So just to settle my own curiosity, like Brad are the majority of the users here done with this game? Or are there still some left?

I for one still play and have switched from zerg to random to find maximum enjoyment out of the game. Blizzard might be giving up on monetizing the game and have been focusing more on their new money machine hearthstone, but when it comes to modern RTS this seems to pretty much still be the only option.

I really sincerely hope from the bottom of my "hearth" that blizzard finds a way to sell shit in sc2, be it skins, music, or BW sounds, whatever it may be, there are still quite a user base out there willing to buy that stuff.

I've gotten back into playing SC2 recently. Stopped months ago due to the mental effort and slight stress ladder games caused because of stuff like BM or cheese, but I'm getting back into it and my skills haven't deteriorated too bad, getting to top diamond rapidly. Should be back to master soon if I play a bit more.

@fluxwavez: Good to hear. And yes ladder stress can be hard to deal with after awhile, I was so close to reaching master league with Zerg and suddenly went into a deep slump which pretty much destroyed my motivation to play, so I decided to switch to random and just have more fun with the game rather than burn myself out by making every game the most important on my never ending road to master league :b

Also I found and I think many others that the competition have gotten harder as the user base have been shrinking, leaving mostly the most "hardcore" and experienced players left. I think that can be a bit discouraging for new players just getting into sc2, if ever such a person is out there.

@tothenines: Definitely agree on the point of the userbase's general skill level getting higher. Players in leagues like Gold or Platinum are way more proficient than I remember them being back in 2013.

I wanted to do what you're doing so bad with playing random and just not caring about the ladder ranking. I don't really care about my ladder ranking as much now as I did back then, though, and with the additions of being able to play simple 1v1, unranked player matches, I might try exploring playing random more. Sounds fun.

Played the hell out of Wings of Liberty, but stopped a year or so before HotS. When it came out I was pretty pumped to continue the story, though I honestly didn't even finish it.

Mission design was cool but I can't stand what they've done with the story. What was originally this huge, epic tale got distilled down to an unearned love story.

So since the campaign left a bad taste in my mouth, I touched multiplayer a handful of times and just didn't have the desire to boot up the client again.

Balancing sort of killed the early game section of the vast majority of SC2 games so it doesn't really hold any appeal for me, since that's the difficult part of the game. 200 food on 200 food fights are generally not as interesting as smaller scale fights where micro is paramount; also the average game takes 10 minutes longer. It also has the standard problem with any game these days in that the players mostly just copy each other instead of trying to do something different; rare exceptions. At the beginning of HoTS I did some unranked games and won like 15 in a row but it wasn't really compelling; was diamond in the first season/week of WoL (there wasn't any higher league at that point). I played a few team games with some old Brood War buddies I was immensely better than back in the day; they're both Master players now.

For me the big issue with SC2 isn't melee since that's almost identical to what it was in Brood War, give or take some balancing decisions; the problem is the custom map scene is awful compared to the Used Map Settings scene, and we have DoTA and to a lesser extent Indie games to thank for that. It's no better than xblig at this point.

Campaign is amazing and versus AI is generally pretty fun. It's definitely worth playing the game just for the campaign; one of the best in any RTS period; such variety in the ways you can approach almost every mission and even how you can build your character/team. Looking forward to Legacy of the Void.

From what I can gather most people that used to play RTS games just play DoTA or a DoTA clone now; SC2 multiplayer audience is probably less than 50,000 in the US; which is less than Brood War like 8 years after that came out. If you want other RTS games to play Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance is absolutely incredible and Company of Heroes isn't bad either.

I played the crap out of WoL, but I've only got room in my life and schedule for one regular multiplayer game. For me and my buds that's DOTA 2 these days.

I still need to go back and finish the HotS campaign mode.