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Blizzard Confirms No LAN Support For Starcraft 2
Kemeno writes "Blizzard has announced that they will be dropping LAN support for Starcraft II, citing piracy and quality concerns. Instead, all multiplayer games will be hosted through their new Battle.net service. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised by this move, but wasn't LAN play how the original Starcraft became popular? Blizzard said, 'More people on Battle.net means ... even more resources devoted to evolving this online platform to cater to further community building and new ways to enjoy the game online. World of Warcraft is a great example of a game that has evolved beyond anyone's imagination since their Day 1 and will continue to do so to better the player experience for as long as players support the title. ... We would not take out LAN if we did not feel we could offer players something better.'"
World of Warcraft is a great example of a game that has evolved beyond anyone's imagination since their Day 1 and will continue to do so to better the player experience for as long as players support the title.
I find it odd that a comparison is being drawn between a stateful monthly payment role playing game and a stateless (allegedly subscription-less) real time strategy game. I definitely see how World of Warcraft is enriched by the spider webbed interaction of thousands of players on a server. However, I fail to see how Starcraft II would benefit from this if you've got a single digit cap on number of players in any given instance of the game.
And can we give up on the piracy concerns? It's just getting embarrassing.
Also, if you're going to force everyone to use Battle.net, I hope you have improved its quality since I was last one it several years ago.
My work here is dung.
luckily we have bnetd!
oh wait...
So now, aside from locating a place where you and your friends can setup your computers and play - you now get to find someplace with an internet connection that can handle all of them at the same time.
Way to go Blizzard.
Are they at least going to release a battle.net server clone source/ dedicated servers for private hosting? Similar to how Valve has a source dedicated server they release for all their major games? A lot of large LAN events only allow limited net access, if any.
For the record I think this is really,really dumb idea.
moox. for a new generation.
Quite disappointing, considering some friends and I still get together and play an 8 man LAN every month or so of Starcraft 1. Feels like an internet connection would be saturated if we were all trying to send data back and forth to BNet, especially the uplink. Maybe if BNet is just used for a quick auth and lobby, then a LAN game is started, that might not be so bad, but it's not looking that way.
Shame the official reason is to combat piracy as well, since it seems this will cause more players to find BNet emulators and won't solve the piracy problem.
There was some thought that Blizz isnt completely stupid and will have client to server authentication over the net, and then P2P the clients on the LAN. At least with this method you could have as many LAN stations as your power will permit.
Good-bye
Somehow I think its more to do with stopping the pirates, no valid key, no multiplayer ever. Diablo II is fun to play on battlenet, but when theres 4+ of us all on lan, we notice the difference with Lag when we all go on battlenet (Do they even run servers in the europe for anything but WOW). Not only that, means if ever the net goes down at a LAN meetup (or is otherwise unavailable) we can't play your game at all.
"I may be full of crap about this game, and I may be wrong, and that's fine." -Jack Thompson
No, Blizzard, you wouldn't take out LAN support (which is obviously popular) unless you thought you could make money by forcing everyone to use battle.net.
Or maybe requiring battle.net allows you to check everyone's serial number without generating a bunch of bad publicity by using SecuROM.
Now I'm gonna have to let all the LAN-party machines access the public Internet. Oh, goody!
Sheesh...
You have the right to remain silent. If you don't, anything you say will be misquoted and used against you.
As a purely coincidental side effect, I'm sure, this will make sure that everyone on the LAN has their own copy, as battle.net will only allow one CD key on at a time.
Quite a reversal of the "Ghost Copy" feature or whatever of StarCraft 1 that allows many people to use one copy over the LAN.
So, i assume battle.net cannot be accessed without an internet connection. So effectively, this doesn't allow us to play at all offline?
Whatever. If they want to make you sign into Battle.net for piracy concerns (remember folks, you need a valid CD key for Battle.net)- the least they could do is autodetect hosts that are on the same subnet and any traffic destined to any of these systems is kept local and /not/ bounced off the Battle.net servers.
There's no @#$@ing way people can or will host LAN parties of any reasonable size if they need a 100mbit/up 25mbit/down (more?) pipe to the internet. Now, if the only thing Starcraft wants you to do is *log into* Battle.net, use Battle.net for the "room hosting", but all the game clients autodetect who's local and who's not and route traffic accordingly, then there should be no problem.
The problem is if Blizzard is insisting that any and all MP traffic is bounced off their servers first. I really hope they're not that stupid.
-AC
That idiot who is always sucking up bandwidth torrenting at LAN parties is about to get beat down.
It seems like we are always pushed towards using broadband just as the quality of these connections is on a constant downfall. Means there will be no multi-player StarCraft II for you when your ISP fails you with their DNS servers; even if everyone in your household owns a legitimate copy of the game.
but it definitely won't keep it's longevity without LAN support, I mean the best thing about games like Starcraft or even FPS like BF1942 was the LAN aspect of getting your friends together ordering a pizza, talking shit and zerging each other. Sure, I can throw on a headset and play with friends, but what if battle.net is down? What if I'm getting a lot of lag...fast paced game players don't have the tolerance of players who are into mmo's exclusively. I think Blizz is making a poor decision.
Ave Molech Setting
We would not take out LAN if we did not feel we could offer players something better.
How is connecting all the computers in the room to a server across the state going to ever be better than connecting all the computers in the room to each other? This man just told everyone that his bullshit is going to start tasting better than icecream. He just needs a neon sign over his head that says "Do not trust this man or anything he says."
I am the richest astronaut ever to win the superbowl.
I dunno about this. What if my ISP is acting up, and I need to get in a bit of Starcrafty goodness with a couple friends I have over or something? No matter what Blizzard does, there's going to be piracy of their game; it's inescapable, no matter what they do. I'm sure bnetd (or at least something similar) is going to pop up.
The most jarring thing to me is the worry that they won't at least let you meet up with specific people on bnet and form a closed game to at least simulate a LAN game (fat chance, with the lag back to Blizzard's servers =/ )
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
This is all about the only form of DRM that works: centrally controlled and account based. Regardless of how many reasons that Blizzard gives, this is all about controlling the product.
Blizzard used to make games because they were fun to play? Given that Blizzard has basically dominated the market why do they continue to stray from their roots... Remember KALI? Warcraft 2 owed ALL of its success to KALI and that would have never existed if LAN play wasn't an option. But battle.net takes in HUGE profits all by itself so I guess its better to force players to use it then make it optional. Control is the name of the game these days. Oh yah.. I forgot, DRM and other Piracy measures work sooooo well don't they?
Interesting because the original Starcraft had the spawn mode where you could play a LAN game using only a single CD/CD key...Now they turn that around to make claims of piracy when it was something that they allowed you to do with the original?
This is just a blatant money grab to monetize Battle.net. They realize the first Starcraft is still being played a decade later, but they aren't making any more money. Throw some ads on Battle.net and you have a continuous revenue stream for years to come.
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So how will people edit maps and then test them? I mean i know there will be 3rd party ways to lan this but is Blizzard trying to prevent me from taking a map, editing it, then having a few friends over to test it out before putting it online? or will all this be done through bnet?
If there is no possibility to play the game in a LAN without Internet access I won't buy it. Period.
I haven't been to a LAN party in about 10 years. It's really easy to get the same experience nowadays with broadband and a microphone. I don't see the point in hauling all my computer stuff over to a friends house when now I can just hop on Steam and round up a few people and play Left 4 Dead. 10 years ago when we were all playing Starcraft and Quake II, there was a definite need for LAN parties since we all had slow 33.6/56K dial-up internet which made multiplayer games extremely slow.
"While this was a difficult decision for us, we felt that moving away from LAN play and directing players to our upgraded Battle.net service was the best option to ensure a quality multiplayer experience with Starcraft II and safeguard against piracy."
THis is the result of a great gaming house bought by a corporate whore. Good job Blizz, not only are you selling the integrity right out from under WoW, you are going to let them fuck up your other franchises too. I still dont understand why Starcraft II has to be 3 separate retail releases. Can someone at least point me to a link that explains their 'reasoning' on this?
Good-bye
Not only did Blizzard's RTS games gain popularity as LAN games, but they capitalized on casual LAN gaming (in offices, etc.) by allowing multiple players players on a single purchased copy of the game. That feature became standard for other RTS games for awhile, but at first it certainly helped Blizzard propel over the crowds (and it certainly was a crowded genre).
So I'm contrasting the old "free" partial copies of the games to gain popularity, to the server = copy-protection methods now that they have the popularity locked in.
I wouldn't care much about it, but I still love LAN options and I'm not all that fond of Blizzard's style of "community building" because I know it's going to be ladder climbing and stat building designed to capitalize on achievement-focused obsessions. I'm sure that will sell them many games, but I'd just like to fire up a quick game with friends without everyone so obsessed with the meta aspects.
LAN support is what makes StarCraft (classic) the best game ever. You can get a bunch of people together in a computer lab and play 4vs4 or in my case 7vs1. BNET access will be blocked from most schools so the multiuser experience will be eliminated since schools and libraries are some of the only places you can find rooms full of 25 PCs. Also, the LAN doesn't LAG like battle net.
:)
So how is this going to play out? If SCII is any good, the community will just produce a local battle net server e.g. (bnetd) for playing games on the LAN. Blizzard is making very a bad, short-sighted move. As for piracy, everyone I know owns at least one copy of the Blizzard Battle Chest, which costs $20 or less for SC and BW. It is the best entertainment one can buy for under $20. The mega mineral maps require internet access though
If anyone from Blizzard reads Slashdot, please go up and smack your management in the head and tell them to make SCII LAN playable. If they don't build it, someone else will and writing a small server to emulate BNET isn't going to be that hard. Even with encrypted session, it will be reverse engineered, just ask Sony about ShowEQ and their futile attempt the encrypt Everquest Traffic. Everyone on planet earth is going to buy the game the day it hits the shelf. Please go smack them in the back of the head now.
This sounds like it might make playing as a group from behind a household NAT router much more difficult, no? There at least will be a speed penalty.
