Gameplanet: StarCraft II has been out for several months now and the focus has shifted almost entirely to multiplayer and, in particular, balancing. How do you handle community feedback?

Kaéo Milker: There are a lot of things we take into account when it comes to community feedback. The most important part is looking at our internal numbers coming in from Battle.net. These are statistics that we’re looking at globally, the player statistics for each of the races, the statistics for each gameplay type. That’s the most valuable data we have because that reflects the true numbers and what’s really happening when millions of players are playing the game.

To a lesser extent but something we still play close attention to are things like forums where players are talking about their own experiences on an individual basis with the races or the maps and the match-ups. So we’re looking at that as well and we’re balancing out the voice of the community with the statistical data that we have. We’re really trying to make measured, calculated choices about the changes to balance we’re making in reaction to that stuff.

Gameplanet: How about data that can’t be measured by statistics, for example, player error?

Milker: Talking about height specifically, we’ll look at data per map, so we can see who’s winning on maps, what races have the advantage and then we can dig into the “why” if we see some really imbalanced outcome on a certain map and there’s a lot of thought that goes into map creation for that reason. But we’re always balancing with all the data – there’s a crazy amount of statistics that we get from Battle.net – and then there’s listening to people. So, one guy might be talking about a problem he had on a certain map, or a certain experience that he had and that kind of gets us thinking about it and looking at it and it might uncover something that our numbers didn’t show, or that there wasn’t a large public outcry about but that we still find insight in and make the game better.

Gameplanet: Do you find that the data you receive and the balancing issues it highlights are different across the regions?

Milker: Yeah, we’ve seen huge swings there and that’s been really fascinating, you know? There’s always a vocal crowd on the forums talking about a certain race being imbalanced, being overpowered or underpowered. What’s been fascinating is that maybe North America has been complaining about a certain race being overpowered and then we look at maybe Europe or Korea and we see the exact opposite is true. It reinforces to us that play-style dramatically swings how balance is feeling and so we never want to look at a forum post in North America and say, ‘OK, this is bad let’s change this.’ We have to look everywhere, we have to look at what we’re seeing globally, because it’s a lot deeper than what just one player’s experience might be. We have to take everything into account. There’s already a very delicate balance in the game that we want to maintain that we want to keep intact as we react to these imbalances that we find.

Gameplanet: Do you have any plans to open up the regions on Battle.net? In Australia and New Zealand we have the option of playing on the South-East Asian servers or the North American servers, for example. Are there any plans to open that up entirely for everyone?

Milker: There is discussion about that kind of thing because there are certain regions that would like the option to play with other regions or that don’t want to be in their own self-contained region pool and we will definitely look into that stuff and definitely look into options like what we’ve done for Australia and New Zealand, allowing them to play in North America or South-East Asia. It’s definitely something we’re hearing from people and it’s definitely something we will explore further.

Gameplanet: Many people complain about the default key mapping, do you have any plans for UI modding?

Milker: Yeah actually, in an upcoming patch we’re going to support hot-key re-mapping, so that’s actually a really big system that’s going in, it’s something we’re testing right now. I’m not sure when it’s going in but it’s something we’ve heard a lot about. It’s a major system that has a lot of far-reaching implications across the game that we wanted to get right.

Gameplanet: Is there a rough date for that?

Milker: I’m not really sure, we have a system in now that we’re testing, but I’m not sure what patch that would be in.

Gameplanet: How do you balance how many patches you’re pushing out?

Milker: Right now we balance it between one content patch and one balance patch, and sometimes a content patch will actually have balance features in it. But we try to space out the content patches and deliver them every couple of months. We’re not three months in and we’re coming up on our 1.20 patch which is a big content patch and that’s going to add a lot of support for mod-makers.