Casual players like me

I disagree with the notion of "cheese" entirely. Obviously if a game is designed such that you can lose blind then it is a bad game, but using FA as an example all of the "cheap" tactics can be defeated with proper situational awareness.

Cheese seems to be mainly an excuse used by scrubs. If I lose I lose fair and square, getting angry doesn't help, looking at why you lost and stopping it happening again does.

I feel like bobucles is a troll

Not at all. He makes some very important points. One of the challenges faced by Uber's other game, SMNC, is that it's hard to keep the new players. They come to play and get stomped horribly by experienced players, and leave. As a result there are less new players in the low tier pool, compounding the problem. And to top it off, the high tier players start complaining about the lack of players and they start leaving, and hard times abound.

So if PA is to be a success beyond the TA/FA community, it will need to be enjoyable to the uninitiated. This means the game should be fun even when losing. And interestingly enough, if you're playing team games and losing, it's much more enjoyable, especially because you can rage about how terrible your team is. After all, LOL practically turned that into an art, and while it may not be the deepest moba, it certainly isn't a simple game.

Fortunately, PA seems to have a lot of areas covered. There's a lot of focus on making interesting teamgames (with control sharing even), large, multi-person games, and so forth. 1v1's aren't necessarily the only legit way to play anymore (like they are in SC2).

In theory you'd want that. In practice, many matchmaking systems still drop you in the average category and let you go down from there. That really needs to go. I think that PA will make the right move there, but it's important to keep in mind that it's not an automatic process.

Bobucles does indeed raise good points here. I don't always agree with him but he seems spot-on here. The game needs easier strategies, and preferably easier strategies that teach players proper gameplay so that they are easy to move out of.

I'd much rather see an easy strategy along the lines of "macro up and pump loads of this basic T1 unit to overrun the enemy" than something like "rush out this one unit with your starting resources, don't take any mexes, and quickly ambush the enemy commander".

So yeah; a slightly overpowered T1 unit with a potent but ever so slightly more complicated counter might be a great way to get new players invested while also teaching them core parts of the gameplay like managing an economy.

Zerg rush is a great example. Yes, it's "allowed", but it's entirely against the spirit of the game and done to force a victory NOW and there's no real room for a spectrum of options -- the rusher wins, or the rushee wins because the rusher heavily crippled his economy putting units out in 3 minutes. It's boring to play as, play against, and shouldn't exist.

Generic comment about how the pros defend against it, thus making it a valiud stratigy becuse if anything in the game can be done, it was intended and thus should be done and if people disagree they they are bad at the game.



Now, I feel we are having 2 discussions here, firstly is ways to improves tha games UI and teaching eliments to ensure players have the tools and knowlage at their disposal to improve their play style and also to promote a good supporting communit within the game.

The other half is people complaining about bad players and how they still suck.

I think it belongs in starcraft, with its focus on short intense game and a threat from the start. But I don't want to port it over to a slower and bigger game like PA.

But yeah, it's generally quite boring. Especially if the rusher loses but then refuses to just quit and has to drag a foregone conclusion out another 10 minutes. The problem with 'cheese' is that it means many different things to many people.

I'm hoping PA will have a minimum of 'all-in' strategies where one player decides right from the start that it's going to be a 5 minute game, but I do hope they allow for a lot of creativity with units and the terrain so that you can get that "this is so mean, but I'm going to do it anyway" feeling.

Well, i mean, it works in an indirect way to increase the demand on certain mechanics and reaction times, but the way it does that is by branching the game into a degenerate/quickly ending decision tree that sort of deflates the point of the game that just got played. That's the part I object to.

Don't worry, I agree.

I was just using the classic response to that argument that people always seem to throw.

What Bobucles says tho, is that new players should beat experienced players, i dont agree with that.(thats what i understood)
My Ideas about it:
1. Good matchmaking and a high playerbase should make the games quite fair.
2. With good game design, the players should at least not get crushed to hard to early.
3. If theese players only win with theese kind of "cheese" the game will get pretty boring.
4. having theese rush tactics could backfire, leading to every new player getting crushed in 5. mins what is even more frustrating than loosing a long battle

Pretty sure you're reading things that were never said. Did you watch the extra credits video that was posted on the topic by bobucles? It explains the concept quite well.

I can't comment on StarCraft because my extent of knowledge about it is that it has a crap UI and I gave up after ten minutes as a result.

However the closest thing in FA is probably the Seraphim bomber rush, where a good player can focus everything on getting out a bomber, and if his micro is good enough completely destroy the other player's starting BO.

