I do 4 drones, overlord, and while the overlord spans I accumulate the $$ for the pool :x

You could try to do the extractor trick (of which I'm a big fan). So you make your drones until you are at ten supply, then wait until you have about 130 minerals, and you make 2 extractors, bringing your supply to 8/10. Then you make 2 drones, cancel your 2 extractors and you're at 12/10. Make an overlord, before that overlord pops, you'll have 200 and make your pool at 12. From there, you're at 11, make 3 drones to 14, make an extractor, 13, make 3 drones to 16, then a queen to bring you to 18 then an overlord, then start making some lings. You can put 3 drones on the extractor so you can get the speed upgrade. It's a pretty normal build, but I use it and it transitions well to almost anything. The only difference between the way I do it and the way others do it is that they usually make the extractor at 13 instead of 14, but other than that, it's pretty standard.

Try it out, it takes a little getting used to, but it's pretty good. I have a few variations where I drop a spine or an evo chamber, and sometimes you need more lings earlier so I make lings before the queen too, but the extractor trick gives a nice little early econ boost.

thanks for the tip!

I actually played a guy that appeared 11/10 in the logs... I was kind of wondering what happend :p

This is a game where tenths of a second are seen as large amounts of time. People were complaining about the 250ms lag time that was unavoidable in beta. Dropping it down damn near crippled their network as well. Further an army of 400 zerglings being created simultaneously would bring the best system to its knees. Some of the base defense maps do a fraction of this with serious performance issues.

Exactly.  They had issues with maphacks in the first starcraft, I am sure if they could get rid of all the data being sent, without serious lag issues, they would.  The reason the system runs the way it does is to keep the latence between computers as small as possible.  And if people didn't cheat, it wouldn't be an issue.

Blizzard Making Their Own Starcraft 2 Mods

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2010/09/21/blizzard-making-their-own-starcraft-2-mods/

"Game Informer have been chatting to Dustin Browder, lead bossman on StarCraft 2, and at the end of the interview, when asked about the other installments of the game, he said this: “We’ve got some mods we’ve developed internally that we’re going to put out to get some more art into the hands of the mod makers but also provide what we hope are some polished gameplay experiences for our fans to get more value out of Battle.net.”

A developer releasing its own mods? I’m not even sure what you call that. Creator generated content? Anyway, they had talked up how powerful and flexible the engine is before release, so I guess we will be able to see Blizzard put some of their own muscle behind that notion. Interesting."

I think for me the best thing is that they will be introducing new art assets through patches which will be cool.

No HotS info at blizcon,  bummer that means it will be ages before release.

http://www.pcgamer.com/2010/09/25/no-starcraft-ii-heart-of-the-swarm-at-blizzcon/

The second part of the Starcraft II trilogy will not be shown at Blizzard’s fan festival this October, says Starcraft II lead designer, Chris Sigaty. Speaking to PC Gamer, Chris explained that the next game won’t be on display, or shown. There is hope – a story panel the Blizzard team are planning might answer some of your questions, but don’t expect to know what happens to Kerrigan and the gang.

“We’re still working on the details [of the expansion],” explains Chris, “and the last thing I want to do is to talk about theoretical things instead of talking about what’s real.”

The Starcraft II team will be delivering a story panel at the show, where fans will be able to ask the team what’s next for Starcraft II. “We will be featuring a Q&A to talk about story,” says Chris, “but that will largely just to tie up any loose ends and questions players have about what was happening during the story. We won’t be going into details about what’s going to happen in Heart of the Swarm.”

Blizzcon takes place over the weekend of October 22nd and 23rd, at the Anaheim Convention Centre. PC Gamer will be there.

Yay! I made my way to silver! I love this game even though I still suck at it.

some info on the next major patch

http://www.pcgamer.com/2010/09/26/blizzard-on-starcraft-ii-1-2-patch-zerg-balance-issues/

On Wednesday, Blizzard deployed the first major balancing patch for Starcraft II, swinging the nerfbat at supposed Terran dominance. Already, the Starcraft II team are planning their next update, which as Chris Sigaty, Starcraft II’s lead producer explains, “we’d like it out by the end of the year.” Read on to discover what’s on the table.

Chris said to PC Gamer that the next patch is “largely our e-sport patch. A couple of big things that will be in there are support for the season rolling, so players can look at the history of how they did in past seasons. There will be bugfixes, balance changes and tweaks, too. Chat is the other major thing we want to get in there next patch. We’ll also add more significant features to the editor.”

The 1.1 patch began to address balance issues within Starcraft II. The changes seemed small – mostly changes to build times. But the community seems convinced that Starcraft II isn’t balanced yet, in particular, there’s a sense that the Zerg are underpowered. How do Blizzard respond?

“You can go up and read on the forums at any one time and there are a bunch of different theories about balance and imbalance. We’re being very cautious about making large swinging changes right now because at the highest level things are actually very strong. The things that we’ll probably be addressing are the 2v2 and larger scale games. Ultimately, the 1 to 1 is what we want to keep as sacred as possible, but as a result right now there are some things that we need to address in the 2v2 at the higher level. We’ll be looking at ways to do that without affecting the 1v1 balance.”

Chris is also keen to address the ongoing idea that Zerg remains underpowered – an idea fuelled partly because so few Zerg players made it into the top 200 Starcraft II players in North America.

“That’s not actually the case,” says Chris. “We have fewer Zerg players overall. I avoid playing Zerg as much as possible because I find them to be just more complex in general. Zerg, or rather larvae management is harder for me to deal with, so I don’t enjoy playing them as much.”

But don’t expect the game to perfectly balanced following the 1.2 patch. Balance, explains Chris, “is an ongoing process that, honestly, will take a year of longer to do. Even after Brood War was released we still patched and continued to drive towards a really solid final balance.”

How can he just completely dismiss that and say there just aren't as many Zerg players? I know it's mostly just a lot of whining, but there are TONS of new threads everyday on peoples' problems with the Zerg race. Personally, I feel that if a race requires more APM just to be on an even level with other races, something is wrong, and they should address that first, but whatever. I'm not expecting perfect balance even remotely soon, but when many of the players agree that there's something wrong with zerg, even if no one agrees as to what that something is, I think it's pretty careless to just casually dismiss it. Even the usual BS statement of "We're always looking into it but our data suggests otherwise" would have been better.