PSA: Starcraft, Self Selection, and Winning Arguments on the Internet

I have quite a bit of contempt for the design of Starcraft. Nevertheless, I was familiar enough with the game to write about Google’s cheating AlphaStar AI. In short, the way that AlphaStar cheated was simply allowing itself to click far more – and far more accurately/effectively – than the human players that it was playing against. It made incredibly stupid decisions, but pulled it off by massively outclicking the opposition.

To explain what I mean by “outclicking,” or “the click tax,” I figured that a video was worth a thousand words. Above we see some Starcraft 2 player explaining “Marine Micro,” one small example of the insane clicking ability you need to have in order to excel at the game. 

In this example, the difference between a good player and a bad player in this “strategy” game is the ability to whip the mouse all over the screen, rapidly clicking small individual groups of marines, spreading them out, clicking on individual banelings to focus fire them down, while also clicking away from the banelings to move your marines further from them in between shots. If you could control Starcraft with your mind, this would be fairly trivial, but because Starcraft is controlled with a keyboard and mouse, only the best players in the world can do this. 

That’s just the “micro,” which is controlling your units in and before battle. Arguably more difficult and definitely more asinine is the “macro” stuff, which is the term for building your base and military. I can’t even hope to cover all the eye rolling garbage and tedium that you have to put up with, but I’ll try to get my point across by focusing only on the truly execrable decision to have up front resource cost.

In Starcraft, when you want to build something, it costs a certain amount of resources, which we’ll simplify to minerals, and it costs those minerals immediately. So if you want to build a new base, which costs 400 minerals, then you need to have at least 400 minerals or you can’t even start. If you have 399 minerals then you get this truly annoying “NOT ENOUGH MINERALS,” voice line to play.

This is obnoxious in and of itself, especially because you can’t just queue up the building, for it to start work the second that you have enough minerals. Often you’ll be just short of having enough resources to build the building, but then you get distracted and have to say, fight off harassment with your army units. By the time you finish dealing with that you’re floating a huge amount of resources and you’re way behind the opponent.

This is bad, but it gets so much worse with queuing production, because the resources for queued up actions are relinquished when the action is queued up, not when you actually start to build said item.

As an example, let’s say that you want to build 10 workers, 30 marines, 8 siege tanks, 10 medivacs, 10 supply depots, all 4 engineering bay upgrades, and maybe a new base. This all costs (let’s say) 4k minerals, which you will have by the time the stuff is finished building. You queue up eight workers, before being greeted with: 

Even though you can only build one worker at a time, workers 2-8, which you have queued up, are costing you the minerals up front. What this means is that you can no longer produce siege tanks, a new base, upgrades, medivacs, or whatever else you want, because workers which you are not even building yet have sucked up all of your resources.

The “skillful” way to play the game is to build one worker at a time per base, then click your barracks and produce one marine (or two if you have a reactor), then click the factory and make one tank, then click the starport and make one medivac, then click the engineering bay and make one upgrade, and so on and so forth. 

You have repeat this process for each building when it has finished building the first thing you wanted it to build. If you try to build multiple units per building you’re just cutting into your own production, and if you don’t start building new units as soon as you can then you’re floating resources, and are getting way behind your opponent. 

The strategic decision was “I want to build these units, buildings, and upgrades now.” The straightforward, easy way, was to queue up all those units, but that’s made impossible due to the shitty UI. The actual way that you have to do this involves well over an order of magnitude more clicks, and those clicks need to be timed to perfection.

All the while you get to hear the chorus of: 

The sheer amount of time sensitive clicks that you need to execute in order to perform kindergarten level strategies is absurd, and it’s all due to the terrible UI. Being good at strategy is almost irrelevant. Being really good at the utter chore that is executing your basic strategy is what allows the players to “show their skill.” 

The game has essentially died, and yet the few people you’ll still find in the community will defend this obnoxiously bad UI as the reason why the game is good. 

