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Starcraft 2’s ‘minegate’ shows that RTS fans still care about the little things

This hotly contested issue is consuming the Starcraft 2 reddit

Where were you during Starcraft 2’s minegate? With no new paid-for content coming to Starcraft 2, fans of the popular RTS game must concern themselves with the truly important issues, like if the damage template of a widow mine is a square, or a circle.

This difficult and all-encompassing question stemmed from an entirely separate discussion as to whether the widow mines were bugged. It turns out they weren’t, and the poster wasn’t taking into account the target line of the device. During the debate however one hero – reddit user AntiBox – pointed out that the apparently square damage model for the widow mine in the sample images was a coincidence, and that everything in Starcraft 2 was circular by design.

For context, a widow mine is a light mechanical unit that gets built by the Terran factory building. It can travel to a point, and then burrows under the ground. While hidden, it can then be activated to deal splash damage to friendly and enemy units around it. It’s not a one-use mine, but there is a cooldown between activation.

It seems AntiBox was downvoted quite heavily for their controversial theory, so they did the only thing a true believer would – bring proof.

No, widow mines aren’t doing damage in a square "because the model is square" from starcraft

In a follow up thread, AntiBox proved that widow mines deal their damage in a circular pattern. If you click through to the thread you can see a left/right compilation using zerglings as fodder for this highly scientific experiment. As you can see, the right side image betrays Starcraft 2’s circular nature, it was just a matter of quantity. Take that, naysayers!

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Minegate may be over before it truly began, but the real minegate were the friends we made along the way.