A sensible design to me is the threat of losing a match should start out low and generally increase as the game progresses. This is naturally true in RTS since bigger armies generally do more damage. TTK is just one parameter than can be tuned to affect this.
To use Banelings as an example again is they can simply kill a player. Nevermind how easy it is to pull off in a high skill game, but at low skill levels a sneaky player could easily hide a few Zerglings and nuke the worker line against a less experienced player. The new player's experience would be "Hm, I'm playing and learning, oh there are units in my base, oh, all of my workers died. This feels horrible." The threat of losing a match feels like a night/day difference before Banelings and after Banelings. And there are numerous such units in Starcraft.
Context matters. The kill threat Banelings present could be totally acceptable later in a match but it feels out of place given how early they can be acquired. I feel Banelings could be made less problematic as easily as making them unable to walk up ramps and requiring them to be morphed from Zerglings on creep. It accomplishes the concept of "less early kill threats" without changing the TTK necessary to make them a viable defensive option.
One could argue early kill threats are a key feature of Starcraft, but I think whether it's a desirable design is debatable.
On April 27 2024 10:51 LunarC wrote: A sensible design to me is the threat of losing a match should start out low and generally increase as the game progresses. This is naturally true in RTS since bigger armies generally do more damage. TTK is just one parameter than can be tuned to affect this.
To use Banelings as an example again is they can simply kill a player. Nevermind how easy it is to pull off in a high skill game, but at low skill levels a sneaky player could easily hide a few Zerglings and nuke the worker line against a less experienced player. The new player's experience would be "Hm, I'm playing and learning, oh there are units in my base, oh, all of my workers died. This feels horrible." The threat of losing a match feels like a night/day difference before Banelings and after Banelings. And there are numerous such units in Starcraft.
Context matters. The kill threat Banelings present could be totally acceptable later in a match but it feels out of place given how early they can be acquired. I feel Banelings could be made less problematic as easily as making them unable to walk up ramps and requiring them to be morphed from Zerglings on creep. It accomplishes the concept of "less early kill threats" without changing the TTK necessary to make them a viable defensive option.
One could argue early kill threats are a key feature of Starcraft, but I think whether it's a desirable design is debatable.
Banelings very rarely finish any game, especially late game. at high level they are used to blow up PF or runbys at expansions. Or they are used to reset ghost count and that's about it.
And at early game they are more defensive unless you go all in, simply because gas is needed for lair tech, see zvz as an example.
At least the last time banelings really win the game outright imo would be nestea level of banelings (which just don't really exist anymore) or burrow banelings that are far more miss than hit
A frustrating loss of banelings are usually zvz or a complete misplay (eg no scan or just a terrible micro mistake), but that's just as frustrating as walking your army into a siege tank line.
Problematic ones would be like Oracle rush that wipe your workers clean and little time to react, or widow mine drops. These are not necessarily due to the low ttk but the overall strength and game ending potential.
Another example of why ttk isn't a problem, is the famous 2 base all in era of TvZ in hots. With hellbat drops, they aren't op because they can kill workers or lings quickly but because they snowball hard and not much counter play. You can go banelings to wipe the drop, the low ttk isn't an issue and comes with a pretty substantial cost. hellion banshee all in also is the same, hellion and banshee doesn't kill queen that quickly, but simply frustrating to lose to.
The problem with sc2 that SG has, is how much it only rotates around the big engagement past a certain point. It's why we have such a passive games in WOL all the way to LOTV in late game. It's not the ttk but how much is determined with one engagement and whoever engage first seems to be always on the losing end.
Storm Giant picked a really hilarious and inopportune time to center their work around the 'Demons and Angels are actually Aliens' trope. Because — unbelievably — this has re-emerged as something people are talking about and really believing. Most recently seen last week from Tucker Carlson during his Joe Rogan appearance where he claims it as a honest belief.
There's been a lot of this around too! Its part of a general load-out of flat earth, Atlantis is real, anti-science, general lunacy crap designed to derange people.
