Negative feedback is more common than positive feedback. This causes businessmen to overestimate the size and magnitude of negative feelings within the consumer base. It’s important to remember the negative voices are louder.
Consumers take advantage of this to gaslight businesses into giving them free stuff, lowering prices etc, and because the business is being hit with so much negative feedback it can feel like their position is unreasonable and they often cave. When making a sale for a car, for example, you will run into 10 or 20 people who will try to gaslight you into lowering the price before finding the one who will buy it for fair market value.
The bottom line of a business takes a short dip after implementing big changes, this is known as the J-curve. This happens because employees have to adapt to the changes and that takes time so productivity dips in the meantime. Analogizing this to SC2, people will freak out over balance changes but later on come to terms with it after they play a bit and adapt. If problems persist later on, you can always fine tune it a month or two or three down the road.
People on Reddit are having a melt down, most notably PiG who is going “full avilo” and saying, more or less, “screw the player base, clem vs hero is all that matters” and it’s important to tune out this overly negative and highly emotional feedback. It’s not based on reality because the PTR has only been live for a few days, nobody knows where it’s at right now and most of them probably haven’t played any games on the PTR, so anyone who asserts confidently that they know all the answers simply isn’t a reasonable voice and should be tuned out. Listen to the calm, cool, collected voices of reasonable community members.
There is one point in particular that PiG made that I want to address specifically and it’s the idea that the game should be balanced around Clem vs Hero and all other levels should be ignored. This is absurd and dangerous thinking. The game is already hemorrhaging casual players. Pro play is important and should be considered but the idea that the casuals are irrelevant is plain insane. Casual players won’t care what happens in Hero vs Clem if their own gaming experience is negative. The bedrock of the game is the casual player. Do not ignore them. Anyone who says otherwise is absolutely crazy.
With that in mind, I would fine tune the liberator. It’s seems over-tuned. The radius seems like a bit too much. I’d try putting it somewhere in between the current version and the PTR version, or maybe tune the width parameter separately from the height to keep zone control but reduce mineral harass potential. There is a very strong sentiment that protoss is getting nerfed and is too weak in PvT and that the ghost is evading a much needed nerf in general. This sentiment is strong enough that even Clem and Jason (both terran players) think the ghost is too strong. You can kill two birds with one stone by reducing the strength of the ghost. People think EMP is too strong vs Protoss and that Snipe is too good vs Zerg. Please consider a small nerf to the ghost to throw the community a bone. I personally don’t like the idea of nerfing the ghost, and I am a zerg player, but this is probably the strongest community sentiment because it’s a nexus point of their three main complains. You can fix all three with a supply or gas cost increase to the ghost.
This doesn’t affect the strength of an individual ghost but would affect the strength of mass ghosts. It would be a nerf to the unit comp but only when made in large numbers. This fixes mass snipe vs zerg and infinite emp vs protoss, and it will help community members feel like protoss is getting some help at the tournament-winning level. A supply cost increase would be the most severe, and a minor cost increase, such as 25 more gas ghost, would be a less severe nerf. There’s a nice range of options depending on what you want to do and what you think the community will be satisfied by.
In terms of Clem calling for a Ghost nerf, I wonder if it’s just Clem seeing the writing on the wall and getting out of the way of the hate train before he gets hit in the face by it.
Yeah, that’s a possibility. The counsel is adding a lot of nerfs to terran late game in general that have an indirect impact on the ghost. For example, the hive tech hydra jump upgrade will allow hydras to burst on the ghosts & cancel the snipes. I’ve done a lot of mass hydra plays in ZvT at a GM level and a big limitation is getting the hydras forward fast enough to stop the snipes going off. Including infestors doesn’t really work the hydras and infestors compete for space. The infestors help vs liberators but not too much vs the ghosts. They work in brood infestor vs ghost but not with hydras. You don’t really have a satisfactory way to cancel snipes. That’s probably why it’s a hive tech upgrade too. But there are a lot of changes like that that will impact TvZ lategame without nerfing the ghost directly. A strong ghost isn’t a problem per se as long as there are counter play options.
He already got a decent hit after his Esports world cup win. Reddit did explode in a way that I can’t remember. Maybe when Rogue talked about swarm host nydus in 2019ish. Still I think he’s just bored of the meta and wants to win a tournament when it’s Terran that is underpowered.
Mass zerglings, banelings and roaches already hard counters ghosts as they do not have aoe damage to deal with these Zerg units.
All you need to block the snipe is to deal a single attack on the ghost. You don’t even need to kill the ghost.
Ghosts are already glass canon. Their HP are low and they are immobile when trying to cast their snipe making them very vulnerable to attack.
What you are proposing will essentially make ghost from a support unit to a completely garbage unit as like you said it would be easy for Zerg to take out the ghosts.
