Dark Swarm had a number of counters from every race (Irradiate, EMP, Siege Tanks, Firebats, Spider Mines, Reavers, Storms, Disruption Web, Dark Archons, Zealots, Dark Templar, potentially Archons, Lurkers, Ultralisks, Zerglings, Queens, etc).
That said, the pathing and the clunky UI also helped keep the spells in check. Control and pathing are both much better in SC2, such that you cannot balance spells with the same amount of power as you could in Brood War.
No, the two are practically the same thing. A healthy game is specifically better for the players.
I mean in terms of fatigue, itâs good to give players an easy path to victory if their opponent messes up. If a player gets hit by fungal, they lose. Very simple.
Thatâs nonsense. You are making things easy for one player but absolutely broken against the other.
Fungal and the Brood Lord + Infestor composition had NO effective counterplay in WOL. It was one of the worst situations the game has ever been in, the other contender being multi-hour Swarm Host games in HOTS.
There is no point in WOL where the BL/Infestor composition was not a problem either. It was a design problem baked into WOL when the game was first released.
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Ah, but this is the beauty! The Zerg has weak Queens, so immediately you force fights, which alot of people find fun. I think itâs not fair of Blizzard to impose what they think is fun (macro) over the populations desires, on ladder especially.
No, it was a significant PROBLEM, one which Blizzardâs developers were too incompetent and unwilling to fix for years. StarCraft IIâs history and potential popularity were forever tainted by the design problems rife throughout WOL.
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You canât forget that alot of these tournament players are playing for money. When that dries up, Iâd argue that people just want quick, satisfying fights.
There are plenty of other genres for people who donât like macro. RTS games with base-building mechanics clearly arenât for them.
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Yeah, but thatâs not really fair, when you consider that Brood War still has a really strong grassroots scene, based on that idea of quick fights.
Yes it is. WarCraft I, II, III, StarCraft I, BW, and StarCraft II are all base-building games where you build up an army and tech tree to fight your opponents. Thatâs what you are signing up for when you play any one of those games.
When players have similar skill levels, those games can sometimes drag on for up to an hour.
The difference is in Brood War, even the best players can lose to very quick rushes. In SC2, most of that stuff got nerfed within the first 2 years.
The same can and does still happen in StarCraft II, if a player doesnât scout and react accordingly. The main changes that weakened rushes in SC2 are larger map sizes and the starting worker change.
In Brood War, games can still drag on for dozens of minutes if a rush doesnât succeed.
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Yeah, and Iâd argue that itâs killed the game for alot of people. Like it or not, a big part of the population preferred the scrappiness of original SC2, Iâd wager.
If I recall correctly, WOL burned through most of its player base within only a few years. The balance issues and design issues quickly drove people away, many of whom never came back.
That âscrappinessâ is usually a function of people not knowing how to play or react to things. You donât see it as often because players have gotten better, rather than because of the gameâs balance.
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No, they nerfed the scrappiness on purpose because they didnât want it. Reapers were nerfed heavily and Queens were buffed heavily because they wanted longer macro games.
No, they didnât.
The things they nerfed were undeniably overpowered issues.
Take for example rax rushes in WoL - originally, the barracks was producable without a supply depot first, effectively resulting an absurdly early rush timing that players literally could not stop.
They also then proceeded to ignore other significant issues as well. Scrappiness was never an issue. What was an issue were things players thought were undeniably overpowered.
I wonât deny that there has been some argument regarding the more macro centric approaches recently, and those arguments are fair, but to say cheese and scrappy games arenât common - at least amongst the playerbase - is undeniably wrong. The reality is that sc2 is a game with a skill ceiling that is nigh unreachable. Even the best of the best of the best make mistakes, and even now we still see innovation in the game. New strategies, new builds, new ideas and new approaches to how the game is played. And thatâs a good thing.
Additionally you keep comparing broodwar to sc2 as if sc2 has a smaller playerbase than BW does. It doesnât. Last I checked sc2 had well over 100k consistent players to Broodwar having anywhere between 10-20k concurrent players.
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They should have let players work out the TvZ early aggression issues themselves. Again, Iâd argue that early aggression in Brood War is far worse.
Brood War is naturally going to be less popular due to other issues, itâs an old game with lots of bugs.
You may be able to argue that with the change from 6 to 12 worker start, but not the other changes.
âScrappinessâ tends to happen when players donât know what to do against something, or when they are unprepared for something. It happens less often as players learn more and get âbetterâ at handling things.
Game length also tends to increase between similarly skilled players for the same reason. As each player gets better at ânot dyingâ to various types of harassment, the game gets harder to close out. That still doesnât justify ruining a gameâs balance such that a player playing a particular faction is on a timer until they practically auto-lose.
WOL Reapers were overpowered for the time that they came out on the tech-tree. They absolutely needed to be nerfed, although you can argue that Blizzard picked the wrong method.
The problem with Reapers was their strength versus their place in the tech-tree. Reapers came out before any other race could reasonably deal with them. There were multiple options to fix this, but Blizzard chose to increase their build time to a ridiculous extent instead of changing tech requirements or locking their strength behind upgrades. The result was a WOL Reaper that nobody made because it was frankly harder to build up Reapers than Carriers.
Two other potential options would have been to reduce the Reaperâs base stats in favor of an upgrade to restore them later, or to require a Factory or some other structure before Reapers could be built.
Instead, Blizzard eventually nerfed the Reaper into an early-game scouting unit in later expansions. The scout variant is still effective at some rushes and harassment attempts, but it falls off harder after the early game.
There is an argument to be made that Queens are needed to account for Zergâs early-game larva mechanics.
To be fair, the UI, unit-control, and graphics are part of that, but Brood Warâs balance would also have to change if the UI was ever updated.
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I would say that objectively, reaper rushes werenât even the best strategy. They were fun, which is very important, but they werenât OP. They took alot of skill to use and were pretty all-in.
Maybe you could argue that âafterâ Reapers were nerfed to a 45 second build time on a tech lab, but at that point Reapers were so bad that players didnât make them even in cases where it might make sense.
For example, WOL Reapers actually had the stats to out-perform Marines against Zealots and a few other things in the late-game, but because each Reaper took up 45 seconds on a Tech Lab Barracks, it took too much dedicated production to produce them in large numbers.
For comparison, a Carrier took 120 seconds for 6 supply. Breaking it down to supply-per-second, that is 0.05 supply per second per Stargate for Carriers, and 0.0222 supply per second for Reapers.
I think there is only one game I have ever seen where a player used WOL Reapers in the late-game, and it was effective, but it also took about 8 or more dedicated Barracks just to produce them. And that was for an army that was still primarily made up of Marines and Marauders. Reapers were not worth making under normal circumstances.
So it begs the question of why did Blizz completely nerf them out of the game? People were having fun.