player friendly? AoE abilities just need to be toned down a bit (possibly in damage, but preferably in radius - EMP is one AoE that doesn't feel too strong; then again, EMP can't kill), but then there are always units like colossus, that just rain down AoE and lack any element of finesse. I'm still convinced that AoE on certain units has room for improvement. I'd be interested to see how a radius reduction of .5 would affect storms' and fungals' killing potential.
EDIT[OT]: I'd also love to see colossus' attack & animation modified to 3-4 weaker attacks in a "Y" or "X" formation respectably, with a concentric 2x2 center from which the range of the attack (and total of beam damage) is calculated. The desired effect would be something like a siege tank shot, where units on the perimeter of the attack take slightly less damage that those in the centre. The way colossus work right now, they erase rows of units in a very uninteresting, way, and this is why colossus count seems to be so impactful in such matchups as PvP, negating positional and supply advantages in many situations where the majority of engagements are fought in that "colossus beam deathstrip".[/OT]
Not sure if you're accidentally or deliberately misunderstanding what I said. I'm talking about when you accidentally stim more than once in quick succession, wasting the health on the units you wanted to stim. There is not a single situation when you actually want to do that. These "negative UI" aspects, as you call them, are still in SC2. Allowing for mistakes to happen is a key part of what makes the game great.
You can double tap storm too, that's already in the game. If you cast stim before it's finished it refreshes the duration. If you cast a storm, wait two seconds, and then cast another storm in the same spot, it also refreshes the duration. There are logical reasons for performing both of these actions.* It's just that stimming is a one press hotkey so it's easier to cock up with stim. What might be more comparable would be if you selected 40 marines and 8 of them stimmed 5 times. Wholly nonsensical! Just like seven storms from seven templar right on the same spot.
But apparently everything I say is disingenuous, so you know.
*Well, a logical reason for imperfect humans. Robots can restim and restorm exactly as the duration ends, I imagine.
And the bolded part emphasizes the moment I could no longer take you seriously. Have a nice life.
On November 30 2012 14:50 Resistentialism wrote: Hey thanks, I guess you're wrong or something then? Feel free to try and correct me.
All right, just this once but then I'm done. I have no interest in having a discussion with someone that likes to say dumb things for the sake of arguing instead of trying to advance rational thought.
You said:
What might be more comparable would be if you selected 40 marines and 8 of them stimmed 5 times. Wholly nonsensical! Just like seven storms from seven templar right on the same spot.
This is utterly nonsensical and unintuitive, with no relation to what was being discussed before. Why would 8 random marines out of a group of 40 stim 5 times when you only issued the command once? That doesn't make sense.
Then let's look at selecting 7 high templar and commanding them to cast storm. If they all go toward the location and storm, this is simply the most pure result of that commend: you told 7 templar to storm that spot, so they stormed it. There is no randomness, there is no unknown or unexplained result. Rather, it's incredibly simple and straightforward. Trying to tell me that your ridiculous example is "more comparable" to this is beyond ludicrous.
What's even more despicable is that you'd take my refusal to continue dealing with an unreasonable person like yourself as some sort of cheap "victory", as evidence that I was somehow incorrect. Shame on you. Find a better hobby.
Here's a question I haven't seen answered so far (Apologies if it has, my eyes aren't what they used to be): while this would undoubtedly add a higher level of skill into the game, could this also be another facet pushing casual players away from the game and into other venues like LoL?
It seems to me that a lot of the great UI changes for HotS have come as a way to try and get more casuals to continually play Starcraft (and the bigger the player base the better for the sport) and I'm worried making the game harder for them will instead thin the player base.
while this is one of the best threads i've read on this issue, i'm not very inclined to believe blizzard will change / erase smart casting thus it's kind of more wishful thinking than anything else
Lot of arguing about what is more intuitive here. I'd like to make the case that you're actually both right. Technically you can argue both ways are "intuitive".
The argument against smartcasting is well summarised just above here, so I'll quote:
On November 30 2012 16:54 iamcaustic wrote: Then let's look at selecting 7 high templar and commanding them to cast storm. If they all go toward the location and storm, this is simply the most pure result of that commend: you told 7 templar to storm that spot, so they stormed it. There is no randomness, there is no unknown or unexplained result. Rather, it's incredibly simple and straightforward.
I would like, however, to point out the exact opposite argument can also be made (in perhaps overly-emphasised language):
- I have my High Templar selected. I want ONE High Templar to storm ONCE. So I click ONCE and it storms ONCE. Good.
- I have my Stalkers selected. I want to blink ONE forward to scout ahead of my army. I click ONCE on Blink. But ALL of my Stalkers blinked forward at once. What the hell? I clicked once, not lots!
- I have my Infestors selected. I want LOTS of Infested Terrans so I click LOTS. Excellent.
- I have my Marines selected. I want LOTS of Marines to stim so I click LOTS. WHAT JUST HAPPENED TO MY MARINES? They've got no health!
The point is that its a little subjective which is more "obvious" of these two things depending on whether you take the view that selecting the units you want to cast should be more important or that clicking the number of times you want to cast should be more important. Both views are essentially equally valid. If anything I'd argue that the latter is the more intuitive of the two (i.e. one click = one instance of the ability on one unit) because there will never be a time you want to put down 10 storms or fungals at exactly the same time in exactly the same spot, but there are significantly more times when you'll want a handful of marines from a group to stim and rush ahead. Not practical, but more "intuitive".
For the record I think the current hybrid setup is the most intuitive and practical for the game; units with abilities that you most likely want to use all at once do so, units with abilities that you most likely will NOT want to use at once do not do so. Whether or not this intuitive and smart behaviour is a good thing for the game is debatable, but changing it means you're likely going to be delving back into the realms of fighting the interface rather than the opposing player.
On November 30 2012 18:57 dUTtrOACh wrote: Does reduced radius make AoE more entertaining?
Nope ... it makes it "single target" and not AoE anymore. Just remember how big some units are ...
On November 30 2012 18:57 dUTtrOACh wrote: What happened to imaginative AoE abilities like Dark Swarm? That was always entertaining.
It gets reintroduced in HotS, but is far from fair in SC2 due to the fact that it has to be nerfed (reduced radius) to stop from killing entire armies. "Tight unit movement" is all that needs to be said here.
I started playing sc and sc2 almost at the same time... But somehow I like SC more..I am good with built..But i fail often to maintain defiler in SC..Its so hard to use..But when I pull of some good swarm or plague..It feels so great.. LOL...I remember when I selected 8 defiler and used swarm..And it all casted in same place.. I prefer not to have auto casting. I want pro level players doing some amazing work with support unit.. And i want support unit to be strong like defiler,HT of SC..
On November 30 2012 14:50 Resistentialism wrote: Hey thanks, I guess you're wrong or something then? Feel free to try and correct me.
What's even more despicable is that you'd take my refusal to continue dealing with an unreasonable person like yourself as some sort of cheap "victory", as evidence that I was somehow incorrect. Shame on you. Find a better hobby.
Well, only as far it was a summary note to your inability to respond to one of my posts without insulting me. The people who try to unilaterally end a discussion on the internet are usually the ones that lost the most. Another axiom is that no one actually ever wins, despite there definitely being losers.
On November 30 2012 21:39 Lightspeaker wrote: Lot of arguing about what is more intuitive here. I'd like to make the case that you're actually both right. Technically you can argue both ways are "intuitive".
I actually do agree with that. My argument isn't that simultameous casting is intuitive to the exclusion of forced single-casting. Forced single-casting has its own logic to it. But so does simultameous casting. I simply disagree with the notion that simultameous casting is unintuitive. I think the intuitive argument is actually a personal like/dislike with little to do with 'intuition' and is a bit of a distraction as the argument never touches on any the effects on gameplay that was originally raised.
Also, keep it reasonable in here people. This conversation has been level-headed throughout and we don't need it boiling up at the end.
I did want to write a longer response, but for now I just have a few questions/sort of statements:
What is the balance between your ideas that (I've read you once say it is indeed a factor of both) the nerfing of spells like storm is from both 'smart-casting' and from unit clumping? AKA, how much stronger could you make storm if unit movement wasn't touched? I'm actually not sure on that and would be interested to know your thoughts.