Childhood's End and Three Body Problem reckon with this theme in pretty marvelous and subversive ways, so for good artists this would be an opportunity. But Stormcraft is playing it straight-up and could suffer optically as a result. You don't want to be launching your 'Aliens are Demons' game the same week as the Daily Wire is publishing its 'Aliens are Demons' exposé. (unless they are the next financial sponsor)
When I think of this I think of how great creatives tend to be lucky, when you are original a lot of fortuitous stuff happens over the course of your work. This is because the novelty you are creating tends to reach out in many directions like the branches of a tree but with little lottery tickets leaves. Conversely when you are unoriginal and visionless and bumble around like Mr. Bean you may just find yourself in some goofy circumstances. Like how Mr. Bean does.
I think they could have anticipated this — the Diablo series has had to make some pretty careful considerations of the social environment within which it portrays religious themes. And I'm pretty sure they are the creators of Diablo and WarCraft and Mario too, they told me in their marketing videos.
On April 28 2024 05:39 MegaBuster wrote: Storm Giant picked a really hilarious and inopportune time to center their work around the 'Demons and Angels are actually Aliens' trope. Because — unbelievably — this has re-emerged as something people are talking about and really believing. Most recently seen last week from Tucker Carlson during his Joe Rogan appearance where he claims it as a honest belief.
There's been a lot of this around too! Its part of a general load-out of flat earth, Atlantis is real, anti-science, general lunacy crap designed to derange people.
Childhood's End and Three Body Problem reckon with this theme in pretty marvelous and subversive ways, so for good artists this would be an opportunity. But Stormcraft is playing it straight-up and could suffer optically as a result. You don't want to be launching your 'Aliens are Demons' game the same week as the Daily Wire is publishing its 'Aliens are Demons' exposé. (unless they are the next financial sponsor)
When I think of this I think of how great creatives tend to be lucky, when you are original a lot of fortuitous stuff happens over the course of your work. This is because the novelty you are creating tends to reach out in many directions like the branches of a tree but with little lottery tickets leaves. Conversely when you are unoriginal and visionless and bumble around like Mr. Bean you may just find yourself in some goofy circumstances. Like how Mr. Bean does.
I think they could have anticipated this — the Diablo series has had to make some pretty careful considerations of the social environment within which it portrays religious themes. And I'm pretty sure they are the creators of Diablo and WarCraft and Mario too, they told me in their marketing videos.
This seems rather a stretch, especially given a good chunk of the overall lore is still under wraps, hell the third faction aren’t even revealed yet.
And most of the potential audience will happily take passable story as long as the gameplay is good anyway. It’s not like SC2’s story wasn’t hot garbage
On April 25 2024 06:40 LunarC wrote: I disagree that balance should be a topic of discussion at this time.
At the current stage a developer's priority should be to create systems that produce an interesting (ideally fun) experience and are able to support further additions as well as room for player discovery. If you don't, you create things like Banelings where no matter how you tweak the numbers the experience is still not enjoyable.
Balance is like polish. If you've designed a turd, you're just polishing a turd.
Hard disagree. Banelings and baneling counterplay is incredible fun to watch and play. They were a bit omnipresent at times especially vs Protoss, that is true.
The game is build on anti boom mechanics. they have completely misdiagnosed the issue of sc2 and blaming it on ttk, now the whole game is just incredibly dull to watch.
I don't disagree completely, but you may be looking at SC2 through rose-coloured glasses.
You remember the insane close TvZ games from Dream or Taeja where last minute splits had you on the edge of your seat, but forget the thousands upon thousands of ZvP games that were ended because of a baneling run-by blowing up a worker line. Peak SC2 is a spectacle, but less than peak SC2 sucks to watch and sucks even more to play.
In an ideal world, you can have fun splitting against banelings, and watch highlight clips from pros, but also not lose the game outright if you don't. The idea Stormgate is going for is that with higher TTK, you can still have flashy micro, but each instance will likely swing the game +/- 10%, and not 100%.
Think of it like "10 battles where the outcome of each swings the game by a small amount" vs SC2's "1 game ending battle after 10 minutes of build up". Not saying Stormgate has pulled that off yet, but that's clearly the idea behind it.
Take a game like counter strike, which has probably more highlight clips than any other esport. Everyone loves seeing pros hit ridiculous shots, and everyone feels great when they hit their shots themselves. But you don't lose the game completely if you miss or aren't looking, it takes 15 rounds to win for a reason.
My feeling of ttk is that while it can be increased a bit from Sc2, it is still essential that landing a good skillshot or doing a good micro trick feels rewading/good. E.g. dropping storms on marines to see them die feels great.
