The other team can get 2 warpgates before you reach the max income. Your strategy is good for long and tied games, but if the other team is paying attention to the size of your team pylon, you might just end up being destroyed by stalkers before having mineral to counter-attack.
Also, you type as fast as you can against the annoyling, but have you realized that you get some advantage if you upgrade the speed?
True, you can go for a timing attack by picking up early warp gates before 10/2 income, but a timing attack will only work against weak (or shorthanded) opponents. Good opponents will be strong enough in the early game against light pressure to survive. You'll end up behind in the long run by investing in something other than income in the early game.
Against really good typing opponents, the only way to really pressure them and protect yourself is to have a lot of warp gates. The team with more warpgates has a pretty big advantage, not the least of which being control of the middle (minerals are still nice, but nexus repairs and nexus energy are extremely important late-game), and against good opponents there really isn't much of a timing window to make an early assault. A combination of nukes and psi storms (and good typing) pretty much erases early hopes to win on pressure.
That said, when minerals (or gas early game) pops up, sending out an attack force to claim it is extremely profitable. It requires a good sense of timing, awareness, and reading, but you can theoretically use as many as 15 or more Zerglings and still turn a nice profit by getting to the middle. And you can obviously gamble a bit more and use fewer Zerglings for more profit.
Strategies? You type words and spam the lowest tier units because you cant read their text if they are swarmed :)
Psi Storm kills all the lowest tier units (except zealots). Surviving mass ling pushes with only one Psi Storm is a very important skill for any player (especially any player on mid) to have.
@ first suggestion: Good NWW players work as a team. Team communication is really important, and shortening the message display either by default or by option will only detract from team communication (which is already fairly restrictive). It's also very important to know which players are the best typists (e.g. knowing which lanes to cover in which priority, what builds people are doing, who's watching the mid, and importantly who else is typing the same words that you were trying to type). Removing the chat function might clean up the interface, but it would remove a lot of the team play aspect, and that would be terrible for the game.
@ second suggestion: The people typing the most aren't always the fastest typists and I think (almost) everyone knows that. The measurement is not attempting to measure who's the fastest typist or who's the best or who helped their team the most, it's just a fun little chart at the end. Especially when you're playing with friends, it can be a source of a lot of fun, it's not supposed to be straight up competitive.
In really, really long games when people are typing all-out for a long time, then the top lists are usually the best typists. But for most games, it's just a fun little thing to check out and more reflects the quality of your teammates than how good you are (unless you can't type 80-100 wpm, in which case you're slowed down more by your slow typing than by the number of enemies who appear). I wouldn't really say that's "unfair" except to say that, "teams who work together are unlikely to have either the fastest typist or the turtle." But they are likely to kill the enemy Nexus and that's what counts.
I think after you play some games (esp working on a good team that's there for nexus kills and not word glory), then you'll appreciate how important teamwork is and how the # words typed is more of a fun thing.
@Forbiddian: Go
Found a couple more typos while playing:
"awrencium"
should be Lawrencium
There are a few words ending in "...yness" that should be "...iness"
"ammine" should probably be "amine" (I'm a chemist, and yes I know what an ammine is, but organic chemistry is far, far more popular than inorganic coordination chemistry)
Also, there's a long word including "neoro" which should be "neuro"
The popularity system is fine and works perfectly. Blizzard wanted a way for players to find the most popular maps. The problem is that it shouldn't be the ONLY WAY to look for maps. I hope people recognize this.
Ideally we get a chatroom (hahahahaha, lololololol, etc.), but in more realistic suggestions:
I think a good idea is if you've had a game open to the public for more than, say, one minute, you could check a box "request more players." People looking for a game would also have an option "show only maps requesting more players." That way you can filter to games which take more than a minute to open AND have players already waiting in the lobby.
It would be similar to the functions which already exist, "Open to Public" and "Show Only New Maps."
It basically filters out the extremely popular maps *AND* the maps where nobody is waiting around. This check box allows players to make games and not have to wait around forever/invite only your closest friends.
Also, the obvious suggestion: Allow you to search based on the name of the map for join game.
