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Okay look, for all the people complaining about *others* wanting chat, (which is just a single thing that adds together with MANY failed social design decisions in 2.0), you are not being forced to participate in any chat, like the 1.0 home screen had a button "Enter Chat," etc; basically you can continue playing sc2 like a "singleplayer game" as some suggest their ideal experience is. (however I also think a lot of those opinions are not informed by experiences with b.net 1.0)
but it's idiotic to suggest that the people who want channels are just being picky about their game, or are entitled and should just interact on FB, reddit tl etc, please don't make suggestions for others in your own image. It's not up to you to dictate the Bnet experience for everyone, especially when certain improvements are very simple and maybe even archaic (how long have chat channels existed on the internet?). And also, the 2.0 chat/flist/channels are still very lacking in key areas that would improve user experience, eg. /commands, larger rooms, moderation, inviting to chats without permission, true invisible mode/DND, chat scrolling to the bottom with new messages, no way to search players for real IDs.. these are improvements to CHAT alone, which is just one dimension of the problem, probably 2nd to the abject failure UMS custom system
and also, we still dont have fucking clans, are you kidding me? An unfortunate explanation for all of this would be that these features are going to be marketed to us as HotS exclusive or "Bnet Premium" or something. I imagine a bunch of old school blizzard employees in a corner of the breakroom, whispering about how incompetent and disconnected the upper management is and lamenting the loss of a fanbase so like themselves..
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i think this really is one of the big problems with SC2.I also played WoW for many years but stipped because it is payed to play(i was paying with gold but the "dealer" didnt have cards)and if WoW gets free now,even that now cata is total shit compared to the other 2 expos.i woud still play it for many hours a day only because the social aspect.SC2 really lags many features taht coud make it so much popular.when i started playing SC2 i started with some of my friends but now im alone they all gave it up,and im palying really little maybe 5-8 ladder games/week.I really liek the community and im following every single tournament there is but it makes me so sad that there are so little people playing it now.
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Amazing article, and I totally agree and can relate to everything said.
Bnet 2.0 failed SC2 so hard its remarkable.
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On March 06 2012 10:33 slytown wrote:
You know why noone's in the BNET chat rooms? It's because they are all on TL and Redditt chatting. I don't understand the complaints.
What does that have to do with anything?
I know you guys think that Tlnet is a good place with TONS of people and really, I love this forum to death but it really isn't enormous as far as online communities go. Even Reddit is as big as it is because it's got far more going on than just SC2 in it.
How is this a proper excuse for how terrible Bnet 2.0 is? Disregarding the fact that the chat system is clumsy as all hell the custom game system is terrible. There is no acceptable way to get a new map to shoot off the ground because the popularity system is a mess. Imagine for a moment if DOTA had never existed prior to SC2. Then today somebody makes Dota exactly like it is an introduces it. In this current custom game system you would never see a soul play it because it would be on page like ...4 on the custom map panal and people never go there. Even if you yourself browse it you will never get a full game.
You really truly underestimate what a good social environment does for a games' longevity. At the current rate SC2 will see spikes for expansions but once the second one is out you're shit out of luck unless things are improved. A proper modding system and a proper social interface really helps a game live forever in RTS terms. That's why you have so many people still playing WC3.
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"The ability to make custom games, so you can for example, make a game called “Level 10 duels”, or simply meet with some folks that aren’t on your friends list for any particular reason or event."
This very last point in the article I think is something like ~80% of the reason SC2 is a ghost town. The popularity contest needs to go away. Not only are there only about 10-25 maps that anyone can reasonably play at a time with strangers, but it would take like an hour to organize a game where everyone goes in with some pre-determined playstyle. For instance, say I want to play special forces for the 500th time because there is nothing else good winning the popularity contest, I also want everyone to play as an infestor because, well fuck, I think that would be cool. Well I can't do that without spending time organizing it and maybe I only play games when I'm feeling lazy (rolleyes). Or maybe I'm new and I don't want to piss everyone off with my suck so I want to join a game with other newbs. Can't do that either. Or maybe I want play the same map with the same people but don't want to put so much awkward social effort into it. You used to be able to just look in the game list and find the same game and enter it. Then you could be all like 'well that game sucked, mike was a dumbass and made carriers'.
