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On June 17 2010 18:46 Half wrote:Show nested quote +On June 17 2010 18:38 nyshak wrote:On June 17 2010 09:57 Half wrote:
The issue is that we need to draw the line at "Monetizing stuff we've had for free for fifteen years with the game". This assumes that providing said service today comes with the cost of yesterday. Not always the case given increased player base etc. So no. This assumes that development costs need to directly reflect sales points. In which case we'd all be paying 200$ for Starcraft 2 right now. (hint: They don't because the market has grown, l2economics kid) The only relevancy is profit margin and development costs. Starcraft 2 is estimated to make 6 million in a year, development costs estimated at 60 million. That means it recoups investment three folds over from 60$ per copy sold. I can actually come up with legitimate, not completely retarded moronic arguments for why they could charge for this. I'm not going to though. Why would I? (hint: Nothing you guys said is even remotely true) Show nested quote +
So when they say 'we' the implication that they have anything to do with the decision making process is bogus... got it.
Why on earth would you have the impression that Community Managers designed the game?
l2economics kid? Wee, I feel enlightened now. Blizz is looking at their profit margin and reducing a feature that implies tremendous amount of ongoing costs. Sure, in bizarro world everything is easy, hardware is basically free, you don't have to support said hardware with x amount of technicians etc. etc. SC2 is not SC1 period. The amount of people playing SC2 will likely rival that of WC3, SC1, D1 and D2 combined. So your asking that Blizzard maintains the service to these games (which is highly unprofitable already) plus SC2. For free. By the same logic if once that guy gave you a ball of ice cream for free, he has to keep it that way forever. Even if the hole neighborhood of kids is swarming him now, because hey, its free ice cream.
Besides, nothings for sure at this point. We don't know if Blizz is going to charge for any extra features.
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I'm not too worried about online play, if bnet doesn't get the job done, iccup will surely open up a server of their own!
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On June 17 2010 20:17 uberdeluxe wrote:
I'm not too worried about online play, if bnet doesn't get the job done, iccup will surely open up a server of their own!
Yeah apparently with their new TOS or EULA (from what I heard), iccup won't have a chance. Can't modify/edit/touch etc.. etc... I'll never say never, but blizzard will probably be on top of that.
Now on the other hand, when someone leaks the Pro version of starcraft 2 (lan compatible version) and modify it for public use, that will be something to look forward to  .
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Sweden33719 Posts
On June 17 2010 17:38 spinesheath wrote:
My bet: It'll cost you a monthly fee and thus in the long run you'll pay more than what you would have spent on another copy of the game.
The other possibility is that it'll only cost you once and less than a full copy of the game. But from that quote it doesn't sound like there is a chance that it will be free.
If that turns out to be the case, I actually genuinely would quit SC2 and not buy any of the expansions.
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Russian Federation410 Posts
On June 17 2010 20:54 FrozenArbiter wrote:Show nested quote +On June 17 2010 17:38 spinesheath wrote:
My bet: It'll cost you a monthly fee and thus in the long run you'll pay more than what you would have spent on another copy of the game.
The other possibility is that it'll only cost you once and less than a full copy of the game. But from that quote it doesn't sound like there is a chance that it will be free. If that turns out to be the case, I actually genuinely would quit SC2 and not buy any of the expansions.
Not if it's like $4.99/month, which sounds reasonable. Plus, you gotta admit that they didn't develop that billing system and all the rest of it to suit the poor Russian and S.American gamers, - gotta use it.
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I just wish they came out straight and just ADMITTED that they want to get some extra cash.
Pretending that there are "technical difficulties", but "we will look into it" is just pathetic
I hate all this political correctness BS.
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There is absolutely 0 chance it's a per-month fee. 0. It would completely destroy their business model. It's awfully hard to be the only RTS on the market that charges a monthly fee. Blizzard isn't dumb, and if they're as greedy as everyone says, they wouldn't risk losing the customers.
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On June 17 2010 20:20 Merikh wrote:Show nested quote +On June 17 2010 20:17 uberdeluxe wrote:
I'm not too worried about online play, if bnet doesn't get the job done, iccup will surely open up a server of their own! Yeah apparently with their new TOS or EULA (from what I heard), iccup won't have a chance. Can't modify/edit/touch etc.. etc... I'll never say never, but blizzard will probably be on top of that.
