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On June 29 2009 18:50 SearingShadow wrote: There will be LAN on Battle.net.
The only people this affects is those without an internet connection.
/facepalm
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On June 30 2009 09:31 Stripe wrote: People already addressed the issue that Bnet would be slower, so the only valid reason for opposing this is because you lack internet.
To everybody complaining that they won't be able to play multi-player due to lack of internet, sucks to be you. You have my sympathies. The vast majority of us don't give a crap as this change won't affect us one bit. Go ahead, don't buy SC2; I guarantee you the impact would be next to nothing, maybe 5k in sales max. Times have changed since SC1; everyone has internet these days and broadband will continue to proliferate. This is a good decision by Blizzard; they'll definitely gain more sales than they lose.
troll moar
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On June 30 2009 07:54 L wrote: The difference is that, in both instances, none of us were actually online. The lan center I talked about for my grade school birthday was actually a LAN center. They had a few consoles hooked up to TVs, some computers in lan, and like 4 with a shared internet connection for people to play counterstrike. We pretty much took all their other computers. In the second instance, the computer lab was defunct; there was no internet. The cables had been rerouted to new labs, so we just rigged up a router and played on our own after installing the games. I could mention a number of impromptu matches I've had at university and at high school using laptops and spare computers off the grid, but that's somewhat irrelevant. The point is that the game was social. We were there connected together. Why go on battle.net with 56k modems when half our buddies didn't even have the net?
Its 2009. Times have changed, its not the stone age of internet anymore. Get internet.
"Why go on battle.net with 56k modems when half our buddies didn't even have the net?"
Thanks for proving my point.
On June 30 2009 07:54 L wrote: If you didn't have this experience with starcraft, and I'm not sure many of the newer post-broadband people would have such an experience, then you simply wouldn't get it. The default response is "oh yeah, just go online and do it", but that's not where the magic of the game was.
Dude, I started playing on battlenet in 1998 on a 56K connection which my parents had to pay for by the minute (so I barely ever played). I've also LAN'd extensively in college, but the new system would work fine for us. In fact I just met up with 2 friends last tuesday for the express purpose of LANing at his apartment, he hacked his router so we could play BGH vs pubbies.
On June 30 2009 07:54 L wrote: That's not where I was captured by starcraft. I was captured because starcraft was a social event. Starcraft was something I'd look forward to because my friends would be there. Now there's a fairly large hurdle involved if I want that experience. A hurdle which shouldn't be there. A hurdle which is between me and what I wanted to get out of this game.
Jesus Christ, its like you're inventing problems. You can still do that. What hurdle? Are your friends incapable of connecting to a wireless connection where you play over BNET?
Or let me guess, the "magic" is gone because instead of connecting to each other via the UDP protocol now you are using a different internet protocol?
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On June 30 2009 09:31 Stripe wrote: People already addressed the issue that Bnet would be slower, so the only valid reason for opposing this is because you lack internet.
To everybody complaining that they won't be able to play multi-player due to lack of internet, sucks to be you. You have my sympathies. The vast majority of us don't give a crap as this change won't affect us one bit. Go ahead, don't buy SC2; I guarantee you the impact would be next to nothing, maybe 5k in sales max. Times have changed since SC1; everyone has internet these days and broadband will continue to proliferate. This is a good decision by Blizzard; they'll definitely gain more sales than they lose.
I'm not affected by this decision any more than you, but I remain unconvinced that it will generate sales. Ostensibly the decision is aimed at boosting sales by reducing piracy, but solid counterarguments abound against this unsubstantiated position. If I'm a pirate who refuses to pay money for games, encountering a more difficult to pirate SC2 will make me either a.) Put in extra effort to pirate it anyways, or b.) Pirate a different game and continue my fun times. Purchasing the game is not an option compatible with a dedicated pirate's lifestyle.
I am, in fact, a dedicated pirate. There has not been a game too difficult for me to pirate. The five PC games I remember purchasing in my lifetime were all Blizzard games.
Personally I love Starcraft more than ice cream in summer, and will be honored to spend hundreds of dollars supporting the franchise of what I believe is the best game made by humankind. Removing LAN does nothing to benefit my paid experience, does nothing to attract shoppers on the market for a good RTS, and does nothing to increase sales.
