Posted on Behalf of David Kim:
Worker/Army Counter
We’ve seen some great questions and comments on why certain decisions were made with our new Worker/Army feature in the UI, so we wanted to discuss how to proceed with potential changes to this feature. First, let us explain our thought process, and then we can decide whether our reasoning was sound and move forward from there.
We’ll begin by discussing the merits of the Worker/Army feature always being displayed vs. requiring a mouseover like we have it now. We had two main reasons for going with the current decision. First, we believe that unlike supply or current resources, this number isn’t something that players have to know every second of the game. Instead, these numbers are beneficial at specific points to gauge the state of the game and make specific decisions. Second, we want to avoid having too much information displayed in the UI. We want to keep the UI cleaner by minimizing the amount of non-essential information being shown on screen at any given moment.
Regarding how the workers are counted, we simply took the same numbers that the Units tab used for observers. This has caused some confusion, because the number is different from how the supply count works. For example, when you have 10 Marines and 10 SCVs and start building 1 more SCV, the supply is displayed as 21 / X (unit supply you have, AND units you are currently building) instead of 20 / X (unit supply you actually have right now). Meanwhile in the Units tab (and therefore in the new worker counter), it would only show that you have 10 SCVs, since that’s how many you currently have on the field.
All that said, these are things that can be changed if needed, so let’s try to figure out what the best choices are for the game before deciding on a solution.
Matchmaker and Balance Testing
Both the matchmaker and the changes we were discussing went out this week! Let’s play as much as we can and figure out our next steps for balance tuning!
ByuN
With how much ByuN accomplished last week, we thought he deserved his own section in the Community Update this week. Congratulations, ByuN! It was so awesome watching him take on teams of the best players in the world to win one of the most prestigious, longstanding tournaments in StarCraft II!
