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.

Several years back, I whipped up a tournament dedicated to Warcraft III’s greatest imbalances.  Of the top-sixteen-ranked imbalances, seven had their roots in the opening year of Reign of Chaos.  Of the remaining choices, six were confined to beta builds, and the other three (Undead Hero Nuking and a pair of “unstoppable” Two-Versus-Two Arranged Team builds) became an afterthought when players got better.

Apart from the moron who can’t afford The Frozen Throne, no Warcraft III player believes Reign of Chaos wasn’t frustrating.  The majority of the game-breaking issues stemmed from Blizzard’s “we knew it was stupid at the time” decision to give caster units and Dryads the nowaday equivalent of medium armor.  What could go wrong when spellcasters designed to counter melee units take additional damage only from melee attacks?  Ironically, it ushered a “balanced” era in Warcraft, the epic struggle between walls of spellcasters and clumps of Ghouls.  This clash of bullshit bottle-necked the available strategies and turned every game into a dash to rid the map of neutral monsters.

Pictured: The Human Army, circa patch 1.05.

Then in 2003, The Frozen Throne made the same leaps as Brood War.  The experience system was tweaked to encourage player interaction and foster multitasking.  Then neutral heroes were introduced, many filling niche roles and allowing players to accept that every hero did not have to be a viable choice in every matchup.  Then “useless abilities” began to evolve.  The Raider’s Ensnare ability became a highly valued asset, because hey, what’s it worth to get free kills in a game where half a dozen of those are the precursor to a rout?  Then 2004’s Wind Walk changes simmered for three years before transforming the Blademaster into Wilt Chamberlain.  In 2010, Humans counter the Blademaster by exploiting Orc’s lack of detection, employing Flamestrike and Blizzard harassment derided as a gimmick when ANGRY_KOREA_MAN popularized it in 2003.

It mattered none for Starcraft players.  They already fell back on their sport.  In their eyes, Warcraft III was a cookie-cutter strategy game.  But I’ve watched the game grow since I lucked into the Reign of Chaos beta eight years ago.  Warcraft III wasn’t a cookie-cutter game because it failed, it happened because humans are fucking stupid.

What, you think “stupid” is exclusive to one game community?  Played on X-Box Live lately?  In forging their non-existent self-esteem, gamers judge themselves on the merits of their record.  (Yes, I’m aware of the irony that I wrote that.)  Since these people have never had an intelligent thought in their lives, they conclude the strategies used at the highest level of competitive play are the “best strategies”.  And without understanding the context for why competitive players create those units, they try to recreate the results and fail.

And this is supposed to change when Starcraft II makes it to retail?  That the Starcraft game model is so superior to role-playing strategy that when millions of World of Warcraft players delve into what may be their second significant time-investment in a video game, they’re going to have an epiphany and become the tactician a decade of Starcraft molded its community into?  Tell me how that turns out.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010 at 10:56 pm and is filed under E-Sports, Gameplay, Online Play, Starcraft, Starcraft II, Warcraft III. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.