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StarCraft II Delayed Until 2010
Blizzard has just announced that StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty won't be released this year. From their announcement: "Over the past couple of weeks, it has become clear that it will take longer than expected to prepare the new Battle.net for the launch of the game. The upgraded Battle.net is an integral part of the StarCraft II experience and will be an essential part of all of our games moving forward. This extra development time will be critical to help us realize our vision for the service. ... As we work to make Battle.net the premier online gaming destination, we'll also continue to polish and refine StarCraft II, and we look forward to delivering a real-time strategy gaming experience worthy of the series' legacy in the first half of 2010."
I'm just sayin'.
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
So not only are they removing the ability to play LAN games, it's actually delayed the release of the game.
Perhaps if they had tasked more drones with mining minerals in the first place, this whole fiasco could have been avoided.
This is bad news...for Diablo fans =(
The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies. -Chomsky
External factors delay the release of the game, not the game's state itself. Furthermore, they will continue to develop the game until those external requirements are met.
Dare we hope for the first truly polished, and moderately bug-free game release in a decade?
We really don't need battlenet. I've seen how that works with DRM on music. And games are bit to expensive to throw away when blizz decides to go bankrubt or that holding battlenet online becomes to expensive.
by unremoving LAN play?
Just give me Diablo 3 in the meantime.
Perhaps this is just another clever ploy of N.K to get the rest of the world very very angry.
"i lost my dignity on a slippery wiener"
Yeah, good things do take time to make, but it takes even longer to ruin things with DRM implementations. Remember what Blizzard has basically said: No more LAN parties. Oh and even if you have your friends over, your game will lag by all of you having to use Battlenet from one connection:(
But seriously, who didn't see this one coming?
South Korea just exploded with rage. This just might push them over the edge and they will finally take out North Korea.
This would be devastating news if it was still the 1990s...
That's true, a release date of 2010 would be over 10 years away!
<Complete your profile by adding a signature!>
... they just need the dust to settle on that, whatchamacallit, lan play debacle?
I mean, the battle.net servers are going to fail upon launch anyway... just as with sc1.
LAN PLAY is one of the things that helped make SC1 awesome, either 12 carriers coming down on an in-room opponent's settlement with "...what the...WHAT THE HELL...OH GOD" to early game 'ling rush with "..YOU CHEEP BASTARD THATS NOT FUNNY"....LAN play was amazing. Now if I'm going to have an 8 man LAN in my garage, it's all gotta go through battlenet, sucking up my bandwidth? Screw you blizzard. You've got another 2 quarters now, give us LAN play.
I really hope SCII doesn't go the way of Starcraft Ghost... I also wonder how much of the problem is Blizzard simply putting every game but WOW on the back burner until they exhaust the franchise...
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
+5 Hell yes.
I wish I could say it was a surprise. Blizzard never releases games on time. I try not to look forward to them.
Of course, this could all just be a marketing scam. They announce the game, wait 18 months, give a delivery date 9 months in the future, and then push it back 3 months at a time until people are frothing with the need for the game, and then release it.
I mean hell, they announced Diablo 3 more than a year ago, and they haven't even bothered to put up the first, tentative, never-to-be-kept release date yet.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
The suit-speak translation is: "Hey. We actually talked to the network guys about two days before we were going to push this out the door and told them what they requirements were and they downed a 2 liter of Dew, gave us some funny looks, then laughed maniacally and twisted in their office chairs, chanting 'More power, more power, more power...' Also, the legal department said the brain implants into the engineers were rejected and they refused to further refine our new hideous DRM. In light of these developments, we're going to release some screenshots and do a hand wave."
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Drat. I wonder what this means for the beta that was supposed to be taking place this summer. I signed up for it of course, and given that I use a Mac as my primary platform I hoped that I might have at least a slightly higher chance of getting picked :P. I don't suppose it's already started? I mean I haven't heard anything, but Blizzard may be trying to keep it super-secret.
I wonder if this has anything to do with them trying to implement LAN-like Battle.net play. This was discussed at length in the last StarCraft II related Slashdot post, though I don't think Blizzard has said much about it. I'm really hoping that they design their online play to take advantage of LAN communication if it detects some or all of the users are playing with the same network. If not, my friends and I might have to stick to the antiquated but virtually lag-less LAN play of the old StarCraft.
On a related note, lets pray that they decide to include a "spawn" feature like they did with the original StarCraft. If they make it so everyone in my occasional 8-person LAN parties would have to shell out $50 for a game that they'll only play once in a while, I just may resort to piracy. Oh don't get me wrong, I'm all about supporting the game creators, but do they really need to mooch $400 from a few friends that will be playing their game for a handful of hours every month or so?
So what is Blizzard's excuse then?
Don't forget they've been bought out, so they're not the Blizzard they used to be. It could be that "Blizzard" is working on some DRM which has really been disguised as Battle.net (i.e. you have to connect to it to verify your installation). Watch your step "Blizzard", because it wont be hard for hackers to offer the LAN support you were so quick to deny your fans, nor will it be difficult to set up a pirate server that out-competes the "wonderful experience" battle.net might have in store.
Help fight spam
There goes my pre-order... not that I pre-order anything usually, this is the first single pre-order I did because of a (nearly) expired gift-certificate.
