Interesting idea - I wonder if you could do it in-game, say add 2 more hotkeys: increase/decrease unit sort position. So you simply tab to your shamen, press [decrease sort position] until they’re where you want them, and it stays that way for the rest of the game. This is much simpler dev-wise than a persistent menu interface, and avoids other issues around persistence. The obvious downside is having to (remember to) do it every game.
No. Learn to play the game the way it is intended. Enough with this “optimization” bullsh*t. All it does is drastically increase the skill floor without increasing the skill ceiling. It ultimately makes the game harder for everyone else and only easier for a select few.
It’s bad game design.
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[emphasis mine]
Do you mean lower the skill floor? This is making managing casters easier for people with lower APM.
[edit, nope you say making the game harder - which is hard to understand as this is purely a request for making the UI easier].
People want to fight the opponent, not the UI. All other things being equal, having to push 3 buttons to get something to happen is always worse game-design-wise than having to push two.
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This “it just makes the game easier for noobs” is just so stupid argument. Basically, all gameplay improvements are making the game “easier”, but it doesn’t mean it’s actually easier. By your logic, an FPS game having a mouse-look is just “something to make the game easier for noobs”. It’s about the convenience and comfort of the gameplay: making a game more accessible just makes the game more fun to a more wider audience, which brings more players and generally makes the game better. There are so many good games, that have been ruined by just not being easy enough to get into them. A good example of this are old games: generally the games that have aged well, are the ones that have the most comfortable and clever gameplay mechanics. That being said, Warcraft 3 is one these, which have aged pretty well, but that doesn’t mean there wasn’t still room for some QOL changes.
Also, how would this change make it the game harder for everyone else? Giving an option to change the priorities would affect in absolutely no way for those players, who do not wish to use it.
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No, it doesn’t make the game easier for people with lower APM. Because they’re not even going to bother with such a feature in the first place. Thus anyone they play against that is is going to have a very very huge advantage against them. Thus, the game becomes harder for them.
Prime example of this: Bunny Hopping in Source Engine games is an unbelievably difficult skill to learn and gives anyone a huge huge huge advantage over anyone who doesn’t know it. But it’s not difficult to learn because it’s actually that hard, it’s difficult to learn because it’s poorly documented and has no surface-level exposure to the casual player just playing the game and is far too complicated for them to understand (such as myself, I cannot learn Bunny Hopping for the life of me). Similarly with a change like this, casual players just won’t understand the concept of selection priorities and basically no matter how you cut it these kinds of things are going to be burried in a text file in the directory somewhere (like with hotkeys) or in some menus that most people are not going to bother with. They just want to play a game, they don’t want to deal with all that complicated crap (like me with Bunny Hopping).
No it does not and this has been proven time and time again to be an incorrect game design philosophy. People don’t care about a game being made more casual, they just want it to be fun. If they don’t find the core gameplay mechanics fun, a small change like this isn’t going to be the straw that breaks the camel’s back for them. Similarly, on my end, features like this that work in this way is actually part of what makes the game funner to me, in my eyes, because you have to know how to handle it. Most features like this do not care about your speed. Your speed will come naturally as you become more use to and understand the game better. Thus, by making this change you don’t improve the game for anyone and you instead make the game worse for someone like me.
There are several RTS examples of this that try to “revive the RTS genre” by drastically oversimplifying the game and they flop because the core RTS fanbase doesn’t want that and they don’t attract outsiders and casuals, for various reasons. A good example of this is Circle Empires. It’s drastically oversimplifyed and goes in the theoretically optimal direction that people like you think: It cuts out all the “bullsh*t” and “overcomplicatedness” of an RTS and just gives you “raw strategy” yet nobody likes it and it’s not a very successful or fun game.
By oversimplyfing these mechanics, you alienate the people that like RTS games in the first place: The people that like complicated mechanics that they can plan their strategies around. Nobody likes bland rock-paper-scissors “raw strategy” design. It’s boring. People want their strategies to be based around how they perform their actions and their unit design to be based around how you have to perform in order to use them to their fullest potential (think MOBAs but with more than a single unit), because at the end of the day an RTS game is an action game first and a strategy game second.
