For a better part of the day, users have been unable to access their Battle.net User accounts. The reason for this was because of standard maintenance over the past 5 hours.

And it wasn't just maintenance. They have finally integrated the new Battle.net Balance system and brought it online today. EU will be next tonight.

Unfortunately, the new changes are still broken. The US Account Page links to the European Battle.Net Balance FAQ instead of the US one and the Battle.net Balance instruction page still has the incorrect URL.

So far, there has been no official announcement about this new major feature addition.

The first time the "new" Battle.net Balance feature was announced was December 9, 2011. When Blizzard revealed the new feature they said that it would be "Coming Soon" and rolling out within the weeks ahead (end of December). It has finally been implemented, but 10 weeks later.

* UPDATE: It's been about 1 hour now, and still no official announcement. I guess they're waiting for it to be rolled out in all regions first.

* UPDATE: 4:30PM now.. most of the managers will be heading home now so there's little hope of an announcement today. That just leaves the next few days.

* UPDATE: Finally! An announcement over two hours after the changes went live.

Took Long Enough

A short while ago, Supererogatory finally published a piece about my older post on Swingin' Ape Studios and the other games they were working on (including exclusive information that I had obtained from Steve Ranck, who was the President and Technical Director at SAS.) I'm surprised he hadn't discovered it back in December. :)

As you know, I've been drawing a lot of parallels about Blizzard's old abandoned games and how they might be revisiting these ideas for their Next Gen MMO.

With that in mind, there was also a tweet about Blizzard's other cancelled project Raiko (which I had also mentioned as one of their cancelled games previously.) Apparently, though, I wasn't aware that Blizzard had outsourced the game to Flextech Productions.

According to Ron Seifried from Flextech, it was a role-played game based on Japanese Samurai.

Video Production Coordinator & 3D Modeler
Blizzard Entertainment
April 1996 – April 1998 (2 years 1 month)

I co-owned Flextech Productions, a company that was financed by Blizzard Entertainment to develop a role-playing game based on Japanese Samurai. This small operation was one of only three pilot companies that Blizzard deemed worthy enough to co-develop an computer game, at a time when resources were limited and time was short. From the days leading up to E3 ’97, we created a prototype that literally wowed our prospective investors, including volumetric lighting and multi-view angles that were years ahead of its time. I also managed finances and coordinated work schedules for development of PC role playing game and managed the video production facility.

Interestingly, Blizzard had brought Stan Sakai onboard to work on the new Next Gen MMO (lore & story.) And wouldn't you know it.. he has a wealth of experience with Japanese Samurai lore. :)

People in the World of Titan

I was going to wait until mid-March to post this, but since we're on the subject of Titan, I figured I might as well do it now.

For a while, I've had a belief that the Next Gen MMO would have a much deeper focus on it's people. I'm not just talking about character customization, but rather the NPCs within the game itself. I've been imagining more of a modern world filled with people, human villains and human heroes rather than the typically mass array of fantastical creatures and fictional aliens.

So, I've been following Brian Schwab (Senior AI/Gameplay Engineer II at Blizzard). He's given a few lectures of AI, but they have always been very careful never to say what game he has been working on at Blizzard. It's in fact the Next Gen MMO and he's their Senior AI programmer. That's why I've been so interested in his lectures; because he talks about his working experiences and he's careful not to reveal ongoing projects.

At this upcoming 2012 GDC (March 5-9), Brian is giving a presentation on Psychology in Game AI.

Less A More I: Using Psychology in Game AI
Tuesday 1:45- 2:45 Room 2006, West Hall, 2nd Fl

When dealing with game AI characters, psychology can’t help but come into play. Players process what they see and experience through a filter of expectations. We expect human-like game characters to exhibit human-like traits. A by-product of the quest to improve AI decisions, however, is that characters can begin to “feel” robotic and sterile. This session will begin by showing various psychological biases that we as game players bring to the experience. We will then show how characters can be imbued with simple affects to exploit these expectations in order to seem more “alive” and believable.

In earlier (2011) presentations, he talks about simple AI behavior and how you need to find a gentle balance so that it's not too challenging for players.

But now, he's focusing on human and human-like characters along with life-life behaviors. While this is no confirmation, it's interesting how he will be discussing this particular aspect of AI given that it's something that Blizzard has not done in any of their games yet (it's only life-like behavior via animation, but never AI) and it's not something that he spends his free time on. If it was an area of AI that he was currently working on exhaustively within Blizzard, though, then he would have a wealth of practical information and real world challenges to share.

Learning about a developer or artist's background and experience is a great way to get an idea about gameplay. For example, the Next Gen MMO team is comprised of many employees with scifi backgrounds such as Ghost and the Halo MMO. The artists themselves have done a lot with with scifi, post apocalyptic, and ancient city designs and concept art. And, a couple key writers have worked on scifi stories, secret societies, or historical civilizations (17th century Japan being one of them.)

This all makes me think that life-life NPC behaviors are planned for Titan. Nothing fancy, mind you.. something that has been proven successful (Blizzard won't experiment) like Skyrim, where the world's inhabitants have daily routines, jobs, reactions, emotions, and better communication options.

And, I'm thinking there will be a lot more people and humanoids (aliens) in the game, rather than just mobs of monsters, with a lot more interpersonal communication going on.

