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***Everything stated here is my opinion unless noted and/or cited otherwise. As a progamer for several years now, I have a wealth of personal experience and observation to draw upon. That said, sometimes I have to speculate due to lack of studies/concrete facts.***
This blog will analyze Starcraft's social features and propose solutions for some long term problems.
Initially I wrote an outline of all the social functionality missing from Starcraft 2. As I continued writing and looked into it further, I realized that almost all the social functionality in terms of chat channels and so on is actually in Starcraft 2. Starcraft 2 has chat channels with moderation, kicking/banning, custom logos and so on. The primary issues with Starcraft 2's social features are presentation/UI related problems rather than a lack of functionality.
Social features are important for player retention and improving the overall experience. People tend to do what their friends do, whether those are pre-existing friends, or friends made through the game. By improving the social experience, I expect that more people would login to hangout without the express goal of playing.
Out of game social features are more important in Starcraft than in many other popular games for a few reasons. The first is that Starcraft's main gameplay mode, 1v1, is inherently anti-social. Laddering for hours on end is one of the most anti-social experiences I've ever had. There's virtually no time during the games to speak to your opponent, even when playing vs friends, due to the pace of the game. Thus, it's very hard to socialize while actually playing which means the social aspect outside an actual game needs to be stronger to encourage people to stick around before/after ladder sessions.
The second main reason that Starcraft needs social features more than some other games is because the gameplay itself is incredibly stressful and intense. Starting a few minutes into the game, there is basically no downtime to do anything at all until the game ends. Social interaction tends to destress people and would make the whole playing experience more bearable for many.
The experience in Starcraft has always been lonely. Although the addition of groups and chat channels has alleviated that slightly, often logging in to Starcraft feels like being isolated. That said, chat has no place in an actual game of Starcraft 1v1 ladder. There simply isn't enough time or energy to make that happen. So the changes I propose will all be focused on the out of game experience.
As I mentioned at the beginning of this blog, the issue with Starcraft's social features is not their functionality but their presentation and usability. Instead of being thrust into the player's face as one of the primary functions of battle.net as in the original b.net, players must make a specific effort to even engage in the social features.
![[image loading]](http://vignette4.wikia.nocookie.net/starcraft/images/9/91/Bnet_SC1_Game1.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20080626210007)
The above screenshot is from Starcraft 1's battle.net. Notice how chat channels cannot be minimized. It is literally impossible to be online without being in some chat channel, even if it's just an empty one that you created. Starcraft 2's approach is similar to being dropped in an MMO in a desert rather than a city. Obviously, the analogy isn't perfect, but the social features should be pushed a bit harder onto the player. If someone doesn't want to use them, that's fine. It's easy enough to close out and put up the social barrier settings, but the majority of people will like being put in a chat channel initially. At least they would know they exist and how they work to some extent.
The hardest part about analyzing all the social features is that they don't appear to be lacking any concrete functionality. Multiple chat windows means you can talk with many people at once easily without being confused no matter what part of the interface you're on. If you could combine multiple chats into a single window that allowed you to tab or /reply or /whisper to decide who specifically you were talking to that might be easier to manage. It's a bit annoying to maintain several low frequency conversations in multiple chat windows.
One of the issues with the chat interface is that here are 3 types of 'chat' things when the functionality could be slightly combined to be simpler. There exist channels, groups and clans. Channels have no moderation or control. Groups have moderation, control, invite/kick/ban etc... Clans have all the same as groups but put a clan tag at the front of your name and you can be in at most 1 clan at a time. The overall experience would be cleaner if channels were merged with groups.
One of the biggest uses for chat channels is forming a hangout spot where people know to return to to find their friends and so on. The problem with regular chat channels is that without moderation, a channel is bound to be overrun by malicious user(s) eventually. It only takes 1 person to ruin a channel. Thus, there is little reason for unmoderated channels to even exist in the first place. An unmoderated chat channel can never be 'home' for long while still allowing for new people to find it and participate. The only unmoderated channels could be the default ones that you are automatically placed in when you log in. Unmoderated channels are throwaway meet up spots.
