This patch 1.5 debacle has really gone too far. I mean it's basically completely unacceptable for there to be THIS many issues. One of the biggest and most problematic issues is that custom games can bug to previous patch versions if you join existing lobbies. There are a huge host of other problems that are causing tons of issues everywhere from language support to gameplay/pathing issues. thread listing all the issues from this patch)
I hope the community is outraged at this level of complete inept shown by Blizzard.
It's almost as if the patch wasn't even fully functionally tested before being released. I work in software development and when you code some new software or deliver some new code that could effect the entire software application it's an absolute 100% requirement that you fully regression test everything. Extensively. Does Blizzard not have enough people testing this stuff? It took almost no time for over 40 bugs to surface, some of them being major issues with gameplay, (be it unit pathing, unit behavior changes or custom games reverting to previous patch code) These are code issues not just data issues. Small issues with menus not working right or ladder points bugging out are one thing, but when your game is an esport with ASUS ROG a mere 4 hours away, core fundamental game bugs and issues not worked out is a ridiculous quality control failure on all fronts and quite frankly totally unacceptable and should never happen.
The 1.5 patch changed the entire sc2 application code, consolidating .mpq's and other data files (I don't know too much technically behind the coding of sc2 in terms of languages used, compliers and engine) but I know the patch changed a bunch of core overall components of the game that effect EVERY game at all times (Fog of war vision changes, unit pathing enhancments, game interface/overlay updates are the noticeable front end changes) Why Blizzard wouldn't be super cautious with a release like this boggles my mind. The custom map issue is amazingly bad. A map could be hosted and then 4 minutes into the game when a queen hits that scouting scv with its pathetically weak and underpowered 3range attack everyone will go WTF. Imagine that happening during ASUS ROG...
Blizzard staff goes in front of cameras and says everything we want to hear and looks all great and that they're working so hard at delivering a quality product...This is not a quality patch in the least. In order for this game to grow and be the foundation, the pillar of RTS esports as they claim they should be striving for a level of excellence higher than this. Starting with delivery of software, application support and general due diligence should be minimum requirements. We should have true LAN support as well for events like this, to help prevent complete meltdowns with battle.net which tends to cause quite a bit of issues at times. I love Blizzard and all of their games, but they need to do much better than this. Too much is at stake to simply rush a patch filled with this many bugs thinking it'll do any good. This is more than just a game, its an esport with people traveling the globe to compete in events. For an event to potentially be in jeopardy over some quality control issues is totally unacceptable and the community should have none of it.
Not only is it buggy, but the 'UI' improvements only focused on the custom game community./
Which is GREAT, fuck yeah! They realize that a huge portion of the population in WC3 and SC1 moved to custom games and to increase the longevity of SC2 they need to cater to them.
But the way they changed navigation, a competitive player has to spend a stupid amount of time to look at a profile, and those changes did not address any demand the community had (i.e. having more statistics on the profile.)
Game may as well be made by activision. I don't really see any point in playing sc2 anymore if blizzards themselves are putting this little effort into their game. Hots will be trash and so will void. Thanks for ruining starcraft.
If they didnt have enough people working for them, they could've just taken more time. Nobody forced them to release the patch before this weekend. I agree, unacceptable sloppiness.
Unless there's a complete 180 which's waves shake the forum, I'm done with actiblizz games. :'(
I can't help but imagining an AED (electrical shock machine that hopefully revives people whose hearts stopped) being put on somebody who went unconscious. Except then it doesn't work. The paramedic looks up, smiles, makes two finger guns at the guy's family and goes "you just got 1.5'd"
it's like we're the newly adoptive family, sc is our baby, and acti-blizz are the paramedics.
On August 02 2012 16:28 endy wrote: I guess that you're still going to buy HotS, so they probably don't care.
I'm not. The shit I've dealt with in WoL is the last shit I'm paying money for. I might watch tournament streams on occasion, and might go back to WoL, but I'm not buying HotS.
On August 02 2012 16:28 endy wrote: I guess that you're still going to buy HotS, so they probably don't care.
no. the wallet vote is the only vote.
Oh I know, that's the main reason I didn't even purchase SC2. But I'm sure Luckyfool will. Millions of RTS fans will too, because there are literally no other decent RTS on the market. I simply meant that Blizzard was abusing their monopoly position.
here is their response to the mod question, here is blizz's response. seems reasonable to me.
yeah the custom game bugs are pretty crazy, but i wonder if those bugs existed in the arcade beta. the main point of that beta was to avoid clusterfucks like this and i didn't see anyone complaining about patching bugs while the beta was still up.
I would be willing to accept these kinds of problems from a smaller game company but come on. Blizzard is making millions upon millions of dollars. They do have the budget and the manpower to sort these things out. Especially since they ran this patch for a long time in the PTR.
They did test. For months. The arcade beta had been open since at least march. Some things happen that you cant account for. So much QQ in here I had to check that I didnt stumble into a Diablo 3 forum by mistake.
On August 02 2012 16:57 eviltomahawk wrote: Whatever happened to all the feedback that they were supposed to get from the 1.5 beta? Did people even post much feedback at all?
most of that feedback was congratulations on certian things they added or another list of features peopel demanded. none of the people really searched and tested for bugs.
When I installed the arcade beta, I also experienced that "let's play with 1 supply roaches" bug. I reported the bug, and I'm sure that I'm not the only one who did so. GJ Blizzard.
On August 02 2012 17:38 jcroisdale wrote: Im happy that this failed as hard as it did, because they never ever will let something like this happen again.
It's a damn shame. It really is. I just hope that this doesn't ruin ASUS ROG. 1 Supply Roaches would break the game, especially ZvP (imagine how much scarier the maxed roach attack would be for Protoss)
I don't know what did Blizzard this day. the release of Diablo III was .... you know i thing how it was and know we have a patch in beta since 2 month with more Bugs than fixes. What do you do Blizzard ?
I noticed something changed back there with blizzard around TBC WoW expansion. This feeling was only deepened further by SC2 and even more by Diablo3, im not gonna buy next title from blizzard. I will keep watching SC2 to see how the competition rise. Competetion can cast away certain bad values of a product because it seeks advantages in other aspects however im to old for this, to be competetive again.
What people don't seem to understand is that it's not as simple as "it works here, therefore it will work there." It's something they've remarked on in WoW and SC2 before. Applying a patch to the live servers is a lot different than creating a patched PTR. They could have 1,000,000 of the finest QA employees on call 24/7, but it wouldn't make a difference come patch day.
The bugs and errors did not exist on the PTR, but they do exist on the live servers. Why is that? Something went wrong when they were applying the patch. You can't test the quality of patching, only what is to be patched. When you're doing such a massive overhaul, yes, sometimes these things can happen. The patch was fine. The patching was not. I'm sure they'd be open to highly technical suggestions on how to prevent this from happening in the future. Hell, they'd employ you if you fixed this issue.
On August 02 2012 18:13 Chargelot wrote: What people don't seem to understand is that it's not as simple as "it works here, therefore it will work there." It's something they've remarked on in WoW and SC2 before. Applying a patch to the live servers is a lot different than creating a patched PTR. They could have 1,000,000 of the finest QA employees on call 24/7, but it wouldn't make a difference come patch day.
The bugs and errors did not exist on the PTR, but they do exist on the live servers. Why is that? Something went wrong when they were applying the patch. You can't test the quality of patching, only what is to be patched. When you're doing such a massive overhaul, yes, sometimes these things can happen. The patch was fine. The patching was not. I'm sure they'd be open to highly technical suggestions on how to prevent this from happening in the future. Hell, they'd employ you if you fixed this issue.
That's pure specualtion on your end. There's nothing to indicate that it is the patching process that messed things up. In fact, this seems highly unlikely given the nature of some bugs and the fact that they were reported during the beta already.
Since the PTR is a direct copy of the live environment, patches and the application thereof can be tested quite effectively. In a well-designed development system, the testing environment is a perfect replica of the live environment.
I do wonder tho, Did any of the peopel QQing hard over this patch actually test the beta and give full feedback to blizzard? Or are you people who just jump on it now thats it out into your actual game. And to be fair it doesnt take ages to look through a profile and find out the league of people unless youre totally emptied for braincells of course. Use common logic and its not that hard to figure out.
On August 02 2012 18:21 rockshock wrote: I do wonder tho, Did any of the peopel QQing hard over this patch actually test the beta and give full feedback to blizzard? Or are you people who just jump on it now thats it out into your actual game. And to be fair it doesnt take ages to look through a profile and find out the league of people unless youre totally emptied for braincells of course. Use common logic and its not that hard to figure out.
Its not the job of the players to test the beta and give feedback to blizzard? Blizzard uses the beta to get it's product tested and if it isnt voluntarily tested they have to find another way.
On August 02 2012 18:21 rockshock wrote: I do wonder tho, Did any of the peopel QQing hard over this patch actually test the beta and give full feedback to blizzard? Or are you people who just jump on it now thats it out into your actual game. And to be fair it doesnt take ages to look through a profile and find out the league of people unless youre totally emptied for braincells of course. Use common logic and its not that hard to figure out.
Its not the job of the players to test the beta and give feedback to blizzard? Blizzard uses the beta to get it's product tested and if it isnt voluntarily tested they have to find another way.
Theres a public PTR for a reason. Of course its upto the community to test the patch. I dont see how the community got any right to whine and cry about stuff not working when theres been a beta for it for ages. And theres no way blizzard got the means to fully test it on theyr own. Thats why we got a public PTR in the first place.
On August 02 2012 18:13 Chargelot wrote: What people don't seem to understand is that it's not as simple as "it works here, therefore it will work there." It's something they've remarked on in WoW and SC2 before. Applying a patch to the live servers is a lot different than creating a patched PTR. They could have 1,000,000 of the finest QA employees on call 24/7, but it wouldn't make a difference come patch day.
The bugs and errors did not exist on the PTR, but they do exist on the live servers. Why is that? Something went wrong when they were applying the patch. You can't test the quality of patching, only what is to be patched. When you're doing such a massive overhaul, yes, sometimes these things can happen. The patch was fine. The patching was not. I'm sure they'd be open to highly technical suggestions on how to prevent this from happening in the future. Hell, they'd employ you if you fixed this issue.
What I still do not understand is WHY they would not cancel the introduction of 1.5 to other regions when shit went wrong on SEA. It's pretty much a downgrade for me, can't say otherwise.
On August 02 2012 18:13 Chargelot wrote: What people don't seem to understand is that it's not as simple as "it works here, therefore it will work there." It's something they've remarked on in WoW and SC2 before. Applying a patch to the live servers is a lot different than creating a patched PTR. They could have 1,000,000 of the finest QA employees on call 24/7, but it wouldn't make a difference come patch day.
The bugs and errors did not exist on the PTR, but they do exist on the live servers. Why is that? Something went wrong when they were applying the patch. You can't test the quality of patching, only what is to be patched. When you're doing such a massive overhaul, yes, sometimes these things can happen. The patch was fine. The patching was not. I'm sure they'd be open to highly technical suggestions on how to prevent this from happening in the future. Hell, they'd employ you if you fixed this issue.
This.
We don't have any insight into the Blizzard release process and assuming they don't test their stuff thoroughly before releasing is, well, stupid. Anyone with real experience in software development (not just "I wrote a website") knows that releasing anything will lead to problems, even if you send it 20 times through QA and have every single line of code covered by a dozen Unit Tests.
Game Development is a very, very complex topic and such problems happen sooner or later, it's just a matter of how fast they are with fixing it.
On August 02 2012 18:13 Chargelot wrote: What people don't seem to understand is that it's not as simple as "it works here, therefore it will work there." It's something they've remarked on in WoW and SC2 before. Applying a patch to the live servers is a lot different than creating a patched PTR. They could have 1,000,000 of the finest QA employees on call 24/7, but it wouldn't make a difference come patch day.
The bugs and errors did not exist on the PTR, but they do exist on the live servers. Why is that? Something went wrong when they were applying the patch. You can't test the quality of patching, only what is to be patched. When you're doing such a massive overhaul, yes, sometimes these things can happen. The patch was fine. The patching was not. I'm sure they'd be open to highly technical suggestions on how to prevent this from happening in the future. Hell, they'd employ you if you fixed this issue.
What I still do not understand is WHY they would not cancel the introduction of 1.5 to other regions when shit went wrong on SEA. It's pretty much a downgrade for me, can't say otherwise.
I've seen varying degrees of shit that went wrong on different servers. Playing on EU I haven't encountered any of the major bugs anyone else has on NA or SEA. But it does make me wonder if they are delaying the KR patch because of this.
On August 02 2012 18:21 rockshock wrote: I do wonder tho, Did any of the peopel QQing hard over this patch actually test the beta and give full feedback to blizzard? Or are you people who just jump on it now thats it out into your actual game. And to be fair it doesnt take ages to look through a profile and find out the league of people unless youre totally emptied for braincells of course. Use common logic and its not that hard to figure out.
Its not the job of the players to test the beta and give feedback to blizzard? Blizzard uses the beta to get it's product tested and if it isnt voluntarily tested they have to find another way.
Theres a public PTR for a reason. Of course its upto the community to test the patch. I dont see how the community got any right to whine and cry about stuff not working when theres been a beta for it for ages. And theres no way blizzard got the means to fully test it on theyr own. Thats why we got a public PTR in the first place.
Blizzard sells a product. We are the customers. We expect the product to work. Blizzard should make the product work. Blizzard finds a way to make customers participate voluntarily in making the product work. Customers aren't doing a good enough job in making the product work. It is the customers fault that the product they bought doesnt work. The customers has no right to complain that the product doesnt work.
On August 02 2012 18:21 rockshock wrote: I do wonder tho, Did any of the peopel QQing hard over this patch actually test the beta and give full feedback to blizzard? Or are you people who just jump on it now thats it out into your actual game. And to be fair it doesnt take ages to look through a profile and find out the league of people unless youre totally emptied for braincells of course. Use common logic and its not that hard to figure out.
Its not the job of the players to test the beta and give feedback to blizzard? Blizzard uses the beta to get it's product tested and if it isnt voluntarily tested they have to find another way.
Theres a public PTR for a reason. Of course its upto the community to test the patch. I dont see how the community got any right to whine and cry about stuff not working when theres been a beta for it for ages. And theres no way blizzard got the means to fully test it on theyr own. Thats why we got a public PTR in the first place.
Your reasoning is disgusting.
If blizzard is incapable of testing the patch it gives them NO RIGHT to implement the patch live and test it there. In fact it should prohibit them from applying the patch.
On August 02 2012 16:28 endy wrote: I guess that you're still going to buy HotS, so they probably don't care.
no. the wallet vote is the only vote.
Oh I know, that's the main reason I didn't even purchase SC2. But I'm sure Luckyfool will. Millions of RTS fans will too, because there are literally no other decent RTS on the market. I simply meant that Blizzard was abusing their monopoly position.
^This. Blizzard knows that it is the only company with a quality RTS and because of this they think they can bend our patience and tolerence every which way without any consequences. I've been in love with Starcraft since Vanilla but things are starting to get riduculus...
On August 02 2012 16:28 endy wrote: I guess that you're still going to buy HotS, so they probably don't care.
no. the wallet vote is the only vote.
Oh I know, that's the main reason I didn't even purchase SC2. But I'm sure Luckyfool will. Millions of RTS fans will too, because there are literally no other decent RTS on the market. I simply meant that Blizzard was abusing their monopoly position.
^This. Blizzard knows that it is the only company with a quality RTS and because of this they think they can bend our patience and tolerence every which way without any consequences. I've been in love with Starcraft since Vanilla but things are starting to get riduculus...
You're applying malign intent to what was essentially a freak accident. There are many FPS console games out there that will never be patched, if you'd rather play a game that will never experience post-patch bugs, I highly recommend you check them out.
On August 02 2012 17:03 IceBurg wrote: They did test. For months. The arcade beta had been open since at least march. Some things happen that you cant account for. So much QQ in here I had to check that I didnt stumble into a Diablo 3 forum by mistake.
You can definitely account for breaking the game. I really want to know what happened between the 1.5 beta and pushing it to live, because the beta certainly didn't break the game like this.
On August 02 2012 18:30 Morfildur wrote: Anyone with real experience in software development (not just "I wrote a website") knows that releasing anything will lead to problems, even if you send it 20 times through QA and have every single line of code covered by a dozen Unit Tests.
Game Development is a very, very complex topic and such problems happen sooner or later, it's just a matter of how fast they are with fixing it.
Actually, this is incorrect. With appropriate testing to a very high standard, you can eliminate the vast majority of problems. This testing, though, is expensive and takes a lot of time, and does not normally apply outside of regulated software development. As an example, I would not expect CCP, Blizzard, Bioware, or another game company to invest that much time and money into testing on a game. As someone that formerly worked for a company that did nothing but software testing and QA for regulated applications (primarily avionics and medical devices), I can assure you that these programs are held to a very high standard by regulatory agencies and that thousands of man hours are spent in code review, simulation testing, hardware/software interaction testing, and run into the ground so that possible bugs and error conditions are handled without crashing the system or having it behave in an irrational manner. (Would really suck if an Airbus 380 or Boeing 777 had a "blue screen" on takeoff or approach, or if the Instrument Landing System were to suddenly forget where it was.)
Wings of Liberty is (obviously) not on the same level as "critical life support software", but it is slightly above the average console or computer game as it is the basis for a pretty good segment of a multimillion dollar industry. I'm not sure how it would work out (legally speaking) if during ASUS ROG we saw a 1 supply roach max vs a Kaldarin amulet templar army. (I think it'd be hilarious, but it's not my money riding on the line.)
I do agree with you, though, that the really important thing is how Blizzard fixes this, and how fast they do it. That more than anything will affect how people view the company. (For comparison, look at the SOE mess around SWG (or, as I call it, Smed is a bastard and I will never purchase their products again) and how CCP handled the community rage over the Incarna expansion for EVE (aka, Soundwave is a troll).
On August 02 2012 18:21 rockshock wrote: I do wonder tho, Did any of the peopel QQing hard over this patch actually test the beta and give full feedback to blizzard? Or are you people who just jump on it now thats it out into your actual game. And to be fair it doesnt take ages to look through a profile and find out the league of people unless youre totally emptied for braincells of course. Use common logic and its not that hard to figure out.
Its not the job of the players to test the beta and give feedback to blizzard? Blizzard uses the beta to get it's product tested and if it isnt voluntarily tested they have to find another way.
Theres a public PTR for a reason. Of course its upto the community to test the patch. I dont see how the community got any right to whine and cry about stuff not working when theres been a beta for it for ages. And theres no way blizzard got the means to fully test it on theyr own. Thats why we got a public PTR in the first place.
Your reasoning is disgusting.
If blizzard is incapable of testing the patch it gives them NO RIGHT to implement the patch live and test it there. In fact it should prohibit them from applying the patch.
Um.. actually they're well within their rights to release a buggy patch. Or a bad patch. They could completely destroy the balance of the game, throw their hands up in the air and say "WAIT UNTIL HotS WE'LL FIX IT THEN LOL ROFL SUCKER" and that'd be that. There's no consumer protection against them making mistakes that cost you nothing or devalue your purchase that I'm aware of.
Blizzard's patch record is pretty bad. Remember patch 1.16? Many simply stayed on 1.15.3, and everybody else hacked their game so it didn't suck that much. Or the ladder features around 1.14? Delayed forever, then released broken, poor WGT. Solution: Custom server + old version, then it doesn't matter how much blizzard fucks up their patches.
On August 02 2012 18:30 Morfildur wrote: Anyone with real experience in software development (not just "I wrote a website") knows that releasing anything will lead to problems, even if you send it 20 times through QA and have every single line of code covered by a dozen Unit Tests.
Game Development is a very, very complex topic and such problems happen sooner or later, it's just a matter of how fast they are with fixing it.
Actually, this is incorrect. With appropriate testing to a very high standard, you can eliminate the vast majority of problems. This testing, though, is expensive and takes a lot of time, and does not normally apply outside of regulated software development. As an example, I would not expect CCP, Blizzard, Bioware, or another game company to invest that much time and money into testing on a game. As someone that formerly worked for a company that did nothing but software testing and QA for regulated applications (primarily avionics and medical devices), I can assure you that these programs are held to a very high standard by regulatory agencies and that thousands of man hours are spent in code review, simulation testing, hardware/software interaction testing, and run into the ground so that possible bugs and error conditions are handled without crashing the system or having it behave in an irrational manner. (Would really suck if an Airbus 380 or Boeing 777 had a "blue screen" on takeoff or approach, or if the Instrument Landing System were to suddenly forget where it was.)
Wings of Liberty is (obviously) not on the same level as "critical life support software", but it is slightly above the average console or computer game as it is the basis for a pretty good segment of a multimillion dollar industry. I'm not sure how it would work out (legally speaking) if during ASUS ROG we saw a 1 supply roach max vs a Kaldarin amulet templar army. (I think it'd be hilarious, but it's not my money riding on the line.)
I do agree with you, though, that the really important thing is how Blizzard fixes this, and how fast they do it. That more than anything will affect how people view the company. (For comparison, look at the SOE mess around SWG (or, as I call it, Smed is a bastard and I will never purchase their products again) and how CCP handled the community rage over the Incarna expansion for EVE (aka, Soundwave is a troll).
While i mostly agree with you there are some factors to consider: The difference to avionics and medical applications is that those run on a defined hardware, have a very limited scope and the interfacing with other parts of the system is very strictly defined.
As an example, there is no situation like: User clicks on 'Find Match' but before the Server returns the response, the user clicks on something else which means the asynchronous request requires a different callback but it can't be used yet since the other request is still pending, which means we either need a new thread or we have to delay the User until the first one finishes, making the UI feel slower and making the User create 'Battle.Net UI is too slow' posts. I myself had several situations where i was too fast for the battle.net UI and got into a deadlock preventing me from joining custom games until i relogged because i clicked a button before the system was ready since my internet was faster than my PC, making it show the custom games list before the cached mapdata was loaded from the slow harddrive.
In a heavily client/server oriented UI there is a lot of asynchronous stuff going on, which is by nature extremely hard if not almost impossible to perfectly debug - especially considering that different hardware and operating systems schedule the threads differently and different internet connections lead to threads taking longer for different sections of the code. If their QA systems all have ok internet connections (i.e. usual corporate internet) they can miss problems that appear on very unreliable connections that have occasional spikes or suffer from package loss like some WLAN connections through 3 stone walls that some people use at home.
Sure, with proper programming you can avoid 95% of those problems but you can never completely get rid of them in a program of that scope if you still want to have a very responsive UI and short release cycles.
I agree, this is too extreme and completely unacceptable.
I can't for the life of me understand how this patch could go through with so many bugs. Quite a few of them are dangerous too - could easily mess up some "real" games. I hope Blizzard in the future tests their patches better - we can't have a repeat of this.
Every game has this problem, especially when the beta test is carried out by only a few thousand people. Hardly anyone who actually plays SC2 will have spent any major time on the beta test since they will have been playing the actual game. Of those who did participate in the beta, many were probably just messing around and not actually testing things out.
Once the patch is released, hundreds of thousands of people are using it and then more bugs will arise..... its a quantity issue. This was a major overhaul of the entire game and its backbone, the same thing happens in WoW and just about every other game out there when a major patch hits. They test and test and test but simply don't have the numbers of people testing to ever find all the bugs.
Granted some of the bugs probably happened when applying the patch to the live servers but they can't know what bugs are going to arise until after the fact. The mark of a good company is what they do once the bugs are found, if blizz doesn't fix them for a month or two when they suck, but if every other blizz game is anything to go by, hotfixes will be out within the next few hours and days.
Stop moaning about things that are actually out of Blizzards hands. No one can predict what bugs or glitches or problems may arise once a patch goes live. They will be fixed. Stop being bitchy little children and join the rest of us in the real world please. The bugs have been reported, blizz will fix them, life will go on.
I can't imagine people being so bitter as to stage a boycott of the game because of two days of some bugs in a patch that will quickly be fixed. It's so weird, instead of asking yourself whether Blizzard deserves your money, why not ask yourself whether Heart of the Swarm will be worth your money without starving yourself from a game you'd enjoy for spiteful reasons.
Obviously, there were too many bugs and it's not acceptable, but still...
I'm also a professional software dev, and I've been responsible for introducing unit and functional testing into the QA process at the company I work for, so I know a bit about this. I am absolutely certain that a lot of the bugs we're seeing, like the optimizer's inability to handle insufficient hard drive space, could and should have been covered by a test (automated or in a human test protocol). The errors in the process that generates the balance ruleset for a newly created game also seem like they should have obviously been covered by an automated test to me: There are a limited number of ways to open a new game, you loop through all of them and compare a hash of the data comprising the ruleset in the generated game to a hash of the expected ruleset.
Other stuff, like the weird pathing in certain situations, is basically impossible to write tests for in advance, since before you know which paths produce errors, you'd basically need a working pathing algorithm to generate the data against which you're comparing your results, and I'd imagine that the edge conditions for a pathing algorithm are incredibly complex. I would bet that there were dozens of special cases that the new pathing algorithm handled incorrectly, and we're seeing the one or two that slipped through QA.