That takes a lot of the fun out of it for me.
If moderation could change anything, it would be illegal.
Lan parties are different than online play, because everyone is in the same room. You know everyone who's there, and you can see them from across the room. Nothing is a substitute for human contact, and playing on battle.net won't be the same.
At least it'll have local campaign play, right? You can still play that forever and ever.
I continue to play Warcraft III fairly regularly, mostly in the form of the custom map DotA. My thoughts:
Battle.net has failed to evolve and I feel is discouraging to communities rather than promoting it. I've seen nothing really appreciable since War-III came out with the sad "clan" system. Bots are officially disallowed, but required to develop any sort of reasonable group. The new Warden service makes running a bot far more of a challenge.
The necessity of the bots is this: you can't functionally setup an organized game any other way. There's no mechanism for taking a private game public once you get your friends in it. Game names can't be changed. Custom (non-ladder) games without an external mod have no disincentive to them to deal with the burgeoning population of juvenile tools who like to bail on their first loss in a team game, or worse find a way to actively ruin the game. Blizzards clan system itself is lacking and hasn't been improved upon at all. It's nearly useless outside of ladder games. Players end up creating new accounts with clan tags in the name to "fly their colors." Simply being more prominent in displaying the affiliated clan would have gone a long way.
And come on... the game came out 7 years ago. Fix the damn pathing issues! Blizzard makes amazing games, but their handling of B.net lately has been horribly disappointing.
SIG: HUP
It's ridiculously stupid moves like this that cause me not to purchase the game until, oh, ten years down the road when I can pick it up for a quarter at a yard sale. I'm serious with crap like that. I'm still boycotting Sony (and all their products, including tri-star films) for their stupidity.
It is my understanding that people who are on the same LAN and are playing with each other will still be sending the actual gameplay packets to each others LAN ip address without having to first pass through Battle.Net. All Battle.Net will be doing is authenticating the game and setting up matches and keeping various stats. That said we won't know for sure till the beta is released or Blizzard confirms or denies it.
they seem to have forgotten that they used to give "spawn" CD keys that allowed you to play with friends. I thought you could play LAN with that too.
I buy games, and bought SC1 [and Brood War] and played the hell out of it [spawn copies at LANs!]. might not want to buy SC2 if that's how they want to play...
Until I read about this. HOLY crap am I pissed. I used to work somewhere with a 5$/hr gaming machine rental on a lan of about 10-15 machines. Starcraft, Q2, CS, TF were HUGELY popular lan games we allways had people doing group play 2v2 etc. We did tons of tournaments too that were often won w/ a zerg rush or an a carrier warp.
Those were the good ol days!
We're all going to have to wait for Total Annihilation 3?
Effin A.
How much is your data worth? Back it up now.
http://www.petitiononline.com/LANSC2/petition.html
Starcraft 1 is probably my favorite game of all time. I will not even consider SC2 without LAN play.
I say that partly because draconian DRM schemes make my skin crawl, and partly because some of my favorite Starcraft matches throughout the years have been played in places where Internet connections were not available. Blizzard hasn't really ever had to face a giant PR mess before. They have no idea what kind of stink this is going to cause. It will make the EA-Spore brouhaha look very small.
I'm not buying also, first: no Linux version and now this.
Blizzard: if you want your products to sell start listening to your possibles customers.
Though generally regarded as ineffective, but if enough people join the effort... http://www.petitiononline.com/LANSC2/petition.html
More and more companies are dropping co-op games (except for strategy games), pushing off PC onto consoles (or at least developing on consoles so the control schema sucks), and now droping LAN games?
It seems like the industry is trying desperately to get me to stop playing games.
Oh, and it won't really do much to damp piracy, just shift it from stolen images to stolen keys, thus increasing the harm to legit gamers. Not having a whole "way to go" moment here.
Recently got UT3, BTW, which is so buggy as to be more frustrating than fun. Thank goodness it was only $10. Does play LAN games, but the settings are arbitrarily restricted (and seemingly somewhat random re: options and difficulty).
Is it just me, or is gaming in general going downhill?
"We would not take out LAN if we did not feel we could offer players something better."
You fucking can't. I haven't used Battle.net in well over a decade because it BLEW CHUNKS. The only way I could ever get a decent game of SC going was to call my friends up and have a LAN party.
You just ripped the HEART out of your game. Fuck you, Blizzard. You just guaranteed I'll NEVER touch another thing from your company ever again.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
It was easy to see this coming. They already said that LAN play was axed from Diablo 3, and we saw direct TCP/IP axed even as far back as Warcraft 3 (requiring tunnels like Hamachi to play across the 'net but not battle.net). Blizzard fans/apologists will lap it up, nonetheless.
well, I guess someone will just have to revive BNETD or PVPGN... they think they can fight piracy by removing lan, oh so naive
I still play SC1 almost everyday with a coworker after work LAN only. I have been waiting for that experience to be replaced by SC2. Now they are taking away LAN play, and due to our firewall rules, I doubt it will work or I am worried about it being monitored by or experiencing network "hiccups".
Now instead of buying two legitimate copies of the game, I might be waiting for a cracked pirated version that works over LAN.
Thanks Blizzard.
or if your on dial-up with latencies of 300+ms it won't be playable. ...
imagine lance armstrong having to go to france to practice
because the roads are clogged in his home town
-or-
even if you're on a broadband connection if you play from,
say india, your ping times will always be higher then someone connecting
from the US.
so in a way Americans are supremacist and favor American players
over foreigners >: P
So now, aside from locating a place where you and your friends can setup your computers and play - you now get to find someplace with an internet connection that can handle all of them at the same time.
Or you can just pay $60 per computer per month with a 24-month minimum commitment for mobile broadband, like a lot of proponents of cloud computing on Slashdot have been recommending.
...they'd either need to include the server as well or have a separate network architecture for peer-to-peer play.
So? Both of these have precedent. Valve releases servers, and some of Blizzard's own games (including SC1) have peer-to-peer play.
While we're at it, why is this post modded down?
Whenever a company does something that hurts the consumer in the name of "fighting piracy", it seems to me to be taken by the community as an open invitation to pirate their game. Given the choice between pirating and buying the game, frequently the reason the individual consumer chooses to pay money for the game is the impression one has of the company. Sure, no one is going to pay for a crappy game, but look at the difference between Spore and Starcraft. Spore was seen as a slap in the face of the consumer and consequently was one of the most pirated games in history. The original Starcraft, despite the fact it is easily pirated, is still profitable enough to be sold for $20 in stores.
You want to insure piracy? Piss off your users. Removing LAN and telling LAN users they're nothing but pirates seems to be going down that road pretty nicely.
This is Blizzard we're talking about here. The legendary maker of Starcraft and Diablo II. Everything they do is done incredibly well...to perfection. Don't be so quick to blow this off. I'm guessing that BNet 2.0 will have LAN functionality wrapped inside of it. So it appears like all you have to do to play LAN is connect to BNet first and then after that it's mostly local traffic with the occasional query back to BNet. BNet 2.0 will offer all kinds of new community features like achievements and being able to watch your friends play. Having LAN hooked into BNet 2.0 seems like the best of both worlds for the player while also protecting their software from pirates. If SC2 is anywhere near as good as SC1, I'm definitely willing to take a hit on where I can play multilayer for the sake of throwing Blizzard a bone to help protect their IP.
I don't think piracy is their main concern here. I believe this may be a (somewhat misguided) idea to get a subscription of SCII players, like they got used with WoW. Sure, they said they would allow all bought copies to play on bnet, but they haven't precluded some options (like e.g. a subscription allows you to have pre-made groups, or bigger battles, or something like that). If people buy the game and don't log on bnet, some carrots and sticks will be missing on their options.
What if my ISP is acting up
<devils-advocate>If you fear that your ISP might act up, subscribe to both cable and DSL and have your router automatically switch between the two. It's called multihoming.</devils-advocate>
and I need to get in a bit of Starcrafty goodness with a couple friends I have over or something?
How will your friends play at your house if their PCs are back at their houses?
Most people play online on bnet. The only issue I can see is how will they host those Starcraft tournament in Korea, will they have to login to bnet also?
I have been waiting for this release for quite some time now. I have faithfully worshiped the screen shots, the anticipation was just killing me. Fond memories of Starcraft 1 LAN games still fresh in my mind. With this new twist, well it is like a virtual kick in the balls. Blizzard has pissed on these fond memories without a care in the world. The massive success of WoW has blinded them to what the game players really desire. The justifications are a thinly veiled attempt at retaining control over the user experience. I, like many others will probably never purchase this game unless they reverse the decision. It has now become something I have no reason to spend $59.99 of my money on. Thanks but no thanks gentlemen...
So how will people edit maps and then test them?
<devils-advocate>Against bots. And be glad there even is a map editor; there wasn't one in Warcraft 2 for the original PlayStation or in Starcraft for Nintendo 64.</devils-advocate>
Its when companies become powerful enough to force these retarded decisions on their user base - that's when they are just about to crumble. This is bad news. I've had trouble playing Civ4 when two players are behind the same NAT firewall and the third is connected remotely. If Starcraft 2 has similar issues, I won't play it.
If Blizzard were offering something better, they would not have to remove the game's LAN capability. Customers would just use the "better" thing, right?
Oh wait. Better for Blizzard. Ah, now it makes sense.
Great men are almost always bad men--Lord Acton's Corollary
So now, on top of already buying the game 3 times, one for each race, you're going to keep me from being able to play them on a LAN at my home? What about when my net connection is down? When battle.net is laggy as fuck? What if I don't want to watch Blizzard's annoying as fuck Battle.net advertisements TO PLAY A GAME I ALREADY BOUGHT?
What a joke of a company Blizzard has come. Hey Blizzard: Go screw yourselves, you're not getting any of my money for 1 copy of this game, let alone 3. And you can take your bullshit piracy argument and shove it where the sun doesn't shine; we all know this is about tying CD keys to a single person to keep people from buying used games. I've purchased a copy of most of your games to date, going all of the way back to warcraft. They're all even tied to my battle.net account, along with my legitimate CD keys.
