Liquid Civilization

[Thrawn]

Today Team Liquid is proud to announce the creation of our Civilization Team and an initiative to launch Civilization VI into the world of competitive esports. We are also excited to introduce our newest addition to the Liquid family, legendary strategy gamer Stephen "MrGameTheory" Takowsky who will serve as the team's captain.

Source: https://www.teamliquidpro.com/news/2016/10/21/discovering-new-land-with-mrgametheory

This seems really weird to me. While I've played every civ game since 1, I've never looked into the multiplayer side so I'm not sure how civ is meant to fit into competitive esports?

 

[Sagax]

From the viewer experience standpoint alone, this makes me scratch my head. I like the game, but I only watch Civ streams when I need to fall asleep ASAP. Works every single time.

 

[Browd]

Moderator Action: Moved to Multiplayer.

 

[Biz_]

i appreciate the effort, but L O L

civ6 is a silly game for competitive MP. if they want esports, at least start with something that works like civ4

 

[CanuckSoldier]

It does seem to be a brave new world, and Mr GameTheory has talked to me about this, hard to say were this will go or if it will catch on, but if there is value in it, Civplayers will as it always has, promote what is good for the MP community.

CS

 

[anandus]

Source: https://www.teamliquidpro.com/news/2016/10/21/discovering-new-land-with-mrgametheory

This seems really weird to me. While I've played every civ game since 1, I've never looked into the multiplayer side so I'm not sure how civ is meant to fit into competitive esports?

I can see it happening with the new game speed, but a lot depends on the balancing of things.

Regarding multiplayer, I think I've played Civ 5 for 90% in multiplayer, I didn't really like the singleplayer game, it was too boring for me.
I can see how a multiplayer competition could work, the Youtube-streams are quite popular, although on quick it's just a tad too slow to really stay interesting. Let's see how that works out with the new speed.

 

[Raider]

So a game with
-Poor balance
-Very little and very slow developer support AND a developer with virtually no experience balancing the game for competitive play
-Extremely long games and turns
-Lacking in constant action and generally not "dramatic."
-Game whose previous iterations had only several hundred people online at any given time
-And more

Is going to become a pro multiplayer game... Mkay...

 

[Ryika]

I'm baffled by this decision as much as I am excited to see where this may go. I've been saying for a while now that starcraft-ish battle-maps for Civ (ideally coop) could be great fun, and it looks like they're trying to make it happen. Will have to see whether other teams and organizations hop on board or not.

 

[arik24]

this is good thing because with esports means it giving the severs a reason for slaying up forever.

 

[vans163]

I am actually really interested in this. I even offered a solution under the HoF section of the forum to reduce cheating to 0 (allowing for a Ladder system).

The next step would be to correctly balance the game for online play.

Another MUCH more expensive step is to create an online version of Civ6, by Online I mean instead of shared state multiplayer, where the host has the master state of the game, to create a server based multiplayer experience like League of Legend for example. This will not allow cheating of any kind, no maphack (which is possible in shared state multiplayer as "shared state").

 

[fickle]

While running the game server-side will certainly make it HARDER to cheat, it doesn't eliminate it completely. There are a multitude of online only/server-hosted games in which people have the ability to cheat on, its largely dependent still on the amount of time/effort/money the game developer maintains to actively counter and prevent said cheats as they are created.

 

[skyclad]

Always been a fan of teamliquid forum for brood war and sc2 news! So this is fin news even if it kinda seems like a 1st of april joke

 

[vans163]

While running the game server-side will certainly make it HARDER to cheat, it doesn't eliminate it completely. There are a multitude of online only/server-hosted games in which people have the ability to cheat on, its largely dependent still on the amount of time/effort/money the game developer maintains to actively counter and prevent said cheats as they are created.

Well you would be able to have some utility help. But cheating will be impossible. How can you have a map hack or see what the other player is building, if the server did not send you the data?

Now cheating via the server host tampering with the servers (such as rouge programmers who have access), which often happens in small deployments / companies is another story. But this form of cheating is mostly adding very powerful items to a database to a certain player, for free or for money.

The only cheats possible would not even be considered cheats in my view but utilise / macros. In the example of League of Legends, it would be a macro to auto buy things quickly. or last hit more accurately.

 

[Ryika]

There's tons of cheating even in server-based systems. Just have a look at how every RTS ever has been filled with hackers.

Servers are a great tool to filter out gross cheating, but it can't prevent people from doing stuff that is unfair, simply because servers still have to communicate with the game clients and synchronize them, and while doing so the Clients will inevitably have to be sent information that should not be available to other players.

That's of course a bit less of a problem in Turn-based systems than it is in real-time settings, but servers don't just solve cheating. Especially not if the whole framework of how online play works was not developed to be server-based in the first place.

 

[vans163]

There's tons of cheating even in server-based systems. Just have a look at how every RTS ever has been filled with hackers.

Servers are a great tool to filter out gross cheating, but it can't prevent people from doing stuff that is unfair, simply because servers still have to communicate with the game clients and synchronize them, and while doing so the Clients will inevitably have to be sent information that should not be available to other players.

That's of course a bit less of a problem in Turn-based systems than it is in real-time settings, but servers don't just solve cheating. Especially not if the whole framework of how online play works was not developed to be server-based in the first place.

Ryika please do not confuse shared state multiplayer with server state. The reason cheating is rampant in RTS like Warcraft 3, Starcraft 2 and etc is because they use shared state, meaning every player has a copy of the game state, and the game state is then kept in sync by the players, if a certain player falls behind, all the players freeze up and wait for the droppped/lagging player.

Blizzard made Starcraft 2 at an awkward time. I guarantee you Starcraft 3 / Warcraft 4 will be server state, there will be no more maphack.

Games like League use server state, where the game client needs to request from the server any action, so by the client not having a copy of the game state, the client cannot know where other players are on the map and basically cannot know anything it is not allowed to know.

Applied to World of Warcraft, if WoW used shared state and you were in a raid. If Leeroy started lagging and disconnected, the entire raid all mobs and all players would freeze and wait for Leeroy. If Leeroy did not come back in 45 seconds the players can drop him, unfreeze everything and keep playing.

With server state, if Leeroy started lagged and disconnected, only Leeroy would be affected. Everyone else can keep doing the raid until he comes back.