StarCraft II: Blizzard responds to lack of LAN support

by Kevin Kelly on Jun 30th 2009 8:00AM

Well, it's definitely true. Blizzard has killed LAN support in the upcoming StarCraft II, and here's the official word from Bob Colayco at Blizzard PR:

"We don't currently plan to support LAN play with StarCraft II, as we are building Battle.net to be the ideal destination for multiplayer gaming with StarCraft II and future Blizzard Entertainment games. While this was a difficult decision for us, we felt that moving away from LAN play and directing players to our upgraded Battle.net service was the best option to ensure a quality multiplayer experience with StarCraft II and safeguard against piracy.

Several Battle.net features like advanced communication options, achievements, stat-tracking, and more, require players to be connected to the service, so we're encouraging everyone to use Battle.net as much as possible to get the most out of StarCraft II. We're looking forward to sharing more details about Battle.net and online functionality for StarCraft II in the near future."

So, let it hereby be noted that pirates killed the LAN parrrrrty.

Tags: Battle-net, Blizzard, LAN, RTS, Starcraft, Starcraft-2, Starcraft-II

Reader Comments (187)

FIRST!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I lol'd

Blizzard just wants Battle.net to be the new Steam. Pirates don't have a thing to do with it.

Pirating is nothing but a convenient scapegoat to force everyone who wants to even dabble in multiplayer to pay-to-play on their new battle.net service.

While I'm sure it will be overloaded with bells and whistles, not everyone wants or needs all those "features", but that won't stop 'em! Blizzard's gonna TELL you what you want, and you're gonna friggin' LIKE IT!

Honestly, we really should just stop referring to them as Blizzard, and accept the truth, they are now simply and wholly Activision, through and through.

Au contraire,

LAN is a minor aspect of the game, but Blizzard probably has more to lose from it (vocal LAN lovers complaining) as oppose to just keeping it. True, the online aspect is probably meant as a deterrent against pirates, but I doubt piracy played a large part in this decision.

From my perspective, Blizzard is seeing stars in its online service thanks to WoW, and they're probably trying to get more people to use their online service. If they can convert enough people to playing StarCraft online, then there might be greater potential profit in the long term.

Mario: Minor aspect?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StarCraft_professional_competition

Minor Aspect?

@ Mario...you're an idiot

But honestly, if battle.net is going to move to a pay-for-play model like war of warcraft, i probably wont even get this game anymore. as much as i loved SC, and loved the gameplay of the battlechest....i'm not down for having another bill. i'm trying to "billshrink" my life, not tack more on.

Piracy? Is that what they call disc-swapping, much less their own multiplayer spawn installs?

pretty much.. pirates will always find a way. hell, they even play WoW on localized servers via hamachi and other hacks (don't see the point really).. and honestly the original StarCraft has had a battle.net emulator floating around for over 10 years.. piracy is NOT the reason they're moving to online-only.

@Mario I didn't even get 9 words into your comment.

Aslong as they don't go along with their plan to charge for Battlenet 2.0.

See, "piracy" is a terrible defense. Had they said "cheating", I might have believed them. Stupid maphacks.

Alright, so I can see no one likes my comment. It doesn't bother me.

LAN playing is a minor aspect of the game. More people (by orders of magnitudes) will play single player and online. Yes, I realize that StarCraft happens to be bigger in some parts of the world, and competitions are held, but if you like, I can tell you about numerous LAN parties/competitions anywhere in the world. It doesn't change the fact that it's still a minor aspect of the game that won't affect how well it does, especially when there's another aspect (online) that works extremely similarly.

LAN = Piracy? really?

........really?

have you ever heard of hamachi?

Bitches don't know 'bout my Hamachi.

Hamachi still requires a LAN mode to work.

Balls.

No way I'm going to be able to play at work now.

Or most of us in college "studying" for a few hours between classes

Piracy seems like a lame excuse for excluding LAN. Does anyone else recall spawn mode installation which allowed 8 players to participate in a LAN game using only one copy of the game?

I recall it well. If you could think of a Blizzard game (before Warcraft III), I could spawn it. Diablo Shareware, Starcraft Japan, Starcraft, Warcraft II.

