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This month’s PC Powerplay has an article up on Battle.net. While unfortunately not revealing any new information, it’s still an interesting read:
Before the announcement of Diablo III, the Diablo related channels of Battle.net were fairly quiet. Hours later, they were jam-packed with players reacquainting themselves with one of PC’s most fondly remembered IPs.
Yet Battle.net is a creaky service indeed. Yes, it’s free, but it still lags far behind the online offerings from Xbox Live! and even some of the features of steam.Blizzard promises a complete rejuvenation of Battle.net – which they already refer to as Battle.net 2 – to coincide with the launch of Starcraft II.
Specific details? Sadly, Blizzard remains quiet, and the reaction to the colour scheme in Diablo III won’t fill the developer with confidence when it comes to announcing actual important stuff like anti-cheating systems.
But we’re promised a much more sophisticated player-finding service, as well as the full suite of features we now take for granted elsewhere. Finding friends, organising matches, reserving space, filtering noobs, it’s all on the to-do list.
To impress us though, Blizzard needs to come up with a way to prevent experienced players from re-registering as a newbie so they can stomp true beginners. Is it even possible without the use of rootkits and other unpleasant elements to track how many hours a player has spent with the game? We like to think so.
The new Battle.net will also be more explicitly tuned to what Blizzard calls “e-sports” or professional tournaments. The existing ladder system is very mature, so it remains to see this fleshed out and integrated with the burgeoning spectator side of professional play. Starcraft II tournament championships, in real time, on your PC, in engine, only a few clicks away?
Yes please!
As I have found a few more sources of Battle.net 2.0 info on my roaming of the net, I’ll make a feature article on it in a bit, but it does indeed seem like Battle.net 2.0 will be very very cool.
Thanks pR0gR4m3R for the tip. Team Liquid did the transcript from the mag.
Its clear the current battle.net is slowly but surely becoming outdated. I still find it to be more then decent for most things though
So what can we expect? I think we have to look at other games and services to see what they did right and not to forget: what they did wrong.
Apart from other games, its also interesting to look at the various sites that support esports in various ways: what tools do they use? what are they missing? Which of those things might fit really well into an online service?
Will the new battle.net be revolutionary? Will it set a new standard for cooperative play? I sure hope it will! I do think we can be pretty sure it will be a lot better then the already great old battle.net most off us have gotten used to.