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I agree with almost any point Destiny is making.
The point that SC2 needs to be enjoyable for casual players is valid and imo often overlooked in the TL forums because most of us are long-time players who don't think about the needs of casual gamers.
However, to motivate a player to play for skins like Destiny proposes, will only work if the player plans to play it for a long time anyway (to show off the skins later.)
Meaning, just introducing unlockable stuff will probably not motivate many to play unless they have a desire to invest much time in that game anyway.
Imagine I want to play something with my friends who are not starcraft players. Everyone has a bit of fun in Quake or Unreal, even in Counter-Strike. But no-one of them likes to play SC because they know they will lose badly.
It is just not feasible to say "Okay, watch all Day[9] and Jakattack videos, practice for three months and then we can have a fair game."
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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' ?
This has always been my opinion about so-called Free to Play business models. The idea behind the model is that you only take little bits of money at a time, so people don't really notice how much money they're spending. That's absolutely great news for the company, but it sucks for the customer who winds up spending >$300 on a game like LoL that would cost maybe $30 at release if it were sold as a box title.
Obviously it helps if the micro-transactions are for aesthetics instead of gaining benefits that actually improve your winrate, but in either case the model preys on human psychology ("Only 1$? That's practically nothing!") to get more money without having to make a better product. The same principle of human psychology affects me during Steam sales – I see a game, and think, "if it's only $.79, how much can I really regret the purchase?" And soon enough I have hundreds of dollars of Steam library – but at least at the end of the day I own things that actually took time and effort of a company to make, not just a few hours of a graphic artist's time to create a 3D model.
Day[9] recently said some stuff about how he likes the Free to Play model because it aligns everyone's incentives. Customers give their money over time, instead of all at once, so the company still has incentive to keep the game good so people will still play and spend money. This is only sort of true. Certainly the company has the incentive to keep the game good to keep people playing and/or attract more players. But didn't they anyway in the old release followed by expansions model? Blizzard wants to keep Starcraft good, because it will keep people playing or attract more players, which in turn will bring them more money when they release the next expansion.
And does the Free to Play model align incentives, anyway? Suppose Blizzard puts out a free to play game, for which they have to make an engine, characters, environments, game rules, menus – the whole shebang. But when it releases, they put all that out for free and only charge money for skins. What part do they have the incentive to improve? Well, the skins, of course! Don't get me wrong, they'd like to improve the game in other ways, too, because it might have some more vague effect on player counts, which could influence skin purchases. But much more directly influential on their profits will be to just focus on putting out more and better skins so people spend more money. So if they can spend time either: a) create a new map which will revitalize gameplay, or b) toss out a fresh skin for some character, in terms of incentives, they'll do the latter.
I don't follow either Dota 2 or LoL much, but this has been my impression of their development. The only thing that expands much over time is the thing that they charge money for. So LoL will periodically put out new champions and skins, and Dota will mostly put out new skins, and everything else is on a back burner. There's the occasional balance patch or quality of life patch; they probably have at least a few programmers in charge of tracking down and killing weird bugs; but mostly there's no work put in where there's no profit. Heroes of the Storm started getting publicity and one of its big selling points was that they're making new and interesting maps – but why hadn't MOBAs done that before if not because there's no money in it?
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He has a point when he says there is a demand that isn't being satisfied right now.
If a developper would release tomorow an accessible, fun to play F2P RTS it would be the nail in the coffin for SC2.
I know I would play the hell out of it because it would be something new and fresh. Something that LotV, just like its predecessor, isn't meant to be for Blizzard.
Also, it's easy to say that a big casual player base is healthier. To attract casual players you make your game free ( or cheap, or even easy to pirate, ermBWhum ) and to keep them playing you make your game good. I'm not sure that SC2 at its core can keep their players, because of reason already discussed at lenghts.
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Reading that article made me remember DJ wheat, I totally forgot him :O where did he go?
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On December 17 2014 03:51 SoSexy wrote:
Reading that article made me remember DJ wheat, I totally forgot him :O where did he go?
He became a Twitch millionaire.
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Destiny's theory is that Blizzard should adopt a business model based on microtransactions -> this gives Blizzard a financial incentive to continue developing the game. I'm not sure if this makes sense, because for Blizzard to change business models they require financial incentive to begin with. I'm assuming that Blizzard's management is aware of the success of MOBAs & CS:GO (Heroes of the Storm takes many lessons from those games), and the reason that SC2 doesn't use a F2P model is because it's not a good fit / the game is too old.
This is what has driven me crazy about Destiny. He is somewhat smart person, but when he gets on to one thought, he is just absolutely convinced he is right, and never assesses his own position by attempting to evaluate its assumption or do more research on the subject. On the other hand, I actually believed he was right 2 years ago, and just felt the whole concept of "if they can monetize it, they have an incentive to continue to develop it + more players if F2P" was so brilliant. There was some logic to it, and it was something that could benefit everybody, so you really wanted to believe the thesis was correct.
