Blizzard Previews Revamped Battle.net 188
Blizzard updated the official StarCraft II site today with a preview of how the revamped Battle.net will function. They emphasize the social features, competitive matchmaking system, and the ease of sharing mods and maps. Quoting:
"When the legacy Battle.net service introduced support for user-created mods such as DotA, Tower Defense, and many others, these user-created game types became immensely popular. But while Battle.net supported mods at a basic level, integration with tools and the mod community wasn't where it needed to be for a game releasing in 2010. The new Battle.net service will see some major improvements in this area. StarCraft II will include a full-featured content-creation toolkit — the same tools used by the StarCraft II design team to create the single-player campaign. To fully harness the community's mapmaking prowess, Battle.net will introduce a feature called Map Publishing. Map Publishing will let users upload their maps to the service and share them with the rest of the community immediately on the service. This also ties in with the goal of making Battle.net an always-connected experience — you can publish, browse, and download maps directly via the Battle.net client. Finding games based on specific mods will also be much easier with our all-new custom game system, placing the full breadth of the modding community's efforts at your fingertips."
Why does everything have to be a market? (Score:2, Insightful)
Isn't adding a monetary incentive for mods going to overshadow the inherent incentive of creating something fun?
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My hope is that people resist the urge to get greedy, and the only maps that end up being pay-to-play are the truly commercial-grade level of mods for the game, like completely new campaigns with new art, new units, etc.
My expectation is any stand-alone maps that cost money will simply be copied, with or without enough changes to justify a legal defense, and made available for free, undercutting the entire paid DLC model on Battle.net.
Will it stay free? (Score:2)
Just wondering. The subscription model of WoW has kept me using WC3. :)
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So there's no ongoing benefit to Blizzard keeping the Starcraft 2 servers going after about a year when the sales start to trail off.
What is it like TWELVE YEARS now and people are still playing Starcraft against one another via LAN? You think there's any chance that Blizzard is going to still be running a Starcraft 2 server in 2022?
Sometimes, being a fan of a product to the extent that you'd buy it no matter what works against your own best interest.
Re:Will it stay free? (Score:5, Informative)
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Yeah, I don't think we really have to worry about Blizzard taking their servers down any time soon. They sell their new games based on the fact that Battle.net is so good and reliable for more than a decade now.
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These days, I think there's more spambots than players though.
They're not only annoying, they're badly coded. They enter a game, spew their crap and then leave in less than one second. Lags the game to hell, annoys all the players.
The worst part is: five seconds later, another spambots enters the game and spew the SAME crap again. And then you get a bonus spambot spewing crap for another website three seconds later.
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Diablo 1 is still active on battle.net. This is the game that launched the service in 1996.
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Turn in your gamer card for not knowing that.
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Facebattle.net (Score:5, Insightful)
Great, more of this "social networking" garbage? Can't a game just be a game anymore?
Re:Facebattle.net (Score:4, Interesting)
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I just wish they would have made a deal with somebody at some point. I'm all over the "gaming social networks" because I'm a heavy gamer - there's LIVE, PSN, Xfire, Steam, Facebook (in a way), and now BNET 2.0. I wish they would have just cut a deal with Steam like so many games do and saved a whole bunch of people the headache.
This takes me back to the IM client wars of the early 00s...
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>>there's LIVE, PSN, Xfire, Steam, Facebook (in a way), and now BNET 2.0.
Almost every company is making their own usually terrible social network site. For example, you have to enroll with Bioware's shitty social networking site to play Dragon Age or (presumably) ME2, or at least to get the collector's edition items that you probably should have just gotten included when you bought the game. I'm principally annoyed at them since they had two different email addresses on file for me, and kept bouncing
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>>But to answer the question, it was needed because they plan to make some additional money by selling expansions and additional content.
An online store is one thing. A social network, though? That's kind of inexplicable.
