In my opinion, bringing the game closer to the normal speed seems worth considering. Especially that StarCraft 2 is called a real time strategy game. Well, in reality it’s a lie. In fact it is a 4 times accelerated time strategy game.
I think about starcraft as a knowledge and reason demanding game. I believe it should be the main factor of the player quality. But is it really?
I don’t know if slowing down the game would make it better, because i have never played consistently for at least a week on a lower speed than current SC2 standard. I’m just saying, it deserves to be considered by our community, put to the test.
And when I read the discusions about this idea I see a lot of dislike towards players postulating for it. Which i don’t understand, because many of us don’t know how it would look like.
I’m curious of your opinions especially if you have tried playing starcraft on a slower speed.
why did you make 2 post about this in a day
If i did it had to be an accident.
i could of sworn i just seen a new post about this earlier today, maybe it wasnt you.
Well, I posted a comment under some other user discussion which contained a part of what i wrote in my own discussion. Maybe that’s it.
Do you see Chess Blitz?
DONT U WANT TURN BASED SC2? With allowance of 2 hours to think what you have to do next?? 
it is not even SC2. No RTS I have seen or played has this War3, AOE, like splitting players is no good, that is what leagues are for, low leagues are also slower players etc.
Because the game is made and accepted as is, no one will change a game that has been accepted to be so for 13 years. Especially since development has stopped. I mean if you can’t find what is wrong with your weeks of experience point of view. Holy ****
Someone is making accounts probably the same one who bumped old threads just to say how they need to make the ladder with different speeds. Or if you are different, who you will change speed for, yourself or EVERYONE?
Normal Speed or Slow means units also take ridiculously long to produce, there is no rebuild and battle again and again games would have turned into 20-30 mins a game on average
It is like taking some completely INCOMPATIBLE feature from some mobile or whatever game and putting it here and saying “Wow my ideas are great let’s spam my 'Deas everywhere”
The pacing of the game is one of SC2’s biggest issues. If they were to cut the pacing of the game by 5%, it would probably double the number of people who play it. SC2 is many times faster than blitz chess, and anyone who plays blitz chess knows it’s too fast to allow for good decision making. SC2 is all about spamming pre-memorized actions, and the only way you can do that is by grinding out thousands of hours of practice. Nobody wants to do that. That makes the game a chore. Most people on Earth can’t react as fast as is needed to play SC2, so if they cut the game speed by 5% it would probably double the popularity of SC2.
This was the issue with Blizzard’s design changes which artificially prolonged the game. Doubling the number of bases is equivalent to doubling the speed at which you have to play. They went from 1-3 base plays to 5-9 base plays and the popularity of the game tanked. It’s no wonder, because nobody wants to mindlessly spam APM like a baboon.
SC2 is not a real-time strategy game anymore. It’s a mechanics / endurance game. It’s in a whole new category. League and Dota are more true to the RTS category than SC2 is. That’s just a fact.
SC2 is like a tower defense game but with absurd multitasking. There is a very small element of strategy in making simple decisions like where to place a base, but that’s roughly equivalent to a tower defense game. So, yeah, SC2 just isn’t an RTS anymore. The term I’ve coined for it is “EAM” aka “Endurance and Multitasking.”
Well you know which game I find the most balanced in that? War3, that has the best pace and Stormgate may be something like it in pace not as fast as SC2. But it is not because ‘Cant be fast in SC2’. When WoL came I remember playing weeklies and the game (SC2) being faster was a new stair to climb, it never bothered me with its pace.
The Game speed changes everything, it even changes the build time of units which would have turned too slow. They could have ‘slowed down the battles’ simply by doubling the HP of all units.
I know the fast pace pulled people away but I think it is not just it.
-
SC2 was not free, as much as War3 was not free either, places like Garena allowed many players to play it so although they bypassed owning a copy, the game was a lot more played (and editor was more acceptable I have done both on both games and its like both modding and competitive are discoursing people to do it in SC2)
-
The fast pace is not as much as to me is managing 70-90 workers. The game focuses too much on that because it is a macro game, less on the battles. Ofc players learn to do both but for players of low leagues managing so much economy AND army at the same time, was not OK. Again not because Faster instead of Normal, but because of the macro orientation of the game, HALF of the supply goes to workers.
And in the end, the game has to be hard to master.
yes I agree LotV made it:
- impossible to 1 base punish expander, expander most often wins
- more macro means more actions means harder to manage
- As a war3 player who prefers face to face battles not hiding in mass expanding (I never liked such games even there) it is also not so nice for me but its a challenge I had to accept. Because SC2 is a macro game. But most players who are not hard core arent like that, even so that is StarCraft, I never said ‘hey make it like War3 I dont like it so’. Many of the players casters you see are also from War3 and they inspired me to take the challenge and either play it or not, not whine over difficulty.
(but people were not playing SC2 even before LotV numbers dropped leaving the hard core only)
But again I am also saying these are things to have been thought with the dev of the game, now these 'DEAS are meaningless.
