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StarCraft 2 Beta |OT| (Beta Now Reopen, GL HF)

I

Ice Monkey

Member
SafetyFirst said:
I had received an email with the CD key included. I had to redeem the key within my battle.net account before I could see the game listed there.
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same here, were you twitter?

im scared to play more 2v2 with you, we're 4-0 on the placement matches!
 
S

SafetyFirst

Member
Ice Monkey said:
same here, were you twitter?

im scared to play more 2v2 with you, we're 4-0 on the placement matches!
Click to expand...

It may have been. I created a twitter account for the contest but never received anything that I was a winner.

Yea we are, watch out Boxer and crew!
 
M

mbmonk

Member
If anyone knows of legit beta key contests/giveaways please post it here or PM me.

All the sites I see linked on twitter look shady, like they were put together overnight, and their only purpose seems to be to get you to fill out surveys.

I have no problem actually doing something for a key, but I just have a bad feeling about that particular model.

Thanks.
 
D

darkressurection

Banned
mbmonk said:
If anyone knows of legit beta key contests/giveaways please post it here or PM me.

All the sites I see linked on twitter look shady, like they were put together overnight, and their only purpose seems to be to get you to fill out surveys.

I have no problem actually doing something for a key, but I just have a bad feeling about that particular model.

Thanks.
Click to expand...
Whoa, just came in here to ask the same exact thing. I agree that a lot of the twitter stuff seems like a complete scam. I couldn't get one for my site to cover the game so I doubt any other small sites got any.
 
I

Ice Monkey

Member
mbmonk said:
If anyone knows of legit beta key contests/giveaways please post it here or PM me.

All the sites I see linked on twitter look shady, like they were put together overnight, and their only purpose seems to be to get you to fill out surveys.

I have no problem actually doing something for a key, but I just have a bad feeling about that particular model.

Thanks.
Click to expand...

lol the twitter contest was in october from the official starcraft twitter ghostwriter.
 
D

DreamMachine

Member
mbmonk said:
If anyone knows of legit beta key contests/giveaways please post it here or PM me.

All the sites I see linked on twitter look shady, like they were put together overnight, and their only purpose seems to be to get you to fill out surveys.

I have no problem actually doing something for a key, but I just have a bad feeling about that particular model.

Thanks.
Click to expand...

don't want to be to shameful.. but I am the same way.. Would love to get a beta by contest or any means possible pm or post !

thanks!!
 
A

autobzooty

Member
the purpose of beta contests is to generate hype, generally speaking. blizzard's main intention here is to get some hard and reliable test data. It's not in their best interest to be giving codes out at random or giving them to various websites to hold contests. they want it to be as controlled as possible, so i wouldn't expect any contests to ever come up.
 
V

vultureparade

Member
the purpose of beta contests is to generate hype, generally speaking. blizzard's main intention here is to get some hard and reliable test data. It's not in their best interest to be giving codes out at random or giving them to various websites to hold contests. they want it to be as controlled as possible, so i wouldn't expect any contests to ever come up.
Click to expand...

I think we'll probably see some contests as the beta draws on, but I doubt Blizzard is ready to give away a bunch of keys this early into the beta.
 
H

Hazaro

relies on auto-aim
Wisdom for all of you getting back into SC
bj71h3.jpg
 
I

Ice Monkey

Member
Chris Remo said:
Still need someone? I'm down.
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yeah lets do it, add me: eggsandbacon.tyrone

i should mention safetyfirst is busy and no telling when he'll be back so we still need a fourth unless he pops up soon
 
J

JonAmikar

Ignorant Scrub
I would be all over some GAF 2v2 if I had a key.

2v2 was the best match up in WC3 and it looks as if SC2 could continue the tradition of epic AT's.
 
M

mcrae

Member
Fragamemnon said:
go.go to play SC2 for hite sparkyz confirmed.



I mean, that's cute and all but there is three of them and it's not doing all that much damage for the tradeoff for 450minerals/gas and the loss of mule call-ins. You could make an obscene number of hellions or marines with those minerals that would absolutely throttle that number of hydra.

(that being said, it doesn't seem like a terrible upgrade if you are pushing 200/200 and swimming in minerals already)
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am i watching the same replay as you? there was only one planetary fortress in that video that actually fired on the hydras..
 