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Steam has some pretty rudimentary social networking features. Profile pages, a wall, groups, and chat(+groupchat)/buddy list that works in game, with voicechat/group voicechat. The groups and chat are indespensible though. We managed to get six people together for a competitive 6v6 team and schedule games that way using the group and groupchat features. I probably wouldn't be playing TF2 still (and Valve selling tons and tons of copies of TF2 2.5 years after the release date) if it weren't for the community
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Except it really isn't inexplicable. Some people make friends with people they've met online in various ways, even if "making friends" wasn't their primary reason for going into that online venue.
Years ago, when I played Diablo II on battle.net, I wound up meeting some people during random runs who seemed cool - we chatted a bit, and played together regularly. When Star Wars: Galaxies came out, a bunch of us got together and made characters there, and met more people in that game and over a year or two a gr
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it was needed because they plan to make some additional money by selling expansions and additional content.
There must be a different meaning for the word "needed" that I'm unaware of.
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It still should be optional, people should be free to decide whether they want to use the bnet integration or not. I myself will most likely run sc2 behind a firewall when i play the single player campaign to not be bothered and find a bnet-to-lan utility for lan gaming.
Re:Facebattle.net (Score:5, Insightful)
You youngsters don't know what you missed during id software's heyday. Gaming "has become" a very social activity??? You never played a player mod for Doom ][ or Quake, then, I take it. You never got to play with Homer Simpson as your avatar. Never played Quess, or Weapons Factory, or the original Team Fortress, or QRally, or Loki's Minions, or the original Threewave CTF, or any number of other lesser known player created mods. You never played the original Counter-Strike betas on the HL engine, either.
You never played on team ladders like those hosted by OGL [worldogl.com]. You never listened in on Tapper's live netcasts on Radio Evil.
You never found a handful of servers that you played on regularly. Never got to know the regulars as friends. Never participated on a hosting clan's forums.
Going even further back, you never played Empire on PLATO [daleske.com].
Online gaming has always been a very social activity. The only real change is that many gaming companies, Valve among them, are making it tougher and tougher to create player created and managed communities. I see this as a HUGE step in the wrong direction. :-(
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"Valve among them, are making it tougher and tougher to create player created and managed communities. "
IT's about managing eyeballs in the end, battle.net remember has ads spamming, even if many of those ads are centered around blizzard products, I imagine ad spamming will get worse in the future.
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Battle.net had one ad displayed at the top of the screen. Are you not able to move your eyeballs down?
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You make fantastic, fantastic points. Thanks.
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As long as I don't have to disclose everything including the times I'll probably sit on the can as in most other "social" websites with the rest of the world, I can stomach it.
Face it, what do I want from a "multiplayer community platform"?
a) A matchmaking service that pits me against (or with, in co-op games) players of a similar skill level.
b) A way to keep track of the people I liked to play with (today elevated to "friend" status, but personally, I'd use the word far more selectively).
c) A way to keep m
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I have to agree. I have no interest in BNet. I would rather play with a few of my close friends (as in people I actually know and have met in person). I find most people in these online communities to be about as desirable as 'Anonymous' for personalities. They tend to be irresponsible, infantile, or just douche bags in general when the whim suits them.
I'm one of those that was very disappointed that I would even have to log into BNet just to play Diablo. What I find most amusing out of all of this is that
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The new Battle.net will give you more tools to make it easier to play with your close friends and avoid people you don't want to play with. Why would be against this?
Re:Facebattle.net (Score:5, Funny)
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You must be completely blind. There are more games with great single player experiences than any other time in history. Fallout 3, Borderlands, Tales of Vesperia (o
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Yes. Just don't log on to Battle.net.
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Starcraft II will have a single player mode.
*always* connected? (Score:4, Insightful)
Just... Great.
Yet another game that you can't play without being tethered to the internet. No biggie for multiplayer, but it really shouldn't have any business in single-player campaign mode...
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Yet another game that you can't play without being tethered to the internet
Heaven forbid you could entertain yourself on a long haul flight, or on a high-speed long distance train journey.
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Believe it or not, but there are trains here.
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There are quite a few long distance train services in the US. Most of them are scenic routes because nobody wants to sit on a train that long.
Here is a site you can go to for tickets if you want to sit on one of these long boring rides: http://www.amtrak.com/servlet/ContentServer?pagename=Amtrak/HomePage [amtrak.com]
They even offer sleeping cars because some of these trips are days...