That’s equivalent to asking for Infestor’s or vipers to have the same HP as zergling.
So as conclusions ghosts are fine and players should figure out how to counter them instead of calling for unwarranted nerfs just because they do not know how to handle mass ghosts.
You can upgrade the roach movement speed to be faster than ghosts. You can also do creep spreading to give your army massive significant speed while on creep.
Asides from that, mass zerglings costs only minerals and already have the ability to outrun ghosts.
Nah that’s exaggerating.
If the Terran does a pure Ghost army anyway, that is pretty stupid anyway because they will get obliterated by mass zerglings/banelings and roaches.
As powerful as sniping might be, it is easily stopped by dealing a single attack on the ghost.
And if the Terran have the economy to mass produce Ghosts against you, this likely means you have already lost the economy war as ghosts are pretty expensive to train and takes some time to produce.
Mass zerglings/banelings and roaches do hard counter ghosts because of two following reasons:
The speed of the Zerg army especially on creep
Ghosts lack of AOE damage means they do not trade efficiently against mass cheap units
Not vs a functional unit comp. In a vacuum it goes either way depending on positioning and control but I’d say it favors the ghosts a bit. VS an actual unit comp like (liberator ghost) roaches/lings/banelings are absolutely useless. Hydra infestor nydus provides a much better solution because you can microbial and stutter under the liberators (the hydra dash will help with that) and the hydras have enough range to trigger snipe cancels as well as have enough DPS to kill the ghosts. Mass snipe can be deadly so you simply need a way to get the ghosts and liberators apart and you do that by making lurkers and nydusing his main or a far off base. Ghost require active management while liberators do not, so he will prefer to move the ghosts over moving the liberators to deal with the lurkers. That means you have a chance to push a base with microbial. If he responds with liberators, it means he isn’t managing his ghosts and they are useless without active management so you still engage and fungal the ghosts. Dash will obviously make this much easier.
I am assuming that you do not find mass zerglings/banelings/roaches to be functional or as an ideal counter to mass ghosts due to the presence of siege tanks.
If this is the case, then I would say mass Ghosts are never the problem. It’s just that tanks have to be powerful in order for Terran to keep up with the Swarm’s fast production. Anyway viper’s existence do limit the power of tanks and so there’s no balance issue.
Anyway Starcraft is a game of strategy and so players should be creative in dealing with their potential threats and do not necessarily need to engage their opponents head on.
Tactics like drops, harass, base trading and multi prong attack do help to turn the tide of the war instead of fighting head on and hence there isn’t need to call for unwarranted nerfs.
Siege tanks are usually really bad because their splash cancels the ghost snipes.
Correct.
The siege tank limits itself via being a specialist with mobility vulnerabilities. That’s how units should be – strengths and weaknesses. The trade-off to being strong is specialization, aka the loss of generality. That’s what creates strategy. The siege tank is perhaps the most strategical unit in the game and so you can beat it purely through strategy and don’t even need things like vipers. I’ve been to mid GM with pure mass hydralisk and I do this even vs blueflame hellion mech players which in theory should hard counter hydras. That’s how you know the siege tank is strategical: it can be countered by the things it counters if the situation is right. The unit itself isn’t strong per se, it’s how you use it that makes it strong.
Correct. Mech in general is extremely weak and that’s true to the point you can’t consider it a “real” unit comp. It’s a meme comp. I like the new patch because I think it’s going to make mech quite a bit stronger. The immortal nerf will help thors and tanks. The thor buffs will help vs skytoss. The disruptor nerfs will help thors and hellbats vs disruptors. Disruptors are perhaps the hardest counter that protoss has to mech due to the range and the inability of mech units to dodge.
After further inspection of the broodlord and hydra changes, it’s pretty clear from a zerg perspective that the ghost is totally fine. Protoss are still losing their minds over PvT and how strong the ghost is in PvT but then again protoss are doing really well in win-rates and so I am think they are just wrong. There is no reason to nerf the ghost.
Wardi seems to really like the energy overcharge ability. He says that the #1 goal of this patch should be to “under no circumstances” revert to battery overcharge. He continues by saying battery overcharge had highly predictable outcomes (toss army is smaller → overcharge → terran disengages) and that the energy recharge ability is much less predictable.
HeavenSC, a 5500ish protoss, also says he loves the patch and is fine with the disruptor and immortal changes. He says the issue of PvT is scouting and that the energy overcharge ability fixes that (hallucinated phoenix). He expressed skepticism for the liberator girth upgrade. I can’t link to his twitch vod, however.
