How has the balance council not been replaced yet?

General Discussion
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The current balance being the poorest it has been in the history of the game by a metric fock ton! I look back at the Broodlord infester days (as a non zerg btw) with the most rose tinted glasses one could could imagine in comparison to the balance today. For those that are unaware that era is know as the worse balance bit in sc2 history; now clearly that’s no longer true and we have a new record of bad balance.
This all started ever since the “balance council” took over. So the solution is very simple remove the problem; aka the balance council and replace them with people who actually have an idea what a balance game looks like instead of a completely biased balance council who have made tourney results look… the most skewed in sc2 history once again by such a stupidly large margin its hard to comprehend.

This weird thing we got going right now were Terran is the master race that needs every buff in the book but protoss has had every single unit they ever had nerfed despite tourney results already being in favor of zerg show the balance council is about as clueless as one could possible be.

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If stats and parting go hard at practice, we are definitely going to see some protoss premier wins. Stats beat serral a couple times before the nerfs to transfuse, queen range, creep sight range, infestor, lurker, brood, etc. Parting struggled vs zerg but anything could happen.

Balance heavily favors protoss vs zerg so if a toss is in the same ballpark skill range as serral then he will absolutely dominate serral and it won’t even be close. The problem is that serral radically outclasses all the protoss in the foreign scene, and all the korean tosses retired or are barely returning from military.

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This rant has been noted and we will Adress this issue.

  • disruptors cost 50 Gas more
  • cyclones cost 50 Gas less

We think this will fix the issue.

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How has the balance council not been replaced yet?

And replaced by who? You? The biased charlatans who whine around here?

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I cant believe they nerfed the mothership even more, insanity.

How about real game designers.

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What, are you new here? This game ended all design over 3 years ago… thats WHY theres a balance council made up of the pros.

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That decision was made by the previous administration, easily revertable.

Imagine thinking the Mothership needed nerfs, this change is undefendable.

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Easily reversible? By whom? Theres no current administration to reverse anything and/or take over. So, you must be new here. Or you dont understand the the meaning of “end of development”.

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Microsoft is the new administration, effective very recently, they even fired a bunch of people, probably mostly management positions not creative. Actiblizz decided to end development, Microsoft can revert that very easily. They could even go for a remaster with multi-core support like they did with AoE2, which they did an awesome job with, look how the buildings crumble now, looks fantastic.

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Microsoft have even said literally they were interesting in the blizzard RTS in multiple interviews. So the if anyone is outa the loop its you.
And if blizzard makes a balance council in the first place they can simply make an other one. I’m starting to understand this might be shocking information to you but this is usually what one does if a team does not work out.

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I’d be very surprised if SC2 was restarted. If anything, a new game in the francise would be more likely, something more profitable. Remember that as part of the layoffs, MS also killed the Bliz survival game that was several years into development. If a product is not profitable enough, it’s not likely to be financed beyond the bare minimum, if at all. The results of the market analysis that Bliz did on SC2, resulting in its retirement, will likely be similar to what MS would find.

Restart an already discontinued game, a game that was retired based off revenue analyses? At best, that’s hopium talking.

As for the balance council,

Yes, I know. That, however, it in no way identifies specifically a restart of a retired game.

No, as with the entire history of balance, it ebbs and flows between the races. Balance changes are made, then made again to compensate, which perpetuates the cycle, forever. This was true even with Bliz’s internal balance team: those who had access to the most data and metrics than anyone, during and since.

Besides, who do you think MS would replace them with?? MS doesn’t have anyone that intimately knows SC2’s balance. No one who knows SC2 is left at Bliz. So who does that leave? The balance whine community? Doubtful.

Well now. Between these remarks and those you made to me in another thread, it just reveals the necessity of disparagement to bolster your position, Furaijin. That only demomstrates how weak you find your position to begin with. Then, resorting to peacocking your presumption that I’m not aware of the basis for your claims further shows how weak you believe your own position to be. And all that together only serves to kill one’s position.

Add all that to your gross misunderstanding of my words in the other thread and… well, you’re not building any credibility for yourself.

Edit: And add to all that the way you disparage others who disagree with you.

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Actually i approve this …

But i disagree that the “Game council” have done a bad or poor job, however they only care about balance, not game design.

Stuff like, races personalities and stuff, they dont care. Terran plays like Zerg nowadays, Zerg is defensive race, Protoss is as deathball as ever…

There needs to be a Blizzard guy that tells them from a design point, “This may be good for balance, but this goes against X race core designs”

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Problem with balance team it seems more like race pink slip buff and nerfing trying to get advantage and nothing really do with balance.

