For all you StarCraft players ....................

[Kalros]

I'm sure anyone who follows gaming news has seen today's biggest story:

http://kotaku.com/5304113/no-lan-play-for-starcraft-ii

This is the biggest load of crap I have ever heard, from a company I've always respected ................... until now. I was really afraid that the association with Activi$ion was going to change the way that Blizzard did their business (despite claims by the company themselves that it would not), and it looks like my fears were true.

I accepted the whole "3 Seperate Games" announcement, even found some positives in it. But removing any LAN play?! No freaking way! That is the ONLY way I've played the original since around 2000. And if they stick with this statement, I will NOT be buying a copy.

Anyone who cares, please hop over and sign the petition:

http://www.petitiononline.com/LANSC2/petition.html

[Malekyth]

You're losing your respect for a company over the discontinuation of a single feature? I can see how this would affect the LAN party culture, but can't see how it'll break the game for anyone. It's just a different way of playing. With voice and headsets, who cares?

How can you put this down to association with Activision? Development and maintenance resources are not infinite, and you hardly ever have as much time or as many people to throw at a task as you want or need. Doubtless, someone looked at the data and decided their available resources would not be well-spent on LAN play, especially when they have Battle.net.

Sorry, online petitions don't work. They are the equivalent of saying, "yes, you're really good at this job, and you couldn't be responsible for the hit games you've already got under your belt if you weren't in the disciplined habit of thinking very hard about every decision you make ... but there are more of us, so DO WHAT WE SAY!" The day Blizzard submits to an online petition, is the day after hell freezes over.

[mawdudi]

"safeguard against piracy"

Like this will make LAN pirates buy the game lol. It's actually the opposite, I bought the original SC back in 1998 after I played it on a LAN party. If I had not played it on LAN, I probably would have never bought it.

The only thing removing LAN option does is that it annoys LAN people and makes Blizzard lose few sales...removing LAN option to prevent piracy is one of the stupidest ideas I have heard for awhile.

[mmcookies]

You're losing your respect for a company over the discontinuation of a single feature? I can see how this would affect the LAN party culture, but can't see how it'll break the game for anyone. It's just a different way of playing. With voice and headsets, who cares? How can you put this down to association with Activision? Development and maintenance resources are not infinite, and you hardly ever have as much time or as many people to throw at a task as you want or need. Doubtless, someone looked at the data and decided their available resources would not be well-spent on LAN play, especially when they have Battle.net. Sorry, online petitions don't work. They are the equivalent of saying, "yes, you're really good at this job, and you couldn't be responsible for the hit games you've already got under your belt if you weren't in the disciplined habit of thinking very hard about every decision you make ... but there are more of us, so DO WHAT WE SAY!" The day Blizzard submits to an online petition, is the day after hell freezes over.You'd be surprised. Activizzard is quite good at listening/manipulating their consumers when there's money to be made.

The main problem with LAN play is that Blizzard isn't making any money off of the feature, and this ain't the 1990's. The success of MMOs and distro networks like Steam have proven that centralized gaming works like a charm. There seems to be scarce demand for a LAN feature, and worse it might compete with the new battle.net portal.

So yes, petition away. Maybe there IS a significant demand for LAN play and Blizzard isn't seeing it in their marketing data, but it'd better be one hell of a demand to compete with the masterplan of beefing up bnet to be one of the world's leading gaming networks.

[Kalros]

It's just a different way of playing. With voice and headsets, who cares? Well, its up to 7500. I've watched it grow by 2000 in the last hour or so. So almost 10,000 who know of the petition care, and I'm sure there are more.

[algol]

Real reason: DRM and attempt at further profitization.

I don't enjoy playing with random 12 year olds online, while I do enjoy playing with family and friends on the LAN. Therefore I may not even be buying this now if it turns out to be true.

