Chuckles abound.  By pricing Starcraft II ten dollars above the norm, Blizzard pulled a Bobby Kotick and sold the fuck out.  Or something.

If you’re upset games are becoming more expensive because the industry is jerking to the joys of its own production values, fine.  That price points are being determined by suits instead of production costs?  Whatever.  This is addressed to the crowd that thinks Activision was behind it: You’re fucking idiots.

What can a July of 2002 GameSpot sales rundown teach us about Blizzard’s pricing history?

You mean what was then the most anticipated PC game of all-time was priced at sixty dollars?  And Activision had nothing to do with it?  Gamers have no fucking clue what they’re talking about it?  Unprecedented!

Gamers perplex me.  I’ve worked jobs where people couldn’t make ends meet because life’s necessities skeet on their checkbook.  “Necessities” such as getting their dog’s teeth cleaned, and eight-hundred-dollar rims.  So it’s amusing that ten dollars can prove such a breaking point for a medium prided on bang for the buck.

But if you’re that concerned about an impending price war, let me explain something to you: Why do athletes get paid so much? As an example, the National Football League and National Basketball Association employ revenue sharing as part Collective Bargaining Agreements with their players.  This ensures the athletes receive a percentage of all revenue (through television contracts, ticket sales, etc.) as part of their salaries.  In other words, the salaries fans bitch about are a reflection of what they spend on the product.

In other words, the sixty-dollar price tag you bitch about is a direct reflection of what you will end up spending.  If you want to be a defender of the free market, don’t buy the damn game.  And while you’re at it, you can man up and not play it at all.  But you already made up your mind on this one.  Let me know what name you’re using when Starcraft II comes out.

Addendum: Yeah, I didn’t write anything for a week.  I was sick.  Sue me.

Blizzard Entertainment has an unusual issue: They are scared of their own success.

In 2002, the company crafted the most important netplay upgrade since Battle.net itself, a Warcraft III matchmaking system hailed for consistency and legitimacy.   It’s been downhill in the eight years since.  Today, Starcraft II is now in beta testing.  And so far, the only nice thing to say about this matchmaking system is that I can play Starcraft II with it.

Blizzard doesn’t get it.  Matchmaking isn’t about getting your cat into games against players of equal skill.  It’s about consumer confidence.  No one cares whether the Warcraft III matchmaking system works.  Nobody thinks it does.  And if people don’t believe in Starcraft II’s smorgasbord of algorithms and placement, they won’t convert their time and effort into shaping an accurate leaderboard.

The Reign of Chaos approach worked because its transparent methodology was easy to explain: Start at level one.  Play anyone within six levels of you.  Five wins against equal competition earned you a level.  And if you win fifty percent of your games, the system will nudge you towards level ten.  Simple enough to make win-loss records mean something, simple enough to let players create personal goals.

Yup.  Casual players complained about that system.  A system similar to the one now used by TetrisFriends, a stronghold for casual gaming.  So Blizzard pressed the reset button.  In 2004, the new Warcraft III matchmaking system was built on Expected Ladder Level, where the game would guess your eventual level.  The formula for ELL was never disclosed, so nobody knew the game-to-game reward for beating other players.  What players did know is that one Azeroth player (Jubae) cracked the top five with a near-below-.500 record, that players were tanking games to launch ladder rampages, and top players couldn’t find games at all.  So rather than take the time to play the as-many-as-300 games required to reveal their actual ladder level, people quit.  Lots of them.

We now have Starcraft II.  It combines a modified Elo system with a league format.  Weaker players pad out Novice, Copper, and Silver Leagues, while better players hog Gold, Platinum, and (supposedly-invite only) Pro Leagues.

The first problem? Players in each league don’t directly compete against each other.  It’s a pseudo-league that’s just a simple size.  Instead of explaining you’re in the 97th percentile of all players in one gametype, you’ll be ranked third in a one-hundred-man league.

