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Destiny just released an article on his BLOG. It's a very good read which looks back at the past, the success of CS:GO and MOBA, and his thoughts on the future of Starcraft II as we approach LotV.
His Twitter
His website
I sincerely believe that Legacy of the Void is capable of bringing not only a resurgence to the StarCraft 2 scene, but also long-lasting interest in the game. This will only be true if Blizzard takes the correct steps. Blizzard is fully capable of dedicating the resources necessary to ensure StarCraft 2′s success, and they can do it while turning a profit. I don’t think they’ve shown that they’re willing to do it yet, but I hope they change their mind with the coming of their final expansion to the StarCraft 2 universe.
[....]
So what happened? What gave CS:GO the “push” it needed to see the explosive growth it’s had over the past few years? It wasn’t community support, it wasn’t large community members, it wasn’t a vibrant tournament scene and it wasn’t positive posts on a subreddit.
Valve supported their game. Valve’s released 45 patches in 2014 alone! They’re constantly working with players to keep the game fresh via new maps and balance tweaking. The Steam market place and skinning system make the game feel alive and fresh. They added a new queuing system that allowed people to find matches easier (ever hear complaints about SC2 matchmaking/MMR decay..?). They reworked their ranking system. They reworked a TON of weapon balance in early 2013 based on player feedback (ever hear people calling for a redesign of Protoss..?, or SC2 movement/”grouping” mechanics?). And on top of all of this, they found a way to finance their development teams – by using the Steam market to sell skins and keys.
You need to read the full article. I hope I haven't overstepped a mark here, and that the mods and Destiny himself are OK with this. I feel it's important, and very relevant, and deserves to be here to be discussed.
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sabas123 posted developments from reddit (I avoid that place like the plague!) Here they are. psione is a PR guy for blizzard.You should read the original article before proceeding.
+ Show Spoiler [ On December 16 2014 03:00 psione wrote] +
We absolutely do. I think many people severely underestimate how much content we read. We always appreciate when people put in the time and effort to write out detailed thoughts or opinions.
While this is a new blog, we've seen many of these points brought up before and have discussed them with development. We know these requests are important to the community and we're always looking to make sure that hot topics such as these are given the appropriate amount of attention internally.
With development ongoing for Legacy of the Void, there are still a lot of discussions taking place. As such, we may not be able to jump into topics with definitive answers on feature requests, but we still want to let you know that the request is heard and will be discussed.
+ Show Spoiler [ On December 16 2014 04:00 Destiny wrote] +
I love SC2 very much and my entire career is staked into this game at the moment, so this might come off as a little rough, but I'm absolutely not the kind of person to "play ball" with shoddy PR answers. If you don't want to answer, that's fine, but your post has absolutely zero content in it and I kind of wish it wasn't posted in here at all.
I think many people severely underestimate how much content we read.
This kind of burden always falls on the person making the PR statements. As someone that manages PR for Blizzard on reddit, I'm absolutely sure you know this. In CSGO when patches are made, Valve is constantly addressing concerns from the community in their patches. The recent CZ nerfs reflect that, and there are a huge variety of other patches that are great examples of Valve directly responding to community criticism.
To look at parallels in SC2, some things just refuse to get addressed and even more bizarre patches are made. Buffing the widow mine for Terran, giving them medivac speed boosts, giving the hellbat upgrade immediately...The community has clamored for some kind of buff to the Terran late game but there's been no response at all from Blizzard about these kinds of things. The "perception" that the balance team/Dayvie doesn't listen to the community is well earned, imo, when strange/random changes come out of left field and leave everyone with a "...huh?" kind of feeling after reading some patch notes.
While this is a new blog, we've seen many of these points brought up before and have discussed them with development.
This statement is completely meaningless. One time I told my mom I was going to kill myself in real life if she didn't buy me some lego toy from the store because I was 12 years old and I thought it was funny.
A passing reference to a development team or a development lead is far, far different than a serious, engaging discussion on what kind of capital would need to be raised or what kind of revenue would have been available in the future to justify certain projects. One of the big problems, and I understand this, is that your PR team has never been willing to give the "hard" answer that we need to hear so we can stop bugging you about it.
