#1 There was no threat, so you’re full of dookey.
#2 Like Winter said, You are making a choice to PUBLICLY share/broadcast your game, that’s like sharing a screenshot of your banking info then complaining you got robbed…
#3 This game is on life support and Bliz ain’t gonna do sweet F.A. about what you’re complaining about.
#4 The forums are for players to discuss things, even the “Green posts” aren’t Bliz employees, they are community members who lead and help the rest of us, they aren’t paid.
Just echo what others have said.
In this case, there’s no exploitation that is governed by Bliz’s policy.
The details about one’s play habits are concealed within the game. Revealing details outside of the game is a choice made my the user. For example, another player’s IP can’t be determined from the game. But if a player choses to publically display it outside of the game and is exploited for it, that’s not within Bliz’s purview. That’s wholely on the player.
Additionally, callouts are not against the forum rules. Having them puts the entire post at risk of deletion, which would make your efforts in vain.
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#1 whatever…
#2 That is an interesting analogy you put here, lets imagine another scenario where you have something like the the NBA… now the NBA could choose not to broadcast their games as well right?? but they do, people watch it and the sport becomes more popular which is good for it… which is GOOD FOR THE GAME of starcraft, it maintains and builds a community and makes a game prosper, why else do some game companies pay streamers to advertise their games??. YES the game is old , but its the best RTS out there. NOW IMAGINE someone on an NBA team starts fixing games and cheating using steroids or whatever means they do… will this person receive penalties and a ban? PROBABLY.
#3 saying this game is on life support is a false argument, there are still hundreds of players playing, the community is still active, patches are still being made for the game, saying blizzards not gunna do F.A about what I’m complaining about is wild claim when I was told by a blizzard employee to post suggestions here and that they take harassment and what not seriously. YES I can put a delay on the stream, YES I can mitigate the snipers to the best of my abilities with whatever tools I have, but that’s besides the point because if I AM not streaming I’m still getting cheated/sniped on by players who purposely throw games in order to play lesser skilled opponents
#4 If you actually read the post which it seems like you didn’t and just wanted to post some B.S 4 points about some made up scenario you created. IF you clearly read what I wrote, I made a suggestion which a blizzard employee responded to a ticket I made (not on the forum) and TOLD me to post my suggestion here, WHICH I DID.
LOOK all I’m saying is, SC2 has been recently added on the XBOX game service, which is probably going to bring in some new players, constantly saying the game is dead is just a false statement when I can queue up for a game and get an instant Queue.
I don’t know how you got to comparing a broadcast of a game to sharing your banking info and getting robbed… that’s two completely unrelated things… and is a wild take.
My suggestion is that having the “searching for game” thing hidden when people message you even AFTER blocking them because it allows them to continuously harass you. its cheating… its bad for the game… and it just all around makes people not want to play.
I’ve been harassed basically 24/7 by internet crazies my entire life. If you didn’t somehow leak this information via a website like Facebook or Instagram (make sure your profiles are set to private) then it means someone IRL found your accounts and is harassing you. Easily solution, make a completely new sc2 account with a new name and have no associations between it and the old accounts. Check all the websites that you use to make sure their profiles are private and aren’t leaking information about your identity. Personally I don’t use my real name anyway when signing up for internet services (that way, if your data is leaked or hacked, it doesn’t matter). Finally, be careful who you share information with IRL, and where (because people can overhear).
When making a new account it’s important to have zero overlap with the old account. That includes your friend list. I’ve had “friends” helping their friends to ladder snipe me and things like that before.
Also if you inhabit the same social spheres then people will still be able to recognize you based on your behavior so if you really want your new accounts to stay hidden then you can’t ever enter the same social spheres.
By the way, one way IRL people can find your internet accounts is via bluetooth. Apps like facebook and X listen keep a record of any bluetooth IDs they detect near you. They assume that ID is a friend of yours and will start showing you posts from them or asking you if you know this person. A buddy of mine had a person messaging him on twitter and it turned out to be one of his tenants who was upset for some reason or another. The way she found his twitter account is this exact mechanism. They use all sorts of methods to recommend friends to you, and if someone who hates you is in proximity to you then they can abuse this for nefarious purposes. Best to disable the setting inside android.
Unfortunately facebook services always runs in the background & collects this kind of data no matter what. The only way to truly avoid it is to root your phone, install a custom version of android without all the bloatware. That is quite a technical feat, so if you aren’t a computer guy then maybe you can pick up a phone online. But again this carries risk because you have no idea if you can trust the buyer or if they modified the phone in a way that lets them hack it or something like that.
