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On February 12 2011 20:30 marconi wrote:
improvements to matchmaking, ladder, clan system, cross-realm play... if blizz put all these things in the game right away, what would they have expansions for? It's simple as that, many people fail to realize that. Just look at wow and it's expansions, and the improvements in every one.
Expansions should be for new content. New units, new mechanics, and in general stuff that is in the game. It shouldn't be about fixing things outside of the game that have nothing to do with the actual game. Maybe you're crazy about Blizzard making the system sub-par and dangling that "we fixed the ladder!...for $49.99" carrot in front of your face, but I'm not. Why hold back things to improve the ladder until and expansion? The answer, really is to make as much money as humanly possible, which is the goal of a buisness, but in the meantime, they're only hurting their game.
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Agree with OP. It is getting boring to play on these ladder maps.
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On February 12 2011 20:44 NikonTC wrote:Show nested quote +On February 12 2011 20:32 debasers wrote:
Bnet is an awesome casual tool, put when it comes to competitive play it really sucks. The ladder doesn't need to be competitive. There are tournaments for that.
How do you think competitive players practice for tournaments? Unless you're on a pro-team, it's probably the ladder. So how does playing in a non-competitive atmosphere help you at all, then? Do you see baseball teams just playing catch in practice, and only worry about competitive play in games?
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i think heart of the swarm will implement either cross realm or lan support, so people will definitely buy it, and legacy of the void will implement the other one. sales numbers are the no.1 priority for a company like activision blizzard, not the whine of the users. that comes in second
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On February 12 2011 19:44 FrostyTreats wrote:
i was under the impression that the ladder was the biggest BNET improvement for SC2 in comparison to BW..
On February 12 2011 19:45 Tedde93 wrote:
Last i checked BW didn't have ladder, so you played customs games, OH wait i just remembered something you can still do that. . . If you wanna practice against a certain race on a certain map play custom games with a friend. . .
Anytime someone talks about scBW ladder they're talking about the iCCup ladder.
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most of the people take the ladder too seriously,the ladder is designed to get you ranked among other people,to see how good you are and other things,but i know so many people that are scared of losing on a ladder.It shouldn't be like that because it's not designed to be for earning money or anything with it,it's purely for practice,so you can get better and have some satisfaction with it,when you climb the top of master league(top 200) then you can start talking about that ladder sucks and other things about it.
I can't say anything that's not said but ill tell you guys that this game compared to broodwar is like a young turtle to a old turtle(fucking 200 years difference). And i honestly think that in 6 more months,everything will settle down so good that all whiny little boys which require new maps every week(not saying that i don't but im not thursty for it like some of you are)and other whiny little crap.
-There are balance issues,and there are things that need to be implented - Clan system,Free name changes every 2-3 months,Clan lobby's and ingame webpages would be nice(like an interface). All of this may/will come,better or worse it will,just give it a goddamn break.
-TL;DR Starcraft 2 can't be compared to BW because bw is older then your grandma's teeth,in 6 months most of the things you guys desire will get settled.- Wisdom have spoken. -shutup
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People as always with any game, tend to forget how new SC2 is. BW has been around for 10 years, while SC2 not even 1 yet, have some fucking patience? It's the same in the MMO scene, since WoW came everyone is comparing EVERYTHING to WoW... They dont care that a new game cant have the same flow as one who has been around with 11 million subs for 6 years.
Mentality like this is just ignorant. Either gt in touch with Blizzard and voice your concerns in a normal manner with solid points or shut the fuck up?
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Uh.. the ladder system is pretty much the ONLY thing better about b.net 2.0. If the map rotation were more frequent it would be much better, but that is only a maintenance error. Everything else took a giant shit.
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On February 12 2011 19:26 Arisen wrote:
So, I've been talking to some friends on bnet and some buddys from college, and I'm hearing about more and more people going either back or to BW for the first time in lieu of SC2. While BW was/is a fantastic game, I couldn't help but wondering "why?" So I asked a buddy after a lecture one day.
"Well," he says, "It's just getting real old real fast. We've had the same maps, mostly, since beta, and Blizzard doesn't seem to be interested in letting maps they didn't make in the ladder, and the new maps leaked look to be more of the same. If I want to be competitive in star2 without being on a professional team and going out to these big tournaments with custom map pools, I have to play on the Blizzard ladder, and right now that seem's so unnatractive to me. At least I know with iCCup I have some control over stagnation."
