Blizzard confirms Starcraft II will not have LAN support

[Leevers]

Source: 3FL

In what is a rather disappointing move, Blizzard's Rob Pardo has confirmed that Blizzard will not be shippping Starcraft II with support for LAN multiplayer games, and there are no intentions to introduce it at a later date.

Rob Pardo had this to say about the issue:

"we don't have any plans to support LAN... we will not support it."

Much of what arguably made the original game so successful was the ability to battle it out via LAN with friends, which I have fond memories of doing myself. So this effectively means that the only multiplayer capability will be via online gameplay through Blizzard's Battle.net matchmaking system. Hopefully this isn't the start of a trend, as proper multiplayer (both offline and online) is a standard that most players have come to expect from games for a number of years now.

[C4]

I'd say this would have been motivated by piracy concerns, pretty pathetic to punish the playerbase because of actions of some.

[Ancient_One]

Rather disappointing but will not stop me from buying it at this stage.

[Bawheidbob]

Cant say i have ever had the inclination to drag my rig around the countryside, not really the done thing in these parts.

Though i do know it is a popular pastime in some areas, i would not of thought it would of been such a hard thing to put in place. Perhaps just a sign of the times

[Mortlmike]

Its not really a problem because if battle.net 2.0 works as well as the old battle.net there was never any downtime or problems with it. I don't think I have ever had any problems with battle.net, and I like the stat tracking, etc. Me and my son play on battle.net all the time when we could just play lan.

mortlmike

[Drac]

Originally Posted by Mortlmike

Its not really a problem because if battle.net 2.0 works as well as the old battle.net there was never any downtime or problems with it.

It's a problem because at a typical LAN event you have one ADSL connection feeding 30+ machines. It's quite impossible to play over the internet like that unless you run a net cafe with a very fat dedicated internet pipe.

Not having LAN support for what many consider the biggest multiplayer RTS franchise of all time seems, well, wrong.

I'll still get it because I don't play RTS multiplayer, but that still kinda blows. I bet all he net cafe owners in Korea had a heart attack when they heard that, think of all the extra bandwidth it'll cost them.

[Reoh]

Bring back the LAN petition (over 57k signed).

LAN in Starcraft 2 Please. - Signatures

[Bawheidbob]

Thanks for that Reoh, ill sign it for them, what Drac said seemed valid to me so many people would miss out on there fun.

[Drac]

Also remember that if Starcraft has no LAN support, neither will Diablo III, and that most defiantly is a game I'll be playing at LANs.

[BrAdolf]

These are the sort of games people play at Lans ALL the time - Starcraft, Diablo, Warcraft (the rts) Gees it may be ok for the lucky people in America and China where they all have optical fibre connections but where i am and the rest of the blokes i know that want to play, we all have pretty crap connections because thats the best we can get in our area. Ah well stuff them, first they want you to buy different copies of the game if you want to use the different races and now they screw us by taking lan out - WoW has turned them into money hungry fools. If there's no lan, then I for one am not buying this game or Diablo. End of Rant.