But the more I critically thought about the underlying assumptions, the less lucrative it seemed, and thus I gradaully changed my mind.
An example of a claim he makes - with no support at all - is that the F2P-model is tested and it works! But not in an RTS, from my experience C&C tried to do it, but didn't see a market for it and therefore the game wasn't released. Age of Empires Online tried and failed. Then we can discuss the various reasons for them failing, but the fact of the matter is that this is not a tested model in the RTS genre at all. The idea that because it works in MOBA/CS --> Also works in SC2 is a logical error.
Moreover, at no point in time has he actually attempted to use numbers to estimate the financial viability of this model. A real analysis would contain estimates of how the playerbase would change under a free-to-play scenario. ARPU (average revenue per user) and how much it would cost to develop.
But unless you end up with a really high revenue estimates (and you need really good arguments to back up why you believe the ARPU will be XX and why the playerbase will go up so much), you probably just need to let the benefit of the doubt go in favor of Blizzard. We have no idea how much it costs to develop this. But Blizzard has, they can even come up with more reliable estimates on revenue than we can as they have more expertise and more data.
For some mysterial reason, Destiny and a big part of the community think that these arguments Destiny brings up needs to be repeated because otherwise Blizzard would have no idea that you could monetize stuff.... Please give Blizzard some credit on areas where they know a ton more than we do.
At last, his big thesis is that you can revaliatze a "dying" game with a change in business model. What is he basing this of? How often in the gaming history has a game that was sucesful for a couple of years, suddenly become popular once again? And if this has happened previously, was it related to a change in the business model?
Let's look at HON. They were doing decently a couple of years ago. Then DOTA 2 came, and they reacted by changing the business model..... Didn't work. Anyone have an example here? Obviously CS GO could revializate counterstrike, but that was postioned as a new game. LOTV isn't comparable to CS GO here. And making it F2P and add skins won't change anything in peoples minds. It will still be seen as this super-hard-to learn/un-fun for casuals game.
Destiny are making the same arguments over and over and it's been 2 years. Perhaps it's time for him to actually back it up with relevant empirical arguments and numbers, instead of repeating the same unnaunced stuff over and over.
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On December 17 2014 03:58 Hider wrote:Show nested quote +On December 17 2014 03:51 SoSexy wrote:
Reading that article made me remember DJ wheat, I totally forgot him :O where did he go? He became a Twitch millionaire.
I miss him too. I watched nearly all his shows. Same goes for SotG and Day9. Really miss all of those. At least Day9 is still putting up some sc2 content. Man... SotG was so much fun, especially with the regulars. There was alot of interesting stuff happening between the guys during the show and they had alot of interesting things to say.
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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,
But the flaw with this argument is that you can say this to every single "unpopular" game right now. Just make it free and then more people will play it and the gaming-company will earn more money. So why doesn't every single gaming-company do that, and why isn't every single game really popular?
This is backwards-logic, becasue if a game really was popular, it would still be highly played by its existing playerbase. Sc2 has sold 7M copies, if the game was so superfun it wouldn't just have 50K active multiplayer-players (or w/e the actual number is).
A lot of people already see Sc2 as this super-hard game. That's what it is positioned as in the mainstream-gaming media. If you are going to change peoples perception you will need a complete repositioning of the game. Just adding in Archon-mode isn't enough. You still have all these timings you need to learn, which means you need to seek external information on builds etc to do well. Hearthstone works because it has an inbuild tutorial and you can just play a bit here and there and learn the game and have fun.
Sc2 is way too far away from that. I know every Sc2 fan wants to belief that if just "X happened", then Sc2 would be superpopular again, but unfortunately it's just wish-thinking.
From a monetary perspective, it doesn't make sense for Blizzard to invest a lot of ressources into Sc2 just so they can make the game F2P and thereby have no up-front earnings, but instead cross-finger that people will buy lots of skins to their units, which they - unlike in a MOBA - do not feel attached to + also hope that the skins won't be too confusing when you have lots of them in the battlefield.
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On December 17 2014 04:25 Hider wrote:Show nested quote +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, But the flaw with this argument is that you can say this to every single "unpopular" game right now. Just make it free and then more people will play it and the gaming-company will earn more money. This is backwards-logic, becasue if a game really was popular, it would still be highly played by its existing playerbase. Sc2 has sold 7M copies, if the game was so superfun it wouldn't just have 50K active multiplayer-players (or w/e the actual number is). A lot of people already see Sc2 as this super-hard game. That's what it is positioned as in the mainstream-gaming media. If you are going to change peoples perception you will need a complete repositioning of the game. Just adding in Archon-mode isn't enough. You still have all these timings you need to learn, which means you need to seek external information on builds etc to do well. Hearthstone works because it has an inbuild tutorial and you can just play a bit here and there and learn the game and have fun. Sc2 is way too far away from that. I know every Sc2 fan wants to belief that if just "X happened", then Sc2 would be superpopular again, but unfortunately it's just wish-thinking.
