Giant Bomb Video Game News

Blizzard rolled a natural 20 at pissing me off today.

Edit:  Finally, solid proof that only the honest consumer gets hurt by piracy.

I don't even plan on playing it and it still pisses me off. Way to go Blizzard.

This is a horrible idea. Latency is a big issue, especially in the pro scene. It's seems absolutely insane for Blizzard to leave this feature out, although I can understand them doing it to fight piracy. This is going to hurt the pro scene big time, and since pro Starcraft has really only recently started hitting the main stream, it sounds like they will be crippling it before it can even get started. Great move.

I was only ever planning on playing the singleplayer, so it doesn't affect me too much, but how in the hell is preventing local multiplayer going to do anything about piracy? That makes about as much sense as saying you can pirate Halo 3 by playing split-screen co-op.

@skywing said:

" I had a starcraft lan pary 4 days ago

this feature must be in the game!!!

"

@mrsmiley said:

" This is a horrible idea. Latency is a big issue, especially in the pro scene. It's seems absolutely insane for Blizzard to leave this feature out, although I can understand them doing it to fight piracy. This is going to hurt the pro scene big time, and since pro Starcraft has really only recently started hitting the main stream, it sounds like they will be crippling it before it can even get started. Great move. "

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.

Figures.

This is really stupid, there is no reason to not include LAN support. It's not like it's gonna stop anybody from pirating. My three bros and I still play over LAN when we can bc we don't have a corporate T3 line so the network can be inconsistent and laggy even within the same house. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FwdigYvkzOI

@Deusoma said:

" I was only ever planning on playing the singleplayer, so it doesn't affect me too much, but how in the hell is preventing local multiplayer going to do anything about piracy? That makes about as much sense as saying you can pirate Halo 3 by playing split-screen co-op. "

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)

I predict battlenet will be an interface you need to login to first, then be able to play Starctrat 2. Its gonna be like steam - its all part of the plan.

"The entire nation of South Korea was engulfed in riots today at the announcement that alleged video game 'StarCraft II' will not support locally hosted games. Several of the rioters where heard chanting 'You make us beg: no more lag'."

...and so begins the reformation of Korea against the western world...