f13.net

I am interested in the scale of this issue.

LAN restrictions are only a small subset of the standing issues b.net 2.0 - lack of chat channels, region locking, custom map names, all of these things put together hamper my future online play (in fact, I probably won't get the game at release).

And, by LAN restrictions, could you be more specific? You mean No LAN play, no sub install so everyone has to have a copy, or the 'must be connected to battle.net and if it gets interrupted ever your game freezes' thing? All of these issues have a variety of solutions and may not apply to everybody.

I am really not sure this deserves it's own thread but I'll let it sit for a few days and see.

I've never played SC in a LAN and maybe only half a dozen times played with someone who installed a spawned copy.

It won't, but it weighs on my decision to buy the game none the less.

Doesn't even register for me as an issue.  I'm over 30.  I don't think I've played LAN anything in 11 years.

edit: To be honest, I thought LAN parties would go the way of the dodo as soon decent broadband was widely available.

Like I said, this will almost certainly have 0 effect on me playing SC2 if I buy it, but in principle I just don't like the sort of direction it means Blizzard is going in. Its just one more piece of evidence, along with the other bnet issues, and so forth, that suggest they aren't going to a place with their new games that I'd like to follow.

It's a direction that works for me.  I'm just the casual, log on to battle.net and play a few games type for this. (Yes, yes, the object of eSport fanatics scorn)   It might be considered a win for them that I'm even planning on doing this.  I haven't played a competitive RTS against strangers since Starcraft 1 and the ladder experience of that at launch turned me off from the genre for a while.

I can see how it screws with the tournaments, however, and that's a little upsetting.  Having to rely on battle.net will probably not be idea for that sort of thing.  It's an accounting decision unfortunately.

Its a direction that "works" for me too.  I suck at the game, I'll never be higher than gold league, I'll never be in a tournament, and the chances of me going to some sort of regional lan party are slim to none.  But what doesn't work for me is that its part and parcel of Blizzard's choice to start monetizing battle.net, worry more about piracy than giving users a good/positive experience (something we've crucified other companies for doing).  Just because it doesn't effect me negatively personally, and in effect allows me to play how I want to with no problem, doesn't mean it isn't signs of bigger issues.

Did they have ladders for SC1 at launch?  I always played LAN. There might have been, but I never used it.  

I did try WC3 ladder, and that was the first inkling that I wasn't as good as I had originally thought I was at RTS.  I gave up playing battle.net when I went 1 and eleventy billion.   :why_so_serious:

LAN in itself is of little importance. What's important is the ability to create Spawn installations.

I look at buying a multiplayer game like I would look at buying a football. I should be able to legally play with my friends eventhough the ball happens to be mine. Anyone who's serious about playing will own one anyway so that *they also* can play with whomever they please, but it shouldn't require all my friends to get one just for me to find someone to play with.

This doesn't only apply to StarCraft 2, but it's a reason I haven't played a legal copy of a game at a LAN for years. These most definitely aren't lost sales either - people here aren't going to drop the equivalent of $50 to play the game a few times and only under very specific circumstances. A game that assumes multiple players for it to be fun should be prepared to provide multiple players a way to play. It's no different to how some (console) games have support for multiple simultaneous players.

I remember there being ladders.  If not at launch, very shortly after, because I didn't play very long.  I don't think there were skill divisions, and I got stomped in really soul crushing ways. Mostly everyone just tried to out zealot rush one another.

I'm pretty bad at this because I don't give 100% and I don't feel like putting a lot of effort into improving my mechanics.  My APM is pretty low. I spike at 60-70 APM but play at a pace closer to 35. I get distracted easily, I don't control group a lot of stuff, and there's still a lot of hotkeys I haven't memorized.  I would probably have to be on drugs to get my APM consistently above 60. 

Still, I think it's worth a play for me.  Competitive RTS is a new-again experience, and it'll keep me from resubbing to WoW at least.

Might as well wish for unicorns to jump out to the box.  I don't think this will be a road any major company is going to go down ever again.  They'll just see it as a lost sales.  They see everything as lost sales.  This isn't going to change anytime soon.

Your best bet is morally justified piracy for spawn installations. Kind of like how I justify downloading shows for cable shows I get regularly.  :awesome_for_real:  I guess we'll see if anyone manages to cobble together a hacked way to play multiplayer SC2 off battle.net.

Really, out of all of the issues, the region locking is the most offensive and impacting to me personally.

I agree, the idea of being locked into playing people from just one region is quite offensive. It doesn't really matter if I would actually try to play someone in, say, the US, it's the thought that ticks me off. I can see maybe limiting people due to ping in an FPS, but in an RTS? Not quite.

