Furthermore, if you were allowed to just point to a random map on your harddisk and let other people join your game, God only knows what you would be able to do with that. One hopes that SC2 is a reasonably protected environment, but imagine if you could hack someone's machine through a clever use of the scripting system. Making Battle.Net a vector for hacking someone's machine isn't a good idea, even if they can ban you should they find out about it.
People were scared of this in wc3 and WoW but such is not possible. If you become too scared of what "might" happen and begin boarding yourself up in constant fear of the unknown you will harm those who can use these features and capabilities for good... which is 99.9% of the fanbase.
Blizzard owns the servers. Which means that they are the ones responsible for creating the space for storing your maps to be used in multiplayer. Do you honestly expect Blizzard to offer unlimited, or even Google-level, storage space for your maps? Be reasonable here. We're talking about potentially millions of players. Even with just 5 million players, that's 95TB of storage. Storage that has to be networked, backed up, and so forth. And you expect this to be higher?
I do not expect it to be unlimited, but higher. If Blizzard's intent is to totally remove local map hosting they must be prepared to facilitate a massive amount of custom content, because that is the implication of such a colossal feature being removed - the heart of every battle.net to date!
Blizzard does not want SC2 relegated to a cloistered group of the HardCore. They want casuals, not people like you, real-life casual players to be playing this game in 5-10 years, like they have with WoW.
Your view of "casual" players has been skewed by the abuse of the term that never existed pre-WoW. People only started branding players as casual players when the concept of raiding and late-night grinding daily entered American mainstream. Just as the concept of "hardcore" is likewise skewed.
Unfortunately, their system hurts "casual" players in your classification much more than "Hardcore" players. Without chat channels, local hosting, and a clean interface, those users without much general gaming experience will feel naked and alone, perhaps even intimidated.
Why do you think things like the iPhone and iPad work?
Because people have too much money to spend and nothing better to spend it on? I don't even own a phone and never have/never will. Sorry, I don't know very much about this particular subject. I'll take your word for it.
... You are not a casual player. If "every waking moment of every day" revolves around gaming, you are not casual in any way with regard to your gaming habit.
There is a lot of room between "casual" and "professional". In terms of gaming, that room is generally called "hardcore".
As for the substance of your rant, about the only thing I agree with you on is the censorship issue. That, and maybe game naming (though I think the issue can be alleviated in other ways without being abuseable).
Blizzard owns the servers. Which means that they are the ones responsible for creating the space for storing your maps to be used in multiplayer. Do you honestly expect Blizzard to offer unlimited, or even Google-level, storage space for your maps? Be reasonable here. We're talking about potentially millions of players. Even with just 5 million players, that's 95TB of storage. Storage that has to be networked, backed up, and so forth. And you expect this to be higher?
For free? Remember: Battle.Net is a free service. Maybe they should allow you to pay a bi-monthly fee for more space.
Furthermore, if you were allowed to just point to a random map on your harddisk and let other people join your game, God only knows what you would be able to do with that. One hopes that SC2 is a reasonably protected environment, but imagine if you could hack someone's machine through a clever use of the scripting system. Making Battle.Net a vector for hacking someone's machine isn't a good idea, even if they can ban you should they find out about it.
Lastly, you've forgotten about the marketplace support. If you make a total conversion, Blizzard will allow you to sell it. At which point, since it's making Blizzard money, I'm sure you won't have to deal with it taking up too much memory and so forth.
Blizzard does not want SC2 relegated to a cloistered group of the HardCore. They want casuals, not people like you, real-life casual players to be playing this game in 5-10 years, like they have with WoW. Having an environment that they can control is a fundamental part of that. Why do you think things like the iPhone and iPad work? Because they're closed environments, steadfastly and rigorously controlled by Apple.
I think you're really missing the boat on this one, pal. These are all Blizzard induced problems. SC1 and WC3 had a different method which suffered from none of these issues. So now, by making sure Blizzard controls everything they've also limited it in the same breath.
