Lan 100% Confirmed For Televised Korean Tournaments

[TheEconomist]

1) Internet authentications. HAHAHAH! That'd take three seconds to be worked around and would leave a lifetime of problems for Blizzard in enforcing their rights to royalties.
2) Your country being poor is irrelevant and is no excuse. If you or your country are too poor to pay for small things like a game then maybe you don't need to be playing games at all. Go work and get the money which you so desperately need. I don't believe for a minute though that you're that poor. So this point is irrelevant.
3) We've known about pay-to-play for a long, long, long, long time now. Stop worrying about something that's completely optional and is only there for certain parts of the world that prefer that model.
4) No, it's nothing like a clock on a phone for obvious reasons like the ones I've mentioned and have been said by others. LAN was removed to stop certain forms of piracy and royalty work arounds. A clock on a phone does not endanger the cell phone company of losing hundreds of thousands of dollars or perhaps millions. You keep looking only on the surface and getting upset over nothing when you should dig deeper and see why things are the way they are. It's the only logical way to go about it and will lead you to possessing a more valid and respectable opinion.
5) Piracy, in this case, means internet cafes, tournaments, and what not. Not just the average joe downloading the game. We're talking about preventing mass piracy in tournaments. Did you know for the original game, often times one single copy of the game was used for thousands of players in tournaments? They did this through spawned copies and LAN. If LAN and spawned copies are removed then Blizzard had the legal right to enforce them to buy the game legally. Simple. Blizzard's been getting monetarily raped for the last few year and now, when they want to get some of that back, you say they are monetizing
6) Stop spamming "DEY R MONETIZING!!!" like you're some dirt poor Communist. None of these things you've been complaining about have been monetized. I don't know where you're coming from with this.

@hyde: You are exactly right about LAN being put into StarCraft 2 no matter what. For this reason, Blizzard should remove it from the unmodified game so that they have the legal grounds to enforce their royalities while we, the gamers, can still enjoy our LAN. I wish people would understand this. I've repeated this so many times I'm starting to get a headache. You're completely wrong about them doing it to prevent piracy of the average joe though. Blizzard knows very well they can't stop the average joe. However, in order for a tournament to be legal (and they can't really broadcast it if it's not legal ) it has to have all legal versions of the game and what not. Removing LAN ensures they get the money they deserve. Meanwhile, the general populace is uneffected because LAN was brought back in.

Look at it this way, which is better:

1) LAN being removed and perhaps not usable for, at the most, a few months. But, Blizzard gets millions in extra revenue for what they deserve and are owed by the Koreans for their mass piracy all of these years. This money is then put back into developing the things we love.
2) We get LAN from day one (a feature we'd have regardless). Blizzard gets screwed for a lifetime and they have less money to invest in the things we enjoy so much from them.

[SlickR]

1: If it wasn't for piracy in the first place, SC would have not existed and Blizzard would have not existed!
Tell me, was your first play in SC1 on a legal or pirated copy?

2: Piracy is always part of the picture, developers have 2 paths: make the original game experience much more compelling so that people are inclined to buy the game or (blizzard way) remove every frickin feature that is so important that bnet 1 had, punish any potential legal buyer of the game and give pirates and undecided people more incentive to pirate the game!

3: Since Blizzard chose option 2, they also decided to monetize every aspect of it, including LAN with a stupid pro edition version. This shows they are greedy and money sucking vacuums.

4: Even though I don't like Kespa, without them (again) SC would not have been the e-sports game we all know now. So Kespa (paying or not paying royalties) did Blizzard a favor by popularizing the game and thus SC and BW selling more than 5 million copies in Korea !

5: LAN is an important part of a gaming culture, its the start of interactive experience, meeting people, and having fun. Even if 90% of purchasers don't use it, even if it actually "increased piracy" its small enough reason not to include LAN.
If SC2 is pirated, it will be pirated with or without LAN, so get over it and don't be fooled by corporate titans; you are eating out of their hands!

6: We all know where this is all going, don't we? We know what the music and movie industry is doing, they start small by adding this, that, DRM, AVR, pursuing lonely people, making up laws, pressuring whole countries to fight their fight and f**k*** us all, over their supposed "piracy damages"!!! - When in fact they are making billions of us!

Look at it this way:

You are being mind controlled by carefully thought out phrases, comments and info all designed to wash your brain, to accept everything they say and suck your money no matter what they do.

Next thing you might as well be paying $80 for a 2 hour campaign and bnet 3.0 with no features at all and you are going to be happy about it.

Now tell me everything I said isn't true ?

[DemolitionSquid]

Here's a good analogy.

LAN is like a bunch of vuvuzelas. Its just not the same if everyone's not in sync from lag.

[Dauntless]

1: If it wasn't for piracy in the first place, SC would have not existed and Blizzard would have not existed!
Tell me, was your first play in SC1 on a legal or pirated copy?

What!? Please prove your claims.
And I've always played SC1 legally.

2: Piracy is always part of the picture, developers have 2 paths: make the original game experience much more compelling so that people are inclined to buy the game or (blizzard way) remove every frickin feature that is so important that bnet 1 had, punish any potential legal buyer of the game and give pirates and undecided people more incentive to pirate the game!

They will only be able to pirate parts of the game, like single player and single player custom games, watching replays and playing vs AI.
Multi player is out of bounds, for now.

3: Since Blizzard chose option 2, they also decided to monetize every aspect of it, including LAN with a stupid pro edition version. This shows they are greedy and money sucking vacuums.

How does this cost anyone (except tournament hosts) more money?

