Blizzard should store replays themself.

Lately I gave this a lot of thought.

I'm a wc3 ffa player, currently ranked 50 on the euro server.
I love playing ffa games and I love watching them as well.

Unfortunately the ffa community isn't what it used to be. Many great players left because of all the maphackers and disc hackers.

Because of this I'm watching some older replays now, by players I admire but aren't playing anymore.

The problem is, most of their replays are gone. Fansites only keep them for a while and then remove them and some great entertainment is gone forever.

This made me think, why isn't blizzard storing every replay on their own servers? yeah I know, there are millions of games played each year. So what. That's some terrabytes yes.
It's not that that kind of serverspace isn't easily affordable for a company like blizzard. Look at the amount of stuff google is storing for example.

This gives so many benefits.

- old replays can always be viewed again
- when many people accuse someone of maphacking, blizzard can actually put someone on it investigating the maphackers games. They could even make some voting system "This player maphacks". And only investigate people with votes in the top 1000 every month, a team of just a few persons can do that.
- when you don't have much time to crawl through all the fansites but want to follow one player you can now easily do that, it's easy to create a replay search system when you have all of them
- metadata benefits, all kind of extra information can be extracted, statistics can be calculated
- people don't need to store all these replays themself anymore, because blizzard provides them with this great service.

I didn't play sc1 for a while now but I fully intend to play sc2.
I really hope this will be one of the battlenet changes.

 

I think this is a great idea. Supreme Commander is a game with a similar mechanism. Once you play a game, gpgnet(supcom version of battlenet) asks you if you want to upload the replay to their server. You can then search through their database of replays and find ones you want to watch. I tend to search for the maps that have the top players names in them .

With this in mind I would love to see Blizzard have this feature. Not only to spot out map hackers, but so people can easily learn from whoever is best (probably will be me... lol no just jokes ).

 

1v1? lol, seems good just well we all know Blizzard is lazy :O

 

All they have to do is put some effort into battle.net, because the starcraft: broodwar battle.net was... well... just hopless. This replay thing would be good. Also being able to upload your maps to b.net would be handy too.

 

Blizzard is known for taking theyre sweet time devolping games

 

Great topic. I'm for it.

 

you do reaize that therre are billions of games?

 

Yeah so?

That's just gigabytes and terrabytes we're talking about, should be no problem at all

 

But we'res the profit? Blizzard would just lose money on the server costs for no advantage to themselves, it's just not a realistic thing to ask blizzard to do.

 

They allready plan that with new 2.0 BattleNet server it will be something like facebook (but look more like myspace) and yes all replayes and all stats will be there if u choice to upload (after finish every game).

 

It's a nice idea but I'd like to see this regulated without having worthless games uploaded. It would save a lot of space and cater for better entertainment.

This is only true if you have a copy of the game with a matching version number. However, storing replays on b.net would not solve version mismatch - but the idea that someone can install a new copy, patch it with an old patch (possibly also hosted on b.net and have a nice version selection menu?) and then download a replay and watch it does sound nice. But to be perfectly honest I don't think any kind of bandwidth/system combo available today would be up for this huge task.

 

Storage is one thing. Bandwidth is another. This would take up a lot of bandwidth.

 

Bandwidth is only taken up when information is moving. Game data is already moving through the servers, so there wouldn't be a bandwidth issue. There is still the question of what's the point? Most games aren't even worth watching.

 

I'm talking about as far as getting the replays back to the people. Still, it's not the biggest problem, but, like you said, it's so pointless that even if the amount of bandwidth used is small it would be a waste. I'd rather them just keep working on making Battle.net have less latency.

 

I think on leagues, there should be the option to upload the replay, that way newbs like me can download them easily and watch them.