Holy talent batman! This week’s FAF is a CG sketch by Anarahk of Jim Raynor and Kerrigan as they appear in StarCraft 2. You should also check out their dA page as well. The gallery is freaking amazing.
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The 2 Gate 2 Robo is a pretty safe build against most opponents. It’s a pretty good opening that helps you get a lot of units out allowing you different options based on your opponent’s move.
The video above gives you an idea of how it works, but is missing sound =/.. The video is by Lokazi.
In a recent speech, CEO Bobby Kotick told attendees at the Bank of America Merrill Lynch’s Media, Communications & Entertainment Conference in Newport Beach, CA, “If we were to take that hour, or hour and a half [of the StarCraft 2 cutscenes], take it out of the game, and we were to go to our audiences for whom we have their credit card information as well as a direct relationship and ask, ‘Would you like to have the StarCraftmovie?’, my guess is that … you’d have the biggest opening weekend of any film ever.”
Kotick then discussed how the current film industry is stuck in its inefficient distribution model that cuts in on margins and offered solutions on how Blizzard Activision can be its own distributors in developing and delivering their own franchise films strait to consumers, based on the existing relationship that Blizzard has with its subscribers.
He went on to announce, “within the next five years, you are likely to see us do that. That may be in partnership with somebody, it may be alone.”
So given the quality of the Starcraft cutscenes so far and what Kotick is saying now, its safe to say that we would probably see a 3D Blizzard film in the near future. I imagine that the film distributing companies aren’t too happy to hear about how Blizzard wants to do it, so how we see this film remains to be seen (pun intended). Either way, this is good news for all the Blizzard nerds.
The Destiny Cloud Fist is a pretty gas intensive Terran build… I think the name was coined by HuskyStarCraft. What this is is a 1/1/1 build where you get the Barracks, Factory, and Starport very early. What this build allows you to do is to be really versatile in transitioning between other tactics you want to do.
The video was produced by CollateralSC.
Blizzard recently made a post on where they stood with hacking in StarCraft 2:
Playing StarCraft II legitimately means playing with an unaltered game client. Doing otherwise violates our policies for Battle.net, and it goes against the spirit of fair play that all of our games are based on. We strongly recommend that you avoid using any hacks, cheats, or exploits. Suspensions and bans of players that have used or start using cheats and hacks will begin in the near future.
Its good news, but I’m surprised they didn’t start this sooner.
I think this piece is actually in the official SC fan art gallery, but I wanted to include this because Devon Cady-Lee is an actual professional concept artist for Turbine and a Boston native. So gotta show off the local talent here!
Blizzard just announced improvements to its matchmaking and ladder system. Most improvements involve team match ups:
Improved Matchmaking for Teams
While the matchmaking system as a whole is looking very strong, one area we identified for improvement was matchmaking for arranged teams that were still in placement matches. We found these first few matches for arranged teams were giving them an unfair advantage against their opponents. Since so many new arranged teams were being created every day, this was resulting in a noticeable amount of imbalanced matches for team games. The corrections we’ve made should show an improvement for many team players, especially in the sub-Gold leagues.Improved Placement for Teams
Another related issue we’ve received feedback on and experienced firsthand is the difficulty of placing in a high league while in an arranged team. We made two changes that should improve the experience. 1) The improved matchmaking mentioned above will help teams find opponents of similar skill sooner and, as a result, help to more quickly place teams in the league in which they belong. 2) We also found we were being too conservative in how teams were being placed in leagues and have made some adjustments to allow teams to be more easily placed in higher leagues. 3v3 random and arranged teams will likely notice this change the most.Team Matchmaking Improvements
We found conditions where the matchmaking system was forcing certain teams and players to wait longer than needed for team matches. Those conditions have been addressed and the wait times should be reduced without affecting the quality of the matchmaking.
I mostly play 1v1, but this is good news for those team players.
I am not much of a Zerg player, so I had no clue you can do this…
One of my favorite strategies as Protoss on larger maps is the Void Ray rush. It works pretty well against Zerg and Protoss, but is kind of hard to pull off versus Terrans.
Here’s a video from Force that explains how to do it pretty well:
Here’s the second version of his explanations:
In case you want to check out the Void Rush be played out on the pro-gaming level, see the game by casted by HDStarcraft a while back:
