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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.'"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PvPGN I assume these guys will add SC2 to the list...
As mentioned by Rob Pardo in interviews, piracy is a serious problem and often times tie in closely with LAN. At the end of the day, we want the best for the community and fans that support our games, and having chunk of the community pirate the game actually hurts the community.
1) Pirated servers splinter the community instead of consolidating all players who love to play the game. Battle.net will bring players together in skirmishes, ladder play, custom games, and allow everyone the opportunity to share a common experience.
2) More people on Battle.net means more 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. The original StarCraft is an even better example of how 11 years later, players still love and play this title, and we will continue to support and evolve it with patches.
We would not take out LAN if we did not feel we could offer players something better.
If I were to buy StarCraft II or any other title, I know the money I spent would be going to supporting that title. Personally, I would be upset that others were freeloading while others are legitimately supporting a title that has great potential and goals of making this title have 'long legs.'
If you like a song a lot, buy it, and that artist will only come out with more awesome songs for you. If you like a game, buy it, and we will promise to constantly work to make the player experience better at every corner we can.
Support the causes you believe in (This is applicable to all things, not just gaming).
Don't be a leech to society, innovation, and further awesome creations.
Bolding is his.
The Warcraft 3 networking implementation for internet play via Battlenet just requires that the players start the game in Battlenet. Once the game starts, the client computers talk directly to the host. If all the players were on a LAN, the routing would be done at the LAN level as soon as the game started.
There's not only that.
In it's current incarnation, Battle.net requires you (like most online services faced with connecting through a firewall) to open or forward ports to the machine running the game. Normally this is no problem, for example XBox Live works the same way. Unfortunately, Battle.net wasn't forward-thinking enough to use multiple ports! As only a single port is used for communication between the server and the client, only one client may communicate with the server through the firewall or router.
This should have been fixed back in the day through an update, but alas it's still true. A couple months ago my friends and I decided to pick the old game up and try playing it. I was surprised at how everything worked well after setting up the firewall. Unfortunately the minute I had a few other friends over and we all tried playing over my cable service, a realization quickly dawned. I could host fine, everyone could connect... but there was an inorinate amount of lag once the game started. This lag was only alleviated when the people physically there weren't in the hosted game, or the remote players were sitting it out. Any mix of the two resulted in the game being outright unplayable.
And I'll echo your point. I'm house-sitting for a close friend now and there is no internet at his place. He said having the rest of the guys over for LANs or Rock Band or whatever be it would be fine. If StarCraft 2 were out, it would (have) probably be(en) the game we'd play the most. I don't like this one bit.
Sure, there are rouge servers . . .
It's ROGUE dammit! Rouge is a face paint!
Always going forward, 'cause we can't find reverse.