But the lack of LAN play I also think deters competitors from offering their own services. Remember the days of Heat.net and MSN Gaming Zone for augmenting the LAN mode in order to play online? (It's effectively what things like Hamachi do today).

Not only do I recall spawn mode, I recall it being one of the best advertisements for a game ever. Play at new game at someone's house over LAN, and then go home and buy it for yourself because it was so good. It seems like Blizzard has changed from doing everything they can to earn your support to acting like there's no chance you won't buy their next game so they'll do want they want with it.

But hang on, if someone writes a 3rd party program which works with a hacked copy of the game to provide LAN support, won't that make the pirate version better than the retail version? That's surely going to lose more sales than if both versions had lan support but only one had battle.net support.

The pirates won't necessarily make a hacked game for lan support. Its much more likely they will just make a fake battle.net server program you can run locally.

Yeah I guess there are multiple ways around the problem. I'm not sure if the authentication for each game would work properly though, it might be necessary to just patch all the authentication code out of the binary, kind of like how no-cd cracks work.

@Ghen

That, in essence would be the same thing. Then you'd have hundreds of thousands of people downloading a pirated copy just to be able to LAN. With wireless internet these days though, you could still all technically go to someone's house to play it so long as you all own the game.

If I was a joystiq editor, I would get ready with a photoshop picture of pirates commandeering Blizzard, you know they will need it when those pirates get LAN/BattleNet circumventing patch/app.

If you purchase the game, are you legally allowed to pirate it? (or in this case just download it)

I could buy the game, then download a hacked, pirated version. This would be legal right?

@mychas: no that would not be legal. According to the US and UK law you cannot take a copy from an unauthorised distributor, although in reality you are unlikely to be charged. Also, the act of patching a game to circumvent the copy protection, even if that copy protection stops you from using the device in all the ways you are legally allowed to do, is illegal.

So, nocd cracks and the like are illegal, even if you use it on the bought store copy of your game, and even though they are actually really useful, especially if you have a small notebook or something with no cd drive.

@The Baron: I don't mean this in the pedantic sense, but have you played any amount of Blizzard games via Bnet versus local LAN play? I have since the original Diablo (don't know if Warcraft I or II had bnet play, but I was too big of a chicken to play those online back then anyways). I've played hundreds of hours of online DI, DII, WIII, and SC in local and on Bnet. Local is always much better in terms of performance for obvious reasons.

That is why we LAN party - to erase every last bit of perceivable lag and really get into it. Why should I have to deal with my shitty ISP's up/down bandwidth, and/or various internet hops to Bnet, and/or laggy Bnet because of a new game release just because I want to play multiplayer? That's utter garbage.

If I'm having a LAN night w/ friends, and we have a pile of stellar games to chose from, we'll chose the ones that we can all play at a decent clip with no lag. What Blizzard is saying is that SCII will NEVER be that game.

You successfully called me out - I've never used Battle.net myself.

I'm not sure if this'll be the case, but I imagine that SC2 will support the same networking model as SC: each copy connects to every other copy in a peer-to-peer network, and disputes between the respective states of each version of the world state are handled by synchronization checks. This means that there won't be any more latency than there'd usually be locally, since you'll all prospectively be on the same local network, and thus the peer-to-peer connections will be over the that local network (rather than connecting to Bnet and then back to each player). It's different from a client-server model like WoW, where everyone sends their updates to a central server, which then sends parts of the world state to each player.

Of course, there'll still be the syncing with Bnet (for stats, etc.) which may incur some latency...come to think of it, you're right, that'd suck if you had to have a constant connection to Bnet in addition to all the other copies and you had a bad outbound internet connection...

Piracy is to gaming companies as mild asthma is to a lazy Kid.

(Don't get offended fellow asthma people!)

Haha!

Asthma.

This is why piracy exists in some part.

These guys are removing something that should be free to replace it with something 'quality' that will have a fee attached to it, to avoid people who 'pirate' their games.

If they wanted to avoid piracy, make donuts instead of video games or PC programs.

Love their stuff, it's just that now that Blizzard is Humongoconglomcorp, they do things like this, and can get away with it.

Well they just lost my 150.00 or so on all three Starcraft games.

Alien

Pretty much this. I don't think I'll be getting SC2. Diablo 3? Sure, A-RPG's are rare now and it's my favorite genre. But I think SC2 is the final game.

Blizzard has become too big for themselves. They need to split back to how they were. North and Blizzard.

Diablo 3 will not have LAN either http://hellforge.gameriot.com/blogs/Hellforge/No-Lan-Confirmed-for-Diablo-3-Other-News

Before anybody says anything about how "LAN is outdated", get some real friends, I was definitely planning to have some awesome LAN sessions with both of these games...

The fucked thing is I'll still probably buy both of these games and their expansions... because while this one thing does suck, the games will still be awesome and well worth the money.

Blizzard make good games, but they are no longer a developer I respect.

I definitely have real friends, but most of the ones who game are now located throughout the country and in Canada. See, when people grow up they tend to move to different areas where they can get jobs. Don't be an insulting prick when you haven't considered this very normal scenario.

That being said, Blizzard certainly is squandering all the good will they had towards them, what with splitting it up into 3 different retail products and now removing lan support. While it's something I probably never would have used, it's still anti-consumer, while pirates will pretty much find a way around it. I'm not going to lie, I've pirated a game or two in my past, but I was planning on buying SC2. Now I'm not so sure.

Bananarama, calm down.

I have both friends who have moved on and it would be great to play with them online, but I also still game with people who I know locally, they're not mutually exclusive situations. My comment was directed at anyone who would try to tell me or us in general that there is no point for LAN play.

Also, living in Australia, the net you can get here outside of major cities CANNOT support a would be LAN game with anything resembling a decent latency.(This bit wasn't directed at anyone, just saying.)

@Ihavepants

I know it won't.

Please re-read what I said. My purchase of D3 has nothing to do with LAN and everything to do with it being an A-RPG.

@ihavepants

You know you can still play with people on the same network, you'll just have to make a private game on battle.net rather than a LAN game.

I can't see how this is a terrible loss unless you were planning on pirating the game and playing through hamachi.

I was just throwing it out there seeing as you brought the game up. I didn't know until someone showed me earlier today.

@snarfoogle

What do you mean and can you give me a source?

It seems very stupid of them to say "NO LAN", when they mean "You sign into Battle.net and then make a LAN game".

Even if that's true though, is there no offline mode or such like Steam in case the place you're hosting a LAN does not have an internet connection?

@ Ihavepants, did you think they would like... not like you play with people nearby through battlenet? It's just a private online game with the people who you would normally do LAN with.
To be honest, I see this as an inconvenience but then again most times I run a LAN party we're usually all online anyway so we can play with people who couldn't make it.

It matters when say, your internet is 1.5mb down and 256 up. That's enough for one person to get a decent connection. So you know, in Australia you have to pay for both your internet speed and your quota of bandwidth, and then it depends on what speeds are available in your area.

If we must all run through online IT WILL BE IMPOSSIBLE.

@snarfoogle @James
So your saying its not stupid to send information through the internet to bnet then have bnet send that information through the internet to a computer sitting 2 feet from you, its like having a phone conversation with someone sitting in the next room. Having lag on a LAN is ridiculous.

Does anyone know have the officially announced if bnet is going to be free or a pay to play model?

Unbelievable... Perhaps I am a bit too old-school, but this is almost a deal-breaker for me.

I can think of a lot of games that would require you to own your own copy of a game to play the single player campaign and to play online, but would keep the multiplayer portions open for gaming with your buddies on a local LAN without any hassle at all (requiring no cracks or anything of that sort). Call of Duty allowed this, and that is the reason it became so popular in the beginning I think... And there were many other games out there that allowed the same thing over the years, and I always thought it was a pretty smart way to approach the whole thing...

LAN gaming is one of the few reasons I still hang onto PC gaming. If developers are going to start neglecting this portion of games in the PC world, I may just be done with PC gaming altogether. Removing this option is only going to alienate a large group of your potential audience.

LAME.

I don't even mind games that require a legit copy for every user at a LAN party. The whole reason for LAN support is crazy low lag and the ability to play drunk without affecting your online ranking.

Yeah, it looks like the eventual cracked and LAN-enabled Pirate version is just going to be the better option. Shame Blizzard.

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StarCraft II: Blizzard responds to lack of LAN support

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