This has been nerfed a bit because it was generally agreed to be too much of a win/lose mechanic, so I accept that there are cases where a certain tactic breaks the game.

However the danger is that rather than figure out how to defeat a tactic, a vocal subset of the players will complain that it is unfair to the point where it is nerfed unnecessarily and the game's depth suffers as a result. These are often the same sort of players who enforce arbitrary rules about which units you can and can't build, and whilst they might think it's more fun not to have to worry about air units or nukes (random examples), the better players know that by learning how to overcome those obstacles they will uncover a deeper enjoyment of the game that the scrub cannot even conceive of.

It works both ways too, top players often fail to anticipate noob moves simply because the tactic is so easy to counter that everyone stops using it, then as a result everyone stops anticipating and countering it. One particular game I played on FA had a high-ranking player complaining about cheap noob tactics after his exposed ACU got TMLd. Cheap noob error on his part as far as I'm concerned.

I thing I don't get is the whole aggravation against 'scrubs'.

If they are being counters by a strategy that they cannot defend against, then help them to over come it, don't just call them names and tell them they are bad at the game because that won't help them, and it wont help the community.

The worst part about playing on-line is stuck up elites who get frustrated at players who are not good at the game, and instead prefer to attribute players who are not as good as them with titles like 'scrubs'.

It really makes me hard to be sincere to your opinion with that kind of attitude, and it doesn't do the community any favours when players come to expect to be insulted by better players because they are better at the game.

No I didn't. New players should have ways to hurt experienced players, even if they lose in the long term. A player that ends up dealing ZERO damage isn't having any fun.

Players want ways to deal damage. The wreckage mechanic is the biggest deterrent here, making it very difficult to justify small attacks that only give money to the enemy. Several unit types will undoubtedly be needed to establish wreckage superiority, both for grabbing wreckage and by refusing to give wreckage to the enemy(probably by blowing up).

The video I'm referring to is this one, by the way:
http://www.penny-arcade.com/patv/episod ... -for-skill

This is something that peeves me and has for a while. This paragraph is a basic condensation of one of the major pillars of Sirlin's Playing to Win, and so I can address my core beef with that here:

Why is my fun worse than yours? Who the hell are you (no offense, i mean the general 'you') to tell me that i'm having less of a fun time by playing a 20 minute no rush land only game? Why is it bad to want frustrating mechanics and tactics removed? I can tell you right out that a seraphim bomber rush (as you described it) is frustrating and boring; I don't care that I can win by just scouting it and building X and Y. I care that my enemy has chosen a path which degenerates my choices into "do pre-fabbed set of steps and win or don't and lose". THAT is a true loss of depth, and I don't see how it's of any value whatsoever.

I won't bother with the usage of the word scrub, it does its own job very well as to how it makes you look if you seriously/repeatedly use it in a non-joking manner:

Regarding my use of the word scrub, I have avoided using it up until now because of the reasons rcix and igncom list above. I lazily didn't want to use four words where one would do, plus it seemed to flow better, hence my usage of it. I didn't intend it to come across so perjoratively, and hence I apologise and withdraw my use of it.

I don't have a problem with people wanting to play with restrictions, in fact in the early days of the PA forum one of the first threads I posted was asking for the ability to restrict units on a per unit basis (a feature in TA that was borked in SupCom).

What I do have an issue with is people who flat-out refuse to follow advice, complain that the game is broken, then in a worst-case scenario get a perfectly valid game element removed purely because they are lazy.

This. This is someone you call a scrub. People who simply aren't good at the game don't earn that title, you have to be bad at the game and blame everything except yourself for it. That's when you become a scrub and your opinion honestly should just stop mattering.

Making your own games with your own rules is great and all, but asking to have the global game changed because you're refusing to play it as is, that's bad behaviour.

What i've missed so far in this discussion is just being a nice person while crushing the other. :lol:

I mean, even if I loose I won't turn away from the game when talking about what could be improved in my strategy.

But if I start a online game and i'm being crushed while the opponent only say things like: you suck noob. Then it is unlikely that I will start another game right after or even try to play online ever again.

The big difference are the players themselves. One of the reasons I did not play Dota.
If the community is nice then people will try again and learn from their mistakes.

Thank you.

And I wholeheartedly agree with you on this.

I guess my main objection is that this:

is so easily treated as this:

At the end of a day, if a decision tree created by a common situation/mechanic is not as good as its alternatives (especially if its of a form listed in my quote), then it needs looking at. Just because it works doesn't mean it's good design.