My takeaway from this is that there is a mix of forgivable bugs of the sort that we should be prepared to accept in exchange for the advantages of having a game that is actively maintained and patched by its developers, and other bugs that should never, ever show up in professional code.
On August 02 2012 18:13 Chargelot wrote: What people don't seem to understand is that it's not as simple as "it works here, therefore it will work there." It's something they've remarked on in WoW and SC2 before. Applying a patch to the live servers is a lot different than creating a patched PTR. They could have 1,000,000 of the finest QA employees on call 24/7, but it wouldn't make a difference come patch day.
The bugs and errors did not exist on the PTR, but they do exist on the live servers. Why is that? Something went wrong when they were applying the patch. You can't test the quality of patching, only what is to be patched. When you're doing such a massive overhaul, yes, sometimes these things can happen. The patch was fine. The patching was not. I'm sure they'd be open to highly technical suggestions on how to prevent this from happening in the future. Hell, they'd employ you if you fixed this issue.
This.
We don't have any insight into the Blizzard release process and assuming they don't test their stuff thoroughly before releasing is, well, stupid. Anyone with real experience in software development (not just "I wrote a website") knows that releasing anything will lead to problems, even if you send it 20 times through QA and have every single line of code covered by a dozen Unit Tests.
Game Development is a very, very complex topic and such problems happen sooner or later, it's just a matter of how fast they are with fixing it.
I have no idea how Blizzard release management works but is it not safe to assume it's not good after such a terrible release? I agree with you that there are always bugs and problems with new code, it's part of the business. Shouldn't part of your development process allow for adequate testing? If you can't sufficiently test and verify all changes are working properly, maybe the scope of the patch was too large in one shot which is still a quality control issue.
On August 02 2012 19:17 MasterOfChaos wrote: Blizzard's patch record is pretty bad. Remember patch 1.16? Many simply stayed on 1.15.3, and everybody else hacked their game so it didn't suck that much. Or the ladder features around 1.14? Delayed forever, then released broken, poor WGT. Solution: Custom server + old version, then it doesn't matter how much blizzard fucks up their patches.
Yeah but by that point it was clear they had like one intern working on bw. This is the big patch leading up to the expansion of HotS, and it's terrible. The ui improvements are more like yet another round of lateral movements where they just change things but don't really improve anything, on top of all the buggy shit. It's embarrassing.
I just have no faith in this company to produce anything of quality any more
Makes me chuckle (in a cynical, frustrated way) that most people here will just go straight back to using the game however broken it is, and paying Blizzard money for HOTS. Even the people who say they won't.
On August 02 2012 19:17 MasterOfChaos wrote: Blizzard's patch record is pretty bad. Remember patch 1.16? Many simply stayed on 1.15.3, and everybody else hacked their game so it didn't suck that much. Or the ladder features around 1.14? Delayed forever, then released broken, poor WGT. Solution: Custom server + old version, then it doesn't matter how much blizzard fucks up their patches.
Yeah but by that point it was clear they had like one intern working on bw. This is the big patch leading up to the expansion of HotS, and it's terrible. The ui improvements are more like yet another round of lateral movements where they just change things but don't really improve anything, on top of all the buggy shit. It's embarrassing.
I just have no faith in this company to produce anything of quality any more
What makes you think there's more than 1 intern working on WoL? XD
SC2 is clearly quite low on Blizzard, and particularly, Activision's priority list. No one should be surprised they messed up like this.
I haven't checked out the new patch myself just yet... And given all the discussions going on at the moment, I don't plan to. Pretty terrible attempt at an update by pretty much all reports.
wow gat a life and stop being angry at a computer game developers, especially with such one sided view on the matter without any kind of insights to understand why it went live with so many bugs.
On August 03 2012 00:31 Asmodeusx wrote: wow gat a life and stop being angry at a computer game developers, especially with such one sided view on the matter without any kind of insights to understand why it went live with so many bugs.
I honestly don't know how the people at Blizzard aren't super embarrassed every time a tournament stalls because of Internet problems when they could be using LAN. Or when they release a patch and there's a whole lot of bugs. Or when they release Diablo 3 and it doesn't work.
And if they are embarrassed about these problems, why the heck aren't they trying their hardest to fix these? And if they are, then it's a shame that a top-notch company is so inept.
Blizzard patches are actually buckshots. Patches are then applied (excruciatingly slowly) to correct the mess, while the players suffer. Blizzard's in a very cozy position as far as business goes, with a very strong playerbase of people who will buy HotS and LotV no matter what.
I'm usually driven by my principles, but I don't think I'll be able to keep myself from buying HotS even though now I loathe Blizzard for SC2 (which I can't get myself to like) and for D3, which is just a bad game. This patch just piles on.
I wouldn't care if it were any other company. I've never been a fan of anyone else. The suck is just more striking when it comes from a company which once was so great.
On August 02 2012 16:45 thrawn2112 wrote: here is their response to the mod question, here is blizz's response. seems reasonable to me.
yeah the custom game bugs are pretty crazy, but i wonder if those bugs existed in the arcade beta. the main point of that beta was to avoid clusterfucks like this and i didn't see anyone complaining about patching bugs while the beta was still up.
actually alot of these bugs were reported in the arcade beta, example the old ladder builds of sc2 in the custom game scene. Blizzard just did not give a fuck to read it and released the patch anyway. I blame the incompetent PR members they have that cant relay proper information to the devs to fix the most critical issues posted on forums such as these /blizzard forums.
I have a pretty popular custom map, and they have completely raped it of all its existence and right now its resting in a graveyard because it cannot be played.
Blizzard is just not the same blizzard they were back then. New blizzard, new policy's. As far as i can tell, they look like they want out actually. There are reports of blizzard company going on sale . They know and can see a downward trend is happening with their games.Its only a matter of time till they hit rock bottom unless they seriously remember why they got where they are in the first place.
The people talking about "Activision ruined our Blizzard" are either clueless or have selective memories. Blizzard patches in all games have been riddled with hidden bugs that are fixed after the fact. The larger the scale of the patch, the more bugs that you'll have. Also, why would "Activision greed" have anything to do with the quality of free content? The fact that it exists in the first place seems to be evidence to the contrary.
Take this patch for what it is. It's a patch to prep the game engine for HotS. The Arcade feature is a part of it, but the bulk of this is to get the rendering engine in place for the new effects that will be used in HotS. Considering the scale of that, I'm not shocked that there are a lot of bugs.
On August 03 2012 00:53 Djzapz wrote: Blizzard patches are actually buckshots. Patches are then applied (excruciatingly slowly) to correct the mess, while the players suffer. Blizzard's in a very cozy position as far as business goes, with a very strong playerbase of people who will buy HotS and LotV no matter what.
I'm usually driven by my principles, but I don't think I'll be able to keep myself from buying HotS even though now I loathe Blizzard for SC2 (which I can't get myself to like) and for D3, which is just a bad game. This patch just piles on.
I wouldn't care if it were any other company. I've never been a fan of anyone else. The suck is just more striking when it comes from a company which once was so great.
o.o
I want you to picture Mike Morhaime. Now I want you to picture giving him 70 bucks. Now I want you picture him spending it on something incredibly dumb, such as a latte. If you buy HotS you have just bought Mike Morhaime a 70 dollar latte. Please don't buy a game you don't even like so that you can support awful human beings....
On August 03 2012 00:53 Djzapz wrote: Blizzard patches are actually buckshots. Patches are then applied (excruciatingly slowly) to correct the mess, while the players suffer. Blizzard's in a very cozy position as far as business goes, with a very strong playerbase of people who will buy HotS and LotV no matter what.
I'm usually driven by my principles, but I don't think I'll be able to keep myself from buying HotS even though now I loathe Blizzard for SC2 (which I can't get myself to like) and for D3, which is just a bad game. This patch just piles on.
I wouldn't care if it were any other company. I've never been a fan of anyone else. The suck is just more striking when it comes from a company which once was so great.
o.o
I want you to picture Mike Morhaime. Now I want you to picture giving him 70 bucks. Now I want you picture him spending it on something incredibly dumb, such as a latte. If you buy HotS you have just bought Mike Morhaime a 70 dollar latte. Please don't buy a game you don't even like so that you can support awful human beings....
On August 03 2012 00:53 Djzapz wrote: Blizzard patches are actually buckshots. Patches are then applied (excruciatingly slowly) to correct the mess, while the players suffer. Blizzard's in a very cozy position as far as business goes, with a very strong playerbase of people who will buy HotS and LotV no matter what.
I'm usually driven by my principles, but I don't think I'll be able to keep myself from buying HotS even though now I loathe Blizzard for SC2 (which I can't get myself to like) and for D3, which is just a bad game. This patch just piles on.
I wouldn't care if it were any other company. I've never been a fan of anyone else. The suck is just more striking when it comes from a company which once was so great.
o.o
I want you to picture Mike Morhaime. Now I want you to picture giving him 70 bucks. Now I want you picture him spending it on something incredibly dumb, such as a latte. If you buy HotS you have just bought Mike Morhaime a 70 dollar latte. Please don't buy a game you don't even like so that you can support awful human beings....
You're attacking a man personally, because he is indirectly responsible for releasing a buggy patch for a game that you apparently play/played enough to be a member of a community centered around it. Anyone else find this hilariously stupid?
EDIT: To be clear, I don't care about your choice of purchase. That's your deal and we all decide what we're willing to accept in a product. But "awful human beings"? Come on...
Pretty common stuff back when i played diablo 3. patch 10 hours for something really small, make 500 new bugs and the cycle goes on. I guess sc2 was infected with this syndrome as well
On August 03 2012 01:24 Chef wrote: I'm not talking about the patch lol....
Because making games that aren't to your taste makes them awful human beings? Think that one through...
Oh my god you don't know what you're talking about please stop lol. Do you even know what Morhaime said that pissed everyone off? I am just giving an example of one of the human beings whose living you support if you keep buying Blizzard games. If you like Blizzard games then it doesn't matter, but obv the guy I responded to does not so it's not like his money is going to a good cause or something, it's going to a bunch of fat cats.
I must add, I'm also really curious what "new" features we're actually going to get with Heart of the Swarm. We were promised:
Multiplayer resume from replay Global Play Multilanguage support Clan/group system Unranked matchmaking Multiplayer replay viewing
Browder said in a recent interview that they've been messing around with the clan/group system but don't know what they want. Same with unranked matchmaking as far as players picking matchups and such. Said he wasn't sure about the details of multiplayer resume from replay. But honestly I'd be surprised if we got more than three of those things that we were "promised."
Anybody remember the ultralisk splash bug (repairing PFs with SCVs would be suicide) or the phoenix graviton beam bug (where using graviton beam on a unit would cause the pheonix to become "locked" in the graviton beam state)? The fact that bugs like these actually make it into production is terrifying when you are forcing every single person, including tournament players, to use the latest patch.
I don't think I need to contribute my own thoughts on Blizzard as a company other than this: you reap what you sew.
On August 03 2012 01:24 Chef wrote: I'm not talking about the patch lol....
Because making games that aren't to your taste makes them awful human beings? Think that one through...
Oh my god you don't know what you're talking about please stop lol. Do you even know what Morhaime said that pissed everyone off? I am just giving an example of one of the human beings whose living you support if you keep buying Blizzard games. If you like Blizzard games then it doesn't matter, but obv the guy I responded to does not so it's not like his money is going to a good cause or something, it's going to a bunch of fat cats.
Feel free to enlighten me on what he said that pissed you off. It would have to be pretty big to warrant you to call him an awful human being.
Not liking the business practices is not the same as hating the person was my point. If you don't want to be a Blizzard customer because you find what you get from their products to be unacceptable that's completely acceptable and reasonable.
I'd argue that a lot of businessmen are awful human beings, and I wouldn't classify Morhaime as a good guy after his fluffy announcement that was so transparently complete bullshit.
agreed. multiple people should be fired as a result of this, it is completely unacceptable. I doubt anyone will actually get fired, but honestly heads really should roll, they need to get their act together.
On August 02 2012 18:21 rockshock wrote: I do wonder tho, Did any of the peopel QQing hard over this patch actually test the beta and give full feedback to blizzard? Or are you people who just jump on it now thats it out into your actual game. And to be fair it doesnt take ages to look through a profile and find out the league of people unless youre totally emptied for braincells of course. Use common logic and its not that hard to figure out.
Its not the job of the players to test the beta and give feedback to blizzard? Blizzard uses the beta to get it's product tested and if it isnt voluntarily tested they have to find another way.
