SCOTUS ruled that what you throw out is public property...
Right, but that just means the discs are public property (assuming the data was on disc). If I throw away a book, someone can grab that book out of the trash and claim it for themselves. However, the author does not lose the copyright (even if it was the author who threw away the book).
I know he was stupid to do this, however, I was not aware how much of a cornerstone UAVs are to our current military strategy....
Goodness, you must listen to different news outlets than me. From what I've heard, you'd get the impression that our currently ongoing wars are the last wars we're ever going to fight in person. Next war (or these ones if they go on for more than a couple more years), all our soldiers will be in a datacenter in New Mexico or somewhere while the machines they're controlling are on whatever battlefield it is...
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.
Reading comprehension failure. They never claimed SC2 would benefit from that. You're making a comparison they never made, then pointing out that it's not a valid comparison. Okay... so... your point was? Did you have something to say that actually addresses the text you quoted above it, about online games being able to continually evolve after release?
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
Well, the second option would be MUCH more expensive for Blizzard, requiring a MASSIVE investment in server resources to handle. Since they're doing this to increase profits, I'm sure they're choosing the second option.;)
How long have they been talking about Starcraft II?
Substantially less time than they talked about Diablo II before releasing it, and way, way less time than they spent talking about WarCraft III before finally releasing it.
I'm beginning to believe it will have the same release date as Duke Nukem Forever......
Then you're beginning to believe something incredibly stupid...
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.
Really? What are the bandwidth requirements per player for SC2? And how did you get those numbers? Or, if you don't have those numbers, what made you think anyone would read the above statement you just made and not instantly realize that you're clearly talking out your ass? And once people realized you're just making shit up to support your argument, what made you think they'd even read the rest of what you posted, knowing you're posting dishonestly from the very first paragraph?
...because the one big joy they had with the former game, was the exact option that they're now taking away.
Really? How are they preventing you from getting together with all your friends and playing together?
Did you really get that joy from some knowledge about the underlying technology being used to transmit the data around? I think most people who enjoy this get their joy from playing together with their friends, something they have no intention of taking away, not from some esoteric knowledge about the network protocol being used...
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..
Anyone taking bets on what percentage of people saying this today are going to buy the game anyway? Put be down in the >95% pool...
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.
Given that it worked fine in WarCraft III, I don't see why I wouldn't "lap it up". Silly me, accepting something that works fine and is fun to play. I'm sorry my fun offends your religious sensibilities, but I'm not joining your jihad because a company doesn't comply with your ideology. I'm too busy having fun, and your ideology is kinda silly...
"We would not take out LAN if we did not feel we could offer players something better."
You fucking can't.
You know this a priori how? Personally, I have no religious beliefs about network performance. I like to actually see it in action before claiming I know how well it performs. Silly me, preferring evidence to religious fervor...
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.
So you not only haven't seen how well the new game works, you haven't seen how well Battle.net works in over a decade, but you know how well it will work next year based on a completely different game you saw over a decade ago.
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.
...they would probably want to send all data directly through their own servers, so that you don't get to figure out the IP address of those you are playing against.
Do you have any conception of how much more expensive this would be for Blizzard? Do you understand that they want to make as large a profit as possible? Given this, doesn't it make more sense to assume they've actually written the code you said they'd need to do to pass the packets over the LAN?
Maybe they haven't, maybe they've chosen the option that both degrades game performance and costs them more money to host. I'm just not seeing that as likely...
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.
So, explain to me how having eight people in the same room playing against each other is negatively impacted by having the interface for connecting to the game run through your Battle.net login?
This sounds like it might make playing as a group from behind a household NAT router much more difficult, no?
No. LAN games adapted for Internet play sometimes have this problem, requiring holes in the firewall and other tricks. Games designed for the Internet don't have these problems. So, it sounds like this will make playing behind a household NAT easier, no longer requiring the tricks you needed to get it working in WC3 and such...
There at least will be a speed penalty.
Not necessarily. If it's well implemented, no, not at all. If it's naively implemented, there definitely would be. Being/., the "common wisdom" assumes a naive implementation from a company with a decade and a half experience on the subject.
THis is the result of a great gaming house bought by a corporate whore. [...] Can someone at least point me to a link that explains their 'reasoning' on this?
