New Details For Battle.net 2.0

The folks over at DIII.net combed through information from Blizzard employees about the revamped Battle.net that is slated to debut with Starcraft II. New features will include Achievements for various old and new Blizzard games, improved communication and community features, and better replay and spectating functionality.

So, GPG Online?

[mr_mischief]

Seriously, isn't this what Microsoft and Sony have done for consoles and other game companies have already done for the PC? I wouldn't expect it to be big news that Starcraft 2 will be expected to keep up with features Battlefield 2, Team Fortress 2, and Supreme Commander have.

It's like a dance!

[Bieeanda]

...Jay Wilson has even said that Diablo III won't even contain any other networking functionality besides Battle.net.

One step forward, two steps back! Cha cha cha! Thanks guys, but some of us do, you know, LAN?

Re:It's like a dance!

[stickytar]

Not necessarily backwards as they are overcome some of the slowness of the old LAN days. Doesn't anyone else remember having to install IPX to get Starcraft to work? :) We frequently have LAN parties with World of Warcraft with a single cable modem connection and can all play easily without a hitch. The downside is having to have an internet connection, but the fact is internet is so ubiquitous these days it shouldn't make a difference.

Re:It's like a dance!

[Anonymous Coward]

I didn't realize being rich precluded you from being compensated for your work. With an attitude like that, perhaps you'd prefer they didn't bother developing Starcraft 2 at all, seeing as you don't feel like they should be paid for their effort.

Re:It's like a dance!

[mr_mischief]

Being rich doesn't preclude you from being compensated, but that's either a nice little straw man or an entirely mistaken reading of my post.

What being rich from selling games should preclude is the attitude that the paying customers must jump through hoops because the rich development studios are going broke from people freeloading copies of the game. You can't be a big, profitable game company and be going broke from piracy at the same time. It's not possible.

Re:The most important feature...

[Moridineas]

What I'm surprised about is that they haven't done anything for Starcraft's resolution. The only thing I can figure is that at some point the game reached an "untouchable" status where they didn't feel it was right or fair to make such a sweeping change.

I don't think they wanted to change the viewport size--can make a big difference.

Re:It's like a dance!

[Anonymous Coward]

If you consider entering a 10-20 character key "jumping through hoops", you have serious typing deficiencies, and probably aren't the target audience for a PC game.

But of course, on the other hand, if you think "not buying out of protest" and "illegally downloading for your own enjoyment" are the same thing, you have serious mental deficiencies, and not only aren't the target audience for the game, but probably would be better off in a padded cell without computer access at all.

I mean, it's not like banks aren't rolling in money, what gives them the right to make me jump through hoops just so I can withdraw all the money from your account?

Re:It's like a dance!

[Idiomatick]

Yes, yes they will. You can even setup WOW/WC3 to work on LAN if you pirate it and its an mmo not remotely setup to work that way. Obviously not much is known about the guts of d3s net setup but i'm sure it will be similar. You'll likely need to download a fairly light ap along with d2 to run the server on one machine and have everyone connect to it. Essentially battlenet will be hosted on your lan.