Yeah, but this is absolutely fine for few banelings to decimate entire squad of marines bird brain.
Sad reality that zergs are biggest crybabies like you for example. Can’t kill lib ? OMG what about air units ? Ghosts are only strong behing tanks, PFs etc. In open space they just get destroyed by combination of fungal and banes. If you weren’t bronze you would already figured that out.
Zerg crybabies . Gosh i can no longer F2 + amove with my ling-bane. Sooooo good they nerfed widow mine.
Currently, all three races are capable of dealing with Liberators. While I don’t think the proposed 1-range nerf will break the unit, I don’t agree that the unit is overpowered, nor anywhere near as powerful as you are making it out to be.
If killing 30+ Zerglings in one shot is really a problem, then Banelings would actually need more significant nerfs than Widow Mines. Banelings are actually more destructive against both Zerglings and Marines, making your particular complaint silly:
Having said all of this, I don’t believe that that Widow Mines and Banelings really need nerfs. I just find that particular complaint about one-shotting groups of Zerglings silly.
I’m a prophet, Ryung forgoes widow mines for siege tanks and gets destroyed by mass zealot runbys with a main army shove, that wasn’t even gateway man style either. Get ready for triple engineering bay plays for neosteel armour come the next patch.
true, what’s even sadder is that it makes no difference if you have 0/0 or 3/3 lings. Because for some reason Wm have “ability damage” (ignore armor) and Bane does not.
Also find it lame that the Widow Mine is unburrowed priority-19 instead of 20.
is also an important change for map makers. Because with interactions like lib, you are restricted.
what kind of arguments are these?
because bane only have one shot. each bane attack costs 50/25 even if it does not reach its target.
Was this in the GSL? Ryung isn’t the best vs protoss. I’ll be interested to see what Cure does. I think his TvP is the best on Earth right now. It’s fascinating to see how slow the pro players adapt. Serral finally figuring out that you can dodge the probe block with a 15 hatch is a perfect example. Literally anyone with a brain could’ve figured that one out in about 10 seconds of game analysis. It took, what, 14 years for the pro players to figure it out? Lmao. Shake my head.
It’s going to take the APM spammers awhile to figure out how to deal with zealot runbies, because thinking isn’t one of their strengths. If it can’t be solved by apm spam, they are pretty much lost. A pro player in a balance patch is like tossing a toddler into the ocean. It’s not reasonable to expect a toddler to swim to shore. The rest of us will figure out how to counter eztoss and then the pro players can copy us.
I don’t wanna be mean but i’m sick of zerg crybabies complaining about libs. Without range, libs are very easy to kill by queens and spores, with range you should already have spire and couple of air units. If terran is harassing you with ranged lib and you have no flying units - you seriously messed up your macro.
You really need to learn how to read. I explained exactly what I meant after that sentence, within the same bullet.
Widow Mines can fire off shots at units that would be killed by the splash damage of other Widow Mines i.e. wasting them. Banelings cannot do this. If a target is dead, then the Baneling is not going to blow itself up trying to kill it.
Could we get the Test playlist enabled on the Versus section so that people can unlock the Test related achievements?
In uthermal’s latest video, he uses a half-HP handicap to beat a GM terran. How is that even possible. The answer is easy. Uthermal’s multitasking advantage outweighed having half HP on his units. You can verify yourself by watching the video. Every advantage he gained game from better multitasking. The next time anyone says that SC2 is a strategy game, I am just going to lose it. High level SC2 is 99.9% a multitasking game.
SC2 is a strategy game so long as you have the apm to use said strategies. 
The unique builds is why Uthermal gets 127k subs
I see your point but 50% is still a very big handicap. Macro also decides it all. That is why mass marines can beat someone that does other units but is half the supply.
So yes better mechanics > strategy. And I don’t see why this is a problem. The problem of SC2 is everything dies too fast otherwise nothing wrong with the first.
And APM or to call it multitasking has to matter. I see this in SG but can give examples even in SC2.
TvT - if I let a Terran get to late game it will, be a dice roll, unknown who will win. My army could be at the wrong place out of position and I could lose a base just because of position or he could more BC. Strategical win by opponent?
