Ah, that's unfortunate, but ladder anxiety is actually really prevalent in StarCraft so you're not alone! I think what's cool about SC2 is that there's a lot more to do in the game than just 1v1s, like co-op, teams, campaigns, arcade, etc. My latest video addresses that exact sentiment actually lmao.
It eventually goes away if you play enougth... Its honestly the most exhausting game if you play at your limit tho... I had games where I was denched in sweat after 30 mins playing my hearts out... It feels so damn rewarding winning those tho.
It's the first game syndrome. every game after that doesn't feel bad because you don't have the time to feel bad. You don't learn anything in game , you learn in your sleep , in game you only "gather data" and "test conjectures". So there's no reason to be nervous, it doesn't help the learning process. Once you internalyze that , you will never feel anxiety going into a match.
The thing I feel about wood league SC2 is that it's just massing the army and a-clicking, fairly boring. This way, weirdly enough, even BW feels better because you don't die so fast, and because massing an army just feels like actual effort. - Adûnâi
that sucks, i hate to hear about people that suffer from ladder anxiety. If it helps , your opponent is probably suffering or has suffered from the same.
@@GerzanAlemansc2 is hard, I’ve played CS to top 100 on faceit, EU challenger on League, and rank 1 in a few seasons on WoW. SC2 I played for 150 ish hours and quit because I literally still felt like I couldn’t comprehend what I was doing or why I was even doing it… By far the hardest from a beginner perspective
The skill gap from the top sc2 players and everyone else is by far and away the largest gap of any esports. Most esports games have gaps but are still relatively close when in comparison. I prefer fighting games and fps myself but sc2 has and is still considered the hardest esport game.
Age of empires 2 feels much harder, same amount of micromanagment but the counters is more crutial and forces u to micronerd things and planning the strat on what u will do 5 minutes later on the game and have consistant scouting to what opponent is doing
Man everyone in challanger in lol who never played in pro have to learn how to team play there is no way that 5 challangers friends with no proplay experience would win against any esport team in major league. Then u can ask me then how they are challangers well cuz in proplay is necessary to be able to have champion pool which is not aquaired in soloq u can just play one champ but if u get banned and u have to play different champion u play so much worse champion pool in fact is that important that in lol there never play meta champs all time cuz that need to play meta champ many many times but u don't have time for that so u pick champ that u played 1k games before that's another thing that u have to be flex cuz meta is changing pretty fast
Starcraft 1 and 2 is much more than just a mechanical work. There is so many things you need to know, to calculate, to react to, to do simultaneously and all directions. You telling it like to be good at SC you just need to click a lot.
@@__-nd5qiOh you all so smart. Author made an argument about skill sealing. Closer to the end of the video it all comes down to something like SC is "pressing a lot of a buttons as fast as you can" versus "mega brain hearthstone" or "team work in LOL". My comment was to emphasize that this is not the case. Artosis said what he said exactly because of this reason. SC is very demanding in all aspects of the game and you can't be good without even one of them at a certain level.
I think it's kind of funny that SC2 has some of the best unit pathing and smoothness out of any RTS game ever made, and SC1 has units that get stuck on nothing every 5 minutes.
hahahahaha yeah funny how that works. it's also insane how much of a difference that made with unit balance. Like zerglings in sc1 are purely balanced around the clunkiness of moving around units, but in SC2 without the clunkiness, they're one of the strongest units
@@hiei49 both marines and zerglings have some of the best pathing in all of brood war. It's less brood war being clunky and more sc2's fish school pathing being so game changing.
Mechanically you can play very close to perfection in a moba or fps game. But it's humanly impossible to play mechanically perfectly in starcraft, which would require tens of thousands of apm past mid-game. Every player has to pick and choose what area they focus on and what they give up based on their strength. And that's just mechanics. The information war and mind-game is like poker in itself.
Not even a huge fan of RTS games but I think this can be easily proven by the difficulty of creating a "perfect" Starcraft bot. It's the Go to the Chess of most other esports, even if you ignore the limitless execution ceiling.
@@colbyboucher6391 problem with creating a perfect starcraft bot is that there are numberless situations that can happen evry minute, in chees evrything was writen down and its nearly imposible to find a new "play"
@@Rubenss1234 That's what I mean! Go is the same way, unlike chess it's practically an unsolvable game, although in recent years people *have* made some incredibly good Go bots.
@@marcinsadowski7230 Mechanically as opposed to strategically you can. Controlling a single unit with say 20 decisions (pathing, abilities, etc) to make per 0.1 sec based on say 50 parameters is laughably trivial for an AI. Extremely difficult for humans but feasible to optimize to say 90% accuracy. At the end of the day mechanical difficulty in esports comes down to computational complexity. And Moba is not in the same league as RTS, unless you can prove P=NP
Here are my 2 cents as former high Masters player in SC2. From a mechanical standpoint I don't think SC2 is the hardest. It requires time, effort, concentration and thought. But after a while most of the macro tasks become an automated process, where muscle memory does the job. Games like CSGO requires very precise aim and movement. MOBA's require fast reactions and a lot of game knowledge/sense. When you start playing Grandmasters in SC2, you pretty much know, what they are going to do 99% of the time. Every game is very different though, the hard part is keeping track of each little interaction in the game, which allows you to correctly jugde, whether a certain strategy is viable or even good. For me though SC2 is a very good balance between knowledge and mechanical skill. Think of it as counting cards at a blackjack table, only you're doing 2 tables at once, and you have 1 second to play your hand.
but I wonder if you could say the same thing about MOBAs and CS:GO. I mean you watch CS and it's mostly just sitting afk until someone walks into your line of sight. the amount of keystrokes is nothing compared to other games. MOBAs as well things like CSing and jungle clears become second nature, and then as you say, it's just keeping track of the little minute interactions. Who's to say that one is necessarily easier than the other?
@@SpiralBiscuit it depends on the person really, when i played CS with my friends they always have to carry me but if we were playing against each other in SC then I just clap them so hard. I just happened to be better at multitasking and strategic thinking than my friends - who is better than me at reaction time and spatial awareness
As a former hight master / low gm I kinda agree with you until a certain point. If you watch today starcraft pro scene, the aim is quite similar to csgo aim, players like Clem with insane micro must be incredibly precise during fights. Fast reactions are quite the same when you multi-task at this level. For MOBAs as I played many Dota and LOL games, I feel the game knowledge is quite similar in the end?
@@SpiralBiscuit Its difficult to say because they require very different skillsets and you will almost never find people who have taken the time it takes to get really good at one to have also put in the time for the other genres as well since, y'know, the rest of life is going on still and requires time too. That being said, every now and again you'll get some true degenerate basement-dweller like myself that no-lifed everything and got to a pretty high level. I never went full-on pro in anything other than the Korean BW scene in the early 2000s, but I was top USA 200 ranked Super Smash Melee back in 2002-2008, top 100 Mortal Kombat in mid-90s, top 200 Tekken from Tekken 1 on to Tekken Tag 2, Supreme Master First Class CSGO, 16x GM SC2 (bottom 100), Masters Overwatch, GM CoD competitive games including Warzone, Masters Apex Legends, 6.3k DOTA2 MMR in 2013, Challenger League in LoL 2014. I have a lot more, but that should cover big fighters/shooters/rts/MOBA to show I've been around almost everything and got decently good at it all. The styles are just different skillsets and I would argue one isn't necessarily harder than the other; just different and therefore hard for most to guess at because they themselves only have 1 of the skillsets and not the others. CSGO is not speed APM intensive, but its reflex and muscle memory intensive as fk; most FPS are twitch and trace skillsets when it comes to mechanics whereas RTS are far more tiny micro-movements with a mouse while being able to keep track of the state of a board on a level that the other game types don't require. Fighters are almost entirely button-combo memorization and muscle memory dependent and MOBAs are most similar to RTS but with a far greater emphasis on itemization build and skill order mixed with hitting proper timings in farm levels rather than microing several types of units with in an army comp at once in several clashing waves over time like in RTS. TL;DR I agree.
@@hightierplayers2454 Idd add that MOBA's trade a lot of the individual skill requirements and move that to being able to play well as a team. It is probaply also the reason why, like overwatch, it is so bad to play with randoms. CS also has a large team aspect, but when you look at how impactfull it is relative to individual skill, it is relatively way less important then in moba's. Going back to SC, i think it is fair to say it is one of the more if not most difficult games because it requires a good understanding of strategy, knowledge of the units and races, and the mechanical skill to do whatever you come up with. All of them are required to start playing actual starcraft as it was designed and to be really good at it, while most other games allow you to slack a bit more in some of these apsects.
I still have to say that StarCraft is the hardest one. The mechanical aspect is insane, even learning the basics can be somewhat difficult for beginners. But mechanical difficulty is always present no matter how good you are. The knowledge aspect is also enormous in the game, you have to learn compositions, unit placement, worker mining efficiency, build orders, your opponent's builds and timings so you know what to do with the limited information you got. Yes, you don't have teammates, but that also means everything is up to you, you can't depend on anyone when you might have shortcomings.
i mean you missed the main point of this video with this comment. every argument you have can be countered. You consider LoL easy game? try getting high elo. it took me 5000 hours and 4 and a half seasons to reach high diamond. do u you how much it took me to reach sc2 high diamond? 50 games, which is more or less 20-25 hours(and they were my first ranked sc2 games) . Also it is worth mentioning how hard it is compared to what? Since LoL has a very big player base ofc it's going to be harder to reach the highest ranks. I can simply say starcraft is easier because of the lesser player count, which means easier higher ranks. Also there is one last thing i want to add. Having teammates is the worst part of climbing and becoming better, since you matter only 20%. Unless you are insanely good or insanely bad for your elo there is one rule which applies: 40% games you lose whatever you do, 40% you win whatever you do, and in the 20% remaining you make a difference. This makes the game 1000x harder then it should be, not mentioning the mental damage you get when you lose and there is nothing you can do
@@makuntizichi7148 Rankings are a bad way to measure skill. First of all, rankings on different games function differently. Also, how hard it is to reach a certain league is a very relative way to measure difficulty. Second, I'm not talking of sc2, I'm talking about StarCraft here.
@@makuntizichi7148 It took me about 50 ranked games too... I played a lot before tho. However I still think Starcraft is one of the hardest games ever... As mentioned above the rankings is not consistent. The 20% difference you are talking about is just merely about playing the game a lot just statistically speaking, so there is no point to worry about the other 80%. I always wonder why people are so self centered in such team based games. It's completely mind boggeling to me and thats the reason I hate to play League myself cause people are so arrogant and self centered. League has easily the most toxic community I have ever encountered and I have a lot of hours in all sorts of games. Probably 15k at least idk. Anyways I really agree with the video that all games need a lot of different skills that are important. However in terms of skill ceiling and skill floor, Sc2 is easily the hardest competetive game. Not just mechanically wise but also tactically. Games with imperfect information tend to get insane in theorycrafting all the time btw...
I never thought about the social skills necessary to compete in team sports. I think the general argument for StarCraft’s difficulty (or other RTS) is that it requires all those skills, except the team play. A 1v1 game requires the players to do everything. In a moba, if you don’t look at the minimap at the moment the opponent shows up, a teammate probably saw it and will call it out. In StarCraft, if you missed it, you missed it and it might just cost you the game. I wouldn’t say SC is WAY harder than LoL, but it definitely requires more mastery of different skills than LoL, MTG or that insane rhythm game. And mastering any of these games isn’t easy at all. But I think we all can agree that DOTA is harder than LoL and Brood War is harder than SC2.
I don't think Brood War is harder than SC2. SC2 simply replaced control and interface limitations that BW had with unit abilities, but you still cannot do everything perfectly no matter how fast and how good you are.
@@costinhalaicu2746 that is what makes it harder. The weird pathing, the control group limitations, having to send each individual worker to the mineral patch, no hot keys for buildings, etc. If a player wants to perform as well in BW as they do in SC2, it requires more APM and more camera movement. I know that these restrictions are imposed on both players, so it’s harder for both, which might seem to negate the increase in difficulty. But if either player practices and is able to get around the restrictions, the difficulty ceiling is raised and other players will have to adjust. Day9 has said in one of hi videos that since there are many small weird things in the game, players would specialize in a certain play style and basically ignore some aspect of the game. One could master macro while making lots of micro mistakes while others would master micro, but miss some macro timings. While this is also true for SC2, the discrepancy is narrower because of quality of life mechanics. And it’s even narrower in LOTV, since macro games are rarer and rarer because of the starting worker counts cutting the early game into non existence.