Anyway, I vaguely remembered writing about Starcraft one other time on this site, in an article involving Destiny. He was a professional Starcraft 2 player, before becoming the streamer who bravely defends the honour of neo-liberalism against evil peasants like Mike Peinovich.

If I may quote myself from that article.

I’ve seen some other clips of him over the years, but nothing more than a few minutes. Except weirdly enough one single video of him playing Starcraft II. But not even normally, he was building Queens only, a poor strategy that works because Starcraft II is an absolute joke of a strategy game. It’s a clicking game, with some strategy on the side.

It’s one thing for me to say that Starcraft/Starcraft 2 is a clicking game. It’s another thing for a former professional SC2 player to say exactly that.

Cohost: You could really make it to diamond on mass queens. And then all of a sudden, like half of the guys out there on gold league and below are gonna start just making mass queens.

Destiny: I’m gonna do mass queens because I think that that uhm encourages macro more. And queens counter air and ground so it’s a little more brainless so I can further emphasize that I don’t need to scout or have any strategy. It’s mechanics alone.

I never got to play either Starcraft until they went free to play. I played the Brood War singleplayer, and ragequit at the end of the Zerg campaign when I realized just how many clicks it would take to move my zergling army from one side of my base to the other.

Starcraft: Brood War UI has one particularly obnoxious UI quirk, which is a bizarre limitation on the maximum number of units selectable. You can only select 12, despite theoretically having 200 zerglings. If you wanted to just select your guys you would need to put them into 17 different groups of 12. Good luck hotkeying that.

It’s even worse than you think, because if you drag your mouse over all these units the game essentially chooses 12 of them at random. If the game selects units that are in the center, they won’t be able to move because the other units block them in. Worse, even if the game decides to select the rights units for you, if you quickly drag your mouse over the units again, it selects the same damn units. Additionally, the pathfinding is terrible, so the units only sometimes go where you want them to, even when you manage to click the right ones. 

The end result of all this is that you have to constantly select the army over and over again just to move them from one side of your base to the other side. The strategy was “move my army a bit.” The execution of this wasn’t “select my army, click where I want them to go,” but something that requires dozens of frustrating clicks. 

The user interface is so bad that the game is unplayable, which is a shame, because I like almost everything about the game except for the absolute trash UI. The world is fairly cool, the cutscenes were great, I love the sound design, and I even love the idea of controlling these armies. What I don’t love is having to give myself carpal tunnel just to do basic things like move my guys. 

A few of the absolute worst UI failures of Starcraft were rectified in the sequel. Two prominent fixes include automine, and multiple building selection. To briefly explain, automine is where the workers that you build can be ordered to immediately go mine minerals or gas, which saves you the chore of timing it perfectly when they come out, then manually ordering them to go and mine minerals instead of standing around with their thumbs up their asses doing nothing.

Multiple building selection is even more ridiculous. In the original Starcraft (SC), you had to manually click each individual building to build troops. In the early game this isn’t such a big deal, but by the end of the game you might have a dozen barracks, which you’re using to train marines. In order for all of them to make marines, you need to manually click each individual barracks, then click train marine. You have to do this twelve step process every time you want to make marines, even though your decision was “just make marines.” Imagine the painful “macro” process that I detailed earlier from Starcraft 2, but an order of magnitude worse. 

Starcraft 2 (SC2) fixed only the absolute most embarrassing UI failures, while keeping the same shitty overall UI. However, there were some detractors. Some professional Starcraft players were mad that Blizzard was going to add automine, infinite unit selection, and multiple building selection to the game.

I know, it’s crazy, but there are people like this. All of which brings us to the fifteen year old internet slapfight about this shitty, terrible game.

In one corner we have Dave Sirlin, a skinnyfat Bernie Bro who used to be a mid-high level Street Fighter player. He has some mediocre ideas about game design, and occasionally some decent, if obvious ones. In the latter category is his proclamation that Starcraft has objectively terrible UI, and would be a much better game if you didn’t need to click fourty bajillion times just in order to do very basic things. 

