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Listen to a special audio message from Bill Roper to the Hive Workshop community (Bill is a former Vice President of Blizzard Entertainment, Producer, Designer, Musician, Voice Actor) 🔗Click here to hear his message!
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Read Evilhog's interview with Gregory Alper, the original composer of the music for WarCraft: Orcs & Humans 🔗Click here to read the full interview.
- Joined
- Apr 18, 2011
- Messages
- 1,844
Season 3 Now Locked / Custom Map Spotlight
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Season 3 Now Locked 
Attention, StarCraft II ladder warriors! Season 3 is now locked. At the end of each ladder season, leagues are “locked,” which means players can no longer be promoted or demoted out of their current league or division, and bonus pools will stop growing. That’s no reason to quit playing: even after leagues are locked, players will still be able to play out their remaining bonus pool and compete for standing within their divisions until the season ends two weeks later. The matchmaking skill ratings which determine league promotion and demotion will also continue to update during the lock, so games played during the lock still count toward Season 4 league placement. Now that the lock is in effect, Season 3 will soon come to an end. We’ll be turning over to Season 4 during the week of October 24. Season milestone rewards will be awarded and bonus pools will reset with the beginning of the new season. Hidden skill ratings used for matchmaking and league placement will carry over from the previous season though, so players who have completed placement matches in a previous season will only need to play one new placement match after Season 4 starts. Beginning with Season 4, two changes are coming to future ladder seasons: • Seasons will now last for approximately two months. • Grandmaster league placement time will be reduced to one week (from two weeks) to account for the reduced season length.
____________________________________________________ Custom Map Spotlight 
StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty has a talented and robust mapmaking community, and every day the number of published maps hitting Battle.net continues to grow. To better highlight some of these great creative works, we're featuring new player-made maps each week and placing them at the top of the custom games list in the game client for you to download and play. Check out this week's featured custom maps to see what's available! Map Title: MageCraft Category: Magic Fight Mode: Clan TTG Author: Aphotic Description: A PvP Arena where players get to choose every skill they wish to use. From Fireballs that push players back to the Gravity Flux that pulls everything around it into it. Using the spells players buy and upgrade to their liking, and a large amount of player skill, the objective is to dominate the arena. Map Title: Space Zombies Category: SZS Mode: SZS Author: Nathan Tripp Description: Space Zombies is a remake of map from the original StarCraft. In this survival game, players look to utilize their skills and teamwork to defend their team’s base from 50 waves of zombies. Have a favorite custom map you would like to share? Then let us know! To submit a custom map for review, just leave a comment with the name of the map and its author below. Interested in custom maps? If you want to learn more from a brand-new educational show focused on custom map creation, you can check out MapCraft – State of the Terrain. Listen in as Josh “prodiG” Folland and Jacqueline “Versailles” Geller dive into the nitty-gritty of both competitive and custom map creation on ESV TV on Sundays at 11:00 a.m. PDT. |
- Joined
- Jan 7, 2005
- Messages
- 7,551
We have recently opened a new forum within the Warcraft III Hosted Projects category entitled "Finished Outlines". It houses clinched enterprises hosted by our website, both recent accomplishments, such as "Diablo III Warcraft", and more ancient souvenirs like Darky's "Nature's Call" modding ventures; of which The Spiderqueen and Return of the Dragons.
I'd appreciate knowing if it displaying okay to everyone. To create a forum listing like that, I had to use multiple table cells since apparently vertical-align:middle; does not work for all browsers or it is not its intended purpose. Margins also don't work with negative values so I had to make a floating <div>. But I'm not sure if these things work on all browsers. I'm using one as old as Firefox 3 and it's displaying okay to me. The regular vBulletin forum listing cannot be removed for single forums by Admin CP means, so, sorry about that.I just recently fixed forum permissions for guests. You are welcome to post your thoughts!
This come a little late, but, three days ago, Blizzard announced in their StarCraft II blog that every Tuesday they'll be posting a new wallpaper. Check it out below, and go to the main article for a set of resolutions (click the small picture); pick the one that bests suits your monitor!
I haven't been posting news regarding to them, but keep an eye on Blizzard's blog for exciting StarCraft II high-level play. Today they are casting another day of IPL 3: Origins. I believe this is the live stream, they are casting at the moment I'm writing this (TSL.Alive just defeated Hapryo, and now Lucky's fighting Boxer).If you're lagging while viewing the video, try lowering quality (on the bottom left).
P.S. — If you haven't noticed, we have organized the Favorite Race fields by alphabetical order and there's now a new field for you to type your StarCraft II account and ID in your profile!
P.P.S — Realizing his decreased activity, Pyritie has decided to resign from the staff. He started working for the Hive as a model mini-moderator, and he eventually became a model moderator. He was later made global moderator and worked his way up to become an administrator. But he will still be visiting us!
I'd appreciate knowing if it displaying okay to everyone. To create a forum listing like that, I had to use multiple table cells since apparently vertical-align:middle; does not work for all browsers or it is not its intended purpose. Margins also don't work with negative values so I had to make a floating <div>. But I'm not sure if these things work on all browsers. I'm using one as old as Firefox 3 and it's displaying okay to me. The regular vBulletin forum listing cannot be removed for single forums by Admin CP means, so, sorry about that.I just recently fixed forum permissions for guests. You are welcome to post your thoughts!
This come a little late, but, three days ago, Blizzard announced in their StarCraft II blog that every Tuesday they'll be posting a new wallpaper. Check it out below, and go to the main article for a set of resolutions (click the small picture); pick the one that bests suits your monitor!
I haven't been posting news regarding to them, but keep an eye on Blizzard's blog for exciting StarCraft II high-level play. Today they are casting another day of IPL 3: Origins. I believe this is the live stream, they are casting at the moment I'm writing this (TSL.Alive just defeated Hapryo, and now Lucky's fighting Boxer).If you're lagging while viewing the video, try lowering quality (on the bottom left).
| Season 3 is coming to an end. The question on everyone's mind right now is: so soon? Yes, indeed, it appears Blizzard will be making seasons last 2 months, from 4. Meanwhile, Blizzard has been asking for your opinion on how patch 1.4 changes have influenced your play. The latest "StarCraft Art of War" batch requests feedback on the Warp Prism.But I'd like to take this chance to express my disappointment for the fact that if you are from Europe, you cannot comment on this article. Yes, you can only comment if you're in North America. I'm displeased that this complete region separation history has carried over to the forums as well, as the North Americans make quite good threads, and let's face it, no region has such a complete list of articles; most of the news you see on North America don't even exist in other languages. |
P.S. — If you haven't noticed, we have organized the Favorite Race fields by alphabetical order and there's now a new field for you to type your StarCraft II account and ID in your profile!
P.P.S — Realizing his decreased activity, Pyritie has decided to resign from the staff. He started working for the Hive as a model mini-moderator, and he eventually became a model moderator. He was later made global moderator and worked his way up to become an administrator. But he will still be visiting us!
| P.P.P.S. — Silhouettes. This is a new multiplayer Terran unit for Heart of the Swarm in Blizzard's Facebook page. What is it?! From IGN:
Thank Wazzz for the catch. |
| {EDIT, 10-Oct-2011, 17:45 GMT} Blizzard has just revealed a new Zerg multiplayer unit for StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm, this happened less than 50 minutes ago! On Facebook, lots of people are saying it's the Zerg Lurker from StarCraft 1: Brood War, but there are other suggestions, such as: «siege tank roach». What are your thoughts? By the way, keep a look out for this news article. |
- Joined
- Jan 7, 2005
- Messages
- 7,551
The Hive Workshop has reconsidered the use of exported resources from games whose copyrights are owned by Blizzard Entertainment. If you find any conflicting rules, we'd appreciate that you let us know. The game exports rule has already been rectified.
As of the 28th of September of 2011, The Hive Workshop is accepting the exportation and use — in maps or mods — of artistic resources (skins, icons, and models) from games whose copyrights are owned by Activision Blizzard/Blizzard Entertainment.
A new StarCraft novel is now on stores:
Check out the article to find hyperlinks to Amazon.
Blizzard has announced that the band Foo Fighters will be headlining the closing concert of this year's BlizzCon.The fictional band Lvl 80 Tauren Chieftain is also scheduled to make an appearance! Check out the article here!