In addition to that, I'd like to say, expiring gift-certificates are lame.
Mod me -1 drunk if you want.
Duke Nukem has been in the works for 12 years now. SC2 was announced not even a year ago.
They don't want to release SC2 or D3 (which will net them $60 per copy with no additional fees) as long as their cash cow (WoW) is reaping profits.
As long as the WoW content patches and expansion packs keep the millions of players paying $12/month they're going to do what they can to keep those player playing.
"Action without philosophy is a lethal weapon; philosophy without action is worthless."
Here's a thought.
LAN mode wouldn't require any mad crazy hacks to BattleNet to make it work;
So rather than making us wait six more months ("first half of 2010" = not before March; April 2010 = 11 years after SC1) for half a game crippled by it's dependence on internet access; why not give us a LAN-capable version now and roll out BattleNet in the first patch ?
Of course, if they did that I might actually, you know, buy a copy. As it is, my money is staying in my pocket.
No LAN = No Point.
The nice thing about standards is that there are so many of them to choose from. -- Andrew S. Tanenbaum
Good luck on that. They announced SCII in may 2007, and it's still a minimum of 4 months out.
They didn't announce D3 until July '08...I'd be surprised if they started looking for Diablo beta testers before the end of the year.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Battlenet requires more vespene gas.
WÌÌfÍ--ÍSÌÒÍ...Í...ÌHÌÍfÍÍÍ--ÍÍÍ
Oh and even if you have your friends over, your game will lag by all of you having to use Battlenet from one connection
This isn't a necessary conclusion of that decision. It's entirely possible that Battle.Net will mediate the connection then drop out; for LAN connections, this could mean it's still kept local. Blizzard already uses P2P for the Blizzard downloader for instance.
Oh and even if you have your friends over, your game will lag by all of you having to use Battlenet from one connection:(
Sure, if you're connection is an ISDN line. Anyone with a modern cable or DSL connection that ranges in the 5-6mbit range isn't going to see this lag you speak of.
Yes, but usually in IT you want them to take "IT Time", not "Redwood Forestry time".
lol, beta testers in '09. D3 won't start into beta until 2010 at the earliest. I would be the game doesn't hit shelves until 2011 or 2012.
They say in the summary that the game is pretty much ready. Battle.net just isn't ready for it.
I for one am glad Blizzard is delaying the game to ensure their Battlenet system maintains the same quality as their games. Way too many RTSs release with shoddy or non-existent online support; I'm looking at you, EA (C&C3)!
Demented But Determined.
Doesn't seam to effect me, as I wont buy the game with out LAN.
I hope other people vote with their wallets so when they come out with Diablo 3, Blizzard will include LAN.
The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive
So does this mean they will be able to store our character inventory for more than 90 days before they delete it?
Wake me up when they do.
If they would restore the 30 accounts of mine they deleted (yes you read that correctly, 30 accounts full of characters not 30 characters), that would be a good start too. Ok, so that was askin for a pony territory, I'm jus sayin.
Completely agree with parent. The game is done, now they just need more time to implement corporate requirements like anti-piracy-does-not-work software and "dynamic ads" engines. Or something. Anyway, to me, no LAN, no buy.
Karma cannot be described by words alone.
Maybe they can spend some of their spare time polishing the web site. With javascript off (via noscript) http://www.starcraft2.com/ is a blank page.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
Anyone with a modern cable or DSL connection that ranges in the 5-6mbit range isn't going to see this lag you speak of.
Latency, not bandwidth.
How to solve most of our problems: 1.Lots of nuclear plants. 2.Cure aging.
You're going from under 10 millisecond pings for an internal network, to an external site that very possibly (depending on internet weather) could have pings of a 50-100 milliseconds or more. It doesn't matter what the size of the pipe into your basement is; occasionally you get hangups and stalls when your leave your local network.
I'm afraid you'll need to complete "+3 Nightmare yes" first
No LAN, no fun.
for geeks. from geeks. out of geeks_ http://www.freewear.org
For me at least. Same goes for Diablo.
I don't know why people keep using the word "delay". Nobody from Blizzard ever said that the game would be out in 2009. They said they were going to try, and hoped it would be -- which is crystal-clear PR-speak for "Um, no."
They haven't even started semi-public beta yet, and that's going to last months.
As for the decision to remove LAN play, they probably know what they're doing as far as sales go. People talk like that's a decision that's going to cost them the company, which I think is ridiculous. They know how many people use battle.Net. They know. And we all know that it's far more than they need to stay profitable. Several millions more, probably.
God forbid a video game studio act responsibly and deliver what they promise instead of a game where walls are just suggestions and clipping isn't a cheat. You so-called fans that are disappointed need to look at falling video game quality and thank Blizzard for sticking to their guns as they have in past years. Delay it, by all means if that means I get my money's worth. It's going to eat my soul as all the other Blizzard games have, I might as well have a good user experience while it happens.
And quit bitching about LAN play. You don't need it unless you own a cyber cafe.
and getting ready to implement micro transactions. You must provide your credit card number at the start of each match. Minerals cost $0.05 per 50 to mine. Vespene costs $0.10 per 50 to harvest. Stim packs cost $5.00 to research. You don't want to know how much the Yamato Cannon costs.
