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On October 24 2012 15:25 LoLAdriankat wrote:Show nested quote +On October 24 2012 15:22 Martijn wrote:
Voted for the game client tournament promotion and spectating option. Important to note that I'm not sure how DotA2 handles this, but potentially, this could cost tournaments their ad revenue, so I don't know if that's something to consider. Preferably, (and I realize this is highly controversial) you'd get something like twitch ads or something before/after a game or something.
I personally prefer an ad based model waaaaaaaaaaaay more than any PPV model.
LAN is a no brainer too, but I don't think Blizzard will cave on that no matter how we beg. Even if we see a DDoS at the WCS finals. The way Dota 2 handles it is that you have to buy a ticket to watch it in game. Could range anywhere from $1 to $6 for the entire season+replay pack.
See, that works and all, but I'd very much prefer to have ads running than to have to pay. I watch.. a lot.. of starcraft, obviously. If I had to pay for every tournament I'd watch, I'd have to invest so much. I'd definitely watch less, not more.
Now it's not like this functionality means that streams suddenly won't happen anymore, but obviously I'd like the benefits of in game camera control and casters (like dota2) and still support tournaments/players through getting ads rather than paying in a PPV model.
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SC2 is dying.
Blizzard is killing it.
User was warned for this post
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Really interesting post.
What I would like to see is a fix of the mess that is the game client and battle.net (so everything apart from balance I guess)
That includes: Replay watching with friends, in client replay sharing, in client streaming, automated tournaments, tournament lan, improved custom games system, paid name change
Fortunately some things I have not mentioned are coming in HotS already, like global play, clans, etc.
The reason I think this should be priority number one is because the game would benefit so much from it and its basically only a matter of programming. No game to create from scratch, no brainstorming ideas (its already clear what needs to be done), just improving a client.
So: Little effort and a huge benefit.
Once this is done they can go ahead and balance multiplayer again (something which is hardly ever final and takes much longer and more effort)
I am not sure which of the points fits my opinion most, the poll is a bit strange... or are you really telling me they can't do both paid name change and watching replays with friends? I am no expert by any means but I imagine even a single Programmer would be able to implement both of those things in maybe a month's time?
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On October 24 2012 16:11 rift wrote:Show nested quote +On October 24 2012 15:11 Liquid`Sheth wrote:On October 24 2012 15:08 rift wrote:
Fundamental game design. Could you explain it a little more clearly? I'm on a phone so I'll be concise: Unit pathing.
I almost missed this. What would you want different when it comes to pathing? I'm doing my master thesis on crowd simulation and path planning, so I'm very comfortable in the theory and would welcome the discussion.
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I would like to see Protoss and Zerg redesigned completely  Units like infestor and sentry shouldn't be in the game, as from a spectators point of view, units that eliminate micro from the game really take away from the spectacle. I'd have a much more enjoyable time watching pros play if there were more units that they could show off their superior skills with.
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Allowing Global play and trying to fix the latency issue that is around is my vote. I mean, this issue hasn't even been commented on even tho it was one of the first issues we all wanted to fix.
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On October 24 2012 17:27 Martijn wrote:Show nested quote +On October 24 2012 16:11 rift wrote:On October 24 2012 15:11 Liquid`Sheth wrote:On October 24 2012 15:08 rift wrote:
Fundamental game design. Could you explain it a little more clearly? I'm on a phone so I'll be concise: Unit pathing. I almost missed this. What would you want different when it comes to pathing? I'm doing my master thesis on crowd simulation and path planning, so I'm very comfortable in the theory and would welcome the discussion.
I'm actually curious about this as well. There was a post by Dustin in the forums that they had experimented with the unit pathing that had been demonstrated and their conclusion was that at the vast majority of levels there wouldn't be a noticeable effect because the units would be rallied to a point and then from there when they are moved they would still be in a blob.
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On October 24 2012 17:18 blabber wrote:
if sc2 wants any hope of catching up to LoL, it needs to go free 2 play
I can only agree with this. In my school there are plenty of people who don't see a point investing a single dollar into a game. It's sad, but you can easily download all singleplayer games for free and to someone without the need of competition there is no reason not to play just singleplayer games. I even know some people who want to buy FIFA, and instead of buying the newest FIFA 13 they buy FIFA 11, because it's not that expensive. (I'm talking about consoles, where you can't download everygame for free so easily)
The only fucking reason LoL is that successful is because it is free-to-play. You can try it out for free, you don't have a major disadvantage over players who bought something. The game itself isn't really good compared to other games.
