RTS newbies get immediately destroyed because RTSes are mostly dead, meaning that all online players have been playing it for decades and know a lot. An RTS with a steady influx of new players and matchmaking would work just fine, if anyone were to get one going.
It does (and at least when it came out) it was relatively decent.
The problem occurs when the game has been out long enough that all the active players are leagues ahead of a new player; either they wait forever for a match or get steamrolled.
There's plenty of people playing SC2 online at ~every skill level, right now. Queue times are not long at all.
The main problem is that it's a 12 year-old game, that's been largely abandoned by the developer. The other main problem is that unlike a skill-based MOBA, you can't blame anyone else for your losses. The third main problem is that the game is incredibly stressful, demands 100% of your attention, and the smallest mistake can lose the game for you.
Can you imagine a modern remake with up to date blizzard strategies?
They'd probably add commander level and equipable commander items which grant buffs to your units. You'd have a chance of getting one item each time you win a pvp fight and you can increase the quality/rarity of the drop by using cash shop items. Oh, and the rare items might require a higher commander level... Obviously you'd also be able to buy temporary buffs to your XP gain, so you can equip them sooner.
They could maybe even focus more on group pvp (i.e. 4vs4) so the whales can carry scrubs to wins. That would give them a chance of loot even if they're just there to be farmed and will make them properly fawn over the mighty whales that let them gain their pointless upgrades.
Sure, and it's had a minor, but excellent balance patch earlier in the year, but it's also been more-or-less abandoned for a few years, and is quite clearly not being actively developed.
The patch was put on the Player Test Realm (PTR), which is almost like an open beta. I wouldn't say that it was "released", more like pushed to staging or open beta.
Back when I played it, there was a 50 game skill test for new players which determined which of the major rank pools you were placed in.
Those first 50 games were crazy because you were matched randomly with other new and established players, so sometimes you would play someone really good who would steamroll you in the first 5 minutes, and sometimes you got someone who had at most played the scripted campaigns against the AI and thought they could sit there for the first 30 minutes slowly building up an army.
It was actually pretty fun not knowing which way it would go, and whenever we matched with newbies my partner and I got to experiment with a bunch of different strategies that would never work in a real game.
> played the scripted campaigns against the AI and thought they could sit there for the first 30 minutes slowly building up an army.
This right here is my fundamental problem with multiplayer RTS games. The fun I get out of them is in the slow burn long buildup, but other players always find ways to optimize the early game so they win fast and never actually get to the fun part where everyone has massive bases lobbing nukes at eachother. The fun way to play is not the optimal way to play.
It's now been about 10 years since I've even bothered trying an RTS online.
I don't mean to be rude (I'm a very bad Starcraft II enthusiast) but most people who complain about this problem seem to want to play a solo game for 30 minutes and then eventually meet the other player in the field of battle at the half-hour mark. That's an obvious no-go, you can't ignore 90% of the game and expect to have fun.
The way to beat players who play strong openers is to play a strong opener yourself, but not necessarily all-in aggressive. If you want to get to the late game you enjoy you must get better at the early game. Harass the other guy early, scout their build, make sure you're building counters to what the other player is playing. Defend well. Deny their economy here and there. Inevitably crush them with nukes and capital ships after 30 minutes of solid fundamentals.
(Starcraft is still a lot of fun and I'd encourage you to get back in to RTS playing)
> you can't ignore 90% of the game and expect to have fun.
I think maybe what you meant to say was "... and expect to _win_"
Plenty of people have fun turtling (:
This is one thing I liked about Total Annihilation — defense tech was relatively strong, so some amount of turtling and racing to get high tech artillery (eg) was a viable approach.
I used to play Age of Empires in treaty mode. You had XX minutes where you couldn't attack one another so just focused super hard on macro. Utter chaos when the treaty period ended as everyone had max size armies. Lagged the hell out of my computer. Good times
It was a fairly popular variant of the game too, never had trouble finding matches
Yeah I've felt the same way at times, especially when the armor/weapon types make it very rock paper scissors. It wasn't as blatant in the original StarCraft, but WarCraft 3 and StarCraft 2 seemed to go hard into counters against certain types of units, so someone who either scouts a bit better than you do or picks an army composition that happens to perfectly counter yours will mop the floor with you.
