The Best of (Bad) Intentions; Thoughts on what’s Really Ruining E-sports

“Imagine how much better they could be though,” said my friend, sounding a little disappointed. I looked over at her, a bit puzzled over what she meant.

“Nick and Dan are my favourites by far. I mean, as duos go… maybe if we’re discussing individuals, then,” I said, but my friend interrupted me.

“No no, I agree, they are clearly right up there compared to other E-sports commentators. But imagine how much better they could be if they received some proper training. Like, from someone who usually commentates normal sports like football or something, you know?”

I had to concede the point. Subject matter aside – it didn’t really matter which “normal” sport you compared with – even second-tier sports casters and commentators were simply better in every way than even their best E-sports counterparts. I mean, here we were watching the GSL Starcraft 2 finals, arguably the event that most merited high production values and professionalism in all of pro gaming. And, personal preference aside, I think anyone would struggle to find more professional, experienced hosts than Nick “Tasteless” Plott and Dan “Artosis” Stemkoski within the western Starcraft 2 community. But if we’d have cycled between the GSL broadcast we were currently watching and even the most mundane broadcast of athletics, we would have had a really hard time making a case for the Starcraft broadcast being better in any way, biased as we were. Indeed, we’d probably have a much easier time making that same case for the Korean-speaking trio commentating the same game just a stone’s throw away from Nick and Dan.This exchange between my friend and I has stuck with me for the 7-ish months that have passed since it happened. The reason it stuck is because there’s an extremely uncomfortable question following in the wake of the original discussion. That question is “why”.The struggle to answer this question has permanently recalibrated my mental radar to react to the many instances of amateurishness found in E-sports – especially when the offenders are high-profile individuals or organisations, or when there is, explicitly or implicitly, a lot of money involved. Below is a list of examples of various expressions of suckiness in the Starcraft 2 scene that I’ve picked up on over the past year or so. Later, I’ll propose some potential solutions off the top of my head, and finally I’ll elaborate on why I think that none of these solutions have been pursued at the time I’m writing this. But first things first; let’s start by looking at some wildly different examples of tendencies and events that have no place in professional sports.

Recrafting Stars

Just a quick post here to let people know what I’ve been up to these last few days. Basically, I’ve entertained myself by rebalancing (quite naïvely I think) Starcraft 2. The fruit of this labour can be found on the EU server. It’s called “Xel’Naga Caverns – Odious Repeater Rebalance_V2″. Just searching for “Odious” should bring it up for you if you’re on EU.

The parameters have been changed to hopefully balance things out a bit in the game. My method of choice was very dynamics-driven; I was looking at how people were playing the game (mostly pros, I’ll admit), and listening to people’s complaints about balance (mostly pros, yet again), and responded accordingly. I’d like to think that the changes I’ve made are quite conservative, but I’ve been in this game long enough to know that, well, stuff happens. Anyway, let me know if you find any problems with the map. General comments also welcome. Change log follows below:

Terran:
* Neosteel Frame cost at Engineering Bay lowered to 50/50. The reasoning here is that bunkers are at their most crucial in the early game when the player doesn’t have a lot of units, at which point a cost of 100/100 is potentially quite crippling to the player’s economy.
* Factory requirement for Nitro Packs removed. However, research time increased to 140 seconds. The original slowing of the Reaper was a double-nerf; first the creation of Barracks required a Supply Depot to be built, and then the requirement of having a Factory was added on top, which effectively added a tax of 150 minerals and 100 gas to players favouring Reapers in the early game. Just slowing down the research speed should be sufficient for most players who scout properly to be able to see mass Reapers incoming, and respond appropriately.