Theres a public PTR for a reason. Of course its upto the community to test the patch. I dont see how the community got any right to whine and cry about stuff not working when theres been a beta for it for ages. And theres no way blizzard got the means to fully test it on theyr own. Thats why we got a public PTR in the first place.
Your reasoning is disgusting.
If blizzard is incapable of testing the patch it gives them NO RIGHT to implement the patch live and test it there. In fact it should prohibit them from applying the patch.
I doubt any IRC users here would expect a balanced, scholarly analysis by rockshock ...
On August 03 2012 01:51 Djzapz wrote: I'd argue that a lot of businessmen are awful human beings, and I wouldn't classify Morhaime as a good guy after his fluffy announcement that was so transparently complete bullshit.
On August 03 2012 01:51 Djzapz wrote: I'd argue that a lot of businessmen are awful human beings, and I wouldn't classify Morhaime as a good guy after his fluffy announcement that was so transparently complete bullshit.
I find it a really hard argument to take seriously in the entertainment industry.
If you're not happy with a Blizzard product, you don't buy the next one and you feel cheated out of some money, but no one starves, dies, etc.
In critical industries such as health care, fuel (oil), banking, etc., I can totally follow along with that reasoning.
If you're talking about the D3 announcement, I didn't see anything wrong with it, but I would have liked some details about late game changes. Then again, I didn't go into it feeling jaded toward Blizzard. D3 is the only game of theirs that I really haven't gotten my money's worth from, but I think my tastes have changed and that has contributed to my lack of enjoyment.
On August 03 2012 03:42 TrippSC2 wrote: I find it a really hard argument to take seriously in the entertainment industry.
If you're not happy with a Blizzard product, you don't buy the next one and you feel cheated out of some money, but no one starves, dies, etc.
In critical industries such as health care, fuel (oil), banking, etc., I can totally follow along with that reasoning.
If you're talking about the D3 announcement, I didn't see anything wrong with it, but I would have liked some details about late game changes. Then again, I didn't go into it feeling jaded toward Blizzard. D3 is the only game of theirs that I really haven't gotten my money's worth from, but I think my tastes have changed and that has contributed to my lack of enjoyment.
Okay, so you're taking the utilitarian line of reasoning. Perfectly fine, but (1) quite a few of us care about aesthetics, art, and other "impractical" things, and (2) you're in a video game forum ... if you don't expect people here to think less of a person for ruining games we like, you're crazy.
Just going to say. I don't custom much.. but i lose a lot on ladder due to a problem that I had since 1.3. When I ladder I'm no longer entering the game at the 40-70 second mark. I've already jumped from platinum to diamond this week. I'm very happy with 1.5's ladder aspects. Also, my apm went from about 140 to 225 so I think its more accurate again. I really like the creep on the minimap too. Much better. So thanks for working on the ladder blizzard, even though customs seem to be goofy.
On August 03 2012 03:42 TrippSC2 wrote: I find it a really hard argument to take seriously in the entertainment industry.
If you're not happy with a Blizzard product, you don't buy the next one and you feel cheated out of some money, but no one starves, dies, etc.
In critical industries such as health care, fuel (oil), banking, etc., I can totally follow along with that reasoning.
If you're talking about the D3 announcement, I didn't see anything wrong with it, but I would have liked some details about late game changes. Then again, I didn't go into it feeling jaded toward Blizzard. D3 is the only game of theirs that I really haven't gotten my money's worth from, but I think my tastes have changed and that has contributed to my lack of enjoyment.
Okay, so you're taking the utilitarian line of reasoning. Perfectly fine, but (1) quite a few of us care about aesthetics, art, and other "impractical" things, and (2) you're in a video game forum ... if you don't expect people here to think less of a person for ruining games we like, you're crazy.
In my opinion, "awful human being" implies something a little bigger than being upset about ruining a game. I am passionate about video games, as well, but there is a separation between being upset about a bad game and attacking the maker's character as a human being.
Please inform yourself before you say things that make you look like an idiot. It is not my responsibility to catch you up on current events and the events of the past three years when you enter an argument in pure ignorance.
On August 03 2012 03:42 TrippSC2 wrote: I find it a really hard argument to take seriously in the entertainment industry.
If you're not happy with a Blizzard product, you don't buy the next one and you feel cheated out of some money, but no one starves, dies, etc.
In critical industries such as health care, fuel (oil), banking, etc., I can totally follow along with that reasoning.
If you're talking about the D3 announcement, I didn't see anything wrong with it, but I would have liked some details about late game changes. Then again, I didn't go into it feeling jaded toward Blizzard. D3 is the only game of theirs that I really haven't gotten my money's worth from, but I think my tastes have changed and that has contributed to my lack of enjoyment.
Okay, so you're taking the utilitarian line of reasoning. Perfectly fine, but (1) quite a few of us care about aesthetics, art, and other "impractical" things, and (2) you're in a video game forum ... if you don't expect people here to think less of a person for ruining games we like, you're crazy.
In my opinion, "awful human being" implies something a little bigger than being upset about ruining a game. I am passionate about video games, as well, but there is a separation between being upset about a bad game and attacking the maker's character as a human being.
Even before this patch I was appalled at events being ruined or effected by the simple fact that LAN play is missing from the game, there is no need for it. Auth with Battle.net then send game data over LAN.. where's the problem? LAN's should be lag and problem free!
I really hope all the issue's and more get worked out. They are so far from a quality product.
Blizzard is a business, the only reason they are pushing e-sports is to further their income. Spending the amount of time and effort they are into perfecting a product and keeping up servers for a game you only pay once for, is pretty unique in itself. Sure it helps their future sales, side events, products and their brandname. But in the end it comes down to this model giving them the biggest profit.
Spoiler for reality check, only read if you can deal with it .
I won't say you're all spoiled, but you might want to rethink what's realy going on here and get used to the real world: where businesses are doing things for profit, not for planet or people. Bottom line: You've paid 50$ for a game, which gets updated, bugs get fixed and the whole game is balanced to perfection, sure they can mess up, but aren't we all being a tad unrealistic asking that a business with share holders needs to spend even more money on a game (meaning that it probably will never happen). I wouldn't waste my time on this, they will do as they please (or as long as their shareholders are pleased).
On August 03 2012 04:54 Chef wrote: Please inform yourself before you say things that make you look like an idiot. It is not my responsibility to catch you up on current events and the events of the past three years when you enter an argument in pure ignorance.
I've kept up on things pretty well and nothing at all comes to mind. Quite frankly, I can't fathom anything that would make me think "awful human being" would be justified.
IMO you look like an idiot for saying someone is an "awful human being" because he made a game you didn't like and said something you didn't like. Hardly seems like a compelling reason to hate someone on a personal level. That's a pretty fucked up outlook on life.
On August 03 2012 06:08 peacenl wrote: Blizzard is a business, the only reason they are pushing e-sports is to further their income. Spending the amount of time and effort they are into perfecting a product and keeping up servers for a game you only pay once for, is pretty unique in itself. Sure it helps their future sales, side events, products and their brandname.
Spoiler for reality check, only read if you can deal with it .
I won't say you're all spoiled, but you might want to rethink what's realy going on here and get used to the real world: where businesses are doing things for profit, not for planet or people. Bottom line: You've paid 50$ for a game, which gets updated, bugs get fixed and the whole game is balanced to perfection, sure they can mess up, but aren't we all being a tad unrealistic asking that a business with share holders needs to spend even more money on a game (meaning that it probably will never happen). I wouldn't waste my time on this, they will do as they please (or as long as their shareholders are pleased).
since they force us to use bnet 0.2 i think its legitimate to complain... giving no lan is a good reason too, they force us to play online on their plateform and they fail hard with it...
On August 03 2012 06:08 peacenl wrote: Blizzard is a business, the only reason they are pushing e-sports is to further their income. Spending the amount of time and effort they are into perfecting a product and keeping up servers for a game you only pay once for, is pretty unique in itself. Sure it helps their future sales, side events, products and their brandname.
Spoiler for reality check, only read if you can deal with it .
I won't say you're all spoiled, but you might want to rethink what's realy going on here and get used to the real world: where businesses are doing things for profit, not for planet or people. Bottom line: You've paid 50$ for a game, which gets updated, bugs get fixed and the whole game is balanced to perfection, sure they can mess up, but aren't we all being a tad unrealistic asking that a business with share holders needs to spend even more money on a game (meaning that it probably will never happen). I wouldn't waste my time on this, they will do as they please (or as long as their shareholders are pleased).
since they force us to use bnet 0.2 i think its legitimate to complain... giving no lan is a good reason too, they force us to play online on their plateform and they fail hard with it...
i can't recall saying anything about legitimate things to complaining about, I'm not sure what you are on about here. I'm merely implying that odds are pretty high that you are wasting your time by persuing this approach. If you would stop buying the game because of this, or you could build a situation where Blizzard feels they never should do this again to continue their revenue, then yes you have a case. But complaining on a forum, not realy that effective is it? I wouldn't go so far to call you true activists until you created a Facebook page, sent in a community backed complaint letter or something, that will slightly hurt their reputation for making bug free games.
I, for starters, am all for such a thing. Because revenue is the only thing Blizzard listens to, as was said earlier, the only way to vote is with your wallet.
On August 03 2012 04:54 Chef wrote: Please inform yourself before you say things that make you look like an idiot. It is not my responsibility to catch you up on current events and the events of the past three years when you enter an argument in pure ignorance.
I've kept up on things pretty well and nothing at all comes to mind. Quite frankly, I can't fathom anything that would make me think "awful human being" would be justified.
IMO you look like an idiot for saying someone is an "awful human being" because he made a game you didn't like and said something you didn't like. Hardly seems like a compelling reason to hate someone on a personal level. That's a pretty fucked up outlook on life.
There's nothing wrong with making a terrible game. Selling it for $60 while fully aware that it's broken does make one an awful human being for doing business in a disgusting and despicable way.
That's why Kotick is an awful human being and Morhaime is one of his collaborators in running the business like dicks, with no consideration for the consumer.
It's true that a CEO's job is to please the investors, but when he's willing to treat his consumers like shit to increase his profit margin, yeah, he's a POS.
As much as I agree with peacenl's sentiments, you have to realize that Blizzard is working in a different, privileged environment than most other publicly trading companies in their position. With Starcraft II they have a large captive audience of RTS players and RTS esports fans who have no-one else to turn to. Blizzard are the only major publisher to produce and support a traditional, Dune II style RTS out there and are not likely to have any competition in the near future or even beyond.
This means that they don't have to treat their customers as well as they normally would have to as they are offering a game in a vacuum. Blizzard are not looking over their shoulder thinking "Oh man we have X RTS to beat, they are offering feature A B C, that we don't have, we gotta step our game up!". Even with the advent of LoL, a pseudo MMO, which has stolen WoW's title of most played online game, Blizzard don't have a direct competitor to SC2 to worry about.
This all boils down to them being able to push an incomplete online environment, have questionable design decisions, kill off BW prematurely and treat their playerbase as a free, abusable QA team. I know that game take time to code, update and roll out features for but the glacial pace at which SC2 has developed in comparasion to its indirect competition in LoL and DoTA2 is a big indictment of whatever systems and process they have in place for delivering content. As great as the figureheads behind SC2, Browder, Kim and Morhaime appear to be in public, I have serious concerns with their steering of the Starcraft ship.
I think sabatoging and then strong arming an entire functioning industry to adopt a much weaker and failing (in Korea TV) product, putting countless jobs of those working in that industry in jeopardy (from the basic functioning of the system to the players who may not transition well to the change) all for the sake of a few extra dollars now is pretty unethical.
I really don't get why people think they can just say 'business' like it makes everything okay. For every business there are people running that business, and there's no reason you can't be critical of their actions. There's no reason you shouldn't talk about it so that other people also know and will be less likely to purchase those products supporting cruel business practices. There's no reason a business can't sacrifice some monetary value for the sake of acting like responsible human beings with hearts and values. It's not like the business is being run by the Capitalismtron 5000. There's a human being making these decisions at the end of the day. We are allowed to judge him or her on a moral level.
Blizzard are not looking over their shoulder thinking "Oh man we have X RTS to beat, they are offering feature A B C, that we don't have, we gotta step our game up!".
