Battle.net: A new place for the community

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One day before the announced online conference call starts, Blizzard released a huge amount of information on the new Battle.net, describing how the match system and ladder/ranking system will work, as well as a video interview with the project director of Battle.net, Greg Canessa. With all this information released to their site, what can there be left to announce on the conference call on February the 10th?

Always connected

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It's not news anymore that you will be able to play the singleplayer campaign while connected to the Battle.net, but Blizzard clears things up confirming that every action you do in StarCraft 2, win or lose, gain achievements, your friends list and more will be saved to your Battle.net character.

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Even your save game progress in the campaign can be synched to Battle.net. Say you upgrade your computer and re-install the game; once you connect to Battle.net, you can continue the campaign right where you left off. ”

The competitive arena

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After using the auto-matchmaking system a few times, Battle.net will automatically slot you into a league and division that best suits your skill level. Our goal here is to encourage local competition by finding you a neighborhood of 100 players of equal skill against whom you will be ranked. This will make ranked online play much more enjoyable and give everyone a realistic chance to win their division.”

With the new Battle.net, Blizzard promises a new and smarter and more accurate matchmaking system than we've seen before.

By automatically add you to a league suited for your skill level, everyone has an honest chance to do well and compete in tournaments. As your skill level increases, so will your rank, and you will be added to leagues of higher competition correspondingly with your skills.

There will also be alternate leagues to join such as the practice league, Co-op vs AI where you will be able to play team play against the computers, challenges and more.

Socializing on Battle.net

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We get to see the new chatting system a little closer, and how the Real ID functions. With your Real ID you will be able to send broadcast messages, get information about what your friends are doing, and you will also be able to use the Real ID account in the later Blizzard titles, bringing all your connections from the previous games to the other games.

Even if a friend of you is playing another game, such as Diablo 3 while you're playing StarCraft 2, you will still be able to see what he's doing, and chat with him. This goes for the World of WarCraft players as well.

Modules and community-created content

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Sometime after the release of StarCraft II, modders will have access to an even more advanced means of sharing their work via Battle.net with the StarCraft II Marketplace. With the StarCraft II Marketplace, players will be able to browse, download, rate, comment on, and even buy mods if their creators choose to put a price tag on their work.”

StarCraft 2 will include the same toolkit used by the design team to create singleplayer campaigns.

With a feature called Map Publishing that everyone will be able to access, we can easily publish our maps to the service, and browse, download and rate the maps published.

Later the mapmaker will also be able to use the Blizzard marketplace to sell their work. This won't be available until some time after the release of StarCraft 2.

With all this information recently announced, as well as all the recent balance and design changes done lately, what can Blizzard possible have stored for the broadcast conference call tomorrow (February 10th)? What do YOU think they will announce?