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On January 14 2009 09:58 Excalibur_Z wrote:Show nested quote +On January 14 2009 07:04 CFDragon wrote:+ Show Spoiler +On January 14 2009 06:37 Excalibur_Z wrote:
Originally, I didn't see the point of removing LAN, particularly because private servers could emerge. However, after thinking about it a bit more, it does make sense after some considerations. Removing LAN means Blizzard doesn't need to add DRM to the game, which is a major complaint about EA games, and that gameplay can be regulated through Bnet2.0.
Now, if Bnet2.0 supports things like an extensive Ladder, external tournament/ranking support, and dynamic data rates which scale beyond the maximum allotted speed for online play (thereby minimizing lag in LAN-environment multiplayer games), then there really is no reason for a LAN option beyond piracy protection (although again, private servers will inevitably surface).
We've already seen the parsing and rankings of War3, which has a very powerful and sophisticated Ladder system. A similar system for SC2 is just a stone's throw away.
We've also seen they support community and sponsored events through SC's new external Ladder support. If this is expanded for SC2, maintaining third-party Ladders or tournaments will be easy.
All they have to do is implement the third aspect I mentioned (latency) and LAN play is made completely obsolete. I wouldn't doubt that Blizzard has grandiose plans such as these for Bnet2.0, as they've already claimed it to be an ambitious venture.
Assuming all of these features are added, what then could you argue in favor of LAN play beyond simply more options? Latency can not be fixed, you're still playing over the internet, not a direct LAN connection. The only reason it's really "fixed" with things like Chaos in BW is because the latency issues has to do with the game engine itself, because even a crappy internet connection can play the game with little ping. I suspect that SC2 will require a heavier internet connection than BW. Sure, it may not be very significant, especially for people who just play casually, but for professional gaming the difference between 40 and 140 ping is phenomenal. And how does this eliminate the need for DRM? Or rather, how does LAN validate a need for DRM? There are going to be ways to play with your friends online other than Battle.net, legally or not. So what difference does LAN make in stopping piracy? You want people to use B.net2, then make it a better choice than LAN, not the only choice. Not so, if the engine was able to dynamically identify the maximum throughput of a connection and the latency to other players and adjust the network speed and buffering automatically, which was my point. To explain a bit more, imagine you're playing on B.net with someone across the country. Your ping to that person is ~200ms. The game adjusts accordingly, so network traffic and command buffering are executed at a level which we typically see on Bnet at present. Now, imagine you're playing on B.net but with someone on your LAN. Your ping would only be about 10-20ms. Here, the game would adjust again, but response times would be much faster, just like playing a LAN game of SC, even though you're both logged onto B.net2.0. SC2 shouldn't require more than a slight degree heavier internet connection than BW. All that needs to be sent over the network are unit markers, orders, chat, error-checking packets, etc. It should require no "heavier" an Internet connection than War3. LANs make it easy to pirate things, I think everyone knows this as a fundamental truth. If you are able to pirate a game, not require unique authentication on launch, and play on LAN, then the game is easily pirated. EA circumvents this by requiring authentication, and Blizzard apparently may choose to circumvent this by disallowing LAN play. So, with your concerns allayed and addressed, what then is your argument in favor of making LAN play a requirement?
So why even remove LAN? Why make me have to connect to Battle.net before starting a game over a local area connection? To combat piracy? That's NOT going to stop piracy. I guess the only solace is, is that someone will probably end up hacking SC2 to make it be able to be played via LAN without connecting to Battle.net for an arbitrary reason. Then, all the pirates are going to have LAN anyway, and nothing was accomplished except hampering the paying customers' experience. And how many of the pirates that you're stopping from playing LAN are you going to actually make go out and buy the game? If they were interested in playing over Battle.net they wouldn't have pirated it in the first place. Removing LAN just seems like cutting down on what options your customers have, and it just seems like a pointless decision.
The way I see it is, I want to play SC2 with my little brother. I can go out and pick up two copies of the game, and we can play SC2 on LAN. Or, they take LAN out, someone hacks a way to play on LAN, and then I don't have motivation to pay money for it.
