21 Aug, 2009
StarCraft II Battle.net Discussion Panel
Posted by: BlizzLive Staff In: BlizzCon '09| Panels
The following is the StarCraft II Battle.net Discussion Panel with Rob Pardo:
Battle.net hasn’t been talked about lately because World of Warcraft is our most popular game. The goal is to improve the service so it will be a premier matchmaking service. Launched in 1996 for Diablo, it was updated in 2003. There have been more players on it in total than World of Warcraft. The prospect of StarCraft II and Diablo III will take this further. As always everything in this panel may or may not change.
In Warcraft III, automated matchmaking was introduced. This made it easy to play with friends and we felt this was really important to the game. Warcraft III ended up being extremely popular because of, in part, the effective matchmaking system and ladder. Randomly-selected teams were put in and are by far the most popular way to play the game. If you’re going to lose, it might as be with teammate you can blame. The icon system, a “poor man’s” version of an achievement system, was introduced. It’s your 2D avatar on the service. There is a large modification and custom map making community (e.g. Defense of the Ancients [DotA]) that we learned alot from.
There were some features of the latest Battle.net that Blizzard didn’t like, such as: feeling the chat system was too disorganized, gameplay being disconnected from single player, as well as new players being thrown into the thick of ladder and custom map play (read: pwned). They felt that the ladder system only served best players. In community of ten thousand players, the amount of people that cared about ladder only was one hundred. It wasn’t as successful as it could have been.
How games were displayed and supported was a problem. For example, if you wanted to play something besides DotA or Footmen Frenzy, too bad.
Always-Connected Experience
The goal for StarCraft II’s Battle.net is to provide much closer integration than in previous games. It can do a better job. They want to make sure you’re connected to news, content, news, and friends. Blizzard gamers need to know what’s going on in the community. Blizzard has learned from WoW and the support of the WoW community.
Battle.net accounts will be updated and connected to your emails. For example, in Diablo II, you only got to keep characters for three months. This won’t happen again.
In the login screen you enter your Battle.net account from the very beginning. It’s the first screen you see, with access to single player, multiplayer, widgets, and news. This will happen before you play your first game, so that you’re connected to a larger community. You’ll be able to play as a guest in offline mode if you select Single Player.
Challenges Are Fun
Single Player maps will attempt to teach more advanced multiplayer mechanics (current gaming example: Guild Wars attempted this through the Zaishen Challenges). You will be able to try as many times as you like to improve your time and score as well as compare with your friends. You’ll be able to access freinds list even when you’re playing single player. compare this to battle.net where you have to log out, log into b.net, etc.
One of the features of the Replay Screen is the ability to rewind. They said it couldnt’ be done but we found a way.
Profile: people will be able to browse you, see matches you’ve played, compare achievements, etc.
Achievements
WoW’s system is great, but they will try to improve SC2’s achievement system further. Achievement awards are the avatars. Your achievements will unlock a variety of avatars that you display. Decals show up on units themselves based on achievements. There will be many things you can unlock and display to your friends. The pool of unlockables will be added to over time.
As soon as you’re logged in we can check for patches, make sure you’re up to date.
Cloud storage
If you play the game from work you can actually play a couple missions of the campaign. So when you go home you can leave from where you left off without saving and don’t have to bring a flash drive.
Competitive Arena for Everyone
Another feature is improved automated matchmaking. We want to offer play options for everyone to enjoy; we need to make sure its easy for you to find your friends in organized games.
Ladder play doesn’t have to be for hardcore gamers. We can improve upon that. We all have experience playing competitively in our daily lives i.e. basketball league at gym instead of playing against Michael Jordan. You can have a fun experience without being the best.
Leagues & Divisions
You can get put into these leagues: Practice league, Copper league, Bronze league, Silver league, Gold league, Platinum league and Pro league.
For example , you’ll be known as bronze player, etc. You’ll be in a division. We make sure that you can actually win against each person in your division and that it’s realistic. So everyone has a chance to win in your division. At the end of your division you can go to end of season tournaments and prove who’s going to win the league.
Here are the casual play options: practice league, co-op skirmish, random teams, challenges, custom games. In casual play we slow down game speed, have anti-rush maps and an all-around friendly experience so you don’t have to get 4-pooled rushed on your first game.
Party System
This is something that’s been around most notably in WoW. We didn’t feel any reason why we couldn’t bring over to StarCraft II. You can invite someone to a party & you can see party members, etc. Whoever the party leader is you can select which game you go into. All of you go into the game together. You can play as a persistent party as many games as you want.
Custom Games
You’d see only DOTA games in the game list.If you wanted to play something else you couldn’t play it. All different DOTA games would be consolidated into one line. All games are consolidated into one line. There is a “filter by genre” so you can subdivide & filter even more. For example, the player can select co-op skirmish, and DOTA will go away.
One of the things we added that’s very cool is you can have game lobby be private, invite your friends, and hit “open to public”. So you don’t have to do the whole trying to sneak your friends in and coordinating when they will join.
B.net account system helps to ensure fair games. Smurfing is over. You can only use one Battle.net account to play StarCraft II.
