Competitive Play

Lol you have never played starcraft 2 and your analogy is horrendously wrong. You rarely "click" anyways.

Large competitive focused communities are terrible. DOTA/LOL have their obscene take on balance discussions and public teamplay, Starcraft 2 has its hordes of gold league balance experts and bming upper echelons and COD is well COD. Competitive play isn't bad in and of itself but a game designed around it from the outset will just alienate people. DOW 2 and to an extent COH are examples of non competitive focused games with competitive play. The games can be enjoyed by both types of players without ever falling into the no-fun trap for non competitive players. I play to win and play competitively in any RTS I play but I hate a game whose only aspect is that you must PLAY TO WIN, +100 rank points, NOOB!, YOU'VE BEEN PROMOTED TO ALPHA OMEGA ZULU CARBON LEAGUE! , OPPONENT DOMINATED , U NOOB! , NEW SEASON STARTING , BALANCE NOTES OUT TREES ARE OP , NOOB etc etc etc.

This is what games of PA will look like btw.



It's not spectator friendly in the slightest and the games could last up to 1-5 hours if my supcom ranked games are any indication. That's a far cry from the bite-size chunks of starcraft 2 especially cheese focused games.

Alright starclick is a strawman. It's more starRedundantMechanicsDesignedToMakeTheGameHarderThanItNeedsToBeToCreateAnArtificalSkillGapBasedOnAPM-4SDZZZ4SDRRR5QVclick6QVclick .....

Competitive can do a lot for keeping people drawn to a game, but it also creates a very closed club in most circumstances. And if MNC/SMNC are anything to go by, UBER seem to be good at drawing in players who get put off by the slightest insult.
Competitive players on the most part too are just generally assholes. PA is a game very much revolving around being cool and fun; still being a well balanced and next-gen RTS while doing so, mind, but the design goal is clearly "make everything huge and explosions and Michael Bay". Competitive players like to play on one map and have the same small set of variables to get the most "skill" shown

Dude you click a lot in that game, you hot key spam a lot, you micro/macro a lot. Unless you were just playing a zerg macro game I can't see why youd say that XD I played Protoss in Diamond 1v1 and all I can say is all I ever did was click this way and that XD

Obviously I'm no Pro, but my understanding was that Starcraft does require High APM simply due to it's design, having to build each unit with a button click, having to 'stutter-step' ect ect. SupCom on the otherhand had a very powerful UI with things like repeat build, Factory Assisting and a much more powerful Queue System along with units lacking in 'Special Abilities' that required player input beyond attacking.

Not that you can't spam click needlessly in SupCom to raise your APM but that's besides the point.

Mike

Well, IMHO any sufficiently balanced game ends up being APM intensive.
I bet that if TA had spawn a truly competition-intensive community, with measures of APM, top players would have consistently higher APM than the others.

If the game is balanced you can't just spam one unit:
You have to optimize macro (economy and production), scout AND manage your armies at the same time. A player that has double APM simply can manage twice the amount of production, scouting and armies.

In PA, you get no help for micro-management: it's actually as tedious as it gets, since you need to zoom in, zoom out to move from one scene to another. Scouting is also hard since you need to follow your scouts, since you have no mini-map.

On the other hand, in PA as in TA, macro is very easy: you can program your factories in advance and relax a little to concentrate on base expansion, which can mostly be programmed, too.

If your timing is right, there's really no difficulty in macroing in TA/PA. (in SupCom it was made harder by the necessary building upgrades and base adjacency bonuses)

So I think that competitive play will be APM intensive, as the difference will be between players able to out-micro other players at equivalent macro level.

1a) I think the chrono cam will make any able to transform a game into an action packed movie, with flashbacks and parallel commentaries on the different battle fronts.
1b) is very important. 1h+ games won't be able to generate the same interest as the 8 to 40 minutes games in Starcraft 1 & 2. I hope PA will not be too slow paced. I think not, because being macro based, with an exponential rate of economy growth, war should grow fast and end violently.
2) KickStarter did and future PR will ensure PA has a vibrant community
3) Isn't that contradictory ? if the learning curve steepens then there is a skill ceiling when it's just too steep to climb, no ?
Usually though learning curves are the other way around: the better you get, the easier it is to get better, until you reach "pro level", where the time you have to invest into the game gets very high to get any better.
4) of course, that's mandatory.

