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Bisutopia19302 Posts
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.
If SC1 required a yearly subscription I'd still be paying it. Free to play may make sc2 more accessible, but after a while it's popularity would plateau again without changes to the game.
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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."
Outside of MMR decay and better auto matching generally, all of this are either things blizzard has done (constant patches, actually destructive to an rts' meta game as it causes meta game instability) or things that blizzard will never do (anti blob mechanics) as it uproots the fundamentals of the game, itself destabilizing, but more importantly its an admission of total and abject failure. They're never going to admit to that.
tldr; destiny said nothing new nor gave any advice actually applicable to reality.
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With the economy changes, there ought to be big changes, sc2 movement won't look nearly the same with the less massable economy system.
It is already looking better but I really would love blizzard to be an active patcher. Make more imba patches and patch it with imba patch patch would be so much fun.
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Reading that made me feel like it was actually happening. Jesus Blizzard, what if....what if.
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On December 16 2014 17:09 fruity. wrote:
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.
I dont get this. So many games are able to scale down textures during heavy load times, especially in MMO's where theres tons of players.
Just scale down the graphics and it's fine.
I mean it only happens at 200/200 vs 200/200 right? Seems like a good idea to implement.
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In my opinion, skins are a predatory business model and many people that champion it have no actual intention to buy skins, while seeking to profit from those who will.
Can we please keep our old and fair model of: 'buy a game = access a game' ?
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Just give everyone the option to not see any skins at all during matches. Then you can go crazy with skins, people who are annoyed by hugh flying lings will have better lifes.
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On December 16 2014 19:04 Grumbels wrote:
In my opinion, skins are a predatory business model and many people that champion it have no actual intention to buy skins, while seeking to profit from those who will.
Can we please keep our old and fair model of: 'buy a game = access a game' ?
The thing with skins is that they aren't necessary to buy if you dont want them. Your lings will still be the same whether they look like lings or flying bugs. Since the skins will serve as nothing more than a nice aesthetic look, there's no reason to not have them in the game. Sure itll be weird to look at for the first few games, but people will get used to it. It wouldnt hurt to add it, i mean it's not like sc2 is going to get anymore dead with skins.
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On December 16 2014 19:04 Grumbels wrote:
Can we please keep our old and fair model of: 'buy a game = access a game' ?
This isn't year 2000 anymore. There are other "fair" and more lucrative ways to have revenue for games, just have a look at the non-pay to win games out there.
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in the reddit comment section you had a destiny responding with a well worked out post to a pr guy from blzizard
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.
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.
I love you. ♥
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Destiny making friends again...
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On December 16 2014 19:31 Clonester wrote:
Destiny making friends again...
To be fair, he has a point…
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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...
I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one around who doesn't care at all about skins and bullcrap like that. I think the bolded part is what's the longterm problem for most players. Starcraft has a reputation as Elite-Game. The LotV changes cement that further (like wtf should a newcomer think of mining his one and only base out at 10mins?). That's what needs to change. Yet I fear it is too late for that with SC2. Fundamental control and gameplay mechanics just take too much effort to learn for your average scrub who decides after 3games whether he likes the game or not.
Also if the vital content (MP, SP campaign etc.) costs more with a "f2p"or DLC-model I'm one of those guys who won't even think about playing it. In such games I miss the option to just buy everything for 40€ upfront and everyone who wants to "save" money and rather play a Demo for half a year until he decides to still unlock everything should do that.
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On December 16 2014 19:43 Big J wrote:Show nested quote +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... I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one around who doesn't care at all about skins and bullcrap like that. I think the bolded part is what's the longterm problem for most players. Starcraft has a reputation as Elite-Game. The LotV changes cement that further (like wtf should a newcomer think of mining his one and only base out at 10mins?). That's what needs to change. Yet I fear it is too late for that with SC2. Fundamental control and gameplay mechanics just take too much effort to learn for your average scrub who decides after 3games whether he likes the game or not.
"macro rts games" are unfun, i don't think you can change that without changing the core concept of these games.
I think most people (not all of them  ) wouldn't want to play a starcraft game with automated macro for example.
Nah i would even say multitasking is what puts people off, as soon as you have to do some things "at once" you will lose the average gamer who likes to play these other esports games.
So yeah, you either cater to rts gamers, or you cater to the masses, i know what i prefer
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Czech Republic12129 Posts
On December 16 2014 19:43 Big J wrote:Show nested quote +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... I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one around who doesn't care at all about skins and bullcrap like that. I think the bolded part is what's the longterm problem for most players. Starcraft has a reputation as Elite-Game. The LotV changes cement that further (like wtf should a newcomer think of mining his one and only base out at 10mins?). That's what needs to change. Yet I fear it is too late for that with SC2. Fundamental control and gameplay mechanics just take too much effort to learn for your average scrub who decides after 3games whether he likes the game or not.
It always reminds me the picture where is drawn the difference between casual and hardcore SC2 player. Casual has 1 base, plays with some marines, has 8 SCVs and is thinking about building a planetary on his natural at about 12th minute. When a hardcore gamer stomp his base with 10 tanks, 3 ravens, 5 medevacs, 2 banshees and 50 marines :D
I really love playing SC2 but I loved SC2 more in WoL. Maybe the matchmaking was working better, maybe the game was slower, maybe I was less rusty back then. I don't know why, but all HotS I feel that this is not right.
You know the feeling for sure, it's the feeling that something is wrong and you don't know what it is.
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I'd be more than happy to dump some of those paypal riches into the game I have loved for the past 4+ years.
The article is a pretty good read and brings up some interesting points.
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I am glad Destiny does this, I'm hoping it will matter, but I am so afraid it will not. Regarding gameplay I think LotV is going in a good direction in general, it shows a lot of potential and with some more tweaking to some of the fundamentals I really believe it can be so much more fun than HotS. The mod actually already is.
But then indeed, how to attract more people to enjoy the glorious thing that is SC? I agree with Destiny, please throw it open Blizzard. Free to play with microtransactions is THE way to go. I don't fucking give a shit that I already own 3 accounts with HotS on it. I won't feel bad if LotV will be free, because I will enjoy it either way. Then add some skins, customizability, a more social battle.net and I don't see how SCII can not grow again.
Blizzard is going in an ok direction with their announcements, but they really need to amp it UP. Throw it open, make it free. In the end you will make more money by doing so. There will be chaos, and the chaos will be delightful, and eventually from chaos will rise a better game.
/inspirational mode off
I can probably dream on forever.
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To be honest I'm really tired of the 500th discussion about "better don't screw up Blizzard". It's kinda easy, if they screw up, I may or may not play StarCraft more often. If they fail to make it interesting, I'll stop buying Blizzard's products. Gosh, I'm a fucking consumer, I don't want to put work in making sc2 better, I want to give money to receive some great stuff to enjoy. These days, sc2 makes me much more worry instead of providing fun.
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Lorning
Belgica34432 Posts
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Wouldn't free multiplayer have plagged the game with cheaters/hackers/leavers/what-have-you though?
That's the problem when you can't tie an account to a single player.
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EPT
