Area Commands

[KeyBlue]

My initial reaction was to be outraged by the suggestion of removing the manual reclaim advantage (this is not actually the case, but it was my first emotionally loaded reaction). So in a way similar to Farmsletje, This_Guy and biass.
But after reading the discussions and hearing some different opinions, i changed my mind.

Like exotic explained, we all like all/most of the apm saving features. And this is basicly the same thing. Only a little more extreme, from 10+ to 2-4(?).

Players still need to actually have engineers nearby / decide for them to go reclaim / decide what and where they will go to reclaim.
Any of these things can and will not happen for most players due to various reasons:

• they don't know the map (apparantly some rocks behind the base on regor?)
• they don't have the foresight to prepare engineers before fighting/making reclaim, so they can start reclaiming sooner.
• they don't have control over the reclaim
• simply not having enough engineers on high reclaim maps
• being too busy with unit micro/basebuilding
• they don't realize which spots have the most amount of reclaim (so no or bad usage of ctrl-shift)

A bunch of these happen to me regularly and i like to think that i'm an (above) average player.
So it is not a magic feature that will make sure that everyone has the same amount of reclaim.

And if it becomes too OP, i'm sure dev team can make that engineers using the area command, reclaim a little slower or some similar nerf.

And you can probably still optimize it by doing move - small area reclaim - move - small area reclaim - move - ...
yes?

[ZeRen]

I have idea for improving reclaim, it would be between manual and area reclaim(actually it wouldn´t be so much different then manual reclaim) and I talked about it with Heaven , but He is high rank so you can guess He didn´t liked it

but it would be pointless try to explain it here, right?

[PhilipJFry]

I've just watched this Youtube video and i think the point that is being made in it is pretty much the core of the issue we seem to have with this mod.

In case you don't wanna watch it or just listen to it the point is that a change that lowers the skill floor tends to lower the skill ceiling as well. I think we all agree that thats pretty much what the area command mod would do if it were to be implemented or used by the majority of the playerbase.
The important question is: Are we willing to sacrifice some skill ceiling height to make the game more accessable or not?

Spoiler: show

Which interestingly is something that may very well contribute to this issue.

Maybe we can even find a middle ground and make the mod in some way inferior to manual reclaim. But since i'm not a coder i have no idea if such a thing is possible and how hard it would be to do.

[tatsu]

Are we willing to sacrifice some skill ceiling height to make the game more accessable or not?

it's floor dude

[KeyBlue]

Are we willing to sacrifice some skill ceiling height to make the game more accessable or not?

it's floor dude

Reread his post xD
You didn't get the message.

The point is that floor and ceiling are connected, so lowering skill floor will lower skill ceiling too.

[tatsu]

Reread his post xD
You didn't get the message.

The point is that floor and ceiling are connected, so lowering skill floor will lower skill ceiling too.

actually totalbuiscuit in his video disagrees with this paradigm as do I.

the two aren't linked as a necessity and FA is a prime example of a game where they don't have to be.

Adding area commands lowers the skill floor while doing absolutely nothing to the skill ceiling.

As a matter of fact I think FA is one of those rare games that has an infinite skill ceiling.

and when you look at the vastness of the skill range in the rankings (AKA in games like starcraft the'res only a couple levels and the difference is not all that great wheras in FA a 900 can take on three 300 on his own a 1500 can take on three 900 on his own and a 2100 can take on three 1500 on his own making the skill difference between a 300 and a 2100 a quasi-infinite ocean) and the point is we can (theoretically) climb to 2500 and even beyond.

you see what I mean?

[IceDreamer]

It comes down to one fundamental fact: APM is totally independent of game mechanics. It is a quality intrinsic to each individual player.

What this means is that no matter what we change in the game, a high APM player will have more APM than a low APM player. They will have an advantage. What we CAN control is how that player spends their APM. At present some of the APM is spent mashing l-mouse to grab reclaim manually. If we integrate painter commands, it doesn't close the gap between two players, it shifts the effort sideways, allowing that high-APM player to use that skill to make more decisions. Now that they no longer have to spent 100 clicks implementing their "I want to reclaim these rocks" decision, they can use a much smaller APM to do that, and then spent the other 95 clicks that they still have waiting... Microing units. Dodging shells. Finetuning buildqueues. Keeping an eye on scouting efforts. Using manual abilities (Shield toggle micro, stealth, TMLs...

If anything, doing this will increase, not decrease, the gap between high and low APM players because it allows the high APM players to focus on proper strategic and tactical decision actions instead of wasting time on trivial tasks. This, in my opinion, is a good thing for the game.

[tatsu]

I actually agree with the above but I'm of a mind of "lets see where this takes us before judging it"

[SpoCk0nd0pe]

IceDreamer's post doesn't make much sense to me:
If you have the APM to do the manual reclaim and I don't, you will have more stuff to kill me with. If I can reclaim almost as much as you do by using area reclaim, I could maybe not loose as hard. You are still going to be better though.

My point is a different one:
I have my hands full learning how to eco, learning maps, learning BOs, I barely get to concentrate on my units because I want to learn the basics first. If my attack move engies don't do what I want, stop reclaiming because I made a mistake and overflow eco, or my attention is elsewhere and I overbuild engies to one spot, or my allies overflow and make my engies stop reclaiming (you get my drift here), it is kind of frustrating for a noob. With this, I can just click them and area reclaim to make them do something useful so I can spend more time doing the fun parts of the game.

So I'm with the raise skill floor a little, make the game more accessible crowd

The good players won't have to give their right arm for this. Manual reclaim is still mostly better.

In conclusion, I would ask again if it would be possible to turn this into a UI mod. I would rather learn the game with it right now and enjoy the game more

[tatsu]

IceDreamer's post doesn't make much sense to me:
If you have the APM to do the manual reclaim and I don't, you will have more stuff to kill me with. I

he's basically saying the APM can be used in much more dangerous "rating gap digging" ways than that.