Instead of, "We're just not sure we can implement these changes at the moment," or "our development doesn't believe these are the right choices for now, maybe we'll consider them down the line", why not just say "We don't believe SC2 generates enough income to warrant assigning x number of engineers to work on these projects", or "We believe our time would be better spent on higher revenue-generating projects." Those kinds of answers, again, would probably never come out of a major company because they're PR suicide, but hinting at them more would be so much better than the endless "OH WELL WE'RE TALKING ABOUT IT WITH OUR DEV TEAM I PROMISZE GUYS LOL xDDDDD!!!"
We know these requests are important to the community and we're always looking to make sure that hot topics such as these are given the appropriate amount of attention internally.
What does this even mean?
With development ongoing for Legacy of the Void, there are still a lot of discussions taking place.
I'm sure people are still having discussions about 1.6 and Quake.
As such, we may not be able to jump into topics with definitive answers on feature requests
But you can definitely give a realistic probability to certain things being discussed. Is your entire SC2 team except for one or two lonely devs focusing 100% of their effort on getting Heroes of the Storm ready for the beta and then launch? If so, there's close to no chance that any of these features are going to show up in LotV. That's fine, at least we can hear it and go from there, instead of constantly being dragged around by the dick with these answers of "well, the dev team will look at it, guys!"
Sorry if I come off as jaded in my post, but every Q/A or interview I see with Blizzard PR people are always filled with the non-sensical gobbledyguk. Nothing in any of the posts you've made in here have given any person any amount of insight or news at all regarding the future of LotV as you've said absolutely nothing of substance, just general "PR-speak" with no real meaning.
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Destiny has replied to some comments on Team Liquid HERE and HERE.
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It's incredibly important. It's also probably not going to change anything. Cause everything he's said is pretty much common sense if you've followed the scene at all, and Blizzard should've done something about it a long time ago. If they haven't, and I'm assuming they're not completely retarded, I just don't have the faith in them to do anything now.
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Thanks fruity! I would probably not have read it if you hadn't mentioned it here. Great article!
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well, at least it's better than what he wrote a few years ago.
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Definitely an excellent read, it won't directly affect Blizzard's way of doing things, but it's good to show that we care. Can't remember when the last time was that something got upvoted that high on r/starcraft.
Sadly sc2 came out as a full prized game and people expect (rightfully so) a complete game, with every future content to be free. With LotV being standalone I don't think that will change, since only a free multiplayer would allow microtransactions. But I hope they will at least provide better rewards for playing/laddering even if we won't be able to spend money ingame.
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It is the gameplay that is SC2's biggest issue. Everything else is just icing.
LotV? Last chance, Blizzard.
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Sweden33719 Posts
On December 16 2014 15:46 Musicus wrote:
Definitely an excellent read, it won't directly affect Blizzard's way of doing things, but it's good to show that we care. Can't remember when the last time was that something got upvoted that high on r/starcraft.
Sadly sc2 came out as a full prized game and people expect (rightfully so) a complete game, with every future content to be free. With LotV being standalone I don't think that will change, since only a free multiplayer would allow microtransactions. But I hope they will at least provide better rewards for playing/laddering even if we won't be able to spend money ingame.
I don't really know why they couldn't do something like free multiplayer / pay for campaign. I guess the product is too far along for that, but in theory that sounds good to me.
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well, looking at how his last blog had such an impact, i hope that this blog can make things better...
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On December 16 2014 15:49 purakushi wrote:
It is the gameplay that is SC2's biggest issue. Everything else is just icing
Hm yes and no. The gameplay is the most important factor I agree, but it's a fact that people want to spend money on their favourite game/hobby. Hell I spent money on Hearthstone and I don't even like the game that much. Microtransactions would motivate Blizzard to work harder on the game, since they would actually keep making money with sc2. That would in return result in better gameplay, since they would spent more money on sc2 and would hire more people to work on it, to make more money with microtransactions.