Oh, another thing is that Facebook can allow other people to upload photos and then they can tag you in those photos. Even with your account set to private, these photos may still be available on other people’s pages. I believe there is a setting in facebook that allows you to unlink yourself from other people’s timelines. Just be sure to message them and let them know you are doing it for privacy concerns and ask them to please not be upset.
Also when making new accounts it’s best to use randomized names. That way they can’t google your SC2 name and find your twitter page. So on and so forth. You just gotta be more prudent about what information you share online and aware of common ways that information can get leaked.
If you ever want to stalk yourself, to see if there is information about you out there, you can log into a proxy website and google your own SC2 name and see if it pulls your twitter or facebook or whatever. If it does, that means the search engine found a link between the two and that means you publicly linked the two somehow. It’s important to use a proxy because google shows you content based on your IP and other statistical predictors. If you want an unbiased view of yourself from the average internet user’s perspective then you have to google yourself via proxy. Try googling your internet names and see what comes up. Your stalker found you somehow.
No my dude, YOU dont get it. The balance council are the only ones doing anything to the game and thats “balance” at the pro level for tournaments. There is nothing else being done to the game.
And your analogy of fixing NBA games and steroids is any better…Hahahaha. You’re out of it. I regret even putting my 2 cents in, i should have seen a gigantic wall of text coming as a response.
Go on, keep posting about it. In 5 years, nothing will have been done about your “problem”. Good luck, guy.
This is another reason why ladder names shouldn’t be revealed until AFTER the game; it helps put an end to stream sniping.
It also keeps people from meta gaming by playing against the player, not the race which heavily skews balance and strategy.
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Danks right. that’s such a good idea.
Even further should the game load with a blank screen so u have no idea what your versing.
even team games. should we not be allowed to type to each other and just have attack here defend their icon that comes up with even more icons. something u can click fast.
but yea be able to talk after the match and add to the party if they want to.
This already exists and it’s called a barcode. Barcodes provide no measurable increase in performance. This makes sense since ~75% of your opponents you will encounter a single time in a year. ~20% of them you will play 2 to 3 times:
https://i.imgur.com/4Vyhhg9.png
This magical advantage that barcodes have doesn’t exist in reality because the reality is that you will basically never encounter repeat opponents. Only a very small minority will be repeat opponents. The entire idea of barcoding having an advantage is that they can profile you but you can’t profile them but how is this happening when you only play 1 game per year?
Stream cheating is a similar but separate issue from ladder profiling because they can literally see your screen and queue against you by waiting for you to queue. That’s going to given them an advantage no matter what. It would require custom streaming software that blurs your account names, runs multiple SC2 instances on multiple regions and queues a random account each game. Oh, and a hotkey randomizer. Oh and you’d probably have to file a lawsuit against the websites that track smurf accounts to get them to stop tracking your accounts.
Translation, totally not worth the energy. A better solution is to simply not stream.
I actually think that’s a bad thing, not a good thing. If you know someone who does the same build every game, then you should be able to play against the player - that’s inherently part of strategy, and why players at the pro level who can play the player in addition to the matchup are often so successful.
I might be the exception, but there was a couple players who I’d run into several times a month at least, sometimes for multiple games in a row. I used to run into a player - I think his name was Gary? - who would get a PF at his 3rd base every game after opening tank cyclone, and then immediately go into BCs once he took his third base, and I’d counter the BCs every time and then kill him immediately after, because he didn’t change his strategy even once, no matter how many times I ran into him.
Recently, for example, I had 3 games against the same player in the same day on ladder right at the end of October.
It’s not so common that it happens every day, but it does happen semi-frequently enough that barcoding can absolutely provide a minor one-sided advantage.
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Right, you are correct. Repeat games definitely happen but what is their impact on your winrate. If you are running into 20 opponents 1-2 games for every 1 opponent you face 3+ times, then the impact is going to be negligible. If we assume the repeat opponent wins 100% of the time, we’re talking like a -5% win-rate difference which is about 35 mmr. The random fluctuation of mmr rankings is typically ~300 mmr. So the advantage of repeat-profiling is about ten times smaller than the natural variability of mmr.
In reality the advantage might be 70% in their favor which would be 25 mmr. That’s assuming an opponent can win 70% of the time after playing you 2 times which I think is a bit unrealistic. So, it’s like, yeah, they have an advantage but does anyone honestly care about 25 mmr?
People rage about barcodes because it’s a convenient place to funnel their game frustration.