Nios.kr has it around 400k per season. (end of season) this season it's 250k.
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On December 17 2014 04:05 Hider wrote:Show nested quote +
Destiny's theory is that Blizzard should adopt a business model based on microtransactions -> this gives Blizzard a financial incentive to continue developing the game. I'm not sure if this makes sense, because for Blizzard to change business models they require financial incentive to begin with. I'm assuming that Blizzard's management is aware of the success of MOBAs & CS:GO (Heroes of the Storm takes many lessons from those games), and the reason that SC2 doesn't use a F2P model is because it's not a good fit / the game is too old.
This is what has driven me crazy about Destiny. He is somewhat smart person, but when he gets on to one thought, he is just absolutely convinced he is right, and never assesses his own position by attempting to evaluate its assumption or do more research on the subject.
This kind of thinking that "RTS is a special butterfly" needs to absolutely die ASAP. BW was hugely successful. WC3 was hugely successful. A year ago people said "FPS just isn't what it used to be back in the Quake and 1.6 days, we just have to accept that MOBAs are where it's at now" and boom, look at CS:GO now. Please stop with this "RTS is such a special, unique type of gameplay that could never be mainstream again!" You ignore decades of history with such an absolutely ignorant statement by being so incredibly short-sighted.
As an example, he claims that the F2P-model is tested and it works! Not in an RTS, from my experience C&C tried to do it, but didn't see a market for it and therefore the game wasn't released. Age of Empires Online tried and failed. Then we can discuss the various reasons for them failing, but the fact of the matter is that this is not a tested model in the RTS genre at all. The idea that because it works in MOBA/CS --> Also works in SC2 is a logical error.
The F2P model with micro-transactions is tested and works in FPS and MOBA games. TF2, Dota 2, LoL, etc..Why wouldn't it work with an RTS game? Even BW was pretty much F2P later on in its life if you used the ICCup launcher, though there were no microtransactions there.
Moreover, at no point in time has he actually attempted to use numbers to estimate the financial viability of this model. A real analysis would contain estimates of how the playerbase would change under a free-to-play scenario. ARPU (average revenue per user) and how much it would cost to develop.
Because we don't have access to the playerbase. Want real numbers? All Blizzard has to do is poll their audience. Or they can demo release ONE skin, look at the reception, and try to gauge reaction from there. It's not really possible for us to do as a community.
For some mysterial reason, Destiny and a big part of the community think that these arguments Destiny brings up needs to be repeated because otherwise Blizzard would have no idea that you could monetize stuff.... Please give Blizzard some credit on areas where they know a ton more than we do.
If Blizzard didn't luck into Hearthstone (which even they admit was completely luck), where would they be right now? SC2 is in a sad state, D3 was fucked on launch, even though it's gotten tremendously better (via support from the developer, gasp!) WoW has gotten better as of the recent patch (again, more dev support!), and then there's Heroes of the Storm...I think it's okay to be a little critical of Blizzard.
At last, his big thesis is that you can revaliatze a "dying" game with a change in business model. What is he basing this of? How often in the gaming history has a game that was sucesful for a couple of years, suddenly become popular once again?
I don't know if you're just trolling here or acting intentionally retarded, but the entire section on CS:GO addresses this.
Let's look at HON. They were doing decently a couple of years ago. Then DOTA 2 came, and they reacted by changing the business model..... Didn't work. Anyone have an example here? Obviously CS GO could revializate counterstrike, but that was postioned as a new game. LOTV isn't comparable to CS GO here. And making it F2P and add skins won't change anything in peoples minds. It will still be seen as this super-hard-to learn/un-fun for casuals game.
HoN adapted their business model WHEN THEY WERE ALREADY DEAD, lol. They charged for their game for way way way too long. It's entirely possible HoN would still be around if they adopted a newer business model quicker. CS:GO was also not "positioned as a new game", it was out for a full year before it finally got its act together and it was dead as fuck for a long time after it was released.
Destiny are making the same arguments over and over and it's been 2 years. Perhaps it's time for him to actually back it up with relevant empirical arguments and numbers, instead of repeating the same unnaunced stuff over and over.
