They now talking about "First half 2010" so we really have time for the Beta, first half could be June, I do not see them starting a Beta soon for a game coming up so far now.

But the Beta could give us some good indication on their planned release date anyway, if they do it in coming few months, we could see a release 1st quarter of 2010, if later, means most probably 2nd quarter at best

Ha ha ha ha ha

As long as they do not pull out a Duke Nukem Forever crap, I dun mind waiting.

And seriously, it's Blizzard, I can't remember them ever finishing a game without few pushing back of dates before. People who are surprised must not know their records much

This post has been edited by Gormaz: Aug 6 2009, 12:17 PM

Same, I am not even considering taking this bet

Wait, where did Blizzard confirmed D3 (or even SC2) will be out in 2010?
Way too early to say D3 or SC2 will be out in same year

Imo, there are high chances they will be, but again it's Blizzard, I really do not take anything for granted.

They are among the very very few companies that can say "Lol, suck it" to fans going apeshit about release dates and push back of it.

They get away with it because they do deliver when it comes out and because they do make some good games.

It's really gonna be out when they say so, predicting release dates before Blizzard say a fix date is like predicting the weather 6 months in advance imo...

Wait & See

Yar, I feel SC2 is the "big" thing that is coming out for Blizz right now, and they definitely dun want to come out with a crap, they know really lots of people are waiting on it and will be very very pissed off if they come out with a bad game or half assed one, including solo campaign.

WoW is their milk cow, they keep it around to make lots of benefice and fund their others projects (I have nothing against WoW, I played more than 3 years so it's not blind criticism), xpacs are not that bad to come out tbh, they have the mechanisms perfectly tuned down now (do not stand in Fire/Ice/Lightning/Poison/Little Ponies etc.). Northend has more or less a complete design already so it's copy paste and reskinning.

Instead of "when it's done" I would put a "IT IS NOT OUT BEFORE 2010, DO NOT ASK" but well, that's just me

Yar, I do think we going to hear "something" about SC2 at Blizzcon, at least some screenshot or trailer on the current status of the game etc. I would be very surprised if they don't, it's their own special convention and it's far from being small.

Sounds very sweet indeed for SP content!

Looks like they are really polishing their babies

And well, if they are gonna put it in, they arent gonna put it in (no kinky double sense meant... seriously...)

I do agree LAN has kinda decreased for the past few years with the increase of fast internet. While I am not 100% happy they take it out, well, not like we can decide

And last: Blizzard don't give a crap about Malaysia's internet, it's Guv and Streamyx fault Malaysia has bad internet, not games company.

Personally the more I read about the solo play, the more I can't wait!

This post has been edited by Gormaz: Aug 19 2009, 10:35 AM

Yar, some people were talking about the pseudo-LAN thing, that sounds like a pretty good compromise to me if they manage to do it, just need to connect to authenticate then you still get super low ping and conviviality of a LAN.

Nothing much you could argue about this if they pull it out, to manage to get one connection in a LAN is not that bad nowadays.

Very ambitious game man...

Pretty nice statue of Kerrigan

For the face I was wondering for few secs if it was a statue or a real model.... it's a statue right?

I do see your some of your points but try also to think from Blizzard point of view (Capitalism called, he want to talk to you btw):

* They are not in the business to do charity, they are here to make money *

eSport crap and all (I hate that term btw, it has nothing to do with sport and it's just a term to make it look less geeky) is just a way for them to make more money and hype about the game.

I totally agree that the widespread piracy can, in a very screwed way, improve the spread of the game to the mass (not like I am trying to be the white sheep here, I don't own all the games I played, especially when I was younger and couldnt afford).

But I think that blamming Blizzard for trying to reduce piracy is... sorry to quote Cheese there.... but it's living under a rock, or having a kind of limited view of how the world works. I think they had some guys there that know how to count on their fingers and calculated they would make more money this way so they will go with it. They will also have way more contronl on the "eSport" thinggy this way.

You are putting people who can't afford food in the same sack as the ones who are too poor to afford a PC and a internet connection, that's kind of a hell of a "spread" there... I don't even want to touch this topic with a 15 meters pole...

And finally, let's keep it cool here, nobody is here to attack anyone, I can understand if you are pissed off about it, but entering a thread that is going on like a bull in a corrida isnt the exact best way to have a good discussion going on (not like none of us here works for Blizz and can decide anything anyway right?)

edit: you guys type fast.... I tried to put it nicely...

