Battle.net

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The new Battle.net icon/logo without text.
Login screen.

Battle.net is Blizzard's online match-making component and social networking tool for their game franchises. The network features both PvP and co-op for multiplayer gameplay.

The network offers its services to about 12 million players, and with the new version of Battle.net that will be available with StarCraft II, Blizzard naturally hopes they can serve even more fans.

Since Blizzard have only so far released information about the StarCraft II-specific features for Battle.net, most of this article so far reflects that. As soon as Diablo III information (or any other game) is revealed or leaked, it will be added here.

Battle.net links:


Supported Games

The new Battle.net is directly or indirectly going to support "all Blizzard games", which include:


Pillars of Battle.net

Loading a game of StarCraft II.

The new Battle.net is designed with primarily four main purposes/features to make it the best gaming network:


Always Connected

The player will see a use for being connected at all times, even when playing single player, as he connects to a "character" online that gains Achievements, limited avatars or decals and other related features.

There are a number of features that will only work online, but there will be an offline mode for Single Player and skirmishes, for the odd plane flight or internet downtime you might have.

Unfortunately, this pillar also includes the main reason why there is no multiplayer functionality for LAN.


Finding Games

For RTS games on Battle.net, like Starcraft II, the new Battle.net use a competitive arena matchmaking system that is more intelligent than most available matchmaking technologies right now, and that "learn" progressively how to matchmake. The idea is that whatever skill level you are, you should have fun online, and be set up to win and lose about 50/50.

Diablo III players will instead be matched with people they are likely to have fun with, playing in co-op games.


Social

Chat interface of Battle.net. Somewhat reminiscent of Facebook.

Logging in will allow access to better friend management and other social gaming components. It's easy to use, and easy to keep in touch with friends that like any Blizzard game.

There will be both text chat and voice chat for players in StarCraft II/ and World of WarCraft (presumably all Blizzard games in the future) to use in any game to talk to each other. It will work like a backbone to the network, and will seamlessly integrate friends lists, matchmaking, messaging, and other features.

It's still possible to remain anonymous on Battle.net if players want that and still add friends and be sociable.


Mod Support

Mod support is basically "map making" support, since the maps can easily be modified to be anything rather than just a RTS game. The support for it will include an easy way to see and try others' mods, as well as being able to charge people real money to use your mods, if you have managed to create a very popular one.


Battle.net Characters

Battle.net profile screen showing the character "Ridley".

Battle.net is now outfitted with a brand new feature going live with StarCraft II, and it's a StarCraft II Battle.net character. This character serves as your single persistent identity across the service. Everything you do in the game -- win/loss record, achievements, unlockable rewards, friends list, and more -- will be saved to your character profile for you and your friends to see. Even your save game progress in the campaign can be synched to Battle.net.

Say you upgrade your computer and re-install the game; once you connect to Battle.net, you can continue the campaign right where you left off. This can be handy for people using more than one PC, allowing progress wherever the player is.


Real ID

Cross-game text and voice chatting.

In addition to the anonymous lists and social experience, there will also be a Real ID concept on Battle.net. It's a mutual friendship, so both parties must agree to the request.

Players can then see their Real ID friends by their real name, along with any character they are logged in as. There is also more detailed presence information about what they are doing, you can send or receive broadcast messages to/from them and use cross-game communication between StarCraft II, Battle.net, and World of Warcraft.

It's optional, and need not be activated unless the player wishes it.


StarCraft II on Battle.net

Since Battle.net in its new shape is designed for StarCraft II, most of what we know about it is based on this game. Some information is true for both Starcraft II and Diablo III and some is not. This is the more StarCraft II-exclusive features we have been shown.

Leagues and Ladders

1v1 Platinum League division 75 shown here.

The new Battle.net matchmaking service will measure player skill more accurately than ever before, making online competitive play more accessible for a wider audience. There is also a new Battle.net Leagues and Ladders System to the service.

After using the auto-matchmaking system a few times, Battle.net will automatically slot players into a league and division that best suits your skill level. The goal here is to encourage local competition by finding players a neighbourhood of 100 players of equal skill to be ranked against. The intention is to make ranked online play much more enjoyable and give everyone a realistic chance to win their division.

