Crowdfunded Co-op Updates

Co-op Missions Discussion
1

I wonder if Blizzard could accept a crowdfunding project for Co-op missions, namely adding 1 new commander for each faction and maybe new co-op missions. That is, Patreon sponsors blizzard with money to be diverted for this purpose.

3 new commanders:
Ariel Hanson: the leader of haven colony, mix of terran tech for support and zerg infestations for assault
Kagg: the last of the cerebrates, a powerful zerg force augmented by Xel’Naga energies
Selendis: protoss executor, a formidable mix of elite protoss units

2

Not sure funding is the main issue. Don’t think that’s ever been the issue.

The amount of content, the people interested in developing, and those interested in playing are still o’plenty.

So really, bliz just don’t have interest.

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3

That’s about the sum of it, they went from “here’s 5.0, we’re looking forward to seeing what we can do with the new tools” to “development is over, there will be no work done” in around a month.

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4

Look in the arcade for NEXUS COOP.
You might like it – I sure do. Imba as all heck. Convoluted for sure. But oh boy is it entertaining :slight_smile:

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5

Making news map/commanders for coop is super ultra easy………compared to making detailed reports indicating that all commanders with all prestiges with all enemy compositions and every single mutation combination (including those impossible outside of Custom) work perfectly.
Maybe need to test all graphics settings and also report on lag in various circumstances.

Welcome to paperwork hell.

edit: and there are also all difficulties (I suspect a bit some maps to be bugged for some difficulty settings currently, though I could not point exactly the faults) and likely other things I didn’t write about.

6

Huh? Have you done some specific work? Link please…

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7

Well, that and after the “we’re shutting it all down” announcement, the SC2 devs left in droves. Honestly, at this rate Tangor very well might know more about the editor than anyone still at Blizz.

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8

They could, but they don’t want to.

9

They’re a business so money is the biggest driving factor. If they can make $1mil a month from a small team supporting game X then why would they still have a team assigned to game Y that only makes $5k a month.

P.S. Those numbers are made up, but I hope you get the point. For some real figures Candy Crush made about a $1bil in 2017 and Diablo Immortal made about $100mil in it’s first two months. Mobile games are hugely profitable for Blizz/Acti.

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10

So we crowd fundraise $1trillion, then we’re golden. Problem solved :smiling_face_with_tear:

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11

Not to mention, it just looks bad when you’ve got a multi billion dollar company who has a track record of laying off employees WHILE making record profits and increasing profits for a corrupt CEO…

Yea, not many would contribute to that (myself included) and news media outlets would be all over how stingy and cheap Activision/Blizzard is for asking it’s customers to support development like that.

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12

Blizzard dont need more money to do stuff, they just need to get off there lazy butts and do something with the game. Id be happy with new maps for all things at this point, coop and 2v2,3v3,4v4. Hell there is so many bugs going on right now id just be happy to see some of them fixed, ie rank system mostly. Right now the community map makers over in custom are doing more for the game then blizzard actually is and thats sad at this point.

13

Money often helps in these cases.

Some specific ones include a person who’s interested in PC gaming. He only has a budget of $3,000 and would like to know what his options were. This was back in 2014, but even then, $3K is on the level of “the world is your deep fried oyster”.

Microsoft still updates their old OSes, just not for free. Companies can reach out to them and work out a contract. However, something like patching Windows XP can set you back 7 to 8 figures of USD.

That has been one nice thing about indie companies… they take years to do even simple things, but they’re not hamstrung by “extreme profits”. [shrug]

14

Do they even have anyone left to work on sc2 after Everyone left to frost giant though? I heard rumors that they wanted to work on a sc3, but the rts franchise just might not have been as profitable as Activision wanted. No p2w elements, no ways to spend thousands for the whales.
(I think like 60-100$ is the max you can spend in sc2 coop, and for all the monetization, playing sc2 coop for fine off 0-5$ or a extra 15-60$ from wow token excess profit or a hour of a mcJob is reasonable.)

