f13.net

Check out the bottom image on Blizzard's B.Net site: http://www.battle.net/

I don't know how long that's been there, I just saw the blurb on digg.com just now.

I announced it a year and a half ago. But then, there's nothing official about that I suppose. :P

And lol@Richard Knaak writing Diablo Fan Fiction.

Sure everybody knows they are working on StarCraft 2 but maybe they'll announce something at E3 this year.

(http://madtom.com/rmp/chat/chat/images/smilies/kiki.gif)

I hope I hope I hope it's like Starcraft and not like Warcraft 3.

Not sure what I'm looking at, but I do have a hankering for a tower game now, thanks!

Edit: Help me Jim Raynor, you're my only hope!

From that page:


(http://www.pacersdigest.com/forums/images/smilies/skeptical.gif)

I could never seem to really like SC....all the cheap tactics just pissed me off. I'm the kind of player that likes to build up and use all my units. Zerg rushes are boring.

Zerg rushing is pretty easy to counter, and will generally cripple the rusher pretty badly if the rushee does it well (http://www.battlereports.com/viewreports.php?reportnum=735).

"I want to use all the units" isn't generally the best of strategies, though.   :-P

http://scsequel.ytmnsfw.com/

I have no idea.

Has what you're talking about gone or am I just going senile ?

What image ???

No it's still there but the damn site now crashes my Opera browser. Bastards.

Click on the "pad" at the bottom of the page (assuming you don't have JavaScript turned off or other stuff that would block the JS code from running).

You know, I don't get why Blizzard has been so slow in pushing out a sequel to Starcraft.  It is one of the best selling games ever, yet at best it's looking like a decade between versions. 

No point in making a sequel to a game that continues to bring in half of Korea's GDP annually.  When that cash spigot starts to slow down, then you make a sequel.  Or just update the graphics.

I was always surprised that they didn't do another expansion a la Brood War (adding a few new units and new single-player campaigns).  The single-player story in SC and BW felt very much like parts 1 and 2 of a trilogy.

I guess this has nothing to do with that fps Ghost title?  The PvP clips looked interesting, but I don't have much faith in them sending it out of house to be developed.  With Blizzard's inexperience with fps  this might be a good thing, but getting things like Fallout Tactics instead of Fallout 3, or MOO3 (a decent game but no Moo by any stretch) has jaded me towards the practice.

As far as SC2 goes, It takes Blizzard a remarkably long time to release anything, which is announced years in advance and hyped to hell and back, several times over.  Maybe we'll see it before the turn of the decade, but I doubt it.

SC: Ghost is 'on permanent hiatus' (read: dead).

World of Starctaft please.

That would be great but that's never going to happen as long as WoW's making money.

Absolute nonsense. Whats better to a shareholder than having a ROI equivalent to the GDP of Bolivia? Comming out with a product that increases your ROI to the GDP of Western Europe.  When you have money hats, the next obvious move is to go for money socks, money pants, money houses, and money yachts.

World of Starcraft is a given. And the entire nation of South Korea will be the first people to permanently upload their brains into virtual reality as a result.

How many people play more than one MMOG at a time, though?  I'd imagine that World of Starcraft woudl draw subs away from WoW.

Of course, SOE's Station Pass thing seems to be doing well enough that they feel comfortable hiking up its price, so maybe I don't know what I'm talking about.

No, no... obviously the solution is to add World of Starcraft in as an expansion to World of Warcraft.  It will be rebranded World of Craft.

or start working on it NOW, and in 5 years when WoW is on it's 5th expansion and winding down you'll be able to keep your money hats.

You could even do all sorts of incentives to transfer to the new game, and keep the same billing system!

You mean when WoW is about to release the second expansion.

Also, for me anyway, doesn't work with Netscape unless it's set to render like Explorer.


Seems to be the thing for these huge PC titles to do, for some reason.  Half-Life went what, six years between sequels?  I imagine that part of the delay is because the company doesn't want to dilute it's IP; as long as people think their product is amazing, they'll probably be less inclined to crank cheap sequels our the door.  Of course, whether ANY amount of time will let them top Starcraft is debatable.  Warcraft III didn't go over so well in a lot of circles, and I honestly don't know where they can take the genre now.

I could be wrong but I think part of it is graphics.  They want their games to run on the lowest common denominator PC while still managing to look decent.  They want the next game to be a visually marked leap from the old product that isn't too hardware taxing at the time of release.  Also, as long as B.net has fuckloads of peeps on it, don't they just win the game through advertising anyway?

I mean, they still sell the Battle Chests for like 50 beans. 

One of the reasons why Blizzard is so slow is that they just don't have that many people working there. There used to be two teams -- Blizzard North which worked on the Diablos (and got closed down after too many people left) and the main Irvine location which worked on all the 'Crafts. So if Irvine was working on, say, Warcraft III, that meant nobody was working on Starcraft II except maybe doing some conceptualizing. And Blizzard's also had a steady stream of key people leaving since at least as early as 2000 to found their own gaming companies including ArenaNet (Guild Wars), Flagship Studios (Hellgate: London) and Red 5 Studios (undisclosed MMOG).