Beyond ranked matches, Battle.net will also make it easier to compete by offering a number of other game modes. Custom games will of course make their return, but there will also be a slew of new, casual-friendly game modes such as the Practice League, Co-op Versus AI, Challenges, and more.


Replays

Replays will now automatically be uploaded to Battle.net, and be available for anyone interested in watching them.


Map Publishing

Creating a custom game from available maps.
Joining existing games, much like the old Battle.net, but with more visual feedback.

The Blizzard community has previously been very creative and made a lot of maps and mods for the games seen on Battle.net, like DotA, Tower Defense, and many others. More on this in Mapmaking.

To help this further, Battle.net will feature a Map Publishing feature that will let users upload their maps to the service and share them with the rest of the community immediately on the network. Players can publish, browse, and download maps directly via the Battle.net client. It will also allow for

Finding games based on specific mods (like DotA or Tower Defense) will be easier with the new custom game system, that will allow easier searches and filtering of custom maps.

Sometime after the release of StarCraft II, modders will have access to an even more advanced means of sharing their work via Battle.net with the StarCraft II Marketplace. With the Marketplace, players will be able to browse, download, rate, comment on, and even buy mods if their creators choose to put a price tag on their work.

Blizzard strongly believes that providing content creators with the option of being compensated for their work will lead to some truly amazing projects; having a budget will give modders much more freedom to explore and fully realize all their ideas. This in turn will lead to a bigger selection of mods and a greater variety of content on Battle.net


Diablo III on Battle.net

Thus far the Diablo 3 team has given no specifics about how Diablo 3 will interface with Battle.net. They've mentioned numerous planned improvements, such as to trading and finding other players interested in the same sort of game experience as you, but with the game still so far off, and Battle.net undergoing extensive remodeling pre-Starcraft 2, no details have been offered.

Jay Wilson replied (sort of) to a question about this at Blizzcon 2009: [1]

IGN: Considering that this is the big debut for the redesigned Battle.net, have you figured out anything you're planning on doing, with the exception of things like, obviously, easier ways of setting up co-op lobbies or creating panels so that everybody can immediately jump in and start up exactly where they left off?
Jay Wilson:' Well, for us, Battle.net is... we're not quite at that stage. The full extent of our Battle.net development is that we do run through Battle.net. Pretty much everything that we reveal about Battle.net is going to be introduced in Diablo 3. I won't go through all of this because I don't want to take all your time, but the social networking aspects, the easy communication across games, and definitely... some of our big hooks are really good matchmaking, there was some poor matchmaking in Diablo 2, it was kind of esoteric and hard to use. We want a platform that puts you right next to someone else who's into the same thing as you, at the same level. We want you to be able to open up that friends list and say, oh, my friend Steve's killing Diablo, join! And you're right there next to them. We want players to be able to play together very, very easily. That's going to be a lot of work.


Cheating

Jay Wilson said this about cheating:

The way we handle cheating is almost the same across all our games. Battle.net is the same group for all of us except WoW - but they have representation there as well. Can I give specific examples? Not really, because it's kind of technical and I'm not very technical. But the same group that work on Diablo 2 worked on WoW; worked on StarCraft; worked on StarCraft 2 - Security is their obsession. I would hazard to say we have the most security conscious and experienced staff in the world at solving this problem and that's what they will focus on. It's one of the reasons why the online group is a common support group for all us - we all benefit from the experience of all the previous games.


Battle.net Costs And Profits

Blizzard has always (so far, as of January 2010) maintained that it will be possible for gamers to play StaCraft 2 and Diablo 3 for free over Battle.net.

"When a player buys the StarCraft II box at retail, they will have the ability to play on the new Battle.net for free."
--Kevyn "Karune" Yu, Starcraft 2 community manager [2]


Though "free" is a good thing in the opinion of most fans, it's clear from how carefully-worded all these statements have been that Blizzard is considering ways to monetize Battle.net. [3]

Wired.com: So you don't want to say if you're going to monetize through Battle.net or is that going to be discussed later?
Paul Sams: What we’re saying is, if you buy a copy of StarCraft II, you will be in a position to play the game on Battle.net with no additional cost. That's not to say there are no other things there. But, you'll be able to play and have a great experience. But they'll be a lot of different elements; we're going to be pulling a lot of social networking into the Battle.net experience, and they'll be a much more significant focus on e-sports, and so the competitive elements of that gaming experience with ladders and rankings and tournaments and everything you could imagine and more.
We're going to integrate the games that we have into that Battle.net experience so that it feels like a much bigger and more meaningful community made up of all these Blizzard gamers. When I think of StarCraft II, and if there are other things we're going to do from a monetization perspective, it's certainly possible. But again, if you buy the game, you can play on Battle.net with no additional cost.