The core issue with ttk in sc2 has imo never been the ttk itself, but rather how much one small misclick changes the game win probability. If instead, losing a skirmish due to looking away for a second only changed the game win probability a few percentages due to a high defenders advantage, I think people would generally feel better with it.
Is the main reason behind SC2's lethality not the low ttk? So many units can one-shot each other. Your mineral line can vanish instantly, fights can only last a few seconds, of course small mistakes are game ending
How else would you lower lethality other than increasing ttk? Storm drops are fun, but it becomes less fun when you spend 10 minutes building an army only for it to get melted by a storms while you weren't looking. Or for your mineral line to get wiped by banes or widow mines.
With higher ttk, storms would take longer to kill marines, giving the opponent time to react, but the marines still take damage, you're still rewarded for hitting good storms during a fight, and the opponent is rewarded for reacting/splitting, it's just, as you say, giving you a better % chance to win, and not just straight up winning because they looked away.
High ttk doesn't mean no skillshots or rewarding micro. Many would say the opposite. WC3 has much higher ttk than SG, and is a much more micro based game than either SG or SC2.
On April 25 2024 06:40 LunarC wrote: I disagree that balance should be a topic of discussion at this time.
At the current stage a developer's priority should be to create systems that produce an interesting (ideally fun) experience and are able to support further additions as well as room for player discovery. If you don't, you create things like Banelings where no matter how you tweak the numbers the experience is still not enjoyable.
Balance is like polish. If you've designed a turd, you're just polishing a turd.
Hard disagree. Banelings and baneling counterplay is incredible fun to watch and play. They were a bit omnipresent at times especially vs Protoss, that is true.
The game is build on anti boom mechanics. they have completely misdiagnosed the issue of sc2 and blaming it on ttk, now the whole game is just incredibly dull to watch.
I don't disagree completely, but you may be looking at SC2 through rose-coloured glasses.
You remember the insane close TvZ games from Dream or Taeja where last minute splits had you on the edge of your seat, but forget the thousands upon thousands of ZvP games that were ended because of a baneling run-by blowing up a worker line. Peak SC2 is a spectacle, but less than peak SC2 sucks to watch and sucks even more to play.
In an ideal world, you can have fun splitting against banelings, and watch highlight clips from pros, but also not lose the game outright if you don't. The idea Stormgate is going for is that with higher TTK, you can still have flashy micro, but each instance will likely swing the game +/- 10%, and not 100%.
Think of it like "10 battles where the outcome of each swings the game by a small amount" vs SC2's "1 game ending battle after 10 minutes of build up". Not saying Stormgate has pulled that off yet, but that's clearly the idea behind it.
Take a game like counter strike, which has probably more highlight clips than any other esport. Everyone loves seeing pros hit ridiculous shots, and everyone feels great when they hit their shots themselves. But you don't lose the game completely if you miss or aren't looking, it takes 15 rounds to win for a reason.
My feeling of ttk is that while it can be increased a bit from Sc2, it is still essential that landing a good skillshot or doing a good micro trick feels rewading/good. E.g. dropping storms on marines to see them die feels great.
The core issue with ttk in sc2 has imo never been the ttk itself, but rather how much one small misclick changes the game win probability. If instead, losing a skirmish due to looking away for a second only changed the game win probability a few percentages due to a high defenders advantage, I think people would generally feel better with it.
Is the main reason behind SC2's lethality not the low ttk? So many units can one-shot each other. Your mineral line can vanish instantly, fights can only last a few seconds, of course small mistakes are game ending
How else would you lower lethality other than increasing ttk? Storm drops are fun, but it becomes less fun when you spend 10 minutes building an army only for it to get melted by a storms while you weren't looking. Or for your mineral line to get wiped by banes or widow mines.
With higher ttk, storms would take longer to kill marines, giving the opponent time to react, but the marines still take damage, you're still rewarded for hitting good storms during a fight, and the opponent is rewarded for reacting/splitting, it's just, as you say, giving you a better % chance to win, and not just straight up winning because they looked away.
High ttk doesn't mean no skillshots or rewarding micro. Many would say the opposite. WC3 has much higher ttk than SG, and is a much more micro based game than either SG or SC2.
No, the main reason behind SC2's lethality is low TTK is too effective in ending the game with few safeguards against ending the game early. A designer could put systems in place so low TTK does not overly impact game flow.
