Operation Fix SC2 for LotV [FSFL]: - Page 2

On October 20 2013 09:59 Iblis wrote:
I sadly agree with you all that Blizzard has just decided to treat Starcraft as a money maker asset and do the bare minimum to assure the game is not considered a scam but not invest so much money into it that would make it a risky investment.
We have seen multiple Esport game company throwing millions to players of their games even in beta stages to try and promote their game and give incentive to players to want to invest time on it and be the best.
Blizzard likes its money and doesn't seem to like to give it to players in any form.
Before WCS and that seemingly income that player could get from blizzard I would always be disgusted seeing Dustin Broder in the audience of GSL to make some Public appearance in the Esport scene to make it seems like they care...
They could have just thrown some money around to make this game into a revolution:
-Sponsor big tournament with big money, stimulate the community
-Develop features around the fucking game:
* Daily/Weekly for the fun tournament ingame like in Warcraft 3, 1v1, 2v2, different format, map pool
*Clan support
*Solid chat system
*A custom map system more friendly and rewarding toward newly created with high potential
*Strengthen their hardware infrastructure so the strong player base can actually play without hindrance+ Show Spoiler +
*Have their own fully featured replay manager


I was really enthusiastic before SC2 beta and thought it was going to be the next gen game everyone was waiting for, you could watch any competition happening in the world for a fee, you could have access to other games into the games through the custom map because map creator will be able to have a donate/price for a map so they can make great ones and maintains them. And most of all I really thought Blizzard would have some kind of money commitment in form of salary to some of the best SC2 players making it into a viable job for the gifted and dedicated.

I'm still shocked about how wrong I was and how much faith I put into Blizzard. They could do so much and it would just make the game so much more wanted by tons of more people but they seem to have decided to just exploit the licence to squeeze out money out of people by dedicating just one of their development team and don't put that much features in so the Battlenet cheap infrastructure they made wouldn't blow up and force them to invest in it.


TL DR: SC2 is now just maintained to stay the RTS leader of the market, they have no interest in investing more money in it because their goal is just to make profit so strategically no need to make a revolution when you are already the leader with your basic product. If the players and community want to make it into something more, they'll do it at their cost.

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

On October 20 2013 10:18 unifo wrote:


Interesting post. To expand on some of the ideas, I'm wondering why Blizzard hasn't actually implemented some of the ideas that the community has brought up especially some of the ideas that has a return in investments (eg. name tag change, maybe battle.net plus... etc...). Also Blizzard appears to be extremely late to the party in terms of investment, and even now, their input into e-sports is extremely minimal compared to other companies (Valve with Dota2, Riot and LoL).

It might be to suggest that Blizzard doesn't actually understand the current market on managing online game and that they are running all their games on an outdated business models. I mean if one takes a look at League of Legends and various other online games, there are micro-transactions that are non-game breaking, yet these companies rack up lots of cash though these transaction. Also a lot of these games are free to play, hence players have full access to the game. Starcraft 2 on the other hand, is a simple pay XX bucks to access the game (though it has a demo), no microtransaction, and limited support to the community. I simply don't understand how the game is actually staying afloat especially with server maintenance cost which is monthly, and Starcraft 2 having no income generated beyond the initial pay in.

On October 20 2013 09:49 -Kaiser- wrote:
It's pretty retarded that this got moved to blogs.

On October 20 2013 11:05 Plexa wrote:

Blogs is generous, normally these kinds of threads get insta closed.

On October 20 2013 10:50 iHirO wrote:
My comments:


INTRODUCTION:
- Metagame can feel stale at times but its hard to balance multiple viable strategies.
- WCS Tournament over-saturation, glad its getting reduced in 2014.

TLDR:
- Making the game more modifiable would be cool, but Blizz have clamped down hard on this (see MPQ editing).
- SC2 really lacks Valve's Steam Community support and monetization.
- Live streamed pro games through the engine is definitely the future.

INTERFACE:
- Default Blizzard chat channel would make the game more sociable.
- Make the XP system more intuitive and merge with achievement points

TOURNAMENTS:
- In game tournaments (with a manager interface and branding) would be pretty popular.
- Using that interface for large tournaments might not work as well though.

