It is no secret that these forums are less active nowadays and that is not a surprise to anyone as SC2 is already 15 years old, which for any game it is a lot and for an RTS that is basically never heard of to still be this popular, after all this time!
However, there are always new accounts on these forums, and each of them if you ask they basically say it is Not a second account!
I have a feeling there are somewhere between 25-50 active users on these Forums (at least 1 post a week, some breaks are fine, but to be active during a 1 year period)
Maybe I am completely wrong or close to the truth, I am not sure to say the least!
Please let me know your opinions or even what data we have about the active users!
And also please let me know if you think there many people having multiple accounts!
I come here every 3 months or so and see if there is a shred of anything positive regarding sc2. Still sad.
I just want Starcraft III RTS and it looks like we are at the “wait and see” what happens with Nexon wining the bidding war. Its probably going to be a mobile game
It’s hard to be positive when balance looks like this: https://i.imgur.com/KU6fsV9.png
I told them this would happen. I told them why it would happen. I told them why it would be bad for the game. For a year straight, I wrote essay after essay explaining the basics of data analysis & game design. They did it anyway.
Blizzard needs to wrest balance from whoever is in control over it now and give it to someone who is at least not incompetent.
With all the problems I have in my own life, and all the problems my friends and family give to me, all the problems I solve for society and my own community, and I still find time to save a billion dollar game from financial ruin. But, silly me, nobody cares what I think – even though I’ve been right again and again and again and again, and years in advance: https://i.imgur.com/R467oTT.png. This chart definitively proves this would happen, and I published charts like these 6 years ago.
They gave Protoss buff after buff, zerg nerf after nerf, and when that wasn’t enough they gave terran nerf after nerf. Now there are over 2x as many Protoss in KR Grandmaster as there are Zergs. What an absolute travesty. It’s the worst balance crisis this game has ever endured and by a very large margin. Meanwhile, Esports has crashed, and social media engagement is at an all-time low. I am sure it is just a coincidence.
I tried. Starcraft is doomed. Nothing can save it. They’ve created a branding issue that will persist for at least a decade.
This is a problem with society in general, by the way. We live in an idiocracy where the incompetent people hold the most power. The reasons for this are complicated, but it’s mostly caused by greedy universities handing out diplomas like candy. It used to be that when a corporation hired someone with a bachelor degree, it meant that person would do a pretty good job. Because universities are firing off diplomas like a machine gun, these degrees are completely worthless. The universities trojan-horsed a bunch of fools into the ranks of every corporation, and it really shows. It’s not just a SC2 balance problem – it’s a holywood problem, and an aerospace problem, and an airline pilot problem. The problem is systemic because the federal government reduced the risk of giving out student loans to zero, which green lit universities to give out diplomas with a fire-hose.
The root of the problem is actually how do you tell if a person is competent. That’s essentially the service that corporations pay for. They are willing to pay you more money because you’ve been vetted by a university and this practically guarantees you are competent. But that method doesn’t work any more. Why did corporations have to rely on universities in the first place? Because defining and measuring competence is surprisingly hard. Researchers do all kinds of studies on IQ and “grittiness” and conscientiousness and this and that to figure out what it is that universities were actually doing, and it’s still not clear. But whatever universities WERE doing, it’s obvious they aren’t doing it any more. The reliability of universities for judging competence is gone.
Corporations hold some of the blame because they did a decent bit of filtering as well. You’d get a hundred or so applicants for each job posting and the management would do rounds of interviews and have a very thorough vetting process. But, that’s not what they do anymore. They have diversity mandates which just means finding the most competent person is no longer the priority. Well, it turns out that you can’t do that. Corporations can’t afford the efficiency drop. The economy grows by 5% a year and if you don’t prioritize excellence, one fool can cause tremendous damage. A good example of this was a guy in China who burned down a styrofoam manufacturing plant because he lit some of the styrofoam on fire. Why did he do this incredibly stupid thing? Because just wondered what would happen, and that’s it. Well, the fresh styrofoam off-gases a flammable gas and so as soon as he lit a lighter the entire building was gone. Corporations simply can’t afford to prioritize anything except excellence. If this guy had studied basic chemistry, he’d know this was a VERY bad idea. Obviously, he didn’t have a 5th grade level understanding of chemisty and so an entire company got to go bankrupt because of it. What a wonderful world it is that we live in.
You can also point a lot of the blame at the department of education, which also veered off course and started to prioritize things other than excellence. Their priority was to be an arm of the welfare state by giving anyone who wanted stable income stable income if they pretended to be a teacher. Meanwhile actual good teachers weren’t given proper funding because the money is being launched with a catapult into outer space with no regard for where it goes. The elimination of the DOE is a very large step in the right direction, but they need to start punishing universities for their predatory practices. A good example would be to make the university liable for half of a student’s debt if that student fails to repay the loan by its maturity date. Like magic, universities would suddenly start doing their job again.
This is all so funny because all these systems, from the DOE to elite universities, have a ton of management. They have loads of administrative positions. Yet, not a single one found the impetus to identify and solve these problems. What are these administrators being paid to do if they don’t actively improve education. At a bare minimum, don’t degrade education. Yet, here we are.
Corporations, including Blizzard, need to get serious about who they hire and who gets to make big decisions about things like game balance. If you pick the wrong guy, you get Protoss rocketing off to the moon and social media engagement tanking and esports collapsing – just like that guy who lit the styrofoam factory on fire.
One of the things you can learn from the above chart is that not only is Protoss imbalanced, but the reward of the imbalance decreases with skill – by the time it reaches serral’s level, it’s very small. This means their goal of making protoss win tournaments hasn’t been achieved. They did all this damage and didn’t even achieve their goal.
They needed to buff high micro units, like stalkers, sentries, and adepts, and nerf low micro units like zealots, immortals, and carriers. They did the opposite. Zero-micro units like the mothership got big buffs. Well, congrats, you made Protoss easier to play, but didn’t make it more powerful, and so you’ve FUBAR’d the balance of the ladder while simultaneously failing to give protoss the tools to beat serral and clem.
You might say I am being harsh, but that’s exactly what the manager who runs this operation should be doing. He should be grading their performance and nitpicking every little mistake. This operation is a ship without a captain and we aren’t headed for an iceberg – we’ve already hit the iceberg. The man who raised me was a concrete inspector for a large construction company in Dallas and you can really see his influence on me. Time to stop holding hands and doing our nails and giving one another pats on the back. Somebody somewhere screwed up big time and needs to be held accountable at a bare minimum by losing their ability to create future problems. Move them from their position and reassign them to janitorial.
The sentry’s shield reduces damage by 5, but the radius is cut to a quarter. Like magic, high skill toss dominate tournaments and low skill toss take an MMR hit. The sheer and unadulterated brilliance of this change is how it would buff stalkers in TvP without making blink allins overpowered. Why? Sentries can’t blink to the high ground. Now a hit squad of 4 stalkers, well microd to be tightly packed around a sentry, will be a real force to reckon with. Suddenly there is an incentive to spread out instead of deathballing. Wow, did I just save SC2? Perhaps. Lets wait and see if the balance counsel adopts the idea.