Cybers may be huge in Asia, but it's really not the norm in Europe or US to go to them that much which are Blizz primary targets so while I can feel for it I do think that for Blizz it's mostly "collateral damage". Cybers in Europe (I do think it's the same in US too) are also totally bound to have only legal copies of games anyway, otherwise they would be closed down very fast.

Lan there are also mostly used there for students who just do them among themselves, if they do the "I need to only authenticate once then can play on LAN without the packets to have to go to Bnet" thing, that would fix most of the legit LAN requests, having a shared net connection fast enough to authenticate is not that hard to get nowadays.

I was really pissed off about the No Lan thinggy too at first but from the hints we heard in the last Blizzcon, I am kinda feeling like the damage might not be so huge right now. Cybers in SEA might suffer because of the licensing issue but from a business Point of view you can't blame Blizz for that seriously... and they will get their pirated copies soon enough anyway.

While again I am not the white sheep who never bought pirated games here, if you think from Blizz of view, trying to justify local Cyberz using pirated games is pointless.

I would say to wait until we get real confirmation of what the new Bnet is going to be able to do and how things are exactly going to work.

Edit: I do agree that DRM are right now hurting more than they help PC gaming (lolSpore...). But imo that will pass.
In old time they tried to use stuff like manual confirmation or the "code wheel" stuff, it did not work, they stopped.
DRM are just hightech version of these. When the companies will see it hurt them more than it helps, they will adapt.

This post has been edited by Gormaz: Aug 25 2009, 12:35 AM

That's a good summary of what I think...

Which owe Blizzard to have made the games at the first place, it's quite a catch22 there.

Seriously guys, you really feel like you guys are "entitled" to anything from Blizzard because somehow you played SC1 a lot and consider it as "more than just a game"?

They really don't care about that, they know they are going to make a huge sales on it and that most of the people that whine about it are still going to buy it anyway. It might make some discussions with fans a bit rough right now but at the end of the day folks are still going to do it.

Way aside from the (interesting) discussion we were having I just noticed one thing related to Bnet:

The whole Bnet authentication system seems to be down right now, during the WoW maintenance

For reference you kinda had to link your WoW account to your Bnet account few months back if you wanted to create your Bnet account (which I did for SC2 beta), it seems that made a lot of "collateral damage" when they take out Wow authentication server.... So now I have to use my Bnet ID to log to Wow etc.

I have no idea if any other games using Bnet right now are impacted but I am damn surprised I can't even log to the the Blizzard Store with my Bnet account...

I do hope the Bnet2 is not going to be like this otherwise it's going to affect way more than just WoW... maintenance for WoW is every tuesday starting usually from 6pm to 1-2am at GMT+8 time...

Can someone else try to connect to its Bnet account right now? Maybe it's only for folks who tied their Bnet account to Wow account...

This post has been edited by Gormaz: Aug 25 2009, 10:54 PM

That was last April's Fools if I remember properly.

Blizzard usually always do one of this kind of stuff every year

Woaw, beta only Q2, that's like another year to wait at least I would say for release.

Oh... I didnt read that properly yar...

So there are going for quite a short beta if it won't start before January and the game is planned in Q2...
Only 2-3 months for the beta I guess, I expected a little bit longer maybe.

Well see how, it's Blizzard, my "for next Christmas" unwanted prediction might come true after all

What they mean by placeholder is that when designing a web site it's very common you create the structure first, including links between each pages and all.

But how do you create links to a page that you have not yet written? You put a placeholder page, "systemrequirements.html" for example, and you make the links to this page on all your other pages.

"Usually" you just make an empty page as a placeholder, ie got nothing inside your systemrequirements.html or just some very basic stuff. Then when you have written the full thing, you just replace the file.

Here instead they reused the World of Warcraft page instead (just did a copy past to the right location, renamed it maybe and that's it).

But it was not supposed to be accessible by public until they replaced it by the real one.

Here the mistake was that it WAS made publicly available and people found it out and rushed to spread the news (zomg, zomg, zomg SC2 news!1oneeleven!)

The guy who put the page up definitely made a mistake but the placeholder thing is very "normal" from a development point of view.

This post has been edited by Gormaz: Feb 8 2010, 10:52 AM

Well, could be, or could be just a screw-up from someone there.

Not sure that's the kind of buzz around SC2 they would want though, people are already getting bit irritated by all the delays.

No news from the open beta too... that would mean no SC2 for first half 2010 I think.