Bad comment noob get rekt
Not gonna happen this discussion was brought multiple times from wol and who ever mention it is always laugh at even though when played vs deepmind pro players cried about ai from time to time spiked apm to 1k it really feels unfair when you lose jus cause you don’t have time to breathe and think what should i do next but it is what it is let’s hope that they learned their lesson and that stormgate will be a bit less “he who click fastest”
My statement is “i don’t know but i think it deserves a try” explain me how a non positive or negative statement can possibly be wrong?
What it really comes down to is that SC2 reached its developmemt end-of-life a few years ago. Outside of debating the philosophy of the change, it won’t ever happen because SC2 isn’t being developed any more.
That’s not how multiplayer games work.
WarCraft3 for example is significantly slower game due to large variety of reasons, yet it is even more mechanically demanding since slower and much more simple macro and ~10 times higher hp to dps ratio of units gives players a lot more time to do different micro.
But forget WarCraft, take a look at Heroes Of Might And Magick 3 which is both TBS and gives very little opportunity for micro… And what do we see? Competitive players play it at lightning fast speed to the point you sometimes need to pause the game if you want to understand what has just happened.
This is the nature of the humans: when we compete with other humans we are trying our best, and that among other things includes doing things as quickly as possible.
When developing a product, developers don’t really want to give out big updates for free. They only want to give out maintenance updates, e.g. things that fix issues but don’t really change the product that much, and certainly nothing to improve the features. Even those aren’t great because they cost money to do. The reason for this is so that they can sell a new version of the product with the new features. That’s a common way that the industry works (another common one is a subscription fee and with it comes free updates).
The fact that they halted development of SC2 might be a signal that they are wanting to phase it out so they can introduce a followup in the game series, but I think that would be an unusual move. Only time will tell.
Do you think it may every restart development again?
Just picking up where it was left off? I doubt it. End of life decisions are typically based off cost-benefit analyses. Somewhere around 2020, SC2’s profitability, across its many parts, fell below some benchmark. Games resurging on their own is vitrually unheard of.
Maybe in 10-20 years a remaster could happen, but looking back on Bliz’s remaster history, who knows if they will ever do another.
Thats unfortunate. I would love it if this game had periodic expansions like world of warcraft did even if it meant some extra expenses to playing so long as they did not take to the extreme like was done with Overwatch. It looked like they tried to add some paid content to potentially see to the future of SC2 when warchests came out. Though that seems to have not gotten the results they wanted. At least there is more arcade games to look forward to.
The silver lining is that I think it’s pretty clear where things went wrong. The game market was heading to shorter games at the same time that Blizzard was ramping up the duration of SC2 games. One of the reasons Hearthstone and Diablo Immortals are successful is due to short game times and accessibility. There are a lot of people who didn’t want to commit to an hour long SC2 game, but Blizzard’s designers were obsessed with deleting “game ending moments” which is equivalent to prolonging the game. Have you seen a chart of TvZ game durations? It’s not good. That was a big design mistake.
Increasing the game duration also altered the game genre because it made multitasking the primary aspect of the game. People who liked SC2 for being fast paced strategy were turned-off by the slow stalemate games that emphasized mechanics & endurance. The mass swarmhost issue at the end of HotS was where the issue began, but they didn’t properly identify the issue. Zergs went into swarmhosts as a response to the siege tank making it impossible to ever attack a terran. They reworked swarmhosts but left the tank and so the problems persisted.
It’s common sense game design that applies to everything from video games to board games. You have to design the game to never stalemate. There have to be mechanics that force the game to progress and resolve. They did the opposite. They implemented mechanics that made the game prolong and stalemate.
In my estimate if they were to cut the game speed by 5%, and if they were to redesign the game around 1-3 base plays (instead of 5-7), you’d probably double the number of people who play the game. To get the game to resolve on 1-3 bases you’d have to rework units like the siege tank which is probably the biggest offender in terms of artificially prolonging the game. The siege tank’s efficiency in a defensive posture is simply way too high to allow the game to resolve in a reasonable amount of time. There are a thousand examples of this. Just recently Maru vs DRG in the WardiiTV korean royale. Maru was constantly out of position, losing bases and workers, but the game just kept going on and on and on. It was a 27 minute game that really should’ve resolved in 10 or 15 minutes if not for the siege tank. Mind you, DRG’s style is a very aggressive style that aims to end the game fast. There are other styles that are much stronger and have a higher winrate at the cost of being absurdly slow to resolve the game. Lurker viper comes to mind, for example. So this 27 minute game was a FAST game of TvZ. 
Let’s extrapolate this out for esports. Let’s say I am interested in watching some esports but I tune in and see the finals is a best of 7 and each game is 27 minutes long. Who on Earth wants to spend 3 hours of time watching just the finals, let alone the round of 4/8/16? Of course esports popularity was going to plummet. That’s a no-brainer.
No. RTS is the same regardless. People just hate having to control more than a Diablo character and to make fun of the D4 forums, the hero must not be fat at all. has to be a chad or chadess.
War3 has had more or less the same ratio of people who play Melee vs those who don’t, Heck even AOE 4 is not a very played game, it is all because no one wants RTS,. no changes of pace in SC2 will change anything