With StarCraft: Remastered having a successful renaissance, we’re seeing new patches drop for the venerable franchise, and patch 1.20.8 recently arrived for everyone. Whether you’re a recently returned player or have been enjoying StarCraft for years, here’s what you should be paying attention to in the most recent patch.
The patch is a fairly short one, which isn’t surprising — the changes being made here aren’t aimed much towards game balance in a game that’s been around almost 20 years. No, these are mostly fixes aimed at smoothing matchmaking issues due to latency and streamlining play with friends.
[blizzardquote author=”Matt Sherman” source=”https://us.battle.net/forums/en/starcraft/topic/20759259657#post-1″]Greetings Cerebrates, Commanders, and Executors,
1.20.8 has arrived. This patch was focused on dynamic turn rate and updated friend commands.
Specific Changes & Improvements
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- Matchmaking games now have dynamic turn rate reduction if the client determines high latency. The turn rate will start with 16 and scale down appropriately. We expect this to make a positive impact on latency for matchmaking, and we are very excited to be rolling it out.
- /friends commands have been updated
/f l (or list) Shows all Brood War friends plus all Blizzard friends who are currently in SCR/f la (or list all) Shows all friends (BW + Blizzard, regardless of whether they are in SCR or not) /f lb (or listBlizzard) Shows all Blizzard friends (no Brood War friends) regardless of whether they are in SCR or not
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- /f lo (or listOnline) Shows all friends (BW + Blizzard who are in SCR) who are currently online
- Updated the SD option for bilinear to be a slider. Sliding to the left increases sharpness, sliding to the right increases the intensity of the filter.
- Slightly reduced the size of the Replay UI center console
Bug Fixes
- Fixed an issue where users would sometimes see a blank page on the post matchmaking toast screen.
- Portraits in chat now update immediately when changed for friends and non-friend users
The good news here is that if you’re playing and enjoying the game already, you don’t have to worry about relearning how to play it — none of these changes make any real difference in terms of how units function. These changes simply make your friends list more easy to read and use — it can be adjusted between Blizzard friends, friends specifically playing StarCraft, or all of the above — and allow Matchmaking to adjust the turn rate based on latency. There are also a couple of minor bug fixes to round it out.
While this isn’t a big change, StarCraft is a game that lives and dies on the quality of the matchmaking and the way latency impacts matches. So any adjustment that can make a positive change there — like, say, reducing latency or letting more people play — is a good one. I’m hopeful that this works out because my wife’s a long time StarCraft, player and I’d like to get her StarCraft: Remastered as a gift once we’re done with the move from hell. It’s fun watching her destroy people.