Dear Malstrom
Your response did not anger me at all. Since I’m a huge Blizzard fan, if you argue that Blizzard is still the same old awesome Blizzard, it has the opposite effect rather than making me angry, it gives me hope. I do think you’re being unfair to Teamliquid though.
However, I’m not entirely convinced by some of the arguments that you made in your blog post. What made me a fan of Blizzard was that they always put their customer above everything else, without compromises (and their games are kickass). They rewrote the entire code for Starcraft becasue there were lackluster reactions to the alpha version, and they still to this day release patches for games they made in the nineties. Removing LAN got me worried, and not having cross-region play is baffling to me since the technology obviously was there in the original SC. You say that all other game companies do this, so it’s no big deal, but Blizzard isn’t like all other game companies, and that’s why they are loved by many fans. All other gaming companies are also complaining about used game sales and implementing ridiculous DRM and selling overpriced DLC, Blizzard starting to do this would not be okay just becasue others are doing it, Blizzard is awesome because they do not do this and puts their customers above evertything else. Removing LAN (wich I never truly got over) and disabling cross-region play detracts from the online experience of the game, before the no LAN announcement, I would have laughed in the face of people who told me that Blizzard would do such things.
Me being dissapointed with Blizzard has nothing to with the analogy you made about fishes in a pond. I’m scared that Blizzard will change, and if they do end up being a differnet company than the one I became a fan of, then I will have nothing more to with them, becasue I refuse to end up like the people who believe that Sonic’s games are still good. I can only speak for myself about that though.
To return to the ‘fish in a pond that are now an ocean’ analogy, Starcraft veterans have been crushing all competition in the beta. A more accurate analogy would be sharks in a pond now being released into an entire ocean filled with herring. Or perhaps the analogy wasn’t about skill as much as it was about the priorities of the game maker?
Starcraft 2 having the same values as it’s predecessor should be a given. To many people, competitive gaming was a main attraction of SCBW and even if there are other things that are important, competitive gaming gave Starcraft a long life and shouldn’t be underrestimated. It may not have been why it sold well in its early life but it was never a bad thing and it only did good things for the game. I know competitive gaming hasn’t been removed from SC2 and I know the game will be skill-based, but making it so that tournaments could be held without an internet connection that might lag and letting the best players from all over the world face each other on b.net is not that much to ask for since SCBW had it. Starcraft doesn’t become people’s lives just becasue they play it for longer than six months, I have constantly stopped playing, and then returned to Starcraft, and gotten better at it, and discovered and learned interresting new tricks and strategies ever since the game was new. Finding out that there was an E-sports scene in Korea where progamers executed extreme strategies only made the game cooler. Tournaments are fun because you can find cool stuff in the proffessional matches that you end up learning to surprise your friends in multiplayer (Like when I saw the Bulldog rush in a VOD, looked it up, and took my friend that plays terran completely off guard with it in a 1 on 1 game). Also, a game that lives longer than six months is a good thing, not an anomaly that should be undone. I still don’t fully master Starcraft, and there are always stuff to look up on Liquipedia and that’s what makes SCBW fun to return to. It makes the game more fun the same way finding the warp zones and secrets (like negative world) in Super Mario Brothers was fun.
I really want my fears about Blizzard changing to be proven wrong. Gaming without the old Blizzard would be much less exciting.
It is not Activision that changed Blizzard, it is World of Warcraft. World of Warcraft has turned Blizzard from a ‘product’ company to a ‘service’ company. Starcraft 1 was more of a ‘product’. Starcraft 2 will be more of a ‘service’.
There is something wrong inside Blizzard. I have a spy inside Blizzard, someone I knew, and he pretty much tells me what the developers are playing, are thinking and all. To give you a funny story, when he started working at Blizzard, it was when Starcraft was being developed. We had tried to eliminate farms from the game. But the older devs wanted them so they stayed.
Farms were such a joke. In Warcraft 2, they were so worthless that people used them as walls. Other RTS games had no ‘farms’ such as the Command and Conquer series. Why must you be required to make a worthless building after building a few units? At least Starcraft made their farms a little more useful with the Overlords and pylons. But they still sucked. Even to this day in Starcraft 2, overlords and supply depots are shoved in a corner. No one ever enjoys building these… farms. They are such a nuisance. If you eliminated farms in general, would you cause any real change to the gameplay? No, except you would speed up the gameplay some more by taking away bloatedness. To this day, I have no idea why Blizzard thinks farm buildings are fun.
Anyway, my ‘spy’ informs me that the Blizzard devs are all huge Xbots. They love their Xbox 360s. This is why Greg Canessa was hired. This is why BNET 2.0 exists.
BNET 2.0 is Xbox Live for Blizzard games.
All the arrows are being shot at Activision. But they aren’t the ones responsible for this decision. The arrows, instead, should be fired at the developers and their ‘Xbot’ tendencies for loving Xbox Live. The strange change in Blizzard developers is why I am suspecting that many problems in modern gaming is because game developers are no longer part of the mainstream. They are too far separated and have been stuck in their little cliques.
I can understand the other changes, however. From Blizzard’s point of view, they are trying to make a better customer experience. The chat rooms have been heavily abused in Starcraft and Warcraft 3 with tons of bots, tons of trash, so I can see why Blizzard removed them. However, this is also creating some problems like how can you set up a tournament? How can you meet people online? Was the problem with the chatrooms or the Blizzard made chatrooms?
The no-LAN is so much a legal issue because Blizzard loses the rights of their game footage unless the game is online. And people were pirating Warcraft 3 to play LAN via the Internet.