coderjoe.net

Me, myself, and my code.

rstarcraft.info beta launch

23 March 2011

The History:

Those of you who know me know that I’ve become a bit obsessed with this game called Starcraft 2. Combining two of my favorite internet pass-times I’ve been spending a lot of my free internet time in Reddit’s /r/starcraft community.

When I first joined the Reddit Starcraft community there was a nifty little feature which would display your Starcraft race next to your username. Unfortunately as the community grew, the CSS required to implement this feature did as well. Eventually the required CSS outgrew some subreddit filesize requirement and the icons were forced to disappear.

A little bit later a site called rstarcraft.com was launched by the ever helpful redditor and /r/starcraft mod Aceanuu. The site allowed users to list their accounts, their ranks, their Reddit team, and some other useful information in order to relate redditors to their Battle.net accounts.

An Impetus for Change:

Rstarcraft.com was very useful for those of us that used it, but it quickly fell out of favor with me due to a few things I perceived as shortcomings.

  • You had to manually report and update your ranks
  • There was no verification that the Battle.net users actually had the ranks reported
  • There was no integration with /r/starcraft
  • There was no explicit support for people with multiple SC2 Accounts
  • The site’s functionality was entirely javascript based, causing overly large load times

A new opportunity:

I’m a fairly “competent” software engineer and wanted to improve this situation. When a few quick attempts at offering my services for the improvement of rstarcraft.com failed I got impatient and decided to just spin up a new site to fix the problems I saw.

And thus rstarcraft.info was born. The site fills exactly the same needs as rstarcraft.com but with a few important ( to me at least ) additions.

  • The site allows you to link Battle.net profiles with redditor accounts.
  • It supports multiple battle.net accounts per Redditor.
  • Ranks are synced with actual Battle.net ranks via sc2ranks.com
  • And the most fun: rank and race info can be superimposed on Reddit through the use of an rstarcraft.info Greasemonkey script or Chrome extension!
  • Password recovery is done through Reddit’s messaging system so if someone “steals” your identity, you can always get it back.

The site is officially in open beta, and I’ll be posting a link to the site with a short description on Reddit soon. I hope people enjoy it as much as  my limited test group did.

Get support for the site at the rstarcraft.info Google group.

You can follow progress on the site by watching the Twitter account @rstarcraftinfo