I do think specifically in this case as compared to your other blog posts ("a-move unit", "Leveling the playing field", etc) that this wouldn't automatically result in a 'better game'. It really does feel like different design changes and balance changes could make spells less prominent but I understand why casters being easier to use in some ways sort of promotes that. If a storm goes off on a huge clump of units, that usually does bring about some excitement from the crowd. I know in response people will say "dude THESE GIRLS ARE SCREAMING FOR JANGBI'S STORMS", but we all know BW/SC2 are much less popular now in Korea than when that video was taken, I don't think storm is missing out on that viewership factor quite as much as implied. That was a really awesome time in Korean culture for Starcraft that I don't think BW casting would reinvigorate.
I guess spreading out fungals over an entire army would be harder than it is now, but the spell IMHO still would need a rebalance/redesign, as it really wouldn't be any harder at the pro level to catch that clump of vikings, wait out the root, send in another fungal, etc.
Just sort of initial thoughts I had when reading this a week ago.
Well it's sort of using "unintuitive" in two different contexts, one of which smacks of lawyer-ly-speak. You can say, "yes I did select a big group of templar and tell them to storm one spot, so I got 12 storms and 11 of them were useless duplicates, but strictly speaking I got an effect that resembled the input I put in". This is more of a causal intuitive, where you go: "Boy that was dumb (but yes, I understand how it happened)". Any kind of computer program ought to be shooting for reasonable intuitiveness.
The crux of wanting BW-style casting is that it stratifies player skill by making spells OP, but hard to use, so a better player that can use them effectively can crush a player that can't. Blizzard North never really designed the spells to be OP, and they absolutely never designed them to be hard to use. It's all a matter of a rushed production cycle that happened to luck into a well balanced game back in the golden age of PC gaming. With the help of Korean map makers later on.
There are other ways to make spells stronger but more powered and mitigated by player skill. Like say, increasing collision size on units and giving protoss a non-forcefield dependent early game.
I think the question we should be asking is: What is the role of Fungal Growth? An easy way to answer it is to remove it (or not use it). Can Zergs still win? If so, it's been a crutch. If not, what attribute of the spell is necessary for Zerg? Is it the damage? Is it the slow? If Zerg's damage becomes too low without Fungal Growth then I would add damage to other areas of Zerg to compensate. (example, changing Hyrdalisks to BW style) If the snare element was the critical piece, they could transform Fungal Growth into an Ensnare type ability adjusting the reduced speed until a sweet spot is found.
The more powerful the spell, the more sharp the counters must be, which just isn't the case as we all know, with Fungal Growth. Reducing potency of the spell gives more flexibility to change other things, but nerfing it any which-way because we see a lot of Fungal Growth is bad thinking in my opinion.
Again, the question here I believe is: What is the role of Fungal Growth?
On November 30 2012 14:50 Resistentialism wrote: Hey thanks, I guess you're wrong or something then? Feel free to try and correct me.
What's even more despicable is that you'd take my refusal to continue dealing with an unreasonable person like yourself as some sort of cheap "victory", as evidence that I was somehow incorrect. Shame on you. Find a better hobby.
Well, only as far it was a summary note to your inability to respond to one of my posts without insulting me. The people who try to unilaterally end a discussion on the internet are usually the ones that lost the most. Another axiom is that no one actually ever wins, despite there definitely being losers.
It wasn't a personal insult, it was a statement that it had become impossible to treat your argument as something legitimate, for reasons that should have been fairly obvious. It's also not cool to make up things to try and justify your reprehensible response. There's simply no point in continuing when every response I could make would have "that's completely ridiculous" in it.
On November 30 2012 21:39 Lightspeaker wrote: Lot of arguing about what is more intuitive here. I'd like to make the case that you're actually both right. Technically you can argue both ways are "intuitive".
I actually do agree with that. My argument isn't that simultameous casting is intuitive to the exclusion of forced single-casting. Forced single-casting has its own logic to it. But so does simultameous casting. I simply disagree with the notion that simultameous casting is unintuitive. I think the intuitive argument is actually a personal like/dislike with little to do with 'intuition' and is a bit of a distraction as the argument never touches on any the effects on gameplay that was originally raised.
Also, keep it reasonable in here people. This conversation has been level-headed throughout and we don't need it boiling up at the end.
Exactly as Falling said, it is all about dispelling the notion that the removal of smart casting would somehow be unintuitive. I've also stated that smart casting makes a lot of sense for certain spells. I just don't feel like it is the best option for the AoE spells in SC2.
--------------------------
On December 01 2012 02:00 DrowSwordsman wrote: I did want to write a longer response, but for now I just have a few questions/sort of statements:
What is the balance between your ideas that (I've read you once say it is indeed a factor of both) the nerfing of spells like storm is from both 'smart-casting' and from unit clumping? AKA, how much stronger could you make storm if unit movement wasn't touched? I'm actually not sure on that and would be interested to know your thoughts.
I do think specifically in this case as compared to your other blog posts ("a-move unit", "Leveling the playing field", etc) that this wouldn't automatically result in a 'better game'. It really does feel like different design changes and balance changes could make spells less prominent but I understand why casters being easier to use in some ways sort of promotes that. If a storm goes off on a huge clump of units, that usually does bring about some excitement from the crowd. I know in response people will say "dude THESE GIRLS ARE SCREAMING FOR JANGBI'S STORMS", but we all know BW/SC2 are much less popular now in Korea than when that video was taken, I don't think storm is missing out on that viewership factor quite as much as implied. That was a really awesome time in Korean culture for Starcraft that I don't think BW casting would reinvigorate.
I guess spreading out fungals over an entire army would be harder than it is now, but the spell IMHO still would need a rebalance/redesign, as it really wouldn't be any harder at the pro level to catch that clump of vikings, wait out the root, send in another fungal, etc.
Just sort of initial thoughts I had when reading this a week ago.
I actually think the pathing AI (unit clumping) has little effect overall. Good players still split their units well against storm; it's more the fact that it is so easy for the storming player to cast a bunch of perfectly spread storms, getting insane efficiency even when the splitting player performs well. The issue is compounded in lower leagues when players aren't very good at splitting, making the easy execution and high efficiency of AoE spells hold an incredible amount of weight.
I think going the popularity route isn't a very solid argument. There are a lot of factors surrounding StarCraft in Korea, and even if we take the notion that it isn't/will never be as popular as it was, that still doesn't affect the underlying argument regarding spell casting in SC2. One could even point to competitive StarCraft in the West and its explosive growth as a counter-balance to its perceived decline in Korea, if you really wanted.
As far as fungals on vikings is concerned, note how you said "clump" of vikings. Split, yo! Besides, it certainly would be harder to pull off in the middle of a battle than it currently is, which is when it really counts. Happening to catch some vikings with an infestor outside of a major engagement is one of those "whoops" moments.
Of course the removal of smart casting from certain abilities causes change in balance. That was one of the core points in the OP: because of smart casting, these powerful AoE spells have had to be nerfed significantly to compensate. If smart casting was removed from them, then we'd be looking at re-buffing them to their former strength (or whatever balance numbers make sense).
In terms of defining "better", I think the difference has already been clarified, but let's summarize it here:
The relationship between spell strength and landing perfect spells is an intertwined one.
With smart casting on AoE/area-target spells, anyone can cast perfect spells (e.g. Jangbi-level) with minimal effort. As a result, these spells have had to be nerfed accordingly. These necessary nerfs also mean that you need perfect casting for these spells to have the kind of impact necessary to make them useful (e.g. missed FFs = GG yo). It also makes it very hard for pros to differentiate themselves from an average player in this area.
Without smart casting on AoE/area-target spells, it becomes very hard to get a perfect result. Consequently, the spells can be more powerful because most people won't have 100% efficiency. It also means you don't need perfect casting, because the damage you do manage to inflict will still generally be sufficient enough thanks to the increased strength. This also opens a huge opportunity for pros to differentiate themselves from an average player, as their spell casting will be much more efficient.
What the OP (and myself) consider "better" is the one that allows for a greater range of skill. In this case, it would be the latter of the two. Now, targeting some specific quotes:
On November 30 2012 01:54 Treehead wrote: Is EMP worth anything when casters are split up?
Yes. It's still an incredibly valuable spell in TvP regardless. As for ghosts vs. casters in general, against a clumped group of casters you might want to EMP, while against a split up number of them, snipe would be more useful. It's situational, but the ghost has answers to both.
On November 30 2012 01:54 Treehead wrote: Without a big group of infestors with smartcasting, does zerg have any options for moving into the lategame (it sure didn't feel like it before)?