If Battle.Net 2.0 is sufficient capability wise, allowing eSports and the community to flourish, that will not somehow make this removal a good decision, merely a less bad one. Everyone can only stand to benefit from this feature. I'm sure Blizzard has a tenable strategy for supporting eSports. What's doubtful is whether removing LAN plausibly enhances this yet-to-be-revealed strategy.
EDIT: Regarding detriments:
Connecting machines physically and playing via UDP is significantly simpler and more reliable than relying on a shared internet connection. The latter may not be difficult at all, but the uncertainty involved with ISP reliability makes the former superior. The situations where this relationship is material are only limited by one's imagination.
For Battle.Net games between people on the same local connection, even if the data transit during any given game essentially operates as it would in LAN, the internet connection must remain to coordinate further games.
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On June 30 2009 10:04 EchOne wrote: I am, in fact, a dedicated pirate. There has not been a game too difficult for me to pirate.
Anti-piracy measures are rarely targeted towards you, though. Sure, the fact of the matter is, regardless of how well protected a game is, someone will eventually find a way to pirate it, but that's not the point. Instead of stopping piracy altogether (kind of impossible), the goal is to limit it, and prevent the more 'casual' pirating.
For example, a number of my friends are capable of copy/pasting cracks or using keygens, but wouldn't have the slightest idea as to how to go about finding private servers or how to get them working. This either leaves them with two options for multiplayer-only games: buy them, or not play them altogether. Obviously, this potentially translates to a sale that would never happen, but for, say, Starcraft, they'll likely buy it if that was the only way they could think of playing.
Ultimately, spawn installs (and, to an extent, LANs) make it far easier to pirate, and will likely create more of the 'casual' piraters. While there are definitely many sales that would likely not have been made regardless, without any measures, there will be others who probably would've bought it had it not been so easy to get it free. Honest to god, I don't think any of my friends had a copy of Starcraft, and yet we used to play that game a shitton.
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On June 30 2009 09:58 FieryBalrog wrote:
Its 2009. Times have changed, its not the stone age of internet anymore. Get internet.
Please get your head out of your ass. I don't know if you noticed, but it's 2009, and world is in the middle of economic crisis. Maybe for you it is really easy to say "get internet", but for me as a student from middle/east europe, where average salary is 3 times smaller than in USA... And moreover, like a LOT of lan parties here are in places without internet connection. And I bet lot of people get to know starcraft from lan parties... and now we cannot throw lan party without internet connection? Like wtf?
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On June 29 2009 19:20 Phritz wrote:Show nested quote +On June 29 2009 18:37 DeCoup wrote:On June 29 2009 18:32 Klockan3 wrote: That hopefully means that B-net 2.0 allows for you to customize the latency yourself. Its been 11 years. Latency will not be an issue on b.net 2.0. Or at worst online latency will be better than sc1 LAN latency. The amount of net coding blizzard has learned in the last 11 years makes me positive of this. Have you ever played a Warcraft 3 game with 10 players on bnet? (hosted via Bnet, not with a LAN tool like Ghost++ and Listchecker)? You have delays anywhere from 2 seconds to 5 seconds. I can understand if they're trying to squash things like Garena (up to 90,000 peeps playing WC3 DotA on it, maybe 75% illegal keys and 25% knowing that the lat on Garena is 100 times better than on Bnet) but if the lat on SC2 is anything like WC3 then making multiplayer exclusively via BNet is a horrible decision on Blizzards part. Not to mention how the starleagues will react. You do remember when they refused to upgrade to 1.16 because of some lag issues? Well afaik they wont be able to do that now. I just get the feeling that Blizzard is starting to care a lot more about how much money they can make...
This is just a huge fabrication lol.
Even when I play on asia from east it's only 300 ms tops (+100 ms for the natural delay). And the amount of players in a game hosted by Bnet doesn't change the latency at all.
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Its 2009. Times have changed, its not the stone age of internet anymore. Get internet.
"Why go on battle.net with 56k modems when half our buddies didn't even have the net?"
Thanks for proving my point. Proving what point? I was explaining that back before broadband, starcraft got its start as a game which was extensively played at lan centers, where you were physically near the other players. That's the type of experience starcraft was on a casual level, and the type of experience that the majority of players are going to want to re-capture.
