Dear Malstrom.
I am emailing this link to you if you haven’t seen it already.
http://www.incgamers.com/Interviews/270/blizzards-frank-pearce-interview
This is it. I will no longer buy any more Blizzard games. Before, Blizzard said that they were looking into the features that the fans really wanted, but now they sayt that they were never planned. It turns out that the awesome Battle.net2.0 that Blizzard said would make us forget about LAN was actually a gimped version of the older Battle.net but with Facebook integration and achievements. The detachment to the community that this interview is revealing is astonishing. “We will not add chat rooms, are you sure you really wanted them?” And it gets worse. Before, on any Blizzard game, you could play on other region’s servers no problem, but now it turns out you need to buy 2 versions of the same game if you want to play cross-region.
Just look at the Teamliquid reaction. Never have I seen TL so unified, or any fanbase so unified for that matter.
http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=128014
I have had my doubts about Blizzard before when they announced that they were releasing the game split into three parts and there would be no LAN, but I always trusted that they would be able to compansate it somehow, and make an awesome Battle.net2.0 service.
I was worried about the competitiveness of the game becasue the way that the units behaved didn’t make for any cool micro tricks you can do like in SC1. But since they made the new macro mechanics of each race to be an APM sink and some really cool new abilities, and that they (somewhat) listened to the fans when they made the Phoenix to be able to move and shoot made me at least have hope for the game. Now, I’m not sure I even want this to be resolved.
From one of your previous blog posts, I take it you’re in the WC3 camp when it comes to Blizzard RTS games, but you have to understand that the subtle ways that the units interracted with each other and could be microed against each other was a good thing that made for many layers of skill (Without making it harder for newer players! It just gave the game a higher skill ceiling without affecting the skill floor! Easy to learn, hard to master!) and many cool combat situations. If the game were to truly progress, the subtle SCBW unit interraction should have been combined with the micro of WC3, not replaced by it. And this is Starcraft, not Warcraft, is it really fair to SC players to bring Warcraft elements that they didn’t like into a game with the Starcraft name?
Anyway, I’m getting a bit off topic. Point is, Blizzard just lost a customer, and I hope they will loose many more. (unless they somehow fix this mess) The same hostility that you feel towards 3D Mario, I now feel against Battle.Net2.0.
This is an important email, and I know my response is likely going to anger you (and perhaps get other people angry). So let me go through it one piece at a time.
Let’s start with the comparison of 3D Mario. I do not hate 3D Mario. I just think 3D Mario is not Mario at all. A good comparison of 2D Mario to 3D Mario would be Pac-Man to Pac-Man 2.
Pac-Man was a huge phenomenon, and it had some amazing sequels such as Ms. Pac-Man and Pac-Man Junior. When Pac-Man 2 came out, it was a 2d platformer. Some people liked it. But many Pac-Man fans did not like it. We wanted more regular Pac-Man (which we wouldn’t really see until Pac-Man Championship Edition). Instead, Namco would rather try to cram Pac-Man the Platformer down our throats.
Namco was confused as to why Pac-Man 2 did not sell like oldschool Pac-Man. The main character, Pac-Man, was there. He would eat power pellets. He would avoid ghosts. Why didn’t people transition to Pac-Man 2?
The answer is because Pac-Man 2 was not Pac-Man at all. It was a totally different game. No one at Namco wanted to make classic type Pac-Man games anymore and kept trying to make a 2d platformer.
The parallel is that developers at Nintendo really love 3d Mario and keep making it. However, the audience does not see 3d Mario as a Mario game. They see it as a totally different game. The reason why I call New Super Mario Brothers Wii the name of Mario 5 is because it is the true successor to Super Mario World. Mario 64, Mario Galaxy, etc. are not bad games. They are very good games. But they are not mainline Mario games. When Nintendo made 2d Mario on the DS and Wii, they got massive, massive sales.