Blizzard has improved their support of the Mac community since the "hey day" you refer to. Your "hey day" is the time frame where the Mac versions were ports done by a third party and they were released long after the original PC version, with the exception of Diablo II. Blizzard created an internal Mac team and shipped D2 nearly simultaneously. Since D2 Blizzard has continued to develop the Mac versions along side the PC versions internally and ship at the same time: Warcraft III, World of Warcraft. It looks like they are doing the same for Starcraft II and Diablo III, so how are they hurting the Mac community? Don't be silly enough to say the delay hurts everyone. Blizzard is notorious for long delays, sometimes multiple delays, fans bitch and moan until launch day and then flip and say the game is so involved and polished that the delay was worth it. What hurts gamers is when a company ships a game that is not quite ready and otherwise great ideas are lost behind crashes and other technical problems.
Everyone complaining about LAN play seems to be slightly misunderstanding the situation. Yes, by what they've said you will need a connection to play the official way but once you're in game you are only using the LAN connection. They essentially are forcing you to use battlenet as a matchmaking service, even for local games. If everyone is playing from the same room then the connection doesn't go over the internet at all.
And I'm sure some inventive hacker will create a battlenet emulator that will provide true LAN play without an internet connection.
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
Who knows, maybe the extra time will give them a chance to rethink the idiotic exclusion of LAN play (though I'm not holding my breath on that one).
Probably not going by the following from TFA.
The Spin -
"The upgraded Battle.net is an integral part of the StarCraft II experience and will be an essential part of all of our games moving forward."
Should Be Read As -
The upgraded Battle.net is a required anti-consumer aspect of the StarCraft II experience and will be an essential part of our plan to build control of obsolescence into all of our games moving forward.
Please Note: We have always been at war with eurasia...
Quote of a future A.C.
If you don't like it don't by it blah blah blah.
I'm not going to buy it. Please direct your attention here, thanks...
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1301629&cid=28690039&art_pos=1
This puts me at least one year closer to my PhD. Hopefully blizzard will delay another couple years so I can finish.
chillax137
Current Battle.net games are ALL peer-to-peer. If you play Starcraft 1 with a friend over Battle.net but are on a LAN it works fine without lag.
Why would Blizzard need to receive packets other than those sent in logging onto Battle.net, creating a game, joining it, starting it, and then transmitting the endgame results back to it? There aren't any games out there that make the player host that would need to contact the master server with as much data as it needs to send the actual server (you). I'm sure that 50-100ms latency to Battle.net's server is going to be a dealbreaker when joining a game takes 1/10th of a second longer (even when the game itself is fine)
Regardless, this is all speculation. People need to stop freaking out and wait until the game comes out until you complain. I know you people love to assume that "requiring an online server" is akin to "they want to force you to name your firstborn child Raynor," but nobody actually KNOWS anything except Blizzard. We'll also know soon enough... the Beta will start at least a few months before the game is released.
You can tell when gamers don't know anything about network software implementation. By the time Battle.Net receives your Network Address Translated connections, it all looks like one IP, so while it could easily see that it's all from one network (of arbitrary size), it has no way of selecting a specific client to act as a host, nor commanding the others to connect, as it does not know the LAN IPs. The very closest it could do is ask client machine to perform UDP broadcasts, which is exactly what SC1 LAN play does, and if they implemented all of that anyway it would be a crime against nature to require bnet to bootstrap it.
Sam ty sig.
Oh really? You know this for a fact? Do you KNOW Blizzard at all? They are notorious for waiting to release a game "when it's done," and when it satisfies them. Warcraft 3 came out 7 years after Warcraft 2. Starcraft was not only bigger than Warcraft 2, but after it Blizzard released expansion packs to current games and World of Warcraft (along with 2 expansions). They have extremely long development times, and are known to never announce a release date unless the game is DONE to THEIR standards.
Maybe you're used to companies that announce the release date when they're halfway done and release a game on time but full of bugs? I daresay that that's the norm these days. Now you want to complain about a company that actually finishes their games?
No LAN may suck, but it's nowhere close to a dealbreaker. If you live in some rural area or a country that has poor internet service, that sucks... but it doesn't apply to me or the other 99% of players. I'll cry for this loss as much as I cried for no IPX support in Warcraft 3.
You can tell when someone is talking out of their ass too. Of course they know the LAN Ips, because the client has sent them up to the server. Most matchmakers work this way - you can discover if two people are behind the same IP and have the same address that they should connect internally. In fact you could even choose to ensure people are in the same game this way, but generally they'll already want to be anyways. The only time I've seen this become a problem is on a large corporate network (like say, at a large game corporation) with multiple gateway ips, but there's ways to discover that as well.
The fact is BNET will NOT be in the way after the initial match up. It just means that you'll always need an internet connection to play, and I'm willing to guess the large majority of LAN parties do have an internet connection.
You're putting this into your little world without considering what it means for others. How about this for an example: I'm in the military, and when I deploy I ----cannot connect to Battle.net ---. It's simply not possible for me to do without running running into legal or security issues out in the field. Instead of playing a 4/6/8 player LAN game when winding down for the night, I can't bring this game with me.
So freaking out about no LAN play is a perfectly valid thing for me to do. SC1 and D2 are still hugely popular for downrange geeks.
