Why do people act like balance is an excuse for bad design?

I’ve come back to the game recently after taking a hiatus over the summer. I was pretty obsessed with regaining my rank and after I did that I felt satisfied and took myself out of the “I need to play standard and try to win every game” mentality that I’ve used as a competitive player for years I’ve come back to the game renewed with a desire to try out all the differing ways the game can be played. For the first time in a long time I have been trying to play this game for enjoyment rather than for competition. The keyword there is try.
I have to preface that I love SC2 and I don’t think it’s badly designed wholesale. Rather there are just blatant bandaids for the developer’s inability to come up with solutions for problems they created.
I play Z and for those of you living under a rock Skytoss is really annoying to play against right now because unless the Protoss is an absolute idiot a direct route to 3 bases and skytoss is guaranteed unless you A perform a very tight all in with roaches and queens or you get 6 bases make a million spores and grind out the game from there.
It’s pretty balanced all things considered. However it’s horribly designed. Whenever I bring this up people call me BM or balance whining when in fact no, I actually DO NOT think SC2 is horribly imbalanced in a way that’s noticeable unless you’re at the top levels.
However a P player can sit in their base with batteries and canons and walk their way up to carriers without any fear that the Zerg can do ANYTHING to hinder them if they have more than 100 APM. It makes the game infuriating. It doesn’t matter if it’s bAlaNcEd or not. Any RTS game where a race or nation can sit back while essentially do nothing on the map and create a doom army creates a boring game.
Speed or tech does not matter against battery cannon voidray. You cannot trade into batteries and cannons unless the P doesn’t know what they’re doing so you either have to go super all in or the P gets to carriers and now you have to play a super long turtle game.
You can disagree with me that it’s bad design but I’d like to hear your thoughts on why it is not. The way I got my M1 rank back was by learning how to 55 drone ravager queen all in against EVERY P and guess what? I stopped scouting because every P opens void ray no matter what. It’s just boring that the state of the game is like that.
I don’t think it’s imbalanced, it’s just design. A P can press a button on a battery and the base is defended. It removes any ability to out position/out speed the P player removing any need for mechanical skill. The macro isn’t difficult at all. Build batteries, cannons, stargates on a map pool where it’s super easy to get 3 bases and herp derp go across the map and kill any Zerg who doesn’t have 800 spore crawlers and 1000 corruptors.
Feel free to flame me but this isn’t about balance. I don’t struggle against skytoss because I know how to play against it, it’s just boring and annoying to know how EVERY game is going to play out.
I can’t help but feel the reason the game has been designed this way is because Blizzard couldn’t reconcile that Protoss has the best armies in the game that you can never efficiently trade against without superior position and static D and the tradeoff that requires for balance being weakness in the early/mid game.
Because Protoss sucks in the early-mid game when played like a normal race the Photon Overcharge/MSC from Hots was a solution, then the pylon overcharge, and now the battery overcharge.
It’s a stupid mechanics and no amount of balance is going to change how boring it makes a game like SC2 when what people really want out of this game is a fast paced back and forth duel, not people sitting in their bases playing tower defense.

11 Likes

Some mix the words but it is what I call too, design. Poorly designed protoss units made for cheap low apm wins, and only one poorly made terran unit of that type (widow mine). But protoss has history of bad design - shooting pylons, shooting nexi, batteries in offense

3 Likes

I don’t see how the design of the game could have been kept this way for this long. It’s like the developers just decided at one point “Well I guess we can’t make Protoss function like a normal race so you get to play plants vs zombies until the late game”

4 Likes

Road to gm when? 20 c

1 Like

It’s an example of the “too big to fail” mega-corps hiring randos with big university credentials but no real intelligence nor passion who do the “just enough to get by” levels of work which is plenty for a “too big to fail” project. It’s always amazed me how the universities require a PhD to teach, which requires vigorous university indoctrination by other people who did the same, none of whom have ever been successful in the real world because they are too busy hiding away in their cult giving each other medals for faux accomplishments. The best games out there are basement projects from random people who decided they wanted to make a game. For example, Valheim and Subnautica and Minecraft. The mega-corps couldn’t buy that kind of creativity and passion from a university if they payed a millions dollars. Universities are good at cranking out carbon-copy clones to fill typical societal roles. Cutting-edge game development requires a person to be exceptional with outlandish ideas which is the very kind of attitude the universities try to quash.

4 Likes

You’re writing has improved drastically since your first post. That one was great. Loved the ambition. Always good to see an old face

2 Likes

Your words echo similar sentiments from the community, Roboroadkill - you are not alone.

The ease with which Protoss currently slides into mid/late game impact both PvT and PvZ in unfavorable ways.

Since the last balance patch it wasn’t as evident until now, given the time for Protoss players to understand and utilize the potential afforded them. Complaints have only recently begun to truly escalate as this has become more and more apparent and frustrating to deal with.

1 Like

Have you ever tried holding down the drone button to get ahead economically?

1 Like

Have you ever tried holding down the drone button to get ahead economically?

That’s called standard play. 3 base saturation for example is where Zerg reaches it’s power spike. In the current meta that favors Protoss.

1 Like

I play teams cause I’m old now. I just played 2 Masters, with 2 noobs on my team. This is kind of a regular thing. And even when the “league matchups” are fair, they aren’t fair. Cause you’ll more than half the time see a Plat or Diamond who is worse than me at Gold. But I can’t rank up in teams to save my life cause I just can’t win 1v3 consistently.

Now, they’re saturating 3s with nothing but $$MAPS$$. As if mass skytoss wasn’t already an issue. Now they are basically soliciting it. Morons.