[Lax]

Well, I have to say, I'm not all that excited about being required to purchase 2 copies of the game to play it against the person sitting next to me, on another machine that I own, at my own house. The original Diablo had a "spawn mode" specifically so that you wouldn't have to purchase 2 copies of the game to play together. Other games would "let" you pass the CD after loading to get the game going, etc. That's not called stealing (assuming you purchased the game) or piracy (unless they are able to make the argument that they are leasing you StarCraft II service for life based on your initial purchase price plus $0 per any length of time, and then put it in their Terms of Service that it's prohibited), that's called fair use. It's obviously more about money (they clearly need bigger profit margins) than about a quality experience (and battle.net has always included ads), although the "anti-piracy" bit is a passable argument if not misguided. Pirates will still play through the single player game, and then spam the internet for a "multiplayer fix" until someone outside the range of DMCA provides one.

Anyway, not a deal breaker for me as far as buying the game, but to be honest it probably wont make me purchase that second copy of the game just to play against my wife. We will probably just have less fun playing the game than we would have otherwise.

[heyaz]

I will NOT be buying a copy.
Just like all the people who canceled and quit wow forever because of the will of the forsaken nerf

I don't believe you

[heyaz]

What's silly about many DRM implementations and things like this that are supposed to safeguard against piracy, is that there is one major flaw with their statistics (like the BSA's crap about xxx billion lost per year due to piracy) - most people who pirate software were not buyers anyway.

[Redbeard]

Just wanted to throw out (even though this is a SC thread) that theyre doing the same for Diablo 3.

Im fine with it as long as they dont charge for B.net.

We'll see what happens.

I love internet dramatics though. "A petition is being drafted!!" =P Oh noes.

[mmcookies]

hey now, don't bash internet petitioning

you will only see more of them in the future
and yes, they might even become serious business

[Perrigrin]

Can still play it LAN party style, just need the LAN to have a internet connection to set up the games via battle.net - And what LAN don't have internet connection today?

[Redbeard]

Real reason: DRM and attempt at further profitization.

I don't enjoy playing with random 12 year olds online, while I do enjoy playing with family and friends on the LAN. Therefore I may not even be buying this now if it turns out to be true.I dont understand your complaint. You can just as easily play with friends and family... on b.net. You dont have to play with random anybody.

[Kalros]

I am boggled by the QQ here. The only QQ is because its going to be a little harder to STEAL. So lets say I have 7 other friends over to my house to play some StarCraft 2 multiplayer, much like I've done with the original StarCraft in the past. You dont think its a little ridiculous that all 8 of us have to connect to the internet, then to battle.net, just to play a multiplayer game when we're all in the same room (or rooms depending on the setup)?! And do you honestly think multiple people in the same house having to go through the internet and battle.net wont get any lag when compared to a direct LAN setup? You think battle.net will be so fast and smooth? I'd be willing to take that wager.

And I sure hope you're not accusing me of wanting to STEAL it. I am not afraid to pay for a good quality game (assuming it has the features I want), I'm multiboxing WoW for f***s sake!






../forum/icon/quoteS.png
Quoted




Which will no doubt be crushing to LAN party fiends...if, that is, they still exist.



QFT Yes, they DO still exist. I figured I'd get alot of support here, but I realized this is the place where people to choose to play with themselves. HA!


I don't enjoy playing with random 12 year olds online, while I do enjoy playing with family and friends on the LAN. THANK YOU! Exactly! Another thing, I dont like playing with these nerds online (yes yes, I can look in a mirror), who play the game for 16 hours a day and could wipe the floor with me in 2 minutes.


I love internet dramatics though. "A petition is being drafted!!" =P Oh noes.
Well, it passed 12,000 signatures overnight. And its been up for less than 24 hours, so I'd say there are some people who actually DO give a s**t about this. Its not about "dramatics", its about keeping the features the core players want!

[Otlecs]

Damn.

I must've got lost.

I thought this was the General Multiboxing Discussions forum.

[Kalros]

Yeah, I should have put this in Off Topic. My mistake

As you wish -Gurb

[shaeman]

Whilst I bet you wont have the response times you would find on a lan - I'm pretty certain that battle.net would perform well enough for you to get all the same enjoyment you currently get now. You'd even be able to play with your friends when they weren't at your house too. I don't play starcraft but apparently someone said you can choose to play with your friends in there. So realistically I'm failing to see why you have your knickers in such a twist.

