QuixoticNeutral

Context: This is a quotation from Lim Yo-Hwan (BoxeR), the first great celebrity player from Brood War, who played SC2 for the team he founded around himself (the now-defunct SlayerS) and now coaches the old squad that he also founded, SK Telecom T1. It was said in the legendary semifinal match between BoxeR and Fnatic.Rain at MLG Anaheim 2011, a game that escalated over an hour into an aerial standoff of titanic proportions and eventually, this decisive battle. Before the battle ensued, the game looked frozen in a stalemate scenario, so this was BoxeR's way of imploring the balance designer, "David, do something!"

An immense round of thanks, first of all, for developing and supporting my favourite sport in the world and for your pattern of listening to the concerns of the community. A few questions:

1. A lot of players have expressed that the Hellbat, while progressing towards a more balanced state, has become a needlessly convoluted and counterintuitive unit that is the exception to too many rules. It's mechanical but Medivacs heal it; it transforms from two spaces of cargo to four spaces of cargo; it doesn't benefit from the blue flame upgrade; the transformation requires an upgrade but building the unit straight out of the Factory doesn't. Will future balance changes be made with a mind toward streamlining the nest of rules governing how the unit behaves?

2. One of your best-received decisions over the course of Wings of Liberty was the decision to shift the 1v1 ladder map pool toward selecting tournament-viable maps, including maps designed for the GSL or the TeamLiquid map contest. There seems to be a house rule at Blizzard, though, that every map with an official stamp must have homogeneous resource deposits (eight mineral patches, two gas geysers). Given that competitive maps are breathing life into the game with innovations like mixed blue/gold bases (Icarus) or neutral creep blocking fast thirds (Arkanoid), will we ever see some variation in resource nodes to match the dynamism of the tournament game?

3. I think the custom map community felt a little hard done by in Wings of Liberty, as we were all expecting the second coming of the WC3 mod scene. A lot has improved since launch, including the prominent spotlighting of the community's best creations, but one senses there's still much to be done. Have you seen the interface changes in the Arcade, most recently in 2.0.4, pay off in terms of retaining UMS players? Where do you see room for improvement? I also think even though WC3 technically had a less powerful editor, UMS maps benefited from how popular elements like items/inventory/experience (and later in TFT, easily customizable spells and leaderboards) were baked right into the base game. Will we see more improvements to the Galaxy Editor to give mapmakers a standard toolkit for features like these that aren't exactly core to SC2?

4. What's up with the APM counter? Throughout the HotS beta and since 2.0.4, players have seen theirs reported on the scoreboard as unrealistically high. Is this a bug, and either way, could we have more transparency about what the APM number actually reports?

Oliver, as a longtime Scrabble player on the tournament circuit I wanted to thank you for the quality of your coverage of the game. Along with Stefan Fatsis (of course) you are one of the writers I always recommend to interested readers from outside the scene as a trusted and accurate source.

So: what's your story for how you got into the competitive game? Any stories to share about memorable tournaments or big plays (that we haven't already heard about in your column)? Plans to come back?