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Depends on what you qualify as "high speed." ;) Compared to walking, it's very fast.
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Other than assuming the worst, there's no reason to assume the game cannot function in single player without being connected to battle.net.
After all (and ignoring that GFWL is crap for a second), I could make the same statements about Fallout 3, Dawn of War, or Resident Evil 5 and GFWL. Being able to be "always connected" for "enhanced functionality". None of them require you to log into GFWL to function in single player though. Or any Steam game for that matter (you can go to offline mode, but then you
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It doesn't say that it's mandatory, just that it's available. XBox Live and Steam both have an online presence in singleplayer games, it didn't stop you starting the software offline.
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I beg to differ (Score:2)
Your desktop is obviously always connected
I beg to differ. A lot of people who stick to single-player or split-screen gaming do so because they live where they can't get anything above dial-up and don't want to tie up the phone line for an hour at a time. Even people who live in range of low-end DSL often have PPPoE, and my mother reports that PPPoE will deny her a connection if too many other users are connected to the same DSLAM.
Given that the graphics are fairly modern, we can eliminate vast swaths of the notebook market.
I beg to differ. Any chipset with a better GPU than Intel's "Graphics My Ass", such as the NVIDIA ION chipset, can run
How to do tournament play? with out have the on li (Score:2)
How to do tournament play? with out have the on line part? as for tournament you need to keep stuff to local systems only as any kind of lag / server mess up may mess things up and being on line makes it more likely to not be 100% the same for all players. also people may not want to get banded for what ever software may be on the tournaments systems that are not there own systems.
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You can play it just fine in offline ("Guest") mode. It simply does not record your "achievements" in that mode. But you can still play single players and save your games and what not. This was discussed at length at Blizzcon, mostly due to angry people asking about LAN play at the Q&A session after the speech. I didn't check out this new preview so I'm not sure if it was mentioned there.
Nice deep integration but hoping for API (Score:2)
Maybe we need a Open Game Achievement Standards Body RFC comity group thingie?
Selling mods... (Score:2)
That's neat and all, but I'm wondering if there will be some way to prevent a user from buying a mod, changing it just slightly, and re-uploading it for free.
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As many people I've talked to about this feature has brought this up as well, I'm guessing Blizzard has already thought of this. Maybe Blizzard will specially encrypt maps that you had to pay for so you can't distributed or edit them. I'm pretty sure it's been thought of, but we'll have to see the protection method when the game goes into beta/live.
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Probably nothing will prevent somebody from doing that, other than edit protections built into the maps themselves. Such things tend to get hacked, though. The real thing will be simply folks making a very similar map for free. My guess is, the folks trying to actually charge for maps will be laughed/scorned so much that nobody really bothers, though maybe we'll get some commercial-grade full campaign mods that cost a bit of money (and actually be worth it).
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Or the people charging for mods will be trying to sell work they invested a very significant amount of time into. Something that would not be easy to reproduce for free. Steam has shown that this model works pretty well, so SC2 is not likely to be fundamentally different.
Here is a Problem (Score:5, Insightful)
Here is a problem that has risen from social networking and what not and I can point the finger at Blizzard.
In WoW they came up with all this great new data mining and achievements. We end up with gear scores and Wow Heroes etc.
Now I have a friend that just decided to start playing back in October. He signs up and starts playing on Elune for instance. In 3 months he never was invited into a single group. Ever. Why? "He didn't have any heirloom gear" and "His gear score is too low." etc... The digital equivalent of "The rich get richer and the poor get poorer."
At far as what I've seen most of this social networking crap is only going to frustrate new players and build walls to keep new players out. Most game related social networking results in Clique building and tribal nonsense. I survived the ACiD, TRiBE, iCE ANSI wars in the BBS era. I witnessed the grand flame wars of Usenet. I saw the clan wars in the MMO days, I saw the Guild fights in the early days of the MMOs culminating in the rise of the Uber guilds. The one thing I can say with certainty is "The more 'social' networking tools the more 'anti-social' people behave." or another way to say it is "Social networking is the fertilizer on the asshole crop". I am also fond of "Shit floats in the waters of user content" but that is a bit off topic.