@@casaroli My point is this: it is indeed harder to control your army movement in SC:BW compared to SC2. But in SC2 you have more unit abilities, so the freed up APM from better pathing, comprehensive unit selection and so on, is used in compensation to control more micro intensive units.
How to measure how hard a game is? Simply by measuring the gap between Koreans and Non-Koreans. In SC (particularly brood war) the dominance of Koreans is/was insane! That's mostly because the practice time required to achieved such a high level was crazy. This is translated ino the game where you could see how Koreans were destroying everyone. In SC2, the gap shortened a little bit since the mechanics were easier. I played brood war for more than 12 years and can confirm is ridiculous hard to achieve a good/decent level.
i swear to god kids wanna play video games instead of playing an instrument when playing an instrument is So MUCH EASIER than all of this competitive gaming shit people in online games will do EVERYTHING THEY CAN to fuck you up and a single mistake will be abused untill you fix your gameplay sentient biengs acting like savannah predators on your ass I swear playing a few chords on the piano for 5 minutes a day you'll be playing awesome songs within a month, nobody will tell you you're a bronze trash player, everyone will get excited that you're playing something they know and love, hell even the pvp aspect of music (playing in a band) is actually co op. Girls will swoon if you can play a few songs, they won't give a damn that you're master in some nerdy smelly clickclicklcik game WHY DO WE DO THIS TO OURSELVES
Brood war at a minimum has as high of a knowledge ceiling as any game, but certainly has THE highest mechanical ceiling. I think it has to be the hardest esport.
@@even6978 Looool, osu has 0 fucking tactical thinking, let alone critical. Its a fucking reaction based game and is not harder than sc2. Mechanically simple with difficult tracks =/= playing against real people while controlling an army and maintaining a base.
@@even6978 Do you fail at reading comprehension? Who the hell starts off with using "Osu!" when saying sc2 isnt hard? I get that you shouldnt compare the two, but if you start off the sentence the way you did, it IMPLIES that "Osu!" is mechanically harder, but you literally then go on to say that you arent saying one isnt harder than the other when they CLEARLY have VERY different skill ceilings and entry barriers. You very MUCH can say a game is much harder due to an aspect. Cuphead is a much harder game than Kirby Starshards on the N64 because there are far more bullets and enemies on the screen at a given time. That LITERALLY explains why it's harder because it creates a specific challenge that can easily be in both games but is only present in one. They are both action platformers. ?? I dont get where insecurity comes from, think you're projectin, bud. I only reply or make comments while Im on the can, lmao.
@@Ghost1170 not sure if you can read at a second grade level because i already said it twice but here: I am not saying osu is harder than starcraft 2 or vise versa. However, starcraft does not have the highest mechanical skill ceiling. English must not be your first language but ill repeat myself.
Glad you enjoyed it! Yeah, after trying fighting games, MOBAs, RTS, etc. some skills can transfer, but so many just don't. It's so frustrating but also refreshing to learn the ropes of a new genre and just be a complete noob.
@@capitalistamalvadao4278 Taking more or less time to learn is kinda what skill floor means, man. You keep smugly commenting with obvious bitterness and spite toward a take you don't seem to have listened to. Yes, dota is harder. Duh. It's the same game with twice the mechanics. But LoL and SC are DIFFERENT GENRES. Different, partially overlapping skillsets. That's the point of the video.
@@XavIsOnline The point of the video is that you can't see two different games and say "One is harder than the other". Wich is wrong, as proven by what you just said. The Skill floor does not follow the skill ceiling. SC2 is, clearly, harder than League. But people like to cope to boost their ego.
@@Jaime_Protein_Cannisterall the StarCraft players are proof it’s the hardest and takes the most skill of all games because all these pros who went to other games dominated such as beasty qt,Polt,marine lord,demuslim etc
This is like an ideal college presentation. A bunch of info, very well presented, very easy to understand, all info pointing in a general direction. And finally and most importantly no point made or anything interesting to say.
Fantastic video! As someone with an embarrassing amount of hours in Dota I can confidently say that it is... not the hardest game. Is it extremely difficult, probably one of the most difficult? Absolutely. But when I've attempted to play Starcraft I feel like I could never become halfway decent. But I'm sure that's how some Starcraft players feel about Melee or CSGO. I like how you compared the different types of difficulty, like some SC players may just not be good team players, and a pro League support may thrive in a team environment. I wanted to get good at Dota, so I did, because game's style fit me. Other people are just born good at clicking on heads lol Fun question answered in a clear way!
Hahahahaha yes! I dabble in LoL and fighting games myself, and I find learning them super interesting to see what skills transferred from StarCraft. Unfortunately, I'm just awful at FPS games and I am definitely not born to click heads lol. I've tried Dota a couple times too, the movement is really interesting with turn ratios and I'm considering making a video about it. I'm sure I'll mention it somewhere in a different video for sure if it's not its entire video.
Hahaha, this is just the first video, I will try and get only better from here! I learned a lot making this, and hopefully the future ones can improve because of it
if you think SC is only go fast youre soooooooooooooooo out of the loop. you have to at a bear minimum maintain constant production, iron out build orders to such small details, scout to find out what your opponent is doing know the correct response, micro properly well maintaining production ive only mentioned a fraction so far with how fast paced starcraft is and all the 100000 things you need to be doing. your counter point is not needing to relay on a team or making mild mistakes in a card game. league of legends and MTG are hard games (not mentioning Hearthstone cause the game is sooooooooooooooo random) but SCs skill floor is higher SCs skill ceiling after being out for 15 years is just as unatonable as it was on release and it had 2 years of no balance updates for pros to really iron every detail out
OSU isn't even a good mechanical comparison. It's a one-button rythym game. You only need to focus on what's right in front of you. One of the biggest hurdles for a new RTS player is that even basic macro gameplay has you piano-ing all over the keyboard, keeping tabs on, like, five different locations. And you need to learn to weave that basic mechanical dance into all the more complex stuff you also need to be doing. You can never, ever shirk it if you want to survive. It's that requirement of being an omnipitent being that sets it apart.
this was a really well made video, even though I know nothing about RTS games I enjoyed it a lot. Keep up the good work dude. I'm top 30 in the world for typing speed which isnt nearly as difficult as a MOBA or RTS, it's just a cognitive skill like aim training which requires a metric ton of grinding to get really good at.
hey can you give me some tips for improving on typing speed ? do you have a blog or something ? I am decent, the max I have gone is 146 WPM in 100words/15 seconds in monkeytype. Eagerly waiting for your response !!
I think any game that puts 2 humans against each other is going to be hard. Usually past all the knowledge and mechanical skill it comes down to awareness. But like you said, you could potentially measure difficulty by using "Intentionality" as a metric
Hmm maybe by your definition of game, but if you think about a toy-game example: flipping coins and seeing who wins the most. This is a "game", but it requires no skill at all whatsoever. You could also say that Rock Paper Scissors is another example that may have some skill in it, but the rate at which an unskilled opponent will beat a skilled opponent is likely much higher.
@@SpiralBiscuit is people were sufficiently motivated i bet the skill ceiling of coin flipping is pretty high. teaching yourself like thumb controll and waiting for like optimal climate conditions. id watch the coin flipping gsl
science makes this easy to understand. work is defined by moving weight. sc2 requires more physical and mental work than not just most games, but most of any other human activity. think only stuff like literally being in active warfare can even compare to how alert and responsive and observant you have to be to survive.
As for me, when LOL start fanbase games like "which rank this game is" even pro players cant tell like 100% which is league is. In same time even casual player of starcract can easyly detect which rank of sc2 match is.
Not that SC2 isn't much harder, but LoL is deceitful in this aspect because games between similarly ranked players have the same rhythm for all ranks. It's not that there isn't a skill gap, it's just that you don't see when both players are playing defensively, which is the case for most matches among players with the same skill level. A Platinum player would immediately crush a Bronze player in laning phase. When I was Challenger and I realized from the positioning and movement that the enemy player was much lower, I would just move extremely aggressively and end the game very fast. Against other Challenger players the game was almost always much slower.
I think you summed up the components pretty well within this but there's a critical aspect that I feel is missed here. These games are competitive in nature. It doesn't even matter what you're playing as long as there's a high skill ceiling. It doesn't matter a game is hard to play, you're playing against someone else and the goal is to be better than them. LoL or DotA may be 'easier' to play than starcraft, but it's not easier to be the best. It may be harder infact, there's more money and motivation on the line! I love SC2 and have played thousands of hours. Whenever someone new comes along it's the first thing I mention. You don't need to be better than the game, just your opponent. There's always someone around your skill level, so just jump in and enjoy.
For sure, just exploring what 'easier' even means seems to unravel a lot of preconceptions like the ones you speak of! Even in mobile games, people are competitive and can keep getting better and better!
@@konsolebox they actually do. People just respond to it in a completely different way. Ever wonder why there are people who are so angry at League. Even just saying it's name boils their blood. Saying "League is a terrible game", "don't play that shite", "worst game ever created". You know where that hate comes from? It's because they tried to play it too and find the game hard and got flamed by a 12 yr old. Then they made that their villain origin story. 😂😂😂. There are 2 people who uses the meme "whatever you do don't play League". 1 is actual players who are using reverse psychology and 2 are people who played it before but failed to be good at it. Lmao
@@Vizible21 I don't know. I've been a pretty good StarCraft player who owned my colleagues back in the day and I looked down on DoTA the moment it became popular thinking it's much easier to play since you only control one character. I now respect and play DoTA against AI but still find LoL a toned down version of it, and I think a lot of people will agree with me. I however don't play DoTA online as I don't like the idea of teaming with random people on the Internet. It's just pointless trying to win and gain ranking with just anyone. Still if I have a good team it will be worth reaching even just a good above mid tier rank. In StarCraft however it's pointless. You need to have a good APM and be as good as one of the guys a little lower than the best ones at least. Otherwise it's meaningless and personally nothing to be proud of. Any tier not close to the elite is pointless. Many will argue I should just play StarCraft for fun. No, you only play StarCraft to win. It's not fun if you don't.
The author of this video doesnt understand why Starcraft and in general RTS IS so difticult. BS video. Playing Starcraft for an hour makes much more tired than any other Game i played for the mental effort and concentration that I need. Starcraft is not only about the high mechanical skill. Its the conbination of strategy, knowledge, fast decision making, tactics and mechanical skill that make It so difticult.
Great video, good points. As a Rocket League player it truly hurts that you didn't give it as an example when it comes to mechanical skill/teamplay, though. :p
Ooof youre right i completely forgot about it. I tried to include as many games as possible but im still not familiar with many :c i will try to include it next time!
Not only you need to be very strategic but also have the mechanics for Starcraft which is why it's the hardest. Other esports like league of legends for example you don't need to be very mechanically to achieve high ranks because there are many characters that are very easy to learn.
