Engineering updates to make Starcraft 2 (patch 2.1) better

As of writing, Starcraft 2 patch number 2.1 has been available for a while. I must say that my ADSL connection is not extremely fast, but it is not horribly slow either, some people with fiber optic would consider it slow as 2MB (about 96kbs download speed).

Based on my connection speed and user experience, I recommend that the following changes should be made to Starcraft 2:

1. Download progress indicator for the map list. Just a spinning animation does not tell me anything since the connection could have stalled and I do not know how long I still have to wait.

2. Have some internal checksum system for the map list, especially for Blizzard maps, to avoid repeat map list download if nothing has changed.

3. If the game crashed due to stalled connection and like in my case I was in a multiplayer game with a friend then I would like to be able to reconnect to the game or at least spectate it if there was a record that I was involved in the game. This actually happened in a custom game when some other application decided to start downloading massive patches in the background.

4. A mute or volume control for that annoying voice about base being attacked. The noise spam gets worse as there are more players and especially with Zerg this gets rather annoying and is a really good reason not to play 3vs3. There are several forum entries on the Blizzard forums and it seems like Blizzard has not bothered sorting this out after two years and then they put out ads to ask for people who are passionate about gameplay and quality. Apparently annoyances are not a quality issue.