What is it with the damsel getting mad at her rescuer?

As the armies battle outside for control of the prison, the hero bursts into the cell where his love his held. She sees him enter and is, for a moment, filled with joy that he has returned to rescue him. Then she sees him. He's scarred and wearied, his mind and body burdened by the violence he has used to get here. He's not the man she knew. She storms out, disgusted by what he has become.

What a stupid woman, right? I mean, sure he did some bad things, but they were necessary and for her. She should be grateful!

He lets her go stay with her friends while he meets back with his war counsel. While she's off moping he continues the fight against their enemy. Is it vengeance? Justice? Is he doing it to protect her? Regardless, he's the one in the action. Of course in previous stories she was tough, and still plays the part, but now she's just a prisoner to be rescued, a ship to be protected in the final battle, and overall a burden with all her unreasonable emotions.

I might have my gendered pronouns backward in all that. The dark hero is Sarah Kerrigan while the damsel in distress in James Raynor. Of course there is nuance; it would be a terribly boring story otherwise. But there's the overall narrative: the gender-flipped but otherwise classic story of the stoic hero who does what needs to be done and the emotionally-torn damsel in need of saving.

Heart of the Swarm gameplay

Starting points: Everything I did was on normal difficulty. I only repeated a mission once when I realized that I'd missed a Xel'naga crystal while killing primal zerg. I played to see the story, not to hunt achievements or for speed.

Wings of Liberty seemed a lot harder. Some of those final missions against hybrids felt almost impossible, but I got through them, with some difficulty. Maybe that's because it was primarily a Terran game and then suddenly had strange new units thrown in at the end. Maybe I've gotten better since then, considering I've done some multiplayer since then and that's pretty good training for aggressive play and a good economy.

I did get a little nervous when trying to pop more scourge nests, possibly because I've never quite gotten used to dealing with creep tumors. And Odin (super-Thor unit from the first game) was a bit of a surprise. As a result, I didn't have any lurkers ready and entirely forgot about them. That was stupid and made things much harder, since I'd picked the type that was strong against heavily armored enemies. Don't use mutalisk spam to deal with Thors.

This isn't a criticism of Heart of the Swarm. If anything, normal mode in Wings of Liberty was perhaps too difficult. Normal shouldn't be a walk in the park, but the player should retain at least 99% of their hair during each mission. It should push you a bit, make you nervous, but should not overwhelm the player or make them want to cheat just to get past a mission. Heart of the Swarm made me nervous, made me step up my game a little, but never made me want to break any computer hardware.

The missions themselves were a mixed bag of mixed things in bags. There were some standard "build lots of big units and blow up everything". There were some of the indoor missions where you use Kerrigan and a few handfuls of units (these are the zerg, after all; even their sneaking groups are in the dozens). There were some odd one-time mechanics, such as the freezes, which were then strangely absent in the very next mission on the same planet. There were many fights that made me glad I'd raided in WoW; they were dances of keeping the important people moving and out of the bad stuff. From that perspective, the primal zerg were essentially a lot of trash followed by a few small raid boss fights. But maybe that's just the old saying, "when you need to nail something in, then everything looks like a hammer."

I enjoyed all of the missions. None felt like the same thing as the one before. Only once, when dealing with the scourge nests, did I feel as if the entire thing was just a gimmick dressed up like an RTS. Each mission had its own problem to solve, yet they weren't all quite the same, except for the common thread that tied them all together.

There was a common theme: Kerrigan at the front of the swarm leading a gigantic army. Wings of Liberty tempted me with all sorts of fancy things such as cloaking units and nuclear weapons. I guess that's the Terran way. The Zerg way was a whole lot of units. Maybe they were zerglings with an evolution mission to spawn three instead of only two, though I went with the hopping variant instead. Maybe it was my fleet of mutalisks or my not-as-vulnerable-to-missile-turrets army of hydralisks.

Whatever it was, I had a lot of it and I always had more of it coming. I didn't smash into my enemy once and then retreat. I'd smash into them and keep pushing. I don't know if it is more experience with the game or from playing zerg instead of Terrans, but I didn't care about causalities. If I took massive casualties but destroyed an important base, that was just fine. I had reserves. That was fun! It's all well and good to win with a superior strategy, but why not win with a superior economy?

It sounds silly, but I liked that the way I won was the way they'd win in the story: with a Zerg rush. Of course Kerrigan taught her brood mothers a bit of cunning, but ultimately the Zerg prevails through numbers and a complete disregard for casualties.

Just like riding a bicycle, but totally different

Think about riding a bike.  What do you remember?  Keep pedaling, since it's easier to balance when you're moving.  Balance is important because falling hurts.  Falling is an inefficient form of transportation.  Being inefficient means your parents force you to walk slowly but eat while jumping up and down for the rest of the day to show you why efficiency is important.

Beside all that critical information, you remember the muscle memory.  You remember how to pedal, balance, roll a fall and hide tears, and quietly run when no one can see you.

I started playing Starcraft 2 again.  Intellectually, it all comes right back.  I know to build a wall and what a bioball is and that I need to upgrade my units.  The actual actions are another story.  The rhythm is gone, so marines yell that they're ready to go and I don't have a second set already queued up a moment before.  The clicking is all wrong, with selection failure and consequently, control groups are all wrong.

Some people wish they could go back to the past and tell their past selves what they know now.  But as we all know, we didn't do dumb stuff because we didn't know better, we did it because we were stupid (the politically-correct term is "young").  The smart action is to go back and ask your past self what they know, since you're old and forgot.  Alternatively, kidnap them and force them to play Starcraft for you.

Semi-automated Starcraft

Let's all recognize this as a safe space where we can all say that we're bad at Starcraft without fear of shame.  What's a noob to do?

In general, there are three aspects: economics, tactics, and strategy.  Economics involves securing bases, bringing in resources, and spending those resources in a timely manner for new units and upgrades.  Logistics wins wars.  On the tactical level, you want to manage the precise positioning of units, unit-specific abilities, movement, and precise timing.  And last, but should have probably been first, there is the strategy: when you're going to attack, what units you plan to use, where you're going to attack and where you're going to expand.

At the very least, you need strategy and economics or you're going to have no army and no ability to use it.  Tactics cannot fix a bad strategy or economy, though bad enough tactics can ruin even an otherwise good game.  Some people can manage all three.  Some people can barely manage one.  I can do two at a time, but at almost any time, one of them is being neglected.  The result is that players like me tend to lose a lot.  It's not much fun.

Of course practice would help.  I could play a few games focusing only on one aspect, get that embedded, and move on to the next.  If I had all the time in the world then that might be just fine, but without it, those "training games" are really just me getting my ass kicked.  The frustration and time wasted outweighs the learning.

Automation could help with this.  Allow the player to hand off to the AI a particular aspect of the game.  Such games would be considered distinct game modes, so that all players in a match are using the AI for the same aspect.  For example, in a game where the AI is set to manage the economics, you could tell the AI to keep a certain number of units built at all times and learn upgrades in a certain order as resources are available, allowing you as the player to focus on expanding and tactics.

