EPTWhat can we as a community do to improve StarCraft - Page 9
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Cele
Germany4016 Posts
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Heyjoray
240 Posts
On November 17 2017 05:07 Cele wrote: I hope moderation will take a closer look at this thread. General attitude here has been not very charming last couple of pages. The attitude seems to be fine, ReachTheSky is going on his nostalgia rampage on several pages. Seems to be cool with the mod team | ||
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Artanis[Xp]
Netherlands12968 Posts
On November 17 2017 05:07 Cele wrote: I hope moderation will take a closer look at this thread. General attitude here has been not very charming last couple of pages. I hope you do not get banned  | ||
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Eywa-
Canada4876 Posts
On November 17 2017 05:07 Cele wrote: I hope moderation will take a closer look at this thread. General attitude here has been not very charming last couple of pages. I entirely agree... However, I think this thread is doomed to fail because I don't think the real problem has been identified. Starcraft: Brood War has been nearly unplayable for most people and inaccessible to new players for the past 7+ years. Yet, the community was far more lively and united in one location back in 2011-2014. There was a better atmosphere among players, there was a lot more emotion (sometimes leading to the craziest drama)... But the scene was alive. It's just impossible that a few glitches in the new software completely killed the game and everyone's spirits. Brood War had so many other problems back in the day, but the players and the avid followers were happy to work around them. It's not the perfect user interface and chat functions that make a game... It's the small things. Viewers can be captivated by a single caster. An organizer can be kept interested just by the dedicated and the heart of a few players. Players are motivated by the quality of the games and the interactions with their opponents and fans. None of these can be built into a chat engine, none of them are native features of matchmaking. | ||
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killanator
United States549 Posts
On November 17 2017 05:38 Eywa- wrote: I entirely agree... However, I think this thread is doomed to fail because I don't think the real problem has been identified. Starcraft: Brood War has been nearly unplayable for most people and inaccessible to new players for the past 7+ years. Yet, the community was far more lively and united in one location back in 2011-2014. There was a better atmosphere among players, there was a lot more emotion (sometimes leading to the craziest drama)... But the scene was alive. It's just impossible that a few glitches in the new software completely killed the game and everyone's spirits. Brood War had so many other problems back in the day, but the players and the avid followers were happy to work around them. It's not the perfect user interface and chat functions that make a game... It's the small things. Viewers can be captivated by a single caster. An organizer can be kept interested just by the dedicated and the heart of a few players. Players are motivated by the quality of the games and the interactions with their opponents and fans. None of these can be built into a chat engine, none of them are native features of matchmaking. There is still this sort of enthusiasm though...day9's lets learn series gets tens of thousands of views on youtube and that doesn't count twitch...ASL was pretty highly watched, hopefully that can go higher if they also broadcast it on Twitch to reach a larger audience. I don't think its just accessibility and ease that makes a game popular, if that were the case HotS would be bigger than LoL...I think people like to feel that there is a depth of mechanics and skill ceiling. More people need to be able to see this about BW, I don't think people would be put off by its interface and older 2D graphics (though very nice looking now thanks to RM) if they knew how great of a game it is at its highest level, and even just a joy to play at its lowest level (where I am lol) | ||
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Cele
Germany4016 Posts
On November 17 2017 05:38 Eywa- wrote: I entirely agree... However, I think this thread is doomed to fail because I don't think the real problem has been identified. Starcraft: Brood War has been nearly unplayable for most people and inaccessible to new players for the past 7+ years. Yet, the community was far more lively and united in one location back in 2011-2014. There was a better atmosphere among players, there was a lot more emotion (sometimes leading to the craziest drama)... But the scene was alive. It's just impossible that a few glitches in the new software completely killed the game and everyone's spirits. Brood War had so many other problems back in the day, but the players and the avid followers were happy to work around them. It's not the perfect user interface and chat functions that make a game... It's the small things. Viewers can be captivated by a single caster. An organizer can be kept interested just by the dedicated and the heart of a few players. Players are motivated by the quality of the games and the interactions with their opponents and fans. None of these can be built