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So LAN has become an issue again, due to multiple screw-ups during the recent MLG tournament. From my perspective, this whole LAN issue is really indicative of a more serious problem: Blizzard's reluctance to talk to players. Blizzard is a company, and I get that. They have PR to worry about and they don't want to spoil their reputation.
Unfortunately their reputation is already spoiled. Blizzard's customers are almost all demanding LAN capability, and Blizzard is doing nothing about it. That is a failing business strategy, and it's not really going to lead to good PR.
Worse yet, Blizzard isn't communicating with the community on why. We've gotten a handful of interviews where Blizzard representatives have danced around the issue, claiming it'd be too difficult to implement because currently, everything is tied into Battle.net.
This is demonstrably false thanks to the existence of single-player score screens and the general single-player functionality that does exist. Thankfully, some community members have pointed out that the real reason Blizzard isn't implementing LAN is because of the whole KeSPA issue with SC:BW.
Fine, I get that. Blizzard doesn't want their game to get hijacked again. But they're going about this all very poorly, at least from what I've seen.
First of all, Blizzard should be telling us this. The community shouldn't be responsible for informing itself on why Blizzard is doing what it is doing. If Blizzard wants to have good PR, it should adopt a more transparent approach to its interactions with its customers.
If they don't want to add LAN because of what happened with KeSPA, they should just say so. Beating around the bush, dodging the question, and quickly shooting the idea down the moment it is suggested with no explanation is just adding to the communities' frustration with the lack of LAN support.
Being upfront and honest with your consumers is more likely to garner support than basically ignoring them.
The second issue is that regardless of why LAN isn't being implemented right now, there is absolutely no reason why LAN can't be done. It is honestly laziness on Blizzards part that is the sole reason LAN isn't a function anymore.
There have been multiple suggestions, many of them excellent ideas, on how to implement LAN while still allowing Blizzard to maintain control over tournaments.
Sure; we don't know the full scope of the issue; maybe it'd be really really hard to implement LAN, and all of the suggestions are oversimplifying the problem. If that's the case, telling the community why their proposed solutions wouldn't work would go a lot farther than the current lack of response we're currently getting.
  
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Sometimes orders come from above.
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On February 27 2012 09:30 mrafaeldie12 wrote:
Sometimes orders come from above.
This. I think personally that activision might be part of the reason blizzard hasn't put out on this yet. But I totally agree that it would be good for them and good for eSports. Hopefully they come around.
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they got in bed with activision and are now all about the money. sad cuz SC2 would greatly improve its strategic development with the addition of LAN. IMHO HotS new units look retarded and zerg is getting more units to worry about. Also SC2 feels pretty much like a coinflip thats awful for an eSport, its like CS:S to CS 1.6, a random game with better looks against perfect gameplay and balance.
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On February 27 2012 09:28 Kasha_Not_Kesha wrote:If they don't want to add LAN because of what happened with KeSPA, they should just say so.
I believe they have. If you check the the interview with Dustin Browder done by TL, you will hear him say that there will not be a LAN cus that would mean that Blizzard have to remake the whole battlenet 2.0 since its platform is running online or something like that.
i.e No LAN for SC2
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Well, it's not like LAN support can't be done.
They said that it was impossible to merge servers/ transfer character without losing their achievements and ladder history, then they decided to merge LA+NA, TW+KR, etc.
Also, they know how to add LAN support (they are a gaming company, it's their obligation to know how to program). We learn how add LAN support in a game in the 2nd semester of Electronic Engineering, so...
"Time" is not an excuse neither. The SC2 does not work on WoW/D3. They are a huge company with different groups of people working on different stuff at the same time, so "time" and "not enough people" are not excuses.
If there is a reason why they don't add LAN to game, it would be the old excuse of piracy. With all that DRM stuff going on with Ubisoft, it wouldn't be surprising that Blizzard is afraid of piracy.