What would be the point? Your mind is already made up. Or do you really think when you've reached the point of calling someone a "corporate whore", that when you read what they say on a subject, you aren't going to simply consider it propaganda?
They explained it in their press releases. You didn't buy the explanation. No point rereading it...
If there is no possibility to play the game in a LAN without Internet access I won't buy it. Period.
Which is perfectly fine. Blizzard believes the number of people who do this (and I'm sure they have no illusions about the fact that this will dissuade some people from buying) will be smaller than the number of sales they will make that they wouldn't otherwise make if they require everyone playing to be able to legitimately log in through battle.net. Having hosted one LAN party where we required everyone have a valid key to play, and personally witnessing a group of players make a quick run to Best Buy as soon as this was clear, I would have to say they're almost certainly right. They may indeed lose you as a customer, but they'll gain many more customers than they lose.
I'm sure they do. LAN play was perfectly possible without it, but Kali enabled it over TCP/IP, allowing it to be done over the internet. So if Kali is what make WC2 a success, then building that ability into the game (via Battle.net) is a good idea. Is there some reason you're thinking this was an argument in your favor rather than theirs?
Oh yah.. I forgot, DRM and other Piracy measures work sooooo well don't they?
They don't, and they know it, that's why they're doing it this way instead. DRM doesn't work, but they don't have a problem with piracy with their online-only games (or at least a smaller problem by several orders of magnitude).
So... you've pointed out several good points why Blizzard would want to do this. Did you have any points against, or was your point to argue that this is, indeed, a good idea for Blizzard?
I can accept and understand if they're not wanting to allow spawning any longer, but banning local net play is just wrong. There's just something about playing multiplayer and hearing somebody cursing in the other room because they've just noticed that you've been slaughtering their doods.
There's nothing in the announcement that states they're disallowing spawning. Nor is there anything to suggest you won't be allowed to play with others on the same LAN.
Pretty reasonable solution--the ability to just download all the old games (in both PC and Mac--even if you just have an old PC game key) more than makes up for it.
Did they ever release PC-only or Mac-only keys? I know their most recent titles work on both sides (I'm looking at my WarCraft III CD right now and it lists both Windows and Macintosh as supported by this disc, my WarCraft II Battle-Net Edition CD says the same, alas I can't find any others at the moment but I thought my Diablo II CDs also supported both). I don't remember how long they've been releasing CDs that work in either type of machine, but I assume the if older CDs only worked in one kind of machine or the other, it was due to technical limitations (having the same CD work in either type of machine either wasn't possible or wasn't reliable "back in the day"...)
In BC if you are driving along the highway at 80kph and the speed limit is 80kph, but if everyone else is going 90kph, you are actually breaking the law because you are driving at an unsafe speed in relation to the cars around you.
Commonly repeated myth, not actually true. Now, if you were doing 40kph when everyone around you is doing 90kph, this would be true, but 80kph while the average motorist is doing 90kph breaks no laws at all whatsoever. A 10kph difference does not constitute "an unsafe speed".
Daemon simply means demon in mythology so I would bet in his eyes the term is interchangeable, it is in mine.
Um, no, this is pretty much the exact opposite of the truth. In modern usage they've become nearly synonymous, but in mythology "daemon" refers to the ancient Greek beings that are really more closely analogous with "angels" in modern usage. Daemons are intermediaries between men and the gods, including everything from minor divinities down to ghosts of dead heroes. Of particular interest was the "agathos daemon", which is rather like a Greek "guardian angel".
something that shouldn't happen without surface tension.
That's from the/. summary of the article. I really don't know why the/. summary mentions that droplets can't form without surface tension when the Nature summary makes it clear that the droplets form due to surface tension. Indeed, the/. summary, read naively, would seem to imply that the droplets form due to some cause other than surface tension.
Err, if the/. summary had said what you said it said ("droplets can't form without surface tension"), combined with the fact that they do form, it would in fact imply that there is surface tension. However, phrased as it actually is ("shouldn't" rather than "can't"), you're right, it almost sounds like they're trying to say it's due to something else.
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SCOTUS ruled that what you throw out is public property...
Right, but that just means the discs are public property (assuming the data was on disc). If I throw away a book, someone can grab that book out of the trash and claim it for themselves. However, the author does not lose the copyright (even if it was the author who threw away the book).