You don't get any of that in bnet 2.0. It's a borefest that has virtually eliminated the mapmaking community and requires you to put in a stupid amount of effort to do what people could already do easily in Bnet 1.0.
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From the article:
4. The ability to make custom games, so you can for example, make a game called “Level 10 duels”, or simply meet with some folks that aren’t on your friends list for any particular reason or event.
This can't be emphasized enough! Big reason why we will never see the amount of great custom maps that WC3 had, amongst them Tower Defense and DotA. You can't rly host a game , there is only that join game bullshit.
This is holding back the growth and longevity of the game soo much! Just think about all those people who only ever go on WC3 bnet to play fun maps....
Also the reason why community maps from ESV, Crux and TPW are held back so much. Only viable place to get good opponents in bnet is the ladder, when you just "join game" you have a) no idea how long it will take for someone else to join the map (likely forever since nobody knows you just joined a game on ESV Sanshorn Mist so nobody will ever join) and b) if for some reason somebody does join, he is most likely not your skill level at all.
We can only hope this will be fixed in HotS and with the marketplace system.
But you better not get your hopes up high, considering Bnet 0.2 so far was complete bullshit, a total hindrance for SC2, worse than platforms of their previous games and overall just a disgrace.
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On March 06 2012 02:04 Talin wrote:
Honestly, WoW seems like a pretty bad example of built-in social interaction systems to me and suffers from a similar issue (a ton of players just autopiloting through the game without much communication at all). Needless to say that SC2 is infinitely worse, but if you were looking for examples you'd probably be looking towards something like EVE instead.
well your are right about wow now.
but back in the days the game was very well designed around socializing on the server.
they ruined it almost completely with cata, and some stuff before.
basically you can say that when activision came on board a lot of stuff went down the road with blizz.
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On March 06 2012 15:11 Sovano wrote:
Honestly I spend a lot more time on TL than actually playing SC2. I play a few games and get off. I never had that feeling in WC3, which I play everyday. In my opinion, it's more refreshing to log on and talk to other people. Finding friends in-game is pretty difficult, and very few of my real life friends know what Starcraft 2 is let alone own it.
This except for the WC3 part (never played that online). I'll happily poke around TL all the time. Even during my lunch break at work or sometimes when I'm waiting for an incubation time on an experiment or whatever. But when I get on SC2 in the evening I'll just play through a few games and done. Almost all of the interaction I end up having with other players actually through battle.net is my opponent raging after a loss.
Hell, I didn't even have anyone on my friends list until a couple weeks ago. I've lately been picking up 4v4s to unwind when I don't feel like 1v1 laddering. I've added a few people now; I never talk to them but it actually feels slightly better now I can see theres actual other people online who aren't just rage-fests. That said it'd be nice to actually meet people a bit easier; however the chat system is just awful and frankly I don't even know where to go for decent chat channels under the current crippled system.
I've even thought about taking a bit of a holiday and going all the way to the US to IPL4. But given the complete lack of people I know playing and the fact I don't know anyone IRL who plays I'm thinking it'd be a waste of time.
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Blizzard wants people to play WoW instead its easy to see why they don't want people to stay playing SC2 other than to come back and buy the expansions  .
The motive is there they want people back to WoW. I'm willing to be alot of the SC2 players are former WoW people.
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On March 06 2012 19:01 Lightspeaker wrote:
Almost all of the interaction I end up having with other players actually through battle.net is my opponent raging after a loss.
Yup, and vice versa. I sometimes just rage because there's no one to talk to.
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It is pretty sad that 10 year old games have better social interaction structure than battlenet 2.0. That said, I can't even muster much energy to be angry over it, it's more a sense of defeat.
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On March 06 2012 11:39 TERRANLOL wrote:
Finally an argument I can understand. I always saw people complaining about Battle.net 2.0 and I disregarded it because they were complaining about chat channels even though they were in the game. But now I get it. I do remember when I logged into SC:BW, you were already in a chat channel and chat was flowing, you could see it and that gives off a feeling of its own. I would like to see this in battle.net 2.0. Not only that, but I would like to see this become a staple of battle.net 2.0. I don't want the background to be a picture of a unit and the "find match" button. I want the background to be chat, and I want the find match features listed along the side.
ye i agree with this.
