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REPLAYS
It's imperative to able to host a replay similar to the way replays were hosted in Brood War. It's needed to be able to create a lobby just like any other map being hosted, and have all the slots be spectators with a single host. Within the replay, the host needs to be the one to control the speed of the replay. This is extremely simple and is a very low-risk high-benefit change that could be implemented in a very small patch, and should be taken with high priority and initiative on Blizzard's part.
Sharing replays is another small issue. It is slightly annoying having to upload my replays to a site for someone else to download a single replay. What should implemented within Battlenet is the ability to right click on a replay and select from the menu "Share Replay". Once this is clicked, a small menu like the one at the bottom right of the screen should appear where you select one of your friends to share the replay with. A dialog box should appear for the person you selected with a yes and no button, asking if they want to accept a replay being offered to them. To avoid abuse Blizzard could use the SC2 client to make sure that a replay is below a specific file size (something a normal un-tampered replay would always be under), as it would be easy to create a fake replay with a gargantuan filesize just to @%@% with the system.
It is also very annoying to have to speed through a replay at 8x speed, when one should be able to skip directly to any portion of the replay at any given time.
One feature that would be great for replay analysis is the ability for players that are currently all watching a replay together to take up control of units within the current replay, and have all actions in the actual replay file be ignored; the point is to allow players to start playing from a replay, from any point in the replay. The popular Snes emulator Snes9x allows users to save videos (replays) of player actions, and have the game run them in an automated manner, just as SCII replays function. Although, the emulator allows the user to stop playing the video and take up the controls, from any point in the video. It should be easy to allow for users to disable the automated control of a replay and gain control of the units immediately. This would allow for flexible player analysis of replays. Everyone has always had questions of "I wonder if strategy A or B would have worked in scenario C". If this function were to implemented, then those unintuitive answers could easily be tested within a replay. Although, once a player disables the automated actions that are within the replay files, I can understand if it would be difficult to allow players to jump back into automation without reloading the entire replay.
CLAN TAGS
Players can't rely on Blizzard giving out random or periodic free name changes in order to change their clan tag. There should be a feature that allows a player to place 3 characters before or after their name, to allow for a preceding or trailing tag (either or, not both preceding and trailing simultaneously).
Note: The character amount for the tags does not necessarily need to be 3 characters. The limit could perhaps be five or six; I chose three mainly as a placeholder to get my point across.
MATCHMAKING/LADDER
I am a highly competitive player, and take my playing more seriously than most people. I want a place where I can engage in Battelnet's matchmaking system in a highly competitive environment. The current ladder is competitive, but many people use it for practice as well. I sadly have often been forced to play warmup games and practice new strategies on the ladder just because I didn't have any friends online at the time. My suggestion is to add two separate matchmaking systems, one that is ranked on a ladder and one that is unranked.
To simplify the implementation of such, the unranked matchmaking system could use the player statistics a player has gained from the ranked matchmaking system to determine an opponent of equal or near equal skill. Since the goal of the unranked matchmaking system is to isolate games that are aimed at practice or warmup, you don't need to rise or fall in rank. If a player wishes for their unranked matchmaker to pair them up with tougher opponents, then they should be told that in order to do so they need to ladder on the ranked matchmaking system beforehand.
What this will do is allow for players to have an isolated and competitively ranked ladder, all the while providing them with convenient means of practicing or warmup (or carefree) matches.
To make all of this seem simple to Battlenet users, instead of having a single yellow FIND MATCH button, have two separate buttons; one button should say FIND RANKED MATCH, the other FIND UNRANKED MATCH. Also, Battlenet users will need to somehow be informed that unranked matches use their statistics from the ranked matches to determine their opponents.
Lastly, I want to complain about how annoying it is to have to rely on the third party source SC2ranks.com to view a global ladder. There should be a clear and concise ladder for all players to view their global, and regional rankings. Divisions must have had some specific goals or problems to solve, otherwise Blizzard would not have implemented them in the first place. However, it is very obvious that most people do not like the division system and would much prefer to be able to see a simple and organised ladder. The ladder viewable by players should be similar to the one currently on SC2ranks.com, in that it needs regional filters as well as search functions. It is my understanding the whole division implementation ticked more people off than it did to achieve the goal it was originally created for, and it is highly necessary that something be done in order to de-isolate all the rankings of all the players throughout all the divisions.