Never again. Do you hear me? NEVER AGAIN.
I think this kills the market for people who want to goof off at work, as there's no way those SC2 packets will make it through a corporate firewall, but they'd probably do just fine going back and forth with your cubicle neighbor.
More data, damnit!
More importantly... how many of your friends bought the game after you introduced them to it with those spawn copies? Blizzard is shooting itself in the foot.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
but wasn't LAN play how the original Starcraft became popular?
That's how Warcraft became popular. Starcraft had LAN options but it was more popular over battle.net than LAN.
Two possibilities:
1) They don't want to code LAN support, probably because it's extra coding time and they don't see the immediate benefit, and they see the extra benefits to them (not to users) of forcing people to battle.net.
2) The parent company of Blizzard is putting antipiracy pressure on them and this was a loophole in their plan.
LAN support makes the game last longer for hardcore gamers. That's the major benefit to consumers. However, 95% of the starcraft populace will play on battle.net. Even out of all you slashdot complainers who end up buying it, you'll play on Battle.net. A very small section of people will not buy it, and the cost of coding LAN support vs the lost sales will probably not matter much (and might even save them money).
It's definitely a consumer loss, but it's not a bad move for the sake of Blizzard's own bottom line.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
I'm a big fan of Blizzard titles (but then, who isn't?). My friends and I still get together on at least a monthly basis to play Starcraft or War3 on a LAN. Given that, it should be no surprise that I think this is a very bad move by Blizzard. There's no way my friend's place is going to get an internet connection that is capable of handling all of us simultaneously, with latency comparable to a LAN.
If they keep on this path, Starcraft2 will be largely irrelevant as far as I'm concerned. I doubt it will have the staying power of Starcraft 1 simply because you can't play a pick-up game with friends. Yes, I'll probably still get it eventually for the single-player and occasion B.net game, but you can bet that the pirated version cracked to include a B.net clone for LAN is looking mighty good in comparison.
While we don't yet know what "super" features B.net 2.0 is going to have that are supposed to make up for LAN play, it has been confirmed that B.net play will be free for Starcraft 2 purchasers. However, rumors are starting to fly that B.net will not be free for Diablo3. The statement that SC2 play will be free was carefully worded, and Blizzard responses on D3 have evasive, but with not re-assuring implications.
Given that Diablo3 also has been confirmed to lack LAN play, the only way to play multiplayer is via B.net. If the rumors are true, then the only way to get D3 multiplayer is to pay for it. This is a total reverse from the old days of "spawned" copies of Blizzard games where you could have several players all using the same copy of the game.
I think the removal of LAN play signals the decline of Blizzard as a long-term game maker. Which is too bad as they have wonderful legacy support. SC2 and D3 will still sell like crazy I'm sure, but 10 years from now we'll probably still be playing Starcraft 1 at LAN parties. That or some enterprising pirate will save the day.
Anyway, there's a petition to include LAN play, not that it will do much good. Doesn't hurt to try.
No LAN support means that I know I'll enjoy SCII less than Starcraft I. I think I'll pass this one and wait for some people to hack something to make it playable on LAN.
And this piracy thing is strange. When I invite friends, we can play at 8 people on a board game I was the only one to buy. It is strange that multiplayer video games should work another way around.
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
In the past battle.net has just done match making and left it up to one of the players to actually be the server when a game started. Hopefully this is a sign that games will be served by the battle.net servers. This would cut down on things like map hacks because no one player would need to know where all of the units are.
For those of you that aren't aware, LAN gaming is very much alive with our soldiers stationed in Iraq. Starcraft, Warcraft 3, and Dawn of War were all extremely popular for those with laptops. Even attempting to validate a cdkey through the tiny pipe that is the on-base internet connection would prevent most people from being able to play. This is a disgusting money grab. Nothing more.
Then what was I playing Diablo on in 1998?
I realize the service has surely been overhauled several times since then, but it's hardly a new service. Battle.net has been around for ages.
-William Brendel
How long have they been talking about Starcraft II? I'm beginning to believe it will have the same release date as Duke Nukem Forever......
Does this mean we won't have it for Diablo III as well? Plz noooooooo.
Does bnet\sc use UDP? Are they going to fix all the issue with two machines being on the same nated subnet? Will they auto pick a random UDP port so NATing worked
If the server and clients are on a LAN the packets will go to the person's box who started the game(the server). They will likely be desitened for the external(internet) IP...so even though you are just sending a packet to the machine on same switch you are plugged into you are going to route thru your cable/modem. It will have to go thru NATing...what a waste and a potential for LAG if you have a crappier router. Add 8 machines being NATTed and I don't know what will happen. Not to mention if you Dad is watching Hulu in the other room your local gaming should not be affected.
Hopefully they add an option where you can tell the game you are on the same subnet as the server so it will use the local IP. For security the server should have to say it is okay so you don't give out your internal IP scheme.
I still think it is a bunch of stupid nonsense for selfish reasons(how much money did they make reselling SC1 for years) and not good consumer reasons like they are pitching it. Leave it in Aholes.
If you don't like the game after you've bought it, you can forget about reselling it.
What jerks.
Blizzard just wants to ensure that people aren't running a 16-player LAN game using <16 legitimate copies of the game. Instead of requiring everyone to use battle net, how about some alternatives? Maybe like a Blizzard-licensed USB anal probe that activates SC2 LAN mode... Brando would probably sell it.
Seriously though, why are game companies so quick to fuck their paying customers up the ass these days in the name of fighting piracy? They may well reduce piracy but they also lose sales from people who don't want to be jerked around. I'm a long-time PC gamer but I don't buy any game that requires an Internet connection to "activate" or to play multiplayer. I shouldn't need to "ask for permission" to play locally.
If it's simply using bnet to authenticate I'm fine with that but if everything is hosted online I hope blizzard is ready to have the bnet protocol for starcraft II reverse engineered, becasue thats one hell of a way to piss off your user base
So now instead of all of us having to futz around with our modems we can just click and play? This is somehow a backwards or undesired step? I remember the good old days, when if we wanted to play together we had to deal with crappy modem based connections hoping that something did end the game prematurely.
So what, with most friends I can just waltz in and fire up the laptop and connect right to their internet with a simple password. If I am out and about, like on the town or eating, the last thing I am going to be doing is playing a game on the computer. Sorry, but playing games on the Macbook Pro while sipping half caf decaf lattes with a twist at the local coffee shop just isn't as cool as many think it is.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
For every person who feels as you do, there are probably hundreds if not thousands of people who are going to just buy the game.
Battle.net is far less reliable than LAN play. Internet connections are far more likely to drop than LAN play which really never drops unless you have a hardware issue. As well, Bnet frequently has delays and drops players in Warcraft III so I don't foresee Starcraft II being any different. As well with Bnet, some players have delays due to slower internet connection.
Just because you are wrong and I called you out on it doesn't mean I am a Troll.
...citing piracy and quality concerns...
I just had lunch so I am going to use the summery here instead of wading though any marketspeak. At first I was upset that they are trying to coat an obvious desire to have the best DRM option over with 'quality'. But then I thought, hell, at least they cited piracy. That's a hell of a lot more than most do these days.
I've grown so used to seeing everything spun without even a nod to the actual issue that it took a few before it sunk in that Blizz at least gave us that nod. Not that at the end of the day it makes a damn bit of difference. Their reasoning behind it is still weak at best and I'm sure they know it.
Really, I know what I'm doing...Ohhhh, look at the shiny buttons!
Well I don't know about anyone else, but I *HAVE* boycotted Blizzard since then. I missed out on the LoD expansion of D2 because of it, and honestly I ha ven't missed it much at all.
The only two exceptions made in all that time were playing Warcraft 3 over at a friends house (WC3 will forever be Wing Commander to me.), and picking up one of those 2 dollar Trial CDs to check out mangos with.
Honestly given both of those I saw nothing visually, play, or character-wise that made me feel particularly impressed with them, with the exception of maps that actually allowed jumping/flying in 3d. The few other MMOs I played all do the invisible wall thing, or had no jumping at all, which annoyed me to no end.
But then I'm in the minority, and 10's of millions of players of WoW and Blizzard products can't be wrong?
In WarCraft III (non-ranked) Custom Games Battle.Net is just used to connect the players to each other afaik. So technically it may be not much of a difference once the game hast started.
...and dispense some indiscriminate DRM!!!
This is insanely stupid AND evil. I'm a big fan of StarCraft. I still do LAN parties with my friends from time to time, except we are now over 30, we use laptops instead of desktops and I have to run it inside of Parallels to play it (runs awesomely well and that's the main reason I have Parallels)
I'm so disappointed by this move. The best part of the game is viewing your enemies multitasking desperately trying to keep their bases in one piece or trying to find a ghost when the "Nuclear launch detected" echoes in every computer in the room. You get to actually SEE their faces, hear their frenetic clicks and screams for mercy mixed with insults.
How exactly are you going to make that experience better Blizzard? Don't bullsh1t me, you can't.
I'm keeping my cash with me until they decide to support LAN play and I call to boycott Blizzard until the genius in charge of this decision steps back and, preferably, dies from severe full-body itching after a very long and bloody agony.
No lan = No StarCraft
JMule user : http://www.jmule.org
I was a big fan of RTS from the early days with Dune 2 up to Total Annihilation. But Starcraft was where I finally started to ask "Is there nothing else?" Sure, it was an incredibly polished game and I would have been astounded by it five years before. But the thing is, it really was little more than Orcs in Space. Snazzy voice acting, high production values, but the gameplay was little more advanced. Now I'm sure that there are a million South Koreans who are ready to flame me on this so fine, let's say it's the pinnacle of RTS gaming, we'll run with that for a second. Has anyone done better since then? No.
No matter how advanced the graphics have become, no matter how much more bling has been shoved onto the disc, at the end of the day the AI's still suck and the controls are maddeningly primitive. Here, five units I want to move! Select, click move, watch them run into each other and eventually form a ragged column and then approach a target one at a time, allowing themselves to be crushed in detail.
