(Last Starcraft II update for a while.  Honest!)

Remember “LAN Latency”?  The ICCUP and Garena bad boy that exposed Battle.net’s inner workings?  That in order to ease concerns about Battle.net 2.0, I touted the awesomeness of “what’s coming”?  Yeah, scratch that.  As of now, Starcraft II has no “LAN Latency”.

(Credit to Gibybo for the data.)

Didn’t care much for LAN Latency in Blizzard’s previous titles.  Every hit point countered in Warcraft III, but delay usually didn’t lead to a unit’s spectacular death.  Starcraft DUI pathing and position-oriented micro didn’t make it a necessity, either.  But Starcraft II is fast.  And contrary to popular belief, there is a breaking point in the battle of speed versus skill.

Starcraft righted most of Warcraft II’s crippled online experience.  So when 1999’s Warcraft II: Battle.net edition offered a game speed of “Fastest”, veterans stuck with Faster.  Long-time player Axlotl surmised the issue:

If you were to ask, [this] would be the biggest reason to why even faster players do not like the top speed. You cannot pull your peons off of the gold mine. Now, I know you’re all thinking that I’m wrong, but I don’t mean it like that. If someone attacks your wallin suddently…say with 7 grunts. If you do not have any peons on wood, you are going to die. You can get peons off of the gold mine, but it’s very difficult. If the game is set on high or extra high latency, or someone is lagging up the game, you are a dead man. Even if you have some choppers, you are going to have to use those to repair, and will soon have over 5000 gold banked, with no wood.

In Starcraft, Vultures and Firebats were capable of massive damage.  But their effectiveness lost out as they took severe penalties (75% damage reduction against “large” units) in the late-game.  On the inverse, Starcraft II grants bonus damage.  So while health counts remain similar, an Immortal three-hits a Siege Tank and doesn’t have to stumble like a drunken sailor to do it.

That’s why we’re desperate for an upgrade over 2002’s Warcraft III.  Blizzard better hope “teh evil pirate serverz” don’t beat them to it.

I’d love to get off Starcraft’s ass for a day, but the World Cyber Games kinda disowned her.

Official Games ｜WCG 2010

PC

* Warcraft 3: The Frozen Throne (Blizzard, RTS)
* Counter-Strike (Valve, FPS)
* TrackMania Nations Forever (Ubisoft, Racing)
* Carom 3D (NeoAct, Sports)

Xbox 360

* Guitar Hero 5 (Activision, Music)
* Tekken 6 (Namco Bandai Games, Fighting)
* Forza Motorsport 3 (Microsoft Game Studios, Racing)

WCG 2010 Promotional Game Title:

PC

* Lost Saga (IO Entertainment, Action)

One of two possible scenarios, maybe a combination:

- Screamed it for years: Warcraft III is international and Starcraft is not.  When I call it the “Korean Gaming Machine”, I don’t kid. South Korean dominance of Starcraft is best compared to American dominance of basketball leading into the early nineties.  And where the World Cyber games hosts the most important Warcraft III tournament of the year, the biggest intrigue on the Starcraft side was seeing how the Korean representatives would tank games in order to sweep the medal round.

- Starcraft II is also absent.  The powers that be could be waiting to see if the sequel is competition-ready.  Of course, Blizzard could also have thrown money at the Games to keep KeSPA’s meal ticket off the most visible gaming tournament in the Western Hemisphere.  Would that surprise anyone?  The tournament is paid and bought by Samsung.  Have you looked at their lineup?  Carom3D is a billards game that makes two straight hours of Pac-Man look like Daigo’s parry fetish.  The tournament also touts “Why is this here?” titles as “Promotional Games”.  Also known as “Samsung wants you to buy their crap.”

Either way, this is far from the end of this battle.

Credit goes to Starshaped for the link.

For whatever reason, I’ve had little luck finding people to agree with me on this.  It’s really unfathomable I need to explain the benefits of surprise attacks in a real-time strategy game.  But I’m going to lobby for this until my fingers are stubs or IdrA wins an important showmatch: Starcraft II needs a Hold Fire command for every unit on the battlefield.  The only reason to go without a Hold Fire command is that “The game is not balanced for Hold Fire”.  And if that’s the case, I have to wonder how Blizzard Entertainment used the last two decades to become game development rockstars.

