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On February 04 2012 06:05 Honeybadger wrote:
Team fortress 2 had over a hundred major updates before it went free to play. These updates were free and had no basic financial gain up-front. What it did do, was create a thriving community and continuously high sales figures, and when it went F2P with a brilliant, hard-tested microtransaction system that people were free to completely ignore or even circumvent (a-la crafting) and as a result, TF2 is a milestone in successful business modeling. Blizzard has been drug down by activision/vivendi, who are corporate whores in the nicest sense of the word. Corporations have shifted from "ethical responsibility" to "short term, stockholder gain" and that's why valve will get my dollar, every single time. Gabe himself responds to every email sent (I have several from him)
The valve method has always been "happy players make repeat customers, and good service is likely to draw in new customers." Steam was similar to bnet 2.0 at first. Very bumpy. But they began beavering away at updates NONSTOP and it's now easily one of my favorite services of all time.
Blizzard has been poisoned by vivendi's method of "maximize profits" while valve has done "maximize player retention" and it's worked fabulously for them. NOBODY really complains about steam anymore. The most commotion people make is about the insane sales they have all the freaking time.. I've probably given valve more of my money than I have to blizzard in six years of WoW, SCBW, D2, and SC2 combined.
I've actually been wondering for a while now if Blizzard would make more money by riding on the success of their earlier games with inferior products or by putting more effort into their work and listening to their fans to create great games. I don't know if catering to masses of casual gamers will make more profit than simply creating a long-lasting, great game. I'm not sure the options are mutually exclusive either as Blizzard seems to think.
Most of the solutions to SC2's problems (clumping, maps, UI etc.) are on TL if you do some reading. I suppose casual gamers don't actually know they are problems which make the game less fun, so Blizzard doesn't feel the need to fix them. As for myself I went from being a huge fan of Blizzard to someone who's sick of their corporate greed. I bought SC2 for twice the cost of a regular game and it's not a cost I could just ignore, but I told myself that it was worth it because Blizzards games are so great. I don't really regret getting WoL but I'm definitely not getting any expansions. $60 for the replicator and oracle, with none of the real problems fixed? I'm old enough to rate the game now, not the hype, so I'm gonna spend that on something else.
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I hope you have already sent this to Blizzard #_#
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On February 05 2012 00:51 Split. wrote:I hope you have already sent this to Blizzard #_#
How can we help to make blizzard more aware of these suggestions, and also force a response to the topic starter?
I want some blue post giving us atleast some comment on these issues.
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On February 04 2012 03:37 OblivionMage wrote:Show nested quote +On February 04 2012 02:50 [F_]aths wrote:
The custom game system in WC3 is bad. I still remember all the hassle when I wanted to play a Tower Wars or a Hero Line Wars. Normally it tooks minutes to set up a game. With SC2, it often takes just seconds. It's also way easier to play with a friend, either custom games or ladder team games.
I also find it way easier to establish a chat with the player I just played. I wanted this for WC3 so badly, but was forced to remember his name. Now I can just contact him from the score screen.
1. The custom games system in Warcraft 3 was not bad. Yes, it could take a minute to find players, but you could find players for any custom map, at any time, with any rules/specifications you wanted. In Starcraft 2, you can play 5 custom games with absolutely random people, in maybe 30 seconds. In Warcraft 3, you could play any custom game, with whatever rules you want, with whatever mix of players you want, in maybe 2 minutes. I'm not sure how one could choose the Starcraft 2 method, especially because it greatly discourages people from making new maps, so the Starcraft 2 custom games aren't very good anyway, while the Warcraft 3 games saw constant innovation. 2. It is not way easier to play with a friend in Starcraft 2. There were no issues doing this in Warcraft 3. Just hover over their name in your friends list (or type /whois <playername>), and the game will show you the title of the game they're in. 3. It was not way easier to establish a chat with a player you just played against, not in any way. At any point during the game, you could type /f add <playername>, or you could note his name after the game in the scorescreen, or, if you totally forgot, you could watch your 'lastreplay' to get their name. The lack of 'character codes' made it easier to communicate with players. If you remember their username, you could /whois or /w them whenever you wanted.
