This is on top of Starcraft 1 being free as well.

https://starcraft.com/en-us/articles/20674424

I'm not sure if this has been mentioned, but apparently those who already own Wings of Liberty are getting Heart of the Swarm for free.

Tbh the best thing about SC2 is the Arcade with all the awesome custom made scenarios/maps (play "Doomed Earth", it's amazing). The single-player campaigns are full of awful writing/storytelling and annoyined time-based missions, and the standard multiplayer gets boring after a while.

This is really nice of Blizzard, but I have a friend who got a virtual ticket to Blizzcon this year, and he tells me Diablo 3, on the other hand, is basically being tapered off.

I think Diablo III was a bit of a lost cause from the start, Real money auction house killed off much of the player base at launch (loot drops balanced around buying/selling rather than personal acquisition) and the game changed drastically over time as well. Not to mention you were forced to go through the difficulties from normal to inferno on each character (so you had to go through the same story constantly). It quickly became repetitive, nowadays it's a pretty decent game but I'm no fan of the focus on seasons and rifts. This is one thing I've come to dislike about Blizzard, if you buy a game and enjoy the product, after a few years (or sometimes months) it just won't be the same game anymore. Some might say that's nice but if you look at Overwatch for example your favourite character risks becoming boring to play with all the drastic changes to characters such as Soldier76, McCree, Roadhog, Genji, Mercy etc. Obviously balance is important but I think it can work both ways for a game.

Good points that I can't argue with. I put Diablo 3 down from late 2012 until basically 2016, because it originally sucked so badly. I put it down again this year, because now the game revolves around, as you said, seasons and rifts. It's like Blizzard isn't even trying with D3 anymore.

As far as balance, that's been a thing with Blizz since WoW became popular. I think it's a way for them to keep the meta fresh, tbh, though it can be frustrating.
There's no DRM to speak of, other than having to be online for achievements. iirc there's a way to play the game legally without battle.net, but I'm unsure how, because I barely play it (not much of an RTS fan, though I admit to owning this series)

You sure it will stay that way after it becomes free-to-play?

I'm not sure of anything with Blizzard, honestly, other than WoW keeping its sub structure until the game is below 1 million subs.

If memory serves me right, Blizzard already made the DRM-free versions of older games unavailable...

Or was that Square Enix?

Either way...

:) SC2 is worth playing if you don't mind having to be online, but yes, if always online bothers you, it's not worth it.

It's Nov 14th and it seems Blizzard has crashed. :P

I'm a little confused here. Is this a limited time thing because I don;t see any download options. It almost looks like, "Come on the site and play it for a week" trial type thing.

It should be permanent, those who already owned WoL get Heart of the Swarm free (I think they get like a week or so to claim it). The rest gets WoL for free, it no longer requires a purchase to play WoL.

If they don't get the site back up it won't be anything. :P

And of course they won't even let me log in. :P

Working at least for me, just downloaded their client too.

Too bad the game apparently needs 30GB of free space, so I need to tidy up my hard drives a bit before I can download it... I have 21GB and 18GB free on two partitions, at least need to move around something, but I know there is stuff to delete too. Heck, maybe I will just remove my DOTA2 installation from Steam, I wasn't playing it anyway.