Hey guys, Grant here from Classic Games. Just wanna give you a real quick update on some of the features that we're working on right now on StarCraft: Remastered, but before I do that I wanna thank you guys for all the feedback that you've been giving us in the forums—telling us about the things that you like and what you don't like, and the issues we need to fix: that really helps us know what's going on in the community. So, please keep it up, and we're definitely listening to everything that you're saying.

So, matchmaking 1v1: it's awesome to see so many people that have jumped in and given matchmaking a go. We've had millions of matches made already in just over 6 weeks of StarCraft: Remastered being live. So it's awesome to see so many people playing the global matchmaker. The nature of the global matchmaker does mean we're seeing some issues of latency, and we've been doing a lot of work on that over the last few weeks to try and reduce that as much as possible. Just recently we doubled the number of proxy servers that we're using in Korea and we're already seeing some improvements based on that. We've made a number of other server-side improvements, and very recently you guys all participated in a turn rate experiment which we did which helped us nail down what was a pretty good happy medium turn rate of 10. That said, we want to run in the best—in the fastest—turn rate we can for the connection, so to that end we'll be rolling out a dynamic turn rate system (coming soon). And that will mean that the game will run in the highest possible turn rate that it can for a connection and if the connection has too much latency, it'll keep dropping down to a turn rate that makes sense for that connection. So that's something to look forward to coming soon, and we think that will alleviate a lot of the issues that we're seeing in the global matchmaker as far as latency is concerned.

One thing I want to talk about really quickly is the disconnecting that we saw happening, which it seems like it's no longer happening, or certainly a lot less. People were disconnecting before the end of the game when it looked like they were going to lose in order to not take the loss, and it was also unfortunately preventing the winner from getting a win. That's now been fixed about a week ago and the winner is getting their win, the guy who disconnects gets the loss AND the disconnect stat, so it's a pretty powerful disincentive for people to do this disconnect drop thing before they lose. So as I said, we've seen a lot less of that, and I would expect that to be the case in future.

So still on the topic of matchmaking, I wanna talk about 2v2 and group matchmaking, which is certainly something that a few of you guys are really interested in, and that is certainly been something that's been on our radar from the very beginning of Remastered. We do need to think a bit more about group matchmaking though for a couple of reasons, one of which is the pool size: do we have a large enough pool size to sustain a 2v2, 3v3, 4v4 matchmaking experience? Or is the small pool size going to devalue the experience a little bit? And probably more importantly are the latency issues that we're seeing in 1v1: they're only gonna be exacerbated in 2v2, 3v3, and 4v4 due to the nature of the turn-locked client-host networking infrastructure that StarCraft has. So I think we need to come up with a bit of a better solution for that before we start tackling matchmaking 2v2; so for that reason I would see 2v2/3v3/4v4 as more of a long-term feature rather than anything that we're going to get to in the short term.

Dynamic lighting (real-time lighting): one of the aspects of dynamic lighting is that it does take a lot of VRAM, and particularly when in a high-res 2D game like StarCraft: Remastered. That naturally requires a lot of VRAM, and dynamic lighting requires a whole bunch more VRAM. So one thing that we've been working really hard on is trying to bring that down as much as possible, and I don't make any promises here about what we can do, but that's something we're investigating and if we CAN do something, then I will hope to see that roll out in a patch very soon. Again, no promises, but we're trying to bring that down to 2 gigs so the people that have 2 gigs of VRAM will hopefully be able to experience the real-time lighting as well.

CCMU, sprite limit, bullet limit: I posted about this in the forums recently and I got a bunch of feedback. This is certainly something we want to do; we just wanted to make sure that you guys were okay with it, that you didn't think it was going to break anything in terms of gameplay, because we're certainly committed to not breaking gameplay. So I put that out there to see if you guys thought there were any problems with that, and it seems like overwhelmingly the feedback has been: look, it's fine to raise or eliminate the limits as far as the bullets and the sprites and the CCMU goes. So I see no reason why we shouldn't move forward with that probably in the mid-term future. But if anyone does have a problem with this in terms of gameplay, now's the time to jump in that thread and give us your feedback.