Dear Blizzard,
Between the DRM, the fact that I will need to buy this game *3* times to fully enjoy it, and, oh yes, you're getting rid of one of the things that made Starcraft so much fun (LAN Play), there's no way in hell I'm going to support this game as it has been announced. Take the extra time, get your act in order, and convert all of these pissed off customers into paying customers and change these things that are infuriating so many people.
Thanks,
A potential customer (one of many).
One of these days i'm going to find this 'peer' guy and reset HIS connection!
You can tell when gamers don't know anything about network software implementation.
You can always tell when /. posters don't have enough imagination about how you could implement something.
I'm being somewhat facetious here; I really don't know much about networking. (Though the "gamer" label barely applies. I actually still do a few hours of Starcraft a week with a friend, but not a whole lot else. I'm playing Mass Effect now, but I'm having a hard time thinking of any game I've bought myself since shortly after The Orange Box came out.) (I also know I've used BitTorrent through a NAT without opening ports on the router, at least that I know about.)
What I do know though is a good bit about Starcraft (though I'm not all that good of a player; almost certainly no better than D-class on iCCup). I know that Starcraft was the 10th best selling PC game in the US in June. And I am pretty sure that the popularity of Starcraft in the competitive gaming scene, e.g. South Korea's pro gamers, is a major driving force for why it remains so popular. And as I said in another post, I can think of few things that Blizzard could do that would cripple competitions more than making network games go through Blizzard servers. And this means that: (1) Blizzard has a bunch of stupid people making decisions and will require all traffic to be external, (2) Blizzard will be releasing a special version of the game or server for these high-profile competitions (but then what will they practice on, how will they figure out who gets the special version, etc.), or (3) Battle.Net will only mediate
I'm not sure if you realize how game development works, but this is how it doesn't happen:
Spend years designing a game.
Create artwork.
Create the engine.
Create maps.
Find Beta testers.
Try to run the game.
It turns out that the "try to run the game" step happens pretty early, and it happens often. It's not like they just finish the game and then, as an afterthought, decide to run it for the first time. If it looks like shit at any point, there is ample time to fix that without needing a last-minute delay.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
You're going from under 10 millisecond pings for an internal network, to an external site that very possibly (depending on internet weather) could have pings of a 50-100 milliseconds or more.
I remember the days when 50-100 millisecond ping was considered very nearly incredible, 150 was considered pretty damn good, and 200-250 was considered normal.
Now get off my lawn.
pings of a 50-100 milliseconds or more.
I'm in Canada, man. I'd kill for 50 ms ping!
50 ms is about the lowest I've seen, to places like Seattle. Most often Battle.net is in the 100-150ms range. When I play TF2, there's about two dozen servers under 100ms, two dozen under 200ms, and the rest are considerably higher. Sorting by ping, they start at just over 50 and end well over 300, in just the first page(screen) of results. Most of those servers are empty, too.
50ms... you're going to make me drool.
You're going from under 10 millisecond pings for an internal network
Mine has under 2ms. It might be lower than that - hard to say, exactly.
Given their history, I'd think Blizzard is one of the last companies you have to worry about "Planned Obsolescence" from. They still support online play for their earlier titles, and for most of their games, remove CD-Key checking after a while. There may be plenty of reasons to hate the decision on LAN play, but worry over planned obsolescence isn't really one of them.
No, we aren't happy and we want Blizzard to know.
I'll pass on you sit and wait and take it approach.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Maybe BECAUSE LAN play got removed, they absolutely want to make sure Battle.net goes off without a hitch, which in turn is going to cause the delay. I'll accept that. I'm very displeased with the removal of LAN, but that's implying that Battle.net is going to fail. If it doesn't, then no one's the wiser.
I've been a Blizzard fan since 1995. Blizzard has had hit after hit, and they've always clearly had their pulse on the community, always designed the games that gamers want. Aside from the bnetd thing, they've done a great job catering to their target audience (one could argue that the bnetd "hackers" / digital rights advocates are not part of their audience).
What has Blizzard said about "no LAN play"?
I see this as requiring an internet connection and valid licenses for each seat. Each person at a LAN party will need to log in and authenticate their license. When the game begins, each computer will start sending traffic to the IPs each computer self-reports -- which will be on the same LAN. Each seat will see sub-millisecond pings, so no increased lag will be introduced to level the field.
I expect the next generation of battle.net will support uPNP, and be more NAT friendly than the current one. I expect VOIP. I hope to see better competition selection, including finding games that are low latency, and blacklist / whitelist (or at least plugin) support. I don't expect to see any kind of LAN support, but if their ladder can see all the players of a LAN competing with each other and provide scoring to make subsequent battle.net public games more interesting, I think that's a really big win.
I expect such network authentication means that piracy will be much more difficult and that any cracks that work will have little value. I also expect this to royally blow up in their faces if they fuck it up. I'll tolerate logging in, I won't tolerate anything short of a perfect authentication scheme. They have had a great reputation for battle.net reliability for the last 10 years.
Given their history, I'd think Blizzard is one of the last companies you have to worry about "Planned Obsolescence" from. They still support online play for their earlier titles, and for most of their games, remove CD-Key checking after a while. There may be plenty of reasons to hate the decision on LAN play, but worry over planned obsolescence isn't really one of them.