I sure have. And 2 years ago 40% of the community was telling me that I was wrong, and that SC2 was healthy, and that everything was "fine" and that my doom and gloom posts were just there to cause drama...and look where we're at now. SC2 is dropped as DH's main game and no one knows how much SC2 is even going to be at DH anymore. WCS EU and NA regions have been combined. WCS finals viewership is like 144k. Other major tournaments are getting 40-60k viewership, which is about what a high League streamer will get on any given night.
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On December 17 2014 04:05 Hider wrote:Show nested quote +
Destiny's theory is that Blizzard should adopt a business model based on microtransactions -> this gives Blizzard a financial incentive to continue developing the game. I'm not sure if this makes sense, because for Blizzard to change business models they require financial incentive to begin with. I'm assuming that Blizzard's management is aware of the success of MOBAs & CS:GO (Heroes of the Storm takes many lessons from those games), and the reason that SC2 doesn't use a F2P model is because it's not a good fit / the game is too old.
This is what has driven me crazy about Destiny. He is somewhat smart person, but when he gets on to one thought, he is just absolutely convinced he is right, and never assesses his own position by attempting to evaluate its assumption or do more research on the subject. As an example, he claims that the F2P-model is tested and it works! Not in an RTS, from my experience C&C tried to do it, but didn't see a market for it and therefore the game wasn't released. Age of Empires Online tried and failed. Then we can discuss the various reasons for them failing, but the fact of the matter is that this is not a tested model in the RTS genre at all. The idea that because it works in MOBA/CS --> Also works in SC2 is a logical error. Moreover, at no point in time has he actually attempted to use numbers to estimate the financial viability of this model. A real analysis would contain estimates of how the playerbase would change under a free-to-play scenario. ARPU (average revenue per user) and how much it would cost to develop. But unless you end up with a really high revenue estimates, you probably just need to let the benefit of the doubt go in favor of Blizzard. We have no idea how much it costs to develop this. But Blizzard has, they can even come up with more reliable estimates on revenue than we can as they have more expertise and more data. For some mysterial reason, Destiny and a big part of the community think that these arguments Destiny brings up needs to be repeated because otherwise Blizzard would have no idea that you could monetize stuff.... Please give Blizzard some credit on areas where they know a ton more than we do. At last, his big thesis is that you can revaliatze a "dying" game with a change in business model. What is he basing this of? How often in the gaming history has a game that was sucesful for a couple of years, suddenly become popular once again? Let's look at HON. They were doing decently a couple of years ago. Then DOTA 2 came, and they reacted by changing the business model..... Didn't work. Anyone have an example here? Obviously CS GO could revializate counterstrike, but that was postioned as a new game. LOTV isn't comparable to CS GO here. And making it F2P and add skins won't change anything in peoples minds. It will still be seen as this super-hard-to learn/un-fun for casuals game. Destiny are making the same arguments over and over and it's been 2 years. Perhaps it's time for him to actually back it up with relevant empirical arguments and numbers, instead of repeating the same unnaunced stuff over and over.
The issue is you can't really do that because there's not enough businesses cases or even something we can relevantly compare it with. You are correct in that changing SC2 from Paid to F2P might not work at all, and that Blizzard might be smarter than what we give them credit for... I beg think the opposite. They've made countless decisions, both financial and balance (read: changing the game) wise that makes absolutely no sense. The way that every change seems to happen with SC is they get caught off guard by what was said was going to happen, and then they make seemingly hasty changes with shoddy logic that's given to the community.
I want the F2P model because the current model isn't working. Archon mode, new units, variations of that shit have been done before and it didn't revitalize SC, why would doing the same types of things help? Yes, we've seen F2P fail, but we've also seen F2P be wildy successful. Why not take some serious time, and thought and try it?
Blizzard is playing like how NA pros play. They're not playing to win, they're playing not to lose.
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has any rts tested microtransactions and been successful?
dont really like the assumption that sc2 is not doing well because its not a f2p game. its more likely that it doesnt attract as many players/viewers because of the type of game.
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On December 17 2014 04:28 Ovid wrote:Show nested quote +On December 17 2014 04:25 Hider wrote: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, But the flaw with this argument is that you can say this to every single "unpopular" game right now. Just make it free and then more people will play it and the gaming-company will earn more money. This is backwards-logic, becasue if a game really was popular, it would still be highly played by its existing playerbase. Sc2 has sold 7M copies, if the game was so superfun it wouldn't just have 50K active multiplayer-players (or w/e the actual number is). A lot of people already see Sc2 as this super-hard game. That's what it is positioned as in the mainstream-gaming media. If you are going to change peoples perception you will need a complete repositioning of the game. Just adding in Archon-mode isn't enough. You still have all these timings you need to learn, which means you need to seek external information on builds etc to do well. Hearthstone works because it has an inbuild tutorial and you can just play a bit here and there and learn the game and have fun. Sc2 is way too far away from that. I know every Sc2 fan wants to belief that if just "X happened", then Sc2 would be superpopular again, but unfortunately it's just wish-thinking. Nios.kr has it around 400k per season. (end of season) this season it's 250k.
