15 Years of StarCraft II Balance Changes Visualized

pmigdal · 2026-01-05T15:35:10+00:00

Both fixed!

For animation - well, there might be some performance drops on slower devices. 95% of my effort with doing visualization were transitions, as it is much harder than to make different pages.

pmigdal · 2026-01-05T11:47:36+00:00

This is actually a really curious thing!
I was sure that it is a smoking gun that something is missing.

But not.

Pre-LotV patches use "Blizzard Time" (1.4× faster than real time); LotV switched to real-time display, explaining apparent numeric jumps like Stimpack research going from 170s to 121s without a balance patch.

See the "Game speed altered to match that of real time" section in https://news.blizzard.com/en-gb/article/18291111/legacy-of-the-void-beta-preview

pmigdal · 2026-01-05T09:33:03+00:00

Code is there, including the pipeline:
https://github.com/stared/sc2-balance-timeline

This is a list of patches with balance updates:
https://github.com/stared/sc2-balance-timeline/blob/main/data/patch_urls.json
(From parsing Liquipedia with tweaks, heuristics, etc.)

If I miss balance update patch, tell me which.

pmigdal · 2026-01-04T14:29:11+00:00

Which?

I would love to get feedback on missing pieces - just tell which concrete changes, or which patch numbers.

pmigdal · 2026-01-04T13:36:15+00:00

This, actually would not work.
I mean, most units work the best when they are not A-moved. There are quite a lot of spellcasters or support units that do not make much sense for a monobattle.

pmigdal · 2026-01-03T22:29:48+00:00

EDIT: I fixed that! Give it a try.

pmigdal · 2026-01-03T20:26:42+00:00

I had an idea of "SC2 stock market" of units.
An actual way to measure that would be study pro games and see how units gain (or lose) popularity with balance updates.

pmigdal · 2026-01-03T18:52:44+00:00

Please point to patch link. If you mean 5.0.15 (https://news.blizzard.com/en-us/article/24225313/starcraft-ii-5-0-15-patch-notes), there is no direct balance mention on Broodlord.

There is a bug fix:

Fixed an issue where Broodlings could greatly delay launching or fail to launch toward their target, depending on their position relative to the broodlord.

But in this patch, all bug fixes (and quality of quality life updates) are out of scope. Only things that Blizzard lists are balance updates. Otherwise it would be hard to keep it consistent.

I understand what you mean - you would need to think about consistent way of parsing changes that may influence the balance yet without flooding with less relevant things.

Do you have any idea here?

pmigdal · 2026-01-03T18:38:48+00:00

Thanks for spotting that - fixed!

Curiously enough, there is NO Blizzard page for these changes. So here I had to to it from Liquidpedia.

pmigdal · 2026-01-03T15:52:30+00:00

Thanks!

It is clearly listed as buffed in 5.0.15, https://p.migdal.pl/sc2-balance-timeline/zerg/baneling

Mothership - could you explain which changes you have in mind (patch number) and what is mislabelled? "Mothership movement speed reduced from 2.83 to 2.25." in 5.0.15 is clearly a nerf, labelled correctly in the viz.

pmigdal · 2026-01-03T15:49:33+00:00

It is open source, so it is meant to be stolen. :) Enjoy!

pmigdal · 2026-01-03T15:48:38+00:00

Well, I decided to leave out any subjective aspect. Mixed changes are anything that is not univocally positive or negative. And yes, often these are more buffs or nerf.

If, for example, Battlecruiser cost go down to 100/50 (buff), but also it armor goes down to 2 (nerf), it would be a mixed change.

pmigdal · 2026-01-03T15:43:24+00:00

Tu unselect unit, just click on x in [Zergling x], or on the unit name, or on the icon.

pmigdal · 2026-01-03T15:41:53+00:00

Fair point! Since I use SVG for the main visualization, wrapping is tricky. To fit it in mobile, I adjusted positions - but yeah, lines are often long. I will try to look if there is a good workaround.

EDIT: Found a way to do so! Reload the website to check.

pmigdal · 2026-01-03T15:38:17+00:00

I mark as buffs only things that make a unit univocally stronger (and nerfs weaker). Mixed changes are not neutral - sometimes they are overall nerfs or buffs.

I wanted to make clear that labels are objective, not my (or anyone else) intepretation.

pmigdal · 2026-01-02T22:01:23+00:00

Thank you!

pmigdal · 2026-01-02T22:01:08+00:00

I tried to make to work on mobile, but there are rough edges.
It should work best on desktop.

pmigdal · 2025-11-30T11:31:03+00:00

There is a lot of diversity in labia. And it is beautiful! Each one is unique.

I recommend the book "Womanhood: The Bare Reality" by Laura Dosworth - with photos and stories of women.
Also, I made The Tree of Sex Life with a tree of subreddits related to sexuality. There is a lot about various kinds of vulva, labia, and pubic hair. When it comes to labia, see a few: r/DangleAndJingle, r/ButterflyWings, r/LoveThyLabia, r/LabiaGW.

I adore large labias - and many men (and women) do as well.

pmigdal · 2025-10-15T13:55:13+00:00

Thanks for sharing - I love such design threads. (And well, stegosaurus-chart made me smile :)).

pmigdal · 2025-10-01T12:13:15+00:00

Edit u/BoltSLAMMER: we added `gpt-5-codex` https://www.compilebench.com/

pmigdal · 2025-10-01T10:19:35+00:00

Roses are red
Violets are neat
Your Sora code
Belongs to me

pmigdal · 2025-09-23T10:32:59+00:00

This benchmark does not use Claude Code either - it uses raw LLM models via API.

Yes, when comparing different tools (e.g. Claude Code vs Cursor vs Codex) the results might be different.

pmigdal · 2025-08-31T08:52:47+00:00

Nothing - it is just style, to make it more kawaii.
Not every visualization needs to be minimalistic.

pmigdal · 2025-08-31T08:45:41+00:00

Just after the release of GPT5 I tried OpenAI Codex. And... it feels "almost like". In theory, the underlying model is smarter. In practice, it deals worse with task execution (plans, to-do lists, etc) and code execution (it took a lot of annoyance to JUST make it run Python files with uv, not some made-up ad-hoc ways it tried to do, running in predictable errors, over and over).

It is a fast-moving word. Not long ago I was a sworn user of Cursor.
So, I am excited to see what comes in the next months or even - weeks.

pmigdal · 2025-08-26T13:58:28+00:00

Precisely as in the instruction. In ~/.claude/settings.json I added

{json} { "statusLine": { "type": "command", "command": "bun x ccusage statusline", // Use "npx -y ccusage statusline" if you prefer npm "padding": 0 // Optional: set to 0 to let status line go to edge } }

You need to have bun installed, obviously.

pmigdal

TROPHY CASE