As of the 28th of September of 2011, The Hive Workshop is accepting the exportation and use — in maps or mods — of artistic resources (skins, icons, and models) from games whose copyrights are owned by Activision Blizzard/Blizzard Entertainment.
- Requests forum: Users are allowed to export, modify and upload resources — admitting the number of solicited items is reasonable — at their discretion. There is no policy regarding the quality or degree of modification of such exports within this particular forum ONLY.
- The staff decides whether or not that number is reasonable.
- Maps: Maps may now utilize exports from other Blizzard games. If your map has been previously rejected on grounds of Blizzard copyright infringement, you may request for it to be restored in the Map Resource Moderation.
- Skins: Arbitrary uploading of exported textures is not condoned. Further info on Models below.
- Icons: You are allowed to utilize icons from Blizzard games other than WarCraft III or StarCraft II as base images. However, every icon is still subject to the at-least-75%-freehand rule as well as the requirements of proper bordering and formatting in order to suit the destined game environment.
- Models: Any exported model must be formatted properly to be fitting with other models of the destined game. For example, the difference on the number of polies of a WoW-to-WC3 model and other WC3 models must not be too high, and WC3-to-SC2 models must receive proper diffuse, emmisive and specular textures.
A new StarCraft novel is now on stores:
Check out the article to find hyperlinks to Amazon.
Blizzard has announced that the band Foo Fighters will be headlining the closing concert of this year's BlizzCon.The fictional band Lvl 80 Tauren Chieftain is also scheduled to make an appearance! Check out the article here!
- Joined
- Jan 7, 2005
- Messages
- 7,551
Patch 1.4.0 for StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty has just went live! Like we mentioned in our previous news post, it comes with many (balance) changes both for the game and the editor! Check out the changelog.
Also, here's the picture of the winner of one of Blizzard's contests:
(update, 24-Sep-2011 at 21 o'clock GMT, Summer time +1)
| Balance Snapshot and Situation Report for patch 1.4 To help understand the thought process behind balance changes, Blizzard has recently posted news articles regarding how balance is evaluated. Without further detaining, see "Balance Snapshot" and "Situation Report: Patch 1.4".We are emphasizing the second news batch, since it contains explanations for all the balance changes made in the latest patch. |
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Ultralisks are usually ready to join the game at or around 200 pop. Zerg players usually need to free up some supply in order to start building these guys. Because Ultralisks take two to three times longer to build compared to other units, we felt the time right before Ultralisks are created is the weakest possible moment for using this unit.
Therefore, we made the build time slightly faster in the hope of more accurately gauging the current strength of Ultralisks before making bigger decisions.
- Unit vision up ramps has been reduced by 1.
This change is specifically to address the protoss vs. protoss 4-gate all-in problem. With this change, it will be possible to block the middle of your ramp using one force field, thus preventing your opponent from warping up your cliff.
- Immortal attack range increased from 5 to 6.
We wanted to help protoss fight against the terran 1/1/1 strategy without impacting or changing other parts of the game too much. The units protoss have at their disposal are very limited at the early portion of the game, and most units (other than the Immortal) were used too heavily in more generic unit compositions. Immortals were a good choice due to the current meta-game moving away from heavy Immortal usage.
We decided to go with the range increase so that they have an easier/better capability of taking out siege tanks as well as to have them be more easily usable when in combination with other ranged units.
- Mothership acceleration increased from 0.3 to 1.375.
We wanted to try to bring in a unit that’s rarely used back into the action in order to potentially create new viable strategies for protoss. In the end, it came down to a choice between the Carrier and the Mothership.
We decided to go with the Mothership for a variety of reasons, the biggest one being that we felt its maneuvrability required tweaking. As for the acceleration increase itself, we found that the biggest problem was that the unit felt very unresponsive to use. For a unit whose positioning is so important, we felt that making it easier to maneuver made the most sense.
- Stalker Blink research time increased from 110 to 140.
We felt Blink all-in timing was a bit too much on certain maps/positions. We wanted to implement a change that only affects this tactic without reducing the general usage of Blink itself. We decided to go with adjusting the timing of the upgrade and not touch the ability itself or the cost of the research.
- Warp Prism shields increased from 40 to 100.
