I saw this thread on Reddit, in which a Heroes of Newerth developer explains the reasons why HoN will never have LAN, and why LAN is on the way out for RTS games generally. I thought a lot of people here might find his arguments interesting and worthy of discussion, in relation to SC2's LAN woes.
The main arguments are here:
in today's world putting a LAN feature on a game is the direct equivalent of giving it away for free.
Not my shot to call. But as an Economist, it's easy for me to see why any company making an RTS-style game will never put LAN in it ever again. Pirates ruined LAN, not us. I don't see why everybody is trying to convince companies to put LAN into games- you're convincing the wrong people. As long as piracy is on the rise, LAN will be on the way out. Simple as that. Put yourself in any business' shoes and try to weigh the advantages against the disadvantages and you will understand why, even on the biggest competitive games like Starcraft 2, there will never be LAN.
Goodwill is nice to have but it doesn't pay the bills and any gaming company out there is out there to make money first and make good games second. I'm sorry if this truth offends you but the video game market is an industry and people make games to make money the same way a guy who sells Ice-cream does his job to make money and not to put smiles on people's faces (although I'm sure he does enjoy putting smiles on people's faces).
The majority of the gaming community has a whole has proven to be indifferent about "goodwill". So don't knock on our door, or Blizzard's, or anybody else who doesn't put a LAN feature in their game- it's simple Economics. If I have a choice to add a feature to a game that will reduce revenue by a significant percentage and yield almost nothing in return (money wise) than any smart business wont implement it.
And you better bet piracy is on the rise. I'm not blaming anybody, though- just the same way that the smart Business is drawn to removing LAN because of piracy, the smart Consumer is drawn to piracy because it is rational to not buy a game for 30 dollars when I can download almost the same game for free.
It's a simple case of two Homo Economicus doing what they do best- being rational in a market. LAN is an unfortunate bystander and is going to vanish in the future as long as it's part of a game that can be abused by piracy.
So yeah, I'm listening if you have any good arguments. Let me state for the record that I love LAN, that I wish HoN had LAN, that I think it's lame that tournaments have to be played on-line and not on LAN. But I still accept the inevitability that LAN is going to die.
I don't see why there can't be some sort of security feature built in that forces you to log onto Bnet before you can access LAN. Or even have a separate LAN security identifier accessory...i.e. like an identifier key-chain that you purchase in conjunction with your account.
Microsoft operating systems and office software are two of the biggest pirated softwares and they still make money. This guy tries to act like a realist but he doesn't really have a clue about economics. The opinions are too pessimistic and overgeneralizes the vast majority of people who purchase games with their hard-earned cash. Pirates don't stop revenue streams pirates were not a consumer in the first place. The assumption that a pirated copy was a sale is flawed imo and his last few personal statements are questionable as I perceive them as a cop-out when his whole opinion was about "simple economics".
On June 23 2011 07:10 mdma-_- wrote: that still doesnt explain why they cant allow people to play each other in lan with the necessecity of being logged into bnet/whatever online client.
cheap excuse just to blame it on pirates tbh
What the hell would be the point of LAN if you had to be logged into Bnet? The entire issue with no LAN is retarded internet problems that tournaments seem to constantly have.
I always wondered why LAN was not implemented in SC2, I've heard plenty complain about it but never really seen any discussion on exactly why Blizzard made that choice. Thanks for bringing this to light; I understand Blizzard's position now and my one bit of uneasiness towards them has been laid to rest. Unfortunate that those of us who pay can't have nice things because of those who don't, but it happens.
I just wish there was a way for both parties to have what they wanted. Some sort of authentication tied in with LAN support, but that is a very hard task to accomplish.
On June 23 2011 07:10 mdma-_- wrote: that still doesnt explain why they cant allow people to play each other in lan with the necessecity of being logged into bnet/whatever online client.
cheap excuse just to blame it on pirates tbh
Hackers could fairly easily remove all safeguards like a log-in requirement.
On June 23 2011 07:10 mdma-_- wrote: that still doesnt explain why they cant allow people to play each other in lan with the necessecity of being logged into bnet/whatever online client.
cheap excuse just to blame it on pirates tbh
What the hell would be the point of LAN if you had to be logged into Bnet? The entire issue with no LAN is retarded internet problems that tournaments seem to constantly have.
It would impact the state of the game less. If the game data could be transferred via P2P rather than via Battle.net, then significantly less bandwidth would be required. If all that needed to be sent to Battle.net was a signal of "I'm alive let me play" this allows for significantly less strain on the internet service of the event.
The problem with this type of system is I believe it would be quite easy to fake this Battle.net authentication, compared to reverse engineering the code required to set up LAN. I know that some sorts of LAN support have been hacked together still, but there is no reason for Blizzard to basically make the lives of hackers easier if they don't have to.
If Blizzard and developers like HoN refuse to include LAN for piracy reasons, they really need to up their game and improve the quality of online services in order to compensate.
Many developers are not implementing LAN simply because of piracy, yeah that's about it really. A lot of them are afraid of their profits dropping simply of how the game is pirated.
I recall MW2 was pirated over 4 million times in a week or so on the PC version, entirely over dwarfing the number of legitimate copies bought. Many gamers insist that piracy is not a concern however. Its a controversial topic that neither side are willing to agree on with each other.
Pirates wouldn't have bought the game anyway, and including LAN would let your game get exposed to new people for free. This is like saying "terrorists ruined travel", even though it's the government ruining travelling.
Not to mention that most of these games have online ladder systems and that's what people buy the game for - The competitive ladder.
What can you really say. As a game developer he has to talk like that because its his bread and butter. But, because of this I feel like his opinion is pretty much not relevant because it's strongly biased without any actual proof/evidence to his claims. Just saber rattling towards pirates.
On June 23 2011 07:10 mdma-_- wrote: that still doesnt explain why they cant allow people to play each other in lan with the necessecity of being logged into bnet/whatever online client.
cheap excuse just to blame it on pirates tbh
Hackers could fairly easily remove all safeguards like a log-in requirement.
On June 23 2011 07:10 mdma-_- wrote: that still doesnt explain why they cant allow people to play each other in lan with the necessecity of being logged into bnet/whatever online client.
cheap excuse just to blame it on pirates tbh
What the hell would be the point of LAN if you had to be logged into Bnet? The entire issue with no LAN is retarded internet problems that tournaments seem to constantly have.
This allows players to practice on LAN environment. Then you give large tournament organizers a "special version" that has true lan. I have no idea how much effort blizz would have to put into this but there are ways for lan to be incorporated
On June 23 2011 07:10 mdma-_- wrote: that still doesnt explain why they cant allow people to play each other in lan with the necessecity of being logged into bnet/whatever online client.
cheap excuse just to blame it on pirates tbh
What the hell would be the point of LAN if you had to be logged into Bnet? The entire issue with no LAN is retarded internet problems that tournaments seem to constantly have.
While it´s true that there is no point having LAN with the need of being logged on to battle.net, they could, however, add a feature that somehow connects you to battle.net for some sort of "confirmation" that you indeed have bought the game and then allow you to go LAN-mode.
i'm genuinely intrigued about the people saying this article is nonsense...
Why are Blizzard not including LAN? Like, seriously, it's annoyed a lot of fans and wouldn't be that difficult technically? For what reason are they deciding not to?
Industries have to evolve, not go backwards. Instead of being the next movie industry, maybe the gaming industry needs to re-evaluate its technologies and procedures. There are many ways to approach this, and taking LAN out of games which want to be taken seriously is wrong.
They think Lan will increase piracy, but there is no way to know until they add lan and see an increase in pirated software coupled with a decline in sales. Else they're just playing a guessing game. Until then they're just spouting bullshit.
Also the reddit link has nothing to do with "goodwill" it has everything to do with the Witcher 2 being hyped as shit among PC-gaming crowd and graphics that uses high end pc hardware.
On June 23 2011 07:20 akaname wrote: i'm genuinely intrigued about the people saying this article is nonsense...
Why are Blizzard not including LAN? Like, seriously, it's annoyed a lot of fans and wouldn't be that difficult technically? For what reason are they deciding not to?
So they can shut down tournaments that doesn't have a license. To prevent the whole kespa deal that happened with Brood War.
On June 23 2011 07:14 ThePurist wrote: Microsoft operating systems and office software are two of the biggest pirated softwares and they still make money. This guy tries to act like a realist but he doesn't really have a clue about economics. The opinions are too pessimistic and overgeneralizes the vast majority of people who purchase games with their hard-earned cash. Pirates don't stop revenue streams pirates were not a consumer in the first place. The assumption that a pirated copy was a sale is flawed imo and his last few personal statements are questionable as I perceive them as a cop-out when his whole opinion was about "simple economics".
That also has to do with Windows and Office being so widespread along with skills related to them. Businesses, for the most part, don't pirate. They buy Office and Windows because most people have at least some experience with them. Then, people use them for work, so their kids use them for school. So on and so forth. In the world of office management and skills, market penetration can sometimes be more beneficial than overall sales.
On June 23 2011 07:18 AndAgain wrote: He just said what any intelligent person already understands. Obviously companies have good reasons for not putting LAN.
Yea it's a pity. The problem is most of the prevention for piracy hurts the guys that buy the games too.
I understand his point of view, he and blizzard guys have legitimate opinions and personally I'm fine with no LAN. However blaming it all on the pirates (evil monsters!) is not the way to go. Not going to write a long post so I'll just say that there is no smoke without fire.
On June 23 2011 07:18 AndAgain wrote: He just said what any intelligent person already understands. Obviously companies have good reasons for not putting LAN.
Yea it's a pity. The problem is most of the prevention for piracy hurts the guys that buy the games too.
ALL forms of DRM and "prevention" (such as excluding LAN) hurt the paying customers more than pirates, this is not even a debate.
On June 23 2011 07:18 darkscream wrote: Bad argument made by propagandist.
Pirates wouldn't have bought the game anyway, and including LAN would let your game get exposed to new people for free. This is like saying "terrorists ruined travel", even though it's the government ruining travelling.
Not to mention that most of these games have online ladder systems and that's what people buy the game for - The competitive ladder.
What can you really say. As a game developer he has to talk like that because its his bread and butter. But, because of this I feel like his opinion is pretty much not relevant because it's strongly biased without any actual proof/evidence to his claims. Just saber rattling towards pirates.
Had I not been able to download the vast majority of the games on my computer, I would have bought them instead. I never play SC2 on ladder, I only play against friends. What is your post if not biased, without any actual proof/evidence?
Edit: of course every pirated copy would not have been a sale, but a significant amount would, lets not pretend otherwise.
On June 23 2011 07:21 Seronei wrote: They think Lan will increase piracy, but there is no way to know until they add lan and see an increase in pirated software coupled with a decline in sales. Else they're just playing a guessing game. Until then they're just spouting bullshit.
Also the reddit link has nothing to do with "goodwill" it has everything to do with the Witcher 2 being hyped as shit among PC-gaming crowd and graphics that uses high end pc hardware.
that's really dumb logic, sorry: "walking down through those dark alleyways in this rough neighbourhood at night might get me mugged... but there's no way to know until I try. Well, there's no way to know unless I try, else I'm just playing a guessing game!"
if it's a potential threat, why would they risk it?
On June 23 2011 07:10 mdma-_- wrote: that still doesnt explain why they cant allow people to play each other in lan with the necessecity of being logged into bnet/whatever online client.
cheap excuse just to blame it on pirates tbh
What the hell would be the point of LAN if you had to be logged into Bnet? The entire issue with no LAN is retarded internet problems that tournaments seem to constantly have.
This allows players to practice on LAN environment. Then you give large tournament organizers a "special version" that has true lan. I have no idea how much effort blizz would have to put into this but there are ways for lan to be incorporated
Just one single copy of such a version that leaks onto the internets and well..guess what'll happen.
Pirates are not thieves. Thieves are thieves. The community is punished because of the overblown fear that profitability is lost when games are pirated.
I liked the Lionhead studios comment a few months back, "We lose more money to used games sales than we ever will to piracy".
On June 23 2011 07:18 AndAgain wrote: He just said what any intelligent person already understands. Obviously companies have good reasons for not putting LAN.
Yea it's a pity. The problem is most of the prevention for piracy hurts the guys that buy the games too.
ALL forms of DRM and "prevention" (such as excluding LAN) hurt the paying customers more than pirates, this is not even a debate.
Yea well if guys just wouldn't pirate. It's rather saddening though. The consumers are the ones that have caused the gaming industry to become what it is today. Activision releasing CoD every year? That's us. No lan? That's us too. It sucks ;(
On June 23 2011 07:21 Seronei wrote: They think Lan will increase piracy, but there is no way to know until they add lan and see an increase in pirated software coupled with a decline in sales. Else they're just playing a guessing game. Until then they're just spouting bullshit.
Also the reddit link has nothing to do with "goodwill" it has everything to do with the Witcher 2 being hyped as shit among PC-gaming crowd and graphics that uses high end pc hardware.
that's really dumb logic, sorry: "walking down through those dark alleyways in this rough neighbourhood at night might get me mugged... but there's no way to know until I try. Well, there's no way to know unless I try, else I'm just playing a guessing game!"
if it's a potential threat, why would they risk it?
Because it might increase sales? The same way you would walk through a shady neighborhood because the way is faster.
Also there is no facts that say Lan increase piracy while if you know there is more crime in a neighborhood it certainly makes sense to avoid it.
On June 23 2011 07:21 Seronei wrote: They think Lan will increase piracy, but there is no way to know until they add lan and see an increase in pirated software coupled with a decline in sales. Else they're just playing a guessing game. Until then they're just spouting bullshit.
Also the reddit link has nothing to do with "goodwill" it has everything to do with the Witcher 2 being hyped as shit among PC-gaming crowd and graphics that uses high end pc hardware.
On June 23 2011 07:20 akaname wrote: i'm genuinely intrigued about the people saying this article is nonsense...
Why are Blizzard not including LAN? Like, seriously, it's annoyed a lot of fans and wouldn't be that difficult technically? For what reason are they deciding not to?
So they can shut down tournaments that doesn't have a license. To prevent the whole kespa deal that happened with Brood War.
after dissing your other comment in my last post... thank you for explaining this one to me, that makes a lot of sense. I really have been baffled by how much people say 'LAN!' and how Bliz says 'No!'
On June 23 2011 07:14 ThePurist wrote: Microsoft operating systems and office software are two of the biggest pirated softwares and they still make money. This guy tries to act like a realist but he doesn't really have a clue about economics.
Well you obviously doesnt have a clue about of Micrsoft make money... It´s not from the private user, but from schools/states/big companys that buy license to use thier product.
That's a poor excuse for no LAN, especially when games like League of Legends and Quake Live ARE available for free. And remember Brood War? How did that game even sell a single copy when it had LAN!?
On June 23 2011 07:21 Seronei wrote: They think Lan will increase piracy, but there is no way to know until they add lan and see an increase in pirated software coupled with a decline in sales. Else they're just playing a guessing game. Until then they're just spouting bullshit.
Also the reddit link has nothing to do with "goodwill" it has everything to do with the Witcher 2 being hyped as shit among PC-gaming crowd and graphics that uses high end pc hardware.
that's really dumb logic, sorry: "walking down through those dark alleyways in this rough neighbourhood at night might get me mugged... but there's no way to know until I try. Well, there's no way to know unless I try, else I'm just playing a guessing game!"
if it's a potential threat, why would they risk it?
Because it might increase sales? The same way you would walk through a shady neighborhood because the way is faster.
LOL, you got me there. I love how you extended the metaphor <3
i do think it's their call to make on the relative risks though, and they must have thought it through in some depth.
On June 23 2011 07:27 branflakes14 wrote: That's a poor excuse for no LAN, especially when games like League of Legends and Quake Live ARE available for free. And remember Brood War? How did that game even sell a single copy when it had LAN!?
That game is now on a dog tag that can be installed an infinity amount of times on a infinity amount of computers
On June 23 2011 07:18 AndAgain wrote: He just said what any intelligent person already understands. Obviously companies have good reasons for not putting LAN.
Ya I agree with this. None of what he said came across as new or surprising... it's common sense.
I just wish they could provide LAN capabilities for tournament events (to the organizations), but there are obvious problems with that.
On June 23 2011 07:18 darkscream wrote: Bad argument made by propagandist.
Pirates wouldn't have bought the game anyway, and including LAN would let your game get exposed to new people for free. This is like saying "terrorists ruined travel", even though it's the government ruining travelling.
Not to mention that most of these games have online ladder systems and that's what people buy the game for - The competitive ladder.
What can you really say. As a game developer he has to talk like that because its his bread and butter. But, because of this I feel like his opinion is pretty much not relevant because it's strongly biased without any actual proof/evidence to his claims. Just saber rattling towards pirates.
Had I not been able to download the vast majority of the games on my computer, I would have bought them instead. I never play SC2 on ladder, I only play against friends. What is your post if not biased, without any actual proof/evidence?
This is me exactly, if i can play a game without paying for it..... then i don't pay for it. If a game requires a legit copy to play multiplayer, I generally try to find a way to play for free first and see if its worth buying.... with SC2 I wanted to play it and knew I had no option but to buy it if i wanted to play online and since i'm a blizz junkie i just went out and bought it, infact i bought it twice lol
While many pirates would never pay for the game, there are many who will when forced to. There is a steam patch that allows you to play DN forever with a pirate copy, guess what..... i know a ton of people who were gonna buy it that just downloaded it instead once they found out they could play multiplayer for free......
I Can understand why a business would not want the have lan support, yet cant they make it so you need to authenticate with blizzard to Start a LAN, perhaps with small checks every few mins to authenticate this way a connection is still required but a stable one is not.
Isn't the Witcher 2 a bad example though? It did sell well, although there is no reason for a rational human being with the internet to buy it. Goodwill does make money.
Besides LAN is different. Tell me if I'm wrong but IMO people would still buy it to get the full experience online.
On June 23 2011 07:14 ThePurist wrote: Microsoft operating systems and office software are two of the biggest pirated softwares and they still make money. This guy tries to act like a realist but he doesn't really have a clue about economics. The opinions are too pessimistic and overgeneralizes the vast majority of people who purchase games with their hard-earned cash. Pirates don't stop revenue streams pirates were not a consumer in the first place. The assumption that a pirated copy was a sale is flawed imo and his last few personal statements are questionable as I perceive them as a cop-out when his whole opinion was about "simple economics".
you do realize that microsoft makes money because you NEED to use legit copies in business. if your company gets caught without a license, there's a good chance you will get fucked (while there's almost no risk to pirating a game).
comparing MS, which ships the most popular operating system + business apps in the world, to a video game is pretty stupid. especially when it comes to profit, lol.
On June 23 2011 07:20 akaname wrote: i'm genuinely intrigued about the people saying this article is nonsense...
Why are Blizzard not including LAN? Like, seriously, it's annoyed a lot of fans and wouldn't be that difficult technically? For what reason are they deciding not to?
It's pretty simple, with LAN, you can have things like ICCUP/brainclan, etc. where you dont need to pay for SC to play, and you can play online, with real rankings, etc. Blizzard doesn't make any money off of this, and people that might buy the game would just pirate it instead.
That being said, I think they should introduce a 'tournament' edition, but only under really strict/controlled circumstances (Eg. Only in GSL, MLG mainstage/booth, dreamhack mainstage/booth) so atleast important broadcasted games are un-interrupted, without the chance for people stealing it.
On June 23 2011 07:18 darkscream wrote: Bad argument made by propagandist.
Pirates wouldn't have bought the game anyway, and including LAN would let your game get exposed to new people for free. This is like saying "terrorists ruined travel", even though it's the government ruining travelling.
Not to mention that most of these games have online ladder systems and that's what people buy the game for - The competitive ladder.
What can you really say. As a game developer he has to talk like that because its his bread and butter. But, because of this I feel like his opinion is pretty much not relevant because it's strongly biased without any actual proof/evidence to his claims. Just saber rattling towards pirates.
Had I not been able to download the vast majority of the games on my computer, I would have bought them instead. I never play SC2 on ladder, I only play against friends. What is your post if not biased, without any actual proof/evidence?
This is me exactly, if i can play a game without paying for it..... then i don't pay for it. If a game requires a legit copy to play multiplayer, I generally try to find a way to play for free first and see if its worth buying.... with SC2 I wanted to play it and knew I had no option but to buy it if i wanted to play online and since i'm a blizz junkie i just went out and bought it, infact i bought it twice lol
While many pirates would never pay for the game, there are many who will when forced to. There is a steam patch that allows you to play DN forever with a pirate copy, guess what..... i know a ton of people who were gonna buy it that just downloaded it instead once they found out they could play multiplayer for free......
You make me a bit sad. Why wouldn't you buy a game you spend time playing even if you can pirate it?
On June 23 2011 07:10 mdma-_- wrote: that still doesnt explain why they cant allow people to play each other in lan with the necessecity of being logged into bnet/whatever online client.
cheap excuse just to blame it on pirates tbh
What the hell would be the point of LAN if you had to be logged into Bnet? The entire issue with no LAN is retarded internet problems that tournaments seem to constantly have.
This allows players to practice on LAN environment. Then you give large tournament organizers a "special version" that has true lan. I have no idea how much effort blizz would have to put into this but there are ways for lan to be incorporated
It's a bit unreasonable to think that Blizzard is going to hand tournament organizers a multi-million dollar 'key' and just hope it doesn't fall into the wrong hands. All it takes is once for it to be leaked and then everything is fucked.
Even if the justification is reasonable (it is I think), it doesn't explain why you can't have a LAN version ONLY for major tournaments. Tournaments on the scale of MLG, GSL, DH, IEM should not have to rely on the internet.
On June 23 2011 07:20 akaname wrote: i'm genuinely intrigued about the people saying this article is nonsense...
Why are Blizzard not including LAN? Like, seriously, it's annoyed a lot of fans and wouldn't be that difficult technically? For what reason are they deciding not to?
It's pretty simple, with LAN, you can have things like ICCUP/brainclan, etc. where you dont need to pay for SC to play, and you can play online, with real rankings, etc. Blizzard doesn't make any money off of this, and people that might buy the game would just pirate it instead.
That being said, I think they should introduce a 'tournament' edition, but only under really strict/controlled circumstances (Eg. Only in GSL, MLG mainstage/booth, dreamhack mainstage/booth) so atleast important broadcasted games are un-interrupted, without the chance for people stealing it.
I've wondered why they don't do this myself but the truth is that kind of thing will leak out no matter how much you try to stop it
On June 23 2011 07:18 AndAgain wrote: He just said what any intelligent person already understands. Obviously companies have good reasons for not putting LAN.
Yea it's a pity. The problem is most of the prevention for piracy hurts the guys that buy the games too.
ALL forms of DRM and "prevention" (such as excluding LAN) hurt the paying customers more than pirates, this is not even a debate.
Just because you say it's not debatable, doesn't mean it's the truth.
Let's look at what you say, and apply it to SC2:
Pirates: Can only play single player. Customers: Have to suffer through lag that is pretty damn annoying in local tournaments or lan parties.
I would say that it harms someone that pirates SC2 more than a customer.
It doesn't matter where you stand in this, but don't act like only your point is valid.
For those of you looking for a LAN backbone with an authentication service (including me), it's quite an engineering task. How do they make it run while authenticating, without creating problems that we already have with bnet? If the authentication is too lax, it gets hacked very quickly. If it's too demanding, we all might as well play on bnet anyways. Either way though, once LAN is supported and something goes wrong, the game will be forever pirated, since there's no way to brick the copies which have been pirated.
On June 23 2011 07:18 darkscream wrote: Bad argument made by propagandist.
Pirates wouldn't have bought the game anyway, and including LAN would let your game get exposed to new people for free. This is like saying "terrorists ruined travel", even though it's the government ruining travelling.
Not to mention that most of these games have online ladder systems and that's what people buy the game for - The competitive ladder.
What can you really say. As a game developer he has to talk like that because its his bread and butter. But, because of this I feel like his opinion is pretty much not relevant because it's strongly biased without any actual proof/evidence to his claims. Just saber rattling towards pirates.
Had I not been able to download the vast majority of the games on my computer, I would have bought them instead. I never play SC2 on ladder, I only play against friends. What is your post if not biased, without any actual proof/evidence?
This is me exactly, if i can play a game without paying for it..... then i don't pay for it. If a game requires a legit copy to play multiplayer, I generally try to find a way to play for free first and see if its worth buying.... with SC2 I wanted to play it and knew I had no option but to buy it if i wanted to play online and since i'm a blizz junkie i just went out and bought it, infact i bought it twice lol
While many pirates would never pay for the game, there are many who will when forced to. There is a steam patch that allows you to play DN forever with a pirate copy, guess what..... i know a ton of people who were gonna buy it that just downloaded it instead once they found out they could play multiplayer for free......
You make me a bit sad. Why wouldn't you buy a game you spend time playing even if you can pirate it?
Because you have a limited amount of money, if you don't buy that game you can afford going to that concert with your favorite band and when you can get the game for free it doesn't make any sense to prioritize the companies well being above your enjoyment.
On June 23 2011 07:21 Seronei wrote: They think Lan will increase piracy, but there is no way to know until they add lan and see an increase in pirated software coupled with a decline in sales. Else they're just playing a guessing game. Until then they're just spouting bullshit.
Also the reddit link has nothing to do with "goodwill" it has everything to do with the Witcher 2 being hyped as shit among PC-gaming crowd and graphics that uses high end pc hardware.
that's really dumb logic, sorry: "walking down through those dark alleyways in this rough neighbourhood at night might get me mugged... but there's no way to know until I try. Well, there's no way to know unless I try, else I'm just playing a guessing game!"
if it's a potential threat, why would they risk it?
Because it might increase sales? The same way you would walk through a shady neighborhood because the way is faster.
LOL, you got me there. I love how you extended the metaphor <3
i do think it's their call to make on the relative risks though, and they must have thought it through in some depth.
Yes I agree completely. I don't expect Blizzard to release lan ever which is why I rather ask for a way to rejoin custom games you've disconnected from.
On June 23 2011 07:20 akaname wrote: i'm genuinely intrigued about the people saying this article is nonsense...
Why are Blizzard not including LAN? Like, seriously, it's annoyed a lot of fans and wouldn't be that difficult technically? For what reason are they deciding not to?
It's pretty simple, with LAN, you can have things like ICCUP/brainclan, etc. where you dont need to pay for SC to play, and you can play online, with real rankings, etc. Blizzard doesn't make any money off of this, and people that might buy the game would just pirate it instead.
That being said, I think they should introduce a 'tournament' edition, but only under really strict/controlled circumstances (Eg. Only in GSL, MLG mainstage/booth, dreamhack mainstage/booth) so atleast important broadcasted games are un-interrupted, without the chance for people stealing it.
they have said a tournament edition is a possibility, but thats the closest we will ever get to lan
On June 23 2011 07:27 branflakes14 wrote: That's a poor excuse for no LAN, especially when games like League of Legends and Quake Live ARE available for free. And remember Brood War? How did that game even sell a single copy when it had LAN!?
League of Legends earn it's money on micro-transactions, Quake Live on ads (though it's main purpose is to stroke the fanbase), and when Brood War was big it wasn't as easy as googling "starcraft +crack". Though obviously when a crack was found me and my friends wasted no time copying the shit out of it and spreading it around lan parties.
I find it sad that so many developers only look at the negatives of sharing and completely ignore the positives (exposure, in particular). Yes, there are thieves who download and enjoy games simply because they don't want to buy, but there is a huge segment out there that downloads to try it, because they can't afford it (potential loyal customer, if you don't threaten them at this stage), or for other reasons.
On June 23 2011 07:27 branflakes14 wrote: That's a poor excuse for no LAN, especially when games like League of Legends and Quake Live ARE available for free. And remember Brood War? How did that game even sell a single copy when it had LAN!?
I literally downloaded a pirate copy of BW from ICCUP because I was too lazy to find where I put the disc. That's how easy it is to do. You can make a server that tricks a game client into thinking it's a LAN. Remember, ICCUP is technically an illegal pirate server, so it's not like there isn't precedent.
What if Blizz made LAN, and then ICCUP or somebody made a pirate server with a private ladder using GSL Maps? You think that wouldn't be really popular?
On June 23 2011 07:30 MilesTeg wrote: "you're convincing the wrong people"
On June 23 2011 07:18 darkscream wrote: Bad argument made by propagandist.
Pirates wouldn't have bought the game anyway, and including LAN would let your game get exposed to new people for free. This is like saying "terrorists ruined travel", even though it's the government ruining travelling.
Not to mention that most of these games have online ladder systems and that's what people buy the game for - The competitive ladder.
What can you really say. As a game developer he has to talk like that because its his bread and butter. But, because of this I feel like his opinion is pretty much not relevant because it's strongly biased without any actual proof/evidence to his claims. Just saber rattling towards pirates.
Rather than claiming that every instance of piracy is a lost sale (the common developer claim) or that pirates would not have bought the game anyway (common pirate claim) it's clearly somewhere in the middle - there is likely a significant set of potential customers in the middle who may likely pirate a game if they can but will go ahead and buy it if a pirated version isn't available.
For the people saying that that the computer would not have lost money otherwise, that is simply not true. Not 100% of the people who pirate it are people who just wanted to try it out, and in no way would they have bought it. A percentage of the people who pirated it liked the game, and had the money, but found out there was an inexpensive way ($0) method to get the game. This is true.
The percentage of the people who pirate the game that would have in fact bought it is debatable. Let's say for the argument that its 10%. 10% of the people who pirated the game would have bought the game if there was no method the pirate it.
Someone earlier threw out a number of 4 million pirated copies of MW2. So they lost 400 000 customers if we assume the 10%. Lets say each game is 60 bucks. The company lost 24 million dollars due to lost sales.
Lets say the percentage is 1%. That still is a lost of 2.4 million dollars.
On June 23 2011 07:18 darkscream wrote: Bad argument made by propagandist.
Pirates wouldn't have bought the game anyway, and including LAN would let your game get exposed to new people for free. This is like saying "terrorists ruined travel", even though it's the government ruining travelling.
Not to mention that most of these games have online ladder systems and that's what people buy the game for - The competitive ladder.
What can you really say. As a game developer he has to talk like that because its his bread and butter. But, because of this I feel like his opinion is pretty much not relevant because it's strongly biased without any actual proof/evidence to his claims. Just saber rattling towards pirates.
Had I not been able to download the vast majority of the games on my computer, I would have bought them instead. I never play SC2 on ladder, I only play against friends. What is your post if not biased, without any actual proof/evidence?
This is me exactly, if i can play a game without paying for it..... then i don't pay for it. If a game requires a legit copy to play multiplayer, I generally try to find a way to play for free first and see if its worth buying.... with SC2 I wanted to play it and knew I had no option but to buy it if i wanted to play online and since i'm a blizz junkie i just went out and bought it, infact i bought it twice lol
While many pirates would never pay for the game, there are many who will when forced to. There is a steam patch that allows you to play DN forever with a pirate copy, guess what..... i know a ton of people who were gonna buy it that just downloaded it instead once they found out they could play multiplayer for free......
You make me a bit sad. Why wouldn't you buy a game you spend time playing even if you can pirate it?
Because you have a limited amount of money, if you don't buy that game you can afford going to that concert with your favorite band and when you can get the game for free it doesn't make any sense to prioritize the companies well being above your enjoyment.
Then the company tanks or goes to other measures to make sure you pay(No lan). Then people precede to complain to said company because of this. Really I see no justification.
On June 23 2011 07:10 mdma-_- wrote: that still doesnt explain why they cant allow people to play each other in lan with the necessecity of being logged into bnet/whatever online client.
cheap excuse just to blame it on pirates tbh
Hackers could fairly easily remove all safeguards like a log-in requirement.
Fairly easy = couple of hours.
I am no computer genius but it seems to me that what's needed for tournaments is network play. Games could still be setup through battle.net. The problems occur during the actual game when the information is sent through the battle.net servers rather than peer to peer. Will hackers still be able to "remove all safeguards" when the game is programmed so that you have to be on bnet 2.0 to connect to each other?
It's also an amazingly retarded argument for RTS games anyways because the types of players that would only play lan and not play internet multiplayer are the EXACT SAME PEOPLE who would pirate the game just to play single player.
Well, the goodnews is I'll never have to wonder if maybe I should try out HoN. I know I won't now with the kind of attitude they have.
You treat customers like criminals and surprise surprise they will either not buy it or be the criminal you see them to be. I don't pirate games, most people don't pirate games and those who pirate them are unlikely to actually buy them(moral exceptions of course) So you don't actually loose out on them.
When you start putting in DRM, removing key features, putting in DLC content that should be apart of the game in the first place that's when you start seeing people who would of bought it, just pirate it.
Count me as someone who will never play HoN because of this childish stubborn argument. I can't tolerate nor will I support people who remove features and blame it on the pirates and not themselves. I am completely offended and disgusted.
On June 23 2011 07:14 ThePurist wrote: Microsoft operating systems and office software are two of the biggest pirated softwares and they still make money. This guy tries to act like a realist but he doesn't really have a clue about economics.
But Microsoft would make more money if that stuff wasn't pirated. Just like Blizzard makes way more money because SC2 isn't pirated.
I thought that it was pretty obvious this was the reason... Seeing as Activision did the same thing with CoD by removing dedicated servers. Why add a feature that will just decrease sales? Doesn't really make any sense from Blizzard's perspective. GSL and Dreamhack do not really have any problem with lag / disconnects. MLG seems to be the only event where I see disconnect screens all the time and I guess it's up to them to get a better internet connection at their venues.
Goodwill is nice to have but it doesn't pay the bills and any gaming company out there is out there to make money first and make good games second
Even if you believe it or not, the person who said this paragraph in a public interview should be banned from public speaking, fired and completely dissociated with the company. I understand and even (kinda) agree with his point, but wow.
Anyway. From S2's pov, a small company trying to make it out there, I understand it. From Blizzard's, who at this point would lose almost nothing compared to what they made, there's no excuse for not bringing out LAN. -At LEAST- as a special client, privileged for major competitions (GSL, DH, MLG, etc).
On June 23 2011 07:20 akaname wrote: i'm genuinely intrigued about the people saying this article is nonsense...
Why are Blizzard not including LAN? Like, seriously, it's annoyed a lot of fans and wouldn't be that difficult technically? For what reason are they deciding not to?
It's pretty simple, with LAN, you can have things like ICCUP/brainclan, etc. where you dont need to pay for SC to play, and you can play online, with real rankings, etc. Blizzard doesn't make any money off of this, and people that might buy the game would just pirate it instead.
wait, what does lan have to do with iccup? iccup is essentially a battle.net emulator, right...? it's not using lan...
I pirated the witcher 2 because they didn't release a demo for me to make sure it ran and make sure I liked the gameplay. Then I bought it. Pc games can't be returned or traded in. Demos should be mandatory
...
I've pirated games before for this exact reason. I'm not going to pay money for something that I'm not sure will run and that I'm even less sure I'll enjoy.
yeah i bought brink and there's no way i can get a refund. so fuck that shit. Next time if i don't know if the game is any good i am waiting for a steam sale.
...
I bought Hellgate: London. I feel your pain.
I paid for the lifetime subscription. I feel more pain...
I bought the collector's Edition and the lifetime subscription, I feel a tad bit more pain.
(lol)
Also in case of LAN, if they provide a good online platform (like sc2) why dont release lan also? you dont get nearly as much and as good, as your skill-level games in a lan-cracked tool.
even wc3 has more games (normal games, not dota) in bnet as in all 5-6 lan-tools and people played it there. dota has no support on bnet, so why not use tools there.
I don't wanna defend piratery, but it's not that simple as this developer wants to make it. The problem they have is that its easier to release no LAN then to build the best online-platform for their game themselves.
Btw: I actually bought SC:BW 5 months ago and did play it 2 hours full and don't regret to buy it, even though i only can play on Iccup (what's the most funny thing there? It's not a LAN-crack, it's an Internet-Port crack)
On June 23 2011 07:10 mdma-_- wrote: that still doesnt explain why they cant allow people to play each other in lan with the necessecity of being logged into bnet/whatever online client.
cheap excuse just to blame it on pirates tbh
Hackers could fairly easily remove all safeguards like a log-in requirement.
Fairly easy = couple of hours.
I am no computer genius but it seems to me that what's needed for tournaments is network play. Games could still be setup through battle.net. The problems occur during the actual game when the information is sent through the battle.net servers rather than peer to peer. Will hackers still be able to "remove all safeguards" when the game is programmed so that you have to be on bnet 2.0 to connect to each other?
I am also no computer genius, but I do believe that this way would be crackeable. Maybe not in a couple of hours, but probally wouldn't take too long.
On June 23 2011 07:14 ThePurist wrote: Microsoft operating systems and office software are two of the biggest pirated softwares and they still make money. This guy tries to act like a realist but he doesn't really have a clue about economics.
But Microsoft would make more money if that stuff wasn't pirated. Just like Blizzard makes way more money because SC2 isn't pirated.
What about sales that are made *because* of sharing. When arguing about sharing, you have to look at both sides. If I share SC2 with a friend and he really enjoys it and then buys SC2 / HOTS when that comes out, would that sale have been made if I only told him it's awesome and worth the money? Maybe. Maybe not.
This is what have been explained in every "Why no LAN?"-thread.
1) If Blizzard adds LAN support then it is relatively easy for any good programmer to remove eventuall security checks. The game would be pirated in no time.
2) How many here would honestly buy SC2 along with both expansions if it easily could be pirated? At least I wouldn't.
All gaming companies need to fight piracy in order to stay alive. Suing people is a bad choice since it will make your company look bad. Preventing people from accessing the game without going through your servers is the best solution.
The thing I'm wondering about is how long will it be before someone just sets up an alternate battle.net server in China. People set up fake WoW servers and such so it's not like it's impossible to set up pirate servers without LAN support already in the game--LAN just makes it much easier. After this happens will Blizzard then release LAN support to the rest of the community?
I understand the reasons Blizzard can't have LAN. I love Blizzard, they give me years of entertainment with each game.
I know they've been haunted by the whole LAN issue for a long time. I know they wish they could find a reasonable way to give it to us. They simply can't come out and say: "We're doing it for sales," so they remain relatively quiet.
In fact, bookmark this post. I can almost guarantee that after Legacy of the Void has been on shelves for a while, we will get a big announcement, possibly at Blizzcon, that LAN is finally coming to SC2. When all that's left is the pro scene and sales have begun to dwindle, they will give us LAN.
Until then, I understand. I don't blame the pirates, Blizzard, or anyone else. It's just the way things are.
it definitely makes sense for them, i would want as much money as I can get!
Now, for sc2, all that needs to happen is for Activision to get better netcoding and servers, so that we don't have 0.4 second delay and lag all the time. And so that we can play cross region.
Which unfortunately will be unlikely for a long long time, since Activision doesn't view SC2 as a priority since it's a buy once play free forever game >.>
On June 23 2011 07:40 Batch wrote: This is what have been explained in every "Why no LAN?"-thread.
1) If Blizzard adds LAN support then it is relatively easy for any good programmer to remove eventuall security checks. The game would be pirated in no time.
2) How many here would honestly buy SC2 along with both expansions if it easily could be pirated? At least I wouldn't.
All gaming companies need to fight piracy in order to stay alive. Suing people is a bad choice since it will make your company look bad. Preventing people from accessing the game without going through your servers is the best solution.
I still would. Partially because of loyalty to Blizzard, but mostly for the same reason I buy music digitally, rather than downloading illegal - there is a little extra comfort and security I feel is worth the cost. When it comes to music, that comfort (for me) is properly named files, complete albums, and all those other goodies that are only 50/50 on sharing sites. With games, it's knowing I have proper installation media, I won't have to fret about possibly running a crack that may or may not work, dealing with registry editing, etc. I feel that comfort is worth the money. I could download, crack and install just fine. I just don't think it's worth the hassle relative to the $60 I'd pay at retail.
omg whats wrong here, all that is needed, is to make people sign into their servers for say 5 mins to verify your account, than unlock the LAN feature, just make it so that i have to play a game 1st or something. and what about dream hack and GSL. Making the players play with latency because companies are to lazy to find a way to solve this issue. Pirates aren't to blame, maybe if they would just spend some time going, "hey, you bought the game, hey your signed in, hey you just played an online game, you are now verified as owning the game, LAN is unlocked" ass holes.....
On June 23 2011 07:42 Kollapse wrote: I understand the reasons Blizzard can't have LAN. I love Blizzard, they give me years of entertainment with each game.
woop hooray for some Blizzard love, finally.
We play their games constantly, but most of the comments on these forums make them look like the biggest douche factory ever!
On June 23 2011 07:39 n0ise wrote: Anyway. From S2's pov, a small company trying to make it out there, I understand it. From Blizzard's, who at this point would lose almost nothing compared to what they made, there's no excuse for not bringing out LAN. -At LEAST- as a special client, privileged for major competitions (GSL, DH, MLG, etc).
Having LAN in your game in this day and age is basically encouraging piracy, no matter how big you are it does not look good to shareholders. I know we all want game developers to be benevolent beings who exist only to make us happy, but in the end making money is what it's about and making decisions that will only lose you money isn't exactly a good idea
On June 23 2011 07:27 branflakes14 wrote: That's a poor excuse for no LAN, especially when games like League of Legends and Quake Live ARE available for free. And remember Brood War? How did that game even sell a single copy when it had LAN!?
Because they make their money in different ways and because Brood War was released before broadband was widely available and intenet speeds were so slow it was far less effort to just buy the game, but even then sales would have been lost to people copying the cds (I was the only one of my friends to own a legit copy, everyone else got pirated copies from a dude who basically made a living copying games, music abums and movies).
It sucks, but that's just the way things are going to be, its why we have such intrusive DRM and why so many games now need connections to servers to work (though I suspect that's more to do with the pre-owned games market).
not giving the players and fans what they want is a bad business decision no matter the circumstances. Theres ways around of excluding lan all together. I find this excuse to be old and tired. Why is it so terrible to log into a paid and authenticated account and then play lan? Its not as if many people run with no internet connection at all..
its silly and downright ignorant to exclude an important part of the multiplayer gaming experience because of an exploitable issue. Remember games before cd-keys? lol
On June 23 2011 07:39 n0ise wrote: Anyway. From S2's pov, a small company trying to make it out there, I understand it. From Blizzard's, who at this point would lose almost nothing compared to what they made, there's no excuse for not bringing out LAN. -At LEAST- as a special client, privileged for major competitions (GSL, DH, MLG, etc).
Having LAN in your game in this day and age is basically encouraging piracy, no matter how big you are it does not look good to shareholders. I know we all want game developers to be benevolent beings who exist only to make us happy, but in the end making money is what it's about and making decisions that will only lose you money isn't exactly a good idea
The problem with this statement is the belief that all sharing is 100% bad and no sharing can ever be beneficial to the company. I know it's a different industry, but just look at what Trent Reznor has done with Nine Inch Nails by embracing sharing.
On June 23 2011 07:10 mdma-_- wrote: that still doesnt explain why they cant allow people to play each other in lan with the necessecity of being logged into bnet/whatever online client.
cheap excuse just to blame it on pirates tbh
Hackers could fairly easily remove all safeguards like a log-in requirement.
On June 23 2011 07:10 mdma-_- wrote: that still doesnt explain why they cant allow people to play each other in lan with the necessecity of being logged into bnet/whatever online client.
cheap excuse just to blame it on pirates tbh
Hackers could fairly easily remove all safeguards like a log-in requirement.
Fairly easy = couple of hours.
I am no computer genius but it seems to me that what's needed for tournaments is network play. Games could still be setup through battle.net. The problems occur during the actual game when the information is sent through the battle.net servers rather than peer to peer. Will hackers still be able to "remove all safeguards" when the game is programmed so that you have to be on bnet 2.0 to connect to each other?
I am also no computer genius, but I do believe that this way would be crackeable. Maybe not in a couple of hours, but probally wouldn't take too long.
it seems like it would be crackable in the same way someone could make their own "lan bnet 2.0" already if they really really wanted to.
Give the man some credit. At least he's honest! The thing that pisses me off the most with Blizzard's "customer communication" is that they're - blatantly obviously - lying about their motives for why they insist on doing what they're doing as if it's somehow better than what they used to do.
"The technology isnt there yet". "We hope Battle.net 2.0 will be so good that you won't even need LAN".
Christ. They're insulting our intelligence on a level that's below a DotA-forumgoers average post. This man says something I could actually believe. I think he's wrong or at least inaccurate. But I can see where he's coming from.
On June 23 2011 07:37 Parnage wrote: Well, the goodnews is I'll never have to wonder if maybe I should try out HoN. I know I won't now with the kind of attitude they have.
You treat customers like criminals and surprise surprise they will either not buy it or be the criminal you see them to be. I don't pirate games, most people don't pirate games and those who pirate them are unlikely to actually buy them(moral exceptions of course) So you don't actually loose out on them.
When you start putting in DRM, removing key features, putting in DLC content that should be apart of the game in the first place that's when you start seeing people who would of bought it, just pirate it.
Count me as someone who will never play HoN because of this childish stubborn argument. I can't tolerate nor will I support people who remove features and blame it on the pirates and not themselves. I am completely offended and disgusted.
And people like this is exactly why Blizzard will keep insulting our intelligence - because there are those (and a lot of "those") that eat their BS up raw. Do you actually think Blizzard, or any DRM-happy company thats not including basic once-mandatory assets - like, say, LAN in SC2 - do it for your sake? And not for the sake of their sales? Really?
On June 23 2011 07:39 n0ise wrote: Goodwill is nice to have but it doesn't pay the bills and any gaming company out there is out there to make money first and make good games second
Even if you believe it or not, the person who said this paragraph in a public interview should be banned from public speaking, fired and completely dissociated with the company. I understand and even (kinda) agree with his point, but wow.
A child can see its the truth. You'd prefer them to spout obvious lies?
On June 23 2011 07:45 Destro wrote: not giving the players and fans what they want is a bad business decision no matter the circumstances. Theres ways around of excluding lan all together. I find this excuse to be old and tired. Why is it so terrible to log into a paid and authenticated account and then play lan? Its not as if many people run with no internet connection at all..
Because that's FAR easier to crack than requiring people to play over bnet all the time.
On June 23 2011 07:10 mdma-_- wrote: that still doesnt explain why they cant allow people to play each other in lan with the necessecity of being logged into bnet/whatever online client.
cheap excuse just to blame it on pirates tbh
Hackers could fairly easily remove all safeguards like a log-in requirement.
Fairly easy = couple of hours.
Well they got pirated SC2 campaign working...
Because the SC2 campaign works offline, even without an internet connection.
On June 23 2011 07:45 Destro wrote: not giving the players and fans what they want is a bad business decision no matter the circumstances. Theres ways around of excluding lan all together. I find this excuse to be old and tired. Why is it so terrible to log into a paid and authenticated account and then play lan? Its not as if many people run with no internet connection at all..
its silly and downright ignorant to exclude an important part of the multiplayer gaming experience because of an exploitable issue. Remember games before cd-keys? lol
Just having to be connected to battle.net doesn't prevent pirates from cracking it. Just look at Assassin's Creed 2 which required a constant connection to play it, withing a month there was a crack out that made it possible to play it offline. The only reason Battle.net hasn't been cracked yet is because everything goes through it, if you only need to get a message that says that you're connected pirates can just fake it so the client thinks it's connected to battle.net.
As much as I understand the need for some kind of DRM to protect developers and publishers investments if the method of DRM means that major game features need to be cut then that is not a good situation to be in. I have no idea how LAN could be added while maintaining some form of DRM, I'm not a dev What we really need is some breakthrough in DRM methods that lets them protect the game without cutting features. Even if it means authenticating every LAN session (bnet authenticator?) it would be a better situation than now imo.
On June 23 2011 07:43 Yoshi Kirishima wrote: it definitely makes sense for them, i would want as much money as I can get!
Now, for sc2, all that needs to happen is for Activision to get better netcoding and servers, so that we don't have 0.4 second delay and lag all the time. And so that we can play cross region.
Which unfortunately will be unlikely for a long long time, since Activision doesn't view SC2 as a priority since it's a buy once play free forever game >.>
i don't know about you, but i for one am super happy about the delay. the units react really fast and i don't feel any delay at all.
last week i played 2-3 wc3 tft games on battle.net. holy shit now that's delay, units need 1-2 seconds to respond. it's beyond me how that was playable. sc2 latency is great imo.
On June 23 2011 07:10 mdma-_- wrote: that still doesnt explain why they cant allow people to play each other in lan with the necessecity of being logged into bnet/whatever online client.
cheap excuse just to blame it on pirates tbh
Hackers could fairly easily remove all safeguards like a log-in requirement.
Fairly easy = couple of hours.
I am no computer genius but it seems to me that what's needed for tournaments is network play. Games could still be setup through battle.net. The problems occur during the actual game when the information is sent through the battle.net servers rather than peer to peer. Will hackers still be able to "remove all safeguards" when the game is programmed so that you have to be on bnet 2.0 to connect to each other?
I am also no computer genius, but I do believe that this way would be crackeable. Maybe not in a couple of hours, but probally wouldn't take too long.
it seems like it would be crackable in the same way someone could make their own "lan bnet 2.0" already if they really really wanted to.
They already did. Some Chinese people made a server that enabled LAN or something. It also took a lot of effort to connect to it though.
I think those kinds of arguments are only for the rts genre and its hardly an argument, sc2 was still pirated even without multiplayer. Releasing a fps without lan or dedicated server support is suicide unless your title is called COD. And activision expects you to pay a subscription fee for stat tracking in cod so the company is already a bit crazy and will probably kill the franchise.
That said if lan does come to sc2 I dont want any of that silly DRM crap on it. The last game I bought was splinter cell conviction and that had online play and lan but the fucking drm always interfered and I couldnt play it. Supposedly there is a fix for it by cracking the game but cracking and removing the drm to play my legitimate game is kind of silly..
Piracy is a big issue regardless, whether you take an ethical stance or economic stance. Majority of the pirates would probably not buy the game, however this would still effect sales regardless. There are rational consumers with disposable incomes that would prefer not to buy a game, or even to test it out first - THIS AFFECTS SALES. There are also other forms of social and media pressures to try out a game, but some of these may choose to pirate instead of otherwise buying.
Cracking the online aspect of a game has been happening all the time. I've known people who used a crack on WC3: FT with a bnet bypass (I don't know the details of it) which allowed online access. There are services like Garina or Hamachi which allow online play by creating a virtual network.
i can understand why blizzard, specifically for SC2, is not putting out LAN. games sell heavily frontloaded, and they have 2 more expansions to sell which they intend to make additional game sales out of.
however, if your game has been out well over a year, and your game is a popular competitive esport, and you are making more money off of that scene than you will by the sporadic individual buys, but you are still refusing to give that scene LAN support, that has nothing to do with piracy. that has to do with developers being morons.
people who are willing to wait THAT long to play your game for free were never going to buy your game without pirating it first, and people who have been playing that long deserve some fairly straightforward features that any development team worth their salt is capable of providing. the amount of sales you will lose is trivial at most, but by delaying LAN and suddenly allowing a new market of people who weren't going to play your game until now into the fold, it is reasonable to expect more sales than normal. it's this kind of logic that i haven't seen refuted ever, that makes me convinced that as long as you don't put LAN in during a hype train for the game, it is not a big deal.
Am I being completely idiotic to suggest that they give a version with lan enabled to the likes of MLG, GSL and Dreamhack etc while witholding it from sale to the general public?
edit: read the thread, people have already suggested the same thing. soz.
On June 23 2011 07:39 n0ise wrote: Anyway. From S2's pov, a small company trying to make it out there, I understand it. From Blizzard's, who at this point would lose almost nothing compared to what they made, there's no excuse for not bringing out LAN. -At LEAST- as a special client, privileged for major competitions (GSL, DH, MLG, etc).
Having LAN in your game in this day and age is basically encouraging piracy, no matter how big you are it does not look good to shareholders. I know we all want game developers to be benevolent beings who exist only to make us happy, but in the end making money is what it's about and making decisions that will only lose you money isn't exactly a good idea
The problem with this statement is the belief that all sharing is 100% bad and no sharing can ever be beneficial to the company. I know it's a different industry, but just look at what Trent Reznor has done with Nine Inch Nails by embracing sharing.
Trent Reznor is an independent musician, he can do whatever he wants with his music and nobody can tell him otherwise. It's an entirely different situation.
On June 23 2011 07:10 mdma-_- wrote: that still doesnt explain why they cant allow people to play each other in lan with the necessecity of being logged into bnet/whatever online client.
cheap excuse just to blame it on pirates tbh
Hackers could fairly easily remove all safeguards like a log-in requirement.
Fairly easy = couple of hours.
I am no computer genius but it seems to me that what's needed for tournaments is network play. Games could still be setup through battle.net. The problems occur during the actual game when the information is sent through the battle.net servers rather than peer to peer. Will hackers still be able to "remove all safeguards" when the game is programmed so that you have to be on bnet 2.0 to connect to each other?
I am also no computer genius, but I do believe that this way would be crackeable. Maybe not in a couple of hours, but probally wouldn't take too long.
it seems like it would be crackable in the same way someone could make their own "lan bnet 2.0" already if they really really wanted to.
I'm pretty sure it's a lot more complicated than that.
In one of them you have bypass the "I am on bnet 2.0 checker" while the other changes the way every single bit of data is transfered.
Some people were even saying you could just make them log once before playing, that's basically how the campaign works, and it was cracked instantly.
...any gaming company out there is out there to make money first and make good games second. I'm sorry if this truth offends you but the video game market is an industry and people make games to make money the same way a guy who sells Ice-cream does his job to make money and not to put smiles on people's faces (although I'm sure he does enjoy putting smiles on people's faces).
with that kind of language, i'll be avoiding HoN like dog poo.
to note, there are developers out there like Blizzard, who sell ice-cream to put a smile on people's faces, and by doing this they're intelligent enough to figure they'll make bucket loads of cash.
i'm just throwing a thought out there for you Mr. Developer, just a thought.
EDIT: not that i have ever played HoN, but i've been curious to see how it played, not anymore, i'm pulling a Destiny (standing for what i believe to be right).
That also has to do with Windows and Office being so widespread along with skills related to them. Businesses, for the most part, don't pirate. They buy Office and Windows because most people have at least some experience with them. Then, people use them for work, so their kids use them for school. So on and so forth. In the world of office management and skills, market penetration can sometimes be more beneficial than overall sales.
On June 23 2011 07:30 zyzski wrote:
you do realize that microsoft makes money because you NEED to use legit copies in business. if your company gets caught without a license, there's a good chance you will get fucked (while there's almost no risk to pirating a game).
comparing MS, which ships the most popular operating system + business apps in the world, to a video game is pretty stupid. especially when it comes to profit, lol.
Two birds, one stone.
There is a fundamental flaw in your critiques of my example. My example was not to be evaluated on what type of software it is and its respective implications. That is a given that I understood and hoped people wouldn't point it out as it is of little value to the discussion at hand.
Going back to what I was saying, the fundamental flaw is that you did not read the latter portion of my opinion where I explicitly comment that:
- Pirates don't stop revenue streams - Pirates were not consumers in the first place - The assumption that a pirated copy was a loss in sale is flawed
You do realize there many alternatives to operating systems and office software that are completely free right?
aksfjh - Thanks for the mentioning market penetration. I guess in the world of "office management and skills" market penetration can be beneficial. I want to point out that you used the term incorrectly and that first point is pretty much universally understood (I hope).
zyzski - Profit isn't tied down to "business apps and operating systems" so I have no idea what you are trying to prove in the last line lol except your stupidity. To be sure, video games can be more profitable than business applications.
On June 23 2011 07:10 mdma-_- wrote: that still doesnt explain why they cant allow people to play each other in lan with the necessecity of being logged into bnet/whatever online client.
cheap excuse just to blame it on pirates tbh
Hackers could fairly easily remove all safeguards like a log-in requirement.
Fairly easy = couple of hours.
Well they got pirated SC2 campaign working...
Because the SC2 campaign works offline, even without an internet connection.
I agree with everything but the phrase "Developers make games to make money first, and to make good games second", this explains why HoN is such a soft game, it just seems so bland. Of course they need to make money, it's their job. But you do other things if your objective is to make money, you don't go into the videogame industry.
It like studying medicine vs studying engineering in my country. They have roughly the same requirements, but if I really want to make money, I'll go a hundred times for engineering instead.
I sincerely hope he never sells another copy again, I felt a bit insulted by this statement really, as ridiculous as it may sound lol.
On topic though, I believe it's legit to avoid LAN because of piracy. Piracy is incredibly prevalent, and even without knowing if it truly affects sales, it's still a theft of my intellectual property and if I can avoid it, I will, I think it's that simple.
While it is true that a pirated copy isn't necessarily a lost sale, you can't really prove that someone who pirates a game wouldn't have bought it anyway.
saying that pirates killed lan is stupid. People get mmo games to play them online. The LAN feature is only really neccessary for things like tournaments and when you want to play some games with your friends. If they actually want to play online and get the full benefit of the game, then obviously they need to buy a key. I think what blizzard thinks is that the campaign is actually an important and key feature of starcraft when this isn't so. Most people i know, and most people who i've played on ladder havent even touched the campaign.
On June 23 2011 07:41 Strayline wrote: The thing I'm wondering about is how long will it be before someone just sets up an alternate battle.net server in China. People set up fake WoW servers and such so it's not like it's impossible to set up pirate servers without LAN support already in the game--LAN just makes it much easier. After this happens will Blizzard then release LAN support to the rest of the community?
The way that B.net is set up right now, it's pretty difficult to create a crack since it would need to emulate quite a bit of the B.net architecture in order for it to work (or so I've heard). The hackers are already making small progress in cracking the multiplayer despite the difficulty, and I assume that adding in a LAN mode would only make their efforts easier.
On June 23 2011 07:10 mdma-_- wrote: that still doesnt explain why they cant allow people to play each other in lan with the necessecity of being logged into bnet/whatever online client.
cheap excuse just to blame it on pirates tbh
Hackers could fairly easily remove all safeguards like a log-in requirement.
Fairly easy = couple of hours.
I am no computer genius but it seems to me that what's needed for tournaments is network play. Games could still be setup through battle.net. The problems occur during the actual game when the information is sent through the battle.net servers rather than peer to peer. Will hackers still be able to "remove all safeguards" when the game is programmed so that you have to be on bnet 2.0 to connect to each other?
I am also no computer genius, but I do believe that this way would be crackeable. Maybe not in a couple of hours, but probally wouldn't take too long.
it seems like it would be crackable in the same way someone could make their own "lan bnet 2.0" already if they really really wanted to.
I'm pretty sure it's a lot more complicated than that.
In one of them you have bypass the "I am on bnet 2.0 checker" while the other changes the way every single bit of data is transfered.
Some people were even saying you could just make them log once before playing, that's basically how the campaign works, and it was cracked instantly.
I doubt it's THAT complicated. I mean you send a recieve tcp/ip packets you can just look at what is in the packets and engineer a server program based on it. And according to one guy I got a reply from, some chinese guys already did so.
Crapping all over your customer base is what's going to increase piracy to be honest.
Look at Spore for instance, people hated the inclusion of restrictive and draconian installation limits and the notorious SecuROM rootkit being implemented upon installation. It was so bad that Spore became the most pirated game of the year.
In short, removing essential features for gamers such as LAN support, multiple installs, dedicated server support amongst other things only hurts the legitimate consumer.
I'm not condoning priacy here but when a pirated product which one can illegally obtain for free gives better incentives than actually purchasing the real product.
Not a SC2 related analogy but it's like when one purchases a movie on DVD as opposed to pirating it.
If you pirate, you just put the DVD in the drive and watch the movie. Simple as.
If you purchase the DVD, you put the DVD in the drive and have to deal with about three or four several minute long unskippable trailers for upcoming movies which you may fastforward but cannot skip, then you have to deal with one or two adverts for other products, then you get several long copyright warnings, again treating the customer as if he/she is a potential criminal, and then FINALLY after that, you can go to a menu and hit "play."
On June 23 2011 07:45 Destro wrote: not giving the players and fans what they want is a bad business decision no matter the circumstances. Theres ways around of excluding lan all together. I find this excuse to be old and tired. Why is it so terrible to log into a paid and authenticated account and then play lan? Its not as if many people run with no internet connection at all..
its silly and downright ignorant to exclude an important part of the multiplayer gaming experience because of an exploitable issue. Remember games before cd-keys? lol
Just having to be connected to battle.net doesn't prevent pirates from cracking it. Just look at Assassin's Creed 2 which required a constant connection to play it, withing a month there was a crack out that made it possible to play it offline. The only reason Battle.net hasn't been cracked yet is because everything goes through it, if you only need to get a message that says that you're connected pirates can just fake it so the client thinks it's connected to battle.net.
Well it's been around....... 10 - 11 months since Wings of Liberty has been officially launched. Even longer if you consider how long the beta lasted.
So tell me, why haven't pirates circimvented the need for Battle.net entirely, just to make Blizzard look like idiots by making a free version of the game available that has better features than the version that people have paid ~£40 for?
...any gaming company out there is out there to make money first and make good games second. I'm sorry if this truth offends you but the video game market is an industry and people make games to make money the same way a guy who sells Ice-cream does his job to make money and not to put smiles on people's faces (although I'm sure he does enjoy putting smiles on people's faces).
with that kind of language, i'll be avoiding HoN like dog poo.
to note, there are developers out there like Blizzard, who sell ice-cream to put a smile on people's faces, and by doing this they're intelligent enough to figure they'll make bucket loads of cash.
i'm just throwing a thought out there for you Mr. Developer, just a thought.
EDIT: not that i have ever played HoN, but i've been curious to see how it played, not anymore, i'm pulling a Destiny (standing for what i believe to be right).
Let me tell you this. Of all the developers out there, Blizzard is definitely not the one "out ot put a smile on your face". Selling the game in three parts isn't to make you happy. It's to be able to sell it two more times with minimal effort.
You know what would make this whole community smile? LAN.
That also has to do with Windows and Office being so widespread along with skills related to them. Businesses, for the most part, don't pirate. They buy Office and Windows because most people have at least some experience with them. Then, people use them for work, so their kids use them for school. So on and so forth. In the world of office management and skills, market penetration can sometimes be more beneficial than overall sales.
you do realize that microsoft makes money because you NEED to use legit copies in business. if your company gets caught without a license, there's a good chance you will get fucked (while there's almost no risk to pirating a game).
comparing MS, which ships the most popular operating system + business apps in the world, to a video game is pretty stupid. especially when it comes to profit, lol.
Two birds, one stone.
There is a fundamental flaw in your critiques of my example. My example was not to be evaluated on what type of software it is and its respective implications. That is a given that I understood and hoped people wouldn't point it out as it is of little value to the discussion at hand.
Going back to what I was saying, the fundamental flaw is that you did not read the latter portion of my opinion where I explicitly comment that:
- Pirates don't stop revenue streams - Pirates were not consumers in the first place - The assumption that a pirated copy was a loss in sale is flawed
You do realize there many alternatives to operating systems and office software that are completely free right?
aksfjh - Thanks for the mentioning market penetration. I guess in the world of "office management and skills" market penetration can be beneficial. I want to point out that you used the term incorrectly and that first point is pretty much universally understood (I hope).
zyzski - Profit isn't tied down to "business apps and operating systems" so I have no idea what you are trying to prove in the last line lol except your stupidity. To be sure, video games can be more profitable than business applications.
You keep saying this over and over but it's still not true. While a pirated copy of something is definitely not always a lost sale (For example, i'm not going to actually rent all the movies i watch if i couldn't download them), but i sure as hell downloaded a lot of games until Steam made it even easier than pirating to get a game on release. And i'm by far not the only person in this position.
The companies opposing adding lan support even for live events are just a bit lame. I mean it doesn't even have to be a lan client since that might get pirated but on the venue servers as they did with quakelive isn't impossible so I just don't get why they wouldn't do that..
Btw it's hilarious that the HoN developers who are whining since they just pretty much stole their game idea from icefrog, not that he didn't agree to it or anything just that they are working on a pirated game concept :p
On June 23 2011 07:55 br3ak.g0d wrote: saying that pirates killed lan is stupid. People get mmo games to play them online. The LAN feature is only really neccessary for things like tournaments and when you want to play some games with your friends. If they actually want to play online and get the full benefit of the game, then obviously they need to buy a key. I think what blizzard thinks is that the campaign is actually an important and key feature of starcraft when this isn't so. Most people i know, and most people who i've played on ladder havent even touched the campaign.
You can emulate Lan over the internet, so by allowing lan you can play online anyway and after that it's not too much work to make a private ladder and ta-da you have a pirate battle.net.
I really don't understand this logic. It seems to me like piracy is very little now compared to what it used to be. I think the best way to explain my perception of this is with a poll:
Poll: If SC2 was crackable for LAN, would you still buy it?
Yes (58)
81%
No (14)
19%
72 total votes
Your vote: If SC2 was crackable for LAN, would you still buy it?
Now understandably this poll will be a bit biased due to the dedication of the TL community, but I bet it's true in general due to the existence of the ladder system (ie, why private World of Warcraft servers never really made a huge dent in it's sales or popularity)
On June 23 2011 07:10 mdma-_- wrote: that still doesnt explain why they cant allow people to play each other in lan with the necessecity of being logged into bnet/whatever online client.
cheap excuse just to blame it on pirates tbh
The implementation of LAN is core programming. If it were implemented as you said people could still crack it. And knowing the nature of SC their are plenty of people willing to do it.
On June 23 2011 07:10 mdma-_- wrote: that still doesnt explain why they cant allow people to play each other in lan with the necessecity of being logged into bnet/whatever online client.
cheap excuse just to blame it on pirates tbh
Hackers could fairly easily remove all safeguards like a log-in requirement.
Fairly easy = couple of hours.
I am no computer genius but it seems to me that what's needed for tournaments is network play. Games could still be setup through battle.net. The problems occur during the actual game when the information is sent through the battle.net servers rather than peer to peer. Will hackers still be able to "remove all safeguards" when the game is programmed so that you have to be on bnet 2.0 to connect to each other?
I am also no computer genius, but I do believe that this way would be crackeable. Maybe not in a couple of hours, but probally wouldn't take too long.
it seems like it would be crackable in the same way someone could make their own "lan bnet 2.0" already if they really really wanted to.
I'm pretty sure it's a lot more complicated than that.
In one of them you have bypass the "I am on bnet 2.0 checker" while the other changes the way every single bit of data is transfered.
Some people were even saying you could just make them log once before playing, that's basically how the campaign works, and it was cracked instantly.
I doubt it's THAT complicated. I mean you send a recieve tcp/ip packets you can just look at what is in the packets and engineer a server program based on it. And according to one guy I got a reply from, some chinese guys already did so.
And according to that same guy, the only reason it's this hard is because of the way bnet 2.0 works, adding LAN would have made it a lot easier. It's hard to say anything is completelly uncrackable.
Plus, this amount of control may make it a lot easier to break cracks with patching.
On June 23 2011 07:56 Clbull wrote: Crapping all over your customer base is what's going to increase piracy to be honest.
Look at Spore for instance, people hated the inclusion of restrictive and draconian installation limits and the notorious SecuROM rootkit being implemented upon installation. It was so bad that Spore became the most pirated game of the year.
In short, removing essential features for gamers such as LAN support, multiple installs, dedicated server support amongst other things only hurts the legitimate consumer.
I'm not condoning priacy here but when a pirated product which one can illegally obtain for free gives better
On June 23 2011 07:45 Destro wrote: not giving the players and fans what they want is a bad business decision no matter the circumstances. Theres ways around of excluding lan all together. I find this excuse to be old and tired. Why is it so terrible to log into a paid and authenticated account and then play lan? Its not as if many people run with no internet connection at all..
its silly and downright ignorant to exclude an important part of the multiplayer gaming experience because of an exploitable issue. Remember games before cd-keys? lol
Just having to be connected to battle.net doesn't prevent pirates from cracking it. Just look at Assassin's Creed 2 which required a constant connection to play it, withing a month there was a crack out that made it possible to play it offline. The only reason Battle.net hasn't been cracked yet is because everything goes through it, if you only need to get a message that says that you're connected pirates can just fake it so the client thinks it's connected to battle.net.
Well it's been around....... 10 - 11 months since Wings of Liberty has been officially launched. Even longer if you consider how long the beta lasted.
So tell me, why haven't pirates circimvented the need for Battle.net entirely, just to make Blizzard look like idiots by making a free version of the game available that has better features than the version that people have paid ~£40 for?
Reread, I told you why pirates hasn't cracked battle.net. (Or didn't some chinese dudes do it?)
On June 23 2011 07:58 leizar wrote: I really don't understand this logic. It seems to me like piracy is very little now compared to what it used to be. I think the best way to explain my perception of this is with a poll:
Poll: If SC2 was crackable for LAN, would you still buy it?
Yes (58)
81%
No (14)
19%
72 total votes
Your vote: If SC2 was crackable for LAN, would you still buy it?
Now understandably this poll will be a bit biased due to the dedication of the TL community, but I bet it's true in general due to the existence of the ladder system (ie, why private World of Warcraft servers never really made a huge dent in it's sales or popularity)
Stupid question here as pretty much everyone owns it already...
Atrocious argument without any underlying models or proof. The facts he pushes off of (gaming companies are in it to make money, good business can, in principle, mean worse customer service, and so forth) are sound and true - but the conclusions he draws don't follow from these facts. One would need to prove that introduction of LAN will increase piracy of a given game while decreasing sales. And, considering that SC2 is already pirated to hell, and that Battle.net, even with introduction of LAN, would still be virtually necessary to play against more than a few people (yes, one could set up illegal hosting servers etc. - but that would take far longer than it takes for most of the revenue to come to the company after the release), there are sound logical arguments against his predictions, while there is no proof that LAN would actually increase piracy.
On June 23 2011 07:58 leizar wrote: I really don't understand this logic. It seems to me like piracy is very little now compared to what it used to be. I think the best way to explain my perception of this is with a poll:
Poll: If SC2 was crackable for LAN, would you still buy it?
Yes (58)
81%
No (14)
19%
72 total votes
Your vote: If SC2 was crackable for LAN, would you still buy it?
Now understandably this poll will be a bit biased due to the dedication of the TL community, but I bet it's true in general due to the existence of the ladder system (ie, why private World of Warcraft servers never really made a huge dent in it's sales or popularity)
Stupid question here as pretty much everyone owns it already...
Even worse example, if you have ever seen a WoW private server. They don't even deserve to be called the same game. It's almost unplayable.
On June 23 2011 07:10 mdma-_- wrote: that still doesnt explain why they cant allow people to play each other in lan with the necessecity of being logged into bnet/whatever online client.
cheap excuse just to blame it on pirates tbh
What the hell would be the point of LAN if you had to be logged into Bnet? The entire issue with no LAN is retarded internet problems that tournaments seem to constantly have.
Latency, the simple fact that you don't need to route game data to a server(bnet in SC2 case) is enough reason for LAN. Countless tournaments that were fucked up thanks to lack of LAN support.
On June 23 2011 07:56 worldsnap wrote: You keep saying this over and over but it's still not true. While a pirated copy of something is definitely not always a lost sale (For example, i'm not going to actually rent all the movies i watch if i couldn't download them), but i sure as hell downloaded a lot of games until Steam made it even easier than pirating to get a game on release. And i'm by far not the only person in this position.
lol, I said it twice for the sake of reiteration because they selectively read my post and argued on pretty much no basis.
Pirates were not consumers in the first place = "While a pirated copy of something is definitely not always a lost sale."
On June 23 2011 07:46 redFF wrote: I think they should give companies like MLG,GSL, Dreamhack etc lan copies for their big tournaments.
And what happens when that copy gets leaked a few people get sued to hell and the cats out of the bag for blizzard. People aren't practicing on lan so why make a tournament with lan you would have the same simulated delay as there always has been the 125ms(the delay used for sc2 b.net and the delay in SC1 lan) the only thing that is different is no Internet requirement and a fairly more stable connection. That's convenience to a tournament organizer not to blizzard game companies get burned when people leak shit to pirate all the time you see games break release date so trust isn't exactly high there.
On June 23 2011 07:10 mdma-_- wrote: that still doesnt explain why they cant allow people to play each other in lan with the necessecity of being logged into bnet/whatever online client.
cheap excuse just to blame it on pirates tbh
Hackers could fairly easily remove all safeguards like a log-in requirement.
Fairly easy = couple of hours.
I am no computer genius but it seems to me that what's needed for tournaments is network play. Games could still be setup through battle.net. The problems occur during the actual game when the information is sent through the battle.net servers rather than peer to peer. Will hackers still be able to "remove all safeguards" when the game is programmed so that you have to be on bnet 2.0 to connect to each other?
I am also no computer genius, but I do believe that this way would be crackeable. Maybe not in a couple of hours, but probally wouldn't take too long.
it seems like it would be crackable in the same way someone could make their own "lan bnet 2.0" already if they really really wanted to.
I'm pretty sure it's a lot more complicated than that.
In one of them you have bypass the "I am on bnet 2.0 checker" while the other changes the way every single bit of data is transfered.
Some people were even saying you could just make them log once before playing, that's basically how the campaign works, and it was cracked instantly.
I doubt it's THAT complicated. I mean you send a recieve tcp/ip packets you can just look at what is in the packets and engineer a server program based on it. And according to one guy I got a reply from, some chinese guys already did so.
And according to that same guy, the only reason it's this hard is because of the way bnet 2.0 works, adding LAN would have made it a lot easier. It's hard to say anything is completelly uncrackable.
Plus, this amount of control may make it a lot easier to break cracks with patching.
Well you should remember the context of my original post...
I go to the store and steal a steak. It costs everyone who made that steak money to get that steak there. I argue that I would've never bought the steak in the first place, but since I could take it I did.
Honestly, how is piracy tolerated at all? Companies don't pay millions of dollars developing a game with the mindset "well, people are going to steal this anyway but atleast we can be proud of what we made." That's bullshit. Game developers, movie & tv producers, all of them deserve money for what they make. If piracy is supposed to be okay, then start paying for games with 5 minutes of unblockable advertising for every minute you play because that's how they're going to have to pay for it.
...any gaming company out there is out there to make money first and make good games second. I'm sorry if this truth offends you but the video game market is an industry and people make games to make money the same way a guy who sells Ice-cream does his job to make money and not to put smiles on people's faces (although I'm sure he does enjoy putting smiles on people's faces).
with that kind of language, i'll be avoiding HoN like dog poo.
to note, there are developers out there like Blizzard, who sell ice-cream to put a smile on people's faces, and by doing this they're intelligent enough to figure they'll make bucket loads of cash.
i'm just throwing a thought out there for you Mr. Developer, just a thought.
EDIT: not that i have ever played HoN, but i've been curious to see how it played, not anymore, i'm pulling a Destiny (standing for what i believe to be right).
Let me tell you this. Of all the developers out there, Blizzard is definitely not the one "out ot put a smile on your face". Selling the game in three parts isn't to make you happy. It's to be able to sell it two more times with minimal effort.
You know what would make this whole community smile? LAN.
I dunno. I think you can see when developers put true passion into their games, and Blizz is definitely that type of company, whenever I see their games, I see blizzard, their games have "soul" and few developers manage to do that.
I really respect blizzard for having that huge quality. I don't think they could develop games this good with the attitude the hon developer shows. Making tons of cash doesn't mean they don't put making good games as their first objective, it only means they have great marketing as well.
In a similar note, when I played HoN, I instantly hated it. It played like DotA, felt like that type of game, had tons of heroes and features. But it just didn't have the soul and character of the warcraft universe, it was just... terrible, I can't really explain it well, but it just lacks something, and the same goes for many other game developers. It's also noticeable when comparing the CoD games. God the first ones were brilliant, something happened there, maybe money became their primary concern, I dunno.
On June 23 2011 07:58 leizar wrote: I really don't understand this logic. It seems to me like piracy is very little now compared to what it used to be. I think the best way to explain my perception of this is with a poll:
Poll: If SC2 was crackable for LAN, would you still buy it?
Yes (58)
81%
No (14)
19%
72 total votes
Your vote: If SC2 was crackable for LAN, would you still buy it?
Now understandably this poll will be a bit biased due to the dedication of the TL community, but I bet it's true in general due to the existence of the ladder system (ie, why private World of Warcraft servers never really made a huge dent in it's sales or popularity)
Stupid question here as pretty much everyone owns it already...
I probably should have used past tense, it could easily be applied to HoTS or LoTV though.
And you better bet piracy is on the rise. I'm not blaming anybody, though- just the same way that the smart Business is drawn to removing LAN because of piracy, the smart Consumer is drawn to piracy because it is rational to not buy a game for 30 dollars when I can download almost the same game for free.
this sums the whole debate quite nicely,
i don't see any reason for carrying on this discussion. noone but the biggest sharks in the industry like Blizzard could take the millions upon millions of dollars in losses from piracy and still be productive, 90% of the companies risk going down if they don't find some other magical incentive to add to their game to make people actually want to buy it. how do you think the LOL or Bloodline model came to be, doh.
and there isn't even any comparison between a video game to universally used software like Windows or Office, there's a difference between a product that targets billions and businesses and a product that targets millions of individuals. plus, i don't think Microsoft would mind having the multi-billions of dollars they lose to piracy every year.
now, who would have bought sc2 if they could have it in the same way anyone could always own BW, i mean, you can play the campaign and solo customs vs. ai on a pirated version, so you're paying 60eu/$ for multiplayer on a crap ladder that has so few features it's pretty laughable for such a high profile game. a lot of people would have, but millions less, even people from countries that have high enough wages to afford multiple titles monthly would have pirated it if they only had a small group of friends they wanted to play with.
we're gonna have to live with it, take it and move on.
On June 23 2011 07:56 Clbull wrote: Crapping all over your customer base is what's going to increase piracy to be honest.
Look at Spore for instance, people hated the inclusion of restrictive and draconian installation limits and the notorious SecuROM rootkit being implemented upon installation. It was so bad that Spore became the most pirated game of the year.
In short, removing essential features for gamers such as LAN support, multiple installs, dedicated server support amongst other things only hurts the legitimate consumer.
I'm not condoning priacy here but when a pirated product which one can illegally obtain for free gives better
On June 23 2011 07:49 Seronei wrote:
On June 23 2011 07:45 Destro wrote: not giving the players and fans what they want is a bad business decision no matter the circumstances. Theres ways around of excluding lan all together. I find this excuse to be old and tired. Why is it so terrible to log into a paid and authenticated account and then play lan? Its not as if many people run with no internet connection at all..
its silly and downright ignorant to exclude an important part of the multiplayer gaming experience because of an exploitable issue. Remember games before cd-keys? lol
Just having to be connected to battle.net doesn't prevent pirates from cracking it. Just look at Assassin's Creed 2 which required a constant connection to play it, withing a month there was a crack out that made it possible to play it offline. The only reason Battle.net hasn't been cracked yet is because everything goes through it, if you only need to get a message that says that you're connected pirates can just fake it so the client thinks it's connected to battle.net.
Well it's been around....... 10 - 11 months since Wings of Liberty has been officially launched. Even longer if you consider how long the beta lasted.
So tell me, why haven't pirates circimvented the need for Battle.net entirely, just to make Blizzard look like idiots by making a free version of the game available that has better features than the version that people have paid ~£40 for?
Reread, I told you why pirates hasn't cracked battle.net. (Or didn't some chinese dudes do it?)
If I remember correctly, a lot of stuff ran through the UPlay system Ubisoft implemented into AC2 as well like the saving system which ran through into Ubisoft's servers whether you liked it or not, maybe not as much as Battle.net but still, explained why it took just over a month for AC2 to get completely cracked and for the pirates to win again.
UPlay's original incarnation was a really big example on why single player PC games should not have been treated like online games in terms of having permanent connection requirements to play.
You kids really arent that smart. If Blizzard was to release a LAN Support in anyway,like the need to log in within 24 hours to be able to LAN, hackers will allow it to be able to be used for everyone. How did all you kids forget about hackers? Seriously... They would able to manipulate it to make a server of their own like IccUP for BroodWar. Then Blizzard will have no way of securing who has a real cd key and who doesnt.
Just like WoW private servers. And if that got popular more and more people will switch not needing to buy the expansions either. If you are a casual gamer then this wouldnt be a bad idea.
its a bit annoying with the pirates and if the net would have been so well spread like it is now 15 years ago, broodwar would run without lan as well. (piracy profits too from the good internet hehe). Anyway i prefer how it is now, those dark old lan times have been horrible hehe. (even if spawn version of sc2 would be cool)
And i don't think they will ever implent lan into sc2, thats just unnecessary extra work.
Games got too expensiv, pirating the stuff to easy. So to many people are tempted.
PS: And about that release lan after you sold your copies thing. Thats something you can do for the last game you are going to ever make. But if you plan to make another game afterwards ... people will not buy it and wait till other people buy it, so they can steal it then via lan. Great plan lol.
On June 23 2011 07:56 worldsnap wrote: You keep saying this over and over but it's still not true. While a pirated copy of something is definitely not always a lost sale (For example, i'm not going to actually rent all the movies i watch if i couldn't download them), but i sure as hell downloaded a lot of games until Steam made it even easier than pirating to get a game on release. And i'm by far not the only person in this position.
lol, I said it twice for the sake of reiteration because they selectively read my post and argued on pretty much no basis.
Pirates were not consumers in the first place = "While a pirated copy of something is definitely not always a lost sale."
Enough said.
edit: quotations
Saying that a pirated copy isn't necessarily a lost sale doesn't prove that pirates were not consumers in the first place. Unless you have actual proof of this for us, since you're the one claiming it?
On June 23 2011 08:03 dudeman001 wrote: I go to the store and steal a steak. It costs everyone who made that steak money to get that steak there. I argue that I would've never bought the steak in the first place, but since I could take it I did.
Objection! The store can't sell the steak anymore, while a pirated copy doesn't make the other copy disappear.
On June 23 2011 08:00 Volkov wrote: Atrocious argument without any underlying models or proof. The facts he pushes off of (gaming companies are in it to make money, good business can, in principle, mean worse customer service, and so forth) are sound and true - but the conclusions he draws don't follow from these facts. One would need to prove that introduction of LAN will increase piracy of a given game while decreasing sales. And, considering that SC2 is already pirated to hell, and that Battle.net, even with introduction of LAN, would still be virtually necessary to play against more than a few people (yes, one could set up illegal hosting servers etc. - but that would take far longer than it takes for most of the revenue to come to the company after the release), there are sound logical arguments against his predictions, while there is no proof that LAN would actually increase piracy.
Programs like Garena, which I've heard even added HoN, that has no native LAN, would add SC2 really quickly. A lot more people play WC3 in them and in the actual BNet, so no, there are pretty strong arguments that say you would be able to play with a lot of people really quickly.
You say his argument has no proof, but it definatelly has a sound logical basis, which is basically the same thing you required for the arguments against his predictions.
On June 23 2011 07:18 AndAgain wrote: He just said what any intelligent person already understands. Obviously companies have good reasons for not putting LAN.
Yea it's a pity. The problem is most of the prevention for piracy hurts the guys that buy the games too.
ALL forms of DRM and "prevention" (such as excluding LAN) hurt the paying customers more than pirates, this is not even a debate.
Just because you say it's not debatable, doesn't mean it's the truth.
Let's look at what you say, and apply it to SC2:
Pirates: Can only play single player. Customers: Have to suffer through lag that is pretty damn annoying in local tournaments or lan parties.
I would say that it harms someone that pirates SC2 more than a customer.
It doesn't matter where you stand in this, but don't act like only your point is valid.
ummmm tbh it doesn't hurt the pirate more then the customer. i.e.: ITS FREE If customers want lan, then they should get it.Blizzard if they are so scared their sales will skyrocket down,then they need to find a way to incorporate lan, with having ways where the game becomes hard, if not impossible to pirate onto mutiplayer .
I don't see why we don't just use morse code to transfer the damn data, it might be faster then bnet does...
Gah this is a predicament isn't it, on one side you have your loyal fans being hurt, but on the other you have yourself taking a blow (small or large doesnt matter)...
Perhaps the best choice is to introduce lan after the expansions are out, by that time the purchasing of the game by the mass will be minimal in comparison to the games sales right now.
On June 23 2011 07:47 Jarmam wrote: Give the man some credit. At least he's honest! The thing that pisses me off the most with Blizzard's "customer communication" is that they're - blatantly obviously - lying about their motives for why they insist on doing what they're doing as if it's somehow better than what they used to do.
"The technology isnt there yet". "We hope Battle.net 2.0 will be so good that you won't even need LAN".
Christ. They're insulting our intelligence on a level that's below a DotA-forumgoers average post. This man says something I could actually believe. I think he's wrong or at least inaccurate. But I can see where he's coming from.
On June 23 2011 07:37 Parnage wrote: Well, the goodnews is I'll never have to wonder if maybe I should try out HoN. I know I won't now with the kind of attitude they have.
You treat customers like criminals and surprise surprise they will either not buy it or be the criminal you see them to be. I don't pirate games, most people don't pirate games and those who pirate them are unlikely to actually buy them(moral exceptions of course) So you don't actually loose out on them.
When you start putting in DRM, removing key features, putting in DLC content that should be apart of the game in the first place that's when you start seeing people who would of bought it, just pirate it.
Count me as someone who will never play HoN because of this childish stubborn argument. I can't tolerate nor will I support people who remove features and blame it on the pirates and not themselves. I am completely offended and disgusted.
And people like this is exactly why Blizzard will keep insulting our intelligence - because there are those (and a lot of "those") that eat their BS up raw. Do you actually think Blizzard, or any DRM-happy company thats not including basic once-mandatory assets - like, say, LAN in SC2 - do it for your sake? And not for the sake of their sales? Really?
Excuse me? I am sorry how the hell can I support a company that doesn't have lan and blames it on pirates. Hey. I am going to limit your bandwidth because of pirates, hey I am going to take out major chunks of the games you buy because of pirates.
Where does it stop? Seriously. At what point is it too far? Blizzard needs to put in LAN, games that need lan should get lan and games that continue to use heavy handed DRM, remove important features are not going to be games I am going to buy or enjoy.
On June 23 2011 08:03 dudeman001 wrote: I go to the store and steal a steak. It costs everyone who made that steak money to get that steak there. I argue that I would've never bought the steak in the first place, but since I could take it I did.
Honestly, how is piracy tolerated at all? Companies don't pay millions of dollars developing a game with the mindset "well, people are going to steal this anyway but atleast we can be proud of what we made." That's bullshit. Game developers, movie & tv producers, all of them deserve money for what they make. If piracy is supposed to be okay, then start paying for games with 5 minutes of unblockable advertising for every minute you play because that's how they're going to have to pay for it.
Its tolerated due to the difficulty of stopping it. Take the music industry for example, tons of producers lost millions from pirating songs. They were foolish to pursue individuals in an attempt to prove a point, a scare tactic. Their entire attempt was in vein as they lost even more money with pirating on a continued rise. The only company that took a different perspective was Apple, they made iTunes a focus on convenience and accessibility. The was the most effective way of combating music piracy as of yet.
Additionally there are privacy laws in several countries that allow ISPs to withhold personal information from authorities. Take Canada for example, pirate haven.
These guys just dont get it... pirating is not killing any industries, most of the people who pirate wont even buy the game anyways, if pirating wasnt possible, you would see people lending their games, as they do with DVD's, or books, to friends after they finish reading them.
If anything, pirating is good for all industries, as people will not likely buy something that they havent tested, and liked... there is a bigger chance of someone pirating SC2, liking it and then, buying the game, than anything else, since lets get serious here, the real deal in RTS games is not the missions, not even lan (playing with your friends), the real deal is online play, and great online playing systems should alone be a reason to have to buy the game, rather than them forcing you through silly tactics that are only holding e-sports back (because of how common issues like disconnections and lag are in local tournaments).
There is a great video arround youtube about a book writer, that at first hated pirating, because he though of it as people stealing him money, but when he noticed the places where he was beign pirated had a GREAT increase in sales (like russia), he understood that pirating was a way for new people to get to know his work, and then, if they liked it, buy it.
On June 23 2011 07:56 worldsnap wrote: You keep saying this over and over but it's still not true. While a pirated copy of something is definitely not always a lost sale (For example, i'm not going to actually rent all the movies i watch if i couldn't download them), but i sure as hell downloaded a lot of games until Steam made it even easier than pirating to get a game on release. And i'm by far not the only person in this position.
lol, I said it twice for the sake of reiteration because they selectively read my post and argued on pretty much no basis.
Pirates were not consumers in the first place = "While a pirated copy of something is definitely not always a lost sale."
Enough said.
edit: quotations
You're wrong. Pirates make many real consumers feel like suckers. This leads some of them to start pirating as well.
I recall back in elementary school, and for a majority of high school, I had to rely on bootleg+piracy for games. They were too expensive (I like to get something healthy for lunch and healthy food tend to cost all the money you have) for me.
But because I had the opportunity to play so many games in my childhood, I am able to appreciate great games. So now that I actually can afford games, I buy their products to support the company.
I recall buying Dragon Age 2 just a while ago, and god damn I want my money back. I feel like I got scammed by all the hype, and fooled by DA:O's success. So you know what EA? When you decide to release the next game in that series, I am going to pirate it.
//**
Take a small step back, piracy has plagued any digital media: not just games. Music, movies, etc etc. Things other than games (that includes many software products) learned to adapt to the changing landscape and build a business model which "expects" piracy. Some provide better service to paying customers, some include tangible goods along with their digital media... Do we see software taking away offline functionality for "anti-piracy"? Not really. Do we see film makers making shittier movies because now they earn less through DVD sales? No, they include extra-footages and content.
A lot of single player games have been successful despite piracy. Not adding LAN sure, may net you some more purchase, but for me - I am satisfied enough with LoL to even bother with HoN: at least I know all my friends have access to LoL.
Additionally there are privacy laws in several countries that allow ISPs to withhold personal information from authorities. Take Canada for example, pirate haven.
Until you run out of the 50gb you can transfer each month.
Pirates didn't kill LAN. The companies ultimately made the choice to kill LAN. They blame they were forced due to external pressures and coercion by pirates. I believe them when there are external forces that govern their internal decisions, but to what extent really? At the end of the day, LAN or no LAN they still see profits.
BTW, what is infact killing the induestries is pricing though, all games, specially xbox & ps3 games are overpriced, i remember when steam did a price reduction to left 4 dead as an experiment, they reduced the cost in half, to $25 usd. That day alone they sold more games than the 3 months the game had been out. Game pricing and greedyness is killing the game industries, not pirating, pirating is only helping them, like any demo would.
On June 23 2011 07:56 worldsnap wrote: You keep saying this over and over but it's still not true. While a pirated copy of something is definitely not always a lost sale (For example, i'm not going to actually rent all the movies i watch if i couldn't download them), but i sure as hell downloaded a lot of games until Steam made it even easier than pirating to get a game on release. And i'm by far not the only person in this position.
lol, I said it twice for the sake of reiteration because they selectively read my post and argued on pretty much no basis.
Pirates were not consumers in the first place = "While a pirated copy of something is definitely not always a lost sale."
Enough said.
edit: quotations
You're wrong. Pirates make many real consumers feel like suckers. This leads some of them to start pirating as well.
Personal insecurities have no value. I can claim that I feel good when I buy games as opposed to "feeling like a sucker" because I see to it that money goes to where money is well-deserved. I can coerce my friends and people within my network to purchase software too to make them also "feel good".
^ You realize your argument is a personal sentiment of yours and holds no bearing as neither does my hypothetical situation
On June 23 2011 07:10 mdma-_- wrote: that still doesnt explain why they cant allow people to play each other in lan with the necessecity of being logged into bnet/whatever online client.
cheap excuse just to blame it on pirates tbh
Hackers could fairly easily remove all safeguards like a log-in requirement.
Fairly easy = couple of hours.
I am no computer genius but it seems to me that what's needed for tournaments is network play. Games could still be setup through battle.net. The problems occur during the actual game when the information is sent through the battle.net servers rather than peer to peer. Will hackers still be able to "remove all safeguards" when the game is programmed so that you have to be on bnet 2.0 to connect to each other?
I am also no computer genius, but I do believe that this way would be crackeable. Maybe not in a couple of hours, but probally wouldn't take too long.
it seems like it would be crackable in the same way someone could make their own "lan bnet 2.0" already if they really really wanted to.
I'm pretty sure it's a lot more complicated than that.
In one of them you have bypass the "I am on bnet 2.0 checker" while the other changes the way every single bit of data is transfered.
Some people were even saying you could just make them log once before playing, that's basically how the campaign works, and it was cracked instantly.
I doubt it's THAT complicated. I mean you send a recieve tcp/ip packets you can just look at what is in the packets and engineer a server program based on it. And according to one guy I got a reply from, some chinese guys already did so.
And according to that same guy, the only reason it's this hard is because of the way bnet 2.0 works, adding LAN would have made it a lot easier. It's hard to say anything is completelly uncrackable.
Plus, this amount of control may make it a lot easier to break cracks with patching.
Well you should remember the context of my original post...
Following along with this I've been thinking about how something like this could be implemented and alot of the issue comes down to that for your game client to authenticate with bnet your local files hold the key to what the game expects from a successful authentication so a fake could be set up that could convince your game that it connected to bnet.
You could complicate the authentication by all sorts of means but it would still be very crackable...
On the othe rhand, if blizzard simply wrote a script that changed a "seed" value within the authentication process and updated this locally once a week (although not that straight forward) you could make it so that pirated copies would have a very high upkeep rate to keep then running. At the very least it would require someone with a legal copy to re-crack the encryption every time it happened and for it to be redistributed to all pirated copies which would quickly make having a pirated copy just not worth the effort...
On the other hand I don't work for blizzard and its way easier for them to just leave the game as is...
On June 23 2011 08:10 theOnslaught wrote: These guys just dont get it... pirating is not killing any industries, most of the people who pirate wont even buy the game anyways, if pirating wasnt possible, you would see people lending their games, as they do with DVD's, or books, to friends after they finish reading them.
If anything, pirating is good for all industries, as people will not likely buy something that they havent tested, and liked... there is a bigger chance of someone pirating SC2, liking it and then, buying the game, than anything else, since lets get serious here, the real deal in RTS games is not the missions, not even lan (playing with your friends), the real deal is online play, and great online playing systems should alone be a reason to have to buy the game, rather than them forcing you through silly tactics that are only holding e-sports back (because of how common issues like disconnections and lag are in local tournaments).
There is a great video arround youtube about a book writer, that at first hated pirating, because he though of it as people stealing him money, but when he noticed the places where he was beign pirated had a GREAT increase in sales (like russia), he understood that pirating was a way for new people to get to know his work, and then, if they liked it, buy it.
How many people have you met that said they didn't buy SC2 because they couldn't test it first? And not just as a "protest" because of the lack of LAN, but because they didn't actually knew if the game was good.
Now think about how many people wouldn't have bought the game if they could play online without paying.
It's not that simple, for both sides. You will never bring a argument and everyone will just say. OMG I had never though about that! It makes sense now! This kind of discussion will go on forever.
People keed saying "It's fine to pirate it if you don't have the money to buy it, even if you like it", but seriously, who has a PC capable of running recent games and has actually no money to buy a single game? Just because you spent all your money in other things, doesn't mean you wouldn't have spent it on the game instead of something else if you couldn't pirate it.
I know several people that only buy games that can't be pirated, and not because they are the only good games.
On June 23 2011 08:13 theOnslaught wrote: BTW, what is infact killing the induestries is pricing though, all games, specially xbox & ps3 games are overpriced, i remember when steam did a price reduction to left 4 dead as an experiment, they reduced the cost in half, to $25 usd. That day alone they sold more games than the 3 months the game had been out. Game pricing and greedyness is killing the game industries, not pirating, pirating is only helping them, like any demo would.
Human beings are cheap and prefer not to spend money when they don't have to? You don't say! I guess we better just give away everything for free, then...
On June 23 2011 08:10 theOnslaught wrote: These guys just dont get it... pirating is not killing any industries, most of the people who pirate wont even buy the game anyways, if pirating wasnt possible, you would see people lending their games, as they do with DVD's, or books, to friends after they finish reading them.
If anything, pirating is good for all industries, as people will not likely buy something that they havent tested, and liked... there is a bigger chance of someone pirating SC2, liking it and then, buying the game, than anything else, since lets get serious here, the real deal in RTS games is not the missions, not even lan (playing with your friends), the real deal is online play, and great online playing systems should alone be a reason to have to buy the game, rather than them forcing you through silly tactics that are only holding e-sports back (because of how common issues like disconnections and lag are in local tournaments).
There is a great video arround youtube about a book writer, that at first hated pirating, because he though of it as people stealing him money, but when he noticed the places where he was beign pirated had a GREAT increase in sales (like russia), he understood that pirating was a way for new people to get to know his work, and then, if they liked it, buy it.
Piracy can for sure increase sales, but it can lower them as well. Its a matter of the genre being discussed and other circumstances (ie. An unknown producer may in fact benefit quite a bit from piracy as they get more publicly). Claiming one aspect of the game is "the core" of the game is completely subjective (I do however agree with you that it is all about multiplayer, dont get me wrong). There is still a large consumer base that only play the SC2 campaign, they buy that game specifically to play the campaign.
I still don't understand why they don't supply LAN for professional environments like GSL, MLG, etc. as they promised to do. I can understand why they don't want LAN for everyone.
On June 23 2011 07:56 worldsnap wrote: You keep saying this over and over but it's still not true. While a pirated copy of something is definitely not always a lost sale (For example, i'm not going to actually rent all the movies i watch if i couldn't download them), but i sure as hell downloaded a lot of games until Steam made it even easier than pirating to get a game on release. And i'm by far not the only person in this position.
lol, I said it twice for the sake of reiteration because they selectively read my post and argued on pretty much no basis.
Pirates were not consumers in the first place = "While a pirated copy of something is definitely not always a lost sale."
Enough said.
edit: quotations
You're wrong. Pirates make many real consumers feel like suckers. This leads some of them to start pirating as well.
Personal insecurities have no value. I can claim that I feel good when I buy games as opposed to "feeling like a sucker" because I see to it that money goes to where money is well-deserved. I can coerce my friends and people within my network to purchase software too to make them also "feel good".
^ You realize your argument is a personal sentiment of yours and holds no bearing as neither does my hypothetical situation
Your statements that pirates aren't real customers has no bearing either, then. That statement has no value and no truth to it no matter how many times you repeat it. Your original argument is a personal statement of yours, too. Don't try to twist it around.
On June 23 2011 08:18 brentsen wrote: I still don't understand why they don't supply LAN for professional environments like GSL, MLG, etc. as they promised to do. I can understand why they don't want LAN for everyone.
Try reading the thread, it's been asked and answered multiple times now. No matter how hard they try to keep it under wraps it will leak out.
On June 23 2011 07:12 Coldplum wrote: I don't see why there can't be some sort of security feature built in that forces you to log onto Bnet before you can access LAN. Or even have a separate LAN security identifier accessory...i.e. like an identifier key-chain that you purchase in conjunction with your account.
because thats not feasible, a realistc security via connecting to bnet then lan can be easily cracked.
its just not gonna happen, the best chance we'll see is LAN is 10 years down the road when bliz thinks they cant sell anymore copies of SC2.. thats bout it
On June 23 2011 08:05 SKC wrote: Programs like Garena, which I've heard even added HoN, that has no native LAN, would add SC2 really quickly. A lot more people play WC3 in them and in the actual BNet, so no, there are pretty strong arguments that say you would be able to play with a lot of people really quickly.
You say his argument has no proof, but it definitely has a sound logical basis, which is basically the same thing you required for the arguments against his predictions.
See, the thing is, when comparing two numbers, X and Y, the burden of proof lies with the one proving that they are NOT equal (within some tolerance), and failing to do that, they are considered equal. What you just described are (fairly sound) logical arguments that could explain why X > Y. But, a logical argument is NOT proof -- it's a theory, but theory is tested by experiment. Some experimental data that would suggest the quality of this logical argument is necessary to actually prove that X > Y, as opposed to suggest a way for why it may be so. (Here X = total sales with LAN enabled, Y = total sales with LAN disabled).
Let me point out, by the way - while there are both logical arguments for X ~ Y, and X > Y, it's X > Y that needs to be proven, and in the absence of that proof, the default hypothesis is held: X ~ Y. (Yes, arguments exist against the use of null hypothesis, but the reality is that when comparing two populations, one perturbed and one not, the strength of perturbation can best be analyzed by attempting to reject the null hypothesis that the perturbation is negligible). And logical arguments do not constitute proof, not without the theory being experimentally tested (at least in some form).
Also - it may very well be true that X > Y. Problem is, there is no proof of it.
And I never suggested that the addition of LAN would not result in additional piracy + multiplayer games. I suggested that there is no indication that it would result in reduced sales. Because, as has been stated multiple times, piracy does not constitute lost sales.
On June 23 2011 08:13 theOnslaught wrote: BTW, what is infact killing the induestries is pricing though, all games, specially xbox & ps3 games are overpriced, i remember when steam did a price reduction to left 4 dead as an experiment, they reduced the cost in half, to $25 usd. That day alone they sold more games than the 3 months the game had been out. Game pricing and greedyness is killing the game industries, not pirating, pirating is only helping them, like any demo would.
Take into consideration the time line of that promotion though. This was presumably some time after the release of the time, I doubt any rational distribute would lower the cost of their product close to the launch date. Game pricing is what is keeping this industry GROWING, look at how many more innovations are being created regularly and how many new games are being released all the time. Its simply because of the profit motive, that's why more are going into the industry.
On June 23 2011 08:05 SKC wrote: Programs like Garena, which I've heard even added HoN, that has no native LAN, would add SC2 really quickly. A lot more people play WC3 in them and in the actual BNet, so no, there are pretty strong arguments that say you would be able to play with a lot of people really quickly.
You say his argument has no proof, but it definitely has a sound logical basis, which is basically the same thing you required for the arguments against his predictions.
See, the thing is, when comparing two numbers, X and Y, the burden of proof lies with the one proving that they are NOT equal (within some tolerance), and failing to do that, they are considered equal. What you just described are (fairly sound) logical arguments that could explain why X > Y. But, a logical argument is NOT proof -- it's a theory, but theory is tested by experiment. Some experimental data that would suggest the quality of this logical argument is necessary to actually prove that X > Y, as opposed to suggest a way for why it may be so. (Here X = total sales with LAN enabled, Y = total sales with LAN disabled).
Let me point out, by the way - while there are both logical arguments for X ~ Y, and X > Y, it's X > Y that needs to be proven, and in the absence of that proof, the default hypothesis is held: X ~ Y. (Yes, arguments exist against the use of null hypothesis, but the reality is that when comparing two populations, one perturbed and one not, the strength of perturbation can best be analyzed by attempting to reject the null hypothesis that the perturbation is negligible). And logical arguments do not constitute proof, not without the theory being experimentally tested (at least in some form).
Also - it may very well be true that X > Y. Problem is, there is no proof of it.
And I never suggested that the addition of LAN would not result in additional piracy + multiplayer games. I suggested that there is no indication that it would result in reduced sales. Because, as has been stated multiple times, piracy does not constitute lost sales.
Please, this is no scientific paper.
The logical argument that X > Y is sounder. So they won't risk huge amounts of money because "scientific rigor says they have to prove X isnt ~ to Y" They don't have to prove anything. They have to make the decisions that will most likely give the best amount of profit to the company.
The "default hypothesis" is whatever their manager believe will bring more money. In this case X>Y. If you prove that X~Y, they may change, but there is no reason to believe that, if they have better arguments that X>Y.
Almost no business decision is proven as correct. If they were that simple, it would be easy.
Hackers could fairly easily remove all safeguards like a log-in requirement.
Fairly easy = couple of hours.
I am no computer genius but it seems to me that what's needed for tournaments is network play. Games could still be setup through battle.net. The problems occur during the actual game when the information is sent through the battle.net servers rather than peer to peer. Will hackers still be able to "remove all safeguards" when the game is programmed so that you have to be on bnet 2.0 to connect to each other?
I am also no computer genius, but I do believe that this way would be crackeable. Maybe not in a couple of hours, but probally wouldn't take too long.
it seems like it would be crackable in the same way someone could make their own "lan bnet 2.0" already if they really really wanted to.
I'm pretty sure it's a lot more complicated than that.
In one of them you have bypass the "I am on bnet 2.0 checker" while the other changes the way every single bit of data is transfered.
Some people were even saying you could just make them log once before playing, that's basically how the campaign works, and it was cracked instantly.
I doubt it's THAT complicated. I mean you send a recieve tcp/ip packets you can just look at what is in the packets and engineer a server program based on it. And according to one guy I got a reply from, some chinese guys already did so.
And according to that same guy, the only reason it's this hard is because of the way bnet 2.0 works, adding LAN would have made it a lot easier. It's hard to say anything is completelly uncrackable.
Plus, this amount of control may make it a lot easier to break cracks with patching.
Well you should remember the context of my original post...
Following along with this I've been thinking about how something like this could be implemented and alot of the issue comes down to that for your game client to authenticate with bnet your local files hold the key to what the game expects from a successful authentication so a fake could be set up that could convince your game that it connected to bnet.
You could complicate the authentication by all sorts of means but it would still be very crackable...
On the othe rhand, if blizzard simply wrote a script that changed a "seed" value within the authentication process and updated this locally once a week (although not that straight forward) you could make it so that pirated copies would have a very high upkeep rate to keep then running. At the very least it would require someone with a legal copy to re-crack the encryption every time it happened and for it to be redistributed to all pirated copies which would quickly make having a pirated copy just not worth the effort...
On the other hand I don't work for blizzard and its way easier for them to just leave the game as is...
It's not that simple. They'll figure out the specific call that makes the encryption check, override it with their own code, and make it always return some type of successful result. Generally this results in a system where only pirated copies can play together; this was somewhat similar to something used on one of the various Rainbow 6 games - in that games would validate against each other. Over time, everyone just started playing with Pirated copies because there's no decent way to know who has a "real" copy so the only assumption is that everyone else is a pirate. Eventually, people with legit copies are unable to play with friends or on popular servers being run on pirated copies ( e.g. people would run the pirated copy to mitigate copy protection or to install 3rd party patches ).
On June 23 2011 08:05 SKC wrote: Programs like Garena, which I've heard even added HoN, that has no native LAN, would add SC2 really quickly. A lot more people play WC3 in them and in the actual BNet, so no, there are pretty strong arguments that say you would be able to play with a lot of people really quickly.
You say his argument has no proof, but it definitely has a sound logical basis, which is basically the same thing you required for the arguments against his predictions.
See, the thing is, when comparing two numbers, X and Y, the burden of proof lies with the one proving that they are NOT equal (within some tolerance), and failing to do that, they are considered equal. What you just described are (fairly sound) logical arguments that could explain why X > Y. But, a logical argument is NOT proof -- it's a theory, but theory is tested by experiment. Some experimental data that would suggest the quality of this logical argument is necessary to actually prove that X > Y, as opposed to suggest a way for why it may be so. (Here X = total sales with LAN enabled, Y = total sales with LAN disabled).
Let me point out, by the way - while there are both logical arguments for X ~ Y, and X > Y, it's X > Y that needs to be proven, and in the absence of that proof, the default hypothesis is held: X ~ Y. (Yes, arguments exist against the use of null hypothesis, but the reality is that when comparing two populations, one perturbed and one not, the strength of perturbation can best be analyzed by attempting to reject the null hypothesis that the perturbation is negligible). And logical arguments do not constitute proof, not without the theory being experimentally tested (at least in some form).
Also - it may very well be true that X > Y. Problem is, there is no proof of it.
And I never suggested that the addition of LAN would not result in additional piracy + multiplayer games. I suggested that there is no indication that it would result in reduced sales. Because, as has been stated multiple times, piracy does not constitute lost sales.
I think under these circumstances, its actually the consumer with the burden of proof unfortunately. Companies likely have done internal projections on the effects of piracy and determined it was unfeasible. Whether their projections are correct or not, that's the evidence they hold and it is will not sway unless consumers give insight on how they could be wrong.
...any gaming company out there is out there to make money first and make good games second. I'm sorry if this truth offends you but the video game market is an industry and people make games to make money the same way a guy who sells Ice-cream does his job to make money and not to put smiles on people's faces (although I'm sure he does enjoy putting smiles on people's faces).
with that kind of language, i'll be avoiding HoN like dog poo.
to note, there are developers out there like Blizzard, who sell ice-cream to put a smile on people's faces, and by doing this they're intelligent enough to figure they'll make bucket loads of cash.
i'm just throwing a thought out there for you Mr. Developer, just a thought.
EDIT: not that i have ever played HoN, but i've been curious to see how it played, not anymore, i'm pulling a Destiny (standing for what i believe to be right).
Let me tell you this. Of all the developers out there, Blizzard is definitely not the one "out ot put a smile on your face". Selling the game in three parts isn't to make you happy. It's to be able to sell it two more times with minimal effort.
You know what would make this whole community smile? LAN.
i'd rather pay 3 times for a game i'm going to play for the next 5-6 years with constant updates, as well as 2 massive expansion updates to an already amazing game, as opposed to paying $40-50 for a second rate, infrequently updated, will this game exist in 2 years time?, will this hold my interest for even 1 more month?, type of a game.
sure, Blizzard is an A-hole of a game developer wondering how to sap people's cash, just like all other major game developers out there, but they're just that little bit less evil and they actually do this by making a truly great game which you know will be updated for years to come.
You know what would make this whole community smile? People attempting to understand other people's point of view, rather than go on a tangent and argue a point i was never contesting.
On June 23 2011 07:56 worldsnap wrote: You keep saying this over and over but it's still not true. While a pirated copy of something is definitely not always a lost sale (For example, i'm not going to actually rent all the movies i watch if i couldn't download them), but i sure as hell downloaded a lot of games until Steam made it even easier than pirating to get a game on release. And i'm by far not the only person in this position.
lol, I said it twice for the sake of reiteration because they selectively read my post and argued on pretty much no basis.
Pirates were not consumers in the first place = "While a pirated copy of something is definitely not always a lost sale."
Enough said.
edit: quotations
You're wrong. Pirates make many real consumers feel like suckers. This leads some of them to start pirating as well.
Personal insecurities have no value. I can claim that I feel good when I buy games as opposed to "feeling like a sucker" because I see to it that money goes to where money is well-deserved. I can coerce my friends and people within my network to purchase software too to make them also "feel good".
^ You realize your argument is a personal sentiment of yours and holds no bearing as neither does my hypothetical situation
Your statements that pirates aren't real customers has no bearing either, then. That statement has no value and no truth to it no matter how many times you repeat it. Your original argument is a personal statement of yours, too. Don't try to twist it around.
I'm not gonna respond to your feeble points from now because there is nothing of value in our little debate and I hope you can see to it as well.
Why does my statement that pirates = aren't customers has no bearing? No value? No truth? My original argument "is a personal statement too" "don't try to twist it around?"
First and foremost I'm not trying twist anything around and of course all my statements are personal or else whose statements are they lol? Now that that's cleared up, I've stated it 3 times now because of people who can't read.
Let's logically break this down:
1) Pirates = individuals who get involved in unauthorized copying of computer software. Copyright infringement of this kind is extremely common
2) They do this for several reason, one of them predominantly is because they don't wish to purchase the software
3) Buy not choosing not purchase the software and to pirate it, that indicates they didn't have the intentions of purchasing in the first place, nor did they end up as a customer (they could have been, but unlikely)
I don't have any data on this as I did not conduct a study on this but since you feel so strongly about the issue and feel I am wrong in my logic, maybe you should
On June 23 2011 08:03 dudeman001 wrote: I go to the store and steal a steak. It costs everyone who made that steak money to get that steak there. I argue that I would've never bought the steak in the first place, but since I could take it I did.
Objection! The store can't sell the steak anymore, while a pirated copy doesn't make the other copy disappear.
The pirate is taking a product that cost someone money to make without offering any just compensation. The action is equivalent to stealing.
You want a game to be hyper popular and eventually be able to make you massive tourny dollars?
Get the multiplayer out for free, then charge for things IN the game that don't affect balance. If the next SC2 expansion goes out for free and proceeds to charge for things IN game, hell yea I'd support the shit out of blizzard and buy boat loads of crap.
I've done the same for LoL because I liked the idea of the company succeeding.
Idk, seems stupid and really myopic, where blizzard misses the forest for the trees in the idea of esports, where you make money off the SPORT not the balls you sell to play the game.
So I guess we'll have to wait till the day pirates reverse engineer the code and give us LAN support... and seriously all the argument against LAN support is just a red herring.. which industries fell or bankrupt due to piracy???
On June 23 2011 07:45 Destro wrote: not giving the players and fans what they want is a bad business decision no matter the circumstances. Theres ways around of excluding lan all together. I find this excuse to be old and tired. Why is it so terrible to log into a paid and authenticated account and then play lan? Its not as if many people run with no internet connection at all..
its silly and downright ignorant to exclude an important part of the multiplayer gaming experience because of an exploitable issue. Remember games before cd-keys? lol
Come on guys ! I think removing the Lan option is brilliant , and gives me so much more, than it takes away... Maybe most of you guys played Broodwar , which had a few and good people playing it in the later stages but... Have you ever been around games like dota? maybe hon? What No-Lan provides us is QUALITY. The person that buys the game , and decided to play it , commits to it. I don't know about you but the reason we have such a wonderfull community is pretty much this. The fact that when people pay about something they automatically take it more serious.. We can all understand that if they include LAN (lan in the form of WC3) we will end up playing Sc2 in garena , which may boost the people playing it but will ruin the quality. If they add a feature that requires internet for authentication and then you can play Lan, i am pretty sure that if the <<Thing>> returns again to your pc it will be again very easy to hack it. You want true LAN ? then guess what the solution is...Gamecards!?! We don't want that do we.. Now the tournamet only lan.. that is a good idea.. and i believe the minds in Blizzard have a pretty good excuse for not adding it.. And be honest.. everything is running great till now , except a coupe of drops. <3 Blizzard and Everything she does...
On June 23 2011 07:56 worldsnap wrote: You keep saying this over and over but it's still not true. While a pirated copy of something is definitely not always a lost sale (For example, i'm not going to actually rent all the movies i watch if i couldn't download them), but i sure as hell downloaded a lot of games until Steam made it even easier than pirating to get a game on release. And i'm by far not the only person in this position.
lol, I said it twice for the sake of reiteration because they selectively read my post and argued on pretty much no basis.
Pirates were not consumers in the first place = "While a pirated copy of something is definitely not always a lost sale."
Enough said.
edit: quotations
You're wrong. Pirates make many real consumers feel like suckers. This leads some of them to start pirating as well.
Personal insecurities have no value. I can claim that I feel good when I buy games as opposed to "feeling like a sucker" because I see to it that money goes to where money is well-deserved. I can coerce my friends and people within my network to purchase software too to make them also "feel good".
^ You realize your argument is a personal sentiment of yours and holds no bearing as neither does my hypothetical situation
Your statements that pirates aren't real customers has no bearing either, then. That statement has no value and no truth to it no matter how many times you repeat it. Your original argument is a personal statement of yours, too. Don't try to twist it around.
I'm not gonna respond to your feeble points from now because there is nothing of value in our little debate and I hope you can see to it as well.
Why does my statement that pirates = aren't customers has no bearing? No value? No truth? My original argument "is a personal statement too" "don't try to twist it around?"
First and foremost I'm not trying twist anything around and of course all my statements are personal or else whose statements are they lol? Now that that's cleared up, I've stated it 3 times now because of people who can't read.
Let's logically break this down:
1) Pirates = individuals who get involved in unauthorized copying of computer software. Copyright infringement of this kind is extremely common
2) They do this for several reason, one of them predominantly is because they don't wish to purchase the software
3) Buy not choosing not purchase the software and to pirate it, that indicates they didn't have the intentions of purchasing in the first place, nor did they end up as a customer (they could have been, but unlikely)
I don't have any data on this as I did not conduct a study on this but since you feel so strongly about the issue and feel I am wrong in my logic, maybe you should
Your 3) is wrong. Noone wishes to buy things if they can get it for free, so 2 applies, but it applies to every single thing.
They choose not to buy things when they can do so. But a big part of them, and this is where there is an actual discussion, wether this part is huge or not that big, but undeniably big, will still buy the games if they have no way to obtain them for free.
So while not all pirates are customers, some definatelly are. And those represent lost sales.
Anyone that says piracy doesn't represent lost sales makes no sense. What you can argue is wether the "cons overcome the pros".
On June 23 2011 08:10 theOnslaught wrote: These guys just dont get it... pirating is not killing any industries, most of the people who pirate wont even buy the game anyways, if pirating wasnt possible, you would see people lending their games, as they do with DVD's, or books, to friends after they finish reading them.
If anything, pirating is good for all industries, as people will not likely buy something that they havent tested, and liked... there is a bigger chance of someone pirating SC2, liking it and then, buying the game, than anything else, since lets get serious here, the real deal in RTS games is not the missions, not even lan (playing with your friends), the real deal is online play, and great online playing systems should alone be a reason to have to buy the game, rather than them forcing you through silly tactics that are only holding e-sports back (because of how common issues like disconnections and lag are in local tournaments).
There is a great video arround youtube about a book writer, that at first hated pirating, because he though of it as people stealing him money, but when he noticed the places where he was beign pirated had a GREAT increase in sales (like russia), he understood that pirating was a way for new people to get to know his work, and then, if they liked it, buy it.
How many people have you met that said they didn't buy SC2 because they couldn't test it first? And not just as a "protest" because of the lack of LAN, but because they didn't actually knew if the game was good.
Now think about how many people wouldn't have bought the game if they could play online without paying.
It's not that simple, for both sides. You will never bring a argument and everyone will just say. OMG I had never though about that! It makes sense now! This kind of discussion will go on forever.