I fear that, from what I've seen, Bnet's new social networking tools is going to be more about shutting people out rather then bringing people together.
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You really can't compare MMORPG drama with social tools like having a buddy list in an RTS matchmaking system. There's no persistent gear in Starcraft II. There's going to be battle.net clans, but there already are battle.net clans. The new tools will help those clans keep in touch with each other better, that's really it. As for the achievements, they amount to "this guy finished the campaign" or "this guy reached rank 10 on the multiplayer ladders", neither of which will really matter beyond what will alr
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so... you have a problem with humanity then?
Online social networks are not much different from regular life networks
Have you grown out of the high school stage where you sit there pointlessly wondering "why can't everyone be invited to the party?"
Well everyone can't. The house only fits 20 people. You can't be friends with everyone, because there's only 24 hours in a day and you won't get to know anyone a friend without sacrificing time with someone else. Socializing means excluding some others. Just ac
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Now I have a friend that just decided to start playing back in October. He signs up and starts playing on Elune for instance. In 3 months he never was invited into a single group. Ever. Why? "He didn't have any heirloom gear" and "His gear score is too low." etc... The digital equivalent of "The rich get richer and the poor get poorer."
So wait... you're blaming Blizzard's tools for the fact that these other players are morons? Any WoW player with any sense knows that it's not worth obsessing over someone's gear for 5-mans, let alone the low-level ones. It's unfortunate that Elune is apparently populated by elitist morons, but I don't think we can blame the Armory for that. Before there was the Armory, there was inspecting someone, and yes, people got booted from groups when they got inspected and their gear wasn't up to someone's "standar
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Or, in other words, make sure you play with friends. Then you don't have to worry about gear checks, loot whores, anonymous assholes and other douchebaggery. And look - the social networking tools make that easy! Whodathunkit.
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All the data gearscore uses has been available since WoW 1.0. All it does is inspect a player (something you've always been able to do), add up the item levels of their gear (while hidden to players until recently, item level has been available to mods since 1.0), and then share that number with other users of the mod using the mod communication channels (which have been available since 1.
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Tools are just tools.
How they're used says nothing about the tools and everything about the user.
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[...] I survived the ACiD, TRiBE, iCE ANSI wars in the BBS era. I witnessed the grand flame wars of Usenet. I saw the clan wars in the MMO days, I saw the Guild fights in the early days of the MMOs culminating in the rise of the Uber guilds. [...]
"I've seen.. things, you people wouldn't believe... All those moments will be lost in time. Like tears in the rain..."
Needed Mod (Score:2)
They emphasize the social features, competitive matchmaking system, and the ease of sharing mods and maps.
Great! Maybe someone will make a mod for playing LAN games.
Map Publishing (Score:4, Informative)
The Map Publishing feature is interesting to me. I have released dozens of popular Starcraft maps and distribution has always been a problem. For one, maps are copied peer-to-peer, so the only way to get a new map is to find somebody else who happens to be hosting it at the moment you're looking. For another, maps are not cryptographically signed, so it's trivial for somebody to alter a map so they can cheat in the game. Although I have a reputation as a skilled mapmaker, there are maps circulating with my name still on them that are rigged or badly modified.
On the other hand, the viral transmission and mutation of maps is part of what keeps the mapmaking community alive. Players find a map they like, try to modify it, and set the new version loose in the wild. If it's good it will spread and become the basis for others to tinker with.
So the Marketplace sounds like a potentially good way to encourage the creation of polished maps. But I wonder if closed-source mapmaking can really keep pace with open-source development or if many players will accept (or even discover) pay maps.
TheNevermind
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What about spammers? (Score:2)
If anyone has been playing Diablo 2, then you know how annoying spambots have been lately.
Will this "revamped Battle.net" stop them or will they continue to rouin the game?
Forcing you to be online (Score:4, Interesting)
But they don't emphasis that you now are forced to be online (being monitored by big brother?) when you want to play a solo game.
Apparently there isn't any privacy either, if you are forced to put some family on your new 'friend' list they can track you forever - really bad design.
