Heart of the Swarm Brings Battle.net Upgrades to StarCraft II

[Atmos Duality]

No LAN was precisely why I quit playing. No LAN is why I'm not buying Diablo 3.
I actually loved the single player mode in SC2 and I think the gameplay is actually a step up in many ways from the original (sacrilege I know).

However, this ultimately came back to multiplayer.
It was impossible for me and one other person to get even the most basic 2v2 match to remain stable to the end on my home connection, and any period of significant lag (or reconnection) means the kiss of death.

Funneling 4 people through a good cable connection at my friend's still yielded slight lag; a problem I *never* encountered in 9+ years of playing Brood War.

If Blizzard wants to remain obsessive-compulsive about controlling their game and fighting piracy, fine. They spent megabucks to establish their digital prison, I'm sure they're proud of it.

But that doesn't mean I have to be happy about it, and it doesn't mean I'm going to purchase their game.

 

[Eric the Orange]

Why is that the only possible reason?

I can't think of any other reason to post this that would logically follow. Not a real reason, anyways, tried for about 10 minutes. Why would you say something like this if you weren't going "Hey, give them some slack, they always take their time!" or "Hey, give them some slack, I'm sure it will work out a-okay in the end!"[footnote]Pretty much what the guy said.[/footnote]?

You're free to come up with other reasons, I am all ears.

he than said it was an excuse. He never said it was a good one. I see it as he was agreeing with you.

 

[Atmos Duality]

What are you, poor?

Heh. No, I just live in an area where cable is $150(USD)/month (due to no competition) and DSL is shittier, but functional and MUCH cheaper.

If it's just me, I can get my DSL to behave long enough for a match, but when I have company over, it devolves into something that resembles my old 56k.

The sad part is that unless you have a decent internet line and you live relatively close to Blizzard's servers, the connection as far as delay or straight-up reliability goes will always be objectively worse than on LAN. All of Australia is fucked by this. Everyone who doesn't live in an area with a well-developed Internet infrastructure is fucked by this. Including, yes, a pretty substantial part of Murrica, the shining beacon of hope for western society.

I can at least sort of understand this being done with Diablo 3, not giving hackers the server code (doesn't mean I'm for it, I think they should do a better bloody job of coding it), but Starcraft 2? No excuse, Blizz.

Having the server code wouldn't matter anyway. Unless you can actually access Blizzard's servers directly (good luck) and manipulate the internal algorithms yourself, hacking items into the game isn't going to work so well.

In fact, all item hacks that I saw in Diablo 2 were about tricking the server into accepting bogus parameters from the client (which the end user must always have on their computer anyway); not sending the client bogus items from the server.

Fixing their server software to encrypt item data with session-specific keys would have eliminated an awful lot of hacking and duping, since sending the same item code wouldn't work every time; something that wasn't feasible at the time Diablo 2 was developed due to limited computer resources.

Other hacks were just expanding and looking into data the server already sent to the client.
Maphack worked because the entire map data was sent when the map loaded. It's just that the client program was told to not reveal everything until it was explored.

(which is why Blizzard eventually went after Mousepad, because the last version of Maphack couldn't be easily detected by their servers; it was all client-side.)

Knowing what I do about how Diablo 2 worked, and what Blizzard is claiming as justification for the changes...well, I think they're lying through their teeth. The only practical way to prevent hacking and duping from running rampant is to actively police their servers and that just wasn't a high priority for Blizzard for much of Diablo 2's lifespan.

Eliminating LAN is just a means of ensuring everyone plays on their server and nowhere else.
It's to prevent "illicit servers" from popping up running tunneling software like Hamachi.

Blizzard claimed that they weren't concerned with piracy, yet every measure they've taken seems to be aimed at eliminating piracy.

I wouldn't mind the problem quite as much if they hadn't just flat out lied about their reasoning.

 

[Tanakh]

Practicing against humans will always be better than practicing against bots. A build doesn't only consist of the opening you do, it's also how you transition and how well it works against different strategies. Bots don't employ different strategies. Testing something that you haven't yet mastered without it impacting your ranking is a pretty welcome change.

As for LAN for tournaments, the first of these changes addresses that problem directly. There will never be LAN in SC2 as long as you can resume a game in progress if the internet crashes.

Humm... well, TBH if you are not at very very least in diamond, worring about your rank seems kind of pointless to me, in lower levels like mine i just go for the more GG more skill approach. I guess i can see how a player that worked hard to top silver-gold and don't want to go down might appreciate this but again, just from my perspective, that is totally pointless.

Also, at higher levels players usually have multiple accounts (due the region lock), so they have always had a "practice account"; and i dunno, what are you going to practice midgame or lategame? if it's execution you can do it with bots and strategy can't really be practiced midgame, i guess you can get the "feeling of your build" and that is important, but how are you going to force a similar level player to go the scenario you want at 15 mins or more?

Again, it's a nice feature, but i feel its mainly a "playing while drunk" mode.

For the LAN, well, LAN solves 2 problems, games being interrupted and lag, this solutions solves the big one, not the second. I guess it's an improvement, still LAN would be better.

Also LESS MINERALS! I want that sooo much.

Eliminating LAN is just a means of ensuring everyone plays on their server and nowhere else.
It's to prevent "illicit servers" from popping up running tunneling software like Hamachi.

This, i am very curious to see what happens when you force this on Diablo + a real money AH. Thus (if i have time around those days) i'll join their little social experiment to see the resoults.