People keed saying "It's fine to pirate it if you don't have the money to buy it, even if you like it", but seriously, who has a PC capable of running recent games and has actually no money to buy a single game? Just because you spent all your money in other things, doesn't mean you wouldn't have spent it on the game instead of something else if you couldn't pirate it.
I know several people that only buy games that can't be pirated, and not because they are the only good games.
We bought sc2 because its blizzard, one of the Best game companies, and they still screw up... Just look at Duke Nukem, hyped as shit, alot of people bought it because they though it was going to be awesome, like the first one... what did it turn out to be? a piece of garbage... people pirate for that reason, just as companies might feel ripped off if someone pirates their game, customers feel as ripped off if they pay $50+ usd for a game, and its crap.
To the people who say pirates would not buy games anyway - so there is no sale lost; Of course there are sales lost. Certainly not ALL pirates would buy the game anyway (I myself have pirated tons of games I would never buy, but also some I would in fact buy, if I couldnt get them for free.) but a fair percentage definitely would.
And then there is the fact that if you weren't intending on buying the game anyway, then you in no way have a right to play that game. While it's not completely comparable to stealing a chocolate bar from the store (the store would in that case have one less chocolate bar to sell) it's certainly comparable to sneaking into a concert and then trying to convince the bouncer kicking you out that "hey, I couldn't afford the ticket anyway, so you didn't lose any money on me sneaking in! Therfore I should be allowed to stay." Sorry, doesn't work that way.
Also, let's be real here, the vast, vast majority of people who pirated a game will NOT go and buy it if they like it. C'mon. People just like to be vocal about doing that on forums, because they like to appear all honorable and glorious. I've certainly never gone out and bought a game I initially downloaded for free, but liked a lot, and I don't know a single person that has either. (And I do know quite a few gamers )
The logical argument that X > Y is sounder. So they won't risk huge amounts of money because "scientific rigor says they have to prove X isnt ~ to Y" They don't have to prove anything. They have to make the decisions that will most likely give the best amount of profit to the company.
Almost no business decision is proven as correct. If they were that simple, it would be easy.
No, it's not a scientific paper. But, a statement that X > Y (which is the statement they are making and basing their entire strategies off of) is a numerical statement about two numbers - which is a scientific, verifiable (or rejectable) statement. Which brings me to my original point - he has no proof for what he says.
The statement that "the logical argument that X > Y is sounder" is highly subjective, and I disagree with it. Primarily because no data supports a model that would predict this statement. Other reasons too, but these are mostly just logical counter-arguments of equal soundness. (And equal lack of supporting data).
Also, I was by no means implying that they don't have the right to make those business decisions the way they make them. They have every right, and that is essentially what you stated. But this in no way contradicts what I said, which was that there is no data supporting the predictions he made on which the business decisions rely.
And while true, most business decisions don't rely purely on hard science with a wide array of supporting data, they generally do rely on much, much better evidence than this guy's words. Essentially, he is using pure logic WITHOUT supporting data and WITH counter-arguments to his words (which may actually be wrong, but it's not known) to reject the null hypothesis and make business decisions based on it. Most businesses are not nearly this reckless. (And seeing how generally stupid the publishers' decisions constantly are - it's not that surprising).
It blows my mind how many people try to defend pirating every time these threads come up. You're seriously kidding yourself if you think you're justified in pirating software that you "wouldn't have bought anyways."
Arguments like "Blizzard makes enough money, they could get away with sharing SC2 for free" or "many people would still pay for a copy even were they able to pirate it" are some of the stupidest things I've ever heard. Stop trying to make a case for why you think the game should be in a position where you can pirate it, it just sounds ridiculous.
It's too bad that we can't have LAN but I'm pretty sure just about every reasonable person understands that there's no simple solution, and that yes, pirates are largely responsible for the situation.
On June 23 2011 08:32 VirGin wrote: To the people who say pirates would not buy games anyway - so there is no sale lost; Of course there are sales lost. Certainly not ALL pirates would buy the game anyway (I myself have pirated tons of games I would never buy, but also some I would in fact buy, if I couldnt get them for free.) but a fair percentage probably would.
People that pirate and wont buy, are only affecting rentals if anything, because they're basically the same thing (except one is legal), you dont want to buy the full game, but you want to test it first, so you either rent it or pirate it, if you like it you buy it.
I dont know you but i have a subscription to grooveshark, and i barely ever buy a music disc... just because a disk has 1 or 2 good songs, that doesnt mean its worth $10+ usd. Pricing is just as wrong as pirating.
On June 23 2011 08:10 andeh wrote: 1.6 has lan and you have to be logged into steam to play !
this guy has seemed to only look has hon and sc2 as examples of games using/not using lan
Oh Really ? i have cs, i didn't pay for it.. (i did 7 years ago when i used to play) and i can still play online... You don't have to be on steam to play ofc.
We bought sc2 because its blizzard, one of the Best game companies, and they still screw up... Just look at Duke Nukem, hyped as shit, alot of people bought it because they though it was going to be awesome, like the first one... what did it turn out to be? a piece of garbage... people pirate for that reason, just as companies might feel ripped off if someone pirates their game, customers feel as ripped off if they pay $50+ usd for a game, and its crap.
Doesn't change the fact that it's theft. If you use someone's product without making an expected payment for said product, it's theft.
On June 23 2011 08:10 theOnslaught wrote: These guys just dont get it... pirating is not killing any industries, most of the people who pirate wont even buy the game anyways, if pirating wasnt possible, you would see people lending their games, as they do with DVD's, or books, to friends after they finish reading them.
If anything, pirating is good for all industries, as people will not likely buy something that they havent tested, and liked... there is a bigger chance of someone pirating SC2, liking it and then, buying the game, than anything else, since lets get serious here, the real deal in RTS games is not the missions, not even lan (playing with your friends), the real deal is online play, and great online playing systems should alone be a reason to have to buy the game, rather than them forcing you through silly tactics that are only holding e-sports back (because of how common issues like disconnections and lag are in local tournaments).
There is a great video arround youtube about a book writer, that at first hated pirating, because he though of it as people stealing him money, but when he noticed the places where he was beign pirated had a GREAT increase in sales (like russia), he understood that pirating was a way for new people to get to know his work, and then, if they liked it, buy it.
How many people have you met that said they didn't buy SC2 because they couldn't test it first? And not just as a "protest" because of the lack of LAN, but because they didn't actually knew if the game was good.
Now think about how many people wouldn't have bought the game if they could play online without paying.
It's not that simple, for both sides. You will never bring a argument and everyone will just say. OMG I had never though about that! It makes sense now! This kind of discussion will go on forever.
People keed saying "It's fine to pirate it if you don't have the money to buy it, even if you like it", but seriously, who has a PC capable of running recent games and has actually no money to buy a single game? Just because you spent all your money in other things, doesn't mean you wouldn't have spent it on the game instead of something else if you couldn't pirate it.
I know several people that only buy games that can't be pirated, and not because they are the only good games.
We bought sc2 because its blizzard, one of the Best game companies, and they still screw up... Just look at Duke Nukem, hyped as shit, alot of people bought it because they though it was going to be awesome, like the first one... what did it turn out to be? a piece of garbage... people pirate for that reason, just as companies might feel ripped off if someone pirates their game, customers feel as ripped off if they pay $50+ usd for a game, and its crap.
Anyone that believe Duke Nukem would be that great seriously wasn't following the reviews. And a lot of people still like it. The fact that something is bad doesn't mean you shouldn't pay for it. You don't ask for a refund for a bad movie at the theathers.
Let's look at a company that doesn't have a huge following then, HoN, the game that started this thread. If it could be pirated, it would definatelly have sold A LOT less. People would be still playing pirated versions, with even more people than in the original game, just like they do with Dota. There is no reason to believe this wouldn't happen, because the game that actually made it all possible was only that huge because of piracy.
This guy is so right. I would much rather have preferred downloading a pirated copy of Starcraft 2 and only playing it with the 1 person I know in real life that plays sc2 irl.
We bought sc2 because its blizzard, one of the Best game companies, and they still screw up... Just look at Duke Nukem, hyped as shit, alot of people bought it because they though it was going to be awesome, like the first one... what did it turn out to be? a piece of garbage... people pirate for that reason, just as companies might feel ripped off if someone pirates their game, customers feel as ripped off if they pay $50+ usd for a game, and its crap.
Making decisions with your money is a part of life. Making one that you regret (ie buying a videogame) does not excuse you from stealing one next time you want to play.
Somewhat unrelated, people who couldn't tell Duke Nukem Forever was going to be awful long before it ever came out are precious. I wish I could have that kind of optimism.
On June 23 2011 08:35 theOnslaught wrote: People that pirate and wont buy, are only affecting rentals if anything, because they're basically the same thing (except one is legal), you dont want to buy the full game, but you want to test it first, so you either rent it or pirate it, if you like it you buy it.
I dont know you but i have a subscription to grooveshark, and i barely ever buy a music disc... just because a disk has 1 or 2 good songs, that doesnt mean its worth $10+ usd. Pricing is just as wrong as pirating.
Don't be ridiculous. The price is set and the customer has the option to either buy it or not. The market will dictate whether the price is "wrong." It still does not excuse stealing.
On June 23 2011 07:56 worldsnap wrote: You keep saying this over and over but it's still not true. While a pirated copy of something is definitely not always a lost sale (For example, i'm not going to actually rent all the movies i watch if i couldn't download them), but i sure as hell downloaded a lot of games until Steam made it even easier than pirating to get a game on release. And i'm by far not the only person in this position.
lol, I said it twice for the sake of reiteration because they selectively read my post and argued on pretty much no basis.
Pirates were not consumers in the first place = "While a pirated copy of something is definitely not always a lost sale."
Enough said.
edit: quotations
You're wrong. Pirates make many real consumers feel like suckers. This leads some of them to start pirating as well.
Personal insecurities have no value. I can claim that I feel good when I buy games as opposed to "feeling like a sucker" because I see to it that money goes to where money is well-deserved. I can coerce my friends and people within my network to purchase software too to make them also "feel good".
^ You realize your argument is a personal sentiment of yours and holds no bearing as neither does my hypothetical situation
Your statements that pirates aren't real customers has no bearing either, then. That statement has no value and no truth to it no matter how many times you repeat it. Your original argument is a personal statement of yours, too. Don't try to twist it around.
I'm not gonna respond to your feeble points from now because there is nothing of value in our little debate and I hope you can see to it as well.
Why does my statement that pirates = aren't customers has no bearing? No value? No truth? My original argument "is a personal statement too" "don't try to twist it around?"
First and foremost I'm not trying twist anything around and of course all my statements are personal or else whose statements are they lol? Now that that's cleared up, I've stated it 3 times now because of people who can't read.
Let's logically break this down:
1) Pirates = individuals who get involved in unauthorized copying of computer software. Copyright infringement of this kind is extremely common
2) They do this for several reason, one of them predominantly is because they don't wish to purchase the software
3) Buy not choosing not purchase the software and to pirate it, that indicates they didn't have the intentions of purchasing in the first place, nor did they end up as a customer (they could have been, but unlikely)
I don't have any data on this as I did not conduct a study on this but since you feel so strongly about the issue and feel I am wrong in my logic, maybe you should
Your 3) is wrong. Noone wishes to buy things if they can get it for free, so 2 applies, but it applies to every single thing.
They choose not to buy things when they can do so. But a big part of them, and this is where there is an actual discussion, wether this part is huge or not that big, but undeniably big, will still buy the games if they have no way to obtain them for free.
So while not all pirates are customers, some definatelly are. And those represent lost sales.
Anyone that says piracy doesn't represent lost sales makes no sense. What you can argue is wether the "cons overcome the pros".
Saying that no one buys things they can get for free doesn't make sense when Team Fortress 2 hats sell by the truckload, League of Legends follows a similar trend, and Brood War is one of the biggest selling PC games of all time.
And Valve has the highest revenue per head in the entire world. :D
Keep in mind that as it is, SC2 is essentially "non-important" to Blizzard's bottom line.
Yes, they made good money off of it. No, it doesn't even come close to the amount of money that WoW pulls in.
Anything Blizzard can do to raise the profits of SC2 and thus raise the chances of support for SC2 to continue is good. Obviously.
There's nothing wrong with companies wanting to make profit off their games, even if it seems like everyone here is mad that the companies aren't doing it JUST FOR THE LOVE. Like seriously, there are hundreds of people behind these games working as their full-time job. They want their jobs to continue. This isn't too hard to comprehend.
Yes, no LAN sucks. It sucks a lot, mostly for tournaments (I don't really care about no LAN for casual play). But while piracy in the United States might not offset costs entirely, imagine the amount of piracy that'll happen in say, China, which is hugely notorious for its piracy of software.
This is an imperfect solution (not including LAN) but it seems to be the most obvious solution. Kinda sucks that it is.
EDIT: Also, I personally dislike microtransactions, and that model doesn't work too well for SC2 anyway.
But I think on games that are designed to be ESPORTS - SC2 - Blizzard can afford to develop a "LAN-version" of the game that can be configured to connect to a local server rather than the public servers. Then this could be provided to big LAN tournaments that are willing to work directly with Blizzard.
Imagine: - MLG/Dreamhack/GSL pays Blizzard some fee - Blizzard shows up and installs SC2 "LAN-version" on the computers - Blizzard shows up with a dedicated server - Tournament runs - Blizzard uninstalls all the "LAN-versions"
Also: - The LAN-version doesn't need to be anything huge, but instead a patch on top of an existing SC2 instance. - Not all computers need to be 'patched', only the MAIN stage ones.
I doubt the fees will make up for the extra development cost, but the difference will probably be orders of magnitude less than the sales loss that the OP was talking about.
Saying that no one buys things they can get for free doesn't make sense when Team Fortress 2 hats sell by the truckload, League of Legends follows a similar trend, and Brood War is one of the biggest selling PC games of all time.
And Valve has the highest revenue per head in the entire world. :D
I don't get your argument. League of Legends aesthetics for the most part are only available through purchase, correct? How are they free?
And something selling well is not proof that there aren't a lot of people out there stealing it.
I think under these circumstances, its actually the consumer with the burden of proof unfortunately. Companies likely have done internal projections on the effects of piracy and determined it was unfeasible. Whether their projections are correct or not, that's the evidence they hold and it is will not sway unless consumers give insight on how they could be wrong.
If there is actually proprietary data on this type of stuff, and data-supported models that do predict X > Y (LAN support significantly hurting sales) - well, then my statement is wrong, and his statements are proven, and then everything he said makes 100% sense. But: 1). No such data has ever been released. 2). He did not in any way indicate that there was more to his prediction than data-unsupported logic. 3). Considering how atrociously wrong game publishers often are at predicting what's good business... I honestly doubt that there was serious data gathering and analysis that went into these predictions. I think they are, mostly, based on logic. But I could be wrong, no way to know what's being hidden of course.
I think it would benefit a company like Blizzard (or more like Activision, I suppose) significantly if they did actually demonstrate this type of data and how it proves that X > Y. Yes, it may be viewed as proprietary information - but at the same time, I think it would help establish a better relationship with the community, and I don't see what they would lose by releasing these sorts of numbers.
On June 23 2011 07:56 worldsnap wrote: You keep saying this over and over but it's still not true. While a pirated copy of something is definitely not always a lost sale (For example, i'm not going to actually rent all the movies i watch if i couldn't download them), but i sure as hell downloaded a lot of games until Steam made it even easier than pirating to get a game on release. And i'm by far not the only person in this position.
lol, I said it twice for the sake of reiteration because they selectively read my post and argued on pretty much no basis.
Pirates were not consumers in the first place = "While a pirated copy of something is definitely not always a lost sale."
Enough said.
edit: quotations
You're wrong. Pirates make many real consumers feel like suckers. This leads some of them to start pirating as well.
Personal insecurities have no value. I can claim that I feel good when I buy games as opposed to "feeling like a sucker" because I see to it that money goes to where money is well-deserved. I can coerce my friends and people within my network to purchase software too to make them also "feel good".
^ You realize your argument is a personal sentiment of yours and holds no bearing as neither does my hypothetical situation
Your statements that pirates aren't real customers has no bearing either, then. That statement has no value and no truth to it no matter how many times you repeat it. Your original argument is a personal statement of yours, too. Don't try to twist it around.
I'm not gonna respond to your feeble points from now because there is nothing of value in our little debate and I hope you can see to it as well.
Why does my statement that pirates = aren't customers has no bearing? No value? No truth? My original argument "is a personal statement too" "don't try to twist it around?"
First and foremost I'm not trying twist anything around and of course all my statements are personal or else whose statements are they lol? Now that that's cleared up, I've stated it 3 times now because of people who can't read.
Let's logically break this down:
1) Pirates = individuals who get involved in unauthorized copying of computer software. Copyright infringement of this kind is extremely common
2) They do this for several reason, one of them predominantly is because they don't wish to purchase the software
3) Buy not choosing not purchase the software and to pirate it, that indicates they didn't have the intentions of purchasing in the first place, nor did they end up as a customer (they could have been, but unlikely)
I don't have any data on this as I did not conduct a study on this but since you feel so strongly about the issue and feel I am wrong in my logic, maybe you should
Your 3) is wrong. Noone wishes to buy things if they can get it for free, so 2 applies, but it applies to every single thing.
They choose not to buy things when they can do so. But a big part of them, and this is where there is an actual discussion, wether this part is huge or not that big, but undeniably big, will still buy the games if they have no way to obtain them for free.
So while not all pirates are customers, some definatelly are. And those represent lost sales.
Anyone that says piracy doesn't represent lost sales makes no sense. What you can argue is wether the "cons overcome the pros".
Saying that no one buys things they can get for free doesn't make sense when Team Fortress 2 hats sell by the truckload, League of Legends follows a similar trend, and Brood War is one of the biggest selling PC games of all time.
And Valve has the highest revenue per head in the entire world. :D
TF2 hats are an entirely different thing. They're basically a decision of whether your money or your time is worth more to you. Hoping to get that certain hat from a random drop is like hoping to win the lottery, which is why they sell so well.
On June 23 2011 07:41 Strayline wrote: The thing I'm wondering about is how long will it be before someone just sets up an alternate battle.net server in China. People set up fake WoW servers and such so it's not like it's impossible to set up pirate servers without LAN support already in the game--LAN just makes it much easier. After this happens will Blizzard then release LAN support to the rest of the community?
Fake WoW servers are terrible. They're created by reverse engineering the code and so like 50% of the game is broken.
Having no LAN really does make it much harder if not impossible to set up a pirate server.
On June 23 2011 07:56 worldsnap wrote: You keep saying this over and over but it's still not true. While a pirated copy of something is definitely not always a lost sale (For example, i'm not going to actually rent all the movies i watch if i couldn't download them), but i sure as hell downloaded a lot of games until Steam made it even easier than pirating to get a game on release. And i'm by far not the only person in this position.
lol, I said it twice for the sake of reiteration because they selectively read my post and argued on pretty much no basis.
Pirates were not consumers in the first place = "While a pirated copy of something is definitely not always a lost sale."
Enough said.
edit: quotations
You're wrong. Pirates make many real consumers feel like suckers. This leads some of them to start pirating as well.
Personal insecurities have no value. I can claim that I feel good when I buy games as opposed to "feeling like a sucker" because I see to it that money goes to where money is well-deserved. I can coerce my friends and people within my network to purchase software too to make them also "feel good".
^ You realize your argument is a personal sentiment of yours and holds no bearing as neither does my hypothetical situation
Your statements that pirates aren't real customers has no bearing either, then. That statement has no value and no truth to it no matter how many times you repeat it. Your original argument is a personal statement of yours, too. Don't try to twist it around.
I'm not gonna respond to your feeble points from now because there is nothing of value in our little debate and I hope you can see to it as well.
Why does my statement that pirates = aren't customers has no bearing? No value? No truth? My original argument "is a personal statement too" "don't try to twist it around?"
First and foremost I'm not trying twist anything around and of course all my statements are personal or else whose statements are they lol? Now that that's cleared up, I've stated it 3 times now because of people who can't read.
Let's logically break this down:
1) Pirates = individuals who get involved in unauthorized copying of computer software. Copyright infringement of this kind is extremely common
2) They do this for several reason, one of them predominantly is because they don't wish to purchase the software
3) Buy not choosing not purchase the software and to pirate it, that indicates they didn't have the intentions of purchasing in the first place, nor did they end up as a customer (they could have been, but unlikely)
I don't have any data on this as I did not conduct a study on this but since you feel so strongly about the issue and feel I am wrong in my logic, maybe you should
Your 3) is wrong. Noone wishes to buy things if they can get it for free, so 2 applies, but it applies to every single thing.
They choose not to buy things when they can do so. But a big part of them, and this is where there is an actual discussion, wether this part is huge or not that big, but undeniably big, will still buy the games if they have no way to obtain them for free.
So while not all pirates are customers, some definatelly are. And those represent lost sales.
Anyone that says piracy doesn't represent lost sales makes no sense. What you can argue is wether the "cons overcome the pros".
Saying that no one buys things they can get for free doesn't make sense when Team Fortress 2 hats sell by the truckload, League of Legends follows a similar trend, and Brood War is one of the biggest selling PC games of all time.
And Valve has the highest revenue per head in the entire world. :D
I'm sorry, but can they get the hats for free without huge time investments? Can you just download the hats from another site? It is impossible to get those items, in both LoL and in TF, just by playing cassually. I'm sure that they would get pirated to death and wouldn't sell at all if you could dowload them for free. When you pirate a game, you get the exact same thing you would have paid for.
People will pay for things they can't obtain otherwise, exactly my point in the previous post. I'm not sure what your point is.
We bought sc2 because its blizzard, one of the Best game companies, and they still screw up... Just look at Duke Nukem, hyped as shit, alot of people bought it because they though it was going to be awesome, like the first one... what did it turn out to be? a piece of garbage... people pirate for that reason, just as companies might feel ripped off if someone pirates their game, customers feel as ripped off if they pay $50+ usd for a game, and its crap.
Doesn't change the fact that it's theft. If you use someone's product without making an expected payment for said product, it's theft.
The world is unfair like that, you wanna know what narcotraffic exist?, it exists because of the lack of opportunities. You have the USA complaining about mexicans crossing the border first, then, about mexicans and their drug cartels, but you guys never see the big picture. Mexico is a big contry, with alot of people and lack of opportunities, the narcotraffic boomed when mexicans could not cross the border anymore, so the only chance for them to make something for their families was to join the narco. Alot of people in mexico respects the narco more than the gonverment, because they do more for them, and thats the reality we live in.
Now, im not blaming the USA, but you can see how retarded it was for them to support, and make strong China's economy, rather than work on something with mexico, that has alot of people ready to work. Unlike china, Mexican gonverment has allways support the USA gonverment, you think china is going to do the same?, keep dreaming
On June 23 2011 08:32 VirGin wrote: To the people who say pirates would not buy games anyway - so there is no sale lost; Of course there are sales lost. Certainly not ALL pirates would buy the game anyway (I myself have pirated tons of games I would never buy, but also some I would in fact buy, if I couldnt get them for free.) but a fair percentage probably would.
People that pirate and wont buy, are only affecting rentals if anything, because they're basically the same thing (except one is legal), you dont want to buy the full game, but you want to test it first, so you either rent it or pirate it, if you like it you buy it.
I dont know you but i have a subscription to grooveshark, and i barely ever buy a music disc... just because a disk has 1 or 2 good songs, that doesnt mean its worth $10+ usd. Pricing is just as wrong as pirating.
I don't understand how you come to that conclusion. If you pirate it first, and like it, why would you buy it? You already have the full game avaliable indefinitely (as opposed to renting, which also costs money, obviously.). You'll only buy it after for moral reasons, pretty much exactly the same as donating the money, because you don't actually need the game. And let's be honest, basing a business on donations isn't very smart, is it?
As for music, I subscribe to spotify, because for $20 a month (nothing) it's easier and better than pirating.
The term "This is why we can't have nice things" comes to mind.
I'm not really sure why people are arguing over if lost sales are a good reason or not...it is. You honestly can't expect a company to throw away a chance to make money.
"But adding LAN might increase sales!" Maybe, but if they add LAN there is a 100% chance they will be pirated a ton.
Tell me, though ICCups history how many of the players there do you think actually bought SC1? A nice chunk, no doubt, but don't tell me it was everyone. I'd be willing to bet at least 10% just downloaded it from ICCup before playing the 5/10$ game for hours on end.
This would happen to SC2. It being Pirated isn't in question. It would happen.
It makes sense for them to not add LAN mode. It sucks for the rest of us, but it makes sense. Not that it'll stop people from getting pissed and calling Blizzard the bad guys, though.
On June 23 2011 08:32 VirGin wrote: To the people who say pirates would not buy games anyway - so there is no sale lost; Of course there are sales lost. Certainly not ALL pirates would buy the game anyway (I myself have pirated tons of games I would never buy, but also some I would in fact buy, if I couldnt get them for free.) but a fair percentage probably would.
People that pirate and wont buy, are only affecting rentals if anything, because they're basically the same thing (except one is legal), you dont want to buy the full game, but you want to test it first, so you either rent it or pirate it, if you like it you buy it.
I dont know you but i have a subscription to grooveshark, and i barely ever buy a music disc... just because a disk has 1 or 2 good songs, that doesnt mean its worth $10+ usd. Pricing is just as wrong as pirating.
I would strongly disagree with pricing being considered as wrong as piracy. Piracy happens whether or not the developer approves of it. Pricing is primarily determined by the market, the consumers willingness to buy the product given the circumstances of the market. Piracy is theft, it may be justified but it is intellectual theft regardless. Pricing gives the consumer a choice of whether or not they want it or not.
People talking about Piracy back in the times of BW need to remember that it wasn't half as rampant back then and wasn't considered to be anywhere near serious.
In the current climate, I completely agree with the HoN dev: It just simply isn't viable anymore for any developer to provide such a feature (as sad as it is - especially for persons like myself in Australia who can't play SC2 under 180ping).
Games that people pirate= games they wouldnt buy otherwise. And companies like Valve and Blizzard shouldnt worry about it cause they make awesome games that people WANT to buy.
On June 23 2011 08:39 yoshi_yoshi wrote: I can sympathise with the company's POV on this.
But I think on games that are designed to be ESPORTS - SC2 - Blizzard can afford to develop a "LAN-version" of the game that can be configured to connect to a local server rather than the public servers. Then this could be provided to big LAN tournaments that are willing to work directly with Blizzard.
Imagine: - MLG/Dreamhack/GSL pays Blizzard some fee - Blizzard shows up and installs SC2 "LAN-version" on the computers - Blizzard shows up with a dedicated server - Tournament runs - Blizzard uninstalls all the "LAN-versions"
Also: - The LAN-version doesn't need to be anything huge, but instead a patch on top of an existing SC2 instance. - Not all computers need to be 'patched', only the MAIN stage ones.
I doubt the fees will make up for the extra development cost, but the difference will probably be orders of magnitude less than the sales loss that the OP was talking about.
However, it would be a huge problem if the LAN-version was somehow leaked and fell into the hands of hackers, possibly via a disgruntled employee or some very bold thieves.
Also, I doubt that Blizzard can be everywhere at once. It would probably mean paying for an extra employee or two to travel around with this special "LAN-version" to take time to set it up securely at venues. Considering how slow Blizzard works, I doubt that this can ever happen.
On June 23 2011 08:32 VirGin wrote: To the people who say pirates would not buy games anyway - so there is no sale lost; Of course there are sales lost. Certainly not ALL pirates would buy the game anyway (I myself have pirated tons of games I would never buy, but also some I would in fact buy, if I couldnt get them for free.) but a fair percentage probably would.
People that pirate and wont buy, are only affecting rentals if anything, because they're basically the same thing (except one is legal), you dont want to buy the full game, but you want to test it first, so you either rent it or pirate it, if you like it you buy it.
I dont know you but i have a subscription to grooveshark, and i barely ever buy a music disc... just because a disk has 1 or 2 good songs, that doesnt mean its worth $10+ usd. Pricing is just as wrong as pirating.
I don't understand how you come to that conclusion. If you pirate it first, and like it, why would you buy it? You already have the full game avaliable indefinitely (as opposed to renting, which also costs money, obviously.). You'll only buy it after for moral reasons, pretty much exactly the same as donating the money, because you don't actually need the game. And let's be honest, basing a business on donations isn't very smart, is it?
Exactly, I would argue only a small minority of those ethically and supportive individuals exist in comparison to the majority of pirates. From my experiences they are the ones that pirate very little.
LoL is free and makes money just fine. i don't think piracy is the real factor to not implement a LAN feature.
Torchlight developers know how much their game was pirated and acknowledged that it only helps make their game more popular and allows for a bigger market for Torchlight 2 and their upcoming Torchlight MMO.
Magicka was pirated a lot, then they made a bunch of money from DLC packs and most recently a PvP mode.
if SC2 had LAN, that would be 1 less major complaint about the game that gets brought up at a majority of tournaments. even if exposure at MLG and GSL caused the game to get pirated a ton without many legit customers, it has 2 expansions coming up and incoming DLC.
the OP just makes it seem like the HoN developers don't understand the PC market anymore. Blizzard was really slow to adopt microtransactions with WoW, and whenever they did it made millions. SC2 was also released with a dated model, where they seemed to only care about initial launch sales. they heavily advertised on TV and various Korean markets (McDonald's) and after launch they stopped advertising and had no DLC.
the market is completely different now. SC2 could survive very easily with a low-graphics only, no achievements LAN mode. they could make a ton of money selling skins like the CE Thor that are toggled for bnet games only.
On June 23 2011 07:10 mdma-_- wrote: that still doesnt explain why they cant allow people to play each other in lan with the necessecity of being logged into bnet/whatever online client.
cheap excuse just to blame it on pirates tbh
What the hell would be the point of LAN if you had to be logged into Bnet? The entire issue with no LAN is retarded internet problems that tournaments seem to constantly have.
the internet could be used as a way to verify the authenicaty of your game, and perhaps periodicly pings you or something. it would be a hell of a lot better than what we have now.
On June 23 2011 08:32 VirGin wrote: To the people who say pirates would not buy games anyway - so there is no sale lost; Of course there are sales lost. Certainly not ALL pirates would buy the game anyway (I myself have pirated tons of games I would never buy, but also some I would in fact buy, if I couldnt get them for free.) but a fair percentage probably would.
People that pirate and wont buy, are only affecting rentals if anything, because they're basically the same thing (except one is legal), you dont want to buy the full game, but you want to test it first, so you either rent it or pirate it, if you like it you buy it.
I dont know you but i have a subscription to grooveshark, and i barely ever buy a music disc... just because a disk has 1 or 2 good songs, that doesnt mean its worth $10+ usd. Pricing is just as wrong as pirating.
I would strongly disagree with pricing being considered as wrong as piracy. Piracy happens whether or not the developer approves of it. Pricing is primarily determined by the market, the consumers willingness to buy the product given the circumstances of the market. Piracy is theft, it may be justified but it is intellectual theft regardless. Pricing gives the consumer a choice of whether or not they want it or not.
The pricing is wrong because they're not considering that most people is already too tight to have money to spare for entertainment, We're on a global economy crisis, people dont spend money because they dont have it, if we were all rich as fuck, and still, taking things (Like Lindslay lohan), it would be wrong, obviusly. We're not talking about stealing a frikking ferrari here, we're talking about basic entertainment, that can make you better at alot of things in life. RTS for example, are great at making you great at quick thinking, and desicion making. MMORPGS are fantastic at making people good at problem solving, and team play. Games are great training for life, and a great stress relief in a world filled with just bad things.
For anyone to be able to buy, and play games, watchs movies, etc. should be a human right, and priced accordingly.
On June 23 2011 08:44 Pirat6662001 wrote: Games that people pirate= games they wouldnt buy otherwise. And companies like Valve and Blizzard shouldnt worry about it cause they make awesome games that people WANT to buy.
Top Pirated PC games on Bit Torrent for 2010
1) Call of Duty: Black Ops (4,270,000)
2) Battlefield: Bad Company 2 (3,960,000)
3) Mafia 2 (3,240,000)
4) Mass Effect 2 (3,240,000)
5) Starcraft II (3,120,000)
Pretty much everyone on TL fall under the category of people WANTING to buy SC2. But there is also a large group of people unwilling to buy, these numbers are probably quite a bit larger given the date of the source.
On June 23 2011 08:46 eggs wrote: LoL is free and makes money just fine. i don't think piracy is the real factor to not implement a LAN feature.
Torchlight developers know how much their game was pirated and acknowledged that it only helps make their game more popular and allows for a bigger market for Torchlight 2 and their upcoming Torchlight MMO.
Magicka was pirated a lot, then they made a bunch of money from DLC packs and most recently a PvP mode.
if SC2 had LAN, that would be 1 less major complaint about the game that gets brought up at a majority of tournaments. even if exposure at MLG and GSL caused the game to get pirated a ton without many legit customers, it has 2 expansions coming up and incoming DLC.
the OP just makes it seem like the HoN developers don't understand the PC market anymore. Blizzard was really slow to adopt microtransactions with WoW, and whenever they did it made millions. SC2 was also released with a dated model, where they seemed to only care about initial launch sales. they heavily advertised on TV and various Korean markets (McDonald's) and after launch they stopped advertising and had no DLC.
the market is completely different now. SC2 could survive very easily with a low-graphics only, no achievements LAN mode. they could make a ton of money selling skins like the CE Thor that are toggled for bnet games only.
LoL makes money by microtransactions. Would you be fine if SC2 was free, but you had to pay to be able to play on most maps or even races? Even if you can unlock things with playtime, only the most harcore can get most unlockables. This system just doesn't work for SC2.
Microtransactions with WoW are diferent, they don't even affect the game, they are the same way as HoN does it, not LoL, and LoL wouldn't get the same amount of money by selling skins. WoW is so freaking big it, and this opportunities are not that common, so it works when they do it.
i dont know if this has been mentioned before but:
the # given from torrent downloads of any given game, majority of those numbers are people who would not have bought the game to begin with. i think its very saddening if the developers actually saw those numbers and thought "this is the amount of copies we lose to pirates".
when it actually isn't true...
i dont know, thats just me, speaking from my experience and those around me.
On June 23 2011 08:44 Pirat6662001 wrote: Games that people pirate= games they wouldnt buy otherwise. And companies like Valve and Blizzard shouldnt worry about it cause they make awesome games that people WANT to buy.
Top Pirated PC games on Bit Torrent for 2010
1) Call of Duty: Black Ops (4,270,000)
2) Battlefield: Bad Company 2 (3,960,000)
3) Mafia 2 (3,240,000)
4) Mass Effect 2 (3,240,000)
5) Starcraft II (3,120,000)
Pretty much everyone on TL fall under the category of people WANTING to buy SC2. But there is also a large group of people unwilling to buy, these numbers are probably quite a bit larger given the date of the source.
Silly, I downloaded a game through a bittorrent because it was faster than through blizzard system (i dont own a hard copy), but i still have a legit copy. Just cause you download a torrent doesnt make you a pirate. I download most games i buy (dont own hard copys) through a torrent and have a legal version still. I now that my gamer friends do the same thing cause its efficient
On June 23 2011 08:46 eggs wrote: LoL is free and makes money just fine. i don't think piracy is the real factor to not implement a LAN feature.
That's simply because their business model is vastly different than Blizzards. They make money off of micro-transactions from sale of champions, skills, and other in game items. Blizzard doesn't do this yet, and even when they adjust their business model in HoTS for micro-transactions it will likely not be the majority of their revenue streams. Digital and retail sales make the majority, which piracy affects.
I believe this came up in the funny pictures thread a little bit ago, it'd be nice if people followed it instead of 99% of piracy resulting in thievery. + Show Spoiler +
On June 23 2011 07:14 ThePurist wrote: Microsoft operating systems and office software are two of the biggest pirated softwares and they still make money. This guy tries to act like a realist but he doesn't really have a clue about economics. The opinions are too pessimistic and overgeneralizes the vast majority of people who purchase games with their hard-earned cash. Pirates don't stop revenue streams pirates were not a consumer in the first place. The assumption that a pirated copy was a sale is flawed imo and his last few personal statements are questionable as I perceive them as a cop-out when his whole opinion was about "simple economics".
That is a completely different issue. Microsoft OS and Office sell so well is because of corporate companies, government branches, educational facilities, and not home users. I'm sure if they wouldn't get their asses sued, they wouldn't buy from Microsoft either.
Windows and Office is used by a lot more people who play HoN or Starcraft 2 as well.
I think you're the one who doesn't understand economics.
If you couldn't pirate something but wanted to play it real bad, you would buy it. Your assumption that if people couldn't pirate it, they just wouldn't play it is flawed too.
sidenote: I also wish we could try out games, there's nothing worse than buying a game, playing about 10 minutes just to figure out you absolutely hate it and want to return the game. But since it's opened, you get about 10$ back, so in essence, you paid 40$ to play a game for 10 minutes.
On June 23 2011 08:32 VirGin wrote: To the people who say pirates would not buy games anyway - so there is no sale lost; Of course there are sales lost. Certainly not ALL pirates would buy the game anyway (I myself have pirated tons of games I would never buy, but also some I would in fact buy, if I couldnt get them for free.) but a fair percentage probably would.
People that pirate and wont buy, are only affecting rentals if anything, because they're basically the same thing (except one is legal), you dont want to buy the full game, but you want to test it first, so you either rent it or pirate it, if you like it you buy it.
I dont know you but i have a subscription to grooveshark, and i barely ever buy a music disc... just because a disk has 1 or 2 good songs, that doesnt mean its worth $10+ usd. Pricing is just as wrong as pirating.
I would strongly disagree with pricing being considered as wrong as piracy. Piracy happens whether or not the developer approves of it. Pricing is primarily determined by the market, the consumers willingness to buy the product given the circumstances of the market. Piracy is theft, it may be justified but it is intellectual theft regardless. Pricing gives the consumer a choice of whether or not they want it or not.
The pricing is wrong because they're not considering that most people is already too tight to have money to spare for entertainment, We're on a global economy crisis, people dont spend money because they dont have it, if we were all rich as fuck, and still, taking things (Like Lindslay lohan), it would be wrong, obviusly. We're not talking about stealing a frikking ferrari here, we're talking about basic entertainment, that can make you better at alot of things in life. RTS for example, are great at making you great at quick thinking, and desicion making. MMORPGS are fantastic at making people good at problem solving, and team play. Games are great training for life, and a great stress relief in a world filled with just bad things.
For anyone to be able to buy, and play games, watchs movies, etc. should be a human right, and priced accordingly.
O.O
The people that make games are not doing it for charity. Same way the people that make beds don't do it because they would just love to give people a good nights sleep. They do it to make money. Is it a human right to have a bed?
It's most certainly not a human right to play games or watch movies.
On June 23 2011 08:51 dudeman001 wrote: I believe this came up in the funny pictures thread a little bit ago, it'd be nice if people followed it instead of 99% of piracy resulting in thievery. + Show Spoiler +
Still, it's first point is debatable, because you still pay for a dinner you didn't enjoy, and it's second point even more so. If you have money for a high-end PC, you regularly go out, you actually do stuff for fun that isn't free, you ussually have money to buy a single game. The "lack of money" only exists because you spent it elsewhere. If you couldn't pirate it, maybe you would have saved for it, and bought it. Few people have money to throw around, they just choose to buy games.
Even then, like you said, 99% of them fall on point 3.
On June 23 2011 08:44 Pirat6662001 wrote: Games that people pirate= games they wouldnt buy otherwise. And companies like Valve and Blizzard shouldnt worry about it cause they make awesome games that people WANT to buy.
Top Pirated PC games on Bit Torrent for 2010
1) Call of Duty: Black Ops (4,270,000)
2) Battlefield: Bad Company 2 (3,960,000)
3) Mafia 2 (3,240,000)
4) Mass Effect 2 (3,240,000)
5) Starcraft II (3,120,000)
Pretty much everyone on TL fall under the category of people WANTING to buy SC2. But there is also a large group of people unwilling to buy, these numbers are probably quite a bit larger given the date of the source.
Silly, I downloaded a game through a bittorrent because it was faster than through blizzard system (i dont own a hard copy), but i still have a legit copy. Just cause you download a torrent doesnt make you a pirate. I download most games i buy (dont own hard copys) through a torrent and have a legal version still. I now that my gamer friends do the same thing cause its efficient
Do you think you represent the majority of people who pirate? Anecdotal evidence is not justification for a generalization.
Steam actually is a poster boy for pirating because it's DRM does not work. All that is necessary is a replication of the steam client and platform, which is why games when released on Steam become pirateable within the day. If the game has Lan, this is especially potent in its removing of anyone's need to buy it.
On June 23 2011 08:32 VirGin wrote: To the people who say pirates would not buy games anyway - so there is no sale lost; Of course there are sales lost. Certainly not ALL pirates would buy the game anyway (I myself have pirated tons of games I would never buy, but also some I would in fact buy, if I couldnt get them for free.) but a fair percentage probably would.
People that pirate and wont buy, are only affecting rentals if anything, because they're basically the same thing (except one is legal), you dont want to buy the full game, but you want to test it first, so you either rent it or pirate it, if you like it you buy it.
I dont know you but i have a subscription to grooveshark, and i barely ever buy a music disc... just because a disk has 1 or 2 good songs, that doesnt mean its worth $10+ usd. Pricing is just as wrong as pirating.
I would strongly disagree with pricing being considered as wrong as piracy. Piracy happens whether or not the developer approves of it. Pricing is primarily determined by the market, the consumers willingness to buy the product given the circumstances of the market. Piracy is theft, it may be justified but it is intellectual theft regardless. Pricing gives the consumer a choice of whether or not they want it or not.
The pricing is wrong because they're not considering that most people is already too tight to have money to spare for entertainment, We're on a global economy crisis, people dont spend money because they dont have it, if we were all rich as fuck, and still, taking things (Like Lindslay lohan), it would be wrong, obviusly. We're not talking about stealing a frikking ferrari here, we're talking about basic entertainment, that can make you better at alot of things in life. RTS for example, are great at making you great at quick thinking, and desicion making. MMORPGS are fantastic at making people good at problem solving, and team play. Games are great training for life, and a great stress relief in a world filled with just bad things.
For anyone to be able to buy, and play games, watchs movies, etc. should be a human right, and priced accordingly.
As much as I would love to have free entertainment all the time of my choosing, how is this feasible in a global economy? Besides the warm fuzzy feeling someone might get from providing great entertainment to someone, what is the bottom line at the end of the day? Money. In a such a recession more people will pirate games, and find alternative methods of entertainment that suit their lifestyle and financial situations. Then what happens? Less of a demand and consumer base will be in the gaming industry and as a result companies need to compensate for this - possibly a price drop. Pricing isn't inherently evil, and can't be it's just a tool of exchange.
On June 23 2011 08:44 Pirat6662001 wrote: Games that people pirate= games they wouldnt buy otherwise. And companies like Valve and Blizzard shouldnt worry about it cause they make awesome games that people WANT to buy.
Top Pirated PC games on Bit Torrent for 2010
1) Call of Duty: Black Ops (4,270,000)
2) Battlefield: Bad Company 2 (3,960,000)
3) Mafia 2 (3,240,000)
4) Mass Effect 2 (3,240,000)
5) Starcraft II (3,120,000)
Pretty much everyone on TL fall under the category of people WANTING to buy SC2. But there is also a large group of people unwilling to buy, these numbers are probably quite a bit larger given the date of the source.
Silly, I downloaded a game through a bittorrent because it was faster than through blizzard system (i dont own a hard copy), but i still have a legit copy. Just cause you download a torrent doesnt make you a pirate. I download most games i buy (dont own hard copys) through a torrent and have a legal version still. I now that my gamer friends do the same thing cause its efficient
blizz downloader is a torrent program it's slow because of people like you not using it. I mean i only get 400kbp/s down on the host server that is distributing it plenty for my dsl but not that fast.
On June 23 2011 08:44 Pirat6662001 wrote: Games that people pirate= games they wouldnt buy otherwise. And companies like Valve and Blizzard shouldnt worry about it cause they make awesome games that people WANT to buy.
Top Pirated PC games on Bit Torrent for 2010
1) Call of Duty: Black Ops (4,270,000)
2) Battlefield: Bad Company 2 (3,960,000)
3) Mafia 2 (3,240,000)
4) Mass Effect 2 (3,240,000)
5) Starcraft II (3,120,000)
Pretty much everyone on TL fall under the category of people WANTING to buy SC2. But there is also a large group of people unwilling to buy, these numbers are probably quite a bit larger given the date of the source.
Silly, I downloaded a game through a bittorrent because it was faster than through blizzard system (i dont own a hard copy), but i still have a legit copy. Just cause you download a torrent doesnt make you a pirate. I download most games i buy (dont own hard copys) through a torrent and have a legal version still. I now that my gamer friends do the same thing cause its efficient
Do you think you represent the majority of people who pirate? Anecdotal evidence is not justification for a generalization.
Steam actually is a poster boy for pirating because it's DRM does not work. All that is necessary is a replication of the steam client and platform, which is why games when released on Steam become pirateable within the day. If the game has Lan, this is especially potent in its removing of anyone's need to buy it.
And your anecdote that everybody who downloads via bittorrent is a pirate is better justification? What?
On June 23 2011 08:32 VirGin wrote: To the people who say pirates would not buy games anyway - so there is no sale lost; Of course there are sales lost. Certainly not ALL pirates would buy the game anyway (I myself have pirated tons of games I would never buy, but also some I would in fact buy, if I couldnt get them for free.) but a fair percentage probably would.
People that pirate and wont buy, are only affecting rentals if anything, because they're basically the same thing (except one is legal), you dont want to buy the full game, but you want to test it first, so you either rent it or pirate it, if you like it you buy it.
I dont know you but i have a subscription to grooveshark, and i barely ever buy a music disc... just because a disk has 1 or 2 good songs, that doesnt mean its worth $10+ usd. Pricing is just as wrong as pirating.
I would strongly disagree with pricing being considered as wrong as piracy. Piracy happens whether or not the developer approves of it. Pricing is primarily determined by the market, the consumers willingness to buy the product given the circumstances of the market. Piracy is theft, it may be justified but it is intellectual theft regardless. Pricing gives the consumer a choice of whether or not they want it or not.
The pricing is wrong because they're not considering that most people is already too tight to have money to spare for entertainment, We're on a global economy crisis, people dont spend money because they dont have it, if we were all rich as fuck, and still, taking things (Like Lindslay lohan), it would be wrong, obviusly. We're not talking about stealing a frikking ferrari here, we're talking about basic entertainment, that can make you better at alot of things in life. RTS for example, are great at making you great at quick thinking, and desicion making. MMORPGS are fantastic at making people good at problem solving, and team play. Games are great training for life, and a great stress relief in a world filled with just bad things.
For anyone to be able to buy, and play games, watchs movies, etc. should be a human right, and priced accordingly.
O.O
The people that make games are not doing it for charity. Same way the people that make beds don't do it because they would just love to give people a good nights sleep. They do it to make money. Is it a human right to have a bed?
It's most certainly not a human right to play games or watch movies.
Who said i wanted it free?, i buy my stuff, but just because i have access, and money, that doesnt mean i dont have emphaty for those who dont. Im not asking for anything free, but you know whats worse than theft?, the fact that we're allowing all the money to go to a few, while 90% or more of this worlds population just keeps rotting with nothing at all to fall on.
Just look at the music industry, they say they're broke becuase they cant afford 5 more ferraris ? cmon dude, they're still fucking rich, just not RICHER, there should be a limit in the amounts of money somone can hold, its just retarded for us to want to accumulate money into a couple bank accounts, those guys will never return it to the people, and thats why we're so screwed.
We should care about the hard-working people, not the assholes that're just investing the money, trying to get sick returns from them.
AGAIN, i repeat, i dont want anything for free, i just wish it was priced so anyone could enjoy it, we're talking about basic things here, not luxury items.
On June 23 2011 07:56 worldsnap wrote: You keep saying this over and over but it's still not true. While a pirated copy of something is definitely not always a lost sale (For example, i'm not going to actually rent all the movies i watch if i couldn't download them), but i sure as hell downloaded a lot of games until Steam made it even easier than pirating to get a game on release. And i'm by far not the only person in this position.
lol, I said it twice for the sake of reiteration because they selectively read my post and argued on pretty much no basis.
Pirates were not consumers in the first place = "While a pirated copy of something is definitely not always a lost sale."
Enough said.
edit: quotations
You're wrong. Pirates make many real consumers feel like suckers. This leads some of them to start pirating as well.
Personal insecurities have no value. I can claim that I feel good when I buy games as opposed to "feeling like a sucker" because I see to it that money goes to where money is well-deserved. I can coerce my friends and people within my network to purchase software too to make them also "feel good".
^ You realize your argument is a personal sentiment of yours and holds no bearing as neither does my hypothetical situation
Your statements that pirates aren't real customers has no bearing either, then. That statement has no value and no truth to it no matter how many times you repeat it. Your original argument is a personal statement of yours, too. Don't try to twist it around.
I'm not gonna respond to your feeble points from now because there is nothing of value in our little debate and I hope you can see to it as well.
Why does my statement that pirates = aren't customers has no bearing? No value? No truth? My original argument "is a personal statement too" "don't try to twist it around?"
First and foremost I'm not trying twist anything around and of course all my statements are personal or else whose statements are they lol? Now that that's cleared up, I've stated it 3 times now because of people who can't read.
Let's logically break this down:
1) Pirates = individuals who get involved in unauthorized copying of computer software. Copyright infringement of this kind is extremely common
2) They do this for several reason, one of them predominantly is because they don't wish to purchase the software
3) Buy not choosing not purchase the software and to pirate it, that indicates they didn't have the intentions of purchasing in the first place, nor did they end up as a customer (they could have been, but unlikely)
I don't have any data on this as I did not conduct a study on this but since you feel so strongly about the issue and feel I am wrong in my logic, maybe you should
Your 3) is wrong. Noone wishes to buy things if they can get it for free, so 2 applies, but it applies to every single thing.
They choose not to buy things when they can do so. But a big part of them, and this is where there is an actual discussion, wether this part is huge or not that big, but undeniably big, will still buy the games if they have no way to obtain them for free.
So while not all pirates are customers, some definatelly are. And those represent lost sales.
Anyone that says piracy doesn't represent lost sales makes no sense. What you can argue is wether the "cons overcome the pros".
Saying that no one buys things they can get for free doesn't make sense when Team Fortress 2 hats sell by the truckload, League of Legends follows a similar trend, and Brood War is one of the biggest selling PC games of all time.
And Valve has the highest revenue per head in the entire world. :D
I'm sorry, but can they get the hats for free without huge time investments? Can you just download the hats from another site? It is impossible to get those items, in both LoL and in TF, just by playing cassually. I'm sure that they would get pirated to death and wouldn't sell at all if you could dowload them for free. When you pirate a game, you get the exact same thing you would have paid for.
People will pay for things they can't obtain otherwise, exactly my point in the previous post. I'm not sure what your point is.
My point is that service is what's key when trying to beat piracy, not actively trying to stop piracy. DRM measures have proven to be counter productive in combating it and an awful lot of people were rather miffed when SC2 was announced to not have LAN. Publishers interacting with their community and not treating their customers like money cows waiting to be milked makes the customer more likely to recommend the publisher to their friends, who in turn recommend to their friends and so on, and through all of these new customers the publisher makes their money. And saying pirated copies are lost sales is a bit sketchy.
Piracy if anything just seems like a scapegoat to try to wring remaining customers even harder. Especially when you read articles like this:
On June 23 2011 08:51 dudeman001 wrote: I believe this came up in the funny pictures thread a little bit ago, it'd be nice if people followed it instead of 99% of piracy resulting in thievery. + Show Spoiler +
Still, it's first point is debatable, because you still pay for a dinner you didn't enjoy, and it's second point even more so. If you have money for a high-end PC, you regularly go out, you actually do stuff for fun that isn't free, you ussually have money to buy a single game. The "lack of money" only exists because you spent it elsewhere. If you couldn't pirate it, maybe you would have saved for it, and bought it. Few people have money to throw around, they just choose to buy games.
Even then, like you said, 99% of them fall on point 3.
When I was a kid, I had to download a lot of games because I had no money. I had the gaming PC because my dad did a lot of computer stuff and there were just computers around the house. When my brother and I begged, we might be able to get a new video card or some RAM, but getting games were much more rare (in comparison to how often we wanted them, of course).
When I got older and could afford to buy stuff, I had a nice, solid gaming addiction. Now I don't download stuff (except Spore, but that was after buying a legit copy and being very, very angry over the stupid DRM).
On June 23 2011 08:44 Pirat6662001 wrote: Games that people pirate= games they wouldnt buy otherwise. And companies like Valve and Blizzard shouldnt worry about it cause they make awesome games that people WANT to buy.
Top Pirated PC games on Bit Torrent for 2010
1) Call of Duty: Black Ops (4,270,000)
2) Battlefield: Bad Company 2 (3,960,000)
3) Mafia 2 (3,240,000)
4) Mass Effect 2 (3,240,000)
5) Starcraft II (3,120,000)
Pretty much everyone on TL fall under the category of people WANTING to buy SC2. But there is also a large group of people unwilling to buy, these numbers are probably quite a bit larger given the date of the source.
Silly, I downloaded a game through a bittorrent because it was faster than through blizzard system (i dont own a hard copy), but i still have a legit copy. Just cause you download a torrent doesnt make you a pirate. I download most games i buy (dont own hard copys) through a torrent and have a legal version still. I now that my gamer friends do the same thing cause its efficient
I would argue that is still stealing, you bought a legit copy but that still does mean your stealing. Unless the distributor or producer of a game permitted you to acquire the game in such a manner you would be stealing.
On June 23 2011 08:44 Pirat6662001 wrote: Games that people pirate= games they wouldnt buy otherwise. And companies like Valve and Blizzard shouldnt worry about it cause they make awesome games that people WANT to buy.
Top Pirated PC games on Bit Torrent for 2010
1) Call of Duty: Black Ops (4,270,000)
2) Battlefield: Bad Company 2 (3,960,000)
3) Mafia 2 (3,240,000)
4) Mass Effect 2 (3,240,000)
5) Starcraft II (3,120,000)
Pretty much everyone on TL fall under the category of people WANTING to buy SC2. But there is also a large group of people unwilling to buy, these numbers are probably quite a bit larger given the date of the source.
Silly, I downloaded a game through a bittorrent because it was faster than through blizzard system (i dont own a hard copy), but i still have a legit copy. Just cause you download a torrent doesnt make you a pirate. I download most games i buy (dont own hard copys) through a torrent and have a legal version still. I now that my gamer friends do the same thing cause its efficient
I would argue that is still stealing, you bought a legit copy but that still does mean your stealing. Unless the distributor or producer of a game permitted you to acquire the game in such a manner you would be stealing.
You really believe that? Do you also believe that it's stealing to buy an album, then rip it to my MP3 player? I can't understand this mentality - that every single thing a business desires is how things should be. The shift to digital music mostly happened because consumers got fed up with unreasonable demands, like the example I gave, and decided en masse to say "Fuck you. I'm doing it anyway.".
LAN is clearly wanted dearly, but the fact of the matter is that you CANNOT implement LAN without knowing you're going to lose HUGE amount of money. I do think a potential LAN that require you to log in online yet run a peer-to-peer connection/LAN of some form.
Anyone thinking that Blizzard or any other of these gaming companies don't NEED the money, then please open your own business and attempt to thrive under these savage conditions that are progressing. I do believe that some progress of LAN will be made such that they can implement it without risking piracy, but atm there should be no expectations of it in the immediate future.
Stating that someone like Microsoft has the biggest piracy issues and are still a forward moving company, comes from someone who is ignorant. Their scenario is completely differant in multiple ways. First of it has nothing to do with LAN, and their market is MUCH MUCH MUCH larger than that of a gaming company(specifically PCs).
I as much as anyone, want LAN and pray for it, but until a effective method of LAN that can be backed by the security of online gaming is created, there will only be large declines of LAN use.
On June 23 2011 08:44 Pirat6662001 wrote: Games that people pirate= games they wouldnt buy otherwise. And companies like Valve and Blizzard shouldnt worry about it cause they make awesome games that people WANT to buy.
Top Pirated PC games on Bit Torrent for 2010
1) Call of Duty: Black Ops (4,270,000)
2) Battlefield: Bad Company 2 (3,960,000)
3) Mafia 2 (3,240,000)
4) Mass Effect 2 (3,240,000)
5) Starcraft II (3,120,000)
Pretty much everyone on TL fall under the category of people WANTING to buy SC2. But there is also a large group of people unwilling to buy, these numbers are probably quite a bit larger given the date of the source.
Silly, I downloaded a game through a bittorrent because it was faster than through blizzard system (i dont own a hard copy), but i still have a legit copy. Just cause you download a torrent doesnt make you a pirate. I download most games i buy (dont own hard copys) through a torrent and have a legal version still. I now that my gamer friends do the same thing cause its efficient
I would argue that is still stealing, you bought a legit copy but that still does mean your stealing. Unless the distributor or producer of a game permitted you to acquire the game in such a manner you would be stealing.
You really believe that? Do you also believe that it's stealing to buy an album, then rip it to my MP3 player? I can't understand this mentality - that every single thing a business desires is how things should be. The shift to digital music mostly happened because consumers got fed up with unreasonable demands, like the example I gave, and decided en masse to say "Fuck you. I'm doing it anyway.".
Yes I do. You acquired an ILLEGAL copy of the digital and intellectual contents that Blizzard created, through a method of free exchange that was UNAUTHORIZED and NOT permitted by Blizzard. If that's not stealing, I really need to revise my understanding of it.
We're so masochists as a race(humans), its unbelievable... why are we taking the sides of the few, and not the masses?, i appreciate the creativity and effort of the guys at blizzard, but the reality is that they're not even the ones making the money. The investors are, and they're making shitloads of return just based on a group of devoted, genius creatives that most companies have.
Watch tv shows like dragons den one day, the investors don't care one bit if you're going to feed all the world's hungry people with your invention, they care about return. How much money am i going to get if i invest... Its a stupid logic, that's only making a group of few people rich, while everyone else roots in poverty.
On June 23 2011 08:10 theOnslaught wrote: These guys just dont get it... pirating is not killing any industries, most of the people who pirate wont even buy the game anyways, if pirating wasnt possible, you would see people lending their games, as they do with DVD's, or books, to friends after they finish reading them.
If anything, pirating is good for all industries, as people will not likely buy something that they havent tested, and liked... there is a bigger chance of someone pirating SC2, liking it and then, buying the game, than anything else, since lets get serious here, the real deal in RTS games is not the missions, not even lan (playing with your friends), the real deal is online play, and great online playing systems should alone be a reason to have to buy the game, rather than them forcing you through silly tactics that are only holding e-sports back (because of how common issues like disconnections and lag are in local tournaments).
There is a great video arround youtube about a book writer, that at first hated pirating, because he though of it as people stealing him money, but when he noticed the places where he was beign pirated had a GREAT increase in sales (like russia), he understood that pirating was a way for new people to get to know his work, and then, if they liked it, buy it.
How many people have you met that said they didn't buy SC2 because they couldn't test it first? And not just as a "protest" because of the lack of LAN, but because they didn't actually knew if the game was good.
Now think about how many people wouldn't have bought the game if they could play online without paying.
It's not that simple, for both sides. You will never bring a argument and everyone will just say. OMG I had never though about that! It makes sense now! This kind of discussion will go on forever.
People keed saying "It's fine to pirate it if you don't have the money to buy it, even if you like it", but seriously, who has a PC capable of running recent games and has actually no money to buy a single game? Just because you spent all your money in other things, doesn't mean you wouldn't have spent it on the game instead of something else if you couldn't pirate it.
I know several people that only buy games that can't be pirated, and not because they are the only good games.
We bought sc2 because its blizzard, one of the Best game companies, and they still screw up... Just look at Duke Nukem, hyped as shit, alot of people bought it because they though it was going to be awesome, like the first one... what did it turn out to be? a piece of garbage... people pirate for that reason, just as companies might feel ripped off if someone pirates their game, customers feel as ripped off if they pay $50+ usd for a game, and its crap.
That is still a shitty attitude. Why does the game company owe you anything? Why do they have to make a good game? None of that makes sense to me. This is why reviews exist for movies, books, tv shows, and games, so you don't have to make an uninformed decision before purchasing. If a company keeps on making shitty games, then let the market take care of it by not purchasing its games. If people keep on purchasing their crappy games, then good for the company. None of this means that a company owes you anything.
If you feel ripped off, it's probably because you make poor decisions rather than the company made a mistake. At this point, in the 21st century, people should know that hype and advertising has 0 correlation with quality. People who bought Duke Nukem early should have waited for the reviews.
This is something else that I feel a lot of people have ignored when they give examples of successful games like Counterstrike and BroodWar. CS 1.6 was out in 2003. BroodWar was out in 1998. Are any of you seriously comparing the internet 10 years ago to the internet today? Today you can find torrents and p2p programs of all varieties in a snap. 10 years ago, it would have been a lot more difficult, and the amount of people with passable computer knowledge was a lot smaller. It's not just a matter of ease of torrenting, but the size of the market that is capable of pirating, which increases every year as old people who don't understand computers are replaced by young people who do (that sounds crass but I couldn't think of a nice way to say it).
On June 23 2011 09:03 LITTLEHEAD wrote: LAN is clearly wanted dearly, but the fact of the matter is that you CANNOT implement LAN without knowing you're going to lose HUGE amount of money. I do think a potential LAN that require you to log in online yet run a peer-to-peer connection/LAN of some form.
Anyone thinking that Blizzard or any other of these gaming companies don't NEED the money, then please open your own business and attempt to thrive under these savage conditions that are progressing. I do believe that some progress of LAN will be made such that they can implement it without risking piracy, but atm there should be no expectations of it in the immediate future.
Stating that someone like Microsoft has the biggest piracy issues and are still a forward moving company, comes from someone who is ignorant. Their scenario is completely differant in multiple ways. First of it has nothing to do with LAN, and their market is MUCH MUCH MUCH larger than that of a gaming company(specifically PCs).
I as much as anyone, want LAN and pray for it, but until a effective method of LAN that can be backed by the security of online gaming is created, there will only be large declines of LAN use.
On June 23 2011 08:42 Seam wrote: The term "This is why we can't have nice things" comes to mind.
I'm not really sure why people are arguing over if lost sales are a good reason or not...it is. You honestly can't expect a company to throw away a chance to make money.
"But adding LAN might increase sales!" Maybe, but if they add LAN there is a 100% chance they will be pirated a ton.
Tell me, though ICCups history how many of the players there do you think actually bought SC1? A nice chunk, no doubt, but don't tell me it was everyone. I'd be willing to bet at least 10% just downloaded it from ICCup before playing the 5/10$ game for hours on end.
This would happen to SC2. It being Pirated isn't in question. It would happen.
It makes sense for them to not add LAN mode. It sucks for the rest of us, but it makes sense. Not that it'll stop people from getting pissed and calling Blizzard the bad guys, though.
Citation very much needed...
Really tired of some of the stuff thats done to screw over gamers in the fight against piracy. DRM that slows down pirated releases for a whole evening of some script kiddies time, and is removed for the non paying customer. One time use codes so you have to keep track of account details if you think youll want to replay a game at some point. And no lan, so you can watch MLG and see Incontrol's face get increasingly more FFFFFUUUUU as the connection to bnet lags.
On June 23 2011 08:44 Pirat6662001 wrote: Games that people pirate= games they wouldnt buy otherwise. And companies like Valve and Blizzard shouldnt worry about it cause they make awesome games that people WANT to buy.
Top Pirated PC games on Bit Torrent for 2010
1) Call of Duty: Black Ops (4,270,000)
2) Battlefield: Bad Company 2 (3,960,000)
3) Mafia 2 (3,240,000)
4) Mass Effect 2 (3,240,000)
5) Starcraft II (3,120,000)
Pretty much everyone on TL fall under the category of people WANTING to buy SC2. But there is also a large group of people unwilling to buy, these numbers are probably quite a bit larger given the date of the source.
Silly, I downloaded a game through a bittorrent because it was faster than through blizzard system (i dont own a hard copy), but i still have a legit copy. Just cause you download a torrent doesnt make you a pirate. I download most games i buy (dont own hard copys) through a torrent and have a legal version still. I now that my gamer friends do the same thing cause its efficient
I would argue that is still stealing, you bought a legit copy but that still does mean your stealing. Unless the distributor or producer of a game permitted you to acquire the game in such a manner you would be stealing.
You really believe that? Do you also believe that it's stealing to buy an album, then rip it to my MP3 player? I can't understand this mentality - that every single thing a business desires is how things should be. The shift to digital music mostly happened because consumers got fed up with unreasonable demands, like the example I gave, and decided en masse to say "Fuck you. I'm doing it anyway.".
Yes I do. You acquired an ILLEGAL copy of the digital and intellectual contents that Blizzard created, through a method of free exchange that was UNAUTHORIZED and NOT permitted by Blizzard. If that's not stealing, I really need to revise my understanding of it.
Yeah. You definitely need to revise your understanding of stealing.
Take my Spore experience as an example. A friend of mine bought Spore for me for my birthday. I went home, installed it and had fun. My computer crashed a few days later and I had to format and reinstall. The DRM was locking me out because it thought I already had installed my copies too many times (glitch on their end, as admitted by their tech support that still didn't help me).
What was I to do? Go buy another copy? Hell no. I downloaded it and played the game I legitimately had every right to play. Yet you would call me a thief and say I should be penalized for this?
Ah, the ol'e piracy debate. Don't fucking do it. That should be it. It's bullshit, immoral, selfish and harmful. This is one of the few cases in all debates where I can say that by pirating you actually are hurting esports*.
*Note use of non-capitol letters. This shows the non-ironic use of the word. In future, the use of ESPORTS as displayed should be considered satirical and sarcastic.
On June 23 2011 07:56 worldsnap wrote: You keep saying this over and over but it's still not true. While a pirated copy of something is definitely not always a lost sale (For example, i'm not going to actually rent all the movies i watch if i couldn't download them), but i sure as hell downloaded a lot of games until Steam made it even easier than pirating to get a game on release. And i'm by far not the only person in this position.
lol, I said it twice for the sake of reiteration because they selectively read my post and argued on pretty much no basis.
Pirates were not consumers in the first place = "While a pirated copy of something is definitely not always a lost sale."
Enough said.
edit: quotations
You're wrong. Pirates make many real consumers feel like suckers. This leads some of them to start pirating as well.
Personal insecurities have no value. I can claim that I feel good when I buy games as opposed to "feeling like a sucker" because I see to it that money goes to where money is well-deserved. I can coerce my friends and people within my network to purchase software too to make them also "feel good".
^ You realize your argument is a personal sentiment of yours and holds no bearing as neither does my hypothetical situation
Your statements that pirates aren't real customers has no bearing either, then. That statement has no value and no truth to it no matter how many times you repeat it. Your original argument is a personal statement of yours, too. Don't try to twist it around.
I'm not gonna respond to your feeble points from now because there is nothing of value in our little debate and I hope you can see to it as well.
Why does my statement that pirates = aren't customers has no bearing? No value? No truth? My original argument "is a personal statement too" "don't try to twist it around?"
First and foremost I'm not trying twist anything around and of course all my statements are personal or else whose statements are they lol? Now that that's cleared up, I've stated it 3 times now because of people who can't read.
Let's logically break this down:
1) Pirates = individuals who get involved in unauthorized copying of computer software. Copyright infringement of this kind is extremely common
2) They do this for several reason, one of them predominantly is because they don't wish to purchase the software
3) Buy not choosing not purchase the software and to pirate it, that indicates they didn't have the intentions of purchasing in the first place, nor did they end up as a customer (they could have been, but unlikely)
I don't have any data on this as I did not conduct a study on this but since you feel so strongly about the issue and feel I am wrong in my logic, maybe you should
Your 3) is wrong. Noone wishes to buy things if they can get it for free, so 2 applies, but it applies to every single thing.
They choose not to buy things when they can do so. But a big part of them, and this is where there is an actual discussion, wether this part is huge or not that big, but undeniably big, will still buy the games if they have no way to obtain them for free.
So while not all pirates are customers, some definatelly are. And those represent lost sales.
Anyone that says piracy doesn't represent lost sales makes no sense. What you can argue is wether the "cons overcome the pros".
Saying that no one buys things they can get for free doesn't make sense when Team Fortress 2 hats sell by the truckload, League of Legends follows a similar trend, and Brood War is one of the biggest selling PC games of all time.
And Valve has the highest revenue per head in the entire world. :D
I'm sorry, but can they get the hats for free without huge time investments? Can you just download the hats from another site? It is impossible to get those items, in both LoL and in TF, just by playing cassually. I'm sure that they would get pirated to death and wouldn't sell at all if you could dowload them for free. When you pirate a game, you get the exact same thing you would have paid for.
People will pay for things they can't obtain otherwise, exactly my point in the previous post. I'm not sure what your point is.
My point is that service is what's key when trying to beat piracy, not actively trying to stop piracy. DRM measures have proven to be counter productive in combating it and an awful lot of people were rather miffed when SC2 was announced to not have LAN. Publishers interacting with their community and not treating their customers like money cows waiting to be milked makes the customer more likely to recommend the publisher to their friends, who in turn recommend to their friends and so on, and through all of these new customers the publisher makes their money. And saying pirated copies are lost sales is a bit sketchy.
Piracy if anything just seems like a scapegoat to try to wring remaining customers even harder. Especially when you read articles like this:
I will not even argue for or against DRM, I do believe some things are done right, and some are too intrusive. That system works perfectly fine for LoL, but a lot of people still mind that paying customers have advantages and it definatelly is a system that wouldn't work in most games.
I do believe most piracy estimatives are completelly wrong, I always did. But I still believe that companies lose money because of piracy. It's undeniable that A LOT of stuff is pirated, it doesn't actually matter exactly how much. It's very hard to deny that a good portion of those would never buy the games if they couldn't pirate.
It's obviously just what I can see, but I know a lof of people that only buy games that can't be pirated, I assume everyone does, because it's pretty damn common. Those people would definatelly buy all kinds of games, and not just multyplayer ones, if they couldn't be pirated. They would probally buy less games than they pirate, yes, but they would also buy more games than they currently do.
I'm not exactly trying to say every DRM is great, etc. I just can't believe that piracy doesn't hurt sales at all. Wether it's worth it or not, it's definatelly debatable, and for some games piracy definatelly helps, mostly for advertising, something that the big games don't need as much.
I wish Blizzard would at least make a LAN-version for tournament organizers only. And I mean big tournaments like MLG or GSL. I'm sure that the LAN version wouldn't be leaked because of the huge trust between Blizzard and MLG/GSL.
If you guys think the desition of not making the game with LAN was blizzards, you're just retarded, that was something that the investors decided, based on the fact that they though that would reduce piracy, and hence increase earnings. Why do you think blizzard went after KESPA?, at first, the developer team were probably so proud their game was taken as a local sport in another country, Blizzard & Activision united, and it was probably brought up to them, that they were missing money income in Korea, based on the fact that they were using their IP.
Do i think kespa, MBC, etc should play money to blizzard?, yeah, i think so, its still obvius though, that the new merge, and the investors that came with it, brought it to blizzard, that they needed to take action, just so they could make " MORE MONEY". i bet you, for the blizzard guys, the fact that SC Was so appreciated in korea, was enough, or more than all they money they could have gotten. And the reality is that, if blizzard had asked for those royalties from the beggining, Starcraft would probably never had the growth it did.
On June 23 2011 08:32 VirGin wrote: To the people who say pirates would not buy games anyway - so there is no sale lost; Of course there are sales lost. Certainly not ALL pirates would buy the game anyway (I myself have pirated tons of games I would never buy, but also some I would in fact buy, if I couldnt get them for free.) but a fair percentage probably would.
People that pirate and wont buy, are only affecting rentals if anything, because they're basically the same thing (except one is legal), you dont want to buy the full game, but you want to test it first, so you either rent it or pirate it, if you like it you buy it.
I dont know you but i have a subscription to grooveshark, and i barely ever buy a music disc... just because a disk has 1 or 2 good songs, that doesnt mean its worth $10+ usd. Pricing is just as wrong as pirating.
I would strongly disagree with pricing being considered as wrong as piracy. Piracy happens whether or not the developer approves of it. Pricing is primarily determined by the market, the consumers willingness to buy the product given the circumstances of the market. Piracy is theft, it may be justified but it is intellectual theft regardless. Pricing gives the consumer a choice of whether or not they want it or not.
The pricing is wrong because they're not considering that most people is already too tight to have money to spare for entertainment, We're on a global economy crisis, people dont spend money because they dont have it, if we were all rich as fuck, and still, taking things (Like Lindslay lohan), it would be wrong, obviusly. We're not talking about stealing a frikking ferrari here, we're talking about basic entertainment, that can make you better at alot of things in life. RTS for example, are great at making you great at quick thinking, and desicion making. MMORPGS are fantastic at making people good at problem solving, and team play. Games are great training for life, and a great stress relief in a world filled with just bad things.
For anyone to be able to buy, and play games, watchs movies, etc. should be a human right, and priced accordingly.
O.O
The people that make games are not doing it for charity. Same way the people that make beds don't do it because they would just love to give people a good nights sleep. They do it to make money. Is it a human right to have a bed?
It's most certainly not a human right to play games or watch movies.
Who said i wanted it free?, i buy my stuff, but just because i have access, and money, that doesnt mean i dont have emphaty for those who dont. Im not asking for anything free, but you know whats worse than theft?, the fact that we're allowing all the money to go to a few, while 90% or more of this worlds population just keeps rotting with nothing at all to fall on.
Just look at the music industry, they say they're broke becuase they cant afford 5 more ferraris ? cmon dude, they're still fucking rich, just not RICHER, there should be a limit in the amounts of money somone can hold, its just retarded for us to want to accumulate money into a couple bank accounts, those guys will never return it to the people, and thats why we're so screwed.
We should care about the hard-working people, not the assholes that're just investing the money, trying to get sick returns from them.
AGAIN, i repeat, i dont want anything for free, i just wish it was priced so anyone could enjoy it, we're talking about basic things here, not luxury items.
Food is a basic thing. Shelter. Clothes. Medical care, so you don't die. Those are basic things.
A video game is a luxury item. If you can't afford it, tough luck. You won't die.
For the record, the ones that are hurt the most by piracy are the small studios. And the small time musicians. Those that need to work a daytime job to afford the studio time to put their album out. Those guys are hurt the most by piracy. But that doesn't matter. You can't steal a guys ferrari just because he has a porsche and a lamborghini too. It's still illegal.
I don't see your argument really. Consumers control the price. Everyone can afford games in my country. Maybe not EVERY SINGLE game they want, but let's face it. Almost no one can afford EVERYTHING they want. Such is life.
On June 23 2011 08:32 VirGin wrote: To the people who say pirates would not buy games anyway - so there is no sale lost; Of course there are sales lost. Certainly not ALL pirates would buy the game anyway (I myself have pirated tons of games I would never buy, but also some I would in fact buy, if I couldnt get them for free.) but a fair percentage probably would.
People that pirate and wont buy, are only affecting rentals if anything, because they're basically the same thing (except one is legal), you dont want to buy the full game, but you want to test it first, so you either rent it or pirate it, if you like it you buy it.
I dont know you but i have a subscription to grooveshark, and i barely ever buy a music disc... just because a disk has 1 or 2 good songs, that doesnt mean its worth $10+ usd. Pricing is just as wrong as pirating.
I would strongly disagree with pricing being considered as wrong as piracy. Piracy happens whether or not the developer approves of it. Pricing is primarily determined by the market, the consumers willingness to buy the product given the circumstances of the market. Piracy is theft, it may be justified but it is intellectual theft regardless. Pricing gives the consumer a choice of whether or not they want it or not.
The pricing is wrong because they're not considering that most people is already too tight to have money to spare for entertainment, We're on a global economy crisis, people dont spend money because they dont have it, if we were all rich as fuck, and still, taking things (Like Lindslay lohan), it would be wrong, obviusly. We're not talking about stealing a frikking ferrari here, we're talking about basic entertainment, that can make you better at alot of things in life. RTS for example, are great at making you great at quick thinking, and desicion making. MMORPGS are fantastic at making people good at problem solving, and team play. Games are great training for life, and a great stress relief in a world filled with just bad things.
For anyone to be able to buy, and play games, watchs movies, etc. should be a human right, and priced accordingly.
O.O
The people that make games are not doing it for charity. Same way the people that make beds don't do it because they would just love to give people a good nights sleep. They do it to make money. Is it a human right to have a bed?
It's most certainly not a human right to play games or watch movies.
Who said i wanted it free?, i buy my stuff, but just because i have access, and money, that doesnt mean i dont have emphaty for those who dont. Im not asking for anything free, but you know whats worse than theft?, the fact that we're allowing all the money to go to a few, while 90% or more of this worlds population just keeps rotting with nothing at all to fall on.
Just look at the music industry, they say they're broke becuase they cant afford 5 more ferraris ? cmon dude, they're still fucking rich, just not RICHER, there should be a limit in the amounts of money somone can hold, its just retarded for us to want to accumulate money into a couple bank accounts, those guys will never return it to the people, and thats why we're so screwed.
We should care about the hard-working people, not the assholes that're just investing the money, trying to get sick returns from them.
AGAIN, i repeat, i dont want anything for free, i just wish it was priced so anyone could enjoy it, we're talking about basic things here, not luxury items.
Videogames are luxury items, really stealing food out of need? I can really get it, but companies have to make money they don´t dos tuff just because of goodwill and yeah while prices for games are high its because they cost a lot to make. people , especially gamers, ask for games with super high production values and yet they are willing to pay less for them?Many game companies take huge risks just by making a ¨next gen¨ game and that is why the prevalence of sequels.
Sorry, but the state of the gaming industry is the fault of both the consumers and the companies. They are not a charity, they invest a lot of money and time in making games. Hell many game developers are going under.
Really tired of some of the stuff thats done to screw over gamers in the fight against piracy. DRM that slows down pirated releases for a whole evening of some script kiddies time, and is removed for the non paying customer. One time use codes so you have to keep track of account details if you think youll want to replay a game at some point. And no lan, so you can watch MLG and see Incontrol's face get increasingly more FFFFFUUUUU as the connection to bnet lags.
Again, I WANT LAN.
I know it sucks we have to deal with it, but again, it makes sense they would do it.
I'm getting tired of being screwed over to deal with pirates too, but until there aren't any(LOL) we have to deal with it.
I am a pirate, i live in a 3rd world country where games cost a lot more than in the USA because they don't ship here. The locals from my country have to pay extra money to ship the games from places like USA to my country . That costs extra money , which means games are more expensive in POORER COUNTRYS. Does that make sense?
Thats why piracy is excessively rampant in my country for any form of media, including music/movies/etc. Even the police buy from dvd stores that have all the latest movies (pirated versions).
So with that said, I PIRATE games mainly for that reason and i do not give a damn about the developer. Now with that said, i do buy some games, but only multiplayer games, WHY? because it cant be pirated to get the multiplayer experience.
Now to be honest, even if lived in USA, i will still pirate games. Why? , because 99.9 % of the games i think are good end up being garbage.
I have pirated every big title this year for instance, and the only one i played to the end of the solo campaign was MAFIA 2.
I just recently pirated duke nuken forever, and all i can say is, If piracy didnt exist, that game would be committing a crime for daylight robbery. The game is soooooooo fucking horribleeeeeee my god. I hear it costs 60$ u.s Are you kidden me?????????????????, this is the example im trying to make, if i was an honest citizen, and i went out there and bought that game for $60 , i would feel robbed and abused by the system. Ever heard the saying, the nice guys always finish last?
So with all this said, If blizzard decided to put in Lan, do you ppl honestly think it would be used for its intended purpose ???
Who are you guys kidden. If heart of the swarm released with Lan, thousands of pirates including myself will be so happy. All i need is some program like garena and i will be able to play FOR free in 1v1's , 2v2' s etc. Now im not saying i would still pirate the game even if lan came in, because nothing to me personally will subsitute battlenet, But it would be really stupid to say that not least 20 to 30% of the community will be fine playing on Garena for thier starcraft 2 fix.
Look at warcraft 3 dota, it has more ppl on garena than on battlenet playing dota.
All i trying to say is, Cut the fucking bullshit my fellow pirates. Admit you are a pirate and STFU. Stop denying it . "O IF THE GAME IS GOOD ILL GO AND BUY IT'' ya right lollol, i said that for mafia 2 and i didnt go and buy it. I fooled myself .
On June 23 2011 08:46 eggs wrote: LoL is free and makes money just fine. i don't think piracy is the real factor to not implement a LAN feature.
Torchlight developers know how much their game was pirated and acknowledged that it only helps make their game more popular and allows for a bigger market for Torchlight 2 and their upcoming Torchlight MMO.
Magicka was pirated a lot, then they made a bunch of money from DLC packs and most recently a PvP mode.
if SC2 had LAN, that would be 1 less major complaint about the game that gets brought up at a majority of tournaments. even if exposure at MLG and GSL caused the game to get pirated a ton without many legit customers, it has 2 expansions coming up and incoming DLC.
the OP just makes it seem like the HoN developers don't understand the PC market anymore. Blizzard was really slow to adopt microtransactions with WoW, and whenever they did it made millions. SC2 was also released with a dated model, where they seemed to only care about initial launch sales. they heavily advertised on TV and various Korean markets (McDonald's) and after launch they stopped advertising and had no DLC.
the market is completely different now. SC2 could survive very easily with a low-graphics only, no achievements LAN mode. they could make a ton of money selling skins like the CE Thor that are toggled for bnet games only.
LoL makes money by microtransactions. Would you be fine if SC2 was free, but you had to pay to be able to play on most maps or even races? Even if you can unlock things with playtime, only the most harcore can get most unlockables. This system just doesn't work for SC2.
Microtransactions with WoW are diferent, they don't even affect the game, they are the same way as HoN does it, not LoL, and LoL wouldn't get the same amount of money by selling skins. WoW is so freaking big it, and this opportunities are not that common, so it works when they do it.
WoW microtransactions absolutely affect the game. race changes, faction changes, server transfers, mobile AH.
i'm saying HoN and SC2 could easily implement a low feature LAN mode and make a ton of money off the game and DLC. how many people here actually play SC2 with their roommates or close neighbors? 98% of my bnet friends list doesn't live within 1 hour of me. LAN would only help tournaments run more smoothly and make the game more popular at PC Bangs, which is never a bad thing.
pirates are just a scapegoat. just like how "hackers" are a popular scapegoat for recent online security failures.
On June 23 2011 08:57 theOnslaught wrote: AGAIN, i repeat, i dont want anything for free, i just wish it was priced so anyone could enjoy it, we're talking about basic things here, not luxury items.
That is very vague you do realize, "was priced anyone could enjoy it". Who is everyone? Does everyone have money or some form of value of exchange that is also transmittable? If so how much? What is a price that could from a business perspective be financially feasible while having it priced low enough for everyone to purchase.
Don't get me wrong, your idea is innocent and I would love it as well, it's just unrealistic.
Really tired of some of the stuff thats done to screw over gamers in the fight against piracy. DRM that slows down pirated releases for a whole evening of some script kiddies time, and is removed for the non paying customer. One time use codes so you have to keep track of account details if you think youll want to replay a game at some point. And no lan, so you can watch MLG and see Incontrol's face get increasingly more FFFFFUUUUU as the connection to bnet lags.
Again, I WANT LAN.
I know it sucks we have to deal with it, but again, it makes sense they would do it.
I'm getting tired of being screwed over to deal with pirates too, but until there aren't any(LOL) we have to deal with it.
Again, "This is why we can't have nice things".
It was citation needed for the "LAN would make the game be pirated a ton" section.
On June 23 2011 08:46 eggs wrote: LoL is free and makes money just fine. i don't think piracy is the real factor to not implement a LAN feature.
Torchlight developers know how much their game was pirated and acknowledged that it only helps make their game more popular and allows for a bigger market for Torchlight 2 and their upcoming Torchlight MMO.
Magicka was pirated a lot, then they made a bunch of money from DLC packs and most recently a PvP mode.
if SC2 had LAN, that would be 1 less major complaint about the game that gets brought up at a majority of tournaments. even if exposure at MLG and GSL caused the game to get pirated a ton without many legit customers, it has 2 expansions coming up and incoming DLC.
the OP just makes it seem like the HoN developers don't understand the PC market anymore. Blizzard was really slow to adopt microtransactions with WoW, and whenever they did it made millions. SC2 was also released with a dated model, where they seemed to only care about initial launch sales. they heavily advertised on TV and various Korean markets (McDonald's) and after launch they stopped advertising and had no DLC.
the market is completely different now. SC2 could survive very easily with a low-graphics only, no achievements LAN mode. they could make a ton of money selling skins like the CE Thor that are toggled for bnet games only.
LoL makes money by microtransactions. Would you be fine if SC2 was free, but you had to pay to be able to play on most maps or even races? Even if you can unlock things with playtime, only the most harcore can get most unlockables. This system just doesn't work for SC2.
Microtransactions with WoW are diferent, they don't even affect the game, they are the same way as HoN does it, not LoL, and LoL wouldn't get the same amount of money by selling skins. WoW is so freaking big it, and this opportunities are not that common, so it works when they do it.
WoW microtransactions absolutely affect the game. race changes, faction changes, server transfers, mobile AH.
i'm saying HoN and SC2 could easily implement a low feature LAN mode and make a ton of money off the game and DLC. how many people here actually play SC2 with their roommates or close neighbors? 98% of my bnet friends list doesn't live within 1 hour of me. LAN would only help tournaments run more smoothly and make the game more popular at PC Bangs, which is never a bad thing.
By "don't affect the game", I'm pretty sure he meant that you can't use microtransaction purchased items to be better. All of the items are either aesthetic or just changing things that could've been done had you started off as that race/server.
I'm confused as to why adding a LAN feature will cause a decrease in sales and an increase in Piracy???
Is it just becasue people will pirate the game to play with their friends at home? Off the ladder?
I would have thought that adding additional features to one of your best selling games, especially features that the players WANT, would increase sales, not decrease them???
On June 23 2011 09:03 LITTLEHEAD wrote: LAN is clearly wanted dearly, but the fact of the matter is that you CANNOT implement LAN without knowing you're going to lose HUGE amount of money. I do think a potential LAN that require you to log in online yet run a peer-to-peer connection/LAN of some form.
Anyone thinking that Blizzard or any other of these gaming companies don't NEED the money, then please open your own business and attempt to thrive under these savage conditions that are progressing. I do believe that some progress of LAN will be made such that they can implement it without risking piracy, but atm there should be no expectations of it in the immediate future.
Stating that someone like Microsoft has the biggest piracy issues and are still a forward moving company, comes from someone who is ignorant. Their scenario is completely differant in multiple ways. First of it has nothing to do with LAN, and their market is MUCH MUCH MUCH larger than that of a gaming company(specifically PCs).
I as much as anyone, want LAN and pray for it, but until a effective method of LAN that can be backed by the security of online gaming is created, there will only be large declines of LAN use.
Bill Gates openly admitted that Microsoft benefits from piracy.
That's a very weird to apply that article.
I don't think most people actually think piracy has no benefits at all, ever. I don't think Microsoft thinks piracy is better than no piracy. It doesn't fully apply to games, because Windows competes with a free software, so it's not a question of buying from whom, like a game, but a question of not paying for something diferent, piracy, or paying. If Linux would cost the same as windowns, and would be as hard to pirate, those schools in Russia wouldn't ever consider the switch.
On June 23 2011 08:46 eggs wrote: LoL is free and makes money just fine. i don't think piracy is the real factor to not implement a LAN feature.
Torchlight developers know how much their game was pirated and acknowledged that it only helps make their game more popular and allows for a bigger market for Torchlight 2 and their upcoming Torchlight MMO.
Magicka was pirated a lot, then they made a bunch of money from DLC packs and most recently a PvP mode.
if SC2 had LAN, that would be 1 less major complaint about the game that gets brought up at a majority of tournaments. even if exposure at MLG and GSL caused the game to get pirated a ton without many legit customers, it has 2 expansions coming up and incoming DLC.
the OP just makes it seem like the HoN developers don't understand the PC market anymore. Blizzard was really slow to adopt microtransactions with WoW, and whenever they did it made millions. SC2 was also released with a dated model, where they seemed to only care about initial launch sales. they heavily advertised on TV and various Korean markets (McDonald's) and after launch they stopped advertising and had no DLC.
the market is completely different now. SC2 could survive very easily with a low-graphics only, no achievements LAN mode. they could make a ton of money selling skins like the CE Thor that are toggled for bnet games only.
LoL makes money by microtransactions. Would you be fine if SC2 was free, but you had to pay to be able to play on most maps or even races? Even if you can unlock things with playtime, only the most harcore can get most unlockables. This system just doesn't work for SC2.
Microtransactions with WoW are diferent, they don't even affect the game, they are the same way as HoN does it, not LoL, and LoL wouldn't get the same amount of money by selling skins. WoW is so freaking big it, and this opportunities are not that common, so it works when they do it.
WoW microtransactions absolutely affect the game. race changes, faction changes, server transfers, mobile AH.
i'm saying HoN and SC2 could easily implement a low feature LAN mode and make a ton of money off the game and DLC. how many people here actually play SC2 with their roommates or close neighbors? 98% of my bnet friends list doesn't live within 1 hour of me. LAN would only help tournaments run more smoothly and make the game more popular at PC Bangs, which is never a bad thing.
By "don't affect the game", I'm pretty sure he meant that you can't use microtransaction purchased items to be better. All of the items are either aesthetic or just changing things that could've been done had you started off as that race/server.
What does LAN have to do with increasing piracy, again? The only people who would pirate for LAN are the same people who would pirate for single player, which has been done. Unless, of course, you can somehow create a replication of Battle.net's ladder system and easily accessible user base in one neat package and make it available in LAN mode?
On June 23 2011 08:32 VirGin wrote: To the people who say pirates would not buy games anyway - so there is no sale lost; Of course there are sales lost. Certainly not ALL pirates would buy the game anyway (I myself have pirated tons of games I would never buy, but also some I would in fact buy, if I couldnt get them for free.) but a fair percentage probably would.
People that pirate and wont buy, are only affecting rentals if anything, because they're basically the same thing (except one is legal), you dont want to buy the full game, but you want to test it first, so you either rent it or pirate it, if you like it you buy it.
I dont know you but i have a subscription to grooveshark, and i barely ever buy a music disc... just because a disk has 1 or 2 good songs, that doesnt mean its worth $10+ usd. Pricing is just as wrong as pirating.
I would strongly disagree with pricing being considered as wrong as piracy. Piracy happens whether or not the developer approves of it. Pricing is primarily determined by the market, the consumers willingness to buy the product given the circumstances of the market. Piracy is theft, it may be justified but it is intellectual theft regardless. Pricing gives the consumer a choice of whether or not they want it or not.
The pricing is wrong because they're not considering that most people is already too tight to have money to spare for entertainment, We're on a global economy crisis, people dont spend money because they dont have it, if we were all rich as fuck, and still, taking things (Like Lindslay lohan), it would be wrong, obviusly. We're not talking about stealing a frikking ferrari here, we're talking about basic entertainment, that can make you better at alot of things in life. RTS for example, are great at making you great at quick thinking, and desicion making. MMORPGS are fantastic at making people good at problem solving, and team play. Games are great training for life, and a great stress relief in a world filled with just bad things.
For anyone to be able to buy, and play games, watchs movies, etc. should be a human right, and priced accordingly.
O.O
The people that make games are not doing it for charity. Same way the people that make beds don't do it because they would just love to give people a good nights sleep. They do it to make money. Is it a human right to have a bed?
It's most certainly not a human right to play games or watch movies.
Who said i wanted it free?, i buy my stuff, but just because i have access, and money, that doesnt mean i dont have emphaty for those who dont. Im not asking for anything free, but you know whats worse than theft?, the fact that we're allowing all the money to go to a few, while 90% or more of this worlds population just keeps rotting with nothing at all to fall on.
Just look at the music industry, they say they're broke becuase they cant afford 5 more ferraris ? cmon dude, they're still fucking rich, just not RICHER, there should be a limit in the amounts of money somone can hold, its just retarded for us to want to accumulate money into a couple bank accounts, those guys will never return it to the people, and thats why we're so screwed.
We should care about the hard-working people, not the assholes that're just investing the money, trying to get sick returns from them.
AGAIN, i repeat, i dont want anything for free, i just wish it was priced so anyone could enjoy it, we're talking about basic things here, not luxury items.
Food is a basic thing. Shelter. Clothes. Medical care, so you don't die. Those are basic things.
A video game is a luxury item. If you can't afford it, tough luck. You won't die.
For the record, the ones that are hurt the most by piracy are the small studios. And the small time musicians. Those that need to work a daytime job to afford the studio time to put their album out. Those guys are hurt the most by piracy. But that doesn't matter. You can't steal a guys ferrari just because he has a porsche and a lamborghini too. It's still illegal.
I don't see your argument really. Consumers control the price. Everyone can afford games in my country. Maybe not EVERY SINGLE game they want, but let's face it. Almost no one can afford EVERYTHING they want. Such is life.
Many small studios have profited despite piracy. Dwarf Fortress lives entirely off donations. The guy who made Minecraft is a millionaire despite the fact that his game and every update can be easily pirated. Sins of the Solar Empire was released with no copy protection, yet has sold 500,000 copies and had multiple expansions created for it, with the best part being the original game cost less than one million to make.
On June 23 2011 07:18 darkscream wrote: Bad argument made by propagandist.
Pirates wouldn't have bought the game anyway, and including LAN would let your game get exposed to new people for free. This is like saying "terrorists ruined travel", even though it's the government ruining travelling.
Not to mention that most of these games have online ladder systems and that's what people buy the game for - The competitive ladder.
What can you really say. As a game developer he has to talk like that because its his bread and butter. But, because of this I feel like his opinion is pretty much not relevant because it's strongly biased without any actual proof/evidence to his claims. Just saber rattling towards pirates.
That's not necessarily true, I know a few people who don't buy games that they really want to play because they can pirate them, but they readily admit that if they weren't able to pirate them, they'd buy them.
Some pirates just don't want to spend money if they don't have to. These are thieves.
Interesting read and thanks for bringing this up I was always wondering exactly why LAN wasn't in yet but kinda knew just didn't understand how big it was in terms of profits (dumb me lol). I do agree with those saying it would be nice for GSL and MLG to have special LAN copies or something but someone could find a way to get that out into a programmers hands. Which would then just turn the entire situation upside down so its not worth the risk. Sad things have to be this way but I don't blame them.
On June 23 2011 08:46 eggs wrote: LoL is free and makes money just fine. i don't think piracy is the real factor to not implement a LAN feature.
Torchlight developers know how much their game was pirated and acknowledged that it only helps make their game more popular and allows for a bigger market for Torchlight 2 and their upcoming Torchlight MMO.
Magicka was pirated a lot, then they made a bunch of money from DLC packs and most recently a PvP mode.
if SC2 had LAN, that would be 1 less major complaint about the game that gets brought up at a majority of tournaments. even if exposure at MLG and GSL caused the game to get pirated a ton without many legit customers, it has 2 expansions coming up and incoming DLC.
the OP just makes it seem like the HoN developers don't understand the PC market anymore. Blizzard was really slow to adopt microtransactions with WoW, and whenever they did it made millions. SC2 was also released with a dated model, where they seemed to only care about initial launch sales. they heavily advertised on TV and various Korean markets (McDonald's) and after launch they stopped advertising and had no DLC.
the market is completely different now. SC2 could survive very easily with a low-graphics only, no achievements LAN mode. they could make a ton of money selling skins like the CE Thor that are toggled for bnet games only.
LoL makes money by microtransactions. Would you be fine if SC2 was free, but you had to pay to be able to play on most maps or even races? Even if you can unlock things with playtime, only the most harcore can get most unlockables. This system just doesn't work for SC2.
Microtransactions with WoW are diferent, they don't even affect the game, they are the same way as HoN does it, not LoL, and LoL wouldn't get the same amount of money by selling skins. WoW is so freaking big it, and this opportunities are not that common, so it works when they do it.
WoW microtransactions absolutely affect the game. race changes, faction changes, server transfers, mobile AH.
i'm saying HoN and SC2 could easily implement a low feature LAN mode and make a ton of money off the game and DLC. how many people here actually play SC2 with their roommates or close neighbors? 98% of my bnet friends list doesn't live within 1 hour of me. LAN would only help tournaments run more smoothly and make the game more popular at PC Bangs, which is never a bad thing.
By "don't affect the game", I'm pretty sure he meant that you can't use microtransaction purchased items to be better. All of the items are either aesthetic or just changing things that could've been done had you started off as that race/server.
and how is that different from LoL/HoN skins?
No idea. I may be completely wrong on my response. I don't know anything about LoL/HoN, but I do know some games sell items that have better stats than anything free. So I was comparing it to games like that, in the "doesn't affect the game" sense.
On June 23 2011 09:12 Ridiculisk wrote: I'm confused as to why adding a LAN feature will cause a decrease in sales and an increase in Piracy???
Is it just becasue people will pirate the game to play with their friends at home? Off the ladder?
I would have thought that adding additional features to one of your best selling games, especially features that the players WANT, would increase sales, not decrease them???
Because there's really no way to make sure that somebody playing on a LAN actually bought your game. And the fact that Starcraft 2 is already ridiculously pirated should probably tell you that if you give a feature that esentially encourages piracy is probably going to inflate those numbers even more
On June 23 2011 08:32 VirGin wrote: To the people who say pirates would not buy games anyway - so there is no sale lost; Of course there are sales lost. Certainly not ALL pirates would buy the game anyway (I myself have pirated tons of games I would never buy, but also some I would in fact buy, if I couldnt get them for free.) but a fair percentage probably would.
People that pirate and wont buy, are only affecting rentals if anything, because they're basically the same thing (except one is legal), you dont want to buy the full game, but you want to test it first, so you either rent it or pirate it, if you like it you buy it.
I dont know you but i have a subscription to grooveshark, and i barely ever buy a music disc... just because a disk has 1 or 2 good songs, that doesnt mean its worth $10+ usd. Pricing is just as wrong as pirating.
I would strongly disagree with pricing being considered as wrong as piracy. Piracy happens whether or not the developer approves of it. Pricing is primarily determined by the market, the consumers willingness to buy the product given the circumstances of the market. Piracy is theft, it may be justified but it is intellectual theft regardless. Pricing gives the consumer a choice of whether or not they want it or not.
The pricing is wrong because they're not considering that most people is already too tight to have money to spare for entertainment, We're on a global economy crisis, people dont spend money because they dont have it, if we were all rich as fuck, and still, taking things (Like Lindslay lohan), it would be wrong, obviusly. We're not talking about stealing a frikking ferrari here, we're talking about basic entertainment, that can make you better at alot of things in life. RTS for example, are great at making you great at quick thinking, and desicion making. MMORPGS are fantastic at making people good at problem solving, and team play. Games are great training for life, and a great stress relief in a world filled with just bad things.
For anyone to be able to buy, and play games, watchs movies, etc. should be a human right, and priced accordingly.
O.O
The people that make games are not doing it for charity. Same way the people that make beds don't do it because they would just love to give people a good nights sleep. They do it to make money. Is it a human right to have a bed?
It's most certainly not a human right to play games or watch movies.
Who said i wanted it free?, i buy my stuff, but just because i have access, and money, that doesnt mean i dont have emphaty for those who dont. Im not asking for anything free, but you know whats worse than theft?, the fact that we're allowing all the money to go to a few, while 90% or more of this worlds population just keeps rotting with nothing at all to fall on.
Just look at the music industry, they say they're broke becuase they cant afford 5 more ferraris ? cmon dude, they're still fucking rich, just not RICHER, there should be a limit in the amounts of money somone can hold, its just retarded for us to want to accumulate money into a couple bank accounts, those guys will never return it to the people, and thats why we're so screwed.
We should care about the hard-working people, not the assholes that're just investing the money, trying to get sick returns from them.
AGAIN, i repeat, i dont want anything for free, i just wish it was priced so anyone could enjoy it, we're talking about basic things here, not luxury items.
Food is a basic thing. Shelter. Clothes. Medical care, so you don't die. Those are basic things.
A video game is a luxury item. If you can't afford it, tough luck. You won't die.
For the record, the ones that are hurt the most by piracy are the small studios. And the small time musicians. Those that need to work a daytime job to afford the studio time to put their album out. Those guys are hurt the most by piracy. But that doesn't matter. You can't steal a guys ferrari just because he has a porsche and a lamborghini too. It's still illegal.
I don't see your argument really. Consumers control the price. Everyone can afford games in my country. Maybe not EVERY SINGLE game they want, but let's face it. Almost no one can afford EVERYTHING they want. Such is life.
Thats where you got it wrong buddy, Entertainment, Love, Food, Shelter, etc are all required. Just because you can survive off water, and a roof, it doesn't mean you're a balanced, happy individual. Entertainment should never be a luxury, its part of what makes us balanced, smarter, etc. Its like saying education, or the internet is a luxury, if you think that then you're just sheeple and retarded.
For sustainability to be achieved, all the basic needs of a human begin need to be covered, and for human intellect to grow, we need things like games, school, and love. i own alot of luxury items, i have a razer destructor, a logitech g15, a razer abyuss, and sennheisers pc360 as headphones. Those are luxury items, the right to have a computer with internet, and be able to play a couple games should not be!, those games are making us smarter as a whole.
For example, im mexican and my primary language is spanish (obviusly), well, i learnt most of the english i know(which is obviusly not perfect, and flawed, but still good enough to communicate with you guys), thanks to starcraft and my desire to communicate with more people to be able to get better training.
On June 23 2011 09:12 Ridiculisk wrote: I'm confused as to why adding a LAN feature will cause a decrease in sales and an increase in Piracy???
Is it just becasue people will pirate the game to play with their friends at home? Off the ladder?
I would have thought that adding additional features to one of your best selling games, especially features that the players WANT, would increase sales, not decrease them???
Because there's really no way to make sure that somebody playing on a LAN actually bought your game. And the fact that Starcraft 2 is already ridiculously pirated should probably tell you that if you give a feature that esentially encourages piracy is probably going to inflate those numbers even more
Again, how does it encourage piracy beyond the level that it already is?
On June 23 2011 09:14 Zeke50100 wrote: What does LAN have to do with increasing piracy, again? The only people who would pirate for LAN are the same people who would pirate for single player, which has been done. Unless, of course, you can somehow create a replication of Battle.net's ladder system and easily accessible user base in one neat package and make it available in LAN mode?
Maybe you don't live in a place where piracy is that rampart, but WC3, an RTS just like SC2, has A LOT more players playing the pirated version, specially on China, I believe.
You have things like Garena for matchmaking, you can have "fake" battle nets. I paid for WC3 and it's expansion, but still played on these kind of places, because noone over here played on battle net, because 90% of them didn't pay for the game.
The idea that you only play with people you know on LAN is not corret anymore.
Really tired of some of the stuff thats done to screw over gamers in the fight against piracy. DRM that slows down pirated releases for a whole evening of some script kiddies time, and is removed for the non paying customer. One time use codes so you have to keep track of account details if you think youll want to replay a game at some point. And no lan, so you can watch MLG and see Incontrol's face get increasingly more FFFFFUUUUU as the connection to bnet lags.
Again, I WANT LAN.
I know it sucks we have to deal with it, but again, it makes sense they would do it.
I'm getting tired of being screwed over to deal with pirates too, but until there aren't any(LOL) we have to deal with it.
Again, "This is why we can't have nice things".
It was citation needed for the "LAN would make the game be pirated a ton" section.
ICCup, for one.
Or the fact that 3.2 million were pirated already, and that's only for single player?
Offering Free mutiplayer to pirates too?
Starcraft 1 was pirated Millions of times, what makes you think Starcraft 2 wont in a time where pirating is much more common?
Really tired of some of the stuff thats done to screw over gamers in the fight against piracy. DRM that slows down pirated releases for a whole evening of some script kiddies time, and is removed for the non paying customer. One time use codes so you have to keep track of account details if you think youll want to replay a game at some point. And no lan, so you can watch MLG and see Incontrol's face get increasingly more FFFFFUUUUU as the connection to bnet lags.
Again, I WANT LAN.
I know it sucks we have to deal with it, but again, it makes sense they would do it.
I'm getting tired of being screwed over to deal with pirates too, but until there aren't any(LOL) we have to deal with it.
Again, "This is why we can't have nice things".
It was citation needed for the "LAN would make the game be pirated a ton" section.
ICCup, for one.
Or the fact that 3.2 million were pirated already, and that's only for single player?
Offering Free mutiplayer to pirates too?
Starcraft 1 was pirated Millions of times, what makes you think Starcraft 2 wont in a time where pirating is much more common?
On June 23 2011 09:12 Ridiculisk wrote: I'm confused as to why adding a LAN feature will cause a decrease in sales and an increase in Piracy???
Is it just becasue people will pirate the game to play with their friends at home? Off the ladder?
I would have thought that adding additional features to one of your best selling games, especially features that the players WANT, would increase sales, not decrease them???
Because there's really no way to make sure that somebody playing on a LAN actually bought your game. And the fact that Starcraft 2 is already ridiculously pirated should probably tell you that if you give a feature that esentially encourages piracy is probably going to inflate those numbers even more
Again, how does it encourage piracy beyond the level that it already is?
Allowing people to do more without actually buying the game? And you don't see how that will cause more people to pirate it?
On June 23 2011 09:12 Ridiculisk wrote: I'm confused as to why adding a LAN feature will cause a decrease in sales and an increase in Piracy???
Is it just becasue people will pirate the game to play with their friends at home? Off the ladder?
I would have thought that adding additional features to one of your best selling games, especially features that the players WANT, would increase sales, not decrease them???
Because there's really no way to make sure that somebody playing on a LAN actually bought your game. And the fact that Starcraft 2 is already ridiculously pirated should probably tell you that if you give a feature that esentially encourages piracy is probably going to inflate those numbers even more
Again, how does it encourage piracy beyond the level that it already is?
Allowing people to do more without actually buying the game? And you don't see how that will cause more people to pirate it?
By your logic, they shouldn't add Lurkers to the game, either, because it would be a new feature that attracts people to buy and/or pirate the game >______<
Just for reference. Right now over 5k people are downloading sc2 and pirating it. at 50 a peice. There is something like 300,000 in lost sales just for today. assuming on average sc2 get pirated the same amount for the last 6 months and for the entire 2011.
That means in 2011 alone. sc2 was pirated and lost blizz more than 3.6 million. Thats a huge amount fo money.
I think in 2010 the most pirated gameswas sc2 with like 1.2 million pirated it. Thats hundreds of millions of dollars lost.
On June 23 2011 09:12 Ridiculisk wrote: I'm confused as to why adding a LAN feature will cause a decrease in sales and an increase in Piracy???
Is it just becasue people will pirate the game to play with their friends at home? Off the ladder?
I would have thought that adding additional features to one of your best selling games, especially features that the players WANT, would increase sales, not decrease them???
Because there's really no way to make sure that somebody playing on a LAN actually bought your game. And the fact that Starcraft 2 is already ridiculously pirated should probably tell you that if you give a feature that esentially encourages piracy is probably going to inflate those numbers even more
Again, how does it encourage piracy beyond the level that it already is?
Allowing people to do more without actually buying the game? And you don't see how that will cause more people to pirate it?
And you don't see how that could cause more people to buy it? You set up an SC2 LAN party and invite 20 friends, only 5 of which even have the game. You pirate, share it and have a blast. A few of those 15 that didn't have it want to start laddering and go buy the game.
Piracy isn't a 100% black hole of money, you know.
Really tired of some of the stuff thats done to screw over gamers in the fight against piracy. DRM that slows down pirated releases for a whole evening of some script kiddies time, and is removed for the non paying customer. One time use codes so you have to keep track of account details if you think youll want to replay a game at some point. And no lan, so you can watch MLG and see Incontrol's face get increasingly more FFFFFUUUUU as the connection to bnet lags.
Again, I WANT LAN.
I know it sucks we have to deal with it, but again, it makes sense they would do it.
I'm getting tired of being screwed over to deal with pirates too, but until there aren't any(LOL) we have to deal with it.
Again, "This is why we can't have nice things".
It was citation needed for the "LAN would make the game be pirated a ton" section.
ICCup, for one.
Or the fact that 3.2 million were pirated already, and that's only for single player?
Offering Free mutiplayer to pirates too?
Starcraft 1 was pirated Millions of times, what makes you think Starcraft 2 wont in a time where pirating is much more common?
On June 23 2011 08:32 VirGin wrote: To the people who say pirates would not buy games anyway - so there is no sale lost; Of course there are sales lost. Certainly not ALL pirates would buy the game anyway (I myself have pirated tons of games I would never buy, but also some I would in fact buy, if I couldnt get them for free.) but a fair percentage probably would.
People that pirate and wont buy, are only affecting rentals if anything, because they're basically the same thing (except one is legal), you dont want to buy the full game, but you want to test it first, so you either rent it or pirate it, if you like it you buy it.
I dont know you but i have a subscription to grooveshark, and i barely ever buy a music disc... just because a disk has 1 or 2 good songs, that doesnt mean its worth $10+ usd. Pricing is just as wrong as pirating.
I would strongly disagree with pricing being considered as wrong as piracy. Piracy happens whether or not the developer approves of it. Pricing is primarily determined by the market, the consumers willingness to buy the product given the circumstances of the market. Piracy is theft, it may be justified but it is intellectual theft regardless. Pricing gives the consumer a choice of whether or not they want it or not.
The pricing is wrong because they're not considering that most people is already too tight to have money to spare for entertainment, We're on a global economy crisis, people dont spend money because they dont have it, if we were all rich as fuck, and still, taking things (Like Lindslay lohan), it would be wrong, obviusly. We're not talking about stealing a frikking ferrari here, we're talking about basic entertainment, that can make you better at alot of things in life. RTS for example, are great at making you great at quick thinking, and desicion making. MMORPGS are fantastic at making people good at problem solving, and team play. Games are great training for life, and a great stress relief in a world filled with just bad things.
For anyone to be able to buy, and play games, watchs movies, etc. should be a human right, and priced accordingly.
O.O
The people that make games are not doing it for charity. Same way the people that make beds don't do it because they would just love to give people a good nights sleep. They do it to make money. Is it a human right to have a bed?
It's most certainly not a human right to play games or watch movies.
Who said i wanted it free?, i buy my stuff, but just because i have access, and money, that doesnt mean i dont have emphaty for those who dont. Im not asking for anything free, but you know whats worse than theft?, the fact that we're allowing all the money to go to a few, while 90% or more of this worlds population just keeps rotting with nothing at all to fall on.
Just look at the music industry, they say they're broke becuase they cant afford 5 more ferraris ? cmon dude, they're still fucking rich, just not RICHER, there should be a limit in the amounts of money somone can hold, its just retarded for us to want to accumulate money into a couple bank accounts, those guys will never return it to the people, and thats why we're so screwed.
We should care about the hard-working people, not the assholes that're just investing the money, trying to get sick returns from them.
AGAIN, i repeat, i dont want anything for free, i just wish it was priced so anyone could enjoy it, we're talking about basic things here, not luxury items.
Food is a basic thing. Shelter. Clothes. Medical care, so you don't die. Those are basic things.
A video game is a luxury item. If you can't afford it, tough luck. You won't die.
For the record, the ones that are hurt the most by piracy are the small studios. And the small time musicians. Those that need to work a daytime job to afford the studio time to put their album out. Those guys are hurt the most by piracy. But that doesn't matter. You can't steal a guys ferrari just because he has a porsche and a lamborghini too. It's still illegal.
I don't see your argument really. Consumers control the price. Everyone can afford games in my country. Maybe not EVERY SINGLE game they want, but let's face it. Almost no one can afford EVERYTHING they want. Such is life.
Thats where you got it wrong buddy, Entertainment, Love, Food, Shelter, etc are all required. Just because you can survive off water, and a roof, it doesn't mean you're a balanced, happy individual. Entertainment should never be a luxury, its part of what makes us balanced, smarter, etc. Its like saying education, or the internet is a luxury, if you think that then you're just sheeple and retarded.
For sustainability to be achieved, all the basic needs of a human begin need to be covered, and for human intellect to grow, we need things like games, school, and love. i own alot of luxury items, i have a razer destructor, a logitech g15, a razer abyuss, and sennheisers pc360 as headphones. Those are luxury items, the right to have a computer with internet, and be able to play a couple games should not be!, those games are making us smarter as a whole.
For example, im mexican and my primary language is spanish (obviusly), well, i learnt most of the english i know(which is obviusly not perfect, and flawed, but still good enough to communicate with you guys), thanks to starcraft and my desire to communicate with more people to be able to get better training.
This things are good for humanity.
And yet somehow, for millions of years humanity has survived without internet and playing games. VirGin is right, playing games is not basic, it is indeed a luxury. Even if it wasn't, I can make that argument by saying that given decreasing amount of personal wealth, games would go before food and shelter. That argument alone means that he is not a "sheeple and retarded". I don't even see what sheeple has to do with it, since sheeple implies multiple and VirGin is just one guy.
On June 23 2011 09:21 masterbreti wrote: Just for reference. Right now over 5k people are downloading sc2 and pirating it. at 50 a peice. There is something like 300,000 in lost sales just for today. assuming on average sc2 get pirated the same amount for the last 6 months and for the entire 2011.
That means in 2011 alone. sc2 was pirated and lost blizz more than 3.6 million. Thats a huge amount fo money.
I think in 2010 the most pirated gameswas sc2 with like 1.2 million pirated it. Thats hundreds of millions of dollars lost.
You're a fool, not everyone that pirated the game was going to buy it in the first place.
On June 23 2011 09:12 Ridiculisk wrote: I'm confused as to why adding a LAN feature will cause a decrease in sales and an increase in Piracy???
Is it just becasue people will pirate the game to play with their friends at home? Off the ladder?
I would have thought that adding additional features to one of your best selling games, especially features that the players WANT, would increase sales, not decrease them???
Because there's really no way to make sure that somebody playing on a LAN actually bought your game. And the fact that Starcraft 2 is already ridiculously pirated should probably tell you that if you give a feature that esentially encourages piracy is probably going to inflate those numbers even more
Again, how does it encourage piracy beyond the level that it already is?
Allowing people to do more without actually buying the game? And you don't see how that will cause more people to pirate it?
And you don't see how that could cause more people to buy it? You set up an SC2 LAN party and invite 20 friends, only 5 of which even have the game. You pirate, share it and have a blast. A few of those 15 that didn't have it want to start laddering and go buy the game.
Piracy isn't a 100% black hole of money, you know.
it isn't, but are you really naive enough to believe that the pros outweigh the cons?
On June 23 2011 08:44 Pirat6662001 wrote: Games that people pirate= games they wouldnt buy otherwise. And companies like Valve and Blizzard shouldnt worry about it cause they make awesome games that people WANT to buy.
Top Pirated PC games on Bit Torrent for 2010
1) Call of Duty: Black Ops (4,270,000)
2) Battlefield: Bad Company 2 (3,960,000)
3) Mafia 2 (3,240,000)
4) Mass Effect 2 (3,240,000)
5) Starcraft II (3,120,000)
Pretty much everyone on TL fall under the category of people WANTING to buy SC2. But there is also a large group of people unwilling to buy, these numbers are probably quite a bit larger given the date of the source.
Silly, I downloaded a game through a bittorrent because it was faster than through blizzard system (i dont own a hard copy), but i still have a legit copy. Just cause you download a torrent doesnt make you a pirate. I download most games i buy (dont own hard copys) through a torrent and have a legal version still. I now that my gamer friends do the same thing cause its efficient
I would argue that is still stealing, you bought a legit copy but that still does mean your stealing. Unless the distributor or producer of a game permitted you to acquire the game in such a manner you would be stealing.
You really believe that? Do you also believe that it's stealing to buy an album, then rip it to my MP3 player? I can't understand this mentality - that every single thing a business desires is how things should be. The shift to digital music mostly happened because consumers got fed up with unreasonable demands, like the example I gave, and decided en masse to say "Fuck you. I'm doing it anyway.".
Yes I do. You acquired an ILLEGAL copy of the digital and intellectual contents that Blizzard created, through a method of free exchange that was UNAUTHORIZED and NOT permitted by Blizzard. If that's not stealing, I really need to revise my understanding of it.
The situation he is describing would not be illegal in the United States. Maybe its different where you are from.
In the US, consumers are allowed to make backups of anything they purchase. They can make as many backups as they want, as long as it is restricted to private use and they do not distribute them (especially for profit). This is why things like CD/DVD/BR Burners are not banned even though they are widely used for making illegal copies of games. Because although there are probably a ton of illegal copies made and distributed in this manner, there are legal uses as well (backups, homemade videos, custom music, etc.).
Basically, as long as he owns a legit copy, he can have as many "illegal" copies as he wants. As long as he doesn't try to distribute them to other people or try and sell the copies for profit it's perfectly legal. The grey area is with things like BitTorrent since as you download you are uploading to other people who may or may not have legit copies. However this is enough of a grey area that BitTorrent has not yet been locked down despite being by far the most common way to pirate.
On June 23 2011 09:21 masterbreti wrote: Just for reference. Right now over 5k people are downloading sc2 and pirating it. at 50 a peice. There is something like 300,000 in lost sales just for today. assuming on average sc2 get pirated the same amount for the last 6 months and for the entire 2011.
That means in 2011 alone. sc2 was pirated and lost blizz more than 3.6 million. Thats a huge amount fo money.
I think in 2010 the most pirated gameswas sc2 with like 1.2 million pirated it. Thats hundreds of millions of dollars lost.
