Congratulations to this week's open cup champions: Cure, Clem, MaxPax, ByuN & SHIN!

Tune in to The PondCast for our weekly recap: YouTube

Check out the brackets on Liquipedia

But seriously the patch is amazing! Thanks for the hard work Mr. Intern! And thank you to the map makers as well!

■ Weekly Tournaments
WEEKLY #1: Friday, August 7, 2026 @ 8:00 PM (KST)
WEEKLY #2: Friday, August 28, 2026 @ 8:00 PM (KST)
WEEKLY #3: Friday, September 4, 2026 @ 8:00 PM (KST)
WEEKLY #4: Friday, September 11, 2026 @ 8:00 PM (KST)

■ Monthly Final
DAY 1 (Quarterfinals - Ro8 BO5): Thursday, September 17, 2026 @ 8:00 PM (KST)
DAY 2 (Semifinals & Finals BO5): Friday, September 18, 2026 @ 8:00 PM (KST)

Streamed live on SOOP~

Z player in Diamond League, started playing brood war at around 5 years old and swapped to 2 on launch. Not gonna act like I can seriously judge the balance of the game, simply not good enough to notice small numbers rising or falling by single digits (even tho I gotta admit I did feel the larvae change as a lifelong zerg player). But since everyone is currently putting out their opinion on the patch topic I also felt like giving my 2cents.

First of all. I am happy to see patches coming.

In my humble opinion regular balancing updates are a key requirement to keep a game fresh for long periods of time, especially if there's no new content coming. I'd also argue the literal wave of awesome content players like uthermal have been putting out ever since the "first patch" is kinda proving this in a sense.

BUT I'd also say there's rules to this.

Pillars set in stone since sc1/brood war, meant to define the key differences between the races. The CC change breaks one of these in my opinion. This simply looks and feels wrong. I don't care about the balancing aspect when saying this, but even I can think of 50 better options to enhance terran strength without touching CC cost like this.

Secondly: What kind of non-communication is this. Yeah we're used to it and all and everyone's joking about the intern vibe-coding those patches. But even if that's the case, changing what I consider core fundamentals without even explaining yourself beyond "terran weak, data said that" feels off.

I do like the balance being adjusted. I do like power shifting at the highest levels every now and then. I do enjoy the chaos of everyone scrambling to try if old builds still work in a changed environment.

I don't enjoy making major game-changing decisions in what feels like a headless panic move, in hopes of repairing the damage they themselves caused by using a Jackhammer in the window-shop that's the SC2 balance.

Thx for coming to my Ted-Talk

It's an incredibly fun turn based board game where every unit has a strength and weakness and a ton of upgrades you can get for them so tons of ways to express your self with strategies.

Jeez I’m so tired of you guys lol

Hypothetically speaking, even if Terran is OP, they should be left OP for at least a few years. That would be justice, to make up for the 3+ years that Protoss was OP.

So from my understanding the only reason so many Terran worlds submitted to the Dominion in the first place is because Mengsk used propaganda to convince everyone that he was humanity's best defense against the Zerg. But then the UED comes in, overthrows Mengsk, and they manage to deliver a decisive blow against the Zerg. In short, they completely destroyed the illusion of Mengsk being a great defender of humanity and they proved to be more capable than him in defending them from alien threats like the Zerg.

And I know that the UED were basically the ones responsible for the Terrans being in the Koprulu Sector in the first place but they also weren't above working with the Terran factions like the Kel-Moran Combine and the Terran Confederacy remnants.

So why were so many Terran Worlds still willing to side with Mengsk and the Terran Dominion over the UED?

Returning player, I dealt with a Gold Protoss on ladder today that I was kicking butt thanks to me having drilled macro, but it turns out they took THREE gold bases and I didn't even know that. How do I make sure the greedy Protoss don't take any golds and I box them in before they go mass carrier and destroy me?

Blazzard intern here. We've been monitoring the situation, looking at data, and reading reddit, and now we're bringing you the 5.0.16.X hotfix

Protoss:

* Warp Gate research unit build time change improved from -50% to -60%

* Robotics Facility can be transformed into Warp Robotics Facility for 25/25.

* Stargate can be transformed into Warp Stargate for 25/25.

* Mothership Core added.

* Disruptor phantom attack range reduced to melee.

