57 replies to this topic

[volcaniclostone]

vOdToasT, on 20 April 2010 - 08:26 PM, said:

@ Volcanic, what I mean is that there are many factors that help you win. Mechanics (micro and macro) is one factor. Strategy is another factor. If you have really good mechanics but ^@!$ strategy you're not gonna have too much success. If you have good strategy but ^@!$ mechanics, you're not gonna win a lot either. That's what I meant. This means that just because you have better micro and macro than your opponent, you won't necessarily win. If you have better strategy than your opponent, you might not win either.

Let me simplify what am saying. A better player will always and if not "always" majoroty of the time will beat the lesser player with no matter how far they taken the game or faction. So to recap if a player like yourself shows up and start beating other players its because he has good skill in micro and macro.

vOdToasT, on 20 April 2010 - 08:26 PM, said:

And I know you will always whine at Novus, because you will never get good enough at playing vs Novus (because of your attitude), so to you it will always seem imbalanced.

I dont know where you got the impression that i do bad againts NOVUS   cause thats so funny. My whining its based on an observation done over two years of playing the game and there are players who played the game longer than me and share the same thought.

vOdToasT, on 20 April 2010 - 08:26 PM, said:

The reason I lost two Hierarchy mirrors vs him in that tournament was because new things were invented right in then and there that I couldn't deal with. I beat him in HvH all the time, and I have even done so in previous tournaments. You can ask him and he will confirm what I say, because it's the truth.

Again, you say you beat him all the time, is it because he is a crap player or is it because you have better skill?

vOdToasT, on 20 April 2010 - 08:26 PM, said:

What happened was that we played on maps with lots of instagrabs, so I figured I didn't have to do the standard saucer based strategy. I could get money so fast that I could get Nufai out really fast and just stun the saucers... then own them with Lost Ones using plasma bombs next to them.


The next game he saw what I did and improved on it, taking it to the next level. He went fast nufai and BRUTES. The brutes of course ran over my lost ones.

The third game I had no idea what to do. The matchup had changed completely from what was used to. It was unknown to me, and so I ended up doing some weird mix between normal saucer play and nufai + brute play... it sucked, obviously, as he just went standard play and rolled me over.

Well Nufai is actually very easy to counter without breaking econ or sweat you just have to know how, but what would i know since i dont use h right  

[Kelathin]

vOdToasT, on 20 April 2010 - 08:26 PM, said:

Actually, StarCraft has only had a few balance patches. Most of the patches are just bug fixes. There were only about three or four actual balance patches, so I CAN compare SC to UaW.

@ Kelathin, there were HUGE break throughs that came years after StarCraft's release. Some were simply technical, like mutalisk stacking. Others were strategic, like forge fast expand in protoss vs zerg. This took Protoss vs Zerg and COMPLETELY changed how the matchup is played. Guess when this happened? 2007. You're wrong about most strategies being discovered in the first few patches. That's how it goes for games that aren't played competitively at a high level, because people just don't discover what exists there.

Well, you took what I said relatively out of context. Especially since I said weeks of a patch, not a finite number of patches. Truth be told, I wonder if you understand what I'm stating. If you're familiar with horizontal asymptote. The y increase becomes significantly smaller and smaller as it approaches the asymptote. So as time progresses along (X) the "evolution" becomes smaller and smaller, the fact is you're still improving, but the game doesn't radically change as fast. This means as time progresses, the level of difference between high level players doesn't simply spiral very fast, because the game hasn't fundamentally gone through any miraculous changes. You bring up something like forge fast expanding, it's not exactly evolutionary, it was always doable, just players lacked the timing and/or knowledge to perform it well.

[vOdToasT]

Being better is not just having better micro and macro. It is also to think better than your opponent, because micro and macro is not everything in this game, and neither is it in most RTS games. Yes, a better player will win most of the time, but the fact that he is better does not only come from micro and macro.

There are players who have played for years and still lose to the same old strategies. It doesn't matter how long you've played if your attitude is still " I lost, it's imba, QQ ". For example: Charos was (is?) considered a pretty useless hero... but if you don't use Charos, there is no way you can survive a Novus 5 vehicle assembly push, because they will simply get more units than you do. It doesn't matter how awesome you play - he will make more units than you and overrun you, unless you use Charos. And yet, he was (is?) considered useless... You'd think someone would have come up with using Charos to buy time for you to get your macro rolling after three years.
.. but with this attitude of just saying whatever you lose to is imbalanced, no one did. Or at least no old UaW player that I've talked to.

WLFTL is not a crap player... he's alright, I guess, but I'm better... for now.

Edited by vOdToasT, 21 April 2010 - 07:57 AM.

[The Archon]

Kelathin, on 21 April 2010 - 07:54 AM, said:

...as time progresses along (X) the "evolution" becomes smaller and smaller, the fact is you're still improving, but the game doesn't radically change as fast...

