6 years have passed since transition of SC2 from paid model into F2P and at this moment i think we can universally agree that F2P marked the very end of the game.
Yes, initially in Nov 2017 when SC2 became free, the game had attracted some new players but only few of them. These new guys could not compete against veterans who played since 2010. SC2 popularity grew rapidly but only within first few months and after around 1 year most of these new guys simply quit the game and the rest of the community started spamming trillions of alt accounts. As a result ladder is infested with smurfs, hackers and possibly automated bots which intentionally lower MMR to get to lower leagues. Congratz ! Donât blame balance, donât blame design. These issues are secondary to the fact that ladder is now huge mess and there is virtually no point of playing the game unless youâre at least master 1 who can compete vs most smurfs and hackers.
F2p proved to be a DISASTER for our game. Tell me what you think of this. Am i right or wrong about this ?
I would say itâs not Starcraft 2 becoming F2P thatâs the problem, but instead just that it 1) doesnât make as much money and 2) itâs really not that popular of a genre anymore.
This is just patently false. You are completely omitting the multiple match-fixing scandals in the mid 2010âs, which led to a majority of major sponsors lose trust in SC2, thus reducing a vast portion of the pro sceneâs funding and marketing capacity. You are also forgetting many of the balance issues that were taking place around the time SC2 went free to play, such as never ending swarm host sieges and brood lord/infestor being absolutely broken. F2P was a last ditch effort to try to save a game that was ultimately dying. Did it enable smurfing a lot easier? Sure, but it made it a lot easier to try to get new players into a game that was stagnating at the time. It was a vain attempt to stop the hemorrhaging of the player base that ultimately failed. Mind you, this is not including just how intimidating of a skill ceiling most rts games have. You have to invest hours of learning and mechanical repitition to get to be not garbage, which i s a huge turnoff for most gamers. So just in nature, your target demographic for rts players is small to begin with.
So what ? FEW players joined the game only to abandon it 1-2 years later. Like i said in OP people realized that this game is not for them (too difficult mechanically). Itâs better to play things like MineCraft, LOL or counter-strike which is mechanically 10x easier than SC2.
And i agree that there are other factors that led to SC2 demise like scandals, match-fixing, balance etc. But today all these things are gone and SC2 population is not rising at all.
While F2P is not necessarily bad idea itself but Blizz screwed this idea by forgetting to implement mechanism to prevent alt account spamming (like IP or phone authentication) and now mostly because of that game suffers. When i play ladder 30 -40 % of my opponents do not belogn to my MMR range. I constantly see barcodes with 200-300 APM, instaquitters etc. If someone doesnât do anything about it then i donât see a reason to play ladder below anything than master.
Maybe the switch from paid to F2P had an effect. I remember one of the reasons SC2 was not played much a reason that was overlooked, was not just the game or speed needed but that it was paid, that is what stopped some from buying it and that causes the effect of having yes the difference of players who accessed it from early times. So I think SG is really good decision to start free like LoL is so.
But I had players who reached M or even GM in WoL and HotS then quit LotV never to return because they didnt like the direction it was heading (macro maps, yes defender-expander/turtle is more advantaged than can be punished, Gotcha units (I watched Wintergaming for SG and I agreed with this bit when he mentioned Widow mine, Disruptor etc)
The minimum 10 games where only 1 victory a day did slow things down it was a hassle for me to even write here, as I didnt want to play games for that but it didnt stop from making bunch of alts. I was OK keeping things to main account, in early times was against it as in War3 you could make new acc every time but with SC2 got used to having things on the main. So I agree this is better, on main, never had to allow alts.
That was the whole point of this thread. F2P would be decent idea to keep SC2 alive but only with restrictions of having only one account per user. Currently ladder is infested with tons of smurfs just because of that and nobody even waved a finger to do anything about this. How do you want encourage people to play ladder or keep exisiting players within the game if 1/3 of your games are vs smurfs and possibly hackers/bots etc.
Ladder is absolutely crucial to keeping stable and healthy population of SC2.
Thereâs a lot of things that lead to SC2âs downfall
Game launch was borked. No cash shop for skins, no social aspects, no co-op. It was bare bones and stayed that way for a very long time. That hurt StarCraftâs monetization possibilities and impacted itâs longevity straight out of the door.
WoL was a balance tire fire with Terran being complete while Protoss and Zerg werenât and wouldnât be until their respective expansions. This manifested in things such as overpowered Infestors, Archon Toilets and Terran going MMMGV every game.
Reluctance to fix problems before a new expansion was released. This was most prolific with SH Raven wars in the time between LotVâs reveal and LotVâs release.
Scandals with match fixing.