Alright Slashdot...sit down (Score:2)
What do we have modded up for this article? Anti-Blizzard bnetd, anti-social networking, anti-online connected, anti-WoW. And just one...one! person actually commenting on how it will be great way for him to release his maps.
Sl
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Who cares? (Score:2, Insightful)
Just say no to DRM, lack of LAN support, and splitting the game into multiple parts.
Boycott Starcraft II!
Re:Who cares? (Score:5, Funny)
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That's.... not a boycott though.
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Boycott Starcraft II!
I hate DRM, I have been close to spitting tacks over the multiple mandatory online accounts and SecureROM havoc played with my system by Grand Theft Auto, but I have been longing for Starcraft II for years now.
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I'm assuming the $180 is implying that Starcraft II is going to be released in 3 iterations each priced at $60. You're most likely wrong. The devs said that the 2nd and 3rd campaigns will be more like expansions packs, and will be priced accordingly. Besides it's not like you're forced to buy all three games.
What makes you think you will be constantly pestered to buy maps? Wouldn't you want to see what kind of cool mods/maps the community made without having to jump through hoops to search them? You po
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Re:Who cares? (Score:5, Insightful)
http://www.gamespot.com/news/6199172.html [gamespot.com]
Pardo also said that the second two releases could be considered expansion packs, but that "we really want them to feel like stand-alone products."
i.e., they will charge full price.
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You're wrong.
They might NOT be true. They MAY be true. They aren't KNOWN to be true or untrue. I think they're LIKELY true; I would be happy to be wrong, but I doubt I will be. As the other poster said, maybe the three games will total $140 instead of $180. I wager they'll be $180. They have said they will sell maps, scenarios, and units on battlenet. You seriously think they won
Re:Who cares? (Score:4, Insightful)
Just say no to a company that likes suing their own [wikipedia.org] fans [wikipedia.org] to the ground and directly expanded [wikipedia.org] the reach of EULAs in the United States.
DRM, LAN, they're all just the nip in the proverbial bud of Blizzard's evil, reasons to boycott them we've had for years now.
Re:Who cares? (Score:5, Insightful)
But let's talk about bnetd. Bnetd was where people went to play pirated copies of Starcraft. You can argue some minority of people owned the game and preferred playing. But the reality is, that is where people who didn't pay for the game played. If you owned a company, I am sure you would shut down anyone who did the same to you. This is where some people argue "But the bnetd people said they would do key checks if Blizzard would give them their key gen algorithm". And this is where I look at them funny for being so stupid. Do you really think a company would hand that over to some random people. Give me a break.
Never even heard of Freecraft. Sounds like Blizzard didn't like the name association and its copying of Warcraft's idea. So they changed the name and actually tried to make a unique game instead of copying. Sounds find to me.
As far as Glider is concerned...are you serious? Bots ruin MMOs. People running Glider were getting banned since you had to dig around on the site to even know that it was something that violated the ToS. It was an application made EXPLICITLY to do something that would get you banned. There was absolutely no other application of Glider but to cheat. It deserved to be shut down and was something that benefited people who actually played the game.
You can not like them for doing these things, but you have to realize from a business perspective it is all completely logical. Companies have to protect their IP. If you counter balance this with the fact that they still support and update really really old games and that they make some of the best games ever, you can't really hate them without looking like some sort of hyper-polarized buffoon.
I am not trying to convince you to buy their games. I am just saying, you aren't going to change my mind with those examples since they are all justified by any reasonable person.
Re:Who cares? (Score:5, Insightful)
Ridiculous. What other company still supports servers for a 10+ year old game? What other company ignores release pressures and won't release a game until it is done? Evil my ass.
So that's all it takes for you to deem a company 'non-evil'? Windows still supports 10-years-old OSes and ignores release pressures to release software before it's done, are they a good company too?
But let's talk about bnetd. Bnetd was where people went to play pirated copies of Starcraft. You can argue some minority of people owned the game and preferred playing. But the reality is, that is where people who didn't pay for the game played. If you owned a company, I am sure you would shut down anyone who did the same to you. This is where some people argue "But the bnetd people said they would do key checks if Blizzard would give them their key gen algorithm". And this is where I look at them funny for being so stupid. Do you really think a company would hand that over to some random people. Give me a break.