Scary enough, Blizzard strategy games have earned a perception that they reward mouse speed and nothing else.  The entire post-announcement development cycle of Starcraft II has been a stab at changing this, transforming mechanical game abilities (fighting the twelve-unit selection cap and single-building selection) into various decision-making skills.  Hand-eye coordination will maintain its value, but it’s clear this game is supposed to be a cerebral cage fight.  So why deny gamers access to a significant micromanagement and strategy option that has been validated by Command and Conquer, Supreme Commander, and nearly every military conflict in the history of this damn planet?

Starcraft lacked a true Hold Fire command, and even proved dangerous there; clever use of the Hold Position command could turn a minefield of Lurkers into a crime scene.  Hell, Blizzard has already granted a dedicated Hold Fire button to any unit in Starcraft II that can cloak.  Presumably to, you know, allow players to set traps and conceal their position.

Mindrape.

The benefits for Siege Tanks are obvious enough, but it would extend to any ranged unit with a high damage rate or high mobility.  And when you’ve built your competitive map pool on “valley leading towards a ramp that leads into a base on higher terrain”, there’s no need to explain the benefits of making things a little too quiet.

And hasn’t Blizzard made every implication they want this game built for a television audience?  An American audience infatuated with sports that can hinge on a single play?  When Youtube’s most popular competitive gaming videos are limited to that lucky knife kill in Modern Warfare 2, dare to say how much publicity you can reap from “the ten seconds that turned the world’s largest Starcraft tournament”?  The part where some shmuck gets his pro gaming career defined by the day he got mindfucked?

There is absolutely no reason to go without a Hold Fire command when Starcraft II’s development and Blizzard’s ambitions indicate the game would benefit from it.  Hold Fire embraces the perception of mind-over-micromanagement, and the gameplay mechanic would be a benefit to both of those skills.

The second Golden Age of Video Games in the late nineties wasn’t limited to legendary titles; it was an era where companies won fans by empowering them.  In Starcraft’s case, Blizzard dangled a free-to-play gaming service alongside a “spawn” function where potential buyers could beat the crap out of each other with a friend’s copy of the game.  The corporatization of game development has caused this empowerment to regress.  Hey, why would Sony want a backwards-compatible Playstation 3 when they can charge for digitally-downloaded Playstation 2 software?

In addition to the removal of true local area play and the increase of digital restrictions management, Blizzard Entertainment’s current platform for Starcraft II online play is “one game, one account, one name”.  Why?  Yeah, this approach is about making money.  But it’s coming from more angles than you’d think.

At BlizzCon, Blizzard employees affirmed this decision was to prevent smurfing (talented players “resetting” their record by creating a new account).  Smurfing has two purposes: To experiment with new strategies without tainting their “real record”, or to ego trip through the ranks of mediocrity.  Neither situation addresses the Warcraft III matchmaking system that forces good players to make new accounts in order to find games, and it doesn’t address that bad players will complain anyway because that’s what bad players do.

It’s really a public relations ploy.  Blizzard has plugged three strategy games into Battle.net since smurfing entered the culture, and only decided to hard-line the approach when “millions of World of Warcraft players” came into play.  And since the MMORPG is predicated on making time and effort the most important assets for overcoming challenges, Blizzard is going to make every concession in making sure these players don’t become frustrated.

So, you’ve stripped functionality by convincing new gamers that experts won’t ruin your party.  And thus, Blizzard can to grant that functionality back for a price.

(more…)

I hold dual allegiance to Warcraft III and Starcraft.  My beef with Starcraft has always been its community’s disdain for the role-playing strategy model.  Ironically, their hatred is always cut from the same mold: “I played Reign of Chaos in 2002.  Since bashing newbs was never as competitive as that Starcraft tournament I won money at, the game sucked.”

Yes, the impact of random items and the power of hero units were legitimate gripes.  Warcraft III was not a perfect game and it had some particularly glaring issues.  But since the dirt sheets claim Starcraft II is not a hoax, we need to clear something up: All of the gameplay issues that plagued Warcraft III’s early days will return to haunt Starcraft II.  The question is whether Starcraft players will put aside their hatred for the Warcraft series and come to terms with that.

