WoodedMicrob

As SC2 reaches nearly 90 days with publishing turned off, if publishing isn't turned back on by EWC finals, with GSL saying goodbye, I'm rapidly approaching the opinion that the game has had it's final nail in the coffin quietly hammered in by the developer. 🧵 Microsoft received just shy of 9% of it's revenue from Gaming in 2024, which does include the acquisition of activision blizzard in their report; and with all of the cuts and layoffs that we've been seeing from them in recent months, on top of culture shifts inside Blizzard toward their main money-making IPs, I don't think its a far-fetched claim to assume that SC2 is beyond an afterthought. The Classics team, even if we don't know its size, actively maintained War1 and 2 as it was a recent release, but is still maintaining WarCraft 3 as a classic title, with balance changes, map pools, is even providing sponsorships to content creator-fronted showmatches (see the small stream meta that occurred earlier this year); WarCraft is undeniably Blizzard's strongest IP and they know this is a safe decision, there are multiple titles for WarCraft fans to translate into consumers. StarCraft 2 is not safe to put any time or money into, the community members themselves infamously used to talk about how viewers "who watch StarCraft only consume StarCraft content", the playerbase that once sported an average of ~2 million monthly users, roughly shy of 50% playing melee while the others played co-op/campaign in 2018, has rapidly declined over that period of time. While WarCraft 3 fans have overlap, no matter how large or small, to Hearthstone, WoW, Rumble, or HotS, the only thing StarCraft has overlap with is HotS. But, it'd be revisionist to not bring up that StarCraft fans are incredibly elitist, that during the same time that StarCraft II was rising at the same time as League and the DotA 2 beta, the "eww moba" sentiment was incredibly high, and aside from the more casual playerbase, the majority of those who wouldn't eventually move to play co-op or just leave StarCraft 2 entirely for those games, had very little to zero interest in Heroes of the Storm. StarCraft has less than half of the amount of characters represented to them in Heroes of the Storm, (as does Diablo), but at least the Heroes team added some more unique characters to try to reel in players over than the usual. As for tournaments, I'm pretty sure this has already been extensively covered by people more involved and experienced than me. But with both Blizzard and Microsoft (pre and post acquisition) raking in record profits (as every company seems to be doing in these past few years), while axing employees, and for Blizzard during the period of time where they were shoveling millions of dollars into the open coal furnace that was the OWL that any eukaryotic based organism could tell was a disaster in slow-motion.. you get my point. StarCraft could've likely maintained a smaller, healthier ecosystem, but Blizzard doesn't know how to run esports if they don't have their hands, feet, and meat in the ride at all times. For the community, Blizzard, in their own fault, did not take any chances to give the community opportunities to show that they cared about the franchise, we never saw War Chests go back on sale, the collections page has remained static as a result, and much of that page is completely FOMO'd for any new player that wanted to try the game in the past 6 years. At the summits, the War Chest was *literally* pitched to us as from concept to execution as StarCraft's sort of 'dota pass'-esque plan for the community to directly assist in the future and maintenance of the games esport. Why, it was never expanded upon to include additional tiers for higher prices for those who could throw more money at the scene, I will never know. But especially since the War Chests never returned; there was 0 guarantee (and it likely didn't anyway) that any purchase of skins directly would have any effect on the state of StarCraft 2 esports after 2019. Don't get me started on the promises that were made to multiple community members that ended up just, never happening for whatever priority/monetary/corporate reason, but that's not my part to tell. Onto modding, it seems Blizzard provides an update every 3-4 weeks (which would be around now) on what they're doing with regards to the exploit that resulted in the ability to publish being disabled for all users. This topic has been covered quite a bit but in specific corners of the scene, so I'd like to clear some things for alot of you who I know are still involved in the scene and don't really know what the hell is going on in the first place. There are multiple known exploits in StarCraft II, there are two exploits that have caused the current mess we're in. One was notified to Blizzard previously, they claimed they fixed it; but in reality, the users that were engaging the behavior just simply stopped for a little bit. That exploit is known as a dependency injection; where the malicious user is exploiting something on Blizzard's server - the fact that they set up their hosting system really poorly. You would think that