14 DAY TRIAL // Blizzard Entertainment has just rolled out the standalone installer for its Starcraft II 1.3.0 patch, now available for Mac OS X users and players of the popular real-time strategy game.
“StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty patch 1.3.0 is now live!,” Blizzard announced earlier this week on the Battle.net forums.
At the time, the release was solely available from within the StarCraft II game, by means of software update.
“This patch features adjustments to race balance, notable Join Custom Game improvements, support for the upcoming Grandmaster League, and several bug fixes,” Blizzard said.
Now the standalone (downloadable) patch installer that brings StarCraft II to version 1.3.0 is now available from Softpedia.
The update requires that players have the full StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty game installed.
As noted by Blizzard, several improvements have been made to the Join Custom Game section.
Specifically, the Details panel has been removed, with map details now being shown inside a tooltip for each game.
Players can now bookmark their favorite custom games, while the number of times a game has been bookmarked will be shown in that game's tooltip, Blizzard said.
After updating to version 1.3.0, StarCraft II players will notice that games are now organized into several pages to make finding their desired game type easier.
As described by the game developers themselves, these are:
· Featured: Our team is always on the lookout for new games that are lots of fun. Our latest favorites are shown on this page. · Most Popular: Shows all game types, with the most played games sorted to the top. · By Category: This page allows you to browse through Custom Games based on Category. · Up & Coming: This page highlights games that other players are recommending, but haven't yet become popular. · Fun or Not: From this page you can automatically join a random new Custom Game. After the game, players using Fun or Not are asked to recommend the map (or not). Recommending maps helps get them onto the Up & Coming page. · Recently Played: The last several games you’ve played are shown here. Use this to quickly get back into games you play often, or to easily bookmark a game you enjoyed playing. · Bookmarks: Use this page to view your Bookmarked maps. A search option has been added to the Join Custom Game interface.