Starcraft 2 Beta

[Midge]

if anyone has some spare invite, ive never played starcraft at all but would really like to try it before i pre-order the game :p

[Evolution]

I can't believe they're going to nerf the protoss ever more with the new patch.... allowing force fields to be destroyed by having large units walk over them :/ And all they've done if buff the terrans...

[Yusuf M. Veteran]

I can't believe they're going to nerf the protoss ever more with the new patch.... allowing force fields to be destroyed by having large units walk over them :/ And all they've done if buff the terrans...

Not only that, the range for Void Rays was reduced from 7 to 6. :/

3v3 and 4v4 has been added alongside Facebook integration. Also, the Copper League was removed and the Diamond League has been added (above Platinum).

Patch notes: http://forums.battle.net/thread.html?topicId=23094049316&postId=250240003971&sid=5000#16

[lalalawawawa]

Constant drops, lag spikes... All hell broke lose after patch 13. :laugh:

But I'm having an exam week this week so I don't mind. :p

[Yusuf M. Veteran]

Constant drops, lag spikes... All hell broke lose after patch 13. :laugh:

But I'm having an exam week this week so I don't mind. :p

Indeed. I dropped from games where I, or my teammate and I, had the upper-hand. It's frustrating and Blizzard needs to fix the problems before the end of the beta on the 31st.

[Yusuf M. Veteran]

It seems as though Battle.net 2.0's quality of service went down the drain. I can barely log in half the time and when I can, I'm put in laggy games - sometimes dropping before the game even starts.

[LingeringSoul]

It seems as though Battle.net 2.0's quality of service went down the drain. I can barely log in half the time and when I can, I'm put in laggy games - sometimes dropping before the game even starts.

I thought I had just chosen a bad time last night, but apparently not. I installed the beta and was so excited to play it... until I fired up the client and got a message telling me that Battle.net is down.

I'm determined to play at least one game before the beta ends. I need to justify my pre-order ;).

[Evolution]

All the periodic lag is throwing me off :/

[Yusuf M. Veteran]

I took a break from SC2 for a couple of days in hopes that Blizzard would fix the lag issues. From what I've been reading on the Blizzard forums (and here as well), it looks like the lag issues are still there. The beta is going to end in about one week so Blizzard needs to fix things for people that want to squeeze as much playtime out of the beta as possible.

[Sikh]

Yeah you would think anaron. Right after Patch 13 everything went to hell and is continuing doing too.

I wish i could put more time in but by the 31st i know it wont be fixed.

[Yusuf M. Veteran]

Yeah you would think anaron. Right after Patch 13 everything went to hell and is continuing doing too.

I wish i could put more time in but by the 31st i know it wont be fixed.

It's such a shame too. Patch 13 added the most in terms of content: 3v3/4v4 formats, publishable user-made maps, and Facebook integration. They even enabled UDP to "improve game performance" along with "numerous performance and stability improvements". Of course, that didn't do anything but make things worse.

I sincerely hope Blizzard gets their act together in the coming days.

EDIT: I ran a trace route to see if there were any problems between my computer and Battle.net. Hops 7 through 14 are Blizzard's servers and it doesn't look good. I could be wrong though as I have never performed a trace route to www.battle.net so I don't know what the acceptable latency range is. From my knowledge though, I'd say >100 ms isn't good. The timed out requests (hops 17 through 30) are normal.

Tracing route to www.battle.net [12.129.242.40]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

  1     8 ms     7 ms     7 ms  10.118.0.1 
  2     8 ms     7 ms     7 ms  66.185.89.225 
  3     9 ms     9 ms     9 ms  69.63.249.109 
  4    26 ms    26 ms    26 ms  69.63.248.194 
  5    78 ms    61 ms    69 ms  TenGigabitEthernet2-4.ar6.NYC1.gblx.net [64.208.169.149] 
  6    64 ms    26 ms    28 ms  192.205.37.137 
  7   108 ms   104 ms   113 ms  cr1.n54ny.ip.att.net [12.122.81.58] 
  8   104 ms   105 ms   105 ms  cr2.cgcil.ip.att.net [12.122.1.2] 
  9   107 ms   104 ms   104 ms  cr1.cgcil.ip.att.net [12.122.2.53] 
 10   104 ms   105 ms   104 ms  cr2.dvmco.ip.att.net [12.122.31.85] 
 11   110 ms   111 ms   115 ms  cr1.slkut.ip.att.net [12.122.30.25] 
 12   106 ms   107 ms   104 ms  cr2.la2ca.ip.att.net [12.122.30.30] 
 13   103 ms   104 ms   103 ms  cr84.la2ca.ip.att.net [12.123.30.249] 
 14   103 ms   104 ms   103 ms  gar5.la2ca.ip.att.net [12.122.129.25] 
 15   104 ms   121 ms   104 ms  12.122.255.74 
 16   103 ms   104 ms   105 ms  12.129.193.242 
 17     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 18     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 19     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 20     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 21     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 22     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 23     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 24     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 25     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 26     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 27     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 28     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 29     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 30     *        *        *     Request timed out.

Trace complete.

You guys can run it too with this command: 'tracert www.battle.net > C:\tracert.txt' (without quotes). Just be sure to run CMD prompt in Administrator mode otherwise it won't save the text file. It'll take a couple of minutes to complete and once it's done, you should see "tracert.txt" in your C: drive.