I've been away from PC gaming for a few years and am catching up on demos of games that have come out in the meantime. So far there's little evidence of any advancement in all these years. The videos for Starcraft 2 look like 3D representations of exactly what went on in Starcraft 1. I suppose if Starcraft was the pinnacle of RTS design for you then a graphics buff is all you need.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
There is a petition to Blizzard to try change their mind:
http://www.petitiononline.com/LANSC2/petition.html
I don't know if they will but it couldn't hurt (no registration required).
Everyone on planet earth is going to buy the game the day it hits the shelf.
I own Starcraft, Warcraft1/2/3, and Diablo2, and I'm definitely looking forward to SC2 and D3; however, I'm planning to wait until you can buy all three races of SC2 in a single box for less than $50. If the reviews don't go to 11 on a scale of 1 to 10, then I'll wait until I can pick up all three in a single box for $20.
Blizzard really should have just updated the graphics and released a SC1.5 for $20. Everyone would have bought that the day it hit the shelf.
You know, the whole phone-home every time you want to use the product model? Claiming it would be awesome for consumers. What was it called again?
Oh yeah, Divx.
Whatever happened to that?
Introducing the new Occam Fusion! Now with sqrt(-1) fewer blades!
Yeah, because Blizzard barely recovered their investment on the original game... right? Give me a break. Starcraft is a poster child for how insanely profitable a game can be even when it has no real copy protection. The original game has a simple cd-check that can be passed with any 1:1 copy method.
I think Blizzard knows that this move will actually increase piracy rates as people like myself would refuse to pay good money for a handicapped product. But at the same time they think the monetization of bnet will offset that, and they may well be right. Still, the principle remains that they lied about piracy being the reason when the actual reason is milking their customers. You shouldn't do business with people who are willing to print lies.
Some of my friends and I regularly lan Starcraft. On a large kitchen table. 8 of us. Just using my macbook to create a wireless network. No router. No battlenet. Not Third party. It always works. It's never down. We can play whenever, and really where ever we want. I'm really disappointed that blizzard is trying to compare the social aspect of gaming over battlenet to sitting across from your friends and screaming uncontrollably when you get lurked really really badly.
it better have NAT so I can play with people on a LAN behind the same IP. SC1 wouldn't let 2 people on the same IP play on the bnet in the same game without crippling lag.
That's all well and good until you have a LAN party which has a crappy/non-existent connection to BNet. I'm certainly not taking a hit on my own experience to give Blizzard a bone to protect their IP. Not especially since there are so many other better ways to tackle piracy.. And don't get me started about me being a pirate, I've bought pretty much all of their games since SC1. Except WoW which I refuse to play.
Why couldn't they STILL make people connect to bnet to start up a game, but once the game is started it uses the local network only. This way all they get the control they want, and the players get the LAN performance they want.
Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins, for they are subtle, and quick to anger.
I see this being, like diablo III, just an easy way to get more people to pay monthly for bnet access. No thanks.
I found dealing with all of the adolescent assholes on bnet bad enough with Diablo II, I'm certainly not PAYING for a laggy experience filled with bigots and idiots.
Slashdot needs to interview Natalie Portman.
Everyone on planet earth is going to buy the game the day it hits the shelf.
Therefore they don't give a shit.
Best times of my teenage LAN life. Mine bus. Tank. Rocket launcher. It was like that old Micro Machines game with guns.
A little Starcraft. Command and Conquer. Subspace. And Ultima Online... that was like introducing heroin to a bunch of guys drinking chocolate milk. Cruising IRC bots for warez and mp3s.
Man. Anyone remember the sheer joy you felt when you connected with something more than dialup for the first time? It was like a geek frontier back in those days. Cue the guys who were phreaking long distance to get into BBSs with acoustic couplers to tell me that I missed the real frontier...
But what if there's a nuclear war
Then you get to use your war skills learned while playing Starcraft games in the world away from keyboard, and playing video games is the least of your worries.
People are forgetting starcraft 1 didn't initially have lan support either until a few updates. There is still a possibility lan support will be added on later. This could be a method to reduce initial piracy initially where it matters the most. Hopefully, they will add lan support after while.
If that's the case, this is a acceptable decision on the part of blizzard in my view as long as they don't wait a long time. If not, then I can only say that this make starcraft 2 much less appealing to me.
From battle.net forums; Karune is a Blizzard Poster.
Q u o t e:
I think the reasons starcraft has lasted so long as a game and community are because:
1) Well designed and fun to play game.
2) Free battle.net - Having a place where gamers can come together and play the game 24/7 helps to foster a bolster and lively community.
3) Continued support for the game even after 11 years, they still patch it when it needs a patch.
4) Pro-Starcraft gaming. This is a big deal to serious starcraft players or to anyone that enjoys competition. These games are fun to watch and makes casual players want to play the game.
5) Lan support. - Lan parties are fun.
If you take away LAN support you will still have the 4 other pillars for a strong starcraft community. Plus if LAN support helps rid battle.net of hackers, cheaters and piracy because the network traffic is harder to decipher then all the better. That only strengthens the spirit of fair competition on battle.net.
The first 4 pillars are ALL being made better.
1) Development time for StarCraft II have far exceeded the original StarCraft in both the standard of quality and duration, to ensure the highest in quality RTS experience we can possibly create.
2) Not only is it free to play online for people who purchase the game, Battle.net 2.0 is designed with the new generation of online community and eSports in mind.
3) As long as there are people playing our games, we will continue to support them, and we have continued with this tradition with our legacy titles like the original StarCraft.
4) StarCraft II was created with eSports as a cornerstone in design philosophy. StarCraft evolved into an eSport. Preview Options Submit Continue Editing Preview Cancel Get More Comments Reply Prefs Search Everything will be just tickety-boo today.
5) Map Editor will be better than any we have ever released.
and:
6) ??? - will have to wait and see :)
For me personally- I loved LAN parties, but the direction in which Battle.net is headed, I would always choose to play on Battle.net > 99% of the time and even if for whatever reason I did decide to lug my computer to a friend's house in this day of age (<1%), I would still be playing with them on Battle.net against others at their place.
[ Post edited by Karune ]
What about Blizzard trying to to establish bnet against Steam?
Company Blizzard(TM) is looking to hire top prosthesis designer to replace left foot.
News at 10.
There is no -1 Disagree mod. Slashdot.org/faq defines mod options. USE IT.
I dunno if anyone posted this yet or not (I read through and tried to check) but there is a petition to include LAN going on. Already has 22k+ sigs on it. Dunno if it will help, but it's worth a shot!
http://www.petitiononline.com/LANSC2/petition.html
As far as I know, Starcraft was always about click counts and fast action. It's a real time strategy game after all, where every moment counts. Now even with a very good connection (and that already poses problems) the latency with b.net servers will be at 50+ ms (more like 200+ ms in most cases, remember, data has to go out and come in on the other side + processing overhead). This will basically make the game unplayable for the more experienced gamers (the fans and core target audience). To me this simply looks like a marketing suicide, but maybe I'm missing something here.
That ever thought it was cool to pirate a Blizzard game. Because if you didn't buy it, you couldn't play on battle.net.
It's a shame almost everyone I know plays Warcraft III over LAN's because battle.net is so laggy. I won't be buying SC2 if I can't play LAN games, mainly because my gaming consists of playing with my friends in the computer labs.
I have three copies of Star Craft/Brood Wars. They're for LAN parties, and the occasional solo game.
I never have played, and never will play, the game on BattleNet.
Now, what do I do with the copy of XP that I bought to play the game, since 2K (or, maybe, WINE) is enough for Star Craft and I don't do Windows for anything but Star Craft?
This does give your company's IT the ability to monitor and crack down on unauthorized play. If SC2 becomes as popular as SC1, I could kind of understand if a company wants to block SC2 traffic during work hours.
That said, I agree with the points on avoiding lag. But I think we shouldn't fault Blizzard for wanting to cut down on dev costs by keeping their servers in-house. I'd imagine that their in-house servers, which are designed to scale to many thousands of players, would have an almost completely different code base than the server they'd ship with the product. I'm also sure that they weighed this dev cost against statistics of their existing products and players.
In other words, stop bitching. You know you're gonna play it no matter what.
Witness the first MAJOR flop for Blizzard in 11 years.
I mean, comparing SC2 to WoW? WTF? SC2 is a RTS, WoW is MMORPG. Sure WoW basically forces you to be legitimate, but not at a very high price. SC2 is not that interactive and you cannot be "drawn" into it as with WoW.
Sorry people, I give SC2 no thumbs up out of 2.
Seriously though, it's tiring to have companies actively inconvenience their users just in case some people might steal it. To throw a company a bone to help protect their IP, strange how Blizzard did just fine until wild success of WoW got them gobs of cash. Now, suddenly, with the most successful MMORPG, with the most revenue, they need to be careful about people stealing their games or else they will go poor?
I suspect that the sudden success of WoW has attracted unfortunate decision makers who tend to jump into successful companies/products and sink them. I see it all too often, a brilliant idea brilliantly executed draws the people who don't achieve success on their own to take it over and enforce the same decisions that keep them from succeeding on their own onto the otherwise capable group.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
...this piracy thing is strange. When I invite friends, we can play at 8 people on a board game I was the only one to buy. It is strange that multiplayer video games should work another way around...
Mod parent up!
And besides, my upstream hasn't changed in about 7 years, sadly, so the network experience concerns that are 'old' aren't necessarily behind us.....
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Which is to say it doesn't. Bnet has always worked simply as a matchmaking service. It hosts the chat features in the lobby, and handles connecting the various users together. Once the game is started, its hosted on 1 persons machine, and all the others connect p2p with them.
Therefore, although it may be a slight inconvenience to connect a whole bunch of computers at a LAN party to the internet, latency and bandwidth concerns should be mostly non existent.
Everything will be fine, nothing to see here.
This is to block stuff like Hamachi and GameRanger.
