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On October 20 2012 02:57 Lysenko wrote:Show nested quote +On October 19 2012 23:11 paralleluniverse wrote:On October 19 2012 22:43 [F_]aths wrote:On October 19 2012 20:13 Tomasy wrote:
Those changes look great !
But I think that most of them should be allready in when game launched 2 years ago. That is not as easy as one thinks. I currently develop an overclocking tool for GeForce cards. Even though is uses a very simplistic UI, you as a user will have no idea how hard it was to implement it and how complex the interactions are behind the UI just to offer a consistent experience. The Bnet UI is much more complex than my tool and even though the Bnet looks quite simplistic, too; behind it you have complex interactions.You cannot just come up with a perfect solution instantly. And when you have a working solution, it gets harder every time to change even small things. LoL, DotA2, WC3 and WoW don't seem to have any problems with designing good online systems. What did SC2 get? A massive devolution, B.net 0.2, with absolutely nothing new (other than Facebook integration). NOT ONE SINGLE new idea, except Facebook. The most basic features gutted, which have only slowly been re-added back in. Blizzard's track record on the new B.net is abysmal. It's only recently that B.net and B.net changes in HotS are finally moving in the right direction. Is it because Greg Canessa finally got fired? A couple things: 1) Greg Canessa did not get fired. He's now the head of mobile platform development for Activision. 2) Everything that [F_]aths said is exactly right. However, Battle.net 2.0 definitely had some significant project management problems. The decision to design and implement what we ended up getting for Battle.net 2.0 for SC2 probably came later than it should have. The original software team for the unannounced MMO project got pulled off that around the end of 2009 to go into immediate crunch time to implement the first version of Battle.net 2.0. They threw what released with the game together in a very short period of time, starting from basically zero. Because of this accelerated schedule, a lot of desired features got cut or delayed to be able to arrive at a stable UI that allowed people to play the game. Then, of course, while work on the UI has certainly proceeded, since the game was released, the Battle.net 2.0 team was drawn down again, since maintaining a full-size team is something they prefer to do with a new project. Because of this, the bigger changes (including under-the-hood changes that we really don't see much of, some of which have been patched into WoL by now) have had to wait until HOTS development ramped up. There are obviously some disconnects with the community about the desirability of certain specific features, but many of the things people have suggested or asked for have probably just not been possible due to the staffing of the team. None of my comments are excuses for them making choices that aren't best for the UI or the community feel of the game, but a little understanding of how things came to be the way they are can help put it in perspective, I think. 3) LoL and DOTA2 are certainly driving Blizzard's feature choices as much as anything. WC3's UI is really nothing to be particularly proud of -- it has some nice features but some things people remember warmly may not have been as actually successful at the time. WoW has a much, much larger UI team than any other Blizzard project.
Thanks for the info.
But I'm not impressed.
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On October 20 2012 13:57 paralleluniverse wrote:
Thanks for the info.
But I'm not impressed.
Sorry, not sure what you're getting at. My point was to make clear that it wasn't an ignorant or lazy development team that led to the battle.net 2.0 that we have today. Making software is about resources, time and people, that determine how much can be done and how well. Those are things controlled by management (like Greg Canessa was) and their bosses. Also that during the HOTS development cycle the situation may well be different than before, in which case the UI may get farther in less time than for WoL.
Or not, since we have no idea what is going on internally regarding SC2 UI.
Edit: Your angry comment in that closed thread about Blizzard "finally admitting" that hiding losses was to avoid making people feel bad was off the mark, btw. They made that clear when they made that change midway through WoL beta.
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I don't know about you guys, but the new UI looks good. I like the menu screen, though the background (with Kerrigan) still looks plain. Just give us back the full screen chats, without the stupid 100 people restriction, invite the trivia bots and all is forgiven.
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On October 20 2012 14:40 Lysenko wrote:Show nested quote +On October 20 2012 13:57 paralleluniverse wrote:
Thanks for the info.
