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On January 15 2011 12:13 fearus wrote:Show nested quote +On January 15 2011 11:29 thehitman wrote:On January 15 2011 10:15 wankey wrote:On January 15 2011 09:44 razboi wrote:
It might not be perfect but it shows us that they are trying. I kinda like BNet the way it is. Can it be improved more, yes, I think so. But so far, i'm a satisfied customer. Are you kidding me? It might not be perfect but it shows us that they are trying. Are you KIDDING ME? Yes, for a startup company, or maybe an amateur game design company or hell, maybe even Valve in their early days of Steam, but BLIZZARD. Oh the almighty BLIZZARD, the same people we gave 7 years to make a sequel game. Who rake in more money than EA and Activision COMBINED. What on earth were they thinking? Who designed this custom game fail? Fire Greg Cannessa please, fire him now. Do you realize how much you're all been gipped? I can make you a masters league in 5 minutes. Write a PHP code to filter all to 10% of players, design a new icon, and voila, a completely new feature called masters league is upon us! All hail masters league! None of the features they've come up with are ACTUALLY useful. Where is the categorization? Where is the search in custom games? Why didn't they look at Warcraft 3 and think to themselves, hmm maybe there might be a tug of war or a ship battle custom game. Why weren't they included in categories? Why aren't there categories!? Porn websites have better categorization than Starcraft 2 custom games. Why can't I click, tug of war, and look at a list of tug of war games? Or click Dota and look at a list of Dota games? Instead the only thing I can do is filter with 5 settings. That's great, the rest of the games on B.net are just custom. Why is there even a "faster" filter??? Can't they get into poeple's heads and TELL them that Starcraft IS this fast. There is no slow, normal, fast setting. THIS IS STARCRAFT. They on the bloody earth did they keep this arcane feature from 12 years ago? Why is the custom game browser one of the simplest, mundane and useless features ever to graze the earth? On the other hand, Why can't I see people's ping!??! Another stupid dumbass blunder. Blizzard is the Apple of gaming, except Blizzard actually make shitty games but the mass fanboys can't really see it through their thick glasses. They lather on EXTREMELY large budgets to make up for their losses in talent to produce an extremely well polished mediocre game. If not for the asians playing Multiplayer keeping Starcraft 2 alive, it would've been tossed away like no other. I fully agree with your post and don't forget that we waited 7 months for the simplest of things - chat channels. I could also probably make chat channels in C++ in like 1 hour. Do the menu look, link up the buttons and save the text, as simple as that.Don't forget that we also didn't get LAN so going to a LAN party you have to play on the internet, want to play with ur friends in a PC cafee sitting right next to you, no luck you need to connect to the internet. Also don't forget Blizzard removed cross-region play so some poor souls buy 3-4 copies of the game. Also don't forget that Blizzard needed 7 months to come up with simple kystomizable keys. Also don't forget that after 7 years of development and additional 7 months of waiting custom games still sucks. 10 years into the future and WC3 bnet is better than SC2 bnet, heck SC1 bnet is better than SC2 bnet. Also don't forget about the inability to lock a custom game and the stupid long countdown. I'd say Blizzard needed to fire Craig 7 months ago when he failed to deliver. Oh hi R2CH, maybe you could have developed SC2 within a week too.
No, but if blizzard gave me support and all the money they have I would have probably build SC2 in 7 years as much as they took all alone and probably do a better job at it.
There is no excuse for Blizzard for the failed systems they did. They had the time, the resources, the experience and the people to do it perfectly but they failed.
Also 7 months for simple chat channels is amazing even how they took so long. I fail to see how they needed so much time for simple chat channels, not to mention all the things they didn't add, improve or fix.
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People really shouldn't defend Blizzard just because chats were added. It seems like you feel the need to appease them, now that they've met just one of many popular demands by the fanbase because they might go the other way again.
That attitude is wrong. There are so many flaws left in SC2 (or rather, it's online interface) that one thing players shouldn't do is stopping to complain. Sure, it should remain contructive criticism. But unless the game doesn't live up to the promises ("best online interface", "you won't want to go offline again" etc), there's no reason to stop the criticism.
