SC2Mapster

Paypal for Battle.net by Blizzard

Yesterday, Blizzard announced that they would be using Paypal as their cashing out company for the Diablo III Auction House. What exactly does Paypal being added to Diablo III have to with us, you may ask? I would have to respond that this new partnership between Paypal and Blizzard will likely run deeper than just Diablo III, especially since such a system would need to be embedded into Battle.net itself. They also stated that Paypal will soon become a valid payment option for other Battle.net services (like digital downloads and WoW realm changes, etc). Yes, I am implying here that Blizzard is likely going to be using Paypal as the distributor for the SC2 Map Marketplace as well! In order to purchase a map, you link a paypal account to your Battle.net account and you're good to go as long as you have the funds. If you're the author, Blizzard dumps any money made into your associated Paypal account every X amount of time. Seems logical, no? Keep in mind, I'm just throwing this out there, it's just some guess work, but it seems likely, ;).

Project Support Groups by ProzaicMuze et al

ProzaicMuze has just recently started up a group for supporting projects. This is certainly something we need around the community, especially with the state of SC2 Mapping at current time. It seems like a lot of people feel like Blizzard has forgotten about us, though I am sure that is not the case, as we'll have a huge amount of updates in the 1.4 patch, any future patches, and I guarantee HotS will bring about some cool new things for us (and then of course, LotV as well). What exactly will their group do, you may ask? Simple, they'll choose a map every so often, play it, test it for bugs, and give the map author feedback. Now, this isn't just a dedicated quality assurance team for mappers, it's a team full of great tutorial makers (like OneTwo and PM himself) and other experienced authors (such as Dogmai and Mephs), who know the ins and outs of the editor and can not only give feedback on the playability of the map, but also how to better develop your map. Let's help them, help us by showing the support group some support! Some threads you may want to keep in mind are their Mini Tutorials Archive and their Testing Archive.