Robert Bridenbecker, Blizzard’s VP of online technology, has taken the time to provide some revealing details as well as answer a short Q&A in a session hosted in Samsung City Hyatt Hotel. The original articles have been released in Korean, and are available here and here. A kind soul has posted the full translation on Battle.net’s forums soon after the articles went live.

According to the information released today, Battle.net 2.0 will immensely improve community features. It will create a better competitive environment that players can enjoy and also will make changes to ladder and league.

Also, Blizzard is currently setting the new battle.net release date to around April and here are the scheduled contents:

• Achievements
• Community related contents
• Player’s detailed connection info
• Player’s detailed game history
• Friend’s friend invite contents

It’ll be surprising to see features like Achievements go live during the beta, mainly because of the huge sign that states “Disabled for Beta” on that part of Battle.net’s interface. More detailed game histories and the ability to see information about your opponents and allies will also be welcomed features.

The most controversial decision reported about in the Q&A is the confirmation of the lack of chat channels – the heart and soul of Battle.net. This is how many gamers have met their allies and rivals on the gaming service throughout the years, starting new friendships and gaining arch-enemies. It’s the way the team behind this blog originally met 12 years ago! Unsurprisingly, many have already expressed their disappointment with this change and are urging Blizzard to reconsider.

Instead of the normal chat features, Blizzard will implement something more akin to the popular social sites flooding the Internet nowadays:

Especially about friend’s friend related contents, blizzard will implement in battle.net 2.0 as the main community system. According to blizzard, the new battle.net 2.0 system with friend’s friend invite will enable users to be more active in the community.

This is similar to facebook and twitter with micro-blogs and blizzard is also following this trend. Blizzard also states that since battle.net 2.0 does not have open chat channels, they will have to shoot for an even better community system as the ultimate goal.

Gamers are not Twitter social-media type simpletons. Most do not need another Facebook to interact with the people they already know. Chats and Forums are the natural habitats of gamers, and Blizzard is taking away the ability to randomly meet people to chat, play and discuss the game with. Despite the fact that this is in line with most recent gaming platforms, we, among many others, would love to see Blizzard reconsider the removal of chat channels.

The update, which is due in April, will not include the following:

Single Player Contents

• There are contents that will be locked at the beginning and will only be unlocked as you clear specific objectives. When you unlock these contents, you will be given some awards.
• Unlocking achievements will give players decals(distinct patterns) or portrait pictures.

Result screen revamp

• Currently, when you finish a match, you only see scores but the revampt will include all the details.

The more anticipated contents such as professional leagues and use-map marketplace will be included in future updates after release and will include watching replays of the players in professional league. Also, the players in pro-league will be able to advertise his career history and others.

The Q&A session spans 7 questions in total:

Q : There are currently hacks out there for single player and multiplayer is in danger too. Are you guys working on more security measures?

A : Hacking is something that we did not want to see. It is very unfortunate. The current hacked clients may contain virus and we would like to encourage our users to avoid downloading them. In the case of multiplayer, we will be working to make sure that it is not hacked but since you will be able to play any multiplayer without battle.net, I think the system is pretty secure from hacking.

Q : Will the April content release include 3v3 or 4v4?

A : 3v3 and 4v4 team plays will not be released in April but will be in the official release.

Q : Is there plans to release public chat channels? Also, if you do release it, how will you fight against spams and profanity?
A : Battle.net 2.0 will not support open chat channels. We will take actions to the reported spams, profanity and rude behaviors with the new Report Player functionality.

Q : Then, how will clan system work? If there is no open chat channel, then wouldn’t that impede clan system?

A : We will be announcing clan system at (after?) release so we cannot discuss that right now.

Apparently, there is a distinct, separate clan system planned, which will not depend on open chat channels and is not limited to the social features that have been implemented or announced up until now.

Q : Unlike Warcraft 3 battle.net, will you be able to see your rankings and match history in the website?

A : Of course. Just like WoW armory, you will be able to see those in the new battle.net community site. You can expect some great things since it will be a whole new innovative web service.

Q : Even if you divide realm servers by continents, if you look at Asia, there are many different spoken languages. Will you provide real-time translation system?

A : We have no plans to support realtime translation system right now but we are looking into it and considering it.

Q : The currentl battle.net supported games include Starcraft 1, Diablo, Warcraft 3. Will you keep supporting this? Are you concerned about merging them with battle.net 2.0?

