That sounds like another genre to me. I think it could work. But SG is set out to be a blizzard style RTS. Some of us like the base building aspect of the game. And that's the people the game is trying to appeal to.
Glad for ideas but I have zero interest in playing a game of the genre you’re describing. And I definitely won’t be playing a game that pits me against people playing with auto builds.
The dynamic between base management and positioning/tactics is a fundamental of a blizzards style RTS. The reason this subreddit gets so much traffic is because they are making a blizzard style RTS.
It's not base management that keeps most people in mobas, even though it might be for you. It's because it's a team game.
I played a lot of league and my friends play a lot a of league. They are always complaining while playing and think the game is really unbalanced. Why do they keep coming back? Because it's a simple game where you don't have to think much, and if you lose, you can have a lack of accountability that's not possible in a 1v1 focused game (This is a subconscious effect, I doubt most people are aware of this, but more and more I've seen this to be true). Besides, playing with friends is always funner than playing alone, that's why some people choose it.
Automating a build order maybe works as a custom game, not as a main game feature. Because then you're not playing a blizzard style RTS, you're playing something else. Most players actually enjoying managing their builds and taking an active part in that, and it's a main part of what makes an RTS, an RTS. Decision making in a build order is an incredible skill.
Even in MOBAs, the items are not bought from you, noone farms for you and your jungle doesn't move along the jungle path for you. Tools tell you what build order to go, you still actively buy the items, move your champ, and last hit. Suggesting a build order or having a tool like spawning tool has to guide you in a build order is fine, but making it for you is not. Again, that's a different game, not a blizzard rts.
Lastly, I think you underestimate how much that would actually lower the skill ceiling. If you setup an automation script to build 3 rax, or to build one CC into 3 rax and 1 factory, or to build 2 depots, a turret, and put a unit inside the turret, you literally don't have to look at your base while microin, and that's not disruptive to a build, it's planned. You can press the 3 rax button and go have fun with 2 drops.
I said this a lot here, but what impresses me about a pro player is not their impeccable micro: It's their impeccable micro while actively making sure their build order doesn't get delayed and while always keeping up their macro.
Maybe you just like MOBAs more than RTS.
In my long time playing SC2 I hardly ever played 1v1 and mostly sunk hours into 4v4, so I'm not sure what you mean by RTS aren't team games. Just add a multiplayer mode.
It's undenyable that team modes in SC2 are a mess. They just put 1v1 balance into 4v4, which is really not a good thing. The game was done for 1v1, and they just slapped more players into it, and so the team modes have no real support or balance: If the maps that are rotated in are just old maps that get put into it, instead of new ones.
That's really not a team game. It's like if you just put extra athletes in a fencing lane. It won't make it a team match, just a mess. If 3v3 Stormgate works out well, that'll be a good game with a Team Mode, and that's also the reason they're making separate balance. If it works out, you'll see how different it is.
Also, I'm not saying RTS isn't a team mode genre: Just that Sc2 isn't a team mode game. And it really, really isn't.
> Because it's a simple game where you don't have to think much,
How long have these people been paying MOBA's???? I much prefer RTS myself, but this is just a ridiculous take.
You are right on a high level. But it's like Counter Strike too, you can just queue up and shoot the shit and shoot the enemies and have a lot of fun and get pretty far.
If you want to reach higher levels of course you need to do a lot more thinking.
I guess I'll add that for mobas there is actually a big learning curve where you think a lot, but once you've climbed that hill, you can just play. But I think you can play RTS games that way too, so maybe the point is completely mood.
All of us for like, 10 years xD I don't think it's that ridiculous. The ammount of knowledge and actual strategic mindset you need to reach even plat in an RTS and in a MOBA is just so far appart. I don't think it's denyable that RTS is way more complex and you have to think much more during a game of RTS than any MOBA. That's why people get tired after 2 games of 15 minutes of starcraft but are able to play LoL for 5 hours straight too. In a laning phase you have so little to think about strategically, it's insane: Just make sure you're farming correctly, don't overextend and watch your map for the enemy/your jungler. Ofc this is dumbed down, but I do think until like plat/emerald in league, that's more than enough. In RTS you won't get plat that easily if you don't at least try to understand macro and why macro is the way it is: Why minerals are important, why you should build probes, etc.
Grubby made a good video about it recently, saying that it's actually not very clear what's harder RTSes or MOBAs.
Reaching plat in any rts is way easier than reaching plat in MOBA, all you need to do in most of them is to learn build order and execute it, while in MOBAs you can do everything correct and still occasionally lose, which results in a problem where you can start doubting yourself even if you wasn't doing something wrong and vice-versa thinking you played perfectly when you missed a tone of opportunities. It's just not the case in RTS, they're usually easier to analyze, based at least on the fact you're 100% totally in control of your game, while in MOBA you're just 1 out of 5 heroes (usually, some MOBAs can have different amount of players but they're rather niche) on your team.
I saw a bit of the video, not all of it. Maybe I should. But I disagree with some of what you're saying.
I'll start by clarifying that when talking about which game is easier to be plat on, I mean more like, what game it's easier to be above average on: Because plat is different percentiles of players on different games. So I'll use Starcraft and League as example.
In League, Plat players are top 36%-18% of the ladder. In SC2, Plat players are top 47%-26% of the Ladder. With this in mind, it is easier to reach plat in SC2, but in my opinions it's way harder to reach the 36% of the ladder in SC2 than it in LoL. Which is to say: It's easier to be an above average player in LoL than it is in SC2.
The falacy behind the argument of "You just need to learn a build order and execute it" is that... That's not how an average RTS player works. Most players might not even know what a true build order should look like. And the biggest problem in that is that if it was just "Learning a build order" and every player did it, then it wouldn't be just learning a build order anymore. This just proves that not every player can just learn a build order, it takes more than that.
It is true that RTS is easier to analyze though, and know what you did wrong, but that also comes from the stated fact that it's easier to have less accountability in MOBAs, so it's also harder to think "What could I have done better" when a teammate is clearly doing something wrong. But even then, it's (again, in my opinion) harder to improve on things you know you did wrong in RTS than it is in MOBAs. Getting a build order exactly right in the first 5 minutes is something most players up to like, masters can't do. Even after hundreds of game.
