StarCraft II LAN Dropped Thanks to Piracy

Why do they have to make it difficult for those of us who buy games in their vain attempts at fighting piracy?

A frank, direct message to all game developers:

You are encouraging piracy by fucking with legitimate, paying customers. IF YOU DICK WITH THE PEOPLE WHO GIVE YOU MONEY THEY WILL STOP DOING SO AND PIRATE THE GAME INSTEAD.

It's that simple.

What the @#$% are they thinking!!!!!!! What about people in developing countries with crap slow Internet connections or no Internet at all. Latency issues. Professional competitions. Are they stark raving mad?

@Phyre:

People in developing countries pirate everything, everybody knows that

or

People in developing countries can't afford battle.net subscriptions so they're not welcome to the party

Choose either bullshit statement above as response to your totally obvious points raised. Totally obvious if you're sane of course, of which Blizzard aren't (or just greedy).

@LePhuronn:

I am originally from South Africa, currently living in the UK. Firstly, the cost of buying a game in South Africa is prohibitive. I will be the first to admit that I pirated almost every single game I played because they were too damn expensive to buy. Ever since moving to the UK I feel that it is dirt cheap to buy a game and will from now on buy every game I play (except the ones with copy protection built in because I have been burned badly from buying a game with copy protection - SecureROM - which I couldn't get to work).

Game developers need to understand that they aren't losing sales to piracy - the people who pirate games wouldn't have bought the game in the first place.

Secondly, Internet access in South Africa is also damn expensive, capped at 3GB per month, and not to mention terribly slow. Therefore when going to LAN parties the chances that the host of the party actually has an Internet connection are very poor. So that would totally rule out the possiblity of playing StarCraft II at LANs in SA.

The massively popular original StarCraft game probably owes a lot of its popularity to piracy anyway. Blizzard probably made more out of the original StarCraft due to its widespread piracy than if it weren't pirated at all.

Just my two cents.

@LePhuronn:

I am originally from South Africa, currently living in the UK. Firstly, the cost of buying a game in South Africa is prohibitive. I will be the first to admit that I pirated almost every single game I played because they were too damn expensive to buy. Ever since moving to the UK I feel that it is dirt cheap to buy a game and will from now on buy every game I play (except the ones with copy protection built in because I have been burned badly from buying a game with copy protection - SecureROM - which I couldn't get to work).

Game developers need to understand that they aren't losing sales to piracy - the people who pirate games wouldn't have bought the game in the first place.

Secondly, Internet access in South Africa is also damn expensive, capped at 3GB per month, and not to mention terribly slow. Therefore when going to LAN parties the chances that the host of the party actually has an Internet connection are very poor. So that would almost entirely rule out the possiblity of playing StarCraft II at LANs in SA.

The massively popular original StarCraft game probably owes a lot of its popularity to piracy anyway, and thus Blizzard probably made more out of the original StarCraft due to its widespread piracy than if it weren't pirated at all.

Just my two cents.

Silly comment system made me inadvertantly double post. Sorry guys.

Plain and simple. I won't be purchasing the game. Starcraft II is dead before it comes out. Hopefully EA brings out a good strategy LAN game instead :-)

If you have to sign in to play it's just another form of DRM.

@LePhuronn
Couldn't agree more. They treat paying people like criminals.

@Phyre
Good point about the band width cap. This game is costing you real money just to be able to play it.

90% of gamers have internet
blizard make game
game is multiplayer trough bnet
buy game, play online/lan trough bnet?


i dont see whats wrong with it, and 16k peopel out of the million(s?) people expecting the game to come out?

LOL INTERNET

@caskachan:

Where do you get those stats from? Your arse? Your post doesn't make any sense.

Like any one play games on LAN only anymore, will just be like STEAM in the beginning before they added Offline mode.

So what, pray tell, is a LAN party then?

It will be possible for hackers to mod the game for LAN and they will do that. Then they'll put the game on the internet and everyone that wants to play LAN will pirate the game.

