BA DSD why it works, how it is good and you getting over it.

[smoth]

So as part of my earlier post to picasso I wanted to make a thread on some thoughts I have been putting together. This may well be a wall of text and I full expect people to troll this thread but I am going to this post anyway.



Let's get the preliminary part out of the way.

But you hated BA+Speedmetal.

I did because speedmetal breaks the gameplay by altering the speed of units. It was entirely metal and had one pathway leading to very poor gameplay. I am not encouraging discussion of this I am just saying why I hated it and felt it was bad.



So, why is dsd good?
Well that is not a simple answer so I have to go into a few thoughts and observations of rts gaming that I have had over the years.



Lets first go over the average player
Most players are not the competitive 1v1 types.
This is true, most gamers do not crave an intense challenge of 1v1 tooth and nail gameplay. it is a part of the community but a majority prefers team matches and comm stomps(vs an ai). This is done for a few reasons:

New players want to feel they get to play.
In a competitive 1v1 tooth and nail match they will absolutely be the enemy target and possibly will lose. Sometimes they may win but most people are sore losers and will rage and complain when they lose.

Players don't like to lose and love to feel like they won.
You know that guy who sits in the back playing with himself all match? yeah that guy. Well he is most gamers. Gamers these days are used to rapid save/load mechanics, easy wins to the point that many games have gone from challenging to grind(WOW and many mmos) They are not challenging except for the first time someone runs them. Afterwards it is broken down to a repeatable formula that people mindlessly rehearse and the only wrench in it is that 12 year old kid who refuses to follow the pattern

How does that explain anything?
By being in the back of the team they feel they have done something useful and have accomplished the win even if they didn't really help.

see chester(the little yellow dog) that is your average gamer,
hides behind a stronger ally to feel that he is strong


How does dsd helps this? I mean, I am not seeing the point!
Dsd helps because often the new guy can sit in the back and "tech." The better player will eventually get some use out of the noob "hey new guy you can build nooks!" newguy:"holy crap, I want those, how do I nooks!?!" This gives the player a role and allows him to contribute. Eventually the noob will either want his own piece of the action and graduate to a frontline player OR he becomes an actually useful tech or air player.



So why do we need those guys?

because we want warm bodies
Fact of the matter is there are NOT enough players in spring. These days gamers are more demanding, they want to come online and be greeted by 1000s of players all playing different matches so they can quickly join and get started. Without numbers people come online and find no matches readily available and will leave for the nearest tripple A title, which will have this player count.

That is illogical player count has nothing to do with quality.
Quality is a LOL qualitative property. You cannot have something be worth more just by virtue of it being free. "something is only worth what others are willing to pay for it." People see no games as a measure of how fun something is. Unless they are trendy douches then they only play unpopular games.

So what, they can still play!
Can they? or will they get mercilessly slaughtered? It happens in any game, the population goes small, a hand full of diehards stick around, no new player stands a chance. I have watched this since '98 when I used to be the diehard shogo player. Well spring has been around for 5 years, new players will within the evening meet stronger more experienced players who despite trying to take it easy will accidentally crush the new player. This drives people away.

Again, I am not seeing it smoth, what does this have to do with DSD?
Dsd is the noob stomping ground, the shithole that they can wallow around in and be nooby. They will not be insta crushed and there are enough people around that even if it goes down to 4v4 there is a good chance there will be at least 1 shit player on the other team.




So how exactly does this help the community?

Fact of the matter is we need all skill levels of players.
Remember how I talked earlier about the players not finding enough people at their level? This quagmire acts like a tarpit trapping creatures in it. Some are strong enough to escape others stay there. For the ones that are strong enough to escape..

They can grow to be mighty and the rest stay to feed it.

But in the mean time they are not in my 1v1 or my tabula match
if they were you would just eat them alive. They would not stick around, there are other games that they can "win" in.


FINE let them leave!
And we are back at square one. You know how you are tired of that same circle jerk with the same guys. Yeah well have fun being alone.

You need people to join, have the chance to become good and then give you a good fight, otherwise you will just play with the same faces FOREVER. Because let me tell you, there are many other games they could play with FAIR competition.



Oh please smoth, I'll just teach them to be better and they will learn
That's pretty arrogant. Like you are the best? Who says they WANT your advice. Esp when 90% of the time it is assholes or trolls barking orders at new players. You guys come off like this:

That is no good. Fact of the matter is if they want help, a few matches and they will ask for it. You can say, "hey, need a hand guy?" and that person might take you up. Odds are they will, after they lose. No amount of tutorials will stop this. It is human nature and has happened since the beginning of gaming. Also you are not here to work, you are here to play not train people in spring.