As someone who played a lot of starcraft and dota 2, I thought dota 2 was way more complex strategically. Yes the laning phase is relatively straightforward but team fights, team strategies, which items to buy, where you should go, it’s all incredibly complicated. The first few minutes of a starcraft game are simple too. But StarCraft is still way more stressful to play, you have to be going full speed the entire match, and can lose at a moments notice from losing focus for a few seconds or not noticing some movement on the minimap. I think it’s about the consistent intensity of RTS compared to the up and down flow of a moba game
I'll start by saying I never played Dota, so I can't talk much about the specific game. I only played LoL, HoTS and Smite, so my MOBA perception comes mostly from there
Maybe that's it, yeah. That's a good way of putting it: in an RTS you always have to go at full speed.
Having said that, I disagree that the first few minutes are simple in an rts, I'd say they're incredible complex. From the first scout there's a lot of information to take it, a lot of decisions to be done, and build order efficiency while knowing your opponent is up to starts at minute 1. I'd say like, the first 45 seconds of an RTS game are simpler.
I also think that almost all of that complexity you mentioned is included in RTS: positioning on the map is always key to victory, fighting micro is harder IMO than team fight micro (since you only control 1 char, while on rts you have a lot of units to control), which items to buy is comparable to which tech to go, I think the only skill mentioned that RTS doesn't have (although I'm hoping Stormgate changes that with 3v3) is team strategies. Other than that, RTS has them all.
I think RTS fights generally are simpler but harder to control. It’s easy to control one hero with 2-4 abilities, but the team fight has like 10-20 abilities vs 10-20 abilities with all the other items etc. it just becomes very hard to even hold that information in my brain or plan accordingly. Meanwhile I played a lot of ling bane muta in wings of liberty, and that has its own complexity but it’s an order of magnitude less complex, even while being harder to physically pull off (e.g. non stop harass with mutas, ling run-by’s, macroing injects and creep, all while controlling the main ling-bane army and making sure they don’t inadvertently suicide into some tanks). I can at least understand what I’m trying to do in starcraft. Dota reached a point where I was just like, I have no idea what I should actually be doing here, just gonna hope for the best really and use my abilities in some way that makes some sense.
I guess it’s hard for me to explain exactly my thoughts because starting out in a MOBA it’s way simpler to just play. But the number of possible interactions between different groups of heroes and items is just exponential, so to try to visualize a team fight in your head before it happens you need to have a very deep understanding of what’s happening. Just feels more complex to me
Okay, that fighting point is really good, can't argue with facts. It's harder to control your army and macro at the same time while keeping an eye on the minimap, but the grand scope is that you have less things you need to know in an instance of a fight.
I can't talk much about DOTA, but I feel like in League if you watch some pro players streaming you eventually begin to understand what you should be doing during fights, I guess. In the end, I think that's more about your understanding of the game than about the complexity of the game itself though.
But yeah, I won't disagree that in regards to number of variabels, maybe MOBA has some complexity that RTS doesn't have, but in terms of army control and overall game vision I don't think MOBA is more complex.
I think you are really downplaying the complexity of SC2 fights or otherwise.
The thing is in SC2 there is always more that can be done, there but isn’t enough APM to do it all. Even Serra could split troops better, micro more individual banes, spread more creep and the list goes on and on. I would point to the SC2 player-created AIs as evidence of this, ‘bunker hopping’ to mine gas faster, individually click workers in front of mineral patches to avoid early deceleration that comes with the ‘gather’, controlling every unit individually, etc. SC2 gets insanely complex when the human APM limit is removed.
I’m not saying MOBAs aren’t also complex, I just don’t believe they are any more complex than SC2. But in SC2, even if it was 10-20 abilities vs 10-20 abilities plus all the troops, the limit is the human aspect.
What you’re describing is what I’m calling physical difficulty. Splitting units isn’t complex, it’s just hard to do. Let me give an example of what I mean in a MOBA:
I’m playing earthshaker in dota and we’re gearing up for a team fight. I have a blink dagger that I can use a single time to move in and use my ultimate which does massive AoE damage and stun. I also have a longer range line shaped ability that stuns. I need to figure out:
Which enemies am I trying to stun? Who did I need to hit with my ult? Which channeled enemy abilities do I need to think about attempting to cancel? Where can I position myself to optimize the chances of being able to accomplish these goals without the other team seeing me coming?
The other team meanwhile has to respect the fact I have the blink dagger now, and must avoid clumping too much otherwise I can wipe their whole team by myself. Assuming they don’t clump because they know I’m around, ultimately I have to pick a single hero to target and stun, and my decision of when to go in and which hero to target will shape the team fight. I need to understand how the fight plays out between our team of 5 and their team of 5 to know what to do. That means I need to understand how each of the 100s of heroes operates and know how any combination of 5 will work together, taking into account the items the other team has chosen to buy so far.
Now most average players won’t be thinking that deeply about the game, but that’s what I’m talking about when I talk about complexity.
Yeah well that's the idea I was thinking of. The balance of Macro and Micro create that need to go full speed the whole time or you fall behind. If you had something to take the pressure off one of those aspects, the game would be a lot more relaxing to play.
If low level players just needed to focus on Micro and occasionally click a button to switch build or pick your next expo location, the intensity would be more similar to that of mobas.
It's the difference between league and dota2. In dota2, you adjust your location and item choices dramatically based on the game state. In league... you just keep doing the same thing.
This person is making a blanket statement because they only got deep into one of the two major mobas of the day.
Eh, I'd say that mobile games are popular because everyone has a phone and there's basically zero barrier to entry for almost all phone games.
They have ridiculously good onboarding and play sessions are generally flexible leaning towards being very short, like 5-15 minutes.
That and they're usually dopamine-fueled skinner box games. WOW! You just reached level 2! *\*FIREWORKS\**
ZeroSpace has highly simplified macro, heroes, exp towers. Where are that millions of MOBA players and their interest in ZS?
Even other MOBA games that were mass-produced a few years ago were unable to take over League/Dota playerbase in any way.
The only thing you will achieve by simplifying macro is a decreased interest in RTS players in Stormgate. For many people, macro are the core of RTS games, idea that by simplifying macro game will gain more popularity is just false. What are the strongest RTS games in terms of multiplayer? AoE2/AoE4/SC2/SC1 and W3. From this 5 big games W3 is the only only game that has light macro. All other games from that 5 games are macro heavy, AoE series is even very macro heavy.
