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Starcraft II goes free-to-play seven years after launch

259 points by amq 9y ago

cableshaft 9y ago
I should probably go back to playing this. I only got about halfway through the first campaign and never got around to installing heart of the swarm, even though I paid for it (like $20). I enjoyed the game, there's just too many damn games out there now vying for my attention. I wonder how much of an effect being free to play will boost its popularity for esports. I know Blizzard was pushing for it.
- dmoy 9y ago
  I guess it might boost it a little. But there's little to no chance it will become a really popular esport again... especially not when blizzard is putting so much focus on overwatch now. I mean like it'll be really difficult to beat out League of Legends for popularity now. Those tourney which just finished pulled like concurrent 15m viewers (significantly more than NHL finals).
  - bagacrap 9y ago
    Is there an RTS that will replace it (besides bw)? RTS may be a relative niche but that doesn't mean it's disappearing. Lots of traditional sports persist indefinitely without ever reaching the popularity of (either kind of) football. To some extent, the less popular the sport the purer it remains as it's less likely to be subsumed by profit motives.
    - plopz 9y ago
      I think SC2 is in a pretty good place right now. The craziness of 2010-2014 was fun and exciting, but ultimately untenable for an RTS.
    - gozur88 9y ago
      I see a lot of new RTS games produced, but what I don't see is any reason to play them. They're pretty much the same as what we already have with different graphics and different tech trees. Different, but not better, or at least not appreciably so.
    - oneweekwonder 9y ago
      Little bit tongue in the cheek but littlewargame can be a contender :) http://www.littlewargame.com/ http://www.littlewargame.com/
  - Retric 9y ago
    I much prefer SC2, but I agree League of Legends is really designed to be watched in a way that StarCraft 2 is not. A StarCraft 2 game can last anywhere from 5 minutes to 2+ hours. And they tend to stack so a series might take 20 minutes or 5 hours. Games often snowball from minor advantages so only a seconds of that may be really important. League of Legends games on the other hand have some back a forth and are bound fairly closely to 25 minutes at top play. Allowing for more bite sized games, you can also jump into the middle of a match and understand what's going on more easily. Even better, lower level games tend to more closely match top play like other sports.
    - giblaz 9y ago
      The problem with games like League & DotA is they're nearly impossible to understand what's going on as a spectator unless you already play the games. They're a victim of their own complexity - over 100 characters each with a minimum of 4 unique abilities. It makes major fights practically impossible to follow as a person who doesn't play the game. SC2, on the other hand, is much easier to grok as a spectator. It's 1v1, so you know each army is controlled by 1 player, and the capabilities of the units are far more obvious as well, since a lot of them are based on pre-existing science fiction concepts. League & Dota get far more viewers because the games are far more popular, however, as a spectator sport, they fall short because of their complexity.
      - vkou 9y ago
        > SC2, on the other hand, is much easier to grok as a spectator. It's 1v1, so you know each army is controlled by 1 player, and the capabilities of the units are far more obvious as well, since a lot of them are based on pre-existing science fiction concepts. The problem is that SC2 had very long periods of unwatchable metas. Twelve months of pro games consisting of two players building deathballs, having one battle (Where someone gets caught out of position, and loses their entire army in 5 seconds,) and the game ending was awful, as a spectator sport. (That was any Heart of the Swarm match involving Zerg in a nutshell.) I was like watching a chess game, that, at turn 15, if one side didn't have a clear advantage, getting decided by a coin flip. This may be fun from a player's perspective, but is awful as a spectator sport.
- Havoc 9y ago
  Heart of the swarm was the best of the three.
gcb0 9y ago
software is going downhill. ID software, of DOOM fame, used to release all their games as shareware. and 7 years later release the source. just last week someone got sued by Microsoft or EA (dont really remember) for running a game server they reverse engineered for a game they don't even support anymore!
- Cursuviam 9y ago
  I would place that more on John Carmack being great, than the gaming industry going down hill.
  - QAPereo 9y ago
    It's both. Ubisoft is a perfect example of gaming actively seeking its nadir, having fully embraced the ethics of gambling and mobile fee2pay games in fully priced games, all while offering a highly buggy and mediocre experience. On the other hand, you still have CD Projekt Red... it's not as though the spirit of Carmack has died. It was rare then, it's rare now, but it does feel like it might be dwindling. Before it was just a matter of talent and ethics. Now it's a matter of talent, ethics, the scale of production, and the possibility of massive payouts by embracing LCD tactics.