Just take a look for instance at diablo immortal. 2 videos but about 2 minutes in total (46 s + 1:10)

Diablo immortal is a game people can spend money to dramatically enhance “earned” loot drops, it’s pretty much a pay for loot system and he’s just reacting. While predatory and kinda undermines the skill based aspect in terms of money revenue.

I think there was a sad curve where like just because a game is crappy, not skill based, is practially a wallet throwing simulator. If you make games for the SOLE sake of generating revenue instead of developing a good game. It overtakes it. I think the same happens with guild wars 2, They have a buy it for life model and a crappy mobile game somehow makes 10x more despite having fractions of the development costs.

Turns out that selling a game to people with high skill curves who have to play or grind it all day, who might be skipping out on say, doctorates or college wages to play 24/7 or just people enjoying their teens.

Sadly isn’t as lucrative as selling mobile games to casual ceos who poop on the go and drop 1000$ on a 2d mobile game they play for a few minutes on the crapper. Or stay at home moms spending 5-50$ here and there to 500-2000$ on hello kitty themed outfits. I think it’s a sad fact but if you don’t care about money, for a stockholder driven company, a shovel ware profit driven game being sold to people who barely play them but throw money is just shamefully lucrative and the market follows the money. That’d be fine except imo it kinda feels like in blizzard they strangle other properties.

I remember even them saying WoW, a previous CASH COW of gigantic proportions was seen as redundant to a soccer mom’s candy crush… Activision… choosing shoddy candy crush swap games over MMorpgs. It was just a sad day.

If you actually take a look at Frost giant’s studio page though. Mistake me if im wrong. But don’t they LITERALLY literally have like… Lead sc2 coop designer, lead blizzard story tellers, lead sc2/wc3 designers, lead server designers that were from sc2 on their page?

Ex:

Ryan Schutter

LEAD UX DESIGNER

Former Lead Designer on StarCraft II, creator of GameHeart.

Kevin Dong

LEAD CO-OP DESIGNER

Former Lead Co-Op Designer on StarCraft II, Project Manager for Team Liquid.

Tim Morten

PRODUCTION DIRECTOR & CEO

Former Production Director of StarCraft II and C&C: Generals 2.

Tim Campbell

GAME DIRECTOR & PRESIDENT

Former Game Director of Wasteland 3, Lead Campaign Designer of Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne.

James Anhalt

CHIEF ARCHITECT

Former Lead Engineer on StarCraft II.

From frost giant's page:
https://www.frostgiant.com/

I know everyone’s a optimist but like… How exactly are… we supposed to get sc2 updates if the lead coop designers went to form another company since activision wouldn’t rubberstamp a sc3?

I think the coop team was pretty good and one of the most f2p friendly no p2w teams and it looks like their vision will carry over to coop in the new rts and i hope the best for them.

But i also remember Ben Brode leaving hearthstone with a ton of hype, and the only thing that came out was a marvel snap game. It looks like they have a beta set for 2023 though. Hope it comes out fun. 3v3 coop /pve and 1v1 too.

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15

I highly doubt blizzard/activision is gonna do anything rts related. I mean look its been how long since wc3 and sc2 and what have they done, remasters of all the old blizzard games, with the excepetion of dioblo imortal and diablo4. ever since activision took over we really havent seen any new content besides that and maybe 2 or 3 expansions on wow, let alone heros of the storm and hearthstone, which have totally gone by the way side. Overwatch hastnt seen any new content in ages. The only thing act/bliz even really gives a hoot about is call of duty, thats it, period. Pretty much anything blizzard besides diablo is now in the gutter. And there have not been any mentions whats so ever in the last few years for new games besides diablo. Right now our only hope is that when microsoft takes over here in the next year they do something with all the other titles, but we shall see and hope. Till then frost giant is really only what we are gonna get, i for one cant wait to see what they got. By the sounds of it its gonna be like wc3 crossed between starcraft, demons against mech stuff, maybe that would be diablo, lol. Anyways time will tell

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16

also, i think since the announcement of the merger everything has been on hold. We were haveing patchs once a month up until they announced microsoft was take over, since then we have had only 3-4. They have most like put every game title they have on hold unless there are absolute fixs needed till the merger is over. basicaly keep the lights on till the new boss’s take over.