LADDERING WITH OFFRACES
As a competitive player I would greatly enjoy being able to offrace (playing as a race other than my main race) while using the matchmaking system as well as having a rank on a ladder. I can currently do this, although playing as an offrace on the ladder would greatly lower my overall rank, so that isn't an option if I value my current rank in any way.
I suggest having three separate ratings for each race a player can play as. This way, a player can be placed into the silver league for their one on one Zerg play, while being placed in the Gold league as Terran for their one on one play.
The current solution to this issue would to be buy multiple accounts, but that is expensive. Brood War never had this problem, as anyone could create multiple accounts on servers like iCCup, and thusly offrace on them. The new Battlenet could mimic this sort of idea, but instead of having players create three different accounts, they could just localize the three ratings of all three races into a single account.
CHAT COMMANDS
It's extremely annoying to be in a match while having to message someone in particular. Brood War used the irc-esque functionality where you could type /w NAME MSG. This would be really useful if the current /r command would reply to the last person you whispered to using the /w NAME MSG command. This way in order to engage in discussion with a specific person, you only have to use /w NAME MSG and then have all subsequent messages begin with /r.
Since character codes are what differentiate one player from another, this might be impossible unless the format string for the whisper command were to include a player's character code: /w NAME.CHARACTERCODE MSG.
FFA
Why in the world is FFA unranked? There could some really interesting play, really interesting laddering as well if FFA were ranked. I would absolutely enjoy FFA if I could be matched up with people in my skill range, but sadly since I cannot I never use FFA as it's a waste of time (from my point of view) to be matched up with Bronze and Platinum league players.
ONE ON ONE MAP POOL
[Almost] Needless to say, someone that isn't exceptionally skilled at playing StarCraft 2 cannot easily create a balanced or well-created map for StarCraft 2. There are many people out there that worked on maps for realms like iCCup in Brood War, and the maps that were created were exceptional. The maps that Blizzard has created for the current map pool have room to be improved upon -I myself am not skilled enough to go into deep detail on this topic, though iCCup.Diamond definitely is and has taken time to write and start a very exceptional topic here: http://us.battle.net/sc2/en/forum/topic/801781456#1
The point is that Blizzard employees alone just aren't satisfying the wants of competitive players to an acceptable extent. Variation in the authors of ladder maps should be striven for, with emphasis on introducing iCCup maps.
LAN
I don't unerstand why LAN wasn't implemented, and I don't really care. Though, what I do care about is tournament games where money is on the line. The fact is that Blizzard servers aren't going to be 100% reliable, actually, they are significantly far from that. However if money is on the line a LAN-like environment should be accessible for tournament purposes.
However, if players are to play in a LAN-like environment in tournaments then they need to be able to practice in an identical environment; it isn't enough to just enable a LAN-like environment purely for tournaments. If fear of abuse is the problem, then perhaps some sort of Pro-League license could be created in which only professional players have access to this LAN-like environment. This may be a bad suggestion, but the point still stands that Blizzard online every-day servers aren't sufficient for highly competitive play, and this problem needs to be fixed one way or another.
CROSS-REALM PLAY
This section is rather simple. Everyone would like to be able to participate in all of the other servers, just as this was possible in Brood War. We all have friends in various places, and the sooner this is implemented the better.
ADDITIONAL SUPPORT FOR THIS POST
Here is a link to a large thread showing support for this post: http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=180300
This post was concocted and maintained throughout the thread linked to in the previous sentence. This just goes to show that there are a lot of people in support of all the points detailed here in this post.
It's imperative to able to host a replay similar to the way replays were hosted in Brood War. It's needed to be able to create a lobby just like any other map being hosted, and have all the slots be spectators with a single host. Within the replay, the host needs to be the one to control the speed of the replay. This is extremely simple and is a very low-risk high-benefit change that could be implemented in a very small patch, and should be taken with high priority and initiative on Blizzard's part.
Sharing replays is another small issue. It is slightly annoying having to upload my replays to a site for someone else to download a single replay. What should implemented within Battlenet is the ability to right click on a replay and select from the menu "Share Replay". Once this is clicked, a small menu like the one at the bottom right of the screen should appear where you select one of your friends to share the replay with. A dialog box should appear for the person you selected with a yes and no button, asking if they want to accept a replay being offered to them. To avoid abuse Blizzard could use the SC2 client to make sure that a replay is below a specific file size (something a normal un-tampered replay would always be under), as it would be easy to create a fake replay with a gargantuan filesize just to @%@% with the system.
