Heart of the Swarm to Have Separate Ladder

[TheEconomist]

Basically, I'm making a joke about how his polls are so negative and try their best to put words in people's mouths.

[SinsWage]

Ah yes.

Poll: Everyone knows this game is really terrible. What about it is the terriblest?

Just kidding guys. Everyones opinion is valid. You just have to find an audience who agrees with you.

[flak4321]

@Blazur: That's me, taking the road less travelled. The thought occurred to me and I just shared. And I'm not surprised in the least, nor do I loathe or despise anything to do with it. My only request would be to modify the friends list to show which game they are playing.

That's a sure thing. Blizzard changed the UI for the WC3 expansion and all of the WoW expansions. The fact that, like you said, the Bnet UI right now is very Terran tells me they'll make it more Zergish in HOTS.

I got both games within a week of their respective releases and never noticed any difference in the UI. The new units made a difference in the experience. Are you perhaps referring to the Bnet interface of the games? I never really played it online so I have to ask.

[TheEconomist]

Battle.net interface and menus. Yes. In order for you to not immediately know what I'm talking about, you must misunderstand the meaning of the UI. UI = user interface, which includes Battle.net and the pre-gameplay menus; not just the gameplay UI (which already change for their races).

[flak4321]

Battle.net interface and menus. Yes. In order for you to not immediately know what I'm talking about, you must misunderstand the meaning of the UI. UI = user interface, which includes Battle.net and the pre-gameplay menus; not just the gameplay UI (which already change for their races).

I understand UI's acronym usage. I just typically consider the gameplay UI and Bnet UI's different entities, is all, and made a note that I did not use the bnet UI portion for WC3. This view comes form the older Blizz games in which you didn't have to see Bnet to play the campaign and against AI opponents. For SC2, the launch UI is the bnet UI, which is a step in entering the SP UI, so I would have to consider them 2 halves of a greater whole. What we have is 2 different interpretations of an UI description is all.

That said, I agree that it is very possible we might see a more Zergish Bnet UI appearance with HotS and similar changes for LotV. I would request the option of choosing our Bnet appearance once we own each part of the game. On a related note, I would also love it if Blizz set it up so we could load all three games from the same icon/launcher as is possible w/ SC1 since the no CD patch and choose which game to enter from there.

[TheEconomist]

UI = user interface

Anything the user inferfaces into is the UI. There's no separate identities or halves or whatever. You said you didn't notice a difference in the UIs for WC3 and TFT but there were changes.

If you meant gameplay UI, then it already changes. What's there to discuss. If you meant Battle.net UI, WarCraft 3 and WoW all have changing UIs. So it's likely SC2 will too.

[Blazur]

If you meant Battle.net UI, WarCraft 3 and WoW all have changing UIs. So it's likely SC2 will too.

Eh, they don't really have different UI's. It's the exact same interface but with a different background. I'm not sure how they did it with WoW, but your WC3 example doesn't depict a different UI.

In SC WoL the UI is clearly Terran based. I'm curious to know if it'll adopt a different theme for the expansions, or if they're just gonna swap the flying BC in the background.

[TheEconomist]

I didn't say different UIs I said changed UI, meaning background, buttons, music, etc. which was the context of the post I was replying to.

[sandwich_bird]

I wonder if gamers with the expansion(s) will still be able to play with gamers without it. So will it be like SC:BW where you have to change the cd to do so or will it be more like WoW?

That's a concern to me because I know that most of my friends definitely won't get the expansion.

[SaZun]

Most of blizzards media have moved to a different form of media. Maybe it will be like war3 in its current state where you launch a different executable to load the version of the game you like.

This seems like what could happen as a lot of bnet 2.0 changes would have to be implimented to support "changing ladders" without closing the program. Though I guess they could just add another row of selection above the brackets in multiplayer.

example:

WoL--HoTS--LoTV
1v1--2v2--3v3--4v4--FFA
Terran--Zerg--Protoss--Random

Though I suppose it could be like WoW where each expansion is just a patch applied to the game, requiring purchased keys attached to your account to access the patched data.