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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?
by unremoving LAN play?
Just give me Diablo 3 in the meantime.
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!
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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.
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.
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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."
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.
At that point you're just refusing to use Battlenet out of stubborness.
Virginia is for lovers. EVE is for griefers.
I'm afraid you'll need to complete "+3 Nightmare yes" first
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...
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'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.
Psst... join the rest of us in the 21st century and turn Javascript on.
Or are you saying you're willing to run gigabytes of Blizzard's C++ DirectX code on your computer but not a few kB of their Javascript?
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.
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.
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.