Wow you actually covered/featured almost every single game I was thinking about when trying to answer this question myself, from Fighting games to TCGs, to Dota etc. Good video, big ups
Thanks! Although there are certainly many games to consider. I hadn't even considered other RTS's, as someone else pointed out in the comments that AoE2 is pretty dang hard as well hahahaha
Funny how fighting games were the example for getting into it quickly since it's straightforward, but I feel like the skill floor in fighting games is a lot higher than in starcraft 2, you need like 100+ hours of practice to not lose against a low tier guy doing only sweeps and throws. I guess unless "getting into the game" means getting to the true strategy part which only happens in Masters league so that'd mean it has the highest floor
Ah honestly I think I meant the skill floor getting a new player picking up the game and being able to formulate a game plan. I think in fighting games a lot of like the joystick to move and buttons to punch n' stuff makes a lot of sense intuitively, but I feel that might not be the case with RTS games as a whole. I think what I'd categorize what you are speaking of is a competitively skill floor which is a bit different, but still worth thinking about though. Getting into games competitively is probably another video in itself. I think that might've been an inconsistent example though because it was talking about hardest "esport" lol so you make a solid point
Nahhhh man. I'm just getting into fighters and RTS games and this is nonsense, Starcraft is way harder. In a low-level Street Fighter match, you can easily win by just having a good grasp of your normals. A lot of that quickly becomes muscle memory because they're fairly intuitive. You don't need "100+ hours of practice". If they're sweeping that much, bait it and jump in when they sweep. If they're trying to walk up and throw you, just smack 'em. I've won games that way and that was after an hour of just drilling the range on those punches n' kicks. Of course a better player will screw you but you *will* find games like that and it can be fun because there's actually mind games happeing. SC2, on the other hand... Build these workers. OK, now make sure that you have two queued up all the time. Don't queue more, not efficient. You'll need to hotkey new workers every 12 seconds or so. Now multiply that by four for the four bases you're going to have. Oh, by the way, make sure they're not idle, so you do need to put your camera over there too. Keep doing this until you have, like, 80 workers (in other words, never, ever stop). Now in-between those four seperate queues each running on their own 12-second timer, (so every 3 seconds potentially), make sure you're putting up whatever buildings you're going go need as soon as you have the resources. Constantly, in other words. Again, never, ever stop if you can help it. Some of those buildings will produce units, more queues for you to babysit in-between those other queues you need to hit every three seconds and keeping tabs on idle workers. Now that you've dedicated your entire brain and your hands to playing macro piano, did I mention that you also have a game to play? Scouting, point defense, actually attacking your enemy and the micro that potentially comes with it. All woven between your sub-3-second macro piano game. So if all of that base building stuff is stuck in your mental stack you'll think too slowly and get rolled. No, it needs to be so instinctive that you don't put any brain power towards doing it at all, even when doing a bunch of other shit at the same time. Congratulations. You are qualified to play StarCraft online at a level that's actually fun. I *know* that's probably a bullshit assesment. But to my idiot noob brain it's true and you can't convince me otherwise. But compare that bullshit assessment to your own... RTS games are significantly more daunting than fighters, as someone who's looking for a way in to both.
Not sure if Starcraft is the hardest game, but I do like that a pro player in their early 30s can keep up with someone in their teens. The fact that you can compete with either brute speed or sheer experience and knowledge of psychology is really cool.
think it's amazing for a game so mechanically intensive as well. This is the same for fighting games where you can have someone like Daigo Umehara who is 41, and is still placing good results in the biggest tournaments.
@@hightierplayers2454 wait seriously? do you have names? My mom's in her 70s and she's way better at beat saber than I am, but she has no idea where to start when it comes to sc2, even though she wants to learn.
commanding an army is always tough, just look at history world wars and genghis khan, napoleon, alexander, battles that decided human fates and where we are today(could been society of NAZIs if we lost)
My top game Gunbound is an interesting example. It's a lot of 'memory ceiling' where there's a lot of formulae that go into making a proper shot, and the best players (among those who don't have calculators doing the formulae for them) have played so long those numbers are purely in the mind and they can 'visualize' how much range they need in a shot based on conditions, it's similar to the 'instinct' in SC to conduct all the rhythmic steps for micro/macro, and pulling off a ~1.5 screenlength high angle high wind shot can feel as good as the best micro action in SC. And then, much less influential but still very important, it's got micro since your next turn comes up faster based on how fast the current turn is, so you don't have much time for planning and need to complete your movement, angle adjustment, and powering up as quickly as possible. The final notable skill type is 'knowledge' much like described in the video here, knowing exactly what each Mobile can do in a given situation can save you from a lethal and give you an extra turn, it's pretty low-variable compared to something like Hearthstone or other strategy games, but that's all the more reason to ensure the opponent can't gain an advantage from some subtlety you didn't know. It might not be Gunbound (which has gotten a few tournaments in the past but never huge), but some artillery game will be a big esport one day, I got a feeling.
Man, I dont even play starcraft anymore to say ALL of the games mentioned are bar far, not even close to how difficult decision making and mechanical output it takes to be amazing at starcraft. It's far easier to become Global on csgo than become masters in sc2. Ive tried both and gotten to LEM and only stopped cause cheaters were supposed to plague Global elite in csgo at the time I was playing and went to faceit/esea. Couldnt get out of diamond in sc2 in the same time. Game's way harder
Shooters also take barely any skill lmao Moba are even worse since its a pick up counter draft thing The only thing that matter is the pick up phase wich says a lot about the gameplay
Curious on what your ESEA/Faceit ranks were. CSGO matchmaking never meant anything since any serious player is on those clients. You haven't even reached Global and yet make that statement as if you have experience reaching the rank which is odd. Were you a 3000+ elo faceit 10, ESEA A+ (premier/advanced/mdl) player because that would be a better comparison when you compare sc2 master/GM ladder since CSGO uses clients for it's actual high level rankings and to my knowledge sc2 does not use a third party client. @Trigunn has never played any FPS at a high level and especially counter-strike to be making that statement either.
It can be counterintuitive, but a game’s difficulty directly derives of the all player cumulative time played. Chess isn’t complicated because of its rules but because of its players. lol got played enough that now that silver lee otps know combo that used too be too complicated even for pro players a year after the champion came out. Riven auto animation cancel was like dark magic when it was found to raise dps. Now it’s a requirement to play riven.
Actually this is a point that's really interesting, especially when it comes to fighting games. FGC developers oftentimes try to introduce uncertainty in outcome in a lot of scenarios in order to reduce the prevalence of legacy skills dominating new players. I remember in like season 3 when pros couldn't even do the Alistar W-Q combo hahahaha
That's one of the things that gets me about "esports". I watch a hi level player/ team...then I go out buy the game and try to play that way. But the game doesn't play like the Esports games do. Years of playing overwatch and I still can't find teammates who regroup. It is mandatory to get an IRL group of people together to even attempt to play the game. It's different from any irl games where you can play pick up games that, despite lacking some skills, you can pick up and play the same way a pro can, even if a pro would whoop you.
Most games are so extremely complex when you go deep it's impossible to distinguish which is more complicated. But RTS games definitelly have the biggest skill floor so they are the hardest.
in undergrad, I would play both starcraft and league. that is, I would play ladder starcraft for a maximum of 2 hours before completely burning out then I'd chill with my friends and play 5 hours of league no problem afterwards to "relax", and I just do some stupid stuff and let my team carry me while I run it down mid not really the same level of efforts put into each but having a team is pretty nice, you can relax a bit more whereas in SC you're always "wired" constantly
hahaha I was considering @ing you but nah I'm not dead. Will upload less frequently. I'm considering making a second channel for stuff that I uploaded before, but idk if I want to edit more, even if it's just really simple cuts. I was thinking just moving that kind of stuff to my stream and just doing really easy cuts, similar to what other Twitch streamers to nowadays.
Starcraft is definitely harder than LoL (or basically any other eSport). You compared LoL having four players to 1v1 Starcraft, well, Starcraft also can have 4v4... imagine the chaos in those games! It's just that the money is in 1v1, so that's where majority of the play is, but trust me, 4v4 Starcraft is also crazy complex and hard.
I actually find that large team games are more one-dimensional than 1v1s, as it usually boils down to 4 people cheese or 4 people macro hard. I haven't really played enough to be sure though. I think when I'm talking about esports, it's only really useful to talk about 1v1s.
Only difference being that LoL is being led by meta cycles which leads to bad players (relative to specific mmr levels) being able to climb just to attract more players and money. SC, Dota, and all 1v1 games don't have that shit issue.
every game has meta cycles as long as there are balance changes , it's inevitable including dota and sc. remember when void rays were shit and then became the staple mid game strat before carriers? that's a meta cycle. ofc it is more prominent in mobas due to having way more characters that get buffed / nerfed.
I jist discovered your channel and i hope you keep this videos up! As you mention, comparing games in terms of difficulty is no possible if you attemp to compare every single variable involved. But it is possible to project those variables to a single metric by taking tiers. A player from certain tier should be able to beat ANY player from a tier below at least 50,0001% of the time in the long run. This creates a level of soft-ownage. The more tiers you can create from the best of the best up to players barely above the skill flor, the higher the skill ceiling would be theorethically. Anyways, in practice this is impossible to meassure, but at least we can estimate comparisons. Saludos!
@@SpiralBiscuit thanks! It's just that there's a long way for me to go. I have Master friends and playing against them is like playing a different game entirely. Even watching them is insane.
Why is everyone referring to SC / SC2 as pure 1v1? I mean there were (and still are) also 2v2 tounaments out there, even if they are not that famous. So saying those games do not have a team aspect is just wrong.
It's similar to chess. Chess has 2v2 in bughouse, but you're not going to become a professional chess player solely off of bughouse tournaments. In a similar vein, nobody can make a living playing 2v2 StarCraft. Thus it's not considered to be a pure 1v1 ESPORT. You are actually correct though if this was many years ago in which Proleague had a 2v2 slot, but nowadays you can only be a professional in 1v1.
When they taught an AI to play GO it wiped the floor with the best of the best and the high level players looked to it's games for inspiration. It was teaching them. The same thing happened with DOTA. Then they tried to get it to learn SC2. No one, at any level, is asking for AlphaStar replay packs to learn from. I also don't think that being able to hit F2 makes SC2 easier than BW. When you play BW you are fighting the game as much as you are fighting your opponent. SC2 frees up more of your time to play the game. Is StarCraft the Hardest Esport? I think so.
At the end of the day, competition can make any simple game hard. You're not learning against the game like dark souls, you're learning against other people. I personally think multiplayer games are going away from multiple avenues of skill expression and are more interested in intuitiveness with mechanical benchmarks for outplay. Games like Valorant and CSGO are low floor high skill games and are really popular these days.
Yeah, the thing with Starcraft is that to be a GM, you need literally every skill mentioned in the video at the upper echelon. You make a bad read? Your comp gets countered and you lose because your opponent has comparable physical skill. You lack the physical APM? You get out-micro'd and lose pretty much every even fight. You lack rock-solid macro? You fall behind after the early game and lose. You lack perfect game mechanic knowledge? You may win a decent bit of matches, but even with comparable skill in other metrics, you'll have a decidedly negative WR in masters. This isn't even getting into the mind games possible in an rts, because you can to a degree control what knowledge your opponent has to your activities.
I like to debate with my friends regarding the difficulty in League and StarCraft 2, as a player of both games, I'd argue that League would be the more complex game than StarCraft, given that League has a lot more variables to consider than StarCraft 2. i.e: the 9 other players in the game, creep score, itemization, champions, champion counters, champion mastery, summoner spells, objectives, map vision, map rotation, etc. But the RTS gamer in me wants to scream out and say StarCraft 2 is the most difficult e-sports game there is, given how from my narrow viewpoint and experience, StarCraft 2 requires you to be responsible for ALL your variables compared to League where you need to gamble on how good your team is or how bad your opponents are. Overall, I'd conclude that StarCraft 2 is difficult due to the fact that you are solely responsible for your wins and losses, you cannot blame anyone else, meanwhile in League you could easily lose because the enemy team had more better players, or your team didn't cooperate, etc.
@@capitalistamalvadao4278 I don't personally play Dota 2, so I can't really have an opinion on that. On my limited playtime (3 hours with Sven) I could say it's certainly even more difficult than League, but that's more of an uninformed opinion than an observation.
It also matters what you are naturally good at. If you are tall as hell and good at jumping volleyball won't be the hardest sport. No game have never exhausted me more than SC. I cold play 2 games tops then I was done for the day. League on the other hand I could play for an entire day.
I feel like sc:bw is literally the hardest esports of all time and forever will be in terms of individual performance. The gap between the best amateur player and pro in sc is astronomical esp in Korea. I think the reason is because the layer of gameplay is so deep and a game of sc is like many minigames happening across the entire map continuously so one or two good plays or decisions cant win player the game.
At least when I say StarCraft Brood War is the best eSport, I mean that it is the father of eSports. I don't think any of the games would have gotten the attention they have gotten or in some cases even existed without SC BW. Yes they all test different skills and all have different things to enjoy about them, but StarCraft will always be the most iconic. The fact that someone is talking about it this many years later further proves my point.