I know he was stupid to do this, however, I was not aware how much of a cornerstone UAVs are to our current military strategy. ...
Goodness, you must listen to different news outlets than me. From what I've heard, you'd get the impression that our currently ongoing wars are the last wars we're ever going to fight in person. Next war (or these ones if they go on for more than a couple more years), all our soldiers will be in a datacenter in New Mexico or somewhere while the machines they're controlling are on whatever battlefield it is...
Wasn't the CDA shot down way back?
Only the anti-indecency/anti-obscenity parts.
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.
Reading comprehension failure. They never claimed SC2 would benefit from that. You're making a comparison they never made, then pointing out that it's not a valid comparison. Okay... so... your point was? Did you have something to say that actually addresses the text you quoted above it, about online games being able to continually evolve after release?
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
Well, the second option would be MUCH more expensive for Blizzard, requiring a MASSIVE investment in server resources to handle. Since they're doing this to increase profits, I'm sure they're choosing the second option. ;)
How long have they been talking about Starcraft II?
Substantially less time than they talked about Diablo II before releasing it, and way, way less time than they spent talking about WarCraft III before finally releasing it.
I'm beginning to believe it will have the same release date as Duke Nukem Forever......
Then you're beginning to believe something incredibly stupid...
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.
Really? What are the bandwidth requirements per player for SC2? And how did you get those numbers? Or, if you don't have those numbers, what made you think anyone would read the above statement you just made and not instantly realize that you're clearly talking out your ass? And once people realized you're just making shit up to support your argument, what made you think they'd even read the rest of what you posted, knowing you're posting dishonestly from the very first paragraph?
You make it sound like a crime for a company to do something that benefits itself.
Welcome to Slashdot! :)
...because the one big joy they had with the former game, was the exact option that they're now taking away.
Really? How are they preventing you from getting together with all your friends and playing together?
Did you really get that joy from some knowledge about the underlying technology being used to transmit the data around? I think most people who enjoy this get their joy from playing together with their friends, something they have no intention of taking away, not from some esoteric knowledge about the network protocol being used...
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..
Anyone taking bets on what percentage of people saying this today are going to buy the game anyway? Put be down in the >95% pool...
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.
Given that it worked fine in WarCraft III, I don't see why I wouldn't "lap it up". Silly me, accepting something that works fine and is fun to play. I'm sorry my fun offends your religious sensibilities, but I'm not joining your jihad because a company doesn't comply with your ideology. I'm too busy having fun, and your ideology is kinda silly...
"We would not take out LAN if we did not feel we could offer players something better."
You fucking can't.
You know this a priori how? Personally, I have no religious beliefs about network performance. I like to actually see it in action before claiming I know how well it performs. Silly me, preferring evidence to religious fervor...
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.
So you not only haven't seen how well the new game works, you haven't seen how well Battle.net works in over a decade, but you know how well it will work next year based on a completely different game you saw over a decade ago.
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.
I doubt it...
...they would probably want to send all data directly through their own servers, so that you don't get to figure out the IP address of those you are playing against.
Do you have any conception of how much more expensive this would be for Blizzard? Do you understand that they want to make as large a profit as possible? Given this, doesn't it make more sense to assume they've actually written the code you said they'd need to do to pass the packets over the LAN?
Maybe they haven't, maybe they've chosen the option that both degrades game performance and costs them more money to host. I'm just not seeing that as likely...
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.
So, explain to me how having eight people in the same room playing against each other is negatively impacted by having the interface for connecting to the game run through your Battle.net login?
This sounds like it might make playing as a group from behind a household NAT router much more difficult, no?
No. LAN games adapted for Internet play sometimes have this problem, requiring holes in the firewall and other tricks. Games designed for the Internet don't have these problems. So, it sounds like this will make playing behind a household NAT easier, no longer requiring the tricks you needed to get it working in WC3 and such...
There at least will be a speed penalty.
Not necessarily. If it's well implemented, no, not at all. If it's naively implemented, there definitely would be. Being /., the "common wisdom" assumes a naive implementation from a company with a decade and a half experience on the subject.
THis is the result of a great gaming house bought by a corporate whore. [...] Can someone at least point me to a link that explains their 'reasoning' on this?