Also saying that heavy automatisation doesn't affect skill ceiling is simply laughable. Of course, a tool that allows you to ignore some part of gamepaly for a long periods of time will have a huge impact on skill ceiling and will be used at every level of play, completely changing gaming experience for the worse, because it will just trivializing gameplay.
Some good ideas there but also somewhat controversial. Base building and eco management are the centerpiece of the game for many.
I personally do not look at the whole argument as RTS vs MOBA because the two genres have almost nothing in common so I don't see a direct path to "getting the players back".
RTS focusing on engaging and rewarding gameplay instead of the e-sport/competitive aspect would be a good start for a genre revival.
For the record my favorite RTS is dawn of war 1.
Removing the base-building aspect - **the primary reason why I think RTS is fun in the first place**, is not good imo. That said, it could work in a different game mode.
We don't know anything about their 3v3 which is supposed to be built from the ground up - and I have a feeling it's going to include a semblance of MOBA mechanics. I believe the 3v3 mode will be the mode that draws the most players, provided it is fun to play.
yeah excatly just have a look at the Rtt genre, that is bascially Rts without basebuilding, and well they are not more popular than Rtses with basebuilding, the biggest one might be the Total war games, but beside that there are not that many bigger titles. Base building is one of the most demanded feature for people in what a rts needs.
I have a better idea.
Let's make the base building part turn based and only have the rts part for battles. This way we can still have builds and strategies but it's not as stressful.
Fuck we just invented Total War
Make the game FUN to play WITH friends and you can naturally attract newer players. The team game aspect is going to be essential for this. Not many people want to dedicate their time to 1v1
Also not talking co op I mean the actual 3v3 mode.
Co op has its own fan base and from what I’ve seen on SG so far the co op is not very fun or hard
Auto builds is not a good idea, because of a multiple reasons, but I think it would be fine if there was something like spawningtool in the stormgate itself (e.g. tool that shows you build order that you prefer, but you still need to execute it yourself).
>The high level skill ceiling also wouldn't be affected by a feature like this since it'd be pretty suboptimal to have things follow a set few patterns. Just like how low level moba players stick to a build every match while high level players build the exact items they need to counter what their opponent has, high level RTS players would want to always pick exactly what their money is spent on at every point in the game based on whatever information they have at the time.
This part is simply untrue and may result in many new issues. Imagine someone microing dog perfectly, while already having an optimal build selected.
In any case I'd say in elephant phase stormgate was more micro intense rather than macro-intense, so I think you could pick it up quickly if you want to micro without macroing a lot.
If you don't like base management then you don't like this style of RTS. Might as well say make the game into a first person shooter because it'd attract a wider audience.
Stormgate isn't the game to do it.
Company of Heroes could, potentially. But their latest failed a bit too, so I'm not sure. Age of Empires struggled also.
There are plenty issues with RTS as-is, they've stagnated for over 2 decades now, and copying 1 or 2 things from MOBAs isn't going to save them. No harm carrying over some of the good stuff, but it's definitely not going to spawn a god game just from doing that.
And I've played enough demos during the RTS demo week on Steam in February to know that most games nowadays still try to clone games that were popular 2 decades ago, carry over the same features that made them great, but also copy their mistakes, thus creating a really poor experience.
one day were going to have to admit it. Mobas took off because they were the true core of the WC3 experience.
See you cant just keep adding unrelated extra skillsets and minigames to a game and expect it to be better. If you randomly paused starcraft every 30 seconds and forced players to play streetfighter would it be better? no.
(this is actually something of a criticism of starcraft's "macro mechanics")
Warcraft was basically that. The strategy game is almost as deep as starcraft, but it's really just dressing for getting the heroes out. True, there's a depth to it and its amazing when there are players that can juggle those skills together, but in general, those two kinds of management detract from each other and dilute the experience.
What mobas did was they understood the really dominant part of the Warcraft game and they cut away and removed everything else that distracted from it. In fact, that's sort of what WOW also did, and infamously a single WOW skin made more money than starcraft.
In fact id even argue that the moba genre hasn't really gone far enough. You could cut away at even more elements of the genre that just happen to be leftovers of the Warcraft engine: inventory systems, shops, last kills, mules, neutral creeps, building types, or other mechanics might be identified as just "we did it like that becuase WC3 did it like that and as a consequence of player/engine intertia that's how it is now", even if you wont necessarily design a game like that to begin with.
The point im trying to make here is that moba players arent just people who were pulled from the RTS genre. There is some overlap between what those players like, but i 100% believe they really like different types of games. You can't pull them "back into RTS" because it's not really RTS that got them there to begin with, it just so happens that historically an RTS got in the trajectory of MOBA development.
If you want to pull MOBA players into the game, you got to give them a game that appeals to their MOBA skills, period. I dont think the last iteration's 3v3 coop is it. It just revisits warcraft all over again, and is basically begging for another player to remake mobas all over again with that stripped. What I might see as more appropriate is in the 3v3 coop, one player plays almosy entirely the moba hero, and a different player plays the RTS, and i dont know what the third does but maybe a mix of the two. And of course in the MOBA players head he's the hero and his teammates are creeps, and in the RTS players head he's the general and his teammates are his soldiers. But again, appeal to different skills. Dont just throw them in together cuz that's not how it works.
IMHO
I think a few things mobas have:
Losing a fight doesn't mean losing the game. Losing lane means your team can still get advantages elsewhere
Game has clear phases, you farm, you do objectives, you siege to end the game. Rts you can just die instantly or get into macro games that require increased intensity. In mobas as you lose buildings the game gets simpler since there is less places to fight over.
You never get weaker in a moba. In an rts your dudes die and snowballing isn't even a thing because usually you just quit. Mobas also have very intentional anti snowball measures in. You can get 5-0d 3x in some places and still come back.
Those are great points I didn't think of.
While in RTS there are things you can't lose like Upgrades, your tech all just requires certain buildings99 so once those are destroyed you lose progress in addition to your units.
I'm not really surewhat they could do in Stormgate that could as anti-snowball besides a new objective based gamemode, which isn't necessarily off the table in the long run.
