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[Also posted @ Wellplayed.org and SC2 Forums, please thumbs up there if you like it  ]
Welcome to the second iteration of my modifications and additions to the current BNet UI. My first set of designs and concepts were met with really great enthusiasm and feedback and I'm honored by the compliments. I felt like there were a number of things I needed to change/add to best satisfy the community, so I've continued the project.
The purpose of these designs is to give Blizz some community input on how the UI could look and what features we'd really like to see down the line. To that effect: please comment on my designs and ideas, if there's something that everyone wants, I'll add/change it and hopefully we can keep everyone happy. This is probably the iteration I will send to Blizzard in email form, unless we decide it needs more work.
I understand that design doesn't magically make features appear and function, and that some of these ideas/features are unfeasible. But having well developed concepts of how things could and should work ought to give the developers inspiration and direction. I don't want to insult anyone or downplay their work, rather I laud the achievements of the SC2 team. But I also want them to know that it can be improved and I know they can access the resources to do it.
To Begin
+ Show Spoiler +Starting with the Fun or not page (as it was the main screenshot I was working with), I'll bring your attention to reorganized left and right panels, as well as a slightly larger chat channel button at the bottom right.
The left panel buttons are arranged: Home/Welcome, Community, News, Galaxy Editor, Replays, Event, Help. The right panel buttons include your profile, achievements, ladder and Clan. The reasoning here is to create consistent design; functions centered around your profile (summary, achievements, ladder and clan) are kept by your player icon, and other functions (including social, informative, etc.) are kept separate. The player's icon and create party button are made smaller to make room for these buttons and your clan's name is added to the top right of the right panel (although it disappears when you're in a party).
Full Screen
+ Show Spoiler +While I have not modified my other designs to fit this, I would like to present a view of how the UI could maximize it's use of space.
First, the Starcraft 2 logo has been shrunk (we have a login screen for a large logo). The panels to the left and right have been squashed upwards to match, however the icons are proportionally smaller. Notice how the buttons still seem plenty large enough and there still is plenty of room (for the icons of partymembers, for instance). The bottom social/menu space has been squashed downwards, but again at no detriment to useability or visual style. The major change is that the central window has been maximized in all directions. If not being able to see the 3d elements (planet/hyperion) on either side was a problem, I have made the main window's background slightly transparent.
Across all types of displays it would be a boon to be able to use more space.
Chat Channels
+ Show Spoiler +After the overarching UI changes, I'll return to the first UI element I worked at redesigning. Here we see the channel fills the main window by default but retains it's current functionalities of resizing, etc. On the right you can see the players' names now have their clan attached. The mod for the channel would have a specially colored name/icon. At the bottom right I have added three buttons: Emoticons, Moderation/voting, and Channel options. The functions for emoticons and moderation would also be based in chat commands. Channel options would include public/privacy, user cap, password control, preferred moderators and so on for a moderator. Any ideas for options a non-moderator might want in a channel?
FYI the channel discussion is taken from a design by LzGaMeR, which included a functionality which I felt was pretty cool: in-line "join as observer" links (which one would assume add you as an obs to a game). I think they could even look like buttons.
Continuing the idea of consistent design, IM/social functions should mainly be kept at the bottom of the screen. This also makes sure you are always able to chat with others.
Home/Welcome
+ Show Spoiler +Here I've broken up News and Community into two separate panels. They both rotate between views every few seconds (as the News/Community panel does now). Recent Broadcasts have been lumped in as a view in the community panel. Forums are the second view of Community, showing the top rated threads from the SC2 forums (clicking on one brings you to the thread in the in-game forums). The third view is General Chat Channel, which shows a realtime view of an instance of a chat channel (or just a still image). Clicking on this brings up that chat channel so you can join right in. These modifications are mostly aimed at getting a new or not previously social player involved with the community ("hey look, people are posting in the forums/chatting in this channel, I guess I could join in"). Broadcasts are an insular social mechanic (friends vs. community) and so I'm leaning toward deemphasizing them on this page.
Community/Forums
+ Show Spoiler +At the moment, that's pretty much it: a page to use the SC2 forums in-game. The icon is the forum icon from the SC2 website. I've fiddled with it slightly since my last post to include the important navigation of breadcrumbs, some text I had misplaced and a style more in-line with the rest of the UI.
News
+ Show Spoiler +Again, very simply, this is now the dedicated News page, with a cool UNN icon (;D). I've modified it to mimic the SC2 website, with a header space where featured, breaking, and otherwise important news would be emphasized, and individual news stories have a shortened version with a link to their own page. The tabs down the left give you different types of news, including upcoming events (see Event page). I could see having major sc2 communities getting their own news tabs here (TL, for instance).
Galaxy Editor
+ Show Spoiler +As an in-game web browser was met with a general "meh", I decided to fill it's gap with a Galaxy Editor page. The major use of this page would be to manage and edit your own custom maps/mods, maps you've downloaded from bnet/interwebs, as well as all maps you have on your computer. Also, it serves as a link into the editor itself.
The UI mimics that of joining a custom game, with criteria buttons across the left, a category chooser and a search function. In the list of maps, you are given the author(s) name(s), a green star which indicates maps you've created, and green checks or red exclamation marks along the left.
A map that has been installed in the correct directory (esp those downloaded from Bnet) will have a green check, those that are found on your machine but are not in the right directory for play (esp those downloaded externally) have the red mark. If you are the author of the map, green or red mean whether you've published the map to Bnet or not.
Right clicking on a map in the list gives you several options, including to edit, duplicate, delete, install (copies the map to the correct directory for play), and publish (if you are the author). You can use this to purge unwanted maps you accidentally downloaded without leaving SC2.
The coolest part of this feature would be multiplayer mapmaking: when you're in a party and enter a map or the editor directly, you are prompted whether you'd like to invite your party to help out. You are all taken then into a multiuser session of Galaxy Editor, including the party chat. This would certainly be madness for random groups of players, but for a dedicated mapmaking team, it would be a way to accelerate the map/modcrafting experience.
Event/Tournament
+ Show Spoiler +A central location to create and participate in Tournaments, as well as check out major events. Icon is a fairly straightforward trophy. Let's start at the top left:
First we have the event/tournament browser, with four major options (as well as more minor sorting options) across the top. "All" shows all events and tournaments chronologically, "Event" only shows major events (ones based in RL locations esp.), "Bnet" shows tournaments based exclusively on BNET, and "LAN" shows tournaments that your compy can currently access via LAN. Checkboxes allow you to focus on new events or ones with vacancies, if you're feeling competitive.
The window itself includes important information about the events/tournaments (date, name, status, format) as well as a link (website/thread opens in browser) and a details button (hovering/r-clicking also work). Popularity of events would be dictated by how many followers they have (see tournament view).
At the bottom we see "Apply" and "Observe" buttons. With an open tournament selected, you can apply to it (assuming they're BNET application enabled) using this. Hitting the observe button brings up a list of replays from the tournament, which can include a recording of the voice input from the observers (mute-able, but allows for built-in commentary). If you are accepted to a tournament, the apply button changes to "join" and you can use this to hop into your next game in the tournament.
At the top right is the create tournament function. The following screen would include lots of options, including number of participants, admin list, obs list, map pool, details, prizes, links, etc. Also, you indicate whether it is a LAN or BNET based tournament (or both, I guess). Once you've made a tournament, you can gather players and begin games, but there are no time limits for when the tournament is finished or when the next game must happen (depends on when the players and obs hit a "ready" button).
My major reasoning in these features and interfaces is to help make organizing and running and participating in tournaments, big or small, easier. And making these things easier means more tournaments. :3
Alternatively, you can always use the existing custom game or the new LAN function (!) to run a tournament if you know what you're doing/have the resources/are baller like that.
Tournament View
+ Show Spoiler +Expanding on the Event view, this is a concept for the homepage of a particular event (tsl woo). It presents all any current matches, all the matches of the tournament, important information, brackets, a list of admins and players, and a heads up of the number of spectators and followers. At the top left, there is the event panel and title of the event. There is space for an image, whether it's uploaded or selected from a few tournament brackety images. The creator of the tournament is credited here as well. Navigation tabs line the left side of the page and include access to a list of recent series, in depth information about the tournament, the brackets (with links to replays of the series), and the player list. The body of the recent matches page is topped by a current games panel, with a link to spectate in a special "viewing session" of the game in progress (separated from the game itself so as to not affect gameplay). The current matches will rotate like the news panel on the homepage, and you can see the players involved and time elapsed. This is of course a feature that would take some doing, and I would personally acquiesce to this space being used to spotlight headline/latest matches' replays. Also, if none are underway this space is used to keep viewers up to date on when the next set of matches are coming. The list of matches are grouped by series, and show the names of the players, the bracket and the match date. There is a pronounced lack of win/lose stats here in order not to spoil the results. The bracket view shows the full breakdown of the tournament. Drilling into a particular matchup on either of these shows you a list of the replays (with fake replays included to fill out the series). At the far right of the page there are the "join next match" button and Spectator panel. Only participants in the tournament can use the join next match button (organizers/admins would have a control button here) and it joins you to the lobby of your next match. The spectator panel keeps track of users that are following/viewing the tournament and the follow button keeps you up to date with the happenings of the tournament (in a broadcast-type field).
Clan
+ Show Spoiler +yay clan support! Located within your player profile, you have access to a roster of your clanmates, a button to join your special clan chat channel, as well as clan broadcast and events spaces. The icon is a modification of the achievement icon, hopefully evoking images of winged family crests. I wasn't sure what info would be best to include in the roster list (besides names, rank, connection status), any ideas?
Clan news functions like the player broadcast function, showing the latest post from clan admins. Clan events includes a rotating trophy case-esque (or list/calendar if that's preferable) of the upcoming events. Each of these has a "+" button next to them for admins to create new news posts and events. The event builder has a choice of icon, choice of date/time and text boxes for title and description. Clan events will have an achievement toast-like alert when they're starting. Finally, these two areas could be made much larger if the roster needs less space (or exchanges places with the clan news space).
Parties (Full screen)
+ Show Spoiler +While on one hand it makes sense that the max party count is 4 for 4v4 league play, it totally doesn't on the other. Parties should exist to make joining games as a group easier at any number. I would recommend pushing the cap on party numbers to 8 or 11 (as per my concepts), or even 16 with some sort of scrollable UI (or even a "view party" button), because it should match the max player cap possible. You'll notice there isn't room for players' names, so when you hover on the partymember's portrait you get their name/clan as feedback.
Players in a party should not be limited in what they can do; you should be able to start a ladder game, 1player game, or replay while in a party, but you'll get a popup if your party decides to ladder/join a game. The popup has options to leave your current game and join them, or continue your game and stop the party's attempt (will probably get you kicked).
If the party has more members than a team ladder matchup and tries to join one, the leader gets a popup which forces him to choose (checkboxes) the correct number of players from the party. The same goes for joining custom games (if insufficient slots are available). Players who aren't picked can do other stuff and aren't kicked from the party (can even chat with those in game with the party chat).
