It was a mech game on Equilibrium. I almost puked.
https://sc2pulse.nephest.com/sc2/?type=character&id=1545337&m=1#player-stats-mmr
Same clan, same mmr range, same race. 92% winrate so he clearly isnât out of practice.
VS zero? Thatâs the only mech game I can recall on that map and heâs 5800 mmr. It was vs liberator ghost mech before the liberator range nerf and before the ghost snipe nerf. I am pretty sure it was before the fungal range buff too. There is also a high probability that the balance counsel will nerf ghosts given harstem needs something to draw attention away from chronoboost & snipe recently eviscerated serral at the world cup finals so itâs crazy easy to use that excuse. On the next patch, I win that game 100% of the time.
it was an engagement at the center of the map at the watchtower. It confirmed to me beyond a shadow of a doubt that mech stomps on hydra infestor viper unit compositions.
Hydras are really fragile so you have to be careful how you take the engagements. Yes you can take a bad engagement and instantly throw the game. Basically you have to do a 4 overlord drop with 16 hydras into his main and while he is reeling from that you abduct stragglers or blinding cloud clusters of tanks and engage with hydra ling. You just stutter step and hold position and the hydras delete everything including all the buildings.
Basically itâs the same maneuver as innovation did in all matchups. You pressure the third and when heâs not looking you load into medivacs and drop the main. The last time innovation was in the gsl, he did the same exact thing vs his protoss opponent.
Why bdo we have two egomaniacsâŚ
you are demented. obsessed. get air. please.
this isnât funny any more.
Is it egotistical to think itâs easy to grill a cheeseburger or to sip a glass of wine? No? Then why is it considered egotistical to think game balance is easy? Itâs easy because 99% of people on Earth could do the job without any training and could have the issue solved in under an hour of work. All you are doing is tweaking some values until win-rates equal out to 50/50. Itâs literally the easiest job on the planet and itâs not egotistical to think that, itâs realistic.
The only reason the balance counsel finds it hard is because they donât want to do their job. They want to find a way to nerf protoss without actually nerfing protoss, and because thatâs impossible theyâve set themselves up for failure. Imagine trying to grill a cheeseburger without using heat and then pretending people are egotistical for saying âWhat the heck is going on here, all we are doing is grilling cheeseburgers so what the flip is the hold-up?â. Thatâs how dumb these people are.
Do you think I am being harsh? I detected this issue 6 years ago. Analogizing this to the balance counsel, theyâre the new management who took over a restaurant. In this restaurant, the employees spent 4 years trying to figure out how to turn the grill on. 2 years after new management came in, they still havenât figured out how to turn the grill on. Itâs absolutely ridiculous in any other context. David Kim builds the entire flipping restaurant, brick by brick, runs the electrical through the walls, tiles the floors, installs the grills and hooks up the gas lines, and he passes it off to these guys canât even figure out how the grill works. Itâs absolutely wild stuff, man. Youâre not building a game engine from scratch, designing the gameplay, implementing the art and running the marketing â youâre just looking at win-rates to see which race is OP, watching a few replays to figure out which unit is the cause, and reducing one of its stats by 5% or so. If it handât been going on for 6 years, didnât affect million dollar tournaments, it would be really funny. It would be hilarious. You could make a comedy routine making fun of these guys. But considering the scope and scale of the issue, it really shouldnât funny at all. But hey I am a positive guy.
Actually, they did make a skit about this:
The philosophers are too busy pondering the metaphysical interpretation of reality to bother kicking the ball, in the same way the balance counsel is too busy pondering the impact of nerfing the carrier on some niche game scenario to bother fixing PvZ winrates.
âYou see, Hermarchus, how can we kick a ball that is not real? How do we prove that is real! What does it mean to âkickâ anyway?â
vs
âYou see, Harstem, what will happen when MaxPax faces Serral on Alcyone at the 28 minute mark with a Sicillian-Scotish Hybrid queen drop opener, variant B-7-83, if the carrier is nerfed!?â
Love wc3 lately, switched almost entirely to it a bit over a year ago. People who say they donât like hero games really arenât giving it a chance. Itâs the complete opposite of what disappointed me about stormgate etc. Sure it has problems but none of the heroes are the problems (biggest hero problems are heroes like beast master and priestess just being bad, because no amount of number tweaking will ever make them work+fun). It mostly just has the usual Blizzard RTS problem of air being OP lategame. Like there are other things, arent there always, like its depressing to be higher ranked with your human offrace than your mainrace just because of humans better lategame scaling and easier requirements to play a solid game (basic logics ported over from starcraft serves you fine for human, but it leads you completely wrong for the others), or the loot table randomness going against you hard. But itâs aged really well, id love to see a wc4. I donât feel there are as many interactions in wc3 where it feels like a fight is so much easier for one side to control than another, which is my main beef with XvP in sc2 atm.
I feel like stormgate are desperate to achieve this map control centric play that was really well enabled in war3 from creeps and shops, but their solution to try get there is just so crude compared to how war3 plays.
Also the maps are much more varied without feeling like gimmick maps, as map makers have more to work with than just choke points and rush distance (which you can basically just translate to accurate winrate predictions for different matchups from eyeballing the map at this point in sc2). Stuff like fountains, the turtle rock wards and mass heal, critters, creep loot tables, do the map merc camps have a troll priest with abolish, does the map have easy shredder for human, how many shops for heal scroll pushes, is there a market place for item catchup, before any of the usual expansions + chokes + whatever stuff.