Blizzard never designed the game for Zerg to mass infestors. This style of play is exactly why Blizz is looking to nerf fungal growth -- something they might not have to look at if they instead just removed smart casting from the ability. The best of the best Zergs might still be able to get a similar result that any random ladder player can currently get today, but for most people the ability would be appropriately "nerfed" without actually having to muck with the balance numbers and/or design.
On November 30 2012 01:54 Treehead wrote: What about pheonixes - what the heck do we do about them?
What about them? Graviton beam is fine as a smart cast ability. I don't think single-target abilities should lack smart casting -- it'd be too much to try and select a single caster then try and select a single target as well. There should be a good balance between precise and imprecise selection, I think.
On November 30 2012 01:54 Treehead wrote: And for all AE casters, if the AE is harder to use, how much more damage should it deal (it still can't be BW storm for much the same reason siege tanks are weaker in WoL)?
This question is a clear lack of understanding of the game. Siege tanks don't do as much damage because of some changes to the AI. In Brood War, siege tanks would waste their shots on units that were already killed by another tank; that doesn't happen in SC2, making tank damage much more efficient. Due to increased efficiency, the damage had to be reduced. Sound similar to what I was just saying regarding AoE spells? If you reduce the ease of efficiency with AoE spells, then their strength can very well be returned to BW levels (theoretically).
Browder on why they can't remove tank overkill: "To help with perfomance, units do not fire all at once. There is a tiny offset between different units firing their weapons. From the users perspective it is almost simultaenous, but the shots are actually 1/8-1/16th of a second apart. Since units cannot target units that are already dead and since Siege Tanks hit their targets instantly, this creates the situation you are describing, where Siege Tanks waste fewer shots."
On November 30 2012 01:54 Treehead wrote: I'd be willing to bet that removal of smartcasting would be the largest game change we've seen since some point early in the design phase - is it worth rebalancing everything with this notion in mind? Will people be patient enough to see it through? Is it something we can even convince Blizzard is a good change?
Heart of the Swarm and Legacy of the Void. I bring them up because they are, by their very nature, rebalancing everything. Blizzard has also mentioned that they'll be looking at WoL units for the sake of redesigning/rebalancing them to be better during the HotS beta. And, finally, in terms of the community convincing Blizzard to implement changes through discussion and implementation, look no further than the new unbuildable rocks/debris in HotS. They're the result of the community discussing the ramp block strategy (namely, how to get rid of it because it's stupid) and implementing a band-aid solution in the form of neutral supply depots.
On November 30 2012 01:54 Treehead wrote: A lot of testing went into getting this game as good as it is - and if we're going to give that up - even just for some units - I personally think we should have a really gamebreakingly good reason for doing so.
A much more powerful and skill-oriented spell casting experience, which opens opportunities to have much cooler/more powerful spells and a better professional scene where top level players have another outlet to differentiate themselves from the pack. I think that's a pretty good reason.
On November 30 2012 01:54 Treehead wrote: On the constructive end of things, if we're looking to add more potential for skill - why is everyone looking to change what we have instead of trying to come up with something new that we don't have yet?
This is simple: without addressing how AoE spells work in SC2, even if you add new units and spells, they'll still be restricted from a balance standpoint in terms of what they can do. It really hinders the "cool"-factor that spells could have, as well as the professional scene to a lesser degree. At the end of the day, it's all about wanting SC2 to be the most awesome game it can be. Nothing more, nothing less.
I'll keep it high level so this doesn't degenerate into a dozen different discussions (only some of which would really be on topic - all the questions you answered really only meant to indicate that there were a lot of things to consider though, whcih I hope you'll agree on). The larger point I was making is this: the team designing SC2 does not have infinite time to change this game, so while I agree that we want the skill cap to be higher (we want something hard enough to do yet powerful enough when done right - rivalling some of the old BW micro skills), I disagree that making old abilities initiate differently is the best focus of their time. If we're optimizing not the "awesomeness" of each bit of SC2 without regard to time, but instead the "awesomeness" which can be added per unit of time, I think this statement is rather obvious. Why so? If we can agree that adding new things can have the same effect on metagame considerations (which can easily be shown by noting that you can add more powerful units without smartcasting alongside less powerful units without it as two separate units), it's simply a choice of "do I get to see something new?" vs. "do I get to see the same thing I've been seeing, but know that it was harder to do". Either way, the balance testing needs to be done. Either way, the metagame changes. If we make something new versus remaking something old, we do a number of things:
1. You have to add something every expansion - why not add things you know are popular (and not warhounds or replicants which you later will have to pretend you didn't waste resources on)?
2. By raising the skill cap using something new, we don't remove unit functionalities some players have come to like (remember how b.net looks after any unit gets nerfed? or how well removing any of the WoL units went?).
3. When you change something old, it becomes difficult to convince anyone (let alone the people who made the original) that yours is better. This is a great post with well-thought-out reasoning, and yet look at all the people posting who are unconvinced. Now look at all the people who loved Barrin's FRB thread - and still Blizzard isn't budging an inch. Get support for a new idea though (while admittedly harder, I think more people would look at HotS 'my new stuff' threads if they were created by MorroW instead of joblo7), and the bar is substantially lower. Remember Oracle dispel from a HotS patch ago? Grubby's idea. Why? They needed to try something new, and people like Grubby.
4. Remember when you first saw HotS? You thought a lot of it sounded awesome compared to WoL right? That's because it was new. New stuff is fun.
Yes, these are all practical considerations. I have no theoretical reasoning that says you're not right about removing smartcasting being a theoretically better move for some casters (I think you are). But I don't see it happening, and there are ways of accomplishing this same goal with a higher likelihood of success - so I don't see why one wouldn't do that, except that it involves being a bit more imaginative approach (or collaborative - you could, for instance, crowdsource ideas and use that as a way of starting out your idea with a lot of support off the bat) .
One sidenote: though there are many reasons siege tank damage was lowered from BW, one which many have stated (including LaLush in a post so old I hope I don't have to find it) is that the increased mineral gain from being on a small number of bases makes area controlling spells and abilities (like storm, siege tanks, and lurkers) better. That was what I was referring to.
I kinda get the feeling that the argument that BW style non-smartcasting might be good for the game is pretty believable, but the argument that you'd actually want to implement it now, like it was back then, is going to fall flat, no matter what kind of mental hoops you're putting yourself through to frame it.
It's just bad video game design. People sometimes get excited about glitchy behaviour in video games across all genres that can be exploited, and sometimes these behaviours get assimilated into the game proper, like street fighter's frame cancel combos, and be a good thing. The problem here is that you're trying to add in something that's flatly less intuitive.
Despite iamcaustic, I don't think the concerns I've inexpertly raised are all that complicated. I'm getting the feeling that we're redefining the objective here when it comes to deciding what's intuitive. Come up with better ways to balance the spells other than punishing people with an in-game effect they couldn't possibly have wanted to happen, no matter the state of the match.
It wasn't a personal insult, it was a statement that it had become impossible to treat your argument as something legitimate, for reasons that should have been fairly obvious. It's also not cool to make up things to try and justify your reprehensible response. There's simply no point in continuing when every response I could make would have "that's completely ridiculous" in it.
Listen, the line that got you up in arms had a subjoined "Wholly Nonsensical!". Why can't I give an illustrative counterexample to other peoples' absurdity when I see it?
I posted this before (but no one really commented yet):
As someone who watched BW and even WC3 a lot, SC2 is a somewhat problematic game compared to the two.
I'm not a "BW elitist" but some things done in BW were done right. In WC3 (which is probably an easier game to play than SC2), a lot of things were done right compared to SC2. And WC3 had smart casting, formation movement (you can make it so the fastest unit in your control group is slowed down to the slowest, to make microing easier), MBS, etc... it wasn't a "fighting the interface" game but yet WC3 has less problems than SC2.
WC3 and BW (IMO) are much better than SC2. SC2 has all sorts of problems right now. Throwing out ideas on how to potentially fix it is a good thing. We definitely want SC2 to succeed. Right now, SC2 has design problems and a lot of problems that both BW and WarCraft III did better (and again, WC3 wasn't a "fighting the interface game"... WC3 has everything SC2 has besides unlimited unit selection).
So it's not me (or others) wanting SC2 to be like BW (or wanting SC2 to be WC3).
Also I don't think that removing smart casting would make battles more of a "knife's edge". Currently, battles are a knife's edge because mainly of positioning and how easy it is to be in the wrong position and how spell casters can change everything all in an instant (force fields and fungal for example).
