"Competitive" PVP gaming will always be a breed of its own. There's always the next imbalanced thing happening, and the higher you go the more meta-game you'll need to "play". (at the very top, the meta-game is often NOT to play, dodging matches you can't win)

Play hard, but most of all play fast, if you're interested in winning titles or rewards or fame or whatever is at the top of the ladder. That is, don't aim to stay competitive forever. Get to the top. Then move on.

And, of course, always stop playing when you're not having fun anymore.

I think you're on the right track here, but I disagree on the specifics.  I do agree that higher starting resources would be more interesting, and randomizing those resources might work (I'd be cautious of Zerg's larva production bottleneck causing them to relatively overperform the other factions at some resource values and underperform at others) but I don't think it would at all stop the "all-in" gambits.  It would make their timing and composition a bit more variable, but people would still be pulling them off and quitting when they fail.

My belief is that there are two issues at play.  The first is that all Starcraft II 1v1 maps are extremely similar, adhering religiously to the formula of a high-ground starting position with a single narrow entrance (possibly a secondary entrance blocked by rocks) and secondary resources right outside of this entrance.  They tend to be similarly sized, the distance between bases is meticulously measured out, and the intervening terrain is usually fairly straightforward and clear.  With such reliably homogenous starting scenarios, players can be confident the same defensive and offensive tricks will ALWAYS work the same way, which is boring and defeats the entire point of different maps.  Unless the game reaches the late game, all 1v1 maps play essentially the same way, and this means opening gambits always work the same way.

The second, and much more important issue, is the very high lethality and decisiveness of Starcraft battles.  They're over in seconds, there is virtually never an opportunity to retreat, and there is no way to regroup even if you could.  This means that it's often easy to win decisive battles, and virtually impossible to recover from a decisive loss.  Unless you're perfectly evenly matched, this usually means the first battle has an obvious winner and he's going to have to screw up to lose the match.  This is a remarkable departure from Warcraft III, where you actually could buy a "get out of jail free" card for 350 gold and had very effective "natural" defenses in your base to give you a chance to regroup, so a single bad field battle was hardly a game-ender.  

It's very sad that Blizzard abandoned everything they learned in WC3 and were afraid to at all tweak the formula of Starcraft, creating a game that essentially has the same strengths and weaknesses of its predecessor.

Personally, if a game like Starcraft 2 came from a smaller studio, I'd be praising it.  But coming from Blizzard with virtually limitless resources and development time, I'm actually quite underwhelmed.  This is the very best that a world-class developer with no timing pressures and infinite development resources can produce?  It's a great game, to be certain, but in my opinion it's inferior to Warcraft III.

 

EDIT:  Try playing large team (3v3/4v4).  The maps are quite a bit more variable, and you will rarely run into coordinated 3 or 4 man gambits.  Without coordination, a solo gambit is very easy to foil so you usually see conservative openers (note: conservative != passive; a standard ling, zealot, marine, or roach rush is conservative, but it can still be very, very deadly)

From my experience, the cheese starts to dwindle as you climb the ladder. Cheese is inherently a high-risk high-reward strategy and gets easier to stop as players get better. I think the reason most soft-core RTS gamers have trouble with cheese is because they instinctively like to turtle and "play the game" i.e. safely climb the tech tree and get huge fleets of battlecruisers and battle it out in a massive battle in the middle of the map.

Having said that I feel that cheese is necessary in RTS games. It is a ruthless teacher that forces the player to think through each decision they make in a game. Being the victim of, learning from and eventually beating cheese is a sort of rite of passage and the first step to becoming a better player.

Its no longer about playing the game.... look at korea!

 

There is a reason I've not even done my 5 ranking games in SC2.... I simply don't care to play that style of game. 

 

Enjoy the campaign and the AI, but the people are simply annoying. 

This is something I always discuss with my brother. There is something we always say about multiplayer/MMO's usually and that is that playing with other people is the beauty and at the same time the bane of those type of games. For example, Worlf Of Warcraft. Heres a game that is an example of how the player base can ruin it for everyone else just looking to enjoy the game. Everything has been taken to spread sheets and if you divert by a small amount then you will have a bunch of random people calling you all sorts of stuff. I could go on all night with the kind of morons you run into WoW but I bet most of you already know.

My next example is my favorite RTS game of all time, and no it isn't Starcraft or Warcraft, its a game called Kohan. This is like a 8-10 year old game and as you can guess finding a game nowadays can take a while. So this summer I decided to try it out again and to my amazement there were still people that played online. So in many of those games I played, it usually took like 30 mins to actually start the game, that is we were sitting in the lobby waiting for  someone to pop on to have a 4v4 game. After that long ass wait we would start the game, and in many of those games 5-10 mins in people would be giving up and calling game over... "Finish it up already", "Whats taking so long just kill us already" etc...

