Let me start by saying i was gold league in wings of liberty. havent played in a year at least. maybe 2.

My friend plays heart of the swarm and only that game. He keeps telling me i need to get it to play together. he loves 2 vs 2.

ive never even seen this game before. havent read up on it or anything.

Is it still going strong? Would i even have fun playing this now or would i just be stomped over and over?

Starcraft 2 is worth playing for the singleplayer alone, multiplayer is a faint shadow of the original's glory and essentially the way everyone plays is to copy someone else; Blizzard basically negated 90% of the early game by making early game turtling extremely viable through progressive nerfs; the amount of micro needed for a large group of units is also drastically lower since you can select as many as you want (well up to 255, can't get that many in a regular game) thus greatly lowering the skill ceiling.

@fredchuckdave: Uhm, how is it lowering the skill ceiling that you don't have to do unneccessary busywork to move a large army? You still need to split them up in smaller groups to micro properly...

@fredchuckdave: i never touch the campaigns. They actually bore me. But i had some fun with the multiplayer. Also i had plenty of trouble microing well in Wings of Liberty. Did they do something to make that easier too?

@tobbrobb: Don't get him started..

Plenty of people still play SC2, the playbase isn't going anywhere soon.

Starcraft 2 is still going strong. The proliferation of League of Legends has caused it to lose a lot of popularity in Korea, but there is still a strong interest in it.

The single-player is a lot of fun, just ignore everything plot related (the story is as bad as Diablo 3's). The actual missions are interesting and there is a huge amount of variety. The single player alone is worth the price of admission.

Multiplayer is a mixed bag of frustration and fun... I loved multiplayer Starcraft with Wings of Liberty, but I feel that the expansion ruined the game. I primarily play Zerg, and the Terran's Spider Mines have caused me to ragequit so hard that I won't play again: I can't counter it, and my macro isn't good enough to bait an attack.

I'll probably get back into multiplayer up with the next expansion and I'm sure 2v2 with a dedicated partner would be a lot of fun. But there is a reason MOBAs (or ARTS, whatever you want to call them) have taken over the competitive eSports scene. There's something really satisfying about working together as a team that you just can't get with a 1v1 game.

@scroll: I was just curious. It seemed like such a bad example when there is arguably real differences between BW and SC2 that could be called "dumbed down". Ah whatever, doesn't matter.

Fredchuckdave is a protoss player obviously.