  - admyral 9y ago
    Your perception of technology changes as you age. Anything new in your teens and 20s is hailed as a innovation sure to change the world in profound new ways. In your 30s-40s, weird and burdensome, no better than the traditional ways of doing things. Past that point, you'll view everything as borderline destructive and proof of society's decline.
    - teddyh 9y ago
      “Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.” — Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt
giblaz 9y ago
SC2 is a beautiful game, as a spectator sport and as a competitive activity. I've put about thousands of hours into the game, achieving Masters in 1v1 ranked 8x. I've thought long and hard about what Blizzard could have done to make the game more popular from the get go. Some of my thoughts: 1) The multiplayer should have been F2P from the beginning, and the campaign should have been a buyable add-on. Valve was already doing this on top of the in-game paid cosmetics, and Blizzard could have easily copied their business model for SC2. The game was ripe for those kind of additions. 2) The original UI was far too heavily focused on 1v1 ranked. The reason games like SC:BW and WC3 had such long-term and widespread appeal was because of how easy the casual modes (custom games, big team games) were to access. 3) Blizzard, in an attempt to prevent another Kespa power grab situation, created very restrictive rules for non-Blizzard SC2 tournaments that effectively prevented a large number of independent tournaments from being run. This goes in stark contrast to a game like DotA 2 where Valve put little regulation on independent tournaments which allowed the scene to thrive organically. 4) The official tournament system for professional play was terribly implemented from the get-go. Region locking was a very short sighted idea used to give a boost to non-Korean players, but it was wholly irrelevant as Korean players won every tournament anyways and effectively made the early rounds of Blizzard tournaments much more boring and predictable because you would have mediocre foreign players getting smashed by the Korean players. If Blizzard did this again, they should have simply let the "best" players in, regardless of their region. This is why the GSL was always the more exciting tournament - the player base, from top to bottom, was always far more talented than the WCS. 5) Implementing MMR decay was a terrible idea - it caused a huge number of competitive players to abandon the game for games like League of Legends and DotA, where they could take a legitimate break from the game and come back and still face similarly talented players. It was good Blizzard went back on this, but they damaged the game's competitive playerbase with this move. 6) For too long, Blizzard was far too afraid to make sweeping changes to their game in the same vein as DotA or League. As a competitive player, I don't mind this much, but to keep players coming back, doing major game altering updates is a guaranteed way to keep your playerbase coming back. Very recently, i.e. with the most previous expansion (Legacy of the Void), Blizzard has been actually doing some serious and interesting changes to the game that I believe will keep it fresh and fun while the core game stays intact. Making the game F2P is great news, and certainly the book is not closed on SC2. I hope Blizzard does not give up on the game now that it's F2P and instead focuses on growing the game organically again. SC2 tournaments should have the same hype levels as a major boxing match - everyone who follows esports should at least tangentially be aware of it happening. The game has the potential to be that kind of spectator sport, it's just up to Blizzard to keep working on it at this point and keep player interest up as best they can. I still play the game, albeit much less than I used to. If the playerbase started growing again, I would be tempted to put more time in again. It's still a great game - it always has been.
danharaj 9y ago
I don't have time to play Starcraft these days, but the SC2 API for AI research [0] is a fun place to experiment in reinforcement learning in my spare time. [0] https://github.com/Blizzard/s2client-proto https://github.com/Blizzard/s2client-proto
- nametube 9y ago
  What kinds of models have you been playing around with ?
  - danharaj 9y ago
    A3C for now just to replicate the results in the paper. After that, I want to investigate more geometrically motivated methods like manifold learning and see if they can be adapted to processes.
tango979 9y ago
This is a pretty comprehensive, up to date getting started playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL37EkmqQJzsj6R8mQ8uBM6X79_b8xjpJn https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL37EkmqQJzsj6R8mQ8uBM... Also, though slightly dated: https://www.reddit.com/r/starcraft/comments/3s424k/starcraft_2_a_beginners_guide/ https://www.reddit.com/r/starcraft/comments/3s424k/starcraft...
partycoder 9y ago
