Star Craft II: Heart of the Swarm

[Tev]

So SC2: Heart of the Swarm has been out for a few weeks now. It's on my list of things to pick up here in May when my finances stabilize a bit and various birthday monies come gushing in. I was wondering if any of you have picked up this expansion yet and what you thought of it. Is it worth the wait we had to endure for "part two" of what shouldn't have needed to be a three part trilogy?

[Kim]

The Butts of Starcraft 2: Heart of the Swarm (http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/04/09/starcraft-2-buttocks/)

Well-handled, tongue-in-cheek critique of the game's presentation of Kerrigan vs the male characters.

[Azisien]

Campaign

I haven't finished it yet but I guess I haven't because I find it a little lackluster. It's too easy a lot of the time (I played WoL on Normal and was occasionally challenged, now I'm playing HotS on Brutal without much difficulty). The story is so god-awful I can barely stand it (sexism included). The gameplay itself is all right. I like the unit evolutions. But it's doing nothing innovative at all thus far It is WoL: The Zerg. A very safe sequel/expansion.

Multiplayer

I like their new UI, and I've started sorta casual laddering from time to time. I dunno, competitive SC has never interested me. It's always felt a lot more like work than play, and I have enough work.

Fuck Blizzard, Actually

When I got HotS, the second day I had registered it (afterwards clearing cookies etc on browser), I got an email saying my Blizzard password had been changed. My account had been hacked somehow, but after a 48-hour wait period I got my account back. During the whole process, Blizzard was shoving massive ads of BUY OUR AUTHENTICATOR in my face.

A few days later I logged on to play some more Campaign, and before I got to loading the saved game, I got booted off Battle.net. Always Online, Always Fun, that's my motto! My smartphone buzzes. An email saying my Blizzard password was changed. COOOOOOL. Hack Combo x2! This time I had SMS verification, so I was able to get my account back the same day. Not without a few ads for Blizzard Authenticators though.

So how about Fuck Blizzard, actually? My personal information, however minimal, is clearly not safe in their hands. They're one of the richest, if not the richest, video game developer in the world. Admittedly they must paint a large target, but in the sum of all my accounts on all the Internets over 15 years, I can't count on the one hand examples of where my account security was breached. It's like the PSN thing, and getting hacked at my Blizzard account twice. Oh, and someone was able to access my World of Warcraft account once, few years back.

They'll be getting no more money from me. I encourage you to put yours elsewhere too.

[Loyal]

They could have created a genetic amalgam of every great writer of the last five centuries and still not have been capable of creating a good plot for HOTS. The story following WoL is that unsalvagable. That said, the campaign itself is fun. Not challenging, because you're overpowered as fuck and can clear a lot of missions using Kerrigan alone, but overpowered in a really fun way. I mean you can get Banelings that - get this - explode into more banelings. Ultralisks that self-rez when killed!

Multiplayer now has unranked play, which is really nice for people like me who get super anxious laddering.

Still waiting on proper updates to the Arcade, since it seems to still favor the monolithic approach of ensuring only the most popular maps ever get played with any consistency, thus ensuring that a depressingly small percentage of custom maps ever gain any traction whatsoever regardless of their quality.

[Grandmaster_Skweeb]

When I got HotS, the second day I had registered it (afterwards clearing cookies etc on browser), I got an email saying my Blizzard password had been changed. My account had been hacked somehow, but after a 48-hour wait period I got my account back. During the whole process, Blizzard was shoving massive ads of BUY OUR AUTHENTICATOR in my face.

A few days later I logged on to play some more Campaign, and before I got to loading the saved game, I got booted off Battle.net. Always Online, Always Fun, that's my motto! My smartphone buzzes. An email saying my Blizzard password was changed. COOOOOOL. Hack Combo x2! This time I had SMS verification, so I was able to get my account back the same day. Not without a few ads for Blizzard Authenticators though.

So how about Fuck Blizzard, actually? My personal information, however minimal, is clearly not safe in their hands. They're one of the richest, if not the richest, video game developer in the world. Admittedly they must paint a large target, but in the sum of all my accounts on all the Internets over 15 years, I can't count on the one hand examples of where my account security was breached. It's like the PSN thing, and getting hacked at my Blizzard account twice. Oh, and someone was able to access my World of Warcraft account once, few years back.

