StarCraft 2 Sets New Mark for Piracy

[Fetzenfisch]

Why would you want to play Starcraft single player?

To play through it and discard it like the 50 other games they downloaded in the past few months. Pirates download everything.

Or maybe because Blizz designs great campaigns that are interesting, fun and exciting to play?
That made up 90% of my reasons to buy it, havent played a single game of multiplayer yet. I will start this , like usual, when i beat the campaign, having learned enough ways to use my units.

 

[Tiamat666]

I think that the huge amount of piracy and the huge amount of sales qualify as proof that piracy does not necessarily equal lost sales.

 

[Xocrates]

I played the hell out of SC1. If you think SC2 is the same game, you either don't know RTSes or don't know SC2 half as well as you think you do.

I beat the Hard AI in 3 days after having not played SC in over a decade...That's either poor AI, or the mechanics are too simple. At £35, it shouldn't have any of those problems.

SC2 would have been decent 5 years ago, but not today. It introduces zero to the genre making it too simplistic for anyone who isn't brand new to the genre (And if they are they may as well save their money and just buy Dune 2, Total Annihilation, or splash out £1 more and get Supreme Commander...), the missions are terrible - spam new unit, and the storyline is gash, an overplayed cliché at best.

Try it on brutal and say the first part again, also read the description on each starcraft 2 difficulty.

Also in my opinion sc2 major fail was battle.net 2.0, it was supposed to be so good that people wouldn't want to pirate sc2.

Very Hard AI (hardest in skirmish) simply gives the AI 1.5x resources. That is just a very, very lame way to challenge the player, especially when you consider the price of the game. Instead of improving tactics, it just gives the AI more resources.

You sure it's 1.5x resources? I remember hearing somewhere that sc2 would be the first blizzard rts game where AI doesn't cheat.

Also sorry, I meant that you should try the campaign on brutal, it's not just spamming the new unit you've received.

Positive, watch the replays and check their income. I have a feeling that the campaign would do the same, ergo it doesn't make use of fair tactics.

Most (all?) other RTSs AI start cheating way before that point, usually not only altering resources but damage and HP (not to mention there's hardly an RTS where the AI is affected by the fog of war). This is less a case of the game being poor and more of a case of good AI being really hard to make, even with Blizzard's piles of money.

 

[Thedutchjelle]

Hahaha.

So they remove LAN, add no region function and other crap to keep piracy down. And then they get pirated. Come on Blizzard, give us our Bnet 1.0 functionality back :\

No region is not to keep piracy down, it have nothing to do with that. It is just you can't ensure good connection cross region. Anyway, they are saying about they want to add cross region back since beta, if they have the time to.

Sry man, but that's not true. Really. If that was the real reason, then why do African players play on the European servers? Also, a number of European players bought an US license to play on the US gateways and they're doing fine. If you can play FPSes and the like on the internet then surely you can play a RTS.

They will probably add cross region back in, but with somesort of stupid fee if you want to switch. Like the name thing.

 

[Jodah]

snip

The way you counter piracy is the way Blizzard used to for SC, Diablo 2 and Warcraft 3. You should really look up the way those worked. As it is, nothing at all changes besides the customers being fucked in the ass and the pirates not giving a shit about the multi-player, although, they didn't care about it anyways.

You mean by making a game so good that they can absorb the hit...exactly as this article says and exactly as I said...

The only thing that they made difficult for paying customers is that there is no LAN. You have to log on ONCE to register the game, and you do not even need the game installed on the machine you log on to register it with. If anyone has a computer but cannot log on to the internet in this day and age they are doing it wrong. I'm sorry but there is absolutely no reason someone can't go to an internet cafe, school, friends house, use their phone, etc to log on a single effing time. There is an offline mode, for some reason people seem to forget this. I can understand some of the anger at the lack of LAN use but that really is the only legitimate complaint from paying customers. Anything else is just b****ing and moaning.

Do you think I bought 3 copies of Age III with expansions so my family could play over LAN? Should I have had to?

Blizzard is really saying that if you want to play a LAN game, you have to buy a copy for each person. This is the same company who made it easy to play SC1 without more than one disc.

As I said, LAN complaints are the only legitimate ones. And this discussion is completely off topic. I'm not saying LAN should have been removed nor that the new Battle.net system actually did anything to curtail piracy. My point is that the game itself is good enough that it can absorb the hit via piracy so that they do not need to have overly intrusive DRM (like always-online play and install limits). Love it or hate it, companies are going to continue to try to stop piracy. I would rather have them take the Blizzard path than some of the other ones.

Long story short, yes there should be LAN in SC2 but that is a different discussion then the one in this thread. Removing it may have been a way to force people to buy more games but everyone here knows it did nothing for that goal. The real reason this record setting piracy didn't hurt Blizz is because SC2 is good enough on its own.

