
Starcraft II goes free-to-play seven years after launch - amq
https://arstechnica.co.uk/gaming/2017/11/starcraft-ii-goes-free-to-play-seven-years-after-launch/
======
invalidOrTaken
Highly recommended. Probably my favorite part is the asymmetrical approaches
of the races. Interested in firepower, maneuver warfare, and positioning?
You'll enjoy the Terrans. Want to achieve the dream of bloodless (for you,
anyway) war? Try the Protoss. Want to be an efficient Darwinian nightmare?
Pick up the Zerg.

It's this mix of styles, to the point that the races feel like they're in
different _genres_ , that makes SCII such a varied game. And that doesn't even
account for different playstyles _within_ the races.

~~~
markcerqueira
Want to build an almost unstoppable flying ball of death? Play Protoss and
only build Stargate units. ;)

~~~
0xfeba
I always played Protoss in SC1 and just built a huge amount of Carriers.

~~~
SOLAR_FIELDS
Always worked when you played someone who didn't know what they were doing but
a solid micro setup with scourge or wraiths would always destroy this setup :)

~~~
TeMPOraL
Or 6+ Valkyries to immediately clear Carriers' Interceptors. Then it's just
shooting fish in a barrel ;).

~~~
SOLAR_FIELDS
Same goes for the battlecruiser spammer - you could always tell when that was
going down and it was even easier to counter :)

------
staunch
Digital drug dealers let you have the first one free. That's how they get you
hooked!

I can't play Starcraft (or chess, poker) for fear of being sucked into the
competition and waking up years later. Gone down that rabbit hole enough to
know I'd regret it.

~~~
darethas
I know many scoff at this (because I have this same opinion and get scoffed
at) but this is so true. Video game addiction is very real. Very, very real.
Just as debilitating as any other addiction. The only "advantage" I would say
is you don't get as much physiological damage as you do with substance abuse,
but even that can be debated: bad posture, bad blood circulation, carpel
tunnel, eye strain and migraines, sleep deprivation, etc.

Obligatory Don't be afraid to ask for help! Many counselors are now
specifically trained for dealing with video game addiction now! Especially if
you are college it's probably free!

~~~
jeffshek
Video game addiction is a hard thing to admit. Society also mocks you. For
this reason, I've never touched World of Warcraft (WoW). I knew that once I
started ... I could easily see myself playing for stretches of eighteen hours
a day. YouTube showed a clip about someone who had played about 14,000 hours.
Granted, it's his life and he can spend it however he wants ... but jesus, 14k
hours?!

I'm not sure what it is - certain personalities are just so easily addicted to
video games. I'm one of them, so I try to avoid them as much as possible. I
find myself so easily addicted that I'm sometimes worried that I'll fall back
into a video gaming binge. Every now and then, I'll mentally trick myself into
thinking I have enough willpower to play just "one" game and I'll get the
craving out. Nope. It's always six hours later and I'm late for whatever I had
planned for the rest of the day. More frequently than not, the next day I'll
trick myself again into one "last" game. I'll blow through another six-eight
hours that'll feel like minutes. Day 2 is normally when I have enough angst to
uninstall and purge the game. I'm older now (29) so I'm better at realizing
the mental tricks of the "one" game fallacy, but even this weekend I played
six-seven hours straight of Starcraft 2. (The mental justification was I was
"thinking" about AI/ML strategies to play SC2, sigh.)

I'm averaging about six-seven months between each relapse, so it's not like I
have some absurd problem - but back in college, I could easily spend a week of
non-stop playing some forgettable RTS, sleep, drink and then repeat. There's
some pang of sadness as I wish I had done something a little more useful, but
in hindsight a lot of those failures made me realize how bad video games were
to my personality.

~~~
darethas
> I'm not sure what it is

Video games are perfect, especially for people who like to tinker and are
curious, which to me has been every hacker ever. That's what it is. They
literally are just _really damn good_ at what they do.

