Carmac responds to IEM Criticism: "Bring on the pitchforks…

On January 20 2012 15:27 vasculaR wrote:
isn't it funny that.. it COULD very well be PC problem and people still want to bash blizzard for no LAN.

On January 20 2012 14:33 Tyrant0 wrote:


LeVeLlEr LoL, aDdInG lAn Or NoT oNlY hAs To Do WiTh EnGiNeErInG, nOt PiRaTiNg?mOnEy lolololol

Have you read anything? Blizzard themselves have stated its an engineering issue. Who cares whether it is or isn't? Stick it to blizzard that the player base will make sacrifices to see a LAN feature, even if they have to rework battle.net and delay hots. Then they either have to retreat to the piracy excuse, or simply have no excuse at all. It puts the players in a much more powerful position vs blizzard's stance on LAN.

Cologne, Guangzhou and New York City went just fine (as esports events go). We had problems at this event. There's only so much you can do to prepare for an event like this. There will always be issues to solve that are beyond your control. Here's what happened:

On January 20 2012 12:54 Medrea wrote:


Go and read what Huk Thorzain and Rotterdam as well as many of the players who were at the event said. Network problems happened as well and thats to be expected, but evidently the systems werent equipped or, more likely, maintained well enough to service a tournament.

On January 20 2012 15:41 gparent wrote:


It has to be a piracy or money issue. Unless they are terrible programmers, there is no way they can't add 'if' checks of a SP variable for the entire interface and mock it so LAN works with it, to give a (rather bad) example.

I mean, think about WC3. It had an internet profile that was less super-integrated than today but still, essentially the same design problems to tackle programming wise. When you select LAN play, nothing was loaded and you started broadcasting on LAN if you hosted a server, so tournaments don't even have to setup servers unless Blizzard wants to avoid piracy. They could use the black box approach, and quite frankly probably earn a shit ton of money that way. More likely? I think so. Unless they're giving us a surprise with HotS, but I'm not holding out at this point.

On that note, most of the posts from Apollo324 are completely inaccurate.

Moving the server-side code to client side should be absolutely trivial. Essentially you just ship the server code with the client, it's that simple.

The reverse engineering concerns aren't very relevant to security unless their security depends on being hidden, which would be a bad security practice (excluding actual data such as passwords, obviously those need to be stripped away if there are any in the server code, but that would, again, be awful programming).

As for the distributed architecture, this is a non-concern. Since their architecture (hopefully) is scalable, the code must be written to work with a range of one to an infinity of machines (sorta).

As for the actual games, it seems like the PCs they were using were the concern, not any kind of lag issues. It is unfortunate that it happened this way, it's unacceptable for a big tournament organization hosting eSports to not have computers that have vastly superior amounts of power than required to play the top game from that tournament in enough quantity, with spares.

EDIT: I wrote my post with knowledge up to the fact that the PCs were bad, so excuse me if this changed while I was writing this brick.

On January 20 2012 16:36 ToD wrote:
i remember i used to complain a lot about conditions at esl tournaments during wc3 times just to be called a "whiner" or "crybaby", feels kinda weird to be reading about this now.