In the other corner we have “rekrul,” not to be confused with some other e-gamer who died named “Reckful.” Dan Schreiber, aka “Rekrul” was a Starcraft “pro-gamer,” and had some amount of internet clout on a forum called “Team Liquid,” specifically the Brood War section. I have found no pictures of Rekrul or the anons of the Brood War forum, but I do have this artist’s interpretation. 

 

Just before this, UC Berkeley had put on a class about Starcraft. I can’t imagine paying to be educated about something so boring and worthless, but it really happened.

Sirlin had decided to take this class, and was blogging about it. Unfortunately, the link to Sirlin’s blog posts about the course gives a “page not found” error. Nevertheless, we can infer what he was saying through the seething on the Brood War forum. We’ll skip over most of that, and focus on Rekrul’s highly intellectual responses, starting on page 12, when he hops into the thread.

This Sirlin kid is a dumbfuck. Why are you guys even talking about the nonsense he spews?

Ladies and gentlemen, we’ve found exactly what we came here to see.

Rekrul starts off by asking his fellow Brood War Chads why they’re even talking about this Sirlin character. In classic internet fashion, just two pages later Rekrul unleashes this upon us. The screencap is not even one third of his wall of text. 

But we’re not quite there yet. We still have a few more comments of his to get through, in order to set the stage. 

Umm he’s not right at all, a neutral starcraft would result in very boring repetitive games.

I can rip him a new asshole if you’d like. LOL.

…

Seriously who is this Sirlin kid and what rock did he crawl out from under anyways?

…

can someone just link me to all the bullshit he wrote so i can end his life completely? thx

He makes one more comment before the wall of text that is so wrong that it tweaked my autism and I feel compelled to respond.

Turning the game into more of a slower turn-basedish strategy game will result in games being decided by who can memorize the best builds much like chess. You will not be able to make up for any errors you do make. There will be no amazing things you can do.

Apparently, in chess the game is decided by who can make the “best builds.” There is no coming back from any errors, and there are no amazing things that you can do.

Cool story bro. Here’s a video of former world champion Magnus Carlsen winning a classical game after blundering away a full piece to a strong grandmaster. I have started the video at the correct time.

Bro, you can’t do anything amazing in chess, and you can’t ever recover from tiny mistakes, bro. It’s so ridiculous that Chess.com put out a video titled “Bobby Fischer’s 5 Most Brilliant Chess Moves.” There’s no such thing as a brilliant chess move, because the game doesn’t require you to click around a lot in order to move the pieces. 

Here’s another video of theirs. They claim to have found the greatest move of all time, which is absurd, because the fact that there’s no click tax means that the game would have been totally solved after just a few months and everyone would just play the same optimal game all the time.

I mean the game is thousands of years old, yet I’ve been informed by idiots on the internet that strategy games get figured out after just six months, like Tic Tac Toe. This must have been some variant of chess where you have to click a lot.

Above is the starting position. Take a minute and try to figure out the best move. When you’re ready, scroll down. 

I don’t know why I put exclamation marks behind that move. After all, there’s no such thing as amazing play in chess. That only exists in Starcraft, a now long dead game, and that’s only because the UI is shitty. Maybe if chess had a really shitty user interface where you needed to juggle the pieces around could there be amazing plays. Until then it’s not happening.

By the way, it’s true that openings in chess have been figured out to a large extent. It’s a problem at the highest level, and one of the solutions is to play Fischer Random Chess, the variant proposed by the most based chess world champion, Bobby Fischer. Turns out that the best players in the world at regular chess are the best players at Chess 960. 

But again, even classical chess is far from having been figured out, despite the starting position remaining the same. That’s why there’s such a continuum of elo rankings for the best players, instead of one single rating that they’ve all gotten to where they draw the game every single time like it’s Tic Tac Toe.

Some people don’t bother bringing the most basic of reality checks to their own hypotheses. 

The fact that APM is so important in SC is what makes the strategy so advanced.

The exact opposite is true, but continue.

Because the game is so technical every player is playing every situation in a different way due to their own macro/micro and their opponents macro/micro. This creates an infinite amount of scenarios in which players much ‘feel’ and find the right strategical decision for that situation.