Edit: Also as rukanth said the main team of sc2 has left, who also made wc3 if im not mistaken, im probably wrong on that but im not looking all that up right now as ive had about half a fifhth of wisky in me, lol. Anyways like he said all the brains have left so now were stuck with the zombies trying to emulate there master but can’t

17

$5 per CO, so $75 is what I got since the “face sakes” (Kerr, Ray, and Art) are included for free. This is roughly what I ended up spending. I did do the CO Bundles (for $10, so includes the CO’s announcer and 30-day Stimpack/XP boost), and $10 into the Warchests. I ended up getting Vorazun and Abathur for free via the Twitch Prime deal.

Oh, if announcers can also apply to Coop, although no game play change there (so to speak).

Not sure what “fine off” is supposed to mean.

18

Oh yeah, you get the first 3 for free, then the next 3-4(?) come with Lotv (Swann, karax, zagara, and vorazun), then after that. You can play 1 commander of your choice for 5$ and main them if you want or buy a collection.

All things considered. Next to most of activision’s offering, sc2 is like the only modern game that is surprisingly consumer friendly. Free pvp, and completely fine to play off free commanders with prestiege or 5$ for a commander you want or wow token.

Sadly instead of continuing development it seems like activision just said no to rubber stamping a sc3 or further coop development and they left instead.

I think the problem is, people want consumer friendly games, and sc2 was great for that, but activision driven by stockholders could have a year of record breaking profit. And still lay people off just to get literal bonuses for the ceo.

I think hearthstone and wow had lots of q/a problems because the testers were fired during a record breaking profit during covid year and it showed up with “placeholder image” “placeholder text” written over hearthstone cards and wow quests and “unnamedquestitem#47” etc named items in wow quests as well as some quest givers having like “quest text goes here” as apparent things from beta to launch.

Activision has all these wonky internal metrics apparently in WoW they try to game and hearthstone like “time played” in bfa wow leading to chorelike gameplay (all grind, no worthwhile gold farming, 4 weeks repeatitive content, removal of flight), just to increase time played /sub money gathered and people just quit it instead.

I think in hearthstone, number of matches played per day was made a thing so they started killing control decks after united in stormwind somewhat after barrens priest.

God knows if there was anything in sc2 though. Rts just aren’t /haven’t been that monetizable. Unlike a LoL or Dota where you can sell 10-20$ skins with new voicelines, you’d have to do one for each unit while avoiding lag or p2w.

I mean. Even if you wanted to monetize a rts, would anyone play it? Like, what would you even do? overwatch style 1-5$ lootboxes for pink abathur skins and different character selection models? Who buys different ui menus in a rts? Would developing models for 20 units over 1 return investment, etc.

I did think they did a good job having few if any 300-1000$ p2w or wallet throwing shenanigans in sc2 vs throw wallet to win and spend 20$ to spawn loot diablo immortal.

But it’s kinda unclear if activision said no to more coop development or if they wanted to do more, but didn’t have the funds to. Or just if they wanted to force them to develop lootboxes/p2w and they quit, etc.

19

They sell announcers and skins for Sc2. Problem is, I’m more into content. I was happy to spend $5 to $10 for COs. I did wait until the campaigns were on sale. But I’m past the point where I’d spend $$ on cosmetics like skins (even though the Simulant Zerg structures and units being pretty neat).

And FWIW, there was stinginess amongst us. People waiting for a sale b/c $5 CO was too much :\

20

Unless we’re willing to shell out $20M+ in 2 weeks like Diablo Immortal did they’re not going back. If blizz really wanted to develop SC2 we would have gotten 2 more add-on campaigns for zerg and protoss and probably squeezed the possible COOP commanders and maps dry. But I guess 5 bucks for a commander is cheap change compared to a $20 top-up to get a hail mary run for a 5-star gem.