The first part of Starcraft II came out in 2010. As a sequel to one of the greatest RTS games ever made, it had a number of issues, the biggest one being the online multiplayer was intense, stressful, and in order to be a decent player required several clicks per second to keep up with unit production. If you didn't like playing in this way, there was no other way to play - unlike the first game, custom games with more casual mechanics, chat channels, player-made lobbies and so on did not exist. Essentially it was made for the pro player.

As a result, interest for the other two parts of Starcraft II (Zerg and Protoss expansions) has been much lower than expected of a Blizzard game. According to their own data, most buyers only play the single player and never touch the multiplayer at all.

For the beta of the Protoss expansion(the full game is scheduled to come out within the next few months), the devs actually made an amazing change. One of the key mechanics of Starcraft II was that each faction had a "macro mechanic" that increased unit production but required a lot of attention and clicking to keep up - e.g. for Zerg you had to press 3 keys to "inject larva" every 30 seconds, and if you missed the 30s mark any time, you'd lose a few seconds of unit production, which is huge for a strategy game. This had to be done manually and could not be queued up.

The devs automated or removed all of the macro mechanics for this expansion on September 3, for the reason that they wanted to take the clicks away from those repetitive actions and spend them on the exciting parts of the game: actual strategy, and unit control during battles. In my opinion this was the best possible change, acknowledging that clicking for the sake of clicking doesn't make the game better, deeper or more fun.

Then the community (i.e. the hardcore people remaining after everyone else had long left Starcraft behind) complained that they were taking away the skill of the game that they'd prtacticed for 5 years.

So this week the dev team reverted the change: the mechanics will now work exactly like they did in the previous expansion. The reason being " we think the gain of having auto inject does not outweigh this negative perception that the change creates."

This is one of the most cowardly statements I have ever read from a developer. They acknowledge what the correct path is but they intend to let the hardcore, vocal community on Reddit and fansites hold back the accessibility of the game just so they don't lose the "skills" they've been practising i.e. fast clicking (there is no strategy involved in this mechanic).

I agree with you, and something that makes me specially mad is that just like you said it is a change that has a lot of benefits with NO drawbacks by giving you more time to care for whats important in a match, that's whats important right? STRATEGY? -- i've never ever have played an online sc match but i've enjoyed the games, guess that stat will remain the same; what saddens me is that because of that this may very well be the last SC ever

That's exactly what I thought out after a few seconds of playing SC2.

Really pissed off they made it for hardcore players and not for the average gamer. Now the franchise is dead, but for a few clicking frenzy pro players.

It's not just for pro players. It's for people that want a game that is challenging mechanically and strategically. It's the hardest game in the world and it should remain that way. I'm not saying that the readdition of macro mechanics was a good idea and I'm not saying that the complete removal of macro mechanics was a good idea. But what I am saying is that Zerg (and I only play Zerg) was stupid easy to macro without having to worry about injects. There's so much more to say on this topic, but I'm sure the game will be the best it can be in a few months.

I think it's a good decision.

Terrans need to keep on dropping mules on their own, Protoss have to remember to Chronoboost stuff, so why should the Zerg get a free pass when it comes to macro? The OP seems to be coming from a rather ignorant point of view, ignoring the thing that's most important and holy in SC2 - balance. Every race has one burden in the macro that it has to control constantly to keep up. Give me one reason why Zerg should get a free pass?

i bought the game played the campaign then sold it to my friend

Am one of those people who just plays Starcraft 2 games for the campaigns. RTS games generally have higher skill ceiling and SC2 took that to new heights with game being made with hardcore/pro players in mind. They lost a lot of multiplayer fans to other games and even some of their big streamers and famous players. Why play a game when lot of fans are not interesting in playing or watching it.

Oh well, should be the last one i think. I'll pick it up when it is cheaper. Have the collector's edition pre-ordered but that is for friend's birthday gift.

Damn the hardcore.

But Zerg is eternally punished for missing injects. Terran can spam mules and Toss can catch up on Chrono. Zerg can never catch up on injects, which is why the current solution is that queens can now stack injects. The people that are perfect at injects have an advantage over the people that miss injects, but the people that miss injects aren't punished as hard as they used to be.

That solution is ok, I'm fine with stacking injects, but the OP was about automatic injects - with no clicking at all necessary. That idea is a bad one. Especially since Queens need the energy for Creep Tumors, so automaticaly using it can hurt you.

i hate macro Bs that makes macro micro heavy. its just lame stuff that makes you attack a little less.