Détails de certaines modifications à venir pour le mode coopératif
Le mode coopératif est lui aussi un sujet de discussion actif pour l'équipe de développement, et David Sum, Senior Game Designer, est revenu il y a quelques heures sur certains points de celui-ci. En dehors de quelques corrections de bugs à venir, l'équipe étudie actuellement divers points tels que le matchmaking, l'équilibrage des commandants, les nerfs, les niveaux de maîtrise et les rochers. Voici les détails:
Hiya! My name is David Sum and I’m a Senior Game Designer on StarCraft II. I started designing games 16 years ago and I’ve been doing so for StarCraft II for the last 5 years. Some of the things I’ve worked on include: unit design, balance, and campaign systems like Kerrigan Leveling, Evolutions and Mutations, Spear of Adun, and Protoss Army Factions. I also try to help out on multiplayer when I can (so many David’s on this team!). I’m currently focused on Co-op Missions, specifically Commander design, progression and Mastery Levels. Let’s chat about Co-op Missions!
Echoing Matt, I want to reiterate that we definitely read the forums and we really appreciate everyone being involved with helping us build StarCraft II together.
We wanted to call out a few bugs that people found that we’re going to fix in a future patch:
- Matchmaking: We set up our match maker in a way to get players into the game quickly and start having fun. Some of you have expressed dissatisfaction in the “quality” of the matching, namely the large gaps in difficulty settings. Matchmaking is all about tuning the compromises. We will explore some tweaks to the system with our engineers and see if we can compromise a little bit of that speed to get some better quality.
- Commander Balance: We continue to monitor balance vigilantly. Looking at our internal stats, the win rates for each commander are actually very close. Now, these are very basic stats and aren’t the only things we look at when making balance changes. We also look at the community forums. For example, people have been calling out the fact that Raynor strongly encourages player to build infantry units instead of mechanical ones. Over the last few patches we’ve been updating some of Raynor’s upgrades to diversity his army composition. This is important to us and we continue to look at this issue, we’re now looking at medic mastery upgrades.
- Nerfs: You might be thinking: “Why are you nerfing Commanders in Co-op Missions?!” Ideally all Commanders are competitive with each other and every choice is viable. We want to offer a variety of gameplay so if only a few commanders are viable at the highest difficulty (or Mutation Challenge) it’s not very fun for people who like the other Commanders. Rather than just balancing a Mutation Challenge around an overpowered Commander and effectively making it very difficult for others, we want to target the specific issues making them unbalanced. In the end, the goal is to achieve a better variety of Commanders who can complete the challenges. We feel like we’ve actually gotten to a great place in this regard. We do like that there are certain Commanders that are better week-to-week depending on the challenge and that is a fun decision to figure out who that is.
- Mastery Levels: We’re aware that there some less than desirable Mastery upgrades on some Commanders. We’re starting to take a look at redesigning some of these so that there are more compelling choices. In our next patch we’re addressing some of those issues on a few of the Commanders: Raynor, Artanis, and Swann. Hopefully these changes will lead to more interesting choices. We’ll be looking at the hero birth and revive time Mastery upgrades next. While we’ve found some of them pretty useful for certain Weekly Mutations, generally it’s not the most exciting upgrade since they’re not that extreme. We could not reduce revive time by too much otherwise you could just suicide your hero non-stop and that just seemed like a degenerate playstyle. We would like to consider some new Mastery Levels that do not affect the hero unit at all and maybe open up and alter the playstyle in a fun way instead. Let us know if you have ideas!
- Rocks: Our intent here was to keep the expansion times for commanders closer to each other. Vorazun and Swann were gaining some significant advantages over other Commanders. We’re going to keep an eye on this for now but we are open to exploring other options. Let us know if you have ideas here as well!
Thanks for playing and posting on the forums!
Echoing Matt, I want to reiterate that we definitely read the forums and we really appreciate everyone being involved with helping us build StarCraft II together.
We wanted to call out a few bugs that people found that we’re going to fix in a future patch:
- Vorazun’s Orbital Assimilators collect gas slower than 3 Probes in a standard Assimilator. We’re increasing it by 5% to match.
- Zagara’s Bile Launcher not doing damage.
- Alarak’s Supplicants were not benefiting from the Havoc’s increased range buff.
- Matchmaking: We set up our match maker in a way to get players into the game quickly and start having fun. Some of you have expressed dissatisfaction in the “quality” of the matching, namely the large gaps in difficulty settings. Matchmaking is all about tuning the compromises. We will explore some tweaks to the system with our engineers and see if we can compromise a little bit of that speed to get some better quality.
- Commander Balance: We continue to monitor balance vigilantly. Looking at our internal stats, the win rates for each commander are actually very close. Now, these are very basic stats and aren’t the only things we look at when making balance changes. We also look at the community forums. For example, people have been calling out the fact that Raynor strongly encourages player to build infantry units instead of mechanical ones. Over the last few patches we’ve been updating some of Raynor’s upgrades to diversity his army composition. This is important to us and we continue to look at this issue, we’re now looking at medic mastery upgrades.
- Nerfs: You might be thinking: “Why are you nerfing Commanders in Co-op Missions?!” Ideally all Commanders are competitive with each other and every choice is viable. We want to offer a variety of gameplay so if only a few commanders are viable at the highest difficulty (or Mutation Challenge) it’s not very fun for people who like the other Commanders. Rather than just balancing a Mutation Challenge around an overpowered Commander and effectively making it very difficult for others, we want to target the specific issues making them unbalanced. In the end, the goal is to achieve a better variety of Commanders who can complete the challenges. We feel like we’ve actually gotten to a great place in this regard. We do like that there are certain Commanders that are better week-to-week depending on the challenge and that is a fun decision to figure out who that is.
- Mastery Levels: We’re aware that there some less than desirable Mastery upgrades on some Commanders. We’re starting to take a look at redesigning some of these so that there are more compelling choices. In our next patch we’re addressing some of those issues on a few of the Commanders: Raynor, Artanis, and Swann. Hopefully these changes will lead to more interesting choices. We’ll be looking at the hero birth and revive time Mastery upgrades next. While we’ve found some of them pretty useful for certain Weekly Mutations, generally it’s not the most exciting upgrade since they’re not that extreme. We could not reduce revive time by too much otherwise you could just suicide your hero non-stop and that just seemed like a degenerate playstyle. We would like to consider some new Mastery Levels that do not affect the hero unit at all and maybe open up and alter the playstyle in a fun way instead. Let us know if you have ideas!
- Rocks: Our intent here was to keep the expansion times for commanders closer to each other. Vorazun and Swann were gaining some significant advantages over other Commanders. We’re going to keep an eye on this for now but we are open to exploring other options. Let us know if you have ideas here as well!
Thanks for playing and posting on the forums!
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