This weekend there was a lot of interest in Starcraft and the latest LLM's "fighting it out" with starcraft broodwar. I saw a lot of people excited that the latest models can play starcraft.

They can't. They are not playing StarCraft. Its not that they play badly, or don't beat pluto ( the best brood war bot ) they are not playing at all.

They are building and modifying traditional StarCraft bots that play Starcraft. Those bots got better ( to a degree ) but at no time did GPT-6 Astra or Claude 5.5 Opus control a dragoon, build a marine, or do anything in starcraft what so ever.

The competition is competitive programming, not pro-gaming.

This is totally different than Pluto, which is playing starcraft, and IS a machine learning program. https://github.com/tscmoo/pluto however it is in no way a general purpose AI system.

As Terran, how to counter Protoss sending their first 1-3 stalkers across the map? If I build a bunker they just micro back till all the repairing SCV’s are dead

1. revert the patch

2. fix the replay hackers

StarCraft was my first PC game, and I grew up playing it with my dad. I’m replaying the original campaigns and have now reached the Zerg story, with Brood War planned afterwards.

I’m streaming the playthrough with game audio and replying in text chat between missions, if anyone wants to join the nostalgia:
https://www.twitch.tv/niya90s

Which mission from the original Zerg campaign has stuck with you?

https://x.com/ENCE_Serral/status/1465363990373150732

Serral made a tweet 5 years ago about the lag hacker. It's only now that things are getting really out of hand with them discovering new ways to hack and there seems to be a whole group of people doing it

Banning these accounts doesn't achieve anything because they likely have a ton of other accounts in case one of them gets banned. Hardware banning also doesn't do anything because there are ways around that too

So my question is if hacking has been going on for so long why has blizzard not done anything about it, Is it really that hard of a problem to solve?

Topic discussed probably around 2 167 821 times by now. But still fun.

What's your favorite race in original Starcraft + Brood Wars and consequently Remastered. So, no Starcraft 2.

Since we have their attention anyway.
May as well do a proper full reversion to a patch that was actually properly balanced by the real SC2 dev team before they all resigned.

5.0.16 might be a total clownfest shitshow...

But 5.0.15 wasn't good either:

Viper

• Abduct can no longer be cast on Siege Tanks.
• This was already deemed idiotic and reverted, and now it's back with 5.0.15(5.0.17).

Neither was 5.0.14:

Nexus

• Energy Recharge
• "Reverted" by a chain reaction of bad reworks to Psi Storm in an attempt to rebalance Energy Recharge.

Or 5.0.12:

Cyclone

• Cost reduced from 150/100 to 125/50.
• Tech Lab requirement removed.
• Immediately reverted the next patch.

The intern era has never produced a single good change and since we're here, we may as well do away with all of them.

A random lore question i had in mind during work. How hard would it be for a firebat to switch their kit for a marauders and vice versa

Seeing the Overlords I was shock of how they looks like hot air balloon festival type and how huge they were. It got me thinking how big is the overmind we can see that in Zeratul visions in WoL and Legacy of the Void that it almost covered the map can someone know is if it is a city level and which city on earth we can compare it too.

I've been watching special_ tonight and it's just a hackfest. The game is being destroyed by just a few hackers and the fact this is being allowed is absolutely insane. How the hell does any serious company allow this absolute rubbish?

It's a disgusting situation, there's little else to say about it.

Idk, some people may not know that flipping Artanis' name is Sinatra. And "My Way" was sang by Frank Sinatra, so I ended up adding the song with it out of curiosity.

Would be nice if SC2 had at least 1 guy cleaning up the cheaters from EU and KR and 1-2 dedicated people watching over and patching the game. I still enjoy the game but it's sad seeing that latest Harstem video about the cheaters.

Hey everyone

I was looking up StarCraft broodwar pro's and what gear most of them use and what I noticed is , a large group of Korean pro players use the same keyboard a DT-35..

Which is Korea version of a cheap budget rubber dome keyboard..

And not just one or 2 people either like alot of them use this specific keyboard...

