posted 06-30-2002 12:13 AM            

First of all I'm assuming that the enemy is smart enough to want to get rid of my money early in the game, and as its early inthe game I'll only have a few critical buildings. Advantage 1: I know where he's comin for. Advantage 2: If I'm terran I can throw 30-40 marines at a problem and not give a sh*7. Advantage 3: Some buildings, such as armories and missle turrets, I can afford to lose one or two of.

What does this mean for me? Well lets say I'm terran and you're protoss. Terran defense chain up to detection is Command Center, Barracks, Armory and refinery > comsat. Protoss attack chain up to DT is Nexus, Gateway, Cybernetics, Refinery and Citadel, Archives. Ok so you have to build more, and get way more gas. True you can move around while you build and I can't, but you still do lose the money while you're building. However you can get it back, but then again I have less to build. (One day I should figure this out on paper) Anyway lets call this even.

posted 07-03-2002 08:23 AM               

quote:

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Umm...no. I can and will deny it.

Solution? Don't get hit by the first beam.

Think about it. In SF2 if you get hit with a deep jumping attack you can't avoid the followups...is that cheap? If you jump towards someone after they release a fireball you get a DP every time...is that cheap?

If you get hit with a Bison crossup in ST you just lost right there. Is that cheap?

Just don't put yourself in that situation. Easier said than done, I know. But AHVBx3 is easily avoidable - just avoid the first AHVB. It's not like it's unblockable. (Except a guard break, but that is a different issue)

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posted 07-03-2002 07:11 PM            

Ok, Granted DT's blades are powerful...they take off 30 I think. A turret is 200. So yes you can kill one easily with your 240 attack points to my 200 defense. However keep in mind 1 I have 6 of these things, plus the comsat. Marines do 8 damage per shot...I have 15..so thats 120...+ the firebats which do 16, * 4 = 64 on top of the 120...thats 184...plus the medics keepin my men healthy. Sounds a bit uneven, but then keep in mind you're the attacker...you only have the 240 you bought with you. and now you have to decide if you want to sick all of your men on a turret, or some on me and some on a turret, or all on me, while I stand next to a turret and gun you down, all the while making more men and getting closer to Science Vessel status. I mean:

posted 07-29-2002 07:42 AM            

sirlin claims that

quote:

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The first step in becoming a top player is the realization that playing to win means doing whatever most increases your chances of winning. The game knows no rules of “honor” or of “cheapness.” The game only knows winning and losing.

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and later on goes on to say that

quote:

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I’ve talked about how the expert player is not bound by rules of “honor” or “cheapness” and simply plays to maximize his chances of winning.

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in general, i seemed to be getting the sense that in short, "anything goes", when it comes down to the "expert gamer"---and yet, later on the article, sirlin claims that

quote:

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there is a limit. There is a point when the bug becomes too much. In tournaments, bugs that turn the game off, or freeze it indefinitely, or remove one of the characters from the playfield permanently are banned. Bugs so extreme that they stop gameplay are considered unfair even by non-scrubs.

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do these two points not seem incompatible? on one hand, you clearly suggest that the expert gamer will use whatever means necessary to win, but yet you argue later on that "oh yeah, by the way, there are some things you can't do because they are percieved to be "unfair"". by virtue of you own arguement, anyone who thinks of exploits/bugs as being unfair is just as "scrub" as someone who refuses to use cheap throws because they are refusing to do whatever it takes to win.

i am merely taking your first argument to its logical extreme, but i think it is entirely conceivable to have a game in which the winner is inevitably the one who can "remove one of the characters from the playfield permanently" before the other. and if you don't think thats fair, then i would simply refer you to the section of sirlin's article named "scrub".

please, no responses based on technical aspects of SF or any other game--i don't know what game actually has a bug like this, so it might as well be hypothetical. lets focus on the logic for a sec

posted 07-29-2002 11:28 AM               

1. you must be willing to use that technique to win

2. the game is probably 'broken' (i.e. not fun)

However, the burden of game balance should fall on the developer, not the player. Take for example rushing in RTS games or camping in FPS games. If a game is going to allow you do it, you have no right to complain. It may make the game less enjoyable, but that isn't really the point. Sportsmanship issues aside, you shouldn't complain unless you are willing to accept that the game allows for this. After all, you can't consider yourself an expert level player until you now how to deal with those sorts of tactics. It's acceptable to change the rules for everyone equally, but to do so on a personal level is just self-defeating.