Also, if you create a custom game with too few slots for your party members, by default all will be asked to join and excess are added to the observer team (and can be moved from there or elect to leave).
Finally, a new button ("View with Party") should exist on the replay page to allow party viewing of replays. When you hit it, your party is invited, the replay is shared to them and you are all taken into the replay together.
Join custom game (LAN)
+ Show Spoiler +The standard join custom game view has a couple of modifications. Specifically, there are two new tabs (open lobbies, LAN), a join private button and a right-click option on games to view open lobbies. The join private button brings up a popup with a game name (and password?) textbox, with which you can join a game that has a name and hasn't been made public. The Open Lobbies tab shows a list of open lobbies with numerous sorting options (defaulting to latest created). The list includes the name of the games, the host's name and number of slots available. There is also the option (a checkbox) to include games without titles in the list of open lobbies (checked by default). If you use the r-click "view open lobbies" on a particular map, the map has a similar view with a list of open lobbies for that map specifically. Next, the LAN tab: simply a list of visible LAN based custom games with open lobbies. If there are no available LAN games, the list is replaced with a "no LAN games found" overlay. I haven't included in these designs, but on the create new custom game page, there'd be a separate "create LAN game" button, so there isn't overlap between LAN and Bnet(or should there be?). The implementation of LAN is of course a sticky proposition to Blizz for "protective" reasons, but I know it's the most requested feature that should have been in at launch, and that there's a simple and safe way to do it: 1. LAN games can be accessed after logging in with your BNet credentials
2. but if you want to play w/o BNet connection, you can authorize a specific computer for "offline" play
3. If your computer is authorized, you can play LAN in "offline" mode
4. Only one of your authorized computers can have LAN access at a time (requiring at least a temporary connection to BNET when you migrate this function)
5. ???
6. Profit
Everyone happy?
Game Lobby
+ Show Spoiler +Here's a couple of ideas for how a few modifications to the basic game lobby could expand the usefulness of this feature. First, just next to the GAME LOBBY text, you have some text informing you of whether the game is private or public. There are several additional controls across the top of the central area for the creator of the game. Here is a view of a public, named game lobby. Just above the team containers is a textbox for input of a game name. Giving a game a name lets you explain you intentions and lets other players join it by name. The game name can only be changed when the lobby is private. Also, there is now a checkbox for auto-matchmaking. This defines whether your game lobby will be available to players clicking "join game" on a map itself (rather than drilling down into the list of open lobbies and selecting from there), and is active by default. Finally, there is an additional add player button labeled "+observer". This allows you to add players directly as observers to the new Observer team, which is available in any map (with an option to deny this in the map editor).
Options/Hotkeys
+ Show Spoiler +I wanted to give a view of how the offline LAN and cross-regional play could work in the options screen. The offline authorization function is essentially just a checkbox which allows expanded offline play, but requires an internet and bnet connection (if you've already authorized a computer, Bnet will have recorded that and will deny further authorization until you uncheck that box in the previously authorized computer). While you shouldn't need this feature to play LAN when connected to Bnet, it should be nice for a person who wants to be able to play while traveling or when connection to the internet is a problem. Further down this page are options for cross-regional interaction and play. As detailed in the information popup, these checkboxes enable you to play and chat with players from other regions, at the expense of game stability. This is an option mainly aimed at top tier players, who I feel like would benefit greatly from easier interaction across regions (or for players who want a different languaged SC2 to where they live, but don't want to deal with lag). Activating this might require a restart of the game client to download appropriate font sets. Finally, a really simple and awesome suggestion I got from Clamev on the TL forums: interface hotkeys! Want to start a quick match? Hit control+G! Navigate the UI with Function keys! or customize to your own delight in the hotkey menu! This seems like a completely realistic and reasonable request which would benefit everyone.
Okay so that's it for now. What do you think? Any questions? Are these features/pages you would want? Are there any you would get rid of or change? Is there anything I'm not thinking of?
Your humble servant,
Goblinoid
Original post
+ Show Spoiler +To Begin+ Show Spoiler +Starting with the join custom game page (as it was the main screenshot I was working with), I'll bring your attention to reorganized left and right panels, as well as a slightly larger chat channel button at the bottom right.
The left panel buttons are arranged: Home/Welcome, Community, News, Web Browser, Replays, Event, Help. The right panel buttons include your profile, achievements, ladder and Clan. The reasoning here to create consistent design; functions centered around your profile (summary, achievements, ladder and clan) are kept by your player icon, and other functions (including social, informative, etc.) are kept separate. The player's icon and create party button are made smaller to make room for these buttons and your clan's name is added to the top right of the right panel (although it disappears when you're in a party). After the base level UI changes, I'll return to the first UI element I worked at redesigning. Here we see the channel fills the main window by default but retains it's current functionalities of resizing, etc. On the right you can see the players' names now have their clan attached. There is a bit of space at the bottom right of the channel which should be filled out, I'm thinking chat/mod buttons, any suggestions? (currently it's just an extension of the channel user list)
FYI the channel discussion is taken from a design by LzGaMeR, which included a functionality which I felt was pretty cool: in-line "join as observer" links (which one would assume add you as an obs to a game). I think they could even look like buttons.
Continuing the idea of consistent design, IM/social functions should be mainly kept at the bottom of the screen. This also makes sure you are always able to chat with others. Added another window obscuring Tychus' face (sorry pardner) which focuses on player interaction, giving links to the forums and a stream from a general chat channel (clicking on it pops up the channel so you can write in it). I don't know how much of the majority use/look at the "recent broadcasts" window, I might remove it to make more room for a chat channel window built directly into the homepage. Also moved around buttons to make room, and removed the 'Community' from 'News and community'. At the moment, that's pretty much it: a page to use the SC2 forums in-game. The icon is the forum icon from the SC2 website. Alternatively, this view could be used for dedicated channels, but I felt that'd be a bit redundant. Any thoughts/suggestions? Again, very simply, this is now the dedicated News page, with a cool UNN icon (;D). Modified this page so the tabs down the left give you different types of news, including upcoming events(!) and clan news (see Clan, below). I could see having major sc2 communities getting their own news tabs here (TL, for instance). Maybe even a "add to my feed" button, so you can link up any news source you like (maybe going overboard now). WHAT'S THIS?!?! Web browser get out of SC2 you are not a scv, you can't even harvest minerals. Honestly this is a long shot of a feature, and I wanted to gauge interest with some visuals. Co-opted the current icon for news/community since it seemed to fit. Included all the expected functions: tabs, back, forward, reload/stop, home, search, options, history/favorites. Links that would take you to an out of game browser would now load here. Would you want a browser in your SC2, or is it just overkill? A central location to create and participate in Tournaments, as well as check out major events. Icon is a fairly straightforward trophy. Let's start at the top left: First we have the event/tournament browser, with four major options (as well as more minor sorting options) across the top. "All" shows all events and tournaments chronologically, "Event" only shows major events (ones based in RL locations esp.), "Bnet" shows tournaments based exclusively on BNET, and "LAN" shows tournaments that your compy can currently access via LAN. The window itself includes important information about the events/tournaments (date, name, status, format) as well as a link (website/thread opens in SC2 browser) and a details button (hovering/r-clicking also work). At the bottom we see "Apply" and "Observe" buttons. With an open tournament selected, you can apply to it (assuming they're BNET application enabled) using this. Hitting the observe button brings up a list of replays from the tournament, which can include a recording of the voice input from the observers (mute-able, but allows for built-in commentary). If you are accepted to a tournament, the apply button changes to "join" and you can use this to hop into your next game in the tournament. At the top right is the create tournament function. This includes lots of options, including number of participants, admin list, obs list, details, prizes, links, etc. Also, you indicate whether it is a LAN or BNET based tournament (or both, I guess). Once you've made a tournament, you can gather players and begin games, but there are no time limits for when the tournament is finished or when the next game must happen (depends on when the players and obs hit a "ready" button). My major reasoning in these features and interfaces is to help make organizing and running and participating in tournaments, big or small, easier. And making these things easier means more tournaments. :3 Alternatively, you can always use the existing custom game or the new LAN function (next paragraph) to run a tournament if you know what you're doing/have the resources/are baller like that. Finally, I have included at the bottom right the functionality for LAN games. Drilling down here you can create a game or see a list of available LAN games. LAN could also be located in the multiplayer section ( Example), which would free up more room for tournament stuff. The implementation of LAN is of course a sticky proposition to Blizz for "protective" reasons, but I know there's a simple and safe way to do it: 1. LAN games can be accessed after logging in with your BNet credentials
2. but if you want to play w/o BNet connection, you can authorize a specific computer for "offline" play
3. If your computer is authorized, you can play LAN in "offline" mode
4. Only one of your authorized computers can have LAN access at a time (requiring at least a temporary connection to BNET when you migrate this function)
5. ???
6. Profit Everyone happy? yay clan support! Located within your player profile, you have access to a roster of your clanmates, a button to join your special clan chat channel, as well as clan news and events spaces. Icon is a modification of the achievement icon, hopefully evoking images of winged family crests. I wasn't sure what info would be best to include in the roster list (besides names, rank, connection status), any ideas?
Clan news includes posts from clan admins and longer posts have a button labeled "..." with a link to a separate page/popup. Clan events includes a rotating trophy case-esque (or list/calendar if that's preferable) of the upcoming events. Each of these has a "+" button next to them for admins to create new news posts and events. The news builder is essentially a text box, and the event builder has a choice of icon, choice of date/time and text boxes for title and description. Clan events will have an achievement toast-like alert when they're starting. Finally, these two areas could be made much larger if the roster needs less space (or exchanges places with the clan news space).
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damn, this looks amazing, im amazed at how you did this :O
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God that would be so sick, looks sooooooo awesome.
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You know what'd be cool for 1.3? If when I clicked for a quickmatch, it gave me options to choose my race and gametype, as opposed to being blank and not letting my play any ladder games... that'd be sweet.
Sorry, just venting.
Your ideas are cool though. I'd get behind all of them.
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Get this to Blizz asap Very well done!
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that looks really good, good job
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I would personally fit LAN under custom, but since it's a feature that isn't there I guess it's kind of moot. I'm also not sure about the forums and chat in one window thing, clutters things up especially with tabs at the bottom as well. Forum integration however looks like how I expected it to work in the first place, ditto the clan page. Not sure about the event thing, but it's better than what there is certainly. But please, no browser. It'd invite problems and it's not something I personally want Blizz to be spending time on.
Nice work though, keep it up!
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WOW all those look sooo nice.
There must be some secret reason Blizz doesn't want to do something nice like this. I refuse to believe that a team of probably thousands couldn't realize how much better it could look/be. Even regarding the work involved, Blizz is rolling in $$$. Not to mention most of these are cosmetic changes or changes that would require little new implementation and could be done with the existing libraries.
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Wow, why aren't you working at blizzard mate ? I would love the have b.net as the gallery shows!