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On February 27 2012 09:39 Zeburial wrote:Show nested quote +On February 27 2012 09:28 Kasha_Not_Kesha wrote:If they don't want to add LAN because of what happened with KeSPA, they should just say so. I believe they have. If you check the the interview with Dustin Browder done by TL, you will hear him say that there will not be a LAN cus that would mean that Blizzard have to remake the whole battlenet 2.0 since its platform is running online or something like that. i.e No LAN for SC2
You say that like remaking bnet 2.0 would be a terrible thing... It would be welcomed by a vast majority of players. Bnet 2.0 is terrible, especially in comparison to the original. It's waaaay buggier and has much less functionality. Chat channels are a joke, sometimes it straight up doesn't load, the custom game screen is a total pain (hope you don't want to play anything past the first page).
A bnet 2.0 remake would be desired, because right now it feels like a giant step backward to bnet 0.2.
As for LAN, I've been watching some assembly this weekend (though the hours were rough) because of the PPV MLG thing. In just the small amount I watched, dApollo lagged out of a game twice, while one of the players lagged out once (can't remember who it was, sorry). In just the 3-4 hours of assembly I watched, 3 lag outs. Nice one bnet, how about lan?
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On February 27 2012 09:37 jumbotroN wrote:
they got in bed with activision and are now all about the money. sad cuz SC2 would greatly improve its strategic development with the addition of LAN. IMHO HotS new units look retarded and zerg is getting more units to worry about. Also SC2 feels pretty much like a coinflip thats awful for an eSport, its like CS:S to CS 1.6, a random game with better looks against perfect gameplay and balance.
No, not even close.
One of the biggest things is because of balance - They wanted to be able to see every game played, and collect data from it so they could have a better idea of how to balance their game. I think what sparked this idea was actually their adventure into the realm of MMORPG - aka World of Warcraft.
See, a WoW server is basically a bunch of numbers. Your character's states, position on the world map, shit they have in the inventory etc. After seeing the power of an MMORPG server, Blizzard decided that with Starcraft 2, in order to have the best idea of the balance of their game, they would use a similar server for SC2. In order to do this, they have to make sure that no game is being played offline (at least, when it's player vs player) so they could literally have statistics for EVERY game. This lead them to create SC2 around this idea, and eventually they figured out that they couldn't implement LAN because then they wouldn't have statistics to a lot of the games that would be played offline by pro players - and let's be honest, pro players would use LAN mode more than anyone. They probably wouldn't even play online after the establishment of pro houses, unless it was to play against friends from other teams.
TL;DR - Technology has advanced, and Blizzard is trying to figure out how they can take advantage of that. Also, they need their servers to be like this for balance.
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On February 27 2012 09:39 Zeburial wrote:Show nested quote +On February 27 2012 09:28 Kasha_Not_Kesha wrote:If they don't want to add LAN because of what happened with KeSPA, they should just say so. I believe they have. If you check the the interview with Dustin Browder done by TL, you will hear him say that there will not be a LAN cus that would mean that Blizzard have to remake the whole battlenet 2.0 since its platform is running online or something like that. i.e No LAN for SC2
That never stopped Blizzard from remaking Starcraft 1 lol.
![[image loading]](http://www.oocities.com/Area51/Comet/2481/96e3pic1.gif)
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The original SC looks really cluttered and all the units seem unintelligible. This is why I prefer the actual BW's art style/colour choice since I can actually clearly see what I'm doing.
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This poor horse.
I honestly don't totally understand what you are saying. You are mad primarily because Blizzard hasn't stated why there is no lan? They have, multiple times. The two main ones are piracy, and having to redo the game without battle.net involved. They state these things. The community just says "no thats not the real reason." Ok...
They probably DO want to maintain control of the tournament scene (more specifically, the right to shut it down), but that doesn't invalidate their other reasons. More importantly, they don't have much motivation to do so. What do they really GAIN from adding LAN? Seriously, what do they stand to gain? The community will thank them for like a week, most people will bitch about how it should have been there from the start, and within a week everyone will be back to bashing Blizzard about every other problem they have with them. They can't win.