@Rodrigo: (Hah, told you so!) I figured it was the extra gas causing the reps to desync. Glad to see when you reran the experiments you got the same data. Also that the gas advantage was removed. As a player with like 100 gas, it was really unfair to everyone else.
I have a couple more suggestions, though these aren't urgent at all:
Right now everything costs around a 10:1 ratio (mins to gas), so you rarely want more than 1 gas and you only want 2 gas in pretty extreme circumstances (like you're typing very fast and get enough minerals from typing to require more gas).
I think it'd be very interesting if special abilities cost *significant* amounts of gas (like 100+ gas). I'm talking about defensive abilities like nukes, nexus-heals, etc. Or maybe some other specialty units or weapons were a significant gas investment (like 1:2 or 1:3 ratio).
Basically players would get to choose to run a more streamlined, gas-light build, OR invest minerals into gas income (or a balance of both).
Right now, mineral income is always the limiting factor (until very late-game, but even then 10 minerals/2 gas is very gas-heavy and you never, ever want more than 2 gas income), but there could be another level of complexity and skill if building to more gas opened up different play options, like healing or nukes.
As a quick change, I think it'd be very interesting if healing your nexus cost 0 minerals and 100-200 gas. If you invested a lot into gas, that's manageable, but if you don't invest in gas and have a more streamlined build, you risk being chipped to death.
I played a game perhaps with a particularly egregious opening, but here are some of the "words" MY TEAM had to type IN THE FIRST MINUTE of play:
lipscomb (had to look it up... it's a surname and the name of a Christian college, would NEVER be lowercase)
mum (pretty obscure english word, I've only heard it in "mum's the word" and british for mom)
chachka (Yiddish)
gane (Scottish)
aix (a species of duck)
bregma (actually a word, but nobody had heard of it... it's some medical term)
lld (looks EXACTLY like "lid" by the way, and would never be lowercase (stands for Doctor of Laws, and isn't
really used in the US)
llyr (some god in Welsh mythology, not lowercase in English)
scnt (an initialism for Somatic Cell Nuclear Transfer)
It's cool that we're getting new words, but these aren't words. These are obscure references or words from other languages. Without the internet, nobody would know what these words are.
Also, Ultralisks became really easy to type with these changes while the regular enemies became much, much harder (since you can't read the words or anything). "Mind-numbingly" is very easy to type, but "lld" is very hard to type (since you'll think you're typing "lid" 99% of the time and for sure enter it wrong twice.
Gas isn't as important as minerals, this is true, but gas is still extremely important because it is required to get more minerals.
Players with 21 gas or more can avoid upgrading gas until they have maxed out mineral upgrades. This means that they're upgrading minerals faster than new players. By 5 minutes in, everyone should have finished their upgrades an bought 1 gas income, but because the experienced players got minerals first, they maxed out earlier and have more income.
To simplify the model, assuming no income from typing, the player with 21 gas will have an extra 117 minerals that the new player can never make up (this is after buying gas income). Assuming 12 minerals a minute income from typing, the new player will be short 89 minerals. This is a fairly realistic model for gameplay in the first 3 minutes, since there aren't too many opponents.
Keep in mind that players with a LOT of wins, corresponding to effectively infinite gas (read: 100+ wins) never have to waste money on gas income and will have an extra 50 minerals on top of that, and possibly even more if the new player has to buy additional gas income.
These players have an extra 200+ mineral advantage late-game, in addition to a gas advantage.
This is added over all the other advantages that they have from the team-joining elements (good players will try to team up with them, good players won't box them onto the other team with forcefields), plus all the advantages that come with experience like knowing how all the upgrades work, knowing which units to build, etc.
I don't mind the start. It only takes two or three minutes before the action heats up (similar to actual SC2). Gives you some time to chill, etc. It's really important online when you need to communicate with your teammates, so I'm really glad a break time is implemented.
However, I have a *HUGE* problem with winners getting extra gas, for a number of reasons.
First, the rich get richer. Good players are given even more of an edge over bad players. Obviously the players with the most wins are the most experienced (and usually the best), but you get other advantages over that.