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Would be awesome too bad blizzard won't do this 
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honestly sc2 should have all this. dunno why they think less is more. what's funny is as i was looking at the pictures i felt like i was looking at steam lol and that's old technology. blizzard is behind. hopefully by the time legacy of the void comes out bnet 2.0 or 2.6 or w/e we're at by then will look something similar to this. no reason to not have clan support, tourneys, and what not. I also liked your idea on integrating tourneys other than blizzard ones into their system. it would be good for blizzard and the little guy
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Really sad that some one like you can create a better UI than a company as big and wealthy as Blizzard.
Good work.
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wow blizzard is really making progress with their-- wait, what?
you, my friend, are awesome. not only did you add pretty much all the things i want blizzard to add, but you made it look seamless in your images.
also, i see what you did there, adding named game rooms. bit of subliminal messaging, that 
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Blizzard obviously has almost no idea what they're doing. Yours is basically 100% awesomer. I really wish clans of some sort were in the game. Jeez.
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I like pretty much everything you added/changed except for the location of the LAN feature... but since there is no LAN anyways it's not a big deal.
Nice work!
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This is nice, hopefully the UI designers in blizzard will copy your work.
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On March 26 2011 05:20 VarpuliS wrote:also, i see what you did there, adding named game rooms. bit of subliminal messaging, that
haha, technically EGLzGaMeR wrote the channel text, so I can't take credit. But I do support it ^_^
Also @ LAN placement, I'll see about that
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I feel as though the Web browser has no reason to be built into SC2, I imagine the majority of SC2 players have computers capable of handling a simple alt+tab to use their current web browser of choice. The only reason someone may use this is so that they continue to be involved in chat channels while browsing the internet I suppose, but if thats the case you could add an option for a sound notification when you get a private message in-game while you are alt tabbed or something similar.
The two features that are the most appealing by FAR are Clan support and the in game tournament registration, both of those would be amazing.
Event Registration/Tournament viewing
I love the idea of a system like this, I can't think of any game that has anything equivalent to this in it, but for a extremely competitive game such as SC2 I think it would add a ton to the spectator experience for the average player. Just finished a ladder game and don't feel like playing again? Time to check if theres any tournaments going on to watch. It would work fucking fantastically well if Blizzard could develop a technology equivalent to HLTV/SourceTV that would allow you to enter in progress tournament games and spectate them.
I honestly can not understand why I system such as that isn't implementable, I know it would require rewritten a most likely very large amount of code so that when one player in the game lags it doesn't effect the other players, but that is do able with architecture that goes from each user, to one centralized server and then back to each user. For some reason the system they decided to go with for SC2 doesn't connect players directly anymore but instead connects both players to a blizzard server, this adds an increased delay in response time for both players. But with this they took advantage of none of the benefits it offers! It's honestly a terribly designed system, just terrible. They could have done what HoN did so easily, they definitely have more then enough money to support it and it would make the game experience so much better but I guess theres no point in day dreaming :S.
Clan Support
Despite not being a part of any clan this is such an integral feature to have in a competitive game, and the way you designed it is outstanding, nothing more to say about that really.
I do have a couple things to nitpick with your design though. The chat box being over Tychus' face looks bad, it's extremely out of place and clunky looking. And if you're working on basically redoing all features of the UI, make it widescreen, I can't believe how incredibly lazy it was of them to not have the features be scalable, it makes no sense. Finally I think the news section could be made more, how can I put this... made to look like it was designed this century? Currently its extremely basic, theres barely any information available to the user at first glance, it should be more like TeamLiquid's front page, multiple categories and what not. It could even contain twitter feeds from the pros or something interesting like that.
Perhaps for LAN support to could just be a simply checkbox, then when you click find game a pop up appears informing the user that the match will be unranked because it is using Virtual lan.
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Awesome, I want clan support and the new look
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Everything looks really solid! Some features would probably not be updated (tournaments/events) as frequently as we want. Also "Join clan channel" means you have to register your clan under battle.net settings which could be a huge administrative hassle. Other than that, I like the direction you're going with the chat channel feature and web browser!
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mannnnn that UI just oozes sex. That's really the biggest thing holding starcraft back is the interface, it just makes b.net seems so....idk lonely and disconnected.
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Looked at pictures before i read the OP...............fail
-_- got all excited and crap
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I really love the "Join as Observer" button! Definitely something I'd love to see in the future!
On March 26 2011 05:20 sjschmidt93 wrote:
Really sad that some one like you can create a better UI than a company as big and wealthy as Blizzard.
Good work.
Blame Activision, not Blizzard.
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You need to work for blizzard
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On March 26 2011 05:21 ThaZenith wrote:
Blizzard obviously has almost no idea what they're doing. Yours is basically 100% awesomer. I really wish clans of some sort were in the game. Jeez.
designing a layout is pretty insignificant compared to all the behind the scenes stuff one has to do for it to, you know... actually work.
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Wow I Love the ideas! Awesome job!
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Love pretty much everything you did. Feels like this is what we could have had ;_;
On a sort of related note, since I clicked on this thead with this in mind. I would love if they added the ability to scroll the replay menu with hotkeys (while seeing the races etc), or changed the layout somehow. I can't tell how many times i've accidently double clicked instead of single clicked and opened the wrong one while trying to browse through a mass of replays i've just downloaded, then you have to go through the loading screen and exiting the replay and navigating back. It's just a simple quality of life change which would really remove some frustration.
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Looks brilliant. I wish it were easy to implement.
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On March 26 2011 05:33 GinDo wrote:
Looked at pictures before i read the OP...............fail
-_- got all excited and crap
Hahaha same here. I thought they were the improvements that occurred during 1.3 (haven't been on since so I haven't got a chance to check anything), and then realized that they were all custom made.
That being said though, they look fantastic and it would be awesome to see this kind of stuff in Battle.net!
edit: Was going to suggest that there be a way to view TL.net in addition to the official b.net forums, but realized you also thought of that and added in a steam-esqe browser, haha. 
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Ok here is what I think ;
Chat - That is what it always should have looked. Blizzard should really look into this and try to remove player limit for chat rooms etc. But guess they have a reason for current look , don't know really
Home - Top right part looks OK but I don't understand why would you need a chat room in home view. Maybe it's just me but small chat windows makes me wanna kill myself.
Forums - You need a browser for this , implementing a non-browser forum there is too much work and doesn't worth it. Also it will only cause more QQ threads in official forums.
Browser - Almost impossible , it's really a damn hard task to do for so little gain. Beyond being hard , I can't see the point anyway.
News - I thought there is already a community news window and it looked like the one in your screenshot? Adding feeds are hard because lots of users gonna add lots of weird RSS and then cry for why it's not working etc etc. I can guarantee you , you don't want to add a feature you can't %100 control in a user software.
Clan - Looks good , especially roster part. But I doubt they'll implement something like clan news. Clan news gives clan members a spam board. And considering the size of community , it'll cost too much to Blizz , saving all that data and work. Yea it's easy to put a 100x100 box there but when you think about it , it's kinda like you're asking for a 100x100 twitter there.
And with all do respect , I had to add one thing ; various people keep creating "UI Improvements" threads for a while now. I can remember 3 in last 3 weeks at top of my head.
The problem is that implementing a good idea is HARD and I'm not pulling that out of my ass really , I'm somewhat a coder who knows a little about how this things works , and believe me creating a screenshot of "browser in Bnet" , "twitter in bnet" , "rss in bnet" may be easy and it's even easy for a decent programmer like me but it's HARD for Blizzard. Because big big companies doesn't have the luxury to release something half-baked , knowing that someone will exploit the shit out of it and will create tons of user reports etc etc. ( rss feed for example , imagine how many mails they would get because users are trying to add a non-standart rss)
It sucks to be the guy posting serious stuff and looking like a hater but yea this is what I think.
Still kudos for your time and effort , although I strictly believe everything I said above , I also know for sure any developer ( including Blizzard guys ) LOVES these kind of things. Community feedbacks are always awesome , no matter how impossible etc they are.
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On March 26 2011 05:35 mufin wrote:Show nested quote +On March 26 2011 05:21 ThaZenith wrote:
Blizzard obviously has almost no idea what they're doing. Yours is basically 100% awesomer. I really wish clans of some sort were in the game. Jeez. designing a layout is pretty insignificant compared to all the behind the scenes stuff one has to do for it to, you know... actually work.
Yet they have a whole team assigned to do just that. It's simply a lack of community input which could have completely changed peoples opinions on Bnet 2.0.
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There is very little that would make me happier then to see these changes implemented, great work i really like the clan page and the built in browser.
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Feature requests (as discussed on SotG):
- Voting maps up instead of veto-ing them. I know you already have the fun or not thing, but this'd pertain more specifically to the ladder.
- Selecting tournament mapsets. This could/should be a map category in the current system imo, so possibly requires no ui change, but if you ever happen to play with that screen.. If you do an event info page it'd probably have to be there anyways.
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I want hotkeys in my Bnet!
I want to be able to start a laddergame without having to touch my mouse.
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I wish they'd add the in game tournaments from wc3, those were really fun. The changes you implemented are awesome I hope they add all of that(and everything else we used to have) eventually!
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Love most of the changes, especially clan & events pages.
I like the idea of a browser inside the client, but given how clunky it is just to navigate chat windows currently I can't imagine wanting to deal with that for a browser too. Maybe if the design and usability improves generally in the future it would be something to add.
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It is like this the UI should have been looking from the beginning. :E
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gotta love it man good job.
I would love a browser inside sc2 actually.. u already have chat and chatrooms and whatnot...steam does it, why not blizz?
Also, i would definitely love the clan system. This is something that was promised by Blizzard some time ago and is still not in. Several people like me have wasted the name change just so we could have the clan name in it :S
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Wow fail not reading the OP and going straight to the gallery. I saw LAN and peed myself. Alas.
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Such great work, ++++++
The clan feature seems neat.
I really wish they could bring the speed navigating through profiles, etc to the speed it was at for the first few months. It's getting a little slower every day it seems like.
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Everything looks really solid! Some features would probably not be updated (tournaments/events) as frequently as we want. Also "Join clan channel" means you have to register your clan under battle.net settings which could be a huge administrative hassle. Other than that, I like the direction you're going with the chat channel feature and web browser!
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I love it, great job man. You should teach Blizzard developers how to develop games.
Your suggestions are just amazing and just what it needs, great job.
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I really like the most of it, though I would think most TL users would be more comfortable tabbing out? I could be completely wrong there.
The tourney idea is really great IMO also
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Nice Job!! Really Innovative. Only thing I'm doubtful on is the web browser inside the game. I feel it would be much more efficient to run the game in windowed mode and then just use your normal web browser. Perhaps for those links that require a web browser to just simply paste the url so it would be much easier for users to copy and paste to go to those links.
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Somebody get this guy a job in Blizzard. I am behind you in all points. Granted I don't expect Blizzard to fix everything in one patch but one by one and I am okay with it. I really like your design and ideas but I do feel that browser is a bit overkill. If Blizzard do do that, I don't mind :D as long as my shitty laptop can handle it >.>
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The funny thing is that most of this should be painfully obvious to anyone designing the UI.
That's what happens when you hire the same person that designed Xbox Live's UI.
