@greythepirate: Go
I think blizzard give us promising news. I'm mad at the people who asked literally nothing (between 99-100% of the questions were useless)
Please if you're going to continue to comment please for the love of God stop complaining about EVERYTHING. I swear it's like I've never read a post where you don't complain. I get it you're unhappy with Blizzard, suck it up. Honestly you don't think the rest of us have had our issues with them? We all know they aren't the best company but it seems like they're trying to make up for a previous lack of support. I hate to come off like an asshole but I'm sick of seeing you always whine. Rant over, I respect you as a mapmaker and I respect your opinion I just don't want to hear about it in every post.
This is the most promising news we've gotten on the future of the editor... ever.
Both are legitimate views. On one hand, they could have provided more specific details, but on the other, the details and commitments already made do show us good news. In short, it is not as much as what was said, and more of that stuff was said, which reflects a certain direction of action that is taken to be positive. The key aspect is the commitment of resources. Something I'm not always sure people are aware of, is that Blizzard hiring any developer in any capacity is 70k USD commitment a person, more once you factor in normal benefits and what not. Irvine is an expensive place (Source: myself, living there and going to school nearby).
@FockeWulf: Go
We all know they aren't the best company but it seems like they're trying to make up for a previous lack of support.
I think this should be emphasized. Large organizations are made of humans, and humans make mistakes. How they resolve those mistakes is a far more useful thing. In this case Blizzard took a risk, and has suffered for it (that risk being the overcommitment and fairly large team in Titan). In reflection, large teams are not very productive (see Mythical Man Month for why). Combined with the success of Hearthstone, they have recognized that smaller is better. Consequently resources have been reallocated and dispersed. Also Blizzard is having to rectify many years of technical debt (I doubt the effort to create CASC and the migration of every game to it is/was a small project).
I know this may sound strange, but patience is in order. In the grand scheme of things, 3 years is... nothing really. Although we are accustomed to the hyper pace of software development, as a trade/industry, it is maturing and slowing down, as it should. Physical hardware development takes considerably longer, where things must be planned out for years, and take just as long to implement. Again I must reference Mythical Man Month in that software is hard, and it always will be hard, and thus will take time to do right. As the very very very old saying goes: Good Fast Cheap, choose at most, 2.
Yeah, ever since I started looking at blizzard in the light of any other company, the choices they made, made much more sense looking back at them. That is not to say that they are justified in their screw ups, and in everything they do (right or wrong), it just makes a lot of their actions make much more sense as well as less aggravating in that light. It takes a while to do some things because everything takes some amount of resources on the part of blizz, big or small.
However, it is a very interesting thought that I have been getting from people like FokeFulf that the modders are different from the general community that plays games, because we actually develop content. The topic of the differences between a modder, and the general player, and what benefits if any should the modder have if any over the average customer who will simply play games would be a very interesting subject to have in another thread, or directly with blizzard entertainment. It is an interesting topic when you really start to dig into the meat of it, but difficult in how it would be implemented.
yeah i tell the same. Blizzard told us promising news, great news. Then people asked stupid things like "why is this rts engine support mainly rts games" or "will sc2 modding get seperated from sc2 modding?" And the most annoying for me is that 75% was about the map store which we will never get and i'm happy that it will never see the light.
I always wonder what games/etc people are comparing Blizzard to that makes them so horrible. I started off with C&C Renegade. Their developers, westwood were acquired by EA, and support for the game itself was dropped within months of release, let alone modding/mapping. Most games I play don't even give you the option of mapping/modding them, let alone such a powerful editor. So I find the SC2 editor to be great and a lot of fun. What games are you guys coming from and what are examples of what made them such wonderful supporters of their modding community? I suppose the new steam workshop stuff is cool as far as making it easy to advertise and install mods for players (though it's not hard to download maps on the arcade either...). I suppose it has a benefit as far as search functions go, but the workshop as a whole is still a pretty new creation.
It is a question of scope. People only compare Blizzard against others who even permit modding at all. Which cuts the list of companies to compare against down to almost nothing. Also people foolishly (yes, foolishly) compare Blizzard to Valve, while ignoring the circumstances that Valve are in are unique and effectively not possible for any other game company. The 2 largest things that set Valve apart are: 1) They are private, courtesy of Microsoft, which made Gabe Newell a millionaire, which allowed him to finance Valve out of his pocket for 4 some years and 2) They learned well from Microsoft, in that profit is best when you are a middleman, and don't make anything, which in Valve's case, they have yet to produce a game of their own in 8 years, and simply sit as middleman with Steam and collect (from an economic point of view) monopoly rents on most digital game transactions. Valve is more akin to a venture capitalist bank then anything else, just the venture capitalist for games. Then again, most major tech players are the same, easier to just buy then actually develop everything.
