After some thinking, I have an appreciation for the PvP design. This game has to be treated differently from other genres. People need to find fun in base-building, and unit selection.
Watching pro-games doesn’t necessarily help, because they have their own style. They don’t face cheese that much, but on ladder it’s a part of the game. They are gifted with 300 APM, but most of us aren’t.
Simple strategies seem hard to beat, but they can be. It takes creative thinking. I think the balance team made an interesting choice not following all of our suggestions. What is boring to watch (macro wars, non-interaction) is really the nature of the game, which is turf war. The enemy is 40 seconds away, there is no rush, alot of wins come through sheer perseverence.
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i’m sorry that you didn’t find much enjoyment on versus game mode but that just how real time strategy (RTS) games with pvp are. The core gameplay has been really hard ever since back in sc bw not just sc2. And the same with warcraft series. I means, RTS game gave birth to moba genre and moba just another pvp hardcore.
Fortunately, sc 2 has more than just versus mode. There’s a ton of fun game mode you can find out of arcade custom game and there’s even a big campaign modding community that you can try out and hopefully find a mod that can let you have ‘actual’ fun in campaign.
There’s also coop mode that is just not in great shape right now because free commanders are bugged and you have to pay for other commanders if you want to level up past level 5. But still worth to try it out.
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Nah league shows this isn’t true. You can have both casual and hardcore elements to the same game. League does this well and it’s why it’s over a thousand times more popular than sc2. Sc2 is a meme because it’s designed exclusively around the abilities of elite mechanical players. This emphasis is so extreme that the mechanical skills are more important to winning than things like tactics & strategy. It’s so bad that micro is basically irrelevant. I’ll give you an example. Ryung vs solar in the GSL had a terran lose 5 medivacs for free, full of bio, with gold-league micro, and the terran won anyway.
Micro is irrelevant. Strategy is irrelevant. All that matters is how fast you spam APM. The emphasis on APM spam is so severe that protoss professionals can’t win tournaments anymore. The potential to win is there, but they make multitasking mistakes, like missing the timing on a shield battery overcharge during a critical moment.
The emphasis on APM spam means the quantity of actions is much more important than the quality of actions. You can’t win at SC2 unless you can spam 300 apm to do crappy micro in 3 locations at once. That’s because the sheer number of units/bases that have to be managed is staggering, and some micro is better than no micro, so it’s about splitting your attention and doing crappy micro in 3 locations at once. That’s why the micro & unit interactions are so boring in the pro scene. There is no unit retainment & micro refinement & complex unit interaction navigation. It’s all about spamming the apms faster than the other guy.
Here is a perfect example:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6-IR4HVtGg&t=389s
- Gold league decision making. It’s basically impossible to allin into blink stalkers because you need a surround to beat them and you can’t get that when the toss is defensive.
- Gold league micro. He just runs the overlords in to their death, losing a thousand minerals in the process.
- Gold league positioning. He could’ve sent the overlords a different route, such as approaching from the right.
- Gold league unit movements. He could use the overlords as bait to get a bad blink, by moving them forward and backward, right on the threshold of what the protoss thinks he can blink for. Instead they are just moved to their death.
- Gold league unit comp. Defensive toss likes to hide in their sim city. Bane drops become powerful because you can rain splash on their clumped units and kill probes at the same time. You can split an overlord off and hit the natural’s mineral line at the same time. Instead he’s doing queen ravager ling, all of which melts to the oracles and stalkers. Skipping the ravagers in favor of banes give you more durability vs the oracles & gives you the money to do bane drops. Skipping the queens would free up 1050 minerals which could’ve been 42 more zerglings which are amazing vs blink stalkers.
- All from a premier tournament competitor, aka someone who is supposed to be amazing at SC2 but really is just an APM spammer.
Game 2 is equally bad. All he had to do was make some banelings when attacking the gold base, and it’s a free win:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6-IR4HVtGg&t=927s
Shake my head. APM spammers. Gotta love 'em.
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Disagree./ I am doing this just to test.
The new forum poster spoke his first word! 