H

Hazaro

relies on auto-aim
C

Campster

Do you like my tight white sweater? STOP STARING
That Nydus Canal strategy is just way too powerful. It's quickly becoming a degenerate strategy for Zerg players; I've lost twice to it tonight.

It's crazy cheap (minerals/gas wise) and you can get it really, really early in the game. Granted if you defend against it they've spent a fair bit of time on not-so-great tech, but man, it's just so easy to slip an Overlord in on the edges of your base and setup a Nydus canal before I even have a factory up.
 
M

mint

Banned
Man I wish I had this game. Never played SC but was an avid AOE player, and SC2 looks very familiar (more familiar than WC3 for example).
 
S

spoon!

Member
Campster said:
That Nydus Canal strategy is just way too powerful. It's quickly becoming a degenerate strategy for Zerg players; I've lost twice to it tonight.

It's crazy cheap (minerals/gas wise) and you can get it really, really early in the game. Granted if you defend against it they've spent a fair bit of time on not-so-great tech, but man, it's just so easy to slip an Overlord in on the edges of your base and setup a Nydus canal before I even have a factory up.
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Agreed. From what I've seen it is goddamn retarded. It's approximately a trillion times stronger than arbiter recall ever was. Even discounting the fact that you can get it so early, all you need is a slither of vision and you can port your entire army across. hax.
 
I

Ice Monkey

Member
spoon! said:
Agreed. From what I've seen it is goddamn retarded. It's approximately a trillion times stronger than arbiter recall ever was. Even discounting the fact that you can get it so early, all you need is a slither of vision and you can port your entire army across. hax.
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it takes a very long time for them to get all their troops through, just keep the majority of your base scouted, build enough air-ground to handle it and target the worm first.

In the ffa game i played earlier i got wormed 2 or 3 times and each time it didnt work as effectively as possible because i was prepared for it.

I'm really bad with getting economy back though so i ended up losing bad, but essentially i shut down the strategy and just failed to counter his corruptor/brood lord second attack.

its just a wholly different way of playing sc, it is a lot stronger than arbiter recall but its just new. it changes the metagame and there are definite ways to counter it.
 
godhandiscen

godhandiscen

There are millions of whiny 5-year olds on Earth, and I AM THEIR KING.
Minsc said:
First professional benchmark out!

Starcraft2-CPUs.png




Edit: I should add, there's a little humor to be found in this benchmark - that is, no matter how much money you have, it is actually impossible to max out Starcraft 2 @ 60fps without a pretty wild overclock - around 5GHz probably (seeing that it is CPU limited and only supporting 2 cores)! :lol
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They could be running feedback processes though. I specifically came to this thread after I found my performance to be dissapointing. Core i7 @ 3.7GHz + GTX295. It wasn't bad, definitely 30~40fps at the lowest when i would zoom in, but still really sad given I am used to a perfect 60fps.
 
T

TheExodu5

Banned
godhandiscen said:
They could be running feedback processes though. I specifically came to this thread after I found my performance to be dissapointing. Core i7 @ 3.7GHz + GTX295. It wasn't bad, definitely 30~40fps at the lowest when i would zoom in, but still really sad given I am used to a perfect 60fps.
Click to expand...

I'm still pretty hopeful for optimizations. As pointed out earlier, some settings are too demanding of the CPU when they shouldn't be (shaders mostly).

Anyways, I booted up GPU-Z today to check out GPU usage. A whopping 49% max usage from my GTX 275 over a 30 minute replay. The game is way too CPU intensive and just won't scale with newer graphics hardware. Keep in mind this is at 1680*1050 with no AA. They need to offload a ton of work to the GPU (like I said, there's no reason shaders should be put onto the CPU). I really hope this is a bug.

If you graph GPU usage and CPU usage over your game (give it a shot, download GPU-Z and just open the task manager to check CPU usage), you'll notice that the first core of your CPU will be fully utilized, the second core will be way underutilized, and so will your GPU. There's a lot of resource wasting here.

Anyways, actually played a game today since my friend came over with his beta account. Zergling swarm = awesome!
 