Making sweeping generalisations about a whole community probably wouldn't have helped your cause any either.

[mawdudi]

Whilst I bet you wont have the response times you would find on a lan - I'm pretty certain that battle.net would perform well enough for you to get all the same enjoyment you currently get now. You'd even be able to play with your friends when they weren't at your house too. I don't play starcraft but apparently someone said you can choose to play with your friends in there. So realistically I'm failing to see why you have your knickers in such a twist.

Making sweeping generalisations about a whole community probably wouldn't have helped your cause any either.

Well since you don't play Starcraft, you probably don't know that you are able to play Starcraft on LAN with only one player owning the cd and it is legal, since you can install a special Spawn-version of the game which allows you to play LAN games without owning the game.

Removing LAN means this isn't possible anymore. This isn't gonna raise sales of SC2, no one is gonna pay 40-50euros so they can play few games of SC2 over Battle.net during a LAN party.

Other than that raging about removing LAN is mostly pointless, people are just angry because they cant ware and play on LAN with no one buying the game.

[Taliesin]

Having been an avid StarCraft LAN player in the past, I agree that the main drawback to this change is that you lose the software spawn feature to quickly configure multiple machines using the same license for group play. Honestly, this wouldn't have been a big deal even in the past for the people I played with as we all had our own copies, but it made it easier for us to just get everything set up on another LAN (we used a university computer training room after regular hours, as opposed to actually using our own machines).

The additional latency that the whole BNet structure will introduce kinda sucks, but I would imagine that you'd hardly even notice it, and really doesn't affect RTS games as much as FPS and MMOs, since most of the action is based on processed decision making.

My biggest concern is that playing StarCraft games on BNet was an absolute cheater-fest as it seemed like 80% of the matches I played ended up with my opponent using one of a huge multitude of cheats to win the game. Granted, LAN games will be private sessions with password restricted entry, but I have such a tarnished idea of BNet multiplayer gaming that just the idea alone makes me cringe. I'm willing to wait to hear how the final implementation looks before I consider open gaming on there ever again. But I expect LAN gaming should be a fairly decent experience.


TL/DR: I'm more concerned about the lack of cheating control evident on BNet in the past, and less concerned about any technical issues or the spawn feature.

[Starbuck_Jones]

Its disappointing that they are choosing to remove LAN play. My favorite thing about LAN parties is you finally get to play the game with no lag. Not every ones DSL or Cable can handle 10-12 people hammering away at it at the same time. It only takes one r-tard at the LAN to fire up their torrent client and saturate the connection. If they choose to not add LAN support, im sure the community will.

I still plan to purchase it regardless to go through the campaigns.

[Lax]

My biggest concern is that playing StarCraft games on BNet was an absolute cheater-fest as it seemed like 80% of the matches I played ended up with my opponent using one of a huge multitude of cheats to win the game. Granted, LAN games will be private sessions with password restricted entry, but I have such a tarnished idea of BNet multiplayer gaming that just the idea alone makes me cringe. I'm willing to wait to hear how the final implementation looks before I consider open gaming on there ever again. But I expect LAN gaming should be a fairly decent experience. Yeah, map hacks and such were all too common. However, Diablo 2 and Warcraft 3 both have or had Warden at least for certain types of matches, so you can be sure that StarCraft 2 will have something similar. Of course, LAN games were never guaranteed to be cheat-free either (beyond walking over and punching whoever is cheating). I share your tarnished view of historic bnet though. D2 bots galore, economy counted in hundreds of duped rings, etc -- no fun.

The additional latency that the whole BNet structure will introduce kinda sucks, but I would imagine that you'd hardly even notice it, and really doesn't affect RTS games as much as FPS and MMOs, since most of the action is based on processed decision making. Now, I don't know if they are changing something with the new Battle.Net implementation, and I don't know if this is different for ranked matches, but historically every player connected directly to the host player, and if you were on the same local network, you would connect though LAN instead of WAN. So as far as that goes, the latency should be roughly the same either way. However, if you happen to lose connection to battle.net during play, that would kill the game (and yeah, someone could kill the bandwidth with torrents, if the LAN administrator is unable to prevent that).

