Battle.net 2.0 Concerns - StarCraft Legacy - Page 2

On June 11 2010 16:09 telfire wrote:
While I understand that these are features a lot of people want, no one seems to understand that MOST people do not care about these features. That doesn't mean you should be ignored but it does mean they have more pressing concerns they should deal with first. No matter what order they choose to do things in people are going to complain.

Personally I'm quite glad gameplay comes first to them. Gameplay is more important than Battle.net by a massively wide margin, absolutely no question. If you disagree with that statement, fine, don't buy the game. Most people buy a game for the game itself, not social networking features. And make no mistake, the things people want -- chatting and clans -- are just as much "social networking" as the Facebook integration (which for the record probably didn't take a single developer more than 1 day to implement).

Bottom line: Stuff takes time to make, Blizzard can either use that time and wait to release the game a few more years, or they can release it now and continue to work on it over the next few years. Personally I prefer the ladder. People seem to think there's some mystical 3rd option of get the fairies to use their pixie dust and magically add these features to Battle.net, but that simply isn't reality. Stuff takes time. End of story.

We waited 10 years, and I'm not waiting 10 more because something like 0.1% of the people who are going to buy it want chat. You will get your chat and clans. It just isn't their first priority, and I agree with that decision.

On June 11 2010 16:09 telfire wrote:
While I understand that these are features a lot of people want, no one seems to understand that MOST people do not care about these features. That doesn't mean you should be ignored but it does mean they have more pressing concerns they should deal with first. No matter what order they choose to do things in people are going to complain.

Personally I'm quite glad gameplay comes first to them. Gameplay is more important than Battle.net by a massively wide margin, absolutely no question. If you disagree with that statement, fine, don't buy the game. Most people buy a game for the game itself, not social networking features. And make no mistake, the things people want -- chatting and clans -- are just as much "social networking" as the Facebook integration (which for the record probably didn't take a single developer more than 1 day to implement).

Bottom line: Stuff takes time to make, Blizzard can either use that time and wait to release the game a few more years, or they can release it now and continue to work on it over the next few years. Personally I prefer the ladder. People seem to think there's some mystical 3rd option of get the fairies to use their pixie dust and magically add these features to Battle.net, but that simply isn't reality. Stuff takes time. End of story.

We waited 10 years, and I'm not waiting 10 more because something like 0.1% of the people who are going to buy it want chat. You will get your chat and clans. It just isn't their first priority, and I agree with that decision.

On June 11 2010 18:31 setzer wrote:
First, Blizzard has separate development teams for SC2 and Bnet. They work independently of each other and generally only Chris Sigaty and Dustin Browder communicate between each team. The same goes for their esport team.

Second, we waited 12 years to get a good game AND a good platform, not a good game marred by a haphazard platform that noone enjoys playing on. There have been multiple polls where people that show over 90% of people dislike bnet and the direction Blizzard has gone with bnet.

Chat channels and clan channels are only two of the features Blizzard has decided to not implement. If these features are not the top priority of the bnet team, then what is? Their entire goal is to provide an enjoyable platform for all levels of players. They have completely failed this goal.

On June 11 2010 19:07 imbecile wrote:
I think the two most pressing problems are the ones of player ID/account management and crossplatform/connectivity. Because those are basic architechture decisions that are not easy to change after the fact. Chat channels, tournament systems and ladder modes, all this can be changed and added later relatively easy.

Here my take on it:

A player ID must provide ways to account for region, clan, public player short name, and unique qualifier. Something like [@region.][clan|]name[>qualifier]

The only parts that are required in the db are region (which can be 1,2,3 or e,u,a) and name. Qualifier is set, if name already exists. Clan is a separate key, and are created at clan creation, and can be assigned by a clan leader (the clan creator by default).

When using the IDs, several parts can be omitted usually, like region, which defaults to current, or the qualifier, if the clan/name combination is unique already in that region. Really great would be some kind of tab completion for names within a clan.

Every battle net account should be able to have multiple player IDs, for using different races and being in different regions. They might even chose to sell that, but please spare us from having multiple installs and pay full price for each. Smurfing can be limited by weighing the initial placement after the placement matches of additional IDs in an account by the placement of the other accounts.

I personally have no problem with localized leagues and divisions. That's how professional sport leagues are organized too. But there should exist a cross region champions league for which you need to qualify. And every league and division should have at least it's own chat channels (public and for members only) to get some sort of community, and maybe even rivalry within a league.

For connectivity: Since it is a client server protocol, and it won't change at this point anymore, Blizzard should really consider to offer a "Starcraft e-sport edition" server software package to interested parties like ESL and Kespa, or active clans and event organizers. Big support contracts connected to that optionally. Those act as proxies and cache to battle.net, but reduce lag for games within them and offer a degree of autonomy for the 3rd parties. Blizzard wouldn't want to concern itself anyway with day to day league and event management.

The small lan party would still be forced to their region connectivity, but that train has passed I think.

On June 12 2010 00:09 telfire wrote:

Your point? Bliz still has to allocate their time and resources.