It is also very annoying to have to speed through a replay at 8x speed, when one should be able to skip directly to any portion of the replay at any given time.
One feature that would be great for replay analysis is the ability for players that are currently all watching a replay together to take up control of units within the current replay, and have all actions in the actual replay file be ignored; the point is to allow players to start playing from a replay, from any point in the replay. The popular Snes emulator Snes9x allows users to save videos (replays) of player actions, and have the game run them in an automated manner, just as SCII replays function. Although, the emulator allows the user to stop playing the video and take up the controls, from any point in the video. It should be easy to allow for users to disable the automated control of a replay and gain control of the units immediately. This would allow for flexible player analysis of replays. Everyone has always had questions of "I wonder if strategy A or B would have worked in scenario C". If this function were to implemented, then those unintuitive answers could easily be tested within a replay. Although, once a player disables the automated actions that are within the replay files, I can understand if it would be difficult to allow players to jump back into automation without reloading the entire replay.
CLAN TAGS
Players can't rely on Blizzard giving out random or periodic free name changes in order to change their clan tag. There should be a feature that allows a player to place 3 characters before or after their name, to allow for a preceding or trailing tag (either or, not both preceding and trailing simultaneously).
Note: The character amount for the tags does not necessarily need to be 3 characters. The limit could perhaps be five or six; I chose three mainly as a placeholder to get my point across.
MATCHMAKING/LADDER
I am a highly competitive player, and take my playing more seriously than most people. I want a place where I can engage in Battelnet's matchmaking system in a highly competitive environment. The current ladder is competitive, but many people use it for practice as well. I sadly have often been forced to play warmup games and practice new strategies on the ladder just because I didn't have any friends online at the time. My suggestion is to add two separate matchmaking systems, one that is ranked on a ladder and one that is unranked.
To simplify the implementation of such, the unranked matchmaking system could use the player statistics a player has gained from the ranked matchmaking system to determine an opponent of equal or near equal skill. Since the goal of the unranked matchmaking system is to isolate games that are aimed at practice or warmup, you don't need to rise or fall in rank. If a player wishes for their unranked matchmaker to pair them up with tougher opponents, then they should be told that in order to do so they need to ladder on the ranked matchmaking system beforehand.
What this will do is allow for players to have an isolated and competitively ranked ladder, all the while providing them with convenient means of practicing or warmup (or carefree) matches.
To make all of this seem simple to Battlenet users, instead of having a single yellow FIND MATCH button, have two separate buttons; one button should say FIND RANKED MATCH, the other FIND UNRANKED MATCH. Also, Battlenet users will need to somehow be informed that unranked matches use their statistics from the ranked matches to determine their opponents.
Lastly, I want to complain about how annoying it is to have to rely on the third party source SC2ranks.com to view a global ladder. There should be a clear and concise ladder for all players to view their global, and regional rankings. Divisions must have had some specific goals or problems to solve, otherwise Blizzard would not have implemented them in the first place. However, it is very obvious that most people do not like the division system and would much prefer to be able to see a simple and organised ladder. The ladder viewable by players should be similar to the one currently on SC2ranks.com, in that it needs regional filters as well as search functions. It is my understanding the whole division implementation ticked more people off than it did to achieve the goal it was originally created for, and it is highly necessary that something be done in order to de-isolate all the rankings of all the players throughout all the divisions.
LADDERING WITH OFFRACES
As a competitive player I would greatly enjoy being able to offrace (playing as a race other than my main race) while using the matchmaking system as well as having a rank on a ladder. I can currently do this, although playing as an offrace on the ladder would greatly lower my overall rank, so that isn't an option if I value my current rank in any way.
I suggest having three separate ratings for each race a player can play as. This way, a player can be placed into the silver league for their one on one Zerg play, while being placed in the Gold league as Terran for their one on one play.
The current solution to this issue would to be buy multiple accounts, but that is expensive. Brood War never had this problem, as anyone could create multiple accounts on servers like iCCup, and thusly offrace on them. The new Battlenet could mimic this sort of idea, but instead of having players create three different accounts, they could just localize the three ratings of all three races into a single account.
