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Before I say anything I would like to say, yes its a beta, no one is expecting perfection, especially not me.
As a concerned consumer of Blizzard products the state of Battle.net 2.0 is beginning to worry me (I'm sure I'm not alone here either). Let me explain why.
- Time. Battle.net 2.0 was the reason that Starcraft was delayed for so long. This generated (unsurprisingly) alot of hype about Battle.net 2.0. - I mean if it takes so long to make then it must be awesome. Why am I concerned about this. If it took Blizzard so long to make something that is, quite frankly considerably worse than say regular battle.net in pretty much all ways, how long is it going to take them to make something that is actually worth using? 2 months to release, 2 years to make what we got. You do the math, doesn't look good.
- Priorities. When Battle.net 2.0 was previewed by Blizzard all those years and months ago it had alot of exciting new features. All of which have been removed or are not currently in beta. Ok fair enough, we just wanna play the game and have fun. What concerns me is that the priority for Blizzard instead of adding something like a chat room, clan system or even something trivial but still useful like a pacman game inside battle.net. Blizzard instead decided to add Facebook. I don't mean to be blunt, but who actually wanted that? Does anyone actually add gamer friends to their facebook account? I have my mom and my wife on facebook I don't want someone from halfway around the world adding them and being like "Hi I'm Robs friend from the internet". - Thats just wrong. Priorities. An analogy that Jdanzi put to me on msn actually seems appropriate to sum up this point. "What Blizzard are doing is watering the plants when the house is burning down" - The house being Battle.net 2.0.
- Features. As an engineer myself in real life one of the sayings I find myself saying far too often is "If its not broken, don't fix it". Another saying I find myself using more than I should be is "Simple products are good products". More or less if your product does what it says on the tin then thats what the consumer is paying for not anything more than that. No one gives a shit if your brand new Ford Mondeo comes with a bumper sticker, but they expect it to take you from A to B. I think Blizzard need to learn a lesson from those two sayings. Battle.net 2.0 is a medium to play Starcraft 2, no one cares about adding facebook friends or achievements or portraits or what randomly selected metal your league happens to be or making yourself feel good about being rank 4 in bronze league "omgz im rank 4 at being shit". What people want is to play Starcraft 2 against other people and to do that they need a way of communicating with them that doesn't require giving out personal information to total strangers.
These things concern me. It should concern you too. Blizzard I hope you read this and I hope you understand that as a consumer I am disappointed in your total lack of understanding your customer and your apparent total lack of forethought when implementing Battle.net 2.0. As a positive suggestion I suggest you start with Battle.net 2.0 the way it was at the start of Beta, because it was better.
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It does seem hugely under-impressive for something due for release in two months and under development for years. Unless they are holding a lot back.
I see it as the same as most other game lobbys really. In fact I'd say the current state is somewhat less impressive socially than other games.
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Sweden33719 Posts
EDIT2: Moving this poll here as well:
On May 23 2010 07:56 Renaissance wrote:Poll: Your thoughts on Battle.net 2.0 (years in the making)?A joke. (1144) 86% Okay. (148) 11% Great. (38) 3% 1330 total votes Your vote: Your thoughts on Battle.net 2.0 (years in the making)? (Vote): A joke.
(Vote): Okay.
(Vote): Great.
EDIT3: And this:
On May 23 2010 08:08 Two_DoWn wrote:Has anyone actually felt connected to a larger community when they logged into battle.net? Sure, I can chat privately with friends, but only one at a time. Or I could, if i could actually make a friend, which I cant cuz I cant get to know anyone because I cant talk to them in the first place. A poll, cuz polls are fun. Poll: Which Would You Rather HaveWarcraft 3 Battle.net (645) 76% SC1 Battle.net (116) 14% Battle.net 2.0 (93) 11% 854 total votes Your vote: Which Would You Rather Have (Vote): Battle.net 2.0
(Vote): SC1 Battle.net
(Vote): Warcraft 3 Battle.net
Unless they are holding a lot back.
This is something that people have hoping for so long, but I think it's becoming increasingly clear that they just fucked up. Badly.
Really, really, really badly.
EDIT: Because I'm vain, I'm gonna move this rant from like page 4 to here. Note that ymirheim was talking about the social features specifically and I kinda misunderstood him, but the rant is relevant to the thread anyway.
