Zerg Spawn Larva idea/suggestion.

@Aurora perfectly said

@rational I cant argue stupid fundamentals with you... thats like arguing why wheels on a car need to be round....

 

With all due respect, the tone of some people replying to this thread could stop making assumptions of what the purpose of this idea is about.

Too quickly are repliers trigger happy to perceive this idea strips down the game, or buffs the Zerg or takes anything away from what foundation is currently set up.

I'm not ignorant to believe it's fool-proof, or that others don't have objections about it. Yet when they claim it's doing something it's not, or state the obvious which ignores the point of the idea, I get fairly disheartened of why no one contributes in a respectful manner.

@ kuvasz

How is this a dumbing down feature? Am I lessening the amount of clicks? Am I lessening the awareness of the player? If you your reading that somewhere in my posts, then clearly I'm incapable of explaining this through text.

Read through it again, and please note out where I take a click away, where I detour the players attention for that moment to click spawn larva; cause clearly I'm reading something different then you or vise versa.

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@ Aurora

I don't follow your logic. Why does it have to be queue or no queue? Afraid of change? Or just not satisfied with suggested change if it's not from Blizzard directly? Because I'm not ripping open a black hole of issues with this suggestion...and I'm most certainly not on some hell bent mission to undo some grand design.

Why are you making things up such as " If this would be added, then one might as well suggest warpgates to have a queue of one, or even commanding units to spawn while the Overlord count is still to low, and so on.", when this has nothing to do with the subject? Anyone can draw extreme conclusions from a change, but it has no place in the end other then a way to detour away from the point at hand.

For 1 thing, it's still a manual cast...it still requires awareness to be attentive to when to cast it again. Not all elements in this game must be kept safe due it's nature of separating pros/serious players from the rest.

Just because a game element works for a select number of players, doesn't qualify it as an untouchable feature. Thankfully I'm not advising a compete overhaul of it nor am I requesting a dumb down version of the game. Yet if you insist I am, then that's all the thread will whittle down to, is you accusing me of something I'm clearly not after.

Why am I being pinned as lowering the bar? And how is it that you get the feeling this is brought on by loses I've attained? Can I not be a productive player and get my fair share of wins with out suggesting something?

Despite if this ability is the sole cause of Zerg loses or not, does not count it as a clean cut feature unfit to see adjustments. A Zerg player can and has shown to win matches, yet that is not merit to demonstrate a neglect for improving how the game functions.

Am I offending you in some manner? Because you ether want this to turn into a humorous thread, or clearly mocking a poster will win you this title of enlightenment for securing what idea of the game you feel is untouchable.

Feel free to not respond to this thread then, because if you're going to summarize it's purpose as such to mislead others of my intents, that I'd rather you not comment at all on the subject.

Clearly you have hostilities toward past idea suggesters or I'm some bother to your eyes, because I find a hostile approach to your posts as though you can't reason with someone you disagree with.

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And lastly

LunaticWoda,

I don't care for reputation on these forums, because it often doesn't match what I view the poster as...yet clearly I'm not the only one who finds your posts lacking if this is how you respond on such topics when someone questions your posts.

 

If you don't care about rep on these forums, then why do you use the rep of LunaticWoda to ridicule him? Seems quite hypocritical to me. But perhaps I could have seen that coming. I've been here discussing this game for 3 years now. If you're saying that people are pointing out the obvious or anything, then you might want to search through the forum a little bit. It's not like you're the first one to bring up this queue idea. As for my credibility, my rep here used to be 23, but it got reset about six months ago. Just saying that I'm not some forum troll or anything, if that is what you think of my posts, but I'll get into that shortly. >_>

Furthermore, I am in fact being serious, and you seem to be to ignorant to realize that there are in fact people who do care about every single mechanic requiring full attention of the players. I was hoping to illustrate that with a joke, instead of making more futile attempts at trying to get you to realize this, but apparently I was wrong. Concerning your surprised tone on how some people might seem a tad harsh: this is a discussion forum about a competitive game. Not sure if you expect people to apologize to you for showing some form of criticism? If you can't take that, then you're free to go elsewhere.