Or I could as I used to do before they nerfed the IM, 1 to 1 the Terran early - superior controls wins, he makes control/micro mistakes more , loses the units, loses the game. I see nothing wrong with it.
And in SG one of the reasons I lose my games is I let them do too much. If all I play will be 1 fight at a time, they have the time to react. And if I do not use my multitasking power… how am I different from Bronze? Anyone can produce a bunch of workers, macro and where I will be better in such case? Nowhere if I let them do the same, the advantages get equalized or I would become disadvantaged. But there in SG at least things don’t die fast and one has also time to react. But either way multitasking is the weapon that others may not have.
His macro was ahead because his multitasking was better. That’s how high level sc works. You apply pressure to your opponent so that they cannot concentrate on their macro or micro. You pull ahead because you can stay on top of your build while being pressured and or applying pressure yourself. It’s an advantage gained by superior multitasking.
Too much emphasis on multitasking is probably a bad idea:
lthough biological stress responses can be in principle triggered by all kinds of different stressors, humans’ actual stress responses are associated with the nature of the stressor (so-called specificity hypothesis; Kemeny, 2003; Lazarus, 1990), i.e., specifically situations that are perceived as threatening trigger HPA axis responses. Overall, multitasking and work interruptions differ from commonly investigated stressors in their nature as they are primarily based on cognitive demands (in contrast to typical threatening psychosocial stressors), especially when induced digitally, i.e., without the direct presence of further persons (i.e., during digital job interviews; Becker et al., 2023). Therefore, with regards to the specificity hypothesis, it remains an open question whether physiological stress responses to multitasking and work interruptions differ between digital and non-digital stressors. For cognitive stressors such as multitasking, both SNS and HPA axis responses have been reported
Multitasking activates the part of the brain that responds to threats. Lmao. Great game design. League has 1400x as many active players and this is probably because it’s a flavor of RTS that has a lower emphasis on multitasking. When multitasking is the primary mode of winning, the quantity of actions is much more important than the quality of actions.
Uthermal’s video proves that beyond doubt. Everyone here can hopefully agree that having a 50% HP handicap is a very bad strategical decision. He’s making dumpster tier strategical decisions, by playing with a 50% handicap, and he wins anyway because the quantity of actions is much more important than the quality of the strategy. High level SC2 is not a strategy game, it’s a multitasking game.
What uthermal did in that video was very impressive, just to be clear. What I am saying is “given this evidence, is the primary mode of winning, in sc2, strategical or mechanical?” and the answer to that is clearly that it’s a mechanical game that favors players with high multitasking ability.
Because, in a multitasking game, quantity matters more than quality. You can do completely brain-dead strategical plays, like having a 50% HP handicap, and you can still win. When quantity matters more than quality, the only thing that SC2 boils down to is APM spammers spamming APM at other APM spammers until one APM spammer has slightly less APM than the other APM spammer, thus making a multitasking mistake, and this mistake compounds into a losing position by increasing the probability they make future multitasking mistakes (because they are now behind). It’s mindless clicking in other words. It’s about spamming very simple actions which are, by definition, the only actions you can do on the time-scales that are required to keep up with the game pacing.
HotS era terrans could kill 8 charge zealots with 3 marines. Literally. That’s the quality of moves that used to happen in sc2. Now it’s waiting 20 minutes to see who makes the first multitasking mistake, i.e. looking in the wrong place at the wrong time. Boom, a fungal connects and the game is over. Big whoop.
It’s time to be optimistic Batzy. The balance counsel has reversed their decision on maps after playing on the new terran map pool https://youtu.be/CxlrhI0vrns?t=3912 They realized the easiest way to impact the meta is with a diverse and numerous pool of maps on the condition that you get loads of veto’s in ladder and tournaments. Harstem even stated that they wanted maps that feel impossible depending on the matchup. You better be preparing your 1 base hive builds, champ.
Yes but that is why pure strategy games can be boring. Like turn based or even warhammer serieswhere you just watch generated armies fight with little to no commanding of it at all.