Also, don't exclusively blame the developers. Most of those are avid gamers themselves and they certainly aren't happy with the current state, unless they've lowered their standards dramatically since WC3. But it's not their choice to decide what's being developed, since other people direct ressources, money and manpower.
Chances are we won't see any major improvements anyway, since SC2 has sold very well despite all the issues. Blizz will survive screwing over the hardcore fanbase as long as they continue to appeal to people who don't care about the things we criticize. Many people are first-time customers, didn't grow up with the franchise and lack any comparison. They don't know that B.Net2 is lacking because they never knew B.Net1.
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I'm not a big fan of the interface myself, it feels really empty. I enjoyed the wc3 interface waaay more. Never rlly played BW so can't really compare those 2. I'm a little bit disappointed by how slow it takes for them to implement changes to this, but eventually( in a year or two) it'll get better I guess...
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People seriously underestimate the actual amount of work that big software projects cost, such as SC2. Especially integrating all kinds of features and different platforms (SC2, WoW) is a tremendously complex task once you get into it. Bystanders who only observe the end product with its inevitable imperfections, cannot understand this it seems.
That said, some choices that Blizzard made are debatable. This mostly regards the custom games part of the interface. It always puzzled me why in WC3 it wasn't possible to filter games by gamename or map or anything. The list was just completely unordered, looking very unprofessional. On the other hand, I only ladder in SC2 so the custom game stuff doesn't bother me really..
The only bug that really bugs me is the fact that I cannot enter certain private chat channels anymore as I was online during the chatroom-messup-crash on battle.net (ppl who were online are still registered as present in those channels and thus cannot join the channel again).
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the missing features (search etc.) are easy to implement (i am a professional software developer) compared to the stuff that has been done for the game itself.
So the failure must be caused by incompetent management decisions. As a software company grows frequently the tech-oriented managers/leads are replaced by people coming from the business/financial/marketing area. By the time those people start doing technical/product related decisions which are beyond their personal competence. I have experienced this scheme numerous times in the software industry: non-techs decide about technical issues such as network protocols or decide to skip important features ("Nobody needs that in the future.."). Long term those companies and their products tend to fail  , but this takes quite a time. Frequently they survive because of customer lock-in.
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You guys need to just calm the hell down. I mean afterall, with out b.net-.0.2 how else would we import our Facebook friends!?
Ya so what if I had 2 friends on Facebook who I already had added to my list. The game does it for me! Just think how many valuable resources went into making this handy tool! TY blizzard!
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On January 15 2011 23:49 Morphs wrote:
People seriously underestimate the actual amount of work that big software projects cost, such as SC2. Especially integrating all kinds of features and different platforms (SC2, WoW) is a tremendously complex task once you get into it. Bystanders who only observe the end product with its inevitable imperfections, cannot understand this it seems.
That said, some choices that Blizzard made are debatable. This mostly regards the custom games part of the interface. It always puzzled me why in WC3 it wasn't possible to filter games by gamename or map or anything. The list was just completely unordered, looking very unprofessional. On the other hand, I only ladder in SC2 so the custom game stuff doesn't bother me really..
The only bug that really bugs me is the fact that I cannot enter certain private chat channels anymore as I was online during the chatroom-messup-crash on battle.net (ppl who were online are still registered as present in those channels and thus cannot join the channel again).
As I stated earlier, overall quality in the software industry went down considerably. To see this, just take the time and use linux. Then you see what dedicated individuals as well as groups living solely on donations can accomplish quality wise. If free software developers of the gnu/linux community can do that, a company with actual money should only do better. Quality software development is a matter of dedication and priorities. If your priority is making money and the incentive you put in front of your employee is more money for faster results, he'll do a shitty but fast job. I'm pretty sure most of the time spent making Bnet was on meetings and calculations, not actual design and programming. You can easily tell by the product.
