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Comment: Re:Meh (Score 1) 293

by zaffir (#35907238) Attached to: Taking the Fun Out of <em>StarCraft II</em>

To be honest with you, it sounds like you are bad at the game.

Starcraft is very much about speed and memorization, but it is far from ONLY about speed and memorization. Yes generally a player that is faster and knows his build better will typically win. But the advantage that gives decreases at the higher levels of play. You can't count on having better mechanics than your opponent, and even if you do your advantage is usually not big enough. The core mechanics of the game are the foundation on top of which you build the more advanced, more interesting aspects of the game. In basketball it doesn't matter if you have a playbook full of awesome, creative, winning strategies if you can't dribble well enough to execute them. You have to learn to crawl before you can walk.

Starcraft is about having more stuff, and to some extent the right kind of stuff, than your opponent. How do you do that? You need to be faster, your build needs to be optimized, AND you need to do things to keep him from getting more stuff than you. That last one is what makes it interesting. He took a fast expansion- should you take one yourself, or go kill him because he's invested money in his economy and not his army, meaning you have more dudes? You're trying to take an expansion to get an economic lead- what are you going to do to keep him from rolling over your army with his forces? You fell behind somewhere and now he has a bigger army- how are you going to delay him from pushing in and killing you? Can you position your army and control the engagement in such a way that you turn what would be a losing fight into a winning one? All of that and more starts to matter once you have solid fundamentals.

Watch the way the pros play, preferably longer games. You'll see what I'm talking about.

Comment: Re:what's wrong with letting the game be a game? (Score 1) 293

by zaffir (#35907000) Attached to: Taking the Fun Out of <em>StarCraft II</em>

At the higher levels it's all build order and strat and multitasking at an insane level. It's fun, but when you get to the higher levels the experimentation in the game is pretty much gone. If you experiment at all with a new strat you are dead.

I disagree wholeheartedly. Metagame shifts are always happening, they just don't happen overnight. If you experiment with a new, untested strategy then yes you are going to lose. You're doing something new and untested vs. someone that has probably done what they're doing 100 times before, after seeing some pro do it for the 2000th time. But after you've done your new untested build/composition only 20-30 times, assuming it's a sound strategy to begin with, you'll have hopefully started to refine it to the point of it being viable.

Comment: Re:I predict more are going to jump ship from Micr (Score 1) 480

by zaffir (#33904710) Attached to: Microsoft Admits OpenOffice.org Is a Contender

Actually, the ribbon was created to expose more functionality. Most users of Office weren't aware that there were any new features added since Office 2000. MS had solid research to back that up. The ribbon really does a great job of exposing new, useful features. I'm amazed you aren't modded troll.

Comment: Re:PS3 (Score 5, Informative) 516

by zaffir (#33460100) Attached to: Video Appliance For a Large Library On a Network?





Comment: Re:He sega dreamcast (Score 1) 1115

by zaffir (#32868844) Attached to: Has Any Creative Work Failed Because of Piracy?

Because if piracy didn't exist, your friend would have shelled out $50 for the retail version of all of those games, right?

"CESA reports a total of 19,347,668 downloads for the top twenty DS games and 86 billion yen ($941 million) in damages." - http://www.siliconera.com/2010/06/09/pokemon-platinum-tops-nintendo-ds-piracy-list/

And yet Nintendo is making money hand over fist with the NDS.

Correlation is not causation.
