Battle.net 2.0 Concerns - StarCraft Legacy

Within the community, the restricted discussion is most readily apparent across the various fan sites and community boards. We've all observed the flavor of the week posts, where Poster A finds an imbalanced, missing, or incomplete feature and the entire community works itself up into a frenzy; Posters B through Z agree, or "/sign", and we all sit around congratulating ourselves on our amazing deductive abilities while subsequently faulting Blizzard for their lack of intelligence. Rarely, does anything constructive result from this process and all too often does it repeat itself. While nuggets of important information can likely be found in these posts, the manner in which they are created and the cycle they perpetuate does not help the community and does not help the development of StarCraft II. As a community, we need to be more respectful of Blizzard and each other. We need to demand more from each other. We have the knowledge and the ability to be helpful toward impacting the success of our beloved game positively. But this outcome entails focusing on explanations and solutions. Feedback on many of the issues important to us needs to be more than pointing out the flaws. Being able to convey our thoughts maturely and constructively demonstrates to Blizzard that, aside for our extensive experience, there are other reasons why we deserve to be taken seriously. Remember, our demographic isn't the only target-audience. For the vast majority of us, a sale is already assured. There's a sense of misplaced entitlement in the community. While we have a vested interest in the game and experience, we aren't "owed" anything. We have to do our best to stay relevant for the journey; it is the only way to positively affect real change. While the community's issue stems from our limited experience with an unfinished product coupled with our desire to be both relevant and have a game worthy of our treasured history, Blizzard's issue with groupthink is slightly different and bit more complicated.

Blizzard's problem is twofold. Firstly, they have tasked themselves with following up a universally adored game and reinventing the entire online gaming experience in the process. This has led to expectations that cannot be met. Without adequate communication to the fan base, the result is disappointment in various shades. To be fair, during the development of StarCraft II Blizzard has been the most open and transparent that they have ever been regarding one of their games. We have been granted Q&A Batches, Battle Reports, and fan site press events. These were incredible, and they helped energize the base. However, Battle.net - the platform upon which the entire system had to run - was kept secret. Obviously, there are many reasons why Blizzard chose to do this. The issue is that Blizzard has promised to revolutionize every aspect of the online RTS experience and failed to account for their limited experiences in many of the areas required for a polished online experience. Their product remains unfinished and flawed. Without engaging the community, with all of our various talents and experiences, in an open dialogue they relied exclusively on their in-house tunnel vision. This isn't to say that there isn't great debate and discussion in-house regarding the various aspects of the game or the service, but rather that there is no outside dissent. This is readily apparent when you read or watch any of the various interviews with the game designers, producers, or officers. They seem woefully out of touch with what the community is really interested in. The exclusion of chat channels is just one example.

The expectations were set high with StarCraft

Time and time again we see a developer or a producer ask us if the feature is something we really want. Either our thunderous outcry is being communicated inadequately or the decision-makers inside Blizzard are too insulated. Blizzard's isolated stance in conjunction with the tightly controlled message exemplifies groupthink, and this brings us to the second issue regarding the phenomenon: Blizzard is perhaps a victim of its own success. In many regards, they looked on a very high-level at what they have produced in the past and used that as their basis to move forward. To some extent they must feel that they know what is best, and it is evident from some of the interviews that they are in fact "telling" us what we want. A certain amount of "we know what you want" is noticeable. Realistically, while Blizzard has its own vision and desires for Battle.net 2.0 they can't possibly tell what we want. Now, granted that they aren't catering Battle.net just to us, but our concerns should probably still be addressed. It's just good business.

When people have spent years of their lives working on something very specific, tunnel vision is inevitable. Sometimes that works; look at many of the other products Blizzard has created without outside consultation. However, for many of the things that Blizzard and the community want to accomplish with StarCraft II, an open dialogue is important. This is where Blizzard has missed the proverbial bus. Despite the fact that our feedback could be communicated more effectively, they haven't yet figured out how to best receive and evaluate it.

Traditionally, Blizzard Entertainment has developed games quietly. They were characterized as a disengaged, aloof developer, yet they planned, implemented, and supported games reliably. Marketing and public relations has always been a component of Blizzard, but fan sites have largely been excluded from this. Up until the creation of Blizzard's RTS Community Team in the summer of 2007, community sites were largely ignored by the Public Relations department. In the decade preceding the announcement of the sequel, with the exception of the Sandlot Tournament, we were a dismissed demographic. The PR team judged us to be a superfluous extension of their success. We were never engaged despite our best efforts while general gaming publications and traditional news outlets were granted access to which we had traditionally been shut out of. It is only in recent years that we've been recognized as an important part of the overall target market.

On June 11 2010 07:03 LordofAscension wrote:
Thanks for the feedback guys! We have some more stuff in the works but we knew we had to push this one out ASAP.

~LoA

On June 11 2010 08:36 Takkara wrote:
No offense meant, but it's already posted and discussed in this thread:
http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=128014&currentpage=109

Probably best to keep things all together. If this deserves it's own thread also, then this link can serve as a "cross-post" of the conversation that happened regarding it.

On June 11 2010 08:36 Takkara wrote:
No offense meant, but it's already posted and discussed in this thread:
http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=128014&currentpage=109

Probably best to keep things all together. If this deserves it's own thread also, then this link can serve as a "cross-post" of the conversation that happened regarding it.

