I pirated SC2 recently and I say that as a hardcore fanboy of Starcraft 1 who was really excited when sc2 was announced. Warezed version was available at the day of release despite battle.net authorization to install. Why I did that? I felt offended by shitloads of restrictions put on top of sc2. In the past I supported Blizzard and bought almost every single thing they released since Diablo1, because they were user friendly and didn't give a shit about the fact that their games were trivial to pirate. They still sold tens of millions copies of each title and Starcraft 1 is competitively played to this day, after 12 years. Apparently back then they understood how to win the hearts of customers.
Now Sc2 (and D3 soon) is an antithesis of everything Blizzard represented in the past. Battle.net is a lackluster designed for iron grip control first and foremost, not for user convenience. Tell casual player that he can't share his copy with his family to check single player out, just like he always did, because EULA says so and come back to tell us how it went For the uninformed: there is only one account and you can't create sub-accounts. That means that the campaign progress or multiplayer stats are shared. 4 people playing sc2 in a household even on a single PC? in theory 240 bucks, thank you very much... with incoming 2 expansions, 4 copies each. Also, want to play from US with people in Europe? another 60 bucks for the copy from the region you want to play with.
I pirated sc2 only to check out the story - and sadly found even more disappointment. Technical side of single player is top notch, but they botched the story and raped the lore.
goto ubi forums, read over hundred page long thread how people could not connect to authorize their settlers 7 or AC2 for a month (!), come back here and explain to us why you think AC2 crappiness is the main culprit of lower sales. You will even find statements that pirated version offers superior experience.
an one more thing - there was no end to whining of legit customers who were unable to play their _singleplayer_ game. Ubisoft blamed pirates for DDoS when servers crapped out. Many many people couldn't authorize for weeks, same thing with Settlers 7. Just read the ubi forums.
I hope you don't think that screwing over what's left of your paying user base in the pursue of imaginary pirate's treasure chests full of gold coins is a good business plan
and yet blizzard sold 13 million copies of starcraft 1, how is that possible? diablo 2 also did extremely well and these game were extremely trivial to pirate.
valve experimented with game prices and they made most money on -75% off.
Last weekend, Valve decided to do an experiment with Left 4 Dead. Last weekend's sale resulted in a 3000% increase over relatively flat numbers. It sold more last weekend than when it launched the game. WOW. That is unheard of in this industry. Valve beat its launch sales. Also, it snagged a 1600% increase in new customers to Steam over the baseline.
Worried retailers, fear not. The weekend sale didn't canabalize sales from retail. In fact, they remained constant. Well, constant isn't a 3000% increase, but it's still pretty good, right?
6:56 PM - Looking at a third-party game, it saw increases of 36,000% with a weekend sale. Oh. Em. Gee. Okay, Gabe is starting to convince me that PC at retail is going to die very soon.
Oh, more data. I'm such a data nerd. Here's some data!
During the Holiday sales:
* 10% sale = 35% increase in sales (real dollars, not units shipped)
* 25% sale = 245% increase in sales
* 50% sale = 320% increase in sales
* 75% sale = 1470% increase in sales
At 75% off, they are making 15% more money than they were at full price.
you don't pay royalties to the manufacturer of the hammer you used to build a house and sell it with profit. You paid for the hammer - that's it. KeSPA did all the legwork to set up everything and now blizzard comes in and says 'pay up, bitches, you use our game'. Yeah, but they don't sell a game, they sell competition between players. Game is merely a tool, 50 bucks a pop. It's distasteful because greatly Blizzard benefited from increased sales for years thanks to the tv coverage and didn't have to pay a dime for that. Easy money. They got the best marketing possible for free and now they want the cut on top of that.