This is well-executed by Mobas. Heroes are relatively lethal to each other the whole game, but the game is won by killing the enemy's defenses, not killing heroes. Each defensive layer is harder to kill than the next. Also, killing a hero early when they are low level without many items means they are dead for shorter and lose less resources compared to later in the game. Thus the game-ending threat a hero kill presents is nonexistent early and high later because how long the hero is dead for and your hero's ability to threaten defensive buildings starts insignificant and increases over time.
This concept applied to SC2 could be safeguards against early threats to the main base. It could be in the form of default defenses near the main base ramp and/or mineral line, or redesigning early units to be unable to threaten the main base easily. There are surely more clever ways to accomplish this that don't simply import Moba elements.
Why could this be a desirable design? Because I think it helps newer or casual players feel like they have more leeway to explore the game. Not in the sense that their opponent presents an actual early kill threat (their opponent would likely also be new and likely unable to properly abuse early power spikes). But because of the sense of safety it fosters when a new match starts. It's basically impossible to lose a game in a Moba without getting numerous chances to level up skills and buy some items, so a player is more likely to experience more of the game each match they play.
On April 25 2024 06:40 LunarC wrote: I disagree that balance should be a topic of discussion at this time.
At the current stage a developer's priority should be to create systems that produce an interesting (ideally fun) experience and are able to support further additions as well as room for player discovery. If you don't, you create things like Banelings where no matter how you tweak the numbers the experience is still not enjoyable.
Balance is like polish. If you've designed a turd, you're just polishing a turd.
Hard disagree. Banelings and baneling counterplay is incredible fun to watch and play. They were a bit omnipresent at times especially vs Protoss, that is true.
The game is build on anti boom mechanics. they have completely misdiagnosed the issue of sc2 and blaming it on ttk, now the whole game is just incredibly dull to watch.
I don't disagree completely, but you may be looking at SC2 through rose-coloured glasses.
You remember the insane close TvZ games from Dream or Taeja where last minute splits had you on the edge of your seat, but forget the thousands upon thousands of ZvP games that were ended because of a baneling run-by blowing up a worker line. Peak SC2 is a spectacle, but less than peak SC2 sucks to watch and sucks even more to play.
In an ideal world, you can have fun splitting against banelings, and watch highlight clips from pros, but also not lose the game outright if you don't. The idea Stormgate is going for is that with higher TTK, you can still have flashy micro, but each instance will likely swing the game +/- 10%, and not 100%.
Think of it like "10 battles where the outcome of each swings the game by a small amount" vs SC2's "1 game ending battle after 10 minutes of build up". Not saying Stormgate has pulled that off yet, but that's clearly the idea behind it.
Take a game like counter strike, which has probably more highlight clips than any other esport. Everyone loves seeing pros hit ridiculous shots, and everyone feels great when they hit their shots themselves. But you don't lose the game completely if you miss or aren't looking, it takes 15 rounds to win for a reason.
My feeling of ttk is that while it can be increased a bit from Sc2, it is still essential that landing a good skillshot or doing a good micro trick feels rewading/good. E.g. dropping storms on marines to see them die feels great.
The core issue with ttk in sc2 has imo never been the ttk itself, but rather how much one small misclick changes the game win probability. If instead, losing a skirmish due to looking away for a second only changed the game win probability a few percentages due to a high defenders advantage, I think people would generally feel better with it.
Is the main reason behind SC2's lethality not the low ttk? So many units can one-shot each other. Your mineral line can vanish instantly, fights can only last a few seconds, of course small mistakes are game ending
How else would you lower lethality other than increasing ttk? Storm drops are fun, but it becomes less fun when you spend 10 minutes building an army only for it to get melted by a storms while you weren't looking. Or for your mineral line to get wiped by banes or widow mines.
With higher ttk, storms would take longer to kill marines, giving the opponent time to react, but the marines still take damage, you're still rewarded for hitting good storms during a fight, and the opponent is rewarded for reacting/splitting, it's just, as you say, giving you a better % chance to win, and not just straight up winning because they looked away.
High ttk doesn't mean no skillshots or rewarding micro. Many would say the opposite. WC3 has much higher ttk than SG, and is a much more micro based game than either SG or SC2.
