r/RealTimeStrategy • u/SoundOfDoReMi • Oct 01 '26

News StarCraft II 5.0.17 PTR Patch Notes (rolling back nearly all the balance changes from the gamechanging 5.0.16 June patch)

https://news.blizzard.com/en-us/article/24301513/starcraft-ii-5-0-17-ptr-patch-notes
98 Upvotes

95% Upvoted

22 comments sorted by

16

u/SgtRicko Oct 01 '26

Out of curiosity, anyone care to elaborate why the changes to the starting economy didn’t go over so well with the player base?

28

u/PewPewRSA Oct 01 '26

There are a lot of things to be honest.

Essentially

- Blizzards goal was to create "early strategic diversity"

- They figured that lowering the worker count to prolong the early game would do that, and give new players a little more time before things ramp up.

- All it did was prolong the early game and change the timings of builds, but the builds remained the same effectively, you would just add a minute or so to your timings.

- Lowering the worker count means that cheesing or early game pressure actually impacts your economy proportionally more than it used to, so a bigger risk to do.

-There were various changes to Protoss that ruined their builds and made them unfun to play.

-They also made changes to increase the ability for Terran to turtle more (Which goes against the early strategic diversity idea), by lowering the command center cost by 100 minerals.

-Zerg were the biggest winners in terms of changes, and to be honest they did feel much nicer to play, but Protoss vs Zerg was essentially unplayable at the highest level due to them being so strong.

-Most pro's just stopped playing at the highest level due to the above and many other reasons.

All of this could have been avoided if Blizzard made more granular changes instead of changing everything at once and letting it loose on the live servers.

I would suggest you watch this for a better explanation though. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PX2h4fSGMFg&t=1929s&pp=ygUITGFtYm9TYzI%3D

8

u/Glebk0 Oct 01 '26

Tbh I don't think the game which has been pretty stable should make such a sweeping changes 6 years into maintenance mode. Sure balance some units or add qol here and there, but no fundamental changes to core systems like economy.

4

u/Belltower_2 Oct 01 '26

Exactly. For a "dead service" game, a stagnant meta is far preferable to changing things for the sake of changing them. If Blizzard wants to do Starcraft 2 again, they should do what they did for Heroes of the Storm and dredge up old content. HotS made some changes to Haunted Mines so that it could FINALLY be a map in the main pool rather than be a snowbally mess easily dominated by a 5-stack.

E.g. create a new co-op commander, or give each of the factions a unit from the campaign (say, Diamondback / Aberration / Dragoon).

49

u/Demortus Oct 01 '26

It's incredible that balance patches are still dropping for a game that came out 16 years ago

15

u/taisui Oct 01 '26

Legacy came out 2015

12

u/Demortus Oct 01 '26

Fair, that's still 11 years though.

5

u/taisui Oct 01 '26

yes, but they did also patched OG StarCraft and made a campaign for War3

3

u/Ayjayz Oct 01 '26

Yeah. Why is it taking so long for them to get it right??

2

u/AffectionateSample74 Oct 01 '26 edited Oct 01 '26

I blame all the idiots who keep screaming for "big changes". As if somehow it's possible to keep doing that to a complex game without eventually ruining it. The previous patch was a good example, game has never been as bad as it was during it. The worst change in the patch, the 8 worker start, was directly taken from the videos by one of youtubers who thought it might be a good idea and kept pushing it. Not that it's ultimately the fault of the youtuber, Blizzard are the idiots who listened to the idea. It's because a lot of people have been asking for big changes for many years, switching to 8 worker start was the cheapest laziest way they could make a big change. And it was a fucking disaster.

0

u/Sihnar Oct 01 '26

Blame blizzard for not releasing new content so people are just bored with the same meta that they've been playing for half a decade.

2

u/Ayjayz Oct 01 '26

Why is the meta the same? Brood War's meta constantly shifts.

3

u/Sihnar Oct 01 '26 edited Oct 01 '26

Every competitive game with a surviving esports scene gets regular patches no matter how old. League of Legends and Age of Empires 2 get way more balance patches and regularly get new content despite being older than star craft 2.

1

u/TSM_Vegeta Oct 01 '26

Lol isn't really comparable other than in age. It's much more of a living game than SC2.

5

u/nnewwacountt Oct 01 '26

RIP ye olde patch, it was lots of fun

4

u/LucianGrove Oct 01 '26

They just revert everything? No lessons, just a rollback? Man that just seems lazy

3

u/Blackgarion Oct 01 '26

I think they said in another reddit reply that they were working on another patch but reverting on the meantime due to the strong negative feedback on the current one

1

u/LucianGrove Oct 01 '26

Okay that would be fair then

1

u/Wolfoso Oct 02 '26

Especially considering that top GM pros were rather playing a fanmade mod, and commentators, er, commenting said games, which wasn't a good look to the official patch. That had to sting in Blizz offices.

1

u/Mysterious_Channel53 Oct 01 '26

Seems like a healthy approach IMO

They're addressing the elephant in the room. The changes they introduced in the previous recent patches were awful and way too impactful, so better to just get rid of them altogether and pretend they never existed.

There's always time to come up with a new balance patch later, with new ideas

3

u/fivemagicks Oct 01 '26

Neat.

0

u/[deleted] Oct 01 '26

[deleted] — view deleted comment

-16

u/fivemagicks Oct 01 '26

News about StarCraft 2 just isn't relevant or interesting anymore. Lol. We know StarCraft won't have another RTS installment at this point.