The long awaited free name change is now available by logging into the Account Management pages. Remember you can only change your name for free once and then you will be required to pay if you wish to change it again.

StarCraft II Custom Map Contest Winners

The winners of the Blizzcon custom map contest have been announced as:

• Benjamin Lagarhus - MAD
• Ivan Vidusenko - Zergling Round-Up
• Andreas Lundkvist - Photon Command

From the information gathered at Blizzcon this year, we believe these maps will be featured and playable in the near future.

Top 200

This weeks top 200 players are in for all 6 regions and NesTea is fighting for the Zerg, Terran are still looking strong but the overall representation of Zerg and Protoss is now neck and neck with only a 6 player difference.

This is the closest we've seen the global representation of all 3 races since the game was released.

Winners Group

Honorable Mention

You can see all the none StarCraft pumpkins here.

Several new questions have been added to the official Editor Q&A thread answering more of your questions.

Official Comic Contest

The official Blizzard comic contest is back and now open to entries from all Blizzard franchises, World of Warcraft, Diablo and StarCraft.

A new wallpaper has been uploaded to the World of Warcraft wallpapers pages featuring Blizzcon 2010.

Source: worldofwarcraft.com

The wallpaper is available in a variety of resolutions from here.

Blizzcon Contests

During Blizzcon this year there was a variety of competitions going on and it's about time we reported back on the StarCraft results.

Fan Art

StarCraft Protoss v. Zerg was the name of the second place winner in the fan art competition, the only StarCraft piece to make it into the top 3.

Source: us.blizzard.com

Songs

Two StarCraft songs made it into the top three, here are the direct links to the MP3's. Source

• Winner: The Queen of Blades by Saher Behrooznia
• Third: For the Swarm by Nicholas Stephen Tomassetti

Community Spotlight: StarCraft Costumes

This week in the community spotlight we take a look at the various StarCraft costumes walking around our streets.

View more StarCraft costumes »

Kerrigian, Queen of Blades

Whilst the variety of units people choose to dress up as is fairly small, there is still a great range in costumes as people try to bring our favourite characters to life.

Marines

It's amazing to see how many different styles of Marine can come from the StarCraft world, cloth, foam and cardboard are just a few of the materials that people choose.

If you liked number 3 then make sure you check out the I want to be a Marine! article from August.

Nova and the Ghosts

A common theme in StarCraft cosplay is Nova, Ghosts and Ghost like NPC's seem to be a regular choice for the female costume wearer.

Pick `n` Mix

There are many more costumes which have at one time or another been seen at a party, convention or just in the bedroom and these are the Pick `n` Mix outfits that we picked out.

Hopefully in the coming months we will start to see more StarCraft cosplay and an even better variety of costumes.

This weeks top 200 for all 6 regions are now in and it looks like Terran has pushed Zerg back down the top 3, it's nice to see some new faces achieving good results as well.

GSL

The first details of the GSL season 3 are coming in and we now have the registration dates and expected competition days.

The round of 16 begins tomorrow for season 2 and we have updated our season 2 results pages with the current tournament results.

Fan Art

Four more works of art have been added to the official Fan Art pages.

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• Source: us.blizzard.com

State of the Game

Episode 17 of the State of the Game podcast is out and available, this week the presenters are a little tired but always it is worth the time to listen and find out the state of the game.

Blizzcon Highlight Real

You can access the page at any time using the link on the right hand side of every page under the twitter button (Make sure you follow us on Twitter!). But for now you can just click Heart of the Swarm.

We'll do our best to track down any Heart of the Swarm news as it happens and keep you up-to-date.

General Information

• Heart of the Swarm was confirmed not to be aiming for a 2011 release.
• Over 91,000,000 ranked matches have been played on Battle.net
• Blizzard plan to develop and release custom maps, with 4 being shown at Blizzcon.
• The custom map market place is unlikely to be out before Heart of the Swarm.

New Features

Coming Soon

• Private and Public Chat channels will be out before the end of the year.
• Patch 1.2.0 will include mouse tracking to work with triggers.
• Customisable keybindings are currently running on an in house version, it should be out pretty soon.
• We hope to allow you to watch replays with buddies next year (January / February).

League Changes

• You will get new icons as your rank up in your league.
• More details will be added to the leagues and ladders pages.
• Top players of each division will get special banners
• New Master and Grand Masters leagues will come:
  • Masters - The top 1 - 2 % of the overall StarCraft population in each region will get their own special league and icons.
  • Grand Masters - The top 200 players from each region will get their own ladder

Season Wiping

• We will announce when the new season is coming.
• When a season is wiped you will keep your MMR but lose your wins/loss ratings.
• You will only need to play 1 placement match in the new season to be placed.
• You will have access to your previous season records.

Other

• We want to develop a tournament server that allows you to choose which patch you want to play.
• Featured replays are coming.
• We want to allow you to see your statistics in detail on the web at some point.
• We have a lot of plans to improve the scoreboard screen, they'll probably come with Heart of the Swarm.
• We would like to all you to change ratings per race one day.
• We have 2 goals to make the editor easier:
  • Improving the UI and adding guides.
  • We also want to add tools for new users and advanced users.
• A new Novel, Devils Do will be released, it is a follow up from Heavens Devils.

New Maps

Four custom maps will be released by Blizzard along with the 3 top maps from the custom map competition, Blizzard say they will work on updating their custom maps frequently.

• Star Jeweled
• Aiur Chef
• Left 2 Die
• Blizzard DOTA

They will be free to play, unlocked so we can see how they work and all the assets will be included in the Editor for us to use - including a collect of Warcraft models.

Heart of the Swarm

Whilst no real information was given about Heart of the Swarm some concepts were shown.

Random Facts

• Each division currently contains 20% of the players.
• A 45:55 win ration for a race is fine, 40:60 is not.
• We use Face Effects to animate the mouths of models, close ups have additional animations.
• StarCraft 2 ships in 11 different languages.
• Over 500 maps were entered into the custom map contest.
• Heart of the Swarm takes place less than 100 years but more than 1 hour after Wings of Liberty.
• Software Blizzard use:
  • Studio Max
  • Photoshop
  • Maya

Costumes

There weren't as many StarCraft 2 costumes as we had hoped at Blizzcon but there were still a few.

Invitational

The invitational had its ups and downs but the results are in and here's the top 3:

• NEXGenius
• Loner
• Duckload-Ra

Source: us.blizzard.com

You can Download all the replays from the invitational here.

Exhibition Match

The exhibition match between FruitDealer and SlayerSBoxeR was well worth watching and provided 2 amazing games with FruitDealer coming out on top.

The replays can be found here.

The Panels

• Day 1
  • Opening Ceremony and pictures
  • StarCraft Cinematics
  • Secrets of the Masters
  • Custom Maps and Editor
  • Story Q&A
  • Costumes
  • SlayerSBoxeR vs FruitDealer Pics
  • Day 1 Overview
• Day 2
  • Art
  • Multiplayer
  • Day 2 Overview

Today we had 2 StarCraft panels covering Art and Multiplayer and here are the summaries.

StarCraft Art

The art panel was full of images focussed around the new custom maps Blizzard announced yesterday along with some concepts from Heart of the Swarm, the first expansion for StarCraft 2.

StarCraft Multiplayer

The multiplayer panel gave a lot of insight into how StarCraft is balanced and the tools that the team use, along with answering some great questions.

Closing Ceremony

The closing ceremony didn't give us any more StarCraft news, but Diablo 3 fans were happy to hear that 1000 Blizzcon attendees would be getting Diablo 3 Beta keys.