StarCraft is fun. In the latest expansion you can see how the designers worked on making games faster, by starting with more workers and reducing the amount of resources in the map to force players to compete for them, and added harassment units. They also tried to reward micromanagement more, to prevent the phenomenon coloquially known as "the ball". But in my opinion this still needs adjustment. e.g: the Protoss disruptor needs nerfing, and suicide seeker missiles should not be viable.
- Synaesthesia 9y ago
  Good news they’re nerfing disruptor hard pretty soon and removing seeker missiles too.
ben_jones 9y ago
Blizzard reminds me a lot of Google. Massively successful tech company with gobs of money that found success early and has been enjoying it ever since. They can afford, and have the inclination to, give tremendous attention to detail and it shows in their products on a variety of levels. That said it leads to this weird level of apathy in some parts of their business. They have tremendously talented engineers who do mind blowing work on features they are visibly passionate about. At the same time core business features that are more "boilerplate" tend to receive less effort which leaves to a lot of gripe from their incredibly passionate fanbase.
- dogma1138 9y ago
  In all honesty Valve is more like Google. Blizzard had moderate success, then had a unicorn (WoW) which made them and their parent companies at the time (Universal and then Activision) a lot of money. Valve on the other hand is the Google of the PC gaming scene through Steam. I would equate Blizzard to be more like IBM or Microsoft in all honesty, Microsoft is probably a better case than the big blue.
  - methodover 9y ago
    Speaking of Valve -- there's an area that is absolutely ripe for disruption. The Steam client hasn't really improved over the years. It's missing basic features -- like sorting your game list. They completely lost the social game to Discord and Curse, and the steaming game to Twitch. Their review system is maybe their best feature, but it's still pretty bad -- vulnerable to brigading, and not a super clear indicator for me if I'll be interested in a game or not. They're basically a CDN. For me, that's all they provide. And they charge an INCREDIBLE amount for their services, to developers -- 30%, I believe. Do they really provide THAT much value? I doubt it. I personally can't wait for some startup to blow them out of the water.
    - macintux 9y ago
      Maybe it's been fixed, but as of a couple years ago Steam didn't seem to have a way to kill an account. After some security breach or another I decided it was time to remove it (I was never fond of the ownership model anyway), but couldn't find any way to do it.
bsder 9y ago
I dumped SC2 and will not go back. SC2 always felt like a way to funnel players into the tournaments rather than an actual game. It was "You will play this like 1v1 and you WILL like it." After my third timed rush mission, that was it. No more. Blizzard can grab cash without me.
- nichochar 9y ago
  Why are you so angry about this? SC2 is probably the purest 1v1 esport. I don't think that's a bad thing. It's been heavily optimized for this use case, which is why they urge you to play it the way it was designed. You don't have to play it, it sounds like you don't like highly competitive 1v1 tournament friendly games. That's fine, go play something else, no need to bash blizzard. That company actually has many other games you could check out...
  - bsder 9y ago
    I'm angry because SC2 basically sucked the oxygen out of the RTS genre for those of us who like "S" more than "RT" because now everything must be "Esport-friendly" (read: tailored to ADHD millenials).
    - lolsal 9y ago
      If you don't think there is `S` in SC2 I would think you haven't played it much.
      - astrobe_ 9y ago
        He's not totally wrong. At low level, just doing macro/economy right wins the game. Executing a strategy requires so much micro-management and multitasking that's actually unavailable to 90% of the player base. Between low and high level, a mix of "better macro" and better tactics (don't fight in chokes when your race needs space etc.) wins games, not strategy. OTOH, it's a bit like saying that at intermediate levels, you win a chess game by not being the first to blunder (or seeing your opponent's mistake). I believe that an RTS game like Zero-K (a TA-like) for instance is more strategic. Your initial factory choice, which determines which kind of units you'll use is a first strategic choice; static defenses are much more important than in SC2 (where they are more or less considered a waste of resources, except for anti-air maybe). TA is based on territory dominance, so holding a point in the middle of the map is important. In SC2, the middle of the map is where the "deathball" vs "deathball" final match typically happens.
invalidOrTaken 9y ago
Highly recommended. Probably my favorite part is the asymmetrical approaches of the races. Interested in firepower, maneuver warfare, and positioning? You'll enjoy the Terrans. Want to achieve the dream of bloodless (for you, anyway) war? Try the Protoss. Want to be an efficient Darwinian nightmare? Pick up the Zerg. It's this mix of styles, to the point that the races feel like they're in different genres, that makes SCII such a varied game. And that doesn't even account for different playstyles within the races.