This would allow players to focus on either their strengths, offloading their weakest skill to the AI, or their weaknesses, giving them the mental space to focus and learn.

I have to come clean about this

I want to start off to make sure we're all in the right context with this: this isn't a long-term thing. Not yet, at least. It only started recently. But it's so good. Not good good, but it feels good, you know? While I do it, it's pretty nice. I know it's not doing me any good. It's not helping those who rely on me. It's probably just annoying to anyone else. Laughable, really. Well, if it wasn't a problem.

I like to think of myself as a gamer. I like the sound of it. But maybe that's not an accurate term anymore. Maybe if I can kick this, but that's a maybe, an if, and frankly I'm not sure how likely it is.

I asked a friend who know a bit about this stuff if he could help me try it out. His girlfriend knows more and maybe she could have helped me, seen what was going on before it was too late. But maybe it was too late the second I considered it. Once I took that first step, it's like the final road with no sidepaths. There certainly isn't a high road. I'm not saying I blame my friend. He did what he could with what he knew. He didn't know better and I should have known that. I'd just wanted to try it out. Something different. A new experience, you know?

And no, this isn't some long-winded roundabout joke about how I tried another MMO. It's about something more real. Or at least something that we see the financial aspects a bit more, with the few big-timers who can get rich off it while the rest of us, well we do what we do.

I made a void ray. I liked it. So I made another. And another. Pretty soon I had a dozen void rays and not much else. But it did the trick. And then I started another game and a dozen void rays got someone scared and hiding behind a wall of turrets with their command center already destroyed along with the expansion. That was supposed to be the last game of the night, but then I started another one. This didn't go as well. Considering my almost total ignorance of protoss mechanics, I think I did okay. With a bit more care I might have pulled off a win, thought it would have been close.

They might be expensive and terrible against lots of small enemies, but damn; they're so flexible. Air or ground, they can hit it. They can fly. I'm so used to terran armies, mostly based on the ground, since while their power isn't weak, it is the ground that they rule. Well, and any air that has marines under it. They are powerful, but harder to move around. Voids rays, those can go anywhere. And wow are they impressive against buildings.

Maybe I can shake this. I hope I can, because I don't think there is any future in it. Maybe you can take this as a cautionary tale. Void rays are not "one-time fun, one time and done. They are not a one-time thing. Maybe they're fun once, but when you find yourself sucked in and trapped, that fades.

Consistency of Play

Some people don't like that WoW starts off with success based on how you play. Then comes raiding, when your ability to play your class still matters, but progression is based on learning new dances, mostly meaning standing in particular places at particular times. They don't seem to think this is much fun.

They might be wrong. It could be that the problem is not the dancing, but raiding, that they as individuals have done it for too long. If they think the learning has shifted from class-based to dance-based, maybe they've just played that class for too long. Dancing may not be the problem at all.

I think they're right, though. I've found a similar pattern in other games. The core gameplay is one type, but some bits of content radically shift away from that.

Poor Rogues
Rogues may have it the worst. The sneaky types, maybe rogues, bandits, assassins, people who are supposed to be in shadows. For much of the game they can sneak. Much of the time they can stay hidden, strike for quick kills, and then vanish. Then come the bosses.

Bosses like to ignore stealth rules. They know where you are unless you're lucky and the devs specifically scripted the boss to be "dumb" and not always know where you are. Apparently not being omniscient makes you stupid. What all this means is that what your role is based on: quick damage from shadows, often with poor defense and health, is ruined. Rogues in WoW may have it the worst, but I have never run into a game that handles sneaking well when bosses are involved.

Minigames are stupid
I don't like minigames much. Maybe some here and there, as an idle distraction, but not much past that. I like to play the game I signed up for, not some gimmick that someone tacked on top of it.

RTS

If it is an RTS, I want base-building. I want to build buildings and units and if we're feeling really fancy, have upgrades and technologies. But the buildings and the units are essential. Given this, I don't like missions that give me a few units and tell me to navigate some strange maze of unusually well-planned and perfectly-timed traps. Does it require greater tactical skill to manage them perfectly with no economy giving room for error? Sure. But that doesn't make it more fun. Can you imagine a multi-player Starcraft game where everyone starts with a dozen random units are are told to duke it out? That might be cool, once or twice, but eventually it would get boring and annoying and we'd want our base-building maps back.

Economic management, so-called macro, is critical. Managing production and gathering, expanding well, getting units to where they need to be, these are critical to the gameplay, even before anyone has started shooting. It's like the American Civil War, in which big government accountants crushed the Confederacy, not through martial prowess, but through industrial might.

Splinter Cell
I like the sneaking aspect of the series. I like the finding paths through areas and better ways to kill everyone. I like when there are no bullets leaving enemy guns. Shadows and stealth.

The semi-recent one, Splinter Cell: Conviction is a fine game. I like some of the new mechanics and it was definitely worth whatever discounted price I paid for it. And at times it even gives a sneaky twist to the shootouts, with some shadows and enemies who remember last positions rather than just where I am always. But then there are the levels where I get dumped into a shootout. There is cover, but not much concealment, and of course since it is the middle of a fight, everyone has their flashlights out, so even if there was any space for hiding, I couldn't. These fights piss me off.

Let there be shadows! This doesn't mean that shootouts are bad by themselves. I've played FPS that were just constant bullets with barely any cover and they were fine. But those were what was consistent with the game. So within these games, it is often the sneaking levels that I enjoy less, and the vehicle fights even less than sneaking, such as the "we'll drive a truck and turn constantly so you can't aim, now shoot the tanks with perfect aim and hitscan shells" or the classic "enemy aircraft are coming, use this anti-aircraft gun with a painfully slow turn rate or we'll all die."

Last Bold Type
There is nothing wrong with a different play. Variety is nice. But when players expect, and are almost consistently given, one type of play, and then are randomly or unexpectedly pushed into a significantly different way of playing, that can be a major turn-off.

Meaningful decisions must be permanent, for a short time

Why would any ever level up that class? It's terrible! All the other classes beat it at its main role. I feel sorry for anyone who plays that class. But it won't last, because I bet next month they'll be overpowered again.

It's pretty hard to pick a class when balance is a factor.

But good news! I found this great game where you can reroll in only a few minutes. A few clicks can change your "race" and from there you can customize extensively. If you screw up, you'll get a new opportunity in a short while.

But don't confuse this for some trivial game of throwaway decisions! What you do matters. How you specialize will affect how you play and how your enemy must react. Of course there are some cookie-cutter specializations, but variety is critical, because standard specs can only take you so far. Eventually you're going to need to mix it up, or at least play especially well. Yep, there's also a skill element to it, and no matter how well you follow the formula, you still need to be able to think and adapt, quickly.

What is this wonderful game of specialization and skill? World of Warcraft? Don't make me laugh. EVE? Please. LotRO? More like LOL! Also, not league of legends.

This game is Starcraft 2.

Yes, I did just say that. It has meaningful decisions, that last a very short time.