On May 23 2010 06:20 ymirheim wrote:Show nested quote +On May 23 2010 06:14 Renaissance wrote:On May 23 2010 06:11 MadZ wrote:
it really annoys me to see all this whinning about sc2 BETA. because it is BETA ffs blizzard can change everything about the game at any time. of course i would like to see some changes and thats why i leave CONSTUCTIVE feedback on blizzards forums instead of just go to tl.net and whine because whinning and saying that dustin browder is an idiot isnt gonna get you anywhere!! wait for the game to come out and see what it is like there. if it is s*** then go play broodwar that is still an awesome game and if sc2 turns out to be awesome you can play that.. It may be the beta but the release date is in two months. Everyone has the right to complain at this point. There are some things that Blizzard has totally missed, and even with countless threads on their forums they have yet to do it. Blizzard needs to start listening to users more. No one has the right to complain at this point. Why don't people get it, the client running on your computer, the functionality and features available to you, the functionality of the battlenet infrastructure that is currently running is NOT the prototype running at blizzard headquarters. This is a beta, blizzard is not using it for our pleasure or benefit they are using it because they need our help in identifying bugs and balance issues. They know what things they need this help with and they are only going to provide you with whatever functionality they actually want to get tested. Don't anyone see how ridiculous all of this is? Do you really think that the obvious stuff missing from the beta right now is missing because they are refusing to listen to fan demands? This is a beta, this is not the game, this is whatever part of the game that blizzard needs you to test for them at any given time. The singleplayer campaign is not in the game, in fact not a shred of it is. Are people freaking out about blizzard skipping a singleplayer campaign for this game? Ofcourse not because common sense tells you that there is a campaign, it has probably been finished for some time now. It is not in the beta because blizzard does not want or need us to test it. People make the mistake of thinking that the beta process is some kind of iterative design where the features of the game are slowly added as they get completed until the beta turns into the retail version when everything is done. That is not how a beta works. They don't add stuff to it when it gets completed, they add selected functionality.
This would make sense, if it wasn't for one very simple thing: Blizzard has said that most of the things we are asking for will not be in the game for release.
I don't care what version Blizzard are running in their HQ, hell that version probably even has LAN, that's not something we'll ever get.
Let's look at a list of features we have asked for, and see which ones blizzard have said will be in for relase. I'm not gonna look for sources of these, at least not tonight as I've gotta eat and go to bed.
I'll start out with an obvious one:
LAN
Will not be in the game. It seems that they have even given up on the idea of having a LAN-through-bnet where you would have to authenticate your game before playing on LAN. Their reasons for this have been stupid excuses along the lines of people who want LAN being evil fly-wing-pulling bastards*:, but I guess it's probably piracy related.
* Ok I guess I'm gonna have to source this one, since otherwise nobody will believe me:
-How do you think that the removal of LAN play will affect the game's popularity, especially in tournament situations where you can't have 50 people on one DSL connection, or less-developed areas where broadband is restricted?
The question really is, for us... I feel like broadband is available in a lot of places. Most of our users are already able to connect via broadband, and if you don't have broadband your online gaming experience is probably suffering on its own already. We're trying to create a stronger internet community, to encourage people to play on the internet, which is how it's meant to be played: With achievements, with the matchmaker, with your friends - you can see them if you're logged on wherever you are in the world.
We've found that certainly for us, StarCraft is a vastly superior experience when playing against someone of equal skill as you, and that might not be your friends. It's much, much more fun when you're being matchmade against someone with your skill level, and believe me, that's something we've been working on perfecting in StarCraft II. In the beta, we're still ironing out all the kinks but you almost always feel like you should be matched against somebody of your skill level, who can play at the level you can play at. In StarCraft, if you're playing someone who is better or worse than you, it really loses some of its teeth.
Sure, there'll always be someone who likes beating up on noobs, who likes pulling wings off butterflies, but that's not a fun experience. But by building a huge Battle.net community and bringing it together, we want to get them to play together. That was our goal from the beginning: to have everybody all on the same server, playing as one huge community.
I certainly hear the concerns about it, but it's something we're going to try and see how it goes, first.
Dustin Browder on pulling the wings off butterflies and how it relates to wanting LAN in the game
Clan features
Not at release. Wc3 had them, they were appreciated. SC2 won't have them for release, but hopefully later. Hopefully.
