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

[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.