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No Tychus, I do not believe that a whole bunch of people using the same internet connection will not be able to play at the same time in the same place. And Blizzard has said nothing about this being the case. I assume you are asking something along the lines of "so why can't people just hop on the same internet and still be at the same place?" correct?
Broadband gaming may hit some bumps on the road IMO. Imagine for the next year how far cellphone technology can go. Streamed HD capable cellphones? I wont be surprised if it becomes a standard.
But, for the next year, broadband infrastructure wont be growing as fast. See, all our connections are not riding on infinite bandwidth. Everything will pass on either intercontinental optical cable or satellites. Can these infrastructure components really be put up as fast as client technology grows? I don't think the networks will scale to what each client device is capable of.
Even now, Gigabit Ethernet is becoming a staple feature in most motherboards. But where is our mass-available gigabit internet connection? I think there will be an increase in demand for bandwidth but less supply. There are already issues about ISPs throttling connections around the world. Pay per gigabyte subscriptions are popping up here in my country and I don't like where it is going.
Me and my officemates have company issued laptops (HP Compaq 6510b's) that can perfectly run WC3. We play DoTA regularly via LAN using just our laptop wifi cards. We can do this outside the company network while reserving a conference room post office hours. Latency is great and the games are great.
AMD will be releasing DX11 GPUs on-die with their upcoming processors. Intel and Nvidia are also sure to release more powerful mobile graphics.
Soon, ANY modern laptop will be able to run SC2 easy regardles of price point. I wouldn't be surprised if netbooks can run SC2 in ~2 years time. We wont all be playing in our homes because the home-bound gaming PC is fast disappearing. Proximity gaming may be the way to go instead of broadband gaming IMO.
Unless the Blizzard servers are next door, nothing will compare to lan latency for people in lan proximity.
If this rumour is true, I think there will be great demand for it to be released for all who pay for the game.
Blizzard said they were implementing a LAN alternative in which a person would log-on to Battle.net to authenticate the copy. Then the people on the network would join the same game. Then Battle.net would not require the connection to be run through it so it's basically just running through the network a la LAN.Quote:
Originally Posted by silencbank
I'm asking if Blizzard so they scrapped this idea because people seem to think they did.
Well then what Kimera said was right. As far as I know the only way to be able to authenticate then play offline is single player. And from all the things that I have read over the past few months in regards to it, Blizzard never said anything along the lines of being able to do it in multiplayer. I do think that it would be very possible to do so, and even suggested an easy way to do it. But like the quote said in Kimera's post "That functionality's not there. Our goal is to make sure that connectivity to the Battle.net servers is such that that's the experience that people want".
It would appear so.
But, they definitely said they would at one time.
I don't even remember them saying this. All I can remember is hoards of people suggesting this (including myself). They may have regarded it as a possible option, but I don't recall them ever saying that they were even on any sort of path to implement it. It could be that it just got washed out in all the other madness. Do you got a link or quote you could toss up?Quote:
Originally Posted by TychusFindlay
I used to have it on hand when I was a regular news poster. Alas, I not only left all of that information fall into disarray in various .txts but it's also on a completely different computer that I no longer use :(
We'll just have to hope Kimera has a link because it could very well be that I misunderstood what they were saying. At the moment, I can't remember if they only said that they might implement such a feature.
Can't anyone check the wiki? I just visited the battle.net page and followed the sources there.
Anyway, the original LAN link: http://www.shacknews.com/onearticle.x/60156
The more recent info came from this link: http://www.incgamers.com/Interviews/...ce-interview/4Quote:
Battle.net developer Greg Canessa says that Blizzard is actively working on a LAN-like solution to include for Battle.net play in StarCraft II.
"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.
Blizzard recently announced that traditional LAN play would not be included in the game, with offline play only being allowed in the singleplayer campaign.
I asked Canessa whether the solution his team is working on might include a pseudo-LAN connection, where the game would only check in with Battle.net to authenticate 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."
With Blizzard making LAN exclusively for people they choose fit to have it, I am sure there will be a crack sooner or later. I dont think their half-ass LAN solutuion will cut it for those looking for the real deal. If Blizzard is not going to help the community, the community helps itself. Before you know it, Blizzard may eventually give in, and make LAN more accessible.
Assuming it works as promised, there's no difference between LAN and the pseudo-LAN other than requiring authentication from Battle.net which I can approve of doing.
One thing to note
Any custom map with WASD is unplayable over Bnet. It will lag like hell, and is a very good indicator that Bnet is not going to be the most efficient way to play this game multiplayer. If you ever want to play a custom map with friends that uses WASD, you're going to have to deal with connectivity/lag issues.
I would figure that this sort of problem would be alleviated with LAN support if you had the option to use it, so there's still a fair good reason to have LAN.
I didn't think that top down shooter was unplayable due to lag. I didn't really experience any, to be honest. I was more upset by the fact that I actually had to turn down the graphics because it was lagging my i5 750, HD 5770 to 15-20 FPS which doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Somehow, changing the perspective of StarCraft 2 turns it into Crysis 2 :D
Ah okay, I remember him saying that.
Sounds like part of the problem would've been the peer-to-peer stuff, since you would have to have one of the players hosting it. Which player should host it? How close is close enough to use the pseudo-LAN? How far is far enough to switch to the servers? There were probably lots of questions that ended up killing it, rather than some executive decision. Then again, perhaps they are still working on a solution. That could be part of what this downtime before phase 2 is about.
It's due to the nature of trigger-based movement, which requires more data transferred between all players. This takes up more bandwidth, thus lag.
You can play these maps fine singleplayer, but as soon as you play multiplayer, it'll start to slow down/freeze/drop players.
@n00bonicPlague: LAN, and therefore pseudo-LAN, only works when you're, well, on a LAN. Therefore, the distance is limited by how far your LAN goes which for most people is their house but sometimes is as large as a business building.