Life In 19x19

Indeed, explo and I are apparently the only two european L19 players on bnet. Would be cool to have a duathlon tournament: sc2 games and go games. But alas, region locking says noooo.

Patrick Allen 3d is going to the MLG Raleigh SC2 Pro Circuit which is in a couple of weeks. He's been doing really well in SC2, just joining Quantum Gaming (http://www.qgaming.net) and ranked 66th in Blizzard's top 200 SC2 ladder post and 334th worldwide (out of 1,000,049 who are in leagues). I've been getting a lot of tips and advice from him which has helped my game. Hopefully he'll do well and maybe even give a little plug for Go in any interview he gets . He is "Time" in the list: http://www.mlgpro.com/content/news/3109 ... t-Released (interestingly enough, there is another player going who goes by "Josekii"...hmm).

Araban wrote:I've been getting a lot of tips and advice from him which has helped my game.

That's awesome. Do you know him IRL? (Sorry, but talking about SC2 always makes me want to use more internet abbreviations.) If not, how do you recommend procuring such a mentor? My rating is about 400-425 points right now.

MountainGo wrote:

Araban wrote:I've been getting a lot of tips and advice from him which has helped my game.

That's awesome. Do you know him IRL? (Sorry, but talking about SC2 always makes me want to use more internet abbreviations.) If not, how do you recommend procuring such a mentor? My rating is about 400-425 points right now.

I've met him IRL yeah, I got to know him through Todd B. and we brushed shoulders in 2 USGCs. He even helped me a bit with my Physics homework in the 2008 USGC since I was also taking summer quarter classes at the time. I don't know how you'd go about finding a mentor/sparring partner...maybe try playing in a casual weekly tournament? You'll be brushing online shoulders with some pretty good players I'd reckon. But yeah, definitely surprised me when I saw he was very hardcore in RTS games .

I'm worried about the way Activision-Blizzard is going. I mean microtransactions. 60€ for a game, but then you'd have to pay to change your name. I'm pretty sure next we'll be seeing user-created maps and mods as additional purchasable content. After all, EULA states that all content created is Blizzard's property if you send it to their servers. With no LAN, using A-B's servers is the only option.

Microtransactions use the following business model:
1. First you impose arbitrary restrictions or neglect essential features in software
2. Then you kindly offer a shortcut around the restriction / add small feature for some $$$
3. Community is happy that "problem" gets solved

In a sense it's a way to drive the leverage. Like in poker, you're hesitant to fold when you've already invested money in table. "You only lose big on good hands", as the saying goes.

I remember ten years ago when you 'owned' the copy of software you bought. You could play it for many years, download any content and patches the community created. Reverse-engineering was possible. Nowadays there's mostly big enterprises which spend millions to develop games. Stakes are high. Sell on impression. Buy out your opposition. Corner the market and drop the passion.

Toge wrote:I remember ten years ago when you 'owned' the copy of software you bought.

I have the same criticism. The idea that you have to log into battle.net to do anything and that it's impossible to play over a LAN makes it feel like you're paying $60 for a service rather than a product. It's a shame, but ultimately I still have an absolute blast playing, so I can't complain. And if they want to introduce fees for mods, okay. As long as it never costs extra to play single player or league quick matches, they've provided an amazing, full-featured game right there. Anything else is gravy. Some people act like game companies are a government that needs to respect our gamers' rights, which is wrong-headed if you ask me.

The region locking stuff really galls me. What ever happened to old adages like "deliver a product the consumer wants, and you'll make money" or "if people demand something, the market will deliver"? There wasn't a big, pent-up demand for region locked software. It's completely anti-consumer. How does Blizzard make money by preventing someone from playing against their friends in other regions? For that matter, who makes money when an American tourist can't play a DVD they bought while on vacation in France? How can that put money in somebody's pocket? I just don't understand the economics of that.

I don't know about starcraft, but in the case of DVDs, the region locking is to permit them to sell the same DVD at different prices in different regions without the chance that people in the discount regions will resell the DVDs to people in richer regions.

fwiffo wrote:For that matter, who makes money when an American tourist can't play a DVD they bought while on vacation in France? How can that put money in somebody's pocket? I just don't understand the economics of that.