You are severely, SEVERELY overestimating the amount of people who even care about this stuff. The polls are taken on hardcore gaming websites. That is not representative of the gaming community at ALL. It is representative of the hardcore gaming community, which is a tiny, tiny fraction of the entire gaming community. A fraction that has a tendency to wrongly think it's more important than everyone else.


They haven't failed anything. The game isn't even out yet, and even when it's out it won't be finished. They have already stated that every major point is going to be addressed. They have already stated that they simply cannot do it by release; they have too much on their plate. What more do you want? What you're demanding is IMPOSSIBLE. Again, there's no fairies with pixie dust to make these features magically appear. They take time, planning, design, coding, testing, more coding, and more testing.

The bottom line is Blizzard has what they have. And that is a FANTASTIC game (almost no one argues that) wrapped in an extremely good network (some will argue that, but I and my friends have found it more than adequate; again the thing gamers actually care about is the GAME). At this point, there are less than 2 months to launch. It's too late for just about anything that doesn't already exist to exist by that point. They have already repeatedly acknowledged they regret that they disappointed the community, but there's absolutely nothing that can be done at this point except to work on it and get it out as soon as they can, which is what they are doing!

And yet the community keeps beating this dead horse, demanding the impossible, and insulting the company when all in all they've created the best RTS of all time. No one else has ever done a better job in the history of the entire world. Certainly not any of the people who are complaining the loudest.

Even having created the best video game of all time, they still have recognized things they didn't do quite perfectly, and apologized to the community for it, which is more than I've seen from literally any other video game company ever. And yet people keep complaining and chastising them. It would suck to be the best in the world at something. Everyone holds you to impossible, ridiculous, insane standards.

Dustin Browder: It's not gonna happen with the launch, it's just a production issue and we don't have the time to do it at this point. We disappointed our fans, that is a huge bummer, right, and that is never a goal we intentionally pursue, but it's not gonna happen for launch at this point. We simply got too much polish left to do on the rest of the game to also get that in. And we certainly hear that from some of the players but a lot of players are also enjoying Battle.Net quite a bit at this point. So, we surely hear the people's need for additional features that we don't have and we definitely keep working on those down the road. We've got what we've got for launch at this point and it doesn't include chat channels.

For example, they stated that their first planned patch would be the tournament patch with Chatrooms following. (This information was presented on April 19th, which may have already shifted because of community awareness they brought forward). The community focuses on "We don't have chat channels, we need them!", but in doing so trade off tournaments, which is the entire reason we need to strive to be number one to eight in the divisions

On June 12 2010 03:08 Gifted wrote:
[Important note: For people who don't know who me, I am one of the key contributers to the research and content of this article.]

It sounds like your suggestion is very much aligned to what we suggested in our article. The only thing that truly is different at points is terminology, as we decided for example to use the idea of "Character.Account" which would "feel ok" across multiple games, not just StarCraft II, because it's the terminology they've used so far.. (Which is what the scope of the decision needs to expand on)


To further build up upon your point is some interesting things to consider.

First, Dustin Browder's quote from our article existed MONTHS ago, so months ago they knew they didn't have the adequate resources to put features (such as Chat Channels in this example)

Source: http://sclegacy.com/articles/730-battlenet-20-concerns#When Will Chatrooms Arrive?

Ultimately what I think is a fundamental flaw in the community mindset is one simple point. We have to be realistic with time, it is not a resource we can pull out of nowhere. Trying to rage and bring up a concern about battle.net will not enable it to be created any faster as the process will still take the same amount of time regardless. What it WILL do is ensure that Blizzard can recognize their current choices in priority and possibly change them to reorder what features are planned at what times.

For example, they stated that their first planned patch would be the tournament patch with Chatrooms following. (This information was presented on April 19th, which may have already shifted because of community awareness they brought forward). The community focuses on "We don't have chat channels, we need them!", but in doing so trade off tournaments, which is the entire reason we need to strive to be number one to eight in the divisions. If Blizzard came out with a poll asking "Would you rather have group/chat first, or would you rather have tournaments?", then suddenly the community is feeling the same pressure and decisions that Blizzard has to identify. Blizzard isn't HOLDING chat channels back, it's merely handling priorities.

Not insulting the community at all, but do you think the majority of people who cry out "chat channels" (For example) realize that by doing so could prioritize chat higher than tournaments, which gives potential worth to e-sports, divisions and whatnot? (EDIT: And regarding that, which do you think people would give a higher priority if given the chance... the ability to build the game play and put "worth" to the top of a division, or the ability to chat with people randomly which is achievable by communities such as SC:L and TL.net, friends list and IM chat for now. Both features are definitely coming, the question is, which would you rather have first?)

Some thoughts to consider overall, I'd be interested in seeing more responses.

It would suck to be the best in the world at something. Everyone holds you to impossible, ridiculous, insane standards.

On June 12 2010 08:41 anImaru wrote:
But how would cross realm play get implemented? The current gateway system wouldn't work. Blizzard got rid of LAN partially to deal with 3rd party platforms connecting bootlegged copies through LAN and if you still have the current gateway system these companies can just create a gateway like iCCup to get around the lack of LAN instead.