The group search functionality is really cool. It lets you actually hone in on a specific group without having to know exactly what you're looking for beforehand. The problem is that for a brand new player, they aren't really going to know what to search for. In addition, this functionality is not immediately thrust at them so it may not find some people.
To summarize, Starcraft 2 has virtually all the functionality we could ask for in its social features. The issues have to do with presentation and an abundance of features rather than the functionality itself. New players need to be thrust into the social features more aggressively, because many don't know how to even use them or that they exist. Unmoderated chat channels are not very helpful because they are too vulnerable to malicious users and thus do not easily form a long term meet up spot. Combining chat channels with groups/clans while making the process more omnipresent would help toward making people actually use the features more. Chat channels are important enough that you should be able to join them from any page. Starcraft could benefit from more unified social experience by imposing groups onto players. My parting thought with you is that Starcraft's social features appear to be hard to use and almost hidden within the interface. The fact that I began writing a blog about what features were lacking and ended up realizing part way through that the functionality was not actually lacking can be testament to that.
I had planned this blog for about a week and had mentally written up an outline. I thought I had a good handle on what Starcraft's social features included and what they lacked. Through actually writing down my ideas I realized that Starcraft has basically all the social features we could ask for. Groups and clans do exactly what people want and more. Thus, somewhere in the writing process the blog turned into an analysis of why starcraft still feels so incredibly lonely and isolated which is a harder problem to pin down. Unfortunately, my specialty lies in functionality and more concrete things rather than the presentation and usability.
 
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Are you writing these blogs to refer to on your CV or so?
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Canada11202 Posts
Three years ago? I considered writing on this subject and took two screen shots to illustrate. I don't think I ever wrote on it, but the pictures might be helpful in explaining the issue.
I thought of the UI in terms of a Hub. What is the screen that you go back and forth by default. What is the central room by which you enter all other rooms.
iCCup
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/PvXx2Y0.png)
On iCCup chat is the hub. Chat channels are the room by which you must enter all other (multiplayer) rooms. The greatest amount of UI real estate is taken up by people and their chat. To enter any sort of game, you must go back into a room of people (Unless you choose to make your own private channel.) You cannot help but feel that there are people online because you always must pass in and out of the central hub. You need not interact with them, but the UI always places you in a social setting by default. Without even thinking or being intentional you enter a buzzing marketplace or forum of people.
SC2 (Screen shot from Liberty, but I don't think the placement of chat is much different)- if I wasn't feeling lazy, I'd make a new screen shot and write on it in paint...
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/rtNiu6R.png)
The Hub of SC2 is the menu screen. The Menus screen is the room by which you must enter all other multiplayer rooms. The people are all buried in a tiny corner. You can go from Single Player, to Ladder, to Arcade without seeing a soul beyond your opponent. Rather than passing through a bustling hub, you must intentionally go into a back side office. Or maybe chat is the janitor closet, I don't know. The point is the UI does not revolve around people and chat, it revolves around menus. The architecture of the building is very nice and you can easily get to and from your work, but the building echoes with emptiness. That is unless you go down the side passage to seek out the people.
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I agree with the whole writeup pretty much, but I had a question about this paragraph:
On June 11 2015 00:02 qxc wrote:If you could combine multiple chats into a single window that allowed you to tab or /reply or /whisper to decide who specifically you were talking to that might be easier to manage. It's a bit annoying to maintain several low frequency conversations in multiple chat windows.
Is this design you are proposing similar to the chat in Heroes of the Storm, which is a bit more like WoW's chat and was recently ported to Legacy of the Void beta? If the new chat in LotV/Heroes is not the same as what you proposed, how would you tweak it?