But I'm not impressed. Sorry, not sure what you're getting at. My point was to make clear that it wasn't an ignorant or lazy development team that led to the battle.net 2.0 that we have today. Making software is about resources, time and people, that determine how much can be done and how well. Those are things controlled by management (like Greg Canessa was) and their bosses. Also that during the HOTS development cycle the situation may well be different than before, in which case the UI may get farther in less time than for WoL. Or not, since we have no idea what is going on internally regarding SC2 UI. Edit: Your angry comment in that closed thread about Blizzard "finally admitting" that hiding losses was to avoid making people feel bad was off the mark, btw. They made that clear when they made that change midway through WoL beta.
My point is, excuses aside, B.net 2.0 was absolute trash when it first launched. It's amazing that they've utterly failed and completely screwed up B.net when WC3, WoW, Dota 2 had great online and social systems.
They raved that B.net 2.0 was going to be the greatest thing ever, so good that you won't want to play on LAN. So good that there wasn't even one single new idea, other than Facebook. You've talked about how the project was horribly managed. I would add that in addition, the project was visionless.
On Blizzard hiding stats, you've got the timeline all wrong. Stats weren't hidden as part of the WoL beta. It happened way after the game was launched. As far as I've seen, they've never stated the reason was ladder anxiety and hurt feelings, but now they've inadvertently admitted it.
The official reason was that win ratios were meaningless, except at the top. This is true. But it also meant that useful stats, like win ratios by race or map, will never be shown unless the decision was reversed. So it was glaringly obvious all along that this wasn't the real reason, and now we have confirmation.
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I'd say its hard to know what their vision was if they didn't have the resources to execute it. Also, that Greg Canessa moved on might well have slowed things down as his successor got up to speed on what was going on. I don't know.
As for what they said when they removed the loss display for sub-Master players, yes, they said it was a meaningless number in lower leagues, but the underlying problem was always that they didn't want people discouraged by it.
http://us.battle.net/sc2/en/forum/topic/2267600441
And yeah, it happened several months into release in patch 1.3, I had misremembered.
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Lol! It only took them 2 1/2 years to do something from WC3.
Simply amazing.
Who knows, maybe by LoV they will 'discover' the magical technology to give us LAN.
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On October 20 2012 16:55 Lysenko wrote:I'd say its hard to know what their vision was if they didn't have the resources to execute it. Also, that Greg Canessa moved on might well have slowed things down as his successor got up to speed on what was going on. I don't know. As for what they said when they removed the loss display for sub-Master players, yes, they said it was a meaningless number in lower leagues, but the underlying problem was always that they didn't want people discouraged by it. http://us.battle.net/sc2/en/forum/topic/2267600441And yeah, it happened several months into release in patch 1.3, I had misremembered.
The whole thing would have gone down better if they admitted that B.net 2.0 sucked and what they were going to do about it. But they pretended it was the best thing since sliced bread and that everything turned out as planned. It was planned that there were no chat channels, for example. Remember when they ask if we really wanted chat channels?
It was obvious from the very beginning that what they wanted B.net 2.0 to be was a platform where you could interact with friends and absolutely no one else. It was obvious.
Look at how they kept selling Real ID, integrated Facebook into B.net, how no chat channels were planned, how there's a section in your profile to track your friends division rank, how it was near impossible to search for anyone's profile that wasn't on your friends list, how it was impossible to even talk to anyone that's not on your friends list (still not possible, unless you're in the same chat channel), and so on. It was designed as an online system where you can easily play SC2 with you're already established friends, and that's it. So it wasn't just for a lack of resources that the end result was shit.
The idea was to strip everything out that wasn't related to interacting with your existing friends. When B.net 2.0 was released, that's exactly what we got. As far as we could tell from what they said, they designed exactly what they wanted. They were blank on new and innovative ideas and at first, completely dismissive of what made the old B.net great. EVERYTHING revolved around friends. And everything else? Fuck it.
B.net is finally on the right track, and by the time HotS launches it looks like it will be quite good. The changes that have been announced are awesome. But you cannot rewrite history. B.net 0.2 has been utter shit since the WoL beta.
Also, the statement about hiding stats that you link says that win-loss got removed because they were meaningless. That's what I said that they said.