I play Dota 2 and the most rewarding skill is communicating with my team and guiding them to victory Also knowledge of playing this game for 4k hours...
League is easier without shadow of a doubt , You can get GM with hands alone and no micro ... ask Tyler1 about his Korean Ladder adventures Anyone who thinks That League is harder , doesn't know what they're talking about. You can pick up league and play a game instantly. Just the Hotkey management is harder than anything league players have done in terms of complexity. The difficulty of League comes from it's restrictions , for instance Cooldowns rather than skill expression. In starcraft you can ALWAYS micro harder and faster. In league if you move at the speed of 455 and have 5 cd skills. That's that.
League of losers or i mean MOBAS in general take no skill this is a obvious fact for anyone with a IQ superior to 30 Especially the more casual mobas like smite LOL ect those take nothing at all Tyler 1 and many streamer already proved it thats why its so popular I MEAN EVERYONE CAN pick up a moba but can the same be said to SC? Nope never in a billion year
from my humble analysis: SC1 requires attention to error prevention in micro, as shown with the dragoon, and SC2 requires more precision micro with marine splits, baneling targeting, blink micro with stalkers, viper grabs etc. My best level was playing Zerg main, and employing a ling-muta pressure, like a Knight in chess, or mongolian warfare, always threatening 2 positions forcing the enemy to pick a battle/loss. It was medium micro and macro heavy, but having a main army of Ling-Mutas that you can split, and a batch of lings from hatchery on A-Move sent to a pressumed enemy expansion while baiting/harassing his main army always secured I was 1 base ahead.. Add in Nydus channel once in a while.. :D My highest ranking opponent was a Protoss player in masters with 13K games who didn't want to play 1v1 with me again cause my playstyle was too stressful.. I only did platinum in 1v1 ladder and diamond in 2v2/3v3/4v4, back when there was only plat-diamond-master as the highest. But I rocked a 200-400 APM back then. Now its only 100-160 APM, and I am a filthy casual. To me, I have seen no harder games or learned others a harder game. In MOBA you have 1 unit to micro, and have only the minimap awareness on rotation, there is no zerg queen/mule/chrono boost or gate timings/barracks/larva spawn on top of microing an army.. And you play with Fog of War as opposed to Chess, so you have to scout and gather intelligence..... In chess you have perfect knowledge.. In starcraft and also in life, you have to make the right decision, with imperfect knowledge..
lol I remember being 16 and frustratingly quitting Brood War because I realized there was no possible way to approach the APM of the pros, even when I tried to arbitrarily click and spam commands😅
@@even6978 nope you can calculate how hard a game is lmao Take league for example the pros already stated that 95% of the game is done by the pick draft phase wich says a llt about the gameplay
I still claim QUAKE3/Quakelive Is higest skill game in Esports there is, i played bunch of sc2 and fps games and LOL,Dota2 etc.. Anyway why i claim this to be true.. if we take a avarage or semi-pro playing vs top lvl pro In starcraft i can win by cheese at least 1 game out of 1000 games... probably not but you get the idea as in Quake no matter how much you chezze or do whatever you will always lose to a pro no matter what as game is such high skill gapped and chess like strategy behind it while still playing super fast fps game... thats my humble opinion :) btw i love playing still both of these 2 games since both are super competitive im Master 1 in SC2 and in Quake also very hihg rank :) Peace and love felow gamers ;)
Actually, this was a really interesting point that I never really brought up simply because I am just not that familiar with Quake. But I do know that it's notorious for just never having upsets and the better player always wins. I think in some sense that almost makes it a worse spectator experience, as there is just simply way less uncertainty in outcome. I tried Quake Champions, and I just couldn't even kill anyone a single time... really turned me off to be honest hahaha. There are just no noobs playing Quake :c
@@SpiralBiscuit Anyway i love both or even all games that are competitive and each represents uniqe skill needed for that game :) IN matter of quake why its not many players nowadays and way u cant kill anyone is beacsue to even start playing game at very noob level its such a high skill and mechanics needed any new players simply give up so yeah in that sens quake its kinda shit.. but on skill level itself yeah id say top2 with SC2 just there always :D
People who complain of ladder anxiety have clearly never laddered in SC2 -There is no one to blame but yourself -It's just you and the other person -When you lose there could be any number of reasons you lost, each of which has to be painfully pulled apart during replays I have never experienced ladder anxiety again in FPS or MOBAs since playing SC2 ladder
SC2 King of (current) e-sports. Period. Stop beating around the bush : Speed, Reasoning, Dexterity, Knwoledge, Fainting and all the information war, Strategy, Tactic, Execution. Too bad Blizzard did not support the multiplayer and you would have it all. And I am only a Diamond level player.
a mid-high range fps player can sometimes outplay pro players or just get lucky. A high range league player (challenger or right outside of it) on their one trick can pretty easily beat pro players. A pro starcraft player will play against other pro players who are only power ranked a dozen spots below them in the world, and not lose 1 map to that player if they played 10 times. Any GM player will never lose to a diamond player. Diamond fps/league players might be able to scrape a game off a gm, or win lane in leagues case. The skill gap is not close. SC and SC2 are infinitely harder.
I would have to say out of all the games I've played Yes Starcraft 2 def the hardest. I was asked to join a clan that went pro in counterstrike right before steam got to it. i can beat the original ninja gaiden on NES in almost record time (said to be one of the hardest games made for NES) but To this day and i've been playing starcraft on and off since brood war. I still can't get passed freakin DIAMOND. WTF? yea my ranking for league is higher then my starcraft ranking but i only put a couple months into league compared to the years of starcraft. still love the shit out of the game best game ever.
@@SpiralBiscuit Yea this was before You tube days. about 22 21 years ago I was a master at that game. Had no idea about the glitches (where you jump and attack with 1,000 strikes killing bosses instantly) So pretty much my runs looked almost identical to the records minus using the glitches. One of the first games i really started playing when i was about 4....took me damn near 7 years to actually beat it, then another 2 to master it. thanks buddy
Every single factor that you listed knowledge, brain computing, execution etc isn't irrelevant to starcraft..... it's just as much as a factor as in any other game. Then you add the insane mechanics required and its why starcraft is the hardest most difficult game to play. Knowing what counters what, how army sizes can snowball and certain units snowball even more meaning 30 marines vs 40 marines isnt going to lead to a linear outcome where 10 marines from the larger group will survive. In sc2 my hands are making 200 apm and my brain is also making hundreds of calculations per minute. Your video makes it seem like starcraft is all about mechanics will ignoring these other things but its isn't. Those other things are just as important.
I'd have to disagree there for sure. I've tried to play fighting games, MOBAS, FPS, etc. and they blow me away in how difficult they are to play. Seems a bit narrow minded to me. Not even Brood War, just sc2 as well?
@@SpiralBiscuit Brood war has mechanichal restrictions that make it unsuitable as a competetive sport. Nothing impressive about players not being able to execute a basic strategy due to technichal limitations, or basic strategies failing because of a lack of control. Other e-sports simply lack the historical, theoretical and practical depth that SC2 brings to the table. Let alone the technichal accuracy. Not even other, more modern and more costly games can even closely compare to SC2's clean and precise gameplay. Sc2's competetive scene also doesn't rely on exploits and broken metas like most fighting games. It has some of this of course, but there are always legit counterstrategies for everything. Comparing the range of effectiveness in metas between SC2 and other games is like comparing Monopoly to chinese Go. It doesn't require a narrow skillset like shooters where 99% of the time a team or player wins bas on "pointed and clicked the headshot faster than opponent". It being a measurement of skill and strategy isn't hindered by teamgames being the meta like for MOBAs. There is no single skillset, strategy, exploit, talent that can bring you to the top in SC2. All top players in SC2 excel in everything the game expects and 99.9% of them quickly fade away from the scene due to the immensly high standards. Unlike shooters, fighting games MOBAS etc. Where one OP charachter/ item etc. Can make or break a career. I'm not being closed minded, I just know what I'm talking about. Anyone that knows SC2 as an e-sport enough can only be bewildered by the sight of LOL and CS:GO pulling infinite numbers of fans only due to the fact that the fans play the game on their own time. Most fans of competetive SC2 haven't touched the game in years and are still glued to the screen.
Starcraft is the only game I had to give up because just laddering was too stressful, so I can comfortably say yes...
Ah, that's unfortunate, but ladder anxiety is actually really prevalent in StarCraft so you're not alone! I think what's cool about SC2 is that there's a lot more to do in the game than just 1v1s, like co-op, teams, campaigns, arcade, etc. My latest video addresses that exact sentiment actually lmao.
It eventually goes away if you play enougth... Its honestly the most exhausting game if you play at your limit tho... I had games where I was denched in sweat after 30 mins playing my hearts out... It feels so damn rewarding winning those tho.
It's the first game syndrome. every game after that doesn't feel bad because you don't have the time to feel bad.
You don't learn anything in game , you learn in your sleep , in game you only "gather data" and "test conjectures". So there's no reason to be nervous, it doesn't help the learning process. Once you internalyze that , you will never feel anxiety going into a match.
The thing I feel about wood league SC2 is that it's just massing the army and a-clicking, fairly boring. This way, weirdly enough, even BW feels better because you don't die so fast, and because massing an army just feels like actual effort.
- Adûnâi
that sucks, i hate to hear about people that suffer from ladder anxiety. If it helps , your opponent is probably suffering or has suffered from the same.
The fact that RTS did not become mainstream compared to MOBA is a testament to the learning curve necessary between the two games
It's probably just marketing and ease of production actually
@@doggerlander not really as aplayer of sc2 and lol i can say sc2 is more dificult
@@GerzanAlemansc2 is hard, I’ve played CS to top 100 on faceit, EU challenger on League, and rank 1 in a few seasons on WoW. SC2 I played for 150 ish hours and quit because I literally still felt like I couldn’t comprehend what I was doing or why I was even doing it… By far the hardest from a beginner perspective
The skill gap from the top sc2 players and everyone else is by far and away the largest gap of any esports. Most esports games have gaps but are still relatively close when in comparison. I prefer fighting games and fps myself but sc2 has and is still considered the hardest esport game.
Age of empires 2 feels much harder, same amount of micromanagment but the counters is more crutial and forces u to micronerd things and planning the strat on what u will do 5 minutes later on the game and have consistant scouting to what opponent is doing
@@29rogans7 I watch both and trust me it's not even close. If you're ever in doubt, watch serral screen. It get me dizzy just from switching too much
Brood war is way harder than SC2
Man everyone in challanger in lol who never played in pro have to learn how to team play there is no way that 5 challangers friends with no proplay experience would win against any esport team in major league. Then u can ask me then how they are challangers well cuz in proplay is necessary to be able to have champion pool which is not aquaired in soloq u can just play one champ but if u get banned and u have to play different champion u play so much worse champion pool in fact is that important that in lol there never play meta champs all time cuz that need to play meta champ many many times but u don't have time for that so u pick champ that u played 1k games before that's another thing that u have to be flex cuz meta is changing pretty fast
@@marcinsadowski7230 jesse wtf are you talking about
Starcraft 1 and 2 is much more than just a mechanical work. There is so many things you need to know, to calculate, to react to, to do simultaneously and all directions. You telling it like to be good at SC you just need to click a lot.
That was literally the point of the video
Found the guy that didn’t bother to watch the first half of the video
Ok but only selecting 12 units is BS
@@Andreych95 I assume it was a limit of technology at the time as in the sequel you can select nearly if not all units at the same time
@@__-nd5qiOh you all so smart. Author made an argument about skill sealing. Closer to the end of the video it all comes down to something like SC is "pressing a lot of a buttons as fast as you can" versus "mega brain hearthstone" or "team work in LOL". My comment was to emphasize that this is not the case. Artosis said what he said exactly because of this reason. SC is very demanding in all aspects of the game and you can't be good without even one of them at a certain level.
I think it's kind of funny that SC2 has some of the best unit pathing and smoothness out of any RTS game ever made, and SC1 has units that get stuck on nothing every 5 minutes.
hahahahaha yeah funny how that works. it's also insane how much of a difference that made with unit balance. Like zerglings in sc1 are purely balanced around the clunkiness of moving around units, but in SC2 without the clunkiness, they're one of the strongest units
@@SpiralBiscuit I think marines are a better example for that. Lings are pretty busted clunky or not (specially against clunkier ranged units).