If your asymptote theory is only based on payers gradually improving their ability to micro/macromanage then it's fundamentally flawed.  What has been said about Starcraft strategies, counters, etc. illustrates that that's where the game can take new directions: in players' strategies.  The technical limits of the game (which you say are gradually being reachd) aren't applicable; rather, it's about players outsmarting each other, discovering/inventing new strategies.

While technically the game could be broken down into an obscene number of permutations, and so technically you may be right, it's like saying that the bits on an audio CD only have a finite number of permutations, and so the perfect piece of music is gradually being approached as artists exhaust all the other possibilities.  That's simply not how it works.

Disclaimer: I'm not a competitively skilled player, so feel free to ignore any of the above.

Edited by The Archon, 21 April 2010 - 08:18 AM.

[Valdez]

The Archon, on 21 April 2010 - 08:16 AM, said:

While technically the game could be broken down into an obscene number of permutations

Well there's the obscene part and the not so obscene part too. There are probably dozens of things you can do with Charos's burning blaze ability but I doubt any of those uses actually have any competitive value. Ideally every aspect of the game should be "good enough" to have some potential strategy use, but if the gameplay balance is wacky, that wouldn't apply. I think that's the case with UAW too, where you have things like Charos whose raison d'etre is pretty much to be a walking tornado and nothing else, which really says a lot about strategic versatility for him. And ironically as vod mentioned he's probably the only countermeasure in the whole Masari metagame against a Novus full scale vehicle attack.

Edited by Valdez, 21 April 2010 - 08:30 AM.

[Kelathin]

The Archon, on 21 April 2010 - 08:16 AM, said:

If your asymptote theory is only based on payers gradually improving their ability to micro/macromanage then it's fundamentally flawed.  What has been said about Starcraft strategies, counters, etc. illustrates that that's where the game can take new directions: in players' strategies.  The technical limits of the game (which you say are gradually being reachd) aren't applicable; rather, it's about players outsmarting each other, discovering/inventing new strategies.

While technically the game could be broken down into an obscene number of permutations, and so technically you may be right, it's like saying that the bits on an audio CD only have a finite number of permutations, and so the perfect piece of music is gradually being approached as artists exhaust all the other possibilities.  That's simply not how it works.

Disclaimer: I'm not a competitively skilled player, so feel free to ignore any of the above.

I'm not basing it on micro-management or macro-management at all, if I was I'd admit my own logic is flawed. Micro/Macro talk is more of the Volc and Vod discussion than mine. Mine is a technical number of permutations, while your music analogy could be used, it isn't the same result. In most RTS, some strategies are superior to others. Why? Because there is the end result of "win", unlike music which can be interpreted in various ways, "winning" is quantifiable. There is a winner and a loser, minus the cheating desyncers. A superior strategy when players of equal skill (micro and macro skills included) always results in favoring the superior strategy. Would you not agree to that?
However, I personally do not feel "invention" of a particular strategy or counter strategy means the game evolving past its technical limitation. The game will always be the boundary and all it can merely offer is the capability of challenging players to approach it's never reachable limitation. A player can always do something "slightly" different. What I am saying, however is that the asymptote results in competitive players strategical difference becoming less and less, as you approach the asymptote you go into infinite decimals rather than whole numbers.

@Valdez, yes the number of things you can do competitively does force a large number of permutations to be garbage.

Edited by Kelathin, 21 April 2010 - 08:39 AM.

[Valdez]

Ultimately if you're really talking technical stuff then of course you can never overcome it unless you get down to the core stuff like the engine or code.

The technical aspect of the game itself shouldn't be confused with metagame. The metagame is what has the potential to change or evolve based on stuff like new strategies or even patches that rebalance the gameplay.

Regarding comparison between competitive players there's no concrete way to determine for certain because of playstyle/paradigm variance. It's why I don't really believe in the concept of a "best player" unless there is a discrete way of defining what is the best, although I do acknowledge the concept of a "top player" because the top guy is very easy to determine, just look at the ladder and identify whoever's on the no.1 spot at the moment. For simplification purposes generally top player and best player are simply synonymous.

Edited by Valdez, 21 April 2010 - 08:56 AM.

[Kelathin]

Valdez, on 21 April 2010 - 08:52 AM, said:

Ultimately if you're really talking technical stuff then of course you can never overcome it unless you get down to the core stuff like the engine or code.

The technical aspect of the game itself shouldn't be confused with metagame. The metagame is what has the potential to change or evolve based on stuff like new strategies or even patches that rebalance the gameplay.