I got your message Blizzard, and frankly I don't care what you have to say about digital rights management. You damn fringe world software companies are all alike, don't know where your loyalties lie. Y'all have a real good day now, y'hear?
starcraft without lan support is something like a bird without wings.
Playing Starcraft without LAN is like buying a CD and not been able to play it i a party, just over your headphones.
The first time I played Starcraft 1, i played at a friend's Lan Party. I bought the game the next day.
Here at home, I have a shared broadband connection. My brother is constantly downloading stuff so, everytime I want to play an online game I have to tell him to cap his donwloads. So thank you Blizzard... all this years of designing SC2 and you've condemn the game with just one decision.
Thank god I just bought an XBOX...
When they say they found a way to "curb piracy" they really mean they found a way to stop people from reselling non-subscription games. If you can't get a subscription out of people you can at least force everyone to buy a new copy of their very own. Battlenet accounts contain all your games similar to steam, so the only way to sell one would be to only have one game on it. Aside from that, trying to sell something that requires more than just the physical media is enough to stop most of the casual sales - there might be some but it would be rare. (not sure if gamestop type stores would even try to deal with that kind of hurdle)
You know the "pirates" will be the ones who actually supply people with a patch that allows LAN play. Not necessarily for people who want to steal the game, just for people who don't want to be gimped/monitored.
You know, I used to support Blizzard going after bnetd, as it's major use was to avoid Battle.Net's authentication servers.
This has changed my mind. Eliminating LAN play, which was one of the features that made Warcraft 2 popular. 8-player LAN no less!
Fast fotward 20 years, to when high-end laptops can play modern games so that you can do LAN games without having to lug desktops around... and they cut this feature? WTF, Blizzard?! I used to respect you!
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
No Lan support for Stacraft 2 (or Diablo 3) then I wont be buying it.
I advise you all to do the same, and I don't even have to tell my friends not to as we all only play LAN.
Blizzard games I own.
1 Warcraft 1
1 Warcraft 2
1 Diablo 1
1 Warcraft 2 Bnet
2 Starcraft
2 Broodwar
2 Diablo 2
2 Diablo 2 LoD
2 Warcraft 3
2 Warcraft 3 frozen thrones.
Oh, and try playing with a few people behind 1 router/firewall. It doesn't work so well on most game patch levels and on most routers/firewalls.
The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive
I am not a Blizzard RTS fan (like Westwood and EA's RTS games like C&C) and disappointed by this move. I signed the online petition too.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
More so, I buy most of my games after trying them on LAN at a party. Sure, I'm copying the game to my comp without buying it, but if I actually plan to play it away from the party I'll buy it myself.
I'm going to laugh when a hacked pirated copy comes along with a lan feature.
I understand their piracy stance. However, all they would have to do to make me happy would be to require bnet authentication when starting a game and then letting the game itself run over the lan without the need of an external connection. Hell, have it authenticate every minute or two. A shared pipe could easily accommodate that. But my measly 40k up speed probably can't handle an 8-man lan...
-SaNo
If memory serves, the spawn installs were multiplayer-only. Back then, Blizzard wanted people to play multiplayer for free.
s/Fast fotward 20/Fast forward 15/i
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
I bought the first starcraft (probably multiple copies, plus the expansions) because ONE friend had ONE cd, and installed it on a 4-computer LAN.
I don't care if you have all sorts of copy protection and CD keys and authenticated servers required to play over the internet. That's fine. But if four of us drag our computers together and two people have the game and want to play, you need to ENCOURAGE the other two to play. That's how you make more sales.
Your first sentence said it best.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
Blizzard,
I've got every game you've made tied to my new battle.net account. I've purchased them all and have valid legal cd keys. If you remove lan support which is most of the most basic fundamental pieces of functionality for any game worth playing. I will not buy this game.
I'm the person that hosts lan parties for my friends. If I'm not playing it, they aren't playing it.
The only thing that goes across state is the match making. The actual game is run on a local computer. So if everyone is on a LAN, everyone is on a LAN. But you'll still have to perform matchmaking through battlenet.
I want Starcraft 2 with lan support. If Blizzard doesn't want to supply lan support, then I'm not buying. It's that simple.
I don't have a consistently solid internet connection. My ISP stinks. Even today I get lagged off a SC game if it is longer than 30 minutes. Guess I am screwed. I actually connected with my wife's stepfather playing SC on his LAN when we would stay the night. I think not supporting LAN play is a big mistake. It is bad enough that the entire game will end up costing people close to $180. They are going to have 3 sets up single player missions (each with new units) in a staggering release.
Way to screw over:
1.People who LAN from public places such as college dorms where often online gaming doesnâ(TM)t work.
2.People who like to LAN with friends but have crappy speeds (hint: 8 players playing online adds up to about 100 kb/s download and 50 kb/s upload.
3.People with small monthly bandwidth caps. I donâ(TM)t like the prospect of using 500Mb/hour to LAN with my friends when I have a 10GB cap per month.
Yes, and you also couldn't serve as a game host on a LAN game.
There's another factor for Blizzard to do this: They've gotten greedy. They've realized that multiplayer is where most of the buyers are, so now they don't want you to be able to play multiplayer without paying them first.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
Blizzard really should have just updated the graphics and released a SC1.5 for $20. Everyone would have bought that the day it hit the shelf.
With all the patches Blizzard has put out for Starcraft 1, I've never understood why they never added in support for resolutions higher than 640x480. They added 800x600 support to the Diablo II expansion, but that's as far as they went. (I didn't ever play Warcraft 3, so I don't know if they supported higher resolutions there.)
I guess you could call me a pirate. Me and my girlfriend like to play network games from time to time. Mostly Civilization 4, but a few others such as for example Starcraft. However, we only buy one copy of the game, but I don't feel that this is very immoral.
We were really looking forward to SC2, but if we will not be able to play it without buying two copies of it, I don't think we'll buy any copy at all actually. Way to go Blizzard, you just converted a content customer into a discontent customer!
Instead of everyone connected over a 100mbps local network, you now have 8 players funneling out through the same shared Internet connection.
Does all the data exchanged between computers in the game have to go out through Battle.Net? I would have thought that most of the actual game-state data would go host-to-host with no intermediate. In that case, the data wouldn't have to go out past the router...
Still not an ideal situation, though. What if you want to host a game somewhere you don't have internet access handy?
Bow-ties are cool.
I'm pretty sure I'll be playing lan based games with SCII. I just won't be paying Blizzard for a copy of the game to do so though. Their choice, I'll pay for what I want or not pay, but I'm going to get it.
Whoa there! It sounds like you're contradicting lupis42. The only (valid) reason they would require you to open ports to host a game would be to allow game traffic to bypass their servers and go directly between players. Traffic in a LAN party would reach the router, and bounce back to the hosting machine (assuming the router behaves correctly, not all of them do). Your limiting factor there is the ability of the router to process the packets. It is a bottle neck, but not nearly as big as the DSL uplink.
Of course, this then begs the question, why remove LAN? All the game traffic is being directed between clients anyways. It sounds like they have ulterior motives of some kind. (Piracy fears are overblown, but legitimate. Add "revenue"? Minute cuts to development costs? Corporate insecurity/control freak issues?)
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
and it will take what? 2 days for the cracked version to hit the piratebay? When are they going to learn that inconveniencing your customers to stop piracy doesn't do anything other than inconvenience your customers. If you want to waste money trying to stop pirates, fine... but don't make your game less fun because of it.
Let's not forget that patches can add content (or maybe even gasp... LAN support?). UDP protocol was added to SC1 in a patch and I don't think it's far fetched that LAN could be added too.
That being said, I think we need to hold off bashing this decision until we see what b.net 2.0 has to offer. If it fails to live up to the LAN then it's time for pitch forks and torches and lobbying for a patch.
Not quite...there's plenty of people who will buy a battle chest for $20 but wouldn't buy a new game for $60 based purely on the price. That isn't really an argument you can use to make your case. A decent number of people who got the battle chest most likely pirated it (or at least did Ghost Copies) before it was cheap as dirt, and Blizzard is toeing the ever-popular DRM line to prevent that this time. Not exactly DRM, but annoying enough that SCII won't be the hit the first game was.
I don't know this for myself, but several others have commented that BattleNet now requires you to open a port to host games. In essence, that means game traffic does not travel to their servers at all, but between clients and the "host". Only the lobby traffic need travel to their servers. In other words, they really don't have a great incentive to streamline their game protocol.
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
While I am annoyed by Blizzard's decision, I suspect it may not be as bad as all that. I'd be surprised if ALL traffic is going to be routed through battle.net. What seems more likely is that Battle.net would handle authentication and matchmaking, but have the actual gameplay be a traditional peer-to-peer situation. If that turns out to be true, then a LAN-based SC2 game would still take advantage of your 100mbs local network. Of course, I'm just guessing here.
But I suspect I'm right, simply based on how greedy Blizzard is. I can see them wanting to make sure you paid for your copy and serve you ads, but they *don't* want to pay for all that gameplay bandwidth.
You guys remember a few years ago when EA released Need for Speed: Underground and it was lacking LAN support? It wasn't long before someone made their own fix and put out a Lan Patch that added the feature. I bet someone will do the same for Starcraft 2.
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This isn't a piracy issue, it's a control issue. A stupid one at that.
I am a huge SC fan, and still play to this day.
I seriously don't know if I will buy SCII now.
I have many computers, and they all have legit version of SC on them. So not only do I need to pay for 4 new copies* I also have to really on have a fast WAN connect? and on Battle.nets servers having the same ping and latency as my internal net work? Somehow I doubt that will happen.
Lag is bed enough on Battle.net games now, and this won't improve things.
Of course, if Blizzard decided to turn off battle.net, or has some issues, or goes out of business** we are screwed.
Also, I know people who played in environments where there isn't a WAN, just a LAN.
*That's a different topic, and really games should only need 1 license per household. Just like every other type of game medium in the world needs. The fact that I generally need to by 2 or more copies of a game is why I am really picky about which games I buy. I wont buy any game I haven't played elsewhere, and it has to ahve excellent reviews from people I know and trust. This meams I probably only buy 10 percent of games I would normally buy.