So we spent up to an hour waiting to fill a game up to finish it up in 5 mins? Yes I agree that players are the problem and sadly I think it will only get worse with time.

I put a few people through rehab in the WBC series.

 

I'm an asshole, and I was a bad bad man with a keyboard and mouse at the time, so it wasn't too difficult to convince them that I could smoke them like a cheap cigar if I wanted to, but just wasn't interested in a ten minute game of click wars.  I got a few die hard cheeseball rushers to actually play things out and enjoy the whole strategy game, instead of just individually clicking spell buttons on walk through maneuvers.  There's not much better than a four hour game of dark elves vs high elves with high level support heroes that didn't tank off the start.  Unfortunately, some tard programmer left out object recycling and eventually your units stopped popping out, so it had to end before you reached the 16 bit limit.  I hit that sucker pretty often playing with some of my better regular opponents.  Premature ends to some awe inspiring bloodbaths considering the unit caps were a few hundred high and the resources were finite for full draw.

 

Alas, people smart enough to slow down and enjoy the game all by themselves are few and far between, and people smart enough to try after coaxing aren't much more common.

I might be misunderstanding what you mean here, but a Quit is considered a loss in Starcraft II.

Starcraft II's online stuff is all about catching your opponent unprepared.  6 Pool, Proxy Gate, Proxy Barracks; they're used because if you don't account for it, it's game over.  They're great for Win Farming, but there is no strategy involved of any kind.


From my experience with Starcraft II, Cheese remains throughout the ladder.  The only one you don't see is the 6 Pool, because it's countered by a Wall-In and leaves you so far behind.  I've seen the 6 Pool destroy ZvZ at Diamond, because Zerg have no counter to it unless they 6 Pool themselves.  And in Team Games, Zerg wins; 4x 6 Pools cannot be stopped unless your Team went 4x 6 Pools.  It's the fastest any side can get Units out, and so it dominates.

Cheese, to me, isn't 'neccessary' so much as it is impossible to remove.  No matter what, you're going to have plays designed to end the game as soon as possible with the least amount of resistance; the entire game is designed around being able to catch your opponent off guard.  Protoss are the least viable for this type of play; if you Scout a Proxy Gate, they've lost the game right there, and it's their only 'Cheese' play.

8-pool beats 6-pool.  Their lings arrive while your lings are eggs.  Run your workers in circles until your lings are out.

If you wait for 10-pool, though, you're probably screwed.

In my experience in 3v3, this is extremely unreliable and you can often get the same effect at much lower risk by using the 8-pool variant.  I just don't 6-pool anymore, the extra time you get over 8-pool isn't worth it when the 8-pool variant can trivially get the second overlord and queen out without sacrificing his zergling production.

A few days ago I had urge to play some 1v1 Starcraft2. So I asked a friend of mine who still ladders to play custom 1v1 with me. I play Zerg, he plays Protoss.

What he did first was build 2 pylons and 1 cannon right at the bottom of my ramp. I actually managed to counter that as I seen from pro players how to do it. But after that game I lost all will to play SC2 further

It sounds like you want Kohan instead of Starcraft.  Perhaps you should make it when you're done with Elemental.    An RTS GalCiv done in that style sounds delicious- seriously.

I really think you could make a very good RTS-game in that style, given what Stardock is good at game development-wise.

 

What you're describing sounds very similar to other competitive genres at low-level (aka scrub) play.  Doesn't matter if it's Starcraft, Counterstrike, or Tekken.  You run into those sorts.  You can't really make them play differently- outside of curbstomping them untli they get it or quit, which probably isn't possible in SC.

One of the aspects of games like Starcraft is that, as you begin to lose, you are also less able to fight back. This is why you have all-in strategies. You can plan your build order in a way to give you one chance at victory, but if it fails, you are absolutely crippled, without even being attacked once, and completely unable to fight back.

You often see a player resign even when he still has bases, an army, and is gathering resources. It's just that he's so far behind his rival that it's better to just give up than to waste the other player's time, since he has no chance of winning. Starcraft and other RTS games are in that end of the spectrum.

In the middle you'd have a game like Street Fighter, where your ability to fight back is always the same, regardless if your health meter is low or high. You won't see players quitting before the match is over, because they always have a chance to win.

The opposite extreme would be a game like Puzzle Strike, where the more you begin to lose, the more able you are to fight back.

 

Ok before I say this, let me state I have played neither starcraft 1 or 2, but I have been meaning to for the longest. With that said, how does this even sound like something viable for an RTS game? If I am losing and can't imply no brilliant Tactical maneuver which opens up a window of opportunity. Then why even bother?