into a chat engine, none of them are native features of matchmaking. I guess it depends on on how you define alive. I think in terms of viewership and most important in terms of players on the server we are having more players now than in those days that you just mentioned. Sometimes I share your feeling that the “spirit“ of the fans has been going down, but it's really hard to tell right? Because it's a very subjective point of view and depends a lot on our experiences etc. However that's not really the point of this topic so I'm not gonna delve further into it. I think it's fair to say that the current infrastructure of battle.net does not promote an environment that is helpful to alleviate the concerns voiced by you. And that's really all we can expect blizzard to do, to provide the right environment for this community flourish again. @ artanis: wouldn't want you to get banned either :-) | ||
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Eywa-
Canada4876 Posts
On November 17 2017 06:02 killanator wrote: There is still this sort of enthusiasm though...day9's lets learn series gets tens of thousands of views on youtube and that doesn't count twitch...ASL was pretty highly watched, hopefully that can go higher if they also broadcast it on Twitch to reach a larger audience. I don't think its just accessibility and ease that makes a game popular, if that were the case HotS would be bigger than LoL...I think people like to feel that there is a depth of mechanics and skill ceiling. More people need to be able to see this about BW, I don't think people would be put off by its interface and older 2D graphics (though very nice looking now thanks to RM) if they knew how great of a game it is at its highest level, and even just a joy to play at its lowest level (where I am lol) You make great points, but I don't see either of those contributing enormously to the foreign BW scene. Neither the ASL nor Day9's series make the game that much more enjoyable for top level foreigners to play. TBH, Day9 could stream himself playing solitaire and he would draw in the same viewership. It would be super cool if Day9 were more involved in the scene, but his stuff isn't even advertised on TL. At the moment, he is mainly creating content for his following, not for the foreign BW scene. | ||
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Eywa-
Canada4876 Posts
On November 17 2017 06:12 Cele wrote: I guess it depends on on how you define alive. I think in terms of viewership and most important in terms of players on the server we are having more players now than in those days that you just mentioned. Sometimes I share your feeling that the “spirit“ of the fans has been going down, but it's really hard to tell right? Because it's a very subjective point of view and depends a lot on our experiences etc. However that's not really the point of this topic so I'm not gonna delve further into it. I think it's fair to say that the current infrastructure of battle.net does not promote an environment that is helpful to alleviate the concerns voiced by you. And that's really all we can expect blizzard to do, to provide the right environment for this community flourish again. @ artanis: wouldn't want you to get banned either :-) Yes, it is hard to measure, and it's important to not look at the past with rose colored glasses. I think in this case however, there are a couple ways in which the past was measurably better. The TL thread viewership and participation (especially for tournaments) is way down from those days. Players who used to be super motivated are now simply defeated, it's depressing to talk to some of the guys who've held the scene up for a long time. There's no conflicts driven by passion in today's Brood War scene (and I mean real conflict - there are some who troll 619 or comment about Koreans in foreign events, but generally speaking, people seem to be more indifferent). All of the above are measurable changes that are strictly negative (regardless of how much people disliked the drama back in the day, at least everyone gave a damn). | ||
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Cele
Germany4016 Posts
On November 17 2017 06:02 killanator wrote: There is still this sort of enthusiasm though...day9's lets learn series gets tens of thousands of views on youtube and that doesn't count twitch...ASL was pretty highly watched, hopefully that can go higher if they also broadcast it on Twitch to reach a larger audience. I don't think its just accessibility and ease that makes a game popular, if that were the case HotS would be bigger than LoL...I think people like to feel that there is a depth of mechanics and skill ceiling. More people need to be able to see this about BW, I don't think people would be put off by its interface and older 2D graphics (though very nice looking now thanks to RM) if they knew how great of a game it is at its highest level, and even just a joy to play at its lowest level (where I am lol) I I think that stream numbers are very much overrated in this regard. When I was on staff for ICC and in charge of the media section i observed the influence of big Events on activity on the server. Much to my initial surprise there hardly was any. For instance when tasteless and artosis started casting ASL again everybody was pretty hyped about it. But it affected activity a lot less than expected. Today I think that open tournaments, team leagues, newbie training programs another things are much more important when it comes to increasing activity and participation. Of course big events a good advertisement for the game but what does it help everybody's watching the Stream but nobody's playing? | ||
