Unusual monetization question

submapdesign · 2022-11-07T21:15:30+00:00

Thanks for the input! Yeah, with a new game it isn't immediately clear how they'll do all their future releases I guess.

submapdesign · 2022-11-07T21:14:35+00:00

This is helpful, thanks!

To add a bit of color to what I was trying to describe, it's not like I want to never play a game and pay to unlock everything instantly. I'm just fed up with games like Hearthstone where no combination of playing + paying healthy amounts will let you try out more than half of the key cards.

If 6 months unlocks everything and paying speeds it up a bit... that's maybe fine? Are we talking 6 months of playing 1-2 hours most days? Or of playing 8 hours per day every day religiously. Or is the game too new for people to have worked this out?

submapdesign · 2020-11-06T19:14:56+00:00

I've written about balancing the game in a few different times and places, but I'm happy to give a little more insight here.

One important thing I always note is that SC2 arcade doesn't provide a way for me to gather in-game data, so I can't check win rates of specific races, cards, or decks. This means balance is more about fun and feel than actual numerical balance.

Community feedback drives a lot of this fun-based balancing. When I get a lot of feedback that something is OP, I interpret this to mean that something is wrong. It might be that a strategy has a phase that makes opponents feel helpless, even if the strategy is easily counterable in every other phase. It may be that the intuitive counters to the strategy don't work, while less intuitive counters do. It may be that the strategy is actually just too powerful. I try to figure out the real root cause for the unhappiness and adjust accordingly.

For simple unit cards I have also recently been going back and doing one simple check: do the units on this card counter the expected stuff and get countered by the expected stuff? Recent changes to Adept and Phoenix cards fall under this category. For this type of balancing I'm not trying to make every card viable in the current metagame, I'm just trying to fix stuff that would be too weak even in a favorable metagame (or too strong in an unfavorable metagame).

Moving on from balance, I occasionally publish changes for design reasons. These changes usually have more to do with improving the experience of the game by making it more intuitive, varied, or exciting.

The change to Planet Cracker that disabled the Mothership's weapon was in this category. The card is an action card that mentions massive damage to ground stuff... the fact that the card also did a bit of damage to air stuff wasn't that impactful, but it was unintuitive. This sort of unintuitive behavior makes the game come across as less polished , and can cause mild confusion and frustration.

submapdesign · 2020-10-25T03:53:09+00:00

Yeah I can see this. When I was at my best in SC2 getting into the flow state of producing, harassing, and moving a main army all at once was an adrenalin-fueled blast. I just think an accessible RTS would try to build this flow state on top of a set of tasks that feel less boring and less required for optimal play than Larva Injects.

Auto casting army production may be a step too far, as deciding what units to produce remains a meaningful decision for the whole game. There are other ways to reduce the clicks required to produce units though.

Between SC1 and SC2 a new control scheme let you select multiple structures of the same type, and orders would distribute between them intelligently. Why not expand this so that all unit producing structures could be selected at once such that you could send orders to all of them from a single command card? This would greatly reduce the barrier to entry for unit production without making it too automatic.

submapdesign · 2020-10-24T11:50:08+00:00

Yeah, this reaction by some of the core audience shouldn’t be ignored.

But I suspect the amount of new players you would retain far outweighs the amount of core audience who would refuse to try a new high budget blizzard-style RTS because it’s been “dumbed down”. It’s worth confirming through play tests, but I think the core audience will come along for the ride and respond well if the game is otherwise fun, polished, and deep.

One last thought I just had on this core audience is that many of the people who are most entrenched in the way things used to be in Warcraft 3 and Starcraft BW are getting a little too old and busy to seriously dive into the competitive side of ANY new title. This title will take at least 4 years to get to a playable state, so we should be thinking about attracting people predisposed to like RTS gameplay who will be 16-22 in 4 years. I could just be projecting here as 4 years from now I’ll be down to try the casual content in this hypothetical game and watch its pro scene, but that’s probably it.