Except they were. Only it was their own game that they couldn't make as much money off of anymore. They couldn't have their new game living in its shadow, so they destroyed it. If it were another company's game and they somehow had the ability to destroy it still, they would do exactly the same. It is destructive rather than constructive business practice. You seek not to build something more amazing and more functional, but only to eliminate the competition. They took the people who built ESPORTS and their game from the ground up into something legitimate and basically said "LOL fuck you dopes, thanks," sued them, cannibalised what they worked on, and made a massive mess of everything. Some people justify this saying it's business, but those people are idiots. When you owe someone a decade of hard work and you return the favour by bossing them around and fucking up their lives, you're an awful person. A business is a collection of people making decisions, none of them feeling totally responsible because hey, a tonne of other people were involved too. But that doesn't make what these people do not awful.
On August 03 2012 06:08 peacenl wrote: Blizzard is a business, the only reason they are pushing e-sports is to further their income. Spending the amount of time and effort they are into perfecting a product and keeping up servers for a game you only pay once for, is pretty unique in itself. Sure it helps their future sales, side events, products and their brandname.
Spoiler for reality check, only read if you can deal with it .
I won't say you're all spoiled, but you might want to rethink what's realy going on here and get used to the real world: where businesses are doing things for profit, not for planet or people. Bottom line: You've paid 50$ for a game, which gets updated, bugs get fixed and the whole game is balanced to perfection, sure they can mess up, but aren't we all being a tad unrealistic asking that a business with share holders needs to spend even more money on a game (meaning that it probably will never happen). I wouldn't waste my time on this, they will do as they please (or as long as their shareholders are pleased).
I think we all know that we are spoiled; blizzard is doing a great job being present and updating their game. The issue is that they seem to have gotten worse at it. It feels as if we are dealing with a downgraded version of a company we love so much.
On August 03 2012 07:11 Chef wrote: I think sabatoging and then strong arming an entire functioning industry to adopt a much weaker and failing (in Korea TV) product, putting countless jobs of those working in that industry in jeopardy (from the basic functioning of the system to the players who may not transition well to the change) all for the sake of a few extra dollars now is pretty unethical.
I really don't get why people think they can just say 'business' like it makes everything okay. For every business there are people running that business, and there's no reason you can't be critical of their actions. There's no reason you shouldn't talk about it so that other people also know and will be less likely to purchase those products supporting cruel business practices. There's no reason a business can't sacrifice some monetary value for the sake of acting like responsible human beings with hearts and values. It's not like the business is being run by the Capitalismtron 5000. There's a human being making these decisions at the end of the day. We are allowed to judge him or her on a moral level.
Blizzard are not looking over their shoulder thinking "Oh man we have X RTS to beat, they are offering feature A B C, that we don't have, we gotta step our game up!".
Except they were. Only it was their own game that they couldn't make as much money off of anymore. They couldn't have their new game living in its shadow, so they destroyed it. If it were another company's game and they somehow had the ability to destroy it still, they would do exactly the same. It is destructive rather than constructive business practice. You seek not to build something more amazing and more functional, but only to eliminate the competition.
Just to clarify, I completely agree with you, Blizzard are an utterly horrible company in their handling of BW in Korea. I stiill follow SC2 esports because of the people involved.
Blizzard had the biggest opportunity, the biggest fucking opportunity imaginable, to work with KeSPA and the teams and the players to create an amazing new esport game to continue the incredible legacy of BW. They could have interfaced with the finest RTS minds on the planet (coaches as well) who truly understood the game at a deep level. They could have talked it out with KeSPA, an organisation, for all its flaws, managed to sustain the most spectacular scene in the world at a financial level. I'm sure by in meeting with the companies backing KeSPA, big corporations, clearly invested in BW, SC2 could have been built from the ground up to provide some sort of win-win for both sides (imagine integrating the teams directly inside of the client, you could have STX themed Zerg, T1 themed Terran, tutorials from the coaches and players, ads for the companies arrghhhh so much more possible).
No Blizzard essentially harbored an enormous grudge against KeSPA and the PC Bangs, possibly the only two things keeping their fucking game alive so long and proceeded to fuck them both over. Ridiculous requirements for new accounts and Battle.net 0.2 meant SC2 was dead on arrival in PC Bangs. As soon as they got any sort of leverage over KeSPA and suddenly realized that no-one in Korea really cared about SC2 they murdered BW in cold blood, forced KeSPA to implement the hideous Dual game Starleague and had the arrogance to say that SC2 was the only game built from the ground up to be an esport. Now LoL, a game that I have a hard time respecting, despite its clear appeal and success, is the new BW and it is pretty much Blizzards fault.
On August 03 2012 07:11 Chef wrote: I think sabatoging and then strong arming an entire functioning industry to adopt a much weaker and failing (in Korea TV) product, putting countless jobs of those working in that industry in jeopardy (from the basic functioning of the system to the players who may not transition well to the change) all for the sake of a few extra dollars now is pretty unethical.
I really don't get why people think they can just say 'business' like it makes everything okay. For every business there are people running that business, and there's no reason you can't be critical of their actions. There's no reason you shouldn't talk about it so that other people also know and will be less likely to purchase those products supporting cruel business practices. There's no reason a business can't sacrifice some monetary value for the sake of acting like responsible human beings with hearts and values. It's not like the business is being run by the Capitalismtron 5000. There's a human being making these decisions at the end of the day. We are allowed to judge him or her on a moral level.
Blizzard are not looking over their shoulder thinking "Oh man we have X RTS to beat, they are offering feature A B C, that we don't have, we gotta step our game up!".
Except they were. Only it was their own game that they couldn't make as much money off of anymore. They couldn't have their new game living in its shadow, so they destroyed it. If it were another company's game and they somehow had the ability to destroy it still, they would do exactly the same. It is destructive rather than constructive business practice. You seek not to build something more amazing and more functional, but only to eliminate the competition.
Just to clarify, I completely agree with you, Blizzard are an utterly horrible company in their handling of BW in Korea. I stiill follow SC2 esports because of the people involved.
Blizzard had the biggest opportunity, the biggest fucking opportunity imaginable, to work with KeSPA and the teams and the players to create an amazing new esport game to continue the incredible legacy of BW. They could have interfaced with the finest RTS minds on the planet (coaches as well) who truly understood the game at a deep level. They could have talked it out with KeSPA, an organisation, for all its flaws, managed to sustain the most spectacular scene in the world at a financial level. I'm sure by in meeting with the companies backing KeSPA, big corporations, clearly invested in BW, SC2 could have been built from the ground up to provide some sort of win-win for both sides (imagine integrating the teams directly inside of the client, you could have STX themed Zerg, T1 themed Terran, tutorials from the coaches and players, ads for the companies arrghhhh so much more possible).
No Blizzard essentially harbored an enormous grudge against KeSPA and the PC Bangs, possibly the only two things keeping their fucking game alive so long and proceeded to fuck them both over. Ridiculous requirements for new accounts and Battle.net 0.2 meant SC2 was dead on arrival in PC Bangs. As soon as they got any sort of leverage over KeSPA and suddenly realized that no-one in Korea really cared about SC2 they murdered BW in cold blood, forced KeSPA to implement the hideous Dual game Starleague and had the arrogance to say that SC2 was the only game built from the ground up to be an esport. Now LoL, a game that I have a hard time respecting, despite its clear appeal and success, is the new BW and it is pretty much Blizzards fault.
They wasted SC2 in Korea. Fuck them.
SC2 in a nutshell essentially. SO much wasted potential.
On August 03 2012 00:53 Djzapz wrote: Blizzard patches are actually buckshots. Patches are then applied (excruciatingly slowly) to correct the mess, while the players suffer. Blizzard's in a very cozy position as far as business goes, with a very strong playerbase of people who will buy HotS and LotV no matter what.
I'm usually driven by my principles, but I don't think I'll be able to keep myself from buying HotS even though now I loathe Blizzard for SC2 (which I can't get myself to like) and for D3, which is just a bad game. This patch just piles on.
I wouldn't care if it were any other company. I've never been a fan of anyone else. The suck is just more striking when it comes from a company which once was so great.
o.o
I want you to picture Mike Morhaime. Now I want you to picture giving him 70 bucks. Now I want you picture him spending it on something incredibly dumb, such as a latte. If you buy HotS you have just bought Mike Morhaime a 70 dollar latte. Please don't buy a game you don't even like so that you can support awful human beings....
Calling him an awful human being is a bit sensationalist.
On August 03 2012 00:53 Djzapz wrote: Blizzard patches are actually buckshots. Patches are then applied (excruciatingly slowly) to correct the mess, while the players suffer. Blizzard's in a very cozy position as far as business goes, with a very strong playerbase of people who will buy HotS and LotV no matter what.
I'm usually driven by my principles, but I don't think I'll be able to keep myself from buying HotS even though now I loathe Blizzard for SC2 (which I can't get myself to like) and for D3, which is just a bad game. This patch just piles on.
I wouldn't care if it were any other company. I've never been a fan of anyone else. The suck is just more striking when it comes from a company which once was so great.
o.o
I want you to picture Mike Morhaime. Now I want you to picture giving him 70 bucks. Now I want you picture him spending it on something incredibly dumb, such as a latte. If you buy HotS you have just bought Mike Morhaime a 70 dollar latte. Please don't buy a game you don't even like so that you can support awful human beings....
Calling him an awful human being is a bit sensationalist.
DB: "Oh yeah BW is a good game and there is a scene about it. If you want BW, go play it."
and then Mike M came up and said: "Oh wait, but we killed it! Time to move one bitches!"
Awesome, awesome PR from Blizzard that makes everyone want to just puke all over the place.
On August 03 2012 07:11 Chef wrote: I really don't get why people think they can just say 'business' like it makes everything okay. For every business there are people running that business, and there's no reason you can't be critical of their actions. There's no reason you shouldn't talk about it so that other people also know and will be less likely to purchase those products supporting cruel business practices. There's no reason a business can't sacrifice some monetary value for the sake of acting like responsible human beings with hearts and values. It's not like the business is being run by the Capitalismtron 5000. There's a human being making these decisions at the end of the day. We are allowed to judge him or her on a moral level.
100% true. Even without getting into the moral level, I don't understand why people say "well it's a business, what do you expect". Yes I know businesses want to maximize profit, do I give a fuck? As a consumer I want to maximize my utility. I have every right to complain if the business delivers a shitty product for my money.
On August 03 2012 07:11 Chef wrote: I really don't get why people think they can just say 'business' like it makes everything okay. For every business there are people running that business, and there's no reason you can't be critical of their actions. There's no reason you shouldn't talk about it so that other people also know and will be less likely to purchase those products supporting cruel business practices. There's no reason a business can't sacrifice some monetary value for the sake of acting like responsible human beings with hearts and values. It's not like the business is being run by the Capitalismtron 5000. There's a human being making these decisions at the end of the day. We are allowed to judge him or her on a moral level.
100% true. Even without getting into the moral level, I don't understand why people say "well it's a business, what do you expect". Yes I know businesses want to maximize profit, do I give a fuck? As a consumer I want to maximize my utility. I have every right to complain if the business delivers a shitty product for my money.
Agreed. Bottom line for all us Blizzard haters (now) is that, we all know that they made great games, they had much more resources, time, and whatever was needed to do something close to that, instead they produced something that was not what the loyal customers have come to expect of the company which is why we the customers feel cheated out. I for one have stopped buying Blizzard games automatically and hope that many who also feel cheated to do the same (though I imagine many have already taken this path)
Shoutout to all the haters these days, getting really tired of these flamefests on TL:
There are two central things that you're afraid to admit because it reveals a weakness in your character, but you lack the authority to speak your opinions with the ferocity that you do because of the weakness of your argument AND you lack the integrity to put anything on the line because you deal your arguments out in anonymity.
It really is that simple.
You're trying to convince the rest of the forum that you have something valuable to say by flaming Blizzard about decisions that they make/made when you have no details of what actually took place. Furthermore, you're able to continue to whine and complain and make half truths seem substantive because no one is able to call you out and create any consequences for your behavior. You have no choice in the matter if you want to participate in an online forum, but you have a choice in how you behave given the fact that no one will put any serious limits on your behavior. Self-moderation and self-responsibility used to mean something around here - maybe I'm just older and more cynical but fucking christ you guys are annoying.
Newsflash - unless your posts have something of value to add to a discussion in a factual sense, agreeing with the 20 previous posters who piled on venomous comment after comment is a waste of time for yourself and everyone else in the world who has to wade through that filth.
I realize nothing I say here will make any impression on you, but if one of you people stops to think about what you're doing before you type then maybe I haven't wasted the last 5 minutes of my time.
On August 03 2012 00:59 IntoTheWow wrote: You know why this didn't affect other games in the past? because if a patch was buggy, people could just not patch in tournaments and use LAN.
lol.
