14 DAY TRIAL // Blizzard has been having a busy month of February this year. It released an update on the Monk class of Diablo III just a few days ago and it also gave a detailed preview of the upcoming changes that would be made to the Battle.net service in order to fully support StarCraft II. The service will greatly improve its social infrastructure, it will allow players to store personal digital items online, like unlockables, achievements and saved games for the title's single-player campaign, and it will also provide a more elaborate mod structure.
Yesterday, Activision, the current owner of Blizzard, gave its financial conference call for the Q4 of 2009, and, among many other things, it also provided some news for StarCraft II fans, which is pretty much every gamer on the globe. While the title is expected to be launched sometime half-way through the year, like any good one, it has a planned closed beta testing session, a session that will open up this month. The words came right out of Blizzard CEO Mike Morhaime, so babies will probably be named after him, in his honor.
Further details offered by Morhaime were sketchy at best, but, even so, he's probably the most loved person on the planet right now. The beta participation will be opened to North America, Europe, Taiwan, Australia, New Zealand and South Korea, the Mecca of StarCraft tournaments. As far as quantity availability goes, Blizzard's CEO said that the beta would include thousands of participants, and, while that may sound like much, it's a frighteningly small number compared with that of players that want to get in, but will be left out.
Entering the beta can be done through several ways, but the general road towards it lies in your Battle.net account. However, that doesn't mean that you can just register an account and keep your fingers crossed that you'll get into the beta. The catch is that you have to have at least one fully registered Blizzard game on your account to enter the beta-participation application. Which means that at least 11.5 million people can apply, which is the number of World of Warcraft players.