It's amazing how melodrama can be substituted for a coherent argument.

The market change is pretty minor in real play and some will like it and some won't. But it's a major change.

Build orders will always exist. Why? Because given a finite number of options, the best player will pick the most efficient ones.

Chess:
-simple game that has a very refined balance to it
-will likely to still be played in 100's of years
-is a turn based game
-can immediately see what the opponent is doing

Sins:
-fun video game, despite being currently imbalanced.
-will probably not still be played in 100's of years
-is an RTS (You can beat your chest with your RT4X marketing lingo all you want; it's still an RTS)
-cannot immediately see what he opponent is doing until you scout them

Comparing sins to chess is comparing apples to oranges.

There are also several different build orders for every race. The point of a build order is to MAXIMIZE your efficiency in obtaining a certain short term goal. For example, getting LRM's quickly, teching RA quickly, teching enforcers quickly, getting a strong econ asap, etc.

When you begin a game of sins, everyone starts with the same planet configuration, though they may have different neighbouring planets. Because of this STATIC UNCHANGING element to the game, build orders are necessary. There is at least 1 way to achieve a short term goal is quickly as possible in RTS. The point of build orders is to find that 1 way (or variants). There is absolutely nothing wrong with having build orders in an RTS and the ONLY way to completely circumvent them is to have random assignments of your starting econ, military, and planet infrastructure (which is not necessarily a bad idea...). Even then, although it would defeat specific build orders, you would still have variations of build orders, like "if you start with lots of crystal, and want to go lrm spam, do this, this, and this"

Also, one more thing regarding your chess analogy, there's a lot of common openers used in professional games. You can consider these as build orders. Furthermore, when someone sees their opponent open with a certain movement, they often think to themselves all the possible openers their opponent may be about to do before making their move. This would be similar to me knowing that you're going RA rush build order and I counter with LRM spam build order.

Nobody clicks buttons in starcraft... they learn the hotkeys

Build orders only exist as your initial boost. How you play after that is entirely up to you. It's like saying smash brothers is all about button mashing when it clearly has elements of precision and some strategy to the game.

I'm guessing that you're blaming your losses and inability to do well at the game on people using a pre-planned, memorized attack on you. It's a pity people can be so naive.

Think of it this way: a build order is a matter of efficiency. After a series of played games, the player eventually (if they aren't a total idiot) recognizes some basic constants that typically are good for doing in the early game. It's not like your whole game plays on "build w,x,y,z attack here and win" it's mostly about setting up your economy. Using a build order is imperative for a competitive player - it's the base from which they launch attacks; the canvas on which they paint their picture. All RTS games have a build order, but a major change like this not only disrupts the balance for most races, it disrupts the build orders of many players. It's honestly a game breaking change.

Horay!

Competitive gaming: Systematically draining the fun out of every game since 2003

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2008/02/25

btw onyxia deep breaths more

Competitive gaming has been breathing life into games since they were created....typically games were made to be competitive.

This isn't hello kitty space adventure, some of us enjoy competition, have fun comp stomping. You know what, I take that back, you probably can't even beat the new AI.

Any game that has a winner and loser will be competitive. Don't tell me you play so that you can lose.

I play to loose, its the wave of the new millienum man, come on

thiosk, took me a sec to realize its from starcontrol 2, one of the planet monsters.

I don't know about anyone else, but I play for fun. Now I'm not saying the game can't be competitive, but it is after all a game, and games should be fun. If you truly enjoy the game then it shouldn't matter if you win or lose. You should play to win because that is the object of the game, but if you lose you shouldn't throw a temper tantrum like a three year old and bitch about how the game isn't balanced. And as far as I'm concerned, so what if the build orders got screwed up, play some more and find a different one instead of coming to boards and complaining about it.

A great player should be able to play the game well regardless of a few changes that come out in a patch because all great players have one trait in common, flexibility. So play a few games against the computer see the changes firsthand and then adjust your strategy accordingly, don't waste your's and everyone else's time bitching about it on the boards.