Also, Blizzard is difficult to compare against any other game company, because they make 5 (now 6) games and self publish, which no one else does (EA makes almost no games, they publish games made by contracted studios, who usually only work on 1 or 2 games at most, same for Activision, and rare for any indie studio to do more then 1 game at a time).
So yeah, Blizzard is seen as not Valve (ignoring the economic situation that makes what Valve does even possible to begin with) and thus as Not Good (TM).
If you need help transcribing my own accent then I can do it. Even in Australia I still get no respect -_- Could be worse, could have called me a kiwi.
Edit>
the largest project. Between your CEO and our project
As for the questions asked or lack thereof; what was there to ask?
When you are in that situation your thought processes change. There are questions which are a waste if asked because we already know the answer even if only unofficially. Development questions? What the hell is the point of asking them at Blizzcon? They are better asked in an official format like through Rafael or on the forums.
As for the big questions, there was a producer, a dev and Rafael - what can they do in that moment in time? Dryeyece and I made our voices _very_ heard during the Benefit Dinner on the issues that affect us. Was I going to waste time asking how to do X, hell no. We needed the people who can make a difference to our lives (development community) to understand everything we have gone through, why the fact that the delay of the marketplace caused the issues it did - in that case we succeeded. By the time the little community discussion came around there was nearly nothing left to be said - except for the question I asked, about career pathways into the company and getting more resource/training support to bridge the gap between Indi Dev and AAA Dev.
They have stated and they have shown me in person the fact that they care, and that they want change and that they are sorry for the shit that happened to us. Where we decide as a community to go from there is up to us.
Perhaps it's mentioned somewhere else, but I still would have liked to have something mentioned about more map statistics. At least number of players per day/week or so would be cool.
Haha, I have a friend who lived in New Zealand for some time, so I've heard that phrase a few times. Is it more of a playful jab, or more stinging than that?
Also, Flight of the Conchords, awesome show! lol (A show about 2 New Zealand guys in a band that come to the US)
I talked to Rafael about Analytics, it is something that we need to discuss more - not in terms of him and me, but in terms of community and Blizzard.
The Kiwi and Aussie culture is the same in this regard, the more we take the piss out of someone (make fun of them) the more we like them. So there is that never ending rivalry between us, but come a war and shit hits the fan, we will be the first in to defend each other.
Well i disagree there weren't things to ask. just to name a few: campaign support for arcade, add more statistics for uploaders, custom race issue, upload space limit problems (remove the space limit or add us a way to increase it rather than the current system, which is you want to upload more? buy another copy of sc2). And these are just things i suddenly think about, if i could get to a panel like this i would plan questions. Many of these questions were already discussed on forums etc but didn't make huge impact on them it seems or they got confused. As they said in the panel tell them exactly what do you want and why do you need this, and imo the best way to do it is to tell them personally right there.
1. Cause opposites attract.
2. Archetypal evil drives emotional dynamics and provokes discussion.
3. Criticism is never excessive, we're not retarded to drown in pink snivel of unconditional approval.
4. Negative feedback may not mean negative attitude.
@Mille25: Go
3. Criticism is never excessive, we're not retarded to drown in pink snivel of unconditional approval.
4. Negative feedback may not mean negative attitude.
Yes, but the approach to the criticism can communicate a negative attitude, even if one is not intended. And one common way this occurs IS excessive criticism (Boy who cried wolf approach, or wailing baby approach).
I learned a valuable lesson once: Never present problems. Present problems AND present multiple possible solutions. Just presenting a problem with no context as to the goal and possible remedies is borderline useless. Telling someone "Fix this" with no even GENERAL direction is a waste of time and breath.
Which is what Blizzard has done with this talk. They have presented the situation and the overall problems (Lack of support, lack of certain features) and presented CLEAR solutions that will address those problems (Hiring a person to work on documentation, hiring 2 people to work on arcade features). At this point, what we can do is draw up, CLEARLY, what we want. As they noted, just saying "Serverside banks" did not really help, since some people want it for anti cheating (thus you need to encrypt it, otherwise people just Wireshark and sniff the values) others want global sync (so need an API or other function to have map loading come from server after authenticating), and others may have other reasons to have a serverside bank (Global stat tracking).
I don't know if it made it on the audio, but one of the things they mentioned at Blizzcon was that they were unsure of the reasons we asked for certain features (as to implement those features correctly, addressing the reasons said features were being requested).
Mostly this was directed at server-side banks. I take their openness towards server banks to mean server-side banks are possible and reasonable to implement.
They wanted to be sure that the way server banks were implemented addressed our desires for server-side banks. (For example, if it were to prevent hacking, server-side banks can still be hacked(*?))
Perhaps we could use this thread, or a new one, to outline what we'd like to see in server-side banks?
