I cancelled my preorder as well. I really like the game, but I won’t support companies that remove options and act like you’re silly for wanting them. Especially when they’ve been standard for ages and they’re not offering a better alternative. I didn’t purchase Modern Warfare 2 for the exact same reason.
Shame when your favorite developers pull this stuff though.
wait…what? can someone elaborate on this?
Its tinfoil hat stuff, don’t sweat it.
I boycotted MW2 as well, but the changes here don’t really bother me that much. I hate the way Blizzards PR is handling the info, mostly because they try to convince you that the features they are removing are good for you to not have. Thats bullshit and we all know it.
However, LAN play was stealing a lot of money from Starcraft, because people could pirate and play over LAN without any authentication. Now I hate DRM as much as the next guy, but if being online is the only thing I have to do to play a MULTIPLAYER game, then I’m willing to accept that over other bullshit, like needing to be online for single player (they announced that you only had to phone home once for this, because I thought it was bullshit before I heard that too) or having limited installations or having securom or other crap included.
I wish LAN was implemented for tournaments and stuff, but so long as the traffic for the game stays on the network, it shouldn’t be too big of a deal. Battle.net acts like match making, and connects the players directly, then sharing one connection to authenticate the players isn’t the end of the world. If they fuck it up and route all traffic through battle.net, which they wouldn’t because its just going to mean they have to have the best servers outside of google on earth, then it would blow chunks.
Either way, I’m buying it, and the majority of you crying about not getting it will be too.
I fail to see how LAN gaming “costs Blizzard money.” This is a totally specious argument about piracy. You know what? The fact that the US Treasury, Walmart, and Microsoft don’t redirect all their income to me also costs me a lot of money in hypothetical land, but I don’t go whining about it. Corporations looking for government enforced rents shouldn’t either.
Everyone I have ever played SC or any other Blizzard game with on a LAN has owned a copy of the game in question. Maybe they didn’t have it on them that day, but they did buy it. Why? Because LAN gaming was ONE part of the Blizzard experience, which focused on Bnet, but also included LAN as a supporting feature. THE TWO COMPLEMENTED EACH OTHER.
A Blizzard fan was a LOYAL Blizzard fan. Why? Because there was a bond of trust between Blizzard providing a great experience that cared about players, and the fans paying to get in on that experience. Activision has broken that bond of trust ever since they merged with Blizzard.
You can talk about how there is no trust in the world of Capital, but that is another specious argument. Contracts don’t work because of mystical forces of the market, or because of armies of lawyers, they largely work because of TRUST. Blizzard needs to learn that trust is as important to profits as lawyers and bean counters.
I will NOT buy SC2 until Blizzard wakes up and lets the players have their freedom of assembly on bnet so they can actually create a vibrant gaming community that will both make Blizzard piles of money and make the fans happy. It’s not a big deal to implement communication technology from the mid-nineties in your new game. Bring back chat, LAN, cross-regional play, free user created maps, and clan support, and we’ll party like it’s 1999.
Husky had it down, Blizzard doesn’t need any apologists on this one.
I can see how people would be upset about no LAN. I don’t give a fuck about it myself, but I can understand it.
Chat rooms can go straight to hell though. Between D2, WC3 and SC1, I’ve had my fill of the spammers and douchebags that populated them. I don’t think I’ve seen one normal conversation on one of those things yet.
If you don’t like chat, don’t use it. It isn’t mandatory. But lots of people make good use of it. Especially for something like organizing online tournaments. The fact that you have to organize the games outside of bnet, and also share your e-mail with your opponents (though, they say this will go away), is a major turn off. Not to mention that you can only play with folks in your region so international gatherings are out.
And all of their decisions concerning bnet, despite whatever reasonings they’re offering, do nothing to promote community. They’ll likely sell a lot of copies of the game no matter what they do, but without a strong community it probably won’t have the longevity that their former titles have had if they stick to this.
If they had cut one of these features, I probably would have kept my preorder. I already don’t like the 3 game split, but I can deal with it. But knocking out Chat, LAN, and Cross-Region support in one fell swoop was too much.
People are willing to bend over and take anything up the ass these days. I didn’t buy Modern Warfare 2, Assassins Creed 2 and Splinter Cell Conviction for similar reasons.