There is no chance for Starcraft 2 to ever catch up with this game anymore and the longer they wait the harder it will be. LoL is still growing and Starcraft 2 is shrinking more and more. They have to change this asap or Starcraft 2 will not stand a chance in competitive E-Sport anymore, because why would you sponsor a tourney with 20k viewers when you can sponsor one with 60k viewers at the same time.
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For me the number 1 thing i want to see done is increase the skill cap somehow, i want consistent champions, i want to think "oh that zerg is really good with his army control", instead of "that zerg is about as good as the average zerg". I dont really care for the leading 2 options in the poll, however it would be fun if your friends could join your ladder game, only see from your perspective and then you can talk with them about it.
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On October 24 2012 16:45 []Phase[] wrote:
hmm ok, I dont really understand the high vote count for being able to watch a pro in the game. While a cool feature, and something that def should be added, if the gameplay isnt fun or fun to watch anymore, who is going to care? Actually, if all people can watch in the sc2 game itself, how will pros run commercials? how will companies promote their products through streams now? I guess the best thing would be they pay blizzard, but will that money actually be spent on improving Starcraft? We could only hope...
There's ways. Allowing for instance banners to be set by the person hosting the game in the popular locations (preferably we'd have some presets so it's easy to get a tournament display on there) and hell, it wouldn't be that difficult to play something like a twitch ad when you join a game as a spec or when the game ends. It'd even stop adblock from costing players revenue.
If anything I think the bigger hurdle is implementation. There's a good reason why you can't just join/rejoin sc2 games. There's no equivalent of keyframes as far as I'm aware, so you'd have to sync the game from start.
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Depends if you mean what I want for myself, or what I think would be the best for the game/community overall.
Personally nr1 balance/design rework and nr2 ingame spectating. Best for the community overall would probably be way better custom games and social stuff on nr1 and again ingame spectating on nr2. f2p sounds good at first, to get a lot of new players, but I don't think it's viable to suddenly rework their entire businessplan for the game. They might make it f2p a year after the last expansion or so, when the game will be dead anyway.
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Improve gameplay - redesign, overhaul, enhance... whatever... just make it fun.
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On October 24 2012 16:22 Ender2701 wrote:
Everything outside of the main game feels like it's coded in Flash. Stop doing that please, it's really stupid that my replays and the single player maps take forever to load. I want the interface to feel snappy. Maybe make the noises better for clicking on stuff to give a better feeling of responsiveness.
Actually, I think the UI is coded in Flash lol. Yeah, the whole UI has a ridiculous amount of latency for no apparent reason. Look at any web application, people spend months trying to get the response time of their site down to milliseconds, and Blizzard's local game UI takes seconds to render what has to be kilobytes of data at best. WTF Blizzard, WTF. Even just embedding Chromium or a similar HTML5 engine and rendering everything in HTML+Javascript would certainly be faster.
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We need a bigger casual player base. I think this will be achieved by by making sc2 multiplayer free to play and changing the ladder around a bit.
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I would like the ingame spectating. Just an option to enable it, so friends or depending on the option everyone can pop into my game and watch me ladder. Just my camera view nothing fancy. I don't stream often no sense since I would get 1 or 2 viewers but if it is in-game I would get more people to watch and it would keep other people longer in the game.
I can invite them to play a match afterwards and there is something to do for me if I don't really feel like playing at that moment.
The other thing I would like is a way to have resume from replay from pro matches. So I can be Teaja for once and play out the last big battle with my friend. See if I have it to micro my way out of a seemingly un winnable situation.
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Damn if they could fix the latency issues I wouldn't care about anything else.
Since 1.5 I haven't been able to play terran in 1v1's because it seems like every other game my latency can't handle marine stutter stepping. Every now and then I even have latency issues with stalkers shooting and moving, but that's rare.