Since I started playing undead main there was a shift into MK first for human vs undead unprompted by patches or map changes, while also some % of good humans were going pala rifle as a viable off-meta play like mech is in sc2, then followed up by an undead meta shift into crypt lord fast expo, then there was an actual meaningful balance patch that completely changed everything again, human back into AM, refining their aggression against the undead FE, undead trying different hero fast expands being unable to rely on a frenzy destroyer bust, lots of lich first that didnt really manage to stick, now back to CL and some DK, dreadlord first or third being experimented with, some people still thinking lich first can work if they just play better or something, way more banshee play coming in. Meanwhile undead vs orc was completely volatile as well with different orc strats coming in and out of fashion and undead moving between DR/CL/Alch/PL for 3rd hero based on situation and meta fashion. The patch completely changed the undead mirror comps, only matchup for undead that hasnt completely changed since I first played my first undead game was vs elf where high aggro/tempo games have been dominant. I donât get that in SC2 as much, thereâs still some changes (like its been fun to see mutas coming back in a bit ZvT and the indecision around lurker viability) but god it was refreshing to be in a period where the meta was actually moving, and actually felt viable to just go do whatever you think is best because clearly nobody else had the answer solved. SC2 balance council would never ever do something like give undead a T2 dispel after the game has been balanced around it not having dispel until T3 for 20 years, it was a huge change inside an already stacked patch.
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WC3 has interesting history because the entire genre of MOBA started out as a map inside WC3. The EULA at the time didnât require the user to sign over the legal rights to any content created inside the map editor which allowed the super-popular Dota map to be developed into a separate game, thus launching the MOBA category.
League of Legends recently hit 8 million concurrent players. SC2 by contrast has ~14k. League is literally 600x more popular, and itâs just one MOBA game. Translation, Blizzard was on the right track w/ WC3 but bungled it big time likely because they didnât do a market analysis to figure out what players actually want.
It will forever amaze me how blind big corporations are to obvious truths. The most recent example is Disney losing big on Acolyte. They spent $700k to produce each minute of the show. I personally thought it was pretty decent but I can also understand how it was an enormously terrible business decision based on the current political environment in the united states. They didnât do their market analysis to figure out who watches Star Wars, and what those people would be interested in. Young men love action and thriller, old men love historical fiction, young women love romance, old women love feel good social stories like the Halmart channel. Itâs not hard to see why the Mandolorian excelled while the Acolyte failed â they produced a story that nobody was interested in. It had these feel-goody vibes that tried to convey the message of unity and that our enemies arenât as different as we think they are â that they are just ordinary people. At the same time, itâs a dark story about the Jedi genociding a group of people. They are trying to suck and blow at the same time. Had they simply made the witch cult the Nightsisters from Dathomere and fully committed to the dark side of the story it wouldâve been much better.
RTS has the same issue. It has great potential but the kings of RTS (WC3, SC2) are chronically mismanaged by people who just donât know what direction is up, and theyâve ruined the RTS genre for everyone because it now has a brand issue. RTS is a bad brand that everyone assumes the games suck because they are RTS. If I were launching a new RTS game, I would market it very distinctly as a separate category specifically to avoid it being associated with the mismanaged RTSs that exist today.
The best analogy that I can think of is that Coke developed a new soda, I believe it was called âCoke Oneâ. Coke spent ridiculous amounts of money on it. Pepsi was able to tank their investment while investing a fraction of the cost themselves by marketing a similar product, I think it was called âPepsi Twoâ or something like that. But they made it a terrible product & consumers formed an association between the two that caused Pepsi Two to take down Coke One with it.
Thatâs SC2 right now. They chronically mismanage it, allowing elitists to design it around APM spamming, and itâs tanking the entire RTS genre as a result. Iâve worked as a game dev for 15 years, primarily on RTS games, and people behind the scenes are really ticked off because theyâve spent ridiculous amounts of time and money developing upcoming games that are practically guaranteed to flop due to the brand issue that SC2 has created.
Take a look at this chart, it is absolutely wild:
https://i.imgur.com/FoEDaag.png
Source:
https://quanticfoundry.com/2024/05/21/strategy-decline/#
Just adding on to this a bit more. Here is Asmongold doing a video about Stormgate:
https://i.imgur.com/ohXiufX.png
407k viewers over 8 months w/ 8k likes.
vs
https://i.imgur.com/KpRvaBl.png
471k views in 1 day w/ 15k likes.
The RTS genre is as dead as a door nail. 
I still play dota a lot too and I Rember the OG dota where pudge didnât even have hook and all these OP flies lol. The meta in Wc3 in a way became dota slowly over the years as its all about the heroes. Wc3 feels great even years alter with a botched reskin. Sc2 is the kind of game I think I want to play then realize after a week no its not really that fun it feels like a click fest. Whatâs crazy though is even with the much lower mechanical and factorio like mechanics for sc2 Happy has still found a way to be dominate with everyone trying to copy him and no one can. This is whta i love when you watch him play heâs never doing anything i think man âI cant do that everâ he just does it all correctly always and his understadning is what makes him a champ not his fingers thatâs perfect. SO yea my biggest RTS hope is wc4 because wc3 to me is the best rts of all time. Whats sad though is when WOL first dropped and people didnt have the meta solved those games sometimes had the feel of a wc3 FFA which Imo was the best RTS thing ever FFA had so much depth with the heroes and upkeep system etc. Now it feels nothing like this it feels like stress and boring and not creative or fun. the way he can time a slow acolyte at 6 damage to steal last hits from camps with heroes and mtuple high damage units while hes playing on the other side of the map is nuts and feels very dota lol. And in wc3 its not about i clicked first its i saw all the incoming damage knew all the attack speeds and right clicked this guy ahead of time at just the right moment to maybe steal this. I love that