Starcraft 2 Beta Application – Do You Make It?

June 18th, 2009

I don’t know about the rest of you but I of course applied for the impending Starcraft 2 beta. I went through all the little steps and one in particular gave me pause.

I have applied for betas before and usually they ask you your system specs (some people lie) and then they ask you about your gaming habits (many people lie) and then you press fill submit and wait. Not with this one.

You can’t complete the application to the SC2 beta on Battle.net unless you have an account with at least one registered Blizzard game. Cool enough, but you won’t be lying to Blizz about your gaming habits and you will have to establish yourself as a customer.

Your account is right there. How long you have played and for all I know, how many hours or often per week or month or years. Not too big a deal, I have been a dedicated gamer with this company for 5 years and am just as hyped as any other gamer about Starcraft 2 and the beta.

Second step, you have to download a small application to provide Blizzard with needed system information. No one will be telling any lies about their machines this beta! So I look at this tiny screen – that true to their word only provides the minimal information that a developer and company would want to know about who is playing in beta, and – I stop. I am frozen with doubt.

I have a good machine, but what if it’s not good enough? I really want in. Or, even worse, what if it’s too good? So maybe I should switch to my cruddy laptop? Well duh. I won’t get into beta if I don’t press submit but… I kept that uneasy feeling, until talking with a group of friends who also just happen to be avid gamers.

Very casually says I, to this group of fanatic gamers “Well hmm who else applied to the Starcraft 2 open beta?” Every voice in the room chimed out “Me!” except for Stan, whom I secretly believe is still playing pong on a hand me down Atari he keeps in his mom’s basement.

“Well, you know, I removed my nvidia video card because of that port conflict with the wireless card, and now I just have that cruddy onboard video card and I was going to put in another gigabyte of ram but, was waiting on the hardware specifications for Starcraft 2 and I had my screen res changed to play…” I trailed off not wanting to show them just how worried I was.

No one but me was worried about screen res, gigs of ram or how powerful their processor was. Everyone else it seems had super machines. I kept on worrying until I spoke to a good friend of mine, another gamer, and one who is waiting just as eagerly as the rest of us for the Starcraft 2 beta invitations.

He calmed me down nicely with just a few words. It seems that gaming companies don’t just want people who play 40 hours a week. Nor do they want only casual gamers. They don’t want only the most powerful machines or the weakest – but a broad spectrum of types.

“Your best chance of getting in is when the fewest people have the same configuration as yours. It’s only good if they test it on a broad range of types of machines.”

Ok, so I feel a little better but I’m still sitting here thinking maybe I could change my screen resolution. I wonder what the most unusual resolution is and is there a rare processor type I can get?

How about ram, maybe 250 megs will get me into beta instead of 3 gigs… I wonder just how much my machine will hold?

Until I figure out a sure fire way to get into the Starcraft 2 beta though, I will just sit like all of us hardcore Starcraft 2 fans and hope for that Blizzard official email invitation… Unfortunately, Blizzard still didn’t confirm a beta start date but final preparations seem to be underway.