You're a fool, not everyone that pirated the game was going to buy it in the first place.
People keep up bringing this up, but I do not see how it makes it better. It is the equivalent argument to saying that not everyone that drinks and drives will murder someone. It happens often enough.
On June 23 2011 09:21 masterbreti wrote: Just for reference. Right now over 5k people are downloading sc2 and pirating it. at 50 a peice. There is something like 300,000 in lost sales just for today. assuming on average sc2 get pirated the same amount for the last 6 months and for the entire 2011.
That means in 2011 alone. sc2 was pirated and lost blizz more than 3.6 million. Thats a huge amount fo money.
I think in 2010 the most pirated gameswas sc2 with like 1.2 million pirated it. Thats hundreds of millions of dollars lost.
You're a fool, not everyone that pirated the game was going to buy it in the first place.
Of course. But considering if even half would have bought it. Thats still millions in lost sales. Still a lot of money.
On June 23 2011 09:12 Ridiculisk wrote: I'm confused as to why adding a LAN feature will cause a decrease in sales and an increase in Piracy???
Is it just becasue people will pirate the game to play with their friends at home? Off the ladder?
I would have thought that adding additional features to one of your best selling games, especially features that the players WANT, would increase sales, not decrease them???
Because there's really no way to make sure that somebody playing on a LAN actually bought your game. And the fact that Starcraft 2 is already ridiculously pirated should probably tell you that if you give a feature that esentially encourages piracy is probably going to inflate those numbers even more
Again, how does it encourage piracy beyond the level that it already is?
Allowing people to do more without actually buying the game? And you don't see how that will cause more people to pirate it?
And you don't see how that could cause more people to buy it? You set up an SC2 LAN party and invite 20 friends, only 5 of which even have the game. You pirate, share it and have a blast. A few of those 15 that didn't have it want to start laddering and go buy the game.
Piracy isn't a 100% black hole of money, you know.
it isn't, but are you really naive enough to believe that the pros outweigh the cons?
Maybe I am. I'm more just a huge fan of the infinite goods / scarce goods economy model. I think that embracing this model is in the best interest of both the content creators and content consumers and don't understand why so many, on both sides, reject it as piracy, thievery or any such nonsense.
On June 23 2011 09:12 Ridiculisk wrote: I'm confused as to why adding a LAN feature will cause a decrease in sales and an increase in Piracy???
Is it just becasue people will pirate the game to play with their friends at home? Off the ladder?
I would have thought that adding additional features to one of your best selling games, especially features that the players WANT, would increase sales, not decrease them???
Because there's really no way to make sure that somebody playing on a LAN actually bought your game. And the fact that Starcraft 2 is already ridiculously pirated should probably tell you that if you give a feature that esentially encourages piracy is probably going to inflate those numbers even more
Again, how does it encourage piracy beyond the level that it already is?
Essentially encourages piracy = not discouraging piracy I think is the angle he's going for. Apparently this game was widely pirated? Im interested to know what kind of version you can actually pirate though, as if its just using bittorrent to get the game onto a different pc then I can see that, blizz's digital distribution isnt the speediest.
Also these figures might have something to do with the fact that for a prolonged time you couldnt play the official copy of the game offline for single player, I was going to a cafe, connecting to the net to authenticate my copy online and then taking my laptop home while I was waiting for my house broadband to be connected.
If I'd thought about it, I'd have pirated a copy. And I own about 130 games on steam, so I'm hardly a hardcore pirate.
Just because you can survive off water, and a roof, it doesn't mean you're a balanced, happy individual.
We don't care if someone is a "balanced, happy individual." Society doesn't exist to allow you to be a "balanced, happy individual." I believe the quote is "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness". Not the guarantee of it.
Entertainment should never be a luxury, its part of what makes us balanced, smarter, etc. Its like saying education, or the internet is a luxury, if you think that then you're just sheeple and retarded.
Ignoring your insults, even if we do consider entertainment to be a basic need, videogames are a form of entertainment. Even if being entertained is necessary for being a reasonable human being, having access to whatever videogame you want is not. Videogames are not the only entertainment available. There are many forms of entertainment that are entirely free.
And even if I were to allow that videogames were somehow a necessity, that doesn't make any particular videogame a necessity. There are lots of cheap, free, and free-to-play games out there. You could be playing Dwarf Fortress right now, for nothing.
You do not have to be able to play any game you want for any price you so desire. If you feel that way, then you have an overdeveloped sense of entitlement.
Publishers have no incentive to allow LAN in games until the amount of revenue they gain decreases from lack of LAN support. It probably never will for SC2, or HoN, or LoL. Developers are funded by publishers or are their own publishers. Piracy is not a sole cause but it is a contributing factor, and any ways piracy becomes more convenient are discouraged by publishers. It's pretty simple.
Really tired of some of the stuff thats done to screw over gamers in the fight against piracy. DRM that slows down pirated releases for a whole evening of some script kiddies time, and is removed for the non paying customer. One time use codes so you have to keep track of account details if you think youll want to replay a game at some point. And no lan, so you can watch MLG and see Incontrol's face get increasingly more FFFFFUUUUU as the connection to bnet lags.
Again, I WANT LAN.
I know it sucks we have to deal with it, but again, it makes sense they would do it.
I'm getting tired of being screwed over to deal with pirates too, but until there aren't any(LOL) we have to deal with it.
Again, "This is why we can't have nice things".
It was citation needed for the "LAN would make the game be pirated a ton" section.
ICCup, for one.
Or the fact that 3.2 million were pirated already, and that's only for single player?
Offering Free mutiplayer to pirates too?
Starcraft 1 was pirated Millions of times, what makes you think Starcraft 2 wont in a time where pirating is much more common?
if it weren't for SC:BW pirates at Korean PC Bangs, there might not even be an SC2. piracy made the game popular. a pirated game doesn't mean a loss of a sale. it just means that someone who would likely never buy your game got to play your game and is now a fan of your work.
SC2:WoL pirates just makes a bigger market for SC2:HotS, and whatever DLC and paid services they wish to introduce until then.
The people advocating tournament only LAN, note that this never works. Just like movies where people can get the original before the dvd comes out, the LAN game will leak and it will be all over the net. I know we all want LAN, but it will never happen, and I can't blame the game publisher for that.
On June 23 2011 08:46 eggs wrote: LoL is free and makes money just fine. i don't think piracy is the real factor to not implement a LAN feature.
Torchlight developers know how much their game was pirated and acknowledged that it only helps make their game more popular and allows for a bigger market for Torchlight 2 and their upcoming Torchlight MMO.
Magicka was pirated a lot, then they made a bunch of money from DLC packs and most recently a PvP mode.
if SC2 had LAN, that would be 1 less major complaint about the game that gets brought up at a majority of tournaments. even if exposure at MLG and GSL caused the game to get pirated a ton without many legit customers, it has 2 expansions coming up and incoming DLC.
the OP just makes it seem like the HoN developers don't understand the PC market anymore. Blizzard was really slow to adopt microtransactions with WoW, and whenever they did it made millions. SC2 was also released with a dated model, where they seemed to only care about initial launch sales. they heavily advertised on TV and various Korean markets (McDonald's) and after launch they stopped advertising and had no DLC.
the market is completely different now. SC2 could survive very easily with a low-graphics only, no achievements LAN mode. they could make a ton of money selling skins like the CE Thor that are toggled for bnet games only.
LoL makes money by microtransactions. Would you be fine if SC2 was free, but you had to pay to be able to play on most maps or even races? Even if you can unlock things with playtime, only the most harcore can get most unlockables. This system just doesn't work for SC2.
Microtransactions with WoW are diferent, they don't even affect the game, they are the same way as HoN does it, not LoL, and LoL wouldn't get the same amount of money by selling skins. WoW is so freaking big it, and this opportunities are not that common, so it works when they do it.
WoW microtransactions absolutely affect the game. race changes, faction changes, server transfers, mobile AH.
i'm saying HoN and SC2 could easily implement a low feature LAN mode and make a ton of money off the game and DLC. how many people here actually play SC2 with their roommates or close neighbors? 98% of my bnet friends list doesn't live within 1 hour of me. LAN would only help tournaments run more smoothly and make the game more popular at PC Bangs, which is never a bad thing.
pirates are just a scapegoat. just like how "hackers" are a popular scapegoat for recent online security failures.
It's not sound business strategy to implement something that will lose you money only to offset it with something that will make profits. The same argument came up in discussing how it's not reasonable for Blizzard to let the profits from WoW offset potential losses from other games.
On June 23 2011 09:03 LITTLEHEAD wrote: LAN is clearly wanted dearly, but the fact of the matter is that you CANNOT implement LAN without knowing you're going to lose HUGE amount of money. I do think a potential LAN that require you to log in online yet run a peer-to-peer connection/LAN of some form.
Anyone thinking that Blizzard or any other of these gaming companies don't NEED the money, then please open your own business and attempt to thrive under these savage conditions that are progressing. I do believe that some progress of LAN will be made such that they can implement it without risking piracy, but atm there should be no expectations of it in the immediate future.
Stating that someone like Microsoft has the biggest piracy issues and are still a forward moving company, comes from someone who is ignorant. Their scenario is completely differant in multiple ways. First of it has nothing to do with LAN, and their market is MUCH MUCH MUCH larger than that of a gaming company(specifically PCs).
I as much as anyone, want LAN and pray for it, but until a effective method of LAN that can be backed by the security of online gaming is created, there will only be large declines of LAN use.
Bill Gates openly admitted that Microsoft benefits from piracy.
That's a very weird to apply that article.
I don't think most people actually think piracy has no benefits at all, ever. I don't think Microsoft thinks piracy is better than no piracy. It doesn't fully apply to games, because Windows competes with a free software, so it's not a question of buying from whom, like a game, but a question of not paying for something diferent, piracy, or paying. If Linux would cost the same as windowns, and would be as hard to pirate, those schools in Russia wouldn't ever consider the switch.
Microsoft benefits from piracy because of "networks effects." The more users using Microsoft, the more powerful it becomes. You're right, this doesn't really apply to games because there's no kind of gaming monopoly since it's (relatively) easy to make new games that'll oust older ones.
On June 23 2011 09:26 Powerhunger wrote: Publishers have no incentive to allow LAN in games until the amount of revenue they gain decreases from lack of LAN support. It probably never will for SC2, or HoN, or LoL. Developers are funded by publishers or are their own publishers. Piracy is not a sole cause but it is a contributing factor, and any ways piracy becomes more convenient are discouraged by publishers. It's pretty simple.
And any statistician will say that it's a terrible argument, because there is no control >.>
On June 23 2011 09:05 theOnslaught wrote: We're so masochists as a race(humans), its unbelievable... why are we taking the sides of the few, and not the masses?, i appreciate the creativity and effort of the guys at blizzard, but the reality is that they're not even the ones making the money. The investors are, and they're making shitloads of return just based on a group of devoted, genius creatives that most companies have.
Watch tv shows like dragons den one day, the investors don't care one bit if you're going to feed all the world's hungry people with your invention, they care about return. How much money am i going to get if i invest... Its a stupid logic, that's only making a group of few people rich, while everyone else roots in poverty.
You have no idea how things work. The guys at Blizzard have jobs because the investors pay for them to create games. If the guys at Blizzard do a good job, they will be more in demand and all things equal their pay increases.
There would be no games if the investors didnt stump up the cash in the first place. They are the ones taking the risk, so therefore it is only fair that they should share in the rewards.
On June 23 2011 08:44 Pirat6662001 wrote: Games that people pirate= games they wouldnt buy otherwise. And companies like Valve and Blizzard shouldnt worry about it cause they make awesome games that people WANT to buy.
Top Pirated PC games on Bit Torrent for 2010
1) Call of Duty: Black Ops (4,270,000)
2) Battlefield: Bad Company 2 (3,960,000)
3) Mafia 2 (3,240,000)
4) Mass Effect 2 (3,240,000)
5) Starcraft II (3,120,000)
Pretty much everyone on TL fall under the category of people WANTING to buy SC2. But there is also a large group of people unwilling to buy, these numbers are probably quite a bit larger given the date of the source.
Silly, I downloaded a game through a bittorrent because it was faster than through blizzard system (i dont own a hard copy), but i still have a legit copy. Just cause you download a torrent doesnt make you a pirate. I download most games i buy (dont own hard copys) through a torrent and have a legal version still. I now that my gamer friends do the same thing cause its efficient
I would argue that is still stealing, you bought a legit copy but that still does mean your stealing. Unless the distributor or producer of a game permitted you to acquire the game in such a manner you would be stealing.
You really believe that? Do you also believe that it's stealing to buy an album, then rip it to my MP3 player? I can't understand this mentality - that every single thing a business desires is how things should be. The shift to digital music mostly happened because consumers got fed up with unreasonable demands, like the example I gave, and decided en masse to say "Fuck you. I'm doing it anyway.".
Yes I do. You acquired an ILLEGAL copy of the digital and intellectual contents that Blizzard created, through a method of free exchange that was UNAUTHORIZED and NOT permitted by Blizzard. If that's not stealing, I really need to revise my understanding of it.
The situation he is describing would not be illegal in the United States. Maybe its different where you are from.
In the US, consumers are allowed to make backups of anything they purchase. They can make as many backups as they want, as long as it is restricted to private use and they do not distribute them (especially for profit). This is why things like CD/DVD/BR Burners are not banned even though they are widely used for making illegal copies of games. Because although there are probably a ton of illegal copies made and distributed in this manner, there are legal uses as well (backups, homemade videos, custom music, etc.).
Basically, as long as he owns a legit copy, he can have as many "illegal" copies as he wants. As long as he doesn't try to distribute them to other people or try and sell the copies for profit it's perfectly legal. The grey area is with things like BitTorrent since as you download you are uploading to other people who may or may not have legit copies. However this is enough of a grey area that BitTorrent has not yet been locked down despite being by far the most common way to pirate.
He was replying to the guy that downloaded SC2, not the transfer of music. That or Blizzard started making music.
If that example applied to music, yes it would be illegal, you can't download a music just because you own the CD, what you can do it rip it from the CD to anywhere you want, it's basically the reason emulators and roms aren't technically illegal.
There is a very clear line between ripping a copy of something you own, and downloading another copy of something you already own.
Of course, that notion is already kinda silly, and applying that to a game is even sillier, if he has the game, and he downloads it because it's faster, who cares. I doubt that many people actually do that though, so the vality of the example is debatable. Still, piracy numbers are never correct.
On June 23 2011 09:21 masterbreti wrote: Just for reference. Right now over 5k people are downloading sc2 and pirating it. at 50 a peice. There is something like 300,000 in lost sales just for today. assuming on average sc2 get pirated the same amount for the last 6 months and for the entire 2011.
That means in 2011 alone. sc2 was pirated and lost blizz more than 3.6 million. Thats a huge amount fo money.
I think in 2010 the most pirated gameswas sc2 with like 1.2 million pirated it. Thats hundreds of millions of dollars lost.
You're a fool, not everyone that pirated the game was going to buy it in the first place.
People keep up bringing this up, but I do not see how it makes it better. It is the equivalent argument to saying that not everyone that drinks and drives will murder someone. It happens often enough.
Excuse me sir, which arguing college did you go to? Because they have done some sterling work...
On June 23 2011 08:46 eggs wrote: LoL is free and makes money just fine. i don't think piracy is the real factor to not implement a LAN feature.
Torchlight developers know how much their game was pirated and acknowledged that it only helps make their game more popular and allows for a bigger market for Torchlight 2 and their upcoming Torchlight MMO.
Magicka was pirated a lot, then they made a bunch of money from DLC packs and most recently a PvP mode.
if SC2 had LAN, that would be 1 less major complaint about the game that gets brought up at a majority of tournaments. even if exposure at MLG and GSL caused the game to get pirated a ton without many legit customers, it has 2 expansions coming up and incoming DLC.
the OP just makes it seem like the HoN developers don't understand the PC market anymore. Blizzard was really slow to adopt microtransactions with WoW, and whenever they did it made millions. SC2 was also released with a dated model, where they seemed to only care about initial launch sales. they heavily advertised on TV and various Korean markets (McDonald's) and after launch they stopped advertising and had no DLC.
the market is completely different now. SC2 could survive very easily with a low-graphics only, no achievements LAN mode. they could make a ton of money selling skins like the CE Thor that are toggled for bnet games only.
LoL makes money by microtransactions. Would you be fine if SC2 was free, but you had to pay to be able to play on most maps or even races? Even if you can unlock things with playtime, only the most harcore can get most unlockables. This system just doesn't work for SC2.
Microtransactions with WoW are diferent, they don't even affect the game, they are the same way as HoN does it, not LoL, and LoL wouldn't get the same amount of money by selling skins. WoW is so freaking big it, and this opportunities are not that common, so it works when they do it.
WoW microtransactions absolutely affect the game. race changes, faction changes, server transfers, mobile AH.
i'm saying HoN and SC2 could easily implement a low feature LAN mode and make a ton of money off the game and DLC. how many people here actually play SC2 with their roommates or close neighbors? 98% of my bnet friends list doesn't live within 1 hour of me. LAN would only help tournaments run more smoothly and make the game more popular at PC Bangs, which is never a bad thing.
pirates are just a scapegoat. just like how "hackers" are a popular scapegoat for recent online security failures.
It's not sound business strategy to implement something that will lose you money only to offset it with something that will make profits. The same argument came up in discussing how it's not reasonable for Blizzard to let the profits from WoW offset potential losses from other games.
slapping LAN on the game would sell more copies of it. pirated copies don't mean a loss of sales. LAN wouldn't lose them money. it would only increase future profits.
On June 23 2011 09:12 Ridiculisk wrote: I'm confused as to why adding a LAN feature will cause a decrease in sales and an increase in Piracy???
Is it just becasue people will pirate the game to play with their friends at home? Off the ladder?
I would have thought that adding additional features to one of your best selling games, especially features that the players WANT, would increase sales, not decrease them???
Because there's really no way to make sure that somebody playing on a LAN actually bought your game. And the fact that Starcraft 2 is already ridiculously pirated should probably tell you that if you give a feature that esentially encourages piracy is probably going to inflate those numbers even more
Again, how does it encourage piracy beyond the level that it already is?
You can torrent SC2 right now. But since the meat of SC2's gameplay is in multiplayer, and there's no way to play multiplayer without having a B.Net account, and there's no way to authorize your pirated copy of SC2, you cannot play SC2 multiplayer. And if you can't play SC2 in multiplayer, why the hell would you pirate it in the first place?
See, it's easy to crack a game. It's much harder to crack B.Net, since B.Net doesn't run on your machine. If LAN were available, all hackers would need to do is to convince your copy of SC2 to LAN with someone else's copy of SC2. That's trivial; just a bit of tracing through he assembly and short-circuiting the parts that talk to B.Net.
However, since LAN isn't available, short-circuiting the parts that talk to B.Net won't help. It would just make the game singleplayer-only. And therefore, if Blizzard made LAN available, it would immediately make a pirated copy of SC2 much more valuable. Therefore, more people would pirate it instead of playing it themselves.
Because once you have LAN, it's very easy to set up non-LAN play. All you need is for a machine to look like it is an SC2 client, but instead farm its packets out to the internet. Once you can do that, you can set up your own ICCUP-style ladder if you want. And then you have 100% of the SC2 experience while paying $0 to Blizzard.
I find it funny that people make the argument that everyone who pirates Starcraft 2 wouldn't have bought it anyway. This is completely true. But on the flip side, of everyone who has bought Starcraft 2, who would've pirated instead if you could play the multiplayer on the pirated version? Maybe a small part would've bought the game of all those who pirated it, and maybe a small part would've pirated the multiplayer if possible. But that's still a lot of lost money for Blizzard. Not to mention controlling tournaments and such to avoid the Kespa thing.
On June 23 2011 09:03 LITTLEHEAD wrote: LAN is clearly wanted dearly, but the fact of the matter is that you CANNOT implement LAN without knowing you're going to lose HUGE amount of money. I do think a potential LAN that require you to log in online yet run a peer-to-peer connection/LAN of some form.
Anyone thinking that Blizzard or any other of these gaming companies don't NEED the money, then please open your own business and attempt to thrive under these savage conditions that are progressing. I do believe that some progress of LAN will be made such that they can implement it without risking piracy, but atm there should be no expectations of it in the immediate future.
Stating that someone like Microsoft has the biggest piracy issues and are still a forward moving company, comes from someone who is ignorant. Their scenario is completely differant in multiple ways. First of it has nothing to do with LAN, and their market is MUCH MUCH MUCH larger than that of a gaming company(specifically PCs).
I as much as anyone, want LAN and pray for it, but until a effective method of LAN that can be backed by the security of online gaming is created, there will only be large declines of LAN use.
Bill Gates openly admitted that Microsoft benefits from piracy.
Microsoft does benefit by the fact that if people pirate their software at home they become familiar with it. Businesses on the other hand generally cannot pirate software, and as everyone is familiar with Microsoft products, the familiarity (which the piracy contributes to) helps keep their stranglehold on the market.
Ofcourse if there was no piracy, they would probably make more money despite a lower penetration rate.
You can't compare the effects on a game like SC2 as its not used by businesses.
On June 23 2011 09:21 masterbreti wrote: Just for reference. Right now over 5k people are downloading sc2 and pirating it. at 50 a peice. There is something like 300,000 in lost sales just for today. assuming on average sc2 get pirated the same amount for the last 6 months and for the entire 2011.
That means in 2011 alone. sc2 was pirated and lost blizz more than 3.6 million. Thats a huge amount fo money.
I think in 2010 the most pirated gameswas sc2 with like 1.2 million pirated it. Thats hundreds of millions of dollars lost.
You're a fool, not everyone that pirated the game was going to buy it in the first place.
People keep up bringing this up, but I do not see how it makes it better. It is the equivalent argument to saying that not everyone that drinks and drives will murder someone. It happens often enough.
Excuse me sir, which arguing college did you go to? Because they have done some sterling work...
How is the analogy poor? Illegally downloading a game and drunk driving are both illegal, and both of them have the possibility to cause harm. One by potential lost sales, and the other by injury or death. People not against piracy are saying that not all pirates would have purchased anyway, and I make the analogy that not all drunk driving results in death. This doesn't change that more drunk driving usually leads to more death, and more pirating will mean a greater number of people that might have bought it. Also, both are illegal.
Bill Gates openly admitted that Microsoft benefits from piracy.
Again, are gaming corporations apart of the same business? No, gaming is typically in a small percentage of those who even own a computer. Typically Males in and around their 20s.
This is not the same thing as someone who doesn't want to spend $400 for photoshop or something of the similar nature. I myself may or may not have pirated something of like the likes of photoshop for which I NEVER would have actually purchased because it was only to play around with...similar to that of a video game.
People will pirate games to try and them and yes they may purchase them afterwards, but the fact is that with a falling economy in the states, and gaming companies (especially newer ones) are trying to establish themselves for the future so that they can continue to make games. The amount that will try the game and then purchase it after compared to the LOSS in market would likely be more severe for that of a gaming corporation.
Of course i dont have facts to back that up, and i can't show statistics on this happening, but it would logically make sense that the same does not apply to video games as it does to operating systems, or business applications and software.
When the gaming industry (in the states) maintains a foothold of that of the PC industry, or something near to it, i would expect things to fall more into line of someone like Microsoft. This is why i stated the Microsoft is not the same as a gaming company in my original post.
On June 23 2011 09:26 Powerhunger wrote: Publishers have no incentive to allow LAN in games until the amount of revenue they gain decreases from lack of LAN support. It probably never will for SC2, or HoN, or LoL. Developers are funded by publishers or are their own publishers. Piracy is not a sole cause but it is a contributing factor, and any ways piracy becomes more convenient are discouraged by publishers. It's pretty simple.
And any statistician will say that it's a terrible argument, because there is no control >.>
I don't consider any of the arguments here to be statistically motivated. People want LAN. There isn't enough pressure on the publishers to get LAN, you don't get LAN. Game publishers want developers to make products people will buy. People are currently buying products without LAN, and publishers perceive LAN as a liability up until the point that it makes them more money. Has nothing to do with stats, it's a pretty simple established pattern.
On June 23 2011 07:10 mdma-_- wrote: that still doesnt explain why they cant allow people to play each other in lan with the necessecity of being logged into bnet/whatever online client.
cheap excuse just to blame it on pirates tbh
Think logically. It makes perfect sense from a business standpoint. Pretty much anyone can find a way to pirate a game that has LAN just by googling it.
On June 23 2011 08:46 eggs wrote: LoL is free and makes money just fine. i don't think piracy is the real factor to not implement a LAN feature.
Torchlight developers know how much their game was pirated and acknowledged that it only helps make their game more popular and allows for a bigger market for Torchlight 2 and their upcoming Torchlight MMO.
Magicka was pirated a lot, then they made a bunch of money from DLC packs and most recently a PvP mode.
if SC2 had LAN, that would be 1 less major complaint about the game that gets brought up at a majority of tournaments. even if exposure at MLG and GSL caused the game to get pirated a ton without many legit customers, it has 2 expansions coming up and incoming DLC.
the OP just makes it seem like the HoN developers don't understand the PC market anymore. Blizzard was really slow to adopt microtransactions with WoW, and whenever they did it made millions. SC2 was also released with a dated model, where they seemed to only care about initial launch sales. they heavily advertised on TV and various Korean markets (McDonald's) and after launch they stopped advertising and had no DLC.
the market is completely different now. SC2 could survive very easily with a low-graphics only, no achievements LAN mode. they could make a ton of money selling skins like the CE Thor that are toggled for bnet games only.
LoL makes money by microtransactions. Would you be fine if SC2 was free, but you had to pay to be able to play on most maps or even races? Even if you can unlock things with playtime, only the most harcore can get most unlockables. This system just doesn't work for SC2.
Microtransactions with WoW are diferent, they don't even affect the game, they are the same way as HoN does it, not LoL, and LoL wouldn't get the same amount of money by selling skins. WoW is so freaking big it, and this opportunities are not that common, so it works when they do it.
WoW microtransactions absolutely affect the game. race changes, faction changes, server transfers, mobile AH.
i'm saying HoN and SC2 could easily implement a low feature LAN mode and make a ton of money off the game and DLC. how many people here actually play SC2 with their roommates or close neighbors? 98% of my bnet friends list doesn't live within 1 hour of me. LAN would only help tournaments run more smoothly and make the game more popular at PC Bangs, which is never a bad thing.
pirates are just a scapegoat. just like how "hackers" are a popular scapegoat for recent online security failures.
It's not sound business strategy to implement something that will lose you money only to offset it with something that will make profits. The same argument came up in discussing how it's not reasonable for Blizzard to let the profits from WoW offset potential losses from other games.
slapping LAN on the game would sell more copies of it. pirated copies don't mean a loss of sales. LAN wouldn't lose them money. it would only increase future profits.
Obviously they have done analysis of this and disagree. I tend to believe them, sad as the case may be for those of us that would like Lan.
I can understand why Blizzard don't introduce LAN, My friend pirated a copy of SC2 then played the single player liked it and bought a full copy. It would be very naive to think he would do the same if he could play online for "free".
They need to add baneling capes to SC2 so that their primary source of revenue is no longer from game sales, but from selling shit to djWHEAT. Then they can stop giving two hoots about piracy and implement LAN mode.
On June 23 2011 09:36 Phaded wrote: They need to add baneling capes to SC2 so that their primary source of revenue is no longer from game sales, but from selling shit to djWHEAT. Then they can stop giving two hoots about piracy and implement LAN mode.
Really tired of some of the stuff thats done to screw over gamers in the fight against piracy. DRM that slows down pirated releases for a whole evening of some script kiddies time, and is removed for the non paying customer. One time use codes so you have to keep track of account details if you think youll want to replay a game at some point. And no lan, so you can watch MLG and see Incontrol's face get increasingly more FFFFFUUUUU as the connection to bnet lags.
Again, I WANT LAN.
I know it sucks we have to deal with it, but again, it makes sense they would do it.
I'm getting tired of being screwed over to deal with pirates too, but until there aren't any(LOL) we have to deal with it.
Again, "This is why we can't have nice things".
It was citation needed for the "LAN would make the game be pirated a ton" section.
ICCup, for one.
Or the fact that 3.2 million were pirated already, and that's only for single player?
Offering Free mutiplayer to pirates too?
Starcraft 1 was pirated Millions of times, what makes you think Starcraft 2 wont in a time where pirating is much more common?
ICCup wasn't LAN.
iccup was possible BECAUSE OF LAN MODE.
nope iccup was a emulated battle.net server, they ran mods such as LatencyChanger mod developed by MasterofChaos was in default on their server but it still required an external program for that plug-in. which allowed you to lower then b.net latency from the lowest of 250ms down to lan delay of 126ms-ish.
Blizzard turned a blind eye to those servers although they could take it down if they wanted, brainclan etc. Just like they taken down WoW servers and SC2 servers. iccup had nothing to do with lan mode in sc1. Yes you can play pirated copies of SC1 on iccup but blizz figures when the game is 10 years old who cares.
Really tired of some of the stuff thats done to screw over gamers in the fight against piracy. DRM that slows down pirated releases for a whole evening of some script kiddies time, and is removed for the non paying customer. One time use codes so you have to keep track of account details if you think youll want to replay a game at some point. And no lan, so you can watch MLG and see Incontrol's face get increasingly more FFFFFUUUUU as the connection to bnet lags.
Again, I WANT LAN.
I know it sucks we have to deal with it, but again, it makes sense they would do it.
I'm getting tired of being screwed over to deal with pirates too, but until there aren't any(LOL) we have to deal with it.
Again, "This is why we can't have nice things".
It was citation needed for the "LAN would make the game be pirated a ton" section.
ICCup, for one.
Or the fact that 3.2 million were pirated already, and that's only for single player?
Offering Free mutiplayer to pirates too?
Starcraft 1 was pirated Millions of times, what makes you think Starcraft 2 wont in a time where pirating is much more common?
ICCup wasn't LAN.
iccup was possible BECAUSE OF LAN MODE.
nope iccup was a emulated battle.net server, they ran mods such as LatencyChanger mod developed by MasterofChaos was in default on their server but it still required an external program for that plug-in. which allowed you to lower then b.net latency from the lowest of 250ms down to lan delay of 126ms-ish.
Blizzard turned a blind eye to those servers although they could take it down if they wanted, brainclan etc. Just like they taken down WoW servers and SC2 servers. iccup had nothing to do with lan mode in sc1. Yes you can play pirated copies of SC1 on iccup but blizz figures when the game is 10 years old who cares.
I believe he's equating lan mode to peer to peer game play. Which in essence is correct. There was a direct interaction between clients while there is none in SC2. At least I believe this is correct.
On June 23 2011 07:18 darkscream wrote: Bad argument made by propagandist.
Pirates wouldn't have bought the game anyway, and including LAN would let your game get exposed to new people for free. This is like saying "terrorists ruined travel", even though it's the government ruining travelling.
Not to mention that most of these games have online ladder systems and that's what people buy the game for - The competitive ladder.
What can you really say. As a game developer he has to talk like that because its his bread and butter. But, because of this I feel like his opinion is pretty much not relevant because it's strongly biased without any actual proof/evidence to his claims. Just saber rattling towards pirates.
This.
Blizzard are control freaks, imho. They just want an excuse for getting away stuff like this. If this contiues we'll end up loaning the products that we buy more than actually owning them. Blizzard's not the only company wanting this.
If LAN directly correlates to a vastly increased level of piracy, why put it in?
It may be nice to have, but its not essential.
And don't come arguing with me that it is essential, I get that you'd like it but that doesn't define essential. I think the growth of SC2 e-sports scene pretty much shows that a game can easily thrive competitively without LAN functionality.
On June 23 2011 09:31 Stiluz wrote: I find it funny that people make the argument that everyone who pirates Starcraft 2 wouldn't have bought it anyway. This is completely true. But on the flip side, of everyone who has bought Starcraft 2, who would've pirated instead if you could play the multiplayer on the pirated version? Maybe a small part would've bought the game of all those who pirated it, and maybe a small part would've pirated the multiplayer if possible. But that's still a lot of lost money for Blizzard. Not to mention controlling tournaments and such to avoid the Kespa thing.
how many people is that though? this isn't the 90s. my gamer friends aren't my next door neighbors and roommates anymore. i rely on bnet to play SC2 because almost all of my friend's list is out of state and when they aren't available for a custom 1v1 I can instantly find a random ladder match.
LAN would let me play with 3 or 4 of my local friends, only 1 of which is a big SC2 fan and the other 2 have since uninstalled the game.
hell, a LAN mode would probably keep those 2 other friends playing the game, and more likely to watch MLG and buy the expansion. even if they had pirated the game at first just to LAN with friends, when we want to play stupid customs like Nexus Word Wars or StarJeweled they would have to buy the actual game. or more realistically, when we want to play a quick game together without having to pack up our computers, we'd just play the game on bnet.
it happens all the time with my steam friends. a few of us buy the game on steam sale, the ones that miss the sale pirate the game to see what its like, then end up paying full price later to play with us on steam.
On June 23 2011 09:21 masterbreti wrote: Just for reference. Right now over 5k people are downloading sc2 and pirating it. at 50 a peice. There is something like 300,000 in lost sales just for today. assuming on average sc2 get pirated the same amount for the last 6 months and for the entire 2011.
That means in 2011 alone. sc2 was pirated and lost blizz more than 3.6 million. Thats a huge amount fo money.
I think in 2010 the most pirated gameswas sc2 with like 1.2 million pirated it. Thats hundreds of millions of dollars lost.
You're a fool, not everyone that pirated the game was going to buy it in the first place.
People keep up bringing this up, but I do not see how it makes it better. It is the equivalent argument to saying that not everyone that drinks and drives will murder someone. It happens often enough.
Excuse me sir, which arguing college did you go to? Because they have done some sterling work...
How is the analogy poor? Illegally downloading a game and drunk driving are both illegal, and both of them have the possibility to cause harm. One by potential lost sales, and the other by injury or death. People not against piracy are saying that not all pirates would have purchased anyway, and I make the analogy that not all drunk driving results in death. This doesn't change that more drunk driving usually leads to more death, and more pirating will mean a greater number of people that might have bought it. Also, both are illegal.
Explain to me where the analogy fails.
Because the person you were quoting was talking about the "I think in 2010 the most pirated gameswas sc2 with like 1.2 million pirated it. Thats hundreds of millions of dollars lost" line, specifically.
Nobody said it made it better, just that it made the conclusion obviously wrong. Also equating people getting killed in car accidents to blizzard not getting money, thats not really the best of analogies.
On June 23 2011 07:10 mdma-_- wrote: that still doesnt explain why they cant allow people to play each other in lan with the necessecity of being logged into bnet/whatever online client.
On June 23 2011 09:42 Subversion wrote: I totally agree with this.
If LAN directly correlates to a vastly increased level of piracy, why put it in?
It may be nice to have, but its not essential.
And don't come arguing with me that it is essential, I get that you'd like it but that doesn't define essential. I think the growth of SC2 e-sports scene pretty much shows that a game can easily thrive competitively without LAN functionality.
[citation needed]
Although I guess that's been done before in this thread >.<
On June 23 2011 07:18 darkscream wrote: Bad argument made by propagandist.
Pirates wouldn't have bought the game anyway, and including LAN would let your game get exposed to new people for free. This is like saying "terrorists ruined travel", even though it's the government ruining travelling.
Not to mention that most of these games have online ladder systems and that's what people buy the game for - The competitive ladder.
What can you really say. As a game developer he has to talk like that because its his bread and butter. But, because of this I feel like his opinion is pretty much not relevant because it's strongly biased without any actual proof/evidence to his claims. Just saber rattling towards pirates.
This.
Blizzard are control freaks, imo. They just want an excuse for getting away stuff like this.
No. I know a lot of people who bought it that would've much rather just downloaded it. You're talking about people who would download but not buy it. There are a lot of people that would download it and buy it. I have some friends who have somehow downloaded fake versions and don't play online (just single player). No LAN prevents them from playing online, but it doesn't affect Blizzard's sales. But I have some friends who bought the game, but would never buy it if they could play against others for free. That's the problem.
Really tired of some of the stuff thats done to screw over gamers in the fight against piracy. DRM that slows down pirated releases for a whole evening of some script kiddies time, and is removed for the non paying customer. One time use codes so you have to keep track of account details if you think youll want to replay a game at some point. And no lan, so you can watch MLG and see Incontrol's face get increasingly more FFFFFUUUUU as the connection to bnet lags.
Again, I WANT LAN.
I know it sucks we have to deal with it, but again, it makes sense they would do it.
I'm getting tired of being screwed over to deal with pirates too, but until there aren't any(LOL) we have to deal with it.
Again, "This is why we can't have nice things".
It was citation needed for the "LAN would make the game be pirated a ton" section.
ICCup, for one.
Or the fact that 3.2 million were pirated already, and that's only for single player?
Offering Free mutiplayer to pirates too?
Starcraft 1 was pirated Millions of times, what makes you think Starcraft 2 wont in a time where pirating is much more common?
if it weren't for SC:BW pirates at Korean PC Bangs, there might not even be an SC2. piracy made the game popular. a pirated game doesn't mean a loss of a sale. it just means that someone who would likely never buy your game got to play your game and is now a fan of your work.
SC2:WoL pirates just makes a bigger market for SC2:HotS, and whatever DLC and paid services they wish to introduce until then.
LAN has nothing to do with loss of profits.
im sure right now you think you have made a good argument, but you fail to also seee how FLAWED it really is.
the first part of your argument made sense. That yes ICCUP helped make starcraft what it is today. However the part where your argument completely flopped is when you said sc2 sales is reaping the benefits of starcraft 1 because pirates were able to play on it /test it.
you forget to ask yourself this question, How is starcraft 2 reaping the benefits? is it because it excluded lan thus ppl have TO PURCHASE THE GAME to play multiplayer?
if starcraft2 included lan and then ended up being pirated and iCCUPsc2 got made, do you think starcraft 2 would have made "as much profits" , or Lost sales?
your argument is basically terrible, because it presumed that both games had LAN. when in reality sc2 is only benefiting in profits from sc1 BECAUSE IT EXCLUDED LAN.
On June 23 2011 09:42 Subversion wrote: I totally agree with this.
If LAN directly correlates to a vastly increased level of piracy, why put it in?
It may be nice to have, but its not essential.
And don't come arguing with me that it is essential, I get that you'd like it but that doesn't define essential. I think the growth of SC2 e-sports scene pretty much shows that a game can easily thrive competitively without LAN functionality.
[citation needed]
Although I guess that's been done before in this thread >.<
Simple how many pirated copies are playing on battle.net 2.0 right now? 0 i would think although maybe a guy has his private little thing.
How many pirated copies of other blizz games wc3 garena are being played on garena right now even if you assume 99.9% are payed for copies that still leaves 1 2 which would be more then battle.net 2.0
It's called how easy is it to do something emulating a network over the Internet, not that hard. emulating a compete server to not just list games but semi host them a bit harder.
On June 23 2011 09:21 masterbreti wrote: Just for reference. Right now over 5k people are downloading sc2 and pirating it. at 50 a peice. There is something like 300,000 in lost sales just for today. assuming on average sc2 get pirated the same amount for the last 6 months and for the entire 2011.
That means in 2011 alone. sc2 was pirated and lost blizz more than 3.6 million. Thats a huge amount fo money.
I think in 2010 the most pirated gameswas sc2 with like 1.2 million pirated it. Thats hundreds of millions of dollars lost.
You're a fool, not everyone that pirated the game was going to buy it in the first place.
People keep up bringing this up, but I do not see how it makes it better. It is the equivalent argument to saying that not everyone that drinks and drives will murder someone. It happens often enough.
Excuse me sir, which arguing college did you go to? Because they have done some sterling work...
How is the analogy poor? Illegally downloading a game and drunk driving are both illegal, and both of them have the possibility to cause harm. One by potential lost sales, and the other by injury or death. People not against piracy are saying that not all pirates would have purchased anyway, and I make the analogy that not all drunk driving results in death. This doesn't change that more drunk driving usually leads to more death, and more pirating will mean a greater number of people that might have bought it. Also, both are illegal.
Explain to me where the analogy fails.
Because the person you were quoting was talking about the "I think in 2010 the most pirated gameswas sc2 with like 1.2 million pirated it. Thats hundreds of millions of dollars lost" line, specifically.
Nobody said it made it better, just that it made the conclusion obviously wrong. Also equating people getting killed in car accidents to blizzard not getting money, thats not really the best of analogies.
I don't care about who Onslaught was quoting, the argument he made is one seen in this entire thread and it is a flawed argument. The conclusion is also not wrong generally, just specifically. If out of 1000 games only 20 are real lost sales, those are still 20 lost sales. The number doesn't change the reality of the crime.
I also don't think you understand what an analogy is. Just because you interpret dieing in a car accident to be worse than Blizzard losing money, does not make it a poor analogy. The analogy serves to clarify. The fact that you see an issue with drunk driving, but not pirating and stealing someone's stuff, just serves to illustrate something about your personal morals, not the analogy as a whole.
I happen to agree that drunk driving is worse, by the way, I just don't then make the conclusion that pirating is suddenly ok because something worse exists. The analogy works because it illustrates that both are wrong due to bad consequences that follow them. The percentage of bad consequences to actions does not change how good or bad those actions are. They are separate issues.
On June 23 2011 07:18 Meteora.GB wrote: Many developers are not implementing LAN simply because of piracy, yeah that's about it really. A lot of them are afraid of their profits dropping simply of how the game is pirated.
I recall MW2 was pirated over 4 million times in a week or so on the PC version, entirely over dwarfing the number of legitimate copies bought. Many gamers insist that piracy is not a concern however. Its a controversial topic that neither side are willing to agree on with each other.
You could pirate MW2, do some coding and you could play online with people that had bought the game, doubt it would be that easy to do though if the game developers actually made an effort to stop stuff like that
I don't mind not including LAN as long as BNET performs. Up to this point, it hasn't.
It's really silly that iCCup is able to have nearly 0 latency for ALL players while Blizzard has insane lag sometimes even within the same region. Not to mention, Blizzard further taken advantage by region locking accounts. What's the point of this? Not only do you take out LAN, you make people pay MORE money for cross-region accounts that don't even perform well? Now we have an issue.
Really tired of some of the stuff thats done to screw over gamers in the fight against piracy. DRM that slows down pirated releases for a whole evening of some script kiddies time, and is removed for the non paying customer. One time use codes so you have to keep track of account details if you think youll want to replay a game at some point. And no lan, so you can watch MLG and see Incontrol's face get increasingly more FFFFFUUUUU as the connection to bnet lags.
Again, I WANT LAN.
I know it sucks we have to deal with it, but again, it makes sense they would do it.
I'm getting tired of being screwed over to deal with pirates too, but until there aren't any(LOL) we have to deal with it.
Again, "This is why we can't have nice things".
It was citation needed for the "LAN would make the game be pirated a ton" section.
ICCup, for one.
Or the fact that 3.2 million were pirated already, and that's only for single player?
Offering Free mutiplayer to pirates too?
Starcraft 1 was pirated Millions of times, what makes you think Starcraft 2 wont in a time where pirating is much more common?
if it weren't for SC:BW pirates at Korean PC Bangs, there might not even be an SC2. piracy made the game popular. a pirated game doesn't mean a loss of a sale. it just means that someone who would likely never buy your game got to play your game and is now a fan of your work.
SC2:WoL pirates just makes a bigger market for SC2:HotS, and whatever DLC and paid services they wish to introduce until then.
LAN has nothing to do with loss of profits.
im sure right now you think you have made a good argument, but you fail to also seee how FLAWED it really is.
the first part of your argument made sense. That yes ICCUP helped make starcraft what it is today. However the part where your argument completely flopped is when you said sc2 sales is reaping the benefits starcraft 1 because pirates were able to play on it.
you forget to ask yourself this question, How is starcraft 2 reaping the benefits? is it because it excluded lan thus ppl have TO PURCHASE THE GAME to play multiplayer?
if starcraft2 to included lan and then ended up being pirated and iCCUPsc2 got made, do you think starcraft 2 would have made "as much profits" , or Lost sales.
your argument is basically terrible, because it presumed that both games had LAN. when in reality sc2 is only benefiting in profits from sc1 BECAUSE IT EXCLUDED LAN.
THATS THE FACTS.
by the time ICCup was popular, BW bnet was awful. it had no matchmaking. there was no reason for any serious player to spend their days on bnet. it was terrible
for as much as people hate on bnet2.0 (mostly because NO LAN), it makes SC2 worth buying to play on bnet.
the question is whether adding LAN would mean a loss of profits. my argument is that even if LAN attracts pirates, it attracts more paying customers than you would have gotten without it. pirates are a scapegoat. if you have a quality game and a quality online service, people will pay to play.
This really isn't news. It was always about the money and piracy. As the first guy said, it's a cheap excuse. You find alternative solutions to your woes. Major tournaments deserve the proper product solution in order to run smoothly and professionally.
The best players truly standout above the rest in LAN settings. The game is much and I mean much faster and the sensitivity is nuts. They should have separate products for the DHs/MLGs/GOMs.
It's like asking the top sprinters to race 100m while wearing weights around their ankles.
im confused how putting a lan option for sc2 would lower revenue(in any sense) as i will elaborate below.
okay lets assume with the lan feature you can create any map (and we will assume no one makes recreations of the campaign as maps). So if your by yourself you can only play vs computers, which isn't much training at all seeing playing against something that gets more minerals per trip, map hacks, and can have perfect macro is never going to happen in a normal game. Now yes, you can play with buddies/family/etc, but that means they would have to bring their rig over to your house or you have a spare computer, which, seems highly unlikely as 2 people playing together over and over and over after awhile should get boring. Furthermore, how are you ever going to become better at the game if you only have a limited number of practice partners, the whole point of playing online games is for the ONLINE community. The whole point of laning is to either: have fun with friends or in off-line competitions. And when you're playing with friends, almost everyone wants to "be the best" so they have "bragging rights" so to speak. And if you want to be the best... you would need to play on a regular basis, and in most cases playing on a regular basis won't be achieved purely through playing in lans and therefore, you would need the game to play ladder in order to get better. And if you need the game, you would have to buy it. As for competitive play [i will use MLG in this example], no one is going to play unless they: are "good" such as a pro player or would just like to go to have fun (getting "owned" by a pro), but most likely, a person willing to drop $70 on an mlg ticket is already an avid player, spectator, and community-contributing individual and why would they drop $70 to get owned when they could buy the game for $50?
For example, I know 20~ people IRL that play sc2 from school etc. 15~ aren't even close to active, so I would never be able to lan with them and ontop of that, there are only 2 of us that are actually good. top master (myself) and GM (my buddy). There is only so much you can do on lan because you have to be on the same network and for "logistical reasons" i don't see people using it as the only medium for playing the game. Yes, there will be exceptions but they will be out-liers, so why worry?
Lastly, if your product isn't "pirateable" someone will just pirate something else that is free and play it. They never would pay for it in the beginning, however, with starcraft you can only accomplish so much in a LAN setting, thus if they truly "like the game" after playing with buddies for several weeks or a month they may have the sense to go out and buy it.
I would like to see a counter-argument(s) that would prove me wrong but in essence my logic is: people would have never played the game before because it costs $$ -> [assume lan function here]they like the lan which has only limited features due to the "logistics" of how lans work -> said person decides to buy the game because they want to play it more and not be limited by needing to lan.
The only forseeable problem I could see is college campuses (where a network would be fucking huge).
Really tired of some of the stuff thats done to screw over gamers in the fight against piracy. DRM that slows down pirated releases for a whole evening of some script kiddies time, and is removed for the non paying customer. One time use codes so you have to keep track of account details if you think youll want to replay a game at some point. And no lan, so you can watch MLG and see Incontrol's face get increasingly more FFFFFUUUUU as the connection to bnet lags.
Again, I WANT LAN.
I know it sucks we have to deal with it, but again, it makes sense they would do it.
I'm getting tired of being screwed over to deal with pirates too, but until there aren't any(LOL) we have to deal with it.
Again, "This is why we can't have nice things".
It was citation needed for the "LAN would make the game be pirated a ton" section.
ICCup, for one.
Or the fact that 3.2 million were pirated already, and that's only for single player?
Offering Free mutiplayer to pirates too?
Starcraft 1 was pirated Millions of times, what makes you think Starcraft 2 wont in a time where pirating is much more common?
ICCup wasn't LAN.
iccup was possible BECAUSE OF LAN MODE.
nope iccup was a emulated battle.net server, they ran mods such as LatencyChanger mod developed by MasterofChaos was in default on their server but it still required an external program for that plug-in. which allowed you to lower then b.net latency from the lowest of 250ms down to lan delay of 126ms-ish.
Blizzard turned a blind eye to those servers although they could take it down if they wanted, brainclan etc. Just like they taken down WoW servers and SC2 servers. iccup had nothing to do with lan mode in sc1. Yes you can play pirated copies of SC1 on iccup but blizz figures when the game is 10 years old who cares.
again, iccup was possible BECAUSE OF LAN mode. when a game includes lan, it basically gives the code out on what is required to EMULATE battlenet.
LAN does not always mean LAN. programs like garena /iccup used the lan mode to hook up to these online programs.
You said it yourself, you ddint have to buy sc1 to play in iccup, And where did you get the audacity to say Blizzard doesn't care cause the game was 10 years old, where did blizzard say that?
I am not saying ICCUP was wrong, I even admit im a pirate in previous posts. Im just pointing out common knowledge here on why sc2 has excluded LAN. BECAUSE OF PIRACY. nothing more nothing less. you cannot defend piracy cause its not possible to defend stealing, even if its morally right ( robin hood) . At the end of the day its still wrong, and because of that, i perfectly understand why blizzard has not included LAN.
it sucks for tournaments, but thats just something everybody is going to have to live with.
On June 23 2011 09:21 masterbreti wrote: Just for reference. Right now over 5k people are downloading sc2 and pirating it. at 50 a peice. There is something like 300,000 in lost sales just for today. assuming on average sc2 get pirated the same amount for the last 6 months and for the entire 2011.
That means in 2011 alone. sc2 was pirated and lost blizz more than 3.6 million. Thats a huge amount fo money.
I think in 2010 the most pirated gameswas sc2 with like 1.2 million pirated it. Thats hundreds of millions of dollars lost.
You're a fool, not everyone that pirated the game was going to buy it in the first place.
People keep up bringing this up, but I do not see how it makes it better. It is the equivalent argument to saying that not everyone that drinks and drives will murder someone. It happens often enough.
Excuse me sir, which arguing college did you go to? Because they have done some sterling work...
How is the analogy poor? Illegally downloading a game and drunk driving are both illegal, and both of them have the possibility to cause harm. One by potential lost sales, and the other by injury or death. People not against piracy are saying that not all pirates would have purchased anyway, and I make the analogy that not all drunk driving results in death. This doesn't change that more drunk driving usually leads to more death, and more pirating will mean a greater number of people that might have bought it. Also, both are illegal.
Explain to me where the analogy fails.
Because the person you were quoting was talking about the "I think in 2010 the most pirated gameswas sc2 with like 1.2 million pirated it. Thats hundreds of millions of dollars lost" line, specifically.
Nobody said it made it better, just that it made the conclusion obviously wrong. Also equating people getting killed in car accidents to blizzard not getting money, thats not really the best of analogies.
I don't care about who Onslaught was quoting, the argument he made is one seen in this entire thread and it is a flawed argument. The conclusion is also not wrong generally, just specifically. If out of 1000 games only 20 are real lost sales, those are still 20 lost sales. The number doesn't change the reality of the crime.
I also don't think you understand what an analogy is. Just because you interpret dieing in a car accident to be worse than Blizzard losing money, does not make it a poor analogy. The analogy serves to clarify. The fact that you see an issue with drunk driving, but not pirating and stealing someone's stuff, just serves to illustrate something about your personal morals, not the analogy as a whole.
I happen to agree that drunk driving is worse, by the way, I just don't then make the conclusion that pirating is suddenly ok because something worse exists. The analogy works because it illustrates that both are wrong due to bad consequences that follow them. The percentage of bad consequences to actions does not change how good or bad those actions are. They are separate issues.
A flawed argument for what? The number of people pirating the game =/= the number of lost sales. Nobody is saying people are pirating the game and also paying for it, therefore all the other piracy is ok.
An analogy is comparing 2 similiar circumstances. I dont see that these situations are that similiar, its like a wee version of godwins law. The fact that I notice the difference of scale between piracy and manslaughter shows something about my perspective. At no point did I endorse piracy for the sake of not paying for things. Over a hundred games on steam, shelves of games and dvd's, shelves of books, I have no issue with paying for things.
At no point did I say that piracy is ok because something worse exists.
So, what the companies are offering is a better experience than LANning with your friends. I don't know about anyone else, but I would be real fucking bored if I could only play HoN on LAN. Matchmaking ladders are a big reason why people buy the MP game. If you can't make that experience good, you don't deserve to sell the game in the first place.
On June 23 2011 10:02 scorch- wrote: So, what the companies are offering is a better experience than LANning with your friends. I don't know about anyone else, but I would be real fucking bored if I could only play HoN on LAN. Matchmaking ladders are a big reason why people buy the MP game. If you can't make that experience good, you don't deserve to sell the game in the first place.
when you have a lan setting you can set up a server to emulate a network and wala you can play games with people like you would on battle.net garena is a prime example of that, although hamachi was first. If lan was just restricted to people playing in the same room there wouldn't be an issue.
Really tired of some of the stuff thats done to screw over gamers in the fight against piracy. DRM that slows down pirated releases for a whole evening of some script kiddies time, and is removed for the non paying customer. One time use codes so you have to keep track of account details if you think youll want to replay a game at some point. And no lan, so you can watch MLG and see Incontrol's face get increasingly more FFFFFUUUUU as the connection to bnet lags.
Again, I WANT LAN.
I know it sucks we have to deal with it, but again, it makes sense they would do it.
I'm getting tired of being screwed over to deal with pirates too, but until there aren't any(LOL) we have to deal with it.
Again, "This is why we can't have nice things".
It was citation needed for the "LAN would make the game be pirated a ton" section.
ICCup, for one.
Or the fact that 3.2 million were pirated already, and that's only for single player?
Offering Free mutiplayer to pirates too?
Starcraft 1 was pirated Millions of times, what makes you think Starcraft 2 wont in a time where pirating is much more common?
ICCup wasn't LAN.
iccup was possible BECAUSE OF LAN MODE.
nope iccup was a emulated battle.net server, they ran mods such as LatencyChanger mod developed by MasterofChaos was in default on their server but it still required an external program for that plug-in. which allowed you to lower then b.net latency from the lowest of 250ms down to lan delay of 126ms-ish.
Blizzard turned a blind eye to those servers although they could take it down if they wanted, brainclan etc. Just like they taken down WoW servers and SC2 servers. iccup had nothing to do with lan mode in sc1. Yes you can play pirated copies of SC1 on iccup but blizz figures when the game is 10 years old who cares.
again, iccup was possible BECAUSE OF LAN mode. when a game includes lan, it basically gives the code out on what is required to EMULATE battlenet.
LAN does not always mean LAN. programs like garena /iccup used the lan mode to hook up to these online programs.
You said it yourself, you ddint have to buy sc1 to play in iccup, And where did you get the audacity to say Blizzard doesn't care cause the game was 10 years old, where did blizzard say that?
I am not saying ICCUP was wrong, I even admit im a pirate in previous posts. Im just pointing out common knowledge here on why sc2 has excluded LAN. BECAUSE OF PIRACY. nothing more nothing less. you cannot defend piracy cause its not possible to defend stealing, even if its morally right ( robin hood) . At the end of the day its still wrong, and because of that, i perfectly understand why blizzard has not included LAN.
it sucks for tournaments, but thats just something everybody is going to have to live with.
what? a lot of games have no LAN mode and people make private servers all the time. MMOs definitely have no LAN mode, and i've seen tons of private servers for MMOs.
there are WoW private servers. they suck. anyone who seriously wants to play WoW buys the game and subscribes to Blizzard. but somebody that initially played for free on a crappy private server because the WoW free trial is a joke (capped at level 10 or something stupidly low and with limited ability to interact with other players through messaging, partying, or the auction house) and realizes the game is really polished is more inclined to buy the game and escape the stupidity of buggy, imbalanced private servers.
From what I have read about how Brood War got popular, it was mostly because of the LAN. Brood War wasn't so popular in the beginning, but because it was so easy to get for free ALOT of people started playing which led to more people eventually buying it (to be official) and to lead it to what it is today. And also, ultimately, lead into the great success of SC2 right now.
I know for myself, alot of games I have played have been pirated or tried on in an not real way. As in Private Servers for WoW. I started playing like that then got hooked and transfered over to the real thing. Same thing with DOTA for wc3, and ALOT of other games. I think the guy the OP quote's statement is invalid because he doesn't know anything about how deep this goes. No one does.
On June 23 2011 10:08 Motat wrote: From what I have read about how Brood War got popular, it was mostly because of the LAN. Brood War wasn't so popular in the beginning, but because it was so easy to get for free ALOT of people started playing which led to more people eventually buying it (to be official) and to lead it to what it is today. And also, ultimately, lead into the great success of SC2 right now.
I know for myself, alot of games I have played have been pirated or tried on in an not real way. As in Private Servers for WoW. I started playing like that then got hooked and transfered over to the real thing. Same thing with DOTA for wc3, and ALOT of other games. I think the guy the OP quote's statement is invalid because he doesn't know anything about how deep this goes. No one does.
yea it's incredibly ironic actually. DotA itself became hugely popular because of LAN. now the DotA-clone is saying LAN would hurt the game.
On June 23 2011 10:02 scorch- wrote: So, what the companies are offering is a better experience than LANning with your friends. I don't know about anyone else, but I would be real fucking bored if I could only play HoN on LAN. Matchmaking ladders are a big reason why people buy the MP game. If you can't make that experience good, you don't deserve to sell the game in the first place.
when you have a lan setting you can set up a server to emulate a network and wala you can play games with people like you would on battle.net garena is a prime example of that, although hamachi was first. If lan was just restricted to people playing in the same room there wouldn't be an issue.
You know that HoN released a free to play version of its game on garena right?
On June 23 2011 09:21 masterbreti wrote: Just for reference. Right now over 5k people are downloading sc2 and pirating it. at 50 a peice. There is something like 300,000 in lost sales just for today. assuming on average sc2 get pirated the same amount for the last 6 months and for the entire 2011.
That means in 2011 alone. sc2 was pirated and lost blizz more than 3.6 million. Thats a huge amount fo money.
I think in 2010 the most pirated gameswas sc2 with like 1.2 million pirated it. Thats hundreds of millions of dollars lost.
You're a fool, not everyone that pirated the game was going to buy it in the first place.
People keep up bringing this up, but I do not see how it makes it better. It is the equivalent argument to saying that not everyone that drinks and drives will murder someone. It happens often enough.
Excuse me sir, which arguing college did you go to? Because they have done some sterling work...
How is the analogy poor? Illegally downloading a game and drunk driving are both illegal, and both of them have the possibility to cause harm. One by potential lost sales, and the other by injury or death. People not against piracy are saying that not all pirates would have purchased anyway, and I make the analogy that not all drunk driving results in death. This doesn't change that more drunk driving usually leads to more death, and more pirating will mean a greater number of people that might have bought it. Also, both are illegal.
Explain to me where the analogy fails.
Because the person you were quoting was talking about the "I think in 2010 the most pirated gameswas sc2 with like 1.2 million pirated it. Thats hundreds of millions of dollars lost" line, specifically.
Nobody said it made it better, just that it made the conclusion obviously wrong. Also equating people getting killed in car accidents to blizzard not getting money, thats not really the best of analogies.
I don't care about who Onslaught was quoting, the argument he made is one seen in this entire thread and it is a flawed argument. The conclusion is also not wrong generally, just specifically. If out of 1000 games only 20 are real lost sales, those are still 20 lost sales. The number doesn't change the reality of the crime.
I also don't think you understand what an analogy is. Just because you interpret dieing in a car accident to be worse than Blizzard losing money, does not make it a poor analogy. The analogy serves to clarify. The fact that you see an issue with drunk driving, but not pirating and stealing someone's stuff, just serves to illustrate something about your personal morals, not the analogy as a whole.
I happen to agree that drunk driving is worse, by the way, I just don't then make the conclusion that pirating is suddenly ok because something worse exists. The analogy works because it illustrates that both are wrong due to bad consequences that follow them. The percentage of bad consequences to actions does not change how good or bad those actions are. They are separate issues.
A flawed argument for what? The number of people pirating the game =/= the number of lost sales. Nobody is saying people are pirating the game and also paying for it, therefore all the other piracy is ok.
An analogy is comparing 2 similiar circumstances. I dont see that these situations are that similiar, its like a wee version of godwins law. The fact that I notice the difference of scale between piracy and manslaughter shows something about my perspective. At no point did I endorse piracy for the sake of not paying for things. Over a hundred games on steam, shelves of games and dvd's, shelves of books, I have no issue with paying for things.
At no point did I say that piracy is ok because something worse exists.
My point was that the person Onslaught quoted made an estimate of lost sales based on number of times SC2 has been pirated. Onslaught responded with the idea that not all pirates are lost sales, and no other points. And I have seen other people saying that not all pirates are lost sales as an idea that companies shouldn't worry about pirating. My point was that this argument was flawed because some pirating is lost sales.
I already explained how the situations are similar. Here I will explain it again. Drunk driving and pirating are [negative actions]. Injury from a car crash and lost sales are [negative result]. The situation is that not all [negative action] will lead to [negative result], but some of the time [negative action] DOES lead to [negative result]. I am arguing that because it happens some of the time, we should be trying to curb [negative action], not ignore it because it happens all the time. The analogy between the two works even better because both actions are illegal, and I would also argue immoral under a standard set of societal morals. Just because one negative action is worse than another, why would that make it a poor analogy?
I do understand Blizzards decision to not have LAN because of piracy, aswell as very limited chat functions on Battlenet due to chatspam in their other games, it´'s all business.
On the other hand if someone else would release a equally good strategy game with LAN and overall better multiplayer experience then I think Blizzard would have to re-evaluate their decision because that game would completely take over as an ESPORT. The ESPORT factor of Starcraft 2 is really important to it's marketing and without it I think the game would quickly fall in popularity.
I hope someone else manages to make some really good strategy games, and other games, because currently Blizzard is pretty much sitting on a monopoly in several gamegenres just like Microsoft is with windows, they can do whatever they like without worry of competition.
Really tired of some of the stuff thats done to screw over gamers in the fight against piracy. DRM that slows down pirated releases for a whole evening of some script kiddies time, and is removed for the non paying customer. One time use codes so you have to keep track of account details if you think youll want to replay a game at some point. And no lan, so you can watch MLG and see Incontrol's face get increasingly more FFFFFUUUUU as the connection to bnet lags.
Again, I WANT LAN.
I know it sucks we have to deal with it, but again, it makes sense they would do it.
I'm getting tired of being screwed over to deal with pirates too, but until there aren't any(LOL) we have to deal with it.
Again, "This is why we can't have nice things".
It was citation needed for the "LAN would make the game be pirated a ton" section.
ICCup, for one.
Or the fact that 3.2 million were pirated already, and that's only for single player?
Offering Free mutiplayer to pirates too?
Starcraft 1 was pirated Millions of times, what makes you think Starcraft 2 wont in a time where pirating is much more common?
ICCup wasn't LAN.
iccup was possible BECAUSE OF LAN MODE.
nope iccup was a emulated battle.net server, they ran mods such as LatencyChanger mod developed by MasterofChaos was in default on their server but it still required an external program for that plug-in. which allowed you to lower then b.net latency from the lowest of 250ms down to lan delay of 126ms-ish.
Blizzard turned a blind eye to those servers although they could take it down if they wanted, brainclan etc. Just like they taken down WoW servers and SC2 servers. iccup had nothing to do with lan mode in sc1. Yes you can play pirated copies of SC1 on iccup but blizz figures when the game is 10 years old who cares.
again, iccup was possible BECAUSE OF LAN mode. when a game includes lan, it basically gives the code out on what is required to EMULATE battlenet.
LAN does not always mean LAN. programs like garena /iccup used the lan mode to hook up to these online programs.
You said it yourself, you ddint have to buy sc1 to play in iccup, And where did you get the audacity to say Blizzard doesn't care cause the game was 10 years old, where did blizzard say that?
I am not saying ICCUP was wrong, I even admit im a pirate in previous posts. Im just pointing out common knowledge here on why sc2 has excluded LAN. BECAUSE OF PIRACY. nothing more nothing less. you cannot defend piracy cause its not possible to defend stealing, even if its morally right ( robin hood) . At the end of the day its still wrong, and because of that, i perfectly understand why blizzard has not included LAN.
it sucks for tournaments, but thats just something everybody is going to have to live with.
PGTour, WGtour, ICCUP all helped to provide gamers the best possible environments to compete against one another. Not fucking Blizzard. B.Net is still horrible and the Ladder was always a joke. Not to mention the Ping, if it weren't for people like Pat and company perhaps someone else would step in because BW was just that fucking good of a game that people who were playing a decade ago still play it to this day.
You see flaws in a system you correct it. If it weren't for the support of the community and the fact we could create the proper third party programs to enhance the experience the game wouldn't be where it is today.
Blizzard is already milking SC2 to the fucking bone and it makes me sick. Before, they wanted to have each 'expansion' be a standalone. They only changed their minds within the last few months. Still, with the custom shop and the fact you have to buy more than one copy to play on any given server is excessive. Smart. Hell, there is a reason why Bob Kotick is one of the most hated people in the gaming industry. I'd pat him on the back for the success he's had. I'll give him that. When it's all said and done I would knock Bob on his ass and say, "Don't worry. It's nothing personal. It's just business," and walk away.
-_-
Whatever the case is, the consumer's opinion doesn't matter and ultimately you hinder the progress of the sport. Nothing you can do about it until people refuse to buy into such rubbish.
I'd have to agree. Unless there's a way to stop piracy (which there probably isn't with lan) then even I, if i were the head of some company, would not release games with lan and have half my customers gone.
Too all you people attacking pirates. Argue with this:
I am deeply disappointed in Blizzard for not having LAN, a lot of enjoyment that I personally could have had has been lost due to the feature missing. I will not buy further products from Blizzard after I stop playing SC2(which, admittedly, will probably be for quite a while still). As a paying customer I am appalled that they would value short term gain(which they have no proof that no-LAN has actually increased anyway) over long term goodwill(me and others being happy customers).
No matter where you stand on the piracy versus no-piracy issue, the fact remains that their product is worse than it would have been with LAN support, thus directly punishing their actual paying customers.
Not to mention the fact that there's no proof whatsoever that adding LAN would actually lower total sales, which is the only thing that counts in the end. Who cares if 5 million instead of 3 million pirate the game if you still have the same amount of sales but higher goodwill for the future of your company?
To sum up, I, as a paying customer, has gotten a product that is worse than it would have been with LAN. I could care fuck all about people pirating the game since I, a paying customer along with all other paying customers, is the one who is ultimately responsible for Blizzard employees being paid, and I am a little less happy than I could have been.
On June 23 2011 09:59 BroboCop wrote: im confused how putting a lan option for sc2 would lower revenue(in any sense) as i will elaborate below.
okay lets assume with the lan feature you can create any map (and we will assume no one makes recreations of the campaign as maps). So if your by yourself you can only play vs computers, which isn't much training at all seeing playing against something that gets more minerals per trip, map hacks, and can have perfect macro is never going to happen in a normal game. Now yes, you can play with buddies/family/etc, but that means they would have to bring their rig over to your house or you have a spare computer, which, seems highly unlikely as 2 people playing together over and over and over after awhile should get boring. Furthermore, how are you ever going to become better at the game if you only have a limited number of practice partners, the whole point of playing online games is for the ONLINE community. The whole point of laning is to either: have fun with friends or in off-line competitions. And when you're playing with friends, almost everyone wants to "be the best" so they have "bragging rights" so to speak. And if you want to be the best... you would need to play on a regular basis, and in most cases playing on a regular basis won't be achieved purely through playing in lans and therefore, you would need the game to play ladder in order to get better. And if you need the game, you would have to buy it. As for competitive play [i will use MLG in this example], no one is going to play unless they: are "good" such as a pro player or would just like to go to have fun (getting "owned" by a pro), but most likely, a person willing to drop $70 on an mlg ticket is already an avid player, spectator, and community-contributing individual and why would they drop $70 to get owned when they could buy the game for $50?
For example, I know 20~ people IRL that play sc2 from school etc. 15~ aren't even close to active, so I would never be able to lan with them and ontop of that, there are only 2 of us that are actually good. top master (myself) and GM (my buddy). There is only so much you can do on lan because you have to be on the same network and for "logistical reasons" i don't see people using it as the only medium for playing the game. Yes, there will be exceptions but they will be out-liers, so why worry?
Lastly, if your product isn't "pirateable" someone will just pirate something else that is free and play it. They never would pay for it in the beginning, however, with starcraft you can only accomplish so much in a LAN setting, thus if they truly "like the game" after playing with buddies for several weeks or a month they may have the sense to go out and buy it.
I would like to see a counter-argument(s) that would prove me wrong but in essence my logic is: people would have never played the game before because it costs $$ -> [assume lan function here]they like the lan which has only limited features due to the "logistics" of how lans work -> said person decides to buy the game because they want to play it more and not be limited by needing to lan.
The only forseeable problem I could see is college campuses (where a network would be fucking huge).
A pirated game wouldn't be able to run only on actual LAN. There are coutless programs that replicate a "battle.net" where pirated copies can run just fine. Take WC3 for example. I have the original copy, a few of my friends have original copies, NOONE I know has recently played on battle.net, because everyone plays on Garena, or Eurobattle, or whatever the server where piracy doesn't matter. They basically replace battle.net, specially on places where piracy is a lot more common, which is the case of Brazil, and specially China. These servers have several times more people than battle.net. They have ladders, premium memberships and basically make money on the fact that people will play cracked versions online.
So no, you don't have to be on the same network to enjoy the benefits of a cracked game, and LAN support, WC3, probally the closest example we can find to draw parallels to SC2, proves that. Blizzard's experience with the rampart piracy of WC3, it's probally the most played game in this kind of servers (not in small part because of DOTA), is probally a big reason there is no LAN in SC2.
It's depressing they actually think piracy would crush their sales when pirates usually wont buy a game regardless if they can't get it for free. Whatever, sacrifice the integrity of a competition because you think a downloaded copy=lost sale. They're essentially crapping on their PAYING CUSTOMER'S faces and saying they'd rather spend their energy fighting pirates than pleasing fans.
On June 23 2011 07:10 mdma-_- wrote: that still doesnt explain why they cant allow people to play each other in lan with the necessecity of being logged into bnet/whatever online client.
cheap excuse just to blame it on pirates tbh
Think logically. It makes perfect sense from a business standpoint. Pretty much anyone can find a way to pirate a game that has LAN just by googling it.
Whether or not a game has LAN has absolutely zero effect on whether or not it's pirated. Starcraft 2 doesn't have LAN but was heavily pirated. Modern Warfare 2 doesn't have LAN but was heavily pirated. Spore doesn't have LAN but was heavily pirated, the list is endless. Not even DRM that forces a constant connection will stop piracy (Looking at you Ubisoft), all it'll do is piss off actual customers which is exactly the wrong thing to do.
I'm pretty sure that if pirates want, they can just create an artificial battle.net the same way they created an artificial IW.net for CoD. I wonder if Blizzard even tried to be creative before dismissing it. I mean, if you're physically at a LAN-event, there must physical restrictions one can use to make sure you're not a pirate. I'm thinking about connecting authenticators via infrared or measuring the distance between both clients or providing the organizer with expensive blizzard certified self destructing hardware that emulates a LAN Battle.net.
How about DUAL SCREEN PLAY? Almost every GPU these days supports hooking up 2 screens, implementing such a feature doesn't seem too complicated and since most pros play on the lowest settings anyways, there shouldn't be any problems with the FPS.
On June 23 2011 07:10 mdma-_- wrote: that still doesnt explain why they cant allow people to play each other in lan with the necessecity of being logged into bnet/whatever online client.
cheap excuse just to blame it on pirates tbh
Think logically. It makes perfect sense from a business standpoint. Pretty much anyone can find a way to pirate a game that has LAN just by googling it.
Whether or not a game has LAN has absolutely zero effect on whether or not it's pirated. Starcraft 2 doesn't have LAN but was heavily pirated. Modern Warfare 2 doesn't have LAN but was heavily pirated. Spore doesn't have LAN but was heavily pirated, the list is endless. Not even DRM that forces a constant connection will stop piracy (Looking at you Ubisoft), all it'll do is piss of actual customers which is exactly the wrong thing to do.
You're wrong. It doesn't have absolutely no impact whatsoever, it does have an impact, and it is a factor. It just isn't the ONLY factor.
Here's how security works: You build a security system to make it sufficiently difficult for anyone to breach that they don't have the time or resources to break it, or want to bother breaking it. It is impossible to make something completely unbreakable, anyone sufficiently determined will eventually manage.
LAN makes it much easier to pirate it. Lack of LAN does not make it immune, but it makes it a lot harder. Thus, one can logically conclude, that the inclusion of LAN will increase the rate at which the game is pirated.
HoN should probably focus on making there fucking game stable instead of thinking about useless shit like this. Going to get buried alive if DOTA2 goes F2P model.
It's just a stupid excuse not to include it. They want to put 'hurdles' in front of the pirates, but it never works. Hell, it isn't even a challenge. My message to the developers, keep giving them more obstacles. You'll just give them more incentive to crack it. -_-
On June 23 2011 07:10 mdma-_- wrote: that still doesnt explain why they cant allow people to play each other in lan with the necessecity of being logged into bnet/whatever online client.
cheap excuse just to blame it on pirates tbh
Think logically. It makes perfect sense from a business standpoint. Pretty much anyone can find a way to pirate a game that has LAN just by googling it.
Whether or not a game has LAN has absolutely zero effect on whether or not it's pirated. Starcraft 2 doesn't have LAN but was heavily pirated. Modern Warfare 2 doesn't have LAN but was heavily pirated. Spore doesn't have LAN but was heavily pirated, the list is endless. Not even DRM that forces a constant connection will stop piracy (Looking at you Ubisoft), all it'll do is piss of actual customers which is exactly the wrong thing to do.
You're wrong. It doesn't have absolutely no impact whatsoever, it does have an impact, and it is a factor. It just isn't the ONLY factor.
Here's how security works: You build a security system to make it sufficiently difficult for anyone to breach that they don't have the time or resources to break it, or want to bother breaking it. It is impossible to make something completely unbreakable, anyone sufficiently determined will eventually manage.
LAN makes it much easier to pirate it. Lack of LAN does not make it immune, but it makes it a lot harder. Thus, one can logically conclude, that the inclusion of LAN will increase the rate at which the game is pirated.
As much as it provides a stumbling block, I'm still yet hear to hear of a major game that hasn't been cracked, leaving pirates playing the game and customers stuck with DRM.
Portal 2 has actually broken the 3 million sales mark despite very heavy pirating. Valve don't even consider piracy to be an issue at all.
BTW AFAIK there is already pirates playing HoN for free on Garena so, no leg to stand on for HoN developer here. Most of the Asian communities have to use Garena to even make the game playable im pretty sure.
You can pirate just about any game if you are savvy enough and have the determination to do so. This is not what removing LAN is meant to do.
Removing LAN, just like patching security holes, just makes it far harder and more inconvenient for pirates to crack and distribute the game. Similar to general internet security, there is no guaranteed way to secure any software completely from another active individual.
The point here is nullifying the various routes pirates have and LAN is a wide open target for potential pirates. I still have trouble understanding how people can be so nonchalant about most piracy.
On June 23 2011 07:10 mdma-_- wrote: that still doesnt explain why they cant allow people to play each other in lan with the necessecity of being logged into bnet/whatever online client.
cheap excuse just to blame it on pirates tbh
Think logically. It makes perfect sense from a business standpoint. Pretty much anyone can find a way to pirate a game that has LAN just by googling it.
Whether or not a game has LAN has absolutely zero effect on whether or not it's pirated. Starcraft 2 doesn't have LAN but was heavily pirated. Modern Warfare 2 doesn't have LAN but was heavily pirated. Spore doesn't have LAN but was heavily pirated, the list is endless. Not even DRM that forces a constant connection will stop piracy (Looking at you Ubisoft), all it'll do is piss off actual customers which is exactly the wrong thing to do.
I don´t think you get the full picture. With LAN support you can pirate the game and play online vs anyone in the world by using a simple program, that´s what happened with Warcraft 3 with the program hamachi. Without LAN you can only pirate the singleplayer portion of the game.
I don´t support Blizzard's decision of not having LAN but I can see their reasoning behind it. I really believe and hope that not supporting LAN will come back to bite them in the ass in the end. The only reason why they can get away with doing it is because there is no equally good game with LAN support to compete with SCII. If there was, then surely that game would have a huge advantage because it has LAN support, it may get pirated more but me as a paying customer would definitely buy it over a game with no LAN support.
The sad truth is probably that the average buyer of SCII has no clue what LAN is though, we live in a world of ignorant people. One doesn´t have to look further than the COD phenomenon to realize this sad truth, the masses buy anything with a cool marketing campaign.
On June 23 2011 07:10 mdma-_- wrote: that still doesnt explain why they cant allow people to play each other in lan with the necessecity of being logged into bnet/whatever online client.
cheap excuse just to blame it on pirates tbh
Think logically. It makes perfect sense from a business standpoint. Pretty much anyone can find a way to pirate a game that has LAN just by googling it.
Whether or not a game has LAN has absolutely zero effect on whether or not it's pirated. Starcraft 2 doesn't have LAN but was heavily pirated. Modern Warfare 2 doesn't have LAN but was heavily pirated. Spore doesn't have LAN but was heavily pirated, the list is endless. Not even DRM that forces a constant connection will stop piracy (Looking at you Ubisoft), all it'll do is piss of actual customers which is exactly the wrong thing to do.
You're wrong. It doesn't have absolutely no impact whatsoever, it does have an impact, and it is a factor. It just isn't the ONLY factor.
Here's how security works: You build a security system to make it sufficiently difficult for anyone to breach that they don't have the time or resources to break it, or want to bother breaking it. It is impossible to make something completely unbreakable, anyone sufficiently determined will eventually manage.
LAN makes it much easier to pirate it. Lack of LAN does not make it immune, but it makes it a lot harder. Thus, one can logically conclude, that the inclusion of LAN will increase the rate at which the game is pirated.
The impact lies upon the hackers who crack the game, and not the downloaders. As a downloader, it makes no difference to me how the game was cracked, all I have to do is search up the torrent and then I get to play the game. It does not reduce the number of people pirating the game because it has absolutely no impact on the downloaders.
On June 23 2011 07:10 mdma-_- wrote: that still doesnt explain why they cant allow people to play each other in lan with the necessecity of being logged into bnet/whatever online client.
cheap excuse just to blame it on pirates tbh
Think logically. It makes perfect sense from a business standpoint. Pretty much anyone can find a way to pirate a game that has LAN just by googling it.
Whether or not a game has LAN has absolutely zero effect on whether or not it's pirated. Starcraft 2 doesn't have LAN but was heavily pirated. Modern Warfare 2 doesn't have LAN but was heavily pirated. Spore doesn't have LAN but was heavily pirated, the list is endless. Not even DRM that forces a constant connection will stop piracy (Looking at you Ubisoft), all it'll do is piss of actual customers which is exactly the wrong thing to do.
You're wrong. It doesn't have absolutely no impact whatsoever, it does have an impact, and it is a factor. It just isn't the ONLY factor.
Here's how security works: You build a security system to make it sufficiently difficult for anyone to breach that they don't have the time or resources to break it, or want to bother breaking it. It is impossible to make something completely unbreakable, anyone sufficiently determined will eventually manage.
LAN makes it much easier to pirate it. Lack of LAN does not make it immune, but it makes it a lot harder. Thus, one can logically conclude, that the inclusion of LAN will increase the rate at which the game is pirated.
As much as it provides a stumbling block, I'm still yet hear to hear of a major game that hasn't been cracked, leaving pirates playing the game and customers stuck with DRM.
Portal 2 has actually broken the 3 million sales mark despite very heavy pirating. Valve don't even consider piracy to be an issue at all.
If they didn't consider it an issue they wouldn't force you to be connected to steam to play any single player game you own.
I lost internet for a week and was unable to play any steam games at all. It would try to log in, tell me to check my internet, then close.
Didn't our good friend Bobby Kotick say that e-sports games like SC2 are barely worth it due to the cost of running and maintaining the game? Why is a desperate need for total control the best way to make money? by all means give the damn game to Kespa or ICCUP and charge whatever fees you can get with zero maintenance.
On June 23 2011 09:21 masterbreti wrote: Just for reference. Right now over 5k people are downloading sc2 and pirating it. at 50 a peice. There is something like 300,000 in lost sales just for today. assuming on average sc2 get pirated the same amount for the last 6 months and for the entire 2011.
That means in 2011 alone. sc2 was pirated and lost blizz more than 3.6 million. Thats a huge amount fo money.
I think in 2010 the most pirated gameswas sc2 with like 1.2 million pirated it. Thats hundreds of millions of dollars lost.
You're a fool, not everyone that pirated the game was going to buy it in the first place.
People keep up bringing this up, but I do not see how it makes it better. It is the equivalent argument to saying that not everyone that drinks and drives will murder someone. It happens often enough.
Excuse me sir, which arguing college did you go to? Because they have done some sterling work...
How is the analogy poor? Illegally downloading a game and drunk driving are both illegal, and both of them have the possibility to cause harm. One by potential lost sales, and the other by injury or death. People not against piracy are saying that not all pirates would have purchased anyway, and I make the analogy that not all drunk driving results in death. This doesn't change that more drunk driving usually leads to more death, and more pirating will mean a greater number of people that might have bought it. Also, both are illegal.
Explain to me where the analogy fails.
Because the person you were quoting was talking about the "I think in 2010 the most pirated gameswas sc2 with like 1.2 million pirated it. Thats hundreds of millions of dollars lost" line, specifically.
Nobody said it made it better, just that it made the conclusion obviously wrong. Also equating people getting killed in car accidents to blizzard not getting money, thats not really the best of analogies.
I don't care about who Onslaught was quoting, the argument he made is one seen in this entire thread and it is a flawed argument. The conclusion is also not wrong generally, just specifically. If out of 1000 games only 20 are real lost sales, those are still 20 lost sales. The number doesn't change the reality of the crime.
I also don't think you understand what an analogy is. Just because you interpret dieing in a car accident to be worse than Blizzard losing money, does not make it a poor analogy. The analogy serves to clarify. The fact that you see an issue with drunk driving, but not pirating and stealing someone's stuff, just serves to illustrate something about your personal morals, not the analogy as a whole.
I happen to agree that drunk driving is worse, by the way, I just don't then make the conclusion that pirating is suddenly ok because something worse exists. The analogy works because it illustrates that both are wrong due to bad consequences that follow them. The percentage of bad consequences to actions does not change how good or bad those actions are. They are separate issues.
A flawed argument for what? The number of people pirating the game =/= the number of lost sales. Nobody is saying people are pirating the game and also paying for it, therefore all the other piracy is ok.
An analogy is comparing 2 similiar circumstances. I dont see that these situations are that similiar, its like a wee version of godwins law. The fact that I notice the difference of scale between piracy and manslaughter shows something about my perspective. At no point did I endorse piracy for the sake of not paying for things. Over a hundred games on steam, shelves of games and dvd's, shelves of books, I have no issue with paying for things.
At no point did I say that piracy is ok because something worse exists.
My point was that the person Onslaught quoted made an estimate of lost sales based on number of times SC2 has been pirated. Onslaught responded with the idea that not all pirates are lost sales, and no other points. And I have seen other people saying that not all pirates are lost sales as an idea that companies shouldn't worry about pirating. My point was that this argument was flawed because some pirating is lost sales.
I already explained how the situations are similar. Here I will explain it again. Drunk driving and pirating are [negative actions]. Injury from a car crash and lost sales are [negative result]. The situation is that not all [negative action] will lead to [negative result], but some of the time [negative action] DOES lead to [negative result]. I am arguing that because it happens some of the time, we should be trying to curb [negative action], not ignore it because it happens all the time. The analogy between the two works even better because both actions are illegal, and I would also argue immoral under a standard set of societal morals. Just because one negative action is worse than another, why would that make it a poor analogy?
Fair enough, I would have set your post out as a response to someone who actually was making that claim then. Ive often seen Onslaughts post as a response to MAFIAA studies that show little to no objectivity, and frankly im still pissed about the DEA (Digital Economy Act) that got passed in the UK on the back of a lot of false figures.
If I pirate the game now, having already paid for it, I do not run the risk of losing Blizzard a sale. However, there is no real scenario where drink driving is without the risk of manslaughter. So not all pirating is [negative action] whereas all drink driving is.
On June 23 2011 07:10 mdma-_- wrote: that still doesnt explain why they cant allow people to play each other in lan with the necessecity of being logged into bnet/whatever online client.
cheap excuse just to blame it on pirates tbh
Think logically. It makes perfect sense from a business standpoint. Pretty much anyone can find a way to pirate a game that has LAN just by googling it.
Whether or not a game has LAN has absolutely zero effect on whether or not it's pirated. Starcraft 2 doesn't have LAN but was heavily pirated. Modern Warfare 2 doesn't have LAN but was heavily pirated. Spore doesn't have LAN but was heavily pirated, the list is endless. Not even DRM that forces a constant connection will stop piracy (Looking at you Ubisoft), all it'll do is piss of actual customers which is exactly the wrong thing to do.
You're wrong. It doesn't have absolutely no impact whatsoever, it does have an impact, and it is a factor. It just isn't the ONLY factor.
Here's how security works: You build a security system to make it sufficiently difficult for anyone to breach that they don't have the time or resources to break it, or want to bother breaking it. It is impossible to make something completely unbreakable, anyone sufficiently determined will eventually manage.
LAN makes it much easier to pirate it. Lack of LAN does not make it immune, but it makes it a lot harder. Thus, one can logically conclude, that the inclusion of LAN will increase the rate at which the game is pirated.
As much as it provides a stumbling block, I'm still yet hear to hear of a major game that hasn't been cracked, leaving pirates playing the game and customers stuck with DRM.
Portal 2 has actually broken the 3 million sales mark despite very heavy pirating. Valve don't even consider piracy to be an issue at all.
Starcraft 2 multiplayer. HoN? Maybe not major, but it definatelly is quite famous.
The single player being cracked may not actually be that bad, because a huge part of the players plays for the multiplayer, so someone that really likes the single players is very encouraged to buy the game.
If the multiplayer was cracked, though, not only would they lose that incentive, it could become another WC3.
If people are pirating a multiplayer game and using the LAN to form their own servers it pretty much means the developers failed at creating a good online game system. Battle.net 2.0 has an excellent matchmaking system, and a pretty damn good custom game system. There would be extremely little incentive for people to pirate SC2 to play on a pirate battle.net realm, which would have a smaller playerbase and less support.
People hear about LAN and piracy here and they think ICCup. ICCup was the result of SC1's nonexistent matchmaking and terrible ladder system. The people on ICCup are competitive players looking for something that the game does not provide them. This is not true for SC2.
Piracy is a bigger concern for companies creating single player games, whose players have no incentive to actually buy the game. Online achievements or DRM that forces people to remain connected to the internet is an attempt to create incentives to actually buy the game.
Another incentive is cost, but for most pirates, the only acceptable cost is 0. So why change a game for people who wouldn't buy it anyway? Make the game good so people will want to buy it, and they will.
The idea that including LAN is dooming your game to financial failure is absurd. The idea that not having LAN in SC2 has created a single extra sale is absurd. If Blizzard truly cared about piracy, they would have put more draconian measures on the single player, which was available for piracy on the first day of release (you can play it offline). They could have taken a page from ubisoft and made people stay connected to battle.net to play the campaign. Assassin's creed 2 took forever to crack, and even then it was a convoluted system.
Piracy is simply being used as a scapegoat so that developers can maintain total executive control over their game and keep it open for any future DLC opportunities.
On June 23 2011 07:10 mdma-_- wrote: that still doesnt explain why they cant allow people to play each other in lan with the necessecity of being logged into bnet/whatever online client.
cheap excuse just to blame it on pirates tbh
Think logically. It makes perfect sense from a business standpoint. Pretty much anyone can find a way to pirate a game that has LAN just by googling it.
Whether or not a game has LAN has absolutely zero effect on whether or not it's pirated. Starcraft 2 doesn't have LAN but was heavily pirated. Modern Warfare 2 doesn't have LAN but was heavily pirated. Spore doesn't have LAN but was heavily pirated, the list is endless. Not even DRM that forces a constant connection will stop piracy (Looking at you Ubisoft), all it'll do is piss of actual customers which is exactly the wrong thing to do.
You're wrong. It doesn't have absolutely no impact whatsoever, it does have an impact, and it is a factor. It just isn't the ONLY factor.
Here's how security works: You build a security system to make it sufficiently difficult for anyone to breach that they don't have the time or resources to break it, or want to bother breaking it. It is impossible to make something completely unbreakable, anyone sufficiently determined will eventually manage.
LAN makes it much easier to pirate it. Lack of LAN does not make it immune, but it makes it a lot harder. Thus, one can logically conclude, that the inclusion of LAN will increase the rate at which the game is pirated.
As much as it provides a stumbling block, I'm still yet hear to hear of a major game that hasn't been cracked, leaving pirates playing the game and customers stuck with DRM.
Portal 2 has actually broken the 3 million sales mark despite very heavy pirating. Valve don't even consider piracy to be an issue at all.
Starcraft 2 multiplayer. HoN? Maybe not major, but it definatelly is quite famous.
The single player being cracked may not actually be that bad, because a huge part of the players plays for the multiplayer, so someone that really likes the single players is very encouraged to buy the game.
If the multiplayer was cracked, though, not only would they lose that incentive, it could become another WC3.
That's the most hilarious thing I've read in this entire thread. It could become another WC3, like that's a bad thing? Despite all the piracy and garena bullshit that made blizzard go all butthurt, wikipedia has the following to say about WC3: "The game proved to be a best seller and one of the most anticipated and popular computer game releases ever, with 4.5 million units shipped to retail stores and over one million units sold within a month."
Which game developer in their right mind wouldn't want their game to be like WC3?
On June 23 2011 07:10 mdma-_- wrote: that still doesnt explain why they cant allow people to play each other in lan with the necessecity of being logged into bnet/whatever online client.
cheap excuse just to blame it on pirates tbh
Think logically. It makes perfect sense from a business standpoint. Pretty much anyone can find a way to pirate a game that has LAN just by googling it.
Whether or not a game has LAN has absolutely zero effect on whether or not it's pirated. Starcraft 2 doesn't have LAN but was heavily pirated. Modern Warfare 2 doesn't have LAN but was heavily pirated. Spore doesn't have LAN but was heavily pirated, the list is endless. Not even DRM that forces a constant connection will stop piracy (Looking at you Ubisoft), all it'll do is piss of actual customers which is exactly the wrong thing to do.
You're wrong. It doesn't have absolutely no impact whatsoever, it does have an impact, and it is a factor. It just isn't the ONLY factor.
Here's how security works: You build a security system to make it sufficiently difficult for anyone to breach that they don't have the time or resources to break it, or want to bother breaking it. It is impossible to make something completely unbreakable, anyone sufficiently determined will eventually manage.
LAN makes it much easier to pirate it. Lack of LAN does not make it immune, but it makes it a lot harder. Thus, one can logically conclude, that the inclusion of LAN will increase the rate at which the game is pirated.
As much as it provides a stumbling block, I'm still yet hear to hear of a major game that hasn't been cracked, leaving pirates playing the game and customers stuck with DRM.
Portal 2 has actually broken the 3 million sales mark despite very heavy pirating. Valve don't even consider piracy to be an issue at all.
Starcraft 2 multiplayer. HoN? Maybe not major, but it definatelly is quite famous.
The single player being cracked may not actually be that bad, because a huge part of the players plays for the multiplayer, so someone that really likes the single players is very encouraged to buy the game.
If the multiplayer was cracked, though, not only would they lose that incentive, it could become another WC3.
Warcraft 3 sold quite a number of millions of copies though.
On June 23 2011 09:21 masterbreti wrote: Just for reference. Right now over 5k people are downloading sc2 and pirating it. at 50 a peice. There is something like 300,000 in lost sales just for today. assuming on average sc2 get pirated the same amount for the last 6 months and for the entire 2011.
That means in 2011 alone. sc2 was pirated and lost blizz more than 3.6 million. Thats a huge amount fo money.
I think in 2010 the most pirated gameswas sc2 with like 1.2 million pirated it. Thats hundreds of millions of dollars lost.
You're a fool, not everyone that pirated the game was going to buy it in the first place.
People keep up bringing this up, but I do not see how it makes it better. It is the equivalent argument to saying that not everyone that drinks and drives will murder someone. It happens often enough.
Excuse me sir, which arguing college did you go to? Because they have done some sterling work...
How is the analogy poor? Illegally downloading a game and drunk driving are both illegal, and both of them have the possibility to cause harm. One by potential lost sales, and the other by injury or death. People not against piracy are saying that not all pirates would have purchased anyway, and I make the analogy that not all drunk driving results in death. This doesn't change that more drunk driving usually leads to more death, and more pirating will mean a greater number of people that might have bought it. Also, both are illegal.
Explain to me where the analogy fails.
Because the person you were quoting was talking about the "I think in 2010 the most pirated gameswas sc2 with like 1.2 million pirated it. Thats hundreds of millions of dollars lost" line, specifically.
Nobody said it made it better, just that it made the conclusion obviously wrong. Also equating people getting killed in car accidents to blizzard not getting money, thats not really the best of analogies.
I don't care about who Onslaught was quoting, the argument he made is one seen in this entire thread and it is a flawed argument. The conclusion is also not wrong generally, just specifically. If out of 1000 games only 20 are real lost sales, those are still 20 lost sales. The number doesn't change the reality of the crime.
I also don't think you understand what an analogy is. Just because you interpret dieing in a car accident to be worse than Blizzard losing money, does not make it a poor analogy. The analogy serves to clarify. The fact that you see an issue with drunk driving, but not pirating and stealing someone's stuff, just serves to illustrate something about your personal morals, not the analogy as a whole.
I happen to agree that drunk driving is worse, by the way, I just don't then make the conclusion that pirating is suddenly ok because something worse exists. The analogy works because it illustrates that both are wrong due to bad consequences that follow them. The percentage of bad consequences to actions does not change how good or bad those actions are. They are separate issues.
A flawed argument for what? The number of people pirating the game =/= the number of lost sales. Nobody is saying people are pirating the game and also paying for it, therefore all the other piracy is ok.
An analogy is comparing 2 similiar circumstances. I dont see that these situations are that similiar, its like a wee version of godwins law. The fact that I notice the difference of scale between piracy and manslaughter shows something about my perspective. At no point did I endorse piracy for the sake of not paying for things. Over a hundred games on steam, shelves of games and dvd's, shelves of books, I have no issue with paying for things.
At no point did I say that piracy is ok because something worse exists.
My point was that the person Onslaught quoted made an estimate of lost sales based on number of times SC2 has been pirated. Onslaught responded with the idea that not all pirates are lost sales, and no other points. And I have seen other people saying that not all pirates are lost sales as an idea that companies shouldn't worry about pirating. My point was that this argument was flawed because some pirating is lost sales.
I already explained how the situations are similar. Here I will explain it again. Drunk driving and pirating are [negative actions]. Injury from a car crash and lost sales are [negative result]. The situation is that not all [negative action] will lead to [negative result], but some of the time [negative action] DOES lead to [negative result]. I am arguing that because it happens some of the time, we should be trying to curb [negative action], not ignore it because it happens all the time. The analogy between the two works even better because both actions are illegal, and I would also argue immoral under a standard set of societal morals. Just because one negative action is worse than another, why would that make it a poor analogy?
Fair enough, I would have set your post out as a response to someone who actually was making that claim then. Ive often seen Onslaughts post as a response to MAFIAA studies that show little to no objectivity, and frankly im still pissed about the DEA (Digital Economy Act) that got passed in the UK on the back of a lot of false figures.
If I pirate the game now, having already paid for it, I do not run the risk of losing Blizzard a sale. However, there is no real scenario where drink driving is without the risk of manslaughter. So not all pirating is [negative action] whereas all drink driving is.
I finally understood your last point. That is true. I am glad all of the issues between you and I are resolved at least ^_^.
On June 23 2011 10:40 Gheed wrote: If people are pirating a multiplayer game and using the LAN to form their own servers it pretty much means the developers failed at creating a good online game system. Battle.net 2.0 has an excellent matchmaking system, and a pretty damn good custom game system. There would be extremely little incentive for people to pirate SC2 to play on a pirate battle.net realm, which would have a smaller playerbase and less support.
People hear about LAN and piracy here and they think ICCup. ICCup was the result of SC1's nonexistent matchmaking and terrible ladder system. The people on ICCup are competitive players looking for something that the game does not provide them. This is not true for SC2.
Piracy is a bigger concern for companies creating single player games, whose players have no incentive to actually buy the game. Online achievements or DRM that forces people to remain connected to the internet is an attempt to create incentives to actually buy the game.
Another incentive is cost, but for most pirates, the only acceptable cost is 0. So why change a game for people who wouldn't buy it anyway? Make the game good so people will want to buy it, and they will.
The idea that including LAN is dooming your game to financial failure is absurd. The idea that not having LAN in SC2 has created a single extra sale is absurd. If Blizzard truly cared about piracy, they would have put more draconian measures on the single player, which was available for piracy on the first day of release (you can play it offline). They could have taken a page from ubisoft and made people stay connected to battle.net to play the campaign. Assassin's creed 2 took forever to crack, and even then it was a convoluted system.
Piracy is simply being used as a scapegoat so that developers can maintain total executive control over their game and keep it open for any future DLC opportunities.
Good point, if blizzard bnet was the best client available then there wouldnt be bunch of servers like ICCUP, there are multiple threads with good suggestions on how to improve bnet, but blizzard seems to not care.
On June 23 2011 10:40 Gheed wrote: If people are pirating a multiplayer game and using the LAN to form their own servers it pretty much means the developers failed at creating a good online game system. Battle.net 2.0 has an excellent matchmaking system, and a pretty damn good custom game system. There would be extremely little incentive for people to pirate SC2 to play on a pirate battle.net realm, which would have a smaller playerbase and less support.
People hear about LAN and piracy here and they think ICCup. ICCup was the result of SC1's nonexistent matchmaking and terrible ladder system. The people on ICCup are competitive players looking for something that the game does not provide them. This is not true for SC2.
Piracy is a bigger concern for companies creating single player games, whose players have no incentive to actually buy the game. Online achievements or DRM that forces people to remain connected to the internet is an attempt to create incentives to actually buy the game.
Another incentive is cost, but for most pirates, the only acceptable cost is 0. So why change a game for people who wouldn't buy it anyway? Make the game good so people will want to buy it, and they will.
The idea that including LAN is dooming your game to financial failure is absurd. The idea that not having LAN in SC2 has created a single extra sale is absurd. If Blizzard truly cared about piracy, they would have put more draconian measures on the single player, which was available for piracy on the first day of release (you can play it offline). They could have taken a page from ubisoft and made people stay connected to battle.net to play the campaign. Assassin's creed 2 took forever to crack, and even then it was a convoluted system.
Piracy is simply being used as a scapegoat so that developers can maintain total executive control over their game and keep it open for any future DLC opportunities.
Yeah, that decision cost Ubisoft, however insignificantly. I havent bought a Ubisoft game since AC, given that it was a poorly ported drm laden insult.
I also would have thought that bnet was enough added value to make lan play for anything not a tournament way too much effort. I cant imagine anyone who could afford the game choosing not to use an automatching system over the price of the game.
On June 23 2011 07:10 mdma-_- wrote: that still doesnt explain why they cant allow people to play each other in lan with the necessecity of being logged into bnet/whatever online client.
cheap excuse just to blame it on pirates tbh
Think logically. It makes perfect sense from a business standpoint. Pretty much anyone can find a way to pirate a game that has LAN just by googling it.
Whether or not a game has LAN has absolutely zero effect on whether or not it's pirated. Starcraft 2 doesn't have LAN but was heavily pirated. Modern Warfare 2 doesn't have LAN but was heavily pirated. Spore doesn't have LAN but was heavily pirated, the list is endless. Not even DRM that forces a constant connection will stop piracy (Looking at you Ubisoft), all it'll do is piss of actual customers which is exactly the wrong thing to do.
You're wrong. It doesn't have absolutely no impact whatsoever, it does have an impact, and it is a factor. It just isn't the ONLY factor.
Here's how security works: You build a security system to make it sufficiently difficult for anyone to breach that they don't have the time or resources to break it, or want to bother breaking it. It is impossible to make something completely unbreakable, anyone sufficiently determined will eventually manage.
LAN makes it much easier to pirate it. Lack of LAN does not make it immune, but it makes it a lot harder. Thus, one can logically conclude, that the inclusion of LAN will increase the rate at which the game is pirated.
As much as it provides a stumbling block, I'm still yet hear to hear of a major game that hasn't been cracked, leaving pirates playing the game and customers stuck with DRM.
Portal 2 has actually broken the 3 million sales mark despite very heavy pirating. Valve don't even consider piracy to be an issue at all.
Starcraft 2 multiplayer. HoN? Maybe not major, but it definatelly is quite famous.
The single player being cracked may not actually be that bad, because a huge part of the players plays for the multiplayer, so someone that really likes the single players is very encouraged to buy the game.
If the multiplayer was cracked, though, not only would they lose that incentive, it could become another WC3.
Warcraft 3 sold quite a number of millions of copies though.
You're a fool, not everyone that pirated the game was going to buy it in the first place.
People keep up bringing this up, but I do not see how it makes it better. It is the equivalent argument to saying that not everyone that drinks and drives will murder someone. It happens often enough.
Excuse me sir, which arguing college did you go to? Because they have done some sterling work...
How is the analogy poor? Illegally downloading a game and drunk driving are both illegal, and both of them have the possibility to cause harm. One by potential lost sales, and the other by injury or death. People not against piracy are saying that not all pirates would have purchased anyway, and I make the analogy that not all drunk driving results in death. This doesn't change that more drunk driving usually leads to more death, and more pirating will mean a greater number of people that might have bought it. Also, both are illegal.
Explain to me where the analogy fails.
Because the person you were quoting was talking about the "I think in 2010 the most pirated gameswas sc2 with like 1.2 million pirated it. Thats hundreds of millions of dollars lost" line, specifically.
Nobody said it made it better, just that it made the conclusion obviously wrong. Also equating people getting killed in car accidents to blizzard not getting money, thats not really the best of analogies.
I don't care about who Onslaught was quoting, the argument he made is one seen in this entire thread and it is a flawed argument. The conclusion is also not wrong generally, just specifically. If out of 1000 games only 20 are real lost sales, those are still 20 lost sales. The number doesn't change the reality of the crime.
I also don't think you understand what an analogy is. Just because you interpret dieing in a car accident to be worse than Blizzard losing money, does not make it a poor analogy. The analogy serves to clarify. The fact that you see an issue with drunk driving, but not pirating and stealing someone's stuff, just serves to illustrate something about your personal morals, not the analogy as a whole.
I happen to agree that drunk driving is worse, by the way, I just don't then make the conclusion that pirating is suddenly ok because something worse exists. The analogy works because it illustrates that both are wrong due to bad consequences that follow them. The percentage of bad consequences to actions does not change how good or bad those actions are. They are separate issues.
A flawed argument for what? The number of people pirating the game =/= the number of lost sales. Nobody is saying people are pirating the game and also paying for it, therefore all the other piracy is ok.
An analogy is comparing 2 similiar circumstances. I dont see that these situations are that similiar, its like a wee version of godwins law. The fact that I notice the difference of scale between piracy and manslaughter shows something about my perspective. At no point did I endorse piracy for the sake of not paying for things. Over a hundred games on steam, shelves of games and dvd's, shelves of books, I have no issue with paying for things.
At no point did I say that piracy is ok because something worse exists.
My point was that the person Onslaught quoted made an estimate of lost sales based on number of times SC2 has been pirated. Onslaught responded with the idea that not all pirates are lost sales, and no other points. And I have seen other people saying that not all pirates are lost sales as an idea that companies shouldn't worry about pirating. My point was that this argument was flawed because some pirating is lost sales.
I already explained how the situations are similar. Here I will explain it again. Drunk driving and pirating are [negative actions]. Injury from a car crash and lost sales are [negative result]. The situation is that not all [negative action] will lead to [negative result], but some of the time [negative action] DOES lead to [negative result]. I am arguing that because it happens some of the time, we should be trying to curb [negative action], not ignore it because it happens all the time. The analogy between the two works even better because both actions are illegal, and I would also argue immoral under a standard set of societal morals. Just because one negative action is worse than another, why would that make it a poor analogy?
Fair enough, I would have set your post out as a response to someone who actually was making that claim then. Ive often seen Onslaughts post as a response to MAFIAA studies that show little to no objectivity, and frankly im still pissed about the DEA (Digital Economy Act) that got passed in the UK on the back of a lot of false figures.
If I pirate the game now, having already paid for it, I do not run the risk of losing Blizzard a sale. However, there is no real scenario where drink driving is without the risk of manslaughter. So not all pirating is [negative action] whereas all drink driving is.
I finally understood your last point. That is true. I am glad all of the issues between you and I are resolved at least ^_^.
Agreed, best argument Ive had in a while. Although as far as I can tell, we were actually arguing from a pretty similiar point :D
On June 23 2011 07:10 mdma-_- wrote: that still doesnt explain why they cant allow people to play each other in lan with the necessecity of being logged into bnet/whatever online client.
cheap excuse just to blame it on pirates tbh
Think logically. It makes perfect sense from a business standpoint. Pretty much anyone can find a way to pirate a game that has LAN just by googling it.
Whether or not a game has LAN has absolutely zero effect on whether or not it's pirated. Starcraft 2 doesn't have LAN but was heavily pirated. Modern Warfare 2 doesn't have LAN but was heavily pirated. Spore doesn't have LAN but was heavily pirated, the list is endless. Not even DRM that forces a constant connection will stop piracy (Looking at you Ubisoft), all it'll do is piss of actual customers which is exactly the wrong thing to do.
You're wrong. It doesn't have absolutely no impact whatsoever, it does have an impact, and it is a factor. It just isn't the ONLY factor.
Here's how security works: You build a security system to make it sufficiently difficult for anyone to breach that they don't have the time or resources to break it, or want to bother breaking it. It is impossible to make something completely unbreakable, anyone sufficiently determined will eventually manage.
LAN makes it much easier to pirate it. Lack of LAN does not make it immune, but it makes it a lot harder. Thus, one can logically conclude, that the inclusion of LAN will increase the rate at which the game is pirated.
As much as it provides a stumbling block, I'm still yet hear to hear of a major game that hasn't been cracked, leaving pirates playing the game and customers stuck with DRM.
Portal 2 has actually broken the 3 million sales mark despite very heavy pirating. Valve don't even consider piracy to be an issue at all.
Starcraft 2 multiplayer. HoN? Maybe not major, but it definatelly is quite famous.
The single player being cracked may not actually be that bad, because a huge part of the players plays for the multiplayer, so someone that really likes the single players is very encouraged to buy the game.
If the multiplayer was cracked, though, not only would they lose that incentive, it could become another WC3.
Warcraft 3 sold quite a number of millions of copies though.
But not because of LAN.
Your point? Unless you are claiming that removing LAN would have increased sales(which I believe is ludicrous at best) you have none.
Buuuhuuu, pirates ruined our shit, pirates are the reason we're not making as much money as we would.
Grow the fuck up developers. Music and movie-industry has been saying the same shit for years, but looking at the numbers it turns out they're lying. They're making money as never before, despite not keeping up with the wishes of customers in terms of prices and ways of selling their merchandice.
Now, there are ofcourse diffferences when it comes to games, but are there good games out there that didn't make money? I don't really see an issue here, good games -will- sell.
I'd buy any good game. As an example, I bought Morrowind and I didn't buy Oblivion.
See how that work developers? Get your shit straight and your games will be paid for. Stop making boring fps-games or shitty games in general and stop blaming your lack of creativity and skill on pirates, it just doesn't work.
If they didn't believe piracy was an issue then lan would be implemented.. I'm fairly certain that the companies have more insight,knowledge and stats on the situation then most the people here trying to act smart and call BS.
On June 23 2011 10:21 Alsn wrote: Too all you people attacking pirates. Argue with this:
I am deeply disappointed in Blizzard for not having LAN, a lot of enjoyment that I personally could have had has been lost due to the feature missing. I will not buy further products from Blizzard after I stop playing SC2(which, admittedly, will probably be for quite a while still). As a paying customer I am appalled that they would value short term gain(which they have no proof that no-LAN has actually increased anyway) over long term goodwill(me and others being happy customers).
No matter where you stand on the piracy versus no-piracy issue, the fact remains that their product is worse than it would have been with LAN support, thus directly punishing their actual paying customers.
Not to mention the fact that there's no proof whatsoever that adding LAN would actually lower total sales, which is the only thing that counts in the end. Who cares if 5 million instead of 3 million pirate the game if you still have the same amount of sales but higher goodwill for the future of your company?
To sum up, I, as a paying customer, has gotten a product that is worse than it would have been with LAN. I could care fuck all about people pirating the game since I, a paying customer along with all other paying customers, is the one who is ultimately responsible for Blizzard employees being paid, and I am a little less happy than I could have been.
Stop being melodramatic. For you and 99% of all other players, LAN has no effect. LAN would be optimal for tournaments, but Battle.net gets the job done.
All of you people complaining about being a 'paying customer' and suffering because of pirates are rightfully mad, but at the wrong people. You should be mad at pirates for causing this. Or do you go to the airport and bitch and moan about going through airport security because you aren't a terrorist?
On June 23 2011 10:36 TheLink wrote: Didn't our good friend Bobby Kotick say that e-sports games like SC2 are barely worth it due to the cost of running and maintaining the game? Why is a desperate need for total control the best way to make money? by all means give the damn game to Kespa or ICCUP and charge whatever fees you can get with zero maintenance.
Yes he did. That's why it is best to outsource it and cut cost.
There comes a time when developers stop supporting their products. The longevity of B.Net is an exceptional case and products on the old B.Net get updated/patched rarely, but Blizzard still supports it. B.Net 2.0 costs a ton to run and it will only get worse with every new release. SC2 will go at the back of the list like every other game they've made.
The best features were always made through third parties. The community knows best. Once you put the product into our hands we find ways to improve and enhance the experience. It is what we do and we're quite good at it.
On June 23 2011 10:52 Indar wrote: If they didn't believe piracy was an issue then lan would be implemented.. I'm fairly certain that the companies have more insight,knowledge and stats on the situation then most the people here trying to act smart and call BS.
They dont have more insight, they simply look at the existence of piracy as the only real reason that they could be having declining sales which is incredibly arrogant. How many times would a company say, "you know...we didnt sell well because we made a shitty product and didnt genuinely try to make a game our fans would like." They always point to piracy because it acquits them of all blame. It's never the developer's fault, they're NEVER the the culprit but always a victim in their eyes.
On June 23 2011 10:58 starcraft911 wrote: Unfortunately it's true. Games that require an account to be logged in like sc2 are proven by statistical evidence to be pirated less.
What statistics can't tell you is how gamers feel about a game they've waited 12 years for having no basic LAN function. I personally felt like Blizzard were to a lesser extent emotionally blackmailing me into online only play.
On June 23 2011 10:58 starcraft911 wrote: Unfortunately it's true. Games that require an account to be logged in like sc2 are proven by statistical evidence to be pirated less.
That is true but the real question you should ask is would they sell less with LAN support? They would be pirated more but perhaps sell better aswell, it´s difficult to say.
On June 23 2011 10:21 Alsn wrote: Too all you people attacking pirates. Argue with this:
I am deeply disappointed in Blizzard for not having LAN, a lot of enjoyment that I personally could have had has been lost due to the feature missing. I will not buy further products from Blizzard after I stop playing SC2(which, admittedly, will probably be for quite a while still). As a paying customer I am appalled that they would value short term gain(which they have no proof that no-LAN has actually increased anyway) over long term goodwill(me and others being happy customers).
No matter where you stand on the piracy versus no-piracy issue, the fact remains that their product is worse than it would have been with LAN support, thus directly punishing their actual paying customers.
Not to mention the fact that there's no proof whatsoever that adding LAN would actually lower total sales, which is the only thing that counts in the end. Who cares if 5 million instead of 3 million pirate the game if you still have the same amount of sales but higher goodwill for the future of your company?
To sum up, I, as a paying customer, has gotten a product that is worse than it would have been with LAN. I could care fuck all about people pirating the game since I, a paying customer along with all other paying customers, is the one who is ultimately responsible for Blizzard employees being paid, and I am a little less happy than I could have been.
Stop being melodramatic. For you and 99% of all other players, LAN has no effect. LAN would be optimal for tournaments, but Battle.net gets the job done.
All of you people complaining about being a 'paying customer' and suffering because of pirates are rightfully mad, but at the wrong people. You should be mad at pirates for causing this. Or do you go to the airport and bitch and moan about going through airport security because you aren't a terrorist?
Who gave you permission to speak for me? LAN has an effect, me and my friends have LAN parties at a location where there is no internet connection, SC2 missing this feature has made it so that we can't use that location for our LAN parties. Thus, a missing LAN function has a direct impact of my enjoyment of the product and that's just one(out of many) examples. Get off your high horse claiming it has no effect when it most certainly does.
Everyone who watched MLG Dallas was disappointed while if LAN was possible, they wouldn't have been. Everyone who watched IEM Cologne was disappointed because a great game ended in a disconnect. There is no way that you can argue that the product is better because there is no LAN. Sure, most of those disconnects were not Blizzards fault(most of the time it is because of error prone venue internet connections), but having LAN would fix most of the issues and make it a more enjoyable experience for the hundreds of thousands of people who actually follow tournaments. Maybe not by much, but it would be an improvement.
Blaming the pirates is such a ridiculous argument I don't know if I should even be responding to it. But just look at Valve, they've realized that a happy customer is worth more than some douchebags pirating the game when they could have actually afforded it. Everyone who wouldn't have bought the game anyway is a moot point, no matter how many/few those happen to be. Like others have brought up, Spore is the perfect example of where punishing the customers for actions out of their own control hurt the company making the product.
Just because SC2 made a profit doesn't mean I can't be pissed of at Blizzard for behaving like assholes. In the end, the customer is always right, the pirate shouldn't even be in the picture.
It also affects actual paying customers when the company who makes their favorite game can't put as many resources into the expansion or sequel because they're losing too much potential profit from piracy.
(They should have a very limited special LAN tournament edition, though.)
What some people here don't understand is that there are different types of pirates. There are those who would like to play the game and would be willing to buy it, but only if the game price is below the current retail one. The other type of pirates are the ones who don't really care about the game and would never consider buying it. Now, the first type of pirates are a LOSS to game developers, because they are potential customers. If SC2 had LAN, then private servers will be more than enough for the price sensitive pirates, therefore hitting Blizzard's pockets. Currently these people will either buy SC2 when the price is right for them, or already have the game. I see no problem with the lack of LAN support to be honest and yes Blizzard needs the money, because unlike other shit studios they actually care about their products and protecting their properties means more awesome games for us. Win/Win all around.
On June 23 2011 07:10 mdma-_- wrote: that still doesnt explain why they cant allow people to play each other in lan with the necessecity of being logged into bnet/whatever online client.
cheap excuse just to blame it on pirates tbh
Think logically. It makes perfect sense from a business standpoint. Pretty much anyone can find a way to pirate a game that has LAN just by googling it.
Whether or not a game has LAN has absolutely zero effect on whether or not it's pirated. Starcraft 2 doesn't have LAN but was heavily pirated. Modern Warfare 2 doesn't have LAN but was heavily pirated. Spore doesn't have LAN but was heavily pirated, the list is endless. Not even DRM that forces a constant connection will stop piracy (Looking at you Ubisoft), all it'll do is piss of actual customers which is exactly the wrong thing to do.
You're wrong. It doesn't have absolutely no impact whatsoever, it does have an impact, and it is a factor. It just isn't the ONLY factor.
Here's how security works: You build a security system to make it sufficiently difficult for anyone to breach that they don't have the time or resources to break it, or want to bother breaking it. It is impossible to make something completely unbreakable, anyone sufficiently determined will eventually manage.
LAN makes it much easier to pirate it. Lack of LAN does not make it immune, but it makes it a lot harder. Thus, one can logically conclude, that the inclusion of LAN will increase the rate at which the game is pirated.
As much as it provides a stumbling block, I'm still yet hear to hear of a major game that hasn't been cracked, leaving pirates playing the game and customers stuck with DRM.
Portal 2 has actually broken the 3 million sales mark despite very heavy pirating. Valve don't even consider piracy to be an issue at all.
Starcraft 2 multiplayer. HoN? Maybe not major, but it definatelly is quite famous.
The single player being cracked may not actually be that bad, because a huge part of the players plays for the multiplayer, so someone that really likes the single players is very encouraged to buy the game.
If the multiplayer was cracked, though, not only would they lose that incentive, it could become another WC3.
That's the most hilarious thing I've read in this entire thread. It could become another WC3, like that's a bad thing? Despite all the piracy and garena bullshit that made blizzard go all butthurt, wikipedia has the following to say about WC3: "The game proved to be a best seller and one of the most anticipated and popular computer game releases ever, with 4.5 million units shipped to retail stores and over one million units sold within a month."
Which game developer in their right mind wouldn't want their game to be like WC3?