I have something like 60 wins, and now it's hard for me to lose (assuming I put in some minimum of effort). I am a pretty good player, but my girlfriend is not. She doesn't spend ANY resources and she doesn't look at the minimap and barely even moves the camera. Still, when she plays games on my account, she still wins most every game. I'd say she has at least a 70% win ratio.
Why is that? I am almost always the person in the game with the greatest number of wins. That means that experienced players who know how important it is to get on a good team naturally chase after being on my (her) team, whereas inexperienced players will flounder around or choose randomly. My team almost always outguns the other team massively, to the point where often I can just do nothing and my team will win the 3v2.
Secondly, the rich are encouraged to get even richer. Because having more gas is an advantage, you're actually given extra incentive to create imbalanced teams to blow the other team away and get your cheap win/gas. I would normally love to just play some fair games and go with the noobs and walk them through how to play, but until I had more than 40 gas, I was thinking about how much more efficient my macro would be with that extra gas, and how I needed wins. THANKFULLY that was changed to 10 mineral income max, so it's much more balanced, but until you have 21 wins, gas is extremely precious, and even after then it saves you up to 50 minerals.
Lastly (and possibly most important to you): I'm around 95% certain that the gas differential is the cause of the replay desyncs. The replay games don't sync with the server history of player score, so in every replay, every player starts with 50 mins and 0 gas. In the actual game history, the players had gas/minerals in order to get upgrades, but the replay thinks that they have 50/0. As soon as someone spends gas, the replay desyncs.
This is corroborated by some old replays I had that didn't desync (when everyone was newer and bought gas upgrade first and couldn't use all the gas, so the replay didn't desync). But my new replays all start with me upgrading minerals within the first 5 seconds, so the game thinks I have "-3" gas and realizes that there's an error and desyncs.
I mean, there could be another explanation, but that would seem to make sense. If you changed the score boards to offer no rewards, you'd also probably see less award abuse.
0
True, you can go for a timing attack by picking up early warp gates before 10/2 income, but a timing attack will only work against weak (or shorthanded) opponents. Good opponents will be strong enough in the early game against light pressure to survive. You'll end up behind in the long run by investing in something other than income in the early game.
Against really good typing opponents, the only way to really pressure them and protect yourself is to have a lot of warp gates. The team with more warpgates has a pretty big advantage, not the least of which being control of the middle (minerals are still nice, but nexus repairs and nexus energy are extremely important late-game), and against good opponents there really isn't much of a timing window to make an early assault. A combination of nukes and psi storms (and good typing) pretty much erases early hopes to win on pressure.
That said, when minerals (or gas early game) pops up, sending out an attack force to claim it is extremely profitable. It requires a good sense of timing, awareness, and reading, but you can theoretically use as many as 15 or more Zerglings and still turn a nice profit by getting to the middle. And you can obviously gamble a bit more and use fewer Zerglings for more profit.
Psi Storm kills all the lowest tier units (except zealots). Surviving mass ling pushes with only one Psi Storm is a very important skill for any player (especially any player on mid) to have.
0
@ZarafFaraz: Go
@ first suggestion: Good NWW players work as a team. Team communication is really important, and shortening the message display either by default or by option will only detract from team communication (which is already fairly restrictive). It's also very important to know which players are the best typists (e.g. knowing which lanes to cover in which priority, what builds people are doing, who's watching the mid, and importantly who else is typing the same words that you were trying to type). Removing the chat function might clean up the interface, but it would remove a lot of the team play aspect, and that would be terrible for the game.
@ second suggestion: The people typing the most aren't always the fastest typists and I think (almost) everyone knows that. The measurement is not attempting to measure who's the fastest typist or who's the best or who helped their team the most, it's just a fun little chart at the end. Especially when you're playing with friends, it can be a source of a lot of fun, it's not supposed to be straight up competitive.