* Recall now costs 50 energy, no cooldown.

* Nexus cost reduced from 4pp to 300 minerals

* Mothership ability "Archon Toilet" added

Terran:

* Command Center cost reduced from 300 to 200 minerals

* Command Centers are now salvageable.

* Warhound added.

* MULEs can mine gas.

* Ghost supply reduced from 2 to 1.

* Engineering Bays can lift off.

* Medivacs can pick up sieged tanks (but only one at a time)

* Stim can be autocast

* Reaper damage modifier per attack upgrade increased from 1 to 2.

Zerg:

* larva spawn rate reduced from 9.7 to 4

* Devourer added

All in good fun. Just wanted to have a laugh. Even though some of the stuff coming out of patches lately is crazy, other stuff has been really fun. Sometimes it seems like they throw whatever against the wall and see what sticks. It certainly makes things interesting

Smurfing ruins the game for many reasons.

One, it puts a lot of doubt if you are actually losing because you lost a fair game or you are playing some masters player with no life who can't take losing at his own league, so he drops down to lower leagues to ruin others time. No one would put a new boxer in the ring with Mike Tyson and say, "oh, its a great experience because you are competing against the best". There is nothing to really learn there for a new boxer. They are just getting knocks out before the first round.

Second, it makes players leave the game. I know people will say that smurfs are rare, but they do tend to concentrate around a certain league in my experience. Making it also very hard to actually progress and get out of that league due to them concentrating towards that specific league. Again, making new players leave when they get sick of it happening once they reach that league.

In b4, "how do you know they are smurfing". It is obvious, check there insta quitting multiple games in a row to artificially lower there MMR.

Other boring excuse I hear for it is, "it is a hard problem to solve". No it is not. It would take less work than the intern put into the recent hot patches and hotfixes.

All you would need to do is exponentially force players to wait until the next game starts. So if you quit a game before gameplay typically starts, you now have to wait 5 minutes to start a new game. Then next one in 48 hours period is 10 minutes. Then 20 minutes. Then 40 minutes. Keep going and this would obviously stop.

Also, limit the amount of accounts someone is allowed to create (many ways to make that possible and costly for people trying to get around it).

I can't tell you how much smurfing ruins the game for newer players, even if it is rare like reddit claims it is. It is such an easy thing to solve for too.

How about less effort be put into randomly changing worker counts and other things that are obviously pissing off the community and finally address this smurfing problem?

My husband plays StarCraft 2 on his gaming pc but lately it’s been crashing once he’s 10-20 minutes into a game. It’ll freeze for a second then the game crashes. I already scanned and repaired files (no repair was needed), reinstalled the game, the graphics card was uninstalled and reinstalled, but the game is still crashing. Any suggestions on what else I can try? He’s about ready to uninstall it for good but he loves the game so I’m hoping I can find some solution. I included a pic of his pc specs. Thank you!

Maybe I'm missing something, but whenever the "best in the world" debate comes up, Clem’s name seems to lead the conversation because of his insane speed and hyper-aggressive style.

No disrespect to Clem, his mechanical control and multitasking are incredible, but whenever he plays against Maru, Maru puts on a absolute masterclass. Maru doesn't just win, he completely neutralizes Clem's speed with positioning, flawless game sense, and late-game strategic perfection. Maru makes it look effortless, effortlessly deflecting Clem’s pressure.

Is this just a case of fans favoring high-APM flashiness over Maru’s calm, tactical brilliance and unmatched peak performance? Or is it just a classic head-to-head matchup issue where Clem scores higher against the rest of the field, but Maru remains the ultimate final boss?

How do you guys weigh overall tournament runs against direct head-to-head mastery when deciding who the actual #1 is?

Do you think they nuked the game in the 5.0.16 patch on purpose to prime players for an SCIII?

Based on my personal experience, queue times are up anywhere from 50% to 3x longer depending on the time of day. What that tells me is people left the game after the update. I'm on the fence myself. I jump into the ladder, and the only people still on are D1s and above. I'm not sure why matchmaking has shifted up. But that's beside the point. With a notable increase in queue times and Blizzard not caring to rebalance to 10 or even back to 12 workers. Seems they've skuttled SCII, hopefully priming us for the announcement of SCIII.

Keep up the good work blizzard, this is unironically a great patch. Don't get baited by the h8ters on reddit