MPQ Modding Shutdown Petition - Page 9

On July 27 2012 12:31 Caltu wrote:
I personally think this is the correct move by Blizzard.

Any form of moding that can have affect on your game in any sense is a bad road to leave open.

My main example is World Of Warcraft
WoW has had 3rd party content forever, and its affected the game in both development and playability. The developers have had to make content around the mods. "Deadly boss mods" alerts the player to incoming abilities and other effects that they need to respond to. Blizzard have had to make encounters exponentially more difficult over the years to counteract the modding.

Any form of modding I think needs to be stopped.
Where would it stop if all content producers knew of this? Warning lights for common timings of pushes ect?
Personally I think this is a good road to go down for Blizzard [Even tho Dark Protoss Is bloody cool]

On July 27 2012 08:36 Blazinghand wrote:
This would be more successful as a thread on the battle.net forums.

On July 27 2012 12:27 trbot wrote:

I've actually been careful to address every point you made, so I'm not sure what you're complaining about. No one has yet expressed a problem with my arguments.

On July 27 2012 12:27 trbot wrote:
However, half a dozen people have expressed that you appear to have no idea what you're talking about, that you're making incoherent arguments, and so on.

On July 27 2012 09:39 CaptainCharisma wrote:


Where did I say he cannot participate?

On July 27 2012 12:27 trbot wrote:
Arguing that I don't respond logically is just silly, since high level theory has drilled nothing into me more strongly than pure, unabated logic and reason. When was the last time you wrote a 50 page mathematical proof? I finished one last December, and I'm writing another right now. Something tells me that you're in the minority, having trouble grasping my points. On a side-note, I have a fairly good understanding of the corporate world and government (having worked at several fortune500 companies, and having studied economics, ethics in government and professional practice alongside CS at one of the world's top 10 schools for CS), so I wouldn't toss those claims around arbitrarily.

There's a fundamental difference between my frustration and yours. I understand what I'm talking about, and you're waxing sophistic from ignorance, playing the devil's advocate in an e-penis measuring contest with no end.

On July 27 2012 11:56 CaptainCharisma wrote:
You are right in that I have no idea about what these changes are doing at the programming level. It may be a complete waste of time for all I know. However, I am assuming Blizzard is making the change because it has at least some sort of benefit, whether or not people know what that is yet, or are wrong about it. I am assuming the people who work at Blizzard have qualifications similar if not better (most likely) than yours. I find it likely that Blizzard has some sort of rational basis for its decisions. My arguments draw on this logic.

On July 27 2012 12:27 trbot wrote:
You're making an appeal to authority, and it makes no sense. That's not logic. It's actually a classical logical fallacy. Google it. It presupposes that experience will lead Blizzard to make the right decision. You fail to understand how trivial a change this is, and it has turned your argument into mush. Some programmer was working on the installer after his boss said "we want to allow users to play SC2 faster while they're installing, just like we do for Diablo 3," and while figuring out how he could make it happen, he had to make a few dozen mundane decisions. That he would run some MD5 hash on each MPQ file to verify that it had downloaded properly before running the game was one of those mundane decisions. Implementing this hash checking took him 1 hour. Implementing it a different way that wouldn't prevent modding would take him a similar amount of time. (He's a smart guy.) I've already mentioned alternative methods of accomplishing this programmer's goal in a previous post. You're making a strategic mountain out of a trivial decision with simple alternatives.

On July 27 2012 11:56 CaptainCharisma wrote:
You said " It seems to me like a reasonable thing that most people will believe is fair (if you pysicially can't see the red one). It almost seems like the benefit is greater than the cost.."

Now you say " Blizzard is bound by its shareholders and its bottom line. It doesn't need a moral compass or a constitutional obligation. If a large fraction of its user base is annoyed by its decisions, it will fail. Even if I accept your premise that you're in the majority, I've already argued that even 10% (already accounted for by my colourblind kin) is too much to discount."

Why are you making arguments about fairness when you acknowledge that Blizzard is only bound by its shareholders and its bottom line. Recognizing you have failed on the fairness front (because as you said, Blizzard doesn't need a moral compass - I'm glad you agree with me on that), you seem to claim that the, let's say 10% of people who use mods (a very high estimate considering the amount of casual players who have probably never even heard of TL) being disgruntled is enough, from a profit perspective, for Blizzard to revert these changes. Well guess what, Blizzard wants to go ahead with the changes. They've probably crunched the numbers and disagree with you.

