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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.
hacking is getting worse as the game falls in price because the cost of getting caught falls.
the hacking problem gets 10,000 times worse when someone can just create a new free multiplayer account while hiding behind a VPN.
i wish Blizzard would make it so that i can see my own fancy skins on my units but my opponent just sees standard unit models/skins on his/her screen. until that happens Blizzard can't get too creative with skins.
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On December 17 2014 00:16 -Archangel- wrote:
Destiny forgot that adding skins for SC2 units is not as easy. These skins would influence FPS of players. Sure you could make skins that would not, but you need a way to test it for weaker computers.
So it takes time and effort to make a skin, you cannot just mass produce it like in CS:GO. Letting community do some will present same problems.
For voice packs, I don't see a reason why not.
I think is not that hard to make simple skins, just like Dota does. Polygon count doesn't need to increase, neither texture size. It's all about optimizing. If they want, they can. They are doing it anyways for Heroes of the storm, though.
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On December 17 2014 00:22 boxerfred wrote:Show nested quote +On December 17 2014 00:16 -Archangel- wrote:
Destiny forgot that adding skins for SC2 units is not as easy. These skins would influence FPS of players. Sure you could make skins that would not, but you need a way to test it for weaker computers.
So it takes time and effort to make a skin, you cannot just mass produce it like in CS:GO. Letting community do some will present same problems.
For voice packs, I don't see a reason why not. We are talking a 4 year old game :/
And the game still struggles even on super high-end PCs in massive 4v4 fights. Now let each player have totally unique skins and things get even harder.
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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 mostly agree with this. In addition to that, I think that skins fits a lot worse into an RTS for two reasons: (1) You feel less attached to your units in Sc2 than to your hero in a MOBA and (2) Skins fits worse into a game where there are lots of units as it easily can make it more confusing.
Destiny keeps believing that you can just turn around Sc2 by making it F2P and adding in microtransactions. But what he imo doesn't get is that you just can't turn around this type of game. Lots of people have tried it and quitted it. It has super high learning barriers and if the RTS genre is going to be popular in the future, it needs to reform it self. The underlying issue here isn't as much the business model, but rather the easiness of learning the game as a new player.
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.
Free multiplayer would be pretty bad as a big part of the target audience is paying $40 for the multiplayer only (probably around 500k). If you gave them multiplayer for free, Blizzard would lose a big chunk of money without any monetization to back it up.
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One aspect I think alot of people are overlooking when they are begging for Blizzard to add all sorts of micro-transactions to SC2 is this: Both Dota 2 and CS:GO are just as good, or better, gameplay-wize than their predecessors. The mechanics that made Dota awesome are still there in Dota2, and CS:GO has the same kind of magic that 1.6 had.
The same cannot be said for SC2. SC2 is still outshined by it's predecessor in so many ways, and I think most people would agree that BW was still a better game than SC2 is. This is for me the biggest downfall for SC2, and if Blizzard cannot make SC2 to be just as good of a game as BW was, I don't think adding a bunch of micro-transactions will fix much tbh.
SC2 just isn't fun to watch. That's the main problem for the SC2 esports scene IMO. If LOTV can be just a really awesome game at it's core, and produce sick pro games, I bet the viewer numbers would go up significantly. I know I would start watching again.
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On December 16 2014 19:01 Jarcraft wrote:Show nested quote +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.
1. scaling down textures impacts "readability".
2. if the MMO were being played for $20,000 between 2 guys who spent the last 5 years of their life perfecting their skills and then 1 couldn't tell for certain what a unit on the screen was then you'd have giant protest.
3. WoL and HotS is playable on 32 Bit systems which can only instantly access 2 GB (2^32) of memory at one time.
with WoL and HotS Blizzard struck the correct balance between readability, fancy/flashy graphics, and keeping FPS high.
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On December 17 2014 00:22 boxerfred wrote:Show nested quote +On December 17 2014 00:16 -Archangel- wrote:
Destiny forgot that adding skins for SC2 units is not as easy. These skins would influence FPS of players. Sure you could make skins that would not, but you need a way to test it for weaker computers.
So it takes time and effort to make a skin, you cannot just mass produce it like in CS:GO. Letting community do some will present same problems.
For voice packs, I don't see a reason why not. We are talking a 4 year old game :/
That has always tried to work on old computers as well. Also with LoL being tried by 67 000 000 people you can be sure many of those have more than 4 year old computers.
For big numbers SC2 has to appeal to gamers in all parts of the world with any computers. And most gamers are not rich enough to buy new computers often. USA and some richer parts of EU are not only gamers in the world, they are not even the bigger group, they are just the richest one.
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I used to play at least 10 games of SC2 per day back in 2010-2013. I have been in Masters league for 15 seasons.