BitTorrent is where 'people go to get pirated copies of MPAA movies', yet is that sufficient reason to shut them down? no, because BitTorrent is not, by itself, illegal. And neither was bnetd, regardless of what your RIAA-like red herrings may suggest.
Never even heard of Freecraft. Sounds like Blizzard didn't like the name association and its copying of Warcraft's idea. So they changed the name and actually tried to make a unique game instead of copying. Sounds find to me.
Yeah, except the part where they also had to remove compatibility with Warcraft II's files to avoid getting sued. That's how the whole freaking project *started*, btw, as a way to play an improved version of Warcraft II. Somebody does that to ID's games and they give it their kudos. Somebody does that to Valve's games and they freaking advertise it on their website. Somebody does that to *Blizzard*, however, and here comes the lawyers.
As far as Glider is concerned...are you serious? Bots ruin MMOs. People running Glider were getting banned since you had to dig around on the site to even know that it was something that violated the ToS. It was an application made EXPLICITLY to do something that would get you banned. There was absolutely no other application of Glider but to cheat. It deserved to be shut down and was something that benefited people who actually played the game.
Did it deserve to be shut down? perhaps. Did it deserve to be shut down by the bullshit copyright and EULA claims Blizzard used? hardly. Did we, people who had nothing to do with the whole thing, deserve to gain such an incredibly dangerous legal precedent over it? hell fucking no. Yet that's what happened.
You can not like them for doing these things, but you have to realize from a business perspective it is all completely logical. Companies have to protect their IP. If you counter balance this with the fact that they still support and update really really old games and that they make some of the best games ever, you can't really hate them without looking like some sort of hyper-polarized buffoon.
"Business perspective" has a way of making otherwise evil acts seem completely logical. Hell, nothing Microsoft has ever done has been illogical from a strictly business perspective, specially given their current size and power, yet we're perfectly fine with calling them a bunch of evil motherfuckers. Also, the 'best games ever' thing is purely subjective and, therefore, fails at being a decent enough argument.
I am not trying to convince you to buy their games. I am just saying, you aren't going to change my mind with those examples since they are all justified by any reasonable person.
Not really, they aren't.
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So that's all it takes for you to deem a company 'non-evil'? Windows still supports 10-years-old OSes and ignores release pressures to release software before it's done, are they a good company too?
No, it isn't. I responded to all the points the parent poster listed as making them evil and why I didn't think it was evil. But nothing like starting out yo
Re:Who cares? (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't conflate "pro-piracy" with "anti-DRM". Two different issues, and one doesn't imply the other.
Re:Who cares? (Score:5, Insightful)
No, it isn't. I responded to all the points the parent poster listed as making them evil and why I didn't think it was evil. But nothing like starting out your argument with a strawman, right?
So why mention it, if it has no bearing on whether they're evil or not?
BitTorrent is a horrible analogy. BitTorrent simply is a fast way to transfer files among peers. The tool is inherently neutral even if many uses are illegal. bnetd was designed to bypass protection on proprietary code so that people could play online without paying for the game. Even if you want to say that it was designed only to give people better online performance (weak at best considered how it was used), the fact that it was doing it for proprietary code is the difference between bnetd and BitTorrent. If BitTorrent only transferred files based off of someone else's code, then maybe you would have a point. But it doesn't, so you don't.
Wrong. You could already play online with a pirated copy of Starcraft and Diablo 2 thanks to the wonders of LAN and direct TCP/IP play (why did you think they took it out for SC2?). All bnetd did was to allow people to run their own Battle.net-like servers for running a private league or such, something that had a lot of interest not just from the 'pirate' crowd but from legit owners as well.
That's great for Valve (another company that is awesome). But if Blizzard doesn't want other people using their assets, IT IS THEIR RIGHT TO DO SO. Why can't people write their own code and make their own art? Slashdot props up originality but then defends people who want to steal the ideas, art, and code from other games to make a game exactly like the original (except that it is usually worse) instead of coming up with their own ideas. In any case, you may not like it. But companies have the right to defend their property. It doesn't make them evil.
