Razzia of the Blizzsters - Page 20

On May 20 2015 09:05 NoSoldier wrote:
1. of all BW aint sc2. Yes sc2 is fucked up. But its like comparing cs 1.6 to source and GO. Its just not the same game. It doesnt work that way.

On May 20 2015 02:06 SC2John wrote:


I think the key point here is that the players, the people who actually spend money and invest time into the game (especially for a game as time and effort-intensive as Starcraft), need to be prioritized over "having more viewers". If a game is good, if people enjoy playing it, then the game will naturally lead to more interest and more viewers. The opposite is not true; more viewers will not make players playing a game they don't enjoy prosper.

And again, just to reiterate: TheDwf's main point here is that Blizzard has done a lot of things wrong with SC2, including killing the strategy part of RTS and hijacking tournaments, and we should be critical of them going into LotV or else we risk further damage.

On May 22 2015 20:16 Kangoroo wrote:

DWF had adversely mentioned casuals (they are most of people from RL).

On May 22 2015 21:42 TheDwf wrote:

Nope. I mocked the hypocrisy of using the “casual excuse” to justify anything … especially as SC2 is 100% built against newcomers. All the so-called “casual-friendly” stuff hilariously backfired because the Blizzsters understood little of what players—particularly newbies and occasional players—want when they play Starcraft.


+ Show Spoiler +

The Blizzsters tried to chase chimeras instead. Just like they quartered the Dragoon into several wonky units, they quartered the player into caricatural prototypes like “Mr. Viewer” or “the Casual”. They were so eager to cater for the needs of those illusory creatures that they completely forgot about the grassroot origins of Starcraft… and alienated much of their historical basis in the process, without gaining anything since there was no social manna from the heavens to draw from. And now the game is almost unplayable for the overwhelming majority of players, i. e. newbies and upgraded newbies, while the pro scene suffers from (a) the obnoxious semi-tombola aspect generated by Spaghettification and (b) the distinguished mediocrity of the average SC2 game.

On May 22 2015 23:49 SC2John wrote:


While I love this graph in so many ways, I just wanted to hint that I was alluding mostly to the fact that 1) Blizzard never communicates well with the community, and very rarely gives the players what they would like to see in the game, and 2) The fucking BNet UI and features like skins/icons/accessories have been neglected for ~6 years now, in spite of numerous posts in support of them. It's amazing Blizzard was ever able to let Arcade go for free, but that's about the only time they've shown that they're willing to keep the players in mind; everything else has been about monetizing SC2 as an ESPORT.

On May 20 2015 13:00 BronzeKnee wrote:

Honestly, I think WOL 2011 was the golden age of SC2

On May 22 2015 23:49 SC2John wrote:


While I love this graph in so many ways, I just wanted to hint that I was alluding mostly to the fact that 1) Blizzard never communicates well with the community, and very rarely gives the players what they would like to see in the game, and 2) The fucking BNet UI and features like skins/icons/accessories have been neglected for ~6 years now, in spite of numerous posts in support of them. It's amazing Blizzard was ever able to let Arcade go for free, but that's about the only time they've shown that they're willing to keep the players in mind; everything else has been about monetizing SC2 as an ESPORT.

On May 23 2015 14:41 BronzeKnee wrote:
Per usual, it is time for the community to step up. Half-Life and WC3 were great games on their own, but it is Counter-Strike and DOTA (and spin-offs of those games) that are being played today.

On May 23 2015 16:44 207aicila wrote:


Um what. You realize War3 still has a very sizable following in China and South Korea? Still? As for Half-Life, it's worth noting that the vanilla game kept a healthy playerbase in Europe as well for nearly 10 years. Not in the States, where brainless console shooters swept the market, sure, but Half-Life was still alive, as were many mods other than CS.

Also, for all the people comparing SC2 to CS:GO and DotA 2.... you might be new to esports, or simply haven't followed it very closely, but here's another knowledge bomb: CS 1.6 at its peak had far more players than CS:GO does now, it always was much more popular than Source and many of the people who still played it casually up until say 2011-2012 transitioned to MOBAs rather than CS:GO. Again, not something you might know if you only follow esports in the US. As for DotA... there are still plenty of people playing the original, and up until recently most of the Chinese DotA community (read: most of the DotA community period, for obvious reasons) was unwilling to transition to DotA 2, even though some of the professional teams had done so (to great success).

