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.

This article was written by Halfthought for the Battle.net and Teamliquid forums and has been edited for publication on The Ghetto.

Almost all of Starcraft II’s current balance problems can be pinpointed on the Roach.  The majority of gripes about Starcraft II balance and unit diversity more-or-less stem from this completely misguided unit.

The Roach’s role is screwed up.  It originally gained 15 health per second in its 2008 reveal.  It has now been nerfed to earning this regeneration when upgraded and burrowed.  Its initially-creative role has been nerfed out of existence.

They are now a unit that costs 75 minerals and 25 gas, but somehow do the most basic ranged damage per second in the entirety of the Tier 1 tech tree.  They have 145 health, the highest for its cost, and the highest period outside of the Protoss army.  They are also a ranged unit, although they cannot attack air.  They cost one supply.  I almost forgot, they start off with two armor points.  To make things even more absurd, they have upgrades to allow them to move at fast speeds, faster than any basic unit except Zerglings, and also regenerate their health when burrowed.  And they can move while burrowed with the upgrade.

That is absurd. If someone told me a unit like this would stand a chance at making it to retail before the finish of the Starcraft II beta, I would have told them they were insane.  On paper, the unit is simply absurd.

I am not complaining Roaches are overpowered, and that’s precisely what’s wrong with the game.  They should be overpowered.

In order to ensure the Roach is not overpowered, the Protoss and Terran received Marauders and Immortals.  Without these two units, Terran would lose every game against the Zerg, and the Protoss would be at a ridiculous disadvantage.

Blizzard ensured the Roach isn’t overpowered by creating an equally-overpowering counter.  An overpowered counter.   These counters are easily available.  Located at Tier 1.5 and for a price of 100 minerals and 25 gas, the Marauder does 13.5 damage per second against the Roach.  With Stim Packs, it deals 20 damage per second.

While most Tier 1 units do very good damage for their cost, they are usually balanced because they are easy to kill.  For cost, Marines will deal three times as much damage as Carriers, but Marines die easily to splash damage.  The Marauder does not.

Once again, in a vacuum, the Marauder is overpowered like the Roach, because of the Roach.  Specifically, they are overpowered against Roaches.  And as a result, against armor in general.

Finally, the Protoss have the Immortal.  The Immortal single-handedly makes Terran mechanical units nonviable.  Sure, Terrans can EMP, but it is not nearly as reliable as infantry builds, or more recently, massing Marauders.  The Immortal, by any measure, is an overpowered unit.  It is also the single largest “counter” in Starcraft, doing thirty extra damage versus Armored, and is the only unit to carry more than a 50 percent bonus.  Against Armored, they deal 35 damage per second.  With the exception of Battlecruisers, that is the single highest damage per second in either Starcraft or Starcraft II.

What we have is an arms race caused by the Roach.  Starcraft II damage is generally higher, but by a magnitude of 30 to 40 percent.  Not 200 percent.  The Marauder has too much health for both its damage potential and in relation to the theme of Terran play.  And the Immortal simply deals too much damage versus armored units.

Remove it, or drastically rework it.  Rebalance the game accordingly, and most of the current gameplay problems in Starcraft II will no longer exist.  Terran Mech will be viable.  Infantry play will be more diverse.  Protoss versus Zerg will be more dyanmic.  Templars will be able to be balanced correctly.  Zerg were not designed for a 145-health, two-armor, 16-damage, 75-mineral, 25-gas unit.  Starcraft is not designed around such a unit.

Every April 1st, creative mongrels use the internet to wreak havoc on the human condition.  I don’t have the time for an epic April Fool’s joke.  Let me comment on another.

Teamliquid.net is “introducing” SC2ProMod: Because we already determined the public won’t watch Starcraft if players don’t play regional manager with their mineral line.  In a world oblivious to time zones and the concept of April Fool’s, where each part of the Earth operates on a different clock, people missed the fucking point:

As future reference for Starcraft III and the mind-control headset that will dumb down the game for noobs with slow fingers, it is important to remember why people would think this isn’t an April Fool’s joke.  Let’s travel back to 2007 and 2008, when the internet learned Starcraft would have a competent interface and the internet lost its fucking mind.