On August 02 2012 19:17 MasterOfChaos wrote: Blizzard's patch record is pretty bad. Remember patch 1.16? Many simply stayed on 1.15.3, and everybody else hacked their game so it didn't suck that much. Or the ladder features around 1.14? Delayed forever, then released broken, poor WGT. Solution: Custom server + old version, then it doesn't matter how much blizzard fucks up their patches.
Therein lies the problem and why it's not surpising that people get quite upset about this sort of thing. Blizzard chose to shoulder the burden themselves when they didn't need to. With Battlenet 0.2, they have more control, which means the customer is even more reliant upon the company to be our nanny and fix stuff. We need to beg and plead to fix maps, change maps on the ladder and now we have to sit on our hands and wait for them to fix the errors in patches.
Blizzard should be held to a higher standard then the past because they took away many things the community used to do on the claim that they could do it better. When it isn't better, they should know because there used to be ways to get around these things when gamers had more control.
I still have on my computer that program that allows you to change to any patch version of bw you wanted.
On August 03 2012 11:29 Fzero wrote: Shoutout to all the haters these days, getting really tired of these flamefests on TL:
There are two central things that you're afraid to admit because it reveals a weakness in your character, but you lack the authority to speak your opinions with the ferocity that you do because of the weakness of your argument AND you lack the integrity to put anything on the line because you deal your arguments out in anonymity.
It really is that simple.
You're trying to convince the rest of the forum that you have something valuable to say by flaming Blizzard about decisions that they make/made when you have no details of what actually took place. Furthermore, you're able to continue to whine and complain and make half truths seem substantive because no one is able to call you out and create any consequences for your behavior. You have no choice in the matter if you want to participate in an online forum, but you have a choice in how you behave given the fact that no one will put any serious limits on your behavior. Self-moderation and self-responsibility used to mean something around here - maybe I'm just older and more cynical but fucking christ you guys are annoying.
Newsflash - unless your posts have something of value to add to a discussion in a factual sense, agreeing with the 20 previous posters who piled on venomous comment after comment is a waste of time for yourself and everyone else in the world who has to wade through that filth.
I realize nothing I say here will make any impression on you, but if one of you people stops to think about what you're doing before you type then maybe I haven't wasted the last 5 minutes of my time.
That's funny though. You consider us haters because we and many other people feel like Blizzard's behavior has been bad, and their games have been underwhelming. Plenty of good arguments have been brought forward and you choose to ignore them.
I'm not a douchebag and you're more than welcome to like Blizzard and their games, but don't be condescending to those of us that disagree with you. You call us haters, and by essentially denying us the right to complain, I think it's fair to say that you're a mindless fanboy. If anything in this forum is "filth" as you call it, it's people like you who use ridiculous language like "fucking christ you guys are annoying" and "newsflash" and "factual sense" (lol what).
The internet has gotten to the point where you can't even bring up legitimate criticisms of anything or some guy with no conception of ambiguity will barge in and pretend that everything is fine and we should just appreciate everything or shut up.
Women have rights today because they stood up even though other people disagreed. And I bet they were really annoying to simpletons too.
Yeah, except the people in my business (software development) don't listen to shit like this because you have no idea what it takes to make these patches happen. You have no idea what it takes to test video games, you have no idea what it takes to edit code that has been worked on by hundreds of different people. You don't know that when your tester finds a bug it doesn't mean it gets fixed. You don't know that when your lead designer decides it isn't worth your time to fix something, it doesn't make the cut for the patch. You don't realize that your biggest complaints have no weight with the people who make decisions because they don't have the same goals as you.
If you want to make a difference you need to make an argument that has value to the organization because you're appealing to their goals as a company, their department, their personal interests. If you're doing anything else, you're speaking nonsense to a group of eager participants.
All I'm saying is that you guys are out to get the big bad blizzard when the people writing the code to fix the issues that you're complaining about probably did nothing wrong. The testers who let the bug slip through probably caught it a day too late to make the cut. The producer probably had to decide that the one fix you most cared about needed 3 more days to fine tune.
Shit goes wrong guys, we just don't need the endless 'blog' posts about KESPA and how they failed in Korea and all this other stuff that has nothing to do with anything anytime someone breaks a line of code. It's filth and you know it.
Well this whole conversation also slipped into "all things blizzard do that we don't like". I think D3 is pretty representative of some of the bad things that have happened.
You and Blizzard agree that any arbitration shall be limited to the Dispute between Blizzard and you individually. To the full extent permitted by law, (1) no arbitration shall be joined with any other; (2) there is no right or authority for any Dispute to be arbitrated on a class-action basis or to utilize class action procedures; and (3) there is no right or authority for any Dispute to be brought in a purported representative capacity on behalf of the general public or any other persons.
There's way too many Blizzard apologists in this thread, the patch roll-out was awful and it's absolutely laughable to blame the community for not spending enough time on the test server.
Have some empathy though man. You think there's someone sitting in Blizzard's office going 'How can I fuck over those Teamliquid nerds with my 1.5 patch?'
I don't mean to single you out, but I'm just incredibly frustrated by the whole uprising of 'public opinion' on the video games industry. The industry is dying as we know it (see stock prices, see large publishers dying, see lack of new IP or any attempts to create new genre). Our entire culture is warped now into believing that we have to respond to these trolls (see Mass Effect 3).
If you haven't noticed it is turning gaming into a micro-transaction driven industry where there isn't any risk because all the consumers are responsible for the content they choose to purchase. No one is going to splurge 150 million into a single player game with a 50 hour story or a huge expansive universe or anything else we used to see 5-10 years ago because *gasp* someone might not like it. Instead we'll get free to play worlds where you pay $2.99 to reload your ammo, $4.99 to play the next level, etc.
On August 03 2012 12:03 Fzero wrote: Yeah, except the people in my business (software development) don't listen to shit like this because you have no idea what it takes to make these patches happen. You have no idea what it takes to test video games, you have no idea what it takes to edit code that has been worked on by hundreds of different people. You don't know that when your tester finds a bug it doesn't mean it gets fixed. You don't know that when your lead designer decides it isn't worth your time to fix something, it doesn't make the cut for the patch. You don't realize that your biggest complaints have no weight with the people who make decisions because they don't have the same goals as you.
If you want to make a difference you need to make an argument that has value to the organization because you're appealing to their goals as a company, their department, their personal interests. If you're doing anything else, you're speaking nonsense to a group of eager participants.
All I'm saying is that you guys are out to get the big bad blizzard when the people writing the code to fix the issues that you're complaining about probably did nothing wrong. The testers who let the bug slip through probably caught it a day too late to make the cut. The producer probably had to decide that the one fix you most cared about needed 3 more days to fine tune.
Shit goes wrong guys, we just don't need the endless 'blog' posts about KESPA and how they failed in Korea and all this other stuff that has nothing to do with anything anytime someone breaks a line of code. It's filth and you know it.
Its a healthy dosage of reality and you are choosing to mask the circumstance with happy thought filled with rainbow bullshits. It is always better to face the facts and learn from the mistakes. And the facts reminds that Blizzards have royally screwed up big time on 2 of their biggest titles. And not only did they screw up but they did in S.Korea for SC2, the mother land of Progaming.
A friend of mine use to joke about how funny would it be if Blizzard suddenly went bankrupt because WoW got hacked and the server kept crashing, I refuted back with "Well they can just release SC2, the Koreans would immediately drop everything and buy like 20 millions copies." We all had our laughs there. But truthfully speaking, the game is buried under MOBAs, CS clones, and endless of social MMOs.
Maybe, just maybe we need to take a step back and observe through a different scope at the factual occurences. The company that we once loved and cherished have turned its back on us.
I'm not coating anything in rainbow bullshit. The complaints in this thread don't even get close to making an argument that would affect any change at any level of Blizzard's company. I agree with you that it sucks that content got released in this state. I *really* disagree with the way that you're choosing to try to fix the problem. That's what this thread is right? You're not just venting? You guys are trying to express your displeasure in an attempt to alert someone and to get other people to agree with you.
I'm making an effort to share with you some personal experience that might help you get something accomplished. I don't know why, maybe it's something I ate this afternoon. I really never make posts like this because they are futile.
But Fzero, don't you see? Diablo 3 is one of the worst games ever and we should all band together to address this injustice. /s
In my opinion this complete hysteria because there are a few minor bugs in the game for two days until Blizzard hotfixes them is so ridiculous, the fact people call it endemic to Blizzard's decline etc. is so dumb. That's how software development works, you fix bugs and then you release something and bugs reappear to your horror. The same thing happened with every WoW patch in history. I know there was a WC3 patch once that made a unit have double splash damage and it took two weeks until someone noticed why this unit was suddenly so popular, but of course by that time the damage was done.
Diablo 3 is a great game, it's very successful and had good reviews, the fact that Blizzard fans take it for granted that it's garbage is an example of a completely warped mentality where you've lost sight of reality. Yeah, it's not fun that modern game developers have us jump through hoops just to ensure no piracy and the like, but those are industry wide business 'advances', it's not just Blizzard that does these things.
To be fair, Blizzard has had disastrous patches even in the days of BW. I think it was 1.10 that made it so every previous replay that featured a Zerg player wouldn't work. There was a huge outcry at the time, but I think it was eventually fixed. I'm not remembering the details too well...it was probably eight years ago or something.
These types of things happen in software development, though the magnitude of this patch's shortcomings seems a bit extreme. In any case, just give it some time and it should clear up.
Sadly Blizzard really has bigger fish to fry considering the new WoW expansion is coming out quite soon. It's a pretty big undertaking considering the amount of players, possible network issues, amount of money to be lost and made etc. If a casual player who plays maybe 5 hours a week is unhappy they might cancel their sub, convince others to do the same and move on to a different (probably free) game. No one really cares if a few SC2 players are less than satisfied because we will still watch/play, grumble under our breaths and still buy HotS. I think if they had simply delayed the patch until more proper resources could be given to it, no one would have really faulted them.
Defending Blizzard here is pretty pointless. Of course you cannot be 100% sure if your patch is bug-free or no, but with the new BlizzLauncher and without LAN, there is no way around this patch. You are forced to use it, and it fucks your game over, especially custom games, which every tournament relies on (not only ASUS ROG, but also the playhems, z33ks and g04sc2s).
Some people even say "you guys are not really appreciative of the work that Blizzard put in, constantly patching, etc. etc." but really, would anyone have bought this game if they had no intention to patch it in the first place?
I would be fine with the possibility to revoke this patch and play on the previous one again. They owe this at least to the tournament organizers who put a lot of work in it.
On August 02 2012 16:28 endy wrote: I guess that you're still going to buy HotS, so they probably don't care.
Not me. I didn't get D3, and I won't get HotS. I won't keep giving money to devs that don't deserve it.
I am a huge zerg fan and always have been a big fanboy of blizz and i was thinking i would get HotS. My mind changed until i bought D3. Nope, not going to give a flying fck to HotS. Blizzard needs a wake up call and that can only be done by us consumers.
That said, haven't logged in to sc2 for more than 6months now :S
On August 02 2012 16:28 endy wrote: I guess that you're still going to buy HotS, so they probably don't care.
Not me. I didn't get D3, and I won't get HotS. I won't keep giving money to devs that don't deserve it.
I am a huge zerg fan and always have been a big fanboy of blizz and i was thinking i would get HotS. My mind changed until i bought D3. Nope, not going to give a flying fck to HotS. Blizzard needs a wake up call and that can only be done by us consumers.
That said, haven't logged in to sc2 for more than 6months now :S
I think you are still gonna get it. I just have this damn feeling.
On August 03 2012 12:16 Fzero wrote: Have some empathy though man. You think there's someone sitting in Blizzard's office going 'How can I fuck over those Teamliquid nerds with my 1.5 patch?'
Willful negligence is generally considered malicious.
I think it was 1.10 that made it so every previous replay that featured a Zerg player wouldn't work. There was a huge outcry at the time, but I think it was eventually fixed.
What.... No that's not fair. All patches break replays recorded in old patches because of the way replays work. When Blizzard introduced the replay feature (whether they actually invented the concept themselves or not) it was ingenious. A file that would allow you to watch replays in full resolution in a filesize so small even 56k users were not left out. You can amass thousands of replays and still take up hardly any space on the computer. In exchange for this, since they way they work is recording only the actions players made, the game engine has to be the same. Since patching to old versions was not a very complicated process it didn't really matter. Ya, there were weird things like 1.11 patches could play 1.9 patches almost all the time, but if there was a balance change or a unit ai change or something like that, this is just the way the replay function works while letting people have crappy computers that don't need every patch of SC installed to run. They might have added a repatch feature later, but by then like people say, hardly anyone was available to work on SC.
