StarCraft FLAME WARS

[Trailers]

I liked HW2, just not as much as HW1

Sure, the epicness was gone, sure the plot was jumbled, even retarted, at the beginning of the game.

Sure, there's no Kadesh and you have to fight the fucking movers.

But come on, HW2, the scale was overhauled, the graphics were overhauled, and the mods are WAY better. Also, flak frigates.

[Xenonier]

When you mean gamers you mean the terrifying examples of humanity who have sold their souls for maximum proficiency at one strategy game or another correct, whether it's HW or SC? Screw them, they're almost as intolerable as the graphics gamers who only want pretty things, who have allowed travesties like the Xbox to dominate the market. Damn the hardcore, graceless crunchers of numbers!

Red Alert 2 continues to thrive because of its modding community, which is the best reason any game can have for continuing to exist. It means that the game will always have new content rather than endless rehashings of strategies and macros, drove forward by percentage increases in efficiency. As is RTS is a genre that gets tired fast; turn-based strategy like Civilization is more graceful and less frantic. The less chance a game has of being turned into a sport the better, over all.

Sounds rather subjective, not objective. Professional Koreans may well sell their souls, but the last time I checked the majority of top foreigners have fully functional lives, most of them being in college and playing around two to four hours a day five days a week, at most. Building the skill takes consistent practice, but keeping it up there doesn't require as much maintenance. These people love the game, there's no doubt about that, but They're hardly faceless numbercrunchers who exist only to play to win.

That said however, the second paragraph is completely wrong if only because we're seeing new strategies in competitive RTS we haven't seen before. Starcraft at any level is never a rehash, for two reasons. Firstly, if you're playing against different people all the time there's always a significant variance in judgement and distance as you adapt to new players, while at the professional leagues skills are always evolving. The skillset required is always more complete, but there's always breadth within that to expand one's playing style. Inter.Mind and By.Flash manage to have styles that are completely different and new, dominate the Terran strategic playbook atm, and reflect their heritage without brainlessly emulating it.

Professional competition with a deep game doesn't kill creativity or turn it into a game of rehashes, those are the players that become universally recognised as boring and generally reviled (Goodfriend, Midas, etccc). The players who dominate and define the game are always new and different, for some reason. The constant update of new maps ensuresthis, as well.

And modern Civilisation games fail. Anyone playing on the higher difficulty levels must play incredibly formulaic and work on set rulesets. A perfect example of this is how one beat's Sid difficulty in Civ III or It's equivalent in Civ IV. Formulaic the whole way through.

[Arenumberg]

Homeworld 1 had Kamikaze <3.

[Kreshh]

Homeworld 1 had Kamikaze <3.

You could even ram your mothership into theirs if you were skilled enough.

Might as well go out in style...

[Central Facehuggeria]

I liked HW2, just not as much as HW1

Sure, the epicness was gone, sure the plot was jumbled, even retarted, at the beginning of the game.

The plot started okay and devolved into idiocy after rescuing the shipyard.

No, wait. The plot retconned HW canon. Nevermind, the plot started idiotic.

But come on, HW2, the scale was overhauled, the graphics were overhauled, and the mods are WAY better. Also, flak frigates.

Yeah, the scale and graphics were better. And the mods are better because HW2 was designed to be more mod friendly.

The subsystem targeting thing was a good idea, but the intrusive interface and 'frigates beat bombers, destroyers beat frigates, battlecruisers beat destroyers, and bombers beat battlecruisers' balance was a huge step back from HW1 IMO.

[Jordaxia]

I didn't find the interface intrusive? I mean it's certainly a lot more visible than HW1s but I'd not call it intrusive, personally. Besides that, I'm in almost complete agreement about the balance changes, because they did favour whoever could hammer out a balanced fleet fastest, whilst restricting access to a balanced fleet based on research priority. to clarify, a balanced fleet needed battleships (everything is dead now) and frigates (and so are your bombers), but you could only build fighters at first, so the first person to complete the research and get out a few ships of those varieties (so as to counter against every threat) was all but guaranteed the win, because the bombers you'd need to take out that enemy battleship would be so easily shot down by their frigates whilst the battleships countered basically everything else in their own time. and even if you did neutralise the frigate threat whilst sparing your bombers, the battleships insane HP meant that with enough time, its lightest weapons would STILL take out bombers and corvettes and your mothership. I know that at that point you could warp out, but once you're being forced to warp out your mothership, unless you've got something really special about to show, it's basically game over, because you're probably going to lose all your resource capability as you get hounded across the map. And rushing rarely ever worked, because your lighter vessels, bombers and corvettes, couldn't really do enough damage without being countered by interceptors/lance fighters, generally resulting in a net income loss for you unless you managed to disengage combat successfully (difficult to do in a bombers v interceptor matchup) Though having a carrier nearby really did help. which brings me to my next gripe. Did nobody think the maps were just a bit too small to allow for some real carrier tactics? my biggest complaint about an 'epic space game' is that I didn't feel like I was dealing with a theatre of combat, just 2 opposing motherships with a small amount of intervening nothingness.

Now, HW1, that was delicious. I remember dancing a squad of five assault frigates around the firing arc of a taiidan heavy cruiser, neutralising it without losing a single assault frigate. sure it took a little time, but the feeling of using actual maneouvrability in a fight rather than just brute strength made it so worth it.

Speaking of assault frigates, what the HELL were they thinking when they removed them. I loved them! and on a related note, the lack of 'generic' jack of all trades was another thing that hampered the games balance, because everything devolved down to a 'good against X bad against Y' fest.