Will you go for a mechanical army? Then you'd better have the resources to support it. And the upgrades. And structures. If you change your mind halfway in and decide you want infantry instead, go for it, but you're not getting a refund.

Maybe your enemy is going heavy air. Well then anti-air units would be handy. So I hope you've not specialized in something ground-oriented like siege tanks and marauders. I guess you should have kept some marines around. But don't spam them, lest a colossus or ten show up in a few minutes.

After so long feeling stuck on one character and one class, it's liberating to choose, choose, and choose, different every time if I want, trying new things without forking over gold or whatever other currency (time) the developers demand. One day I might go with a lot of marine-marauder drops, the next I'm working on reaper harassment, and then I'm using ground-heavy mixes for the fight after that. Maybe I even mix them all together, taking advantage of each unit as it becomes available and discarding it when it wears out, dipping into upgrades here and there without committing 100% to any one thing, as a jack of trades who can outmaneuver the master of one.

But again, these aren't meaningless, trivial decisions. There are consequences. Victory or defeat. So I want to learn and I want to do better. But for all the permanence of the decisions, they only last a short time, so I can move on from failures rather than be burdened by them. That's not something you can easily do if you find yourself playing the wrong class this month.

However I don't think simple class-switching is the solution, since then everything becomes meaningless. The genre is slower, with days or weeks as the scale, rather than minutes. To shorten the effect of a decision could weaken it too much, destroy the meaning, the need to plan it out or think it through.

Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go regret attempting to make a sneaky-type character in Dragon Age: Origins. And if anyone is interested in a three year old game, I'm sure I'll have more to say about it in a few days.

When I see a bad idea, I think, "Hey, I should try that!"

While with my awesome nerd friends (the same who gave me this shiny newer computer) we watched a bit of "when cheese fails", a show dedicated to replays of people trying cheap (cheese) strategies, and failing at it. For example, this might be a protoss player using very fast cannons as a "cannon rush" or "cannon contain" in which mass photon cannons are used to bottle in or attack the enemy. The overall concept of cheese is interesting to me, seeing whether people consider it valid or not, what they think is or is not cheese. And why the fuck do they call it cheese?

The particular replay was of a protoss-terran battle, in which the terran attempted to use a few early marines, along with most of his SCVs, to attack the enemy earlier than would be expected, even building a bunker to really hold the line. But he managed to be insufficiently aggressive and generally tactically failful and was defeated, leaving him with a weak economy which was soon overrun.

Then we played a 2v2 match, as terran-zerg matched with random-random who turned out to be terran-protoss. I did something unusual: I scouted. Yea, I'm that guy who doesn't scout and then gets terribly surprised when a horde of enemies arrives to which I have no counters. So there I was, scouting, with my SCV, when I thought "Hey, there's a bad idea; I should try that!"

So I built a barracks. It wasn't planned. Just an impulse. I normally build a barracks about now and this is the SCV I have selected, so why not build it here?

Here's the area I was working in.



1 is where a normal person might build this so-called "proxy barracks". From there it can quickly bring units to the front lines and blocks the enemy from expanding. Also it's not likely to be noticed very quickly. Players would have to either run all the way around, fly over (and flying takes a while unless it's a terran building or an overlord), or blast through the pile of metal there. It's a good location.

Psh.

3 is the protoss base. Sadly, that wasn't much of an option. Though now that I think of it, I might have to try that some time.

I went with 2. This area isn't in sight of the main base. Players will by habit build something there, for the sole purpose of visibility. Supply depots and pylons are popular choices. Zerg may float over an overlord. But not this protoss. And he paid for it.

Watching the replay, my SCV was for a few moments mere inches away from being seen. A wayward twitch, one extra jolt on his hover controls, and it would have been spotted. But no. That little tiny bit of grey-black fog kept him safe.

By the time I left my hiding spot I had a half-dozen marines, two barracks with reactors, and a filled bunker. One does not expect that on their doorstep. Or in this case, their back porch, since their doorstep was fairly well secured.

And so began the harassment. They'd run out and shoot something, running back at the sight of enemies, to the cover of the bunker. All the while four were being produced at a time. Eventually the protoss nexus was destroyed, many probes gone, and the pylons powering his unit-producing structures knocked down. But the day was saved with the arrival of a few siege tanks and more marines from his ally.

Except my barracks fled to live again and his base was still entirely offline. I'd been a highly successful distraction. Turns out the real threat wasn't two and a half barracks (third one got its SCV killed halfway in), but the zerg ally who was expanding and quickly saturating bases with drones, a luxury granted by my cheesy irritation.

Then he made a ton of roaches and blew up the protoss expansion, a nexus that he'd managed to build in time to avoid being revealed. Hilarity ensued as I sent a few reapers for some more obnoxiousness (that's word! AWESOME!), reapers who blew up an attempted terran expansion, and the protoss attempt to reactivate his base, a single probe with a single pylon warping in, both of which died from a single volley each. Then the roaches arrived at the main ramp. Soon later our enemies surrendered.

The game lasted about 18 minutes, which I consider somewhat quick, but obviously not super-fast. In my experience games last either 5 minutes (rush->gg), 25 (major attack->gg) or fifteen hours (anyone have any spare minerals?), so 18 would make it a quick non-rush. It might sound like the other team was bad. Maybe. Maybe not. Of course they made some significant mistakes, as did we, but ultimately I think it was one single tiny mistake which tipped everything.

He did not watch his other ramp. That's all. This isn't some massively stupid thing. Just a little tiny thing that can go terribly, terribly wrong. It's not spamming marines to fight colossi. It's forgetting a stim, once. But that small error, if exploited, can compound into a gigantic problem. Or at least a gigantic irritation.

That's something that fascinates me, whether in games or real life, how a single error can have multiplying effects, causing problems far beyond the actual mistake. I remember an arena match, a close one, but where I'm pretty sure we were on the verge of victory. One enemy was nearly dead and one ally was nearly dead. I cast blessing of protection to save the ally. Alas... I cast it on the wrong player, and rather than saving my ally, who died, it instead stopped my warrior teammate from delivering the killing blow to the nearly-dead enemy, who did not die. It came down to one single mis-click, and yet it cost the entire match.

Going back to my Starcraft strategies, which mostly revolve around being annoying while someone else did all the killing, it makes me wonder why I played a paladin for so long. Wouldn't a CC-heavy class have been better? A rogue perhaps? I actually did have a lot of fun when I played a rogue, relishing the sheer irritation that they can cause. But somehow I never switched to one. I liked tanking. Or maybe I liked short queues. Which makes me wonder if anyone would play Starcraft if it required completing the campaign first and if we needed to complete missions on hard or higher to unlock units, much like a gear grind. Wouldn't that be a pretty stupid system for competitive PvP?

We're at World of Warcraft, pick a side

Once upon a time I was a noob. I'd see pretty gear and say "ooh, pretty gear!" and then I'd attempt to get said pretty gear. Someone once called me a ninja. In retrospect I should have better explained that the dagger from SM lib was a better stabber than what I had at the time, but they didn't seem eager to listen to reason anyway.