A : The current battle.net will continue being supported. I would like to see it being supported continuously and we are discussing how we will go about. The merging details have not been completely decided in terms of technical aspect so it is hard to answer that. We will be discussing that later.

In case you have forgotten (it’s been a while!), Battle.net was launched with the release of Diablo in 1997, 13 years ago. It is a live platform that serves Diablo, Diablo 2, StarCraft, WarCraft 2, WarCraft 3, and all the expansions of the aforementioned games. Adjusting the platform across so many games would require a huge amount of patching, and it’s not suprising Blizzard has not declared its official stance on the issue.

A significantly more lengthy interview was given by Dustin Browder to VG247, going into the gory details of the expectations and numbers emerging from StarCraft 2’s beta testing. Many of the things Dustin mentions, like the possibility of adding and removing units, have been talked about extensively in the latest Blizzcast, but there’s certainly some meat in this one.

Here are some interesting excerpts from the interview:

Dustin Browder: So far, the beta numbers we’ve been looking at have been very, very positive. We’re close to a 50 percent win ratio for almost every race. What we’re really doing right now is waiting to see, as the community learns more, to see if something changes in the meta-game that causes this not to be the case. And, of course, we’re still dealing with issues of unit diversity, particularly on the Zerg side.

What level of concurrency to you want to get to before the end of the beta?

Dustin Browder: I think we want to maintain about 10,000. It’s sort of our goal, and we’ve just about hit that at this point. I can see we’re at 9,000-something right now, and 10,000 is the goal.

The number of online players has certainly been growing steadily as Blizzard sends out more and more keys.

While some StarCraft 2 Beta testers have been hacking at the world’s fastest RTS for 12 years, a significant portion of the gamers are… noobs that are overwhelmed by StarCraft’s ruthless pace and macro-oriented mechanics.

Dustin Browder: We’re seeing two types of players. We’re seeing the hardcore who’ve been with us for the past 12 years, who are just totally loving it and having a great time. We’re seeing newer players get into the beta and struggling a bit with the speed, with the rushes, with the style of gameplay we’re presenting them with. We’ve seen a lot of feedback from the newer players saying, ‘Oh my God, this is really rough. What the hell are you guys doing?’

Are you seeing clicks-per-minute generally increase as you run the beta over time?

Dustin Browder: I’m sorry, I’m able to see it on a game-by-game basis; I’m not able to see it globally. But that’s a great question, and certainly a stat we’d love to have. We have a ton of stats right now, and we’re having a trouble getting at them a little bit. There’s a large volume of data that our business intelligence guys are working very hard to give us access to. What I have access to now is fairly limited. I have access to maps, I have access to win-loss by race and by skill, I have access to certain unit stats, but no, I don’t have access to action-per-minute on a global scale. I’m not able to see it increasing as we go. I imagine that it would.

Some more interesting quotes:

• Our internal stats show us that Terrans are down in 1v1 versus Protoss and Zerg, and our internal stats also show us that Terran-Terran teams are also taking a hit in almost every match-up. This we believe to be largely because of map design. The Terrans lack some of the mobility to come rescue their allies in the early game…
• We’re going to change the maps a little bit and see if we get different results, but the Terrans being down is something we’ve started to address and we’re going to continue to address in the coming weeks.
• In addition, we view Battle.net this time around a little more as we do WoW. We hope to be doing constant content development going forward…
• There are also going to be some changes to how we do match-making. I know this for sure. But I’m not exactly sure of everything that’s going to happen. We develop these features and some of them will make the content patch, and some of them will not.

… and the first StarCraft 2 meme was born. It all started with the recent StarCraft 2 beta patch, which, along with the previous patch, hit the Mothership with a massive nerf. Its movement, price, build time, food cost, abilities, shields and hit points have all been affected.

Mothership

• The build time for this unit has increased from 120 to 160.
• The food cost of this unit has increased from 6 to 8.
• The number of shots fired by this unit has decreased from 8 to 6.
• The shield of this unit has decreased from 400 to 350.
• The health of this unit has decreased from 400 to 350.
• The acceleration of this unit has decreased from 1.3125 to 0.3125.
• The deceleration of this unit has increased from 0 to 1.

Then, something epic happened.