All of those games utilized intrusive DRM that is nothing but a hassle for the paying customer. And on top of that, they all launched at $59.99. I’m not going to pay more to be inconvenienced or for “consolized” features.
It’s not 1998 anymore. People have options. That includes Starcraft 1. And the next developer that’s given the opportunity to capitalize on Blizzard’s…erm…Activision’s greed. There have been some really good, competitive non-Blizzard RTS released in the past 10 years (e.g. Rise of Nations/Legends) that lacked the financial backing to get going. If Blizzard slips up, the same things that happen to Medal of Honor and NFL 2K could happen; they could go from relevant to irrelevant real fast. I’m not crazy, I know that’s unlikely. But a split community is.
It’s not like I was hoping they’d remove it, I just don’t care that it’s gone. I was playing the beta for a month before I even realized that it wasn’t there, and even then, only because I heard other people talking about it.
I think thats the thing, theres a very small subset of people who would use the chat for anything productive. I think its silly that they removed it, considering its not that hard to implement, but maybe they’re worried about server strain. I don’t know, to me it doesn’t make sense for the chat to be removed, even as pointless as it is.
You have joined Battle.net west-23
XXXRandomGamerXXX: Zerg is too strong! FUCKING IMBA
sephiroth007: Anybody play the latest Final Fantasy?
MyLifeForAuir: I HATE BLACK PEOPLE
Yeah, definitely not missing that chat room. Will hurt a bit organizing tournaments, but with all the good external software and websites out there for making and running brackets, I doubt it’ll be missed that much.
Lan play really ended up hurting blizzard at a lot of pc cafes and such, where people could pirate the game and play all day. Again, if all thats required is a quick authentication online, and matchmaking, then all network traffic stays on the LAN, whats the big problem? It stops external leagues from operating, which is bad for those competitive ladders, but again those competitive ladders allowed people to compete without ever purchasing the game. It was always run in a gray area and nobody should be surprised to see it shut down, as much as it sucks.
Cross Region play, yeah thats just straight up bullshit. I think its more of a side effect of the change to users having a single account. In BW, you could make infinite accounts, and whatever serial number was on the installtion you were using was your unique identifier. With SC2, your cdkey is attached to your Battle.net account, so your local installation has no cd key info stored at all. This means when you log into the gateway, unless your account information is stored locally on that server, they aren’t able to verify you. I think really, this is a technical hurdle that they don’t have time to implement, and I fully expect blizzard to fix this within 6 months of release, especially if the players stay vocal.
Also, I really hope somebody does come along and create a really good RTS that can rival SC, competition is always good. Unfortunately, nobody can come close to what Blizzard has achieved, so we get an experience that is only 80% as good as it should be. Fortunately, that 80% is still better than anything else you’re going to get, so I’m going to enjoy it.
I can’t take you seriously when you don’t have the Shang Tsung avatar =/. What happened to it?
Those were just public chat rooms. The way they were more typically used was people would make a private chat based on their clan, or matchmaking, or for tryouts, or whatever. There wasn’t tons of spam and bots like in public channels. The way it worked was that, when you logged on, you had a couple haunts. Chat rooms that were always up, and good players were in them, and you guys would have matches or try out team builds or whatever. Because people could invite friends or good players they came across to the channel, the channels grew and became more social, and more competitive, and so on. Sort of like an arcade versus online play in fighters. Sure, you can always just play some random online and cross your fingers it’ll be a good game, but it often isn’t, and you don’t really get to know any of these folks. It doesn’t promote community. I understand that a lot of people don’t want to get involved in this way, or don’t care enough to want that style of competition, but they can just use random matchmaking. For the folks that play this as their main game, which lots do, no chat hurts it.
And with LAN and piracy, I don’t think it holds up. RTS games aren’t casual. They are in no way pick-up-and-play (they arguably have the steepest learning curve of any genre), and anyone coming to LAN games plays regularly from what I’ve seen. And I guess it’s possible that they’d pirate a home copy and just practice against the AI, but I’ve never run into it. Maybe it’s more common in Korea or China. But even if that’s the case, these people aren’t going to buy the game anyway. Why revolve anything around them? So the guy who doesn’t own the game and doesn’t practice might buy a copy to be in a LAN tournament? Doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.
