Battle.net

Diablo

When the service initially launched with Diablo in November 30, 1996, Battle.net offered only a few basic services like chatting and game listings. Players could connect to the service, talk with other gamers and join multiplayer games of Diablo. Besides user account data, no game data was stored on the Battle.net servers. When a player connected to a game, they would be connecting directly to the other players in the game. No data was sent through the Battle.net servers. While this made the service quick and easy to use, it quickly led to widespread cheating since players using cheats could modify their game data locally. However, since there was an option to create private games, many players ended up playing with people they knew.

StarCraft

The release of StarCraft in 1998 increased usage of the Battle.net service significantly. Features such as ladder ranking and game filters were added to the service. Battle.net grew even larger after the release of the expansion pack StarCraft: Brood War, with tens of thousands of players logged on at any given time (even in the present day). StarCraft Battle.net was especially successful in South Korea, where the number of players logged on was often many times that of the United States.

StarCraft also brought with it a new copy protection scheme using CD keys. Under Diablo, Battle.net would allow any client to connect to the service. With StarCraft, only those players with a valid and unique CD key – a generated 13-digit number distributed with each boxed game – were allowed onto the service. Only one person could connect to Battle.net using a specific CD key at a time. CD-Keys could also be muted (unable to chat in channels or whisper), voided (restricted to The Void channel), jailed (both muted and voided) or banned from Battle.net entirely. Every Blizzard game since StarCraft has used the CD key system to connect to Battle.net. StarCraft: Brood War used as its CD-key whatever CD-key was found on the original StarCraft on that computer, and was thus only installable if the original was already installed. With the release of the Gateway system in Brood War (selectable regional server clusters), two players can play at the same time, as long as they are on different gateways. Given how the gateways are expectedly separate from each other, each with their own games list and user accounts that are not shared across the other gateways, it is still maintained that they cannot play in the same game nor chat with each other, etc.

Diablo II

Diablo II was released in 2000 to much fanfare. The main highlight of Diablo II as it relates to Battle.net was that the game used the client–server model. The game was no longer simulated on each player's computer, but instead was run on Blizzard's server. This also meant that all of the character data for the game was stored on the Battle.net servers. The game also has an open character feature on Battle.net which stored the player's character on the client. This allowed players to play characters locally or on a LAN, and then use those same characters on Battle.net. However, any open games played on Battle.net were not protected from cheating by other players since they could have modified their characters locally. Diablo II also had a unique feature that would show the players in the Battle.net chat room as avatars who looked like their characters did in the game. It also used a different Battle.net interface than previous games, where previously there were mainly only color differences. There was also expanded ladder support including a "Hardcore" ladder which listed players whose characters would be removed permanently if they died in-game. Again, with Diablo II usage of Battle.net increased steadily, climbing even higher with the release of the expansion pack Diablo II: Lord of Destruction in 2001.

Warcraft III

Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos was released in 2002 and its expansion pack, Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne, was released in 2003. The release of these two games brought with them a number of new features to the online service. The most significant feature to be added was probably the concept of Anonymous Matchmaking. This feature allowed a user who wanted to play a game to simply press a button and automatically be matched up with one or more other players who were similar in skill (based on ranking) and also wanted to play a game. This allowed for people to get into games quickly and easily. It also reduced win-trading, where two people would purposely win and lose games to artificially raise their rank on the ladder. The matchmaking concept was also expanded to team games in a feature called "Arranged Teams". In an arranged team game, you could make a team with one or more friends, which was then anonymously matched up with another team of the same size and rank. However, a strategy was introduced on how to cheat the automated 'fair' matchups, called 'Abusing', simply by someone losing the Arranged Team Games intentionally with one ally so that with another ally (who wants to gain wins easily) won't find it difficult because the automatic matchups would put the two players up against relatively unskilled players. Automated tournaments were added in the expansion, where players would compete to be crowned tournament champion in a series of games played throughout the day. In addition to the new game styles, a slew of other features were added including selectable chatroom icons unlocked based on the player's number of wins, a friends list, and clan support.

World of Warcraft

World of Warcraft initially did not support Battle.net, having separate accounts from Battle.net once until the revamp of Battle.net on March 20, 2009 which forced players to merge their World of Warcraft accounts with the new Battle.net accounts. The features of Battle.net utilized in World of Warcraft include allowing players to engage in cross-realm, cross-faction and cross-game chat, which allows players to talk with their friends on their Real ID friends list, from other factions, other servers as well as other games such as StarCraft II and Diablo III. On November 11, 2009 Blizzard Entertainment made Battle.net a mandatory feature for World of Warcraft players.