A “Yo Mommaship” Battle.net thread appeared, and it delivered. Multiple Blizzard employees have made their contributions to the thread, along with tens of other posters. To spare you from sifting through all the pages of the thread, we’ve compiled the best Yo Mommaship jokes in one Massive (Armored, Psionic) list:

1. Yo Mommaship so fat her food cost has increased from 6 to 8.
2. Yo Mommaship’s so trashy she doesn’t attack Roaches.
3. Yo Mommaship’s so fat she made Jim Raynor say “That’s no moon!”
4. Yo Mommaship so lazy that it takes her almost 3 minutes to be instantly teleported.
5. Yo Mommaship so dumb she forgot to fire two of her guns.  (see patch notes!)
6. Yo Mommaship such a floozy, she took 10 marines in her vortex and still had energy left.
7. Yo Mommaship’s so fat when she sits around the base, she sits AROUND the base.
8. Yo Mommaship so dumb when I said “we require more minerals” she took a Centrum.
9. Yo Mommaship so fat that when she uses Mass Recall, your units are still where you left them.
10. Yo Mommaship so fat, you must construct additional pylons. Always.
11. Yo Mommaship so fat she burns all her energy by turning around.
12. Yo Mommaship so fat she tried to cloak herself but it tore.
13. Yo Mammaship so fat, it takes 3 orbital scans to see all of her.
14. Yo Mammaship so ugly, she blinds detectors.
15. Yo Mommaship so dumb she thinks that the Ghost Academy is where Casper lives.
16. Yo Mommaship is so fat, the map can only hold one per player.
17. Yo Mommahip so fat she hit wormhole transit and got stuck on both sides.
18. Yo Mommaship so fat, Blizzard had to nerf her TWICE, just to fit her through the door.
19. Yo Mommaship so fat, she takes up the entire control group.
20. Yo Mommaship so fat she thought feedback was takeout. (Avarius)
21. Yo Mommaship so fat she needs shields just to keep it tucked in.
22. Yo Mommaship so fat her rear-end is considered a high-yield vespene geyser.
23. Yo Mommaship so fat when she delayed the release of beta 3 weeks because they had to upload her.
24. You Mommaship so fat, she takes food from all players in the game.
25. Yo Mommaship so dumb, she takes financial advice from Infestors.

The StarCraft 2 Beta is going at full speed. Thousands of players can be found online at any time of the day, testing their skill against each other, constantly improving and getting a better handle on the game. Many great games have already been played and released through replay files and YouTube videos, and this is just the beginning!

The first patch – of many to come, according to Chris Sigaty – has been released yesterday. Blizzard have been quick to assess the data and feedback gathered from the beta; the patch already introduces some balance changes among various bug fixes. Not only that, but some abilities have been completely removed from the game!

Here are the changes, followed by some clarification on their reasons.

TERRAN

Viking

The armor value for this unit in Fighter Mode has decreased from 1 to 0.
The damage done by this unit in Fighter Mode has changed from 6 (+8 armored) to 10 (+4 armored).

Reaper

The damage done from D-8 Charges has decreased from 40 to 30.
The delay between attacks for D-8 Charges has decreased from 2.5 to 1.8.

Orbital Command

The build time for this upgrade has decreased from 50 to 35.

PROTOSS

Observer

Gravitic Boosters: The cost of this research has decreased from 150 minerals and 150 vespene gas to 100 minerals and 100 vespene gas.

High Templar

Phase Shift: This ability has been removed from the game.
New ability: Feedback – Drains all energy from the target unit and causes damage equal to the amount of energy drained.

Colossus

The building pathing radius for this unit has decreased from .75 to .5625.

Mothership

Vortex: The energy cost of this ability has increased from 75 to 100.
Vortex: The target radius of this ability has decreased from 3.0 to 2.5.
Temporal Rift: This ability has been removed from the game.
Wormhole Transit: This ability has been removed from the game.
New ability: Mass Recall – Teleports all of the player’s units in the target area to the Mothership.

Nexus

Chrono Boost can no longer target allies.

Gateway

The build time of this building has increased from 50 to 65.

ZERG

Infestor

Fungal Growth: The damage done by this ability has decreased from 48 to 36.
Fungal Growth: This ability now prevents affected units from burrowing.
Neural Parasite: Functionality changed – The Infestor now channels this spell, which lasts 10 seconds or until the Infestor is destroyed. You can now target all units with this ability.

Terran Infestation: The ability’s energy cost has reduced from 50 to 25 and Infested Terrans now spawn 1 at a time.

