On Wednesday the 10th of February Blizzard releases their 2009 results calendar and will also hold a conference call that will be broadcast over the Internet(!). This broadcast was stressed out.A good sign? We won’t know for sure until the week after next. Ofcourse there are a lot of different speculations about this. Optimistic and pessimistic ones. What will be the news? The “realist” Kennigit from TL.net wrote:

Let’s just leave this for what it is – standard financial report/conference call that is going to be broadcast….Does it really seem reasonable that they would announce beta during that call? No. It’s going to be like CEO/CFO/COO, Bobby “dolla dolla bills” Kotick and a couple bankers sitting in
talking finances for investors.

That seems logical of course but why would they broadcast it then? Other people are speculating about: “SC2 canceled”?,”No Beta in 2010″? or something like “”I’m probably going to do terrible, terrible damage to the mic by saying this…but IT’S BETA TIME!”. We hope that Blizzard won’t approve our mistrust in them again and awaiting good news.

Check out the sources to read the speculations:

Gosugamers.net

TL.net (speculations)

PRnewsWire (original)

At the Russian game convention “Igromir 2009″ [literally means "Gamesworld"] where Blizzard

is represented,Chris Sigaty answered  some questions in the panel.

One of them is related to the Beta Start

Q: When will StarCraft 2?
A: Tomorrow (laughter). Usually Blizzard we’re not talking about dates.

While we plan for next year to do a beta test.
As soon as we feel that the game is finished we will release it soon.

This is an indirect but explicit  announce that controverts Mike Morhaimes words:

“I’m confident the beta will start this year,”

At this rate we can pre-order Starcraft II for our grandchildren.

Source

Guys we are very sorry. Due to some technical problems we were unable to live stream the show coverage. We are now publishing the whole stuff so you can be sure that you did’n miss anything important.

The first article will be about the new Battle.net chat system. Blizzards are integrating the all chats across all realms and all new games. Here what they say:

Blizzard: We want to make it easy for you to find and chat with your friends, we feel that’s something we can improve on and we want you to stay connected with your friends. Online, offline and again across games.

Blizzard: This is an example of what it looks like within you’re in the blue screens within the UI, and the chats work differently than the past. We decided to switch the chat system to more instant messenger style chat so it’s easier for you to organize and have conversations with one person or multiple people.

If you think it’s like World of Warcraft, it can be kind of challenging to hold different conversations, like I’ll use a wild example, more relevant to the crowd but if you’re hanging out in Stormwind and you have all of the different public chat channels up and also trying to keep three different whisperers together and talk to your party and it’s hard to do that, going up and down to figure out what’s going on so we felt if we go to more of an IM style chat and allow you to organize your conversations however you want to do them.

As we all know LAN was canceled in Starcraft 2 and Blizzard is blaming piracy. Blizzard wants to offer us a much better Network instead of LAN or the “normal” Battle.net. They promised a new generation even if there are lots of opinions but let’s see if Battle.net 2.0 is worth it?

|Is it worth the loss of LAN play?

|Is it worth the delays?

|Is it really just a bunch of features 70% of players won’t even care about?|

I visited many forums and i have read many threads like this one on the battle.net ; the majority opinion about Battle.net 2.0 is negative and there is also the sc2 Lan petition that has almost 100.000 Total Signatures and it’s one of the top gaming petitions ever. Lan/Battle.net 2.0 or both is a BIG topic today. But let’s face it: Battle.net 2.0 has many new features. What for? What features? Is Battle.net 2.0 worth to delay SC2 Release?

“A true online destination platform, Battlenet will become the foundation for connecting the tens of millions of members of the Blizzard community in a social gaming network across all Blizzard’s future games. This will begin with World of Warcraft and Starcraft 2. To put Battlenet into context, it will be a service similar to Xbox Live and it will leverage the technologies, infrastructure, and expertise that Blizzard has developed over the last decade in multi-player play and social networking. And as Mike Morhaime will discuss later in the call, there is no better opportunity to launch this strategic initiative than through the launch of Starcraft 2.”

-Blizzard Robert Kotick

As we all know , Blizzard has ALWAYS high quality releases with millions of gamers. It is conceptional that Blizzard DOES NOT want to disappoint us but that’s a big dilemma in disappointing on the game quality or disappoint in waiting sooo long (Starcraft2 has a big Release Delay. It should be released 1 year ago like they said). So what’s the point? What’s the point in making the Starcraft 2 Beta a closed Beta? We could suppose that Blizzard doesn’t trust their fans. When Blizzard says “its become clear that it will take longer than expected…” that means they’ve got some revolutionary ideas on how to improve their product and its worth pushing back a release for.

But you know: It’s done when it’s done.

So let’s go back to Battle.net 2.0:

“Our vision for Battlenet is ambitious. As I have said before, we intend to make Battlenet the premiere online gaming destination. We view the next generation of Battlenet as strategically important to the future of our company. It’s the foundation for all future online games at Blizzard and will be the cornerstone of our community. In addition to supporting tournaments, rankings, and multi-player game matching for Starcraft 2 and future Blizzard games, the next generation of Battlenet will add social networking features, cross-game communication, unified login and account management, and more. Battlenet will bring together players from across all of our games including World of Warcraft, eventually allowing them to connect, communicate, and share experiences with each other through the service regardless of which Blizzard game.”

-Blizzard Mike Morhaime

So what’s the purpose? Connect the world with gaming? I foresee Blizzard buying Nokia to steal their Slogan:

“Battle.net – Connecting people”

So there are many ideas of twitter/facebook functions and associations with Battle.net. New functions like 3D Avatars and animations that should help to represent your identity on the Internet. But seriouly. Aren’t we spammed enough with myspace/facebook/twitter and many more. I don’t want to have 1337 accounts for all “communities” like this to be on this comedy that is called “internet”. Maybe one universal account on the Battle.net 2.0 could help me to interact with the “world” so the gaming will be more “face-to-face” like in the Reallife. But isn’t it ironic and paradox?

About 4/5 years ago there was a burning matter of anonymity on the internet. Now people are trying to get the opposite. Blizzard is of course in the position to make that management: “Blizzard manages the most popular game in the world (World of Warcraft) and 2 other franchises on top of that, both with new sequels in the works. That is a very large player base.” So why don’t use this to make a huge network? Even if it’s hard to satisfy every player Blizzard will make because they never gave up. We can just wait and hope.

In the meanwhile we can start with the Beta on 20~22 August and enjoy the BlizzCon 09 (also on starcraft2.pro)

Good luck and Have fun.