Playing to win: Starcraft II, addendum

This is an addendum to the recent series detailing the casual player’s journey into competitive multiplayer real-time strategy in Starcraft II.  Previous posts here: 1, 2, 3, 4

Success!  As of this writing, I’m officially a member of the 1v1 gold league!  Actually, I got into Gold League several days ago and have just been too busy (and a bit sick) to post my update.  After being again denied a promotion after my 100th win, I was almost ready to just give up all hope in the league placement system, but one win later, I got the promotion I was waiting for.  I decided to play one more game as a christening of my new league placement.  In it, I soundly secured a solid victory in a ZvZ mirror on Lost Temple against another Gold player.  Yep.  I’m finally where I should be.  I’ve achieved the goal that I originally set out for myself.  My journey… is complete.

This isn’t to say that I won’t be playing Starcraft II anymore.  My experiences have culminated in my eventually finding enjoyment in competitive multiplayer RTS.  So I actually like playing online now.  There are still a lot of things I want to learn and want to try.  I also still have friends that need me to help with their team league games, too.  But I’ll definitely be scaling back my play time.  It’s time that I started moving onto some other, newer gaming experiences (or older ones that I had put on hold).  Aside from the occasional iPhone game, I haven’t actually played anything else other than Starcraft II since its release.  That might be fine for those of you with aspirations of going pro and joining tournaments, but my fickle soul is restless, and it’s starting to feel the fatigue of “one-base play”, so to speak.

I decided a while ago that I wanted to end my series on the journey into Starcraft II multiplayer by examining for a little bit of how the competitive experience compares to my other favorite competitive gaming genre – fighting games.

When I first decided to pour some significant effort into getting better at RTS, I expected to find a lot of overlap between certain aspects in fighting games and the skills I’d need in RTS.  In hindsight, that expectation was pretty ridiculous.  They’re entirely different types of games, but now that I’ve spent a good amount of time playing both, I feel that I can adequately compare the two, if only to pinpoint the emphases of each genre for those that wish to become more involved with competitive gaming.

As I got proficient in Soul Calibur II against the guys in my dorm during college, I immediately found the appeal of fighting games: they were very much about playing the mind of your opponent – by reading him, baiting him, psyching him out, and just generally being one step ahead of his thoughts.  If you can get into the mind of your opponent, there’s nothing he can really do.  These impressions were only affirmed as I learned how higher-level Virtua Fighter was played, and especially later, when I began playing Street Fighter IV.

RTS, however, seems more of a battle of wills.  I don’t really know how to put it any other way.  I think that the distinction is best seen by examining the idea of advantage.  In a fighting game, the player’s life bar is the measure of victory.  However, the life bar rarely plays a role in what one is actually doing in the game.  A solid playstyle does not somehow become weaker just because the person executing it has less life.  There are some situations in which it matters (especially in games that have chip damage mechanics), but for the most part, the meat of the game lies in those small bursts of decision-making, where the two players are trying to determine what the other is going to do.  When one player succeeds in such an exchange, he gets his combo damage, and then another such exchange occurs (with either a complete reset, a frame advantage/disadvantage situation, or a wakeup game).  But the important thing to note is that in each exchange, any player can come out ahead with a correct guess.  This is why fighting games culminate in a battle of minds.  If you know what your opponent is going to do, no matter what their advantage is on paper, you can usually win, even after the opponent has depleted all but a sliver of your life.  This is also why fighting game matches can be so exciting.  The potential for a “losing” player to make a comeback is enormous.

In contrast, the traditional RTS model (and that of a lot of strategy gaming in general) consists of a slippery slope, where the slightest economic lead can be exploited to become an even larger lead, until victory is secured.  Some strategically-minded boardgames are starting to adopt mechanics in which disadvantaged players get artificially imposed advantages as a way of leveling the playing field and making the entire game more exciting.  For example, in Power Grid, players take their turn orders in such a way that the losing player gets the advantage for the turn.  If the rules were not engineered in this way, the slippery slope problem could easily cause one player to race way ahead of the other players in the game, giving little incentive to the other players to continue playing after a certain point.  In Starcraft II, if you can weaken a player’s economy just a slight amount, you can exploit that disadvantage to expand and get an even better economy.  Or you can commence a full frontal attack while their capacity to reinforce is diminished.  Or you can harass their economy even more while it becomes increasingly difficult for them to defend.  The disadvantaged player’s only hope against an adept opponent is to do some sort of push to reduce the other player’s advantage.  Day[9] talked about this in a TvT daily about maintaining advantage.  This property alone makes RTS gameplay a lot more methodical and, to some extent, predictable.

But the important thing that separates RTS from, say, a strategic board game, is, of course, the real-time element.  This adds that layer of execution that allows a player to improve, essentially, by an infinite amount.  One can become better just by simply doing more things than the other player.  This is important because the slippery slope effect does not really account for any element of execution.  When execution starts playing a role, then a disadvantaged player can simply try harder to catch up.  Now this isn’t to say that every situation is winnable.  There comes a point where, no matter how hard you try, you’re not going to get back into the game because your economy has been sufficiently damaged, or your army was completely overrun by your opponent.  This is usually where we see the “GG”.  But in a lot of other instances, it is surprisingly possible to make comebacks simply because of the nonexistent skill ceiling in an RTS.  This is why I say that playing an RTS feels more like a battle of wills more than anything.  If you want that win hard enough and you push yourself hard enough, you can still take the game in the midst of some dire situations.  Of course, you still have to be smart about it, responding correctly to what you see your opponent doing, and not initiating fights you can’t win.  But assuming that both players have equal knowledge of the strategy and the matchup, the game seems to boil down to who has the better execution.

