battle.net 2.0 is a restaurant! - Page 12

On June 01 2010 01:34 BadWithNames wrote:
Apparently the project manager for Battle.net 2.0 is a man by the name of Greg Canessa. He's the one "training the waiters" so to speak. Since Bnet 2.0 is his baby he's the person I'd like to hear from now that issues with the features of Bnet 2.0 (or lack there of) have shown up.

http://www.shacknews.com/featuredarticle.x?id=1187

Here's an interview with him.

Excerpt (post psuedo LAN/low latency solution discussion):

Shack: And you couldn't possibly be abandoning the competitive leagues of StarCraft II.

Greg Canessa: Right, and we have solutions for location-based tournaments and other things. We just haven't announced the specifics for a lot of things. But we're working on it.

Really? Now's the time to start talking about it.

Shack: Can you clear up this whole LAN issue? How is that actually going to work from the end-user's perspective? Are you looking at a pseudo-LAN solution? Is that something that's on the table?

Greg Canessa: Well really the goal with Battle.net is to maintain a high-quality, always-connected experience that Rob [Pardo] and I talked about on stage. We want to eliminate griefing, we want to eliminate smurfing, we want to eliminate all these things. We want to give people that persistent character and the attachment to that character, so they're not going to misbehave. It's about community enforcement, and it's also about piracy and other things.

So the new Battle.net is an always-connected experience. Well, LAN, if you think about it, LAN play underpins--now that you understand our design, and you understand what we're trying to do, hopefully it makes a little more sense--because it kind of undermines what we're trying to do with the always-connected experience.

So we are looking at--we do understand and acknowledge and sympathize with some people's concerns about latency in certain scenarios, in certain regions of the world, location-based tournaments--and we are working on solutions. With regard to things we can do that maintain connectivity to Battle.net in some way, but also provide a great quality connection between players playing.

Shack: Maybe something where you connect once to Battle.net, but from that point on you'd only connect every now and then, and the connection would essentially act as a zero-ping LAN?

Greg Canessa: Something like that. Maintaining a connection with Battle.net--I don't know if it's once or periodically--but then also having a peer-to-peer connection between players, so that it'll facilitate a very low-ping, high-bandwidth connection between two players. Those are the types of things that we're working on. So we understand and acknowledge and sympathize. I think part of this LAN thing was that people saw that out of context, without understanding what we were doing with the service. And hopefully now that people understand this huge service we're building.