All the same arguments can be compared to Starcraft’s leap forward from Warcraft II:  Dynamic balance between three factions?  Didn’t know “Terrans can’t stop a six-food Spawning Pool build” and “Zealots can’t compete with Zergling mobility” were racial specialties.  And way to bridge the gap between the elite and scrubs with your pointless interface upgrades.  You may have a centralized gaming server to work with, but good luck being the competitive standard Warcraft II was.

Didn’t turn out that way.  But just as it took several years for Boxer to demonstrate Vultures and Dropships weren’t useless pieces of metal, Moon and Grubby had to beat the crap out of each other to flesh out Warcraft’s fantastic metagame.

(more…)

Unfamiliar with the original Starcraft megastar?  SlayerS_Boxer is the ultimate argument for why you hate Terran players.  So when he speaks, you’re apparently supposed to listen.  Spoiler alert: The wizard of nuclear warfare and dropship play has a beef with replays:

Replay is a big problem too. The retirement of old progamers was influenced by replay. Even when Nal_rA and others pulled off an interesting strategy, copying it a day or two after is possible because of replay. As the old progamers went down, fans left. More effort was needed to hold them, but such effort is insufficient nowadays.

Isn’t it funny that the final opinion of a professional gamer always caters to their skill set?  And that every Starcraft-related opinion is a matter of preserving the game’s skill gap?  And that I consider this news-worthy because his “replays” are a legendary cross between “entertaining” and “jaw-drop”?

Let’s assume Boxer isn’t full of crap.  Replays have a detrimental impact on the game of Starcraft because replays expose too many holes in gimmick strategies.  If you believe this, congratulations!  Your hero just conceded that Starcraft lacks the depth to continue being the ultimate competitive video game!

He is echoing the same argument that people make when they choose college basketball over the pro game.  National Basketball Association rosters feature so much talent that the game devolves into a war of one-on-one basketball, where superstars use the benefit of a referee’s whistle to take over the game.  Likewise, Boxer is upset that his micro-heavy, risk-first style has been “deemed inferior” by a set of boring playstyles where the final resource tallies would look natural on an Obama budget.

In other words, Boxer is arguing that competitive Starcraft would be far more fun to watch if it looked like your last LAN party instead of trained machines going all binary on each other.  Well, South Korea is the only country on the planet with a refined taste for professional gaming, and they did it by convincing the world they’re a hell of a lot better than us at video games, so I’m going to have to disagree with that.

Warcraft III and Starcraft are popular on the competitive gaming scene, the rare combination of popularity and skill-based gaming, blah blah.  Apparently, Starcraft fans see it differently.  They disregard Warcraft III’s Chinese popularity and point fingers at Korea’s Starcraft fetish.  They explain the “disparity” by claiming Starcraft is the ultimate test of athletic ability.

I personally believe that Starcraft requires the most diverse skill set of any competitive game going.  But that’s not the reason for Warcraft III’s underachievement.  Let’s ignore the matchmaking aspect, where KeSPA can create exciting tournaments on a weekly basis; Warcraft III’s failings are all about accessibility and presentation.

Know how Europeans can’t understand America’s infatuation with the American brand of football?  Know how Warcraft III players want to choke Defense of the Ancients players?  Warcraft III has the same issue: It’s too complicated for a live audience.  Knowledge of the game’s nuances may not be a headache for veterans, but imagine selling “Warcraft: The Sport” to somebody who has never played a real-time strategy game.

“Tuck Rule”?  What the hell is the Tuck Rule?

With an exception for spellcasting units (Defilers, Dark Archons), you can watch competitive Starcraft without knowing a single thing about the game.  Psionic lightning looks like lightning, Marines look like dudes with guns, Zerglings have claws, and shit blows up.  The ebb and flow of combat and map control are all you need to decide who is winning a contest.

Compare that with Warcraft III, a game that relies heavily on role-playing elements (spells, abilities, effects) to distinguish units and heroes. These numbers and gameplay mechanics must be memorized in order to recognize their impact on the playing field.  You cannot look at the graphics for spells like Soul Burn, Howl of Terror, and Inner Fire and determine what they do on face value.  And good luck explaining why the Human player is about to win the game because he’s been pinned in his base but is about to get his Mountain King to level six.

Consider the hero experience system.  Know that the amount of experience granted by a unit corresponds to its “level”, a number typically equal to the unit’s food cost?  Know that rule doesn’t apply to Gryphon Riders, Demolishers, Meat Wagons, Frost Wyrms, and Mountain Giants?  How about diminishing returns on experience points gained via neutral unit kills?  The amount of bonus experience a lone hero gains as the player advances up the tech tree?

