Why Patching Starcraft is a Nightmare (Blizzard Sucks)

Community pure balance is garbage, it takes the most fun and interesting designs because it's unfair, then we get a stormgate on our hands instead of a cool-ass game.

bring back hots collosus they felt powerful now they lose to 1 marauder 1 medivac >_>

Make the carrier great again! 🙏

Path 3… serious question?

Why are we still bothering with this game? Let's just move to one of the new RTS where the devs would be very happy to have us as players.

I have an ambitious balance patch that i uploaded years ago in response to all the protoss nerfs. It should still be public and live

The anti balance council patch just feels petty lol

It sucks SC2 took so long and that the custom games system was so bad. It couldve been the de facto esport at the same time as being the best entry level game dev platform.

I think the expansions were way too slow, way too changing, and they never stopped fiddling with balance. Broodwar is essentially frozen and its a bit imbalanced yes, but still a compelling game. I dropped out of SC2 by the last expansion because I wanted to play the same game and improve at it but the game was a different game every few months

Your list is just make SC2 into broodwar with QoL lmao. I love the broodwar mod BTW. Idk, SC2 is lost IMO. We need one of the new RTS games to pan out, I don't think they will, I think we get this wave of new RTS, then someone comes and takes the best elements and comes out with the next report RTS

I didnt realize SC2 was a "classic" now. I forget time keeps on keeping on.

I uninstalled SC2 over the arcade nonsense. While it's unlikely, there was absolutely no guarantee someone wouldn't come up with some kind of arbitrary code execution exploit eventually. It's completely egregious that it's still a thing in any capacity.

Blizzard is not the same company for many years. Honestly I don't believe there is a team for RTS games in Blizzard. I think there are just two guys that work on HotS and SC2 patches and both of them are fullstacks (they are doing code, 3D animations, QA, testing etc.)

Just checking on the Google and War3 Reforged was made by so called Blizzard Classic Games Team 1 (lol?), with support from Lemon Sky Studios, BOSi Art Studios, and Keystone (real devs behind it?).
War2 and War1 Remastered were made by Blackbird Interactive. Blizzard only paid for it.

SC1: Remastered was the only one done correctly and probably by Blizzard! They only redraw sprites for the game and improved an engine a little bit. Good job there I guess. At least they didn't broke anything like guys from Warcraft 1-3 Remasters.

blizzard thing title got 18k view

I love StarCraft I don't want it to ever die, and I'm not even a hard core.

If there was only a game that didn't have Warp Gate for Protoss, defensive Queens for Zerg/Tier 1 Hydralisks, and Vultures for Terran instead of widow mines...

man making hydra tier 1 is cool.
Also I'd say, imagine you can have only one queen, but with absolutely different role

Remove warp gate. Just do it!

It's just insane with the amout of money in gaming, that none of it goes here. Like instead of stormgate we could have that team fixing this and working on SC3... ffs

again i will say that we need to slash worker count and bring back early game to the game

Yeah looks like Blizzard or.. the SC team @ least.. is just in very basic maintenance mode. It doesnt make them money to fix all the things. And to be honest.. all said things.. make me NOT want to go back to starcraft. Placed in masters? No legaue promo screen? WTF. The thing is .. with the money from MS now.. this could be different. They could work on SC3 for instance while at the same time they could fix and improve the game constantly.. but.. MS also is in this kind of "oh.. our gaming buisness needs to generate money aswell" phase (after those insane purchases).. so its kind of hard there too. Also lots of SC2 og devs left blizzard a long time ago. IF a SC3 game ever materializes.. its going to be very very different.. or thats my guess. Its a pain to see honestly. SC2 is one of the best games ever made. SC2 is still my most played game even though i havent played in years. Maybe they find a good way to earn money with a potential SC3 and then it happens.. who knows. I learned SC2 by watching Apollos vidoes back in the day! Shoutouts! man.. .time really flies...

