I think a large part of it is Blizzard working against piracy/hacks. They’ve started using their Warden anti-hack stuff in multiple products recently (like WC3), and it only works on Battle.net. Most of the private servers for pirated copies of the game run using the LAN interface, because it’s easier to set up games through that then to run a full BNet server. By forcing you to authenticate with them for even LAN play, they make it harder to pirate their games for the full experience or run hacks.

I honestly don’t understand why this is such a huge deal. It’s nice to have LAN support, but we all obviously have internet connections.

Amy Rose Posted:

There’s not much to code for LAn, is it? you can just keep the same basic LAN format and make minor adjustments as you find glitches… wow, that’d cost like €2.50 more than not doing it, so let’s not do it.

Do you have any software development experience?