Have a mentioned how I liked RTS' before? With all of these blogs it gets hard to pin down the little personal snippets that I have already shared, so I'll just drop that under the impression that I haven't before. But don't get me wrong, just as with any tactical game I'm absolutely terrible at the genre myself. I just can't get to grips with strategic match-ups and inevitably just start flooding my opposition with bodies until I win. A sound enough strat to get me through most RTS campaigns, (Except 'Army Men RTS', strangely) but I doubt it would fly against the top tournament professionals of the time. I'd imagine that's part of the reason why I will never join the Warcraft 3 Reforged tournaments, although after the mess of a show they had recently, it might be worth attending just to watch the fireworks. (Come on, that was a good segue-way!)
If I were the folk over at Blizzard's community department and thus responsible for cleaning up the mess that the development team left the community in, I would probably be handling things the exact same way they were. Basically, they've decided to ignore all the burning fires around them and continue on as though everything is business as usual. "Fans are upset about the fact that the new netcode completely destroys all the infrastructure of the old game? Well we'll just hold our ground and start a tournament with the new systems, let everyone see how good they are!" It makes absolute sense as far as I'm concerned, even if the majority of the community want nothing to do with you it behoves you to deliver to those who still do.
That is the reason why, despite everything that Blizzard messed up and wantonly lied about, I still held some begrudging respect for their conduct. (Or at least the conduct of those left holding the bag.) They weren't about to abandon this game just because the going got tough, and that's something I admire. (Even is this is a remaster that practically ruined an entire decades old community.) But Blizzard some how can never stop their spiral into vilification and even when trying to do something good for the community, through a live Warcraft tournament, their own ineptitude managed to screw everything up.
Now before I get into ripping this situation I feel the need to make something clear, purely because I'm not sure that I do often enough. Blizzard is a huge company with many different departments working on several different aspects of the game, so when something goes this spectacularly badly it isn't necessarily the fault of those most visible. The whole misleading marketing might have very well been an order from Activision to clamp down on communication for fear of hurting sales, and this story very much shows the Blizzard community managing team taking the brunt for the failings of the development team. (And that's never fun.) Although, do remember that all these people do fall under the Blizzard banner and in that environment the failures, as well as the successes, are shared.
Imagine the scene: You've signed up to be members of the first big tournament for 'Warcraft 3 Reforged', you're probably incredibly excited about Blizzard reviving the competitive scene for this title in such a big way and you're eager to start cutting through all the negativity that this title has accrued. What do you get for your endless optimism? A big fat disconnect right in the middle of your play session! If you don't remember, one of the more contentious aspects of the 'Reforged' controversy was the way in which this new title completely erased the online infrastructure that the old 2002 game had been using and replaced it with their own. Now fundamentally this meant that all the content released that had utilised appropriated assets could not be ported over (for copyright reasons) and that content creators had to sign a creatively stifling contract in order to use the custom tools. (But that's a subject for another blog.) In the immediate, however, this new online infrastructure was incredibly shoddy and built a reputation for crashing mid-match. Now obviously this was hardly the biggest issue with 'Reforged' as such issues could be theoretically fixed, but one would have thought the team would have done that before going ahead and hosting a tournament. (Seems I know nothing.)
The tournament was practically besieged with regular disconnects that forced many matches to be restarted. Seems the kinks of the online engine had not been exaggerated by a frustrated community, like some had suggested, and were actually bad enough to the point where I'm surprised that this was the released build of the game. Remember that these folk were playing in the same room as each other and still disconnecting; there's no other reason for that than fundamentally poor infrastructure. But perhaps the most notorious of the disconnects happened during one of the biggest matches of the event; that of Swedish player ThorZain against a Korean player named Moon. Now, Moon is widely considered to be one of the best RTS players in the world, so when ThorZain started showing potential as challenger in their best-out-of-three bout, things began to get interesting. Long story short, their match suffered from two disconnects in a short time, both time when it looked like Thor was getting the upperhand. (According to people who know more about RTS' then I do, personally I had no idea who was looking better.) Folks are now saying that the forced restarts allowed Moon to learn from the strategy and beat Thor in the third match-up, leading to what some would call an unfair win.
Whatever your position on the 'fairness' of it all, such a situation undoubtedly casts a shadow upon the whole tournament that will stay in the community's minds. Remember that 'For Honor' Tournament a couple years back that was decided due to an animation glitch that allowed one player to bypass through another's block? That little incident was enough to entirely kill all the competitive hype for that game and is arguably one of the reasons why that game in now almost completely dead. (Which sucks cause I really liked it.) Now I wouldn't say this will have as drastic of a reaction, it's impossible to say, but when half of the active community of your game is claiming that the poor mechanics of the title itself meddled with the results of the competition, that's going to harm your overall optics for future events.
After significant troubles the event organisers ended up switching back to 'Warcraft 3 original' graphics in the settings menu and that cleared up the crashes, (For some inexplicable reason.) and isn't that just the perfect irony to cap off this situation? Blizzard have managed to pull a Bethesda in despoiling their own brand in everything from high quality game creation to consumer friendly practises and now even event organising, they haven't got much reputation left at this point. The question is whether all of this negativity has the legs to last until the launch of Blizzard's next big title; Overwatch 2. (Which is already garnering it's own stable-full of backlash due to claims of it being a copy-past cash grab.) For their part, I hope Blizzard can get their act together long before that comes as Overwatch is actually a brand I'm somewhat invested in. (I used to spend a lot of nights jamming to some OW.) What I'm basically saying is; please come back to the way you used to be, Blizzard; we all miss you!
No comments:
Post a Comment