Still, gimme my terran back in 1v1's 
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On October 24 2012 17:31 Imbu wrote:Show nested quote +On October 24 2012 17:27 Martijn wrote:On October 24 2012 16:11 rift wrote:On October 24 2012 15:11 Liquid`Sheth wrote:On October 24 2012 15:08 rift wrote:
Fundamental game design. Could you explain it a little more clearly? I'm on a phone so I'll be concise: Unit pathing. I almost missed this. What would you want different when it comes to pathing? I'm doing my master thesis on crowd simulation and path planning, so I'm very comfortable in the theory and would welcome the discussion. I'm actually curious about this as well. There was a post by Dustin in the forums that they had experimented with the unit pathing that had been demonstrated and their conclusion was that at the vast majority of levels there wouldn't be a noticeable effect because the units would be rallied to a point and then from there when they are moved they would still be in a blob.
Because of the 200 food cap, you could use some pretty complex methods. For the moment ignoring 4v4 which could become some what of a hindrance seeming that's 1600 food count potentially ;p To give people an idea, in game right now as far as I can tell (and this really is pure speculation seeming I have no idea who at blizzard I could ask about this), there's A* for global pathplanning and some social forces for local planning. We've seen ECM corridors and potential field approaches work for crowds of 10k+ on pentium 4s, so really, there's a lot of complex stuff you could implement. I had an email correspondence with the lead engineer on Red Alert 3 a few years back, and surely since then we've come a long way, but there's still much more we could do.
Now if only I knew who to bug about path planning and unit behavior at blizzard ;p
Shameless plug to the section of the Day9tv launch party I did back around release on the topic of pathing and unit behavior.
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- Change unit collision behavior away from current unit blobs to a more spectator friendly unit spread, and adjust balance accordingly
- Automated tournaments on Battle.net, perhaps for small rewards like ladder points, achievements or something
- Clan features like a appending a changeable clan tag to your name in a different color
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All things in this pool are pretty important but also easy to implement at the same time. So I want as many of them as possible.
The thing I would like to be changed in SC2 has been already sounded in a manner. It was said about possibility to comeback etc. As I see it, a comeback is hardly possible because players don't have many ways to rule the game. Now players just take early 3rd and get 200/200 very soon. What sense to harass with prism if damage will be almost nothing considering your opponent's income. What sense to micro each unit carefully, if you have 16 gateways and 3k/2k resourses in reserve? Midgame is very important and very interesting part of the game, but now it almost skips. Especially in the TvZ.
When I win 1v1 ladder games I usually think something like "I chose right BO and did no rude mistakes so I won". Or when I lose "I did well during 19 minutes, but that 2 fungles did too much damage so I lost". I mean, how games are going now? You macro during 14 minutes, after that you do timing attack and if you fight badly, you lose. Because you have only one timing attack for all game. If there was midgame, the game wouldn't be so one-mistake-dependent. You would have more timings, harass would have more sense (because at this stage you don't have very-very high income), careful micro would give you tangible benefits etc.
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I think SC2 is on its right way with HOTS, however i feel that bnet 2.0 was bad from the begining and even tho some things have been fixed, there's still a long way to go. Here's just a short list of what i think are vital things to focus on and some suggestions that might inspire thinking in that direction.
1: Bnet UI - looks nice but it takes away alot of the social aspect, the chat / channel windows are minimalistic (even tho you can make them bigger it doesn't feel intergrated) What we could've had is something similar to the old bnet where the Chatroom actually feels like a part of the game, My suggestion would be to have a seperate page similar just like multiplayer / arcade has, where the chat is in the center of the screen with tabs so that you can be in diffrent channels etc.
Also you can still keep the old chat system for PM's, since it gives that "msn" or "skype" feeling which is kind of nice. but the channels feel somewhat dead as it is now, you always have the multiplayer screen in the background which is kind of dull, instead there could be an dedicated channel/chat page with intergrated minigames next to chat channel such as battle ship or tetris.
2: Clans - alot of people have been waiting for this and its really boring that its not around yet, clan tags should be presented in a good looking manner such as [ASdF] or similar before the name tag itself, and you could go alot further, for example you could have clan leagues, giving clans an extension to the multiplayer option, Where you could compete in 1v1 and 2v2 for your clan. an individual league wich would make competitive gaming bigger. reward top clans at the end of each season with stuff like profile pictures and beta keys, invitations to events or good deals in blizzstore..something atleast. Clans could have a max-member cap but could be able to have an A and B squad, something monitored and organized by the clan leader. which in its turns could have rules such as you "you cannot transfere a player from a squad to another more than 1 time per week" etc.
