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So I'm going to rant a bit here. I've tried a blog post like this before, and it was pretty unsuccessful. Hopefully this time will be different.
I've been playing this game since WoL beta and I have enjoyed every bit of it. This game is very intrinsically rewarding. When you have practiced hard, you can see yourself improving in terms of macro and micro. You can feel yourself improving mouse accuracy, moving the screen around more swiftly, and other things that make this game fun. Extrinsically you can see your rank go up a little bit, or maybe even get promoted! But that's it. Blizzard has attempted implementing an extrinsic reward system with custom decals, custom skins for some units, and animations (which are pretty much only used as a trolling mechanism), but these haven't had any additions or changes in forever. Furthermore, the fact of the matter is not everyone can get their rank to go up, especially with a decreasing player base.
I know that a lot of people have been complaining about Blizzards decaying MMR, but in all honesty it is the amount of players that is the problem. In ANY type of game there is going to be players that are just naturally better than somebody else. Once there are people playing the game, there is going to be 40% bronze, 30% silver, and only a VERY small 3% masters. Those numbers don't and HOPEFULLY won't change either (...change again anyways, everyone went apeshit crazy when they were demoted without notification last time). MMR decay DOES affect the ladder right now, I'm not going completely ignore that fact, but it doesn't affect players who get to play a couple of games a day that much.
So why does the amount of players matter so much? Let's take a look. Now for example let's say that Starcraft II is a new game with a lot of new players who are interested. Those players start to play, get better at the game, and become better at various rates. Now a new batch of players, let's say some of the original group's friends and some random others, buy the game and these new players become better at various rates too. The first group is going to have more experience than the second group and have an advantage. Keep going on with this pattern constantly and you have a good majority of the players who are new to the game at the bottom of the skill ladder, with more experienced players at the top. With newer players constantly being added on, players who have started to become even a TINY bit better have the illusion of becoming much more skilled much quicker (e.g. 5 more iterations of player groups that come into the game and now the first group is now the around top 14% of the game!). Now there are many factors that can affect this like individual player skill, learning speed, amount of playing time and more, but under the assumption that they affect around all of the groups the same; it should ROUGHLY even out (see below for my AMAZING MS paint picture).
http://imgur.com/VNaqMKR
Well what about now? With Starcraft II losing players left and right, let's take another look at what happens. There are no new players to have at the bottom. Players who have played constantly and are still getting better don't have much wiggle room anymore. They stay in their league for a long time and think they aren't improving at all. With the community just telling them that they just need to "just macro better, just practice more" they think they just are terrible at this game and will never get better. Players on the border of each league will now be demoted as well because the percentages for each league stay the same. With the same intrinsic reward system now biting the players in the butt, people start to dislike the game more. They find any reason to blame the game, "MMR decay is stupid," "[insert race here] is so IMBA," "the game is too intimidating," "the meta is too stagnant," and they all eventually lead up to "I'm going to quit until Blizzard fixes it." This leads to a terrible downhill spiral that is coming into effect.
So what needs to be changed from the community? As unfortunate as it is, the main thing is that players just need to realize that not everyone is master's league material. Players need to understand that everyone else who plays this game gets better at it. There are other things that we can do like inviting friends to play the game, play team games, and encourage players to play for FUN instead of getting better and having good "standard" play (*gasp* god forbid we play a game just for the fun of it). The most important thing for you who is reading this is just to keep playing Starcraft.
What can be changed by Blizzard? Let me start off by saying the campaign was fucking amazing and beautifully done. The achievements were rewarding and challenging in every aspect. I would easily pay another $60 for LOTV campaign. But even so, please oh please make match making free to play. Having to pay 60$ for a game that is super hard to get into is ridiculous. With time ticking away and players still getting better, people who get into the game are going to have a HUGE hurdle to climb just to get their foot in the door. I know they made team games free for anyone with a friend who has the game, but even that can't convince a player that they're going to be good at 1v1 or even enjoy it for that matter.
Add more ways that the community would WANT to help support their game. We can always help individual teams out by buying items from their sponsors, watching streams with ads /etc, but we can only buy the game/some Starcraft apparel (which is very limited too) to help support Blizzard directly.
Personally I think they should convert the current experience players earn through match making into a type of in-game currency that we can use in an in-game store. The store could have various animations, decals, skins, announcers, and whatever else they could think of to get people to buy. People could buy the in-game currency or just work for it by grinding thousands of ladder games. I know how many players have stated their dislike of skins and whatnot, so please add a disable button as well. "Hey wait a minute Chiyosuke, you're just copying DotA and LoL!" Yes I am. I'm not trying to say anything different or hide it. It works as a business and it has been proven to do well.