The conversation lasted all of 5 or so minutes, but it has really go me to thinking as to the longevity of sc2. My friend, I feel, raised an interesting view-point; Blizzard's inflexibility when it comes to the SC2 ladder is alienating a lot of people. Allot of people (me included) feel that the unwillingness to allow custom maps into the map pool for the ladder is making the laddering experience allot less fun. We've been hitting the same few maps on ladder for close to a year now, and we have community sites like iCCup shoving maps at blizzard and the company remaining resolute with their mapmakers, either for the sake of making their map makers feel better, or because of some financial reason (unlikely, but I'd hate to think Blizzard's doing this to spare their ego).
"Maps," my friend continued on "aren't even the only problem. Why can't I choose to play on metalopolis, instead of getting a random map? Why Can't I choose to play vs. Terran instead of vs a random race? In Brood War, I'd spend entire practice sessions on specific maps on a specific matchup I was having trouble with, and it lead to interesting play. You couldn't do the exact same thing ZvT on python as you could ZvT on Fighting Spirit. The way the ladder itself was structured led to more interesting plays based on maps. Do you know how hard it is to develop a specific style on a specific map in star2 without a lot of very good practice partners? You have to pray that map/match up comes up on the random ladder to get some practice."
Once again interesting. I tend to agree with this sentiment. Why do I have to play vs a random opp race on a random map. I think you'd see allot more interesting strategies pumped out of your average player if there was a better system, like the iCCup ladder in place.
"Why," he exclaimed "can I only have one account per game? If I'm a competitive player vying for top 200 and I want to play around with protoss on the ladder, I'm risking allot of points. Why can't I just have a separate account? What if I'm having allot of problems with a specific map, and I'm really struggling with zvp on one of these new maps that blizz puts out, what am I going to do? Suck it up and get my ass handed to me a bunch? In BW I'd reset my account, play against some D players and really find some timings that I could abuse at those higher levels without being worried all the time about all the stuff those better players could do to me."
Another good set of points, I thought. Allot of people would disagree with the last point, as the whole "smurfing problem" could get out of hand, but to be honest, I think that resetting your account to find these holes and timings you could abuse was such a good way to improve in BW (listen to Day9's old podcast named "Why You should play against worse players") for an overview of the concept.
"It seems," he concluded, "they're just trying to create a situation where they can ream the game for as much money as it's worth. People will clamor for LAN latency for months, then they'll come along and say 'good news, we'll be releasing a patch that implements LAN latency...for a fee'. They'll start selling map packs, or whatever they can get away with. I hope I'm wrong, but that just seems the direction things are going, and if that's the case, I'm fine with going back to BW."
The whole conversation was pretty eye opening to me. I of course, wanted allot of the same things he wanted, but I never stopped to think that Blizzard being so inflexible about providing these sorts of things might lead people to stop playing because they're getting bored with it, or just are frustrated with Blizzard that much. It seems to me like, if these new maps are just more of the same and blizzard continues refusing community maps, how long before casual competitive players (read non-pros) just drop away?
So I thought I'd share and see what everyone thought about the Blizzard Ladder effecting the longevity of the game. Thanks, Peace.
I'm pretty sure that if we checked the numbers of Starcraft 1 players on BNet and ICCup since the release of Starcraft II Beta, we would realise that they are pretty much continuously plummeting.
This is how you find out general trends, you get the facts first, you don't just pretend to have asked 2 random guys at your college.
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On February 12 2011 20:50 Arisen wrote:Show nested quote +On February 12 2011 20:44 NikonTC wrote:On February 12 2011 20:32 debasers wrote:
Bnet is an awesome casual tool, put when it comes to competitive play it really sucks. The ladder doesn't need to be competitive. There are tournaments for that. How do you think competitive players practice for tournaments? Unless you're on a pro-team, it's probably the ladder. So how does playing in a non-competitive atmosphere help you at all, then? Do you see baseball teams just playing catch in practice, and only worry about competitive play in games?
im pretty sure top masters counts as competitive environment
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I have to pretty much agree with most of what's been said in the OP. I really think SC:BW became what it is now, because the community had so much control over stuff like Maps and the Ladder-System in general and we've seen how bad Blizzard handles the ladder and the Maps being played on the ladder when we look at WC3:TFT, so why don't they give the community more options and support them? I mean, it's not like the community doesn't make a huge effort about new Maps; ICCup has been making great Maps, getting the community aware of them and at the same time playtesting them with very good players for Months now. They've also made an effort to communicate with Blizzard and major Tournament-organizers for quite some time, but we have yet to see Blizzard reacting to this.