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@greythepirate: Go I think blizzard give us promising news. I'm mad at the people who asked literally nothing (between 99-100% of the questions were useless)
@FockeWulf: Go
Please if you're going to continue to comment please for the love of God stop complaining about EVERYTHING. I swear it's like I've never read a post where you don't complain. I get it you're unhappy with Blizzard, suck it up. Honestly you don't think the rest of us have had our issues with them? We all know they aren't the best company but it seems like they're trying to make up for a previous lack of support. I hate to come off like an asshole but I'm sick of seeing you always whine. Rant over, I respect you as a mapmaker and I respect your opinion I just don't want to hear about it in every post.
Both are legitimate views. On one hand, they could have provided more specific details, but on the other, the details and commitments already made do show us good news. In short, it is not as much as what was said, and more of that stuff was said, which reflects a certain direction of action that is taken to be positive. The key aspect is the commitment of resources. Something I'm not always sure people are aware of, is that Blizzard hiring any developer in any capacity is 70k USD commitment a person, more once you factor in normal benefits and what not. Irvine is an expensive place (Source: myself, living there and going to school nearby).
I think this should be emphasized. Large organizations are made of humans, and humans make mistakes. How they resolve those mistakes is a far more useful thing. In this case Blizzard took a risk, and has suffered for it (that risk being the overcommitment and fairly large team in Titan). In reflection, large teams are not very productive (see Mythical Man Month for why). Combined with the success of Hearthstone, they have recognized that smaller is better. Consequently resources have been reallocated and dispersed. Also Blizzard is having to rectify many years of technical debt (I doubt the effort to create CASC and the migration of every game to it is/was a small project).
I know this may sound strange, but patience is in order. In the grand scheme of things, 3 years is... nothing really. Although we are accustomed to the hyper pace of software development, as a trade/industry, it is maturing and slowing down, as it should. Physical hardware development takes considerably longer, where things must be planned out for years, and take just as long to implement. Again I must reference Mythical Man Month in that software is hard, and it always will be hard, and thus will take time to do right. As the very very very old saying goes: Good Fast Cheap, choose at most, 2.
@ArcaneDurandel: Go
Yeah, ever since I started looking at blizzard in the light of any other company, the choices they made, made much more sense looking back at them. That is not to say that they are justified in their screw ups, and in everything they do (right or wrong), it just makes a lot of their actions make much more sense as well as less aggravating in that light. It takes a while to do some things because everything takes some amount of resources on the part of blizz, big or small.
However, it is a very interesting thought that I have been getting from people like FokeFulf that the modders are different from the general community that plays games, because we actually develop content. The topic of the differences between a modder, and the general player, and what benefits if any should the modder have if any over the average customer who will simply play games would be a very interesting subject to have in another thread, or directly with blizzard entertainment. It is an interesting topic when you really start to dig into the meat of it, but difficult in how it would be implemented.
The QA was indeed useless due to the fact nobody really asked any good questions or followed up.
However, I think the presentation as a whole, as greythepirate said "Is the most promosing news we've gotten on the future of the editor....ever"
@Bounty_98: Go
yeah i tell the same. Blizzard told us promising news, great news. Then people asked stupid things like "why is this rts engine support mainly rts games" or "will sc2 modding get seperated from sc2 modding?" And the most annoying for me is that 75% was about the map store which we will never get and i'm happy that it will never see the light.
I always wonder what games/etc people are comparing Blizzard to that makes them so horrible. I started off with C&C Renegade. Their developers, westwood were acquired by EA, and support for the game itself was dropped within months of release, let alone modding/mapping. Most games I play don't even give you the option of mapping/modding them, let alone such a powerful editor. So I find the SC2 editor to be great and a lot of fun. What games are you guys coming from and what are examples of what made them such wonderful supporters of their modding community? I suppose the new steam workshop stuff is cool as far as making it easy to advertise and install mods for players (though it's not hard to download maps on the arcade either...). I suppose it has a benefit as far as search functions go, but the workshop as a whole is still a pretty new creation.
It is a question of scope. People only compare Blizzard against others who even permit modding at all. Which cuts the list of companies to compare against down to almost nothing. Also people foolishly (yes, foolishly) compare Blizzard to Valve, while ignoring the circumstances that Valve are in are unique and effectively not possible for any other game company. The 2 largest things that set Valve apart are: 1) They are private, courtesy of Microsoft, which made Gabe Newell a millionaire, which allowed him to finance Valve out of his pocket for 4 some years and 2) They learned well from Microsoft, in that profit is best when you are a middleman, and don't make anything, which in Valve's case, they have yet to produce a game of their own in 8 years, and simply sit as middleman with Steam and collect (from an economic point of view) monopoly rents on most digital game transactions. Valve is more akin to a venture capitalist bank then anything else, just the venture capitalist for games. Then again, most major tech players are the same, easier to just buy then actually develop everything.