1 Like

It’s brings a smile to my face that people still remember BS I spouted when I was 13. Glad I was able to make people’s days more interesting xD

2 Likes

I have never heard of this tactic. In my 7 years of playing Zerg it never occurred to me that taking advantage of Zerg’s greatest strength (production) would be a viable way of winning games…

My point is that it’s the ONLY way you can win games vs Skytoss unless you all in. There isn’t diverging game paths. Either ravager queen all in or go to a massive economy. That’s it. And it’s because the Protoss just builds batteries and cannons and can never be assaulted. Kinda dumb

5 Likes

Good to know I’m not alone. However I fear that despite the complaints nothing will be done to remedy this issue.

2 Likes

PvZ design was always weird with Z being ablr to facerroll P with tons of grounds units.What changed is that now they cant facerroll with air units during lategame too. If a P does not make air,will lose to several compositions and then to lurkers when they get out,because lurker counter most of the ground units except disruptors,but once Z has vipers it id just pulling everything and win.

P air (some void nerf carrier is fine) should be nerfed and lurkers too because against T they are also too good unless the T has 20ghosts.

“Lurkers are good against Terran unless Terran counters the lurkers.”

High level TvZ is fine on both ends, it literally needs no adjustments, just map balance.

3 Likes

Protoss ground is viable it just cannot directly engage into a siege position of lurkers lol. Protoss players say this when their army cannot just roll over their opponents army. It’S nOt vIabLe. I call a massive load of BS. To beat Zerg late game ground (Broodlords, lurkers, infestor viper etc) with Protoss ground you have to use warp prisms and army splitting to deny expansions and catch the Zerg off guard. It’s similar to ZVT where the Zerg has the stronger army and the Protoss has to catch them off guard, where the situation is reversed in ZVT. Aka the Protoss cannot just roll over their opponents and has to use an APM of above 100 if they want to defeat a zerg that is not afk and actively positioning their army and abusing terrain (aka the way the game is SUPPOSED to be played)

Most late game ZVP’s in master and above aren’t even about the air necessarily. The real damage comes from the ground armies that deny the expansions. You never just have one army. A good Protoss composition is voidray carrier templar with ground units to counter zerg ground. Archon immmortal vs ultra ling, tempests against broodlords, chargelot immortal vs lurkers etc. If you’ve watched any high level late game ZVP you’ll notice that the Zerg never wins through army engagements but rather through the ling bane and hydra lurker runbys, counter attacks, splitting their army and sieging multiple positions etc. It’s not just build 50 corruptors herpdy derp

Protoss late game armies are not the problem. I don’t think they’re imbalanced and ground is absolutely viable for P. The problem is that Protoss has no incentive to do what the other races HAVE to do which is ground into air because with exception of Terran in LOTV the ultimate doom armies for all races involve air and ground.

Protoss is given a pathway to late game tech that no other race has which is having no need to scout, only have to build essentially static D for defense, and three bases are secured for free. Zerg and Terran can have their third bases threatened without their opponent needing to all in. Aka adept play, DT’s, immortal chargelot, archon drops blah blah

None of those options that can threaten a Zerg third base and eco set the Protoss back even a fraction of what it would cost a Zerg or Terran in order to threaten the Protoss third base.

Does that seem right to you? That the race with THE strongest units in the whole game that forces Zerg to play split map with 1000 spores also has the easiest time expanding and gathering economy? That doesn’t add up.

The developers couldn’t think of a early and mid game Protoss design that would make them vulnerable to attacks while also not making it so they just die to Z ground. That’s why overcharge, MSC, batteries were added in the first place.

If you go ALLLLLLLLLL the way back to like 2011 - 2012 Zerg’s exploited Protoss’s inability to play early - mid game by maxing out 200/200 on roaches as fast as possible killing many poor Protoss players.

This was a problem however the solution was NOT to just give them a building that can be clicked on that instantaneously defends a base. Why not an early game unit like the queen that is strong for defense but can be caught out and outmaneuvered through SKILL?

The batteries role balances the game but it leaves the game unopen to anything potentially exciting, any engagements or trades in the early part of the game. This is why people like Starcraft. It’s a strategy game that gets going instantly and any mistake can cause you to lose the match. The battery overcharge/cannon defense design completely destroys the soul of what SC2 is about imo

MSC was introduced because of warp gate abuse in PvP as was battery overcharge due to proxy robo builds. Sentries were that “early game unit like the queen that is strong for defense but can be caught out and outmaneuvered through skill.” Then they introduced ravagers.

I was keeping the thread theme and talking about design, it is pretty funny T having to turtle and massing ghosts because Z has many many cloaked and fast siege units. Of course that can be stopped,same with Z and skytoss, that does not mean from a design point of view it feels right.

I find it so interesting (sarcasm) how some people on the internet believe they can judge the state of “high level balance” from a small handful of games. News flash, just in those games alone there are thousands of different branches that could have been taken instead, if a player makes a slightly different choice or has their eyes in a slightly different position. This is something the crybaby Artosis doesn’t understand when he whines about hellbat allins. For every 1 game he sees in the GSL where a hellbat allin doesn’t work, there are 10,000 games on the ladder where it does. You can’t expect every possible outcome, of which there are MILLIONS, to be expressed in 10 or 20 games. To understand balance, you have to look at all these possible outcomes and the only possible way to do that is through statistics because it is completely and utterly impossible to watch and comprehend that volume of games.

Oh yeah, every high level TvZ you see Terran staying behind static defense until hyper late game. You literally never ever see them fight until then because lurkers literally just exist. I mean it’s the most popular matchup by far because of the intense back and forth, but yeah it’s all about Terran turtling. Because Turtling is synonymous with frequent skirmishes and back and forth combat. Yes. That’s how language works. /s