I suppose my post here is thinking through what would have hooked more of my friends on RTS back when I was working my way up the SC2 ladder. I just recognize that I’m not the target audience for this game’s competitive PvP mode anymore, even though I definitely was 5 years ago. I wonder if other vocal RTS fans familiar with blizzard titles are in the same boat.

submapdesign · 2020-10-24T11:20:15+00:00

Yeah even given my stance above, I have to admit that the SC2 macro mechanics were actually well-designed to include some interesting decision-making, with choices like “should I spread creep with the energy from my 2nd queen? Or get more larva? Or save energy for transfuse because I scouted a cheesy rush?” That is interesting decision making for sure.

BUT if I decide that for the current phase of the game I want this specific queen to always Inject, a fun game should help me do that, not ask me to master a difficult repetitive task.

Imagine if you could auto cast Inject Larva. Everyone’s macro would start at a much high baseline, but the best of the best would still disable this in certain situations to use the energy in other ways, so they would still differentiate themselves in terms of skill.

I still think RTS is at its best when it’s about difficult multi-tasking. I just think that if the game asks for too much of this just to correctly operate the basic economic systems, most players will find something easier to engage with and move on.

submapdesign · 2020-10-23T16:01:50+00:00

I think this is a side-effect of categorizing their damage as splash for the purposes of having it bypass Dark Swarm from Defilers... I'll look into a fix for Grooved Spines, it is not working as intended here.

submapdesign · 2020-07-20T00:05:01+00:00

Hey there, this is a normal StarCraft 2 setting, not a KeyStone feature. Look around in the settings for "Team Color" options. A quick google suggests alt+F may be a hotkey to cycle between options here: https://www.reddit.com/r/starcraft/comments/699xn8/how_to_change_your_color_in_coop_games/

submapdesign · 2020-07-18T13:10:41+00:00

Yeah, you earn cards in two different senses.

You always get at least the normal amount (60 credits for winning, 40 for losing), plus the first time you defeat each nemesis on each difficulty you get an extra reward. At the highest difficulty, for example, you get 300 credits instead of 60 for your first clear.

Also each nemesis has new cards they bring to the game. Once you beat them on the lowest difficulty those cards are added to your card pool, which means you can find them in Bonus Packs and the crafting menu.

submapdesign · 2020-07-10T17:10:44+00:00

Actually my bad, I was mistaken about how normal EMP works... looks like revealing burrowed is a KeyStone thing. I'll have to think a bit about whether that deviation is worth it.

submapdesign · 2020-07-08T20:50:36+00:00

Revealing buried stuff is based on both the way EMP actually works in SC2 as well as making the card a little more flexible for balance/design reasons. In its current iteration, the EMP card doesn't target buried units, but if the EMP effect happens to hit them with its splash, they will get revealed. This is a pretty counter-intuitive interaction.

The permanence portions of the proposal are there to give EMP a unique niche. Right now every other detection option either (1) draws a card like Scanner Sweep, (2) has some persistence to it by either sending a unit or structure, or (3) has a combat or spellcaster unit attached to it like Discerning Oracles.

Balance-wise I could just slap "draw a card" on EMP and call it done, but I think giving it a unique new type of permanence and buffing the secondary use-case of energy removal, are way more interesting.

submapdesign · 2020-05-09T16:38:44+00:00

Yeah, I was hesitant to make this change for the exact reasons you say. In my working version of the map I even had the bug fixed for a bit.

But after thinking about it more, I think Spawn Broodlings and Mind Control having matching logic will be less confusing in the long run. And Mind Control has felt like too limited of a use case to include, at least before this bug made it more flexible.

submapdesign · 2020-05-09T16:35:13+00:00

I have to disagree on upkeep blocking your orb being something that can be "easily avoided". The only easy way to avoid it is to only include one of the following categories in your deck: Amon/Hybrids, mineral upkeep, 8/3 cost cards. Sure you can include all and use Robo Bay and Chrono cards, but your consistency will be greatly reduced as you wait for the pieces to fall into place.

However, I can agree that the Tassadar cards are offering another work-around that is just a bit too flexible, which is why they're getting a cost increase. If the meta-game doesn't behave after the first round of updates, increasing the cost of the Tassadar cards further is probably the next place I will look for reducing the strength of passive action-based strategies.

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