- markcerqueira 9y ago
  Want to build an almost unstoppable flying ball of death? Play Protoss and only build Stargate units. ;)
  - 0xfeba 9y ago
    I always played Protoss in SC1 and just built a huge amount of Carriers.
    - SOLAR_FIELDS 9y ago
      Always worked when you played someone who didn't know what they were doing but a solid micro setup with scourge or wraiths would always destroy this setup :)
      - TeMPOraL 9y ago
        Or 6+ Valkyries to immediately clear Carriers' Interceptors. Then it's just shooting fish in a barrel ;).
        SOLAR_FIELDS 9y ago
        Same goes for the battlecruiser spammer - you could always tell when that was going down and it was even easier to counter :)
      - 9y ago
staunch 9y ago
Digital drug dealers let you have the first one free. That's how they get you hooked! I can't play Starcraft (or chess, poker) for fear of being sucked into the competition and waking up years later. Gone down that rabbit hole enough to know I'd regret it.
- darethas 9y ago
  I know many scoff at this (because I have this same opinion and get scoffed at) but this is so true. Video game addiction is very real. Very, very real. Just as debilitating as any other addiction. The only "advantage" I would say is you don't get as much physiological damage as you do with substance abuse, but even that can be debated: bad posture, bad blood circulation, carpel tunnel, eye strain and migraines, sleep deprivation, etc. Obligatory Don't be afraid to ask for help! Many counselors are now specifically trained for dealing with video game addiction now! Especially if you are college it's probably free!
  - derefr 9y ago
    I don’t know about video game addiction; I interpreted the parent as simply talking about how—if you have the right kind of brain—it can be relatively easy to end up as a professional {e-sport, poker, chess} player and devote your entire life to high-level competitive play, making money from tournaments, studying or practicing whenever you’re not playing, etc. This is a fine life for some people, but if you want to do something else with your life, the knowledge that you’d do well in these competitive-play pursuits can feel like a black hole always pulling at you. It’s easy to lose passion for “real work”—doing good in the world, creating stuff, entertaining people; these are all pursuits that have their high points, but aren’t fundamentally structured to match the human reward system. They have moments where you have to struggle through to regain your desire to do them. Competitive gameplay—probably a lot like competitive athletics—is very “natural” to the human brain. If you’re good at it, it’s hard to resist letting that be your life—and people encourage you to let it! Imagine being 7’1” and enjoying basketball, but having other passions that are stronger (academic economics, let’s say.) If there’s ever a lull in your love of academia, you’d be tempted to just quit and play basketball, right? That’s not an addiction, per se. But you have to repress it like one all the same.
Dowwie 9y ago
great! all you have to do is play 10,000 hours to be on par with just about anyone else on the network or face being grieved during a "4v4 newb" match where most of them are nowhere near newb
- markcerqueira 9y ago
  Not true. There are plenty of new players entering the scene everyday. I got one of my coworkers into StarCraft just recently and he's already 1v1ing without anything you mentioned. Yes, there are toxic players out there but that goes for any community.
  - SOLAR_FIELDS 9y ago
    I also found this to be the case, I think the ELO system they implemented when I was playing in the WoL era to be quite accurate, I was quickly able to rise through bronze but found people that were more or less equally matched to me at high silver and low gold. Was enjoyable and not huge fluctuations in skill level except for the occasional unavoidable smurfer. I did find that 1v1 was definitely more balanced than team play, so I think both you and parent are correct. In team play with friends we were much more likely to encounter people of radically different skill levels playing together.
rkuykendall-com 9y ago
I wasn't able to tell from the post. Does this mean me and 2 friends can each download Starcraft II and play a multiplayer game, either against one another, or against 3 other AIs?
- neogodless 9y ago
  I agree that might not be clear in the post, but it actually sounds like that may have already been an option... that getting the free starter trial might have been enough to play custom multiplayer games (presumably over LAN, but maybe even on Battle.net?)
  - mbrd 9y ago
    Yes, custom games between friends are already free with the Starter Edition. This latest announcement will add the first campaign, multiplayer ladder, and much of the co-op mode to the selection of free modes. SC2 does not support LAN games so it’s all via Battle.net
- sgillen 9y ago
  Yes it appears that's what this means.
aerovistae 9y ago
I for one am still playing Age of Empires II. I am the last of my kind :(
markatkinson 9y ago
I bought all 3, 3 days before it went free. So painful.
test6554 9y ago
The day before I finally broke down and purchased it. Aww yiss.
SN76477 9y ago
Blizzard make damn fine games.

