If you haven't heard, Starcraft II was officially delayed yesterday by Blizzard.  Nobody was really surprised, though many were disappointed.  The game was moved into 2010 for a release, and the reasons it was delayed may surprise you.

Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty wasn't delayed due to technical issues with the game itself, but rather due to technical and maturation issues with Blizzard's new version of Battle.net, their online gaming service.  We'll let the master of the underworld, Bobby Kotick, explain:

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Blizzard has launched their new Battle.Net Website in preparation for the launches of their next big sequels - Diablo 3 and StarCraft 2.  The site sports a fancy new look, and you'll need to create a new account to get started.  But what does the account get you?

First off, this will be your one account to manage all past and present Blizzard products.  You can add CD keys for any games you own, and most of these titles like the Diablo and Warcraft series, will let you download the game via the site.  No more hunting for lost CDs!  World of Warcraft players can merge their game account with the new BattleNet account as well.

Finally players can automatically opt in to any upcoming Betas that may be coming, you know, so you can be one of the cool kids.

Blizzard promises that there are plenty more features on the way for Battle.Net including cross game communication tools and more.  Sounds good to me!

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Blizzard has always been great about patching games, even far after any other developer would have abandoned them.  Even given the fact that Diablo III is just over the horizon, they are getting ready to patch the venerable predecessor, Diablo II.  And this time, they are taking input from the community.

If you were to get an advance look at the patch notes for Diablo II 1.13, what is the one patch note you would want to see?

I asked my fellow Co-Optimus staffers for their input.  Here's our ideas to make Diablo II even better than it already is.

Nick: "Please just go ahead and patch Diablo 3 into Diablo 2."

Marc: "can I has moar rainboz pls?"

Jim: "I'm all for a Care Bears total conversion mod."

Katrina: "I don't think I've thought about Diablo 2 recently enough to crave a patch..."

Mike: "I want a shared stash, and the ability to respec.  Fortunately, those things have been posted a million times over there already."

Jason: "Care bears? Rainbows? No... what Diablo 2 really needs is a new final boss... I'm thinking that when you kill Mephisto, a certain gentleman comes running in... his war cry is known far and wide... he strikes fear into all... the death of Mephisto is the harbinger of..."

Click read more, quickly!

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Creatures of the night and rainbow lovers everywhere are all looking forward to the release of Diablo III.  You also might be anticipating another Blizzard title, a sequel to the largely unknown and very obscure title StarCraft.  As you might expect, then, the online backbone supporting both games, Battle.net, will be getting an overhaul soon.  The new features of Battle.net 2.0 sound fantastic.  DIII.net has some of the details, among which are ingame channels and voice chat, ladders secured against cheating, automatic tournaments, and achievements, similar to those in WoW.  In a move sure to cause many gamers to lose jobs, spouses, etc., a "Blizzard Level" system is also planned.

Kaplan: Your ‘WoW’ score would be just one factor that will go into your Blizzard Level. And rather than call it a ’score,’ we just wanted it to be like you’re leveling up on Blizzard games… You’ll have this Blizzard identity, and you’ll be able to see things like ‘Oh, this guy was great at Diablo III, but he never played Starcraft and he was mediocre in WoW. That sort of thing.

So it appears gamers can level grind in Battle.net now as well as Diablo 3 and World of Warcraft.  That sounds cool, and scary at the same time.  Videogaming247 reports that the Starcraft and Diablo teams are working together to make sure Battle.net 2.0 is a success.  You can expect B.net 2.0 to arrive when Starcraft 2 is released, likely 2009.