A similar divide occurs with classic Zelda and modern Zelda. In classic Zelda, the game was action packed, and I could run around and explore at my leisure. But modern Zelda is ‘story based’ and the game is more about solving puzzles than being about action. It feels like a very different game. Since Zelda has not been selling well, I believe the antidote to Zelda is to incorporate the classic values into it. Note that my complaint isn’t that the game is in 3d (just as my complaint about 3d Mario is that it is in 3d). My complaint is that the game skeleton has radically changed and become something else completely. This is why I tried to call 3d Mario as ‘Star Finder Mario’ since all you do is run around trying to find stars. In 2d Mario, you just kept moving to the right and hopped on the flagpole.
I believe the Wii Revolution was, in great part, an Old School Revolution as many of the hit games from Wii Sports to Wii Play to Mario 5 all had those Old School values which Nintendo abandoned during the 64 bit and Gamecube eras (and Microsoft and Sony do not have at all). Nintendo has a monopoly on the Old School if they have the courage to seize it.
The reason why I champion the Old School is not just because it includes myself but it is the ‘invisible market’ and its values built up gaming and will save gaming today. I delight that children will grow up playing a 2d Mario on a home console again. I just wish children could grow up playing Zelda.
Here is where I part ways with you. You say that Starcraft 2 is diverging away from what made Starcraft 1 great (and you cite the micro). I believe the people who know the least about why Starcraft 1 became great are the regulars at Team Liquid forum. Just because you play a game a ton, even if you write essays about it, doesn’t mean you understand why it sells. Hell, sometimes the developers do not understand why a game sells.
There were many RTS games around the same time Starcraft came out. What Starcraft excelled at was the three unique races and differentiating them. The content of Starcraft, like all Blizzard games, was extremely well polished. But Starcraft always was the ‘noob RTS’ and the thought of anyone taking it seriously I think is funny. (And yes, I do find South Korea’s tastes as funny.) If you wanted a more complex RTS game, you would have played Age of Empires or Dark Reign or maybe even Total Annihilation. Blizzard RTS games were always considered ‘cartoony’ and very much ‘for the noobs’. Interestingly, this is what people say about World of Warcraft today.
Team Liquid really showed their colors when they began to bash Warcraft 3 gamers. They also regularly attack Command and Conquer fans. Now, why attack people who are fans of RTS games not named Starcraft? Beats me. But places like Team Liquid have all the classic signs of ‘hardcore hive’ mentality. These people literally believe they are the ‘elite gamers’.
As I said in the post earlier, I believe the main reason why there is so much ‘rage’ is because as Starcraft 2 nears release, reality and these ‘elite gamers’ are colliding. The imaginary world these ‘elite gamers’ have created for themselves never truly existed. This is why, out of the blue, “everything” is wrong with Starcraft 2. A few months ago, “everything” was right with the game. I predict as the launch date grows near, the hostility to Starcraft 2 will only increase from these ‘elite gamers’.
But let’s look at the issues people are complaining at one at a time.
Where is the micro in Starcraft 2?
If you want micro in a RTS game, play Warcraft 3. Warcraft 3 is amazing with its demands on micro. But wait, the ‘elite gamers’ said “Warcraft 3 is stupid.” Why? Because it has some creeps and heroes? It is still very much a RTS game and still obeys RTS game rules. The truth is that Warcraft 3 was so complicated with its interlocking auras and diverse amount of micro that it went over most people’s heads. Ironically, the game ended up being ‘too hardcore’ which is why many people gravitated to Tower Defense, dungeon crawler, and DOTA custom games.
I cannot take any micro complaints to Starcraft 2 seriously because these same identical complainers dismissed the micro-heavy Warcraft 3.
Also, there is tons of micro in Starcraft 2 if you wish to use it. You mentioned the Phoenix. Also, there is the Phoenix ability that lifts units up. There are the stalkers with their blink. There are the roaches with their burrow move. There are the void rays that require their beam to charge and can continue firing while moving. There is the Queen spawn larva, the chrono boost, the M.U.L.E.s, and so on. There is tons of micro in the game.
But Starcraft 2, like Starcraft 1, is also more dependent on macro. In other words, the more units you have the more likely you will win. If you want to see a few units wipe out an army in a micro-heavy way, then play Warcraft 3.
