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Comment by rollcat | Hacker News Reader

I keep my fingers crossed for the revival of the StarCraft franchise. I grew up with the game, and it's kinda sad to see the current state of SC2: old bugs, new bugs, community trying to take over the processes but having a very bumpy ride, opaque decision making (de-facto spokespersons/community figures under muddy NDAs), and unfortunately all our 2010 fears (no local/LAN play!) coming true, when server outages are hitting during in-person tournaments.

SC2 is still the best RTS there is. Immortal, Stormgate, and ZeroSpace are all showing great promise, but none of these is even at the public alpha stage. So SC2, with all of its problems, it is.

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RTS is such a great genre. I know everyone loved StarCraft but I enjoyed Warcraft II and 3 more… along with C&C, Red Alert and Age of Empires. Not sure why.

Warcraft 3 was a great balance between micro and macro management due to the Hero concept. SC always just felt like a game of numbers… but I am sure I just wasn’t as experienced.

Regardless I would love it if the genre stayed alive and I am glad Age is continually updated and stable.

Ah, sweet memories of Helm's Deep on WC3 Bnet

Wow, I completely forgot about Red Alert. That game was a blast!

Chew on this!!

Awaiting orders.

Affirmative!

What a gem.

Right? And that soundtrack! I could listen to Hell March without the game. They actually released the full soundtrack as a CD.

I recently found an open source version that has been fun (https://www.openra.net/).

Ms bought Nokia - out of business

Ms bought Skype - useless as Zoom won the Covid era

MS bought Lynda.com- who?

MS bought LinkedIn- does anyone pay $90 a month to use it?

MS bought Danger - the best tactical keyboard mobile phone. DEAD

MS bought Halo vr system a $3509 pos that never got an update

Ms buys stuff , never making stuff.

I live near Linkedin HQ, and judging by their MASSIVE number of sprawling headquarters buildings, quite a few people do pay to use it

> does anyone pay $90 a month to use it?

Some do apparently

LinkedIn is probably the only one that don’t belong on that list.

Who made/makes VSCode?

VSCode was an in house MS project

Wasn't the initial codebase github atom? So, about as in house as edge2 (the current one) is.

VSCode was released several years before the github acquisition, and is unrelated to atom.

Linkedin is used by every recruiter.Most of the recruiters pay. It has captured most of employment traffic

And enterprise sales teams use it a ton as well.

LinkedIn serves a few purposes:

- It’s where Fortune 500 middle management networks and brags about professional accomplishments.

- Its where enterprise sales people get leads and network with those middle managers

- It’s where recruiters go to find talent of any type

And then, MS bought GitHub, OpenAI...

Hotmail, DOS, Windows NT (Dave Cutler from DEC)

I don't think NT belongs on the list as it was entirely developed in house. Sure the lead developer had designed an OS while at DEC and NT built upon his experience from that, but it was still a entirely new OS

There was no in house talent behind it. Dave already knew what he was gonna build before he arrived. Yeah, compared to the others that came in wholesale, I think NT still counts as an acquisition.

MS AI research plus big game IP is a future investment

I too delusionally hope for warcraft 4 (a good one)

Age of Empire is thriving under microsoft, its not biggest esports out there but the game is pretty stable and receiving seemingly endless content updates

I expect starcraft would be the same, maybe cant go back to it former glory but atleast it would be alive especially if make it to gamepass

Not only is AoEII doing really well under Microsoft, it's doing so despite taking a couple of goes to get it right in the modern era. Most other companies would have given up when HD edition got a bit of a middling response.

I really wish they would update Rise of Nations, which MS also published. Obviously not as popular, but I loved the tech tree and the territory system.

As a StarCraft 2 fan, I’m actually quite happy with the current game balance. The last two rounds of balance patches from the community were far better for the playability and fun of the game. It was alarming when Blizzard cut funding for GSL and it looked like the Korean scene was practically done, but Afreeca and the community pulled together and kept that prize pool interesting enough for the Korean pros.

I'm glad the age of proxy void rays and queen walks is gone, but there's a lot to be desired from the process. My main grievance is that the community members who form the balance council are under some insane NDA, they're afraid of even discussing what is in the NDA, let alone what they're working on.

You end up with a design by committee with minimal community input, which feeds the cycle back into balance whine shitposts and YT reaction videos. It's arguably better than nothing, but far from healthy.

I miss David Kim.

The description of the DNA by Harstem in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IYxQ9qfftk8 doesn't sound that insane.

Glad to hear the GSL and pro scene still lives on. 2011-12 SC2 was the first esport that I followed. Plenty of good memories from those days, like the GSL final with the Archon toilet.