Iccup was always illegal. Changes in TOS haven't changed anything in this respect.
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On June 17 2010 18:38 nyshak wrote:Show nested quote +On June 17 2010 09:57 Half wrote:
The issue is that we need to draw the line at "Monetizing stuff we've had for free for fifteen years with the game". This assumes that providing said service today comes with the cost of yesterday. Not always the case given increased player base etc. So no.
SC1 has had over 100,000 people on B.Net before, its actually no excuse at all. What is even the difference to them if i connect to the Euro or US server like i do in SC1? They pay for the bandwidth one way or another (although why should we be caring about bandwidth costs for a company offering multiplayer gaming, its never come up with another game). They say its the region pricing thats a problem, except why exactly is that a problem? Have the accounts tie across servers, someone who pays monthly should be allowed to play on any server and someone who doesn't should. There's no technical problem here its complete bullshit.
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On June 17 2010 20:15 nyshak wrote:
Blizz is looking at their profit margin and reducing a feature that implies tremendous amount of ongoing costs.
How does allowing me to log on to either the NA or the EU server cost them any money? It's not like I log into both at the same time and it's not like EU servers do not cost anything for upkeep (or require no technicians etc).
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On June 17 2010 21:38 Meff wrote:Show nested quote +On June 17 2010 20:15 nyshak wrote:
Blizz is looking at their profit margin and reducing a feature that implies tremendous amount of ongoing costs. How does allowing me to log on to either the NA or the EU server cost them any money? It's not like I log into both at the same time and it's not like EU servers do not cost anything for upkeep (or require no technicians etc).
Because in SC2 world unlike SC1 world you keep a large amount of persistent, region-specific state with you. It was never intended for people to cross region boundaries, therefore a region-lock. It's a non-trivial amount of development to find solutions around the technical issues of the system they've established. You can say "BUT SC1 HAD IT IN THE STONE AGE?!" all day but it doesn't change the fundamental fact that SC1 != SC2.
All that being said, there's still no clear evidence they'd charge for it quite yet. There's a decent shot they find a good solution and just enable it on all clients. It's just that unlike chat channels it just seems from the outside to be ripe for a fee. Not the least of which because it reminds people of WoW server transfers.
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Sweden33719 Posts
On June 17 2010 21:10 Go0g3n wrote:Show nested quote +On June 17 2010 20:54 FrozenArbiter wrote:On June 17 2010 17:38 spinesheath wrote:
My bet: It'll cost you a monthly fee and thus in the long run you'll pay more than what you would have spent on another copy of the game.
The other possibility is that it'll only cost you once and less than a full copy of the game. But from that quote it doesn't sound like there is a chance that it will be free. If that turns out to be the case, I actually genuinely would quit SC2 and not buy any of the expansions. Not if it's like $4.99/month, which sounds reasonable. Plus, you gotta admit that they didn't develop that billing system and all the rest of it to suit the poor Russian and S.American gamers, - gotta use it.
No, if they charge monthly for global play I will not buy this game, there is no such thing as a reasonable fee for this.
Because in SC2 world unlike SC1 world you keep a large amount of persistent, region-specific state with you. It was never intended for people to cross region boundaries, therefore a region-lock. It's a non-trivial amount of development to find solutions around the technical issues of the system they've established. You can say "BUT SC1 HAD IT IN THE STONE AGE?!" all day but it doesn't change the fundamental fact that SC1 != SC2.
I don't care if I can't bring my EU achievments to the US server - just let me create a separate account on each server lol
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On June 17 2010 21:33 infinity2k9 wrote:Show nested quote +On June 17 2010 18:38 nyshak wrote:On June 17 2010 09:57 Half wrote:
The issue is that we need to draw the line at "Monetizing stuff we've had for free for fifteen years with the game". This assumes that providing said service today comes with the cost of yesterday. Not always the case given increased player base etc. So no. SC1 has had over 100,000 people on B.Net before, its actually no excuse at all. What is even the difference to them if i connect to the Euro or US server like i do in SC1? They pay for the bandwidth one way or another (although why should we be caring about bandwidth costs for a company offering multiplayer gaming, its never come up with another game). They say its the region pricing thats a problem, except why exactly is that a problem? Have the accounts tie across servers, someone who pays monthly should be allowed to play on any server and someone who doesn't should. There's no technical problem here its complete bullshit.