Online replays
Not for release. They "hope to add them later", which is code for "never" seeing as how WC3 has gone its entire life without the feature being added, despite SC having had it since 2001 or thereabouts.
Chat channels
Not for release. I don't know why they can't just hack up something extremely simple as a temporary solution - just let me create a persistant chat which people can freely enter or leave, please!! Bnet is completely desolate without these... Clan channels really made battle.net feel like a community; you'd have your home channel and then you'd go to other channels and meet new people.
It was fun, it's too bad they - by the looks of things - never experienced that, or they'd see the importance of having these, even in their most rudimentary of forms. And I'm not being sarcastic or snide here (unlike a lot of the majority of this post), if all you were exposed to was the "clan x17" type channels, I can understand why you don't see a great need for them to return.
Chat commands
We have /r. That's it. They haven't even commented on this as far as I'm aware.
Customizable hotkeys
"Not for release". Wc3 had this, what's so hard about it? The chinese hacked up a basic hotkey editor (I mean, at the time I think it was basically editing a text file, but they gave it an interface and shit) like.... 3 days after beta was out?
Ladder rankings
I don't know what they've said about this except that they are aware people want to see their rankings. When I first heard about the division system, man, I was excited. I pictured a competitive setting where you'd advance from division to division, with play offs, with tournaments, with everything you can imagine.
Instead we get this "everyone is a winner" bullshit. Yeah, make all the divisions equal, that's fucking awesome. Yeah, make it so that you can't compare your rankings between divisons, that's just great. Oh and while you are at it, why not make it so you can't view anything except YOUR divison. Oh and hey, having divisions go by number is just far too scary when someone gets put in division 500, let's give them random names.
This isn't the fundamental support needed to create a competitive enviornment (which, incidentally, a ladder is), it's KINDERGARTEN. If you are old enough to play SC2, you are old enough to realize that there are people out there who are better than you, and if the shock of discovering this is too much for you, well, you were going to find out sooner or later, at least this way you are unlikely to get physically hurt in the process.
Custom game lobby
Yeah, I'd like one that doesn't suck, please? Hopefully this is some seriously placeholder shit cause right now it's pretty barren. Let's see:
- No way of telling who the host is? Check
- No way of telling ping? Check
- No way of searching? Check
- No way of setting a game name? Check
I just cannot imagine that they are planning on leaving it this way, so for now, I'll let this one slide. I think it's just a really basic version to allow us to use the custom game feature at a very bare-bones level.
Oh and these are somewhat related to custom games, but not the lobby:
- Unable to create password protected games (blizzard, let me tell you, having to invite 6 streamers and their co-casters by typing in their names, is not fun - give me password protected games and let people join by themselves - please).
- Unable to switch map once you've created a game. Really, can't the map selection process be part of the pre-game lobby? I don't get it.
Cross server playability
There is none. There won't be any for release. They don't even have latency as an excuse anymore - I played on US today without battleping, after the TCP to UDP switch, and it's completely smooth. No lag, next to no latency differences from playing on EU.
---------
Let's move on to some less basic things, but that I'd still have hoped would be in a the sequel to their - quite frankly - amazing battle.net platform. Actually, let me stop for a moment first and explain why I think Battle.net was amazing.
A lot of people look at the old SC1 battle.net and deride it as aesthetically unpleasing, or a buggy piece of shit (black list bug, which wasn't really a bug but a "feature" to stop people from trying to spam join game - I miss the bnet days before this was implemented). Or they think of the annoying chain animations present in all of WC3s bnet interface... And yeah, there were problems with Battle.net but it had a couple of things going for it: it was very, very simple and very, very functional.
WaaaghTV/HLTV
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half-Life_TV
http://www.waaaghtv.com/en/news/
WaaaghTV has been around since 2003, and there was even an SC version made not too long ago. Basically, it lets you view live games, from within the game, as if they were a replay. It's a completely lag free way of streaming games, with a built in slight delay, and supports a virtually infinite number of users (as far as I understand it), with next to no bandwidth costs.
This is, again - as far as I understand it, I've not been a huge part of the WC3 community nor the CS one - the premier way of streaming tournament games except for the very biggest ones.
