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, Blizzard présente à la communauté la liste de ses travaux en cours et qui occuperont les développeurs les mois à venir. Au planning : équilibrage, ladder, cartes, modes et nouveaux contenus.
Mise à jour d'équilibrage
Blizzard va se concentrer et prendre le temps d'examiner les répercussions des changements du patch du 29 janvier (sur le TvP par exemple) avant de travailler à d'autres modifications.
Problème du temps d'attente dans le haut du ladder
Un problème faisait que les joueurs les plus skillés du ladder jouaient très fréquemment des matchs déséquilibrés. Ce problème devrait être résolu lors de la remise à zéro du ladder le 1er février.
Répartition des ligues
Des ajustements mineurs vont être effectués avec la remise à zéro du ladder le 1er février pour maintenir le pourcentage de joueurs dans les ligues de bronze et d'argent.
Le bug du Leave League
Ce bug ne serait pas universel et ne se produit que dans certaines circonstances (rappel : il arrive qu'un joueur qui quitte sa ligue récupère automatiquement un MMR de joueur maître voire grand maître, même si il est de niveau moindre). Blizzard a déjà réduit le nombre de cas et espère de nouvelles améliorations à l'avenir.
Fonctionnalités en ligne
Blizzard nous parle des travaux en cours sur différents points du jeu :
- Blizzard continue de travailler sur le ladder depuis la BlizzCon. Il espère pouvoir l'améliorer en début de seconde moitié de 2016.
- Les Missions en Coop sont toujours en développement et de nouveaux commandants, missions, etc.. seront dévoilés au cours de l'année.
- Des packs de voix et de skins sortiront après le pack de missions de Nova. Un skin sera disponible avant et sera déblocable grâce aux haut-faits. Blizzard travaille aussi sur d'autres packs qui sortiront plus tard dans l'année mais aussi sur une amélioration du moteur et de l'interface du jeu pour accueillir ce nouveau contenu.
- Les tournois par équipes et en archonte sont toujours prévus mais Blizzard veut d'abord finir de travailler sur les améliorations du ladder. Blizzard réfléchit et considère certaines des idées de la communauté comme une option pour ne plus limiter le temps dans les tournois, des trophées différents par saison ou encore ajouter d'autres formats de tournois.
Pas de nouvelle cartes pour la Saison 1
Le map pool de la nouvelle saison du ladder utilisera les même cartes. Blizzard estime que le jeu est sorti trop récemment et qu'il est préférable pour les joueurs de ne pas encore changer toutes les cartes. De plus, les cartes actuelles sont jugées suffisamment équilibrées et variées.
Néanmoins, Blizzard étudie la question d'apporter certains changements aux cartes actuelles pour régler des problèmes d'équilibrage dans certains matchs-up. Aucune modification suggérée par les joueurs n'a pour le moment été validé même si certaines vont être étudiées (d'autres non) :
Crête de Lerilak - Transformer les tours rocheuses en rochers destructibles sur la 3e base.
Bonne suggestion qui permettra d'équilibrer la carte sans la dénaturer. Permettra de se concentrer sur une défense en un point, ce qui est d'une grande aide dans beaucoup de situations.
Chantier naval orbital - Réduire l'espace de saut entre la 1ère et 3e base
Idée solide afin de légèrement réduite l'efficacité des ouvertures reapers qui pouvaient harass trop facilement en TvZ.
Terrasses de Prion - Transformer les minerais enrichis des expands en minerais normaux
Idée intéressante sur le papier qui s'est révélée mauvaise à l'essai. retirer les minerais enrichis prive la carte de ce qui la rend unique, la rendrait banale.
Enfin comme les cartes vont rester dans le ladder plus longtemps qu'à l'accoutumée, Blizzard envisage de changer un plus grand nombre d'entre elles au lancement de la saison 2
Blizzard sur Community Feedback Update - January 29 (Source)
Balance Update Today
The Balance Update is going out today and we've been discussing many potential issues and topics internally and externally, but now is the time to refocus and analyze the effects of today's patch changes and realign our immediate goals.
Beginning today, we're focusing on the specific issues and changes that will come from the balance update. We're getting a lot of mixed feedback based on initial impressions. One example is TvP at the pro level in KR, where we're getting feedback ranging from "Protoss has completely no chance vs. Terran and will lose every single game," to "these changes were way too minor that there's no impact whatsoever in the matchup," with lots more between those two extremes.