Yes, it does. That a company has the legal right to do something doesn't mean the act itself is automatically "non-evil", legality is independant of morality. And suing your own fans because they tried to port their favorite (and quite ancient) game to Linux and make a couple improvements on the way *is* evil by almost any definition of the word.
Tin foil hattery. Call me when this is used in all the BS ways Slashdotter say it COULD be used. They will be shot down. Also, this is a problem with the legal system. If there was a simple way for Blizzard to say "Hey, Glider needs to be shut down because it is doing this..." and it was reasonable (which it was) then it could have just been shut down. Our legal system is so screwed up that they had to jump through hoops to get Glider to shut down. Also, no one blames Glider. If it wasn't created in the first place, then this wouldn't have happened. I understand why you don't like Blizzard because of it, but it doesn't make them evil.
And you know it'll be shot down for a fact... why, exactly? And yes, expanding the reaches of EULAs and copyright law beyond the limits that came before it is pretty much "evil" as well.
Uh, no. MS does break monopolistic laws all the time. That is why they are evil. Their actions are not reasonable.
This game is going to sell in the millions. Talking about this stuff is not going to stop anyone from buying it. I'd like to get on games.slashdot.org and talk about games. But you guys politicize everything. I feel like Slashdot becomes a bunch of Fox News watchers when it comes to Blizzard. There is this positive feedback loop that mods up people that hate Blizzard but then ignore the millions of times more evil companies like Apple and Nintendo. Can't you guys just be excited for a new good game? No, I guess not.
Apple and Nintendo can't be evil, they made the iPod and the Wii respectively and they're great. Seriously, you may try to get away from politics, but politics certainly won't leave you alone, and if you don't actively protest companies that behave unethically, that's exactly how they'll continue to behave.
Bread and circuses indeed.
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Yeah, except the part where they also had to remove compatibility with Warcraft II's files to avoid getting sued. That's how the whole freaking project *started*, btw, as a way to play an improved version of Warcraft II. Somebody does that to ID's games and they give it their kudos. Somebody does that to Valve's games and they freaking advertise it on their website. Somebody does that to *Blizzard*, however, and here comes the lawyers.
You make such biased political comparisons. At least say what Valve game and what id (not ID) game you are talking about.
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(plus, bonus "I hated and didn't finish one of your GOTY titles, thus demonstrating I am not your representative customer and can be safely ignored")
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Actually, wasn't this more of a "I bought one of your products and found out while playing it that it sucked, and if you screw it up again I won't buy the next one. Honest!"
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Read the context. He "didn't like the look" and "didn't finish the single player campaign". And he's concerned about LAN play. What does this tell you? Despite "hating" WC3 he probably put a few dozen hours into it (at least) at LANs or possibly even on battle.net. If he really didn't like the actual gameplay of the multiplayer, I'm pretty sure he wouldn't give two shits about SC2 or whether or not it had LAN play.
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You know what they say about assuming...
Now, I know I've played War3 over LAN (although never on Battle.Net), in addition to playing completely through some of campaigns.
I'm another person who didn't really like War3. Adding 3D graphics was a good idea. Adding more races and variety was a good idea. Making all units cost at least 2 population units was a bad idea. Halving the population cap w
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What about those of us who will not buy StarCraft II without LAN party capability?
Your money will scarcely be missed.
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If I were a Blizzard employee, I would be annoyed with you too. They probably had nothing to do with the development of WC III. And you just come up and randomly trashing a game their company makes.
I think you have severe social skill problems. And that says something when you are on a tech site.
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The more interesting story in my mind is the fact they've got an investor conference call today, the SC2 beta forums got created (and then quickly made private) on battle.net on Monday, and rumors are going around about the beta coming out on Friday, at least since last week sometime. This battle.net preview thing is really just more evidence that they're getting close to beta, since basically the game was delayed until 2010 due to battle.net taking too long.
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Actually, the best way to fight piracy is to make a product pirates aren't interested in.
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And actually, an extra click wouldn't be bad so that you could find the specific game type you wanted. Rather than have ev