As opposed to just a few possible scenarios in chess…

Hercules Chess:

In 1950, an American Mathematician by the name Claude Shannon wrote a magazine “How To Programme A Computer For Playing Chess“. In that paper he came up with an estimate that the number of games of chess would be 10¹²⁰ . That actually beats the number of atoms in the known universe which is estimated to be 10⁷⁸ to 10⁸² atoms. That’s a huge number!

Imagine thinking that 10^120 is a large number? Bro, there aren’t enough possibilities here for chess players to demonstrate their skill.

It is only under the stress of having to multitask and do so much shit that we can see a true player’s strategical ability put to the test. If you slow the game down any dumb fuck kid like Sirlin can figure out what the best strategical decisions are (thanks to watching a lot of replays, which is what someone like Sirlin would do to get ‘good’ at a game considering he’s too dumb to comprehend the obvious facts of what I’ve just written in this post.)

If the game is made like this retard wants you’re going to end up with games being boring and decided by merely a few mistakes and a few smart moves. Starcraft in its current state are so back and forth simply because it is so easy to make mistakes and so easy to do amazing stuff at the same time, which happens thousands of times per game and why it’s entertaining to play and watch.

Classical chess time formats are slow as well, and even bullet chess has the top players performing well over an order of magnitude fewer actions per minute as compared to Starcraft players. I guess that means that with classical time formats, usually around 2 hours per player when adding the increment, you and I could easily draw Magnus Carlsen. After all, as long as the game is slow, it’s a simple formality to find the best strategy. 

Just give me five second and I’m sure I’d find Qg3, right?

I’ve been sidetracked by someone being wrong on the internet, which is ironic since the point of this piece is to ignore those people. Only now have we arrived at the wall of text that spawned this piece. 

hello, can someone please make sure sirlin gets this:

Dear Sirlin,

I’m not going to quote much of this. Only the beginning, the end, and this one middle part.

In all your idiocy you are kinda right on a certain level when you say ‘lessening the mechanics will make it more of a strategical game.’ This will be very true. But only true at the very beginning or maybe the first 6 months-yearish. As with all new strategy games players will continuously come up with all sorts of new strategies that they can use to outsmart and outwit their opponents. If Starcraft2 is made how you want it to be a lot of geniuses that would have otherwise failed because they have no dextrous skills will be owning it up with their brilliant strategies. This will only last a year. After a while everyone will know the optimal strategies and your brilliant creators of strategies will now be average joe schmoes.

Now you could try to argue that with non-stop new maps to use new strategies on the brilliant players will always have their edge. But I’m going to tell you right now your argument would be null and void. When you play starcraft you have many limitations based on what matchup you’re playing and the type of map it is. Even if you keep drastically changing maps the general limitations will always remain the same and players will have to do similarish-type opening builds and the game simply won’t be fun. It will only be interesting for the first year or so due to strategies still being discovered + constant balance changes by Blizzard forcing people to adapt.

The first year will be fun, yes, after that no one will give a fuck about the game anymore and it certainly won’t be a good spectator sport. 

Uh, about that…

We’ll circle back to this. 

What the fuck is a strategy to you anyways? Go Corsair DT against zerg to kill the overlord and expand safely? LOL is that a strategy? WOW WHAT A SICK STRATEGY!!!! SO BRILLIANT. No. The strategy is to use your insane high APM to execute the build with perfect timing so that you can harass overlords and wiggle that little fucker into zerg’s main.

I mean fuck it man…Make starcraft easier to play? LOL THEY SHOULD MAKE IT HARDER TO PLAY.

This isn’t the Special Cyber Olympics. THIS IS STAAAAAAAAAAARCRAFT.

“The strategy is to use your fingers a lot bro.”

