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My opinion of Starcraft 2 and its overpriced expansion pack, can probably be summed up as "meh".

If we're talking about WoW, I should probably leave before I break the swear filter

Yeah, blew through it in one day, it just seems cheap.

starcraft 2: story, character development to some extent,
swarm: kerrigan: I am angry zerg guys: we are zerg, w/ no story at all, and just repeating the same talking animations

All the missions are just press F2, apply zergling, repeat, even on brutal there's very few situations where you can't just roll in with zerglings after hitting them with some minimal support, if you go roach broodling+baneling broodling+kerrigan chain+broodling, its hilariously easy. I mean it got to the point in the one mission with the kill-field that I was so used to just sending everything out at once that I kept walking into it with the opposite force by accident, and STILL was in no risk of losing.

I just dont know, they could have actually done a story of some sort, had kerrigan struggle with being a monster, /something/ but its all just like they came up with some character designs, and some random things for them to say, and ran with it.

Judging Starcraft after blitzing the SP campaign is like reviewing a movie in which you only sat through the intro. Then stating that the AI is 'too easy' just makes it an even poorer critique, it's AI, it's never going to give a competent player much trouble.

Won't be getting HOTS. Terrans just get too much love and the resulting balance is just a joke.

Yeah, as a casual fan of starcraft... I'm not going to pay for several versions of the same game for different campaigns. Particularly ones that I have to be online to play by myself...!

MarsNZ wrote:
Judging Starcraft after blitzing the SP campaign is like reviewing a movie in which you only sat through the intro. Then stating that the AI is 'too easy' just makes it an even poorer critique, it's AI, it's never going to give a competent player much trouble.

Won't be getting HOTS. Terrans just get too much love and the resulting balance is just a joke.

So, what you're saying is... I won't be getting it because one race (seems) to be imbalanced. (without the meta game even having settled down at all and Protosss actually winning everything so far). Also, didn't Terran get the least new stuff? They got mines, hellbats and some tweaks to reapers and siege tanks, that's about it right?

Also, why is everyone talking about an overpriced expansion pack? I got it for 30, that's always been the price of expansion packs here.

As for the campaign, having fun on brutal, I think I blew through all but 2 missions yesterday. It's pretty much what I expected, not to all that eye opening or amazing, but still fun while it lasts.

There was talk long ago that the games would all cost $60 when WoL was released. Now it's $40, which is less, but still a lot for an expansion pack. Those kind of things usually sell for $20-$30 here.

MarsNZ wrote:


Won't be getting HOTS. Terrans just get too much love and the resulting balance is just a joke.

If this is the actually case, why are the professional players not reporting this? Can you even cite specifics? I'm not that great a player and nothing Terrans have has been back breaking. I mean you certainly need to push for detection a lot harder with the mines, and light melee stuff countered a bit harder.

Wait, the professional players are something relevant, that anyone other than the professional players should give a damn about? That's news to me. I thought they were something to be properly ignored.

 Melissia wrote:
Wait, the professional players are something relevant, that anyone other than the professional players should give a damn about? That's news to me. I thought they were something to be properly ignored.

I'd disagree... But we're talking about Starcraft. Pro SC players take themselves way too seriously (I blame the South Koreans). I think most of them are so accustomed to the game itself that any balance issues present in it are overlooked as not that big a deal. I mean, we're talking about the guys who assume anyone who beats them cheats and then ban them from future competition.

 LordofHats wrote:
I mean, we're talking about the guys who assume anyone who beats them cheats and then ban them from future competition.

You're not giving me any reason to give a gak what they think.

I can't say I care either. And I pay too much attention to competitive Pokemon @_@

 LordofHats wrote:

 Melissia wrote:
Wait, the professional players are something relevant, that anyone other than the professional players should give a damn about? That's news to me. I thought they were something to be properly ignored.

I'd disagree... But we're talking about Starcraft. Pro SC players take themselves way too seriously (I blame the South Koreans). I think most of them are so accustomed to the game itself that any balance issues present in it are overlooked as not that big a deal. I mean, we're talking about the guys who assume anyone who beats them cheats and then ban them from future competition.

Well, there's some grade-A nonsense. First of all, professional players take it seriously for a reason, it's what they live from, it's their income.

And pro play is where balance issues will surface the fastest because of their thorough knowledge and mastery of the game. There's a reason blizzard works hand in hand with the pro's.

And... accusing anyone who beats them of cheating? I'm guessing you're basing this purely on hearsay or a single person being a dick. The only pro I can imagine capable of that level of idiotry would be Idra, but the whole community agrees that he's a raging dill weed.

