[D] Blizzard’s pro-gaming intentions in SE Asia

1. You're paying for a Blizzard Game that's bound to last for a long, long time.

That's right. People can look at Starcraft, or Diablo II, or Warcraft 3 and realize just how freakishly long Blizzard has been supporting this game. This is where Cost vs Value comes in. As opposed to the typical 'latest' RTS like let's say.. Company of Heroes or Dawn of War II which are remarkable RTS in their own right, the 'good times' in these games when the community was at its critical mass for the game to be really fun didn't last very long. But the main point is this: Blizzard's games have a stupendously crazy habit for possessing freakishly long life cycles spanning ten years or so.

I don't really care for the marketing slogans like 'Best Single Player experience' or 'Best Multiplayer experience' or whatever. They don't work for me when the RTS genre has spread out so diversely, having a RTS experience that's declared the 'best ever' isn't going to sit well with me. After all these years of the RTS genre evolving with cover systems and 'realistic' kinds of gameplay where typical infantry rifles can do nothing vs heavily armored vehicles, there're certainly going to have people who will think that SC2 is taking a huge evolutionary step backwards. Nothing wrong with that opinion.

But let's put things into perspective here: I've been playing WoW on and off since '06, and I've bound to have spent at least...

Vanilla WoW + BC + WoTLK = 80 + 60 + 60 = 200
Subscription = Total two years subscription = 24 months x 25 = 600.

I've spent about S$800 on WoW through the years. Now, think about a game that's going to last as long, or possibly longer than WoW and has the potential to serve as a future platform of long-term gaming that's slated to replace Warcraft III. If you have seen the level of features and functionality Blizzard has thrown at the typical user with the Map Editor, that potential is exponentially expanded.

Think about it. The S$109 you're paying for is going to last just that long instead of a Company of Heroes that remains hot for 2-3 years at most. Believe me, I'm thoroughly in love with CoH and still think that DoW2 falls short of that game, but the community for that game is somewhat dead.

Game longevity. That's the Value that you're going to pay for your S$109.

2. Local competitive/non-competitive event support.

For the past 7-8 years, many gamers including myself have been observing places like Korea, Europe or USA with unbridled envy that they could have such awesome competitive/eSports support in their countries and have gaming as a widespread mainstream thing as a result. Here in Singapore we still have our parents who mock gaming, etc, you all know it. For years, people like my clan, [Bf.Nut] have been trying so hard to foster this competitive eSports thing, but without a big name to aid us in this country it hasn't always taken off completely without getting really big like in Korea.

But Blizzard is in town now, and if anything, they seem serious to place a foothold in Southeast Asia. I don't know how else they could've expressed it better by having their global community manager to hang around in Singapore for at least a week, and plopping down that investment to open an office here. These people mean business, and if we can take things into perspective, if we can help Blizzard to succeed in this endeavor, I don't reckon there's anything to stop Singapore from turning into something like Korea. Wouldn't we want to have something like that? I know for sure that as a gamer I've been hungering after this opportunity for the past 7 years. No longer do we need to always adhere to the Korean/US tournaments, and fly for 8/18 hours to those respective countries, play for 20 minutes get our asses kicked and come back. Competitively I don't think we'd learn anything that way. Perhaps this time we could take a train to KL, kick ass/get asses kicked and come back knowing that we've learnt something. And that can be made possible with Blizzard SEA in town and given the business incentive to remain in town.

That's the Value that you might be getting out of your S$109.

3. Better latency. But NEWater! The US beta is already good enough! Why do we need to be localized?

I asked the same thing. I remarked that the region-locking proposal was probably a victim of the US beta's success. Players of the US beta will concur with me in saying that the experience with the US beta is indeed, excellent. I could kick arse comfortably even if I have 250ms latency. But the response I received was because the playerbase on US beta is already, very small. Thinking about it, my typical login screen will inform me of just how many players there are on Battle.net now, and there'd be an average of 9000+ games played at any one time. That's probably 27,000 players on average and it's unlikely we'd be sharing the US Battle.net server with just 27,000 players when the game launches and the collective lag generated by that much more traffic will kill us.

That's the explanation I was given. So, maybe region locking is somewhat reasonable, after all. That's possibly the Value you might be getting out of your S$109