I did not comment on cross-realm play specifically but on the issue of B.Net as a service as a hole. BNet 2.0 will be more expensive to keep up than BNet 1.0 because of the (supposedly) much bigger playerbase of SC2. So Blizzard is trying to keep it free but have to reduce the number of features. Yes I know, some here believe that the more traffic you have to pay for as a company the cheaper it gets in total but this is not so. There's a threshold where any company will ask "Can we do this for free like we did before?"
Also saying that bandwith probs have never come up with another game is kinda out of proportion. Games like C&C or whatever don't have such a huge fanbase I'm sure. Millions are going to play SC2 worldwide like they play WoW (WoWs still bigger yes, but you get the point), only SC2's main features are free of charge.
At the end of the day though, we will have to wait for cross-realm play to be implemented to see whats up.
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Besides that Meff, I hope some of you realize there are many MMO's out there that don't incur costs to play on different regional servers. Sure, you will have to create a new character in most cases but this ties into how the old B.Net worked. New gateway = new nickname with a clean slate.
On June 17 2010 21:45 FrozenArbiter wrote:
I don't care if I can't bring my EU achievments to the US server - just let me create a separate account on each server lol
Precisely, most of the hardcore gamers don't care about achievements. All that stuff is icing on the cake. We just want to be able to enjoy the game no matter where we play it from.
Here's some trivia. Other than saying, "GL HF" at the start of the game what is the usual follow-up?
+ Show Spoiler +
Why take the ability away to interact with all players? Besides that, it's bad practice to play against people only from Canada and the U.S. for me anyway.
Anyone playing in Asia will have an advantage. I hate to say it, but it's the truth.
I need to be familiar with all styles of play to have an edge. We don't need limitations.
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On June 17 2010 20:15 nyshak wrote:
[
l2economics kid? Wee, I feel enlightened now. Blizz is looking at their profit margin and reducing a feature that implies tremendous amount of ongoing costs. Sure, in bizarro world everything is easy, hardware is basically free, you don't have to support said hardware with x amount of technicians etc. etc. SC2 is not SC1 period. The amount of people playing SC2 will likely rival that of WC3, SC1, D1 and D2 combined. So your asking that Blizzard maintains the service to these games (which is highly unprofitable already) plus SC2. For free. By the same logic if once that guy gave you a ball of ice cream for free, he has to keep it that way forever. Even if the hole neighborhood of kids is swarming him now, because hey, its free ice cream.
Besides, nothings for sure at this point. We don't know if Blizz is going to charge for any extra features.
Load of bullshit. If operating SC2 was anything but overwhelmingly profitable, it would not have been made. Realize you are now suggesting in order for SC2 to be profitable 1% of the population needs to purchase a service that is going to cost a fraction of the games total price. That would mean that SC2 was operating so close to the middle line that a 1% difference in profit will make or break the product. That kind of operating ethic is not something Blizzard would do.
Moreover, the ability of SC2 not to be overwhelmingly profitable is absurd. 6 million customers in the first year with little depreciation and value, 2 expansions, and an expected lifetime by analysts of fifteen years. You know what the operating costs would have to be to offset this? It would need to be roughly half of WoWs. Which is absurdly implausible on a technical level due to the lack of required data to be stored.
Blizzard classic servers are actually maintained at a slight profit to blizzard, considering SC1 remains consistently among the top 20 best selling PC games per week lists. You know why that is? Because they didn't pull this shit (assume they are going to pull shit, otherwise, thx for ongoing awesome service)
tremendous amount of ongoing cost
What operating costs? I'll be fair, it could require a substantial amount of development costs. But operating costs? No.
Show nested quote +On June 17 2010 21:28 InRaged wrote:On June 17 2010 20:20 Merikh wrote:On June 17 2010 20:17 uberdeluxe wrote:
I'm not too worried about online play, if bnet doesn't get the job done, iccup will surely open up a server of their own! Yeah apparently with their new TOS or EULA (from what I heard), iccup won't have a chance. Can't modify/edit/touch etc.. etc... I'll never say never, but blizzard will probably be on top of that. Iccup was always illegal. Changes in TOS haven't changed anything in this respect.
No kid, ICCUP is not illegal. Piracy is illegal. Iccup is not piracy. Iccup is user modification of non-encryped channels of a digital product you own, perfectly legal under US and EU law.
