What are the main 'Battle.net' differences between SC2 and Warcraft III?

Question

Some people complain about Battle.net 2.0 in StarCraft 2 saying that there are many features missing from Warcraft III, like for example 'clan support'. What are the main differences between these games (having only Battle.net in mind)?

Asked by ClarityForce

Answer

Warcraft 3 had:

• Clan Support, which meant that you could actually put your account in a clan and have it assigned certain ranks. It also included a custom chat room for your clan, where the clan leader had a shiny golden icon (Oh how I loved it) and could ban people from his village.

• Automated tournaments. Basically every other day, there was a completely automated tournament, where you just had to win enough games in 2 hours to get placed into the playoffs and the play a normal elimination grid from there. There were special rewards for this, e.g. winning a game in the RO8 of the playoffs was actually worth 5 wins or something for your account, which helped you unlock some of the race portraits for your accounts faster.

• In Warcraft 3, you could actually save multiplayer games in custom games and continue them later. This enabled everybody in tournaments, for example, to quickly save the game if it started lagging and continue it at a later point. In SC2, if it lags too hard and you disconnect, the game is basically gone and you're screwed.

• You could create as many accounts as you wanted. Wether this was a good or a bad thing for the game shall not be discussed here, but it is something that you can't do in SC2.

• You could freely switch around between all servers. A couple of clicks and you were playing on the Korean ladder.

These are the things that SC2 doesn't have, but there are other things which both games kinda have but which many players consider being better implemented in WC3:

• In WC3, your account had a simple, server-wide identifiable level. When you earned a certain amount of experience (gained by winning games), you leveled up (you also lost experience when you lost games). The advantage of this was that you actually had a meaningful representation of your placement relative to other players in the ladder. Due to the league and division system it is not that way in SC2. I still remember the day when Grubby went to Korea and actually reached Level 60 (something that only very, very few players did before him).

• Albeit it is possible to do the same thing in SC2 to a degree, WC3 had an official, more expansive browser-based stats-database for all accounts including a wide myriad of stats based on everything you could imagine. You could literally go to the website and see that your winning percentage against race x on map y was n% when you used a blade-master as the first hero, and k% when you used a farseer as the first hero.

As a bonus (it isn't WC3 so not what you asked for, but this is one of the most commonly requested features for BNet 2.0), in BW you could watch replays together with multiple people online. This feature is currently not available in Starcraft 2, but it wasn't in Warcraft 3 either.

These are just a couple of things, and I will keep adding things as I think of them.

Answered by heishe

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Warcraft 3 obtain phat lewt in early Orc stages

Question

In the early Orc stages in Warcraft 3 I recall there being a chest on a small island that is inaccessible. This chest is an item called phat lewt. My question is how do I go about obtaining this item and what is its value in the game? I understand the concept of receiving phat lewt, just wanted to know what it is in WC3.

Answer

That island is inaccessible even once you reveal it with a cheat, so there's no way to reach the chest in the campaign.

According to WoWWiki, it's valued at 500 gold, and it's used in practice as a filler item for NPC heroes in the campaign while not having any other utility at all:

In practice, Phat Lewt is used throughout the campaign as an "inventory slot filler" for non-player heroes. Phat Lewt is flagged as the most powerful item in the game despite not actually doing anything, thus AI heroes will never drop the item. Many heroes have 1 to 6 Phat Lewts in their inventories throughout the campaign, but they are always invisible to players.

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what does unit production mean in the post game stats after playing dota?

Question

I know the main ranking list is the one shown when the game ends, but it's bothering me why some heroes almost always have the most unit production value? what does it represent since no one can really create units in dota?

Answer

Unit Production is just a hold-over from the fact that this is a Warcraft 3 map - the stat is standard in the normal game. It does have a disproportionate impact on the end rankings, though, so it does heavily skew the results.

Certain skills of heroes in DotA are performed by essentially creating a whole bunch of units for a limitted time. For example, Dwarven Sniper's Scattershot (if he still has that, it's been a while) creates a lot of units in order to produce the effect, so he tends to be one of the "high unit production" heroes. The logic behind it varies based on the hero and the skill in question, but if you look at which heroes tend to have high unit production, you can usually figure out what skill is the cause of these rankings.

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SC2 statistics by player like WC3 does it?

Question

In WC3 TFT when you're doing ladder, you can view a lot of statistics online, e.g:

http://classic.battle.net/war3/ladder/w3xp-player-stats.aspx?Gateway=Azeroth&PlayerName=Jorgie

I've been trying to find the similar information for SC2 but the most I can see is a basic match history and the # of wins, am I missing something? It would be nice to view a detailed statistical information about your profile.

Thanks!

Answer

SC2 Ranks has a match history, and can also show win percentage by map, but I believe they skim off the Battle.Net API, so it won't be any more than Blizzard provides in the first place.

If you want more information about your own matches, SC2 Gears can look through all your past replays and give you much more information. What it can do is too extensive to list here, check out their features page.

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