Also I don’t think it would make the game easier for noobs anyway because they wouldn’t bother with this and the ones that do (Namely, the more experienced and sweaty try hard players) are given a pretty big advantage over them.
And no, this is largely misrepresneting my argument. Okay, let’s imagine for a second that we are discussing a suggestion that would objectively make the game easier. It wouldn’t really be equivalant to this. It would be more equivalant to an FPS game adding auto-aim. It removes a skill that people can learn in the game that they can have fun with, and lowers the skill ceiling which makes it harder to stand out against other players (which is also a large part of the fantasy of an RTS game in my opinion) It also removes a subtle but important part of the game that makes an FPS game more fun, no?
That’s the deal with making a change like this. The game of an RTS game is not the units smashing their faces into each other. It’s about the UI. It’s about how you control the units. It’s about figuring out the best way to get around your limitations. That’s exactly what you’re doing in an FPS with aiming, wouldn’t you think? You have to figure out the best way to make quick aiming decisions while doing something else like dodging or planning your next move like where to take cover or if you should use a grenade or not or switch weapons.
How about a different scenario for an FPS game: Weapon slots. Should an FPS game allow you to put whatever weapon you want on whatever slot you want? No, you need to know where that weapon is. That’s apart of the skill of an FPS game. If you pull out the wrong weapon for the situation, you are f*cked. That is something you should be punished for and learn to get around the limitations of.
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please read and comment my post about unit groups here thanks 
https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/warcraft3/t/pre-set-control-groups-in-options
I don’t think that someone having different unit group order is a very very huge advantage. Best described as negligible IMHO.
And, given how easy it would be to set up, noobs will start doing it. Thus, it’s far more likely to be reducing the skill floor - the skill to enable this is lower than the (still miniscule) skill required to overcome not having it.
Skill “floor” is really a bad construct anyway because it requires arbitrarily defining minimally proficient / effective.
I think we’re discussing different things. Unit groups vs grouping units of same type in the UI.
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Incorrect. In a fight, those precious extra tenths to halves of a second can mean huge differences. Even in lower-level games. I’d almost say especially in lower-level games, where the lengths of fights will be much longer and changes like this will save even more time.
You’re not thinking like a noob. Noobs have no f*cking clue what a hotkey or unit group order even is and damn well are not going to go searching through options menus or looking through burried text documents in the game directory (like the Hotkeys file) to look for options are going to optimize their gameplay and make them the sweatiest tryhard they can possibly be, when they don’t even have any idea what they actually need to look for. Really you’re almost dealing with these kinds of people for a casual market,
Incorrect again. A Skill Floor is about as arbitrary as a skill ceiling. That is to say, it’s really in the eye of the beholder, but that goes both ways. But I try to look at this from multiple perspectives, but most importantly the perspective of a casual player, because I’m pretty damn casual myself. I don’t want to spend 100s of hours figuring out super-optomized hotkey layouts and other nonsense like that, I just want to play a game. And I’m going to be really upset at playing this game when someone who should be at the same skill level as me is suddenly playing better because of “optomizations” that I don’t care for. Therefore, raising the skill floor for me. I can pretty reasonably say I am in the same boat as most of this oh so juicy “casual” audience in this sense.
If that’s your definition then there’s almost no such thing as negligible.
I dunno, pretty sure many will. Noob here doesn’t usually refer to someone who uses whiteout on their monitor, they’re still usually gamers with adequate PC knowledge.
In other words, you agree that it’s arbitrary…?
Also, IMHO floor is slightly more arbitrary than the ceiling.
You saying this is pretty arbitrary and kind of proves my point.
We’re talking about the casual market, here. The casual market are almost all not particularly intensive PC gamers. Most phone games don’t even have concepts like “hotkeys” and “micro.”