Does someone need to explain to PiG that the ladder equalizes win-rates to 50/50, making the statistic useless unless the ladder equalization is corrected for? If Protoss has an advantage for long enough the ladder simply removes the difference in win-rate by promoting the protoss and demoting the zergs. If that’s the case we’d expect there to be a difference in the number of protoss and zergs which is exactly what’s observed. So the win-rate he quotes is almost certainly BS. This is the trouble with letting people balance the game without a trained statistician to interpret the data. It turns out people who play video games are bad at interpreting data. More shocking news at 11.
Lol, kept listening and PiG falsifies his own theory by admitting the balance changes have not affected the historical win-rates at all. He says this to make the claim that the balance counsel can’t affect the ladder. But what it really proves is that the ladder is good at equalizing win-rates so if the win-rates are constant then the ladder functions exactly how we know the ladder functions. Great job at proving the obvious, PiG.
If this is indicative of the quality of balance discussions happening behind the scenes, SC2 is in deep doodoo. These arguments are insanely bad and display a very deep misunderstanding of how these systems work. It’s obvious they are pushing hard to balance the game for professionals and professionals alone, and that will hurt the casual player base which is the bedrock of SC2.
You can’t even measure balance at the Serral level because it’s impossible to disentangle balance from the individual players’ skill levels. Balancing around Serral will be equivalent to equalizing a skill gap and that will make the game imbalanced on an equal skill and equal effort basis. It will create imbalance.
The proper way to measure ladder balance is to calculate per matchup MMR ratings. You adjust each player’s MMR ranking according to their matchup win-rate. You take the average of this for a large and randomly selected group of people. Then you take the difference between matchups for that average. This eliminates the inherent luck on the ladder. It eliminates the impact of promotion and demotion on the ladder. It eliminates the skill differences between players. It measures raw balance. It just sounds like they have nobody there to calculate these stats for them so they are just bumbling around in the dark while being gaslit with misleading arguments while pressured to buff protoss for the tournament viewer value.
Imagine enrolling in a statistics class and telling the professor you measured the income of Australia by sampling only Portsea which has an average income of $218k/year. The professor wouldn’t be sure if he should laugh or cry. Apparently everyone is a millionaire in Australia. It’s a classic cherry picking argument that holds no water whatsoever. It is mind boggling to see these logical errors used so flagrantly. I’m truly amazed.
I get that the balance counsel is a group of video game enthusiasts who are donating their time, but I can’t help but be frustrated by the clear lack of expertise. If this is any indication of what’s going on behind the scenes, I don’t think they know what they are doing, at all. I would step up to the plate except that I don’t want to deal with the headache of constantly correcting everyone all the time. It’s like herding cats. That and I am neck deep in other investments so I don’t have the time other than to throw out the occasional bit of advice. They really need to hire a phd level statistician or computer scientists. I bet if you took it to a university professor he’d make a class project out of it. Just don’t be surprised when GM was an accurate indication of balance all along
I would say the biggest problem with nerfing the ghost is the ghost serves as the only viable counter to a lot of common strategies. the ghost in the games current state is necessary but at the same time so good at what it does its causing problems. several units added by blizzard for sc2 have caused quite a few problems like the mass free unit spam of swarm hosts broodlords and infestors in the past or the whole warp gate mechanic forcing protoss gateway units to be much weaker than they probably should be just to counter the rapid reinforcement capability. Then widow mines have caused quite a bit of grief for how easy they are to use and get value out of compared to the required skill to deal with them, liberator range being absolutely so broken that maps had to be designed around them specifically to prevent god spots where the liberator would be completely invulnerable to ground units and defense structures while still being able to deny mining. and the queen having to be so powerful on the defense because zerg have literally no other options against air units until they can start getting out corruptors vipers and infestors.
suprisingly out of all the terran units that actually need buffed a bit, the viking is always over looked. maybe give the ghost a nerf but buff up the vikings to counter air better and to reinforce the ground army better. Vikes in penguin mode are decent with alot of ground in the early game but fall off to the way side in the late game, and them being an anti air unit is a complete joke, when they fold like a wet noodle to every air unit in the game that shoots other air units. If the vike was given proper attention then the ghost wouldnt need to be so powerful in the first place.
I’m fairly certain that Vikings perform fine against air as long as some outside interference such as Storm or Parasitic Bomb is not involved. If you disagree, please elaborate when and why.
for one the only air unit that shoot back that there good against is the tempest, every other unit destroys vikings. so theres that. there suppose to be good against both carriers and bcs but both will obliterate vikings in a head to head fight most of the time. Dont get me started on how bad they are agianst muta phenix and libs, especially muta. I play zerg my self and usually have no problem taking fights 2-1 and completely destroying them when im out numbered by far greater numbers, corrupters not so much but they still decimate vikes.
all im saying is if they were a little bit better that you could easily nerf ghost.