On June 11 2010 08:56 Archerofaiur wrote:


Starcraft Legacy's work wasnt really getting the recognition it deserved in that thread. I included it there so that people looking for info could find related material.

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.

On June 12 2010 04:11 Madkipz wrote:


wait what? there has been multiple turnaments during the beta uptime. WHAT ARE YOU SMOKEING, just because blizzard wants a piece of the turnament cake does not mean it should come at the cost of chat channels, cross realm accounts and Lan. A solid foundation for gamers and hardcore pros to play on is better than an unstreamed community event, held by blizzard.

People are up in arms because they where initially presented with a bnet 2.0 that had chat channels and expected it to be in the finished product, infact Dustin claimed they could implement it within a day or two.

Your basically saying: Blizzard have said they will implement it eventually.

What you forget is that your oppinion in the matter counts for shit. Rather than stand stubbornly on your own you should as a consumer follow the hardcore communty, you need to thread the bridge towards a greater divine where your voice is one of thousands so the matter builds up vocal support rather than simply being something the "hardcore elitists want."

As a consumer, if you want a perfect game you will have to complain or they will keep half assing it untill the world riots in disbelief.

On June 12 2010 07:35 Dionyseus wrote:
I haven't finished reading the article but what I've read so far appears well written, however I just came across something I strongly disagree with and it's your solution to the identifier problem. I hate the idea of allowing your character name to be copied by whoever, not only does it destroy the feeling of uniqueness but it makes things confusing when you aren't sure who exactly it is that you are playing against, or even who the players are in a replay.

The solution I support is one in which there's just a unique character name, no identifier. It solves all the problems listed above. Yes I realize that this creates the problem of not being able to call yourself Superman once someone has taken the name, but that's a finder's keepers looser's weepers situation which I find fair, if you badly want to name your character Superman then you should get the name before anyone else does.

And all this talk about us being 0.1% of community... the threads about bnet 2.0 have like 200,000 views. That's still a lot even if it's non-unique viewers. Also, we're the ones who keep buying blizzard products for years to come; not the guy who buys it once and then goes back to xbox.

On June 13 2010 10:18 telfire wrote:


Thanks for proving my point and demonstrating how unrealistic the mindset of you guys really is.

200,000 is about 0.02% of the community, assuming that 200,000 is actually 200,000 (more like 25k tops) and assuming Bliz sells 10 million copies (I honestly believe they'll sell twice that, easy).

You got me, I was wrong. The group of people crying about chat is not even remotely close to the 0.1% I guesstimated.

On June 13 2010 11:24 telfire wrote:
Unrealistic is the widespread expectation that chat and other minor features should be implemented before release, and the generally selfish attitude of almost every post I've seen about Battle.net 2. If you're truly just making suggestions, that's fine I guess, but that is certainly not the tone of the majority of posts.

Also, it seems a bit odd to be continuing to "make suggestions" at this point (considering those suggestions are the same ones voiced repeatedly, we all have seen them, if you think Bliz hasn't you're crazy). Blizzard has made clear statements to nearly every problem anyone has cited with Battle.net (with the exception of LAN, and I will say no LAN is a real shame, but nothing to boycott an amazing game over). They said they are going to fix it. So why are people still complaining about it? Everything they can do, they've done. They let us know they're working on the stuff.

On June 13 2010 11:24 telfire wrote:I realize private/clan chat rooms would definitely be an exception to this, and I do think chat should be added eventually, I just recognize that it's not a top priority or nearly as big a deal as people make it out to be. It's not as simple as "chat should be added". You have to weigh it against what they would spend their time on instead. Chat or tournaments? Chat or a stable network that doesn't crash all the time?

When you say "it's not as big of a deal as people make it out to be" I can see your point. As you can notice in one of my previous posts, I elude to the theory that if a person who complains about chat channels finally gets it so that chat channels comes before tournaments, but later realizes they would rather have tournaments... is this something they would truly be happy with? I understand the response to this would be mixed, but I think that the average person doesn't realize that to gain progress in one feature, it will ultimately pull resources from another one.

On June 14 2010 02:09 StarStruck wrote:
So you rehashed all the important info you found and put it in one place.

I would get straight to the point though. As a beat writer you should never beat around the bush. That and your article is way too wordy. I would tone it down a bit. On the bright side, you give the developers something easier for them to look at.

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.

Perhaps a corporate license version of the game can be created by Blizzard, and it could be sold to organizers and companies running major tournaments. This version of the game could include the LAN functionality while disabling Battle.net functionality and features in all forms. The risk of software pirates getting ahold of this corporate license version and duplicating it is valid. However, they would be prevented from interacting with the mainstream of users. There is very little a user can do with a LAN-only game. If a LAN-based option continues to be excluded, there may be adverse affects to the development of e-sports.

The Achilles heel with the direction of Battle.net 2.0 is Blizzard's responsibility to deliver dependable service for tournament play. If this is possible, then the removal of LAN can be justified. The results are currently looking grim, and they are leading to speculation that the competitive scene will suffer. Time will tell the effectiveness of Battle.net. Recently, players have been reporting very positive experiences with Battle.net 2.0 in LAN-like settings, using the "always connected" experience. Further optimization is planned for beta patches, release, and beyond.