5 minutes my guy, that's a very odd sense of time you got there.
@@hiei49 both marines and zerglings have some of the best pathing in all of brood war. It's less brood war being clunky and more sc2's fish school pathing being so game changing.
Well AI wasn't the best back in 90s
StarCraft is actually a sport game because of the mechanical skill that is required
Haha yeah i dont think theres any doubt in anyones mind about that
@@SpiralBiscuit LOL if u think if sth is a "sport" or not, just look at the shape of the "athletes".
its an e sport game yeah. its not a sport though
that's why blizzard WERE blizzard: they cared about it!
@@alpha-cf2oi chess is considered a sport too, can you still say the same?
Mechanically you can play very close to perfection in a moba or fps game. But it's humanly impossible to play mechanically perfectly in starcraft, which would require tens of thousands of apm past mid-game. Every player has to pick and choose what area they focus on and what they give up based on their strength. And that's just mechanics. The information war and mind-game is like poker in itself.
Not even a huge fan of RTS games but I think this can be easily proven by the difficulty of creating a "perfect" Starcraft bot. It's the Go to the Chess of most other esports, even if you ignore the limitless execution ceiling.
@@colbyboucher6391 problem with creating a perfect starcraft bot is that there are numberless situations that can happen evry minute, in chees evrything was writen down and its nearly imposible to find a new "play"
@@Rubenss1234 That's what I mean! Go is the same way, unlike chess it's practically an unsolvable game, although in recent years people *have* made some incredibly good Go bots.
U don't know moba proplay if u think u can play close to perfection
@@marcinsadowski7230 Mechanically as opposed to strategically you can. Controlling a single unit with say 20 decisions (pathing, abilities, etc) to make per 0.1 sec based on say 50 parameters is laughably trivial for an AI. Extremely difficult for humans but feasible to optimize to say 90% accuracy. At the end of the day mechanical difficulty in esports comes down to computational complexity. And Moba is not in the same league as RTS, unless you can prove P=NP
Here are my 2 cents as former high Masters player in SC2.
From a mechanical standpoint I don't think SC2 is the hardest. It requires time, effort, concentration and thought. But after a while most of the macro tasks become an automated process, where muscle memory does the job. Games like CSGO requires very precise aim and movement. MOBA's require fast reactions and a lot of game knowledge/sense.
When you start playing Grandmasters in SC2, you pretty much know, what they are going to do 99% of the time. Every game is very different though, the hard part is keeping track of each little interaction in the game, which allows you to correctly jugde, whether a certain strategy is viable or even good. For me though SC2 is a very good balance between knowledge and mechanical skill.
Think of it as counting cards at a blackjack table, only you're doing 2 tables at once, and you have 1 second to play your hand.
but I wonder if you could say the same thing about MOBAs and CS:GO. I mean you watch CS and it's mostly just sitting afk until someone walks into your line of sight. the amount of keystrokes is nothing compared to other games. MOBAs as well things like CSing and jungle clears become second nature, and then as you say, it's just keeping track of the little minute interactions. Who's to say that one is necessarily easier than the other?
@@SpiralBiscuit it depends on the person really, when i played CS with my friends they always have to carry me but if we were playing against each other in SC then I just clap them so hard. I just happened to be better at multitasking and strategic thinking than my friends - who is better than me at reaction time and spatial awareness
As a former hight master / low gm I kinda agree with you until a certain point.
If you watch today starcraft pro scene, the aim is quite similar to csgo aim, players like Clem with insane micro must be incredibly precise during fights.
Fast reactions are quite the same when you multi-task at this level.
For MOBAs as I played many Dota and LOL games, I feel the game knowledge is quite similar in the end?
@@SpiralBiscuit Its difficult to say because they require very different skillsets and you will almost never find people who have taken the time it takes to get really good at one to have also put in the time for the other genres as well since, y'know, the rest of life is going on still and requires time too.
That being said, every now and again you'll get some true degenerate basement-dweller like myself that no-lifed everything and got to a pretty high level. I never went full-on pro in anything other than the Korean BW scene in the early 2000s, but I was top USA 200 ranked Super Smash Melee back in 2002-2008, top 100 Mortal Kombat in mid-90s, top 200 Tekken from Tekken 1 on to Tekken Tag 2, Supreme Master First Class CSGO, 16x GM SC2 (bottom 100), Masters Overwatch, GM CoD competitive games including Warzone, Masters Apex Legends, 6.3k DOTA2 MMR in 2013, Challenger League in LoL 2014. I have a lot more, but that should cover big fighters/shooters/rts/MOBA to show I've been around almost everything and got decently good at it all.
The styles are just different skillsets and I would argue one isn't necessarily harder than the other; just different and therefore hard for most to guess at because they themselves only have 1 of the skillsets and not the others. CSGO is not speed APM intensive, but its reflex and muscle memory intensive as fk; most FPS are twitch and trace skillsets when it comes to mechanics whereas RTS are far more tiny micro-movements with a mouse while being able to keep track of the state of a board on a level that the other game types don't require. Fighters are almost entirely button-combo memorization and muscle memory dependent and MOBAs are most similar to RTS but with a far greater emphasis on itemization build and skill order mixed with hitting proper timings in farm levels rather than microing several types of units with in an army comp at once in several clashing waves over time like in RTS.
TL;DR I agree.
@@hightierplayers2454 Idd add that MOBA's trade a lot of the individual skill requirements and move that to being able to play well as a team. It is probaply also the reason why, like overwatch, it is so bad to play with randoms. CS also has a large team aspect, but when you look at how impactfull it is relative to individual skill, it is relatively way less important then in moba's.
Going back to SC, i think it is fair to say it is one of the more if not most difficult games because it requires a good understanding of strategy, knowledge of the units and races, and the mechanical skill to do whatever you come up with. All of them are required to start playing actual starcraft as it was designed and to be really good at it, while most other games allow you to slack a bit more in some of these apsects.
I still have to say that StarCraft is the hardest one.
The mechanical aspect is insane, even learning the basics can be somewhat difficult for beginners. But mechanical difficulty is always present no matter how good you are. The knowledge aspect is also enormous in the game, you have to learn compositions, unit placement, worker mining efficiency, build orders, your opponent's builds and timings so you know what to do with the limited information you got.
Yes, you don't have teammates, but that also means everything is up to you, you can't depend on anyone when you might have shortcomings.
i mean you missed the main point of this video with this comment. every argument you have can be countered. You consider LoL easy game? try getting high elo. it took me 5000 hours and 4 and a half seasons to reach high diamond. do u you how much it took me to reach sc2 high diamond? 50 games, which is more or less 20-25 hours(and they were my first ranked sc2 games) . Also it is worth mentioning how hard it is compared to what? Since LoL has a very big player base ofc it's going to be harder to reach the highest ranks. I can simply say starcraft is easier because of the lesser player count, which means easier higher ranks. Also there is one last thing i want to add. Having teammates is the worst part of climbing and becoming better, since you matter only 20%. Unless you are insanely good or insanely bad for your elo there is one rule which applies: 40% games you lose whatever you do, 40% you win whatever you do, and in the 20% remaining you make a difference. This makes the game 1000x harder then it should be, not mentioning the mental damage you get when you lose and there is nothing you can do
@@makuntizichi7148 Rankings are a bad way to measure skill. First of all, rankings on different games function differently. Also, how hard it is to reach a certain league is a very relative way to measure difficulty.
Second, I'm not talking of sc2, I'm talking about StarCraft here.
@@makuntizichi7148 There's no chance you got to high diamond in your first 50 games of starcraft 2.
@@smugegeez1406 first ranked games, not first starcraft games
@@makuntizichi7148 It took me about 50 ranked games too... I played a lot before tho. However I still think Starcraft is one of the hardest games ever... As mentioned above the rankings is not consistent.
The 20% difference you are talking about is just merely about playing the game a lot just statistically speaking, so there is no point to worry about the other 80%. I always wonder why people are so self centered in such team based games. It's completely mind boggeling to me and thats the reason I hate to play League myself cause people are so arrogant and self centered. League has easily the most toxic community I have ever encountered and I have a lot of hours in all sorts of games. Probably 15k at least idk.
Anyways I really agree with the video that all games need a lot of different skills that are important. However in terms of skill ceiling and skill floor, Sc2 is easily the hardest competetive game. Not just mechanically wise but also tactically. Games with imperfect information tend to get insane in theorycrafting all the time btw...
That 6 million echo slam with the 'legends never die' background music brings f*cking chill man
hahahaha yeah i also got chills making it
I have played this game for 8 years. And I still can’t do simple builds for Terran XD
🤣🤣🤣
That classic stuck dragoon clip 🤣
Nice edit making him to ascend on a whole new level
hahaha thanks that definitely made me laugh making it, even though it made the video copywrited xd
I never thought about the social skills necessary to compete in team sports.
I think the general argument for StarCraft’s difficulty (or other RTS) is that it requires all those skills, except the team play.
A 1v1 game requires the players to do everything. In a moba, if you don’t look at the minimap at the moment the opponent shows up, a teammate probably saw it and will call it out. In StarCraft, if you missed it, you missed it and it might just cost you the game.
I wouldn’t say SC is WAY harder than LoL, but it definitely requires more mastery of different skills than LoL, MTG or that insane rhythm game.
And mastering any of these games isn’t easy at all.
But I think we all can agree that DOTA is harder than LoL and Brood War is harder than SC2.
I don't think Brood War is harder than SC2. SC2 simply replaced control and interface limitations that BW had with unit abilities, but you still cannot do everything perfectly no matter how fast and how good you are.
@@costinhalaicu2746 that is what makes it harder.
The weird pathing, the control group limitations, having to send each individual worker to the mineral patch, no hot keys for buildings, etc.
If a player wants to perform as well in BW as they do in SC2, it requires more APM and more camera movement.
I know that these restrictions are imposed on both players, so it’s harder for both, which might seem to negate the increase in difficulty.
But if either player practices and is able to get around the restrictions, the difficulty ceiling is raised and other players will have to adjust.
Day9 has said in one of hi videos that since there are many small weird things in the game, players would specialize in a certain play style and basically ignore some aspect of the game.
One could master macro while making lots of micro mistakes while others would master micro, but miss some macro timings.
While this is also true for SC2, the discrepancy is narrower because of quality of life mechanics. And it’s even narrower in LOTV, since macro games are rarer and rarer because of the starting worker counts cutting the early game into non existence.
Team play can also happen.
@@konsolebox I know there’s 2v2 in sc2.
But the main competitive scene is 1v1.
@@casaroli My point is this: it is indeed harder to control your army movement in SC:BW compared to SC2. But in SC2 you have more unit abilities, so the freed up APM from better pathing, comprehensive unit selection and so on, is used in compensation to control more micro intensive units.
That was an insanely well produced video. Epic ending too!!! Really enjoyed it :)
Wow, thank you so much! I'd recognize that name anywhere, the Superiorwolf (Gosu) himself :OOO
How to measure how hard a game is? Simply by measuring the gap between Koreans and Non-Koreans. In SC (particularly brood war) the dominance of Koreans is/was insane! That's mostly because the practice time required to achieved such a high level was crazy. This is translated ino the game where you could see how Koreans were destroying everyone. In SC2, the gap shortened a little bit since the mechanics were easier. I played brood war for more than 12 years and can confirm is ridiculous hard to achieve a good/decent level.
SC2 is easy compared to SC1. AoE2 is also hard but the pacing is much slower than SC.
There are reasons why SC1 and AoE2 stood the test of time.
Learning rts games is like learning an instrument
i swear to god kids wanna play video games instead of playing an instrument when playing an instrument is So MUCH EASIER than all of this competitive gaming shit
people in online games will do EVERYTHING THEY CAN to fuck you up and a single mistake will be abused untill you fix your gameplay
sentient biengs acting like savannah predators on your ass
I swear playing a few chords on the piano for 5 minutes a day you'll be playing awesome songs within a month, nobody will tell you you're a bronze trash player, everyone will get excited that you're playing something they know and love, hell even the pvp aspect of music (playing in a band) is actually co op.