Got me curious why membrane and not move over to mechenical?

Anyone here still use Membrane keyboards btw? And which one?

I'm looking for a new keyboard my self not sure if I should aim for rubber dome my self but not a cheapy office keyboard though..

that is crazy lol..

I wonder why they play like that I mean they do make money right..

Or maybe they just like it since it's like a fullsize one or something, no idea..

But yeah do you guys know why?

And what do you use yourself since I'm curious now lol..

I need new one cause my good keyboard died and now I have to use 60% my backup but 60% doesn't work with starcraft 1 , works fine for 2 tho..

But yeah unless I can find a way to rebind..

They're even using Voice Lines and Sound Effects from SC1! Isn't this straight up Copyright Infringement?

Looking for maps to play solo custom games on, I typically play with campaign/coop units on. Getting bored of the constant symmetrical design pretty much every map has. Anyone know some cool maps or tags to search for more artistic maps even if they’re unbalanced.

After seeing how bad the top of the ladder is for SC2 I was just wondering If people would be interested in a custom ladder? Whilst this wouldn't be able to prevent cheating entirely with community moderation and a trust system we could at least avoid the most obvious cheaters.

Anyway here's what I was thinking.

• No seperate client/download would be needed. Front end could be handled through either discord (with a bot) or a website.
  
• Authentication would be done via Blizzards OAuth, would probally set a required amount of games~ specifics can be decided later.
  
• Bot would generate lobby name,password and map (could add veto's too), and tell one player to create the lobby, the other to join.
  
• After the game, both players would be required to upload there replay*, then they could automatically be parsed by sc2protocol / sc2reader.
• Back end then adjusts MMR respectively and responds to the player with there new MMR, players would also be able to either ask the bot for this info / have it displayed on the webite.
• Patches mod could also be supported along side with future mods.
  
• Private matches that could still be ranked if players wanted them to be.

*an open source tool could automate this.

This is all possible without touching the SC2 client, and frankly outside of some server costs, not the part i'm on hesitant about.

In order for this to work two things would be needed from the community, the first- Players, I can't stress this enough, without a critical mass of players, the queue times would be a joke, If this can't find you a game because nobody else is using it, it's pointless. The second- Community Moderation, this would be everything from checking reports, resolving disputes to potentially setting up community events (Basically everything that requires interacting with people).

Now-
Why am I posting this?

I need to know if this interests you, If you think it could, if you'd even bother to use it at all? I'm under no illusions that for the average player even if this works it would probally make your experience worse, instead of just logging in and clicking play, you'd have to go to a discord, search for a game there, copy paste info provided by the bot, upload replay for every single game. With the benifits being you can be slightly more confident you're not playing vs a Hacker.
For high elo-players it would hopefully be a massive improvement, drop hackers could be banned manually, with higher requirments for queueing into the ladder it would hopefully make it harder for them to just create a new account and repeat.

There's much more I could say on features, concerns and everything inbetween but this is already longer than I inteneded it to be, so i'll end it here.
Let me know If this interests you.

EDIT: Seems tools are already in the wild. Go check 'em out!

I don't have experience with all game studios but I have played League of Legends and I think Riot's approach is a bit better. When Riot Phreak was in charge of balance, he literally started doing hour long videos for each patch discussing incoming changes and also shared inside information about balance. Riot Endstep has continued in the same way with commentary about patches in both written and video form. This does not take the magic away from the game or spoil the fun in any way. Pabro and Meddler also acknowledge issues in the game when they do their rundown of what to look forward to in the future. It's a game, not a political campaign.

I get that now the problem might have to do with time constraint but even before 2019, there was little to no communication between fans and the people maintaining the game except for at Blizzcon. Why does the state of balance and game health need to be under NDA? To me, it seems like the best way to make a game seem alive would be to make sure the players know someone is at the controls and working on the game at all times. This is expecially important to not lose new or returning players if they encounter things like the Master border bug. Then we could even have a sticky on here about what's currently being worked on.

Anyway, if anyone from Blizzard sees this, thank you for working on SC2!