The bigger problem?  Let me put it this way: Know how people claim a good college basketball team would beat a bad NBA team? Rating in each level of play are independent of the other leagues.  As of this writing, the top-ranked North American player is Canadian Warcraft III semi-pro KiWiKaKi, who holds a rating close to 1900.  Meanwhile, Oakhill of the Battle.net forums (thanks to placement that was no fault of his own) has dominated his Bronze League to a 2100 rating  Great! I totally look forward to Copper League players telling me to get on their level.

Solve for x.

If you are going to create a matchmaking system that doesn’t disclose its methodology, it needs to be effective out of the box.  Even X-Box Live’s Trueskill (link credit to Veryrandom), the work of calculus hell, matches you on a fifty-level ranking system that appears to work consistently.  And right now, I’m looking at a Starcraft II ladder where nobody can explain how record correlates to rating, a team ladder where the best players can’t advance the rankings because they’re “heavily favored” to win.  You know, the same things that happened to Warcraft III.

So yeah.  Blizzard originally trashed their best ladder system to create fair matchups for weaker players.  They’re now tweaking it to give casuals false satisfaction.

What’s that saying about fixing things that aren’t broken?

I hold dual allegiance to Warcraft III and Starcraft.  My beef with Starcraft has always been its community’s disdain for the role-playing strategy model.  Ironically, their hatred is always cut from the same mold: “I played Reign of Chaos in 2002.  Since bashing newbs was never as competitive as that Starcraft tournament I won money at, the game sucked.”

Yes, the impact of random items and the power of hero units were legitimate gripes.  Warcraft III was not a perfect game and it had some particularly glaring issues.  But since the dirt sheets claim Starcraft II is not a hoax, we need to clear something up: All of the gameplay issues that plagued Warcraft III’s early days will return to haunt Starcraft II.  The question is whether Starcraft players will put aside their hatred for the Warcraft series and come to terms with that.

All the same arguments can be compared to Starcraft’s leap forward from Warcraft II:  Dynamic balance between three factions?  Didn’t know “Terrans can’t stop a six-food Spawning Pool build” and “Zealots can’t compete with Zergling mobility” were racial specialties.  And way to bridge the gap between the elite and scrubs with your pointless interface upgrades.  You may have a centralized gaming server to work with, but good luck being the competitive standard Warcraft II was.

Didn’t turn out that way.  But just as it took several years for Boxer to demonstrate Vultures and Dropships weren’t useless pieces of metal, Moon and Grubby had to beat the crap out of each other to flesh out Warcraft’s fantastic metagame.

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I’ve followed the blog Modern Warfail 2 since a similarly-named product came to market.  It’s best described as “There is no reason one blog dedicated to the failings of one game on one platform should be so wildly entertaining”.

In the eight years since its release, Warcraft III has never truly endured a gauntlet of game-breaking hilarity  But as long as we’re in the “final stretch” leading to Starcraft II, why not start now?

Shortly before dealing with the latest crash hack, Blizzard responded to “spambots that say ‘meow’” by “banning people who say ‘meow’”.  The week after?  The legendary “buildover farm hack” has company.

The first hack allows towers to fire while constructing.  In addition, cancelling a structure allows it to stand and fight for several seconds while your worker moves on to something better.  And should you be so bad that you lose with this hack, you have the ability to create untargetable buildings with no hit points.  Best summed as “Highperching for Pussies”, these glorified doodads cannot be killed, so enjoy your seven-hour race to see whose internet craps out first.

The second?  (Note: These pictures are NOT Kodos_Forsaken from the Battle.net forums, only continuing proof he is the most hated man on Battle.net.)

It lets players choose “Neutral (Passive)” as their playable race.  Yes, the game grants you twelve sheep on your quest to taking over the world. Really, what the hell is there to say? Maybe it’s time to start that Warfail III blog.

Credit to the Warcraft III General Discussion Forum for supplying the links.

