Extra Credits: Balancing for Skill

[Johannes]

You cited no reason why something being obscure or unintended by devs means it's bad. If it's fun, interesting and doesn't break the rest of the game, where's the issue?

[smoth]

Last I watched ba, 20 units dying did more damage than their weapon. Meaning I could win more effectively by hugging your base until all my guys are killed than actually shooting it. The death explode was THAT strong.

Krogoths took ultra damage from torps

etc. It doesn't matter, you'll just blow over any point I list but those are at least 2 issues that were present in ba for almost 4-5 years. Hell the explosion thing still may be.

[Johannes]

Those are not at all comparable to the things SwiftSpear mentioned. They were obviously intended by the designer (at one point at least) and don't require any specific motor skill to master.

And units exploding on death is quite visible to anyone who observes it happening. So then to want your units dying next to enemy stuff is an obvious thing to want, it adds another aspect to consider when maneuvering your units. But now, better than shooting? Try playing the game and see how that'll work for you...
Self-Ding units for better explosions is interesting too, takes some more skill but it's really obvious (but not easy) how to do that too once you've thought of it once - and again, self-d explosion values and wreck destruction were intended by designer.

Now stuff like torps doing extra damage to krogs, yeah there's nothing really interesting to be found there, even if totally inconsequential most of the time and removed from the game iirc.
There's still things like air unit damages being a ridiculous mess (even after being revised repeatedly, forcing people to adapt to a new set of weird arbitrary values that replaced the old ones). And these are no fun even when you've learned them. But again, not what we were talking about.

[SwiftSpear]

You cited no reason why something being obscure or unintended by devs means it's bad. If it's fun, interesting and doesn't break the rest of the game, where's the issue?

Something unintended by the devs doesn't make it bad. Something obscure is bad, because if a good player does it to a weaker player, and the weaker player has no reasonable way of figuring out how that technique was performed, the good player might as well be cheating for as much as the weaker player is concerned.

You want someone, at any point in the game, to understand what they need to do to get better at the game. You want someone to have a clear idea of what skills they must improve primarily to compete. At the same time you want them to feel like they have a fighting change at pretty much all times (even if they know that the law of averages means they will ultimately lose to a better player, they won't have fun if in 100% of skirmishes they are killed, regardless of how they approach each specific skirmish). Highly obscure mechanics have a bad habit of producing very awkward skill curves as well. You many be very good at team fortress classic without learning to bunnyhop, but you can get from point A to point B 20% faster if you know how to bunnyhop. However, in the early days of learning the skill it's actually generally slower. You accidentally bang into walls and floor obstacles and lose all your speed, you mess up your keystroke timing and take large speed penalties. For a long while it feels like you're worse than you used to be. If TFC didn't have so many players who you could obviously see are gaining an advantage from the skill, and were willing to teach it, it wouldn't be the kind of thing you'd ever stumble upon.

Another good example is infinite juggle combos in fighter games. Most of them take frame perfect timing to execute... however, even frame perfect timing is actually masterable. And all of a sudden, opposing players can't afford to be hit by you with any move that can potentially start a combo. Your skill level may be VERY high, but the power advantage gained by mastering one of these combos is too high a jump. It doesn't appropriately scale down to keep the game fair, and doesn't appropriately give the opponent a fighting chance.

A lot of competitive players and game designers influenced by that community tend to overlook those negatives. And honestly, to a degree I definitely do agree with you. It's preferable to have bunnyhopping in your TF2 style game then to be stuck with a drab movement system like the one in Call of Duty... However, it's not a one or the other thing. The movement system in TF2 is still VERY high skill, but it scales more fairly, it doesn't require unfair leaps in understanding on the part of the player; it is consistently and deliberately designed to work the way it does, scale in the advantage it grants players vs the time invested into mastering it, and preserve the class balance and team balance of the game in a intentional and designable fashion. Warsow is another great example of this. The movement system takes a bit of explanation to learn, it follows a logic that can be understood in real world language "you slingshot your mouse view into your jump for extra speed". It was also very intentionally designed and balanced to work the way it did. And I'd argue it makes for a much better game than Quake 2 with it's bunnyhopping for that reason.

For an RTS example, zergling vs baneling micro in Star Craft 2 is highly difficult, to the point where it's complained about by elite level players, yet it's balanced to work a certain way, and it's clear the logic behind it. It's just extremely hard to consistently pull off. There are other builds you can use, but they don't produce the same advantage as the simple zergling counter builds. It provides paths for the elite player without removing the weaker player's options. That's an example of a well designed mechanic. SC2 beta's TvZ reaper builds were the opposite. They were hard to pull off, but there was only one real strategy that worked against a well done reaper rush, and it was MUCH harder to execute than the reaper rush itself.