《星际争霸II》玩家弃用官方平衡改用 Patches Mod 粉丝补丁

Back in the summer, I expressed my concern with Blizzard’s reckless approach to patching StarCraft II and Heroes of the Storm in recent times. At the time, SC2 had just released one of its most sweeping patches in history, and no one really knew how it was going to shake out.

While I was concerned by the approach of reworking so much so quickly, I was willing to keep an open mind about most of the patch’s changes. So how did things end up? It turned out to be an unmitigated disaster of historic proportions, to the point the StarCraft community collectively said, “You know? We’ll make our own balance patch. With blackjack! And Swarm Queens!”

Before I get more into this, I want to remind everyone that at this point my engagement with competitive StarCraft II is purely as a viewer, and a casual one at that. I don’t stay glued to tournament results or win rates. I just like watching casts by my favourite YouTuber over dinner a few nights a week. So if you want an expert analysis of this entire mess, there are probably better sources, but this is such an unprecedented situation, not just for SC2 but for gaming as a whole, that I think it’s worth discussing.

Patch 5.0.16 — better known as the eight worker patch because of its reduction to starting worker counts — was a disaster. Almost no one liked it, not a single pro player was in favour of it, player counts dropped. People were so unhappy they did something unprecedented: They jumped ship to a fan-made balance patch instead. Players began to favour a mod created by a popular mapmaker, the confusingly named PatchesSC. Yes, it’s the Patches patch. Patches’ patch? The patch made specifically by Patches. That patch.

The Patches Mod predates the disastrous eight worker update and thus wasn’t a direct response to it, but the mass migration to Patches definitely was. Many professional tournaments switched to using the Patches Mod, and it got its own unofficial ladder via Vespene.gg. The ladder even has a small prize pool to reward the top players.

Like the eight worker patch, Patches Mod radically overhauls the game’s balance, with adjustments to almost every unit in the game, but it takes a different direction. It kept the traditional worker count and makes its biggest changes through a large number of new upgrades that bring additional functionality to units in the mid and late game.

One of the great advantages of Patches Mod is that it focuses most of its changes on the latter stages of the game, and therefore players can continue to use their existing early game build orders and usually still do at least okay-ish. This has been proven in decisive fashion by ByuN, who has continued to win tournaments with the same damn bio build he’s been using in every version of the game for the last sixteen years.

This highlights what I think is the biggest problem with Blizzard’s recent approach to updating SC2 and Heroes of the Storm. They keep ripping up foundational elements of these games that were put in place long ago, by more experienced developers, and for good reason. Then they’re left scrambling to find bandaids for all the new problems this creates, often creating yet more issues in the process. This mod’s approach of mainly adding new options rather than trying to reinvent the core foundation of the game is, in my view, a much healthier way of shaking up the meta.

Patches has the further advantage of being very responsive, and is regularly updating the mod, whereas Blizzard has been pretty slow about updating SC2 in recent years. The mod makers are also very communicative about the reasoning behind their changes, whereas Blizzard has tended to just dump changes onto the PTR without explanation.

I think that highlights what I see as the other key difference between Patches Mod and recent official updates. As Zagara would put it, it comes down to vision. Patches’ volunteer devs have a clear vision for how they want to improve the game. Blizzard these days just seems to be throwing out stuff at random to see what sticks.

Again, I can speak only as a viewer, but I have been enjoying watching pro games played on Patches Mod a lot more than the retail version of the game. Part of this is just the thrill of something new to be sure, and right now pros haven’t perfectly solved Patches the way they have retail SC2. Things will probably settle into a more stable meta eventually, so it’s hard to say how much longevity Patches Mod will have. But I can say right now I much prefer watching SC2 on Patches Mod. As a Protoss fan, I especially like the upgrades to give Stalkers more range and survivability in the late game. Stalker micro is so fun to watch, but they traditionally haven’t scaled well past the early game.

Regardless of what you think of Patches, though, this is an intriguing precedent to set. I can’t think of any other example of a playerbase embracing a mod over official balance, at least not in this manner or in a game of SC2‘s notoriety.

I don’t think fully switching to fan made balance patches is necessarily the ideal solution long term. It risks dividing the playerbase between competing mods. Whatever you may think of retail SC2, there is value in having a single official version of the game as a central touchstone.

But the idea of also holding tournaments on other versions of the game as a way to add variety holds a lot of promise. Perhaps this is the secret to keeping an aging game fresh. Not by redesigning its official version and making everyone relearn the game whether they like it or not, but by mixing in alternate versions. We’ve already seen a bit of this with the popular SC: Evo Complete mod, which allows the StarCraft 1 versions of races to play alongside their SC2 counterparts in the SC2 engine. Now and then you’ll see pro tournaments held with SC: Evo, and that’s always super fun to see.

Blizzard has recently reverted the eight worker patch and all of its unpopular changes, so it’s hard to say what the future holds for Patches Mod and competitive SC2 in general. Perhaps people will return to the official version of the game, but I doubt we’ve seen the last of Patches Mod.

I do want to say that I respect Blizzard for being willing to revert the patch. No irony, no sarcasm; it’s good to see a studio willing to admit it made a mistake. I wish they could have done the same with the equally ill-conceived changes Heroes of the Storm has gotten recently. But obviously it’s not great that we ended up here in the first place, and it doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence for future official balance changes by Blizzard.

That’s why it’s comforting to know the community can fall back on unofficial versions of the game. Maybe the future of SC2 involves a spread between several different versions of the game, both official and fan-made. While there are risks in spreading the community too thin, I also think there’s a lot of exciting potential in exploring these alternate versions of the game. Maybe it’s this kind of experimentation that will keep StarCraft II healthy going forward.

The world of online gaming is changing. As the gray area between single-player and MMO becomes ever wider, Massively OP’s Tyler Edwards delves into this new and expanding frontier biweekly in Not So Massively, our column on battle royales, OARPGs, looter-shooters, and other multiplayer online titles that aren’t quite MMORPGs.