In WC3, the chat was more cumbersome as you need to memorize the other guy's name. In SC2 we have a chat box where we even can read the previous discussion when we are in a game. This was not possible in WC3. In WC3, the /r command already was there (as it is available in SC2 games) but when you had a chat with two guys, you needed to frequently enter the whole user name again. I am glad that SC2 fixed this issue.
In WC3, any username was unique per realm so many weird usernames showed up. SC2 allows any name to be used up to 1000 times, which is an advantage over WC3. Overall, I use the chat function in SC2 way more because it is easier to keep track of friends.
The whois command in WC3 still made it difficult to count the amount of space characters. It was a pain to get with a friend into a custom game.
In WC3 you needed to accept to play with weird custom map settings. Often I didn't find the game I wanted to play and needed to create my own game. Often it took minutes to start. SC2 favors default map settings over other ones, but this provides a faster game start and ensures that most guys are familiar with the map settings.
The UI could be better, but it should't try to emulate WC3 (or SC1.)
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Really love the post, good job! also loved the "how sc2 could have looked' link amazing new features
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I agree with this.
At first the title remembered me of the whine thread in which somepony complained that certain menus are opaque and others no, while sometimes the buttons read "OK" and some other times "Proceed".
But this are the issues we can all agree on.
Shared replays are the fabled thing from BW, Chatrooms are damn staple to pc games, removing the loss counts is just sucking up to casuals.
Yes, the ratio is approximately 50/50, but it´s not a statistic if there is only wins. It feels like someone is lying right into my face if I see only one half and the other half is hidden from me. Just like MMR is hidden.
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Bnet2.0 just doesn't feel right. Back then in BW, I would finish a game and just come back to a channel with all the folks there like it was a community. With a whole screen dedicated to a channel is just a completely different immersive experience than coming back to a tiny chat channel. I find myself spending less time on the B.net screens nowadays.
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clan support coming with add on blizzard said
there will be NO lan, you guys should stop complain its a fact
and the other things ... well /f msg etc was often very anoying in sc1 when someone talked to everyone and also the channels now are better then in sc1 cause you can be in more etc etc, overall sorry i like it as it is and i am pretty sure expect the announced clan support there wont be anything else
for me watching replays together is the thing i miss the most
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On February 05 2012 00:58 [F_]aths wrote:Show nested quote +On February 04 2012 03:37 OblivionMage wrote:On February 04 2012 02:50 [F_]aths wrote:
The custom game system in WC3 is bad. I still remember all the hassle when I wanted to play a Tower Wars or a Hero Line Wars. Normally it tooks minutes to set up a game. With SC2, it often takes just seconds. It's also way easier to play with a friend, either custom games or ladder team games.
I also find it way easier to establish a chat with the player I just played. I wanted this for WC3 so badly, but was forced to remember his name. Now I can just contact him from the score screen.