The biggest catastophe I remember is when there was a bug that made it so that if a drone was damaged and built something and then cancelled, it would crash the game if it were killed later. Which is huge and PGT immediately fixed / stayed on the patch before themselves, but overall I had a fairly good experience with Blizzard patches over the years and 1.12 was one of the best. I think there is also way more leaniance to a company that's smaller and also willing to let their users host their own servers and develop their own fixes. You can say 'oh well they're trying that's cute' and a few programmers will be annoyed trying to fix Blizzard's errors again, but it's not like the proscene is devastated everytime Blizzard fucks up, or people suddenly can't get a good game of SC. In SCII that is the way it is ~
On August 03 2012 07:11 Chef wrote: I think sabatoging and then strong arming an entire functioning industry to adopt a much weaker and failing (in Korea TV) product, putting countless jobs of those working in that industry in jeopardy (from the basic functioning of the system to the players who may not transition well to the change) all for the sake of a few extra dollars now is pretty unethical.
I really don't get why people think they can just say 'business' like it makes everything okay. For every business there are people running that business, and there's no reason you can't be critical of their actions. There's no reason you shouldn't talk about it so that other people also know and will be less likely to purchase those products supporting cruel business practices. There's no reason a business can't sacrifice some monetary value for the sake of acting like responsible human beings with hearts and values. It's not like the business is being run by the Capitalismtron 5000. There's a human being making these decisions at the end of the day. We are allowed to judge him or her on a moral level.
Blizzard are not looking over their shoulder thinking "Oh man we have X RTS to beat, they are offering feature A B C, that we don't have, we gotta step our game up!".
Except they were. Only it was their own game that they couldn't make as much money off of anymore. They couldn't have their new game living in its shadow, so they destroyed it. If it were another company's game and they somehow had the ability to destroy it still, they would do exactly the same. It is destructive rather than constructive business practice. You seek not to build something more amazing and more functional, but only to eliminate the competition. They took the people who built ESPORTS and their game from the ground up into something legitimate and basically said "LOL fuck you dopes, thanks," sued them, cannibalised what they worked on, and made a massive mess of everything. Some people justify this saying it's business, but those people are idiots. When you owe someone a decade of hard work and you return the favour by bossing them around and fucking up their lives, you're an awful person. A business is a collection of people making decisions, none of them feeling totally responsible because hey, a tonne of other people were involved too. But that doesn't make what these people do not awful.
If those CEOs with huge amount of $$$ in their bank accounts actually think like a human with moral, this shitty economy downtime wouldn't happen in the first place, money blinded them and made them into monster.
And ye we have been abused as free beta tester/QA since WoL and facepalm in the case of D3.
I think it was 1.10 that made it so every previous replay that featured a Zerg player wouldn't work. There was a huge outcry at the time, but I think it was eventually fixed.
What.... No that's not fair. All patches break replays recorded in old patches because of the way replays work. When Blizzard introduced the replay feature (whether they actually invented the concept themselves or not) it was ingenious. A file that would allow you to watch replays in full resolution in a filesize so small even 56k users were not left out. You can amass thousands of replays and still take up hardly any space on the computer. In exchange for this, since they way they work is recording only the actions players made, the game engine has to be the same. Since patching to old versions was not a very complicated process it didn't really matter. Ya, there were weird things like 1.11 patches could play 1.9 patches almost all the time, but if there was a balance change or a unit ai change or something like that, this is just the way the replay function works while letting people have crappy computers that don't need every patch of SC installed to run. They might have added a repatch feature later, but by then like people say, hardly anyone was available to work on SC.
The biggest catastophe I remember is when there was a bug that made it so that if a drone was damaged and built something and then cancelled, it would crash the game if it were killed later. Which is huge and PGT immediately fixed / stayed on the patch before themselves, but overall I had a fairly good experience with Blizzard patches over the years and 1.12 was one of the best. I think there is also way more leaniance to a company that's smaller and also willing to let their users host their own servers and develop their own fixes. You can say 'oh well they're trying that's cute' and a few programmers will be annoyed trying to fix Blizzard's errors again, but it's not like the proscene is devastated everytime Blizzard fucks up, or people suddenly can't get a good game of SC. In SCII that is the way it is ~
There was also one that would crash the game if you tried to repair something being loaded into a dropship, I think.
I don't know what to say or expect on behalf of the programming team who made this patch 1.5.This is a total C++ kind of program.It is a total mess to entire SC2 players either pro or not.This is not acceptable in our reason or any of our mild speculation.Blizzard should be responsible for this mess and maybe face a court trial.
Ever since Activision bought Blizzard the company as a whole has been going downhill. Diablo 3 has been fairly disastrous concerning the game design and now SC2 with this new patch.
It's all about the $$$ now with Activision. You can kiss the good quality games Blizzard has made goodbye.
It seems programmers are getting a whole lot of rage. Please consider that developers, designers, achitects, testers and technical staff all have a manager that tell them exactly what to do and are constantly pushing them to do more things in less time.
To put it into simpler terms, the fact that a game was not release ready is largely to blame on managers and CxOs. Because they didn't allocate enough resources or time for proper testing and developping. Whereas there is no excuse for testers in their lack of expertise or thorough testing, they will get fired.
If these programmers and testers were giving enough time, I'm positive that they could have done a better job. However, when pressed for time by deadlines and pressure from a senior, I'm sure they won't do their best job.
But hey anyone who thinks about it, should realize that SC2 is not top priority for Blizzard now, because they have so much more in the pipeline, in such a case it's very easy for errors like these to slip in. Not saying that these errors are okay, just a logical consequence.
Unlike most people I dont seem to be so passionate for this issue as to write a while paragraph. But I believe the fault is more in the management of the product rather then the programmers themselves.
The most hilarious thing of it all is, by the time this thread has dried up, Blizzard will have already patched everything Anyway, piece of advice: if you haven't played any SC2 since it came out and are happy with watching streams and/or events, then think carefuly about buying HOTS.
It is nice to see people passionate about sc2, it shows how much you love/like this game. If you truely hated the people behind this game then you would leave and play other games like LoL, dota or some other cool app games. I won't deny that the patch has it faults but please give the patch some time to be fixed. I am sure in a couple weeks it will be all sorted out. Also the game is still playable, it's not like it will affect your life or wellbeing.
On August 04 2012 10:19 DtorR wrote: It is nice to see people passionate about sc2, it shows how much you love/like this game. If you truely hated the people behind this game then you would leave and play other games like LoL, dota or some other cool app games. I won't deny that the patch has it faults but please give the patch some time to be fixed. I am sure in a couple weeks it will be all sorted out. Also the game is still playable, it's not like it will affect your life or wellbeing.
On August 02 2012 16:57 eviltomahawk wrote: Whatever happened to all the feedback that they were supposed to get from the 1.5 beta? Did people even post much feedback at all?
most of that feedback was congratulations on certian things they added or another list of features peopel demanded. none of the people really searched and tested for bugs.
on the beta server i didnt have any lags although it was a US server and i am playing from europe. now i have lags on the EU server.... moreover, the custom game issues did not happen. they just didnt put everything on the test server....
On August 02 2012 16:25 Swwww wrote: Game may as well be made by activision. I don't really see any point in playing sc2 anymore if blizzards themselves are putting this little effort into their game. Hots will be trash and so will void. Thanks for ruining starcraft.
how is this little effort when they have just released this huge patch? Even if it isn't working 100% as intended, still a pretty big chunk of new stuff added in and changed
Yeah, I'm really glad I didn't decide to play recently. (As far as I know) This is Blizzards second big launch fail. First D3, and now a major patch for SC2? Two strikes.
...Three strikes your out. Would be nice, but will not happen. As mentioned earlier, blizzard/activision is exploited their monpolistic stituation and their good reputation, that isnt used up for many people. I wont purchase HOTS or any other blizz product, until this changes.
Is anyone else getting constant friggin' lag spikes after 1.5? I've lost countless ZvZ's in ling/bane b/c of it, as well as having massive micro issues early game in PvT/TvP.
I'm starting to wonder when people will stop putting "I love Blizzard and all their games" at the end of these blogs. I mean, we're going on 3 years of more or less the same bullshit...
On August 04 2012 10:19 DtorR wrote: It is nice to see people passionate about sc2, it shows how much you love/like this game. If you truely hated the people behind this game then you would leave and play other games like LoL, dota or some other cool app games. I won't deny that the patch has it faults but please give the patch some time to be fixed. I am sure in a couple weeks it will be all sorted out. Also the game is still playable, it's not like it will affect your life or wellbeing.
I can't log in or play single player, and I have sent three support tickets now trying to get a fix, so the game is in fact 100% unplayable for some.
On August 05 2012 03:39 FabledIntegral wrote: Is anyone else getting constant friggin' lag spikes after 1.5? I've lost countless ZvZ's in ling/bane b/c of it, as well as having massive micro issues early game in PvT/TvP.
I think I kept getting this same lag spikes you are even after turning down the graphics settings... wtf
I don't understand why they feel like they are in a hurry. They took forever to release Diablo 3 and it was lackluster. They should just release a quality product, instead of releasing a bugged one. It's inexcusable for there to be this type of bull-shit that the consumers have to deal with. If it happened a few times, sure I'd let it slide, we all make mistakes. But this shit happens all the damn time. Get your shit together blizzard.
On August 04 2012 05:44 lunafraga wrote: I don't know what to say or expect on behalf of the programming team who made this patch 1.5.This is a total C++ kind of program.It is a total mess to entire SC2 players either pro or not.This is not acceptable in our reason or any of our mild speculation.Blizzard should be responsible for this mess and maybe face a court trial.
Flawless representation of my reaction. Literally lol'd
I agree with the people who are saying that these masses of bugs have happened before, even in BW. BUT, you have to realize that it's Blizz's fault for not having LAN support. Yes, we're back to this topic again, but for good reason. It's a big reason why these types of patches are recieving huge overreactions.
On August 04 2012 17:30 LuckyFool wrote: they're putting in effort and actively working to correct issues, it's not a total lost cause, I just feel they could be doing a MUCH better job.
Tech support has informed me that I do not meet the system requirments to play the game and thats why I cant LOG IN.
Nevermind that logging in shouldnt be a demanding act...
i7 920 @ 3.7ghz (42 hours prime stable) 12 gigs of DDR3 Ram at 1566mhz or so 64 gig SSD (with OS and SC2) GTX 560
lol.
I closed the ticket and remade a new one cuz thats just... wow.
I reformated, took away the OCs, tested my ram, tried a different HD, tried windows XP instead of 7....
Then I tried logging into my wifes account and it worked fine.
the gaming industry gets away with murder on stuff like this. If things consistently happened like this in any other industry there would be an enormous amount of outrage. I cant believe people in the thread are actually blaming the consumer for the failure of the product. It is not our job to test the PTR. You do not depend on your customer to test things for you. That is a horrible business practice.
I dont see it changing though since the majority of consumers are young and you have tremendous monopolies in gaming right now. It is sad
On August 06 2012 12:53 Sadist wrote: the gaming industry gets away with murder on stuff like this. If things consistently happened like this in any other industry there would be an enormous amount of outrage. I cant believe people in the thread are actually blaming the consumer for the failure of the product. It is not our job to test the PTR. You do not depend on your customer to test things for you. That is a horrible business practice.
I dont see it changing though since the majority of consumers are young and you have tremendous monopolies in gaming right now. It is sad
Yeah I mean I don't get how anyone can blame the consumers for this failure of 1.5 lol.. if it's our job to test it then shouldn't absolutely everything be an open beta rather than invite-only?
On August 04 2012 17:30 LuckyFool wrote: they're putting in effort and actively working to correct issues, it's not a total lost cause, I just feel they could be doing a MUCH better job.
Tech support has informed me that I do not meet the system requirments to play the game and thats why I cant LOG IN.
Nevermind that logging in shouldnt be a demanding act...
i7 920 @ 3.7ghz (42 hours prime stable) 12 gigs of DDR3 Ram at 1566mhz or so 64 gig SSD (with OS and SC2) GTX 560
lol.
I closed the ticket and remade a new one cuz thats just... wow.
I reformated, took away the OCs, tested my ram, tried a different HD, tried windows XP instead of 7....
Then I tried logging into my wifes account and it worked fine.