Girls will swoon if you can play a few songs, they won't give a damn that you're master in some nerdy smelly clickclicklcik game
WHY DO WE DO THIS TO OURSELVES
The reason people play competitive games is because you know, they want to compete.
Sc is by far the hardest esport.
Sc2 is easier, still hard but sc1 was like the game was playing against you
Brood war at a minimum has as high of a knowledge ceiling as any game, but certainly has THE highest mechanical ceiling.
I think it has to be the hardest esport.
no it just doesn't when games like osu exist, not saying one is harder, but you cant boil it down to x game is harder im this aspect so its harder
@@even6978 Looool, osu has 0 fucking tactical thinking, let alone critical. Its a fucking reaction based game and is not harder than sc2.
Mechanically simple with difficult tracks =/= playing against real people while controlling an army and maintaining a base.
@@Ghost1170 are you insecure? i never said either game was harder. I just said that starcraft does not have the highest mechanical skill ceiling.
@@even6978 Do you fail at reading comprehension?
Who the hell starts off with using "Osu!" when saying sc2 isnt hard?
I get that you shouldnt compare the two, but if you start off the sentence the way you did, it IMPLIES that "Osu!" is mechanically harder, but you literally then go on to say that you arent saying one isnt harder than the other when they CLEARLY have VERY different skill ceilings and entry barriers.
You very MUCH can say a game is much harder due to an aspect. Cuphead is a much harder game than Kirby Starshards on the N64 because there are far more bullets and enemies on the screen at a given time. That LITERALLY explains why it's harder because it creates a specific challenge that can easily be in both games but is only present in one. They are both action platformers.
?? I dont get where insecurity comes from, think you're projectin, bud. I only reply or make comments while Im on the can, lmao.
@@Ghost1170 not sure if you can read at a second grade level because i already said it twice but here: I am not saying osu is harder than starcraft 2 or vise versa. However, starcraft does not have the highest mechanical skill ceiling. English must not be your first language but ill repeat myself.
That's an incredibly well made video.
Each genre has different skill floors by nature but they all take months to years of practice to master.
Glad you enjoyed it! Yeah, after trying fighting games, MOBAs, RTS, etc. some skills can transfer, but so many just don't. It's so frustrating but also refreshing to learn the ropes of a new genre and just be a complete noob.
Except some take less time than others.
League is easier.
@@capitalistamalvadao4278 Taking more or less time to learn is kinda what skill floor means, man. You keep smugly commenting with obvious bitterness and spite toward a take you don't seem to have listened to. Yes, dota is harder. Duh. It's the same game with twice the mechanics. But LoL and SC are DIFFERENT GENRES. Different, partially overlapping skillsets. That's the point of the video.
@@XavIsOnline The point of the video is that you can't see two different games and say "One is harder than the other". Wich is wrong, as proven by what you just said.
The Skill floor does not follow the skill ceiling.
SC2 is, clearly, harder than League. But people like to cope to boost their ego.
playing starcraft is like playing LOL with 10 hero at the same time , and that just the mecanicals part of this
As an 6000 hours dota 2 player, StarCraft is just on another level
I think something to add is how Polt went from starcraft 2 top professional playerto became league of legends T1 head coach. I miss captain America.
Believe his brother became League Proffesional player
@@Jaime_Protein_Cannisterall the StarCraft players are proof it’s the hardest and takes the most skill of all games because all these pros who went to other games dominated such as beasty qt,Polt,marine lord,demuslim etc
Good points! Yes, StarCraft is the hardest game. Yes, BroodWar and SC2. Yes, I am biased.
No game will ever come close on how dificult starcraft BW is.
This is like an ideal college presentation. A bunch of info, very well presented, very easy to understand, all info pointing in a general direction. And finally and most importantly no point made or anything interesting to say.
Great video! I was really not expecting such a low view count for such a well-made video! Hope you grow a lot!
Aww, that means a lot, thank you!
Finally a connection to Osu and Starcradt. They are more similiar than people would think
hahaha true, drawing pad sc2 when?
Fantastic video! As someone with an embarrassing amount of hours in Dota I can confidently say that it is... not the hardest game. Is it extremely difficult, probably one of the most difficult? Absolutely. But when I've attempted to play Starcraft I feel like I could never become halfway decent. But I'm sure that's how some Starcraft players feel about Melee or CSGO. I like how you compared the different types of difficulty, like some SC players may just not be good team players, and a pro League support may thrive in a team environment. I wanted to get good at Dota, so I did, because game's style fit me. Other people are just born good at clicking on heads lol
Fun question answered in a clear way!
Hahahahaha yes! I dabble in LoL and fighting games myself, and I find learning them super interesting to see what skills transferred from StarCraft. Unfortunately, I'm just awful at FPS games and I am definitely not born to click heads lol. I've tried Dota a couple times too, the movement is really interesting with turn ratios and I'm considering making a video about it. I'm sure I'll mention it somewhere in a different video for sure if it's not its entire video.
@@SpiralBiscuit pls make dota video.
I wasted so many hours on it I need to at least be able to watch video and be like haha relatable
@@XidaRen hahahahaha i have not played enough, but i have an idea that is largely based on dota
Your editing and commentary are top notch. I really enjoyed this video
Hahaha, this is just the first video, I will try and get only better from here! I learned a lot making this, and hopefully the future ones can improve because of it
if you think SC is only go fast youre soooooooooooooooo out of the loop. you have to at a bear minimum maintain constant production, iron out build orders to such small details, scout to find out what your opponent is doing know the correct response, micro properly well maintaining production ive only mentioned a fraction so far with how fast paced starcraft is and all the 100000 things you need to be doing. your counter point is not needing to relay on a team or making mild mistakes in a card game. league of legends and MTG are hard games (not mentioning Hearthstone cause the game is sooooooooooooooo random) but SCs skill floor is higher SCs skill ceiling after being out for 15 years is just as unatonable as it was on release and it had 2 years of no balance updates for pros to really iron every detail out
OSU isn't even a good mechanical comparison. It's a one-button rythym game. You only need to focus on what's right in front of you. One of the biggest hurdles for a new RTS player is that even basic macro gameplay has you piano-ing all over the keyboard, keeping tabs on, like, five different locations. And you need to learn to weave that basic mechanical dance into all the more complex stuff you also need to be doing. You can never, ever shirk it if you want to survive. It's that requirement of being an omnipitent being that sets it apart.
this was a really well made video, even though I know nothing about RTS games I enjoyed it a lot. Keep up the good work dude. I'm top 30 in the world for typing speed which isnt nearly as difficult as a MOBA or RTS, it's just a cognitive skill like aim training which requires a metric ton of grinding to get really good at.
Thank you! Also wow that's nuts lmao. How long did it take you to write that comment? xd
hey can you give me some tips for improving on typing speed ? do you have a blog or something ? I am decent, the max I have gone is 146 WPM in 100words/15 seconds in monkeytype. Eagerly waiting for your response !!
2.7 seconds
I think any game that puts 2 humans against each other is going to be hard. Usually past all the knowledge and mechanical skill it comes down to awareness. But like you said, you could potentially measure difficulty by using "Intentionality" as a metric
Hmm maybe by your definition of game, but if you think about a toy-game example: flipping coins and seeing who wins the most. This is a "game", but it requires no skill at all whatsoever. You could also say that Rock Paper Scissors is another example that may have some skill in it, but the rate at which an unskilled opponent will beat a skilled opponent is likely much higher.
@@SpiralBiscuit is people were sufficiently motivated i bet the skill ceiling of coin flipping is pretty high. teaching yourself like thumb controll and waiting for like optimal climate conditions. id watch the coin flipping gsl
science makes this easy to understand. work is defined by moving weight. sc2 requires more physical and mental work than not just most games, but most of any other human activity. think only stuff like literally being in active warfare can even compare to how alert and responsive and observant you have to be to survive.
As for me, when LOL start fanbase games like "which rank this game is" even pro players cant tell like 100% which is league is. In same time even casual player of starcract can easyly detect which rank of sc2 match is.
Not that SC2 isn't much harder, but LoL is deceitful in this aspect because games between similarly ranked players have the same rhythm for all ranks. It's not that there isn't a skill gap, it's just that you don't see when both players are playing defensively, which is the case for most matches among players with the same skill level.
A Platinum player would immediately crush a Bronze player in laning phase. When I was Challenger and I realized from the positioning and movement that the enemy player was much lower, I would just move extremely aggressively and end the game very fast. Against other Challenger players the game was almost always much slower.
Brood War is the hardest e-sport. SC2 is an easier version of that. BW is also a bigger esport now than SC2.
The skill ceiling is the highest in RTS.
I think you summed up the components pretty well within this but there's a critical aspect that I feel is missed here. These games are competitive in nature. It doesn't even matter what you're playing as long as there's a high skill ceiling. It doesn't matter a game is hard to play, you're playing against someone else and the goal is to be better than them. LoL or DotA may be 'easier' to play than starcraft, but it's not easier to be the best. It may be harder infact, there's more money and motivation on the line!
I love SC2 and have played thousands of hours. Whenever someone new comes along it's the first thing I mention. You don't need to be better than the game, just your opponent. There's always someone around your skill level, so just jump in and enjoy.
For sure, just exploring what 'easier' even means seems to unravel a lot of preconceptions like the ones you speak of! Even in mobile games, people are competitive and can keep getting better and better!
Watching pro gamers in SC will make you feel like not worth competiting at all. DotA and LoL don't do that.
@@konsolebox they actually do. People just respond to it in a completely different way. Ever wonder why there are people who are so angry at League. Even just saying it's name boils their blood. Saying "League is a terrible game", "don't play that shite", "worst game ever created". You know where that hate comes from? It's because they tried to play it too and find the game hard and got flamed by a 12 yr old. Then they made that their villain origin story. 😂😂😂. There are 2 people who uses the meme "whatever you do don't play League". 1 is actual players who are using reverse psychology and 2 are people who played it before but failed to be good at it. Lmao
@@Vizible21 I don't know. I've been a pretty good StarCraft player who owned my colleagues back in the day and I looked down on DoTA the moment it became popular thinking it's much easier to play since you only control one character. I now respect and play DoTA against AI but still find LoL a toned down version of it, and I think a lot of people will agree with me. I however don't play DoTA online as I don't like the idea of teaming with random people on the Internet. It's just pointless trying to win and gain ranking with just anyone. Still if I have a good team it will be worth reaching even just a good above mid tier rank. In StarCraft however it's pointless. You need to have a good APM and be as good as one of the guys a little lower than the best ones at least. Otherwise it's meaningless and personally nothing to be proud of. Any tier not close to the elite is pointless. Many will argue I should just play StarCraft for fun. No, you only play StarCraft to win. It's not fun if you don't.
The skill to realize that my conscientiousness is too low for all of this.
The author of this video doesnt understand why Starcraft and in general RTS IS so difticult. BS video. Playing Starcraft for an hour makes much more tired than any other Game i played for the mental effort and concentration that I need. Starcraft is not only about the high mechanical skill. Its the conbination of strategy, knowledge, fast decision making, tactics and mechanical skill that make It so difticult.
Agreed. Even SC2 feels like easy mode after BW.
Great video, good points. As a Rocket League player it truly hurts that you didn't give it as an example when it comes to mechanical skill/teamplay, though. :p
Ooof youre right i completely forgot about it. I tried to include as many games as possible but im still not familiar with many :c i will try to include it next time!
kick ball in goal WOOW
"Is there anything to get hype about without this crazy execution?"
Chess go *THONK*
Not only you need to be very strategic but also have the mechanics for Starcraft which is why it's the hardest. Other esports like league of legends for example you don't need to be very mechanically to achieve high ranks because there are many characters that are very easy to learn.