I think the reasoning is that it allows them to price things locally to the limit the region can bear. If you have two markets with vastly different price levels (say, Japan and China) and you don't want to use DRM, then you have three options. You can charge both China and Japan the "Japan" price and then nobody in China will be able to buy it. You can charge them both China's price and then you won't be making nearly as much profit from Japan as you could be -- they're willing to pay lots more per DVD than China is. Or you could charge them different prices, but then you'll notice that a lot of "Chinese import DVD" business will suddenly start to spring up in Japan, where people buy them at China's prices and sell them at just below Japan's prices. Once again, you're not making as much money in Japan as you could be. The "solution" is to region-lock them so that the Chinese can only watch their version, and the Japanese can only watch their more expensive ones. That's why if you look at a map of region codes, they don't correspond to physical location as much as socio-economic levels.

Of course, in practice what happens is that China pirates everything and Japan buys region-unlocked DVD players, so it's a fair question why it still happens. But you can see why it sounded like a good idea in the beginning...

EDIT: Darn, daniel beat me to it by a minute

MountainGo wrote:I have the same criticism. The idea that you have to log into battle.net to do anything and that it's impossible to play over a LAN makes it feel like you're paying $60 for a service rather than a product. It's a shame, but ultimately I still have an absolute blast playing, so I can't complain. And if they want to introduce fees for mods, okay. As long as it never costs extra to play single player or league quick matches, they've provided an amazing, full-featured game right there. Anything else is gravy. Some people act like game companies are a government that needs to respect our gamers' rights, which is wrong-headed if you ask me.

- You're right. I still think the campaign and multiplayer options are worth 60€. But now I know that 60 euros doesn't include the level of customer support I've come to expect from Blizzard. Want to change name? Sure, 10 bucks. I mean geez. Warcraft III supports multiple profiles in case your family members want to play. SCII supports exactly one and sharing with family members is explicitly prohibited.

Leaving out LAN has two reasons:
1) It should make piracy more difficult if all games happen in Blizzard's servers
2) One unified platform for games can make Blizzard money (tournaments for example), which players could otherwise skip

For us players it's a risky business. How well will Blizzard deal with hackers? Will the map pool contain fresh and balanced maps? Is it possible for a group of friends to play custom map together? Everything depends on Blizzard's willingness to spend on maintenance, which in turn costs us one way or another. This is the high stakes business model.

Could we edit the main post to include the ID's of people and their regions that would be willing to play/practice?

Lucid.971 EUROPE
Division - Diamond
Race - Random (or zerg)

Christos wrote:Could we edit the main post to include the ID's of people and their regions that would be willing to play/practice?

Lucid.971 EUROPE
Division - Diamond
Race - Random (or zerg)

Teamliquid does the same thing(list of user handles for other games they have in a side forum/thread), and I think it's a great idea.

Christos wrote:Could we edit the main post to include the ID's of people and their regions that would be willing to play/practice?

Lucid.971 EUROPE
Division - Diamond
Race - Random (or zerg)

Since I wasn't OP in this thread and I didn't just want to edit his out, I just posted a list here: http://lifein19x19.com/forum/viewtopic. ... 428#p26428

I just found out that 'Shift-#' adds units/buildings to the already existing control group #. I've spent almost 100 games selecting the original group, shift-selecting the new units and then pressing Ctrl-# to reset the control group. Particularly annoying as I'm still looking down at my keyboard occasionally to make sure I'm hitting the right number.

Is there any place I can go to find out useful little things like this. I assume I've picked up most of them through experimentation and watching day9 and similar stuff but it was incredibly frustrating to only just find that out.

Tooveli wrote:I just found out that 'Shift-#' adds units/buildings to the already existing control group #. I've spent almost 100 games selecting the original group, shift-selecting the new units and then pressing Ctrl-# to reset the control group. Particularly annoying as I'm still looking down at my keyboard occasionally to make sure I'm hitting the right number.

Is there any place I can go to find out useful little things like this. I assume I've picked up most of them through experimentation and watching day9 and similar stuff but it was incredibly frustrating to only just find that out.

http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmes ... _id=114943