GrantTheAnt
7 Posts
* The OP concerns: first, I'd say those tweets referenced are from September and to be fair we've done a lot of work on MM latency since the launch in mid-August, including the DTR system, and both feedback and data has been very positive. We see around 1% of games are running in the lowest turn rate due to latency, and almost 85% in the highest now. This is not to say that there isn't more work to be done on the MM - we have more plans (including the diagnostic tool) and we'll keep focusing on the games that are performing poorly. The reddit thread referenced should be taken with a large grain of salt. There is quite a lot of lost in translation moments in that thread for whatever reason. For example, I can say that our engineering team is the same size as it has always been. Sure, the art team is not doing a huge amount of SCR any more, but that's expected given that the art is done apart of tweaks. So *overall* the SCR team is smaller now, but on the engineering side (which is what matters for all of these issues) we're technically larger since a couple of senior engineers have been added to the Classic server team, one of which will spend the bulk of his time on SCR. There are no plans to disband the SCR team or anything of that nature. We're still here, we're still working on the game every single day. And even though we may not have played the game every day for the last 20 years like some folks here, I promise you that we treasure the game just as much, and want to see it as the best product it can be. * Replays on profile - we're working on this right now. * Chat bug - we rolled out a change to the spam filtering algorithm yesterday. I've asked for feedback on the Blizzard forum, if anyone sees it still occurring. There are no reports of it still being active right now. * /f m for Blizzard friends - this is going through QA right now. It should be coming soon. * Friends following ("abc has entered StarCraft, left StarCraft, entered game xyz") for Blizzard friends - this is also going through QA right now. * Battlenet UI responsiveness. We're reworking the technical side of the UI to improve responsiveness. We have a small change coming very soon, and a much larger change which we're working on at the moment. * "Patches are coming slower now". We're on patch 11 in around 13 weeks. * Regional social (friends/chat). Unfortunately, at this stage, this is how all Blizzard services work (in the same way as gateways), so our hands are tied on this one for now. All I can say is that we've raised the topic internally at Blizzard to the relevant teams so they're aware of our suggestions. * Our priorities in general: I've talked about this on the Blizzard forums, but StarCraft is many things to many people. They often have competing priorities. Some people hate that we worked to reduce the realtime lighting requirements; other people love it. Some people don't care about EUD at all; other people only ever played SC with EUD. Some people are still impacted by MM latency; other people say it's perfectly fine now. We try to service all groups and not leave anyone out. We receive feedback and requests from many different sources and it's impossible to work on everything at once. So we triage. And I understand that it's frustrating when we're not servicing the issue that's most important to you. I also know that we don't always get it right. Sometimes we've gotten the priorities wrong, and one thing we're doing to improve on that is expanding our network of reliable community sources and to open direct communication lines with them. * On timeframes: we generally don't talk specifically about timeframes, because once a date is out there it becomes an iron clad guarantee, which can be tough to deliver on all the time given the nature of game dev. * We did not coerce/force other servers to shutdown. We have a lot of respect for the work that Fish did over the years for the BW community. * On global MM generally: there are some routes that are particularly bad - EU to Korea for example. The route between those regions is so bad that internet traffic tends to route the other way around the world, which is not ideal for low latency. So this leads to 2 obvious questions: * Why global MM and not regional? As you guys know, SC is somewhat unique in that a large portion of the playerbase is in one region, and the playerbase in general is not in the scale of the Hearthstones of this world. Regional MM outside of Korea would have meant very long queue times. We already see some complaints for queue times - they would be far longer under a regional MM. In short, queue times and latency are in direct competition with each other. Also, in another sense, the MM is kind of regional - in the sense that the MM will try very hard to match you with someone close to your MMR and close to you geographically. If you're getting matched on the other side of the world, it means there was no one else closer in a reasonable MMR range, and additionally that the MM predicted no one suitable would be available in the near future. In short, if you're matched with someone a long way away, without