Removing smart casting or going the WC3 route of not making OMG WTF OP would lessen the "knife's edge" effect and make games more gradual instead of you make 1 mistake you lose and you can't come back from the game.
Edit - Of course I'm not saying removing smart casting automatically fixers everything. As I said earlier, positioning (being out of position) or deathball syndrome (basically, how splitting your army is really discouraged in the game, thus making being out of position even more of a threat) is a detrimental to the game.
Some things:
1. Since being out of position (which unlike both WC3 and BW) is such a huge factor in whether you win or lose games (unlike both BW and WC3, splitting up your army for long periods of time is discouraged), something has to be done with that.
2. Deathball syndrome - Splitting up your army means that if you're hit by a deathball, your split up army loses (due to how easy it is to mass a death ball, unlike both BW and WC3).
3. Things die a lot faster (thanks to deathball syndrome, in BW the armies sort of came in waves after wave which meant that your army died gradually instead of all at once... in WC3, units have a large enough health that it takes like a minute for any unit to die). Also, take note units actually do more damage (even outside of deathballs) in SC2 than BW. Hydralisks for example do a ton of damage in SC2 compared to BW. Marauders (didn't exist in BW) also did a ton of damage. The only thing that did more damage in BW are spell casters (which is countered by BW's mechanics), possibly Marines (stim doubled the attack rate instead of just increasing it by 50%) and maybe Carriers.
4. Spells that root (fungal) or impede movement (forcefield) in general heightens the above two negative issues. If this was WC3 (units died slowly) or if this was BW (units weren't all in a clump and splitting up your army was encouraged in most match ups), then fungal or force field wouldn't be as much of a problem.
In fact, Stasis Field is probably a more powerful and stronger ability than both Forcefield and Fungal combined (if it was in the game, you could easily split your opponent's army in half) but yet due to BW's overall gameplay, it wasn't OP.
Not that I'm saying SC2 isn't a great game but that SC2 could have the potential to be a better game. It doesn't have to be like BW or WC3 but if you look at those games, I'd much rather everything not be a "knife's edge" or you mess up once, you lose and can't come back."
tl;dr - The problem isn't the easy interface or whatever exactly. It's the fact that the game is way too much of a knife's edge where you make one mistake or get caught out of position one time, you can lose the entire game.
If SC2 games didn't revolve around losing "entire" armies in seconds (in BW "and" WC3, it was all gradual), then spells like fungal, etc wouldn't be a problem.
On November 23 2012 12:56 TheFish7 wrote: Hatcheries (larva) have smart-casting now as well. I'm wondering if the OP would advocate getting rid of that as well?
Why don't we just dumb down the game back to Warcraft2, (before BattleNet edition) and remove everything UI improvement including building ques and auto-attack. It would, without a doubt, solve practically every problem we have in SC2 and really distinct the good from the best.
Nah. Remove the "knife's edge" problem from SC2, and the game is fixed.
Though really though, while WC2 was more fighting the UI than BW, BW was definitely a harder game to play. Things like muta micro, shuttle + reaver micro, move shotting, etc required precision micro (though you had enough time to do "precision micro", unlike SC2 where it's like you get your hand off of your army for 1 second to do "micro"... then you find your army is already gone.
In WC2, it was just mindlessly clicking fast (not that WC2 is bad but the "micro" in WC2 compared to BW is mindlessly clicking fast).
ACTUALLY yet another reason for SC2 to be less "knife's edgy". If the game was less of a knife's edge, players would have more time to actually micro and macro units.
In BW, smart casting wasn't needed at all because it was a more gradual game. You could select individually multiple ghosts to lock down those 8 battlecruisers or multiple corsairs to disruption web multiple areas (inb4 who wastes 500/500 [Fleet Beacon + Spell Upgrade] on Disruption Web) because you didn't worry about all your units dying in seconds.
BW was fast paced, a lot more than WC3 (which some people dislike because it's too slow) but yet it was still gradual.
SC2 is fast paced too but it's a lot less gradual and more "one small mistake, you lose".
Also, again WC3 (which has the same SC2 "interface help", minus unlimited group selection but "PLUS' the fact you can set your entire control group to move at the same speed [which reduced the need to micro]) was arguably an easier game to play than SC2.
WC3, the better player usually won (there are a lot more consistent players in high level WC3 than SC2 right now, though that's not a good argument considering WC3 is kind of low) but the point is, even with the easy interface, WC3 had consistent top players.
What matters is that the game isn't too random (random in the sense that one mistake or one BO can win/lose you the game so easily). And again, this applies to BW too (the game was gradual and not too random).
Edit - I know this isn't concerning smart casting but it does deal with the overall perceived problems of SC2 (that the game is to random and doesn't have as much ways as differentiating player skill level).
I like SC2 but I feel that they can take cues from BW (and WC3) to make SC2 a better game (*cough, bring back reaver with hold fire and weapons free abilities[so you can manually fire scarabs], cough*).
(Reavers are better than anything.)
Edit 2 - Actually, this is what the reasons I like Swarm Hosts - They're not Deathbally and they're not the type of unit that (offensively) causes you to lose in seconds (compared to other units or units compositions). Same with the Tempest, Widow Mine (sort of), etc. HotS is definitely doing the right things in making SC2 more of a gradual game and less of a sword fight (for people tired of "knife's edge" analogy... realistically, sword fights lasts only like seconds unlike movies which show minutes of back and forth action). So instead of sword fights, we want boxing matches (until someone pulls a knife out of nowhere of course)!
___________________ Edit: Anyway, as for the topic again. Smart cast removal can be reasonable if the game is more gradual (that's why it worked in BW). I definitely do think smart casting removal can make the game more exciting to watch and play (when you successful do something without smart casting and can do it consistently, you feel good). But on to the actual topic of discussing if smart casting will improve the game and make it so the better play wins more often - I'd say no and that the main problem (again) is the fact that game design (how everything dies so fast and one mistake means you lose).
Outside of "IMBA" spells (like forcefields, fungal, etc) that change the outcome of matches in seconds... there's also just an MMM ball stimming and taking things out in seconds. Banelings and Zerglings. Mass colossus, etc. There's a lot of a-move stuff that is as effective as fungals in destroying stuff.
Fungals and forcefields are problems but they're not that much worse problems than the above (I mean, with MMM ball moving in , at least you can position yourself while both fungal and forcefield restrict stuff).
Again, in BW - There was wave after wave of army fighting each other. There was rarely points in the game where all a player's army supply was in one spot (it was usually really spread out).
Ultimate tl;dr - Make game more like BW or WC3. Better player wins more consistently. Also smart cast can be more easily removed to add to spectator PoV or player feeling of success when you successfully do something without smart casting "if" the game requires less of smart casting (fungals, forcefields, etc) because battles end too fast or snowball too fast.
I feel like HotS new units actually address a huge part of the problem without having to change the game's mechanics too much (like path finding, etc).
Of course the removal of smart casting from certain abilities causes change in balance. That was one of the core points in the OP: because of smart casting, these powerful AoE spells have had to be nerfed significantly to compensate. If smart casting was removed from them, then we'd be looking at re-buffing them to their former strength (or whatever balance numbers make sense).
In terms of defining "better", I think the difference has already been clarified, but let's summarize it here:
The relationship between spell strength and landing perfect spells is an intertwined one.
With smart casting on AoE/area-target spells, anyone can cast perfect spells (e.g. Jangbi-level) with minimal effort. As a result, these spells have had to be nerfed accordingly. These necessary nerfs also mean that you need perfect casting for these spells to have the kind of impact necessary to make them useful (e.g. missed FFs = GG yo). It also makes it very hard for pros to differentiate themselves from an average player in this area.
Without smart casting on AoE/area-target spells, it becomes very hard to get a perfect result. Consequently, the spells can be more powerful because most people won't have 100% efficiency. It also means you don't need perfect casting, because the damage you do manage to inflict will still generally be sufficient enough thanks to the increased strength. This also opens a huge opportunity for pros to differentiate themselves from an average player, as their spell casting will be much more efficient.
What the OP (and myself) consider "better" is the one that allows for a greater range of skill. In this case, it would be the latter of the two. Now, targeting some specific quotes:
On November 30 2012 01:54 Treehead wrote: Is EMP worth anything when casters are split up?
Yes. It's still an incredibly valuable spell in TvP regardless. As for ghosts vs. casters in general, against a clumped group of casters you might want to EMP, while against a split up number of them, snipe would be more useful. It's situational, but the ghost has answers to both.