That is the fun of it, in SC2 it went too extreme: Disruptor, Storm insta kills marines, banes or mines insta kill etc. While EMP complainers cannot complain when they can teleport out and their army doesnt evaporate like from storm.
I remember a game of Innovation vs HuK was either late Hots or early LotV. Storm spam killed a bunch of marines so Inno made a bunch of marauders to win.
I agree SC2 leaves no space for strategy with this pace but I also stay by what I said that multitask skills have to be there, MICRO MACRO mistakes have to be there to differentiate worse players from better players, same is for any RTS, same is for LoL - lose hero like a lamer, no excuse for controls. As I said, slower the pace of dying in SC2 and these skills are meaningful. But SC2 shouldn’t even try to be what it isnt, SC2 is SC2 leave the improvements to new RTS games
Where did I say that SC2 should be purely strategical? Right now, SC2 is purely mechanical. Pointing out that it is purely mechanical in no way implies it should be purely strategical. I am saying the game shouldn’t be 99.9% mechanics. It should be 75% at most. The reason sc2 is a meme to the gaming community is because the game’s design has gone off-the-rails-crazy to require mechanical skills so rare that less than 0.1% of RTS players have them. League has 1400 players for every 1 player of SC2.
Designing SC2 around Serral & Crew is like forcing the entire world to buy lamborghinis. Oh, you needed a school bus! Too bad, we only make lamborghinis. The same logic in any other context is patently absurd, yet it’s the norm in SC2 to the point nobody even realizes it’s there. It’s like air. It’s invisible. That’s how normal it is. To everyone outside the SC2 community, SC2 is a meme. The over-emphasis on mechanics isn’t like air, it’s like trying to swim through molasses. It’s so unnatural and grating, it’s like holding your face against the asphalt while driving down the road. You’d have to be crazy to do it.
The reason Uthermal’s content is so popular is because he is extremely mechanically gifted and this allows him some lenience in what strategies he can do. This proves, unequivocally, that there is a ravenous hunger for more strategy. People are tired of going “wow, this guy clicks so fast, I guess he gets to win the tournament. Wow much apm spam. Total amaze.” It’s not interesting or entertaining.
The most entertaining players of all time were players like SoS, who would do crazy things like put a nexus into a terran’s main. Yes, he won the game with it. That’s the sort of thing that’s entertaining. Go watch the GSL casters react to the nexus and contrast it to the bland, boring casting of modern SC2. The difference is like night and day; it’s so obvious one is fun and the other is BORING.
To quote Asmongold, one of the most popular streamers of all time:
I think that one problem that RTS has is micromanaging multiple bases. If they can figure out a way to allow players to be competitive without having to micromanage multiple bases I think that RTS can keep growing, like, there’s micromanaging multiple bases like, uh, microing units, like those are the two problems that I think RTS games really need to overcome in order for them to be appealing to a mainstream audience. Again, that’s the weakness they have.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xpFMrkO11MU&t=644s
The same argument, mutatis mutandis: the mechanical skills are the most important aspect of the game, to the point they basically delete any other aspect of the game. The other aspects are totally irrelevant. SC2 was designed around the 0.1% most mechanically elite players, and that’s just absurd thing to do. Tone it down a bit. Cut back on the mechanics by 10-15% minimum, and you’d probably double the number of players in the game. Right now, nobody wants that much multitasking. Multitasking legitimately causes the human brain to entire a crisis mode, similar to what would happen if you are in physical danger. Not only did they design it with heavy emphasis on multitasking, they designed it with such an absurdly heavy emphasis that only 0.1% of players can tolerate it.
I can’t stress just how out of the universe crazy the current game state is. When you are losing 1400 to 1, that’s a 99.9% loss rate. SC2 is absolutely getting its butt kicked by other games in the RTS genre. SC2 is bronze in the RTS category and League is Grandmaster. That’s how big of a performance difference there is here.
Ironically that’s exactly what most people like. People like having a heavy emphasis on tactics and strategy. Micromanaging the units to get a better outcome is 99% of League. You can’t have a tactical game unless you have absolutely brutal outcomes for bad tactical decisions. If disruptors aren’t capable of causing game ending moments, then they don’t affect the game outcome. What affects the game outcome, then? Multitasking does. When you remove tactical and strategical win-cons from the game, you force players to win using other asymmetries and the only asymmetry left is multitasking. You can’t create asymmetrical outcomes using micro anymore.
