It has been exhilarating to see the explosion of interest and popularity around a custom game in StarCraft II the last few days. It’s actually six games in the StarCraft II Arcade right now, as Starbow has six different maps to play on. And I’ve been playing them. And I keep getting crushed, but that’s okay. I know that many of my co-workers at Blizzard and friends outside the company have been playing on them, too. The discussion around the game is good stuff. It’s good for every part of the community and it’s enjoyable for us. I hope it continues and stays enthusiastic.
Especially over this past weekend, when Starbow talk really took off, it presented a bit of a conundrum on these forums. It’s Arcade talk, and it really belongs in the Arcade forum. But it’s actually about a custom melee map, and it should go in the Melee Map forum. And what about the Multiplayer & eSports forum? At the time, there were perhaps ten threads to work with, so why not just leave it in General Discussion?
But now there are dozens of these threads, and tournaments are being put together, and we’ve got Extension Mods and other impactful features coming in Patch 2.1, and it seems like we should be spreading the love. So I’m going to move some of these threads. Not all of them, mind you. Many of them, in fact, are truly “general discussion”. They’re about the community and the state of the game and how we players feel about, well, everything.
For every day I can remember going back to Patch 1.5, the most-played game in the StarCraft II Arcade has been Squadron Tower Defense. I’ve played that game quite a bit, and it makes sense to me that so many players enjoy it. It’s one of those games that we like to call “easy to play; hard to master”. It’s not easy to just figure out all on your own. At some point, if you’re going to play it well, you’ve got to at least look some things up (if not talk to people – I’ve talked to many of my co-workers about the game, and I made a bunch of notes about it). These sorts of games bring people together, and that’s ultimately what we all want. The hope of bringing people together is why we have Arcade Highlights and Workshops, and if you think about it, that hope is why we schedule tournament events and cheer for clans and develop game expansions.
As I said above, don’t be surprised if some threads get moved, and don’t be shy about starting new threads in other sub-forums! If you want to specifically talk about an Arcade game, or a melee map, or a tournament, please do so in those specific forums.
Those of us in community management continue to read everything you have to say and act on your behalf as much as possible, in addition to highlighting and playing awesome new games … and so many other things. And we hope that everyone – by all means – enjoys StarCraft II in all of its wonderful forms. It’s really a huge collection of games, and we’re quite proud of it.
We’ll see you in Starbow.
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