It’s a stupid concept that eliminates the strategy concept of starcraft 2.
Being able to alter your gameplay to play specific to an opponent is important for growth in both players regardless of level.
I think that’s why generally gameplay has stagnated rather than it being due to a lack of balance changes or new units.
The introduction of people using barcode handles was the point where the twitch viewer count dropped dramatically.
The introduction of other popular multiplayer games just exacerbated the issues.
The more you add chance to a game, i.e. barcode handles, the more it seems unfair and awkward to people, thereby lowering overall viewer count.
In another aspect, knowing who their favourite streamer is beating is important for overall popularity of the streamer.
Adding something that removes a barcode style handle will help to improve the chances of stream followers for popular players and the streamers will help to make starcraft a more popular game.
Well, first of all, you ask for the impossible.
Imagine they really ban those barcode nicknames. You think the players will immediately go and pick all the different nicknames? No! They will just use some other characters, like “LLLLLLLLLLLL” or “UUUUUUUUUUUU”.
Even if Blizz makes it impossible to use the nickname already used by someone else (which I’d gladly accept, sick and tired of those countless “Alex” guys), the barcode users will just combine characters like “|||I|l|||l||” or “||||||l|||I|” — combinations here are countless. There’s just no possible way to prevent all this.
Second, you’re missing the point about the game stagnation reasons. This game stagnates first and foremost due to the lack of new players — they don’t care for barcodes, they might not even care about the ladder overall, but they do care about the new content, which goes in campaigns, co-op, arcade etc. So no wonder that Activision’s greedy strategy “make as little new as possible, reuse old as much as can” leads to these tragic consequences.
Third, how in tarnation can the barcode nickname decrease streamer’s view count? Just… how?? People watch the SC2 streams to see the gameplay, the nicknames of opponents mean little for them. As for the barcode by the streamer himself, this makes even less sense, since stream viewers actually know who is streaming by seeing Twitch/YouTube nickname and often streamer’s face on webcam too — do you really think that won’t be enough for them and that they should care about the streamer’s ingame nickname?
And fourth, you may think that knowing your opponents name adds it to the strategical aspect, but it’s actually the other way around.
The whole point of this game is not knowing what your opponent’s doing (because of Fog of War), SCOUTING what’s going on in his base and his army, THINKING about what you’ve seen, MAKING CONCLUSIONS about his plan and then COUNTERING it — this is what you call strategy.
Sitting on your ass and not moving out ever until the last push, on the other hand, is just some blind “I’ll do something I want and hope I can win with this” — and this has nothing to do with strategy.
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I never said anything about streamers using barcode as the viewer obviously knows who they are but it exacerbates the “meeehe random makes the game crap” mentality.
Knowing your opponent at a high level changes unit positioning, choice of build order, and a few other MINOR factors that can make a large impact through a game.
Knowing it for the second game causes massive changes in both players again.
It’s the reason that BoX does so well for streams but normal ladder games don’t.
The only other thing I can think of to combat that, which I have put in another thread for a general thing is to have ladder set up so that you could possibly end up in a BoX series with whoever with the option to give up the series without losing points for giving up on the series.
People alter their overall gameplay at high level for it.
This thread is not intended for low league changes nor is it specifically for new viewers.
New viewers will either find it interesting or wont. Either way, for a new player, there is a lot of things to get through before they even touch the multiplayer.
The point is the draw on twitch.
Twitch dictates what games are popular at the moment and having barcodes makes it hard to relate to viewers who is good and worth watching.
Knowing your chosen streamer beat a barcode player means nothing.
Knowing your chosen streamer beat a good or bad player means everything.
At that point, you start to take an interest in the players, and start to think “I could do that” and buy the damn game.
This doesn’t mean much to you or me, but to a new player, it can mean the difference between buying and passing up on the game.
And what prevents you from changing all of that with random enemies? Don’t you actually modify your builds or your strategy according to scouting information throughout the game? Or you just pick some strategy at start and use it till the end, no matter how it actually turns to work?
I find this contradicting.
And why would opponent’s name ever mean something to someone?
Are you trying to say that the viewers should be familiar with most of the players’ nicknames on every region to actually know if the opponent is good or bad?
The best and simplest way to find out how good the opponent is is to watch how he PLAYS. Right now, at this game. And his name means nothing there.
Once again, what barcode names have to do with it?
The viewers may turn into actual players after being impressed by THE GAMEPLAY, not by who plays it.