http://us.battle.net/sc2/en/forum/topic/17085919227
We just wanted to provide our thoughts on this topic. First, we’d like to say that the suggestion seems solid, and we really respect how everything is laid out and handled in a constructive way. This post is a good example of a really well thought out post that stays on topic with strong reasoning backing up the suggestion, rather than only emotions backing it up. Seeing posts like these is very impressive, because we understand that this type of analysis is very difficult to do when compared to just saying something unconstructive or emotion based only.
With that said, one of our main design philosophies, not just on Starcraft 2 but for Blizzard design as a whole, is to iterate and polish. Everything we put into our games goes well beyond just theorycrafting and has a heavy emphasis on figuring out exactly how something turns out in reality. We then gauge the two together over a long period of time before making a final decision on that specific mechanic.
We also hear the concerns that the current resourcing model places a lot of pressure on the player to expand. Our current thinking is that some degree of increased pressure is good for the game. We like the increased risk of mining out when committing to early aggressive strategies. With that said, the time it takes to mine out could be too fast. Like with most areas, we started extreme so that we could get a good feel for the impact of these changes, but we might need to scale back as we move forward. This is one of the areas we’ll be iterating on as we continue to test this system.
There are two clear, opposing ways we can go in terms of iteration. More advantage towards teching vs. more advantage towards expanding. The community suggestion takes it heavily towards the expanding advantage, whereas closer we go towards the HotS model takes it back to teching advantage. What we mean by this is let's take the case of a player who is teching on 2 bases going up against a player who isn't teching and has 4 bases:
- In the HotS resourcing model, the 2nd player has almost no econ advantage (due to it being difficult to fully saturate every base + how the mining works per base)
- In the community suggestion model the 2nd player will have near double the econ advantage (due to it being pretty easy to fully saturate every base)
- In the Void model, we have something in between the above
It's difficult to say for certain due to not a lot of playtesting time yet, but we believe the next step in tuning the resource model is to go a bit more towards having slightly less advantage for the expanding player, because we feel we went a bit too far in the other direction already. We're thinking of maybe trying 100% and 60% up from 100% and 50% for minerals.
To aid us in testing this model, the next wave of beta invites will include roughly top 20% of players from Season 1. We look forward to seeing more games and hearing more feedback.
And just to restate once more, we’re not saying the proposed suggestion isn’t worth further consideration. We just plan to spend more time evaluating the current system. At this point it’s unclear how well either option will work out in the end. We want to keep all options open, but for now we’d like to finish pursuing the current direction that is showing lots of strong potential first before making conclusions on this topic.