a global MM there would be no match at all. * Why not rewrite the net code to a client-server model and host the servers ourselves? We looked at this early on, but the SC code contains certain interdependencies. Changing one system can potentially impact another. Changing something as fundamental as the network layer carried a significant risk of changing the way SC played, which was a dealbreaker for us. Our general policy was to leave the core of SC alone, and make changes around it, so as not to break or change the delicate genius of the game. We're doing some preliminary investigative work towards a system that may have a somewhat similar effect to this without affecting the SC net code directly. Building a global MM was a much more difficult undertaking than a regional one, but we believe it's the right one for SC globally. Maybe, ultimately, we'll have to surrender on one or both of the above, but we've made good strides on improving the MM latency since launch, and we're rolling out new improvements all the time. We still have some rabbits left in the hat, and I believe we should run them down before we jump to a last resort. Wow, this has been quite the long post, but hopefully it gives at least some context to the decisions we're making, and some level of confidence that we're working hard on making SCR the game that you all (and we) want it to be, regardless of where you stand on it right now. As always, your feedback is extremely helpful and I appreciate the time you guys take to talk to us and make this an awesome gaming community. | ||
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SCC-Faust
United States3736 Posts
On November 17 2017 12:08 GrantTheAnt wrote: * The OP concerns: first, I'd say those tweets referenced are from September and to be fair we've done a lot of work on MM latency since the launch in mid-August, including the DTR system, and both feedback and data has been very positive. We see around 1% of games are running in the lowest turn rate due to latency, and almost 85% in the highest now. This is not to say that there isn't more work to be done on the MM - we have more plans (including the diagnostic tool) and we'll keep focusing on the games that are performing poorly. This is true, they are outdated tweets and I didn't mean to use them as driving home points in pro player dissatisfaction. In retrospect, they were definitely not a completely accurate portrayal of how the majority of professional players feel I'm sure, so it was not an intelligent way to display my opinion. However, I do want to say that I know some of the players whose tweets I posted still have the same feelings regarding their experience with latency and matchmaking and have played SC:R less as a contributing factor. Also, this data is interesting and something that definitely sheds light on us. Something I would like to point out though is I believe the large majority of people playing on the highest turn-rates are Koreans. As someone from USA, I feel like my latency experience is not too uncommon and I have played two games last night where I believe were on turn-rate 4, despite it being a 1% chance. You are the person with the data, and I am not really sure what the solution is when the majority of the playerbase is Korean (and I'm sure they are very satisfied with the dynamic turn rate, as it was a good QoL improvement). I guess all I'm saying here is I hope you don't forget about us foreigners and you do realize that even if the majority of the playerbase (Koreans) are not experiencing these issues, I feel as if a large portion of non-Koreans are. The reddit thread referenced should be taken with a large grain of salt. There is quite a lot of lost in translation moments in that thread for whatever reason. For example, I can say that our engineering team is the same size as it has always been. Sure, the art team is not doing a huge amount of SCR any more, but that's expected given that the art is done apart of tweaks. So *overall* the SCR team is smaller now, but on the engineering side (which is what matters for all of these issues) we're technically larger since a couple of senior engineers have been added to the Classic server team, one of which will spend the bulk of his time on SCR. There are no plans to disband the SCR team or anything of that nature. We're still here, we're still working on the game every single day. And even though we may not have played the game every day for the last 20 years like some folks here, I promise you that we treasure the game just as much, and want to see it as the best product it can be. Thank you for this. It was not my intention at all to spread false information, and for that I apologize. * Replays on profile - we're working on this right now. * Chat bug - we rolled out a change to the spam filtering algorithm yesterday. I've asked for feedback on the Blizzard forum, if anyone sees it still occurring. There are no reports of it still being active right now. * /f m for Blizzard friends - this is going through QA right now. It should be coming soon. * Friends following ("abc has entered StarCraft, left StarCraft, entered game xyz") for Blizzard friends - this is also going through QA right now. * Battlenet UI responsiveness. We're reworking the technical side of the UI to improve responsiveness. We have a small change coming very soon, and a much larger change which we're working on