Tuesday, July 20, 2010

Beta Waves: Down - Status

What a night and what an end to the Starcraft II: Beta. My phone is broken. I hate IP Telephony. It just doesn’t feel as robust as the old school analog version. I want it back. In sheer frustration I broke my keyboard and had to play my last few games with an extremely wobbly keyboard and a broken S-key. Sigh.

So what is the status of the game. Whether Battle.net 2 is up to par compared to the version that shipped with the original Starcraft is still up for debate. On one hand, the automated matchmaking is extremely nice and just about everything else is worse. Except I do remember the chat room splits and frequent disconnects that plagued Battle.net for the first year of vanilla Starcraft.

Race balance-wise I expect many more play styles to be discovered and patches to come. I primarily play Protoss, but have more than 400 games as random behind me in the beta. I’m not sure that makes me qualified to speak about balance, but I’ll do that anyways.
Protoss vs Zerg is probably slightly in Protoss’ favor. I' like that, but don’t know what to change about the game to fix it. Maybe buff Hydralisks slightly? Protoss vs Terran is just ridiculous in Terrans favor. I expect that once people at large figure out how to play Terran they will have an out-of-this-world win rate against Protoss. Basically too few Terrans at the moment understand when to expand and how to transition from the early harass into a solid mid game. That will change and hopefully there will be a patch :-/ How Zerg vs Terran play out I don’t quite know. I suspect that the early game is more fair than in PvT, but that the mid-to-late game is still in Terran’s favor.

I like the smaller national scenes we have here in Denmark and probably in other small countries too. I especially like how we already have starcraftii.dk and sc2replays.dk, who are active and covering the scene as it is. And of course www.dailyrush.dk, which have been here for 10 years or so. Amazing.

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