I believe that if the human races makes contact with intelligent extraterrestrial life, our species will be at nuclear war in a day.  No, it won’t happen because the aliens pull an Independence Day on us.  I think everything will be going great.  Then the leader of the aliens will shop at Wal-Mart.  As the greeter begs him to show his receipt, the leader will realize the human race has no redeeming value and deserves to be obliterated.

How did I come to such an impulsive conclusion?  During the last several months, Warcraft III has witnessed a rash of cyber-warfare.  As nerds spam the chat channels of people on the internet that they don’t like, one tough guy houses his idle weaponry in Clan PK on Azeroth.

Meow, meow, meow, meow…

Clearly, Blizzard is under shareholder obligation to curtail spambots in their seven-year-old, financially-irrelevant video game.  Forget that the last two weeks of ladder play have been under siege by a new disconnect hack, the fantastic story of using a macro to queue illegal building commands and crash the game (Author’s Note: This issue is now patched as of January 20th); someone at Blizzard logged out of World of Warcraft to try and defeat this spammer.  How did he attempt to do this?  By forcing Battle.net to impose a two-week IP ban on any person who says “meow” in Clan PK.  Seriously.

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Warcraft III and Starcraft are popular on the competitive gaming scene, the rare combination of popularity and skill-based gaming, blah blah.  Apparently, Starcraft fans see it differently.  They disregard Warcraft III’s Chinese popularity and point fingers at Korea’s Starcraft fetish.  They explain the “disparity” by claiming Starcraft is the ultimate test of athletic ability.

I personally believe that Starcraft requires the most diverse skill set of any competitive game going.  But that’s not the reason for Warcraft III’s underachievement.  Let’s ignore the matchmaking aspect, where KeSPA can create exciting tournaments on a weekly basis; Warcraft III’s failings are all about accessibility and presentation.

Know how Europeans can’t understand America’s infatuation with the American brand of football?  Know how Warcraft III players want to choke Defense of the Ancients players?  Warcraft III has the same issue: It’s too complicated for a live audience.  Knowledge of the game’s nuances may not be a headache for veterans, but imagine selling “Warcraft: The Sport” to somebody who has never played a real-time strategy game.

“Tuck Rule”?  What the hell is the Tuck Rule?

With an exception for spellcasting units (Defilers, Dark Archons), you can watch competitive Starcraft without knowing a single thing about the game.  Psionic lightning looks like lightning, Marines look like dudes with guns, Zerglings have claws, and shit blows up.  The ebb and flow of combat and map control are all you need to decide who is winning a contest.

Compare that with Warcraft III, a game that relies heavily on role-playing elements (spells, abilities, effects) to distinguish units and heroes. These numbers and gameplay mechanics must be memorized in order to recognize their impact on the playing field.  You cannot look at the graphics for spells like Soul Burn, Howl of Terror, and Inner Fire and determine what they do on face value.  And good luck explaining why the Human player is about to win the game because he’s been pinned in his base but is about to get his Mountain King to level six.

Consider the hero experience system.  Know that the amount of experience granted by a unit corresponds to its “level”, a number typically equal to the unit’s food cost?  Know that rule doesn’t apply to Gryphon Riders, Demolishers, Meat Wagons, Frost Wyrms, and Mountain Giants?  How about diminishing returns on experience points gained via neutral unit kills?  The amount of bonus experience a lone hero gains as the player advances up the tech tree?

Congratulations, you’ve developed a system where the strategy of levelling a hero falls on creeping patterns and complex calculus.  It may provide for one hell of a role-playing strategy hybrid, but good luck selling it to the red states.

In 2004, Warcraft III’s chic strategy was to pair the Beastmaster with early-game Night Elf units.  Blizzard “fixed” the problem, reducing the Beastmaster’s strength by one point.  That is, twenty-five hit points and one point of damage.  Whether the patch stymied his effectiveness or players simply got better, the Beastmaster’s reign of terror was resigned to history.