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It is possible to shut down private servers though. Blizzard have already started to do it with WoW.
Obviously they can't shut down all of them but they can shut down the more popular ones making the multiplayer experience for the pirates a less than a thrilling experience.
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United States12270 Posts
On January 15 2009 00:43 CFDragon wrote:Show nested quote +On January 14 2009 09:58 Excalibur_Z wrote:On January 14 2009 07:04 CFDragon wrote:+ Show Spoiler +On January 14 2009 06:37 Excalibur_Z wrote:
Originally, I didn't see the point of removing LAN, particularly because private servers could emerge. However, after thinking about it a bit more, it does make sense after some considerations. Removing LAN means Blizzard doesn't need to add DRM to the game, which is a major complaint about EA games, and that gameplay can be regulated through Bnet2.0.
Now, if Bnet2.0 supports things like an extensive Ladder, external tournament/ranking support, and dynamic data rates which scale beyond the maximum allotted speed for online play (thereby minimizing lag in LAN-environment multiplayer games), then there really is no reason for a LAN option beyond piracy protection (although again, private servers will inevitably surface).
We've already seen the parsing and rankings of War3, which has a very powerful and sophisticated Ladder system. A similar system for SC2 is just a stone's throw away.
We've also seen they support community and sponsored events through SC's new external Ladder support. If this is expanded for SC2, maintaining third-party Ladders or tournaments will be easy.
All they have to do is implement the third aspect I mentioned (latency) and LAN play is made completely obsolete. I wouldn't doubt that Blizzard has grandiose plans such as these for Bnet2.0, as they've already claimed it to be an ambitious venture.
Assuming all of these features are added, what then could you argue in favor of LAN play beyond simply more options? Latency can not be fixed, you're still playing over the internet, not a direct LAN connection. The only reason it's really "fixed" with things like Chaos in BW is because the latency issues has to do with the game engine itself, because even a crappy internet connection can play the game with little ping. I suspect that SC2 will require a heavier internet connection than BW. Sure, it may not be very significant, especially for people who just play casually, but for professional gaming the difference between 40 and 140 ping is phenomenal. And how does this eliminate the need for DRM? Or rather, how does LAN validate a need for DRM? There are going to be ways to play with your friends online other than Battle.net, legally or not. So what difference does LAN make in stopping piracy? You want people to use B.net2, then make it a better choice than LAN, not the only choice. Not so, if the engine was able to dynamically identify the maximum throughput of a connection and the latency to other players and adjust the network speed and buffering automatically, which was my point. To explain a bit more, imagine you're playing on B.net with someone across the country. Your ping to that person is ~200ms. The game adjusts accordingly, so network traffic and command buffering are executed at a level which we typically see on Bnet at present. Now, imagine you're playing on B.net but with someone on your LAN. Your ping would only be about 10-20ms. Here, the game would adjust again, but response times would be much faster, just like playing a LAN game of SC, even though you're both logged onto B.net2.0. SC2 shouldn't require more than a slight degree heavier internet connection than BW. All that needs to be sent over the network are unit markers, orders, chat, error-checking packets, etc. It should require no "heavier" an Internet connection than War3. LANs make it easy to pirate things, I think everyone knows this as a fundamental truth. If you are able to pirate a game, not require unique authentication on launch, and play on LAN, then the game is easily pirated. EA circumvents this by requiring authentication, and Blizzard apparently may choose to circumvent this by disallowing LAN play. So, with your concerns allayed and addressed, what then is your argument in favor of making LAN play a requirement? So why even remove LAN? Why make me have to connect to Battle.net before starting a game over a local area connection? To combat piracy? That's NOT going to stop piracy. I guess the only solace is, is that someone will probably end up hacking SC2 to make it be able to be played via LAN without connecting to Battle.net for an arbitrary reason. Then, all the pirates are going to have LAN anyway, and nothing was accomplished except hampering the paying customers' experience. And how many of the pirates that you're stopping from playing LAN are you going to actually make go out and buy the game? If they were interested in playing over Battle.net they wouldn't have pirated it in the first place. Removing LAN just seems like cutting down on what options your customers have, and it just seems like a pointless decision. The way I see it is, I want to play SC2 with my little brother. I can go out and pick up two copies of the game, and we can play SC2 on LAN. Or, they take LAN out, someone hacks a way to play on LAN, and then I don't have motivation to pay money for it.
This was what I said in my first post in the thread. There's not going to be a way to prevent private servers from popping up. There will always be FSGS-style server programs because the matchmaking process and chatting infrastructure are easily emulated. So you might say "how does removing LAN combat piracy?" Well, for the average user, it will. Just like for the average user, Red Alert 3 requires authentication on launch. That's not a problem for advanced users like us, it's easy for us to find cracks to get around that DRM, just like it won't be a problem for us to download a server emulation program like FSGS and redirect the game to that private server.
For the Ozzie who said his bandwidth beyond download cap is slightly above dialup, I'm surprised it has such an effect. I played SC on dialup for years (33.6Kbps at that) and never had a problem with the speed.
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Well, how many of these "average users" know how to operate a torrent to pirate a game, but not know how to find other cracks for it? Most of the time the average user is the one purchasing the game. Pirates consist maninly of the 'advanced' users. I just don't think removing LAN will do anything to boost their sales of SC2.
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On January 15 2009 03:14 CFDragon wrote:
Well, how many of these "average users" know how to operate a torrent to pirate a game, but not know how to find other cracks for it? Most of the time the average user is the one purchasing the game. Pirates consist maninly of the 'advanced' users. I just don't think removing LAN will do anything to boost their sales of SC2.
Just face it; you and your brother arey in the minority when it comes to not having internet connection. The "average" gamer who buys SC2 most likely has broadband Internet and would have no use for LAN. Not including LAN is pretty negligible market-wise.
Piracy has a huge effect on the PC game market: these "1337 hackers" you describe doesn't fit the average torrenter at all. The "hacks and cracks" that you mention are most likely going to be a hassle to download and get working. Many people would think its not worth the trouble and would just buy the game. Since multiplayer the whole purpose of SC2, not being able to play against one another would be pretty pointless.
Battle.net would also be a higher quality and more reliable product than private servers. I doubt any of these privately hosted servers would be large enough to have their own sophisticated ladder system and community without getting sued by Blizzard.
It just seems like good market sense for Blizzard to abandon LAN based on how many costumers they'll shun and how many they'll gain.
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On January 15 2009 03:50 Pendragon wrote:
Since multiplayer the whole purpose of SC2
This is the only part of the post I disagree with. Multiplayer will undoubtedly have better replay value, but I wouldn't have gotten so addicted to starcraft in the first place had it not been for the story.
It will be a bigger disappointment to me if the story is lackluster than if the multiplayer is horrid.
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On January 15 2009 03:50 Pendragon wrote:
Battle.net would also be a higher quality and more reliable product than private servers. I doubt any of these privately hosted servers would be large enough to have their own sophisticated ladder system and community without getting sued by Blizzard.
So if Battle.net's so much better than LAN, why not just include it for the people that do use it (i.e. LAN parties, offline tourneys, people in their private homes) and the hackers will just have a mediocre experience unless they purchase it? And I never said I didn't have an internet connection, I just said I'd rather play over LAN than Battle.net. Public Battle.netters are generally terrible to play with, and LAN has better ping.
Look, I'll come out and admit it, I wouldn't be extremely affected by the removal of LAN. There are two things here that I think about mainly. One, it's the removal of features solely to fight piracy. That's not the way to combat it! You shouldn't have the paying customers suffer for the people who aren't going to buy your game anyway. And two, by forcing the game to be played online, it means that in years to come if/when Battle.net goes down or stops supporting SC2 or whatever, we won't have multiplayer unless there is a hack for it. I know that's long term thinking and whatnot, but there are plenty of old games I play multiplayer over LAN that I can't play online because the company's servers are all down.
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United States47024 Posts
On January 15 2009 03:50 Pendragon wrote:
It just seems like good market sense for Blizzard to abandon LAN based on how many costumers they'll shun and how many they'll gain.
