On October 24 2012 09:15 Lysenko wrote:Show nested quote +On October 23 2012 22:33 mostevil wrote:
All the authorititively stated "you don't understand, programming UI's is really hard" posts are making me sad in my little programmers heart. The mechanisms for the UI are there and work fine. All the "hard" work is done. Unless its a software design clusterfuck moving and adding content around on them isn't that difficult. The disconnect between you and the people saying that is that the programming for a good UI (particularly a flashy, responsive UI like Blizzard wants for SC2) is not the hard part. What's hard is the specification, and to a lesser degree the art production. Edit: The difference between a good UI and a horrible UI is a subtle one, and the code used to make it is usually not the problem. This is why people make entire careers out of being human interface designers with only limited coding.
Sure, but that hasn't changed that much, there are some nice new renders on a couple of the buttons but the buttons themselves are the same design. The overall navigation looks like an improvement, but house styles not changed. I'd hope its not the product of months worth of work by a UI designer/team.
The exception to that is probably the arcade and customs interfaces which are really awkward. We'll have to see the latest incarnation that to see if they've really worked something out on the UI design front.
Battlenets problems run much deeper and are those of missing features, not navigation and look and feel. I'm not saying its a bad step, but it's a dissapointingly small one.
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On October 21 2012 07:24 Lysenko wrote:Show nested quote +On October 20 2012 19:50 paralleluniverse wrote:
Where in the post does it say anything about ladder anxiety? It doesn't. The closest it gets is saying that having the matchmaker push people towards a 50% win ratio "doesn't feel good". But guess what, that hasn't changed, the matchmaker still pushes people towards a 50% win ratio. So if this was the real reason for removing losses, why are they suddenly coming back? The link I quoted to you contained this, from a blue post on the SEA forums, from around the Spring of 2011. Relevant parts highlighted: Show nested quote +We had a pretty strong rationale for removing losses from the records of players below Master's League. Essentially, prior to that level of play, the losses you've sustained aren't particularly meaningful. Please allow me to explain:
Let's say that you're new to StarCraft II and you play (and lose) a ton of games. You've racked up dozens of losses and a handful of wins, and things look grim. Instead of giving up, you get better, learn effective strategies, and you start playing much more skillfully. Pretty rapidly, the matchmaking system starts pitting you against tougher opponents - but because of the very nature of the matchmaking system, and even though you're making progress and facing tougher opponents, your win/loss rate stays at around 50%. In a scenario like this, it means that your wins will probably never surpass your losses, even though you've become a better player and your wins have become more meaningful than those early losses. Even for someone who starts pretty strong, win/loss numbers should still settle around 50/50 anyway. That doesn't feel good, but worse, those numbers also don't accurately reflect your current level of skill or progress anyway. Now, back to your post: Show nested quote +Stats are back because the REAL reason they were removed, the "pressure" of laddering, is fixed by having unranked play. It was about ladder anxiety and the fact playing the ladder can hurt people's feelings. And this was obvious all along, despite their transparent attempts to scapegoat the win ratio as being meaningless. They've been perfectly up-front that loss counts and loss ratios make people feel bad. They've also been up-front that they're meaningless. They are COMPLETELY meaningless with a good matchmaking system except at the high and low end of the scale because deviations from 50% are nothing more than a historical record of where one's been since the last reset. I'm not sure why you're so keen to find a conspiracy here. When they rolled out Battle.net 2.0 in 2009 at Blizzcon, they were very clear right then that they weren't showing MMRs because they wanted to reward playing more than improvement. That message was crystal clear. Nobody thought that removing losses was for any reason other than (a) keeping people from feeling bad in lower leagues and (b) because the win/loss ratio don't tell you anything useful. Those two reasons are interrelated. That's why they always talk about both in the same sentences. I agree it's not enough reason from a product quality standpoint to avoid having chat channels in a game. However, you have to admit that the VP of customer service (whoever that is) at Blizzard probably looks at the problem differently than you do. As I pointed out in the post to which you were responding, chat channels were obviously a different issue than the stuff which project management and staffing would have affected. Not sure why you didn't get that from my post, since I was explicit about it.
What you've highlighted is basically explaining why losses are meaningless. They've repeated 4 times in that post that it was removed because it was meaningless.
You write:
Nobody thought that removing losses was for any reason other than (a) keeping people from feeling bad in lower leagues and (b) because the win/loss ratio don't tell you anything useful.
You're wrong. Here's Excalibur_Z back in 2011:
And the reason why he read the statement as saying losses were removed, not because of ladder anxiety, but because they are meaningless, is because that's exactly what the statement says, and how any rational person would read it.
Too bad that he was wrong because Blizzard lied.
Also, why are you randomly talking about MMR and the VP of customer service? These things are completely irrelevant to the discussion. Frank Pearce isn't VP of customer service. He's management, and management manages the whole project.
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On October 27 2012 02:40 paralleluniverse wrote:
Too bad that he was wrong because Blizzard lied.
