Kemeno writes "Blizzard has announced that they will be dropping LAN support for Starcraft II, citing piracy and quality concerns. Instead, all multiplayer games will be hosted through their new Battle.net service. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised by this move, but wasn't LAN play how the original Starcraft became popular? Blizzard said, 'More people on Battle.net means ... even more resources devoted to evolving this online platform to cater to further community building and new ways to enjoy the game online. World of Warcraft is a great example of a game that has evolved beyond anyone's imagination since their Day 1 and will continue to do so to better the player experience for as long as players support the title. ... We would not take out LAN if we did not feel we could offer players something better.'"
World of Warcraft is a great example of a game that has evolved beyond anyone's imagination since their Day 1 and will continue to do so to better the player experience for as long as players support the title.
I find it odd that a comparison is being drawn between a stateful monthly payment role playing game and a stateless (allegedly subscription-less) real time strategy game. I definitely see how World of Warcraft is enriched by the spider webbed interaction of thousands of players on a server. However, I fail to see how Starcraft II would benefit from this if you've got a single digit cap on number of players in any given instance of the game.
And can we give up on the piracy concerns? It's just getting embarrassing [gamesites200.com].
Also, if you're going to force everyone to use Battle.net, I hope you have improved its quality since I was last one it several years ago.
WoW is a residual cash cow. They hope to do the same thing with StarCraft 2 by increasing ad revenue with Battle.net
I don't think the comparisons mean much except that they are internally projecting how one game is going to do in comparison to their already established MMORPG.
I wonder if all that extra ad revenue will make up for the fact that a bunch of their core demographic are using university network connections that block access to Battle.net.
Everyone I know that went away to college (7 different schools, actually) still has access to Battle.net, WoW, etc.. Where are you getting this information that Battle.net is blocked from universities?
Still, would you block 40% of your target demographic? how about 20%? 5%? You will have plenty of new gamers that were not playing when SC1 came out. Plenty of older gamers that are no longer interested.
It's a veiled attempt to combat piracy that's likely to work against them in the end. Just because it worked for WoW I think someone got it in his or her head that this is the greatest idea evar. Piracy of Wow is, essentially, zero. Sure, there are rouge servers, but if you look at the total number of players on legitimate (that is, account/key/subscription enforced) realms vs. other the 'loss' is negligible.
It's unfortunate that bliz is treating a much smaller, simpler, less involved game the same way they do WoW. Hopefully they'll add LAN support back in at some point...or someone will hack it in and P2P it.
Well, think of it this way. I'm a fanboy and I'll buy this game.
I own eleven fucking copies of Starcraft and Broodwars. I can have my own 8 man LAN party and then some. That's how big of a SC nut I was. Will I buy multiple copies of SCII? Fuck no. No LAN party, no reason to.
Blizzard is going to make "fuck-you money" with this game one way or another, but I'm telling you now, that's 7 copies unbought because you're greedy and removing LAN support.
There are other MMOs that are like that. For example, guild wars has many people in towns, but where you do most things the number is 8 (or 16 for certain missions). It is not as big as WOW but it has a good number of people. Guild wars has no monthly fee and totally online. No LAN based play.
As for batttle.net, if it is like the diablo II days, they are in trouble. It sucked back then.
I can honestly say that this is a huge disappointment to me. I was really looking forward to having an old school LAN party with my friends like we used to back in Junior High and high school. Somehow, having 4 friends in the same house/room connect to battlenet just to play with each other is a tad disappointing.
Yet another game whose bombing will be put down to "piracy" when in actuality it will be their own asshattery. Starcraft was great for LAN parties, but as other posters have pointed out with the upload speed on the average cable connection that is now deader than Dixie. You watch, when it doesn't sell the kinda numbers they expected because they burnt the LANers they will STILL blame piracy!
It makes me think of the interview not long ago with the head of THQ over the closing of Iron Lore (here is the link [kotaku.com]), where all he did was bitch and moan about how it was everyone's fault but theirs that the company went under. It was piracy and PC having some many different combinations and it isn't our fault..bla bla bla. I tried the demo and it spent more time crashing to desktop than playing, and when it did play it was obviously a lame Diablo ripoff with very little to make it different from it or Dungeon Siege.
I for one am sick of this "it's always piracy" bullshit. Because that is EXACTLY what it is. yes, there are some who pirate games, just as there are those that pirate movies or books or music. i don't see those guys going out of business, do you? How about making a product that doesn't suck with fancy epeen graphics and physics with bad guys dumb as Forest Gump, how about that? All your anti piracy bullshit doesn't hurt the pirates, they get it cracked before the game hits the shelves. It hurts guys like me that won't even buy your games at release anymore because I have to crack them due to the fact your ^%$#%^# DRM doesn't run on my 64bit OS but the games do. WTF?
So to conclude this rant, quit playing the bullshit piracy card Blizzard. We know as well as you it is because you are now Blizzardvision and think every fricking thing should have a WoW constant revenue stream or be able to be rehashed year after year like CoD. You are screwing over the fans that actually bought your fricking product just to try to squeeze them for more cash and probably hit them with ads while you are at it. Well fuck you too buddy. I will not be buying Starcraft II even though I was really looking forward to it. Anyway this guy [metacafe.com] is able to rant about the anti piracy BS better than I can. QUIT SCREWING YOUR CUSTOMERS!!!!!
Not everyone has a high speed connection now either. Also, last time I used Battle.net, the process for hosting a private game was annoying and cumbersome.
Also, since most "broadband" connections are only fast on download, and Battle.net will require all game data to be uploaded once for every person playing at a LAN party, ADSL is likely to be too slow for more than two or three players.
Wouldn't bother me if I played multi-player RTS games in any environment *other* than LAN, but every time I've tried, latency, bandwidth, and crappy lobby systems have leeched all the fun out of it.
In it's current incarnation, Battle.net requires you (like most online services faced with connecting through a firewall) to open or forward ports to the machine running the game. Normally this is no problem, for example XBox Live works the same way. Unfortunately, Battle.net wasn't forward-thinking enough to use multiple ports! As only a single port is used for communication between the server and the client, only one client may communicate with the server through the firewall or router.
