Starcraft 2 makes major announcements (and I am off the hype train)

[Ail]

theshrike said:
@Ail

actually when I am with my parents I play starcraft with my brother. There have been other case when I travel with friends on a train.

and yes, both situations leave me without internet. Aside from that, there is no way to be sure that their servers will never go down.
Do you feel that everyone one on a LAN is a pirate for some reason? I fail to understand the rabid defense of blizzard giving you less of a product.

I don't think you understand how Wow is.

Wow servers go down for a couple minutes at any time of the day( which is very rare except on patch day) and Blizzard' forums get flooded with posts within a few minutes..

So yes, I trust Blizzard in being able to provide a stable Battlenet, they have demonstrated the last 5 years that stable servers  is something they can reliably provide...

I don't feel like everyone playing on LAN is a pirate but providing a game which will lack its major feature without a valid CD-Key to play MP is going to deter a lot of the casual pirates( which are the majority, most of the people that download music online illegally will not go through the process of connecting to a private server with little security guarantee to play a MP game, heck most woudn't even know how to set that up).

Sure the hardcore hackers which represent a very small percentage of the gamers will probably find a way around but the majority of the ppls won't and will have to make the choice between purchase the game or not play it and in the end a decent percentage of them will purchase it which will be to the benefit of every other person that purchased it ( Blizzard will make more cash, there will be more bnet users, bnet will be enhanced more, SC2 will get more support through patches and expansion, the support will last longer...).

Piracy has to end somewhere, right now it is getting so widespread on PC that the people that don't do it are those being singled out by the others gamers as being stupid, it's nice that Blizzard is taking a step to fix this...

 

One of the feature you can already expect from bnet 2 is an ELO like ranking ( like chess) and the capability to be randomly matched against players of similar skills as you if you desire so ( it's technology Blizzard has already deployed in others games). Due to that I expect the leaderboard on bnet to be a lot more reliable than they ever have been for SC2 and to trully reflect who are the best players worldwide...

I fully expect Diablo 3 to be the same and have some of its features only available on Battlenet to encourage ppls to buy legit copies too ( the best runewords in D2 were only available on bnet, I expect more features like this, making the bnet experience superior to the single player one).

PS : And to me it does not feel like less of a product. I play online a lot and I find the experience provided by online servers a lot superior to the LAN one... Since I have reliable internet ( which has been over 6 years by this day) I haven't played a LAN game...