EPTOn June 19 2011 07:10 deathly rat wrote:
I don't understand exactly what your point is here. The big difference is that these games were created when new RTSs were potentially the most popular game title. SC2 was created at a time when RTSs are a niche market. If Blizzard wanted to make more big bucks they could easily make a FPS or another MMO. Of course they have to make money on SC2, but deciding to make it was surely either because they wanted to or it was a very brave business risk. Both worthy of praise.
I don't understand exactly what your point is here. The big difference is that these games were created when new RTSs were potentially the most popular game title. SC2 was created at a time when RTSs are a niche market. If Blizzard wanted to make more big bucks they could easily make a FPS or another MMO. Of course they have to make money on SC2, but deciding to make it was surely either because they wanted to or it was a very brave business risk. Both worthy of praise.
There is a very big different between making enough money to have a profit and maximizing that profit. Yes, RTS's aren't a huge player in the market right now, but removing cross-realm play, etc will not improve their profits for that reason. I can agree with them appealing to the casual market, as it grows the community, but the only people who will buy multiple accounts are the people who truly care about the game and would buy it anyways.
Also, that doesn't explain WoW.
I don't like micro transactions, but name changes are a particular issue. In an online environment it is very important to know who you are talking to. If people were changing their name all the time then somebody could easily tell you that they are someone else who has just changed their name and use this to scam you. Also, it is a significant obstacle for known scammers.
I do agree that quickly changing names would be too easy and would cause problems, but it doesn't have to be that way. For instance, instead of a name change in WoW costing real money, it could cost a rather large amount of in-game money. I suppose that the cost of name changes could be attributed to the amount of server time needed to change, but they could easily be mitigated by the $15 a month that you pay for that server time.
Realms and servers are designed to be closed systems. In WoW it would destroy the economies of servers, and in SC2 regional servers reduce lag for players.
I do agree that having cross-realm interation on WoW would cause many problems with the economy (as WoW isn't designed that way) but that isn't an excuse for being able to create characters on different servers. In SC2, you could just connect to different servers, possibly with a new SC2 name, and play from there. The lag would be a side effect that players would accept, and could be reduced by playing on the same server.