259 points by amq 9y ago

I should probably go back to playing this. I only got about halfway through the first campaign and never got around to installing heart of the swarm, even though I paid for it (like $20). I enjoyed the game, there's just too many damn games out there now vying for my attention. I wonder how much of an effect being free to play will boost its popularity for esports. I know Blizzard was pushing for it.

dmoy 9y ago
I guess it might boost it a little. But there's little to no chance it will become a really popular esport again... especially not when blizzard is putting so much focus on overwatch now. I mean like it'll be really difficult to beat out League of Legends for popularity now. Those tourney which just finished pulled like concurrent 15m viewers (significantly more than NHL finals).
- bagacrap 9y ago
  Is there an RTS that will replace it (besides bw)? RTS may be a relative niche but that doesn't mean it's disappearing. Lots of traditional sports persist indefinitely without ever reaching the popularity of (either kind of) football. To some extent, the less popular the sport the purer it remains as it's less likely to be subsumed by profit motives.
  - plopz 9y ago
    I think SC2 is in a pretty good place right now. The craziness of 2010-2014 was fun and exciting, but ultimately untenable for an RTS.
  - gozur88 9y ago
    I see a lot of new RTS games produced, but what I don't see is any reason to play them. They're pretty much the same as what we already have with different graphics and different tech trees. Different, but not better, or at least not appreciably so.
  - oneweekwonder 9y ago
    Little bit tongue in the cheek but littlewargame can be a contender :) http://www.littlewargame.com/ http://www.littlewargame.com/
- Retric 9y ago
  I much prefer SC2, but I agree League of Legends is really designed to be watched in a way that StarCraft 2 is not. A StarCraft 2 game can last anywhere from 5 minutes to 2+ hours. And they tend to stack so a series might take 20 minutes or 5 hours. Games often snowball from minor advantages so only a seconds of that may be really important. League of Legends games on the other hand have some back a forth and are bound fairly closely to 25 minutes at top play. Allowing for more bite sized games, you can also jump into the middle of a match and understand what's going on more easily. Even better, lower level games tend to more closely match top play like other sports.
  - giblaz 9y ago
    The problem with games like League & DotA is they're nearly impossible to understand what's going on as a spectator unless you already play the games. They're a victim of their own complexity - over 100 characters each with a minimum of 4 unique abilities. It makes major fights practically impossible to follow as a person who doesn't play the game. SC2, on the other hand, is much easier to grok as a spectator. It's 1v1, so you know each army is controlled by 1 player, and the capabilities of the units are far more obvious as well, since a lot of them are based on pre-existing science fiction concepts. League & Dota get far more viewers because the games are far more popular, however, as a spectator sport, they fall short because of their complexity.
    - vkou 9y ago
      > SC2, on the other hand, is much easier to grok as a spectator. It's 1v1, so you know each army is controlled by 1 player, and the capabilities of the units are far more obvious as well, since a lot of them are based on pre-existing science fiction concepts. The problem is that SC2 had very long periods of unwatchable metas. Twelve months of pro games consisting of two players building deathballs, having one battle (Where someone gets caught out of position, and loses their entire army in 5 seconds,) and the game ending was awful, as a spectator sport. (That was any Heart of the Swarm match involving Zerg in a nutshell.) I was like watching a chess game, that, at turn 15, if one side didn't have a clear advantage, getting decided by a coin flip. This may be fun from a player's perspective, but is awful as a spectator sport.
Havoc 9y ago
Heart of the swarm was the best of the three.

gcb0 9y ago

software is going downhill. ID software, of DOOM fame, used to release all their games as shareware. and 7 years later release the source. just last week someone got sued by Microsoft or EA (dont really remember) for running a game server they reverse engineered for a game they don't even support anymore!