StarCraft II

StarCraft II is the first game to natively support the new revamped Battle.net online interface. It is split into three installments: the base game with the subtitle Wings of Liberty, expansion pack Heart of the Swarm, stand-alone expansion pack Legacy of the Void and downloadable content mission packs Nova Covert Ops. The new Battle.net was planned with a marketplace for StarCraft II which would allow players to download both free and paid maps, but this feature has not yet been implemented. Instead, regular and custom maps are available for everyone and sorted by a popularity system based on total playtime. The new interface includes a chat service which is similar to that of Instant Messengers which allows players to interact across different games. Initially not having been shipped with regular, channel-based chat rooms, this was later added in a patch after both community and gaming media noted the lack of the feature. The game also supports VoIP for players.

Diablo III

Blizzard confirmed on June 28, 2008 at the Worldwide Invitational in Paris, France that Diablo III would feature Battle.net support. Currently, a Battle.net account is now mandatory in order to play Diablo III.

Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft

Hearthstone requires a Battle.net account to play.

Heroes of the Storm

Heroes of the Storm requires a Battle.net account to play.

Overwatch

Overwatch requires a Battle.net account to play.

Battle.net 2.0

Battle.net was revamped by Blizzard in 2009 and officially unveiled on March 20, 2009, it was further elaborated on during Blizzcon 2009. The new Battle.net contains three unique sections. The first allows players to connect all Battle.net accounts, World of Warcraft characters and friends list together and integrate them into a unified single Battle.net account. Players can also unlock achievements in-game which would in turn unlock avatars and decals which would be shown on the player's profile, the decals can also be seen in-game on the player's units.

The second section consists of making Battle.net into a competitive platform for players which involves a new improved matchmaking system, simplifying the process of players organizing games. The ladder system has also been revamped; the system classifies players into certain leagues according to their level of competitiveness. Players would then compete against others who have a similar skill level to their own, albeit across leagues. There is also a special practice league to practice and hone skills, where game speed is reduced and maps are designed to create a slower pace of the game. The party system works similar to that of World of Warcraft where players with friends would join together and enter games as a party.

The final section involves the new chat system which involves a new system similar to Instant Messaging across games. Players may communicate with friends across games, servers, and characters.

Another new element is the use of an online marketplace which allows player or map makers to create and sell their maps online through Battle.net, players can also browse and search through maps online and rank them by player ratings as well as download both free and paid maps. This is however not implemented yet.

On May 5, 2010, Blizzard revealed that Battle.net 2.0 would be integrated with social networking site Facebook, "linking the world's premier online gaming platform with the world's most popular social platform".

Security

To help users protect their Battle.net accounts, Blizzard implemented a two-factor authentication option for the service. Launched in 2008, this was initially through a separate device that could be purchased from Blizzard, encoded with the user's credentials. The device fit on a keychain and would generate pseudorandom numbers linked to the player's account, which they would enter when logging into Battle.net to affirm their identity. Later, Blizzard introduced the Battle.net mobile application for iOS and Android platforms in 2009, replicating the same functionality. An update during June 2016 simplified the process, allowing the user, when logging into their Battle.net account from a computer, to simply press a single button on their connected mobile device to affirm their authenticity. Though not required to use Battle.net, some game aspects require the user to enable two-factor authentication through either the device or mobile app, such as Diablo III's Auction House (which uses real money transactions).

Growth history

By November 1997, Blizzard claimed that Battle.net had 2.2 million games played, 1.25 million different users, and averaged 3,500 new users each day. By April 1999, it was reported that Battle.net had 2.3 million active users, and more than 50,000 concurrent users. By September 2002, their active user count had jumped to 11 million. By September 2004, their active user count was up to nearly 12 million, spending more than 2.1 million hours online each day, and they had an average of 200,000 concurrent users, with a peak concurrent user count of 400,000. In 2006, Blizzard claimed that Battle.net, when combined with the World of Warcraft subscriber base, was a leader of online gaming, noting that "even Xbox Live is not even close to us". In November 2008, Blizzard banned over 357,700 accounts that were found to be using third-party hacks.

Community content

A community of developers has arisen around Battle.net. Many unofficial clients are available for Battle.net, and most of the protocol used by Battle.net-enabled games has been reverse-engineered and published by volunteers.

Also, several communication tools have been made, like a "whisper" tool, so that a player could talk to their friends even if they are in a game.