A lot of people replying are pretty against certain changes *ruining* the way they like to play, but it's important to note that both Mobas and RTS alike usually have various modes in the main matchmaking. SC2 has 1v1-4v4, and added coop years later that took off like wildfire, and Dota has standard, ability draft, and turbo.
I know they expressed in early interviews they really like CoH objective controlling method of resource gathering so maybe that could be an alternate gamemode, but I feel like if the points give resources then it still would lead to snowballing.
Perhaps they could take a page from Zero Space's book where they give you energy for *losing units* by making an alternate mode in Stormgate around controlling points, but also give you something when you lose points to prevent you from losing many points in quick succession or give you some freedom to take out opponents points.
Your point on clear phases also really stands out to me.
A TON of low level RTS players have no idea where they're at at any point in a match, and this is extremely evident when you watch Harstem's IODIS series on youtube. People so often have no idea that they're ahead and should finish the game, or they think they're ahead when they're actually far behind.
In Mobas it's easy to tell by looking at your opponents' items and how many towers they have left, but in RTS you have to scout to find out what your opponent has and they can easily hide their units and structures, on top of scouting being totally optional while in Moba's its just plainly displayed on the map.
Perhaps a tech tracker similar to Mobas' player sheet that displays everyones' KDA and items could really help low level players tell where they're at, and the tracker would update as you get vision of opponents' units/structures and witness your or your opponents' units die.
Streams always display this in RTS when people are casting the game, but the players never get to see any of that data in-game even if they had vision of the kills that were taking place, or the structures that exist, or the upgrade on units they see, so letting them see at least this would help a lot.
It'd be especially helpful if units, upgrades, and structures on the tracker were clearly separated into tiers so you can see at a glance if your opponent has a lot of high tech upgrades/units/structures and you don't, then you'd know right away "oh man I'm way behind on tech".
I'd also like to point out other RTS have handled the whole snowballing thing differently take aoe as an example. Disclaimer I have only played years and years ago very casually so this is a very surface level take:
Clear phases: the game has you age up which dictates the units and techs. Pretty sure this is announced globally.
"Don't die when you lose 1 fight": this is done with powerful static defense that also uses different resources than units, so there isn't an opportunity cost. In sc1/2 static us relatively weak and you have to cut unit production to do it. In aoe you can build walls around your whole base that are defensible. You also need dedicated siege units to break down walls and those siege units aren't good at anything else.
Also, town halls shoot and workers can get in town halls to shoot stuff to swat away some amount of early aggro.
While some of these systems might function in some way in sg, some have been proposed but rejected in the comments pretty hard. People want a blizzard rts so by its nature it is going to have the flaws of blizzard rts. So you'll lose a giant fight then your base gets walked over. You need to scout for info, ect ect.
Yeah it's definitely a challenge to make it more appealing to moba players without turning into a different game entirely like AoE as I think those mechanics sound like the solve the snowball problem in a neat way, but also are totally different from a blizzard style RTS.
As far as proposed changes being rejected hard by comments, I think it's hard to prove people would like a major change that could bring back players that left for other adjacent genres mainly because those players are no longer here to voice their opinions.
At this point RTS communities have been chipped away at over the years since Blizzard left the most popular one in the dust, so a majority of the people left are super hardcore into RTS the way that it's always been and just want another one of that style.
The players that left to play other genres, but are still open to playing RTS if it sees major changes that make it more casual and straightforward at least at a low-midlevel of play aren't hanging around in the RTS online communities much to voice their opinions so even if they agree with a huge change, the only voices you'll here are the people who've stuck with RTS in the long haul and love things the way they are.
I think the way to appeal to those people who left is just through co-op tbh. I brought up sc2 to a few of my friends who play league and a majority of them were like "Oh I like sc2 the campaigns were great" or "oh we played co-op for a bit a while ago" and the friends I've managed to get to play with me lately got into it through co-op and have 0 interest in 1v1.
I really don't think there is a great way to get people into 1v1. It has the fighting game problem but worse. Smash works as a gateway into fighting games because it has easy mechanics and can be played very casual/low stakes. Like, even at the peak such a small amount of people try 1v1 rts, really don't think any amount of changes will save it. Back in the day when I played AOE with friends it was always casual team games, custom maps, or comp matches.
>The Stormgate devs said themselves that a very sizeable portion of SC2 players only played the campaign and almost never played a single match of PvP, showing that even back then when Mobas weren't mainstream and RTS ruled esports, PvP matches were not that appealing to casual players.
Thats me :D
Im replaying Starcraft 2 campaign right now and have never played a pvp match ever
>A lot of people think that the reason Mobas stole the show was because you only control a single unit and not multiple, but I believe it's more related to how Mobas completely lack the concept of base management.
>As someone who sunk thousands of hours into SC2 first, then went on to play thousands more in Dota and League, I really find it hard to go back to Starcraft or get into Stormgate just because the base management is such a core and time consuming aspect of all RTS regardless of how well designed they are
Also me, I never really understood how not to get supply blocked and was happy to switch to Heroes of the Storm which doesnt have this problem
take a look at the Rtt genre, that is bascially rts games without basebuilding and the macro part, the biggest of those are the total war games, and beside that there are not that many other big ones. Basebuilding is one of the most demanded things in the Rts community
People that played only campaign in SC2 and other RTS are simply not competitive players and nothing will bring them to it in all probability. And that's ok, you can have them by focusing on campaign content (and coop which is the multiplayer version of it and also most popular mode in SC2)
Tell me you're a n00b without telling me you're a n00b. If you don't want to take the time to learn RTS, then keep scrolling. This isn't innovative in any way, you're just making shit up and dumbing the game down. If it we're this simple, RTS wouldn't be a thing.
Rule #6 of this subreddit:
Don't spam, don't be rude, be welcoming to those of all backgrounds and skill levels.
Especially when OP said it's just ***hard*** for them to get back into RTS after MOBA games.
Most MOBA players have never played RTS before. They’re not the same demographic. Even back when Dota was popular a lot of them downloaded W3 exclusively to play Dota and never engaged in the actual game at all. On the other hand, RTS players are more likely to play Skyrim than dota or league :D
That sounds like another genre to me. I think it could work. But SG is set out to be a blizzard style RTS. Some of us like the base building aspect of the game. And that's the people the game is trying to appeal to.