Cursuviam 9y ago
I would place that more on John Carmack being great, than the gaming industry going down hill.
- QAPereo 9y ago
  It's both. Ubisoft is a perfect example of gaming actively seeking its nadir, having fully embraced the ethics of gambling and mobile fee2pay games in fully priced games, all while offering a highly buggy and mediocre experience. On the other hand, you still have CD Projekt Red... it's not as though the spirit of Carmack has died. It was rare then, it's rare now, but it does feel like it might be dwindling. Before it was just a matter of talent and ethics. Now it's a matter of talent, ethics, the scale of production, and the possibility of massive payouts by embracing LCD tactics.
- admyral 9y ago
  Your perception of technology changes as you age. Anything new in your teens and 20s is hailed as a innovation sure to change the world in profound new ways. In your 30s-40s, weird and burdensome, no better than the traditional ways of doing things. Past that point, you'll view everything as borderline destructive and proof of society's decline.
  - teddyh 9y ago
    “Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.” — Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt

giblaz 9y ago

SC2 is a beautiful game, as a spectator sport and as a competitive activity. I've put about thousands of hours into the game, achieving Masters in 1v1 ranked 8x. I've thought long and hard about what Blizzard could have done to make the game more popular from the get go. Some of my thoughts: 1) The multiplayer should have been F2P from the beginning, and the campaign should have been a buyable add-on. Valve was already doing this on top of the in-game paid cosmetics, and Blizzard could have easily copied their business model for SC2. The game was ripe for those kind of additions. 2) The original UI was far too heavily focused on 1v1 ranked. The reason games like SC:BW and WC3 had such long-term and widespread appeal was because of how easy the casual modes (custom games, big team games) were to access. 3) Blizzard, in an attempt to prevent another Kespa power grab situation, created very restrictive rules for non-Blizzard SC2 tournaments that effectively prevented a large number of independent tournaments from being run. This goes in stark contrast to a game like DotA 2 where Valve put little regulation on independent tournaments which allowed the scene to thrive organically. 4) The official tournament system for professional play was terribly implemented from the get-go. Region locking was a very short sighted idea used to give a boost to non-Korean players, but it was wholly irrelevant as Korean players won every tournament anyways and effectively made the early rounds of Blizzard tournaments much more boring and predictable because you would have mediocre foreign players getting smashed by the Korean players. If Blizzard did this again, they should have simply let the "best" players in, regardless of their region. This is why the GSL was always the more exciting tournament - the player base, from top to bottom, was always far more talented than the WCS. 5) Implementing MMR decay was a terrible idea - it caused a huge number of competitive players to abandon the game for games like League of Legends and DotA, where they could take a legitimate break from the game and come back and still face similarly talented players. It was good Blizzard went back on this, but they damaged the game's competitive playerbase with this move. 6) For too long, Blizzard was far too afraid to make sweeping changes to their game in the same vein as DotA or League. As a competitive player, I don't mind this much, but to keep players coming back, doing major game altering updates is a guaranteed way to keep your playerbase coming back. Very recently, i.e. with the most previous expansion (Legacy of the Void), Blizzard has been actually doing some serious and interesting changes to the game that I believe will keep it fresh and fun while the core game stays intact. Making the game F2P is great news, and certainly the book is not closed on SC2. I hope Blizzard does not give up on the game now that it's F2P and instead focuses on growing the game organically again. SC2 tournaments should have the same hype levels as a major boxing match - everyone who follows esports should at least tangentially be aware of it happening. The game has the potential to be that kind of spectator sport, it's just up to Blizzard to keep working on it at this point and keep player interest up as best they can. I still play the game, albeit much less than I used to. If the playerbase started growing again, I would be tempted to put more time in again. It's still a great game - it always has been.

danharaj 9y ago

I don't have time to play Starcraft these days, but the SC2 API for AI research [0] is a fun place to experiment in reinforcement learning in my spare time. [0] https://github.com/Blizzard/s2client-proto https://github.com/Blizzard/s2client-proto

nametube 9y ago
What kinds of models have you been playing around with ?
- danharaj 9y ago
  A3C for now just to replicate the results in the paper. After that, I want to investigate more geometrically motivated methods like manifold learning and see if they can be adapted to processes.

tango979 9y ago

This is a pretty comprehensive, up to date getting started playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL37EkmqQJzsj6R8mQ8uBM6X79_b8xjpJn https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL37EkmqQJzsj6R8mQ8uBM... Also, though slightly dated: https://www.reddit.com/r/starcraft/comments/3s424k/starcraft_2_a_beginners_guide/ https://www.reddit.com/r/starcraft/comments/3s424k/starcraft...

partycoder 9y ago

StarCraft is fun. In the latest expansion you can see how the designers worked on making games faster, by starting with more workers and reducing the amount of resources in the map to force players to compete for them, and added harassment units. They also tried to reward micromanagement more, to prevent the phenomenon coloquially known as "the ball". But in my opinion this still needs adjustment. e.g: the Protoss disruptor needs nerfing, and suicide seeker missiles should not be viable.