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Honestly I could fucking cry these things are so good! You have some serious talent for design, and I hope this really gets some much-needed attention. Your interface is just so understandable and so functional. It provides all the information you could ask for in a clean, concise manner. Obviously you designed interfaces for things that don't even exist yet (clan support, LAN, etc.) but I think you absolutely have the right idea.
I cannot articulate how much better I think your interface design feels. Perhaps it's a bit unfair because again you have features that don't exist yet, but even for things that already do exist (news, chat, welcome) I think you propose some massive improvements. That and I think the whole "Events & Tournaments" tab is a fucking great idea that I would imagine could be implemented with what Battle.Net already supports!
Once again, great work. I hope this post gets the plethora of attention it deserves.
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Excellent stuff. It's hard for me to not believe that much of this is in the SC2 playbook at Blizzard. The only things I'd be personally interested in is Clan Support / Event management tools. Nix the browser jazz. You don't need that.
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Wow. Doing Blizzard's job for them! Would definitely support this, except I doubt Blizzard will... they're too stubborn.
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I laughed very hard after reading imaginary idra's messages on teamliquid channel.
very nice work.
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It's not like Blizzard doesn't know about these possibilities (at least they should) - it's just that they don't know whether or not we really want them to make b.net2 awesome.
+ Show Spoiler [first of all] +lan and cross regional play
not like it's gonna happen, but I really want it
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this is EXACTLY what bnet 2.0 should have been
when is blizzard hiring you?
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Canada606 Posts
I like both your optimism that they'll have a LAN button and the overall design of a number of these pages. I especially like the web browser/events pages, I think that those would be a nice touch.
For the pictures themselves, I like that you put a bunch of progamer's names in the chat, gave me a good laugh.
I would honestly support the events page the most of the things I saw, but my second choice would be the rearrangement of buttons, it's just much cleaner.
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On March 26 2011 08:58 monitor wrote:
Wow. Doing Blizzard's job for them! Would definitely support this, except I doubt Blizzard will... they're too stubborn.
No kidding eh? its like every time someone has a great suggestion blizzard is like:
"Damn.. that was a good idea... i guess we can't use it now"
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What about a Multiplayer Map Maker section? Where groups of people can get together to create maps in Galaxy Editor together. It might help create a more dynamic and faster map making community if they can talk to each other and design in real time with the maps being saved to both people at the end of a session.
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Has Blizzard actually said anything about clans? That would be so cool and so fun - really bring the eSports side of it further.
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On March 26 2011 05:20 sjschmidt93 wrote:
Really sad that some one like you can create a better UI than a company as big and wealthy as Blizzard.
Good work.
Well, it only consists of screenshots, no UI. The coding required to create such features would be huge. But I wonder what they were working on all of the years anyway. They probably recoded bnet 2.0 from scratch. But then they just stopped without reaching the qualitative level of its predecessor. Features like clan integration should be quite natural.
I also miss a big online manual like Mojo StormStout's Warcraft III Strategy Guide was, where details about the game mechanics are carefully explained.
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web browser? damn, totally remove the need for alt-tabbing
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On March 26 2011 09:29 zende wrote:
Has Blizzard actually said anything about clans? That would be so cool and so fun - really bring the eSports side of it further.
It's been brought up many times with them. They brush it off or pretty much say "Oh yeah, we can do that in HoTS." =[
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On March 26 2011 09:33 universalwill wrote:
web browser? damn, totally remove the need for alt-tabbing
That's why I use windowed fullscreen mode. Instant alt-tab ftw.
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clan support would b pretty awesome...
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I think SC2 needs more man power behind it. SC2 has been pushed by Blizzard pretty well but Starcraft in general has some of the most constructive and organized groups among any competitive game. Its a gold mine waiting to be tapped.
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They're saving clan and tournament support for future expansions so that more people will buy them, thought this was common knowledge.
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On March 26 2011 09:25 Torpedo.Vegas wrote:
What about a Multiplayer Map Maker section? Where groups of people can get together to create maps in Galaxy Editor together. It might help create a more dynamic and faster map making community if they can talk to each other and design in real time with the maps being saved to both people at the end of a session.
AMG great idea :D
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On March 26 2011 14:43 politik wrote:
They're saving clan and tournament support for future expansions so that more people will buy them, thought this was common knowledge.
They confirmed this, or is this just cynical speculation?
The expansions will sell well without those features I think what with more story, units, achievements, maps, etc. Maybe even new map functions and abilities. Like Bridges, and boats.
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They have at least confirmed that clans will come with the next expansion, but cynical speculation does help me guess what their reasons are. (HoN had clans in early beta, and that game was made by like two guys in their basement)
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Man if only....
Blizzard need to get to work!
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This is quite nice.
what I really want is a way to host/join a custom game given a set of options, such as map, your race, and the race you want to play against.
At times me/other people join and exit games because the guy is not the race I want to play against.
Or atleast a custom game section like Iccup with titles: me zerg, you porotoss FS 1.3 go go go.
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although i love this stuff
it falls on deaf ears
Blizzard likes to say they listen to the community
and every now and then you'll hear about some random 2 second change that blizzard made according to someones suggestion. but it's incredibly rare.
i myself know the troubles. i've been begging blizzard to change the timeout value on custom map publishing for months now. it's a 2 second change and blizzard ignore me like the plague. probably laughing at me.
i love your UI and nothing would make me happier than to see something similar be implemented. but i guarantee blizzard will not care for it.
irregardless. good work.
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this would turn bnet 0.2 into bnet 2.0
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This is the sexiest post I've ever seen.
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O man that was just be so awesome if Blizzard was actually doing this. Ur images were rly professional looking, very nice. Its sad that u can do something so awesome, and most things blizzard do are pretty much ordinary or dissapointing in comparison. Not to baxh blizz though as they of course made the game. Gr8 work and hope this gets noticed.
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Holy moly, this is great!
But im so sad now, because the first thing i thought was, that a patch will come out soon, which brings all this features!
And i was so happy, but now after reading the thread, im really sad
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Hope they take up some of your suggestions, the clan features especially look very nice and I would love to see some of those implemented. Seems like we have been waiting for clan support since beta iirc
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On March 26 2011 16:54 decaf wrote:
this would turn bnet 0.2 into bnet 2.0
Was about to post the exact same thing, down to the non-capital t!
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Australia2107 Posts
Really want clan support ASAP.
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Wow they look really good, hopefully blizzard does implement it one day.
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On March 26 2011 07:16 Roxy wrote:everyone should go over to SC2 Forums and thumbs up this! Link for the Lazy
I agree, Blizzard needs to see this and take their heads out of their *xl*
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This is really amazing, I hope Blizzard takes a good look at these ideas, it would improve the online sc2 experience tenfold.
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Why doesn't this guy work for Blizzard? -_-
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Awesome work, this would be so amazing if they included like that. I have to congratulates you on the ergonomy of the whole thing too ^^
And I was a bit sad when I saw the LAN UI ... *sigh*
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This would be AWESOME, i LOVE the clan support, I wish a blizz representative came and looked at this :O
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Finally the real bnet 2.0 and none of that 0.2 crap
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It really look nice. Have you suggest it on b.net's forum ?
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On March 27 2011 04:01 StoLiVe wrote:
It really look nice. Have you suggest it on b.net's forum ?
Yup, here's the link and if you want to help out, post ideas/responses and thumbs up there (so that the thread doesn't get devoured by the bnet forum so quickly)
Thanks for the feedback, guys! I'll be updating the designs and thread with the input you've given me sometime soon :D
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just give me back alt+q q to leave games, ill be happy
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I have to say that's looks awesome. I doubt they will make it like this but you can always hope :D
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I love this, but I don't have a US account to reply in the thread
If you happen to have one and you support this idea, please let your voice be heard!
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clan support and maybe a daily/weekly tournament on line like they had for warcraft 2! i thought that was a really good concept. maybe instead of rewarding points for all participants maybe just offer achievements/feats of strength for winning them or placing top 3 or something
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I bet you worked hard on this and the changes seem good, so no disrespect.
But as a developer myself, I'd say UI designers can make some awesome apps and features with photoshop, but it is entirely different story to make them a reality. Sure many of your changes are cosmetic, but there is also stuff that needs some serious labour and testing and refining the concepts. Implementing back end, testing bugfixing etc.
That being said, HotS probably has new shiny stuff in the interface, I bet they are saving the major features there. And I also bet they are listening to players and communities, even though many of you don't believe it.
Btw. From developer point of view SC2 is an awesome product.
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How it should be. Awesome work.
Go make it blizz. Today rather than tomorrow!
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Whoa hey I just updated this all over the place, but I'm not making a new thread, so check out the front page and enjoy!
Your humble servant,
Goblinoid
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I'm absolutely in love with those changes, very nice job.
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Omg the tournament section would be the most awesome thing ever!!!
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Sadly, Blizzard needs to sell expansions Pack, don't expect to see Battle.net to be "completed" (with such nice features) until Legacy of the Void (in a least 2 years).
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On April 12 2011 18:34 ShadeOfDraG wrote:
Sadly, Blizzard needs to sell expansions Pack, don't expect to see Battle.net to be "completed" (with such nice features) until Legacy of the Void (in a least 2 years).
That's the spirit! Even unreasonable features could be reasonably developed with that kind of time frame
(I mean, it really is too bad that they can't leverage the expansions on story and balance changes)
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i wish it would be like this :3
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Very nicely done! Although much of what you've done are dependent on features Blizz may or may not ever implement, there's still a lot of nice tweaks that Blizz should adopt to make the UI more useful and informative.
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Your creativity inspires me. Emphasis on functionality while missing none of the form. Good job on the thought behind this, I really hope blizzard sees it.
You posted on Blizzard Suggestions forum as well?
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Isn't this way better than blizzard's bnet ui? Is it good or bad thing lol? Should I cry or laugh?
oh.h
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Moderation in chat channels and clan support are just so important.
Im seriously annoyed of trolls in the various practice group channels I lurk in.
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+ Show Spoiler +On March 26 2011 05:04 Goblinoid wrote:[Also posted @ Wellplayed.org and SC2 Forums, please thumbs up there if you like it ] Welcome to the second iteration of my modifications and additions to the current BNet UI. My first set of designs and concepts were met with really great enthusiasm and feedback and I'm honored by the compliments. I felt like there were a number of things I needed to change/add to best satisfy the community, so I've continued the project. The purpose of these designs is to give Blizz some community input on how the UI could look and what features we'd really like to see down the line. To that effect: please comment on my designs and ideas, if there's something that everyone wants, I'll add/change it and hopefully we can keep everyone happy. This is probably the iteration I will send to Blizzard in email form, unless we decide it needs more work. I understand that design doesn't magically make features appear and function, and that some of these ideas/features are unfeasible. But having well developed concepts of how things could and should work ought to give the developers inspiration and direction. I don't want to insult anyone or downplay their work, rather I laud the achievements of the SC2 team. But I also want them to know that it can be improved and I know they can access the resources to do it. To Begin+ Show Spoiler +Starting with the Fun or not page (as it was the main screenshot I was working with), I'll bring your attention to reorganized left and right panels, as well as a slightly larger chat channel button at the bottom right.