at the moment. * "Patches are coming slower now". We're on patch 11 in around 13 weeks. * Regional social (friends/chat). Unfortunately, at this stage, this is how all Blizzard services work (in the same way as gateways), so our hands are tied on this one for now. All I can say is that we've raised the topic internally at Blizzard to the relevant teams so they're aware of our suggestions. This is all fantastic news. * Our priorities in general: I've talked about this on the Blizzard forums, but StarCraft is many things to many people. They often have competing priorities. Some people hate that we worked to reduce the realtime lighting requirements; other people love it. Some people don't care about EUD at all; other people only ever played SC with EUD. Some people are still impacted by MM latency; other people say it's perfectly fine now. We try to service all groups and not leave anyone out. We receive feedback and requests from many different sources and it's impossible to work on everything at once. So we triage. And I understand that it's frustrating when we're not servicing the issue that's most important to you. I also know that we don't always get it right. Sometimes we've gotten the priorities wrong, and one thing we're doing to improve on that is expanding our network of reliable community sources and to open direct communication lines with them. This is true - I think I even mentioned in a previous post that I legitimately have no idea what the majority of the player base wants. In my personal view, I just found it upsetting that reducing requirements for a visual enhancement feature took precedence when a chat bug was so prevalent that it actually made running tournaments a huge difficulty. A lot of tournament organizers have resorted to using discord to mediate and organize tournaments because of this (CFC, TLOpen, Zotac, PATL, and more). That is on top of the fact that it is actually difficult in itself to even hold a conversation on battle.net channels. I'm not really trying to shit on you here, this is just my personal opinion on the matter and it could be in the minority for all I know. * On timeframes: we generally don't talk specifically about timeframes, because once a date is out there it becomes an iron clad guarantee, which can be tough to deliver on all the time given the nature of game dev. Don't worry buddy, we're all familiar with Blizzard and their timeframes. + Show Spoiler + ![[image loading]](https://i.imgur.com/sKdhHCS.png?1) * On global MM generally: there are some routes that are particularly bad - EU to Korea for example. The route between those regions is so bad that internet traffic tends to route the other way around the world, which is not ideal for low latency. So this leads to 2 obvious questions: * Why global MM and not regional? As you guys know, SC is somewhat unique in that a large portion of the playerbase is in one region, and the playerbase in general is not in the scale of the Hearthstones of this world. Regional MM outside of Korea would have meant very long queue times. We already see some complaints for queue times - they would be far longer under a regional MM. In short, queue times and latency are in direct competition with each other. Also, in another sense, the MM is kind of regional - in the sense that the MM will try very hard to match you with someone close to your MMR and close to you geographically. If you're getting matched on the other side of the world, it means there was no one else closer in a reasonable MMR range, and additionally that the MM predicted no one suitable would be available in the near future. In short, if you're matched with someone a long way away, without a global MM there would be no match at all. * Why not rewrite the net code to a client-server model and host the servers ourselves? We looked at this early on, but the SC code contains certain interdependencies. Changing one system can potentially impact another. Changing something as fundamental as the network layer carried a significant risk of changing the way SC played, which was a dealbreaker for us. Our general policy was to leave the core of SC alone, and make changes around it, so as not to break or change the delicate genius of the game. We're doing some preliminary investigative work towards a system that may have a somewhat similar effect to this without affecting the SC net code directly. Building a global MM was a much more difficult undertaking than a regional one, but we believe it's the right one for SC globally. Maybe, ultimately, we'll have to surrender on one or both of the above, but we've made good strides on improving the MM latency since launch, and we're rolling out new improvements all the time. We still have some rabbits left in the hat, and I believe we should run them down before we jump to a last resort. Wow, this has been quite the long post, but hopefully it gives at least some context to the decisions we're making, and some level of confidence that we're working hard on making SCR the game that you all (and we) want it to be, regardless of where you stand on it right now. As always, your feedback is extremely helpful and I appreciate the time you guys take to talk to us and make this an awesome gaming community. This is interesting, thank you for sharing this information. I hope you continue to stick around and post in this thread a bit, because a lot of what you said has been super enlightening and has changed my personal opinion on some of the issues that I was either wrong about, or did not have complete information about. | ||
