Whose LAN is it anyway?

by Kirym09

Over this past summer, Blizzard’s Vice President of game design Rob Pardo confirmed that Starcraft II would not support LAN play. As usual, the outcry from the PC community was palpable, so Blizzard went into damage-control, and came back with an interesting response:

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"We are working on solutions with regard to things we can do to maintain connectivity to Battle.net in some way, but also provide a great quality connection between players," said Canessa. To clarify, Shack suggested a scenario where the game would only check in with Battle.net to authenticate the game before reverting to typical LAN behavior.

"Something like that," he replied. "Maintaining a connection with Battle.net, I don't know if it's once or periodically, but then also having a peer-to-peer connection between players to facilitate a very low-ping, high-bandwidth connection... those are the things that we're working on."

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One goal here is rather obvious: to stop piracy. Blizzard of all people will know that this will be hacked in a very short time, allowing LAN to be played without activation. As long as the protocol exists somewhere in the code, it will be exploited. Blizzard has expressed that piracy is not the reason for taking away LAN, but it’s hard to argue that it isn’t an added perk, especially with popular services such as Garena, which through the use of a VPN take advantage of the LAN protocol, and are usually lag-free alternatives to Battle.net

The new Battle.net 2.0 will play a much more active role in SC II. A lot has changed since 1997 when the original Battle.net was launched, and it is safe to assume (based off of current announcements) that Blizzard’s matchmaking system has developed both in terms of properly matching players of equal skill and latency. Among its many other features that have been revealed are in inter-game integrated chat and achievements. Additionally, it totally revamps the custom map system, which is a discussion for another day.

Achievements are coming to B.net 2.0. Unnecessary, but nice to have.

There is one seriously flawed argument that LAN made Starcraft what it is today. Previously only LAN through IPX (along with modem, direct, and serial) was available in the original Starcraft, something few people were able to use or probably manage. Blizzard didn’t add UDP until patch 1.09 which wasn’t released until February of 2002, yet the game still managed to be popular enough to be entered into the World Cyber Games when it started in 2000, and begin its ascent to godhood in South Korea through its early nationally televised competitions.

Let us just grant for a moment that LAN did make Starcraft what it is today. Starcraft 2 will be just as popular at release if not more in the future, reaching a new audience of players. The primary instances of LAN are in PC Bangs in South Korea. In this case, players will be at computers that have internet access, and thus will be able to authenticate (either through a personal or public account) and play with LAN latency with friends right next to them. This certainly puts a damper on LAN parties (large or small), where the participants all do not own a copy of the game (and can’t share it to play together) or internet usage is limited, disallowing authentication. In most circumstances these days, you will have internet access at least enough to authenticate with Battle.net. Lamentably, this certainly is a major problem to areas that do not have significant broadband coverage. All of these problems are irrelevant if the aforementioned crack is developed.

It would appear a major goal of this would be to control the professional gaming scene. In World of Warcraft, the competition sponsors are forced to buy servers expressly for the purpose of arena matches, and we can safely assume that it comes at a pretty hefty price. Though competitions can duplicate server interactions, it is likely that they would face heavy legal action. The new ‘pseudo-LAN’ may invalidate the need for such servers, but that doesn’t mean Blizzard is any less committed to getting a piece of the profit made in professional gaming. Look forward to see them meddling with that in the future.

But what effect does it really have? I want to make no mistake about it, I am certainly pissed off that it’s happening, and it seems overall like an unnecessary step (especially concerning my cynicism above the haste with which a crack will come out), but for the majority of Starcraft players, and in a majority of circumstances it is not as earth shaking as the initial response to the news sounded like. Unlike an issue like dedicated servers in MW2, most people won't even notice a difference, and in the end that's what Blizzard is counting on.