If you have the means and web development experience, I would recommend that you start working on a simple replacement for Diablo 3 Trade Chat as soon as possible and start promoting it. (I'll help if it's a good webapp.)

Bashiok has recently confirmed that D3 will only have private chat, and there won't be any open or public channels. The reason for this change is to prevent player trading and linking of items, forcing them to use the Auction Houses (ideally, the Real Money Auction House.)

They're in there right now. Unless people are expecting general open channels? We've consistently said we won't have those.

Blizzard has consistently stated that they won't have general chat?

It was said once. By Bashiok. 6 MONTHS AGO. And he said Chat Channels were working and that it would be like Diablo II IRC style.

Chat channels are in, and working. They're more like the Diablo II IRC style than the individual chat windows like StarCraft II has.

Having ways for friends and acquaintances to create social groups has been in the long term plans of the new Battle.net for some time. Whether they're called clans or not is a smaller detail. It's just getting the time to work on adding in those types of want-to-have features. Almost assuredly not for the launch of the game, but hopefully at some point in the future.

This change is another method, just like the recent stash size changes, to force use of the RMAH. Even if the RMAH isn't used directly, it's still used indirectly in many cases since pro users will be purchasing Gold Auction House items, converting to gold, and then selling it for cash.

Players will still want to trade items and engage in private sales, though, to avoid costly Auction House expenses. Or maybe they just don't want to take the risk of selling a valuable item on the RMAH, and would rather trade for it.

So, grab yourself a good name (like D3XCHANGE.COM, which is currently available) and give the players something they need: a very user-friendly website where players can simply select a region to join a Trade Chat IRC-like interface. No sign-in or registration required, posts require Captcha to prevent spam, and just make it really easy for players to come and go from.

This can't be a forum, IRC, or any other kind of overcomplicated process or something requiring an third-party application. It has to be something simple and easy, just like IMGUR.COM.

It's too bad item linking isn't possible (due to Blizzard's strict no mod policy), but eventually a item DB feature could be added for easier linking.

* UPDATE (02/08/2012):

I already talked about this in the comments below, but decided to add it to the post since they're often skipped.

The thing you have to remember is that spam is not an issue these days. It's not 1998 anymore and spam is easily preventable. If you work for a large business, you've probably seen their standard spam filters at work. Even if you own a GMail account, their spam system is incredible. Out of hundreds of thousands of spam messages, 1 might make it through and even then it's flagged as spam.

Within online games, there are many ways to prevent spam. Rift, for example, locks out general chat until the player reaches a certain (low) level. Spam is hardly ever an issue, because their support team addresses it so quickly, players are banned, and the spammers need to purchase a brand new $60 game. It's not worth their time spending $60 each time.. not only does it take a lot of time to setup, they might only be able to target a few individuals before they get banned. Spammers gave up because it wasn't worth the time and investments.

And that's just one simple method. There are also player reporting thresholds if you're limited on support staff (if enough unique players report someone specifically, they can be silenced until an investigation takes place), timer restrictions or flood protection, keyword detection, player preferences (they need to manually join the channels, or they can squelch channels), chat can be unlocked using non-scripted processes (leveling, doing a quick puzzle in-game, etc.), or even captchas are available.

Spamming existing in Diablo 2 because Blizzard never really tried to prevent spamming (it was possibly a technology limitation). In D2, key generators existed where spammers could create as many CD-Keys as they wanted without any cost. Even if they were banned, it didn't matter.. they didn't need to purchase a new CD-Key and had thousands more available. Spamming was (is) fairly easy in WoW due to Blizzard's very limited support staff, trial accounts, and they fully support modding. Their only preventative spam measures were 20-year old basic flood protection algorithms. It's gotten a lot better now than how it was.

Diablo 3 is a completely different beast, though. It's smaller, easier to support, and easier to patch or upgrade with new changes. Most importantly, though, Diablo 3 does not permit mods, and Warden will be actively searching for any third-party applications that interact with the game. Automation is detected and users are banned quickly (spam being extremely easy to detect compared to character botting.) And every time they're banned, a replacement spambot will cost $60. It's absolutely not worth the spammers time or money. And even then, this is without a rudimentary spam chat filter. If they were to employ a simple level restriction (and prevent D3 demos from public communication), it would pretty much end spam.

You might think to yourself; "Well, if Blizzard allows spamming, then they could make money from these spammers since every time they get banned, they have to pay another $60." But spammers aren't idiots, they're not even going to be spamming within Diablo 3 in the first place due to the high cost of replacement involved.

Simply put, there's not going to be any spamming in the first place, so there's no need for spam protection!

So, Blizzard is removing an essential communication feature for either two purposes. It either forces trading to happen within the Auction Houses, or it's used to prevent annoying spam and improve the customer experience.

But.. there's not going to be any spam in the first place! That just leaves forced AH use.

* UPDATE (02/08/2012):

So, either we had a Real ID incident where the public outcry finally forced Blizzard to change their stance on Public Chat within Diablo 3, or Bashiok wasn't reading the forums for almost 4 days and he just now realized he made a mistake.

Blizzard is now implementing public chat within Diablo 3.

It was always there, of course, since JW already confirmed it was part of the game. Question is.. did they intend on actually turning it on, or did they wait to see what the community thought first?