Also the chart I shared shows it’s probably sufficient to have 3 builds that you swap between and as long as you do that it’s basically impossible for players to profile you because the vast majority of your opponents you will play 3 times or fewer. So if you cycle between 3 builds then they just don’t have enough data to figure out how you play. So this chart gives you information needed to custom tailor your play to fix the issue.
Maybe they could profile more high level patterns in that occur regardless of the build that you use but probably not. That’s like 6000 mmr grandmaster level of profiling. Uthermal for example pays attention to if you move towards or away from scans. No matter what strategy you are doing, that pattern is going to show up.
It really depends on whether they’re a varied player or whether they’re a one-trick pony. The latter basically guarantees the win for me, where varied strategies/players are much harder to face since they have that wider repertoire.
That said, I see your point.
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Yeah so the balance counsel worked up the courage to fix the issue with protoss in masters, gm, and the lower end of the professional level. Toss absolutely dominate these levels. The counsel did this because one of the protoss members of the balance counsel developed objectivity, meaning he saw past his own protoss biases to see the game as it actually is. The protoss at the professional level had a melt down and started to attack their protoss representative, saying he wasn’t doing a good job at advocating for them. They ranted about SC2’s designers having a bias against protoss historically – before the balance counsel. It was giga cringe. The counsel walked back most of the ideas and now there’s talk they are delaying the patch for several months which is code for the balance patch is cancelled indefinitely. So the protoss whiners at the pro level won, once again.
These youtube whiners absolutely refuse to be realistic about game balance and it isn’t clear if they do this purposefully or if they are just blinded by balance rage to the point where common sense is thrown out the window. I happen to suspect it’s purposeful because they repeat the mantra, like robots, “but muh protoss can’t win muh premier tournament”. Schools teach the IQR test in 7th grade math and that alone is enough to know that premier tournaments are outliers that are irrelevant to balance discussions. Youtuberss are using an argument that is so bad that 7th grade math can defeat it, which to me meets the threshold needed to claim they are malicious in their intentions. It’s very hard to be wrong about something so basic and so easy to understand unless it’s deliberate. I think the protoss professionals know that protoss is advantaged by balance, but they just don’t care. They refuse to see it nerfed because it will hurt their performance.
That’s why it’s a big mistake to let professional players balance the video game that they play. It’s an obvious conflict of interest. Having esports people design the game is a conflict of interest as well because they will design it for esports and not for the player base. The entire thing is an absolute fiasco. Their most obvious play is to cut the balance patch down until it does basically nothing. This satisfies the protoss whiners on youtube and it minimizes risk because it keeps the status quo. So we’re going to have at least another year of PvPcraft 2.
On a positive note I am super impressed with the protoss who managed to see game balance for what it is despite his own biases and despite the gaslighting and peer pressure. Those are leadership qualities and are crazy rare.
It matters more for pros than us and that skews balance pretty heavily. But it also happens to non-GMs. Want an example?
Back when charge had +8 damage I used to play on EU a fair bit late at night. There wasn’t a lot of people online so I’d vs the same people over and over - and I’d just crush them with sheer macro and mass warp gates, with optional tech if I felt the need.
It got so bad people were just cheesing me every game. No attempt to macro or get better. After a week I finally yelled at some poor dude about it and they literally told me they were only doing it because it’s me and they couldn’t win a fair fight.
After that I had enough of this “lets look up what this person likes to do” crap. I wasn’t even cheesing or allinning and I ran into the same crap pros run into. And it’s obnoxious.
All tournaments and ladder should be blind going in. If that means you can’t adapt to your opponent on the fly? Too bad. You’re trying to abuse outside meta knowledge to enhance your performance in-game with hard counter build order wins, essentially. not you specifically but that’s just how I feel about the system. It’s like pros abusing Adderall and I find it shameful.
Yes. That’s part of strategy. That’s my point. You’re actively using what your opponent does against them. I even gave my own example of it. And that’s a good thing; because it forces diversity, which in itself is its own skill.
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Hard disagree that it’s a good thing. It was actively used against balance by KESPA at one point. Pros were being instructed to not use their best builds because of this which in turn has a hard trickle effect due to top down balancing.
And lets face it, there’s no real upside to having a total lack of anonymity when it comes to competitive modes. We don’t need it to deal with bad timings and cheeses, at best it’ll scrape 1-2 wins off of us before it’s obsolete. Noobs can’t use it because they’re not good enough to know how to use the knowledge yet…so who benefits from this?
Only the pro meta who abused it under KESPA. You might like it but it’s a toxic mechanic that has a bad history.
PS and stream sniper/cyber stalkers. They EAT THIS CRAP UP. But that’s usually why decent Streamers offset their Streams by about 5 mins.