BUG FIXES

Addressed an issue causing people to receive an “Internal Battle.net Error” message with their game client.

Muting your microphone will no longer cause your microphone to be turned off in the operating system once the program has exited.

Please note that the voice chat functionality has only partially been implemented. There are many known issues with voice chat that we expect to address in a future patch.

The “Medium” graphical settings were reconfigured to work better on appropriate machines. The video settings “auto-detect” functionality has been reset as a result.

Added a frame rate limiter to the game menus to prevent some graphics cards from running at higher frame rates than necessary.

The main change to the Terran has been the tweaking of the Reaper’s attack, making it less effective in hit and run attacks against buildings. A common tactic with the Reapers is to quickly move around an enemy base, switching between harassing (and sometimes completely decimating) worker lines and taking down the occasional Pylon or Supply Depot. With the decrease in damage per attack, and despite the overall increase in damage per time, the Reapers will now have to stop and dedicate their attack to a building in order to efficiently destroy it.

The Viking’s damage has been changed to allow the Terran to have a flying answer to the constant threat of the Zerg Mutalisk . Since they are light units, Mutalisks will now take 66% more damage from Vikings.

The only change to the Zerg was to the Infestor, the Zerg’s most advanced spell caster, and, unfortunately, quite an underwhelming unit according to feedback from all over the community. The new Fungal Growth ability might prove useful in Zerg mirror matches with its effect on burrowing, but the improved Neural Parasite spell will definitely come into use. Previously, this ability was limited to biological units, leaving out many of the potential threats to the Zerg unaffected. Now, and as seen in the third battle report, Neural Parasite will once more be able to take control of the super-dangerous, anti-swarm Colossus.

The most disappointing and “safest” item on the patch notes list is the Protoss Mothership. This end-game unit, which turned out to be both fun and highly effective to use in competitive gameplay, has been hit with the nerf-hammer, and might as well be renamed “Motherbiter“. Having its “Town Portal” ability removed means the Mothership is quite vulnerable considering its extremely slow speed (think Overlord), and its most deadly spell, the black-hole generating “Vortex”, has had its effect dialed down and its cost increased. Granted, the old Mothership was quite the powerhouse, perhaps indeed an overpowered one – but it’s a shame to see it stripped down of its distinctive abilities and tuned to the exact same characteristics of the Arbiter: Cloaking field, Recall, and Vortex, which is essentially Stasis Field with a cooler effect.

We, among many others, have been testing the voice system integrated into Battle.net 2.0 and the game, but without great success. Communications have been choppy and unclear compared to modern stand-alone solutions, and it was clear that this is an unfinished feature. While it’s obvious that Blizzard will eventually get it right, this is perhaps the most immature aspect of the recently launched gaming platform.

One of the most important patch-related questions has finally been answered conclusively. Will replays from previous game versions remain viewable? Answer:

As has been mentioned before, different display aspect ratios provide slightly different gaming experiences, giving (and denying) a certain edge depending on one’s system setup. Check out this animated gif to get a clear idea about how StarCraft’s field of view adjusts to the gamers’ monitors.

While Blizzard has claimed that the difference will be minor, the above illustration makes it clear that it is not. If you have a 4:3 or 5:4 aspect ratio monitor and you intend to play StarCraft competitively, it’s probably time to move on.

Moving on, the thirteenth Blizzcast has been released, and it’s beta all the way. Very interesting comments from the senior people in charge of StarCraft 2, Dustin Browder and Chris Sigaty, which we will highlight here.

• Blizzard hopes to release a patch at least once a week, promising to react as much as on a daily basis.
• How radical can changes get? Dustin Browder: “As much as necessary”.
• Is it possible that units will be introduced or removed from the game? Dustin Browder: “Absolutely”.
• The planned period for the beta was 3-5 months, but Blizzard is currently targeting 3 months.
• The Galaxy editor will be release late in the beta with a “major content patch”. No information on what else this may include.
• The developers believe that the beta and feedback they get from the community is critical to the game’s success.

Some select quotes:

So community, you guys, will be doing a lot of interfacing directly and sort of bubbling up the big points to us.

… if we discover something that is a fundamental mistake, absolutely we will add or cut as necessary to make this game as good as we possibly can by the time it ships.

