They better not ****ing do this with Warcraft IV.

Skyman747 Posted:

”We got quite different answers about local area networking (LAN), where both Dustin or Sigaty said they were still discussing it, however, Pardo knew immediately: “we don’t have any plans to support LAN,” he said and clarified “we will not support it.” The only multiplayer available will be on Battle.net.” – sauce

I find that strange. But by ditching LAN they lose the Koreans, so oh well blizzard.

They cant possibly be ditching LAN entirely. I’m positive battlenet will kick into lan transmission in a lan situation, but you still need to be connected to their battlenet service at the same time.

it would be stupid to have an entire house of people’s data going through the same uplink, to battlenet, then back to them. laggggg

what i meant was that if your internet connection is down you will not be able to play with your friend who is in the same room as you are, which is absolutely ridiculous

and if you have bad internet that occasionally lags/disconnects you’ll get that while you’re playing on a lan :s

really i don’t care much myself since i don’t play starcraft but this is the kind of thing that makes me loathe the game industry: they turn everything into a service which makes you dependent on the company and if the company goes away you are pwned

TUBSWEETIE Posted:

Signed. People shouldn’t have to resort to hax to have basic functionality that has been industry standard for something like 15 years.

Kilroy Posted:

play is slowly disappearing, you know. Even on consoles, local multiplayer is dying out, and I really don’t know why. It’s a great thing to be able to kill 3 of your friends at a party in Halo, but newer games are simply getting rid of that functionality.

The reason it’s slowly dying out is because they don’t make money from the 3 friends playing YOUR copy of the game. They want to sell each person a copy of the game and make them play online cuz then it’s 4 times the money.

Nintendo disagrees with this selfish kind of forced-marketing, which is why they are brutally murdering all the other consoles.

Shii Posted:

Nintendo disagrees with this selfish kind of forced-marketing

The Pokemon series wants to disagree with you there.

Shii Posted:

The reason it’s slowly dying out is because they don’t make money from the 3 friends playing YOUR copy of the game. They want to sell each person a copy of the game and make them play online cuz then it’s 4 times the money.

Nintendo disagrees with this selfish kind of forced-marketing, which is why they are brutally murdering all the other consoles.

This video amused me greatly:

http://www.gossipgamers.com/blizzard-angered-hitler-with-no-starcraft-2-lan-play/

Sancdar Posted:

I think any ‘boycott’ over this issue as as much Log in to see images!

Steam DRM is actually a lot less objectionable than the normal style of online activation.

Business as normal: You install the game from a disk, if you lose this disk or it gets scratched then you’re ****ed and must re-buy the game. Whilst installing, it adds another program to your system that you didn’t ask for (SecuROM) which proceeds to tell you whether or not you’re allowed to play your new game based on such factors as what other programs you have installed, whether the games company says you’re allowed at that moment, the colour of your shirt and whether or not there are birds flying overhead.

Typically the company uses this to enforce either a pointless disk check, once again meaning that you’re totally ****ing screwed over should anything happen to that fragile piece of plastic, or to enforce a limited number of “activations” which either limit how many PCs you can install on, or how many times you can install the game at all. Very often it will require you to manually deactivate PCs so a hard system wipe will take one of your activations with it. In the long run you are likely to use up all of your allowed installs and then be told to go buy the game again.

With Steam it’s tied to an account not a computer, so you can download whatever you want, to wherever you want, and as many times as you want, but you can only sign into your account and play your games from one place at a time. In exchange for loss of control over your game (you don’t have a disc, you’re reliant on them to keep playing) they take responsibility for keeping the “disc” safe for you on their servers. The only time I’ve ever had difficulty playing a game was when I was offline… even that can be worked around with most games by use of “Offline mode”, but some games won’t be playable from offline. It’s still not perfect (no resale/lending/trade, 2 members of a family can’t play games from the same account simultaneously, all goes kaputski if Steam dies) but it’s a damn sight better than the first option.

There’s always hacks and cracks, but for the legal gamer, Steam offers a lot more useful stuff for a lot less bull****. The part that really grates is the idea of having to go and grovel to customer support to ask to play your own game without paying for it all over again.

Yeah, I totally forgot about some of the bull**** copy protection schemes. Anyway, I am fine with online activation run by a company that’s proven to be reliable and doesn’t look like it’s in danger of vanishing. I know there are games that had online activation that no longer work at all just by servers failing, and even more than that games with private servers. Everyone hates gamespy, but at least they were around forever.