I’m glad that the now dead Starcraft community brought up the actual strategy game known as chess. Five hundred years past the last major rules update, chess has somehow, despite no mechanical “skill” requirements, outlasted Starcraft. Chess managed to do this, despite the fact that you don’t have to play an annoying and tedious minigame everytime you want to move a piece. Or rather, it is precisely because you don’t have to do any time critical dexterity checks to play chess that the game has the respect and longevity that it is famous for.

Internet communities do not necessarily represent the broader society. Often they are congregations of gremlins who represent less than 0.1% of society, yet can gather in large absolute numbers online. That was true before mass censorship, and is even more true today. How do you think someone like Juan Fuentes can retain an audience? You think normies want to be a part of the Joelita Express?

The idea that a video game should be difficult to control, especially a strategy game, is so absurd that it’s laughable. If these dipshits are mad that SC2 lets you select all the units that you want, multiple buildings, and get workers to automine, why not go further in the other direction?

Why allow the player to select more than one unit at a time? Why not restrict the maximum movement of a unit to three feet in any direction, instead of the whole map? Why let workers mine by themselves, when we could force the player to click 100 times to simulate gathering the minerals and gas? If having shitty UI is the goal of the game, why not maximize this to the umpteenth degree? After all, they should make the game harder to play, right?

Rekrul was a bloviating moron, but this view was widespread in this tiny little e-niche of people who could stand to play this game that had objectively shitty UI. Another example was penned by user Zelc.

Team Liquid (Brood War Forum):

My third point is that what Sirlin calls “mindless APM” is not just a useless device to make the game harder. It actually has a purpose: it adds a “screen-time” cost to micro and macro, thus providing a trade-off between the two and increasing the depth of the game. Suppose you’re playing Zerg against Protoss. This means that if you want to build more units, you’re paying a cost of an x% chance your army will die from Psionic Storm as you’re not paying attention to run them out of the area of effect. If you’re busy microing your army, there’s an x% chance you’ll lose all your workers to a drop. One of the biggest reasons low level players have low APM in Starcraft is because they spend too much time watching battles. Higher level players know when they can safely stop watching a battle and return to their base to order the next wave of units.

The cost of watching your army would be preserved under automine and MBS, but the cost of building units will be significantly reduced. Thus, automine and MBS significantly reduce strategic decisions regarding the resource of “screen-time”. This has several effects, such as putting a lot more emphasis on micro skill at the cost of macro skill. It also removes an interesting advantage to the defender (as they don’t need to split their attention as far as an attacker) which can damp the positive feedback of an advantage. Perhaps I lack imagination, but it’s hard to replicate this effect of mindless APM.

Before I go any further, I need to concede some tiny grain of truth, albeit poorly argued by these people. Depth in a game is just pattern recognition and opportunity cost. In Starcraft, your resources are minerals, gas, units, and attention. By adding “mindless clicks,” you theoretically tax this “attention” resource more and add strategic decisions in terms of what the player decides to spend his clicks on.

Except actually you don’t, since some players can physically do more clicks, and there are so many beneficial things that you can do at any moment in time that outclicking your enemy means that you win. That’s why Google’s Starcraft AI destroyed Serral, the best human player, four games to one. It made moronic strategic decisions, then massively outclicked him and won, because Starcraft is a clicking game, not a strategy game.

Starcraft could be turned into a strategy game just by adding an APM limiter. The best human players can produce about 300 APM, or around five actions per second. Drop that down to just two per second, and suddenly the entire game is strategic decisions, because every action that you take represents other actions that you did not enact. “Do I cancel that hatchery that’s being attacked, or queue up more drones? Do I micro my army by firing biles at that siege tank, or build static defenses against the medivac drop?” 

You could crank the APM limiter and gamespeed down massively. Let players choose what speed they play at, even down to very slow speeds, such as 1 APM. There is no technical limitation on doing this, and real strategy games already let you do exactly this. What do you think time controls are in chess? If you want to play a deeper game, play with longer time controls. If you want to play a faster paced game, use shorter time controls.

No one really knows if Starcraft would be as deep a game as chess if there was an APM limiter. What we do know is that chess lived, and Starcraft died.

Jaime, can you pull up that screencap again?