4: Even though I don't like Kespa, without them (again) SC would not have been the e-sports game we all know now. So Kespa (paying or not paying royalties) did Blizzard a favor by popularizing the game and thus SC and BW selling more than 5 million copies in Korea !

Fair enough, but without Blizzard where would Kespa be?

5: LAN is an important part of a gaming culture, its the start of interactive experience, meeting people, and having fun. Even if 90% of purchasers don't use it, even if it actually "increased piracy" its small enough reason not to include LAN.
If SC2 is pirated, it will be pirated with or without LAN, so get over it and don't be fooled by corporate titans; you are eating out of their hands!

LAN is a positive part of gaming culture. Piracy is a negative part of gaming culture. If they wanna get piracy to go, LAN has to go.

6: We all know where this is all going, don't we? We know what the music and movie industry is doing, they start small by adding this, that, DRM, AVR, pursuing lonely people, making up laws, pressuring whole countries to fight their fight and f**k*** us all, over their supposed "piracy damages"!!! - When in fact they are making billions of us!

Look at it this way:

You are being mind controlled by carefully thought out phrases, comments and info all designed to wash your brain, to accept everything they say and suck your money no matter what they do.

Next thing you might as well be paying $80 for a 2 hour campaign and bnet 3.0 with no features at all and you are going to be happy about it.

Now tell me everything I said isn't true ?

I'm controlling my own mind very much by myself, thank you. You are confusing Blizzard with Activision.

Here's a good lousy analogy.

LAN is like a bunch of vuvuzelas. Its just not the same if everyone's not in sync from lag.

Fixed.

[TheRabidDeer]

Honestly? Threads like this and the people posting in them make me not want to visit the forum. All I see is irrational bandwagoning saying, "Blizzard is charging for everything! Soon every unit you want to make ingame is going to cost REAL money instead of minerals!"

If you want to make a claim and an argument about something happening, use proper facts and make your case. It is unappealing and makes me want to hit you all in the face when you make these claims with no basis.

Everybody in here needs to get a brain of their own, look at the facts, and come up with their own point of view instead of getting sucked into groupthink.

[don]

Look at it this way, which is better:

1) LAN being removed and perhaps not usable for, at the most, a few months. But, Blizzard gets millions in extra revenue for what they deserve and are owed by the Koreans for their mass piracy all of these years. This money is then put back into developing the things we love.
2) We get LAN from day one (a feature we'd have regardless). Blizzard gets screwed for a lifetime and they have less money to invest in the things we enjoy so much from them.

There are 3 kinds of people I can think of:

1. People who will buy the game regardless
2. People who will never buy the game; will pirate the game regardless
3. People who will Not Buy or Buy the game depending on reviews
3a. They will pirate the game first, review it themselves and decide after if they will buy
3b. They will read reviews first and decide if they will pirate or not
3c. They will read reviews first and decide if they want to get into SC2 or not altogether

For #2, Blizzard cant do anything about it. There will be no convincing them, Blizzard never "lost" any money from them.

For #3, lets say that there was a pirate version with LAN. How can the legit version with no LAN regain Blizzard money that "is then put back into developing the things we love."?

[mikill]

Well this is crappy... No LAN! I think this is a bit of a scam. Blizzard should allow LAN to the comsumer. I mean you already have to have an internet connection to install the game, thus they can track if you have a legal copy of the game. But what really annoys me is that Blizzard puts us all into the pot saying we are all the problem but only a few spoil it for the majority. And this whole piracy thing do you know where 85% of the piracy occurs? China, Russia, Germany, and Eastern Asia. But what did Blizzard do? Blizzard decided to keep the game at Teen rating or the equivalent in respected countries to promote their game, to allow it to be sold in such countries.

[DemolitionSquid]

Honestly? Threads like this and the people posting in them make me not want to visit the forum. All I see is irrational bandwagoning saying, "Blizzard is charging for everything! Soon every unit you want to make ingame is going to cost REAL money instead of minerals!"

If you want to make a claim and an argument about something happening, use proper facts and make your case. It is unappealing and makes me want to hit you all in the face when you make these claims with no basis.

Everybody in here needs to get a brain of their own, look at the facts, and come up with their own point of view instead of getting sucked into groupthink.

Yeah! Free your mind! Be an individual.

And my individual self thinks this is all BS and we should have LAN.

[protoswarrior]

I might be speaking out of turn here, but here is a thought:


From BW days, how many of you ACTUALLY used the LAN feature and how often?



I'm do not wish to take sides here, but I want to point out that the feature itself is useful for creating live tournament events either privately or publicly. What I don't think is relevant to most people buying SC2 is this feature.
Why?
Because that majority of people will not be hosting LAN parties every weekend (exaggeration here).

Is this relevant to you? If yes, then I commend you for asking for it, but what about the rest of you?


EDIT:

And, TRD makes a good point. There are a lot of people here who are just like "yeah, grab your pitchforks and torches me laddies!" without really understanding (?) or vocalizing their thoughts with reliability and at least some objectivity.

I believe everyone should calm down and take a deep breath.

colored for emphasis

[TheRabidDeer]

Yeah! Free your mind! Be an individual.

And my individual self thinks this is all BS and we should have LAN.

It isnt about being an individual, its about having your own thought process instead of latching onto an idea. It is very possible for multiple people to have a similar reason to care about not having LAN, so long as you come up with your own argument and logical reasons for caring. Be honest about it too.

How many of you have the NEED of LAN? Why does battle.net 2.0 not fulfill that need? What would it need to do to fulfill that need? Having a professional LAN version for big events was one of the necessary things with SC2, since (as we saw) if bnet goes down for a big event its a big deal that cost money for all involved, even the players.