This weekend Blizzard hosts BlizzCon in the Convention Center in Anaheim releasing information about Patch 2.1, more of their plans for the near future and information about their games that become closer to their release. Patch 2.1 which will become available on a Public Test Realm next week.

That patch will bring a lot of changes to battle.net. The first change is the addition of "events" in battle.net where you can set a time and date with a note in a calendar within the clan and groups. When the date comes closer, there will be notifications appearing reminding you about the event.



The next addition for clans is the possibility to upload an image for your clan which appears onto your main building.



Since a few mods like monobattles are very popular on battle.net, Blizzard added a way to easily make every melee map a monobattle map using "extension mods".
These mods are then added to the map on the fly allowing you to change the rules of the map on every map without the requirement of having maps published.



The level cap for the races will be raised from 30 to 35 and new rewards will be STARCRAFTS decals. Reaching level 35 will grant you access to a STARCRAFTS portrait for your account.



Old StarCraft fans will surely appreciate the addition of an option to change the ingame music. SCBW's music has been remastered and will be made available in version 2.1.



The arcade side will receive changes, too. The biggest change will be the the completely free accesss to the arcade and custom games for everyone. This allows that everyone can play the arcade. The only barrier of entry will be the download of the game to play all of the StarCraft 2 funmaps.
The only content remaining for SC2 license owners is the ladder and the campaign.



The Custom Games will be free, too.



The lobbies will receive a new addition, too. Battle.net will detect when a host is away from keyboard and will remove him from the game, if he doesn't react to a popup in time. When the host is kicked, another player will become the new lobby host role.



Another plan of Blizzard is the addition of updated WarCraft III hero models for SC2. They started with the Orc heroes and hope to be able to release the heroes of the other races. The Orc heroes will be released next year for usage in arcade maps via a mod dependency.



Another change for the Starter Edition (= free SC2) is that they can now play all three races instead of only the Terran one. This allows the players to become familiar with the other races before they buy the game to join the ladder.



Patch 2.1 is scheduled to be released later this year. Next week they will release a balance patch containing the changes currently tested in a few balance test maps on battle.net. If these changes do not suffice, David Kim announced that they will address the issue before the next WCS season next year.

During the Q&A part of the SC2 panel, players asked about the marketplace and a reconnect feature.
- The reconnect feature is being looked into by Blizzard, but might not make it into patch 2.2 next year. But they hope to add such a feature one day.
- The marketplace is something they still wish to add, but currently they don't have the tech-infrastructure implemented required for that. But the realization of Heroes of the Storm is one step into the direction to the marketplace as it contains elements that would be required for a marketplace. They will look into it again after releasing Heroes of the Storm.

Another question was about the Art Tools having no importer for existing SC2 models. Community Manager Cloaken had no information, if that will be added, but he revealed that the programmers are working on expanding the Art Tools plugin usage to other modeling software and further improvements. So, this really might be added by Blizzard one day.

We will cover Heroes of the Storm, too, as it uses the SC2 engine and was build with the SC2 editor. So, stay tuned for more information.

Update:
Blizzard released a blog about the information presented in the SC2 panel. You can read it here.

Update II:
Have a look at the Heroes of the Storm teaser for now.


Update III:
Enjoy Carbot's Heroes of the Storm Trailer.


Update IV:
Or check out the Developer interview revealing that they use the SC2 Editor for the creation of Heroes of the Storm.