Not entirely. BAR has constant action with a low TTK, but it isn't lethal by any mean since you build almost just as quick. That's how most sc2 game goes as well, a few large engagements that reduce both army size, and rinse and repeat with different units/upgrades etc. storm drop should be rewarded for high skill requirement and risk taking.
If you look at MOBA for example, most engagements are pretty crowd pleasingly chaotically lethal, but the game isn't over by one poor engagements. It's how comeback can happen, and how stronger team simply do better.
This is also why zerospace system makes so much better sense, you get low ttk with units dying everywhere through pretty insane combos/army units, but you also build quick and have anti snowball mechanics (top bar ability and faction design). only issue really is the early game can be very snowbally
Earlygame snowball is good imo because there needs to be a tradeoff with cheese/all ins/timing attacks on one side vs the equilibruim//no rush 15 handshake/standard gameplay on the other. Pull off your early game strat and no matter how long the gane lasts, your advantage should remain quite substantive barring large errors on your part. It's on the opponeny to then force errors or simply play much better.
LagTV, who you may know from the longest running StarCraft youtube series Will Cheese Fail, did a pretty long talk comparing Frost Giant and Uncapped Games on their last podcast. They start by going over the Uncapped reveal, but talk about both games in comparison as it progresses.
I'm not aware of any other direct comparisons by media figures yet so it felt valuable to post, here's where it starts in their podcast:
MaximusBlack is also one of the 50~ $2000 kickstarter tier Stormgate supporters so although this clip is severe, the longer talk is very even-headed and I think they've been pretty good in their coverage of the game over the last year.
On April 27 2024 10:51 LunarC wrote: A sensible design to me is the threat of losing a match should start out low and generally increase as the game progresses. This is naturally true in RTS since bigger armies generally do more damage. TTK is just one parameter than can be tuned to affect this.
To use Banelings as an example again is they can simply kill a player. Nevermind how easy it is to pull off in a high skill game, but at low skill levels a sneaky player could easily hide a few Zerglings and nuke the worker line against a less experienced player. The new player's experience would be "Hm, I'm playing and learning, oh there are units in my base, oh, all of my workers died. This feels horrible." The threat of losing a match feels like a night/day difference before Banelings and after Banelings. And there are numerous such units in Starcraft.
Context matters. The kill threat Banelings present could be totally acceptable later in a match but it feels out of place given how early they can be acquired. I feel Banelings could be made less problematic as easily as making them unable to walk up ramps and requiring them to be morphed from Zerglings on creep. It accomplishes the concept of "less early kill threats" without changing the TTK necessary to make them a viable defensive option.
One could argue early kill threats are a key feature of Starcraft, but I think whether it's a desirable design is debatable.
Of all early game things I find banelings the least opressive. Things like (Cloaked) Banshee, Oracle, DT's are way easier to control and way harder to deal with as an inexperienced player. In generel I agree the SC2s worker lines are too damn vulnerable vs all kinds of shit and game ending damage to a worker line is way too easy to execute. I mean games are decided basically without even one army clash. Where is the fun in that?
On April 25 2024 06:40 LunarC wrote: I disagree that balance should be a topic of discussion at this time.
At the current stage a developer's priority should be to create systems that produce an interesting (ideally fun) experience and are able to support further additions as well as room for player discovery. If you don't, you create things like Banelings where no matter how you tweak the numbers the experience is still not enjoyable.
Balance is like polish. If you've designed a turd, you're just polishing a turd.
Hard disagree. Banelings and baneling counterplay is incredible fun to watch and play. They were a bit omnipresent at times especially vs Protoss, that is true.
The game is build on anti boom mechanics. they have completely misdiagnosed the issue of sc2 and blaming it on ttk, now the whole game is just incredibly dull to watch.
I don't disagree completely, but you may be looking at SC2 through rose-coloured glasses.
You remember the insane close TvZ games from Dream or Taeja where last minute splits had you on the edge of your seat, but forget the thousands upon thousands of ZvP games that were ended because of a baneling run-by blowing up a worker line. Peak SC2 is a spectacle, but less than peak SC2 sucks to watch and sucks even more to play.
In an ideal world, you can have fun splitting against banelings, and watch highlight clips from pros, but also not lose the game outright if you don't. The idea Stormgate is going for is that with higher TTK, you can still have flashy micro, but each instance will likely swing the game +/- 10%, and not 100%.
