Rob Simpson: So now that beta is here, how excited are you guys to be at this stage in development? Also, what have you learned from previous betas that you have applied to the StarCraft II beta launch?

Chris Sigaty: Well this is actually a huge milestone for us. We've been working on this game for many years at this point and it's actually a shift in the fundamental thought process of the development team itself. We've been putting together builds for shows like BlizzCon, the announcement, that sort of thing. But it's always been these very small portions of the game and now, here it is, kind of marking a major milestone. We are now within months of ship and it's a massive change. It's really exciting and mostly our whole dev team is excited to finally really share it with the community at large. Not just a show, not just something now they're playing, but they're seeing it for real. So that's huge.

Dustin Browder: Yeah, we're very excited to get this in front of the fans and see what they think and get their comments and see what's going on with the balance and see what they think of the whole experience. This is something we have been working on for years now, to get this in front of people. And it's really exciting to finally be able to put it out there live and see what the fans really think.

Chris Sigaty: As far as the previous betas go and what we've learned from the past, there are some things that we anticipate, and of course we don't know, each beta is slightly different, but for sure the main central focus of the beta is balance for us. There's also of course, the normal bugs and compatibility and that sort of thing. With balance being there, one of the things we do expect having seen it in the past to some extent is people will latch onto the easiest things first so we do expect for the first few weeks to largely have the data not be that meaningful to us.
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Rob Simpson: The new Galaxy Map Editor won't be available initially in beta, but what can people expect when they finally get their hands on it and when would you guys like that to be?

Chris Sigaty: So the editor is something that we're talking a lot about. We would like to potentially release it in what we're calling our major content patch update that's planned for pretty late in the beta to be honest with you. The question really is, will it be far enough along and in a spot where we can allow people to look at it and publish and will we have enough time to react to that? So it's something we're looking at closely. We've discussed it, but I can't say that it will or will not happen at this point, I don't know. It's a goal, but on the periphery of whether it will happen or not, that's probably my best answer to that. What we hope to get from having the editor out there early is get some people started on some cool ideas for maps so that when the game launches they can have some cool stuff up very quickly on the service basically, so that other players can download it and have some other options out there. We feel like we're going to hit a lot of the cases that players would have not only with just their multiplayer maps but we will have some cool mod maps that we're going to do on our own, but they're largely just glimpses at things rather than entire answers. The earlier we can get the community started, the better, it's just the time window is shorter than we have talked about.

You haven't asked this question yet, but I'll answer it ahead of time. We were targeting three to five months for the beta, we're really at a three month period of time for the beta at this point. We are still targeting the first half of this year, so with that in mind, it really shortens the window of time with our major content patch coming out pretty close to the end whether it's even worth it putting out the map editor at that point.