And since Blizzard put multiple building selection in their coffee, Starcraft II was ruined and the company was never heard from again.

Right?  Right?

It’s always struck me curious that Blizzard Entertainment has done little to dictate the direction of the real-time strategy genre despite owning it for fifteen years.  At least when it comes to the enemies of Infinity Ward and Nintendo, developers act like computer worms, merely replicating Call of Duty and Mario.  Compare the gameplay direction of Blizzard’s best to their closest competition (Age of Empires, Company of Heroes, Total Annihilation), and it’s like a world where nobody tried to copy what made Street Fighter so successful.

See, Blizzard strategy games are what real-time strategy would be if it had originated in the arcades.  No other competitive games demand a skill set that twists hand-eye and mental dexterity into knots.  And  surprisingly enough, nobody’s taken their cue.  So I would like to thank Blizzard Entertainment: It is a guarantee that Starcraft II will ruin the next decade of my life by consuming it.

When I tore into Starcraft II, I did it because “this game has issues” is better criticism of a beta build than “I want to make love to you, Dustin Browder!”  Enough of that crap.  This is going to be one of the greatest games of all-time.  Not just “quality game that chewed our time” material, this game is a fucking statement, a gigantic middle finger to anyone who believed the company couldn’t create a legendary strategy game without the company’s founding fathers or a crappy, outdated interface.

I totally called it: Starcraft II would be Blizzard’s arcade-strategy style wrapped in a web of mindgames.  And so far, we’ve only seen smudges of potential, where David Kim rolls a Baneling amoeba into some bastard’s dignity, where Orb fulfills the wet dream of any Protoss-on-Zerg hate crime.

Really, has it dawned on people yet?  We’re discussing and embracing a beta build as though it has a rich history!  The “Who’s who?” of international Starcraft discovering that talent from all walks of the genre can match them blow for blow.  This divide’s proving close enough that Starcraft fans are resting hope on the Koreans still locked into KeSPA contracts.  Did you see Major League Gaming’s beta-cast between IdrA and CauthonLuck?

Where Randy Couture versus Brock Lesnar could embrace “world-class game-planner versus the most terrifying professional wrestler of the last twenty years”, you can now have “Premiere American Starcraft player discovering one of Warcraft III’s original superstars can hang with him”. Styles sell tickets, storylines sell tickets, and in Starcraft II, the storylines are the playstyles. Think this isn’t serious business?  I’ll be damned if gamers won’t look down upon each other for playing shitty games like Warcraft III, and tune in to watch competitive gaming prove the superiority of Starcraft above all else.

And it’s doing it with a balance build more playable than any Command and Conquer game ever was, more playable than Reign of Chaos ever was.  Just wait until Blizzard uses the next three years to tweak the finer things.  And then watch the superstars turn the game into clockwork, a game of Blitz chess with two-hundred-and-fifty pieces jockeying for position.

Yes.  This game is at least two months away from retail.  And it’s already that good.

Recommend you watch in high-def.

Where was I those last couple of days?  You’d almost think I got a job on short notice.

(Last Starcraft II update for a while.  Honest!)

Remember “LAN Latency”?  The ICCUP and Garena bad boy that exposed Battle.net’s inner workings?  That in order to ease concerns about Battle.net 2.0, I touted the awesomeness of “what’s coming”?  Yeah, scratch that.  As of now, Starcraft II has no “LAN Latency”.

(Credit to Gibybo for the data.)

Didn’t care much for LAN Latency in Blizzard’s previous titles.  Every hit point countered in Warcraft III, but delay usually didn’t lead to a unit’s spectacular death.  Starcraft DUI pathing and position-oriented micro didn’t make it a necessity, either.  But Starcraft II is fast.  And contrary to popular belief, there is a breaking point in the battle of speed versus skill.

