Perhaps most important in the new software, however, is the new, precise match-making system. Battle.net is designed to quickly learn what skill level you are on and match you against opponents that will give you around a 50% win/loss ratio. If you have more wins, you'll rapidly face harder opponents until it evens out, and the same goes for losses.

The matchmaking system is surprisingly quick and accessible -  simply click the "Multiplayer" button (Single Player greyed out in beta), select what type of game you want to play (1v1, 2v2 etc), pick your preferred race and find a game. Within a few seconds a match is found and the game starts to load.

Players can also create a custom game, allowing for friends to play against each other, but these games do not count in any ladder rankings or your personal win/loss scores. In the future, this will also be where fan-made mods will be started, letting players choose games like Defence of the Ancients or Tower Defence.

There is also a new league and ladder system on Battle.net. Rather than viewing your global player (seeing "rank 1,526,256 in the world" is a bit depressing), players are split into Copper, Bronze, Silver, Gold and Platinum leagues. In each of the leagues, players are sorted into different groups of a number of hundred ranks. When you are reaching the top of your group, you can progress to a higher level league.

This may not sound so exciting, since you're not measured by everyone else at once, but it's actually a very smart system. It still measures your relative skill to the rest of the world and every one rank you gain is a measurable achievement.

To try out new tactics or learn a new race's units, serious ladder players can play public games to do this without affecting ladder rank. They will still be matched against similarly skilful players.

This is all just in the early beta stages, and more features will be added. Among other things, we'll see map and modmaking added and Blizzard has already prepared StarCraft II and Battle.net for this by giving modders access to snippets of the interface, much like it did with WoW.

Looking in the installation folder of the game, a "Mods" folder contains three sub-folders named "Core.SC2Mod", "Liberty.SC2Mod" and "LibertyMulti.SC2Mod". This is obviously partly to make it easy to change interface and functionality for the two upcoming expansions, but also likely to let modders make their whole new StarCraft II experience, if they would wish it.

Unfortunately, there are also drawbacks with the beta. We hope many of these will be handled before launch.

One popular complaint concerns the fact that as soon as a character is made on the net, it's not possible to change the name or the identifier. This was briefly mentioned in our latest podcast and could potentially be something Blizzard will charge money for changing as a "microtransaction". The developer has mentioned microtransactions before, saying Battle.net will work similar to  WoW, with players having to pay to have their name changed. We have asked Blizzard on its plans for this, so stay tuned for more info.

The major concern, however, is the divide between European and North American players (and all regions, in fact). All older versions of Battle.net allowed for intercontinental gameplay, but not now. The community over at StarCraft: IncGamers has now been divided between American/Australian/Canadian members and Europeans. We strongly dislike this divide, and hope it's just one of those technical aspects of the beta that will be fixed before launch.

All in all, it's still in very early closed beta, and many changes will likely be made pre-release. Even so, it's quite impressive, and the only serious naysayer we've encountered so far is our resident StarCraft II-skeptic Paul.

We are producing a veritable stream (live stream, in fact) of StarCraft 2 news, commentated gameplay videos and tactical guides through the StarCraft 2 Beta Centre, so don't miss StarCraft: IncGamers for a lot more content!

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