[geinou]

Funny how people are angry about that they cannot install the game right now.

Hell, it's not yet time it says.

Yeah, looking forward to this game. Never been a good RTS gamer, the campaign could be fun though.

[boojiboy7]

[drobe]

Guys, lets play OMFG NOT SERIOUS starcraft.
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[drobe]

~use map settings~
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[geinou]

I'm never dead fucking serious about a game while playing online or at a LAN. It's about the fun. Yeah, winning is cool, but for me it's about the fun. The real problem is, like boojiboy said, finding other non-serious players. It's actually kinda hard.

Well, I was serious while driving racing simulations in leagues though.

[firenze]

[Gironika]

[drobe]

[Pat the Great]

I have this mental image of a Selectbutton SC2 club being like a highly ritualized style of warfare, where you announce your unit's presence on the battlefield and challenge the enemy army to a one-on-one duel while the rest of your units watch.

Alternately, y'all could play it like a rough approximation of international politics. When someone attacks your SCV line, you call upon the international community (read: the other SB SC2 club members in the game) to rebuke the aggressor. Non-aggression pacts and peace talks are had. Then some asshole nukes your civilian population, etc. The whole game takes four hours.
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-pat m.
twitter

[Kappuru]

I'm going to throw down the gauntlet and pretty much say I can beat anyone from SB 1-v-1.
I was high gold to high platinum/diamond in the SC2 beta.
I used to play SC1 obsessively, to the point of wanting to go pro when I was 14.
My parents wouldn't let me. Wise choice, but I sometimes still wonder what could have been.
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[skelethulu]

I am fucking TERRIBLE at this game and I challenge any of you to play in any bizarre mods we find together. I really don't want to play the vanilla multiplayer, after losing enough for a lifetime in the beta.
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[drobe]

Kappuru, I still want to know your secret. Is there a certain juice from a certain fruit that you drink?
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[analogos]

[Talbain]

[Predator Goose]

[Kappuru]

[analogos]

[Predator Goose]

Yeah, I used MGO as an extreme example because, like you said, it's one game practically designed from the ground up to be goofy. So would it be unfair then to read what you're saying as SC and SCII are built as competitive games and that I'd be missing out if I didn't play them competitively? Kind of like how someone would be missing out if they didn't fuck around in MGO? Sorry to put words in your mouth.

If so then it's painting the game as just not for me again. I'm not really the competitive type. Ah well.
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I can no longer shop happily.

[analogos]

[haze]

the hostility towards competitive starcraft play is really interesting. that's not meant sarcastically, I've been thinking about the reactions in this thread.

I think Cuba hit it on the head, it's pretty much a fighting game. not literally, but especially in the skills required. and hey we have a 40-page discussion thread on fighters on this very forum, but not too many people complain about the "OMFG SERIOUS" types over there. fighting games depend as much (or as little) on memorizing combos and character matchups as starcraft is about APM and build orders, but the latter gets far more misconceptions.

maybe it's the online thing. being face to face with your opponent makes a big difference, and it's much easier to do that with fighters than Starcraft. online, it seems like the only way people can express themselves is with their win ratio, so many serious players get a little too serious about that. but on the other side of the screen, when you know nothing about your opponent, it's easy to assume the worst of them when they whip your ass, even if they didn't say anything. they're automatically a OMFG SERIOUS gamer. curiously, I've heard the same thing reported of boardgame players; in person they're the most polite people ever, and online they're usually huge jerks.


but I'm pretty sure the anonymity isn't everything. I have this one anecdote from many years ago, when playing Starcraft with some online friends. in one team game, half the players got dropped, so all that was left was me vs 2 others, and we decided to keep playing anyway. even outnumbered, I managed to crush their combined forces by constantly staying on the offensive. one of my opponents was impressed I managed to pull it off. the other got so disgusted at the defeat that he refused to ever play Starcraft again.

what turns people off of starcraft by a bad defeat more than a fighting game? they're completely different in a fundamental way. Fighters are basically a race for points. Get points by hitting the other guy more often than he can hit you; your character doesn't get tired at low health, and unlike Bushido Blade you can't break their legs and make them limp for the rest of the match. Starcraft is about building up and taking away. Each player takes time to build up their own little sandcastle, but the game can only end when one of the sandcastles are demolished. I think that this hits casual players much harder psychologically.

funny enough, this divide is much more obvious in the modern boardgame world. German boardgames are very often a race for points with no leg-breaking allowed, while American boardgames are usually about direct conflict and taking away from opponents. one of these genres is very popular among the "casual" players, while the other still has the stereotype of only being played by "serious" male geeks. guess which is which!


if you don't enjoy Starcraft because you're not good at it, that's fair enough. though I think anyone can get better at it, if you simply enjoy playing it and can tolerate the crappy defeats. you're gonna lose a lot of sandcastles.

[Talbain]

For someone to claim they are a "casual" player (still am loathe to use this terminology) and bring so much ego into a game probably makes them a lot less casual than they might project. I don't really think that it's a game that any player can ever lose, I don't find it quite so absolute as a fighting game. There are a lot of times where I've felt that a victory was achieved due to some other element in play that really had nothing to do with actually breaking down everything, and I think that's part of why I'm a big fan of the custom maps.

