Blizzard Discusses StarCraft 2 Balance, Patch 1.2
"A couple of big things that will be in there are support for the season rolling, so players can look at the history of how they did in past seasons. There will be bugfixes, balance changes and tweaks, too," Sigaty explained. "Chat is the other major thing we want to get in there next patch. We'll also add more significant features to the editor."
On the hot topic of balance, Sagaty says "We're being very cautious about making large swinging changes right now because at the highest level things are actually very strong. The things that we'll probably be addressing are the 2v2 and larger scale games. Ultimately, the 1 to 1 is what we want to keep as sacred as possible, but as a result right now there are some things that we need to address in the 2v2 at the higher level. We'll be looking at ways to do that without affecting the 1v1 balance."
Though the North American Top 200 ranking and current GSL tournament are being dominated by Terran and Protoss players, Sagaty insists that the Zerg race is not underpowered. "That's not actually the case," he says. "We have fewer Zerg players overall."
Sagaty explains that he personally finds Zerg too complex for his liking, implying that others might too. A genuine imbalance could also explain the dearth of Zerg, though even the mere perception of imbalance may be enough to scare some players away.
"We'd like [patch 1.2] out by the end of the year," Sagaty says, though he warns balance "is an ongoing process that, honestly, will take a year or longer to do. Even after [StarCraft's expansion pack] Brood War was released we still patched and continued to drive towards a really solid final balance."
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moshman
replyOh and you don't think there are fewer Zerg players because it's slightly imbalanced against Zerg?
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Despite what people may think, Terran has always been the hardest race to master. It's the EASIEST to pick up and learn, but master their strats is the hardest of all the races.
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In SCBW, Terran was harder to play compared to the other races. There was a lot of micro management with buildings, abilities, and spells.
In SC2, this is definitely not the case. Their units have great synergy, there are only a few abilities / spells that are needed (one can argue that all you need is stim tbh), and you largely do not have to worry about unit composition as MMM is very cost effective against almost anything.
SC2 also has more emphasis on the larva management coupled with creep management for zerg. Just for these reasons, zerg is just harder to play.
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If you tell people that there are fewer Zerg, they believe Zerg is underpowered, and thus less people choose Zerg, and thus more people think it's underpowered, and so on and so forth. You cannot trust the movements of the herd as an indicator of the validity of any statement, because it so easily gives way to domino effects.
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And the fact that Idra is arguably the best SC2 player out there means nothing? He was wiping the floor with other players last time I checked. Siege Tanks have been nerfed against Zerg masses, Thors are no longer as much of a threat against Mutas for good players, there's a great dynamic going on with Baneling use, Brood Lords remain goddamn infuriating for pretty much any enemy force, any player not putting constant pressure on Zerg will allow them to create an unholy number of larvae for instant army replacement...
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Protoss has no problems with Brood Lords. I can almost see Terran having a problem, except Vikings rape Broodlords and Corruptors.
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Brood lords are so ridiculously expensive in both cost and time that they're rarely ever fielded.
The main difficulty in dealing with them is to target fire the unit, not the spawn. Attack moving around them will usually cause the units to target fire the spawn, because the brood lord is out of range. -
Sure, Vikings, Blink Stalkers, Corruptors and whatnot will take them out, but MOST of the enemy forces will be struggling to deal with the onslaught of broodlings and the attached Zerg force, or it won't be all that easy to reach them if it's a raid at the back of your main while the large majority of the Zerg force is turning your expansions into rubble. They laugh in the face of stationary defences, and that's what I meant by infuriating.
I stopped playing after I finished the SP and got most of the Hard achievements on account of having a simple brain incapable of dealing with multiple threads at once, mind, so most of my experience is either old, at slow speed, or from Day9/Psy narrated replays.
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The problem with playing zerg is keeping up with the opponent in terms of economy and army. Zerg tends to have periods of macroing really hard and periods of making bursts of units in the early / mid game. Learning the timings of these can be extremely difficult when
1) you're mostly in the dark of what the opponent is doing
2) have to adjust if your opponent is doing a quirky timing attack
3) there are tons of different timing attacks that they have to worry about
This, along with an unforgiving larva mechanic, and a APM intensive creep mechanic, make zerg extremely difficult to play. Now start looking at the map pool and how constricting it is, and you have a recipe for the hardest race to play.
This is why you don't see as many zerg players. People get frustrated losing to lower rated players consistently. It's also aggravating seeing opponents executing easy strategies (4 warp gate push for example) and rolling over the zerg players because they did an extra round of drones instead of units. The margin of error for zerg is razor thin.
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IdrA...one of the top Zerg players in the world commented on the 1.1 patch and made some interesting remarks: http://myeg.net/article/article_detail.php?article_id=877
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The ladder maps generally suck for zerg, especially at high levels of play.
I also wonder what Blizzard considers "high levels" of play. Platinum? Diamond? The skill difference from top of Diamond to bottom of Diamond is completely insane, so judging balance based on all of Diamond (or even Platinum or Gold) is probably not accurate.
As far as the "Blizzard is trying to balance for everyone, not just the pros" bullshit, Platinum and below the players are generally making such large and crippling mistakes in their fundamental play that makes it either pointless or damned near impossible (or worthless) to balance for them. Stuff like "expanding" or "building more than a dozen workers in a 45 minute match" would help their game immensely, not any sort of balance tweak.-
It is unfortunate that Zerg is so map sensitive. No ability to wall off and no cliff jumping units makes this hard. Mutas are the only unit that can deal with ledges, but they really aren't good for defense.
I think they definitely need to give Zerg some sort of ability to handle cliffs since Zerg has almost no way to handle a tank drop on Lost Template or Collossi on Kulas. This would make them far less map dependent.
I don't know what that ability would be though... -
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i believe 10 of the korean top 20 are zerg, us lazy whiteys don't have the apm i guess
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MMM is cheap, fast, and easy. They do "The RIght Thing" when a-moved, and are pretty damned strong against anything - particularly with Stim. Very, very little micro is necessary.
Compare that to Zerg, where *very* heavy micro, intelligent splitting of unit pools, positioning, etc... is necessary to be able to compete.
Look at the Thor vs. Muta debacle. A-move a Thor, and it does "The Right Thing" in attacking an unmicroed group of Mutas. Specific action is necessary on the part of the Zerg player to have his/her units do "The Right Thing" - without sufficient micro, the Mutas clump and die tragically. With sufficient micro, they succeed.
This isn't to say that micro doesn't help the other races - but it's absolutely required to come close to matching performance as Zerg.
IMHO they need to modify the other two races to be just as micro-heavy as Zerg is, or find ways to make Zerg units do "The Right Thing" more often.
Side-note: There's no tutorials on how to beat a Protoss cannon rush or fast Void Ray build. Nor are there tutorials on beating early Reapers, or breaking a sieged-up Terran. But there's one to specifically teach folks an easy counter to early Zerg aggression. Seems a little unfair, really.
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