What would be the point? Your mind is already made up. Or do you really think when you've reached the point of calling someone a "corporate whore", that when you read what they say on a subject, you aren't going to simply consider it propaganda?
They explained it in their press releases. You didn't buy the explanation. No point rereading it...
If there is no possibility to play the game in a LAN without Internet access I won't buy it. Period.
Which is perfectly fine. Blizzard believes the number of people who do this (and I'm sure they have no illusions about the fact that this will dissuade some people from buying) will be smaller than the number of sales they will make that they wouldn't otherwise make if they require everyone playing to be able to legitimately log in through battle.net. Having hosted one LAN party where we required everyone have a valid key to play, and personally witnessing a group of players make a quick run to Best Buy as soon as this was clear, I would have to say they're almost certainly right. They may indeed lose you as a customer, but they'll gain many more customers than they lose.
Remember KALI?
I'm sure they do. LAN play was perfectly possible without it, but Kali enabled it over TCP/IP, allowing it to be done over the internet. So if Kali is what make WC2 a success, then building that ability into the game (via Battle.net) is a good idea. Is there some reason you're thinking this was an argument in your favor rather than theirs?
Oh yah.. I forgot, DRM and other Piracy measures work sooooo well don't they?
They don't, and they know it, that's why they're doing it this way instead. DRM doesn't work, but they don't have a problem with piracy with their online-only games (or at least a smaller problem by several orders of magnitude).
So... you've pointed out several good points why Blizzard would want to do this. Did you have any points against, or was your point to argue that this is, indeed, a good idea for Blizzard?
I can accept and understand if they're not wanting to allow spawning any longer, but banning local net play is just wrong. There's just something about playing multiplayer and hearing somebody cursing in the other room because they've just noticed that you've been slaughtering their doods.
There's nothing in the announcement that states they're disallowing spawning. Nor is there anything to suggest you won't be allowed to play with others on the same LAN.
Pretty reasonable solution--the ability to just download all the old games (in both PC and Mac--even if you just have an old PC game key) more than makes up for it.
Did they ever release PC-only or Mac-only keys? I know their most recent titles work on both sides (I'm looking at my WarCraft III CD right now and it lists both Windows and Macintosh as supported by this disc, my WarCraft II Battle-Net Edition CD says the same, alas I can't find any others at the moment but I thought my Diablo II CDs also supported both). I don't remember how long they've been releasing CDs that work in either type of machine, but I assume the if older CDs only worked in one kind of machine or the other, it was due to technical limitations (having the same CD work in either type of machine either wasn't possible or wasn't reliable "back in the day"...)
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
Right, and the performance characteristics of a decade old game played on the Internet as it was a decade ago is very relevant to this discussion.
In BC if you are driving along the highway at 80kph and the speed limit is 80kph, but if everyone else is going 90kph, you are actually breaking the law because you are driving at an unsafe speed in relation to the cars around you.
Commonly repeated myth, not actually true. Now, if you were doing 40kph when everyone around you is doing 90kph, this would be true, but 80kph while the average motorist is doing 90kph breaks no laws at all whatsoever. A 10kph difference does not constitute "an unsafe speed".
Technically, it's MSFT. MS is Morgan Stanley.
So, Morgan Stanley was behind MS-DOS?
Daemon simply means demon in mythology so I would bet in his eyes the term is interchangeable, it is in mine.
Um, no, this is pretty much the exact opposite of the truth. In modern usage they've become nearly synonymous, but in mythology "daemon" refers to the ancient Greek beings that are really more closely analogous with "angels" in modern usage. Daemons are intermediaries between men and the gods, including everything from minor divinities down to ghosts of dead heroes. Of particular interest was the "agathos daemon", which is rather like a Greek "guardian angel".
something that shouldn't happen without surface tension.
That's from the /. summary of the article. I really don't know why the /. summary mentions that droplets can't form without surface tension when the Nature summary makes it clear that the droplets form due to surface tension. Indeed, the /. summary, read naively, would seem to imply that the droplets form due to some cause other than surface tension.
Err, if the /. summary had said what you said it said ("droplets can't form without surface tension"), combined with the fact that they do form, it would in fact imply that there is surface tension. However, phrased as it actually is ("shouldn't" rather than "can't"), you're right, it almost sounds like they're trying to say it's due to something else.