If I survived Moletrap, I can handle Khalador. Though really, I focus on Code S more than Code A
I’ve been hearing a lot of positive review on STParting’s Protoss play. Supposedly he’s the Protoss Bass Ass as of late.
Developer Update with Production Director Chris Sigaty
by Chris Sigaty
May 7, 2012 9:00 AM PDT
Greetings fellow StarCraft II players! The past couple weeks have been amazing for the StarCraft II community. At the Dreamhack Open we saw the Swedish “Spoon Terran,” Thorzain, triumph over GSL champion Polt in front of a hometown crowd in an amazing series. That same weekend, the Major League Gaming Spring Arena finals went to best of 7 games to see DongRaeGu victorious against MarineKing, avenging a loss in the Winter Championship. Looking ahead, Team Liquid StarLeague 4 was just announced here and is already getting a lot of excitement from the community. And finally, we have exciting news coming out of Korea as KeSPA and OnGameNet commit to all-new StarCraft II leagues, joining GomTV’s GSL and GSTL to create an all-new StarCraft II eSports landscape. Add all of that to the 2012 Blizzard World Championship Series, and the StarCraft II community is already off to an epic 2012 in what could be the most exciting eSports year yet.
In the midst of all this great community news, we want to announce some of the exciting things we’re working on this year for StarCraft II. Here’s a list of some of the features we are planning to release at or around the launch of Heart of the Swarm:
**
Multiplayer resume from replay
Global Play
Multilanguage support
Clan/group system
Unranked matchmaking
Multiplayer replay viewing**
Let’s go into more detail on each of these, starting with multiplayer resume functionality. We know how important eSports is for the StarCraft II community, and it’s important to us too. For some time now we have been discussing ways to improve StarCraft II to ensure that tournaments both large and small run as smoothly as possible. While we are discussing many different improvements, we’ve heard your feedback and are creating a way that games can be continued if they are ended prematurely during an eSports event. We have been investigating solutions to this issue for some time, but we expect to offer the ability to resume play from a replay at or around the launch of Heart of the Swarm.
Some of you may have read details about Diablo III Global Play, which will allow Diablo III players to create characters in different regions from their home region so they can play with friends in other parts of the world. We know this is something StarCraft II players have been asking for, and we’re working hard to make it available along with multilanguage support, at or around the release of Heart of the Swarm. We’ll have information as we get closer to Heart of the Swarm’s release.
We continue to read your passionate requests for clan support. We can confirm that we are building a clan/group system that will be released with Heart of the Swarm. We also intend to have our first version of unranked play so you will have the ability to match-make against like-skilled players without having to affect your ladder ranking while you practice off-race or experiment with a new build order.
We’ll also be offering a beta sneak peek of Heart of the Swarm to attendees of the MLG Spring Championship on June 8–10 at the Anaheim Convention Center in Anaheim, California. Additionally, we will be releasing news in the next few weeks about how your participation in the upcoming Arcade (1.5) beta can win you chances to get into the upcoming Heart of the Swarm multiplayer beta test.
It’s shaping up to be an amazing year for StarCraft II. Can you believe that Flash will soon be competing in StarCraft II? Before we sign off, we wanted to call attention to a newly created StarCraft II magazine, GLHF magazine, created by a passionate group of StarCraft players. The first issue features some high production quality in our opinion and is well worth checking out. See you online!
The StarCraft II Team
So…still no LAN support?
Just so you know its never going to happen with any Blizzard game in the future at least that is their stance. To avoid piracy which is unfortunate because I think most of us remember the joys of LAN play with friends and large tournaments that are not in our near future 
To be fair I understand why they are not doing it as well.
MLG is straight live right now with SC 1 stars Flash and Jaedong playing SC2
Funny how new school Blizzard killed SC 1
Man, DRG really had a mastermind plan in the last game of the grand finals. Really unusual transitions. Props to Alicia for some nearly clairvoyant defense too.
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not playing consistently, but I’m still decent. 
What else are you playing now a days?
real life 
i’m almost certain the old bw vets will not be superstars in sc2. this is because sc2 has too many scrub friendly herp derp units that prevent superior players from using their micro to win. fungal growth prevents movement, so you can’t do shit about it. ditto force fields. ditto concussive shells. too many stupid abilities in the game.
for example, in sc1, if you a-moved vultures into dragoons, the vultures would die. but if you were a pro, you could surround the goons with your vultures, lay mines all around them, and win. so that unit would become 20x better in the hands of a better player.
that dynamic is missing in sc2. example. a collosus is a herp derp AOE unit. doesn’t matter if you are fucking bisu, i can micro a collosus just as well as you. at best, a pro can make a unit maaaybe 1.5 better due to his superior micro.
oh and the macro mechanics make for retardedly powerful all ins which means even foreigner scrubs can occasionally take games off korean pros, which was impossible in bw. for example, goody beating MMA. /facepalm. stephano and naniwa are legit though.
so the only real way pros can differentiate themselves is through strategy and positioning and multi tasking. but since skill isn’t nearly as big a factor, the tournament scene is volatile. witness how champions come and go but can’t be consistent at all. jijaki wins GSL and falls off the face of the earth. this shit is common, because the game was designed horribly. just like diablo 3.
still kind of entertaining to watch, but vastly inferior to brood war.
