Blizzard's Frank Pearce Interview

28 May 2010 at 14:01:17 by

Blizzard's Frank Pearce took the time out to discuss Blizzard's strategy with StarCraft 2, Battle.net and the future projects we'll be hearing more about after BlizzCon this year...

First off, do you have anything new for us on Battle.net?

Depends on what you know on Battle.net!

Well, is there anything on the horizon that you haven't talked about up to this point?

I don't think so. Not at this point. We've got a street date of 27 July set for StarCraft 2, and I think pretty much everything that you guys are going to see coming 27 July has already been talked about pretty extensively.

Are you happy with the league system that you have at the moment? I know one or two fans have some slight concerns with it.

I think we're pretty happy with the league system. It's a difficult balance to strike, because you want to feel like you're competitive within the context of that system, as a player, and if you're just being ranked in a huge ladder against 800,000 other players, or whatever it is, you start to feel pretty anonymous and inconsequential, and so with the league system the way we've got it and the different skillsets for the different leagues, you'll always be able to be competitive within your bucket, within the scope of Battle.net. So it's based around the concept of intramural type leagues, and things like that. Even though you might be playing soccer within the context of the league, you're not playing at a professional competitive level, but you still feel like you're competitive within your league.

How many do you have in each of these brackets, normally?

It really depends on how many players are on Battle.net. We'll bucket them based on their skill level, and the number of players that the matchmaking system doles out.

One of the things that people have asked about is if it would be possible to change your name on Battle.net, or reset your stats?

In terms of your profile on Battle.net? Nothing specific planned for launch, but definitely something that if there's a big demand for it, then we can certainly consider it, and we'll see what the community reaction is to the feature set when we launch.

That'll possibly be similar to how World of Warcraft does it, then?

Sure. Maybe. Yeah. Depends.

What does it depend on?

Depends on whether or not it's something the community really wants. [Laughs]

I know you've said you have plans for guilds, or clans. Is that something you're planning to release before the first expansion?

Groups and clans is definitely something that we would have a goal of delivering prior to the first expansion. We'll be definitely releasing patches along the way, and so we'll try and get it into one of the patches before Heart of the Swarm comes out.

So that'll be small patches and content patches?

Content patches, I think, is probably something more reserved for the concept of a game like World of Warcraft. I don't know if we'll describe any of our patches as content patches, but definitely patches that enhance the feature set of Battle.net. We've got guys that are working on new maps that we can deliver online, and whether we do something like a "Map of the Week" or put those in a patch is still to be determined.

You did that for StarCraft and Warcraft 3, I think.

Yeah, for Warcraft 3 we did maps every week.

Would those be in the same concept, or possibly using the premium map-making system for people to buy them?

Well, we don't have any plans to launch the marketplace any time soon. Definitely something we want, because we want not only to be able to deliver content that we create to the community, but also if the community is making great content for themselves, have a mechanism by which that can be distributed to the community as well.

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