The SC2 competitive scene will not die out without LAN. It honestly isn't much of a hindrance to its growth (this is hard to prove one way or another). It is just annoying. Yes, I want lan. Do I ever expect to see it? No.
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On February 27 2012 09:39 Zeburial wrote:Show nested quote +On February 27 2012 09:28 Kasha_Not_Kesha wrote:If they don't want to add LAN because of what happened with KeSPA, they should just say so. I believe they have. If you check the the interview with Dustin Browder done by TL, you will hear him say that there will not be a LAN cus that would mean that Blizzard have to remake the whole battlenet 2.0 since its platform is running online or something like that. i.e No LAN for SC2
That's absurd though. The game runs perfectly fine in single player mode i.e. without access to Battle.net. Allowing us to have LAN functionality from there is dead simple, they just aren't doing it.
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On February 27 2012 10:21 HardlyNever wrote:
I honestly don't totally understand what you are saying. You are mad primarily because Blizzard hasn't stated why there is no lan? They have, multiple times. The two main ones are piracy, and having to redo the game without battle.net involved. They state these things. The community just says "no thats not the real reason." Ok...
Because piracy and having to re-make the game without battle.net are both issues that can be worked around while adding LAN functionality.
What do they really GAIN from adding LAN? Seriously, what do they stand to gain? The community will thank them for like a week, most people will bitch about how it should have been there from the start, and within a week everyone will be back to bashing Blizzard about every other problem they have with them. They can't win.
I don't really see "people won't appreciate it enough" as a valid reason not to cater to their consumer, though I'm willing to accept that this is a bit of an idealistic and unrealistic view; they don't really have any reason to add LAN from a business perspective. Then again, I can't see why they wouldn't want to. I dunno.
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On February 27 2012 10:14 IntoTheheart wrote:
The original SC looks really cluttered and all the units seem unintelligible. This is why I prefer the actual BW's art style/colour choice since I can actually clearly see what I'm doing.
What the fuck are you talking about...?
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On February 27 2012 09:58 hoby2000 wrote:Show nested quote +On February 27 2012 09:37 jumbotroN wrote:
they got in bed with activision and are now all about the money. sad cuz SC2 would greatly improve its strategic development with the addition of LAN. IMHO HotS new units look retarded and zerg is getting more units to worry about. Also SC2 feels pretty much like a coinflip thats awful for an eSport, its like CS:S to CS 1.6, a random game with better looks against perfect gameplay and balance. No, not even close. One of the biggest things is because of balance - They wanted to be able to see every game played, and collect data from it so they could have a better idea of how to balance their game. I think what sparked this idea was actually their adventure into the realm of MMORPG - aka World of Warcraft. See, a WoW server is basically a bunch of numbers. Your character's states, position on the world map, shit they have in the inventory etc. After seeing the power of an MMORPG server, Blizzard decided that with Starcraft 2, in order to have the best idea of the balance of their game, they would use a similar server for SC2. In order to do this, they have to make sure that no game is being played offline (at least, when it's player vs player) so they could literally have statistics for EVERY game. This lead them to create SC2 around this idea, and eventually they figured out that they couldn't implement LAN because then they wouldn't have statistics to a lot of the games that would be played offline by pro players - and let's be honest, pro players would use LAN mode more than anyone. They probably wouldn't even play online after the establishment of pro houses, unless it was to play against friends from other teams. TL;DR - Technology has advanced, and Blizzard is trying to figure out how they can take advantage of that. Also, they need their servers to be like this for balance.
I don't think the top players even take ladder as serious practice since most of it is probably done in custom games, that's basically the same as playing offline.
Plus, it's not like Blizz is actually giving a good use to those statistics with the way they're 'balancing' the game. If anything, they should realize that the reason why BW and WC3 got so big was the fact that they stayed the fuck away from them, actually giving the players and organizations full control on how those games developed.
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They won't implement LAN because they are scared of piracy but they can rent servers and still preserve all of the data they want. They are fucking lazy or it's a hole in game they want to fill with expansions to boost their sales.
Let's hope they at least will fill those holes with expansions.
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On February 27 2012 09:58 hoby2000 wrote:Show nested quote +On February 27 2012 09:37 jumbotroN wrote:
they got in bed with activision and are now all about the money. sad cuz SC2 would greatly improve its strategic development with the addition of LAN. IMHO HotS new units look retarded and zerg is getting more units to worry about. Also SC2 feels pretty much like a coinflip thats awful for an eSport, its like CS:S to CS 1.6, a random game with better looks against perfect gameplay and balance. No, not even close. One of the biggest things is because of balance - They wanted to be able to see every game played, and collect data from it so they could have a better idea of how to balance their game. I think what sparked this idea was actually their adventure into the realm of MMORPG - aka World of Warcraft. See, a WoW server is basically a bunch of numbers. Your character's states, position on the world map, shit they have in the inventory etc. After seeing the power of an MMORPG server, Blizzard decided that with Starcraft 2, in order to have the best idea of the balance of their game, they would use a similar server for SC2. In order to do this, they have to make sure that no game is being played offline (at least, when it's player vs player) so they could literally have statistics for EVERY game. This lead them to create SC2 around this idea, and eventually they figured out that they couldn't implement LAN because then they wouldn't have statistics to a lot of the games that would be played offline by pro players - and let's be honest, pro players would use LAN mode more than anyone. They probably wouldn't even play online after the establishment of pro houses, unless it was to play against friends from other teams. TL;DR - Technology has advanced, and Blizzard is trying to figure out how they can take advantage of that. Also, they need their servers to be like this for balance.
I call bullshit. Why?
BW is, by far, the most balanced RTS game there is and yet it still has a diversity and uniqueness to it. Not implementing LAN is all about the Money and Control. Plain and simple to understand.
And pros aren't even playing Ladder seriously because they got their team-mates who are willing to help them and vice-versa. Online Competitive play when there is a possibility that the games can have no lag issues and almost no connection problems using LAN is bullshit.
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I just fucking want some LAN, ESPORTS will never be legit without it. Games lagging a shit-ton and DC'ing is unacceptable. 
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this is why blizzard may make the game, but they shouldn't shit on the community for their wallets sake. let's take the us into comparison where do you think i will be in the next 10 years? lol blizzard probably wouldn't come to mind with all the realization of all the bullshit happening in the world now a days... not going on about a rant but honestly fuck blizzard corporate greedy pigs now, lol no turning back now!
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On February 27 2012 09:58 hoby2000 wrote:Show nested quote +On February 27 2012 09:37 jumbotroN wrote:
they got in bed with activision and are now all about the money. sad cuz SC2 would greatly improve its strategic development with the addition of LAN. IMHO HotS new units look retarded and zerg is getting more units to worry about. Also SC2 feels pretty much like a coinflip thats awful for an eSport, its like CS:S to CS 1.6, a random game with better looks against perfect gameplay and balance. No, not even close. One of the biggest things is because of balance - They wanted to be able to see every game played, and collect data from it so they could have a better idea of how to balance their game. I think what sparked this idea was actually their adventure into the realm of MMORPG - aka World of Warcraft. See, a WoW server is basically a bunch of numbers. Your character's states, position on the world map, shit they have in the inventory etc. After seeing the power of an MMORPG server, Blizzard decided that with Starcraft 2, in order to have the best idea of the balance of their game, they would use a similar server for SC2. In order to do this, they have to make sure that no game is being played offline (at least, when it's player vs player) so they could literally have statistics for EVERY game. This lead them to create SC2 around this idea, and eventually they figured out that they couldn't implement LAN because then they wouldn't have statistics to a lot of the games that would be played offline by pro players - and let's be honest, pro players would use LAN mode more than anyone. They probably wouldn't even play online after the establishment of pro houses, unless it was to play against friends from other teams. TL;DR - Technology has advanced, and Blizzard is trying to figure out how they can take advantage of that. Also, they need their servers to be like this for balance.