- Alan

posted 07-29-2002 12:50 PM               

I was privileged during my senior year in college to have an extremely articulate yet talented gamer for a roommate, who played Starcraft and Magic: The Gathering almost continuously. Through listening to him (as a third criterion for a useful gamer is to be voluble as well ), I came to many of the same conclusions as you did.

A strategy is only "broken" when no one has yet figured out a way to counter it (for people who do not involve themselves in the gaming community, it is "cheap" when THEY have not yet figured out a way to counter it). Once there is a method to counter a strategy (or at least to make it less powerful), it is no longer considered "broken". Thus, if a strategy absolutely cannot be countered, it will always be "broken". A game itself is "broken" if any one strategy is "broken" permanently. Games that are broken aren't played very much at a competitive level.

However, there is a flip side to this. Games that have NO strategies that would be considered "broken" at first are ALSO not played very much at a competitive level. A simple game which has no depth to it, no strategies, is not considered viable for any sort of major tournament play. In many ways, this is because the entire metagame of tournament play (I use "metagame" in the Magic sense, that is, the game of what strategies to concentrate on (or in the M:TG arena, which cards and combos to use)) is specifically designed around finding these "broken" strategies and then discovering the counter to them.

In fact, it is much like Sirlin's "Yomi Layer 3" (which, in my opinion, is by far the best article on this site) in the metagame. Take the Zergling rush in Starcraft as an example. If you Zergling rush against an opponent who is not prepared for it, you will win. No question. However, if they are prepared for it, you will lose. Thus, when the Zergling rush first came out, it was used extensively, and many people who watched in despair as their probes or SCVs exploded one after another resorted to "CHEAP!!!".

But then, once the Zergling rush became widespread, people started building specifically to defeat it. And once the Zergling rush becomes less than 50% certain, it's more or less useless unless you like short games. So, after a while, people stopped playing the rush so much. Now, instead, they realized that people would be wasting energy on trying to build to stop a rush that wasn't coming, so they started building for tech, knowing that they would have an advantage over the person who was building to defend against the rush.

However, now we have many people building for tech and economy, thus leaving them wide open for the rush.

So, the rush was very powerful, but was counterable by strong defense. But this counter left you open to a third counter, which in TURN left you open to the rush. (Heh heh, I'm not good at Starcraft so please don't correct me on the particulars of it.) Classic Yomi level 3 action, only this time, the Yomi was decided before the game even started.

Thus, if a game is so shallow and boring that there really is a strategy that is completely uncounterable, a strategy so powerful that no one would even think of using anything else, it is not an interesting game, and certainly will not be played at any serious level. I would suggest that scrubs are not the people who refuse to use so-called "cheap" tactics, but in fact are the people who FAIL TO REALIZE that their "cheap" tactic has a counter. (Assuming that it has one, of course. ) For example, Richard Hatch's technique in Survivor had a very simple counter: get EVERYONE to vote against him. If he was so slimy and everyone didn't like him, why wasn't he caught against an alliance and voted off? But the scrubs weren't willing to do that, because they failed to realize that a tactic is only "cheap" so long as you fail to do anything about it.

The kickboxing example is not a good one. In real life, rules must be set around the game, because the game takes place in the larger context of a world where anything can happen, and moreover in the larger context of a world where people aren't going to get into a ring if they have an appreciable chance of dying in it. Thus, the "rule" that, for example, you're not allowed to bring a gun into the ring is not an external rule, it is essential to the particulars of the game. In Street Fighter 2, you cannot pull a gun out and shoot the other guy unless it is part of that character's milieu. In general, you are mistaking "rules made up by people" with what Sirlin is railing about. He is saying that every game takes place within a strictly defined set of rules, and that a "scrub" is a person who refuses to play under those sets of rules, feeling them to be unfair.

A more applicable point would be "house rules" in games like Monopoly and poker. If we say, for example in poker, that you may not bet more money than an opponent has, that's a house rule, and you're certainly perfectly welcome to use it... in your house. But calling such tactics "cheap" when you go to the World Series of Poker will certainly do nothing more than get you laughed out of the hall.