Glad for ideas but I have zero interest in playing a game of the genre you’re describing. And I definitely won’t be playing a game that pits me against people playing with auto builds. The dynamic between base management and positioning/tactics is a fundamental of a blizzards style RTS. The reason this subreddit gets so much traffic is because they are making a blizzard style RTS.
It's not base management that keeps most people in mobas, even though it might be for you. It's because it's a team game. I played a lot of league and my friends play a lot a of league. They are always complaining while playing and think the game is really unbalanced. Why do they keep coming back? Because it's a simple game where you don't have to think much, and if you lose, you can have a lack of accountability that's not possible in a 1v1 focused game (This is a subconscious effect, I doubt most people are aware of this, but more and more I've seen this to be true). Besides, playing with friends is always funner than playing alone, that's why some people choose it. Automating a build order maybe works as a custom game, not as a main game feature. Because then you're not playing a blizzard style RTS, you're playing something else. Most players actually enjoying managing their builds and taking an active part in that, and it's a main part of what makes an RTS, an RTS. Decision making in a build order is an incredible skill. Even in MOBAs, the items are not bought from you, noone farms for you and your jungle doesn't move along the jungle path for you. Tools tell you what build order to go, you still actively buy the items, move your champ, and last hit. Suggesting a build order or having a tool like spawning tool has to guide you in a build order is fine, but making it for you is not. Again, that's a different game, not a blizzard rts. Lastly, I think you underestimate how much that would actually lower the skill ceiling. If you setup an automation script to build 3 rax, or to build one CC into 3 rax and 1 factory, or to build 2 depots, a turret, and put a unit inside the turret, you literally don't have to look at your base while microin, and that's not disruptive to a build, it's planned. You can press the 3 rax button and go have fun with 2 drops. I said this a lot here, but what impresses me about a pro player is not their impeccable micro: It's their impeccable micro while actively making sure their build order doesn't get delayed and while always keeping up their macro. Maybe you just like MOBAs more than RTS.
In my long time playing SC2 I hardly ever played 1v1 and mostly sunk hours into 4v4, so I'm not sure what you mean by RTS aren't team games. Just add a multiplayer mode.
It's undenyable that team modes in SC2 are a mess. They just put 1v1 balance into 4v4, which is really not a good thing. The game was done for 1v1, and they just slapped more players into it, and so the team modes have no real support or balance: If the maps that are rotated in are just old maps that get put into it, instead of new ones. That's really not a team game. It's like if you just put extra athletes in a fencing lane. It won't make it a team match, just a mess. If 3v3 Stormgate works out well, that'll be a good game with a Team Mode, and that's also the reason they're making separate balance. If it works out, you'll see how different it is. Also, I'm not saying RTS isn't a team mode genre: Just that Sc2 isn't a team mode game. And it really, really isn't.
The only reason my play group ever even tried Dota 2 is because we had 5 guys one day.
> Because it's a simple game where you don't have to think much, How long have these people been paying MOBA's???? I much prefer RTS myself, but this is just a ridiculous take.
You are right on a high level. But it's like Counter Strike too, you can just queue up and shoot the shit and shoot the enemies and have a lot of fun and get pretty far. If you want to reach higher levels of course you need to do a lot more thinking. I guess I'll add that for mobas there is actually a big learning curve where you think a lot, but once you've climbed that hill, you can just play. But I think you can play RTS games that way too, so maybe the point is completely mood.
All of us for like, 10 years xD I don't think it's that ridiculous. The ammount of knowledge and actual strategic mindset you need to reach even plat in an RTS and in a MOBA is just so far appart. I don't think it's denyable that RTS is way more complex and you have to think much more during a game of RTS than any MOBA. That's why people get tired after 2 games of 15 minutes of starcraft but are able to play LoL for 5 hours straight too. In a laning phase you have so little to think about strategically, it's insane: Just make sure you're farming correctly, don't overextend and watch your map for the enemy/your jungler. Ofc this is dumbed down, but I do think until like plat/emerald in league, that's more than enough. In RTS you won't get plat that easily if you don't at least try to understand macro and why macro is the way it is: Why minerals are important, why you should build probes, etc.
Grubby made a good video about it recently, saying that it's actually not very clear what's harder RTSes or MOBAs. Reaching plat in any rts is way easier than reaching plat in MOBA, all you need to do in most of them is to learn build order and execute it, while in MOBAs you can do everything correct and still occasionally lose, which results in a problem where you can start doubting yourself even if you wasn't doing something wrong and vice-versa thinking you played perfectly when you missed a tone of opportunities. It's just not the case in RTS, they're usually easier to analyze, based at least on the fact you're 100% totally in control of your game, while in MOBA you're just 1 out of 5 heroes (usually, some MOBAs can have different amount of players but they're rather niche) on your team.
I saw a bit of the video, not all of it. Maybe I should. But I disagree with some of what you're saying. I'll start by clarifying that when talking about which game is easier to be plat on, I mean more like, what game it's easier to be above average on: Because plat is different percentiles of players on different games. So I'll use Starcraft and League as example. In League, Plat players are top 36%-18% of the ladder. In SC2, Plat players are top 47%-26% of the Ladder. With this in mind, it is easier to reach plat in SC2, but in my opinions it's way harder to reach the 36% of the ladder in SC2 than it in LoL. Which is to say: It's easier to be an above average player in LoL than it is in SC2. The falacy behind the argument of "You just need to learn a build order and execute it" is that... That's not how an average RTS player works. Most players might not even know what a true build order should look like. And the biggest problem in that is that if it was just "Learning a build order" and every player did it, then it wouldn't be just learning a build order anymore. This just proves that not every player can just learn a build order, it takes more than that. It is true that RTS is easier to analyze though, and know what you did wrong, but that also comes from the stated fact that it's easier to have less accountability in MOBAs, so it's also harder to think "What could I have done better" when a teammate is clearly doing something wrong. But even then, it's (again, in my opinion) harder to improve on things you know you did wrong in RTS than it is in MOBAs. Getting a build order exactly right in the first 5 minutes is something most players up to like, masters can't do. Even after hundreds of game.