Just things to keep in mind.

On May 24 2015 00:35 BronzeKnee wrote:


I'm 30 years old. I played CS and DOTA from there very beginnings and watched them evolve.

I don't think you understood my point. My comment said was that while WC3 and Half-Life were great games, the DOTA and Counter-Strike player base were much bigger respectively, long before CSS came out and before DOTA 2 was in development. I didn't say that there wasn't a following for WC3 or Half-Life. It is just that those great games became engine platforms for community mods that set the gold standard and quickly outstripped the popularity of the game they were built on.

That hasn't changed. In fact the player base for Counter Strike continues to grow, as does the player base for MOBAs.

And your comment about CS 1.6 is misleading. From what we know CS:GO averages around 250-400k average players per day, and has peaked at 577,186 players (that is a record as of this month, the game is still growing!). CS 1.6 drew somewhere between an estimated 250-450k, but we don't know if that was peak numbers, or average numbers (it is likely those are peak numbers). Either way Counter Strike in all forms has grown, because you take those CS:GO numbers and add them to the CSS and CS 1.6 players and you'll have a higher number today than CS has ever had.

http://store.steampowered.com/stats/
http://www.reddit.com/r/counterstrike/comments/18prp5/16_how_many_players_cs_had_in_its_glory_days/

On May 24 2015 01:28 207aicila wrote:


I'm highly curious where you get those estimates of CS 1.6 from.

Now here's a caveat: I do not have any numbers either, or any kind of credible sources to cite, I have only my personal experience and if that's not enough then feel free to disregard everything I'm going to say.

With that in mind, I hail from an ex-communist Eastern European country. From the early 2000s up until the rise of LoL (followed by DotA2, CS:GO and various other games), if you picked any random male aged 12 to 30 who owned a personal computer at home, chances are they played Counter-Strike at least semi-frequently. If you picked any male student whose school or university had computer labs, chances are Counter-Strike was installed on every working PC there and was enjoyed frequently. Likewise, many an internet cafe made good money because people would come to play Counter-Strike, more than any other game.

But I have no numbers to give you. In fact I doubt any numbers could exist. Because you'd be dealing with a region where, for some reason or another (mostly economic), pretty much all gamers were pirates. The situation's only begun to change recently, what with Steam's convenience and sales, and oddly enough with skins in F2P games. But for a long time, it was almost unheard of to pay for games or software in general. Which is why games that were easy to pirate and play with friends were so popular, but CS more than any other.

To compare Steam stats alone would be to ignore the hundreds of thousands of Eastern European gamers that used to play 1.6 regularly. I don't know where the misconception among US gamers stems from, that 1.6 is long dead and all servers are filled with bots, but I can vouch that up until 2011 (which incidentally is when I too drifted off from 1.6), you could find literally thousands of servers, most of them with 20 or more slots, many of which were full pretty much all day. With real people. And cheating was far from rampant, most servers, especially the popular ones, would have an admin online pretty much at any given time.

Again, none of this is concrete or objective or conclusive proof, but it saddens me deeply to see these misconceptions about a phenomenal game, although at the same time I cannot necessarily fault you (or most gamers for that matter) for not knowing this.

On May 25 2015 06:29 Zorgaz wrote:
Haven't posted here in ages. A fine post OP, might not agree with everything but certainly most of it. I still regard the Collosi as one of the great tragedies of Starcraft.

On June 05 2015 02:48 Charoisaur wrote:


nah, nerfing the collossus was basically the only good change that has been made in LotV.

On June 05 2015 02:48 Charoisaur wrote:


nah, nerfing the collossus was basically the only good change that has been made in LotV.

On June 05 2015 04:24 [PkF] Wire wrote:

I'm not disagreeing with this ; but if we have to get all the gimmicks LotV is bringing with it just to get rid of the colossus, I'll keep my colossus please.