Congratulations, you’ve developed a system where the strategy of levelling a hero falls on creeping patterns and complex calculus.  It may provide for one hell of a role-playing strategy hybrid, but good luck selling it to the red states.

In the Starcraft universe, my world of ass-kicking resides on the International Cyber Cup, a.k.a. ICCUP.  In return for creating a playing field with more functionality than Battle.net, Blizzard Entertainment has recently condemned it as a “pirate server”.  Sorry to hear your Battlecruiser Rush wasn’t cutting it there, Dustin.

The talent level is good.  Damn good.  How good?  I’ve drawn up a synopsis of the letter grade ranking system on the internet’s most Korean gaming server.

Empowered by numerous victories on Big Game Hunters, you’ve chosen to play on ICCUP.  In the grand scale of things, you’re a solid player.  You have little trouble defeating your friends (though they insist they’ll get the better of you after playing the campaign one more time).  However, you’re unprepared for a world where man and Starcraft can wed in matrimony.  Your friends play Halo all the time, but that’s only because of that drinking game where you chug every time someone says the Battle Rifle is bullshit.  By your eleventh straight loss, it should be quite apparent that ICCUP is not for you.

Through dumb luck or hard work, you’ve maintained your default ranking of D or beaten enough D- players to achieve the D+ rank.  For every three games you play against even competition, Bisu will join your game to remind you that you are dog shit.  This will fuel your insecurities, leaving you to compensate by logging onto the Battle.net forums to brag about beating me.

As a C-level player, it’s possible you are very good.  It’s also possible you cherrypicked your only good matchup to make it this far.  It’s also possible you’re a Korean who mocks your opponents for “me kor u noob baka rofl ^_^”.  If you earned this rank on merit, you have mastered Starcraft.  Your skill level is now defined by how many games of Starcraft you can play simultaneously.

In your daily war against Korean pre-teens and the Western World’s sixty remaining Starcraft players, you have earned the respect of the internet.  As a B-Class Starcraft player, there is little doubt to whether or not you are the coolest kid in the school anime club.  You possess all the skill of your paid-to-play peers, but your parents keep disconnecting the router because you won’t take out the garbage.  Too bad you mom can’t see such an endeavor is beneath you.

You are an A-Class Starcraft player.  Your life consists of the horrifying reality that you will play a video game seventy hours a week.  You do this on the hope that Tossgirl will walk into the love letter you wrote in Vulture Mines.  Some of your opponents will be chess computers.  They have already calculated that you will lose the game and will hack your hard drive to make sure you can never play again.  Your lone reprieve will be the occasional game against IdrA.  Just mass Carriers and you should be fine.

Congratulations.  You have achieved what mortals wouldn’t dare.  You have reached the world-class “Olympic” ranking.  If you achieve this ranking, start tearing out the drywall in your room.  You are a secret government project and it is important that you know where the cameras are.  At this level of play, the metagame is for pussies.  Rather than guessing your next move and micromanaging their army, your opponents will telepathically restrain you from pressing keys on your keyboard.  Just don’t bother complaining about it on the internet.  Some D- player will tell you it’s part of the game and that you need to stop sucking so bad.

I hate being late for parties.

Teamliquid.net is the de-facto Starcraft journalism hub in the Western World.  Its members protect their passion for Starcraft like a first-born.  Need proof?  Teamliquid’s Hot_Bid drew up an article detailing the state of early-game Zerg in Starcraft II.  That is, thirty-six-hundred words detailing a problem that will be irrelevant in three months.

I’m not here to slam one for writing a dissertation on a non-issue.  The obvious hypocrasy would be obvious.  I’m more embarrassed over the ensuing discussion.

To summarize: Joneagle_X of SC2Forums wrote an article addressing Hot_Bid’s entry a review of each Zerg unit.  This conflicted with Hot_Bid’s point of view.  Eventually, Jon was goaded into defending himself on Teamliquid decided to interject himself into Teamliquid discussion for no reason at all. He began his defense with this:

I’m the guy whom HotBid “made look like he knows nothing.” Sometimes the ridiculousness you guys post makes it into my inbox and then I just have to respond. Feel free to read (and inevitably downplay) my review here. And in contrast to HotBid’s two days (maximum 20 hours) of playtime I’ve logged almost 60 hours on StarCraft 2.