The video basically is describing some of the different skills you need to have just to play a starcraft game
Wow you actually covered/featured almost every single game I was thinking about when trying to answer this question myself, from Fighting games to TCGs, to Dota etc. Good video, big ups
Thanks! Although there are certainly many games to consider. I hadn't even considered other RTS's, as someone else pointed out in the comments that AoE2 is pretty dang hard as well hahahaha
I'm so surprised this channel doesn't have at least 10k subs yet
Because he spouts BS
Funny how fighting games were the example for getting into it quickly since it's straightforward, but I feel like the skill floor in fighting games is a lot higher than in starcraft 2, you need like 100+ hours of practice to not lose against a low tier guy doing only sweeps and throws. I guess unless "getting into the game" means getting to the true strategy part which only happens in Masters league so that'd mean it has the highest floor
Ah honestly I think I meant the skill floor getting a new player picking up the game and being able to formulate a game plan. I think in fighting games a lot of like the joystick to move and buttons to punch n' stuff makes a lot of sense intuitively, but I feel that might not be the case with RTS games as a whole. I think what I'd categorize what you are speaking of is a competitively skill floor which is a bit different, but still worth thinking about though. Getting into games competitively is probably another video in itself. I think that might've been an inconsistent example though because it was talking about hardest "esport" lol so you make a solid point
lol no
Nahhhh man. I'm just getting into fighters and RTS games and this is nonsense, Starcraft is way harder.
In a low-level Street Fighter match, you can easily win by just having a good grasp of your normals. A lot of that quickly becomes muscle memory because they're fairly intuitive. You don't need "100+ hours of practice". If they're sweeping that much, bait it and jump in when they sweep. If they're trying to walk up and throw you, just smack 'em. I've won games that way and that was after an hour of just drilling the range on those punches n' kicks. Of course a better player will screw you but you *will* find games like that and it can be fun because there's actually mind games happeing.
SC2, on the other hand...
Build these workers. OK, now make sure that you have two queued up all the time. Don't queue more, not efficient. You'll need to hotkey new workers every 12 seconds or so. Now multiply that by four for the four bases you're going to have. Oh, by the way, make sure they're not idle, so you do need to put your camera over there too. Keep doing this until you have, like, 80 workers (in other words, never, ever stop). Now in-between those four seperate queues each running on their own 12-second timer, (so every 3 seconds potentially), make sure you're putting up whatever buildings you're going go need as soon as you have the resources. Constantly, in other words. Again, never, ever stop if you can help it. Some of those buildings will produce units, more queues for you to babysit in-between those other queues you need to hit every three seconds and keeping tabs on idle workers.
Now that you've dedicated your entire brain and your hands to playing macro piano, did I mention that you also have a game to play? Scouting, point defense, actually attacking your enemy and the micro that potentially comes with it. All woven between your sub-3-second macro piano game. So if all of that base building stuff is stuck in your mental stack you'll think too slowly and get rolled. No, it needs to be so instinctive that you don't put any brain power towards doing it at all, even when doing a bunch of other shit at the same time. Congratulations. You are qualified to play StarCraft online at a level that's actually fun.
I *know* that's probably a bullshit assesment. But to my idiot noob brain it's true and you can't convince me otherwise. But compare that bullshit assessment to your own... RTS games are significantly more daunting than fighters, as someone who's looking for a way in to both.
you ARE tripping man. just like how practice to how lose verse cheap strategies and to be more versatile SAME thing for both SC games
Not sure if Starcraft is the hardest game, but I do like that a pro player in their early 30s can keep up with someone in their teens.
The fact that you can compete with either brute speed or sheer experience and knowledge of psychology is really cool.
think it's amazing for a game so mechanically intensive as well. This is the same for fighting games where you can have someone like Daigo Umehara who is 41, and is still placing good results in the biggest tournaments.
Have you seen the 6 Grandmasters in their 70s? Eldest is 75 years old he's ranked 116 last I checked.
@@hightierplayers2454 wait seriously? do you have names?
My mom's in her 70s and she's way better at beat saber than I am, but she has no idea where to start when it comes to sc2, even though she wants to learn.
commanding an army is always tough, just look at history world wars and genghis khan, napoleon, alexander, battles that decided human fates and where we are today(could been society of NAZIs if we lost)
My top game Gunbound is an interesting example. It's a lot of 'memory ceiling' where there's a lot of formulae that go into making a proper shot, and the best players (among those who don't have calculators doing the formulae for them) have played so long those numbers are purely in the mind and they can 'visualize' how much range they need in a shot based on conditions, it's similar to the 'instinct' in SC to conduct all the rhythmic steps for micro/macro, and pulling off a ~1.5 screenlength high angle high wind shot can feel as good as the best micro action in SC. And then, much less influential but still very important, it's got micro since your next turn comes up faster based on how fast the current turn is, so you don't have much time for planning and need to complete your movement, angle adjustment, and powering up as quickly as possible. The final notable skill type is 'knowledge' much like described in the video here, knowing exactly what each Mobile can do in a given situation can save you from a lethal and give you an extra turn, it's pretty low-variable compared to something like Hearthstone or other strategy games, but that's all the more reason to ensure the opponent can't gain an advantage from some subtlety you didn't know.
It might not be Gunbound (which has gotten a few tournaments in the past but never huge), but some artillery game will be a big esport one day, I got a feeling.
Man, I dont even play starcraft anymore to say ALL of the games mentioned are bar far, not even close to how difficult decision making and mechanical output it takes to be amazing at starcraft. It's far easier to become Global on csgo than become masters in sc2.
Ive tried both and gotten to LEM and only stopped cause cheaters were supposed to plague Global elite in csgo at the time I was playing and went to faceit/esea.
Couldnt get out of diamond in sc2 in the same time. Game's way harder
you only got to lem because of the rank update you GN2 pleb
Shooters also take barely any skill lmao
Moba are even worse since its a pick up counter draft thing
The only thing that matter is the pick up phase wich says a lot about the gameplay
Curious on what your ESEA/Faceit ranks were. CSGO matchmaking never meant anything since any serious player is on those clients. You haven't even reached Global and yet make that statement as if you have experience reaching the rank which is odd. Were you a 3000+ elo faceit 10, ESEA A+ (premier/advanced/mdl) player because that would be a better comparison when you compare sc2 master/GM ladder since CSGO uses clients for it's actual high level rankings and to my knowledge sc2 does not use a third party client.
@Trigunn has never played any FPS at a high level and especially counter-strike to be making that statement either.
It can be counterintuitive,
but a game’s difficulty directly derives of the all player cumulative time played.
Chess isn’t complicated because of its rules but because of its players.
lol got played enough that now that silver lee otps know combo that used too be too complicated even for pro players a year after the champion came out.
Riven auto animation cancel was like dark magic when it was found to raise dps. Now it’s a requirement to play riven.
Actually this is a point that's really interesting, especially when it comes to fighting games. FGC developers oftentimes try to introduce uncertainty in outcome in a lot of scenarios in order to reduce the prevalence of legacy skills dominating new players. I remember in like season 3 when pros couldn't even do the Alistar W-Q combo hahahaha
That's one of the things that gets me about "esports". I watch a hi level player/ team...then I go out buy the game and try to play that way. But the game doesn't play like the Esports games do. Years of playing overwatch and I still can't find teammates who regroup. It is mandatory to get an IRL group of people together to even attempt to play the game.
It's different from any irl games where you can play pick up games that, despite lacking some skills, you can pick up and play the same way a pro can, even if a pro would whoop you.
Great vid. Send this to someone just getting into starcraft
Most games are so extremely complex when you go deep it's impossible to distinguish which is more complicated. But RTS games definitelly have the biggest skill floor so they are the hardest.
I have huge respect for broodwar and sc2 pro player
in undergrad, I would play both starcraft and league.
that is, I would play ladder starcraft for a maximum of 2 hours before completely burning out
then I'd chill with my friends and play 5 hours of league no problem afterwards to "relax", and I just do some stupid stuff and let my team carry me while I run it down mid
not really the same level of efforts put into each but having a team is pretty nice, you can relax a bit more whereas in SC you're always "wired" constantly
GREAT VIDEO!!
Oh good, this is still a thing. I was wondering what happened to the uploads.
hahaha I was considering @ing you but nah I'm not dead. Will upload less frequently. I'm considering making a second channel for stuff that I uploaded before, but idk if I want to edit more, even if it's just really simple cuts. I was thinking just moving that kind of stuff to my stream and just doing really easy cuts, similar to what other Twitch streamers to nowadays.
Nice video! I can see the Gerald influence, and I mean that in a good way! :)
Thanks, he is literally the entire reason I wanted to make these videos haha
starcraft 2 is easy compared to broodwar lol, broodwar IS the hardest esport game
This was really well made :) gj fr.
thank you!
Ive never won a PVP game of SC2 but its nice to play against the easy AI and feel like a top player
Starcraft is definitely harder than LoL (or basically any other eSport). You compared LoL having four players to 1v1 Starcraft, well, Starcraft also can have 4v4... imagine the chaos in those games! It's just that the money is in 1v1, so that's where majority of the play is, but trust me, 4v4 Starcraft is also crazy complex and hard.
I actually find that large team games are more one-dimensional than 1v1s, as it usually boils down to 4 people cheese or 4 people macro hard. I haven't really played enough to be sure though. I think when I'm talking about esports, it's only really useful to talk about 1v1s.
If we go that route, definitely checkout 8 man free for alls in starcraft. Talk about difficult games then.
@@Walleytherobot yeah, they turn into negotiations and backstabbing! Lol agreeing not to attack each other etc.
Only difference being that LoL is being led by meta cycles which leads to bad players (relative to specific mmr levels) being able to climb just to attract more players and money. SC, Dota, and all 1v1 games don't have that shit issue.
every game has meta cycles as long as there are balance changes , it's inevitable including dota and sc. remember when void rays were shit and then became the staple mid game strat before carriers? that's a meta cycle. ofc it is more prominent in mobas due to having way more characters that get buffed / nerfed.
I jist discovered your channel and i hope you keep this videos up!
As you mention, comparing games in terms of difficulty is no possible if you attemp to compare every single variable involved. But it is possible to project those variables to a single metric by taking tiers. A player from certain tier should be able to beat ANY player from a tier below at least 50,0001% of the time in the long run. This creates a level of soft-ownage. The more tiers you can create from the best of the best up to players barely above the skill flor, the higher the skill ceiling would be theorethically.
Anyways, in practice this is impossible to meassure, but at least we can estimate comparisons. Saludos!
I have played SC2 for the past 12 years and I only managed to actually play 1v1 in the past 4. I am now Diamond 2, so average.
nice, Diamond 2 is actually quite high! Last time I checked Plat 1 is top 30th percentile, so Diamond 2 is not bad!
@@SpiralBiscuit thanks! It's just that there's a long way for me to go. I have Master friends and playing against them is like playing a different game entirely. Even watching them is insane.
Why is everyone referring to SC / SC2 as pure 1v1? I mean there were (and still are) also 2v2 tounaments out there, even if they are not that famous. So saying those games do not have a team aspect is just wrong.
It's similar to chess. Chess has 2v2 in bughouse, but you're not going to become a professional chess player solely off of bughouse tournaments. In a similar vein, nobody can make a living playing 2v2 StarCraft. Thus it's not considered to be a pure 1v1 ESPORT. You are actually correct though if this was many years ago in which Proleague had a 2v2 slot, but nowadays you can only be a professional in 1v1.
short answer to the question asked in the title: yes
When they taught an AI to play GO it wiped the floor with the best of the best and the high level players looked to it's games for inspiration. It was teaching them. The same thing happened with DOTA. Then they tried to get it to learn SC2. No one, at any level, is asking for AlphaStar replay packs to learn from.
I also don't think that being able to hit F2 makes SC2 easier than BW. When you play BW you are fighting the game as much as you are fighting your opponent. SC2 frees up more of your time to play the game.
Is StarCraft the Hardest Esport? I think so.
This Video Is So Well Done! From Start To Finish! SO GOOD!
At the end of the day, competition can make any simple game hard. You're not learning against the game like dark souls, you're learning against other people. I personally think multiplayer games are going away from multiple avenues of skill expression and are more interested in intuitiveness with mechanical benchmarks for outplay. Games like Valorant and CSGO are low floor high skill games and are really popular these days.
8:58 Ironically pepe mogs both of them KEKW
Yeah, the thing with Starcraft is that to be a GM, you need literally every skill mentioned in the video at the upper echelon.
You make a bad read? Your comp gets countered and you lose because your opponent has comparable physical skill.