Past performance is no indication of future gains as all those commercials go...
http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/12/02/1728243
You think that one person will completely saturate a broadband connection? Gosh, I hope they were the tiniest bit smarter than that in developing the network protocol ;)
A huge number of people in the military play WOW from Iraq, so I suspect the OP is lying anyway to try to make a point.
A huge number of people in the military play WOW from Iraq, so I suspect the OP is lying anyway to try to make a point.
Um... what? I was deployed to Iraq (an airbase) and Japan (Iwakuni,Japan) and didn't see WoW played at either location. We couldn't get the Internet in our barracks room in Japan, we had to go to the public leisure room to surf the Internet.
You sound like an enormous fanboy, raving about "THEIR standards." WotLK was a rushed piece of junk that they're still trying to balance, Warcraft 3 was a disappointment that most people abandoned to go back to Starcraft, and now they're shoving Battle.net so far up your ass that you can't even play at LANs.
You even pull a magic 99% number completely out of your ass. You're a total fanboy.
Given their history, I'd think Blizzard is one of the last companies you have to worry about "Planned Obsolescence" from. They still support online play for their earlier titles, and for most of their games, remove CD-Key checking after a while. There may be plenty of reasons to hate the decision on LAN play, but worry over planned obsolescence isn't really one of them.
Past performance is no indication of future gains as all those commercials go...
It is an indication, it's just not a guarantee. I do realize how pedantic that sounds, but really, we're not supposed to try to learn from history?
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
"If everyone is playing from the same room then the connection doesn't go over the internet at all."
That is not how it works now for SC, and they have said nothing to suggest that it will work the way you describe.
As it is now, when several people in the same room are behind a single router you have lag, and possible a lot other issues such as dropping players, unable to join each other games, etc. They use the public interface of your router to make a connection, and everyone makes a connection to everyone. Most firewalls/routes can't handle that very well. In WoW, each person connects to a central server, and never a connection to each other. So being behind the same router only slows you down by sharing bandwidth.
Right now, blizzards asks for you to open/forward ports from the outside interface to the PC in question, you can not do that for all PC's involved. A good amount of firewalls/routers you don't need to, but plenty you do, more so if you are creating games to join.
Simplified: It's like setting up multiple servers each running a webserver, you forward port 80 to one machine, but none of the others can be connected too.
The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive
He didn't click the link, must have been in a hurry to post or was too afraid where he might end up...
Right, because each game client is going to submit to bnet a complete list of all of its interface IPs, including VPN and wireless connections, and bnet is going to be able to decide with only that limited information which precise subnet to ask each client to broadcast on, even though it has no knowledge at all of the topology or technology involved for each device, or even if the apparent subnets on each machine are part of a connected network. There are so many ways it can all go wrong, I would be genuinely surprised if they decided that was the right way to provide the "experience".
The best compromise would be to have each client elect a network interface to use for LAN play, and submit only that network interface's IP. You wouldn't be able to do this with aliased interfaces (many IPs per interface), but maybe you could with bridges (many interfaces per IP, though Windows does this exceedingly poorly). Giving users so much frustration and potential failure points *just* for anti-piracy, something the real hackers will subvert in a matter of days anyway, is exactly the kind of mistake Blizzard will not make.
Sam ty sig.
These are the people who said they "kind of have to" monetize certain features of battle net (source: http://www.joystiq.com/2008/10/11/blizzards-wilson-some-battle-net-features-to-be-monetized/ ) As if even they are being hit by this recession, but we know they make more than enough on wow alone ($15.98/mo x 11,000,000 players = $175,780,000 per month x 12 months in a year = $2,109,360,000 per year. minus about $250,000,000 due to larger subcription deals) then they turn around and announce that they are making a live action warcraft movie directed by Sam Raimi? (source: http://www.joystiq.com/2009/07/22/aicn-sam-raimi-set-to-direct-world-of-warcraft-movie/ ) So let me get this straight.... you "kind of have to" bitch slap all of the Starcraft and Diablo fans to impress your warcraft followers? We wait years for sequels only to have LAN stripped and a new Battle.net that isn't exactly free.... While the in the same amount of time the warcraft people got warcraft 3 plus its own expansion and an MMO plus several expansions to that MMO now a delay due to bnet. I'd like to quote some fellow Slashdot users on blizzard's actions "Blizzard right now reminds me of Sony three years ago. Drunk with success, and making every wrong decision." - Toonol "Blizzard flat out has made a *stupid* call that serves *no* purpose. It costs them *nothing* to implement LAN play and in fact this very well could *increase* the chances their game gets pirated, because the pirated game will eventually have LAN play. Blizzard issued a challenge and the crackers of the world are going to take it up." - Cowmonaut
Build more supply depots. (b -> s)
"From the depths of my skeptical and rationalist soul, I ask the Lord to protect me from California touchie-feeliedom."
Back in dem days, Of StarCraft I most people had dial up, so Lan Parties were a good idea.... Now it is not.
It's still not common to have a MiFi router and pay $60 per month for service. You can get dial-up anywhere, but you can only get cable or DSL at your own home, and even then only if your home is in the city.
You CAN still have LAN parties with Starcraft 2 though, so it's NOT a (entirely) valid point. The only difference is people have to own the game to play it.
So in other words, what used to be a $50 game for four players is now a $200 game for four players. If I want to buy a $200 video game, I'll buy Rock Band or something. Even games on the lowly DS tend to have at least some capacity for spawn installations.