In really, really long games when people are typing all-out for a long time, then the top lists are usually the best typists. But for most games, it's just a fun little thing to check out and more reflects the quality of your teammates than how good you are (unless you can't type 80-100 wpm, in which case you're slowed down more by your slow typing than by the number of enemies who appear). I wouldn't really say that's "unfair" except to say that, "teams who work together are unlikely to have either the fastest typist or the turtle." But they are likely to kill the enemy Nexus and that's what counts.
I think after you play some games (esp working on a good team that's there for nexus kills and not word glory), then you'll appreciate how important teamwork is and how the # words typed is more of a fun thing.
0
@Forbiddian: Go Found a couple more typos while playing:
"awrencium" should be Lawrencium
There are a few words ending in "...yness" that should be "...iness"
"ammine" should probably be "amine" (I'm a chemist, and yes I know what an ammine is, but organic chemistry is far, far more popular than inorganic coordination chemistry)
Also, there's a long word including "neoro" which should be "neuro"
0
@KratsAU: Go
The popularity system is fine and works perfectly. Blizzard wanted a way for players to find the most popular maps. The problem is that it shouldn't be the ONLY WAY to look for maps. I hope people recognize this.
Ideally we get a chatroom (hahahahaha, lololololol, etc.), but in more realistic suggestions:
I think a good idea is if you've had a game open to the public for more than, say, one minute, you could check a box "request more players." People looking for a game would also have an option "show only maps requesting more players." That way you can filter to games which take more than a minute to open AND have players already waiting in the lobby.
It would be similar to the functions which already exist, "Open to Public" and "Show Only New Maps."
It basically filters out the extremely popular maps *AND* the maps where nobody is waiting around. This check box allows players to make games and not have to wait around forever/invite only your closest friends.
Also, the obvious suggestion: Allow you to search based on the name of the map for join game.
0
Sick game, glad to see that it's back!
@Rodrigo: (Hah, told you so!) I figured it was the extra gas causing the reps to desync. Glad to see when you reran the experiments you got the same data. Also that the gas advantage was removed. As a player with like 100 gas, it was really unfair to everyone else.
I have a couple more suggestions, though these aren't urgent at all:
Right now everything costs around a 10:1 ratio (mins to gas), so you rarely want more than 1 gas and you only want 2 gas in pretty extreme circumstances (like you're typing very fast and get enough minerals from typing to require more gas).
I think it'd be very interesting if special abilities cost *significant* amounts of gas (like 100+ gas). I'm talking about defensive abilities like nukes, nexus-heals, etc. Or maybe some other specialty units or weapons were a significant gas investment (like 1:2 or 1:3 ratio).
Basically players would get to choose to run a more streamlined, gas-light build, OR invest minerals into gas income (or a balance of both).
Right now, mineral income is always the limiting factor (until very late-game, but even then 10 minerals/2 gas is very gas-heavy and you never, ever want more than 2 gas income), but there could be another level of complexity and skill if building to more gas opened up different play options, like healing or nukes.
As a quick change, I think it'd be very interesting if healing your nexus cost 0 minerals and 100-200 gas. If you invested a lot into gas, that's manageable, but if you don't invest in gas and have a more streamlined build, you risk being chipped to death.
0
Words that sound like well-known words or have preferred alternate spellings:
demoniac = demonic
tolbooth = tollbooth
.
Here are some words you can add if you need to fill in gaps:
.
cassoulet cassiterite casiquiare cassiopeia pathlessnesses quasi-judicial vedette quagmire woodenly
0
@RodrigoAlves: Go
A lot of the new "words" aren't English words.
I played a game perhaps with a particularly egregious opening, but here are some of the "words" MY TEAM had to type IN THE FIRST MINUTE of play:
lipscomb (had to look it up... it's a surname and the name of a Christian college, would NEVER be lowercase)
mum (pretty obscure english word, I've only heard it in "mum's the word" and british for mom)
chachka (Yiddish)
gane (Scottish)
aix (a species of duck)
bregma (actually a word, but nobody had heard of it... it's some medical term)
lld (looks EXACTLY like "lid" by the way, and would never be lowercase (stands for Doctor of Laws, and isn't really used in the US)
llyr (some god in Welsh mythology, not lowercase in English)
scnt (an initialism for Somatic Cell Nuclear Transfer)
It's cool that we're getting new words, but these aren't words. These are obscure references or words from other languages. Without the internet, nobody would know what these words are.