I love RTS games, but they're probably never going to achieve the level of success they have in the past. You can still make them, but like arena shooters, movement shooters, and fighting games, they really are from a different era that modern players struggle to come to terms with, and it's hard to justify risking putting a lot of money behind them. It's a shame, because I love all of these genres, but I wouldn't bet the farm on them.

There's always a chance and I hold onto hope. Baldur's Gate 3 is a CRPG with a budget way beyond what I would ever be comfortable risking on a genre that has been fairly niche in the overall video game landscape for 15+ years, and it paid off massively. However, being realistic, BG3 is a game that is strong regardless of your skill level and the other genres I've mentioned struggle with that.

> love RTS games, but they're probably never going to achieve the level of success they have in the past. You can still make them, but like arena shooters, movement shooters, and fighting games, they really are from a different era that modern players struggle to come to terms with

Interesting take. Why do you think that is? They just fallen out of fashion or something else?

Not the GP but I’ll give my take:

The long term value for an RTS is with the multiplayer. The problem is that the games are incredibly demanding to play. It takes a lot of practice and experience to get good enough to get off the “bottom rung” of the online ladder, just to be able to reach close to a 50% win rate.

Many gamers find this too stressful to deal with. They end up quitting the game and moving on to something else. This causes the “bottom rung” to move up in skill, as the weakest players leave. Since winning in these games is zero-sum it gets harder and harder to win the more weak players leave. Eventually only the most dedicated players remain, making it extremely difficult for new players to break onto the scene.

The other aspect to RTS games, the single player campaign, takes a lot of effort for the developers and designers to build. Unfortunately it has very little staying power. People play through the story maybe once with each faction and then either try out multiplayer or move on to a different game.

I think that's fairly accurate, thanks for putting it into words!

Hit the nail on the head. The execution requirements for RTS games are steep and the competition is fierce. You have to completely re-arrange your priorities from "win games" to "be better than I was last match, and I'll get there eventually", and it's something that modern audiences don't see often and struggle to engage with.

I think the other thing that is that the RTS community has de-emphasized modes other than 1v1 to the extent that it's basically a 1v1 game like fighting games. At least with MOBAs there's a destressing factor of losing with a team that stops the feeling of sole total responsibility that makes so much ladder anxiety. Similarly, arena shooters also have team deathmatch modes.

I'd say it's like this for any older game which still has a multiplayer community regardless of genre. There just isn't a big influx of new players and the bad ones give up.

That may be the case but other genres, such as shooters (first and third person), have found ways to get around it. Fortnite, for example, has nowhere near this issue whereas Quake 3 is plagued by it. The 100-player battle royale structure of Fortnite is one mechanism I think helps to mitigate the problem of overwhelming skill gap.

This kind of thing hasn't really been tested in RTS games, which usually focus on 1v1s.

Fortnite's solution has been bots, which is not very popular because plenty of people think they're above bots. Or think that bots cheat (which is true in Starcraft). Or in fighting games, they don't play like humans so you end up learning bad habits.

They didn't cheat on sc2 did they? They did in sc1. But regardless, with the breakthroughs in AI recently, I don't think they'd need to cheat on a hypothetical sc3.

I know in SC2 the harder AI would get free resources.

I think "playing like a human" can still be an issue depending on the game. Until people want to play against AIs, there's not a lot of work put into making AIs human-like rather than just AI players.

Also there still Starcraft 1 AI tournaments which are interesting. https://youtu.be/gqggsFpTAt8

Probably doesn't need to be perfectly human-like. If you want human-like, play against humans :-) Just keep it as fair as possible with the AIs.

I didn't know they were still doing SC1 AIs, I always wanted to make one but never quite figured out how to get started.

The big issue with bots is that they are almost never good enough to beat a moderately skilled and muscle-memoried human player. People who try to use them to learn don't end up being any better than a n00b, as it were.

Randomness is a big mitigator.

In MtG or LoL, a worse player than the opponent might still win 40% of games (luck of the draw or teammates), even ignoring matchmaking systems.

Players can aim for losing less over time, while still having a chance to win any particular game.

In SC or chess any chance of success against a better player is effectively zero.

I taught a friend to play multiplayer Supreme Commander. And your outlining of the "on boarding" problem is spot on. They ended up getting through it because they already where a good RTS player and I 1v1ed them for a while (didn't abliterate them every match, and slowly ramped up the difficulty while providing constructism). However most new players don't have access to 1 on 1 coaching!

RTS games are just too stressful. They require 10+ minutes of full concentration. Whether you've just won or lost an engagement, you better keep up with scouting, building your army, gathering resources, expanding your base, preparing for the next engagement, etc. You get absolutely no downtime.

