Chat confirmed, new identifier system, whiners; pow, right in the kisser

[hyde]

Chat will still come months after the game is released, there is still no cross-region play, still no LAN, still restrictive map publishing features, still no better way of going through custom games and replays, still worst way to add friends, still low level of privacy and still no clans.

I'm not satisfied and until all our demands are met, than I'm boycotting all Blizzard games and everyone dissatisfied should also!

There is no Cross Region play in WoW, theres still over 11 million people playing it. Sure this might be StarCraft and a RTS, but this isn't a huge deal.
Not from a business/sales perspective, most games are region locked on PS3/360 as well. This is just a feature that has been grand fathered over from 90's era of PC gaming.

No LAN..is clearly just their suits pushing for somesort of DRM tactic. I have to say though, Blizzard is freaking stupid/lame for it. They already have invasive DRM...you must be connected to Battle.Net servers all the time while you play the game..

The rest...we will have to see in Phase2/Retail.

you aren't, I am!

And "great game" is still up in the air. The campaign may actually suck, who knows.

This is Blizzard, they're known for trashing entire games and firing entire studios (Blizzard North and rebooting Diablo3 three times) . I don't think they're going to muck up StarCraft 2.

[Dauntless]

We've known about these groups and channels for them for ages. But when it's repeated once all the whiners are suddenly okay with it?

[Skyze]

Yep.. Its lame to say "one of the patches after release".. WC3 watching replays online was "one of the patches to come after release" but we saw how that turned out.

Besides, I dont see any fixes to the REAL issue, Divisions.. Chat channels was fixed easily by IRC, just a bit more alt-tabbing.. Divisions is the #1 biggest issue with bnet, which they wont fix.

[Kimera757]

Man, so we ARE getting chat rooms after all? This must be Activision's doing.

But... I thought the general consensus was that Activision was evil?

We've known about these groups and channels for them for ages. But when it's repeated once all the whiners are suddenly okay with it?

They wanted reassurance. It's hard to find that info on the battle.net forums.

[Norfindel]

Why you even need that silly random identifier? Why not just check if the damn username is already taken and offer to change it? Then, if you want to add ".1337", or whatever sillyness suits you to make it unique, at least you're the one choosing it.

It doesn't looks that difficult to do, and is what everyone else does. I think someone throw dumbling gas on Blizzar's HQ, or something.

[Deathstar]

They balanced identifiers by allowing only one username per account. Also, we won't see chat rooms until 2011

[killermofo]

And "great game" is still up in the air. The campaign may actually suck, who knows.

Chat channels - I'm assuming the randomly assigned identifier is to track & isolate individuals for spam moderation, which i am all for.

Cross regional play would be a plus but realistically it would require something equivilent to blizzard having to launch satellites into space & or an array of satellite dishes to build the cross regional infrastructure, correct me if I am wrong.

God help us if the campaign actually turns out sucking.. but I'm willing to bet that Blizzard will not fail us..

Give bliz some credit they're doing great so far, we're in thel balancing and final development stages.. there's more than one way to skin a cat but it's not worth boycotting over a few split hairs.

[Alex06]

Looks like we got through to them!

[Drake Clawfang]

Chat will still come months after the game is released, there is still no cross-region play, still no LAN, still restrictive map publishing features, still no better way of going through custom games and replays, still worst way to add friends, still low level of privacy and still no clans.

I'm not satisfied and until all our demands are met, than I'm boycotting all Blizzard games and everyone dissatisfied should also!

This is why Blizzard has so little insentive to listen to the fans - the ones complaining the loudest won't be satisfied no matter what they do, so why bother trying?

Good to see Chat channels will return, hopefully this will indeed curb a bit of the complaining. But I doubt it.

[Hammy]

Your title is kinda silly since it's the people who were complaining the most about this stuff who are probably the happiest

This is great news indeed! Can't wait to see what these chat channels look like. I hope they make a bunch of "auto" channels like in BW/Wc3/D2 etc... A default division channel would be great for instance.

Zotac/CraftCup channels are going to be crazy though
Can't wait to set up an SC:L chat channel.