So, like, who is this change really for??? Perhaps for the people that just want to make the game easier and slower because they’re getting slower and more spoiled with easier games??? Because it’s not really going to be suitable for any core audience outside of the RTS audience, they won’t give 2 sh*ts about this or that change because they have no idea what they should expect. And inside the RTS audience there’s only a select specific group of people that want this and most of the RTS audience doesn’t because they like the games they play just the way they are.
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Sorry, currently playing something else so wanted to post quickly.
The floor is defined by being able to play effectively / reasonably etc, very arbitrary terms. The ceiling is kinda the asymptote where no matter how much you increase your skill you won’t get better results. Far less arbitrary.
This is the WC3-casual market we’re talking about. Most people who play phone games won’t play WC3 even casually.
It’s a QoL suggestion, so it’s for anyone who doesn’t think fighting the UI should be part of the game.
No, the floor is literally the bare minimum you need to just play the game IMO. You know, like, it’s the lowest possible skill set you need. Hence, uh, floor.
So basically just f*ck all the people who think it’s fun the way it is right now I guess for a vast minority of people b*tching on the forums about “fighting the UI.” Like, what do you think is the actual game here??? Something other than its basic most fundemental mechanics for interacting with the game itself???
The vast majority of WC3 casual players don’t give a f*ck about this, which is why the only possible markets you’re talking about are the actual casual market ooooorrr… A select minority of people that think that because they’re getting old they can’t play this game anymore when in reality you really don’t need to be fast at all to play it at a fun level.
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How can you, er, not play the game.
If you start the game then go to sleep you’re “playing” the game. But that is not the skill floor, you get exactly 0 information from analyzing that and any discussion using that definition would go precisely nowhere.
Both choices annoy people, just a different set. You’re either saying annoy all those people (the majority) who like the old thing somewhat but would prefer all the dated interface cleaned up.
Fighting against the opponent. I’m sure you know what I mean. This isn’t street fighter where you have to learn combo key sequences to cast spells.
One way to think of it is:
The actual game is everything that is required to be stored in a replay file in order to replay it properly. So player colors, mouse coordinates, names, etc aren’t important. Orders are all you need - how you issue them is irrelevant, but what they do and when they’re given - that is the whole game.
The UI is simply a way for you to produce those orders, and that should be made as easy as possible so that skill is judged solely by the contents and timing of the orders, or as close as you can get to it.
Another way to look at it - nobody today would ever consider making a new game and deliberately putting in these types of limitations for the purpose of adding difficulty.
Go play a f*cking grand strategy game then and stop polluting my RTS with those bad game design philosophies for an ACTION GAME.
Actually, it kind of is. It’s an Action game, not a f*cking turn-based strategy.
This is a VERY BAD mentality. This is exactly what is killing the genre right now. This is NOT the game and when you make an RTS game this IT FLOPS because NOBODY LIKES IT (See: Grey Goo, AoE 3, Circle Empires). This isn’t f*cking chess where all that matters is what you do with your units. HOW you do the things you do is FAR FAR more important and what is fun about an RTS and where the actual skill lies. Without that, it’s NOT AN RTS.
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Well said by @Templarfreak which is why I think the game design and skills should be decided by pro level only. If they say the friendly unit pathing is bad , change it. But right now even the ability to control your army things like Selection 12 (ok as a huge compromise to change this not to F2 all army but just increase), pathing, it all forces the player to play better.
He’s fighting with the UI but for someone who studied design this is called immersion as one of the ways - when unwanted features such as game engine limits produce interesting things players do)…
Will you heal your unit because he couldn’t pass?
Did you lose your needed caster because you weren’t careful? This would be reduced if too many dumped down groups
Did you force your hero to heal because of how your units are positioned?
Everything is down to player decision and creates a variety of reasons player to be careful, increasing the depth and the skill needed to master the game.
I don’t necessarily think this, it just needs to be thought of more carefully than “optimization automatically = better game”
They didn’t flop because they had modern UIs… That’s like blaming bad sales of a modern FPS because its graphics were too good.