For players who were better than me from the start, I found that poking the player was a great way to learn how to get better. By simply looking at weaknesses, you may "lose" the match, but you win in a longer stretch. I think there's never really an opportunity that is passed by if an observer is active in their playstyle, but I feel that's a much more salient issue when it comes to top tiers in fighting games. You can lose quite a bit and even be active at trying to understand a person or character's playstyle, but due to the nature of play with fighting games, you may not learn anything from observation alone. For example, I essentially had no clue about zoning until I perused forums and learned from higher level players. The same is true of character tiers. While some of this can be said about Starcraft or RTS games in general, a significant amount can be gleaned from observation. Much the same as a football coach often teaches teams how to play by showing football footage of a specific team, a player can learn another player's strategy to some degree by watching them play.
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[CubaLibre]

haze that was a good post.

Another difference is that so much of Starcraft takes place behind the fog of war. Scouting and getting a picture of what your opponent is up to is a much larger portion of the game, and you spend a much larger proportion of time not knowing exactly what your enemy is doing. This happens in a certain sense in a fighting game as well, but the consequences are much more immediate and can be responded to more or less instantly. When you get beat in a fighting game, you can watch the guy dominating you moment by moment - you can see he's earned it. Often in Starcraft your opponent just seems to have forces that drift out of nowhere that seem perfectly suited to beating yours, and you're like, what the hell. Of course a high-level player, due to better play (more scouting) and better knowledge of available strategies (more accurate extrapolation from the scouting they do have) is not taken by surprise like that nearly as often. But to a beginner this can be a lot more disheartening.

Overall though, I still say that Starcraft has a lot more in common with Street Fighter than Total War.
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Let's Play, starring me.

[Broco]

[haze]

[boojiboy7]

I think analogos hit it on the head for me really.

It's not that I would mind playing Starcraft competitively, or getting some co-operative action going (really, the best times I have had in RTS game have been being on a team with someone), but it is the "unfriendliness" of learning how to play the game online that annoys me. I think it might be the online thing, really, but even when I have played the original or Warcraft 3 at LANs, the people who play the games just expect you to know Protoss development tress and such, and seem to get offended when you don't. This has the effect of putting new players on the defensive, which makes them not really want to play your game.

This is different in the fighting game community. Whenever I've been in a fighting game crowd, even the super serious SRK dudes, people are constantly offering tips to each other. "Oh, maybe you should've tried an XYZ" or whatever. Granted, this isn't in a tournament, but in just casual play. Still, fighter players seem interested in getting other players good.

Maybe it has something to do with the interactions between players being more immediate in fighting games, or in the way that a "comeback" is much more viable in fighting games. Fighting games make you feel better immediately for beating a skilled opponent, if in no other way than making that fight look more interesting. And a fighter with nearly no health is still able to do as much damage as a fighter with full health (except obviously in games like Bushido). Contrast to Starcraft where, for the most part, once your base is pretty fucked, you're done.

Perhaps it also has to do with win conditions as well. Win conditions and timing. Winning in a fighting game is a matter of depleting that bar. And it happens quick as hell. While wins can be quick in Starcraft, they can also be slow as hell, and most often consist of total domination. Spending an hour of your life to only end in complete defeat and destruction can feel really defeating, especially when the guy on the other end is a faceless, non-talking drone. The affect of this on early player mentality could be understandably devastating.

I don't know. These are just quick thoughts. As it is, I will probably play the single player campaign at some point, but probably not bother with much multiplayer, unless I find a group that is willing to actually talk about it openly, which has been the problem in the past.

[Dracko]

What kind of system is this supposed to run on?
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[boojiboy7]

I've heard it runs on more than you'd think, but no clue on specifics.

[another god]

As far as I'm concerned: getting good at Starcraft is infinitely easier than in a fighting game.

Everytime I've ever flatout lost in SC is because I wasn't doing anything. I wasn't making more buildings/units/etc. I had a shitton of resources and they were being wasted because I was conservative with my worker usage.

Of course there's the early game rush, but that's silly. That never happens unless you really suck. Read a build order and learn how to defend against annoying tactics. It's pretty much a single player game for 3 minutes anyways*.

*It's not, but if you're concerned about the early game rush beating you then, yeah, it is.

[Talbain]

[firenze]

[another god]

Build order isn't too hard to figure out. It's a lot easier to figure out than SFIV combos.
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interdimensional

[Jam]

That's a misleading comparison and you know it.
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The King of America

[Wall of Beef]

I wish they made Starcraft: Ghost instead of this.
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[notbov]

the first thing Blizzard used to show off the editor at Blizzcon was a Ghost-lite. at any rate, i wouldn't be surprised if someone ran with the ball Blizzard dropped and made a fairly full featured Ghost-esque thing in SC2's editor, considering some of the stuff people put out during beta.

[another god]

Yeah. SC:Ghost is going to come in 50 flavors. One of them is going to be good, though.
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interdimensional

[Talbain]

Well my computer basically can't run this game.

/sigh
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[Pat the Great]

Just bought the digital DL. add me--pattheflip at gmail (yes, i'm giving you fucks my real id).

A lot of you guys have hit the nail on the head in the SF comparison. I will say, though, that if you preface the beginning of each game with "I'm kind of new at this", some people will be more inclined to be merciful and relax a bit--though you will probably still lose horribly.

Go try multiplayer, lose, and watch the replays with a focus on your opponent. I find that demystifying the WHY YOU LOST (in a very concrete way, not someone telling you "Build more workers") makes SC2 a lot more fun.
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-pat m.
twitter

[Fiero]

[analogos]

[Pat the Great]

$60. Same price (unless you pre-ordered it on sale).

I actually have a CE coming in the mail, but I'm just gonna resell it. Decided I don't care about the stuff it comes with.
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-pat m.
twitter

[analogos]

Why the fuck do I have this and not Continuum Shift.