1. The custom games system in Warcraft 3 was not bad. Yes, it could take a minute to find players, but you could find players for any custom map, at any time, with any rules/specifications you wanted. In Starcraft 2, you can play 5 custom games with absolutely random people, in maybe 30 seconds. In Warcraft 3, you could play any custom game, with whatever rules you want, with whatever mix of players you want, in maybe 2 minutes. I'm not sure how one could choose the Starcraft 2 method, especially because it greatly discourages people from making new maps, so the Starcraft 2 custom games aren't very good anyway, while the Warcraft 3 games saw constant innovation. 2. It is not way easier to play with a friend in Starcraft 2. There were no issues doing this in Warcraft 3. Just hover over their name in your friends list (or type /whois <playername>), and the game will show you the title of the game they're in. 3. It was not way easier to establish a chat with a player you just played against, not in any way. At any point during the game, you could type /f add <playername>, or you could note his name after the game in the scorescreen, or, if you totally forgot, you could watch your 'lastreplay' to get their name. The lack of 'character codes' made it easier to communicate with players. If you remember their username, you could /whois or /w them whenever you wanted. In WC3, the chat was more cumbersome as you need to memorize the other guy's name. In SC2 we have a chat box where we even can read the previous discussion when we are in a game. This was not possible in WC3. In WC3, the /r command already was there (as it is available in SC2 games) but when you had a chat with two guys, you needed to frequently enter the whole user name again. I am glad that SC2 fixed this issue. In WC3, any username was unique per realm so many weird usernames showed up. SC2 allows any name to be used up to 1000 times, which is an advantage over WC3. Overall, I use the chat function in SC2 way more because it is easier to keep track of friends. The whois command in WC3 still made it difficult to count the amount of space characters. It was a pain to get with a friend into a custom game. In WC3 you needed to accept to play with weird custom map settings. Often I didn't find the game I wanted to play and needed to create my own game. Often it took minutes to start. SC2 favors default map settings over other ones, but this provides a faster game start and ensures that most guys are familiar with the map settings. The UI could be better, but it should't try to emulate WC3 (or SC1.)
Yes, there were flaws in WC3, but playing something new was easy. You could host any map and after 20 minutes your game was more likely full then not.
In SC2 you can´t open a game to some really unknown map. No matter how long you wait, your game will still be on page 50+ and nobody will see it.
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This thread is so good. Everything the OP has said in his post is absolutely correct. I agree with all points which he has stated. The entertainment value of SC 2 & Battle.net could be so much better, if Blizzard would care. I really don't understand how a company that big like Blizzard is not capable of implementing these basic improvements without making a big hassle of it (like telling it will be implemented with the release of addons - which is just a bad exuse for not doing the work right now). It would be some super basic work for the programmers of the Blizz-Battle.net-Team and it could be done in less than a months work. While online replays might be a bit more complicated, other aspects like chat commands, adjusting ladder issues and implementing automated tournaments are not as complicated as Blizzard claims.
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Blizzard isn't malicious or even greedy here (with some aspects anyway), rather, I think they simply DO NOT UNDERSTAND.
When the Blizzard VP says, "Do you really want chat rooms?" he sounds like he's just completely confused why people were even asking for chat rooms. In his mind, if there's a matchmaking system what would you use chat rooms for? Probably he's never been a part of a WC3 community so it doesn't understand how these things were used and how they sustained the game and the community. Not to mention seeing chat goes a long way to fighting the desolate feeling you get when the only thing you see is a 'find match' button.
It's the same with custom games -- when asked, Blizzard doesn't seem to get WHY not having a list of open lobbies essentially restricts available custom maps to the top 20. "Fun or Not" was at least an attempt to address the issue but not having any choice in a custom map just isn't fun at all. Did Blizzard even try the feature? Players don't like it, and if I'm trying to host or try out a new game I don't want 'blind' players anyway -- I want someone looking for the type of map I'm hosting.
There's a big difference in player mindset between, "I want to host this specific game and wait for players" and "I want to browse what games are already waiting and jump into one."
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Some quick observations on the battle.net 1.0 vs 2.0 image and the people discussing this as a descent into interface hell with no upsides:
That image is comparing features Battle.net 1.0 had 3-4 years after release to the state of Battle.net 2.0 a year and a half later. We had to wait three years for replays the first time around, and the features Warcraft 3 had were four years after the original launch of battle.net
You could also say that Starcraft 2 is a far inferior game to Brood War because Starcraft 2's balance at launch doesn't match the level of balance achieved by Brood War after 7 years of patches improving its balance. To a certain extent, that would be true. But Starcraft 2 remains a work in progress, just like Starcraft 1 was, as Blizzard continued to tweak things and explore the consequences of the system they set up.
