Twitter developer chat (log) - Page 3

Q. How exactly does the ladder/division/league system work? How do players move up and down? What exactly is the top 8 for? Tournaments?

A. We are working on a FAQ for this right now that we will release to the community soon. At some point in the future we will be looking at doing tournaments and that is what the top positions are for.

Q. Will units that have been cut from the game still be in the Galaxy Editor, or higher tier units from original StarCraft?

A. Units that have been cut from the game completely will NOT be in the editor. However, there are many units that make an appearance in the single-player campaign that WILL be available to use in the editor, such as the Medic, Firebat, and Goliath.

Q. Will there be an option that allows you to choose between different customized hotkey configurations?

A. We are in the process of adding a few hotkey templates for ship which include left and right-handed "name-based" options. Grid based left and right-hand templates. Finally, we also intend to add a "Classic" hot key template which will, as best as possible, attempt to mimic the hotkey settings from the original game. We'll default to "name-based" right-handed for ship, but the end user can then choose from any of the other four templates.

Long term we're exploring allowing fully customizable hot keys. Assuming we can solve the many user interface challenges to make this work we will either release it in a patch or in the upcoming expansion.

Q. Will you be adding additional zoom-out levels since it was suggested by a lot of players?

A. No, we will not be adding zoom-out levels. StarCraft II plays well only at a very specific camera height. Too close and you cannot see what is going on, too far and you cannot effectively micro your units. We have picked a camera position that maximizes the tension between the player's need to see a lot of space as well as micro units. There are also game perfomance implications of a zoomed out camera. If we zoom out more, we are drawing more units on screen at one time and game perfomance will suffer.

Q. The protoss templar line seems much less reliable to use than a robo build. Same for terran mech builds. What are your plans?

A. We are looking hard at the terran mech builds and will hopefully bring out some fixes in the next patch. I don't know that I agree that Templars not useful. We are certainly seeing that at some skill levels, but other skill levels are getting quite a bit out of High Templars. We will continue to evaluate as we go forward in the beta.

Q. Will more than one user profile per account be allowed?

A. At ship we intend to have only a single profile per user. This encourages better player behavior and allows us to do better match-making between players. It obviously causes a number of issues. For example I may want to try a new race as a player but I'm afraid of losing rating, what do I do? We are looking to fix these types of issues for launch.

Q. High and Dark Templars have split into two techs. Are you seeing a lot of people just going for other tech options now?

A. High Templars are not a given in every game, nor are Dark Templar, but we are certainly seeing these units get a lot of use.

Q. Do you agree with players about the zerg voice, or are you happy with it?

A. We are looking at pulling some different takes for the zerg Queen that change the personality of her voice (a little bit).

Q. Who would win in a fight, Greg Street or Dustin Browder?

A. The battle would be close, but both parties would suffer TERRIBLE, TERRIBLE DAMAGE!

Today's #BlizzChat is now over! We'd like to especially thank our StarCraft II Game Director Dustin Browder and Production Director Chris Sigaty for their time, and thank you to all who participated!

On March 13 2010 10:27 Spartan wrote:
Q. Will we be able to play with our friends on other continents like we could in StarCraft's Battle.net?

A. Currently we do not have plans to integrate friends between regions for launch. In the long run that's definitely something we'll be looking at.

On March 13 2010 11:34 oBlade wrote:


Yeah, if this gets set aside as a "long run" goal, it might simply go forever unfulfilled, and it's preposterous not to have it in the release. Sundering the community regionally is a step backwards and it will obviously impede SC2's e-sports potential.

With BW, we have battle.net servers for which a player's real location is irrelevant, and we have private servers to unify all regions. I want to be connected again in SC2, not isolated.

On March 13 2010 13:27 danl9rm wrote:


I believe they'll eventually implement it for custom games. But quite honestly, I don't want them to ever put it in for matchmaking. People are already complaining about lag, and now they want more?

On March 13 2010 15:04 Ftrunkz wrote:
Stuck on asia.... where 90% of the gamer population will not speak english...

wtf. omg.

On March 13 2010 11:34 Mohdoo wrote:
For some reason, I get the feeling that they were referring to having all your stats and whatnot be cross server. Like your ladder rank and profile and all that being the same for all servers. It would seem strange for them to only allow a connection to be made to one server or another.

On March 13 2010 11:34 FrozenArbiter wrote:


Really don't think so, unfortunately.