In the GSL, Ryung lost 5 medivacs (and all the bio) due to bad micro and it just didn’t matter. SC2 is not a tactical game. It is not a strategical game. Tactical & strategical asymmetries were removed from the game, because players whined when a fungal melted their whole army. The only asymmetry left is multitasking.
That’s ironic because WoW has the same problem. How often do you see new content be released and the players that have already mastered the game mechanically beat it in a few days and then cancel their subscription. When you have hundreds of thousands of players playing millions of games and sharing everything, strategy is the easiest thing to be ironed out yet mechanics is locked behind a certain amount of practice. So mechanics are usually the last thing holding back players.
From a developer perspective it’s almost impossible to appease the current player base and have a new strategy come out every year. Look at the time that they removed macro mechanics and how much backlash they received.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lco9Ki-5qfQ
Yes community backlash is a very real concern that I am sure game designers are quite sensitive to. Hearthstone has a way around this. There are different formats that you can play. Some formats are more lenient and experimental. So if players don’t like experimenting with new & exciting builds, they can play the “standard” format.
I’ve often thought that the way SC2 win cons work is pretty lame. You have to kill all their buildings. That’s the ultimate win con. Why not make it so that if a Zerg loses all his queens, he loses the the game? You always have to have at least 1 queen or the zerg loses. That would be interesting. Similar things could apply to terran and orbital commands. You have to have at least 1 orbital or your army can’t communicate and you lose. There’s all sorts of fun things that could be experimented with in a “wild” ladder format.
I suspect, over time, you’d find most players would play wild, rather than standard.
Sources:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KaXWXtg1Qe4&t=1247s
That’s always going to be true regardless of the game or genre. This is more an issue with what asymmetries are available to leverage for a win condition. When GSL players can mis-micro their medivacs, losing 5 of them, and still win, asymmetries in micro are not relevant to the outcome anymore. Really what they’ve done is they’ve reduced the impact of strategical and tactical asymmetries to the point they are almost irrelevant, and now players have to rely on multitasking to win. Multitasking is an asymmetry that comes from the player, and not the game, so the game’s outcome is entirely decided by factors external to the actual game. That’s why Serral wins, wins, and wins some more, even though the balance trajectory of zerg has been steeply downward (he’s the best multitasker).
This is a laughable supposition because Serral only recently realized you can dodge a probe block with a 15 hatch. It’s not easy to iron-out the strategies. It’s not. The reason SC2 strategy seems easy to master is because one strategy has an overwhelming dominance over all other strategies, and that strategy is called: apm spam. Macro strategies favor players who are mechanically gifted, and that’s how you end up with a dude winning every tournament under the sun yet being so slow to figure out he can dodge a probe block with a sooner hatchery.
Optimizing a build is as ez pz as “does this help me maximize my drone count or not?”. It’s a very easy goal to optimize your builds towards. If you want to win with a 1 base hive rush, you need completely different goals because the win-cons are different. That means optimizing variables in a totally different fashion. Having a high drone count can, ironically, be an impediment. This complicates the strategy of the game, and player’s don’t like that: they like simplifications, not complications. Different win cons require optimizing variables towards totally different goals, and that jacks the complexity through the roof.
It’s way easier to figure out how to get an econ lead & to leverage a multitasking advantage. Let’s get to where I can do more attacks than my opponent can handle and I will use my superior multitasking to hammer him from several angles until he breaks. That’s why SC2 strategy is so simple. It’s because this strategy is bonkers overpowered compared to all the others. Players like it because it simplifies the strategical element of the game.
If I am doing a 1 base hive rush, I need a way to limit the economic growth of my opponent to 1 base as well. That means I need control over his natural, and I need map control to eliminate the possibilities of counter attacks. I also need lots of time, because hive is very slow to get out. This means a proxy hatch & creep in their natural, followed by a lurker ambush with hold-positioned lurkers, which will reset his army while you rush to hive. The added advantage of the creep is that he will be low on scans, which makes the lurkers better since they have burrow evasion. After that, you need a win con from hive. Since you have lurkers and your opponent is on 1 base, a single viper can start pulling tanks and libs into your lurkers. This means lurkers have a range advantage, and that’s an asymmetry you can leverage for a win.