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Regarding the link, if you actually read everything he says, he describes a scenario where losses pile up as someone learns the game. It's 100% obvious that not discouraging people is the message.
The reason I'm scratching my head at your arguing this is that they had always made clear that retaining players was the core of their goals with bnet. The idea that they were somehow being deceptive about this change makes no sense. The linked quote didn't emphasize it, but it was nevertheless crystal clear.
Chat channels are a different case than the rest of bnet's issues. During the chat channel debate over D3 it became clear that they were having some kind of internal issue over the workload associated with enforcing the TOS in chat. In particular, the game developers were saying "sure we'll have chat channels" while the customer service folks (specifically Bashiok, who works for them) said "it's too expensive to support" and then walked that back a few days later. I'm quite sure that the issue there was providing a WoW level of support without subscription fees. (While the pre-WoW games had chat channels, WoW set high expectations about players being able to report misbehavior and expect a response.)
Obviously they belatedly changed their mind on this, but it's certainly a special case feature due to that requirement of CS support.
Edit: Bashiok's walked- back post did state that support was the issue with chat channels.
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Probably not enough UI changes. Unless they completely trash this X-Box GUI and restart everything, nothing will ever be enough.
That said, I'm glad they're working a bit more on adding UI info and stats. Some big things that they need to add:
• More relevant end-game stats. As far as I remember even SC1 had one or two relevant stats that SC2 didn't have, and SC1's stats were terrible.
The major scores mentioned don't show the complete breakdown which is stupid; it's possible for a person to have a higher score than their opponent in all the breakdown categories but still have a higher overall score for that major score.
Some really important stats are things like: Army [value] produced, army [value] destroyed. This is in contrast with stupid stats like "units produced/lost" which is completely pointless since some units have more value (resource cost) than others (some are even free)
• They can also improve a bit on the replay GUI stats.
The most important stat to see who's winning in a game is net worth [minus unspent resources]. Including other stats such as total mined resources, and efficiency (net worth divide by total mined resources) are also extremely useful to easily/quickly understand how the game is progressing in general, as well as to spot different players' play styles. These are certainly useful stats to have for the game over screen as well.
• One of the best things to add more flavor to the game and maybe renew a bit of interest in achievements is having little descriptor phrases identifying certain aspect of a player's play style during the game. What I'm talking about may be the most well known from Goldeneye 007 for N64 —called awards— where characters were given various judgements on their play such as "most cowardly", "mostly harmless", "most professional". There could be stats (generated over time, or at least in team games) based on stats like having low/high average energy on casters when losing them, winning the game with a higher/lower economy than allies/opponent(s), most/least casters used, most/least maintained scouted area on the map (perhaps biased for zerg though), average game length, most/least diverse army (probably hard to calculate and balance though), and other things like that
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On October 20 2012 17:17 paralleluniverse wrote:
The whole thing would have gone down better if they admitted that B.net 2.0 sucked and what they were going to do about it. But they pretended it was the best thing since sliced bread and that everything turned out as planned. It was planned that there were no chat channels, for example. Remember when they ask if we really wanted chat channels?
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B.net is finally on the right track, and by the time HotS launches it looks like it will be quite good. The changes that have been announced are awesome. But you cannot rewrite history. B.net 0.2 has been utter shit since the WoL beta....
Yeah agreed. Aside from agreeing that SC2 was in terrible shape, I also think that with HotS coming out, the games finally starting to feel like what SC2 was supposed to be.
The map editor is more useable now (a bit less bugs, a bit more features work now), open games now exist, resume from replay is coming (as well as shared replays I think?), uhh... what else? Well, regardless, things are... nicer, for sure.
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On October 20 2012 17:53 Lysenko wrote:
Regarding the link, if you actually read everything he says, he describes a scenario where losses pile up as someone learns the game. It's 100% obvious that not discouraging people is the message.
The reason I'm scratching my head at your arguing this is that they had always made clear that retaining players was the core of their goals with bnet. The idea that they were somehow being deceptive about this change makes no sense. The linked quote didn't emphasize it, but it was nevertheless crystal clear.
