Starcraft 2 impressions

[SineSwiper]

Well, like security through obscurity, balancing through obscurity is just as ineffective. It basically means that a small group of people know how to cheat the system through the overpowered characters, and the rest don't. Until of course, they see it being used over and over again, and try them out.

This isn't balance. It's the same as not knowing a security hole and only a select few people exploiting it.

[Don]

Has there ever been a reasonably complicated anything that is actually balanced? Balance through obscurity seems to be the only halfway reasonable way to have some semblance of balance. I really Blizzard just shuffles the balance every 3-6 months and then the new paradigm will keep people confused long enough while they're rediscovering the 'best strat' or 'best class' or 'best build' depending on what game you're talking about.

I think it's silly to assume things that are inherently different is somehow supposed to have the same effectiveness. If anything, war is supposed to be inherently imbalanced since the side that won is generally stronger in some way. Even Chess is believed to be an imbalanced game (white appears to have an advantage since they go first) and the pieces on both side are identical!

[Eric]

I actually rather hate how Blizzard goes about patching their games. Unless there's something ridiculously broken they sit on their hands and just let imbalances and annoying issues fly. Happens in WoW all the time where the patch will just break something and people have to wait 3-4 months for the next patch and bug fixes because it's not a priority issue.

Happened in WC3, and Diablo 2 as well. Blizzard is just really really slow about patching. I play other PC games and I notice how often other games will just patch shit. City of Heroes used to patch stuff almost weekly, Dawn of War II was patching fairly consistently, though a major gameplay/revamp patch came later, BUT they were still releasing minor balance changes and bug fixes fairly frequently.

[Don]

I think Blizzard just waits until enough time has passed for a problem to become significant that way people will thank them for releasing a patch to address the said issue after it has become a significant problem as opposed to just stop the problem. Like they say in IT nobody really thanks you for preventing a problem. You got to wait until a problem occurs and then fix it to show your worth!

[SineSwiper]

Even Chess is believed to be an imbalanced game (white appears to have an advantage since they go first) and the pieces on both side are identical!

Though there's some statistical data on that, many believe that it's more psychological than being a "flaw" in the game.

I think Blizzard just waits until enough time has passed for a problem to become significant that way people will thank them for releasing a patch to address the said issue after it has become a significant problem as opposed to just stop the problem. Like they say in IT nobody really thanks you for preventing a problem. You got to wait until a problem occurs and then fix it to show your worth!

Or it's more likely that they have development cycles and they fix them when they release a bunch of other fixes. In LOTRO, they might occasionally have some major issue with an ability that was discovered in public beta, but they were still going to release it because public beta might as well been a PR pre-production. Only the most serious and fatal things would have stop them.

[Don]

Of course there are development cycles but I think the way Blizzard does stuff is like this cycle they'll only deal with Terran or only Death Knights unless something ridiculous comes up. But balance is one of these things where it should work perfectly fine in parallel unless you can only trust one guy to come up with these ideas. If I'm balancing Terran units and someone tells you studies show Hydralisks should move 5% slower for them to be balanced why would it hurt to change that at the same time? I think the reason why development takes so long for these patches is because it takes more time to NOT fix something but make it look like you did than actually fixing the problem. All these games have very well-known metrics and it's easy to get them close to what should be ideal. You can say Protoss wins 60% of the time and that's too high, so say get 10 of your interns to look at 100 generic Protoss vs whatever race replay, and assuming these guys are halfway competent they'll probably come up with stuff like 'I think Zealots are really powerful' and then you can say make Zealot buildtime from 25 to 30 seconds. What does that do in terms of balance? Don't know but it's probably a safe bet it'll change it in the right direction without making Protoss go under 50%, and it'll be months before you can collect some aggregate stats to see what your change does, but really it's not rocket science to guess some reasonable changes that err on the side of caution.

And I think this makes sense because people want to have something to look forward to. If you say in this patch we fixed every balance problem existed, well first of all you probably didn't so people will complain, and then people will probably think that means you're not improving the game anymore and leave. I think WoW fixed it one class at a time and they were pretty significant changes so does that mean the class that was fixed last was just in a whacked state for an year? Of course not. It's more like it took an year before they got to the last class to change a bunch of stuff that makes it look like something is different about the class without actually changing the class. After all WoW has pretty easy metrics too for balance (DPS, HPS, etc) and if a class is clearly inferior, they do get addressed rather quickly, but if your class is just doing 2% less DPS than what it should, clearly they're not in a hurry to fix it not because they can't fix it, but because they want to make that 2% fix spaced out so that it looks like they're always working on something.

[Flip]

Ive been playing the campaign lately and its really fun. I'm only 12 missions in, but the game has loads of content for people who arent interested in multiplayer. I just finished The Dig in which i spent an hour blasting things with that giant laser. Good stuff. Its nice to see that while the units in multiplayer feel skimpy, they packed everything into the single player and you get a lot of variety. Im playing on hard, which is kind of easy, but i didnt feel like killing myself on insane difficulty.

[Eric]

You better be playing on Brutal.

And drone harder in Multiplayer. ;P

[Flip]

No, just on hard. i want to see the story and say i beat it, but like i said, i dont feel like going through the headache of doing it on brutal or insane or whatever they call the hardest setting.

Ha, did you watch my VODs? Friday was awful, i had like a 7 or 8 game losing streak, but then on Saturday i won like 9 out of 10 and got it all back. I'm current almost 1300, like 1280 something.

The hardest part is def figuring out how many lings to get early to be safe and how many drones you can get away with. With so many early/mid game timing pushes, it isnt always safe to fast expand and drone hard. Im still a nub!

[Eric]

Only time I don't Fast Expand @ 14 is when the opponent is close, like North vs West Metaloplis.. I also like to keep a few zerglings right outside of their base and poke up to see what they're doing. If they're going heavy ground, make sunkens, if there's not much in he front, assume they''re teching, and drone hard. If you're scared of air make a 3rd queen early, and use it to spread creep. Always connect your natural/main with creep, unless you're playing another zerg.

You'd be surprised how much sit you can produce to defend after you see them moving out of their base.

[Eric]

Nother jaw dropping mod, this one looks Dead Spacey.

[Eric]

http://day9tv.blip.tv/file/4210235/

Day9 had a nice one on when to know when to drone.

[Flip]

Finally beat the single player:

Spoiler: show

The Hard setting was pretty easy up until the last mission. Kerrigan just rapes with her psi storm spell and tanks dont seem to bring her down very fast. After reloading 4 or 5 time, i simply got lucky and one time when she was supposed to come attack she got caught up someplace it looked like and didnt come attack for the 2nd half of the mission. Theres no stopping that bitch, hooray for retarded AI.

It also took me a few tried to realize you need to take down the nydus worms, not just the ones in your base. The mission before i chose to not have mutas or blords at the last mission, so the worms were the big attack waves. If you dont get a group of 8-10 banshee to take out the nydus's outside your base the waves get too strong to stop. I also used lots of the psi disupters that slowed down their movement and even build planetary fortresses at each choke to help with the defense of tanks and bunkers. Even still, Kerrigan would crush whatever front line she attacked. It was def tough.