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On December 16 2014 15:51 Liquid`Jinro wrote:Show nested quote +On December 16 2014 15:46 Musicus wrote:
Definitely an excellent read, it won't directly affect Blizzard's way of doing things, but it's good to show that we care. Can't remember when the last time was that something got upvoted that high on r/starcraft.
Sadly sc2 came out as a full prized game and people expect (rightfully so) a complete game, with every future content to be free. With LotV being standalone I don't think that will change, since only a free multiplayer would allow microtransactions. But I hope they will at least provide better rewards for playing/laddering even if we won't be able to spend money ingame. I don't really know why they couldn't do something like free multiplayer / pay for campaign. I guess the product is too far along for that, but in theory that sounds good to me.
I fully agree, I was really hyped at BlizzCon and hoped they would announce just that, but then they announced it as a standalone game. It's better than nothing I guess, but I was still very disappointed.
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I'd say it's worthy of a reference post. I agree with a lot of his points, too. I definitely think Blizzard has the capability to make the game a great success, but I really don't see them committing much more to SC2, which really is a bummer.
Though, the comparisons to CS:GO are not totally valid. CS:GO is a team-based FPS, like TF2 is, where small little dinky additions to the game (skins, hats, whatever) are much more... appropriate... If you had this WICKED pink knife, and were running around with that, people on your team would think "Holy shit, what a badass motherfucker." But with SC2, team matches just aren't popular enough (-cough- horrible balance -cough-). That isn't to say that it isn't possible. I think it'd actually be pretty damn cool if there were more unique skins for units and stuff. It'd be interesting to see if Korean leagues would even allow them, since it might "interfere with competitive play" (which I think is a legit reason), but LoL tournaments do allow for skins in-game, so who knows.
I definitely agree that there needs to be some sort of "objective" to laddering. I mean, getting master league is awesome and all, and getting grandmaster is pretty cool too. But like, for all of those silver-leaguers and platinum players, I just don't see the point. You sort of know you suck, and just playing SC2 in-game isn't reallllly that much fun in itself, so there should be some rad unlockables that you can WORK towards, so people keep playing the game. Of course, having "people keep playing the game" is way more significant when you have a way to get more money from them...
But it's clear that Blizzard does not (want to) put a huge amount of effort into keeping SC2 fresh and modern. At most, they do a few half-assed balance patches here and there, just to keep the Korean scene alive. But just think how cool it'd be if Blizzard gathered a bunch of Korean pros and just, you know, asked for help?
@Jinro / Musicus
They would need another way of monetizing the game for that to be viable. I did not buy HotS to play the shit-tier campaign with shit-tier writing. Admittedly, I did like the WoL campaign, though. I just think they'd be missing out on a HUGE amount of their purchases if they did that.
Edit: I just noticed you mentioning this Musicus -- sorry.
I do think it's worth noting, however, that many MMO's that are one-time-purchases, like Guild Wars 2, have a ton of microtransactions available (many of which are absolutely retarded RNG bullshit). Of course, that's an MMO, but I don't know why people find an online, multiplayer game so different from an MMO.
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But mind you guys, too much balance tweaking and map changes are bad for pro-level players. However, anything else such as a large variety of skins would be cool.
However, I think starcraft should not deviate from being a serious competitive game. I think most of the gamers out there now prefer casual games and that is why starcraft isn't very popular relative to other AAA games (that and starcraft is not released every year). Starcraft should prob stand to its tradition and be a serious game, not a spineless game that changes unit balance only due to popular opinion that might change the next month.
We should never get so frustrated by the lack of "popularity" of starcraft. Some is prob Blizzard's fault, but some is just because starcraft is not so kid-friendly because a lot of gamers are young or casual (correct me if I'm wrong). We should take a deep breath and change only what we need. When the gamers interests shift back to a serious and strategy-intensive gaming, starcraft will shine again.
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On December 16 2014 16:04 Blargh wrote:
@Jinro / Musicus
They would need another way of monetizing the game for that to be viable (perhaps you are implying this?). I did not buy HotS to play the shit-tier campaign with shit-tier writing. Admittedly, I did like the WoL campaign, though. I just think they'd be missing out on a HUGE amount of their purchases if they did that.