Chat channels are a different case than the rest of bnet's issues. During the chat channel debate over D3 it became clear that they were having some kind of internal issue over the workload associated with enforcing the TOS in chat. In particular, the game developers were saying "sure we'll have chat channels" while the customer service folks (specifically Bashiok, who works for them) said "it's too expensive to support" and then walked that back a few days later. I'm quite sure that the issue there was providing a WoW level of support without subscription fees. (While the pre-WoW games had chat channels, WoW set high expectations about players being able to report misbehavior and expect a response.)
Obviously they belatedly changed their mind on this, but it's certainly a special case feature due to that requirement of CS support.
Edit: Bashiok's walked- back post did state that support was the issue with chat channels.
Here's what the old statement said:
Even for someone who starts pretty strong, win/loss numbers should still settle around 50/50 anyway. That doesn't feel good, but worse, those numbers also don't accurately reflect your current level of skill or progress anyway.
So, what's the problem with displaying win/loss anyway? It was not an accurate method of tracking skill, improvement or progress. Really, it wasn't. It was ultimately just misleading players, and causing them to judge themselves and others against what amounts to useless information.
Where in the post does it say anything about ladder anxiety? It doesn't. The closest it gets is saying that having the matchmaker push people towards a 50% win ratio "doesn't feel good". But guess what, that hasn't changed, the matchmaker still pushes people towards a 50% win ratio. So if this was the real reason for removing losses, why are they suddenly coming back?
Their stated reason is because win-loss is meaningless. They stressed this point four times in that post. Four.
And here's the statement in the recent UI update:
And finally, now that we have added unranked play as an option, we’ve returned full stats [and players who] are not interested in the pressure of being ranked can now use the unranked play mode.
Stats are back because the REAL reason they were removed, the "pressure" of laddering, is fixed by having unranked play. It was about ladder anxiety and the fact playing the ladder can hurt people's feelings. And this was obvious all along, despite their transparent attempts to scapegoat the win ratio as being meaningless.
If they really wanted to solve the problem of people being discouraged to play and ladder anxiety, they should have also removed past season data. Having a permanent, unchangeable marker of how (possibly) bad you've done in past seasons is clearly a much more significant factor to ladder anxiety than showing losses that will converge to wins in the long run anyway.
The shitness of B.net 2.0 isn't just about chat channels (which are pretty good now). It was the whole thing:
Look at how they kept selling Real ID, integrated Facebook into B.net, how no chat channels were planned, how there's a section in your profile to track your friends division rank, how it was near impossible to search for anyone's profile that wasn't on your friends list, how it was impossible to even talk to anyone that's not on your friends list (still not possible, unless you're in the same chat channel), and so on. It was designed as an online system where you can easily play SC2 with you're already established friends, and that's it. So it wasn't just for a lack of resources that the end result was shit.
The idea was to strip everything out that wasn't related to interacting with your existing friends. EVERYTHING revolved around friends. And everything else? Fuck it.
As for the chat channel thing. Don't blame it on PR. Not only is the moderation argument a terrible one, and has never stopped any good online game from making chat channels, but the infamous "Do you really want chat channels?" quote came from Frank Pearce, one of the execs at Blizzard, not some random PR guy. It's indicative of the whole direction of B.net 2.0 originally -- it's not just project management and staffing, they were completely out of touch.
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Seems like league/rank on portraits for me. One of the portraits has a brown frame (Bronze?), a few of them have a dark-blue one (Masters?), one of them has a golden one (Gold), some a greyish one (Silver/Plat?), and there's one with a crystal-blue (Diamond, probably).
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On October 19 2012 20:05 Kazeyonoma wrote:Show nested quote +On October 19 2012 19:27 Hubble wrote:
I still don't get why this wasn't there from the start... It's basically the same now as it was in wc3.