Zerg:
* Default speed of Overlords increased, bonus speed of Pneumatized Carapace decreased by a corresponding amount. This should give Zerg players more of a fighting chance to scout walled-off Terran and Protoss opponents in the early game. The speed is set to be the same as the speed of flying Terran buildings; there was no reason for Terran players to have such an advantage over Zerg players as they can already scan anywhere on the map using Orbital Commands.
* Fungal Growth base damage decreased slightly, bonus damage versus armored increased by a corresponding amount. This change was made to make going Bio against a Zerg opponent slightly more of an option for Terrans. Fungal growth was doing so much damage so quickly that Medivacs couldn’t hope to outheal the damage even in large numbers.
* Hydralisk cost changed to 125/25. Hydralisks were very heavy on gas and only incidentally useful in most matchups. This fix should hopefully increase the popularity of Hydralisks as Zerg players should feel less backed into a corner by throwing down a Hydralisk Den and building a few Hydras.
* Ultralisk attack range has been increased slightly. This is to make the Ultralisk/Zergling combination more useful. More Zerglings can now squeeze in between Ultralisks and their targets, making the surround easier to achieve.

Protoss:
* Carrier cost changed to 400/200. This change was made to make Carriers a better mineral dump for Protoss players and hopefully make them less cost-prohibitive to use in general.

* Observer and Warp Prism speed upgrades changed to 50/50, down from 100/100. This should make it easier for a Protoss player to retain map awareness, and also gives them more opportunities to harass and employ “speciol tektiks”.

Letter to an Aspiring Game Designer – Chapter 1

Note: This is the first draft of the first chapter of a book I am working on. I’m publishing here in its raw, unedited form (sadly, with no pretty pictures either), to hear what people think about the format of the book.

Privileged Information and You

I’m pretty sure that most people who remember the original unveiling of the PlayStation 3 do so for the comedy value of the Sony presentation that featured it. Memes such as “599 US dollars”, Warhawk’s motion controls and the Giant Enemy Crab are the staple jokes of nerds everywhere, the kind you can even break out among non-gamers and sometimes get a chuckle in return. My own strongest memory of the PS3′s early days, however, is that of the long since abandoned idea of having not one, but two HDMI outputs on the console. The reason that this has stuck with me wasn’t so much Sony’s stated ambitions (multi-display single-local-player/online experiences), but rather that I saw the opportunity to finally bridge the gap between networked play and single-console multiplayer. See, playing together with other people on the same console has its own charm that networked experiences don’t quite offer (though LAN’s do get closer to the same experience than playing over the internet does). Meanwhile, split-screen sucks pretty hard even on big displays, and there’s also the problem of not being able to hide your hand from your opponent, as it were. Playing something ultra-twitchy like Street Fighter works really well with a shared screen, whereas a game much more reliant on positioning or subterfuge is almost always a crappy experience when your opponent can see what you’re doing.

The Social Side of Fear

I’ve always loved horror games. Since I was little, playing Alone in the Dark on my older brother’s PC (with its pathetic little old-school speaker that went *beep* whenever the game was trying to scare you), I’ve always found the concept of exploring dangerous, dark environments appealing. I think this has gone beyond subject matter for me; it’s not so much that there’s zombies or ghosts or monsters or that the action takes place in haunted mansions, it’s more about what all those things combined with the mechanics of a good horror game convey. And that is a feeling of disproportionate excitement and fear of failure. I say disproportionate because horror games aren’t necessarily more difficult than other games. Indeed, many games in other genres try to get players excited and fearful by overly increasing the level of difficulty and being unfair, but this usually just results in frustration. Horror games – the good ones – are often quite easy so long as one is meticulous and cautious going through them. But you’ll rarely hear anyone say that Resident Evil or Silent Hill were easy games. This is because of the psychological pressure that those games apply to the player. The difficulty in playing them, in beating them, ends up going beyond the mechanics of actually progressing through the game. This is not unlike Japanese RPGs, where final boss fights aren’t normally very difficult – they’re just long and gruelling so it feels like you’re accomplishing something. There is a sort of meta-game that happens in players’ minds, making players’ experience go beyond the actual events in the game. Everyone who’s played a good horror game knows what I’m talking about. There is nothing in the game mechanics that makes you pause and catch your breath before opening the door to the next unexplored room. Yet you wait. And wait.