Someone needs to step in and smack the software industry hard. They do anything they want because they can put whatever in their EULAs and ToSes and with no resistance circumvent common sense, basic user rights, first sale doctrines and whatnot.
government with the power to crack down on market abuse? sounds fine
problems start when governments start to regulate even the minute details and pretty much can decide who is the winner (tax breaks, subsidies and whatnot). When that happens, the biggest players prefer to game the system by political influence and not by using market forces to their advantage. Also big companies love shitloads of regulation - yes, they have to pay more to be compliant, but they win less competition from smaller firms. Big ones can accomodate compliance costs thanks to their size but smaller firms cannot, thus making them more expensive and less competitive. There is also one drawback of too much regulation - companies start to lose ground to firms from other countries which don't have to do all the costly paperwork required.
mods expose a metric ton of data not available with pristine game client (to the point the game is pretty much unplayable without them), if you really want you can know exactly how long the auction is going to last. Besides people say that 5 mins is added each time someone bids up.
recently Blizzard tried to push their RealId feature to the official forums which was your real name attached to your battle.net account. Uproad was so huge they had to cave in - big numbers of WoW players were cancelling their subsriptions not to mention Starcraft 2 and Cataclysm preorders and this fiasco was picked up by the mainstream media. To control damage to their bottom line in the light of upcoming releases they put the idea on the backburner. Thread with posts of outraged customers grew 1 post every 4 seconds and it was impossible to read as it grew faster than you could consume with your eyes. It hit 50k in 3 days before getting locked and we are talking only about the US forums, european ones had similar threads with thousands of posts.
People mentioned many other problems with real names on game forums which outweigh overall benefits of people not being a dick on the internet. The most frequent and obvious: - women would be harassed by basement trolls who have seen no sunlight simply because they are women - minorities would be harassed because of funny names, stereotypes and whatnot - minors would be at risk and pedos would have an even easier hunting - social stigma of gaming can hurt your professional career because employers always check what the internet has to say about you
agreed this whole trend of pushing 16x9 to the masses sucks hard. Monitors for some reason are evaluated on a diagonal basis and the wider the screen is, you need less pixels to achieve the same effect. Why not megapixels, which would be actually a useful metric here? Similar thing happened with cameras, manufacturers convinced unwashed masses that raw megapixels is everything that matters, while above some rather low level it's meaningless and quality of matrix and optics is what matters most - 20Mpix pic does you no good if it's all grainy and with shitloads of artifacts. Besides, it's too much detail for a human eye already
maybe widescreen at bigger sizes are ok, but what about lowend laptops are terrible with their pathetic 768px vertical? That pinnacle of human technology was available like 15 years ago? Half of the screen is used up by all the toolbars your office apps or browsers have and you do nothing but scroll all day. Add banners and you have to scroll to see the damn first sentence of the web article. I thought we are supposed to go higher with resolution as technology advances but all we get is 1/4 of the screen used to show beautiful white nothing on the sides.
Even 16:10 are on their way out (everything has to be fullhd hdtv now) so i had to buy pretty obsolete by today's standards 1920x1200 monitor to actually get any meaningful vertical upgrade from my previous 1280x1024. And i prefer to scale FF window to 4:3 format, zoom in web page contents hard and lay back. Remaining space is for pidgin conversation windows and such
Yup, actiblizz went hardcore with this one - 1 race per installment is crap, i know there are 30 missions which was similar to the content volume of sc1, but come on, how many of them will be worthless fillers and how many missions you can play straight with single race without getting bored? engine and tools are there, cost of campaign creation is peanuts and they will sell expansions twice $40+ a pop.
What about the regionalization that was not there in sc/broodwar? There is no global community with regions. At the moment you actually need 1 copy per region. Blizzard say that maybe they'll fix that someday, and for now they suggest that people can get around the issue by forking out another 60 to get a copy from a different area.
i can't imagine the crap that will happen with d3 when people will simply get used to these dirty tricks.
pretty much unanimously community thinks that bnet 2.0 is a hardcore fail, it doesn't offer features available 10 years ago in classic battle.net, like convenient means of communication between players or ability to play across region borders. What people get now looks like flash ridden XBoxLive imitation, infested with Facebook and people say you can actually feel lonely there with thousands of players. But hey, you can farm achievements!