This should have been fixed back in the day through an update, but alas it's still true. A couple months ago my friends and I decided to pick the old game up and try playing it. I was surprised at how everything worked well after setting up the firewall. Unfortunately the minute I had a few other friends over and we all tried playing over my cable service, a realization quickly dawned. I could host fine, everyone could connect... but there was an inorinate amount of lag once the game started. This lag was only alleviated when the people physically there weren't in the hosted game, or the remote players were sitting it out. Any mix of the two resulted in the game being outright unplayable.
And I'll echo your point. I'm house-sitting for a close friend now and there is no internet at his place. He said having the rest of the guys over for LANs or Rock Band or whatever be it would be fine. If StarCraft 2 were out, it would (have) probably be(en) the game we'd play the most. I don't like this one bit.
"What's the difference other than everyone has to own the game?"
The big obvious one is that battlenet was slow, crashed a often and was flooded with other problems. Back when starcraft was out I had high speed internet, along with very few others, but we still had LAN parties because social interaction was (and may still be) fun, and there is just no way you're going to out perform my LAN, even with today's high speed Internet. There's probably a lot of people out there who would just rather play online, typing or talking through a cold microphone, i'm not one of em.
"We would not take out LAN if we did not feel we could offer players something better."
I highly doubt it.
Just one more reason I no longer support Bizzard. Just as soon as I begin to forget why I dislike them they give me more reasons.
No, no, no. There are plenty of people without high speed connections, you obviously live in, or in the vicinity of a city. (In a country with an Internet infrastructure not consisting of snails and mud.) Many people in many countries have crappy DSL-connections at best. Many still connect through dial up-modem. (I know this is hard to believe for someone born on the Internet through a 1000 Mbit connection.)
This gives, as many has already pointed out, a situation where you could have 8 guys connected to a 1000/100 Mbit switch. Lovely, no problems at all.
Or, the same 8 guys, with 8 great modern computers could be connected through that same 1000 Mbit switch,but then linked to battle.net through a 8 Mbit down/1 Mbit up connection! This is nothing short of madness.
Some of the best LAN-parties I've ever been to has been in cabins in the coutryside. It's peaceful, we disturb no one and no one disturb us. Obviously, Blizzard think we're better off playing something else nowadays.
To throw out LAN-support as of 2009 is not just a mistake, it's a god damn disgrace to the gaming industry.
The funny thing was that the original versions of Diablo and Starcraft also had "install spawn copy" feature, so that only one person would need the game to host multiplayer games, and the spawned copies could join those and only those games hosted by the person with the full version.
Between this and trying to sucker people into buying the same game three times for single player (one version for each race campaign, though this might have been changed since I last looked), I'll just pass out on Starcraft 2 entirely.
So now, aside from locating a place where you and your friends can setup your computers and play - you now get to find someplace with an internet connection that can handle all of them at the same time.
So now, aside from locating a place where you and your friends can setup your computers and play - you now get to find someplace with an internet connection that can handle all of them at the same time.
Or you can just pay $60 per computer per month with a 24-month minimum commitment for mobile broadband, like a lot of proponents of cloud computing on Slashdot have been recommending.
The Warcraft 3 networking implementation for internet play via Battlenet just requires that the players start the game in Battlenet. Once the game starts, the client computers talk directly to the host. If all the players were on a LAN, the routing would be done at the LAN level as soon as the game started.
Are they at least going to release a battle.net server clone source/ dedicated servers for private hosting? Similar to how Valve has a source dedicated server they release for all their major games? A lot of large LAN events only allow limited net access, if any.
For the record I think this is really,really dumb idea.
Quite disappointing, considering some friends and I still get together and play an 8 man LAN every month or so of Starcraft 1. Feels like an internet connection would be saturated if we were all trying to send data back and forth to BNet, especially the uplink. Maybe if BNet is just used for a quick auth and lobby, then a LAN game is started, that might not be so bad, but it's not looking that way.
Shame the official reason is to combat piracy as well, since it seems this will cause more players to find BNet emulators and won't solve the piracy problem.
Maybe if BNet is just used for a quick auth and lobby, then a LAN game is started, that might not be so bad, but it's not looking that way.
Blizzard will obviously be doing it this way, they're just being unnecessarily cryptic. Not doing so is a surefire way for Blizzard to piss off everyone involved in E-Sports/competitive gaming.
A few thing about Haofang: It is biggest gaming site in China, it has millions of users for many games including SC and WC3. It is free and using LAN(TCP/IP protocol) to allow players to play. How Haofang works: You download a small program for Haofang, run it, tell it where your SC folder is. You join a room(max 255 players because TCP/IP can handle max to 255)then hit RUN, the little program will load your SC up and instead of log on to Bnet you go to LAN, and can find many games their to play since 255 players in the same room is a lot. Why it is bad: Cos millions of players in China were/are/going to using pirated SC/WC3 to play without any limitation. Why Blizzard cares: Of course they care, if even SC2 is going to last only half the life of SC the next big market is definitely China(cos Korea is given). If things going on like SC/WC3 Blizzard is going to lose tons of money. Did Blizzard do anything about it: Yes they did but failed. A few year back Blizzard sued Haofang but lost and Haofang is continue to grow and now become the most recognize site in China(among gamers of course). Why is Haofang able to sneak pass Blizzard: Haofang told that they only allow players play via LAN(TCP/IP) they do not do anything to mess with Blizzard Battle.net and thus can not be judged. I know it is bullshit since it allows players with pirated copies play multi play which is the life SC, but it holds true in the EULA and Blizzard can do nothing about it.
If you've ever seen the connections made by an online game of Starcraft, you'd quickly realize that beyond the lobby, the game itself is connected to each player. And why is everyone thinking there is somehow a ton of data to move between the players? Has anyone forgot about games like Supreme Commander with gawd-awful huge maps and thousands of units at once? It plays just fine over the internet with even the government definition of broadband. I seriously doubt that Blizzard would have trouble optimizing the data flow between players.
The official forums are filled at this point with people either deriding the exclusion of LAN play or people popping up to defend this as a good move... Though I can't say I like the implicit assumption that all the people that want LAN play back are pirates, as in this Blizzard response from Karune:
Source [battle.net]
As mentioned by Rob Pardo in interviews, piracy is a serious problem and often times tie in closely with LAN. At the end of the day, we want the best for the community and fans that support our games, and having chunk of the community pirate the game actually hurts the community.