Map size? Didn't have to download from blizzard so it was a moot point. Worried about hacks from downloading a map? I don't recall an issue ever arising from past games. Your apple argument makes me laugh, since that's the exact PROBLEM most people have with their software and why non-apple fanboys are so enthusiastic about non-apple solutions and their monopolistic policies.
I think the best thing to do would be for players to fix the problems themselves by making third party servers. Theres no reason to rely on an incompetant battle.net 2 team to fix them.
A way around this problem would be to have "popularity credits" where you earn the right to have more storage based on the popularity and frequency of play on your map. If you own 5% of the custom game market/played maps pool over a week for example, as in 1 in 20 custom maps games hosted are made by you, then you should be entitled to more space.
i think this is an important issue that should really be discussed. this is even more important then balance, because it effects the longevity of the game and the size of the community.
the reason for the success of all of blizzard current RTS's are not due to solely to their balance. They are in fact largely due to the creativity and success of the map/mod community, who have kept these games alive.
WC3 would have fallen out of the scope of many rts fans if it weren't for the amazing custom maps and mods that many people have made. I for one, bought the game just so i could play those maps, along with many of my friends. They were "games" in games. The same goes for sc1.
I used to think of blizzard as an amazing, "for the gamer" company, who put out all these great titles, and who actually cared about the people playing their games. This was very true with diablo, starcraft broodwar, and warcraft 3. In my experiences, they maintained the freedom of the people who played it, and allowed players to do what ever they wanted. There were little restrictions on the communities that developed alongside their games. For this, these communities thrived. And so did blizzard.
World of Warcraft also saw this. With the expansion, and all of the patches, improvements, expansions, and work that went into it, it showed the people who played it, that blizzard actually was apart of their game experience. They weren't just the creators. But there was a direct relation made between blizzard and the gamer. As i played wow, i made many friends. For a lot of the people who played it, Warcraft 3, starcraft, and diablo were games that were played with guild mates, and friends they met through wow. It was a passtime. While servers were down, or there werent any raids going on, i would always hop on with my friends and play some wc3 custom games.
Hell, even throughout college, me and my friends downloaded custom tower defenses, and played them, together. We actually had this thing we call "STD's". or, "shitty tower defenses". we would go on a mapping site for wc3, and download every tower defense we could find and play it. There were a lot of crappy ones, but there were also a lot of good ones. (GemTD and YouTD were ones we found to be particularly amazing).
After reading your post, i don't see this happening at all with starcraft. I dont see myself playing the game, and its custom games, for fun. I thought originally that you would be able to host maps from a local game client to play with friends. So you could find a few that you liked, a few diamonds in the rough, and play them, like i did with warcraft 3. But the likely hood of that now, is very far from realization. You can only find maps based on popularity. There is literally no way for a new map to get up there in popularity because there is no way to actually sift through the mountain of maps out there. There will be some popular maps, and that's it. If a map doesn't make its stay within its first few days, its out completely. How can this benefit anyone?
Also, placing such restrictions on the map making community is really harsh, and only hurts the quality of maps that will be seen in sc2. Ever take a look at the AC130 gunner video?
I doubt that map will fit under the 10mb limit (even 20mb) when its done, and it will never get published. Also, the stargate rpg map. Imagine how much fun that would be if the entirety of SG-1 lore were to go in to it. It wouldn't fit in 20mb. Blizzard, Your also limiting the amount of passion people will have for this game (for modders). because, why should some one spend the time to make a 50mb map, or the effort to actually make something like that.
Your basically saying, to each map or modder. "Here ya go, you have room for 5 ideas, which can only be about the length of a 7 minuet mp3."
imagine if you were to go up to Shakespeare and tell him to tell you everything about one of his major works, in 7 minuets. Thats impossible and unreasonable.
So where did blizzard go wrong? I don't think this restriction could be imposed by a company who has had a a very loyal fan base as blizzard. (Blizzcon anyone?) I don't think 10 years ago, we would have seen any restrictions on a product like this, by blizzard. Or by any self-respecting game company who actually cared about their community.
I hope blizzard takes some sort of steps to "improve their product". Not by adding useless features that 90% of us don't want or intend to use (facebook anyone?). But by actually letting us add content into the game.