On November 30 2012 01:54 Treehead wrote: Without a big group of infestors with smartcasting, does zerg have any options for moving into the lategame (it sure didn't feel like it before)?
Blizzard never designed the game for Zerg to mass infestors. This style of play is exactly why Blizz is looking to nerf fungal growth -- something they might not have to look at if they instead just removed smart casting from the ability. The best of the best Zergs might still be able to get a similar result that any random ladder player can currently get today, but for most people the ability would be appropriately "nerfed" without actually having to muck with the balance numbers and/or design.
On November 30 2012 01:54 Treehead wrote: What about pheonixes - what the heck do we do about them?
What about them? Graviton beam is fine as a smart cast ability. I don't think single-target abilities should lack smart casting -- it'd be too much to try and select a single caster then try and select a single target as well. There should be a good balance between precise and imprecise selection, I think.
On November 30 2012 01:54 Treehead wrote: And for all AE casters, if the AE is harder to use, how much more damage should it deal (it still can't be BW storm for much the same reason siege tanks are weaker in WoL)?
This question is a clear lack of understanding of the game. Siege tanks don't do as much damage because of some changes to the AI. In Brood War, siege tanks would waste their shots on units that were already killed by another tank; that doesn't happen in SC2, making tank damage much more efficient. Due to increased efficiency, the damage had to be reduced. Sound similar to what I was just saying regarding AoE spells? If you reduce the ease of efficiency with AoE spells, then their strength can very well be returned to BW levels (theoretically).
Browder on why they can't remove tank overkill: "To help with perfomance, units do not fire all at once. There is a tiny offset between different units firing their weapons. From the users perspective it is almost simultaenous, but the shots are actually 1/8-1/16th of a second apart. Since units cannot target units that are already dead and since Siege Tanks hit their targets instantly, this creates the situation you are describing, where Siege Tanks waste fewer shots."
On November 30 2012 01:54 Treehead wrote: I'd be willing to bet that removal of smartcasting would be the largest game change we've seen since some point early in the design phase - is it worth rebalancing everything with this notion in mind? Will people be patient enough to see it through? Is it something we can even convince Blizzard is a good change?
Heart of the Swarm and Legacy of the Void. I bring them up because they are, by their very nature, rebalancing everything. Blizzard has also mentioned that they'll be looking at WoL units for the sake of redesigning/rebalancing them to be better during the HotS beta. And, finally, in terms of the community convincing Blizzard to implement changes through discussion and implementation, look no further than the new unbuildable rocks/debris in HotS. They're the result of the community discussing the ramp block strategy (namely, how to get rid of it because it's stupid) and implementing a band-aid solution in the form of neutral supply depots.
On November 30 2012 01:54 Treehead wrote: A lot of testing went into getting this game as good as it is - and if we're going to give that up - even just for some units - I personally think we should have a really gamebreakingly good reason for doing so.
A much more powerful and skill-oriented spell casting experience, which opens opportunities to have much cooler/more powerful spells and a better professional scene where top level players have another outlet to differentiate themselves from the pack. I think that's a pretty good reason.
On November 30 2012 01:54 Treehead wrote: On the constructive end of things, if we're looking to add more potential for skill - why is everyone looking to change what we have instead of trying to come up with something new that we don't have yet?
This is simple: without addressing how AoE spells work in SC2, even if you add new units and spells, they'll still be restricted from a balance standpoint in terms of what they can do. It really hinders the "cool"-factor that spells could have, as well as the professional scene to a lesser degree. At the end of the day, it's all about wanting SC2 to be the most awesome game it can be. Nothing more, nothing less.
I'll keep it high level so this doesn't degenerate into a dozen different discussions (only some of which would really be on topic - all the questions you answered really only meant to indicate that there were a lot of things to consider though, whcih I hope you'll agree on). The larger point I was making is this: the team designing SC2 does not have infinite time to change this game, so while I agree that we want the skill cap to be higher (we want something hard enough to do yet powerful enough when done right - rivalling some of the old BW micro skills), I disagree that making old abilities initiate differently is the best focus of their time. If we're optimizing not the "awesomeness" of each bit of SC2 without regard to time, but instead the "awesomeness" which can be added per unit of time, I think this statement is rather obvious. Why so? If we can agree that adding new things can have the same effect on metagame considerations (which can easily be shown by noting that you can add more powerful units without smartcasting alongside less powerful units without it as two separate units), it's simply a choice of "do I get to see something new?" vs. "do I get to see the same thing I've been seeing, but know that it was harder to do". Either way, the balance testing needs to be done. Either way, the metagame changes. If we make something new versus remaking something old, we do a number of things:
1. You have to add something every expansion - why not add things you know are popular (and not warhounds or replicants which you later will have to pretend you didn't waste resources on)?
2. By raising the skill cap using something new, we don't remove unit functionalities some players have come to like (remember how b.net looks after any unit gets nerfed? or how well removing any of the WoL units went?).
3. When you change something old, it becomes difficult to convince anyone (let alone the people who made the original) that yours is better. This is a great post with well-thought-out reasoning, and yet look at all the people posting who are unconvinced. Now look at all the people who loved Barrin's FRB thread - and still Blizzard isn't budging an inch. Get support for a new idea though (while admittedly harder, I think more people would look at HotS 'my new stuff' threads if they were created by MorroW instead of joblo7), and the bar is substantially lower. Remember Oracle dispel from a HotS patch ago? Grubby's idea. Why? They needed to try something new, and people like Grubby.
4. Remember when you first saw HotS? You thought a lot of it sounded awesome compared to WoL right? That's because it was new. New stuff is fun.
Yes, these are all practical considerations. I have no theoretical reasoning that says you're not right about removing smartcasting being a theoretically better move for some casters (I think you are). But I don't see it happening, and there are ways of accomplishing this same goal with a higher likelihood of success - so I don't see why one wouldn't do that, except that it involves being a bit more imaginative approach (or collaborative - you could, for instance, crowdsource ideas and use that as a way of starting out your idea with a lot of support off the bat) .
One sidenote: though there are many reasons siege tank damage was lowered from BW, one which many have stated (including LaLush in a post so old I hope I don't have to find it) is that the increased mineral gain from being on a small number of bases makes area controlling spells and abilities (like storm, siege tanks, and lurkers) better. That was what I was referring to.
Fair points. At the end of the day, though, you speak of alternative ways to increase the skill ceiling of spell casting, but don't seem to provide any (unless I missed something, in which case just let me know ). Another thing to consider is that people also said similarly of getting the neutral supply depot concept on ladder -- that Blizzard would never do it. Lo and behold, we now have unbuildable rocks/debris featured on HotS ladder maps. When I was in the "Blizzard probably won't add the neutral depot concept" camp, I took the time to outline an alternative solution. This time around, I'm willing to help push the simple and straightforward solution (no smart casting on AoE) in the hopes that Blizzard acts the same as they did on the neutral depot issue.
Sidenote: it's interesting you brought up the dispel ability on the Oracle. That was a combo idea between Grubby and myself (he came up with the dispel idea, I suggested to add it to the Oracle).
-----------------------------------------
On December 01 2012 14:59 Resistentialism wrote: Listen, the line that got you up in arms had a subjoined "Wholly Nonsensical!". Why can't I give an illustrative counterexample to other peoples' absurdity when I see it?
*sigh*
On November 30 2012 16:54 iamcaustic wrote: You said:
What might be more comparable would be if you selected 40 marines and 8 of them stimmed 5 times. Wholly nonsensical! Just like seven storms from seven templar right on the same spot.
This is utterly nonsensical and unintuitive, with no relation to what was being discussed before. Why would 8 random marines out of a group of 40 stim 5 times when you only issued the command once? That doesn't make sense.
Then let's look at selecting 7 high templar and commanding them to cast storm. If they all go toward the location and storm, this is simply the most pure result of that command: you told 7 templar to storm that spot, so they stormed it. There is no randomness, there is no unknown or unexplained result. Rather, it's incredibly simple and straightforward. Trying to tell me that your ridiculous example is "more comparable" to this is beyond ludicrous.
I shouldn't have to repeat myself. Bolded part is the key here: you keep saying absurd things and pretending like it's no less ridiculous than my statements.
I called what I said absurd when I wrote it, and now I'm doing so for a third time. The idea is to show how the line of thinking gets more nonsensical when you try to apply it more broadly. Yes is was purposefully more absurd. IE thank you for noticing, please stop trying to complain about it.
