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Starcraft 2: no LAN support?!

The Fatman

The Fatman

Captain
Captain
http://www.gamespot.com/news/6212765.html

Blizzard confirmed that SC2 will not support or allow LAN play, citing Piracy concerns. All multiplayer must be done through battle.net.

I will never begrudge a company for getting the money they are owed and deserve. However, the most fun I've ever had with any game was playing 8 player SC1 on a LAN party. No need to jerk around with battle.net, no lag, and if someone new wanted to join in, we could burn them a copy and they could join the LAN to try the game. Maybe we have an abnormally honest group, but almost every single person who we gave "sample" copies of the game to ended up buying a retail version to play on the old battle.net at home anyways.

I guess I'm rambling at this point, but I just can't say how strongly I disagree with this decision by Blizzard.
 
Yeah, this is lame. Its cool though, I already decided I wouldn't be buying this game when they decided to divide it into three parts. Good luck getting my money Blizzard
 
LAN was almost the exclusive way my friends and I played Starcraft! This is bullshit taken to ridiculous extremes.
 
Naturally there is a petition out to get it put in. They even included "please" in their plea. I guess they took a note from Diablo III fans and realized mouthing off and acting like jerks to get a change done doesn't impress Blizzard much.
 
I somehow dont see Blizzard caving in. They know their game will sell so they probably wont care
 
I don't know if this will make a large dent in their sells either. I have SC but I've never played it (friend gave me a legally purchased used copy last year) and after hearing it'll be sold in 3 parts I'm in no hurry to get involved in SC II either.
 
How about a system where you can only do LAN if you have an authorized B.net account, like after you have signed in just ONCE to Battle.net, your game opens up the option for LAN? Basically just an authentication process.
 
The Evil Dead said:
How about a system where you can only do LAN if you have an authorized B.net account, like after you have signed in just ONCE to Battle.net, your game opens up the option for LAN? Basically just an authentication process.
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Stop, you're using basic logic and sense! That doesn't make money!
 
Blizzard announced that Diablo III wouldn't support LAN play ages ago, that the same is true of Starcraft II is hardly surprising.

Foley0402 said:
No need to jerk around with battle.net, no lag, and if someone new wanted to join in, we could burn them a copy and they could join the LAN to try the game.
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So you burned copies of a game that generously included a multiplayer spawn client specifically for this purpose, and you wonder why Blizzard is concerned about piracy? :lol:

Teelie said:
and after hearing it'll be sold in 3 parts I'm in no hurry to get involved in SC II either.
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Starcraft II is being sold in three parts in the same way that Starcraft is sold in two parts, or that Diablo II is sold in two parts, or that World of Warcraft is sold in three parts. The difference this time around being that Blizzard is actually telling folks about their expansion plans prior to the initial release. The other difference is that owners of the first release who're only interested in multiplayer won't need to buy the other releases to receive the multiplayer updates included therein, it's a common platform. TCO for the multiplayer-only crowd will be lower than that of the original Starcraft.

clint g said:
Well, theres also talk of making battlenet a pay service
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No there isn't.
 
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We were talking about this in WoW yesterday. Everyone had great stories about LAN parties but no one could remember the last time they actually went to one.

I'm perfectly aware that a local LAN is going to have next to no latency issues compared with playing through a remote server, but the reason we did that ten years ago was because playing online fucking sucked. Now, with a good high speed connection and a VoIP, you can play your friends online and have a rewarding experience. RTS games don't usually come down to millisecond timing issues anyway.

Blizzard has figured out that the only way to make money in the PC gaming market is to force the people who want to play your game to play it directly through them. Looking at the state of the PC game market, who in their right mind would blame them?
 
Rii said:
clint g said:
Rii said:
No there isn't.
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Yes there has been. How it gets implemented, if it gets implemented or when it gets implemented is a different story
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In other news, there's "talk" that NASA never actually went to the moon.
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And, yet I posted a link from a Blizzard rep saying they were discussing it :confused:
His response probably wasn't what you'd want to hear. "We are looking to monetize Battle.Net so that we get to keep making these games and updating features," said Wilson. "We kind of have to."
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His words, not mine. How they do it I don't know but you're keeping your head in the sand about it doesnt change the fact that they were discussing ways to get money out of battle net
 
So what does Rob Pardo have to say about Jay Wilson's comments?

So Julian Wilson told us that you guys are looking monetize Battle.Net in some way. Is that right?

Wow, that's an evil way of putting it. Julian's turning into a business guy on me. Here's the way I would put it. We're definitely not looking at turning Diablo into a subscription based game. It's clearly not an MMO, so it's not appropriate to do a business model like that. The way we approach all of our games now, is we come up with what we think is a great game, and then we wrap the appropriate business model around it. If that's just a box price, then that's that.

With Battle.Net we're definitely looking at possible different features that we might be able to do for additional money. We're not talking about Hellgate or anything like that. We're not going to tack things on. I think World of Warcraft is a great example to look at. We charge people if they want to switch servers or if they want name changes, things that aren't core to the game experience, they're really just optional things that some people want. It takes us some development work to do it, so it makes sense to charge for it. We would never do something like say to get the full game experience, you'll have to pay extra.
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OH NOES, MA SKY IS FALLING.
 
The difference I see between SCII and Diablo or WOW is that SCII is three seperate campaigns of the races involved. Diablo and WOW had expansion packs that added to the existing content. They never had "missing" content. The way StarCraft II is being represented is that it will be sold in three chunks, each race being a seperate purchase. Sort of like buying it on installment plans. You purchase one third of the total game every time you buy one of the parts. It might not be exactly like that but they have poorly sold the concept to a lot of people who believe otherwise.
 
Rii said:
So what does Rob Pardo have to say about Jay Wilson's comments?

So Julian Wilson told us that you guys are looking monetize Battle.Net in some way. Is that right?

Wow, that's an evil way of putting it. Julian's turning into a business guy on me. Here's the way I would put it. We're definitely not looking at turning Diablo into a subscription based game. It's clearly not an MMO, so it's not appropriate to do a business model like that. The way we approach all of our games now, is we come up with what we think is a great game, and then we wrap the appropriate business model around it. If that's just a box price, then that's that.

With Battle.Net we're definitely looking at possible different features that we might be able to do for additional money. We're not talking about Hellgate or anything like that. We're not going to tack things on. I think World of Warcraft is a great example to look at. We charge people if they want to switch servers or if they want name changes, things that aren't core to the game experience, they're really just optional things that some people want. It takes us some development work to do it, so it makes sense to charge for it. We would never do something like say to get the full game experience, you'll have to pay extra.
Click to expand...

OH NOES, MA SKY IS FALLING.
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And so...they're trying to charge for stuff? Yep sounds like they were indeed trying to make money off of Battlenet. I'm glad you're finally admitting to the obvious
 
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