Depends on the definition of activity. Is playing one game a season the criteria for being active? In this scenario I would rather use a weekly metric (those who play at least one game every week) as thus are the people that are most likely to purchase skins.
Also please don't misunderstand me. I believe that Sc2 should initially have been designed and developed around a F2P-business model. But the idea that you can just suddenly change your mind by making it F2P and end up in a win/win-scenario is just very naiive and/or wish-thinking.
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On December 17 2014 04:05 Hider wrote:Show nested quote +
Destiny's theory is that Blizzard should adopt a business model based on microtransactions -> this gives Blizzard a financial incentive to continue developing the game. I'm not sure if this makes sense, because for Blizzard to change business models they require financial incentive to begin with. I'm assuming that Blizzard's management is aware of the success of MOBAs & CS:GO (Heroes of the Storm takes many lessons from those games), and the reason that SC2 doesn't use a F2P model is because it's not a good fit / the game is too old.
This is what has driven me crazy about Destiny. He is somewhat smart person, but when he gets on to one thought, he is just absolutely convinced he is right, and never assesses his own position by attempting to evaluate its assumption or do more research on the subject. As an example, he claims that the F2P-model is tested and it works! Not in an RTS, from my experience C&C tried to do it, but didn't see a market for it and therefore the game wasn't released. Age of Empires Online tried and failed. Then we can discuss the various reasons for them failing, but the fact of the matter is that this is not a tested model in the RTS genre at all. The idea that because it works in MOBA/CS --> Also works in SC2 is a logical error. Moreover, at no point in time has he actually attempted to use numbers to estimate the financial viability of this model. A real analysis would contain estimates of how the playerbase would change under a free-to-play scenario. ARPU (average revenue per user) and how much it would cost to develop. But unless you end up with a really high revenue estimates, you probably just need to let the benefit of the doubt go in favor of Blizzard. We have no idea how much it costs to develop this. But Blizzard has, they can even come up with more reliable estimates on revenue than we can as they have more expertise and more data. For some mysterial reason, Destiny and a big part of the community think that these arguments Destiny brings up needs to be repeated because otherwise Blizzard would have no idea that you could monetize stuff.... Please give Blizzard some credit on areas where they know a ton more than we do. At last, his big thesis is that you can revaliatze a "dying" game with a change in business model. What is he basing this of? How often in the gaming history has a game that was sucesful for a couple of years, suddenly become popular once again? Let's look at HON. They were doing decently a couple of years ago. Then DOTA 2 came, and they reacted by changing the business model..... Didn't work. Anyone have an example here? Obviously CS GO could revializate counterstrike, but that was postioned as a new game. LOTV isn't comparable to CS GO here. And making it F2P and add skins won't change anything in peoples minds. It will still be seen as this super-hard-to learn/un-fun for casuals game. Destiny are making the same arguments over and over and it's been 2 years. Perhaps it's time for him to actually back it up with relevant empirical arguments and numbers, instead of repeating the same unnaunced stuff over and over.
LoL was basically dead for a year before its resurgence in 2011. It was the joke game we dicked around with in the downtime between WOL beta and release.
A good number of people are talking like these things are linear and irreversible, like what goes down can never come up. 2 of the three esports bigger than sc2 laid on a death bed before they enjoyed success.
Gamers are fickle and love to spend money on superfluous shit. You don't need to be a marketing expert to see that.
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On December 17 2014 04:34 Hider wrote:Show nested quote +On December 17 2014 04:28 Ovid wrote:On December 17 2014 04:25 Hider wrote: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, But the flaw with this argument is that you can say this to every single "unpopular" game right now. Just make it free and then more people will play it and the gaming-company will earn more money. This is backwards-logic, becasue if a game really was popular, it would still be highly played by its existing playerbase. Sc2 has sold 7M copies, if the game was so superfun it wouldn't just have 50K active multiplayer-players (or w/e the actual number is). A lot of people already see Sc2 as this super-hard game. That's what it is positioned as in the mainstream-gaming media. If you are going to change peoples perception you will need a complete repositioning of the game. Just adding in Archon-mode isn't enough. You still have all these timings you need to learn, which means you need to seek external information on builds etc to do well. Hearthstone works because it has an inbuild tutorial and you can just play a bit here and there and learn the game and have fun. Sc2 is way too far away from that. I know every Sc2 fan wants to belief that if just "X happened", then Sc2 would be superpopular again, but unfortunately it's just wish-thinking. Nios.kr has it around 400k per season. (end of season) this season it's 250k. Depends on the definition of activity. Is playing one game a season the criteria for being active? In this scenario I would rather use a weekly metric (those who play at least one game every week) as thus are the people that are most likely to purchase skins. Also please don't misunderstand me. I believe that Sc2 should initially have been designed and developed around a F2P-business model. But the idea that you can just suddenly change your mind by making it F2P and end up in a win/win-scenario is just very naiive and/or wish-thinking.