CHAT COMMANDS
It's extremely annoying to be in a match while having to message someone in particular. Brood War used the irc-esque functionality where you could type /w NAME MSG. This would be really useful if the current /r command would reply to the last person you whispered to using the /w NAME MSG command. This way in order to engage in discussion with a specific person, you only have to use /w NAME MSG and then have all subsequent messages begin with /r.
Since character codes are what differentiate one player from another, this might be impossible unless the format string for the whisper command were to include a player's character code: /w NAME.CHARACTERCODE MSG.
FFA
Why in the world is FFA unranked? There could some really interesting play, really interesting laddering as well if FFA were ranked. I would absolutely enjoy FFA if I could be matched up with people in my skill range, but sadly since I cannot I never use FFA as it's a waste of time (from my point of view) to be matched up with Bronze and Platinum league players.
ONE ON ONE MAP POOL
[Almost] Needless to say, someone that isn't exceptionally skilled at playing StarCraft 2 cannot easily create a balanced or well-created map for StarCraft 2. There are many people out there that worked on maps for realms like iCCup in Brood War, and the maps that were created were exceptional. The maps that Blizzard has created for the current map pool have room to be improved upon -I myself am not skilled enough to go into deep detail on this topic, though iCCup.Diamond definitely is and has taken time to write and start a very exceptional topic here: http://us.battle.net/sc2/en/forum/topic/801781456#1
The point is that Blizzard employees alone just aren't satisfying the wants of competitive players to an acceptable extent. Variation in the authors of ladder maps should be striven for, with emphasis on introducing iCCup maps.
LAN
I don't unerstand why LAN wasn't implemented, and I don't really care. Though, what I do care about is tournament games where money is on the line. The fact is that Blizzard servers aren't going to be 100% reliable, actually, they are significantly far from that. However if money is on the line a LAN-like environment should be accessible for tournament purposes.
However, if players are to play in a LAN-like environment in tournaments then they need to be able to practice in an identical environment; it isn't enough to just enable a LAN-like environment purely for tournaments. If fear of abuse is the problem, then perhaps some sort of Pro-League license could be created in which only professional players have access to this LAN-like environment. This may be a bad suggestion, but the point still stands that Blizzard online every-day servers aren't sufficient for highly competitive play, and this problem needs to be fixed one way or another.
CROSS-REALM PLAY
This section is rather simple. Everyone would like to be able to participate in all of the other servers, just as this was possible in Brood War. We all have friends in various places, and the sooner this is implemented the better.
ADDITIONAL SUPPORT FOR THIS POST
Here is a link to a large thread showing support for this post: http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=180300
This post was concocted and maintained throughout the thread linked to in the previous sentence. This just goes to show that there are a lot of people in support of all the points detailed here in this post.
Basically, I want to get what I've written into this post to get a good bit of publicity so it can be taken seriously. I want to discuss with you all the changes I've proposed and make any necessary changes to my post on the Blizzard forums, so that it can represent a lot of peoples' opinions. In return I'd like to get everyone that likes my post to thumbs it up, post in the same topic on the Blizzard forums linking to and voicing support for its opinions, and more of the like.
I'm thinking that some of these changes can be implemented sooner than later if we can get a lot of people to jump on it as if it were some sort of online petition.
Things wanted from you:
- If you like my post from the Blizzard forums, then thumbs it up on the Blizzard forums and post saying how you agree with what was said (providing a link to my post on your post), perhaps adding in more of your own thoughts or highlighting key points I've made with quote bb-code.
- Discuss the post I've created and critique it (in this thread) so I can better the post overall on the Blizzard forums.
- Add additional information or suggestions to discuss that can possibly be added into my post on the Blizzard forums
If we can get my post to keep a valid representation of a whole lot of voices, then perhaps the changes voiced will be implemented. Sure this may or may not help at all, but it really takes a small amount of effort, and can't hurt; I'd appreciate it if you participated regardless of what affect it will have. Be sure to post on the Blizzard forums linking to or referring to my post so it's very clear that we all want the same thing. The Blizzard forums are discussion forums, so you do need to foster discussion, not only post in agreement as if signing a petition