Now consider the Orc Blademaster.  He can mix and match early-game item drops to increase his damage by as many as twenty to thirty points.  And unlike the Beastmaster, the Blademaster’s effectiveness is dictated by his attack damage.  Can you see where there may be a problem with this? Give credit to eSportsFrance for charting the conclusions I came to.

That’s right: In the last nineteen major international tournaments, Orcs have won fifteen.  In seven of those tournaments, Orcs fought each other to determine the winner.  What a way for Warcraft III’s competitive legacy to end.  It’s long dealt with accusations that the game is geared towards luck, items, and heroes.  And what did we end up with?  Players stacking the Blademaster with items and raining hell with Critical Strike, an ability that gives the Blademaster a fifteen percent chance for his attack to deal double, triple, or quadruple the damage.

So when’s Starcraft II coming out?

Credit to H4x for the link.  Anyone interested in the Warcraft III competitive scene owes it to themselves to read the article.

Russia Hackteam is tired of your honest play.  Vladimir Vladivostok is looking to make a challenge that you cannot win!

Can the forces of Stalin conquer the forces of evil?  I guess we’ll just have to find out!

I’d like to clear up a misconception about Blizzard’s decision to “eliminate smurfing” from Starcraft II.  A number of web sites have gone out of their way to explain why I am a bitch.

Spoiler alert, douchebags: That is not why I smurf.

I wrote an entire dissertation explaining how Blizzard broke Warcraft III’s matchmaking system.  The old iteration of the service was damn good, good enough to become the groundwork for Halo 3’s ladder.  The flaw? Bad players were getting stomped by good players playing on new accounts.  And what do shitty players do when they get a raw deal?  They don’t get better, they bitch and complain.  And since they make up the majority, Blizzard caved to them.

Today, the company paints smurfing as an ego boost for elite Warcraft III players.  Here’s the dirty secret: Top-level Warcraft III players do not smurf because they enjoy it.  They smurf because in 2004, Blizzard pushed a set of matchmaking changes designed to eliminate smurfing.  They were configured for 2004’s player activity.  2004’s crappy Warcraft III players are now 2009’s crappy Defense of the Ancients players.  As a result of the diminished activity, top players cannot find games.

The Four vs. Four Random Team rankings tell the story.  The “cream” is dominated by posers.  Elite players cannot find enough games to max out their account’s experience level.  As of this writing, my primary Warcraft III account has a 55-39 Random Team record.  After 94 games, my search time averages thirty minutes to an hour.  And playing at night?  Forget about it.  When all I want to do is play the damn game, the easiest way to do this is to make a new account and start over.

You know that evil “pirate server” known as ICCUP?  I play Starcraft there.  My winning percentage looks like a solid batting average.  I don’t have qualms about getting my ass kicked.  And your employees stand up and say I smurf because I’m a pussy?  Fuck you.  I’ll see you at the top and let you know what it tastes like.

Origin of: Named after Europe’s Eurovision song contest, where the continent unites to vote on the quality of a country’s music based on whether or not they share a border with said country.

What it means: A four-man Warcraft III strategy where two players share their resources with the other teammates, who then advance up the tech tree for top-tier units or spellcasters.

Why it’s stupid: Yeah, this one’s easy.  Consider Protocol, the Warcraft III success story.  It emphasizes playing for an economic advantage, then using a wall of Tier 3 units to steamroll the opponent.  It may also employ hundreds of thousands of towers, collectively known as “It’s fine, learn to counter.”  In its own twisted way, “protocol” can be understood as a set of rules for engagement.  But since few people know what the term means, Protocol set the precedent.  In their own mind, the average dumbass now had carte blanche to give “their” “original” strategy an idiotic name.  Eurovision is no different than any other feeding strategy; instead of having three shitty teammates feed a single player, two shitty teammates feed two players.  It’s like walking onto a football field, claiming you have an awesome strategy nobody has ever done before, running a play-action pass and calling it “Slumdog Millionaire”.