** Anyone who has been at a company going through bankruptcy or a merger know the "we will release a key if that happens' line is utter crap and a bold face lie.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
And yes I did once participate in such a thing.
If you haven't already, sign the petition, please!
http://www.petitiononline.com/LANSC2/
Blizzard assumes everyone in the world has reliable corporate Internet like it does at its headquarters.
LAN > Internet play ... always
I am failing to see why this is difficult or worse than what we had to do before.
Hell I can remember it was a bear getting everyone on the same local lan because some people are just thick.
If Steam is ok for many where is the fault in this? What? I might actually have to worry less about people cheating/etc? Or is the hold here simply because so many people still hold a grudge over the battle net issues from many many years ago though some holding the grudge were never impacted whatsoever? (as in they want to join a victim class regardless of the issue)
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Funny, Battle.net was the reason I never played the Warcraft 3 collector's edition I bought. I installed it, tried to get into a multiplayer game, got 'placed' in a game full of Koreans, was wiped out before I even started collecting resources. Tried to join another game, something similar happened. LOVE your no-choice unavoidable automatic game matching system, assholes! I still want my $80 back.
Fuck it, I don't even like (traditional) RTS games anymore for about the same reason. (World in Conflict is awesome though) If they screw up Diablo III, I'll be REALLY pissed. I love Diable.
Friend: "The NIC is misconfigured..." Me: "No prob, I'll just telnet in and fix it." *Silence*
My point wasn't that everyone could play multiplayer for free. My point was that someone who owned the game could spawn multiplayer installs so that all his friends could play for free.
The person who had the CD would have to host, of course, but the idea is that one or more of the free players would go out and buy the game themselves.
I agree with your assessment of why they're making this decision.
That really sucks for families, and or people rooming together that wish to play. I have two kids and 3 PCs. I guess we will have to create a private game on battle.net then all play via one modem connection. Up yours Blizzard! I may skip this game. I given enough money to you guys over the years(D2,wartcraff3, and monthly WOW).
And Blizzard just lost a sale with this announcement (probably MANY sales, but I can only speak for myself).
I've only played about 10 minutes of StarCraft 1, but I *was* still planning on buying StarCraft 2. But if they're going to make stupid, disrespectful decisions like this, I certainly shall not be giving them any of my money.
Sig? What's that? Oh, 'signature'...and it's supposed to be witty? Right...
jumped the shark, is over the hill, run by the marketing department, etc
id buy their arguments if people across the world had unlimited acess to the internet, but since this sadly isnt the case, theyll be cutting out a major part of their playerbase whose only chance to get in touch with blizzards games is trough LAN parties (found out about diablo1 trough a LAN party myself which got me to look into blizz games alot since then)
This is stupid. The onliest reason people are still into StarCraft I is because it is still the RTS of choice for gaming championships and good fun for LAN-parties. When there's no LAN-support, neither will be driving continued playability for Starcraft II - meaning Starcraft III will be a much tougher sell.
The reason is indeed twofold: piracy, and the fact you cannot monetize LAN-parties as easily as you can monetize Battlenet.
This is a kick in the balls for most users, wholly greed-based, and no good will come of it.
Therefore, by the (faulty) logic you're using, you're just a cow with a keyboard - osu-neko (2604)
I will not buy or play this game. Fuck you Blizzard.
Yes, I ahve been a proponent of famly lisencing for years. I think when the industry started it was geard for a single male and created by single males.
SO no one thought in terms of a family playing.
Seriously, SCII is a trilogy, and there are 4 people in my house.
So I am looking at 60 bucks per game, 3 game 4 people -- 720 dollars.
Now I ahve to rely on buggy servers, latencies out side mu control? AND they strip out first sale possibilities?
No, no thanks.
You know who did this write with their games? Age of Empires(MS no less) and the M&M heroes series.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
If those people are too thick to get on a LAN game which takes just one step, what makes you think it will be easier for them to go through Battle.net, which takes four or more steps? (It gets worse if they can't remember their password; I don't think you can have the same CD key attached to multiple Battle.net accounts.)
I have no problem with requiring authentication via the internet before allowing play. I have a problem with forcing people to use Battle.net to set up the game. That, and I'm not convinced these pseudo-LAN games will even be possible - it seems that even now, people behind the same router can't both play games on Battle.net at the same time.
Vivendi Blactivision, you've done it again!
First, paying for the same Warcraft 3 mod three times, and now, no LAN support? You guys must really be banking on Korean sales, because it sounds like you're about to fall into the same pit Sony did with the Playstation 3. Momentum can only carry you dimwits so far, and you've already spent most of yours on not one but two crappy World of Warcraft expansions.
You know what this sounds like to me? A way to pin people into paying subscriptions for Battle.net 2.0! I wouldn't be surprised. The first hit is always free, and now that they're hooked on the smell of money, you can expect to have Korean style item malls and 'premium' services (like allowing more than two people to play in a single multiplayer game, being able to play custom maps and mods, and generally not having your online experience crippled by the publisher) taking precedence over the actual game experience. I'm especially disappointed that they'd have the balls to call this one on pirates and punish their fans for it when one, everyone knows that whole argument is bull, two, they're still almost guaranteed a hefty profit at launch, and three - the giant BlizCon LAN parties! What the fuck, man?
I don't know what Blizzard became after 2004, but if this is any indication, they must think themselves invincible. The best part is that you know there's going to be a LAN hack within a week or two of launch, just like after Steam first came out. They're wasting a lot of their popular capital on moves like this, and I hope it bites them in the ass.
By the way, my CAPTCHA was 'repaid'. Pretty fitting.
is just an announcement. Do not doubt that Star Pro League, OnGameNet, and the rest of Korean pro gaming will have a BIG say in this.
Expect a reversal before launch.
Associate the Warcraft, Diablo, and Starcraft franchises with Activision, and this will start making sense. Maybe the Taco Bell and AT&T billboards in Ironforge aren't too far off either.
Kirkland Signature
thanks for helping me save $60, assholes.
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
LAN play could've checked the RegistryKEY used for the game to ensure it wasn't just the same game installed on multiple machines.
Sounds like the company has lost touch with its roots and the fans. They want draconian control over their product. Unfortunately it will prolly still sell like crazy. Like others here though, it wont be one of my purchases.
The thing I notice is - if you have played any of the pre-releases at BlizzCon, you played it in LAN mode. I wonder if this year's BlizzCon will be using Battle.net for the demo stations.
I'm not a big gamer, in fact so much so, that StarCraft remains the only game that I've continued to play many many years after it came out. I hope that Starcraft 2 is as good of a game. I've been to a few LAN parties, and they're kind of fun. However, the people I did that with have moved on with their lives. We live in distant places, and LAN parties aren't practical. We do still play Starcraft occasionally. I'm a little disappointed, but this certainly won't stop me from buying the game.
As we loose freedom and profit hording corporate run game companies take away choice and enforce policement. I for one won't be buying this game until some hacks the code and makes a LAN option possible.
This is correct. Though we haven't seen pricing yet. It would be safe to infer the standard $50-$60 price point for each one.
Kinda crazy no? Not like the "expansions" will provide new features... all the Races need to be complete in each Game/Campaign or else you wouldn't be able to play against the AI's differing race.
So it will basically be 50-60 bucks for some more maps. Lovely.
I was probably going to buy SC2 before this news. Now, at best, I might pirate it. Without LAN it might not even be worth doing that... Fuck you Blizzard!
I still just want starcraft 1.9.
Keep the unit balance, just update the graphics, pathing issues on the new maps, improve bnet, etc. It is a fluke blizzard balanced starcraft with only 5 patches and my guess is they won't be so lucky with SC2.
Then I'd have to find someplace where mobile broadband is available.
does scores == 40-80?
It can also mean 40 to 100. Or 60 to 120. It can also mean 7,000 or more.
[swat] ...
Your summary here needs help. I don't know anything about Haofang, but I know that your post is riddled with holes.
You seem to lack an understanding of TCP/IP. "Transmission Control Protocol" over "Internet Protocol" is used by, well, they whole Internet. How do you think you access Slashdot? You're not on the same LAN they are! (hint: HTTP travels across TCP/IP)
A limit of 255 would not be a TCP limit. 254 might be, but only if a VPN and a /24 subnet were involved. Of course, that too would be a silly, arbitrary limitation. You can have thousands of connections using the ubiquitous 192.16/16 subnet. You can have private networks with millions of machines using the 10/8 subnet. No, 255 isn't a TCP/IP limit. It is probably some other type of technical limit in their setup.
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
what a pedantic, arsehole reply.
Screw my karma. You sir, are a dick.
I, in a civil tongue, point out that the poster who capitalize SCORES was incorrect if he was trying to say very few people care about this. I get moderated Troll.
Earlier today, someone corrects me on a technicality and gets moderated informative (because I was incorrect). You, being a typical foul mouthed internet denizen, call me an "arsehole" and "dick." Which results in you getting moderated insightful. What did you add to the conversation? Nothing. Pretty much the model for not insightful if you ask me.
You know, I'm only an asshole if the guy didn't know what "scores" meant and if he didn't he shouldn't use the damned word.
So I better call you an "asshole dick" if I want to get moderated insightful and not a troll? Which causes me yet again to wonder why I bother wasting my time on this site.
Boy you sure DECIMATED me.
My work here is dung.
Are you saying that if blizzard or some anti-piracy group or law enforcement organization were to subpoena your ISP records based on the IP address you used to post your comment, they would not find some starcraft 2 torrent downloaded from a pirate-bay-type site?
Suuuuuure ;)
All I can say is, this game will, one way or another be played on a LAN. This is just alienating your customers. Don't you know that the consumer always wins? The only way you will prevent this from happening is to never release this game.
pr@blizzard.com
billing@blizzard.com
Dear Blizzard,
You are dropping support for LAN play with Starcraft 2 and Diablo 3, so high speed internet is required for multiplayer, and if your Battle.Net servers are down for any reason then I can't play multiplayer.
