When talking about developing Warcraft 1 & 2.
1 & 2.
So, they knew when building SC1 and War3 that people would do it. And, since they had thought about it earlier, they definitely had time to invest in finding a fix if it was important, for both SC1 and War3. They had no obligation keep it, and every reason to fix it.
They didn’t. Like, you understand that that means that they did not think that it was a big enough of a problem. They consciously decided to let you do it, because they couldn’t think of a way to restrict it that was still enjoyable, or they thought it, itself, was fun.
This gets ever more exacerbated if we’re talking about SC2, because it was known from the moment the game started development that it was going to be played competitively like this. It was a vital feature of the game that it was mindful of competitive players.
They left the tactics in, so they clearly believe these to be competitive-acceptable strategies!
Like, from the other thread, you said these–
And I think there’s a convincing argument that when building War2 they didn’t know this. But they absolutely knew it going into SC1.
I plan to talk about your point in a future post, but the short answer is we were — in retrospect — too scared of the consequences to allow players to be able to build anywhere on the map. […]
After launch it was clear that the road-building requirement was the greatest flaw in War1, and was therefore one of the first things fixed in War2 — mostly a matter of ripping out code.
If we had more development time we might even have fixed it in War1, but boy was the entire project a race against time.
“It”, in the last sentence, is “the road-building requirement was the greatest flaw in War1.”
Now, whether or not they would have fixed it the same way is unclear, but it’s clear from the phrasing to me that their idea of “fix” here was “ripping out code”, ergo, the implication of that fix being the same one is fairly clear to me.