Think of it like "10 battles where the outcome of each swings the game by a small amount" vs SC2's "1 game ending battle after 10 minutes of build up". Not saying Stormgate has pulled that off yet, but that's clearly the idea behind it.
Take a game like counter strike, which has probably more highlight clips than any other esport. Everyone loves seeing pros hit ridiculous shots, and everyone feels great when they hit their shots themselves. But you don't lose the game completely if you miss or aren't looking, it takes 15 rounds to win for a reason.
My feeling of ttk is that while it can be increased a bit from Sc2, it is still essential that landing a good skillshot or doing a good micro trick feels rewading/good. E.g. dropping storms on marines to see them die feels great.
The core issue with ttk in sc2 has imo never been the ttk itself, but rather how much one small misclick changes the game win probability. If instead, losing a skirmish due to looking away for a second only changed the game win probability a few percentages due to a high defenders advantage, I think people would generally feel better with it.
Is the main reason behind SC2's lethality not the low ttk? So many units can one-shot each other. Your mineral line can vanish instantly, fights can only last a few seconds, of course small mistakes are game ending
How else would you lower lethality other than increasing ttk? Storm drops are fun, but it becomes less fun when you spend 10 minutes building an army only for it to get melted by a storms while you weren't looking. Or for your mineral line to get wiped by banes or widow mines.
With higher ttk, storms would take longer to kill marines, giving the opponent time to react, but the marines still take damage, you're still rewarded for hitting good storms during a fight, and the opponent is rewarded for reacting/splitting, it's just, as you say, giving you a better % chance to win, and not just straight up winning because they looked away.
High ttk doesn't mean no skillshots or rewarding micro. Many would say the opposite. WC3 has much higher ttk than SG, and is a much more micro based game than either SG or SC2.
No, the main reason behind SC2's lethality is low TTK is too effective in ending the game with few safeguards against ending the game early. A designer could put systems in place so low TTK does not overly impact game flow.
This is well-executed by Mobas. Heroes are relatively lethal to each other the whole game, but the game is won by killing the enemy's defenses, not killing heroes. Each defensive layer is harder to kill than the next. Also, killing a hero early when they are low level without many items means they are dead for shorter and lose less resources compared to later in the game. Thus the game-ending threat a hero kill presents is nonexistent early and high later because how long the hero is dead for and your hero's ability to threaten defensive buildings starts insignificant and increases over time.
This concept applied to SC2 could be safeguards against early threats to the main base. It could be in the form of default defenses near the main base ramp and/or mineral line, or redesigning early units to be unable to threaten the main base easily. There are surely more clever ways to accomplish this that don't simply import Moba elements.
Why could this be a desirable design? Because I think it helps newer or casual players feel like they have more leeway to explore the game. Not in the sense that their opponent presents an actual early kill threat (their opponent would likely also be new and likely unable to properly abuse early power spikes). But because of the sense of safety it fosters when a new match starts. It's basically impossible to lose a game in a Moba without getting numerous chances to level up skills and buy some items, so a player is more likely to experience more of the game each match they play.
You're skipping over big parts about mobas. Heroes respawn. That difference will always make them less volatile than in RTS. Units die when they are killed in RTS, they aren't back within a minute. And low ttk applies to worker harass as well, which isn't a thing in mobas. One of the big reasons SC2 games can end at any moment is because worker lines get blitzed.
Sure you can give each race comeback mechanics or static D on their town halls, but that would probably hurt strategic variety, for example rushes would probably die if you spawned with powerful static D. They also wouldn't make the game any less lethal past 5-10 minutes. The problem with SC2 isn't just volatile early game like you say, it's that you often get 1 army fight lasting 5 seconds that decides the game, even after 15 minutes of build up.
Concepts better suited to RTS would be things like upkeep (players who fall down in supply can still find advantages and bigger armies aren't always worth it), or diminishing returns (so getting workers blown up has less of an impact).
I am surprised to see that people say the bad thing that is making RTS less fun is that losing all your workers means you can't win and ends the game. To me, the fun thing about RTS is that I get to decide when I surrender. And the less fun thing about RTS is that the game can give you false feedback where you think turtling is good because you survive longer. The worst thing a game can do is make you arrive in a lost game state, but making it impossible for you to know that you already lost and it is pointless to play on.