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they're screwing the pooch on a lot of things here, I think a lot of bad judgement calls were made on blizzard's team in terms of balance and multiplayer design, seems like they totally missed the mark on what they were hoping to go for and because of time constraints and what not, we have a rushed unfinished product that seems to pale in comparison with their older interfaces in terms of key features. There are as many negatives as there are positives with this new "BNet 2.0", especially considering BNet 1.0 was the multiplayer interface to be rivaled by companies to come.. they got it right the first time, the followup was weak
hopefully blizz can learn from their mistakes (which obviously they won't admit but the reception is pretty much the indicator) and trust not to make these leaps of faith by hiring a console interface designer to lead a project that should've been done by someone with experience in PC online interfacing (both completely different)
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It's just really sad to see one of the greatest game company in the world who made oh-so-perfect games to just get greedy and not care about the products. Where is the Blizzard we knew and love? Where are the flawless games that are knowed by every single person who ever owned a pc game? Where is the love for the games and the constant battle to make it better and better? Where is the company that revolutionized RPG and RTS and MMORPG?
Swimming in piles of money and eaten alive by Activision it seems... I am really sad...
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On January 15 2011 23:49 Morphs wrote:
People seriously underestimate the actual amount of work that big software projects cost, such as SC2. Especially integrating all kinds of features and different platforms (SC2, WoW) is a tremendously complex task once you get into it. Bystanders who only observe the end product with its inevitable imperfections, cannot understand this it seems.
People most certainly are not underestimating it. Developers that sell 1/20th of the number of games Blizzard does can afford to develop better online services.
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For the record , Company of Heroes Tales of Valor multiplayer interface (without fancy specific names or marketing it as separate) , owns battlnet in every possible aspect.
Played COH 2 years ago , and today bought Tales Of Valor standalone multiplayer-centric expansion (lacks old campaigns , but i played the olders already) and i can tell you that COHTOV is technically superior to SC2 , technically i mean , in patch support (engine updates, crash fixes, memory optimizations) , in pefromance as well , the the graphics options has a bar indicator for memory usage , and all the little stuff that hardcore players need , real numerical ping , system inf warnings for players that lag and technical information output , there is also tons of stuff i didn't even found out yet.
And you don't need silly matchmaking and battlecrap services which go heavy on the companies pocked for maintaining the servers and online HDD space for maps , you don't need that , OH , COHTOV has matchmaking as a PLUS too !
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8748 Posts
On January 16 2011 00:01 Schnullerbacke13 wrote:the missing features (search etc.) are easy to implement (i am a professional software developer) compared to the stuff that has been done for the game itself. So the failure must be caused by incompetent management decisions. As a software company grows frequently the tech-oriented managers/leads are replaced by people coming from the business/financial/marketing area. By the time those people start doing technical/product related decisions which are beyond their personal competence. I have experienced this scheme numerous times in the software industry: non-techs decide about technical issues such as network protocols or decide to skip important features ("Nobody needs that in the future.."). Long term those companies and their products tend to fail , but this takes quite a time. Frequently they survive because of customer lock-in.
I think this is probably closest to the truth. As big as Blizzard is, it's a real danger. And even though Blizzard has been around a long time for a gaming company, they haven't been around for a long time as a company in general. There's probably some inexperience still lingering around with the people in charge. They strongly follow a certain business philosophy but don't realize that it doesn't fit the particular project at hand.
