Building the Blizzard Home

Picture courtesy of PublicDomainPictures

When I first saw the name for Blizzards newly announced digital card game; Hearthstone, I found it incredibly fitting.

Blizzard is building a community and it is doing it by setting up an entire universe for its fans. World of Warcraft is the world, Starcraft takes care of space and Diablo has religion covered. All that was needed was a home for all of us that make up the Blizzard community and now we will have Hearthstone for that.

Hearthstone creates a nice relaxing place for all of us who wants to be part of the community, but who doesn't have hours upon hours each day to pour into the other Blizzard games. (at least not on an ongoing basis).

Because lets face it, even if you are a casual player, WoW, Diablo and Starcraft demands a good deal of time investment in order to be able to enjoy them fully.

The main complaint I see from the "WoW is dying" crew is that they only log in to the game to chat with their friends, and now their friends have stopped playing. Maybe Hearthstone will help here as I Blizzard will tie it into the Battle.net chat and allow players to poke people in other games and challenge them for a match of Hearthstone.

In essence Hearthstone is a simple concept, but in reality I believe it to be ingenious. Not only will it most likely earn Blizzard tons of money through the Blizz store, it also gives them a new game to cross-reward in.
Buy the collectors edition of WoW/SCII/D3 expansion and get a free Hearthsone card pack? It will happen and people will love it!.

Furthemore launching a nice little game like this helps keep gamers on the Blizzard platform and that ties right back into forming the community.

What is next for Battle.net? I don't know, but I could imagine we will see more personalized spaces for our profiles. Maybe even a mini game where we can collect rewards ingame that we can decorate our Battle.net profiles with. Collect a legendary weapon in WoW and mount it on your Battle.net Profile wall. Clear a demon infested house in D3 to recover an antique rocking chair. Defeat a wave of Zerglings in a side mission in SCII to collect rare seeds from a stranded spaceship. The seeds can be planted in your Battle.net profile garden and other members of the community can come and help you water and nurture them.

Did the latter sound a little too much like farmville? Maybe so, but I can't wait to see if we will we get a "house" on Battle.net to put our Hearthstone in.

For now though, I am just super excited about the prospect of playing Hearthstone!

The SimCity Launch Troubles

I know I am late, making a post about the server issues for SimCity. The reason for this is I have actually been able to connect to the game since the 8th so I have been busy playing!

But that doesn't mean I didn't have any of the login issues which means that as a gamer I feel justified to rant a little bit about SimCity.
Because it should be possible to do better!



At the launch here in Europe, the only server I found available was the Oceanic one.  All the European ones were full. When I say all I mean the 4 that were originally available at launch, not the ones that has since been set up by EA after they realized that people actually want to play the game Maxis has developed. GASP!

And here is where I get confused. I get that servers cost money and that companies prefer to earn money rather than spend them, but it seems that each time a new game with DRM launches the people behind the game face the same surprise. "People want to play the game they bought from us". Even with big launch issues for other games in the past, it seems noone in the gaming industry is learning from this. (even though they may say they do.) In fact EA commented on the D3 launch trouble, promising that because of all the experience EA has with online games they would make sure not to prepare properly and that no similar issues woud arise with the launch of SimCity. Fast forward until today and unfortunately it turns out that they actually ended up doing a much worse job than Blizzard.

So why is it that with numbers available about pre-orders, sales and seeing the engagement of the fan base on the official and unofficial sites, EA (and other gaming companies) can not make a better estimate for server capacity.

Why not go big at first and then downsize? I am sure a company as big as EA could find something else to use the server capacity for should SimCity not need it in the future.

Instead they did a launch where I gave up on logging in on release day after having sat in queues for hours and continously being told that there was a network error when finally thought I was getting in.
This gave me a bit of a laugh though as I was told by the servers I had been playing for 1 hour. Yeah sure, if staring at the countdown timer qualifies for playing then I sure was a hardcore gamer on release day.

Then on the next day I spent half and hour trying to get the same servers to show up as the friends I wanted to play with. (The servers showing as available for them showed as full to me and some of the servers they were seeing didn't even appear on my list.)

Funny thing is though now that the issues has mainly disappeared, gamers will forgive (if not forget) as long as Maxis and EA fixes the next biggest issue with the game: The Traffic AI!  After all, we are getting a free game out of it!

The Password Jungle

Remember back in the days when your game boxes would take up half your shelf space? While opening the box of a game you have been waiting for is a special feeling, I am glad that most of my games are now digital downloads as it saves space and is convenient when you are traveling a lot like I am.

Remember when you had to queue for hours in the bank to get your bills paid? I do a monthly celebatory dance when I log in to my netbank and sort it all out in 10 minutes.
In short, I love that a lot of things has conveniently moved to the Internet and can be sorted, dowloaded or organized with a couple of clicks of the mouse.

However, with the ease of access comes another issue that I know my grandmother for instance never had to deal with; Passwords! Almost everything on the Internet requires you to use passwords and quite frankly it has come to a point for me where it is getting a bit ridicolous.

I have passwords for Internet banking, for emails, for taxes, for forums, for this blog. I even have a password to log into my computer, in fact I have 2; one for my home computer and one for my work computer.

And then there are the passwords for all my gaming, I have a battlenet account password, a Steam password, an Origin password and a SOE password. I have passwords for Guild Wars 2, for Tera, for Minecraft, for my Neopets account (although I can not remember this one), for Path of Exiles etc. etc. etc.

Then there are of course passwords for Reddit, Flickr, Facebook, StumbleUpon, Pinterest and a variety of other social media sites.
In short, I have passwords coming out my ears and of course as someone who knows a lot about Internet security and who has seen my fair share of unfortunate people getting their accounts and emails compromised, I do follow all the rules to keep my data safe. This means not using the same password for multiple sites or accounts and changing my passwords on a regular basis.

This of course causes a new issue. My boyfriend despairs every time I have to log in to one of my accounts, that I haven't used for a bit, as he knows the scenario that will play out:

First I will confidently enter my username and password. Then I will stare in amazement when I am informed that either the username or password is incorrect. I will then mumble something about being certain that it is the right one and retype it. After having repeated this a couple of times I will start getting flustered and maniacally enter one of the 13611 different password and username combinations I have. After approximately 15 minutes I will red in the head, sweating and enraged give up and click the lifesaving "have you forgotten your password button" and reset my password to something completely new. Repeating the password to myself again and again, I will swear that I will never forget this particular login again.... which usually lasts as long as until next time I need it.

And I am not alone. In fact the more we go online the bigger the problem gets and lets be honest with ourselves, there are only so much capacity in our brains for remembering random strings of numbers, symbols and letters. The problem is so big that when searching for "Tools to remember passwords" Google returns 217,000,000 search results of sites providing free or paid for programs that can help you with the task.

We might have freed up a lot of space and spare time by bringing everything online, but it comes at the cost of filling our poor heads with columns of passwords. Bring on memory chips or implement fingerprint/retina scans as a standard login method for all our online adventures I say!

Do you have issues remembering all your passwords as well? Or have you found a magical solution for the issue?