Starcraft righted most of Warcraft II’s crippled online experience.  So when 1999’s Warcraft II: Battle.net edition offered a game speed of “Fastest”, veterans stuck with Faster.  Long-time player Axlotl surmised the issue:

If you were to ask, [this] would be the biggest reason to why even faster players do not like the top speed. You cannot pull your peons off of the gold mine. Now, I know you’re all thinking that I’m wrong, but I don’t mean it like that. If someone attacks your wallin suddently…say with 7 grunts. If you do not have any peons on wood, you are going to die. You can get peons off of the gold mine, but it’s very difficult. If the game is set on high or extra high latency, or someone is lagging up the game, you are a dead man. Even if you have some choppers, you are going to have to use those to repair, and will soon have over 5000 gold banked, with no wood.

In Starcraft, Vultures and Firebats were capable of massive damage.  But their effectiveness lost out as they took severe penalties (75% damage reduction against “large” units) in the late-game.  On the inverse, Starcraft II grants bonus damage.  So while health counts remain similar, an Immortal three-hits a Siege Tank and doesn’t have to stumble like a drunken sailor to do it.

That’s why we’re desperate for an upgrade over 2002’s Warcraft III.  Blizzard better hope “teh evil pirate serverz” don’t beat them to it.

Despite warnings to Blizzard employees such an act would be punishable by death (or a Bobby Kotick conference call), I got access to the Starcraft II beta.  And since I was “hired” to address the game’s issues, allow me to continue my burial of New Super Battle.net Steam.  I’ve already explained that the matchmaking system needs to prove me wrong before I embrace it.  Time to focus on chat.

In the quest to protect children from the pedophiles and liberals that inhabit the internet, Blizzard gridlocked their communication system.  It’s pretty clear why: World of Warcraft is a pay-to-play MMO and the audience expects pay-to-play support, a game where you can report people for swearing.  Thus, this audience expects Blizzard to deal with Starcraft’s most dangerous criminals.  And rather than slash budget to enforce conduct on a free-to-play online service, they’ll just make it impossible to get your opinion around.

Why can’t I chat with all the people I don’t want to!?

The problem?  Blizzard’s official, possibly-stretching-the-truth story is that Starcraft II was beta-ready last year; an extra year to push the “Battle.net 2.0 is so awesome you wouldn’t want to pirate it!” spiel.  And you’ve reinvented the way chat does business.  Good luck selling this to long-time Battle.net users, the demographic most likely to jailbreak the game.

The two-name system is the culprit, which I thought was there to prevent name-squatting.  You select a visible first name a private last name, which players will have to know in order to add you to their friends list.  Hated friend codes for the Wii?  Here’s an upgrade: You can select the one you want!  You now have a system where you can’t see the full name of the dude who beat your brains out (sans the awkward process of adding them to your friends list), and a nightmare for competitive gaming where replays only identify players by their first name.  (Yeah IdrA, that wasn’t you.  We believe you.)  All of which makes no sense, since players can be identified through league rankings anyway.

And open chat channels?  Confirmed absent, presumably because they’re a conduit for spam and butthurt.  Yes, invite-only clan channels will be there later.  The problem is that as Starcraft and Warcraft III matured, open clan channels became the open chat channels, the GGLs and X17s became the get-togethers.  And Arranged Team and Custom Game invites fed off those channels.  All far less awkward than a feigned “What’s up?  Wanna 2s?” directed towards a random member of your league.

Not that any of this will matter to cross-ocean buddies if region-locking remains.  Currently a “feature” in World of Warcraft, there’s no word on whether Americans can stomp Europeans or Koreans if they want.  Think there’s no reason for concern?  Blizzard was pretty mum on LAN as well, and we saw how that turned out.

If it means disabling a safety net in the options menu, I’m fine with compromise.  But omitting these features to protect your consumer base isn’t going to solve software piracy.  Someone will find a way to implement them, even if it means doing it without your support.

This is going to be a legendary game.  I’d just like to be able to tell everyone that.  Through Battle.net 2.0.

