As some of you are aware, the lead designer for co-op left and formed a new RTS studio called Frost Giant studios, with a bunch of others from SC2 or Blizzard in general. I know we won’t get any new Co-op commanders, probably won’t get any new maps either. However, does anyone know if Blizzard still has people dedicated to SC2? Blizzard said, “…We will continue doing season rolls and necessary balance fixes moving forward.” I would like to see some bug fixes to co-op mode such as the Zagara mastery bug, Kerrigan’s achievements, Alarak gateways, among others.
However, because since a large part of the SC2 Co-op mode is gone (lead designer, CEO, Lead server engineer, etc.) exactly who is left to fix bugs and such–anyone?
I’m hoping next week we’ll have a patch, if they’re going to add new mutators–if not, hopefully the mutations will start at the beginning again, however, if they don’t, at least fix some bugs in a patch, I’ll hazard a guess that they don’t have anyone with co-op expeireince to fix co-op bugs, or they don’t care about SC2 anymore. Please correct me if I’m wrong about any of this. What’re your thoughts about this, guys?
here are the rest of the people who started Frost Giant Studios: Frost Giant Studios – Frost Giant Studios is a game development studio located in Orange County, California, on a mission to bring real-time strategy (RTS) games to a broader audience.
R.I.P. 
are my thoughts.
that’s what I was afraid of, lol.
Activision will deploy their devils, I mean staff…
let’s hope they know what to do…
In the conventional sense, “nobody is irreplaceable”. Unless the current staff wrote whole potfuls of spaghetti code mess, any new developer should be able to look it over, get up to speed, and start contributions. However, this is typically 6+ months of time to be able to make contributions. It doesn’t make much sense, but then again, here we are.
OTOH, there was an art here as well, given it’s a video game. Not some corporate enterprise project.
Other than running servers and multiplayer balancing, it would appear any and all remaining devs are gone.
I think the remaining staff should have the ability to read those code.
I think they may only fix some easy bugs.
Zagara, is a simple varialbe bug.
Kerrigan may caused by they caeated a new attack class but forgot to link it to the achievements.
For Alarak, they need to find another key not conflict with other keys.
They can easily improve H&H P3 by changing the platform cost,
but I am afraid Abathur P3’s 200 biomass is not a simple variable problem.
The coming patch: “new mutations” or “recycle” would be an indicator for any future change of coop.
Total bummer. Perhaps they can find a solution to the problem.
I was SOOO looking forward to playing Warfield and Valerian Mengsk CO-OP Commanders.
Had such high hopes when I saw Arcturus Mengsk.
they still have a janitor employed, once he is done cleaning the gutters he will possibly have some time to take a look at SC2 issues.
Im still playing because i like the game. I wont spend another dollar even on stimpack though since it most likely wont be used to support this game
Hah, just saw this. Was wondering where Monk went now that SC2 is done.
There is one intern, keeping the lights on and reading the forums once each month or two.
Then the intern can’t take it after reading the forum, so they hire a new intern that last another 2 months… so the cycle repeats.
The Janitor is a cost and will be automated away.
They may ask the unpaid intern to do balances on SC2.
Actually, I’d think it was the other way around. They don’t have any janitors, and they were having the developers clean the gutter!
Speaking of which, if we check on Blizzard’s career site, we may find job openings that suspiciously resemble the Sc2 Coop project 
Truthfully, id say Activision has destroyed the RTS dedicated watd at blizzard and im not even hopefull to get ballence changes unrelated to the pro-gameing scene of SC2 PVP. And further more, id say that Starcraft in general is completly over at this point. And that is sad to say, i have been an avid fan playin as much as possible since i was 7 back in '98 and was looking forward to even more. So goodbye all, i hope frostgiant studios spiritual sucessor to Star Craft is everything i was hopeing to get to see.
And therein lies the rub: You have to pay the new dev’s salary while they’re getting up to speed, on a game which is no longer producing revenue.
(Though 6 months seems like a hell of a long time to start contributing. It’s a reasonable amount of time to hit full productivity–in fact, I could imagine that taking up to a year, depending on the project–but if I needed 6 months to reach the point of doing bug fixes, I’d quit the software biz and go sell ice cream for a living.)
I meant to say “significant contributions”, although it can vary widely. Indeed, some bug fixes should be straight forward, but I reckon others will be daunting enough to not be feasible, or take that much longer. 6 months is generally what I heard as a “canned interview response”.
Ah, that makes sense.
Of course, now I’m considering what it might be like trying to fix bugs in an unfamiliar code base if literally every developer who worked on it had just left for a new job. Nobody to warn you that changing this variable over here will cause three other things to break over there. That would be nerve-racking to say the least.
And from what I understand, game software tends to be produced under very high pressure, on tight deadlines, and highly optimized, which is a recipe for… shall we say… difficult code.