It's quite apparent you have no interest in the pro scene of SC2 and that's fine, but spouting nonsense about it is not. I'd suggest you watch a stream or two of those guys actually just playing ladder and you'll soon see that they are very friendly, community driven people.

Yeah, there's going to be some rotten apples, but every community has that right?


Edit: Oh yeah, I actually wanted to post about the game.

Just finished HotS on brutal (first play through). Quite enjoyed it, story was predictable as expected but I was no less entertained by it. Though missions seemed to get easier the further you got, some of the upgrades being just completely broken. (Torrasque, I'm looking at you)

 Soladrin wrote:
. And... accusing anyone who beats them of cheating? I'm guessing you're basing this purely on hearsay or a single person being a dick. The only pro I can imagine capable of that level of idiotry would be Idra, but the whole community agrees that he's a raging dill weed.

It's sad but true. There was a huge stink about a few months ago (I'm trying to find the article). Some guy beat a pro-South Korean player in his first tournament and all the pros accused him of cheating and got him banned from ever competing again. When people went back and rewatched the match they saw no evidence of cheating. The pro player made a mistake in his comp and it cost him the game.

My experience with "pro players" is entirely negative. The fact that they obsess over starcraft certainly doesn't help, given that the game has always been a festival of mediocrity (and has stagnated the entire RTS genre) it's not likely that I'd care what they think anyway

Then again, people will probably interpret this as me saying "ermagerd ah haet starcarft", so YMMV.

 Melissia wrote:
My experience with "pro players" is entirely negative. The fact that they obsess over starcraft certainly doesn't help, given that the game has always been a festival of mediocrity (and has stagnated the entire RTS genre) it's not likely that I'd care what they think anyway

Then again, people will probably interpret this as me saying "ermagerd ah haet starcarft", so YMMV.

Your opinion of the attitudes/livelihoods of Professional SC players as well as the quality of SC as game aside, the simple fact is that they're very relevant authorities on balance in the game. If any particular element in the game was out of whack, even slightly they'd be noting it. Certainly if the game was so far shifted in favor of Terrans as the poster I was quoting was suggesting they'd be in an uproar. After all a game that has a wholly predictable outcome quickly loses spectator value, once SC loses it's spectator value they stop making living.

I mean you might think Starcraft stagnates the genre or whatever, and I suppose that's fair as personal opinion. However even if the game has been lacking in general innovation, I think it's pretty objectively true that the balance has been drum tight in it's modern history.

Heart of the Swarm: if you liked Wings of Liberty, you will probably like this. The single player is the same deal but with Zerg and without turning one of the most iconic female characters ever into an object reward for the hero. The plot has some issues but at the least it's executed better than Wings of Liberty.

Not sure what the multiplayer will turn out to be like yet. The MLG had more than a hint of Terran-favoured imbalance, but a lot of the games were really exciting to watch and all three races made it into the semifinals. I'm not very good at the multiplayer, but coop vs AI with friends has been reasonably entertaining.

[delete: this is getting off topic.]

Chongara wrote:
If any particular element in the game was out of whack, even slightly they'd be noting it.

Even if that's so, it doesn't necessarily mean anything for skill levels other than pro. For example, take a hypothetical strategy that takes little skill to execute and has great payoffs, and also takes much more skill to stop, but if you have that skill level you can defeat the strategy with 100% reliability. This hypothetical strategy would be completely irrelevant at the pro level, but utterly ruinous to the balance (and, thus, fun) at lower skill levels.

Trickle-down balance isn't a thing that exists. Even Blizzard doesn't think it exists. What pros think of balance is only relevant at their skill level unless they're specifically considering a weaker player's limitations.

HiveFleetPlastic wrote:
Heart of the Swarm: if you liked Wings of Liberty, you will probably like this. The single player is the same deal but with Zerg and without turning one of the most iconic female characters ever into an object reward for the hero. The plot has some issues but at the least it's executed better than Wings of Liberty.

I found it to be far less engaging than WoL. Kerrigan might not be a reward object (and this very faint praise, imo), but she is wholly and utterly unlikeable. Maybe it's just me but "Mindlessly hellbent on revenge" has always been amongst the least interesting, and least sympathetic of all character motivations. They're trying to play her as some kind of "Dark anti-hero" but she comes off as an entirely psychotic villain, at least in my view.

The supporting cast is no better, with each of the characters having some kind of catch phrase "Essence", "Strands", "Power" etc.. that they seem to just repeat like a broken record, along with a level of navel-contemplation that would be eye-rolling if handled by normally robust writers. This is blizzard we're talking about so it was that much worse. It felt like I was playing a game based on some terrible fanfic.

Wings of Liberty was a silly cliche fest, but at least it was an amusing clichefest.

HiveFleetPlastic wrote:

Chongara wrote:
If any particular element in the game was out of whack, even slightly they'd be noting it.