I think the real reason is more insidious - the people who are left at Blizzard don't like Starcraft, they resent it.

Guys like Roper who were instrumental in War3 and WoW keep saying that Warcraft is their primary IP, Warcraft is their first love, etc etc. SC was a better game than any of the Warcrafts, and I think it pains them to admit that. They want to believe that Warcraft is their golden child when it is in fact a totally generic paint-by-numbers fantasy setting.

They've probably rationalized away the success of SC as a fluke. Reading between the lines it just doesn't seem very popular internally.

I find it difficult to appreciate RTS games for which the phrase 'build order' is frequently useful.  Starcraft was the sitcom of RTSes: dumb enough and with a loud enough laugh track for the average sheep to be entertained by.  I suspect at least some management at Blizzard shares my view on this.

Musn't like chess then, huh?

It's hip and trendy to dislike starcraft now?

I hope not. I've disliked it for long enough that I'll dislike having to like it to remain on the fringes.

I hate all RTSs equally. Starcraft isn't special.

This is an awful mischaracterization.

Starcraft was played a lot by some very smart people, so the strategies became more refined. The Chess analogy is a good one. If you are some dopey mediocre chess player playing against your small group of mediocre buddies openings and things like that don't really matter. As your understanding of the game increases and the competition becomes more advances people's over understanding increases dramatically and certain strategies get names, counter strategies, and become part of the meta-game.

Any game played as much as Starcraft would end up with the same sort of meta-game, except that most of them would have degenerative strategies and be horribly broken.

Only if you never liked it in the first place.

Part of Starcraft's success in that regard is that Blizzard stayed on top of balance patches, both to eliminate "broken" strategies (reaver popping) and make "weaker" strategies more viable (firebats).  3 unique races and a bunch of unique viable strategies for each one makes for a lot of variation from game to game.  Few RTSes pull that off.

Yep, that was pretty much a given.. but i did get my rush to overlord drop down so that it was pretty freaking hard to beat. It finished about 80% of my opponents. I had it down so everything was loaded and ready and I got the speed upgrade just when the overlords were all loaded and halfway to the enemy base. it worked particuarly well on maps such as lost temple that had a 'choke point', since I'd bypass a lot of their main defense. A lot of of times it woudln't kill them outright but the destruction of all of their harvesting units and sometimes if I was really lucky their main base normally gave me the edge to finish them off.

Of course that left me vulnerable in the early mid game due to having to rush to tier2; The smart ones were the ones who investigated my base just at the right time and se me teching to tier2.. at that point, i'd have to scuttle the whole mess and dig in for a long fight. I mitigated this by doing a modified zerg rush (more of an early attack) to harrass them into playing defensively.

It was just one of the many things that made the game outstanding; there is no 'one way' to win, and even those who try and battlecruiser/carrier cheese or zerg rush keke get owned by people who know what they were doing.

The zerg rush, for instance, was really only effective against people who didn't know how to play; it also left you extremely weak versus mid and early game counterattacks, since you 'blew your wad' so to speak early.

Zerg rushing is the Starcraft equivalent of the scholar's mate (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scholar%27s_mate).  It's really impressive that so many people consider it an unbeatable strategy.

(edit) The animated GIF on that page looks like ripe avatar material.  Hmmm...

Known as the 'Children's Mate' in Russia. Heh.

It's very hard to create competitive games that don't end up with silly degenerative strategies. Especially when you throw in the fact that many many people play these games many many times against a very wide variety of opponents. Exploits and cheese tend to get found fast and replicated fast.

Who cares? People thought the market was tapped of users when it was UO and EQ. We've added 100 bajillion users since then. There is no evidence of an upper bound that I can see. Yes, there is migration between games, especially as they age. But we are also adding new users every day. I'd say build a fun game and you will both capture and grow market share.

Am I to believe that this is going to be another pay to play game?  Damnit, just let me play on battle.net for free.

Someone tell me a website where I can find build orders and whatnot for StarCraft.  I played last night and the only dude I beat was a guy who had built six hydralisk dens in his base, but had built no hydralisks, only mutalisks. 


What did people do before the internet?  How did they feel better about themselves?

They focused on improving themselves, bettering their own lot and competing with those around them instead of saying 'i'm ok as is' then finding someone worse than them and yelling 'pwned n00b' to prove that sentiment?

Nah, that's idealistic bull.  They just kicked bums.

That is the most awesome strategy I have ever heard of.

I learned most of what I know about SC from battlereports.com (http://www.battlereports.com/index.php).  (Looks like the stuff I submitted there under the name Baxter is now unviewable... damn you, Tripod!)

For pretty much anything Stacraft related in the English-speaking world, go here: http://www.teamliquid.net/. SCLegacy has a fair amount of stuff, including early game strats, so you might also want to look there: http://www.sclegacy.com/strategy/analysis/ownage_threebasics.php

Also, it's worth reading Battlereports.com if only for the Hall of Fame stuff.