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Comment by faitswulff | Hacker News Reader

The fact that this post seems to be engendered by a comment on a forum ("The pathfinding in the game is terrible.") reminds me of 'Designing Video Games is Hard Work, But the Millions of Angry Players Make It All Worthwhile'

http://thehardtimes.net/harddrive/designing-video-games-hard...

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A corollary to this is that the more a game looks and feels like a fallible piece of software, the more players will react to it like a piece of software, ushering you onto the "infinite demands" feature treadmill in an attempt to make the game feel more complete.

If it all feels adequately justified by the scenario and core premises, then there's an actual resolution. They shut up and play.

I use to be a high level Age of Kings player (Even got an invite to the first World Cyber Olympics in NYC).

The pathing was ALWAYS horrible but the PATCHING by the developer was even worse. There were times when the community just banned certain things because they were just broken (Teuten's Town halls were only costing wood but did more damage than high costing resource units and buildings).

As a high level player a broken pathing allowed me to micro my troops and get an advantage over other players. Most players play with the speed of a 4X and there were few of us who played by trying to make 150+ commands a minute.

So this horrible pathing was seen as an advantage by faster players.

Scale APM Description ~50 Casual player ~75 Experienced player ~150 Proficient player >200 Proficient player with superfluous actions

Brood War does this all the time. The pathing is notoriously bad[1] and nothing has been done to fix it because it's not a problem. It allows players extinguish themselves by working with the weird behaviors.

[1] Day[9] on Pathing in BW https://youtu.be/rWvoMrYCQBU?t=17m50s

Brood War hasn't had to ban a whole unit or building, though.

EDIT: Now that I think about it, the narrow ramps that you see in the campaign are banned for competitive maps because units like Dragoon will simply never go up or down one unless babysat the whole way, one by one, clicking a few pixels further with each move command so that the Dragoon doesn't go backward. Brood War is full of unbalanced and unworkable mechanics and was fixed not by Blizzard patches, but by literally professional pro map makers.

As a casual gamer I find this aggravating. Why should the NPCs be left dumber and less human than they could be? It breaks immersion and makes the game harder for novices to enjoy.

Because it's hard to fit a lot of intelligence into the game, when it has to run on a 90MHz Pentium I with 16MB of RAM available.

I thought it was pretty good, and more than enjoyable, when it came out 19 years ago.

As did I back in the day. But now I'm older with less time to micromanage pathfinding. And our devices are much faster than when many of these games launched

Well, in general, the rest of the answer to your question is that newer games tend to have better pathfinding, but adding better pathfinding to older games will make them essentially different games. Casual players might like it; serious players would throw a shit-fit. It's one of those "we can, but should we?" questions; everyone's going to have a different opinion.

Now...I don't see why they couldn't have included it as a toggle-able option. I know that I've considered trying to build updated versions of old games, and when thinking about how to do it, that seemed like the best choice.

When I heard these arguments and no rush or no attacking 20 minutes it would get under my skins. To me the T in RTS was Time and many people wanted to remove Time out of the game.

This is precisely why RTS as a genre pretty much died.

Sounds a lot like brood war. If you can micro your units well you have a significant advantage.

It's not really the same sort of thing. In this case, the programmers are dealing with the tricky problem of trying to fix the pathfinding somewhat while leaving the experience of the original game 'authentic'. The pathfinding is terrible, the pathfinding was terrible 21 years ago when the game came out. These forum posts are not surprising and unexpected whining, just a reminder new audiences are finding bad pathfinding from 21 years ago still bad.

In news from Spain, Generallissimo Francisco Franco is still dead.

Maybe the solution is a classic/pro mode and a novice/Renaissance mode.

splitting the player base is almost always a bad idea

If the alternative is completely alienating a large pool of potential customers then I don't see the disadvantage

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