I would also add some personal preferences:
5) I wouldn't like the meta-game to be solely for clans. Solo players should be able to have some fun and climb up the ladder.
6) The game should not be aimed at competitive play only. Starcraft 2 does this in an ok manner with custom games and non-ladder games, but it has still a little bit too much emphasis on ladder game. I don't know how to solve this though.

I'd agree on the fact that PA is not spectator friendly to watch. The gameplay is reasonably slow compared to micro focussed RTS games. So that becomes a bit of an issue when you try to cast it live.

A possible slightly inferior alternative is to record the replay of a game, and use the chronocam feature to perform casting and analysis after the match has finished. It just takes a bit of reviewing as the caster has to make notes at which times certain events happen and what to explain at those times. The advantage of this is that since you don't have to improvise, you can work out the analysis much better.

I wonder if it's pleasant to watch the game if it was fastforwarded to 2 or 3x the normal speed. Though it's an ideal solution if you're trying to fit in all the gameplay in a smaller timeframe. Of course if you're really good at the game, you could always play it at 2x the speed if the game and server hardware allows for this.

Unfortunately speeding up the gameplay for competitive matches, might make it hard for new players to enter the competitive community. In Starcraft Day9 is one of the casters that analyses replays after the game is already done, a similar format could be used in PA.

Having a slump early in the learning curve deters new players. Making it easier to get better as you get better eventually leads to a stratified community with a glut of experienced players and a bunch of new players who can't even learn from games as they don't have the experience and skill required to comprehend what just happened. They hit a brick wall and give up where as the first generation of players who were all new at launch learned together. This is very evident in DOW 2 where the skill curve is a vertical line for new players.

Ideally the skill curve keeps steepening but never quite reaches infinity leaving room for improvement at the top level.The best type of learning curve is where time is directly proportional to amount learned until the pro-level.

The aerial "game" in BF3 and Planetside 2 is noob unfriendly as per your example.

Noobs flying aircraft in both games don't have enough "points" to equip their aircraft with flares. As a result, they get blown out of the skies by pro pilots who have lock on missiles.

The end result is noobs usually stop flying aircraft in disgust.

not only do I want a ladder, but I want a 2 v 2 ladder a 3 v 3 ladder a 4 v 4 ladder a 8 v 8 ladder a 2 v 2 v 2 v 2 v 2 v 2 v 2 ladder, ect ...

I don't care how you calculate it, make it happen!

@ ghostflux : dude you have HOTS, if you're still not happy go ask blizzard for SC3, you're in the wrong forum, dude. And you wasted your money on this game.

weird i have very low APM while choosing my start spot. : ( I think this means I'm in the noob category

I'm a low level player with low APM. That doesn't mean I can't recognize the difference between a click spammer and relevant APM.

Don't be a troll, i'm not saying only APM matters:

You can't be a good individual sport player without tactics, technical skills and physical skills.

There's no difference in e-sport. The physical part involves APM, reflexes and resistance to stress.

My bet is that the pro-scene if any in PA will be made of people with consistently better tactics, innovative builds and higher APM in the heat of battle.

Pro-matches of starcraft, supcom and XTA(ta spring) are a demonstration of that.

There's a fan made ladder at the moment in the backers forums but you have to play by gentlemens rules. So Mex on metal spots only no stacking etc. It's fun

Chess is watched when high level players play against each other and they can last a while. I don't think it will be very boring if it is intelligently interesting and you can learn and be surprised by what other people are able to pull off.

Simply knowing games and gamers in general, whether Uber does anything or not PA will be a competition sport. It could be a forum thing, or an ingame ranked thing, or MLG for all I know. But as long as there are powerful players out there, they will want to see who is the best. Even if it doesn't, for instance, make it to MLG, people will watch finals and things on youtube or twich.

The point is, PA is a game, and games usually have winners. And someone's got to be the best, and if I get good I'm sure as hell not going to pass up a chance to pit my skills against others. Doesn't matter if it's a spectator-friendly game or a 10-hour stalemate. There will be competitive PA in the future, and that's that.

A very wise galactic cow right there.

I fully agree with it.

Wise cow indeed but we do have in the backers forum a gentlemen's ladder so you can join it.....

Competitive play is fine but I hope it doesn't have the frantic pace that StarCraft has and focuses more on the long pitched battles that characterised TA.

I'd rather this than short quick battles that are over in less than 3 seconds.

Many people actually think that will be the problem with competitive play and casting and e-sports in general.
I think nobody made it happen yet so thats why it doesn't exist.