Of course SC2 would still sell millions of copies, LAN or not, cracked or not. The problem with WC3 also is much more recent than that, so it isn't exactly lauch sales that were affected. These servers weren't that famous until much later, primarly after the Dota explosion. What I meant is that Blizzard probally saw thousands of players playing on a cracked server, battle.net empty in comparison, and though "well, that sucks, shouldn't we try to prevent that?". I would definatelly not want that happening if I were a developer.
Maybe WC3 wasn't a great example of piracy actually affecting a game, like what happened with Demigod's launch, but it's probally one of the bigger things Blizzard saw and used as a motive to change things. Huge games like these are going to sell well no matter what, but what happened to WC3 lately isn't good for the developers. Everyone knows Blizzard likes to be in control of their games, more than usual. Now, that those plataforms already exist, who knows how that would actually affect, or not, sales.
On June 23 2011 11:05 zarepath wrote: It also affects actual paying customers when the company who makes their favorite game can't put as many resources into the expansion or sequel because they're losing too much potential profit from piracy.
(They should have a very limited special LAN tournament edition, though.)
Losing too much potential profit? Which dreamworld are you living in where PC games aren't a massively profitable industry, in spite of piracy? According to this link which I found after very little digging on google(top result) says that PC gaming is projected to grow by 9% and in fact did grow by almost 20% in 2010. Compared to pretty much anything a 20% revenue growth is absolutely amazing and 9% is well above what you could expect in the current economic climate. If you think PC gaming companies can't afford to make sequels you are quite frankly delusional.
In the end the only reason they don't release LAN is because they feel like they absolutely must milk every last cent out of their product, regardless if they piss off their customers. From an economical point of view that's an outright stupid thing to do(goodwill = higher likelihood of future sales) but I guess most companies nowadays only care about short-term gain, not long-term growth.
On June 23 2011 10:20 dc302 wrote: I'd have to agree. Unless there's a way to stop piracy (which there probably isn't with lan) then even I, if i were the head of some company, would not release games with lan and have half my customers gone.
Seriously? Half the customers? Don't make me laugh. You've been pumped like chicken meat with propaganda it seems. It's all about control.
While I think we all agree that LAN would be a boon for tournaments, custom servers, etc, I can understand this argument about pirating - if I was in charge of a business and understood the situation I would probably do the same thing with a game, since its not good for the game but as a large corporation like Blizzard you can't be losing huge amounts of money to pirating.
On June 23 2011 10:51 hashaki wrote: Now, there are ofcourse diffferences when it comes to games, but are there good games out there that didn't make money? I don't really see an issue here, good games -will- sell.
Yes, actually, there are good games that don't make money. There are also shit games that do make money. This is the case before piracy, and it is the case after.
The difference is this: before piracy, a game that didn't sell would sell more than now. It would have made more, even though it didn't sell well. The same goes with good games; there will always be assholes who could have afforded the game but pirated it simply because they could.
That is true but the real question you should ask is would they sell less with LAN support? They would be pirated more but perhaps sell better aswell, it´s difficult to say.
There are many people who purchased SC2 just to get multiplayer. That is, they would have pirated it if they could have gotten multiplayer over SC2.
Do you honestly believe that the number of people who didn't buy SC2 because of a lack of LAN play is greater than the number of people who would have pirated it if they could have gotten the full experience without buying it?
But just look at Valve, they've realized that a happy customer is worth more than some douchebags pirating the game when they could have actually afforded it.
They also bundle every single one of their games with DRM. Or what did you think Steam was? Sure, it may be very nice DRM that has very nice features and utility for the user. But it's still DRM.
(They should have a very limited special LAN tournament edition, though.)
That sounds like a fine idea... right up until you realize that people can just pirate that. Once the code is out there, you're screwed. Some pro player may, while doing a keyboard check, just slip a USB drive into a convenient slot and start downloading the tournament-edition. And then we're right back at where we started.
None of this is to say that piracy and counterfeiting aren't real problems. The GAO accepts that the problem is "sizeable," but it also points out just how much bad data is used to produce these studies. Actual dollar figures and job loss numbers should be handled with extreme care and a good bit of skepticism; the GAO also noted that numerous experts told it that "there were positive effects [from piracy on the economy] and they should be assessed as well."
Basically....piracy is much more complicated than people think and I don't think one economist has more resources than the government to properly assess it and more importantly make an ACCURATE interpretation of the data.
The fact is that no one know how or how much piracy affects sales.
In some cases piracy brings exposure and sales, in others it makes buying redundant. But piracy has always been around, and the gaming industry got HUGE in a relatively short ammount of time, so i think it's safe to say that, while potentially harmfull, piracy doesn't even scratch the industry. Make a good game, provide a good service, your game will sell, the better it is, the more it will sell. period.
On June 23 2011 07:10 mdma-_- wrote: that still doesnt explain why they cant allow people to play each other in lan with the necessecity of being logged into bnet/whatever online client.
cheap excuse just to blame it on pirates tbh
Think logically. It makes perfect sense from a business standpoint. Pretty much anyone can find a way to pirate a game that has LAN just by googling it.
Whether or not a game has LAN has absolutely zero effect on whether or not it's pirated. Starcraft 2 doesn't have LAN but was heavily pirated. Modern Warfare 2 doesn't have LAN but was heavily pirated. Spore doesn't have LAN but was heavily pirated, the list is endless. Not even DRM that forces a constant connection will stop piracy (Looking at you Ubisoft), all it'll do is piss of actual customers which is exactly the wrong thing to do.
You're wrong. It doesn't have absolutely no impact whatsoever, it does have an impact, and it is a factor. It just isn't the ONLY factor.
Here's how security works: You build a security system to make it sufficiently difficult for anyone to breach that they don't have the time or resources to break it, or want to bother breaking it. It is impossible to make something completely unbreakable, anyone sufficiently determined will eventually manage.
LAN makes it much easier to pirate it. Lack of LAN does not make it immune, but it makes it a lot harder. Thus, one can logically conclude, that the inclusion of LAN will increase the rate at which the game is pirated.
As much as it provides a stumbling block, I'm still yet hear to hear of a major game that hasn't been cracked, leaving pirates playing the game and customers stuck with DRM.
Portal 2 has actually broken the 3 million sales mark despite very heavy pirating. Valve don't even consider piracy to be an issue at all.
Starcraft 2 multiplayer. HoN? Maybe not major, but it definatelly is quite famous.
The single player being cracked may not actually be that bad, because a huge part of the players plays for the multiplayer, so someone that really likes the single players is very encouraged to buy the game.
If the multiplayer was cracked, though, not only would they lose that incentive, it could become another WC3.
That's the most hilarious thing I've read in this entire thread. It could become another WC3, like that's a bad thing? Despite all the piracy and garena bullshit that made blizzard go all butthurt, wikipedia has the following to say about WC3: "The game proved to be a best seller and one of the most anticipated and popular computer game releases ever, with 4.5 million units shipped to retail stores and over one million units sold within a month."
Which game developer in their right mind wouldn't want their game to be like WC3?
Of course SC2 would still sell millions of copies, LAN or not, cracked or not. The problem with WC3 also is much more recent than that, so it isn't exactly lauch sales that were affected. These servers weren't that famous until much later, primarly after the Dota explosion. What I meant is that Blizzard probally saw thousands of players playing on a cracked server, battle.net empty in comparison, and though "well, that sucks, shouldn't we try to prevent that?". I would definatelly not want that happening if I were a developer.
Maybe WC3 wasn't a great example of piracy actually affecting a game, like what happened with Demigod's launch, but it's probally one of the bigger things Blizzard saw and used as a motive to change things. Huge games like these are going to sell well no matter what, but what happened to WC3 lately isn't good for the developers. Everyone knows Blizzard likes to be in control of their games, more than usual. Now, that those plataforms already exist, who knows how that would actually affect, or not, sales.
That point in particular is a flawed argument. Even if their game was pirated to hell and back, in the end the only thing that matters is: Would we have sold more copies by making an inferior product(removing LAN)? I would wager that the answer to that is no. Who cares if tons of people are playing it for free when honourable people are paying and very happy with the product they received? If that's the reason, then I feel even more pissed that they would remove LAN for me(paying customer) just out of pure spite towards garena players(non-paying customers).
To calm down a little though, I don't really see a way of proving one way or the other if LAN would decrease or increase sales, because the only way to truly prove it would be to go back in time, release it with LAN, and then compare the separate timelines. In the end, I'm still pretty damn pissed that I'm receiving a lesser product purely because they feel butthurt about pirates.
On June 23 2011 10:20 dc302 wrote: I'd have to agree. Unless there's a way to stop piracy (which there probably isn't with lan) then even I, if i were the head of some company, would not release games with lan and have half my customers gone.
Seriously? Half the customers? Don't make me laugh. You've been pumped like chicken meat with propaganda it seems.
Agree..
Lets look at WoW for example.( Not a player, not a huge fan either)
The thing is that there are MILLIONS of private servers, yet still they are the biggest MMO in the world.
So i don't buy the piracy thing. The only thing is that Blizzard won't be able to make their own ladder and SC2 as they like.
ICCUP would eat them in few days, cuz they know that at least 60% of the players hate the ladder map pool, hate everything blizzard really do.
On June 23 2011 10:21 Alsn wrote: Too all you people attacking pirates. Argue with this:
I am deeply disappointed in Blizzard for not having LAN, a lot of enjoyment that I personally could have had has been lost due to the feature missing. I will not buy further products from Blizzard after I stop playing SC2(which, admittedly, will probably be for quite a while still). As a paying customer I am appalled that they would value short term gain(which they have no proof that no-LAN has actually increased anyway) over long term goodwill(me and others being happy customers).
No matter where you stand on the piracy versus no-piracy issue, the fact remains that their product is worse than it would have been with LAN support, thus directly punishing their actual paying customers.
Not to mention the fact that there's no proof whatsoever that adding LAN would actually lower total sales, which is the only thing that counts in the end. Who cares if 5 million instead of 3 million pirate the game if you still have the same amount of sales but higher goodwill for the future of your company?
To sum up, I, as a paying customer, has gotten a product that is worse than it would have been with LAN. I could care fuck all about people pirating the game since I, a paying customer along with all other paying customers, is the one who is ultimately responsible for Blizzard employees being paid, and I am a little less happy than I could have been.
Stop being melodramatic. For you and 99% of all other players, LAN has no effect. LAN would be optimal for tournaments, but Battle.net gets the job done.
All of you people complaining about being a 'paying customer' and suffering because of pirates are rightfully mad, but at the wrong people. You should be mad at pirates for causing this. Or do you go to the airport and bitch and moan about going through airport security because you aren't a terrorist?
have you never played a game on LAN settings compared to online? The difference is ridiculous, besides it also makes it possible to just...you know play with internet required!
On June 23 2011 11:14 lorkac wrote: If the only thing that's wrong with battlenet is lag--then that's the internet connection's fault, not the Blizzard.
If LAN does nothing more than allow you to have what Battlenet Provides, why have LAN?
Which means the only people who would complain about no LAN are the people who are trying to not buy SC2.
The question should not be "Why is there no LAN?" The question should be "Being that BattleNet provides us what we need, why do we need LAN?"
On June 23 2011 07:18 AndAgain wrote: He just said what any intelligent person already understands. Obviously companies have good reasons for not putting LAN.
Yea it's a pity. The problem is most of the prevention for piracy hurts the guys that buy the games too.
ALL forms of DRM and "prevention" (such as excluding LAN) hurt the paying customers more than pirates, this is not even a debate.
Actually it is, because you've provided zero proof.
Which means the only people who would complain about no LAN are the people who are trying to not buy SC2.
And the only reason you don't want a CCTV camera in your living room is because you want to commit crimes. What other reason can there be? The camera doesn't stop you doing anything you were normally going to do so you shouldn't have a problem with it.
On June 23 2011 07:18 AndAgain wrote: He just said what any intelligent person already understands. Obviously companies have good reasons for not putting LAN.
Yea it's a pity. The problem is most of the prevention for piracy hurts the guys that buy the games too.
ALL forms of DRM and "prevention" (such as excluding LAN) hurt the paying customers more than pirates, this is not even a debate.
Actually it is, because you've provided zero proof.
On June 23 2011 07:18 AndAgain wrote: He just said what any intelligent person already understands. Obviously companies have good reasons for not putting LAN.
Yea it's a pity. The problem is most of the prevention for piracy hurts the guys that buy the games too.
ALL forms of DRM and "prevention" (such as excluding LAN) hurt the paying customers more than pirates, this is not even a debate.
Actually it is, because you've provided zero proof.
You don't need to give "proof" for a logical progression of thought.
I completely understand the reasoning. I have no way of knowing how much money piracy has cost game developers, and the game developers should get the money - they made the game.
On the other hand, would piracy be less rampant if games were more reasonably priced? I'm enough of a fan that I got the special edition of SC2 for the full $100, but in the abstract, for a game I'm not sure is going to be awesome, I wouldn't want to pay more than $30-$40. Maybe I'm out of touch with the market, but to me it seems like video games are kind of over-priced on the whole. Obviously not extremely overpriced as sales are huge, but selling for more than they're "worth".
I wouldn't care that much about LAN if playing over the internet, everything going to the servers, was more reliable. But right now it doesn't, and while that's not exactly Blizzard's "fault" - they have nothing to do with the infrastructure - it's still frustrating (and happens everywhere).
On June 23 2011 07:18 AndAgain wrote: He just said what any intelligent person already understands. Obviously companies have good reasons for not putting LAN.
Yea it's a pity. The problem is most of the prevention for piracy hurts the guys that buy the games too.
ALL forms of DRM and "prevention" (such as excluding LAN) hurt the paying customers more than pirates, this is not even a debate.
Actually it is, because you've provided zero proof.
Are you kidding me? DRM by definition makes it harder for paying customers to use the product than if there were none. The history of all the different securoms and whatnot where some dvd players were incorrectly flagged as virtual drives and stuff resulting in problems for paying customers as a direct result of DRM. Downloaded songs(legally) not working in all types of mp3 players, etc.
On the other hand, once a game is pirated, pirates often have a superior product in that you don't need a CD in the drive, you don't need to run prohibitive clients(say what you want about steam, but it has its problems). They just download, install, and enjoy. No need to be connected to the internet continously while playing, etc. etc.
Why he would have to actually provide proof of something that is so simple to understand, I have no idea.
Funny how you guys keep going on when I've already showed you the perfect unexploitable solution for this whole lag problem. Blizzard needs to implement Dual Screen Play. Every modern machine has 2 video outs and enough USB slots to hook up all the required equipment. All we lack is a software patch by blizzard.
On June 23 2011 10:21 Alsn wrote: Too all you people attacking pirates. Argue with this:
I am deeply disappointed in Blizzard for not having LAN, a lot of enjoyment that I personally could have had has been lost due to the feature missing. I will not buy further products from Blizzard after I stop playing SC2(which, admittedly, will probably be for quite a while still). As a paying customer I am appalled that they would value short term gain(which they have no proof that no-LAN has actually increased anyway) over long term goodwill(me and others being happy customers).
No matter where you stand on the piracy versus no-piracy issue, the fact remains that their product is worse than it would have been with LAN support, thus directly punishing their actual paying customers.
Not to mention the fact that there's no proof whatsoever that adding LAN would actually lower total sales, which is the only thing that counts in the end. Who cares if 5 million instead of 3 million pirate the game if you still have the same amount of sales but higher goodwill for the future of your company?
To sum up, I, as a paying customer, has gotten a product that is worse than it would have been with LAN. I could care fuck all about people pirating the game since I, a paying customer along with all other paying customers, is the one who is ultimately responsible for Blizzard employees being paid, and I am a little less happy than I could have been.
Stop being melodramatic. For you and 99% of all other players, LAN has no effect. LAN would be optimal for tournaments, but Battle.net gets the job done.
All of you people complaining about being a 'paying customer' and suffering because of pirates are rightfully mad, but at the wrong people. You should be mad at pirates for causing this. Or do you go to the airport and bitch and moan about going through airport security because you aren't a terrorist?
have you never played a game on LAN settings compared to online? The difference is ridiculous, besides it also makes it possible to just...you know play with internet required!
On June 23 2011 11:24 PepperoniPiZZa wrote: Funny how you guys keep going on when I've already showed you the perfect unexploitable solution for this whole lag problem. Blizzard needs to implement Dual Screen Play. Every modern machine has 2 video outs and enough USB slots to hook up all the required equipment. All we lack is a software patch by blizzard.
Because your solution only addresses 2 player matches.
On June 23 2011 11:24 PepperoniPiZZa wrote: Funny how you guys keep going on when I've already showed you the perfect unexploitable solution for this whole lag problem. Blizzard needs to implement Dual Screen Play. Every modern machine has 2 video outs and enough USB slots to hook up all the required equipment. All we lack is a software patch by blizzard.
Which means the only people who would complain about no LAN are the people who are trying to not buy SC2.
And the only reason you don't want a CCTV camera in your living room is because you want to commit crimes. What other reason can there be? The camera doesn't stop you doing anything you were normally going to do so you shouldn't have a problem with it.
I actually would not have a problem with a CCTV camera in my room, personally. And yes, it is because I don't plan on doing anything illegal. And it also is because I don't feel shy about myself and I don't feel as if my life is this big secret I need to protect from the eyes of the world. I'm not some fundamentalist nut job in the midwestern united states.
That's me personally.
The question is, how bad is the crime in the place you're living in that CCTV cameras need to be bought? Do you really want to live in a neighborhood that is so bad that they need CCTV cameras?
On June 23 2011 11:23 VGhost wrote:I wouldn't care that much about LAN if playing over the internet, everything going to the servers, was more reliable. But right now it doesn't, and while that's not exactly Blizzard's "fault" - they have nothing to do with the infrastructure - it's still frustrating (and happens everywhere).
This is exactly my point. If playing on the internet actually meant you got a perfect experience where you would never ever want to play on LAN instead, that would of course be fine.
But the reality is quite simply not so. LAN is superior in many ways to Bnet 2.0. Sure, I'm the first to defend their matchmaking system, it's quite awesome. Their ladder system too, very good. Map pool? Could be better, but it's only on the ladder so I don't really mind. But not having the option of LAN is quite simply negative, there's no upside for the customer here. Sure, maybe Blizzard has done some amazing research and realised that this game will sell better due to no LAN but that does not mean that they can take away my right to be pissed about it.
Which means the only people who would complain about no LAN are the people who are trying to not buy SC2.
And the only reason you don't want a CCTV camera in your living room is because you want to commit crimes. What other reason can there be? The camera doesn't stop you doing anything you were normally going to do so you shouldn't have a problem with it.
I actually would not have a problem with a CCTV camera in my room, personally. And yes, it is because I don't plan on doing anything illegal. And it also is because I don't feel shy about myself and I don't feel as if my life is this big secret I need to protect from the eyes of the world. I'm not some fundamentalist nut job in the midwestern united states.
That's me personally.
The question is, how bad is the crime in the place you're living in that CCTV cameras need to be bought? Do you really want to live in a neighborhood that is so bad that they need CCTV cameras?
Which means the only people who would complain about no LAN are the people who are trying to not buy SC2.
And the only reason you don't want a CCTV camera in your living room is because you want to commit crimes. What other reason can there be? The camera doesn't stop you doing anything you were normally going to do so you shouldn't have a problem with it.
I actually would not have a problem with a CCTV camera in my room, personally. And yes, it is because I don't plan on doing anything illegal. And it also is because I don't feel shy about myself and I don't feel as if my life is this big secret I need to protect from the eyes of the world. I'm not some fundamentalist nut job in the midwestern united states.
That's me personally.
The question is, how bad is the crime in the place you're living in that CCTV cameras need to be bought? Do you really want to live in a neighborhood that is so bad that they need CCTV cameras?
I was only trying to get a point across through analogy. In actively taking tough measures against piracy, publishers are treating customers like potential pirates rather than treating pirates like potential customers.
On June 23 2011 11:24 PepperoniPiZZa wrote: Funny how you guys keep going on when I've already showed you the perfect unexploitable solution for this whole lag problem. Blizzard needs to implement Dual Screen Play. Every modern machine has 2 video outs and enough USB slots to hook up all the required equipment. All we lack is a software patch by blizzard.
Sounds exploitable to me.
It's a videosignal generated by a GPU, you can't just reroute it to somewhere without any signficant loss in quality and huge delay.
On June 23 2011 11:24 PepperoniPiZZa wrote: Funny how you guys keep going on when I've already showed you the perfect unexploitable solution for this whole lag problem. Blizzard needs to implement Dual Screen Play. Every modern machine has 2 video outs and enough USB slots to hook up all the required equipment. All we lack is a software patch by blizzard.
Because your solution only addresses 2 player matches.
On June 23 2011 11:23 VGhost wrote: I completely understand the reasoning. I have no way of knowing how much money piracy has cost game developers, and the game developers should get the money - they made the game.
On the other hand, would piracy be less rampant if games were more reasonably priced? I'm enough of a fan that I got the special edition of SC2 for the full $100, but in the abstract, for a game I'm not sure is going to be awesome, I wouldn't want to pay more than $30-$40. Maybe I'm out of touch with the market, but to me it seems like video games are kind of over-priced on the whole. Obviously not extremely overpriced as sales are huge, but selling for more than they're "worth".
I wouldn't care that much about LAN if playing over the internet, everything going to the servers, was more reliable. But right now it doesn't, and while that's not exactly Blizzard's "fault" - they have nothing to do with the infrastructure - it's still frustrating (and happens everywhere).
Even though there will always be countless people who claim to "pirate to see if it works", or "pirate and then buy", the vast, vast majority of people will pirate no matter what and because it's free. Thus, factoring pirates into pricing decisions is stupid.
Companies should charge to optimize (number of people willing to pay price) * (price) which I'm sure they've given a LOT of thought to. What it's "worth" really has little to do with it.
Furthermore, it's impossible to tell how much it's really "worth". A lot of times studios have to invest millions into flops and then make it back on the one hit. Do you factor the cost of development of the failed game into the value of the successful game? What about the cost of marketing - maybe it coudl be less, or maybe the more people buying it allows that aforementioned price to be lower because number of people went up.
As far as the piracy argument I think the guy in the reddit thread nailed it. I also think there is a psychological aspect at work where game studios, besides protecting their monetary interests, hate the feeling of being wronged by the pirates. If you put your blood sweat and tears into a product and then someone played it without paying the price you asked for, you would probably want to stop them too regardless of whether it made economic sense.
On June 23 2011 11:24 PepperoniPiZZa wrote: Funny how you guys keep going on when I've already showed you the perfect unexploitable solution for this whole lag problem. Blizzard needs to implement Dual Screen Play. Every modern machine has 2 video outs and enough USB slots to hook up all the required equipment. All we lack is a software patch by blizzard.
Sounds exploitable to me.
It's a videosignal generated by a GPU, you can't just reroute it to somewhere without any signficant loss in quality and huge delay.
Hence the quick attempt at post salvage :D
Though it'd take a mighty computer to run something like that. Although I guess if you're running a big tournament that's the least of your worries.
Which means the only people who would complain about no LAN are the people who are trying to not buy SC2.
And the only reason you don't want a CCTV camera in your living room is because you want to commit crimes. What other reason can there be? The camera doesn't stop you doing anything you were normally going to do so you shouldn't have a problem with it.
I actually would not have a problem with a CCTV camera in my room, personally. And yes, it is because I don't plan on doing anything illegal. And it also is because I don't feel shy about myself and I don't feel as if my life is this big secret I need to protect from the eyes of the world. I'm not some fundamentalist nut job in the midwestern united states.
That's me personally.
The question is, how bad is the crime in the place you're living in that CCTV cameras need to be bought? Do you really want to live in a neighborhood that is so bad that they need CCTV cameras?
I was only trying to get a point across through analogy. In actively taking tough measures against piracy, publishers are treating customers like potential pirates rather than treating pirates like potential customers.
And this is the issue. Take a look at this picture:
Relatively recent poll from Bitgamer. Look at those numbers. People are pirating games and THEN SUBSEQUENTLY BUYING THEM.
That's the piracy community, at least 87% of them according to this poll of 12,000 people of the best private tracker in the world. Instead of treating us like criminals who are literally stealing their livelihoods and actually producing quality games and removing DRM would make me, and a majority of others to buy their games. I outright bought Witcher 2 because of the removal of DRM after I played it a bit.
The voice of "I PIRATE EVERYTHING SINCE I DONT PAY FOR EVERYTHING" is a very small part in the community but consequently the loudest -- giving the illusion they are the majority when in fact most of pirates hate their fucking guts if they like the game and don't buy it after. Every major cracker tells you to buy the products if you enjoy them. There are thousands of comments of people saying "SO BUYING THIS" after torrenting them.
These are potential customers that they are driving away as criminals. That's my issue with this crap. They take away something that is basically mandatory in a game like this and then when people flip a shit about it, they blame it on pirates.
Which means the only people who would complain about no LAN are the people who are trying to not buy SC2.
And the only reason you don't want a CCTV camera in your living room is because you want to commit crimes. What other reason can there be? The camera doesn't stop you doing anything you were normally going to do so you shouldn't have a problem with it.
I actually would not have a problem with a CCTV camera in my room, personally. And yes, it is because I don't plan on doing anything illegal. And it also is because I don't feel shy about myself and I don't feel as if my life is this big secret I need to protect from the eyes of the world. I'm not some fundamentalist nut job in the midwestern united states.
That's me personally.
The question is, how bad is the crime in the place you're living in that CCTV cameras need to be bought? Do you really want to live in a neighborhood that is so bad that they need CCTV cameras?
I was only trying to get a point across through analogy. In actively taking tough measures against piracy, publishers are treating customers like potential pirates rather than treating pirates like potential customers.
And this is the issue. Take a look at this picture:
Relatively recent poll from Bitgamer. Look at those numbers. People are pirating games and THEN SUBSEQUENTLY BUYING THEM.
That's the piracy community, at least 87% of them according to this poll of 12,000 people of the best private tracker in the world. Instead of treating us like criminals who are literally stealing their livelihoods and actually producing quality games and removing DRM would make me, and a majority of others to buy their games. I outright bought Witcher 2 because of the removal of DRM after I played it a bit.
The voice of "I PIRATE EVERYTHING SINCE I DONT PAY FOR EVERYTHING" is a very small part in the community. Every major cracker tells you to buy the products if you enjoy them. There are thousands of comments of people saying "SO BUYING THIS" after torrenting them.
These are potential customers that they are driving away as criminals. That's my issue with this crap. They take away something that is basically mandatory in a game like this and then when people flip a shit about it, they blame it on pirates.
I can vouch for this. I've pirated many games and then bought them because I just thought they were worth buying. Brood War, Diablo 2 (while avoiding a minefield of trojans) and Starcraft 2 included.
Which means the only people who would complain about no LAN are the people who are trying to not buy SC2.
And the only reason you don't want a CCTV camera in your living room is because you want to commit crimes. What other reason can there be? The camera doesn't stop you doing anything you were normally going to do so you shouldn't have a problem with it.
I actually would not have a problem with a CCTV camera in my room, personally. And yes, it is because I don't plan on doing anything illegal. And it also is because I don't feel shy about myself and I don't feel as if my life is this big secret I need to protect from the eyes of the world. I'm not some fundamentalist nut job in the midwestern united states.
That's me personally.
The question is, how bad is the crime in the place you're living in that CCTV cameras need to be bought? Do you really want to live in a neighborhood that is so bad that they need CCTV cameras?
Way to generalize? Hi, I'm from Sweden and grown up in a family of Social Democrats(or as Tea-Party'ers would say, a communist) and I most certainly would mind having a CCTV camera in my home. Just because you don't mind doesn't mean that it's okay for everyone else.
I lived for 5 years in the most troubled area in my city(which, admittedly, is pretty damn safe compared to the slums of some of the worlds major cities, but we had our share of shootings in the street where I lived) and I would vehemently have opposed CCTV-like camera systems around where I lived. The money spent on cameras would always be better spent on better education and measures aimed at eliminating poverty(hint: poverty is the cause of most violent crime).
On June 23 2011 11:24 PepperoniPiZZa wrote: Funny how you guys keep going on when I've already showed you the perfect unexploitable solution for this whole lag problem. Blizzard needs to implement Dual Screen Play. Every modern machine has 2 video outs and enough USB slots to hook up all the required equipment. All we lack is a software patch by blizzard.
Sounds exploitable to me.
It's a videosignal generated by a GPU, you can't just reroute it to somewhere without any signficant loss in quality and huge delay.
On June 23 2011 11:24 PepperoniPiZZa wrote: Funny how you guys keep going on when I've already showed you the perfect unexploitable solution for this whole lag problem. Blizzard needs to implement Dual Screen Play. Every modern machine has 2 video outs and enough USB slots to hook up all the required equipment. All we lack is a software patch by blizzard.
Because your solution only addresses 2 player matches.
Pick one: A solution or No solution
Yes you're right.
I pick a solution: LAN.
What you are proposing a PARTIAL solution that would benefit almost no-one, but would take developer time to be implemented.
So actually, no solution is better than your "perfect" alternative.
Which means the only people who would complain about no LAN are the people who are trying to not buy SC2.
And the only reason you don't want a CCTV camera in your living room is because you want to commit crimes. What other reason can there be? The camera doesn't stop you doing anything you were normally going to do so you shouldn't have a problem with it.
I actually would not have a problem with a CCTV camera in my room, personally. And yes, it is because I don't plan on doing anything illegal. And it also is because I don't feel shy about myself and I don't feel as if my life is this big secret I need to protect from the eyes of the world. I'm not some fundamentalist nut job in the midwestern united states.
That's me personally.
The question is, how bad is the crime in the place you're living in that CCTV cameras need to be bought? Do you really want to live in a neighborhood that is so bad that they need CCTV cameras?
I was only trying to get a point across through analogy. In actively taking tough measures against piracy, publishers are treating customers like potential pirates rather than treating pirates like potential customers.
And this is the issue. Take a look at this picture:
Relatively recent poll from Bitgamer. Look at those numbers. People are pirating games and THEN SUBSEQUENTLY BUYING THEM.
That's the piracy community, at least 87% of them according to this poll of 12,000 people of the best private tracker in the world. Instead of treating us like criminals who are literally stealing their livelihoods and actually producing quality games and removing DRM would make me, and a majority of others to buy their games. I outright bought Witcher 2 because of the removal of DRM after I played it a bit.
The voice of "I PIRATE EVERYTHING SINCE I DONT PAY FOR EVERYTHING" is a very small part in the community. Every major cracker tells you to buy the products if you enjoy them. There are thousands of comments of people saying "SO BUYING THIS" after torrenting them.
These are potential customers that they are driving away as criminals. That's my issue with this crap. They take away something that is basically mandatory in a game like this and then when people flip a shit about it, they blame it on pirates.
I can vouch for this. I've pirated many games and then bought them because I just thought they were worth buying. Brood War, Diablo 2 (while avoiding a minefield of trojans) and Starcraft 2 included.
Diablo 2 was not even worth the trouble haha.
And yeah, even for most multiplayer games it's possible to test them out with Tuungle. I know I bought at least 5-6 games in the past year I would have completely avoided when I pirated them and played them on Hamachi or something. Most notable being Section 8.
The loudest part of the Piracy community is the smallest minority, unfortunately.
On June 23 2011 11:24 PepperoniPiZZa wrote: Funny how you guys keep going on when I've already showed you the perfect unexploitable solution for this whole lag problem. Blizzard needs to implement Dual Screen Play. Every modern machine has 2 video outs and enough USB slots to hook up all the required equipment. All we lack is a software patch by blizzard.
I don't understand the people in this thread that don't undertand their point, look at Korea for example. Starcraft 1 is on every single computer practically, do you honestly think every single computer with a copy was purchased? I had SC BW on all my computers growing up but I only owned one copy because if I wanted to play LAN with some friends I'm obviously not going to buy 3 copies for my own house. It makes perfect sense to me, all I wish was that they could implement something like others have suggest where you can play on LAN connection but you need a valid battle.net ID to log in. I don't know how it would work, not an expert obviously, but something like that would do wonders for SC tourneys.
On June 23 2011 07:14 ThePurist wrote: Microsoft operating systems and office software are two of the biggest pirated softwares and they still make money. This guy tries to act like a realist but he doesn't really have a clue about economics. The opinions are too pessimistic and overgeneralizes the vast majority of people who purchase games with their hard-earned cash. Pirates don't stop revenue streams pirates were not a consumer in the first place. The assumption that a pirated copy was a sale is flawed imo and his last few personal statements are questionable as I perceive them as a cop-out when his whole opinion was about "simple economics".
Every single friend I know that owns SC2 would have pirated it instead if given the chance. They aren't non-consumers.
"and they still make money" is kind of a dumb argument, because they are still losing money regardless. You can't just legitimize it by saying, well at least they make some money!
I'm definitely annoyed that there is no LAN but I can understand the reasoning behind it. If not for Blizzard, at least for S2 with HoN, which is a MUCH smaller company who it WOULD affect a lot more in terms of revenue.
Bottom line though is, whether it's good or bad, right or wrong, companies most definitely would lose money if their game could be pirated. It's literally millions of copies pirated.. and of course not all of the would have bought the game, but quite a lot would have.
Taking out LAN doesn't stop piracy. Hell I pirated SC2 when it first came out to see if I'd like it since I wasn't in the beta and there was no demo. I played through the entire single player when I pirated it and then I bought it a week later and played through the single player again.
Dear companies, not everyone fucks you over. So stop crying out piracy as a blanket excuse for making shitty games and removing features.
On June 23 2011 11:46 Schnell wrote: Taking out LAN doesn't stop piracy. Hell I pirated SC2 when it first came out to see if I'd like it since I wasn't in the beta and there was no demo. I played through the entire single player when I pirated it and then I bought it a week later and played through the single player again.
Dear companies, not everyone fucks you over. So stop crying out piracy as a blanket excuse for making shitty games and removing features.
On June 23 2011 11:46 Angra wrote: They aren't talking about single player.
Not everyone pirates for just MP. They already have ways to make it so you can't play MP if you don't have a real copy of the game. Not having LAN doesn't matter.
On June 23 2011 11:46 Angra wrote: They aren't talking about single player.
Not everyone pirates for just MP. They already have ways to make it so you can't play MP if you don't have a real copy of the game. Not having LAN doesn't matter.
If they had LAN pirated copies can run multiplayer on Hamachi (and eventually a more robust service, similar to ICCUP)
I think the solution is to just start developing games for free and rely on a microtransaction model. The whole idea of games as a service is definitely more lucrative than selling retail imo and its pointless for the consumer to pirate a game they can download for free anyway.
Having basic functionality be free, such as LAN, while requiring a monthly fee to play online would be ideal.
Obviously this only applies purely to multiplayer games, so I'm not sure how content such as sc2's campaign could be handled.
I´ve pirated my fair share of games over the years but I´ve always bought the games I really enjoyed playing, the games I didn´t buy I would never have bought anyway. I pirate games that I´m unsure if they are worth buying or not since very few games release demos that give a good overview of the actual game.
I have definitely bought more games due to piracy, games that I would never have tried in the first place if I couldn´t download them and try for free. If someone creates a really good game that I enjoy playing, I would feel bad about not buying it. I don´t buy a large percentage of the games I pirate though since there´s so many bad games released.
Now that I think about it I´ve actually bought every release from Blizzard since the first Warcraft except the expansion for Diablo I, Hellfire or whatever it was called.
On June 23 2011 11:52 gurrpp wrote: I think the solution is to just start developing games for free and rely on a microtransaction model. The whole idea of games as a service is definitely more lucrative than selling retail imo and its pointless for the consumer to pirate a game they can download for free anyway.
Having basic functionality be free, such as LAN, while requiring a monthly fee to play online would be ideal.
Obviously this only applies purely to multiplayer games, so I'm not sure how content such as sc2's campaign could be handled.
..Are you seriously saying you think the solution to this is to have a subscription fee + item shop?
On June 23 2011 11:24 PepperoniPiZZa wrote: Funny how you guys keep going on when I've already showed you the perfect unexploitable solution for this whole lag problem. Blizzard needs to implement Dual Screen Play. Every modern machine has 2 video outs and enough USB slots to hook up all the required equipment. All we lack is a software patch by blizzard.
That would take one heck of a computer to run.
Considering that most pros prefer to play at the lowest settings, I strongly doubt it.
On June 23 2011 11:24 PepperoniPiZZa wrote: Funny how you guys keep going on when I've already showed you the perfect unexploitable solution for this whole lag problem. Blizzard needs to implement Dual Screen Play. Every modern machine has 2 video outs and enough USB slots to hook up all the required equipment. All we lack is a software patch by blizzard.
Sounds exploitable to me.
It's a videosignal generated by a GPU, you can't just reroute it to somewhere without any signficant loss in quality and huge delay.
On June 23 2011 11:27 latan wrote:
On June 23 2011 11:24 PepperoniPiZZa wrote: Funny how you guys keep going on when I've already showed you the perfect unexploitable solution for this whole lag problem. Blizzard needs to implement Dual Screen Play. Every modern machine has 2 video outs and enough USB slots to hook up all the required equipment. All we lack is a software patch by blizzard.
Because your solution only addresses 2 player matches.
Pick one: A solution or No solution
Yes you're right.
I pick a solution: LAN.
What you are proposing a PARTIAL solution that would benefit almost no-one, but would take developer time to be implemented.
So actually, no solution is better than your "perfect" alternative.
On June 23 2011 11:52 gurrpp wrote: I think the solution is to just start developing games for free and rely on a microtransaction model. The whole idea of games as a service is definitely more lucrative than selling retail imo and its pointless for the consumer to pirate a game they can download for free anyway.
Having basic functionality be free, such as LAN, while requiring a monthly fee to play online would be ideal.
Obviously this only applies purely to multiplayer games, so I'm not sure how content such as sc2's campaign could be handled.
..Are you seriously saying you think the solution to this is to have a subscription fee + item shop?
Are you fucking serious?
Could you come up with an even more stupid idea?
You start off with the three workers, but you either have to win a ton of games or pay some cash to unlock each new unit. I could see it working
On June 23 2011 11:52 gurrpp wrote: I think the solution is to just start developing games for free and rely on a microtransaction model. The whole idea of games as a service is definitely more lucrative than selling retail imo and its pointless for the consumer to pirate a game they can download for free anyway.
Having basic functionality be free, such as LAN, while requiring a monthly fee to play online would be ideal.
Obviously this only applies purely to multiplayer games, so I'm not sure how content such as sc2's campaign could be handled.
..Are you seriously saying you think the solution to this is to have a subscription fee + item shop?
Are you fucking serious?
Could you come up with an even more stupid idea?
Nothing in that post mentioned a subscription. I think he meant games along the lines of League of Legends. Free with optional cash stuff if you like the game.
Best solution would seem to me to be this: release the game with no LAN to prevent piracy in the initial release period and offer a solid online component. Then 6 month - 1 year down the track release a patch that enables LAN play for those that want it. At this point piracy is less of a problem anyway (most games sell the vast majority of copies in the first few months) and you get to announce it as a big new feature. This gives you free publicity, sells additional copies to those people that wanted LAN play and allows some more people to pirate the game (which actually can be beneficial since many of those pirates will be poor high school/college students who will have nice paying jobs once the inevitable sequel rolls around will then be more likely to buy it). It really is win/win.
On June 23 2011 11:34 Fruscainte wrote: The voice of "I PIRATE EVERYTHING SINCE I DONT PAY FOR EVERYTHING" is a very small part in the community but consequently the loudest -- giving the illusion they are the majority when in fact most of pirates hate their fucking guts if they like the game and don't buy it after. These are potential customers that they are driving away as criminals. That's my issue with this crap. They take away something that is basically mandatory in a game like this and then when people flip a shit about it, they blame it on pirates.
So you think self-reporting surveys are accurate. Do you really think that nobody lied about whether they buy the game?
Furthermore, what about all the people who don't vote because they are ashamed. Or even better, the fact that MOST PEOPLE ARE APATHETIC means that the same people who don't give a shit about pirating and not buying are the same people who don't give a shit about your surveys examining the ethics of it.
It's called a silent majority. You are in extreme rationalization mode if you really think most pirates buy games they like, and it's also a LOT easier to "not like" a game that you've played for 20 hours if it lets you talk yourself into keeping 60 bucks.
On June 23 2011 11:50 ak1knight wrote: If they had LAN pirated copies can run multiplayer on Hamachi (and eventually a more robust service, similar to ICCUP)
You missed the overarching theme to my original post. My point is that not everyone screws over companies and will buy the game if it's good enough. Even if it had LAN pirates would play with a small group of people regardless. Pirating is a pain in the ass, constant updates deter pirates from pirating because they have to wait to fix their games or stay on the current version and not get any new features. Taking out features because of a threat that you can't get even remotely reliable numbers to is bad for everyone.
On June 23 2011 11:52 gurrpp wrote: I think the solution is to just start developing games for free and rely on a microtransaction model. The whole idea of games as a service is definitely more lucrative than selling retail imo and its pointless for the consumer to pirate a game they can download for free anyway.
Having basic functionality be free, such as LAN, while requiring a monthly fee to play online would be ideal.
Obviously this only applies purely to multiplayer games, so I'm not sure how content such as sc2's campaign could be handled.
..Are you seriously saying you think the solution to this is to have a subscription fee + item shop?
Are you fucking serious?
Could you come up with an even more stupid idea?
Nothing in that post mentioned a subscription. I think he meant games along the lines of League of Legends. Free with optional cash stuff if you like the game.
requiring a monthly fee to play online would be ideal.
On June 23 2011 11:52 gurrpp wrote: I think the solution is to just start developing games for free and rely on a microtransaction model. The whole idea of games as a service is definitely more lucrative than selling retail imo and its pointless for the consumer to pirate a game they can download for free anyway.
Having basic functionality be free, such as LAN, while requiring a monthly fee to play online would be ideal.
Obviously this only applies purely to multiplayer games, so I'm not sure how content such as sc2's campaign could be handled.
..Are you seriously saying you think the solution to this is to have a subscription fee + item shop?
Are you fucking serious?
Could you come up with an even more stupid idea?
Nothing in that post mentioned a subscription. I think he meant games along the lines of League of Legends. Free with optional cash stuff if you like the game.
On June 23 2011 11:24 PepperoniPiZZa wrote: Funny how you guys keep going on when I've already showed you the perfect unexploitable solution for this whole lag problem. Blizzard needs to implement Dual Screen Play. Every modern machine has 2 video outs and enough USB slots to hook up all the required equipment. All we lack is a software patch by blizzard.
That would take one heck of a computer to run.
Considering that most pros prefer to play at the lowest settings, I strongly doubt it.
On June 23 2011 11:24 PepperoniPiZZa wrote: Funny how you guys keep going on when I've already showed you the perfect unexploitable solution for this whole lag problem. Blizzard needs to implement Dual Screen Play. Every modern machine has 2 video outs and enough USB slots to hook up all the required equipment. All we lack is a software patch by blizzard.
Sounds exploitable to me.
It's a videosignal generated by a GPU, you can't just reroute it to somewhere without any signficant loss in quality and huge delay.
On June 23 2011 11:27 latan wrote:
On June 23 2011 11:24 PepperoniPiZZa wrote: Funny how you guys keep going on when I've already showed you the perfect unexploitable solution for this whole lag problem. Blizzard needs to implement Dual Screen Play. Every modern machine has 2 video outs and enough USB slots to hook up all the required equipment. All we lack is a software patch by blizzard.
Because your solution only addresses 2 player matches.
Pick one: A solution or No solution
Yes you're right.
I pick a solution: LAN.
What you are proposing a PARTIAL solution that would benefit almost no-one, but would take developer time to be implemented.
So actually, no solution is better than your "perfect" alternative.
The benefit for professional play would be huge.
You are forgetting about observers and referees. as i said, almost useless.
On June 23 2011 11:52 gurrpp wrote: I think the solution is to just start developing games for free and rely on a microtransaction model. The whole idea of games as a service is definitely more lucrative than selling retail imo and its pointless for the consumer to pirate a game they can download for free anyway.
Having basic functionality be free, such as LAN, while requiring a monthly fee to play online would be ideal.
Obviously this only applies purely to multiplayer games, so I'm not sure how content such as sc2's campaign could be handled.
..Are you seriously saying you think the solution to this is to have a subscription fee + item shop?
Are you fucking serious?
Could you come up with an even more stupid idea?
He's kind of half right. I don't know about the monthly fee, but having an item shop/other microtransactions is extremely lucrative in the present. Just look at League of Legends' format, they have a highly successful business model and are making a huge profit off of it. If that business model were to be refined even more, it would be hugely successful for any game company that wants to have online play.
Pirates did not kill LAN, every company that refuses to put it in their games has contributed to killing LAN.
Pirates did not make the decisions to not release it as an option, so the blame rests squarely on the shoulders of whoever decided that for each and every company who has perpetuated the choice.
There will always be pirates, and like Notch, and other outspoken people have said, providing the player with services they couldn't have with a pirated version is much more likely to entice pirates to buy the software than removing features everyone could use just to cripple pirated versions. Pirates are gamers too, and if the companies can offer us something we genuinely want, we may consider buying your game, but if they strip us of any consolation for pirating an already less-useful version of the game, then we're likely to refuse to pay just to spite them.
Removal of LAN capabilities does not stop pirates. It simply penalizes legitimate players of the game, removing an extremely useful option, forcing them to rely on a centralized system for all online gameplay. We've all see what can happen to battle.net at times, whether it's benign bugs, crippling lag, or the servers going offline constantly. Even a company as large ans powerful as Activision-Blizzard cannot keep 100% uptime for their servers, which means that we the player loses out.
And to make matters even more ridiculous, the only thing that needs to be done to give pirates the same game as legitimate players is for someone to develop a battle.net 2.0 server emulator, which was in the works a while ago and showed considerable progress in a rather short time. If the people who were developing that emulator had not stopped in the face of lawsuits, they may very well could have completed the project and things would be even worse off for Activision-Blizzard.
I was waiting for that server emulator to be released, because I figured I wouldn't have the money available to buy SC2, so I had no plan on paying for it, I was lucky enough to have money at the right time, and bought SC2, but I would have been completely fine with pirating it if that server emulator had been released before I had the money.
On June 23 2011 09:59 BroboCop wrote: im confused how putting a lan option for sc2 would lower revenue(in any sense) as i will elaborate below.
okay lets assume with the lan feature you can create any map (and we will assume no one makes recreations of the campaign as maps). So if your by yourself you can only play vs computers, which isn't much training at all seeing playing against something that gets more minerals per trip, map hacks, and can have perfect macro is never going to happen in a normal game. Now yes, you can play with buddies/family/etc, but that means they would have to bring their rig over to your house or you have a spare computer, which, seems highly unlikely as 2 people playing together over and over and over after awhile should get boring. Furthermore, how are you ever going to become better at the game if you only have a limited number of practice partners, the whole point of playing online games is for the ONLINE community. The whole point of laning is to either: have fun with friends or in off-line competitions. And when you're playing with friends, almost everyone wants to "be the best" so they have "bragging rights" so to speak. And if you want to be the best... you would need to play on a regular basis, and in most cases playing on a regular basis won't be achieved purely through playing in lans and therefore, you would need the game to play ladder in order to get better. And if you need the game, you would have to buy it. As for competitive play [i will use MLG in this example], no one is going to play unless they: are "good" such as a pro player or would just like to go to have fun (getting "owned" by a pro), but most likely, a person willing to drop $70 on an mlg ticket is already an avid player, spectator, and community-contributing individual and why would they drop $70 to get owned when they could buy the game for $50?
For example, I know 20~ people IRL that play sc2 from school etc. 15~ aren't even close to active, so I would never be able to lan with them and ontop of that, there are only 2 of us that are actually good. top master (myself) and GM (my buddy). There is only so much you can do on lan because you have to be on the same network and for "logistical reasons" i don't see people using it as the only medium for playing the game. Yes, there will be exceptions but they will be out-liers, so why worry?
Lastly, if your product isn't "pirateable" someone will just pirate something else that is free and play it. They never would pay for it in the beginning, however, with starcraft you can only accomplish so much in a LAN setting, thus if they truly "like the game" after playing with buddies for several weeks or a month they may have the sense to go out and buy it.
I would like to see a counter-argument(s) that would prove me wrong but in essence my logic is: people would have never played the game before because it costs $$ -> [assume lan function here]they like the lan which has only limited features due to the "logistics" of how lans work -> said person decides to buy the game because they want to play it more and not be limited by needing to lan.
The only forseeable problem I could see is college campuses (where a network would be fucking huge).
A pirated game wouldn't be able to run only on actual LAN. There are coutless programs that replicate a "battle.net" where pirated copies can run just fine. Take WC3 for example. I have the original copy, a few of my friends have original copies, NOONE I know has recently played on battle.net, because everyone plays on Garena, or Eurobattle, or whatever the server where piracy doesn't matter. They basically replace battle.net, specially on places where piracy is a lot more common, which is the case of Brazil, and specially China. These servers have several times more people than battle.net. They have ladders, premium memberships and basically make money on the fact that people will play cracked versions online.
So no, you don't have to be on the same network to enjoy the benefits of a cracked game, and LAN support, WC3, probally the closest example we can find to draw parallels to SC2, proves that. Blizzard's experience with the rampart piracy of WC3, it's probally the most played game in this kind of servers (not in small part because of DOTA), is probally a big reason there is no LAN in SC2.
it costs money to brunt the bill of hosting servers though. so my question to this is: where does the money come from to host said servers that work "better than battlenet"? Back when I played lineage 2 as my main game I sometimes would goof off on "private servers" for example and the servers were trash because well... there was no money to be made off "private servers" because the whole point of them was to not pay for the game and play on them, thus they were poorly maintained.
On June 23 2011 11:34 Fruscainte wrote: The voice of "I PIRATE EVERYTHING SINCE I DONT PAY FOR EVERYTHING" is a very small part in the community but consequently the loudest -- giving the illusion they are the majority when in fact most of pirates hate their fucking guts if they like the game and don't buy it after. These are potential customers that they are driving away as criminals. That's my issue with this crap. They take away something that is basically mandatory in a game like this and then when people flip a shit about it, they blame it on pirates.
So you think self-reporting surveys are accurate. Do you really think that nobody lied about whether they buy the game?
Furthermore, what about all the people who don't vote because they are ashamed. Or even better, the fact that MOST PEOPLE ARE APATHETIC means that the same people who don't give a shit about pirating and not buying are the same people who don't give a shit about your surveys examining the ethics of it.
It's called a silent majority. You are in extreme rationalization mode if you really think most pirates buy games they like, and it's also a LOT easier to "not like" a game that you've played for 20 hours if it lets you talk yourself into keeping 60 bucks.
Stay classy. Come back with something substantial please. I got a poll of thousands of people, people all throughout the thread backing me up saying they buy games they enjoy all the time and piracy has directly caused sales for them and so forth. You are some random with 4 posts who is saying "I know for a fact that the majority of pirates just do it to steal!!!!"
Is Piracy morally wrong? Sure. I don't doubt that for a second.
Is it legally or fiscally wrong? Not at all. In fact, everything is pointing that piracy directly helps the industry more than it hurts. Look a few pages back if you actually read the thread and you would see that government study, again, backing me up.
On June 23 2011 07:10 mdma-_- wrote: that still doesnt explain why they cant allow people to play each other in lan with the necessecity of being logged into bnet/whatever online client.
cheap excuse just to blame it on pirates tbh
Very easy to modify a client to think it's connected to a central server when it isn't.
Personally, I'm not all that bothered. It's incredibly rare for me and my friends to be playing locally without having a decent connection available. There are many other things I'd rather the HoN developers do before even mentioning adding LAN support. For one, optimizing the OSX version of the client a little better.
Also, I have absolutely no problem buying a game if it's good, and priced appropriately. Unfortunately, with the sheer volume of terrible games that are over-hyped and under-developed, and the ridiculous prices being charged for games these days (as much as $120-130NZ these days), without being able to try the game before-hand, I don't bother buying games.
On June 23 2011 12:01 Bobbias wrote: I was waiting for that server emulator to be released, because I figured I wouldn't have the money available to buy SC2, so I had no plan on paying for it, I was lucky enough to have money at the right time, and bought SC2, but I would have been completely fine with pirating it if that server emulator had been released before I had the money.
On June 23 2011 11:34 Fruscainte wrote: The voice of "I PIRATE EVERYTHING SINCE I DONT PAY FOR EVERYTHING" is a very small part in the community but consequently the loudest -- giving the illusion they are the majority when in fact most of pirates hate their fucking guts if they like the game and don't buy it after. These are potential customers that they are driving away as criminals. That's my issue with this crap. They take away something that is basically mandatory in a game like this and then when people flip a shit about it, they blame it on pirates.
So you think self-reporting surveys are accurate. Do you really think that nobody lied about whether they buy the game?
Furthermore, what about all the people who don't vote because they are ashamed. Or even better, the fact that MOST PEOPLE ARE APATHETIC means that the same people who don't give a shit about pirating and not buying are the same people who don't give a shit about your surveys examining the ethics of it.
It's called a silent majority. You are in extreme rationalization mode if you really think most pirates buy games they like, and it's also a LOT easier to "not like" a game that you've played for 20 hours if it lets you talk yourself into keeping 60 bucks.
So essentially, I got a legitimate poll of 12,000 people -- and you got yourself going LOL IT'S BIASED AND WRONG AND SINCE PIRATES ARE THE MOST IMMORAL PEOPLE ON EARTH IT'S OBVIOUSLY FAKE AND WRONG.
Stay classy. Come back with something substantial please. I got a poll of thousands of people, people all throughout the thread backing me up saying they buy games they enjoy all the time and piracy has directly caused sales for them and so forth.
Is Piracy morally wrong? Sure. I don't doubt that for a second.
Is it legally or fiscally wrong? Not at all. In fact, everything is pointing that piracy directly helps the industry more than it hurts. Look a few pages back if you actually read the thread and you would see that government study, again, backing me up.
You do know what response bias is, right? It's like going to colleges and asking students if they smoke marijuana. You see examples of this every day.
On June 23 2011 11:34 Fruscainte wrote: The voice of "I PIRATE EVERYTHING SINCE I DONT PAY FOR EVERYTHING" is a very small part in the community but consequently the loudest -- giving the illusion they are the majority when in fact most of pirates hate their fucking guts if they like the game and don't buy it after. These are potential customers that they are driving away as criminals. That's my issue with this crap. They take away something that is basically mandatory in a game like this and then when people flip a shit about it, they blame it on pirates.
So you think self-reporting surveys are accurate. Do you really think that nobody lied about whether they buy the game?
Furthermore, what about all the people who don't vote because they are ashamed. Or even better, the fact that MOST PEOPLE ARE APATHETIC means that the same people who don't give a shit about pirating and not buying are the same people who don't give a shit about your surveys examining the ethics of it.
It's called a silent majority. You are in extreme rationalization mode if you really think most pirates buy games they like, and it's also a LOT easier to "not like" a game that you've played for 20 hours if it lets you talk yourself into keeping 60 bucks.
So essentially, I got a legitimate poll of 12,000 people -- and you got yourself going LOL IT'S BIASED AND WRONG AND SINCE PIRATES ARE THE MOST IMMORAL PEOPLE ON EARTH IT'S OBVIOUSLY FAKE AND WRONG.
Stay classy. Come back with something substantial please. I got a poll of thousands of people, people all throughout the thread backing me up saying they buy games they enjoy all the time and piracy has directly caused sales for them and so forth.
Is Piracy morally wrong? Sure. I don't doubt that for a second.
Is it legally or fiscally wrong? Not at all. In fact, everything is pointing that piracy directly helps the industry more than it hurts. Look a few pages back if you actually read the thread and you would see that government study, again, backing me up.
First of all, it is legally wrong. It's against the law. You seem confused.
Second of all, an internet poll asking people to self-report something morally wrong is completely useless and anyone without your distorted logic can see it.
Finally, the poll asked if they will buy it when it's "amazing." Again, it's pretty easy to talk yourself out of considering something amazing if it saves you money. It's also completely unfair to the games that aren't "amazing" but are "good." I don't see why you think people are entitled to consume for free and only pay if they are truly amazed.
On June 23 2011 11:34 Fruscainte wrote: The voice of "I PIRATE EVERYTHING SINCE I DONT PAY FOR EVERYTHING" is a very small part in the community but consequently the loudest -- giving the illusion they are the majority when in fact most of pirates hate their fucking guts if they like the game and don't buy it after. These are potential customers that they are driving away as criminals. That's my issue with this crap. They take away something that is basically mandatory in a game like this and then when people flip a shit about it, they blame it on pirates.
So you think self-reporting surveys are accurate. Do you really think that nobody lied about whether they buy the game?
Furthermore, what about all the people who don't vote because they are ashamed. Or even better, the fact that MOST PEOPLE ARE APATHETIC means that the same people who don't give a shit about pirating and not buying are the same people who don't give a shit about your surveys examining the ethics of it.
It's called a silent majority. You are in extreme rationalization mode if you really think most pirates buy games they like, and it's also a LOT easier to "not like" a game that you've played for 20 hours if it lets you talk yourself into keeping 60 bucks.
So essentially, I got a legitimate poll of 12,000 people -- and you got yourself going LOL IT'S BIASED AND WRONG AND SINCE PIRATES ARE THE MOST IMMORAL PEOPLE ON EARTH IT'S OBVIOUSLY FAKE AND WRONG.
Stay classy. Come back with something substantial please. I got a poll of thousands of people, people all throughout the thread backing me up saying they buy games they enjoy all the time and piracy has directly caused sales for them and so forth.
Is Piracy morally wrong? Sure. I don't doubt that for a second.
Is it legally or fiscally wrong? Not at all. In fact, everything is pointing that piracy directly helps the industry more than it hurts. Look a few pages back if you actually read the thread and you would see that government study, again, backing me up.
You do know what response bias is, right? It's like going to colleges and asking students if they smoke marijuana. You see examples of this every day.
Or asking a publisher whether or not piracy is lost sales :D
On June 23 2011 11:34 Fruscainte wrote: The voice of "I PIRATE EVERYTHING SINCE I DONT PAY FOR EVERYTHING" is a very small part in the community but consequently the loudest -- giving the illusion they are the majority when in fact most of pirates hate their fucking guts if they like the game and don't buy it after. These are potential customers that they are driving away as criminals. That's my issue with this crap. They take away something that is basically mandatory in a game like this and then when people flip a shit about it, they blame it on pirates.
So you think self-reporting surveys are accurate. Do you really think that nobody lied about whether they buy the game?
Furthermore, what about all the people who don't vote because they are ashamed. Or even better, the fact that MOST PEOPLE ARE APATHETIC means that the same people who don't give a shit about pirating and not buying are the same people who don't give a shit about your surveys examining the ethics of it.
It's called a silent majority. You are in extreme rationalization mode if you really think most pirates buy games they like, and it's also a LOT easier to "not like" a game that you've played for 20 hours if it lets you talk yourself into keeping 60 bucks.
So essentially, I got a legitimate poll of 12,000 people -- and you got yourself going LOL IT'S BIASED AND WRONG AND SINCE PIRATES ARE THE MOST IMMORAL PEOPLE ON EARTH IT'S OBVIOUSLY FAKE AND WRONG.
Stay classy. Come back with something substantial please. I got a poll of thousands of people, people all throughout the thread backing me up saying they buy games they enjoy all the time and piracy has directly caused sales for them and so forth.
Is Piracy morally wrong? Sure. I don't doubt that for a second.
Is it legally or fiscally wrong? Not at all. In fact, everything is pointing that piracy directly helps the industry more than it hurts. Look a few pages back if you actually read the thread and you would see that government study, again, backing me up.
You do know what response bias is, right? It's like going to colleges and asking students if they smoke marijuana. You see examples of this every day.
If you spent any amount of time in Bitgamer and in the piracy community, as I said multiple times -- it would only reaffirm those statistics.
On June 23 2011 11:34 Fruscainte wrote: The voice of "I PIRATE EVERYTHING SINCE I DONT PAY FOR EVERYTHING" is a very small part in the community but consequently the loudest -- giving the illusion they are the majority when in fact most of pirates hate their fucking guts if they like the game and don't buy it after. These are potential customers that they are driving away as criminals. That's my issue with this crap. They take away something that is basically mandatory in a game like this and then when people flip a shit about it, they blame it on pirates.
So you think self-reporting surveys are accurate. Do you really think that nobody lied about whether they buy the game?
Furthermore, what about all the people who don't vote because they are ashamed. Or even better, the fact that MOST PEOPLE ARE APATHETIC means that the same people who don't give a shit about pirating and not buying are the same people who don't give a shit about your surveys examining the ethics of it.
It's called a silent majority. You are in extreme rationalization mode if you really think most pirates buy games they like, and it's also a LOT easier to "not like" a game that you've played for 20 hours if it lets you talk yourself into keeping 60 bucks.
So essentially, I got a legitimate poll of 12,000 people -- and you got yourself going LOL IT'S BIASED AND WRONG AND SINCE PIRATES ARE THE MOST IMMORAL PEOPLE ON EARTH IT'S OBVIOUSLY FAKE AND WRONG.
Stay classy. Come back with something substantial please. I got a poll of thousands of people, people all throughout the thread backing me up saying they buy games they enjoy all the time and piracy has directly caused sales for them and so forth.
Is Piracy morally wrong? Sure. I don't doubt that for a second.
Is it legally or fiscally wrong? Not at all. In fact, everything is pointing that piracy directly helps the industry more than it hurts. Look a few pages back if you actually read the thread and you would see that government study, again, backing me up.
First of all, it is legally wrong. It's against the law. You seem confused.
Second of all, an internet poll asking people to self-report something morally wrong is completely useless and anyone without your distorted logic can see it.
Finally, the poll asked if they will buy it when it's "amazing." Again, it's pretty easy to talk yourself out of considering something amazing if it saves you money. It's also completely unfair to the games that aren't "amazing" but are "good." I don't see why you think people are entitled to consume for free and only pay if they are truly amazed.
I'm curious, what do you do for money?
First of all, no it's not. YOU clearly don't understand the law. It's against the law to provide the files, which is why all major crackers and torrent suppliers are from foreign soil. The actual downloading of them is still being debated.
Second of all, I got numbers, a whole community reaffirming those numbers and people in this thread reaffirming those numbers. Stop assuming any numbers against your point is "distorted"
On June 23 2011 11:34 Fruscainte wrote: The voice of "I PIRATE EVERYTHING SINCE I DONT PAY FOR EVERYTHING" is a very small part in the community but consequently the loudest -- giving the illusion they are the majority when in fact most of pirates hate their fucking guts if they like the game and don't buy it after. These are potential customers that they are driving away as criminals. That's my issue with this crap. They take away something that is basically mandatory in a game like this and then when people flip a shit about it, they blame it on pirates.
So you think self-reporting surveys are accurate. Do you really think that nobody lied about whether they buy the game?
Furthermore, what about all the people who don't vote because they are ashamed. Or even better, the fact that MOST PEOPLE ARE APATHETIC means that the same people who don't give a shit about pirating and not buying are the same people who don't give a shit about your surveys examining the ethics of it.
It's called a silent majority. You are in extreme rationalization mode if you really think most pirates buy games they like, and it's also a LOT easier to "not like" a game that you've played for 20 hours if it lets you talk yourself into keeping 60 bucks.
So essentially, I got a legitimate poll of 12,000 people -- and you got yourself going LOL IT'S BIASED AND WRONG AND SINCE PIRATES ARE THE MOST IMMORAL PEOPLE ON EARTH IT'S OBVIOUSLY FAKE AND WRONG.
Stay classy. Come back with something substantial please. I got a poll of thousands of people, people all throughout the thread backing me up saying they buy games they enjoy all the time and piracy has directly caused sales for them and so forth.
Is Piracy morally wrong? Sure. I don't doubt that for a second.
Is it legally or fiscally wrong? Not at all. In fact, everything is pointing that piracy directly helps the industry more than it hurts. Look a few pages back if you actually read the thread and you would see that government study, again, backing me up.
You do know what response bias is, right? It's like going to colleges and asking students if they smoke marijuana. You see examples of this every day.
If you spent any amount of time in Bitgamer and in the piracy community, as I said multiple times -- it would only reaffirm those statistics.
How do you know people actually buy games when they claim to?
s2 allows for HoN to be played free on Garena in Southeast Asia. The players there are ip region blocked from joining their original servers. I think this is a win-win situation. Piracy is pretty prevalent there. A lot of players in SEA play DotA because of LAN and TFT is easily pirated. I'm sure s2 has worked out some deal with Garena. I think that's pretty smart of them tbh.
Personally I just bought Dungeon Siege 3. I finished the game in maybe 14-15 hrs. I am really glad I bought sc2 and HoN because I've spent way more time on those 2 games than I'll ever on DS3. (at most i'll replay DS3 once).
I will gladly pay for any good game a good developer puts out. Regardless of LAN feature or not. As long as they make good games that I enjoy, as an individual consumer, I'll be happy to pay my money for it.
Dungeon Siege 3 imo was pretty well made. Me and friend had fun playing Local co-op but it was a tad short. Wish they did something like Torchlight where you could keep hunting for items and etc lol.
Edit :- I think it's just 4-5 countries like SG, MY, Thai, Viet in SEA.
On June 23 2011 11:34 Fruscainte wrote: The voice of "I PIRATE EVERYTHING SINCE I DONT PAY FOR EVERYTHING" is a very small part in the community but consequently the loudest -- giving the illusion they are the majority when in fact most of pirates hate their fucking guts if they like the game and don't buy it after. These are potential customers that they are driving away as criminals. That's my issue with this crap. They take away something that is basically mandatory in a game like this and then when people flip a shit about it, they blame it on pirates.
So you think self-reporting surveys are accurate. Do you really think that nobody lied about whether they buy the game?
Furthermore, what about all the people who don't vote because they are ashamed. Or even better, the fact that MOST PEOPLE ARE APATHETIC means that the same people who don't give a shit about pirating and not buying are the same people who don't give a shit about your surveys examining the ethics of it.
It's called a silent majority. You are in extreme rationalization mode if you really think most pirates buy games they like, and it's also a LOT easier to "not like" a game that you've played for 20 hours if it lets you talk yourself into keeping 60 bucks.
So essentially, I got a legitimate poll of 12,000 people -- and you got yourself going LOL IT'S BIASED AND WRONG AND SINCE PIRATES ARE THE MOST IMMORAL PEOPLE ON EARTH IT'S OBVIOUSLY FAKE AND WRONG.
Stay classy. Come back with something substantial please. I got a poll of thousands of people, people all throughout the thread backing me up saying they buy games they enjoy all the time and piracy has directly caused sales for them and so forth.
Is Piracy morally wrong? Sure. I don't doubt that for a second.
Is it legally or fiscally wrong? Not at all. In fact, everything is pointing that piracy directly helps the industry more than it hurts. Look a few pages back if you actually read the thread and you would see that government study, again, backing me up.
You do know what response bias is, right? It's like going to colleges and asking students if they smoke marijuana. You see examples of this every day.
If you spent any amount of time in Bitgamer and in the piracy community, as I said multiple times -- it would only reaffirm those statistics.
How do you know people actually buy games when they claim to?
So your argument is that people are lying (for no reason) that they are buying games? Both on a non-consequential poll, and thousands of people on forums and comment postings? There's a conspiracy out there to actually convince people we are buying games?
There's a time to stop posting. This is about that time for you.
I got actual people backing my points up and you got theoretical situations of a giant conspiracy against everyone.
On June 23 2011 11:34 Fruscainte wrote: The voice of "I PIRATE EVERYTHING SINCE I DONT PAY FOR EVERYTHING" is a very small part in the community but consequently the loudest -- giving the illusion they are the majority when in fact most of pirates hate their fucking guts if they like the game and don't buy it after. These are potential customers that they are driving away as criminals. That's my issue with this crap. They take away something that is basically mandatory in a game like this and then when people flip a shit about it, they blame it on pirates.
So you think self-reporting surveys are accurate. Do you really think that nobody lied about whether they buy the game?
Furthermore, what about all the people who don't vote because they are ashamed. Or even better, the fact that MOST PEOPLE ARE APATHETIC means that the same people who don't give a shit about pirating and not buying are the same people who don't give a shit about your surveys examining the ethics of it.
It's called a silent majority. You are in extreme rationalization mode if you really think most pirates buy games they like, and it's also a LOT easier to "not like" a game that you've played for 20 hours if it lets you talk yourself into keeping 60 bucks.
So essentially, I got a legitimate poll of 12,000 people -- and you got yourself going LOL IT'S BIASED AND WRONG AND SINCE PIRATES ARE THE MOST IMMORAL PEOPLE ON EARTH IT'S OBVIOUSLY FAKE AND WRONG.
Stay classy. Come back with something substantial please. I got a poll of thousands of people, people all throughout the thread backing me up saying they buy games they enjoy all the time and piracy has directly caused sales for them and so forth.
Is Piracy morally wrong? Sure. I don't doubt that for a second.
Is it legally or fiscally wrong? Not at all. In fact, everything is pointing that piracy directly helps the industry more than it hurts. Look a few pages back if you actually read the thread and you would see that government study, again, backing me up.
First of all, it is legally wrong. It's against the law. You seem confused.
Second of all, an internet poll asking people to self-report something morally wrong is completely useless and anyone without your distorted logic can see it.
Finally, the poll asked if they will buy it when it's "amazing." Again, it's pretty easy to talk yourself out of considering something amazing if it saves you money. It's also completely unfair to the games that aren't "amazing" but are "good." I don't see why you think people are entitled to consume for free and only pay if they are truly amazed.
I'm curious, what do you do for money?
First of all, no it's not. YOU clearly don't understand the law. It's against the law to provide the files, which is why all major crackers and torrent suppliers are from foreign soil. The actual downloading of them is still being debated.
Second of all, I got numbers, a whole community reaffirming those numbers and people in this thread reaffirming those numbers. Stop assuming any numbers against your point is "distorted"
You don't have numbers because you have no way of verifying that any of those numbers are real. If I surveyed everyone about how often they committed homicide, I'm pretty sure it would come up a lot lower than the actual murder rate. I couldn't then run around saying I have a source that proves the murder rate is zero.
On June 23 2011 11:34 Fruscainte wrote: The voice of "I PIRATE EVERYTHING SINCE I DONT PAY FOR EVERYTHING" is a very small part in the community but consequently the loudest -- giving the illusion they are the majority when in fact most of pirates hate their fucking guts if they like the game and don't buy it after. These are potential customers that they are driving away as criminals. That's my issue with this crap. They take away something that is basically mandatory in a game like this and then when people flip a shit about it, they blame it on pirates.
So you think self-reporting surveys are accurate. Do you really think that nobody lied about whether they buy the game?
Furthermore, what about all the people who don't vote because they are ashamed. Or even better, the fact that MOST PEOPLE ARE APATHETIC means that the same people who don't give a shit about pirating and not buying are the same people who don't give a shit about your surveys examining the ethics of it.
It's called a silent majority. You are in extreme rationalization mode if you really think most pirates buy games they like, and it's also a LOT easier to "not like" a game that you've played for 20 hours if it lets you talk yourself into keeping 60 bucks.
So essentially, I got a legitimate poll of 12,000 people -- and you got yourself going LOL IT'S BIASED AND WRONG AND SINCE PIRATES ARE THE MOST IMMORAL PEOPLE ON EARTH IT'S OBVIOUSLY FAKE AND WRONG.
Stay classy. Come back with something substantial please. I got a poll of thousands of people, people all throughout the thread backing me up saying they buy games they enjoy all the time and piracy has directly caused sales for them and so forth.
Is Piracy morally wrong? Sure. I don't doubt that for a second.
Is it legally or fiscally wrong? Not at all. In fact, everything is pointing that piracy directly helps the industry more than it hurts. Look a few pages back if you actually read the thread and you would see that government study, again, backing me up.
You do know what response bias is, right? It's like going to colleges and asking students if they smoke marijuana. You see examples of this every day.
If you spent any amount of time in Bitgamer and in the piracy community, as I said multiple times -- it would only reaffirm those statistics.
How do you know people actually buy games when they claim to?
So your argument is that people are lying (for no reason) that they are buying games? Both on a non-consequential poll, and thousands of people on forums and comment postings? There's a conspiracy out there to actually convince people we are buying games?
There's a time to stop posting. This is about that time for you.
I got actual people backing my points up and you got theoretical situations of a giant conspiracy against everyone.
It's psychological. People want to convince themselves they are not bad people. So the one time they bought a game they thought was great allows them to check that on the poll, never mind the 100 times they said "ehh, it was ok, I'm not going to buy it."
On June 23 2011 11:34 Fruscainte wrote: The voice of "I PIRATE EVERYTHING SINCE I DONT PAY FOR EVERYTHING" is a very small part in the community but consequently the loudest -- giving the illusion they are the majority when in fact most of pirates hate their fucking guts if they like the game and don't buy it after. These are potential customers that they are driving away as criminals. That's my issue with this crap. They take away something that is basically mandatory in a game like this and then when people flip a shit about it, they blame it on pirates.
So you think self-reporting surveys are accurate. Do you really think that nobody lied about whether they buy the game?
Furthermore, what about all the people who don't vote because they are ashamed. Or even better, the fact that MOST PEOPLE ARE APATHETIC means that the same people who don't give a shit about pirating and not buying are the same people who don't give a shit about your surveys examining the ethics of it.
It's called a silent majority. You are in extreme rationalization mode if you really think most pirates buy games they like, and it's also a LOT easier to "not like" a game that you've played for 20 hours if it lets you talk yourself into keeping 60 bucks.
So essentially, I got a legitimate poll of 12,000 people -- and you got yourself going LOL IT'S BIASED AND WRONG AND SINCE PIRATES ARE THE MOST IMMORAL PEOPLE ON EARTH IT'S OBVIOUSLY FAKE AND WRONG.
Stay classy. Come back with something substantial please. I got a poll of thousands of people, people all throughout the thread backing me up saying they buy games they enjoy all the time and piracy has directly caused sales for them and so forth.
Is Piracy morally wrong? Sure. I don't doubt that for a second.
Is it legally or fiscally wrong? Not at all. In fact, everything is pointing that piracy directly helps the industry more than it hurts. Look a few pages back if you actually read the thread and you would see that government study, again, backing me up.
You do know what response bias is, right? It's like going to colleges and asking students if they smoke marijuana. You see examples of this every day.
If you spent any amount of time in Bitgamer and in the piracy community, as I said multiple times -- it would only reaffirm those statistics.
How do you know people actually buy games when they claim to?
So your argument is that people are lying (for no reason) that they are buying games? Both on a non-consequential poll, and thousands of people on forums and comment postings? There's a conspiracy out there to actually convince people we are buying games?
There's a time to stop posting. This is about that time for you.
I got actual people backing my points up and you got theoretical situations of a giant conspiracy against everyone.
You probably should stop posting about statistics, actually. I support having LAN and agree that piracy is a stupid reason to keep it out, but this really is a disgrace to legitimate statistics >.>
On June 23 2011 11:34 Fruscainte wrote: The voice of "I PIRATE EVERYTHING SINCE I DONT PAY FOR EVERYTHING" is a very small part in the community but consequently the loudest -- giving the illusion they are the majority when in fact most of pirates hate their fucking guts if they like the game and don't buy it after. These are potential customers that they are driving away as criminals. That's my issue with this crap. They take away something that is basically mandatory in a game like this and then when people flip a shit about it, they blame it on pirates.
So you think self-reporting surveys are accurate. Do you really think that nobody lied about whether they buy the game?
Furthermore, what about all the people who don't vote because they are ashamed. Or even better, the fact that MOST PEOPLE ARE APATHETIC means that the same people who don't give a shit about pirating and not buying are the same people who don't give a shit about your surveys examining the ethics of it.
It's called a silent majority. You are in extreme rationalization mode if you really think most pirates buy games they like, and it's also a LOT easier to "not like" a game that you've played for 20 hours if it lets you talk yourself into keeping 60 bucks.
So essentially, I got a legitimate poll of 12,000 people -- and you got yourself going LOL IT'S BIASED AND WRONG AND SINCE PIRATES ARE THE MOST IMMORAL PEOPLE ON EARTH IT'S OBVIOUSLY FAKE AND WRONG.
Stay classy. Come back with something substantial please. I got a poll of thousands of people, people all throughout the thread backing me up saying they buy games they enjoy all the time and piracy has directly caused sales for them and so forth.
Is Piracy morally wrong? Sure. I don't doubt that for a second.
Is it legally or fiscally wrong? Not at all. In fact, everything is pointing that piracy directly helps the industry more than it hurts. Look a few pages back if you actually read the thread and you would see that government study, again, backing me up.
You do know what response bias is, right? It's like going to colleges and asking students if they smoke marijuana. You see examples of this every day.
If you spent any amount of time in Bitgamer and in the piracy community, as I said multiple times -- it would only reaffirm those statistics.
How do you know people actually buy games when they claim to?
So your argument is that people are lying (for no reason) that they are buying games? Both on a non-consequential poll, and thousands of people on forums and comment postings? There's a conspiracy out there to actually convince people we are buying games?
There's a time to stop posting. This is about that time for you.
I got actual people backing my points up and you got theoretical situations of a giant conspiracy against everyone.
You probably should stop posting about statistics, actually. I support having LAN and agree that piracy is a stupid reason to keep it out, but this really is a disgrace to legitimate statistics >.>
I wasn't using it as a legitimate statistic -- I was using it to reaffirm myself and everyone in this thread saying they buy games they pirate and the community being the majority in saying they buy games they pirate.
Sure, it may not be 100% accurate -- I'm not saying it is. But come on, I make an entire post to make a point and you nit pick out one single part of it to simply re-enforce my point and explode it into something much bigger than it was meant to be.
On June 23 2011 11:34 Fruscainte wrote: The voice of "I PIRATE EVERYTHING SINCE I DONT PAY FOR EVERYTHING" is a very small part in the community but consequently the loudest -- giving the illusion they are the majority when in fact most of pirates hate their fucking guts if they like the game and don't buy it after. These are potential customers that they are driving away as criminals. That's my issue with this crap. They take away something that is basically mandatory in a game like this and then when people flip a shit about it, they blame it on pirates.
So you think self-reporting surveys are accurate. Do you really think that nobody lied about whether they buy the game?
Furthermore, what about all the people who don't vote because they are ashamed. Or even better, the fact that MOST PEOPLE ARE APATHETIC means that the same people who don't give a shit about pirating and not buying are the same people who don't give a shit about your surveys examining the ethics of it.
It's called a silent majority. You are in extreme rationalization mode if you really think most pirates buy games they like, and it's also a LOT easier to "not like" a game that you've played for 20 hours if it lets you talk yourself into keeping 60 bucks.
So essentially, I got a legitimate poll of 12,000 people -- and you got yourself going LOL IT'S BIASED AND WRONG AND SINCE PIRATES ARE THE MOST IMMORAL PEOPLE ON EARTH IT'S OBVIOUSLY FAKE AND WRONG.
Stay classy. Come back with something substantial please. I got a poll of thousands of people, people all throughout the thread backing me up saying they buy games they enjoy all the time and piracy has directly caused sales for them and so forth.
Is Piracy morally wrong? Sure. I don't doubt that for a second.
Is it legally or fiscally wrong? Not at all. In fact, everything is pointing that piracy directly helps the industry more than it hurts. Look a few pages back if you actually read the thread and you would see that government study, again, backing me up.
You do know what response bias is, right? It's like going to colleges and asking students if they smoke marijuana. You see examples of this every day.
If you spent any amount of time in Bitgamer and in the piracy community, as I said multiple times -- it would only reaffirm those statistics.
How do you know people actually buy games when they claim to?
So your argument is that people are lying (for no reason) that they are buying games? Both on a non-consequential poll, and thousands of people on forums and comment postings? There's a conspiracy out there to actually convince people we are buying games?
There's a time to stop posting. This is about that time for you.
I got actual people backing my points up and you got theoretical situations of a giant conspiracy against everyone.
You probably should stop posting about statistics, actually. I support having LAN and agree that piracy is a stupid reason to keep it out, but this really is a disgrace to legitimate statistics >.>
I wasn't using it as a legitimate statistic -- I was using it to reaffirm myself and everyone in this thread saying they buy games they pirate and the community being the majority in saying they buy games they pirate.
Sure, it may not be 100% accurate -- I'm not saying it is. But come on, I make an entire post to make a point and you nit pick out one single part of it to simply re-enforce my point and explode it into something much bigger than it was meant to be.
The point is that the poll is nothing more than an exaggerated anecdote that doesn't serve as grounds to reaffirm anything at all :/
On June 23 2011 11:52 gurrpp wrote: I think the solution is to just start developing games for free and rely on a microtransaction model. The whole idea of games as a service is definitely more lucrative than selling retail imo and its pointless for the consumer to pirate a game they can download for free anyway.
Having basic functionality be free, such as LAN, while requiring a monthly fee to play online would be ideal.
Obviously this only applies purely to multiplayer games, so I'm not sure how content such as sc2's campaign could be handled.
..Are you seriously saying you think the solution to this is to have a subscription fee + item shop?
Are you fucking serious?
Could you come up with an even more stupid idea?
Great, rather than actually discuss my point you resort to ad hominem attacks.
My idea is to let everyone have access to a LAN only, basic version of the game. Ideally you wouldn't even have to connect to any service to play the free version. If you wanted to play online on battle.net, then you would have to pay a subscription. IMO its quite reasonable to charge people each month for a service you provide them (matchmaking, ladder, access to custom maps). Then you could also throw in other micro transactions such as name change, stat reset, icons, chat channels, etc..
You've been living under a rock if you think the current model for selling video games is sustainable on the pc. Every game I've bought in the past 2 years besides sc2 has been either super cheap over steam (less than $10), free through a client/browser, or subscription based.
For all those people saying that its common to pirate a game and then buy it if its good. What you are saying is based on ANECDOTAL EVIDENCE, which doesn't mean fuck. For every person who is willing to proudly say that they have pirated a game and then buy it, there's probably at least 100 who pirated without buying and don't go bragging about it on the internet.
Without the actual data about how many potential customers publishers and developers lose to piracy you can't make the decision about whether its worth it to take active measures to prevent piracy or not. The people who have access to those numbers, i.e. the people who actually know what the fuck is going on, have decided its worth more to take measures to protect their IP than to spread goodwill.
I hope there's an economically viable way to provide LAN support and DRM free gaming, and that's why I brainstormed these ideas and posted them.
On June 23 2011 07:10 mdma-_- wrote: that still doesnt explain why they cant allow people to play each other in lan with the necessecity of being logged into bnet/whatever online client.
cheap excuse just to blame it on pirates tbh
How is it in any way a cheap excuse when it costs the company millions of dollars in lost sales?!?!
You make no sense, I guess you find millions lying on the sidewalk?
On June 23 2011 11:34 Fruscainte wrote: The voice of "I PIRATE EVERYTHING SINCE I DONT PAY FOR EVERYTHING" is a very small part in the community but consequently the loudest -- giving the illusion they are the majority when in fact most of pirates hate their fucking guts if they like the game and don't buy it after. These are potential customers that they are driving away as criminals. That's my issue with this crap. They take away something that is basically mandatory in a game like this and then when people flip a shit about it, they blame it on pirates.
So you think self-reporting surveys are accurate. Do you really think that nobody lied about whether they buy the game?
Furthermore, what about all the people who don't vote because they are ashamed. Or even better, the fact that MOST PEOPLE ARE APATHETIC means that the same people who don't give a shit about pirating and not buying are the same people who don't give a shit about your surveys examining the ethics of it.
It's called a silent majority. You are in extreme rationalization mode if you really think most pirates buy games they like, and it's also a LOT easier to "not like" a game that you've played for 20 hours if it lets you talk yourself into keeping 60 bucks.
So essentially, I got a legitimate poll of 12,000 people -- and you got yourself going LOL IT'S BIASED AND WRONG AND SINCE PIRATES ARE THE MOST IMMORAL PEOPLE ON EARTH IT'S OBVIOUSLY FAKE AND WRONG.
Stay classy. Come back with something substantial please. I got a poll of thousands of people, people all throughout the thread backing me up saying they buy games they enjoy all the time and piracy has directly caused sales for them and so forth.
Is Piracy morally wrong? Sure. I don't doubt that for a second.
Is it legally or fiscally wrong? Not at all. In fact, everything is pointing that piracy directly helps the industry more than it hurts. Look a few pages back if you actually read the thread and you would see that government study, again, backing me up.
You do know what response bias is, right? It's like going to colleges and asking students if they smoke marijuana. You see examples of this every day.
If you spent any amount of time in Bitgamer and in the piracy community, as I said multiple times -- it would only reaffirm those statistics.
How do you know people actually buy games when they claim to?
So your argument is that people are lying (for no reason) that they are buying games? Both on a non-consequential poll, and thousands of people on forums and comment postings? There's a conspiracy out there to actually convince people we are buying games?
There's a time to stop posting. This is about that time for you.
I got actual people backing my points up and you got theoretical situations of a giant conspiracy against everyone.
You probably should stop posting about statistics, actually. I support having LAN and agree that piracy is a stupid reason to keep it out, but this really is a disgrace to legitimate statistics >.>
I wasn't using it as a legitimate statistic -- I was using it to reaffirm myself and everyone in this thread saying they buy games they pirate and the community being the majority in saying they buy games they pirate.
Sure, it may not be 100% accurate -- I'm not saying it is. But come on, I make an entire post to make a point and you nit pick out one single part of it to simply re-enforce my point and explode it into something much bigger than it was meant to be.
The point is that the poll is nothing more than an exaggerated anecdote that doesn't serve as grounds to reaffirm anything at all :/
The 'statistic' was there to make a point to people who are not active in the piracy community and bought into the stereotype that we all just pirate games since it's convenient and never buy games we enjoy. Not to be taken word for word.
On June 23 2011 11:52 gurrpp wrote: I think the solution is to just start developing games for free and rely on a microtransaction model. The whole idea of games as a service is definitely more lucrative than selling retail imo and its pointless for the consumer to pirate a game they can download for free anyway.
Having basic functionality be free, such as LAN, while requiring a monthly fee to play online would be ideal.
Obviously this only applies purely to multiplayer games, so I'm not sure how content such as sc2's campaign could be handled.
..Are you seriously saying you think the solution to this is to have a subscription fee + item shop?
Are you fucking serious?
Could you come up with an even more stupid idea?
Great, rather than actually discuss my point you resort to ad hominem attacks.
If you're going to use fancy words, at least use them right.
Well, in the sake of NOT turning this into a massive flamefest (which is what I saw from this thread from the get-go) and getting banned I'm going to back out.
why do they have to make multi million dollars in profit at the cost of making a better game... not to mention that they could have a sign in to battlenet and then just let you lan
The question should be more like this : "If there is no LAN-Modus, is any pirate interested in this fact?" And the answer is NO! Why? - Because the big majority of the people, who are getting a cracked copy of a game are only interested in the single player modus. I mean take WoW, this is a game what should be only played online. Still there are a lot of private servers for cracked versions of this game. Take Half-Life2 a couple of days after it was released a "friend" of mine was offering a cracked version of it to me, which didn't need any online bla... On the other hand if SC1 didn't have a spawn version, you can be sure I wouldn't have bought this game. The biggest problem in the modern game industry is , they underestimate the capabilities of the pirates on the one hand and at the other side we have bunch of people in the management, which don't have any clue, what the customers (fans) really want.
If you are a fan of game you will in 95% of the cases buy it. If you just need a lil bit entertainment for a weekend, who would really pay 40-50$ unless you have to much money?
By saying pirates are killing the LAN, you are only searching for an easy excuse. Sure with an already included LAN system, you take a lot of work from the pirates, but if you believe without LAN you could prevent them for cracking your game, you are just stupid.
On June 23 2011 11:52 gurrpp wrote: I think the solution is to just start developing games for free and rely on a microtransaction model. The whole idea of games as a service is definitely more lucrative than selling retail imo and its pointless for the consumer to pirate a game they can download for free anyway.
Having basic functionality be free, such as LAN, while requiring a monthly fee to play online would be ideal.
Obviously this only applies purely to multiplayer games, so I'm not sure how content such as sc2's campaign could be handled.
..Are you seriously saying you think the solution to this is to have a subscription fee + item shop?
Are you fucking serious?
Could you come up with an even more stupid idea?
Great, rather than actually discuss my point you resort to ad hominem attacks.
If you're going to use fancy words, at least use them right.
Stop sidestepping. You didn't respond to the fact that your post was garbage and didn't address any part of my idea.
On June 23 2011 07:10 mdma-_- wrote: that still doesnt explain why they cant allow people to play each other in lan with the necessecity of being logged into bnet/whatever online client.
cheap excuse just to blame it on pirates tbh
How is it in any way a cheap excuse when it costs the company millions of dollars in lost sales?!?!
You make no sense, I guess you find millions lying on the sidewalk?
It'll cost them a lot more down the line if they keep treating their customers like criminals.
i think everybody who lives in the real world understood this, you can argue all you want that pirating is not wrong, that people buy the games they like after they downloaded them etc. Their is zero actual proof to this, a poll on a random website is not legitimate evidence.
Reality is people take shit and dont pay for it, developers dont want that to happen so they remove things to keep it from happening. Blizzard has shown no intent on budging on the issue despite the whining.
SC2 is doing fine without LAN, the fact that blizzard went so far out of their way to remove it and put battle.net 2.0 as a online replacement is a testament to how dedicated developers are to stopping pirating.
It is absolutely not "rational to pirate games." On the contrary it represents the view that one is entitled to the product of another person for less than what that person is willing to exchange it. That is extremely irrational view, although disturbingly prevalent in our increasingly irrational world.
I used to be one of the top crackers in Sweden like 20 years ago. The game companies are still here and posting million dollar profits. They are just stuck in the illusion that if nobody pirated games they would sell as many copies as the legit sales + the pirated versions. Which is so far from the truth I almost suffocate laughing. Their policy isn't made by the people who know how shit works it's made by the money men wearing suits and lying through their teeth.
The hard truth is that they spend a couple of millions making a game and expect to make billions. Once they sell XK games their profit margin is like 99%. If they weren't so greedy piracy would end...
Blizzard have more than 2 500 million dollars just in cash assets. I guess they be hurting for money reeel bad. I know I would with so little. I wonder how they can afford food and clothing when pirates have bleed them bone dry ;-)
Funny how Valve doesn't have a huge piracy issue. Maybe Gabe was onto something when he said that gamers will buy a game if the content is worth its weight.
On June 23 2011 12:27 Ingenol wrote: It is absolutely not "rational to pirate games." On the contrary it represents the view that one is entitled to the product of another person for less than what that person is willing to exchange it. That is extremely irrational view, although disturbingly prevalent in our increasingly irrational world.
that makes no sense. if two people offer you to trade the same thing, but one asks for less, the rational thing is to choose to trade with the one who asks for less in return. I'd find it very hard to come up with anything MORE rational. so in conclusion, you must be crazy or something.
On June 23 2011 12:27 Ingenol wrote: It is absolutely not "rational to pirate games." On the contrary it represents the view that one is entitled to the product of another person for less than what that person is willing to exchange it. That is extremely irrational view, although disturbingly prevalent in our increasingly irrational world.
You're right. But look into infinite goods / scarce goods.
On June 23 2011 12:27 Ingenol wrote: It is absolutely not "rational to pirate games." On the contrary it represents the view that one is entitled to the product of another person for less than what that person is willing to exchange it. That is extremely irrational view, although disturbingly prevalent in our increasingly irrational world.
that makes no sense. if two people offer you to trade the same thing, but one asks for less, the rational thing is to choose to trade with the one who asks for less in return. I'd find it very hard to come up with anything MORE rational. so in conclusion, you must be crazy or something.
What the chap asking for money should be providing is good service along with it. That's why Steam is so successful. Games are cheap, accessible, and Valve interact with their community. Hell, email Gabe Newell yourself now, he'll respond eventually. Russian pirate distributors provided cheap localised games when every publisher overcharged their unlocalised games in Russia. Valve provided cheap localised games and perceived piracy issues in Russia vanished.
On June 23 2011 12:27 Ingenol wrote: It is absolutely not "rational to pirate games." On the contrary it represents the view that one is entitled to the product of another person for less than what that person is willing to exchange it. That is extremely irrational view, although disturbingly prevalent in our increasingly irrational world.
Your logic fails at "entitled". Whether or not someone is entitled to something has absolutely nothing to do with whether or not someone will do something. It takes an idiot to think that every "purchase" on this planet is optimal through "entitlement".
People are not entitled to other people's cars, but if other people leave their cars running and unlocked, cars will be stolen anyways.
On June 23 2011 12:28 shockaslim wrote: Funny how Valve doesn't have a huge piracy issue. Maybe Gabe was onto something when he said that gamers will buy a game if the content is worth its weight.
Valve doesn't have huge piracy issues for many reasons.
i completely agree with the developers opinion. i've always felt this way though. piracy will ultimately kill LAN. there's no way about it. by not having LAN capabilities it allows companies to control their product. sounds liek smart business decision making if you ask me. its going to be the future. people better get used to it or get left by the wayside.
As mentioned several times in this thread, this developer speaks the truth and makes valid points. I doubt there will ever be LAN is another Blizzard game. The fact of the matter is, people will pirate games and not pay for them. If the developer feels that removing LAN is important for protecting their product, so be it.
LAN is a liability for Blizzard. If it exists in their program code, there will eventually be someone that can bypass all safeguards and make it exploitable by all. I'm betting that Blizzard built SC2 without LAN consideration at all, so they're not going to go back now and develop it for future deployment.
In HoN's defense, they make a DOTA-style game, which would be extremely pirated since many players are Russian/Brasilian, notorious for mass piracy.
As for SC2, it is absurd that large tournaments can't have LAN. I'm sure a multi-billion dollar company like Blizzard could figure out a way to let players play over a LAN connection, even if they had to authenticate through Battle.net first.
The grammar is a little funky to go with the flow.
This developer pissed me off really bad that I almost want to martyr myself for it but I won't. This thinking is so draconian, so backwards, so what's wrong with the PC gaming industry now-a-days. LAN is not what give rise to piracy. http://torrentfreak.com/us-government-told-piracy-losses-are-exaggerated-100616/ All the post by the HoN guy did was make it so that I will never buy a game they make ever.
I didn't buy MW2 for the exact same reasons. How bad was aimbots/hackers/etc on the PC side rampant as hell. I've been pretty loyalty to Blizzard but clearly Activision is clearly starting to sink its teeth into Blizzard as much as I was a defender before saying that Blizzard was fine, blah blah blah. I recently quit wow and my number 2 reason was because the direction suddenly was taking Cata. They just 180'd from Nov/Dec saying yea dungeons are hard and ppl being decently happy with the way they are and now 20% nerfs across the board to all raids plus wtf is with the more daily quest stuff.
SC2: I'm so on the fence buying HoTS. Blizzard's lack of communication with customers I think in someways hasn't always been their strong suit but they have a lot of fans so they try to do the right way. But I'll I'm seeing them backwards. Broadband may be more available now but whatever netcode Blizz has implemented is clearly not optimized or totally featureless. How do you not have /dnd????? How do you not have chat??? Chat only can have 100 ppl in it?? Is it the year 2000 again???? Easily made clan features. It for some reason on a giant list of things to be put out but they don't seem to have a priority on any of it.
There was another article I wanted to link but couldn't find it on anandtech's pc gaming forum from about a year or year and a half ago about some indie dev talking about piracy and such. I really wish I could find it.
This piracy propaganda started with the big companies like EA, Activision, Ubisoft, etc. saying "oh no the pirates are coming this is why with have to do this." So now all the little companies say yea that the problem with us too. Yeah, yeah we need to throw on some drm crap and limit you to 2 computer installs without an easy way to reset them and it will hurt the paying customer more than the pirates.
Some of this is the customers fault. STOP BUYING THEIR SHITTY GAMES. Vote with your wallet. People make the argument that because we are the PC community that if we don't buy it we won't get the next game. That BS we are usually the most vocal (trying to think of something but not coming out right.). That pic of the MW2 boycott and mostly on that list had bought it. I cried a little that day.
Developers listen to your customers who pay the game. Stop preaching your not the one buying the game. Bulletstorm there is not way in hell I'm buying that game. A)No PC demo wtf is this(oh but we can release a WTF is Duty Calls parody of CoD to market the game. B)Cliffy B and Epic abandoned the PC community. WTF was Gears of War for the PC I pirated that game to try it out and wtf is was the worse thing I've ever seen Deleted it about 2 hrs after trying it because of how intrusive GFW was. How hard is to copy steam????. lol Unreal Tournament 3 I didn't even look at that game because of what I was told of how bad the IU mad that game.
Developers you want to know what piracy is on the rise??? console games. All I hear is people talking about wanted to mod their 360 and just put all their games on there.
On June 23 2011 07:32 On_Slaught wrote: Even if the justification is reasonable (it is I think), it doesn't explain why you can't have a LAN version ONLY for major tournaments. Tournaments on the scale of MLG, GSL, DH, IEM should not have to rely on the internet.
because nothing is safe in this world even sony, sega, and god damn us senate got hacked to pieces
what make you think stopping the 'hacker' to just waltz into the MLG/GSL/DH/IEM server and grab the tournament edition copy and spread it on the internet ?
On June 23 2011 07:32 On_Slaught wrote: Even if the justification is reasonable (it is I think), it doesn't explain why you can't have a LAN version ONLY for major tournaments. Tournaments on the scale of MLG, GSL, DH, IEM should not have to rely on the internet.
because nothing is safe in this world even sony, sega, and god damn us senate got hacked to pieces
what make you think stopping the 'hacker' to just waltz into the MLG/GSL/DH/IEM server and grab the tournament edition copy and spread it on the internet ?
Games get torrented before release nowadays. It's far more probable that some disgruntled or jackass or pirate employee at Blizzard would upload one copy of the tournament-edition game when it goes gold and watch it snowball from there.
Whatever they feel will help them make better games (in the future, i guess, since everyone would probably agree that SC2 would be improved with LAN). I dont agree with it, but not my call to make.
I think i agree with the guy. Hackers could get rid of any sort of authentication requirement for lan play. HoN, though I haven't played it since beta, seemed to have perfect latency though.
On June 23 2011 12:27 Ingenol wrote: It is absolutely not "rational to pirate games." On the contrary it represents the view that one is entitled to the product of another person for less than what that person is willing to exchange it. That is extremely irrational view, although disturbingly prevalent in our increasingly irrational world.
that makes no sense. if two people offer you to trade the same thing, but one asks for less, the rational thing is to choose to trade with the one who asks for less in return. I'd find it very hard to come up with anything MORE rational. so in conclusion, you must be crazy or something.
It makes perfect sense, you walk into a store and pick up an iPad, take it home for 3 weeks then go back and say you want to buy it and you were just trialling it...
Anybody who claims to download games just to "try" them are just using an excuse to make themselves feel better for being thieves, even worse are the people who pirate it and then try to argue that it's a waste of money and rubbish the game...
Hobbies cost money, PC gaming has always been one of the more expensive, people claiming that money is scarce nowadays just needs to siphon out what to buy and what not...
This concept has been around for a while but it won't stop your average consumer from complaining about the lack of lan support. Obviously the probably millions blizzard had to drop on a lawsuit batttle over ip rights with kespa is argument enough for them to nix lan support.
Could we still see lan support? yeah sure, in 2018 when it's been out for 8+ years and as far as blizzard is concerned there is no more of the games to be sold.
Does it suck to not have lan for tournaments and such, of course...do pirates effect sales enough to make it worth it to the company to nix it...yeah of course it does. MW2 is a perfect example and while all 4 million pirated copies may not have been purchases, I'd almost gurantee you at least 25% might of been...which is a minute scant little 50 million in sales right? Obviously that's a lot to lose out on, and why you won't see lan support in games anytime soon.
On June 23 2011 12:22 4of8 wrote: The question should be more like this : "If there is no LAN-Modus, is any pirate interested in this fact?" And the answer is NO! Why? - Because the big majority of the people, who are getting a cracked copy of a game are only interested in the single player modus. I mean take WoW, this is a game what should be only played online. Still there are a lot of private servers for cracked versions of this game. Take Half-Life2 a couple of days after it was released a "friend" of mine was offering a cracked version of it to me, which didn't need any online bla... On the other hand if SC1 didn't have a spawn version, you can be sure I wouldn't have bought this game. The biggest problem in the modern game industry is , they underestimate the capabilities of the pirates on the one hand and at the other side we have bunch of people in the management, which don't have any clue, what the customers (fans) really want.
If you are a fan of game you will in 95% of the cases buy it. If you just need a lil bit entertainment for a weekend, who would really pay 40-50$ unless you have to much money?
By saying pirates are killing the LAN, you are only searching for an easy excuse. Sure with an already included LAN system, you take a lot of work from the pirates, but if you believe without LAN you could prevent them for cracking your game, you are just stupid.
There is one tip that I have to give you there. Do not take your own experience as the common things experienced by everyone.
Even been to China? Brazil? People stopped playing on the legit Battle.Net because there is literally -nobody- there. Everyone are on Garena or other servers playing their pirated copy of game. Stats like " [...] 95% of the cases [...]" is total BS. Do not standardize your view on a subject.
Currently, the single player is sc2 IS free. NO need to hack or anything. just log into your account once on your friend's computer. Tell him to disable internet and play offline. Voila, 100% of the singleplayer is free.
Now, without the LAN capability, the only way of pirating the game is to make an emulation of the bnet server. I am pretty sure there is one already out, but I really doubt its functionality.
On June 23 2011 12:27 Ingenol wrote: It is absolutely not "rational to pirate games." On the contrary it represents the view that one is entitled to the product of another person for less than what that person is willing to exchange it. That is extremely irrational view, although disturbingly prevalent in our increasingly irrational world.
that makes no sense. if two people offer you to trade the same thing, but one asks for less, the rational thing is to choose to trade with the one who asks for less in return. I'd find it very hard to come up with anything MORE rational. so in conclusion, you must be crazy or something.
It makes perfect sense, you walk into a store and pick up an iPad, take it home for 3 weeks then go back and say you want to buy it and you were just trialling it...
Anybody who claims to download games just to "try" them are just using an excuse to make themselves feel better for being thieves, even worse are the people who pirate it and then try to argue that it's a waste of money and rubbish the game...
Hobbies cost money, PC gaming has always been one of the more expensive, people claiming that money is scarce nowadays just needs to siphon out what to buy and what not...
the majority of the games i download are single player only games that i would really never bother paying money for in the first place. developers wouldnt even have made a cent from me so it doesnt really hurt anyone. of course, there are games that i would definitely fork out the money for even if they are only single player (eg skyrim). pirates arent thieves.
On June 23 2011 12:22 4of8 wrote: The question should be more like this : "If there is no LAN-Modus, is any pirate interested in this fact?" And the answer is NO! Why? - Because the big majority of the people, who are getting a cracked copy of a game are only interested in the single player modus. I mean take WoW, this is a game what should be only played online. Still there are a lot of private servers for cracked versions of this game. Take Half-Life2 a couple of days after it was released a "friend" of mine was offering a cracked version of it to me, which didn't need any online bla... On the other hand if SC1 didn't have a spawn version, you can be sure I wouldn't have bought this game. The biggest problem in the modern game industry is , they underestimate the capabilities of the pirates on the one hand and at the other side we have bunch of people in the management, which don't have any clue, what the customers (fans) really want.
If you are a fan of game you will in 95% of the cases buy it. If you just need a lil bit entertainment for a weekend, who would really pay 40-50$ unless you have to much money?
By saying pirates are killing the LAN, you are only searching for an easy excuse. Sure with an already included LAN system, you take a lot of work from the pirates, but if you believe without LAN you could prevent them for cracking your game, you are just stupid.
There is one tip that I have to give you there. Do not take your own experience as the common things experienced by everyone.
Even been to China? Brazil? People stopped playing on the legit Battle.Net because there is literally -nobody- there. Everyone are on Garena or other servers playing their pirated copy of game. Stats like " [...] 95% of the cases [...]" is total BS. Do not standardize your view on a subject.
Currently, the single player is sc2 IS free. NO need to hack or anything. just log into your account once on your friend's computer. Tell him to disable internet and play offline. Voila, 100% of the singleplayer is free.
Now, without the LAN capability, the only way of pirating the game is to make an emulation of the bnet server. I am pretty sure there is one already out, but I really doubt its functionality.
isnt ICCup for BW illegal then? my friends lost their BW cd keys and technically couldnt play online.. so we just logged on ICCup and there.. free online for us
personally im fine without lan. ive always played sc1 on the internet anyways. i just would like to see a special tournament exclusive version with lan support so the pros could play their best. only thing is they would want time to practice on the new server and it just rolls downhill from there :/
On June 23 2011 12:52 pirates wrote: I didn't kill LAN.
On June 23 2011 07:14 ThePurist wrote: Microsoft operating systems and office software are two of the biggest pirated softwares and they still make money. This guy tries to act like a realist but he doesn't really have a clue about economics. The opinions are too pessimistic and overgeneralizes the vast majority of people who purchase games with their hard-earned cash. Pirates don't stop revenue streams pirates were not a consumer in the first place. The assumption that a pirated copy was a sale is flawed imo and his last few personal statements are questionable as I perceive them as a cop-out when his whole opinion was about "simple economics".
This.
Also, the main reason I, and i'll assume most others, want LAN capabilities is for large events to run smoothly. Everyone at large events has purchased the game, maybe even multiple copies of it.
On June 23 2011 12:22 4of8 wrote: The question should be more like this : "If there is no LAN-Modus, is any pirate interested in this fact?" And the answer is NO! Why? - Because the big majority of the people, who are getting a cracked copy of a game are only interested in the single player modus. I mean take WoW, this is a game what should be only played online. Still there are a lot of private servers for cracked versions of this game. Take Half-Life2 a couple of days after it was released a "friend" of mine was offering a cracked version of it to me, which didn't need any online bla... On the other hand if SC1 didn't have a spawn version, you can be sure I wouldn't have bought this game. The biggest problem in the modern game industry is , they underestimate the capabilities of the pirates on the one hand and at the other side we have bunch of people in the management, which don't have any clue, what the customers (fans) really want.
If you are a fan of game you will in 95% of the cases buy it. If you just need a lil bit entertainment for a weekend, who would really pay 40-50$ unless you have to much money?
By saying pirates are killing the LAN, you are only searching for an easy excuse. Sure with an already included LAN system, you take a lot of work from the pirates, but if you believe without LAN you could prevent them for cracking your game, you are just stupid.
There is one tip that I have to give you there. Do not take your own experience as the common things experienced by everyone.
Even been to China? Brazil? People stopped playing on the legit Battle.Net because there is literally -nobody- there. Everyone are on Garena or other servers playing their pirated copy of game. Stats like " [...] 95% of the cases [...]" is total BS. Do not standardize your view on a subject.
Currently, the single player is sc2 IS free. NO need to hack or anything. just log into your account once on your friend's computer. Tell him to disable internet and play offline. Voila, 100% of the singleplayer is free.
Now, without the LAN capability, the only way of pirating the game is to make an emulation of the bnet server. I am pretty sure there is one already out, but I really doubt its functionality.
isnt ICCup for BW illegal then? my friends lost their BW cd keys and technically couldnt play online.. so we just logged on ICCup and there.. free online for us
Technically it is illegal. It is like saying that you lost a toy so you stole another... free toy!
On June 23 2011 07:14 ThePurist wrote: Microsoft operating systems and office software are two of the biggest pirated softwares and they still make money. This guy tries to act like a realist but he doesn't really have a clue about economics. The opinions are too pessimistic and overgeneralizes the vast majority of people who purchase games with their hard-earned cash. Pirates don't stop revenue streams pirates were not a consumer in the first place. The assumption that a pirated copy was a sale is flawed imo and his last few personal statements are questionable as I perceive them as a cop-out when his whole opinion was about "simple economics".
This.
Also, the main reason I, and i'll assume most others, want LAN capabilities is for large events to run smoothly. Everyone at large events has purchased the game, maybe even multiple copies of it.
just wondering how many of you have stolen music in your life time. any amount at all from a torrent or w/e. even though you probably would not have gone out and bought the music you still got something that someone worked very hard on and deserves some sort of compensation.
Isnt starcraft 2 already like the most pirated game of all time? I think I read that on the game's wikipedia page. Clearly, pirates are finding ways around the lack of LAN.
they could release lan versions for tournaments only, and they probably could find a way to make lan work.
i'm not computer expert but would it be possible for lan to be accessed after going through b.net? that fixes the shitty internet problem for playing against friends. you still need b.net but i'd rather do that then exclude it.
On June 23 2011 07:14 ThePurist wrote: Microsoft operating systems and office software are two of the biggest pirated softwares and they still make money. This guy tries to act like a realist but he doesn't really have a clue about economics. The opinions are too pessimistic and overgeneralizes the vast majority of people who purchase games with their hard-earned cash. Pirates don't stop revenue streams pirates were not a consumer in the first place. The assumption that a pirated copy was a sale is flawed imo and his last few personal statements are questionable as I perceive them as a cop-out when his whole opinion was about "simple economics".
This.
Also, the main reason I, and i'll assume most others, want LAN capabilities is for large events to run smoothly. Everyone at large events has purchased the game, maybe even multiple copies of it.
just wondering how many of you have stolen music in your life time. any amount at all from a torrent or w/e. even though you probably would not have gone out and bought the music you still got something that someone worked very hard on and deserves some sort of compensation.
Don't even bring music into this.
I tend to stray from buying CD's because the record company gets most of that money, not the artist.
I dont agree with the HoN developer at all. Companies are in an age where you have to work around piracy because it just isn't going to go away.
On June 23 2011 13:35 barkles wrote: Isnt starcraft 2 already like the most pirated game of all time? I think I read that on the game's wikipedia page. Clearly, pirates are finding ways around the lack of LAN.
Yes but you can't play multiplayer, which is the main reason for getting the game so people are still forced to buy it. With LAN you can set up private servers and there would be no reason to buy the game.
Still I'd like to see a LAN enabled version of the client released exclusively to big trusted tournaments like GSL and MLG.
On June 23 2011 07:10 mdma-_- wrote: that still doesnt explain why they cant allow people to play each other in lan with the necessecity of being logged into bnet/whatever online client.
cheap excuse just to blame it on pirates tbh
What the hell would be the point of LAN if you had to be logged into Bnet? The entire issue with no LAN is retarded internet problems that tournaments seem to constantly have.
This allows players to practice on LAN environment. Then you give large tournament organizers a "special version" that has true lan. I have no idea how much effort blizz would have to put into this but there are ways for lan to be incorporated
disgruntled employee leaks "special version" to bittorrent
On June 23 2011 07:32 On_Slaught wrote: Even if the justification is reasonable (it is I think), it doesn't explain why you can't have a LAN version ONLY for major tournaments. Tournaments on the scale of MLG, GSL, DH, IEM should not have to rely on the internet.
because nothing is safe in this world even sony, sega, and god damn us senate got hacked to pieces
what make you think stopping the 'hacker' to just waltz into the MLG/GSL/DH/IEM server and grab the tournament edition copy and spread it on the internet ?
Even if the LAN version were somehow leaked, there would be no balance patches, no new maps, no heart of the swarm for it. It wouldn't be popular for very long.
People really wants to utilizes LAN for lag free environment, it's true that the current state of the internet is great, but doesn't it isn't enough for clear out the delay issue that LAN-user feels. Sometime I even question the peak capability of SC2 progamers due to the minute delay presented over online connection vs LAN. I always like the idea have establishing a LAN-like connection AFTER connection through server, but like people say, hackers can find ways to bypass loopholes of that function. I really hope somehow these companies able to find a foolproof way to create that environment without jeopardizing their revenues.
On June 23 2011 07:14 ThePurist wrote: Microsoft operating systems and office software are two of the biggest pirated softwares and they still make money. This guy tries to act like a realist but he doesn't really have a clue about economics. The opinions are too pessimistic and overgeneralizes the vast majority of people who purchase games with their hard-earned cash. Pirates don't stop revenue streams pirates were not a consumer in the first place. The assumption that a pirated copy was a sale is flawed imo and his last few personal statements are questionable as I perceive them as a cop-out when his whole opinion was about "simple economics".
This.
Also, the main reason I, and i'll assume most others, want LAN capabilities is for large events to run smoothly. Everyone at large events has purchased the game, maybe even multiple copies of it.
just wondering how many of you have stolen music in your life time. any amount at all from a torrent or w/e. even though you probably would not have gone out and bought the music you still got something that someone worked very hard on and deserves some sort of compensation.
Don't even bring music into this.
I tend to stray from buying CD's because the record company gets most of that money, not the artist.
I dont agree with the HoN developer at all. Companies are in an age where you have to work around piracy because it just isn't going to go away.
Forgive me if this isn't what you meant, but isn't that exactly what the HoN developer is saying? Their company is working around piracy by not have LAN. "Working around" is similar to "adapting to" pirates, isn't it?
The bad part about this is that the world isn't ready for everything to be online all the time, without stuff like cloud computing, 100% internet connection uptime for every country in the world and almost LAN-like latency from anywhere in the world having no LAN will always be a bad thing.
Why people still want LAN for sc2 is beyond me... I pray to god they will never give it to us.
The amount of connection we get with pros, playing against them, their streams etc...is something we wouldn't have so much if all they were doing was practicing in-house.
On June 23 2011 12:17 gurrpp wrote: My idea is to let everyone have access to a LAN only, basic version of the game. Ideally you wouldn't even have to connect to any service to play the free version. If you wanted to play online on battle.net, then you would have to pay a subscription.
If Sc2 released like that they would have made no money from me. I would have played through the single player, played some multiplayer with friends and then moved on.
My friends no longer play and I don't play custom games or have the desire to be #1 or be on top any leader boards. It wouldn't be worth paying a subscription model for access
Personally, I don't know what they can do. The OP had some good points and the game would probably get cracked so you could avoid any DRM and still be able to use LAN. The only thing I could see is later on in the games life when the economics of it all tip in a way that it wouldn't hurt to add LAN.
Question. When blizzard deputed multiplayer at blizzcon, they apparently had a LAN client. What kind of security measures did they (or what is probable) utilize to prevent leaks and why is that not feasible for an event?
On June 23 2011 14:08 kNyTTyM wrote: Question. When blizzard deputed multiplayer at blizzcon, they apparently had a LAN client. What kind of security measures did they (or what is probable) utilize to prevent leaks and why is that not feasible for an event?
I don't think security was much of an issue in a private LAN like that.
the internet is not reliable it drops out it's laggy the connection becomes exponentially more unreliable to longer it travels.
whatever. blizzard wants to sell an extra 5-10% more copies (piracy is a minority. publishers play it up just like they did with the music industry saying YOU'RE KILLING THE INDUSTRY. no. there is money to be made. you just have to not be retarded about it)
they can do what they like. side effect of this ends up being tournaments lag out and dc theres no reconnection support theres no decent observer features (seriously when dota 2 comes out with dota tv which used to be HLTV for the original counter-strike you will all shit your pants, thousands of people watching a game INGAME, NOT A STREAM, NOT A VOD, INGAME, LIVE.) battle.net 2.0 is horrible (again look at hon or in the future dota 2. it will blow battle.net out of the fucking water)
they are harming their games chances at esports significantly by not implementing lan or making battle.net actually worthwhile. as it stands battle.net 2.0 just looks like a flash website someone designed for a school project.
blizzard are afraid the community will make a better online platform than they can. and they will.
Hmm I just had a thought. Wouldn't this be more of a problem with the legal system than with current industry ideals? Every game developed is copyright protected so what's stopping the companies from going on a manhunt for those who host LAN servers/blatant piraters and suing their asses for money. If legal fees or some other legal system deterrent is in the way, that's just like saying "Hey, people are stealing my stuff and the system doesn't let me do anything about it." I'm pretty noob when it comes to legal stuff but this is just the way I see it
On June 23 2011 14:23 Gak2 wrote: Hmm I just had a thought. Wouldn't this be more of a problem with the legal system than with current industry ideals? Every game developed is copyright protected so what's stopping the companies from going on a manhunt for those who host LAN servers/blatant piraters and suing their asses for money. If legal fees or some other legal system deterrent is in the way, that's just like saying "Hey, people are stealing my stuff and the system doesn't let me do anything about it." I'm pretty noob when it comes to legal stuff but this is just the way I see it
That would be so retarded. Why would they want to hunt down their fans and treat them like criminals? Have you noticed how hated the RIAA is these days? Is any other industry going to take a lesson from this and handle the transition to the digital age properly?
More importantly, as a consumer, why do you even think this is remotely acceptable? Did they really brainwash you that badly?
A simple solution blizzard could implement is that when you purchase a battle.net key it comes with a secondary key, in which you can validate it online therefore unlocking a secure .exe for Starcraft 2. Once installed, the only one account can be logged in for that specific .exe/file, which would be the account of the person who purchased and registered a battle/net account. So in conjunction with an online account we will also have a separate account for LAN. If anything blizzard could charge 5 - 10$ from their online store for a LAN key and LAN version download, which could only be logged in with one account.
On June 23 2011 14:08 branflakes14 wrote: Once again, the customer suffering when they've paid money.
Are HoN users forced to pay a fee every month to play the game online ?
Nop
Alternate skins, couriers, etc. all cost money or ingame coins that are earned at a 1/9 exchange ratio. So they release things costing 6800 silver coins or 900 gold coins (gold ones are bought, silver are earned) at a time when only 3 people in the game even had earned 6800 coins total. I think they make enough from this system to support server costs, but it feels a little scummish.
In addition the reason this topic is coming up so much for hon is because their servers have basically been down the last month, to the extent that I've stopped playing the game. (Over 50% of the time they're down). So its the worst case scenario - it's an impossible to play game at all, and then when people point out that with lan at least we could play the game when their servers are being DDOS by everyone on earth (seriously, it's not even lulzec ddosing them most of the time) they say something about their game being pirated.
Their game is hugely moddable - all the things you can buy in the shop you can install into your game for free with a minimal technical understanding. This has almost never stopped anyone from buying coins. In the exact same way lan would rarely prevent someone from buying as opposed to pirating a game. HON has a huge amount of wonderful features for competitive play - every replay ever is available online, stats are tracked, reliable matchmaking system, etc. which would be missing from a lan.
The major reason that companies do this is because of China/Garena and SEA countries that take full advantage of LAN in any way they can in cyber cafes. However, I doubt most of the countries doing this could actually afford the full price for the games(or at the least it would be 6-7x as expensive relative to average wages. I'm already annoyed by buying sc2 for 60$, I would never buy it if it cost 500$) - in HON's case it's especially bizarre as hon is on garena for free for SEA countries. So this argument literally DOES NOT APPLY to hon. (As far as I understand this is the elephant in the room for sc2 lan - sure YOU may buy sc2 even if it has lan, but no one in china would - or at least that's blizzard's opinion).
S2 (hon's developers) are being DDOS/hacked for a reason. I love hon but s2 is possibly the worst gaming company on earth in about half its divisions. Its ceo (Maliken) plays the game, hacks the servers so he can't lose, does racist and homophobic flames, then the company stands behind his statements (or at the least never disavows them). He then demands a "faggot" (literal quote) announcer for his game, gets it, etc. S2 in general trolls worse than 4chan about any topic or the other and the major reason why the community is so bad is s2 themselves. It's a weird case of trolls ddosing a troll.
On June 23 2011 14:40 Diversify wrote: A simple solution blizzard could implement is that when you purchase a battle.net key it comes with a secondary key, in which you can validate it online therefore unlocking a secure .exe for Starcraft 2. Once installed the only one account can be logged in for that specific .exe/file, which would be the account of the person who purchased and registered a battle/net account. So in conjunction with an online account we will also have a separate account for LAN. If anything blizzard could charge 5 - 10$ from their online store for a LAN key and LAN version download, which would be could only be logged in with one account.
omg yes, but I think it is too smart and makes too much sense, therefore most likely wont happen
Anywho even if it had LAN the vast majority of people who bought it would still buy it because they would want to play online too, playing with the same few friends on LAN isn't going to be any fun for very long at all. The only real change is that a lot more people who haven't decided to buy it would, purely as another game to have and to play a few times with their friends and then just forget about.
On June 23 2011 14:40 Diversify wrote: A simple solution blizzard could implement is that when you purchase a battle.net key it comes with a secondary key, in which you can validate it online therefore unlocking a secure .exe for Starcraft 2. Once installed the only one account can be logged in for that specific .exe/file, which would be the account of the person who purchased and registered a battle/net account. So in conjunction with an online account we will also have a separate account for LAN. If anything blizzard could charge 5 - 10$ from their online store for a LAN key and LAN version download, which would be could only be logged in with one account.
Also, this is not a hon developer. It is their community coordinations guy who does guides for them.
This is basically like Day9 stating that this is why blizzard doesn't have lan. It may be true, but it's really not his area of expertise or something that people would generally ask him.
Wrong! These ""Pirates make us do it X-way"-Arguments are so hypocritical. PC Games and LAN aren't going down because of Piracy, it's because PC Games need more develpment/support! No LAN and only Console-Games are just the easy money.
@Blizzard LAN They just need to give LAN to GomTV/MLG/Dreamhack etc. the normal Player don't needs LAN - but big tournaments would profit from it.
On June 23 2011 07:32 On_Slaught wrote: Even if the justification is reasonable (it is I think), it doesn't explain why you can't have a LAN version ONLY for major tournaments. Tournaments on the scale of MLG, GSL, DH, IEM should not have to rely on the internet.
because nothing is safe in this world even sony, sega, and god damn us senate got hacked to pieces
what make you think stopping the 'hacker' to just waltz into the MLG/GSL/DH/IEM server and grab the tournament edition copy and spread it on the internet ?
Games get torrented before release nowadays. It's far more probable that some disgruntled or jackass or pirate employee at Blizzard would upload one copy of the tournament-edition game when it goes gold and watch it snowball from there.
Blizzard's not taking that chance.
yea or this. the point is, if its available somewhere in the internet then it will be available everywhere instantly
On June 23 2011 14:54 Khaymus wrote: How is there 26 pages of discussion on this? It is a very simple topic. People are stealing games so companies are trying to counteract that.
You want LAN? Stop stealing from the company. That is never going to happen, so guess what...we don't get LAN anymore.
Get used to it. We did it to ourselves.
stop acting like this entire community is stealing piracy is a small margin and nothing really changes that margin. the more a game is bought the more it is pirated. the less a game is bought the less it is pirated. it's always the same small minority margin.
do super markets place huge restrictions on the way you shop because of shoplifters? do they say "if you dont want a security guard to follow you around the shop all day maybe you should stop stealing!"
theft will always be present in every market forever. you want incentives for people to buy that they wont get if they steal. you DONT want incentives for people to steal other than cost.
On June 23 2011 14:40 Diversify wrote: A simple solution blizzard could implement is that when you purchase a battle.net key it comes with a secondary key, in which you can validate it online therefore unlocking a secure .exe for Starcraft 2. Once installed, the only one account can be logged in for that specific .exe/file, which would be the account of the person who purchased and registered a battle/net account. So in conjunction with an online account we will also have a separate account for LAN. If anything blizzard could charge 5 - 10$ from their online store for a LAN key and LAN version download, which could only be logged in with one account.
You must be trolling. You honestly believe that solution wouldn't get hacked and implemented in a pirate version of SC2?
in fact i have never ever stolen from any company. In fact they have stolen my money for years now by providing no service, no gametime,... for my money. If i could i would go the store tell them "the game ist totally shit, i want my money back" THEN they would see how much money the just lose because of bad/cheap game design.
This thread is pretty terrible, I bet 95% of the people commentating on it have no experience with hacking and/or economics. Don't disregard the guy's arguments as bullshit if you can't prove that Blizzard won't lose any money to pirates if they implemented LAN support.
On June 23 2011 14:54 Khaymus wrote: How is there 26 pages of discussion on this? It is a very simple topic. People are stealing games so companies are trying to counteract that.
You want LAN? Stop stealing from the company. That is never going to happen, so guess what...we don't get LAN anymore.
Get used to it. We did it to ourselves.
stop acting like this entire community is stealing piracy is a small margin and nothing really changes that margin. the more a game is bought the more it is pirated. the less a game is bought the less it is pirated. it's always the same small minority margin.
do super markets place huge restrictions on the way you shop because of shoplifters? do they say "if you dont want a security guard to follow you around the shop all day maybe you should stop stealing!"
theft will always be present in every market forever. you want incentives for people to buy that they wont get if they steal. you DONT want incentives for people to steal other than cost.
Piracy is way more widespread than shoplifting, as there is no reprecussions when downloading games compared to getting caught stealing. People can say what they will but my experience after working several years as a video game store manager is that piracy is a big deal and affects sales.
People even pirate the GSL so i expect that SC2 with LAN would be a huge target.
It makes me so furious to read what the HoN developer wrote talking about "goodwill" and how PC users just don't have it. What about the Indie Game Pack that was offered for free and made money from donations only? How much money did that make?
Speaking of goodwill, what about goodwill from the companies? Games have gotten more and more expensive with more games shipped as incomplete, stripped down versions that the user must buy expansion packs or DLCs to fully enjoy. How about companies that actually care about if people are enjoying the game? Which company lets you refund your $60 after you decided that the game is not for you?
Fucking ridiculous for HoN developer to trash the users while somehow attempting to justify the money-sucking techniques that the industry has been using for the past 5 years.
I am absolutely sure those people that have nearly every single game that was ever released (pirated) would have bought every single one of them. Similar to those that downloaded about a million CDs and DVDs. They are all millionaires - and only because they saved money by pirating these kind of things... money, that could belong to the companies behind these products, according to some dudes that studied business economics :rolleyes:
I don't really get this... they are worried by some poor dudes stealing the game (that has lan), being unable to play it online against everyone that bought it and on the other hand they don't implement features like a name change for 10$ or some stupid skins for stupid amounts of money, that would have made them more money than the sales of the game could ever have in no time. Look at HoN or even LoL and how many many people "donated" at least half of their salary every month just to have retarded forum avatars, limited edition skins with extra large boobs and other useless stuff.
PS: My favorite game regarding this issue recently is CIV V - an excellent game - but you have to spent like 500 dollar on it to be able to play every civ/expansion. Seriously - I'd never ever consider buying this shit. Stop ripping people off, if you don't want them to steal your software...
do super markets place huge restrictions on the way you shop because of shoplifters? do they say "if you dont want a security guard to follow you around the shop all day maybe you should stop stealing!"
Security Cameras Security Guards Scanners that detect electronics on the way out of the store One/two entrances to flow traffic in and out certain areas Glass cages around many electronics
I am pretty sure they are good at adding strain to the customer to protect their profit...you are just so used to it by now.
And don't pretend like the community doesn't pirate. It is indeed a large chunk of the community...it isn't some small obscure percent that does it.
in fact i have never ever stolen from any company. In fact they have stolen my money for years now by providing no service, no gametime,... for my money. If i could i would go the store tell them "the game ist totally shit, i want my money back" THEN they would see how much money the just lose because of bad/cheap game design.
There's reviews, demos and forums for that. Just cause you don't enjoy something you bought doesn't mean they stole your money. Try again.
On June 23 2011 15:10 denzelz wrote: It makes me so furious to read what the HoN developer wrote talking about "goodwill" and how PC users just don't have it. What about the Indie Game Pack that was offered for free and made money from donations only? How much money did that make?
Speaking of goodwill, what about goodwill from the companies? Games have gotten more and more expensive with more games shipped as incomplete, stripped down versions that the user must buy expansion packs or DLCs to fully enjoy. How about companies that actually care about if people are enjoying the game? Which company lets you refund your $60 after you decided that the game is not for you?
Fucking ridiculous for HoN developer to trash the users while somehow attempting to justify the money-sucking techniques that the industry has been using for the past 5 years.
do super markets place huge restrictions on the way you shop because of shoplifters? do they say "if you dont want a security guard to follow you around the shop all day maybe you should stop stealing!"
Security Cameras Security Guards Scanners that detect electronics on the way out of the store One/two entrances to flow traffic in and out certain areas Glass cages around many electronics
I am pretty sure they are good at adding strain to the customer to protect their profit...you are just so used to it by now.
And don't pretend like the community doesn't pirate. It is indeed a large chunk of the community...it isn't some small obscure percent that does it.
none of those interfere with you shopping however other than a short wait time if it's busy. but whatever.
On June 23 2011 15:09 IcedBacon wrote: This thread is pretty terrible, I bet 95% of the people commentating on it have no experience with hacking and/or economics. Don't disregard the guy's arguments as bullshit if you can't prove that Blizzard won't lose any money to pirates if they implemented LAN support.
I think most people would concede that they would lose money, it's more whether that loss is negligible enough to not care about or too much to risk it.
On June 23 2011 14:23 Gak2 wrote: Hmm I just had a thought. Wouldn't this be more of a problem with the legal system than with current industry ideals? Every game developed is copyright protected so what's stopping the companies from going on a manhunt for those who host LAN servers/blatant piraters and suing their asses for money. If legal fees or some other legal system deterrent is in the way, that's just like saying "Hey, people are stealing my stuff and the system doesn't let me do anything about it." I'm pretty noob when it comes to legal stuff but this is just the way I see it
That would be so retarded. Why would they want to hunt down their fans and treat them like criminals? Have you noticed how hated the RIAA is these days? Is any other industry going to take a lesson from this and handle the transition to the digital age properly?
More importantly, as a consumer, why do you even think this is remotely acceptable? Did they really brainwash you that badly?
What are you talking about? RIAA? Digital age? Are you saying people are entitled to a video game, which the developers want compensation for, for free? What I'm saying is this: if Blizzard wants people to pay $50 to play their game, then they should have that right and this right should be protected by law. It's the consumers choice to accept the deal or not. If you took their game for free... then you are, in fact, stealing.
And as for brainwashing I'm not sure but... it seems like they brainwashed me to think people like you lack any intelligence. Please make your arguments more clear next time.
do super markets place huge restrictions on the way you shop because of shoplifters? do they say "if you dont want a security guard to follow you around the shop all day maybe you should stop stealing!"
Security Cameras Security Guards Scanners that detect electronics on the way out of the store One/two entrances to flow traffic in and out certain areas Glass cages around many electronics
I am pretty sure they are good at adding strain to the customer to protect their profit...you are just so used to it by now.
And don't pretend like the community doesn't pirate. It is indeed a large chunk of the community...it isn't some small obscure percent that does it.
none of those interfere with you shopping however other than a short wait time if it's busy. but whatever.
Many times stores can't remove alarms from packages and the alarm goes of in another store when you walk in/out. Security guards don't harass regular joes but people who look different, i've read about many cases of discrimination by security guards in stores. Costs are higher due to these security issues so without them we'd have cheaper stuff. Doesn't that interfere?
On June 23 2011 12:27 Ingenol wrote: It is absolutely not "rational to pirate games." On the contrary it represents the view that one is entitled to the product of another person for less than what that person is willing to exchange it. That is extremely irrational view, although disturbingly prevalent in our increasingly irrational world.
that makes no sense. if two people offer you to trade the same thing, but one asks for less, the rational thing is to choose to trade with the one who asks for less in return. I'd find it very hard to come up with anything MORE rational. so in conclusion, you must be crazy or something.
It makes perfect sense, you walk into a store and pick up an iPad, take it home for 3 weeks then go back and say you want to buy it and you were just trialling it...
Anybody who claims to download games just to "try" them are just using an excuse to make themselves feel better for being thieves, even worse are the people who pirate it and then try to argue that it's a waste of money and rubbish the game...
Hobbies cost money, PC gaming has always been one of the more expensive, people claiming that money is scarce nowadays just needs to siphon out what to buy and what not...
the majority of the games i download are single player only games that i would really never bother paying money for in the first place. developers wouldnt even have made a cent from me so it doesnt really hurt anyone. of course, there are games that i would definitely fork out the money for even if they are only single player (eg skyrim). pirates arent thieves.
music and movies on the other hand....
Pirates are thieves, your taking a product without paying, I don't understand how Singleplayer games makes it any different? Even if you would never buy it your still taking it.
See my previous example, but let's say you walk into a Ferrari dealership smash a window, hotwire and drive off into the sunset, but it's ok right becaues you'd never buy one normally, totally not theft.
On June 23 2011 12:27 Ingenol wrote: It is absolutely not "rational to pirate games." On the contrary it represents the view that one is entitled to the product of another person for less than what that person is willing to exchange it. That is extremely irrational view, although disturbingly prevalent in our increasingly irrational world.
that makes no sense. if two people offer you to trade the same thing, but one asks for less, the rational thing is to choose to trade with the one who asks for less in return. I'd find it very hard to come up with anything MORE rational. so in conclusion, you must be crazy or something.
It makes perfect sense, you walk into a store and pick up an iPad, take it home for 3 weeks then go back and say you want to buy it and you were just trialling it...
Anybody who claims to download games just to "try" them are just using an excuse to make themselves feel better for being thieves, even worse are the people who pirate it and then try to argue that it's a waste of money and rubbish the game...
Hobbies cost money, PC gaming has always been one of the more expensive, people claiming that money is scarce nowadays just needs to siphon out what to buy and what not...
the majority of the games i download are single player only games that i would really never bother paying money for in the first place. developers wouldnt even have made a cent from me so it doesnt really hurt anyone. of course, there are games that i would definitely fork out the money for even if they are only single player (eg skyrim). pirates arent thieves.
music and movies on the other hand....
Pirates are thieves, your taking a product without paying, I don't understand how Singleplayer games makes it any different? Even if you would never buy it your still taking it.
See my previous example, but let's say you walk into a Ferrari dealership smash a window, hotwire and drive off into the sunset, but it's ok right becaues you'd never buy one normally, totally not theft.
Your arguments are bordering on nonsensical. It's not up for debate whether piracy is stealing as it falls under an entirely different definition.
On June 23 2011 14:23 Gak2 wrote: Hmm I just had a thought. Wouldn't this be more of a problem with the legal system than with current industry ideals? Every game developed is copyright protected so what's stopping the companies from going on a manhunt for those who host LAN servers/blatant piraters and suing their asses for money. If legal fees or some other legal system deterrent is in the way, that's just like saying "Hey, people are stealing my stuff and the system doesn't let me do anything about it." I'm pretty noob when it comes to legal stuff but this is just the way I see it
That would be so retarded. Why would they want to hunt down their fans and treat them like criminals? Have you noticed how hated the RIAA is these days? Is any other industry going to take a lesson from this and handle the transition to the digital age properly?
More importantly, as a consumer, why do you even think this is remotely acceptable? Did they really brainwash you that badly?
What are you talking about? RIAA? Digital age? Are you saying people are entitled to a video game, which the developers want compensation for, for free? What I'm saying is this: if Blizzard wants people to pay $50 to play their game, then they should have that right and this right should be protected by law. It's the consumers choice to accept the deal or not. If you took their game for free... then you are, in fact, stealing.
And as for brainwashing I'm not sure but... it seems like they brainwashed me to think people like you lack any intelligence. Please make your arguments more clear next time.
Nope. You're a lost cause. See you in 10 years when things have changed. But I'm sure when that happens, you will have no realization of why, what economics changed, or how the industry adapted.
On June 23 2011 07:12 Coldplum wrote: I don't see why there can't be some sort of security feature built in that forces you to log onto Bnet before you can access LAN. Or even have a separate LAN security identifier accessory...i.e. like an identifier key-chain that you purchase in conjunction with your account.
There was one with CoD4 as far as i remember ( you had to be logged on steam or something around the lines ) and after following a simple 14 step tutorial you could still get it working on "LAN". Hence even i was able to do it and i suck at about everything related to a PC, it took me hours of work to set up my linux...
As long as they don't want ppl to play there game online for free the only solution is not to make LAN, i am amazed that it took them 6 years to realize this...
We might see LAN arrive as soon as some "private server" is invented for sc2 ( tho i imagine it would be harder then with wow ) since then the whole " We don't give LAN so that ppl can't play online with a cracked version" isn't true anymore.
On June 23 2011 12:27 Ingenol wrote: It is absolutely not "rational to pirate games." On the contrary it represents the view that one is entitled to the product of another person for less than what that person is willing to exchange it. That is extremely irrational view, although disturbingly prevalent in our increasingly irrational world.
that makes no sense. if two people offer you to trade the same thing, but one asks for less, the rational thing is to choose to trade with the one who asks for less in return. I'd find it very hard to come up with anything MORE rational. so in conclusion, you must be crazy or something.
It makes perfect sense, you walk into a store and pick up an iPad, take it home for 3 weeks then go back and say you want to buy it and you were just trialling it...
Anybody who claims to download games just to "try" them are just using an excuse to make themselves feel better for being thieves, even worse are the people who pirate it and then try to argue that it's a waste of money and rubbish the game...
Hobbies cost money, PC gaming has always been one of the more expensive, people claiming that money is scarce nowadays just needs to siphon out what to buy and what not...
the majority of the games i download are single player only games that i would really never bother paying money for in the first place. developers wouldnt even have made a cent from me so it doesnt really hurt anyone. of course, there are games that i would definitely fork out the money for even if they are only single player (eg skyrim). pirates arent thieves.
music and movies on the other hand....
Pirates are thieves, your taking a product without paying, I don't understand how Singleplayer games makes it any different? Even if you would never buy it your still taking it.
See my previous example, but let's say you walk into a Ferrari dealership smash a window, hotwire and drive off into the sunset, but it's ok right becaues you'd never buy one normally, totally not theft.
Hah. This just makes me laugh. I really wish I could see the kind of shit you said circa 2001 as the music industry was forced into a change it didn't want to make.
The answer is quite simple. Have BNET or similar system for non-Blizzard games auto detect the network locations of people connecting. If both players are detected to be within the same network segment, it can create an secure-connection directly between the two for just that game. Once they leave the game it can hand-off their connection back to BNET. Its possible, if the companies wanted to put the development into it. It very much is possible.
On June 23 2011 07:21 Seronei wrote: They think Lan will increase piracy, but there is no way to know until they add lan and see an increase in pirated software coupled with a decline in sales. Else they're just playing a guessing game. Until then they're just spouting bullshit.
Also the reddit link has nothing to do with "goodwill" it has everything to do with the Witcher 2 being hyped as shit among PC-gaming crowd and graphics that uses high end pc hardware.
On June 23 2011 07:20 akaname wrote: i'm genuinely intrigued about the people saying this article is nonsense...
Why are Blizzard not including LAN? Like, seriously, it's annoyed a lot of fans and wouldn't be that difficult technically? For what reason are they deciding not to?
So they can shut down tournaments that doesn't have a license. To prevent the whole kespa deal that happened with Brood War.
What you're saying is you need to see evidential proof that if you let people play the game without requiring them to connect to a main server they will take advantage of that fact?
On June 23 2011 14:23 Gak2 wrote: Hmm I just had a thought. Wouldn't this be more of a problem with the legal system than with current industry ideals? Every game developed is copyright protected so what's stopping the companies from going on a manhunt for those who host LAN servers/blatant piraters and suing their asses for money. If legal fees or some other legal system deterrent is in the way, that's just like saying "Hey, people are stealing my stuff and the system doesn't let me do anything about it." I'm pretty noob when it comes to legal stuff but this is just the way I see it
That would be so retarded. Why would they want to hunt down their fans and treat them like criminals? Have you noticed how hated the RIAA is these days? Is any other industry going to take a lesson from this and handle the transition to the digital age properly?
More importantly, as a consumer, why do you even think this is remotely acceptable? Did they really brainwash you that badly?
What are you talking about? RIAA? Digital age? Are you saying people are entitled to a video game, which the developers want compensation for, for free? What I'm saying is this: if Blizzard wants people to pay $50 to play their game, then they should have that right and this right should be protected by law. It's the consumers choice to accept the deal or not. If you took their game for free... then you are, in fact, stealing.
And as for brainwashing I'm not sure but... it seems like they brainwashed me to think people like you lack any intelligence. Please make your arguments more clear next time.
Nope. You're a lost cause. See you in 10 years when things have changed. But I'm sure when that happens, you will have no realization of why, what economics changed, or how the industry adapted.
Enjoy your carriage, friend.
Calling me a lost cause based on two forum posts in which I invite arguments against my own? That's pretty low. Even for a troll.
On June 23 2011 12:27 Ingenol wrote: It is absolutely not "rational to pirate games." On the contrary it represents the view that one is entitled to the product of another person for less than what that person is willing to exchange it. That is extremely irrational view, although disturbingly prevalent in our increasingly irrational world.
that makes no sense. if two people offer you to trade the same thing, but one asks for less, the rational thing is to choose to trade with the one who asks for less in return. I'd find it very hard to come up with anything MORE rational. so in conclusion, you must be crazy or something.
It makes perfect sense, you walk into a store and pick up an iPad, take it home for 3 weeks then go back and say you want to buy it and you were just trialling it...
Anybody who claims to download games just to "try" them are just using an excuse to make themselves feel better for being thieves, even worse are the people who pirate it and then try to argue that it's a waste of money and rubbish the game...
Hobbies cost money, PC gaming has always been one of the more expensive, people claiming that money is scarce nowadays just needs to siphon out what to buy and what not...
the majority of the games i download are single player only games that i would really never bother paying money for in the first place. developers wouldnt even have made a cent from me so it doesnt really hurt anyone. of course, there are games that i would definitely fork out the money for even if they are only single player (eg skyrim). pirates arent thieves.
music and movies on the other hand....
Pirates are thieves, your taking a product without paying, I don't understand how Singleplayer games makes it any different? Even if you would never buy it your still taking it.
See my previous example, but let's say you walk into a Ferrari dealership smash a window, hotwire and drive off into the sunset, but it's ok right becaues you'd never buy one normally, totally not theft.
Your arguments are bordering on nonsensical. It's not up for debate whether piracy is stealing as it falls under an entirely different definition.
His example is extreme, but the underlying action is the same. I said it before and I'll say it again, pirating is taking a product that cost people money to make, with the expectation of profit, and offering no just compensation. It really is the equivalent of stealing.
There's reviews, demos and forums for that. Just cause you don't enjoy something you bought doesn't mean they stole your money. Try again.
A demo doesnt tell me: You will have the game finished in about 2 hours. Demos dont tell me "The finished game will be bugged like hell" Deomos dont tell me "See the one situation which is extremely annoying? The game will be like this for the whole rest of the game, but the demo ends here" A review just doesnt tell anything negative, Reviews are advertisment nowadays. I can remember times when certain game magazines really tested games out and literally wrote "This game isnt worth a penny, dont buy it. Give your money to an charity organisation, its better invested there" Nowadays there is no game "bad" there are all grat games with at the very least 80/100 points, doesnt matter how shitty they are. And as far as your "forum" argument goes. Just look here.... are the next seasons maps now good or bad? Do we all want GSL maps or not? Is the SC2 story great or not? Is SC2 worth buying if you never ever intend to play MP? 1000 users will give you 1000 answers about this topics. So... no help either.
The gameing industry (and to a part also the film industry) can get away with bad quality and blame it all to piracy. If you buy a car which says "35 MPG" and you find out its really 8 MPG on average, you can just give it back. If a game says "1000 hours of gameplay" and in reallity its 10 you cant.
Something to remember in HoN's defense is they have lan FOR TOURNAMENTS. Although all of you internet warriors are out to prove that the internet won't pirate a game with lan. It almost certainly will happen.
On June 23 2011 12:27 Ingenol wrote: It is absolutely not "rational to pirate games." On the contrary it represents the view that one is entitled to the product of another person for less than what that person is willing to exchange it. That is extremely irrational view, although disturbingly prevalent in our increasingly irrational world.
that makes no sense. if two people offer you to trade the same thing, but one asks for less, the rational thing is to choose to trade with the one who asks for less in return. I'd find it very hard to come up with anything MORE rational. so in conclusion, you must be crazy or something.
It makes perfect sense, you walk into a store and pick up an iPad, take it home for 3 weeks then go back and say you want to buy it and you were just trialling it...
Anybody who claims to download games just to "try" them are just using an excuse to make themselves feel better for being thieves, even worse are the people who pirate it and then try to argue that it's a waste of money and rubbish the game...
Hobbies cost money, PC gaming has always been one of the more expensive, people claiming that money is scarce nowadays just needs to siphon out what to buy and what not...
the majority of the games i download are single player only games that i would really never bother paying money for in the first place. developers wouldnt even have made a cent from me so it doesnt really hurt anyone. of course, there are games that i would definitely fork out the money for even if they are only single player (eg skyrim). pirates arent thieves.
music and movies on the other hand....
Pirates are thieves, your taking a product without paying, I don't understand how Singleplayer games makes it any different? Even if you would never buy it your still taking it.
See my previous example, but let's say you walk into a Ferrari dealership smash a window, hotwire and drive off into the sunset, but it's ok right becaues you'd never buy one normally, totally not theft.
Your arguments are bordering on nonsensical. It's not up for debate whether piracy is stealing as it falls under an entirely different definition.
His example is extreme, but the underlying action is the same. I said it before and I'll say it again, pirating is taking a product that cost people money to make, with the expectation of profit, and offering no just compensation. It really is the equivalent of stealing.
No, it is not. It never was and never will be. You forget to mention piracy is the COPYING of something that is essentially INFINITE in quantity. It is far from being black and white like you make it seem.
It confuses me how the reaction to piracy being the reason LAN does not exsist is simply "Just put a security feature on it!" Hello there, what do you think pirates do? The second the Starcraft 2 client gains LAN functionality they will crack whatever security features are put on it and open it up to abuse. There is NO security protection that would stop pirates from opening up LAN completely once it is there.
On June 23 2011 14:23 Gak2 wrote: Hmm I just had a thought. Wouldn't this be more of a problem with the legal system than with current industry ideals? Every game developed is copyright protected so what's stopping the companies from going on a manhunt for those who host LAN servers/blatant piraters and suing their asses for money. If legal fees or some other legal system deterrent is in the way, that's just like saying "Hey, people are stealing my stuff and the system doesn't let me do anything about it." I'm pretty noob when it comes to legal stuff but this is just the way I see it
That would be so retarded. Why would they want to hunt down their fans and treat them like criminals? Have you noticed how hated the RIAA is these days? Is any other industry going to take a lesson from this and handle the transition to the digital age properly?
More importantly, as a consumer, why do you even think this is remotely acceptable? Did they really brainwash you that badly?
What are you talking about? RIAA? Digital age? Are you saying people are entitled to a video game, which the developers want compensation for, for free? What I'm saying is this: if Blizzard wants people to pay $50 to play their game, then they should have that right and this right should be protected by law. It's the consumers choice to accept the deal or not. If you took their game for free... then you are, in fact, stealing.
And as for brainwashing I'm not sure but... it seems like they brainwashed me to think people like you lack any intelligence. Please make your arguments more clear next time.
Nope. You're a lost cause. See you in 10 years when things have changed. But I'm sure when that happens, you will have no realization of why, what economics changed, or how the industry adapted.
Enjoy your carriage, friend.
Calling me a lost cause based on two forum posts in which I invite arguments against my own? That's pretty low. Even for a troll.
You admitted that they brainwashed you to ignore any arguments other than your own. How am I trolling in refusing to refute someone who admits to something like that? I just want to talk to someone who doesn't outright admit they can't think for themselves on the concepts of pricing, infinite goods and scarce goods.
There's reviews, demos and forums for that. Just cause you don't enjoy something you bought doesn't mean they stole your money. Try again.
A demo doesnt tell me: You will have the game finished in about 2 hours. Demos dont tell me "The finished game will be bugged like hell" Deomos dont tell me "See the one situation which is extremely annoying? The game will be like this for the whole rest of the game, but the demo ends here" A review just doesnt tell anything negative, Reviews are advertisment nowadays. I can remember times when certain game magazines really tested games out and literally wrote "This game isnt worth a penny, dont buy it. Give your money to an charity organisation, its better invested there" Nowadays there is no game "bad" there are all grat games with at the very least 80/100 points, doesnt matter how shitty they are. And as far as your "forum" argument goes. Just look here.... are the next seasons maps now good or bad? Do we all want GSL maps or not? Is the SC2 story great or not? Is SC2 worth buying if you never ever intend to play MP? 1000 users will give you 1000 answers about this topics. So... no help either.
The gameing industry (and to a part also the film industry) can get away with bad quality and blame it all to piracy. If you buy a car which says "35 MPG" and you find out its really 8 MPG on average, you can just give it back. If a game says "1000 hours of gameplay" and in reallity its 10 you cant.
You're comparing two totally different things, just like when you said companies steal your money just cause you dislike their product.
A car has a specified MPG and that's tested.
Games can be played through in 5 hours or you could finish all achievements and extra difficulties for a 50+ hour game.
It's a pretty stupid comparison.
I read game reviews and there's still alot of 3/10, you just need to find the right place to read reviews then.
i completely understand what that guy is saying but I still disagree. There are ways to implement lan IF the developer can promote high end INCENTIVES for someone who actually buys the game. For example make it so that the best features can only be used by signing in with a legit account. People just need to be creative!!!!!!
it amazes me how many people will argue that pirating is anything but stealing.
"NO I AM NOT STEALING!! I am illegaly taking something that i am supposed to pay for.. for free, without the creators/distributors permission..."
Hmm. ok.
If Stealing is perfectly acceptable in your moral beliefs then you are going to steal, just dont deny it.
If you pirate just say "Ya i steal digital content."
"Its not stealing because they charge too much." .... so cars/houses/boats/computers/everything above $5 should be free? How will anything ever be created/produced again...ever?
People you hurt when you pirate video games = other gamers. Because video game companies lose money, and stop making games. Its really that simple.
You justify stealing because you are cheap/selfish and want something you cant afford...? Sounds like 100% of the thiefs in prison ?
IDK people who argue in favor of pirating are the most hypocritical/selfish people on the net.. would be nice if they would just admit it.
"I steal video games, because its whats best for me and me alone."
(I don't pirate video games, because once I turned 4 years old I learned stealing was bad.)
What blizzard needs to do (and other esports games creating companies) is simply require Any/all tournaments to buy tournament editions of the game. Tournament edition of the game will have lan support.
So that your major tournaments MLG, Dreamhack, GSL will have the lan support.
But then again what is to prevent hackers from taking these copies off of harddrives and such... nothing. So i understand why they refuse to even do this.
Simple case of the community shooting itself in the foot.
I've always found (in my case) that pirating helps sales. When ever I pirate a game, Portal 2 most recently, I tell all my friends about it. When I tell all my friends about how great it is, they then go out and buy it themselves. If I never pirated it, they would have never bought it in the first place.
You can't compare HoN and SC2. Blizzard is a much larger company and SC2 is a much different game. Adding LAN support would not only act as a huge fan service but also help with the longevity of the game by fixing a lot of major problems SC2 has when played competitively. If it's all about money, which of course it is, LAN support should be seen as a long term investment. Whatever slight monetary gain they risk, they could just as easily win back in terms of appreciation from the fans. Especially now with PC gaming being what it is. I'm tired of developers using the same excuse over and over again.
On June 23 2011 15:51 exittlight wrote: I've always found (in my case) that pirating helps sales. When ever I pirate a game, Portal 2 most recently, I tell all my friends about it. When I tell all my friends about how great it is, they then go out and buy it themselves. If I never pirated it, they would have never bought it in the first place.
So if you steal, and tell your friends to buy it... stealing is ok?
Golden posts like these are the exact reason competitive games are refusing to add lan into their titles.
I steal cars... so i can tell my friends how awsome they are!!
Clearly you are justified in stealing the car then.
Just add LAN 2 years after it comes out. By then everyone who wants to play would have a copy anyways, so the only ones pirating a copy are one's who wouldn't have ever bought it.
On June 23 2011 12:27 Ingenol wrote: It is absolutely not "rational to pirate games." On the contrary it represents the view that one is entitled to the product of another person for less than what that person is willing to exchange it. That is extremely irrational view, although disturbingly prevalent in our increasingly irrational world.
that makes no sense. if two people offer you to trade the same thing, but one asks for less, the rational thing is to choose to trade with the one who asks for less in return. I'd find it very hard to come up with anything MORE rational. so in conclusion, you must be crazy or something.
It makes perfect sense, you walk into a store and pick up an iPad, take it home for 3 weeks then go back and say you want to buy it and you were just trialling it...
Anybody who claims to download games just to "try" them are just using an excuse to make themselves feel better for being thieves, even worse are the people who pirate it and then try to argue that it's a waste of money and rubbish the game...
Hobbies cost money, PC gaming has always been one of the more expensive, people claiming that money is scarce nowadays just needs to siphon out what to buy and what not...
the majority of the games i download are single player only games that i would really never bother paying money for in the first place. developers wouldnt even have made a cent from me so it doesnt really hurt anyone. of course, there are games that i would definitely fork out the money for even if they are only single player (eg skyrim). pirates arent thieves.
music and movies on the other hand....
Pirates are thieves, your taking a product without paying, I don't understand how Singleplayer games makes it any different? Even if you would never buy it your still taking it.
See my previous example, but let's say you walk into a Ferrari dealership smash a window, hotwire and drive off into the sunset, but it's ok right becaues you'd never buy one normally, totally not theft.
Your arguments are bordering on nonsensical. It's not up for debate whether piracy is stealing as it falls under an entirely different definition.
His example is extreme, but the underlying action is the same. I said it before and I'll say it again, pirating is taking a product that cost people money to make, with the expectation of profit, and offering no just compensation. It really is the equivalent of stealing.
No, it is not. It never was and never will be. You forget to mention piracy is the COPYING of something that is essentially INFINITE in quantity. It is far from being black and white like you make it seem.
How else can the developers be compensated and profitable? The only alternatives are running the game as a "service" and/or using ads, which both will not work with single player games.
You do realize that without compensation for developers, the major pushing factor for game development will be removed. Games aren't like music or books, where even if there is no profit, many good quality songs and books will be created anyways.
Games are most like movies: created for #1 purpose of making money. Without that factor, no one would create the big blockbusters or video game hits that take millions of dollars to make. We'll be left with B movies and small games created as hobbies.
So games can't just be given away with no expectation for compensation, EVEN IF they are infinitely reproducible. Likewise, you claim the current situation of selling copies of the game for money is not acceptable. So I ask again, how can the developers be compensated?
On June 23 2011 15:43 visual77 wrote: You admitted that they brainwashed you to ignore any arguments other than your own. How am I trolling in refusing to refute someone who admits to something like that? I just want to talk to someone who doesn't outright admit they can't think for themselves on the concepts of pricing, infinite goods and scarce goods.
It's called sarcasm? It's kind of hard not to belittle someone who blatantly insults your own intelligence first.
Is it impossible to create a kind of USB- thingy, which unlocks LAN?
Once you put that USB-thingy in, which matches to your verification code, you get the option to play via LAN on your computer, if the v.codes of both your copy of the game as well as the USB match?
The owner of the internet cafe I played in once bought one (1) copy of frozen throne, installed it in over a hundred computers in his shop, and when dota hit he was literally making millions. Even non-pirates were profiting. So many hours were used playing dota, and all blizzard got was a portion of the purchase price of the first copy. There's something messed up about that. I can understand why they'd want to stop LAN, because without Lan, this would not be possible.
Internet cafes throghout my country did this. Without LAN, they'll die. But, for sure, they were able to derive a lot of value from a minimal investment because of piracy and LAN.
On June 23 2011 15:59 ToastieNL wrote: Is it impossible to create a kind of USB- thingy, which unlocks LAN?
Once you put that USB-thingy in, which matches to your verification code, you get the option to play via LAN on your computer, if the v.codes of both your copy of the game as well as the USB match?
Again this can probably be cracked and put into a pirated client in a couple of days.
Again this can probably be cracked and put into a pirated client in a couple of days.
the same technology they use for their WoW authenticator would solve all this problems. They claim it never has been cracked. Problem solved. Still they would never put this up. Why? Because its so fucking easy to blame pirates for missing content, raises in price and bad gameplay.
Its like the film industry who also blames the failure of their 100000 million dollar film without story, stupid dialoguies, bad actors and mass special effects to the fact that there are pirates.
On June 23 2011 16:00 maryelizbethwinstead wrote: The owner of the internet cafe I played in once bought one (1) copy of frozen throne, installed it in over a hundred computers in his shop, and when dota hit he was literally making millions. Even non-pirates were profiting. So many hours were used playing dota, and all blizzard got was a portion of the purchase price of the first copy. There's something messed up about that. I can understand why they'd want to stop LAN, because without Lan, this would not be possible.
Internet cafes throghout my country did this. Without LAN, they'll die. But, for sure, they were able to derive a lot of value from a minimal investment because of piracy and LAN.
So you're suggesting that people should have to pay Blizzard for how much time they play their games?
Again this can probably be cracked and put into a pirated client in a couple of days.
the same technology they use for their WoW authenticator would solve all this problems. They claim it never has been cracked. Problem solved. Still they would never put this up. Why? Because its so fucking easy to blame pirates for missing content, raises in price and bad gameplay.
Its like the film industry who also blames the failure of their 100000 million dollar film without story, stupid dialoguies, bad actors and mass special effects to the fact that there are pirates.
WoW has private cracked servers? It's not the same thing at all. One is a online game that uses a key+password to autenticate the login to the server, even if you crack it and circumvent the key you still get no real game as it's all online. In SC2 if you circumvent the key (don't need to crack the actual keycodes) you gain access to a full client with LAN enabled.
On June 23 2011 15:51 exittlight wrote: I've always found (in my case) that pirating helps sales. When ever I pirate a game, Portal 2 most recently, I tell all my friends about it. When I tell all my friends about how great it is, they then go out and buy it themselves. If I never pirated it, they would have never bought it in the first place.
Is this actually supposed to be some kind of justification?
"I've always found (in my case) that stealing helps people. When ever I steal from someone, my friend most recently, they learn a valuable lesson. If I never stole from them they wouldn't have never learned their lesson, so in actuality, I'm helping them." exittlight logic right here guys.
It's a sad thing when people bring up the "it's a company, they want to make money" card. I know this sounds naive, but it should be about making the best possible game and then getting profit out of it, not about making the biggest possible amount of money and getting away with as little good game as possible. You can tell if a developer genuinely wants to produce a good game and it doesnt. Starcraft 2 unfortunately is an example of the latter (not saying I dont like it at all, but you can tell from how its made). Early WoW and the blizzard games before that were examples of good games. This was always why I liked Blizzard: They said "hey wouldn't it be cool if we have that in the game?" and they added it disregarding the additional time, money and effort needed to complete a game. They made, in essence, games they wanted to play themselves and that is in my opinion what game development should be about. There is a reason the best games come from indie studios. Do you think they sit down on a table and ponder "How can we make the biggest amount of money?". No, they make a good game and then sell it and try to get by and if the game is really good people will buy it, and then the sequel and they will tell all their friends how good it is and the friends will buy it too. They will then buy the sequels, spinoffs and expansions as long as the developers continue to deliver a good game.
I have bought SC2 and am not really satisfied. You wanna know the reason why I spent the 60€ on it? Cause I had pirated WC3 and liked it. I liked it so much I bought it, and then eventually WoW, Diablo2 and SC2. As long as a studio releases great games they will get money. Maybe they don't get the most possible out of it, but who cares? The shareholders? Fuck the shareholders! As soon as they dictate how a game has to be I sure as hell won't buy it.
The video of Gabe Newell posted earlier in the thread is very inspiring. It gives me confidence that we will still continue to have good games despite all that EA/Activision greedmachine. There is one thing that is for sure: I will buy DotA2 and most probably it will be the money that could have been HotS.
WoW has private cracked servers? It's not the same thing at all. One is a online game that uses a key+password to autenticate the login to the server, even if you crack it and circumvent the key you still get no real game as it's all online. In SC2 if you circumvent the key (don't need to crack the actual keycodes) you gain access to a full client with LAN enabled.
no, there is a piece auf hardware called "authenticator" which creates a new code every 10 (?) seconds you need to logi in. Its sold as an account security tool.
Is it just me, or did the guy argue against putting anything in games? He says putting LAN would increase piracy, so would putting in anything desirable to the public.
After all, a game gets pirated more than nothing. Maybe he should start selling copies of rubbish data, then all his piracy woes would disappear.
On June 23 2011 15:51 exittlight wrote: I've always found (in my case) that pirating helps sales. When ever I pirate a game, Portal 2 most recently, I tell all my friends about it. When I tell all my friends about how great it is, they then go out and buy it themselves. If I never pirated it, they would have never bought it in the first place.
Is this actually supposed to be some kind of justification?
"I've always found (in my case) that stealing helps people. When ever I steal from someone, my friend most recently, they learn a valuable lesson. If I never stole from them they wouldn't have never learned their lesson, so in actuality, I'm helping them." exittlight logic right here guys.
you'd be suprised how piracy can help sales rather than hinder it you know of the deus ex human revolution leak ? most people were basically set on the fact that, that game would be complete shit. after the leak almost every single person that played the leak came out and said "im totally buying this game, it's amazing"
I have no problem with no lan mode. Sucks for tournament organizes but who the hell doesn't have the internet these days? I mean I have the worst internet on earth and I can handle a few games going at the same time on the same connection. In fact adding lan would not increase my enjoyment of the game in any way.
When they first said there would be no lan I was pissed, but now that I have seen how it works I truly don't care. Instances like that fail MLG will stop happening because they now aware of the problem and it is fixable as we saw with the last MLG.
That said removing lan is certainly not something I'm happy about, its just that I no longer care whether it is there or not.
If Blizzard came up to me and said you can decide what we work on next, Lan or clan support, I woul go clan support.
WoW has private cracked servers? It's not the same thing at all. One is a online game that uses a key+password to autenticate the login to the server, even if you crack it and circumvent the key you still get no real game as it's all online. In SC2 if you circumvent the key (don't need to crack the actual keycodes) you gain access to a full client with LAN enabled.
no, there is a piece auf hardware called "authenticator" which creates a new code every 10 (?) seconds you need to logi in. Its sold as an account security tool.
On June 23 2011 15:51 exittlight wrote: I've always found (in my case) that pirating helps sales. When ever I pirate a game, Portal 2 most recently, I tell all my friends about it. When I tell all my friends about how great it is, they then go out and buy it themselves. If I never pirated it, they would have never bought it in the first place.
Is this actually supposed to be some kind of justification?
"I've always found (in my case) that stealing helps people. When ever I steal from someone, my friend most recently, they learn a valuable lesson. If I never stole from them they wouldn't have never learned their lesson, so in actuality, I'm helping them." exittlight logic right here guys.
you'd be suprised how piracy can help sales rather than hinder it you know of the deus ex human revolution leak ? most people were basically set on the fact that, that game would be complete shit. after the leak almost every single person that played the leak came out and said "im totally buying this game, it's amazing"
People would have read reviews and bought the game regardless if it was really that good, it's not like piracy is the only way to get information about a game or you blow 60 bucks, this isn't the NES era.
On June 23 2011 15:51 exittlight wrote: I've always found (in my case) that pirating helps sales. When ever I pirate a game, Portal 2 most recently, I tell all my friends about it. When I tell all my friends about how great it is, they then go out and buy it themselves. If I never pirated it, they would have never bought it in the first place.
Is this actually supposed to be some kind of justification?
"I've always found (in my case) that stealing helps people. When ever I steal from someone, my friend most recently, they learn a valuable lesson. If I never stole from them they wouldn't have never learned their lesson, so in actuality, I'm helping them." exittlight logic right here guys.
you'd be suprised how piracy can help sales rather than hinder it you know of the deus ex human revolution leak ? most people were basically set on the fact that, that game would be complete shit. after the leak almost every single person that played the leak came out and said "im totally buying this game, it's amazing"
People would have read reviews and bought the game regardless if it was really that good, it's not like piracy is the only way to get information about a game or you blow 60 bucks, this isn't the NES era.
Yeah. Even /v/, the most negative gaming community in the world, were looking forward to the game even before the leak.
On June 23 2011 16:22 MaGariShun wrote: It's a sad thing when people bring up the "it's a company, they want to make money" card. I know this sounds naive, but it should be about making the best possible game and then getting profit out of it, not about making the biggest possible amount of money and getting away with as little good game as possible. You can tell if a developer genuinely wants to produce a good game and it doesnt. Starcraft 2 unfortunately is an example of the latter (not saying I dont like it at all, but you can tell from how its made). Early WoW and the blizzard games before that were examples of good games. This was always why I liked Blizzard: They said "hey wouldn't it be cool if we have that in the game?" and they added it disregarding the additional time, money and effort needed to complete a game. They made, in essence, games they wanted to play themselves and that is in my opinion what game development should be about.
I have bought SC2 and am not really satisfied. You wanna know the reason why I spent the 60€ on it? Cause I had pirated WC3 and liked it. I liked it so much I bought it, and then eventually WoW, Diablo2 and SC2. As long as a studio releases great games they will get money. Maybe they don't get the most possible out of it, but who cares? The shareholders? Fuck the shareholders! As soon as they dictate how a game has to be I sure as hell won't buy it.
The video of Gabe Newell posted earlier in the thread is very inspiring. It gives me confidence that we will still continue to have good games despite all that EA/Activision greedmachine. There is one thing that is for sure: I will buy DotA2 and most probably it will be the money that could have been HotS.
Pirates will always be pirates. Even if you bring the best game out there, people will still download it.
Quite frankly, you are naive. Companies make money, thats the way everything works. But just because a product has to make money doesnt mean it can't be fun or good, or Blizzard cant spend more time and effort in it. I'm sorry that you hate SC2 that much, but blizzard has done a tremendous job of making an awesome game, which they are very skilled at. Especially Blizzard is known for their innovation and care they put in their games.
Did Blizzard only do it for the money? No, if they would really be in it for the money they wouldnt make games, simple as that. There are other markets in the software-industry that are way more profitable, if all they ever wanted and did was make money they could just switch and make your next b2b application, turn into a company like IBM for example.
There is a reason the best games come from indie studios. Do you think they sit down on a table and ponder "How can we make the biggest amount of money?". No, they make a good game and then sell it and try to get by and if the game is really good people will buy it, and then the sequel and they will tell all their friends how good it is and the friends will buy it too. They will then buy the sequels, spinoffs and expansions as long as the developers continue to deliver a good game.
The best game comes from indie studios? Are you serious? Name one. Do you really honestly believe that a bunch of guys with a loan from the bank are just going to make something and hope for the best, instead of doing endless market research, trying to figure out what the people want and create that. Indie developers are fragile, they dont have the bankaccounts big developers have. They cant just create something they love, what if it becomes a huge flop? Blizzard could handle it if SC2 failed miserably, do you really think any indie developer can when they just spend 6 months of work in a project?
I wish everything you said was true, that if you just love what you do and put a hell lot of effort in it you become rich. But thats not the case, you actually have to get out of your chair and see if people would want to buy your game, do some market research and adjust your game design.
(If its worth anything, i work at an indie game development studio that creates games for mobile devices)
On June 23 2011 16:24 Seditary wrote: Is it just me, or did the guy argue against putting anything in games? He says putting LAN would increase piracy, so would putting in anything desirable to the public.
After all, a game gets pirated more than nothing. Maybe he should start selling copies of rubbish data, then all his piracy woes would disappear.
No. Getting a better game increases sales, that should be obvious. It also increases piracy, but probably not the piracy percentage, which i would assume even lowers a bit. So as a result, you get more sales, and more pirated games at the same time. Implementing LAN on the other hand means that some people who want to play multiplayer pirate the game instead of buying it. So the percentage of pirates over buyers increases. While it will also probably attract next to no additional buyers, this means that if they implement it, they actually sell less games than if they had not.
There are basically 3 numbers here. Total amount of people who play the game, the subset of people who pirate the game, and the amount of people who buy the game. Gaming companies want to maximize the third group, while the other two should not matter to them at all. Making a better game increases groups 1, 2, and 3 all alike. As the company does not care for 1 and 2, but the size of three is important to them, that is a desired effect. Stuff that makes a game easier to pirate, or increases the quality of the pirated version of the game increases 1 and 2, but lowers 3. So if the expected result of a change makes group 3 smaller, there is no reason for a gaming company to implement it.
On June 23 2011 16:22 MaGariShun wrote: It's a sad thing when people bring up the "it's a company, they want to make money" card. I know this sounds naive, but it should be about making the best possible game and then getting profit out of it, not about making the biggest possible amount of money and getting away with as little good game as possible. You can tell if a developer genuinely wants to produce a good game and it doesnt. Starcraft 2 unfortunately is an example of the latter (not saying I dont like it at all, but you can tell from how its made). Early WoW and the blizzard games before that were examples of good games. This was always why I liked Blizzard: They said "hey wouldn't it be cool if we have that in the game?" and they added it disregarding the additional time, money and effort needed to complete a game. They made, in essence, games they wanted to play themselves and that is in my opinion what game development should be about. There is a reason the best games come from indie studios. Do you think they sit down on a table and ponder "How can we make the biggest amount of money?". No, they make a good game and then sell it and try to get by and if the game is really good people will buy it, and then the sequel and they will tell all their friends how good it is and the friends will buy it too. They will then buy the sequels, spinoffs and expansions as long as the developers continue to deliver a good game.
I have bought SC2 and am not really satisfied. You wanna know the reason why I spent the 60€ on it? Cause I had pirated WC3 and liked it. I liked it so much I bought it, and then eventually WoW, Diablo2 and SC2. As long as a studio releases great games they will get money. Maybe they don't get the most possible out of it, but who cares? The shareholders? Fuck the shareholders! As soon as they dictate how a game has to be I sure as hell won't buy it.
The video of Gabe Newell posted earlier in the thread is very inspiring. It gives me confidence that we will still continue to have good games despite all that EA/Activision greedmachine. There is one thing that is for sure: I will buy DotA2 and most probably it will be the money that could have been HotS.
Such a naive view on games and the industry. Valve are doing good yet they ruined TF2 with purchasable bullshit that turned the game into a trade simulator more than a team-based FPS.
On June 23 2011 15:51 exittlight wrote: I've always found (in my case) that pirating helps sales. When ever I pirate a game, Portal 2 most recently, I tell all my friends about it. When I tell all my friends about how great it is, they then go out and buy it themselves. If I never pirated it, they would have never bought it in the first place.
Is this actually supposed to be some kind of justification?
"I've always found (in my case) that stealing helps people. When ever I steal from someone, my friend most recently, they learn a valuable lesson. If I never stole from them they wouldn't have never learned their lesson, so in actuality, I'm helping them." exittlight logic right here guys.
That is such a terrible analogy that attempts to skew the argument. If the entire discussion is built on the idea of sales, it's an ends-based discussion about sales, and if the above statement is true/demonstrates that pirating helps sales, then 1+1=2: it's a proper justification.
If you weren't too busy trying to insult people to make arguments, it seems your counter would be that the act of stealing itself is unethical. First, that's a means-based judgment that has no application to an ends-based discussion. Second, it doesn't make sense either because the reason that "stealing" is bad is the fact that it harms someone - pirating simply duplicates the copy, so there's no property loss/harm to the company. You might claim that that stealing does result in lost sales, thus creating that harm, which brings us back to his point and things like actually making substantive arguments.
On June 23 2011 15:51 exittlight wrote: I've always found (in my case) that pirating helps sales. When ever I pirate a game, Portal 2 most recently, I tell all my friends about it. When I tell all my friends about how great it is, they then go out and buy it themselves. If I never pirated it, they would have never bought it in the first place.
Is this actually supposed to be some kind of justification?
"I've always found (in my case) that stealing helps people. When ever I steal from someone, my friend most recently, they learn a valuable lesson. If I never stole from them they wouldn't have never learned their lesson, so in actuality, I'm helping them." exittlight logic right here guys.
you'd be suprised how piracy can help sales rather than hinder it you know of the deus ex human revolution leak ? most people were basically set on the fact that, that game would be complete shit. after the leak almost every single person that played the leak came out and said "im totally buying this game, it's amazing"
People would have read reviews and bought the game regardless if it was really that good, it's not like piracy is the only way to get information about a game or you blow 60 bucks, this isn't the NES era.
i've never trusted reviewers. apart from getting paid they get shunned if they give games bad reviews it really only happens with large corporations like EA or activision. yes yes, tinfoil hat, conspiracy blah blah bullshit.
but the shunned thing is true reviewers are given early access to games to do reviews. if that reviewer does a bad review for one of their games they wont send them any more early access games.
or worse you remember APB initial release? review embargo for a week after launch? because they knew the game was awful but were trying to sell it anyway before anyone knew?
Fail i think we should be allowed to have a damn LAN there is no reason we cannot... Starcraft 2 is already pirated literally so if the so called new era of games have no LAN that harms the good people more than the pirates... and all the pirates get is LAN and single player which honestly who gives a shit....the good folks who want to play these games with LAN parties are unable to because it requires internet access for all who want to be in the same game... which of course requires some one to have a huge amount of internet good-put just to keep everything peachy without disconnects and lag.
On June 23 2011 15:51 exittlight wrote: I've always found (in my case) that pirating helps sales. When ever I pirate a game, Portal 2 most recently, I tell all my friends about it. When I tell all my friends about how great it is, they then go out and buy it themselves. If I never pirated it, they would have never bought it in the first place.
Is this actually supposed to be some kind of justification?
"I've always found (in my case) that stealing helps people. When ever I steal from someone, my friend most recently, they learn a valuable lesson. If I never stole from them they wouldn't have never learned their lesson, so in actuality, I'm helping them." exittlight logic right here guys.
you'd be suprised how piracy can help sales rather than hinder it you know of the deus ex human revolution leak ? most people were basically set on the fact that, that game would be complete shit. after the leak almost every single person that played the leak came out and said "im totally buying this game, it's amazing"
People would have read reviews and bought the game regardless if it was really that good, it's not like piracy is the only way to get information about a game or you blow 60 bucks, this isn't the NES era.
i've never trusted reviewers. apart from getting paid they get shunned if they give games bad reviews it really only happens with large corporations like EA or activision. yes yes, tinfoil hat, conspiracy blah blah bullshit.
but the shunned thing is true reviewers are given early access to games to do reviews. if that reviewer does a bad review for one of their games they wont send them any more early access games.
or worse you remember APB initial release? review embargo for a week after launch? because they knew the game was awful but were trying to sell it anyway before anyone knew?
This whole argument is moot, Blizzard thought of that and implemented guest passes. And for anyone claiming that piracy is good for the games industry please realise what you are saying.
Its like saying stealing bread from the baker is a good thing because you can say to your friends what a good bakery it is. You might want to read this to get a glimpse of the real effects.
Did you know that for a large portion of games on the apple appstore 90% of the total downloads are pirated? Obviously, if piracy wasnt there they wouldnt sell 90% more. Some people just download because its easy and that, i get that. But there are people that would have brought the game instead of downloaded it.
On June 23 2011 15:51 exittlight wrote: I've always found (in my case) that pirating helps sales. When ever I pirate a game, Portal 2 most recently, I tell all my friends about it. When I tell all my friends about how great it is, they then go out and buy it themselves. If I never pirated it, they would have never bought it in the first place.
Is this actually supposed to be some kind of justification?
"I've always found (in my case) that stealing helps people. When ever I steal from someone, my friend most recently, they learn a valuable lesson. If I never stole from them they wouldn't have never learned their lesson, so in actuality, I'm helping them." exittlight logic right here guys.
That is such a terrible analogy that attempts to skew the argument. If the entire discussion is built on the idea of sales, it's an ends-based discussion about sales, and if the above statement is true/demonstrates that pirating helps sales, then 1+1=2: it's a proper justification.
If you weren't too busy trying to insult people to make arguments, it seems your counter would be that the act of stealing itself is unethical. First, that's a means-based judgment that has no application to an ends-based discussion. Second, it doesn't make sense either because the reason that "stealing" is bad is the fact that it harms someone - pirating simply duplicates the copy, so there's no property loss/harm to the company. You might claim that that stealing does result in lost sales, thus creating that harm, which brings us back to his point and things like actually making substantive arguments.
The point of the analogy is he rationalizes a poor and selfish behavior and convinces himself that it's actually a good thing which is bullshit.
On June 23 2011 16:24 Seditary wrote: Is it just me, or did the guy argue against putting anything in games? He says putting LAN would increase piracy, so would putting in anything desirable to the public.
After all, a game gets pirated more than nothing. Maybe he should start selling copies of rubbish data, then all his piracy woes would disappear.
No. Getting a better game increases sales, that should be obvious. It also increases piracy, but probably not the piracy percentage, which i would assume even lowers a bit. So as a result, you get more sales, and more pirated games at the same time. Implementing LAN on the other hand means that some people who want to play multiplayer pirate the game instead of buying it. So the percentage of pirates over buyers increases. While it will also probably attract next to no additional buyers, this means that if they implement it, they actually sell less games than if they had not.
There are basically 3 numbers here. Total amount of people who play the game, the subset of people who pirate the game, and the amount of people who buy the game. Gaming companies want to maximize the third group, while the other two should not matter to them at all. Making a better game increases groups 1, 2, and 3 all alike. As the company does not care for 1 and 2, but the size of three is important to them, that is a desired effect. Stuff that makes a game easier to pirate, or increases the quality of the pirated version of the game increases 1 and 2, but lowers 3. So if the expected result of a change makes group 3 smaller, there is no reason for a gaming company to implement it.
I see what you're saying and I agree with you, but I've never heard a big company care about piracy percentages, only raw numbers. I'm sure plenty of people have seen times when companies have put all their efforts into reducing group 2, no matter the consequence to group 3.
On June 23 2011 15:51 exittlight wrote: I've always found (in my case) that pirating helps sales. When ever I pirate a game, Portal 2 most recently, I tell all my friends about it. When I tell all my friends about how great it is, they then go out and buy it themselves. If I never pirated it, they would have never bought it in the first place.
Is this actually supposed to be some kind of justification?
"I've always found (in my case) that stealing helps people. When ever I steal from someone, my friend most recently, they learn a valuable lesson. If I never stole from them they wouldn't have never learned their lesson, so in actuality, I'm helping them." exittlight logic right here guys.
you'd be suprised how piracy can help sales rather than hinder it you know of the deus ex human revolution leak ? most people were basically set on the fact that, that game would be complete shit. after the leak almost every single person that played the leak came out and said "im totally buying this game, it's amazing"
People would have read reviews and bought the game regardless if it was really that good, it's not like piracy is the only way to get information about a game or you blow 60 bucks, this isn't the NES era.
i've never trusted reviewers. apart from getting paid they get shunned if they give games bad reviews it really only happens with large corporations like EA or activision. yes yes, tinfoil hat, conspiracy blah blah bullshit.
but the shunned thing is true reviewers are given early access to games to do reviews. if that reviewer does a bad review for one of their games they wont send them any more early access games.
or worse you remember APB initial release? review embargo for a week after launch? because they knew the game was awful but were trying to sell it anyway before anyone knew?
This whole argument is moot, Blizzard thought of that and implemented guest passes. And for anyone claiming that piracy is good for the games industry please realise what you are saying.
Its like saying stealing bread from the baker is a good thing because you can say to your friends what a good bakery it is. You might want to read this to get a glimpse of the real effects.
Did you know that for a large portion of games on the apple appstore 90% of the total downloads are pirated? Obviously, if piracy wasnt there they wouldnt sell 90% more. Some people just download because its easy and that, i get that. But there are people that would have brought the game instead of downloaded it.
i wasn't really talking about blizzard, i guess i got way too offtopic.
On June 23 2011 15:51 exittlight wrote: I've always found (in my case) that pirating helps sales. When ever I pirate a game, Portal 2 most recently, I tell all my friends about it. When I tell all my friends about how great it is, they then go out and buy it themselves. If I never pirated it, they would have never bought it in the first place.
Is this actually supposed to be some kind of justification?
"I've always found (in my case) that stealing helps people. When ever I steal from someone, my friend most recently, they learn a valuable lesson. If I never stole from them they wouldn't have never learned their lesson, so in actuality, I'm helping them." exittlight logic right here guys.
You can't just replace ''stealing'' with ''piracy''. Its a completely different thing. Something being pirated doesn't bring the same losses to a company then it being stolen.
What Exitt is trying to say, is that piracy can spread the popularity of something, but I think this is mostly the case in lesser known music, games, books, etc, rather then something made by blizzard who have plenty of resources to do advertising.
Anyway, back on topic, it's sad that something like piracy is effecting the customers in a negative way.. I wish a company would just ignore piracy and try to release a product thats as good as possible in every way, but I guess thats simply not possible...
On June 23 2011 16:54 Nazarid wrote: Fail i think we should be allowed to have a damn LAN there is no reason we cannot... Starcraft 2 is already pirated literally so if the so called new era of games have no LAN that harms the good people more than the pirates... and all the pirates get is LAN and single player which honestly who gives a shit....the good folks who want to play these games with LAN parties are unable to because it requires internet access for all who want to be in the same game... which of course requires some one to have a huge amount of internet good-put just to keep everything peachy without disconnects and lag.
Well, but there are possibilities to play LAN games over the Internet. So basically, if you implement LAN, the pirated games get an, albeit a bit worse, nearly complete multiplayer mode. And as SC2 is primarily a multiplayer game, and the pirated copies only having singleplayer is a pretty good argument to buy rather than pirate. But if the pirated games suddenly have LAN and as a result some kind of online multiplayer, that argument becomes a lot weaker, which will lead to some people who buy the game to instead pirate it.
Also piracy isnt the only reason Blizzard didnt introduce LAN (yet?). They marketed the game as competitive online game using battle.net matchmaking, and they want to do everything thats possible to promote the use of that.
How about we crash and burn PC gaming industry and start back at square one. Since we can't compete with soccermoms and their spawn for the gaming market and developers have become beyond paranoid about releasing their games on PC I really see no reason to go on like this. Bad PC ports, scarcely any improvements graphic wise since all games need to be able to run on hardware that's 6 years old...
Just burn it all and watch small gaming studios sprout up on the burned soil. Fertilized with the shit that was.
On June 23 2011 15:51 exittlight wrote: I've always found (in my case) that pirating helps sales. When ever I pirate a game, Portal 2 most recently, I tell all my friends about it. When I tell all my friends about how great it is, they then go out and buy it themselves. If I never pirated it, they would have never bought it in the first place.
Is this actually supposed to be some kind of justification?
"I've always found (in my case) that stealing helps people. When ever I steal from someone, my friend most recently, they learn a valuable lesson. If I never stole from them they wouldn't have never learned their lesson, so in actuality, I'm helping them." exittlight logic right here guys.
You can't just replace ''stealing'' with ''piracy''. Its a completely different thing. Something being pirated doesn't bring the same losses to a company then it being stolen.
What Exitt is trying to say, is that piracy can spread the popularity of something, but I think this is mostly the case in lesser known music, games, books, etc, rather then something made by blizzard who have plenty of resources to do advertising.
Anyway, back on topic, it's sad that something like piracy is effecting the customers in a negative way.. I wish a company would just ignore piracy and try to release a product thats as good as possible in every way, but I guess thats simply not possible...
That's really not the point of it, like I stated earlier in the thread. It's that he rationalizes a selfish behavior and attempts to find a certain situation or aspect where it's supposedly beneficial to other people, when it's purely selfish.
On June 23 2011 17:17 Simberto wrote: I thought you were saying that they should set them on fire?
I sweareth it was a metaphorical fire. Like the one that burns in your heart, that doesn't burn in the hearts of current high skilled developers. We need to light that shit up, yo.
On June 23 2011 17:17 Slaytilost wrote: And run around in circles all day long? Artists, game designers and programmers need management to steer them and the project.
Yet smaller studios like frictional games and uh.. uh.. others- Can function with a smaller crew and still make a good game. They need the fire in their souls LIGHTED UP.
On June 23 2011 11:34 Fruscainte wrote: The voice of "I PIRATE EVERYTHING SINCE I DONT PAY FOR EVERYTHING" is a very small part in the community but consequently the loudest -- giving the illusion they are the majority when in fact most of pirates hate their fucking guts if they like the game and don't buy it after. These are potential customers that they are driving away as criminals. That's my issue with this crap. They take away something that is basically mandatory in a game like this and then when people flip a shit about it, they blame it on pirates.
So you think self-reporting surveys are accurate. Do you really think that nobody lied about whether they buy the game?
Furthermore, what about all the people who don't vote because they are ashamed. Or even better, the fact that MOST PEOPLE ARE APATHETIC means that the same people who don't give a shit about pirating and not buying are the same people who don't give a shit about your surveys examining the ethics of it.
It's called a silent majority. You are in extreme rationalization mode if you really think most pirates buy games they like, and it's also a LOT easier to "not like" a game that you've played for 20 hours if it lets you talk yourself into keeping 60 bucks.
So essentially, I got a legitimate poll of 12,000 people -- and you got yourself going LOL IT'S BIASED AND WRONG AND SINCE PIRATES ARE THE MOST IMMORAL PEOPLE ON EARTH IT'S OBVIOUSLY FAKE AND WRONG.
Stay classy. Come back with something substantial please. I got a poll of thousands of people, people all throughout the thread backing me up saying they buy games they enjoy all the time and piracy has directly caused sales for them and so forth.
Is Piracy morally wrong? Sure. I don't doubt that for a second.
Is it legally or fiscally wrong? Not at all. In fact, everything is pointing that piracy directly helps the industry more than it hurts. Look a few pages back if you actually read the thread and you would see that government study, again, backing me up.
You do know what response bias is, right? It's like going to colleges and asking students if they smoke marijuana. You see examples of this every day.
If you spent any amount of time in Bitgamer and in the piracy community, as I said multiple times -- it would only reaffirm those statistics.
How do you know people actually buy games when they claim to?
So your argument is that people are lying (for no reason) that they are buying games? Both on a non-consequential poll, and thousands of people on forums and comment postings? There's a conspiracy out there to actually convince people we are buying games?
There's a time to stop posting. This is about that time for you.
I got actual people backing my points up and you got theoretical situations of a giant conspiracy against everyone.
You probably should stop posting about statistics, actually. I support having LAN and agree that piracy is a stupid reason to keep it out, but this really is a disgrace to legitimate statistics >.>
I wasn't using it as a legitimate statistic -- I was using it to reaffirm myself and everyone in this thread saying they buy games they pirate and the community being the majority in saying they buy games they pirate.
Sure, it may not be 100% accurate -- I'm not saying it is. But come on, I make an entire post to make a point and you nit pick out one single part of it to simply re-enforce my point and explode it into something much bigger than it was meant to be.
Basically, quit nitpicking bro.
Isn't he nitpicking the evidence part of your thread?
On June 23 2011 17:17 Simberto wrote: I thought you were saying that they should set them on fire?
I sweareth it was a metaphorical fire. Like the one that burns in your heart, that doesn't burn in the hearts of current high skilled developers. We need to light that shit up, yo.
On June 23 2011 17:19 HeIios wrote: Yet smaller studios like frictional games and uh.. uh.. others- Can function with a smaller crew and still make a good game. They need the fire in their souls LIGHTED UP.
Smaller crews still include some form of project-management, be it a bit more agile (SCRUM, KANBAN etc) Executives, managers and the like arent always evil people that try to steal your babies. Some of them are actually quite nice!
On June 23 2011 17:17 Simberto wrote: I thought you were saying that they should set them on fire?
I sweareth it was a metaphorical fire. Like the one that burns in your heart, that doesn't burn in the hearts of current high skilled developers. We need to light that shit up, yo.
On June 23 2011 17:19 HeIios wrote: Yet smaller studios like frictional games and uh.. uh.. others- Can function with a smaller crew and still make a good game. They need the fire in their souls LIGHTED UP.
Smaller crews still include some form of project-management, be it a bit more agile (SCRUM, KANBAN etc)
I want to ask you a question and I want you to answer it in truth. Is your heart on fire? Is your soul burning? I never meant anything about project managers, I love those guys. The executives are the ones who see potential profit as a bigger sell (harr harr) than potential quality. The kinds who dictate terms that are NOT great for their consumers but good for the shareholders.
Well if we're going all methophoric, my heart is pumping blood through my veins. And in order to do that i need to go to the store and buy food. After i've established living i also try to enjoy myself, and make some fun products during my day job, and that whats lights my fire.
There is no company in the world that doesnt care about their customers, and only aims to bring the worst possible experience to them. There are no executives or shareholders that will potentially reduce the amount of sales on purpose. Why would they do that? It doesnt make any sense.
Yes my heart is on fire, by making games that sell good and are fun to play. There's actually quite a correlation between both of em
I just wish they created some kind of system like this.
To do lan mode you have to some kind of internet, you can log on. Then if you and your friend are on the same router, you can directly connect to each other, and other people on the same network as well they can join as well. If bnet disconnects somewhere along the line? Game continues, and you just end up playing together through your network.
On June 23 2011 17:31 Slaytilost wrote: Well if we're going all methophoric, my heart is pumping blood through my veins. And in order to do that i need to go to the store and buy food. After i've established living i also try to enjoy myself, and make some fun products during my day job, and that whats lights my fire.
There is no company in the world that doesnt care about their customers, and only aims to bring the worst possible experience to them. There are no executives or shareholders that will potentially reduce the amount of sales on purpose. Why would they do that? It doesnt make any sense.
Yes my heart is on fire, by making games that sell good and are fun to play. There's actually quite a correlation between both of em
Take a careful look at what I wrote, I never went to an extreme like you are (well maybe about burning them down, but come on). I'm tired of correcting myself in your assumptions, and thus I will burn you too. But not before I tell you something.
I understand how a business works, trust me. I understand how consumers work. I'm saying we should start anew because I see no light at the end of the tunnel for PCgaming, we are going to get the shaft again and again until our asses are so sore that all we can do is ask for one more. It's the frog in boiling water effect, they keep adding nails to the coffin that is pc gaming, we've signed the release form for our bunghole. We will never go back to the way things were, and pirates (who are NOT consumers) is not to blame here, it's just that the console market is too great of a threat. It's not even david vs goliath, more like Roadrunner vs Megazord. This direction aint gonna work out for us.
On June 23 2011 14:54 Khaymus wrote: How is there 26 pages of discussion on this? It is a very simple topic. People are stealing games so companies are trying to counteract that.
You want LAN? Stop stealing from the company. That is never going to happen, so guess what...we don't get LAN anymore.
Get used to it. We did it to ourselves.
stop acting like this entire community is stealing piracy is a small margin and nothing really changes that margin. the more a game is bought the more it is pirated. the less a game is bought the less it is pirated. it's always the same small minority margin.
do super markets place huge restrictions on the way you shop because of shoplifters? do they say "if you dont want a security guard to follow you around the shop all day maybe you should stop stealing!"
theft will always be present in every market forever. you want incentives for people to buy that they wont get if they steal. you DONT want incentives for people to steal other than cost.
Actually, they do have guards following customers in high risk neighborhoods. And yes, it is because of stealing.
You're privilege is showing, you might want to cover that up.
On June 23 2011 16:51 karpo wrote: Such a naive view on games and the industry.
I'm well aware that how I worded it, it would sound very naive. It is of course not that simple and people have to make money to run a business. What I tried to say in a very black-and-white-ish and exaggerating manner is, that you can only play the "business" card until a certain point. If game designers are not passionate and just think about the dollarz, games won't be good. Creating a good game involves a huge amount of and creativity (read: new stuff) and creativity has no place in a completely calculated business because you have no guarantee that something produces money if it hasn't been done before. What you're left with are EA/Activision style annual re-releases of a minimally altered old game.
On June 23 2011 16:47 Slaytilost wrote: Pirates will always be pirates. Even if you bring the best game out there, people will still download it.
So you opinion is that you should make worse games, because people will pirate them anyways? People who download everything and don't buy stuff even if it's good are not a factor. You lose no money through them as they would not buy anything anyways. Give people a reason other than "you are bad if you pirate it" to buy your product and they will buy it. I mean if the only reason to not pirate a game is a moral one people will sure as hell pirate it.
On June 23 2011 16:47 Slaytilost wrote: Quite frankly, you are naive. Companies make money, thats the way everything works. But just because a product has to make money doesnt mean it can't be fun or good, or Blizzard cant spend more time and effort in it. I'm sorry that you hate SC2 that much, but blizzard has done a tremendous job of making an awesome game, which they are very skilled at. Especially Blizzard is known for their innovation and care they put in their games.
My post was exaggerated and naive on purpose (read above). I never said I hate SC2, but what I miss in it is Blizzard's known innovation that you cite. That and the fact that I will have to buy 2 expansions with predominantly singleplayer content I dont care about just to be able to continue playing multiplayer. Oh, and the fact that they have become so greedy that they dont let you have multiple accounts, free namechanges or play cross server because you could somehow buy the game cheaper in china. Bnet 0.2 doesnt have clan features, didnt have chat channels for quite some time and the dnd doesnt really block traffic so you can get spammed during tournaments. Some of this stuff would be really easy to implement, they just dont do it because they are too greedy. I still bought the game, like it and play it, but it lacks on innovation and polish.
The best game comes from indie studios? Are you serious? Name one. Do you really honestly believe that a bunch of guys with a loan from the bank are just going to make something and hope for the best, instead of doing endless market research, trying to figure out what the people want and create that. Indie developers are fragile, they dont have the bankaccounts big developers have. They cant just create something they love, what if it becomes a huge flop? Blizzard could handle it if SC2 failed miserably, do you really think any indie developer can when they just spend 6 months of work in a project?
I consider games such as trine, machinarium, minecraft etc. better games than 99% of the stuff major publishers release. I never said indie studios have it easy, just that they can make the better games IMO.
I wish everything you said was true, that if you just love what you do and put a hell lot of effort in it you become rich. But thats not the case, you actually have to get out of your chair and see if people would want to buy your game, do some market research and adjust your game design.
Of course you don't get rich. The question is if you rather want to be rich or do the stuff you wanna do. If it works out both then awesome, if not, you have to decide.
On June 23 2011 17:09 Slaytilost wrote: Also piracy isnt the only reason Blizzard didnt introduce LAN (yet?). They marketed the game as competitive online game using battle.net matchmaking, and they want to do everything thats possible to promote the use of that.
Spoiler alert: They tell you that to not make you an angry customer.
the only 2 reasons why there is no LAN are: 1. Piracy 2. No control over other leagues (they fear KESPA 2.0)
On June 23 2011 17:31 Slaytilost wrote: Well if we're going all methophoric, my heart is pumping blood through my veins. And in order to do that i need to go to the store and buy food. After i've established living i also try to enjoy myself, and make some fun products during my day job, and that whats lights my fire.
There is no company in the world that doesnt care about their customers, and only aims to bring the worst possible experience to them. There are no executives or shareholders that will potentially reduce the amount of sales on purpose. Why would they do that? It doesnt make any sense.
Yes my heart is on fire, by making games that sell good and are fun to play. There's actually quite a correlation between both of em
Take a careful look at what I wrote, I never went to an extreme like you are (well maybe about burning them down, but come on). I'm tired of correcting myself in your assumptions, and thus I will burn you too. But not before I tell you something.
I understand how a business works, trust me. I understand how consumers work. I'm saying we should start anew because I see no light at the end of the tunnel for PCgaming, we are going to get the shaft again and again until our asses are so sore that all we can do is ask for one more. It's the frog in boiling water effect, they keep adding nails to the coffin that is pc gaming, we've signed the release form for our bunghole. We will never go back to the way things were, and pirates (who are NOT consumers) is not to blame here, it's just that the console market is too great of a threat. It's not even david vs goliath, more like Roadrunner vs Megazord. This direction aint gonna work out for us.
Thats a pretty grim view of the PC games industry my friend. Why do you feel so shafted? There's still great titles around, and money to make. Sometimes gems like Starcraft 2 or Portal are released, instead of just another Call of Duty game that looks just like the previous.
In a way, i see the console market as PC gaming anew, a 'lets burn this PC down and create our own Xbox/PS/whatever'. There are actually very decent games for consoles, and sometimes you just have to bend over tbh. Just go with the flow, instead of always complaining (not targeting anyone in particular) about bad ports just to go out and buy a console to play the 'original' so to speak.
Now i'm not a fan of the controller, but i'm sure PC gaming wont die out completely. Personally i dont feel shafted at all, im having a blast playing games on my PC, even if they are ports.
On June 23 2011 16:47 Slaytilost wrote: Quite frankly, you are naive. Companies make money, thats the way everything works. But just because a product has to make money doesnt mean it can't be fun or good, or Blizzard cant spend more time and effort in it. I'm sorry that you hate SC2 that much, but blizzard has done a tremendous job of making an awesome game, which they are very skilled at. Especially Blizzard is known for their innovation and care they put in their games.
My post was exaggerated and naive on purpose (read above). I never said I hate SC2, but what I miss in it is Blizzard's known innovation that you cite. That and the fact that I will have to buy 2 expansions with predominantly singleplayer content I dont care about just to be able to continue playing multiplayer. Oh, and the fact that they have become so greedy that they dont let you have multiple accounts, free namechanges or play cross server because you could somehow buy the game cheaper in china. Bnet 0.2 doesnt have clan features, didnt have chat channels for quite some time and the dnd doesnt really block traffic so you can get spammed during tournaments. Some of this stuff would be really easy to implement, they just dont do it because they are too greedy. I still bought the game, like it and play it, but it lacks on innovation and polish.
People bought BW even though it was more or less the same, at the time it was a predominantly singleplayer expansion. We will see two expansions probably cause they really couldn't complete everything within a reasonable timeframe. Both WC3 and SC had one expansion that had a fleshed out singleplayer aspect, it worked out ok then?
The fact that people can't smurf is great for me as there's way less griefing and people actually play against opponents they are close to in skill. The alternative is smurf accounts witch leads to screwing with the MMR ratings, people griefing low ranked players and trolling everywhere like it was in WC3/WoW. Cross server is price but also latency and the fact that they want to keep ladders separate for US/EU/SEA/SKR.
The chat client and other Bnet features are pretty lame at the moment, i admit. You blame everything on greed yet have no real proof. You say this or that is simple yet you know nothing about how the client works or how much work it takes.
What's depressing about this argument is that none of the people who support having lan have any non-anecdotal evidence for their argument
The other depressing thing is the failure at making a proper analogy for why pirating is bad.
-------------------
The reason pirating is bad is NOT because people stole the games
The reason pirating is bad is because if someone is 50/50 about buying a game since he's not sure, he's more likely to just steal it than spend $60.
The people who pirate will pirate. (Doesn't matter if they buy the game or not, you can't stop them from pirating)
The people who will buy the game will buy the game. It doesn't matter if it's pirated and free, they are fans and will be fans till the bitter end.
The people who are apathetic to the game but are too inept to know how to pirate said game are not a threat to the company. They will either buy the game or they won't.
The people who are apathetic AND are also adept at pirating the game will most likely pirate the game instead of buy it because one option is free and the other costs $60.
The pirates will be pirates no matter what. The fans will be fans no matter what. The apathetic will either buy the game or pirate the game (whichever is easier)
If Blizzard can make pirating the game difficult enough so that apathetic players will find it easier to buy the game instead of pirate it, why wouldn't Blizzard do that?
Which means the only people who would complain about no LAN are the people who are trying to not buy SC2.
And the only reason you don't want a CCTV camera in your living room is because you want to commit crimes. What other reason can there be? The camera doesn't stop you doing anything you were normally going to do so you shouldn't have a problem with it.
I actually would not have a problem with a CCTV camera in my room, personally. And yes, it is because I don't plan on doing anything illegal. And it also is because I don't feel shy about myself and I don't feel as if my life is this big secret I need to protect from the eyes of the world. I'm not some fundamentalist nut job in the midwestern united states.
That's me personally.
The question is, how bad is the crime in the place you're living in that CCTV cameras need to be bought? Do you really want to live in a neighborhood that is so bad that they need CCTV cameras?
I was only trying to get a point across through analogy. In actively taking tough measures against piracy, publishers are treating customers like potential pirates rather than treating pirates like potential customers.
That's because treating pirates like "potential customers" doesn't help.
Here's an example. A person can use piracy as a "try before you buy" kind of thing. And I'm totally fine with the concept of trying the game out before having to pay for it. Therefore, the way to treat such people as "potential customers" is to give them alternate ways to try before they buy: you make a free demo.
Does the presence of a free demo affect piracy rates? Hell no. Doom had a full third of the game as a free demo and was the most pirated game ever.
Which means the only people who would complain about no LAN are the people who are trying to not buy SC2.
And the only reason you don't want a CCTV camera in your living room is because you want to commit crimes. What other reason can there be? The camera doesn't stop you doing anything you were normally going to do so you shouldn't have a problem with it.
I actually would not have a problem with a CCTV camera in my room, personally. And yes, it is because I don't plan on doing anything illegal. And it also is because I don't feel shy about myself and I don't feel as if my life is this big secret I need to protect from the eyes of the world. I'm not some fundamentalist nut job in the midwestern united states.
That's me personally.
The question is, how bad is the crime in the place you're living in that CCTV cameras need to be bought? Do you really want to live in a neighborhood that is so bad that they need CCTV cameras?
I was only trying to get a point across through analogy. In actively taking tough measures against piracy, publishers are treating customers like potential pirates rather than treating pirates like potential customers.
And this is the issue. Take a look at this picture:
Relatively recent poll from Bitgamer. Look at those numbers. People are pirating games and THEN SUBSEQUENTLY BUYING THEM.
That's the piracy community, at least 87% of them according to this poll of 12,000 people of the best private tracker in the world. Instead of treating us like criminals who are literally stealing their livelihoods and actually producing quality games and removing DRM would make me, and a majority of others to buy their games. I outright bought Witcher 2 because of the removal of DRM after I played it a bit.
The voice of "I PIRATE EVERYTHING SINCE I DONT PAY FOR EVERYTHING" is a very small part in the community but consequently the loudest -- giving the illusion they are the majority when in fact most of pirates hate their fucking guts if they like the game and don't buy it after. Every major cracker tells you to buy the products if you enjoy them. There are thousands of comments of people saying "SO BUYING THIS" after torrenting them.
These are potential customers that they are driving away as criminals. That's my issue with this crap. They take away something that is basically mandatory in a game like this and then when people flip a shit about it, they blame it on pirates.
OK, let's break this graph down.
22% of these people "try to support good developers." OK, but what about the mediocre ones? This is something that I don't think people understand: most good developers were bad developers at one time or another. Not everyone has the talent to pull everything off right the first few times. Making a game is like any other skilled art form: it requires practice.
The mediocre developers today are the good developers of the future. Which these pirates are shafting by playing their games without paying for them. If you don't like their games, that's fine: don't play them.
43% will only buy the absolute best of the best, using whatever metric they so choose. These have the same problem as the above: it doesn't help anyone but the best of the best. I guess a game developer doesn't deserve money if a game isn't absolutely perfect.
There have been so many games that I have enjoyed. But far fewer of them are what I would call "amazing". The majority of pirates are saying that they shouldn't have to pay for a game that is merely good; it must be "amazing" or fuck that game developer for not being utterly perfect in every way and innovating the genre.
Hell, I love SC2, but would I call it "amazing"? No; it is merely an example of a excellently executed RTS game, using standard RTS gaming conventions.
22% ARE THE REASON WHY WE DON'T HAVE LAN! They admit it themselves: they would steal the game, but they can't, because they can only get the full experience by buying it. That is 2,640 sales of SC2 that we can, by their own admission, say would not have been made if SC2 had LAN play.
LAN in SC2 now has a definite price tag: $158,400. Minimum.
10% are assholes. But to be honest, these are the ones I respect the most. Why? Because at least they admit it. The top 65% likes to pretend that their actions are all noble. That they are pirates, but they still support "good developers", however widely or narrowly they define that.
There's a purity in saying, "I'm just going to take what I want." I can respect that. Sure, they're tools. But they're pure about it; they don't try to put on airs. They don't try to act like they're not exactly what they clearly are. They don't try to convince you that they can be bargained or reasoned with. They want your shit for free, period.
It's the entitlement complex of the 65% that I hate. The ones who say that it is wrong for them to buy a game and find out it's not "good". That it's wrong for them to make mistakes. That it's right for them to play mediocre games without paying the game developer what they're due just because they don't find those games to be "good".
The voice of "I PIRATE EVERYTHING SINCE I DONT PAY FOR EVERYTHING" is a very small part in the community
The statics clearly show that 10+22=32% of the community are part of this. The only difference is that 22% are willing to pay if methods are employed that restrict their access to certain content unless they pay. This 22% is the reason DRM, in all its forms, exists. It's the reason why we cannot have nice things.
32% is not a "very small part" of anything; it is almost one third. One out of every 3 pirates will not buy the game, no matter how good, unless forced to (and even then, it's only 1 in 5 that will do it if forced to).
So don't go acting like pirates are all noble and game developers can appease them with anything less than server-based DRM or MMO-style content lockdown.
On June 23 2011 17:57 lorkac wrote: If Blizzard can make pirating the game difficult enough so that apathetic players will find it easier to buy the game instead of pirate it, why wouldn't Blizzard do that?
Because it can turn "fans" into 50/50 guys or pirates if its done so that it impairs their experience too hard.
The chat client and other Bnet features are pretty lame at the moment, i admit. You blame everything on greed yet have no real proof. You say this or that is simple yet you know nothing about how the client works or how much work it takes.
I'm a programmer and CS student myself, so i know some things about software development. Name change is already implemented just not free, so i call that one easy. Dnd also can't be too hard you just have to track the status on the serverside (which i presume they do cause it shows you the status of your friends in the client) and then don't pass the messages if the target is on "block" mode. Im well aware that other things are more difficult and that even little changes require extensive testing and deployment can fuck things up. But blizz has so much capacity that it really shouldn't be a problem
On June 23 2011 17:47 MaGariShun wrote: It is of course not that simple and people have to make money to run a business. What I tried to say in a very black-and-white-ish and exaggerating manner is, that you can only play the "business" card until a certain point. If game designers are not passionate and just think about the dollarz, games won't be good. Creating a good game involves a huge amount of and creativity (read: new stuff) and creativity has no place in a completely calculated business because you have no guarantee that something produces money if it hasn't been done before. What you're left with are EA/Activision style annual re-releases of a minimally altered old game.
Activision releases a new Call of Duty just about every year. Every time its more or less the same game, sure the explosions get prettier and all that, but in essence its the same game. Yet still 18 million copies of Call of Duty: Black Ops where sold (which grosses about $818 million). Do you believe 18 milion people got shafted, and will be shafted every year? Sure you could descibe it as a re-release and people get screwed over by buying at again and again. But if they werent satisfied with the last game they wouldnt buy the next. So, the way i see it is its just a franchise with a loyal following that enjoys to play the new game every year. I sincerely believe that if someone did not enjoy the previous 2 COD games they wouldnt buy the next one. Which basicly means people like COD, eventhough i dont.
My post was exaggerated and naive on purpose (read above). I never said I hate SC2, but what I miss in it is Blizzard's known innovation that you cite. That and the fact that I will have to buy 2 expansions with predominantly singleplayer content I dont care about just to be able to continue playing multiplayer. Oh, and the fact that they have become so greedy that they dont let you have multiple accounts, free namechanges or play cross server because you could somehow buy the game cheaper in china. Bnet 0.2 doesnt have clan features, didnt have chat channels for quite some time and the dnd doesnt really block traffic so you can get spammed during tournaments. Some of this stuff would be really easy to implement, they just dont do it because they are too greedy. I still bought the game, like it and play it, but it lacks on innovation and polish.
I kinda like the expansion model tbh, you should also consider what good it brings. For one, you wouldnt be playing now if they decided to release the game in one go, the singleplayer would still be in development. Also, what i like most, is that they can revise the game's balance, add and remove units to keep it fresh. Sure there is a price tag, but in my opinion well worth it. I actually think multiple characters per b.net account was a feature once, or will be a feature in the future just because there still is some sort of character selection screen after you log in. Those could be remnants of an alpha feature. We shouldnt judge whether features are easy to implement or not, Blizzard's wonderful employers are the only ones that can do that. Either way, they decided not to prioritise implementing/improving some of the things you mentioned. As you might have noticed they are still hard at work at some features, and new features will be added. Chat channels where added, they have some crazy plans about a map-market and i'm sure there will be lots of more awesome stuff coming expansions. Sure some features are missing, and i'd like to see them implemented (watching replays together anyone?), however as the game is now its well worth my money in my opinion. It lacks innovation as in, its not a completely new franchise star1 was, but i find it (compared to other games) a pretty innovative and polished games. But you know, that just like my opinion man.
Of course you don't get rich. The question is if you rather want to be rich or do the stuff you wanna do. If it works out both then awesome, if not, you have to decide.
When you pick both you have to balance them too. I'm sure David Kim and his team would have wanted another 5 years to balance the game perfectly, but it has to ship at some time. Luckily in this business you get rich by making good products, because customers buy good products.
On June 23 2011 17:57 lorkac wrote: If Blizzard can make pirating the game difficult enough so that apathetic players will find it easier to buy the game instead of pirate it, why wouldn't Blizzard do that?
Because it can turn "fans" into 50/50 guys or pirates if its done so that it impairs their experience too hard.
I repeat--true fans will always buy it no matter what.
"fans" who turn 50/50 because the game doesn't have enough non-game features are not really fans and were already in the 50/50 category anyway.
The presence of the pirate culture allows those 50/50 fans to think "The game is not to my liking, but enough to my liking that I'm willing to steal it." Without that piracy culture present, that 50/50 fan would not even think of the option of not paying for it--and hence will have pay for a copy in order to try it out. (Demo's being the other way to try it out)
It's the presence of the Piracy culture that allows people to have the option to be 50/50. Without the pirate culture, people either buy the game or not.
On June 23 2011 18:11 MaGariShun wrote: I'm a programmer and CS student myself, so i know some things about software development. Name change is already implemented just not free, so i call that one easy. Dnd also can't be too hard you just have to track the status on the serverside (which i presume they do cause it shows you the status of your friends in the client) and then don't pass the messages if the target is on "block" mode. Im well aware that other things are more difficult and that even little changes require extensive testing and deployment can fuck things up. But blizz has so much capacity that it really shouldn't be a problem
I'm a programmer and a game developer myself, so i guess i have some insight in game development. Its not, ever, the question if Blizzard is capable enough. Its never the question whether its technically possible. Its capacity that is the problem, game development isnt that hard, its just a whole lot of work. Its the sheer amount of content, or code that goes into such projects. I'm Blizzard has a huge todo list, and they have to prioritize that. At the moment they seem focused on the new expansion instead of the things mentioned above.
The chat client and other Bnet features are pretty lame at the moment, i admit. You blame everything on greed yet have no real proof. You say this or that is simple yet you know nothing about how the client works or how much work it takes.
I'm a programmer and CS student myself, so i know some things about software development. Name change is already implemented just not free, so i call that one easy. Dnd also can't be too hard you just have to track the status on the serverside (which i presume they do cause it shows you the status of your friends in the client) and then don't pass the messages if the target is on "block" mode. Im well aware that other things are more difficult and that even little changes require extensive testing and deployment can fuck things up. But blizz has so much capacity that it really shouldn't be a problem
So you're saying the options Blizzard had was to either spend more money than they already did to try to get a *possibly* safe LAN system or ensure they prevent LAN abuse by saving money and not spend any resources in coding/testing it?
And you're confused why Blizzard decided to use the free option of not bothering with LAN? (Using your logic of course)
I can understand why they would think that from company's point of view but there are a few things i really dont agree with:
LAN feature ≠ giving it away for free.
Look at all the Valve games. They all have LAN, you can download all of them from wherever and get on a jailbroken server easily. That means they dont sell at all right? No. Most people that try the pirated multiplayer actually end up buying the game (if they like it) Why? Because finding good servers is hard, ping is high, people are stupid and cheating is not avoidable. Thats an easy example because theyre all FPS games right? Strategy games cant work that way... Well look at wc3. Again, LAN, custom servers and actually a pretty big scene on them afaik. But if they join these servers, play and have fun do you think they will stay there? Ofcourse not, they will seek out the better service with customer support, cheater protection and competition.
The only exception to this is Garena for DotA and thats because the system in game cant match you up by skill in custom games, besides dota isnt even made by Blizzard.
Another exception is Modern Warfare 2, though not that well known you can get full service (actually better service in some ways) with pirated copy. This is kind of a exception because it has no servers and activision actively went against pc so the fact people actually bought it on pc after getting told theyre secondary market is impressive.
This goes to my second point -
Goodwill is important
Look at the entire marketing strategy for Battlefield, its all about how they care and its working like magic. Most Indie games feature single player only or multi player that can be cracked without a problem but still they get amazing sales with no marketing (not all of them ofcourse).
I've been pirating games all of my life, I have absolutely no hard feelings doing so, but now as Im starting to earn some money I actually buy a lot of my games. Why? Because I can see if a company cares. There is absolutely no reason for me to buy some of the games i own except for being appreciative of the work developers do.
Valve, Blizzard, Indie companies - these are all companies I can put faces behind that care and I buy most of their games due to it (and the support ofc.) Activision - sure I can put a face behind them but its not one I would give my money... Bioware - though they dont have a "face", I used to buy their old games, not so much now with all the pre-release DLC bullsh--
My point is if a company actively speaks to its community and updates their games they will have loayal fans which can and will bring new people to the community.
This all applies to people who have an interest in buying your stuff which brings me to my final point -
Pirates are not stealing from companies
Sure, to take it literally they are but a lot of them would never buy your game. They should a must be thought of as potential customers, not people who steal, companies should try to motivate them to buy their games, not fight against them and piss of their fans in the process.
On June 23 2011 07:10 mdma-_- wrote: that still doesnt explain why they cant allow people to play each other in lan with the necessecity of being logged into bnet/whatever online client.
cheap excuse just to blame it on pirates tbh
No people who steal from others, regardless of how justified they feel cause this kind of thing.
You need ID with you credit card? It's because too many people try to commit fraud. You need two IDs to rent a movie? It's because people steal films. Are you complaining about the retardness that is DRM? It's there because people steal in the first place.
It boils down to this; stupid rules and regulations are there because people, consumers, do stupid things.
I completely understand why Blizzard does not have Lan support.
If we didnt have money to worry about we wouldnet have to settle with lagg down with the monetary system and "Lan latency" will be standard in everygame.
Sure, to take it literally they are but a lot of them would never buy your game. They should a must be thought of as potential customers, not people who steal, companies should try to motivate them to buy their games, not fight against them and piss of their fans in the process.
People who intend to steal never intend to buy the product--that is why they steal. This sentence is aggravating to hear because it means absolutely nothing.
If I said that people who are hungry would like to eat, it would not be understood as an argument for stealing from a grocery store.
I'm not saying Blizzard shouldn't have LAN. Whether or not LAN is present doesn't stop the arguments in support of piracy from being stupid.
At no point is taking someone's product and not compensating it a good thing. It's an insult to the industry, and an insult to the market itself. It isn't like you're renting the game. Pay say small price for a month's worth of service, pay full price for full service. You're stealing someone's property.
Yes, his property. His product. To you it is just data that you copied, to the company it's another person out there in the world pushing the mindset that games should be free.
The logic for piracy is at best selfish and at worse malicious. It sounds too much like politicians promising bridges that they never have to build unless absolutely forced to.
On June 23 2011 07:12 Coldplum wrote: I don't see why there can't be some sort of security feature built in that forces you to log onto Bnet before you can access LAN. Or even have a separate LAN security identifier accessory...i.e. like an identifier key-chain that you purchase in conjunction with your account.
Because of cracks, this has been tried and doesn't work.
The chat client and other Bnet features are pretty lame at the moment, i admit. You blame everything on greed yet have no real proof. You say this or that is simple yet you know nothing about how the client works or how much work it takes.
I'm a programmer and CS student myself, so i know some things about software development. Name change is already implemented just not free, so i call that one easy. Dnd also can't be too hard you just have to track the status on the serverside (which i presume they do cause it shows you the status of your friends in the client) and then don't pass the messages if the target is on "block" mode. Im well aware that other things are more difficult and that even little changes require extensive testing and deployment can fuck things up. But blizz has so much capacity that it really shouldn't be a problem
So you're saying the options Blizzard had was to either spend more money than they already did to try to get a *possibly* safe LAN system or ensure they prevent LAN abuse by saving money and not spend any resources in coding/testing it?
And you're confused why Blizzard decided to use the free option of not bothering with LAN? (Using your logic of course)
No, I was pointing out two things they could change easily and that would make the community happier. Yet they don't for whatever reason. They won't make any money out of it, probably on the contrary (they will charge for namechanges eventually - maybe it comes together with the map marketplace) so its just about doing the community a favor that doesnt cost them all too much. They decided not to do it which is a decision I dont like, cause the "old Blizzard" would probably have done it. My post was not about LAN mode, but I'll give you my opinion: I fully understand why there is no LAN. From a business perspective it is the logical thing to do, but I'm sure the game would have made profit even with it and all the piracy. I always hate it when they cut stuff because of piracy. Its just not fair. Because other people pirate the game the paying customer gets punished? I don't like that way of thinking. IMO Blizz shouldn't force customers to use their service to ensure they have to buy the game, but provide a service such good that people buy the game and use the service because of it.
Sure, to take it literally they are but a lot of them would never buy your game. They should a must be thought of as potential customers, not people who steal, companies should try to motivate them to buy their games, not fight against them and piss of their fans in the process.
This is just silly. It's because of pirates that we have sequels every year and it's because of pirates that I have to log in to Battle.net every time I start SC2. Stop pretending that piracy is something small and harmless. Downloading games IS stealing, no idea on which planet you live in. People work hard day and night to give you great games and by downloading the game for free you are not acknowledging their efforts. There is no free meal as they say and the same is with games. Today you get if for free and few months/years down the line you see companies less willing to invest money into expensive games and projects. No other company besides Blizzard, is willing to spend this crazy amount of money for a game to promote E-sports. If SC2 is not successful, I doubt we will see e-sports rising anytime soon. If you cannot afford a game, save some money and wait for it to become cheaper. I have been buying my games, although they cost A LOT in Bulgaria. SC2 is like 1/9th of your monthly salary. If I can't afford a game this month I might get it the next on. People had to work shitty jobs just to pay for their music/movies in the past, the same should be for games.
Sure, to take it literally they are but a lot of them would never buy your game. They should a must be thought of as potential customers, not people who steal, companies should try to motivate them to buy their games, not fight against them and piss of their fans in the process.
People who intend to steal never intend to buy the product--that is why they steal. This sentence is aggravating to hear because it means absolutely nothing.
If I said that people who are hungry would like to eat, it would not be understood as an argument for stealing from a grocery store.
I'm not saying Blizzard shouldn't have LAN. Whether or not LAN is present doesn't stop the arguments in support of piracy from being stupid.
At no point is taking someone's product and not compensating it a good thing. It's an insult to the industry, and an insult to the market itself. It isn't like you're renting the game. Pay say small price for a month's worth of service, pay full price for full service. You're stealing someone's property.
Yes, his property. His product. To you it is just data that you copied, to the company it's another person out there in the world pushing the mindset that games should be free.
The logic for piracy is at best selfish and at worse malicious. It sounds too much like politicians promising bridges that they never have to build unless absolutely forced to.
My mistake, I didnt mean to make it sound like I support it or think its not stealing.
I meant it from marketing point of view (Sure, to take it literally they are but a lot of them would never buy your game.) I meant this for single player games, I have many friends who pirate games and will never buy most of them unless they can clearly gain something from it (like multiplayer)
Once again, Im not saying piracy is right, or should be accepted, I mean it in the way they shouldnt try to fight against someone who doesnt actually hurt them (as in the will never buy it, so his money isnt a loss) example - Assassins creed 2's awful DRM system which only limits paying customers.
On June 23 2011 07:18 darkscream wrote: Bad argument made by propagandist.
Pirates wouldn't have bought the game anyway, and including LAN would let your game get exposed to new people for free. This is like saying "terrorists ruined travel", even though it's the government ruining travelling.
This analogy fails because terrorists are in the vast (VAST) minority whereas pirates are in the majority.
There is no excuse for piracy, even if you think it is not harmful. Saying piracy is ok is like saying people don't own the rights to the fruits of their own labour.
Piracy is the WRONG way to go about "fighting" record companies and game companies that you think have unfair licenses and relationships to content creators.
The right way is to be a customer of the companies that have business practices you agree with.
The chat client and other Bnet features are pretty lame at the moment, i admit. You blame everything on greed yet have no real proof. You say this or that is simple yet you know nothing about how the client works or how much work it takes.
I'm a programmer and CS student myself, so i know some things about software development. Name change is already implemented just not free, so i call that one easy. Dnd also can't be too hard you just have to track the status on the serverside (which i presume they do cause it shows you the status of your friends in the client) and then don't pass the messages if the target is on "block" mode. Im well aware that other things are more difficult and that even little changes require extensive testing and deployment can fuck things up. But blizz has so much capacity that it really shouldn't be a problem
So you're saying the options Blizzard had was to either spend more money than they already did to try to get a *possibly* safe LAN system or ensure they prevent LAN abuse by saving money and not spend any resources in coding/testing it?
And you're confused why Blizzard decided to use the free option of not bothering with LAN? (Using your logic of course)
No, I was pointing out two things they could change easily and that would make the community happier. Yet they don't for whatever reason. They won't make any money out of it, probably on the contrary (they will charge for namechanges eventually - maybe it comes together with the map marketplace) so its just about doing the community a favor that doesnt cost them all too much. They decided not to do it which is a decision I dont like, cause the "old Blizzard" would probably have done it. My post was not about LAN mode, but I'll give you my opinion: I fully understand why there is no LAN. From a business perspective it is the logical thing to do, but I'm sure the game would have made profit even with it and all the piracy. I always hate it when they cut stuff because of piracy. Its just not fair. Because other people pirate the game the paying customer gets punished? I don't like that way of thinking. IMO Blizz shouldn't force customers to use their service to ensure they have to buy the game, but provide a service such good that people buy the game and use the service because of it.
I repeat my question.
But this time I'll use smaller words.
Why should blizzard spend extra effort (and money) to counteract something that shouldn't be done anyway?
For example. If rats steal an apple from your fruit bowl each day--does that mean you should buy one extra apple each time you buy groceries since you can't stop that rat anyway? Or should you buy a rat trap? OR you could pick the option where you stop buying fruits and just buy canned goods since rats can't steal canned food. Buying the rat trap requires bait, requires management, lots of time, etc... Just buying food that rats can't still is easy to do and removes the problem more quickly.
Sure, to take it literally they are but a lot of them would never buy your game. They should a must be thought of as potential customers, not people who steal, companies should try to motivate them to buy their games, not fight against them and piss of their fans in the process.
People who intend to steal never intend to buy the product--that is why they steal. This sentence is aggravating to hear because it means absolutely nothing. .
Yea, but when you steal you're taking something away from someone. With pirating you are just copying it, which is why the argument "i wouldnt have bought it anyways" is a good one, but one which you cant apply to stealing.
So many games today you can just pirate, but they still make tons and tons of money, pirating doesnt mean that you wont sell any games. And actually i think often times pirating helps to sell games by sort of spreading the word. And sc2 not having LAN probably means that a lot of people wont buy it as well.
Sure, to take it literally they are but a lot of them would never buy your game. They should a must be thought of as potential customers, not people who steal, companies should try to motivate them to buy their games, not fight against them and piss of their fans in the process.
People who intend to steal never intend to buy the product--that is why they steal. This sentence is aggravating to hear because it means absolutely nothing.
If I said that people who are hungry would like to eat, it would not be understood as an argument for stealing from a grocery store.
I'm not saying Blizzard shouldn't have LAN. Whether or not LAN is present doesn't stop the arguments in support of piracy from being stupid.
At no point is taking someone's product and not compensating it a good thing. It's an insult to the industry, and an insult to the market itself. It isn't like you're renting the game. Pay say small price for a month's worth of service, pay full price for full service. You're stealing someone's property.
Yes, his property. His product. To you it is just data that you copied, to the company it's another person out there in the world pushing the mindset that games should be free.
The logic for piracy is at best selfish and at worse malicious. It sounds too much like politicians promising bridges that they never have to build unless absolutely forced to.
My mistake, I didnt mean to make it sound like I support it or think its not stealing.
I meant it from marketing point of view (Sure, to take it literally they are but a lot of them would never buy your game.) I meant this for single player games, I have many friends who pirate games and will never buy most of them unless they can clearly gain something from it (like multiplayer)
Once again, Im not saying piracy is right, or should be accepted, I mean it in the way they shouldnt try to fight against someone who doesnt actually hurt them (as in the will never buy it, so his money isnt a loss) example - Assassins creed 2's awful DRM system which only limits paying customers.
The loss comes from the culture that easy piracy brings.
It's not that SC2 will lose sales right now, it's the threat that if piracy becomes easier and more widespread that SC4 or SC5 or whatever product they make in the future gets hurt. The harder it is to pirate, the less people will pirate. The less people pirate the smaller the chance that piracy will hurt sales.
Those friends of yours only pirate because they know that they can do it. Piracy to them is this thing they can do easily. The goal of anti-piracy campaigns is to minimize the population of these people. You don't do that by asking pirates to stop pirating, you do that by physically and intentionally changing your product to counteract common piracy techniques.
Sure, to take it literally they are but a lot of them would never buy your game. They should a must be thought of as potential customers, not people who steal, companies should try to motivate them to buy their games, not fight against them and piss of their fans in the process.
This is just silly. It's because of pirates that we have sequels every year and it's because of pirates that I have to log in to Battle.net every time I start SC2. Stop pretending that piracy is something small and harmless. Downloading games IS stealing, no idea on which planet you live in. People work hard day and night to give you great games and by downloading the game for free you are not acknowledging their efforts. There is no free meal as they say and the same is with games. Today you get if for free and few months/years down the line you see companies less willing to invest money into expensive games and projects. No other company besides Blizzard, is willing to spend this crazy amount of money for a game to promote E-sports. If SC2 is not successful, I doubt we will see e-sports rising anytime soon. If you cannot afford a game, save some money and wait for it to become cheaper. I have been buying my games, although they cost A LOT in Bulgaria. SC2 is like 1/9th of your monthly salary. If I can't afford a game this month I might get it the next on. People had to work shitty jobs just to pay for their music/movies in the past, the same should be for games.
That's not true.
Because of developers who think they can pretend piracy we have to log in in Bnet, just because of developers who think it's LAN what causes piracy we have no LAN.
No LAN and LAN do nothing in favor or against piracy at all. All piraters will pirate and crack their games, every DRM was cracked what was yet released. There is nothing what prevents piracy.
The problem with DRM and constant online is that it hurts the players who actually bought the game. Because they want a full game and they get it only with 2 extra spy programs they don't want, or only if they are online (ever thought that some players who buy buy it because they don't want to have Internet on that special PC?) Piraters don't care. They don't care about LAN (see WoW private servers), they don't care about DRM, the real piraters just don't care.
I actually thought about cracking my already buyed copy of Dead Space 2, which i enjoyed and i don't regret buying it, but i don't wanna install the stupid "only 5 Installs and being online"-tool.
What publishers don't understand is that while piracy isn't good, there politic about "preventing" piracy is also really flawed and does nothing good.
Look at the entire marketing strategy for Battlefield, its all about how they care and its working like magic.
It is? Maybe among "the community" it works, but we'll see next year, when the CoD game outsells Battlefield. Maybe not on PC, but certainly overall.
Most Indie games feature single player only or multi player that can be cracked without a problem but still they get amazing sales with no marketing (not all of them ofcourse).
Bullshit. Most indie games do not get "amazing sales." And many that do only do so because they sell cheaply. When was the last time you saw an indie game go for $50?
these are all companies I can put faces behind that care and I buy most of their games due to it (and the support ofc.)
This says something about you as a person, that you can only care about "certain people" even though others are also people who worked hard on their games too. Devaluing other people, seeing them as sub-human and not worthy of participating in modern capitalism, is wrong and despicable.
Again, if you're going to be a pirate, I prefer the "it's all about ME!" kind of piracy, where you just take everything equally. This picking-and-choosing is what allows you the pretense of nobility. You support the "good" ones and steal from the "bad" ones. It's a way of salving your ego. You feel a bit like Robin Hood, hurting the "bad" people by playing their games without paying for them, while helping the "good" people.
It's a despicable attitude, the pretense of nobility hiding the withered, blackened heart of decadence and corruption.
Pirates are not stealing from companies
So, what exactly do you call it when someone works hard to create some entertainment, that you then play and enjoy without just and fair remuneration? The fact that you did not take a physical, tangible product does not mean that you aren't enjoying something without having remunerated the people responsible.
On June 23 2011 07:39 n0ise wrote: Goodwill is nice to have but it doesn't pay the bills and any gaming company out there is out there to make money first and make good games second
Even if you believe it or not, the person who said this paragraph in a public interview should be banned from public speaking, fired and completely dissociated with the company. I understand and even (kinda) agree with his point, but wow.
A child can see its the truth. You'd prefer them to spout obvious lies?
I would've wanted him to formulate the post in a way that says "Our main goal is to make quality games, but of course we have to support our financial needs", not "we'd do whatever if we get good money, good games sounds ok". I thought it was obvious and simple as a clear blue sky, I guess not for everyone.
Besides, it's not even completely true. Believe or not, (on an individual level, at least) out there there's people more interested in making a quality product and enjoying their jobs, rather then making a fortune out of it. Uncanny, I know.
Sure, to take it literally they are but a lot of them would never buy your game. They should a must be thought of as potential customers, not people who steal, companies should try to motivate them to buy their games, not fight against them and piss of their fans in the process.
People who intend to steal never intend to buy the product--that is why they steal. This sentence is aggravating to hear because it means absolutely nothing.
If I said that people who are hungry would like to eat, it would not be understood as an argument for stealing from a grocery store.
I'm not saying Blizzard shouldn't have LAN. Whether or not LAN is present doesn't stop the arguments in support of piracy from being stupid.
At no point is taking someone's product and not compensating it a good thing. It's an insult to the industry, and an insult to the market itself. It isn't like you're renting the game. Pay say small price for a month's worth of service, pay full price for full service. You're stealing someone's property.
Yes, his property. His product. To you it is just data that you copied, to the company it's another person out there in the world pushing the mindset that games should be free.
The logic for piracy is at best selfish and at worse malicious. It sounds too much like politicians promising bridges that they never have to build unless absolutely forced to.
My mistake, I didnt mean to make it sound like I support it or think its not stealing.
I meant it from marketing point of view (Sure, to take it literally they are but a lot of them would never buy your game.) I meant this for single player games, I have many friends who pirate games and will never buy most of them unless they can clearly gain something from it (like multiplayer)
Once again, Im not saying piracy is right, or should be accepted, I mean it in the way they shouldnt try to fight against someone who doesnt actually hurt them (as in the will never buy it, so his money isnt a loss) example - Assassins creed 2's awful DRM system which only limits paying customers.
The loss comes from the culture that easy piracy brings.
It's not that SC2 will lose sales right now, it's the threat that if piracy becomes easier and more widespread that SC4 or SC5 or whatever product they make in the future gets hurt. The harder it is to pirate, the less people will pirate. The less people pirate the smaller the chance that piracy will hurt sales.
Those friends of yours only pirate because they know that they can do it. Piracy to them is this thing they can do easily. The goal of anti-piracy campaigns is to minimize the population of these people. You don't do that by asking pirates to stop pirating, you do that by physically and intentionally changing your product to counteract common piracy techniques.
I agree. When they find a way to stop piracy without something as awful as most drm (which doesnt stop anyone i should add) I absolutely think they should include it in everything.
But the thing i was getting at was that cutting LAN support and limiting your customers (aka must be online to play) will improve your sales BUT giving your customers all you can and supporting them will improve your sales by as much. There was a youtube video earlier in this thread with Gabe Newell talking about how piracy isnt a problem for them, i encourage everyone to look at it.
On June 23 2011 07:41 Strayline wrote: The thing I'm wondering about is how long will it be before someone just sets up an alternate battle.net server in China. People set up fake WoW servers and such so it's not like it's impossible to set up pirate servers without LAN support already in the game--LAN just makes it much easier. After this happens will Blizzard then release LAN support to the rest of the community?
The way that B.net is set up right now, it's pretty difficult to create a crack since it would need to emulate quite a bit of the B.net architecture in order for it to work (or so I've heard). The hackers are already making small progress in cracking the multiplayer despite the difficulty, and I assume that adding in a LAN mode would only make their efforts easier.
And it is easier to stop a few versions of a complicated hack. If there was lan the hack would be so easy that it would be impossible to keep the losses low.
Blizzard has also made the chinese version od SC2 a mini transaction type of game, keeping the demand for hacks on a low.
The chat client and other Bnet features are pretty lame at the moment, i admit. You blame everything on greed yet have no real proof. You say this or that is simple yet you know nothing about how the client works or how much work it takes.
I'm a programmer and CS student myself, so i know some things about software development. Name change is already implemented just not free, so i call that one easy. Dnd also can't be too hard you just have to track the status on the serverside (which i presume they do cause it shows you the status of your friends in the client) and then don't pass the messages if the target is on "block" mode. Im well aware that other things are more difficult and that even little changes require extensive testing and deployment can fuck things up. But blizz has so much capacity that it really shouldn't be a problem
So you're saying the options Blizzard had was to either spend more money than they already did to try to get a *possibly* safe LAN system or ensure they prevent LAN abuse by saving money and not spend any resources in coding/testing it?
And you're confused why Blizzard decided to use the free option of not bothering with LAN? (Using your logic of course)
No, I was pointing out two things they could change easily and that would make the community happier. Yet they don't for whatever reason. They won't make any money out of it, probably on the contrary (they will charge for namechanges eventually - maybe it comes together with the map marketplace) so its just about doing the community a favor that doesnt cost them all too much. They decided not to do it which is a decision I dont like, cause the "old Blizzard" would probably have done it. My post was not about LAN mode, but I'll give you my opinion: I fully understand why there is no LAN. From a business perspective it is the logical thing to do, but I'm sure the game would have made profit even with it and all the piracy. I always hate it when they cut stuff because of piracy. Its just not fair. Because other people pirate the game the paying customer gets punished? I don't like that way of thinking. IMO Blizz shouldn't force customers to use their service to ensure they have to buy the game, but provide a service such good that people buy the game and use the service because of it.
I repeat my question.
But this time I'll use smaller words.
Why should blizzard spend extra effort (and money) to counteract something that shouldn't be done anyway?
For example. If rats steal an apple from your fruit bowl each day--does that mean you should buy one extra apple each time you buy groceries since you can't stop that rat anyway? Or should you buy a rat trap? OR you could pick the option where you stop buying fruits and just buy canned goods since rats can't steal canned food. Buying the rat trap requires bait, requires management, lots of time, etc... Just buying food that rats can't still is easy to do and removes the problem more quickly.
Your analogy is not really on spot. Let me extend it a bit: Say you have kids too and you want them to be healthy and happy. Your option is to tell the kids: "Shut up and sit down! The rat is stealing an apple everyday so from now on you will only eat canned food" and the kids will eventually be mad because they only get the canned stuff but love the real fruit. I would say give the rat that 1 apple a day, it doesn't cost you that much that it would ruin you and your kids are a lot happier and healthier that way. And who knows, maybe the rat will prove to be useful some day. The Analogy is still a bit off because pirating doesn't take away something you already own (like say, an apple, but only potential customers and it might generate additional customers too (if not for the pirated game, maybe for the sequel?).
TL;DR: As I said before, to not include LAN is the business thing to do. Including it would in turn please the customers and make them more loyal to your company and products. If it would gain or lose them money I'm not sure about: Piracy can have a lot of effects, negative and positive and I don't know how it would eventually influence SC2 in the long run.
Sure, to take it literally they are but a lot of them would never buy your game. They should a must be thought of as potential customers, not people who steal, companies should try to motivate them to buy their games, not fight against them and piss of their fans in the process.
People who intend to steal never intend to buy the product--that is why they steal. This sentence is aggravating to hear because it means absolutely nothing. .
Yea, but when you steal you're taking something away from someone. With pirating you are just copying it, which is why the argument "i wouldnt have bought it anyways" is a good one, but one which you cant apply to stealing.
So many games today you can just pirate, but they still make tons and tons of money, pirating doesnt mean that you wont sell any games. And actually i think often times pirating helps to sell games by sort of spreading the word. And sc2 not having LAN probably means that a lot of people wont buy it as well.
It *is* stealing.
Stealing is not the act of someone losing something. It is the act of taking something from someone that he did not intend for you to have.
If I raped your sister, and then told you "I didn't kill her, you still get her back" it would not be acceptable at all. If I licked your burger and told you "I just wanted to taste it in case I wanted to buy one" it would not be acceptable at all. If I hotwired your car and drove it around for a few months and gave it back--IT WOULD NOT BE OKAY.
The logic of "I left something behind so it's okay" is bad logic.
The fact of the matter is, when I am pirating Starcraft II, which really is just as easy as any other game, I'm actually get a better version of the game than what the developer offers me because I am able to play on Lan while the amount of people not pirating SC2 because of the requirement(lulz) of being connected to Bnet is barely significant.
Most Indie games feature single player only or multi player that can be cracked without a problem but still they get amazing sales with no marketing (not all of them ofcourse).
Bullshit. Most indie games do not get "amazing sales." And many that do only do so because they sell cheaply. When was the last time you saw an indie game go for $50?
these are all companies I can put faces behind that care and I buy most of their games due to it (and the support ofc.)
This says something about you as a person, that you can only care about "certain people" even though others are also people who worked hard on their games too. Devaluing other people, seeing them as sub-human and not worthy of participating in modern capitalism, is wrong and despicable.
Again, if you're going to be a pirate, I prefer the "it's all about ME!" kind of piracy, where you just take everything equally. This picking-and-choosing is what allows you the pretense of nobility. You support the "good" ones and steal from the "bad" ones. It's a way of salving your ego. You feel a bit like Robin Hood, hurting the "bad" people by playing their games without paying for them, while helping the "good" people.
It's a despicable attitude, the pretense of nobility hiding the withered, blackened heart of decadence and corruption.
So, what exactly do you call it when someone works hard to create some entertainment, that you then play and enjoy without just and fair remuneration? The fact that you did not take a physical, tangible product does not mean that you aren't enjoying something without having remunerated the people responsible.
I wish people would read more carefully .
Battlefield - isnt pc community the one we are all talking about, the one who has easiest time pirating? Indie games - these games dont sell as well as high budget titles but they dont cost as much and most importantly they have almost no marketing. With that in mind their numbers are very impressive. Robin hood attitude - as I have said in a response, I dont think pirating anything is right and it shouldnt be accepted. My entire post was about how companies shouldnt fight against pirates because they cant win, they should encourage people to buy them with support and giving a damn about their games. Pirates are not stealing from companies - Like i said in the first sentence, they ARE stealing from them im not saying they arent. Im saying companies must look at them not as someone to fight against (at this point since there is no way to stop them) but, once again, encourage people by quality service.
this is stupid. It's like saying internet killed the music industry cuz ppl download the songs. It actually gave it a huge ass boost, as bands got more fans some of which turned out to buy the cds, and the bands released other content like shirts or special dvds, collector's editions and put more emphasis on tourneys and concerts which are more popular then ever. (save for hippie festivals maybe)
If werent for hackers, about 1/10th or less people would have played w3 and dota (in the west the figures would have been better, eastern Europe, China, etc would have bought almost none), thus Hon would not have a market to speak of.
Same for fcking Blizzard with SC:BW, wihtout that sc2 would be nothing, and sc:bw wouldnt have spread the way it did w/out easy accessability. I had pirated copies of BW before i became a fan and bought the cd, twice.
The chat client and other Bnet features are pretty lame at the moment, i admit. You blame everything on greed yet have no real proof. You say this or that is simple yet you know nothing about how the client works or how much work it takes.
I'm a programmer and CS student myself, so i know some things about software development. Name change is already implemented just not free, so i call that one easy. Dnd also can't be too hard you just have to track the status on the serverside (which i presume they do cause it shows you the status of your friends in the client) and then don't pass the messages if the target is on "block" mode. Im well aware that other things are more difficult and that even little changes require extensive testing and deployment can fuck things up. But blizz has so much capacity that it really shouldn't be a problem
So you're saying the options Blizzard had was to either spend more money than they already did to try to get a *possibly* safe LAN system or ensure they prevent LAN abuse by saving money and not spend any resources in coding/testing it?
And you're confused why Blizzard decided to use the free option of not bothering with LAN? (Using your logic of course)
No, I was pointing out two things they could change easily and that would make the community happier. Yet they don't for whatever reason. They won't make any money out of it, probably on the contrary (they will charge for namechanges eventually - maybe it comes together with the map marketplace) so its just about doing the community a favor that doesnt cost them all too much. They decided not to do it which is a decision I dont like, cause the "old Blizzard" would probably have done it. My post was not about LAN mode, but I'll give you my opinion: I fully understand why there is no LAN. From a business perspective it is the logical thing to do, but I'm sure the game would have made profit even with it and all the piracy. I always hate it when they cut stuff because of piracy. Its just not fair. Because other people pirate the game the paying customer gets punished? I don't like that way of thinking. IMO Blizz shouldn't force customers to use their service to ensure they have to buy the game, but provide a service such good that people buy the game and use the service because of it.
I repeat my question.
But this time I'll use smaller words.
Why should blizzard spend extra effort (and money) to counteract something that shouldn't be done anyway?
For example. If rats steal an apple from your fruit bowl each day--does that mean you should buy one extra apple each time you buy groceries since you can't stop that rat anyway? Or should you buy a rat trap? OR you could pick the option where you stop buying fruits and just buy canned goods since rats can't steal canned food. Buying the rat trap requires bait, requires management, lots of time, etc... Just buying food that rats can't still is easy to do and removes the problem more quickly.
Your analogy is not really on spot. Let me extend it a bit: Say you have kids too and you want them to be healthy and happy. Your option is to tell the kids: "Shut up and sit down! The rat is stealing an apple everyday so from now on you will only eat canned food" and the kids will eventually be mad because they only get the canned stuff but love the real fruit. I would say give the rat that 1 apple a day, it doesn't cost you that much that it would ruin you and your kids are a lot happier and healthier that way. And who knows, maybe the rat will prove to be useful some day. The Analogy is still a bit off because pirating doesn't take away something you already own (like say, an apple, but only potential customers and it might generate additional customers too (if not for the pirated game, maybe for the sequel?).
TL;DR: As I said before, to not include LAN is the business thing to do. Including it would in turn please the customers and make them more loyal to your company and products. If it would gain or lose them money I'm not sure about: Piracy can have a lot of effects, negative and positive and I don't know how it would eventually influence SC2 in the long run.
Actually, with kid's in the analogy, the only realistic option is to kill the rat and to empty the house as you poison everything inside hoping everything dies as you and your kids wait for the slaughter to finish.
At that point, the rat would wish the parent simply got canned goods instead.
On June 23 2011 19:18 Geo.Rion wrote: this is stupid. It's like saying internet killed the music industry cuz ppl download the songs.
Actually, the music industry loved the internet UNTIL piracy reared its ugly head. The music and film industry LOVE being able to have websites with samples and trailers and all the other wonderful things the internet has. The music industry is specifically complaining about piracy.
In my opinion this whole argument is bullshit cooked up by some financial consultant because it's an easy way to promise the companies better results.
Sure there are some die-hard pirates that won't buy games no matter what but most people are reasonable with that stuff. I've got a bunch of online pals from my WoW time that started working by now (back then they were students as I am and pirated the shit out of new games like I do now...). When they started making money and having more available to spend they started buying more games.
They buy MMOs like Star Trek that they only test for some days or just go through the release lists of the months and preorder the stuff they're interested in.
Honestly: make good games that players will enjoy and you'll make money. If it's not enough you either spend too much making the game or you simply think you should get more than you will ever get...
and LAN doesn't even have anything to do with that at all... sure a few people play with tools like hamachi (at least that's what we used about 5 years ago), but it's not like a LAN modus "enables" you to pirate and play online... Who the hell pirates a game to play it in LAN modus over the internet? Are LAN parties such a big thing anywhere that you gotta "guard" your multiplayer by giving the games no LAN? Is Hamachi such a big hazard with millions of users playing pirated games there?
Honestly: What bullshit! Those guys are only damaging themselves by not adding LAN to "Esport" games
The chat client and other Bnet features are pretty lame at the moment, i admit. You blame everything on greed yet have no real proof. You say this or that is simple yet you know nothing about how the client works or how much work it takes.
I'm a programmer and CS student myself, so i know some things about software development. Name change is already implemented just not free, so i call that one easy. Dnd also can't be too hard you just have to track the status on the serverside (which i presume they do cause it shows you the status of your friends in the client) and then don't pass the messages if the target is on "block" mode. Im well aware that other things are more difficult and that even little changes require extensive testing and deployment can fuck things up. But blizz has so much capacity that it really shouldn't be a problem
So you're saying the options Blizzard had was to either spend more money than they already did to try to get a *possibly* safe LAN system or ensure they prevent LAN abuse by saving money and not spend any resources in coding/testing it?
And you're confused why Blizzard decided to use the free option of not bothering with LAN? (Using your logic of course)
No, I was pointing out two things they could change easily and that would make the community happier. Yet they don't for whatever reason. They won't make any money out of it, probably on the contrary (they will charge for namechanges eventually - maybe it comes together with the map marketplace) so its just about doing the community a favor that doesnt cost them all too much. They decided not to do it which is a decision I dont like, cause the "old Blizzard" would probably have done it. My post was not about LAN mode, but I'll give you my opinion: I fully understand why there is no LAN. From a business perspective it is the logical thing to do, but I'm sure the game would have made profit even with it and all the piracy. I always hate it when they cut stuff because of piracy. Its just not fair. Because other people pirate the game the paying customer gets punished? I don't like that way of thinking. IMO Blizz shouldn't force customers to use their service to ensure they have to buy the game, but provide a service such good that people buy the game and use the service because of it.
I repeat my question.
But this time I'll use smaller words.
Why should blizzard spend extra effort (and money) to counteract something that shouldn't be done anyway?
For example. If rats steal an apple from your fruit bowl each day--does that mean you should buy one extra apple each time you buy groceries since you can't stop that rat anyway? Or should you buy a rat trap? OR you could pick the option where you stop buying fruits and just buy canned goods since rats can't steal canned food. Buying the rat trap requires bait, requires management, lots of time, etc... Just buying food that rats can't still is easy to do and removes the problem more quickly.
Your analogy is not really on spot. Let me extend it a bit: Say you have kids too and you want them to be healthy and happy. Your option is to tell the kids: "Shut up and sit down! The rat is stealing an apple everyday so from now on you will only eat canned food" and the kids will eventually be mad because they only get the canned stuff but love the real fruit. I would say give the rat that 1 apple a day, it doesn't cost you that much that it would ruin you and your kids are a lot happier and healthier that way. And who knows, maybe the rat will prove to be useful some day. The Analogy is still a bit off because pirating doesn't take away something you already own (like say, an apple, but only potential customers and it might generate additional customers too (if not for the pirated game, maybe for the sequel?).
TL;DR: As I said before, to not include LAN is the business thing to do. Including it would in turn please the customers and make them more loyal to your company and products. If it would gain or lose them money I'm not sure about: Piracy can have a lot of effects, negative and positive and I don't know how it would eventually influence SC2 in the long run.
Actually, with kid's in the analogy, the only realistic option is to kill the rat and to empty the house as you poison everything inside hoping everything dies as you and your kids wait for the slaughter to finish.
At that point, the rat would wish the parent simply got canned goods instead.
I wanna see that internet pirate poison! I think you got what I meant, so there is no point in further arguing about the accuracy of the analogy. Ya know, I just wanna have LAN
On June 23 2011 19:18 Geo.Rion wrote: this is stupid. It's like saying internet killed the music industry cuz ppl download the songs.
Actually, the music industry loved the internet UNTIL piracy reared its ugly head. The music and film industry LOVE being able to have websites with samples and trailers and all the other wonderful things the internet has. The music industry is specifically complaining about piracy.
Music industry also hated radioes and fought against them, untill they realized they were actually extremely helpfull.
On June 23 2011 19:23 xlep wrote: In my opinion this whole argument is bullshit cooked up by some financial consultant because it's an easy way to promise the companies better results.
Sure there are some die-hard pirates that won't buy games no matter what but most people are reasonable with that stuff. I've got a bunch of online pals from my WoW time that started working by now (back then they were students as I am and pirated the shit out of new games like I do now...). When they started making money and having more available to spend they started buying more games.
They buy MMOs like Star Trek that they only test for some days or just go through the release lists of the months and preorder the stuff they're interested in.
Honestly: make good games that players will enjoy and you'll make money. If it's not enough you either spend too much making the game or you simply think you should get more than you will ever get...
and LAN doesn't even have anything to do with that at all... sure a few people play with tools like hamachi (at least that's what we used about 5 years ago), but it's not like a LAN modus "enables" you to pirate and play online... Who the hell pirates a game to play it in LAN modus over the internet? Are LAN parties such a big thing anywhere that you gotta "guard" your multiplayer by giving the games no LAN? Is Hamachi such a big hazard with millions of users playing pirated games there?
Honestly: What bullshit! Those guys are only damaging themselves by not adding LAN to "Esport" games
Their decision to remove LAN might or might not be a good decision. It might or might not hurt their business to do so. It's reasonable to be upset that there is no LAN.
What is not unreasonable is to believe that it's a bad idea for a company to not want their game to be pirated.
Imagine a world where piracy is legal. Perfectly Legal.
Blizzard releases SC2. Valve decides to grab it, copy the files to CDs and since they didn't need to spend any money on research and development they can sell the game at 2-3 dollars a CD. Blizzard goes bankrupt and never releases a game again. Valve does this for every single one of its competitors. Valve is now the only company that sells games. They then release games that have the most antipiracy protection that the world has ever known going so far as needing your DNA to turn on the programs you buy in order to protect its market share.
Just because the pirate feels that it is harmless does not mean that it is.
The chat client and other Bnet features are pretty lame at the moment, i admit. You blame everything on greed yet have no real proof. You say this or that is simple yet you know nothing about how the client works or how much work it takes.
I'm a programmer and CS student myself, so i know some things about software development. Name change is already implemented just not free, so i call that one easy. Dnd also can't be too hard you just have to track the status on the serverside (which i presume they do cause it shows you the status of your friends in the client) and then don't pass the messages if the target is on "block" mode. Im well aware that other things are more difficult and that even little changes require extensive testing and deployment can fuck things up. But blizz has so much capacity that it really shouldn't be a problem
So you're saying the options Blizzard had was to either spend more money than they already did to try to get a *possibly* safe LAN system or ensure they prevent LAN abuse by saving money and not spend any resources in coding/testing it?
And you're confused why Blizzard decided to use the free option of not bothering with LAN? (Using your logic of course)
No, I was pointing out two things they could change easily and that would make the community happier. Yet they don't for whatever reason. They won't make any money out of it, probably on the contrary (they will charge for namechanges eventually - maybe it comes together with the map marketplace) so its just about doing the community a favor that doesnt cost them all too much. They decided not to do it which is a decision I dont like, cause the "old Blizzard" would probably have done it. My post was not about LAN mode, but I'll give you my opinion: I fully understand why there is no LAN. From a business perspective it is the logical thing to do, but I'm sure the game would have made profit even with it and all the piracy. I always hate it when they cut stuff because of piracy. Its just not fair. Because other people pirate the game the paying customer gets punished? I don't like that way of thinking. IMO Blizz shouldn't force customers to use their service to ensure they have to buy the game, but provide a service such good that people buy the game and use the service because of it.
I repeat my question.
But this time I'll use smaller words.
Why should blizzard spend extra effort (and money) to counteract something that shouldn't be done anyway?
For example. If rats steal an apple from your fruit bowl each day--does that mean you should buy one extra apple each time you buy groceries since you can't stop that rat anyway? Or should you buy a rat trap? OR you could pick the option where you stop buying fruits and just buy canned goods since rats can't steal canned food. Buying the rat trap requires bait, requires management, lots of time, etc... Just buying food that rats can't still is easy to do and removes the problem more quickly.
Your analogy is not really on spot. Let me extend it a bit: Say you have kids too and you want them to be healthy and happy. Your option is to tell the kids: "Shut up and sit down! The rat is stealing an apple everyday so from now on you will only eat canned food" and the kids will eventually be mad because they only get the canned stuff but love the real fruit. I would say give the rat that 1 apple a day, it doesn't cost you that much that it would ruin you and your kids are a lot happier and healthier that way. And who knows, maybe the rat will prove to be useful some day. The Analogy is still a bit off because pirating doesn't take away something you already own (like say, an apple, but only potential customers and it might generate additional customers too (if not for the pirated game, maybe for the sequel?).
TL;DR: As I said before, to not include LAN is the business thing to do. Including it would in turn please the customers and make them more loyal to your company and products. If it would gain or lose them money I'm not sure about: Piracy can have a lot of effects, negative and positive and I don't know how it would eventually influence SC2 in the long run.
Actually, with kid's in the analogy, the only realistic option is to kill the rat and to empty the house as you poison everything inside hoping everything dies as you and your kids wait for the slaughter to finish.
At that point, the rat would wish the parent simply got canned goods instead.
I wanna see that internet pirate poison! I think you got what I meant, so there is no point in further arguing about the accuracy of the analogy. Ya know, I just wanna have LAN
I agree. When they find a way to stop piracy without something as awful as most drm (which doesnt stop anyone i should add) I absolutely think they should include it in everything.
But the thing i was getting at was that cutting LAN support and limiting your customers (aka must be online to play) will improve your sales BUT giving your customers all you can and supporting them will improve your sales by as much. There was a youtube video earlier in this thread with Gabe Newell talking about how piracy isnt a problem for them, i encourage everyone to look at it.
That video is old, I'm sure Gabe Newell acknowledge that pirates is a big problem for pc, as portal 2 was a complete failure on the pc sales compared to consoles.
On June 23 2011 18:58 NicolBolas wrote: It's a despicable attitude, the pretense of nobility hiding the withered, blackened heart of decadence and corruption.
Are we still talking about a guy who occasionally downloads games?
On June 23 2011 19:18 Geo.Rion wrote: this is stupid. It's like saying internet killed the music industry cuz ppl download the songs.
Actually, the music industry loved the internet UNTIL piracy reared its ugly head. The music and film industry LOVE being able to have websites with samples and trailers and all the other wonderful things the internet has. The music industry is specifically complaining about piracy.
Music industry also hated radioes and fought against them, untill they realized they were actually extremely helpfull.
Not to mention the lawsuits against VCRs and tape recorders. The companys that survives is always the ones that changes with the times and changes their way of work.
The music industry is making money, more than ever, but not on CD sales. New business models and major sales in live events and merchandise is bigger than the losses of fewer CD sales. The future business model in gaming is min transactions and online control, something that doesn't include lan.
On June 23 2011 19:18 Geo.Rion wrote: this is stupid. It's like saying internet killed the music industry cuz ppl download the songs.
Actually, the music industry loved the internet UNTIL piracy reared its ugly head. The music and film industry LOVE being able to have websites with samples and trailers and all the other wonderful things the internet has. The music industry is specifically complaining about piracy.
Music industry also hated radioes and fought against them, untill they realized they were actually extremely helpfull.
...........
Um.....
The Music Industry have always liked Radio.
It was a way for them to tour without having to pay for a bus/plan/car.
Good Games will sell well, FACT! Bad games won't sell well and pointing at piracy won't make the game better. Delevop better Games and stop trying to search for excuses!
On June 23 2011 19:18 Geo.Rion wrote: this is stupid. It's like saying internet killed the music industry cuz ppl download the songs.
Actually, the music industry loved the internet UNTIL piracy reared its ugly head. The music and film industry LOVE being able to have websites with samples and trailers and all the other wonderful things the internet has. The music industry is specifically complaining about piracy.
Music industry also hated radioes and fought against them, untill they realized they were actually extremely helpfull.
...........
Um.....
The Music Industry have always liked Radio.
It was a way for them to tour without having to pay for a bus/plan/car.
I don't think you know what you're talking about.
They did not. I dont know much on this issue but ask an expert and they will tell you the same, I got this information from an interview with Howard Bloom, a guy who has been a big part of the industry and launched careers of some big big names. (I cant link you to this interview sadly, its a set of interview and together theyre like 10hours + and the music industry part is just a small segment of them)
On June 23 2011 18:57 gnutz wrote: No LAN and LAN do nothing in favor or against piracy at all. All piraters will pirate and crack their games, every DRM was cracked what was yet released. There is nothing what prevents piracy.
Couldn't be more wrong. Now if you want to play against other players you HAVE to buy the game. Pirated versions allow u to play against AI and single player I guess. If they implement LAN you will be able to play against other players on pirated version as well, because EVERY security system can be and will be cracked. It's just a matter of time and effort put. So yea, it will decrease the number of copies bought in favour of pirated copies.
As much as I'd like to have LAN I really think that it might be better to not put it instead of putting it in so it can be pirated easily. On the other hand with such a larger programming force in Blizzard they should be able to come up with a solution.
On June 23 2011 19:18 Geo.Rion wrote: this is stupid. It's like saying internet killed the music industry cuz ppl download the songs.
Actually, the music industry loved the internet UNTIL piracy reared its ugly head. The music and film industry LOVE being able to have websites with samples and trailers and all the other wonderful things the internet has. The music industry is specifically complaining about piracy.
Music industry also hated radioes and fought against them, untill they realized they were actually extremely helpfull.
...........
Um.....
The Music Industry have always liked Radio.
It was a way for them to tour without having to pay for a bus/plan/car.
I don't think you know what you're talking about.
They did not. I dont know much on this issue but ask an expert and they will tell you the same, I got this information from an interview with Howard Bloom, a guy who has been a big part of the industry and launched careers of some big big names. (I cant link you to this interview sadly, its a set of interview and together theyre like 10hours + and the music industry part is just a small segment of them)
Early AM radio was news, sports and music. FM radio did not come about until later and was mostly instrumental music. Some time after that was when the more "popular" form of music started to take shape.
But the music and radio had been together long before FM came into power.
On June 23 2011 19:41 Jedi Master wrote: Good Games will sell well, FACT! Bad games won't sell well and pointing at piracy won't make the game better. Delevop better Games and stop trying to search for excuses!
The only thing LAN provides that Battlenet doesn't is the ability to play games against other humans when you don't have an internet connection.
Everything else AND MORE is provided by Battlenet 2.0
If you're having a problem with lag--get better internet. It's not Blizzard's responsibility you have crappy hardware.
On June 23 2011 07:10 mdma-_- wrote: that still doesnt explain why they cant allow people to play each other in lan with the necessecity of being logged into bnet/whatever online client.
cheap excuse just to blame it on pirates tbh
Hackers could fairly easily remove all safeguards like a log-in requirement.
yes but the cracks that are coded would be invalid the next patch. And what does that have to do with a lan?
On June 23 2011 19:18 Geo.Rion wrote: this is stupid. It's like saying internet killed the music industry cuz ppl download the songs.
Actually, the music industry loved the internet UNTIL piracy reared its ugly head. The music and film industry LOVE being able to have websites with samples and trailers and all the other wonderful things the internet has. The music industry is specifically complaining about piracy.
Music industry also hated radioes and fought against them, untill they realized they were actually extremely helpfull.
...........
Um.....
The Music Industry have always liked Radio.
It was a way for them to tour without having to pay for a bus/plan/car.
I don't think you know what you're talking about.
No No, not even in the US
[...] A publisher could not, once he had sold sheet music prevent, or more to the point profit from, his song being performed or played; there was no legal recourse. Publishers realised that the developments in the film and radio industries would be difficult to tap as potential revenue sources. To remedy this situation the American Society of Composers, Authors and
Publishers (ASCAP) was formed for the purpose of issuing licences and collecting royalties. Although formed in 1914, ASCAP did not begin issuing royalty cheques to its members until 1921. American radio broadcasters resisted pressure to make royalty payments for the records they played. Radio it was claimed, had bought the records and so, according to American law, had a legal right to play them. Besides which, playing records on the radio was tantamount to free advertising. A battle of monumental proportions followed. ASCAP was determined to collect its royalties on radio play - which was fast becoming the major distribution media for music since its coming of age as a major commercial venture in 1921. And the broadcasters were equally determined not to pay. The broadcasters claimed that ASCAP was acting as a monopoly (which it was) and after having ASCAP outlawed in several states, eventually in 1939, the broadcasters formed Broadcast Music Incorporated (BMI) as a rival to ASCAP. Many of the musicians and composers who had been excluded from ASCAP (Appalachian musicians, country fiddlers, blues singers, and New Orleans jazz men) joined the BMI and began to get increasing exposure and payments for the air-play of their recordings. However, further disruption occurred in the US industry when the American Federation of Musicians called a strike in 1942 that lasted over a year. To put these problems into perspective, the US music market had the around same value in 1945 as it had in 1920, despite the significant technological improvements. Concurrent with the problems of profiting from the new media of radio, the music industry also saw another key development in the 1930’s and 1940’s. This was the development of the ‘Star System’. Jack Kapp and Ted Lewis
incorporated Decca Records in 1934. Instead of investing in machinery for the manufacture of records, Kapp focused his attention on a limited roster of heavily promoted ‘stars’. First among these were Bing Crosby and the Dorsey Brothers. As well as organising promotion for these artists, Kapp also concentrated on supplying the growing network of jukeboxes with Decca records, and perhaps most importantly, halved the retail price of a record. Jukeboxes had been popular in the South for a long time before they caught on in the north. One of the reasons for this was that they acted as an outlet for the music that didn’t get played on the radio (in particular black music).
On June 23 2011 19:41 Jedi Master wrote: Good Games will sell well, FACT! Bad games won't sell well and pointing at piracy won't make the game better. Delevop better Games and stop trying to search for excuses!
You're totally not getting the point. This thread is about why RTS games won't have LAN mode, and not about sales figures. (Also, bad games won't sell? What world do you live in?)
On June 23 2011 19:23 xlep wrote: In my opinion this whole argument is bullshit cooked up by some financial consultant because it's an easy way to promise the companies better results.
Sure there are some die-hard pirates that won't buy games no matter what but most people are reasonable with that stuff. I've got a bunch of online pals from my WoW time that started working by now (back then they were students as I am and pirated the shit out of new games like I do now...). When they started making money and having more available to spend they started buying more games.
They buy MMOs like Star Trek that they only test for some days or just go through the release lists of the months and preorder the stuff they're interested in.
Honestly: make good games that players will enjoy and you'll make money. If it's not enough you either spend too much making the game or you simply think you should get more than you will ever get...
and LAN doesn't even have anything to do with that at all... sure a few people play with tools like hamachi (at least that's what we used about 5 years ago), but it's not like a LAN modus "enables" you to pirate and play online... Who the hell pirates a game to play it in LAN modus over the internet? Are LAN parties such a big thing anywhere that you gotta "guard" your multiplayer by giving the games no LAN? Is Hamachi such a big hazard with millions of users playing pirated games there?
Honestly: What bullshit! Those guys are only damaging themselves by not adding LAN to "Esport" games
Their decision to remove LAN might or might not be a good decision. It might or might not hurt their business to do so. It's reasonable to be upset that there is no LAN.
What is not unreasonable is to believe that it's a bad idea for a company to not want their game to be pirated.
Imagine a world where piracy is legal. Perfectly Legal.
Blizzard releases SC2. Valve decides to grab it, copy the files to CDs and since they didn't need to spend any money on research and development they can sell the game at 2-3 dollars a CD. Blizzard goes bankrupt and never releases a game again. Valve does this for every single one of its competitors. Valve is now the only company that sells games. They then release games that have the most antipiracy protection that the world has ever known going so far as needing your DNA to turn on the programs you buy in order to protect its market share.
Just because the pirate feels that it is harmless does not mean that it is.
You sir, have the brain of deranged parrot. You do not understand the meaning of pirating. Learn Intellectual Property Law.
Pirating is not the act of selling a product, but merely making illegal copy's of a product.
Selling of an illegally copied product is a whole other story.
One thing I think is funny is this: Hypothetically I could copy a billion copy's of every software on the face of the planet to a billion other earth like planets. Where they also "pirated" to a billion more. AND YET, it would have not fucking effect on us, because it's just a fucking copy and it's not like the programmers are fucking curling over dying every time someone makes an illegal copy.
The only people who are suffering are the sad sorts who invested their lives into make a shitty product that no one buys. So the have a cry over it all, they cry in their warm beds. Why? Warm bed? Cause their fucking programmers with Computers COMPUTERS FUCKING COST MONEY. PROGRAMMING TAKES A LIFE STYLE OF MONEY TO LEARN. BIG FUCKING WHOOP IF ALREADY WELL OFF PEOPLE GET LESS MONEY. DESIGN A BETTER PRODUCT. GIVE BETTER SERVICES.
On June 23 2011 19:23 xlep wrote: In my opinion this whole argument is bullshit cooked up by some financial consultant because it's an easy way to promise the companies better results.
Sure there are some die-hard pirates that won't buy games no matter what but most people are reasonable with that stuff. I've got a bunch of online pals from my WoW time that started working by now (back then they were students as I am and pirated the shit out of new games like I do now...). When they started making money and having more available to spend they started buying more games.
They buy MMOs like Star Trek that they only test for some days or just go through the release lists of the months and preorder the stuff they're interested in.
Honestly: make good games that players will enjoy and you'll make money. If it's not enough you either spend too much making the game or you simply think you should get more than you will ever get...
and LAN doesn't even have anything to do with that at all... sure a few people play with tools like hamachi (at least that's what we used about 5 years ago), but it's not like a LAN modus "enables" you to pirate and play online... Who the hell pirates a game to play it in LAN modus over the internet? Are LAN parties such a big thing anywhere that you gotta "guard" your multiplayer by giving the games no LAN? Is Hamachi such a big hazard with millions of users playing pirated games there?
Honestly: What bullshit! Those guys are only damaging themselves by not adding LAN to "Esport" games
Their decision to remove LAN might or might not be a good decision. It might or might not hurt their business to do so. It's reasonable to be upset that there is no LAN.
What is not unreasonable is to believe that it's a bad idea for a company to not want their game to be pirated.
Imagine a world where piracy is legal. Perfectly Legal.
Blizzard releases SC2. Valve decides to grab it, copy the files to CDs and since they didn't need to spend any money on research and development they can sell the game at 2-3 dollars a CD. Blizzard goes bankrupt and never releases a game again. Valve does this for every single one of its competitors. Valve is now the only company that sells games. They then release games that have the most antipiracy protection that the world has ever known going so far as needing your DNA to turn on the programs you buy in order to protect its market share.
Just because the pirate feels that it is harmless does not mean that it is.
You sir, have the brain of deranged parrot. You do not understand the meaning of pirating. Learn Intellectual Property Law.
Pirating is not the act of selling a product, but merely making illegal copy's of a product.
Selling of an illegally copied product is a whole other story.
One thing I think is funny is this: Hypothetically I could copy a billion copy's of every software on the face of the planet to a billion other earth like planets. Where they also "pirated" to a billion more. AND YET, it would have not fucking effect on us, because it's just a fucking copy and it's not like the programmers are fucking curling over dying every time someone makes an illegal copy.
The only people who are suffering are the sad sorts who invested their lives into make a shitty product that no one buys. So the have a cry over it all, they cry in their warm beds. Why? Warm bed? Cause their fucking programmers with Computers COMPUTERS FUCKING COST MONEY. PROGRAMMING TAKES A LIFE STYLE OF MONEY TO LEARN. BIG FUCKING WHOOP IF ALREADY WELL OFF PEOPLE GET LESS MONEY. DESIGN A BETTER PRODUCT. GIVE BETTER SERVICES.
pfft
This post makes my head hurt. "fucking this, fucking that" and caps galore.
LAN is great. It allows players to play each other at 0ms (or near 0ms if you wanna get picky about it) without having to rely on their internet connection. The problem with the lack of LAN is that if you invite 16 of your friends over to have a party in your basement, everyone would be uploading to and downloading from some server that's kilometers away just to play with people in the same room.
I believe Starcraft 2 desperately needs LAN, especially for big tournaments in America (because American internet blows). The problem is that we don't live in a perfect world where pirates don't exist, so Blizzard has to make compromises. They have shareholders to please, anyway.
Any relevant discussion on the topic of piracy is precluded by our lack of hard data. We simply do not know enough to draw definite conclusions. At the moment we have generalizations, biased statements coming from the developers (i.e. the victims), and therefore untrustworthy, and the occasional outright lie.
Until enough data is gathered, and the complex nuances of using digital products understood, we will be knocking our heads against a wall of our own making.
Everyone knows by now that piracy boosts the longterm sales - of music, of books, of games, of everything. Everyone but incompetent CEOs trying to increase their end-of-the-year bonuses.
On June 23 2011 20:08 xtfftc wrote: Everyone knows by know that piracy boosts the longterm sales - of music, of books, of games, of everything. Everyone but incompetent CEOs trying to increase their end-of-the-year bonuses.
All Bobby Kotick wants to do is make as much profit as possible in a short term, sell his properties, and then buy a few hundred small islands for himself.
Well this may seem strange to admit, but i pirated sc2. After playing it at a mates I was hooked, but alas for the next two weeks I had big bills due. So I downloaded a pirate copy while I saved. I bought it the second I could. My point is only that SC2 is already hacked. Adding a LAN feature to me limits piracy by the simple fact it is a local network. Piracy is limited, to the physical constraints of having enough players on a LAN. Perhaps a 1v1 only LAN mode ? Surely there is a compromise here.
On June 23 2011 20:08 xtfftc wrote: Everyone knows by now that piracy boosts the longterm sales - of music, of books, of games, of everything. Everyone but incompetent CEOs trying to increase their end-of-the-year bonuses.
Who do you think you are? You have in no way or form studied long term affects of piracy on the market.
Indie studios are suffering greatly due to piracy, not to mention the fact that: blizzard ain't **** wading in money, nor so is many of the studios, rather its the publisher like EA who are doing it.
If you look at blizzard stock it hasn't really razed trough the roof.
What sort of ignorant statement is that? Proclaiming yourself a market strategist. I am fully baffled over many of the statements in this thread.
Its the same with the music market, sure the publishers and record companies are still wading in money but the artists are not.
On June 23 2011 19:23 xlep wrote: In my opinion this whole argument is bullshit cooked up by some financial consultant because it's an easy way to promise the companies better results.
Sure there are some die-hard pirates that won't buy games no matter what but most people are reasonable with that stuff. I've got a bunch of online pals from my WoW time that started working by now (back then they were students as I am and pirated the shit out of new games like I do now...). When they started making money and having more available to spend they started buying more games.
They buy MMOs like Star Trek that they only test for some days or just go through the release lists of the months and preorder the stuff they're interested in.
Honestly: make good games that players will enjoy and you'll make money. If it's not enough you either spend too much making the game or you simply think you should get more than you will ever get...
and LAN doesn't even have anything to do with that at all... sure a few people play with tools like hamachi (at least that's what we used about 5 years ago), but it's not like a LAN modus "enables" you to pirate and play online... Who the hell pirates a game to play it in LAN modus over the internet? Are LAN parties such a big thing anywhere that you gotta "guard" your multiplayer by giving the games no LAN? Is Hamachi such a big hazard with millions of users playing pirated games there?
Honestly: What bullshit! Those guys are only damaging themselves by not adding LAN to "Esport" games
Their decision to remove LAN might or might not be a good decision. It might or might not hurt their business to do so. It's reasonable to be upset that there is no LAN.
What is not unreasonable is to believe that it's a bad idea for a company to not want their game to be pirated.
Imagine a world where piracy is legal. Perfectly Legal.
Blizzard releases SC2. Valve decides to grab it, copy the files to CDs and since they didn't need to spend any money on research and development they can sell the game at 2-3 dollars a CD. Blizzard goes bankrupt and never releases a game again. Valve does this for every single one of its competitors. Valve is now the only company that sells games. They then release games that have the most antipiracy protection that the world has ever known going so far as needing your DNA to turn on the programs you buy in order to protect its market share.
Just because the pirate feels that it is harmless does not mean that it is.
You sir, have the brain of deranged parrot. You do not understand the meaning of pirating. Learn Intellectual Property Law.
Pirating is not the act of selling a product, but merely making illegal copy's of a product.
Selling of an illegally copied product is a whole other story.
One thing I think is funny is this: Hypothetically I could copy a billion copy's of every software on the face of the planet to a billion other earth like planets. Where they also "pirated" to a billion more. AND YET, it would have not fucking effect on us, because it's just a fucking copy and it's not like the programmers are fucking curling over dying every time someone makes an illegal copy.
The only people who are suffering are the sad sorts who invested their lives into make a shitty product that no one buys. So the have a cry over it all, they cry in their warm beds. Why? Warm bed? Cause their fucking programmers with Computers COMPUTERS FUCKING COST MONEY. PROGRAMMING TAKES A LIFE STYLE OF MONEY TO LEARN. BIG FUCKING WHOOP IF ALREADY WELL OFF PEOPLE GET LESS MONEY. DESIGN A BETTER PRODUCT. GIVE BETTER SERVICES.
pfft
Ah, you see, in my hypothetical there is no such thing as piracy. Copying a game is just copying a game and you can do whatever you want to do with that game. because it's your right to own that copy of the game.
So you give it away for free. The person you give it to then gives you a donation of $2-$3 because he likes you. You find 2-3 million people to donate to. Those people also choose to donate $2-$3 to you. It's your copy of the game, not like it hurts anyone. And it's the people's money to give away. Not like they hurt anyone.
And being that these were just money shared between friends, they don't pay any sales tax. Why would they? It's just 2-3 million people and a company being friends.
So sure, Blizzard goes bankrupt, roads don't get maintained and teachers are fired due to less taxes. But why hamper your right to share a copy of your game for free right?
How about this scenario. It's real life. Piracy is illegal but people do it anyway.
Blizzard makes SC2.
Apple decides to pirate 6million copies of the game and gives it away for free. Even advertises that it will give away free CDs.
Everyone grabs the free CD's supported by Apple. Blizzard goes bankrupt. Steve chuckles in the background.
At least in this scenario--roads and teachers don't get anal raped.
On June 23 2011 20:16 hypnobean wrote: Nothing in this article explains why they should not prioritize a LAN version for big, Blizzard sponsored tournaments like GSL, MLG, etc.
Because if you have a Lan version, even if it only is for big tournaments, a lot of people will get their hands on it, and that means it will get leaked somehow. Which means that crackers will get their hands on it, too. And this means it will get released over the internet.
I still don't see why they wouldn't allow login verification and then LAN. I don't personally miss LAN at all but fail to see how they can't have the already mentioned solution.
On June 23 2011 20:08 xtfftc wrote: Everyone knows by now that piracy boosts the longterm sales - of music, of books, of games, of everything. Everyone but incompetent CEOs trying to increase their end-of-the-year bonuses.
That's as ridiculous as saying one pirated game is one lost sale. Say what you will about Bobby Kotick, as much as I dislike his ways he's anything but an incompetent CEO. Activision was nowhere near the force they are today ten years ago.
On June 23 2011 20:22 papaz wrote: I still don't see why they wouldn't allow login verification and then LAN. I don't personally miss LAN at all but fail to see how they can't have the already mentioned solution.
Once LAN is in the game the login requirement can be cracked out.
On June 23 2011 18:58 NicolBolas wrote: It's a despicable attitude, the pretense of nobility hiding the withered, blackened heart of decadence and corruption.
Are we still talking about a guy who occasionally downloads games?
Yes. When you believe that you have a right to something you didn't pay for, that's corruption. When you believe that it's OK to do something that hurts other people, that's not being nice.
Yes, it may not be as bad as physically attacking people. But the thought process of both is foundationally the same: "I'm more important than you, the wants, needs, and rights of others have no meaning to me, and I don't give a damn about the rules."
On June 23 2011 20:13 biskyree wrote: Adding a LAN feature to me limits piracy by the simple fact it is a local network. Piracy is limited, to the physical constraints of having enough players on a LAN. Perhaps a 1v1 only LAN mode ? Surely there is a compromise here.
It is not hard at all to turn LAN into internet play. All you need to do is convince the LAN-enabled SC2 that it's talking to another machine over LAN, but you instead forward those packets over the internet. Once you have LAN, it cannot help but become internet play.
On June 23 2011 20:42 MulletMurdoc wrote: Seems like an excuse to cut costs to me, while still raking in every last penny they can suck out of the general consumer.
The cost of implementing LAN would be trivial, so no. It's about piracy and always has been.
On June 23 2011 20:42 MulletMurdoc wrote: Seems like an excuse to cut costs to me, while still raking in every last penny they can suck out of the general consumer.
Yeah implementing LAN in a modern game sure is expensive... It's not like this thread is full of valid speculations/arguments on why LAN was removed, all better than yours.
It's a bullshit reason and they all know it. It's just pointless speculating, since there have been no actual studies that i know of that proves this hypothesis.
What baffles me is that so many companies sees pirated downloads as lost sales, when in reality, 90% of those that download a pirated game never would have bought the game in any case. So I downloaded Heroes of might and magic V. Would I have bought it if I couldn't pirate it? NO.
On June 23 2011 20:47 labbe wrote: It's a bullshit reason and they all know it. It's just pointless speculating, since there have been no actual studies that i know of that proves this hypothesis.
What baffles me is that so many companies sees pirated downloads as lost sales, when in reality, 90% of those that download a pirated game never would have bought the game in any case. So I downloaded Heroes of might and magic V. Would I have bought it if I couldn't pirate it? NO.
So they take flak from gamers just to spite them with no LAN?
I'm pretty sure it's a decision made after alot of planning and thought.
90% you say? Did you just make that up or you got any kind of statistics to show for it?
On June 23 2011 07:14 ThePurist wrote: Microsoft operating systems and office software are two of the biggest pirated softwares and they still make money. This guy tries to act like a realist but he doesn't really have a clue about economics. The opinions are too pessimistic and overgeneralizes the vast majority of people who purchase games with their hard-earned cash. Pirates don't stop revenue streams pirates were not a consumer in the first place. The assumption that a pirated copy was a sale is flawed imo and his last few personal statements are questionable as I perceive them as a cop-out when his whole opinion was about "simple economics".
Yes every industry that has piracy tends to overestimate their losses simply by looking at how much/often their software/movie/song/book etc gets pirated.
Simple economics rationale means that a large part of those that download a game for example doesn't value it at the purchasing price of say 30$ but rather somewhere between 0-29$.
In other words those people wouldn't buy the game at 30$ since it's above their reservation price but will download it at 0$.
However the question is how many people that value the game at 30$ or higher still pirate it since that's actually a loss for the company.
Question is how large that group of pirates is for any given game.
In the end though I'm personally pretty sure piracy hurts the companies, just not as much as they say it does.
On June 23 2011 20:47 labbe wrote: It's a bullshit reason and they all know it. It's just pointless speculating, since there have been no actual studies that i know of that proves this hypothesis.
But how much would you be able to trust those studies anyway? I mean, with net-transparancy you'd have to get a large group of people to admit that they're pirating. I doubt anyone would cooperate unless it were anonymous, and even if it's anonymous a large percentage wouldn't probably be totally honest.
On June 23 2011 20:47 labbe wrote: It's a bullshit reason and they all know it. It's just pointless speculating, since there have been no actual studies that i know of that proves this hypothesis.
What baffles me is that so many companies sees pirated downloads as lost sales, when in reality, 90% of those that download a pirated game never would have bought the game in any case. So I downloaded Heroes of might and magic V. Would I have bought it if I couldn't pirate it? NO.
So they take flak from gamers just to spite them with no LAN?
I'm pretty sure it's a decision made after alot of planning and thought.
90% you say? Did you just make that up or you got any kind of statistics to show for it?
Nope, I pulled that number out of my ass. What I do know is that, I have never seen any research that actually have proved a correlation between downloads and lost sales.
It's all just speculation to me, and that's why it bothers me that they just choose to not implementing LAN "just to be safe".
Just to be clear, I don't think that Blizzard just should ignore piracy, but I'm positive that they could have implemented LAN into battle.net in someway without increasing the risk of piracy if they really had tried. So to me it's just an excuse.
On June 23 2011 20:08 xtfftc wrote: Everyone knows by now that piracy boosts the longterm sales - of music, of books, of games, of everything. Everyone but incompetent CEOs trying to increase their end-of-the-year bonuses.
I'd disagree. From a business standpoint facilitating piracy really offers no benefit; it's equivalent to making a product and giving it away for free. On top of that the scope of piracy is pretty huge, and Starcraft isn't something that benefits much from other merchandise (except for the occasional blizzard strategy book very few people buy). If it does, I highly doubt it's enough to compensate for losing millions of potential purchases.
What I don't nderstand though, is why blizzard refuses to implement LAN and make it available only for tourney organizes. Almost every major tourney (including Blizzcon ironically) has had lag issues.
The trick to managing piracy is making it hard enough that 90% or so of the consumers can't do it. The last 10% (in private encrypted anonymous dark networks and their friends) doesn't matter.
But I have to admit I know more than 1 person who has bought a game just because warez version didn't allow multiplayer gaming.
On other hand, the same persons have just abondoned whole games (and game series) because they didn't have money to buy it.
On June 23 2011 20:42 MulletMurdoc wrote: Seems like an excuse to cut costs to me, while still raking in every last penny they can suck out of the general consumer.
The cost of implementing LAN would be trivial, so no. It's about piracy and always has been.
On June 23 2011 20:42 MulletMurdoc wrote: Seems like an excuse to cut costs to me, while still raking in every last penny they can suck out of the general consumer.
Yeah implementing LAN in a modern game sure is expensive... It's not like this thread is full of valid speculations/arguments on why LAN was removed, all better than yours.
Sarcasim... another very mature response. Well played sir
On June 23 2011 20:42 MulletMurdoc wrote: Seems like an excuse to cut costs to me, while still raking in every last penny they can suck out of the general consumer.
Yeah implementing LAN in a modern game sure is expensive... It's not like this thread is full of valid speculations/arguments on why LAN was removed, all better than yours.
Sarcasim... another very mature response. Well played sir
He's right, you are clueless on the subject if you believe they cut LAN because of the development cost. If they wanted to "rake in every last penny they can suck out of the general consumer" and nothing else we'd have cosmetic DLC by now.
On June 23 2011 20:42 MulletMurdoc wrote: Seems like an excuse to cut costs to me, while still raking in every last penny they can suck out of the general consumer.
Yeah implementing LAN in a modern game sure is expensive... It's not like this thread is full of valid speculations/arguments on why LAN was removed, all better than yours.
Sarcasim... another very mature response. Well played sir
Sarcasm in response to a totally pointless post with no facts or even arguments to back it up. "I think blizzard are greedy money suckers" - thats the only thing your post says and it wasn't just me that responded in kind.
I think SC2 even had LAN implemented at one point but it was removed... Maybe that's a pointer towards it not being about cutting dev costs for one of the easiest multiplayer functions out there.
What I don't nderstand though, is why blizzard refuses to implement LAN and make it available only for tourney organizes. Almost every major tourney (including Blizzcon ironically) has had lag issues.
i actually wrote a paragraph on this in my post on page 7 but found it redundant and edited out.
it's very simple. once you enable lan in the game, it will get cracked, yes, you can make versions for tournament organizers, but they'll always leak out and you'll always have to recode the game to disable the lan feature you allowed for a tourney after it's done.
and then hackers are going to use your code and make an alternative lan version that may not be the same as the original in form but will be the same in content, aka the multiplayer. and SC isn't a game like WOW that you can pirate and you can ignore the million private servers because your content is significantly different than the pirates', once a method to lan gets leaked, the whole game transfers over to the competent hackers and millions of pirates.
only way you can handle it thus far has been the blizz way or the f2p model which is retarded as fuck imo. i could think of some other possibilities to make lan happen going out of your way to please the fans, but i don't see any being cost effective for any company save possibly blizzard and a few others.
ps: i'm amazed at the things people spew out of their mouths on this issue. no lan seems like a no-brainer for the current state of affairs in the gaming world, and all these arguments that "companies killed lan, not the pirates !!" or "where does it stop with the greed, piracy isn't that big a deal" sound really (dowright willingly) ignorant to me.
companies need to downprice their games that's for sure, but stop vilifying the people that create most of your entertainment wanting to protect their work and earn their monetary compensation for it just because you for one "would have bought" this or that game instead of pirating it.
This matter has been a speculation and been disscussed quite a few time on TL. In 2009 I post a thread about this matter and there are some good information as well as discussion there. http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=96603
Sure, to take it literally they are but a lot of them would never buy your game. They should a must be thought of as potential customers, not people who steal, companies should try to motivate them to buy their games, not fight against them and piss of their fans in the process.
People who intend to steal never intend to buy the product--that is why they steal. This sentence is aggravating to hear because it means absolutely nothing. .
Yea, but when you steal you're taking something away from someone. With pirating you are just copying it, which is why the argument "i wouldnt have bought it anyways" is a good one, but one which you cant apply to stealing.
So many games today you can just pirate, but they still make tons and tons of money, pirating doesnt mean that you wont sell any games. And actually i think often times pirating helps to sell games by sort of spreading the word. And sc2 not having LAN probably means that a lot of people wont buy it as well.
It *is* stealing.
Stealing is not the act of someone losing something. It is the act of taking something from someone that he did not intend for you to have.
If I raped your sister, and then told you "I didn't kill her, you still get her back" it would not be acceptable at all. If I licked your burger and told you "I just wanted to taste it in case I wanted to buy one" it would not be acceptable at all. If I hotwired your car and drove it around for a few months and gave it back--IT WOULD NOT BE OKAY.
The logic of "I left something behind so it's okay" is bad logic.
Those analogies are terrible. It's more like "I took a picture of your sister and masturbated to her." She wasn't harmed in the process, but it's still not pleasant.
The OP really makes me punch someone or at least something.
Oh, the bad pirates!
The software companies, with their infinite lobbying power, have established an unprecedented legal state, where software is not goods. It is the only market when the buyer is in a position far superior to the seller. We are all used to the "EULAs" - yet if you were to stick anything like that on anything else (say, a fridge), it would be outright illegal. Only in software business has the seller the right to limit the cumstomer's rights. Only there he can stop you from reselling the product and you somehow magically are not entitled to ask for money back if it does not work.
And last but not least, look at all the "anti-piracy measures", that do not harm the pirates in any way, but often piss the hell out of legal users.It is actually better donwload pirated copies of the software we payed for, when possible for that reason!
So if they want to point fingers, they rather find themselves a mirror!
Sure, to take it literally they are but a lot of them would never buy your game. They should a must be thought of as potential customers, not people who steal, companies should try to motivate them to buy their games, not fight against them and piss of their fans in the process.
People who intend to steal never intend to buy the product--that is why they steal. This sentence is aggravating to hear because it means absolutely nothing. .
Yea, but when you steal you're taking something away from someone. With pirating you are just copying it, which is why the argument "i wouldnt have bought it anyways" is a good one, but one which you cant apply to stealing.
So many games today you can just pirate, but they still make tons and tons of money, pirating doesnt mean that you wont sell any games. And actually i think often times pirating helps to sell games by sort of spreading the word. And sc2 not having LAN probably means that a lot of people wont buy it as well.
It *is* stealing.
Stealing is not the act of someone losing something. It is the act of taking something from someone that he did not intend for you to have.
If I raped your sister, and then told you "I didn't kill her, you still get her back" it would not be acceptable at all. If I licked your burger and told you "I just wanted to taste it in case I wanted to buy one" it would not be acceptable at all. If I hotwired your car and drove it around for a few months and gave it back--IT WOULD NOT BE OKAY.
The logic of "I left something behind so it's okay" is bad logic.
Those analogies are terrible. It's more like "I took a picture of your sister and masturbated to her." She wasn't harmed in the process, but it's still not pleasant.
Better analogy - Walk into EBGames or w/e take game off shelf, it's ok because I would never pay for it.
On June 23 2011 20:08 xtfftc wrote: Everyone knows by now that piracy boosts the longterm sales - of music, of books, of games, of everything. Everyone but incompetent CEOs trying to increase their end-of-the-year bonuses.
No. Kids on the internet who want to play games for free know that. General hint: If you think you know something super important, and all the important people haven't thought of it because they are stupid, you're most likely wrong.
Sure, to take it literally they are but a lot of them would never buy your game. They should a must be thought of as potential customers, not people who steal, companies should try to motivate them to buy their games, not fight against them and piss of their fans in the process.
People who intend to steal never intend to buy the product--that is why they steal. This sentence is aggravating to hear because it means absolutely nothing. .
Yea, but when you steal you're taking something away from someone. With pirating you are just copying it, which is why the argument "i wouldnt have bought it anyways" is a good one, but one which you cant apply to stealing.
So many games today you can just pirate, but they still make tons and tons of money, pirating doesnt mean that you wont sell any games. And actually i think often times pirating helps to sell games by sort of spreading the word. And sc2 not having LAN probably means that a lot of people wont buy it as well.
It *is* stealing.
Stealing is not the act of someone losing something. It is the act of taking something from someone that he did not intend for you to have.
If I raped your sister, and then told you "I didn't kill her, you still get her back" it would not be acceptable at all. If I licked your burger and told you "I just wanted to taste it in case I wanted to buy one" it would not be acceptable at all. If I hotwired your car and drove it around for a few months and gave it back--IT WOULD NOT BE OKAY.
The logic of "I left something behind so it's okay" is bad logic.
Those analogies are terrible. It's more like "I took a picture of your sister and masturbated to her." She wasn't harmed in the process, but it's still not pleasant.
Better analogy - Walk into EBGames or w/e take game off shelf, it's ok because I would never pay for it.
That's a physical copy of something that's taken time and resources to produce. An actual analogy would be like walking into a book store, opening a book and copying it out word for word. Chances are you'll get kicked out, but the owner would never for a second think of phoning the police to say you were stealing the book, because copying things just isn't theft.
Sure, to take it literally they are but a lot of them would never buy your game. They should a must be thought of as potential customers, not people who steal, companies should try to motivate them to buy their games, not fight against them and piss of their fans in the process.
People who intend to steal never intend to buy the product--that is why they steal. This sentence is aggravating to hear because it means absolutely nothing. .
Yea, but when you steal you're taking something away from someone. With pirating you are just copying it, which is why the argument "i wouldnt have bought it anyways" is a good one, but one which you cant apply to stealing.
So many games today you can just pirate, but they still make tons and tons of money, pirating doesnt mean that you wont sell any games. And actually i think often times pirating helps to sell games by sort of spreading the word. And sc2 not having LAN probably means that a lot of people wont buy it as well.
It *is* stealing.
Stealing is not the act of someone losing something. It is the act of taking something from someone that he did not intend for you to have.
If I raped your sister, and then told you "I didn't kill her, you still get her back" it would not be acceptable at all. If I licked your burger and told you "I just wanted to taste it in case I wanted to buy one" it would not be acceptable at all. If I hotwired your car and drove it around for a few months and gave it back--IT WOULD NOT BE OKAY.
The logic of "I left something behind so it's okay" is bad logic.
Those analogies are terrible. It's more like "I took a picture of your sister and masturbated to her." She wasn't harmed in the process, but it's still not pleasant.
Better analogy - Walk into EBGames or w/e take game off shelf, it's ok because I would never pay for it.
Pirating something doesn't remove the original dipshit, that's why pirating doesn't equal stealing.
Stealing = taking the original, now it's gone and the profit for the item is removed(e.g you lose it)
Pirating = Taking a copy of the original, the item is still there but you may have lost a potential customer, but you can sell the original to someone else.
Saying that pirates wouldn't have bought the game is partially a stupid argument, they wouldn't stop being gamers just because they can't get games for free. This would make them buy SOME games, not all off the games they downloaded.
On June 23 2011 12:22 4of8 wrote: The question should be more like this : "If there is no LAN-Modus, is any pirate interested in this fact?" And the answer is NO! Why? - Because the big majority of the people, who are getting a cracked copy of a game are only interested in the single player modus. I mean take WoW, this is a game what should be only played online. Still there are a lot of private servers for cracked versions of this game. Take Half-Life2 a couple of days after it was released a "friend" of mine was offering a cracked version of it to me, which didn't need any online bla... On the other hand if SC1 didn't have a spawn version, you can be sure I wouldn't have bought this game. The biggest problem in the modern game industry is , they underestimate the capabilities of the pirates on the one hand and at the other side we have bunch of people in the management, which don't have any clue, what the customers (fans) really want.
If you are a fan of game you will in 95% of the cases buy it. If you just need a lil bit entertainment for a weekend, who would really pay 40-50$ unless you have to much money?
By saying pirates are killing the LAN, you are only searching for an easy excuse. Sure with an already included LAN system, you take a lot of work from the pirates, but if you believe without LAN you could prevent them for cracking your game, you are just stupid.
There is one tip that I have to give you there. Do not take your own experience as the common things experienced by everyone.
Even been to China? Brazil? People stopped playing on the legit Battle.Net because there is literally -nobody- there. Everyone are on Garena or other servers playing their pirated copy of game. Stats like " [...] 95% of the cases [...]" is total BS. Do not standardize your view on a subject.
Currently, the single player is sc2 IS free. NO need to hack or anything. just log into your account once on your friend's computer. Tell him to disable internet and play offline. Voila, 100% of the singleplayer is free.
Now, without the LAN capability, the only way of pirating the game is to make an emulation of the bnet server. I am pretty sure there is one already out, but I really doubt its functionality.
isnt ICCup for BW illegal then? my friends lost their BW cd keys and technically couldnt play online.. so we just logged on ICCup and there.. free online for us
Technically it is illegal. It is like saying that you lost a toy so you stole another... free toy!
I read this, and after having an aneurysm, I thought about why people have no concept of the difference between digitally copying something and physically stealing something.
I still have no idea. Thankfully I have health insurance to cover future brain damage.
Well you better use that insurance now to fix your brain and then re-read what I wrote and the quote included. Then you might notice something!
It makes me sad that people WANT to pirate the best things in the world. When it comes to fast food, gas, energy that hurts the enviroment, taxes, and other things that are "bs" people stand down and buy it all. But charging money for video games and movies!?! Thats where pirates draw the line THAT should be free?!!!
I gladly pay for video games/sc2 tournys and movies knowing I am supporting people doing what they love, their passion. Everytime anyone pays for something they are basically voting. They are saying I like this product I want it to continue being made.
I don't get how people don't see how buying a game directly supports the people who made it.
Put yourself in the shoes of someone who is living their dream and making games / movies. For all the things in this world that are over priced and a rip off I think games and movies are the cheapest pleasures anyone can buy.
I think a lot of pirates are high school and college aged kids, I know some who when I tell to watch a movie or play a game they ask how much I paid, laugh, and then say "maybe I'll download it". They do this cause they have no money but want the content. I hope that once they get a job they start to pay for movies and games to support the people making them. I do feel for people that can't afford all the games they want. It's not entirly black and white but pirating is deffinatly wrong compared with all the other bullshit people put up with and don't do anything about it.
On June 23 2011 21:02 TheSubtleArt wrote: I'd disagree. From a business standpoint facilitating piracy really offers no benefit; it's equivalent to making a product and giving it away for free. On top of that the scope of piracy is pretty huge, and Starcraft isn't something that benefits much from other merchandise (except for the occasional blizzard strategy book very few people buy). If it does, I highly doubt it's enough to compensate for losing millions of potential purchases.
What I don't nderstand though, is why blizzard refuses to implement LAN and make it available only for tourney organizes. Almost every major tourney (including Blizzcon ironically) has had lag issues.
Even offering that they would either need:
1) An entirely seperate binary for LAN versus Retail that requires they keep two builds in sync and modify two codebases unless the LAN support was a DLL plug-in. At any rate, it's more overhead. 2) Have the LAN capability coded into the Retail release and require some form of hardware dongle to unlock it.
Both of these scenanrios will not deter piracy, instead it will open the floodgates since option 1 would be leaked, and option 2 would be relatively easy to circumvent when you have the binary and need only figure out what it is looking for on the hardware dongle. At the end of the day there is no good answer to this and there won't be as long as softwaere development APIs/Frameworks remain the same (ie. easy to inject code into a binary's memory space, easy to read a binary's memory space and manipulate it in real-time, etc) the only real option is to require authentication against a central server (such as BNet) which negates the reason behind having LAN support in the first place.
Everytime anyone pays for something they are basically voting. They are saying I like this product I want it to continue being made.
and like exactly like elections, you rarely get what you voted for.
nearly half the games i own (console and pc) are extremely shitty, yet were hyped in magazines, forums or had a really good 1st part. so they already collected my money, regardless i enjoyed their product or not. There is no way to honor a good game, because the sames system honors bad games too.
I am less concerned with films. I go to the cinema and if i like the film i buy it on DvD. If i didnt see it in the cinema i can still ask a friend. Not much damage done to my moneybag.
I download lots of stuff that i don't pay. I just don't undestand why i should buy a game 50-60€ with 15 hours content, or 20-30€ for a movie i'll see just once, so i download it. However, i didn't mind at all to pay 50€ for sc2 because of multiplayer and especially ladder.
I understand Blizzard with not implementing LAN, but on the other hand a lot of people want to play on Blizzard's ladder and not on some shitty ladder with no one to play on your level. (Same as WoW private servers)
Piracy mainly concerns games which doesn't justify their value.
1. ANY sort of LAN implementation is going to be cracked. There is no method to safely introduce it into the game and crackers wont find it. 2. In poor countries like Romania, Bulgaria where a salary is around 300/400euros no one is paying 50 euros for a game. Except few others like me, that can afford it with a bit of sacrifice. I rarely see people here to buy games. Usually they are buying it for multiplayer. And this is the ONLY reason someone is buying that. Even internet coffee's use pirated software here. And they use only the ones that have multiplayer in them. Talking why Blizz didnt introduce it is pointless. Because any of u had a software/gaming company u will do anything to prevent piracy. It's like working and not getting paid. Also this non lan thing has it's advantages also. Look at wc3 and eurobnet. I think it has more users than bnet ever had. So. why would u buy a game if it is for free?
On June 23 2011 07:27 branflakes14 wrote: That's a poor excuse for no LAN, especially when games like League of Legends and Quake Live ARE available for free. And remember Brood War? How did that game even sell a single copy when it had LAN!?
I literally downloaded a pirate copy of BW from ICCUP because I was too lazy to find where I put the disc. That's how easy it is to do. You can make a server that tricks a game client into thinking it's a LAN. Remember, ICCUP is technically an illegal pirate server, so it's not like there isn't precedent.
What if Blizz made LAN, and then ICCUP or somebody made a pirate server with a private ladder using GSL Maps? You think that wouldn't be really popular?
I wish there was LAN, but a business is a business. S2 can't afford to lose any sales. They can't handle it financially. Blizzard may be able to, but why would they want to? They would be extremely generous in doing so. Yea, it would be nice, but I don't expect it. It's really too bad there's not some other way atm.
Sure, to take it literally they are but a lot of them would never buy your game. They should a must be thought of as potential customers, not people who steal, companies should try to motivate them to buy their games, not fight against them and piss of their fans in the process.
People who intend to steal never intend to buy the product--that is why they steal. This sentence is aggravating to hear because it means absolutely nothing. .
Yea, but when you steal you're taking something away from someone. With pirating you are just copying it, which is why the argument "i wouldnt have bought it anyways" is a good one, but one which you cant apply to stealing.
So many games today you can just pirate, but they still make tons and tons of money, pirating doesnt mean that you wont sell any games. And actually i think often times pirating helps to sell games by sort of spreading the word. And sc2 not having LAN probably means that a lot of people wont buy it as well.
It *is* stealing.
Stealing is not the act of someone losing something. It is the act of taking something from someone that he did not intend for you to have.
If I raped your sister, and then told you "I didn't kill her, you still get her back" it would not be acceptable at all. If I licked your burger and told you "I just wanted to taste it in case I wanted to buy one" it would not be acceptable at all. If I hotwired your car and drove it around for a few months and gave it back--IT WOULD NOT BE OKAY.
The logic of "I left something behind so it's okay" is bad logic.
Those analogies are terrible. It's more like "I took a picture of your sister and masturbated to her." She wasn't harmed in the process, but it's still not pleasant.
Actually no. My analogy is still more accurate.
The reason is because in your analogy is more akin to getting a demo of a game. It's more akin to being given a poster or reading an article of a game where you need to use your imagination in order to get the full experience.
Piracy is when you take the game, rip it, use it to your liking for as long as you want, then toss it back where you found it feeling good about yourself because you didn't have to take her out on a date to fuck her--even bragging to yourself that you saved $60 to get a damn good or damn bad fucking. When asked why you raped her, you reply "I wouldn't have gone out with her anyway."
Fast Food companies copyright the flavors of their food so that if someone starts giving away burgers and fries that tastes like theirs, they can legally sue them for it. Do people complain about that? No. Why? Because unlike Gaming Companies, people respect the rights of fast food places MUCH MUCH more than they respect the artists and programers that try to make good game products.
All I know, is that I live in Japan right now... So does my Friend. I come from Europe, He comes from Canada.. I can't play SC2 against him, either online or offline, despite living close enough I could probably hit his front door with a book from my balcony. LAN would solve that problem, so would Region free online. Blizzard aren't providing either, and it can't be to keep the online experience good for people, because I get better connection from here to Europe than I do from the UK to Europe. So that excuse is total bollocks too.
On June 23 2011 23:42 Gingerninja wrote: All I know, is that I live in Japan right now... So does my Friend. I come from Europe, He comes from Canada.. I can't play SC2 against him, either online or offline, despite living close enough I could probably hit his front door with a book from my balcony. LAN would solve that problem, so would Region free online. Blizzard aren't providing either, and it can't be to keep the online experience good for people, because I get better connection from here to Europe than I do from the UK to Europe. So that excuse is total bollocks too.
Is Blizzard's choice to not have LAN a good idea? Maybe, maybe not. That's subjective.
Is Blizzard crazy for worrying about piracy? No they're not.
I wish they were harsher on pirates through punishment (financial punishment) instead of making their game more secure. But that's me personally, I'm not Blizzard. I'm not the one shelling out the money to make a game. I'm just the consumer.
On June 23 2011 23:38 lorkac wrote: Fast Food companies copyright the flavors of their food so that if someone starts giving away burgers and fries that tastes like theirs, they can legally sue them for it. Do people complain about that? No. Why? Because unlike Gaming Companies, people respect the rights of fast food places MUCH MUCH more than they respect the artists and programers that try to make good game products.
It has little to do with respect, if a business steals another business's food recipe simply because of the legal process of created a business they have made a big target out of themselves while also risking whatever profits they got from the recipe. Compare that to the pirating gamer who is a much smaller target (my friend did it, I left my wifi open, etc.) who at the same time likely has little money which means even if they do press charges there will be little returned to them to even compensate for the legal fees. In the same way if I copy McDonald's food in the privacy of my own home they aren't going to give a shit about it, it's only when if I made a business out of it and started making a profit that they would take notice.
On June 23 2011 23:42 Gingerninja wrote: All I know, is that I live in Japan right now... So does my Friend. I come from Europe, He comes from Canada.. I can't play SC2 against him, either online or offline, despite living close enough I could probably hit his front door with a book from my balcony. LAN would solve that problem, so would Region free online. Blizzard aren't providing either, and it can't be to keep the online experience good for people, because I get better connection from here to Europe than I do from the UK to Europe. So that excuse is total bollocks too.
Is Blizzard's choice to not have LAN a good idea? Maybe, maybe not. That's subjective.
Is Blizzard crazy for worrying about piracy? No they're not.
I wish they were harsher on pirates through punishment (financial punishment) instead of making their game more secure. But that's me personally, I'm not Blizzard. I'm not the one shelling out the money to make a game. I'm just the consumer.
I'm just a consumer, and my enjoyment of the product is being totally stopped dead in it's tracks by blizzards stance on that issue, in what is an industry standard feature not being present. Sure they have every right to worry about piracy, but as a legit customer (for every blizzard game I own.. every steam game, every console game.. I don't even use an R4 card or w/e the hell it's called on the DS all my games are legit. ) I reserve the right to be annoyed when a feature is denied to me because someone else is stealing. Not my problem, I paid you my money, yet I can't play the "Multiplayer" with a friend, who lives next to me. No amount of sales talk can sidestep that fact. Me (a legit customer) and my friend (another legit customer) cannot play the "Multiplayer" option together. Either Online or Offline.
This is total BS looking at it from Blizzards perspective. I would agree with the notion if it was some small indie company trying to make some money and a name for themselves. But if it is the monster of acti-blizzard it absolute bs they are a huuuuuuge company and yes while LAN will make then take a small financial hit it shouldn't matter THAT much blizzard essentially has free money from all of us for a very long time, they don't even have to produce the best quality at this point cause theyre brand name is so engrained into everyone. Good companies take these small hits all the time to keep customers happy and keep future business.
If i was blizzard i would rather have someone playing my game for free if it keeps them from playing some other companies game. LAN is a very big deal and a huge factor into why many PC games lasted for so long and are still being played today.
On June 23 2011 23:42 Gingerninja wrote: All I know, is that I live in Japan right now... So does my Friend. I come from Europe, He comes from Canada.. I can't play SC2 against him, either online or offline, despite living close enough I could probably hit his front door with a book from my balcony. LAN would solve that problem, so would Region free online. Blizzard aren't providing either, and it can't be to keep the online experience good for people, because I get better connection from here to Europe than I do from the UK to Europe. So that excuse is total bollocks too.
Is Blizzard's choice to not have LAN a good idea? Maybe, maybe not. That's subjective.
Is Blizzard crazy for worrying about piracy? No they're not.
I wish they were harsher on pirates through punishment (financial punishment) instead of making their game more secure. But that's me personally, I'm not Blizzard. I'm not the one shelling out the money to make a game. I'm just the consumer.
I'm just a consumer, and my enjoyment of the product is being totally stopped dead in it's tracks by blizzards stance on that issue, in what is an industry standard feature not being present. Sure they have every right to worry about piracy, but as a legit customer (for every blizzard game I own.. every steam game, every console game.. I don't even use an R4 card or w/e the hell it's called on the DS all my games are legit. ) I reserve the right to be annoyed when a feature is denied to me because someone else is stealing. Not my problem, I paid you my money, yet I can't play the "Multiplayer" with a friend, who lives next to me. No amount of sales talk can sidestep that fact. Me (a legit customer) and my friend (another legit customer) cannot play the "Multiplayer" option together. Either Online or Offline.
In the same way, not their problem that you are dissatisfied. Especially when you still purchased the product knowing there wouldn't be LAN, that is only more incentive for them to stick to their guns. If people really want LAN the best thing they can do is not purchase Heart of the Swarm and Legacy of the Void and hope enough people do it for Blizzard to start caring, based on the so called Modern Warfare 2 boycotts this isn't likely to happen. Gamers cave easily.
I hate this kind of attitude, where they are hurting paying costumers because they have a silly fear of no one buying their product. If everyone downloads your product, that means it was so bad that they weren't willing to pay money for it.
If that's the case, you have a lot bigger problem on your hands, your game/movie/music/whathaveyou isn't good(and it's unlikely it'd have gotten good reviews, so people wouldn't have bought it anyway).
A company should only fear piracy if they are producing bad products.
Sure, to take it literally they are but a lot of them would never buy your game. They should a must be thought of as potential customers, not people who steal, companies should try to motivate them to buy their games, not fight against them and piss of their fans in the process.
People who intend to steal never intend to buy the product--that is why they steal. This sentence is aggravating to hear because it means absolutely nothing. .
Yea, but when you steal you're taking something away from someone. With pirating you are just copying it, which is why the argument "i wouldnt have bought it anyways" is a good one, but one which you cant apply to stealing.
So many games today you can just pirate, but they still make tons and tons of money, pirating doesnt mean that you wont sell any games. And actually i think often times pirating helps to sell games by sort of spreading the word. And sc2 not having LAN probably means that a lot of people wont buy it as well.
It *is* stealing.
Stealing is not the act of someone losing something. It is the act of taking something from someone that he did not intend for you to have.
If I raped your sister, and then told you "I didn't kill her, you still get her back" it would not be acceptable at all. If I licked your burger and told you "I just wanted to taste it in case I wanted to buy one" it would not be acceptable at all. If I hotwired your car and drove it around for a few months and gave it back--IT WOULD NOT BE OKAY.
The logic of "I left something behind so it's okay" is bad logic.
Those analogies are terrible. It's more like "I took a picture of your sister and masturbated to her." She wasn't harmed in the process, but it's still not pleasant.
Actually no. My analogy is still more accurate.
The reason is because in your analogy is more akin to getting a demo of a game. It's more akin to being given a poster or reading an article of a game where you need to use your imagination in order to get the full experience.
Piracy is when you take the game, rip it, use it to your liking for as long as you want, then toss it back where you found it feeling good about yourself because you didn't have to take her out on a date to fuck her--even bragging to yourself that you saved $60 to get a damn good or damn bad fucking. When asked why you raped her, you reply "I wouldn't have gone out with her anyway."
That's a stupid analogy, since in yours you are actually hurting the girl. You can't really use analogy with living things, since no matter what you do, you'd be doing damage(which you don't do with a computer game, movie etc). Hence his analogy with the picture is a lot better.
It doesn't matter how much money Blizzard has overall. Starcraft 2 has to be profitable by itself for them to continue developing it while being responsible to their investors. "Blizzard has enough money" is a foolish argument. They aren't going to start developing out of charity because they make a ton of money off of WoW.
A company should only fear piracy if they are producing bad products.
So let me get this straight, if you make a quality product less people will pirate it? Its the other way around
Look at various torrent sites ( i know you know them) and see what the most popular games and movies are pirated, it is usually high profile games that cost millions to make.
The most popular game to get a N64 emulator for are OoT and Mario 64, how many people do you think tried to snag a Superman 64 rom? Only the few demented people who wanted to see just how horrible it is.
I agree that it is sad we cant have LAN, but the reasoning makes perfect sense.
Player tries to save money by pirating--says its his right to do so. Company tries to save money by adding features to hinder pirating--is then called heartless and soulless.
The truth: Both the consumer and the producer are trying to save money. The consumer is pissed off that the producer is acting exactly like the consumer.
A company should only fear piracy if they are producing bad products.
So let me get this straight, if you make a quality product less people will pirate it? Its the other way around
Look at various torrent sites ( i know you know them) and see what the most popular games and movies are pirated, it is usually high profile games that cost millions to make.
The most popular game to get a N64 emulator for are OoT and Mario 64, how many people do you think tried to snag a Superman 64 rom? Only the few demented people who wanted to see just how horrible it is.
I agree that it is sad we cant have LAN, but the reasoning makes perfect sense.
My point is, if the product is good enough, people will buy it.
A lot of people might download it, don't get me wrong, but if they were ever going to buy the game, they would likely do so even if they downloaded it. If they would never have bought the game no matter, then you've just reached out to one more customer, which *might* buy it, but in the least(assuming the product is good) have a positive attitude towards the game/company when talking about it.
So yes, a good product might be downloaded more, but that's not really something to fear, while a bad one has a good reason to fear it.
On June 23 2011 23:42 Gingerninja wrote: All I know, is that I live in Japan right now... So does my Friend. I come from Europe, He comes from Canada.. I can't play SC2 against him, either online or offline, despite living close enough I could probably hit his front door with a book from my balcony. LAN would solve that problem, so would Region free online. Blizzard aren't providing either, and it can't be to keep the online experience good for people, because I get better connection from here to Europe than I do from the UK to Europe. So that excuse is total bollocks too.
Is Blizzard's choice to not have LAN a good idea? Maybe, maybe not. That's subjective.
Is Blizzard crazy for worrying about piracy? No they're not.
I wish they were harsher on pirates through punishment (financial punishment) instead of making their game more secure. But that's me personally, I'm not Blizzard. I'm not the one shelling out the money to make a game. I'm just the consumer.
I'm just a consumer, and my enjoyment of the product is being totally stopped dead in it's tracks by blizzards stance on that issue, in what is an industry standard feature not being present. Sure they have every right to worry about piracy, but as a legit customer (for every blizzard game I own.. every steam game, every console game.. I don't even use an R4 card or w/e the hell it's called on the DS all my games are legit. ) I reserve the right to be annoyed when a feature is denied to me because someone else is stealing. Not my problem, I paid you my money, yet I can't play the "Multiplayer" with a friend, who lives next to me. No amount of sales talk can sidestep that fact. Me (a legit customer) and my friend (another legit customer) cannot play the "Multiplayer" option together. Either Online or Offline.
nation is bombed by terrorist.
airport security goes up.
Innocent passenger is annoyed by heightened security.
Is the fault on the airport for adapting to cultural norms, or is the fault on the terrorist for changing cultural norms?
On June 24 2011 00:12 Treemonkeys wrote: It doesn't matter how much money Blizzard has overall. Starcraft 2 has to be profitable by itself for them to continue developing it while being responsible to their investors. "Blizzard has enough money" is a foolish argument. They aren't going to start developing out of charity because they make a ton of money off of WoW.
Blizzard having enough money matters significantly.Do you think the bussiness model for a small indie company is the same for blizzard...please . With money you can make more of it (and potentially lose) My family runs a deli, we give free coffee to all our customers, we'll even bring it straight to the good customers without asking. Its an extra cost to our store and there is no reason for us to do it, but it keeps customers happy and they in turn keep coming to our store even if our prices are quite high. 20 years ago there was no way our store could of done this it would of cost us too much, even though it would of been something we would of loved to do. Blizzard is in a position to be able to do things like this with they're company, they choose not to and thats they're choice but, you can only gauge your customers for so long before they get sick of it, especially when the product and service is mediocre. SC2,WOW are all replaceable.
take a look at IKEA they have TONS of services that "lose" there company money yet they are still one of the most successful companies out there.
On June 24 2011 00:12 Treemonkeys wrote: It doesn't matter how much money Blizzard has overall. Starcraft 2 has to be profitable by itself for them to continue developing it while being responsible to their investors. "Blizzard has enough money" is a foolish argument. They aren't going to start developing out of charity because they make a ton of money off of WoW.
Blizzard having enough money matters significantly.Do you think the bussiness model for a small indie company is the same for blizzard...please . With money you can make more of it (and potentially lose) My family runs a deli, we give free coffee to all our customers, we'll even bring it straight to the good customers without asking. Its an extra cost to our store and there is no reason for us to do it, but it keeps customers happy and they in turn keep coming to our store even if our prices are quite high. 20 years ago there was no way our store could of done this it would of cost us too much, even though it would of been something we would of loved to do. Blizzard is in a position to be able to do things like this with they're company, they choose not to and thats they're choice but, you can only gauge your customers for so long before they get sick of it, especially when the product and service is mediocre. SC2,WOW are all replaceable.
take a look at IKEA they have TONS of services that "lose" there company money yet they are still one of the most successful companies out there.
Well Blizzard took the stand that LAN would just be too costly to them due to piracy. Instead, everyone is just going to have to deal with B.NET 2.0 lag and without having cross server. I would love to have LAN and have lagless offline tournaments, but the problem is that having LAN in Blizzards eyes gives up too much for too little in return.
On June 24 2011 00:12 Treemonkeys wrote: It doesn't matter how much money Blizzard has overall. Starcraft 2 has to be profitable by itself for them to continue developing it while being responsible to their investors. "Blizzard has enough money" is a foolish argument. They aren't going to start developing out of charity because they make a ton of money off of WoW.
Blizzard having enough money matters significantly.Do you think the bussiness model for a small indie company is the same for blizzard...please . With money you can make more of it (and potentially lose) My family runs a deli, we give free coffee to all our customers, we'll even bring it straight to the good customers without asking. Its an extra cost to our store and there is no reason for us to do it, but it keeps customers happy and they in turn keep coming to our store even if our prices are quite high. 20 years ago there was no way our store could of done this it would of cost us too much, even though it would of been something we would of loved to do. Blizzard is in a position to be able to do things like this with they're company, they choose not to and thats they're choice but, you can only gauge your customers for so long before they get sick of it, especially when the product and service is mediocre. SC2,WOW are all replaceable.
take a look at IKEA they have TONS of services that "lose" there company money yet they are still one of the most successful companies out there.
Well Blizzard took the stand that LAN would just be too costly to them due to piracy. Instead, everyone is just going to have to deal with B.NET 2.0 lag and without having cross server. I would love to have LAN and have lagless offline tournaments, but the problem is that having LAN in Blizzards eyes gives up too much for too little in return.
Its fair blizzard took that stance cause it would be a healthy bit of coin they are losing. I just think there are other place you can skrimp and save on. Especially when LAN was one of the big reasons the preceding game was so successful .
A company should only fear piracy if they are producing bad products.
So let me get this straight, if you make a quality product less people will pirate it? Its the other way around
Look at various torrent sites ( i know you know them) and see what the most popular games and movies are pirated, it is usually high profile games that cost millions to make.
The most popular game to get a N64 emulator for are OoT and Mario 64, how many people do you think tried to snag a Superman 64 rom? Only the few demented people who wanted to see just how horrible it is.
I agree that it is sad we cant have LAN, but the reasoning makes perfect sense.
My point is, if the product is good enough, people will buy it.
A lot of people might download it, don't get me wrong, but if they were ever going to buy the game, they would likely do so even if they downloaded it. If they would never have bought the game no matter, then you've just reached out to one more customer, which *might* buy it, but in the least(assuming the product is good) have a positive attitude towards the game/company when talking about it.
So yes, a good product might be downloaded more, but that's not really something to fear, while a bad one has a good reason to fear it.
The problem with the logic "They wouldn't buy it anyway" is that the only reason people have the thinking of "I won't buy this game I'm playing" is because pirate culture both A.) Exists and B.) is not punished harshly enough.
If I were Blizzard, I'd not be scared to pirate games and simply sue every person who downloaded the game, every website that tried posting the game up for downloading. I would then hire hackers to create viruses that destroys and erases hard drives and put those up as free downloads on torrent sites so that people who do download get viruses that harm the entire computer maliciously. I would infest every single torrent site with as many viruses as I can to make it so harmful and dangerous to download "free" content that no one would download anymore.
I would be more aggressive, less compromising, and less friendly than Blizzard is because my personality believes that if you punish people for doing something wrong, in time they will stop doing it en mass.
But I'm not Blizzard. Blizzard would rather try nicer fixes like no LAN than simply spreading viruses, malwares and hack accounts.
Because of Blizzard's lax punishment system--people are willing to say "I don't want to buy this game because I'm going to pirate it anyway." Why? Because the punishment for pirating is almost zero.
Edit: When I said that "If I were Blizzard, I'd not be scared to pirate games and simply sue every person who downloaded the game, every website that tried posting the game up for downloading." what I meant was that I would sue them, not for profit, but for punishment.
I would force them to give everything they have. Every shirt, DVD, Game, savings, their bed, their bed frame, their posters, the cans in their recycling bin, etc...
The point of the sue would not be to recoup losses, it would be to punish stealing. Punish.
If I were Blizzard, I'd not be scared to pirate games and simply sue every person who downloaded the game, every website that tried posting the game up for downloading. I would then hire hackers to create viruses that destroys and erases hard drives and put those up as free downloads on torrent sites so that people who do download get viruses that harm the entire computer maliciously. I would infest every single torrent site with as many viruses as I can to make it so harmful and dangerous to download "free" content that no one would download anymore.
A company should only fear piracy if they are producing bad products.
So let me get this straight, if you make a quality product less people will pirate it? Its the other way around
Look at various torrent sites ( i know you know them) and see what the most popular games and movies are pirated, it is usually high profile games that cost millions to make.
The most popular game to get a N64 emulator for are OoT and Mario 64, how many people do you think tried to snag a Superman 64 rom? Only the few demented people who wanted to see just how horrible it is.
I agree that it is sad we cant have LAN, but the reasoning makes perfect sense.
My point is, if the product is good enough, people will buy it.
A lot of people might download it, don't get me wrong, but if they were ever going to buy the game, they would likely do so even if they downloaded it. If they would never have bought the game no matter, then you've just reached out to one more customer, which *might* buy it, but in the least(assuming the product is good) have a positive attitude towards the game/company when talking about it.
So yes, a good product might be downloaded more, but that's not really something to fear, while a bad one has a good reason to fear it.
The problem with the logic "They wouldn't buy it anyway" is that the only reason people have the thinking of "I won't buy this game I'm playing" is because pirate culture both A.) Exists and B.) is not punished harshly enough.
If I were Blizzard, I'd not be scared to pirate games and simply sue every person who downloaded the game, every website that tried posting the game up for downloading. I would then hire hackers to create viruses that destroys and erases hard drives and put those up as free downloads on torrent sites so that people who do download get viruses that harm the entire computer maliciously. I would infest every single torrent site with as many viruses as I can to make it so harmful and dangerous to download "free" content that no one would download anymore.
I would be more aggressive, less compromising, and less friendly than Blizzard is because my personality believes that if you punish people for doing something wrong, in time they will stop doing it en mass.
But I'm not Blizzard. Blizzard would rather try nicer fixes like no LAN than simply spreading viruses, malwares and hack accounts.
Because of Blizzard's lax punishment system--people are willing to say "I don't want to buy this game because I'm going to pirate it anyway." Why? Because the punishment for pirating is almost zero.
If I were Blizzard, I'd not be scared to pirate games and simply sue every person who downloaded the game, every website that tried posting the game up for downloading. I would then hire hackers to create viruses that destroys and erases hard drives and put those up as free downloads on torrent sites so that people who do download get viruses that harm the entire computer maliciously. I would infest every single torrent site with as many viruses as I can to make it so harmful and dangerous to download "free" content that no one would download anymore.
A company should only fear piracy if they are producing bad products.
So let me get this straight, if you make a quality product less people will pirate it? Its the other way around
Look at various torrent sites ( i know you know them) and see what the most popular games and movies are pirated, it is usually high profile games that cost millions to make.
The most popular game to get a N64 emulator for are OoT and Mario 64, how many people do you think tried to snag a Superman 64 rom? Only the few demented people who wanted to see just how horrible it is.
I agree that it is sad we cant have LAN, but the reasoning makes perfect sense.
My point is, if the product is good enough, people will buy it.
A lot of people might download it, don't get me wrong, but if they were ever going to buy the game, they would likely do so even if they downloaded it. If they would never have bought the game no matter, then you've just reached out to one more customer, which *might* buy it, but in the least(assuming the product is good) have a positive attitude towards the game/company when talking about it.
So yes, a good product might be downloaded more, but that's not really something to fear, while a bad one has a good reason to fear it.
The problem with the logic "They wouldn't buy it anyway" is that the only reason people have the thinking of "I won't buy this game I'm playing" is because pirate culture both A.) Exists and B.) is not punished harshly enough.
If I were Blizzard, I'd not be scared to pirate games and simply sue every person who downloaded the game, every website that tried posting the game up for downloading. I would then hire hackers to create viruses that destroys and erases hard drives and put those up as free downloads on torrent sites so that people who do download get viruses that harm the entire computer maliciously. I would infest every single torrent site with as many viruses as I can to make it so harmful and dangerous to download "free" content that no one would download anymore.
I would be more aggressive, less compromising, and less friendly than Blizzard is because my personality believes that if you punish people for doing something wrong, in time they will stop doing it en mass.
But I'm not Blizzard. Blizzard would rather try nicer fixes like no LAN than simply spreading viruses, malwares and hack accounts.
Because of Blizzard's lax punishment system--people are willing to say "I don't want to buy this game because I'm going to pirate it anyway." Why? Because the punishment for pirating is almost zero.
The music industry tried this and it didn't work.
Actually, the music industry never tried to fill torrent sites with as many harmful viruses as they could. They never got on Napster and started to post several hundred thousand songs that contained viruses just to punish napster users.
On June 24 2011 00:31 lorkac wrote:If I were Blizzard, I'd not be scared to pirate games and simply sue every person who downloaded the game, every website that tried posting the game up for downloading. I would then hire hackers to create viruses that destroys and erases hard drives and put those up as free downloads on torrent sites so that people who do download get viruses that harm the entire computer maliciously. I would infest every single torrent site with as many viruses as I can to make it so harmful and dangerous to download "free" content that no one would download anymore.
I would be more aggressive, less compromising, and less friendly than Blizzard is because my personality believes that if you punish people for doing something wrong, in time they will stop doing it en mass.
But I'm not Blizzard. Blizzard would rather try nicer fixes like no LAN than simply spreading viruses, malwares and hack accounts.
How foolish are you? You honestly think that a massive corporation like Blizzard Entertainment would be able to spread malicious code and not get in trouble with the law? They aren't vigilantes who are going to risk getting in a huge class action lawsuit for some petty revenge. Have some common sense.
A company should only fear piracy if they are producing bad products.
So let me get this straight, if you make a quality product less people will pirate it? Its the other way around
Look at various torrent sites ( i know you know them) and see what the most popular games and movies are pirated, it is usually high profile games that cost millions to make.
The most popular game to get a N64 emulator for are OoT and Mario 64, how many people do you think tried to snag a Superman 64 rom? Only the few demented people who wanted to see just how horrible it is.
I agree that it is sad we cant have LAN, but the reasoning makes perfect sense.
My point is, if the product is good enough, people will buy it.
A lot of people might download it, don't get me wrong, but if they were ever going to buy the game, they would likely do so even if they downloaded it. If they would never have bought the game no matter, then you've just reached out to one more customer, which *might* buy it, but in the least(assuming the product is good) have a positive attitude towards the game/company when talking about it.
So yes, a good product might be downloaded more, but that's not really something to fear, while a bad one has a good reason to fear it.
The problem with the logic "They wouldn't buy it anyway" is that the only reason people have the thinking of "I won't buy this game I'm playing" is because pirate culture both A.) Exists and B.) is not punished harshly enough.
If I were Blizzard, I'd not be scared to pirate games and simply sue every person who downloaded the game, every website that tried posting the game up for downloading. I would then hire hackers to create viruses that destroys and erases hard drives and put those up as free downloads on torrent sites so that people who do download get viruses that harm the entire computer maliciously. I would infest every single torrent site with as many viruses as I can to make it so harmful and dangerous to download "free" content that no one would download anymore.
I would be more aggressive, less compromising, and less friendly than Blizzard is because my personality believes that if you punish people for doing something wrong, in time they will stop doing it en mass.
But I'm not Blizzard. Blizzard would rather try nicer fixes like no LAN than simply spreading viruses, malwares and hack accounts.
Because of Blizzard's lax punishment system--people are willing to say "I don't want to buy this game because I'm going to pirate it anyway." Why? Because the punishment for pirating is almost zero.
The music industry tried this and it didn't work.
Actually, the music industry never tried to fill torrent sites with as many harmful viruses as they could. They never got on Napster and started to post several hundred thousand songs that contained viruses just to punish napster users.
They would if they could (after all, they wouldn't be doing it themselves, just some paid hackers*).
The thing is, comments, ratings, anti-virus, trusted users and release groups prevent this from being viable. There have been tons of malicious releases, but they get easily filtered.
*They can get a lot of bad advertising and maybe even get sued if the hackers betray them, though.
On June 24 2011 00:31 lorkac wrote: If I were Blizzard, I'd not be scared to pirate games and simply sue every person who downloaded the game, every website that tried posting the game up for downloading. I would then hire hackers to create viruses that destroys and erases hard drives and put those up as free downloads on torrent sites so that people who do download get viruses that harm the entire computer maliciously. I would infest every single torrent site with as many viruses as I can to make it so harmful and dangerous to download "free" content that no one would download anymore.
That would be illegal.
It also wouldn't work, at all. Music companies already tried filling up sites with junk downloads. As always, the scene evolved and it now doesn't work at all.
A company should only fear piracy if they are producing bad products.
So let me get this straight, if you make a quality product less people will pirate it? Its the other way around
Look at various torrent sites ( i know you know them) and see what the most popular games and movies are pirated, it is usually high profile games that cost millions to make.
The most popular game to get a N64 emulator for are OoT and Mario 64, how many people do you think tried to snag a Superman 64 rom? Only the few demented people who wanted to see just how horrible it is.
I agree that it is sad we cant have LAN, but the reasoning makes perfect sense.
My point is, if the product is good enough, people will buy it.
A lot of people might download it, don't get me wrong, but if they were ever going to buy the game, they would likely do so even if they downloaded it. If they would never have bought the game no matter, then you've just reached out to one more customer, which *might* buy it, but in the least(assuming the product is good) have a positive attitude towards the game/company when talking about it.
So yes, a good product might be downloaded more, but that's not really something to fear, while a bad one has a good reason to fear it.
The problem with the logic "They wouldn't buy it anyway" is that the only reason people have the thinking of "I won't buy this game I'm playing" is because pirate culture both A.) Exists and B.) is not punished harshly enough.
That's an assumption, which you have no way of backing up, not to mention it adds nothing to the subject. If A) the pirated culture didn't exist, then... we're in a different world and prices would possibly be lower, companies would likely need to spend more money on advertisement, etc etc but in the end it doesn't really matter, that's not the reality we live in. If B) that's atleast not really a world I'd want to live in. Punishing harsher would require a lot more privacy loss(which is already getting extinct) over the internet.
There are however toooons of research on the "lost sales" subject. Quick google search resulted fx in this: Linkie(this one mind is music) which show calculated losses are grossly exaggerated. There are plenty of more detailed ones that have been made over the years.
It is my believe these industries(especially the music one) should rather embrace technology and work with it, rather than pissing in the costumers faces and pointing in a random direction and yelling "monsters, they be stealing joo".
PS. Gl making a buisness with that attitude. Alienating a huge portion of possible costumers/friends of your customers is a good buisness move.
If I were Blizzard, I'd not be scared to pirate games and simply sue every person who downloaded the game, every website that tried posting the game up for downloading. I would then hire hackers to create viruses that destroys and erases hard drives and put those up as free downloads on torrent sites so that people who do download get viruses that harm the entire computer maliciously. I would infest every single torrent site with as many viruses as I can to make it so harmful and dangerous to download "free" content that no one would download anymore.
This is very illigal.
Jesus christ. Let's just operate chips into people's brains instead. It's people with psychopathic opinions like his we should be afraid of. Not pirates. Open your eyes to the real threat here people.
Pirating is a loophole in the supply demand chain. Its a way of getting something for free and side stepping the whole trade arrangement. Its going to be abused and taken to the fullest extent every time. No consumer in the right mind pays more then they have to, and with pirating they can pay zero.
The whole idea of people as saints and buying a game because they have decided that the developer deserves the money after using their software for "x" number of hours is bullshit at best.
Pirating is wrong, but due to the lopsided power distribution of the consumer and supply, pirates by and large can get away with anything under the general idea that because tracking them down is a nuisance logistically and a nightmare legally, they can do as they please. Then they fabricate some pseudo-soapbox stand on free speech or some shit and try to alleviate the burden of responsibility from the conscience and place it squarely on the developers for not working hard enough.
If I were Blizzard, I'd not be scared to pirate games and simply sue every person who downloaded the game, every website that tried posting the game up for downloading. I would then hire hackers to create viruses that destroys and erases hard drives and put those up as free downloads on torrent sites so that people who do download get viruses that harm the entire computer maliciously. I would infest every single torrent site with as many viruses as I can to make it so harmful and dangerous to download "free" content that no one would download anymore.
This is very illigal.
Jesus christ. Let's just operate chips into people's brains instead. It's people with psychopathic opinions like his we should be afraid of. Not pirates. Open your eyes to the real threat here people.
This mindset is the Pirates mindset.
Blizzard is being nice simply doing things like No Lan instead of doing illegal things to get what they want (Pirates)
Why doesn't Blizzard do this? BEcause there is so much stuff out there to STOP them from doing it. Blizzard is punished for putting stuff on torrents but Pirates are not. Do you see how silly that double standard is? It's okay to punish Blizzard for posting torrents but its' not okay to punish everyone else from posting torrents.
On June 24 2011 00:59 Torpedo.Vegas wrote: Pirating is a loophole in the supply demand chain. Its a way of getting something for free and side stepping the whole trade arrangement. Its going to be abused and taken to the fullest extent every time. No consumer in the right mind pays more then they have to, and with pirating they can pay zero.
The whole idea of people as saints and buying a game because they have decided that the developer deserves the money after using their software for "x" number of hours is bullshit at best.
Pirating is wrong, but due to the lopsided power distribution of the consumer and supply, pirates by and large can get away with anything under the general idea that because tracking them down is a nuisance logistically and a nightmare legally, they can do as they please. Then they fabricate some pseudo-soapbox stand on free speech or some shit and try to alleviate the burden of responsibility from the conscience and place it squarely on the developers for not working hard enough.
If I were Blizzard, I'd not be scared to pirate games and simply sue every person who downloaded the game, every website that tried posting the game up for downloading. I would then hire hackers to create viruses that destroys and erases hard drives and put those up as free downloads on torrent sites so that people who do download get viruses that harm the entire computer maliciously. I would infest every single torrent site with as many viruses as I can to make it so harmful and dangerous to download "free" content that no one would download anymore.
This is very illigal.
Yes. I agree. Torrent sites are very illegal.
No, they're not.
Torrent sites don't actually distribute any music, movies, games or whatever, all they distribute are the torrent files, which are not copyrighted works. The person uploading the copyrighted work is the one whos breaking the law.
Now intentionally uploading viruses to a site in an attempt to cause malicious harm, that is very much illegal.
If I were Blizzard, I'd not be scared to pirate games and simply sue every person who downloaded the game, every website that tried posting the game up for downloading. I would then hire hackers to create viruses that destroys and erases hard drives and put those up as free downloads on torrent sites so that people who do download get viruses that harm the entire computer maliciously. I would infest every single torrent site with as many viruses as I can to make it so harmful and dangerous to download "free" content that no one would download anymore.
This is very illigal.
Jesus christ. Let's just operate chips into people's brains instead. It's people with psychopathic opinions like his we should be afraid of. Not pirates. Open your eyes to the real threat here people.
This mindset is the Pirates mindset.
Blizzard is being nice simply doing things like No Lan instead of doing illegal things to get what they want (Pirates)
Why doesn't Blizzard do this? BEcause there is so much stuff out there to STOP them from doing it. Blizzard is punished for putting stuff on torrents but Pirates are not. Do you see how silly that double standard is? It's okay to punish Blizzard for posting torrents but its' not okay to punish everyone else from posting torrents.
Do you see how silly that is?
You missed the point, It would be about blizzard putting viruses on torrents en mass. Which is very different then me putting up my favourite porn on a torrent.
If I were Blizzard, I'd not be scared to pirate games and simply sue every person who downloaded the game, every website that tried posting the game up for downloading. I would then hire hackers to create viruses that destroys and erases hard drives and put those up as free downloads on torrent sites so that people who do download get viruses that harm the entire computer maliciously. I would infest every single torrent site with as many viruses as I can to make it so harmful and dangerous to download "free" content that no one would download anymore.
This is very illigal.
Jesus christ. Let's just operate chips into people's brains instead. It's people with psychopathic opinions like his we should be afraid of. Not pirates. Open your eyes to the real threat here people.
This mindset is the Pirates mindset.
Blizzard is being nice simply doing things like No Lan instead of doing illegal things to get what they want (Pirates)
Why doesn't Blizzard do this? BEcause there is so much stuff out there to STOP them from doing it. Blizzard is punished for putting stuff on torrents but Pirates are not. Do you see how silly that double standard is? It's okay to punish Blizzard for posting torrents but its' not okay to punish everyone else from posting torrents.
Do you see how silly that is?
You want to take away your own rights and all others, dude? You want Blizzard to be able to break the laws that protects us??? You cleary lack basis understanding of society works, pal.
A company should only fear piracy if they are producing bad products.
So let me get this straight, if you make a quality product less people will pirate it? Its the other way around
Look at various torrent sites ( i know you know them) and see what the most popular games and movies are pirated, it is usually high profile games that cost millions to make.
The most popular game to get a N64 emulator for are OoT and Mario 64, how many people do you think tried to snag a Superman 64 rom? Only the few demented people who wanted to see just how horrible it is.
I agree that it is sad we cant have LAN, but the reasoning makes perfect sense.
My point is, if the product is good enough, people will buy it.
A lot of people might download it, don't get me wrong, but if they were ever going to buy the game, they would likely do so even if they downloaded it. If they would never have bought the game no matter, then you've just reached out to one more customer, which *might* buy it, but in the least(assuming the product is good) have a positive attitude towards the game/company when talking about it.
So yes, a good product might be downloaded more, but that's not really something to fear, while a bad one has a good reason to fear it.
The problem with the logic "They wouldn't buy it anyway" is that the only reason people have the thinking of "I won't buy this game I'm playing" is because pirate culture both A.) Exists and B.) is not punished harshly enough.
If I were Blizzard, I'd not be scared to pirate games and simply sue every person who downloaded the game, every website that tried posting the game up for downloading. I would then hire hackers to create viruses that destroys and erases hard drives and put those up as free downloads on torrent sites so that people who do download get viruses that harm the entire computer maliciously. I would infest every single torrent site with as many viruses as I can to make it so harmful and dangerous to download "free" content that no one would download anymore.
I would be more aggressive, less compromising, and less friendly than Blizzard is because my personality believes that if you punish people for doing something wrong, in time they will stop doing it en mass.
But I'm not Blizzard. Blizzard would rather try nicer fixes like no LAN than simply spreading viruses, malwares and hack accounts.
Because of Blizzard's lax punishment system--people are willing to say "I don't want to buy this game because I'm going to pirate it anyway." Why? Because the punishment for pirating is almost zero.
The music industry tried this and it didn't work.
Actually, the music industry never tried to fill torrent sites with as many harmful viruses as they could. They never got on Napster and started to post several hundred thousand songs that contained viruses just to punish napster users.
They would if they could (after all, they wouldn't be doing it themselves, just some paid hackers*).
The thing is, comments, ratings, anti-virus, trusted users and release groups prevent this from being viable. There have been tons of malicious releases, but they get easily filtered.
*They can get a lot of bad advertising and maybe even get sued if the hackers betray them, though.
Macrovision tried the next best thing with a product called Hawkeye. It was designed to flood P2P networks with a whole bunch of fake results and what-not. It worked very well for a brief period ( hawkeye fake files actually outnumbered real files in terms of downloads ), but the product was cancelled in 2009. Even using non-malicious and difficult to detect technologies to try to flood the market eventually failed as people picked up on the signatures of what hawkeye would try to do and weeded them out.
Keep in mind, also, that music piracy is a fundamentally different market than software piracy and movie piracy. While many people do pirate both music and software ( and movies ), there's a substantial difference in the technologies that work in each industry as well as what people in an industry are willing to accept. E.g. consumers in the music industry basically jump ship and stop buying at the first sight of disruptive DRM, whereas consumers in the movie industry will take it up the tailpipe as long as the movie quality remains very high and there's lots of bonus features ( tbh, a lot of the movie DRM is also what provides those bonus features ). Software is way different from both of those and sits more at a middle ground - mainly because you can't actually protect Software. The concept behind Software DRM is to push back the day the first marginally functional pirated copy is floating around. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.
Also, businesses software is heavily pirated by small business - it's not just games. Also, large-scale corporate license compliance is dreadful. Nearly everyone investigated by SAP for compliance is out of compliance by large margins.
If I were Blizzard, I'd not be scared to pirate games and simply sue every person who downloaded the game, every website that tried posting the game up for downloading. I would then hire hackers to create viruses that destroys and erases hard drives and put those up as free downloads on torrent sites so that people who do download get viruses that harm the entire computer maliciously. I would infest every single torrent site with as many viruses as I can to make it so harmful and dangerous to download "free" content that no one would download anymore.
This is very illigal.
Jesus christ. Let's just operate chips into people's brains instead. It's people with psychopathic opinions like his we should be afraid of. Not pirates. Open your eyes to the real threat here people.
This mindset is the Pirates mindset.
Blizzard is being nice simply doing things like No Lan instead of doing illegal things to get what they want (Pirates)
Why doesn't Blizzard do this? BEcause there is so much stuff out there to STOP them from doing it. Blizzard is punished for putting stuff on torrents but Pirates are not. Do you see how silly that double standard is? It's okay to punish Blizzard for posting torrents but its' not okay to punish everyone else from posting torrents.
Do you see how silly that is?
Despite how frightening close corporations in America are to being considered persons, they don't have equal rights of a person. You actually think a corporation should hold the same rights as an individual? That's insane.
If I were Blizzard, I'd not be scared to pirate games and simply sue every person who downloaded the game, every website that tried posting the game up for downloading. I would then hire hackers to create viruses that destroys and erases hard drives and put those up as free downloads on torrent sites so that people who do download get viruses that harm the entire computer maliciously. I would infest every single torrent site with as many viruses as I can to make it so harmful and dangerous to download "free" content that no one would download anymore.
This is very illigal.
Yes. I agree. Torrent sites are very illegal.
Torrent sites are in no way illegal. The day a medium of sharing information becomes illegal will be a very sad day for humanity. There's illegal content hosted on many torrent sites, but that doesn't make sites themselves illegal.
If I were Blizzard, I'd not be scared to pirate games and simply sue every person who downloaded the game, every website that tried posting the game up for downloading. I would then hire hackers to create viruses that destroys and erases hard drives and put those up as free downloads on torrent sites so that people who do download get viruses that harm the entire computer maliciously. I would infest every single torrent site with as many viruses as I can to make it so harmful and dangerous to download "free" content that no one would download anymore.
This is very illigal.
Sort of like putting out torrents that are riddled with information pickers to pull information from users who illegally download music?
Oh wait :D It's only illegal if a private company were to do it, but a associations or public group were to do it, there would be no question of legality?
LAN is what made 90s games big, and what enabled the start of growth in 00's. Now with how rampant illegal copies of games are it's a very big issue with corps and shareholders.
Would you want want to invest your money into a company who releases 3 games a year and 1 of which won't make much profit since everyone is hacking it?
How about the uneasy approach from activision investors when looking at the legal matters of SC:BW IP rights in Skorea? As people who enjoy watching/playing the game, yeah it doesn't make sense, but investors, the reason the games are made these days, it does make sense to exclude LAN.
Any LAN mode = giving away the code for linking players together in games. All the encryption, protocols and such. Any inclusion of LAN mode makes emulating battle.net orders of magnitude easier, and this must be understood. Inclusion of LAN isn't just "Oh, now I can play with two friends!" It's seriously opening a huge can of worms.
The question that must be asked is as follows:
Is the number of people worldwide that would pirate the game if full functionality was available larger than the number of people that refuse to buy the game because we didn't include LAN mode?
The answer to that question drives the decision on whether or not to include LAN. I would expect that the number of people that didn't buy SC2 because of lack of LAN would be far less than the number of people that would pirate the game if the full functionality was available.
Another thing is people think that the way people play SC2 as viewed from Team Liquid is the only way people play these games. Demigod's developer mentioned that only 23% of people that bought the game ever logged onto their multiplayer servers. The other 77% played this completely multiplayer game solely against AI's.
For a game like SC2, I would argue that over 50% of people that bought the game will not have finished any set of placement matches. Pirating, even for the single player, is a huge issue, and I'm sure Blizzard will attempt to address that in the upcoming expansions.
If I were Blizzard, I'd not be scared to pirate games and simply sue every person who downloaded the game, every website that tried posting the game up for downloading. I would then hire hackers to create viruses that destroys and erases hard drives and put those up as free downloads on torrent sites so that people who do download get viruses that harm the entire computer maliciously. I would infest every single torrent site with as many viruses as I can to make it so harmful and dangerous to download "free" content that no one would download anymore.
This is very illigal.
Jesus christ. Let's just operate chips into people's brains instead. It's people with psychopathic opinions like his we should be afraid of. Not pirates. Open your eyes to the real threat here people.
This mindset is the Pirates mindset.
Blizzard is being nice simply doing things like No Lan instead of doing illegal things to get what they want (Pirates)
Why doesn't Blizzard do this? BEcause there is so much stuff out there to STOP them from doing it. Blizzard is punished for putting stuff on torrents but Pirates are not. Do you see how silly that double standard is? It's okay to punish Blizzard for posting torrents but its' not okay to punish everyone else from posting torrents.
Do you see how silly that is?
You want to take away your own rights and all others, dude? You want Blizzard to be able to break the laws that protects us??? You cleary lack basis understanding of society works, pal.
No. What I'm saying is that it's silly that some dude posting a random porn film on a torrent is not treated the same way as Blizzard and vice versa.
I'm saying that it's silly to have favoritism in the law.
I'm saying that if people were punished as harshly as Blizzard would be punished--people wouldn't upload anything.
I'm saying if Blizzard was allowed to post stuff as freely as people post stuff--people wouldn't upload anything.
I'm saying the favoritism in how file sharing is protected is forcing corporations into sillier and sillier options in an attempt to protect their product--like the loss of LAN.
And no, you saying Blizzard should just take it up the ass and like it because Blizzard is too big to fail is not an argument.
If I were Blizzard, I'd not be scared to pirate games and simply sue every person who downloaded the game, every website that tried posting the game up for downloading. I would then hire hackers to create viruses that destroys and erases hard drives and put those up as free downloads on torrent sites so that people who do download get viruses that harm the entire computer maliciously. I would infest every single torrent site with as many viruses as I can to make it so harmful and dangerous to download "free" content that no one would download anymore.
This is very illigal.
Jesus christ. Let's just operate chips into people's brains instead. It's people with psychopathic opinions like his we should be afraid of. Not pirates. Open your eyes to the real threat here people.
This mindset is the Pirates mindset.
Blizzard is being nice simply doing things like No Lan instead of doing illegal things to get what they want (Pirates)
Why doesn't Blizzard do this? BEcause there is so much stuff out there to STOP them from doing it. Blizzard is punished for putting stuff on torrents but Pirates are not. Do you see how silly that double standard is? It's okay to punish Blizzard for posting torrents but its' not okay to punish everyone else from posting torrents.
Do you see how silly that is?
You want to take away your own rights and all others, dude? You want Blizzard to be able to break the laws that protects us??? You cleary lack basis understanding of society works, pal.
No. What I'm saying is that it's silly that some dude posting a random porn film on a torrent is not treated the same way as Blizzard and vice versa.
I'm saying that it's silly to have favoritism in the law.
I'm saying that if people were punished as harshly as Blizzard would be punished--people wouldn't upload anything.
I'm saying if Blizzard was allowed to post stuff as freely as people post stuff--people wouldn't upload anything.
I'm saying the favoritism in how file sharing is protected is forcing corporations into sillier and sillier options in an attempt to protect their product--like the loss of LAN.
And no, you saying Blizzard should just take it up the ass and like it because Blizzard is too big to fail is not an argument.
People cant legally publish stuff with copyright on torrents or any other hosting service, the thing that is legal-ish is downloading it from direct sites, downloading from torrents is already slightly illegal as you are sharing the files you downloaded with other people. (and very illegal for the original uploader)
You've continuously made stuff up in this thread, talk about things you dont know about (music vs radio and this whole pirating issue tbh). Ive given a reason why companies should include LAN etc. and you chose to ignore that a concentrate on poorly written sentece.
You believe in cutting people's rights, corporations sabotaging individuals and basically black mailing them, airport staff touching your balls. I would not be surprised to find out you download music and movies from the internet.
If I were Blizzard, I'd not be scared to pirate games and simply sue every person who downloaded the game, every website that tried posting the game up for downloading. I would then hire hackers to create viruses that destroys and erases hard drives and put those up as free downloads on torrent sites so that people who do download get viruses that harm the entire computer maliciously. I would infest every single torrent site with as many viruses as I can to make it so harmful and dangerous to download "free" content that no one would download anymore.
This is very illigal.
Jesus christ. Let's just operate chips into people's brains instead. It's people with psychopathic opinions like his we should be afraid of. Not pirates. Open your eyes to the real threat here people.
This mindset is the Pirates mindset.
Blizzard is being nice simply doing things like No Lan instead of doing illegal things to get what they want (Pirates)
Why doesn't Blizzard do this? BEcause there is so much stuff out there to STOP them from doing it. Blizzard is punished for putting stuff on torrents but Pirates are not. Do you see how silly that double standard is? It's okay to punish Blizzard for posting torrents but its' not okay to punish everyone else from posting torrents.
Do you see how silly that is?
Despite how frightening close corporations in America are to being considered persons, they don't have equal rights of a person. You actually think a corporation should hold the same rights as an individual? That's insane.
No. I think that the law should not care who is standing in front of it.
Much like I don't want the law to turn a blind eye to a corporation--I also don't want the law to turn a blind eye to some dude just because he's not a corporation.
It's not about treating a corporation like an individual. It's about turning a blind eye when someone does something you deem illegal only if the person doing it is poor. If the person doing it is rich, suddenly all hell breaks lose and you whine about how bad and awful the rich person is for doing exactly what non-rich people are doing.
Corporations in America being allowed to fund politicians more than citizens can? That's bullshit because that is giving more rights to a corporation than a citizen.
Corporations in America being given stimulus for having a failing business while citizens don't get any stimulus for the same thing? Bullshit because Corporations are being given more support than a citizen.
Corporations being punished for doing stuff on a torrent site that many other citizens are doing? Bullshit because citizens are being given more protection than business owners.
If I were Blizzard, I'd not be scared to pirate games and simply sue every person who downloaded the game, every website that tried posting the game up for downloading. I would then hire hackers to create viruses that destroys and erases hard drives and put those up as free downloads on torrent sites so that people who do download get viruses that harm the entire computer maliciously. I would infest every single torrent site with as many viruses as I can to make it so harmful and dangerous to download "free" content that no one would download anymore.
This is very illigal.
Jesus christ. Let's just operate chips into people's brains instead. It's people with psychopathic opinions like his we should be afraid of. Not pirates. Open your eyes to the real threat here people.
This mindset is the Pirates mindset.
Blizzard is being nice simply doing things like No Lan instead of doing illegal things to get what they want (Pirates)
Why doesn't Blizzard do this? BEcause there is so much stuff out there to STOP them from doing it. Blizzard is punished for putting stuff on torrents but Pirates are not. Do you see how silly that double standard is? It's okay to punish Blizzard for posting torrents but its' not okay to punish everyone else from posting torrents.
Do you see how silly that is?
You want to take away your own rights and all others, dude? You want Blizzard to be able to break the laws that protects us??? You cleary lack basis understanding of society works, pal.
No. What I'm saying is that it's silly that some dude posting a random porn film on a torrent is not treated the same way as Blizzard and vice versa.
I'm saying that it's silly to have favoritism in the law.
I'm saying that if people were punished as harshly as Blizzard would be punished--people wouldn't upload anything.
I'm saying if Blizzard was allowed to post stuff as freely as people post stuff--people wouldn't upload anything.
I'm saying the favoritism in how file sharing is protected is forcing corporations into sillier and sillier options in an attempt to protect their product--like the loss of LAN.
And no, you saying Blizzard should just take it up the ass and like it because Blizzard is too big to fail is not an argument.
I really don't think you make much sense, so I'll just leave you with your opinions to yourself. Maybe you should read up on the nature of filesharing? Among other stuff like society in general, yes?
I assume everyone supporting companies like blizzard removing LAN and having restrictive DRM would be completely fine if they used something like onlive for the single player to make it unpiratable also. I mean it doesn't matter if the video quality isn't as nice or there is input lag or you you can't play online or you have to pay for lots of bandwidth that doesn't matter as long as there is no piracy. Any company that does not use onlive like technology is giving the game away for free and the shareholders must be very mad about that so it will soon become standard.
It also doesn't matter how much money that would cost blizzard just like it doesn't matter how much it costs blizzard to run servers that are a middleman for the data between every single sc2 game that will ever be played forever. Nobody ever talks about that even if it is theoretically possible for the servers to cost more than the profit from the converted pirates.
On June 24 2011 01:25 lorkac wrote: Corporations being punished for doing stuff on a torrent site that many other citizens are doing? Bullshit because citizens are being given more protection than business owners.
Distributing viruses is a crime. Copyright infringement is generally a civil offence.
This isn't even bringing in the fact that copyright infringement for personal use is de facto unenforceable.
On June 23 2011 07:18 darkscream wrote: Not to mention that most of these games have online ladder systems and that's what people buy the game for - The competitive ladder. .
Haha - no. No way even close to 50% of the people who bought SC2 play on the ladder.
If I were Blizzard, I'd not be scared to pirate games and simply sue every person who downloaded the game, every website that tried posting the game up for downloading. I would then hire hackers to create viruses that destroys and erases hard drives and put those up as free downloads on torrent sites so that people who do download get viruses that harm the entire computer maliciously. I would infest every single torrent site with as many viruses as I can to make it so harmful and dangerous to download "free" content that no one would download anymore.
This is very illigal.
Jesus christ. Let's just operate chips into people's brains instead. It's people with psychopathic opinions like his we should be afraid of. Not pirates. Open your eyes to the real threat here people.
This mindset is the Pirates mindset.
Blizzard is being nice simply doing things like No Lan instead of doing illegal things to get what they want (Pirates)
Why doesn't Blizzard do this? BEcause there is so much stuff out there to STOP them from doing it. Blizzard is punished for putting stuff on torrents but Pirates are not. Do you see how silly that double standard is? It's okay to punish Blizzard for posting torrents but its' not okay to punish everyone else from posting torrents.
Do you see how silly that is?
Despite how frightening close corporations in America are to being considered persons, they don't have equal rights of a person. You actually think a corporation should hold the same rights as an individual? That's insane.
No. I think that the law should not care who is standing in front of it.
Much like I don't want the law to turn a blind eye to a corporation--I also don't want the law to turn a blind eye to some dude just because he's not a corporation.
It's not about treating a corporation like an individual. It's about turning a blind eye when someone does something you deem illegal only if the person doing it is poor. If the person doing it is rich, suddenly all hell breaks lose and you whine about how bad and awful the rich person is for doing exactly what non-rich people are doing.
Corporations in America being allowed to fund politicians more than citizens can? That's bullshit because that is giving more rights to a corporation than a citizen.
Corporations in America being given stimulus for having a failing business while citizens don't get any stimulus for the same thing? Bullshit because Corporations are being given more support than a citizen.
Corporations being punished for doing stuff on a torrent site that many other citizens are doing? Bullshit because citizens are being given more protection than business owners.
No. It is illegal for both of them, Blizzard is not going to risk having their reputation affected by such egotistical acts of vigilantism. If a torrent turns out to have a virus on it, few people will download it, and if many more turn up people might begin to wonder why. There are other very legal ways to punish pirates, although none of them actually to deter pirates, like how Valve handles people who are found playing a pirated version of their game in mulitplayer.
Putting DRM onto a product just delays the time it takes for it to be cracked and able to be pirated, it doesn't stop pirating, there's anecdotal evidence suggest it actually increases pirating.
People cant legally publish stuff with copyright on torrents or any other hosting service, the thing that is legal-ish is downloading it from direct sites, downloading from torrents is already slightly illegal as you are sharing the files you downloaded with other people. (and very illegal for the original uploader)
You've continuously made stuff up in this thread, talk about things you dont know about (music vs radio and this whole pirating issue tbh). Ive given a reason why companies should include LAN etc. and you chose to ignore that a concentrate on poorly written sentece.
You believe in cutting people's rights, corporations sabotaging individuals and basically black mailing them, airport staff touching your balls. I would not be surprised to find out you download music and movies from the internet.
I have nothing more to say to you.
A.) I'm glad you agree that file sharing is illegal.
B.) You seeing a reason for LAN does not counter Blizzard's reason for not having LAN. Both reasons can exist without either being wrong. In other words--you don't actually have a good reason for why not having LAN is wrong other than you feel like it.
C.) I don't believe in cutting people's rights. I'm simply saying that I'm the type of person who believes in treating people exactly like you yourself are treated--and that I'm glad that Blizzard isn't me. If you read my post you'd see that I said it was a good thing that Blizzard wasn't like me. I come from a country where if homeless people showed up on your property and built a shack while you were off in the beach, the law of the land would not kick them out and tell you to just accept your new neighbors. I come from a country where laws are broken daily in front of police officers who feel that those laws being broken in front of them are harmless unless they feel its not. I come from a country where the firefighters can choose to not show up to a fire unless it's big enough to worry about. I hated that.
I moved to the US and I hear that laws are only going to be pushed if the perpetrator is rich enough/poor enough? I think that is bullshit. So stop with your privileged mindset that punishment is only something corporations should get because they deserve it and that everyone in your class/age/economic/social bracket is a saint that is simply doing what he can to get by. It's favoritism and its no different than my neighbor's house burning down because the fire marshal wanted to take a shower before he left the station and so they left half an hour after they were called in.
Just because you think something is harmless does not make it so.
D.) As someone who knows people who work in the airport. I find it offensive that you would rather they "don't mind" that people stole their planes and crashed it into buildings. I find it offensive that you think they should just "calm down" after they are given such immense government pressures to control their passengers. That you would think that riding a plane is this easy thing that you deserve to have and that its not one of the most expensive things to drive *IN THE WORLD.* After 9/11 airports had a hard time making enough money to pay for the fuel to transport people--let alone make a profit. They can't afford to be known as the plane that terrorist hijacked, or that had a shoe bomb explode. It's their right to worry about those kinds of things as business owners.
When business owners are being abused by "fringe groups," it is within their right to get pissed off and try to make a safer product.
C.) Did you read that post you linked about the music industry? It only became a problem *because* DJ's decided to upload the content without paying the producer of the music. In essence, the Music Companies only got upset when radio hosts decided to act *EXACTLY* like pirates do now. They didn't mind having music on the radio. It's cheaper for them to have it on the radio. They mind when people don't pay for the music they made because that is *stealing.*
You made me this way, Darkspore. Me and Steam, we used to be tight. I was legit. If devs want to cut down on piracy they need to cut down on the number of terrible games that are released at the standard 49.99 price point (@HoN dev, when did you last pay 30 dollars for a game that wasn't B-list or 3 years old?). The ice cream man does his thing to make money and not to put a smile on my face, sure, but if he puts shit in a cone and tries to call it chocolate at 4.99 you can bet I'll be stealing my next shitcone just to be safe. All it takes is one overpriced, bad game to make a permanent cynic who is more likely to "try" the next game before buying it. Similarly it only takes a couple of incidents like MW2 to make developers feel like taking out popular but admittedly risky features like LAN is also just safer. I'm sorry we can't trust each other any more, PC devs, but maybe we can get some ice cream and talk sometime.
On June 24 2011 01:50 AGsc wrote: You made me this way, Darkspore. Me and Steam, we used to be tight. I was legit. If devs want to cut down on piracy they need to cut down on the number of terrible games that are released at the standard 49.99 price point (@HoN dev, when did you last pay 30 dollars for a game that wasn't B-list or 3 years old?). The ice cream man does his thing to make money and not to put a smile on my face, sure, but if he puts shit in a cone and tries to call it chocolate at 4.99 you can bet I'll be stealing my next shitcone just to be safe. All it takes is one overpriced, bad game to make a permanent cynic who is more likely to "try" the next game before buying it. Similarly it only takes a couple of incidents like MW2 to make developers feel like taking out popular but admittedly risky features like LAN is also just safer. I'm sorry we can't trust each other any more, PC devs, but maybe we can get some ice cream and talk sometime.
Um... sorry but if I knew the ice-cream man was putting shit in the cone and trying to pass it off as chocolate, I wouldn't even steal it.
If I were Blizzard, I'd not be scared to pirate games and simply sue every person who downloaded the game, every website that tried posting the game up for downloading. I would then hire hackers to create viruses that destroys and erases hard drives and put those up as free downloads on torrent sites so that people who do download get viruses that harm the entire computer maliciously. I would infest every single torrent site with as many viruses as I can to make it so harmful and dangerous to download "free" content that no one would download anymore.
This is very illigal.
Jesus christ. Let's just operate chips into people's brains instead. It's people with psychopathic opinions like his we should be afraid of. Not pirates. Open your eyes to the real threat here people.
This mindset is the Pirates mindset.
Blizzard is being nice simply doing things like No Lan instead of doing illegal things to get what they want (Pirates)
Why doesn't Blizzard do this? BEcause there is so much stuff out there to STOP them from doing it. Blizzard is punished for putting stuff on torrents but Pirates are not. Do you see how silly that double standard is? It's okay to punish Blizzard for posting torrents but its' not okay to punish everyone else from posting torrents.
Do you see how silly that is?
Despite how frightening close corporations in America are to being considered persons, they don't have equal rights of a person. You actually think a corporation should hold the same rights as an individual? That's insane.
No. I think that the law should not care who is standing in front of it.
Much like I don't want the law to turn a blind eye to a corporation--I also don't want the law to turn a blind eye to some dude just because he's not a corporation.
It's not about treating a corporation like an individual. It's about turning a blind eye when someone does something you deem illegal only if the person doing it is poor. If the person doing it is rich, suddenly all hell breaks lose and you whine about how bad and awful the rich person is for doing exactly what non-rich people are doing.
Corporations in America being allowed to fund politicians more than citizens can? That's bullshit because that is giving more rights to a corporation than a citizen.
Corporations in America being given stimulus for having a failing business while citizens don't get any stimulus for the same thing? Bullshit because Corporations are being given more support than a citizen.
Corporations being punished for doing stuff on a torrent site that many other citizens are doing? Bullshit because citizens are being given more protection than business owners.
No. It is illegal for both of them, Blizzard is not going to risk having their reputation affected by such egotistical acts of vigilantism. If a torrent turns out to have a virus on it, few people will download it, and if many more turn up people might begin to wonder why. There are other very legal ways to punish pirates, although none of them actually to deter pirates, like how Valve handles people who are found playing a pirated version of their game in mulitplayer.
Putting DRM onto a product just delays the time it takes for it to be cracked and able to be pirated, it doesn't stop pirating, there's anecdotal evidence suggest it actually increases pirating.
Being that majority of a company's sales comes from the early purchases of a product--delaying piracy is all the company wants.
Yes, it is illegal for both. And yes, there are more "legal" ways of punishing.
It is however, NOT OUR CALL how Blizzard deals with its problems. As I have said before--I'm glad Blizzard is a nicer person than me because if blizzard had the same mindset as myself or had the same mindset as pirates, bad things would happen.
To get mad at Blizzard for minding their own business and deciding to pursue a reductive form of problem solving so that they don't have to hunt people down is stupid. To think Blizzard is being malicious about not putting in LAN--is stupid. To think Blizzard is removing LAN *just* to save money on SC2 and not because Blizzard is attempting to find a good business model through trial and error--is stupid.
If Blizzard were to do illegal things--people would be in an uproar. But when Pirates do illegal things--it's the company's fault?
It's a stupid double standard that sounds silly when pointed out. It's easy to say "Blizzard can't put stuff online for people to download; that would be illegal!" and yet they still don't see that it's just as illegal for pirates to do it also.
From what I've seen, the best way to make money despite piracy is to change the pricing model to have little to no upfont cost, and then use microtransactions to earn money. Or just microtransactions in general to make money, since consumers are surprisingly willing to spend money on cosmetic items.
On June 24 2011 02:03 Spawkuring wrote: From what I've seen, the best way to make money despite piracy is to change the pricing model to have little to no upfont cost, and then use microtransactions to earn money. Or just microtransactions in general to make money, since consumers are surprisingly willing to spend money on cosmetic items.
The credit system that became popular in America around the 50's is actually very similar to this model.
Instead of spending X on a house, you borrowed money from a bank and bought a house while making paying Y dollars a month to eventually "pay off" the house.
In essence, instead of making games cost $60 dollars, people bought the game for $0 upfront and simply had a monthly payment of Y dollars a month until the $60 is payed in full. Then add cosmetic things much akin to when people buy a house how they always "spend a bit more" to fix counter tops, change the paint on the walls. etc...
That makes a lot of sense to do. It really does.
Question though...
Why should Blizzard implement a new business model if they don't want to? (I'm not saying they shouldn't. Heck, to me it sounds like a great idea. But then again I'm not Blizzard. Different strokes for different folks right?)
Do games without LAN get pirated less than games that have it. The way I see it is they are gonna steal it anyway so cutting corners to punish a paying customer isn't helping anyone either.
The actual funny thing is that cracked SC2 versions are out that "HAVE" Lan support.
How ironic is that ?
Get the game for real cash => no LAN.
Steal it from the internet => get LAN.
If you just stop giving features to the players because it is "somehow" potentially risky , than its totally stupid to sell your game with all your game code to the customer.
If you want to be ridiculous safe , produce a server that runs the game and connect players to it ; without any data on the client.
Ofcourse that means a giant amount of "streaming" or whatever, but any other solution simply means its a matter of time and effort of the pirates to crack your game and any security you think you have.
At the end, Blizzard just "fuks" the players that really spend money on the game, and i feel very bad if i not even get a LAN mode to play a nice game i actual paid for.
If you made a LAN-party in the last couple of months you can play all old stuff from the galaxy as it has LAN , but nobody played SC2 even as we all bought the game and the overall feeling was bad to be unable to play it within the LAN. Then there was someone with a cracked version which had LAN; just guess what happened .....
What ever the solution is, it simply can not be to totally remove LAN.
You have to get a model that gives you LAN and allows protection, any other solution is just bad for the peops that really pay money for your game , the pirate players will get the cracked game, LAN and a custom Battle Net hacked server anyway ; and they really do ...
On June 24 2011 02:10 Baarn wrote: Do games without LAN get pirated less than games that have it. The way I see it is they are gonna steal it anyway so cutting corners to punish a paying customer isn't helping anyone either.
Kespa.
Massive giant Lawsuit.
It was about LAN. (Well, indirectly, it's actually a bit confusing if you go deep into the details, but the overall gist is LAN)
Blizzard, while in a lawsuit about LAN, releases a game without LAN.
A year later, Blizzard's game still has servers packed with players that did not drift off to ICCup and other LAN servers.
On June 23 2011 23:42 Gingerninja wrote: All I know, is that I live in Japan right now... So does my Friend. I come from Europe, He comes from Canada.. I can't play SC2 against him, either online or offline, despite living close enough I could probably hit his front door with a book from my balcony. LAN would solve that problem, so would Region free online. Blizzard aren't providing either, and it can't be to keep the online experience good for people, because I get better connection from here to Europe than I do from the UK to Europe. So that excuse is total bollocks too.
Is Blizzard's choice to not have LAN a good idea? Maybe, maybe not. That's subjective.
Is Blizzard crazy for worrying about piracy? No they're not.
I wish they were harsher on pirates through punishment (financial punishment) instead of making their game more secure. But that's me personally, I'm not Blizzard. I'm not the one shelling out the money to make a game. I'm just the consumer.
I'm just a consumer, and my enjoyment of the product is being totally stopped dead in it's tracks by blizzards stance on that issue, in what is an industry standard feature not being present. Sure they have every right to worry about piracy, but as a legit customer (for every blizzard game I own.. every steam game, every console game.. I don't even use an R4 card or w/e the hell it's called on the DS all my games are legit. ) I reserve the right to be annoyed when a feature is denied to me because someone else is stealing. Not my problem, I paid you my money, yet I can't play the "Multiplayer" with a friend, who lives next to me. No amount of sales talk can sidestep that fact. Me (a legit customer) and my friend (another legit customer) cannot play the "Multiplayer" option together. Either Online or Offline.
nation is bombed by terrorist.
airport security goes up.
Innocent passenger is annoyed by heightened security.
Is the fault on the airport for adapting to cultural norms, or is the fault on the terrorist for changing cultural norms?
I don't believe your using terrorism as an analogy for lack of lan.. If you want to play that analogy..
Airport security might be annoying (it is.. don't lie) but it's not removing your in flight meal to deter terrorists from buying tickets to the plane. They're checking your not doing anything illegal before they allow you to carry non your journey as normal. In as much as it's like Steam.. You go through your security checks (sign in online) then you can carry on as normal, (online play, Lan, whatever)
On June 24 2011 02:10 Baarn wrote: Do games without LAN get pirated less than games that have it. The way I see it is they are gonna steal it anyway so cutting corners to punish a paying customer isn't helping anyone either.
Kespa.
Massive giant Lawsuit.
It was about LAN. (Well, indirectly, it's actually a bit confusing if you go deep into the details, but the overall gist is LAN)
Blizzard, while in a lawsuit about LAN, releases a game without LAN.
A year later, Blizzard's game still has servers packed with players that did not drift off to ICCup and other LAN servers.
Wat? That didn't answer my question at all. Had nothing to do with LAN. It was coming to a fair deal for both sides. You make it sound like Kespa, ogn, mbc weren't interested in coming to a deal at all. Exaggerate something already settled more. pfft I doubt Iccup would make a star 2 server at all.
On June 23 2011 23:42 Gingerninja wrote: All I know, is that I live in Japan right now... So does my Friend. I come from Europe, He comes from Canada.. I can't play SC2 against him, either online or offline, despite living close enough I could probably hit his front door with a book from my balcony. LAN would solve that problem, so would Region free online. Blizzard aren't providing either, and it can't be to keep the online experience good for people, because I get better connection from here to Europe than I do from the UK to Europe. So that excuse is total bollocks too.
Is Blizzard's choice to not have LAN a good idea? Maybe, maybe not. That's subjective.
Is Blizzard crazy for worrying about piracy? No they're not.
I wish they were harsher on pirates through punishment (financial punishment) instead of making their game more secure. But that's me personally, I'm not Blizzard. I'm not the one shelling out the money to make a game. I'm just the consumer.
I'm just a consumer, and my enjoyment of the product is being totally stopped dead in it's tracks by blizzards stance on that issue, in what is an industry standard feature not being present. Sure they have every right to worry about piracy, but as a legit customer (for every blizzard game I own.. every steam game, every console game.. I don't even use an R4 card or w/e the hell it's called on the DS all my games are legit. ) I reserve the right to be annoyed when a feature is denied to me because someone else is stealing. Not my problem, I paid you my money, yet I can't play the "Multiplayer" with a friend, who lives next to me. No amount of sales talk can sidestep that fact. Me (a legit customer) and my friend (another legit customer) cannot play the "Multiplayer" option together. Either Online or Offline.
nation is bombed by terrorist.
airport security goes up.
Innocent passenger is annoyed by heightened security.
Is the fault on the airport for adapting to cultural norms, or is the fault on the terrorist for changing cultural norms?
I don't believe your using terrorism as an analogy for lack of lan.. If you want to play that analogy..
Airport security might be annoying (it is.. don't lie) but it's not removing your in flight meal to deter terrorists from buying tickets to the plane. They're checking your not doing anything illegal before they allow you to carry non your journey as normal. In as much as it's like Steam.. You go through your security checks (sign in online) then you can carry on as normal, (online play, Lan, whatever)
I'm not using the analogy for lack of LAN. The analogy is to Blizzard *deciding* to make their product safer and people getting upset at the wrong people.
The airport would rather not have ANY security other than the person checking the ticket. Xray machines, metal detectors, airport security blah de blah de blah are all expensive and reduces ticket sales. But they do what they do because they *have* to. because of government pressure, because of people forging tickets, because of stow aways, because of terrorists, because of many many factors not all of which are legitimate. Because they live in a world that requires it--airports hire people they'd rather not hire (to cut costs) who run expensive machines to do something that scares away customers.
It's the company's right to do that. Airplanes and Videogames are not privileges people are entitled to. They are products of a global market bought and sold be the economics of trade.
On June 24 2011 02:10 Baarn wrote: Do games without LAN get pirated less than games that have it. The way I see it is they are gonna steal it anyway so cutting corners to punish a paying customer isn't helping anyone either.
Kespa.
Massive giant Lawsuit.
It was about LAN. (Well, indirectly, it's actually a bit confusing if you go deep into the details, but the overall gist is LAN)
Blizzard, while in a lawsuit about LAN, releases a game without LAN.
A year later, Blizzard's game still has servers packed with players that did not drift off to ICCup and other LAN servers.
Wat? That didn't answer my question at all. Had nothing to do with LAN. It was coming to a fair deal for both sides. You make it sound like Kespa, ogn, mbc weren't interested in coming to a deal at all. Exaggerate something already settled more. pfft I doubt Iccup would make a star 2 server at all.
Oh, sorry.
Kespa was a lowly organization whose sole intent was for the goodness of all and Blizzard was an evil tyrant who wished to plunge the world into the darkness of its evil ways.
Does that sound better?
Will it sound better if I added that Blizzard enjoys killing kittens? how about if I add that Kespa is completely innocent and was never ever corrupt at all? Would that make it sound better?
I just think Blizzard should implement a tournament version of the game that has LAN, and if you want/need to practice with lan latency then you can buy that version, as well as any major tournament organizations.
On June 24 2011 02:10 Baarn wrote: Do games without LAN get pirated less than games that have it. The way I see it is they are gonna steal it anyway so cutting corners to punish a paying customer isn't helping anyone either.
Kespa.
Massive giant Lawsuit.
It was about LAN. (Well, indirectly, it's actually a bit confusing if you go deep into the details, but the overall gist is LAN)
Blizzard, while in a lawsuit about LAN, releases a game without LAN.
A year later, Blizzard's game still has servers packed with players that did not drift off to ICCup and other LAN servers.
Wat? That didn't answer my question at all. Had nothing to do with LAN. It was coming to a fair deal for both sides. You make it sound like Kespa, ogn, mbc weren't interested in coming to a deal at all. Exaggerate something already settled more. pfft I doubt Iccup would make a star 2 server at all.
Oh, sorry.
Kespa was a lowly organization whose sole intent was for the goodness of all and Blizzard was an evil tyrant who wished to plunge the world into the darkness of its evil ways.
Does that sound better?
Will it sound better if I added that Blizzard enjoys killing kittens? how about if I add that Kespa is completely innocent and was never ever corrupt at all? Would that make it sound better?
Please oh wise one--how should it have sounded?
Still aren't answering my question about if pirates steal games with LAN or no LAN more. Your best response is no response at all still.
My beef with no LAN is that if my internet goes out and i'm playing against a friend in the same room on the same network, which is typically what I do when I play, then I don't get to play the game I purchased anymore. Sure I can single player offline, but it really is not great when I want multi-player.
As well, I should NOT have to have internet to play ANY RTS vs a person. Nor should there ever be lag when I am playing on the same bloody network, which thanks a lot BNET, there is!
edit: Plus the layout of bnet sucks horribly, its like the designer has never used a f**king computer
While most pirates are probably not lost customers, some of them undoubtedly are.
Even if 5% of pirates were potential customers, when games get pirated 5 million times (like Call of Duty), that's still 250,000 sales lost, millions of dollars lost.
On June 24 2011 02:10 Baarn wrote: Do games without LAN get pirated less than games that have it. The way I see it is they are gonna steal it anyway so cutting corners to punish a paying customer isn't helping anyone either.
Kespa.
Massive giant Lawsuit.
It was about LAN. (Well, indirectly, it's actually a bit confusing if you go deep into the details, but the overall gist is LAN)
Blizzard, while in a lawsuit about LAN, releases a game without LAN.
A year later, Blizzard's game still has servers packed with players that did not drift off to ICCup and other LAN servers.
Wat? That didn't answer my question at all. Had nothing to do with LAN. It was coming to a fair deal for both sides. You make it sound like Kespa, ogn, mbc weren't interested in coming to a deal at all. Exaggerate something already settled more. pfft I doubt Iccup would make a star 2 server at all.
Oh, sorry.
Kespa was a lowly organization whose sole intent was for the goodness of all and Blizzard was an evil tyrant who wished to plunge the world into the darkness of its evil ways.
Does that sound better?
Will it sound better if I added that Blizzard enjoys killing kittens? how about if I add that Kespa is completely innocent and was never ever corrupt at all? Would that make it sound better?
Please oh wise one--how should it have sounded?
Still aren't answering my question about if pirates steal games with LAN or no LAN more. Your best response is no response at all still.
Pirates steal both.
Games with LAN have servers formed which are more stable that games without LAN.
These servers pull away customers and encourages more piracy.
On June 24 2011 02:10 Baarn wrote: Do games without LAN get pirated less than games that have it. The way I see it is they are gonna steal it anyway so cutting corners to punish a paying customer isn't helping anyone either.
Kespa.
Massive giant Lawsuit.
It was about LAN. (Well, indirectly, it's actually a bit confusing if you go deep into the details, but the overall gist is LAN)
Blizzard, while in a lawsuit about LAN, releases a game without LAN.
A year later, Blizzard's game still has servers packed with players that did not drift off to ICCup and other LAN servers.
Wat? That didn't answer my question at all. Had nothing to do with LAN. It was coming to a fair deal for both sides. You make it sound like Kespa, ogn, mbc weren't interested in coming to a deal at all. Exaggerate something already settled more. pfft I doubt Iccup would make a star 2 server at all.
Oh, sorry.
Kespa was a lowly organization whose sole intent was for the goodness of all and Blizzard was an evil tyrant who wished to plunge the world into the darkness of its evil ways.
Does that sound better?
Will it sound better if I added that Blizzard enjoys killing kittens? how about if I add that Kespa is completely innocent and was never ever corrupt at all? Would that make it sound better?
Please oh wise one--how should it have sounded?
Still aren't answering my question about if pirates steal games with LAN or no LAN more. Your best response is no response at all still.
Pirates steal both.
Games with LAN have servers formed which are more stable that games without LAN.
These servers pull away customers and encourages more piracy.
WC3, DoTA, etc...
Great response. Still lost revenue if they steal for campaign only because that was the only interest anyway. Way I see it is a thief is a thief. If they could download ferrari then should ferrari cut features on their car? Even with pirates that hijacked ships the dutch, french and spanish didn't cut features on their ships because of the fear pirates might make use of the ship at some point. YAAAAAARRRRRRRRR they make ships of poor quality now to haul goods and gold. Maybe we shouldn't be pirates anymoooooooooore.
I've decided that it's silly trying to show pirates that what they're doing is harmful and it's shocking to me how a site like TL can have people this disrespectful to ESports. It's just frustrating and sad.
Why do they always blame pirates? I mean one of the main reason why I like playing Starcraft and HoN is because of the amazing matchmaking system. I just push a button and in one minutes I've already got a match on my hands against players of similar skill to mine.
Can such a feature be available on LAN? I don't know, maybe not.
And on that note I wish developers would stop taking out LAN just because of pirating. It's a stupid reason, games will get pirated no matter if they have LAN or not.
People cant legally publish stuff with copyright on torrents or any other hosting service, the thing that is legal-ish is downloading it from direct sites, downloading from torrents is already slightly illegal as you are sharing the files you downloaded with other people. (and very illegal for the original uploader)
You've continuously made stuff up in this thread, talk about things you dont know about (music vs radio and this whole pirating issue tbh). Ive given a reason why companies should include LAN etc. and you chose to ignore that a concentrate on poorly written sentece.
You believe in cutting people's rights, corporations sabotaging individuals and basically black mailing them, airport staff touching your balls. I would not be surprised to find out you download music and movies from the internet.
I have nothing more to say to you.
A.) I'm glad you agree that file sharing is illegal.
B.) You seeing a reason for LAN does not counter Blizzard's reason for not having LAN. Both reasons can exist without either being wrong. In other words--you don't actually have a good reason for why not having LAN is wrong other than you feel like it.
C.) I don't believe in cutting people's rights. I'm simply saying that I'm the type of person who believes in treating people exactly like you yourself are treated--and that I'm glad that Blizzard isn't me. If you read my post you'd see that I said it was a good thing that Blizzard wasn't like me. I come from a country where if homeless people showed up on your property and built a shack while you were off in the beach, the law of the land would not kick them out and tell you to just accept your new neighbors. I come from a country where laws are broken daily in front of police officers who feel that those laws being broken in front of them are harmless unless they feel its not. I come from a country where the firefighters can choose to not show up to a fire unless it's big enough to worry about. I hated that.
I moved to the US and I hear that laws are only going to be pushed if the perpetrator is rich enough/poor enough? I think that is bullshit. So stop with your privileged mindset that punishment is only something corporations should get because they deserve it and that everyone in your class/age/economic/social bracket is a saint that is simply doing what he can to get by. It's favoritism and its no different than my neighbor's house burning down because the fire marshal wanted to take a shower before he left the station and so they left half an hour after they were called in.
Just because you think something is harmless does not make it so.
D.) As someone who knows people who work in the airport. I find it offensive that you would rather they "don't mind" that people stole their planes and crashed it into buildings. I find it offensive that you think they should just "calm down" after they are given such immense government pressures to control their passengers. That you would think that riding a plane is this easy thing that you deserve to have and that its not one of the most expensive things to drive *IN THE WORLD.* After 9/11 airports had a hard time making enough money to pay for the fuel to transport people--let alone make a profit. They can't afford to be known as the plane that terrorist hijacked, or that had a shoe bomb explode. It's their right to worry about those kinds of things as business owners.
When business owners are being abused by "fringe groups," it is within their right to get pissed off and try to make a safer product.
C.) Did you read that post you linked about the music industry? It only became a problem *because* DJ's decided to upload the content without paying the producer of the music. In essence, the Music Companies only got upset when radio hosts decided to act *EXACTLY* like pirates do now. They didn't mind having music on the radio. It's cheaper for them to have it on the radio. They mind when people don't pay for the music they made because that is *stealing.*
I wish I could stop myself from responding but I just cant resist.
A) When did I or anyone in this thread argue otherwise? Its not a question of opinion its a fact.
B) I actually gave an example how it would help them, and I dont think i even need to give an example how not having LAN is wrong (just to be safe though, there have already been many drops in proffesional sc2 games, not to mention you have to be online to play your friends) Im not saying i have 100% accurate stuff that cannot be questioned, Im saying having loayal fans does bring profit and alienating your fans reduces them.
C & D)
C) ]I don't believe in cutting people's rights. Like the right of privacy maybe? I'm simply saying that I'm the type of person who believes in treating people exactly like you yourself are treated--and that I'm glad that Blizzard isn't me. If you read my post you'd see that I said it was a good thing that Blizzard wasn't like me. I come from a country where if homeless people showed up on your property and built a shack while you were off in the beach, the law of the land would not kick them out and tell you to just accept your new neighbors. I come from a country where laws are broken daily in front of police officers who feel that those laws being broken in front of them are harmless unless they feel its not. I come from a country where the firefighters can choose to not show up to a fire unless it's big enough to worry about. I hated that. That sucks, but it doesnt mean it should go from one extreme to another.
I moved to the US and I hear that laws are only going to be pushed if the perpetrator is rich enough/poor enough? I think that is bullshit. So stop with your privileged mindset that punishment is only something corporations should get because they deserve it and that everyone in your class/age/economic/social bracket is a saint that is simply doing what he can to get by. What privilege did I say individuals should have? I said the mustnt be allowed to put viruses and fish for people, the same way individuals cant It's favoritism Like the way airport staff should have rights normal people dont have aka body scanners and TSA agents? and its no different than my neighbor's house burning down because the fire marshal wanted to take a shower before he left the station and so they left half an hour after they were called in.
Just because you think something is harmless does not make it so.
D.) As someone who knows people who work in the airport. I find it offensive that you would rather they "don't mind" that people stole their planes and crashed it into buildings. I find it offensive that you think they should just "calm down" after they are given such immense government pressures to control their passengers. That you would think that riding a plane is this easy thing that you deserve to have and that its not one of the most expensive things to drive *IN THE WORLD.* After 9/11 airports had a hard time making enough money to pay for the fuel to transport people--let alone make a profit. They can't afford to be known as the plane that terrorist hijacked, or that had a shoe bomb explode. It's their right to worry about those kinds of things as business owners. Here i just find amazing you are concerned about the company not making money instead of the usual argument of safety of people but whatever I guess.
On June 23 2011 15:10 denzelz wrote: It makes me so furious to read what the HoN developer wrote talking about "goodwill" and how PC users just don't have it. What about the Indie Game Pack that was offered for free and made money from donations only? How much money did that make?
Speaking of goodwill, what about goodwill from the companies? Games have gotten more and more expensive with more games shipped as incomplete, stripped down versions that the user must buy expansion packs or DLCs to fully enjoy. How about companies that actually care about if people are enjoying the game? Which company lets you refund your $60 after you decided that the game is not for you?
Fucking ridiculous for HoN developer to trash the users while somehow attempting to justify the money-sucking techniques that the industry has been using for the past 5 years.
Games were not cheaper before. Especially when taking inflation in account.
That doesn't mean they couldn't be even cheaper now. The industry has grown a lot there's is a lot, more competition now, technology costs are cheaper.
On June 23 2011 12:27 Ingenol wrote: It is absolutely not "rational to pirate games." On the contrary it represents the view that one is entitled to the product of another person for less than what that person is willing to exchange it. That is extremely irrational view, although disturbingly prevalent in our increasingly irrational world.
that makes no sense. if two people offer you to trade the same thing, but one asks for less, the rational thing is to choose to trade with the one who asks for less in return. I'd find it very hard to come up with anything MORE rational. so in conclusion, you must be crazy or something.
It makes perfect sense, you walk into a store and pick up an iPad, take it home for 3 weeks then go back and say you want to buy it and you were just trialling it...
Anybody who claims to download games just to "try" them are just using an excuse to make themselves feel better for being thieves, even worse are the people who pirate it and then try to argue that it's a waste of money and rubbish the game...
Hobbies cost money, PC gaming has always been one of the more expensive, people claiming that money is scarce nowadays just needs to siphon out what to buy and what not...
the majority of the games i download are single player only games that i would really never bother paying money for in the first place. developers wouldnt even have made a cent from me so it doesnt really hurt anyone. of course, there are games that i would definitely fork out the money for even if they are only single player (eg skyrim). pirates arent thieves.
music and movies on the other hand....
Pirates are thieves, your taking a product without paying, I don't understand how Singleplayer games makes it any different? Even if you would never buy it your still taking it.
See my previous example, but let's say you walk into a Ferrari dealership smash a window, hotwire and drive off into the sunset, but it's ok right becaues you'd never buy one normally, totally not theft.
Your arguments are bordering on nonsensical. It's not up for debate whether piracy is stealing as it falls under an entirely different definition.
His example is extreme, but the underlying action is the same. I said it before and I'll say it again, pirating is taking a product that cost people money to make, with the expectation of profit, and offering no just compensation. It really is the equivalent of stealing.
I could say it's the equivalent of advertising and my equivalency is just as valid as yours.
On June 24 2011 02:53 lorkac wrote: I've decided that it's silly trying to show pirates that what they're doing is harmful and it's shocking to me how a site like TL can have people this disrespectful to ESports. It's just frustrating and sad.
No LAN does NOT necessary stop piracy, it just postpones it, for example it took some Guys 6-9 Months to at LAN and private servers to MW2 and it took people less than a week to do this with crisis 2. I think that someday crackers will find out how to play SC2 or HoN LAN, if the game is more popular it will get cracked faster, no game is completely secure
On June 23 2011 15:10 denzelz wrote: It makes me so furious to read what the HoN developer wrote talking about "goodwill" and how PC users just don't have it. What about the Indie Game Pack that was offered for free and made money from donations only? How much money did that make?
Speaking of goodwill, what about goodwill from the companies? Games have gotten more and more expensive with more games shipped as incomplete, stripped down versions that the user must buy expansion packs or DLCs to fully enjoy. How about companies that actually care about if people are enjoying the game? Which company lets you refund your $60 after you decided that the game is not for you?
Fucking ridiculous for HoN developer to trash the users while somehow attempting to justify the money-sucking techniques that the industry has been using for the past 5 years.
Games were not cheaper before. Especially when taking inflation in account.
That doesn't mean they couldn't be even cheaper now. The industry has grown a lot there's is a lot, more competition now, technology costs are cheaper.
Unless you work in the industry you have no basis for this. the cost of game development isn't just "cheaper now", you still have to pay developers, develop the product, pay for advertising, etc. People swear just because computers are faster, that making a game from scratch is somehow "magically cheaper".
Most people who choose to obtain a product via piracy would not have opted for the legitimate course had piracy not been an option. The piracy argument is more or less crap.
On June 24 2011 02:57 Exe_adrian wrote: Why do they always blame pirates? I mean one of the main reason why I like playing Starcraft and HoN is because of the amazing matchmaking system. I just push a button and in one minutes I've already got a match on my hands against players of similar skill to mine.
Can such a feature be available on LAN? I don't know, maybe not.
And on that note I wish developers would stop taking out LAN just because of pirating. It's a stupid reason, games will get pirated no matter if they have LAN or not.
Really? Want to point me to the pirated multiplayer capable copy of SC2?
Easier solution, sell a "Tournament Edition" LAN only copy, remove single player, only have multiplayer enabled, it can not go on the tournament ladder either. It will be used pretty old school style, both computers connect, other computers connect to IP, then there, it's done.
The HoN guy in the post who blames Piracy, piracy is always going to be there, that's an excuse you can use yourself not to develop the necessary software to combat these issues. There are multiple solutions to these problems, others including. You host all the tournaments or most of them, and give out these editions to trusted partner, who do not release them to the public. All these products would have the characters for your HoN, LoL, SC2, etc.. all the minor crap. Easy enough and then you can create a way for them to import their preselected keys, etc.. into the computer.
There are solutions just people don't want to do the pogramming part sometimes, it's more expensive usually.
I believe if the Major Tournament scene want a LAN or a dedicated server system for their event then they talk to Blizz directly ( they prolly have been in contact with Blizz). Most of the people who are complaining on here is really minor. It really doesn't make a difference. LAN to play with your friends, really not a good argument to a company that has more to lose then gain. LAN for a major tournament GSL is in Seoul and the BNET servers are right there in the city. They have a deal with GOM to dedicate servers for their games (possibly).
It seems to me that most of the people making the opinions here have not made anything worth losing. If you developed a product and thought you could make money off it, would you allow it to be pirated and lose your investment. No, you would be mad as hell. You would make it so that it could be protected as long as possible. So why are we bashing them (Blizz and Hon). It seems to me we are bashing them cause we want cool stuff for us. Its no longer the ME generation but the FREE generation. Game Industries aren't focused on the people without money. Its focused on the consumer who has money to spare. Same with sponsors. So, take this post with a grain of salt. If you're one of those guys who say I'm not wasting my money on that, then don't.
I read reviews and then spend my money. If I'm not happy with it( oh well, nothing ventured nothing gained) To say not having a LAN format is hurting the game, really? I don't see Major tournaments having a problem drawing and audience. Dreamhack had no problem drawing a crowd.
They'll keep blaming pirates for online-only just like they keep blaming terrorists for stricter laws.
Thanks a ton, anyone who agrees with removing game features. I had to explain again to a friend yesterday how SC2 is a less feature-rich game than SC1, despite costing more and being released a decade later.
Can't play friends in the same room OR friends in Europe.
On June 24 2011 03:31 Mallard86 wrote: Most people who choose to obtain a product via piracy would not have opted for the legitimate course had piracy not been an option. The piracy argument is more or less crap.
people who steal music probably would not have bought the album, but they are still getting it for free which is unfair to the artist. so denying lan is just keeping it fair in any game developers POV
On June 23 2011 12:52 pirates wrote: I didn't kill LAN.
On June 23 2011 20:08 xtfftc wrote: Everyone knows by now that piracy boosts the longterm sales - of music, of books, of games, of everything. Everyone but incompetent CEOs trying to increase their end-of-the-year bonuses.
I'd disagree. From a business standpoint facilitating piracy really offers no benefit; it's equivalent to making a product and giving it away for free. On top of that the scope of piracy is pretty huge, and Starcraft isn't something that benefits much from other merchandise (except for the occasional blizzard strategy book very few people buy). If it does, I highly doubt it's enough to compensate for losing millions of potential purchases. .
Never heard of free samples? It is the #1 strategy for promoting a product (when it's good).
On June 24 2011 03:31 Mallard86 wrote: Most people who choose to obtain a product via piracy would not have opted for the legitimate course had piracy not been an option. The piracy argument is more or less crap.
I personally would've bought plenty of stuff had I not been able to get it for free. We can't just assume most people wouldn't have bought it anyway.
On June 23 2011 15:10 denzelz wrote: It makes me so furious to read what the HoN developer wrote talking about "goodwill" and how PC users just don't have it. What about the Indie Game Pack that was offered for free and made money from donations only? How much money did that make?
Speaking of goodwill, what about goodwill from the companies? Games have gotten more and more expensive with more games shipped as incomplete, stripped down versions that the user must buy expansion packs or DLCs to fully enjoy. How about companies that actually care about if people are enjoying the game? Which company lets you refund your $60 after you decided that the game is not for you?
Fucking ridiculous for HoN developer to trash the users while somehow attempting to justify the money-sucking techniques that the industry has been using for the past 5 years.
Games were not cheaper before. Especially when taking inflation in account.
That doesn't mean they couldn't be even cheaper now. The industry has grown a lot there's is a lot, more competition now, technology costs are cheaper.
Unless you work in the industry you have no basis for this. the cost of game development isn't just "cheaper now", you still have to pay developers, develop the product, pay for advertising, etc. People swear just because computers are faster, that making a game from scratch is somehow "magically cheaper".
game development cost is not the same as the cost of manufacturing the actual physical product, that's what i had in mind.
On June 23 2011 07:10 mdma-_- wrote: that still doesnt explain why they cant allow people to play each other in lan with the necessecity of being logged into bnet/whatever online client.
cheap excuse just to blame it on pirates tbh
I'm sorry, but I totally disagree with that statement. I'm just gonna be upfront and tell the truth:
Back in the BW days...none of my friends bought the game. None of them. I didn't even buy the game. Do I make myself clear?
We were all young men in our 20's, ready and willing to thumb our noses at the "system" and download anything, and everything we can, for free. Even when we knew a game didn't cost very much money. Even when we knew it's an awesome game and we really should buy it.
Our social circle was such that, if we caught you actually spending money on anything you didn't have to, you were criticized, derided, made fun of. In fact we would make a huge point of downloading the very item you spent dear old $60 on, and wave it in your face. This went for nigh anything at all. If you spent too much money when you didn't have to, you won't be hearing the last of it from the group.
We didn't steal real-world items. We didn't rob banks or steal from the grocery store(come on). But the digital world...was fair game. Every game we played...Quake...Hexen...UT...Duke3D...every game you can possibly think of in the late 90's...we pirated those games and played them.
Obviously that meant that we never played BW on Battle.net. But we didn't care. It was enough(at the time) to just play against each other on makeshift LAN's coppled together through coax cable(wow those were the days).
As for myself? I truly loved(and still love) Blizzard games and began to buy them, the group be damned. Diablo II, Warcraft series, WoW...and so on. And I'll say this.
Because BW supported spawning and LAN, we saw no reason to buy it. At all. Ever. Why should we, when we can get it for free? This brings up the most important question of all:
Why would you willingly spend hard-earned money on something, when it's a mouse-click away?
...unless not all the functionality is there - unless you buy the game. Or you can't play the game, or enjoy the game to it's fullest extent. Bingo. There you go.
I think game companies should always release demos and/or trials for their games. The main reason I pirate is because I don't want to spend $60 on a game I might not even like. Most games I pirate I don't end up liking anyway so i uninstall them and move on. The games that I play regularly I actually own. I never played HoN because I'm not sure if I will like it, so I don't want to risk my money on something I might not like. I don't view my piracy as theft, because most games I pirate I wouldn't have bought anyway. I am too poor and don't like to risk my money on something I might not like. If there is a game that I know I will like I just buy it right away, but most of the time I want to try it out first, so I can make an informed purchase.The market needs to adapt to consumer, the consumer shouldn't have to adapt to the market.
On June 23 2011 15:10 denzelz wrote: It makes me so furious to read what the HoN developer wrote talking about "goodwill" and how PC users just don't have it. What about the Indie Game Pack that was offered for free and made money from donations only? How much money did that make?
Speaking of goodwill, what about goodwill from the companies? Games have gotten more and more expensive with more games shipped as incomplete, stripped down versions that the user must buy expansion packs or DLCs to fully enjoy. How about companies that actually care about if people are enjoying the game? Which company lets you refund your $60 after you decided that the game is not for you?
Fucking ridiculous for HoN developer to trash the users while somehow attempting to justify the money-sucking techniques that the industry has been using for the past 5 years.
Games were not cheaper before. Especially when taking inflation in account.
That doesn't mean they couldn't be even cheaper now. The industry has grown a lot there's is a lot, more competition now, technology costs are cheaper.
It's not though alought making disks is much cheaper then making chips to go into games that only makes the mass producing of the games cheaper, but games used to be developed for much less, making the thing that physically holds the game has gotten much much cheaper, but the price of development as sky rocketed. Along with the price of hardware when sony and microsoft unveiled their new systems they sold it to you at a debt you only payed for part of the system they planned on making that up once you bought x amount of games probably around 5-8 games somewhere near the avg for people. Just because one thing has gotten cheaper to do doesn't meant the other parts have also, the only reason why the price has stayed pretty much the same is expectations and expansion becuase it became cheap to make the physical thing holding the game and the audience has grown very much so sense the 80's they made up for selling cheap games by selling in volume.
So I was thinking of a way to change the way the game worked so that you had to be registered online in order to play a offline in a LAN mode, so to speak.
What if, in order to plan on a LAN mode of sorts, you had to connect to battle.net at least once on the machine you play in order to get 'recognized,' or rather, so battle.net can give you the privilege of playing in the offline LAN mode. It would be like saying,"We just want to make sure you bought the game/activated your account (you know, the CD keys/codes). Now that you have made contact with Battle.net with a legitimate account that has access/bought the game, we will give you the privilege on this machine to run in the LAN mode."
I know that there are always downsides of something, and with this, if you wanted to play on a brand new machine, you would NEED access to the internet still, at least at first, to play on the LAN mode. Also, I am not that knowledgeable in regards to how easy it would be to bypass this, so I'm not sure how secure this would be.
And, this may have been suggested before. Nonetheless, could someone enlighten me a little bit more as to why Blizzard wouldn't have something set up at least similar to this?
I find it hard to believe that having LAN would increase sales of SC2, or that it would bring a significantly larger amount of Esports fans. There is no way the amount of people who want to buy SC2 but don't because it lacks LAN is more than the amount of people who would download it illegally with LAN. You really think tons of people are about to buy SC2 until they discover it doesn't have LAN support? And i highly doubt that the reason my friends don't follow the starcraft2 scene don't do it because the one time they watched a game it lagged in a key moment. LAN would be awesome for the pro scene but there is just no way that from Blizzards perspective it is a profitable venture.
On June 23 2011 15:10 denzelz wrote: It makes me so furious to read what the HoN developer wrote talking about "goodwill" and how PC users just don't have it. What about the Indie Game Pack that was offered for free and made money from donations only? How much money did that make?
Speaking of goodwill, what about goodwill from the companies? Games have gotten more and more expensive with more games shipped as incomplete, stripped down versions that the user must buy expansion packs or DLCs to fully enjoy. How about companies that actually care about if people are enjoying the game? Which company lets you refund your $60 after you decided that the game is not for you?
Fucking ridiculous for HoN developer to trash the users while somehow attempting to justify the money-sucking techniques that the industry has been using for the past 5 years.
Games were not cheaper before. Especially when taking inflation in account.
That doesn't mean they couldn't be even cheaper now. The industry has grown a lot there's is a lot, more competition now, technology costs are cheaper.
It's not though alought making disks is much cheaper then making chips to go into games that only makes the mass producing of the games cheaper, but games used to be developed for much less, making the thing that physically holds the game has gotten much much cheaper, but the price of development as sky rocketed. Along with the price of hardware when sony and microsoft unveiled their new systems they sold it to you at a debt you only payed for part of the system they planned on making that up once you bought x amount of games probably around 5-8 games somewhere near the avg for people. Just because one thing has gotten cheaper to do doesn't meant the other parts have also, the only reason why the price has stayed pretty much the same is expectations and expansion becuase it became cheap to make the physical thing holding the game and the audience has grown very much so sense the 80's they made up for selling cheap games by selling in volume.
Not exactly sure what are you trying to say here or if you are even arguing against me but to clarify my main point was:
The market has grown tremendously.
It is an industry that is now bigger than the movie industry.
they spend millions on development (mostly on marketing) because they know they can make billions. (or they could spend close to zero and still make millions, look at notch).
So to get an actual idea to whether games are cheaper or more expensive to the consumers relative to the past one would have to adjust for other factors additional to inflation.
On June 23 2011 15:10 denzelz wrote: It makes me so furious to read what the HoN developer wrote talking about "goodwill" and how PC users just don't have it. What about the Indie Game Pack that was offered for free and made money from donations only? How much money did that make?
Speaking of goodwill, what about goodwill from the companies? Games have gotten more and more expensive with more games shipped as incomplete, stripped down versions that the user must buy expansion packs or DLCs to fully enjoy. How about companies that actually care about if people are enjoying the game? Which company lets you refund your $60 after you decided that the game is not for you?
Fucking ridiculous for HoN developer to trash the users while somehow attempting to justify the money-sucking techniques that the industry has been using for the past 5 years.
Games were not cheaper before. Especially when taking inflation in account.
That doesn't mean they couldn't be even cheaper now. The industry has grown a lot there's is a lot, more competition now, technology costs are cheaper.
It's not though alought making disks is much cheaper then making chips to go into games that only makes the mass producing of the games cheaper, but games used to be developed for much less, making the thing that physically holds the game has gotten much much cheaper, but the price of development as sky rocketed. Along with the price of hardware when sony and microsoft unveiled their new systems they sold it to you at a debt you only payed for part of the system they planned on making that up once you bought x amount of games probably around 5-8 games somewhere near the avg for people. Just because one thing has gotten cheaper to do doesn't meant the other parts have also, the only reason why the price has stayed pretty much the same is expectations and expansion becuase it became cheap to make the physical thing holding the game and the audience has grown very much so sense the 80's they made up for selling cheap games by selling in volume.
Not exactly sure what are you trying to say here or if you are even arguing against me but to clarify my main point was:
The market has grown tremendously.
It is an industry that is now bigger than the movie industry.
they spend millions on development (mostly on marketing) because they know they can make billions. (or they could spend close to zero and still make millions, look at notch).
So to get an actual idea to whether games are cheaper or more expensive to the consumers relative to the past one would have to adjust for other factors additional to inflation.
the video game is not bigger than the movie industry, unless you're using an absurd delimiter like "the quantity of games produced in 2010 is greater than movies," which it looks like you are.
On June 24 2011 05:55 Solicer wrote: So I was thinking of a way to change the way the game worked so that you had to be registered online in order to play a offline in a LAN mode, so to speak.
What if, in order to plan on a LAN mode of sorts, you had to connect to battle.net at least once on the machine you play in order to get 'recognized,' or rather, so battle.net can give you the privilege of playing in the offline LAN mode. It would be like saying,"We just want to make sure you bought the game/activated your account (you know, the CD keys/codes). Now that you have made contact with Battle.net with a legitimate account that has access/bought the game, we will give you the privilege on this machine to run in the LAN mode."
I know that there are always downsides of something, and with this, if you wanted to play on a brand new machine, you would NEED access to the internet still, at least at first, to play on the LAN mode. Also, I am not that knowledgeable in regards to how easy it would be to bypass this, so I'm not sure how secure this would be.
And, this may have been suggested before. Nonetheless, could someone enlighten me a little bit more as to why Blizzard wouldn't have something set up at least similar to this?
It's not as easy as that. It's not hard to find a "auth.blizzard.com/authenticate" (example of url upon which the authentication service would listen) and replace it with "auth.pirated.com" in binary file and thus bypassing the whole auth. Of course you could use some sort of public/private key encryption which would validate that the message token from blizz authentication service was really sent from blizzard but, as with the auth url, the public key can be found and replaced in order to make the fake tokens seem legit.
On June 23 2011 15:10 denzelz wrote: It makes me so furious to read what the HoN developer wrote talking about "goodwill" and how PC users just don't have it. What about the Indie Game Pack that was offered for free and made money from donations only? How much money did that make?
Speaking of goodwill, what about goodwill from the companies? Games have gotten more and more expensive with more games shipped as incomplete, stripped down versions that the user must buy expansion packs or DLCs to fully enjoy. How about companies that actually care about if people are enjoying the game? Which company lets you refund your $60 after you decided that the game is not for you?
Fucking ridiculous for HoN developer to trash the users while somehow attempting to justify the money-sucking techniques that the industry has been using for the past 5 years.
Games were not cheaper before. Especially when taking inflation in account.
That doesn't mean they couldn't be even cheaper now. The industry has grown a lot there's is a lot, more competition now, technology costs are cheaper.
It's not though alought making disks is much cheaper then making chips to go into games that only makes the mass producing of the games cheaper, but games used to be developed for much less, making the thing that physically holds the game has gotten much much cheaper, but the price of development as sky rocketed. Along with the price of hardware when sony and microsoft unveiled their new systems they sold it to you at a debt you only payed for part of the system they planned on making that up once you bought x amount of games probably around 5-8 games somewhere near the avg for people. Just because one thing has gotten cheaper to do doesn't meant the other parts have also, the only reason why the price has stayed pretty much the same is expectations and expansion becuase it became cheap to make the physical thing holding the game and the audience has grown very much so sense the 80's they made up for selling cheap games by selling in volume.
Not exactly sure what are you trying to say here or if you are even arguing against me but to clarify my main point was:
The market has grown tremendously.
It is an industry that is now bigger than the movie industry.
they spend millions on development (mostly on marketing) because they know they can make billions. (or they could spend close to zero and still make millions, look at notch).
So to get an actual idea to whether games are cheaper or more expensive to the consumers relative to the past one would have to adjust for other factors additional to inflation.
I don't think you're making any point then. You're only point being made is that the gaming industry is bigger than the movie industry. Okay. and the movie industry has been suffering major losses every year to piracy, increased cost of production, and we've all griped about how much it costs for movie tickets nowadays. nothing in that comparison legitimizes anything you're arguing for.
production costs have gone up: yes market costs have gone up: yes hardware costs have gone down: yes production costs + market costs > hardware costs? yes
therefore end product costs more? yes.
where's the flawed logic here. pointing out ONE scenario of a gaming group who paid almost nothing to make millions is the EXCEPTION not the status quo. If it was so easy to make games at the cost of nothing and then make millions off of it, there'd be a LOT more millionaires out there. You think people who run these corporations are legitimately stupid? you think they're BILLIONAIRES because they're unintelligent? They do what they see is the best move for their business because it is the most intelligent move possible based on their advisory reports, and expert advice. The thought process of people in this thread is mindbogglingly stupefying.
/sarcasm Yes yes, piracy is cool, obviously it doesn't hurt anyone! lol, blizzard is evil! /sarcasm off
Lulz at comparing Blizzard and HoN blaming pirates to governments blaming terrorists for increased infringements on our rights. ESPORTS, right?
Please, tell me when anyone here was granted the inalienable right via their constitution to fucking LAN access for a computer game. Where? Anyone. Show me where a country has given that right, like Freedom of Expression/Privacy/Gun Ownership/Vote etc. etc. and I'll accept the above comparison. Before then, you're all alarmist trolls. Blizzard refusing LAN support is nothing like the Bush administration pushing Congress into allowing the American people to be wiretapped for no reason at all. Or the Obama administration for pushing Congress to allow that policy to stay in place. If you think it is, you're being silly. And you take your videogames waaaaaayyyy too seriously.
Sorry guys, but LAN will never be implemented because of piracy, and we've known that for the past year and a half. You can make a claim for special "authenticators" and bullshit like that, but remember the WoW authenticators people bought for their account to stop hackers and bots? They were cracked in how long? I saw forum posts two months after the things came out about people losing their accounts despite the authenticator being on there. It's basically a miniature CD key generator, after all. And that's all any other LAN authenticator would be. And if you wanted Internet access before LAN access, (first of all, that completely misses the point of LAN), then you have to understand that that would be easily hacked as well. People aren't stupid, and neither are pirates. The only reason multiplayer hasn't been hacked and replicated yet is because you need so much communication with the Battle.net servers. Take that away, and you're done. Blizzard has lost control of their game.
And anyone else whining that Blizzard "just wants more money" is right. Blizzard only wants more money. They're a gaming COMPANY. It's what they do. They have to pay bills too, ya know. And to fault them for that is laughable. It's not like they're some evil, soulless organization out to suck us dry. You know, they're not charging us monthly for ladder access. They could easily do that, you can't play WoW without a subscription, so they have the infrastructure in place. They're not charging you anything beyond the 60 dollars to buy the game, and the reduced price (probably 40 dollars) to buy the two expansions.
For being such an evil company, Blizzard is actually pretty kick ass.
How did this get to 40 pages of rationalizing piracy? Obviously piracy reduces revenue in most cases.
Music: The music industry lost over half its revenue over the past decade. Without record sales, the Indie artist model has shifted to licensing their hit single to an ad campaign and performing concerts indefinitely. Concert ticket prices have risen drastically. People used to look at their $14 and say, "I'd rather have a CD than this money because it's the only way I'll get to listen to that music when I want." The internet today laughs at people with a purchased music collection.
Movie: The movie industry has flat-lined for the past decade in theatre and DVD sales. Their model has shifted twoards theatre revenue from "event" movies, huge budget films, mostly 3D, and mostly action-adventure.
Game: The only entertainment industry that is growing is the gaming industry. If it weren't for the dynamic of the console (difficult to pirate games) and the server (essential to online games, high upkeep costs, secrecy of code) then this industry would fall just like the others. Game industries can't afford to let pirates create a work-around for online play.
On June 24 2011 06:14 akomatic wrote: How did this get to 40 pages of rationalizing piracy? Obviously piracy reduces revenue in most cases.
Music: The music industry lost over half its revenue over the past decade. Without record sales, the Indie artist model has shifted to licensing their hit single to an ad campaign and performing concerts indefinitely. Concert ticket prices have risen drastically. People used to look at their $14 and say, "I'd rather have a CD than this money because it's the only way I'll get to listen to that music when I want." The internet today laughs at people with a purchased music collection.
Movie: The movie industry has flat-lined for the past decade in theatre and DVD sales. Their model has shifted twoards theatre revenue from "event" movies, huge budget films, mostly 3D, and mostly action-adventure.
Game: The only entertainment industry that is growing is the gaming industry. If it weren't for the dynamic of the console (difficult to pirate games) and the server (essential to online games, high upkeep costs, secrecy of code) then this industry would fall just like the others. Game industries can't afford to let pirates create a work-around for online play.
This is almost all incorrect. The music industry as a whole is growing (1, 2). Only record sales are shrinking. The money is coming in from increased concert revenue and other scarce goods. The movie industry is also growing (source)
On June 24 2011 06:14 akomatic wrote: How did this get to 40 pages of rationalizing piracy? Obviously piracy reduces revenue in most cases.
Music: The music industry lost over half its revenue over the past decade. Without record sales, the Indie artist model has shifted to licensing their hit single to an ad campaign and performing concerts indefinitely. Concert ticket prices have risen drastically. People used to look at their $14 and say, "I'd rather have a CD than this money because it's the only way I'll get to listen to that music when I want." The internet today laughs at people with a purchased music collection.
Movie: The movie industry has flat-lined for the past decade in theatre and DVD sales. Their model has shifted twoards theatre revenue from "event" movies, huge budget films, mostly 3D, and mostly action-adventure.
Game: The only entertainment industry that is growing is the gaming industry. If it weren't for the dynamic of the console (difficult to pirate games) and the server (essential to online games, high upkeep costs, secrecy of code) then this industry would fall just like the others. Game industries can't afford to let pirates create a work-around for online play.
This is almost all incorrect. The music industry as a whole is growing (1, 2). Only record sales are shrinking. The money is coming in from increased concert revenue and other scarce goods. The movie industry is also growing (source)
You're rght, I'm sorry I mispoke. I was looking at charts for CD and DVD/VHS/BlueRay sales. As I said, concert and theatre sales have picked up the slack from other sources. The advent of 3D has bucked the flat-lining I was mentioning. That said, all of these trends (increased cost and emphasis on live experiences, DRM, no LAN, selling music licensing) are the result of trying to bypass piracy.
On June 24 2011 05:55 Solicer wrote: So I was thinking of a way to change the way the game worked so that you had to be registered online in order to play a offline in a LAN mode, so to speak.
What if, in order to plan on a LAN mode of sorts, you had to connect to battle.net at least once on the machine you play in order to get 'recognized,' or rather, so battle.net can give you the privilege of playing in the offline LAN mode. It would be like saying,"We just want to make sure you bought the game/activated your account (you know, the CD keys/codes). Now that you have made contact with Battle.net with a legitimate account that has access/bought the game, we will give you the privilege on this machine to run in the LAN mode."
I know that there are always downsides of something, and with this, if you wanted to play on a brand new machine, you would NEED access to the internet still, at least at first, to play on the LAN mode. Also, I am not that knowledgeable in regards to how easy it would be to bypass this, so I'm not sure how secure this would be.
And, this may have been suggested before. Nonetheless, could someone enlighten me a little bit more as to why Blizzard wouldn't have something set up at least similar to this?
It's not as easy as that. It's not hard to find a "auth.blizzard.com/authenticate" (example of url upon which the authentication service would listen) and replace it with "auth.pirated.com" in binary file and thus bypassing the whole auth. Of course you could use some sort of public/private key encryption which would validate that the message token from blizz authentication service was really sent from blizzard but, as with the auth url, the public key can be found and replaced in order to make the fake tokens seem legit.
I see. So, is there any way at all to have the LAN mode disabled until you can verify, through the internet, that you have bought the game (with the correct keys/codes, and a legitimate account)? Or is there no way to do this because of the nature of the files/data that is needed to activate the LAN mode?
On June 23 2011 15:10 denzelz wrote: It makes me so furious to read what the HoN developer wrote talking about "goodwill" and how PC users just don't have it. What about the Indie Game Pack that was offered for free and made money from donations only? How much money did that make?
Speaking of goodwill, what about goodwill from the companies? Games have gotten more and more expensive with more games shipped as incomplete, stripped down versions that the user must buy expansion packs or DLCs to fully enjoy. How about companies that actually care about if people are enjoying the game? Which company lets you refund your $60 after you decided that the game is not for you?
Fucking ridiculous for HoN developer to trash the users while somehow attempting to justify the money-sucking techniques that the industry has been using for the past 5 years.
Games were not cheaper before. Especially when taking inflation in account.
That doesn't mean they couldn't be even cheaper now. The industry has grown a lot there's is a lot, more competition now, technology costs are cheaper.
It's not though alought making disks is much cheaper then making chips to go into games that only makes the mass producing of the games cheaper, but games used to be developed for much less, making the thing that physically holds the game has gotten much much cheaper, but the price of development as sky rocketed. Along with the price of hardware when sony and microsoft unveiled their new systems they sold it to you at a debt you only payed for part of the system they planned on making that up once you bought x amount of games probably around 5-8 games somewhere near the avg for people. Just because one thing has gotten cheaper to do doesn't meant the other parts have also, the only reason why the price has stayed pretty much the same is expectations and expansion becuase it became cheap to make the physical thing holding the game and the audience has grown very much so sense the 80's they made up for selling cheap games by selling in volume.
Not exactly sure what are you trying to say here or if you are even arguing against me but to clarify my main point was:
The market has grown tremendously.
It is an industry that is now bigger than the movie industry.
they spend millions on development (mostly on marketing) because they know they can make billions. (or they could spend close to zero and still make millions, look at notch).
So to get an actual idea to whether games are cheaper or more expensive to the consumers relative to the past one would have to adjust for other factors additional to inflation.
I don't think you're making any point then. You're only point being made is that the gaming industry is bigger than the movie industry. Okay. and the movie industry has been suffering major losses every year to piracy, increased cost of production, and we've all griped about how much it costs for movie tickets nowadays. nothing in that comparison legitimizes anything you're arguing for.
production costs have gone up: yes market costs have gone up: yes hardware costs have gone down: yes production costs + market costs > hardware costs? yes
therefore end product costs more? yes.
where's the flawed logic here. pointing out ONE scenario of a gaming group who paid almost nothing to make millions is the EXCEPTION not the status quo. If it was so easy to make games at the cost of nothing and then make millions off of it, there'd be a LOT more millionaires out there. You think people who run these corporations are legitimately stupid? you think they're BILLIONAIRES because they're unintelligent? They do what they see is the best move for their business because it is the most intelligent move possible based on their advisory reports, and expert advice. The thought process of people in this thread is mindbogglingly stupefying.
/sarcasm Yes yes, piracy is cool, obviously it doesn't hurt anyone! lol, blizzard is evil! /sarcasm off
READ. UNDERSTAND. Then respond. Ironic that you should talk about thought process.
Answer this easy questionnaire, the answers can be found in the quoted posts:
1 Did I make any conclusion at all as to whether the end product costs more?
2 What can you conclude about my position on piracy and blizzard based on the quoted posts? (this is a bit of a trick question).
Once you answer this correctly we can continue discussing.
On June 24 2011 06:04 brazenraven wrote:
the video game is not bigger than the movie industry, unless you're using an absurd delimiter like "the quantity of games produced in 2010 is greater than movies," which it looks like you are.
Is "sells more" a good enough absurd delimiter for you?
On June 24 2011 05:55 Solicer wrote: So I was thinking of a way to change the way the game worked so that you had to be registered online in order to play a offline in a LAN mode, so to speak.
What if, in order to plan on a LAN mode of sorts, you had to connect to battle.net at least once on the machine you play in order to get 'recognized,' or rather, so battle.net can give you the privilege of playing in the offline LAN mode. It would be like saying,"We just want to make sure you bought the game/activated your account (you know, the CD keys/codes). Now that you have made contact with Battle.net with a legitimate account that has access/bought the game, we will give you the privilege on this machine to run in the LAN mode."
I know that there are always downsides of something, and with this, if you wanted to play on a brand new machine, you would NEED access to the internet still, at least at first, to play on the LAN mode. Also, I am not that knowledgeable in regards to how easy it would be to bypass this, so I'm not sure how secure this would be.
And, this may have been suggested before. Nonetheless, could someone enlighten me a little bit more as to why Blizzard wouldn't have something set up at least similar to this?
It's not as easy as that. It's not hard to find a "auth.blizzard.com/authenticate" (example of url upon which the authentication service would listen) and replace it with "auth.pirated.com" in binary file and thus bypassing the whole auth. Of course you could use some sort of public/private key encryption which would validate that the message token from blizz authentication service was really sent from blizzard but, as with the auth url, the public key can be found and replaced in order to make the fake tokens seem legit.
I see. So, is there any way at all to have the LAN mode disabled until you can verify, through the internet, that you have bought the game (with the correct keys/codes, and a legitimate account)? Or is there no way to do this because of the nature of the files/data that is needed to activate the LAN mode?
The only truly bypassing way (and it still can be bypassed btw), is to force the client to check and check often with the bnet servers to reauthenticate enough times to make it difficult/annoying for piracy to break the code, but at that point, if you need to connect through to bnet so often, why not just do it ON bnet.
On June 24 2011 06:14 akomatic wrote: How did this get to 40 pages of rationalizing piracy? Obviously piracy reduces revenue in most cases.
Music: The music industry lost over half its revenue over the past decade. Without record sales, the Indie artist model has shifted to licensing their hit single to an ad campaign and performing concerts indefinitely. Concert ticket prices have risen drastically. People used to look at their $14 and say, "I'd rather have a CD than this money because it's the only way I'll get to listen to that music when I want." The internet today laughs at people with a purchased music collection.
Movie: The movie industry has flat-lined for the past decade in theatre and DVD sales. Their model has shifted twoards theatre revenue from "event" movies, huge budget films, mostly 3D, and mostly action-adventure.
Game: The only entertainment industry that is growing is the gaming industry. If it weren't for the dynamic of the console (difficult to pirate games) and the server (essential to online games, high upkeep costs, secrecy of code) then this industry would fall just like the others. Game industries can't afford to let pirates create a work-around for online play.
This is almost all incorrect. The music industry as a whole is growing (1, 2). Only record sales are shrinking. The money is coming in from increased concert revenue and other scarce goods. The movie industry is also growing (source)
You're rght, I'm sorry I mispoke. I was looking at charts for CD and DVD/VHS/BlueRay sales. As I said, concert and theatre sales have picked up the slack from other sources. The advent of 3D has bucked the flat-lining I was mentioning. That said, all of these trends (increased cost and emphasis on live experiences, DRM, no LAN, selling music licensing) are the result of trying to bypass piracy.
I don't think it's so much the result of 'bypassing piracy' as it is a changing marketplace. The content itself has become an infinite good whose primary purpose is drawing attention to the scarce goods (live concerts, online experiences, etc.). As more people share the content freely, those scarce goods become more valuable and become the main source of revenue. Fighting 'piracy' is a losing battle not only because you won't stop people from sharing, but it's really in the best interests of everyone if content creators and consumers alike learned to embrace this new model.
That doesn't mean they couldn't be even cheaper now. The industry has grown a lot there's is a lot, more competition now, technology costs are cheaper.
was an argument that the games should be even cheaper, and my argument back is it's not that easy that just because technology costs are cheaper, that games can inevitably be cheaper. get it? got it? k.
On June 23 2011 07:14 ThePurist wrote: Microsoft operating systems and office software are two of the biggest pirated softwares and they still make money. This guy tries to act like a realist but he doesn't really have a clue about economics. The opinions are too pessimistic and overgeneralizes the vast majority of people who purchase games with their hard-earned cash. Pirates don't stop revenue streams pirates were not a consumer in the first place. The assumption that a pirated copy was a sale is flawed imo and his last few personal statements are questionable as I perceive them as a cop-out when his whole opinion was about "simple economics".
Dumb dumb dumb dumb post. Do you have a clue about economics? If you did, you would realize that the fact that piracy drives up prices across the board. Say that you are trying to determine the present value of an project with a known market size. In order to price out the product, you must account that a certain percentage of users will not pay. Piracy is most definitely a sale, the provider of the software just does not get paid.
On June 24 2011 06:14 akomatic wrote: How did this get to 40 pages of rationalizing piracy? Obviously piracy reduces revenue in most cases.
Music: The music industry lost over half its revenue over the past decade. Without record sales, the Indie artist model has shifted to licensing their hit single to an ad campaign and performing concerts indefinitely. Concert ticket prices have risen drastically. People used to look at their $14 and say, "I'd rather have a CD than this money because it's the only way I'll get to listen to that music when I want." The internet today laughs at people with a purchased music collection.
Movie: The movie industry has flat-lined for the past decade in theatre and DVD sales. Their model has shifted twoards theatre revenue from "event" movies, huge budget films, mostly 3D, and mostly action-adventure.
Game: The only entertainment industry that is growing is the gaming industry. If it weren't for the dynamic of the console (difficult to pirate games) and the server (essential to online games, high upkeep costs, secrecy of code) then this industry would fall just like the others. Game industries can't afford to let pirates create a work-around for online play.
This is almost all incorrect. The music industry as a whole is growing (1, 2). Only record sales are shrinking. The money is coming in from increased concert revenue and other scarce goods. The movie industry is also growing (source)
You're rght, I'm sorry I mispoke. I was looking at charts for CD and DVD/VHS/BlueRay sales. As I said, concert and theatre sales have picked up the slack from other sources. The advent of 3D has bucked the flat-lining I was mentioning. That said, all of these trends (increased cost and emphasis on live experiences, DRM, no LAN, selling music licensing) are the result of trying to bypass piracy.
I don't think it's so much the result of 'bypassing piracy' as it is a changing marketplace. The content itself has become an infinite good whose primary purpose is drawing attention to the scarce goods (live concerts, online experiences, etc.). As more people share the content freely, those scarce goods become more valuable and become the main source of revenue. Fighting 'piracy' is a losing battle not only because you won't stop people from sharing, but it's really in the best interests of everyone if content creators and consumers alike learned to embrace this new model.
I agree, this was the thesis of the recent book "free" by Chris Anderson. But in the context of games there is no live experience. The alternative in the gaming industry is hard-to-pirate console games and server-side games. I think offering the single-player for SCII for free may have been a great markettng tool to get people to buy the multiplayer. But if a person was able to pirate the entire thing because the multiplayer code was exposed, then suddenly there is no more "scarce good."
On June 24 2011 06:14 akomatic wrote: How did this get to 40 pages of rationalizing piracy? Obviously piracy reduces revenue in most cases.
Music: The music industry lost over half its revenue over the past decade. Without record sales, the Indie artist model has shifted to licensing their hit single to an ad campaign and performing concerts indefinitely. Concert ticket prices have risen drastically. People used to look at their $14 and say, "I'd rather have a CD than this money because it's the only way I'll get to listen to that music when I want." The internet today laughs at people with a purchased music collection.
Movie: The movie industry has flat-lined for the past decade in theatre and DVD sales. Their model has shifted twoards theatre revenue from "event" movies, huge budget films, mostly 3D, and mostly action-adventure.
Game: The only entertainment industry that is growing is the gaming industry. If it weren't for the dynamic of the console (difficult to pirate games) and the server (essential to online games, high upkeep costs, secrecy of code) then this industry would fall just like the others. Game industries can't afford to let pirates create a work-around for online play.
This is almost all incorrect. The music industry as a whole is growing (1, 2). Only record sales are shrinking. The money is coming in from increased concert revenue and other scarce goods. The movie industry is also growing (source)
You're rght, I'm sorry I mispoke. I was looking at charts for CD and DVD/VHS/BlueRay sales. As I said, concert and theatre sales have picked up the slack from other sources. The advent of 3D has bucked the flat-lining I was mentioning. That said, all of these trends (increased cost and emphasis on live experiences, DRM, no LAN, selling music licensing) are the result of trying to bypass piracy.
I don't think it's so much the result of 'bypassing piracy' as it is a changing marketplace. The content itself has become an infinite good whose primary purpose is drawing attention to the scarce goods (live concerts, online experiences, etc.). As more people share the content freely, those scarce goods become more valuable and become the main source of revenue. Fighting 'piracy' is a losing battle not only because you won't stop people from sharing, but it's really in the best interests of everyone if content creators and consumers alike learned to embrace this new model.
I agree, this was the thesis of the recent book "free" by Chris Anderson. But in the context of games there is no live experience. The alternative in the gaming industry is hard-to-pirate console games and server-side games. I think offering the single-player for SCII for free may have been a great markettng tool to get people to buy the multiplayer. But if a person was able to pirate the entire thing because the multiplayer code was exposed, then suddenly there is no more "scarce good."
While I don't have a good example or idea for every game to have a scarce good (hence why I'm a code jockey and not a business major), SC2 has a very visible scarce good - the b.net ladders. If only authorized copies could connect up to the ladder, use the matchmaking system and have a rank, league and division, then there would be a scarce good to sell to the customers. I'm not advocating a subscription service by any means, just to clarify.
I've made this example before in this post, but I'll reiterate because I think it's very relevant here - Imagine setting up a LAN party and inviting 20 gamer friends. Of those 20, only 5 have copies of SC2 (and thus, b.net ladder rankings). The other 15 are on the fence about the game. You install 15 free copies (free in the the sense that Blizzard is okay with this kind of behavior, not illegal copies) and have a 10 hour LAN party. Of those 15, 5 have so much fun that they want b.net rankings and go buy the game. The infinite good (the game itself) has promoted the scarce good (access to the b.net servers).
On June 23 2011 07:14 ThePurist wrote: Microsoft operating systems and office software are two of the biggest pirated softwares and they still make money. This guy tries to act like a realist but he doesn't really have a clue about economics. The opinions are too pessimistic and overgeneralizes the vast majority of people who purchase games with their hard-earned cash. Pirates don't stop revenue streams pirates were not a consumer in the first place. The assumption that a pirated copy was a sale is flawed imo and his last few personal statements are questionable as I perceive them as a cop-out when his whole opinion was about "simple economics".
Dumb dumb dumb dumb post. Do you have a clue about economics? If you did, you would realize that the fact that piracy drives up prices across the board. Say that you are trying to determine the present value of an project with a known market size. In order to price out the product, you must account that a certain percentage of users will not pay. Piracy is most definitely a sale, the provider of the software just does not get paid.
That's all jibberish, you can't just throw a bunch of economist lingo out there expecting it to form an argument by accident.
If they want to take away LAN personally I don't care, BUT they should allow private organizations such as iccup to host their own server. The developer of the game (bliz, whatever company owns made hon, whomever) should have an option for people to use their servers for the same as a replacement for the bliz servers. The new server host would just have to have the same authentic ID checking program that would verify that the person has bought the game. This first of all would lower lag for a lot of gamers (aka bliz servers), and put less load on the bliz servers, which would save bliz money.
Not to mention, how much money do they lose with putting LAN in?
On June 24 2011 06:14 akomatic wrote: How did this get to 40 pages of rationalizing piracy? Obviously piracy reduces revenue in most cases.
Music: The music industry lost over half its revenue over the past decade. Without record sales, the Indie artist model has shifted to licensing their hit single to an ad campaign and performing concerts indefinitely. Concert ticket prices have risen drastically. People used to look at their $14 and say, "I'd rather have a CD than this money because it's the only way I'll get to listen to that music when I want." The internet today laughs at people with a purchased music collection.
Movie: The movie industry has flat-lined for the past decade in theatre and DVD sales. Their model has shifted twoards theatre revenue from "event" movies, huge budget films, mostly 3D, and mostly action-adventure.
Game: The only entertainment industry that is growing is the gaming industry. If it weren't for the dynamic of the console (difficult to pirate games) and the server (essential to online games, high upkeep costs, secrecy of code) then this industry would fall just like the others. Game industries can't afford to let pirates create a work-around for online play.
This is almost all incorrect. The music industry as a whole is growing (1, 2). Only record sales are shrinking. The money is coming in from increased concert revenue and other scarce goods. The movie industry is also growing (source)
You're rght, I'm sorry I mispoke. I was looking at charts for CD and DVD/VHS/BlueRay sales. As I said, concert and theatre sales have picked up the slack from other sources. The advent of 3D has bucked the flat-lining I was mentioning. That said, all of these trends (increased cost and emphasis on live experiences, DRM, no LAN, selling music licensing) are the result of trying to bypass piracy.
I don't think it's so much the result of 'bypassing piracy' as it is a changing marketplace. The content itself has become an infinite good whose primary purpose is drawing attention to the scarce goods (live concerts, online experiences, etc.). As more people share the content freely, those scarce goods become more valuable and become the main source of revenue. Fighting 'piracy' is a losing battle not only because you won't stop people from sharing, but it's really in the best interests of everyone if content creators and consumers alike learned to embrace this new model.
I agree, this was the thesis of the recent book "free" by Chris Anderson. But in the context of games there is no live experience. The alternative in the gaming industry is hard-to-pirate console games and server-side games. I think offering the single-player for SCII for free may have been a great markettng tool to get people to buy the multiplayer. But if a person was able to pirate the entire thing because the multiplayer code was exposed, then suddenly there is no more "scarce good."
While I don't have a good example or idea for every game to have a scarce good (hence why I'm a code jockey and not a business major), SC2 has a very visible scarce good - the b.net ladders. If only authorized copies could connect up to the ladder, use the matchmaking system and have a rank, league and division, then there would be a scarce good to sell to the customers. I'm not advocating a subscription service by any means, just to clarify.
I've made this example before in this post, but I'll reiterate because I think it's very relevant here - Imagine setting up a LAN party and inviting 20 gamer friends. Of those 20, only 5 have copies of SC2 (and thus, b.net ladder rankings). The other 15 are on the fence about the game. You install 15 free copies (free in the the sense that Blizzard is okay with this kind of behavior, not illegal copies) and have a 10 hour LAN party. Of those 15, 5 have so much fun that they want b.net rankings and go buy the game. The infinite good (the game itself) has promoted the scarce good (access to the b.net servers).
Edit: Bam! 250 posts. Zealot icon!
while the bnet ladder as a scarce good is viable, what's stopping someone from taking the cracked version and making something similar to iccup? Elo rankings and mmr isn't exactly unrepeatable. They wouldn't have it set up quite the same as bnet but the ICCup rankings did it's job, you could probably do the same by mashing together code from various other games with matchmaking. Believe me, if there was a way for LAN to exist I'd support it, but currently from a business standpoint it stands to serve few, and hurt the company too much to risk it. And to me, that's feasible, and I don't hate blizzard for it. It makes cents. (lol bad pun).
On June 23 2011 20:08 xtfftc wrote: Everyone knows by now that piracy boosts the longterm sales - of music, of books, of games, of everything. Everyone but incompetent CEOs trying to increase their end-of-the-year bonuses.
I'd disagree. From a business standpoint facilitating piracy really offers no benefit; it's equivalent to making a product and giving it away for free. On top of that the scope of piracy is pretty huge, and Starcraft isn't something that benefits much from other merchandise (except for the occasional blizzard strategy book very few people buy). If it does, I highly doubt it's enough to compensate for losing millions of potential purchases. .
Never heard of free samples? It is the #1 strategy for promoting a product (when it's good).
I have, but there's a difference between giving a customer a free sample, which is a very tiny chunk of a product, and giving away a game complete with almost all features someone desires. You'd be surprised how many people play Sc2 casually and don't care for multiplayer beyond playing a game at a lan party with friends. It's just not practical from a business perspective to introduce lan, and Blizzard is first and foremost a company that wants profit.
On June 24 2011 05:55 Solicer wrote: So I was thinking of a way to change the way the game worked so that you had to be registered online in order to play a offline in a LAN mode, so to speak.
What if, in order to plan on a LAN mode of sorts, you had to connect to battle.net at least once on the machine you play in order to get 'recognized,' or rather, so battle.net can give you the privilege of playing in the offline LAN mode. It would be like saying,"We just want to make sure you bought the game/activated your account (you know, the CD keys/codes). Now that you have made contact with Battle.net with a legitimate account that has access/bought the game, we will give you the privilege on this machine to run in the LAN mode."
I know that there are always downsides of something, and with this, if you wanted to play on a brand new machine, you would NEED access to the internet still, at least at first, to play on the LAN mode. Also, I am not that knowledgeable in regards to how easy it would be to bypass this, so I'm not sure how secure this would be.
And, this may have been suggested before. Nonetheless, could someone enlighten me a little bit more as to why Blizzard wouldn't have something set up at least similar to this?
It's not as easy as that. It's not hard to find a "auth.blizzard.com/authenticate" (example of url upon which the authentication service would listen) and replace it with "auth.pirated.com" in binary file and thus bypassing the whole auth. Of course you could use some sort of public/private key encryption which would validate that the message token from blizz authentication service was really sent from blizzard but, as with the auth url, the public key can be found and replaced in order to make the fake tokens seem legit.
I see. So, is there any way at all to have the LAN mode disabled until you can verify, through the internet, that you have bought the game (with the correct keys/codes, and a legitimate account)? Or is there no way to do this because of the nature of the files/data that is needed to activate the LAN mode?
The only truly bypassing way (and it still can be bypassed btw), is to force the client to check and check often with the bnet servers to reauthenticate enough times to make it difficult/annoying for piracy to break the code, but at that point, if you need to connect through to bnet so often, why not just do it ON bnet.
While I agree that I don't think LAN will be implemented due to certain result of it getting pirated, saying that LAN wouldn't be worth it with constant verification checks is illogical. The game would still be played over LAN, and therefore would result in sub 10ms delay, instead of say 200ms to the BNet servers. That is a huge advantage. Besides the fact that game traffic wouldn't have to go over the ethernet connection, greatly shrinking bandwidth usage.
On June 24 2011 06:14 akomatic wrote: How did this get to 40 pages of rationalizing piracy? Obviously piracy reduces revenue in most cases.
Music: The music industry lost over half its revenue over the past decade. Without record sales, the Indie artist model has shifted to licensing their hit single to an ad campaign and performing concerts indefinitely. Concert ticket prices have risen drastically. People used to look at their $14 and say, "I'd rather have a CD than this money because it's the only way I'll get to listen to that music when I want." The internet today laughs at people with a purchased music collection.
Movie: The movie industry has flat-lined for the past decade in theatre and DVD sales. Their model has shifted twoards theatre revenue from "event" movies, huge budget films, mostly 3D, and mostly action-adventure.
Game: The only entertainment industry that is growing is the gaming industry. If it weren't for the dynamic of the console (difficult to pirate games) and the server (essential to online games, high upkeep costs, secrecy of code) then this industry would fall just like the others. Game industries can't afford to let pirates create a work-around for online play.
This is almost all incorrect. The music industry as a whole is growing (1, 2). Only record sales are shrinking. The money is coming in from increased concert revenue and other scarce goods. The movie industry is also growing (source)
You're rght, I'm sorry I mispoke. I was looking at charts for CD and DVD/VHS/BlueRay sales. As I said, concert and theatre sales have picked up the slack from other sources. The advent of 3D has bucked the flat-lining I was mentioning. That said, all of these trends (increased cost and emphasis on live experiences, DRM, no LAN, selling music licensing) are the result of trying to bypass piracy.
I don't think it's so much the result of 'bypassing piracy' as it is a changing marketplace. The content itself has become an infinite good whose primary purpose is drawing attention to the scarce goods (live concerts, online experiences, etc.). As more people share the content freely, those scarce goods become more valuable and become the main source of revenue. Fighting 'piracy' is a losing battle not only because you won't stop people from sharing, but it's really in the best interests of everyone if content creators and consumers alike learned to embrace this new model.
I agree, this was the thesis of the recent book "free" by Chris Anderson. But in the context of games there is no live experience. The alternative in the gaming industry is hard-to-pirate console games and server-side games. I think offering the single-player for SCII for free may have been a great markettng tool to get people to buy the multiplayer. But if a person was able to pirate the entire thing because the multiplayer code was exposed, then suddenly there is no more "scarce good."
While I don't have a good example or idea for every game to have a scarce good (hence why I'm a code jockey and not a business major), SC2 has a very visible scarce good - the b.net ladders. If only authorized copies could connect up to the ladder, use the matchmaking system and have a rank, league and division, then there would be a scarce good to sell to the customers. I'm not advocating a subscription service by any means, just to clarify.
I've made this example before in this post, but I'll reiterate because I think it's very relevant here - Imagine setting up a LAN party and inviting 20 gamer friends. Of those 20, only 5 have copies of SC2 (and thus, b.net ladder rankings). The other 15 are on the fence about the game. You install 15 free copies (free in the the sense that Blizzard is okay with this kind of behavior, not illegal copies) and have a 10 hour LAN party. Of those 15, 5 have so much fun that they want b.net rankings and go buy the game. The infinite good (the game itself) has promoted the scarce good (access to the b.net servers).
Edit: Bam! 250 posts. Zealot icon!
while the bnet ladder as a scarce good is viable, what's stopping someone from taking the cracked version and making something similar to iccup? Elo rankings and mmr isn't exactly unrepeatable. They wouldn't have it set up quite the same as bnet but the ICCup rankings did it's job, you could probably do the same by mashing together code from various other games with matchmaking. Believe me, if there was a way for LAN to exist I'd support it, but currently from a business standpoint it stands to serve few, and hurt the company too much to risk it. And to me, that's feasible, and I don't hate blizzard for it. It makes cents. (lol bad pun).
There is nothing stopping them. But I'm also not convinced it would drain so much revenue from Blizzard as to hurt the company. If there was an ICCup 2, I think it's safe to assume that the only people that would shift to it are the more knowledgeable players. Not everyone who plays SC2 frequents forums like these and would even be aware of these alternate servers. Money would be lost, certainly, but would 100% of the money be lost? Probably not.
In fact, I think most people who shift to ICCup 2 would be the more skilled players. That would leave players like myself (mid Gold, but aware of these alternate servers) in a weird position - do I not pay Blizzard and play on a server where I can never find a fair match, or do I go to the b.net servers where there are people at my skill level.
At the same time, another scarce good coming out of Blizzard on this one would be to keep b.net more desirable than ICCup 2. Provide a better matchmaking system, more detailed stat tracking, more attractive options for match types. By keeping their service more attractive than ICCup 2, they are selling the scarce good - the talent of their developers.
On June 24 2011 06:14 akomatic wrote: How did this get to 40 pages of rationalizing piracy? Obviously piracy reduces revenue in most cases.
Music: The music industry lost over half its revenue over the past decade. Without record sales, the Indie artist model has shifted to licensing their hit single to an ad campaign and performing concerts indefinitely. Concert ticket prices have risen drastically. People used to look at their $14 and say, "I'd rather have a CD than this money because it's the only way I'll get to listen to that music when I want." The internet today laughs at people with a purchased music collection.
Movie: The movie industry has flat-lined for the past decade in theatre and DVD sales. Their model has shifted twoards theatre revenue from "event" movies, huge budget films, mostly 3D, and mostly action-adventure.
Game: The only entertainment industry that is growing is the gaming industry. If it weren't for the dynamic of the console (difficult to pirate games) and the server (essential to online games, high upkeep costs, secrecy of code) then this industry would fall just like the others. Game industries can't afford to let pirates create a work-around for online play.
This is almost all incorrect. The music industry as a whole is growing (1, 2). Only record sales are shrinking. The money is coming in from increased concert revenue and other scarce goods. The movie industry is also growing (source)
You're rght, I'm sorry I mispoke. I was looking at charts for CD and DVD/VHS/BlueRay sales. As I said, concert and theatre sales have picked up the slack from other sources. The advent of 3D has bucked the flat-lining I was mentioning. That said, all of these trends (increased cost and emphasis on live experiences, DRM, no LAN, selling music licensing) are the result of trying to bypass piracy.
I don't think it's so much the result of 'bypassing piracy' as it is a changing marketplace. The content itself has become an infinite good whose primary purpose is drawing attention to the scarce goods (live concerts, online experiences, etc.). As more people share the content freely, those scarce goods become more valuable and become the main source of revenue. Fighting 'piracy' is a losing battle not only because you won't stop people from sharing, but it's really in the best interests of everyone if content creators and consumers alike learned to embrace this new model.
I agree, this was the thesis of the recent book "free" by Chris Anderson. But in the context of games there is no live experience. The alternative in the gaming industry is hard-to-pirate console games and server-side games. I think offering the single-player for SCII for free may have been a great markettng tool to get people to buy the multiplayer. But if a person was able to pirate the entire thing because the multiplayer code was exposed, then suddenly there is no more "scarce good."
While I don't have a good example or idea for every game to have a scarce good (hence why I'm a code jockey and not a business major), SC2 has a very visible scarce good - the b.net ladders. If only authorized copies could connect up to the ladder, use the matchmaking system and have a rank, league and division, then there would be a scarce good to sell to the customers. I'm not advocating a subscription service by any means, just to clarify.
I've made this example before in this post, but I'll reiterate because I think it's very relevant here - Imagine setting up a LAN party and inviting 20 gamer friends. Of those 20, only 5 have copies of SC2 (and thus, b.net ladder rankings). The other 15 are on the fence about the game. You install 15 free copies (free in the the sense that Blizzard is okay with this kind of behavior, not illegal copies) and have a 10 hour LAN party. Of those 15, 5 have so much fun that they want b.net rankings and go buy the game. The infinite good (the game itself) has promoted the scarce good (access to the b.net servers).
Edit: Bam! 250 posts. Zealot icon!
Damn protoss. I knew there was a reason I couldn't like you.
I don't think anyone would pay $60 (sometimes $120,$180 for mutliple servers) just for the match-making and bnet 2.0. Especially when you consider that most pros just play custom games. I think they had to draw the line somewhere, and totally withholding multiplayer code was the most logical place. And when you consider the Korean subscription model, almost nobody would pay a monthly fee if they could have the LAN for free.
My overall mindset is that I want this well-made RTS game to make a profit. I want companies to not give up on this genre. And I feel like LAN, though nice, would almost certainly decrease revenue.
What sucks about not having LAN (with HoN in particular) is that over the last 5 weeks there has been massive downtimes from DDoS attacks and data/hardware failures. It feels almost like HoN has been down as much as it has been up for the last month. Without any LAN, nobody can even log on and dick around in training mode or watch replays at all until the servers come back up.
This isn't an argument for LAN as much as it is an argument to have at least something implemented to allow players to do something if shit goes awry and servers go down for days.
On June 24 2011 06:14 akomatic wrote: How did this get to 40 pages of rationalizing piracy? Obviously piracy reduces revenue in most cases.
Music: The music industry lost over half its revenue over the past decade. Without record sales, the Indie artist model has shifted to licensing their hit single to an ad campaign and performing concerts indefinitely. Concert ticket prices have risen drastically. People used to look at their $14 and say, "I'd rather have a CD than this money because it's the only way I'll get to listen to that music when I want." The internet today laughs at people with a purchased music collection.
Movie: The movie industry has flat-lined for the past decade in theatre and DVD sales. Their model has shifted twoards theatre revenue from "event" movies, huge budget films, mostly 3D, and mostly action-adventure.
Game: The only entertainment industry that is growing is the gaming industry. If it weren't for the dynamic of the console (difficult to pirate games) and the server (essential to online games, high upkeep costs, secrecy of code) then this industry would fall just like the others. Game industries can't afford to let pirates create a work-around for online play.
This is almost all incorrect. The music industry as a whole is growing (1, 2). Only record sales are shrinking. The money is coming in from increased concert revenue and other scarce goods. The movie industry is also growing (source)
You're rght, I'm sorry I mispoke. I was looking at charts for CD and DVD/VHS/BlueRay sales. As I said, concert and theatre sales have picked up the slack from other sources. The advent of 3D has bucked the flat-lining I was mentioning. That said, all of these trends (increased cost and emphasis on live experiences, DRM, no LAN, selling music licensing) are the result of trying to bypass piracy.
I don't think it's so much the result of 'bypassing piracy' as it is a changing marketplace. The content itself has become an infinite good whose primary purpose is drawing attention to the scarce goods (live concerts, online experiences, etc.). As more people share the content freely, those scarce goods become more valuable and become the main source of revenue. Fighting 'piracy' is a losing battle not only because you won't stop people from sharing, but it's really in the best interests of everyone if content creators and consumers alike learned to embrace this new model.
I agree, this was the thesis of the recent book "free" by Chris Anderson. But in the context of games there is no live experience. The alternative in the gaming industry is hard-to-pirate console games and server-side games. I think offering the single-player for SCII for free may have been a great markettng tool to get people to buy the multiplayer. But if a person was able to pirate the entire thing because the multiplayer code was exposed, then suddenly there is no more "scarce good."
While I don't have a good example or idea for every game to have a scarce good (hence why I'm a code jockey and not a business major), SC2 has a very visible scarce good - the b.net ladders. If only authorized copies could connect up to the ladder, use the matchmaking system and have a rank, league and division, then there would be a scarce good to sell to the customers. I'm not advocating a subscription service by any means, just to clarify.
I've made this example before in this post, but I'll reiterate because I think it's very relevant here - Imagine setting up a LAN party and inviting 20 gamer friends. Of those 20, only 5 have copies of SC2 (and thus, b.net ladder rankings). The other 15 are on the fence about the game. You install 15 free copies (free in the the sense that Blizzard is okay with this kind of behavior, not illegal copies) and have a 10 hour LAN party. Of those 15, 5 have so much fun that they want b.net rankings and go buy the game. The infinite good (the game itself) has promoted the scarce good (access to the b.net servers).
Edit: Bam! 250 posts. Zealot icon!
Damn protoss. I knew there was a reason I couldn't like you.
I don't think anyone would pay $60 (sometimes $120,$180 for mutliple servers) just for the match-making and bnet 2.0. Especially when you consider that most pros just play custom games. I think they had to draw the line somewhere, and totally withholding multiplayer code was the most logical place. And when you consider the Korean subscription model, almost nobody would pay a monthly fee if they could have the LAN for free.
My overall mindset is that I want this well-made RTS game to make a profit. I want companies to not give up on this genre. And I feel like LAN, though nice, would almost certainly decrease revenue.
How much of the player base is comprised of pros? If every single master league player decided not to play, that is, by definition, only a 2% dip in sales.
I also want this well made RTS game to make a profit. That's why I bought it and will buy the expansions, even if I could get them for free. I'm just thinking that the piracy bogeyman is incredibly overblown, and this insane desire to smash piracy might not only be misguided, but even harmful. There are opportunities that they could embrace that I honestly feel will make them *more* money, give a better experience to the consumers and generate more goodwill among their fan base.
Hopefully this hasn't been brought up yet, but how exactly does LAN latency work for BW's ICCup? Would it be possible to implement something like that for sc2 or would the LAN setting need to actually exist first?
Sweet more developers speculating based on arbitrary and made up stats about every pirated game being a lost sale and blah blah blah, piracy hasn't really got any easier or any more widespread in terms of a percentage of users since the PC came popular. In terms of impacting software sales the internet era is way better off than the era of Atari ST disk swaps, since the majority of ST/Amiga owners were nerds as opposed to nowadays where the majority of even PC gamers would prefer to have the ease of use of buying a product and playing it properly than pirating stuff with confusing workarounds to play multiplayer or even single player in some games.
It's the DRM and invasive anti-piracy measures that cause a rise in people pirating because the experiences can not only be equally annoying but the pirated versions can actually be easier to use. It's a sad case of publishers misinterpreting pirated copies as lost sales that then becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. It doesn't help that there's clever bastards who set up DRM software houses based around exploiting said myth and thus giving legitimacy to the idea that it's true.
Anything past requiring a valid CD key to play online is not only a stupid idea in the first place, it also can actively dissuade people from buying your product. Indie devs don't make stuff DRM-free out of a grand utopian vision of people being good natured people, it's just not good business sense.
Anyone that's compares pirating software to the equivalent of stealing a real life object, or committing a real crime like rape. Is a complete moron.
Pirating ONLY means the developers get less money. OK????!?!
No one dies from pirating, no one gets raped.
Not having LAN support is just today's way of company's/developers trying to get more money. THAT IS ALL. It's not even going to work either.
*note: I do like Blizzard. I don't want them to fail. But piracy will never take down blizzard. People do buy stuff they have pirated if they can get better support from the bought version.* I have tested games like Magicka, realised it's a fun game. Then bought it. Fuck people who say pirating is causing developers to lose money.*
On June 23 2011 10:51 hashaki wrote: Buuuhuuu, pirates ruined our shit, pirates are the reason we're not making as much money as we would.
Grow the fuck up developers. Music and movie-industry has been saying the same shit for years, but looking at the numbers it turns out they're lying. They're making money as never before, despite not keeping up with the wishes of customers in terms of prices and ways of selling their merchandice.
Now, there are ofcourse diffferences when it comes to games, but are there good games out there that didn't make money? I don't really see an issue here, good games -will- sell.
I'd buy any good game. As an example, I bought Morrowind and I didn't buy Oblivion.
See how that work developers? Get your shit straight and your games will be paid for. Stop making boring fps-games or shitty games in general and stop blaming your lack of creativity and skill on pirates, it just doesn't work.
Zzz
Then explain to me why, I had zero incentive to buy BW back in its heyday.
ZERO. INCENTIVE.
I had the game for free. So did all my friends. We didn't care how good the game was(we loved it). You oughta take some of that foul language and remove it, because it's not helping your examples one bit.
On June 24 2011 06:14 akomatic wrote: How did this get to 40 pages of rationalizing piracy? Obviously piracy reduces revenue in most cases.
Music: The music industry lost over half its revenue over the past decade. Without record sales, the Indie artist model has shifted to licensing their hit single to an ad campaign and performing concerts indefinitely. Concert ticket prices have risen drastically. People used to look at their $14 and say, "I'd rather have a CD than this money because it's the only way I'll get to listen to that music when I want." The internet today laughs at people with a purchased music collection.
Movie: The movie industry has flat-lined for the past decade in theatre and DVD sales. Their model has shifted twoards theatre revenue from "event" movies, huge budget films, mostly 3D, and mostly action-adventure.
Game: The only entertainment industry that is growing is the gaming industry. If it weren't for the dynamic of the console (difficult to pirate games) and the server (essential to online games, high upkeep costs, secrecy of code) then this industry would fall just like the others. Game industries can't afford to let pirates create a work-around for online play.
This is almost all incorrect. The music industry as a whole is growing (1, 2). Only record sales are shrinking. The money is coming in from increased concert revenue and other scarce goods. The movie industry is also growing (source)
You're rght, I'm sorry I mispoke. I was looking at charts for CD and DVD/VHS/BlueRay sales. As I said, concert and theatre sales have picked up the slack from other sources. The advent of 3D has bucked the flat-lining I was mentioning. That said, all of these trends (increased cost and emphasis on live experiences, DRM, no LAN, selling music licensing) are the result of trying to bypass piracy.
I don't think it's so much the result of 'bypassing piracy' as it is a changing marketplace. The content itself has become an infinite good whose primary purpose is drawing attention to the scarce goods (live concerts, online experiences, etc.). As more people share the content freely, those scarce goods become more valuable and become the main source of revenue. Fighting 'piracy' is a losing battle not only because you won't stop people from sharing, but it's really in the best interests of everyone if content creators and consumers alike learned to embrace this new model.
I agree, this was the thesis of the recent book "free" by Chris Anderson. But in the context of games there is no live experience. The alternative in the gaming industry is hard-to-pirate console games and server-side games. I think offering the single-player for SCII for free may have been a great markettng tool to get people to buy the multiplayer. But if a person was able to pirate the entire thing because the multiplayer code was exposed, then suddenly there is no more "scarce good."
While I don't have a good example or idea for every game to have a scarce good (hence why I'm a code jockey and not a business major), SC2 has a very visible scarce good - the b.net ladders. If only authorized copies could connect up to the ladder, use the matchmaking system and have a rank, league and division, then there would be a scarce good to sell to the customers. I'm not advocating a subscription service by any means, just to clarify.
I've made this example before in this post, but I'll reiterate because I think it's very relevant here - Imagine setting up a LAN party and inviting 20 gamer friends. Of those 20, only 5 have copies of SC2 (and thus, b.net ladder rankings). The other 15 are on the fence about the game. You install 15 free copies (free in the the sense that Blizzard is okay with this kind of behavior, not illegal copies) and have a 10 hour LAN party. Of those 15, 5 have so much fun that they want b.net rankings and go buy the game. The infinite good (the game itself) has promoted the scarce good (access to the b.net servers).
Edit: Bam! 250 posts. Zealot icon!
Damn protoss. I knew there was a reason I couldn't like you.
I don't think anyone would pay $60 (sometimes $120,$180 for mutliple servers) just for the match-making and bnet 2.0. Especially when you consider that most pros just play custom games. I think they had to draw the line somewhere, and totally withholding multiplayer code was the most logical place. And when you consider the Korean subscription model, almost nobody would pay a monthly fee if they could have the LAN for free.
My overall mindset is that I want this well-made RTS game to make a profit. I want companies to not give up on this genre. And I feel like LAN, though nice, would almost certainly decrease revenue.
How much of the player base is comprised of pros? If every single master league player decided not to play, that is, by definition, only a 2% dip in sales.
I also want this well made RTS game to make a profit. That's why I bought it and will buy the expansions, even if I could get them for free. I'm just thinking that the piracy bogeyman is incredibly overblown, and this insane desire to smash piracy might not only be misguided, but even harmful. There are opportunities that they could embrace that I honestly feel will make them *more* money, give a better experience to the consumers and generate more goodwill among their fan base.
Speaking as someone who bought BW (again) 10 years after release, I appreciate the value of pirated software to foster growth of a community, goodwill, and future sales. But in the case of SC2, my gut says that the loss of sales would be moderate, and that the goodwill gained would have a smaller value. I guess it's just a judgment call.
On June 23 2011 10:51 hashaki wrote: Buuuhuuu, pirates ruined our shit, pirates are the reason we're not making as much money as we would.
Grow the fuck up developers. Music and movie-industry has been saying the same shit for years, but looking at the numbers it turns out they're lying. They're making money as never before, despite not keeping up with the wishes of customers in terms of prices and ways of selling their merchandice.
Now, there are ofcourse diffferences when it comes to games, but are there good games out there that didn't make money? I don't really see an issue here, good games -will- sell.
I'd buy any good game. As an example, I bought Morrowind and I didn't buy Oblivion.
See how that work developers? Get your shit straight and your games will be paid for. Stop making boring fps-games or shitty games in general and stop blaming your lack of creativity and skill on pirates, it just doesn't work.
Zzz
Then explain to me why, I had zero incentive to buy BW back in its heyday.
ZERO. INCENTIVE.
I had the game for free. So did all my friends. We didn't care how good the game was(we loved it). You oughta take some of that foul language and remove it, because it's not helping your examples one bit.
Maybe cause you were a kid with no money? Who through thankfully due to piracy was able to play the game, then because of having the game later bought SC2? hello piracy promoting blizzard?
On June 24 2011 06:14 akomatic wrote: How did this get to 40 pages of rationalizing piracy? Obviously piracy reduces revenue in most cases.
Music: The music industry lost over half its revenue over the past decade. Without record sales, the Indie artist model has shifted to licensing their hit single to an ad campaign and performing concerts indefinitely. Concert ticket prices have risen drastically. People used to look at their $14 and say, "I'd rather have a CD than this money because it's the only way I'll get to listen to that music when I want." The internet today laughs at people with a purchased music collection.
Movie: The movie industry has flat-lined for the past decade in theatre and DVD sales. Their model has shifted twoards theatre revenue from "event" movies, huge budget films, mostly 3D, and mostly action-adventure.
Game: The only entertainment industry that is growing is the gaming industry. If it weren't for the dynamic of the console (difficult to pirate games) and the server (essential to online games, high upkeep costs, secrecy of code) then this industry would fall just like the others. Game industries can't afford to let pirates create a work-around for online play.
This is almost all incorrect. The music industry as a whole is growing (1, 2). Only record sales are shrinking. The money is coming in from increased concert revenue and other scarce goods. The movie industry is also growing (source)
You're rght, I'm sorry I mispoke. I was looking at charts for CD and DVD/VHS/BlueRay sales. As I said, concert and theatre sales have picked up the slack from other sources. The advent of 3D has bucked the flat-lining I was mentioning. That said, all of these trends (increased cost and emphasis on live experiences, DRM, no LAN, selling music licensing) are the result of trying to bypass piracy.
I don't think it's so much the result of 'bypassing piracy' as it is a changing marketplace. The content itself has become an infinite good whose primary purpose is drawing attention to the scarce goods (live concerts, online experiences, etc.). As more people share the content freely, those scarce goods become more valuable and become the main source of revenue. Fighting 'piracy' is a losing battle not only because you won't stop people from sharing, but it's really in the best interests of everyone if content creators and consumers alike learned to embrace this new model.
I agree, this was the thesis of the recent book "free" by Chris Anderson. But in the context of games there is no live experience. The alternative in the gaming industry is hard-to-pirate console games and server-side games. I think offering the single-player for SCII for free may have been a great markettng tool to get people to buy the multiplayer. But if a person was able to pirate the entire thing because the multiplayer code was exposed, then suddenly there is no more "scarce good."
While I don't have a good example or idea for every game to have a scarce good (hence why I'm a code jockey and not a business major), SC2 has a very visible scarce good - the b.net ladders. If only authorized copies could connect up to the ladder, use the matchmaking system and have a rank, league and division, then there would be a scarce good to sell to the customers. I'm not advocating a subscription service by any means, just to clarify.
I've made this example before in this post, but I'll reiterate because I think it's very relevant here - Imagine setting up a LAN party and inviting 20 gamer friends. Of those 20, only 5 have copies of SC2 (and thus, b.net ladder rankings). The other 15 are on the fence about the game. You install 15 free copies (free in the the sense that Blizzard is okay with this kind of behavior, not illegal copies) and have a 10 hour LAN party. Of those 15, 5 have so much fun that they want b.net rankings and go buy the game. The infinite good (the game itself) has promoted the scarce good (access to the b.net servers).
Edit: Bam! 250 posts. Zealot icon!
Damn protoss. I knew there was a reason I couldn't like you.
I don't think anyone would pay $60 (sometimes $120,$180 for mutliple servers) just for the match-making and bnet 2.0. Especially when you consider that most pros just play custom games. I think they had to draw the line somewhere, and totally withholding multiplayer code was the most logical place. And when you consider the Korean subscription model, almost nobody would pay a monthly fee if they could have the LAN for free.
My overall mindset is that I want this well-made RTS game to make a profit. I want companies to not give up on this genre. And I feel like LAN, though nice, would almost certainly decrease revenue.
How much of the player base is comprised of pros? If every single master league player decided not to play, that is, by definition, only a 2% dip in sales.
I also want this well made RTS game to make a profit. That's why I bought it and will buy the expansions, even if I could get them for free. I'm just thinking that the piracy bogeyman is incredibly overblown, and this insane desire to smash piracy might not only be misguided, but even harmful. There are opportunities that they could embrace that I honestly feel will make them *more* money, give a better experience to the consumers and generate more goodwill among their fan base.
Speaking as someone who bought BW (again) 10 years after release, I appreciate the value of pirated software to foster growth of a community, goodwill, and future sales. But in the case of SC2, my gut says that the loss of sales would be moderate, and that the goodwill gained would have a smaller value. I guess it's just a judgment call.
Unfortunately, it is a judgement call. I think it could work if they managed it right. There is not enough evidence supporting this for any company of this size to feel okay doing it. Their investors would flip out. I just honestly feel that evidence will slowly mount over the next decade until what I'm suggesting becomes commonplace for companies of all sizes.
It's pretty much the same as what happened with DRM free music downloads over the past decade. 10 years ago, it was extremely hard to believe that virtually all music would be released for download in a non restricted format. Now look at the music industry. It's changed, but it's still there, still profitable and the consumers got what they wanted.
I just want to say - I hardly believe that 3 million coppies of SC2 being pirated last year converted into greater profits than if it weren't to be pirated at all...
I am apt to believe that pirating doesn't really generate revenue as some may defend here. Call it logic, or call it experience (having pirated games before), but after I pirate a game, I RARELY purchase it afterwards. Unfortunately, there is little incentive to buy a game you can already obtain, and most pirates by definition have little morals to buy a game after pirating it.
Not having lan features likely only lost a small percent (if any at all) from buying the game. Having a game that is easily able to being pirated would likely lose a lot potential buyers (most notably the casual fans). Seems relatively logical from my point of view.
(and in my opinion, pirating is pretty much equal to stealing in most occasions - there aren't too many times it is not the same :| )
I agree with the reasons why LAN shouldn't be implemented. I agree piracy would take away revenue from the company and regardless of how small in terms of % that is, money is money to a business,
All i can say is fair enough. We already had big offline tournaments like dreamhack and mlg in which there weren't that many major issues.
Also, i think it would be easier to have all the computers at a offline event access the internet via wireless cards instead of them all being connected physically which would be the case in a lan. If this isn't the way lans are done, lemme know since my knowledge might be outdated.
At the end of the day. i pay good money to play sc2 and if there is no lan that's not a big deal. I prefer more money going to the company so they produce quality games rather than crap games like what blizzard did to wow (wow is just a money machine now).
On June 24 2011 07:26 Aruno wrote: Anyone that's compares pirating software to the equivalent of stealing a real life object, or committing a real crime like rape. Is a complete moron.
Pirating ONLY means the developers get less money. OK????!?!
No one dies from pirating, no one gets raped.
Not having LAN support is just today's way of company's/developers trying to get more money. THAT IS ALL. It's not even going to work either.
*note: I do like Blizzard. I don't want them to fail. But piracy will never take down blizzard. People do buy stuff they have pirated if they can get better support from the bought version.* I have tested games like Magicka, realised it's a fun game. Then bought it. Fuck people who say pirating is causing developers to lose money.*
That counter to the analogy doesn't really make sense. If you steal something, noone dies, noone gets raped. The only thing that happens is the person you stole from get's less money.
Piracy is still no exactly the same as stealing, because piracy only affects the developer, while stealing affects the middle man that loses his item/money. And people don't care nearly as much about the money of the big business man as they care about the money of people like themselfs or their close ones.
On June 23 2011 07:10 mdma-_- wrote: that still doesnt explain why they cant allow people to play each other in lan with the necessecity of being logged into bnet/whatever online client.
cheap excuse just to blame it on pirates tbh
Because a simple hack would pass this, unfortunately.
On June 24 2011 07:26 Aruno wrote: Anyone that's compares pirating software to the equivalent of stealing a real life object, or committing a real crime like rape. Is a complete moron.
Pirating ONLY means the developers get less money. OK????!?!
No one dies from pirating, no one gets raped.
Not having LAN support is just today's way of company's/developers trying to get more money. THAT IS ALL. It's not even going to work either.
*note: I do like Blizzard. I don't want them to fail. But piracy will never take down blizzard. People do buy stuff they have pirated if they can get better support from the bought version.* I have tested games like Magicka, realised it's a fun game. Then bought it. Fuck people who say pirating is causing developers to lose money.*
downloading a game is the equivalent of stealing.. you have to pay to play Sc2 and if you do download it you can play it for free. you have to pay for food, or you can steal it and eat it for free. the difference is that when you steel a material item the producer looses money because of the actual loss of that product, where as the loss from piracy means the loss of a possible client.
YOu can compare the two and it does not mean that you are moronic... Sc2 is not loosing money from piracy but it is in the sense that it is loosing prospective revenue. piracy does loose the company money and there IS something wrong with that, or are you one of those people who walks around with a che guevara shirt who hates when companies fufil their function? piracy wont take down blizzard, but why should it hamper them? why shouldn't they try to make more money.
have you ever taken a commerce course or a marketing course?
The era of software being a possession that you can own and make use of is over.
Software is now a service. When you buy a game, you're not buying the game, you're buying the right to play the game. To make use of their service. Pirating a game is kind of like sneaking into a movie theater. Or maybe like hiring a lawyer and then refusing to pay him. It's not about stealing a material object, but rather refusing to pay for a service.
Because of this, something like LAN is either going to have to undergo radical changes, or it'll never be back. Don't ask me what those changes are though, because there isn't much you could do to let people enjoy the benefits of lan without it being too easy for hackers to get rid of any safeguards or protection. But if they do come up with something that won't make them vulnerable to piracy, there's no doubt they would do it. Pleasing your customers is part of making a game successful.
downloading a game is the equivalent of stealing.. you have to pay to play Sc2 and if you do download it you can play it for free. you have to pay for food, or you can steal it and eat it for free. the difference is that when you steel a material item the producer looses money because of the actual loss of that product, where as the loss from piracy means the loss of a possible client.
YOu can compare the two and it does not mean that you are moronic... Sc2 is not loosing money from piracy but it is in the sense that it is loosing prospective revenue. piracy does loose the company money and there IS something wrong with that, or are you one of those people who walks around with a che guevara shirt who hates when companies fufil their function? piracy wont take down blizzard, but why should it hamper them? why shouldn't they try to make more money.
have you ever taken a commerce course or a marketing course?
Have you ever downloaded food? Stop trying to compare the two.
Next time I steal food from you, by copying the food, and leaving your food alone and where I found it. Are you going to cry? Yeah you sure are missing out.
Piracy is free marketing.
Microsoft and Bill Gates on Piracy: Microsoft has admitted that piracy of its Windows operating system has helped give it huge market share in China that will boost its revenues when these users "go legit". Bill Gates said, "It's easier for our software to compete with Linux when there's piracy than when there's not."
He has also said in reference to China: As long as they are going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They'll get sort of addicted, and then we'll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade. - Bill Gates
downloading a game is the equivalent of stealing.. you have to pay to play Sc2 and if you do download it you can play it for free. you have to pay for food, or you can steal it and eat it for free. the difference is that when you steel a material item the producer looses money because of the actual loss of that product, where as the loss from piracy means the loss of a possible client.
YOu can compare the two and it does not mean that you are moronic... Sc2 is not loosing money from piracy but it is in the sense that it is loosing prospective revenue. piracy does loose the company money and there IS something wrong with that, or are you one of those people who walks around with a che guevara shirt who hates when companies fufil their function? piracy wont take down blizzard, but why should it hamper them? why shouldn't they try to make more money.
have you ever taken a commerce course or a marketing course?
Have you ever downloaded food? Stop trying to compare the two.
Next time I steal food from you, by copying the food, and leaving your food alone and where I found it. Are you going to cry? Yeah you sure are missing out.
Piracy is free marketing.
Microsoft and Bill Gates on Piracy: Microsoft has admitted that piracy of its Windows operating system has helped give it huge market share in China that will boost its revenues when these users "go legit". Bill Gates said, "It's easier for our software to compete with Linux when there's piracy than when there's not."
He has also said in reference to China: As long as they are going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They'll get sort of addicted, and then we'll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade. - Bill Gates
You can't think of it that way. Problem with windows is that they can't really ensure that all the copies of their software are legit, because a skilled person can bypass pretty much all the defenses. Sure, you can disable updates for false copies, but the system still works. I'm sure that if they could ensure that every single copy of win was pair for, they would.
Also, i would like to remind everyone the companies like S2 games, Blizzard and developers generally sell games for living. I find it ridiculous that you even think you have any right to give them "tips" about how being prone to piracy will in the long run make them more money.
I find it ridiculous that you even think you have any right to give them "tips" about how being prone to piracy will in the long run make them more money.
Sometimes I find things people tend to say, to be ridiculous. We're consumers, we automatically have a right to tell the producer of the product we're purchasing how we would like it. They're doing something that is actually harming the user base.
On June 23 2011 07:10 mdma-_- wrote: that still doesnt explain why they cant allow people to play each other in lan with the necessecity of being logged into bnet/whatever online client.
cheap excuse just to blame it on pirates tbh
What the hell would be the point of LAN if you had to be logged into Bnet? The entire issue with no LAN is retarded internet problems that tournaments seem to constantly have.
Not really, if you just had it so that you would need to be connected to b.net but in a LOCALLY HOSTED GAME, then it would be fine.
I find it ridiculous that you even think you have any right to give them "tips" about how being prone to piracy will in the long run make them more money.
Sometimes I find things people tend to say, to be ridiculous. We're consumers, we automatically have a right to tell the producer of the product we're purchasing how we would like it. They're doing something that is actually harming the user base.
You have right to say them that you want LAN, because you want LAN. But saying that they should add lan and thus allow for piracy in order to make more money, which is a case some people make, is just stupid. BTW, i would love lan in sc2, not for me necessarily but for the tournaments that look really stupid when the lag screen pops up.
On June 24 2011 05:55 Solicer wrote: So I was thinking of a way to change the way the game worked so that you had to be registered online in order to play a offline in a LAN mode, so to speak.
What if, in order to plan on a LAN mode of sorts, you had to connect to battle.net at least once on the machine you play in order to get 'recognized,' or rather, so battle.net can give you the privilege of playing in the offline LAN mode. It would be like saying,"We just want to make sure you bought the game/activated your account (you know, the CD keys/codes). Now that you have made contact with Battle.net with a legitimate account that has access/bought the game, we will give you the privilege on this machine to run in the LAN mode."
I know that there are always downsides of something, and with this, if you wanted to play on a brand new machine, you would NEED access to the internet still, at least at first, to play on the LAN mode. Also, I am not that knowledgeable in regards to how easy it would be to bypass this, so I'm not sure how secure this would be.
And, this may have been suggested before. Nonetheless, could someone enlighten me a little bit more as to why Blizzard wouldn't have something set up at least similar to this?
It's not as easy as that. It's not hard to find a "auth.blizzard.com/authenticate" (example of url upon which the authentication service would listen) and replace it with "auth.pirated.com" in binary file and thus bypassing the whole auth. Of course you could use some sort of public/private key encryption which would validate that the message token from blizz authentication service was really sent from blizzard but, as with the auth url, the public key can be found and replaced in order to make the fake tokens seem legit.