As for reason and logic behind my posts: if you don't get it, read it again. I'm being as clear as I can. Your inability to understand my words doesn't mean that they are wrong. What I don't understand however, is how me trying to add a few examples to compare your suggested idea, is having nothing to do with the topic in your opinion. If you ask me to explain myself, then how can I do such a thing without having to resort to saying exactly the same thing, over and over again? Perhaps you have not noticed, but these arguments tend to go in circles after a while. Or in this case, as soon as page 2 of a single thread.

All you do is trying to dismantle an argument of me saying that players should always be paying attention to every aspect of the game, without trying to substitute some of it with mechanics to make it more easy to handle then required for most players. Which is an argument which you have already lost beforehand anyway. Not sure if you read posts made by Blizzard, their podcasts, etc... but this whole subject has already been discussed to death on other forums and by other people before you even brought it up. I was being quite mild in my responses, but meh. As you might have already noticed: this forum is filed with feedback and suggestion on the game, including many suggestions of my own. I'm not sure where you got the idea of me suggestion you're a bad player, and that you can't suggest stuff because of it, but that argument makes no sense to me.

And seeing as you completely avoid my main argument about this game revolving around player awareness (macro) and fast reaction time (micro), and these being properly balanced as it is... then I might as well not even bother to reply any longer indeed. If you can't seem to understand on what 2 basic concepts the multiplayer part of the game is based upon, then I'm clearly wasting my time here. I have yet to see you counteract my argument on how this concept of yours, because instead of doing so, you keep saying stuff like that I feel that the game in it's current state is perfect in some way. Of course it is not, but that doesn't take away the fact that your idea is no improvement as I see it.

So until you finally decide to respond to this properly, instead of avoiding it and making me seem like some sort of online bully, I will not reply directly to you any longer as far as this thread goes. Just don't think I'm taking this to personally, because I am not. Just not going to waste anymore time on trying to make this clear to a person who won't even go directly into what I'm saying.

One last thing, though. I get the idea that your suggestion is mostly to make the game more easy to handle for players who are having some trouble with macro. In a game where balance is everything, and where Blizzard plans to make this one of the most (commercially) successful competitive e-sports game of all time... do you honestly believe they will change the game in a way to make it more attractive for lower skilled players? If there aren't any clear issues with the mechanic from a pro player's point of view, then it's very unlikely for this to ever change. You won't hear me say that it's out of the question. Credits to you if they do change it, and 'd respect that, just saying that as for now, it makes no sense at all to even hope they will.

 

The irony...

I don't expect you or anyone else to see it, but it's all over that post.

You're not reading my posts as I figured you would, or reading something that's clearly not there. I am sorry if I'm returning said favor to yours, but in the case of this last one, it's quite hard not to misinterpret where you're going with it.

Perhaps my bane of this topic is how I'm being accused of things simply not true, of being told my suggestions or statements are doing something I never implied they would do nor set out to achieve.

I can't reply to a question you ask me if it's in-regards to something I never actually said nor cared to bring into discussion. (in part that I felt it was irrelevant to the discussion to being with) So getting impatient with my lack of proper response is unfair to say the least.

It's the misconception that I have concerns with, not people commenting on the idea itself. (I'm setting my self up for disappointment, in part that my OP is clearly not getting out what I had originally hoped)

Going for general themes such as awareness and dumbing down the game are far from what I'm suggesting, yet I can't escape the fact someone is reading that somewhere or simply coming to the conclusion that's the end-all goal here.

Literally typed the words out of my mind. (This is exactly how I'm feeling towards a fair some of repliers) There is only so much text can do when someone else reads something not there, or completely different then what was posted. Happens countless times and is perhaps the leading cause of these "circles" when it turns away from the topic and more into a bicker of, "I already told you that!".

If you mean dismantle as I'm trying to avoid it altogether, then yes. Because I'm not siding with the fact players need to have their hands held, and that they should be-able to be less aware/skillful of their clicks and time spent in one particular place.

Why waste my time on a sub-argument that I'm not after to begin with? I just don't want to de-rail away from what I considered to be the thread's goal at heart.

Not sure where I lost it, (or started it for that matter) as it seems more of an opinion, we aren't arguing facts from what I've seen.

It has part to do with you trying to add that in to this thread, and I never truly wanted to deal with it in the first place.