Iccup is against the EULA. Breaking the EULA is not illegal, but means your contract of use can be terminated without legal repercussions for THEM. Great. They can ban you from Battle.net servers for not playing on Battle.net servers.
You can only be sued for breaking EULA if you break an already existing law in the process. If they put some irrelevent clause in the EULA "If you play this game while wearing pink", they could technically terminate you're account, but they could do that anyway for no reason what so ever. They couldn't sue you.
Operating Iccup servers is of completely questionable ethic. You are not operating a Iccup server tho.
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On June 17 2010 21:45 Takkara wrote:Show nested quote +On June 17 2010 21:38 Meff wrote:On June 17 2010 20:15 nyshak wrote:
Blizz is looking at their profit margin and reducing a feature that implies tremendous amount of ongoing costs. How does allowing me to log on to either the NA or the EU server cost them any money? It's not like I log into both at the same time and it's not like EU servers do not cost anything for upkeep (or require no technicians etc). Because in SC2 world unlike SC1 world you keep a large amount of persistent, region-specific state with you. It was never intended for people to cross region boundaries, therefore a region-lock.
First: if they never intended for people to cross region, they made poor design choices and it's their problem to fix them, not ours to pay. I do not consider solutions that "fix" a design flaw by making the customer pay more to be acceptable and that is true in videogames as it would be with a car or a chair.
That said: if storage space is an issue, I will happily pay 1 additional euro cent when buying the game at retail. That should more than adequately cover for the few extra kilobytes of disk space (or megabytes, if they've made a murderously inefficient data structure).
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Sweden33719 Posts
No kid,
Please stop calling people kid, it's a bit disrespectful.
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On June 17 2010 21:49 Half wrote:
No kid, ICCUP is not illegal. Piracy is illegal. Iccup is not piracy. Iccup is user modification of non-encryped channels of a digital product you own, perfectly legal under US and EU law.
Iccup is against the EULA. Breaking the EULA is not illegal, but means your contract of use can be terminated without legal repercussions for THEM. Great. They can ban you from Battle.net servers for not playing on Battle.net servers.
You can only be sued for breaking EULA if you break an already existing law in the process. If they put some irrelevent clause in the EULA "If you play this game while wearing pink", they could technically terminate you're account, but they could do that anyway for no reason what so ever. They couldn't sue you.
Operating Iccup servers is of completely questionable ethic. You are not operating a Iccup server tho.
We are talking about Iccup server itself, "kid", and operating Iccup server is illegal. Nobody talks/cares about legality of playing on illegal server.
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On June 17 2010 22:01 FrozenArbiter wrote:Please stop calling people kid, it's a bit disrespectful.
mmk. sorry just a bit grumpy tdaaay.
Anyway....yeah. I seriously don't get the logic of pre-emptively defending a corperations right to charge you more money. I mean, I have some serious respect for almost everyone who works at Blizzard, I'm a huge blizzard fan, and doing what you're doing is just absurd and counterproductive.
Even on the off chance that Blizzard is actually having an extremely tough time making ends meet (which is extremely unlikely), bitching about a price hike is almost always a valid consumer complaint unless you're like fighting nazis or something. It falls on the shoulders of the company to defend this kind of action, not the shoulder of fans.
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On June 17 2010 21:49 Half wrote:Load of bullshit. If operating SC2 was anything but overwhelmingly profitable, it would not have been made. Realize you are now suggesting in order for SC2 to be profitable 1% of the population needs to purchase a service that is going to cost a fraction of the games total price. That would mean that SC2 was operating so close to the middle line that a 1% difference in profit will make or break the product. That kind of operating ethic is not something Blizzard would do. What operating costs? I'll be fair, it could require a substantial amount of development costs. But operating costs? No.
Right there are no operating costs once you operate something. Hardware won't fail you. Ever. Admin staff, technicians? Blah, you can do it all on your own. Your superman. Kiddo. Wee, now I see what your about. Calling others kid makes you feel more mature eh?
Besides I never claimed what you said. I said that Blizz, like any company, has to make sure that they maximize their profits. Thats basic economics for you right there. If that means cutting costs and not providing service X for free then that is what will be done. Tough real world out there I know. That has nothing to do with if the development of SC2 is profitable at all.
Blizz is still doing way more than any other company out there. BNet 2.0s main features (though its a small list) are still free - and no that does not mean Blizz can run this for free on their end.
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