Connecting The Blizzard Community
Why not celebrate all of our games & bring all our games under one roof? The idea here is that if you’re a StarCraft II player but also have WoW accounts, you’ll still be able to be informed about what’s going on in WoW.
We’ve decided to switch chat over to instant messenger style chat. It’s easier to chat with one person or multiple people.
People often play with real-life friends. The other thing we’ve noticed is, especially with WoW growth, real-life friends are created from in-game friendships. When new games comes out, you want to play with your group of friends. It’s hard for WoW players, even if you’re in same guild, to coordinate this.
Realms keep your friends apart and you’ve got the concept of trying to keep track of character names, etc. We kind of looked at xbox live. We added each other to our friends list. All my friends are popping online and I couldn’t remember who each person was. Then we looked at myspace: the only challenge they had was to find new friends. They could name themselves something goofy or use their real name. Even if you used the search function you still might not find all of them. In google talk, once I’ve added you I could just assign an alias to you.
So, we’ve decided to introduce the concept of battle.net RealID. In real life we know each other by real names, so why don’t we introduce that to the service itself? If you are friends with someone it doesn’t matter what game or realm they are on in battle.net, you can communicate with all of them.
RealID
Once you have battle.net RealID, you don’t have the pressure of staying on the same character because you’ve already done these achievements.
Imagine you might play StarCraft II for 6 months & play other games. What’s going to happen is you’re going to know which ones are playing D3 & you will have a friends network right at beginning of the game. You don’t have to start it from scratch.
With RealID you have additional functionality in addition to friends. We can be in StarCraft II but you can be talking about something in WoW.
We also have the concept of a broadcast. The way it works is if someone is playing WoW, War3, SC2 you can tell your friends what you might want to play later. We will also be making these changes in WoW to reflect real-life friends.
Real-life friends are mutual. Privacy options & parental controls will be there. Something we are definitely adding to the service. There are lots of knobs & dials. We want you to choose what info you share with friends.
Custom Map Community
Something we haven’t always talked about. Two years after WarCraft III was out, the popularity of games actually shifted to playing custom games. 99% of people played Reign of Chaos when it was released. The modding community eventually shifted this towards custom games.
The StarCraft II editor will be more powerful than WarCraft 3’s. These editors are the tools we use to build the campaign. Everything we can do you should be able to do, plus there is more, i.e. functionality we don’t need, such as items.
We have the concept of map publishing. Once you actually make a map you can publish it up to the service. You can make it so that everyone can get a hold of it. You can download maps without joining a game. When you pull up a list of maps, you can browse all the maps on the service. You can see all maps on battle.net – everything that’s been published.
The big things to discuss in the future i.e. not at launch of StarCraft II.
StarCraft II Marketplace
You can see all the different maps and it is easy to browse. We have the concept of ratings, and people can comment on maps. You’ll be able to browse, search for maps & they’ll be rated by stars. There will be free & premium maps. A portion of the revenue will go to map creator.
This is all aimed at making this awesome, awesome, map community. What happens when people have a budget? Take a look at all the sorts of things people can create i.e. Counterstrike & Day of Defeat. Imagine if you could hire a small dev team and create a game using StarCraft II as your engine. This creates a much larger selection of content for players.
We want to see what new genres people can come up with. Tower defense came from WarCraft III; now it’s in other games.
Defense of the Ancients and other maps will be a free map. We totally intend for there to be lots of free content i.e. the iPhone apps store. We are trying to add a layer of super professional content on top of that. We can look at maps that rise to the top & can create matchmaking for these maps.
All this adds greatly to the longevity of the game. Get prepared to start making awesome maps! We want you to have a head-start – it takes a long time to make an awesome game.
Q&A:
Q: Any plans for add-ons for forums, fansites, social networks?
A: Yes we have some aggressive plans for this area after the game launch.
Q: For achievements, what about offline play – for people who can’t connect two weeks? Does that get factored into battle.net?
No. If we allow people to bring offline games into achievements, it allows people to hack the system.
Q: Will you be discouraging cheating by banning IDs? Will it affect other games?
A: In WarCraft III we could ban your account, but accounts were free. Now we can do any of these things. The question is what the person did.
Q: With battle.net, should we expect significant reduction in latency?
A: We are looking at various solutions to decrease latency especially for other countries.
Q: Are you guys doing anything to make people liable for leaving games?
A: It’s really hard for us to enforce something like a custom map like that from a Blizzard point of view. Our solution in WarCraft III was that we had a concept of shared control. If your partner drops you can control all his units. We’re looking for solutions but there are things that will be tough to enforce. People might have a legitimate reason to leave, so it’s really hard for us to be the bad guys to enforce this.
Q: Do you have any plans for realtime spectators & pro-league replays?
A: Yes, we’ll have realtime spectators for ship & pro-league replays on ship.
Q: Matchmaking system – how does that mix in 2v2 if your friend is different rank?
A: We track your ranking as a team.
Q: Will we be experiencing new battle.net changes for legacy games?
A: No, not for now.
Q: You guys have plans for allowing people to incorporate their own models, etc?
A: Definitely. But I’m not sure of the extent of that.
