My name is Greg Canessa and I'm the project director for the new Battle.net service here at Blizzard Entertainment.

Battle.net is a service with a long and storied history, very successful for the company, very strategic.

It launched with Diablo, and then moved on with StarCraft, Diablo II, Warcraft II Battle.net Edition, and then Warcraft III.

Our vision for the new Battle.net is to build a world-class online game service for all Blizzard games.

There are three key design tenets or pillars for the new Battle.net.

The first is the "Always-Connected Experience."

This is where you have the concept of a persistent character, and many of the benefits of being always connected to Battle.net throughout the gameplay experience.

There's a persistent character that's online at all times, being able to socialize and chat with friends inside and outside of the game, having the connected experience extend into the single-player experience, and having a full achievement and unlockable rewards system.

That achievement system will be a cross between what you see in World of Warcraft and other online game services.

Players can earn single-player achievements in the campaign as well as in skirmish or co-op vs. AI modes.

Unlockable rewards in the new Battle.net come in two forms for StarCraft II -- portraits and decals. There'll be an interface in your character profile where you'll be able to see the entire collection of portraits and decals.

You'll be able to select any portrait that you've earned as your portrait to show off to the community.

Any that you have not earned will be grayed-out, and you'll be able to right-click on it and view the correlated achievement.

So you'll be able to earn that achievement to unlock that reward, and you can collect them all.

The second pillar or tenet is the Competitive Arena for Everyone.

That's the design principle that shows our desire to create a great, structured competitive play experience for everyone on the new Battle.net, while at the same time making it accessible to a whole new audience.

These include some of our more casual gameplay modes, custom games, co-op vs. AI, and a practice league. A lot of the competitive features fall under this second pillar.

What we’ve done for the competitive player is we've created a new auto matchmaking system on Battle.net for StarCraft II.

This system is the most sophisticated one we've ever created, and one of the most sophisticated in the industry.

This is a learning system that will learn your skill level as you play through games.

You can also play on our leagues and ladders system in a structured team.

You can simply invite your friends into a party, and have our auto matchmaking system put you into a game and you'll be ranked with your friends on our leagues and ladder system.

The third pillar is Connecting the Blizzard Community. This is where the social networking and communications aspects of the new Battle.net experience come into play.

Everything from forming up a friends list, chatting and socializing, text chat as well as voice chat, cross-game communication between StarCraft II and World of Warcraft, as well as broadcasts, system notifications, and other aspects.

Battle.net is being built specifically around Blizzard games.

Unlike other online game services, we can do tightly integrated gaming features specific to our games, that other online gaming services can't pull off.

We want to take advantage of the opportunity to relaunch Battle.net. We want to create a service with a set of features that not only works for World of Warcraft and StarCraft II but will power all Blizzard games going forward.

That is the opportunity that is in front of us, and that is why we're investing so much time in creating the next generation of Battle.net.