Yes, we were thinking that if the MP was free to play, they could monetize on all kinds of things. Like skins, soundpacks, potraits etc. and one of those would be the campaign.
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It's the same point about making SC2 multiplayer F2P with micro-transactions.
Blizzard could do that but why would they bother?
SC2 is a old game by now.
Any effort spent on it would make much more money when applied to heartstone or heroes.
There simply is no financial rationale to attempting a SC2 revival.
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Wow such a great article, with so many good ideas. An entire reskinned army, now that would be awesome 
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On December 16 2014 16:10 swissman777 wrote:
But mind you guys, too much balance tweaking and map changes are bad for pro-level players.
Can't comment for pro players, but I feel more regular but smaller tweaks to balance would be the way forward. Perhaps in a similar way to how windoze gets monthly patches. Rather than having a buff to widow mines, then a nerf, just give a unit a small nudge, see how things work out (let's not forget that maps factor in a big way with balance) Going forward and how the change has effected meta etc.
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It's funny because Blizzard is focusing so much on Heroes, when the hype and popularity I have gauged from the MOBA and gaming community has been close to non-existent for that game. They are taking WAYYYY too long to release it in open beta, and they are not giving any timetables on when it will arrive, so there is no way for people to get excited for it. It frustrates the shit out of me when a company like Blizzard that 5 years ago was a giant and one of the trailblazers of multiplayer PC gaming is now taking a backseat and riding on its competitive card game and generic MOBA.
Starcraft is one of the reasons Blizzard is so popular. It is one of their big three franchises, and it just seems like they don't even like it anymore. They are holding one of the only unique and uncharted genres in all of gaming (especially esports and competitive gaming), and are completely squandering it with a ton of other projects that are all just speculative and mysterious at this point (i.e. Overwatch, which isn't even that unique or innovative of a game).
It really pains me to see Starcraft 2 just dragging its feet along until LotV and that stagnation has become standard with the game. One patch in like 2 months on the freaking widow mine is not enough change or dynamics to keep people coming back to try it out. It's not hard for Blizzard to release an experimental patch, see how it pans out, gauge criticism and response, and react accordingly in short time. Even if changes to the game ended up being game-breaking, Blizzard could make it possible for tournaments currently happening to just run an earlier patch of the game, which completely avoids broken competition.
Jeez, if some people in this community had the opportunity to work directly over Blizzard's shoulder with Starcraft 2, then we would probably see huge improvements to the game and subsequently the fanbase and esports scene. But alas, "the resources are just not there".
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In theory a nice read but i don't agree with him in the end.
I don't see how these things would change anything, you first need a game which is easy accesable if you wanna have high player numbers, micro transactions are only there to keep the people playing.
sc2 lacks this easy enjoyable mode, archond mode is a step in the right direction, but not enough.
I also don't buy that a better arcade would change anything, maybe custom games were a big part of games 10 years ago, but today you get completely new games (professional ones) for a few bucks, there simply is no need to play arcade games (let's be real, even the best arcade games are not anywhere near the quality of "real games")
So yeah, in theory destiny's blog makes sense, but i still think the people which work for blizzard are smarter than most people who bitch about their decisions, it isn't always as easy as it looks 
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Maybe one of our benevolent overlords could start a poll asking if we'd be willing to pay for ingame goodies like skins (LotV one is old  ).
I'd be happy too myself. Though I know Blizzard have said in the past that skins are an issue due to the extra graphical load.. Just add a toggle to turn these paid-for-addons on or off blizz.. doh.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/kXMSRav.png)
Give more please.
EDIT: You know, they do this in WoW and apparently doing so there isn't an issue. So what's the real reason? CBA?
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Good read but doubt Blizzard will do anything. They have already milked the game enough and after LotV they will probably move on to other things. Unless Blizzard finds a new way to make a profit (ie microtransactions if they want to implement it), they most likely will just release LotV, patch it a few times, and finish with sc2. We should just accept SC2 for it is and shouldn't get our hopes too high up for LotV.
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EPT