Add more ways for people to be social in game. Players love to talk about their game. The clan calendar that they plan to add in 2.1 is nice, but not something that a clan wouldn't have already in a very basic set of forums or website. Give players in game streaming. Let player's friends join in their ladder match and see how well they play or bug them. Give clans a leveling system and make clan tournaments with prizes like decals or skins. Give clans a reason to exist and have interaction with people.
Add a reason to come back. Right now there is absolutely no reason to come back day after day to play. I have had ladder anxiety before and there was not a single reason for me to even try to get over it except intrinsic reward (and the extra experience for the first game). Maybe give players who play the most per season a chance to win a couple of tickets to a SCII event. Or a few clan tournaments every day that players can participate in to win some clan experience / clan decals. Maybe a couple of objectives a day like "Kill 5 banelings with only marines" or "Block your enemy in their main base using a forcefield" for in game currency. Something similar. Anything.
I love this game so much, all I want is for it to succeed and do well. Please just keep on loving and plying this game.
I made a previous blog post that was downrated to the ground before because of "attacking" Starcraft and some ideas presented, but the point that I made of the player base falling drastically was pretty accurate (albeit it didn't even take 1 year when I thought it would take 2). The ideas in the post weren't the best either, but I just wanted to come up with ANY ideas that would be more appealing to a larger crowd. I suggest reading that too :D lol shameless self-promotion/"I TOLD YOU SO" lololol
 
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Making multiplayer free means Blizzard can only sell WoL and HotS for guys interested in the campaign. "Free to play" often looks to me like an admission "Okay the game is not really finished and we plan to sell you incremental content updates." However I think that Blizzard could have done a better job with the starter edition to showcase the multiplayer for no cost right at the launch of the game.
Adding a reason to come back probably has little impact if the game does not meed the expectations of a player in the first place. There are so many invitations for "f2p" games that you essentially would need to pay a player to come back (I am exaggerating a bit of course.) It is still a shame that the Starcraft client does so little to get a casual player involved in following the pro scene though.
Ingame currency adds another layer of complexity and distracts from playing the actual game. Casual gamers are probably disengaged by it because they know they cannot keep up.
Two seasons ago I was plat, last season gold, now I am silver. But what game do I want to play? I like a ladder who tries to be honest to me. While the actual rank is still obfuscated with the division system, a rough estimation of my skill versus the current playerbase is possible.
I agree that not everyone must focus on getting better or practice the standard play. Mods (applicable for every ladder map, of course while not playing in the ladder) like monobattles or BGH should have been out long ago, to keep a causal playerbase happy.
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MMR Decay makes my enjoyment for the game decay </3
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On December 12 2013 07:19 Chiyosuke wrote:
"Hey wait a minute Chiyosuke, you're just copying DotA and LoL!" Yes I am. I'm not trying to say anything different or hide it. It works as a business and it has been proven to do well.
Pretty soon, we're going to need to make a Liquipedia article called "Riot's Law" which explains that SC2 has to copy LoL to survive as a logical fallacy. For example, look at the popular social media website, Myspace.com. In the mid-2000s, Myspace was the biggest and baddest social media outlet in the world, but began to decline with the rise of Facebook.com. As a result, Myspace began implementing changes to their site to emulate Facebook. Not surprisingly, it did very little to stabilize the loss of Myspace's user-base. Now, I'm not saying that SC2 is (or isn't) experiencing as dramatic of decline in population as Myspace, I'm saying that tinkering with all the little bells and whistles to match what is trendy is historically shown to not work on the internet, and I can give you a ton of other examples of this. In fact, Blizzard has become a major brand name for just the opposite reason, which is their ability to be innovative in their approach to entertainment, which would not be the case if they just started copying trendiness in gaming.
Another problem with the assumption that copying Riot's model is the key to a grand rebirth of SC2 is assuming that LoL isn't a bubble just waiting to burst. LoL existed in 2008, well before SC2's release, but only recently, in the last couple of years has hit its stride as a top game. According to alexa.com, website traffic to the websites riotgames.com and leagueoflegends.com has nearly tripled in the last year, making their success very relevant, but also, very recent. It is impossible to know if they have created a recipe for long-term success or are a flash-in-the-pan, especially in a newly-emerging competitive market for MOBA game development; titles like Dota2 or Heroes of Newerth, or even Heroes of the Storm could easily split the market share of users playing the genre.
Also, by presenting a MOBA-based solution to SC2's problems, there is absolutely no guarantee that Blizzard will implement or even consider anything that you are proposing.
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Ingame currency adds another layer of complexity and distracts from playing the actual game. Casual gamers are probably disengaged by it because they know they cannot keep up.
I do agree that casual gamers are turned off by SCII because of how complicated it is. I just thought that giving players an additional incentive might be a nice push to get some players playing the game more. But if anything, this would encourage more people to just start playing for a reward. In-game currency is a very basic system and is no more complicated than the experience system that is currently implemented in the game. In fact, being able to use your current experience as an in-game currency works fine as well. Players who are interested in getting more of the currency work to get it by playing the game, so I don't understand how you think it's distracting.
