Blizzard moves its premier eSport title a little closer towards a free-to-play model as an old feature from WarCraft II and the original StarCraft makes a return. Starter Edition players are given access to game content without owning the game itself.
Perhaps peering slightly at its competitors, Blizzard has decided to open their flagship eSports title to a new audience by offering its content for free to Starter Edition players. The condition is that you have to be in a lobby with a friend that owns the game, and the upgrade only carries your account to the level of the highest expansion level in the party. It is however, best explained by Blizzard themselves:
Nowadays, anyone who hasn’t yet purchased StarCraft II can still play, thanks to the Starter Edition. While Starter Edition players have access to much of the game, there are many features that they previously couldn’t try before upgrading to the full game. Spawning closes that gap. Any player at a lower expansion level who joins a party that includes a player at a higher expansion level is Spawned up, and gets to play using the features and options of the highest expansion level for as long as they’re in a party together.
For example, when a Starter Edition player joins a party with a Wings of Liberty-level player, both are instantly playing Wings of Liberty. When those two players then join a party with a Heart of the Swarm-level player, they all immediately gain access to Heart of the Swarm content, and they keep that access until their party no longer includes any higher-expansion level players.
Blizzard's Community Manager Cloaken explains it further:
An additional Interview with Production Director Chris Sigaty can be found over at Gamespot.com, in which he details the motivation, inception and further plans of the Starter Edition and the Spawning feature.
Whether or not this will prove fruitful is still up in the air, it has been generally viewed as a step in the right direction, though. On a similar note, a Battle.net Desktop Client has surfaced, that aims to make updating and accessing your Blizzard titles a whole lot easier.