Just my two cents...

Uh, okay, I'm going to try and be as nice as possible. You sound misinformed, not stupid.

First of all, if you want to play for "fun" Play a cooperative game, not a multiplayer game. The way you say it clearly denotes your idea of fun is different than competitive players. We play to win, if we lose (Most of us anyway) are unhappy, but we take the loss and we learn from it to become better, we watch the replay, see what they did right and what we did wrong. Then give em hell the next game.

Second of all. I'm still winning games, I've played 7 since the patch came out, just not as vasari. I know I can no longer win with them against my clan mates, they're just gimped to all hell now. Playing them in a competitive game outside of Huge+ maps is impractical.

Complaining about balance (Lack of now) is what makes dev's improve the game, without criticism they'd have no reason to think the game needs improvement... That's just common sense.

And being able to adapt? Adapt to totally unfair circumstances where the only way you could win was a massive gap in player skill and knowledge? That's not competitive, I want a real game, not stomping on noobs. As it is, when I get someone in my game on ICO with less than 10 games I make it a point to ask if that's a new account or if they're new to the game, if the latter I tell them that the game would end with me winning basically, and they should play with someone at a skill level more akin to their own. Getting stomped by someone with over a hundred MP games when you have none isn't going to teach you anything, and it certainly won't teach ME anything. Which is the whole reason I'm playing, to get better.

Ignorance is bliss I suppose, I said I'd played several games, and I have seen the effects, if I hadn't I wouldn't know about these goddamn changes. Notice how I said the big balance changes were not mentioned in the patch notes? Yeah. Kind of hard to know about something without playing the game when the only way to know about them is to play the goddamn game. Christ, I'm trying to be nice, but the more I read your post the more your blatant ignorance and inability to comprehend what I've written is infuriating. And this isn't even the worst reply so far.



To all the people supporting the cause, don't just roll over and accept the imbalance untill 1.04 comes out, get them to hotfix this nonesense. Keep the thread alive, I know frog has been directed to the post, show him what people think of the game. Tired of people sucking up to him on IRC and shit, saying how great the changes are, without having a goddamn clue about how they affect the game.

THIS PATCH WAS BAD FOR SINS, PLEASE FIX BALANCE. I'm off to bed, I'm sick, and these changes are just frustrating. Enjoy your imbalanced PoS and have fun comp stomping if you think this patch was good. Because I can't imagine a serious competitive player not seeing how this skews the balance.

Last post before I go to bed, you're misinformed.

The flucuations, are not really there.

18000 credits bought me 5k crystals with this new market in my last game. You think that doesn't absolutely imbalance the game? I don't know what to say. As the race most suited to gathering credits, the TEC have a huge advantage in this system. Part of the vasari's advantage was their tech being one single line for both resources. They sold resources to make their credits, not the other way around, this change KILLS any strategy that sold resources. The only way to play in a game that lasts more than 10-20 minutes is to have trade ports or you'll just be broke. Vasari require 4 civic labs, Advent require 3, TEC require 2. TEC can get an extra trade port per planet, vasari and advent cannot, TEC can get persuasive economy (Got Credits?)

There's plenty more here to explain, but unless you're competitive, and actually play more than TEC (Most noobs do not) then you won't understand and it's a waste of keystrokes to go on.

There is no resource economy anymore, there is onyl credit economy. Following buildings are even more worthless:Refinery.

@Haeso

I never once in my post said that I was a competitive player, in fact, as you so aptly noted, my idea of fun is different from the competitive player's idea; so following that through to conclusion I must not be a competitive player then am I? Wait a minute, that's what I said in my first post, holy shit you just told me of what I already said.