Every other game gives you downtime. Shorter round based games like fighting games give you time to catch your breath. Respawn time is a reprieve for both sides. Even just being on the queue screen for Starcraft II was enough to get my heartrate up in anticipation for the stressful games.

Fighters are arguably bigger than they’ve ever been. SF6 alone has made massive inroads in terms of level of entry to the field.

Hell one need only look at the size of this years EVO.

Fighting games can simultaneously be bigger than they've ever been but nowhere near the level of success that other genres reach. You either have to be cool with losing 9/10 matches you play or have a large amount of knowledge and/or mechanical execution. Simplifying mechanical execution only goes so far because mechanical execution is just a foregone conclusion at a certain level of play, and most of the game becomes a mental exercise. Many people struggle to accept that they are the problem and the reason they're performing poorly, and this is something that's massively exacerbated by the prevalence of team-based multiplayer games. Prize pools at flagship events are always ridiculously low. One-on-one mentoring is by and away the easiest way to get into the genre, and it is also probably the most "expensive" way to introduce people bar none.

I love the genre; it's in a great place, and it doesn't need to change. I'm glad the playerbase is very cautious about losing some of the magic chasing after mass market appeal. The downside is just that it's hard to justify throwing a lot of money at these games.

Giant Grant Games makes a compelling case for why single-player campaign and mod-development experiences are often overlooked but are key for RTS crossover success. And this came out long before the success of BG3. I hold out hope that someone will crack the formula!

https://youtu.be/XehNK7UpZsc

I rediscovered Brood War during Covid (free to play). 99% of matchups I lost. But there was one 4+ hour 1v1 marathon on a huge map. Lost that one too but what an incredible game. So many comebacks on both sides. So close. Matching skills is key to a GG.

Brood War is incredibly tough for newcomers. Skill-wise, the mid-F rank (barely above the rock bottom) is the equivalent of SC2's low diamond (roughly middle of the playerbase) - people are either this good, or drop out.

If you're looking for a more fair match, and don't mind SC2 being a very different game, you should give it a try. If you can max out on literally anything before 15:00 and a-move your opponent, you will probably get a 50% winrate.

SC2's matching engine and ladder is designed to generate ~50% win rates among players of all skill levels.

Same for BW, same for chess, that's basically how ELO/MMR works. The very bottom (and the very top) of the ladder of course have a skew, there are people who are so bad (or so good) that the ladder can't find anyone worse (better) than them and get less than (or more than) 50% winrate. It's just that the skill floor for BW is so damn high.

Brood war path finding can be rough to adjust to, even if you played SC2.

I wish star craft had a "scatter" button to space out your units like command and conquer has (its been a decade but I think the button is X). Maybe even some formation options to avoid everyone packing in a tight ball where the move command is issued. AOE is so lethal in SC I think it hurts the gameplay.

Its a safety issue as well. Pro terrans often have wrist issues from splitting their units. With the other races it isn't as crucial, but still an issue.

The SC2 professional scene is doing really well I think. Lots of games being played at the highest levels. And tons of content for it on YouTube with some of the best play by play commentators out there. I really enjoy that.

What deep pocketed Microsoft could do is really up the ante and make the prize money for tournaments of say Quake (they own ID) or SC2 and others really high and attract even more buzz etc etc.

I just hope these games and IP don’t just become afterthoughts. Will we get a demonic hell on earth new doom game? Will we get an even more hellish Diablo game? Will we get a SC3?

With all these game studios under one roof I wonder how many games will get axed in the pursuit of “synergies”?

> The SC2 professional scene is doing really well I think

I could easily claim the opposite. There's very little to no mention of SC2 for Blizzcon '23 as well.

That sucks. I didn’t know that.

Hoping that Microsoft does something with sc2

Age of Empires has been very well maintained, even restored. It has a pretty large player base 20 years after release. It would be cool to see the same happen with Starcraft

Agreed, an SC3 would be potentially awesome. And I've always thought it would be interesting if they built a StarCraft MMO.

That Starcraft ghost seemed like a cool concept.

Also I wonder why "World of starcraft" never happened. Terran would play like kinda like Planetside, zerg could play like the alien team in Natural Selection, protoss like the predator in the AVP games.

My assumption for why "World of X" games didn't pan out under ActiBlizz was because Project Titan destroyed all appetite for other MMO games at Blizzard. You've got the MMO team on WoW. Are you going to split that team up to go work on MMOs for Starcraft or Diablo?

Good luck to SC2. I hope they're smart enough not to touch SCBW and leave it as is.

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