What online video games (and here I am making sure to distinguish between
online, competitive type video games, versus offline because in my experience
offline video games hardly ever come up in counseling, it's always your CODs,
CSes, LoL and WoW's of the world) do psychologically is they provide a
structure, a way to advance and progress -- with a tight feedback loop of your
progress and a way to socialize with other people. Ultimately these 3 things
lead to a huge sense of accomplishment and dopamine rush. Your attention is
kept because you have these short spurts of quests, or "you just gotta kill 3
more mobs to get that next level and unlock your new spell tree" or you got to
check your auction to get that gold to buy the new gear to do the new raid
with your clan next week because you really don't want to let those guys down,
etc.

The problem is, outside that virtual reality, you see depression, lack of
ability to focus at work, not getting work done on time, lack of interest in
tasks considered "boring". The way to success is to create these same
structures in your life, but for the goals you want to accomplish. _Much_
easier said than done, but at a high level, that's what it is all about. We
escape to our virtual reality to get our virtual high and virtual feeling of
belonging and virtual progress because we lack any or all of these areas in
our real lives and it pains us too much to be able to face that
disappointment. And for some of us, that mountain of unfinished tasks, or
incomplete projects because of our thousands of hours racked up on Steam seems
insurmountable, so that even when we do have free time and no games, we
procrastinate -- "it's too much, I'll never get it done anyways"
(Procrastination -- especially _habitual_ procrastination is almost always a
defense mechanism, and not a moral/character flaw such as "I am just lazy")

Now why we escape to the video games? Any number of factors, be it depression,
ADHD, or simply never having a good role model or someone to teach you
structure and discipline in your life (the latter is usually the case), but
that's besides the point. The point is to recognize it, realize you will never
be happy unless you achieve what _you_ want from your life. (Why every time I
have a couple hours free, I can't work on my side project as intently as I
play 3 ranked matches in League of Legends?)

I could probably fill up a book with information I learned about it, but
everyone is unique. I want to help, if this resonates true in your life --
reach out to me. If you just want someone to email back and forth or talk to,
it's my user name at google's mail service.

------
tango979
This is a pretty comprehensive, up to date getting started playlist:
[https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL37EkmqQJzsj6R8mQ8uBM...](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL37EkmqQJzsj6R8mQ8uBM6X79_b8xjpJn)

Also, though slightly dated:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/starcraft/comments/3s424k/starcraft...](https://www.reddit.com/r/starcraft/comments/3s424k/starcraft_2_a_beginners_guide/)

------
danharaj
I don't have time to play Starcraft these days, but the SC2 API for AI
research [0] is a fun place to experiment in reinforcement learning in my
spare time.

[0] [https://github.com/Blizzard/s2client-
proto](https://github.com/Blizzard/s2client-proto)

~~~
nametube
What kinds of models have you been playing around with ?

~~~
danharaj
A3C for now just to replicate the results in the paper. After that, I want to
investigate more geometrically motivated methods like manifold learning and
see if they can be adapted to processes.

------
cableshaft
I should probably go back to playing this. I only got about halfway through
the first campaign and never got around to installing heart of the swarm, even
though I paid for it (like $20). I enjoyed the game, there's just too many
damn games out there now vying for my attention.

I wonder how much of an effect being free to play will boost its popularity
for esports. I know Blizzard was pushing for it.

~~~
dmoy
I guess it might boost it a little. But there's little to no chance it will
become a really popular esport again... especially not when blizzard is
putting so much focus on overwatch now.

I mean like it'll be really difficult to beat out League of Legends for
popularity now. Those tourney which just finished pulled like concurrent 15m
viewers (significantly more than NHL finals).

~~~
bagacrap
Is there an RTS that will replace it (besides bw)? RTS may be a relative niche
but that doesn't mean it's disappearing. Lots of traditional sports persist
indefinitely without ever reaching the popularity of (either kind of)
football. To some extent, the less popular the sport the purer it remains as
it's less likely to be subsumed by profit motives.

~~~
oneweekwonder
Little bit tongue in the cheek but littlewargame can be a contender :)

[http://www.littlewargame.com/](http://www.littlewargame.com/)

------
ben_jones
Blizzard reminds me a lot of Google. Massively successful tech company with
gobs of money that found success early and has been enjoying it ever since.
They can afford, and have the inclination to, give tremendous attention to
detail and it shows in their products on a variety of levels.

That said it leads to this weird level of apathy in some parts of their
business. They have tremendously talented engineers who do mind blowing work
on features they are visibly passionate about. At the same time core business
features that are more "boilerplate" tend to receive less effort which leaves
to a lot of gripe from their incredibly passionate fanbase.

~~~
dogma1138
In all honesty Valve is more like Google. Blizzard had moderate success, then
had a unicorn (WoW) which made them and their parent companies at the time
(Universal and then Activision) a lot of money.

Valve on the other hand is the Google of the PC gaming scene through Steam.

I would equate Blizzard to be more like IBM or Microsoft in all honesty,
Microsoft is probably a better case than the big blue.

~~~
methodover
Speaking of Valve -- there's an area that is absolutely ripe for disruption.
The Steam client hasn't really improved over the years. It's missing basic
features -- like sorting your game list. They completely lost the social game
to Discord and Curse, and the steaming game to Twitch. Their review system is
maybe their best feature, but it's still pretty bad -- vulnerable to
brigading, and not a super clear indicator for me if I'll be interested in a
game or not.

They're basically a CDN. For me, that's all they provide.

And they charge an INCREDIBLE amount for their services, to developers -- 30%,
I believe. Do they really provide THAT much value? I doubt it. I personally
can't wait for some startup to blow them out of the water.

~~~
sushid
They're essentially the universal gaming app store. If you create your own
store you're going to have to 1. provide a significant discount to compete and
2. have large names jump ship with you.

At this point, the only way a competitor has a fighting chance is if Origin or
Blizzard starts opening up to third party games. Blizzard did that with
Destiny 2 but it seems like they might only want to partner up with high
quality dev work (whereas Steam is littered with shovelware made on RPG
Maker).

~~~
theandrewbailey
Origin has been selling third party games for many years. They sell Assassin's
Creed and lots of indies.

[https://www.origin.com/usa/en-
us/store/browse?fq=publisher:u...](https://www.origin.com/usa/en-
us/store/browse?fq=publisher:ubisoft&sort=rank%20desc)

~~~
justanotherbody
I use origin for the limited set of exclusives (sim city, mass effect3) and
consider it the poster child of what not to do

Admittedly my usage is low. However twice I have encountered installer errors
regarding permission issues

It turned out origin never created the root installation folder. Manually
creating it yielded a successful install. WAT?!

I won't be buying anything further requiring origin until 2019 at the
earliest.

------
giblaz
SC2 is a beautiful game, as a spectator sport and as a competitive activity.
I've put about thousands of hours into the game, achieving Masters in 1v1
ranked 8x. I've thought long and hard about what Blizzard could have done to
make the game more popular from the get go. Some of my thoughts:

1) The multiplayer should have been F2P from the beginning, and the campaign
should have been a buyable add-on. Valve was already doing this on top of the
in-game paid cosmetics, and Blizzard could have easily copied their business
model for SC2. The game was ripe for those kind of additions.

2) The original UI was far too heavily focused on 1v1 ranked. The reason games
like SC:BW and WC3 had such long-term and widespread appeal was because of how
easy the casual modes (custom games, big team games) were to access.

3) Blizzard, in an attempt to prevent another Kespa power grab situation,
created very restrictive rules for non-Blizzard SC2 tournaments that
effectively prevented a large number of independent tournaments from being
run. This goes in stark contrast to a game like DotA 2 where Valve put little
regulation on independent tournaments which allowed the scene to thrive
organically.

4) The official tournament system for professional play was terribly
implemented from the get-go. Region locking was a very short sighted idea used
to give a boost to non-Korean players, but it was wholly irrelevant as Korean
players won every tournament anyways and effectively made the early rounds of
Blizzard tournaments much more boring and predictable because you would have
mediocre foreign players getting smashed by the Korean players. If Blizzard
did this again, they should have simply let the "best" players in, regardless
of their region. This is why the GSL was always the more exciting tournament -
the player base, from top to bottom, was always far more talented than the
WCS.