I’ve discovered most of the Starcraft 2 complainers do not understand Warcraft 3. All the things they are demanding with micro have already been made. And to be bluntly honest, most of the Starcraft 1 hardcore do not sound like they know much about RTS games in general. I find it very difficult to take anything they say seriously when their reactions attack every other RTS game not named Starcraft yet they are so cowardly they do not stand behind what they say. What they do instead is gather around an altar called ‘community’ (which isn’t a ‘community’ at all but just some message forums) and proclaim their ranting is obedience to the Community God.
Starcraft 2 doesn’t have LAN.
This is old news. Anyone complaining about it today is just trying to find something to complain about. It is water under the bridge.
Starcraft 2 will have two expansion packs. We must buy the game three times!
This isn’t true at all. The ‘three games’ have turned into one game with two expansion packs. All of Blizzard games have had one expansion pack in the past. Now, there is just one extra.
When people mention this, I know they are just trying to find something to complain about. Unlike previous expansions, the multiplayer expansions do not have to be bought. The expansions are primarily for single player. Blizzard has said they do not wish to segregate the Starcraft 2 players by the different expansions. So the ‘new content’ will come in a patch. (This is as I understand it. Blizzard may have changed this lately. Right now, Blizzard is too focused on getting Wings of Liberty out before they can really sit down and tackle Heart of Swarm.)
With the longevity of Blizzard games, I’ve always found every Blizzard expansion pack to be worth it. Blizzard did not make a ‘Counterstrike’ like Westwood did.
In order to play with people in another region, you must buy the game of that region.
While this is different from the previous Blizzard games, this is very common with many games today. It appears the region locking is to help control piracy.
Again, I go back to the value argument. Blizzard games and their longevity are of such value that buying a game in order to play with people in that region doesn’t sound ‘outrageous’ to me. Especially considering that once you have the game, you can play it forever (until Blizzard shuts down the servers). I find the ‘outrage’ over this issue hollow because it is the equivalent of not playing WoW for four months.
Most games today do not allow you to play against anyone in the world. Starcraft 2 isn’t doing anything different. It is a very different world today than when Starcraft 1 came out.
Starcraft 2 may not have chat rooms.
As a suggestion to people trying to persuade Blizzard on this issue, instead of saying, “WE ARE DA COMMUNITY, BLIZZARD! DO WHAT WE SAY!”, say something like “You spent a great effort putting in these achievements. How are we going to show them off if there are no chat channels?” I expect private chat channels will eventually be put back in. What it will likely be is some sort of ‘clan channel’ instead.
But believe it or not, I have to agree with Blizzard on this one. In Warcraft 3, the chat channels became a cesspool that was filled with lewd behavior and potty mouth kids. It was filled with spammers and with bots. The only real benefit to the chat channels was that you could do something while waiting for the game to find players. As for me, I would recite Shakespeare monologues in a public channel and see how far I got before the game connected me.
I remember with the original Starcraft, not long after the game came out, going to the chat window thingy and tried to think of the most absurd chat channel name to join. So I thought of a channel name I knew wouldn’t exist. I typed in ‘sex’ and, lo and behold, I discovered a full channel filled with trading and dealing and likely some prostitution rings. I was shocked that stuff like this was going on below the surface and within Starcraft. With their game being used in such a manner, I can see why Blizzard wants to place the axe on the chat channels. In Warcraft 3, they were even worse.
Chat channels introduce a part of the Bnet experience that Blizzard cannot control. So they clearly do not want to do it. However, I expect them to put in some sort of chat channel substitute. Some people who are trying to compare the lack of chat channels to lack of dedicated servers in Modern Warfare 2 are really stretching it. If there is any equivalent to the lack of dedicated servers in MW 2, it would have been the removal of LAN. And crying about the removal of LAN is ridiculous since it is already very old news. You either accept it at this point or don’t.
In addendum, I would not be surprised if the standard Blizzard message forums are eventually phased out in the future. There is no reason for a company to allow anyone to post whatever he or she likes on their own website (a reason why I do not allow comments on my website). The current behavior on the forums will likely lead to the removal of them.
Blizzard has been killed by Activision. Starcraft 2 is nothing but trying to get monetary gain.
This is flat out not true. Blizzard does not answer to Bobby Kotick, and there are legal protections of Blizzard. Blizzard is not owned by Activision in the same way as, say, Infinity Ward was. If Kotick waddled over and told the Blizzard developers what game they should be making, the Blizzard guys could tell Kotick to go fly a kite. Power within a business is based on how much cashflow on e is responsible for. Blizzard is responsible for a massive amount of cashflow. No one is going to tell Blizzard what to do.
I can assure you that the Starcraft 2 direction has nothing to do with Activision or Bobby Kotick. This is how Blizzard wants it. One thing many people do not know about Blizzard devs is that they are HUGE Xbox Live fans. This is a big reason why Bnet 2.0 is Bnet 2.0.
The charge that Blizzard is only interested in monetary gain also doesn’t fly. Why is Starcraft 1 still being supported when Blizzard could shut down the servers and have people transition to Starcraft 2? It is not in Blizzard’s interest to keep paying for Starcraft 1’s service.
Why give away the Galaxy Editor? It would make more sense for Blizzard to sell it if they were interested in monetary gain.
Why allow people to get the multiplayer upgrades of the expansion packs without paying for them? That doesn’t sound like monetary gain there.
Why not charge people per time for their use of online multiplayer? Aside from places like Brazil and Russia, this isn’t being done. Blizzard is having the service be free. Despite its issues, the service is very expensive to run. Why should Blizzard offer it for free?
I don’t think people realize how much Blizzard could be clamping down on if they wanted to rake in money.
I’m not seeing anything done with Starcraft 2 that is that different from the usual Blizzard way of doing things (with the main exception of removing LAN). In these situations, I must ask myself: “Is this a legitimate complaint or are people just going into nerd rage like gerbils falling off the wheel?” In this case, I’d have to say it is just baseless nerd-rage. People bringing up issues that are well under the bridge, like lack of LAN support, tells me they are just trying to find reasons to rage. And why are they trying to find reasons to rage? It is because the Era of Starcraft 1 Hardcore is over.
Or to put another way, I relish the destruction of the Starcraft 1 Hardcore. When I played Starcraft or any RTS game back in the day, I played it for fun. I played it as a video game. The Starcraft 1 hardcore do not wish to play a game like Starcraft 2 for fun. They play it as a bizarre type of ego-machine and eerily remind me of the WoW hardcore raiders. If you spend your day playing Starcraft for 13 to 16 hours a day, it doesn’t matter how many games you win, you lose the big game of life. Video games are supposed to supplement our lives, not be our lives. There is a difference between being a video game fan and being a video game fanatic. This fanaticism is actually harming Starcraft in the long run, and it is long time for it to be smoked out.
Another reason why I detest the Starcraft 1 hardcore is their blind hatred to other RTS games including Warcraft 3. Starcraft 1 was never that great of a RTS game. Just because you grew up with it doesn’t mean it was that good.
This Saturday, I watched the so-called “Team Liquid” invitational challenge where they supposedly play for money (not much money though. Neighborhood poker matches easily exceed the amount of prize money they had). What was entertaining about the games was the commentators who got super excited when a scv would get killed. The players, themselves, were not that good. The Little One, who is said to be ‘super creative’, did nothing creative at all in his games and just ended up being rolled by traditional roaches and corrupters. Oh wait, he used a planetary fortress as a base defense. That wasn’t creative, it was dumb as he lost the game and I don’t think the fortress ever fired a single time at anything. In the final games, I saw just traditional attacks and watched so-called “pro-player” Idra make Copper Player moves like sending in countless hydralisks to be burnt to a crip by the long lasers from Collossi. I’ve watched other tournament replays as well. Unless the game of Starcraft 2 is new to you, I don’t see why these games are interesting at all (without their peppy commentators who squeal at the sight of a worker dying. It is entertaining how they find even the initial worker versus worker dual with the beginning scouts to be an ‘epic battle’ hahaha). With those invitationals, they appear to be inviting the same people over and over again. With tens of thousands of beta players, you’d think you would see different people than just a dozen.