For a similar example: I live in a house with two roommates, and we have a pretty rowdy crowd of guys who come over a lot. Oftentimes we'll get out the Playstation 2 and play some Madden 2002 or Tony Hawk Pro Skater 3. When we play THPS 3, since it's a two-player game, the loser of a game hands his controller to the next person in line, a time-honoured tradition. However, when I'm playing, there is a special rule against me that says I can only have three rounds and then I have to give up the controller. This is because I am way better than everyone else, and indeed, it would NOT be fair for me to play using the same rules as everyone else, as I can beat them with my eyes closed (REALLY ). When I play against them, I don't do "excessive" manual combos or "cheap" 50-move, million-point combos, as that's boring for everyone else and hardly satisfying for me. But if I were to go to a THPS3 tournament or play online against people of my skill level, I certainly WOULD use those and any other tricks in my bag (and probably get wasted anyway).

This, by the way, highlights the reason some people have been saying "games should be fun" and some people have been saying "games don't have to be fun". When I go out to the park and play a game of touch football with my friends, or play a game of tennis, or any of this, I'm having fun. That's a GAME. However, when I turn on the TV and watch a group of burly men injure each others' knees (ahh Dave Barry, will you ever cease to have good metaphors for football?), or watch Serena Williams face down Venus across the court, I am watching people who, by and large, are NOT having fun. They are playing under the same rules I am (in the tennis example, at least), but they are playing to WIN, not playing to have fun. This is a SPORT, not a game, and it is in this sense that competitive computer gaming is a sport, not a game.

The difference between the two is that the "fun" you have while playing a game comes from PLAYING THE GAME. People often confuse the two. When I play Starcraft against a computer, I have fun purely from playing the game. When I play tennis against my friend from work, I have fun from playing the game and the athletic workout. When I play THPS3 against my friends who are not as good as me, I have fun from playing the game. The "fun" you have while playing a SPORT is from WINNING the game. It is not "fun" to win against the computer, inasmuch as it can hardly appreciate the intricacies of my victory dance. It is a little fun to win against my friend from work, but not so much. It is not fun at all to win against my friends on THPS3, since all I gain from my victory is them saying "Well, it happened again." This is what Sirlin means by play to win. The fun you have from simply playing a game pales in comparison to the pleasure (I'm switching words here because it's a more accurate description) you gain from beating good opponents. When I was in sophomore year of college, we had a LAN all throughout our dorm, and some of the best Counter-Strike players I've ever met played on that LAN. When I eventually got to the point where I could usually beat them, even playing on a 233 MHz machine in software mode, that was far more pleasurable than the actual act of playing Counter-Strike could have ever been.

posted 07-29-2002 12:52 PM               

And yes - I also disagree with this article. There's no sense saying bugs should be abuseable unless all bugs are abuseable - similarly, game balance problems can be viewed as bugs in themselves because they are errors in design. It's no fairer to abuse them than it is to walk around to the other side of the machine and kick the other player in the crotch, then walk back to your side and kill his character.

Let's take a really extreme example - Battle realms, an RTS with excellent strategy, had an old patch where you could target an enemy's buildings and hit ctrl-d twice, and they would go boom. (ctrl-d is the hotkey to destroy your own buildings). Both players can do it, and it is unstoppable but easily reciprocatable, PLUS any player who has been taken out of the game can still do it, with greater efficiency in fact because they have full vision. Is it okay? No, and every BR player online knew not to use it, except maybe as a joke, because it would simply remove the fun and the flavor from the game.

An even better example. Counterstrike. If you're on the phone with a friend, when he dies he can zip around as a ghost, and tell you where other people are. This strategy does not make you instantly win, of course - because someone else can still luck out or have a faster gun reflex than you - but simply because this tactic is not unstoppable, does that make it okay to use it? I should think not. If it became tournament standard to use this tactic, people would be LOOKING to get a team member killed early so that they could get advice from beyond the grave. And this tactic FITS Sirlin's description of a fair tactic.

At its most basic level i agree with what Sirlin is trying to say - people complain of "cheapness" too often. But his qualifiers for what dictates what is a fair tactic are not really accurate, I think. A better way of putting it might be that tactics are fair as long as they do not change what the basic idea of the game is. If the point of counterstrike is a game where stealth and hiding are paramount, then any tactic not implemented deliberately by the developers (as described above) which makes stealth useless is not approved for play. If the point of battle realms is to build an army and attack with it, then the tactic described above where the idea would then be to find your enemy's town center and hit ctrl-d on all his buildings is simply not playable, and everyone knows it.

posted 07-29-2002 12:56 PM               

The essay on winning and "srubs" is very arrogant and very hypocritical. You give this long essay about if you don't do everything you can to win then you are a scrub. And yet you then acknowledge that stuff like exploiting a bug that makes player 1 lose is then still considered "cheap."

