To me personally, not being able to name a game is not too much of an issue especially with the way that it becomes the host that have to manually invite everyone wanted (and fairly easily if everyone is on your friend list, just hoping the friend list isn't limited to like 20-30 like in WC3). As for public games, I say they should at least show the player host's name (especially in cases that you get booted and you want to avoid rejoining the same game 3-4 times in a row only to get rebooted).Xenon wrote:
Hmm... I've thought about this. There are other things that Blizzard has done that may be related:
-You cannot name games.
-You cannot host a map that has not been published (as far as I know, unless they change it later)
All of these serve to prevent "unmoderated" open communication. No fake games that are just advertisements in the game title. No maps used to spread material Blizzard disapproves of (they can ban the person that uploaded it; otherwise "porn maps" might proliferate fast with the ability to use flash movie textures).
There's also the possibility that the Chinese government's endless control demands play a role, but it's unlikely that alone would make Blizzard do this to all realms.
If this is the case, it seems like a severe overreaction to a minor problem, and rather... authoritarian.
Although the lack of map hosting without having to publish does annoy me since I can easily want to test things with a few select others without having to even privately publish (don't want to have 5-15 "test" versions laying around on their servers). Sometimes, it might be that I got an interesting idea of a map but it might be possible that it get removed if they have content checkups and they find it just a bit too much (enter inappropriate-equivalent word of some kind) even if it wasn't that bad.
There is other aspect that might annoy me a lot about the potential publishing-only mentality. Let's say you found that new map that interest you a lot and you play it. Let's say said map gets removed out of publishing for a dumb reason. Then you are screwed out of playing the map or the map version you really want. That's presuming that published maps are "cached" like the current melee maps are thus you can't "republish it" back.
As for "porn" maps, I believe all those "safeguards" won't really cut it anyway. At worst, it will be some cheap porn there and there that nobody really cares due to the probable file limit for the published content of some kind. Heck in both BW and War3, I don't remember seeing even cheap porn maps often on the game list.