I ran whatever place was fun. La di da dee da di dee da. I'd sing that as I played. Sometimes I'd type it as well. Sometimes with the chat box open, sometimes without. I'd turn right, left, right, i, right, left, right, stormstrike, stormstrike, right, left, right, i,right, stormstrike, stormstrike, right, left.

Or maybe e was grounding totem. It's entirely possible that e was nothing at all, since like I said, I was a noob.

I had a lot of fun being a noob.

Then I started playing 'smarter', researching builds and gear locations, trying to do things in a more optimal manner. I'd know what loot could drop before I went, without having seen it before. Still, for a while this was okay. I could wander about as a mostly noob and have fun.

There was a tipping point. A point when I began to optimize more and more. The fun started to fade. When I didn't get loot, my plan fell apart. When I did a quest at the wrong time, my plan fell apart.

It's a stupid state to be in. It is optimizing just enough to get the negative effects, without getting the fun benefit. I did play 'better', but what's the point of that if I'm having less fun?

I should have gone all the way, immersed myself in optimization, doing everything in a planned, perfect manner. Get this and this and that perfectly aligned. Go all the way. At that point I could have enjoyed the optimization itself. But I didn't go far enough.

Instead I got stuck in the middle. I had some idea of better ways, but wasn't quite motivated enough to get to all of them. I had some ideas of better results, but lacking the ways, wasn't quite there.

Smart people can know they are smart. Stupid people, as a blessing to them and curse to the rest of us, often do not know they are stupid. Incidentally, that's a scientific fact, that generally speaking at low ends of the scale, confidence and ability are inversely related. But I had the worst of all worlds. I was a stupid person given the knowledge of what he was.

Ignorance of one's own ignorance is bliss.

It didn't end there. In Starcraft I'm finding myself loving the theorycraft and tactics and just having this new set of rules to play with. But I'm not so great at execution. My mouse speed and accuracy aren't quite where they'd need to be. I get distracted by shinies. Doubtlessly, time will help, but in the meantime I'm stuck in the situation of being fully aware that I'm not particularly good. I really should just pick a side. I could be hardcore and practice and learn and get it all right. Or I could care less (meaning reduce my amount of caring, not to be confused with the often incorrectly stated phrase "couldn't care less") and clap my hands with glee if I make my first marines at ten minutes.

Incidentally, who else associates the song "Stuck in the Middle with You" with a cop getting his ear cut off, all thanks to Quentin Tarantino?

Finally, an application for a BS in Psychology: Starcraft

Specifically, BS in Starcraft.

I'm a harasser. My friend is a macroer. She can manage the constant building of massive armies of doom (usually their own doom, judging from the casualty numbers). But me? I'm an asshole. I'm a manipulative, irritating, passive-aggressive, jackass who does not ever give you a break but you can't quite lash out at me because oh poor little me what did I ever do to you?

As a bad player, I am well aware of the concept of negative momentum. You're losing and off-balance, so you keep losing and stay off-balance. Economy wrecked? That means a slow recovery and reduced aggression. Economy threatened, but not actually damaged? Reduced aggression too, there's defense to do! And then the other side has the initiative. They can now choose where to attack. They can build anywhere they want, because you're holed up, waiting for the next attack. Meanwhile you cannot expand, because expansions are vulnerable, so you starve in a little hole, wondering if you can ever escape.

I've been on this side. It doesn't help that I'm often overly defensive, not expanding until I think I can fully defend, which is a ridiculous notion, since failure to expand means limited resources which make it harder to build up a force to defend with, meanwhile the lack of pressure means my enemy can build up more as well.

It's all about the mind games.

While my friend builds armies that knock at the front door, I'm somewhere else, killing workers, hitting expansions, knocking out a building here and there. I won't win the game. I can't. I'm not an existential threat. But I cannot be ignored either. "Pay attention to me!"

It's trolling without words.

My reapers blow up a bunch of workers and sure, it hurts, it's an economic setback, but it's hardly a death blow. Well, unless your attack gets delayed by the need to defend. Unless you get nervous and have to keep more units back to defend against this. But which angle? Better cover them all. Now you're not attacking, but defending, but defending what? I dare you to leave and you don't dare to. This is what happens when facing bad players. They get totally paralyzed. I tell them sit and stay and they sit and stay, while my friend walks up with a hammer. They see her coming but they obediently sit and stay and wait.

Somewhere in there I transition to banshees, pretty much directly after, possibly taking the tech labs and abandoning the reaper tactics entirely. They're really just a filler until I can get the more flexible banshees.

Better players fare, well, better. They might not hide quite so much. But they aren't immune. Gotta deal with the harassment. Better leave a few units back. Maybe too many. Better build a few more anti-air. Maybe too many. Better get more detectors. Maybe too many. But never quite enough. But cannot not build them.

In this latter scenario my harassment isn't physical, but mental. I'm effectively neutralized as a threat. In one particular game I was almost certain that at any moment I'd get rolled over by one serious attack, but I kept the banshees out there and visible in a false show of strength. I still cannot be ignored. So my enemy tweaks his unit mixes, changes the build slightly, isn't quite comfortable. Or fully effective. Too much anti-air is trouble when a ground army rolls in. That ground army was my friend's, terribly expensive and easily lost, but with momentum, and expansions, who cares about lost resources? A 2-1 loss ratio means nothing if the resource income is 3-1, or more.

It isn't even necessary to attack a player to influence them. They can see what happens to their ally. They react to what didn't happen to them, but could.

I've pushed protoss into spamming stalkers or photon cannons. Depleting resources, hundreds or thousands, merely to deal with a few hundred worth of banshees. Missile turrets spammed. One zerg player rushed for hydralisks before realizing that it would be siege tanks, not banshees, that would ultimately destroy him, and of those I had no shortage (at least as far as he could tell!), so he quit.

It's a bit like the adage of how we always prepare to fight the previous war. I'm the first attack and very visible. So enemies prepare for that. Meanwhile my ally is barely noticeable, might as well not exist at all, until they show up with tomorrow's war.

It was a good day. I wonder what the next day, back to a comfortable losing streak, will be like. Win, lose, still pretty damn fun.

User Interface

Also known as "UI, but UI is too short of a post title, since we all know the title must be more than two letters. For other examples, see 'FU' and 'H8', neither of which make particularly great titles, due to saying very little except some sort of generic dislike." On the other hand, run-on titles aren't so great either.

Does WoW have a good baseline UI? I have no idea. Maybe? Perhaps it is what scares away those 30% who don't get past level 10. Or those 30% just don't like MMOs or whatever you prefer to call WoW.

But who cares? WoW has a customizable UI. If it doesn't get the job done, we change it. Can't heal? UI! Can't tank? UI! Can't use the AH? UI! Can't DPS? UI!

UI? UI!

You-eye. Ooo-eee.

I don't much like this approach. It's not merely a bandaid; it's a lie. Yes, a lie. What does a custom UI say? Well okay, it could just say "I want something prettier" and that's fine. But beside that, what does it say?

