You can look that the other way: only very skilled players (top diamond and above) can split-marine making a reasonable trade against banelings. Over a 90% of the player base aren't skilled enough to perform a good marine splitting and have no time or speed to develop that skill. That means Blizzard sets aside a 9X% of the Terran players of a quite necessary skill to win in the TvZ matchup. Maybe it's much more reasonable to balance the game for the 9X% of the player base.
Sorry but no, no serious gamemaker should ever choose to balance a game around anything but the highest level of play. If it turns out that that's still reasonably balanced for the lower levels, that's fine, but there should never be compromised on keeping the top end of the game competitive. Balancing for casual play is ridiculous, because casual players are not going to care about the balance.
Why do you asume than the very most of the players means casual players. There are a lot of usual and competitive players in the medium tier, far more than in the top tier. And a top player has much more skill to overcome an unbalance than a regular player, that's why Terran pros aren't afraid of a baneling bust. Ridículous is consider only top players worried about balance.
I dunno, fundamentally I agree, balance impacts everyone, and they are all paying customers who matter to your business' bottom line. But then, if it's balanced at the top and not at the bottom isn't that a problem where the players in the bulk of the pack are misapplying the tools they are provided? It kinda feels like asking Adobe to make the free lasso tool do straighter lines because it's not working for you instead of learning to use the polygonal lasso.
Kinda thinking "weakest" is more just... fewer possible effective lists. Any faction can make 1-2 good lists for most missions. Some are just less flexible and more limited in their options.
Incorrect. No Casual gamer sticks to a game where they have an inherent disadvantage compared to another... They get tired of losing all the time and give up on the game as their time is better spent playing something else.
@Spleen hit my point really well -- the game should be balanced around data from the highest level games, because for the bulk of mid-level and lower level games, the games won't be won or lost because of balance issues. And as for @paraelix's point, I would point out that there are plenty of casual players of LoL, Dota 2 and the huge majority of fighting games, but again, those are completely balanced around pro level play (especially Dota.) If something feels broken in a mid level game but not at the highest level, the answer is going to be "learn higher level tactics to deal with it," which is perfectly reasonable.
Except that your exact words were "casual players are not going to care about the balance." - which is incorrect.
Okay, I'll revise it to "Casual players are not going to be impacted by balance because in most cases the balance problem can be solved by better play, and the balance changes would have a negative impact on the highest level of play." It's impossible to make a game as complicated as Infinity balanced at every single level. Casual players are just going to be impacted much less by meta play and balance changes in general, since they're not going to be in a position where a 1-2 point cost change is going to effect them as much, for example. Should CB remove or equalize AVA for TR bots because they are too strong in low level games? No, pretty much anyone would balk at that. I would just additionally balk at any other change based on the reasoning that something is too strong in low or mid level games.
Yeah, the Yuandun lists were definitely interesting. Shame about the fluff, but that's a different discussion. I'd be game for a book full of CBLs like that. You know, this probably is the best definition of 'weakest' in Infinity: "can only make 1-2 good lists for most missions" I know Imperial SS was like that in N2 for the Paradiso missions, there was a single build possible. Made them very predictable and easily countered.
And an ITS tournament "mode" like SoF or LI that required the use of the pre-gen CBLs. That would be a cool tourney to attend.
That would be fine if there wasn't skill ceiling, and everyone would be able to learn to perfectly use all the tools. That's not the case, mostly because of excesive and redundant complexity of Infinity (other point that should be adressed). Otherwise what happens is exactly what happens with sc2: game generates a lot of frustration and the acceptance level is very low, a lot of players drop the game when they realize they can't deal with their enemies in fair terms, and the skill required to do that looks above their ceiling or requires a time they can't invest. In the case of sc2 it has two serious advantages over Infinity: 1 - It's an online game, so an small player base is a minor issue as you will always find people to play against, even if you haven't friends which play the game. If you have a local game and you have only a few players, every player you lose because of the game complexity or unbalance is a drama for that local community. 2 - There is an actual sc2 progaming scene, which has its own audience and also can atract people into the game. There aren't Infinity retransmissions, so there isn't any advantage of having the game perfectly balanced for the few top players because only them will feel it. Also, because of the lack of retransmissions, the chances to learn how top players deal with big problems is close to zero for the most of the community. As game shouldn't be balanced for the 30% lowest and most casual player, it shouldn't either be balanced for the 4-5% top players. You can't think a faction is well balanced only because somebody place second in a Interplanetario, against any other proof and opinion.
I'd like to also put forward that it's almost impossible to consider current faction 'pecking order' without unintentionally considering their performance history. Especially as the changing nature of ITS meaning that factions who found it easy to be top-dog last year might struggle this year. As an example, Morats are looking to be quite strong this season due to the TAG and MI buffs, but traditionally have been seen as a 'weak' ITS faction due to lacking in aspects that ITS encouranged (e.g. cheap camo specialists) where they couldn't compete with factions that had said aspects in spades. That's not to say they couldn't do well, just they were 'fighting uphill'.
There's also the slowness because of the very high buy-in on changing factions. Not everyone is ready to proxy, meaning you're stuck with a faction you buy into so if a faction is stronger you won't see the most competitive players migrate very quickly the way you would in a computer game or a board game where all factions are available.
I'm not sure I agree there, the most competitive Infinity players tend to run multiple factions anyway, and if you look at 40k (with it's... substantially higher buy-in per-faction) it's normal for players to swap factions when a new codex is found to be more powerful.
Yes, but most people won't be able to jump between 10+ factions and play a significant number of games with each to test the water within a month of time. Even the game's format makes faction dominance slow and less apparent since it also takes quite a few games to actually judge what this is.
My point you quoted was referring to mid-level games, where no one is playing near the skill ceiling. Hell, I would say that due to the style of game Infinity is that probably no one is playing at the skill ceiling. Look at SC1 though -- that's about as perfect as I've ever seen balance get in a 1v1 game. And it was balanced around the highest level of play. Just because a new player can't deal with Protoss doesn't make Protoss OP, nor does it mean they deserve a nerf. If Protoss is underperforming at the highest level, but overperforming at low levels, which one do you balance around? (Clearly the answer is around the highest level, because that's the place where skill level is going to have a lower impact.) As for your second point, I'm arguing the opposite, as I have before. Just because MO won Interplanetario last year didn't make it good. That's where my argument about player count and community size came from -- if a bottom tier army (let's face it, MO is not in a good place right now) can win the "world competition", there's clearly a huge gap in skill level even at that tournament.