Synaesthesia 9y ago
Good news they’re nerfing disruptor hard pretty soon and removing seeker missiles too.

ben_jones 9y ago

Blizzard reminds me a lot of Google. Massively successful tech company with gobs of money that found success early and has been enjoying it ever since. They can afford, and have the inclination to, give tremendous attention to detail and it shows in their products on a variety of levels. That said it leads to this weird level of apathy in some parts of their business. They have tremendously talented engineers who do mind blowing work on features they are visibly passionate about. At the same time core business features that are more "boilerplate" tend to receive less effort which leaves to a lot of gripe from their incredibly passionate fanbase.

dogma1138 9y ago
In all honesty Valve is more like Google. Blizzard had moderate success, then had a unicorn (WoW) which made them and their parent companies at the time (Universal and then Activision) a lot of money. Valve on the other hand is the Google of the PC gaming scene through Steam. I would equate Blizzard to be more like IBM or Microsoft in all honesty, Microsoft is probably a better case than the big blue.
- methodover 9y ago
  Speaking of Valve -- there's an area that is absolutely ripe for disruption. The Steam client hasn't really improved over the years. It's missing basic features -- like sorting your game list. They completely lost the social game to Discord and Curse, and the steaming game to Twitch. Their review system is maybe their best feature, but it's still pretty bad -- vulnerable to brigading, and not a super clear indicator for me if I'll be interested in a game or not. They're basically a CDN. For me, that's all they provide. And they charge an INCREDIBLE amount for their services, to developers -- 30%, I believe. Do they really provide THAT much value? I doubt it. I personally can't wait for some startup to blow them out of the water.
  - macintux 9y ago
    Maybe it's been fixed, but as of a couple years ago Steam didn't seem to have a way to kill an account. After some security breach or another I decided it was time to remove it (I was never fond of the ownership model anyway), but couldn't find any way to do it.

bsder 9y ago

I dumped SC2 and will not go back. SC2 always felt like a way to funnel players into the tournaments rather than an actual game. It was "You will play this like 1v1 and you WILL like it." After my third timed rush mission, that was it. No more. Blizzard can grab cash without me.

nichochar 9y ago
Why are you so angry about this? SC2 is probably the purest 1v1 esport. I don't think that's a bad thing. It's been heavily optimized for this use case, which is why they urge you to play it the way it was designed. You don't have to play it, it sounds like you don't like highly competitive 1v1 tournament friendly games. That's fine, go play something else, no need to bash blizzard. That company actually has many other games you could check out...
- bsder 9y ago
  I'm angry because SC2 basically sucked the oxygen out of the RTS genre for those of us who like "S" more than "RT" because now everything must be "Esport-friendly" (read: tailored to ADHD millenials).
  - lolsal 9y ago
    If you don't think there is `S` in SC2 I would think you haven't played it much.
    - astrobe_ 9y ago
      He's not totally wrong. At low level, just doing macro/economy right wins the game. Executing a strategy requires so much micro-management and multitasking that's actually unavailable to 90% of the player base. Between low and high level, a mix of "better macro" and better tactics (don't fight in chokes when your race needs space etc.) wins games, not strategy. OTOH, it's a bit like saying that at intermediate levels, you win a chess game by not being the first to blunder (or seeing your opponent's mistake). I believe that an RTS game like Zero-K (a TA-like) for instance is more strategic. Your initial factory choice, which determines which kind of units you'll use is a first strategic choice; static defenses are much more important than in SC2 (where they are more or less considered a waste of resources, except for anti-air maybe). TA is based on territory dominance, so holding a point in the middle of the map is important. In SC2, the middle of the map is where the "deathball" vs "deathball" final match typically happens.

invalidOrTaken 9y ago

Highly recommended. Probably my favorite part is the asymmetrical approaches of the races. Interested in firepower, maneuver warfare, and positioning? You'll enjoy the Terrans. Want to achieve the dream of bloodless (for you, anyway) war? Try the Protoss. Want to be an efficient Darwinian nightmare? Pick up the Zerg. It's this mix of styles, to the point that the races feel like they're in different genres, that makes SCII such a varied game. And that doesn't even account for different playstyles within the races.

