how does that work when few people want to play alternately? does the new campaign destroy the old one or you get to reload from saves? Either way, inconvenient.
You can still reload your old saves, they don't go anywhere. At least the local copies. I am not too sure what the 'cloud' saving does. Local copies save though.
they were spammed because it was trivial to create bunch of accounts, also blizzard never really cared about law and order on battle.net - after all when the copies are sold, money was made, why bother to police their network service. Now single account costs 60 bucks, i don't think many would try to spam and risk permaban.
Another thing is you could always create your own channel, nobody forced you to sit in the public one. Now you don't get any of that, but as i said - try to organize anything with that pathetic IM.
Well that was (later) true of the original. They stopped chat gateways a while back I think. Now it is $60 sure, but I would guess that was done for later? I dunno. I didn't have any issues with it. What exactly don't you like about the chat and party system? I mostly use voice chat on it with my friends and we found it useful enough to not hop in Vent.
i stand corrected. still if i am not mistaken you don't get to store maps downloaded from battle.net permanently, so you have to get them manually from dedicated sites. And running maps from editor is not what i would call a convenience more like 'jumping through the hoops'
I am not sure about B.net downloaded maps. I haven't got one that way yet. But either way the old SC style is the same. Thats just something you have to deal with if you go though the B.net system which is new and optional as far as I can tell. I would have to play more than the 2 custom maps I downloaded and tried to know for sure. Hasn't been an issue for me so far though. I mean thats how most people got maps in SC1 and that seemed to work out ok.
as if database cared how it presents its data. Majority of players probably don't need it, good for them but there are some that do - all the guys who play competitively. There is no coherent info who is where on the ladder, even for diamond and platinum leagues where it really counts - these guys couldn't care less about what is their position among 100 hundred random people, they want to know the truth.
Like I said, I hope they add that for you. I didn't mean for that to sound condescending or anything. I just didn't convey that part well I guess. Blizzard has an epic history of supporting games so it could come out. I mean they were adding replays and league features into SC1 how long after release?
what? i played both and it's not like i played sc1 once 12 years ago and only have fond memories - i repeated sc1 like 5 times and i enjoyed it every single time despite its aging mechanics. I could go very deep into detail how much sc2 story sucks but i don't think you care much. Find any of 10-20 page long threads in the single player section of blizzard forums, you'll get all the info you need. The fact is that there was more substance story-wise in 10 terran missions in sc1 (which also had to introduce absolutely green players to the game) than in almost 30 in sc2 where for the half of the game you run after some artifacts with no other purpose but to get monies. Maybe you don't agree - but still proper comparison is full SC vanilla (30missions) to SC2:WoL (25-29) and here SC1 wins hands down.
Both SC1 and BW had kickass ending, SC2 has deus ex machina in action which requires half an hour of sitting at 1 base to fire... and then you get cheesy cinematic. Amount of retcons and plotholes in SC2 is staggering.
I guess we were discussing different things. I took what you said to mean that you thought 1/3 of the amount of story material was in 2 that was in 1. I thought that was ridiculous because SC1 just had CG, text blurbs, and the little visual boxes with voice. SC2 had all of that along with the Wing Commanderish 'click on and "chat" with' or whatever stuff. Way more material there. Now if you didn't like it, thats an opinion thing. As far as retcon, didn't really bother me. If the game had come out 4 or even 5 years after the original it might have, but if it is an enjoyable game story I don't mind it having some changes 12 years on. You are allowed to change your overall story vision over that many years I think :p Again just an opinion.
As for the missions I think there was still more there. Sure it was a few less in numbers, but they were more difficult with the new settings. I remember the original SC being pretty easy. This time around you could tweak the difficulty level much more so that added a lot more to the missions for me. Also the achievements and challenges do add something (even if it is minimal) to do beyond the raw missions and waitings for custom content.
I didn't really see any plotholes (by video game standards) and I didn't think the ending was deus ex machina at all. If anything my complaint there was I felt it was spelled out wayyy early and it was just "Well I wonder if that is going to happen in this one or in the next Zerg expansion". I don't want to post any spoilers, but between Tygus looking at the video logs and Raynor's chats with the Specter guy I though the ending was foretold very early. If anything I felt I saw that coming too early, not it was something out of nowhere to just end the story.