So I went back to Brood War...

samusaran253

Yesterday I reinstalled StarCraft: Brood War and went on the original Battle.net for the first time in a very long time. I tried out both the US West and US East servers. However I must admit, I was rather disappointed. I remember playing this game all the time from like 2004 to 2008, like every day for 6 hours a day, even longer on weekends. There were like hundreds of millions of people playing then, and when you logged in there would be public channels numbering up to Brood War USA-25, and there were games every where, the Use Map Settings list had tons of games, and it would add more all the time. When I logged in just now there were only 125,000 people in a game, however that doesn't show the amount of people in public or private chat rooms. And the highest default channel with a lot of people in it was Brood War USA-5.

This is horrible, I remember when this was practically the most popular game in the world, in fact, Battle.net had more players than Xbox Live for many years, and still might have more in numbers of total accounts. But now it's just a shadow of it's former self. Nobody even plays melee anymore, though I guess there's not really much of a point now that Blizzard removed ladder (in like 2009), and so now we are stuck with basic stat-tracking that only tracks our wins/losses/draws for melee games, and we can't advance to ladder games. I see that people are still using bots to advertise their clans however, so at least there is still some clan activity going on, albeit, probably not as much as a few years ago.

I wonder if any people still make new maps for this game, I used to make tons of custom maps and even some mods, which was really cool, but now it seems that everyone is just playing the same stuff that we played a few years ago, only to a lesser extent. Does no one play any zombie games anymore? Those were the best, I pride myself on being a beta tester of and perhaps first person to ever beat Undead City, which even the map maker, who I was good friends with on Battle.net, had been unable to do. It took me a few hundred games to beat it, but I finally beat it, and damn was that an accomplishment.

The people were relatively friendly, albeit not as talkative as before. I only came across one internet tough guy, he claimed to be 22 years old, but I suspect he was 12, he kept talking about how he wanted to go beat up random people on the internet and was asking people for their address and stuff. He was probably a pedophile, come to think of it. There was also 1 guy who lagged, which I'm not even sure how that is possible, seeing as how I used to play using 56k dial-up and I almost never lagged.

By the way, does anyone know the name of that one map? The one where it's like Raccoon City and Undead City, but I think it's called "Dawn of the Dead" or something. It's where you're in a city with other players and there's AI police that attack the zombies, and if I recall correctly, there's like tanks (controlled by no one; p12) that form a barrier, similar to Raccoon City, but it's harder than Raccoon City. If anyone knows the name of this map, please let me know. All-in-all, it's still an infinitely better game than StarCraft II.

Funky

Not really sure what the UMS scene is like but most BW players have moved off of the normal battlenet as far as I know. Most play on iCCup, they have ladders etc and the latency is pretty much lan latency however they do it.

pixelburp

samusaran253 wrote: »

[...] All-in-all, it's still an infinitely better game than StarCraft II.

Interesting article; it's always slightly depressing jumping onto multiplayer servers of old / dead games.

But on the last line? I don't think that's a fair comparison - don't forget that SC1 has had... what? 10+ years of solid patching to bring it to the level it's at. SC2 is only a couple of years old, with a handful of patches. The equivalent exp. pack hasn't even come out yet!

Spacedog

ROC pisses on both BW, and SC2

--Fanboyism rulllllllllllllllllllllllez!

NeoSlicerZ

Play on Brain/Fish/iCCup. Fish has like 30k+ players.

IRL_Sinister

Spacedog wrote: »

ROC pisses on both BW, and SC2

--Fanboyism rulllllllllllllllllllllllez!

Reign of Chaos? o_O

DeVore

Fanboyism, in all its forms, is the Religious Fundamentalism of the tech age.


DeV.

Funky

Spacedog wrote: »

ROC pisses on both BW, and SC2

--Fanboyism rulllllllllllllllllllllllez!

Don't even know what you mean by ROC but what I do know is TROLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOOLOLOLOLOL

Sir Digby Chicken Caesar

Spacedog wrote: »

ROC pisses on both BW, and SC2

--Fanboyism rulllllllllllllllllllllllez!

never thought I'd hear you say that after you and bicky chewed me out of it for saying broodwar wasn't as good as age of empires

RoyalMarine

Sir Digby Chicken Caesar wrote: »

never thought I'd hear you say that after you and bicky chewed me out of it for saying broodwar wasn't as good as age of empires

but its not as good as AOE

seraphimvc

RoyalMarine wrote: »

but its not as good as AOE

someone call the SC mod to ban this guy...

oh wait...:D