EPT
So what's the deal with LAN bitching? Make sure you read that in a Jerry Seinfeld-ish voice like the rest of my entry titles. Personally, I don't find it to be that big a deal. Yeah, LAN is good LAN is great, but is having to log on battlenet still that difficult? I felt the biggest push behind personal lans was that you get to play with all your friends. Obviously you couldn't have everyone on their own internet while doing this, so splitting up yours and moving on did the job back then. There's going to always be haters ranting and raving about that 40 ping vs 5 ping, but I feel that RTS is a bit more forgiving in that aspect. Sure, you want to be the fastest AWP headshot in the land on CS, but complaining about latency in a game like SC2 is pretty sad. It's not brood war, where twitch mutalisk gaming is king. .003 of a second isn't going to hurt you that badly. Some might argue that twitch gaming with some marauders/marines might make a good difference if you are the fucking flash and move faster than the game can.
LAN's were about togetherness for me. Going up against your close friends in punching range was pretty goddamn awesome. We still had the internet back then. We were hooked up. It was all lone and good to go. Keep in mind this was around 2002 or 2003. When SC1+BW came out, it was around '99, when cable internet was still new and exciting content. I'm sure most people would prefer lanning to 56k connection, but even back then was it really THAT noticeable? I don't know. I was like 15 and all I played was BGH and NR20 Fastest Maps (see silver sc2 scrub).
Fastest Maps
I wonder if we'll see stuff like that again. There was a huge community for fastest maps back then, but with the new random opponent ladder system I'm assuming most will just stick to that to prove themselves. Certainly everyone reading this remembers those, there were like 100 versions all different colors, stacked minerals. I'm sure other people remember stacking photon cannons too. Oh god, that was hilarious. ("Oh, just 1-3 cannons? Certainly my army of carriers can handle that." *nuke goes off*)
Ch34t3rz
While I'm on the subject of cheese and cheats, wonder what Blizzard is going to do this time about map hacking? It's apparently ruined WC3 from what my friends told me who used to play. I remember using the shit out of one when I played stupid comp stomps against people who BS (backstab). ICCUP has anticheat stuff too right? Well, regardless, having a maphack will probably be an indispensable tool in SC2 as far as countering goes. No tricks will go unseen.