/rant

[Central Facehuggeria]

I didn't find the interface intrusive? I mean it's certainly a lot more visible than HW1s but I'd not call it intrusive, personally.

I felt it took up way too much space and made it seem more like a game rather than an actual spacebattle.

HW1's interface was tasteful and subtle, and I could often find myself getting lost in the pretty light show as ion beams cut across the stars.

HW2's interface always drew my attention away from the battle.

[Arizona Nova]

@Xenonier: I've realized something a little while ago. If you play games for a living as opposed to as entertainment, you have turned gaming into a job. I find this utterly horrifying. Combine this with the fact that the professional atmosphere seems akin to that of professional sports, which I also loathe at a fundamental level, and suddenly the appeal of professional gaming was gone for me. I hate jocks, whether they play football or Starcraft is irrelevant.

Your paragraph about difficulty levels confounds me. Why are you playing at the highest difficulties? Why ever do that at all? I've never seen the point of doing that, in Civ or Baldur's Gate or whatever. Being dead set on beating the game (especially for Civ) as your sole objective is missing the whole damn point. You're trying to imagine yourself building an empire; sacrificing that immersion for efficiency and e-peen bragging rights for beating it at deity is simply absurd. At any rate, any Civ past II fails, I give you that at least. Feature creep at its finest.

Outside of working, for pay, for someone else, I hate efficiency, is basically what it comes down to. I love it when it comes to o-rings on the space shuttle, but I'll be damned before I arrange my schedule around raid instances or practice 2-4 hours a day (for a game! My sister doesn't practice trumpet 2 hours a day and she is accounted hardcore!) to master an RTS.

[Zerstorendar]

If you can't respect professional sportsmen at least for their natural abilities and the dedication they put in to making full use of their abilities (for the most part), then you have an irrational bias. And it seems to me that your irrational bias against professional sport is colouring your opinion of professional gaming, which is fine. The point is turning gaming into an e-sport has a huge appeal for a huge amount of people for a number of reasons. Firstly, there are always those who will play for fun, but they have professional gamers as the ultimate example of what to aspire to. Even for those that are a bit more serious, the pro gamers set the benchmark and lead the charge onward into the evolution of new stratagems, tactics, builds etc. And finally for the pro gamers themseleves, look at it from their perspective: they wouldn't do it if they didn't enjoy it, just like most professional sportsmen. They may not like losing, but they love winning, and they love the game. It is the pro gamers that supercharges a community, and they are the primary reason Starcraft is so successful while games like Dawn of War, whose professionals mostly left, floundered.

Your "I HAET JOCKS" point of view seems once again irrational, but mostly irrelevant. Firstly, 'jocks' is a sterotype, and sterotyping people is never a good idea. Secondly, I have no idea how you reach the conclusion that because a pro gamer operates in a professional atmosphere he is a jock of some kind. The game is different, the player is different, the skill set and personality is different. People who are born with a natural talent at gaming as opposed to running (for example) can now live a successful life with hard work and proper use of their skills. Every human being plays to their strengths, and it is no different for pro gamers. They do what they do because they love it, and they're good at it. Communities follow their example and their exploits, and it brings nothing but good.

So basically your "I hate jocks and SC pros are jocks, therefore I hate SC pros" philosophy can fuck right off, because your irrationality means nothing when compared to the benefits of a pro gaming scene for all involved.

I'll be damned before I arrange my schedule around raid instances or practice 2-4 hours a day (for a game! My sister doesn't practice trumpet 2 hours a day and she is accounted hardcore!) to master an RTS.

WoW addiction=/=pro gaming. Bad example. Not to mention your sister wouldn't play that much (hurhur 2-4 hours is alot now?) if she didn't enjoy it, something you seem to think is the one true purpose of gaming anyway.

[Xenonier]

There's quite a significant amount of inherent bias associated with your word of the word job, to begin with. From your post alone, it seems to carry the implication that the very idea of a job being something which forms the basis of both a true love and fun-based attachment/commitment, and a drive to excel and overcome all challengers as would be expected of professional athlete is the concept that truly scares you. Professional competition at any level is truly an enterprise in which people choose to excel, at any all cost. People take something fun and sharpen it to the point it dominates their lives, and this search for efficiency is key behind any successful drive to stand at the very top of any field. However, they do indeed love their game. They would not survive at any level of professional competition if they did not, and many top players who lose the touch cite a victory as undermining their drive to win and interest in the game.

Now, From my understanding of the word Jock, it leads into the other problem about high order competition or analysis. The classic "Jock" is someone who either seeks their superior abilities or uses them as a bludgeon with which to hurt or typecast others. I wouldn't say professional competition leads to that (well, automatically, although there are these concerns) and the combination of inbuilt-modesty in the Korean culture around games leads to a scene which is less extreme in examples of egoism.

As for your examples about your sister and WoW, unless WoW is their job it doesn't carry well. Secondly, people who study four hours every day are the ones planning to get to the very top, with the knowledge if it's a hit and miss they'll still have the skills for something comfortable. Efficiency is often typecast as something which kills emotion or fun, and that's something I find amusing. It's when people try and make a game 'for fun' as efficient as possible, learning and analyzing as much as they can to improve their play when we have our greatest level of subjective and objective emotional investment. And it's from those investments, we get the fun in the first place.

tl;dr, building an empire is nice, don't get me wrong. However, I'd rather build an Empire where I know everyone is as skilled and deadly as possible, making every decision cut throat and on the edge. After all, that way there's so much more to win - or lose. That however, could merely just be me.