Starcraft 1 was a ton more fun before the ‘Starcraft Hardcore’ came to be. One of my complaints is the stupid notion of people tying ‘gg’ at the end of every match or ‘gl hf’ at the beginning of them. You have a freaking keyboard in front of you. How can these Starcraft 1 players who brag about their micro cannot micro enough to type in half a dozen letters from their full-sized keyboard that even the average grandmother can do? The only reason why anyone says the ‘gg’ Internet lingo is because they are imitating Koreans.
So most of all, I am sick and tired of the bullshit Korean worship from the Starcraft 1 hardcore. It reminds me, in a micro way, how in the 80s many people thought the Japanese were the ‘real gamers’ and everyone should imitate them. E-sports did not begin in South Korea. E-Sports was going on and was far more popular back during the 80s.
Above: Now THIS is real E-Sports. That cartridge alone is worth more than what people think. And… *gasp*… some of this occurred in AMERICA. I even remember the ‘Archon’ Tournaments. And that was the early 1980s. E-Sports is a very old phenomenon. But it comes and goes with particular games. It has never turned into a game industry despite people trying. I don’t think Blizzard will succeed in this where others had failed. South Korea ‘E-Sports’ has already generally collapsed with people trying to fix matches.
It’s time to get rid of the incessant ‘Korean worship’ from Starcraft. None of it is productive or helpful. If you are in Europe, play your game like a European. If in America, play like an American. Act like a Korean when you are on their servers.
I’m running into more and more people who played RTS games back during the early days of Blizzard and are just shaking their heads at the junk going around today. Back during the Kali days, no one would be taking the game so seriously. I wish Shlonglor still had his game site so he could make fun of these people (the reason why he doesn’t is because he works at Blizzard now, alas). But I know for sure that the people back then would not be acting in the entitlement manner these ‘hardcore’ are today.
People complain about the lack of micro. Let me tell you about how Warcraft 2 removed the micro ability from the archers in Warcraft 1. In Warcraft 1, the archers could continue moving around shooting at the orcs. In Warcraft 2, they stopped and then shot. This was horrible to Warcraft 1 players! But yet Warcraft 2 put Blizzard on the map. I thought Starcraft was a decline over Warcraft 2 due to the lack of ‘boats’ and islands (and the interesting gameplay which it caused). I was concerned that Warcraft 3 was going to ruin the Warcraft franchise because of how much they changed in the storyline and how significantly different the game was to Starcraft. I thought World of Warcraft was going to be a bad joke. If there are two game companies people should never underestimate, the first would be Nintendo and the second would be Blizzard.
Someone point to me the failed games that Blizzard has published. There are none. All of them have been blockbuster hits. This doesn’t mean Starcraft 2 will follow the same way. However, probability points that it will.
But most of all, I am saddened that gamers do not exercise critical thinking anymore. What they do, instead, is surrender all their thinking to message forums such as Team Liquid and point to a ‘consensus’ as a “conclusion”. Message forums are breeding grounds for errors and lunacy. In the past few days, I have seen their rapid complaining be imitated by those on the Bnet message forums. These people outside did not reach this conclusion independently. They are just mindless herd followers. They even copy and post posts from Team Liquid into the general Blizzard forums. Why do they do this? I don’t know. And I bet they don’t know either.
I wish players like yourself would come to your own conclusion based on your own critical thinking. Why let message forums decide your thinking on matters? If you do this, the next thing you know you will be spouting Korean lingo during your Starcraft games and consider it ‘rude’ when other players do not respond back with more Korean lingo.
The Starcraft 1 hardcore has a choice. It can either…
A) Realize that their hardcore ways were nothing more than exercises of vanity and feel-good illusions.
or…
B) Resist the fact that time has passed them by. They will huddle together, pretending it is the twentieth century, playing Brood War like an isolated primitive tribe when the rest of the world has entered the modern age.
I think the complaints, which one must admit are all over the place and even complaining about issues long under the bridge (like LAN) are merely symptoms. The main cause of their distemper is that the Starcraft 1 hardcore ways are no more and were never quite real. The lake is getting larger and the big fish are realizing they were small all along.
Good riddance, I say. I welcome the destruction of the Starcraft 1 hardcore and their condescending and arrogant ways.