Slashdot interviews blizzard

Slashdot: The LAN-play question has been a major issue. What are you doing to facilitate gameplay between people who are in the same room?
Rob Pardo: There are definitely some things we are investigating. Whether or not they will be in at launch, I don't know. I really think that the vast majority of people wont have an issue. Even if you look at Warcraft 3, which did have LAN play, the vast, vast majority of people played on Battle.net and that was what, seven years ago? So I think that it is a very small percentage of people that will be affected, and only a small percentage of the time. That said, we are looking at some technology that would allow us to detect a peer-to-peer connection if we detect something like a high latency over a certain amount. Unfortunately, this would only be able to work for custom games, since we need to ensure the accuracy of competitive or ladder games via Battle.net.

Slashdot: With World of Warcraft, there are regional server groupings. How is Battle.net going to integrate with different parts of the world?

Rob Pardo: I believe the current plan is to do a similar approach to the way WoW is set up, so there will be large regional breakdowns. Hopefully in the future we will even have the ability for you to move around, but that isn't decided yet.

On August 25 2009 13:25 fusionsdf wrote:


....seriously retarded

On August 25 2009 13:27 lepape wrote:


If I understood this part correctly, this is bad news. Very bad news.

On August 25 2009 13:32 lazz wrote:

wait, so if i want to play SCII with someone outside my area I won't be able to?

On August 25 2009 13:38 Ftrunkz wrote:
i dont think they'd be THAT stupid lazz, and before everyone has a hissy fit and starts shannanaganing (totally a word) about it, we know next to nothing about it and sc1 had uswest, useast, asai and europe obviously, but after it a while it was kinda 'decided' on the server for the best players etc.

edit: just read the post before mine... really? Source?

. Even if you look at Warcraft 3, which did have LAN play, the vast, vast majority of people played on Battle.net and that was what, seven years ago?d

On August 25 2009 14:08 SpiritoftheTunA wrote:
god i hate how rob pardo makes comments on how the "vast majority" of wc3 players used b.net over lan when blizzard never even collected stats on their lan usage

i call steaming smelly bullshit

On August 25 2009 14:40 Zelniq wrote:
yeah seriously rob pardo pisses me off..where does he get the idea that almost nobody plays on LANs

On August 25 2009 14:56 x89titan wrote:

maybe he never got invited to a lan party and this will be his revenge.

On August 26 2009 00:46 Zato-1 wrote:

Seriously. I play DOTA through LAN more often than not.

On August 25 2009 13:27 lepape wrote:


If I understood this part correctly, this is bad news. Very bad news.

On August 25 2009 14:56 x89titan wrote:

maybe he never got invited to a lan party and this will be his revenge.

i already read lan wasn't gonna in sc2 and im trying to cope with it.

On August 25 2009 13:25 fusionsdf wrote:


....seriously retarded

On August 26 2009 04:50 Catch]22 wrote:
who cares? not playing with australians means no lag for me, i never once felt sad about not being able to play wow on american servers, who cares, seriously.

On August 26 2009 05:01 Polis wrote:


What if you want to play something that is not very popular (UMS or FFA), or you are simply playing in hours where there is few players from your region. What about tournaments or clans that have players from diferent regions?

On August 26 2009 01:03 Sharp-eYe wrote:
First of all, can someone explain the point of Gateways in Battle.net? Is it because of server overload or something? I honestly never liked Gateways, because it seperates the community too much.

On August 26 2009 08:25 bLah. wrote:
gateways keep players in their regions allowing you to have normal ping in each game which is good enough reason for having gateways.

On August 26 2009 01:03 Sharp-eYe wrote:
First of all, can someone explain the point of Gateways in Battle.net? Is it because of server overload or something? I honestly never liked Gateways, because it seperates the community too much.

Second, can they not just do what steam does? It is fairly clear they want to make a platform similar to steam/XBox live. Both services allow lan play through their service. For example, steam allows you to sign in an offline mode, and then you can only see games on your LAN. This is great because you do not require internet connection, while Valve knows you are using a legal copy as the steam accounts only take legal cd keys.

Rob Pardo is a little irritating. Maybe he has never heard of Dreamhack?

On August 26 2009 11:25 DeCoup wrote:


Steam offline mode does not work that way. It's like 'appear offline' from live messenger. My mates play left4dead on my steam account all the time. They just set it to offline mode so people on my friends list don't try to chat with him or join the games he's in.

