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.
Show nested quote +On May 23 2010 06:20 ymirheim wrote: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:
LANWill 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:
Show nested quote +
-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 gameClan featuresNot at release. Wc3 had them, they were appreciated. SC2 won't have them for release, but hopefully later. Hopefully.
Online replaysNot 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 channelsNot 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 commandsWe 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 rankingsI 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 lobbyYeah, 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 playabilityThere 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.
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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/HLTVhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half-Life_TVhttp://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.
TournamentsWC3 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
Show nested quote +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.
EPT
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