Blizzard Releases StarCraft Patch

NRP128 writes "Blizzard has released an update for the aging StarCraft real time strategy game. From the official site: 'We have released a mini patch for StarCraft (1.12b) to address a crash that occurred for certain players using the new Korean chat functionality in patch 1.12. Please see the patch notes for further details.' Several new features seem to have been added in addition to the Korean chat functions. The patch notes can be found on the Starcraft site.

Comments

Do you actually have WoW?

[JavaLord]

I know there will be a ton of people whining why there isn't an update for World of Warcraft but please remember they are entirely different dev teams.

There was a fairly large update to World of Warcraft last Tuesday that fixed many problems such as the Paladin Seal of the Crusader being broken.

Re:Do you actually have WoW?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, too bad they didn't eliminate the suck.

1. Combat system is purely level based. If you're more than three levels lower than a target, it can slaughter you and there's not a damned bit of skill you can use to prevent that. All your attacks will miss and all your abilities will be resisted. This goes for both PVE and PVP.

2. Mobs link like mad, and there's absolutely no way to pull them. This means that a quest involving level 10 monsters may not be completable until level 20, since you won't be able to take on four or five level 10s until that time. Unless you're a mage, the only class with croud control abilities.

3. Insane respawn times. Mobs respawn very, very quickly, such that most of the times I've died have been because mobs I'd already cleared out suddenly started respawning.

Combined with #2, this makes for some painful gameplay, as you clear your way through a cave only to have the path out all link down on you since they respawned while you were healing.

Of course, once dead, you're almost guarenteed to die several more times, since you can only ressurect at your corpse and all the mobs in the area will have respawned. Rule #2 guarentees there'll be no escape. Unless you res at the graveyard, in which case you have to waste 10 minutes waiting for res sickness to wear off, and probably need to run back anyway to complete whatever you were doing. In some cases this is actually less time than it would take to repeatedly die at your corpse.

4. Quest and shop NPCs can be killed. This means that more often than not, you'll be unable to complete a quest because some Horde fucktard will have decided that it's more fun to prevent other people from playing the game than playing it himself.

Not too surprisingly, all the assholes decided to play on the Horde side (given that they are the enemy) and have decided that it's really fun at level 60 to come and clear out towns meant for level 10s. Blizzard says that we should use PVP to take care of the problem, which would be nice if it weren't for the fact that any number of level 10s will never be able to take on a level 60 due to rule #1.

5. Grouping is next to impossible. Since World of Warcraft can be soloed, everyone solos. In the end, no groups for you.

6. Hacks out the wazoo. This is a Blizzard game, so "poor security" goes without saying, but they're still trying to ban speedhackers and the like.

7. Insane server issues. Oops, the servers are down again. Oops, there goes the login server again. Hope you didn't want to play for the next two hours.

8. PVP mayhem. WoW is all about ganking if you PVP. Blizzard encourages it. Remember the honor system? Unimplemented, except for some very strange bugs related to certain neutral factions. (Some level 60 Alliance player was able to slaughter Ironforge due to this bug, and there wasn't a damned thing the players could do about it. Blizzard never gave a coherent response, suggesting that he do quests to get his rep back up. Except that he couldn't do quests, since all the quest givers would attack him on sight.)

Griefing is considered fair play. Players have used glitches in pathing to stand and repeatedly kill quest NPCs or passers-by, and Blizzard's answer has always been to "seek a PVP solution," which is really nice when a two level 60s are corpse-camping your level 20 character - one at the graveyard, one at the corpse.

I'm sure people will just mod this down instantly, because apparently Blizzard is cool again, but WoW isn't as great as some people seem to think it is, and Blizzard doesn't appear to be interested in addressing certain issues.

Fix the Auction houses

[JavaLord]

And an emergeny patch today which is supposed to fix much of the lag experience when many players congregate in an area. Cool!

Thank god, now the auction houses would be bearable if they would only make the torches in the Auction house do 6000 points of damage rather than make annoying noises when someone ran into them/danced on them.