Offline Mode allows you to play games through Steam without reconnecting to the Steam Network every time you wish to play - this is particularly useful if you do not plan on playing over the internet and would prefer not to download new updates for your single-player games.

Steam left beta in September 2003, but the release which added Offline Mode didn’t arrive until March 2004

On August 25 2009 14:08 SpiritoftheTunA wrote:
god i hate how rob pardo makes comments on how the "vast majority" of wc3 players used b.net over lan when blizzard never even collected stats on their lan usage

i call steaming smelly bullshit

On August 27 2009 09:40 outrage wrote:
Rob Pardo knows that people like LAN. Blizzard is making a huge effort to make "LAN" look bad. In one article he says that its a "footnote" in history like its low tech when its the same TCP/IP that's under battle.net. In this article he says LAN might be for people who are crazy and living in a closet.

Its marketing. He's swaying all the kids who might otherwise think LAN is a necessary feature of a multiplayer game.

They've just gotten greedy after all that WoW money and an easy 25 million from Starcraft 2 isn't enough for them anymore. Now they want to charge for new content and probably popular maps, etc.. And Pardo is making it all look good.

On August 27 2009 23:19 Eury wrote:
LAN is dying off, I don't see how anyone can argue against it. When I was a kid back in 98 we were attending LAN parties all the time, today that activity is a lot less popular. My youngest brother, that is the same age now as I was back then, rarely attend LAN parties, and he is a big gamer.

Sure, for people in rural areas this is unfortunate, but most gamers tend to live in more populated areas. There are advantages and disadvantages for living out on the countryside.

For people living in South America, South East Asia etc you are pretty much out of luck. You are just too few paying customers for Blizzard to cater to.

On August 27 2009 16:54 FieryBalrog wrote:
Sounds like there'll be LAN functionality eventually implemented through Battle.net, just as Steam does it.

You won't be able to play ranked matches over LAN. What a surprise, but I bet some idiots will whine about that, too.

On August 27 2009 23:26 Tsagacity wrote:
Although I agree that the need for internet-less LAN gaming is dying off, I would be careful about confusing that with LAN parties. LAN parties definitely aren't dying off Just more and more of them have internet connections.

On August 28 2009 00:11 Eury wrote:

I meant smaller LAN parties that you have with friends. In the mid to late 90s it wasn't rare that you organized small LAN parties with friends pretty much every weekend, as a good Internet connection was a luxury. For better or worse that tend to be more and more a thing of the past.

Big LAN parties, like Dream Hack, will most likely live on for years to come, because they are pretty much social events more than anything else. And as you said, they got Internet connections.

On August 28 2009 00:17 Tsagacity wrote:
I meant small ones as well.

On August 27 2009 22:55 floor exercise wrote:
The removal of LAN is twofold, one is piracy/limitation of play ability to curb resale of games. If you can only play the game by logging into their service that uses your master account that holds all your games, you can't easily resell that game, and your options of playing without being connected is severely limited so you aren't getting the same experience.

Secondly, it funnels all the players onto Battle.net where they are free to monitor and record usage patterns, system hardware, demographics etc. It's an extremely powerful tool. It sounds tinfoil hattish but it's true, having that sort of access to data is incredibly helpful to them from a business perspective.

I wish he would say these things instead of making ridiculous statements.

On August 28 2009 00:45 DefMatrixUltra wrote:


Sure, not having LAN will probably make it take longer to pirate the game, but Blizzard could at least say that LAN isn't a launch feature like 100 other things they've mentioned.

On August 29 2009 05:27 FrozenArbiter wrote:
It should be pointed out that wanting to make more money isn't inherently bad, it's only bad that in the process they are hurting the quality of the game.

On August 29 2009 12:33 Elian wrote:
They'll continue to try. I'm hoping the SC strength and wisdom of Korea can enforce some legitimacy out of this, and we'll get something akin to LAN without being online all the time.

On August 29 2009 13:17 TheYango wrote:

After all these Kespa fiascos, I don't have much faith in the "wisdom" of Korean SC right now.

On August 29 2009 16:43 Elian wrote:


Yeah, I suppose so.

Still, it is an industry - I don't think, even if KESPA is ridiculous that Blizzard will entirely ignore the sport that has developed. It's obvious they need LAN in order to play it as they have, or a LAN workaround.

Though, it will be interesting how KESPA Blizzard dynamics play out for the next generation.