What I wrote really wasn't that clever, and it really ought not be so hard to understand.
I'll take one more swing at this whole intuition thing.
The best analogy I can think of is the Mass Effect cover system. In that game, if you run up to a wall, you automatically crouch behind it so you can shoot from cover. I (even outside the analogy) would much prefer a manual crouch button over the the automatated crouch system.
So your argument goes, it is unintuitive to have a manual crouch button because when you stand next to a wall, a modern game should know that you want to crouch. When would you ever want to stand out in the open to get shot when you could be under cover, shooting. You never, ever, ever want to be in the open firing. Therefore it's unintuitive.
And I'm saying intuition has nothing to do with it. Manually crouching is just is intuitive but the game allows you to mess up by crouching in wrong places where there is no cover or run up to a wall and not crouch because you didn't order it. But you can also crouch in more cover places than the automated system will let you (degrees of cover). Not only that, but the automated system restricts certain movements- 'sticky walls' where you are trying to poke out and shoot, but the automated cover system won't let you move out of cover, even if only for a second. The intuitive of it is your your character obeys your orders precisely even if it is wrong, but also when it is even more right than the computer programming would allow. Automated systems may even out the bottom end, but also (in the cases that I am arguing) serve as a limiter- simultameous magic box casting. Player autonomy if you will.
Intuition doesn't even come into play- both have their own logic. One is automated based on what the computer thinks you want. The other is manual and the computer obeys exactly what you command. This carries the risk on the one hand of being wrong, but on the otherhand being even more precise or faster than the computer will let you.
@Goldfish You are right that everything dies faster in SC2 (I think it was an over-reaction to WC3 complaints.) The goal is to space out casting a little more, but it is quite possible the rest of the battle might need to be slowed down so armies don't vanish in a blink of an eye.
You have a reason to want to crouch sometimes and not crouch at other times, though. That's the difference. In your case the automatic control is unintuitive because it causes your character to perform actions you didn't intend shep/femshep to do, and what's worse, you're now fighting the wall instead of fighting the reapers or whatever.
There's no reason to ever waste storms by simultaneously casting more than one in the same spot.
But there is reason to cast simultameously in multiple spots and the game won't let you do that either. That's what I mean by a manual system allows both. Mess up casting in one spot or be awesome and cast simultameously in multiple spots. Automated single casting chokes this potential.
edit You can spam out storms with forced single-casting, but that goes back to one of my actual points which is- very few are actually impressed by good storms anymore. They are individually not very powerful and it doesn't take much to spam them out. It's a mundane event.
Harder to do is not the same thing as unintuitive. Just because something is switched to manual control doesn't make it suddenly 'unintuitive.' It's just harder because the computer isn't going to do your job for you. (The difference between most MMORPG range auto targetting vs FPS manual targetting. Manually targetting is difficult and auto-targetting more easily does what you want to do with less clicking, but that doesn't make it one more or less unintuitive.)
Game won't let me cast in multiple spots? I'm not the worlds fastest but I can spam out a line of storms and make it look slick. I thought that was the idea, it was too easy for guys like me to cast in multiple spots. If the argument is about magic box formation casting... it might as well just not exist, it never comes up.
As a Protoss player, my smart-casters are templar and sentries. Both units feel right to me. Templar are already very difficult to use because you have to manually spread them and use them individually against ghosts. If you're using templar properly in PvT, you're not smart-casting. They're super-easy to use in PvZ, but you also don't seem them much in PvZ because they suck against roaches. And sentries would be useless if not for smart-casting. You don't get anything out of one forcefield, nor do you get anything out of 5 forcefields that are cast over a period 5 seconds. If you can't spam click forcefields, you might as well not have the spell in the game.
The only real issue is spamming fungals and IT's, and while the problem might have to do with the ease of use, I think the more significant problem is that the spells are so good that you can afford to make 30 infestors. You don't see templar spam vs Terran because if Protoss makes 30 templar, they lost to ghosts. Similarly, you don't see ghost spam in the MU because Terran loses to colossi if they build 30 ghosts. There's only one caster in SC2 that you can make 30 of and think that you could probably use a few more.
On December 02 2012 03:32 Falling wrote: You can spam out storms with forced single-casting, but that goes back to one of my actual points which is- very few are actually impressed by good storms anymore. They are individually not very powerful and it doesn't take much to spam them out. It's a mundane event.
I know, like I said, that's what I thought the point of the idea was. The game probably would be better immediately with stronger AoE spells that were also simply harder to use. However, you guys are falling all over yourselves to try and explain away how this is somehow intuitive, and that's just not right. There's also not a chance in hell blizzard is going to go with your suggestion because people would hate it.
On December 02 2012 03:32 Falling wrote: Harder to do is not the same thing as unintuitive. Just because something is switched to manual control doesn't make it suddenly 'unintuitive.' It's just harder because the computer isn't going to do your job for you. (The difference between most MMORPG range auto targetting vs FPS manual targetting. Manually targetting is difficult and auto-targetting more easily does what you want to do with less clicking, but that doesn't make it one more or less unintuitive.)
What you're talking about now would be more like the game aiming my storms for me. There's a point where automatic control trivializes a game, especially when it's multiplayer. Smartcasting ain't where it's at. Give me an analogy where a game automatically does something critically crippling to your resources in its attempt to "help" you and I can probably explain where they mixed up their idea of what intuitive means. There are plenty of games that give you reasons to want to aim indirectly, too.
Best thread ever, I cannot agree with this more. I hope Blizzard takes a look and put this in the expansion.
Removing smart casting solves so many things: 1. When casters say great/amazing/money fungals/storms, they are now actually difficult to do when multiple ones are used. 2. It takes away the 1-A/ 1 group that almost everyone uses, even the pros. 3. Makes it difficult at the pro level, and perhaps we can finally see a reigning champion who can play well every GSL instead of dark horses that keep making the semi-finals. (This current GSL consist of new players pretty much/ or players that were not very famous a few seasons ago) This makes it easier to be a fan of a particular player. 4. No longer will you feel that there is nothing you can do once the opponent has too many spell casters.
@OP Also, I think the nerf of damage from BW is due to the fact that units are more clumped in SC2. In BW there is so much spacing between units so that storms can only probably hit 5 ground units. If they do decide to return the damage I hope they also do it for siege tanks because siege tank nerf damage is quite significant.
Edit: -I think force fields though, maybe it can be semi- smartcast. You can cast 4 in one group or something. Or else it might be too difficult -I think terrans need a damage dealing spell caster (the raven seeker missile is not it) -I am disappointed with HoTS, it gives 2 more spell units for protoss and a tier 3, when they have enough of both. And they gave terrans only 2, and both are low-tier units which terrans have enough of. And I still dislike the swarmhost.
I would be fine with a fix to fungal that consists of adding an animation delay to the snare. I'm thinking something along the stun of Leshrac in DotA 2. That is, after you've cast the spell, it takes 1-2 seconds before it actually triggers and snares/damages. That would give time to maneuver out of the area that you thought your opponent cast the fungal at, which would also add an element of mind games as you'd have to anticipate where the fungal was targeted.
Of course the removal of smart casting from certain abilities causes change in balance. That was one of the core points in the OP: because of smart casting, these powerful AoE spells have had to be nerfed significantly to compensate. If smart casting was removed from them, then we'd be looking at re-buffing them to their former strength (or whatever balance numbers make sense).
In terms of defining "better", I think the difference has already been clarified, but let's summarize it here:
The relationship between spell strength and landing perfect spells is an intertwined one.
With smart casting on AoE/area-target spells, anyone can cast perfect spells (e.g. Jangbi-level) with minimal effort. As a result, these spells have had to be nerfed accordingly. These necessary nerfs also mean that you need perfect casting for these spells to have the kind of impact necessary to make them useful (e.g. missed FFs = GG yo). It also makes it very hard for pros to differentiate themselves from an average player in this area.
Without smart casting on AoE/area-target spells, it becomes very hard to get a perfect result. Consequently, the spells can be more powerful because most people won't have 100% efficiency. It also means you don't need perfect casting, because the damage you do manage to inflict will still generally be sufficient enough thanks to the increased strength. This also opens a huge opportunity for pros to differentiate themselves from an average player, as their spell casting will be much more efficient.