"You can't play this game well enough and the problem is not your skill or the game design; the problem is that you're not looking at it correctly."

Now maybe I'm crazy, but shouldn't the default game UI be the correct way to look at the game, or at least sufficiently close that everyone (+-100%) do not feel the need to change it? Can you imagine a car like that? Oh sure, all the stuff works, and you can customize it, but maybe the windows should be at eye level, rather than foot level, by default. Of course we could drive with the windows that low, but the angle would mean a really short visual range, so drive slowly!

Healers like to whine. About how they are fighting the UI rather than playing a game. Psh. Everyone is fighting the UI. Every class has the information it needs not where it is needed, which is to say, where we are looking. Why are my cooldowns hidden away at the bottom of my screen? Why is the health of my party over on the right? The action is in the center!

We could say that these are skills to learn. Well sure, we can go with a "learn the UI" approach and block extensive customization. That sounds awful, right? Maybe. Or maybe not. Most games use this approach. Such as Starcraft 2, which I hope is an interesting topic for you, because I'm going to be talking about it a lot (or I might suddenly stop after this post, it could go either way).

Starcraft has a pretty awful, inefficient UI. If I want to build a marine, how do I do that? There's no "build marine" button. Instead I have to find a barracks, select it, build the marine. The particular barracks matters as well. It's some crazy complex stuff (not really, but let's pretend for the sake of exaggeration). I'm attacking over here (lower left), but building over here (upper right), see the problem? Just awful. But.

That's the UI that we all use. That is what we learn. We can tweak it slightly with some hotkeys and control groups, but none of us have a fancy light that pops up and says "carrier group spotted in minimap, build marines." Which may be a good thing because I'm not sure how well marines counter carriers. Maybe vikings would be better? Pretend I didn't go on that tangent (I wonder what this button labeled "backspace" does).

There's another layer to it: the actual game. The UI is not layered on the game, it is the game. The barracks builds marines. Let's say that again: the barracks builds marines. The build unit menu does not build marines. There is not so much a UI that I fight to build marines, but the game, and that game within the world simulation that it simulates. Of course with careful use of hotkeys and rally points players can halfway imitate a build unit menu despite using barracks, but ultimately the barracks builds the marine, so I have no choice but to be aware of the world and what is going on, rather than the UI. If that barracks is on fire, I do not have an alert of burning buildings, but instead the place that builds marines also can burn, so again, I am not playing the UI, but the game.

I guess what it ultimately comes down to is this: When I see someone playing, I want to think "wow, he's really good at this game" rather than "where did he get that UI?"

You may now commence commenting about how you healed hardmode something with the default UI and I'm just bad.

Being gold level doesn't mean you're remotely good at Starcraft

I finally got Starcraft and before finishing the single-player campaign, decided to delve into the scary world of getting zealot, zergling, or ze marine rushed, also known as multi-player. The first step is to say, "no, I am already awesome, I don't need practice matches." Then you do a few games to figure out an initial ranking.

It sounds like a great system. Win a bunch and you're probably a good player. Lose and you can go in the copper bracket (it's like bronze, but worse*). This way when you're playing for real glory and fame, you're playing for the correct amount of glory and fame and against people with similar capabilities in amassing glory and fame.

Sure sounds great. But me? I like to ruin the system. I didn't mean to, but it happens.

My placement matches were mostly filled with me rolling over mediocre players in about 15 minutes. I wasn't playing great or anything. Okay. Average, I'd say. Not especially fast or with any great strategy. My micro is pretty good, but that doesn't compensate for my awful macro. But my opponents... Impressively bad.

So I ended up in a gold bracket, which I think is supposed to be good. Ranked 8, which sounds pretty good to me. So of course I was frightened. Gold? I'm not a gold level player! I watch Day9 and he's talking about how really basic stuff like having a plan for your buildings is how you get out of silver or bronze, and that's what I fail at. My fail is silver-level, not gold. I should be bad at, I dunno, reaper kiting, not basic construction.

But maybe I'm expecting too much. Not only does me being at gold not mean I'm good, other players being at gold doesn't mean they're good either. My first few opponents were awful. I faced an enemy who, based on the replay, built no offensive units for at least 5 minutes, until finally he built: one reaper. His refinery went up before his first supply depot. The next opponent wasn't awful, but a slightly slow zerg player, which is disastrous for a race that must expand quickly.

Then there were the possibly good players who quit before the game was anywhere near over. They'd launch one attack which got beaten, and then surrender. I'm not an aggressive player, so it's not as if these were players making their final push for survival or trying to retake the initiative: they already had it. Though the most recent player like that at least made sense to quit, based on his strat failing horribly. He rushed, slowly, with marines and... all his SCVs. It might have worked if he'd been faster, but he delayed and I had a bunker up. So everything died and he had 10 minerals. Recovery wasn't totally impossible, given my defensive nature, since he at least had an orbital command, meaning mules could get him going again if I wasn't quick.

But before long Starcraft realized that I was clearly faced gold-plated players and set be up against solid gold. Those players promptly crushed me into the ground. Painfully. The kind of defeat where you watch the replay and start running through the tactics and seeing what you could have done better, and then realize that the second wave was right behind so you were screwed no matter the tactics.

Despite my losing record, I actually feel pretty good about 1v1. I'm ever so slowly improving. Besides, until I fall into silver, I'm ahead of where I should be, so until then I don't think I'm really losing. Sadly, 2v2 isn't the same story. My first ranking match I was with a pretty good ally and we were able to work together for a solid win. Then I got a string of bad allies who felt more bronze than silver (my 2v2 is silver), so I figured I'd try 1v1 where I could only fail myself.

Happy Independence Day, Americans! Hey Britain, how's it feel seeing your empire get crushed by a bunch of jackasses with poor equipment in a distant land? Is there anything that makes it feel better?

The problem with the Starcraft MMO

As we all know, or at least are very convinced of because we desperately want to hear it and hate dissenting opinions, Blizzard is creating a MMO based on Starcraft. We know this because they have claimed that it is with a new IP, and Starcraft is new relative to Warcraft which is almost as old as me if I was younger than I am.

I want to get the jump on it and just call dibs on a few topics. Yes, you can do that. Maybe some socialist bloggers believe in sharing, but I believe in hoarding ideas. That's why my draft folder is filled with unpublished posts, such as this one that I started five months ago, hence why it is filled with obsolete Brood Wars references.

First off, I am calling dibs on any and all Ghost whining.
Energy pool: too low. All it takes is one in and out of cloak and you're practically empty. No lockdown means helpless against vehicles, as if that weren't bad enough.
Nuclear strike: Cast time is way too long. And no, this isn't the new "aimed shot from shadowmeld".

Siege tanks will end up with some major problems. Sure they have heavy armor and a lot of firepower, but not since Onyxia has stance-dancing been such a huge issue. Beside that, Thors are stealing their jobs with more damage, more health, and greater mobility.

Goliaths also will hate the lag time between ground and air attacks. Meanwhile Vikings will complain about their hybrid tax.