Also, Blizzard is difficult to compare against any other game company, because they make 5 (now 6) games and self publish, which no one else does (EA makes almost no games, they publish games made by contracted studios, who usually only work on 1 or 2 games at most, same for Activision, and rare for any indie studio to do more then 1 game at a time).
So yeah, Blizzard is seen as not Valve (ignoring the economic situation that makes what Valve does even possible to begin with) and thus as Not Good (TM).
God damnit I am not fucken british!
If you need help transcribing my own accent then I can do it. Even in Australia I still get no respect -_- Could be worse, could have called me a kiwi.
Edit>
the largest project. Between your CEO and our project
the largest project. Between SCU and our project
Amen.
As for the questions asked or lack thereof; what was there to ask?
When you are in that situation your thought processes change. There are questions which are a waste if asked because we already know the answer even if only unofficially. Development questions? What the hell is the point of asking them at Blizzcon? They are better asked in an official format like through Rafael or on the forums.
As for the big questions, there was a producer, a dev and Rafael - what can they do in that moment in time? Dryeyece and I made our voices _very_ heard during the Benefit Dinner on the issues that affect us. Was I going to waste time asking how to do X, hell no. We needed the people who can make a difference to our lives (development community) to understand everything we have gone through, why the fact that the delay of the marketplace caused the issues it did - in that case we succeeded. By the time the little community discussion came around there was nearly nothing left to be said - except for the question I asked, about career pathways into the company and getting more resource/training support to bridge the gap between Indi Dev and AAA Dev.
They have stated and they have shown me in person the fact that they care, and that they want change and that they are sorry for the shit that happened to us. Where we decide as a community to go from there is up to us.
@DogmaiSEA: Go
Perhaps it's mentioned somewhere else, but I still would have liked to have something mentioned about more map statistics. At least number of players per day/week or so would be cool.
Haha, I have a friend who lived in New Zealand for some time, so I've heard that phrase a few times. Is it more of a playful jab, or more stinging than that? Also, Flight of the Conchords, awesome show! lol (A show about 2 New Zealand guys in a band that come to the US)
I talked to Rafael about Analytics, it is something that we need to discuss more - not in terms of him and me, but in terms of community and Blizzard.
The Kiwi and Aussie culture is the same in this regard, the more we take the piss out of someone (make fun of them) the more we like them. So there is that never ending rivalry between us, but come a war and shit hits the fan, we will be the first in to defend each other.
@DogmaiSEA: Go
Well i disagree there weren't things to ask. just to name a few: campaign support for arcade, add more statistics for uploaders, custom race issue, upload space limit problems (remove the space limit or add us a way to increase it rather than the current system, which is you want to upload more? buy another copy of sc2). And these are just things i suddenly think about, if i could get to a panel like this i would plan questions. Many of these questions were already discussed on forums etc but didn't make huge impact on them it seems or they got confused. As they said in the panel tell them exactly what do you want and why do you need this, and imo the best way to do it is to tell them personally right there.
The ninja turtle one?
I'm impressed by the amount of negativity in this thread, considering its pretty much 100% positive news.
@Mille25: Go
1. Cause opposites attract.
2. Archetypal evil drives emotional dynamics and provokes discussion.
3. Criticism is never excessive, we're not retarded to drown in pink snivel of unconditional approval.
4. Negative feedback may not mean negative attitude.
Yes, but the approach to the criticism can communicate a negative attitude, even if one is not intended. And one common way this occurs IS excessive criticism (Boy who cried wolf approach, or wailing baby approach).
I learned a valuable lesson once: Never present problems. Present problems AND present multiple possible solutions. Just presenting a problem with no context as to the goal and possible remedies is borderline useless. Telling someone "Fix this" with no even GENERAL direction is a waste of time and breath.
Which is what Blizzard has done with this talk. They have presented the situation and the overall problems (Lack of support, lack of certain features) and presented CLEAR solutions that will address those problems (Hiring a person to work on documentation, hiring 2 people to work on arcade features). At this point, what we can do is draw up, CLEARLY, what we want. As they noted, just saying "Serverside banks" did not really help, since some people want it for anti cheating (thus you need to encrypt it, otherwise people just Wireshark and sniff the values) others want global sync (so need an API or other function to have map loading come from server after authenticating), and others may have other reasons to have a serverside bank (Global stat tracking).
While we're being constructive...
I don't know if it made it on the audio, but one of the things they mentioned at Blizzcon was that they were unsure of the reasons we asked for certain features (as to implement those features correctly, addressing the reasons said features were being requested).
Mostly this was directed at server-side banks. I take their openness towards server banks to mean server-side banks are possible and reasonable to implement.
They wanted to be sure that the way server banks were implemented addressed our desires for server-side banks. (For example, if it were to prevent hacking, server-side banks can still be hacked(*?))
Perhaps we could use this thread, or a new one, to outline what we'd like to see in server-side banks?