(1) BNet2.0 is new, Blizzard is taking baby steps with new features. Blizzard recognizes that community involvement is important to the game's popularity, but has enough work on their plate just finishing the game for its release so it isn't a priority - give it time.
(2) Blizzard likes $ and respects their IP. Blizzard doesn't want to give modders too much freedom to use their engine for radically different purposes too soon. Look at how DoTA has put Warcraft out of the spotlight. I think this is the other big reason why LAN is out, piracy being primary. And it makes sense considering the game hasn't even been released yet - give it time.
I'm not sure I understand your complaints on custom models, textures, and sound... is it just a size limit issue or are they disallowed completely? What is the exact restriction on each of these?
I think a lot of this thread is over reaction. We have absolutely no idea what the final cap is going to be.
SC1 and WC3 had a different method which suffered from none of these issues. So now, by making sure Blizzard controls everything they've also limited it in the same breath.
Map size? Didn't have to download from blizzard so it was a moot point.
Try distributing a 50 MB map to 10 other people when hosting a UMS map and you'll quickly realize why BNET hosting is necessary in SC2.
Can't read anything about SC2 without getting depressed about Blizzard. It's obvious the old teams are gone and that the new corporate overlords have taken over. What a pile of shit.
On May 24 2010 10:54 mmp wrote: I see two things going on here:
(1) BNet2.0 is new, Blizzard is taking baby steps with new features. Blizzard recognizes that community involvement is important to the game's popularity, but has enough work on their plate just finishing the game for its release so it isn't a priority - give it time.
(2) Blizzard likes $ and respects their IP. Blizzard doesn't want to give modders too much freedom to use their engine for radically different purposes too soon. Look at how DoTA has put Warcraft out of the spotlight. I think this is the other big reason why LAN is out, piracy being primary. And it makes sense considering the game hasn't even been released yet - give it time.
I'm not sure I understand your complaints on custom models, textures, and sound... is it just a size limit issue or are they disallowed completely?
Hi, completely understandable.
I am pointing out the differences in models and textures from wc3 to sc2 to make a statement on why the size value of maps and large projects are going to be significantly different. Sc2 assets are going to be significantly larger and thus will require more space to hold.
1 - This is plausible and likely. However, I feel that they should have held redundant features like Facebook and put in core features first, like chat rooms, online replays, local hosting, and things like that, and THEN, post-release, add-in whatever gimmicks they have on their plate.
2 - Piracy has never significantly impacted sales on games except for really crappy games that wouldn't have sold well regardless, this is a really lame reason to exclude LAN. As you said, though, Blizzard likes their $$ even if it means pissing off their legitimate buyers. I don't believe that their intention is to limit modders that greatly, though - they are introducing micro transactions in the form of Premium Maps, it's better for them to facilitate more maps and mods and give them as much power as possible, right? That maximizes the potential to take advantage of their popularity, and thus gives more money. This will yield more cash than limiting the game on-release and driving away custom content providers.
I think a lot of this thread is over reaction.
I like over reaction. It has a good ring to it.
I also said I don't know what the final cap will be, and I acknowledge this. But this doesn't change the fact that any cap on the AMOUNT of maps limited is silly (I expect there to always be a size limit). This can be avoided entirely by re-inventing the wheel and allowing local hosting.
Also, for the record, that 120mb exe I was talking about - I got that through to my players in about 20 minutes. I had a full house usually, so that's 10 players, and most were using bad connections. There are ways to speed the process up if you want to get into it, including torrent-like transfers that allow each user to send extra parts to each other during the transfer, maximizing upload speeds and bandwidth usage. But I don't think this would ever happen due to router issues, and due to laziness. Plus, I think the max size they'd ever allow for a map would be 20mb.
People were scared of this in wc3 and WoW but such is not possible. If you become too scared of what "might" happen and begin boarding yourself up in constant fear of the unknown you will harm those who can use these features and capabilities for good... which is 99.9% of the fanbase.