If I'm ignorant of anything in this thread, it's that I don't see how my idea is playing a roll in taking away from a players macro intensity.

You're striving to show how key a role it plays, where I never made it a vendetta to lessen that role to being with.

Hrm, I must have alzheimer's cause I don't recall ever mentioning, to you at any rate, about you claiming the game is perfect; I'm almost certain that was to someone else.

That's the catch however, in part that what you consider proper is me replying to what arguments you've brought up, that as I've mentioned I never wanted to deal with in-part of them not dealing with my suggestion.

Truly I must be a simpleton if I'm the only one grasping it as a minor, yet useful addition to offer what I feel can aid in getting a more accurate picture of how Zerg games often go when larva is a more stable source. I had a reasoning behind it for the end all goal of noting if the Zerg have too little to too much larva due to the SL's current structure; am I contradicting my self here?

My intention was for players of all skill levels, not a training bicycle fix for those unable to ride with the best of them.

You can't truly balance something in my opinion if it's too extreme on both ends. In my eyes, I feel the SL ability is making games too easy or too hard, depending on your opponent, and finding a way to meet in the middle allows you to properly tune it to be as balanced as possible.

 

Rational Ill explain this as simply as humanly possible

The reason people jump and say it would make zerg OP or easy is this.
One of the BIG game mechanics is larvae for the zerg. It forces you to balance your macro by forcing you to see those queens every so often regardless if your sitting on your *** and teching or if your in a major battle. The point to zerg is to be a "swarm" low cost lower hp units to be exchanged for very very very fast production. the only way to maintain this high output is to be able to properly manage your micro and macro simultaneously . No other faction has this level of complexity when it comes to unit production. because with Protoss and Terran you can control group your rack or gateways or starports etc and produce units white in the middle of a battle. The downside for those 2 races is they need to spend more to get the momentum going. Zerg doesnt have the challange of gaining momentum they have the challange to keep it up which is not easy especially in very high micro situations.

Making it so Queens auto larvae in any capacity would defeat that purpose. For the zerg would basically turn into the persian army in 300. Sure maybe terran/protoss (Spartans) have better units but they must pay for it zerg are ment to just brutally overwhelm and cause chaos while trying to keep order within their bases.

So to sum up yet again. Blizzard will never never never change the queen/larvae hatchery relationship

 

LunaticWoda, while that response is better then your last...You seem confused as to what I was proposing.

You made a great speech of the value of the Queen's macro ability, and why it's there. Yet I'm not going to dispute that, because that had nothing to do with my suggestion; I was never selling auto-cast, or attempting to remove this relationship between SL and the Queen being manual.

If change you mean remove or separate them, I wont comment, because that's not what I was talking about.

Yet, change in the sense of tuning/adjusting how their relationship works, I would have to disagree that it would be out of the question for future patches/questions.

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One argument that seems to be brought up, is ideas like these lessen the reward for players being aware as well having a fast reaction time. There is truth to this, yet it also conflicts with the argument others have made about reducing the amount of extra controls players already have in SC2 from past RTS games; AI being more advanced/user-friendly, path-finding allowing different outcomes of a fight, and even the selection of more then 12 units.

We can remove said features to make the game more challenging, or you can go the other direction, by giving players more choices/options rather then making trivial tasks harder to do.

In the case of Zerg's Spawn Larva, it is a lost opportunity once you forget to recast the spell after the hatchery has been untouched for a few seconds to minutes. This does indeed set a rather unforgiving system which some will argue it sets the novices apart from the experienced. Yet if such is true, why again not go back to operation "strip" out player forgiveness features, and say...set a cooldown for Mules/Scans/Supply or set Cooldowns on said buildings C. Boost was just used on? You'd then have to hawk eye when the Cooldown is off in order to get use of that spell/building.

I'm not seriously suggesting that, because I think it's ridiculous, but it feels like a double-standard to treat the Zerg as such yet not the other 2 races.

To clarify, I'm not reducing the amount of clicks or the awareness of the spell, but offering the player a chance to play the game how it should be in my opinion; which would be the quality of troops(As well how they are used) and the attention to base management with out going extreme on ether case to where you get overly penalized for missing one.

It's not to dumb down the game, yet in the end, if that's all you see out of the idea, I'm not sure how else I can communicate otherwise.