The alternative is to let it wither and die a slow death. There hasn't been any tests to see if SC2 is failing because it's not F2P or if it's just not a very popular game, but these can be put in on a smaller scale. We already have the ability to have skins through a marketplace (buying Ultra skin with collector's edition), is it really that hard to start adding some holiday ones? Adding custom decals? Mods can do it already. I know I'd love to have a KT Rolster decal and I would pay a good amount for one.
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On December 17 2014 04:31 Destiny wrote:Show nested quote +On December 17 2014 04:05 Hider wrote:
Destiny's theory is that Blizzard should adopt a business model based on microtransactions -> this gives Blizzard a financial incentive to continue developing the game. I'm not sure if this makes sense, because for Blizzard to change business models they require financial incentive to begin with. I'm assuming that Blizzard's management is aware of the success of MOBAs & CS:GO (Heroes of the Storm takes many lessons from those games), and the reason that SC2 doesn't use a F2P model is because it's not a good fit / the game is too old.
This is what has driven me crazy about Destiny. He is somewhat smart person, but when he gets on to one thought, he is just absolutely convinced he is right, and never assesses his own position by attempting to evaluate its assumption or do more research on the subject. This kind of thinking that "RTS is a special butterfly" needs to absolutely die ASAP. BW was hugely successful. WC3 was hugely successful. A year ago people said "FPS just isn't what it used to be back in the Quake and 1.6 days, we just have to accept that MOBAs are where it's at now" and boom, look at CS:GO now. Please stop with this "RTS is such a special, unique type of gameplay that could never be mainstream again!" You ignore decades of history with such an absolutely ignorant statement by being so incredibly short-sighted.
But it kinda is. I think we all can agree that reaching for the masses practically means "make it as easy as possible to enjoy".
Do you think sc2 fits there? What exactly can blizzard do about the gameplay to attract the average joe? Skins and voice packs might be interesting to think about as soon as we have a large enough playerbase to keep them playing, but there is no way these additions would help getting people to play the game in the first place (at least not longterm DUE to the gameplay)
Some people say the arcade and therefore custom games are the easy solution here, but i srsly doubt that as well. Sure, years and years ago some mini games might have been a strong reason to keep playing that rts game (BW, Wc3), but would that be the same today? We have easy access to a lot of different games (via steam for example), would custom games really be enough for people to care about sc2?
I think the archon mode was included for lotv exactly cause of this "problem", but will it be enough?
TBF blizzard announced another game mode, but i think we don't have any real informations about that yet
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On December 17 2014 04:46 The_Red_Viper wrote:Show nested quote +On December 17 2014 04:31 Destiny wrote:On December 17 2014 04:05 Hider wrote:
Destiny's theory is that Blizzard should adopt a business model based on microtransactions -> this gives Blizzard a financial incentive to continue developing the game. I'm not sure if this makes sense, because for Blizzard to change business models they require financial incentive to begin with. I'm assuming that Blizzard's management is aware of the success of MOBAs & CS:GO (Heroes of the Storm takes many lessons from those games), and the reason that SC2 doesn't use a F2P model is because it's not a good fit / the game is too old.
This is what has driven me crazy about Destiny. He is somewhat smart person, but when he gets on to one thought, he is just absolutely convinced he is right, and never assesses his own position by attempting to evaluate its assumption or do more research on the subject. This kind of thinking that "RTS is a special butterfly" needs to absolutely die ASAP. BW was hugely successful. WC3 was hugely successful. A year ago people said "FPS just isn't what it used to be back in the Quake and 1.6 days, we just have to accept that MOBAs are where it's at now" and boom, look at CS:GO now. Please stop with this "RTS is such a special, unique type of gameplay that could never be mainstream again!" You ignore decades of history with such an absolutely ignorant statement by being so incredibly short-sighted. But it kinda is. I think we all can agree that reaching for the masses practically means "make it as easy as possible to enjoy". Do you think sc2 fits there? What exactly can blizzard do about the gameplay to attract the average joe? Skins and voice packs might be interesting to think about as soon as we have a large enough playerbase to keep them playing, but there is no way these additions would help getting people to play the game in the first place (at least not longterm DUE to the gameplay) Some people say the arcade and therefore custom games are the easy solution here, but i srsly doubt that as well. Sure, years and years ago some mini games might have been a strong reason to keep playing that rts game (BW, Wc3), but would that be the same today? We have easy access to a lot of different games (via steam for example), would custom games really be enough for people to care about sc2? I think the archon mode was included for lotv exactly cause of this "problem", but will it be enough? TBF blizzard announced another game mode, but i think we don't have any real informations about that yet
The difference between custom games and things like steam games is that if I have an idea, and some basic skills in the map editor, I can make what games I want to play. I used to spend hours in the custom games in BW and WC3, and I know after being in Asia for the last 5 years, WC3 and BW is being held up by custom and the team portions of the games.