"yeaaaaaaaaaaah, I'm gonna need you to build that LLT"

*Edit to fix images*

[SirArtturi]

Good essay on the positive sides of DSD. I completely agree with you. DSD is a good map, theres no question. And yes we need it, as much as we need BA aswell to keep the community alive and running. But as much as we need DSD, we need good alternatives. Not everyone loves to eat same oatmeal every day and we should respect those also. So whiners yes do have right to be worried if the dsd is taking over, cos that would kill it aswell.

So no need of trolling here. Ah what the heck, just let me do this one:

But you hated BA+Speedmetal.

I did because speedmetal breaks the gameplay by altering the speed of units. It was entirely metal and had one pathway leading to very poor gameplay. I am not encouraging discussion of this I am just saying why I hated it and felt it was bad.

Well, it's not entirely metal, but it kinda has one pathway (it represents linear gameplay with two passess) and yes it does alter the speed of units (typemap)

[Cheesecan]

First of all good job on making such a freakishly long post readable. Pretty well said most of it.

*joke* The only way a noob is ever going to graduate to be a front line player is if they have a slow CPU, then the only available spots for them are at the front of DSD.

I think the advent of the ABC ffa host pulled a few noobs out of BADSD, I've seen whole games there stocked with only noobs(not smurfs).

DSD will eventually fade away just like Altored Divide and Speedmetal did, the question is will we have a next thing to attract new players. If you think about it new maps are almost never played anymore, the community has become less explorative in that sense.

[Das Bruce]

[Reverted]
Lets try that again shall we. Gota you appear to want to disagree with smoth, please do so in a more reasonable fashion.

[Gota]

User was banned (one day) for this post.
ok...Ill try not to make him cry again...

[Cheesecan]

Gota's posts were fine, he was being reasonable and not provoking anyone with what he said. He simply laid out arguments on DSD.

I didn't at all get the feeling he was trying to disagree with smoth.

[knorke]

I think for most players 1v1 Spring* is just too annoying.
Not because they get beaten, I think most players do not really mind that that much. The problem is how you lose:

• in counterstrike noobs get headshoted from behind some window across the map and think "wow, that guy is good. i want to learn that too!"
• in quake the pro steals all items, nub sees the enemy jumping around, doing tricks and bla and think "wow, thats cool. i want to learn that too!"
• in starcraft noobs get rushed at 5minutes by 100 zerglings or get microed to death by 5 marines but again you can kind of see how the opponent played better.

Now in Spring*, why do noobs lose there? It is mostly annoying things that are not cool at all.
-did not know where resources are. (no visible spots, dont know about F4. on some maps metal in water is invisible)
make wind on no-wind maps.

-units stuck or can not go up/down slopes. clogged factories/harbour.

-did not know about some functions of the interface: camera points to sky, trapped in FPS mode, "there is a cross in middle of screen and mouse pointer gone"

-in starcraft you see a dozen SCV carrying minerals and know "those guys bring me resources."
In BA you see a small spinning thing and have to look at its tool tip to see what it is good for.

Basically there are too many abstract numbers and mechanics.
It feels more like learning a the functions&buttons of some program (CAD or office or something) then learning a game.
I can understand how each of these things alone is a dealbreaker for rts gamers.
So if "learning the game" feels too much like work or math new players either
a) leave.
b) play in a way where they can just bash units into each other and watch explosions.

*most/all spring games have those problems, not just BA.

[PicassoCT]

ct does not have the workers invisible problem. I really liked somths essay, a very fine analysis, i will have to think about it for some time before i might find some logic hole in that... if there is one.

Question is, could you omptimize this map even moar for noobsecurity? Just think of shielded safezones, were no enemy unit can travell- unless they hold some points uncontested for quite some time.

The Problem is, how do we get the pros to ignore the nubs, or even see them as usefull..

In my eyes, the addition of chickens did contribute a lot to Spring, the Ai-Enemy doesent rage, he doesent quit, he just gives a shit and attacks...

[luckywaldo7]

I think for most players 1v1 Spring* is just too annoying.
Not because they get beaten, I think most players do not really mind that that much. The problem is how you lose:

• in counterstrike noobs get headshoted from behind some window across the map and think "wow, that guy is good. i want to learn that too!"
• in quake the pro steals all items, nub sees the enemy jumping around, doing tricks and bla and think "wow, thats cool. i want to learn that too!"
• in starcraft noobs get rushed at 5minutes by 100 zerglings or get microed to death by 5 marines but again you can kind of see how the opponent played better.

Now in Spring*, why do noobs lose there? It is mostly annoying things that are not cool at all.
-did not know where resources are. (no visible spots, dont know about F4. on some maps metal in water is invisible)
make wind on no-wind maps.

-units stuck or can not go up/down slopes. clogged factories/harbour.

-did not know about some functions of the interface: camera points to sky, trapped in FPS mode, "there is a cross in middle of screen and mouse pointer gone"

-in starcraft you see a dozen SCV carrying minerals and know "those guys bring me resources."
In BA you see a small spinning thing and have to look at its tool tip to see what it is good for.

