shagg_187 said:
Ice Monkey, it's called Beta Testing. Blizzard clearly has no choice but to do so since it wants to deliver the best experience and don't want all the pros and noobs alike complaining that the game/menu/functionality is broken.
They have changed alot in Battle.net 2.0 and they will need to test and see if people appreciate the change. They have also made the game online only and they will need to test that as well.
Also, you can't pirate the game. If you do, you get no benefits in this online only game.
This is blizzard doing itself a favor by making sure their game is not dead on arrival, and not doing favor to us. But yes, I know what you mean.
i know, beta testing is necessary and all so they may not really care that much about us. They like every other company exists mainly to make money. And they are basically designing a way to print money by releasing starcraft 2.
It may be looking on the bright side or something but be honest, when starcraft 2's beta first came out, was it SO BAD back then that the multiplayer couldn't have been released as is? Absolutely not! It may have needed balance, that's obvious with all the balance changes since then, but they could absolutely have released it back then and everyone would have been perfectly happy with the final product. Then the balance changes would have been released and the game would have improved and everyone would have still been happy.
I really think there's only two possible reasons why blizzard gave such an extensive beta test when the product was as well done as it was when the beta first released:
1. they want to start tourneys immediately after release, and it would be bad form in some way or just simply undesirable to go full speed into tourneys and progaming in general with a product that still needs a good chunk of balance. For example, if winners won 10000 dollars or more because that hatchery cancel larva ling rush was exploited, it would look bad.
2. they did it almost as a gift that obviously has some nice tertiary benefits to the game.
I'm starting to not really know where I'm going with this, so I'll just restate the simple fact that blizzard could have easily just released the game after single player was done and the multiplayer was as it was when beta first started, and nobody would have been upset about it.
They would have had plenty of testing by the hordes of people who would have bought the game and to stress the servers they could have easily just had a good week or two beta test before release with a severely limited version of the game and 100000 people or more given invites to this extremely limited version. Like you're only allowed to play terran and tier 3 units arent included.
I guess that's my major point in this long rant, every other developer's betas or demos are considered successful by their fans when they are severely limited like starcraft 2 only allowing you to play as terran or something. Blizzard gave us the whole damn game for months and they didnt arguably need to.
Look at team fortress 2. 119 patches or something crazy like that, not all of which are just gracious content and look at how beloved that's been since it first released. Did they even have a beta test? Blizzard could've done that and succeeded, but they gave us so much more.
I want to play now!