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Sero
United States692 Posts
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Golgotha
Korea (South)8418 Posts
On November 17 2017 12:08 GrantTheAnt wrote: I've been wanting to jump into this thread for a couple of days but haven't found the time. There are some interesting points that deserve more info, so here goes (in no particular order): * The OP concerns: first, I'd say those tweets referenced are from September and to be fair we've done a lot of work on MM latency since the launch in mid-August, including the DTR system, and both feedback and data has been very positive. We see around 1% of games are running in the lowest turn rate due to latency, and almost 85% in the highest now. This is not to say that there isn't more work to be done on the MM - we have more plans (including the diagnostic tool) and we'll keep focusing on the games that are performing poorly. The reddit thread referenced should be taken with a large grain of salt. There is quite a lot of lost in translation moments in that thread for whatever reason. For example, I can say that our engineering team is the same size as it has always been. Sure, the art team is not doing a huge amount of SCR any more, but that's expected given that the art is done apart of tweaks. So *overall* the SCR team is smaller now, but on the engineering side (which is what matters for all of these issues) we're technically larger since a couple of senior engineers have been added to the Classic server team, one of which will spend the bulk of his time on SCR. There are no plans to disband the SCR team or anything of that nature. We're still here, we're still working on the game every single day. And even though we may not have played the game every day for the last 20 years like some folks here, I promise you that we treasure the game just as much, and want to see it as the best product it can be. * Replays on profile - we're working on this right now. * Chat bug - we rolled out a change to the spam filtering algorithm yesterday. I've asked for feedback on the Blizzard forum, if anyone sees it still occurring. There are no reports of it still being active right now. * /f m for Blizzard friends - this is going through QA right now. It should be coming soon. * Friends following ("abc has entered StarCraft, left StarCraft, entered game xyz") for Blizzard friends - this is also going through QA right now. * Battlenet UI responsiveness. We're reworking the technical side of the UI to improve responsiveness. We have a small change coming very soon, and a much larger change which we're working on at the moment. * "Patches are coming slower now". We're on patch 11 in around 13 weeks. * Regional social (friends/chat). Unfortunately, at this stage, this is how all Blizzard services work (in the same way as gateways), so our hands are tied on this one for now. All I can say is that we've raised the topic internally at Blizzard to the relevant teams so they're aware of our suggestions. * Our priorities in general: I've talked about this on the Blizzard forums, but StarCraft is many things to many people. They often have competing priorities. Some people hate that we worked to reduce the realtime lighting requirements; other people love it. Some people don't care about EUD at all; other people only ever played SC with EUD. Some people are still impacted by MM latency; other people say it's perfectly fine now. We try to service all groups and not leave anyone out. We receive feedback and requests from many different sources and it's impossible to work on everything at once. So we triage. And I understand that it's frustrating when we're not servicing the issue that's most important to you. I also know that we don't always get it right. Sometimes we've gotten the priorities wrong, and one thing we're doing to improve on that is expanding our network of reliable community sources and to open direct communication lines with them. * On timeframes: we generally don't talk specifically about timeframes, because once a date is out there it becomes an iron clad guarantee, which can be tough to deliver on all the time given the nature of game dev. * We did not coerce/force other servers to shutdown. We have a lot of respect for the work that Fish did over the years for the BW community. * On global MM generally: there are some routes that are particularly bad - EU to Korea for example. The route between those regions is so bad that internet traffic tends to route the other way around the world, which is not ideal for low latency. So this leads to 2 obvious questions: * Why global MM and not regional? As you guys know, SC is somewhat unique in that a large portion of the playerbase is in one region, and the playerbase in general is not in the scale of the Hearthstones of this world. Regional MM outside of Korea would have meant very long queue times. We already see some complaints for queue times - they would be far longer under a regional MM. In short, queue times and latency are in direct competition with each other. Also, in another sense, the MM is kind of regional - in the sense that the MM will try very hard to match you with someone close to your MMR and close to you geographically. If you're