Custom games (using maps that were not made by Blizzard) have helped build the community, and now are a substantial portion of the games played. Among the most popular of these games in Warcraft III are tower defense maps and Hero solo maps (like Defense of the Ancients, and arena maps) or pure RTS games like Civilization Wars, where the player develops their economy, tech, and unit diversity but the player has no control of their units.

bnetd

A group of gamers reverse engineered the network protocol used by Battle.net and Blizzard games, and released a free (under the GNU GPL) Battle.net emulation package called bnetd. With bnetd, a gamer is not required to use the official Battle.net servers to play Blizzard games.

In February 2002, lawyers retained by Blizzard threatened legal action under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) against the developers of bnetd. Blizzard games are designed to operate online exclusively with a set of Blizzard-controlled servers collectively known as "Battle.net". Battle.net servers include a CD key check as a means of preventing software piracy.

Despite offers from the bnetd developers to integrate Blizzard's CD key checking system into bnetd, Blizzard claims that the public availability of any such software package facilitates piracy, and moved to have the bnetd project shut down under provisions of the DMCA. As this case is one of the first major test cases for the DMCA, the Electronic Frontier Foundation became involved. For a while negotiations were ongoing to resolve the case without a trial. However, the negotiations failed and Blizzard won the case on all counts: the defendants were ruled to have breached both StarCraft's End User License Agreement (EULA) and the Terms of Use of Battle.net. This decision was appealed to the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals, which also ruled in favor of Blizzard/Vivendi on September 1, 2005.

Privacy and Real ID

On July 6, 2010, Blizzard announced that they planned to change the way their forums worked to require that users identify themselves with their real name. The reaction from the community was overwhelmingly negative with multiple game magazines calling the change "foolhardy" and an "Epic Fail". It also resulted in the largest user response ever on the Blizzard forums. This included personal details of a Blizzard employee who gave his real name "to show it wasn't a big deal". Shortly after revealing his real name, personal information was posted that included his phone number, picture, age, home address, and other details.

Some technology media outlets suggested the change was a good idea and would benefit both Battle.net and the Blizzard community. Others worried that Blizzard would open their fans up to real-life dangers such as stalking, sexual predators, and employment issues, since a simple Google search by a user's employer would reveal their online activities. There was also concern that this would lead to real-life harassment and safety concerns, especially for women and transgender gamers who are already harassed quite often in-game.

Blizzard initially responded to some of the concerns by saying that the changes would not be retroactive to previous posts, that parents could set up the system so that minors cannot post, and that posting to the forums is optional. However, due to the huge negative response, Blizzard President Michael Morhaime issued a statement rescinding the plan to use real names on Blizzard's forums for the time being.

2012 hacking

During 2012, Blizzard suffered a number of incidents related to security. In May 2012, shortly after Diablo III's launch, they discovered a number of accounts that had been hacked using traditional means through password knowledge, with affected game characters being stripped of in-game possessions that could be sold for money. Blizzard noted at this time that those accounts affected did not use their authentication option, and made changes to try to improve security, such as the above authentication requirement for the game's Auction House. A few months later on August 4, 2012, Blizzard reported that their Battle.net servers had been hacked into, with the perpetrators gaining access to some personal information, including user e-mail addresses, answers to security questions, and scrambled passwords, but not enough for user accounts to be compromised, according to Blizzard. Blizzard required all players on Battle.net in North America to change their password and suggested all users change their security questions.

These security breaches led to a class-action lawsuit against Blizzard in November 2012, claiming that the company was making a profit from the sale of Authenticator devices rather than using the money to enhance the security of their own servers, and that they failed to notify affected users about the August data breach in a timely manner. Most of the claims in the suit were summarily dismissed in favor of Blizzard in July 2013, primarily as the platiffs could not show any harm they suffered from these breaches, and the remaining claims related to Battle.net Authenticator promotional claims were resolved through mediation. The case was ultimately closed in February 2014.

General criticism

Public opinion of the new Battle.Net has been mixed among fans since StarCraft II's release. Lacking a classic chat interface throughout the beta and after release, the feature was only added after large fan feedback on the official forums and attention to the topic on gaming media. To this day, StarCraft 2's custom scene — that is, custom maps and scenarios created by players and community enthusiasts (sometimes incorrectly referred to as "mods") — is very small (both in terms of maps available and players playing them) compared to both of its predecessors, WarCraft 3 and StarCraft, despite a more powerful editor. Both limits imposed upon map makers (limited upload, limited rights) and the sorting of maps through a "popularity system", where a very limited selection of maps attract attention, are causes of this issue. Several prominent features of previous games, like shared watching of replays directly on Battle.Net and multiple accounts per copy, have also not made it to StarCraft II. In-game support for clans, also present in its predecessor Warcraft III, was eventually added to the game two and a half years after release.

Games by Battle.net version

Battle.net Classic

Restricted Chat Functionality

Battle.net 2.0