The final thing I want to talk about today is EUD. In 1.18 we kinda left EUD behind, and that's because we introduced some strong anti-cheat and tamper-proof measures to prevent people from cheating in games of StarCraft, and obviously this is the right thing to do: we want to protect the integrity of the game and make sure it's a fun experience for everyone. We don't want people cheating. But it did kinda leave behind EUD, and that made us a little sad because we like the idea that people can experience StarCraft in whatever way they want to, and if that's playing EUD maps, well, that's fine. Unfortunately we cannot release a game into the public with a security hole in it, so these are the reasons why we've continually patched out EUD over the years. Supporting every EUD offset would be a mountain of work and so it's probably not something that's ever going to be possible. But what we have been doing—we've had a very talented engineer here at Blzzard working on enabling SOME of the EUD offsets again—and right now in Remastered, we have a very popular tower defense map working, 100% complete. So that is kind of the start of EUD for us, and again in the mid-term future you can expect to see this map rolling out—this mapping being whitelisted and us saying it's now okay to play this map. And I would love to hear from you guys as to what maps you're playing and what maps are popular, and we'll see what we can do—once we make sure there's no security holes and seeing if we can actually emulate them successfully—we'll see if we can whitelist those maps going forward. So again, we'll never do every EUD offset and support every EUD map, but this is certainly the start of us bring back some measure of EUD, and I know there's gonna be a whole bunch of folks out there that are gonna be very excited about that.

So that's all I got time for today. Keep talking to us in the forums; we're definitely listening. We don't have time to respond to every comment or every question, but we are certainly listening to you guys, and we plan to do more of these video updates in the future. So, thanks for listening, and I'll see you soon!

I wonder if "support EUD" literally means allow EUDs to work, or to actually do what mapmakers want and make proper triggers for those conditions / actions, so we don't have to hack memory in order to achieve our goals.

If they were sensible, they'd just implement support for both. Make official triggers for the various actions they want to support, and then implement translations from EUD offsets into those officially sanctioned triggers. That way existing EUD maps could work.

Well, they've said their approach is to simply whitelist certain EUD maps. This makes me think we're getting no official support of EUDs or new triggers - simply certain maps are gonna be blizz approved, probably via some arduous red tape filled Blizz process. What this means I imagine is only popular maps that receive enough support to be noticed by blizz will be whitelisted, while the vast majority of EUD maps will not be supported.

So, in summary, basically the worst approach they could have possibly taken, not to mention the laziest. Though I question how lazy it actually is as surely there will have to be some employee being paid to vet and whitelist EUD maps - who would of course be on a salary. Just how long is Blizz gonna support this whitelisting process, I wonder?? 5 years, 10, 50??

EUD (Extended Unit Death) was another tough nut to crack. A composite armored Abrams' walnut. Very rare. They taste too good not to crack though. Similar to CCMU, we have created methods to support a handful of the most popular existing maps. Another independent post will be created to cover this rich topic.

EUD - we do not intend to rebuild maps. Rather, we basically have an EUD emulator to emulate hundreds of the offsets. That's why some EUD maps will be supported as we move forward, and not all.

EDIT: Found clarification from Grant in the dev update post: https://us.battle.net/forums/en/starcraft/topic/20759307870#post-6
So it looks like they're actually taking the ideal approach!

No, that's not that ideal approach.

That means if I want to make a new map today, I have to use EUD offsets, which are fiddly and annoying to use and change with each version of the game.

The ideal approach, as I stated, is to implement those functions as proper trigger conditions/actions, and then having their emulator translate classic EUDs offsets into those new trigger conditions/actions transparently.

If Blizzard was willing, it would be most ideal to have some system like you propose

Roy, the ideal approach is for Blizzard to do more, not less. Not sure why you'd argue against that.

What's weird is that you even said what I proposed was ideal:
and then went on to say what they're doing is ideal, when they're (apparently) not doing what I proposed.