The state of Battle.net 2.0 - Page 4

On May 23 2010 05:45 FrozenArbiter wrote:

This is something that people have hoping for so long, but I think it's becoming increasingly clear that they just fucked up. Badly.

Really, really, really badly.

On May 23 2010 06:46 Toxi78 wrote:
Could someone tell me why they decided to make Battle.Net 2.0 ?
Having played Diablo 2 and WarCraft 3 for the past 10 years, i dont remember having seen any single person complaining about the battle.net as it is right now. Who needed Battle.Net 2.0 ? Who told them we needed facebook ingame sothat real life people know we're a nerds and internet people can stalk into our personal information ? Who told them it was better to give your e-mail to add a friend instead of doing "/f a accname" ?
Then about the lack of chat-lobby, I find it really funny not to have channels in a BETA game. First it would avoid hundreds of morons posting retarded threads on their forums when they could just ask people on the same game via channels and get to know what they wanted to. Second, at a beta stage, it could be simply good to have channels to meet people in an environment you dont know anyone in.
They lack of common sense. They are bringing marketing to a whole new level : they dont answer to their customers' requests, THEY CREATE THE NEW NEEDS. Yeah of course it's how the world goes nowadays, but you need really good ideas to make it work not achievment baby stuff or Play Co-op vs Computer modes. blizzard should stick to what they were doing best in the best : creating awesome video games. For the socialization, i think we human are the most capable people of making every place with basic features a friendly place, without having half of our personal info posted or our full game history avaible for anyone, even custom games.

ps: has anyone else noticed that you could not fucking mute a moron in you dont have him in friend list? lack of common sense, anyone?

On May 23 2010 06:13 Necrosjef wrote:


Customers don't want a platform to be used for a game in 15 years. They want a platform to be used now, immediately.

Your next point about infrastructure is the scary thing, you are right which is why it is scary. Like I said before it took them years to make battle.net 2.0, and it is quite frankly a sack of shit. How can they presume to fix something that complicated in 2 months.

As for the business point of view, your wrong. Portraits and achievements and aren't what gives you the value of the product, they are gimmicks to try and suck in people. They don't add value and they don't make money, just a shoddy way of doing business. The only reason these things are there at all is because some phaggot in a meeting thought it would be a good idea. If you were to ask anyone important such as Jinro if these things were important he would say GTFO.

On May 23 2010 06:48 Brad wrote:


Times change, you can't stick with the same tech from 12 years ago, casual players wouldn't buy it.

On May 23 2010 06:47 PokePill wrote:


I agree completely.

They are not holding anything back.

What we have right now is pretty much what we're going to have at launch. You want clans? LAN? Chat channels? Tournaments? Lower latency? Chat commands? Rankings? Buy our expansion back, we didn't have time to do that in the last 7 years.

On May 23 2010 06:52 Necrosjef wrote:


Yeah I agree with this. Its definitely a bit of fool's hope for the ones who are saying things like "it will be in release". I've been in alot of betas and what you get in beta is whats in release.

The product will be going Gold in about a month which means there won't be a lot of changes made to it after that. I reckon the product we see in beta phase 2 (if there is one) will be the finished article.

On May 23 2010 05:36 Necrosjef wrote:
Before I say anything I would like to say, yes its a beta, no one is expecting perfection, especially not me.

As a concerned consumer of Blizzard products the state of Battle.net 2.0 is beginning to worry me (I'm sure I'm not alone here either). Let me explain why.

- Time. Battle.net 2.0 was the reason that Starcraft was delayed for so long. This generated (unsurprisingly) alot of hype about Battle.net 2.0. - I mean if it takes so long to make then it must be awesome. Why am I concerned about this. If it took Blizzard so long to make something that is, quite frankly considerably worse than say regular battle.net in pretty much all ways, how long is it going to take them to make something that is actually worth using? 2 months to release, 2 years to make what we got. You do the math, doesn't look good.

- Priorities. When Battle.net 2.0 was previewed by Blizzard all those years and months ago it had alot of exciting new features. All of which have been removed or are not currently in beta. Ok fair enough, we just wanna play the game and have fun. What concerns me is that the priority for Blizzard instead of adding something like a chat room, clan system or even something trivial but still useful like a pacman game inside battle.net. Blizzard instead decided to add Facebook. I don't mean to be blunt, but who actually wanted that? Does anyone actually add gamer friends to their facebook account? I have my mom and my wife on facebook I don't want someone from halfway around the world adding them and being like "Hi I'm Robs friend from the internet". - Thats just wrong. Priorities. An analogy that Jdanzi put to me on msn actually seems appropriate to sum up this point. "What Blizzard are doing is watering the plants when the house is burning down" - The house being Battle.net 2.0.

