Updates to be expected for 2019 for those of you who are interested.
TEAM MATCHMAKING
As I mentioned at BlizzCon, although we had hoped to roll this out in 2018, it unfortunately didn’t happen for us this year. We’re very excited to get this work done, so it’s a top priority heading into 2019. We haven’t decided yet which mode we’ll roll out first (2v2? 3v3 BGH?) but once the base of team matchmaking is done, it will be a much less difficult task to roll out other modes that make sense.
64-BIT
Not the most exciting task for players, I know. But essential. Apple will be eliminating 32-bit apps next year, and at some point it’s reasonable to expect Microsoft to do the same. We’re planning a phased rollout of our 64-bit client in 2019, which means we’ve been spending a lot of time on this recently, and will continue to do so into 2019. As I said at BlizzCon, if you’re still using 32-bit Windows, it’s time to start thinking about 64-bit (you still have a good amount of time, but good to have this on your radar early).
FURTHER LEAGUE DIVISIONS
This is an investigation into a world where we have more ranking categories, e.g. A+, A-, B+, etc. If we decide it’s a good thing, it will turn into a development task and we’ll reprioritize.
REPLAY AUTOSAVE NAMING
I’ve posted about this previously. We had a version of this implemented based on community feedback, but once we took it to QA and our own playtests, we all agreed we could and should do a little more with it. So we circled back around for a full design pass and we have a new, improved version of this going through QA validation now. Unfortunately it was just a little too late to make this patch, but we’re optimistic that we’ll pick it up in the next patch.
RACEPICKING
It’s a pretty hot topic now that we’ve put work against the prevention of ladder dodging, and there are two sides that have opinions we need to listen to and decide on. This is an investigation task where we take community feedback and decide how to approach this thorny topic.
DISCONNECTIONS FROM SERVER
We know that players are still getting disconnected for reasons that aren’t obvious, and this has been an ongoing investigation in 2018. The good news is that we recently reduced those disconnections by 90% - but the number is still too high and we still have work to do on this.
MATCHMAKER ALGORITHM IMPROVEMENTS
The balancing act of SCR matchmaking is matching as many people with the Korean population as quickly as possible without having a deleterious impact on latency. One area we’ve identified as possible to improve is for people who have decent connectivity to Korea to be able to use their actual latency rather than a guess based on their region. It’s been a lot of work, but we’re getting close to rolling this change out. The flipside to using actual latency is that folks with poor connectivity will not be able to use VPNs to trick the matchmaker into matching them with Koreans and getting terrible matches as a result. Therefore, it will be a win for latency across the board.
RELAXED INPUT
Since the release of 1.18 we’ve talked about relaxing the input behavior of SCR - many people believe that not being able to accept keyboard input while the mouse button is depressed is a goofy system. At least one of the launchers in the old days changed this behavior. In the strictest sense, this was by-design in the original SC code. But we’ve now reached out to a lot of people on this issue, and the overwhelming believe is that this should change (including Korean pros). We’ve actually already made the code change. The next step is rolling this out to a PTR environment for people to test and provide feedback on.
RESTORING THE DISCONNECT STAT
Due to a totally new server infrastructure in 1.18, we lost the ability to accurately report disconnects. Eventually we decided it was better to hide this stat than to show something that we couldn’t guarantee was accurate, so we hid disconnect stats a few months ago. However, we acknowledge that there is value to this stat in organizing custom games (not so much in ranked because the player takes a loss in a disconnect event). So, we’ll be looking at whether we can get the disconnect stat to be reported accurately and - whether or not we can - whether we should restore the display of this stat to users.
SHOW OPPONENT'S RANK IN MATCHMAKING PRE-GAME POPUP
Show as a border color the rank of the opponent before entering the game (and possibly the MMR too).
ADD A "WATCH REPLAY" BUTTON SOMEWHERE IN THE POST-GAME UI
This would serve as a fast way to watch the replay of the game just played.
FORCE PLAYERS TO ACTIVELY CHOOSE THEIR RACE IN A GAME LOBBY
This would prevent players from forgetting to choose a race.
ABORT GAME START IF A PLAYER LEAVES A LOBBY DURING THE COUNTDOWN
We need to investigate the feasibility of implementing this feature.
DISPLAY RACE OF EACH PLAYER IN-GAME IN THE DIPLOMACY POPUP
Just in case you missed or forgot the race of your opponent.
OPTIONS MENU PERFORMANCE
Since we use CEF (Chromium Embedded Framework) to power all of our new menus (including Options), it can take a while for the web browser to spin up on demand on some PCs. We’re still using quite an old version of CEF which causes many pain points, so we’d like to upgrade CEF. This and some other efforts will hopefully improve the performance of the options menu. Some of those optimizations we attempted to roll out in 1.22.2, but it introduced other issues with missing UI, so we've rolled it back for now.
OBSERVER DESYNCS
Occasionally we see a situation where an observer will desync from the other players, seeing a different view of the game to everyone else. This is a tough nut to crack - so the more reports we can get of this, the better - video & replays would be great.
FRIEND REQUEST ERROR MESSAGE
This is a pretty simple one (but important) - some of our error reporting around friend invitation failure is ambiguous and can lead people to believe that the friends system in general is misbehaving. We’d like to tighten this up.
WORKER COUNT IN REPLAYS
We’re at the investigation stage of figuring out:
Whether this change is universally supported
How to represent the info on the replay UI
UNIT COUNT IN REPLAYS
We’re at the investigation stage of figuring out:
Whether this change is universally supported
How to represent the info on the replay UI
API TO REPLACE THE WEB API THAT STARLOG.GG RELIED ON
In our continuing efforts to support the community, we’d like to offer a replacement API for StarLog.gg.
CONSOLIDATION OF GATEWAYS
This is something we’ve wanted to do for a long time - but the gateway part of our server infrastructure is essentially the 1998 server code, and it still underpins SCR, WarCraft 3, and Diablo 2. Therefore, we haven’t been able to make this change without impacting the other games. With WarCraft 3 being Reforged and having an active team on it, and us getting more control of the Diablo 2 codebase and update system, this starts to become more of a reality.
CLAN
It’s early days for this feature, but we’re looking at what we can do to build out a clan system to replace the old clan system.
BWAPI
This is always something we’ve wanted to do, and we did make some progress towards this in 2018, so we’re hoping that we can continue to fit in work towards BWAPI in 2019.
Here's the link
https://us.battle.net/forums/en/starcraft/topic/20770517068?page=1
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