I agree with you 100% that without criticism the devs won't get done what needs to get done, I never challenged that fact. What I challenged was the fact that a whole hell of a lot of people play one game and then immediately come onto the boards and say something along the lines of OMG THIS GAME SUX NOW BECAUSE THE PATCH FUCKED UP MY PERFECTLY PLANNED UBER STRATEGY! This type of criticism is a waste of everyone's time because it doesn't give the devs any type of feedback of what the problem is, just that some idiot thinks the game is horrible now. The devs need constructive criticism, which is exactly what you gave them so I don't see the problem.

I don't understand why you feel this animosity towards me when my post wasn't directed at you at all, it was simply my response to JinxOfSin's statement. I know that because it was his post that I quoted, not yours. So why you take my post so personally is beyond me but then again I must be too ignorant to understand who I was directing my post at. Just for the record, my post was not meant as an attack on anyone, just my opinion which you rather rudely dismissed out of anger.

I also, never said the game was balanced in fact, I never made one reference to the balance of the game in my opening post, but now that you bring it up I will make a few comments on the game's balance. Vasari was basically the end all be all of 1.02, it destroyed everything as the RA rush was basically unstoppable if executed properly. So, in response, the devs toned down the Vasari in this patch, and after playing a few games, I can honestly say that they toned them down too much. Now with this feedback, the devs can go back to the drawing board for version 1.04 and fix some of the stuff they did bad, or better yet, they could come out with a new 1.03 patch with a few quick fixes, like making the Vasari able to stand up with the other races again.

With that being said, I just want to address one more topic and then you will never hear from me again, but I will surely check back to see how much flaming this response drew from you. You claim that you want the game to be balanced, but balance is a funny word because balance is a concept, much like a circle that you can see or infinity. There is no such thing as balance because with balance comes the term perfect which is another abstract concept that doesn't exist. There is no such thing as a perfectly balanced game, hell there isn't even such a thing as a close to perfectly balanced game. In short balance is a nice thing to wish for, but you can't expect it to happen so deal with the imbalances and give the devs something to work towards for the next patch to try and give the game more of this thing that you call balance instead of taking the time to flame me for trying to have fun with a game instead of be the guy with the most wins.

I don't dislike the market because it interferes with strategies: simply that is doesn't make any sense. It's a magical bin of infinite, really cheap, instantly delivered resources. Player trade would add to the diplomacy side of the game (the most enjoyable aspect, in my opinion, much like Defcon) and remove the 'can have all the resources you can pay for'.

I haven't played enough with the new patch to decide whether it's better, but I don't think it's any worse. It just makes the silliness of the idea more obvious: that's right, there's an invisible person out there making unlimited resources and starting the price for their absolutely essential product at a very low price. Black market should be for short-term stopgaps or desperation, not the primary 'I run my entire empire on the magical crystal shipments that instantly appear in my house' stuff.

I haven't tried out the new patch yet. I will when I get some time. I must say though I've been convinced by the arguments of the competitive gamers here, though am a casual player myself. There was a big strategic element in getting your resource balance right which sounds like has been taken away. Strategy good... better for pwning Noobz!!1!

I'm only on page 1 so far, but I have to say that I agree wholeheartedly with Uranium's post. Build-orders are an atrocity against real strategy. They are anything but actual strategy--static, automatic responses to start every game are silly and ruin games, they do not define "competitive play."

Edit: Quick response. The fundamental difference in perspective between the "RTS/competitive play" crowd and the rest of us seems to be in defining our "fun." For me, I do not enjoy games that I can win quickly by following some build order or massing lots of ships. I prefer a more "roleplaying" style of game for these 4X games (of which Sins is a member, though it plays out in "real time"). Even if it's real RTS, I think it's great that's slower and one can play more and longer in one game. The bottom line for me is that it's not the destination that is fun, it's the journey. I enjoy the process of playing the game, not the winning and losing. In fact, some of the most fun I've ever had is playing games of GalCiv2 or MOO2 that I know I'm going to lose...I guess I'm just weird that way.