What the OP (and myself) consider "better" is the one that allows for a greater range of skill. In this case, it would be the latter of the two. Now, targeting some specific quotes:
On November 30 2012 01:54 Treehead wrote: Is EMP worth anything when casters are split up?
Yes. It's still an incredibly valuable spell in TvP regardless. As for ghosts vs. casters in general, against a clumped group of casters you might want to EMP, while against a split up number of them, snipe would be more useful. It's situational, but the ghost has answers to both.
On November 30 2012 01:54 Treehead wrote: Without a big group of infestors with smartcasting, does zerg have any options for moving into the lategame (it sure didn't feel like it before)?
Blizzard never designed the game for Zerg to mass infestors. This style of play is exactly why Blizz is looking to nerf fungal growth -- something they might not have to look at if they instead just removed smart casting from the ability. The best of the best Zergs might still be able to get a similar result that any random ladder player can currently get today, but for most people the ability would be appropriately "nerfed" without actually having to muck with the balance numbers and/or design.
On November 30 2012 01:54 Treehead wrote: What about pheonixes - what the heck do we do about them?
What about them? Graviton beam is fine as a smart cast ability. I don't think single-target abilities should lack smart casting -- it'd be too much to try and select a single caster then try and select a single target as well. There should be a good balance between precise and imprecise selection, I think.
On November 30 2012 01:54 Treehead wrote: And for all AE casters, if the AE is harder to use, how much more damage should it deal (it still can't be BW storm for much the same reason siege tanks are weaker in WoL)?
This question is a clear lack of understanding of the game. Siege tanks don't do as much damage because of some changes to the AI. In Brood War, siege tanks would waste their shots on units that were already killed by another tank; that doesn't happen in SC2, making tank damage much more efficient. Due to increased efficiency, the damage had to be reduced. Sound similar to what I was just saying regarding AoE spells? If you reduce the ease of efficiency with AoE spells, then their strength can very well be returned to BW levels (theoretically).
Browder on why they can't remove tank overkill: "To help with perfomance, units do not fire all at once. There is a tiny offset between different units firing their weapons. From the users perspective it is almost simultaenous, but the shots are actually 1/8-1/16th of a second apart. Since units cannot target units that are already dead and since Siege Tanks hit their targets instantly, this creates the situation you are describing, where Siege Tanks waste fewer shots."
On November 30 2012 01:54 Treehead wrote: I'd be willing to bet that removal of smartcasting would be the largest game change we've seen since some point early in the design phase - is it worth rebalancing everything with this notion in mind? Will people be patient enough to see it through? Is it something we can even convince Blizzard is a good change?
Heart of the Swarm and Legacy of the Void. I bring them up because they are, by their very nature, rebalancing everything. Blizzard has also mentioned that they'll be looking at WoL units for the sake of redesigning/rebalancing them to be better during the HotS beta. And, finally, in terms of the community convincing Blizzard to implement changes through discussion and implementation, look no further than the new unbuildable rocks/debris in HotS. They're the result of the community discussing the ramp block strategy (namely, how to get rid of it because it's stupid) and implementing a band-aid solution in the form of neutral supply depots.
On November 30 2012 01:54 Treehead wrote: A lot of testing went into getting this game as good as it is - and if we're going to give that up - even just for some units - I personally think we should have a really gamebreakingly good reason for doing so.
A much more powerful and skill-oriented spell casting experience, which opens opportunities to have much cooler/more powerful spells and a better professional scene where top level players have another outlet to differentiate themselves from the pack. I think that's a pretty good reason.
On November 30 2012 01:54 Treehead wrote: On the constructive end of things, if we're looking to add more potential for skill - why is everyone looking to change what we have instead of trying to come up with something new that we don't have yet?
This is simple: without addressing how AoE spells work in SC2, even if you add new units and spells, they'll still be restricted from a balance standpoint in terms of what they can do. It really hinders the "cool"-factor that spells could have, as well as the professional scene to a lesser degree. At the end of the day, it's all about wanting SC2 to be the most awesome game it can be. Nothing more, nothing less.
I'll keep it high level so this doesn't degenerate into a dozen different discussions (only some of which would really be on topic - all the questions you answered really only meant to indicate that there were a lot of things to consider though, whcih I hope you'll agree on). The larger point I was making is this: the team designing SC2 does not have infinite time to change this game, so while I agree that we want the skill cap to be higher (we want something hard enough to do yet powerful enough when done right - rivalling some of the old BW micro skills), I disagree that making old abilities initiate differently is the best focus of their time. If we're optimizing not the "awesomeness" of each bit of SC2 without regard to time, but instead the "awesomeness" which can be added per unit of time, I think this statement is rather obvious. Why so? If we can agree that adding new things can have the same effect on metagame considerations (which can easily be shown by noting that you can add more powerful units without smartcasting alongside less powerful units without it as two separate units), it's simply a choice of "do I get to see something new?" vs. "do I get to see the same thing I've been seeing, but know that it was harder to do". Either way, the balance testing needs to be done. Either way, the metagame changes. If we make something new versus remaking something old, we do a number of things:
1. You have to add something every expansion - why not add things you know are popular (and not warhounds or replicants which you later will have to pretend you didn't waste resources on)?
2. By raising the skill cap using something new, we don't remove unit functionalities some players have come to like (remember how b.net looks after any unit gets nerfed? or how well removing any of the WoL units went?).
3. When you change something old, it becomes difficult to convince anyone (let alone the people who made the original) that yours is better. This is a great post with well-thought-out reasoning, and yet look at all the people posting who are unconvinced. Now look at all the people who loved Barrin's FRB thread - and still Blizzard isn't budging an inch. Get support for a new idea though (while admittedly harder, I think more people would look at HotS 'my new stuff' threads if they were created by MorroW instead of joblo7), and the bar is substantially lower. Remember Oracle dispel from a HotS patch ago? Grubby's idea. Why? They needed to try something new, and people like Grubby.
4. Remember when you first saw HotS? You thought a lot of it sounded awesome compared to WoL right? That's because it was new. New stuff is fun.
Yes, these are all practical considerations. I have no theoretical reasoning that says you're not right about removing smartcasting being a theoretically better move for some casters (I think you are). But I don't see it happening, and there are ways of accomplishing this same goal with a higher likelihood of success - so I don't see why one wouldn't do that, except that it involves being a bit more imaginative approach (or collaborative - you could, for instance, crowdsource ideas and use that as a way of starting out your idea with a lot of support off the bat) .
One sidenote: though there are many reasons siege tank damage was lowered from BW, one which many have stated (including LaLush in a post so old I hope I don't have to find it) is that the increased mineral gain from being on a small number of bases makes area controlling spells and abilities (like storm, siege tanks, and lurkers) better. That was what I was referring to.
Fair points. At the end of the day, though, you speak of alternative ways to increase the skill ceiling of spell casting, but don't seem to provide any (unless I missed something, in which case just let me know ). Another thing to consider is that people also said similarly of getting the neutral supply depot concept on ladder -- that Blizzard would never do it. Lo and behold, we now have unbuildable rocks/debris featured on HotS ladder maps. When I was in the "Blizzard probably won't add the neutral depot concept" camp, I took the time to outline an alternative solution. This time around, I'm willing to help push the simple and straightforward solution (no smart casting on AoE) in the hopes that Blizzard acts the same as they did on the neutral depot issue.
Sidenote: it's interesting you brought up the dispel ability on the Oracle. That was a combo idea between Grubby and myself (he came up with the dispel idea, I suggested to add it to the Oracle).
I mean there are a number of straightforward and unimaginative ways to do this.
1. Make a new unit which has a more powerful AE spell without smartcasting attached. 2. Make an upgrade available for each of the T3 casters (probably raven rather than ghost?) which gives them an AE damage ability with a larger radius that deals more damage but does not have smartcasting. 3. Make a new unit/upgrade an old unit so that it can cast a spell which destroys any magical effect in the area including effects which are centered on ground like storm and FF that would not have smartcasting.
There are also more imaginative approaches which don't actually mess with smartcasting but require more work to use well. Please don't post regarding the following changes relative to balance - they aren't intended to be balanced - they're intended to be something which after some amount of testing *could* be balanced. The main theme here is making zones which are difficult not to overlap, but which provide a great benefit when you can do so.