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On December 17 2014 04:46 The_Red_Viper wrote:Show nested quote +On December 17 2014 04:31 Destiny wrote:On December 17 2014 04:05 Hider wrote:
Destiny's theory is that Blizzard should adopt a business model based on microtransactions -> this gives Blizzard a financial incentive to continue developing the game. I'm not sure if this makes sense, because for Blizzard to change business models they require financial incentive to begin with. I'm assuming that Blizzard's management is aware of the success of MOBAs & CS:GO (Heroes of the Storm takes many lessons from those games), and the reason that SC2 doesn't use a F2P model is because it's not a good fit / the game is too old.
This is what has driven me crazy about Destiny. He is somewhat smart person, but when he gets on to one thought, he is just absolutely convinced he is right, and never assesses his own position by attempting to evaluate its assumption or do more research on the subject. This kind of thinking that "RTS is a special butterfly" needs to absolutely die ASAP. BW was hugely successful. WC3 was hugely successful. A year ago people said "FPS just isn't what it used to be back in the Quake and 1.6 days, we just have to accept that MOBAs are where it's at now" and boom, look at CS:GO now. Please stop with this "RTS is such a special, unique type of gameplay that could never be mainstream again!" You ignore decades of history with such an absolutely ignorant statement by being so incredibly short-sighted. But it kinda is. I think we all can agree that reaching for the masses practically means "make it as easy as possible to enjoy". Do you think sc2 fits there? What exactly can blizzard do about the gameplay to attract the average joe? Skins and voice packs might be interesting to think about as soon as we have a large enough playerbase to keep them playing, but there is no way these additions would help getting people to play the game in the first place (at least not longterm DUE to the gameplay) Some people say the arcade and therefore custom games are the easy solution here, but i srsly doubt that as well. Sure, years and years ago some mini games might have been a strong reason to keep playing that rts game (BW, Wc3), but would that be the same today? We have easy access to a lot of different games (via steam for example), would custom games really be enough for people to care about sc2? I think the archon mode was included for lotv exactly cause of this "problem", but will it be enough? TBF blizzard announced another game mode, but i think we don't have any real informations about that yet
What about making it so that from bronze to gold, your main building automatically produces workers until you're at 16 on each base? Maybe you can set up a file before-hand to automatically create gasses at x number of workers? Then new players can simply focus on making units and attacking? Maybe up until silver league you can right click on a unit in a building and the building will automatically produce that unit, assuming you have the resources/supply to do so?
Maybe in bronze/silver/gold leagues there are rocks outside of your natural expansion every game that have to be brought down to prevent people from early rushing you? Maybe through platinum league EVERY CC/hatchery/nexus has some sort of built-in defense system that lasts until 8 minutes have passed?
There are ways to make the game more "casual friendly" at lower levels while still keeping the higher levels in tact.
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On December 17 2014 04:49 Destiny wrote:Show nested quote +On December 17 2014 04:46 The_Red_Viper wrote:On December 17 2014 04:31 Destiny wrote:On December 17 2014 04:05 Hider wrote:
Destiny's theory is that Blizzard should adopt a business model based on microtransactions -> this gives Blizzard a financial incentive to continue developing the game. I'm not sure if this makes sense, because for Blizzard to change business models they require financial incentive to begin with. I'm assuming that Blizzard's management is aware of the success of MOBAs & CS:GO (Heroes of the Storm takes many lessons from those games), and the reason that SC2 doesn't use a F2P model is because it's not a good fit / the game is too old.