5) Implementing MMR decay was a terrible idea - it caused a huge number of
competitive players to abandon the game for games like League of Legends and
DotA, where they could take a legitimate break from the game and come back and
still face similarly talented players. It was good Blizzard went back on this,
but they damaged the game's competitive playerbase with this move.

6) For too long, Blizzard was far too afraid to make sweeping changes to their
game in the same vein as DotA or League. As a competitive player, I don't mind
this much, but to keep players coming back, doing major game altering updates
is a guaranteed way to keep your playerbase coming back. Very recently, i.e.
with the most previous expansion (Legacy of the Void), Blizzard has been
actually doing some serious and interesting changes to the game that I believe
will keep it fresh and fun while the core game stays intact.

Making the game F2P is great news, and certainly the book is not closed on
SC2. I hope Blizzard does not give up on the game now that it's F2P and
instead focuses on growing the game organically again. SC2 tournaments should
have the same hype levels as a major boxing match - everyone who follows
esports should at least tangentially be aware of it happening. The game has
the potential to be that kind of spectator sport, it's just up to Blizzard to
keep working on it at this point and keep player interest up as best they can.

I still play the game, albeit much less than I used to. If the playerbase
started growing again, I would be tempted to put more time in again. It's
still a great game - it always has been.

~~~
supergeek133
Do you ever find the multiplayer game inaccessible for anyone below
Masters/Diamond tier?

The beauty of League/Overwatch/PUBG/CSGO as an esport is the burden of game
knowledge is relatively low comparatively.

RTS are essentially giant paper rock scissors games, but so fast paced it's
really hard to get over the initial hump/learning curve, especially with as
much micro across multiple groups as SC2 requires to get higher.

I don't know, I've always been able to compete at an average level in most
ranked multiplayer games, but it seems with SC/SC2 it's always one end of the
spectrum or another.

~~~
notl4wy3r
> Do you ever find the multiplayer game inaccessible for anyone below
> Masters/Diamond tier?

Three quarters of players are below masters/diamond, so presumably it's
reasonably accessible even below those tiers.

> I've always been able to compete at an average level in most ranked
> multiplayer games, but it seems with SC/SC2 it's always one end of the
> spectrum or another.

What do you mean by this? No matter how good you are, unless you're the very
best, you're going to get to the point where you win about half your games in
SC2, as with any other 1v1 zero-sum match-made game.

~~~
vkou
> Three quarters of players are below masters/diamond, so presumably it's
> reasonably accessible even below those tiers.

Yes, but how engaged are they with the game?

I had a lot of RTS experience, so when SC2 launched, I placed Diamond/Master
pretty quickly. I enjoyed it for about a thousand matches.

It's unclear how enjoyable people placing in Bronze and Silver found it. One
friend of mine did grind out ~2000 games, and eventually made it from Bronze
into Platinum, but I don't know anyone else who started in the lower brackets,
and stuck with the game like he did.

~~~
giblaz
I had many friends who grinded from Bronze/Silver/Gold up to higher ranks
playing thousands of hours. Frankly though, I think these players would've
been better served with more fun casual time killing modes, but like I stated
in my original post, the game was not released with this emphasised in the
beginning.

------
Dowwie
great! all you have to do is play 10,000 hours to be on par with just about
anyone else on the network or face being grieved during a "4v4 newb" match
where most of them are nowhere near newb

~~~
markcerqueira
Not true. There are plenty of new players entering the scene everyday. I got
one of my coworkers into StarCraft just recently and he's already 1v1ing
without anything you mentioned. Yes, there are toxic players out there but
that goes for any community.

~~~
SOLAR_FIELDS
I also found this to be the case, I think the ELO system they implemented when
I was playing in the WoL era to be quite accurate, I was quickly able to rise
through bronze but found people that were more or less equally matched to me
at high silver and low gold. Was enjoyable and not huge fluctuations in skill
level except for the occasional unavoidable smurfer.

I did find that 1v1 was definitely more balanced than team play, so I think
both you and parent are correct. In team play with friends we were much more
likely to encounter people of radically different skill levels playing
together.