1. We know the Void Ray is going to get a revamp - what about giving them an circular AoE attack (similar to storm) which does smaller damage to smaller units (to keep it from being effective against anti-AA units like the hydra/marine) and which does not stack (so a bunch of clumped up VRs does approximately the same dps one VR does, while 3-4 with well-placeded attacks does much more. For example, let's say a Void Ray Attack occurs as often as storm would tick, has a slightly lower radius and is balanced to deal a % of health so that it would deal Colossus-like damage against roaches, corruptors, and other high-health units, while dealing much, much lower damage against marines and hydras (e.g. 8% of health every half second with a range of 6 and radius of 1 - so it deals a ton of damage to big units, storm-like damage to marauders and roaches, and much, much less against ground-to-air units).
2. We know the thor is going to get 250 CC cannons - what about an ability which creates a zone of immunity to magic around the thor - so that things like fungal/nueral/storm/feedback do not function on units within the zone while the spell is active, and also FF/storm/fungals cannot be placed within the zone (for perhaps 30 seconds, costing 75 energy). Its attack/health will likely need altering to balance this (as it is obviously quite powerful) so that Thor-only armies don't become prominent - effectively remaking the thor into a unit which is best used in small numbers to provide your armies backbone with immunity from crippling spells. Now, army micro becomes about building as few thors as you need to protect the meat of your army and keeping your army within these thor's bubble of protection. Or you could make it in some shape other than a bubble in order to move away from blobby styles of army movement.
3. We could unlink the damage and root from fungal, where the damaging component saps 50 energy from all friendly units within 6 range of it (costing 25 energy to cast). This spell (in order to have more of a 'flavor' to it) could deal 10 damage the first second, and then 20 per second for the next two seconds, and finally 40 in the last second (as the fungus gets worse it deals more damage - like an infection, or you could even just call the ability infection). If a root is still needed to balance zerg play (with Vipers it may not), perhaps an additional root spell could be researched.
Just a few examples of how you could make things which promote micro but don't require a rework on existing things. The biggest reason I didn't mention this before is that just about everyone high level will look at this list, look at my name, and conclude that since I'm nobody, I'm probably not worth listening to. A moderator or progamer has a much lower hurdle for proposed changes getting community support (that's why I suggested they think something up - not because I don't have plenty of ideas).
You can argue that these are all bad in the current game without drastic changes - and you're right, but drastic changes can come with new content, and HotS will (and should) be drastically different.
On December 02 2012 03:32 Falling wrote: You can spam out storms with forced single-casting, but that goes back to one of my actual points which is- very few are actually impressed by good storms anymore. They are individually not very powerful and it doesn't take much to spam them out. It's a mundane event.
I know, like I said, that's what I thought the point of the idea was. The game probably would be better immediately with stronger AoE spells that were also simply harder to use. However, you guys are falling all over yourselves to try and explain away how this is somehow intuitive, and that's just not right. There's also not a chance in hell blizzard is going to go with your suggestion because people would hate it.
Seriously can we stop with this intutitve vs unintuitive crap? It is personal preference as to what everyone thinks is "intuitive". This word doesn't belong in the conversation. You are correct: Blizzard won't change this because too many people would be pissed about it no matter how much more intriguing it makes the game at higher levels.
With this change would have to come other drastic BALANCE changes that I personally am all for, but again I don't think Blizzard is about trying to redesign the game because a minority of us believe this could be done better.
On December 02 2012 01:55 Resistentialism wrote: I called what I said absurd when I wrote it, and now I'm doing so for a third time. The idea is to show how the line of thinking gets more nonsensical when you try to apply it more broadly. Yes is was purposefully more absurd. IE thank you for noticing, please stop trying to complain about it.
What I wrote really wasn't that clever, and it really ought not be so hard to understand.
You're certainly correct about not being clever.
On December 01 2012 21:36 iamcaustic wrote: I shouldn't have to repeat myself. Bolded part is the key here: you keep saying absurd things and pretending like it's no less ridiculous than my statements.
Bolding for emphasis again. Nobody said or implied that your example wasn't purposefully absurd. The issue is that you considered the removal of smart casting on AoE spells to be equivalent to that level of absurdity, which isn't even close to the truth. There is certainly a failure to understand here, but the issue isn't on my end.
Just remove the smart casting...And everything will be all right.. If they remove smart casting..Then we will see fan girl shouting again watching snipe,fungals,storms,seeker missiles.. And also if they remove smart casting they will have to increase the strength of the spells..So that those few but well executed spells can make the difference(i said few and well executed).. it will also discourage army ball...As programmer wont want to get hit by a strong storm or fungals or even seeker missile.. And I believe just removing the smart casting is the key to solve every problem that we are facing now like fungals, noneffective storms and snipe..
I think they should also revert back to the group limit. Maybe increase a bit from BW and make it 20 or something. It is ridiculous to see everything under 1 group.
On December 02 2012 14:13 thesums wrote: I think they should also revert back to the group limit. Maybe increase a bit from BW and make it 20 or something. It is ridiculous to see everything under 1 group.
It actually sucks to keep everything in a single group. At the very least, you're going to want spell casters in a different group to more easily manage spells and to avoid having them run into enemy fire. It's also ridiculously hard to manage harassment groups without having them in separate control groups.
I really don't see it being an issue as players continue to get better at the game.
On December 01 2012 02:00 DrowSwordsman wrote: I did want to write a longer response, but for now I just have a few questions/sort of statements:
What is the balance between your ideas that (I've read you once say it is indeed a factor of both) the nerfing of spells like storm is from both 'smart-casting' and from unit clumping? AKA, how much stronger could you make storm if unit movement wasn't touched? I'm actually not sure on that and would be interested to know your thoughts.
I do think specifically in this case as compared to your other blog posts ("a-move unit", "Leveling the playing field", etc) that this wouldn't automatically result in a 'better game'. It really does feel like different design changes and balance changes could make spells less prominent but I understand why casters being easier to use in some ways sort of promotes that. If a storm goes off on a huge clump of units, that usually does bring about some excitement from the crowd. I know in response people will say "dude THESE GIRLS ARE SCREAMING FOR JANGBI'S STORMS", but we all know BW/SC2 are much less popular now in Korea than when that video was taken, I don't think storm is missing out on that viewership factor quite as much as implied. That was a really awesome time in Korean culture for Starcraft that I don't think BW casting would reinvigorate.
I guess spreading out fungals over an entire army would be harder than it is now, but the spell IMHO still would need a rebalance/redesign, as it really wouldn't be any harder at the pro level to catch that clump of vikings, wait out the root, send in another fungal, etc.
Just sort of initial thoughts I had when reading this a week ago.
I actually think the pathing AI (unit clumping) has little effect overall. Good players still split their units well against storm; it's more the fact that it is so easy for the storming player to cast a bunch of perfectly spread storms, getting insane efficiency even when the splitting player performs well. The issue is compounded in lower leagues when players aren't very good at splitting, making the easy execution and high efficiency of AoE spells hold an incredible amount of weight.
I think going the popularity route isn't a very solid argument. There are a lot of factors surrounding StarCraft in Korea, and even if we take the notion that it isn't/will never be as popular as it was, that still doesn't affect the underlying argument regarding spell casting in SC2. One could even point to competitive StarCraft in the West and its explosive growth as a counter-balance to its perceived decline in Korea, if you really wanted.
As far as fungals on vikings is concerned, note how you said "clump" of vikings. Split, yo! Besides, it certainly would be harder to pull off in the middle of a battle than it currently is, which is when it really counts. Happening to catch some vikings with an infestor outside of a major engagement is one of those "whoops" moments.
Just read this post. Yeah I wasn't really going for the "popularity" argument other than people posting videos of Jangbi's storms isn't a convincing argument of why casting in BW was better because it is pretty unlikely that would ever happen again.
And to that last one, I'm not talking about me in my personal games. Ryung v Hyun on Abyssal City (I think it was IPL just this weekend, maybe NASL sometime in the last week? EDIT: It was NASL, I remember Rotterdam saying "this is so stupid!", it was in the NASL playoffs) is a pretty good example. Ryung is way ahead all game, vikings as they move forward to attack begin to clump, not even insanely but just enough that once they're trapped in the fungal they can't get free. Ryung actually did end up winning that game but by the skin of his teeth when he was ahead in bases/supply most of the game. Storm makes much more sense to me in that way, if you get sloppy and let your units get clumped up, your vikings are going to have a lot of damage on them. With fungal, they are gone. No ifs, ands, or buts. The way that relates to this discussion is removing smart-casting isn't going to solve this issue IMO. In situations like that it is not significantly harder to just grab infestors one at a time to keep ensaring the units. But design/balance change will.