How am I going to 'Get' internet for a room that simply isn't wired for it, but otherwise perfectly works for Lan purposes? Should I fucking call my IT department and be like "hey, blizzard are being douchebags, so I need you to drill another huge hole in the wall, put up some cable guards and run 16-24 ethernet cables from the.. we don't have another router? How much do the 24 slot ones go for? 300-500$? Maybe I'll just.. not do this".
Dude, I started playing on battlenet in 1998 on a 56K connection which my parents had to pay for by the minute (so I barely ever played). I've also LAN'd extensively in college, but the new system would work fine for us. In fact I just met up with 2 friends last tuesday for the express purpose of LANing at his apartment, he hacked his router so we could play BGH vs pubbies. So what happens when you want to Lan in a lobby outside of your classes, or just set up a game between you three without having to 'hack a router'?
Oh you can't.
Jesus Christ, its like you're inventing problems. You can still do that. What hurdle? Are your friends incapable of connecting to a wireless connection where you play over BNET?
Or let me guess, the "magic" is gone because instead of connecting to each other via the UDP protocol now you are using a different internet protocol? I'm not inventing anything. I've already given you two examples which simply could NOT HAVE HAPPENED. So no, I couldn't fucking do it. Additionally, there's no hurdles? Go ahead and set up the ports for 8-12 of your friends on your wireless router. You'd pretty much use every slot to open the required ranges (and then some), and you'd then have 8+ people who are in the same room using a single connection connecting to B.Net. I dunno how fast your connection is, but splitting throttled bandwidth 8 ways is not my idea of high performance.
The additional interface hassles which aren't present in, say, UDP Lan, also make playing there a much more enjoyable experience.
I mean, its 2009, so I should just stay at home, play online and have less interaction with the people I like most? Somehow it seems technology went the wrong way. 2009 isn't all its cracked up to be.
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Sydney2287 Posts
For everyone saying that you should have the internet connection to handle 4-8 players in a LAN/Wireless network being able to connect to the internet at the same time, that might be the case where you live, not everyone is in the same demographic though :o. Different countries, different incomes, different infrastructure.
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I'm sick of seeing people defend Blizzard in this thread. You people need to understand that there are places and times when having an internet connection is impossible and/or impossible for several to a dozen people. Playing at LAN parties (and its called that because you play over LAN ffs) is as much a part of gaming as playing over battle.net or whatever the server is.
On June 30 2009 11:45 Bockit wrote: For everyone saying that you should have the internet connection to handle 4-8 players in a LAN/Wireless network being able to connect to the internet at the same time, that might be the case where you live, not everyone is in the same demographic though :o. Different countries, different incomes, different infrastructure.
Exactly part of my point. I used to live in Honduras and down there the cable connection (while I lived there) was equivalent to a 56k connection in the United States. Now if my friends and I were to have a lan party (like we had, several of) it would mean that we would all have to connect through battle.net over one connection. On that connection impossible, it would also mean we would need a proper router for the job (or switch, which would be better) and ours was very ill equipped.
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On June 30 2009 09:31 Stripe wrote: People already addressed the issue that Bnet would be slower, so the only valid reason for opposing this is because you lack internet.
To everybody complaining that they won't be able to play multi-player due to lack of internet, sucks to be you. You have my sympathies. The vast majority of us don't give a crap as this change won't affect us one bit. Go ahead, don't buy SC2; I guarantee you the impact would be next to nothing, maybe 5k in sales max. Times have changed since SC1; everyone has internet these days and broadband will continue to proliferate. This is a good decision by Blizzard; they'll definitely gain more sales than they lose.
Really? How about you give us one damn reason that there SHOULDN'T be LAN - oh wait, there isn't. It won't stop pirating because it's an unstoppable force - people will pirate it no matter what, and if they can't play multiplayer by pirating, they just won't get the game at all. Literally all you guys are saying is, "Well, sucks to be you guys, suck it up and go with whatever Blizzard tells us." There's a lot of places that don't have a good enough internet connection to support a decent game of SC, or to support a high number of players. Furthermore, it doesn't matter if you have no lag on a B.net game between people on the same LAN - the problem is that if one spike goes through your internet connection or your internet just goes down or B.net goes down, there's NO other option to play SC2 multiplayer. Stop being such a selfish asshole and realize what the other side's problem is.