Also, Ultralisks became really easy to type with these changes while the regular enemies became much, much harder (since you can't read the words or anything). "Mind-numbingly" is very easy to type, but "lld" is very hard to type (since you'll think you're typing "lid" 99% of the time and for sure enter it wrong twice.
0
@RodrigoAlves: Go
Gas isn't as important as minerals, this is true, but gas is still extremely important because it is required to get more minerals.
Players with 21 gas or more can avoid upgrading gas until they have maxed out mineral upgrades. This means that they're upgrading minerals faster than new players. By 5 minutes in, everyone should have finished their upgrades an bought 1 gas income, but because the experienced players got minerals first, they maxed out earlier and have more income.
To simplify the model, assuming no income from typing, the player with 21 gas will have an extra 117 minerals that the new player can never make up (this is after buying gas income). Assuming 12 minerals a minute income from typing, the new player will be short 89 minerals. This is a fairly realistic model for gameplay in the first 3 minutes, since there aren't too many opponents.
Keep in mind that players with a LOT of wins, corresponding to effectively infinite gas (read: 100+ wins) never have to waste money on gas income and will have an extra 50 minerals on top of that, and possibly even more if the new player has to buy additional gas income.
These players have an extra 200+ mineral advantage late-game, in addition to a gas advantage.
This is added over all the other advantages that they have from the team-joining elements (good players will try to team up with them, good players won't box them onto the other team with forcefields), plus all the advantages that come with experience like knowing how all the upgrades work, knowing which units to build, etc.
0
@RodrigoAlves: Go
I don't mind the start. It only takes two or three minutes before the action heats up (similar to actual SC2). Gives you some time to chill, etc. It's really important online when you need to communicate with your teammates, so I'm really glad a break time is implemented.
However, I have a *HUGE* problem with winners getting extra gas, for a number of reasons.
First, the rich get richer. Good players are given even more of an edge over bad players. Obviously the players with the most wins are the most experienced (and usually the best), but you get other advantages over that.
I have something like 60 wins, and now it's hard for me to lose (assuming I put in some minimum of effort). I am a pretty good player, but my girlfriend is not. She doesn't spend ANY resources and she doesn't look at the minimap and barely even moves the camera. Still, when she plays games on my account, she still wins most every game. I'd say she has at least a 70% win ratio.
Why is that? I am almost always the person in the game with the greatest number of wins. That means that experienced players who know how important it is to get on a good team naturally chase after being on my (her) team, whereas inexperienced players will flounder around or choose randomly. My team almost always outguns the other team massively, to the point where often I can just do nothing and my team will win the 3v2.
Secondly, the rich are encouraged to get even richer. Because having more gas is an advantage, you're actually given extra incentive to create imbalanced teams to blow the other team away and get your cheap win/gas. I would normally love to just play some fair games and go with the noobs and walk them through how to play, but until I had more than 40 gas, I was thinking about how much more efficient my macro would be with that extra gas, and how I needed wins. THANKFULLY that was changed to 10 mineral income max, so it's much more balanced, but until you have 21 wins, gas is extremely precious, and even after then it saves you up to 50 minerals.
Lastly (and possibly most important to you): I'm around 95% certain that the gas differential is the cause of the replay desyncs. The replay games don't sync with the server history of player score, so in every replay, every player starts with 50 mins and 0 gas. In the actual game history, the players had gas/minerals in order to get upgrades, but the replay thinks that they have 50/0. As soon as someone spends gas, the replay desyncs.
This is corroborated by some old replays I had that didn't desync (when everyone was newer and bought gas upgrade first and couldn't use all the gas, so the replay didn't desync). But my new replays all start with me upgrading minerals within the first 5 seconds, so the game thinks I have "-3" gas and realizes that there's an error and desyncs.
I mean, there could be another explanation, but that would seem to make sense. If you changed the score boards to offer no rewards, you'd also probably see less award abuse.