Regarding comparison between competitive players there's no concrete way to determine for certain because of playstyle/paradigm variance. It's why I don't really believe in the concept of a "best player", although I do acknowledge the concept of a "top player" because the top guy is very easy to determine, just look at the ladder and identify whoever's on the no.1 spot at the moment. For simplification purposes generally top player and best player are simply synonymous.

When ingame you are going to be limited by the game. Yes, I was talking technically, and at least you acknowledge that you can't really overcome it.

Bringing up metagame, the metagame is an "interesting" concept. Typically, metagame is thinking about what your opponent relying on psychological knowledge such as using early air rush to force an opponent to adopt early AA when in reality your main force is composed of ground forces. That merely changes because people's adopting of what they consider proper. If there was a game with hard counters only, then metagame would be almost nonexistent.

Top player using something such a a ladder, only means something if ladder lacks cheaters

[Valdez]

Kelathin, on 21 April 2010 - 09:06 AM, said:

If there was a game with hard counters only, then metagame would be almost nonexistent.

Nonexistent yeah, if the game had zero unconventional aspects, for example an RTS with no unit abilities and only damage dealing.

Pokemon for example is one of the prime examples of a game that's ass deep in hardcounters. It's basically a 16-way rock scissor paper game, but it's actually got quite a metagame around it by centered around movesets and unconventional moves. EndWar is another example but this time it's 7-way rock scissor paper, with less unconventional fluff to play around with.

Even with a metagame present I don't really consider it a good thing if there's a lack of strategic depth. When I'm Masari and there's an oncoming Novus horde and you tell me the only way I stand a chance is to spend the research and popcap on getting a single specific hero unit for that single specific ability, I call that lousy game design, even if it were somehow designed that way so the hero would have 1 use in the game rather than no use at all.

Edited by Valdez, 21 April 2010 - 09:30 AM.

[Kelathin]

Valdez, on 21 April 2010 - 09:28 AM, said:

Nonexistent yeah, if the game had zero unconventional aspects, for example an RTS with no unit abilities and only damage dealing.

Pokemon for example is one of the prime examples of a game that's ass deep in hardcounters. It's basically a 16-way rock scissor paper game, but it's actually got quite a metagame around it by centered around movesets and unconventional moves. EndWar is another example but this time it's 7-way rock scissor paper, with less unconventional fluff to play around with.

Even with a metagame present I don't really consider it a good thing if there's a lack of strategic depth. When I'm Masari and there's an oncoming Novus horde and you tell me the only way I stand a chance is to spend the research and popcap on getting a single specific hero unit for that single specific ability, I call that lousy game design, even if it were somehow designed that way so the hero would have 1 use in the game rather than no use at all.

Think simpler like tic tac toe , if you think logically and counter every move your opponent will always end up in a statemate.

[vOdToasT]

Valdez, on 21 April 2010 - 08:29 AM, said:

And ironically as vod mentioned he's probably the only countermeasure in the whole Masari metagame against a Novus full scale vehicle attack.

He is needed for a while, to compensate for taking longer time to build an infrastructure... but after a while you don't need him anymore. It's not like you have to rely on him the entire game - that would be stupid, since when he dies, he's dead.

[Saphri]

charos isnt just useful as a "walking tornado", his frenzy ability is as important.  he also beats the crap out of nufai and kamal just by whacking them senseless with his sword.

[vOdToasT]

True, he can be good to surpress Hierarchy heroes... and chase them with frenzy. Unmake + frenzy + dark vortex = dead hero.

Even if he doesn't kill the heroes, having him as a shield to force the heroes to keep their distance with the help of your units can be good.

Edited by vOdToasT, 21 April 2010 - 10:40 AM.

[JAGX]

vOdToasT, on 20 April 2010 - 05:56 PM, said:

@ Volcanic, you will not always lose to someone who has better micro and macro. A player can have awesome mechanics but be a dumbass and lose because his opponent thinks better. You will NOT always lose to players who have better micro and macro, that is pure bullshit. So what if my units are better and more numerous? If you out think me I will still lose, because they're in the wrong place at the wrong time... or because I didn't even get them out in time.

Having 500 apm and perfect macro doesn't make you smart, and in fact doesn't even make you very succesful if you can't think. Vs good players with just DECENT macro you will lose, if they can think.

So true.  PC vs Xbox is a prime example, pretty much all PC players with 6+ fingers have better micro than most of the best Xbox players (except maybe lep, he was a freak).  That being said, I still manage to best PC players, yet I could never do what they do with heroes or units with abilities.  One time I played a PC player who almost beat me with ohm bots, it was absurd!  The only way I beat him was because I had a better strat, but other than that he was running circles around em killing everything from reapers to defilers to walkers with friggin' ohm bots!  This difference is made more clear on games like BFMEII or, as I'm sure Vod would agree, stealth tanks in C&C--like the elite stealth that is micro-managed so well that it can obliterate an army.