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?

For whatever reason, I’ve had little luck finding people to agree with me on this.  It’s really unfathomable I need to explain the benefits of surprise attacks in a real-time strategy game.  But I’m going to lobby for this until my fingers are stubs or IdrA wins an important showmatch: Starcraft II needs a Hold Fire command for every unit on the battlefield.  The only reason to go without a Hold Fire command is that “The game is not balanced for Hold Fire”.  And if that’s the case, I have to wonder how Blizzard Entertainment used the last two decades to become game development rockstars.

Scary enough, Blizzard strategy games have earned a perception that they reward mouse speed and nothing else.  The entire post-announcement development cycle of Starcraft II has been a stab at changing this, transforming mechanical game abilities (fighting the twelve-unit selection cap and single-building selection) into various decision-making skills.  Hand-eye coordination will maintain its value, but it’s clear this game is supposed to be a cerebral cage fight.  So why deny gamers access to a significant micromanagement and strategy option that has been validated by Command and Conquer, Supreme Commander, and nearly every military conflict in the history of this damn planet?

Starcraft lacked a true Hold Fire command, and even proved dangerous there; clever use of the Hold Position command could turn a minefield of Lurkers into a crime scene.  Hell, Blizzard has already granted a dedicated Hold Fire button to any unit in Starcraft II that can cloak.  Presumably to, you know, allow players to set traps and conceal their position.

Mindrape.

The benefits for Siege Tanks are obvious enough, but it would extend to any ranged unit with a high damage rate or high mobility.  And when you’ve built your competitive map pool on “valley leading towards a ramp that leads into a base on higher terrain”, there’s no need to explain the benefits of making things a little too quiet.

And hasn’t Blizzard made every implication they want this game built for a television audience?  An American audience infatuated with sports that can hinge on a single play?  When Youtube’s most popular competitive gaming videos are limited to that lucky knife kill in Modern Warfare 2, dare to say how much publicity you can reap from “the ten seconds that turned the world’s largest Starcraft tournament”?  The part where some shmuck gets his pro gaming career defined by the day he got mindfucked?

There is absolutely no reason to go without a Hold Fire command when Starcraft II’s development and Blizzard’s ambitions indicate the game would benefit from it.  Hold Fire embraces the perception of mind-over-micromanagement, and the gameplay mechanic would be a benefit to both of those skills.

The second Golden Age of Video Games in the late nineties wasn’t limited to legendary titles; it was an era where companies won fans by empowering them.  In Starcraft’s case, Blizzard dangled a free-to-play gaming service alongside a “spawn” function where potential buyers could beat the crap out of each other with a friend’s copy of the game.  The corporatization of game development has caused this empowerment to regress.  Hey, why would Sony want a backwards-compatible Playstation 3 when they can charge for digitally-downloaded Playstation 2 software?

In addition to the removal of true local area play and the increase of digital restrictions management, Blizzard Entertainment’s current platform for Starcraft II online play is “one game, one account, one name”.  Why?  Yeah, this approach is about making money.  But it’s coming from more angles than you’d think.

At BlizzCon, Blizzard employees affirmed this decision was to prevent smurfing (talented players “resetting” their record by creating a new account).  Smurfing has two purposes: To experiment with new strategies without tainting their “real record”, or to ego trip through the ranks of mediocrity.  Neither situation addresses the Warcraft III matchmaking system that forces good players to make new accounts in order to find games, and it doesn’t address that bad players will complain anyway because that’s what bad players do.

It’s really a public relations ploy.  Blizzard has plugged three strategy games into Battle.net since smurfing entered the culture, and only decided to hard-line the approach when “millions of World of Warcraft players” came into play.  And since the MMORPG is predicated on making time and effort the most important assets for overcoming challenges, Blizzard is going to make every concession in making sure these players don’t become frustrated.

So, you’ve stripped functionality by convincing new gamers that experts won’t ruin your party.  And thus, Blizzard can to grant that functionality back for a price.

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