The left panel buttons are arranged: Home/Welcome, Community, News, Galaxy Editor, Replays, Event, Help. The right panel buttons include your profile, achievements, ladder and Clan. The reasoning here is to create consistent design; functions centered around your profile (summary, achievements, ladder and clan) are kept by your player icon, and other functions (including social, informative, etc.) are kept separate. The player's icon and create party button are made smaller to make room for these buttons and your clan's name is added to the top right of the right panel (although it disappears when you're in a party). While I have not modified my other designs to fit this, I would like to present a view of how the UI could maximize it's use of space.
First, the Starcraft 2 logo has been shrunk (we have a login screen for a large logo). The panels to the left and right have been squashed upwards to match, however the icons are proportionally smaller. Notice how the buttons still seem plenty large enough and there still is plenty of room (for the icons of partymembers, for instance). The bottom social/menu space has been squashed downwards, but again at no detriment to useability or visual style. The major change is that the central window has been maximized in all directions. If not being able to see the 3d elements (planet/hyperion) on either side was a problem, I have made the main window's background slightly transparent.
Across all types of displays it would be a boon to be able to use more space. After the overarching UI changes, I'll return to the first UI element I worked at redesigning. Here we see the channel fills the main window by default but retains it's current functionalities of resizing, etc. On the right you can see the players' names now have their clan attached. The mod for the channel would have a specially colored name/icon. At the bottom right I have added three buttons: Emoticons, Moderation/voting, and Channel options. The functions for emoticons and moderation would also be based in chat commands. Channel options would include public/privacy, user cap, password control, preferred moderators and so on for a moderator. Any ideas for options a non-moderator might want in a channel?
FYI the channel discussion is taken from a design by LzGaMeR, which included a functionality which I felt was pretty cool: in-line "join as observer" links (which one would assume add you as an obs to a game). I think they could even look like buttons.
Continuing the idea of consistent design, IM/social functions should mainly be kept at the bottom of the screen. This also makes sure you are always able to chat with others. Here I've broken up News and Community into two separate panels. They both rotate between views every few seconds (as the News/Community panel does now). Recent Broadcasts have been lumped in as a view in the community panel. Forums are the second view of Community, showing the top rated threads from the SC2 forums (clicking on one brings you to the thread in the in-game forums). The third view is General Chat Channel, which shows a realtime view of an instance of a chat channel (or just a still image). Clicking on this brings up that chat channel so you can join right in. These modifications are mostly aimed at getting a new or not previously social player involved with the community ("hey look, people are posting in the forums/chatting in this channel, I guess I could join in"). Broadcasts are an insular social mechanic (friends vs. community) and so I'm leaning toward deemphasizing them on this page. At the moment, that's pretty much it: a page to use the SC2 forums in-game. The icon is the forum icon from the SC2 website. I've fiddled with it slightly since my last post to include the important navigation of breadcrumbs, some text I had misplaced and a style more in-line with the rest of the UI. Again, very simply, this is now the dedicated News page, with a cool UNN icon (;D). I've modified it to mimic the SC2 website, with a header space where featured, breaking, and otherwise important news would be emphasized, and individual news stories have a shortened version with a link to their own page. The tabs down the left give you different types of news, including upcoming events (see Event page). I could see having major sc2 communities getting their own news tabs here (TL, for instance). As an in-game web browser was met with a general "meh", I decided to fill it's gap with a Galaxy Editor page. The major use of this page would be to manage and edit your own custom maps/mods, maps you've downloaded from bnet/interwebs, as well as all maps you have on your computer. Also, it serves as a link into the editor itself.
The UI mimics that of joining a custom game, with criteria buttons across the left, a category chooser and a search function. In the list of maps, you are given the author(s) name(s), a green star which indicates maps you've created, and green checks or red exclamation marks along the left.
A map that has been installed in the correct directory (esp those downloaded from Bnet) will have a green check, those that are found on your machine but are not in the right directory for play (esp those downloaded externally) have the red mark. If you are the author of the map, green or red mean whether you've published the map to Bnet or not.
Right clicking on a map in the list gives you several options, including to edit, duplicate, delete, install (copies the map to the correct directory for play), and publish (if you are the author). You can use this to purge unwanted maps you accidentally downloaded without leaving SC2.
The coolest part of this feature would be multiplayer mapmaking: when you're in a party and enter a map or the editor directly, you are prompted whether you'd like to invite your party to help out. You are all taken then into a multiuser session of Galaxy Editor, including the party chat. This would certainly be madness for random groups of players, but for a dedicated mapmaking team, it would be a way to accelerate the map/modcrafting experience.
A central location to create and participate in Tournaments, as well as check out major events. Icon is a fairly straightforward trophy. Let's start at the top left:
First we have the event/tournament browser, with four major options (as well as more minor sorting options) across the top. "All" shows all events and tournaments chronologically, "Event" only shows major events (ones based in RL locations esp.), "Bnet" shows tournaments based exclusively on BNET, and "LAN" shows tournaments that your compy can currently access via LAN. Checkboxes allow you to focus on new events or ones with vacancies, if you're feeling competitive.
The window itself includes important information about the events/tournaments (date, name, status, format) as well as a link (website/thread opens in browser) and a details button (hovering/r-clicking also work). Popularity of events would be dictated by how many followers they have (see tournament view).
At the bottom we see "Apply" and "Observe" buttons. With an open tournament selected, you can apply to it (assuming they're BNET application enabled) using this. Hitting the observe button brings up a list of replays from the tournament, which can include a recording of the voice input from the observers (mute-able, but allows for built-in commentary). If you are accepted to a tournament, the apply button changes to "join" and you can use this to hop into your next game in the tournament.
At the top right is the create tournament function. The following screen would include lots of options, including number of participants, admin list, obs list, map pool, details, prizes, links, etc. Also, you indicate whether it is a LAN or BNET based tournament (or both, I guess). Once you've made a tournament, you can gather players and begin games, but there are no time limits for when the tournament is finished or when the next game must happen (depends on when the players and obs hit a "ready" button).
My major reasoning in these features and interfaces is to help make organizing and running and participating in tournaments, big or small, easier. And making these things easier means more tournaments. :3
Alternatively, you can always use the existing custom game or the new LAN function (!) to run a tournament if you know what you're doing/have the resources/are baller like that.
Expanding on the Event view, this is a concept for the homepage of a particular event (tsl woo). It presents all any current matches, all the matches of the tournament, important information, brackets, a list of admins and players, and a heads up of the number of spectators and followers. At the top left, there is the event panel and title of the event. There is space for an image, whether it's uploaded or selected from a few tournament brackety images. The creator of the tournament is credited here as well. Navigation tabs line the left side of the page and include access to a list of recent series, in depth information about the tournament, the brackets (with links to replays of the series), and the player list. The body of the recent matches page is topped by a current games panel, with a link to spectate in a special "viewing session" of the game in progress (separated from the game itself so as to not affect gameplay). The current matches will rotate like the news panel on the homepage, and you can see the players involved and time elapsed. This is of course a feature that would take some doing, and I would personally acquiesce to this space being used to spotlight headline/latest matches' replays. Also, if none are underway this space is used to keep viewers up to date on when the next set of matches are coming. The list of matches are grouped by series, and show the names of the players, the bracket and the match date. There is a pronounced lack of win/lose stats here in order not to spoil the results. The bracket view shows the full breakdown of the tournament. Drilling into a particular matchup on either of these shows you a list of the replays (with fake replays included to fill out the series). At the far right of the page there are the "join next match" button and Spectator panel. Only participants in the tournament can use the join next match button (organizers/admins would have a control button here) and it joins you to the lobby of your next match. The spectator panel keeps track of users that are following/viewing the tournament and the follow button keeps you up to date with the happenings of the tournament (in a broadcast-type field). yay clan support! Located within your player profile, you have access to a roster of your clanmates, a button to join your special clan chat channel, as well as clan broadcast and events spaces. The icon is a modification of the achievement icon, hopefully evoking images of winged family crests. I wasn't sure what info would be best to include in the roster list (besides names, rank, connection status), any ideas?
Clan news functions like the player broadcast function, showing the latest post from clan admins. Clan events includes a rotating trophy case-esque (or list/calendar if that's preferable) of the upcoming events. Each of these has a "+" button next to them for admins to create new news posts and events. The event builder has a choice of icon, choice of date/time and text boxes for title and description. Clan events will have an achievement toast-like alert when they're starting. Finally, these two areas could be made much larger if the roster needs less space (or exchanges places with the clan news space). ( Full screen) + Show Spoiler +While on one hand it makes sense that the max party count is 4 for 4v4 league play, it totally doesn't on the other. Parties should exist to make joining games as a group easier at any number. I would recommend pushing the cap on party numbers to 8 or 11 (as per my concepts), or even 16 with some sort of scrollable UI (or even a "view party" button), because it should match the max player cap possible. You'll notice there isn't room for players' names, so when you hover on the partymember's portrait you get their name/clan as feedback.
Players in a party should not be limited in what they can do; you should be able to start a ladder game, 1player game, or replay while in a party, but you'll get a popup if your party decides to ladder/join a game. The popup has options to leave your current game and join them, or continue your game and stop the party's attempt (will probably get you kicked).
If the party has more members than a team ladder matchup and tries to join one, the leader gets a popup which forces him to choose (checkboxes) the correct number of players from the party. The same goes for joining custom games (if insufficient slots are available). Players who aren't picked can do other stuff and aren't kicked from the party (can even chat with those in game with the party chat).
Also, if you create a custom game with too few slots for your party members, by default all will be asked to join and excess are added to the observer team (and can be moved from there or elect to leave).
Finally, a new button ("View with Party") should exist on the replay page to allow party viewing of replays. When you hit it, your party is invited, the replay is shared to them and you are all taken into the replay together.
The standard join custom game view has a couple of modifications. Specifically, there are two new tabs (open lobbies, LAN), a join private button and a right-click option on games to view open lobbies. The join private button brings up a popup with a game name (and password?) textbox, with which you can join a game that has a name and hasn't been made public. The Open Lobbies tab shows a list of open lobbies with numerous sorting options (defaulting to latest created). The list includes the name of the games, the host's name and number of slots available. There is also the option (a checkbox) to include games without titles in the list of open lobbies (checked by default). If you use the r-click "view open lobbies" on a particular map, the map has a similar view with a list of open lobbies for that map specifically. Next, the LAN tab: simply a list of visible LAN based custom games with open lobbies. If there are no available LAN games, the list is replaced with a "no LAN games found" overlay. I haven't included in these designs, but on the create new custom game page, there'd be a separate "create LAN game" button, so there isn't overlap between LAN and Bnet(or should there be?). The implementation of LAN is of course a sticky proposition to Blizz for "protective" reasons, but I know it's the most requested feature that should have been in at launch, and that there's a simple and safe way to do it: 1. LAN games can be accessed after logging in with your BNet credentials
2. but if you want to play w/o BNet connection, you can authorize a specific computer for "offline" play
3. If your computer is authorized, you can play LAN in "offline" mode
4. Only one of your authorized computers can have LAN access at a time (requiring at least a temporary connection to BNET when you migrate this function)
5. ???
