With Patch 3.2 comes a slew of new content, including the first of the Nova Covert Ops Mission Packs. But that’s not all: you’ll also see improvements to patching as well!

In the past, we often had to disconnect players from our servers whenever we made a significant update to the game, and anyone playing immediately before the server went offline would see an alert around 30 minutes before it happened.

Our latest update to patching in Patch 3.2 means we won’t have to take the service down for certain types of smaller patches. Instead, you’ll see a dialogue box pop up in the top right of the UI letting you know about the update.

The nice thing about the new system is that if you’re in a game at the same time we release one of these patches, you can now play out your entire game no matter how long it is, without scrambling to finish (and potentially being more likely to lose) before the shutdown timer finishes counting down.

While you won’t be able to queue for a new game until after you’ve applied the patch, you’ll still be able to defer the patching process until later if you’re just hanging out in the UI and chatting with friends. You can choose to dismiss the dialogue and stay logged in, or shut down the client and apply the patch via the Battle.net desktop app before relaunching StarCraft II and queuing for a new game once more.

While we will still likely have some server downtime for major StarCraft II patches, we expect this change to result in an overall net decrease in the number of instances that we might have to take down the service down to apply patches going forward.

We’ll be using this feature next week to release a follow-up bug fix patch to 3.2, and we look forward to getting your feedback on how the process goes at that time. Thanks for reading, and GL HF!