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Aotearoa39261 Posts
On January 15 2011 17:59 wherebugsgo wrote:Show nested quote +On January 15 2011 15:15 Treemonkeys wrote:On January 15 2011 15:11 Spawkuring wrote:
Keep in mind that these features are things Bnet 1.0 already has, and that thing is over a decade old. And not only that, but we had to practically scream in Blizzard's ear for them to put chat channels in since they were vehemently against doing so months before. You attack us for whining, yet it was precisely that which got us chat channels back. Fans can and should give feedback, whether positive or negative, and it's ridiculous to pretend that everything about Bnet 2.0 is peachy when it blatantly isn't. This is completely absurd, and it is why these QQ threads exist. There was no screaming and Blizzard was NEVER vehemently against doing chats channels. You guys are just acting like brats who think they have to whine enough to get what they want. They have said all along they would be improving bnet over time. LOL biggest troll I've ever seen. Here are some things Blizzard's either failed to deliver, misled the community about, or just sucked at implementing in SC2: 1. Blizzard never intended chat channels to be in the game until the community protested. As late as the end of beta phase 1, Blizzard said there were not going to be chat channels. When they realized what an uproar it caused, they reversed the decision during the beta downtime. Now that they're included, the chat channels are riddled with bugs and problems. 2. Originally Blizzard removed cross-region play from SC2, unlike its past games where you could create an account on any of the servers. Then, Blizzard promised cross-region support (I think between beta phase 1 and 2), and then reneged and only gave it to SEA players. Basically, SEA players were in uproar because, originally, Australia was tied to SEA and many would have to deal with major lag because of the way some ISPs work there. EU and NA players also complained about the lack of cross-region support, because of friends in other regions, and the like. IMO, Blizzard realized that they would lose some business if they didn't give SEA players the option to play on the NA server. However, I'm fairly sure they didn't think the EU/NA concerns were important, so they only implemented cross-region support for SEA players. 3. No LAN support. WTF? There is NO reason for this. All this "authentication" and "piracy" garbage is unfounded. There was nothing stopping Blizzard from requiring battle net authentication the first time you play a game. Then, the game can be played on a LAN. What's so difficult about this? It works to prevent piracy the same way requiring the Internet for multiplayer does. The only difference is that tournaments no longer have to deal with lag and drops, which have already happened multiple times in the short history of SC2 competition. To date, Blizzard has not given a good reason for this decision. 4. The lack of proper hotkey support. Past games have all provided customizable hotkeys (not Blizzard games, perhaps, but still). WoW has GREAT customization. SC2 is garbage in comparison. Now that we have an in-game hotkey modifier, it's still garbage. It's very buggy, and it certainly seems like Blizzard is somehow incompetent in this area. For example, as I stated earlier in the thread, you can't map Terran/Zerg hotkeys to "W" without making a conflict with the Protoss warp-in hotkey. Yet, I was able to do this pre-patch with a hotkey editor from this forum. Last night, my hotkey profiles were all reset inexplicably. I logged out and logged back in an hour later, and I had to remap all my keys (after losing my ladder game because I kept hitting the wrong keys) which took 10-15 minutes to do. To add insult to injury, the techlab and reactor hotkeys are still messed up for me. They register as "z" and "x", respectively, in-game, whereas I have set them to "x" and "c" in the hotkey changer. I don't understand why it will not change. 5. No clan support. No tags. Nothing. 6. Custom game list. WTF? Big fail here. I could go on. There's bugs with several of the maps, for example. Shakuras is still not on the map pool. The bug was known about for well over a month before this last patch, yet nothing was done about it. The worst part is that the team seemed to have enough time to include an easter egg with this last patch, yet they didn't have the foresight to correct many of the existing bugs, nor double-check the features they were adding in this patch. On January 16 2011 00:01 Schnullerbacke13 wrote:the missing features (search etc.) are easy to implement (i am a professional software developer) compared to the stuff that has been done for the game itself. So the failure must be caused by incompetent management decisions. As a software company grows frequently the tech-oriented managers/leads are replaced by people coming from the business/financial/marketing area. By the time those people start doing technical/product related decisions which are beyond their personal competence. I have experienced this scheme numerous times in the software industry: non-techs decide about technical issues such as network protocols or decide to skip important features ("Nobody needs that in the future.."). Long term those companies and their products tend to fail , but this takes quite a time. Frequently they survive because of customer lock-in.
Two really really good posts. Agreed with both.
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8748 Posts
On January 16 2011 00:05 Attiicus wrote:
You guys need to just calm the hell down. I mean afterall, with out b.net-.0.2 how else would we import our Facebook friends!?