I’m not real happy about seeing all these companies go the Apple route, where charging more and taking away options are not only common, but they act like these things are good for you. They always call it “streamlining the experience”, which is a more positive way of saying: “We’re dumbing it down for you and making it easier for us. People will buy our shit anyway, as it’s got a lot of buzz and that’s what sells.” And it’s true. They’ll sell a lot of copies no matter what they do. But if they make it tough to be a competitive game it will hurt them in the long run, more so than piracy ever would.
As for myself, I’m not so hard up for a new game that I’ll buy things even when I don’t like them, or in this case, how they’re being implemented. If they fix these things, I’ll gladly buy the game. It’s really good. But I’m not gonna buy it first and then cross my fingers.
Just wanted to add I just finished listening to Huskys State of B.net video, and pretty much just echos what most people are feeling right now. Still not enough to drive me away from the game, it’s too much fun for whats there to boycott even with the faults it currently has.
Actually, what happens is people pirate the game, then play emulated servers like iccup and hamachi that use the LAN connection of the game to play games online, emulating the game taking place on the lan. If you remove the lan support, you remove this problem and force everyone who wants to play the game to own a legit copy. I don’t have a problem with this. I haven’t seen anybody whos done any lag tests via setting up computers on a local network, and sharing a single internet connection and playing. The logical thing would be for all the game traffic to go directly between the clients, which means it never leaves the lan anyway outside of authenticating the users. If for some reason the traffic does leave the lan and route through battle.net, thats a huge flaw in their networking code.
As for the rest of the stuff you said, I agree, but like I said its not enough to put me off of buying the game. Missing chat channels doesn’t prevent people from friending good players and getting matches with them in, or friending people they meet on message boards, and I pretty much expect chat to be implemented pretty early in the games online life. If they don’t, I still have the best RTS on the market. If they do, it’s icing on the cake.
Wrong. People pirate it, crack it, and mod it and still people play it without the need of the official BNET. The non-legit version was out like a week after Blizzard started their closed beta for it and according to the dude that had all of the SC2 and BNET 2.0 code on his laptop, a lot of stuff was almost the same so he had LAN support added already the next day I saw him. Forgot to mention that his version of SC2 also allows you to set a default channel before logging on and has access to private channels and advanced guild functionality. Blizzard was amazing when SC and D2 were new games, but in this time period they’re a joke.
What Blizzard is doing isn’t preventing piracy, it’s encouraging it.
This is like DRM Spore that forced almost everyone to not buy it and download the cracked version instead.
I don’t think whats happening with SC2 is anywhere on the level of Spore DRM. Theres no limited installs; in fact, when you register the key to your name, you can download the client whenever you want wherever you want from battle.net. Thats the complete opposite of what happened with Spore DRM.
Their only DRM is forcing you to be online when you want to play the multiplayer version. Thats a small price to pay, better than Securom and Limited Installs and all the other crap that plagues the PC industry.
I was aware there was a single player hack for SC2, I hadn’t heard anybody had made a Multiplayer hacked version, but it’s not super surprising that somebody would be able to reverse engineer the server for battle.net. At the same time, I’m glad their focusing their time and efforts onto getting the game top notch and performance issues solved, rather than adding in the stuff that is less important (chat, guilds, etc) that they want to implement
LOL @ the fake DotA
[media=youtube]yTf5666mhro[/media]
Now ***that ***was effing awesome. LOL, oh how amazing you are SCII editor. HAH!
~K.
I’m still getting the game regardless…mainly for the singleplayer campaigns. I really enjoyed the story.
I never really played much online, and the people I did play OG SC with have moved on in life.
hahaha, thats fucking golden, good use of intro movies
Like I said before, the problem for blizzard won’t be sales, but player longevity. Will they still have the same level of longevity success with II as they did I? The short answer in today’s gaming world is a resounding NO! Gamers are as fickle as they come, and if you can’t secure gamers with the basics, then it’s just a matter of time before a developer with sense will capture their attention for the next 3 mos.
I’m hoping that Blizzard will continue to be as successful as ever, but they are rubbing me the wrong way after being “acquired” by Activision. There’s a lot of emphasis on micro-transactions and less on gamer interactivity with each other post gameplay. Are they forgetting that people love to hang out online with their friends/people with similar interests? Starcraft and Diablo (and many games for that matter) offer more than just gameplay. They offered a means to socialize with your ilk…