I 100% agree with the people saying that people who pirate the game wont buy it. Also most people don't play much LAN and pirates are the same. The reason to buy the game will be to get stable servers and all the nice features that they're adding to battle.net. Private servers will be available, but people who want a high quality of servers will always buy the game.

This is what will happen, a few groups of crackers will get there hands on the beta code, they will go though the code and find a way to modify it or create a mod for it that allows LAN play. This will then be applied to the full game when they get there hands on it, this new LAN enabled version will appear all over the net and many legitimate customers (who may of bought the proper game) will download it just so they can play on LAN.

The result will be piracy of this game will rival if not surpass that of Spore, both because of people with legit copies downloading for LAN and people who won't pay for a game from a developer that buggers around with there fanbase like this.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LAN_party

Um...why did you post this link? I know what a LAN party is, evidently you didn't given that you said

[citation]Like any one play games on LAN only anymore, will just be like STEAM in the beginning before they added Offline mode.[/citation]

@Phyre:

People in developing countries pirate everything, everybody knows that

or

People in developing countries can't afford battle.net subscriptions so they're not welcome to the party

Choose either bullshit statement above as response to your totally obvious points raised. Totally obvious if you're sane of course, of which Blizzard aren't (or just greedy).


------------------------------------

Ur wrong mate, i bought 3 copies of warcraft....but cant play on bnet ..i get super delay of a 1000ms...but instead use my legit copies to play on the lan ... so please stop generalising...

I think you've missed the point - these two statements are the usual bullshit that game studios come out with the justify stupid DRM, missing features or whatever. In fact didn't I clearly say these were bullshit statements?

I'm not the one generalising - they are.

ok my bad

The term LAN or LAN Party does in no way indiciate the lack of an Internet connection... and again.. very few house holds.. maybe not in South Africa.. but most modern households does have an solid Internet connection these days and a router (or software capable of sharing an single Internet connection).

The only solid argument I see here is the fact that it will be more difficult to play on an cracked version then in... ex. Starcraft 1.

People going to LAN Parties tend to use LAN connections because they are faster and LAG and Latency is almost never an issue on a LAN network.

It's sad to see that Blizzard is taking this path. Looking at how big LAN tournaments are in the eastern reaches of the world you wonder why its being removed. Removing the LAN feature doesn't bother me that much as I would rather sit at home and play against a wider variety of people. The implication of what it means though is chilling.

Battle.net has been a free service since Diablo and I've used it for Diablo, Starcraft and Diablo 2. With our WoW accounts turning into Battle.net account it leaves to wonder if we will be paying 10EU a month for another online service. And that's before you take into account data cap costs.

It makes perfect business sense to not lose billions to piracy. They deserve every cent coming to them because they deliver us probably thee best games out there. Safeguarding their property they worked on for 6 years is their full right. Blizzard cannot be held responible for bad internet connections due to bad governance (e.g. South Africa where I live). Professional competitions? WOW has regular seasonal competitions with immediate paid out real prices unlike some fraudster leages. Blizzard will do the same for SC2. Why should some other company cash in on their turf? No man, support blizzard! They have always been in touch with gamers and what they want, but not at their expense. Immagine the moola they lost with SC1 due to piracy over a decade! See the extra cash due to this move as more capacity to hire more developers and deliver more cool blizzard games.

Err, you do know that piracy of this game will be higher then normal now thanks to this, you also do know that less then 90% of all pirated copies are a loss in sales. In addition because of this that more people who would of bought the game now won't bother or will pirate instead.
And lastly, how does removing LAN help stop people pirating the game, it doesn't, all anti-piracy software is bypassable and this isn't even that, its a feature they are removing that a cracker can add back in to the pirated version.

I still go to LAN parties about 4 times a year. The games are much better when facing across a desk from your opponent. Internet gaming is faceless and boring in comparison.

There's no technical reason for them not to release LAN compatibility. The piracy argument is bull. They want control of resale.

I'll be interested to see if the Battlenet servers stay up on the week of release. Always with a major release of a game that requires online authentication, the auth servers get swamped and no one can play. There'll be thousands of angry forum posts. Fun!!