Seriously, I think you advocates of uber mouse handling shouldn’t be taking it as a disadvantage if the AI is a bit smart. Think of it this way, you can delegate more of your lightspeed mouse clicks elsewhere and still rule the game.

Its like asking pro athletes not to wear sport shoes when playing the game. As newer shoes come out onto the market, do we expect to cap how useful the sports shoe can be for the athlete?

It used to be that if one wanted to build a building where units were, one would have to cancel to the build order and specifically order units in the area to move out of the way. Since warcraft 3, controllable units move out of the way of a planned building. Are the advocates of esport-tastic-starcraft saying we should revert back to the pre-warcraft 3 manual selection?

I’m not asking that sarcastically, by the way, I’d be genuinely interested in such a thing.

I operate under the assumption that what we’re dealing with here is a Real Time Strategy game, with the player taking the role of the ‘general’ of his army. I therefor both expect and advocate that the game will be designed around making being a simulated general as fun and streamlined as possible, rather than building in things that explicitly DETRACT from my ability to command my army and instead force me to be some sort of ‘e-athlete’. If I want to play something that incredibly stresses my hand-eye coordination, I have Halo in my X-Box right now.

Well see the problem here is, some one tells his friend that he isn’t that good and asks if he can be handicap. I’ve played basketball with friends, and if someone is so bad that they need everyone else to use a handicap is well… that friend wouldn’t be invited to play again.

On the flip side, if you are so good its not even funny, you would do either of two things. 1)Play handicap yourself, like not ball handling well(or letting your friend kill your expansion) or 2) You totally pwn your friends to hell every time that eventually they don’t want you to play anymore.

Good tactics is just that, good tactics. You sitting at home may have a better tactical plan for your team to win then they do at that time, but would you be able to win the game for them? No.

APM, Great hand eye coordination, Stamina etc etc.. are good qualities of good athletes and gamers. Come on this isnt the special Olympics now :p

Ah, the Mountain Giants. I didn’t see them that much (not that my battle.net rating was all that hot, mind you) and when I did they were fairly hard kills.

I was pretty okay with the taunt ability; you could get around it with really hardcore micro skills, which I don’t like, but the ability nor its counter wasn’t really game-breaking. Ideally, I would have wanted it to work like… mmm… like some of the abilities involving taunts in D&D; it should either FORCE units to attack it (such that the controller literally CAN’T re-target them) or apply a penalty debuff to units that chose NOT to attack it after the ability was used.

I’m not sure that would be balanced in the current version of War III, but in vacuum, that’s how I’d prefer an ability like that to function.

AOE spell damage is a much trickier question.

I don’t think I’d want my units to automatically dodge it; sometimes you want them to just stand their ground and gut it out, other times you DO want them to stop attacking and get out of dodge, other times they CAN’T move (narrow bridge, for example). But that’s kind of a tactical call that -I- gotta make.

You could of course add various toggles for tactical options to your units, but where does that end? How many option toggles for unit AI is TOO many?

Ultimately, having really high APM via crazy mouse skills is going to give people an advantage, of course. I just don’t think it ought to be a big enough one to offset a genuine edge in tactical acumen in the opponent. It’s why I love things like autocast and automatically marching in formation; that frees me up to really THINK about the overall situation.

@SCV_Operator -

What you propose is certainly technically possible, but it’s almost certainly never going to happen. Blizzard has a long track record of not wanting to water down their games with lots of different rules ‘environments;’ hell, IIRC, it was a major concession for them to even build in different SPEED SETTINGS in WCIII you could use in non-ladder play. And witness WoW, where their response to people who often clamor for free-for-all servers, ‘classic’ ruleset servers, etc. get met with a universal ‘never going to happen.’

“I wonder if part of the problem is to do with how SC has been received and used beyond what could ever have been imagined 10 years ago. It was designed to be a good game that was fun and competitive to play, but I doubt anyone foresaw competitive play (I’m sure in one interview the devs say they never imagined such high click rates for instance.)

The new game has to build on those things, the designers are trying to satisfy casual gamers, hardcore fans and competitive players. Might it be possible to design the game in such a way that you could choose which bits of automation to have? So for tournaments, you could switch off autocast and ‘all units move at same speed in a group’, and if you entered the tournament you’d know that those were the rules. But if you wanted to play against a friend online, you could choose to put those things in place – the difference between kicking a ball around in a park with a mate and competing in a competitive sport?

Is this possible? Any thoughts?”

Very nice idea indeed! to put an option of whether to use or not to use automation. Bravo!

Please devs, I beg you to answer this question on the next Q&A batch.

The new game has to build on those things, the designers are trying to satisfy casual gamers, hardcore fans and competitive players. Might it be possible to design the game in such a way that you could choose which bits of automation to have? So for tournaments, you could switch off autocast and ‘all units move at same speed in a group’, and if you entered the tournament you’d know that those were the rules. But if you wanted to play against a friend online, you could choose to put those things in place – the difference between kicking a ball around in a park with a mate and competing in a competitive sport?

Is this possible? Any thoughts?