A shitstorm predictably ensues, with Jon’s critics claiming his opinion is irrelevant because 1) he’s not good at Starcraft and 2) the entirety of Teamliquid has more Starcraft II experience than Jon does.

This is a fair time to note that I wake up every morning and wonder why people are content with being so stupid.

Early in my campaign against the Japanese Role-Playing Game, I was derided for playing one-hundred hours on a single Final Fantasy VII save file?  Why?  It wasn’t because I needed a life.  According to my detractor, I hadn’t played enough Final Fantasy VII to criticize the game.

In modern gamer culture, “years of experience” isn’t enough to validate your opinions.  Now, I’m supposed to get on my knees for the idiot who has played fifty games of Starcraft II?  And I’m supposed to respect the opinion of his critics because they’re totally awesome at the sequel’s predecessor?

You are terrible at this game.

I don’t care who you are: If you are reading this entry and Starcraft II has not been released, you are fucking garbage at Starcraft II and your opinion has no more merit than anyone else’s.  Being totally awesome at the predecessor does not change that.  1998’s best Starcraft players would be laughed out of a modern tournament.  Ten years from now, we will be talking about “Starcraft II in 2009″ the same way.

So if you’d like to get a head-start on being a complete dick, go ahead.  Just letting you know I’m calling you out on it.

Edit: Amending the record to show Joneagle was not directly responding to Hot_Bid’s entry.  Thanks, Dreadwave!

Edit Edit: Let’s try this again.

(Note: This is my final entry regarding the Starcraft II trilogy debate.  I know you’re sick of it.  I’m sick of it.  Let’s get it over with.)

The argument against the trilogy is somewhere between “Fuck Kotick” and “Fuck Blizzard”.  By announcing expansion packs in advance (as though Brood War and The Frozen Throne weren’t planned), the claim is that Blizzard sold out.  If Wings of Liberty becomes the defining consumer product of our lifetime, the company will ruin it with their preplanned follow-ups.  I still haven’t heard a reason why the pre-Blizzard-is-evil, near-perfect dungeon-crawler Diablo II received an expansion pack that gutted the game’s depth.  They can’t explain this, either:

Don’t recognize the games in the front? “Insurrection: Campaigns for Starcraft” and “Retribution: Authorized Add-On for Starcraft” are glorified map packs featuring shoddy single-player campaigns and unplayable multiplayer maps.  And who greenlighted them?  The 1998, do-no-wrong, do-it-for-the-fans Blizzard Entertainment.

Insurrection was released four months after Starcraft hit shelves.  It was produced by Aztech New Media, a company whose resume was a lone map pack for Warcraft II.  That’s it.  Inexplicably impressed, Blizzard authorized the company to create a map pack for what would become the most beloved real-time strategy game of all-time.  GameSpot’s Greg Kasavin was kind-hearted in his evisceration of the product:

“Insurrection’s production quality is nowhere near the original’s. You’ll know that right away when you realize there’s no front end to the game. You access the campaign exactly how you would any fan-made scenario. And with several high-quality fan-made campaigns already available for free on the Internet, there remains little reason to own this add-on; rather, there remains only the question as to why Blizzard authorized such a lackluster product in the first place.”

Undeterred, Blizzard authorized a second add-on, released one month after Brood War.  Retribution was spawned by WizardWorks Software, a company that released mission packs for a number of popular PC games.  Oh, and Duke Nukem II.  That is, the second game in a platforming franchise that would eventually herald Duke Nukem 3-D. The verdict on Retribution?  When you’re discussing a game authorized by Blizzard, “collector’s item” is the last thing you would expect to hear.  But if you have sixty dollars, Amazon is selling.

For those of you counting, they authorized four Starcraft games in eight months.  They only made two of them.  Conclusion?  Blizzard whored the franchise to make a quick buck. Fortunately for you, it failed so spectacularly that you’ve never even heard of it. They’re the company’s equivalent of the Star Wars Christmas Special.  George Lucas won’t mention Chewbacca’s family or Life Day, and Blizzard isn’t mentioning Insurrection and Retribution.  Go ahead and deride the Starcraft II trilogy, just don’t pretend these particular add-ons never happened.