The state of Battle.net 2.0 - Page 10

On May 23 2010 09:08 chuDr3t4 wrote:

No.

On May 23 2010 08:11 Illison wrote:
In-reply to OP

You have to understand Blizzard's player base to understand why they would add in achievements, and facebook integration. The majority of sales aren't going to come from people who read TL, it isn't going to come from people who are the top notch players of the world. It is going to come from regular gamers, past gamers of Starcraft and gamers of any other blizzard game. I think its pretty easy to understand why they would "focus" or at least have their battle.net x2 team focus on facebook integration and achievements.

On May 23 2010 09:32 Ideas wrote:
i feel like im one of the only people who benefitted from facebook stuff lol. I logged on and had 4 of my friends suggested to me so i didnt have to re-add them, and then i found out 1 more of my friends just got beta and we played a few games immediately lol.

that aside, I can't wait till SC2 ICCUP. seriously the ladder in SC2 is so garbage :\

On May 23 2010 09:32 Ideas wrote:
i feel like im one of the only people who benefitted from facebook stuff lol. I logged on and had 4 of my friends suggested to me so i didnt have to re-add them, and then i found out 1 more of my friends just got beta and we played a few games immediately lol.

that aside, I can't wait till SC2 ICCUP. seriously the ladder in SC2 is so garbage :\

On May 23 2010 05:36 Necrosjef wrote:
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.

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.

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.


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:

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


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.