6. Profit
Everyone happy? Here's a couple of ideas for how a few modifications to the basic game lobby could expand the usefulness of this feature. First, just next to the GAME LOBBY text, you have some text informing you of whether the game is private or public. There are several additional controls across the top of the central area for the creator of the game. Here is a view of a public, named game lobby. Just above the team containers is a textbox for input of a game name. Giving a game a name lets you explain you intentions and lets other players join it by name. The game name can only be changed when the lobby is private. Also, there is now a checkbox for auto-matchmaking. This defines whether your game lobby will be available to players clicking "join game" on a map itself (rather than drilling down into the list of open lobbies and selecting from there), and is active by default. Finally, there is an additional add player button labeled "+observer". This allows you to add players directly as observers to the new Observer team, which is available in any map (with an option to deny this in the map editor). / Hotkeys+ Show Spoiler +I wanted to give a view of how the offline LAN and cross-regional play could work in the options screen. The offline authorization function is essentially just a checkbox which allows expanded offline play, but requires an internet and bnet connection (if you've already authorized a computer, Bnet will have recorded that and will deny further authorization until you uncheck that box in the previously authorized computer). While you shouldn't need this feature to play LAN when connected to Bnet, it should be nice for a person who wants to be able to play while traveling or when connection to the internet is a problem. Further down this page are options for cross-regional interaction and play. As detailed in the information popup, these checkboxes enable you to play and chat with players from other regions, at the expense of game stability. This is an option mainly aimed at top tier players, who I feel like would benefit greatly from easier interaction across regions (or for players who want a different languaged SC2 to where they live, but don't want to deal with lag). Activating this might require a restart of the game client to download appropriate font sets. Finally, a really simple and awesome suggestion I got from Clamev on the TL forums: interface hotkeys! Want to start a quick match? Hit control+G! Navigate the UI with Function keys! or customize to your own delight in the hotkey menu! This seems like a completely realistic and reasonable request which would benefit everyone. Okay so that's it for now. What do you think? Any questions? Are these features/pages you would want? Are there any you would get rid of or change? Is there anything I'm not thinking of? Your humble servant, Goblinoid Original post+ Show Spoiler +To Begin+ Show Spoiler +Starting with the join custom game page (as it was the main screenshot I was working with), I'll bring your attention to reorganized left and right panels, as well as a slightly larger chat channel button at the bottom right.
The left panel buttons are arranged: Home/Welcome, Community, News, Web Browser, Replays, Event, Help. The right panel buttons include your profile, achievements, ladder and Clan. The reasoning here to create consistent design; functions centered around your profile (summary, achievements, ladder and clan) are kept by your player icon, and other functions (including social, informative, etc.) are kept separate. The player's icon and create party button are made smaller to make room for these buttons and your clan's name is added to the top right of the right panel (although it disappears when you're in a party). After the base level UI changes, I'll return to the first UI element I worked at redesigning. Here we see the channel fills the main window by default but retains it's current functionalities of resizing, etc. On the right you can see the players' names now have their clan attached. There is a bit of space at the bottom right of the channel which should be filled out, I'm thinking chat/mod buttons, any suggestions? (currently it's just an extension of the channel user list)
FYI the channel discussion is taken from a design by LzGaMeR, which included a functionality which I felt was pretty cool: in-line "join as observer" links (which one would assume add you as an obs to a game). I think they could even look like buttons.
Continuing the idea of consistent design, IM/social functions should be mainly kept at the bottom of the screen. This also makes sure you are always able to chat with others. Added another window obscuring Tychus' face (sorry pardner) which focuses on player interaction, giving links to the forums and a stream from a general chat channel (clicking on it pops up the channel so you can write in it). I don't know how much of the majority use/look at the "recent broadcasts" window, I might remove it to make more room for a chat channel window built directly into the homepage. Also moved around buttons to make room, and removed the 'Community' from 'News and community'. At the moment, that's pretty much it: a page to use the SC2 forums in-game. The icon is the forum icon from the SC2 website. Alternatively, this view could be used for dedicated channels, but I felt that'd be a bit redundant. Any thoughts/suggestions? Again, very simply, this is now the dedicated News page, with a cool UNN icon (;D). Modified this page so the tabs down the left give you different types of news, including upcoming events(!) and clan news (see Clan, below). I could see having major sc2 communities getting their own news tabs here (TL, for instance). Maybe even a "add to my feed" button, so you can link up any news source you like (maybe going overboard now). WHAT'S THIS?!?! Web browser get out of SC2 you are not a scv, you can't even harvest minerals. Honestly this is a long shot of a feature, and I wanted to gauge interest with some visuals. Co-opted the current icon for news/community since it seemed to fit. Included all the expected functions: tabs, back, forward, reload/stop, home, search, options, history/favorites. Links that would take you to an out of game browser would now load here. Would you want a browser in your SC2, or is it just overkill? A central location to create and participate in Tournaments, as well as check out major events. Icon is a fairly straightforward trophy. Let's start at the top left: First we have the event/tournament browser, with four major options (as well as more minor sorting options) across the top. "All" shows all events and tournaments chronologically, "Event" only shows major events (ones based in RL locations esp.), "Bnet" shows tournaments based exclusively on BNET, and "LAN" shows tournaments that your compy can currently access via LAN. The window itself includes important information about the events/tournaments (date, name, status, format) as well as a link (website/thread opens in SC2 browser) and a details button (hovering/r-clicking also work). At the bottom we see "Apply" and "Observe" buttons. With an open tournament selected, you can apply to it (assuming they're BNET application enabled) using this. Hitting the observe button brings up a list of replays from the tournament, which can include a recording of the voice input from the observers (mute-able, but allows for built-in commentary). If you are accepted to a tournament, the apply button changes to "join" and you can use this to hop into your next game in the tournament. At the top right is the create tournament function. This includes lots of options, including number of participants, admin list, obs list, details, prizes, links, etc. Also, you indicate whether it is a LAN or BNET based tournament (or both, I guess). Once you've made a tournament, you can gather players and begin games, but there are no time limits for when the tournament is finished or when the next game must happen (depends on when the players and obs hit a "ready" button). My major reasoning in these features and interfaces is to help make organizing and running and participating in tournaments, big or small, easier. And making these things easier means more tournaments. :3 Alternatively, you can always use the existing custom game or the new LAN function (next paragraph) to run a tournament if you know what you're doing/have the resources/are baller like that. Finally, I have included at the bottom right the functionality for LAN games. Drilling down here you can create a game or see a list of available LAN games. LAN could also be located in the multiplayer section ( Example), which would free up more room for tournament stuff. The implementation of LAN is of course a sticky proposition to Blizz for "protective" reasons, but I know there's a simple and safe way to do it: 1. LAN games can be accessed after logging in with your BNet credentials
2. but if you want to play w/o BNet connection, you can authorize a specific computer for "offline" play
3. If your computer is authorized, you can play LAN in "offline" mode
4. Only one of your authorized computers can have LAN access at a time (requiring at least a temporary connection to BNET when you migrate this function)
5. ???
6. Profit Everyone happy? yay clan support! Located within your player profile, you have access to a roster of your clanmates, a button to join your special clan chat channel, as well as clan news and events spaces. Icon is a modification of the achievement icon, hopefully evoking images of winged family crests. I wasn't sure what info would be best to include in the roster list (besides names, rank, connection status), any ideas?
Clan news includes posts from clan admins and longer posts have a button labeled "..." with a link to a separate page/popup. Clan events includes a rotating trophy case-esque (or list/calendar if that's preferable) of the upcoming events. Each of these has a "+" button next to them for admins to create new news posts and events. The news builder is essentially a text box, and the event builder has a choice of icon, choice of date/time and text boxes for title and description. Clan events will have an achievement toast-like alert when they're starting. Finally, these two areas could be made much larger if the roster needs less space (or exchanges places with the clan news space).
So when are you applying to work at blizzard :D?? This is sick ^_ ^
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This is amazing!!!
Starcraft world...in Starcraft! woo
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That is really cool! I hope Blizzard is watching...
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You have some really great ideas there OP, really wish Blizzard would consider some of these.
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Blizzard needs to hire you. Right now. You need to be put in charge of the redesign of the Battle.net User interface and a team of programmers need to be put at your disposition immediately. You should also be provided with a monkey smoking a cigar.
This is the Battle.net I wish I had. This is great work.
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I thought it was obvious that blizzard is well aware of how to improve the bnet interface. They just plan to introduce the changes slowly over the next 4 expansions, at a cost of $60 a pop of course.
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oh god if they added your UI....they would seriously make millions
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I really like this UI. I think it is fairly functional without creating too much complexity.
I loved the Tournaments pages as well as the clan integration. I really hope Blizzard is looking at this.
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This is great, and also what blizzard should have done a long time ago. Ínstead of the crapnet.2.0 this should be there (clan support ftw . You did a great job. But looks like we gotta wait for years for such things because blizzard cant make enough money, like srsly wc3 compared to sc2......
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What do I think ?
Well, I think Blizzard should hire you.
Great Job. I hope they are listening.
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The tournament ideas are fantastic. The problem I would forsee is lag, though - too many observers could create lag in big tournaments like TSL. I think that it'd be necessary to cap observers and give the refs a fast banhammer that can kick people and close slots if necessary.
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You sir, should go work for Blizzard. Those look amazing, keep it up.
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Interesting ideas but I can understand why blizzard haven't implemented them.
It comes down to region locking and accounts being region-specific. It wouldn't be possible to find, observe let alone join EU or KR matches from the NA region because of this segregation. Clan functionality with respect to these events would also not work because of the seperation between regions. If this was ever to be a possibility you would need to first remove the region-locking of accounts, which wouldn't benefit blizzard financially and would piss off a lot of people who bought second and third accounts for multi-region play.
Battle.net forum implementation would mean increased exposure to popular raging and complaining topics that are prevalent in the b.net forums, it wouldn't benefit SC2/blizzard and it wouldn't benefit most players either, as I think its safe to say this behaviour is not conducive of a healthy SC2 experience.
And as for LAN, it's a topic that's already been discussed to death but allowing people to play without an internet connection (even if its originally only intended to be on 'authorized computers') opens up an avenue for hackers and piraters to implement a completely off-line LAN play that lets people play without an account.
Oh and the multiplayer map-making is a good idea, but so incredibly difficult to implement given the dependancies between all the sections of the data editor and triggers, I can't see it happening unless it becomes a hugely wanted feature, and even then it would need to be part of an expansion because of the work required to implement it.
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Just have to rofl at all the "why havent blizz hired you yet?" guys.
Lets make this straight. Blizzard was aware of most if not all of the features suggested in the OP before you had seen the first teaser pictures of B.net 2.0 UI. The desingers are not retarded, the creator of this topic is not a genius. (ok he migth be genius I really do not know, but you dont have to be a genius to come up with what he did if you just put a little work in.)