One best examples queen nerf off creep it counter two builds but can be crushed with other builds.

Problem was it effected a build that pros keep useing vs finding counters play.

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Buddy last time i had deathball and felt strong was 2014
Now we have lameball and terran/zerg who still scream toss op and they rly believe what they are saying we had serral vs reynor and after loss second game reynor pick protoss mass stalkers vs LURKERS… And got obliterated…

I can alrdy imagine before the game his thoughts were something like
“Hehe now he will see ill mass stalkers and wait till i research blink im gonna a move him to stone age”

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sorry i meant “deathball reliant as ever”

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Their business model was bad. They made the game F2P to entice casuals and hoped people, who wouldn’t even buy the game itself, would invest into skins, and that makes no sense. If anything, they should be looking to milk the hardcore fanbase. $5/month for multiplayer is an extremely cheap form of entertainment. These people get hundreds of hours a month in entertainment. A movie and popcorn by comparison could easily be $20. $5/month. It’d be enough to pay a team of 10 or so people to roll out regular updates. The problem is that they have a team of developers and they have to decide “do I put these guys on project A or project B?” and SC2 nets less than the other options (diablo, hearthstone, minecraft, etc).

The last thing the balance team did was delete the infested terran and permanently cement a balance advantage to protoss – a lead so large that the “balance counsel” is afraid to address because it means fundamental changes to protoss itself, not “minor tweaks”. They were pressured into this due to poor Protoss performance in the professional scene, and tried a last-minute patch to fix it. That’s more or less what happened.

A computer scientist or data scientist or statistician would make short work of that problem. Give them a data dump of SC2 replays and 2 weeks and you’d have your answers. Anyone with a math background could probably do it, but the above 3 have programming skills and that makes processing the data dumps much easier. Basically you spit out a giant correlation matrix. In one dimension you have race, in other dimension you have game time, in another dimension you have base count, in another dimension you have number of workers, etc. This is all correlated with chance to win, so you identify the peak chances to win, and list the top 10 variables with the highest correlation at that spot in the table. You’d find that on map “abc” race “z” has a large uptick in chances to win with predictors “X number of workers” and upgrades “P, Q and L.” That tells you there is an interaction on that map with those variables which is imbalanced. It’s that easy.

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I’m not disagreeing in principle, but adding pay to play model would create a massive backlash. It would cause an exodus that would only hurt the game. Every one who disagreed with it would leave and it would deter many would-be players from picking the game up, thereby chunking the playerbase. If the game started out with p2p, that would be different.

I have to call your seemingly insider insights into the balance council’s mentality and thought processes into question. Your basis for it, the cementing of the protoss advantage by Bliz, has the same air of balance whine (I’m not saying you are whining, I mean just the general concept) that those who don’t have the knowledge or data are always engaged in. In other words, it yells bias. Also, there’s been several patches put out by the balance council, not just one.

As for computer modeling, I can’t speak to the specifics, but I have to wonder, if it’s as easy as you describe, why it wasn’t ever done in the game’s history. Bliz has never been hurting for money, so investing in something that would only help wouldn’t ever have been out out the question. On the contrary, I’d bet that computers have been involved in balance for a long time. But can computer outputs be trusted completely? Does a human need to be there to evaluate the validity of what the computers suggest? Again, I don’t know. That’s outside my wheelhouse. But even without the details, I’d hard pressed to believe that computers haven’t been playing a significant roll in balance.

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I already paid for the game once, paying for a monthly sub after that just to play multiplayer would be total bs, and at that point id throw the game in the trash.

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No just no. I absolutely hate this model. I am not fan of recurring fees for nearly anything. Imagine you jut read daily X money taken from your card for this, Y money for that. Because subscriptions that you have to control. Sometimes apps ive seen I have to specially discover they have an automated recharge that was not in plain sight.

I want to pay for the game once as done already that’s it. I agree with however needing to pay for an extra account, while with F2P they made gazillion new accs, ofc smurfing hakingm, trolling all these increased

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The desicions made by previous administrations means nothing. This is exactly the short sight profit now mentality that lead to actiblizz downfall. Having a 10+ years game and community is insanely valuable for a company and u have to treat it well. Do u really think AoE2 has a bigger player base than SC2?

Steam just realeased a major patch for CS 1.6. What is the projected revenue for that one? You see, Steam also gets it.

Who cares about what they did with a game in development that never saw the light of day. Its obvious the’ll also use the IP for something else, that doesnt take away the fact they could give love to SC2.

Exactly, this guy talking like they recieved alien technology or something. They are Microsoft, they can figure something out and improve whatever code SC2 has, including balance.