Not including LAN is a meaningless move surely aimed to stop pirates. Most of the people complaining about LAN not being included are a minority, at best. Most people don't use LAN and couldn't care less whether it was included or not.
Miss your precious SC2 LAN parties? Don't buy it then. You wont be missed and they certainly don't need your money.
Yeah except it wont stop pirates. Hell it will encourage pirates. Watch me predict the future. This will absolutely be one of the most pirated games ever... LAN or not
A huge amount of people are going to buy SC2 so they can play with other people online. I know people are going to pirate it, they always do. Even with Piracy, Blizzard games have sold like hotcakes and this highly anticipated, legendary title will not be any different.
Everyone and their mother is going to pirate the game to play the single player and comp stomp? Of course not. This game will sell fantastic amounts and quickly top any relevant charts. All Blizzard games do and SC2 is one of the biggest.
Also, without LAN included, the biggest use for pirated games is nipped in the butt. For every one person that pirates it so that they can comp stomp, or every PA person that is PMSing over no LAN, there will be 30 people that buy it legit to play it online.
Not including LAN is a meaningless move surely aimed to stop pirates. Most of the people complaining about LAN not being included are a minority, at best. Most people don't use LAN and couldn't care less whether it was included or not.
Miss your precious SC2 LAN parties? Don't buy it then. You wont be missed and they certainly don't need your money.
Yeah except it wont stop pirates. Hell it will encourage pirates. Watch me predict the future. This will absolutely be one of the most pirated games ever... LAN or not
A huge amount of people are going to buy SC2 so they can play with other people online. I know people are going to pirate it, they always do. Even with Piracy, Blizzard games have sold like hotcakes and this highly anticipated, legendary title will not be any different.
Everyone and their mother is going to pirate the game to play the single player and comp stomp? Of course not. This game will sell fantastic amounts and quickly top any relevant charts. All Blizzard games do and SC2 is one of the biggest.
Also, without LAN included, the biggest use for pirated games is nipped in the butt. For every one person that pirates it so that they can comp stomp, or every PA person that is PMSing over no LAN, there will be 30 people that buy it legit to play it online.
So? It will still be pirated, and cracked to work with LAN. It's a simple matter of redirecting the server. Taking LAN out won't make it harder to play pirated copies online. The security is mostly server based. Pirated copies won't play on battle net regardless of LAN support. Pirates don't give a shit about this. They just want to give it a whirl for a few minutes or play with a LAN party. The only people this fucks over is legit users.
Does your friend not have an internet connection? Does he live in a cave?
Permanent, cheap internet is not as ubiquitous as you seem to think it is
Don't worry, by the time Blizzard actually releases SC2 in 4-5 years even Africa will have high speed internet in every house. Gypsy settlements have it over running water nowadays.
So? It will still be pirated, and cracked to work with LAN. Taking LAN out won't make it harder to play pirated copies online. The security is mostly server based. Pirated copies won't play on battle net regardless of LAN support. Pirates don't give a shit about this. They just want to give it a whirl for a few minutes or play with a LAN party. The only people this fucks over is legit users.
I can see your point.
Even so, I believe this is an unhappy drop in the huge freaking bucket of money Blizzard will make from this title. If you add up the pirates, the LAN crowd and the moral bastions that don't buy it out of spite...it will still equal a mind boggling profit for Blizzard.
Claiming gloom, doom and failure based off what some people think on forums isn't a very broad scope. People that post and check forums are the minority.
We'll just have to wait and see. I think I have theory crafted about as much as I care to at the moment.
So? It will still be pirated, and cracked to work with LAN. Taking LAN out won't make it harder to play pirated copies online. The security is mostly server based. Pirated copies won't play on battle net regardless of LAN support. Pirates don't give a shit about this. They just want to give it a whirl for a few minutes or play with a LAN party. The only people this fucks over is legit users.
I can see your point.
Even so, I believe this is an unhappy drop in the huge freaking bucket of money Blizzard will make from this title. If you add up the pirates, the LAN crowd and the moral bastions that don't buy it out of spite...it will still equal a mind boggling profit for Blizzard.
Claiming gloom, doom and failure based off what some people think on forums isn't a very broad scope. People that post and check forums are the minority.