getting matched on the other side of the world, it means there was no one else closer in a reasonable MMR range, and additionally that the MM predicted no one suitable would be available in the near future. In short, if you're matched with someone a long way away, without a global MM there would be no match at all. * Why not rewrite the net code to a client-server model and host the servers ourselves? We looked at this early on, but the SC code contains certain interdependencies. Changing one system can potentially impact another. Changing something as fundamental as the network layer carried a significant risk of changing the way SC played, which was a dealbreaker for us. Our general policy was to leave the core of SC alone, and make changes around it, so as not to break or change the delicate genius of the game. We're doing some preliminary investigative work towards a system that may have a somewhat similar effect to this without affecting the SC net code directly. Building a global MM was a much more difficult undertaking than a regional one, but we believe it's the right one for SC globally. Maybe, ultimately, we'll have to surrender on one or both of the above, but we've made good strides on improving the MM latency since launch, and we're rolling out new improvements all the time. We still have some rabbits left in the hat, and I believe we should run them down before we jump to a last resort. Wow, this has been quite the long post, but hopefully it gives at least some context to the decisions we're making, and some level of confidence that we're working hard on making SCR the game that you all (and we) want it to be, regardless of where you stand on it right now. As always, your feedback is extremely helpful and I appreciate the time you guys take to talk to us and make this an awesome gaming community. Thanks for posting bro. It takes balls to post here and you could have just ignored it. I've been really impressed with the dev updates and how you guys keep pushing out patches. You also don't shy away from addressing the major concerns and are honest about them. I also agree that global is the way to go and it would be better to try and fix the latency rather than bail now and go regional (the queues and MM would be irregular due to extremely low pop in EU and U.S.). Thanks again for this, the community truly appreciates it and will support y'all. | ||
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GunSlinger
614 Posts
I personally, am having a blast playing Starcraft again. Although there are a few minor bugs and some issues yet to deal with... I am looking forward to seeing them fixed. As to what we can do as a community to improve Starcraft? Something that seemed to work in the past was having a channel dedicated to Teamliquid on West. I remember it was a pretty happening channel back in the day. There were usually people afking there and it even had a bot. It felt nice to have a place to go when you logged in, even if everyone was afk. Sometimes on Friday nights you would get lucky and there would be people willing to play UMS maps, Big Game Hunters or whatever. It was also just a nice way to meet people, especially if you were new and didn't quite know how to traverse the dark world of Bnet. Someone would have to host the bot, though. | ||
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killanator
United States549 Posts
On November 17 2017 06:32 Cele wrote: I I think that stream numbers are very much overrated in this regard. When I was on staff for ICC and in charge of the media section i observed the influence of big Events on activity on the server. Much to my initial surprise there hardly was any. For instance when tasteless and artosis started casting ASL again everybody was pretty hyped about it. But it affected activity a lot less than expected. Today I think that open tournaments, team leagues, newbie training programs another things are much more important when it comes to increasing activity and participation. Of course big events a good advertisement for the game but what does it help everybody's watching the Stream but nobody's playing? I agree with everything you say. But I think big events that are well watched are important to always exist in this day and age. Someone who plays LoL who wants a competitive game to play needs to be convinced that BW will scratch that competitive itch, and having visible well watched events is part of that. | ||
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ProMeTheus112
France2027 Posts
I think you understand, it's hard to accept so many issues with the game when we pay for it to be improved and it stays like this after release. But, I see you care and are really trying to make it right. Also ofc we can make the difference between the company and the people working at the company. I have not seen you yet acknowledge another issue which is very important to me, which is that ladder should register games properly. Unless it has already been fixed, this and the chat bugs are making me stay away from the game as it was just much more efficient (and fun) when there were no such issues. I am not satisfied with a game being released in such a state, much less a remaster of Starcraft. Regarding global MM, I am still not sure that the approach is correct for this reason : because of the dynamics and populations, MMR values are different from one region to another. This