That's what you get when your services are shaped primarily by Activision HQ and deals with Facebook, not by the desires of customers.
last time i checked, ICCup server located was Russia, central hub for broodwar community, was alive and kicking. Admins tailored the bnetd/fsgs code to their needs, implemented bunch of cool stuff, working ladder and antihack among the others. It's light years above the blizzard's battle.net which is abandoned by the blizzard for many years already.
first of all, when you cancel on the website, they ask for a reason and be sure many many people put 'i don't want my name in the context of a computer game on the internet' second - people not only cancelled their current wow subscriptions but also preorders for Starcraft 2 and WoW: Cataclysm released this year (SC2 in 2 weeks). PR disaster would simply kill sales. Suddenly the pile of money involved is bigger and profits from deal with facebook would not be enough to cover the easily measured losses.
and from personal experience from regular reading the official forums - you can be damn sure that what customers want is a secondary issue for Activision Blizzard now. Pretty much all concerns fall on deaf ears and only a massive outcry (that WoW thread grew 15 posts/min for 2 days straight) with flood of cancelled subscriptions/preorders plus media outlets describing the problem, adding to PR damage can do anything meaningful. Only non-issues or already answered questions get any official replies that have any substance in them and Blizzard changing the already set course is unheard of.
SC2 community gets no LAN and crappier, less useful, regionalized, tailored for nickel-and-diming XBoxLive imitation. Be sure nothing of value was said by Blizzard to explain why exactly Battle.net 2.0 is shit when compared to a decade old Battle.net classic. Quite recent quote from a high rank guy showing that Blizzard got drunk with all that money from WoW and now they know what their customers want better than the customers themselves: - Do you really want chat rooms? (duh, you think why that interviewer asked you a question about this? maybe because community wanted them and expressed that desire in countless threads?)
Blizzard HQ has it backasswards. New battle.net for sc2/d3 doesn't offer anything of value besides matchmaking (was there already in 2003 in wc3) and flash heavy interface, people can't even communicate freely because devs thought that crippling battle.net to the level of braindead console user is such a great idea. There are no features people care about - lan latency, chat channels to organize community efforts like clans or tournaments, clan/tournament features, global ranking (that doesn't lie to you how good you are like the current system) but devs found time to include facebook... WTF?
Even mapmaking community that got very powerful tool bitches about the unreasonable rules. You can't propagate your map yourself so you need battle.net to take care of it (i guess they want to be a middleman and get their slice from paid premium maps), but the problem is there is some ridiculously low quota - your account can have 5 maps, total 20MB. In short: they want money from map market, but they don't want to pay for storage and bandwidth.
guess what was there first, in the very first playable version of sc2
it certainly was not a battle.net server, because they worked on it last year. First versions had tried and true LAN screen. They programmed it in to scrap later and put the bloat of the battle.net only multiplayer in instead. Isn't that more work?
LAN detection would solve few problems - latency in the beta is so bad, that even AI in comp stomp games can timeout on you (everything is routed throug bnet), i mean, seriously?
if they are going green, why are they burning a lot of juice to power up their servers, not to mention customers forced to have their networking gear running to play single player campaigns?