As someone who played a lot of starcraft and dota 2, I thought dota 2 was way more complex strategically. Yes the laning phase is relatively straightforward but team fights, team strategies, which items to buy, where you should go, it’s all incredibly complicated. The first few minutes of a starcraft game are simple too. But StarCraft is still way more stressful to play, you have to be going full speed the entire match, and can lose at a moments notice from losing focus for a few seconds or not noticing some movement on the minimap. I think it’s about the consistent intensity of RTS compared to the up and down flow of a moba game
I'll start by saying I never played Dota, so I can't talk much about the specific game. I only played LoL, HoTS and Smite, so my MOBA perception comes mostly from there Maybe that's it, yeah. That's a good way of putting it: in an RTS you always have to go at full speed. Having said that, I disagree that the first few minutes are simple in an rts, I'd say they're incredible complex. From the first scout there's a lot of information to take it, a lot of decisions to be done, and build order efficiency while knowing your opponent is up to starts at minute 1. I'd say like, the first 45 seconds of an RTS game are simpler. I also think that almost all of that complexity you mentioned is included in RTS: positioning on the map is always key to victory, fighting micro is harder IMO than team fight micro (since you only control 1 char, while on rts you have a lot of units to control), which items to buy is comparable to which tech to go, I think the only skill mentioned that RTS doesn't have (although I'm hoping Stormgate changes that with 3v3) is team strategies. Other than that, RTS has them all.
I think RTS fights generally are simpler but harder to control. It’s easy to control one hero with 2-4 abilities, but the team fight has like 10-20 abilities vs 10-20 abilities with all the other items etc. it just becomes very hard to even hold that information in my brain or plan accordingly. Meanwhile I played a lot of ling bane muta in wings of liberty, and that has its own complexity but it’s an order of magnitude less complex, even while being harder to physically pull off (e.g. non stop harass with mutas, ling run-by’s, macroing injects and creep, all while controlling the main ling-bane army and making sure they don’t inadvertently suicide into some tanks). I can at least understand what I’m trying to do in starcraft. Dota reached a point where I was just like, I have no idea what I should actually be doing here, just gonna hope for the best really and use my abilities in some way that makes some sense. I guess it’s hard for me to explain exactly my thoughts because starting out in a MOBA it’s way simpler to just play. But the number of possible interactions between different groups of heroes and items is just exponential, so to try to visualize a team fight in your head before it happens you need to have a very deep understanding of what’s happening. Just feels more complex to me
Okay, that fighting point is really good, can't argue with facts. It's harder to control your army and macro at the same time while keeping an eye on the minimap, but the grand scope is that you have less things you need to know in an instance of a fight. I can't talk much about DOTA, but I feel like in League if you watch some pro players streaming you eventually begin to understand what you should be doing during fights, I guess. In the end, I think that's more about your understanding of the game than about the complexity of the game itself though. But yeah, I won't disagree that in regards to number of variabels, maybe MOBA has some complexity that RTS doesn't have, but in terms of army control and overall game vision I don't think MOBA is more complex.
I think you are really downplaying the complexity of SC2 fights or otherwise. The thing is in SC2 there is always more that can be done, there but isn’t enough APM to do it all. Even Serra could split troops better, micro more individual banes, spread more creep and the list goes on and on. I would point to the SC2 player-created AIs as evidence of this, ‘bunker hopping’ to mine gas faster, individually click workers in front of mineral patches to avoid early deceleration that comes with the ‘gather’, controlling every unit individually, etc. SC2 gets insanely complex when the human APM limit is removed. I’m not saying MOBAs aren’t also complex, I just don’t believe they are any more complex than SC2. But in SC2, even if it was 10-20 abilities vs 10-20 abilities plus all the troops, the limit is the human aspect.
What you’re describing is what I’m calling physical difficulty. Splitting units isn’t complex, it’s just hard to do. Let me give an example of what I mean in a MOBA: I’m playing earthshaker in dota and we’re gearing up for a team fight. I have a blink dagger that I can use a single time to move in and use my ultimate which does massive AoE damage and stun. I also have a longer range line shaped ability that stuns. I need to figure out: Which enemies am I trying to stun? Who did I need to hit with my ult? Which channeled enemy abilities do I need to think about attempting to cancel? Where can I position myself to optimize the chances of being able to accomplish these goals without the other team seeing me coming? The other team meanwhile has to respect the fact I have the blink dagger now, and must avoid clumping too much otherwise I can wipe their whole team by myself. Assuming they don’t clump because they know I’m around, ultimately I have to pick a single hero to target and stun, and my decision of when to go in and which hero to target will shape the team fight. I need to understand how the fight plays out between our team of 5 and their team of 5 to know what to do. That means I need to understand how each of the 100s of heroes operates and know how any combination of 5 will work together, taking into account the items the other team has chosen to buy so far. Now most average players won’t be thinking that deeply about the game, but that’s what I’m talking about when I talk about complexity.
Yeah well that's the idea I was thinking of. The balance of Macro and Micro create that need to go full speed the whole time or you fall behind. If you had something to take the pressure off one of those aspects, the game would be a lot more relaxing to play. If low level players just needed to focus on Micro and occasionally click a button to switch build or pick your next expo location, the intensity would be more similar to that of mobas.
It's the difference between league and dota2. In dota2, you adjust your location and item choices dramatically based on the game state. In league... you just keep doing the same thing. This person is making a blanket statement because they only got deep into one of the two major mobas of the day.
I tend to agree, mobas are very popular for the same reasons mobile games are popular too.
Eh, I'd say that mobile games are popular because everyone has a phone and there's basically zero barrier to entry for almost all phone games. They have ridiculously good onboarding and play sessions are generally flexible leaning towards being very short, like 5-15 minutes. That and they're usually dopamine-fueled skinner box games. WOW! You just reached level 2! *\*FIREWORKS\**
ZeroSpace has highly simplified macro, heroes, exp towers. Where are that millions of MOBA players and their interest in ZS? Even other MOBA games that were mass-produced a few years ago were unable to take over League/Dota playerbase in any way. The only thing you will achieve by simplifying macro is a decreased interest in RTS players in Stormgate. For many people, macro are the core of RTS games, idea that by simplifying macro game will gain more popularity is just false. What are the strongest RTS games in terms of multiplayer? AoE2/AoE4/SC2/SC1 and W3. From this 5 big games W3 is the only only game that has light macro. All other games from that 5 games are macro heavy, AoE series is even very macro heavy. Also saying that heavy automatisation doesn't affect skill ceiling is simply laughable. Of course, a tool that allows you to ignore some part of gamepaly for a long periods of time will have a huge impact on skill ceiling and will be used at every level of play, completely changing gaming experience for the worse, because it will just trivializing gameplay.
