Chaque semaine, David Kim, Senior Game Designer chez Blizzard et responsable de l'équilibrage sur Starcraft II : Legacy of the Void, fait le point sur le développement du jeu et s'exprime sur les prochaines évolutions à venir et sur les retours qu'elles avaient suscités dans la communauté.
Cette semaine plusieurs points sont abordés :
- Blizzard a décidé d'aligner le nombre d'APM (Actions par minute) des joueurs avec le temps réel en jeu. Concrètement, ça ne changera rien mais les APM sont la seule donnée qui a été oubliée sur Legacy of the Void lors du changement de l'horloge en jeu au temps réel. Résultat ? Tous les joueurs auront plus d'APM ! Ça n'est pas une priorité mais ce changement est au planning.
- Lors d'une prochaine mise à jour, la vitesse en jeu des Missions en Coop sera automatiquement réglée sur la plus rapide (Faster) si les deux joueurs ont lancé en mode Brutal.
- Suite à la DreamHack Winter, Blizzard est très satisfait de l'état du PvP et de l'omniprésence des Disrupteurs dans ce match-up. Malgré tout, Blizzard envisage de tester une réduction du bonus de dégâts contre les boucliers du Disrupteur afin qu'il puisse toujours 1-shot les Zélotes et Traqueurs mais plus les Disrupteurs. Une façon d'inciter à une plus grande diversité dans les compositions d'armées en PvP.
- Le Pylon Overcharge étant jugé trop fort, l'un des changements qui sera prochainement en test sera d'augmenter le coût de la surcharge photonique à 50 de mana tout en augmentant sa durée.
- Blizzard juge le nerf du temps de construction du Porte-nefs trop fort et souhaite donner un coup de pouce à l'unité protoss. Néanmoins Blizzard hésite à simplement réduire son temps de construction.
- Le Thor est l'une des rares unités à ne pas avoir subit de modifications au passage à Legacy of the Void. Cela pourrait bientôt être le cas afin de proposer une alternative aux Terrans lorsqu'ils ont besoin de contrer de l'aérien. L'une des idées de Blizzard serait d'améliorer les dégâts du Thor contre les unités aériennes blindées.
- La communauté trouve que les Zergs sont la race la plus forte du moment et Blizzard aurait tendance à aller dans ce sens. Cependant, la conclusion de l'analyse des parties de joueurs professionnels est bien moins manichéenne. Blizzard n'est pas encore persuadé qu'il y ait un problème d'équilibrage et veut laisser encore du temps à la scène pro pour trouver des solutions aux compositions à base de Ravageurs et de Lurkers. Dans le cas contraire, Blizzard réfléchit en parallèle à des solutions (pour la carte de test) pour équilibrer les zergs, comme un nerf de la Bile corrosive ou changer le timing auquel les Lurkers sont disponibles.
Enfin, Blizzard termine en demandant à la communauté de donner ses retours sur ces potentiels changements à venir en jeu afin de les mettre à l'essai sur la carte de test d'équilibrage et, éventuellement, un déploiement plus rapide en jeu. Sur Heart of the Swarm, la carte de test n'était utilisée que lorsque Blizzard était certain qu'il y avait un problème. Sur Legacy of the Void, Blizzard aimerait utiliser la carte de test de façon préventive pour anticiper les soucis d'équilibrage.
Blizzard sur Community Feedback Update - December 4 (Source)
APM Change to real time
We appreciate your bringing this to our attention and are looking into adjusting APM for real time. Our intent was to apply real time to the in-game clock in addition to all time-related information with Legacy of the Void, and this was overlooked. We don't think this is a game breaking issue that must be fixed asap or anything like that, but we've definitely added this to our list of tasks to implement.
Co-op Missions Game Speed
Thank you for your suggestion regarding Co-op Missions game speed on Brutal. Our Co-op Missions team is currently looking to change the game speeds so that if both players are playing on Brutal difficulty, the game speed will be on Faster. Please let us know how this feels when the change goes in, and also remember that nothing is completely final in this area. We'll continue to tune things if needed in the future.