That’s a strategy. “I am going to maximize my drone count, scout for any timing attacks, and hammer him from 90 drones with 3 attack angles until he breaks”, isn’t a strategy. That’s just multitasking. There is a bit of strategy in the best way to optimize your drone count while taking the least damage to timing attacks, but, beyond that, it’s an entirely mechanical.
Here is a good example. This build gets the hive before your natural even finishes, lmao:
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2099876902?t=3h59m02s
What’s unique about builds like the above is that they win without mass drones & without upgrades, and they use a very wonky unit comp which in this case was swarm host ultralisk queen. Winning in standard without upgrades is basically impossible. Beating bio with swarmhosts is impossible. Beating terran with 1 base hive is impossible. Beating a terran on 1 base is basically impossible (it happens rarely at pro level, usually after a failed proxy rax, but still very rare). Builds like this are a nexus of impossibilities, and it all comes down to the fact that if you just spam workers & upgrades, you have such an insane lead that it’s insurmountable with any other combination of variables. The only way to beat a worker/upgrade spammer is to spam workers and upgrades yourself. That makes the game heavily multitasking favored, because with lots of workers comes lots of bases to manage and lots of units to macro, position, and micro. TLDR, SC2 becomes an APM spam game because economical players are too powerful.
I can tell you almost certainty what went through their mind. They know that it’s technically impossible for an asymmetrical game to be balanced, so they made the asymmetries of the game irrelevant to the outcome. This fixes the balance issue because the balance of the game doesn’t impact the outcome – the player’s multitasking skill does. A consequence of having a strategical/tactical game is that one faction is going to be better than the other. That’s reality. The proper way to fix this is to have seasonal variety, where they shake-up the balance to favor a new faction. Maybe that can be achieved with the map pool. But, the emphasis on mechanics was almost certainly a remedy to the balance situation.
Instead of making these useless patches, why don’t you guys actually patch up any vulnerabilities that allow hackers to hack your game? OP useless.
Dude, did you ever played any team shooter game?
My brother is sort of pro gamer in one of those, and he and his teammates are spending countless hours figuring out the strategy of how to attack certain chokepoing, how and where to defend and etc. Because at the highest level of play this really matters.
On the slightly lower level of play it also matters, as long as there are no mechanically stronger player around. I have many thousands of hours in that particular game, however in a duel with a pro - just a handful of people really - I would get like 2 or 3 out of 10. In other words a pro is likely to knock me out even if he pushes from unfavorable position and me having an advantage.
Yet strategy still matters on regular level of play. If people know what key points they need to take - even by drowning enemies in bodies - it could lead to victory even for objectively weaker team.
Same in StarCraft. People who click twice as fast as you and have smaller reaction time will win almost no matter what.
If you want a game purely disconnected from mechanical skill you should look in direction of HoMM3… but even then mechanical skill matters still because faster clicks allows you to save more time on timer by the end of the game and these seconds may decide the fate of the game.
Nah, its because in SC2 cyberbullying and bad manners are normalized. By freaks like aforementioned uThermal, and by casters who gaslight people via balance whining (e.g. LowkoTV - nearly every popular caster does that - but he stands as example because once upon a time he did made a good content).
It would be unfair not to mention that some units have an INSANE micro potential. That is person who click very fast can make unit many times more effective compared to those who don’t.
I mean I don’t know how we draw this conclusion moba is popular since one unit means 20 apm game they are literally popular because they are easy to play. Back when dota came about in wc3 more people used custom lobbies than played wc3 and they thought that game was too hard and it was snails pace compared to this. All of my buddies then found the normal rts modes in games hard and all loved how easy dota was. They wanted to make the skill ceiling high and unfortunately that was a mistake that its now far to late to fix if the game had a lower skill ceiling it would have been much more successful IMO.