Isn't it ironic, doncha think?
I see this as requiring an internet connection and valid licenses for each seat.
And here's where it gets ridiculous. If I buy one copy of Chess, it comes with enough boards and pieces for two players (unless I picked up Navia Dratp by mistake). If I buy one copy of Mario Kart Wii or Super Smash Bros. Brawl, it can serve for up to four players. If I buy one copy of Mario Kart DS, it can serve for up to eight players on some tracks. Compare these to Starcraft 2, which needs four copies for a family of four. If I wanted a $200 game, I'd buy Rock Band.
Exactly which Blizzard titles no longer have CD-Key checks? I may have been under a rock for the last year or so (work requirements) and I do not recall seeing any press releases or news about any such change to a Blizzard game.
If you play Starcraft 1 with a friend over Battle.net but are on a LAN it works fine without lag.
It also reportedly works fine with only one copy of the game, much like DS Download Play. I haven't seen any evidence that Starcraft 2 will allow a similar sort of "spawn" installation.
From the wikipedia article:
"The game proved to be one of the most anticipated and popular computer game releases ever, with 4.5 million units shipped to retail stores and over one million units sold within a month. Warcraft III won many awards including "Game of the Year" from more than six different publications.
That's not really my definition of a "disappointment," at least not in terms of review scores and sales. If we're talking about people playing, currently on US West there are 68807 people playing Warcraft 3 and 52367 on Starcraft. Pretty impressive numbers for Starcraft, but it's still not "most people." Not to mention that Warcraft 3 mods can be MUCH more diverse than Starcraft mods. I've gotten more gameplay time out of Warcraft 3 than I have with any other game.
I never played WotLK (I only played WoW for the first year or so after release), but I've heard bad things. However, I do know that WoW on release was pretty impressive and fun (though the release was a bit bumpy as all MMO releases are). However, I'm willing to forgive *one* questionable release that I've never played.
If enjoying all of the games that a company has released makes me a "fanboy" then yes, that's what I am. However, they've never disappointed me, so I don't expect them to. If it sucks, then maybe I'll be more skeptical of games to come... but if it's good, the lack of LAN support will be a tiny annoyance that will only really matter at LANs where not everybody has bought the game.
"they want to force you to name your firstborn child Raynor,"
Force? My second will be called Kerrigan btw.
No need to overcomplicate things, they'll just implement what works for most people.
Most people on a LAN will have at least one (and usually, only one) network interface on the same subnet as others on the same LAN. Their public IP addresses will be identical -- most likely BNET won't try to get clients to connect via internal interfaces unless they have the same public IP address.
So it'd be pretty trivial for the client to send a list of its internal addresses to BNET and for the BNET server to decide if it's trying to play with clients that have the same public IP. If so, it finds any matching internal addresses and gets them to connect to each other.
I don't think they'd need to bother with broadcasts - their networking code would be designed to handle play over the internet. Even though unicast to each machine on the LAN is less efficient, the LAN itself is pretty fast compared to the internet. If their multiplayer is playable over the internet then that won't be a problem for local networks.
There are other options, too. If the clients have the same external IP, the server could notify them of this and they could start broadcasting and listening for discovery packets on every network interface they have. This would be a bit easier for the BNET server; it pretty much just says to each client "I think you guys are local to each other, see if you can find each other". Then leaves it up to them.
One question is whether BNET will proxy traffic for users that aren't able to connect directly to each other -- a lot of people don't have their routers set to forward ports to their own computers, and so on. That would provide a fallback method for clients on the same LAN that for some reason can't find each other.
I think what he was trying to say is that games like Warcraft 3 and Starcraft no longer require CDs to be in the drive to play. They removed the CD check some time in the last couple of years, so now it's just install and go.
In my experience of playing Warcraft 3 over B.Net and LAN, the way it works is, if you want to play a LAN game, no CD-key check is done. Therefore you can take 1 set of WC3 discs to a LAN party and everyone can play.
However, when playing online, a hash of your CD key is sent upon connection. If someone with that CD key is already connected, it will not let you connect. I believe the way Blizzard detects shared or widely leaked CD keys is when you have connections using 1 CD key from MANY different IP addresses ( not just 2-3. I've played WC3 from 2-3 different IP addresses (dorm room, friends place, college campus WiFi ) for over 2 years and never had so much as a warning.
In my -personal- experience, and what I hear from people I know personally whose stories I can verify, Blizzard ( NOT Activision-Blizzard ) has been very reasonable, and does not issue bans unless there are extreme circumstances. For this reason I continue to look forward to their products. Perhaps post-merger they will do things differently, but there is no data on which to base this theory.
He's confusing CD key checks with checking that your disc is in the drive. The removal of the latter is actually only a somewhat recent occurrence, coinciding with allowing people to download games they already own from the Blizzard Store (now part of the new Battle.net) by entering their CD key online.
[slowpoke]Hold the press, Blizzard postponed a game's release date![/slowpoke]
Seriously, I've been a Blizzard fan since '96 (and I've been 9 back then) and I can't really recall a time when they released a game on time. Nothing to watch here, folks.
The whole LAN thing IS retarded, but we all know it will take like what, a week, for someone to write a program to simulate LAN play.
