StarCraft II does away with LAN play:
by Steve on 30/06/09 at 2:37 pm
So has pirating & hacking finally taken it’s toll on LAN style gaming and forced developers to remove the feature to protect it’s product?
Blizzard today confirmed that LAN functionality will be absent from Starcraft II’s multiplayer component, as both a piracy prevention mechanism and a quality-assurance initiative.
“We don’t currently plan to support LAN play with Starcraft II, as we are building Battle.net to be the ideal destination for multiplayer gaming with Starcraft II and future Blizzard Entertainment games,” a Blizzard representative said in a statement. “While this was a difficult decision for us, we felt that moving away from LAN play and directing players to our upgraded Battle.net service was the best option to ensure a quality multiplayer experience with Starcraft II and safeguard against piracy.”
“Several Battle.net features like advanced communication options, achievements, stat-tracking, and more, require players to be connected to the service, so we’re encouraging everyone to use Battle.net as much as possible to get the most out of Starcraft II,” the statement continued. “We’re looking forward to sharing more details about Battle.net and online functionality for Starcraft II in the near future.”
It is obvious that piracy was a concern for the developer and that Battle.net would play a role in helping to counteract theft of the game and any hacking which would ruin fair play amongst the non hacking gaming community.
“We’re definitely talking about ways with Battle.net that we can provide the best online experience for our customers so that there’s not an incentive to pirate the product but instead an incentive to be part of that community of gamers playing that game and they’d want to be part of that social experience on top of the single-player experience,” he said.
Blizzard expects to begin closed beta for Starcraft II by this summer and is currently accepting sign ups for players to test it out once the testing phase becomes available.
I am all for personalizing a game like for instance modding and newer weapons and what not but for MMO games hacking and cheating plague the LAN and ruin the experience for gamers with integrity. I am actually glad to see the developers try to do something to take back there games and protect gamers from hackers.
-Steve
[gamespot]
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