Why did this game decline in popularity so much? There was a

>>382042839
The koreans moved to LoL and the rest of the world never really cared all that much about it.

MOBAS took the RTS concept and packaged it in an accessible format.

>>382042839
RTS took more skill than FPS and MOBA games.

They hella fucked up in multiple ways by not playing nice with KeSPA, bad balance patches that forced a boring three-base macro meta and resentment from casuals for not having a good base to make custom games from.

>tfw 2010/2011 era sc2 general threads were some of the best content this website has ever produced
>tfw they're never coming back

>>382042839
Blizzard mishandled it so much in it's early days you could write a book on it.

Between obvious gameplay flaws (unit clumping, terrible terrible damage), to the terrible balance (GomTvT, BLInfestor), the heavy price tag (+expansions) and the complete lack of giving of fuck about the community that Blizzard just assumed would love whatever they made, they screwed the pooch royally in WoL.

When combined with the meteoric rise of Mobas, and the natural decline of a game as it ages, there just is no way for SC2 to keep up.

The sad thing is LotV is actually really good, and if SC2 came out like it is now it would probably have 4-5x the player base left.

>>382043580
they also catered hard to APM autists during beta, doing things like refusing to give zerg queen autocast spawn larva, and giving every race an equally obnoxious APM test like nexus's boost and terran's mule.

>>382043983
>tfw you became an APM autist as a result and the only thing to scratch the itch since is GW2 engi

>>382042839
Straight up, SC2 was poorly designed as a competitive game. It was way too stressful for the average player, too focused on cheese and lack of strategy for a long time, zero fucks given about custom games (how fucking hard is it to copy Wc3?), and overall too fast paced to be really enjoyable. The casual based got driven away by these, and that was that.

>>382044824
>>382043580
splitting the game into 3 parts was the first strike. hard counters were the second. abandoning it when overwatch was getting popular was the third.

>>382042839
The failure was predicted by dota 1 becoming more popular than WC3. An rts can't be a big esport today because people don't want to play or watch them.

>>382044824
What you call "poorly designed" is just how competitive RTS is. Competitive Aoe2 is fast as shit (not to mention brood war), but no one here played or knows about those games in a competitive sense so they think SC2 had some kind of design flaw. That's just RTS.

I can only speak for myself but Blizzard games are so expensive. I was expected to pay 60$ and then another 45$ twice to play as the games came out. Incredible.

>>382045478
>That's just RTS
It really isn't. Trying to be an esport instead of a game crippled starcraft 2 more than anything else.

>>382045478
I think it's more a case of people not wanting to play hyper competitive 1v1 games with dozens of different things to manage all while being implicitly judged by an elo system for every little mistake than it is about the RTS genre.

The game did sell millions of copies so it's not really a case of people being put off by the idea of an RTS.

>>382045478
Brood war is honestly slower. You wont lose entire armies in 2s of bad decisions. You'll slowly lose the game to loses from micro and macro fall behind. Aoe2 has huge downtimes in the first ages. You need APM, but APM isn't what characterizes the game as 'fast' here, though it's part of it. The fatal fastness of SC2 was losing entire games in 10s in a terran bio ball push based on who split better, or being cheesed and immediately losing the game. Dark age rush wasnt really a thing in Aoe2 like 6pool/banshee rush was at sc2 launch. For casual players, that shit was too stressfull, to be able to lose the game immediately at any second.

>>382043983
I'd say injects are on a different level than mules and chronoboost. You can bank mules and chronoboost, they aren't as necessary to always hit at the perfect time.

But Injects are basically do or die at anything above plat league. You literally don't have enough larva to ever win if you aren't at least fairly decent at injects. Super annoying

>>382046221
There's just as much cheese in BW as there is in SC2 though.

File: ByA8_1GIEAAt6hC.png (348KB, 600x339px) Image search: [Google]

348KB, 600x339px

>splitting the game into 3 parts
>Blizzard being utter shit at balancing the game
>tournament prize pools being a joke compared to MOBAs even back when LoL was still relatively young

>>382046471
I wouldn't really say so. Sc2 at launch had endless cheese: banshees, reapers, zerg rush, terran drops (though that was rally a staple), void ray rush, DT etc. And all of these were GG for a casual player if you didn't scout the specific rush. Void Rays in particular were the dumbest shit-- why could you ever charge them on rocks on some maps, for the love of god Blizz. In contrast, brood war had way worse tools to cheese. Shuttles sucked generally, T1 aircraft all sucked outside mutas, capitol ships had severe drawbacks (but were probably better than the sc2 counterparts). Cloaked units were less prevalent, worker harass specialists less prevalent too-- reapers too ages to balance in sc2.

>>382046997
Hmmm, maybe I'm thinking too much of modern SC2 where every race has maybe one or two good cheeses. Early days SC2 was pretty bad about that. Back in 2010 getting a hatchery after a roach warren was considered a "macro build" for fuck's sake.

>>382046724
kaitlyn is my favorite grill streamer, based

Even games like LoL and Dota 2 have been better at reinventing themselves than SC2 (Dota 2 to a greater extent, probably)
SC2 doesn't have the benefit of having another, very popular RTS to compete against and take inspiration from

>>382042839
>what changed?
eSport bullshit and moba trash competitors.

the game is too fast and battles between two large clusters of units can last 15-20 seconds making it feel more like a computer calculating outcomes than an actual interaction between two human beings

>>382048619
>making it feel more like a computer calculating outcomes than an actual interaction between two human beings
Once you've followed the scene closely enough, you really do get a feeling for different players small micro differences though. It's really fascinating actually, hardly as binary and calculated as it might seems at first

>>382046221
BW is probably the most mechanically demanding game of all time at the highest levels. Sure it's harder to outright kill your opponent, but to actually macro is way more difficult than any other RTS I've played. SC2's problems stemmed in some sense from making army's into big deathballs.

>>382050941
Highest level isn't the problem though, the issue was the feel of the game for casual players-- which for Sc2 was crushing stress that you can lose the game in any given 30s interval if you fuck up. You will never lose brood war games in the same time-frame even if de-facto a large fuck up will make the game un-recoverable. Didn;t split right against banes? Game over, son. That didn't occur in BW. TvZ in paticular in BW is a lot of dancing plauges, science vessel vs scourge, dark swarm creep. It's super slow compared to Sc2 even if the APM backing it up is huge.

>>382052732
That's true, that's actually part of why I stopped playing SC2. I would get too stressed out playing on ladder.

>>382046238
In legacy you can queue them up if you have extra energy/multiple queens. ie you can inject 2 or more times at once and it'll continuously spawn larva

>>382042839
>largest esport in the world
You mean the only esport in the world?

Still by far the biggest RTS. There are ~30k people online at all times across the servers.

>>382045624
All AAA games are expensive at launch, anon

>>382043580
>The sad thing is LotV is actually really good, and if SC2 came out like it is now it would probably have 4-5x the player base left.
Yeah everyone loves 5 minute games that hinge on one person making an extremely minor mistake.

Not.

>>382053321
What's not to like?

>>382043186
lol

>>382042839
Blizzard makes trash these days.