And the contrast people make with MOBA about what MOBA does right is also surprising to me. I really dislike the fact that in MOBA you have to play out your game until the end in almost all cases. It sucks to be playing a losing game for 50 minutes. Sure, comebacks can happen. But they can also happen in RTS. It would also be really bad if a game has a comeback mechanic that is so strong that the first 30 minutes of the game basically don't matter.
It would be good for the game devs to think about how long an ideal game of RTS should last. And if losing games really early should be a thing, yes or no. I can't really debate the popularity of MOBA. But I have this feeling that MOBAs are possible despite their games taking too long. And despite their games being filled with indecisive actions. Sure, games can be very different in this regard and still be very popular. Compare how often a point is scored in football vs how often in basketball. But to me, 30 minutes of fighting creeps to level up and gear out your hero so get an edge in the 3 teamfight you are going to have that actually decide the game is not what I would envision as an ideal game concept. I would say that players being stuck in a game where either they want to concede, or their team members have lost faith and want to concede, and they end up raging at each others is one of the things that make MOBAs so toxic.
For me, the concept similar to a boxing match where each player at any moment during the match can pull out a combination and deliver a knockout is way more exciting.
So Frost Giant abruptly ended their partnership with Stormgate World (open source and free, useful API) last month to launch a partnership with their direct competitor untapped.gg, who now has full reign over match and player data, in-game and externally. Their premium model for other games is horrible and any useful API access for other third party stats sites will cost money and makes you directly finance your competitor who can then just copy your tools if they are successful enough.
"The entire three weeks of Frigate will be under NDA and playtesters–including our Kickstarter founders at the $40 pledge tiers and above–will keep their experience strictly confidential."
Is this purely to try and drive more sales? Seems really weird to go from an open non-NDA'd beta back into a closed and confidential playtest. Did they give any reasoning anywhere else?
On April 30 2024 11:13 cha0 wrote: "The entire three weeks of Frigate will be under NDA and playtesters–including our Kickstarter founders at the $40 pledge tiers and above–will keep their experience strictly confidential."
Is this purely to try and drive more sales? Seems really weird to go from an open non-NDA'd beta back into a closed and confidential playtest. Did they give any reasoning anywhere else?
They probably saw just how fast the interest and hype in the game is dropping off. The NDA would help them build a marketing campaign around the update, it's their last shot imo
I'm already feeling bad for modders if that is how they'll handle stats.
Every dollar counts when you spend as big as FGS.
On April 30 2024 11:19 KingzTig wrote:
The NDA would help them build a marketing campaign around the update, it's their last shot imo
This NDA will never hold. Thanks to inflation $40 isnt really much these days and if you post stuff on other places than twitch and youtube, who is gonna take that down?
I'm honestly totally perplexed by the NDA. There is no chance at all that they'll be able to keep anything secret. And are they planning to actually enforce it? Not that they don't have the right to, but it would be a PR disaster for them to go after some teenager for going online and talking about the video game they're playing.
What do they think the NDA is going to accomplish? Maybe the secret strategy is to pivot to a lawsuit-based profit model, where they lose money on the game but make up for it by suing their fan base.
They will reveal the faction in one of the gaming shows in the summer. Hundreds of thousands of people watch those shows. How many people will see a leak before it gets taken down? Only a few hundred people dedicated enough to look for those leaks? Most of the people who follow Stormgate that closely are already in the beta. If a few hundred people who are not in it see those leaks, it still doesn't diminish the exclusivity of their reveal all that much, so I doubt they care.
On April 30 2024 18:31 _Spartak_ wrote: They will reveal the faction in one of the gaming shows in the summer. Hundreds of thousands of people watch those shows. How many people will see a leak before it gets taken down? Only a few hundred people dedicated enough to look for those leaks? Most of the people who follow Stormgate that closely are already in the beta. If a few hundred people who are not in it see those leaks, it still doesn't diminish the exclusivity of their reveal all that much, so I doubt they care.
I think you might underestimate the possibility of content creators talking about a leak without actually leaking or showing content themselves. They do it all the time and it's never getting taken down because I don't think you can actually legally take stuff like that down or else big game companies would have tried to do so. So yeah, if something's being leaked and some big content creators catch onto it, they will talk about it and distribute the leak to a larger audience.