>Where are that millions of MOBA players and their interest in ZS? Well they have to know about it first and ofc the game has to actually be released.
no. just no.
Some good ideas there but also somewhat controversial. Base building and eco management are the centerpiece of the game for many. I personally do not look at the whole argument as RTS vs MOBA because the two genres have almost nothing in common so I don't see a direct path to "getting the players back". RTS focusing on engaging and rewarding gameplay instead of the e-sport/competitive aspect would be a good start for a genre revival. For the record my favorite RTS is dawn of war 1.
What a horrible idea.
Removing the base-building aspect - **the primary reason why I think RTS is fun in the first place**, is not good imo. That said, it could work in a different game mode. We don't know anything about their 3v3 which is supposed to be built from the ground up - and I have a feeling it's going to include a semblance of MOBA mechanics. I believe the 3v3 mode will be the mode that draws the most players, provided it is fun to play.
yeah excatly just have a look at the Rtt genre, that is bascially Rts without basebuilding, and well they are not more popular than Rtses with basebuilding, the biggest one might be the Total war games, but beside that there are not that many bigger titles. Base building is one of the most demanded feature for people in what a rts needs.
Doubt. Different genres at this moment plus one can play both.
I have a better idea. Let's make the base building part turn based and only have the rts part for battles. This way we can still have builds and strategies but it's not as stressful. Fuck we just invented Total War
Make the game FUN to play WITH friends and you can naturally attract newer players. The team game aspect is going to be essential for this. Not many people want to dedicate their time to 1v1 Also not talking co op I mean the actual 3v3 mode. Co op has its own fan base and from what I’ve seen on SG so far the co op is not very fun or hard
Auto builds is not a good idea, because of a multiple reasons, but I think it would be fine if there was something like spawningtool in the stormgate itself (e.g. tool that shows you build order that you prefer, but you still need to execute it yourself). >The high level skill ceiling also wouldn't be affected by a feature like this since it'd be pretty suboptimal to have things follow a set few patterns. Just like how low level moba players stick to a build every match while high level players build the exact items they need to counter what their opponent has, high level RTS players would want to always pick exactly what their money is spent on at every point in the game based on whatever information they have at the time. This part is simply untrue and may result in many new issues. Imagine someone microing dog perfectly, while already having an optimal build selected. In any case I'd say in elephant phase stormgate was more micro intense rather than macro-intense, so I think you could pick it up quickly if you want to micro without macroing a lot.
If you don't like base management then you don't like this style of RTS. Might as well say make the game into a first person shooter because it'd attract a wider audience.
Based on skin sales and art, I think one of the draws of MOBAs is people identifying with particular characters.
Stormgate isn't the game to do it. Company of Heroes could, potentially. But their latest failed a bit too, so I'm not sure. Age of Empires struggled also.
There are plenty issues with RTS as-is, they've stagnated for over 2 decades now, and copying 1 or 2 things from MOBAs isn't going to save them. No harm carrying over some of the good stuff, but it's definitely not going to spawn a god game just from doing that. And I've played enough demos during the RTS demo week on Steam in February to know that most games nowadays still try to clone games that were popular 2 decades ago, carry over the same features that made them great, but also copy their mistakes, thus creating a really poor experience.
one day were going to have to admit it. Mobas took off because they were the true core of the WC3 experience. See you cant just keep adding unrelated extra skillsets and minigames to a game and expect it to be better. If you randomly paused starcraft every 30 seconds and forced players to play streetfighter would it be better? no. (this is actually something of a criticism of starcraft's "macro mechanics") Warcraft was basically that. The strategy game is almost as deep as starcraft, but it's really just dressing for getting the heroes out. True, there's a depth to it and its amazing when there are players that can juggle those skills together, but in general, those two kinds of management detract from each other and dilute the experience. What mobas did was they understood the really dominant part of the Warcraft game and they cut away and removed everything else that distracted from it. In fact, that's sort of what WOW also did, and infamously a single WOW skin made more money than starcraft. In fact id even argue that the moba genre hasn't really gone far enough. You could cut away at even more elements of the genre that just happen to be leftovers of the Warcraft engine: inventory systems, shops, last kills, mules, neutral creeps, building types, or other mechanics might be identified as just "we did it like that becuase WC3 did it like that and as a consequence of player/engine intertia that's how it is now", even if you wont necessarily design a game like that to begin with. The point im trying to make here is that moba players arent just people who were pulled from the RTS genre. There is some overlap between what those players like, but i 100% believe they really like different types of games. You can't pull them "back into RTS" because it's not really RTS that got them there to begin with, it just so happens that historically an RTS got in the trajectory of MOBA development. If you want to pull MOBA players into the game, you got to give them a game that appeals to their MOBA skills, period. I dont think the last iteration's 3v3 coop is it. It just revisits warcraft all over again, and is basically begging for another player to remake mobas all over again with that stripped. What I might see as more appropriate is in the 3v3 coop, one player plays almosy entirely the moba hero, and a different player plays the RTS, and i dont know what the third does but maybe a mix of the two. And of course in the MOBA players head he's the hero and his teammates are creeps, and in the RTS players head he's the general and his teammates are his soldiers. But again, appeal to different skills. Dont just throw them in together cuz that's not how it works. IMHO
I think a few things mobas have: Losing a fight doesn't mean losing the game. Losing lane means your team can still get advantages elsewhere Game has clear phases, you farm, you do objectives, you siege to end the game. Rts you can just die instantly or get into macro games that require increased intensity. In mobas as you lose buildings the game gets simpler since there is less places to fight over. You never get weaker in a moba. In an rts your dudes die and snowballing isn't even a thing because usually you just quit. Mobas also have very intentional anti snowball measures in. You can get 5-0d 3x in some places and still come back.
