Bring back Heart of the Swarm

[abs-2628]

12 worker LOTV ladder was garbage nobody asked for in 2015, end 8 worker start didn’t solve any of its problems ( i agree with you Miro - it only added 40 seconds of dead time and after that the game is literally no different than pre 5.0.16 patch, only maybe some cheeses became weaker plus you have to cut worker production to afford certain structures).

However i don’t want reversing to 12 worker start because i’m 44 and too old to break my fingers. So do you mind if we bring back Heart of The Swarm ladder - with all of its glory, removed LOTV units and old maps ? At this point the game is dead so it should have rather positive impact on playerbase - few people will quit and a lot more old-school vets will come back.

Let’s bring good ol’ days back fellas !

[JCarrill0-1742]

You can still play HotS campaign as well game melee gameplay!

Just change your setting before the melee match and enjoy HotS.

You can also change it to WoL as well!

[abs-2628]

I know, thanks, but without ELO rating this is completely useless. Not sure if you remember old WOL/HOTS ladders - for lots of people they were much more enjoyable, slower, less punishing etc. In short “BETTER”. When they were removed for good, thousands of players stopped playing SC2. Because i am the fan of the franchise i kept playing and having no choice i transitioned to LOTV but i always hated it. I never really fully adapted to it.

[JCarrill0-1742]

Well this was an ever evolving game, 15+ years later…

HOTS is definitely a fan favorite, that’s why they left the option in melee gameplay mode.

Perhaps there is a HOTS ladder somewhere out there, reliving those glorious days!

[Nergal-21674]

@abs-2628

for lots of people they were much more enjoyable, slower, less punishing etc.

I agree with you as well. I enjoyed exactly that aspect of the game back then, the very fact that the game DID run at a slower pace and you didn’t loose half your army from a single misclick during a skirmish. I used to play WoL and HotS a lot more, then quite less and not as much when LotV arrived. And then it kept on slowly and slowly increasing the game speed just a tiny little with each patch, barely detectable. By now it’s basically a measure of “are you a fast enough typist”. The moment one reverts the game to a custom HotS mode and tries a test game vs AI, it’s very obvious how much different those two factors have ended up being now as compared to back then.

Alas, I barely play the game anymore as is. Less than half an hour a week. Every time I miss it, I start it, play one or two games in standard ladder, and then close it in disappointment. The same repeats after a week or so, with exactly the same outcome.

[JCarrill0-1742]

I do understand that so many people do miss the days of Heart of the Swarm, it was a good expansion to the game for sure!

[abs-2628]

Sad thing is people like us are minority now. If current patch will be rejected by SC2 community, 100 % they will revert back to 12, not 6 workers. I think HOTS is definitely dead and you would need support from famous content creators/known players like Winter/PiG/Lowko to ask for HOTS to be reinstated. And of course lots of other players who wants HOTS back.

[Cat-21912]

Is this constructive? How should we flag this?

@abs-2628

However i don’t want reversing to 12 worker start because i’m 44 and too old

So 10 is enough then? Our age is irrelevant, they should revert the patch.

[Leviathan-1945]

By clicking the icon, Cat, without instigating by announcing it. Since your posting offtopic, your post is just as eligible for flagging, which is quite hypocritical.

[Cat-21912]

Sure, I clicked “You flagged this as inappropriate.”

However I am still not sure about the difference between “Inappropriate” and “Trolling”?
What would you suggest in this situation?

[Leviathan-1945]

Either is fine. They often overlap.

[abs-2628]

8 and 10 worker count doesn’t do anything other than adding 40 seconds of dead time.
Only 6 worker HOTS economy (bases layout, mineral count in each base, production time of buildings and units) can slow SC2 pace and make the game more strategical.

Ruff was right. You cannot make 8 worker economy. You can either have 12 worker LOTV or 6 worker HOTS economies.

[Cat-21912]

We could have a PTR trial on that 6 workers. Or a custom map made for trial.
But I fear people will start sleeping & get bored earlier.

What want to achieve is to discourage Protoss Pylon rushes in 4v4, but it’s difficult to come up with a good plan.

[abs-2628]

The problem is bringing HOTS back in 2026 is next to impossible. Most people interested in older ladders have quitted long time ago and majority of current playerbase are people who started playing during LOTV or after the game has become F2P so they will never support that.

@Cat-21912

What want to achieve is to discourage Protoss Pylon rushes in 4v4, but it’s difficult to come up with a good plan.

6 worker start definitely can discourage this because you won’t have enough money to build all the cannons, plus if it fails it is absolutely game over.

On 6 workers every cheese was essentially all-in. There was no transition out of it.

[Cat-21912]

Maybe you are right abs , but I am not 100% sure. We should test it - worth a trial.

[Eliwan-1354]

In my opinion, the worker count is not actually all that important – what is are all the shifts to the other units that happened between end of HotS and start of LotV.

If you actually want to change mid game, you need to change things that change the mid-game.

Humor, for a second, if there were no changes besides the worker count. This is a huge overhaul to the beginning of the game and all openings, because all of them are built around 12 workers so the rug under them is all gone.