But 99.9% of the fanbase is just that; the fan base. The vast majority of players who will be buying SC2 are not the "fanbase". They are not hardcore players.
Your view of "casual" players has been skewed by the abuse of the term that never existed pre-WoW. People only started branding players as casual players when the concept of raiding and late-night grinding daily entered American mainstream. Just as the concept of "hardcore" is likewise skewed.
The egocentric view of the dedicated PC gamer. Everything was just fine before WoW.
In truth, the casual vs. hardcore divide has long existed, particularly in the console gaming world. My view of "casual" players has been what it was before WoW even existed. They are people who do not think of gaming in terms that we do: as a significant part of their life. Gaming is something they do maybe 3 hours a week at best.
Casuals is who yearly updates of Madden and other sports games sell to. And Blizzard wants in on the casual market with SC2.
Your apple argument makes me laugh, since that's the exact PROBLEM most people have with their software and why non-apple fanboys are so enthusiastic about non-apple solutions and their monopolistic policies.
I'm pretty far from an Apple fanboi (I'd sooner break my fingers than buy an iPad after my experience with the iPod Touch), but I do understand what they're doing. And I understand why they're successful.
See, "most people" don't have a problem with their software. We do, but Apple doesn't give 2 shits about what a bunch of geeks on a forum do. They're interested in the mainstream.
All the mainstream wants is something that works. If they're exposed to how it works in any way, they are repelled. They don't care how e-mail works; they just want to press the button on the device marked "e-mail" and see their e-mail. They don't care how documents work; they just want to press the button to view or edit documents and then do so.
They don't care about the 20MB limit on the number of maps they can expose. They see the limit, and accept it for what it is: the system saying you can't do that. Maybe they'll care to ask why, but even that's not a question they care about.
No, all they care about is whether they can play the maps that they want to play. All they care about is playing with their own circle of real-life friends; they don't meet people on a forum and decide to play with them. They don't have many, or any, real-life friends on different server groups that they would want to play with.
They care about Facebook integration. Hell, for a lot of them, Facebook is the Internet. That matters to them far more than being able to name matches, or have chat channels (which they will rarely if ever use) or whatever. They don't think of people they meet in a random game as "people"; if they ladder, they think of the opponent as an advanced computer and nothing more.
blizzard needs to start listening to its customers its sad really how capitalistic there organization has become - ive waited for this game for 3 years now always checking news sites and keeping up to date.
This is very informative, I've never thought about this issue before. Bnet2.0 definitely feels more 'locked up' and automated than previous interfaces - really isolates the player. About the only thing I really like about it is the party system for 2v2.
On May 24 2010 11:03 NicolBolas wrote:Casuals is who yearly updates of Madden and other sports games sell to. And Blizzard wants in on the casual market with SC2.
Casual gamers will be attracted to games like Wii Sports, not an RTS game like SC2. And it's quite obvious that a 'casual' game won't be around so long, and the next game someone makes will replace it. It won't be still massively popular after 20 years like BW. Not to mention that non-'casuals' are a significant portion of the community, probably yielding more sales than casuals(for games like this).
I am a Casual Player. I spend every waking moment of every day contributing to an overall overarching gameplan of modmaking and custom content, or working on my novel. I have been producing custom projects for 10 years.
... You are not a casual player. If "every waking moment of every day" revolves around gaming, you are not casual in any way with regard to your gaming habit.
There is a lot of room between "casual" and "professional". In terms of gaming, that room is generally called "hardcore".
As for the substance of your rant, about the only thing I agree with you on is the censorship issue. That, and maybe game naming (though I think the issue can be alleviated in other ways without being abuseable).
Blizzard owns the servers. Which means that they are the ones responsible for creating the space for storing your maps to be used in multiplayer. Do you honestly expect Blizzard to offer unlimited, or even Google-level, storage space for your maps? Be reasonable here. We're talking about potentially millions of players. Even with just 5 million players, that's 95TB of storage. Storage that has to be networked, backed up, and so forth. And you expect this to be higher?
For free? Remember: Battle.Net is a free service. Maybe they should allow you to pay a bi-monthly fee for more space.