From a company as strong and as powerful as blizzard this really shouldn't happen. Its gotten to the point where i am really starting to question how dedicated blizzard really is to its community. If you start comparing blizzard with valve you can clearly see night and day differences, the amount of dedication value has put forward to make games like CS:GO a game that the community wants is outstanding. When the GO was initially released the over all response to it was "wtf, its shit". So what did valve do, they essentially let the community make the mechanics and gameplay to what they wanted. Gun recoil that took skill to handle, grenade mechanics that made sense, items on the map that didnt feel out of place. What does blizzard do, IT GIVES US THE FUCKING SWARM HOST. WHY CANT YOU JUST GIVE US THE LURKER!!!! FFS
I think the biggest reasoning behind events like this all kind of fall into the market diagrams of supply and demand. When CS source came out, counter strike players didnt like it, so they didnt buy it and they didnt play it. This forced Valve into a position that no other video game company has had to take. It actually has to please its fan base. When you look as Call of Duty games, every year they release another shit game, that gets more and more generic. However, people still buy it, if every COD game breaks record sales regardless of how cookie cutter the game is, why the fuck would activision change the way they make games.
The real power here is in the community, we need to be the demand that shapes the supply.
People keep saying they want esports and gaming to be taken more seriously, to become part of the mainstream and a respected profession. Everything starts at the top. The companies that design and maintain the games are as important as those who play them and make careers out of playing them.
It's not our responsibility to test their releases. PTR is simply a tool they use to "help" in their QA process.
With a childish and lackluster approach to game design and overall quality management, the general public will coherently treat the products as childish things, which shouldn't be something anyone who wants to see esports succeed to see.
And people who say this is taking things far too seriously should realize, I don't view starcraft 2 as just a video game, it's a platform for a serious esport with serious money and people dedicating their lives to, shouldn't we treat things that break or degrade the platform seriously?
Thanks for the response everyone so far, lots of interesting dicussion.
the only reason they launched this patch is because they wanted to get more attention to the custom games before the first thing you had the click was multiplayer/singleplayer. a useful distinction. now its custom games/EVERYTHING else
now why the retarded distinction by blizzard? because they want as I said get more attention to custom games why do they want that? because they are soon going to implement the pay for custom games thing and it looks less obvious if you change the ui a little sooner. and why does this happen? because piece of shit company activision blizzard doesn't give a fuck about their games anymore, they only want to get as much money out of the community as possible before their games die. It happened to WoW, to d3 and now its going to happen to sc2 too (well it did before with bnet0.2)
So yeah thanks for fucking up all 3 of my favorite series/games blizzard!
On August 07 2012 07:38 LuckyFool wrote: People keep saying they want esports and gaming to be taken more seriously, to become part of the mainstream and a respected profession. Everything starts at the top. The companies that design and maintain the games are as important as those who play them and make careers out of playing them.
Personally I think that it starts at the bottom. Blizzard never intended Star1 to become this massive eSport that it became, the fans turned it into an eSport.
Also an interesting point to add, is a parallel with Soccer. The goal line technology that could have been implemented years ago that hasn't yet. Countless numbers of goals have been allowed when they shouldn't have. and denied when the ball was clearly over the line. The lack of innovative thinking from the top has hurt the sport, and it has been the fans rallying behind a technology that will keep the sport moving forward.
Its just like in politics, we have the power. We can seek out alternatives, we can drive innovation with our choices. We don't have to sit back and let companies like Microsoft has the power to potentially ruin PC gaming with Microsoft 8. We can rally behind linux, we can drive the support that we need, and that we want.
thats a good point Burns but I feel like things are different now. With how heavy Blizzard pushed themselves into esports, with all the funding for GOM every season, the intervention/threats against Kespa (single handily forcing korean scene to stop with broodwar) and everything else they are pushing for everything to go through them (no LAN, ip blocking/restricting etc) It's as if Blizzard is no longer allowing things to start from the bottom anymore. They are forcing everything through them, in which case if they fail everything will fail with them.
This alone is one of the biggest problems/risks not even considering the actual game. In a perfect world Blizzard would make a game the people want and then step back and let people who are good at running esports, run esports.
You're a hero for taking the time to voice your concerns in this thread, LuckyFool, and to itemize a lot of the problems. I think a lot of people would LIKE things to be better, but just don't know exactly what to say. Take me for example, I don't have the time to play enough to see what exactly is wrong... but reading this thread taught me a lot.
I am afraid that the whole corporate mentality of cutting corners and focus on quarterly earnings is going to eventually ruin the quality games we all love... just feels like their isn't much to be done about it. These days they are pandering to a whole different generation that never played great games like Broodwar, don't expect much, and are primarily after graphics and gimicks.
I do commend Blizzard for putting so much financial support behind SC2... because I fear without it, the game wouldn't sustain a scene on it's own.
It's not blizzard, it's the entire video game industry. Day 1 games always need to get patched for loads of bug fixes and performance issues. Every major release to date has a million hits on google on how to fix problems on certain machines and bugs that crash the game. This is not to mention gamebreaking drm that prevents people from playing the game altogether, but that's getting slightly off topic.
I think the source of this problem comes from 3 places.
The first is obvious, greed. Less time in QA, less people in QA means less money spent which becomes profit.
The second is that pc is a tricky platform. Just googling graphics card benchmark will show 4-5 pages of graphic cards that can conceivably play SCII. Mix that with the number of processors someone could have and raise that to the power of 2 for AMD/ATI and it's impossible to reasonably test all these systems with different settings/programs installed/software updates and have the finished product ship out in time. This particular screw-up has nothing to do with it since it seems to be a widespread phenomenon.
The last problem is because shit like this doesn't matter to the business analysts in the higher up positions - due partially to how big pirating is a concern. Consumers have almost no power in this industry. Dragon Age 3 is going to be the best selling RPG game ever when it comes out because 99% of the people who were disgusted with DA2 and said they're never going to buy Dragon Age 3 is going to pre-order it as soon as they see the first trailer. On a profit loss pie chart in a board room somewhere it's gonna be a tiny line for "people pissed at us for our retarded drm" and the rest of the pie on "pirating". More importantly, idiots threaten to pirate the games they don't support as if that's helping their cause. There was a boycott of CoD sometime back because of no dedicated servers, CoD is one of the most consistently profitable titles in the entire world and will be until the generation of gamers stop liking FPS games. When HotS is about to come out and open beta starts no one's going to remember this patch, no one's going to bitch at them for QA until the game comes out and has problems, which will then be forgotten in a months time. Basically we don't make big enough of a splash for stuff like this so it will not be fixed in the near future. Gamers aren't organized enough to influence the companies they buy from and the biggest profit lost for analysts will always be pirating, not because their customers are pissed they didn't QA.
Companies like valve, CD Projekt, old blizz are far and away the exception rather than the rule.
Is there a way besides calling in (my work makes it hard to call atm...) to get a DIFFERENT person to review a support ticket? Just had a 2nd ticket where I was told my comp cant handle sc2 and thats why I can't log in.
brb pulling my eyes out with a house key in order to relieve the stress
On August 02 2012 16:31 Kleinmuuhg wrote: If they didnt have enough people working for them, they could've just taken more time. Nobody forced them to release the patch before this weekend. I agree, unacceptable sloppiness.
I think you're forgetting that Activision Blizzard is a public company. Their sole reason for existing is to maximize shareholder value. ATVI probably has much stricter deadlines than the Blizzard of the past. I can see the executives really dropping the hammer on Blizzard to push whatever content will keep people from leaving SC2 (content being the custom game area) in order to maximize revenue going forward.
On August 07 2012 10:46 Count9 wrote: It's not blizzard, it's the entire video game industry. Day 1 games always need to get patched for loads of bug fixes and performance issues. Every major release to date has a million hits on google on how to fix problems on certain machines and bugs that crash the game. This is not to mention gamebreaking drm that prevents people from playing the game altogether, but that's getting slightly off topic.
I think the source of this problem comes from 3 places.
The first is obvious, greed. Less time in QA, less people in QA means less money spent which becomes profit.
The second is that pc is a tricky platform. Just googling graphics card benchmark will show 4-5 pages of graphic cards that can conceivably play SCII. Mix that with the number of processors someone could have and raise that to the power of 2 for AMD/ATI and it's impossible to reasonably test all these systems with different settings/programs installed/software updates and have the finished product ship out in time. This particular screw-up has nothing to do with it since it seems to be a widespread phenomenon.
The last problem is because shit like this doesn't matter to the business analysts in the higher up positions - due partially to how big pirating is a concern. Consumers have almost no power in this industry. Dragon Age 3 is going to be the best selling RPG game ever when it comes out because 99% of the people who were disgusted with DA2 and said they're never going to buy Dragon Age 3 is going to pre-order it as soon as they see the first trailer. On a profit loss pie chart in a board room somewhere it's gonna be a tiny line for "people pissed at us for our retarded drm" and the rest of the pie on "pirating". More importantly, idiots threaten to pirate the games they don't support as if that's helping their cause. There was a boycott of CoD sometime back because of no dedicated servers, CoD is one of the most consistently profitable titles in the entire world and will be until the generation of gamers stop liking FPS games. When HotS is about to come out and open beta starts no one's going to remember this patch, no one's going to bitch at them for QA until the game comes out and has problems, which will then be forgotten in a months time. Basically we don't make big enough of a splash for stuff like this so it will not be fixed in the near future. Gamers aren't organized enough to influence the companies they buy from and the biggest profit lost for analysts will always be pirating, not because their customers are pissed they didn't QA.
Companies like valve, CD Projekt, old blizz are far and away the exception rather than the rule.
Except I think the tide is slowly turning.
Nintendo's profits tanked when the casuals got bored, and the actual gamers that they ostracised didn't go back. Their share price fell after revealing the WiiU, because it still looks like a gimmicky child's toy.
The anger that actiblizz have generated with D3 has been far and above anything I've seen before. The agressive DRM, anti piracy and control freak measures put in place by multiple companies has had a backlash, and HAS had a tangible impact on their value. CoD will still be the highest grossing game ever time it comes out. Fantastic. I don't care, because that side of the gaming world don't make games I care about (I'm aware that activision produce CoD, but I'm mentally separating Blizzard and actiblizz, because Blizzard still had the name and good faith). Blizzard did, they always have, but in acting like the rest of the games world, they've alienated people like myself, and because it's not CoD, because it's not "generic brown bloom shooter 4" - we're a sizeable chunk of their target market.
On August 07 2012 05:55 Burns wrote: From a company as strong and as powerful as blizzard this really shouldn't happen. Its gotten to the point where i am really starting to question how dedicated blizzard really is to its community. If you start comparing blizzard with valve you can clearly see night and day differences, the amount of dedication value has put forward to make games like CS:GO a game that the community wants is outstanding. When the GO was initially released the over all response to it was "wtf, its shit". So what did valve do, they essentially let the community make the mechanics and gameplay to what they wanted. Gun recoil that took skill to handle, grenade mechanics that made sense, items on the map that didnt feel out of place. What does blizzard do, IT GIVES US THE FUCKING SWARM HOST. WHY CANT YOU JUST GIVE US THE LURKER!!!! FFS
I think the biggest reasoning behind events like this all kind of fall into the market diagrams of supply and demand. When CS source came out, counter strike players didnt like it, so they didnt buy it and they didnt play it. This forced Valve into a position that no other video game company has had to take. It actually has to please its fan base. When you look as Call of Duty games, every year they release another shit game, that gets more and more generic. However, people still buy it, if every COD game breaks record sales regardless of how cookie cutter the game is, why the fuck would activision change the way they make games.
The real power here is in the community, we need to be the demand that shapes the supply.
Although I agree with the point that Blizzard should have had better Q&A on 1.5, compairing Blizzard to Valve is unfair. Valve has Steam, which allows them to fund the majority of their free games like TF2, GO and DotA 2. None of these games are intented to be "commerical" products and are used to give people a reason to install Steam on their PCs. It is a plan that has worked out for them and given Valve a huge amount of commerical success. But also affords them the ability to develope games in a way that almost no studio can.
Personally, Blizzard is far more commited the community that most game designers I have experienced. The replay features alone in SC2 are far beyond anything that any other game has ever had. The fact that we saw that we are getting as much insight into the creation of the HotS units is also suprising. Every other studio I have ever watched only releases unit information when the game is in its final stages The community gives Blizzard a hard time, which is expected. But in the end, I have always enjoyed everything they have released and exect the same from HotS.
I dunno it seemed a source control issue to me, but definitely could have been QA. QA could have been QA'ing the whole 1.5 patch but if they don't play SC2 at all then no one is going to know queens don't have a range 3 attack anymore. Also, the deployment of the new patch could have been just deploying the wrong dependency version with the major changes or something like that but I doubt it. Who knows how they do it, but one things for certain: the people who are passionate about games aren't behind it's development anymore... how else could the patch be released like this without anyone saying, "hey, custom games are broke dude," or "why is roach range 3 again?"
They could have new devs and QA too, those who aren't aware of the differences between the live bnet service and their locally deployed version or whatever and think that because it all works on their test environment it will work identically on bnet.