A decade ago, people talked about Starcraft dying. No one talks about it now, because it already happened. In the meantime, Chess has only gotten more popular. 

Reddit (OP by Destiny):

People, ESPECIALLY people in this community seem to fail to realize that a game’s competitive success lives or dies by its casual accessibility. Yeah, in a dream world we all want this ULTRA CUT-THROAT COMPETITIVE FUCK YOUR FACE game where OH MY FUCKING GOD SKILL CEILING SO HIGH NO MULTIPLE BILDING SIELECT FUK AUTO-MICRO OH MY GOD SO COMPETITIVEEE!1111…But in the real world, no one wants to play that game except competitive people.

Imagine an internet community so toxic that Destiny is the ALL-CAPS voice of reason.

Well, you don’t have to imagine anymore.

Competitive games are not fun.

It’s not fun to play ranked matches that affect a ladder ranking. Why on earth would you play a game that gives you ladder anxiety? Why would you play a game where 11/11 or 6 pools or 4gates can kill you in under 4 minutes? Why would you play a game that punishes mistakes so cruelly?

The average, casual player wouldn’t. One of the Starcraft 2’s major problems is its inability to understand that its primary audience (the casual gamer) has been completely neglected.

Let’s look at Brood War for a second. Check out what you see as soon as you log in. The chat + friends list takes up almost 70% of the screen! If you want to play “Melee” games (kind of the equivalent to Laddering in SC2) you have to click the “Join” button on the right, and then filter for the melee games you wanted to play. Starcraft 2 has taken a relatively minor and extremely unpopular feature of Starcraft Brood War and made it the focal point of their game. Why in the FUCK would you design a game around the most unpopular feature of its predecessor?! This shows a clear and disgusting lack of understanding on Blizzard’s part and is entirely unacceptable for a company trying to design a competitive game.

People tend to like non-competitive game modes of course, but what they really hate is games with terrible UIs that require you to spend a billion clicks to execute simple strategies.

Destiny spent years trying to tardwrangle the idiots in that e-community. Ultimately, even he realized that it didn’t matter. What mattered was what Blizzard was going to do, since they had the power to do something about it. 

Destiny’s Blog (2014):

I sincerely believe that Legacy of the Void is capable of bringing not only a resurgence to the StarCraft 2 scene, but also long-lasting interest in the game. This will only be true if Blizzard takes the correct steps. Blizzard is fully capable of dedicating the resources necessary to ensure StarCraft 2’s success, and they can do it while turning a profit. I don’t think they’ve shown that they’re willing to do it yet, but I hope they change their mind with the coming of their final expansion to the StarCraft 2 universe.

Nine years ago is his last post pertaining to Starcraft. That’s four years after the initial release, and about a year before the third and final expansion for the game. He correctly identifies Blizzard as having the power to fix Starcraft, realized that they wouldn’t, and then he just moved on with his life to being an annoying defender of neo-liberalism online.

Remember that “Rekrul,” fag? Remember how Starcraft was so important to him? Turns out he moved on with his life as well, just two years after that forum post. His status is listed as retired, and his last posts on the game were from twelve years ago. 

How’s Starcraft doing these days?

According to SC2Pulse, they had a fairly recent mini-peak at 4k players per day when they went free to play, and are now down to about 2k per day. Let’s see how some competitors are doing.

Webtribunal (Sourcing LeagueFeed):

Just short of three and a half million gamers played LoL daily in December 2021. The number is calculated by pooling data from the previous 30 days.

Also, note that this is the average, not the peak number of players.

I really despise League of Legends, and never played any of the MOBAs for any length of time other than HOTS. However, LOL’s playerbase is more than one thousand times larger than Starcraft’s, and Starcraft used to be the big kid on the block. One thousand times larger.

In 2016 Dave Sirlin made a podcast breaking down the failures of Starcraft 2. It was something of a victory lap for him, because the game was dead even then. 

