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Starcraft 2: No Lan Support
Posts
Most likely they are emulating LAN through b.net 2.0 to reduce piracy.
Puh-lease. Whatever Blizzard want to charge they are good for the money, they support their games over a decade after they come out and they never charged a cent for Battlenet. You get what you pay for with them and I don't think it's unreasonable for a game of Starcraft's quality to be released in 3 instalments especially with the amount of content they are cramming into each one. Fans are going to be playing Starcraft 2 for YEARS getting more than their money's worth so what's the problem? Boo hoo it's going to cost maybe a bit more than what SC and Brood War cost, get over it.
It's not just different, it's sad, because Blizzard was always really awesome about things like LAN multiplayer, custom content, and spawned multiplayer installs. Hell, SC supported direct connect via serial. Which I sadly used more than once.
It's kind of like Microsoft. In the beginning, it was all about getting your product out as far and wide as you could. Install spawned multiplayer/demos on your friend's computers! Play together via internet/lan/direct dial/carrier pigeon! Then, they got huge, made $Texas on WoW, and everything's about locking down piracy, scanning running apps in memory, authentication, etc.
How do you suppose pirates will manage to "crack" a feature out of thin air?
The same way people mod games and crack the install files.
Starcraft 2: Terran Campaign
- Single player is all about the Terrans (you playing as)
- Multiplayer has all the races available
Starcraft 2: Zerg Campaign
- Single player is all about playing as the Zerg
- Multiplayer has all the races available, maybe some new expansion-like shit too
Starcraft 2: Protoss Campaign
- Single player is all about playing as the Protoss
- Multiplayer has all the races available, maybe some new expansion-like shit too (units and such)
All told, if the single player content is as lengthy as they boast, I don't see what the problem is. I mean, I get the position people are taking somewhat, but when the misconception is being made that we're getting shit for content, it makes me a little bothered. We haven't seen the content, we only know what they're boasting, and when it comes to boasting Blizzard is one of the companies that delivers on it for the most part.
I hope I don't come across as a fanboy to them, that time is long since behind me. It's bullshit, but not as big as bullshit people make it out to be.
The LAN support thing though is just bullshit.
Doesn't South Korea have a super modern network infrastructure, with like 97% of the country online and on much faster connections than what we generally get in the US?
How about I just alter my DNS to resolve "battle.net" to whatever bnetd-like app I've written to facilitate multiplayer without Blizzard interceding?
Anything made my a human can be broken by another human. Someone will crack it, one way or another.
yes.
But to create a multi-player interface out of nothing is not exactly the same thing
It's like not MOD!, CRACK!, SHAZAM! and there's a LAN feature
There's more to LAN than redirection of DNS
You say this, and yet I can plug in a serial code for SC I, because my cd is cracked, into their DD service and get the game right to my pc, at no charge.
This is light years ahead of other companies, and in no way indicative of the sort of behavior you're trying to pin on them. Be reasonable.
On the black screen
Hey look at that. Bnet lives on 127.0.0.1
Salmon'd for wut? Dude, Starcraft came out in 1996 and it certainly wasn't the only game at that time to support serial connection. Lucasarts did it with Rebellion and Jedi Knight, and the first Alien vs. Predator did it too (I forget what year that came out, later though).
Most important thing, right there.
There are better ways to protect a product from theft than removing a feature from the product.
Well, the problem people have is the steps being taken. When it inconveniences honest customers, it's a bad thing. I will concede to that argument. Unless it's like, some nitpicky inconvenience.
Modders have given multiplayer to games with zero multiplayer support before.
G&T's Dragon Ball Xenoverse Steam Group
You forgot the part where they removed it because they're adding an as yet unannounced feature, which is probably the exact same feature, just over b.net 2.0
Indeed.
To elaborate on the single player stuff, imagine each race's story being like a pie. You can either be delivered the pies as a whole one at a time, or getting 1/3 of each pie on three occassions. In the end, you still get all three. Why this is a problem I don't fucking know. Maybe the tradition of expansion story delivery being broken is making people confused and angry.
If my LAN game requires internet connectivity, it isn't really a LAN game as one of the benefits of that is you don't need the interwebs to play.
Sure, but will it be 1) Stable 2) Needed at all?
how do you know it will require internet connectivity?
Isn't the point of LAN to play multiplayer games when there is no internet available?
Thats what I always used it for. LAN parties and such.
G&T's Dragon Ball Xenoverse Steam Group
I think we're jumping the gun on the 'omg no games without internet!!!' thing
I'm thinking an offline mode or something along those lines, similar to steam
If it has an offline mode like steam then there is no problem.
It's possible to reverse engineer source code from an executable. Once you have the source code you whatever you want with the game.
Actually that's called modding, not cracking.
Also mods are created from custom models, sounds, maps and code that hooks into the game engine, just about always with the specific support from the original developer. If SC2 is hard-coded to interact with Battle.net to find games, IMO it would be basically impossible to get your code to run in-process, hook in to the game connection algorithms, integrate with the UI. This is all assuming you've got the LAN connection logic coded up yourself and you've managed to faithfully re-create the game hosting code to self-host.
Like I was saying about DoW II's anti lan hamachi features, you can always break something, but the key is to make it so annoyingly difficult that it crosses the convenience threshold for 99% of people who, if they are inclined to buy the game at all, would rather just shell out than bother with painful crack processes. And I support intelligent processes that make it harder to pirate stuff.
I'm not so sure about this one.
On the black screen
Yeah but when you incorporate something into an online service, you pretty much make it online. LAN is an offline thing traditionally.
Edit - Damn you snuck that edit in. An offline mode like that would propose that Battle.net 2.0 isn't just going to be an updated server structure, but a program as well.
Offline multiplayer? Hey wait I think there's a word for that, I think it's LAN.
It could just as easily interface with the game, I'm positive they've been pushing Battle.net into territories beyond online server structure.
That's why they call it 2.0
You basically won the thread.
I don't know why everyone else is oblivious so I limed you.
Which is why I said I'm reserving full judgement until the details are available. They could easily just mean "olol friends list!" though. That phrase itself doesn't mean a whole lot. What we DO know, though, is that at this moment, you can't stick two computers on a LAN together and just play. Internet is required, either for authentication or actual game serving. This is a value negative to me.
If you have to reverse engineer the source code in order to mod the game then it's both.
Boy that'll be fun. Playing WoW or SC2 or Diablo 3 and seeing popups about friends logging on, and getting messages asking to play one of the two I'm not playing.
In all seriousness though, if Battle.net 2.0 has that sort of structure, I would be impressed. All I want is convenience.