I barely play SC2 any more and have dropped out of Master league as a result. My reasons:
1. No reason for me to rank up. I know I cant reach Grandmasters, I have been in Masters multiple times.
2. MMR decay. This absolutely killed it for me. I have 2 accounts and I play on both EU and NA, both ranked and unranked. I also do not play more than maybe 5 games of SC2 a week. The result is that because of the MMR decay and the small amount of games I play per week, it would actually place me at the beginning of a season vs platinum/ sometimes gold players and I would have grind like 50+ games just to get back into Master league. I found this very discouraging. It's not like I suddenly lost my skill and deserve to be placed in Platinum league. And it's not fair for my opponents either.
3. No real community within Battle.net
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I give credit to Destiny for thinking Blizzard will actually read and consider, seems like he spent some time writing that up. Sadly I have 0 faith in Blizzard. They have never shown any signs of wanting to make SC2 And Bnet 2.0 a great place.
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On December 17 2014 00:30 Hider wrote:Show nested quote +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 mostly agree with this. In addition to that, I think that skins fits a lot worse into an RTS for two reasons: (1) You feel less attached to your units in Sc2 than to your hero in a MOBA and (2) Skins fits worse into a game where there are lots of units as it easily can make it more confusing. Destiny keeps believing that you can just turn around Sc2 by making it F2P and adding in microtransactions. But what he imo doesn't get is that you just can't turn around this type of game. Lots of people have tried it and quitted it. It has super high learning barriers and if the RTS genre is going to be popular in the future, it needs to reform it self. The underlying issue here isn't as much the business model, but rather the easiness of learning the game as a new player. Show nested quote +
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.
Free multiplayer would be pretty bad as a big part of the target audience is paying $40 for the multiplayer only (probably around 500k). If you gave them multiplayer for free, Blizzard would lose a big chunk of money without any monetization to back it up.
but that's the point. If they give free multiplayer but make it a microtransaction system, it might actually get more people interested in the RTS genre, more people might give it a chance, Archon mode might be something actually pretty cool. There's so many ways to turn SC into something profitable, but they're not willing to do it. Every single sign points to this investment by Blizzard as something of a good thing. eSports has grown tremendously in the last few years. SC has always been one of the leaders in that aspect, despite being a hard game to play.
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On December 17 2014 01:15 Psychobabas wrote:
I used to play at least 10 games of SC2 per day back in 2010-2013. I have been in Masters league for 15 seasons.
I barely play SC2 any more and have dropped out of Master league as a result. My reasons:
1. No reason for me to rank up. I know I cant reach Grandmasters, I have been in Masters multiple times.
2. MMR decay. This absolutely killed it for me. I have 2 accounts and I play on both EU and NA, both ranked and unranked. I also do not play more than maybe 5 games of SC2 a week. The result is that because of the MMR decay and the small amount of games I play per week, it would actually place me at the beginning of a season vs platinum/ sometimes gold players and I would have grind like 50+ games just to get back into Master league. I found this very discouraging. It's not like I suddenly lost my skill and deserve to be placed in Platinum league. And it's not fair for my opponents either.
3. No real community within Battle.net
Also this.
#3 especially. I would not be playing SC2 right now if not for this group of people on Skype that I play with on a regular basis. 1v1 is lonely as hell, but it becomes so much better when you actually have a support system and friends to play with (or watch your stream, or chat about strats with, or complain about protoss with)
Otherwise it just becomes bar code vs bar code and who the hell wants that as a casual player.
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East Gorteau22261 Posts
On December 17 2014 01:16 DwD wrote:
I give credit to Destiny for thinking Blizzard will actually read and consider, seems like he spent some time writing that up. Sadly I have 0 faith in Blizzard. They have never shown any signs of wanting to make SC2 And Bnet 2.0 a great place.
I think they have, they just have somewhat inflated confidence in their own direction and ability to make SC2 the best it can be. I absolutely don't think Blizzard have made only bad calls with SC2, it's just that they're bad at knowing when to listen and learn and when to not.
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Blizzard is literally a shadow of its former self, or maybe they just haven't evolved and their business model is outdated and expired. They seem so clueless about how to develop games their fans want in a timely manner. What are their most recent offerings? A card game? YEAH no. Not going to bother with that. A moba? Um yeah ok a little late for that. More WoW? You would think that they would have realized after having success with WoW that they would find a way to monetize all the games that came afterwards but instead they didnt and then the game suffers because blizzard didnt find a way to make it profitable for them to continue diligent work on it. Diablo 3? Wow was that game terrible upon release. The most promising thing blizz has goin for it is overwatch which to be honest could crash and burn miserably. My only thought is that blizz is going to monetize overwatch the way valve did with csgo and then make it f2p. They just dont have the leadership they need AKA someone to put their foot down, present the issues, and have them addressed promptly and completely.
