Blizzard announces HoTS Feature List

On May 08 2012 19:57 Drowsy wrote:

On May 08 2012 15:48 Hider wrote:

On May 08 2012 14:13 Seiniyta wrote:

On May 08 2012 12:24 Liquid`Zephyr wrote:

On May 08 2012 12:18 Probulous wrote:

On May 08 2012 11:27 Liquid`Zephyr wrote:

On May 08 2012 11:21 windsupernova wrote:
How dare Blizzard re add features Grrrrrr. Should have left Bnet as it is. Its almost like they realized they screwed up and are trying to correct their mistake it makes me soooo mad.

its not that we are mad that we will now have these features. its that blizzard intentionally left out basic functionalities that previous incarnations of a ~12 year old starcraft had [or other lesser RTS games] in order to readd them later to make more money. owning WoL feels like i bought an 2012 aston martin with a tape deck and roll down windows and its just frustrating

That's a pretty big call. It is also possible that Blizzard just had completely the wrong idea about what the community valued in the previous game and have been playing catch up since then. The improvements they have made since launch suggests the latter to me. Companies make mistakes and to just assume they do them on purpose is a tad extreme.

You're suggesting they intentionally sabotaged their major release product so as to provide old features during the expansion. What if WOL completely flopped? It's not impossible but I find it highly unlikely that they would do this on purpose.

admittedly its just my opinion. if, while designing the biggest and most anticipated rts sequel of all time, Multiplayer resume from replay, Global Play, Multilanguage support, Clan/group system, Unranked matchmaking and Multiplayer replay viewing seem like things that never crossed blizzards minds as things that could be added to sc2 [while most have existed in other, older, blizzard games with overwhelming positive feedback], or you believe that they believed the community would not enjoy then you are free to take the other side.

Contray to popular belief, despite the cash cow that's World of Warcraft Blizzard doesn't has an endless amounts of resources to work with when developing a game. I'm sure those things crossed Blizzard's mind during developement but their priority were elsewhere. The game engine, building the framework of battle.net 2.0, not only for SC2 but for World of Warcraft and Diablo 3. I think most of the work went into the game engine and made sure you can actually play it.

They also probably looked at Battle.net 1.0 and saw what people were actually using things for, they initially scrapped chat channels in battle.net 2.0 because they found that chat channels in the first one were dominated of spammers and the like which isn't ideal. It was a bad idea to remove chat channels but I can understand their thought process. They probably went over all the stuff and cut things that they thought would speed up developement time by quite a bit. (remember, SC2 was in developement for ages).

I also think that after WoW Blizzard kind of forgot that what works for a MMO doesn't always work for an RTS. (The lack of Global play) for example.

Although Blizzard made some terrible decisions not including some crucial things It's probably not because of some marketing scheme. They prefer had all that stuff at launch and for HoTs come with actual new exciting changes to Battle.net instead of these overdue things.

Yeh im sure there priorities were designing cool units like the collosus and the mauruders. Developing nice maps like steppes of war and incinetation zone, and making that facebook implementation stuff that nobody cares about, while having no clue what the community reallye wanted (really want chat channels?)

hahaha.... god I remember that facebook integration shit. I don't know ANYONE on sc2 or on fb who has actually used that. What useless garbage that was.

Blizzard announces HoTS Feature List - Page 62