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Though you can bet that even if they don't kick themselves and go "oh we probably should keep it in there" that the community will make a pirated version of their server letting us play in private networks. Whether Blizzard wants to or not they can't stop that, they can only slow the spread of it.
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Seriously, what people don't understand is that removing LAN has no benefits. You say it stops pirates, IT DOESN'T. PEOPLE WILL PIRATE IT. You want me to explain a code thing? Give Starcraft II a code so you can't simply burn it onto another CD without hacking it, THERE YA GO. You know how many "casual pirates" that will reduce? MORE THAN REMOVING LAN.
Seriously Blizzard, what are the detriments to having LAN? What do they lose by keeping LAN in the game?
You know what they lose by removing LAN? Advertising and audience. Good job.
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Again and again, I read "ITS STUPID BECAUSE IT WON'T STOP ALL PIRATES", but really, that's equivalent to saying anti-virus programs aren't worth using because they won't stop/detect viruses with 100% effectiveness. As awesome as polarizing to extreme outcomes is (NO ANTI-PIRACY MEASURES WILL KILL YOU GAME A LA DEMIGOD), its hardly realistic.
While, yes, a ton of people will pirate the game regardless, there's still a large number who either don't know how to use private servers, or do not enjoy them. Those are the sales that are at stake, not Mr. I'll-pirate-everything-anyways. And, like it or not, the exclusion of LAN is likely one of the easier to implement and least intrusive anti-piracy measures available.
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On June 30 2009 12:39 Yenzilla wrote: Again and again, I read "ITS STUPID BECAUSE IT WON'T STOP ALL PIRATES", but really, that's equivalent to saying anti-virus programs aren't worth using because they won't stop/detect viruses with 100% effectiveness. As awesome as polarizing to extreme outcomes is (NO ANTI-PIRACY MEASURES WILL KILL YOU GAME A LA DEMIGOD), its hardly realistic.
While, yes, a ton of people will pirate the game regardless, there's still a large number who either don't know how to use private servers, or do not enjoy them. Those are the sales that are at stake, not Mr. I'll-pirate-everything-anyways. And, like it or not, the exclusion of LAN is likely one of the easier to implement and least intrusive anti-piracy measures available.
Except that 1) it kills noticeable pockets of the community and 2) it won't affect sales really at all, and it might even reduce them. All this will do to the pirating scene is make the piraters work harder or make them move on to another game. It will in no way convince piraters to buy the game because they were never interested in buying it in the first place. All this does is reduce the number of multiplayer options we have and hurts the community. Absolutely horrific move by Blizzard, worse than some of their WoW decisions.
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I would very much prefer LAN than fight piracy.
Not that I won't manage, but still...
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On June 30 2009 12:44 Stratos_speAr wrote: It will in no way convince piraters to buy the game because they were never interested in buying it in the first place.
That's part of the polarization problem again. Not everyone who pirate games fall under that umbrella. I know a number of people who pirate games out of convenience, and entirely willing to dish out money for games that are more of a hassle to get working (multiplayer games, generally). I'll cite Demigods again, you really think the proportion of legitimate users would've been as low if it wasn't just laughably easy to get?
Hell, even in SC1's case, my group of friends used to play (close to 8 of us) with not a single real copy between us (at least, not until I buckled and bought it a while later) because spawns just made it easier to have one CD and throw it around.
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On June 29 2009 18:42 Klockan3 wrote:The difference is of course that piracy gets harder which is good. No, SC2 will be cracked a week before it hits retail stores just like every other game, and the people who actually paid their money for the game will be endlessly buttfucked by this. Remember how people who bought Doom 3 were cracking it because the DRM was so fucking annoying? You couldn't run the game if you even had Nero installed on your computer. Blizzard clearly thinks that it's worth it to screw their paying customers so that 5-10% of software pirates who aren't smart enough to log on to The Pirate Bay can't steal the game.
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I feel obliged to add my one-liner of outrage. This is a really terrible idea. Blizzard just shot themselves in the foot, except the gun wasn't a pistol but an RPG.
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