Wow, people are so spoiled nowadays. The foundation is being able to play the game. And guess what? The matchmaking system, in the beta, is great. The original battle.net let people chat in order to talk to friends and set up games. However we can now make parties to chat with friends, and the matchmaking sets up games - generally better and fairer ones than we'd have gotten talking to random people back in the day. Forums are for talking, battle.net is for playing. This setup is a lot like xbox live - you have access to friends, you can make parties and talk to people you know, but there isn't any functionality to just talk to random people. Why? Because they're not hosting a chat service. If you want to hang around somewhere and talk about SC2, there are clearly places to do it (i.e. all the forums where people are whining). Battle.net is for playing SC2.

And Xbox Live has communities that come even close what proper online games have on the PC right? Don't make me laugh.

Newsflash, Xbox LIVE is trash compared to how gaming is done on the PC. So saying "it's like xbox live" only makes things worse for the new system, not better. Thank you for supporting how shitty Bnet2.0 is.

Patch 15 is out, and I don't know how I feel about it. Tanks were nerfed which has an interesting set of effects. Early against Protoss defense has become a lot harder for me. Stalkers survive much better. Terran I am looking forward too, but really haven't had a chance to check out. The nerf put Marines and Marauders with proper upgrades into a sweet spot so it takes an extra shot to kill them. I am hoping this means less tank vs tank wars whilst Ravens and Vikings battle it out in the sky. Not to say I didn't enjoy it since most Terrans went straight Viking, and I dominated the air as a result.

Thors and poor Hellions got a damage upgrade nerf too sadly. I don't really get why though. Hellions get 10 from pre-ignitor vs light already. Is another 3 really that critical? I might have to run some damage vs health calculations, but I never used them much so I probably don't care enough. Thor nerf just annoys me. Their AA is good against one unit really. Does it matter if they crush Mutalisks just a bit more? Not a big deal one way or the other to be honest.

Beta ends soon though, which makes me a sad panda. I don't know if I want a quick crack for on-line play in the interim or not. I mean on the one hand it is more time with Starcraft 2 while waiting for my super awesome (and free cause my brother is so awesome and lazy) collector's edition, but on the other it will mean quicker and more piracy which I just can't stand the thought of. The game is really awesome, and it sounds like Battle.net 2.0 (worst misnomer ever since every game had a new version) issues will be resolved. Not that I care honestly outside of difficulty adding friend. I want to play against more VGChartz people damn it!

On that note, you people can hit me up through Steam (name is Gnizmo) if you want to go a few rounds before beta ends. Or we could team up to do 4v4 in a world of awesome! Which ever.

The Thor & hellion nerf i think was massively needed.  Before the patch, a large mech army by terran was virtually unbeatable by an equally skilled zerg & equal to larger size army.  The Hellions are still extremely effective vs zerg with the range buff they received few patches ago. 

Is there any way to still play it now that beta is done? 

Except those two nerfs did, literally, nothing to affect that. Hellions lost 3 vs light which didn't put them below any critical junctures. Pre-ignitor, the upgrade that makes it so powerful, is completely unaffected. Thors, similarly, are no worse against Mutalisks, and the nerf affected nothing else. It wasn't massively needed, cause it didn't change anything. At all.

I'm sure this is old news to the people that were complaining about this, but just in case, I'll put up what a blue (Blizzard poster) said earlier regarding some concerns:

So they are fixing most of the things that make Bnet 2.0 such a horrible system, even worse than GFWL. Now about that LAN... I wonder if Blizzard will give in before the hackers get it implemented.

Well, since people not buying legal copies constitute the grand majority of people who use the LAN functionality, Blizzard is probably going to leave it to them.

Because they obviously have had problems with piracy in any of their other games right? Didn't SC1 sell near 11 million? Man Piracy really stopped it from selling and obviously none of them used LAN. Your post is so full of fail it's kind of funny, in a sad sort of way.

You're so good at refuting things that were never said. I never stated that piracy stopped their games from selling. However, since you bring it up, they sold 11m copies, but I'd be shocked if less than 25m people played the game. Looking at WC3, the sheer number of illegal copies being used on alternate servers like G-Arena is staggering. I remember I used to log on to play Dota, and anytime blizzard released a patch, if you DLed it, you'd not find a game for weeks, because all of the pirated copies would be using the older version. And just this one service accounted for thousands of users playing dota at any given time. When the server had issues, I was shocked to find that half my friends couldn't log onto b.net to play due to having illegal copies. It was (is) very widespread. Now, blizzard sells enough that they do just fine DESPITE it, but that doesn't mean they want to encourage it. And especially now that virtually all players can have as good an experience via b.net as they could over a LAN, blizzard is unlikely to add it later.

Speaking of posts being so full of fail (something you are clearly well versed in), my statement was actually fact. Blizzard has no intention of implementing LAN because, as they have stated, they consider it unnessecary. Most of those who would need to take advantage of it would do so to circumvent b.net authentication. I always enjoy when you, instead of arguing with the point someone made, make up a point of your own to attack instead.