Travelling Without Moving

It seems like certain people are repeatedly blessed and cursed in various different ways. Some have the luxury of being born into money and social status, never wanting for anything but always having to question the motives of less fortunate people wanting to befriend them. Some never seem able to find anyone to marry, but have no trouble finding partners for casual relationships. For whatever reason, it seems like my curse is that of choice. Now, let’s get out of the way that I know that this is just a pattern that my mind is seeing. The problem is no doubt that I make such a big deal of the choices that are presented to me. But knowing this doesn’t empower me to make my brain work any differently; I am still burdened by every significant, or even seemingly significant, choice I have to make.

As people have often told me, the problems and choices that I usually struggle with are luxury ones more than half the time. The choice I had to make today was one of those, and it wasn’t the first time this very dilemma was presented to me. What made this situation so much heavier, however, was that though the choice in itself was pretty simple (do I want to work for company X or company Y), there was a bit of a meta quality to it. Beyond the decision of who I wanted to lift a paycheck from, there was what I perceived as a decision on which long-term path I wanted to start walking down.

Put your Mouth where your Money Is

As the year is coming to a close, the big-name games for this season are starting to pile up at retailers everywhere. Nowadays, games aren’t considered “new” for very long. They are generally marked down within the first few months of their lives, and as the holiday shopping season approaches shelf space is at a even more of a premium than otherwise. So I felt rather good about being able to walk into my local store and pick up two games for what would have been the price of one just two weeks earlier. Saving money is always a good idea in my book, but that’s not really why I’d held off on my purchase of these two titles. The reason was that I was pretty unsure about the quality of both of them. The games in question were Castlevania: Lords of Shadow and Enslaved: Odyssey to the West and if you’d buy either of them on impulse you really have too much money to burn. Or know little about games.

The Two-Month War – A Cautionary Tale

Heeeeeeey ladies and gentlemen and welcome to another Odious Repeater Blog Post. This one takes place a good while too late after my previous one, for which I want to sincerely apologize to both my subscribers.

Those who have braved my walls of text in the past might recall that my last post was a bit of a rant about what I considered to be the pretty shoddy storytelling in Starcraft II. Well, pretty much immediately after finishing that post, I decided to start giving the multiplayer a go. And only now at this very moment, when none of my usual playing buddies are online, do I feel like I wouldn’t rather be playing the game than writing a blog post.

Yes, that’s how addicted I’ve become. And the worst part of it is that I didn’t even see it coming. Which I have since come to believe was Blizzards plan all along.

See, everything in Starcraft 2 could be said to be geared towards getting players online, and ideally on the ladder. The main campaign of the game is far removed from the dynamics of playing with and/or against other human opponents, but it does a pretty good job of teaching the basic mechanics and some basic applications. Almost every mission revolves around a key mechanic, now that I think about it, and though some of the units don’t make the transition from single to multiplayer, there’s still lessons to learn from the missions in which they feature.

And then there’s the fact that the campaign ends on a cliffhanger, and the two sequels are already announced. So even if a player, for reasons that defy understanding, can’t wait for the next piece of C-movie narrative featuring the stereotypes that inhabit the Koprulu sector, they’ll have to do something else until the next episode shows up. They could play a different game. They could play the campaign again, on a higher level of difficulty (which raises ones level of skill further, making the jump to multiplayer that much easier) or they could play one of the other single player game modes, if unwilling to try multiplayer just yet.

Enter the Challenges, all of them carefully – elegantly – designed to teach players to step out of their comfort zone, interacting with the game in ways that apply much more to multiplayer scenarios than the single player campaign. And so, the threshold to playing against real people is lowered further still.

And then there’s the achievements. Now, I don’t care about achievements in games. The people who generally go for them do so for reasons that are completely opaque to me. Or rather, I think I know why, and it makes me like those people less, so I choose to pretend to not “get it”. But as a tool to get people to explore the game’s many modes, they are ridiculously effective.

