I strongly urge most of you to read the following post here.

In the state of current Bnet 2.0, I have always kept an optimistic threshold. So what if the Beta doesn't have chat channels, LAN, or a decent friends list system (with the non-unique names)? I had faith.

But now they say there is no confirmation of a channel system, definitely no LAN, and perhaps the way user names not being unique will stay?

Not to mention the terrible map hosting system, or the lack of cross-region support. I have to buy 3 titles and 6 expansions to participate on all regions?

People complained that we had achievements and facebook integration over channels and an aesthetic friends list, but I simply thought they would come eventually. To me, this is quite disturbing. Perhaps blizzard has their priorities twisted.

People think achievements and facebook integration are better than channels and all the other shit the old battle.net had? That's fucking bullshit. I don't give a shit about aesthetic appeal. In its current state, battle.net 2.0 sucks balls without channels. They even made the friends list stupid by requiring emails and shit. This is dumb as hell.

What? Matchmaking has nothing to do with group chat rooms. Sure in some chat rooms people look for games, but the rest of the time it's used for chatting and socializing. God Blizz is getting lazy and stupid.

I hope this shit functions in the same way channels do on battle.net.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on May 28 2010, 10:08 pm by devilesk.

Regarding chat channels I think Blizzard is only stating that they are removing the "public" channels. Private chats with friends and clan chats are all that are needed really. I suppose it will function like Bnet now, Except without the Brood War USA-1, Brood War USA-2, channels etc.... If you wanted to open a chat with your friends you could open it, and your friends would be able to join it no problem, basically the Bnet equivalent of typing "/j chat123" and telling my friends to join me. Clan chats are implemented which is great. I really think Blizzard is only getting rid of the crappy spam/advert public channels which nobody really spends time in anyways... which is a good step in my opinion.

Friends list is kind of dumb right now, it makes it very difficult to add friends. I'm pretty sure Blizzard will implement another way to add friends in the future.

Map hosting system will only get better... Im 100% sure they are going to add other filters other than "popularity"

cross region support doesn't bother me too much, because the lag when I do try to play in another region is immense, therefore I only play on USEast/Lordaeron. The main problem with this is If a map is published on the US server, it can't be played by the rest of the world.... which is terrible

The no LAN thing doesn't really bother me much, although im sure a lot of people will be pissed on this topic, don't worry though, within a month or 2 of release there will be a no-LAN crack for SC2

They're supposed to be removing region locking some time after the release, 'when things have settled' I believe they said.

@13Stallion - I'm pretty sure that's NOT what they meant.
You know those little chat boxes you can open up with your friends? THOSE are the "chat" they're talking about. Meaning that, if I want to talk to random people, I'd have to add them to friend list (which is tedious as shit right now), OR make them join a clan.
Thank god I didn't preorder Sc2

U know why littlebigplanet sucked ass? Because, it doesn't have a good online sharing system. I can't "host" a game and make people join my Hub before starting the game.. I have to wait for fucking random people to join.. WHILE I'M PLAYING.. this lags the entire shit up (terrible especially since it's a platformer), AND, most of the time, the "host" has almost finished the level... so then you follow him, and after tons of lag time, he goes into another game, which you probably didn't want to play. so WTF?

Now B.net 2 is going to be the same shit.. You can only join with random people or your close friends.. There will be no way to coordinate with people and to host games you like. This will also completely destroy the custom maps economy... because there'd be no point in showing off. The whole B.net 2 looks good, but is too fucking melee orientated, and is only for retards who think they can play like koreans.. either that or they are koreans. Taking out Chat rooms is basically taking out half the experience for me, and I WILL NOT buy SC2 if chat rooms are not added.

I'm pretty sure I read somewhere that chat channels were only removed for the Beta and will be there in the released game.

EDIT:
Gonna try to find where it was that I saw that.

Having to set up chat rooms with people only in my friends list is stupid. The great thing about battle.net is you can have random people join channels and you can meet random people and chat. Having to set up a channel and invite people you want in it makes it entirely different and stupid.

WHAT?!
Of course we want chat rooms, its such a big part of the battle.net experience. Battle.net with out chat rooms is, almost, useless. I can't believe they would even consider leaving chat rooms out.

B.net 2.0 is a fail, period.
The worst, imo, is their whole publishing system... if only we could overwrite older/buggy versions of stuff we released to auto-redirect to the latest version! -.-

Wow,

I copied and pasted my response, exactly the same as above... on the b.net forum

Not only did they remove it, they didn't send me a Notice, AND I can no longer post there.

all i can say is.. wow... guess SEN ain't that bad after all... <3

The deal still stands.. no chat channels and other shit = no buy. fuck this shit.

The only problem I really have at the moment is the map hosting/publishing system and the lag. I do not believe i have to elaborate on these matters.