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The problem with Heroes's chat is that there is no option to have multiple windows. What I'm proposing is the ability to consolidate specific chats while maintaining isolation from others. So, I could have a 'personal chat' window where I can hit tab to cycle through all the individuals I'm currently talking with, but there would be no chat channel messages there. Then each chat channel I join would open its own window, that unless specified, maintains only that channel's messages. Hopefully that conveys the idea. It's a bit messy in my head, but that's the jist.
I don't write these for a cv or anything similar. I set a goal for myself when I took a break from Starcraft to maintain weekly blogs. I enjoy writing and discussing topics so I find the whole process enjoyable and by keeping myself to a schedule I actually do them consistently.
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One of the biggest uses for chat channels is forming a hangout spot where people know to return to to find their friends and so on. The problem with regular chat channels is that without moderation, a channel is bound to be overrun by malicious user(s) eventually. It only takes 1 person to ruin a channel. Thus, there is little reason for unmoderated channels to even exist in the first place. An unmoderated chat channel can never be 'home' for long while still allowing for new people to find it and participate. The only unmoderated channels could be the default ones that you are automatically placed in when you log in. Unmoderated channels are throwaway meet up spots.
I take it you never spent any time on U.S. East in )v( or other unmoderated channels?
Unmoderated channels are fine, you can still squelch a malicious user and everything goes on without probs and is definitely the best way for new users to find themselves into groups. The unmoderated channels don't necessarily have to be default ones, those can be moderated.
Overall battle.net 1.0 definitely provides the better social experience and recreating that interface would be so easy and good..
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I definitely agree. I remember on Bnet 1.0 that I often logged in just to discuss with some people who I already know were going to be in the channel. Because they were always there around that time.
Not having a nice social experience is what helped make me stop playing SC2.
I definitely agree that having a preset channel which you join when you start up the game would be a vast improvement to the game.
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On June 11 2015 06:58 qxc wrote:
The problem with Heroes's chat is that there is no option to have multiple windows. What I'm proposing is the ability to consolidate specific chats while maintaining isolation from others. So, I could have a 'personal chat' window where I can hit tab to cycle through all the individuals I'm currently talking with, but there would be no chat channel messages there. Then each chat channel I join would open its own window, that unless specified, maintains only that channel's messages. Hopefully that conveys the idea. It's a bit messy in my head, but that's the jist.
That makes sense, thanks. From what I remember, you can do what you describe in WoW's chat, but it's vastly more configurable than the other games.
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United Kingdom36156 Posts
I very much agree. I stopped playing ladder because it was too lonely and hard work.
The only other game I played extensively online was AoE1, which was an intensely social experience and far, far more enjoyable as a result.
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I think the biggest thing that would help the social aspect of sc2 would be near real time public observation games. Allow "delayed" observation for all games played by players ranked in top 8 of every league in a HLTV fashion.
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When I got dragged into playing BW by a friend of mine in 2008, the first thing he told me was to go to a specific bnet channel, where other german noobs were hanging out. It took about 10 minutes to find my first practice partners, I even got coached by a good player over TS that day. All it needed was a simple chat UI, nothing more nothing less.
Chilling in the channel was a huge part of playing BW. You could talk about games, you could hop into a quick custom game, you could ask to observe etc. I know that SC2 also offers those Features, but there are no places to go to.
The chat window is too tiny and due to its size, it's easy to ignore it. In BW, it was impossible to ignore chat, unless you joined an empty channel. The divide between MMR play and custom games is useless. Imho, the whole UI should be unified. ONE big chat window with buttons attached to switch between channels / game modes. The matchmaking Screen may look pretty, but it's basically consisting of a few buttons and lots of nothing.
I don't think we'll ever see a real overhaul of the SC2 interface again. The fact that they've implemented the Heroes chat tells a lot. After the release of LOTV, there'll be some balance patches, and that'll be it. There are so many possiblities, yet None will ever be part of the game. Coaching Features, in-game spectating, a good voice / Video chat plug-in (why no Skype Integration?), etc. SC2 will continue to be a lonely experience, and that's sad.