Blizzard has made a decision to not implement thease features, and 95% of the times the reasons why a gaming company does this are
1. They are saving them to release them in the future. Usually in expansions.
2. They did not want to invest money to program that.
Rest 5% is that they think thats its not good for the game.
And yes that leaves 0% of chance to that they havent came up with the idea.
Sorry for a mess of words.
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I would really like the clan support and the tournament tracking feature. Plus these two actually seem like something blizzard would implement.
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That tournament tracker idea is so sexy. Would make following tournament so much easier. Hope Blizzard implements something like that.
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one day
there shall be clan support
i know it!
great work @ op
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This is what battlenet 2.0 should have been, rather than the battlenet 0.2 we got
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I-It's Beautiful... That sums up everything that could be in B.Net 2.0 I fucking want it. I want it now! Sent to blizzard
Spotlight plzkthxbye
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now THIS is what battle.net should have looked like great work
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I Posted this over on the B.Net forums, and gave credit to Goblinoid so hopefully ExcaliburZ will see it over there or a Blizzard team member will see it over there.
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Nice images, very well done and good ideas!
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Would like to see the tournaments feature and a sleeker Chat UI. An in game browser would be awesome as well.
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This just goes to show how badly blizzard dropped the ball hard with battle.net 2.0
Even just a few of these features would have redeemed it...
The ones I would most be interested in:
custom game 'open lobbies' option
tournament section
Watching matches, live and not right in the game.
Clan support
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omg. how much time did you put into this?
spectator mode would be awesome but i imagine thw risk of slowing the game would increase too much :-(
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This is an absolute dream scenario.
I think the changes you're proposing look fantastic, but I don't expect them to happen anytime soon (some not at all).
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These are awesome ideas. I would think the tournament ideas would be something blizzard would approve of, if not already looking at doing. Same goes for the clan ideas.
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I think... I think I'm in love with your ideas. Is that possible?
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On June 28 2011 11:43 RommelTJ wrote:
I think... I think I'm in love with your ideas. Is that possible?
+1 on that.. that must of took you a lot of work! blizzard should hire you and fire the other guys working there so that we would all be happy 
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Blizzard should have people like you, I hope they read this and take some stuff and use it and hire you for bossmode..
Great work!
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im absolutely amazed at what you did there.
Considering Blizzards ressources im totally baffled that they re not able to adjust the current battlenet to something like this. I mean the community told them since release that there are some major features missing in their "new and revolutionary" multiplayer-platform.
Of course thats not all, we could continue how battle.net#2 fails with reduced stats for every gamer or only one account per license.
Is it really all about the money? I would agree that under the current circumstances (stakeholders pleasure and such) Blizzard is obliged to make as much money as they can. Do they really need to cut on those features?
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You know what SC2 needs?
Something like STV from TF2, which would make spectating a lot easier. Want to spectate a match? Connect to STV instead of sitting on your ass for 30 minutes waiting for it to start because you can't join once it's started. Would remove the need for like 10 observers in a single tourney game.
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Give the man the money he deserves and implement the functions he suggests. Thank you, Blizzard. This thread really needs more recognition.
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This is REAL Battle.net 2.0!
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wow... looking through half way and surprised why didn't i see this months back...
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...This is beautiful. I love you OP. Has someone showed this to Blizz yet?
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unfortunately there is zero chance of this actually happening...
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This thread definitely needs more recognition, 4 months old and only 8 pages?
D:
Great job on these designs sir, I like the look of the chat channels ^^.
However, if 'Input limit reached' couldn't be fixed after months, I'm not holding my breath for too many changes till HotS, if even then.
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this actually would deserve the title bnet TWO point o
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Is this real life or a fantasy? =O
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all of these changes are amazing and i truly wish you could beat blizzard over the head with them until they get amnesia and do your plan because its in front of them. that said none of these will be implemented until at least LotV because they dont give a shit about bn2.0 functions while making other games. why spend resources and people and time to fix things that in their eyes is working great and as intended. the unfortunate part is that all of these changes are fucking awesome and deserve to be implemented <3 ty for showing what bnet is capable of
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Only one addition.
"Close all chat windows" button
That is, assuming chat functionally remains the same in that a new window gets opened for every individual user who sends a message (which I hope it doesn't).
Otherwise, absolute pure genius. I don't understand why Blizzard can't take a step back and spend an hour doing some dedicated GUI design reasoning. That's all it takes to realize the current design is garbage.
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This is just awesome, great work! =)
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Common Blizz, lets get on this
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If Blizzard added one of these features before HOTS i'd be dumbfounded.
Most likely they would add some of these in HOTS and add that to their "reasons to buy this".
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I have no knowledge of what would actually be possible to implement or not, but just looking at the designs make me scream inside that they probably aren't even trying to make something like that work.
The Tournament / Event tab, in particular, is an amazing idea.
Great work man, I can only hope that this gets recognized and given more attention. Blizzard needs to hire you ! :D
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great topic! i''ve been looking for people who try to make suggestsions for the battle.net UI for a long time now, i think it's little details like this which make a game so much more enjoying.
also, i think that in the match history, you should be able to directly see against whom you played, how long it took and which races were involved.
races and names should be visible and the additional details when you hover with the mouse over a game and if you want the ingame data, you click on it =)
also, in the game lobbies, give visual effects when choosing a race. right now it's just boring text (Terran, Zerg, Protoss & Random)
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Wish blizzard would reveal changes like this on next blizzcon.
I agree with all improvements you are proposing.
One can only hope for better tommorow.
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please blizzard, PLEASE !
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I think its a little harsh to criticize blizzard for not doing this. The op is really just pictures with none of the computing that goes into making any of it real. Its criticizing nasa for not making the Enterprise. Rather than making the UI ridiculously complicated, shouldnt we focus on having the features that are there work really well - like reducing lag and having the UI pages load faster (they load so slow, and i feel the "improved" UI would be infinitely worse).
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On July 10 2011 05:18 lcl wrote:
I think its a little harsh to criticize blizzard for not doing this. The op is really just pictures with none of the computing that goes into making any of it real. Its criticizing nasa for not making the Enterprise. Rather than making the UI ridiculously complicated, shouldnt we focus on having the features that are there work really well - like reducing lag and having the UI pages load faster (they load so slow, and i feel the "improved" UI would be infinitely worse).
Yes blizzard is doing a great work.
NO, this is clearly not enought : do you know any other game with such lag problem ? with no lan mode ? Why Bnet 2.0 is worst than Bnet 1.0 ?
Blizzard is a great company, but they need to deserve this, Bnet 2.0 is NOT a great application.
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On July 10 2011 05:18 lcl wrote:
I think its a little harsh to criticize blizzard for not doing this. The op is really just pictures with none of the computing that goes into making any of it real. Its criticizing nasa for not making the Enterprise. Rather than making the UI ridiculously complicated, shouldnt we focus on having the features that are there work really well - like reducing lag and having the UI pages load faster (they load so slow, and i feel the "improved" UI would be infinitely worse).
Most of the major changes proposed are purely aesthetic (chat window being nice and big) and don't necessarily involve any new overhead behind the scenes, just rearranging. I'm not sure what you mean by more complicated. The interface is already needlessly complicated and most of the lag that already exists stems from that problem.
Separate chat window instances for every message at the bottom of the screen clutter the UI, making any popular streamer's client lag when they attempt to scroll through to find the one message they're looking for. It's really bad.
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Russian Federation4295 Posts
Sadly, that nothing of those nice changes will be implemented in the future
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If these changes were implemented, it would fix all the things I don't like about sc2 (even though I love it as is, I would love it more).
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If this became real I don't think I would have a life anymore because Starcraft 2 would have soooooo much to do and be so fun.
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Wow. Why is battle.net not like this I don't even know. Just take like 1 month of wow subscription money, make this happen, and starcraft 2 online becomes greatest thing ever.
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this... this is what I expected battle.net to look like... then they gave use this so called "improved" battle.net
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How did I not see this thread? This guy needs to be hired immediately. I understand Lan might not be able to work, but even still, if blizzard could add even just half of these features to sc2, it would make things 10x more enjoyable.
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Damn, looking through the gallery made me depressed after I alt tabbed back into real B.net.
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Seriously, what should we do for that to be done ?
This is depressing, we can't do shit
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Can someone spam blizzard with this thread please? They need to see this! You just fixed battle.net
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cool stuff. this stuff would make sc2 SO much better.
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clan support, tournaments, and replay observing with friends would be all i could ask blizzard for. hopefully battle.net looks a little more like this some day.
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Looks nice overall.
I will say that its a nice fusion between the Bnet 1.0 style and the BNet 0.2 style. Chat channels look like they were always supposed to, clan support is a no brainer, etc. Basically it appears to me that you have shown the world what Blizzard COULD have done with BNet 0.2. It COULD have been this great, but sadly Blizzard is lazy and didn't fulfill their side of the bargin.
That being said, I kind of just watch to ditch this whole blue, over beveled look and go back to the BW look. Maybe I'm just nostalgic, but I miss the definitive 'DUMMM' when you click something.
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Can't believe I missed this originally. All these changes look so great!
Battle.net has so much potential, Blizzard needs to get the ball rolling.
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This all looks perfect, I have a lingering feeling it'll never happen.
Nonetheless, I support all of this ^_^
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I am quoting myself because people don't seem to be understanding that a lot of the OP's post is impossible to do and is simply wishful thinking, which is why most people agree with him (we would all love ferraris wouldn't we?). And to the people who are actually thinking he should be hired for making these screenshots, your words are like nails on a chalkboard, at least have the slightest idea about software & UI design before making such comments.
---- from earlier in this thread
Interesting ideas but I can understand why blizzard haven't implemented them.
It comes down to region locking and accounts being region-specific. It wouldn't be possible to find, observe let alone join EU or KR matches from the NA region because of this segregation. Clan functionality with respect to these events would also not work because of the seperation between regions. If this was ever to be a possibility you would need to first remove the region-locking of accounts, which would mean a lot more lag between players, less financial benefit to blizzard (part of their reasoning) and pissing off a lot of people who bought second and third accounts for multi-region play.
The battle.net forum implementation would mean increased exposure to popular raging and complaining topics that are prevalent in the b.net forums, it wouldn't benefit SC2/blizzard and it wouldn't benefit most players either, as I think its safe to say this behaviour is not conducive of a healthy SC2 experience.
Re: LAN, it's a topic that's already been discussed to death but allowing people to play without an internet connection (even if its originally only intended to be on 'authorized computers') opens up an avenue for hackers and piraters to implement a completely off-line LAN play that lets people play without an account. It takes away the control from Blizzard, as they have no way of moderating tournaments or events that use LAN and cannot 'ban' any of these events if for example they don't pay royalties to blizzard for using their game (KeSPA is an example of one such company).
Multiplayer map-making is a good idea, but so incredibly difficult to implement given the dependancies between all the sections of the data editor and triggers, I can't see it happening unless it becomes a hugely wanted feature, and even then it would need to be part of an expansion because of the work required to implement it.
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Wow, how did i manage to not see this.
The tournament tracker is sick! I have been waiting forever for Blizzard to do something like that, it would boost the andience of the tournaments so much.