[needs citation]
You don't respond to bullshit with proposterous and even more made up bullshit. It's most likely merely a DRM issue. And your explanation is just too convoluted to even address.
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i find it amusing tho that on their sc2 facebook page they often refer to events as 'LAN parties'. Which they obviously cannot be
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On February 27 2012 12:00 MinscandBoo wrote:
i find it amusing tho that on their sc2 facebook page they often refer to events as 'LAN parties'. Which they obviously cannot be
we should phase out lan party and instead call them bnet parties
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the whole "it'd be too difficult to implement" thing is a lie, as anyone with programming knowledge should know.
adding network capability onto an existing program (sc2) is just as difficult as adding it onto starter programmers' tetris clones. In other words, it never gets harder. they just don't want to do it.
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On February 27 2012 09:30 mrafaeldie12 wrote:
Sometimes orders come from above.
Exactly.
We keep complaining to David Kim and Dustin Browder and friends about LAN, and I'm pretty sure that they too are tired of seeing tournament after tournament run into internet issues at the worst of times. However, I have a feeling that they have an ultimatum from higher up in the corporate bureaucracy to always give a round-about excuse about not including LAN. We can pressure the game developers all we want about including LAN, and perhaps they even secretly want LAN. However, in the end they aren't the ones calling the shots on this issue.
LAN won't happen. It never will. The executives at Activision-Blizzard have made their decision, and it near impossible that any amount of complaints from the consumers or the game developers will change their mind. The best thing to hope for is for the game developers to implement measures to compensate for the problems caused by the lack of LAN, such as the ability to rejoin dropped games or being much more proactive about not blacklisting big LAN events.
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Its obvious Blizzard is not interested in LAN because of piracy and probably because they cant monitor anything if it existed. The joke is that without LAN there will almost always be hiccups that could ruin the competativeness of a tournament.
Overall there is a pretty god damn simple solution that should leave both parties happy. No one says LAN mode has to exist without battle.net. Why not just intergrate both, if there is a LAN custom game mode INSIDE battle.net. A custom mode that allows people to connect peer to peer once the actual game starts but requires battle.net to start the game. This way no one gets lag or gets dropped even if some party of the game loses connection to battle.net.
Once the game is over you have to be on battle.net again to make a new LAN game.
This satisfies both parties since we both get LAN and Blizzard can keep their battlenet. If anyone is going to tell me this isnt easy to code or whatever, Blizzard has their own fucking codemonkey team JUST for battlenet, they have the resources and its not something farfetched (peer to peer gaming that uses a client to find players to play with is nothing new).
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On February 27 2012 15:46 Spicy_Curry wrote:Show nested quote +On February 27 2012 12:00 MinscandBoo wrote:
i find it amusing tho that on their sc2 facebook page they often refer to events as 'LAN parties'. Which they obviously cannot be we should phase out lan party and instead call them bnet parties
I'm in favor of this motion.
AYE!
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When the hell will Blizzard wake up and realise that LAN isnt needed for players, it's needed for TOURNAMENTS!!!
Watching IPL 4 now and i'm getting so fucking pissed when it all gets ruined because of an internet connection issue, not even a computer issue! It's not even IPL's fault!
WAKE THE FUCK UP BLIZZARD!
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Bnet 2.0 is a anti pirace and a full controll measurement, how do you totally forgo both piracy and torunaments etc being run without you making any money out your own game ? Make it competetive and make it only playable while being online.
And saw someone earlier comment about activison, if you knew anything about it all you would know about how Vivendi told Activsion got told not to touch the goldenboy Blizzard.
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Rebuild bnet 2.0. I dont care if we dont get lan at this point. Just allow reconnects and overhault the friends/chat/channel system.
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EPT