Cannot sleep.

I pick and choose which posts I reply to on a whim, I do not have a personal interest in you. You do not matter to me more than any other person on the forums, for good or worse. Instead of taking it personally like an attack, understand that I know what I'm talking about, and you simply do not, thus I'm informing you.

"RA rush" if you're getting "RA rushed" you're playing on huge, or you are just fucking terrible, because I can tell you for a fact I have killed every single player who has tried to rush to RA on anything but huge random/large random/areolian sector. Unless he's being pooled by another player it's not possible unless you suck, and if he is being pooled, you should be able to overwhelm them easily unless you're sim citying and going full econ, which if you scout, you should adapt to their playstyle and rush THEM. The game isn't balanced around huge, I enjoy the occasional huge map, but I understand that without fucking the entire rest of the game you cannot balance it.

Now onto the whole "Balance is an infinate circle" true balance is unnattainable outside of simple games like rock paper scissors. But the fact remains, the game was more balanced in it's previous versions race vs race. Even if LRMs were a little too strong early game, the races played on a pretty equal footing, especially compared to now.

I've done serious projects in games like wc3, where we constantly balance tested our maps, I know that true balance isn't attainable. The goal is to get as close to it as you can. This patch was a step in the wrong direction.

I'm not saying you're wrong but how do you know that the vasari are unplayable now if you have not played as them?



This is patently untrue and for someone as elitist and arrogant as yourself you really ought exercise some restraint before uttering such nonsense. I do believe, and feel free to correct me if I am mistaken, that players are able to view replays of games they participate in. That said, if someone of exceedingly high skill were to play someone of a more basic level it would stand to reason that upon viewing the replay, the lesser of the two players would have the potential of gaining a great deal of insight on strategy from the stronger player.

On the other hand, the truly great player knows that the secret of achieving excellence is to engage in diversity. In effect, this amounts to playing matches against ALL level of players. There is something to be learned from every match, every encounter, and every player. Obviously you can gain a great deal of skill in playing strong players but if you limit games to only those types you will miss out on tactics and strategies that you would otherwise not encounter because they don't fall within the "acceptable" category. Even if you expose yourself to nothing new you still have the valuable opportunity to teach a player utilizing your knowledge. Teaching is a powerful reinforcement technique and can often lead to insights otherwise unattainable.

Perhaps your condescending attitude towards those with different opinions is a way for you to compensate for your inadequacies in other aspects of your life. If this is true, then I must advise you that it is a temporary solution that is neither helpful to yourself nor others. Concentrate on knowledge and insight. They are infinitely more valuable than your petty ego.

Agreed. I've run LAN parties of 100+ people for years and I must say the ones that didn't have competitions were always ten times more fun. I'm not saying this because I'm a bad gamer I usually won most comps, but there's no fun in it. This is why games are always best for the first month of their release, after that all the 'pro competitive' players have harassed everyone else out of the game and turned it into a set of pre-determinded rules/moves/build strat/whatever.

Is that why the most popular build orders are centered on:

1) LRM spam to win the game.
2) Quickly tech-rushing to an overpowered tech to win the game.
3) Building an EXACT number and type of units to cripple the enemy to win the game.



They do? Name one. The only thing I've seen competitive gaming do is keep a game alive, but it's akin to calling someone who is completely brain-dead alive just because they have a machine breathing for them.

I can name plenty of games that competitive gaming completely killed too. Here's two off the top of my head.

- Natural Selection had an originally fun game completely smashed flat by ridiculous changes 'inspired' by competitive gameplay. In just one 'version change', the entire point of the original game was turned totally upside down, and such asinine, gamebreaking changes like 'res4kills' was added (wherein every kill a player makes will reward his team with more resources (or himself if he was an alien). This heavily promoted 'ramboing' and totally destroyed the original point of the game). In addition, the friendly 'competitive scene' utterly alienated new players, made a point of chasing 'scrub' servers away, and are the only people to have played that mod in the last two years.