They'll be getting no more money from me. I encourage you to put yours elsewhere too.

I'm going to go out on a limb here, and call me crazy, but if you're getting 'hacked' twice in short period of time like that you're passwords are pretty much weak something fierce. I've done a fair bit of cracking in my time in my network security classes, both as official projects and for funsies, and passwords are about the easiest means of getting access to anything.

Hybrid passwords are even easier to crack than straight up word passwords.

Two-factor authentication is far more effective than relying on a password that with today's level of computer power can be easily dictionary attacked, man-in-middled, sniffed, or simply brute forced if the attacker is lazy and/or very patient (even if the brute force method is the least efficient). While it isn't completely foolproof it makes you a significantly more pain in the ass target to hit and thus lowering your chances of repeated attacks.

Also, fun fact: blizzard makes very little, to almost no, profit on their physical authenticators. If you don't want to order one than use the smartphone app.

But if you insist on not using two-factor authentication for whatever reason then find a book, flip to a random page, and pick a sentence at random. Make that sentence your password.

Also goes without saying that doing a local scan for malware, virus, loggers, rootkits, etc. should be done. Preferably bit level, on a different operating system architecture and in a pre-boot environment.

[Azisien]

I'm going to go out on a limb here, and call me crazy, but if you're getting 'hacked' twice in short period of time like that you're passwords are pretty much weak something fierce. I've done a fair bit of cracking in my time in my network security classes, both as official projects and for funsies, and passwords are about the easiest means of getting access to anything.

Your limb is wrong, my passwords are quite strong. I'd share them with you to dissect, but that would probably drastically diminish their strength. You're crazy.

An alternate profit revenue is probably people re-buying their games. I don't have stats on the occurrence of that, though, it has certainly happened quite a few times within my gaming circle of friends.

[e: I appreciate the advice, though I doubt I need it. My PC was recently reformatted, with KIS and MalwareBytes that run scheduled scans and come up with no threats. Although it's possible I have the Mother Of All Sneaky Viruses/Bugs/Whatevers, I'll believe Blizzard is running a shoddy business first. (Also *Activision*)

[Arcanum]

Well first, Blizzard is probably one of the biggest targets when it comes to passwords being hacked due to the mass profits that can be made from WoW and Diablo 3. And since your battlenet ID is shared across all their games the odds are even worse (one username/password versus three separate ones for SC, Diablo, and WoW). What is extra terrible is that battle.net passwords are not case sensitive. Yeah, that's right, they don't give a shit about your caps, making things quite a bit easier for someone to hack your password.

Anyway, with that out of the way on to actual HotS stuff.

The Plot

This has been covered already. There was no way for them to salvage Kerrigan's story after the clustfuck ending that was WoL. There are only a handful of redeeming things about playing through the campaign, plot-wise. 1) Zeratul continues to be a badass, which has me hopefuly for the Protoss expansion. 2) An awesome character from Brood War shows up (it's Stukov for those wondering, not Duran (that one isn't spoilered so nobody gets their hopes up)) which I thought was great. 3) We learn some more about the Xel'Naga, the history of the zerg, and the Big Bad Shadowy Glowy Eyes guy behind the hybrids and all that (yes I know his actual name, but no point in spoiling that).

I really enjoyed Kerrigan as a hero-turned-antagonist in SC1 and BW, but in HotS they made her a good gal again and it just feels so... generic. Honestly the only reason I played through the campaign was to learn more about what was happening in the Koprulu sector.

Gameplay
As said before, HotS is way easier than WoL. I breezed through it on Hard, not needing to strategize at all. I could build up a mass of whatever new unit I had recently acquired and that would be enough to win me the level. During the last few missions all I did was build up a massive army of ultralisks (that I evolved to respawn when killed, the ability has like a 30-60 second cooldown after they revive so they technically aren't immortal), with a few hydras for anti-air, and steamrolled everything.

I mean I still had fun playing the game, but it was a "I am an unstoppable god/hivemind" kind of fun, not a "shit this is challenging and I need to formulate a good strategy, yes I did it that feels really rewarding" kind of fun.