We all know SC2 will be a great hit, like any other Blizzard game. Stop being delusional because Blizz ain't bancrupting anytime soon.
P.S. where's my Diablo3 damn Blizz!
It's simple guys - just *DON'T* buy the game. If no one buys it, Blizzard will get the message. Personally, it looks far too WOW for me. Blizzard did a great job of the original Diablo and StarCraft/Broodwars. Diablo 2 was a gross fuckup imho. Diablo 3 doesn't look much better, and StarCraft 2 is shaping up to be a fuckup as well. No thanks.
Dave
Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter. --Martin Luther King Jr.
millions of Koreans cried out in anguish, and were suddenly silenced...
Anyone can "stand up for what they believe", but it takes a very brave individual to change what they believe. - Loundry
Not all that surprising considering all the bad press they have been getting about being weasels about the whole no LAN option. With Battle.Net the only option now, they better make DAMN sure it works as it should. Also despite all the bad press, I am sure they probably expect to break every record ever set for selling of a video game, ever. Which means on week one when everyone is logging into Battle.Net they better make DAMN sure they actually have the capacity to handle all the requests for service.
I am 100% that this is what this is about, nothing to do with the actual game at all. Sure they may continue to balance in the meantime, but likely that is it.
Can we hope that they will develop a LAN enabled starcraft 2 during this mean-time ? It would be a welcome surprise.
Maybe it will give them time to rethink the title.
"Wings of Liberty"? It sounds like a Republican Think Tank
-
I know man. Things like these just make you want to go out and shoot some people
I'm in the military, and when I deploy I ----cannot connect to Battle.net ---.
Just make Osama wear a Kerrigan outfit, and get your Blackhawk pilots to say "In the pipe, five by five." whenever dropping you off.
Game on, partner!
That's disregarding the fact that Blizzard is no longer independent, and no longer has the same leadership that it started out under. When the company was young, their goal was to distinguish themselves and create some really quality games. Now their main objective is to milk the franchises that they've created. The actions of a company in its early stages do not necessarily predict what will happen when it gets bigger.
I think Blizzard has done very well maintaining the quality of their products as their company matures. Yes, they've lost some of the heart and soul as they've boiled down their success into a formula that can be repeated. That's a natural process though, and that's what a smart company does when it's successful. I don't expect anything new or spectacular from them though. If I want innovation, be it in the business model or the product itself, I'll be looking for new players in the industry. New companies have to fight more to distinguish themselves, so they are largely responsible for pushing the envelope. It's more of a gamble too, but hey, "Variety is the spice of life."
"they want to force you to name your firstborn child Raynor,"
Fuck, that's a good idea. No forcing is necessary.
Please stop spouting this stuff. Blizzard Entertainment was not directly affected by the merger of Vivendi Games and Activision in the forming of Activision Blizzard. Vivendi Games has owned Blizzard for most of a decade now, and decided to use the popular Blizzard name to make the resulting company look more attractive.
The merger did not result in a change in management within Blizzard Entertainment. What's more, Vivendi had majority control during the merger, so at worst, half of the management of the company that owns Blizzard has changed.
All of the major changes have been decided by the developers at Blizzard, without pressure from above. Yes, that includes splitting the game into three, removing LAN, and centering it around battle.net.
The Guide is definitive. Reality is frequently inaccurate.
Not only that but do you play World of Warcraft? Their authentication servers are down ALL The time. When I have a couple of friends over and we want play starcraft, we do NOT want to worry about whether Blizzard has technical issues. Not to mention the infamous Patch Tuesdays that brings WoW to its knees. Will they have to bring down SC2 once a week too?
This is the end of the road for me. I'm cancelling my WoW account right now. Requiring Battle.net for all their future games? No thanks.
A gaming tournament on the Internet is like a 100m Backstroke contest out on the ocean.
Only LAN play offers a setting that flattens out confounding variables like ping and rate; it's the pure form of competitive network play. Now Blizzard, certainly a beneficiary of many a notable StarCraft tournament, eliminates the most suitable and basic environment for tournaments, for the sake of putting in DRM features that reduce the value of your game even further. Of course they'll try and spin it, but it's no less than a big, erect middle finger right in your face.
What consumer positive effects does removing LAN support provide?
What consumer Negative effects does it create?
What possible evil does it allow for?
When you think about it in this manner it leads one to believe something is up regardless of how much you might like blizzard.
In short: The past performance of other companies in similar situations is an indication of what's to come. Right?
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
I'll worry about planned obsolescence from Blizzard the day they shut down Diablo II multiplayer. My same Starcraft and Diablo II and Warcraft III are still a lot of fun on Blizzard's multiplayer servers, and are still patched and maintained. Blizzard went back and re-wrote their installers for Starcraft and Diablo II so it'd work on Intel Macs. Starcraft was (at the time) 8 years old, and Diablo II was 6 years old. Blizzard still supports them. So let's talk about planned obsolescence when Blizzard actually obsoletes a game.
Maybe Blizzard will take this extra time to reevaluate releasing a purposely crippled game for their loyal fans and decide enable LAN gaming. Maybe they'll even decide to let players use all the races they pay for instead of instead of selling them one game for the price of three. Any more miracles to wish for while we're at it?
If you are not releasing it for Linux delay it forever because I'm not interested.
