Starcraft II jettisons LAN support

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Give us something new: Your comment has been echoed literally
thousands of times since this Blizzard
announcement. And like all the other echoes,
you haven't offered anything in the way of a
solution or even how you would prefer it. In
other words, how about giving some constructive
criticism? Don't say "wah, I don't like
this. I'm not going buy your products any
more." Say "I don't like this. This is
how it should be..."

And how do you think it should be? How should
PC game developers protect their investments?
Based on your apprehension to use battle.net, I
assume you also don't approve of Steam or
Windows Live. But I think I can assume that
you approve of Starcraft's loose cd-key
protection. But that doesn't work either.
People don't say "Even though this game is
easy to pirate, I'm going to buy it because I'm
a good guy." No, people just pirate it
while saying "Can you believe how easy this
game is to pirate?!" A lesser known game
company (name escapes me) has tried the loose
cd-key method recently and the game was pirated
into oblivion -- proving that you cannot bank
on the honesty of PC gamers. And on today's
internet with ubiquitous broadband and
bittorrent, the ability to download large files
is many orders of magnitude easier than it was
in '97 during Starcraft's time.

But, in the vast pool of piracy-mitigation
techniques employed all around, Blizzard seems
to be offering users a rather simple and non-
invasive means for protecting their investment.
All they require is that you connect to
battle.net when you want to play multiplayer.
They're not installing invasive monitoring
software or rootkits. They're not forcing you
to activate your product while limiting the
number of installs you can perform. They're
not forcing you to connect to Steam or Windows
Live every time you want to play the game. So,
what about it is too much for you?

And yes, the uncooperative minority (in this
case the pirates) tend to always ruin it for
the majority. That is a sad truth of life.
Terrorists bombings causing us to have to take
our shoes off at the airport; That one kid that
wouldn't shut up in class in elementary school
causing everyone to have to be punished; Or
simply the software pirates that hurt a game's
sales so much that other companies take note
and employ defensive strategies.

The majority of people recognize that Blizzard
is providing a nice service in battle.net to
the user while also protecting their
investment. But a very vocal minority wants
Blizzard to delay the game and implement a
feature that is not in the majority's interest
anyway. If that were to happen, then the
minority, again, would ruin it for the majority
in the form of everyone having to wait another
year or so to actually get their hands on this
game.

So, when you become a big time game developer,
you can pour millions of dollars into a game
and then release it to the fickle public with 0
piracy protections. We'll sit back and watch
how that one works out for you.

It's all about the $$. Blizzard is not a rock
band that proclaims "it's all about the music,
man". They're a capitalist entity with selfish
goals of profit. They recognize that piracy on
the internet is sophicticated and prolific, and
they have taken acceptable steps to mitigate
that. Blizzard has managed to stay in business
because they release quality products and they
know what they are doing. In the world of
under-developed, over-produced games (Star Wars
Force Unleashed comes to mind) that you pay
full price for, Blizzard games are easily a
bargain. I think all this no-LAN outrage is
hasty and unfounded.; Posted by: Uncle Ebeneezer Posted on: 07/09/09 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use