Ya so what if I had 2 friends on Facebook who I already had added to my list. The game does it for me! Just think how many valuable resources went into making this handy tool! TY blizzard!
I think this is a really dumb way to attack Blizzard. We need as many people as possible in our community. After gameplay, I think community is the most important part of the game. Every effort made at building and maintaining community is a big part of what separates SC from these "technically superior" games that have only ~200k or less players whose communities die in less than 3 years. Blizzard fully admits that the phenomenon of SC1 was damn lucky. With SC2, they're making purposeful efforts to repeat the feat.
It's silly that every time Blizzard does something to reach more people, there are some "hardcore" fans that say it's a money grab. Which isn't totally untrue, but if Blizzard is doing what's best for the game, then that's also a money grab, because what's best for the game can also be best for Blizzard's health as a company. So a real money grab is when they do something bad for the game, to get more money, and so the point hinges on whether Blizzard's efforts to expand community are bad for the game. As if that's even a question haha.
But it's really silly that the hardcore fans have that viewpoint because here they are in an awesome community, enjoying the community and the game, and they see more people as playing the game and joining the community as bad. It's selfish and/or shortsighted, because it's like "Hey Blizzard actually you already have a community of SC fans. Here we are. Dedicate all your resources to making the best product you can for us and ignore any services you could do for everyone else." Blizzard has done a pretty damn good job balancing between the two extremes.
If their #1 goal is to have SC2 still being played by a decent amount of people 10 years from now, which I think is what is most important to all of us here (and not by any means Blizzard's safest way of maximizing profits), then I can see how every decision they've made and their general allocation of resources makes sense. So we have a few rough years of bnet 2010-2012 let's say, well then 2013-2018 can be our golden years, and we'll all forget about the start. But down the road we'll be damn happy that Blizzard was able to get enough people initially interested in SC at the start so that a strong community could get set up and hold for all those years. Unfortunately, coming out with a perfect product in the opinion of hardcore fans is not what best builds a strong long term community.
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On January 15 2011 09:43 MavercK wrote:
because they hired the guy who designed xbox live to design battle.net 2.0
nothing can be done.
unless they fire him and scrap the entire interface.
Which they should. I guess not really, but yeah, BNET is bad. Making a bad chat-system in 2011 should earn them a medal. Why not just implement IRC or something akin to that? I don't get Blizzard's angle on this whole online-thing.
EDIT: Schnullerbacke13 probably telling it like it is.
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On January 16 2011 00:57 Liquid`Tyler wrote:Show nested quote +On January 16 2011 00:05 Attiicus wrote:
You guys need to just calm the hell down. I mean afterall, with out b.net-.0.2 how else would we import our Facebook friends!?
Ya so what if I had 2 friends on Facebook who I already had added to my list. The game does it for me! Just think how many valuable resources went into making this handy tool! TY blizzard! I think this is a really dumb way to attack Blizzard. We need as many people as possible in our community. After gameplay, I think community is the most important part of the game. Every effort made at building and maintaining community is a big part of what separates SC from these "technically superior" games that have only ~200k or less players whose communities die in less than 3 years. Blizzard fully admits that the phenomenon of SC1 was damn lucky. With SC2, they're making purposeful efforts to repeat the feat. It's silly that every time Blizzard does something to reach more people, there are some "hardcore" fans that say it's a money grab. Which isn't totally untrue, but if Blizzard is doing what's best for the game, then that's also a money grab, because what's best for the game can also be best for Blizzard's health as a company. So a real money grab is when they do something bad for the game, to get more money, and so the point hinges on whether Blizzard's efforts to expand community are bad for the game. As if that's even a question haha. But it's really silly that the hardcore fans have that viewpoint because here they are in an awesome community, enjoying the community and the game, and they see more people as playing the game and joining the community as bad. It's selfish and/or shortsighted, because it's like "Hey Blizzard actually you already have a community of SC fans. Here we are. Dedicate all your resources to making the best product you can for us and ignore any services you could do for everyone else." Blizzard has done a pretty damn good job balancing between the two extremes. If their #1 goal is to have SC2 still being played by a decent amount of people 10 years from now, which I think is what is most important to all of us here (and not by any means Blizzard's safest way of maximizing profits), then I can see how every decision they've made and their general allocation of resources makes sense. So we have a few rough years of bnet 2010-2012 let's say, well then 2013-2018 can be our golden years, and we'll all forget about the start. But down the road we'll be damn happy that Blizzard was able to get enough people initially interested in SC at the start so that a strong community could get set up and hold for all those years. Unfortunately, coming out with a perfect product in the opinion of hardcore fans is not what best builds a strong long term community.