You lack the physical APM? You get out-micro'd and lose pretty much every even fight.
You lack rock-solid macro? You fall behind after the early game and lose.
You lack perfect game mechanic knowledge? You may win a decent bit of matches, but even with comparable skill in other metrics, you'll have a decidedly negative WR in masters.
This isn't even getting into the mind games possible in an rts, because you can to a degree control what knowledge your opponent has to your activities.
great video, my man!
I like to debate with my friends regarding the difficulty in League and StarCraft 2, as a player of both games, I'd argue that League would be the more complex game than StarCraft, given that League has a lot more variables to consider than StarCraft 2. i.e: the 9 other players in the game, creep score, itemization, champions, champion counters, champion mastery, summoner spells, objectives, map vision, map rotation, etc.
But the RTS gamer in me wants to scream out and say StarCraft 2 is the most difficult e-sports game there is, given how from my narrow viewpoint and experience, StarCraft 2 requires you to be responsible for ALL your variables compared to League where you need to gamble on how good your team is or how bad your opponents are.
Overall, I'd conclude that StarCraft 2 is difficult due to the fact that you are solely responsible for your wins and losses, you cannot blame anyone else, meanwhile in League you could easily lose because the enemy team had more better players, or your team didn't cooperate, etc.
yup that's basically the point of the vid haha
So, using the same logic you used, Dota is Harder than League.
Do you think Dota is harder than SC2?
@@capitalistamalvadao4278 I don't personally play Dota 2, so I can't really have an opinion on that. On my limited playtime (3 hours with Sven) I could say it's certainly even more difficult than League, but that's more of an uninformed opinion than an observation.
It also matters what you are naturally good at. If you are tall as hell and good at jumping volleyball won't be the hardest sport. No game have never exhausted me more than SC. I cold play 2 games tops then I was done for the day. League on the other hand I could play for an entire day.
I feel like sc:bw is literally the hardest esports of all time and forever will be in terms of individual performance. The gap between the best amateur player and pro in sc is astronomical esp in Korea. I think the reason is because the layer of gameplay is so deep and a game of sc is like many minigames happening across the entire map continuously so one or two good plays or decisions cant win player the game.
Hell yeh brood war is way harder than StarCraft 2 I can’t f2 that’s why I don’t play it only 2
From trying SC2 I understood that mobas are like playing candy crush.
At least when I say StarCraft Brood War is the best eSport, I mean that it is the father of eSports. I don't think any of the games would have gotten the attention they have gotten or in some cases even existed without SC BW. Yes they all test different skills and all have different things to enjoy about them, but StarCraft will always be the most iconic. The fact that someone is talking about it this many years later further proves my point.
08:35
08:35 한국 프로 경기에서 구단간의 경쟁에서는 스타크래프트는 어떤 선수를 상대팀 선수와 맞붙을지도 순서도정해야하며
2vs2와 같은 팀경기도 있기 때문에 더욱 복잡해집니다
I play Dota 2 and the most rewarding skill is communicating with my team and guiding them to victory
Also knowledge of playing this game for 4k hours...
League is easier without shadow of a doubt , You can get GM with hands alone and no micro ... ask Tyler1 about his Korean Ladder adventures
Anyone who thinks That League is harder , doesn't know what they're talking about. You can pick up league and play a game instantly.
Just the Hotkey management is harder than anything league players have done in terms of complexity. The difficulty of League comes from it's restrictions , for instance Cooldowns rather than skill expression. In starcraft you can ALWAYS micro harder and faster. In league if you move at the speed of 455 and have 5 cd skills. That's that.
League of losers or i mean MOBAS in general take no skill this is a obvious fact for anyone with a IQ superior to 30
Especially the more casual mobas like smite LOL ect those take nothing at all
Tyler 1 and many streamer already proved it thats why its so popular
I MEAN EVERYONE CAN pick up a moba but can the same be said to SC? Nope never in a billion year
from my humble analysis: SC1 requires attention to error prevention in micro, as shown with the dragoon, and SC2 requires more precision micro with marine splits, baneling targeting, blink micro with stalkers, viper grabs etc.
My best level was playing Zerg main, and employing a ling-muta pressure, like a Knight in chess, or mongolian warfare, always threatening 2 positions forcing the enemy to pick a battle/loss. It was medium micro and macro heavy, but having a main army of Ling-Mutas that you can split, and a batch of lings from hatchery on A-Move sent to a pressumed enemy expansion while baiting/harassing his main army always secured I was 1 base ahead.. Add in Nydus channel once in a while.. :D
My highest ranking opponent was a Protoss player in masters with 13K games who didn't want to play 1v1 with me again cause my playstyle was too stressful.. I only did platinum in 1v1 ladder and diamond in 2v2/3v3/4v4, back when there was only plat-diamond-master as the highest. But I rocked a 200-400 APM back then. Now its only 100-160 APM, and I am a filthy casual.
To me, I have seen no harder games or learned others a harder game. In MOBA you have 1 unit to micro, and have only the minimap awareness on rotation, there is no zerg queen/mule/chrono boost or gate timings/barracks/larva spawn on top of microing an army..
And you play with Fog of War as opposed to Chess, so you have to scout and gather intelligence.....
In chess you have perfect knowledge.. In starcraft and also in life, you have to make the right decision, with imperfect knowledge..
lol I remember being 16 and frustratingly quitting Brood War because I realized there was no possible way to approach the APM of the pros, even when I tried to arbitrarily click and spam commands😅
the only real measure of how "hard" an esport/sport is is how good the competition is, because every game technically has infinite skill ceiling
we'd have to ask which esport is the most competitive instead
@@even6978 nope you can calculate how hard a game is lmao
Take league for example the pros already stated that 95% of the game is done by the pick draft phase wich says a llt about the gameplay
@@trigunn3414 thats just not true, its only partially true when the teams are extremely evenly matched
there is no comparison one is playing checkers and the other is playing chess what are we even comparing here..
I still claim QUAKE3/Quakelive Is higest skill game in Esports there is, i played bunch of sc2 and fps games and LOL,Dota2 etc..
Anyway why i claim this to be true.. if we take a avarage or semi-pro playing vs top lvl pro In starcraft i can win by cheese at least 1 game out of 1000 games... probably not but you get the idea
as in Quake no matter how much you chezze or do whatever you will always lose to a pro no matter what as game is such high skill gapped and chess like strategy behind it while still playing super fast fps game... thats my humble opinion :) btw i love playing still both of these 2 games since both are super competitive im Master 1 in SC2 and in Quake also very hihg rank :)
Peace and love felow gamers ;)
Actually, this was a really interesting point that I never really brought up simply because I am just not that familiar with Quake. But I do know that it's notorious for just never having upsets and the better player always wins. I think in some sense that almost makes it a worse spectator experience, as there is just simply way less uncertainty in outcome. I tried Quake Champions, and I just couldn't even kill anyone a single time... really turned me off to be honest hahaha. There are just no noobs playing Quake :c
@@SpiralBiscuit Anyway i love both or even all games that are competitive and each represents uniqe skill needed for that game :)
IN matter of quake why its not many players nowadays and way u cant kill anyone is beacsue to even start playing game at very noob level its such a high skill and mechanics needed any new players simply give up so yeah in that sens quake its kinda shit.. but on skill level itself yeah id say top2 with SC2 just there always :D
People who complain of ladder anxiety have clearly never laddered in SC2
-There is no one to blame but yourself
-It's just you and the other person
-When you lose there could be any number of reasons you lost, each of which has to be painfully pulled apart during replays
I have never experienced ladder anxiety again in FPS or MOBAs since playing SC2 ladder
Of course you havent
Shooters and MOBAS take no skills or barely any at all these genre are for pretentious people
SC2 King of (current) e-sports. Period. Stop beating around the bush : Speed, Reasoning, Dexterity, Knwoledge, Fainting and all the information war, Strategy, Tactic, Execution. Too bad Blizzard did not support the multiplayer and you would have it all. And I am only a Diamond level player.
SC2 vs MOBA = Tennis vs Basketball
Starcraft Broodwar was a strategic game, where you can play mind games and where an All In is harder to pull off then standard play.
Starcraft 2 ....
a mid-high range fps player can sometimes outplay pro players or just get lucky. A high range league player (challenger or right outside of it) on their one trick can pretty easily beat pro players.
A pro starcraft player will play against other pro players who are only power ranked a dozen spots below them in the world, and not lose 1 map to that player if they played 10 times. Any GM player will never lose to a diamond player. Diamond fps/league players might be able to scrape a game off a gm, or win lane in leagues case.
The skill gap is not close. SC and SC2 are infinitely harder.
I would have to say out of all the games I've played Yes Starcraft 2 def the hardest. I was asked to join a clan that went pro in counterstrike right before steam got to it. i can beat the original ninja gaiden on NES in almost record time (said to be one of the hardest games made for NES) but To this day and i've been playing starcraft on and off since brood war. I still can't get passed freakin DIAMOND. WTF? yea my ranking for league is higher then my starcraft ranking but i only put a couple months into league compared to the years of starcraft. still love the shit out of the game best game ever.
Wtf you have a ninja gaiden record??? I watched the Summoning Salt video on that and I was like wtf is this game LOL
@@SpiralBiscuit Yea this was before You tube days. about 22 21 years ago I was a master at that game. Had no idea about the glitches (where you jump and attack with 1,000 strikes killing bosses instantly) So pretty much my runs looked almost identical to the records minus using the glitches. One of the first games i really started playing when i was about 4....took me damn near 7 years to actually beat it, then another 2 to master it. thanks buddy
Every single factor that you listed knowledge, brain computing, execution etc isn't irrelevant to starcraft..... it's just as much as a factor as in any other game. Then you add the insane mechanics required and its why starcraft is the hardest most difficult game to play. Knowing what counters what, how army sizes can snowball and certain units snowball even more meaning 30 marines vs 40 marines isnt going to lead to a linear outcome where 10 marines from the larger group will survive. In sc2 my hands are making 200 apm and my brain is also making hundreds of calculations per minute. Your video makes it seem like starcraft is all about mechanics will ignoring these other things but its isn't. Those other things are just as important.
in league of legend the most important thing is mentality
and diapers, also schizo meds AND DONT FORGET TO DILATE.
I play LOL for over 5 years and starCraft only campaign and I love Esports So I felt this video is for me really well produced
Wow, amazing content quality for your subscriber/view count. Hope you know its well recognised :D
Thanks, that means a lot!
SC2 is the only e-sport I can take seriously.
I'd have to disagree there for sure. I've tried to play fighting games, MOBAS, FPS, etc. and they blow me away in how difficult they are to play. Seems a bit narrow minded to me. Not even Brood War, just sc2 as well?
@@SpiralBiscuit Brood war has mechanichal restrictions that make it unsuitable as a competetive sport. Nothing impressive about players not being able to execute a basic strategy due to technichal limitations, or basic strategies failing because of a lack of control.
Other e-sports simply lack the historical, theoretical and practical depth that SC2 brings to the table. Let alone the technichal accuracy. Not even other, more modern and more costly games can even closely compare to SC2's clean and precise gameplay.
Sc2's competetive scene also doesn't rely on exploits and broken metas like most fighting games. It has some of this of course, but there are always legit counterstrategies for everything. Comparing the range of effectiveness in metas between SC2 and other games is like comparing Monopoly to chinese Go.
It doesn't require a narrow skillset like shooters where 99% of the time a team or player wins bas on "pointed and clicked the headshot faster than opponent".
It being a measurement of skill and strategy isn't hindered by teamgames being the meta like for MOBAs.
There is no single skillset, strategy, exploit, talent that can bring you to the top in SC2. All top players in SC2 excel in everything the game expects and 99.9% of them quickly fade away from the scene due to the immensly high standards. Unlike shooters, fighting games MOBAS etc. Where one OP charachter/ item etc. Can make or break a career.
I'm not being closed minded, I just know what I'm talking about. Anyone that knows SC2 as an e-sport enough can only be bewildered by the sight of LOL and CS:GO pulling infinite numbers of fans only due to the fact that the fans play the game on their own time.
Most fans of competetive SC2 haven't touched the game in years and are still glued to the screen.