In this way, Starcraft really is an “e-sport”.  There are strategies, counter-strategies, and plays in sports such as basketball and hockey, and there are moment-to-moment mind games, but the overwhelming factor of success in a sport is simply the players’ ability to execute consistently in all situations.  I think this is an important thing that separates RTS from fighting games.  Fighting games, in my opinion, have a lower skill ceiling.  (By “skill”, I’m referring to execution and not to strategy and yomi, so don’t go lynching me.)  It’s true that one can get infinitely better by having infinitely better reaction times, but there comes a point where you reach a physical limit that is simply shattered by the timing windows of a fighting game.  You’ll never be able to actually react to something like a 4-frame crouching jab in Street Fighter.  It’s practically impossible for the human body to do so.  There are also game limitations on the optimization of damage.  It is definitely possible for a player to learn how to get optimal damage out of every combo opportunity.  So there does come a point where players can approach the execution skill ceiling of a fighting game, though I wouldn’t claim that any particular person has really reached that level yet.  Even Daigo drops his combos on occasion.  But my point is that players are clearly getting close, and as they do, the game’s focus shifts from execution to the mind games.  If both players are capable of punishing optimally and executing their combos perfectly, then all that’s left is to determine what to do based on what you think your opponent will do.  And that’s where I think a lot of players would agree that the depth of the fighting game lies.

The execution skill ceiling in RTS, by contrast, has no end in sight.  By mid-game, with one or two expansion bases running, the possibility for fights on multiple fronts, and the ability to control every individual unit to optimal effect, the amount of things that can possibly be done by a single player blows the mind.  The strategy starts to focus around where you want to spend your time and attention.  But as one increases in skill, they acquire more of the ability to split their attention between multiple things.  Because of this, I’d say that playing an RTS is as much about playing against yourself as it is playing against your opponent.  And to the genre’s credit, victories are so much more satisfying knowing that it was achieved, for the most part, because you were simply more adept than your opponent.  There are very few guesses involved.  You can’t throw out a random wakeup Ultra and hope to win.

So the two genres of competitive games I’ve described feel about as diametrically opposed as they can get.  I can’t claim that I like one more than the other for reasons based solely on the competitive gameplay dynamic, since they’re just so different.  But for external, more pragmatic reasons, I still think I lean toward liking fighting games more than real-time strategy.  The biggest reason is time.  Fighting games finish so much faster.  If you’re being outplayed, you’ll find out within the minute-and-a-half you’re given for the round.  Even if you’re Zangief and your opponent is just running away from you and sitting on a life lead, at least you don’t need to worry about banging your head against a contain for a full five-to-ten minutes until the opponent has the tech and the army size to finally march into your base with confidence.  And you can run 1000+ man tournaments over the course of a weekend, as opposed to GSL’s 64-man tournament being run over the course of several weeks.

Related to the short game times, the learning process in a fighting game is also much quicker.  In a fighting game, you’re typically just learning about situations with no regard to how you got into the situation.  You can practice those situations easily and in very short periods of time with a lot of repetition.  Also, modern fighting games have elaborate training modes with features like input recording (to practice punishing various attacks or blocking certain attack strings), CPU block behavior (to practice hit-confirms or link combos), and hit behavior (to practice counter-hit-confirms, etc).  Training in an RTS, on the other hand, typically requires nothing less than grinding out a ton of games.  And even with a training partner helping you practice counters to particular builds, it can take a long time to master the various timings involved in scouting and countering strategies.  Starcraft II’s best training tool is a build tester custom map, which really only lets you practice what essentially amounts to the early game.  Mid- and late-game situations in an RTS match are very dependent on what your opponent did beforehand, so one has to study both the situation and the lead-up, which can really only be learned through game experience.

I will have to say, though, that I like how serious competitive RTS can actually be played online.  The effect of lag on my games has been, for the most part, non-existent (except for one time when I was doing Muta harass, flew them right over a huge ball of Marines, and lost about two-thirds of them because my retreat move command got lost in a lag spike).  I most definitely can’t say the same about Street Fighter IV, where for half of my online games, I’m not sure if I’m dropping combos because of lag or because I just actually suck.  Unless of course my match becomes a slide show, in which case I’m pretty sure lag is the culprit.

But anyway, I’m just sorta rambling at this point.  The road to Gold – it’s been fun!  Though I basically lost a month-and-a-half to it, I can’t say I regretted it.  It was a great learning experience, and I’m happy to finally understand, at least to some limited degree, what it is that makes competitive RTS such a singular experience.  I’m always disappointed whenever I read some artsy game journalist’s blog, and they shrug off entire swaths of competitive gaming culture out of complete (and willing) ignorance.  I think they’d be surprised at the increasingly growing relevance of competitive multiplayer in the trends of modern gaming, and they’d best learn something about it before they find themselves woefully unprepared to discuss it in any intelligent manner.

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