UI still sub-par 2 years later. Why don't we care? - Page 43

Of course they dont. If they told us the reasons, we probably would hate them even more than we already do. ( hate as beeing pissed off i guess ).

To fully understand this situation, you need to put yourself in blizzards position.

You must understand that Blizzard cannot allow a game to survive 2 long. If it does, they dont get new income from another game they will make.

Here comes the first mistake: If they make a game like starcraft 1 or diablo 1, they are almost certainly guaranteed to sell their next titles. The reason is a huge respect for the company as a gaming industry, making it more likely to buy their games rather than others.

However, if we talk about a community like we had in diablo 1 or sc:bw, its a small load to the servers, so its a small cost.

In the starcraft 2 the cost of servers is consistently higher, and since there is no LAN (anti piracy maybe, but more likely for monitoring their gaming community), players have no way to play it out of battle.net.

Now lets assume that sc2 life is about to end beeing a "profit" in monetary form for blizzard.
What then the company wants is to shut down those servers or migrate them to something "new/pay for play".

However (and here is the key concept), if you have a huge community playing that game, you cant shut down the servers, because even if in terms of agreement you specify this eventuality, 5.000.000 angry gamers will have a huge impact in your next game sales. Those 5 million might translate into 50k very bad opinions on internet, and that might "persuade" a potential customer not to buy their next title.

Now, lets assume, that you create a bad UI, unfriendly, and loag loading each key you press, you get those 5 million down to barely 100.000 gamers left active.
Now you close the servers for that game (or leave a small, lagging one), and you get 1k bad opinions online.
Then you simply overflow the "bad" opinions with reviews, your own webpages, or simply information about your next title.

You will have a much higher chance to quiet down 1k ppl than 50k.

A simple example:

"Alcampo" is a shopping center that in spain has had NO internet interest at all for a huge ammount of time. Because of where i worked before, i saw first hand what happens you "you, the company" have no movement on the internet: People do it for you, the way they want.

If you search "Alcampo" in youtube, nowdays (after the campaign Alcampo did), the first things you see are something posted to have a "ok" image on internet. Before, the top video was a dude that was using a plastic bag of "alcampo" to lose weight. You can imagine that even with absolutelty nothing to do with the store, it actually impacted the store very negativly.
(Btw now its on the 7th spot in the youtube search).

Same shit here, just more complex.

About Pros, or casters:

Its obvious they cant bite the hand that is feeding them. "WE" (the regular players) have the luxury to comment on this freely, but they might lose a lot because of this. (remmber when Naniwa probe rushed some zerg and lost his code S seed?)

Now, the question we should ask ourselves: Is there any way we can influence Blizzard to change their approach? If there is, How to? And do we really want to do it?.

1: There is always a way, just it might require us to have strong principles ( like not buying the game until they show they solved this issue, and we would have to do it by the millions), or commitment.

2: Hard spamming a a twitter account for 1 month by about 70% of the guys that are following anyone from blizzard related to the matter could do the trick. Or creating a good amount of negative blog/threads about this.

3: Thats what everyone has to decide, but i am quite sure that without a form of "agreement" from everyone, most people will think the same way people who dont vote for politics think: If only i do it, it wont have any effect, and i only will only look like a loner who just rage talks.

At least this is my opinion :D.