Yes, and none of this is going to be achieved with the aid of Facebook integration, particularly while Blizzard simultaneously refuses to provide the most basic of features anyone who has played any multiplayer PC game over the last 10 years would come to reasonably expect. It's gimmicky, superfulous and adds absolutely nothing to the overall online gaming experience.
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I personally find it very very irritating that Blizzard delivers such a great game, but then drops the ball when it comes to Battle.net. Arguments that try to defend the amount of work and planning that goes into such projects are futile in my eyes. A customer gets what a customer gets. For a company that supposedly values social interaction very high, the lack of foresight on social features for the gaming man or woman are heartbreaking.
Since chat channels are out I played more custom matches than I did in the previous months + beta combined. With strangers I might add!
I find it especially confusing that Blizzard, a company with the most successful MMO in the history of like ever fails to deliver a compelling multiplayer-interface. And keep in mind they have 5 years of experience in handling the biggest amount of gamers that ever subscribed to a game on this planet.
"How?" I ask myself then. How is it possible that Blizzard didn't go "We're not only going to invest in creating the best rts game ever, we will also create the greatest multiplayer interface human hands will ever digitally touch."
Instead we get something that looks like it was made for a console market.
Greg Cannessa: "Common we all know it takes ages to type words on a console. Why would you..."
Rest: "PC MOTHERFUCKER! PC!!"
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On January 15 2011 09:41 Torte de Lini wrote:
Why can't they do it like in WC3 except just show how many slots have been made/filled whatever.
Because by the time you refreshed the list and clicked the game it will be full. That's one of the few features I love about battle.net. To bad it fails when you try to join with a party an there aren't enough places in the game. Instead of creating a new lobby it will give an error that the lobby is full.
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On January 15 2011 09:43 MavercK wrote:
because they hired the guy who designed xbox live to design battle.net 2.0
nothing can be done.
unless they fire him and scrap the entire interface.
Lets form a Protest.
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On January 16 2011 03:42 Zombo Joe wrote:Show nested quote +On January 15 2011 09:43 MavercK wrote:
because they hired the guy who designed xbox live to design battle.net 2.0
nothing can be done.
unless they fire him and scrap the entire interface. Lets form a Protest.
Well why not , i think it's about time to make a stand up , just like they did over at Left For Dead 2 was announced so fast.
Clearly , he's the only lead who is not experienced enough , and this console crap is making my stomack go around , i won't say consoles are totally wrong , okay fine , i got a wii , im a ninteno junkie but when i play a console(only ninteno's first parties - a dosen top line franchises) that's stuff is there and you use it there and it's okay there , but when i play a PC game , i don't WANT that here, i don't want the console style , the console feel , the console ways.
Consoles are for playing only , relaxing sitting down with friends , socializing , you play , you don't modify , customize super duper bla bla , but on a PC you're not on with friends and you devote to the most hardcore experience.
Im not a biased guy because of my nintendo addiction , but i am able to keep double minded , when i use the console it's another mentality , it's a console , that's cool for it , that's fine , split screen is required for console games it's a standard , for PCs it's not and nobody needs it and doesn't whine about it for not being also on PCs , that's why im saying , i don't want SHOW MORE button on a PC game , that's a thing of mobile casual console world (typical bad design) , i don't want that on PCs, we don't need that here.
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