Re:dear libertarians and tea baggers:
on
Health Care Reform
·
· Score: 1
in other words, libertarian and tea bagger rejection of universal healthcare is based on a lack of ability to understand that life is complicated. what happens if you DON'T pay for healthcare as a society? people who get sick just disappear off the face of the earth? they are all paragons of personal financial virtue and never need aid? you yourself never need a helping hand? think about reality, then form an opinion
universal healthcare will be a disaster, mark my words and now back to earth. 1. the US currently runs a deficit of 1.5trillion dollars, don't think that such reform can be done without bankrupting the country, especially when economy is on life support now, even without that bill. How long can you pile up debts, no less than 1T every year? In pursue of universal happiness there will be universal downgrade of everything. 2. libertarians don't mind paying for insurance but they oppose MANDATORY insurance and that's the case. You go to jail if you don't have insurance if i got it right. 3. government run healthcare is unconstitutional - but who cares about the constitution 4. problems with the US healthcare: - insurance tied to employer bacause of the tax code, any system where 3rd party pays doesn't put downward pressure on prices, quite the opposite. People should shop around with their own money - no competition across the state borders so there are de facto monopolies on the state level - bad for prices - doctors practise defensive medicine and run every test possible not to be sued - bad for prices 5. i know first hand how government run healthcare works - in my country there are monthly limits of procedures, so for example if you happen to get cancer, you may wait several months for a potentially life saving procedure. And this system is permanently in the red. There is always more money needed. Maybe other countries got it right but i don't think any of government run healthcare systems works without pumping tons of money into the system.
disclaimer: i used to be idealist leftist but after hearing what Peter Schiff has to say I converted to libertarianism. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rcwzC-2LigM - about HC reform
no, she was available, willing and reportedly dirt cheap. She was even dubbing Kerrigan initially in first available trailers. Besides, why would anyone working in a voice acting business throw away an offer from blizzard? it's not like you get better offers from TV with a 6 figure pay thanks to your fame.
abundance of unemployed people means that in general minimum wage is set too high. Economics 101: big supply + low demand = downward pressure on prices. Yes, lowering it sucks for those who have to live off such wage, but is it better to spend billions on welfare as a country? Money doesn't exactly fall from the sky.
It similar to the current efforts of propping up housing market to keep prices from falling (and subsidize mortgage industry) even when there are thousands of vacant houses and millions of people can't afford them at the same time.
Glynnis Talken Campbell dubbed Kerrigan in early SC2 trailers and that shit sounded the same, people at blizzcon were cheering after hearing first second of the sentence with her classic voice. Tricia Helfer is not the real deal and never will be. They brought back all the old voices (except Zeratul, guy dubbing him died) so you'd think they care about details and consistency only to discover in horror that the arguably most memorable voice of whole SC1 is replaced by a chick with fake tits.
Metzen is not always right, you know, being the main lore guy he singlehandedly destroyed whatever was left from warcraft universe in WoW with retcons, ridiculous plot twists and such. Recent voice acting in WoW addons is sub-par in opinion of many - almost all cool classic character voices from WC3 were 'upgraded' to mediocre voices but with shitload od digital effects slapped on top of them. SC2 also follows the path of cheesiness - believable field medics replaced with dropships healing with magic ray, double scythes that have 0 usability in reality and should belong to fantasy or giant walking mechs that no military force would ever use because of fragility, complexity and mediocre mobility. There is a need of change to keep things fresh, but offending the intellect is entirely different thing.
one example i really can't get over with is Starcraft 2 and the change of Kerrigan's voice. Blizzard replaced relatively unknown voice actress who did magnificent job at fleshing out the character with Tricia Helfer (Caprica Six from BSG) for her sex appeal. She sounds god awful and nothing like the original. Blizzard simply had to fix what wasn't broken. Earlier they tried to replace Raynor's voice but due to serious backlash they reverted back, only to change Kerrigan who was so good in sc1 that everyone thought she is safe. No amount of whining on official forum can make them change their mind. They only pretend to listen when they expect that players pretty much agree with them on a given matter, if there is a serious criticism - people meet complete silence, no comments. Apparently showing piece of famous ass in marketing campaign > consistency and feel of the key character. All other VAs are there.
This will greatly reduce my pleasure of experiencing single player campaigns, i don't need to give Helfer a chance, i know it. Old voice is too entrenched in my brain, cognitive dissonance is a given. God damn it...
Slashdot Mirror
I pirated SC2 recently and I say that as a hardcore fanboy of Starcraft 1 who was really excited when sc2 was announced. Warezed version was available at the day of release despite battle.net authorization to install.
