no IPX connection ^^ for my old computer ! sad news ! *joke inside*.
Really badnews for those who don’t always have the NET and can not play with friends without .... really sad news… Modem connection and udp connection in SC:1 was a great improvment ... for all a generation of 56k modem players… *cry*.

I hope fan programmer make a patch to bypass the battle.net and play on LAN.

Not that hard to understand the reasoning for this, while it do sucks for most of us I totally understand why. This makes me maybe cancel some plans with friends since we planned to have an “Oldschool LAN” when Starcraft II would hit the streets and battle like we did when the first game hit the shelfs.

The reasoning for this is because piracy can use LAN Emulators to play the game online in Multiplayer. And we all know the game will be copied amongs Pirates, that cannot be avoided. However they can make sure the Pirates are restricted to Singelplayer only by not including LAN play to force them to buy the game if they want to play it online. I doubt we’ll see any private Battle.Net servers this time arround, atleast not in the forseeable future since they’re pushing Battle.Net to the next step which means a whole lot of work to do, so to put it simply: The only way people are going to be able to play the game online is to buy this product.

While it sucks with no LAN play, I understand the reasoning.

“http://www.petitiononline.com/LANSC2/petition.html Help us out here ”

Yeah, we’ll see…

Removing LAN only encourages piracy.

I can’t say I’m happy about this. How am I supposed to play multiplayer with friends when I lose my internet connection due to a storm or whatever. I hope we’ll be atleast be able to play agains the AI offline.

This is, quite frankly, unacceptable.  When SC is still on the top-ten selling PC games list, to say that inclusion of LAN would lead to rampant piracy is hilarious.

Bah. The guys at Blizzard have lost their minds. This will only provoke more piracy and less sales.

I’m certainly not paying for StarCraft 2 if I can’t play LAN with my friends. And the same goes for Diablo 3.

Wanna be Sony, Blizzard?. Bad move.

RTS is all about LAN. Always have been.

Hey Guys… maybe I’m missing something here.

Yes, it sucks that officially LAN will not be supported in SC2. Why does it suck? Because not everyone will necessarily have access to the internet at say a LAN party, and because the LAG experienced on an internet connection being shared amongst many can be really bad due to bottleneck of the upstream bandwidth (which is generally low on most residential based ADSL lines).

BUT

Really, getting an internet connection shouldn’t be a problem, even at a LAN party (just have your buddy hosting the party, share his). We’re still left with the LAG issue though, but are we really? Using the example of playing a WC3 game on Battle.net. My friends and I used to try this out, and would all connect to our battle.net accounts. I would host a game and they would all join. Now essentially Battle.Net was being used as an intermediatary for stats and initial handshaking etc. The actual TCP/IP packets were not going via the Battle.NET servers but via the person who hosted the game itself. Now TCP/IP is a routable protocol and therefore automatically able to find the shortest route for a packet to take, thus it will simply send all packets via the switch and between the clients and the server (person who hosted). So in a nutshell, for a locally hosted game, that uses Battle.NET for “authentication”, the LAG should be virtually < 1 ms.

Assuming that SC2 works in a similar fashion (and I’m sure it will, as this is more a technical protocol issue, rather than a design one), we should be able to have LAN parties (as long as we can connect to the net), and have 0 lag.

Hooray!

First they chunk it into 3 installments (look how long it’s taking for the 1st one…will we see the Zerg campaign in 2016 only?). I accepted it…because one could at least use any faction/race in LAN. Nope - not true it seems because there won’t be any LAN.

I don’t like it because as much as I enjoyed the SP experience I spent far more time playing it over a LAN (two legit copies…thanks to their battlechest). Sure battlenet has it’s uses for online games but my time would be split at least 90% LAN and maybe 10% online.

Sadly I won’t be buying SC2 because of this. Oh well at least there’s Diablo III (doh! also not!)