The Glade 4.0

From mmo-champion.com

Activision Blizzard Q4 2009 Results
Activision published their results for the Fourth Quarter of 2009 and released a handful of information, nothing really new here but it's worth a recap.

* Cataclysm will be released in 2010.
* Starcraft 2 will be released in 2010, the beta starts in February.
* The slides mention "value added services" a couple of times, it is most likely linked to Bornakk's post hinting at a "premium" service for the Auction House available from web.
* World of Warcraft still has 11.5m subscribers, it didn't change much since last year's announcement.

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Los Angeles Kings 2014 Stanley Cup Champions

"I love this **** team right here."
-Jonathan Quick

Beta forums are up. Looking like sometime this week for sure. Maybe even tomorrow(Wednesday).

http://forums.battle.net/index.html?sid=5000

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Los Angeles Kings 2014 Stanley Cup Champions

"I love this **** team right here."
-Jonathan Quick

It has officially started and I, of course, didn't get an invite. But, my one hope of actually getting to play today was also destroyed when they failed to sent out keys to Blizzcon '08 attendees. I didn't attend Blizzcon '08(I went to Blizzcon '09 where they didn't give us any beta at all), but my brother did. But Blizzard is being a bunch of assholes and not letting those people in until later apparently.

_________________
Los Angeles Kings 2014 Stanley Cup Champions

"I love this **** team right here."
-Jonathan Quick

Wow. Some of the stuff they're talking about for the Battle.net revamp is really cool. I wonder how granular and meta their auto-pairing will get? It'd be pretty neat if they could do things like analyze, say, your "clicks per minute" or whatever it is the Korean pros go apeshit over, and integrate that kind of thing, or some learned approach to "grading" your micromanaging skills and incorporate that into your ranking and pairing, since they're talking about using AI-derived algorithms to do the matchmaking.

And, Raltar, promotional keys are always later stages of beta. Early betas are about tightly controlling hardware profiles and slowly expanding them. You don't just let the unfiltered masses in when you're making sure your **** can run right on known qualifying configurations.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

They said they let in a lot of Blizzcon beta invites with the first wave. They didn't say how many exactly, but they said "a large number." Brother still didn't get it, though.

_________________
Los Angeles Kings 2014 Stanley Cup Champions

"I love this **** team right here."
-Jonathan Quick

If you didn't get in this phase, there are downloads out there for the client so you can be more prepared in case you get in the beta later you can jump right in. Not gonna say where, but people that want these things know where to get it. I wouldn't be surprised to see an offline crack sometime within the next two days, which would honestly fit my needs just fine.

_________________
Los Angeles Kings 2014 Stanley Cup Champions

"I love this **** team right here."
-Jonathan Quick

Brother got his beta invite just now. Looks like I'll get to play tomorrow evening after he goes to bed.

EDIT:

Went ahead and played tonight. After all of the excitement I had and even the knowledge of what it would be, I am still underwhelmed now that I actually get to play. I dunno, I guess it is because I have no real desire to get stomped by other players and playing skirmish against the computer is kinda boring since the only skill level you can give the AI opponents is very easy. Truth be told, I am more excited about the single player campaign, which isn't included(obviously).

Still, they have some neat additions to the game. For example, once you finish a map, you get a breakdown of everything like you did in Starcraft 1, but in this one you also get a build order. Basically, it shows what each person built and how far into the match it was built. Still seems kinda buggy, though. The last game I went through only showed my stuff up until about 7 and a half minutes in. I had carriers and a mothership built towards the end and they didn't show up. Submitted a bug report.

Also, achievements are disabled. Stats are disabled. There are only a handful of maps available.
Only 1v1 and 2v2 are available game modes. 3v3, 4v4 and FFA are all disabled in the normal matchmaking(ladder I guess?). But if you create a custom game, it seemed the FFA mode was at least an option, never tried it, nor did I try a me vs 2 or 3 computers. Should be possible, though.

_________________
Los Angeles Kings 2014 Stanley Cup Champions

"I love this **** team right here."
-Jonathan Quick

I didn't get invited to the Beta, but I did download the Beta client. Here is a page that explains how to get replays working. You can also look for a program called lazylaunch2, which will allow you to actually play the game, but No SP campaign and no MP. You have to download maps that have AI enabled on them in order to play against some really crappy computer AI opponents. But it's better than nothing.

Kaffis, they may, in fact, incorperate APM (Actions per minute) in the match selection process, as that is one of the "stats" that you can view during replays. Not really sure how the match making system is going to work at this point.

I've been watching a bunch of replays and I'm even more excited about this game than I was before. Terrans are hella fun so far. Marines, Marauders, and Medivacs (M+M+M) are turing out to be extremely versatile and effective. Naturally, there are counters to this, but it's very easy for the Terran player to trainsition or adapt to something else. For instance, each Terran military unit building (Barracks, Factory, & Starport) has 2 possible add-ons. Tech Labs enable more advanced units to be produced and also provides upgrade research. And Reactors allow you to produce 2 units at the same time from the building it's currently attached to. But the best part is, they are interchangeable. So you can use a Reactor with Barracks to mass produce marines, 2 at a time. But then you can lift the barracks up, and swap in a starport/factory to the same reactor add-on to easily switch to mass producing Hellions or Vikings/Medivacs! Hella cool!

