This week saw the relaunch of Starcraft.org. Home to Blizzard's Authorized Maps Database for StarCraft: Brood War, it has always been a bastion for fan content.

With SC.org's relaunch and SC2's impending release, the site has been completely recoded to showcase user submissions in various categories including maps, fan art, fan fiction, strategies, modding tools, tutorials, and replays.

An extensive commenting and reviewing system is in place to allow the site's userbase to provide feedback and critique to each submission and help foster the community's efforts. The blogs section allows each user to share their thoughts with friends and other users and help expose your opinions to the vast SC community.

This is all possible through a new backend which in addition to helping ease the submissions system, allows for very simplistic searches of the vast content catalog, and doing all of this very speedily -- is also now designed such that if your submissions prove popular enough, they'll automatically be promoted to the frontpage of the site!

Congratulations to the StarCraft.org staff for completing a long, arduous revamp of the site. It looks great. Everyone at StarCraft2Forum.org is excited! Check out the new site at StarCraft.org.

This week's patch is a bit more laid back. It's a smaller change but still (surprisingly) gives a small boost to the Terrans and another small nerf to the Protoss in the form of a 10 HP reduction in the unit's shields. The Terran received across the board reductions in the upgrade times for its infantry and vehicle and ship upgrades (all the upgrade times were reduced by 30 seconds). This is a significant boost since in StarCraft 2 a +1 attack upgrade gives a +5 attack bonus. That means +2 would give every unit affected a +10 damage boost.

There are also some bug fixes including a correction to Reaper pathing. 

StarCraft II Beta - Patch 3 

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Well it looks like it's already time for another StarCraft 2 beta patch. This time it looks like Terran has gotten a huge buff and the Protoss have taken another large hit. The Protoss Mothership has been significantly reduced in terms of HP and strength. Its cost in build time and food allocation has also been raised. This is good news for anyone who has been Mothership rushed (myself included). That thing was just impossible to kill and completely destroyed anything in its path. And then it promptly recalled itself home. Now it's significantly weaker and doesn't have that option for a cheap escape.

In addition the Zerg Corruptor received a +2 damage boost against massive units which should make this unit even better against Battlecruisers, Colossus, and Motherships (woohoo!). The Protoss Chronos also saw a reduction in its duration and most of the useful Terran buildings have had their build time reduced fairly significantly. 

Perhaps even important, the Terran Banshee now comes with the cloak ability. This will make the unit far more deadly out of the gate and more achievable. 

Overall I think these changes are farsighted and will benefit the game as a whole. I think Terran, if anything, may have just become the most powerful of the three races short of very late game. But this should help overcome the ridiculous cheap-ness of the Protoss late-game Mothership + Carrier + Warp Ray + Stalker combination. 

Here's the full changelist: 

StarCraft II Beta - Patch 2 (version 0.4.0.14133) 

Balance Changes

Blizzard's Rob Simpson has hosted a very long segment on StarCraft 2 this week. Dustin Browder and Chris Sigaty sat down and discussed the fundamentals of the recently released StarCraft 2 Beta. Most of the points are over-arching and discuss the general process of the beta. However, they did confirm that Blizzard is planning on a full, 3 month beta (they were originally planning a 5 month beta) process.

They are also emphasizing the role of community sites like StarCraft2Forum.org to get opinions directly to developers (basically bringing your ideas to our attention so we can pass it on rather than posting on Battle.net like 30,000 others) and via the in-game feedback function which will provide indirect beta support.

Dustin also focused heavily on the Chronos Boost (he called it Time Warp) and its use for a Protoss player and its change from the BlizzCon 2009 build. He also discussed the Zerg's Fungal Growth ability and a player's ability to counter it by destroying a targeted unit very quickly and make the ability almost completely useless.

Chris Sigaty also talked about the potential release of the StarCraft 2 Map Editor and confirmed that it may be released during the beta. They are also planning a major content update for beta late in the process that will include Blizzard-created modification maps and game styles.

Lastly, they discussed some of the single player and mapmaking features including the achievement functions that will be available upon launch. Including the map publishing system which will allow mapmakers to upload their maps to a database to be downloaded (and purchased) by end users.

Dustin also mentioned a unit called the Diamondback that will be featured in the Terran campaign.

I want to reiterate that Blizzard is clearly emphasizing the community and sites like ours to provide reliable and speedy feedback to developers during the beta. Make sure to have your voice heard on our boards so we can pass on your thoughts to the developers! Get crackin'! And don't forget to check out BlizzCast 13 yourself!