NEW WCS FORMAT:
- Ranked 2v2 tournaments sound interesting but there has never been much viewer interest.

GAME MODIFICATIONS:
- Being able to modify the game UI could be unfair on players (and the esports scene)
- Seeing someone’s statistics before the game starts sounds like a bad idea.

COACHING:
- Having an available coaching list and filter in game sounds interesting, not sure about adding payment data though.

STRATEGY:
- Dota style in game generated strategies sound good and would encourage more player invention and interaction.

CLANS:
- Clans are pretty underused at the moment, they should definitely be searchable.
- Customisation has memory storage costs and needs to be policed.

PRACTICE PARTNERS:
- Something is needed to make practicing easier, either allow custom games to be named or implant MMR range and game type.

PLAYER PROFILE:
- No facebook like features please.
- GSL-like player stats would be fun but hard to implement.

REPLAYS:
- Replay storage costs money and would kill 3rd party websites like ggtracker, not a good idea.

VOICE & VIDEO INTERACTION:
- Skype is good enough.
- Communication cannot be disabled by the game, not technically possible.

SPECIAL EVENTS:
- They should run the TL map competition twice a year to keep the scene alive (also more team maps)

On October 20 2013 12:03 JBright wrote:
http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=424707

This thread already exists and what the OP wrote could easily go in there. We don't need everyone to make their own thread every time they think they have a great suggestion.

On October 20 2013 23:48 nanosystem wrote:
Soooo, you want Starcraft, but with Reddit, Facebook and Twitch. And microtransactions everywhere.

About your ideas:

Interface
- Paying for ads inside SC2? Why should anybody do that? If you want SC2 to grow, wouldn't it be better to provide free ads for the good stuff?
- You want to unclutter the interface, but you want to have a large list of (redundant and unnecessary) options on ~1/3 of the screen. Wouldn't that add clutter?
- Friend List and Chat Area should be combined due to being closely related. Also, the chat doesn't have to take up that much space.
- The default channel will be a shithole if everyone's in it (like Twitch, but with more balance whine and trolls). The user should be able to set which channels auto-open.

Popularity
- That's just Reddit/Digg/TL, but inside SC2. It's redundant.
- Up-/downvoting maps is in the game, more or less.
- Invites vote manipulation.

In-Game Levels
- Can't criticize it too much since it's basically unchanged.

In-Game Points
- Ehh, why not.

Cash Purchases
- No. Just no.
- Real money tournaments are silly. Why not participate in free tournaments with prize money? (And there are enough free tourneys.)
- Transferability: Which games do you want to transfer the points to? Diablo (where the RMAH will be removed soon)? WoW (which isn't going F2P anytime soon)? Also, having SC2 as a glorified WoW points farm doesn't exactly help promoting it.
- Featuring: Needing popularity won't prevent abuse from the people with enough popularity. Having a cooldown doesn't encourage people to pay money to promote their something when it's visibility will be minimal. Making tournaments pay isn't helping eSports.
- Donations: Blizzard would take money from the players, which doesn't help the pros (and thus, eSports). In fact, it would be detrimental for the players.

Tournaments
- Idea is fine. How it's supposed to work is not.
- Again, paying money for tournaments is a horrible, horrible idea and discourages people from playing.
- Hosted Tournaments sound redundant. Also, making money go to Blizz is a bad idea. Again, it discourages people from making tourneys and reduces the money going to the players.
- Having no limit for the WCS qualifiers sounds REALLY tiresome for the players. Imagine having to go through 15 rounds. It'll be too tiresome for players. Using WCS points to qualify for WCS is useless since most people who'll try to qualify won't have any points, so you're making them use money to play, which doest exactly encourage amateurs.