If you don't wanna jump through all the hoops to enable replays, you can watch a lot of replays from Alpha/Beta footage on youtube. Some things have changed (like Nighthawks name change to Ravens), but you can still get a good idea of how each race is coming together. Also, much of the talk on many of the beta forums seems to indicate that the 3 races are balanced pretty well at the moment. Which leads many to think that the beta will be shorter than anticipated. But who knows for sure. This is Blizzard, after all. They'll release it, "When it's ready."

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"I Live, I Love, I Slay, and I Am Content."
- Conan the Barbarian

Neat. What's a good source for finding replays?

Nevermind, I reached the bottom of that page. Heh. Now, I suppose the more pertinent question I have is, Is this sanctioned by Blizzard? I notice that one of the links to download the client is to Fileplanet, which lends credence to the notion that Blizz isn't furious over this, but then some of the other steps look.. well, scurvy. =)

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

You mean, they'll release it...after they've destroyed much of the excitement around the game because peoples hopes have been crushed due to so many delays? I don't even get excited for Blizzard games anymore because I never have an idea when they'll come out. Blizzard games always feel like some game that's due out in 10 years to me, even if in reality it's only 2 or 3. It's such an afterthought.

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My brother's birthday present for me.. 14 months ago.. was to pay off my StarCraft II pre-order at Gamestop. Heh.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

Not to mention year long betas...

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Holy shitsnacks!

Ever since Activision bought them out, they have been hitting reasonable release dates. They have already said that this year, both Wings of Liberty and Cataclysm will be released.

Also, my brother was given a beta invite. Debating on if I should take it or not because of how boring beta is(as there are no AI difficulties above very easy and of course there is no single player campaign). Might be fun to play some 2v2 with my brother, though.

_________________
Los Angeles Kings 2014 Stanley Cup Champions

"I love this **** team right here."
-Jonathan Quick

Got into beta this weekend... this reminds me of why I rarely played non custom rules games in SC1...

Its not fun when Im trying to learn what anything does and get 20 marines/10 zealots/frakton of zerglings in 3-4 min into my base...

Multiple times...

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Play a couple of games against the AI. They never seem to attack with more than 5 marines/zealots/roaches. You'll be able to learn what everything does that way.

_________________
Los Angeles Kings 2014 Stanley Cup Champions

"I love this **** team right here."
-Jonathan Quick

Collector's Edition details announced.

http://us.starcraft2.com/features/collector/

I'll probably get it, just for the Raynor dog tag USB drive with the original SC and BW on it. That is all kinds of awesome!

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"I Live, I Love, I Slay, and I Am Content."
- Conan the Barbarian

I hope I can sell off the WoW pet because even when I played, I hated non-combat pets.

_________________
Los Angeles Kings 2014 Stanley Cup Champions

"I love this **** team right here."
-Jonathan Quick

Gamestop and Amazon have pre-orders up now. Both sites include beta access with pre-purchase.

I was all prepared to get the Collector's Edition, but I'm not paying $100 for it. Not when it'll probably be the same price when they release the other 2 races.

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"I Live, I Love, I Slay, and I Am Content."
- Conan the Barbarian

Wish I could play, but I've never been terribly good at SC so I'll probably just skip this altogether unfortunately.

Got a beta key, game won't work.

Installed it on the computer upstairs, and the mouse stops working as soon as you start the program.

Installed it on the computer downstairs, and it screwed up my file system somehow and took a couple hours to fix.

No real response from blizz to either of these issues, so looks like I still won't be playing.

I'm using VPN and a friend's account to play... kinda meh about it... my wait for diablo continues

My bnet name is wwen.ars if someone wants to add me to the friends list.

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"...the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?" -Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

I just played an hour and 30 min game that was pretty hilarious, which ended with our opponents declaring it "the gayest game of sc2 ever" and then they surrendered. By the end almost all resources were mined or sucked dry. I was running low on everything, including a place to build a base as I was building a nexus and buildings behind a fern wall near a zelnaga tower at one point. I wish I could copy paste the chat log. One of them, which had been destroyed except for a few probes, started a nexus at a spot (which I had a gas building there scouting O_o) and a scooted my phenix's's over and hovered and destroyed his last probe. He replied to that with "fag." Watching it in fast forward on the replay, I can literally taste his tears. The best guy on their team thought I was gone when he found me building mass stargates twice before mostly purging me from the game, but I kept harassing them with DTs and whatever I could find. I'm literally throwing kitchen sicks at his wall by the end. Completely wiped out and my partner still having a squadron of vikings he says "I'd say gg, but this is the gayest thing ever" or something to that effect and they leave. I must save this replay for the ages.

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"...the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?" -Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Sounds like good times.

_________________
Los Angeles Kings 2014 Stanley Cup Champions

"I love this **** team right here."
-Jonathan Quick

Wwen, replay? Just rename it as a .jpg and I think you can attach it to the posts, mine have all been pretty reasonable sizes thus far.

_________________
"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades