SC2 will push e-sports to new heights - Page 11

For anything that can be done both over the internet and with a direct connection over a LAN, the connectivity over a LAN will always be better, however marginally.

On January 20 2009 03:56 Patrio wrote:
If they want to remove LAN to force players to play online bcause of copy protection, why not just force players to come online to download the LAN (only people with a real key can dl it) and it only works on the cd-key who downloaded it?

Or is this to easy to crack?

On January 20 2009 03:16 FrozenArbiter wrote:
LAN = Doesn't require an actual internet connection.
IT
IS
DIFFERENT


Again, you can't run a Starleague on bnet, your players will get spammed, they might drop, bnet maintenance, patches, temporary downtime etc... And if you are gonna implement "non-bnet servers for league play" then wtf, just implement god damn LAN :[

On January 20 2009 03:58 Daniri wrote:
If that's the case, then granted. But it doesn't seem to be so. I'm not too knowledgeable in this so I can only go off other's arguments and information, and so far "your" side hasn't offered any technical arguments where as I've seen plenty from the other.

The speed of light in a fibre-optic cable is about 200,000 km/s (kilometres per second), or roughly 124,274.238 miles per second (according to Google).

The straight-line distance between Tokyo and LA is about 8815km

For any signal, regardless of how many Bytes long/large it is to get from Tokyo to LA, it must travel along the fibre cable for at least 44ms (milliseconds, 8815/200,000). Therefore for a message to travel from where you're playing Diablo, to the B.Net server and for the server to send you the result will take at least 88ms.

The other 82ms of latency that make up the 170ms you were experiencing between Japan and US West are the intermediate hops (you're not directly connected to the B.Net server so your messages need to be relayed via routers that sit in-between you and it), as well as the time it takes for the B.Net server to process the message (which could be you clicking on a monster to attack it) and send you the result.

Before I continue, compare the slight delay in reaction from the game at a ping of 170ms to the 5ms ping (at most!) one might experience over LAN. If there's a 'true' Diablo experience it is when your character attacks immediately after you clicked and not a fraction of a second afterward. Some say the delay is negligible, to me it is not.

Now consider us poor sods at ad anum extremum mundi (i.e. Australia, New Zealand, South Africa). We live in (sometimes relatively) developed nations with relatively fast broadband Internet. But the straight-line distance between Sydney and LA is about 12,000km.

This gives a minimum latency of 60ms and hence a minimum ping of 120ms. But this yields but a 30ms higher ping than from Tokyo to LA? Naturally this minimum doesn't tell the whole story of intermediate hops and server processing time which normally brings latency on connections between Australia and the US to around 300ms. But even disregarding all that I'd say that there are some of us who don't want a delay between clicking and seeing your character swing. Even if it is a fraction of a second (i.e. 120ms), if you're used to the responsiveness of LAN, playing on Battle.NET is pure torture.

On January 20 2009 04:53 TheYango wrote:
There's no complex technical argument to be made. LAN latency is strictly better than latency with any online server could be. If two people are on a router, then when they are playing on LAN, information travels from player A, to the router, to player B. If they're online though, information has to travel from player A, to the router, to the server, back to the router from the server, then to player B. That time going from the router to server and back is non-zero.

On January 20 2009 03:16 FrozenArbiter wrote:
LAN = Doesn't require an actual internet connection.
IT
IS
DIFFERENT


Again, you can't run a Starleague on bnet, your players will get spammed, they might drop, bnet maintenance, patches, temporary downtime etc... And if you are gonna implement "non-bnet servers for league play" then wtf, just implement god damn LAN :[

On January 20 2009 06:30 Excalibur_Z wrote:
Players getting dropped/maintenance/downtime: Won't (shouldn't) happen because all of the players and observers would all be on the same local network, meaning if it did happen, it wouldn't be the fault of B.net and would have happened during a LAN game.

On January 20 2009 06:34 armed_ wrote:

The fact that a game can't even be started during server downtime is a huge issue that you're overlooking. What, do you expect all serious matches to be scheduled around Blizzard's maintenance schedule?

~Oh, also, it'll be great if Blizzard releases a buggy patch the day before a major tournament final and they're forced to play on it.

Basically if you remove LAN mode support you're gambling on a large number of factors to avoid any issues when you could simply be certain of success if you'd kept it.

On January 20 2009 06:49 Excalibur_Z wrote:


I'm just saying I can see where they're coming from if they choose to follow this path. B.net has a very good track record of uptime for an online gaming service. It's not going to be like WoW where every other Tuesday they take every server down for maintenance. More importantly, not all the realms would be down at the same time and there are multiple gateways from which to choose.

On January 20 2009 03:13 maybenexttime wrote:
Exacpt you cannot use this "LAN" if you've got no internet connection? ROFL, yeah "exactly like playing on LAN."

On January 20 2009 03:16 FrozenArbiter wrote:
LAN = Doesn't require an actual internet connection.
IT
IS
DIFFERENT


Again, you can't run a Starleague on bnet, your players will get spammed, they might drop, bnet maintenance, patches, temporary downtime etc... And if you are gonna implement "non-bnet servers for league play" then wtf, just implement god damn LAN :[

On January 20 2009 04:53 TheYango wrote:
There's no complex technical argument to be made. LAN latency is strictly better than latency with any online server could be. If two people are on a router, then when they are playing on LAN, information travels from player A, to the router, to player B. If they're online though, information has to travel from player A, to the router, to the server, back to the router from the server, then to player B. That time going from the router to server and back is non-zero.

On January 20 2009 07:36 Eury wrote:


My post was a respond regarding the ingame latency not regarding internet connection.



First of all it limits piracy if you buy into that. Second with tournament servers you can add a lot of features that a normal LAN mode don't have.




You seem really confused so I guess I will try yet again to explain how it works.
Bnet only sets up the custom game after the game starts all ingame communication as movements etc is PEER TO PEER.
That means the information gets sent directly from Player A to Player B and not through
Bnet so if Player A and Player B are at the same router they will have LAN latency.
Now, if you whisper someone for an example that information will get sent through Bnet but then again those kind of features you wouldn't have in a LAN mode at all and they don't effect the actual game play.
If there is still something unclear about p2p then feel free to ask.

First of all it limits piracy if you buy into that. Second with tournament servers you can add a lot of features that a normal LAN mode don't have.

On January 20 2009 07:42 freelander wrote:
you are wrong, imo
it's p2p, but it's through net, so the latency will be the double of your ping to your internet provider.

On January 20 2009 07:44 FrozenArbiter wrote:

Still doesn't solve:
- Patches - new patch in the middle of a league = disaster.
- With LAN you can play multiplayer with no internet connection - why remove this? Also, several people in this thread alone have said they cannot connect to Bnet due to firewall settings (ie at College/Univ).

Also, how the hell are you going to handle tournament servers? Should everyone hosting a SC2 league have to apply for one from Blizzard? Meh is all I have to say.

Another issue (although very small) is that you can use whatever ID you want on LAN, which is perfect when you want your ID to be "Samsung Khan | Jangbi" or whatever other super long sponsor tag you can think of.

On January 20 2009 08:42 FrozenArbiter wrote:
But the thing is a Starleague lasts months.. Meh - all I'm saying is, regardless of their reasons, LAN is preferable to no LAN, from a customers point of view (and that should be what matters).