Why I did that? I felt offended by shitloads of restrictions put on top of sc2. In the past I supported Blizzard and bought almost every single thing they released since Diablo1, because they were user friendly and didn't give a shit about the fact that their games were trivial to pirate. They still sold tens of millions copies of each title and Starcraft 1 is competitively played to this day, after 12 years. Apparently back then they understood how to win the hearts of customers.
Now Sc2 (and D3 soon) is an antithesis of everything Blizzard represented in the past. Battle.net is a lackluster designed for iron grip control first and foremost, not for user convenience. Tell casual player that he can't share his copy with his family to check single player out, just like he always did, because EULA says so and come back to tell us how it went
For the uninformed: there is only one account and you can't create sub-accounts. That means that the campaign progress or multiplayer stats are shared. 4 people playing sc2 in a household even on a single PC? in theory 240 bucks, thank you very much... with incoming 2 expansions, 4 copies each. Also, want to play from US with people in Europe? another 60 bucks for the copy from the region you want to play with.
I pirated sc2 only to check out the story - and sadly found even more disappointment. Technical side of single player is top notch, but they botched the story and raped the lore.
so there is no harm done to the economy as a whole. Ok, one may say IP industries suffer but it means something else doesn't.
goto ubi forums, read over hundred page long thread how people could not connect to authorize their settlers 7 or AC2 for a month (!), come back here and explain to us why you think AC2 crappiness is the main culprit of lower sales.
You will even find statements that pirated version offers superior experience.
an one more thing - there was no end to whining of legit customers who were unable to play their _singleplayer_ game. Ubisoft blamed pirates for DDoS when servers crapped out. Many many people couldn't authorize for weeks, same thing with Settlers 7. Just read the ubi forums.
I hope you don't think that screwing over what's left of your paying user base in the pursue of imaginary pirate's treasure chests full of gold coins is a good business plan
and yet blizzard sold 13 million copies of starcraft 1, how is that possible? diablo 2 also did extremely well and these game were extremely trivial to pirate.
valve experimented with game prices and they made most money on -75% off.
Last weekend, Valve decided to do an experiment with Left 4 Dead. Last weekend's sale resulted in a 3000% increase over relatively flat numbers. It sold more last weekend than when it launched the game. WOW. That is unheard of in this industry. Valve beat its launch sales. Also, it snagged a 1600% increase in new customers to Steam over the baseline.
Worried retailers, fear not. The weekend sale didn't canabalize sales from retail. In fact, they remained constant. Well, constant isn't a 3000% increase, but it's still pretty good, right?
6:56 PM - Looking at a third-party game, it saw increases of 36,000% with a weekend sale. Oh. Em. Gee. Okay, Gabe is starting to convince me that PC at retail is going to die very soon.
Oh, more data. I'm such a data nerd. Here's some data!
During the Holiday sales:
* 10% sale = 35% increase in sales (real dollars, not units shipped)
* 25% sale = 245% increase in sales
* 50% sale = 320% increase in sales
* 75% sale = 1470% increase in sales
At 75% off, they are making 15% more money than they were at full price.
needless to say, Koreans are in the right here
you don't pay royalties to the manufacturer of the hammer you used to build a house and sell it with profit. You paid for the hammer - that's it.
KeSPA did all the legwork to set up everything and now blizzard comes in and says 'pay up, bitches, you use our game'. Yeah, but they don't sell a game, they sell competition between players. Game is merely a tool, 50 bucks a pop.
It's distasteful because greatly Blizzard benefited from increased sales for years thanks to the tv coverage and didn't have to pay a dime for that. Easy money. They got the best marketing possible for free and now they want the cut on top of that.