in bw you just logged in and people were talking and all around and you could see them in the lists etc. it was there by default and it was all around you when you werent ingame. you were the closest thing to connected as possible
in sc2 i log in and theres nothing, except when friends talk to you personally.
even if you join a chat channel its usually pretty dead plus they are hard to find, and they are so small and tiny and the interface is just annoying small windows and annoying click sounds wherever i click in bnet.
imagine logging into sc2 and theres a screen in top right of a stream that shows some pro tournament, and the background is all chat just going wild over that game. you click channels and you can join "sweden", "germany" channels all over the place. they are there as default and bnet really tries to involve you into socializing.
in sc2 it just feels like it doesnt actually try to encourage you at all to be socializing. you dont log and see huge splashes of conversations to enter or topics to read about or nothing. only thing you feel invited to do when u enter bnet is to search for a game.
i think really many wants this social interaction and even if they gave us chat channels, they cap it and we have to join it and know what the channel is called and we have to enter it like its some secret place. and then were there and its dead anyway with afk people cause nobody feels like chatting in this small awful looking green bluish window where you have to lean forward to read what things say
to paint a picture of what im getting at abit
entering bnet should give the feeling of entering a market, there should be people all around you doing different stuff. get visually encouraged and invited to take part yourself.
in sc1 i made all my friends and contacts through bnet and custom games. in sc2 i didnt make a single friend by just starting conversation with random people on bnet. i think that just speaks for itself how discouraging bnet 2.0 is from a social aspect
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It's not only the lack of features and integration I've an issue with, it's also the very act of trying to typing something out in SC2 feels really unresponsive and sluggish, leading to many misstypes. I don't understand how they could have gotten this so wrong, the only time there should be noticable latency is when you actually hit enter and send the message across bnet, it frustrates me to no end.
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On March 06 2012 01:52 orangesunglasses wrote:
love "ghost town effect" it fully describes the problem. the other problem is blizz who created so many popular games sucks at making them AMAZING games most of the time
This is what I hate about all gaming communities. Full of ungrateful pricks who think even their mom would design better games. Blizz games are amazing! Of course you teenagers who have never designed or produced real games can not appreciate anything, you are just simple consumers who whine about everything.
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On March 06 2012 19:56 Coeus1 wrote:Show nested quote +On March 06 2012 01:52 orangesunglasses wrote:
love "ghost town effect" it fully describes the problem. the other problem is blizz who created so many popular games sucks at making them AMAZING games most of the time This is what I hate about all gaming communities. Full of ungrateful pricks who think even their mom would design better games. Blizz games are amazing! Of course you teenagers who have never designed or produced real games can not appreciate anything, you are just simple consumers who whine about everything.
Can't say if you are trolling or not, but the problem here isn't that blizz sucks at making proper games. The main issue is that bnet 1.0 is better than 2.0 in almost everyway. That's what so infuriating, and really unfortunate for a game that could be such a great platform for socialising while playing a great game.
People have been asking for proper chat channels, clan support etc (everything has mostly been covered already). So it's not that we nag on blizzard telling them they have made a shit game, it's just that most of us can't grasp how they ended up making bnet 2.0 infinitely worse then its predecessor.
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On March 06 2012 19:47 MorroW wrote:
to paint a picture of what im getting at abit
entering bnet should give the feeling of entering a market, there should be people all around you doing different stuff. get visually encouraged and invited to take part yourself.
This is the best analogy I've seen for what I was getting at earlier. Theres just no real encouragement to get involved and it feels difficult to do so because its inherently hidden away and thus seems rather "cliquey". This is especially bad for someone like me who doesn't know anyone IRL who plays and didn't play BW to any huge extent and so doesn't know anyone from back then either.
Thanks for the analogy MorroW.
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Doesn't help when the only chat channel I used to try to get into (Teamliquid) usually has 65+ people either in game or afk, 20 or so silent, 10 peddling off custom games I have no desire to play, and 5 people arguing or just plain spamming.
It's always full, but always so boring.
Sometimes I wonder if battle.net 2.0 is not fully to blame, but also the aging community that's more concerned with skill than having fun.... It seems like the overemphasis of E-sports and underemphasis of fun in Starcraft 2 is almost stifling any new blood to the game
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Clans (including clan tags AND a clan chat channel), group replay viewing.
Some basic starter channels like general looking for group / looking for team (or clan) could also help people show that there are other people online.
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EPT