This is what has driven me crazy about Destiny. He is somewhat smart person, but when he gets on to one thought, he is just absolutely convinced he is right, and never assesses his own position by attempting to evaluate its assumption or do more research on the subject. This kind of thinking that "RTS is a special butterfly" needs to absolutely die ASAP. BW was hugely successful. WC3 was hugely successful. A year ago people said "FPS just isn't what it used to be back in the Quake and 1.6 days, we just have to accept that MOBAs are where it's at now" and boom, look at CS:GO now. Please stop with this "RTS is such a special, unique type of gameplay that could never be mainstream again!" You ignore decades of history with such an absolutely ignorant statement by being so incredibly short-sighted. But it kinda is. I think we all can agree that reaching for the masses practically means "make it as easy as possible to enjoy". Do you think sc2 fits there? What exactly can blizzard do about the gameplay to attract the average joe? Skins and voice packs might be interesting to think about as soon as we have a large enough playerbase to keep them playing, but there is no way these additions would help getting people to play the game in the first place (at least not longterm DUE to the gameplay) Some people say the arcade and therefore custom games are the easy solution here, but i srsly doubt that as well. Sure, years and years ago some mini games might have been a strong reason to keep playing that rts game (BW, Wc3), but would that be the same today? We have easy access to a lot of different games (via steam for example), would custom games really be enough for people to care about sc2? I think the archon mode was included for lotv exactly cause of this "problem", but will it be enough? TBF blizzard announced another game mode, but i think we don't have any real informations about that yet What about making it so that from bronze to gold, your main building automatically produces workers until you're at 16 on each base? Maybe you can set up a file before-hand to automatically create gasses at x number of workers? Then new players can simply focus on making units and attacking? Maybe up until silver league you can right click on a unit in a building and the building will automatically produce that unit, assuming you have the resources/supply to do so? Maybe in bronze/silver/gold leagues there are rocks outside of your natural expansion every game that have to be brought down to prevent people from early rushing you? Maybe through platinum league EVERY CC/hatchery/nexus has some sort of built-in defense system that lasts until 8 minutes have passed? There are ways to make the game more "casual friendly" at lower levels while still keeping the higher levels in tact.
I've had the thought before that maybe lower levels (bronze and silver) could play on medium and fast speed, instead of faster which is the default for everything. Those lower speeds are not used for anything else ever anyway.
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On December 17 2014 04:49 Destiny wrote:Show nested quote +On December 17 2014 04:46 The_Red_Viper wrote:On December 17 2014 04:31 Destiny wrote:On December 17 2014 04:05 Hider wrote:
Destiny's theory is that Blizzard should adopt a business model based on microtransactions -> this gives Blizzard a financial incentive to continue developing the game. I'm not sure if this makes sense, because for Blizzard to change business models they require financial incentive to begin with. I'm assuming that Blizzard's management is aware of the success of MOBAs & CS:GO (Heroes of the Storm takes many lessons from those games), and the reason that SC2 doesn't use a F2P model is because it's not a good fit / the game is too old.
This is what has driven me crazy about Destiny. He is somewhat smart person, but when he gets on to one thought, he is just absolutely convinced he is right, and never assesses his own position by attempting to evaluate its assumption or do more research on the subject. This kind of thinking that "RTS is a special butterfly" needs to absolutely die ASAP. BW was hugely successful. WC3 was hugely successful. A year ago people said "FPS just isn't what it used to be back in the Quake and 1.6 days, we just have to accept that MOBAs are where it's at now" and boom, look at CS:GO now. Please stop with this "RTS is such a special, unique type of gameplay that could never be mainstream again!" You ignore decades of history with such an absolutely ignorant statement by being so incredibly short-sighted. But it kinda is. I think we all can agree that reaching for the masses practically means "make it as easy as possible to enjoy". Do you think sc2 fits there? What exactly can blizzard do about the gameplay to attract the average joe? Skins and voice packs might be interesting to think about as soon as we have a large enough playerbase to keep them playing, but there is no way these additions would help getting people to play the game in the first place (at least not longterm DUE to the gameplay) Some people say the arcade and therefore custom games are the easy solution here, but i srsly doubt that as well. Sure, years and years ago some mini games might have been a strong reason to keep playing that rts game (BW, Wc3), but would that be the same today? We have easy access to a lot of different games (via steam for example), would custom games really be enough for people to care about sc2? I think the archon mode was included for lotv exactly cause of this "problem", but will it be enough? TBF blizzard announced another game mode, but i think we don't have any real informations about that yet What about making it so that from bronze to gold, your main building automatically produces workers until you're at 16 on each base? Maybe you can set up a file before-hand to automatically create gasses at x number of workers? Then new players can simply focus on making units and attacking? Maybe up until silver league you can right click on a unit in a building and the building will automatically produce that unit, assuming you have the resources/supply to do so? Maybe in bronze/silver/gold leagues there are rocks outside of your natural expansion every game that have to be brought down to prevent people from early rushing you? Maybe through platinum league EVERY CC/hatchery/nexus has some sort of built-in defense system that lasts until 8 minutes have passed? There are ways to make the game more "casual friendly" at lower levels while still keeping the higher levels in tact.
How does any of that change the fact that SC is just fucking boring to play for a casual, once the hype wears off?
All popular esports are team games, with the exception of fighting games (which start with action from the first second.)
You can dick around with friends or blame the 4 other noobs on your team - both are more entertaining.
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EPT
