Caliostro said:
Again, what's the big difference between that one shot you manage to score head on in a shooter, or the epic combo breaker you manage to pull, or the one attack on your base you manage to foil, or that one attack you manage to pull off to destroy your enemy's building?
It's harder to learn from constant defeat in a game like StarCraft than in TF2, because the genre deliberately obscures your enemy from view.
Why? If anything I'd argue the exact opposite. As mentioned before in this thread, SC2 gives you a replay file you can watch after without fog of war. You can review it as much as you like and study your enemy's moves step by step. You can literally watch every action he does and how they affect him. You can see the bases he makes, the units he builds, etc, etc.
How is this any different from recording a match in SF4 and studying your enemy's moves? Hell, a game like TF2, or most shooters really, is far less transparent. If you're lucky you can see what your enemy does in the miliseconds right before he plugs you. If you wanna study his strategies you'll need to find him and ask him for a demo/record, or at the very least get a server demo. By default all you get to study are his exact actions before he sends you to the respawn screen.
As for the Matchmaking... I think Greg and Shamus put it best.
It's very difficult to explain in words, but from my experience with TF2, SF4, and now StarCraft 2... it's a mistake to think that just because you're playing someone with equal skill, that it isn't intense, and isn't incredibly challenging, because it is. StarCraft 2 is also easily at its
best when you're playing someone on your same level. And to be frank, the reason that the "small victories" doesn't apply to SC2 when you're playing someone superior to you is because those small victories will not happen.
You will MAYBE attack his base, you will almost certainly be crushed. Far more likely is that your opponent will steamroll into your base without you building anything more than a handful of the first tier units. Again, it feels like you're never getting to experience the full game in a match like that.
And even the information provided to you by the game can be hard to decipher, because the game itself is so complex. "He built a Vespene Refinery so early on. Why did he do that? I don't understand that at all." You might be able to understand WHAT they do but not why, and it's a lot more arcane than learning why the enemy sniper in TF2 was sitting in that one position right there. (Just ask Jordan [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/columns/on-the-ball/7216-On-the-Ball-A-Shoddy-Star-Craftsman]).
I've had fun playing people vastly better than me in TF2 and SF4. SC2 feels different, an the only way to really explain that is to have people play it for themselves.
Silva said:
I think it's very easy to forget the simple pleasures of gaming past. This new Western approach of equalising the battlefield is going to decrease the diversity of the gaming experience itself. It reminds me all too easily of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, and the complete lack of real challenge or ease in the game because everything levels with you.
Mr Funk, it really comes down to whether you enjoy equal matches or random ones. Some people like equality. Others don't. Some like a chaotic (read: realistic) battlefield, where they will sometimes face geniuses and sometimes other newbies. Others don't. No matter what the developer's approach, except if they get off their butts and provide dedicated servers and private server capabilities for everything, they will alienate half the audience.
Being put on an equal playing field does not make the game easy by any stretch of the imagination. "The complete lack of real challenge" is only when you're playing someone worse than you. An equal match is a challenging one. And there IS an element of chaos, because even equal players can screw up, or sometimes your tactic will fool people and others it won't.
RTS games have never used dedicated servers - ever - and you have "private servers" with Custom games. I don't see the hangup there.
More importantly, skill in games is hardly a consistent thing, especially within the lower tiers. People might have an amazing, flawless game on one day, then forget that we need a villager to create a building the next. Humans aren't easy to throw into matches on the basis of "skill level" because we're unpredictable. We try new things constantly, especially before we've found a style that suits us perfectly (for some, no such style is ever found). In this sense, matchmaking is a random process anyway, because it will never adequately match up "equal" players. It is silly to expect perfection from it, so the need for adding a random element to it was indeed dubious - just not for the reasons you thought of.
No, I know this. I know this very well. Obviously, SOMEONE has to win the game, and that tends to result in them just outplaying the opponent. Whether that's through mistakes or luck can vary. But the matchmaker does its best to put people on as much of an even playing field as possible.
For me, this equal matchmaking would make for a very "samey" experience. Part of the fun in the Age of Empires series, Warcraft, and Total Annihilation was in facing opponents who were much better than me. If I had curb-stomped all opponents like I usually did on the N64, then there would have been little point. Even if you cannot see your enemy and thus never learn from your defeats, part of the community fun and atmosphere in competitive play is enjoying the fact that you had your butt handed to you.
Only.. it doesn't. There's nothing "samey" about the experience other than for the most part, almost all of your matches will be challenging. You WILL get your butt handed to you if you don't take it seriously.
Dexter111 said:
Good god... again, right now e.g. in the Beta the Matchmaking DOES NOT work "too well", in fact it barely works at all, I dunno why Blizzard would say that... maybe out of the same reason they said a Trilogy is needed. Whenever you click "Find Match" it displays "Looking for Players" in the Top middle of the screen. After about 5-10 seconds it displays "Expanding Search" (this almost always happens), whenever this happens you usually get matched against an opponent that isn't at the same Skill Level as you. There's also an easy way to check this out, if you for example lose too fast/they were too good or if they were too easy just "Add Friend" your opponents at the end and you can see in what Leagues they are playing, I've already got matched against a lot of Silver/Gold and even Platinum people.
Also refer to the thread called "The expanded matchmaking is backfiring": http://forums.battle.net/thread.html?topicId=23767542850&sid=5010
Because right now, in beta, they have the matchmaker tuned to get people into a match ASAP rather than get them into the most balanced match. Because they're trying to, y'know, test the actual game. Since there are only ~10,000 people on at once AT MAX, and most of those are playing games, it would take much longer to find a perfectly balanced one.
And it *still* works really well. I've had outliers here and there, especially with the influx of new blood, but for the most part almost all of my matches have been exceptionally close and well balanced, and the same goes for the folks here at Escapist HQ.
The_root_of_all_evil said:
What I'm talking about is the same cheats that are available in Modern Warfare 2, Diablo or Command and Conquer where the matchmaking system is cheated.
Which is... how? Throwing matches to lower your rating to stomp on newbs? You can't actually "cheat" without risking getting your game ID banned, you can't make new accounts without buying new copies of the game. If you're just throwing matches to win on newbies, guess what? Your rating will go back up. And then you'll have to throw some more matches.
But the ranking system is based on grinding. As Shamus said, you're always battling against someone as good as you (allegedly), and you'll be spending a large amount of the time just trying to maintain your own rank. (Without the problems of disconnecting/ragequitting)
So, those who want to rise in ranks not only have to constantly fight for survival, but fight constantly, so they don't get left behind.
But ... there's no point to rising in ranks. You don't GET anything out of it. There's no grinding. You're just playing the game like you'd be playing it otherwise. You don't have to do anything differently other than just play the game normally, and if that's your definition of grinding than you and I are on *way* different pages here.
They're opinions based on the evidence I have. I think Dexter111 has the facts.
He doesn't.
Proteus214 said:
...make me a match,
Find me a find,
Catch me a catch.
Dammit Funk, now that song is going to be stuck in my head all day.
OT: There is also the problem of facing the exact same opponents over and over again. If you get matched up so precisely and there doesn't happen to be anyone at your "level" then wouldn't you always be in the "oh crap not this guy again" situation?
Hasn't been a problem. In a month of beta-ing, I've maybe run into the same team ... ONCE. And it was like at 4 AM. So when there are hundreds of thousands of players on the actual game, it won't be much of a problem.
But even if that did happen; if the game tried to match you up with a group of 100 or so similar-skill players, wouldn't that be the birth of an impromptu community, too? Why couldn't you add them as friends in the game if you had good matches?