On top of the monthly subscription fee, World of Warcraft has added various additional revenue streams through allowing players to pay to move their characters between realms or switch their alliance. It's expected that we'll see similar options with Diablo 3; players may be able to pay to move characters between servers, pay for larger stash sizes or to create more characters on a given account.

Another possibility is that Diablo 3 might offer something like the current Diablo 2 ladder character system, but only to paying subscribers. Currently, Diablo 2 realm characters who are created in each new ladder season have special perks non-ladder characters do not. There are numerous high level unique items, cube recipes, and end game quests that only ladder characters can access. This is free in Diablo 2, but in Diablo 3? Other potential bonus content for Diablo 3 subscribers who pay the (monthly?) fee might include ladder rankings of various types, the ability to create more characters per account, special subscriber-only quests, tournaments and PvP rankings, and more.

Note that this is all speculative; the Diablo 3 developers have not yet made any official comments on what will or will not be offered for free over Battle.net.

In terms of the financial model, our ideal, our goal has always been to make the game first. You know, what’s going to make the best game? And then we’ll figure out what we need to do to support that on a financial model side.
--Leonard Boyarsky [4]

Other quotes have been much the same; entirely non-committal about fees in either direction. It's clear that the developers are keeping their options open, but hoping to include some additional revenue streams -- if they intended for Diablo 3 to be just as free as Diablo 2, they've had plenty of opportunities to say so.

"Mike mentioned it in an Activision Blizzard investor meeting [paraphrased] “A player that buys Starcraft 2 at retail will have the ability to play on Battle.net with no additional fee.” I’ll point out that this is a very carefully worded statement."
--Bashiok, Diablo 3 Community Manager [5]

We'll get a much better idea of their plans for Diablo 3 when Starcraft 2 is released and we see what sorts of fee vs. free services it offers, and how those go over with players.

Unknown what these "forms of payment" might be. Image from Battle.net, not part of WoW, July 2009.


Development

Battle.net started as a matchmaking service for Diablo players in 1997, and was revolutionising at the time, as it did not require the player to go out of the game to connect to the service or set up a game with a friend. It had IRC-like chat commands that could be used both inside and outside of the game, and was a very popular way to play Diablo. Diablo unfortunately suffered greatly from hacks and cheating, something Blizzard helped improve in the second iteration of Battle.net, for StarCraft I and Diablo II.

With Diablo II, the Battle.net team was reinforced with more anti-hack measures, and by the release of WarCraft III, there was a whole team dedicated to keeping the network safe from cheaters.

Battle.net fell out of favour to StarCraft players as the network became increasingly outdated and laggy. An unauthorized third party service called iCCup gained popularity. It's essentially a hacked, or at least modified, version of Battle.net, and offers more services and functionality than the original.

"Battle.net 2.0" is a nickname given to the new version of Battle.net by the fans, and the work on it presumably began in late pre-alpha inside Blizzard in 2008. Back then, a great deal was still known about the network, and you can read more about it in the Battle.net 2.0 Article Series publicised by IncGamers' game channels at the time.

Blizzard also stated that services like iCCup would be fought with legal measures when the new Battle.net is released.


Media

Here is a gallery of Battle.net pictures taken from the development period before launch:

  • New Battle.net icon.

  • Login screen.

  • Loading a game of SC2

  • Chat interface.

  • Battle.net profile

  • 1v1 Platinum League

  • Cross-game text/voice chat

  • Creating a custom game

  • Joining custom games.

  • Battle.net 2.0 logo suggestion.


Reference



Blizzard has said little about their plans to enhance revenue streams through Battle.net 2.0, other than pledging to continue some level of free play out of the box for all gamers.


Current Status

Already, Battle.net is quite popular, but Diablo II players are on average 1.2 players per game, meaning the overwhelming majority of games are really net-based Single Player experiences. Blizzard is putting focus on making sure people will have a good time alone, and an even better time in groups.

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