Someone needs to step in and smack the software industry hard. They do anything they want because they can put whatever in their EULAs and ToSes and with no resistance circumvent common sense, basic user rights, first sale doctrines and whatnot.
government with the power to crack down on market abuse? sounds fine
problems start when governments start to regulate even the minute details and pretty much can decide who is the winner (tax breaks, subsidies and whatnot). When that happens, the biggest players prefer to game the system by political influence and not by using market forces to their advantage. Also big companies love shitloads of regulation - yes, they have to pay more to be compliant, but they win less competition from smaller firms. Big ones can accomodate compliance costs thanks to their size but smaller firms cannot, thus making them more expensive and less competitive.
There is also one drawback of too much regulation - companies start to lose ground to firms from other countries which don't have to do all the costly paperwork required.
mods expose a metric ton of data not available with pristine game client (to the point the game is pretty much unplayable without them), if you really want you can know exactly how long the auction is going to last. Besides people say that 5 mins is added each time someone bids up.
recently Blizzard tried to push their RealId feature to the official forums which was your real name attached to your battle.net account. Uproad was so huge they had to cave in - big numbers of WoW players were cancelling their subsriptions not to mention Starcraft 2 and Cataclysm preorders and this fiasco was picked up by the mainstream media. To control damage to their bottom line in the light of upcoming releases they put the idea on the backburner.
Thread with posts of outraged customers grew 1 post every 4 seconds and it was impossible to read as it grew faster than you could consume with your eyes. It hit 50k in 3 days before getting locked and we are talking only about the US forums, european ones had similar threads with thousands of posts.
People mentioned many other problems with real names on game forums which outweigh overall benefits of people not being a dick on the internet. The most frequent and obvious:
- women would be harassed by basement trolls who have seen no sunlight simply because they are women
- minorities would be harassed because of funny names, stereotypes and whatnot
- minors would be at risk and pedos would have an even easier hunting
- social stigma of gaming can hurt your professional career because employers always check what the internet has to say about you
agreed
this whole trend of pushing 16x9 to the masses sucks hard. Monitors for some reason are evaluated on a diagonal basis and the wider the screen is, you need less pixels to achieve the same effect. Why not megapixels, which would be actually a useful metric here? Similar thing happened with cameras, manufacturers convinced unwashed masses that raw megapixels is everything that matters, while above some rather low level it's meaningless and quality of matrix and optics is what matters most - 20Mpix pic does you no good if it's all grainy and with shitloads of artifacts. Besides, it's too much detail for a human eye already
maybe widescreen at bigger sizes are ok, but what about lowend laptops are terrible with their pathetic 768px vertical? That pinnacle of human technology was available like 15 years ago? Half of the screen is used up by all the toolbars your office apps or browsers have and you do nothing but scroll all day. Add banners and you have to scroll to see the damn first sentence of the web article. I thought we are supposed to go higher with resolution as technology advances but all we get is 1/4 of the screen used to show beautiful white nothing on the sides.
Even 16:10 are on their way out (everything has to be fullhd hdtv now) so i had to buy pretty obsolete by today's standards 1920x1200 monitor to actually get any meaningful vertical upgrade from my previous 1280x1024. And i prefer to scale FF window to 4:3 format, zoom in web page contents hard and lay back. Remaining space is for pidgin conversation windows and such
Yup, actiblizz went hardcore with this one - 1 race per installment is crap, i know there are 30 missions which was similar to the content volume of sc1, but come on, how many of them will be worthless fillers and how many missions you can play straight with single race without getting bored? engine and tools are there, cost of campaign creation is peanuts and they will sell expansions twice $40+ a pop.
What about the regionalization that was not there in sc/broodwar? There is no global community with regions. At the moment you actually need 1 copy per region. Blizzard say that maybe they'll fix that someday, and for now they suggest that people can get around the issue by forking out another 60 to get a copy from a different area.
i can't imagine the crap that will happen with d3 when people will simply get used to these dirty tricks.
pretty much unanimously community thinks that bnet 2.0 is a hardcore fail, it doesn't offer features available 10 years ago in classic battle.net, like convenient means of communication between players or ability to play across region borders. What people get now looks like flash ridden XBoxLive imitation, infested with Facebook and people say you can actually feel lonely there with thousands of players. But hey, you can farm achievements!
