And I think the reason is because balance isn’t in check. I’m just not going to get into details. You know who I am. What I believe in.
There is a bonjwa and his name is Serral. What gives a player the ability to dominate regardless of game design and balance? The ability to multitask for long periods of time. They shifted the eco of the game from 1-3 base plays (to 5-7) for the specific reason of making multitasking the dominate factor of the game. Since multitasking is a player trait it obfuscates balance issues, but that’s equivalent to saying the game design is no longer relevant. In game factors like the HP of a lurker aren’t capable of being tweaked to a sufficient degree that they can overcome the advantage of having superior multitasking. This means balance can’t be adjusted to impact premier tournament finals, which permanently cements the 1 or 2 or 3 strongest multitaskers as the top players.
This was a colossal design mistake because the gaming market was headed towards less multitasking (and endurance), and they did this because it’s obvious that gamers don’t like multitasking (nor endurance), but SC2 went the opposite way and paid the price for doing so. It went from the king of esports to a meme of spamming apm faster than the other guy.
This destroyed the strategy of the game because it prioritizes speed over quality. This has become so extreme that top tournaments often see massive strategical mistakes that end up not mattering because the strategically advantaged player makes a multitasking mistake that decides the game outcome. A perfect example of this is hero losing 7 void rays for free to 1 bile – the better you are at multitasking, the less likely things like this will happen.
If you graph quality of chess moves vs time spent thinking about the moves, there is an obvious correlation. The longer the player thinks about the moves, the higher the quality of the moves, and this quality takes a nose dive at about the 1 second mark. Almost all SC2 decisions are made in the sub-second time range, with most of them being in the 0.05 second range. The emphasis on speed has made it impossible for strategy to impact the game because strategical thinking simply can’t happen on these time scales.
SC2 is no longer an RTS game: it’s in a new category called “EAM” aka “Endurance and Multitasking” because those are the dominant factors that decide who wins and who loses. What little strategy is left is adjacent to these two factors – players make strategical decisions specifically to avoid scenarios where their multitasking load increases or where they’d have to play a longer game.
The fundamental issue of long term game viability is that games draw in players because players like the game the way that it is. You can remix the game design only so many times while keeping it within the design constraints of what your player base likes, and that puts a limit on how long until the player base gets bored. You can only remix the same thing so many times before it’s the same thing. After this limit is reached, the only way to keep content fresh is to do something so new that your player base won’t like it. Long term game viability is about cycling between multiple games that are liked for different reasons, and SC2 is currently the odd one out in the cycle.
I think they underestimate the options available to the RTS genre, but they will make their die hard fanbase of apm spammers mad if they explore those options. A good example of this is how the pro scene had an existential crisis over the HP of rocks on the map Crimson Court. They can’t explore what the game would look like with different parameters when those parameters go too far from what the existing player base likes. So you have to be willing to push boundaries a bit and make the crybabies mad in order to broaden the game’s options and push back the limit of boredom. In a bad situation you still want to get the most value out of it that you can, so you salt mine the crybabies for drama and try to generate user engagement from that in a sort of drama tv type setup. This would allow you to annoy your existing player base a bit while you broaden the game’s horizons and push it towards new possibilities.
SC2 has this problem more severely than other games because pro players get triggered by something as simple as the HP of rocks. They need to do way crazier things to save starcraft than merely tweaking rock HP values. They need 1 base maps and island maps and 50 base maps and maps with 1 mineral patch and maps with 100 mineral patches. They need maps with center spawns and corner spawns and maps where you spawn IN THE SAME BASE as your opponent. They need waypoint capture and capture the flag and race to max bank and hold-out challenges. The options are limitless if you stop listening to the crybabies in the pro scene.
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