I have been waiting breathlessly for these games, so that I can have LAN parties again, now all that was for nothing. You have destroyed my hopes.
Because of your decision, I am canceling my World of Warcraft, and my wife's. And I will never purchase another Blizzard game as long as I live.
Sincerely,
Now just in case Blizzard actually listens to it's customers, there is a petition started yesterday.
http://www.petitiononline.com/LANSC2/petition.html
But only 25k people have signed so far.
The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive
but I certainly just lost the last bit of incentive I had to buy this game. The Bnet system is terrible, and always will be compared to LAN. I was already having second thoughts once they alluded to episodic releases and needing to pay for each campaign seperately as if it was the full game, though I had been waiting for this game long enough I figured I would at least buy the first one before deciding if the rest were worth paying for... Now I'm certain the game won't even remotely be worth my time and hard-earned money if I can't play the full campaign, AND I can't play LAN games with my friends. Even if Bnet allowed free multiplayer outside of their matchmaking service (which if their track record is anything to go by, they won't), it would simply be too much trouble, and too much latency to make it worthwhile. At this rate, it will be the seventh game in the last 2 years, that I have pirated, for no other reason than because the game was crippled in the name of "anti-piracy" and DRM.
Sign the petition for LAN in SC2
http://www.petitiononline.com/mod_perl/signed.cgi?LANSC2&1
Yes, the DRM was probably a big part in this decision. They even admit that.
But I rather suspect that they are also happy to save on development time. LAN support requires its own UI, at least a port of some crusty old network code (if not a reimplementation), and a heaping pile of QA.
Sure, that's a small effort compared to the rest of the game. But I've seen much smaller features get the axe when it becomes time to Ship The Game.
And that analysis assumes that the server application already runs locally. If they are running server instances through Battle.net, then adding LAN play could be a huge task.
I am writing from Africa on a shoddy internet connection that 12 of us share, Sometimes even when you're the only one on you can't even log onto Google talk. Not to mention caches, transparent proxies and firewalls. Please give those of us who pay for the game LAN play.
They want more people pirating the game? Doesn't make sense to me, but it's their choice.
Now I know for sure I'll find a way to pirate it.
One of the things myself and a mate do on the train is boot up our netbooks, turn on our bluetooth and play games over BTPAN with no internet - starcraft won't be on that list.
The support contact is here: http://us.blizzard.com/support/webform.xml?locale=en_US
Let them know the disabling LAN support will only INCREASE the number of pirates of their game who will then turn to the "other" battle.nets.
I will be setting up an Auto Dial to spam (800) 953-SNOW with a pre-recorded message aswell, the more of you who can do this the better!
I host lan games weekly. Can be anywhere from 2-12 players. Most players i invite dont play games at their home, or dont own a gaming pc. I have 4 setup ready to go myself. All gigabit with gigabit switch for perfect lag free gaming. This is my hobby and i am far from rare. I helped introduce many games to others are i would be rich if i had commission from the games i helped sell. Startcraft was awesome, even recent valve games allow lan and not everyone own the game. Demigod is excellent and 3 invitees bought it due to playing it at my party. Starcraft 2 it appears will not be gracing my household, or my friends. There is no way i can afford the downloads of multiple computers playing via a foreign server every week. Or adjust to going from a gigabit setup to all sharing my much slower broadband connection.
This is not a feature to make the customer happy. This is a feature to piss off the customer. This is a feature to lose customers. With all too much attention paid to non-paying people who will likely never be paying customers no matter what you do!
I'm sure everyone remembers spawn copies so only one person needed a disk to play on a LAN? Whatever happened to that line of thought?
Blizzard is no longer the company I once knew them to be and worshiped, they got sunk by the fat WoW cow.
Now I look to companies like Stardock/Ironclad who seem to have gotten the right idea about how to treat it's users. IE giving people what they pay for.
Starcraft 1: LAN support + it was possible to legally install ("spawn") many copies of the multi-player client on several PCs on your network.
Starcraft 2: No LAN support + One install.
Starcraft 2 will surely have updated graphics and maybe (or hopefully) some improved gameplay, but it sounds like the first one was a better product.
People will probably manage to create a fake battlenet server that you can log your patched and pirated copy of starcraft 2, rendering piracy, again, as a way to experience superior products.
Citing piracy concerns is just corporate spin mumbojumbo.
Its only ever profit expectations that concern a corporation.
Quote "While this was a difficult decision for us, we felt that moving away from LAN play and directing players to our upgraded Battle.net service was the best option to ensure a quality multiplayer experience with Starcraft II..." Quote This is just a load of BS. I find it really hard to believe that my friends and I will be better served connecting to a service (most likely in another state) and wait for the lag to get through the time of setting up a âoegame roomâ that we have to password protect to keep the random Bnet kiddy from popping in and spamming âoego go goâ. They are looking for a new way to pump advertising to people plain and simple and to suggest otherwise is just downright insulting. I had played WoW (and most every other Blizz game) since before the release and finally gave up because of their attitude: we are going to control every aspect of how people play our games and funnel them into having the fun we want them to have. They will probably pull the crap that the people that made Dawn of War 2 did. Where you have to have an internet connection just successfully install and activate the single player. On the bright side with the gaming companies starting this crap I will have more time to spend outside.
Like alot of people here, Starcraft was perhaps the best game to play at LAN parties. Sure Blizzard said they are going to improve battle.net servers, but can they improve my connection? LAN support is an absolute MUST have for games like this and removing it is a deal breaker for me. I bought SC1 and Broodwar, but there is no way I would buy a game that takes such a key feature out. There are alot of games out there for my limited gaming dollar... Blizzard just reduced that list by one.
Lets be honest, if it was not for Koreans, this game, which is 10 year old, would still not have as huge following as it does now. Name me another game that after 10 years still played (video game) on professional level? CS! That is right folks! The reasons both those games did so well was because
1: They were fun
2: you can play pick up game on LAN! Where most games were played.
S.Korea PC bang rooms (pc rooms) bring us the best and the brightest for SC, and what now? The success from LAN, and "piracy" that brough StarCraft to such great international acknowledgment and follow were in FACT BECAUSE OF PIRACY AND LAN!
So how is that now, people who not gave life year after year to this old game, and this marketing that Blizzard could never dream in getting with all the billions theey have now, and all the viral/asstrotufing shit, is not their enemy?
Wow! GOOD JOB BLIZZARD! Because in 3 years max, no one will remember SCII, and cycle for the game will get smaller and smaller, and the game will get shittier and shittier. EA is looking at you, and smiling, as you are taking your star and a cash cow into the shitters..
Oh and the 3 CD trilogy bullshit, where you have to buy each races campaign-- fuck you, I hope this game tanks you greedy pieces of shit.
Oh one more thing, you think people do not know about your viral/asstrotufing bullshit on youtube? It is so fucking transparent, you should be embarrassed for paying those people money.
P.s. We will hack it, and we will make it LAN-- like it or not -- and we are not pirates, but people who are tired on how we are told we should be playing your games. I bought it, IT IS MINE, crippling it because you want to make more money> FUCK YOU.
No LAN play? I wont be buying the game, and as a consequence I wont motivate others to do so as well. So Long, and thanks for all the games.
...and after being a fan and user of almost EVERY single Blizzard game since WarCraft I, I have now just dropped Blizzard and will not be purchasing SC2. Some of us actually want to use what we pay for by ourselves. And fuck having to connect to the 'net to use it.
-a pissed off very long time customer who just washed his hands of you.
pi=sigma{n:0-infinity}[(1/16)^n][(4/(8n+1))-(2/(8n +4))-(1/ (8n+5))-(1/(8n+6))]
Just signed.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law
I am not sure if anyone mentioned it, but all the greatest players from Korea played in PC BANG, computer LAN rooms, from mostly pirated copies. Now Blizzard has the audacity to tell people that LAN, the one and only reason why StarCraft is still popular, is a scourge now?
Do you know that we, Koreans, are the reasons it is still so popular? We made it into national sport BECAUSE OF LAN.
I am very sad to hear that no more LAN will be available. It will be the death of StarCraft.
Maybe I just have things configured wrong, but right now I can't get two PCs to play StarCraft on Battle.Net at the same time from in the same room. It's because I have to use Port Forwarding. The LAN solution works great, as long as we don't want anyone from outside to join us.
Without LAN, how will this work in SC2?
Maybe Battle.Net will only be used for auth, and then allow for local games? That would eliminate any lag issues, too.
-David
Yeah "Blizzard, here is your foot and here is a shot gun". I actually bought D2, and then later the D1/D2 Collectors Edition Box set, and was most likely going to buy a similar box set with D3. So in some cases I would own 3 copies of the one game, just because I loved it so much. How was I introduced to it? Yep a "Copyright Infringed" copy, if I hadn't played it for free, I probably wouldn't have been so hooked on it. I could barely afford food back then, let alone a computer game. "Piracy" != "Copyright Infringement" and "Copyright Infringement" doesn't necessary mean lost sales.
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of cats. MEOW!!
Not only was I going to buy Starcraft II, but I was thinking about purchasing a nice laptop to run it (as my current machine is a desktop and WAY too outdated to play it) and a second "LAN license" so my roommate could play. Now, it's not worth it to me; our internet connection can't handle the traffic of two online games to Battle.net at once, and even if it could, what if we have our laptops somewhere we cannot access Battle.net? Maybe we're on a bus, or train, maybe we're in a park. Maybe we don't like latency.
Blizzard, the only thing you won't be selling out with this move is copies of Startcraft II.
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
You want to combat piracy? Make the game phone home to Battle.net before the LAN game, check the SN, and then let people connect locally. No net connection? 5 LAN games and then you have to check in. Hell, set up a phone line users can type a number into and get a response code to authorize more games with a legit SN, if you've got computers capable of playing Starcraft II, you can at least usually make a phone call.
It's still a slap in the face but at least it's not removing one the major features that draw people to your game COMPLETELY. You're going to learn a swift lesson from this, Blizzard. Mark our words.
