Ask Blizzard About Starcraft2, Diablo III, WoW, or Battle.net 520
Well, Blizzcon 2009 is about to get underway (look for the big news from the keynote in a few hours) and given how fast it sold out I'm sure there are still many rabid fans interested in what Blizzard might have to say that don't want to shell out the $40 for Pay-Per-View access. So, to that end we have interviews scheduled tomorrow with the teams from Starcraft2, Diablo III, World of Warcraft, and Battle.net. If there is anything you wish to know about the progress or juicy details from any of these teams please leave it in the comments below. We'll try to parse through for the best questions and get you answers during our interview slots tomorrow. The usual Slashdot interview rules apply.
StarCraft II - LAN PLAY (Score:5, Insightful)
Why, why why why is there no LAN play?
I understand the desire to have a method of preventing piracy. But, if I get a group of 10 buddies in a room, and we want to go nuts with this game, ALL of us using the Internet to access a server is just plain dumb.
It's great if we want to setup a 'virtual LAN' party. But REAL face to face ones suffer as a result.
Why not make it require AUTH to open LAN play, then everything else is local? Anything is better than forcing everyone to use battleNet.
LAN (Score:5, Insightful)
There's been talk that Starcraft II would not support LAN. The reason I am a fan of Starcraft and want to buy Starcraft II is I spent many many hours playing it in LAN cafes. People will be doing LAN with pirated version anyway, they'll just run their own battle.net server locally and the only thing you'll achieve is piss off other consummers with a crippled product. Why oh why?
Re:Reduced Effort in World of Warcraft (Score:4, Insightful)
Sir:
I respectfully disagree. I think the end-game content and social aspect is most aspired after by the majority of players of World of Warcraft. In my opinion, I think Blizzard made the right decision in reducing the barrier to this end-game content and social aspect by making leveling faster and easier. Lower level content is still available for those who wish to pursue it (and comes with fulfilling achievements like Loremaster), but it is no longer an ominous, artificial, and arbitrary barrier to entry to the more desired content.
Mind you, I don't know the habits of most WoW players, but I'm confident that Blizzard isn't selling themselves short here. I'd say they're catering to the desires of their paying customers, but not necessarily overindulging them.
Starcraft II LAN Support (Score:2, Insightful)
As a company who has shown a generally tendency toward keeping its fans happy (the return of the original voice actor for Raynor being a great, recent example of this), are you paying attention to the heavily supported petition at http://www.petitiononline.com/LANSC2/petition.html? I ask this because the petition brings up quite valid points about the creation of pirate battle.net servers. Surely you must realize that time and time again game companies make similar decisions regarding anti-piracy practice (think Spore DRM), and each time all it nets the company supporting it is a loss in valid customers frustrated with the lack of support and an increase in piracy. (For reference, Spore was supposed to have "unbreakable" drm to protect it, yet it was also considered the most pirated game of all time and in fact the cracked version was available up to a week before its official release.)
What about spammers? (Score:5, Insightful)
Will you do anything to protect us from being annoyed by spambots who can enter a game, write five lines of spam and leave the game in less than 2 seconds? Why can't you guys put protection against those idiots, it's easy enough to detect those kinds of patterns and block the user accounts.
And if you think making a private game in D2 protects you against those morons, they started using private messages to tell you about their crap, which is D2-related spam about items and stuff, which are also not allowed by Blizzard, which they should also be stopping from happening.
I know that Diablo II is old and playing on battle.net is free, but still, that doesn't leave a good impression when asking me if I want to play your future games.
Why should I buy your product? (Score:3, Insightful)
After several instances of your company being evil towards the community bnetd & removal of LAN play on your newest titles, please give me a good reason to buy what you are selling.
Re:Are there any plans to revamp Parental Controls (Score:3, Insightful)
This is not always a help... My wife plays WoWC too. Sadly, she's better at the game than I am.
Re:StarCraft II - LAN PLAY (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, to get more to the point, what answer do they have for our troops in Iraq, Afghanistan, and who knows where else who would like to play a quiet LAN game when internet access is limited or nonexistent.
Also, what kind of ports are required, given that a lot of college students are behind restrictive campus firewalls.
For a final question on this LAN issue, will the game be playable at all if your battle.net account is banned? This is probably a fitting punishment for hacking and the like, but false positives are inevitable, and I don't really want to put down $50 for something if, on a whim, Blizzard can revoke my license.
MY QUESTION (Score:1, Insightful)
Why the hell did you let the WC3 / WoW art team work on SC2?
ZERGLINGS ARE FELHOUNDS.
It looks retarded and smacks of WoW!
This is not a good thing.
Make them look like zerglings again. PLEASE.
STRUCTURES ARE PLUMP AND UGLY.
It looks retarded and cartoony!
Structures need EMPTY SPACE. Right now every structure is a block, a blob, or similar. Why do the Terran structures, which have extending legs and such, not have any space between the main structure and the extending legs? Look at the previous designs in the original SC.
The structures look like singular objects, when they should look like complex buildings made of many different parts. They look like a singular painted blob.
Re:LAN (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, Blizzard is retarded if they think they can stop it.
Blizzard is also retarded if they think people want to always be connected to Battle.net . I don't give a shit how good BNet 2.0 is, I shouldn't need to be online or connect to your servers just to play the game I bought (3. Fucking. Times).
Re:Are there any plans to revamp Parental Controls (Score:0, Insightful)
Re:StarCraft II - LAN PLAY (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:The Status Quo of Delayed Release Dates (Score:3, Insightful)
My coworker and I love every single one of your games. But we don't love your release dates.
Ever thought about the fact that the REASON you love every single Blizzard game is because they put more emphasis on quality than they do meeting a release date? In my experience in the software development world, if you want to release software with as few bugs as possible (which Blizzard actively strives for more than any other game company I've heard of), and as fun as possible (which requires insane amounts of iterative work with development and then testing), by your logic, they may as well not give a release date until the discs go gold...
I think they have to put a release date on there because the publisher (Vivendi) requires it, but I've never seen a company take so much leeway with those release dates, and I think we're all better off for it.
Re:Battle.net Fixes and Improvements? (Score:3, Insightful)
If I bring my PC to my cousin's house for a LAN party (who lives way out in the country, and only has dial up) are we going to be able to have a full speed, low latency network game of Starcraft II?
Re:Will we see Diablo III on consoles? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Reduced Effort in World of Warcraft (Score:3, Insightful)
reduced effort to level
I'm going to disagree with you on this terminology right here. Okay, sure, the total effort is reduced. But the effort per unit time is the same as always (easy), the only thing that's changed is how much time you're spending. In a game genre that is defined by sucking extra monthly fees out of you by wasting as much of your time as possible, this is actually a welcome breath of fresh air. They no longer have any real incentive to make getting to level 60 take 20 days /played, and thus they speed it up. Yay, Blizz.
Seriously, making leveling in Azeroth easier is a great thing.
First, it keeps new players from being that much further behind where everyone else is doing stuff and having fun, Northrend and level 80. They aren't missing anything by leveling faster than they would if leveling was still as slow and painful as when 60 was the level cap. Who cares if they do slightly fewer kill quests or delivery quests? The only good content they'll be missing out on is Old World 5-man instances, like they'd be doing that anyway! I leveled a character just before the first big leveling nerf, and then just like today about the only instance you have a prayer in hell of finding a group for is Scarlet Monestary.
They really aren't missing anything.
Second, it keeps all the old players who want an alt from going insane doing the same content for a 5th time in a row.
Third, it keeps everyone from just rolling a Death Knight to instantly skip Azeroth. Seriously, if you are going to complain about people skipping content, complain about DKs. Keeping the 1-60 grind as long as it used to be would just guarantee that nobody rolled any alt but a DK.
Re:Battle.net Fixes and Improvements? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Reduced Effort in World of Warcraft (Score:3, Insightful)
As someone levelling their 5th toon, I can say, I love the changes. I am sick and tired of the Barrens, and anything that can get me up to the higher levels faster is going to allow me to keep playing and enjoying the game. The first 2 times I levelled, I did all the quests, got into the lore, etc, but you know what, it's no different the 3rd, 4th, 5th, xth time. If it wasn't for the L2P value of spending hours with a new class, I'd say Blizz should just allow you to start a new toon at level 58 like the DK's, so you can miss all the old world runaround.
Sure, it's annoying to know how much money I've paid for mounts, and how much time I spent on autorun in the old world, but thats the nature of things, they change. I just wish they'd change more, so that maybe levelling other toons wouldn't be the boreing grindfest it is now... cuz I'd really like to try playing a warlock.
Re:Reduced Effort in World of Warcraft (Score:5, Insightful)
I left WoW before any of the packs hit. But I was an obsessive quest completer, I wouldn't leave a zone till I had taken care of every quest I possibly could, which meant before long I was well out leveling the content I was up against (until I finished a zone and then moved to the next, where I'd be just 'midlevel' again).
The reason I left WoW had more to do with my first few raid experiences which were in Stratholme. Here I was, in a town sized dungeon, with lore and nooks and crannies to explore, and the group I was with just wanted to rush to point A to beat Named Boss A, then point B to beat Named Boss B, and etc.
After the third go through, I realized that the way WoW had been set up, high level content was simply contrary to the idea of exploration and 'enjoying the scenery'.
I never had a problem doing 'grey' quests, or popping out of a zone now and then to do an 'appropriately leveled' quest. But raids required people. People who weren't necessarily there to do anything more than grind away till they got their next food pellet in the form of another 'epic' piece of gear.
Maybe that's changed somewhat, I've heard that some of the old 'high level' content can now be sort of soloed by a good maxed out character, and perhaps the new raid stuff isn't so focused on finding the most efficient path through without stopping to look at stuff. But given all I've heard, I doubt it.
And honestly, that's sad. One of the things that Blizzard has always done well is tell a story. Even if some can claim that the stories are lifted from other sources, it's the quality of the story teller that matters just as much as the source of the tale.
I'll always remember WoW for those pre-expansion Worgen related quests (no clue if they've been added to in the expansions), how you could find the origin of their presence in the world through the eleven zones, discover how the 'dark powers' got involved in the human zones, and then have to switch to the Horde side to find the end of the story.
It's a shame, because I know that Blizzard has to put in as much story effort into the high level content.
Re:Starcraft II LAN Petition (Score:2, Insightful)
Economy of Diablo (Score:5, Insightful)
In Diablo II, gold was a worthless commodity. Because the only way to get quality items was from either monster drops or gambling (which would often costs millions of gold to find something salable), the standard unit of economic trade became a unique ring.
This was bad for the economy in general: unlike World of Warcraft's Auction House, it was impossible for players who weren't competitive traders to participate in the economy. In addition, the design of the game in general made trading difficult (having to start a game to initiate a trade, muling, etc.)
What changes are you making to Diablo in order to make the economy of Diablo III more vibrant and accessible?