The Warp Prism is a unit where we could see a lot of potential with it. However, when they’re used in games, it’s very easy to defend vs. them using only a few units. We’re hoping to see more Warp Prism based strategies with this buff.
- Barracks build time increased from 60 to 65.
We first started looking at this change due to the 11 11 rush vs. zerg and also evaluated how easy it is to just put down a bunker on the offensive to do some minor damage early on in terran vs. zerg match-ups without much sacrifice from the terran player.
We also started to notice not just the all-in rushes terran players do, but also that the various early game push options available (before scouting even comes into play) were slightly problematic as well.
Due to both of those reasons, we feel this change is very solid. As always, however, we will continue to evaluate the ongoing effects of this change on gameplay.
- Hellion infernal Pre-Igniter damage upgrade decreased from 10 to 5.
This is an issue we’ve had a lot of pro-player and community feedback on ever since previous terran vs. terran changes were implemented and the meta-game changed. Feedback we’ve been hearing has reflected upon how Hellions with this upgrade seem to ultimately cause for really boring games to watch. One split second mistake makes 1 player lose 20+ workers and the game is pretty much over before anything else really happens.
In a perfect world of terran vs. terran, we’d like to see both bio and mech based strategies viable. We don’t know for certain that this is possible, but this change makes the Hellion relationship vs. Marines and Workers only 1 shot different (assuming marines use Stimpacks in combat). Meaning, this is the smallest change we could make in order to attempt to meet that goal.
We also heard feedback on how some worker relationships aren’t changed even when you purchase the upgrade with this change. We feel not every upgrade in the game has to change every single relationship in the game. For example: choosing to go without upgraded Hellions for a strategy involving killing Drones with the Hellions vs. choosing to upgrade to mostly fight against Zerglings we feel is a perfectly reasonable choice for players to make.
- Raven Seeker Missile movement speed increased from 2.5 to 2.953.
We feel this ability can create cool moments whether it’s separating out the unit that’s marked by the Seeker or if it’s running away from the whole stack to avoid splash damage.
It’s starting to see more play in terran vs. terran matches, but we wanted to increase the movement speed of the Seeker Missile so that dodging it becomes slightly more difficult.
- Infestor
- Fungal Growth damage changed from 36 (47 vs armored) to 30 (40 vs Armored).
- Neural Parasite range decreased from 9 to 7.
Infestors were all around too general. Neural Parasite takes care of the more expensive medium size units as well as massive units, Fungal Growth is good vs. small to lower cost medium units, and Infested Terrans were just good for cost vs. anything that doesn’t move out of position. We like the positional-based gameplay Infested Terrans cause, so we decided to look at the other spells instead.
Fungal Growth is a solid spell that is a core part of the zerg meta-game, so we went with as minimal of a change as possible. We didn’t want to change the current game too much since according to our stats all zerg matchups are very close to even at the highest levels. When testing with the highest level players, we noticed this change is very minor yet still very slightly noticeable.
We decided on the Neural Parasite change in order to create more decision making in terms of the positioning of the Infestor as well as what units are needed at which locations in order to better protect the Infestor casting this spell. Previously, it felt too easy to cast and too difficult to counter without having siege range units.
- Fungal Growth damage changed from 36 (47 vs armored) to 30 (40 vs Armored).
- Overseer Morph cost decreased from 50/100 to 50/50.
- Contaminate energy cost increased from 75 to 125.
We felt zerg are very vulnerable to various early game openers. Also, the cost between creating one Overseer for scouting purposes vs. purchasing the Overlord speed upgrade for all Overlords didn’t seem to differ enough.
This cost change would hopefully encourage slightly earlier scouting using not only the Overseer but also Changelings as well.
For Contaminate, we felt the zerg vs. zerg strategy of locking down the hatchery could easily be problematic, so we put in that change to compensate for the cost decrease of the unit.
- Ultralisk build time decreased from 70 to 55.
Ultralisks are usually ready to join the game at or around 200 pop. Zerg players usually need to free up some supply in order to start building these guys. Because Ultralisks take two to three times longer to build compared to other units, we felt the time right before Ultralisks are created is the weakest possible moment for using this unit.
Therefore, we made the build time slightly faster in the hope of more accurately gauging the current strength of Ultralisks before making bigger decisions.