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Goblin, the tournament list screen (here) needs a search box. It would be impossible to find the tournament you were looking for otherwise.
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On July 18 2011 22:55 XenoX101 wrote:
I am quoting myself because people don't seem to be understanding that a lot of the OP's post is impossible to do and is simply wishful thinking, which is why most people agree with him (we would all love ferraris wouldn't we?). And to the people who are actually thinking he should be hired for making these screenshots, your words are like nails on a chalkboard, at least have the slightest idea about software & UI design before making such comments.
Who are you to say that an integrated forum is a bad thing? do you vouch for media censorship as well within your own country? Why not just delete the Blizzard forum altogether then if it's such a problem?
I agree that a region unlock might be a bit too much considering the lag issue that 'might' come out of it, but this is not excluding all of the changes proposed in this thread. A clan feature wouldn't work because the regions are separated? why is this exactly?
I also agree that LAN is a troublesome issue, but there should be a special LAN version that companies such as GOM, MLG and DreamHack would be able to gain access to. It is unacceptable that a company such as Blizzard who consider themselves huge supporters of competitive play doesn't include a usable version that nullifies lag or drop issues. which has been a problem in some tournaments already (GOM and MLG for instance).
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wow very creative i wish blizzard could make it better ! =)
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This would be the greatest thing ever. Just having all these battle.net features would make the game so much more enjoyable. Great work OP!
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This. So much this. This would be the greatest thing to happen to SC2 since release. So many epic. All of them. All of the epic. After this, no epic left for anything else.
This + Shared replay viewing = SC2 wins the universe and all the internets, too.
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Wow, I just went through all of the pictures and concepts and I have to say. I am impressed definitely. Now someone like Goblinoid knows how to make a UI. If StarCraft 2 was like this, I feel like I would be on it a lot more.
We need something like this so badly. This deserves a bump in my opinion. Now only if we were to tell someone at Blizzard about this, it could get interesting. Maybe they want to give us LAN for LotV because everyone already has purchased the game.
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Nice bump! Didn't ever see this before.
Wow, this is pretty cool. Theres a lot work put into this and a lot of cool stuff
Too bad blizzard won't listen
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found this because of an article not on TL that referenced a TL thread that has gotten really fleshed out since I last looked at it. Most of these changes would be unbelievably amazing!
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I might look at fiddling with this some more, let me know if you have any suggestions for changes/additions/general direction ^______^
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This is pretty awesome. Also interesting because I'm currently in a class for human computer interaction (essentially optimizing designs of interfaces)
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On March 06 2012 05:36 Goblinoid wrote:
I might look at fiddling with this some more, let me know if you have any suggestions for changes/additions/general direction ^______^
Timestamps to chat windows (could be optional setting). It is always annoying to alt tab back to sc2 after idling and notice that someone messaged you and but you have no idea when. This also applies to chat channels.
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On March 06 2012 05:36 Goblinoid wrote:
I might look at fiddling with this some more, let me know if you have any suggestions for changes/additions/general direction ^______^
You could also sketch what kind of statistics page(s) there could be for different game modes (1v1, 2v2, etc). Statistics such as win-lose-tie, match-up specific win-lose-tie, map specific win-lose-tie (also mu&map specific), game lengths in different maps, etc. As they are not likely to show MMR / MMR moving average as numbers there could also be some kind of graphical indication how close to league borders your MMR moving average is (line with markers).
Examples of different statistics are available e.g. from Blizzard's WC3 web-pages. Here is the 3rd of Europe 1v1 ladder (note statistics subpages were malfunctioning when I wrote this).
Regarding league system, MMR & MMR moving average you can find more information from Excalibur_Z's guide.
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They DON'T WANT to improve.
That's the only explanation that I can find, since it's just common sense the majority of things that we ask for, and we even do free for them the concept work... And I'm talking about this: http://imgur.com/a/oiqJP#0
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On March 06 2012 21:16 Ivanero wrote:They DON'T WANT to improve. That's the only explanation that I can find, since it's just common sense the majority of things that we ask for, and we even do free for them the concept work... And I'm talking about this: http://imgur.com/a/oiqJP#0
Oh hey, I forgot to share my updated version of that: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/58526114/SC2_ui:feature_concepts.pdf
It's intended to be interactive (assuming you download/open it with a pdf viewer), but you can scroll through it in your browser if you just want the gist of it (but don't scroll if you intend to interact with it!!).
Let me know if anything isn't user friendly or doesn't make sense (or if any links don't hook up right!). There's a weird link problem in the Tournament page that links you to a custom game lobby which I can't seem to fix, just click on the right side of the orange button for now .
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On March 07 2012 00:55 Goblinoid wrote:Oh hey, I forgot to share my updated version of that: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/58526114/SC2_ui:feature_concepts.pdfIt's intended to be interactive (assuming you download/open it with a pdf viewer), but you can scroll through it in your browser if you just want the gist of it (but don't scroll if you intend to interact with it!!). Let me know if anything isn't user friendly or doesn't make sense (or if any links don't hook up right!). There's a weird link problem in the Tournament page that links you to a custom game lobby which I can't seem to fix, just click on the right side of the orange button for now .
This is so awesome....I just wish it was real
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Someone get this to Blizzard asap O_o.
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It's amazing...
That blizzard STILL hasen't done anything to improve the situations. When they first talked about bnet 2.0 I imagined something awesome, yet so many years later it's still some mediocre service
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On March 07 2012 00:55 Goblinoid wrote:Show nested quote +On March 06 2012 21:16 Ivanero wrote:They DON'T WANT to improve. That's the only explanation that I can find, since it's just common sense the majority of things that we ask for, and we even do free for them the concept work... And I'm talking about this: http://imgur.com/a/oiqJP#0 Oh hey, I forgot to share my updated version of that: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/58526114/SC2_ui:feature_concepts.pdfIt's intended to be interactive (assuming you download/open it with a pdf viewer), but you can scroll through it in your browser if you just want the gist of it (but don't scroll if you intend to interact with it!!). Let me know if anything isn't user friendly or doesn't make sense (or if any links don't hook up right!). There's a weird link problem in the Tournament page that links you to a custom game lobby which I can't seem to fix, just click on the right side of the orange button for now .
That's so awesome... You gotta post that on the Battle.net forums.
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What we know is that Blizzard will definitely be looking into the possibility of looking into this.
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Very well done!
My favorite aspect is the whole tournament/forum aspect you've added to the table
If you need a petition consider it signed
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haha, I'll post it in the Bnet thread for sure, thanks for the love! I was intending to fill out some of the smaller functions (menus, add friends/clan management/leave party button actions, etc.) but I ran out of steam.
Oh, and at the moment, on the bottom left of the screen I have listed recent players you've played (easy way to make new friends/block jerks) but I think it'd be cool if it rotated between a couple different views. What would you want to see there? Recent game stats, profile stats, last game info, etc.?
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If you compare SC2 and bnet 2.0 to SC1 and bnet 1.0 thinking on the context on the moment, time and technology for each one... SC2 is garbage and nothing compared to SC1 for that time, they already had the concept, most of the units, they just added few units and made a new Bnet with less options than its predecessor... And the only innovative things are not innovative for these days...
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On March 07 2012 04:00 Ivanero wrote:
If you compare SC2 and bnet 2.0 to SC1 and bnet 1.0 thinking on the context on the moment, time and technology for each one... SC2 is garbage and nothing compared to SC1 for that time, they already had the concept, most of the units, they just added few units and made a new Bnet with less options than its predecessor... And the only innovative things are not innovative for these days...
I've actually gotten in contact with Blizzard about the UI and everything and I can tell you that they're absolutely AWARE of the topics about the UI and I believe this topic too. I contacted them through a ticket and a GM told me that they know about all this stuff. So maybe that will get some people a little more confident.
Also, we get more information about HOTS on March 8 which is in two days (at least from what I've heard).
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one of the main things about the UI is all that wasted space. Giant obnoxious buttons, wasted space on the side.. could fit a just a nice big black chat room / white text with all that removed!
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On March 07 2012 04:55 godly-cheese wrote:Show nested quote +On March 07 2012 04:00 Ivanero wrote:
If you compare SC2 and bnet 2.0 to SC1 and bnet 1.0 thinking on the context on the moment, time and technology for each one... SC2 is garbage and nothing compared to SC1 for that time, they already had the concept, most of the units, they just added few units and made a new Bnet with less options than its predecessor... And the only innovative things are not innovative for these days... I've actually gotten in contact with Blizzard about the UI and everything and I can tell you that they're absolutely AWARE of the topics about the UI and I believe this topic too. I contacted them through a ticket and a GM told me that they know about all this stuff. So maybe that will get some people a little more confident. Also, we get more information about HOTS on March 8 which is in two days (at least from what I've heard).
That's great to know, since I as many others have spent around 50 bucks or more for this game, and also for those who love eSports, because we know that Starcraft is very relevant for the scene.
But yeah they should show that they're on something, the impression for the player is that they forgot about SC2 while they're focused on Diablo 3, and that's not good. I remember Warcraft 3 days, where if you were ~3 months without playing, going back was like playing a different game. I'd been out of SC2 for 2 seasons and now the only different thing I find is a new official custom map which I bored after ~2 hours.
In 2 years the only big improvements were chat channels and Grandmaster league that I can remember right now, but those are things that everyone expect to see in the launch anyway... I always said that we bought a beta/unfinished game, and well, we usually do it nowadays with all the games (I had the same sensation with SWTOR mmorpg), but my impression from Blizzard is like they don't really listen to the community and they just look for the money, not for making a good product like I felt it was with Starcraft 1 - Warcraft 3. I always think that a company should focus on making a good product and that way the money will come as a consequence.
I hope all of this to change soon, because otherwise people could start to stop trusting on Blizzard, and that's not good for them and neither for their fans/players/customers.
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On March 07 2012 00:55 Goblinoid wrote:Show nested quote +On March 06 2012 21:16 Ivanero wrote:They DON'T WANT to improve. That's the only explanation that I can find, since it's just common sense the majority of things that we ask for, and we even do free for them the concept work... And I'm talking about this: http://imgur.com/a/oiqJP#0 Oh hey, I forgot to share my updated version of that: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/58526114/SC2_ui:feature_concepts.pdfIt's intended to be interactive (assuming you download/open it with a pdf viewer), but you can scroll through it in your browser if you just want the gist of it (but don't scroll if you intend to interact with it!!). Let me know if anything isn't user friendly or doesn't make sense (or if any links don't hook up right!). There's a weird link problem in the Tournament page that links you to a custom game lobby which I can't seem to fix, just click on the right side of the orange button for now .
That is just....... astounding....I'm in love.
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All of this looks sooo sick. You should work for blizzard
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Your key mistake is putting forward a clear idea that would probably benefit the game over all. See blizzard doesn't like that, you need to be screaming all over their forums and using buzzwords like "op/up/game ruined/cancelling subscription" then blizzard will listen to you and change their game.
But seriously your design is wicked cools
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EPT![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/kFfVz.jpg)