As of three years after release, Blizzard still has not balanced the ability of Zerg Queens to one-shot most ground biologicals. Meanwhile the queens won't stop whining that "their parasites are too easy to remove." And when patch 2.0 removes flying they will never ever shut up about it.

Starcraft is trying to convince me to meet a girl and get married

I'd done a bit of 1v1 with a couple of my friends, mostly for fun and games, with us sometimes trying out ideas with varying success. But 2v2, that would require us to go... online. Into that sinister and frightening world with with other people. People who might very well decide to brutally crush me with devastating crushingness. I was afraid. I didn't want to ruin their rankings.

For context, in the 1v1s we'd done before that day (Sunday) I'd spent about 50% of my time swearing at the keyboard. M doesn't build marines in SC2, but it does in Brood Wars. Guess which game I've played more. So yea, I had some serious problems with failure to produce marines. MMMMMMMMMMMM. Nothing? Uh... oh. A. I made it worse when I declared that A would make more sense for marauders, at which point I then started trying to use A to produce marauders, resulting in a whole lot of very very slowly produced marines coming out of barracks with tech labs. The other 50% of my time was spent weeping in despair. The rounded out .1% was spent being accidentally brilliant.

1v1 is very hard. But 2v2, that's easy! As Terran-Terran we went up against a Protoss-Zerg team. My friend focused on ground armies: infantry and tanks, while I went for the more expensive, and micro-intensive, air units, mostly banshees, or all banshees plus one raven. So she did all the charging in to her death while I got to be an obnoxious ass with banshee harassment. Pew pew pew pew, cloak and leave, pew pew pew pew, cloak and leave, repeat until victory. And a few of my helions took out an expansion (undefended).

I can do micro. I can tell units precisely where to go. I know a million little tricks. Or I figure them out quickly. I can become hyper-detail-oriented and at that time, it's pretty useful to tell units precisely which pixel to attack from. So give me the banshees and reapers and siege tanks at just the right range. Speaking of siege tanks, when we did a 1v1 and my macro fell apart completely (remember the M spam?), I found myself trapped on some island in the corner, surrounded by turrets and marines. So I did the only sensible thing: built siege tanks and blew up everything that got too close. Then I used vikings to trick the AI into chasing me back to my anti-air. I still lost, but I was very smart about my inevitable defeat!

My friend managed all the constant production and giant armies to keep track of, while I did the little movements that wrecked the enemy economy. It worked pretty damn well. Both enemies ended up bottled up and losing battles of attrition (and battles of distraction). Eventually a giant ground force rolled in and with heavy air support, smashed their lines and got to work on their main bases. It was over, and would have been even if they hadn't recognized it and surrendered.

Another game as Terran-Zerg against Protoss-Zerg went somewhat similarly. I made a lot more marines, in hopes of using some sort of medivac drop strat with gradually more and more air support, but that got too complex and suffered a setback when my first drop attempt flew right over the main enemy attacking force. So much for my good micro. But it made for a hell of a distraction, allowing my ally to get in place and wreck them. I went back to banshee harassment and ruined the protoss economy. Soon after a few vikings took out a zerg expansion and were in the process of destroying another while my zerg ally smashed through the protoss and zerg armies and was in position to destroy the zerg base. He left the game, followed soon after by the protoss. Another glorious victory.

A second person provides synergy, even if theoretically they are the same (as in the terran-terran game). The mental capabilities can fit together, stronger than alone. Obviously I should apply this same logic to my life, which means getting married. Hopefully to someone who understands my need to harass people.

Since my friends got tired of listening to my many excuses for my crushing defeat, I offer them to you.
The monitors at my friends' house are too low.
The keyboards are a different shape and height.
Chairs are different.
Build order isn't the same as SC1.
Factories cost 50 minerals less, delaying my construction of them.
SC1 doesn't have addons for barracks.
Corinthians specifically, metaphorically says that zergling rushes, and also base walling, are both abominations in the eyes of the Lord.
Fast game speed makes me cry.

In unrelated news, I should get a screenshot of it, from the replay that we hopefully still have, of an ultralisk group trying to get up my ramp, but with the front one blocking the rest. Meanwhile the front one wasn't able to AoE because a lone marine was standing a little bit down the ramp, and so this one total badass tanked the first ultralisk to at least 50% of its health (medivacs are pretty handy when only one units takes and damage at all). Earlier an SCV had bravely been mixed up with a reaper and sent to distract a baneling group. Failing to leap off the ramp in time, he instead drew half the banelings to a premature detonation. As a result, only one marine died, rather than most of the defenders. That brave, brave SCV. I could have sworn he was a reaper... But that would explain his failure to jump off the ramp when ordered.

P.S.I've ordered my own copy of SC2 and within a week or two I expect to have a newerish computer that can run it, thanks to the previously mentioned friends giving me one of their old computers. Let's all clap for them, since a newerish computer means more content, meaning putting off the day when I finally shut up.

P.P.S. Technically Starcraft isn't making any suggestions on male or female, and my state does allow civil unions, but I'm just a bit too sexist against men to marry one.

Dumbing down isn't dumb

Yesterday was not trolling! It was though-provoking. Totally different.

I want to introduce a concept: identical repetitive actions. Hopefully it will allow us to separate "good" and "bad" forms of "dumbing down" as well as giving me an opportunity to put words in "quotations" for no clear purpose.

What is different between SCVs that say "SCV good to go sir!" followed by sitting around and SCVs that say "SCV ready!" followed by them floating over to the pre-selected gathering point?

To start, what do we actually do differently when playing? Well obviously in the former we rush back to tell them where to go whereas in the latter we keep doing what we were doing. For either we will probably also check that we are or are not producing another SCV.

How about mentally, strategically, tactically? What intelligence is coming into play here? At first glance, none at all. You're going to tell the SCV to go zap a node and go back to telling your marines to stop rushing after single zerglings into hydralisk swarms. Did you catch it? It's right there. It's a distraction. It's a simple test of who can best bounce from a simple task to whatever you were trying to do away from your base.

Skill! That wonderful word. What is the skill? It's in the reflexes. Twitch click click click. Hot key here and there and bam right back and forth and no more than a hundreth of a second wasted.

It's a distraction and click-speed test. Sounds a bit like an FPS.

It's an identical repetitive action.

How often are you going to tell that new SCV to go somewhere new? A few times a game, when you need to build or expand, but most SCVs will be produced and promptly (or not) sent to the same mineral field as the one before. This isn't much fun. It's a significant dose of not-fun which gives a benefit to those with good reflexes.

Identical repetitive actions are a bad game mechanic, or a symptom of one. Note that identical really must mean identical. Shooting in a FPS doesn't qualify, since there are slight variations: recoil, new targets, looking around, reloading. These factors mean that you aren't going to win many FPS games by aiming straight ahead and mashing the fire button. But that's exactly how SCVs work 95% of the time. The other 5% of the time, the rally-gathering system still leaves intact the strategic requirement of where to gather.

