Hi,
Today I decided to give a try to the Hard achievements, and once again was shocked at the game speed increase.
After watching a replay (that has a game speed you can change, thus serving as reference), I can tell Faster is definitely much slower, but Faster x2 may be slightly faster.
Could the speed in Hard be Faster 1.5x or 1.8x?
What about Brutal?
Listening to…or rather reading your opinions.
edit: just in case, I’m saying I’m playing on EU servers, let’s not exclude the possibility regions have “adjustments”.
edit2: experimental protocol for best answer in post 15 of this topic
Both Hard and Brutal are set to faster game speed, Normal is normal speed so the gap is fairly large.
This wasn’t the case in the past, originally Hard was set to fast but was changed about a year or so ago.
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I kind of felt as if Harder was a bit slower than Brutal too.
Was very annoying to me, but I did not confirm if it’s just my mind (less action, more chill) or real in-game timer stuff.
Maybe you were matched with a normal ally? In Hard- (or normal +) games the speed is slower than in brutal or standard hard game.
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But I mean… that small difference even if detectable by perception does it make a difference?
Like Rick said, it is suppose to be Faster ever since the change to Hard to better match it.
Also, when you say you’re using replay as a reference. And since you are then what is the actual difference in seconds between this game and another brutal game? Simply calculate the difference in time to find out. Why guess at if it’s 1.5 or 1.8, or even discuss about “it felt slower…?”
Yes, I play Hard to get small XPs very fast. Decreasing game speed is annoying 
What I’m trying to point out is objectively OP can literally calculate if there is an actual slow down. The question if it runs at 1.5 or 1.8 is questionable.
Nobody enjoys playing slower if they can help it. It is literally the reason why bliz originally changed Hard speed to faster.
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Hard is very stressful to me, but there are players that casually play in Brutal, and go in Hard when they want to take it easy.
Those players inputs would be useful, as I set the replay speed as a reference (and it should be the same for everyone), so they don’t need to know the speed of Normal or Casual to answer.
The big thing with hard and brutal is you really want to get your macro (both bases) up quickly.
You also want to be balancing making units vs teching vs making more production structures. Don’t make 6 gateways when you only have 3 zealots on the map (not saying you do this) but don’t be floating 1000 minerals with only 1 gateway either . Hard to perfectly explain this but there is science to balancing early unit production vs more production structures vs teching.
It’s kind of helpful and important to learn how to get by with minimal units and hero or top bar early on while you macro up.
But also don’t just go to 2 bases and full tech / upgrades before making units.
You kind of want to know the amount of stuff you need to get through each segment of the mission, have planning with your macro to afford what you need while also working up to higher tech / research/ upgrades.
But if you kind of know okay I need 60ish supply army to push into second set of Void Thrasher either from calculation or from feel it helps just kind of knowing what you need instinctively for each timing of the mission, then striving (practicing) macro wise to reach that amount.
The time factor for Fast is 1.2 and for Faster is 1.4.
So to confirm the Coop game speeds, I timed two TotP runs, one on Hard and one on Brutal. (I moused over my ally to make sure they had queued for the same difficulty.)
Both Hard and Brutal worked out to be ~26.2 game mins / ~18.4 real mins = ~1.4
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You probably meant 26 game minutes and 18 real.
Oh! Yep, I put them backwards. Fixed it. Thanks!
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Sometimes, i really feel that the SCVs or probes are moving slower.
It’s probably just lag imo, and that’s why I pointed out to OP about actually calculating. We’ve probably all had games where it felt “slow” but when you mouse over only to find you are on the exact same difficulty.
For the record, here is the experimental protocol that would answer to me the best:
- Have a chronometer (or equivalent ready)
- Start a game in Hard or Brutal, starting the chronometer when the ingame timer would start moving
- At some point (can be end of game), stop the chronometer and write down the ingame time
- Launch in pause the replay of the game, setting the speed as Faster, then start the game and the chronometer
- Stop the chronometer at the ingame time at which you had stopped it in the live game
- Divide the time it took in the live game by the time it look in the replay.
- The result of the calculation is what I’m looking for
There’s a possibility that some accelerations I see would not be accounted for because the ingame timer is not tightly tied to everything, but then there’s nothing that can be done.
I calculated the time factor for both a live game in Hard and Brutal above. They were both the expected 1.4.
As for replays, I’m not at home to check, but from what I’m remembering, don’t they just use interger multipliers (2x, 4x, 8x)? If so, they aren’t going to line up with live game speeds.
If replays don’t use the integer multipliers, since I already have the live game timings, I’ll compare them to the replay timings when I get home.
Levi literally did exactly that (for you) and showed it in his initial post. He went further (as seen above) to remind you again because he’s nice lol. Replay doesn’t alter the game speed unless you manually increased it to 2x, 4x, 8x, etc. So the 2nd part of your “protocol” is stupidly useless.
[Here’s why it’s stupid. Let’s say replay (as you believe) somehow changes the actual game speed (ie. there is a difference between Brutal-actual-game-time vs replay-of-Brutal-game-time). After your 2nd part of the test, it would just prove exactly that. The actual game time for said game hasn’t nor will it change while you play, which is WHAT MATTERS. Similarly, since both Brutal and Hard were tested by Levi, then it already proves there’s no actual difference in-game speed (both at 1.4 faster). So you’re just complicating and over-complicating it further because you have a very poor understanding to begin with.]
I am so baffled on why you 1) don’t want to believe him and 2) continue without testing it yourself. At some point, you either have a basic trust in the people that genuinely helped you and did the work for you or you don’t… in which case, then you better put your own effort where your mouth is.
Cuz I mean seriously bud, do you not own a phone or a clock at home? Or is it too difficult to start up 1 x Brutal + 1 x Hard game for 3min on SC2?
I was slightly off about the available replay speeds. There are Normal, Faster, Faster x2, Faster x4, and Faster x8.
I compared the timing of a real game vs its replay that was set to “Faster”:
~26.4 game min / ~19 real mins = ~1.4
So a replay’s “Faster” speed is the same as a game’s “Faster” speed.
No, you read wrong if you think that.
Based on the data he provided, I would need a replay of a game lasting 26.2 game minutes, then see how long it takes for it to finish in real time, and divide that time by his 18.4.
I would thus obtain a value that I expected to be between 1 (equal to “Faster” speed") and 2 (equivalent to Faster x2 setting, but I believe it’s below that).
@Leviathan: thanks for your data. Based on your latest post, with 19/18.4, it would mean it’s “Faster x1.032”, lower than I thought, so maybe there really are factors beyond what is recorded as “game speed” to cause the difference 
.
But thank you again for the data.
Don’t compare the times alone. The length of time I measured in the live game and in the replay are different.
What has to be compared are the ratios (time factors) of the two:
Game: 1.42
Replay: 1.38
The variance of hundreths is from small inconsistencies from starting and stopping the stopwatch and so they can be dismissed.
So it shows that the 1.4 factor for “Faster” is what both the game and the replay use.
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