Listening to Kespaâs nonsense. Seriously Kespa coaches were telling players to hold their best builds in reserve so they could blindside the opponents with something they hadnât practiced for. That 100% impacted balance as Blizzard balances primarily around pros, hoping for a trickle down effect for everyone else. That approach doesnât work when the best players hold back consistently.
Hubris. Between the community update lies where theyâd quote pros whoâd then say they werenât consulted all the way to Blizzard being stubborn with units that over performed massively such as the Liberator (turned out the Liberator was bugged and wasnât investigated despite the complaints about it).
The weird âcommunity leaderâ program Blizzard had/have going on. IDK about you but whenever money is a variable, humans prove consistently that they will do things as favorably as they can for their position. Usually. You canât let people who have vested interest in slanting a map pool decide what maps are going into rotation and what maps are not. Thatâs how you get bad quality, unfair maps in play such as that terrible one with the siege tank high ground that couldnât be accessed via ground between the nat or that Korhol map with the gigantic âplease blink-all in meâ ledge or any number of the âno ramp at the nat + extra wide entranceâ maps. Bad maps galore.
Iâm sure Iâm missing other things but overall SC2 was insanely mismanaged considering the huge investment SC2 was.
All the reasons youâve mentioned were slowly killing SC2 from 2010-2017 maybe. What about TODAY ? The above points are irrelevant now. Iâm pretty sure that adding some restrictions to F2P system would eliminate those smurfs and hackers (why there is no update to anti-cheating software ?) Imagine being low level player (silver, gold and getting smurfed all the time by dia/master players. Obviously most of these low leaguers will drop SC2 in favor of other games, or at best they switch to co-op/arcade.
Looks like i wasnât wrong after all if so many people are complaining about smurfs and some (MindSpirit) are even proposing some payment system to avoid it.
if they had not made it free to play, none of the people i play with would ever have started playing. none of them paid to play. the biggest blow to starcraft 2 was budget cuts, from an activision that no longer wanted to invest in strategy games.
I think the main issue is that the ladder is free. Ranked games should never have been free. Fine with me that the Terran Campaign and other stuff is free.
Unranked and Ranked should be seperated. Unranked vs Ranked should not excist it´s unfair that the ranked risk everything and the unranked doesn´t risk anything.
You forgot about one word âSwarm Hostâ (maybe 2 words, but one unit )
Now seriously this Unit, ask any big Streamer or Commentator in SC2, this game was unbareable to watch in Big Tournaments (which is very important for SC2).
The games were very long and incredibly boring. (The ratings dropped so low, it was very little chance to recover).
Smurfs are a faucet of FtP That youâre always going to get and frankly it didnât stop them when it was paid either. Frankly speaking it was the lack of support from activision, but the community has kept the game going and will continue to do so.
This 100%. Activision, as they always do, attempt to kill whatever they take over. But SC2 still going strong because of the community.
Honestly HotS and WoL balance was so screwy because of Broodlord Winfestor (WoL) into the Mine nerf blink meta (HotS) that completely erased the presence of Terran from competitive play for over 9 months without any answer at all, straight into Swarm Host 4+ hour games (HotS) where competitive players were literally alt tabbing out of the game in the middle of tournaments. This wasnât helped by Activizardâs apparantly constant mismanagement of tournaments before it was all handed over to ESL.
LotV ultimately fixed a lot of the issues that HotS and WoL both had (MSC finally being removed is particularly notable as was ESLâs acquisition of the tournament scene) but it came to late because the game had haemorrhaged players long before. Covid and going FtP was ultimately a saving grace since there were so many new players that joined as a direct result, and that was followed by the community taking control which was a good thing too.
Yep, swarm hosts and ravens back in late HotS were the worst. Turns out free units and spellcasters that do literally everything needed to win games on their own are frowned upon. Infestor got booped for the same reason. Only the BL has really escaped and franklyâŚbroodlords are slow, vulnerable and broodlings have a short enough life that itâs really nowhere near the other 3 that were nerfed into paste.
Iâd argue the community getting control is a mixed bag. The balance council isnât exactly great but at least theyâre fairly active. What theyâre doing is about as good as David Kimâs balance team. What we need is the quality of changes and insight that the Blizzard balance team brought into the game after David Kim was promoted.
That was a second wind and really helped refresh the game imo. We need more things like that in the game. The new cyclone was a good attempt but it kinda took away something Terran needed and gave them something they really didnât need (a mech marauder that can shoot up). A better example of that being done in the past, imo, was the charge change. Giving it 8+ damage was a good idea, it just needed to be tuned down a little to nerf the 8 gate allin that people were doing with it.
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