But: Yeah, it looks much better than now. they rebuilt the entire platform from scratch on a new framework. people can hate on battle 2.0 (0.2 by haters), but from a development standpoint it wasn't like they could just copy/paste code from bnet 1.0 into bnet 2.0 and be done with it. Realize that part of the complexity of battle.net 2.0 was the universal profile they created with it, allow you to link up all of your friends lists across all bnet 2.0 games (wow first, then sc2, then d3, and moving forward). This also allowed them to slowly integrate their consumer base into their cloud platform, which would eventually lead to things like the RMAH, easy digital downloads of WoW:MoP, and ultimately their early stated goal for the sc2 arcade, a means for map makers and custom game creators, to get repaid at least somewhat for their hardwork. yes battle.net 1.0 had features battle.net 2.0 didn't have, but 2.0 had tons of shit 1.0 didn't have either, it's just people gloss over them because they don't look at it from the larger picture the way blizz had to. I am glad they're implementing more stuff, and are continuing to work hard to make more changes. Blizzard has been hiring for their battle.net team at a rapid rate (i know, i applied and interviewed and they told briefly told me about their staffing goals), so don't think for a second that blizzard has given up on its games, or that it's just letting esports die. This is all just chaos speak from people who thrive on the chaos and hysteria more than those who genuinely care about the community and the further development of the game.
100% this, these things take a long time and despite all the criticism, Bnet 2.0 is better than 1.0 in many ways. To put it simply, here are some of the things that Bnet 2.0 added on Bnet 1.0.
- Quick and easy to view global friends list across all Blizzard franchises
- Player status and current game (e.g. SC2) being played of friends on friends list
- Easy simultaneous chat with multiple friends in separate friend windows
- Party system /w auto-join when party joins a game
- Able to be in simultaneous chat channels and party chat
Of course there is plenty more room for improvement, which is what all this talk is about, but it's silly to claim that they've spent all this time working on nothing, when there are clear benefits to Bnet 2.0. And as far as why they haven't improved things so far, well all of the Esports development and explosion of the SC2 scene was most unprecedented, streaming was such a niche before the release of SC2 and esports was nowhere near the scale that it is today (to the extent that people are complaining about too many tournaments). It will take a long time before the kind of changes necessary to accomodate the large SC2 community can be conceptualized, designed and implemented within the existing Bnet framework. But I will remind people that Blizzard have addressed past concerns and said they are slated for HOTS, so given this attitude I feel it is just a matter of time before the other UI concerns are addressed.
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Still want there to be chat channels for all the main things and I want it to display your league in chat channels.
3rd times the charm rofl rofl rofl rofl rofl
Still doesnt fix the game.
A reason people are loosing interest is cuz sc2 isnt as fun to watch anymore.
The main thing wrong with the game is that it doesnt appeal to casuals nor does it appeal to competitive people.
Its too hard/boring for casuals to play but its too EZ to make them exited to watch it. And the game is also to EZ for competitive people to stay interested in playing it.
I think the best thing to do is to give the casuals custom games, team games and more exiting game to watch through a more harder 1v1 game, in which competitive players would stay intrested.
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Every day without a blue post is a sad day. Was hoping for a bit more details on Friday 
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On October 20 2012 23:55 SarcasmMonster wrote:Every day without a blue post is a sad day. Was hoping for a bit more details on Friday
I think there's no beta patch either because next week's beta patch is large. And that they're also reworking the Oracle. Not to mention that today Blizzard is having a 12 hour playing games for charity. At least the Diablo III Quality Assurance Team is.
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Hey all -
Just confirming that we are pushing the balance update to next week as we're still working on a few of the changes.
-Cloaken, Community Manager
Shouldn't surprise anyone.
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Very interested to see what "we’ve made some big changes to improve the overall user experience. With the release of the next major Heart of the Swarm beta patch, we'd like to give you an advance look at those changes." includes. Could just be a rejumbling of the buttons or actual dearly needed features. Hope its the later!
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On October 19 2012 11:14 Sirrush wrote:
So, on the main screen, instead of Kerrigan, give us a big general chat that everyone enters into when they launch the game and, hurray! SC2 becomes a much more social game. Make whatever chat you're in automatically minimize into a window as soon as you leave the initial screen.
I don't know, I just feel that it would help make SC2 become more social overall.
Pls not, I fucking hate general chats..its allways full of awful people talking shit about stuff they simply have no clue of or just bullshitting all the time about everything, everyone... it wouldn't make the game more social...
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EPT