Removing lan from a game that has lasted over 10 years solely because of lan should tell you everything you need to know about the game and Blizzards opinion of you. I know im probably in the minority but the minute they officially confirmed that i cancelled both pre-orders (starcraft and diablo) as it was clear to me that Blizzard Entertainment was dead. This is truly a sad year as of all the numerous dev houses in the pc world only two had even a shred of respect and they were Blizzard and Valve and this year both have given the big fuck you to there fans (and more importantly their customers). Many people complain about consolitis and while those complaints had merit they were never blatantly shoved in your face till this year. PC gaming may have been dying but now i feel it is truly dead.....not only dead but desecrated, the two bastions of pc gaming are now openly pissing on its grave. if you have a pc i urge you to play half-life 1 and 2 / diablo 1 and 2 /deus ex (original) starcraft and warcraft 1, 2 and 3 because unfortunaltly thoses games where the pinnicle of pc gaming and their parents have all but said that they will never be made again.
Joker1980 sheading a tear for all the PC games that were (balders gate/planetscape:torment/half-life/thief/diablo/system shock/warcraft/command and conquer/myst/grim fandango/dreamweb*/Broken sword/etc etc the list goes on and on) because we will never see there like again.
*Yeah i know it wasent a great game but the premise was and the art was and it sums up what PC games USED to be all about good games with good storys, and yeah they didnt always hit the mark but they made you think and that alone made em worth their wight in gold.
END RANT
Well, Bart, your uncle Arthur used to have a saying: "Shoot 'em all and let God sort 'em out."
Blizzard is quite open about it being about keeping game matchups in their control, fighting piracy. I personally don't care, as the people affected are massively outnumbered by the people that are not.
The Guide is definitive. Reality is frequently inaccurate.
You just totally dogged the questions but that's fine and it's perfectly ok that you're ok with this as I'm not your keeper.
Piracy can not be controlled, you know that there will be a torrent of the game out probably even before the game hits the shelves. If you think otherwise then I feel really sad for you.
But you did hit the nail on the head when you said they want to keep control. That's the whole point and we will see what they do with this control...
Now their main objective is to milk the franchises that they've created.
Just have to chime in to say I disagree.
I disagree
Why? Because I love Blizzard. I am not a hater, but I have no love for Microsoft's way of using their costumer's as beta testers for several years after a "completed" product has been out. Blizzard has always made quality games, even if it meant keeping us waiting a year or two longer than anyone else would. Considering lost income, potentially missing "the wave" and having your game be forgotten and obsolete when you finally release it, that's a pretty big risk they take every time they make something just to ensure quality is to be had.
As for milking franchises, StarCraft, WarCraft and Diablo are all so insanely popular and rich in lore I don't think anyone would be dumb enough to not create sequels. If anyone else owned the rights to the titles though... I shudder at the though of EA Games Sancruary of SoccerCraft! They owe it to us fans to make new installments. I generally tire of every game I try after ~30 minutes, but I still keep coming back for Diablo 2 LoD and every now and them I play a few hours of WoW. Deep down, I still feel like their decision to replace the most awesome character ever, the Necromancer, with that hunchback witch docto is a personal let-down. Knowing there are far worse fan boys out there than me, Blizzard probably has the fans in mind when they make Diablo 3 and SC2. I mean damn.. ~12 million people playing WoW, paying a monthny fee, so why would Blizzard need to what everyone else does and milk the licenses they own? I don't think they have a lot of cash flow issues over there.
Oh, and any news on "Project Hydra" or have they still not said anything except it will be a next-gen mmo not following any of their three main franchises?
Just Say'n.
Blizzard does have a history of putting out some good looking stuff on games and ending up not releasing that title (but roll alot of the Tech/Resources into a new title). I can appreciate the relationship they have with their games though.. if something isn't working out right, they can the project even if they PRed it at E3
----- The internet has given everyone the ability to have their voice heard equally as loud.. even if they shouldn't be
this game was supposed to be released December 08 with LAN. Things have only gone downhill now with a release date of 2010 and no LAN (I heard it was to prevent people from pirating it.. what next? they going to take out the keyboard to prevent people from typing in cheats?)!!!
i'd say the majority of people are affected. LAN is very important for PC games and their decision will only increase piracy as now people like myself will be less inclined to purchase from a company that punishes their customers.
Nah, boycott this garbage. I think I'll keep my pride and my money while you can bow your little head down to Blizzard and accept their punishment even though you bought their game and are deserving of better. Fight for what you deserve - otherwise you are gonna get a whole lot less.
Dude you're smoking some crack. No LAN is the biggest deal breaker I could think of - other than no video support. Fight for what you deserve - these companies are just testing the water to see if they can take the power from us and we have to let them know that it's a big no-no (unless of course you enjoy paying extra $$ for less features). Fight for rights with technology. Don't let power hungry gaming companies ruin the standards. What if other companies see this and decide to take away LAN? No more LAN = paying monthly fees for gaming servers.
What makes you think you are in the majority? That most players will be upset enough to "punish" Blizzard? Blizzard is attempting to do with Battle.net what Valve has done with Steam, in terms of controlling their games. Is there a reason that the backlash will sink Blizzard in the way that it hasn't sunk Valve?
The Guide is definitive. Reality is frequently inaccurate.