Kelathin, on 19 April 2010 - 12:30 PM, said:

While players continual to "feel" they are improving competitively, the truth is they are simply approaching the asymptote and never will go beyond asymptote.

Ah Kel, using math without numbers, you clever devil I knew you couldn't resist!
But you're right though, I like to describe balance in that manner as well, because you cannot achieve perfection, merely make it 'more perfect' and the American saying goes...

vOdToasT, on 20 April 2010 - 08:26 PM, said:

Actually, StarCraft has only had a few balance patches. Most of the patches are just bug fixes. There were only about three or four actual balance patches, so I CAN compare SC to UaW.

Ah, but we must remember, these balance patches were rolled out over a series of YEARS, not months.  Like you said, UaW died in it's infancy (due to SEGA's poor ad campaign), and was never really competitively played.  It therefore cannot possibly be balanced and is very different from SC.

vOdToasT, on 20 April 2010 - 08:26 PM, said:

Now that I've gotten used to the new HvH (On high instagrab maps... on maps with little to no instas it's still the same old game) I'm not scared of playing it anymore, because I know the matchup. I could play a best of 5 vs WLFTL and beat him HvH, like I do when we bump into each other in automatch, and like I've done in the cups in the past.

If you don't believe me, just ask him.

Yea Perfi is a good example, he gave me a solid run for my money the other day in a H mirror.  I'm just relearning the game myself, one cup match at a time lol.  I find that practice and trying strats is only good vs top players, and Perfi passes my test.

[vOdToasT]

The first Command & Conquer hasn't had a single balance patch, and it's still balanced, so you saying that UaW can not " possibly be balanced " is not true. The game was known for being balanced despite having non symretical factions, when it was popular.

Tiberian Sun also only had a few balance patches, about three, and it's very balanced.

Just a few examples.

Edited by vOdToasT, 21 April 2010 - 06:28 PM.

[JAGX]

vOdToasT, on 21 April 2010 - 06:12 PM, said:

The first Command & Conquer hasn't had a single balance patch, and it's still balanced, so you saying that UaW can not " possibly be balanced " is not true. The game was known for being balanced despite having non symretical factions, when it was popular.

Tiberian Sun also only had a few balance patches, about three, and it's very balanced.

Just a few examples.

I would disagree with that, but I wasn't really talking about those games.

I simply disagree that a game with the asymmetrical factions, which is heavily map dependant, that has never been played competitively, and has never had a patch that came out after a few months, is balanced.  And, having played the game for a long time, I further reach this conclusion.

As you said the game is always evolving, even now that patches can't keep up to fix the imba things.  And to use your line of thought, why would I go around saying this game was imbalanced if it wasn't?

Nothing can ever be truly 100% balanced (to follow up on the asymptote analogy), while many games come close like SC, I'm afraid UaW hasn't even been played enough to warrant that distinction, let alone had enough attention from the devs who themselves admit it needs work.

Edited by JAGX, 22 April 2010 - 05:26 AM.

[vOdToasT]

Would UaW be balanced on a progamer level? There is no way to know, as it will never reach that level. But at THIS level that we are at NOW, it is balanced, and that's what matters, since we're never leaving this level.

When I say the game is balanced, I mean that on the highest level that exists right now, it's balanced. I don't mean that if two omnipotent beings played vs each other, it would be balanced. That would be silly, since there is no way to find out.

And I never said that the game is balanced on all maps. It's only balanced on the right maps, so your argument of the game being " map dependent " is null.

Edited by vOdToasT, 23 April 2010 - 12:04 PM.

[JAGX]

vOdToasT, on 23 April 2010 - 12:03 PM, said:

And I never said that the game is balanced on all maps. It's only balanced on the right maps, so your argument of the game being " map dependent " is null.

That actually is the definition of balance being map dependent... even if we could agree on what the "right" maps are.

Edited by JAGX, 24 April 2010 - 01:51 AM.

[vOdToasT]

Yes, it IS the definition of it being map dependent, but I never said anything else. THAT is why that argument is null.

Some maps are completely broken.

Edited by vOdToasT, 24 April 2010 - 08:26 AM.

[JAGX]

Well if you say nothing else, then that doesn't null my argument, it is a non-response.

The whole idea of map-dependency is that some maps are totally broken, whereas others are slightly tilted.  I don't think we could say that any maps are perfectly even, much less agree on which ones are the most balanced.

And since there are 3 factions, some maps favor say HvN while the same map might be bad for HvM and maybe be slightly less balanced for NvM.  There's too much criteria needed for one map to be balanced between factions that are so different, thus it depends on which race and which map you play.  There is no one maps that is balanced for all races and all strats, although I think a few come close to being most 'fair' in a sense.

Edited by JAGX, 27 April 2010 - 06:43 AM.