New WCS Format
- 2v2 is imbalanced and unpopular.
- GSL Opens have stopped for a reason. Why would you want to reintroduce them? The game quality will be awful, unlimited brackets will be extremely tiresome for the players, good players might drop out early due to bad luck and bad players might get through due to good luck. Progamers won't have any stability. If they'll drop out, that'd be it for a while.
- Individual tournaments will give out WCS points. Even Bronze League tournaments? Even invite-only tournaments? And again, most of them will be in an Open Tournament format, which is BAD. Also, you're pressuring tournaments to use the Blizzard format, with money going to Blizzard. Not only does it reduce variety, it discourages organizers from opening tournaments. You're also inviting pros to regularly stomp casual gamers for prize money/points and I don't see how that's supposed to help casuals.
- WCS SHOULD NOT appeal to the casual gamer. It's supposed to be a tournament where the best of the best meets. And casual gamers are NOT the best of the best.
- WCS does not go on for too long. It's fine as it is. We don't need more weekend tournaments, we don't need more stress for the pros, we need a perfectly stable tournament, and WCS fits this niche.
- Only inviting players with WCS points to events which give out WCS points makes the points snowball, so it no longer is about the best, but about the one who had most points in the beginning.
- If any clan is allowed to participate, not only will the good clans participate, the not-so-good ones also will. Again, this makes for bad game quality and discourages pro clans from participating.
- Region lock will force an even bigger downsizing of the Korean scene and exclude players like Polt or StarDust, who reside in their respective regions. And the games will be worse.

In-Game Observing
- Pointless.
- Sometimes, people DO NOT WANT to be observed. Making every single game observable means that players will be able to see/steal strategies from the people they'll play against in tournaments.
- Barcodes will make observing your favourite players hard.
- If people will be able to choose when people will be allowed to observe, that'd be literally the same as Twitch, and thus redundant.
- Again, you're supposed to pay to use basic features. Baaaaaaad idea.
- Enabling in-game observing would probably take a looong while of programming.
- New observing interfaces are fine.

Game Modifications
- Caaaaaash. Ugh. Charging cash for everyting won't solve any of the problems.

Coaching
- "The level of players will increase as a whole." Except that casuals won't take any coaching because they are...well, casuals, and good players won't take coaching because they won't need it. Most pros won't coach because they need to practice themselves. Also, does the player level even matter? You're going to be matched with people of your level anyway, so why does it matter?
- Already exists, just not through SC2 itself.
- More paying.

Strategy
- Already exists on TL and the battle.net forums. Redundant.

Clans, Practice Partners, Calendar
- Fine, though partially redundant because everything already exists on TL.

Player Profile
- Same as Facebook.
- Blizzard already tried something like that with Real IDs. Guess how it turned out.
- GSL-style stats would be suicide. They were made by asking Korean journalists. Assuming we have ~150 players who are in WCS, journalists would need to make stats for those 150 nearly every week. While ~64 are managable with a slow schedule, 150 with incredibly short schedule are impossible to keep up-to-date.
- Harassing people on Facebook/IRL, ho!

In-game news
- Redundant with digg/reddit. Just having short headlines like "MVP WINS GSL SEASON 1" would be enough, people who really care for the details are already on TL/Reddit.
- Hooray for twitter spam!

Replays
-Fine.

Voice/Video Interactions
- Exactly why is it needed for tournaments/chats?
- Commentating on in-game streaming? Why not use Twitch, then?

Special Events
- Giving out points for using underused units? How would that help the meta? Underused units are underused for a reason, and new strategies take more than a week to invent for normal people. Pros wouldn't care about points. Also, the ladder would be uninteresting, with a lot of people using the same units.
- VIP rewards are useless for normal players.
- Balance Testing already happens, reddit-like feedback won't help it.
- Again, caaaaash.

Hall of Fame
- Fine.

Methods to get new players into the game
- WHY WOULD YOU WANT TO ADD ADS
- Seriously, why? Just to make money? Do you think Blizzard doesn't make enough money already? Do you think this would shed a good light on SC2? Having ads plastered all over the game? I mean, even the worst F2P games don't use ads inside their games. So why should SC2?
- Players with a Started Edition already can play some custom maps.
- Your "Starter Edition" almost includes the whole game. People wouldn't be encouraged to buy the game if they can ladder and play the most popular/best arcade maps.

Look, don't be surprised Blizzard doesn't listen if you present good ideas along with a bunch of bad ones. Or even worse, Blizzard might listen and start charging money left and right. I don't get it, do you WANT to pay more?