I'm trying to be sensible in the end, don't take anything I'm typing out in a insulting way.

 

I'v been reading through these posts and I have to agree with RationalThought, allowing the player to spend excess Queen energy would make Zerg more playable for novice players and not impact in the slightest the top level players. It would bring the skill requirements for the Zerg closer to the Terran, but not make them any stronger.

I can't see how this queuing suggestion would hurt skilled players who perform their macro brilliantly anyway.

(I don't think even Autocast would affect pro players because they are unlikely to use it much, and anyway RationalThought is not suggesting something as simplifying as Autocast)

Plus Blizzard are going to have to seriously consider doing something like this anyway for the expansion because the Zerg as they stand will not be allot of fun to play single player.

Full Disclaimer: I play Zerg, and I play Starcraft for enjoyment, not competition (I'm only Gold league) and I do not enjoy the heavy base micro of Zerg. I do enjoy overwhelming my opponents with mass units and expanding across the map, and I'd like to focus on that and do less WORK when I PLAY. I want to beat opponents with strategies, not clickiness.

Right now Zerg is a little UP in lower-skilled matches. By lower-skilled I mean everywhere outside of Korea. The top Europeans are mostly Terran. But in Korea Protos and Zerg are doing fantastically.

It strikes me as a bit of a flaw in Starcraft design that they made two of the races so micro intensive that noone outside of Korea can play them properly.

But, once again, I don't think Queuing spawn larvae would actually make Zerg stronger, not the way RationalThought is suggesting it. His suggestion just means that if, as Zerg, you do mess up the punishment is not as severe. Novice players will still mess up, RationalThought did not suggest that Spawn Larvae be done for you.

And I think Single Player Experience is going to be a real concern for Blizzard with this next expansion, so I do not see how anyone could say that they won't change something many people clearly do not enjoy.

 

I can see why RationalThought thinks his idea is good. Terran and Protoss players have to constantly remember to make units, while Zerg players have to constantly remember to spawn larva. Note that zerg does NOT necessarily remember to use those larva; if he constantly creates more, then when he sees that he has 1000+ minerals he can morph his 15 stockpiled larva into units to use all that money.

However, if Terran and Protoss players forget to make units, they have the option to use up their additional money to queue units, so that they don't have to remember to make units so often. But if a Zerg player forgets to spawn larva, he currently cannot queue multiple spawn larva despite having enough energy on his queen. Zerg players lose out on the queuing ability that other races get.

However RationalThought's idea relies on one false premise: that all the races must be equal in the regard to queuing. Yes the Zerg don't have a queuing ability for their queen, but that is at least partially made up by the fact that larva naturally queue themselves, which actually is even better as you can use all such larva at once. He might think that this is not enough of a benefit to justify keeping spawn larva as is, but currently Blizzard does, and they have the final say in what changes occur.

 

Blizzard have issued a statement saying that they are receiving a lot of complaints about the Zerg (or at least Zerg in comparison with the Terran) and are monitoring the situation and deciding on whether to address this with the next patch (complaints about the balancing that is, not about the spawn larvae thing).

Blizzard also pointed out that the Zerg and Protoss are dominating in Korea while the Terran are dominating in the USA and Europe. So there is a good chance that Blizzard will decide that Starcraft 2 is balanced and does not need any fixing.

The point is that Blizzard have acknowledged that there may be a problem with the Zerg. I cannot understand why people keep saying that Starcraft 2 will not be adjusted. Blizzard are famous for listening to their players and for fixing problems.

It is not about forcing things to be equal or making all the races play the same, RationalThought never said that. And that certainly was not the premise (read his first post again if you sincerely care about premise). Furthermore neither the mules nor the chrono boost queue, both can be spammed, so there is no way that RationalThought's suggestion was about making all the "races equal with regard to queuing". In fact this suggestion does not change the way the races play at all other than if a Zerg player does mess up his/her queen micro then he/she an still spend the energy and maybe have a bit of a cushion for the next screw up. It isn't even that useful if you know what you are doing.

Personally I think it is about creating a rewarding playing experience for as many people as possible (which I think is a noble cause). RationalThought did state that the Terran and the Protoss do not receive as severe penalties for neglecting macromangement, and I feel that that is kind of unfair on the Zerg (why should Zerg be more difficult?).