There’s definitely areas where we’ll be watching, areas where we’re nervous, we’re pretty convinced that we may have made a terrible mistake but we’re going to keep watching and see what happens. So far, things that I am convinced must be broken have not yet proven to be so. This is largely I think because other units are overshadowing them and preventing them from being that powerful, right. As the community plays, we’ll see what they find to be truly powerful and then we’ll see what really shakes out of it.

What we’re really trying to do is get players to have some additional strategy and choices when it comes to their base building and their economy, right. We really want to push that part of the game. We want players to be able to choose which type of player do they want to be. Do I want to be a player who can maximize my economy but maybe is not quite as good at commanding my forces on the battlefield or am I a player who is really good at commanding my troops out on the front line but maybe I don’t focus as much on my economy or do I want to try to balance both together.

… for sure the main central focus of the beta is balance for us.

As we continue to cover the beta, up to date news items, interesting tidbits, replays and videos will be posted on our Official Facebook page. Do come visit us there or check out the feed at the upper right corner of this page.

Blizzard has delivered. Thousands of people have already downloaded and installed the StarCraft 2 Beta, the Battle.net 2.0 platform is online and fully operational (where it counts), maps are downloaded swiftly, and finding a match takes seconds.

In general, the beta seems to be going very smoothly. Many players already populate the various leagues, the interface is smooth and quite intuitive, and is, amazingly, integrated into every part of the game in a very unobtrusive and efficient way. Some complaints about unused space have been made, but where it matters – inside the game – it functions beautifully.

Ten Blizzard maps have been made available, all in either 1v1 or 2v2 sizes, on a variety of tilesets:

• Blistering Sands
• Desert Oasis
• Scrap Station
• Steppes of War
• Kulas Ravine
• Lost Temple
• Metropolis
• Twilight Fortress
• Shakruras Plateau

Some maps come in two flavors – novice and normal. Novice type maps have a slightly modified topography and provide players with conditions conducive to less eventful early games.

Battle.net’s post-match screen includes a very informative tab that provides a clear summary of each players’ build orders, directly compared to each other. This second-by-second view provides a great insight into the first crucial minutes of the game and will help players understand where exactly they might have gone wrong without taking the time to go over the replay.

Next on today’s agenda, we’ve compiled a short list of changes to the game we haven’t heard about before the beta began:

• When a Protoss player has one or more Warpgates, hitting “W” will select all of them, making warping units to the field a button-click away at all times.
• Lurkers are no longer a part of the game. The unit is completely gone.
• The Protoss macro mechanic has been replaced. Instead of the periodic Probe mining bonus, the Nexus now has “Chrono Boost“, a 25-energy ability that the Nexus can use on ANY building, including those of allies, to increase the speed of unit production and research. Extremely useful in all situations, from the beginning of the game (build Probes faster) to the end (Build Mothership faster).
• Speaking of the Mothership, its “Black Hole” ability now functions as a souped-up Stasis Field, sucking up all units around the area of effect and keeping them trapped in another dimension for a short period before spitting them all out when it dissipates. Use with a well-timed Nuke for bonus points.
• Mentioned just a couple of days before the beta, Banelings can now again be used as underground mines, detonating while burrowed. However, the favorite strategy with Banelings is currently “get a lot of them and roll into the enemy base”.
• There is NO chat on battle.net besides that with your friends and the “parties” you form with them. No regional or global channels like in StarCraft 1, and no chat gem either.
• The Battlecruiser no longer has different abilities to choose from. Instead, only the Yamato Cannon is available after being researched at the Fusion Core.

• When a player losses all his main structures (Command Center, Hatchery, Nexus), all his units and structures are revealed to the enemy. This measure was implemented to prevent players from abusing the players who just beat them by playing Pylon hide-and-seek. However, it is already raising some concern about end-case situations (stalemates, players still having enough money, etc). The SC2Blog recommends turning this feature off in tournaments and other high-level competitions.

If you’re having a hard time letting go of your recently acquired StarCraft 2 Beta, you can now enjoy its theme music even when doing what you should have been doing instead of playing:
Terran theme: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcghLSIpZlM
Zerg theme: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ivYHY8V-XA
Protoss theme: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zuh96ogWoAc
Menu theme: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tVNyU-BF9wg

For players who are not in the beta and are eager for some action, here are some new high-definition gameplay videos. If you’re looking for more, stay tuned and keep an eye over our Facebook page – it will periodically be updated with noteworthy live streams, as they occur.