Still at BlizzCon 2009, we got the opportunity to spend some time with the Lead Designer of StarCraft II, Dustin Browder. You might remember him from such Blizzard projects as the StarCraft II Battle Reports, where he is one of the announcers. Let me tell you, the man can talk.

The weekend didn't really hold too much in the way of big StarCraft II news, so we decided to get Dustin to talk us through some more details about the new Battle.net service which is due to launch with the game, "When it's done".

One of the very shiny features that looms in B.net future is the all-new matchmaking system, which promises to feature a pretty swanky ladder set up. If you pick up a copy of StarCraft II, and you're new to the game, Dustin promises that you won't just be lumped in with the superstars...

"...even if you're not that new, but you're just not that good! You can get a good position where you're not just trying to be #17,102 instead of #17,103 - that's not a meaningful number to you. We're talking about different divisions and then different leagues within those divisions, that will keep you matched up against 100 people who are about your skill level. So, you can compete against them, you'll see a lot of movement in your position because they're about your skill level, and when we get to the end of the season, we can have a meaningful tournament where you could actually have a shot at winning!

Then you can say "Hey, I'm the tournament champion of Copper 66." And that may not mean much, because it's not a Gold or a Pro division, but it's still Copper 66. And if I'm Copper 65, or Copper 72, that tells me that you won, and that's cool! It's just like - if I go and play intramural softball down here, Sammy Sosa does not show up and start hitting home runs, right? The best soccer players in the world don't just jump out when I'm playing soccer with my buddies on the weekend. That would suck! I mean - it'd be fun for a minute, but it would ruin the game. And you'd enjoy it, to meet the famous player, but I wouldn't want it every game. And so we're just trying to get you matched against your skill level. We figure - if you're matched with your skill level, you're going to have a lot more fun."

While it sounded pretty cool to just put everybody into skill-matched level settings, we heard rumours that noobs would also be getting an additional helping hand. Dustin explained how this works:

"There is a practice league, and that has some very different rules. That is not a league where we're going to be doing a lot of ranking yet. That's just for you to get your feet wet, understand the basic rules... they're on anti-rush maps, maps that fundamentally block off your access to each other until certain points in the game, to give you a chance.

Now, I know there are players out there who like that style of game and want to play it for a long time - and that's cool, those maps will be available through custom games as well. But the practice league, that's there for you to figure out how this game is played, to get comfortable, and to figure out what your strategies are before you jump into even the Copper Division."

This "Copper" he speaks of is the first 'real' ranked level of the game, which then leads into Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum and Pro rankings depending on how good (or not) you are.


Now, I know there are some of you who've been around a while and have seen games attempting to introduce complex new matchmaking / ladder schemes, only to fail miserably (Red Alert 3, I'm looking at you!). We asked Dustin the pretty straightforward question: How much care and time are Blizzard putting into this side of the game to make it better (and actually work?):

"Quite a bit - it's a pretty big focus for us.

"We actually had a pretty good matchmaking system for Warcraft III, but there were some cracks. The biggest crack was that you could instantly re-roll your character, any time you wanted to, and it would reset your stats. By now, we have a single Battle.net account, with a very limited number of characters (and we haven't decided how many yet), per account. You're not going to reroll very often! Which means you're going to be stuck with your rating - and if you get worse, then we will downgrade you, and that's okay. But it means it's going to be a lot less enjoyable for people to try to sneak into the lowest ranks and "pwn noobs!", they're not going to really even want to do that.

"I'm not sure that everybody who did it, by the way, was being malicious. In some cases, they just didn't like their stats, like "that's too many losses, I can do better than that", and they'd reroll. And so they'd come through the lower ranks, until we placed them properly, just cutting a swath of destruction through everybody else, and ruining their whole day."

In case he's using too many words there: No more smurfing!

So - you're a big fan of StarCraft II, you put in hours and hours of gameplay, get your ranking up to somewhere you're pretty proud of, and then your job gets serious, you get a new girlfriend, you go away on an extended family holiday, and you simply can't get to a computer to spend any time with your beloved Zerglings. By the time you get back to the PC, all your hard-earned muscle memory has drained from your fingers, and you're struggling to hold off that rush attack. Suddenly, you can't play to the standard you used to, and your polished Gold League ranking doesn't seem to fit your current playstyle.

Fortunately, Blizzard have you covered:

"You've been gone a while, okay, we're getting ready to move you fast if you look like you're failing. If it looks like you've been out of it, we're going to be a little more aggressive by shoving you down a rank or whatever, because this is not working out. It can take a couple of games to find your feet, once you've been gone for a while, or if you're new to the service.

"We can pretty much figure out within about ten games, where you belong, at least to start with. We're also going to ask players some questions up-front, to try and seed them a little bit more accurately. Whether they answer them honestly or not, we can't really say, but it'll help spread people out a little bit. If you answer honestly, you'll get a better experience - you'll be put against people of your skill level more quickly, it won't take as many games to start finding your rank within the whole overall hierarchy. We can place you pretty accurately - and certainly, when it's all working, you'll win about half your games - which is what you want (well, you actually want to win 60-70% of games, but that means somebody else is losing 60-70% of their games, and that's not fun)."

Over the weekend, Dustin also hosted a panel that included showing off some amazingly creative projects that had been created using the StarCraft II toolset - and we've hunted down a video that shows off a bit of a custom map preview. (That's Dustin on the left in that video, with the beard).

As you can see from this clip, there's some brilliant things that can be done: an uber-lisk, a third-person perspective (featuring a very familiar looking blonde ghost), an underground RPG-style sequence, and even a vertically-scrolling shoot-em-up in the style of Galaga, complete with boss battle at the end of the level.

As Dustin explains:

"We ship the toolset with the game - the editor, the trainer, the missions - the things that are on show have nothing to do with StarCraft II really, they're just using a lot of the assets, and they've created some crazy, crazy mods. We've said, time and time again, that our fans - we can't predict what they've got in store for us. These guys created Defense of the Ancients from Aeon of Strife maps, which are now - as a game type - emulated by major studios around the world, trying to capture that magic and figure out a good way of playing it. We've also got Tower Defense games, which basically invented by our fans on Battle.net, which are now being replicated into great games like Plants vs. Zombies... and so our fans are creating genres of games, using what we consider now to be a pretty primitive tool, on a service that is substandard to what we want to do down the road. So - we're very hopeful that as we improve the tools, and as we improve the quality of the battle.net service, that all of these things will come together into making an experience that's really really popular for our mod-makers and our fans and can create some great content for everybody to play."

Part of the appeal of these new custom map tools is the fact that - in the hopefully not-so-distant future - you'll actually be able to sell your creations, thanks to the new Battle.net 2.0 Marketplace. This is an additional feature to be added after the launch of the service, and Dustin explains what the deal is:

"It's still got a bunch of work to do on it, so there's all kinds of questions that haven't been resolved - like pricing, like protecting the users' maps so they don't get ripped off by other people - all kinds of stuff we haven't figured out on that. I think Rob (Pardo) really just announced it to get these guys ready, because a lot of these guys are working from their garages - they're really grass-roots kind of movements and they need all the lead-time they can get, to figure out what they want to do, who they want to get together, how they want to make it happen. We're very hopeful that by giving them some resources... look what they've done with no resources! It's amazing! What will they do with resources? Who can say? Hopefully cool stuff! We have a lot of faith in our fans and their passion, they'll figure it out and do some pretty awesome stuff."

If your fingers are tingling and you can't wait to check this all out - we're told that the editor will actually be included in the beta version of StarCraft II (even though we're not sure when that will be).

"Not necessarily Beta Day One, but it'll come at some point during the beta, hopefully to help seed the community so when we go out there, on day one, there will already be a few custom maps, and it'll just get better over time."