For most of the checkboxes on that image, I could name a downside to the way battlenet 1.0 worked. Chat rooms as your default view as soon as you joined battle.net meant the average player could get harassed and sworn at before they launched a game. Unique screen names meant everyone was stuck putting numbers at the end of their name anyway to get a name they wanted. You no longer have to coordinate signing into US West or East to meet up with your friends in the US. Hosting a game doesn't require any network related workarounds. You can't get backstabbed by your allies for kicks and watch them win while you lose, or have to grind wins against computers before you can play ladder games. People can't keep re-registering new accounts to smurf the ladder system. The match-making system has done a much better job of setting up fair matchups for me than in WC3, which itself was light years ahead of the original Starcraft. The custom game screen is no longer full of multiple copies of the same map and people having to keep re-hosting their game to move it up the list.
There's really no excuse for only showing losses in the master league, and not giving players access to more of the detailed stats they already track. And while the average casual player benefits from having an easier UI to set up arranged teams, having the console style commands wouldn't hurt. The whole user interface and experience still needs a lot of work, but I'd argue less so than the original did.
The point I'm trying to make is that Starcraft 2 is still a work in progress, and I'm confident Blizzard will continue to refine their product like they've done with their other games. We're still light years ahead of the original battle.net launch even if we haven't landed in the best place yet. The amount of value Blizzard gives you for your entertainment dollar on Starcraft 2 still beats almost anything else out there. If you want to wait until all the balancing and interface tweaks are done before you spend time on it, that's your choice, but I don't mind being along for the ride.
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I posted a link to the US battle net thread on the D3 forums aswell. It may not be relevant to their game but I just wanted to spread the word.
If you want or feel it would help you could add this link to the OP.
http://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/4015202294
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The Battlenet 1.0 vs Battlenet 2.0 picture is making me so sad.
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On February 05 2012 01:44 StartingCrafty wrote:Some quick observations on the battle.net 1.0 vs 2.0 image and the people discussing this as a descent into interface hell with no upsides: That image is comparing features Battle.net 1.0 had 3-4 years after release to the state of Battle.net 2.0 a year and a half later. We had to wait three years for replays the first time around, and the features Warcraft 3 had were four years after the original launch of battle.net You could also say that Starcraft 2 is a far inferior game to Brood War because Starcraft 2's balance at launch doesn't match the level of balance achieved by Brood War after 7 years of patches improving its balance. To a certain extent, that would be true. But Starcraft 2 remains a work in progress, just like Starcraft 1 was, as Blizzard continued to tweak things and explore the consequences of the system they set up. For most of the checkboxes on that image, I could name a downside to the way battlenet 1.0 worked. Chat rooms as your default view as soon as you joined battle.net meant the average player could get harassed and sworn at before they launched a game. Unique screen names meant everyone was stuck putting numbers at the end of their name anyway to get a name they wanted. You no longer have to coordinate signing into US West or East to meet up with your friends in the US. Hosting a game doesn't require any network related workarounds. You can't get backstabbed by your allies for kicks and watch them win while you lose, or have to grind wins against computers before you can play ladder games. People can't keep re-registering new accounts to smurf the ladder system. The match-making system has done a much better job of setting up fair matchups for me than in WC3, which itself was light years ahead of the original Starcraft. The custom game screen is no longer full of multiple copies of the same map and people having to keep re-hosting their game to move it up the list. There's really no excuse for only showing losses in the master league, and not giving players access to more of the detailed stats they already track. And while the average casual player benefits from having an easier UI to set up arranged teams, having the console style commands wouldn't hurt. The whole user interface and experience still needs a lot of work, but I'd argue less so than the original did. The point I'm trying to make is that Starcraft 2 is still a work in progress, and I'm confident Blizzard will continue to refine their product like they've done with their other games. We're still light years ahead of the original battle.net launch even if we haven't landed in the best place yet. The amount of value Blizzard gives you for your entertainment dollar on Starcraft 2 still beats almost anything else out there. If you want to wait until all the balancing and interface tweaks are done before you spend time on it, that's your choice, but I don't mind being along for the ride.
