For example people used to talk about APM in SC2 as a sort of measure of how good someone is. Why should that be? It's a strategy game. Imagine if you could express your ideas effectively into actual game actions?
For the same reason that sporting organizations regulate the equipment allowed during play - the make sure the playing field is reasonably level.
>For example people used to talk about APM in SC2 as a sort of measure of how good someone is. Why should that be?
Because dexterity has historically been a basis for comparison in recreational competition.
>It's a strategy game.
It's a real-time strategy game, which is an important distinction. Chess is a strategy game, and by its design guarantees each player an equal number of moves. SC2 is a real-time strategy game which makes no such guarantees, and if you have the dexterity to execute your strategy faster than your opponent can respond to, you should be rewarded for that.
>Imagine if you could express your ideas effectively into actual game actions?
Imagine the cost of such an interface in today's society, especially compared to a regular USB keyboard and mouse. Now imagine you're a game designer. Do you want to build a system that explicitly favors those rich enough to purchase the best equipment, or do you want to spread your playerbase as widely as possible?
Perhaps in another few decades, we can start rewarding the people with the "best" brains, but as long as we exist in meatspace, people are going to want to test their meat-skills against each other.
While I kind of understand the Ready Player One-esque issue here, I am thinking that most ergonomic aids would look more like software plugins for WoW or EVE than professionally developed HCI hardware.
If I were to be leading a game I'd just make it a requirement that tools were opensourced (hard to enforce in reality tbh) but at least that would help.
It's not chess. That's why.
There is a real physical aspect to the game. Training your fingers to hit certain combinations quickly to execute build orders, and mix in micro is key. Pro players use hot packs to warm up their hands, or glasses to aid their eyes.
The game developer takes a lot of care to ensure the UI / hotkeys / peripheral setups are optimized for pro players.
Using external tools to defeat this setup simply isn't fair and diminishes skill built into the hands and muscle memory of players. Even at a mid-level of skill, people learn simple combos. For example, a Protoss player hitting "4+e" because that's where they have hotkeyed all their Nexuses and e is the hotkey to build probes.
> It's not chess.
I agree it's not chess, and chess often has a time component to it. The realtime nature of a game doesnt mean you should have to be able to "move" in realtime, IMO it would be superior if it tracked more closely to your ability to react, intellectually, in realtime. That is, real time thought more than realtime motion. Ergonomic aids would help people to convert their thoughts into real game plays without limiting them to their body's capabilities. But I also admit this is my opinion and it's clearly an arbitrarily decided dividing line between how much should a game be about myelinating certain move patterns (spread out troops, cast a spell, select production groups) and how much a game should be about quality of thought in realtime (I see he made units X, How am i going to respond? I have many minerals, should I spend them on tech or units?) ...
I don't think "I want to play Starcraft but without micro" is a compelling argument for changing Starcraft. I actually think it's pretty selfish to make these demands. It's a reasonable premise for finding or even creating a new game.
I may just go ahead and make such a game sometime and, I suppose, we'll see if anyone likes such a game dynamic. It would definitely introduce a very meta game where creating and tuning your "loadout" could matter greatly.
For example, SC2 has a very cheap unit called the roach. When burrowed, it can't attack, but regenerates health incredibly quickly.
It's trivial to write a cheat that will, whenever one of your roaches starts taking damage, causes it to burrow, and whenever it stops taking damage, unburrow.
The unit is balanced around human control - no human can, with perfect accuracy, choreograph burrows and unburrows of individual roaches in a pack of ~60.
With such a cheat, roaches punch way above their weight, completely breaking the rock-paper-scissors balance of the game.
Which is trivial for any skilled player, because they are an incredibly cheap, low-tech unit, and passive base defenses are currently very good at fending off very early aggression.
> As an aside, ANY change to a game is going to disrupt the equilibrium in some manner
Yes, and sometimes, the equilibrium settles on an incredibly shallow, uninteresting game-space.
StarCraft is a game of a number of rock-paper-scissors cycles, all operating at the same time. Greedy expansion - versus rushing versus safe plays. Economy versus army versus tech. Roaches versus marauders versus zerglings.
Sometimes, due to patch changes, poor balancing, or because player skill improved, the game ends up stuck in a quagmire, where the risk/reward ratio for many of these options is completely out of whack. The game stagnates, and becomes incredibly unfun to play, and to watch.
Throwing a wrench into balance, by allowing auto-scripts, which have an incredibly uneven effect on the different units, mechanics, and races in the game is far more likely to push it into an unfun equilibrium, then a fun one.
