Pros and Progression, Starcraft 2

I've been playing Starcraft 2 for a few months now, and while I was more excited near the early phases of beta, I became more and more disheartened by the trend of behavior exhibited by pro gamers and their feedback. Their influence has caused Blizzard to revert many of the new innovative interface features in SC2, and returned the game to a more clunky and primitive state. I've made many posts here before about the pitfalls of catering to the casual players, but sometimes even pro gamers are ignorant and misguided.

In the beta relaunch patch, the rally system was changed to move, rather than attack move. This is already on top of a slew of other intentional interface deadweights in SC2, such as the 1 second delay before off-screen alerts are audibly sounded. I know the arguments on both sides for this, but ultimately, this is a game built to test a specific set of skills, namely strategy and tactics. While pro players will demand for a higher skill ceiling to separate themselves from the common group of players and to make their territory more well-suited to their niche, I feel that they are misguided and... frankly, they don't even know what they want.

A well designed program, or game, or any function that has an interface, seeks to minimize the distance between the user's will and the effective outcome. A car with good handling does exactly that: delivering the driver's intent to the vehicle's movement. But would sports racing be more competitive if all drivers were forced to drive vehicles with staggeringly poor handling and had to wear goggles that only allowed them to look backwards? Does intentionally impeding controls and the intentions of the user exhibit meaningful skill?

If it was true, then why do we not see highly competitive and skill-dominant sports where chains were shackled to the feet of the players? Funny that a game like a three-legged-race where poor control is an established feature is not considered to be competitive or impressively skillful at all. In fact, the opposite is true: competitive sports at a globally-presentable level involve attitudes that continually strive to decrease the gap between user will and outcome. Simply put, intentional flaws of the interface are not a characteristic of professional sports (or sports with high skill ceilings, whatever).

Taken to either extreme, there can be problems: a sport with perfect control interpretation would be purely a thinking game (although that's what TBS are); a sport with poor control interpretation would be as tedious as having to move every individual component yourself. But in former, you have competitive, strategic play, and in the latter, you'll have no one willing to play, and nobody to consider it skillful.

Pro players and Blizzard alike need to realise that the skill of the game is beyond the ability to sift through the muddled controls and interface disabilities. The objective is to always design a system that enhances the players intent as much as possible, and then allow players to flourish in their ability from there. If the game is truly one of skill and mastery, then champion players will only have their abilities further maximized by the new capabilities at their hands.

Pros want a game that requires constant immediate attention to even menial tasks that are repetitive and simplistic in nature, and have instead a continued sequence of commands inputted by the player, when one simple constant command would have sufficed. (Specifically about the Rally Attack Move.) Pros are misguided in their reasoning, as a game with tedious manual controls in every facet is unreasonable, unrewarding, and never seen as 'skillful', and thus, unworthy of reaching a grand level. If Pros want to give SC2, or any game, a higher skill ceiling and more global acclaim, they would not choose to impede the improvement of game interfaces.