So really, all we have are different levels of tolerance for cheapness. You draw the line at killing player 1. I draw the line at throwing. There is no argument that will prove that your line is better than mine. We just have different lines of tolerance.

So really we have
scrub version 1: me
scrub version 2: you and all tourney players
and then we have the true enlightened players and the onyl non scrubs that willing to jump into the 2nd player slot so that they can kill player 1 in 3 seconds. Because after all what is that person doing? Everthing they can to win.

The way you argue it there should be no "grey area". You have to either admit that some parts of a game are cheap and should be ruled out or everything is open. As soon as you draw any line whatsoever you are not playing a higher level better game, but a game with your own custom rules that you enjoy.

to the people you call scrubs, we say somethign like throwing is cheap just like we woudl say a bug to kill player 1 is cheap. We make no distinction between them, they are both just cheating from out point of view.

Think about how you feel about how cheap killing player 1 bug is and how the game is better if no1 uses it. That is EXACTLY how a "scrub" feels about throwing.

Having fun is al that matters and we will all add our own points to a game to make it so. Some people just have different preferences and thus draw different lines. To think the line your drawing is better than mine is just pure arrogance.

posted 07-29-2002 12:57 PM               

Now here on page 8 we have Starcraft newbies rambling about things that are "broken", when they really are easily stopped. We had crap earlier in the topic who just said the same thing over and over, refusing to accept that he was wrong.

I am not the best player, but I play to win. Right now in WCIII when good players play against each other, neither will use land mines if they find them. The reason is they are broken, 100% broken. You can take out a whole army, their town hall, and their workers with 3 of them placed around their base and a little micro. That isn't a house rule, it is like you said a generally accepted community rule.

No doubt Blizzard will fix it and huntresses come 1.02. Tower rushing on the other hand, is not broken at all. Newbies don't know how to deal with it, good players fail to scout it, and once it starts it is pretty hard to stop. Tower rushing is playing to win, but most tower rushers don't realize how easily it is countered by anyone that knows how.

Ramble ramble rant rant... message me some time on aim/icq/msn/yahoo if you want to argue/talk. AIM: Dishonru MSN: Dishonru@Hotmail.com Yahoo: Dishonru ICQ:85273175

I play WC3 on Azeroth, don't have an actual account yet. I will probably end up being a random player, although my heart is with the humans. Playing humans isn't playing to win right now, and I very much have that mentality.

And some final explanation of the article, for those who still don't get it:

It wasn't written as 100% literal. A great example is he pointed out someone ELSE (key word there) though that the move was hard to do. That doesn't mean it is hard to do, it doesn't mean someone actually thought it was hard to do. He was citing examples that people could relate to.

posted 07-29-2002 01:06 PM               

quote:

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Originally posted by Persuter:

A more applicable point would be "house rules" in games like Monopoly and poker. If we say, for example in poker, that you may not bet more money than an opponent has, that's a house rule, and you're certainly perfectly welcome to use it... in your house. But calling such tactics "cheap" when you go to the World Series of Poker will certainly do nothing more than get you laughed out of the hall.

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Persueter - actually, in the world series of poker, as in every casino in the world, they play with all-ins. what this means, is that you can bet as much as you want, but if the opponent has only 500 dollars on the table left, he says "all-in" and now the bet is only 500 dollars from either of you. ^_^

think about it - if they didnt use this rule, the world series of poker would be decided by the first hand in each matchup, even if only one dollar was bid, because after that in the second hand the winner would just bid all his money and the other guy would not have enough to cover the bet and fold. And since it's usually texas hold'em that they play, you have no control over which cards you get. So they might as well not even attend the world series of poker, and just have their names in a hat and a dealer there to pass out the cards for the first hand and look at them, then declare the bigger hand the winner of the matchup.

posted 07-29-2002 02:11 PM               

10 players at a 4-8 poker table. the bidding comes to one player and the dealer says - the bet is 8 to you sir, you must have 8 to match. You have only 6 on the table, you say "all-in" and put your 6 in. The dealer then takes 6 from everyones bets to this 8 and puts them in the middle with the previous betting. Then, with the spare 2's that you could not afford, he makes a second pile which you have "no interest in" but the other 9 players can still win. this means, if you happen to win the hand after going all-in, you take the middle pot and the seperate pile is redistributed to the people who bet it. If someone else wins, they take the whole pot.