Needless to say, some folks were less than pleased about being forced to play over the Internet, when a local network connection provides for gameplay with essentially zero latency. I figured I'd give Blizzard a chance to explain itself, so I asked what went into the decision. And this is what they said.
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.
This will probably affect the hardest of the hardcore competitive players, who demand a completely lag-free environment in which to flex their skills. Personally, I sure as heck wasn't planning to schlep my PC to any LAN parties anytime soon, so I can't say I'm too disappointed in this omission. The number of people using third-party LAN play services like Hamachi and Garena is probably big enough for Blizzard's bottom line to feel it, so I can't say I'm surprised they're trying to keep their game as profitable as possible.
Does this ruffle anyone else's feathers?
Edit: Finally, solid proof that only the honest consumer gets hurt by piracy.
Edit: Clearly I was first. Now I can elaborate.
@mrsmiley said:
I agree with you both. Its an incredibly stupid move on their part. I think it will ultimately affect their sales even more than whatever piracy through hamachi could have. As for achievements they would simply just need to make them unnatainable offline. BUt yes the only time I would multiplayer Starcraft was through LAN and this is a horrible, horrible choice which I hope does not also carry over to Diablo, but here it would be leess of an issue.
That is all.
Figures.
The reasoning behind it is that the replay value of starcraft is in the multiplayer, and in fact some people will get the game to play just the multiplayer and the problem occurs with LAN because since it doesn't connect to Battle.Net they can't always authenticate that the game is a real copy. This can be seen in starcraft, I know TONS of people who never bought that game and just pirated it so that they could play the LAN, of course they couldnt play the online matches but the LAN was enough for them, so thats where the concern about piracy comes in. Of course they could use other forms of protection like SecurROM, however these are easily cracked and circumvented, as well as provide not only an inconvienence to the user (such as install limits) but also have a stigma associated with them that can kill a games popularity, having to force someone to connect to Battle.Net to authenticate is more secure. I'm not saying this is the right move though, but I can't think of any other alternatives that wouldn't just be easily circumvented. (Also I assume that the reasoning behind only allowing achievments to be got through online play would be because there will most likely be cheat codes in single play)
...and so begins the reformation of Korea against the western world...
At least they aren't going to have DRM that forces you to call support after 3 installs and installs rootkits on your computer. (Anno 1404)