My path to the current level of multiplayer and addiction that I suffer from was a bit erratic. I actually played a lot of multiplayer matches, even ranked ones, before seriously delving into the challenges. But that’s pretty easy to explain; I was only winning incidentally, and had serious holes in my basic understanding of the game mechanics. I had to come to realize this, and to understand that playing the challenges was the easiest way to improve in these key areas, before I had any incentive to try to achieve a Gold level in all the challenges, and so get my shit together a bit more. And once this had been done, I found myself winning more often. Which made me more prone to play the game online.

Only looking back at this now do I understand how many feedback loops are in place. And then there’s the meta aspect; becoming interested in the multiplayer game leads to wanting to learn from other people. Which leads to YouTube. Which leads to HD Starcraft, Husky, Day9… fuck I love-hate Day9. He’s like a much whiter version of me. But I digress.

I guess that what I’ve come to realize that even though the narrative in Starcraft II left me unimpressed in spite of the increased production values, Blizzard has learned an insane amount about getting people to transition smoothly from being casual players to being at least amateur e-sportsmen/women. Do note that the actual game is still pretty heavy on the micro-management (aka “clicking”), indeed unnecessarily so, one would be hard-pressed to claim that it’s not a whole lot closer to “manageable” for most people. Indeed, if the macro play is handled well, and there’s a good unit composition in the player’s army, a simple “attack-move” with the whole army hotkeyed to “1″ will still rip most opponents of the same level to shreds.

Oh, and then there’s the league and ladder mechanics, which are absolutely ingenious; Battle.net is working overtime to make sure that all players win half of their games which, incidentally, is a great way to ensure players stay in that interval between “overstressed” and “bored” that manages to elude so many game devs.

So screw me. Screw my bullshit about the story in Starcraft II. I was wrong. There’s excellent storytelling in the game. It’s just not in the single player campaign’s narrative. Instead, it’s emergent, which after all is what makes games so very special. Also, everyone’s stories are unique (though pretty much everyone HAS been Void-Raped at least once), and thus that much more appealing. In order to find yours, you just have to hop online and play against other people. And Blizzard has made the transition smoother than ever. Perhaps even managing to convert people who wouldn’t otherwise play game, much as they have done and still do with WoW. We as an industry should take note of this, and steal as much as we can from them. I sure will. Because if I can reverse-engineer the formula to get people as addicted to one of my games as I find myself being to Starcraft II, I’ll be snorting cocaine off of hookers’ asses far more often than I do now.

Message me for my character code by the way. We’ll do some sparring on Metalopolis or some shit.

Anyway, this is OR, signing out.

Thoughts on Fallen Stars

They say a man never really knows himself until his freedom’s been taken away. - Starcraft II intro cinematic

I absolutely, positively loved Starcraft. To a large extent it was because of its story and aesthetics. The plot and characters in Starcraft and its expansion were spot-on, as were the graphics, unit vocalizations and sound. Everything was just right in this game. At least up until the end of the Broodwar campaign… I don’t know if any of you remember how it ended, but in case you don’t, here’s a recap (first and only spoiler alert goes out here): a certain character is exposed as having engineered Protoss-Zerg hybrids, and gives a speech on how he serves a higher power, succeeding in offering a cliffhanger and a jump-the-shark moment all in one. I didn’t know why, but even all those years ago this whole thing set off alarm bells in my head. Still, it wasn’t enough to not leave me wanting more, and feeling that Starcraft represented a milestone in game world design as well as writing for the medium.

Quick Rant on Those That Deserve to Die

I just emo-ragequit out of a game for the first time ages. I generally don’t do this. Normally when I quit out of a game before finishing it it’s out of boredom, if anything. If a game is hard, generally, I stay with it, and try to beat it through exploits if not by playing “fair”.

So which game is it that’s made me angry enough to actually turn it off? Blazblue.