Aren't they all just faceless assholes on the net, anyway? Should I care if they are next door or in Korea when I'm trying to stomp their base?

About a year ago my brother and I went up to my uncle's cabin, which has limited internets because it's in the middle of nowhere, with an extra PC and my old SC1 CD.  We were able to get spawned installs on a few machines and have some LAN games.  Believe it or not.

Not if you are playing with random people.  But if you are the HDH Invitational and having people on 3 continents playing in one tournament, well thats problematic.

That's the supposed big issue with region locking right?  The higher level, intermingling community would either have to buy the other versions or be rather geo-centric.  Well, I guess if you have foreign friends, that could be an issue.   Do they have any real major reason for doing this other than how their network is distributed over the geos?  

I suppose I'll never get to play with Nydus Master Zod.
Why wouldn't we believe it?  I just don't think backwoods gaming is high priority on the Blizzard line item budget.

Yeah, to me the bitching sounds like E-Sport crying, which in turn sounds a lot like hardcore raider crying in WoW when things went all "casual."

I'm not really sympathetic to the concerns of people that play video games for a living, when all the majority of the populace uses it for is fun.

It makes SC2 a no-buy for me. I wouldn't buy it on release anyway, as I'm in no way a serious RTS player or fan of the genre. but I occasionally pick up 3 copies of a RTS (The 2 Star Wars ones, DoW 1&2, CoH, etc) so my friends and I can play around with it on a Friday night with no stress.

Of course D3 will be this way as well, which is where it'll really be a question for me.

Same as Azazel (We agree :ye_gods:). Lack of LAN makes it a no go for me.

Because most people seem to be under the impression that only hardcore/competitive players would care about this.

I'm under no delusion that Blizzard gives a crap.

As one of those maniacal ex e-sport people, this does rub me the wrong way, as does no chat and region locking etc. To be honest it's a kick in the nuts to the people who like to play with their mates online and LAN, as well as people wanting to play their own tournaments. Not to say it can't be done, but it's arder than it used to be. I don't understand why this is the case 12 years on.

The game itself feels great, plays well and minus a couple of small things is a solid sequel to a classic. This whole facebook wow social networking thing is making a simple multiplayer lobby concept a cluster fuck.

Put me in this boat as well. I hate, haaaate the region lock thing.



The LAN thing though, I've never actually played a game over a LAN, unless you count KALI pretending it was a LAN so you could play online.

Ohh god, KALI was awful.  THE LAG.  :ye_gods:

No, it's LAN pretending to be KALI.  You've got them reversed.

;D

Because nobody expected Starcraft to achieve the super-cult following it did when it was developed, and there were no methods to retroactively control the market without looking like a huge bunch of douchebags and blowing apart the generated goodwill they would have towards a sequel.

Now, they know exactly what position they are in, and exactly how hard they can twist your nuts while still making an unbelievable profit. Blizzard will never ever make a product that can get out of their merchandising, promoting, or overall control ever again. Those days are over until they have major competition in the market (which isn't anywhere on the horizon in terms of RTS, MMO, or hack'n'slash RPG).

EDIT: Also I would bet they will relent on a few of those restrictions, and they know which ones they are willing to let go by how loud the community screams.

Thats fine, I'm just not going to buy any of their games whilst they act like said douchebags.

And that's fine as a consumer to vote with your wallet on the issues that bug you. I do the same thing by not buying Ubisoft's DRM shit.

However, people who don't care about playing with someone in Japan, or will never enter an RTS tournament, or have never bothered with a LAN are Legion. They will make the game successful, and the hardcores who are bitching in some other forum will buy the game quietly while raging. I just don't see anything here that's a bad move on Blizzard's part or that's game-breaking for the masses.

And by "voting with your wallet" you mean "get counted as a pirated version", because you'll never be counted as a lost sale because of choices they've made. No sirree.

I miss the days when the restrictions put upon us as consumers were technical restrictions like how many colours the video card could actually produce. These days it's all about "no you can't use keyboard/mouse on the console because it would make it too much like a computer, so have a user interface that eats dick" and "no, you can't use that DVD you bought in england, because it's the wrong zone" or "no, you can't use that dvd player anymore because you've swapped zones too often", or "no, you can't play that single-player game because you're not online".

Pisses me off.

I honestly don't like the lack of LAN support; some of my most memorable times in SC1 were at a friend's house with 3-5 of us playing on LAN. We did this a lot in Diablo 2 as well. Using LAN instead of going on b.net meant less lag, and less potential for disconnects due to shitty internet. I don't know about everyone else here, but even using cable I still get the occasionally disconnect.