Disruptors in PvP
We heard your feedback regarding Disruptors in PvP. We noticed that the majority of feedback after last weekend's Dreamhack PvP games was extremely positive regarding how exciting and micro-based the matchup is now compared to before. We also heard some of your concerns about how heavily Protoss players need to rely on Disruptors, and how the winner is determined mostly by good Disruptor micro. We also heard some feedback regarding how players can't really attack each other with Disruptors, and that it's a similar situation as Swarm Hosts. We don't quite agree with this line of thought yet because we are seeing a lot of skirmishes where actual units are being traded when Disruptors are used. However, we appreciate being made aware of this concern and we'll definitely keep an eye on this going forward.
While we agree with you guys in that the new PvP is very exciting at the moment, we did wonder if we should eventually tune the +shields damage down a little bit so that the Disruptor continues to 1-shot units like Zealots and Stalkers, but doesn't 1-shot other Disruptors. This would naturally buff certain Protoss ground units against the Disruptor as well, potentially lending more diversity to unit compositions in PvP.
Thor
With the new units and new unit changes coming into the game, we do agree with you guys that the Thor could use a pass. There look to be situations where players need better counters to air, so we wonder if the best move here is to up the Thor's damage against armored air units, such as going to flat damage on the AA weapon.
Pylon Overcharge
We're wondering if we can go ahead with increasing the energy cost to 50 for this, while also increasing the duration on this ability. When we analyzed Protoss games so far, it looked to us that the results of most games wouldn't have changed drastically even with this change. We believe this change could improve the game because it would reward players that are being offensive against Protoss for utilizing good positioning as Overcharge won't be able to cover as much ground as it does now. We are considering moving forward with this change sooner than we expected, so please give us your thoughts.
Carrier build time
We believe that we over-nerfed the Carrier during the beta. Due to how strong Carriers were with their new ability, we believe the stat nerf was good. However, we do wonder if we can reduce Carrier build time again so that we can have more Carrier play in Protoss matchups. We think the main cool factor of this unit is that it's rarely seen.
Zerg Burrow Change
This week we heard feedback regarding the creation of an option for 'how' you Burrow. There are a few reasons we don't want an option in this specific case. In terms of general design for StarCraft II:
Players are already overloaded with options that result in minor changes.
It's already pretty difficult for players to find the exact options they want, especially if they're not the most hardcore players out there.
We really don't want to create situations wher
"you are playing wrong because you have the wrong options set."
The more options we have, the higher the chance of this happening.
Those are the design reasons, and going a bit more into detail regarding this specific issue:
We believe there is a clear right answer and we want to focus on making sure of this through Balance Test Map testing.
We say this because we already know how the Terran mode switches work, and we don't really see a huge upside of how the Zerg one is currently done in the live game (as many of you have already pointed out to us).
This change is not a pressing issue. We can take as much or as little time testing it as we need.
We want to make sure everyone spends time playing with the change before jumping to conclusions.
Let's try to figure out what's truly best here and avoid adding minor options as much as possible.
Zerg Strength in general
We definitely hear your feedback about Zerg being stronger, and in the games we play ourselves, we can see that a bit. However, in the highest level games that happened so far, granted there haven't been a large number of games yet at the pro level, what we're seeing is a bit different. This might be because the strategies against things like Ravagers or Lurker based compositions haven't fully developed yet, and it could also be because there is some balance issue. We've seen plenty of times in the past where players like us have some issue, but once pro players show us the way, we perform much better. We just don't know for certain yet, but we could definitely test things like nerfing the damage of Corrosive Bile, timing of when Lurkers are available, etc. on the Balance test map. Let's just get discussions going on potential changes that we could be exploring.
Balance test map update
We want to get your feedback on adding all the above balance changes to the Balance Test Map. We're not saying these changes will go into the game for certain, we just wonder if it'll be better if we can see some of these changes in action earlier on in case something turns out to be an issue that we need to act on sooner rather than later.
As we mentioned towards the end of the beta, our current thought for Balance Test Maps and balance testing in Legacy of the Void is to more aggressively test different options even before we know that they are issues for certain. In this way, we can be more prepared to act quickly if needed. If there turns out to be no need for the change, we can simply remove the change we're testing in the Balance Test Map and go on to other potential changes.
We want to get discussions going because this would be a big change from how the Balance Test Maps were done in Heart of the Swarm. In Heart of the Swarm, we only began testing issues once we were fairly certain that the issue was truly problematic. With Legacy of the Void, we want to get a head start.
Thank you for continuing to help make the game better. Let's continue this collaboration and get constructive discussions going on these topics so that we can do what's best for the game.