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Well if this is all true and if the issues lie with ActiBlizz mostly and not RTS popularity decline in general then we should see another rival company introduce a new RTS that can rival the big boys in MOBA and FPS. With the corporate types involved in gaming these days they will not miss that big a trick.
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On December 17 2014 01:33 johnbongham wrote:
Blizzard is literally a shadow of its former self, or maybe they just haven't evolved and their business model is outdated and expired. They seem so clueless about how to develop games their fans want in a timely manner. What are their most recent offerings? A card game? YEAH no. Not going to bother with that. A moba? Um yeah ok a little late for that. More WoW? You would think that they would have realized after having success with WoW that they would find a way to monetize all the games that came afterwards but instead they didnt and then the game suffers because blizzard didnt find a way to make it profitable for them to continue diligent work on it. Diablo 3? Wow was that game terrible upon release. The most promising thing blizz has goin for it is overwatch which to be honest could crash and burn miserably. My only thought is that blizz is going to monetize overwatch the way valve did with csgo and then make it f2p. They just dont have the leadership they need AKA someone to put their foot down, present the issues, and have them addressed promptly and completely.
Hearthstone seems to be doing pretty well for a side project, wow still has like 7 million subscribers, d3 sold 20 million copies. Yep, Sounds like blizzard is doing terribly and need to change asap 
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On December 17 2014 01:47 MstrJinbo wrote:Show nested quote +On December 17 2014 01:33 johnbongham wrote:
Blizzard is literally a shadow of its former self, or maybe they just haven't evolved and their business model is outdated and expired. They seem so clueless about how to develop games their fans want in a timely manner. What are their most recent offerings? A card game? YEAH no. Not going to bother with that. A moba? Um yeah ok a little late for that. More WoW? You would think that they would have realized after having success with WoW that they would find a way to monetize all the games that came afterwards but instead they didnt and then the game suffers because blizzard didnt find a way to make it profitable for them to continue diligent work on it. Diablo 3? Wow was that game terrible upon release. The most promising thing blizz has goin for it is overwatch which to be honest could crash and burn miserably. My only thought is that blizz is going to monetize overwatch the way valve did with csgo and then make it f2p. They just dont have the leadership they need AKA someone to put their foot down, present the issues, and have them addressed promptly and completely. Hearthstone seems to be doing pretty well for a side project, wow still has like 7 million subscribers, d3 sold 20 million copies. Yep, Sounds like blizzard is doing terribly and need to change asap
the latest word is WoW is at 10 million subscribers again.
http://www.polygon.com/2014/11/19/7250737/world-of-warcraft-warlords-draenor-10-million-subscribers
Blizzard hit a home run with the latest WoW expansion.
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good read . I agree with most of the points .
I fell in love with starcraft starting with starcraft 1 .
I like starcraft 2 very much but I loved starcraft 1 .
Due to time constrictions stacraft 2 is the only game i follow and sometimes play.
I check teamliquid at least 4 times/day
but even for me , who only follows starcraft 2 is clear they can/should improve things to make it great .
I have no problem with them needing to make money to keep the game fresh.
I want to give them money because I love starcraft and it gave me some awesome moments, like when EG-TL in proleague was announced , idra when he loved the game , day9 etc.
we'll see what happens but it does not look good.
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How's is Blizzard not supporting SC2 with setting up WCS and putting $1.6 million out there in prize pool money? In addition, SC2 is free when using the Arcade, Customs and Spawning. As much as I love SC2 and want it to be the big fish in eSports, people have to realize it's a niche game and no amount of money is going to make it 'bigger.' Looking at the numbers SC2 is not a 'ded game.' With the rise of Twitch and eSports events, SC2 was simply the big fish in the pond. Now we're in the Ocean and SC2 is not the big fish. Accept that SC2 is niche and has a vibrant community to support it.
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On December 16 2014 19:43 Big J wrote:
I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one around who doesn't care at all about skins and bullcrap like that.
Skins don't matter you're 100% correct. But (and using the CS:GO as model) It would be a way for blizzard to get additional revenue, which would justify some pen-pusher-higher-up-the-chain to have dev's working on other features.
So from this angle alone I think it would be an excelent step forward. They do this in WoW so why not SC2? No one would be forced into buying them.
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The real key to making SC2 more (enduringly) popular is to make team games more fun. There were thousands of people who played BW pretty much solely for team maps like BGH and money maps it just seemed to be more fun than SC2 has managed so far. If they could crack that nut they could keep so many more players than currently.
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