1) Pirated servers splinter the community instead of consolidating all players who love to play the game. Battle.net will bring players together in skirmishes, ladder play, custom games, and allow everyone the opportunity to share a common experience.
2) More people on Battle.net means more even more resources devoted to evolving this online platform to cater to further community building and new ways to enjoy the game online. World of Warcraft is a great example of a game that has evolved beyond anyone's imagination since their Day 1 and will continue to do so to better the player experience for as long as players support the title. The original StarCraft is an even better example of how 11 years later, players still love and play this title, and we will continue to support and evolve it with patches.
We would not take out LAN if we did not feel we could offer players something better.
If I were to buy StarCraft II or any other title, I know the money I spent would be going to supporting that title. Personally, I would be upset that others were freeloading while others are legitimately supporting a title that has great potential and goals of making this title have 'long legs.'
If you like a song a lot, buy it, and that artist will only come out with more awesome songs for you. If you like a game, buy it, and we will promise to constantly work to make the player experience better at every corner we can.
Support the causes you believe in (This is applicable to all things, not just gaming).
Don't be a leech to society, innovation, and further awesome creations.
They keep saying that they are offering something better. No amount of fancy battle.net matchmaking features is going to get over the technical limitation of requiring every machine on a LAN to constantly communicate back and forth across the same shared pipe to blizzard's servers. This is what they do not seem to understand. That, or more likely, they understand it just fine and don't care, and are more driven by sales and fighting piracy than making their customers happy. When will gaming companies learn? Do not worry about your non-customers, worry about the people who fund your paycheck!
In other words "We want Starcraft 2 to become a glorified chatroom just like WoW has become, and that can't happen if people are having LAN parties with legitimate copies of the game as they have for 10 years with Starcraft... which we now refer to as... 'PIRATED SERVERS!'" and the rest is "The entertainment industry and its programmers deserve to live wealthily while you struggle to find a job to support the nation and its economy. If you disagree with that, you must hate video games!"
I like hamburgers, but that doesn't mean I need to go spend $60 on a burger to "support" the beef industry. I spend $3 on a burger because I want to eat the damn burger.
I think that it's odd that none of the linked articles or well-moderated comments have raised the most salient and powerful issue against this measure: that you can play the game only as long as Blizzard desires to support it or, more pertinently, for so long as Blizzard continues to exist. Blizzard is doing well, but recent events have demonstrated that that can change.
As recent shutdowns or attempted shutdowns of DRM servers have shown (Major League Baseball, MSN Music, Yahoo Music, Wal-Mart Music, Adobe ad-supported PDFs), once a revenue stream dries up, your continued enjoyment of multi-player will be subject to a simple calculation: is the PR cost of cutting off support greater or less than the expense of maintaining the servers and support. The MSN, Yahoo, Wal-Mart servers were only used sporadically in order to shift DRM authorizations from one computer to another. The MLB servers were used every time someone attempted to play a purchased video. The Battle.net servers will be used by far larger numbers of people virtually every time that they want to play (once players exhaust the single player potential). World of Warcraft is the only Battle.net game that generates a continuing revenue stream to justify the expense. Even if there is support for 15-20 years, at some point discontinuation is inevitable -- and there are surprising numbers of people who still play legally purchased 15-20 year old games.
Considering the importance of multi-player in Starcraft 2, players are justified in planning for reality and demanding some form of LAN functionality. Blizzard has legitimate concerns about piracy, but purchasers have legitimate concerns about being able to play the game long after Blizzard has lost interest in it. Blizzard should be willing to develop LAN functionality as a patch, place the code in escrow, and include a contractual provision on the box which automatically authorizes release of patch by the escrow agent if online service is terminated. If it is not, then players should browbeat them with every DRM failure that they can think of, because ultimately they are the only ones who are likely to care.
As a purely coincidental side effect, I'm sure, this will make sure that everyone on the LAN has their own copy, as battle.net will only allow one CD key on at a time.
Quite a reversal of the "Ghost Copy" feature or whatever of StarCraft 1 that allows many people to use one copy over the LAN.
but it definitely won't keep it's longevity without LAN support, I mean the best thing about games like Starcraft or even FPS like BF1942 was the LAN aspect of getting your friends together ordering a pizza, talking shit and zerging each other. Sure, I can throw on a headset and play with friends, but what if battle.net is down? What if I'm getting a lot of lag...fast paced game players don't have the tolerance of players who are into mmo's exclusively. I think Blizz is making a poor decision.
We would not take out LAN if we did not feel we could offer players something better.
How is connecting all the computers in the room to a server across the state going to ever be better than connecting all the computers in the room to each other? This man just told everyone that his bullshit is going to start tasting better than icecream. He just needs a neon sign over his head that says "Do not trust this man or anything he says."
I dunno about this. What if my ISP is acting up, and I need to get in a bit of Starcrafty goodness with a couple friends I have over or something? No matter what Blizzard does, there's going to be piracy of their game; it's inescapable, no matter what they do. I'm sure bnetd (or at least something similar) is going to pop up.
The most jarring thing to me is the worry that they won't at least let you meet up with specific people on bnet and form a closed game to at least simulate a LAN game (fat chance, with the lag back to Blizzard's servers =/ )
This is all about the only form of DRM that works: centrally controlled and account based. Regardless of how many reasons that Blizzard gives, this is all about controlling the product.
Blizzard used to make games because they were fun to play?
Given that Blizzard has basically dominated the market why do they continue to stray from their roots... Remember KALI? Warcraft 2 owed ALL of its success to KALI and that would have never existed if LAN play wasn't an option. But battle.net takes in HUGE profits all by itself so I guess its better to force players to use it then make it optional. Control is the name of the game these days. Oh yah.. I forgot, DRM and other Piracy measures work sooooo well don't they?
LAN support is what makes StarCraft (classic) the best game ever. You can get a bunch of people together in a computer lab and play 4vs4 or in my case 7vs1. BNET access will be blocked from most schools so the multiuser experience will be eliminated since schools and libraries are some of the only places you can find rooms full of 25 PCs. Also, the LAN doesn't LAG like battle net.
So how is this going to play out? If SCII is any good, the community will just produce a local battle net server e.g. (bnetd) for playing games on the LAN. Blizzard is making very a bad, short-sighted move. As for piracy, everyone I know owns at least one copy of the Blizzard Battle Chest, which costs $20 or less for SC and BW. It is the best entertainment one can buy for under $20. The mega mineral maps require internet access though:)
If anyone from Blizzard reads Slashdot, please go up and smack your management in the head and tell them to make SCII LAN playable. If they don't build it, someone else will and writing a small server to emulate BNET isn't going to be that hard. Even with encrypted session, it will be reverse engineered, just ask Sony about ShowEQ and their futile attempt the encrypt Everquest Traffic. Everyone on planet earth is going to buy the game the day it hits the shelf. Please go smack them in the back of the head now.
No LAN support means that I know I'll enjoy SCII less than Starcraft I. I think I'll pass this one and wait for some people to hack something to make it playable on LAN.
And this piracy thing is strange. When I invite friends, we can play at 8 people on a board game I was the only one to buy. It is strange that multiplayer video games should work another way around.
Lan parties are different than online play, because everyone is in the same room. You know everyone who's there, and you can see them from across the room. Nothing is a substitute for human contact, and playing on battle.net won't be the same.
I continue to play Warcraft III fairly regularly, mostly in the form of the custom map DotA [wikipedia.org]. My thoughts:
Battle.net has failed to evolve and I feel is discouraging to communities rather than promoting it. I've seen nothing really appreciable since War-III came out with the sad "clan" system. Bots are officially disallowed, but required to develop any sort of reasonable group. The new Warden service makes running a bot far more of a challenge.
The necessity of the bots is this: you can't functionally setup an organized game any other way. There's no mechanism for taking a private game public once you get your friends in it. Game names can't be changed. Custom (non-ladder) games without an external mod have no disincentive to them to deal with the burgeoning population of juvenile tools who like to bail on their first loss in a team game, or worse find a way to actively ruin the game. Blizzards clan system itself is lacking and hasn't been improved upon at all. It's nearly useless outside of ladder games. Players end up creating new accounts with clan tags in the name to "fly their colors." Simply being more prominent in displaying the affiliated clan would have gone a long way.
And come on... the game came out 7 years ago. Fix the damn pathing issues! Blizzard makes amazing games, but their handling of B.net lately has been horribly disappointing.
Whenever a company does something that hurts the consumer in the name of "fighting piracy", it seems to me to be taken by the community as an open invitation to pirate their game. Given the choice between pirating and buying the game, frequently the reason the individual consumer chooses to pay money for the game is the impression one has of the company. Sure, no one is going to pay for a crappy game, but look at the difference between Spore and Starcraft. Spore was seen as a slap in the face of the consumer and consequently was one of the most pirated games in history. The original Starcraft, despite the fact it is easily pirated, is still profitable enough to be sold for $20 in stores.
You want to insure piracy? Piss off your users. Removing LAN and telling LAN users they're nothing but pirates seems to be going down that road pretty nicely.
We would not take out LAN if we did not feel we could offer players something better.
If Blizzard were offering something better, they would not have to remove the game's LAN capability. Customers would just use the "better" thing, right?
Oh wait. Better for Blizzard. Ah, now it makes sense.
For those of you that aren't aware, LAN gaming is very much alive with our soldiers stationed in Iraq. Starcraft, Warcraft 3, and Dawn of War were all extremely popular for those with laptops. Even attempting to validate a cdkey through the tiny pipe that is the on-base internet connection would prevent most people from being able to play.
This is a disgusting money grab. Nothing more.
they seem to have forgotten that they used to give "spawn" CD keys that allowed you to play with friends. I thought you could play LAN with that too.
I buy games, and bought SC1 [and Brood War] and played the hell out of it [spawn copies at LANs!]. might not want to buy SC2 if that's how they want to play...
I haven't been to a LAN party in about 10 years. It's really easy to get the same experience nowadays with broadband and a microphone.
Then no offense, but your friends suck. There's still no way sitting at home alone in your basement playing with friends online and yelling at them over teamspeak compares to packing 12-15 friends into same basement and duking it out all night long. Sure, you can trash talk over the mic, but there's still going to be times you just need to grab something soft and wail it at your friend when he curbstomps you... Or the joys of building a massive tower of dew from everyones empties.. or waiting to see who crashes first and then raiding his hard drive for that uber pr0n collection he's been hiding....
Don't get me wrong, broadband has changed the world, but there are some things that just aren't the same even with broadband. Hell, my wife's computer is upstairs in her own little room, and I always feel bad that's she's getting left out of the fun when the party's at our place (I keep trying to convince her to move her gear downstairs for the even, but no love).. it's a world of difference being in the same room together versus even being on separate floors, let alone zip codes. (yes, a wife that enjoys lan parties... granted she's more apt to enjoy the simple classics, ala Q3 and Unreal then "complicated" ones in her opinion, like TF2.. but it's a start).
Overall, I think this is a mistake on Blizzard's part. There *are* those of us who still do actual physical lan parties, and in some instances, network dependency in a game can be a BITCH... case in point, new fangled games that have *one* way to patch, direct from the internet. You have 15 people sharing a broadband connection, you know how long it takes for each of them to download a separate 1-2 gig patch? And if it's an EA game, good lord, forget it, I think they're using C64s as their patch servers.... Before all this "lets assume everyone is connected to the internet all the time" mentality, one person could grab the latest patches (from home, before the lan party), bring them to the party, share out the EXEs, and everyone could patch direct from that... now, especially with Steam games, it's always a crapshoot to see who all is upgraded to the latest and how many people will need to download (at the same time) slowing everyone to a crawl. Even trying to plan ahead you can still get burned (last lan party I think it was, there was a TF2 update that came out the night before before the lanparty.. some people had patched the previous weekend, but nooooo, we still had to sit through the mess)
Are you aware that you can just copy the gcf files from an up to date SteamApps folder onto everyone else's machine? Just be sure to close steam first before copying over the files.
We do this all the time when there's a big TF2 update during a weekend LAN at uni (we have the uni's internet connection mostly to ourselves at 11pm but it's still quicker to copy the files over the network or pass round an external drive).