My partner and I had way more fun in those early games when we could stretch it out to 30-60 minutes sometimes. Once you're playing against ranked people who are there to win it's just a mad rush to the first or second tech tier.
There's a game mode in AoE2DE where everyone's behind strong walls at the start. It takes a while to be able to bring them down. So you get to turtle for a while. A game mode like this is what you'd like to play.
Starcraft 2 is the only game the thought of queueing up for a 1v1 game gets my heartrate up (ladder anxiety). It's not so much the winning or losing, but the fact that games are just 20+ minutes of full-tilt. Whether you're winning or losing, there's zero downtime because there's always something that needs to be done.
Other competitive games like CS/Valorant gives you downtime in between rounds and when you die. Similarly with MOBAs, travel time in between your base and lane, when you die. Even fighting games, when you get a hit in, it's back to muscle memory for your bread and butter combo, and rounds are much shorter.
On an unrelated note, I think this lack of downtime is partly responsible for StarCraft pros suffering as much from RSI. There's no clear downtime while playing and the hands have to be going at speed the entire time.
Personally, I think RTSs are way easier to watch. Its easier to understand what is going on at a base level (i.e. build an army and beat the other side).
MOBAs seem super confusing if you dont play. Its 30 minutes of nothing happening, and then like 15 seconds of people getting really excited and then the game is over.
Yeah, I always found watching MOBAs boring but I never really played them; at least RTS I knew roughly what they were doing and doing better than I could.
I disagree that you can “just watch” MOBAs. I don’t play any MOBAs, but I will occasionally watch them. If I don’t have a commentator guiding me along to tell me what is happening (to some degree) then it makes no sense to me.
Are all RTS players interested in online play? I like RTSs, played a certain number, but I've never played online. But RTS devs focusing a lot of their efforts on multiplayers, effort that are going to be wasted on a good portion of the potential market who's just not into MP and is never going to touch the online mode.
> I like RTSs, played a certain number, but I've never played online.
I realized I wrote a mistake: I did play a handful of MP matches of World in Conflict after finishing the (very enjoyable) single-player campaign. It was fun, but not as much as the single player portion; and I never invested enough time for it to be fun.
A large playerbase and good matchmaking could solve this. Ironically the best way for any game to get a large enough playerbase for fair matchmaking and low queue times is to go free-to-play.
I'd love to play an RTS that was APM capped somehow. Maybe in a tiered fashion. As it stands the design of SC2 style RTS is just insanely stressful.
I could see something like SC2 being fun with 2-3 people playing 1 player's role at a time. 1 person on the econ, 2 people on the army. Or much better AI that you can override selectively, so if you want to handle the fighting you can, or if you want to handke the econ you can.
That's a factor. But the bigger factor is it's harder to freemium an RTS without destroying the game.
The fun of RTSes is the learning curve, but throw in a bunch of "you can buy a special unit for $10" and all the sudden the game balancing is destroyed. That leaves you with inconsequential things like avatar skins to sell and very few people would buy those.
Couple that with the fact that new players aren't likely to spend hours online playing the game (because they get destroyed) and you've got a major problem.
For me, the fun of RTSes was in single player games and lan parties.
This was after they sold the game at a fair price for many many years. The "freemium" play was I imagine, in part taken because sales flatlined.
I remember the transition. I kinda hated it, to be honest. Not because of the drops (they were introducing hats and loot well before this) but because the influx of players were...low quality
this wasn't always a problem though. Warcraft 3 and both Starcraft games had a large and diverse audience for a long time. From competitive players to people who enjoyed the story despite the fact that they're quite difficult multiplayer games.
Elden Ring and the Souls games are difficult and even to a point intentionally alienating but have had massive success including in the mainstream.
I don't know what it is but I feel there's something else going on with the rapid decline of RTS besides the difficulty.
Elden ring and Horizon Zero Dawn are amazing solo player games. I don’t wanna play pvp multiplayer. I like Co-Op multiplayer with my buddies. Elden Ring with full game co-op would be amazing. I’d buy all the DLC they could release in a heartbeat.
PC is still king for esports and competitive gaming (outside of niches like fighting games or sports). League and Dota continue to be among the most watched events online.