------
rkuykendall-com
I wasn't able to tell from the post. Does this mean me and 2 friends can each
download Starcraft II and play a multiplayer game, either against one another,
or against 3 other AIs?

~~~
neogodless
I agree that might not be clear in the post, but it actually sounds like that
may have already been an option... that getting the free starter trial might
have been enough to play custom multiplayer games (presumably over LAN, but
maybe even on Battle.net?)

~~~
mbrd
Yes, custom games between friends are already free with the Starter Edition.
This latest announcement will add the first campaign, multiplayer ladder, and
much of the co-op mode to the selection of free modes.

SC2 does not support LAN games so it’s all via Battle.net

------
partycoder
StarCraft is fun. In the latest expansion you can see how the designers worked
on making games faster, by starting with more workers and reducing the amount
of resources in the map to force players to compete for them, and added
harassment units.

They also tried to reward micromanagement more, to prevent the phenomenon
coloquially known as "the ball". But in my opinion this still needs
adjustment. e.g: the Protoss disruptor needs nerfing, and suicide seeker
missiles should not be viable.

~~~
Synaesthesia
Good news they’re nerfing disruptor hard pretty soon and removing seeker
missiles too.

------
markatkinson
I bought all 3, 3 days before it went free. So painful.

------
aerovistae
I for one am still playing Age of Empires II. I am the last of my kind :(

------
bsder
I dumped SC2 and will not go back.

SC2 always felt like a way to funnel players into the tournaments rather than
an actual game.

It was "You _will_ play this like 1v1 and you _WILL_ like it." After my third
timed rush mission, that was it. No more.

Blizzard can grab cash without me.

~~~
nichochar
Why are you so angry about this?

SC2 is probably the purest 1v1 esport. I don't think that's a bad thing. It's
been heavily optimized for this use case, which is why they urge you to play
it the way it was designed.

You don't have to play it, it sounds like you don't like highly competitive
1v1 tournament friendly games. That's fine, go play something else, no need to
bash blizzard.

That company actually has many other games you could check out...

~~~
bsder
I'm angry because SC2 basically sucked the oxygen out of the RTS genre for
those of us who like "S" more than "RT" because now _everything_ must be
"Esport-friendly" (read: tailored to ADHD millenials).

~~~
lolsal
If you don't think there is `S` in SC2 I would think you haven't played it
much.

~~~
astrobe_
He's not totally wrong.

At low level, just doing macro/economy right wins the game. Executing a
strategy requires so much micro-management and multitasking that's actually
unavailable to 90% of the player base. Between low and high level, a mix of
"better macro" and better _tactics_ (don't fight in chokes when your race
needs space etc.) wins games, not strategy.

OTOH, it's a bit like saying that at intermediate levels, you win a chess game
by not being the first to blunder (or seeing your opponent's mistake).

I believe that an RTS game like Zero-K (a TA-like) for instance is more
strategic. Your initial factory choice, which determines which kind of units
you'll use is a first strategic choice; static defenses are much more
important than in SC2 (where they are more or less considered a waste of
resources, except for anti-air maybe). TA is based on territory dominance, so
holding a point in the middle of the map is important. In SC2, the middle of
the map is where the "deathball" vs "deathball" final match typically happens.

------
test6554
The day before I finally broke down and purchased it. Aww yiss.

------
SN76477
Blizzard make damn fine games.

------
gcb0
software is going downhill.

ID software, of DOOM fame, used to release all their games as shareware. and 7
years later release the source.

just last week someone got sued by Microsoft or EA (dont really remember) for
running a game server they reverse engineered for a game they don't even
support anymore!

~~~
Cursuviam
I would place that more on John Carmack being great, than the gaming industry
going down hill.

~~~
admyral
Your perception of technology changes as you age. Anything new in your teens
and 20s is hailed as a innovation sure to change the world in profound new
ways. In your 30s-40s, weird and burdensome, no better than the traditional
ways of doing things. Past that point, you'll view everything as borderline
destructive and proof of society's decline.

~~~
teddyh
“ _Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and
is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that’s invented
between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and
revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after
you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things._ ”

— Douglas Adams, _The Salmon of Doubt_

