REPLAYS

It's imperative to able to host a replay similar to the way replays were hosted in Brood War. It's needed to be able to create a lobby just like any other map being hosted, and have all the slots be spectators with a single host. Within the replay, the host needs to be the one to control the speed of the replay. This is extremely simple and is a very low-risk high-benefit change that could be implemented in a very small patch, and should be taken with high priority and initiative on Blizzard's part.

Sharing replays is another small issue. It is slightly annoying having to upload my replays to a site for someone else to download a single replay. What should implemented within Battlenet is the ability to right click on a replay and select from the menu "Share Replay". Once this is clicked, a small menu like the one at the bottom right of the screen should appear where you select one of your friends to share the replay with. A dialog box should appear for the person you selected with a yes and no button, asking if they want to accept a replay being offered to them. To avoid abuse Blizzard could use the SC2 client to make sure that a replay is below a specific file size (something a normal un-tampered replay would always be under), as it would be easy to create a fake replay with a gargantuan filesize just to @%@% with the system.

It is also very annoying to have to speed through a replay at 8x speed, when one should be able to skip directly to any portion of the replay at any given time.

One feature that would be great for replay analysis is the ability for players that are currently all watching a replay together to take up control of units within the current replay, and have all actions in the actual replay file be ignored; the point is to allow players to start playing from a replay, from any point in the replay. The popular Snes emulator Snes9x allows users to save videos (replays) of player actions, and have the game run them in an automated manner, just as SCII replays function. Although, the emulator allows the user to stop playing the video and take up the controls, from any point in the video. It should be easy to allow for users to disable the automated control of a replay and gain control of the units immediately. This would allow for flexible player analysis of replays. Everyone has always had questions of "I wonder if strategy A or B would have worked in scenario C". If this function were to implemented, then those unintuitive answers could easily be tested within a replay. Although, once a player disables the automated actions that are within the replay files, I can understand if it would be difficult to allow players to jump back into automation without reloading the entire replay.


CLAN TAGS

Players can't rely on Blizzard giving out random or periodic free name changes in order to change their clan tag. There should be a feature that allows a player to place 3 characters before or after their name, to allow for a preceding or trailing tag (either or, not both preceding and trailing simultaneously).

Note: The character amount for the tags does not necessarily need to be 3 characters. The limit could perhaps be five or six; I chose three mainly as a placeholder to get my point across.


MATCHMAKING/LADDER

I am a highly competitive player, and take my playing more seriously than most people. I want a place where I can engage in Battelnet's matchmaking system in a highly competitive environment. The current ladder is competitive, but many people use it for practice as well. I sadly have often been forced to play warmup games and practice new strategies on the ladder just because I didn't have any friends online at the time. My suggestion is to add two separate matchmaking systems, one that is ranked on a ladder and one that is unranked.

To simplify the implementation of such, the unranked matchmaking system could use the player statistics a player has gained from the ranked matchmaking system to determine an opponent of equal or near equal skill. Since the goal of the unranked matchmaking system is to isolate games that are aimed at practice or warmup, you don't need to rise or fall in rank. If a player wishes for their unranked matchmaker to pair them up with tougher opponents, then they should be told that in order to do so they need to ladder on the ranked matchmaking system beforehand.

What this will do is allow for players to have an isolated and competitively ranked ladder, all the while providing them with convenient means of practicing or warmup (or carefree) matches.

To make all of this seem simple to Battlenet users, instead of having a single yellow FIND MATCH button, have two separate buttons; one button should say FIND RANKED MATCH, the other FIND UNRANKED MATCH. Also, Battlenet users will need to somehow be informed that unranked matches use their statistics from the ranked matches to determine their opponents.

Lastly, I want to complain about how annoying it is to have to rely on the third party source SC2ranks.com to view a global ladder. There should be a clear and concise ladder for all players to view their global, and regional rankings. Divisions are (@%@%ing) ridiculous to anyone that is anything more than a very casual gamer. The idea of divisions are great -place players into groups based on skill level, so that if a person plays more and more games they will rise higher and higher in their division, thus feigning actual progression on the global ladder (which is hidden?). Whatever. Yeah, developing video games is about making money, but you have to appeal to both a broad audience and support your high tier players as well. I honestly think the whole division idea pissed everyone off much more than it did to make money or feign player progression. Just scrap the whole idea and implement a simple global ladder (with regional filtering view options). Simple.


LADDERING WITH OFFRACES

As a competitive player I would greatly enjoy being able to offrace (playing as a race other than my main race) while using the matchmaking system as well as having a rank on a ladder. I can currently do this, although playing as an offrace on the ladder would greatly lower my overall rank, so that isn't an option if I value my current rank in any way.

I suggest having three separate ratings for each race a player can play as. This way, a player can be placed into the silver league for their one on one Zerg play, while being placed in the Gold league as Terran for their one on one play.

The current solution to this issue would to be buy multiple accounts, but that is expensive. Brood War never had this problem, as anyone could create multiple accounts on servers like iCCup, and thusly offrace on them. The new Battlenet could mimic this sort of idea, but instead of having players create three different accounts, they could just localize the three ratings of all three races into a single account.


CHAT COMMANDS

It's extremely annoying to be in a match while having to message someone in particular. Brood War used the irc-esque functionality where you could type /w NAME MSG. This would be really useful if the current /r command would reply to the last person you whispered to using the /w NAME MSG command. This way in order to engage in discussion with a specific person, you only have to use /w NAME MSG and then have all subsequent messages begin with /r.

Since character codes are what differentiate one player from another, this might be impossible unless the format string for the whisper command were to include a player's character code: /w NAME.CHARACTERCODE MSG.


FFA

Why in the world is FFA unranked? There could some really interesting play, really interesting laddering as well if FFA were ranked. I would absolutely enjoy FFA if I could be matched up with people in my skill range, but sadly since I cannot I never use FFA as it's a waste of time (from my point of view) to be matched up with Bronze and Platinum league players.


ONE ON ONE MAP POOL

[Almost] Needless to say, someone that isn't exceptionally skilled at playing StarCraft 2 cannot easily create a balanced or well-created map for StarCraft 2. There are many people out there that worked on maps for realms like iCCup in Brood War, and the maps that were created were exceptional. The maps that Blizzard has created are much lower in quality, and a couple of them everyone just plain hates (cough desert oasis cough). I feel like Blizzard isn't capable of creating maps desired by players, but it's necessary for them to monopolize the maps due to the current state of both the game and Battlenet. Future variation on the authors of the ladder map pools should be strived for.


LAN

I don't unerstand why LAN wasn't implemented, and I don't really care. Though, what I do care about is tournament games where money is on the line. The fact is that Blizzard servers aren't going to be 100% reliable, actually, they are significantly far from that. However if money is on the line a LAN-like environment should be accessible for tournament purposes.