What?
How do they gain customers? As far as I know, most people who pirate games are people who can't/wouldn't buy the game anyway, even if pirating it weren't an option. In fact, thats probably the most common poor assumption about video game piracy (and media piracy in general). Cracking down on pirates doesn't translate 1-for-1 into new customers. I'd be surprised if even 1 in 10 software pirates would buy the software if pirating weren't an option. And I'm pretty damn sure that more than 1 in 10 RTS players have used LAN play at some point or another.
Cracking down on pirates isn't an efficient way of gaining new customers. Making a good game is an efficient way of gaining new customers.
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On January 15 2009 04:26 CFDragon wrote:
So if Battle.net's so much better than LAN, why not just include it for the people that do use it (i.e. LAN parties, offline tourneys, people in their private homes) and the hackers will just have a mediocre experience unless they purchase it? And I never said I didn't have an internet connection, I just said I'd rather play over LAN than Battle.net. Public Battle.netters are generally terrible to play with, and LAN has better ping.
It has been stated before: if you were playing your brother, a well coded battle.net would give you the same experience as a LAN game. Since they'll be equivalent you'll have no reason to play LAN over BNET if you have internet access.
Look, I'll come out and admit it, I wouldn't be extremely affected by the removal of LAN. There are two things here that I think about mainly. One, it's the removal of features solely to fight piracy. That's not the way to combat it! You shouldn't have the paying customers suffer for the people who aren't going to buy your game anyway. And two, by forcing the game to be played online, it means that in years to come if/when Battle.net goes down or stops supporting SC2 or whatever, we won't have multiplayer unless there is a hack for it. I know that's long term thinking and whatnot, but there are plenty of old games I play multiplayer over LAN that I can't play online because the company's servers are all down.
If Battle.net ever stops support SC2, it'll probably be like 20 years from now. Blizzard would probably just release a patch that includes LAN support when that happens. Also the Battle.net servers hardly ever crashes; even if one of them do, you still have 3-4 other Battle.net servers to access. I think you're over blowing the unreliability of online mulitplayer.
Costumers probably won't suffer much since most already have internet and LAN won't be relevant to them.
What?
How do they gain customers? As far as I know, most people who pirate games are people who can't/wouldn't buy the game anyway, even if pirating it weren't an option. In fact, thats probably the most common poor assumption about video game piracy (and media piracy in general). Cracking down on pirates doesn't translate 1-for-1 into new customers. I'd be surprised if even 1 in 10 software pirates would buy the software if pirating weren't an option. And I'm pretty damn sure that more than 1 in 10 RTS players have used LAN play at some point or another.
Cracking down on pirates isn't an efficient way of gaining new customers. Making a good game is an efficient way of gaining new customers.
I'm sure Blizzard did their market research and determined that LAN isn't needed in this day and age. Sure they'll lose some costumers, but they'll gain way more. Also even if only 1 in 10 software pirates purchase SC2, that'll be like 100k in sales right their.
Sure more than 1 in 10 SC players used LAN, but you have to take account the fact SC was released 10 years ago. The players that used LAN probably won't care much about in 2009.
From an economic perspective, what Blizzard is doing makes sense. They most definitely have market research statistics reinforce their decision.
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just to remember that blizzard never said they are officialy removing LAN
the same way Dustin Browder said that nothing in the game was final, concernin mbs
,,,
yeah thats something to worry about
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That would ruin LAN parties, I obviously have them -.-
On January 13 2009 10:21 Highways wrote:
Bad decision.
Both Lan and Bnet have their own purposes and cannot be substituted for one another.
QFT for lyfe
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United States12270 Posts
On January 15 2009 09:20 Folca wrote:That would ruin LAN parties, I obviously have them -.- Show nested quote +On January 13 2009 10:21 Highways wrote:
Bad decision.
Both Lan and Bnet have their own purposes and cannot be substituted for one another. QFT for lyfe
Again, not true. If everyone has their own copy with a unique CD-Key, you could all play on B.net. Conversely, if you're sharing, you just fire up some private server software and play offline that way.
Of course, we're all just speculating about the removal of LAN and Battle.net as a requirement for the purposes of DRM. It's been confirmed for D3, but consider that D2 didn't have LAN play either -- it did have TCP/IP direct connection, though. Technically not LAN play, so we're not really missing out on anything.
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this is vivendi at its finest. taking freedom from the gamers (who purchased the product) and forcing them to play it on their corporate platform.
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has anyone confirmed this yet?
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Sweden33723 Posts
On January 15 2009 09:51 Excalibur_Z wrote:Show nested quote +On January 15 2009 09:20 Folca wrote:That would ruin LAN parties, I obviously have them -.- On January 13 2009 10:21 Highways wrote:
Bad decision.
Both Lan and Bnet have their own purposes and cannot be substituted for one another. QFT for lyfe Again, not true. If everyone has their own copy with a unique CD-Key, you could all play on B.net. Conversely, if you're sharing, you just fire up some private server software and play offline that way. Of course, we're all just speculating about the removal of LAN and Battle.net as a requirement for the purposes of DRM. It's been confirmed for D3, but consider that D2 didn't have LAN play either -- it did have TCP/IP direct connection, though. Technically not LAN play, so we're not really missing out on anything.
I think if they remove LAN, they should bring back their old "Install Spawn" deal, where you can install a multiplayer only copy that can only play in games with its "parent" CD-key.
Anyway, I really don't like a feature (yes, LAN is a feature) being taken away from those who pay the game to *maybe* inconvenience those who don't.
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Imo they should have lower then lan latency 100ms im sure lan can mannage 50ms
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United States12270 Posts
On January 15 2009 14:14 IzzyCraft wrote:
Imo they should have lower then lan latency 100ms im sure lan can mannage 50ms
I'm very rarely a dick on these forums, and I even more rarely make personal attacks at people, but many of your posts are incomprehensible to the average human being. I would say all, but I haven't read them all, though "all" would be an educated guess of mine. Firstly, there is no such thing as faster than LAN speed. LAN speed is as fast as it gets. Secondly, your suggestion is irrelevant to the topic at hand and makes no sense.
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United States12270 Posts
On January 15 2009 12:59 FrozenArbiter wrote:Show nested quote +On January 15 2009 09:51 Excalibur_Z wrote:On January 15 2009 09:20 Folca wrote:That would ruin LAN parties, I obviously have them -.- On January 13 2009 10:21 Highways wrote:
Bad decision.
Both Lan and Bnet have their own purposes and cannot be substituted for one another. QFT for lyfe Again, not true. If everyone has their own copy with a unique CD-Key, you could all play on B.net. Conversely, if you're sharing, you just fire up some private server software and play offline that way. Of course, we're all just speculating about the removal of LAN and Battle.net as a requirement for the purposes of DRM. It's been confirmed for D3, but consider that D2 didn't have LAN play either -- it did have TCP/IP direct connection, though. Technically not LAN play, so we're not really missing out on anything. I think if they remove LAN, they should bring back their old "Install Spawn" deal, where you can install a multiplayer only copy that can only play in games with its "parent" CD-key. Anyway, I really don't like a feature (yes, LAN is a feature) being taken away from those who pay the game to *maybe* inconvenience those who don't.
I'm in the same boat as you. I don't think LAN should be removed, but I could see it as being justifiable for the reasons mentioned previously. Being able to advertise your game as "free of DRM" is a huge plus in these days of software phoning home and executing other intrusive measures on your computer.
I always thought the "spawn" feature was a great idea, and I don't know why they stopped doing it. That would be a convenient and easy way to distribute the game at LAN parties.
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"It has been stated before: if you were playing your brother, a well coded battle.net would give you the same experience as a LAN game. Since they'll be equivalent you'll have no reason to play LAN over BNET if you have internet access."
Not if you temporarily had NO internet connection...
Removing features for paying customers to combat pirates who won't buy the game regardless is as stupid as it gets, imo. ;/
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If blizzard doesn't include LAN support, somebody's gonna hack it in there anyway. Dont' worry about it.
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EPT