What this shows is that it takes time for even the very best players in the world to know for certain the impact of any changes to the game. So let's keep an open mind, play a lot of games, explore exactly what changed, and discuss what the best moves will be going forward.
Wait Time Issue at the Top of the Ladder
There was an issue where the highest skill level players were getting a higher frequency of uneven matches, and we are hoping to put out a solution very soon to increase match quality by giving these players more time to find ideal opponents in the queue. This will be addressed with the season roll on February 1.
League Boundary Distribution Update
We made some minor adjustments to Bronze and Silver leagues to maintain our previous percentages. These adjustments are also planned to be addressed with the season roll on February 1.
Leave League Bug
This turned out to not to be a universal issue, but we have confirmed that under certain circumstances leaving league can produce unintended matchmaking behavior. We have already mitigated various edge cases that led to this in recent hotfixes, and we expect further improvements moving forward.
No New Maps for Season 1
As we discussed at the end of last year, we aren't planning to add new maps for Season 1. We wanted to review our reasoning behind this again, because we are seeing some discussion regarding this topic.
- The time between the launch of Legacy of the Void and the start of Season 1 has been quite short, so it'll be better for players not to have to swap out to completely new maps already.
- Balance tuning wise, we have been looking into specific issues brought up such as Reapers in TvZ on Orbital, but haven't seen a need yet to do a specific tuning change on a specific map. This is where we should definitely focus our efforts, and if there are specific parts of a map that need to be addressed, we want to work on that. We can make balance updates to maps any time if they are needed, so please keep this in mind when we discuss specific map issues.
- Diversity wise, the current maps definitely provide a variety of unique map elements, and it's safe to say that the current maps haven't been fully figured out.
We believe these are solid reasons to keep the current map pool for Season 1. However, because these maps will be on rotation a bit longer than normal, we should definitely discuss the potential of rotating a higher number of maps out for Season 2. Let's get discussions going regarding this question this week.
Online Features
We wanted to provide an update on ongoing work in various parts of the game:
Ladder Improvements
The ladder changes we presented at BlizzCon continue to evolve. We are hoping to be able to upgrade the ladder early in the second half of the year.
Co-op Mode
We are excited that so many players are enjoying co-op mode, and we are actively exploring ways to make the experience more varied and more open-ended. We look forward to providing an update on our progress in the months ahead.
As discussed at BlizzCon, we also plan to continue releasing new maps and new commanders over the course of the year.
Skins and Voice Packs
As we shared in the "Future of StarCraft II" panel at BlizzCon, we plan to release skins and voice packs after the Nova mission packs. A new achievement-based skin will be rolling out sooner, but we're working on a broad selection of skin and voice pack content for later in the year, along with changes in the engine and UI to accommodate this new content.
Tournaments
Archon and team tournaments are still in our plans, but we won't begin work on these until after the ladder improvements are complete.
We are also actively considering various suggestions from the community, such as no time limit for the tournament finals, having different trophies per season, or having even more types of tournament modes. We don't have specific plans or timelines around these yet, but we will continue discussing and exploring these ideas.
Back-End
We're working on a variety of improvements under the covers, including further protections against hacking, various performance optimizations, improvements to how our patch deployments work, and more.
That's just a sample of the things that we're actively working on, and there's a lot of other work in motion and in our backlog. Please keep in mind that after we begin implementing a change, we still need time for iteration, polish, localization, and quality assurance before new features and content are ready to be deployed. We're grateful for your support and your patience as we continue to evolve StarCraft II!
Blizzard sur Update on today's discussion (Source)Before we go into it, we would like to point out that the main reason for having this two way communication, and why we've had so much success for the better of the game in the past year compared to previous years is due to all of us working together as 1 team with the focus on making the game better. We have to remember to stay focused on our main goal, and let's continue to work together. This is critical to the success of the game.
Maps
We probably don't need to get into too much detail in regards with the importance of map diversity, so let's just talk a bit about specifically how we should get there. Ideally, every map in the map pool should have a unique, cool factor about it that makes it so that players can explore new strategies/timings/build orders/units/etc. What we mean by this in detail on a per map bases currently is this:
Dusk Towers
Defend 1 choke point to gain access to 4 bases is something unique to this map, and it's already looking like it creates very different games compared to other map types.
