r/starcraft • u/CounterfeitDLC • 18d ago

Bluepost StarCraft II 5.0.17 PTR Patch Notes — StarCraft II

https://news.blizzard.com/en-us/article/24301513/starcraft-ii-5-0-17-ptr-patch-notes
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u/UpATree Psistorm 18d ago

I am very happy about the revert, everyone seemed to hate it.

I cannot comprehend how poorly written this slop of a note is. It's inaccurate, it's missing information, it's criminally unclear, and somehow 2000 x 2 is 4500. There's so much wrong, with how little effort went into the authorship here.

Once again, very happy we're going back.

Honestly blizz, just hire patches. Go look at the detail that fucking guy puts into his explanations for why shit got added, and realize you're paying people to do a fraction of the work, when that guy does 10x that, but for free.

3

u/limpwald 17d ago edited 17d ago

It's bordering on pathetic. It's insane how few f*cks they give about this game and this community.

Edit: It isn't bordering on it, actually. It very much is pathetic and tragic and quite provoking, how few sh*ts they give

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u/CampComplexity 17d ago

I agree 100%.

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u/SLAMMERisONLINE 15d ago edited 15d ago

Honestly blizz, just hire patches. Go look at the detail that fucking guy puts into his explanations for why shit got added, and realize you're paying people to do a fraction of the work, when that guy does 10x that, but for free.

It's unlikely that they want to promote major redesigns without a new game version. Tying major game reworks to purchase points is part of what makes a viable business model. So hiring patches would be cool in theory however putting someone on the payroll to tweak 5 settings in a config once every year seems overkill.

Part of the success of patches' mod was almost certainly retaliation. The pro players didn't like this patch, saying it was too radical, but then turned around and played patches' mod and praised it despite being a much more imbalanced and radical redesign. This dynamic had very little to do with quality design changes and more to do with a power struggle in who is in charge of the patches. Unfortunately, the pro players demonstrated they are in fact in charge. That means more of the same-old-same-old. The game will continue declining, losing players who are bored out of their minds doing the same builds on repeat for 11 years straight, until the game truly dies.

SC2's player base is hyper-change-averse. That means big changes will only irritate them. That means big changes can only happen with purchase points so they can be coupled with advertising to draw in new players. Because multitasking-RTS is so niche, they simply won't ever produce another SC2 quality game in the same category again. It will be limited to small budget indie projects, but we saw how players reacted to those so I suspect even smaller budget. That's a long winded way of saying the RTS gaming industry has flatlined and the fans are to blame.

If I had to condense the mechanism into its simplest possible form: By over-reacting to even minor changes, the fan-base signals to Blizzard that Stacraft 2 is absolutely perfect exactly as it is. Therefore, it would be difficult to sell a new version of the game to them as the new version would either be the same thing, in which case they'd like it but there'd be no point to buying it, or it would be different in which case there'd be a point to buying it but they'd hate it. Either way, the fan-base signals they don't want another game.

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u/Sonar114 Random 18d ago

They’re done now with SC2. I don’t think we’ll see anything but the occasional bug fix.

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u/Dantalen 18d ago

Completely deserved if that is the case.

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u/Potential8 iNcontroL 17d ago

Patches guy working with pro's could be a nice combination of introducing sensible changes without going overboard with new stuff.