[Evolution]

You don't need to create a text file >_> Just run the command prompt :p Your traceroute was't resolved, like mine, which I guess was blocked rather than timed out.... but my the ping for battle.net's att hosting was 91 ms for me... which isn't good.

[Sikh]

..snip..

Funny thing is ATT's servers are still being used and are VERY STRONG, but introducing UDP killed them because now they have 2 protocols and n00bs who dont know how to port forward let along port forward a range for both protocols which causes problems.

I did a trace route before from my router(pfsense box) to battle.net and got always under 67ms when it did the servers. But after patch 13 and running a trace route the first day(it kept telling me I WAS LAGGING..... I love how the game tells you YOU LAG and also you use to be fine / the best person in the game, now you lag.. fail.) and i got 129ms average.

Doing a trace route now and got 164 ms.

**** you blizzard, fix the problems or dont expect me to buy your god damn game.

[killmaster84]

I played today and finally learnt how to build up to the banshee rush, nothin better against protoss when they try to proxy gate me.

[Evolution]

I played today and finally learnt how to build up to the banshee rush, nothin better against protoss when they try to proxy gate me.

Yes ... because they're not vulnerable at all to stalkers + a detector ;)

[killmaster84]

Yes ... because they're not vulnerable at all to stalkers + a detector ;)

Not hard to get rid of the detector ;)

[Yusuf M. Veteran]

Cloaked banshees can be very annoying. As a "pure" Protoss player, I can say that it's one of the most annoying units when going against Terran players. It's only beaten by a proxy barracks/reaper rush.

[Evolution]

We previously announced that the first phase of the StarCraft II beta test would be coming to a close in all regions on Monday, May 31. In order to prepare for the final phase of beta testing, we plan to extend the current phase in all regions until Monday, June 7. After this date, the beta test will be unavailable for several weeks while we make some hardware and software configuration changes for the final phase of the beta test and the release of the game. We plan to bring the beta test back online for a couple of weeks prior to the game’s launch to complete our testing. We’ll have more details to share about when this final phase will begin at a later date.

We’d like to thank all of our beta-test participants for your enthusiasm, dedication, and valuable feedback during the beta test, and we look forward to hearing more of your thoughts on the StarCraft II beta test as the game’s July 27 launch approaches.

http://forums.battle.net/thread.html?topicId=25135304348

[Yusuf M. Veteran]

Yes! Thanks for the heads up, Evolution. (Y)

[Haptic]

@Anaron

My tracert.

Tracing route to www.battle.net [12.129.242.40]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

  1    <1 ms     6 ms    58 ms  router [192.168.1.1] 
  2     *        *        *     Request timed out.
  3    13 ms    13 ms    11 ms  68.85.204.109 
  4     8 ms     9 ms    12 ms  68.85.177.242 
  5    19 ms    18 ms    18 ms  pos-0-14-0-0-ar01.area4.il.chicago.comcast.net [68.87.231.17] 
  6    21 ms    17 ms    21 ms  pos-1-12-0-0-cr01.chicago.il.ibone.comcast.net [68.86.90.53] 
  7    22 ms    18 ms    19 ms  pos-0-0-0-0-pe01.350ecermak.il.ibone.comcast.net [68.86.86.34] 
  8    23 ms   101 ms    25 ms  192.205.37.13 
  9    75 ms    76 ms    77 ms  cr1.cgcil.ip.att.net [12.122.84.50] 
 10    73 ms    73 ms    77 ms  cr2.dvmco.ip.att.net [12.122.31.85] 
 11    74 ms    76 ms    74 ms  cr1.slkut.ip.att.net [12.122.30.25] 
 12    74 ms    78 ms    75 ms  cr2.la2ca.ip.att.net [12.122.30.30] 
 13    79 ms    76 ms    75 ms  cr84.la2ca.ip.att.net [12.123.30.249] 
 14    76 ms    76 ms    72 ms  gar5.la2ca.ip.att.net [12.122.129.25] 
 15    74 ms    77 ms    73 ms  12.122.255.74 
 16    75 ms    76 ms    74 ms  12.129.193.242 
 17     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 18     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 19     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 20     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 21     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 22     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 23     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 24     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 25     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 26     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 27     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 28     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 29     *        *        *     Request timed out.
 30     *        *        *     Request timed out.

Trace complete.

[Yusuf M. Veteran]

@Anaron

My tracert.

[...]

That's definitely better than what I had. Things are back to normal though, as far as I can tell.

Anyway, do you guys play Blistering Sands (1v1)? It's such a "smelly" map. So many people cheese on it. The last time I was on, I was cheesed in 4 of the 7 games I played.

[Haptic]

Well against terran, the best thing you can do is get a stalker out as fast as you can to stop any reaper cheese. Against Zerg, a gate/pylon choke at the ramp can work well against any ling rushes.

What kind of cheese are you having to put up with?

[Yusuf M. Veteran]

I can easily defend against that. It's the really smelly cheese tactics that get to me like proxy barracks/reaper and proxy dual-gate/zealot. I've changed my play style to defend against such tactics but it's really annoying when you don't see it coming. I normally play league matches and people rarely resort to all out cheese tactics. It's only when I play custom games that I come across "unskilled" players.

[Evolution]

Is it just me or have you guys also started losing interest in Starcraft 2 :/ Even the custom games are getting boring after a while.

[Yusuf M. Veteran]

I certainly haven't. In fact, I've gained more interest because I play better each time.