Multiplayer

Hnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnngggggggggg. Seriously, fuck Blizzard. Fuck them for one very specific reason. This reason right here. (http://eu.battle.net/sc2/en/blog/7629778/Heart_of_the_Swarm_League_Percentages-11_03_2013) 32% of StarCraft players are now in gold league. Why is this bad? Because after going 50/50 with my wins and losses in silver league, I got boosted to gold. Now when I lose, instead of feeling like a learned something with an idea of how to play better in my next game, I get stomped into the ground. Now that's not how all my losses go, just the majority. When I do win, it's when I got lucky and matched against someone of similar skill and the game was pretty close throughout (for the most part, I've had about 2 or 3 games where I stomped the other player, which I felt bad about since I know what it's like on the other end).

The matchmaking system just feels ridiculous. Hell, after losing three games in a row, two of them where I was severely out-classed, the game matched me against a freaking platinum player. I didn't even bother playing that game, lest Blizzard decide to randomly up me to platinum league for no reason.

There are just too many people in gold league for the matchmaking to consistently make decent games.

e- Also, re: Loyal's thing about the Arcade, have you clicked on the "Open Games" tab? Because that shows you a list of all the games that currently have people in the lobby, compared to clicking a game you want to play and since nobody is playing it you get thrown in your own lobby. Basically it's similar to how SC1/BW did their UMS game browsing. Sure most of the open games are still the popular ones, but some times you'll find a gem.

[Grandmaster_Skweeb]

Your limb is wrong, my passwords are quite strong. I'd share them with you to dissect, but that would probably drastically diminish their strength. You're crazy.

password 'strength' is obsolete, is what I'm getting at. There are tools out there that use SSD's and GPU's that can work at rate of 300 billion passwords a second on relatively low expense to set up such a rig to do so. And like Arcanum said, blizz is a big fish with a shitton of accounts to get a high rate of return for minimum time invested.

Trust me when I say you'd be a fool not to use some form of two level authentication. This is my field, man. I've done the research and cut my chops. So while blizz partially at fault for their relatively lax system you're equally at fault for not using freely available means of added security.

Edit: Hell, even passwords aren't required. More often than not the password hash is more readily available and desired than the password itself.

[Azisien]

Fair enough. But, I had the SMS/smartphone authentication on my second hack. So, I guess I don't really follow. Blizzard gets more deducted than I do, because it wasn't until I was hacked the first time that I was prompted to add an extra layer of protection. If they're such a target, they should be responsible for deploying their security measures, not me. Not everyone that buys a Blizzard game will be a network security administrator. And at day's end, Blizz games aren't so spectacular that I need to put up with the forefront of computer security on a bi-weekly basis.

[Grandmaster_Skweeb]

The weakest part of any network is the users, always has been.

There is also no such thing as a foolproof system of network security. Just layers that make the target not worth the time.

Sadly, the smartphone app authenticator has been proven to be easier to circumvent than the dongle authenticator. The unfortunate bit here is Blizz could've planned better for a long-term system of security that can be scaled up for future growth. They grew so big so quickly that keeping the whole thing mum from attackers is virtually impossible.

The sad, but unfortunately true, bit here is that Blizz tends to respond much quicker to accounts that have an authenticator than those that don't.
But I've taken this thread off course too much already, I'll just finish with six to seven bucks is worth the avoidance of headaches down the road.

[synkr0nized]

Where the campaign story went in WoL is basically why I am not motivated to purchase HoS. But some of the unit additions and shit looks exciting.

Still pretty meh about their decision to make it three separate games, but oh well. I guess it was this or expansions.


e: Also, the dongle authenticator is great and pretty painless. The only potential issue is if you think you'd lose it or if you travel and are using your battle.net account for whatever reason. I got one back whenever I decided to play WoW on official servers, but now it basically sits there on my desk doing nothing (since I stopped playing that a year ago).

[Azisien]

Still pretty meh about their decision to make it three separate games, but oh well. I guess it was this or expansions.

Okay to their credit, the "sequel" is only MSRP $39.99, which has been a pretty valid "significant expansion pack" price since expansion packs existed.

[Magus]

The weakest part of any network is the users, always has been.


Well as an example I got an email from Vudu today that they weren't even hacked, someone actually literally broke into their headquarters and stole a bunch of harddrives with user data on them, such as email addresses, real addresses, phone numbers, etc. Also passwords.

They assured me that the passwords were encrypted but encouraged me to change my password anyway, which I did.

I have some of the various other protections of course but I still can't stop people actually physically breaking into places. Doesn't happen that often, I suppose, but still.