As Season 2 of the Starcraft II ladder draws to a close, Blizzard is now preparing for the new season and various other things that will be introduced to make the game much better. The Season 2 league lock started back in July 5 in preparation for the new season. The lock meant that no one can get promoted from their current leagues, but they could still Season 3 was scheduled to start on July 18, but was then delayed by a week to July 26. So far, Season 3 is shaping up to be the most eventful yet.

Blizzard has stated that from now on, season league locks are to last for a full two weeks in order for players to play out their bonus pools before the new season starts. Despite the league lock, players can still unlock achievements and portraits, so the games played during this time aren’t all wasted, as the lock only applies to promotions. This also means that win-based achievements won’t be reset with the beginning of each new season, so players shouldn’t worry about it at all.

The players’ performance during the lock still affects their MMR (hidden skill rating), which will then determine if they’re worthy of promotion once the new seasons starts. Once the new season begins, players will be able to get promoted once they start getting the ball rolling. For new players, they will still get five placement matches to determine their current skill level and place them in the corresponding league.

Blizzard also stated that the ideal duration for all future seasons is three months with a two-week lock in between. With each new season, the bonus pool will be erased so that players can start anew. Win-loss records from past seasons will be kept and be accessed through the player profile, but current records will reset to 0-0 for the new season.

With the start of each new season, players are to play a single placement match in order to weed out inactive players, determine your placing in your current league, and see if you are to be promoted or not if you placed high enough during the lock from the previous season. This also means that you lose all your ladder points during the reason. The MMR shall remain the same as it is used by the Battle.net servers to track your current skill level.

But the real highlight for the new season is the new map pool, which will introduce new maps to the ladder and make the metagame much more diverse for all modes of ladder play, from 1v1 to 4v4. This new map pool will result in a lot of changes in the multiplayer metagame and affect how the game will be played in the near future.

Patch 1.3.5 has been recently implemented in preparation for the new season. It is merely a minor patch with a few changes in the user interface, several tweaks in game performance, and most notably the icon update for the Infernal Pre-Igniter upgrade for Terran Hellions, which now correctly features blue flames instead of the former orange.

Season 3 will also introduce Region Linking, connecting multiple Battle.net regions that share to each other for multiplayer matchmaking and communication purposes. These linked servers seem to have been sharing data centers, which may have led Blizzard to this groundbreaking decision. These linked servers include North America and Latin America, Europe and Russia, and Korea and Taiwan. Players from these linked regions will be combined into a single ladder, providing a larger pool of players of all skill levels to play against and improving multiplayer experience.

With all of these changes and additions being implemented for the new season, this has come a long way since its release almost a year ago. This season opens up the second year of Starcraft II, and many more changes may come in the future, especially with the release of the Heart of the Swarm expansion planned for 2012.