(1:04:00)

I feel like if I had made this exact argument when Starcraft 2 was in development most people would have disagreed with this and said “no, it needs to have this bad interface cause that’s what makes the game good.” But now here’s what happened. A bunch of UI things were fixed and it’s laughable to imagine them not being fixed. 

And even bigger than that, the world moved on.

E-Sports are incredibly gay, and I hate the term, because the idea that these people are athletes is viscerally repulsive. Nevertheless, they are a thing, and the first big “esport” was Starcraft.

It truly was the League of Legends, DOTA 2, or Fortnite of its time, and it’s over. No one wants to play a game that has a horrific user interface design. The world has moved on from Starcraft.

 

Getting back to that 2009 Brood War forum thread I have to highlight one last comment. 

A friend of mine agrees with Sirlin and argues pretty much his same point of view. The argument is that because Starcraft is a game of strategy, no physical limitations should be put in place because that excludes players with weak mechanics and superior strategy, potentially increasing the competitive userbase.

When you’re a part of some weird community, online or otherwise, they can make you feel like you’re the lone voice of sanity in the world. Usually you’re just surrounded by the acolytes, and normal people aren’t a part of their thing. Never understimate the amount of people going “LOL gay,” and then moving on with their lives. 

When searching for “Starcraft 2 dying,” I stumbled upon a reddit thread that isn’t full of the weird cult of people who love playing games with terrible user interfaces. The comments weren’t anything revolutionary, just basic, common sense. 

User HiChandy,

Starcraft 2, at least to me, is just simply too fast; it’s just too mechanically demanding. I can guess that majority of players are often fighting with the game, rather than fighting the actual opponent. Like, you could lose your whole army just cause you didn’t check it for 5 seconds. All the LotV changes look good on paper, but in execution they just added more stress and gave an average player the feeling that they were always doing something wrong, and that’s no fun.

Deleted user,

This, so much. I don’t know how I was able to do decently during the Brood Wars days, but I couldn’t get into SC II’s multiplayer at all. The crazy amount of things you have to do, the precise timing and build-orders you have to memorize minute-by-minute, constantly queuing up workers along with your army while upgrading that army and getting them all into formation so you can harass the enemy while also building up a new expansion while also preventing their expansions while also micro-managing abilities while also teching up while also queuing up more units for your army while also attacking with what you have while also defending with what you have and whoops you forgot to build mobile AA in regards to all of that so now 5 mutalysks are just killing all your workers at your expac and now your economy is crippled and you lost.

User dluminous,

Starcraft 2 is pretty “simple” – most of the challenge comes from being mechanically hard which I would not confuse with complexity. Example: I know how to forcefield properly, but to execute that with the other 40,000 things is what is hard.

But the execution has no bearing whatsoever on complexity compared to the when and which way of dodging. SC2 is incredible simple and a sizable % of the player base would be able to compete with top players but mechanically they cannot keep up. If I ask you to draw a large circle when the light turn’s green, you can easily do it. If I give you 0.5 seconds to do it, it suddenly becomes near impossible yet it remains just as complex/simple, does it not?

Basically the when, how, why all contribute towards 1 thing: decision making and it’s decision making which makes complexity. Execution has no bearing on decision making. My $0.02

It’s a clicking game, not a strategy game. A tiny amount of idiots on the internet will call you a “dumbfuck retard” for pointing out that the UI sucks and calling for it to be fixed along with an APM limit. The other 99.9% of the world just moves on.

In the end, no one’s opinion mattered except for Blizzard’s, because they were the ones who actually had the power to fix this garbage. Anyone who engaged with that tiny community of weirdos simply wasted their time. 

I’d been idly thinking about this old internet slapfight on and off for years, even before the creation of this site. In light of the recent constantly online affair known as #BanTheADL, I felt that it was relevant. The internet is full of grifters, weirdos, and people who think that Ben Shapiro tweeting with them means that they’re winning. They’re wrong, but it doesn’t even matter. It’s not like they’ll ever have any sort of institutional power to change anything.

I am done with this, and ready to start a new chapter in The Daily Rake. Winning arguments on the internet isn’t all its cracked up to be.