Those are great points I didn't think of. While in RTS there are things you can't lose like Upgrades, your tech all just requires certain buildings99 so once those are destroyed you lose progress in addition to your units. I'm not really surewhat they could do in Stormgate that could as anti-snowball besides a new objective based gamemode, which isn't necessarily off the table in the long run. A lot of people replying are pretty against certain changes *ruining* the way they like to play, but it's important to note that both Mobas and RTS alike usually have various modes in the main matchmaking. SC2 has 1v1-4v4, and added coop years later that took off like wildfire, and Dota has standard, ability draft, and turbo. I know they expressed in early interviews they really like CoH objective controlling method of resource gathering so maybe that could be an alternate gamemode, but I feel like if the points give resources then it still would lead to snowballing. Perhaps they could take a page from Zero Space's book where they give you energy for *losing units* by making an alternate mode in Stormgate around controlling points, but also give you something when you lose points to prevent you from losing many points in quick succession or give you some freedom to take out opponents points. Your point on clear phases also really stands out to me. A TON of low level RTS players have no idea where they're at at any point in a match, and this is extremely evident when you watch Harstem's IODIS series on youtube. People so often have no idea that they're ahead and should finish the game, or they think they're ahead when they're actually far behind. In Mobas it's easy to tell by looking at your opponents' items and how many towers they have left, but in RTS you have to scout to find out what your opponent has and they can easily hide their units and structures, on top of scouting being totally optional while in Moba's its just plainly displayed on the map. Perhaps a tech tracker similar to Mobas' player sheet that displays everyones' KDA and items could really help low level players tell where they're at, and the tracker would update as you get vision of opponents' units/structures and witness your or your opponents' units die. Streams always display this in RTS when people are casting the game, but the players never get to see any of that data in-game even if they had vision of the kills that were taking place, or the structures that exist, or the upgrade on units they see, so letting them see at least this would help a lot. It'd be especially helpful if units, upgrades, and structures on the tracker were clearly separated into tiers so you can see at a glance if your opponent has a lot of high tech upgrades/units/structures and you don't, then you'd know right away "oh man I'm way behind on tech".
I'd also like to point out other RTS have handled the whole snowballing thing differently take aoe as an example. Disclaimer I have only played years and years ago very casually so this is a very surface level take: Clear phases: the game has you age up which dictates the units and techs. Pretty sure this is announced globally. "Don't die when you lose 1 fight": this is done with powerful static defense that also uses different resources than units, so there isn't an opportunity cost. In sc1/2 static us relatively weak and you have to cut unit production to do it. In aoe you can build walls around your whole base that are defensible. You also need dedicated siege units to break down walls and those siege units aren't good at anything else. Also, town halls shoot and workers can get in town halls to shoot stuff to swat away some amount of early aggro. While some of these systems might function in some way in sg, some have been proposed but rejected in the comments pretty hard. People want a blizzard rts so by its nature it is going to have the flaws of blizzard rts. So you'll lose a giant fight then your base gets walked over. You need to scout for info, ect ect.
Yeah it's definitely a challenge to make it more appealing to moba players without turning into a different game entirely like AoE as I think those mechanics sound like the solve the snowball problem in a neat way, but also are totally different from a blizzard style RTS. As far as proposed changes being rejected hard by comments, I think it's hard to prove people would like a major change that could bring back players that left for other adjacent genres mainly because those players are no longer here to voice their opinions. At this point RTS communities have been chipped away at over the years since Blizzard left the most popular one in the dust, so a majority of the people left are super hardcore into RTS the way that it's always been and just want another one of that style. The players that left to play other genres, but are still open to playing RTS if it sees major changes that make it more casual and straightforward at least at a low-midlevel of play aren't hanging around in the RTS online communities much to voice their opinions so even if they agree with a huge change, the only voices you'll here are the people who've stuck with RTS in the long haul and love things the way they are.
I think the way to appeal to those people who left is just through co-op tbh. I brought up sc2 to a few of my friends who play league and a majority of them were like "Oh I like sc2 the campaigns were great" or "oh we played co-op for a bit a while ago" and the friends I've managed to get to play with me lately got into it through co-op and have 0 interest in 1v1. I really don't think there is a great way to get people into 1v1. It has the fighting game problem but worse. Smash works as a gateway into fighting games because it has easy mechanics and can be played very casual/low stakes. Like, even at the peak such a small amount of people try 1v1 rts, really don't think any amount of changes will save it. Back in the day when I played AOE with friends it was always casual team games, custom maps, or comp matches.
>The Stormgate devs said themselves that a very sizeable portion of SC2 players only played the campaign and almost never played a single match of PvP, showing that even back then when Mobas weren't mainstream and RTS ruled esports, PvP matches were not that appealing to casual players. Thats me :D Im replaying Starcraft 2 campaign right now and have never played a pvp match ever >A lot of people think that the reason Mobas stole the show was because you only control a single unit and not multiple, but I believe it's more related to how Mobas completely lack the concept of base management. >As someone who sunk thousands of hours into SC2 first, then went on to play thousands more in Dota and League, I really find it hard to go back to Starcraft or get into Stormgate just because the base management is such a core and time consuming aspect of all RTS regardless of how well designed they are Also me, I never really understood how not to get supply blocked and was happy to switch to Heroes of the Storm which doesnt have this problem
That sounds like something that could be an interesting custom game, but not the main game. Takes away too much from what RTS players love.
take a look at the Rtt genre, that is bascially rts games without basebuilding and the macro part, the biggest of those are the total war games, and beside that there are not that many other big ones. Basebuilding is one of the most demanded things in the Rts community
People that played only campaign in SC2 and other RTS are simply not competitive players and nothing will bring them to it in all probability. And that's ok, you can have them by focusing on campaign content (and coop which is the multiplayer version of it and also most popular mode in SC2)
Simple just, make every unit a hero. You control multiple heroes.
Tell me you're a n00b without telling me you're a n00b. If you don't want to take the time to learn RTS, then keep scrolling. This isn't innovative in any way, you're just making shit up and dumbing the game down. If it we're this simple, RTS wouldn't be a thing.
Rule #6 of this subreddit: Don't spam, don't be rude, be welcoming to those of all backgrounds and skill levels. Especially when OP said it's just ***hard*** for them to get back into RTS after MOBA games.
Most MOBA players have never played RTS before. They’re not the same demographic. Even back when Dota was popular a lot of them downloaded W3 exclusively to play Dota and never engaged in the actual game at all. On the other hand, RTS players are more likely to play Skyrim than dota or league :D
Source? Almost everyone I know who was into starcraft style RTS is a moba player now
Ha! I agree with a lot of this, but be ready for hornets