I see. So, is there any way at all to have the LAN mode disabled until you can verify, through the internet, that you have bought the game (with the correct keys/codes, and a legitimate account)? Or is there no way to do this because of the nature of the files/data that is needed to activate the LAN mode?
The only truly bypassing way (and it still can be bypassed btw), is to force the client to check and check often with the bnet servers to reauthenticate enough times to make it difficult/annoying for piracy to break the code, but at that point, if you need to connect through to bnet so often, why not just do it ON bnet.
While I agree that I don't think LAN will be implemented due to certain result of it getting pirated, saying that LAN wouldn't be worth it with constant verification checks is illogical. The game would still be played over LAN, and therefore would result in sub 10ms delay, instead of say 200ms to the BNet servers. That is a huge advantage. Besides the fact that game traffic wouldn't have to go over the ethernet connection, greatly shrinking bandwidth usage.
So, assuming that the constant verification checks would help prevent the pirating, would this idea still basically work? The computers are still 'online,' with B.net still making sure that the accounts are active/legitimate accounts, but they are using a newly implemented LAN mode only useable when B.net recognizes that the accounts are legitimate.
On June 24 2011 05:55 Solicer wrote: So I was thinking of a way to change the way the game worked so that you had to be registered online in order to play a offline in a LAN mode, so to speak.
What if, in order to plan on a LAN mode of sorts, you had to connect to battle.net at least once on the machine you play in order to get 'recognized,' or rather, so battle.net can give you the privilege of playing in the offline LAN mode. It would be like saying,"We just want to make sure you bought the game/activated your account (you know, the CD keys/codes). Now that you have made contact with Battle.net with a legitimate account that has access/bought the game, we will give you the privilege on this machine to run in the LAN mode."
I know that there are always downsides of something, and with this, if you wanted to play on a brand new machine, you would NEED access to the internet still, at least at first, to play on the LAN mode. Also, I am not that knowledgeable in regards to how easy it would be to bypass this, so I'm not sure how secure this would be.
And, this may have been suggested before. Nonetheless, could someone enlighten me a little bit more as to why Blizzard wouldn't have something set up at least similar to this?
It's not as easy as that. It's not hard to find a "auth.blizzard.com/authenticate" (example of url upon which the authentication service would listen) and replace it with "auth.pirated.com" in binary file and thus bypassing the whole auth. Of course you could use some sort of public/private key encryption which would validate that the message token from blizz authentication service was really sent from blizzard but, as with the auth url, the public key can be found and replaced in order to make the fake tokens seem legit.
I see. So, is there any way at all to have the LAN mode disabled until you can verify, through the internet, that you have bought the game (with the correct keys/codes, and a legitimate account)? Or is there no way to do this because of the nature of the files/data that is needed to activate the LAN mode?
The only truly bypassing way (and it still can be bypassed btw), is to force the client to check and check often with the bnet servers to reauthenticate enough times to make it difficult/annoying for piracy to break the code, but at that point, if you need to connect through to bnet so often, why not just do it ON bnet.
While I agree that I don't think LAN will be implemented due to certain result of it getting pirated, saying that LAN wouldn't be worth it with constant verification checks is illogical. The game would still be played over LAN, and therefore would result in sub 10ms delay, instead of say 200ms to the BNet servers. That is a huge advantage. Besides the fact that game traffic wouldn't have to go over the ethernet connection, greatly shrinking bandwidth usage.
So, assuming that the constant verification checks would help prevent the pirating, would this idea still basically work? The computers are still 'online,' with B.net still making sure that the accounts are active/legitimate accounts, but they are using a newly implemented LAN mode only useable when B.net recognizes that the accounts are legitimate.
no it wouldnt work because it would be to easy to bypass the security check and the cracks for pirate lan mode would be out in no time... also stuff like Garena and hamachi servers would be up and running in no time.
so no... lan is too much of a risk for blizzard.
and for the people quoting bill gates about piracy.
Its a whole different thing... microsoft makes most of his sales from schools,governments and bussines wich need to have a legal copy or else they can get in a shit ton of trouble.... on the other hand most of the sells from starcraft 2 come from common people not organizations that blizzard can control... so people getting pirate copies of sc2 is a ton of money lost because you cannot track all of the players using cracked versions down but on the other hand microsoft haves an easy time finding organizations , schools and governments that use pirate software making it easy for them to control their main income.
On June 23 2011 07:14 ThePurist wrote: Microsoft operating systems and office software are two of the biggest pirated softwares and they still make money. This guy tries to act like a realist but he doesn't really have a clue about economics. The opinions are too pessimistic and overgeneralizes the vast majority of people who purchase games with their hard-earned cash. Pirates don't stop revenue streams pirates were not a consumer in the first place. The assumption that a pirated copy was a sale is flawed imo and his last few personal statements are questionable as I perceive them as a cop-out when his whole opinion was about "simple economics".
Dumb dumb dumb dumb post. Do you have a clue about economics? If you did, you would realize that the fact that piracy drives up prices across the board. Say that you are trying to determine the present value of an project with a known market size. In order to price out the product, you must account that a certain percentage of users will not pay. Piracy is most definitely a sale, the provider of the software just does not get paid.
That's all jibberish, you can't just throw a bunch of economist lingo out there expecting it to form an argument by accident.
Noob, are you serious? I make businesses profitable for a living, so I do kinda have a bit of an idea of what I am talking about. That paragraph was not even that hard to understand, I am sorry that you are having difficulty.
Edit - checked your post history and found this gem:
On June 23 2011 11:16 latan wrote: The fact is that no one know how or how much piracy affects sales.
In some cases piracy brings exposure and sales, in others it makes buying redundant. But piracy has always been around, and the gaming industry got HUGE in a relatively short ammount of time, so i think it's safe to say that, while potentially harmfull, piracy doesn't even scratch the industry. Make a good game, provide a good service, your game will sell, the better it is, the more it will sell. period.
OK, let's see if you can follow this. Growth of an industry is a function of profitability and market size. Growth of the gaming industry had everything to do with a compelling product ($30-50 for 30+ hours of entertainment) and a growing market (kids who grew up and had more kids and made it into pop culture, etc).
The concept of piracy having a positive effect on exposure and sales is dubious. Up until a few years ago, the majority of games had demos available; first through media such as PC Gamer monthly demo discs and later through free downloads. Simply put, you do not pirate a game without knowing about it first. You pirate it because you want it for free. If you are unable to pirate it, you would need to purchase it. As such, if pirating were impossible, the profitability and growth rate of the gaming industry would be even higher.
There's always an exception to the rule; for instance, a game goes viral via piracy and brings attention to the developers, who go on to make a buttload of money. All that is well and good, but should have no bearing on your willingness to scour the web for Mass Effect 3 cracks once the game is released.
Oh, and don't talk smack about piracy not even scratching the industry when you obviously have no idea about its history. Many good companies closed down, got bought out, merged, reformed, etc, in the past two decades, because they were not making enough money. Surely, the sales they lost to idiots like you who believe in piracy would have helped them, mmm?
On June 24 2011 05:55 Solicer wrote: So I was thinking of a way to change the way the game worked so that you had to be registered online in order to play a offline in a LAN mode, so to speak.
What if, in order to plan on a LAN mode of sorts, you had to connect to battle.net at least once on the machine you play in order to get 'recognized,' or rather, so battle.net can give you the privilege of playing in the offline LAN mode. It would be like saying,"We just want to make sure you bought the game/activated your account (you know, the CD keys/codes). Now that you have made contact with Battle.net with a legitimate account that has access/bought the game, we will give you the privilege on this machine to run in the LAN mode."
I know that there are always downsides of something, and with this, if you wanted to play on a brand new machine, you would NEED access to the internet still, at least at first, to play on the LAN mode. Also, I am not that knowledgeable in regards to how easy it would be to bypass this, so I'm not sure how secure this would be.
And, this may have been suggested before. Nonetheless, could someone enlighten me a little bit more as to why Blizzard wouldn't have something set up at least similar to this?
It's not as easy as that. It's not hard to find a "auth.blizzard.com/authenticate" (example of url upon which the authentication service would listen) and replace it with "auth.pirated.com" in binary file and thus bypassing the whole auth. Of course you could use some sort of public/private key encryption which would validate that the message token from blizz authentication service was really sent from blizzard but, as with the auth url, the public key can be found and replaced in order to make the fake tokens seem legit.
I see. So, is there any way at all to have the LAN mode disabled until you can verify, through the internet, that you have bought the game (with the correct keys/codes, and a legitimate account)? Or is there no way to do this because of the nature of the files/data that is needed to activate the LAN mode?
The only truly bypassing way (and it still can be bypassed btw), is to force the client to check and check often with the bnet servers to reauthenticate enough times to make it difficult/annoying for piracy to break the code, but at that point, if you need to connect through to bnet so often, why not just do it ON bnet.
While I agree that I don't think LAN will be implemented due to certain result of it getting pirated, saying that LAN wouldn't be worth it with constant verification checks is illogical. The game would still be played over LAN, and therefore would result in sub 10ms delay, instead of say 200ms to the BNet servers. That is a huge advantage. Besides the fact that game traffic wouldn't have to go over the ethernet connection, greatly shrinking bandwidth usage.
So, assuming that the constant verification checks would help prevent the pirating, would this idea still basically work? The computers are still 'online,' with B.net still making sure that the accounts are active/legitimate accounts, but they are using a newly implemented LAN mode only useable when B.net recognizes that the accounts are legitimate.
With respect to computer security, there is no black-and-white "works" or "not works". Rather it's a spectrum of confidence in the security of the system. That being said, a verification-only server deters attempts to break the system, but it is still technically subvert-able by either faking the verification step or hacking the client. How likely this happens is not just a function of the effort put in by the developers but by the desire of the community to break such security. Given the popularity of starcraft, it is very likely to be broken.
downloading a game is the equivalent of stealing.. you have to pay to play Sc2 and if you do download it you can play it for free. you have to pay for food, or you can steal it and eat it for free. the difference is that when you steel a material item the producer looses money because of the actual loss of that product, where as the loss from piracy means the loss of a possible client.
YOu can compare the two and it does not mean that you are moronic... Sc2 is not loosing money from piracy but it is in the sense that it is loosing prospective revenue. piracy does loose the company money and there IS something wrong with that, or are you one of those people who walks around with a che guevara shirt who hates when companies fufil their function? piracy wont take down blizzard, but why should it hamper them? why shouldn't they try to make more money.
have you ever taken a commerce course or a marketing course?
Have you ever downloaded food? Stop trying to compare the two.
Next time I steal food from you, by copying the food, and leaving your food alone and where I found it. Are you going to cry? Yeah you sure are missing out.
Piracy is free marketing.
Microsoft and Bill Gates on Piracy: Microsoft has admitted that piracy of its Windows operating system has helped give it huge market share in China that will boost its revenues when these users "go legit". Bill Gates said, "It's easier for our software to compete with Linux when there's piracy than when there's not."
He has also said in reference to China: As long as they are going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They'll get sort of addicted, and then we'll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade. - Bill Gates
Blizzard actively hunts down people trying to make server emulators plus SC2 is quite complicated so I doubt there will be any pirate LAN servers soon. The only thing that might lead to LAN is if some code gets leaked or someone really decides to work on it in private, with inside information or not.
There is no way to stop piracy. It will never and can never be stopped. When will people learn this? The sooner they do the sooner the legit consumer can stop being punished. One bad apple ruins it for the rest, AWFUL logic. This Developer and his mentality infuriates me.
On June 24 2011 05:55 Solicer wrote: So I was thinking of a way to change the way the game worked so that you had to be registered online in order to play a offline in a LAN mode, so to speak.
What if, in order to plan on a LAN mode of sorts, you had to connect to battle.net at least once on the machine you play in order to get 'recognized,' or rather, so battle.net can give you the privilege of playing in the offline LAN mode. It would be like saying,"We just want to make sure you bought the game/activated your account (you know, the CD keys/codes). Now that you have made contact with Battle.net with a legitimate account that has access/bought the game, we will give you the privilege on this machine to run in the LAN mode."
I know that there are always downsides of something, and with this, if you wanted to play on a brand new machine, you would NEED access to the internet still, at least at first, to play on the LAN mode. Also, I am not that knowledgeable in regards to how easy it would be to bypass this, so I'm not sure how secure this would be.
And, this may have been suggested before. Nonetheless, could someone enlighten me a little bit more as to why Blizzard wouldn't have something set up at least similar to this?
It's not as easy as that. It's not hard to find a "auth.blizzard.com/authenticate" (example of url upon which the authentication service would listen) and replace it with "auth.pirated.com" in binary file and thus bypassing the whole auth. Of course you could use some sort of public/private key encryption which would validate that the message token from blizz authentication service was really sent from blizzard but, as with the auth url, the public key can be found and replaced in order to make the fake tokens seem legit.
I see. So, is there any way at all to have the LAN mode disabled until you can verify, through the internet, that you have bought the game (with the correct keys/codes, and a legitimate account)? Or is there no way to do this because of the nature of the files/data that is needed to activate the LAN mode?
The only truly bypassing way (and it still can be bypassed btw), is to force the client to check and check often with the bnet servers to reauthenticate enough times to make it difficult/annoying for piracy to break the code, but at that point, if you need to connect through to bnet so often, why not just do it ON bnet.
While I agree that I don't think LAN will be implemented due to certain result of it getting pirated, saying that LAN wouldn't be worth it with constant verification checks is illogical. The game would still be played over LAN, and therefore would result in sub 10ms delay, instead of say 200ms to the BNet servers. That is a huge advantage. Besides the fact that game traffic wouldn't have to go over the ethernet connection, greatly shrinking bandwidth usage.
Hahahaha.
But on a more serious note, sc2 is p2p, so I guess that if someone really wanted lan and had lots of free time, he could do it.
On June 24 2011 05:55 Solicer wrote: So I was thinking of a way to change the way the game worked so that you had to be registered online in order to play a offline in a LAN mode, so to speak.
What if, in order to plan on a LAN mode of sorts, you had to connect to battle.net at least once on the machine you play in order to get 'recognized,' or rather, so battle.net can give you the privilege of playing in the offline LAN mode. It would be like saying,"We just want to make sure you bought the game/activated your account (you know, the CD keys/codes). Now that you have made contact with Battle.net with a legitimate account that has access/bought the game, we will give you the privilege on this machine to run in the LAN mode."
I know that there are always downsides of something, and with this, if you wanted to play on a brand new machine, you would NEED access to the internet still, at least at first, to play on the LAN mode. Also, I am not that knowledgeable in regards to how easy it would be to bypass this, so I'm not sure how secure this would be.
And, this may have been suggested before. Nonetheless, could someone enlighten me a little bit more as to why Blizzard wouldn't have something set up at least similar to this?
It's not as easy as that. It's not hard to find a "auth.blizzard.com/authenticate" (example of url upon which the authentication service would listen) and replace it with "auth.pirated.com" in binary file and thus bypassing the whole auth. Of course you could use some sort of public/private key encryption which would validate that the message token from blizz authentication service was really sent from blizzard but, as with the auth url, the public key can be found and replaced in order to make the fake tokens seem legit.
I see. So, is there any way at all to have the LAN mode disabled until you can verify, through the internet, that you have bought the game (with the correct keys/codes, and a legitimate account)? Or is there no way to do this because of the nature of the files/data that is needed to activate the LAN mode?
The only truly bypassing way (and it still can be bypassed btw), is to force the client to check and check often with the bnet servers to reauthenticate enough times to make it difficult/annoying for piracy to break the code, but at that point, if you need to connect through to bnet so often, why not just do it ON bnet.
While I agree that I don't think LAN will be implemented due to certain result of it getting pirated, saying that LAN wouldn't be worth it with constant verification checks is illogical. The game would still be played over LAN, and therefore would result in sub 10ms delay, instead of say 200ms to the BNet servers. That is a huge advantage. Besides the fact that game traffic wouldn't have to go over the ethernet connection, greatly shrinking bandwidth usage.
Hahahaha.
But on a more serious note, sc2 is p2p, so I guess that if someone really wanted lan and had lots of free time, he could do it.
I'm sure they could. But it wouldn't affect tournaments. Tournaments aren't going to use a hacked copy of SC2.
On June 24 2011 07:26 Aruno wrote: Anyone that's compares pirating software to the equivalent of stealing a real life object, or committing a real crime like rape. Is a complete moron.
Pirating ONLY means the developers get less money. OK????!?!
No one dies from pirating, no one gets raped.
Not having LAN support is just today's way of company's/developers trying to get more money. THAT IS ALL. It's not even going to work either.
*note: I do like Blizzard. I don't want them to fail. But piracy will never take down blizzard. People do buy stuff they have pirated if they can get better support from the bought version.* I have tested games like Magicka, realised it's a fun game. Then bought it. Fuck people who say pirating is causing developers to lose money.*
How is pirating not like stealing?
A developer works to create a product to be sold to those who want it. People who pirate (take it for free, then share it for free) don't cost the developers money? Of course pirating won't go away, but it's silly to actually try to defend it as some victimless crime.
People don't actually want "LAN", they want P2P. People want to be able to play without lag from 1) latency to b.net servers 2) b.net malfunction.
It's not possible to create P2P that's not easily crackable.
However.. Ladder games and matchmaking (for custom games) should always be on B.net as it is now. "LAN"/P2P could be a complete separate system for single games between specific people.
In my opinion, B.net IS a reason enough to buy SC2. You can't get: 1) the whole ladder and all the players with a pirate copy, thus proper matchmaking. 2) get better at SC2 by just playing custom games over "LAN". The single player is already cracked. Adding LAN doesn't suddenly make you want to play SC2 a lot more.
Activision-Blizzard is really after a "quick buck". Region locking in this sense is much worse than not having P2P-mode (Custom games should be possible between every region). They want everyone to buy a copy, no matter how little you actually play it. Someone that plays the occassional game with a friend is never going to buy SC2.
On June 24 2011 07:26 Aruno wrote: Anyone that's compares pirating software to the equivalent of stealing a real life object, or committing a real crime like rape. Is a complete moron.
Pirating ONLY means the developers get less money. OK????!?!
No one dies from pirating, no one gets raped.
Not having LAN support is just today's way of company's/developers trying to get more money. THAT IS ALL. It's not even going to work either.
*note: I do like Blizzard. I don't want them to fail. But piracy will never take down blizzard. People do buy stuff they have pirated if they can get better support from the bought version.* I have tested games like Magicka, realised it's a fun game. Then bought it. Fuck people who say pirating is causing developers to lose money.*
How is pirating not like stealing?
A developer works to create a product to be sold to those who want it. People who pirate (take it for free, then share it for free) don't cost the developers money? Of course pirating won't go away, but it's silly to actually try to defend it as some victimless crime.
Pirating does not directly take away anything from the developer. Thus it's not theft.
I am not talking about on-selling an 'illegal' copy. I am only talking about the literal 'illegal' copying of files.
If you want to talk about illegal software selling. We need to talk about intellectual property rights. Not that same as piracy. Related. But not the same.
The only "victims" from piracy are the people who put their money and time into the assumption people will pay for their product.
They are victims of their own assumptions.
Lots of develops assume they should be paid lots of money for their work. Guess what, they don't. Guess who assumed wrong?
And no, you can never stop piracy. Trying to stop it, only causes a deeper and darker black market to arise from the "protection" systems.
Be smarter and learn to identify why people pirate, and how you can actually use piracy in your own marketing + distribution.
Its wrong, you know it, i know, we all know it, but most of us still do it... but don't try to justify it and make it seem like its not stealing. I don't believe how many people out there expect everything to be free and handed to them on a silver platter. You not liking the product is NOT a justification for stealing something.
On June 23 2011 07:14 ThePurist wrote: Microsoft operating systems and office software are two of the biggest pirated softwares and they still make money. This guy tries to act like a realist but he doesn't really have a clue about economics. The opinions are too pessimistic and overgeneralizes the vast majority of people who purchase games with their hard-earned cash. Pirates don't stop revenue streams pirates were not a consumer in the first place. The assumption that a pirated copy was a sale is flawed imo and his last few personal statements are questionable as I perceive them as a cop-out when his whole opinion was about "simple economics".
This is so stupid, you realize microsoft cares less about piracy then a game developer because they make something that's used by businesses? Individuals who commit piracy are incredibly hard to track down and sentence but companies are quite easy to do so and will rarely let themselves in with copies software etc. Because of that microsoft doesn't need to do as much against piracy because even the people who copy it for home use are much more likely to use it for the company they might creatre or be part off. Same reason university students can get business programs so cheap, because it pays itself back if those same students get official licences later in their life..
Stupid how many people are actually defending piracy though. Stealing games is just bad for the business. Illegally downloading music is the only thing that I can understand because there you are nor hurting the maker of the music but only the producer really, in fact many artists have gotten increased revenue's because of downloading by having bigger turnups for their performances. The labels are a unneccesary middleman in this day and age as musicians don't really need them so stealing from them doesn't feel as bad, stealing games and to a lesser extent tv shows/movies is just much harder to defend
On June 24 2011 10:35 Rifty wrote: Why do people try to justify pirating?
Its wrong, you know it, i know, we all know it, but most of us still do it... but don't try to justify it and make it seem like its not stealing. I don't believe how many people out there expect everything to be free and handed to them on a silver platter. You not liking the product is NOT a justification for stealing something.
If we lived in a world where I had to literally take away software from someone else to have it myself. Then I would say piracy is theft. Fortunately we don't.
I don't expect everything to be handed to for free. I've paid for loads of software that I've gotten the pirate version of first.
Here is a short list( I own these products now, but originally trialled through pirating ): PowerIso Fraps Diablo I and II Warcraft I, II and III Starcraft 2(bought SC1 outright) Magicka Portal 2 LFD 2 Minecraft and many others that I cannot think of right now. I bought these. Many others too.
Guys, often the people who don't pay for software are the ones that will by natural sharing actually advertise to others that will buy the product. So screw those who don't like piracy.
I'll say this again, pirating is not the enemy. Bad support and bad consumer understanding is.
On June 24 2011 10:35 Rifty wrote: Why do people try to justify pirating?
Its wrong, you know it, i know, we all know it, but most of us still do it... but don't try to justify it and make it seem like its not stealing. I don't believe how many people out there expect everything to be free and handed to them on a silver platter. You not liking the product is NOT a justification for stealing something.
The fact you think correcting others that piracy is not stealing is anyone justifying anything shows your lack of understanding. People are correcting you the same way they would if you said 2+2=5. Piracy is not stealing, for some reason you think that means people are automatically equating that with moral justification for illegal downloading. It's simply trying to get everyone one that same page about the true definition of piracy and how it differs from stealing. It's far from a justification of any kind.
downloading a game is the equivalent of stealing.. you have to pay to play Sc2 and if you do download it you can play it for free. you have to pay for food, or you can steal it and eat it for free. the difference is that when you steel a material item the producer looses money because of the actual loss of that product, where as the loss from piracy means the loss of a possible client.
YOu can compare the two and it does not mean that you are moronic... Sc2 is not loosing money from piracy but it is in the sense that it is loosing prospective revenue. piracy does loose the company money and there IS something wrong with that, or are you one of those people who walks around with a che guevara shirt who hates when companies fufil their function? piracy wont take down blizzard, but why should it hamper them? why shouldn't they try to make more money.
have you ever taken a commerce course or a marketing course?
Have you ever downloaded food? Stop trying to compare the two.
Next time I steal food from you, by copying the food, and leaving your food alone and where I found it. Are you going to cry? Yeah you sure are missing out.
Piracy is free marketing.
Microsoft and Bill Gates on Piracy: Microsoft has admitted that piracy of its Windows operating system has helped give it huge market share in China that will boost its revenues when these users "go legit". Bill Gates said, "It's easier for our software to compete with Linux when there's piracy than when there's not."
He has also said in reference to China: As long as they are going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They'll get sort of addicted, and then we'll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade. - Bill Gates
please argue my point rather than my analogy. Good for microsoft, but we are talking about blizzard and starcraft however. Please follow up with a proper debate i still stand by my post.
downloading a game is the equivalent of stealing.. you have to pay to play Sc2 and if you do download it you can play it for free. you have to pay for food, or you can steal it and eat it for free. the difference is that when you steel a material item the producer looses money because of the actual loss of that product, where as the loss from piracy means the loss of a possible client.
YOu can compare the two and it does not mean that you are moronic... Sc2 is not loosing money from piracy but it is in the sense that it is loosing prospective revenue. piracy does loose the company money and there IS something wrong with that, or are you one of those people who walks around with a che guevara shirt who hates when companies fufil their function? piracy wont take down blizzard, but why should it hamper them? why shouldn't they try to make more money.
have you ever taken a commerce course or a marketing course?
Have you ever downloaded food? Stop trying to compare the two.
Next time I steal food from you, by copying the food, and leaving your food alone and where I found it. Are you going to cry? Yeah you sure are missing out.
Piracy is free marketing.
Microsoft and Bill Gates on Piracy: Microsoft has admitted that piracy of its Windows operating system has helped give it huge market share in China that will boost its revenues when these users "go legit". Bill Gates said, "It's easier for our software to compete with Linux when there's piracy than when there's not."
He has also said in reference to China: As long as they are going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They'll get sort of addicted, and then we'll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade. - Bill Gates
please argue my point rather than my analogy. Good for microsoft, but we are talking about blizzard and starcraft however. Please follow up with a proper debate i still stand by my post.
So your point is piracy hampers Blizzard and Starcraft. My point is that your point is wrong. Piracy does not hamper Blizzard or Starcraft.
why shouldn't they try to make more money
I'm not against Blizzard making money at all. But in my view the people who realise piracy for what it is, and not fight against it, are the ones who will come out ahead. In my view, Blizzard can do what it likes, but they only promote piracy when they take away features and support inside their products.
There was a video on Gabe Newell from Valve that summed up simply on how they view piracy. It's also how I view piracy. Also, the people making money from clamping down on piracy are generally never the developer. It's usually lawyers and other bureaucratic business people.
Also I'm not some cheap "rebel", anti-company yobbo. I am a professional Computer Technician. I want company's to succeed, but punishing piracy doesn't help.
downloading a game is the equivalent of stealing.. you have to pay to play Sc2 and if you do download it you can play it for free. you have to pay for food, or you can steal it and eat it for free. the difference is that when you steel a material item the producer looses money because of the actual loss of that product, where as the loss from piracy means the loss of a possible client.
YOu can compare the two and it does not mean that you are moronic... Sc2 is not loosing money from piracy but it is in the sense that it is loosing prospective revenue. piracy does loose the company money and there IS something wrong with that, or are you one of those people who walks around with a che guevara shirt who hates when companies fufil their function? piracy wont take down blizzard, but why should it hamper them? why shouldn't they try to make more money.
have you ever taken a commerce course or a marketing course?
Have you ever downloaded food? Stop trying to compare the two.
Next time I steal food from you, by copying the food, and leaving your food alone and where I found it. Are you going to cry? Yeah you sure are missing out.
Piracy is free marketing.
Microsoft and Bill Gates on Piracy: Microsoft has admitted that piracy of its Windows operating system has helped give it huge market share in China that will boost its revenues when these users "go legit". Bill Gates said, "It's easier for our software to compete with Linux when there's piracy than when there's not."
He has also said in reference to China: As long as they are going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They'll get sort of addicted, and then we'll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade. - Bill Gates
please argue my point rather than my analogy. Good for microsoft, but we are talking about blizzard and starcraft however. Please follow up with a proper debate i still stand by my post.
So your point is piracy hampers Blizzard and Starcraft. My point is that your point is wrong. Piracy does not hamper Blizzard or Starcraft.
I'm not against Blizzard making money at all. But in my view the people who realise piracy for what it is, and not fight against it, are the ones who will come out ahead. In my view, Blizzard can do what it likes, but they only promote piracy when they take away features and support inside their products.
There was a video on Gabe Newell from Valve that summed up simply on how they view piracy. It's also how I view piracy. Also, the people making money from clamping down on piracy are generally never the developer. It's usually lawyers and other bureaucratic business people.
Also I'm not some cheap "rebel", anti-company yobbo. I am a professional Computer Technician. I want company's to succeed, but punishing piracy doesn't help.
Ironically, battle.net is exactly the kind of indirect response to software piracy that gabe newell advocates. Instead of applying validation keys and such, they moved to a software-as-a-service model that provides value to customers with a side-effect of curbing piracy by having critical functionality reside only on their servers.
If you support piracy in the sense of pressuring the software industry to move to more "reasonable" forms of distribution and service (note: not my opinion), then you should respect battle.net, hon, lol, etc. for what they are.
(And a clarification, my statement is general and not meant for any particular person.)
Piracy is not stealing? You are enjoying other people's work and not paying a single dime for it, what type of for-profit industry in the will allow that? Studios spend 2-3 YEARS dedicating their time to create a great game, if you don't pay for the game why should you get to play it for free and why do people justify doing so?
I'm not ordering anybody to stop pirating, but I want people to at the very least realize what they are doing is wrong..
On June 24 2011 12:33 Rifty wrote: Piracy is not stealing? You are enjoying other people's work and not paying a single dime for it, what type of for-profit industry in the will allow that? Studios spend 2-3 YEARS dedicating their time to create a great game, if you don't pay for the game why should you get to play it for free and why do people justify doing so?
I'm not ordering anybody to stop pirating, but I want people to at the very least realize what they are doing is wrong..
Piracy can also mean you "try before you buy". Your assuming "pirates" don't give money to good game developing company's.
Piracy is not the reason why developers fail. Stop looking at piracy like a blanket bad thing. It's not.
On June 24 2011 12:54 Valentine wrote: What about the companies that are not insanely huge like Blizzard? The developers work hard to create a good game and only get a fraction of what they should have back in return because nerds are too greedy to actually buy the game?
Developers need to change. Piracy is not going away. It's the developers fault for not either designing the product to not be easy to get for a reasonable price or generating negative backlash from their services.
What about the companies that are not insanely huge like Blizzard? The developers work hard to create a good game and only get a fraction of what they should have back in return because nerds are too greedy to actually buy the game?
On June 24 2011 12:33 Rifty wrote: Piracy is not stealing? You are enjoying other people's work and not paying a single dime for it, what type of for-profit industry in the will allow that? Studios spend 2-3 YEARS dedicating their time to create a great game, if you don't pay for the game why should you get to play it for free and why do people justify doing so?
I'm not ordering anybody to stop pirating, but I want people to at the very least realize what they are doing is wrong..
Piracy can also mean you "try before you buy". Your assuming "pirates" don't give money to good game developing company's.
Piracy is not the reason why developers fail. Stop looking at piracy like a blanket bad thing. It's not.
I still don't understand how you don't see piracy as a bad thing. Giving people the option to pay for what they want to play? Meaning that everyone has the right to give the creators 0%?
On June 24 2011 12:33 Rifty wrote: Piracy is not stealing? You are enjoying other people's work and not paying a single dime for it, what type of for-profit industry in the will allow that? Studios spend 2-3 YEARS dedicating their time to create a great game, if you don't pay for the game why should you get to play it for free and why do people justify doing so?
I'm not ordering anybody to stop pirating, but I want people to at the very least realize what they are doing is wrong..
Piracy can also mean you "try before you buy". Your assuming "pirates" don't give money to good game developing company's.
Piracy is not the reason why developers fail. Stop looking at piracy like a blanket bad thing. It's not.
You are absolutely ludicrously wrong if you think that the majority of pirates will try the software then go buy it. There are games out there where the number of pirated copies are even greater than the amount sold....
If you pirate, then buy the software, great. But realize that you are the exception, not the majority by a long shot.
Even if a studio does not release a demo of the game (and this is the minority already), what makes you think that you can pirate the game to "try" it out? It is absolutely in the studio's rights to not release a demo, does it suck for you? yea sure, does it justify you stealing the game? hell no, it just means you don't get to play it. Again, just because you don't agree with what a studio is doing, is not a justification to steal from them.
If you download a movie and watch it, will you still go to the movie theater the next day and pay to watch it again? I'm sure you'll say yes, but you gotta realize how ridiculous that is and how few people will do that...
On June 23 2011 07:06 Ribbon wrote: I saw this thread on Reddit, in which a Heroes of Newerth developer explains the reasons why HoN will never have LAN, and why LAN is on the way out for RTS games generally. I thought a lot of people here might find his arguments interesting and worthy of discussion, in relation to SC2's LAN woes.
Not my shot to call. But as an Economist, it's easy for me to see why any company making an RTS-style game will never put LAN in it ever again. Pirates ruined LAN, not us. I don't see why everybody is trying to convince companies to put LAN into games- you're convincing the wrong people. As long as piracy is on the rise, LAN will be on the way out. Simple as that. Put yourself in any business' shoes and try to weigh the advantages against the disadvantages and you will understand why, even on the biggest competitive games like Starcraft 2, there will never be LAN.
Goodwill is nice to have but it doesn't pay the bills and any gaming company out there is out there to make money first and make good games second. I'm sorry if this truth offends you but the video game market is an industry and people make games to make money the same way a guy who sells Ice-cream does his job to make money and not to put smiles on people's faces (although I'm sure he does enjoy putting smiles on people's faces).
The majority of the gaming community has a whole has proven to be indifferent about "goodwill". So don't knock on our door, or Blizzard's, or anybody else who doesn't put a LAN feature in their game- it's simple Economics. If I have a choice to add a feature to a game that will reduce revenue by a significant percentage and yield almost nothing in return (money wise) than any smart business wont implement it.
And you better bet piracy is on the rise. I'm not blaming anybody, though- just the same way that the smart Business is drawn to removing LAN because of piracy, the smart Consumer is drawn to piracy because it is rational to not buy a game for 30 dollars when I can download almost the same game for free.
It's a simple case of two Homo Economicus doing what they do best- being rational in a market. LAN is an unfortunate bystander and is going to vanish in the future as long as it's part of a game that can be abused by piracy.
So yeah, I'm listening if you have any good arguments. Let me state for the record that I love LAN, that I wish HoN had LAN, that I think it's lame that tournaments have to be played on-line and not on LAN. But I still accept the inevitability that LAN is going to die.
Discuss!
blizzard really doesnt have this excuse, people would buy their games regardless of if there was lan or not
On June 24 2011 12:54 Valentine wrote: What about the companies that are not insanely huge like Blizzard? The developers work hard to create a good game and only get a fraction of what they should have back in return because nerds are too greedy to actually buy the game?
On June 24 2011 12:33 Rifty wrote: Piracy is not stealing? You are enjoying other people's work and not paying a single dime for it, what type of for-profit industry in the will allow that? Studios spend 2-3 YEARS dedicating their time to create a great game, if you don't pay for the game why should you get to play it for free and why do people justify doing so?
I'm not ordering anybody to stop pirating, but I want people to at the very least realize what they are doing is wrong..
Piracy can also mean you "try before you buy". Your assuming "pirates" don't give money to good game developing company's.
Piracy is not the reason why developers fail. Stop looking at piracy like a blanket bad thing. It's not.
I still don't understand how you don't see piracy as a bad thing. Giving people the option to pay for what they want to play? Meaning that everyone has the right to give the creators 0%?
...You mean the company that merged with Activision? Blizzard didn't seem to have a problem with LAN when making WC3 or its other games prior to its merger..
On June 24 2011 08:49 Aruno wrote: Microsoft and Bill Gates on Piracy: Microsoft has admitted that piracy of its Windows operating system has helped give it huge market share in China that will boost its revenues when these users "go legit". Bill Gates said, "It's easier for our software to compete with Linux when there's piracy than when there's not."
this is what sc1 did, very popular, i guess piracy helped a good bit in there.
He has also said in reference to China: As long as they are going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They'll get sort of addicted, and then we'll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade. - Bill Gates
[/quote]
sc2 has figured out the way to collect, which is by making sc2 only have multiplayer in combination with bnet2. Basically they know users will buy the product and not be angry enough to ditch the product. If Windows would insert some security that makes the OS unusable without a legit key, ppl might switch the other OSes. SC2 doesnt have this problem as there is no alternative and the game is still hugely popular...
In my opinion it seems like they used a similar model...
Another non related thing is that software houses are not always right... just look at all the crappy cd/dvd protections many games have had... it didn't stop hackers from cracking the games, yet it game real owners of the game lots of troubles... These protections have been used alot and are still being used for some games... Many users even use the pirated version after buying the legit ones, just to get around the protection..
I feel they should just add lan support and a game like sc2 wouldn't suffer much, but blizz isnt willing to take the risk, and why should they? I feel that despite Blizz having a good reputation listening to their customers, they just do whatever they want -_-
On June 24 2011 12:54 Valentine wrote: What about the companies that are not insanely huge like Blizzard? The developers work hard to create a good game and only get a fraction of what they should have back in return because nerds are too greedy to actually buy the game?
On June 24 2011 12:54 Aruno wrote:
On June 24 2011 12:33 Rifty wrote: Piracy is not stealing? You are enjoying other people's work and not paying a single dime for it, what type of for-profit industry in the will allow that? Studios spend 2-3 YEARS dedicating their time to create a great game, if you don't pay for the game why should you get to play it for free and why do people justify doing so?
I'm not ordering anybody to stop pirating, but I want people to at the very least realize what they are doing is wrong..
Piracy can also mean you "try before you buy". Your assuming "pirates" don't give money to good game developing company's.
Piracy is not the reason why developers fail. Stop looking at piracy like a blanket bad thing. It's not.
I still don't understand how you don't see piracy as a bad thing. Giving people the option to pay for what they want to play? Meaning that everyone has the right to give the creators 0%?
...You mean the company that merged with Activision? Blizzard didn't seem to have a problem with LAN when making WC3 or its other games prior to its merger..
??
I don't really get what you're trying to say. I'm just saying that it harms the small companies (unlike Blizzard) to deprive them of the funds they would receive if people were not stealing their software.
On June 24 2011 12:54 Valentine wrote: What about the companies that are not insanely huge like Blizzard? The developers work hard to create a good game and only get a fraction of what they should have back in return because nerds are too greedy to actually buy the game?
On June 24 2011 12:54 Aruno wrote:
On June 24 2011 12:33 Rifty wrote: Piracy is not stealing? You are enjoying other people's work and not paying a single dime for it, what type of for-profit industry in the will allow that? Studios spend 2-3 YEARS dedicating their time to create a great game, if you don't pay for the game why should you get to play it for free and why do people justify doing so?
I'm not ordering anybody to stop pirating, but I want people to at the very least realize what they are doing is wrong..
Piracy can also mean you "try before you buy". Your assuming "pirates" don't give money to good game developing company's.
Piracy is not the reason why developers fail. Stop looking at piracy like a blanket bad thing. It's not.
I still don't understand how you don't see piracy as a bad thing. Giving people the option to pay for what they want to play? Meaning that everyone has the right to give the creators 0%?
...You mean the company that merged with Activision? Blizzard didn't seem to have a problem with LAN when making WC3 or its other games prior to its merger..
??
I don't really get what you're trying to say. I'm just saying that it harms the small companies (unlike Blizzard) to deprive them of the funds they would receive if people were not stealing their software.
When will people understand that 99% of the "pirates" that dont buy the game actually would never buy the game? they are not potential customers.
Stupid developers killed LAN and PC gaming, not pirates.
Look at Valve. They've never once whined like a little bitch about how piracy kills games and they're still making a killing of what is it, only 3 games released in a past 3 years in 3 separate series?
Also indie developers can make profits. Look at World of Goo. Two indian guys made a great, simple 2D game and got paid big for it, even though the game was only single player and easily pirated.
I don't agree with the HoN developer that LAN support (in SC2) is obviously not technically difficult. The StarCraft 2 server is Battle.net itself. It was never planned to be something you can run on any Desktop PC. And certainly it would mean a tremendous amount of effort to make this happen. Shrugging this of as ' yea it's easy but they simply don't WANT TO' is unfair imho.
And to the people still defending the extremely biased viewpoint of the publisher on the matter of piracy, I would recommend to watch Steal.This.Film part 1+2 for a good watch. 'They' were struggling to keep their unwarranted position of distribution power the same way when the book press was invented, and when the tape recorder was released.. and now the same bullshit again with CD writers and the internet. We don't need your capital anymore to distribute these works of art. Go somewhere else to profit from not doing stuff but simply owning it.
On June 24 2011 12:54 Valentine wrote: What about the companies that are not insanely huge like Blizzard? The developers work hard to create a good game and only get a fraction of what they should have back in return because nerds are too greedy to actually buy the game?
On June 24 2011 12:54 Aruno wrote:
On June 24 2011 12:33 Rifty wrote: Piracy is not stealing? You are enjoying other people's work and not paying a single dime for it, what type of for-profit industry in the will allow that? Studios spend 2-3 YEARS dedicating their time to create a great game, if you don't pay for the game why should you get to play it for free and why do people justify doing so?
I'm not ordering anybody to stop pirating, but I want people to at the very least realize what they are doing is wrong..
Piracy can also mean you "try before you buy". Your assuming "pirates" don't give money to good game developing company's.
Piracy is not the reason why developers fail. Stop looking at piracy like a blanket bad thing. It's not.
I still don't understand how you don't see piracy as a bad thing. Giving people the option to pay for what they want to play? Meaning that everyone has the right to give the creators 0%?
...You mean the company that merged with Activision? Blizzard didn't seem to have a problem with LAN when making WC3 or its other games prior to its merger..
??
I don't really get what you're trying to say. I'm just saying that it harms the small companies (unlike Blizzard) to deprive them of the funds they would receive if people were not stealing their software.
When will people understand that 99% of the "pirates" that dont buy the game actually would never buy the game? they are not potential customers.
So that makes it OK for them to steal the game? Why do they get the experience of playing the game without paying for it? If they aren't willing to pay for a service, they should not be able to get it for free. And your 99% of pirates are not willing to buy the game is just an absurd number you pulled from thin air... even if that 1% of people that were willing to buy the game don't because they can pirate it, it means that is potential revenue lost, no matter how little.
Totally agreed with the HON developers, we criticise so hard without seeing ourselves in their shoes. But there are no way to kill piracy, so killing lan is legitimate.
On June 24 2011 12:54 Valentine wrote: What about the companies that are not insanely huge like Blizzard? The developers work hard to create a good game and only get a fraction of what they should have back in return because nerds are too greedy to actually buy the game?
On June 24 2011 12:54 Aruno wrote:
On June 24 2011 12:33 Rifty wrote: Piracy is not stealing? You are enjoying other people's work and not paying a single dime for it, what type of for-profit industry in the will allow that? Studios spend 2-3 YEARS dedicating their time to create a great game, if you don't pay for the game why should you get to play it for free and why do people justify doing so?
I'm not ordering anybody to stop pirating, but I want people to at the very least realize what they are doing is wrong..
Piracy can also mean you "try before you buy". Your assuming "pirates" don't give money to good game developing company's.
Piracy is not the reason why developers fail. Stop looking at piracy like a blanket bad thing. It's not.
I still don't understand how you don't see piracy as a bad thing. Giving people the option to pay for what they want to play? Meaning that everyone has the right to give the creators 0%?
...You mean the company that merged with Activision? Blizzard didn't seem to have a problem with LAN when making WC3 or its other games prior to its merger..
??
I don't really get what you're trying to say. I'm just saying that it harms the small companies (unlike Blizzard) to deprive them of the funds they would receive if people were not stealing their software.
When will people understand that 99% of the "pirates" that dont buy the game actually would never buy the game? they are not potential customers.
So that makes it OK for them to steal the game? Why do they get the experience of playing the game without paying for it? If they aren't willing to pay for a service, they should not be able to get it for free. And your 99% of pirates are not willing to buy the game is just an absurd number you pulled from thin air... even if that 1% of people that were willing to buy the game don't because they can pirate it, it means that is potential revenue lost, no matter how little.
instead of complaining so much, just join in the fun. im sure you have pirated some things in the past. i dont believe anyone on this world purchases every single song or movie theyve ever watched/heard
On June 24 2011 12:54 Valentine wrote: What about the companies that are not insanely huge like Blizzard? The developers work hard to create a good game and only get a fraction of what they should have back in return because nerds are too greedy to actually buy the game?
On June 24 2011 12:54 Aruno wrote:
On June 24 2011 12:33 Rifty wrote: Piracy is not stealing? You are enjoying other people's work and not paying a single dime for it, what type of for-profit industry in the will allow that? Studios spend 2-3 YEARS dedicating their time to create a great game, if you don't pay for the game why should you get to play it for free and why do people justify doing so?
I'm not ordering anybody to stop pirating, but I want people to at the very least realize what they are doing is wrong..
Piracy can also mean you "try before you buy". Your assuming "pirates" don't give money to good game developing company's.
Piracy is not the reason why developers fail. Stop looking at piracy like a blanket bad thing. It's not.
I still don't understand how you don't see piracy as a bad thing. Giving people the option to pay for what they want to play? Meaning that everyone has the right to give the creators 0%?
...You mean the company that merged with Activision? Blizzard didn't seem to have a problem with LAN when making WC3 or its other games prior to its merger..
??
I don't really get what you're trying to say. I'm just saying that it harms the small companies (unlike Blizzard) to deprive them of the funds they would receive if people were not stealing their software.
When will people understand that 99% of the "pirates" that dont buy the game actually would never buy the game? they are not potential customers.
So that makes it OK for them to steal the game? Why do they get the experience of playing the game without paying for it? If they aren't willing to pay for a service, they should not be able to get it for free. And your 99% of pirates are not willing to buy the game is just an absurd number you pulled from thin air... even if that 1% of people that were willing to buy the game don't because they can pirate it, it means that is potential revenue lost, no matter how little.
instead of complaining so much, just join in the fun. im sure you have pirated some things in the past. i dont believe anyone on this world purchases every single song or movie theyve ever watched/heard
Like i said in a previous post, i don't care about people pirating, it's the people that somehow justifies it with some ridiculous logic and thinks its perfectly OK to steal that bugs me.
On June 24 2011 12:54 Valentine wrote: What about the companies that are not insanely huge like Blizzard? The developers work hard to create a good game and only get a fraction of what they should have back in return because nerds are too greedy to actually buy the game?
On June 24 2011 12:54 Aruno wrote:
On June 24 2011 12:33 Rifty wrote: Piracy is not stealing? You are enjoying other people's work and not paying a single dime for it, what type of for-profit industry in the will allow that? Studios spend 2-3 YEARS dedicating their time to create a great game, if you don't pay for the game why should you get to play it for free and why do people justify doing so?
I'm not ordering anybody to stop pirating, but I want people to at the very least realize what they are doing is wrong..
Piracy can also mean you "try before you buy". Your assuming "pirates" don't give money to good game developing company's.
Piracy is not the reason why developers fail. Stop looking at piracy like a blanket bad thing. It's not.
I still don't understand how you don't see piracy as a bad thing. Giving people the option to pay for what they want to play? Meaning that everyone has the right to give the creators 0%?
...You mean the company that merged with Activision? Blizzard didn't seem to have a problem with LAN when making WC3 or its other games prior to its merger..
??
I don't really get what you're trying to say. I'm just saying that it harms the small companies (unlike Blizzard) to deprive them of the funds they would receive if people were not stealing their software.
When will people understand that 99% of the "pirates" that dont buy the game actually would never buy the game? they are not potential customers.
I think you are wrong with this. The point of SC is play online versus online opponent. People will not pay for the full game but if they can play online for a cheap fee they will pay.
The China server is a very good example of Blizzard decision, they give out the game for free, and charge a monthly fee of 20RMB( 4 USD) a month, and there are alot of peolple on CN server already. While WC3 was sold full version in China for 40RMB(8 USD), and still noone bough it cos they can just play on LAN support platform like Haofang( Garena of China).
From a bussiness standpoint Blizzard made a very good decision, they must be very happy with the monthly fee they are able to earn in China right now. I have some Chinese friends, they will not pay for anything over 100RMB even they love SC2, but they paid 3 months of SC2 monthly fee already and I am pretty sure they will continue to do so in the future.
On June 24 2011 12:54 Valentine wrote: What about the companies that are not insanely huge like Blizzard? The developers work hard to create a good game and only get a fraction of what they should have back in return because nerds are too greedy to actually buy the game?
On June 24 2011 12:54 Aruno wrote:
On June 24 2011 12:33 Rifty wrote: Piracy is not stealing? You are enjoying other people's work and not paying a single dime for it, what type of for-profit industry in the will allow that? Studios spend 2-3 YEARS dedicating their time to create a great game, if you don't pay for the game why should you get to play it for free and why do people justify doing so?
I'm not ordering anybody to stop pirating, but I want people to at the very least realize what they are doing is wrong..
Piracy can also mean you "try before you buy". Your assuming "pirates" don't give money to good game developing company's.
Piracy is not the reason why developers fail. Stop looking at piracy like a blanket bad thing. It's not.
I still don't understand how you don't see piracy as a bad thing. Giving people the option to pay for what they want to play? Meaning that everyone has the right to give the creators 0%?
...You mean the company that merged with Activision? Blizzard didn't seem to have a problem with LAN when making WC3 or its other games prior to its merger..
??
I don't really get what you're trying to say. I'm just saying that it harms the small companies (unlike Blizzard) to deprive them of the funds they would receive if people were not stealing their software.
When will people understand that 99% of the "pirates" that dont buy the game actually would never buy the game? they are not potential customers.
So that makes it OK for them to steal the game? Why do they get the experience of playing the game without paying for it? If they aren't willing to pay for a service, they should not be able to get it for free. And your 99% of pirates are not willing to buy the game is just an absurd number you pulled from thin air... even if that 1% of people that were willing to buy the game don't because they can pirate it, it means that is potential revenue lost, no matter how little.
instead of complaining so much, just join in the fun. im sure you have pirated some things in the past. i dont believe anyone on this world purchases every single song or movie theyve ever watched/heard
Like i said in a previous post, i don't care about people pirating, it's the people that somehow justifies it with some ridiculous logic and thinks its perfectly OK to steal that bugs me.
You logic is that it is not justified. My logic is that it is justified. Who is getting hurt in this picture? What's the bigger picture? Who's got to change? The Pirates or the Developers? Will punishing the pirates create the developers desired outcome of more revenue?
On June 24 2011 12:54 Valentine wrote: What about the companies that are not insanely huge like Blizzard? The developers work hard to create a good game and only get a fraction of what they should have back in return because nerds are too greedy to actually buy the game?
On June 24 2011 12:54 Aruno wrote:
On June 24 2011 12:33 Rifty wrote: Piracy is not stealing? You are enjoying other people's work and not paying a single dime for it, what type of for-profit industry in the will allow that? Studios spend 2-3 YEARS dedicating their time to create a great game, if you don't pay for the game why should you get to play it for free and why do people justify doing so?
I'm not ordering anybody to stop pirating, but I want people to at the very least realize what they are doing is wrong..
Piracy can also mean you "try before you buy". Your assuming "pirates" don't give money to good game developing company's.
Piracy is not the reason why developers fail. Stop looking at piracy like a blanket bad thing. It's not.
I still don't understand how you don't see piracy as a bad thing. Giving people the option to pay for what they want to play? Meaning that everyone has the right to give the creators 0%?
...You mean the company that merged with Activision? Blizzard didn't seem to have a problem with LAN when making WC3 or its other games prior to its merger..
??
I don't really get what you're trying to say. I'm just saying that it harms the small companies (unlike Blizzard) to deprive them of the funds they would receive if people were not stealing their software.
When will people understand that 99% of the "pirates" that dont buy the game actually would never buy the game? they are not potential customers.
I really don't understand your argument. If you could get a Benz for free, would you decide to pay for it? Or simpler, would you pay for a bottle of water if you could get it for free? Look around, sir, people are always looking for something for nothing.
If you could get SC2 for free, would you pay for it? I wouldn't. Maybe I'm part of your 1%?
By this HoN developers logic, authors should no longer write books because of public libraries and e-books pirating.
Hypothetical situation: HotS comes out with LAN enabled and a cracked version is available for download almost immediately. Is any seriously going to NOT buy a legit copy of HotS?
This has been said so many times but developers fail to understand that pirates will pirate a game regardless of LAN or no LAN. The amount of people that will buy a game for multiplayer because they can't play multi with pirate copy (assuming no multiplayer hack was made) is minimal at best. Most will simply pass on the multi and pirate it anyway and move on to the next game shortly there after. Or should they like it maybe they will buy it.
On June 24 2011 12:54 Valentine wrote: What about the companies that are not insanely huge like Blizzard? The developers work hard to create a good game and only get a fraction of what they should have back in return because nerds are too greedy to actually buy the game?
On June 24 2011 12:54 Aruno wrote:
On June 24 2011 12:33 Rifty wrote: Piracy is not stealing? You are enjoying other people's work and not paying a single dime for it, what type of for-profit industry in the will allow that? Studios spend 2-3 YEARS dedicating their time to create a great game, if you don't pay for the game why should you get to play it for free and why do people justify doing so?
I'm not ordering anybody to stop pirating, but I want people to at the very least realize what they are doing is wrong..
Piracy can also mean you "try before you buy". Your assuming "pirates" don't give money to good game developing company's.
Piracy is not the reason why developers fail. Stop looking at piracy like a blanket bad thing. It's not.
I still don't understand how you don't see piracy as a bad thing. Giving people the option to pay for what they want to play? Meaning that everyone has the right to give the creators 0%?
...You mean the company that merged with Activision? Blizzard didn't seem to have a problem with LAN when making WC3 or its other games prior to its merger..
??
I don't really get what you're trying to say. I'm just saying that it harms the small companies (unlike Blizzard) to deprive them of the funds they would receive if people were not stealing their software.
When will people understand that 99% of the "pirates" that dont buy the game actually would never buy the game? they are not potential customers.
So that makes it OK for them to steal the game? Why do they get the experience of playing the game without paying for it? If they aren't willing to pay for a service, they should not be able to get it for free. And your 99% of pirates are not willing to buy the game is just an absurd number you pulled from thin air... even if that 1% of people that were willing to buy the game don't because they can pirate it, it means that is potential revenue lost, no matter how little.
instead of complaining so much, just join in the fun. im sure you have pirated some things in the past. i dont believe anyone on this world purchases every single song or movie theyve ever watched/heard
Like i said in a previous post, i don't care about people pirating, it's the people that somehow justifies it with some ridiculous logic and thinks its perfectly OK to steal that bugs me.
You logic is that it is not justified. My logic is that it is justified. Who is getting hurt in this picture? What's the bigger picture? Who's got to change? The Pirates or the Developers? Will punishing the pirates create the developers desired outcome of more revenue?
Hmmmm.
Your logic is that it's some how OK to steal and get something for free because you weren't going to pay for it anyways. And that somehow doesn't hurt the developers? That is crazy... if somebody is not willing to pay for something, it's not somehow justifiable to just steal it and get it for free, purely because you are not willing to pay. Bottom line is: You play the game that a studio has spent 2-3 years and thousands of man hours working on for FREE. You don't pay a dime. You get the experience of playing for free. You are stealing the work and effort of every person that has worked on the game. How do you argue against that?
Again, if you want to pirate, then pirate, but at the very least realize that what you are doing is wrong and is stealing.
On June 24 2011 12:54 Valentine wrote: What about the companies that are not insanely huge like Blizzard? The developers work hard to create a good game and only get a fraction of what they should have back in return because nerds are too greedy to actually buy the game?
On June 24 2011 12:54 Aruno wrote:
On June 24 2011 12:33 Rifty wrote: Piracy is not stealing? You are enjoying other people's work and not paying a single dime for it, what type of for-profit industry in the will allow that? Studios spend 2-3 YEARS dedicating their time to create a great game, if you don't pay for the game why should you get to play it for free and why do people justify doing so?
I'm not ordering anybody to stop pirating, but I want people to at the very least realize what they are doing is wrong..
Piracy can also mean you "try before you buy". Your assuming "pirates" don't give money to good game developing company's.
Piracy is not the reason why developers fail. Stop looking at piracy like a blanket bad thing. It's not.
I still don't understand how you don't see piracy as a bad thing. Giving people the option to pay for what they want to play? Meaning that everyone has the right to give the creators 0%?
...You mean the company that merged with Activision? Blizzard didn't seem to have a problem with LAN when making WC3 or its other games prior to its merger..
??
I don't really get what you're trying to say. I'm just saying that it harms the small companies (unlike Blizzard) to deprive them of the funds they would receive if people were not stealing their software.
When will people understand that 99% of the "pirates" that dont buy the game actually would never buy the game? they are not potential customers.
So that makes it OK for them to steal the game? Why do they get the experience of playing the game without paying for it? If they aren't willing to pay for a service, they should not be able to get it for free. And your 99% of pirates are not willing to buy the game is just an absurd number you pulled from thin air... even if that 1% of people that were willing to buy the game don't because they can pirate it, it means that is potential revenue lost, no matter how little.
Yes, it makes it OK if it's being discussed from a sales/company standpoint.
The whole "it's unethical" standpoint is nonsensical. Once again, the reason why it would be "unethical" for someone to steal is that it causes harm to a person through physical loss of the possession. Here, the only loss is from potential sales, which means that the "ethical" question really boils down to the same bottom line of whether or not a company loses sales.
Given numerous arguments that have not been substantively addressed by the naysayers: A) Microsoft's success through piracy B) the fact that pirate-ers who do not purchase the game would not have done so anyways
Sales seem to not be harmed, and even possibly aided by piracy.
Your only point then is "it's not fair for them to play." But remember that A: this ability is available for everyone, so it's "fair" since everyone has equal access, and B: people who pirate a game like SC2 do not get full functionality, ie they lack the ability to play online. Given that Battle.net is a huge aspect of multiplayer play, the idea that someone could say pirate WC3 while I pay for it is fine if all they can do is play single player and the occasional LAN with a couple of friends, while I get to play with tens of thousands of people online on an official ladder system.
On June 24 2011 14:15 xHassassin wrote: Stupid developers killed LAN and PC gaming, not pirates.
Look at Valve. They've never once whined like a little bitch about how piracy kills games and they're still making a killing of what is it, only 3 games released in a past 3 years in 3 separate series?
Also indie developers can make profits. Look at World of Goo. Two indian guys made a great, simple 2D game and got paid big for it, even though the game was only single player and easily pirated.
Valve is not a good example. They ruined TF2 with microtransactions and hats.
On June 24 2011 12:54 Valentine wrote: What about the companies that are not insanely huge like Blizzard? The developers work hard to create a good game and only get a fraction of what they should have back in return because nerds are too greedy to actually buy the game?
On June 24 2011 12:54 Aruno wrote:
On June 24 2011 12:33 Rifty wrote: Piracy is not stealing? You are enjoying other people's work and not paying a single dime for it, what type of for-profit industry in the will allow that? Studios spend 2-3 YEARS dedicating their time to create a great game, if you don't pay for the game why should you get to play it for free and why do people justify doing so?
I'm not ordering anybody to stop pirating, but I want people to at the very least realize what they are doing is wrong..
Piracy can also mean you "try before you buy". Your assuming "pirates" don't give money to good game developing company's.
Piracy is not the reason why developers fail. Stop looking at piracy like a blanket bad thing. It's not.
I still don't understand how you don't see piracy as a bad thing. Giving people the option to pay for what they want to play? Meaning that everyone has the right to give the creators 0%?
...You mean the company that merged with Activision? Blizzard didn't seem to have a problem with LAN when making WC3 or its other games prior to its merger..
??
I don't really get what you're trying to say. I'm just saying that it harms the small companies (unlike Blizzard) to deprive them of the funds they would receive if people were not stealing their software.
? The point was pretty straight forward. Blizzard was an example of one of the "smaller" companies pre-Activision merger, and its games had LAN pre-Activision merger, and it still succeeded.
People cant legally publish stuff with copyright on torrents or any other hosting service, the thing that is legal-ish is downloading it from direct sites, downloading from torrents is already slightly illegal as you are sharing the files you downloaded with other people. (and very illegal for the original uploader)
You've continuously made stuff up in this thread, talk about things you dont know about (music vs radio and this whole pirating issue tbh). Ive given a reason why companies should include LAN etc. and you chose to ignore that a concentrate on poorly written sentece.
You believe in cutting people's rights, corporations sabotaging individuals and basically black mailing them, airport staff touching your balls. I would not be surprised to find out you download music and movies from the internet.
I have nothing more to say to you.
A.) I'm glad you agree that file sharing is illegal.
B.) You seeing a reason for LAN does not counter Blizzard's reason for not having LAN. Both reasons can exist without either being wrong. In other words--you don't actually have a good reason for why not having LAN is wrong other than you feel like it.
C.) I don't believe in cutting people's rights. I'm simply saying that I'm the type of person who believes in treating people exactly like you yourself are treated--and that I'm glad that Blizzard isn't me. If you read my post you'd see that I said it was a good thing that Blizzard wasn't like me. I come from a country where if homeless people showed up on your property and built a shack while you were off in the beach, the law of the land would not kick them out and tell you to just accept your new neighbors. I come from a country where laws are broken daily in front of police officers who feel that those laws being broken in front of them are harmless unless they feel its not. I come from a country where the firefighters can choose to not show up to a fire unless it's big enough to worry about. I hated that.
I moved to the US and I hear that laws are only going to be pushed if the perpetrator is rich enough/poor enough? I think that is bullshit. So stop with your privileged mindset that punishment is only something corporations should get because they deserve it and that everyone in your class/age/economic/social bracket is a saint that is simply doing what he can to get by. It's favoritism and its no different than my neighbor's house burning down because the fire marshal wanted to take a shower before he left the station and so they left half an hour after they were called in.
Just because you think something is harmless does not make it so.
D.) As someone who knows people who work in the airport. I find it offensive that you would rather they "don't mind" that people stole their planes and crashed it into buildings. I find it offensive that you think they should just "calm down" after they are given such immense government pressures to control their passengers. That you would think that riding a plane is this easy thing that you deserve to have and that its not one of the most expensive things to drive *IN THE WORLD.* After 9/11 airports had a hard time making enough money to pay for the fuel to transport people--let alone make a profit. They can't afford to be known as the plane that terrorist hijacked, or that had a shoe bomb explode. It's their right to worry about those kinds of things as business owners.
When business owners are being abused by "fringe groups," it is within their right to get pissed off and try to make a safer product.
C.) Did you read that post you linked about the music industry? It only became a problem *because* DJ's decided to upload the content without paying the producer of the music. In essence, the Music Companies only got upset when radio hosts decided to act *EXACTLY* like pirates do now. They didn't mind having music on the radio. It's cheaper for them to have it on the radio. They mind when people don't pay for the music they made because that is *stealing.*
LOL ok you had me going for a good while. Can we stop feeding the troll please.
On June 24 2011 12:54 Valentine wrote: What about the companies that are not insanely huge like Blizzard? The developers work hard to create a good game and only get a fraction of what they should have back in return because nerds are too greedy to actually buy the game?
On June 24 2011 12:54 Aruno wrote:
On June 24 2011 12:33 Rifty wrote: Piracy is not stealing? You are enjoying other people's work and not paying a single dime for it, what type of for-profit industry in the will allow that? Studios spend 2-3 YEARS dedicating their time to create a great game, if you don't pay for the game why should you get to play it for free and why do people justify doing so?
I'm not ordering anybody to stop pirating, but I want people to at the very least realize what they are doing is wrong..
Piracy can also mean you "try before you buy". Your assuming "pirates" don't give money to good game developing company's.
Piracy is not the reason why developers fail. Stop looking at piracy like a blanket bad thing. It's not.
I still don't understand how you don't see piracy as a bad thing. Giving people the option to pay for what they want to play? Meaning that everyone has the right to give the creators 0%?
...You mean the company that merged with Activision? Blizzard didn't seem to have a problem with LAN when making WC3 or its other games prior to its merger..
??
I don't really get what you're trying to say. I'm just saying that it harms the small companies (unlike Blizzard) to deprive them of the funds they would receive if people were not stealing their software.
When will people understand that 99% of the "pirates" that dont buy the game actually would never buy the game? they are not potential customers.
So that makes it OK for them to steal the game? Why do they get the experience of playing the game without paying for it? If they aren't willing to pay for a service, they should not be able to get it for free. And your 99% of pirates are not willing to buy the game is just an absurd number you pulled from thin air... even if that 1% of people that were willing to buy the game don't because they can pirate it, it means that is potential revenue lost, no matter how little.
Yes, it makes it OK if it's being discussed from a sales/company standpoint.
The whole "it's unethical" standpoint is nonsensical. Once again, the reason why it would be "unethical" for someone to steal is that it causes harm to a person through physical loss of the possession. Here, the only loss is from potential sales, which means that the "ethical" question really boils down to the same bottom line of whether or not a company loses sales.
Given numerous arguments that have not been substantively addressed by the naysayers: A) Microsoft's success through piracy B) the fact that pirate-ers who do not purchase the game would not have done so anyways
Sales seem to not be harmed, and even possibly aided by piracy.
Your only point then is "it's not fair for them to play." But remember that A: this ability is available for everyone, so it's "fair" since everyone has equal access, and B: people who pirate a game like SC2 do not get full functionality, ie they lack the ability to play online. Given that Battle.net is a huge aspect of multiplayer play, the idea that someone could say pirate WC3 while I pay for it is fine if all they can do is play single player and the occasional LAN with a couple of friends, while I get to play with tens of thousands of people online on an official ladder system.
Stealing is NOT just the theft of physical property..... do i really need to explain this? There's a million intangible non physical things you can steal, and stealing half a game is still stealing.
On June 24 2011 15:12 CellTech wrote: By this HoN developers logic, authors should no longer write books because of public libraries and e-books pirating.
A more apt comparison would be "Publishers should not release novels as e-books if e-books do not significantly increase consumption." (E-books do significantly increase consumption, so it's a stupid argument.) Whether they'll have a return on investment for the game itself is immaterial to the discussion of whether or not to add LAN support. It's whether or not LAN support will have a return on investment greater than its cost.
From their analysis, LAN will have a negligible (or negative) impact on their sales and will cost them money to implement. As a result, they aren't implementing it. I don't see any particular logical leaps: Most people either buy the game to play online or so they can play single-player. Few people buy games just to play in LANs with their friends, especially since LAN culture is extremely pro-piracy.
As far as no LAN option hurting the tournament scene, well, I doubt that they care. They like tournaments, since they can get licensing fees and they can help to drive interest in the game, but Blizzard's main focus is selling copies of their games. If every SC2 stream stopped broadcasting tomorrow because they were outraged about the lack of LAN support, Blizzard's loss of revenue would be minor at best.
The genie's out of the bottle at this point. The LAN option war is over; constant-online won. Not because it makes sense for the players, but because it's the only option that makes sense for the business.
Different person wrote When will people understand that 99% of the "pirates" that dont buy the game actually would never buy the game? they are not potential customers.
When will people understand that 99% of the pirates that never buy games still play an hour or more a day, and would almost certainly pay for games if they were unable to pirate them? When will people understand that one of the reasons World of Warcraft has such staggering revenue numbers is because the game is almost impossible to effectively pirate? When will people understand that a multi-billion dollar industry spends more on researching this shit than any random individual on the internet?
On June 24 2011 14:15 xHassassin wrote: Stupid developers killed LAN and PC gaming, not pirates.
Look at Valve. They've never once whined like a little bitch about how piracy kills games and they're still making a killing of what is it, only 3 games released in a past 3 years in 3 separate series?
Also indie developers can make profits. Look at World of Goo. Two indian guys made a great, simple 2D game and got paid big for it, even though the game was only single player and easily pirated.
Valve is not a good example. They ruined TF2 with microtransactions and hats.
Valve is the perfect example. TF2 is now Free because of microtransactions.
Valve and Riot understand what the gaming market is like in the present and immediate future.
ActiBlizz and S2 are stuck in the past with their obsession over piracy like Ubisoft and EA.
On June 24 2011 12:54 Valentine wrote: What about the companies that are not insanely huge like Blizzard? The developers work hard to create a good game and only get a fraction of what they should have back in return because nerds are too greedy to actually buy the game?
On June 24 2011 12:54 Aruno wrote:
On June 24 2011 12:33 Rifty wrote: Piracy is not stealing? You are enjoying other people's work and not paying a single dime for it, what type of for-profit industry in the will allow that? Studios spend 2-3 YEARS dedicating their time to create a great game, if you don't pay for the game why should you get to play it for free and why do people justify doing so?
I'm not ordering anybody to stop pirating, but I want people to at the very least realize what they are doing is wrong..
Piracy can also mean you "try before you buy". Your assuming "pirates" don't give money to good game developing company's.
Piracy is not the reason why developers fail. Stop looking at piracy like a blanket bad thing. It's not.
I still don't understand how you don't see piracy as a bad thing. Giving people the option to pay for what they want to play? Meaning that everyone has the right to give the creators 0%?
...You mean the company that merged with Activision? Blizzard didn't seem to have a problem with LAN when making WC3 or its other games prior to its merger..
??
I don't really get what you're trying to say. I'm just saying that it harms the small companies (unlike Blizzard) to deprive them of the funds they would receive if people were not stealing their software.
When will people understand that 99% of the "pirates" that dont buy the game actually would never buy the game? they are not potential customers.
So that makes it OK for them to steal the game? Why do they get the experience of playing the game without paying for it? If they aren't willing to pay for a service, they should not be able to get it for free. And your 99% of pirates are not willing to buy the game is just an absurd number you pulled from thin air... even if that 1% of people that were willing to buy the game don't because they can pirate it, it means that is potential revenue lost, no matter how little.
Yes, it makes it OK if it's being discussed from a sales/company standpoint.
The whole "it's unethical" standpoint is nonsensical. Once again, the reason why it would be "unethical" for someone to steal is that it causes harm to a person through physical loss of the possession. Here, the only loss is from potential sales, which means that the "ethical" question really boils down to the same bottom line of whether or not a company loses sales.
Given numerous arguments that have not been substantively addressed by the naysayers: A) Microsoft's success through piracy B) the fact that pirate-ers who do not purchase the game would not have done so anyways
Sales seem to not be harmed, and even possibly aided by piracy.
Your only point then is "it's not fair for them to play." But remember that A: this ability is available for everyone, so it's "fair" since everyone has equal access, and B: people who pirate a game like SC2 do not get full functionality, ie they lack the ability to play online. Given that Battle.net is a huge aspect of multiplayer play, the idea that someone could say pirate WC3 while I pay for it is fine if all they can do is play single player and the occasional LAN with a couple of friends, while I get to play with tens of thousands of people online on an official ladder system.
Stealing is NOT just the theft of physical property..... do i really need to explain this? There's a million intangible non physical things you can steal, and stealing half a game is still stealing.
Legally? Sure. Ethically? Nope. I think the repetition of "unethically" twice in two consecutive sentences should have been a big enough hint. If you want to make this a question of legality, then the law is inherently utilitarian, which again collapses into an issue of whether or not piracy promotes sales or hurts them.
[Edit] And God forbid you try to argue that legality is good for the sake of legality.
Im still having an issue as to why LAN is IMPOSSIBLE to have without piracy? Is it an ICCUP thing they are afraid of? if so im pretty sure they could sue into the stone age with sc2.... if its really to prevent kids from sharing the game and having 10 people play it off one game purchase in some basement lan.. then thats a very small percentage of players..
even then, wouldnt it be amazing advertising to buy the real thing with single player and battlenet and the whole ordeal? I can think of endless games where i played at a buddy's place for the first time and immediately went out and bought it to play more.
Different person wrote When will people understand that 99% of the "pirates" that dont buy the game actually would never buy the game? they are not potential customers.
When will people understand that 99% of the pirates that never buy games still play an hour or more a day, and would almost certainly pay for games if they were unable to pirate them? When will people understand that one of the reasons World of Warcraft has such staggering revenue numbers is because the game is almost impossible to effectively pirate? When will people understand that a multi-billion dollar industry spends more on researching this shit than any random individual on the internet?
If you argue, you should atleast know the facts.
WoW nearly impossible to pirate? You could google a list with private Servers, download the game legally with test version from Blizzard, change one text file -> there you have it. Pirated WoW. And there are pretty good private servers, even with gamemasters and all the stuff. Of course it's more fun to play it on official servers.
But almost impossible to pirate? lol no. WoW is so successfull because it's a good game with good support, nothing more. I never regret my 5 years of money to Blizzard, even though i knew everytime about private servers.
Different person wrote When will people understand that 99% of the "pirates" that dont buy the game actually would never buy the game? they are not potential customers.
When will people understand that 99% of the pirates that never buy games still play an hour or more a day, and would almost certainly pay for games if they were unable to pirate them? When will people understand that one of the reasons World of Warcraft has such staggering revenue numbers is because the game is almost impossible to effectively pirate? When will people understand that a multi-billion dollar industry spends more on researching this shit than any random individual on the internet?
I watch easily an hour a day of SC2, and I will not pay for a GOMTV ticket to watch the matches. I'll get up for them live, but if I oversleep, or like yesterday fall asleep in the middle of the match and am unable to watch, then I wait for them to pop up on youtube, or I don't watch them at all - there are still four GSL/GSTL finals series that I haven't yet seen - I haven't seen nestea vs. sCfOu despite constantly hearing how great a game it was. I cannot afford the ticket, so regardless of having no option to "pirate" (as watching elsewhere is essentially the same thing) I would not count as a sale for GOMtv.
I also haven't bought a game besides SC2:WoL since... 2003, so maybe I'm not the best example, eh?
On June 24 2011 12:54 Valentine wrote: What about the companies that are not insanely huge like Blizzard? The developers work hard to create a good game and only get a fraction of what they should have back in return because nerds are too greedy to actually buy the game?
On June 24 2011 12:54 Aruno wrote:
On June 24 2011 12:33 Rifty wrote: Piracy is not stealing? You are enjoying other people's work and not paying a single dime for it, what type of for-profit industry in the will allow that? Studios spend 2-3 YEARS dedicating their time to create a great game, if you don't pay for the game why should you get to play it for free and why do people justify doing so?
I'm not ordering anybody to stop pirating, but I want people to at the very least realize what they are doing is wrong..
Piracy can also mean you "try before you buy". Your assuming "pirates" don't give money to good game developing company's.
Piracy is not the reason why developers fail. Stop looking at piracy like a blanket bad thing. It's not.
I still don't understand how you don't see piracy as a bad thing. Giving people the option to pay for what they want to play? Meaning that everyone has the right to give the creators 0%?
...You mean the company that merged with Activision? Blizzard didn't seem to have a problem with LAN when making WC3 or its other games prior to its merger..
??
I don't really get what you're trying to say. I'm just saying that it harms the small companies (unlike Blizzard) to deprive them of the funds they would receive if people were not stealing their software.
? The point was pretty straight forward. Blizzard was an example of one of the "smaller" companies pre-Activision merger, and its games had LAN pre-Activision merger, and it still succeeded.
I was pretty sure you were trying to say that Blizzard wouldn't be harmed due to how big they are. Blizzard (pre-Activision) is still a "big" company by my example. For instance, let's look at S2 games (the ones who make HoN). They have only created 3 games, have a tiny amount of employees, and really only 1 of their products is widely known or used (HoN). Blizzard was "small" after years of WoW money coming in? Bullshit.
On June 24 2011 14:15 xHassassin wrote: Stupid developers killed LAN and PC gaming, not pirates.
Look at Valve. They've never once whined like a little bitch about how piracy kills games and they're still making a killing of what is it, only 3 games released in a past 3 years in 3 separate series?
Also indie developers can make profits. Look at World of Goo. Two indian guys made a great, simple 2D game and got paid big for it, even though the game was only single player and easily pirated.
Valve is not a good example. They ruined TF2 with microtransactions and hats.
Valve is the perfect example. TF2 is now Free because of microtransactions.
Valve and Riot understand what the gaming market is like in the present and immediate future.
ActiBlizz and S2 are stuck in the past with their obsession over piracy like Ubisoft and EA.
TF2 was good, then it got ruined. Now it's free, YAY!
Ive been having so much fun with TF2 this morning. I had bought the game way back when with the orange box but never really caught on to it. Then I heard it went free this morning. Called up my brother to see if he wanted to get it and am now considering....buying my first hat.
On June 24 2011 12:54 Valentine wrote: What about the companies that are not insanely huge like Blizzard? The developers work hard to create a good game and only get a fraction of what they should have back in return because nerds are too greedy to actually buy the game?
On June 24 2011 12:54 Aruno wrote:
On June 24 2011 12:33 Rifty wrote: Piracy is not stealing? You are enjoying other people's work and not paying a single dime for it, what type of for-profit industry in the will allow that? Studios spend 2-3 YEARS dedicating their time to create a great game, if you don't pay for the game why should you get to play it for free and why do people justify doing so?
I'm not ordering anybody to stop pirating, but I want people to at the very least realize what they are doing is wrong..
Piracy can also mean you "try before you buy". Your assuming "pirates" don't give money to good game developing company's.
Piracy is not the reason why developers fail. Stop looking at piracy like a blanket bad thing. It's not.
I still don't understand how you don't see piracy as a bad thing. Giving people the option to pay for what they want to play? Meaning that everyone has the right to give the creators 0%?
...You mean the company that merged with Activision? Blizzard didn't seem to have a problem with LAN when making WC3 or its other games prior to its merger..
??
I don't really get what you're trying to say. I'm just saying that it harms the small companies (unlike Blizzard) to deprive them of the funds they would receive if people were not stealing their software.
When will people understand that 99% of the "pirates" that dont buy the game actually would never buy the game? they are not potential customers.
So that makes it OK for them to steal the game? Why do they get the experience of playing the game without paying for it? If they aren't willing to pay for a service, they should not be able to get it for free. And your 99% of pirates are not willing to buy the game is just an absurd number you pulled from thin air... even if that 1% of people that were willing to buy the game don't because they can pirate it, it means that is potential revenue lost, no matter how little.
Yes, it makes it OK if it's being discussed from a sales/company standpoint.
The whole "it's unethical" standpoint is nonsensical. Once again, the reason why it would be "unethical" for someone to steal is that it causes harm to a person through physical loss of the possession. Here, the only loss is from potential sales, which means that the "ethical" question really boils down to the same bottom line of whether or not a company loses sales.
Given numerous arguments that have not been substantively addressed by the naysayers: A) Microsoft's success through piracy B) the fact that pirate-ers who do not purchase the game would not have done so anyways
Sales seem to not be harmed, and even possibly aided by piracy.
Your only point then is "it's not fair for them to play." But remember that A: this ability is available for everyone, so it's "fair" since everyone has equal access, and B: people who pirate a game like SC2 do not get full functionality, ie they lack the ability to play online. Given that Battle.net is a huge aspect of multiplayer play, the idea that someone could say pirate WC3 while I pay for it is fine if all they can do is play single player and the occasional LAN with a couple of friends, while I get to play with tens of thousands of people online on an official ladder system.
Stealing is NOT just the theft of physical property..... do i really need to explain this? There's a million intangible non physical things you can steal, and stealing half a game is still stealing.
Legally? Sure. Ethically? Nope. I think the repetition of "unethically" twice in two consecutive sentences should have been a big enough hint. If you want to make this a question of legality, then the law is inherently utilitarian, which again collapses into an issue of whether or not piracy promotes sales or hurts them.
[Edit] And God forbid you try to argue that legality is good for the sake of legality.
So you truly believe that ethically, there is nothing wrong with stealing? End result is: You get to play the game for free by stealing it. You don't pay a dime for the efforts and time of all the people that worked on the game. And you honestly believe that's perfectly OK and there is no problems associated with it?
its technically no problem to require bnet login and then route in-game traffic inside lan. blizzard possibly does not want to lose control (aka community driven ladders etc. ). piracy is a lame excuse
On June 24 2011 12:54 Valentine wrote: What about the companies that are not insanely huge like Blizzard? The developers work hard to create a good game and only get a fraction of what they should have back in return because nerds are too greedy to actually buy the game?
On June 24 2011 12:54 Aruno wrote: [quote]
Piracy can also mean you "try before you buy". Your assuming "pirates" don't give money to good game developing company's.
Piracy is not the reason why developers fail. Stop looking at piracy like a blanket bad thing. It's not.
I still don't understand how you don't see piracy as a bad thing. Giving people the option to pay for what they want to play? Meaning that everyone has the right to give the creators 0%?
...You mean the company that merged with Activision? Blizzard didn't seem to have a problem with LAN when making WC3 or its other games prior to its merger..
??
I don't really get what you're trying to say. I'm just saying that it harms the small companies (unlike Blizzard) to deprive them of the funds they would receive if people were not stealing their software.
When will people understand that 99% of the "pirates" that dont buy the game actually would never buy the game? they are not potential customers.
So that makes it OK for them to steal the game? Why do they get the experience of playing the game without paying for it? If they aren't willing to pay for a service, they should not be able to get it for free. And your 99% of pirates are not willing to buy the game is just an absurd number you pulled from thin air... even if that 1% of people that were willing to buy the game don't because they can pirate it, it means that is potential revenue lost, no matter how little.
Yes, it makes it OK if it's being discussed from a sales/company standpoint.
The whole "it's unethical" standpoint is nonsensical. Once again, the reason why it would be "unethical" for someone to steal is that it causes harm to a person through physical loss of the possession. Here, the only loss is from potential sales, which means that the "ethical" question really boils down to the same bottom line of whether or not a company loses sales.
Given numerous arguments that have not been substantively addressed by the naysayers: A) Microsoft's success through piracy B) the fact that pirate-ers who do not purchase the game would not have done so anyways
Sales seem to not be harmed, and even possibly aided by piracy.
Your only point then is "it's not fair for them to play." But remember that A: this ability is available for everyone, so it's "fair" since everyone has equal access, and B: people who pirate a game like SC2 do not get full functionality, ie they lack the ability to play online. Given that Battle.net is a huge aspect of multiplayer play, the idea that someone could say pirate WC3 while I pay for it is fine if all they can do is play single player and the occasional LAN with a couple of friends, while I get to play with tens of thousands of people online on an official ladder system.
Stealing is NOT just the theft of physical property..... do i really need to explain this? There's a million intangible non physical things you can steal, and stealing half a game is still stealing.
Legally? Sure. Ethically? Nope. I think the repetition of "unethically" twice in two consecutive sentences should have been a big enough hint. If you want to make this a question of legality, then the law is inherently utilitarian, which again collapses into an issue of whether or not piracy promotes sales or hurts them.
[Edit] And God forbid you try to argue that legality is good for the sake of legality.
So you truly believe that ethically, there is nothing wrong with stealing? End result is: You get to play the game for free by stealing it. You don't pay a dime for the efforts and time of all the people that worked on the game. And you honestly believe that's perfectly OK and there is no problems associated with it?
Maybe you should read his post again and try a little harder this time to understand what he wrote? Physical and non-phisical property are very different in nature. This is just a fact, simply.
Watch this:
The word 'stealing' is simply to genderless is this case.
I'm not saying is okay/wrong to copy, but you guys need to learn to see that there's a fundamental difference between the two.
so let me try to switch the direction of the discussion a bit.
There could be alternatives to LAN that a game like sc2 could implement, for example, utorrent has a feature that tries to look for peers within the same network the computer is in. if sc2 is p2p they could do something similar, smart routing or something like that, im not a tech guy so im asking, would this be possible? so two computers with a direct connection to each other would p2p directly even if they're playing through b.net.
Wasn't The Witcher 2 one of the most pirated PC games this year or something? They didn't use any DRM at all yet apparently 'noble' pirates still chose to download and continue seeding it.
On June 24 2011 14:15 xHassassin wrote: Stupid developers killed LAN and PC gaming, not pirates.
Look at Valve. They've never once whined like a little bitch about how piracy kills games and they're still making a killing of what is it, only 3 games released in a past 3 years in 3 separate series?
Also indie developers can make profits. Look at World of Goo. Two indian guys made a great, simple 2D game and got paid big for it, even though the game was only single player and easily pirated.
Valve is not a good example. They ruined TF2 with microtransactions and hats.
Valve is the perfect example. TF2 is now Free because of microtransactions.
Valve and Riot understand what the gaming market is like in the present and immediate future.
ActiBlizz and S2 are stuck in the past with their obsession over piracy like Ubisoft and EA.
TF2 is free because you have to install Steam on your machine to play it. A free game to install a WHOLE STORE IN YOUR HOUSE is a very good plan. They want it to be free so you will spend more money in their store.
On June 25 2011 03:33 Shrewmy wrote: Pirates can be pretty hilariously hypocritical.
Wasn't The Witcher 2 one of the most pirated PC games this year or something? They didn't use any DRM at all yet apparently 'noble' pirates still chose to download and continue seeding it.
Yep. And let us not forget Demigod, which was pirated to hell and back. Stardock, who never has DRM on their games, said that one day one only 12% of the people playing on their servers were using legal copies of the game. Then they banned the 88% of the players who stole the game.
So exactly why should Blizzard give us LAN when the internet cannot be trusted?
On June 24 2011 14:15 xHassassin wrote: Stupid developers killed LAN and PC gaming, not pirates.
Look at Valve. They've never once whined like a little bitch about how piracy kills games and they're still making a killing of what is it, only 3 games released in a past 3 years in 3 separate series?
Also indie developers can make profits. Look at World of Goo. Two indian guys made a great, simple 2D game and got paid big for it, even though the game was only single player and easily pirated.
Valve is not a good example. They ruined TF2 with microtransactions and hats.
Valve is the perfect example. TF2 is now Free because of microtransactions.
Valve and Riot understand what the gaming market is like in the present and immediate future.
ActiBlizz and S2 are stuck in the past with their obsession over piracy like Ubisoft and EA.
Why isn't Riot going to develop LAN for tournaments also then?
Unless I heard wrong on Live on 3, it was not going to happen.
On June 25 2011 03:33 Shrewmy wrote: Pirates can be pretty hilariously hypocritical.
Wasn't The Witcher 2 one of the most pirated PC games this year or something? They didn't use any DRM at all yet apparently 'noble' pirates still chose to download and continue seeding it.
You need to think a little deeper, dude. Posts like yours are simply stupid and lack any reasoning skills. Yes, many are downloading 'The witcher 2', but that doesn't mean that the game hasn't been a selling success. On the contrary, it tells us that many people know about it and find it appealing/interesting. You simply cannot simplify that a downloader = a sale. This is logical for crying out load. Also, not all pirates are the same or downloads for the same reasons, ect. I know for a fact that many people want to support a company if they leave out DRM/features that only ruins it for the paying costumer. Treat all people as pirates and that is what you get in the end. Respect is the key.
People are so superficial in their thinking. You cannot ever cover all variables, but at least try to include a few. Sigh.
On June 24 2011 12:54 Valentine wrote: What about the companies that are not insanely huge like Blizzard? The developers work hard to create a good game and only get a fraction of what they should have back in return because nerds are too greedy to actually buy the game?
On June 24 2011 12:54 Aruno wrote:
On June 24 2011 12:33 Rifty wrote: Piracy is not stealing? You are enjoying other people's work and not paying a single dime for it, what type of for-profit industry in the will allow that? Studios spend 2-3 YEARS dedicating their time to create a great game, if you don't pay for the game why should you get to play it for free and why do people justify doing so?
I'm not ordering anybody to stop pirating, but I want people to at the very least realize what they are doing is wrong..
Piracy can also mean you "try before you buy". Your assuming "pirates" don't give money to good game developing company's.
Piracy is not the reason why developers fail. Stop looking at piracy like a blanket bad thing. It's not.
I still don't understand how you don't see piracy as a bad thing. Giving people the option to pay for what they want to play? Meaning that everyone has the right to give the creators 0%?
...You mean the company that merged with Activision? Blizzard didn't seem to have a problem with LAN when making WC3 or its other games prior to its merger..
??
I don't really get what you're trying to say. I'm just saying that it harms the small companies (unlike Blizzard) to deprive them of the funds they would receive if people were not stealing their software.
? The point was pretty straight forward. Blizzard was an example of one of the "smaller" companies pre-Activision merger, and its games had LAN pre-Activision merger, and it still succeeded.
I was pretty sure you were trying to say that Blizzard wouldn't be harmed due to how big they are. Blizzard (pre-Activision) is still a "big" company by my example. For instance, let's look at S2 games (the ones who make HoN). They have only created 3 games, have a tiny amount of employees, and really only 1 of their products is widely known or used (HoN). Blizzard was "small" after years of WoW money coming in? Bullshit.
I'm pretty sure that I have a better understanding of my intentions better than you do, so you can cut the presumptuous stubbornness here. WoW is obviously not an example of LAN games prior to Blizzard's merger with Activision, I'm talking Diablo 2, WC3, WC2, WC1, and obviously SC1.
On June 24 2011 12:54 Valentine wrote: What about the companies that are not insanely huge like Blizzard? The developers work hard to create a good game and only get a fraction of what they should have back in return because nerds are too greedy to actually buy the game?
On June 24 2011 12:54 Aruno wrote:
On June 24 2011 12:33 Rifty wrote: Piracy is not stealing? You are enjoying other people's work and not paying a single dime for it, what type of for-profit industry in the will allow that? Studios spend 2-3 YEARS dedicating their time to create a great game, if you don't pay for the game why should you get to play it for free and why do people justify doing so?
I'm not ordering anybody to stop pirating, but I want people to at the very least realize what they are doing is wrong..
Piracy can also mean you "try before you buy". Your assuming "pirates" don't give money to good game developing company's.
Piracy is not the reason why developers fail. Stop looking at piracy like a blanket bad thing. It's not.
I still don't understand how you don't see piracy as a bad thing. Giving people the option to pay for what they want to play? Meaning that everyone has the right to give the creators 0%?
...You mean the company that merged with Activision? Blizzard didn't seem to have a problem with LAN when making WC3 or its other games prior to its merger..
??
I don't really get what you're trying to say. I'm just saying that it harms the small companies (unlike Blizzard) to deprive them of the funds they would receive if people were not stealing their software.
? The point was pretty straight forward. Blizzard was an example of one of the "smaller" companies pre-Activision merger, and its games had LAN pre-Activision merger, and it still succeeded.
I was pretty sure you were trying to say that Blizzard wouldn't be harmed due to how big they are. Blizzard (pre-Activision) is still a "big" company by my example. For instance, let's look at S2 games (the ones who make HoN). They have only created 3 games, have a tiny amount of employees, and really only 1 of their products is widely known or used (HoN). Blizzard was "small" after years of WoW money coming in? Bullshit.
I'm pretty sure that I have a better understanding of my intentions better than you do, so you can cut the presumptuous stubbornness here. WoW is obviously not an example of LAN games prior to Blizzard's merger with Activision, I'm talking Diablo 2, WC3, WC2, WC1, and obviously SC1.
All I was saying is that I thought you meant something else. I'm not trying to put words in your mouth or claim that you meant something other than what you did, I was just trying to make a fucking point based on what I believed you meant. And all I was making a point about was the size of the company. The only thing I was trying to get across is that I thought you were making a point based on Blizzard being small, and I disagreed awegwaoeiaoweaweg
kk why am I even trying. Done here. You win. Have a good day.
On June 24 2011 14:15 xHassassin wrote: Stupid developers killed LAN and PC gaming, not pirates.
Look at Valve. They've never once whined like a little bitch about how piracy kills games and they're still making a killing of what is it, only 3 games released in a past 3 years in 3 separate series?
Also indie developers can make profits. Look at World of Goo. Two indian guys made a great, simple 2D game and got paid big for it, even though the game was only single player and easily pirated.
Valve is not a good example. They ruined TF2 with microtransactions and hats.
Valve is the perfect example. TF2 is now Free because of microtransactions.
Valve and Riot understand what the gaming market is like in the present and immediate future.
ActiBlizz and S2 are stuck in the past with their obsession over piracy like Ubisoft and EA.
Valve uses Steam as a big brother to mandate their lan mode, it is essentially Battle.net with a much greater scope, it is big enough to the point where they can stop worrying about Piracy all together just because of the infrastructure that is already laid down with steam and how the community has formed around it.
Then you have LoL, which still doesn't have a lan mode and never will. In LO3, the "e-sports manager" for LoL said LAN will be distributed inhouse to tournament organizers using custom hardware from riot.
Saying LAN won't exist in the future probably isn't correct, I think a much more accurate way to say it would be that multiplayer in the future will not exist without a way to for the publisher to control piracy, most likely with some sort of big brother mechanism (ala Battle.net and Steam)
EA is already heading in this direction with their steam-esk service Origin.
It's on the right track, but doesn't actually explain the issue at hand. The gist of it is that any feature included on the game disc can easily be cracked and any security features can be stripped away. The reason you can't play starcraft 2 multiplayer with a pirated copy is because the game client doesn't have the infrastructure to do anything except connect to battlenet, all the code to connect to another player and sync up is stored server-side where pirates and crackers can't access it. Implementing lan means adding code to the game client that supports a direct connection to another player, at which point in security feature can be removed in a few hours and now people can play online with each other on pirates versions. You can argue all you want about the business motives behind the decision, but getting rid of lan support is certainly very effective at preventing pirates from playing multiplayer.
So did anybody post what the developer of torchlight 2 said about piracy and LAN to compare with the HoN developer?
Here’s a selection of direct quotes from Max Schaefer, formerly a VP at Blizzard North and one of the frontmen on Diablo.
On Asian piracy: “Millions and millions of copies of Torchlight downloaded from the illicit market in certain Asian territories. And that’s fine with us. We knew it was gonna happen. For us, we kind of see it as, down the road, we’re building an audience. We’ve long since announced that we’re going to be doing an MMO, and y’know, we kind of view it as a marketing tool for us. We’re going to have millions of people who are familiar with our franchise, familiar with our style, and who are going to be ready customers when we do a global MMO.”
On DRM: “You’re fighting against an immovable force by complaining and being paranoid about [piracy] and all that. We figure if we’re just nice to our customers, charge a low price for our game to begin with, don’t over-burden them with crazy DRM, and customers will be nice to us too. And so far, they have been.”
“We got a lot of letters from people saying ‘Hey, I pirated your game, but it was really cool, so I bought it.’ Y’know, we’re cool with that, we’re not as concerned about that sort of thing as other companies, especially if it makes our honest players inconvenienced. We assume that everyone is an honest player, and we want to make their experience as cool as possible.”
On LAN support, which was just confirmed: “I don’t know why everyone else doesn’t do it. I understand that a lot of other companies want to run you through their portal to expose you to the other products they have and make it easy for you to click a button and buy other stuff. But we’re a small company–we have Torchlight and Torchlight 2. There’s really no reason for us to do that sort of thing. And it’s something [fans] have requested, and we’re happy to be able to do it.”
I hope everyone here knew that pirating was the reason there is no lan in sc2. Nobody is surprised here right? The guy is very smart and it was VERY well put. Excellent points and he is on point for that matter. The argument that piraters were never customers anyway is false. Some piraters never would have put the cash in.. but ill tell you what. I gaurantee you that there are many guys who would pay for the game if they "had to" but if there was a chance to play without paying then they would take it on a dime. That set of players = significant amount of $$$ like it or not.
On June 25 2011 12:32 coolcor wrote: So did anybody post what the developer of torchlight 2 said about piracy and LAN to compare with the HoN developer?
Here’s a selection of direct quotes from Max Schaefer, formerly a VP at Blizzard North and one of the frontmen on Diablo.
On Asian piracy: “Millions and millions of copies of Torchlight downloaded from the illicit market in certain Asian territories. And that’s fine with us. We knew it was gonna happen. For us, we kind of see it as, down the road, we’re building an audience. We’ve long since announced that we’re going to be doing an MMO, and y’know, we kind of view it as a marketing tool for us. We’re going to have millions of people who are familiar with our franchise, familiar with our style, and who are going to be ready customers when we do a global MMO.”
On DRM: “You’re fighting against an immovable force by complaining and being paranoid about [piracy] and all that. We figure if we’re just nice to our customers, charge a low price for our game to begin with, don’t over-burden them with crazy DRM, and customers will be nice to us too. And so far, they have been.”
“We got a lot of letters from people saying ‘Hey, I pirated your game, but it was really cool, so I bought it.’ Y’know, we’re cool with that, we’re not as concerned about that sort of thing as other companies, especially if it makes our honest players inconvenienced. We assume that everyone is an honest player, and we want to make their experience as cool as possible.”
On LAN support, which was just confirmed: “I don’t know why everyone else doesn’t do it. I understand that a lot of other companies want to run you through their portal to expose you to the other products they have and make it easy for you to click a button and buy other stuff. But we’re a small company–we have Torchlight and Torchlight 2. There’s really no reason for us to do that sort of thing. And it’s something [fans] have requested, and we’re happy to be able to do it.”
On June 24 2011 17:35 Destro wrote: Im still having an issue as to why LAN is IMPOSSIBLE to have without piracy? Is it an ICCUP thing they are afraid of? if so im pretty sure they could sue into the stone age with sc2.... if its really to prevent kids from sharing the game and having 10 people play it off one game purchase in some basement lan.. then thats a very small percentage of players..
even then, wouldnt it be amazing advertising to buy the real thing with single player and battlenet and the whole ordeal? I can think of endless games where i played at a buddy's place for the first time and immediately went out and bought it to play more.
it's more than just piracy (which is still a big part of it). the whole KeSPA fiasco where they claimed that playing on LAN meant that they weren't using Blizzard's property outside of what they had already rightfully paid for meant that Blizzard had no control of the use of its game in major tournaments in S. Korea. This is a way for them to also sanction tournaments and provide licenses to organizations that want to hold tournaments using Blizzard's intellectual property. i neither agree or disagree with this position, it's just a statement about Blizzard's views based on what i've read.
i also remember playing starcraft for the first time at my friend's house. i had him immediately burn me a copy so i could play it as soon as i got home.
[edit]: plus speaking from a business perspective, what percentage of sales do you think are lost to the lacking LAN feature than would be lost to piracy? this is of course speculative but i think most people would come to the same conclusion.
On June 25 2011 12:32 coolcor wrote: So did anybody post what the developer of torchlight 2 said about piracy and LAN to compare with the HoN developer?
Here’s a selection of direct quotes from Max Schaefer, formerly a VP at Blizzard North and one of the frontmen on Diablo.
On Asian piracy: “Millions and millions of copies of Torchlight downloaded from the illicit market in certain Asian territories. And that’s fine with us. We knew it was gonna happen. For us, we kind of see it as, down the road, we’re building an audience. We’ve long since announced that we’re going to be doing an MMO, and y’know, we kind of view it as a marketing tool for us. We’re going to have millions of people who are familiar with our franchise, familiar with our style, and who are going to be ready customers when we do a global MMO.”
On DRM: “You’re fighting against an immovable force by complaining and being paranoid about [piracy] and all that. We figure if we’re just nice to our customers, charge a low price for our game to begin with, don’t over-burden them with crazy DRM, and customers will be nice to us too. And so far, they have been.”
“We got a lot of letters from people saying ‘Hey, I pirated your game, but it was really cool, so I bought it.’ Y’know, we’re cool with that, we’re not as concerned about that sort of thing as other companies, especially if it makes our honest players inconvenienced. We assume that everyone is an honest player, and we want to make their experience as cool as possible.”
On LAN support, which was just confirmed: “I don’t know why everyone else doesn’t do it. I understand that a lot of other companies want to run you through their portal to expose you to the other products they have and make it easy for you to click a button and buy other stuff. But we’re a small company–we have Torchlight and Torchlight 2. There’s really no reason for us to do that sort of thing. And it’s something [fans] have requested, and we’re happy to be able to do it.”
this kind of seems like simple pandering to me. they're painting the "big companies" as the bad guys and rallying support and sympathy for their own products, no?
The thing I pirate and don't buy these days are TV shows not games. Music is too easy to buy if it's available. I'll pirate games I own if the DRM and security are pain.
The segment that piracy is possibly a real revenue drain is the 15-24 range: young people without much money but have plenty of time and are fairly savvy on technology.
On June 24 2011 17:35 Destro wrote: Im still having an issue as to why LAN is IMPOSSIBLE to have without piracy? Is it an ICCUP thing they are afraid of? if so im pretty sure they could sue into the stone age with sc2.... if its really to prevent kids from sharing the game and having 10 people play it off one game purchase in some basement lan.. then thats a very small percentage of players..
even then, wouldnt it be amazing advertising to buy the real thing with single player and battlenet and the whole ordeal? I can think of endless games where i played at a buddy's place for the first time and immediately went out and bought it to play more.
it's more than just piracy (which is still a big part of it). the whole KeSPA fiasco where they claimed that playing on LAN meant that they weren't using Blizzard's property outside of what they had already rightfully paid for meant that Blizzard had no control of the use of its game in major tournaments in S. Korea. This is a way for them to also sanction tournaments and provide licenses to organizations that want to hold tournaments using Blizzard's intellectual property. i neither agree or disagree with this position, it's just a statement about Blizzard's views based on what i've read.
i also remember playing starcraft for the first time at my friend's house. i had him immediately burn me a copy so i could play it as soon as i got home.
[edit]: plus speaking from a business perspective, what percentage of sales do you think are lost to the lacking LAN feature than would be lost to piracy? this is of course speculative but i think most people would come to the same conclusion.
i feel like the kespa thing just went on for far too long before blizzard stepped in and tried to stop it. had they sued kespa before it became a full on business/corporation im sure they would have won and blizzard would of retained IP rights to this day.
seriously iccup isn't going to happen even if private servers came about. blizzard would simply branch a deal with GSL/ESL/NASL/TSL/etc that their pro players would only play on battle.net and never a 3rd party ladder or else be suspended from the league/tournament. most people wanna play where the pros are. so everyone else would play on b.net too.
On June 25 2011 12:32 coolcor wrote: So did anybody post what the developer of torchlight 2 said about piracy and LAN to compare with the HoN developer?
Here’s a selection of direct quotes from Max Schaefer, formerly a VP at Blizzard North and one of the frontmen on Diablo.
On Asian piracy: “Millions and millions of copies of Torchlight downloaded from the illicit market in certain Asian territories. And that’s fine with us. We knew it was gonna happen. For us, we kind of see it as, down the road, we’re building an audience. We’ve long since announced that we’re going to be doing an MMO, and y’know, we kind of view it as a marketing tool for us. We’re going to have millions of people who are familiar with our franchise, familiar with our style, and who are going to be ready customers when we do a global MMO.”
On DRM: “You’re fighting against an immovable force by complaining and being paranoid about [piracy] and all that. We figure if we’re just nice to our customers, charge a low price for our game to begin with, don’t over-burden them with crazy DRM, and customers will be nice to us too. And so far, they have been.”
“We got a lot of letters from people saying ‘Hey, I pirated your game, but it was really cool, so I bought it.’ Y’know, we’re cool with that, we’re not as concerned about that sort of thing as other companies, especially if it makes our honest players inconvenienced. We assume that everyone is an honest player, and we want to make their experience as cool as possible.”
On LAN support, which was just confirmed: “I don’t know why everyone else doesn’t do it. I understand that a lot of other companies want to run you through their portal to expose you to the other products they have and make it easy for you to click a button and buy other stuff. But we’re a small company–we have Torchlight and Torchlight 2. There’s really no reason for us to do that sort of thing. And it’s something [fans] have requested, and we’re happy to be able to do it.”
this kind of seems like simple pandering to me. they're painting the "big companies" as the bad guys and rallying support and sympathy for their own products, no?
Somewhat. I think the point is more that as a small company, they don't have the resources to provide the additional services that would justify creating an online hub ala battle.net.
Blizzard on the other hand is large enough to create such a hub. And furthermore, they have a good reason to do so with their integration across their portfolio of releases (i.e., wow, sc2, and d3).
On June 25 2011 03:31 latan wrote: so let me try to switch the direction of the discussion a bit.
There could be alternatives to LAN that a game like sc2 could implement, for example, utorrent has a feature that tries to look for peers within the same network the computer is in. if sc2 is p2p they could do something similar, smart routing or something like that, im not a tech guy so im asking, would this be possible? so two computers with a direct connection to each other would p2p directly even if they're playing through b.net.
You reverse engineer, as stated in a earlier post, to send the authentication to a "fake-real" battle net server that directs you to your "friend opponent" You create a UI out of this then you get a private server.(similier to how G-Arena functions for dota, and god knows very few dota players actually bought war3)
This is actually a cool topic because this delves into how games are coded, why games lack features and we call developers idiots for not doing so. The point of battle net is that a master server actually "reads" your commands before sending it to your opponent, this increases lag (search about command delays between single/multi)
There are other cases that code their game differently, See League of legends. Where data is only sent to ONLY the vision on your current screen, and not the fog of war. This is where you break private servers, replays, and almost observer mode (though there are ugly work-arounds in lol's case).
HoN makers are talking about this? The guys that said ... well US and Europe have to pay but Asia can play for free? The guys that just copypasted basicly each item and hero...ok they renamed it Oo...talk about why there is more and more internet only? The guys that hyped their game basicly with preorder money and got raped by an freetoplay game? This is just like if EA would come and explain what an good rts needs. They should just shut up and keep going with what they can. Go out and copypaste an other game, boost it in esport with basicly zero community and just loose to other games. Myb their next game will Duty of Call, Huhu, StrikeCounter or CraftStar WarBrood.
There is nothing to discuss, removing Lan is just the simpelst way to remove things like DRM and other nasty, useless copyprotections.
On June 25 2011 13:03 tadL wrote: HoN makers are talking about this? The guys that said ... well US and Europe have to pay but Asia can play for free? The guys that just copypasted basicly each item and hero...ok they renamed it Oo...talk about why there is more and more internet only? The guys that hyped their game basicly with preorder money and got raped by an freetoplay game? This is just like if EA would come and explain what an good rts needs. They should just shut up and keep going with what they can. Go out and copypaste an other game, boost it in esport with basicly zero community and just loose to other games. Myb their next game will Duty of Call, Huhu, StrikeCounter or CraftStar WarBrood.
There is nothing to discuss, removing Lan is just the simpelst way to remove things like DRM and other nasty, useless copyprotections.
But in fact, cracked SC2 versions still get LAN.
The only thing you actual accomplish is remove it from the persons that "really" pay money for the game.
The crackers and hackers still get what they want , it just damages the real paying customers and thats ridiculous stupid.
Funny, the witcher 2 devs believed in a game that didn't use draconian DRM and the like to prevent piracy, and instead just went with the policy of "listen to your consumers more carefully and give them what they want", and guess what? A DRM-less game sold over 400k copies in one week. Granted, I haven't followed the sales since then, but I don't regret a penny I spent on that. And you wouldn't believe the advantages of buying a hard copy - you get all sorts of fun goodies, and instruction manual that is actually necessary to read before you start the game, like the good old days. But did you buy it online from GoG as a European? Well, they know the Euro has a much higher exchange rate than the dollar, but they can't charge different prices. What did they do? They offered the difference between 45 euro and 45 dollar(I believe it was 14 euro or something) in store credit so you could buy another game.
Please, the piracy argument is weak. Piracy happens and they can deal with it, but listening to your consumer is what makes games sell. Same approach valve takes to their games, which is probably one of the most successful video game companies in the world.
On June 25 2011 13:03 tadL wrote: HoN makers are talking about this? The guys that said ... well US and Europe have to pay but Asia can play for free? The guys that just copypasted basicly each item and hero...ok they renamed it Oo...talk about why there is more and more internet only? The guys that hyped their game basicly with preorder money and got raped by an freetoplay game? This is just like if EA would come and explain what an good rts needs. They should just shut up and keep going with what they can. Go out and copypaste an other game, boost it in esport with basicly zero community and just loose to other games. Myb their next game will Duty of Call, Huhu, StrikeCounter or CraftStar WarBrood.
There is nothing to discuss, removing Lan is just the simpelst way to remove things like DRM and other nasty, useless copyprotections.
They didn't get raped.
LoL is terrible. Only reason it has players over hon is the people that can't play dota, and those that think LoL is a good game. For whatever reason.
Piracy killed LAN. It is a lot harder to pirate a game without LAN.
On June 25 2011 12:32 coolcor wrote: So did anybody post what the developer of torchlight 2 said about piracy and LAN to compare with the HoN developer?
Here’s a selection of direct quotes from Max Schaefer, formerly a VP at Blizzard North and one of the frontmen on Diablo.
On Asian piracy: “Millions and millions of copies of Torchlight downloaded from the illicit market in certain Asian territories. And that’s fine with us. We knew it was gonna happen. For us, we kind of see it as, down the road, we’re building an audience. We’ve long since announced that we’re going to be doing an MMO, and y’know, we kind of view it as a marketing tool for us. We’re going to have millions of people who are familiar with our franchise, familiar with our style, and who are going to be ready customers when we do a global MMO.”
On DRM: “You’re fighting against an immovable force by complaining and being paranoid about [piracy] and all that. We figure if we’re just nice to our customers, charge a low price for our game to begin with, don’t over-burden them with crazy DRM, and customers will be nice to us too. And so far, they have been.”
“We got a lot of letters from people saying ‘Hey, I pirated your game, but it was really cool, so I bought it.’ Y’know, we’re cool with that, we’re not as concerned about that sort of thing as other companies, especially if it makes our honest players inconvenienced. We assume that everyone is an honest player, and we want to make their experience as cool as possible.”
On LAN support, which was just confirmed: “I don’t know why everyone else doesn’t do it. I understand that a lot of other companies want to run you through their portal to expose you to the other products they have and make it easy for you to click a button and buy other stuff. But we’re a small company–we have Torchlight and Torchlight 2. There’s really no reason for us to do that sort of thing. And it’s something [fans] have requested, and we’re happy to be able to do it.”
They'll act all nice and open with the community right up to the point where Torchlight or their MMO gets big enough. Then they'll turn protective and include DRM and other stuff.
On June 25 2011 16:37 HoldenR wrote: Funny, the witcher 2 devs believed in a game that didn't use draconian DRM and the like to prevent piracy, and instead just went with the policy of "listen to your consumers more carefully and give them what they want", and guess what? A DRM-less game sold over 400k copies in one week. Granted, I haven't followed the sales since then, but I don't regret a penny I spent on that. And you wouldn't believe the advantages of buying a hard copy - you get all sorts of fun goodies, and instruction manual that is actually necessary to read before you start the game, like the good old days. But did you buy it online from GoG as a European? Well, they know the Euro has a much higher exchange rate than the dollar, but they can't charge different prices. What did they do? They offered the difference between 45 euro and 45 dollar(I believe it was 14 euro or something) in store credit so you could buy another game.
Please, the piracy argument is weak. Piracy happens and they can deal with it, but listening to your consumer is what makes games sell. Same approach valve takes to their games, which is probably one of the most successful video game companies in the world.
The Witcher 2 has sold about 500 000 copies so far, not really stellar and i'm pretty sure piracy has made a dent into their sales. If they developed for 360/PS3 the sales would probably exceed 1-2 million easy just due to the lack of piracy for those formats.
On June 25 2011 17:22 Kamais_Ookin wrote: Pirates didn't kill LAN, stupid companies that don't know how to implement it properly killed LAN.
IE: Use your cdkey that you purchased to log on the way you usually do so it is known you payed for the game and then LAN can be selected.
Congratulations! You haven't read the thread where people have explained how this can easily be bypassed.
If they developed for 360/PS3 the sales would probably exceed 1-2 million easy just due to the lack of piracy for those formats.
lack of piracy on these formats? are you serious? Its so simple to crack your xbox so you never ever have to buy an overpriced game again. So your "lack of piracy" leads to an 10€ price increase in comparison to a "easily pirated" PC version? So I demand MORE pirates, maybe games will become even cheaper!
If they developed for 360/PS3 the sales would probably exceed 1-2 million easy just due to the lack of piracy for those formats.
lack of piracy on these formats? are you serious? Its so simple to crack your xbox so you never ever have to buy an overpriced game again. So your "lack of piracy" leads to an 10€ price increase in comparison to a "easily pirated" PC version? So I demand MORE pirates, maybe games will become even cheaper!
except crack your xbox and you either don't play on xbox live, or you're guaranteed to be banned from it eventually.
also opening up your xbox and modding it is much harder than going to a torrent site and downloading a game.
except crack your xbox and you either don't play on xbox live, or you're guaranteed to be banned from it eventually
because a LAN version lets you play via Bnet? Even if you play a cracked SC2 multiplayer you dont have the benefits of matchmaking, you have just a few ppl who are eventually online if you call them for a game. More special services = more paying customers Less specials and more stupid protection measures = harder for pirates but the will eventually overcome it in the end and more pissed off customers.
And get banned from x-box live is like an increase in meat prices for a vegetarian. Ppl who dont want to spend money on games surely spend money on x-box live...
On June 24 2011 10:20 trx wrote: People don't actually want "LAN", they want P2P. People want to be able to play without lag from 1) latency to b.net servers 2) b.net malfunction.
It's not possible to create P2P that's not easily crackable.
However.. Ladder games and matchmaking (for custom games) should always be on B.net as it is now. "LAN"/P2P could be a complete separate system for single games between specific people.
In my opinion, B.net IS a reason enough to buy SC2. You can't get: 1) the whole ladder and all the players with a pirate copy, thus proper matchmaking. 2) get better at SC2 by just playing custom games over "LAN". The single player is already cracked. Adding LAN doesn't suddenly make you want to play SC2 a lot more.
Activision-Blizzard is really after a "quick buck". Region locking in this sense is much worse than not having P2P-mode (Custom games should be possible between every region). They want everyone to buy a copy, no matter how little you actually play it. Someone that plays the occassional game with a friend is never going to buy SC2.
With lan something like ICCUP might show up again (just for sc2) and thousands of people will play on there instead.
the issue i have is its not like lan will like let you go on battle.net or anything, you cant ladder with lan, it would just make it so you could like play with your friends when they come over, why should he have to have a copy of the game to? theres many other games that have multiplayer features that dont require you to go online and you can just play with your friends when they are over. its stupid. and if companies didnt charge outrageous amounts for their outdated games that are just digital downloads to begin with anyways, theres no production cost for a digital download its ridiculous that like for example blizzard sells WC3 for 40 dollars for the battle chest, 40 dollars still for Diablo 2 and like 20 dollars still for BW. just for a digital download, its a ridiculous cost for such an outdated game.
I just want to thank lorkac for being the biggest troll yet to be seen on TL, you really gave me some good laughs. :D
On a more serious note, If implementing LAN is such a detriment to sales, how come Valve have no problem implementing it on every release they make (Dota 2 anyone? So glad that it's Valve that makes Dota 2 and not Blizzard)
On June 27 2011 21:49 labbe wrote: I just want to thank lorkac for being the biggest troll yet to be seen on TL, you really gave me some good laughs. :D
On a more serious note, If implementing LAN is such a detriment to sales, how come Valve have no problem implementing it on every release they make (Dota 2 anyone? So glad that it's Valve that makes Dota 2 and not Blizzard)
On June 27 2011 21:49 labbe wrote: I just want to thank lorkac for being the biggest troll yet to be seen on TL, you really gave me some good laughs. :D
On a more serious note, If implementing LAN is such a detriment to sales, how come Valve have no problem implementing it on every release they make (Dota 2 anyone? So glad that it's Valve that makes Dota 2 and not Blizzard)
TF2 and Portal have LAN?
Authenticate through steam, host a server on the LAN, play on it.
On June 27 2011 21:49 labbe wrote: I just want to thank lorkac for being the biggest troll yet to be seen on TL, you really gave me some good laughs. :D
On a more serious note, If implementing LAN is such a detriment to sales, how come Valve have no problem implementing it on every release they make (Dota 2 anyone? So glad that it's Valve that makes Dota 2 and not Blizzard)
TF2 and Portal have LAN?
You can enable it on the console for portal 2. But of course you need to be connected through steam, so it's sort of like pseudo-LAN.
On June 23 2011 07:18 AndAgain wrote: He just said what any intelligent person already understands. Obviously companies have good reasons for not putting LAN.
Yea it's a pity. The problem is most of the prevention for piracy hurts the guys that buy the games too.
ALL forms of DRM and "prevention" (such as excluding LAN) hurt the paying customers more than pirates, this is not even a debate.
Yea well if guys just wouldn't pirate. It's rather saddening though. The consumers are the ones that have caused the gaming industry to become what it is today. Activision releasing CoD every year? That's us. No lan? That's us too. It sucks ;(
Don't kid yourself. Activision releasing a new CoD every year is because it gives them a billion dollars every year. No LAN is because companies believe that no one buys stuff if you can get it for free.
On June 27 2011 21:24 Keldrath wrote: the issue i have is its not like lan will like let you go on battle.net or anything, you cant ladder with lan, it would just make it so you could like play with your friends when they come over, why should he have to have a copy of the game to? theres many other games that have multiplayer features that dont require you to go online and you can just play with your friends when they are over. its stupid. and if companies didnt charge outrageous amounts for their outdated games that are just digital downloads to begin with anyways, theres no production cost for a digital download its ridiculous that like for example blizzard sells WC3 for 40 dollars for the battle chest, 40 dollars still for Diablo 2 and like 20 dollars still for BW. just for a digital download, its a ridiculous cost for such an outdated game.
Just fyi, you can buy most of the games you're talking about in a store for much cheaper then what blizzard is selling them for. War3 Battle Chest is $20 over at Gamestop, Diablo 2 Battle Chest is $30 (although I bought it for $20 years ago, funny), and Starcraft Battle Chest sells for $20 as well.
I understand the point you're trying to make with digital download, but you need to think of it as a convenience charge just like if you were to buy concert tickets or tickets to a sporting event. On top of whatever you're paying for the ticket, you're also paying anywhere from $2-15 (yes, I've seen it as high as $15), might want to keep that mind.
EPT![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/xp0Cr.jpg)
What we really need is some breakthrough in DRM methods that lets them protect the game without cutting features. Even if it means authenticating every LAN session (bnet authenticator?) it would be a better situation than now imo.
![[image loading]](http://img9.imageshack.us/img9/9880/piracy.png)
![[image loading]](http://img705.imageshack.us/img705/9881/bitgamerp.png)
![[image loading]](http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/steal_this_comic.png)