when you publish your work to Blizzard, that the dependencies (something that a map would naturally require to run, like a mod file like Starbow or SCEVO or a chunk of the base game like the HotS or LotV campaign assets) that you included within that map would be, well, included with it. However, the server needs to resolve these dependencies whenever the map is hosted via a lobby; so, a malicious actor intervenes during the hosting process. The server naively trusts the end user's files since Blizzard never expected anyone to understand let alone mess with this stuff back in 2009 or whenever they set up this particular hosting process, resolves whatever the user gives them, and you end up with an injected lobby. The other exploit involves the malicious end-user messing with the cache in the game. Anyone who has been playing long enough, especially if they've swapped between customs/arcade and melee has likely experienced strange asset recolors, loading screens, music or other oddities persisting across maps and resorted to restarting their game to empty their cache. This is also something that malicious actors can manipulate, and do so openly, there are multiple (or were) maps that, again, BLIZZARD WERE NOTIFIED OF BEFORE, that showed graphic imagery of, lets just say incredibly inappropriate anime "women", as well as other things. This exploit does not only affect images and videos, and the reason I bring this up, is because on May 30th, Blizzard virtually removed the ability to use videos in custom maps except for whitelisted services... The Classic team, that spends 0 time providing updates to StarCraft 2, less time to StarCraft 1, now wants to allocate more resources to manually approving every project that uses a video in their map(s). The same team that can barely handle the upkeep on people being mass reported, barely handle the amount of maphackers on the anticheat that hasn't been updated in 4 years, the team that cannot (and never has) deal with the gross amount of hate speech and other garbage in General chat (which by the way, if they're so worried about the PR of the illicit & hateful hosted videos, why do they not do anything about this when it's the first thing you see when you log in as a new user, it's an issue on all regions in multiple languages)? Granted, the list of maps may not be very large, but this has now turned into permanent upkeep for a company that did not have any to begin with; not to mention, that you can IGNORE this whitelist completely via animation. Why use a video when I could cycle textures on a plane? It's effectively the same thing if the goal is shock value, just for a little more effort. And, lest we forget, the cache is poison-able, so why is there a whitelist in the first place? That update in May at the time not only sowed further doubt that Blizzard a) didn't know what the exploits were and/or b) doesn't know or does not want to solve them. The June update at least gave some direction that there was an idea; as the statement referenced improvements to "services that run custom lobbies"; and seeing as this is a potential security risk, QA for it could take a long time, which is where we are now. A lot of time for a team that is also responsible for any updates to WC1, WC2, SC1, and most importantly, WC3, which is regularly seeing updates. In fact, it's received four (3 PTR) patches of nearly 300 revisions since SC2's publishing went down; I won't even bother counting the dozens if not it's received in comparison to SC2 in total since Blizzard effectively just dropped the game fully (I'm not counting all the hard work the community put in for free; I'm talking exclusively the Blizzard employees.) I understand that the Classic team did have to implement those as well but, if I'm being honest, it didn't seem like those were well implemented in the first place... Nearly 90 days in total without publishing, in which both methods can and would still be possible regardless, completely choking and stifling what little life is left in the StarCraft II population. As a footnote, during my last few months in SCEVO, I spent a lot of time over in KR broadcasts as there was decent interest for the mod on those websites. The overwhelming distaste, distrust and disappointment toward Blizzard wasn't surprising nor unfounded. StarCraft 1 was supposed to receive yearly updates from the classic team, it has not received anything since September of 2022. SCEVO revived a little bit of interest in StarCraft 2 for some koreans, but primarily only because of the inclusion of StarCraft 1 units, and when publishing was disabled, the ability to patch the mod, add new maps, fix bugs, add models, were all removed, all that momentum and opportunity was quickly lost. Time will tell, but, especially after the shit that happened last year with EWC's scheduling, with GSL's "last season", with two months of no contact except for "we don't know what we're doing", so much more, I can only take so much copium huffing. I'd rather just see the game broken open like a coconut and separated from the bnet global branch so people can be left to their own devices. Stop Killing Games.