That's what you get when your services are shaped primarily by Activision HQ and deals with Facebook, not by the desires of customers.
reportedly this 100M is without marketing, only pure development
and there was an article some time ago here on slashdot, that EA spends up to 75% of total game budget on marketing.
last time i checked, ICCup server located was Russia, central hub for broodwar community, was alive and kicking. Admins tailored the bnetd/fsgs code to their needs, implemented bunch of cool stuff, working ladder and antihack among the others. It's light years above the blizzard's battle.net which is abandoned by the blizzard for many years already.
first of all, when you cancel on the website, they ask for a reason and be sure many many people put 'i don't want my name in the context of a computer game on the internet'
second - people not only cancelled their current wow subscriptions but also preorders for Starcraft 2 and WoW: Cataclysm released this year (SC2 in 2 weeks). PR disaster would simply kill sales. Suddenly the pile of money involved is bigger and profits from deal with facebook would not be enough to cover the easily measured losses.
and from personal experience from regular reading the official forums - you can be damn sure that what customers want is a secondary issue for Activision Blizzard now. Pretty much all concerns fall on deaf ears and only a massive outcry (that WoW thread grew 15 posts/min for 2 days straight) with flood of cancelled subscriptions/preorders plus media outlets describing the problem, adding to PR damage can do anything meaningful. Only non-issues or already answered questions get any official replies that have any substance in them and Blizzard changing the already set course is unheard of.
SC2 community gets no LAN and crappier, less useful, regionalized, tailored for nickel-and-diming XBoxLive imitation. Be sure nothing of value was said by Blizzard to explain why exactly Battle.net 2.0 is shit when compared to a decade old Battle.net classic.
Quite recent quote from a high rank guy showing that Blizzard got drunk with all that money from WoW and now they know what their customers want better than the customers themselves:
- Do you really want chat rooms?
(duh, you think why that interviewer asked you a question about this? maybe because community wanted them and expressed that desire in countless threads?)
Blizzard HQ has it backasswards. New battle.net for sc2/d3 doesn't offer anything of value besides matchmaking (was there already in 2003 in wc3) and flash heavy interface, people can't even communicate freely because devs thought that crippling battle.net to the level of braindead console user is such a great idea. There are no features people care about - lan latency, chat channels to organize community efforts like clans or tournaments, clan/tournament features, global ranking (that doesn't lie to you how good you are like the current system) but devs found time to include facebook... WTF?
Even mapmaking community that got very powerful tool bitches about the unreasonable rules. You can't propagate your map yourself so you need battle.net to take care of it (i guess they want to be a middleman and get their slice from paid premium maps), but the problem is there is some ridiculously low quota - your account can have 5 maps, total 20MB. In short: they want money from map market, but they don't want to pay for storage and bandwidth.
guess what was there first, in the very first playable version of sc2
it certainly was not a battle.net server, because they worked on it last year. First versions had tried and true LAN screen. They programmed it in to scrap later and put the bloat of the battle.net only multiplayer in instead. Isn't that more work?
LAN detection would solve few problems - latency in the beta is so bad, that even AI in comp stomp games can timeout on you (everything is routed throug bnet), i mean, seriously?
obligatory http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2009/3/9/
if they are going green, why are they burning a lot of juice to power up their servers, not to mention customers forced to have their networking gear running to play single player campaigns?
in other words, libertarian and tea bagger rejection of universal healthcare is based on a lack of ability to understand that life is complicated. what happens if you DON'T pay for healthcare as a society? people who get sick just disappear off the face of the earth? they are all paragons of personal financial virtue and never need aid? you yourself never need a helping hand? think about reality, then form an opinion
universal healthcare will be a disaster, mark my words
and now back to earth.