Even if that's so, it doesn't necessarily mean anything for skill levels other than pro. For example, take a hypothetical strategy that takes little skill to execute and has great payoffs, and also takes much more skill to stop, but if you have that skill level you can defeat the strategy with 100% reliability. This hypothetical strategy would be completely irrelevant at the pro level, but utterly ruinous to the balance (and, thus, fun) at lower skill levels.

Trickle-down balance isn't a thing that exists. Even Blizzard doesn't think it exists. What pros think of balance is only relevant at their skill level unless they're specifically considering a weaker player's limitations.

This is true enough. It's certainly possible that some races have a lower skill threshold than others. Though I'd probably be inclined to say this would mostly be washed out by the matchmaking algorithm and the worst you'd see is an inflation in the lower skill threshold's race presence in the sort of middling league range. Not really an issue except for the portion of the population who sees making gold league as some kind of badge of honor.

Even then I'm a pretty awful Protoss player. I'm not really finding Terrans harder to deal with than in WoL. The mines are annoying, but ultimately I'm still dying to the same stuttering stepping stimmed infantry in the mid-game that always got me.

HiveFleetPlastic wrote:

Chongara wrote:
If any particular element in the game was out of whack, even slightly they'd be noting it.

Even if that's so, it doesn't necessarily mean anything for skill levels other than pro. For example, take a hypothetical strategy that takes little skill to execute and has great payoffs, and also takes much more skill to stop, but if you have that skill level you can defeat the strategy with 100% reliability. This hypothetical strategy would be completely irrelevant at the pro level, but utterly ruinous to the balance (and, thus, fun) at lower skill levels.

Trickle-down balance isn't a thing that exists. Even Blizzard doesn't think it exists. What pros think of balance is only relevant at their skill level unless they're specifically considering a weaker player's limitations.

The little skill required strategy would most likely become even worse in the hands of a pro due to having proper micro/macro (whichever applies to said strategy). And yeah, I'll agree, some things are better then others in the hands of newbies, but what you are asking is to sacrifice the entire high end balance just to appease the players just starting. Anyone in platinum or diamond league and up will be effected by that, and those are the people who are going to be staying around longer in the first place.

To be fair, the "pro" crowd are less than one percent of the people who actually play the game.

 Melissia wrote:
To be fair, the "pro" crowd are less than one percent of the people who actually play the game.

This is factually true, but I'm not sure how relevant the fact is. This could be said of any game played as a sport, with people that play it professionally and make a living off of it. You can play a ton of custom games & maps in Starcraft, just like you can say play backyard basketball. I'm not sure the needs of the casual amateur has much bearing on the regulation game.

Most people who buy Starcraft are either going to play the campaign and leave it at that, or muck about casually in custom games or the like. The ladder is there for those so inclined and the matchmaking algorithm does a pretty good job of making sure you've got about an even chance at winning most of your games. I'm just not sure there is much incentive for blizzard to be making changes to ensure there is an perfectly even split in the gold league.

Assuming again that these low-skill imbalances are as pronounced as some players have been suggesting, I've not really seen any evidence for it. And again I'm not really sure how relevant it is to the game as a whole. It doesn't affect the majority of the game's casual playerbase, and doesn't affect high-skill amateurs and pros.

EDIT:
There are valid criticisms of Starcraft to be sure and "Stagnant" is probably amongst them. However, failing at general balance and not providing players with match ups where they'll probably have a 50/50ish win/lose ratio isn't one of them.

I'm not saying the game's balance is poor at any particular skill level or any level at all. I'm also not saying that balance at the high end has to be sacrificed for balance at the low end, or vice versa. All I'm saying is that balance at the pro level does not imply balance at any other level, because someone said it but it is not true.

Personally, I kinda see playing the multiplayer as the price of admission for understanding the tournaments. I enjoy watching the tournaments sometimes and they don't necessarily make a ton of sense without having played the game. The single player is fun too (though its story shortcomings should be noted) and the games vs AI are fun for a while even if they don't have that much long-term entertainment value.

HiveFleetPlastic wrote:
I'm not saying the game's balance is poor at any particular skill level or any level at all. I'm also not saying that balance at the high end has to be sacrificed for balance at the low end, or vice versa. All I'm saying is that balance at the pro level does not imply balance at any other level, because someone said it but it is not true.

Personally, I kinda see playing the multiplayer as the price of admission for understanding the tournaments. I enjoy watching the tournaments sometimes and they don't necessarily make a ton of sense without having played the game. The single player is fun too (though its story shortcomings should be noted) and the games vs AI are fun for a while even if they don't have that much long-term entertainment value.

