So I've been playing StarCraft 2 a lot recently, trying to keep my head above 500 in the Gold League as a Zerg player, but it's proving to be difficult. I'm not sure if I just suck (probably) or it's actually true what a lot of the forum buzz is saying: that Zerg is underpowered.

For the sequel of a game whose sweet spot of race uniqueness and game balance spawned a massive cult-like gaming culture, this is a huge problem. But I'm sure Blizzard knows this and is working to solve it. They've always been really good about cultivating their community by listening to feedback. They were still patching and tweaking StarCraft LONG after the initial hype died down, and for that they were rewarded with a rabid fan following that bought up more than 1 million copies on its first day sales 12 years after the last StarCraft expansion pack was released. Now that's fan loyalty.

I would love to see how Blizzard is crunching their Battle.net numbers to figure out the best tweaks to make to the Zerg. I'd be curious about their BI setup, whether they're going with a traditional RDBMS + ETL or a more hip MapReduce setup. Or hell maybe they just have a massive Excel spreadsheet. ;)

I'm also curious about what the actual tweaks are. I'm betting it'll be way less dramatic than what the forum posts are suggesting. With a game as intricate as StarCraft, tiny changes have far-reaching ripple effects. And they also have to reconcile how players of different skill levels will react to the changes. They don't want to just appease the the n00bs but cannibalize their pro gamer community. They also don't want to put themselves in a difficult balance position for when the Zerg installment of StarCraft 2 comes out. Ah what a tangled web to navigate.

Looking forward to see how you handle this, Blizzard. It's either gonna cause a mass exodus by your disillusioned fans, or win back their love in spades. And whatever you do, don't pull an AnntenaGate.

Hello World. Welcome to my new shmancy blog. Its painstaking HTML5 Masonry is a lovechild of Tornado and MongoDB by way of the very excellent un-ORM, MongoEngine, held aloft in the Rackspace Clouds by Puppet, GitHub and duct tape.

I post tiny things to it using a fun, soon to be released Chrome extension and large things to it using a command line client and Markdown flavored text files.

I've used the Wordpress plugin Super Cache to bake the content from my old Wordpress blog into nice, fluffy static html files that nginx happily serves up to weary Googolors who come searching from things like CouchDB search engines or master master Tokyo Tyrant Tyrant.

More fun stuff to come.