After asking about the good things, the exciting things, it was time to turn to something a little less pleasant, the issue of LAN functionality. Looks like you'll still need to be connected to the internet when playing, even if there's a bunch of you in the room and you all just want to play amongst yourselves.

"We know it's a controversial decision, and we're going to be watching it very, very carefully as we go forward. We know from World of Warcraft that there's a huge audience that has an internet connection. When we released the original StarCraft, the internet connection was a prototype - not every machine had them, if it had them it maybe wasn't configured correctly, who knows what state that modem was in? So now, ten/eleven/twelve years later, every machine comes with some kind of ability to connect to the internet, and almost everybody (that we know of) has an internet connection.

"So - it's a part of the PC experience at this point, and we want to use that platform - to make a more integrated experience that's a lot more fun to play. You're getting your achievements, and it's not screwed up because you're on LAN, where you can't get your achievements now. You can connect with your players, and we're not dividing up our community.

"But! There are some legitimate cases for LAN, where I want this because it's what's good about LAN. We're trying to figure out what those cases are, which cases are legitimate, and how we can support those cases in whatever way we can figure out to doing it."

Given that the whole arrangement has been confusing (and, at times, conflicting), we asked Dustin to explain the current set-up for us - and basically, each one of you will need to have a connection, largely for authorisation purposes, tracking achievements, watching friends lists and the like. It's not all that simple though:

"One of the things we're working on is how can we make sure the latency is good - we're looking at other ways we can connect you over the LAN, so you can maintain the connection but you're actually playing across the LAN - what can we do? We're looking at those cases to see what can happen.

"It varies by territory - which is something we're investigating. We don't see a lot of LAN play, there are not a lot of LAN parties. Everybody's all like "Oh, LAN parties!" - but when's the last time you actually played one? "Starcraft... okay, never mind." They actually haven't played it in a long time. But there are other countries where it's more common - so we're sort of gathering information as we go, and we'll see what the real cases are, and then try to provide for them."

We did try to grill Dustin about whether or not we'd get any kind of local servers for StarCraft II, but unfortunately he claimed to not know any more than us on that point. One day, I promise, we'll bail up the right Blizzard employee and get the information we need - but in the meantime, Dustin was telling us about lag/latency balancing; the next best thing.

"The lag will all be based on your connection to your opponent, at the end of the day. So if you're connecting to an opponent far away, at the end of the day, we can't do a lot to save you from that. But if you're going to play against somebody local, you should be in pretty good shape. And we can definitely do things to improve that."

Dustin was "pretty sure" that the game connection will be going through peer-to-peer rather than travelling to and from battle.net, but as that's all part of this LAN-related information gathering, it's (obviously) subject to change.

"One of the things we're going to try to do is provide you more feedback about who is slowing you down, and why. One of the problems on our servers - as opposed to, say, Quake - if I have a good connection to a first-person shooter server, then I have a good connection, I don't see any lag. The other retards get all the lag he wants because his settings are too high, or his connection is garbage - but if I'm playing StarCraft against you, and your settings are too high, then I have a bad experience, and I'm all "What's up with this damn game? It's terrible!" So some feedback... "That guy's got his settings too high!" "OMG! Dude!" ...that's information that you need, to understand what's going on in the game, and why."

At this point, we checked our watches and saw that Dustin had to spirit away to another part of the convention centre in order to host his (very informative) panel, so we were left with a page full of unasked questions, but more than a few answers as well.

Blizzard staff are notorious for keeping very tight-lipped when it comes to release date discussions, and StarCraft II is no exception. Sure, we were hoping for it to be out in 2007, then crossed our fingers it would be delivered by last Christmas, and then it was looking very likely for this year - but as the holiday season approaches, and now with BlizzCon come and gone, in the face of an official announcement I'd say we'll be looking at StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty hitting our shelves and our screens "some time next year". ish. When it's done, anyway.