While I can see the piracy aspect, there are a good few games in my drawer that I wouldn't have considered if I hadn't "borrowed" them for a weekend at a lan party. If you really do have to have 1 CD key per player then I guess SC2 will join the growing list of games which are good but we never have big games with because not enough people own it. (Currently DOWII, CoH. TF2 is the only exception because it's that awesome.)
Seriously though, it's tiring to have companies actively inconvenience their users just in case some people might steal it. To throw a company a bone to help protect their IP, strange how Blizzard did just fine until wild success of WoW got them gobs of cash. Now, suddenly, with the most successful MMORPG, with the most revenue, they need to be careful about people stealing their games or else they will go poor?
I suspect that the sudden success of WoW has attracted unfortunate decision makers who tend to jump into successful companies/products and sink them. I see it all too often, a brilliant idea brilliantly executed draws the people who don't achieve success on their own to take it over and enforce the same decisions that keep them from succeeding on their own onto the otherwise capable group.
Confusing Comparison: RTS vs RPG (Score:5, Insightful)
World of Warcraft is a great example of a game that has evolved beyond anyone's imagination since their Day 1 and will continue to do so to better the player experience for as long as players support the title.
I find it odd that a comparison is being drawn between a stateful monthly payment role playing game and a stateless (allegedly subscription-less) real time strategy game. I definitely see how World of Warcraft is enriched by the spider webbed interaction of thousands of players on a server. However, I fail to see how Starcraft II would benefit from this if you've got a single digit cap on number of players in any given instance of the game.
And can we give up on the piracy concerns? It's just getting embarrassing [gamesites200.com].
Also, if you're going to force everyone to use Battle.net, I hope you have improved its quality since I was last one it several years ago.
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Re:Confusing Comparison: RTS vs RPG (Score:5, Insightful)
Somehow I think not...
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Re:Confusing Comparison: RTS vs RPG (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Confusing Comparison: RTS vs RPG (Score:4, Interesting)
Still, would you block 40% of your target demographic? how about 20%? 5%? You will have plenty of new gamers that were not playing when SC1 came out. Plenty of older gamers that are no longer interested.
It's a veiled attempt to combat piracy that's likely to work against them in the end. Just because it worked for WoW I think someone got it in his or her head that this is the greatest idea evar. Piracy of Wow is, essentially, zero. Sure, there are rouge servers, but if you look at the total number of players on legitimate (that is, account/key/subscription enforced) realms vs. other the 'loss' is negligible.
It's unfortunate that bliz is treating a much smaller, simpler, less involved game the same way they do WoW. Hopefully they'll add LAN support back in at some point...or someone will hack it in and P2P it.
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Re:Confusing Comparison: RTS vs RPG (Score:5, Informative)
Sure, there are rouge servers . . .
It's ROGUE dammit! Rouge is a face paint!
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Re:Confusing Comparison: RTS vs RPG (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, think of it this way. I'm a fanboy and I'll buy this game.
I own eleven fucking copies of Starcraft and Broodwars. I can have my own 8 man LAN party and then some. That's how big of a SC nut I was. Will I buy multiple copies of SCII? Fuck no. No LAN party, no reason to.
Blizzard is going to make "fuck-you money" with this game one way or another, but I'm telling you now, that's 7 copies unbought because you're greedy and removing LAN support.
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Re:Confusing Comparison: RTS vs RPG (Score:4, Informative)
There are other MMOs that are like that. For example, guild wars has many people in towns, but where you do most things the number is 8 (or 16 for certain missions). It is not as big as WOW but it has a good number of people. Guild wars has no monthly fee and totally online. No LAN based play.
As for batttle.net, if it is like the diablo II days, they are in trouble. It sucked back then.
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Re:Confusing Comparison: RTS vs RPG (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Confusing Comparison: RTS vs RPG (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Confusing Comparison: RTS vs RPG (Score:5, Insightful)
Yet another game whose bombing will be put down to "piracy" when in actuality it will be their own asshattery. Starcraft was great for LAN parties, but as other posters have pointed out with the upload speed on the average cable connection that is now deader than Dixie. You watch, when it doesn't sell the kinda numbers they expected because they burnt the LANers they will STILL blame piracy!
It makes me think of the interview not long ago with the head of THQ over the closing of Iron Lore (here is the link [kotaku.com]), where all he did was bitch and moan about how it was everyone's fault but theirs that the company went under. It was piracy and PC having some many different combinations and it isn't our fault..bla bla bla. I tried the demo and it spent more time crashing to desktop than playing, and when it did play it was obviously a lame Diablo ripoff with very little to make it different from it or Dungeon Siege.
I for one am sick of this "it's always piracy" bullshit. Because that is EXACTLY what it is. yes, there are some who pirate games, just as there are those that pirate movies or books or music. i don't see those guys going out of business, do you? How about making a product that doesn't suck with fancy epeen graphics and physics with bad guys dumb as Forest Gump, how about that? All your anti piracy bullshit doesn't hurt the pirates, they get it cracked before the game hits the shelves. It hurts guys like me that won't even buy your games at release anymore because I have to crack them due to the fact your ^%$#%^# DRM doesn't run on my 64bit OS but the games do. WTF?
So to conclude this rant, quit playing the bullshit piracy card Blizzard. We know as well as you it is because you are now Blizzardvision and think every fricking thing should have a WoW constant revenue stream or be able to be rehashed year after year like CoD. You are screwing over the fans that actually bought your fricking product just to try to squeeze them for more cash and probably hit them with ads while you are at it. Well fuck you too buddy. I will not be buying Starcraft II even though I was really looking forward to it. Anyway this guy [metacafe.com] is able to rant about the anti piracy BS better than I can. QUIT SCREWING YOUR CUSTOMERS!!!!!
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Re:Confusing Comparison: RTS vs RPG (Score:4, Insightful)
Not everyone has a high speed connection now either. Also, last time I used Battle.net, the process for hosting a private game was annoying and cumbersome.
Also, since most "broadband" connections are only fast on download, and Battle.net will require all game data to be uploaded once for every person playing at a LAN party, ADSL is likely to be too slow for more than two or three players.
Wouldn't bother me if I played multi-player RTS games in any environment *other* than LAN, but every time I've tried, latency, bandwidth, and crappy lobby systems have leeched all the fun out of it.
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Re:Confusing Comparison: RTS vs RPG (Score:5, Informative)
In it's current incarnation, Battle.net requires you (like most online services faced with connecting through a firewall) to open or forward ports to the machine running the game. Normally this is no problem, for example XBox Live works the same way. Unfortunately, Battle.net wasn't forward-thinking enough to use multiple ports! As only a single port is used for communication between the server and the client, only one client may communicate with the server through the firewall or router.
This should have been fixed back in the day through an update, but alas it's still true. A couple months ago my friends and I decided to pick the old game up and try playing it. I was surprised at how everything worked well after setting up the firewall. Unfortunately the minute I had a few other friends over and we all tried playing over my cable service, a realization quickly dawned. I could host fine, everyone could connect... but there was an inorinate amount of lag once the game started. This lag was only alleviated when the people physically there weren't in the hosted game, or the remote players were sitting it out. Any mix of the two resulted in the game being outright unplayable.
And I'll echo your point. I'm house-sitting for a close friend now and there is no internet at his place. He said having the rest of the guys over for LANs or Rock Band or whatever be it would be fine. If StarCraft 2 were out, it would (have) probably be(en) the game we'd play the most. I don't like this one bit.
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Re:Confusing Comparison: RTS vs RPG (Score:4, Insightful)
Instead of everyone connected over a 100mbps local network, you now have 8 players funneling out through the same shared Internet connection.
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Re:Confusing Comparison: RTS vs RPG (Score:5, Insightful)
"What's the difference other than everyone has to own the game?"
The big obvious one is that battlenet was slow, crashed a often and was flooded with other problems. Back when starcraft was out I had high speed internet, along with very few others, but we still had LAN parties because social interaction was (and may still be) fun, and there is just no way you're going to out perform my LAN, even with today's high speed Internet. There's probably a lot of people out there who would just rather play online, typing or talking through a cold microphone, i'm not one of em.
"We would not take out LAN if we did not feel we could offer players something better."
I highly doubt it.
Just one more reason I no longer support Bizzard. Just as soon as I begin to forget why I dislike them they give me more reasons.
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Re:Confusing Comparison: RTS vs RPG (Score:5, Insightful)
No, no, no. There are plenty of people without high speed connections, you obviously live in, or in the vicinity of a city. (In a country with an Internet infrastructure not consisting of snails and mud.) Many people in many countries have crappy DSL-connections at best. Many still connect through dial up-modem. (I know this is hard to believe for someone born on the Internet through a 1000 Mbit connection.)
This gives, as many has already pointed out, a situation where you could have 8 guys connected to a 1000/100 Mbit switch. Lovely, no problems at all.
Or, the same 8 guys, with 8 great modern computers could be connected through that same 1000 Mbit switch, but then linked to battle.net through a 8 Mbit down/1 Mbit up connection! This is nothing short of madness.
Some of the best LAN-parties I've ever been to has been in cabins in the coutryside. It's peaceful, we disturb no one and no one disturb us. Obviously, Blizzard think we're better off playing something else nowadays.
To throw out LAN-support as of 2009 is not just a mistake, it's a god damn disgrace to the gaming industry.
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Re:Confusing Comparison: RTS vs RPG (Score:5, Insightful)
Between this and trying to sucker people into buying the same game three times for single player (one version for each race campaign, though this might have been changed since I last looked), I'll just pass out on Starcraft 2 entirely.
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luckily! (Score:5, Insightful)
luckily we have bnetd!
oh wait...
Re:luckily! (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:luckily! (Score:5, Insightful)
God, I thought I was the only one who still remembered what douchebags Blizzard were about bnetd.
What happened to all the wankers who hooted and hollered about boycotting them after that?
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Re:luckily! (Score:4, Insightful)
What happened to all the wankers who hooted and hollered about boycotting them after that?
Still here... still boycotting... just not as vocally anymore...
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Remember your wireless card! (Score:5, Insightful)
Way to go Blizzard.
$2,880 per year for four players (Score:5, Funny)
So now, aside from locating a place where you and your friends can setup your computers and play - you now get to find someplace with an internet connection that can handle all of them at the same time.
Or you can just pay $60 per computer per month with a 24-month minimum commitment for mobile broadband, like a lot of proponents of cloud computing on Slashdot have been recommending.
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Re:Remember your wireless card! (Score:5, Informative)
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Battlenet Server Clones? (Score:5, Interesting)
Are they at least going to release a battle.net server clone source/ dedicated servers for private hosting? Similar to how Valve has a source dedicated server they release for all their major games? A lot of large LAN events only allow limited net access, if any.
For the record I think this is really,really dumb idea.
Disappointing (Score:5, Insightful)
Shame the official reason is to combat piracy as well, since it seems this will cause more players to find BNet emulators and won't solve the piracy problem.
Re:Disappointing (Score:4, Insightful)
Blizzard stopped needing to care about gamers after they got popular with WoW. Fuck 'em.
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Re:Disappointing (Score:5, Interesting)
Maybe if BNet is just used for a quick auth and lobby, then a LAN game is started, that might not be so bad, but it's not looking that way.
Blizzard will obviously be doing it this way, they're just being unnecessarily cryptic. Not doing so is a surefire way for Blizzard to piss off everyone involved in E-Sports/competitive gaming.
Also, the piracy issue isn't small scale piracy at private LANs, but large scale piracy in China:
http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=96603 [teamliquid.net]
A few thing about Haofang: It is biggest gaming site in China, it has millions of users for many games including SC and WC3. It is free and using LAN(TCP/IP protocol) to allow players to play.
How Haofang works: You download a small program for Haofang, run it, tell it where your SC folder is. You join a room(max 255 players because TCP/IP can handle max to 255)then hit RUN, the little program will load your SC up and instead of log on to Bnet you go to LAN, and can find many games their to play since 255 players in the same room is a lot.
Why it is bad: Cos millions of players in China were/are/going to using pirated SC/WC3 to play without any limitation.
Why Blizzard cares: Of course they care, if even SC2 is going to last only half the life of SC the next big market is definitely China(cos Korea is given). If things going on like SC/WC3 Blizzard is going to lose tons of money.
Did Blizzard do anything about it: Yes they did but failed. A few year back Blizzard sued Haofang but lost and Haofang is continue to grow and now become the most recognize site in China(among gamers of course).
Why is Haofang able to sneak pass Blizzard: Haofang told that they only allow players play via LAN(TCP/IP) they do not do anything to mess with Blizzard Battle.net and thus can not be judged. I know it is bullshit since it allows players with pirated copies play multi play which is the life SC, but it holds true in the EULA and Blizzard can do nothing about it.
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Re:Disappointing (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:I wouldn't have considered piracy (Score:5, Informative)
As mentioned by Rob Pardo in interviews, piracy is a serious problem and often times tie in closely with LAN. At the end of the day, we want the best for the community and fans that support our games, and having chunk of the community pirate the game actually hurts the community.
1) Pirated servers splinter the community instead of consolidating all players who love to play the game. Battle.net will bring players together in skirmishes, ladder play, custom games, and allow everyone the opportunity to share a common experience.
2) More people on Battle.net means more even more resources devoted to evolving this online platform to cater to further community building and new ways to enjoy the game online. World of Warcraft is a great example of a game that has evolved beyond anyone's imagination since their Day 1 and will continue to do so to better the player experience for as long as players support the title. The original StarCraft is an even better example of how 11 years later, players still love and play this title, and we will continue to support and evolve it with patches.
We would not take out LAN if we did not feel we could offer players something better.
If I were to buy StarCraft II or any other title, I know the money I spent would be going to supporting that title. Personally, I would be upset that others were freeloading while others are legitimately supporting a title that has great potential and goals of making this title have 'long legs.'
If you like a song a lot, buy it, and that artist will only come out with more awesome songs for you. If you like a game, buy it, and we will promise to constantly work to make the player experience better at every corner we can.
Support the causes you believe in (This is applicable to all things, not just gaming).
Don't be a leech to society, innovation, and further awesome creations.
Bolding is his.
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Re:I wouldn't have considered piracy (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:I wouldn't have considered piracy (Score:5, Insightful)
I like hamburgers, but that doesn't mean I need to go spend $60 on a burger to "support" the beef industry. I spend $3 on a burger because I want to eat the damn burger.
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Re:I wouldn't have considered piracy (Score:5, Insightful)
I think that it's odd that none of the linked articles or well-moderated comments have raised the most salient and powerful issue against this measure: that you can play the game only as long as Blizzard desires to support it or, more pertinently, for so long as Blizzard continues to exist. Blizzard is doing well, but recent events have demonstrated that that can change.
As recent shutdowns or attempted shutdowns of DRM servers have shown (Major League Baseball, MSN Music, Yahoo Music, Wal-Mart Music, Adobe ad-supported PDFs), once a revenue stream dries up, your continued enjoyment of multi-player will be subject to a simple calculation: is the PR cost of cutting off support greater or less than the expense of maintaining the servers and support. The MSN, Yahoo, Wal-Mart servers were only used sporadically in order to shift DRM authorizations from one computer to another. The MLB servers were used every time someone attempted to play a purchased video. The Battle.net servers will be used by far larger numbers of people virtually every time that they want to play (once players exhaust the single player potential). World of Warcraft is the only Battle.net game that generates a continuing revenue stream to justify the expense. Even if there is support for 15-20 years, at some point discontinuation is inevitable -- and there are surprising numbers of people who still play legally purchased 15-20 year old games.
Considering the importance of multi-player in Starcraft 2, players are justified in planning for reality and demanding some form of LAN functionality. Blizzard has legitimate concerns about piracy, but purchasers have legitimate concerns about being able to play the game long after Blizzard has lost interest in it. Blizzard should be willing to develop LAN functionality as a patch, place the code in escrow, and include a contractual provision on the box which automatically authorizes release of patch by the escrow agent if online service is terminated. If it is not, then players should browbeat them with every DRM failure that they can think of, because ultimately they are the only ones who are likely to care.
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Bonus! (Score:5, Insightful)
As a purely coincidental side effect, I'm sure, this will make sure that everyone on the LAN has their own copy, as battle.net will only allow one CD key on at a time.
Quite a reversal of the "Ghost Copy" feature or whatever of StarCraft 1 that allows many people to use one copy over the LAN.
I'll buy it...but... (Score:5, Interesting)
but it definitely won't keep it's longevity without LAN support, I mean the best thing about games like Starcraft or even FPS like BF1942 was the LAN aspect of getting your friends together ordering a pizza, talking shit and zerging each other. Sure, I can throw on a headset and play with friends, but what if battle.net is down? What if I'm getting a lot of lag...fast paced game players don't have the tolerance of players who are into mmo's exclusively. I think Blizz is making a poor decision.
Lies can justify anti-piracy inconvenience efforts (Score:5, Insightful)
We would not take out LAN if we did not feel we could offer players something better.
How is connecting all the computers in the room to a server across the state going to ever be better than connecting all the computers in the room to each other? This man just told everyone that his bullshit is going to start tasting better than icecream. He just needs a neon sign over his head that says "Do not trust this man or anything he says."
Hmmmm (Score:5, Insightful)
The most jarring thing to me is the worry that they won't at least let you meet up with specific people on bnet and form a closed game to at least simulate a LAN game (fat chance, with the lag back to Blizzard's servers =/ )
The only form of DRM that works (Score:5, Insightful)
Does anyone remember when... (Score:5, Insightful)
No LAN support? Time to smack someone in the head (Score:5, Interesting)
So how is this going to play out? If SCII is any good, the community will just produce a local battle net server e.g. (bnetd) for playing games on the LAN. Blizzard is making very a bad, short-sighted move. As for piracy, everyone I know owns at least one copy of the Blizzard Battle Chest, which costs $20 or less for SC and BW. It is the best entertainment one can buy for under $20. The mega mineral maps require internet access though
If anyone from Blizzard reads Slashdot, please go up and smack your management in the head and tell them to make SCII LAN playable. If they don't build it, someone else will and writing a small server to emulate BNET isn't going to be that hard. Even with encrypted session, it will be reverse engineered, just ask Sony about ShowEQ and their futile attempt the encrypt Everquest Traffic. Everyone on planet earth is going to buy the game the day it hits the shelf. Please go smack them in the back of the head now.