The long-standing issue with SC2 is that the early game is extremely volatile, while the late game tends to be overly stable and boring.

I hate hardpore cornography!

One of those brand new players. I got placed in Masters for 4v4. Notably, I got matched against the same 4v4 Grandmaster team for every single placement match.

I absolutely want a crazy patch. The StarCraft META has slowly been becoming more and more stale since the very first patch after Wings Of Liberty came out. Not all of it is bad, by no means, I'm not saying that we should bring back a WoL era starcraft, but Professor Grant said it best "this is a boat in need of shaking" go watch his Wings of Liberty retrospective. It mostly covers campaign (which is the best part of the game anyway) but there's a section about balance in there and a lot of fun stuff about multiplayer in general.

It's time to replace battlenet with something like wc3 champions

Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick received over $500 million from the Microsoft acquisition in 2023, primarily through stock options and shares.
Kotick prioritized franchises like Call of Duty, Candy Crush, and Diablo as "pillars of opportunity," aiming for $500M to $1B profit per franchise.
StarCraft was sidelined despite its competitive legacy. The SC2 team was disbanded post-Legacy of the Void, leaving balance patches to a volunteer "balance council".
Microsoft’s 2022 acquisition of Activision Blizzard ($68.7B) included plans to integrate StarCraft into Game Pass but no commitment to SC3 or SC2 updates.
The lack of funding and leadership focus on StarCraft 2 reflects broader corporate trends under Kotick: prioritizing short-term profits over niche but passionate communities.

I like a lot of these proposals, especially the ones you called crazy. But I also dramatically prefer Broodwar over SC2.

Starcraft 2 is at a point where it's too rigid, too figured out to make drastic changes and experimentation, yet too monotone without them. I think a good idea would be a completely new design and balance version, then let 2 run for a while and see which is more popular. Then you can do drastic changes. For example.
- Warpgate could be moved up the tech tree, really far up, Mothership level. Then you don't have to remove it. Balance it in a way it becomes a strategic benefit, so that switching back is also something players could want.
- remove macro mechanics, so that players can focus on what they want to focus on, the battle. I never understood the lead devs design philosophy where he wanted to force players to look at their base, how is that fun? Or redesign it. Zergs inject could be an upgrade at the hatch that automatically injects itself, and could also grows a few tentacles to defend itself.
- make units bigger except visually. Right now the whole death ball can fit through every pathway on the map and close the distance to the enemy all at once. That's why the game is a numbers game. In Broodwar or the c&c genre units always only trickle in.

I thought starcraft 2 would actually be supported now that Microsoft owns blizzard, since Microsoft actually support their esport scene on Age of empires 2 with constant dlc's & patches. Its sad to see such a fun esports game that still holds up in todays standards, being tossed aside like garbage for all these years.

They should just open-source it at this point. The community will identify/fix the bugs for them - they just have to merge the changes. Note: open-source does not mean that people would have a right to just 'steal' the game or IP - could just be open source, but not with a free license.

I mean, yeah you're 110% right, but I see no solution. Microsoft won't move. Balancing is already a thankless job and hardly possible under these circumstances. Most realistic scenario for me is, that just nothing will happen any more, but I wish I'm wrong. Thanks to everyone who tries to make thinks happen.

I am going to strongly disagree. I think that the balance council has done a decent job. Energy recharge has been a great addition and the game has become very dynamic. I didn't even mind the mass cyclones.
Where I think people go wrong is having nostalgia and thinking Blizzard was better at patching and balancing: THEY WERE NOT. Yes they had more resources to make big changes but they also screwed it up plenty of times and they had the luxury of fixing it quickly. If the balance council screws it up, we are stuck with the patch for 6 months and the game might be dead in that time. So them making more smaller changes is totally understandable. I hope we keep the balance council.

the main mode of SC2 should be 3v3

let 1v1 and 3v3 run alongside each other, with same'ish earning from tournaments. stream the events.

by the viewer number alone we should be able to see that 3v3 will be more popular, despite it coming out of nowhere.

by the same token, SC2 should be balanced not to suit 1v1, but to make 3v3 more interesting.

it's the only chance this game has got.

some people don't like to play 1v1's. i only play 3v3.