1. the US currently runs a deficit of 1.5trillion dollars, don't think that such reform can be done without bankrupting the country, especially when economy is on life support now, even without that bill. How long can you pile up debts, no less than 1T every year? In pursue of universal happiness there will be universal downgrade of everything.
2. libertarians don't mind paying for insurance but they oppose MANDATORY insurance and that's the case. You go to jail if you don't have insurance if i got it right.
3. government run healthcare is unconstitutional - but who cares about the constitution
4. problems with the US healthcare:
- insurance tied to employer bacause of the tax code, any system where 3rd party pays doesn't put downward pressure on prices, quite the opposite. People should shop around with their own money
- no competition across the state borders so there are de facto monopolies on the state level - bad for prices
- doctors practise defensive medicine and run every test possible not to be sued - bad for prices
5. i know first hand how government run healthcare works - in my country there are monthly limits of procedures, so for example if you happen to get cancer, you may wait several months for a potentially life saving procedure. And this system is permanently in the red. There is always more money needed. Maybe other countries got it right but i don't think any of government run healthcare systems works without pumping tons of money into the system.
disclaimer: i used to be idealist leftist but after hearing what Peter Schiff has to say I converted to libertarianism.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rcwzC-2LigM - about HC reform
no, she was available, willing and reportedly dirt cheap. She was even dubbing Kerrigan initially in first available trailers.
Besides, why would anyone working in a voice acting business throw away an offer from blizzard? it's not like you get better offers from TV with a 6 figure pay thanks to your fame.
abundance of unemployed people means that in general minimum wage is set too high.
Economics 101: big supply + low demand = downward pressure on prices.
Yes, lowering it sucks for those who have to live off such wage, but is it better to spend billions on welfare as a country? Money doesn't exactly fall from the sky.
It similar to the current efforts of propping up housing market to keep prices from falling (and subsidize mortgage industry) even when there are thousands of vacant houses and millions of people can't afford them at the same time.
Glynnis Talken Campbell dubbed Kerrigan in early SC2 trailers and that shit sounded the same, people at blizzcon were cheering after hearing first second of the sentence with her classic voice. Tricia Helfer is not the real deal and never will be. They brought back all the old voices (except Zeratul, guy dubbing him died) so you'd think they care about details and consistency only to discover in horror that the arguably most memorable voice of whole SC1 is replaced by a chick with fake tits.
Metzen is not always right, you know, being the main lore guy he singlehandedly destroyed whatever was left from warcraft universe in WoW with retcons, ridiculous plot twists and such.
Recent voice acting in WoW addons is sub-par in opinion of many - almost all cool classic character voices from WC3 were 'upgraded' to mediocre voices but with shitload od digital effects slapped on top of them.
SC2 also follows the path of cheesiness - believable field medics replaced with dropships healing with magic ray, double scythes that have 0 usability in reality and should belong to fantasy or giant walking mechs that no military force would ever use because of fragility, complexity and mediocre mobility. There is a need of change to keep things fresh, but offending the intellect is entirely different thing.
i absolutely hate that
one example i really can't get over with is Starcraft 2 and the change of Kerrigan's voice. Blizzard replaced relatively unknown voice actress who did magnificent job at fleshing out the character with Tricia Helfer (Caprica Six from BSG) for her sex appeal. She sounds god awful and nothing like the original.
Blizzard simply had to fix what wasn't broken. Earlier they tried to replace Raynor's voice but due to serious backlash they reverted back, only to change Kerrigan who was so good in sc1 that everyone thought she is safe. No amount of whining on official forum can make them change their mind. They only pretend to listen when they expect that players pretty much agree with them on a given matter, if there is a serious criticism - people meet complete silence, no comments.
Apparently showing piece of famous ass in marketing campaign > consistency and feel of the key character. All other VAs are there.
This will greatly reduce my pleasure of experiencing single player campaigns, i don't need to give Helfer a chance, i know it. Old voice is too entrenched in my brain, cognitive dissonance is a given.
God damn it...