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 présente les modifications qui seront appliquées aux cartes du ladder et parle de la carte de test, de la diversité dans le map pool et de l'équilibrage à venir.
Mise à jour des carte le 9 février
Plusieurs des cartes du ladder vont recevoir des modifications pour améliorer leur équilibrage :
Crête de Lerilak - Transformer les tours rocheuses en rochers destructibles sur la 3e base.
Protocole Central - Retirer l'accès backdoor aux bases principales et les spawns verticaux
Terrasses de Prion - Transformer les minerais de l'expand naturelle en minerais enrichis et ceux enrichis de la 3e en minerais de base.
Promouvoir la carte de test d'équilibrage
Afin d'augmenter le nombre de retours de joueurs et améliorer l'efficacité de la carte de test, Blizzard envisage de la promouvoir directement dans le jeu avec, par exemple, un bouton sur l'écran d’accueil pour y accéder directement ou aider les joueurs à trouver des partenaires pour organiser des matchs. Un match maker est néanmoins hors de question pour le moment, la population de joueurs intéressés par la carte de test est trop faible.
Améliorer la diversité des cartes
Avec l'ouverture de son concours de cartes, Blizzard revient sur ses attentes concernant les soumissions de la communauté. Blizzard aimerait que les cartes puissent être identifiées selon un certain archétype du type : carte macro, carte ruch, carte à minerais enrichis, carte d'un genre inédit, etc ... Et que dans l'absolu le map pool regroupe un maximum d'archétypes de cartes.
Aucun nouveau patch d'équilibrage n'est prévu prochainement puisque Blizzard souhaite d'abord continuer de surveiller l'influence des changements de la dernière mise à jour. Néanmoins, voici les réflexions actuelles de Blizzard :
Les Disrupteurs à nouveau très puissants en PvP
Blizzard souhaite l'avis des joueurs quand au retrait du bonus à l'attaque contre les boucliers. Ce changement ne serait pas trop risqué puisqu'il ne touchera qu'un seul matchup et il a déjà été testé. Blizzard est prêt à l'essayer directement en jeu si besoin.
Retirer le mode siège des Tanks quand ils sont chargés dans un Médivac
Blizzard est d'accord qu'un tel changement serait énorme en TvZ et qu'il faudra l'associer avec un buff du mech. Blizzard examinera aussi certaines propositions des joueurs telles que : augmenter légèrement les dégâts du Tank siège, rendre les Cyclones plus forts contre le combo Cafard/Ravageur ou rendre l'amélioration de vitesse de la Banshee plus rapidement accessible.
Le TvP a l'air plus équilibré qu'avant (suite au patch de l'adepte et de la surcharge photonique).
Blizzard va continuer de surveiller ce match up.
Blizzard sur Community Feedback Update - Feb 4 (Source)
Maps Update on Feb 9
To begin, we would like to thank everyone for the constructive feedback on the specific map changes. It's great to see so many people making map-balance suggestions that uphold the goal of map diversity. It was also awesome to be able to stay focused, aligned, and work through the details in such a quick period of time.
Looking towards the future, we gained a lot of confidence about this map process after working through and locating solid suggestions with you. As we continue to push for map diversity, there will be maps that come up that have balance issues. When that happens, we can stay focused and aim to fix those balance issues as they come up without altering the cool factor of those maps.
As we've been discussing this week, there are several changes that will go into the maps:
Lerilak Crest – Replacing Rock Towers with Destructible Rocks.
Prion Terraces – Changing the natural to a gold base and changing the 3rd to a normal base.
Central Protocol – Removing the back door to main bases and disabling vertical spawns.
Promoting Balance Test Maps
Recently, we tried having a landing screen take over when the Balance Test Map was up, and we were able to get a lot more testing on it. Going forward, we believe that polishing and iterating on this method looks to be the way to go. For example, if we were to add a button on the landing screen as well that players can just click to go directly into the balance testing channel, it could help a lot. The reason why we want to push this type of balance test map promotion over something like a match maker, is mainly due to the population of players out there who are willing to test. Because the population is not big enough to have skill based match making, the wait time will be very long and a majority of the time players won't even get to test units properly due to a large skill difference between the players. On the other hand, promoting the test map and allowing players to arrange matches within the chat channel allows players to organize matches at their own pace, add test map partners for the future to your friends list, and/or discuss issues together as a group.
Still, we know this is something that you have requested, and we're not saying that having a match maker is out of the question. If the interest and actual games that happen on the balance test map becomes big enough to support having a skill-based match maker, we can definitely discuss this option again. Until then, let's focus on finding ways to improve this new approach that we've tried recently to get more and more people to play games on balance test maps!
Map Diversity Going Forward
We wanted to talk to those of you out there who are or will be participating in the map contest going forward.
Obviously, map diversity is something we must push for the game, because we've seen in the past that when all 7 maps in the pool were basically the same, we were only seeing 1 timing/strategy/build order per matchup and the game became stale really quickly.
The main thing we wanted to discuss on this front was the idea of perhaps identifying some archetypes of maps that should always be represented in the map pool. For example, say the rule was something like this: 1 macro map, 1 rush map, 1 high yield minerals exploration map, 1 completely new type of map, etc. This way, there are better guidelines and a bit better set expectation on the map pool as a whole for players, but we would be able to avoid the situation of having only 1 same type of map. Obviously, we're not there yet because we don't have 7 solid archetypes of maps to go by. Still, we believe one of our main goals for this year's map creation could be to focus not only on creating unique and cool maps, but also to focus on locating solid, long-term map archetypes. The reason is that some map ideas only work for 1 season and then their cool factor wears off, and some map ideas will be ideas that can be explored for a long time in different ways.
Therefore, when you create maps for submission, please keep this in mind. If you come up with a new idea altogether, it doesn't need to be perfectly executed. Alternatively, you could take an existing idea but re-use it in a better or cooler way. For example, if you like the idea of Ulrena but would like to submit an even better map of that type, it is definitely an option to just replace Ulrena with that new map without impacting the overall map diversity of the map pool.
These are just only our initial thoughts about how we could take this archetype concept, and we're extremely eager to hear your thoughts. We'd love to see the diversity of map-types grow in a big way, so let us know what you think.
Balance
While it's probably still too early to talk about what the next balance changes should be, here are our current thoughts:
- PvP Disruptors look to be really powerful again.
We wanted to get your thoughts on potentially removing the +shield damage on Disruptors.
This change is a very safe change that only affects 1 matchup, and we've tested this heavily already, so we can make this change to the live game if needed.
- Remove Siege Tank Medivac pick up – to help out in TvT
We still also agree completely that this change will have a big impact on ZvT, and we would definitely combo this nerf with some sort of a mech buff. We could look into things many players have pointed out already such as: increasing Siege Tank damage slightly, making Cyclones stronger vs. Roach/Ravager combo, or bringing the Banshee speed upgrade down a tech level.
Let's definitely start discussing this one.
- TvP definitely looks to be better than before like many of you have also pointed out, but it looks to be too early to know for certain where this matchup has settled.
We will need to keep a close watch on this one together, and react as needed.
- Just like the pro feedback we get, ZvT looks to be a good mix of even games with both sides looking really strong in various games.
We don't have a lot going on this front this week because the balance patch was just last week, but there are definitely at least a couple topics we can already start working on. Other than the 2 immediate balance topics, if there are other critical issues please definitely bring those up and we can work together on locating what the best moves are for the next Balance Test Map.