I was going to mention the latency thing in my previous post but after thinking about it, if they keep the original connection style it wouldn't affect LANs. The other thing I considered mentioning was matchmaking, which is likely more of a chore on bnet than on a LAN, but I haven't seen the new BNet yet so I obviously can't comment that it will suck. I know they made a lot of design changes to BNet and perhaps matchmaking to play exclusively with your LAN won't be so bad.

[Taliesin]

Now, I don't know if they are changing something with the new Battle.Net implementation, and I don't know if this is different for ranked matches, but historically every player connected directly to the host player, and if you were on the same local network, you would connect though LAN instead of WAN.
Hmm, that raises a very good question. I assumed that the removal of LAN support meant that all game traffic would be directed through BNet, as opposed to BNet playing middle-man for negotiating site-to-host communications between players. If they mean that the option to connect to the host directly via a LAN option is being removed from the menu and that BNet will simply continue to serve as negotiator of connections directly between player PCs, then it may not be quite as bad as it sounds. Sounds like we may need more details beyond simply "the LAN option is being removed".

[mmcookies]

Assumptions make excellent basis for arguments.

[Physics101]

Not every ones DSL or Cable can handle 10-12 people hammering away at it at the same time.

I should fire up Starcraft and see how much bandwidth it uses.

WoW is like 4kb each way.....

It's not the KB that'll get people. It's people having to set port forwarding on their routers and gutting their firewalls. Many cheap to mid grade routers just aren't going to have the option set available to pull it off. Personally I had this problem when I had friends connecting to me for d2 over bnet, it wouldn't let the second connection from my lan connect. In the end I never got it to play nice, so I just yarrrrred the wireless of a neighbor for the other machine.

There is a lot of old threads and websites devoted to the hoops you have to jump through to get battle.net to work with 2 or more machines coming from the same ip. If they wanted to protect the game from piracy release a USB dongle that needs to be plugged in for the game to verify, they've proved authenticators are cheap as hell.

(FYI there is already an emulated battle.net for pirated SC, D2, and WC3 out there, somehow I doubt they will be hard pressed to revamp it for sc2)

In the end they are removing a feature that only punishes the people who buy the game, the people who pirate it will probably get the emu b.net connection info/software packed in with their torrent.

[Sychosys]

As a person who was in the WotLK beta I can 100% affirm that Blizzard's wish to merge everything into battlenet has been going on a lot longer than when they became Actard(tm)... They do and have pretty much kept complete autonomy through their last what, 3 purchases? What keeps boggling my mind is how a company with such a high net income can keep being bought out :) I have not seen a deal that hasn't involved Blizzard where some web site or another hasnt pointed out that Blizzard is pretty much a hands off... They just get to claim the income revenues as part of themselves to boost their standing.. Vevindi able to buy Activision? Well after they got ahold of Blizzard, yeah!

[Kayley]

Good thing they removed vultures then. No way I (Australia -> US (WTB more aussie hosts)) can snipe the damn spider mines with the latency ;(
LAN was too much fun.

RiP.
'eep eep' *boom*

[Bettysue]

It's not the KB that'll get people. It's people having to set port forwarding on their routers and gutting their firewalls. Many cheap to mid grade routers just aren't going to have the option set available to pull it off. Personally I had this problem when I had friends connecting to me for d2 over bnet, it wouldn't let the second connection from my lan connect. In the end I never got it to play nice, so I just yarrrrred the wireless of a neighbor for the other machine.

Not hijacking, just wanted to throw this out there in relation to multiple BNet connections, just set the port forwarding of the router to forward the ports to itself and you can keep your firewall up without the issues.

ie TCP 8110 --> TCP 8110 192.168.1.1 will enable the forwarding for the entire LAN, without opening the port to unsolicited connections.