So, which line do you want to take? The only avenue you seem to have left open is that these changes affect nothing other than stopping mods, which I could not verify. My question then is, why has Blizzard invested time money and effort into making them.

On July 27 2012 12:27 trbot wrote:
I responded in terms of fairness because you invoked fairness. (I like to speak in terms people understand most easily. If you speak in terms of fairness, it seems a fair bet that you want a response that explains how some other alternative is equally fair.)

On July 27 2012 12:27 trbot wrote:
There are valid arguments to be made in favour of accommodating red-green colourblindness whether you come at it from the perspective of morality and social obligation, or from a monetarily driven capitalism. If I were to choose my own path, it would be the latter. In the long run, if Blizzard fails to respond to the desires of its customer base, it will fail.

On July 27 2012 12:27 trbot wrote:
You say 10% is a high estimate, but I feel like it's probably higher. Until someone makes an argument that is backed with statistics (unlikely), there's no point in arguing this. This thread in our argument leads to a dead end, since we differ in our opinions. I believe mods are common, and that more noise is to come from, e.g., colourblind folks, if Blizzard nixes mods and doesn't provide a legitimate alternative to STC.

On July 27 2012 12:27 trbot wrote:
Yet again, you appeal to authority, and the argument is ridiculous. You're saying "Blizzard has probably thought of everything, and every decision their programmers and designers make is well thought out." It's frustrating to try to explain to a non computer scientist how these kinds of accidental consequences can, and do, occur every day when programmers work on a large project. Suffice it to say that it's much more likely that this is an unintended consequence of a new development in their installer which has several simple alternatives that do not have the effect of nullifying mods.

On July 27 2012 13:51 CaptainCharisma wrote:
This is cute coming from someone who has done nothing but state his qualifications as if to speak from a position of authority. I'll address the rest of this segment along with my response below.

On July 27 2012 13:51 CaptainCharisma wrote:
It would make more sense to pull me up right there and say "it has nothing to do with fairness - Blizzard will lose customers over this which means they should want to revert the changes", but you didn't. You went along those lines for a while and decided to change your point of attack.

On July 27 2012 13:51 CaptainCharisma wrote:


Herein lies your biggest inconsistency. Please pay attention. Your arguments for fairness necessarily entailed that Blizzard was not simply a money hungry machine - otherwise, why would it care about your fairness arguments? However, you now say your path is "the latter" - that Blizzard is just another subject of "monetarily driven capitalism", so presumably, you do not think these arguments hold any water in the real-world. Instead, you seem to think Blizzard should revert the changes because it will lose profits from the 10 or more %. If you believe this is the case, and that Blizzard is a money driven machine, what are you worried about? What is this petition for? They will allow modding for the sake of their own profits.

On July 27 2012 13:51 CaptainCharisma wrote:
I touched on this above and I'll bring it up again here. I'll accept for argument's sake that what you say is correct, and say these changes were mundane and accidental. Thus, I'm not asserting Blizzard's goal was to prevent modding by doing this. It may have been, as you put forward, an attempt to speed up downloading time as in Diablo 3. So now we have a situation where you believe the changes can easily be reverted in 1 hour, and reinstated in such a way as to allow modding. So what? Perhaps you're right and the cost of allowing modding is very low; all this does is add weight to the idea that Blizzard doesn't want to change it for some reason other than it being too expensive.

On July 27 2012 14:26 CaptainCharisma wrote:
Just because you don't understand something doesn't make it pseudo-intellectual.

..MPQ modding causes no harm to SC2..

It's clear a change like this wouldn't affect negative aspects to the game such as maphacking, so there's really no reason to shut this down. Many players continue playing the game simply on the basis of knowing they can freely make it look however they want.

On July 27 2012 14:57 XenoX101 wrote:
You haven't addressed any of the potential for exploits. One could easily for instance make hard to see units more visible (ghosts, dark templars, observers), or make certain sounds such as the dark templar swipe much louder. You can't just say..



And provide no evidence for it, or no counter argument to the obvious examples mentioned above. If you want your petition to be taken seriously you need to put a bit more thought into the opposition's case, and give them reasons why they would change their minds, and I don't think having pretty things is as much of their concern as the potential for exploits.