First off, the statement I quoted (written by community manager Daxxari) included first the argument that it made people feel bad, then stated the meaninglessness argument and said it was "worse." Yes, it emphasized the meaninglessness argument, but the boldfaced parts in my quote clearly demonstrate that he talked about both reasons.
That doesn't feel good, but worse, those numbers also don't accurately reflect your current level of skill or progress anyway.
The recent statement, by Alan Dabiri, Lead Software Engineer for SC2, mentioned the pressure of laddering in the context of bringing back the losses.
Now, you may have no idea how things work as far as CMs and developers, but it's relevant. The CMs work for Blizzard's customer service organization, which also handles other kinds of end-user support. When the CMs want to offer an answer to a question, they go to the developers and ask, get some info, then write it up in a way that's suitable for putting on the forums.
Suppose Daxxari spoke to, say, Dustin Browder, and got one answer. If he'd talked to Alan Dabiri, he might have gotten the same facts but with a different emphasis. He then rewrites what he's told in his own words. Maybe he heard things a certain way. Maybe the individual with which he spoke sympathizes more with one argument than the other, but both arguments were what achieved consensus on the dev team. Maybe he's choosing to emphasize one or the other based on what he thinks will carry the most weight with players. Regardless, he's put both reasons in his answer and emphasized the meaninglessness for some reason.
Meanwhile, two years later, Alan Dabiri makes a post in which he mentions "pressure" on the players in passing. Maybe he doesn't remember the full discussion that led to the original change very well. Maybe he felt more strongly about the other reason than Daxxari had. Maybe he just wanted to explain that the Unranked mode taking away ONE of the reasons was enough to put the feature back in, and meaninglessness wasn't enough on its own. Regardless, what he didn't do is catalog all Blizzard statements made on all forums, ever, to make sure he was being consistent, before saying what he said. That's ok, he's a software developer and writing blog posts is probably a secondary part of his job.
The point being that these differences just don't mean anything. They mean that two different people (real human beings, remember) were talking. I work in an environment where I interact with dozens of people doing my job, and if someone took a poll on how some team decision two years before (or ten minutes) had been made, you'd get a different answer for each person. That's not lying, that's just how working in a large team works.
Also, why are you randomly talking about MMR and the VP of customer service? These things are completely irrelevant to the discussion. Frank Pearce isn't VP of customer service. He's management, and management manages the whole project.
Their statements on the display of MMR establish that they've always been concerned about not discouraging players on the ladder. That that had come before is the big reason I didn't read any of this the way that Excalibur_Z did. He spends a lot more of his time than I do reading tea leaves from scraps thrown him by CMs and developers, but the exact statement you quoted I never would have said I agreed with.
When I mentioned the hypothetical "VP of Customer Service," I was not talking about Frank Pearce's comments. I was referring to an incident in which Bashiok (a CM, works for the customer service department) indicated that costly customer service was the reason for not including chat channels in Diablo 3. A day or so later, the Game Director for Diablo 3, Jay Wilson, came out and said "Oh no, there will be chat channels in Diablo 3." Shortly thereafter, Bashiok walked back his comments.
Years ago, I worked in software engineering for mass market products. Customer service input, and particularly the limiting of the number of support calls, often resulted in products being rendered less functional in various ways. Because Bashiok works for the customer service organization at Blizzard, and Jay Wilson works in development, it's clear from that entire episode that Bashiok originally got (from somewhere, probably from within his own customer service organization) a story about why chat channels weren't in D3. Then, Jay Wilson, one of the few development people authorized to speak to the public, directly contradicted him, and after a period of time, Bashiok backed off.
It doesn't take much reading between the lines to realize that there was internal discussion about the feature surrounding all of this. Whether the actual VP of customer service (whoever that is) was involved, or whether Bashiok's initial statement was just an assumption because he knew that cost was a consideration, the whole episode demonstrates that chat channels are a matter of some push/pull between development and customer service.
I mean, come on. The developers play these games, and they absolutely want chat channels in. Meanwhile, customer service has their own reasons for wanting them out. That's the only explanation for two games in a row having "they're in"/"they're out"/"they're in" back-and-forth. I was just assuming that Bashiok's initial statement in the D3 case was because his boss's boss's boss had said "OVER MY DEAD BODY" and the development staff had said "SCREW YOU WE'RE GOING PUBLIC WITH THIS AND PUTTING THEM IN." Or something less dramatic.
Frank Pearce's comments (made early in SC2's lifespan) were just expressing one of those sides in the argument. How he came to make that statement (rather than being on the other side) is a mystery. Maybe he was trying to put a (to him) good spin on a decision he didn't like? Maybe he personally found the cost argument compelling but thought that saying "You don't really want chat channels do you?" would come off as less annoying than laying out the cost argument?
But, the fact that the cost argument explicitly found a voice during D3's beta with Bashiok is iron-clad proof that it's been a big part of the back-and-forth over chat channels.
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