Maps

Going forward, we’re going to make a few changes in our approach to the 1v1 ladder map pool.

First, we’ve decided to alter the start location rules for Antiga Shipyard and Entombed Valley to match those of popular tournaments. From now on, starting locations on Antiga Shipyard will be locked to cross-positions only, while Entombed Valley will allow players to spawn only in vertical and cross-positions.

We’ve held off on these changes until now primarily because we thought having different sets of hidden start location rules for each map might be confusing to lower level players. At this point, however, we feel that most StarCraft II players have a solid understanding of starting locations on each map. You will find these changes published during an upcoming server maintenance that will be happening next week.

We’re also discussing our direction for the Heart of the Swarm map pool. Though we will go into further detail at a later date, we are currently planning to make heavier use of popular tournament maps, refresh the map pool more frequently than we did in Wings of Liberty, and work closely with tournament organizations around the world in order to collaborate on map development.

Balance

We felt the nerfs we made to the Infestor with our most recent balance update did not have as much of an impact as we had hoped. In the Heart of the Swarm beta, we’ve been testing Infested Terrans that do not benefit from weapon or armor upgrades, and feel that bringing this change to Wings will help discourage mass-Infestor play in the late game.

We’ve just published a new version of the Antiga Shipyard balance test map to the custom games list under the name (4)AntigaShipyard (1.5.3 Balance v2.0). Please help us test the following change so that we can make another small update to Wings of Liberty balance:

Zerg

• Infested Terrans no longer gain weapon and armor upgrades.

We’re looking for feedback on this change that is based on playtesting. After you’ve had a chance to thoroughly test it, please join us in this discussion thread.