I can understand why this wasn't added - especially given how many essential features were left out, but it still makes me sad that it hasn't even been talked about, not so much as a "maybe in the future". Well, maybe they just want to surprise us with it when they are able to put work into it, it's not totally impossible.
Tournaments
WC3 had automated tournaments right from the start, I'm not sure what they've said about them for SC2. I had always assumed they would be in there, now I dunno 
On May 23 2010 06:52 HalfAmazing wrote:
Battle.net 2.0 is literally worse than WarCraft III's battle.net in every imaginable way. Not a troll, not hyperbole, not exagerrating in the slightest. It is worse. In every possible way. It is more cumbersome, less efficient, less transparent, more isolated, less secure (privacy concerns) and lacking in very basic functionality. If somehow you guys think that because it's a BETA it has a right to be this bad, you are delusional. This is really fucking close to the final product, and NOBODY likes it.
I'd go as far as to say that battle.net 2.0 being as crappy as it is, will actually spike an increase in piracy. Any kind of hacker-designed multiplayer service presented as an alternative to bnet 2.0 is going to provide a more enjoyable multiplayer experience.
You are wrong. There is one advantage of Bnet 2.0 over WC3s Bnet.
There are no chain anmations 
More seriously tho, I completely agree, and I'll openly say that while I will buy the game, and any expansion that is made, unless things start improving, I'll be jumping at the first privately run ladder I see.
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They seem to want to create someone too complicated
Heroes of Newerth has a simple interface and no one complained about it, it was easy to use and had CHAT ROOMS while in beta... imagine how hard they must of worked
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The more I deal with it, the more I realize how clunky and useless -2.0 is. There are 2 things I want bnet for. Play games, and figure out who I'm playing. Right now, I cant get into bnet, (and thus cant do number one) but even when I get in, its a bi*** to find out the rank and relative skill level of my opponent. Match history should have the division and rank of your opponent visible.
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On May 23 2010 05:45 FrozenArbiter wrote:This is something that people have hoping for so long, but I think it's becoming increasingly clear that they just fucked up. Badly. Really, really, really badly.
Gotta agree with this. As the patches came out, I've been trying harder and harder to hold on to the hope that all of the things we want are actually finished and they've been holding them back. The hope is getting harder to hold onto. With Patch 13 and the stupid friend system, lag, non-unique names, and other terrible things they've done, my hope is pretty much gone.
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On May 23 2010 05:45 FrozenArbiter wrote:This is something that people have hoping for so long, but I think it's becoming increasingly clear that they just fucked up. Badly. Really, really, really badly.
It's gonna be a mess to clean up b-net 2.0 after the release Also i totally agree with op and you should post this on the blizz bnet forums
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I agree with PaD; what they're trying to do is way too complicated and useless.
I mean, when I first logged on, I was stunned to find that race selection was in the multiplayer menu. Really? What happened to picking your race in the lobby? Did they really, really need to actually go to lengths to ensure that people don't switch races during countdown?
And then there's the loading screen, which is long and it doesn't give you any countdown for the actual start of the game, so for the whole of the loading time I'm forced to concentrate over the keyboard and mouse like I'm doing some sort of reflex test. Because that's what it is! And the reason why it turns out like this, is because they painstakingly put the countdown before the loading screen, in the bnet2.0 interface.
It's just, ugh, little things that make the system really unweldy and uncomfortable to use. I love the match making system in place (one of the big put-offs of iccup was that I'd run into way the heck too many smurfs and it's really not fun playing clearly superior players) and so and so, but there're so many issues around ~_~
Edit:
On May 23 2010 05:48 Two_DoWn wrote:
Match history should have the division and rank of your opponent visible.
That's one of the little things that bothers me, too. I can't sort match history by date, so I end up with this discombobulated list of games played in random points. The replay list is like that, too. I just have like 40 replays all named Twilight Fortress etc. etc. and it's ridiculous having to find which one is the one I just played.
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On May 23 2010 05:47 PaD wrote:
They seem to want to create someone too complicated
Heroes of Newerth has a simple interface and no one complained about it, it was easy to use and had CHAT ROOMS while in beta... imagine how hard they must of worked
It really makes me sick to my stomach to keep hearing people sport the belief that the reason blizz didn't put in chat is because they can't, don't have time/know-how.
