User suggestions on beta

Today on the Battle.net forums a user wrote a very nice and general overview of the issues he has with the beta. While I myself do not have access to playing the beta, a lot of his suggestions make a lot of sense to me (though some are probably just because it is early on in the beta process).

Wanted to give non-beta players a chance to comment/criticize as well. Debate is welcome if you can read it all, it is pretty long.
Dear SC2 Dev Team:

This is my first of what will hopefully be a series of letters to you to help balance and develop SC2 while it’s in its beta phase. I didn’t write until now because I wanted to make sure that I know what I’m talking about before I voice my opinion. Presently, I have played around 250 games of SC2 split pretty evenly between 1v1 and 2v2 and almost all of them as zerg. Right now I have a 1452 rating in 1v1 plat division 5, which probably puts me in the top 100 of USA players. I have a lot of suggestions this time around so I will be splitting them up into different sections to make them a bit more organized.

Bnet 2.0:

• I was always under the impression this was going to be an independent client that would run in addition to SC2 so you wouldn’t have to be in the game to see if your friends are online sort of like Steam. Will this happen in the future? I would be a fan of this.
• The .identifier addition to screen names is pretty annoying and dumb. It only makes it harder to add/talk to friends, and it will just increase confusion and the amount of people that try to spoof someone’s name because in most cases the identifier doesn’t show. I just don’t see the point…
• I hope that there are still plans to add channels and clan tools for Bnet 2.0. Right now it seems pretty barebones with no tools to emphasize community and social interaction between players
• The main interface looks terrible and unprofessional on a widescreen monitor. At the very least the bottom command bar needs to go across the entire screen…
• A ‘back’ button in the B-net 2.0 interface would be nice.
• Please allow the viewing of my opponent’s profile from the score screen after a game without me having to friend them
• Hopefully there are already plans to allow watching replays with others on bnet. If not that needs to happen.
• We need to be able to add/create folders in the replays menu within the game as well as sort through replays by name/gametype/etc.
• Please add back text commands like /stats /time in game.
• Beyond that Bnet 2.0 is just pretty buggy, but I’m sure that will be fixed soon.

Game Interface:

• We need the F# keys to function like in SC1.
• A nice addition would be the ability to queue ALL of the larvae, or train a unit in ALL of the selected buildings instead of pressing one key 15 times. For example, if you select your 15 larvae and press shift + z to create 15 zerglings instead of z-z-z-z-z-z… it removes a lot of annoyance
• Please add color highlighting or a color change for units which are sub-selected within a group. (Right now it’s neon green on top of neon green, and it’s not very distinct)
• Health bars are ugly, blocky, and way too big. Make something small, skinny, and sleek please!!
• Rally commands from buildings should rally units with a move command instead of an attack command

General Gameplay:
**note the suggestions in this section are very vague and broad, but I thought I would voice some large concerns while it’s still early in the beta. Future letters will have more minor unit tweaking suggestions**

• Unit counters in general are too strong. First of all, starting the beta out with unit counters this strong just makes it harder to balance the game because people will always just say, oh get this to stop that when really the game should be more complex. A truly complex game, for example, involves timed attacks and specific builds to counter other respective specific builds. Moreover, when counters are too strong it decreases the initiative for players to create units while they are being scouted because the other player will just wait and get the counter to that unit. Also, if it is not possible to scout at a certain point then the game just devolves into a mere guessing game. Finally, having really strong unit counters makes it so you can stop someone going an entire strategy just with the “threat” of that counter. For example, all zerg needs to do in zvz to make zerglings worthless is build a roach warren. Likewise, all protoss needs to do to make roaches worthless later in the game is to have the “option” of building immortals if they need to.
• I’d like to see a few more unit abilities in the game. With the new tools for fast casting, it is not that much of an obstacle to use abilities so therefore I think there should be an increase in the amount of abilities available compared with SC1. More unit abilities make the game more exciting and more fun to watch. Less unit abilities make them game more monotonous. Zerg is a prime example of this because really until infestors all they can do is burrow, which is sad. Also, roaches in general put me to sleep with boredom.

Later on in the thread, some users voiced concerns if Blizzard even reads the forums, since traffic seems incredibly low. We were all reassured with:

Yes, we’re reading this forum as well