The point isn't that SC2 is a new game or that the new Battle.Net is a work in progress. It's that features which have proven to work simply weren't carried over for no apparent reason. We're not asking Blizzard to reinvent the wheel here, and they didn't have to create their UI from scratch. We had a whole ton of cool things that worked well and made B.Net 1.0 a wonderful community platform, and very little of it was implemented in 2.0.
You're right when you say the new UI isn't all bad and shows some improvements over the old one. That's right, all of the examples you named are valid. But if I could choose whether to take SC2's UI with the few improvements or WC3's interface as is, I'd choose the latter in a heartbeat. And many others would too.
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Completely agree with the OP, but I'm wondering if this thread will catch blizzard's eye, I don't know how much attention they pay to these forums. In case they don't, there's a clone thread in the blizzard forum, go post in it:
us.battle.net/sc2/en/forum/topic/3988232669
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On February 05 2012 01:44 StartingCrafty wrote:Some quick observations on the battle.net 1.0 vs 2.0 image and the people discussing this as a descent into interface hell with no upsides: That image is comparing features Battle.net 1.0 had 3-4 years after release to the state of Battle.net 2.0 a year and a half later. We had to wait three years for replays the first time around, and the features Warcraft 3 had were four years after the original launch of battle.net You could also say that Starcraft 2 is a far inferior game to Brood War because Starcraft 2's balance at launch doesn't match the level of balance achieved by Brood War after 7 years of patches improving its balance. To a certain extent, that would be true. But Starcraft 2 remains a work in progress, just like Starcraft 1 was, as Blizzard continued to tweak things and explore the consequences of the system they set up. For most of the checkboxes on that image, I could name a downside to the way battlenet 1.0 worked. Chat rooms as your default view as soon as you joined battle.net meant the average player could get harassed and sworn at before they launched a game. Unique screen names meant everyone was stuck putting numbers at the end of their name anyway to get a name they wanted. You no longer have to coordinate signing into US West or East to meet up with your friends in the US. Hosting a game doesn't require any network related workarounds. You can't get backstabbed by your allies for kicks and watch them win while you lose, or have to grind wins against computers before you can play ladder games. People can't keep re-registering new accounts to smurf the ladder system. The match-making system has done a much better job of setting up fair matchups for me than in WC3, which itself was light years ahead of the original Starcraft. The custom game screen is no longer full of multiple copies of the same map and people having to keep re-hosting their game to move it up the list. There's really no excuse for only showing losses in the master league, and not giving players access to more of the detailed stats they already track. And while the average casual player benefits from having an easier UI to set up arranged teams, having the console style commands wouldn't hurt. The whole user interface and experience still needs a lot of work, but I'd argue less so than the original did. The point I'm trying to make is that Starcraft 2 is still a work in progress, and I'm confident Blizzard will continue to refine their product like they've done with their other games. We're still light years ahead of the original battle.net launch even if we haven't landed in the best place yet. The amount of value Blizzard gives you for your entertainment dollar on Starcraft 2 still beats almost anything else out there. If you want to wait until all the balancing and interface tweaks are done before you spend time on it, that's your choice, but I don't mind being along for the ride.
The release version of startcraft 2 had 100 million USD put into it. Probs more than Sc1 and Wc3 combined.
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Someone really needs to shove this down Browder's throat the next time he gets interviewed. Even if he's not directly responsible for the Bnet UI, he's the biggest community person associated with SC2. It's completely unacceptable for Bnet 2.0 to have significantly less features than technology from the 90's.
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On February 05 2012 01:44 StartingCrafty wrote:
The point I'm trying to make is that Starcraft 2 is still a work in progress, and I'm confident Blizzard will continue to refine their product like they've done with their other games. We're still light years ahead of the original battle.net launch even if we haven't landed in the best place yet. The amount of value Blizzard gives you for your entertainment dollar on Starcraft 2 still beats almost anything else out there. If you want to wait until all the balancing and interface tweaks are done before you spend time on it, that's your choice, but I don't mind being along for the ride.
This is a company that had a blank check for video game development leading through most of the StarCraft II development phase. The idea that "the company is trying as hard as possible" is absurd, and "we're years ahead of a comparable point in time" is not valid criteria. This is all about intellectual property rights. Since we're on the topic, I'm just going to peddle my rather vast input on the topic and repost it here:
http://www.the-ghetto.org/content/the-creation-of-battle-net-2-0-part-one
http://www.teamliquid.net/blogs/viewblog.php?id=245508
Battle.net 2.0 was designed to protect Blizzard Entertainment intellectual property rights. To understand why, you have to understand the history of community gaming portals. From the goodwill of third-party gaming portals DWANGO and Kali, Blizzard Entertainment got an eye for the future of computer video games and launched Battle.net. During the most financially-successful period in the history of computer video games, Battle.net became the biggest online gaming service in retail multiplayer products. Blizzard games would sell millions by using the free-to-play network as a selling point.
Two entities would pose issues for Blizzard's prosperity. The first was the Korean e-Sports Players Association, who would help to launch a competitive gaming revolution in South Korea where StarCraft became the crown jewel. While "professional StarCraft" would provide a form of free advertising for Blizzard products, tons of money would be thrown into the scene by corporations much larger than Blizzard. Blizzard would not see any sponsorship or licensing fees for the use of their copyrighted content. During this same period of time, a third-party online gaming portal by the name of Garena would become hugely popular in Southeast Asia, using the Warcraft III custom map Defense of the Ancients as a killer app. Much like Kali, Garena is perfectly legal because it does not use any copyrighted game code to facilitate multiplayer creation. However, software piracy had become much easier and much more global since the creation of Kali. Competing third-party services could now diminish the value of the first-party services.
To fight both of these problems, Blizzard had a way out. World of Warcraft had become the most popular subscription game on the entire planet and the most lucrative in the entire world. It was lucrative because the business model for the MMORPG was built around closed online gaming systems. As was the norm in MMORPGs, people would create programs to try and cheat in the games. A man by the name of Michael Donnelly had created the "Glider" macro bot for use with World of Warcraft. This would lead Blizzard and Donnelly into a court battle. And in this court battle, Blizzard would make a legal argument that could eliminate the issues with Garena, KeSPA, and Donnelly all at the same time. To paraphrase, they argued that the game loaded into the memory on your computer was protected by the creator copyright and that the End User License Agreement packaged with the game could be used to protect that copyright. If the player committed a violation of the EULA, it could be a form of copyright infringement. The Arizona district court would agree.
Two months after the court brought a huge settlement down on Donnelly (in the range of 6.5 million dollars), Blizzard announced that StarCraft II would not be playable on a Local Area Network. StarCraft II multiplayer would be integrated into an always-online gaming service that would become known as Battle.net 2.0. By creating a service which gave Blizzard full control of their copyright, they could fight back against any entity that they believed was detrimental to their bottom line.
They half-assed the service because they knew they could get away with it. Thomas Tippl is on the record (as confirmed through Soren Johnson) as saying that StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty made its money back, it was profitable, but ultimately wasn't worth it for the company. That's right: One of the company heads is on the record as stating that they would have rather spent the money used to develop StarCraft II someplace else. Not with the free-to-play game model flourishing, which is why Diablo III is focusing so heavily on the Real Money Auction House and basically acting as a lead-in for Titan, which will ramp those microtransactions up to eleven.
But ultimately, the biggest issue concerning whether "Blizzard gives you for your entertainment dollar on Starcraft 2 still beats almost anything else out there" is that this is the weakest real-time strategy outing the company has provided in nearly fifteen years. Now, don't mind me, it's still not a bad game. I think I mentioned in one of the other threads that Dustin Browder's work on Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2 is on full display here, and I'd actually say the two games are roughly equal in terms of game quality. Only one game got a hell of a lot less publicity than the other, and doesn't have an established community of professionally-salaried players trying to bend and break it every which way. For Blizzard as a developer of real-time strategy games, StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty was a regression.
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EPT![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/jEzkT.png)
