You might have noticed that I recently have been posting less frequently. I have a few reasons for this.

First, my personal motivation to ladder has dried up. I have fizzled on laddering in many past seasons, and the release of HotS only slightly prolonged my interest. Without actually laddering, I can’t claim to be any sort of authority here.

Second, the HotS meta-game has somewhat stabilized. When I restarted this blog, I was really trying to make some accessible guides in a chaotic landscape and help new players get into multiplayer. Since then, we have seen a few meta-game shifts, and while that will continue, it at least means that there’s a coherent meta-game.

Third, I figured that my StarCraft time is better spent working on Spawning Tool. Truth be told, I don’t know if I was ever authoritative enough to be worth listening to, but Spawning Tool is much more up my alley, and I hope it becomes just as useful.

Of course, this blog isn’t completely abandoned. If I see something really cool, I’ll write it up. I’ll also be putting Spawning Tool updates here. To get your fill, you should check out http://imbabuilds.com/. NoseKnowsAll is a great guy and has been putting together a lot of valuable content.

And quick Spawning Tool update with 2 big features that I haven’t shared yet. First, the research tool. With it, you can put together more advanced queries for replays based on actual timings from build orders. For example, you might be curious to know how effective DT rushes are in PvP (answer: enough), or what the dangerous timings are in TvZ (answer: Roach all-ins from 12-15 minutes, but oddly enough, not Hellion-Marauder play). So play around with that and see what you learn. And please let me know if you have other criteria you would like to see there. I welcome any enhancements to make this tool very powerful.

Of course, that is all limited by the amount of data available, so the other big improvement is that you can now upload replay packs, and it’ll unzip and upload all of the contents. Spawning Tool is also hosted on its own server now instead of piggybacking on my personal server, so it should be better able to handle the load. Keep that coming, and if you hit any server errors, come back to try again later. I receive emails every time there’s a server error, and I do my best to fix them immediately.

So that’s it for now. As always, feel free to reach out to me with questions, suggestions, and feedback. I’m always down to listen. In the meantime, keep laddering in my place.