We'll just have to wait and see. I think I have theory crafted about as much as I care to at the moment. When it releases, i'll be back to say "I told ya so!"
I totally agree it will sell very, very well. Most people are not even aware of DRM, and most of those people don't know how to use Bit torrent :P Regardless, If it has LAN and the DRM is not too restrictive I would happily buy this game, just like I bought Warcraft, and Starcraft.
As for piracy, any game that has really good sales is going to have really high piracy rates. They go hand in hand. Popularity carries across both sides of the fence.
... But it can't hurt to voice your concerns. Companies do listen from time to time.
Not including LAN is a meaningless move surely aimed to stop pirates. Most of the people complaining about LAN not being included are a minority, at best. Most people don't use LAN and couldn't care less whether it was included or not.
Miss your precious SC2 LAN parties? Don't buy it then. You wont be missed and they certainly don't need your money.
If they don't need my money, they they don't need the pirates' money either, which means doing this to stop pirates is a dumb move.
I find it funny that they do this to stop pirates and get more sales, but the people who don't like it are told that their money isn't needed. Nice logic there.
Bottom line is, taking out LAN is just screwing over actual customers in order to spite pirates. Just because the game is still going to sell well doesn't mean it's okay. The inevitability of it is just another reason NOT to do this kind of stupid move in the first place. Why take customer-screwing anti-pirate measures on a game that's going to have no trouble selling in mass quantities?
Not including LAN is a meaningless move surely aimed to stop pirates. Most of the people complaining about LAN not being included are a minority, at best. Most people don't use LAN and couldn't care less whether it was included or not.
Miss your precious SC2 LAN parties? Don't buy it then. You wont be missed and they certainly don't need your money.
If they don't need my money, they they don't need the pirates' money either, which means doing this to stop pirates is a dumb move.
I find it funny that they do this to stop pirates and get more sales, but the people who don't like it are told that their money isn't needed. Nice logic there.
I'm really not understanding the antagonism against everyone who is upset about lack of LAN play. I just broke the news to my entire friend group and they're extremely pissed about it. We LAN Brood War all the time, and there's never a strong enough internet connection for us to play the same way over b.net. They're all remaining hopeful (like a lot of people in this thread) that there's going to be some steam-like authentication that will allow something similar to a LAN (although Blizzard's wording doesn't entirely suggest this).
I know I'll be extremely pissed if this carries over into no LAN for Diablo III, because I play that game A LOT where there is NO internet connection.
Why are people who feel this way having shots taken at them? I realize this is an internet gaming forum, but broadband connections do not grow on trees.
Snork on
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TL DRNot at all confident in his reflexive opinions of thingsRegistered Userregular
Does your friend not have an internet connection? Does he live in a cave?
Permanent, cheap internet is not as ubiquitous as you seem to think it is
Don't worry, by the time Blizzard actually releases SC2 in 4-5 years even Africa will have high speed internet in every house. Gypsy settlements have it over running water nowadays.
I know right. 'A plethora of broadband options' is the best way to describe North America at least. There are no monopolies or dead zones, and nobody will ever take a laptop to a hotel or grandparent's house with no internet.
There really needs to be an animated .gif of John Stewart doing that exaggerated dusting his hands off.
... But it can't hurt to voice your concerns. Companies do listen from time to time.
This may come as a surprise, but I doubt most companies look at any forums other then their own official forum, and even then, they probably ignore most of the suggestions they get there. Whining about their policies on a forum is not going to cause any change in company policy. The only thing that would change their mind would be a large number of customers not buying their product (which I doubt will happen, because nerds love to rage but still need their fix)
Does your friend not have an internet connection? Does he live in a cave?
Permanent, cheap internet is not as ubiquitous as you seem to think it is
Don't worry, by the time Blizzard actually releases SC2 in 4-5 years even Africa will have high speed internet in every house. Gypsy settlements have it over running water nowadays.
I know right. 'A plethora of broadband options' is the best way to describe North America at least. There are no monopolies or dead zones, and nobody will ever take a laptop to a hotel or grandparent's house with no internet.
There really needs to be an animated .gif of John Stewart doing that exaggerated dusting his hands off.
meh, get an I-phone 3gs if you're so worried.
DanHibiki on
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TL DRNot at all confident in his reflexive opinions of thingsRegistered Userregular
Does your friend not have an internet connection? Does he live in a cave?
Permanent, cheap internet is not as ubiquitous as you seem to think it is
Don't worry, by the time Blizzard actually releases SC2 in 4-5 years even Africa will have high speed internet in every house. Gypsy settlements have it over running water nowadays.
I know right. 'A plethora of broadband options' is the best way to describe North America at least. There are no monopolies or dead zones, and nobody will ever take a laptop to a hotel or grandparent's house with no internet.
There really needs to be an animated .gif of John Stewart doing that exaggerated dusting his hands off.
meh, get an I-phone 3gs if you're so worried.
:rotate:At this point I think I'll just install a dedicated FIOS line between my apartment and Blizzard's authentication servers.:rotate:
Bullshit. I shouldn't be held responsible for the crimes of other people. It's not "my task" to seek out pirates and nag them. Piracy happens. It sucks, but companies need to suck it up and just deal with it, and stop punishing the real customers.
Companies "need" to make money. Blizzard's pretty damn good at this, so I'm sure they'll still make boatloads of money even without LAN support. That comment on how "companies need to suck it up and just deal with it" can just as easily be turned around: it sucks that there's no LAN support, but customers need to suck it up and just deal with it. If necessary by not buying the game. Blizzard doesn't owe you LAN support, and you don't owe Blizzard a sale. Simple as that.
Exactly. I'm still going to tell them why they lost my sale though, and go be pissed that I can't play SC2 over at my friend's house. Until someone cracks/hacks/etc the game so that it works without connecting to Battle.net
Does your friend not have an internet connection? Does he live in a cave?
No, actually. He lives in a suburb of a shitty town and can only get DSL because the cable company hasn't decided to run the cables out towards his house yet. When I go play games over at his house, he shuts off his DSL modem so that people aren't bitching about not being able to get to their email or whatever and can concentrate on playing games. Have you never been to a LAN with more than 2 people before?
I just don't get how the lack of LAN is screwing over legit customers, if you're at a LAN odds are you have an internet connection present there as well. If not, get out of the fucking dark ages.
No, actually. He lives in a suburb of a shitty town and can only get DSL because the cable company hasn't decided to run the cables out towards his house yet. When I go play games over at his house, he shuts off his DSL modem so that people aren't bitching about not being able to get to their email or whatever and can concentrate on playing games. Have you never been to a LAN with more than 2 people before?
... But it can't hurt to voice your concerns. Companies do listen from time to time.
This may come as a surprise, but I doubt most companies look at any forums other then their own official forum, and even then, they probably ignore most of the suggestions they get there. Whining about their policies on a forum is not going to cause any change in company policy. The only thing that would change their mind would be a large number of customers not buying their product (which I doubt will happen, because nerds love to rage but still need their fix)
Well, this is a discussion forum about video games. We're allowed to discuss things we don't like and why we don't like them, too.
And EA didn't put DRM on the Sims 3 becasue of the negative fan backlash the Spore DRM got, so I would say that yes, people voicing their concerns can work sometimes. Obviously not here, but if enough people actually voice their concern to Blizzard themselves, you never know what might happen.
Give me the 12000$ to get my cable company to run the cable into my area and I will gladly "get out of the fucking dark ages".
Get a USB dongle from 3.
And pay big cash dollars for your internet.
Are you fucking retarded or can you not comprehend that there are people who are on budgets, who don't have very good internet connections that could support 4-8 people playing an online game, who want to be able to have LAN parties? Like more or less the entire student gamer population of the entire developed world?
Give me the 12000$ to get my cable company to run the cable into my area and I will gladly "get out of the fucking dark ages".
Get a USB dongle from 3.
And pay big cash dollars for your internet.
Are you fucking retarded or can you not comprehend that there are people who are on budgets, who don't have very good internet connections that could support 4-8 people playing an online game, who want to be able to have LAN parties? Like more or less the entire student gamer population of the entire developed world?
Eh, its fairly cheap and he's already got an internet connection thats perfectly viable for playing games online. Over here students get free internet courtesy of their host city and I'm led to believe its pretty much the same everywhere in Europe since school systems rely on it heavily nowadays.
Give me the 12000$ to get my cable company to run the cable into my area and I will gladly "get out of the fucking dark ages".
Get a USB dongle from 3.
And pay big cash dollars for your internet.
Are you fucking retarded or can you not comprehend that there are people who are on budgets, who don't have very good internet connections that could support 4-8 people playing an online game, who want to be able to have LAN parties? Like more or less the entire student gamer population of the entire developed world?
Eh, its fairly cheap and he's already got an internet connection thats perfectly viable for playing games online. Over here students get free internet courtesy of their host city and I'm led to believe its pretty much the same everywhere in Europe since school systems rely on it heavily nowadays.
Perfectly viable? Have you ever used DSL before? Ever? And just because Europe has something, it means that every other place in the whole wide world is the exact same or better, right? I hope so, my crappy internet connection that I have to fight with constantly because water gets into the lines and causes signal loss are getting really annoying, or whenever there's a storm or lots of wind the connection becomes unstable as shit. I'm so glad that now that I know that all I have to do is buy a USB dongle, all my connection problems magically go away and I've somehow gotten cable-like speeds out of my DSL line.
Yes, the DSL is fine for one or two people. But it's nowhere near being able to play without significant latency problems if there's any more people using at once. Try playing an FPS with a ping 500. That's what it's like when trying to use the DSL to play games online when there's a bunch of people over there. (A bunch meaning more than 3 or 4.) You're not so much playing as you are fighting to try and lead your shots fifteen feet in front of where you hope the other guy moves before the lag catches up and you die to a rocket that you didn't see coming at you until you respawn and watch it blow up your dead body.
No, just because Europe has it doesn't mean you do. But you getting water into your line and weather conditions is completely irrelevant. I've had DSL, it was great for the one year before we upgraded to cable, was perfectly fine for all the games I played online, Starcraft, Diablo 2, Counter Strike etc.
The USB dongle is a wireless internet piece, my mom has one that allows her an 4mb connection for a monthly of like 30$.
No, just because Europe has it doesn't mean you do. But you getting water into your line and weather conditions is completely irrelevant. I've had DSL, it was great for the one year before we upgraded to cable, was perfectly fine for all the games I played online, Starcraft, Diablo 2, Counter Strike etc.
The USB dongle is a wireless internet piece, my mom has one that allows her an 4mb connection for a monthly of like 30$.
You really dont know much about internet infrastructure do you?
No, just because Europe has it doesn't mean you do. But you getting water into your line and weather conditions is completely irrelevant. I've had DSL, it was great for the one year before we upgraded to cable, was perfectly fine for all the games I played online, Starcraft, Diablo 2, Counter Strike etc.
The USB dongle is a wireless internet piece, my mom has one that allows her an 4mb connection for a monthly of like 30$.
You really dont know much about internet infrastructure do you?
*shrug* I'm just throwing options out there, he can't have his precious LAN's but getting a bunch of people together on a lowspeed connection is still perfectly viable.
Well in Canada the rate is about 80 bucks a month for 5 gigs of wireless internet, which is obscene compared to the wired rates
in addition to that I live in an obscure enough region in canada that cell usb dongles give me sub-56k speeds They're really not even the expensive end all solution some make them out to be
No, just because Europe has it doesn't mean you do. But you getting water into your line and weather conditions is completely irrelevant. I've had DSL, it was great for the one year before we upgraded to cable, was perfectly fine for all the games I played online, Starcraft, Diablo 2, Counter Strike etc.
The USB dongle is a wireless internet piece, my mom has one that allows her an 4mb connection for a monthly of like 30$.
You really dont know much about internet infrastructure do you?
*shrug* I'm just throwing options out there, he can't have his precious LAN's but getting a bunch of people together on a lowspeed connection is still perfectly viable.
I imagine Blizzard's solution will involve a regular authentication for LAN games. Maybe it just checks the CD keys at the start or something, I dunno.
I really didn't think Blizzard made any horrible decisions up until this point, but now supposedly there won't be multiplayer replay functionality or custom hotkey mapping support!
The latter in particular enrages me, because I know they aren't going to use grid-keys, which is the set-up I prefer for any RTS. Watching replays with friends is also tons more fun than watching it alone, really a pretty important feature considering how popular it was in SC1.
B.net 2.0: They couldn't talk about this. Nor could they talk about single-player. However, LAN is right out due to Bnet 2.0 features that they could not discuss.
Starcraft 2 will be a P2P game. What does that mean for LANs? It means you have to log onto battle.net. Then you start a game. And suddenly, all the information is being sent between the clients, the shortest way possible, which is LAN. This means the speed of your internet connection is irrelevant.
No, just because Europe has it doesn't mean you do. But you getting water into your line and weather conditions is completely irrelevant. I've had DSL, it was great for the one year before we upgraded to cable, was perfectly fine for all the games I played online, Starcraft, Diablo 2, Counter Strike etc.
The USB dongle is a wireless internet piece, my mom has one that allows her an 4mb connection for a monthly of like 30$.
You really dont know much about internet infrastructure do you?
*shrug* I'm just throwing options out there, he can't have his precious LAN's but getting a bunch of people together on a lowspeed connection is still perfectly viable.
Okay, what the guy with DSL is saying is that with more than say 2 or 3 people playing games on the internet, his bandwidth chokes up and everyone has moon pings. Which is perfectly valid, and a leading reason of why LAN support is nice, so you can play a game with normal latency and not have to fight bandwidth limitations.
You are saying that is not in fact how the internet works, and the guy with DSL should just use his magic to make his bandwidth grow large by willing it.
Getting a bunch of people on a lowspeed connection is the opposite of viable, and anyone with any experience with lower bandwidths would know that.
Ninja Snarl PMy helmet is my burden.Ninja Snarl: Gone, but not forgotten.Registered Userregular
edited July 2009
No LAN capability for Starcraft? Have the people at Blizzard been playing too much WoW or what? The original was pirated like crazy and guess what? It also sold like crazy. Keeping features out of a game because they're worried about piracy just means a few pirates will work harder to create a feature which should've always been in the game and the game will still get pirated.
I've yet to see a single company release a game with elements designed to prevent piracy and it ends up not sucking for the people who actually buy the game and prevents any piracy at all.
My money says that the people at Blizzard know there's no way in hell they'll be able to match the spectacle of the original Starcraft and want to delay the piracy long enough to prevent people from finding out what a disappointment the game will be. Starcraft II just won't be profitable enough (relatively speaking) for them to put much effort into it thanks to the cash cow of WoW.
No LAN capability for Starcraft? Have the people at Blizzard been playing too much WoW or what? The original was pirated like crazy and guess what? It also sold like crazy. Keeping features out of a game because they're worried about piracy just means a few pirates will work harder to create a feature which should've always been in the game and the game will still get pirated.
I've yet to see a single company release a game with elements designed to prevent piracy and it ends up not sucking for the people who actually buy the game and prevents any piracy at all.
My money says that the people at Blizzard know there's no way in hell they'll be able to match the spectacle of the original Starcraft and want to delay the piracy long enough to prevent people from finding out what a disappointment the game will be. Starcraft II just won't be profitable enough (relatively speaking) for them to put much effort into it thanks to the cash cow of WoW.
I don't recall such a massive hype for SC as the hype for SC2 atm. Orcs in space and whatnot.
Jutranjo on
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TL DRNot at all confident in his reflexive opinions of thingsRegistered Userregular
Starcraft 2 will be a P2P game. What does that mean for LANs? It means you have to log onto battle.net. Then you start a game. And suddenly, all the information is being sent between the clients, the shortest way possible, which is LAN. This means the speed of your internet connection is irrelevant.
This has been said many times:
1. There are situations in which two or more people with legit copies of SC2 will want to play together and there is not an available internet connection, be it on a road trip, at a house without a connection, or simply because service went out. We have now established harm to the consumer.
2. People who intended to pirate the game and want to LAN will not be able to do so via B.net, but there will be a crack. This measure will not reduce piracy and indeed may increase it for reasons outlined in 1.
3. If they intend to require remote authentication, Blizzard is alienating some customers and failing to achieve the assumed goal of curbing piracy.
The silliness of the measure is equal to X + Y, where X is the units of silliness that are present as a necessity in order to consider DRM and Y is equal to the restrictiveness of the authentication requirements (every game, every ten minutes, every week, etc.)
Posts
A huge amount of people are going to buy SC2 so they can play with other people online. I know people are going to pirate it, they always do. Even with Piracy, Blizzard games have sold like hotcakes and this highly anticipated, legendary title will not be any different.
Everyone and their mother is going to pirate the game to play the single player and comp stomp? Of course not. This game will sell fantastic amounts and quickly top any relevant charts. All Blizzard games do and SC2 is one of the biggest.
Also, without LAN included, the biggest use for pirated games is nipped in the butt. For every one person that pirates it so that they can comp stomp, or every PA person that is PMSing over no LAN, there will be 30 people that buy it legit to play it online.
So? It will still be pirated, and cracked to work with LAN. It's a simple matter of redirecting the server. Taking LAN out won't make it harder to play pirated copies online. The security is mostly server based. Pirated copies won't play on battle net regardless of LAN support. Pirates don't give a shit about this. They just want to give it a whirl for a few minutes or play with a LAN party. The only people this fucks over is legit users.
Don't worry, by the time Blizzard actually releases SC2 in 4-5 years even Africa will have high speed internet in every house. Gypsy settlements have it over running water nowadays.
I can see your point.
Even so, I believe this is an unhappy drop in the huge freaking bucket of money Blizzard will make from this title. If you add up the pirates, the LAN crowd and the moral bastions that don't buy it out of spite...it will still equal a mind boggling profit for Blizzard.
Claiming gloom, doom and failure based off what some people think on forums isn't a very broad scope. People that post and check forums are the minority.
We'll just have to wait and see. I think I have theory crafted about as much as I care to at the moment.
I totally agree it will sell very, very well. Most people are not even aware of DRM, and most of those people don't know how to use Bit torrent :P Regardless, If it has LAN and the DRM is not too restrictive I would happily buy this game, just like I bought Warcraft, and Starcraft.
As for piracy, any game that has really good sales is going to have really high piracy rates. They go hand in hand. Popularity carries across both sides of the fence.
... But it can't hurt to voice your concerns. Companies do listen from time to time.
If they don't need my money, they they don't need the pirates' money either, which means doing this to stop pirates is a dumb move.
I find it funny that they do this to stop pirates and get more sales, but the people who don't like it are told that their money isn't needed. Nice logic there.
Bottom line is, taking out LAN is just screwing over actual customers in order to spite pirates. Just because the game is still going to sell well doesn't mean it's okay. The inevitability of it is just another reason NOT to do this kind of stupid move in the first place. Why take customer-screwing anti-pirate measures on a game that's going to have no trouble selling in mass quantities?
My Let's Play Channel: https://youtube.com/channel/UC2go70QLfwGq-hW4nvUqmog
Touche.
I know I'll be extremely pissed if this carries over into no LAN for Diablo III, because I play that game A LOT where there is NO internet connection.
Why are people who feel this way having shots taken at them? I realize this is an internet gaming forum, but broadband connections do not grow on trees.
I know right. 'A plethora of broadband options' is the best way to describe North America at least. There are no monopolies or dead zones, and nobody will ever take a laptop to a hotel or grandparent's house with no internet.
There really needs to be an animated .gif of John Stewart doing that exaggerated dusting his hands off.
I like how the Zerg can move more as a herd now, even if the zerglings kind of hop instead of run.
Where can I see this in action?
They have the previous battle reports if you scroll down.
around 4:00 of BR3 shows what I'm talking about, albeit with a smaller number.
meh, get an I-phone 3gs if you're so worried.
:rotate:At this point I think I'll just install a dedicated FIOS line between my apartment and Blizzard's authentication servers.:rotate:
No, actually. He lives in a suburb of a shitty town and can only get DSL because the cable company hasn't decided to run the cables out towards his house yet. When I go play games over at his house, he shuts off his DSL modem so that people aren't bitching about not being able to get to their email or whatever and can concentrate on playing games. Have you never been to a LAN with more than 2 people before?
Edit:
DSL is perfectly fine for playing RTS's online.
Get a USB dongle from 3.
Well, this is a discussion forum about video games. We're allowed to discuss things we don't like and why we don't like them, too.
And EA didn't put DRM on the Sims 3 becasue of the negative fan backlash the Spore DRM got, so I would say that yes, people voicing their concerns can work sometimes. Obviously not here, but if enough people actually voice their concern to Blizzard themselves, you never know what might happen.
My Let's Play Channel: https://youtube.com/channel/UC2go70QLfwGq-hW4nvUqmog
And pay big cash dollars for your internet.
Are you fucking retarded or can you not comprehend that there are people who are on budgets, who don't have very good internet connections that could support 4-8 people playing an online game, who want to be able to have LAN parties? Like more or less the entire student gamer population of the entire developed world?
Eh, its fairly cheap and he's already got an internet connection thats perfectly viable for playing games online. Over here students get free internet courtesy of their host city and I'm led to believe its pretty much the same everywhere in Europe since school systems rely on it heavily nowadays.
Perfectly viable? Have you ever used DSL before? Ever? And just because Europe has something, it means that every other place in the whole wide world is the exact same or better, right? I hope so, my crappy internet connection that I have to fight with constantly because water gets into the lines and causes signal loss are getting really annoying, or whenever there's a storm or lots of wind the connection becomes unstable as shit. I'm so glad that now that I know that all I have to do is buy a USB dongle, all my connection problems magically go away and I've somehow gotten cable-like speeds out of my DSL line.
Yes, the DSL is fine for one or two people. But it's nowhere near being able to play without significant latency problems if there's any more people using at once. Try playing an FPS with a ping 500. That's what it's like when trying to use the DSL to play games online when there's a bunch of people over there. (A bunch meaning more than 3 or 4.) You're not so much playing as you are fighting to try and lead your shots fifteen feet in front of where you hope the other guy moves before the lag catches up and you die to a rocket that you didn't see coming at you until you respawn and watch it blow up your dead body.
The USB dongle is a wireless internet piece, my mom has one that allows her an 4mb connection for a monthly of like 30$.
You really dont know much about internet infrastructure do you?
*shrug* I'm just throwing options out there, he can't have his precious LAN's but getting a bunch of people together on a lowspeed connection is still perfectly viable.
I imagine Blizzard's solution will involve a regular authentication for LAN games. Maybe it just checks the CD keys at the start or something, I dunno.
The latter in particular enrages me, because I know they aren't going to use grid-keys, which is the set-up I prefer for any RTS. Watching replays with friends is also tons more fun than watching it alone, really a pretty important feature considering how popular it was in SC1.
Okay, what the guy with DSL is saying is that with more than say 2 or 3 people playing games on the internet, his bandwidth chokes up and everyone has moon pings. Which is perfectly valid, and a leading reason of why LAN support is nice, so you can play a game with normal latency and not have to fight bandwidth limitations.
You are saying that is not in fact how the internet works, and the guy with DSL should just use his magic to make his bandwidth grow large by willing it.
Getting a bunch of people on a lowspeed connection is the opposite of viable, and anyone with any experience with lower bandwidths would know that.
I've yet to see a single company release a game with elements designed to prevent piracy and it ends up not sucking for the people who actually buy the game and prevents any piracy at all.
My money says that the people at Blizzard know there's no way in hell they'll be able to match the spectacle of the original Starcraft and want to delay the piracy long enough to prevent people from finding out what a disappointment the game will be. Starcraft II just won't be profitable enough (relatively speaking) for them to put much effort into it thanks to the cash cow of WoW.
I don't recall such a massive hype for SC as the hype for SC2 atm. Orcs in space and whatnot.
This has been said many times:
1. There are situations in which two or more people with legit copies of SC2 will want to play together and there is not an available internet connection, be it on a road trip, at a house without a connection, or simply because service went out. We have now established harm to the consumer.
2. People who intended to pirate the game and want to LAN will not be able to do so via B.net, but there will be a crack. This measure will not reduce piracy and indeed may increase it for reasons outlined in 1.
3. If they intend to require remote authentication, Blizzard is alienating some customers and failing to achieve the assumed goal of curbing piracy.
The silliness of the measure is equal to X + Y, where X is the units of silliness that are present as a necessity in order to consider DRM and Y is equal to the restrictiveness of the authentication requirements (every game, every ten minutes, every week, etc.)