Orbital Shipyard
Aside from TvZ playing slightly differently, this map is a very standard map. Standard maps aren't necessarily a bad thing to the game, and we can definitely have a couple of these in the map pool.
Prion Terraces
Due to the layout of the gold bases, games can play out very differently. Armies are more mineral heavy, and there are many counters and counters to counters to players taking gold expansions in different ways and different timings.
Ulrena
Stand out rush distance plus the option to not always have to play the rush game depending on how the key choke points are utilized.
Central Protocol
Really difficult 3rd, and layout of natural/main favoring mobility based compositions. Obviously, we are seeing some balance issues on this map, so this is a map where we definitely want to focus on making some balance tuning passes. Let's discuss what specific changes we could make to this map.
Lerilak Crest
Each starting location plays out so differently, and the general feel of the map playing a bit more rush heavy. The fact that each start location plays out differently means players who are more reactive depending on what they scout can perform better on a map like this, which we think is a cool factor.
Ruins of Seras
Similar idea as Lerilak, but macro instead of rush.
So as you can see, each map is unique and contributes to the map pool as a whole being an extremely diverse play experience. Map balance, however, is a different thing. Obviously if a map balance has clear problems we should work towards fixing that like we've already mentioned in the weekly update. We would like to thank and do a major shoutout to the people out there that are sharing specific solutions that we might be able to implement to make specific maps better. It's easy to jump on the bandwagon of "Map X just sucks and there's nothing anyone can ever do about it to make it any better." There are two major problems with this mindset: It's just unproductive, and the statement is just not true. We should know better than this especially since we've been iterating on and polishing various design problems together as a whole.
Map Balance
Granted it's still a bit too early to have heard everyone's thoughts on the specific balance tweaks we should be doing in the near future but let's still talk a bit about some of the suggestions we saw today.
Lerilak Crest – changing out Rock Towers at the 3rd to Rocks
We believe this suggestion is solid, because it's a good balance change to the map without taking away from the cool factor of the map. The map's core difference compared to other maps in the pool will remain intact, but being able to only focus defenses on 1 choke point will be a big help in various situations.
Orbital Shipyard – Blocking some of the jumpable area around the main/3rd location, to reduce the effectiveness of mass reaper openings a little bit.
Again, something like this is solid, especially if Reapers are too strong vs. Zerg on this map, since Reapers will still be stronger in this map than other maps, but we're just reducing their effectiveness slightly.
Prion Terraces – changing golds to normal expansions
While this is an interesting idea on paper, it proves to be bad in practice. Changing this will take away the main reason that makes this map unique, and different from standard maps that don't have any stand out feature about them. Keep in mind, we're not saying the map is perfect, we're just saying let's try to look for another area that can be tweaked that still keeps this unique factor.
Obviously, it's only been 1 day since we've been discussing the specific changes so it's difficult to say right at this moment what the best specific changes are, but let's try to revolve discussions around this sort of thing, so that we can move quickly to put out some balance changes to the current map pool.
Online Systems
It's encouraging to see that the community is eager for new content and features. However, we recognize that there is a temptation once we've talked about something new to want to see it in the game quickly. The reality is that feature and content development often takes more time than even we expect internally – and as a result, we ask for your patience and temperance in your responses each week.
When the net outcome of sharing plans early is to produce incorrect expectations, it incentivizes less transparency – instead, we want to continue to foster open communication, and we hope that you will support this approach. We are committed to quality, and we are determined to take whatever time is necessary to deliver polished work.
There have been some aspersions cast in various threads, alleging that our team is small, that our team is allocated to other projects, or that we delivered an incomplete product. None of these have merit, and frankly this kind of commentary is demotivating to the team. The entire development team from Legacy of the Void is continuing to work hard on StarCraft II – we believe we delivered a compelling scope in Legacy of the Void, and we are excited to have the opportunity to add even more content and features in the months ahead.
Although we were disappointed to see so many unconstructive comments this week, we did appreciate that some constructive feedback is still occurring. Given the passion we see exhibited on both sides of the fence, we believe that the future holds great potential. Whether you are a supporter or a critic of our approach, we are grateful to you all for playing and watching StarCraft II!