Even after the huge success of the GSL-Maps, Blizzard kinda slaps the community in the face by giving us a preview of more Blizzard-Maps on the PTR. They're clearly better than most of the older Maps and it's a step in the right direction, but to me it just looks like a stubborn child saying: "I can do it myself!", when there are lots of ppl willing to help and already made a huge effort to do so.
I am really disappointed with the way Blizzard handles this whole Topic and tbh, I'm already really frustrated to play on the Blizzard-Maps and it has even gotten so far, that I don't really wanna watch one of the biggest European Tournaments with very good Players (I'm talking about Assembly Winter 2011) just because they're using the old Blizzard-Maps.
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I'd say that you should just give it some time, and provide feedback to blizzard of your feelings on the ladder. Their feelings probably mirror yours somewhat, but they refuse to make major changes until they're sure it's for the better.
Blizzard just don't want to risk making their game worse.
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i really enjoyed the automated tournaments for Warcraft 3.
If they brought that back, they could use that to try new maps and keep people interested outside of the ladder itself. that's one thing i can't understand why they didn't bring across... maybe soon...
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Good post which kind of turned into an anti-blizzard rant towards the end. The stuff we see on Bnet2.0 leans towards social networking in gaming I think. Facebook integration, cross game friends systems, your account being an extension of you and exclusive to you. I don't think this is the correct move as it hurts bnet as a practice tool. Being able to thumbs up maps and matchups would be a huge improvement, also give the community some choice over what maps should be included in the pool. Using maps like Steppes with a straight face is just ridiculous in some matchups.
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I do wish i could control the maps and matchups... That just seems like a basic thing that you should be able to influence.
Maybe they should add a practice ladder, where you can fine tune the match ups to what you specifically would like to work on.
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On February 12 2011 21:36 Zips wrote:
I do wish i could control the maps and matchups... That just seems like a basic thing that you should be able to influence.
Maybe they should add a practice ladder, where you can fine tune the match ups to what you specifically would like to work on.
This is pretty much exactly what I was thinking. No reason they couldn't hammer this out.
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On February 12 2011 21:36 Zips wrote:
I do wish i could control the maps and matchups... That just seems like a basic thing that you should be able to influence.
why is it basic? can you influence maps and matchups in tournaments?
can you influence subjects when you have a test?
no, but you can prepare for anything you are not confident on.
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anyone who wants to practice a single race, and avoid a matchup everygame (like a mirror)... unless you are training for a specific match in a tournament like GSL.. well other than that, its retarded.
Reminds me of the ICCUP people who got to B+ or A- without playing one single mirror game. Thats not a real ladder ranking. MATCHMAKING that places you vs any race/player, shows real ranking.
Blizzard's system is frustrating just because of the point gain/loss is so messed up, with the addition of bonus pool and all that.. but the underlying fundamental MMR system is the best system you will get for a ladder... much better than ICCUP or PGTOUR or anything, which was easily abused (hello TSL2??)
If ICCUP was abused for people in TSL2 to get in the top 16... where its very likely they would get caught (which they did).. imagine how many people abused the normal ladder, with very very slim chance of being caught, just to say "Im A-, im better than you".. Along with the avoiding matchups things.. You cant get 4000 Masters in SC2 by avoiding matchups and freewinning.
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i feel like blizzard has to decide at some point if theyre gonna balance the game for these new long ass macro maps or these short ladder maps. aslong as blizz doesnt puls these crappy maps out of the ladder pool and the tournaments keeps using these new better maps:
1) everybody will start playing these better maps and the ladder will die
2) it will cause some balance issuses cause the newer maps need a different kind of balance than these small ones!
so i hope that blizz will start putting these new maps in the pool and balance the game accordingly!
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EPT