Mechanics which reduce identical repetitive actions are good. Queues for buildings mean you no longer have to bounce back to your base for every single new units. In WoW, auto-crafting means you don't have to individually craft every single item when spam-leveling, but that may be a mechanic covering for a deeper problem than a bit of repetition. Auto-attack means you aren't sitting, waiting for the auto-attack timer to come up so you can attack again. Sounds a bit familiar, come to think of it.

Starcraft 2 is horribly dumbed down

If there is one thing I loved in Starcraft it was hearing "SCV good to go, sir!" and I was just BAM right back at my base clicking madly to select it from the crowd and get it to the exact right mineral patch. Maybe you're a noob, but I'd personally manage every single trip on those guys. This is why I had to switch to Actions Per Second rather than Action Per Minute, because when I have 50 SCVs out, it gets intense and I cannot count that high. Why 50 SCVs? Because then I get an insane collection rate, and no, there is no overlap or delay, because I know how to properly manage my units.

Then Blizzard ruined everything by chasing the "casual gamer" demographic, which is just another word for worthless noobs. Sort of like immigrants, except immigrants cannot be farmed for easy early ranking. I call that bootstrapping. Anyway, the specific change is that now a command center can have a rally point set to a resource and the SCV will just gather it, right out of the box. Of course it's still not quite as good as my micromanagement, but it's still a step too far. For the record, any steps are too far. If anything, I think rally points should have been eliminated altogether. It is ridiculous that noobs can just click and click and now units go somewhere. Back in my day they drove out of the factory and they sat there, waiting, doing absolutely nothing, until I manually clicked to move them to the enemy base, at which point they'd be wiped out by rocket infantry.

We called it gaming.

But it gets worse. Back in the day there were medics and they had a short range and were properly vulnerable to zerglings, siege tanks, and broodling spawn. Now there are medivacs which can just fly around like everything is fine and wonderful. FLYING HEALERS! It is my belief that healers should be nearly immobile and highly vulnerable to enemy fire. These days the noobs can just load infantry into a medivac, drop them, and they're getting healed right away. Psh. Unload all? NOOB COMMAND. Good players would individually click to make sure the unload order is just right. Of course just to be sure I also individually load them, to be sure they if I have a seizure and accidentally hit unload all, that they come out in the right order.

It's called a backup plan and it's what smart people do.

Even unit composition has gone down the drain. Count your medics, divvy them up among the groups, keep them moving along with the marines, with stopping when healing was needed. Don't let them get stuck so far behind they they cannot heal the guy in the front who charged a pair of photon cannons. It was all about the tactical skill.

But who am I kidding? Blizzard ruined it all right out of the box. In Command and Conquer a dead grenadier would explode, causing huge friendly damage. You had to spread those guys out, or, use them as suicide bombers. Do firebats explode? Sure, kinda. But do they slaughter the marines around them? No! It's so stupid. Of course Brood Wars just made it worse. Stim packs used to be a careful decision. They'd fight better, but be permanently wounded. Now it's like "oh, I have a medic, I should just spam stim packs" and now these noobs are all spamming stim packs. Even worse, you can use stim packs in bunkers. A real player would unload, stim, jump back in. You know, playing the game.

I've also heard horrible rumors that SCVs can be set to auto-repair. I haven't tested this yet because I refuse to bow to the noobs. But that is outrageous. Auto-repair? Auto? The only thing that should be auto is the gun my marine is using! Back in my day we'd carefully separate out our returning Wraith flights to get all the damaged in one place for easier repair. Of course any good gamer knows I just made that up, because if they aren't all damaged, it's because I gave up too soon.

One last thing: Last Replay. Can you believe SC2 just saves replays? Just like that. Play a game and you have a replay. Back in my day we had to manually save those things. The best we got was the ability to watch the last game, and that's it.

We called it remembering what we were doing.

I could draw out, unit for unit, along with mineral counts (within 5, let's not get crazy), every second of my games, from memory. Why? Because I pay attention during my games. Now the noobs are just pressing buttons and hoping they get pretty explosions rather than performing detailed pre-post-mid-half-re-game analysis.

And that's why I am not subscribed to Starcraft 2.

Categorizing Choices

The other day Tesh caused all sorts of problems by asking questions. When I am dictator I will not allow people like him. But forget I said that.

Or else.

"meaningful risks and decisions"

Two different things... and how are we defining "meaningful" anyway? Is it in the deciding, the challenge, the potential loss or the potential reward? Maybe some calculus involving all of the above? How squishy is that calculus? Could we drop risk entirely and still have meaning for decisions?

So anyway, the questions were about choice. That's one of those fun words, and by fun I mean overused and often meaningless, not because it has no meaning, but because it has so much potential meaning that we don't know which one, and then thing we're arguing past each other because we're using the same word to say different things and don't even realize it.

Choice.

What do players mean when they say they want choices? Who knows? I mean, maybe they do, but I don't, and you don't, and I'm convinced that no dev has the slightest clue. Problem is, choice means a lot of things and thus far no one has done a player-by-player survey of what exactly they mean when they say they want choices.

I want to fix that. I will likely fail due to a lack of publicity, which I may rectify by tweeting photos of my Anthony. But I will try!

Slicing and Dicing Choices

Time
How long do you have to make this choice? If you have all the time in the world, then the choice may seem trivial, even pointless, since you can take the time to look it up. For example: gemming. But slow choices need not be trivially over-optimized by the netosphere. Think of a turn-based game, where yes, there may be best options, optimal options, most efficient, but you don't quite know what they are and it's not because you're a lazy idiot. Which forest should you chop down first in that game of civilization? Who should you invade first? These are slow choices, but they are not trivial (maybe the forest has very very little impact)

Importance: Personal or Objective?
Is the choice aesthetic or does it impact the game? Do I want a blue or red cloak? Do I want a strength or an agility gem? Note that these can be hazy, such as when people have different objectives, so objective and personal can overlap. Flavor differences may also come into play, such as different specs of a DPS class; you may like how one plays, but maybe it isn't the highest damage.

Magnitude of Consequences
What are the consequences? If you pick wrong do you lose the game? Or are you mildly inconvenienced? Compare "soloing Garrosh" with "stacking spirit as a hunter." The good and bad consequences do not need to be equal in magnitude. In the gem example, switching to agility would be better than spirit, but per-gem it's nearly trivial, and there is no cost beside the opportunity cost of the correct gem in the slot. Not soloing Garrosh won't give you anything, but it will save a death. Or for non-obviously stupid choices, try raiding or questing: each one denies you the other, but neither is stupid (I'm assuming the person soloing Garrosh is not doing it for the fun of silly deaths, in which case not soloing him would be the stupid choice).

Keep this one in mind, since the magnitude is often what turns people away, either due to lack or excess. Death in WoW is trivial. Less so in EVE. Guess which one has more subscribers. Guess which one has more people whining about how everything is too easy.

Obviousness
Is it a choice if there is one right answer with significant negative or positive consequences and we know the answer ahead of time? As an extreme example, imagine if a game was found to be too easy, due to having a Win button, which caused anything between winning the current NPC battle to winning the entire game. The devs decide to make it harder, and add choice, by adding a Lose button. Sure, you now have the choice to press the Lose button, but are you? Maybe once, just to see what happens. But then it's right back to the Win button. Or quitting, because that would be a terrible game.