 

[thublihnk]

I can agree with both of those statements, and i never said anything in this thread about BNet having any sort of good effect on anything other than Blizzard's income. In fact, if you browse through my posts (or just read what i'm about to say ---->) you'll see that i'm no fan of BNet 2.0 and quite hate Blizzard for it. But i can't deny the value it has in helping increase revenue. It's a Kotick-ish strategy: barbaric, but it works.

Well, you kinda tossed out the meat of what I had to say. >.> but uh, whatever. Yeah, I suppose we agree on most fronts but the fact remains that Starcaft 2 is doing insanely well, despite being heavily pirated.

 

[Direwolf750]

this is why we can't have nice things. stop torrenting games, and maybe we can get them with less DRM

 

[Wicky_42]

Yup, piracy is definitely an industry-killer.

Definitely - I mean, that's like a gazillion dollars Bliz lost right there. They should go to everyone's computer and check if they've got pirated files on them, and then sue them for the losses - each!

I think you're the first person who's quoted my post and rolled with my sarcasm. Thank you. I'm starting to think we really do need a sarc-mark on the internet.

Pleasure to oblige

 

[Xocrates]

I played the hell out of SC1. If you think SC2 is the same game, you either don't know RTSes or don't know SC2 half as well as you think you do.

I beat the Hard AI in 3 days after having not played SC in over a decade...That's either poor AI, or the mechanics are too simple. At £35, it shouldn't have any of those problems.

SC2 would have been decent 5 years ago, but not today. It introduces zero to the genre making it too simplistic for anyone who isn't brand new to the genre (And if they are they may as well save their money and just buy Dune 2, Total Annihilation, or splash out £1 more and get Supreme Commander...), the missions are terrible - spam new unit, and the storyline is gash, an overplayed cliché at best.

Try it on brutal and say the first part again, also read the description on each starcraft 2 difficulty.

Also in my opinion sc2 major fail was battle.net 2.0, it was supposed to be so good that people wouldn't want to pirate sc2.

Very Hard AI (hardest in skirmish) simply gives the AI 1.5x resources. That is just a very, very lame way to challenge the player, especially when you consider the price of the game. Instead of improving tactics, it just gives the AI more resources.

You sure it's 1.5x resources? I remember hearing somewhere that sc2 would be the first blizzard rts game where AI doesn't cheat.

Also sorry, I meant that you should try the campaign on brutal, it's not just spamming the new unit you've received.

Positive, watch the replays and check their income. I have a feeling that the campaign would do the same, ergo it doesn't make use of fair tactics.

Most (all?) other RTSs AI start cheating way before that point, usually not only altering resources but damage and HP (not to mention there's hardly an RTS where the AI is affected by the fog of war). This is less a case of the game being poor and more of a case of good AI being really hard to make, even with Blizzard's piles of money.

What about DoW? Plus SupCom doesn't cheat unless you want the AI to do so...

DoW's game designer once said the AI cheating was a "necessity", just noting that a good AI would cheat but not get caught. Heck, if you download the AI mod for DoW the mod has preferences for how much the AI cheats.

I didn't play, or know, enough about SupCom's skirmish AI to really comment, but the campaign AI was painfully stupid and the skirmishes I played were won by making tier 1 bombers and telling them to attack the enemy ACU.

The AI in SC2 (and most other RTSs) does it's job well enough: Provide players with an introduction to the game concepts before they jump online, or provide a decent enough challenge for casual players. Heck, I wonder if even if these companies could make better AI whether or not the investment necessary would be worth it.

SC2's AI isn't a genius, but works well enough for what it was meant to do.

 

[Direwolf750]

this is why we can't have nice things. stop torrenting games, and maybe we can get them with less DRM

Since DRM hasn't stopped the torrenting (or even slowed it down) I would say whoever decides to keep using DRM isn't doing it to stop torrenting.

That is the only thing that they can legally say that they are trying to do. If they can justify it more and more, then there WILL be more and more restrictions on those of us who don't want to screw over the companies.

 

[sgrif]

Not defending the pirates, but you seem to imply that each pirate is a lost sale for Blizzard. The only data on the subject (which admittedly there is very little) shows that less than 1% of pirates would actually buy the game were they unable to pirate it. Now I'm not saying that the pirates are right or that they should be able to play a game that they didn't pay for. I personally think these people are rather despicable, however posts like this exaggerate the issue, making it seem like you can't develop for the PC without taking massive losses to pirates. Yes, there is a massive piracy problem. However, combating it really shouldn't be anybody's main focus since the actual amount of money lost to pirates is negligible, and anti-piracy measures tend to hurt paying customers more than they stop pirates.

 

[Mr.Amakir]

Pirates can easily get LAN we loyal costumers don´t. That pretty much sums up everything.