Battlefield fans: Your phony marriage with Electronic Arts is getting more interesting every day.  Two weeks after the release of Battlefield: Bad Company 2, the company severed SecuROM from any purchase made through Steam.

STEAM
Change: The STEAM version of Battlefield Bad Company 2 will no longer have SecuROM on the exe file. Instead it will use [sic] Valves own DRM instead.

Naturally, the makers of Spore are getting praise for a change of heart.  You know, proof Battlefield totally owns Call of Duty, a series that was lax on digital rights managament.

Noticing a trend?  Crippling DRM is announced for an upcoming game.  An outcry ensues.  The company charges headlong anyway.  Weeks after the game’s release, “Please Submit a Blood Sample to Continue Playing” is removed.  And people cheer a “victory”.

I hope you don’t believe this isn’t deliberate.

Digital distribution is granting computer games a longer sales life.  In the world of boxed retail, even the great ones eventually cede shelf room to Nancy Drew’s Pro Teen Detective 2010.  And despite the shift in consumer purchasing habits, it remains that your game development overlords are paranoid.

In a cubicle at Ubisoft or Electronic Arts or Activision, somebody hired for their Master’s in Business Administration degree (as opposed to their brain) has discovered the financial success of an upcoming game may determine whether they have a job in six months.  By fiddling through colorful graphs, this person has determined software piracy during the fourteen-day post-release period is the most monstrous and insidious communist plot we have ever had to face.  And because of this, both the company and various employees are prepared to risk their morality to stymie teh piratez…until that fourteen days is up.

Nobody wants to be the guy that makes the next Psychonauts.  And piracy is too easy to blame for that.  Nobody wants to be the guy that let years of hard work ‘fall victim to new-age tape trading’.  So even if a game like Assassin’s Creed 2 can have its “stay connected or we kill you” approach cracked on the first day, Ubisoft reps can play with each other’s cocks and say “Well, we tried our best and failed miserably.”

Know how the employees of Infinity Ward will instantly regain their babyface status when they deatch themselves from Activision?  Right now, removing DRM isn’t seen as a company calling off the dogs.  It’s seen as a company “coming to its senses”.  So there’s an incredible backlash against DRM.  There just isn’t any backlash to the play right after.

Enjoy your patch.  Developers and publishers really do care about you.  Honest.

(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?

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.

(more…)

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.

(more…)

Ironically, a role-playing game inspired me to write this entry.  I won’t tackle it until Dragon Age is an afterthought, but the reviews suggest the soon-to-be-legendary Mass Effect 2 is akin to “Borderlands, this is how you do a role-playing shooter.”  However, I had an allergic reaction to one review snippet:

Gears of War fans should feel right at home with the cover mechanics and controls. Thankfully, there is still a huge emphasis on tactics and RPG stats – Modern Warfare 3 this is most definitely not.

Four years since Gears of War popularized cover mechanics, and as good as Uncharted 2 worked the flavor, I’m already sick of hiding behind walls.

It’s been a decade since Unreal Tournament and Quake III Arena were the creative heights of twitch shooting.  Since then, developers have gone out of their way to prevent pinball wizards from permeating the new pay-to-play shooter culture of X-Box Live and beyond.

I’ve come to tolerate it.  Twitch shooters didn’t die because they were an inferior format; the business of gaming changed.  My problem?  We’re still hailing and deriding “Doom clones” that embodied nothing Doom and its successors were about.

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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.

(more…)

To this day, I stand adamant that if Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness was the beta-tested, regularly-updated classic built around Battle.net, people would make a toast to Starcraft as the game lost to history.

As of this writing, Battle.net is hosting fifty-six games of Warcraft II.  The majority of the 700 users are probably being used to spam chat channels.  Not a single game can be found on the public game listing.  The remaining portion of the sinking ship took Warcraft II to a number of private servers.  Many companies could tout a fourteen-year-old, small-but-passionate gaming community as a victory.  But not when Warcraft III and Starcraft attract tens of thousands to Battle.net every night.

“Challenge players worldwide with FREE* access to Blizzard’s Battle.net® gaming service.”

So when can Blizzard violate the cardinal reason why the company became a player, to cease support for their free online play?

In many ways, this is a hypothetical situation.  Warcraft II online play is hosted on the same service as a number of more popular Blizzard games, so there would be no reason to pull the plug. I ask the question because four years ago, X-Box Live sold me on the premise that premium-to-play gaming would emulate what MMORPGs have done.  That is, as long as people pay for the service, they earn it.  Well, Electronic Arts is shutting down the multiplayer for a whole cavalcade of titles, namely in the “roster update” sports genre, many titles that are a part of X-Box Live.

Electronic Arts has announced that it will be shutting down the online servers for several EA Sports games in February, most because of their age but at least a few, apparently, because they suck.

And if nobody bats an eye at this, when can companies start ditching the online capability for classic titles in the name of “moving forward”?

I’m simply not sure if it would be a public relations nightmare for Blizzard to abandon support.  Five years ago?  Definitely.  But today, history has written off Warcraft II as a building block for World of Warcraft, and not the game ranked third in GameSpy’s 2001 run-down of the top games of all-time. And quite honestly, why would the new-age consumer care anyway?  Why are you playing a game that was made in 1995?  Get with the times, Starcraft II is coming out.