Furthermore, if you were allowed to just point to a random map on your harddisk and let other people join your game, God only knows what you would be able to do with that. One hopes that SC2 is a reasonably protected environment, but imagine if you could hack someone's machine through a clever use of the scripting system. Making Battle.Net a vector for hacking someone's machine isn't a good idea, even if they can ban you should they find out about it.
Lastly, you've forgotten about the marketplace support. If you make a total conversion, Blizzard will allow you to sell it. At which point, since it's making Blizzard money, I'm sure you won't have to deal with it taking up too much memory and so forth.
Blizzard does not want SC2 relegated to a cloistered group of the HardCore. They want casuals, not people like you, real-life casual players to be playing this game in 5-10 years, like they have with WoW. Having an environment that they can control is a fundamental part of that.
Why do you think things like the iPhone and iPad work? Because they're closed environments, steadfastly and rigorously controlled by Apple.
They were willing when the game is still in alpha. They certainly aren't willing to do it now that the game is in beta depsite their statements that they would.
They never said that they would add and remove units at the first sign of any issue. They said that, if the situation warranted it, they would do so. Thus far, in their estimation, the current situation does not warrant it.
But 99.9% of the fanbase is just that; the fan base. The vast majority of players who will be buying SC2 are not the "fanbase". They are not hardcore players.
I'd love to hear your logic behind this (really, not being sarcastic here). If someone buys a game they are contributing to the profit of the game. If they play the game and enjoy it they are a fan, are they not? Thus, changes to the game overall impacts their experience. If I reduce the Roach supply cost from 2 to 1, this is a change the "casual" player will experience just as the "hardcore" player will experience as they are both playing the game and thus are part of the consumerbase aka fanbase.
The egocentric view of the dedicated PC gamer. Everything was just fine before WoW.
In truth, the casual vs. hardcore divide has long existed, particularly in the console gaming world. My view of "casual" players has been what it was before WoW even existed. They are people who do not think of gaming in terms that we do: as a significant part of their life. Gaming is something they do maybe 3 hours a week at best.
Casuals is who yearly updates of Madden and other sports games sell to. And Blizzard wants in on the casual market with SC2.
For the record I've been playing WoW for quite some time.
I understand what people see Casual gamers as. The guy who signs on once every week to do a instance and then vanishes. The guy who isn't willing to sit in a raid 2 hours and upgrade his gear.
But they are still experiencing a part of the game, they are still playing it. Why are they playing it? Because they find enjoyment. It is not their dedication, but they must be playing because they find entertainment out of it.
While it is true that I am as close to hardcore as you can get without going into the industry, I, too, am doing the exact same thing those casuals are doing - I'm playing and modding to enjoy the game. The only difference between us is the amount of time spent.
The assumption that by adding Facebook Blizzard is "catering to casuals" comes off as offensive to me because 90% of the people I know who are "casual" players do not give a flying fuck about Facebook or any of this bullshit and are just as eager to see the things corrected as I am that I have posted in the OP. That's because they don't play in tournaments, they don't watch Flash vs Jaedong, they just want to play a bunch of custom maps one night every week and call it a day in 2-3 hours.
All of the causal players I know enjoy what it is I do, and some have even contributed. But they're still casual because this is not what they do. They work all day and come back at night to run a Python script and contribute a little piece to my puzzle.
Through my logic, all of these people including myself and those of you who regular iccup are all casual players because you are all here for the same purpose - to find enjoyment.
2. without definite or serious intention; careless or offhand; passing: a casual remark.
Once you enter professional gaming you are no longer casual - that is hardcore, because you aren't just doing it for fun anymore. You're doing it for money.
I have no intentions of ever selling anything I make or investing money into anything I make outside of upgrading computer hardware. Though I have considered it many times, in my eyes that would splinter me from what I have been doing all this time - working to please myself. The moment it becomes a job and not entertainment is the moment this is no longer a casual venture.
I understand wholly your stance but I do not agree that this is the way to view these decisions and nor do I think that companies nor players should be using these terms to brand and stereotype players.