Clan channels are also important imo, and there should be more futures than chat 2012, you should be able to organize inhouse tournaments with brackets intergrated in bnet, you should be able to enable players voice communication in the chat channel so that you can have a channel where you can sit and talk to you clan mates even if your in a game and so. Similar to a skype call but intergrated and where the channel admin can mute or allow mic on people in the channel. Clans should be able to have a "clan page" with a custom logo, statistics and roster information, a hang out for clan members where you can gain archievements and work for rewards such as profile pictures, decals, diffrent ingame UI's, Character models and so on.
For example an archivement for the clan could be "nuke em" and have the objectivs "In clan league games build and nuke 5000 units" and the reward could be a diffrent model of the nuke itself without making it look redicilus ofc. or why not diffrent win diffrent unit portraits ingame or maybe win a diffrent voice like tastosis going "not enough minerals, man" there's tons of things that could be done.
3: if you play solo - 2v2, 3v3 or 4v4 and you meet a really nice guy/girl that you'd like to continue to play with, why not make it easy, at the end of the game couldn't there be an option like "want to quene with your current ally?" with a yes / no box, if both hit yes then automaticly set them in a party and quene for them. or something similar, just throwing it out there.
4: why not have a tournament tab? - I mean its a competitive game where we want to embrace e-sport but we have no online tournaments intergrated? its soon 2013 guys. Here's how it could work:
Blizzard could monthly (one day before the ladder reset) host 1 tournament for each and every league where players just hit the "play tournament" button and get quened up as a qualifier, during qualifiing rounds there could be single elimination before after winning x-ammount of games u get thrown into an bracket, Your then enrolled in the tournament the game will automaticly start when both players hit "ready", you have 5 minutes between each new match to hit ready before W/O and 2 minutes to hit ready between the games once you already play an oponent (say in a best of 3). the tournament should be fast phased and designed to be played in one evening. with a 30 minute break at some point. Games could automaticly be decided if the game would continue for over x-ammount of time(1 hour or so), looking at army value, income and units / buildings killed or w.ever and summing them up. to keep the phase of the tournament up
It could then be posted on your page as "tournament statistics" with individual rewards and perhaps some hardware for the winner, i mean something like a mouse or signed mousepad. maybe a collectors edition figurine or w.ever. No punishments for w/o or leaving players but instead embrace those who stay and fight and reward them.
The same system could be used for Partners/sponsors that want to host tournaments, each and every tournament could get an page with information and a place for a banner or so. Basically intergrating tournaments into the bnet engine.
5:The names - I am one of those people that dont like the fact that my nick cannot be unique. I dont know why we can have the same names but its really redicilus seeing "15 HuskY" and so on. it has always worked fine with unique names even in sc/bw. why change this? imagine in WoW if 200 people were named Executer running around, i mean it takes alot of fun out of the game because in one way you are gaming for your REP, being someone, even if its just being known for being friendly and not a good player its still worth being unique in my opinion. U dont want to end up in a final seeing 3 people with the same name has already been eliminated from a tourney you won, or someone with the same name as you sit and shout "N*gger" in the chat.
6: Intergrated streams - would be nice and the option to set up your stream in the game would be even better. What i mean is for example you could have a "Stream" tab in "settings" where you can enter your justin.tv adress and if you go online sc2 would autmaticly sense this and add you to a streamer list. Also when it senses that your online, there could be a video recorder icon on your name in the chatroom, then people could just right click you pick "View stream" and it could be shown in the intergrated stream player. People could be able to report streams as innapropiate and you could shut down the rights of them using the intergrated stream system. also you could have a license agrement that you dont take responsibilty for what's being streamed when people choose to open the stream player for the first time. also the mature language option is obviously needed.
Thanks for reading,
And please remember its only suggestions, i am not saying that it should be like this and that, i just want to get people thinking and maybe even finding a better solution.
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Karma-X17
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EPT