Re:No LAN support? Time to smack someone in the he (Score:4, Insightful)
And this piracy thing is strange. When I invite friends, we can play at 8 people on a board game I was the only one to buy. It is strange that multiplayer video games should work another way around.
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The human factor (Score:5, Insightful)
Battle.net, I lose my faith in thee (Score:4, Informative)
I continue to play Warcraft III fairly regularly, mostly in the form of the custom map DotA [wikipedia.org]. My thoughts:
Battle.net has failed to evolve and I feel is discouraging to communities rather than promoting it. I've seen nothing really appreciable since War-III came out with the sad "clan" system. Bots are officially disallowed, but required to develop any sort of reasonable group. The new Warden service makes running a bot far more of a challenge.
The necessity of the bots is this: you can't functionally setup an organized game any other way. There's no mechanism for taking a private game public once you get your friends in it. Game names can't be changed. Custom (non-ladder) games without an external mod have no disincentive to them to deal with the burgeoning population of juvenile tools who like to bail on their first loss in a team game, or worse find a way to actively ruin the game. Blizzards clan system itself is lacking and hasn't been improved upon at all. It's nearly useless outside of ladder games. Players end up creating new accounts with clan tags in the name to "fly their colors." Simply being more prominent in displaying the affiliated clan would have gone a long way.
And come on... the game came out 7 years ago. Fix the damn pathing issues! Blizzard makes amazing games, but their handling of B.net lately has been horribly disappointing.
I think they just increased piracy. (Score:5, Insightful)
Whenever a company does something that hurts the consumer in the name of "fighting piracy", it seems to me to be taken by the community as an open invitation to pirate their game. Given the choice between pirating and buying the game, frequently the reason the individual consumer chooses to pay money for the game is the impression one has of the company. Sure, no one is going to pay for a crappy game, but look at the difference between Spore and Starcraft. Spore was seen as a slap in the face of the consumer and consequently was one of the most pirated games in history. The original Starcraft, despite the fact it is easily pirated, is still profitable enough to be sold for $20 in stores.
You want to insure piracy? Piss off your users. Removing LAN and telling LAN users they're nothing but pirates seems to be going down that road pretty nicely.
Bzzzzt...Logic flaw detected (Score:4, Insightful)
If Blizzard were offering something better, they would not have to remove the game's LAN capability. Customers would just use the "better" thing, right?
Oh wait. Better for Blizzard. Ah, now it makes sense.
Stationed in Iraq (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Not suprising: Piracy and cheating (Score:5, Insightful)
I buy games, and bought SC1 [and Brood War] and played the hell out of it [spawn copies at LANs!]. might not want to buy SC2 if that's how they want to play...
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Re:Broadband killed LAN parties (Score:5, Insightful)
I haven't been to a LAN party in about 10 years. It's really easy to get the same experience nowadays with broadband and a microphone.
Then no offense, but your friends suck. There's still no way sitting at home alone in your basement playing with friends online and yelling at them over teamspeak compares to packing 12-15 friends into same basement and duking it out all night long. Sure, you can trash talk over the mic, but there's still going to be times you just need to grab something soft and wail it at your friend when he curbstomps you... Or the joys of building a massive tower of dew from everyones empties.. or waiting to see who crashes first and then raiding his hard drive for that uber pr0n collection he's been hiding....
Don't get me wrong, broadband has changed the world, but there are some things that just aren't the same even with broadband. Hell, my wife's computer is upstairs in her own little room, and I always feel bad that's she's getting left out of the fun when the party's at our place (I keep trying to convince her to move her gear downstairs for the even, but no love).. it's a world of difference being in the same room together versus even being on separate floors, let alone zip codes. (yes, a wife that enjoys lan parties... granted she's more apt to enjoy the simple classics, ala Q3 and Unreal then "complicated" ones in her opinion, like TF2.. but it's a start).
Overall, I think this is a mistake on Blizzard's part. There *are* those of us who still do actual physical lan parties, and in some instances, network dependency in a game can be a BITCH... case in point, new fangled games that have *one* way to patch, direct from the internet. You have 15 people sharing a broadband connection, you know how long it takes for each of them to download a separate 1-2 gig patch? And if it's an EA game, good lord, forget it, I think they're using C64s as their patch servers.... Before all this "lets assume everyone is connected to the internet all the time" mentality, one person could grab the latest patches (from home, before the lan party), bring them to the party, share out the EXEs, and everyone could patch direct from that... now, especially with Steam games, it's always a crapshoot to see who all is upgraded to the latest and how many people will need to download (at the same time) slowing everyone to a crawl. Even trying to plan ahead you can still get burned (last lan party I think it was, there was a TF2 update that came out the night before before the lanparty.. some people had patched the previous weekend, but nooooo, we still had to sit through the mess)
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Re:Broadband killed LAN parties (Score:4, Informative)
Are you aware that you can just copy the gcf files from an up to date SteamApps folder onto everyone else's machine? Just be sure to close steam first before copying over the files.
We do this all the time when there's a big TF2 update during a weekend LAN at uni (we have the uni's internet connection mostly to ourselves at 11pm but it's still quicker to copy the files over the network or pass round an external drive).
While I can see the piracy aspect, there are a good few games in my drawer that I wouldn't have considered if I hadn't "borrowed" them for a weekend at a lan party. If you really do have to have 1 CD key per player then I guess SC2 will join the growing list of games which are good but we never have big games with because not enough people own it. (Currently DOWII, CoH. TF2 is the only exception because it's that awesome.)
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-1 Sycophant? (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously though, it's tiring to have companies actively inconvenience their users just in case some people might steal it. To throw a company a bone to help protect their IP, strange how Blizzard did just fine until wild success of WoW got them gobs of cash. Now, suddenly, with the most successful MMORPG, with the most revenue, they need to be careful about people stealing their games or else they will go poor?
I suspect that the sudden success of WoW has attracted unfortunate decision makers who tend to jump into successful companies/products and sink them. I see it all too often, a brilliant idea brilliantly executed draws the people who don't achieve success on their own to take it over and enforce the same decisions that keep them from succeeding on their own onto the otherwise capable group.
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