Well, seeing as games have a maximum of 16 players and it's unlikely you'll be playing with half that many, it really is easy to organize a large game in the current system (you are aware of party chat, right?). In addition, clans will have chatrooms, and I assume/hope they will allow non-clan members into said chatrooms.
12 players is very likely. And it's not just large custom games (which for many happened all the time in wc3--ffa's, ww3's, rp's etc), but extends to tournament organization as well. Clans could be as far off as the next expansion so they say, so getting in just basic private chat channel functionality would have been a blessing. Moreover, clan chat rooms alone don't suffice everything you can get of chat channels in general.
And party chat is small and limited comparably.
Well, by all means please enlighten me. And I mean out-of-game chat, not chatting with people in-game or in game lobbies.
That's because they disabled the other method to get RealID tested because it's a beta, not a free game license.
Which is why identifiers were removed; to make this easier.
At release it almost certainly won't be.
The only other method was to provide the full identifier, which was just as bad--and useless now since there are no identifiers. I am hoping that we end up with the same system we have now, only with unique names. But there is no evidence as to what we will actually end up with because blizzard has done very little to communicate. Saying they disabled certain features isn't really comforting, because that could apply to the removal of identifiers as well.
Other than the popularity sorting it's pretty nice. After using the new custom game search I appreciate the fact that maps are only listed once, although popularity sort is pretty stupid.
-No password system for private games means you have to individually invite/keep track of everyone you want in the game.
-No way for players to move between teams on their own, the host has to do it for them.
-No map title screen for joining games means no way to communicate how you want the game to be played
before players clog up your game lobby.
-Auto-joining by type means that one player can effectively block players from joining a certain game by idling while the game is hosted. Since players are directed to maps on a first come first serve basis, new hosts won't get any players until the first map is either full or started/canceled.
-If a map-maker deletes his map from the cloud a player has no way of playing it ever again.
-Unique names for published maps means players will sit on blank maps to reserve their own.
-Hosting on the battle.net cloud means unreasonable restrictions on mapping that will always exist.
-The chat lobby in custom games is even smaller than wc3's pitifully small chat box (one line less vertically, significantly smaller horizontally). I can imagine it will be a nightmare for 12 player games.
-Having to scroll to view all the players in 12-player games is annoying.
All that in addition to the popularity problems. Some of these can be worked around, but they all derive from the fact that the system is unintuitive without locally hosting maps as well. It would have made more sense if maps could only be published to the battle.net cloud if they are exceedingly popular or premium. You could still have an enhanced search by type feature, is that really too hard to imagine?
When you buy software, you are buying a license for one person to use. Why should they support you for not following that?
Even in wow, your license grants you to share your account with one other person in your family. There's nothing about not sharing your wc3 with other individuals in the eula either, just that you can't use it on more than one computer. There's even a clause for legally giving away your wc3 to someone else.
Actually, we are getting mixed signals on this one. Chris Sigaty said they are planning to work towards this at some point in the future but they have other priorities at this time.
We are getting mixed signals on
everything. They've said something about cross region and chat channels and etc. all in the past, but then Frank Pearce comes in and disputes that. Then bashiok (vaguely, somewhat) says something else. The communication has been really poor, but what I do know is that what's missing isn't going to cut it for release. And having been in every other blizzard beta, I can safely say that this scale of change generally doesn't happen this close to release. If I'm wrong, god be blessed.
That's your opinion; I could equally say that I'm not going to pretend that BNet doesn't work in its incarnation, because it does. In fact, I'm provably right and you're provably wrong--perhaps what you meant to say is that it doesn't have the feature list you are looking for?
That's just being facetious. Battle.net does not have the feature list to accomplish a lot of of things in wc3, or accomplish them as easily. Sorry if I wasn't freaking literal enough for you.