means once a European player has reached a certain MMR playing against mostly EUR players, then they get matched against KOR players which have a different skill value at that MMR. This is when these EUR players start climbing in MMR a lot, which makes it much less likely to get matched against other EUR players who have a different MMR but close skill level. Or vice versa. It is hard to understand why we still have regional gateways (and chat) but global MM. I have had little issues with lag myself but that's because I stopped playing before I really got to play a lot of games against koreans since I got rly rly annoyed by the ladder failing to register games properly all the time. It's not fun, not fair, not good when you get ghost losses and wins all over the place every day. And when you can't talk to your friends to play fun games either on top of that. And when every interface takes seconds to respond or don't respond at all. So, again thank you for the informative update, I see you are doing your best, can't wait to play my #1 fav game again. PS: need to be able to reset stats since they are messed up since the system doesn't register games properly. Also, something should be done to establish a map pool rotation. Maps should rotate at the very least every few months like every 3 months at a minimum yo. So you shouldn't wait very much longer for that at all. This goes a few steps further by raising the question of which maps can make it to the pool, if part of the pool rotates every time or all of it, and how new maps made by people from the community or pro circuits or whatnot may be included. These questions should have been raised before release or immediately after, which we always did, and still haven't got any action or response taken by the company. Most of us hate blizzard by now, but we don't hate you ^^ PS2: regarding my hope to get banned comment, I think I mostly wrote it out of anger. I don't really like bans and warns and closing+burying threads on TL. whatever. Everybody can have their own opinion ofc, when I can see someone is clearly trying to annoy others by stating "SCR is perfectly playable" and "old BW was unplayable", that makes me tick, I wanna tell that guy or just tell others I think he's dishonest, but its probably not a good approach at all to ban or suggest ban.... PS3: a suggestion for doing justice to SD graphics which I think SCR should definitely do. Just make it switch the resolution back to something that draws SD graphics well like 1.18 did. You cant display SD graphics properly with such upscaling. If the F5 key switching seemlessly between SD and HD has to go for that, it's worth it for sure. If extra work for adapting interfaces, is what's got to be done then, please do. Most games can do that easily including Warcraft 3. The current free to play build should also obviously display these SD graphics just as well. | ||
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lestye
United States4163 Posts
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ninazerg
United States7291 Posts
On November 17 2017 13:23 Sero wrote: Can we talk about how stupid it is to split the US player pool between two regions? Even EU should probably be combined so the custom game list and channels aren't completely dead. Or how about easy changes like updating the map pool to non-retarded maps instead of Nostalgia and Arcadia. Some things are always completely ignored. Yeah, I don't get why the US is split from east to west. It would make more sense to have North America and South America servers respectively. Unfortunately for maps, there's never going to be a consensus on what makes a "good map" among foreigners, because so many people fall into these categories: 1 - "I play OLD SCHOOL MAPS like Lost Temple, because I'm so old school. Give me Gorky Island in the map pool." 2 - "Fighting Spirit is overplayed, so I automatically hate it and any map like it." 3 - "I hate maps with back-door mineral expansions because I'm so bad at StarCraft that I can't handle my opponent getting a third base." 4 - "I hate all old-school maps, and I want all maps to be exactly the same and modern." 5 - "I LIKE ISLAND MAPS AND BLIZZARD MAPS. GO FFA ON OBRITAL DEATH?" I personally just vetoed Nostalgia and Arcadia. | ||
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ProMeTheus112
France2027 Posts
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Golgotha
Korea (South)8418 Posts
On November 17 2017 16:47 ninazerg wrote: Yeah, I don't get why the US is split from east to west. It would make more sense to have North America and South America servers respectively. Unfortunately for maps, there's never going to be a consensus on what makes a "good map" among foreigners, because so many people fall into these categories: 1 - "I play OLD SCHOOL MAPS like Lost Temple, because I'm so old school. Give me Gorky Island in the map pool." 2 - "Fighting Spirit is overplayed, so I automatically hate it and any map like it." 3 - "I hate maps with back-door mineral expansions because I'm so bad at StarCraft that I can't handle my opponent getting a third base." 4 - "I hate all old-school maps, and I want all maps to be exactly the same and modern." 5 - "I LIKE ISLAND MAPS AND BLIZZARD MAPS. GO FFA ON OBRITAL DEATH?" I personally just vetoed Nostalgia and Arcadia. I think I am category 4. | ||
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