- Features. As an engineer myself in real life one of the sayings I find myself saying far too often is "If its not broken, don't fix it". Another saying I find myself using more than I should be is "Simple products are good products". More or less if your product does what it says on the tin then thats what the consumer is paying for not anything more than that. No one gives a shit if your brand new Ford Mondeo comes with a bumper sticker, but they expect it to take you from A to B. I think Blizzard need to learn a lesson from those two sayings. Battle.net 2.0 is a medium to play Starcraft 2, no one cares about adding facebook friends or achievements or portraits or what randomly selected metal your league happens to be or making yourself feel good about being rank 4 in bronze league "omgz im rank 4 at being shit". What people want is to play Starcraft 2 against other people and to do that they need a way of communicating with them that doesn't require giving out personal information to total strangers.

These things concern me. It should concern you too. Blizzard I hope you read this and I hope you understand that as a consumer I am disappointed in your total lack of understanding your customer and your apparent total lack of forethought when implementing Battle.net 2.0. As a positive suggestion I suggest you start with Battle.net 2.0 the way it was at the start of Beta, because it was better.

On May 23 2010 06:20 ymirheim wrote:

No one has the right to complain at this point. Why don't people get it, the client running on your computer, the functionality and features available to you, the functionality of the battlenet infrastructure that is currently running is NOT the prototype running at blizzard headquarters.

This is a beta, blizzard is not using it for our pleasure or benefit they are using it because they need our help in identifying bugs and balance issues. They know what things they need this help with and they are only going to provide you with whatever functionality they actually want to get tested. Don't anyone see how ridiculous all of this is? Do you really think that the obvious stuff missing from the beta right now is missing because they are refusing to listen to fan demands?

This is a beta, this is not the game, this is whatever part of the game that blizzard needs you to test for them at any given time. The singleplayer campaign is not in the game, in fact not a shred of it is. Are people freaking out about blizzard skipping a singleplayer campaign for this game? Ofcourse not because common sense tells you that there is a campaign, it has probably been finished for some time now. It is not in the beta because blizzard does not want or need us to test it.

People make the mistake of thinking that the beta process is some kind of iterative design where the features of the game are slowly added as they get completed until the beta turns into the retail version when everything is done. That is not how a beta works. They don't add stuff to it when it gets completed, they add selected functionality.

-How do you think that the removal of LAN play will affect the game's popularity, especially in tournament situations where you can't have 50 people on one DSL connection, or less-developed areas where broadband is restricted?

The question really is, for us... I feel like broadband is available in a lot of places. Most of our users are already able to connect via broadband, and if you don't have broadband your online gaming experience is probably suffering on its own already. We're trying to create a stronger internet community, to encourage people to play on the internet, which is how it's meant to be played: With achievements, with the matchmaker, with your friends - you can see them if you're logged on wherever you are in the world.

We've found that certainly for us, StarCraft is a vastly superior experience when playing against someone of equal skill as you, and that might not be your friends. It's much, much more fun when you're being matchmade against someone with your skill level, and believe me, that's something we've been working on perfecting in StarCraft II. In the beta, we're still ironing out all the kinks but you almost always feel like you should be matched against somebody of your skill level, who can play at the level you can play at. In StarCraft, if you're playing someone who is better or worse than you, it really loses some of its teeth.

Sure, there'll always be someone who likes beating up on noobs, who likes pulling wings off butterflies, but that's not a fun experience. But by building a huge Battle.net community and bringing it together, we want to get them to play together. That was our goal from the beginning: to have everybody all on the same server, playing as one huge community.

I certainly hear the concerns about it, but it's something we're going to try and see how it goes, first.

On May 23 2010 06:52 HalfAmazing wrote:
Battle.net 2.0 is literally worse than WarCraft III's battle.net in every imaginable way. Not a troll, not hyperbole, not exagerrating in the slightest. It is worse. In every possible way. It is more cumbersome, less efficient, less transparent, more isolated, less secure (privacy concerns) and lacking in very basic functionality. If somehow you guys think that because it's a BETA it has a right to be this bad, you are delusional. This is really fucking close to the final product, and NOBODY likes it.

I'd go as far as to say that battle.net 2.0 being as crappy as it is, will actually spike an increase in piracy. Any kind of hacker-designed multiplayer service presented as an alternative to bnet 2.0 is going to provide a more enjoyable multiplayer experience.

On May 23 2010 07:00 FrozenArbiter wrote:
This isn't the fundamental support needed to create a competitive enviornment (which, incidentally, a ladder is), it's KINDERGARTEN. If you are old enough to play SC2, you are old enough to realize that there are people out there who are better than you, and if the shock of discovering this is too much for you, well, you were going to find out sooner or later, at least this way you are unlikely to get physically hurt in the process.