I’m not sure why RTSes don’t do well these days, but it’s not the UIs. It might be:
- People are dumber on average, especially gamers.
- The programming, esp pathing, is very tricky and must be done exceptionally well. You can really feel the quality of the devs when you play a RTS - which is why WC3 still feels so good, better than SC2. It’s not easy for a company to find good people like that.
- To be good, RTSes require a ton of content. With so much fragmentation in the gaming market, there’s increasing disincentives against big projects.
- Gaming is so corporate now, boardrooms force devs to add monetization crap, focus on marketing, third-party engines, actors, outsourcing, release schedules - who cares about fun. This works for farmville, but makes for bad RTSes.
This is the type of stuff I want players to focus on. I’m accusing you of deprioritizing this stuff.
You bring up pathing. I think many anti-changers totally misunderstand what pro-changers actually want with pathing. They think pro-changers want to get rid of blocking, manually positioning your army, etc. Very few want that. They just want the bugginess and glitchyness gone.
And (most) pro-changers want to keep upkeep etc.
I’d say it’s the opposite. Immersion is about being one with the game, which means you need to reduce external distractions. A UI with selection limits etc is a bit like reading a book with an annoying font - you keep noticing the font and it distracts from the story.
The pros have a conflict of interest. Changing the game reduces their chances of success because they’ve got muscle memory for the current system.
The pros are also not strategic geniuses. I have watched a lot of pro play and they often refuse to change their strategy.
Strategic geniuses have a hard time beating them though because they can have a superior well-placed army but lose because the pros can manipulate the UI better with huge APM. This makes games boring (especially for spectators) because pros just stick to their tried and true fixed strategies. Most of their plan is conceived prior to the game commencing and doesn’t change based on their opponent.
I’m going raider strat. You’re going counter-raider-strat? Well, my raiders beat your counter-raiders because I can UI better. So I’ll just constantly go raiders, game after game, win after win. Yay I’m awesome.
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Sorry but I’ve seen these ‘the game needs more strategies less fighting with mechanics or UI’. Those that think making some sudden attack should beat pro players never mind their mechanics. No the game is mechanics heavy and most of what you describe as ‘fighting with the UI’ is this.
What I meant with whether you will lose a hero, a caster because you weren’t careful is all because the current pathing, blocking and ability (or your lack of) to hotkey and even unit group will cause.
How else would you not be careful if you had pathing that allows you to dumb down this mistake with smart pathing and things like that? Thats why some things stay cause they add obstacles, rest is removing obstacles.
In case of group priority it is not much of a change but many other things discussed are removing obstacles. They can even allow better friendly pathing though, I don’t mind but the idea that it will magically attract players that never play as the above guy explained, will not happen and no the game should not be down further than these few QoL for people that won’t play these modes anyway as again the guy above (Templarfreak) also explained.
I believe that WC3 is the best RTS out - the other real RTSes (excluding sometimes-misclassified genres like TD and MOBA) are mostly strategically very weak (e.g. no attempt to constrain exponential growth). I’m not spoiled by new RTSes, I want the strategy to be far more difficult. I want strategic blunders (eg, the failure to discern your enemies’ strategy, or to adapt your army mix to your enemy’s), to be something disasterous, not like it is now where it’s a minor setback that a bit of APM can remedy. I want players to have to think lots, not just rely almost entirely on muscle memory. You’re arguing for an easy game where almost all you have to do is practice clicking fast in fairly straightforward ways.
IMHO, your mentality is trying to destroy the RTS genre, forcing brain-sapping archaic clickfest gimmicks into modern RTSes when the genre was originally conceived as focusing on rapid planning and quick decision-making. So really we’re just two opinions on opposite sides of an 100% opinion argument. You want the focus more on the cerebellum, I want it more on the cerebral cortex. Any focus on one must reduce the focus on the other.
I’m pretty sure that 1v1 will also be mainly new players. And even if I’m initially wrong, over time it will get more and more likely.
If altering the sort order of unit types within selected groups is significant, what isn’t?
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