The Naked Macromanagement

The macro aspect of StarCraft 2 is quite a mystery to us players who remain on the sidelines, hearing of these glorious stories of fans playing the demo at BlizzCon and WWI. The introduction of MBS (Multiple Building Selection) brought on a mass uproar of dislike from the fans and Blizzard seems to be at a loss of what exactly to do about it. MBS is a feature that allows you to select all of your gateways, barracks, hatcheries, or whatever you have that builds units and build from all of them at once. That means that even Killer56720 can have macro skills like the Monster Terran, iloveoov.

The argument for MBS is that StarCraft shouldn't be a click fest, and winning a game shouldn't be based on who can click faster. I disagree, obviously, mainly because it is a skill; being able to keep up your economy and production whilst microing your units is a very difficult thing to do, or even to achieve understanding of and how to execute properly. Without the constant going back and forth between your base and units the game could get stale. Even after 10 years on StarCraft, about every year a new player with incredible macro skills comes to the scene and blows everybody away. Macro is something that can take years to master, or even improve, which gives gamers a long lasting task.

After much debate on whether MBS should stay or go, Blizzard decided to add a new feature. This was new to the build and only at World Wide Invitational and it is subject to change at any time. Vespene geysers (Assimilator/Extractor/Refinery) now have the ability to double the amount of workers who are mining gas to increase gas intake, which is supposed to divert more focus into macro. This feature is under much debate and could be taken out within the next build of the game or event.

In my opinion, Blizzard seems to be really lost at what to do, and is just trying to find a way to improve focus on macro after MBS took so much out. I think it's a really bad idea. I remember reading about Testie (Canadian SC player) trying to explain to Dustin Browder about how MBS takes out so much macro in the game and he just didn't understand. I don't blame him of course, such understanding might take years of experience in playing StarCraft at a high level. Macro should be more fluent within the game, not a feature that you add to substitute for the lack of but to the developers, adding MBS would give us more free time to micro units, which isn't exactly what we, the players, want.

Just look at WarCraft 3, in many opinions, and even in some pro-gamers opinions, the game is micro intensive and doesn't need much focus on macro. This game wasn't as successful as StarCraft in the e-sports department. But there are many other factors to why the game failed where StarCraft flourished, not just purely because there was less need for attention to your macro and economy.

In my opinion, StarCraft 2 would be better off without MBS and these bizarre substitutions for macromanagment. Of course, I am no game developer, especially on the level of Blizzard, so my expertise is extremely limited.