Additional Pile-Ons: StarCraft II Adding Global Play

Since the dawn of time, people haven't been the greatest communicators. Unable to bridge both geographical and interpersonal gaps, we've come to despise one another on pretenses that are flimsy at best. But maybe, all this time, we really just needed a universal language - a go-between that made sense of our Picaso collage of quirks and differences. What I'm saying is, maybe we needed non-region-locked StarCraft II servers. And soon - finally, mercifully, gosh, jeez, ugh - we'll be getting them.

Blizzard outlined the much-requested Global Play option in a recent blog post, noting that it aims to "expand the possibilities for eSports, expose you to maps and games that aren’t yet published everywhere, and make it easy to play with your friends in other parts of the world." All of those sound like good things, so hooray!

Granted, each region will still have separate profile data, so characters, rankings, progress and things of the like won't make the blink-of-an-eye StarCraft trek across the planet with you. However, there are also benefits to that separation. For instance, servers might be down for maintenance in one region, but in others, they might be all systems go.

Global Play will unite the world and solve so many problems that we'll have to invent new problems just to make up for it "in the coming months." If I had to guess, I'd say it'll probably come before Heart of the Swarm's first-half-of-2013 launch, if only because each will doubtless present all sort of kinks to work out, and it'd be a logistical nightmare to send both onto the frontlines at once. Then again, Blizzard works in mysterious (and sometimes utterly mystifying) ways, so I suppose we'll see.