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
"Piracy" != "Copyright Infringement" and "Copyright Infringement" doesn't necessary mean lost sales.
This is the one truth that the gaming industry will probably never admit.
while it is true that people used to cheat the system and LAN with less than 8 copies of Starcraft (I know I am guilty), has blizzard considered the case of people (like myself) who know nothing of the game, go to a LAN party with friends, play a few rounds, and go THIS IS AWESOME!!! and buy the game? (like myself). Most people will not shell out $50 to try a game with their friends they have heard nothing about. It's a good way of spreading your name and your game
I'd have to agree. Very bad move on Blizzard's part.
Look at the recent problems with World of Warcraft and their PvP zone "Lake Wintergrasp". They promised epic battles with hundreds of players on each side fighting against each other. It was so popular that their servers couldn't handle the load, and the players experienced lag. To "fix" this, they took steps to make it less popular.
And now, what are they doing with SCII? They are forcing traffic towards the battle.net servers. Granted, the logistics are probably different (fewer players, many more battle instances, and I am not sure how much traffic is being sent so there is the possibility it will work ok) but why eliminate the option players previously had to use their own networks?
Why force traffic to a centralised server when you don't have to? Why not let the players decide themselves? And why are they ignoring the recent lessons they have learnt about placing too much load on a centralised server? This may be a case of the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing.
Except for the fact you're not going to be having your next big LAN party.. on LAN, I don't see any other issues.
Battle.Net works fine now (just have port 6112 forward for hosting games), and still has quite an upbeat SC1 community.
On dial-up, I was still able to play in a full 8-player game with no issues. It's not like this is resource intensive in the network department.
Also, this reminds me of the Verizon FiOS 100k$ Half-Life 2 DM tournament. If I'm not right, they finalist played in the same building, but using their FiOS connection over the network. Likewise, many teams (looking at Counter-Strike 1.6) use a non-LAN server to play their games even if both teams are present at the same LAN (so the server doesn't suck).
Not to mention, it won't be long until you have our own copy of bnetd out that you could install and run for your LAN parties. It'll be like connecting to Battle.Net@YourBaseMent.
Over are the days where NoCD cracks are not necessary anymore, seeing as more games don't require CDs. But now come the days of LAN cracks.
I have noticed that piracy is often associated with pc owners.If they make the game unusable on the pc, piracy will be stamped out for good. Win all round eh?
Home fucking is killing prostitution.
...say "Fuck them."
If I feel like playing multiplayer Starcraft, it's not because I want to play online with a bunch of teenage trolls. Looks like I'll be skipping this game. Ah well, more money for publishers who don't punish their players.
There is a war going on for your mind.
...and run it on wine (on Ubuntu).
But looks like I'll use my money for something else.
You can't strip LAN from SC2, like removing LAN from Q3A...
Shame on you Blizzard, you're just becoming worse and worse...first you ruined WoW, now you are ruining SC2...
I've actually played a lot of Blizzard games. I was a huge Diablo 2 (in hardcore/permadeath mode, having level 90+ chars) fan. I never ever played D2 on a LAN. You were disconnected from the "real" economy and I disliked it so my experience was 100% Battlenet. But there are sooo many lowlifes that will do anything to ruin the game, to screw the economy, etc. that I think it makes sense to make as much as possible "server side only".
No LAN mode means much more work for these low-lifes to ruin the game. In a correctly designed client/server SC2 maphack, for example, would be useless. Sure, you could implement one, but it would have no use because infos about ennemy units in the "fog of war" would never ever make it to your computer. Such infos would stay on Battlenet's server and no matter how low-life one would get, he would be fuxxored should he implement a maphack.
Now I'm not saying that this time Blizzard got it right and there's not going to be any maphack for SC2, but simply that if a game is correctly made in a client/server way, it leaves way less opportunities for low-lifes to ruin the game.
So go ahead Blizzard if you can screw pirates and low-lifes planning to write maphack, bots, etc.
We don't want Diablo 1's low-life hacks madness anymore. D2 was better but the rune SNAFU was really bad. I know D3's going to be better.
I guess by the time we arrive at SC7 and D9 the games are going to be "low-lifes free". :)
as someone who played sc back when it came out in the time throuh lan and internet, and as operator of the foremost sc gaming community forum in my country, i say, shove it. if they dont offer people to hold their local tournaments through lan with minimal ping, and instead force people to >100ms pings all over the world through internet, the very factor that made starcraft will go bust - competitive, easy to set up multiplayer matches.
then whichever genius that came up with that idea to remove lan support can do what it would be best used for : shove it up his/her butt.
i aint buying sc2 if it doesnt have lan support. period.
Read radical news here
better like in .. make all your friends pay for the game even if they never played it before just so they can play with you on LAN/schools and other social events? Wow that's one hell of a company evolving in the wrong direction, even wtih EA's DRM t hey managed to let us install our game on 4 machines and play with it in LAN but who am I to judge, I only played SC @ LAN during all my years of high-school during dinner and afterclass at the computers room...
This is terrible news. They will kill LAN parties unless someone happens to have a T1 at home. The typical user broadband connection would crawl with more than a handful of people all going through the same link.
The claim that it will prevent piracy is stupidity at it's best, which is something I didn't expect from Blizzard. I have zero interest playing with the prepubescent crowd that traffics BNet. I also seriously doubt they can improve it to the point where it's lag free like a local LAN either. It's physically impossible to approach that level of performance with a remote server. I won't be holding my breath.
Last but not least, this pretty much screws folks with poor ping times (so long Australia).
Really? QOS and Piracy? Who's running that place?
Thanks Blizz, glad to see you aren't happy with your 8 quadrillion dollars you already made off the fans.
The great irony of this is that someone will inevitably crack/mod the game to add LAN support on some level, and that they'll probably do it before the game even officially launches.
Starcraft is just too high profile not to attract loads of talented people determined to hack the game in all kinds of ways. So everyone needs to just take a chill pill and remember that pirates got your back.
We would not take out LAN if we did not feel we could offer players something better.
I wouldn't pirate the game unless I thought I could offer Blizzard something better than my money... thanks douchebags!
Wasn't there an article recently about how DRM, and other restrictive measures actually drive people to pirate software?
(FYI, I have retail copies of every version of warcraft, diablo, and starcraft, but will not pay for a crippled SC2)
I was actually GOING to buy this game (first game I bought since Starcraft I) but now that they have insulted us by taking out LAN I will definitely NOT buy this game!
I wonder how blizzard feels about a certain semi-pro ladder server which allows anyone ( even without a cd key ) to play starcraft online, they have a link where you can download a 100 mb install of starcraft in a zip file so that all you have to do is unzip, run and play online within minutes. Of course no one doesn't already own multiple starcraft copies and are only downloading the zip file for convenience of being able to play on any computer will actually enjoy playing the game since if they aren't a hardcore starcraft player they will lose 99.99% of the time since this is after all a ladder server. I think that if blizzard does make starcraft 2 bnet only, it would be totally unsuitable for korean pro-gaming, unless the korean's hack a lan into the game, which is pretty likely given that there have been lots of features which were added by third parties for starcraft which are now used widely in bnet and the mentioned ladder server, including a feature which allowed for much better latency ( delay between player and server ). Today's online starcraft community is mostly dominated by people who are familiar with korean pro gaming and I think if starcraft 2 does not cater to korean pro-gaming, they will be losing a lot of potential buyers from that audience. Also, the only people who play starcraft on bnet and bnet like servers now are mostly between the age of 20 to 30, and IMO vastly different than the audience of WOW or warcraft 3, although there are younger people who play from korea since it is a game embedded into the korean gaming culture, north american teen gamers are not likely to play or even know about starcraft nowadays.
They're going to regret removing LAN play and turning single player into a trilogy. I was looking forward to SC2, now I can't be stuffed. No sale. What a shame...
Especially since the shared connection to battlenet for multiple people will never be as good as a connection on a LAN
Especially when I go out to a lent beach house where I can bring a router but no internet.
Or is Blizzard going to sell Hosted Battle.net? ;-)
I was so looking forward to this game. I doubt I am even going to buy it now...
What happens when the internet goes down and I want to play with my roommate? Go eat a dick, Blizz.
The most likely scenario in my eye is this will encourage someone to hack it and distribute a purely lan only hacked copy that they make 0$ money from.
I know I'd download said freebie lan only copy =P
This is another form of DRM. Another game I now won't buy that I otherwise would have. I never play multiplayer games (of this genre) except on the LAN. I don't want or need Big Brother watching me.
Aside from that, it also breaks first-sale; you don't own the game because you can't (in a practical manner) sell it to someone else who will be able to use it in full.
I don't know why everyone is focused on the LAN aspect of the matter... Battle.net is NOT going to be free as stated by Blizzard themselves. This move ENSURES that you will have to pay a monthly fee to Blizzard for playing their game.
With World of Warcraft users being encouraged to "upgrade" their accounts to Battle.net accounts, it seems they will pull off a "Pay for one account each month, and you will be able to play all of our games online".
Yes, that means that if I pay for WoW now and decide to pick Starcraft too, it will basically be free, but it also means that Blizzard plans on milking me for the rest of my sane life. I for one welcome our new Blizzard Overlords...?
Thereby proving that it's not worth paying $X for the game if it can't be played without also paying $40-100/month for internet service. If that's something Blizzard wants to make as a requirement then they'd better not be surprised when sales are not as high as they should be.
Another Blizzard product requires not only an Internet connection but also an additional monthly fee. So yes, there is a cash-cow level.
I completely disagree with this move. They're not considering that if people are actually at a LAN, there are two primary problems: 1. No Internet access. While unlikely, it's possible there wouldn't be Internet Access. Not being able to play the latest game because there's no Internet sucks. 2. Bandwidth. Playing 8+ (?) players on BNET is only possible on the top end Internet connections ...
Rediculous.
If Blizzard doesn't revoke this decision, I won't be purchasing the game after all ... I ONLY play for the LAN experience. For the most part, I could care less about online playing.