Man, I'm a software developer myself and seeing bugs but not being allowed to fix them because other things being prioritized higher hurts everytime. So yeah, I feel bad for the engineers too. But thanks for keeping us updated! I haven't played in forever (because I'm a campaign guy and I've long since given up hope on more content), so I wouldn't have known otherwise. I'm really keeping my fingers crossed for ZeroSpace because between them, Stormgae and Tempest Rising I like the design best (also SG's story is such a nothingburger it was so disappointing).

i didnt know about that master placement thing.. that filters out a large percentage of new players i can feel it

They need to start getting a grip on the chat rooms also. So much political spam and bots and racism every single day.

You’re telling me with all the monthly income they get from WOW they can’t afford to fix sc2? Sounds ridiculous.

The placements are ridiculous I got put into masters… 😅 I won 3 because of quitters.

I wish a developer would just offer to fix the game for blizzard. 🥶

20 games on ladder, I’m diamond fighting constant GMs, SC2 sucks, and constantly getting stomp has ruined the game for me. I’ve even stopped watching videos. I played 4 games last night, it just sucked.

Speaking of a crazy patch, I have a little, a bit unbelievable story to tell.

I had a conversation with a mod maker once, he fixed a lot of funny issues and put a lot of effort into those, but all visuals like literally Hellion tires turning direction level or changes and yet he put it in a way that would attract new players to the game, and he tried making it in a state that would be accepted by the balance council. We had an unpleasant disagreement quite quickly of course. I made a mod myself right after LotV release to address every issue players had with balance and provide maybe not the but at least a solution. One thing I did was splitting the Broodling into two versions, one for Broodlord and the other for buildings, because I was thinking the Broodlord broodling should timeout quicker. This was 7 years ago. Didn't the balance council try the same recently, but failed? They nerfed the Broodlord one, realized the buildings Broodling wasn't intended and they rolled back the changes. Did they ever fix it correctly? I bet they haven't, right? They ditched it. This is just crazy to me.

At the end of the day we need a dev team on the game. Even if these current issues are fixed, the player numbers are rapidly falling regardless. On top of that, new bugs will likely come in the future anyway. Without a dedicated development team the game is sadly doomed. All content creators/pros really anyone with any clout and a care for Starcraft should push blizzard for this. If it's not possible we should probably stop caring about this game, for our own sanity.

blizzard hasnt existed for decades

When I was working with TrenchaunT on Dark Deeds - if we had been denied for 6 months to do any updates, I would have given up. It is sad that Blizzard (is it really Blizzard anymore?) doesn't care anymore. This company has gone down so far from where they were. It makes me so sad that a company that was so beloved has been sold out and no longer cares about their games.

This is what happens when you rely on a commercial company that considers a game not like a living community but as an IP assets they should lie on like Smaug on its treasure.

It ends up being enshittified as they chase the next big viral profitable thing. Community has to get it back somehow, I wish Blizzard would release their assets under a free license. It should be what is demanded IMHO. When do we start a crowdfunding to buy it back from Blizzard? It feels like they don't consider its revenue worth spending a dev salary on. They may even be losing money over it. Could they open it in exchange of 100k USD from the community? I surely would chip in and in case of success that would make history!

We don't need balance changes. We need design changes.

StarCraft 2 ... let it go.

WOW that's a lot of comments already! I'm reading them all but won't be able to respond to many, thanks for adding your voices to the discussion, helps give me a feel for what the community as a whole is experiencing right now. I think a change of pace with a Salt Mines upload tonight, then diving into some theorycrafting around the Crazy Patch changes tomorrow seems like what most of you are interested in seeing!