Now as for the other issues

Channels - I'm not entirely upset that they're removing the b.net channels as far as I know. I mean, if I want community, sites and forums like this are the place for it. It's better than pointless trash talking, flaming, and spamming that we'd see in channels on b.net. Besides Blizzard did say they'll add chats for clans and groups, which is pretty much where we would normally have/want chats at and/or pick up/test random games. HOWEVER if these chatrooms are restricted (as in you either have to be a part of said clan/group or you need special permission) then that's a different story

Friends list - I actually like this friends list. Sure it's requires a little more work (needing e-mails of your friends) and that it seems to focus more around your facebook friends, I actually like this better. I'd rather game with my friends in real life than people i've never met. Then again I'm already facebook friends with many of you noobs here so it shouldn't make too much of a difference

User names - Lack of unique names or w/e, I don't see a problem with this. All that matters is that your friends recognize who you are. Oh and making your name "famous" from making popular maps isn't anything special. Again the only people who'd care are your friends and people from sc2 community sites like this.

No LAN - Not sure what to make of this, only bad thing I see about this is that if you have no internet you are screwed. If you have a working router (which would be needed for LAN) chances are you'd have a working internet.


I can see that all of these are good changes in the long run but the problem I see is that blizzard is bringing about these changes way too fast and radically. People need time to adjust or adapt to new changes. For instance if blizzard really wants to eliminate the need for public channels, they should rather than completely removing them kill our interests in such things. Maybe have both public channels AND their new chatroom features available to us and if we see that these chatrooms are that much better or convenient than public channels, then we can give them the nod to eliminate channels. Well who knows, maybe a couple months after the game's official release, we'd all be loving it

I agree with the general opinion of this thread, and disagree with MillenniumArmy because I like chat channels as an easy way to meet people in-game for events, I like having unique usernames, I like being able to regularly play with people I don't know personally, I like being able to play with people in Europe or Asia, etc.

I also like chatting where the damn program registers my last key before the enter. Nothing else ever had this problem, but the period of my phrase or the l of my lol always gets transferred to the next line because Battlenet is retarded. The chat frames are a hassle to use, are ugly, and... God, I wish it was SCII on Bnet one. I miss the damn simplicity of it. SCII is unnecessarily complicated and less versatile. It's like it took the worst of both worlds. .

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M-r_uCaFxg8
If your not up to date heres a video to explain everything

Anywho i think activision just wants money

Yea, battle.net 2.0 is more than a little disappointing in a couple important areas. The lag issues, though they seem to be on track to fixing those. As for channels, we better get private channels that aren't restricted by having to be in the clan to join them otherwise the community will be kind of restricted. If you play some people on a UMS map that you like you now have to add them all as friends in order to have a chat room to discuss the game and possibly play again which means they will know your name and your email...not exactly the best situation for an online game.

Not being able to play across regions sucks for competitive reasons and also for fun. Say goodbye to all your friends from outside of the country and to getting maps on multiple servers (via b.net anyway, luckily there are map sites to fix this).

But by far the biggest issue is the no lan feature. I know lots of people at colleges which block battle.net so they can't play at all. Also playing a large lan party tournament over one internet connection is not very viable. I was just at a lan party this weekend and 7 of us had Starcraft 2, we dropped out more than a few times...simply because we were trying to do a tournament and playing ourselves caused everyone to drop out rather quickly. It completely sucked, starcraft 1 is so much better in this regard and starcraft 2 will not have much of a shelf life as an rts game that forces you to play online and play online only.

Thank you for helping ruin Blizzard Activision.

Here is the video description, which I find to be quite a good analogy.

I found this on the HoN forums.

That's fun but not true. Tournaments will be supported (afaik) and games are customizable except for low games, and you got to ask yourself there: what do you want to customize there? maybe 10 workers at the beginning? That's senseless.

I didn't play in the SC2 beta, so bear with me a little bit here.

Apparently, what Blizzard is trying to do is give people the best gaming experience and not the best online experience. You've got great support and features for games and that's about it. No chat rooms. Chat rooms were the essence of what really made SC1 and Battle.net 1.0 so popular. You could talk to a whole lot of people, make friends everywhere and play games with them. With an anonymous matchmaking system, it's like playing with a smart computer (sometimes it's a dumb computer) all day long that can talk to you or be silent at other times.

Blizzard seems to be following the example of the console gaming system where you just join a game and play in an endless cycle. Sure, that formula works but only for consoles. You can't really chat on a console because all you've got is your controller and it's a pain to chat with that. You do have voice-talk, but who really wants to listen to that squeaky and annoying 12 year old voice rant about how he just got owned? Voice-talk is good for games, but outside games almost nobody would use it. Battle.net 1.0 was a great success, nobody could have guessed that so many millions of player would join up and play games online. When you have something which has been so successful why in the hell would you want to change it so much? We know that software-wise Battle.net 1.0 was outdated beyond relief, heck, it was released back in 1996 when Diablo 1 was released so you can imagine it's not really meant to be ran on Windows 7, 64 bit multi-core systems most people have right now. It was time a new system was introduced but one that had all the features brought to us by Battle.net 1.0 plus a few new neat features.

I like how Blizzard keeps saying that we'll be able to talk to our friends via private chat, but the question is, how do we get friends without being in channels? I don't get to know somebody just by playing a 20 minute game with them; I only add people to my friends list after I've chatted with them for a while. And if someone tries to tell me that you should add your real life friends, then that's bullshit. I don't know a single person in real life that plays Starcraft (besides my one cousin), so there's no way I can get any friends on bnet 2.0.

Friends is for people you know from forums and IRL. I never added them in SC1 from random channels.