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Originally Posted by boost
nothing much distinguishes the single player from say C&C, they both are fun and have a humorous undertone. But the difference is the multiplayer. Blizzard took great pains to create three races that are fairly unique, yet well balanced. C&C on the other hand had very littler difference in the races, and the differences that there were, were not necessarily balanced.
Then after creating this fairly balanced set of races, Blizzard continued to support the multiplayer through patches. When new strategies emerged that exploited an unforeseen imbalance, Blizzard worked to correct this imbalance, then correct any imbalances that resulted from the first correction. This may not sound that impressive, but it is a TON of work to balance unique races and it is the reason that games are either unbalanced or each side is simply a copy of the others.
I mostly agree with this, but a lot of what kept the game mostly balanced was outside of Blizzard's hands.
First, you may consider this irrelevant, but on the 'newb' maps like BGH, fastest, etc., protoss completely dominates.
Protoss dominated island maps like dire straits, but those died off a long time ago and never were very popular to begin with.
The pro scene has remained mostly balanced over the years for 3 big reasons, IMO:
1) blizzard updates/patches
2) new maps released by korean pro-leagues. it's hard to overstate the importance that map design has on the balance between races.
3) quarks in gameplay that were never intended or never forseen. for example, the muta stack bug, forge first fast expand in pvz, abusing peon AI mostly for defense, all sorts of stuff
Also I'd add that for much of the history of SC progaming, terran was mostly the dominant race (slayers boxer, nada, oov).
and that currently at lower levels all the way up to the competitive-ish level (like B on iccup), protoss takes the least skill, IMO.
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