Some Novice players are currently struggling with Zerg, and also many experienced players are saying Zerg are UP (Even Dimaga said he might switch to Terran in order to win), possibly in part because of this macro mechanic, therefore making the penalty less painful will balance things at least at the Novice stages, while it should not affect competitive play (because competitive players will not need to queue because they get the spawn larvae thing right every time anyway).

If you think queuing spawn larvae is a bad idea because you don't like the flavour of it, or if you feel that Novice players should either battle through the macro tedium it or get stuffed, then I understand that. The races should play differently and that is a good thing.

But I really do think that RationalThought has laid out a simple, and logically sound argument for it.

Once more. This will not benefit competitive players but make Zerg more playable at lower skill levels.

I personally do not think this affects the flavour of the Zerg. Spawn larvae is a new ability for Starcraft 2 and it is causing a lot of complaints, if I worked at Blizzard this would give me pause for thought.

Honestly, I really don't think Blizzard will implement it. I don't think it is in their vision of what the Zerg should be. But I still think it is a good suggestion and I think I would have enjoyed the early stages of the game more if it had been implemented.

Furthermore, it was just a harmless suggestion, read the first post, why do do so many people feel the need to put RationalThought in his place or refute his logic etc? He has been nothing but civil.

 

Edit: As I see now, part of my post has been discussed already, but I only based it on the OP and a couple random replies I read, not the whole picture. Still, I agree with Evan.Greenwood's posts and find RationalThought's idea nice. He also included a very nice limitation on the OP which people seem to have skipped, which is the queue limit.

I think that this could work nicely, imo. It would allow to draw a little bit of attention from the queen and would greatly help the low-end players and wouldn't change anything in high-end play.

Having a queue cap of 1 would just allow you to minimise time lost between consecutive casts while still requiring to look back at the queen after every cast to refill the queue, but if you got somehow sidetracked from a fight or something for a few seconds you wouldn't lose larva time if you chose to.

There's imo a difference between this idea, queueing in general and automatisation(hope this is spelled correctly ):
Queueing as is with a cap at 5 items means that if you so choose you can spend the resources needed now and not need to look back often enough. No good player will queue 5 units on a production building as those resources can be spent in other ways "now" instead of waiting. They do queue 1 more unit though a little before the previous one finishes training to not lose time between the first one finishing and the second one starting. No matter how good you are, if you wait for the unit to finish training before starting building another, you're losing time. You still have to check on your building again as often as if you did queue 1 unit at a time to put the next one in queue a bit before the new one finishes, but if you miss a second or come a second too early it's no time lost. This doesn't apply to queens in the current build: if you check too early you have to check again later and if you check too late you've lost time. With a simple 1 queue limit you'll have to check exactly as often but you'll have a little less time lost.

I don't think it's dumbing down the game, as like the op said, when terran loses a few seconds on calling that mule, the cc has accumulated some extra points and so in effect he hasn't lost anything in the long run appart from having the same amount of minerals a few seconds earlier than later{it can make a difference but it's too minimal}.



If the queen's spawn larva queue was like the other buildings having like a queue of 5 or something{allowing up to 5 casts} then yes it would dumb down zerg as you'd have to check on your queens and hatcheries 5 times less often, and if it was on auto-cast it would be a fire-and-forget mechanism which would take no skill at all to use, but with a queue limit of 1, you still have to check every 40 seconds to make use of the larva and recast the ability, but if you're say 4 seconds too late because you were controlling a battle or something, those won't be 4 seconds of lost larva{which in the long run adds up}.


Imo it's a nice, rational idea, which doesn't dumb down the game, but while requiring the same amount of awareness, makes it a bit less of a loss to not check with 100% accuracy.


At least I think so, it sounds quite reasonable to me, if used with such limitations.


As to the homogenisation argument, of mimicing protoss and terran build mechanisms, I don't agree there. What this idea would accomplish is reduce the loss of not building larva.


Still, again, I don't really think it's needed as zerg don't seem to be limited by larva, at least so far as I've played, with the current build. It all ends up to resources right now, but I wouldn't mind this little convenience for zerg players.