I dunno if I’d necessarily agree with that. You can’t just take the most braindead units and extrapolate that to everything else. Blink stalker/Viking positioning battles take place around the Colossus, which is pretty micro intensive. Sure the colossus themselves are fire and forget, but that doesn’t mean the entire game is. Plus even now Colossus are under microed, how many times in a big battle I see them firing on a lone unit instead of a clump of units.
The fact that the game is accessible to more than a few players willing to dedicate their life to playing is good in my eyes. I think I’d like to see some more diverse, micro based units made in the expansions (Phoenix, Infestor, Hellions) to promote player skill coming through, but to say that there isn’t any right now is a bit disingenuous
blizz tried to make it a casual friendly and a competitive rts, and those two are diametrically oppossed goals. its just not possible. but its pointless to make it casual friendly now because nobody plays the game anymore. the player base has dwindled. most people just watch the game now, which is fine, because its still very fun to watch the pros go at it.
and yes there are micro based units, but you can improve those units so much via skill. here is a day 9 clip where he talks about this problem.
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and that’s a problem. let’s take a cool unit like the phoenix. its so much fun to harass with them. but nope, once they throw down an infestation pit, they just fungal you and then all your phoenix die. the problem is there is nothing you can do to respond to a fungal. because your units can’t move. bad design. and too many sc2 abilities take away meaningful responses from the opponent. so instead of an interesting dynamic where both players react to each other in an engagement, one uses a skill, and the other player can’t do shit. makes the game less interesting to play and watch, because there goes all micro. that’s why force fields are terrible.
so i highly doubt jaedong or flash will dominate. as evidence of this i point out the volatility of the tournament scene where amazing players like nestea can lose to guys like haypro at MLG. skill is no longer a huge differentiating factor, because all the top koreans are roughly equally good at multitasking and APM. so they’re all capable of winning GSL, but they’re all capable of randomly losing to a lower tier player as well.
I half agree, and I half don’t. Stuff like Fungal -> Banelings are exciting to watch. Most people who watch football don’t care about the intricate lineman micro going on between the two lines, regardless of how intense and important it is. They care about the sacks and the long passes. This is what is exciting. So I don’t buy the argument that those skills that reduce micro ability of both players make the game more boring to watch. I do think it helps to lower the difficulty a bit for pros, which in turn does make it harder to separate from the rest of the pack.
However I think a lot of the foreigners you’re talking about are playing way more than you give them credit for. Way more than BW days, there is a ton of money and sponsors and a lot of foreigners are on par with low to mid tier koreans these days
I think there is a pretty distinct difference between SC1 and SC2 when it comes to the level of difficulty and the level of depth. But I’m not entirely sure that the issue is bad design with abilities. I do agree that yes, there’s not much you can do when your stuff gets fungal’d, but SC1 had similar spells that you simply could not respond to–Lockdown and Dark Swarm and Stasis Field. It’s true that AOE/freeze spells in SC2 are a lot more severe and require a lot less skill to pull off, but if that’s contributing to the issue of SC2 lacking depth, I don’t think it’s the fault of the skills alone. But hell if I know what the problem is.
Day9’s complaint/observation about SC2 lacking definitive depth is. . .premature I think. His point is valid, and I’ll agree that there’s some stuff in SC1 that I desperately wish was in SC2–vulture micro and muta micro being the big ones. And I’ll also agree that the inherent level of maximizing a units effectiveness seems much higher in SC1 than in SC2. But I think that’s more an issue of SC2 being a relatively young game, where we haven’t really discovered everything as of yet.
The one thing I do want to point out is that Blizzard’s attitude towards SC2 is awful. I totally agree with fishjie in that Blizzard is doing its best to please both progamers and casual gamers, and that’s just going to leave both parties unhappy. The worst bit is Blizzard’s attitude towards patching. Much of the fun in games (fighting games too) is finding tiny, miniscule things that you can exploit to give you minute advantages. It’s like C. Viper’s stair kick loop in MvC3. Pretty impractical, but if you can do it consistently, there’ll be one day where it’ll give you a minute advantage, and it’ll look flashy as hell to boot.
But Blizzard, for whatever reason, is avid on removing these kinds of things, which makes the game more bland IMO. Things like individual zealot charge micro, viking flower, or mineral boosting are all things that reward hardcore players that have the APM to pull it off, but don’t necessarily give them a blatant advantage if they can (except for mineral boosting; that might have been kind of problematic). But Blizzard patched these things away, because it just doesn’t fit into their vision of what SC should be. Which is just depressing as hell.
dust the dirt of the thread… the HOTS beta has started, people are streaming that shit.
Anyone excited for MLG!!!
I will be when Rain gets cheesed out of the open bracket
Crazy how much progress Flash has made in SC2 to 2 OH Grubby. I’m a big Grubby fan, but I just wish he could do better in SC2.