Let's try some choices
To simplify things, let us assume that our goal is victory. If our goal is instead to have a peaceful empire in a Starcraft melee match, that will require a much different approach.

Where should I attack the enemy base? First off, we have some information. From scouting we have some idea of their buildings. We know what units we have (unless you're like me and someone lose dropships). We can remove some of those obvious bad choices, such as rushing a tank-bunker combo with marines and no medivacs. But what is the good choice? Maybe we don't need to worry about those tanks at all and could instead focus on harassing workers. Or we know they're just turtling forever, so we can ignore them for now and build up units and technology. Or there don't have many detectors and we're pretty sure they don't use sensor sweeps much, so a cloaked banshee attack could wipe them out without them even firing back.

This isn't obvious. We don't know all of what the enemy has, or how he will respond, or whether we can both attack and deal with his secret fleet of battlecruisers, against which our banshees will be useless.

This also isn't fast. But it isn't slow either. We have time, but not enough to go read an essay on counter-terran-turtle tactics. We can think, but not too long.

The magnitude can be significant, or not. We could attack with a few units as a sort of test run, but if we don't bring enough we increase the chance of failure, even while keeping down the magnitude. We could rush with everything, but if that fails, we're in pretty big trouble. What is the gain, anyway? Maybe they're defending nothing at all. Or a gold mineral field. You could even end up doing him a favor, psychologically, by freeing him from feeling he needs to hold that ground. Losing a few tanks and uselessly trapped marines is a small price to pay for freedom to act.

Since we set the goal as victory, and since Starcraft doesn't have many aesthetic choices anyway, we can say this is an objective choice. But what is the actual choice to pick? We don't even know yet if we are even going to attack, let alone how, where, when. These all have some sort of measurable (after the fact) benefit or loss, but how we think still matters. And how they think.

Note that while I used a PvP example, this still applies in PvE. Possibly even the specific scenario, partially thanks to the very vague setting.

Moving on to WoW
Tobold has a strange habit of complaining about raids not having many choices. He has a point, in some ways. Raids often have a correct, intended strategy, and going against that can result in the fight being changed specifically to keep people in that box. This means that the overall choice of the raid is one with significant difference in magnitude of consequence: wiping vs. epics. The choice of strategy itself may not be obvious, but thanks to the ability to reload the fight exactly as it was, and also that internet thing, it can become obvious. Then there is time: we have a lot of time to figure out strats, since they never change.

I want to note that this so far sounds like a really bad game: high magnitude difference, high obviousness, and lots of time. But this isn't what any individual players actually do. Instead they are making much quicker choices, which may still have a high magnitude difference, death/wipe vs. epics, but which will not always be obvious. Of course afterward we can see that that player was obviously retarded, but at the time, they had very little time to make a high magnitude choice, which given the limited information, maybe have had a total lack of obviousness. Low time, high magnitude, low obviousness: that's more or less what salespeople try to push you into, "Buy now! If you don't terrible things might happen! Don't think about it or research it, buy now, before the sale ends!" I think any moral, sane person can agree that sales is an evil thing. Alternatively, this player could be better informed and aware, changing it into a fast, high, obvious choice, which is often takes the form of a twitch test or dance routine.

See how the individual aspects of choices, fast or slow, obvious or not, high or low consequence, are not objectively good or bad. But certain mixes of them can be profoundly unfun, subjectively.

If you're making a turn-based game, your players probably aren't looking for fast choices, so adding them is likely to be unpopular. But if you're making a fast game, asking them to ponder philosophy may not be popular either. These aren't hard rules either, so a game may benefit from a mix of both. Such as Starcraft, where micromanagement may get a lot of attention (check the APM, it's off the charts, I click so fast, you can't beat the rush) #notintendedtobearhymingstatement but the best tactics won't make up for a bad overall strategy, which is a rather slow decision.

Choice vs. Decision
After writing this post I realized that recent events in life might be relevant, and add another level of confusion. I have a bachelor's degree in psychology, which started as an attempt at whatever one gets in chemical engineering. This fall I am heading north to get a master's degree in public affairs (no guest speakers announced yet). One last bit of information: I am the least educated person in my family. My father has a PhD, mother has a master's, brother has a master's (working on PhD now), other brother is a lawyer. Under these circumstances I was at the absolute very least going to college.

College was the path of progression. It was going to happen. I did have choices: school and major. The choices had high magnitude consequences, low obviousness, and were very slow (and yet somehow, still too fast to get it right).

In contrast, going for my master's degree was a decision. This may be a distinction in my mind only, but many things are and that has never stopped me from sharing them. There was no path that said I should get it. It was not the next step or part of any guide. It was something entirely novel, initiated by me.

Can games include decisions, in addition to choices? I think so. After all, while there was no breadcrumb trail to lead me where I am headed, it is not as if I had to invent everything from nothing. Arguably what is going on here is still just a choice, just not a choice that is obvious or expected. From that perspective a game could replicate this: just give so many choices that we cannot possibly evaluate all of them at once, and without obvious best paths, so that we instead must decide on an entire path, rather than just taking one or another road on the same route.

You're still useful as long as things don't change too much

Remember that Starcraft 2 game thingy that came out not recently? So I first played that recently. That's how I roll. Slow. If it helps, imagine that I pronounced roll more like roww, so then it rhymes with slow.

My friends bought it slightly less recently and I played with them a few times. It made me happy. Why? Because it's not so different from Starcraft 1. Oh sure, some new units, some strange tweaks, but more or less the same game. The Zerg got a disgusting upgrade (sound effects make me want to vomit), Terran got even more anti-ground capability (banshees ftw!), and Protoss require more vespene gas. Siege tanks, bunkers of marines, and a few turrets and we're good to go with the turtle.

I wasn't a Starcraft expert, master, or even decent player. I was the sort of person who would cheat to get through the campaigns because dammit, too hard! Then I'd cheat in me vs. AI matches. Wasted away a lot of weekends. Fun times. But I did learn a bit about it. I learned what units do and a bit of the rock-paper-scissors of it all.

The fundamentals were all the same. Harassing enemy gathering with hit-and-run attacks. Peace through superior firepower. High ground. Detectors. Spamming the crap out of gathering units.

So in the few games we've played, I won most of them. I'd surprise them with surprising tactics like vikings blowing up all their SCVs when they had no turrets, then running out when the marines arrived. Or dropships, sorry, medivacs, carrying siege tanks.

And of course as Protoss I still had it all figured out, and by figured out I mean figured out very poorly, since they use a much more dynamic sort of defense than the Terrans, which I'm not very good at. But at least they still have carriers.

And zerg are still disgusting. I did notice that the Ultralisk got majorly buffed, since it seemed to be a giant waste of everything before, whereas now it's like a giant death walker of death and doom.

As I write this I'm waiting for Starcraft to download, since even if it isn't the new one, I can at least get some of the fix.