As over a million gamers flock to play StarCraft 2: Wings of Liberty, a smaller portion of the masses are putting their creative minds to use creating custom maps to share with other gamers on Battle.Net. Inside this collective, there is an even smaller group of people, who make maps which place one player in an unfairly better spot, or even have cliffs in the shapes of racial taunts. While rare, they exist - and this time, Blizzard is taking them down as soon as they're spotted.

In the original StarCraft, Blizzard did not police the custom maps people uploaded. It seems that in this round however, they're ensuring that the sleek new Battle.Net experience doesn't get bumpy with racy or dumb content. Blizzard Community Manager Bashiok had a pretty simple reason for why they were doing it for the sequel:

"Because we can. Literally. We have a support department now of size and ability to enforce these types of things. It simply wasn't possible when our in-game support used to consist of approximately 20 technical support agents. We're working on improving our processes to ensure the map maker has more information on why their map was removed, right now it is a bit vague and has obviously led to this misunderstanding."

People first really started taking notice of Blizzard's new efforts when a map called Ultimate Take Defense got taken down. The creator posted a complaint that his level had no objectionable content, and questioned if it was the use of the word 'bad-ass' that got him taken down. As it turns out, in one of the waves of enemies a group resembled a swastika in the mini-map, and thus was complained about and taken down. The map has been edited and is now back up on the system, and is a pretty solid example of how the system works in itself.

You can find the terms for Blizzard mapmaking here, though I doubt many somehow end up violating the rules trying to map a fun map. We here at Game Rant have been pretty positive about StarCraft 2, so we recommend you take a look for yourself if you haven't already - and now that the online experience just got a little smoother, there's virtually no reason not too - that goes for you too, Mac users.

Have you seen any offensive maps? How has your online experience been with StarCraft 2: Wings of Liberty? We love to hear this stuff!

Source: BigDownload