A

autobzooty

Member
I think that this beta is mainly for the purpose of testing battle.net while the engine testing/optimization is being done internally. I would be very surprised if these engine problems weren't ironed out by the time the game launches.
 
T

TheExodu5

Banned
autobzooty said:
I think that this beta is mainly for the purpose of testing battle.net while the engine testing/optimization is being done internally. I would be very surprised if these engine problems weren't ironed out by the time the game launches.
Click to expand...

The only thing that's worrying is that we're so far in development at this point. Let's hope the performance issues are completely ingrained into the engine. I wouldn't mind the performance so much if I was at least GPU limited, since GPU performance will scale just fine in the future. CPU performance really won't scale much as we're just adding cores, not increasing clockspeed so an engine that isn't optimized for multicore support is going to have issues.

It could very well be that they just haven't written all the GPU shaders yet and are offloading a lot of it to the CPU. In that case we should expect some enormous performance increases. Like I said my GTX 275 is only used to about 50%....doubling that would offload an enormous amount of work off of the CPU (since shaders are completely suited to vector/parallel arithmetic units aka shader units in your GPU). That is my theory at this point...that just has to be the case.
 
F

Fallout-NL

Member
godhandiscen said:
They could be running feedback processes though. I specifically came to this thread after I found my performance to be dissapointing. Core i7 @ 3.7GHz + GTX295. It wasn't bad, definitely 30~40fps at the lowest when i would zoom in, but still really sad given I am used to a perfect 60fps.
Click to expand...


Yes, that's definitely disappointing. Not what you'd expect from a Blizzard game.

But it's a beta, however I'm not sure how dramatically you can improve performance at this stage.
 
T

TheExodu5

Banned
Fallout-NL said:
Yes, that's definitely disappointing. Not what you'd expect from a Blizzard game.

But it's a beta, however I'm not sure how dramatically you can improve performance at this stage.
Click to expand...

Like I posted above: shader work is just suited to a parallel architecture (shader units in your GPU, which are essentially a big parallel array of simple arithmetic units used for just that). Since the shader setting in the game has such a huge impact on CPU demands, my guess is that they just have not written the shaders for the GPU yet and are performing them in software on the CPU (which doesn't have any major parallel processing other than SSE). If that is the case, then writing the GPU shaders will result in an incredibly jump in performance. It would be fairly perplexing why this is the case...though I'm not really aware of how 3D development works and why they might implement shaders on the CPU before doing them on the GPU.

If the case is simply that the shader setting in game is not really shaders and has a lot of non parallel work suited only for the CPU...then we're boned.
 
A

autobzooty

Member
TheExodu5 said:
The only thing that's worrying is that we're so far in development at this point. Let's hope the performance issues are completely ingrained into the engine. I wouldn't mind the performance so much if I was at least GPU limited, since GPU performance will scale just fine in the future. CPU performance really won't scale much as we're just adding cores, not increasing clockspeed so an engine that isn't optimized for multicore support is going to have issues.

It could very well be that they just haven't written all the GPU shaders yet and are offloading a lot of it to the CPU. In that case we should expect some enormous performance increases. Like I said my GTX 275 is only used to about 50%....doubling that would offload an enormous amount of work off of the CPU (since shaders are completely suited to vector/parallel arithmetic units aka shader units in your GPU). That is my theory at this point...that just has to be the case.
Click to expand...

Releasing a game exclusively for the PC in the year 2010 that only supports dual core is just silly. This fact alone is what I'm basing my theory off of, and I'm going to cling to it in the face of all evidence. :lol
 
T

TheExodu5

Banned
autobzooty said:
Releasing a game exclusively for the PC in the year 2010 that only supports dual core is just silly. This fact alone is what I'm basing my theory off of, and I'm going to cling to it in the face of all evidence. :lol
Click to expand...

But that theory leaves us no hope. We need hope damnit!
 
D

DieH@rd

Banned
autobzooty said:
Releasing a game exclusively for the PC in the year 2010 that only supports dual core is just silly. This fact alone is what I'm basing my theory off of, and I'm going to cling to it in the face of all evidence. :lol
Click to expand...


Blizzard is not releasing this game just for 2010 PC's, and that is one of the keys of their sucess. Just look at the minimum requirements :lol
 
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