But, “mid game”? That’s after you’ve saturated your bases. If there were no changes to the game besides starting workers, that can only affect the play pattern of the beginning of the game.

Humor, similarly, if we had all the changes except the worker changes. The mid-game state – the ebb and flow of economies after the 3-4 minute mark, the units you can and want to build, etc; are all the same as they are in the current 8 worker start. But you get to that point faster, because there’s less initial dead time.

The reason WoL/HotS had different mid-game states is because of the amount of baseline abilities and the actual unit balance was different. WoL Siege Tanks need the Siege Tech upgrade! That stymies tank push timings. But with the 12 worker start, siege tank pushes didn’t need to be slowed down in that way, so the ability became baseline. With the 12 worker start, things kicked off faster - So to supplement that, Stim and Combat Shields research faster, Reaper rework, Adept exists, Hallucination is baseline, Ravager exists.

These are the things that so hugely change the way that the game progresses and feels, not the worker count.

@Cat-21912

What want to achieve is to discourage Protoss Pylon rushes in 4v4, but it’s difficult to come up with a good plan.

If the problem is cannon rushes, just increase the build time of cannons. Cannons that are built don’t overperform, it’s that building cannons generate HP too quickly to be nicely dealt with except by pulling enough workers that it hurts the economy badly.

Increasing their build time only would be a meaningful shift for near-GM players who rely on near-exact second timings for counter-buildings, and that’s the sort of situation to which my only response is “tough”, y’know?

If the problem is other types of proxy then I don’t have a suggestion though; I don’t really think they’re problems but I don’t play-play 4v4s (there’s just too much, it’s brain-off for me)

@abs-2628

On 6 workers every cheese was essentially all-in. There was no transition out of it.

But on 6 workers, each cheese response was more razor-thin. Both players were subject to the same painful margins.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ And I don’t see how that doesn’t keep forward for higher players (it certainly still is true in 2v2)

[TerranicII-1450]

@Eliwan-1354

The reason WoL/HotS had different mid-game states is because of the amount of baseline abilities and the actual unit balance was different. WoL Siege Tanks need the Siege Tech upgrade! That stymies tank push timings. But with the 12 worker start, siege tank pushes didn’t need to be slowed down in that way, so the ability became baseline. With the 12 worker start, things kicked off faster - So to supplement that, Stim and Combat Shields research faster, Reaper rework, Adept exists, Hallucination is baseline, Ravager exists.

Most of what you said is correct, but the Siege Tank upgrade was removed during HOTS beta. The unit was useless without it, and Siege Tanks didn’t actually need to be delayed that long.

That’s the real purpose of upgrades. Delaying a unit’s late-game strength until a point where it is balanced (i.e., other units can handle it).

If a unit’s strength doesn’t need to be delayed, then it is better to make it baseline. If a unit is too powerful early on (such as Hellbat drops were in early HOTS), then it is better to lock that strength behind an upgrade (which is why Hellbats get their anti-light damage from Blue Flame instead of baseline now). If a unit is too powerful at full strength even in end-game, then it simply needs to be nerfed (no upgrade will fix an overpowered unit).

You are also correct that some upgrades were removed or their research time was reduced to compensate for the faster game-speed.

[JCarrill0-1742]

So in your opinion, would you say HOTS is superior to LOTV?

[abs-2628]

That depends what you mean by “superior”. When it comes to strategy, overall enjoyment - absolutely yes, game was slower, less punishing and more strategical because there was wide variety of openers.
LOTV may be superior to HOTS only when it comes to pace of the game - it has much faster economy and skips so called “boring part of the game” - it is the main reason LOTV increased worker count from 6 to 12 in 2015.

[Nergal-21674]

@abs-2628

When it comes to strategy, overall enjoyment - absolutely yes, game was slower, less punishing and more strategical because there was wide variety of openers.

I agree with this completely. The slower game speed and the very different balance of the units in term of build speeds, damage take and inflict, made the game a lot more enjoyable and not simply a pump units fast hope not to misclick gameplay all the time.

@abs-2628

LOTV may be superior to HOTS only when it comes to pace of the game - it has much faster economy and skips so called “boring part of the game” - it is the main reason LOTV increased worker count from 6 to 12 in 2015.

The fast economy part and skipping the “boring” parts can be quite fixed with an increased worker count at the start (but leaving all the other things unchanged). Even though I’d think that all the “boring” part was not really so boring, as it gave some time to focus on some scouting, get a feel of the map, do some micro with the scout unit at the enemy base.. all that time was not lost, it was a different gear. And you could feel the change in the “gear shift” after minute 4, when suddenly you could produce units, move with a small army around, perform harassment…. Those first minutes served as the lead-in of every game, the blending you as the player in the rhythm of it all. Maybe a lot of people don’t want that “boring” time at the start, but I call it to be a result of a short attention span and impatience to play a game, that “I want my battlecruiser NOW!” as soon as the game starts. (In full honesty, it’s ridiculous how in the recent LotV gameplays you can have a battlecruiser jump on the enemy base at the minute 4 mark. Let’s jump straight to the most ultimate units, yeyyy! )