I'm in the "Yes, Heavily" camp. This is like if Valve released a good sequel to Counter-Strike 1.6 and didn't include LAN capability. It's a joke. Between this and the region locking, i'm starting to doubt my commitment to sparkle motion.

Not buying in part because of this. If I was going to play I would mostly play at work with coworkers. Getting randomly dropped or Battle.net being down is not acceptable.

Like bhodi said, lan is one of the minor issues. For me at least. We'll see how things go when battle.net returns later this month, but it definitely doesn't look good.

Although I will be buying the game, I'm a sucker like that :/

I like the region locking because fuck Koreans. I don't want the stress of having to deal with them in the context of Starcraft.

At least you're honest. I would wager more than 75% of people who anonymously scream on forums that they aren't buying the game are full of shit.

Actually, I'd wager that a larger percentage are honest and will BT it.

Somehow.

Maybe, I'm certainly not expert on how the Bnet thing will be cracking down on illegal copies.

It doesn't impact me at all.

What is troubling (as other's have said in this thread) is that it seems to signal a change within Blizzard that it cares less about the game and the customer.

I'm much more concerned about the map-making changes, but maybe I'm reading them wrong.  The way I'm reading it you HAVE to use b-net, at least to share maps.  And any maps you share (including assets you create and upload to support the map) become the intellectual property of Blactivision.

I think most user-generated content is crap, but that doesn't mean there haven't been real gems (DotA and FFH2) that, for different reasons, I don't think the initial game creator could/would have made.  Why would I want to bust my ass to create something that immediately becomes someone else's property?  I wouldn't.  I can't imagine anyone with talent and drive would want that either.

Honestly I think I must be misunderstanding the intended purpose of that part of the eula.  Why go to so much effort to create a toolset that is so mod-friendly if you are going to then hamper it with an EULA clause that GUARANTEES that the only thing that will ever get created is complete crap that no one wants?  Makes no sense.

I think they've figured out that their 10+ years worth of accumulated customer goodwill doesn't do them any good if they don't start burning a little of it to stay warm.   :awesome_for_real:

They can get away with more dickishness than this and still retain the loyalty of most of their fanbase.

I don't think a single concern raised in this thread is something I care about at all. Not the no LAN play, not the region locking, not the map EULA, and as for the "omg they don't CARE anymore" thing, that's ... amusing, especially the charge that they don't care about making a good game. I'm not sure they've ever particularly cared about the customer more than any of the other competent studios. You could argue they cared less back then, given the rampant cheating that raged for YEARS on the old battle.net. If anything I think that the customer care has gotten better.

To listen to this thread you'd think they were Mythic or something.  :oh_i_see:

Voted "No" even though I'm not planning to buy for unrelated reasons.  I'm far too old and slow for micro-heavy RTS to appeal, anymore.  If I were going to buy, well, I'm far too old to have any nearby friends who still play games, so I'd need battle.net for any kind of multiplayer, anyway.

Really?  I would think putting up b.net as a free service, connecting all of their games through it, and updating games 5-10 years after their release is pretty solid customer care.

Why would it have gotten better with sc2?

I don't know that it is getting better with SC2 specifically, but it has certainly gotten better since Starcraft originally came out.

Since the release of WoW Blizzard has had to build a real customer service organization. They're pretty fast to solve reported issues now, and they're much better about nailing cheaters than they used to be.

Australia, you are not allowed to play with Europe and the US any more. (http://au.gamespot.com/news/6267245.html?om_act=convert&om_clk=picks&tag=picks%3Btitle%3B1)

Although I am amused that Blizzard is working hard to offer cross-region support.

Ultimately, this is a cultural preference - I'm more able to play with Europeans / US than I am SE Asia players because our cultural differences are a lot less. Language is one thing, but it is only a small part of the cultural divide between Australia and (say) Indonesia.

Makes sense. Why don't we just pair off the West Coast with the Japanese while we are at it? It's about the same distance.  :oh_i_see:

I can't imagine anything worse than being the only english speaking nation paired with an entirely Asian playerbase for multiplayer, personally. The cultural/language barriers would just suck the fun out of the game.

At least they are working on a solution and listening to their playerbase.  Gives me some hope for the game at least.

Heh, I've never had a conversation with anyone I'm playing in Starcraft II.  I think "lame cannon pusher" probably translates pretty well across cultures. 

I can see Australians probably having more Euro and American friends than Asians.

Still, it at least sounds like they're working a lot of stuff people griped about.  SC2armory and other places had links to blue posts on several hot button "esports" issues.

"gl hf" transcends borders

Most people in SEA speak good enough English that you can understand them when you need to and it's fucking hilarious when things go wrong.

India.