- Tribes 2 was also thriving as a refreshing alternative, it was literally to FPS games what SoaSE is to RTS - slower paced, with a lot more tactical and strategic options. The game was never about faced-paced adrenaline fragging and individual glory. The 'competitive' scene whined and cried, and about a year down the line, every server had to chose between 8 different game-altering mods, each of which was 'inspired' by competitive play. Some did X, some did Y, nobody could agree, and with so many ridiculous choices that tore the original game to shreds, the playerbase became completely fractured and collapsed.

Enjoying things your way, more the power to you, but this patch ruins it for people playing the multiplayer game.

We like competition. We enjoy a hard fought battle win or lose, decidedly more so as a win, but still. I can definately appreciate losing that hard battle, but now, it's not a hard fought battle. It's a landslide if I play against any of the good players as vasari if they're TEC. whereas before I usually won. Most players who have played with me whether or not they like me know I'm really good. Ask them, however it is in my opinion as an experienced player, that this patch has made the vasari compared to the TEC a useless race. You can argue all you want, but unless you have some magical way for me to beat an equally skilled tec player as vasari, I'll be playing tec from now. I play to have fun, but competition is that fun for me, if it's not you than fine, but don't kill my fun for yours. You can easily mod the game for how you please, it's not so easy to mod for multiplayer. If I have no chance in winning the game is no longer fun. Thus i will only be playing TEC from now on.

If stuff like this continues, I'll be picking up my sup com FA and dusting that off instead of Sins. I loved the game before the patch, I had such faith in the developers, I expected to be playing this over starcraft two when it came out, not so much anymore.

I think it's because 99% of 'competitive' "PLAY 2 WIN" players like you are generally whining douchebags that I really couldn't give a damn if you all just got shot into space. I had another thread on this same topic somewhere else. I've been an admin on several servers for a huge variety of games, and the asshole with the clan tag is almost always the asshole who is going to start bitching, fighting, cheating, and exploiting.

The guy who plays because the game is fun sees changes and adapts to them.

The guy who plays because only WINNING is fun sees changes and then starts making a thousand posts bitching about how the developers ruined "his" game.

No really, you claim on one hand that competitive gaming somehow "saves" games, but here's one of your brethren threatening to LEAVE the game because it wasn't changed in a way that benefited him, because the developers didn't ask him for his personal opinion because he's just so gosh-dang good at this game, HE should be in charge.

Give me a break. Do you think any 'doubters' are convinced that competitive gaming is somehow the greatest thing since sliced bread, when on these very forums, almost all the bitching is coming explicitly from that camp? That on *ANY* forum, almost all the bitching is coming explicitly from that camp? That in *ANY* game, almost all the bitching is coming explicitly from that camp?

Competitive gaming is the worst thing to ever happen to gaming. I've never seen anyone so readily able to completely suck the spirit and fun out of a game and turn it into a mathematical number crunch solely in the name of shallow, worthless victories quite like a clan could.

Here's the amusing part in all this.

A competitive player gets his perverse pleasure off a little screen telling him he's a winner. Conversely, they also get angry when it says that they lost (then they go on the forums and blame everything and everyone else for it). Competitive players also game against competitive players (ideally), so that means that at any given time, half the competitive scene is feeling great that they just crushed some 'scrub', and the other half of the scene is purple-faced and livid.

And these people are 'breathing life' into a game how?

When I play BF2142 I enjoy it when we win, but I don't exploit the game to the level that clans do to win, and I don't keep playing the game after it's no longer fun just so I can prove a stupid point to a stranger that I could probably be better than them. I don't enjoy it when we lose, but I don't get furious and call my team a bunch of scrub retards before ragequitting, and I don't go get my buddies to join the server and start teamkilling, stealing vehicles, and ruining the game for everyone because "they're just scrubs so it doesn't matter".