It's kind of off-topic, but you will lose horribly if you actually try to win games on micro alone. People talk a lot about micro because it's flashy, but it's really just the icing on the cake. The pros can spend all their time showing off their icing skills because they all have solid macro underneath.
When I played in WoL, you could make it into master league (top ~2% of players) by: ensuring you were never supply blocked, spending all your money, scouting your opponent, and building counters. If you were efficient, you could do everything you really needed to with an APM of ~50.
Against marines, sure. But against siege tanks/disruptors?
Sirlin's spiel about there being more counters than people think (http://www.sirlin.net/ptw-book/introducingthe-scrub) seems applicable here.
That might seem contrived, but there is a player whose job is to contrive it!
No, I don't think the next patch should include "improved" roach AI. But deep strategy games like Starcraft tend to have multiple levels on which to do battle, and you can often nullify an opponent's insurmountable advantage on one level by doing battle on another level. I honestly think that if super-roaches like we've been discussing were patched into the game, with no further changes made, winrates would stabilize around 50% in a few years (assuming everyone hadn't quit in disgust).
Now, that might not be the game you'd want to play. I'll freely admit I wouldn't want to play it. But that's you and me---perhaps whoever's into chess would love it. And "This would no longer be fun for me," while perfectly legitimate, is a very different claim than "the game balance breaks."
That's exactly the point; the "other levels" are macro, micro, and multi-tasking--the "realtime" components of an RTS game. (I consider positioning and scouting a factor of micro and multi-tasking respectively.) Those are the facets of the game that let you take two equally matched strategies, execute slightly better than the opponent, and thereby eke out a gradually compounding advantage.
If you remove those, the "deep strategy" of starcraft is basically just doing the one or two counterplays that you obviously need to do to survive. "He built too many early game marines so now I build banelings or I die." The strategic "if he does this, I'll do this, but then he'll do that" decision tree is very shallow in a game like brood war or sc2.
> What about tanks on high ground and out of reach? What if the roaches have to funnel through a walled choke guarded by some MMLib as well?
Then I'll be forced into one of a small handful of tictactoe-like responses: brood lords, vipers, doom drop on top of your army, or pull you apart with muta/nydus multi-taski... no wait. Just the first three options I guess.
There are a ton of interactions in games that are degenerate if performed at TAS level. These aren't areas looking for disruption; they're just impossible to perform with human inputs and they confer game advantages that are not surmountable by non-assisted players.
The speed running community segregates TAS content from played content specifically because of this. You will not beat the robot that can perform a 60 input 1 frame trick that gives you a .5 second time save.
That's a fair point; I agree. But the ancestors are debating a scenario with sanctioned mechanical aids. vkou classifies them as "cheats" above, but I humbly suggest that he used the term improperly, given the context.
Also, remember that we're talking about RTS games, which have an S component as much as they have an RT component. OpenAI can beat Dendi in the early phases of solo mid, but can a team of AIs beat Navi in a full game of DotA? Perhaps they will eventually, but if they do, it will take a whole lot more than just reaction time.
Yes it can, especially Na`Vi (Dota-reddit jokes that AI won't play with Na`Vi because developers want to test AI with a pro team). There were matches with pro players last month. Players say that mechanics in 5v5 fight are perfect and the global strategy is there.
I won't say that the strategy has many states in Dota: it's the items and position on the map (by choosing one of the objectives).
It's not ready for the real Dota 2 tournaments though: AI was trained for the specific 5 heroes.
StarCraft is physical - that's critical to the entire genre (RTS/MOBA/etc). Without it, it's not StarCraft.
Improving your dexterity is a real part of improving your skill in a game like StarCraft. So using a program to do this for you instead is cheating.
It sounds like you want to play something like Stellaris, Sins of a Solar Empire, or any other 4X-style genre game.
At the end of the day, "skill" is a meaningless term except in the context of a specific game. If Starcraft 3 came out tomorrow with no macro mechanics, no activated abilities, a pay-as-you-go economy rather than a pay-up-front one, then APM would be much less valuable and "skill" would mean something completely different.
Overwatch has this issue right now where players are complaining about Mercy, a character who is fairly simple to pick up and can provide a lot of value. What they ignore is that she was intended to be that way, and that the "skill" Mercy introduces is not lightning-fast reflexes or similar, but the strategic response to her presence.
I'm not campaigning for SC2 to be changed. But players' definition of "skill" generally shouldn't be trusted. Skill is what wins.
Of course, you're right, if the goal is who can strategize the best then APM shouldn't be a factor.
The playing field needs to be level though. Perhaps something like Formula 1 or Le Mans racing will develop for e-sports where people are allowed to fine tune their input with custom code with certain regulations for those inputs.