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On June 11 2015 19:43 eeZe wrote:
I think the biggest thing that would help the social aspect of sc2 would be near real time public observation games. Allow "delayed" observation for all games played by players ranked in top 8 of every league in a HLTV fashion.
So everyone can have a friend obs their game and then know what is going to happen?
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Bisutopia19137 Posts
Having a more ideal chat interface is nice, but that will only be useful to the people currently playing the game. I find it hard to convince any of my gamer friends to jump back into SC2. It's already called "Old" "Same stuff" "Not any different the WoL". How you get people interested in the game again is hard and with the state of LoTV I don't have enough to get people I know re interested.
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The prevalence of seeing (or not seeing) other people chatting, almost regardless of the quality of conversation, makes it FEEL like you're in a hub of activity, rather than a lonely pursuit of ladder grinding... I completely agree with the analyses above 
@BisuDagger, even though chat rooms obviously won't pull anyone back into sc2, the ones you can drag in will be much more likely to feel like the game was 'alive' and has an energy and therefore more likely to stick around (hopefully!)
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On June 11 2015 22:28 Ovid wrote:Show nested quote +On June 11 2015 19:43 eeZe wrote:
I think the biggest thing that would help the social aspect of sc2 would be near real time public observation games. Allow "delayed" observation for all games played by players ranked in top 8 of every league in a HLTV fashion. So everyone can have a friend obs their game and then know what is going to happen?
I think I said delayed.
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Do you REALLY want chat channels ?
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You mention that ladder in 1v1 for hours makes you antisocial? Are you going to go kill some people or what? As far as I know, SC2 isn't violent enough to make anyone antisocial. In fact, there are numerous studies showing how video games dont make people into killers.
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I think you're way too harsh on unmoderated channels.
iirc Blizzard's response to the original criticism when new bnet came out was something like "why would you want to talk to other people?" or at least something like why would you talk to people you don't already know.
And the idea there is that the internet is full of jerkoffs and annoying people who have dumb conversations, and talking to them is a waste of time and maybe you'll spend a whole hour arguing about politics with a troll.
But my answer to that is "so what?" It's not that bad. Yeah, there were channels on old bnet full of spam bots that just make it impossible to talk. And there's always people who are super rude and offensive. But a couple of bad apples doesn't stop people who want to have a good conversation or play the game or whatever from doing it. Making a new channel is dead simple, and for the entire existence of Bnet Blizzard Chat 1 and Public Chat 1 were completely usable.
Original Bnet's moderated channels frequently just became weird and tiny, because no fresh faces are likely to come around. They're alright if you have like 4 people you want to chat with, they're no good long term and you shouldn't only talk to the same 4 people all the time anyway.
I think the real plague of the internet comes out when the chat is secondary to something else, like a video stream or an article. That's when it's all throw aways and no one is there to actually meet people (and you would be crazy to). But for the most part people kind of normalize when they're having a conversation and not just throwing comments into the void.
BNET2 is definitely aggressively trying to protect people from the internet experience. Maybe that helps their PR and maybe it even helps the image of gamers when you can't sign into a gaming portal only to read hate speech as soon as you log in. But at the same time it deprives you of those opportunities to meet people who don't suck as well.
On June 13 2015 01:32 swag_bro wrote:
You mention that ladder in 1v1 for hours makes you antisocial? Are you going to go kill some people or what? As far as I know, SC2 isn't violent enough to make anyone antisocial. In fact, there are numerous studies showing how video games dont make people into killers.
Antisocial != sociopath. Also I think he says that 1v1 sc2 laddering is antisocial, not makes you antisocial.
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Im always auto connected to bunch of channels.
To me its weird that somebody isnt 
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Seriously, add full-screen chat channels back, there's so much wasted real-estate in their current UI.
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EPT