Basically there are too many abstract numbers and mechanics.
It feels more like learning a the functions&buttons of some program (CAD or office or something) then learning a game.
I can understand how each of these things alone is a dealbreaker for rts gamers.
So if "learning the game" feels too much like work or math new players either
a) leave.
b) play in a way where they can just bash units into each other and watch explosions.

*most/all spring games have those problems, not just BA.

I disagree with pretty much everything you said. Playing 1v1 was very appealing to me as a newbie exactly because I wanted to get better. Even with only about 50 ingame hours I would try playing against some of the better players, like Saktoth, knowing I would get steamrolled but figuring that it was the fastest way to get better.

And I do remember swapping camera to great confusion a couple times but in general I don't recall having any problems learning the mechanics of the game. It took me minutes after starting my first game against a (broken at the time) AI to understand resources, having never played TA before, and I'm not any kind of special genius. And the simple truth is that a lot of newbies do play 1v1, its the old players who don't.

I feel like 1v1 has become unappealing to more experience players because everyone talks about how 1v1 is so "competitive" like it's a really big deal. So people really do become afraid to play quite because they are afraid to lose. It's like every 1v1 loss becomes a permanent stain on your honor, as the winner has definitively become "better than you" and gets the privileges of calling you a noob along with the ability to immediately dismiss anything you say about balance. I prefer what you could maybe call the sami-casual 1v1 crowd, where you are just playing to mess around and maybe try out new builds or strategies, or just hone your skills in a friendly enviroment. And at the end of the day nobody cares who won or who lost, only that you had fun and might have learned something new.

Bottom line: it's not so much a game problem as a community problem.

[luckywaldo7]

That said, when I introduced my roommate to Spring his reaction was, "Well, looks like typical gamer crowd".

[Lolsquad_Steven]

Lucky... you just don't get it do you.

[SanadaUjiosan]

I agree, well executed Smoth.

[PicassoCT]

So we had - by accident - a nub galapagos. Now how to exploit it, expand it? Why does only BA benefit from it?

If i concluded it right... every mod needs a second modmode- basically a peacefull settlers or anno, while the pros keep to the frontier?

Wow, that is a difficult one. I mean, it usually doesent work when two guys share the same base. Imagine the Settler player having to deliver UnitCrates to fullfill his peacefull targets, and the pro player depending on crate delivery as a ressource... no that would bring the pressure back...(nub deliver crates or otherwise we will lose)

There Existance really has to be optional...

[PicassoCT]

I slept over the whole thing, and a small addition crept into my mind. The spring experience is so traumatic for nubs because they get to feel they have brought the whole team down (you can clearly see how the enemy floods through the remains of your nub base) so you get to feel like a traitor in addition to loosing.

The problem starts, because we as designers refuse to cut the hands of the pros. In Starcraft and any other strategy, the olymp of players is basically handicapped by a lack of automatisation. So you have to play chess while juggling with units, building stuff. Spring is chess purified, and thats why players can only be save on maps as badsd. If we cut on competitition, we could have moar players - the alternative would be making nubs unkillable for advanced players, one way or the other.

[Pxtl]

Imho, the biggest thing to learn from StarCraft is the map design. Most SC maps have only one or two entrances into the home base and the natural, and thus the home bases are incredibly easy to porc. Even if you lose a teammate, it's still hard to break into these bases.

The most popular BA maps reflect this design by protecting the home base with steep hills or walls. This means the player is less likely to get raeped by jeffies, since he can stop that with one well-placed LLT.

[Cheesecan]

I think it's a trap of discussing BA in terms of Starcraft. Games are too different in all ways I can see..

[PicassoCT]

actually its a quite good comparison... ba dsd is one thing.. and that is.. easy to defend.. its a flat long road to see stuff coming (like sm, bitetheway)

And there even is a gangway... so if you screw up bigtime, your chap from above or below can save you

[Cheesecan]

So you want to teach new BA players Starcraft and then complain they get their asses handed to them in 1 on 1 situations?? sounds like fun.

[AF]

The number one thing that really peeved players in OTA off was being raided and not beign able to do much about it.

The lesson was not learnt.

Pro players persisted, and the victims usually quit and never came back and didn't complain so they were silenced.

This is one of the contributors to the success of games/maps like speedmetal.

BADSD has the bonus that Pro players tend to go front because noobs on the frontline is a recipe for disaster ( though not always ;D ), that and noobs tend to get scared and sit at the very back

[PicassoCT]

What if we made a map with only temporary open battleways? Enough time to prepare for battle... one big clash , and then the border closes again, until enough units assemble in the ante-room. If they dont want to loose, this is what it would take. Just make a lava river, that forces you into wait for minutes... o wait.. knorke did that, with success...
Seems there is popularity to be had in this direction. Lets immure it, and hope it starves to death.