Starcraft 2 - worth buying?

[PizzaSHARK!]

Counterpoints:

• I loved the campaign, even the parts that weren't gameplay.
  
• I haven't run into any maphacking in leagues. Not saying it isn't out there, but it certainly isn't a reason to avoid the game.
  
• Insane AI is incredibly difficult to beat unless you 6 pool it, or are already really good at SC2.
  
• Balance is NOT that bad, and patch 1.1 is a step in the right direction (and isn't glacial; it comes out this month).
  

- I thought the writing was trash. The Matt Horner death-to-the-dominion bits were good (I loved the theme behind the train robbery mission and the media blitz and its ensuing secret mission), but the rest was crap.

We encounter a Protoss faction we never actually get told anything about - other than they hate us and want us to die for desecrating their sacred relics, of course.

Gabriel Tosh (one of the few interesting characters newly introduced) gets shelved the second you bust his Spectre buddies out; maybe they're planning on giving him a bigger role in the ensuing expansions, but why give the player a choice if you're going to arbitrarily make one of those choices canon?

Jim Raynor becomes the Drunk White Space Knight in Shining Black Skull Armor, a complete reversal of his character in Brood War. In Brood War, he quite plainly states that he despises Kerrigan, realizes she can't be redeemed, and tells her straight up that he's going to kill her. Yet in SC2, he's a drunkard and he's moping about his girlfriend that got eated by the Zergs! I guess Fenix didn't mean that much to him after all, huh?

And even if you want to accept the story as kosher (I can't because I actually played Brood War and noticed how they basically ignore all events that took place in it), the writing was terrible... full of overly dramatic one-liners that were being delivered seriously rather than as parodies of themselves.

The gameplay was fun and engaging, but the story and writing were trash.

- It's around. It can be hard to differentiate between good gamesense and maphacking if you aren't experienced, though. Obvious maphacking is obvious, of course - if they don't scout at all the entire game and yet always know what you're doing and where, they're cheating. Blizzard says they're getting a handle on it, and I actually trust them about coming down on cheaters with both boots.

- I haven't messed with the AI since phase 2 of the Beta, and it wasn't terribly difficult to beat once you understood how it "thinks." Maybe we'll see if it's changed any when I get the inclination to farm up those achievements.

- Balance is a farce at high levels of play. You can watch numerous professional-level ZvT games and see an obvious discrepancy in balance there, and ZvP isn't much better. I think the major balance issues are more than Zerg is underpowered than Protoss or Terran are overpowered. Terran is how every race should be and how it should play: all of their units work wonderfully together, the tech trees are tight and refined, and they have absolutely no "useless" units. Every unit has a time and a place. Protoss is close to that, but runs into balance problems in PvT (Ghosts and Vikings together completely neutralize any hope Protoss has of handling large infantry formations and a pure Gateway army will lose to Barracks army supported by Medivacs.) They said the announced notes were just a sampling, so maybe they have some surprises in store for us. If not, the patch will change absolutely nothing about ZvT, though the Siege Tank nerf will shake up PvT.