I'm not sure about this. I've got a buddy who was watching a ton of Day[9] recently and he had never even played SC2 at all. Granted it inspired him to pick up the game, but he was able to enjoy it without having any real frame of reference. Granted this is one piece of anecdotal evidence, but I'm not sure SC would be doing so well as a spectator sport if it was only interesting to watch if you'd played a bunch yourself.

I haven't said the game's balance is poor. I don't really obsess over balance anyway. I'm more interested in variety of gameplay, a little imbalance is perfectly fine as long as the game has a lot of variation. Whether or not starcraft has that is probably YMMV.

Chongara wrote:

HiveFleetPlastic wrote:
I'm not saying the game's balance is poor at any particular skill level or any level at all. I'm also not saying that balance at the high end has to be sacrificed for balance at the low end, or vice versa. All I'm saying is that balance at the pro level does not imply balance at any other level, because someone said it but it is not true.

Personally, I kinda see playing the multiplayer as the price of admission for understanding the tournaments. I enjoy watching the tournaments sometimes and they don't necessarily make a ton of sense without having played the game. The single player is fun too (though its story shortcomings should be noted) and the games vs AI are fun for a while even if they don't have that much long-term entertainment value.

I'm not sure about this. I've got a buddy who was watching a ton of Day[9] recently and he had never even played SC2 at all. Granted it inspired him to pick up the game, but he was able to enjoy it without having any real frame of reference. Granted this is one piece of anecdotal evidence, but I'm not sure SC would be doing so well as a spectator sport if it was only interesting to watch if you'd played a bunch yourself.

I agree it's possible to enjoy it without any real frame of reference. I just think you can understand the games better if you've played yourself, and I find them more enjoyable knowing what's going on better. My point of comparison is League of Legends, which I don't really play at all but some friends do and I still enjoy watching the pro games. I don't necessarily get what's going on when all the abilities start flying in quick succession in the big fights though, and my enjoyment of it is definitely not optimal as a result.

 Melissia wrote:
I haven't said the game's balance is poor. I don't really obsess over balance anyway. I'm more interested in variety of gameplay, a little imbalance is perfectly fine as long as the game has a lot of variation. Whether or not starcraft has that is probably YMMV.

I think on the continuum of strategy games available Starcraft 2 probably has close to the least variety, but attempts the most balance and polish. They made a conscious decision to add little mechanical things that you have to do well to perform well, and that's the most dubious thing to my mind. I'd rather have deeper gameplay and more focus on that than have extra little minigames that have to be done well for my production to work. Still, when I play it I take that in stride as part of the experience, even if it's not what I'd usually go for.

I'm really digging the game so far.

HiveFleetPlastic wrote:
I'm not saying the game's balance is poor at any particular skill level or any level at all. I'm also not saying that balance at the high end has to be sacrificed for balance at the low end, or vice versa. All I'm saying is that balance at the pro level does not imply balance at any other level, because someone said it but it is not true.

Personally, I kinda see playing the multiplayer as the price of admission for understanding the tournaments. I enjoy watching the tournaments sometimes and they don't necessarily make a ton of sense without having played the game. The single player is fun too (though its story shortcomings should be noted) and the games vs AI are fun for a while even if they don't have that much long-term entertainment value.

I think that you are missing one thing. The balance is the most important at the highest level. Lower levels, although still important, may be a little more skewed to one side.

This may seem a little unfair but if your race have some small disadvantage and you are at the middle of the 'skill pool' then due to the matchmaking system you still should have ~50% win / loose ratio. If your race is not balanced towards some you should be getting players with adjusted skill level to yours (due to your history of win / loss at particular race matchup and based at some calculated skill level). Even though the races are skewed, you still are theoretically getting an even chance while playing with random opponent. As your skill grows, the differences between races fade.

The highest level cannot do this because there is a top skill barrier of players. Also only the higher level guys do play for cash (that really matters).

And frankly the bottom of the food chain has so little understanding of the game / so little skill in RTS genre in general, that balancing will never be possible without destroying the game in other levels.

As for the perceived pro-players. Well, the only thing I can say that like with every group out there, they are made of people. You interacting with several idiots does not show the accurate representation of the group. I thought that was quite well established with the other topic in the Video Games section...
Especially when it's based on Korean players with completely different worldview and still influenced by Kespa, which is basically epitome of everything that is wrong with "e-sport".

I'm going to google Kespa now.

Aye, Kespa is a giant thorn in the SC2 communities side. In short, all they do is give blizzard the finger and try to hog all the tournaments in Korea without having to share the loot.

There's plenty of korean players moving away from them. Hell, team Axiom is composed of Korean's only but it's owned by an American and sponsored by TotalBiscuit and HuskyStarcraft (the team owner is TB's wife ).