I'm saying that tinkering with all the little bells and whistles to match what is trendy is historically shown to not work on the internet...
It is impossible to know if they have created a recipe for long-term success or are a flash-in-the-pan, especially in a newly-emerging competitive market for MOBA game development; titles like Dota2 or Heroes of Newerth, or even Heroes of the Storm could easily split the market share of users playing the genre.
Also, by presenting a MOBA-based solution to SC2's problems, there is absolutely no guarantee that Blizzard will implement or even consider anything that you are proposing.
First, thank you for that information, I did not know about Myspace's attempt to come back into the market with an attempted FB copy. And I agree that Blizzard has been very innovative with what they have done so far, but the fact of the matter is that games now are moving towards a Free-to-Play model. Even Blizzard themselves have recognized this and made Hearthstone completely free-to-play in combination of micro-transactions. While I don't know how exactly the community would react to this type of decision, I don't think that players would just stop playing because of Blizzard trying to attract more players with an in-game store.
Secondly, the MOBA market has been competitive for a while now. HoN and DotA split the MOBA scene already but LoL has proven to still stand strong. HoN has been doing so poorly in fact that they have already started to develop another MOBA Strife. I do agree that with Heroes of the Storm coming out that may split it a little more, especially with Blizzards name backing it up, but so far it's too hard to tell.
Finally, regardless of presenting ANY type of solutions to SC2s problems, there is no guarantee that Blizzard will implement or even consider it. I just wanted to suggest some ideas.  I'm just a random blogger, if Blizzard even SAW this I would be amazed.
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Woah. This has been a thoughtful, polite, and relatively factual blog discussion about sc2 design and market strategies.
I just want to congratulate ourselves and say that ninazerg makes an interesting point I haven't heard...
I'm sorry this comment brought down the level of content.
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On December 12 2013 14:13 Chiyosuke wrote:Show nested quote +Ingame currency adds another layer of complexity and distracts from playing the actual game. Casual gamers are probably disengaged by it because they know they cannot keep up. I do agree that casual gamers are turned off by SCII because of how complicated it is. I just thought that giving players an additional incentive might be a nice push to get some players playing the game more. But if anything, this would encourage more people to just start playing for a reward. In-game currency is a very basic system and is no more complicated than the experience system that is currently implemented in the game. In fact, being able to use your current experience as an in-game currency works fine as well. Players who are interested in getting more of the currency work to get it by playing the game, so I don't understand how you think it's distracting. Show nested quote +I'm saying that tinkering with all the little bells and whistles to match what is trendy is historically shown to not work on the internet...
It is impossible to know if they have created a recipe for long-term success or are a flash-in-the-pan, especially in a newly-emerging competitive market for MOBA game development; titles like Dota2 or Heroes of Newerth, or even Heroes of the Storm could easily split the market share of users playing the genre.
Also, by presenting a MOBA-based solution to SC2's problems, there is absolutely no guarantee that Blizzard will implement or even consider anything that you are proposing. First, thank you for that information, I did not know about Myspace's attempt to come back into the market with an attempted FB copy. And I agree that Blizzard has been very innovative with what they have done so far, but the fact of the matter is that games now are moving towards a Free-to-Play model. Even Blizzard themselves have recognized this and made Hearthstone completely free-to-play in combination of micro-transactions. While I don't know how exactly the community would react to this type of decision, I don't think that players would just stop playing because of Blizzard trying to attract more players with an in-game store. Secondly, the MOBA market has been competitive for a while now. HoN and DotA split the MOBA scene already but LoL has proven to still stand strong. HoN has been doing so poorly in fact that they have already started to develop another MOBA Strife. I do agree that with Heroes of the Storm coming out that may split it a little more, especially with Blizzards name backing it up, but so far it's too hard to tell. Finally, regardless of presenting ANY type of solutions to SC2s problems, there is no guarantee that Blizzard will implement or even consider it. I just wanted to suggest some ideas. I'm just a random blogger, if Blizzard even SAW this I would be amazed.
I think that Blizzard's response to LoL would be HotS (the moba one, damn, that is confusing), but will still probably make SC2 players pay for the next expansion.
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I would say that Blizzard's upcoming plan to open the arcade up to the free starter edition is a huge step in the right direction. I'd argue it is bigger than giving away matchmaking. The 1v1 ladder is the heart and soul of SC2, but it's not for casual players and won't attract them. Games on the arcade like star strikers or marine arena are much more suited for attracting those players, and some of those players will naturally start progressing to ranked and unranked play. Not to say there aren't problems with the arcade, but the map editor and arcade is something that SC2 has that Dota and LoL don't and I like how blizzard is pushing that angle.
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EPT