markcerqueira 9y ago
Want to build an almost unstoppable flying ball of death? Play Protoss and only build Stargate units. ;)
- 0xfeba 9y ago
  I always played Protoss in SC1 and just built a huge amount of Carriers.
  - SOLAR_FIELDS 9y ago
    Always worked when you played someone who didn't know what they were doing but a solid micro setup with scourge or wraiths would always destroy this setup :)
    - TeMPOraL 9y ago
      Or 6+ Valkyries to immediately clear Carriers' Interceptors. Then it's just shooting fish in a barrel ;).
      - SOLAR_FIELDS 9y ago
        Same goes for the battlecruiser spammer - you could always tell when that was going down and it was even easier to counter :)
    - 9y ago

staunch 9y ago

Digital drug dealers let you have the first one free. That's how they get you hooked! I can't play Starcraft (or chess, poker) for fear of being sucked into the competition and waking up years later. Gone down that rabbit hole enough to know I'd regret it.

darethas 9y ago
I know many scoff at this (because I have this same opinion and get scoffed at) but this is so true. Video game addiction is very real. Very, very real. Just as debilitating as any other addiction. The only "advantage" I would say is you don't get as much physiological damage as you do with substance abuse, but even that can be debated: bad posture, bad blood circulation, carpel tunnel, eye strain and migraines, sleep deprivation, etc. Obligatory Don't be afraid to ask for help! Many counselors are now specifically trained for dealing with video game addiction now! Especially if you are college it's probably free!
- derefr 9y ago
  I don’t know about video game addiction; I interpreted the parent as simply talking about how—if you have the right kind of brain—it can be relatively easy to end up as a professional {e-sport, poker, chess} player and devote your entire life to high-level competitive play, making money from tournaments, studying or practicing whenever you’re not playing, etc. This is a fine life for some people, but if you want to do something else with your life, the knowledge that you’d do well in these competitive-play pursuits can feel like a black hole always pulling at you. It’s easy to lose passion for “real work”—doing good in the world, creating stuff, entertaining people; these are all pursuits that have their high points, but aren’t fundamentally structured to match the human reward system. They have moments where you have to struggle through to regain your desire to do them. Competitive gameplay—probably a lot like competitive athletics—is very “natural” to the human brain. If you’re good at it, it’s hard to resist letting that be your life—and people encourage you to let it! Imagine being 7’1” and enjoying basketball, but having other passions that are stronger (academic economics, let’s say.) If there’s ever a lull in your love of academia, you’d be tempted to just quit and play basketball, right? That’s not an addiction, per se. But you have to repress it like one all the same.

Dowwie 9y ago

great! all you have to do is play 10,000 hours to be on par with just about anyone else on the network or face being grieved during a "4v4 newb" match where most of them are nowhere near newb

markcerqueira 9y ago
Not true. There are plenty of new players entering the scene everyday. I got one of my coworkers into StarCraft just recently and he's already 1v1ing without anything you mentioned. Yes, there are toxic players out there but that goes for any community.
- SOLAR_FIELDS 9y ago
  I also found this to be the case, I think the ELO system they implemented when I was playing in the WoL era to be quite accurate, I was quickly able to rise through bronze but found people that were more or less equally matched to me at high silver and low gold. Was enjoyable and not huge fluctuations in skill level except for the occasional unavoidable smurfer. I did find that 1v1 was definitely more balanced than team play, so I think both you and parent are correct. In team play with friends we were much more likely to encounter people of radically different skill levels playing together.

rkuykendall-com 9y ago

I wasn't able to tell from the post. Does this mean me and 2 friends can each download Starcraft II and play a multiplayer game, either against one another, or against 3 other AIs?

neogodless 9y ago
I agree that might not be clear in the post, but it actually sounds like that may have already been an option... that getting the free starter trial might have been enough to play custom multiplayer games (presumably over LAN, but maybe even on Battle.net?)
- mbrd 9y ago
  Yes, custom games between friends are already free with the Starter Edition. This latest announcement will add the first campaign, multiplayer ladder, and much of the co-op mode to the selection of free modes. SC2 does not support LAN games so it’s all via Battle.net
sgillen 9y ago
Yes it appears that's what this means.

aerovistae 9y ago

I for one am still playing Age of Empires II. I am the last of my kind :(

markatkinson 9y ago

I bought all 3, 3 days before it went free. So painful.

test6554 9y ago

The day before I finally broke down and purchased it. Aww yiss.

SN76477 9y ago

Blizzard make damn fine games.