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Well I have to admit that before this most recent patch things were running fairly smoothly and i was content with what there was. Achievements and portraits can be fun, but are not the right priority as you said. What I'm getting at is that in my mind they just needed to put in the chat rooms, and some sort of clan system maybe, and then in my eyes it would've been pretty good. Though I would like a change with the leagues and divisions and whatnot, changing that to just a global ladder. I think your points are clear and I'd also agree with PaD, where HoN actually had a really basic and pretty good interface. Maybe blizzard needs some lessons xD.
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I just ignore all the crying over no Chat Rooms. I have a feeling the reason they are not in right now is because they are too easy to implement and test that they can wait until the last minute or even release to put them in. Because of that, they are forcing us to test things that they know wouldn't be tested if everything they had in store was all available.
Give it time...have faith. Blizzard hasn't released a bad game before (in my opinion) and I wouldn't even think this would be the first.
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I'm really worried, that the deadline is so close and well as you described, they haven't hit the nail yet. It's like when you have a project do next morning and you start at 11 pm the day before. I hope they can get their stuff together and pull it off with success. Or at least they could extend the beta. To make sure the game is as good as it can be. Almost everyone has a beta key so it wouldn't be so bad if they did this.
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lets hope when beta goes down they fix this shitstain that is bnet 2.0 and hopefully balance the game also.
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Warcraft 3 battle net is definitely a lot better than the current battle net 2.0. I did not pay attention to what was happening with starcraft 2 much at all until the beta, so I didnt know it was delay to make this battle net 2.0. That's really a disappointment.
Really all the Warcraft 3 battlenet needed was an easy way for friends to join the same custom game, instead of trying to remember how many explanation points was in the "FOOTY FRENZY 4.23 -ar!!!!!!"
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Look at the Client right now: they integrate a payment system, combined with the webshop, ppl will need to pay for battle-net access in the future, if you pay for something you want comfort and features, they implement this now
there is nothing complicated, its a beta and they want to earn money with the b-net in the future...
of course they will implement chatrooms and stuff, but its useless now at this state
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*sigh* come on blizzard. WoW never needed a facebook integration, why would starcraft 2? =(
Well they still have 2 months to get their act together. I'm hoping that they start prioritizing better =\
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Battle.net 2.0 took many years to make and quite frankly, I'm disappointed. I was expecting something awesome like Steam/Battle.net without the bad stuff. Instead it's some glitched up, sloppy interface lacking simple yet important features, and with new features that do not seem to work correctly.
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On May 23 2010 05:52 jewce wrote:
Well I have to admit that before this most recent patch things were running fairly smoothly and i was content with what there was. Achievements and portraits can be fun, but are not the right priority as you said. What I'm getting at is that in my mind they just needed to put in the chat rooms, and some sort of clan system maybe, and then in my eyes it would've been pretty good. Though I would like a change with the leagues and divisions and whatnot, changing that to just a global ladder. I think your points are clear and I'd also agree with PaD, where HoN actually had a really basic and pretty good interface. Maybe blizzard needs some lessons xD.
I think maybe what I said was a bit wrong or rather put across wrong.
Bells and whistles can be nice. But get the core of your product working well before adding stuff that makes it more complicated.
Its much easier to fix something simple than to try and fix something complicated.
Things like achievements and portraits aren't bad things but making sure the product does what it is supposed to do in the first place should be the priority. i.e. allowing people to play Starcraft 2 over the internet with other people from around the world with low latency, in a cheat free environment etc etc.
Adding achievements is fine but you better make damn sure the fundamentals of the product work to perfection before you start adding things that don't necessarily add value.
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On May 23 2010 05:51 Southlight wrote:
I mean, when I first logged on, I was stunned to find that race selection was in the multiplayer menu. Really? What happened to picking your race in the lobby? Did they really, really need to actually go to lengths to ensure that people don't switch races during countdown?
And then there's the loading screen, which is long and it doesn't give you any countdown for the actual start of the game, so for the whole of the loading time I'm forced to concentrate over the keyboard and mouse like I'm doing some sort of reflex test. Because that's what it is! And the reason why it turns out like this, is because they painstakingly put the countdown before the loading screen, in the bnet2.0 interface.
there is nothing wrong with race selection, and you can change race during countdown,, and there is countdown.. first you whine about it, then you complain?
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EPT
