Twitter remains abuzz at the news, with fans variously describing Blizzard's surprise move as "totally insane," "just...wrong," and, worst of all, "EPIC FAIL." An online petition has amassed over 25,000 signatures so far.
Although Blizzard's keen to emphasize the features of their online service -- which will track player stats and provide rich community functions -- it's seen as a preemptive strike against potential Starcraft II pirates, as those with illegal copies of the game would be banned from connecting to Blizzard's servers. A somewhat similar move by EA last year resulted in its massive hit Spore racking up thousands of one-star reviews on Amazon, and being slapped with a class-action lawsuit.
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Everyone is always outraged about one thing or an other. Just STFU and play the damn game. It's going to be great with or with out it...
Their justifications for dropping LAN support do not hold water.
It will do nothing to stop piracy on top of their authenticated server system. It will just pointlessly up network latencies for people playing across a LAN, as data will have to needlessly traverse the net.
I'm sure their will be a workaround but this is definitely a big blow. I played Starcraft about a million times and all of them were LAN.
Blizzard has found a way to circumvent piracy: World of Warcraft is subscription-based and all the upcoming games (Starcraft 2, Diablo 3) will be tied to a non-transferrable Battle.net account.
Sure, the games will be pirated somehow but not as easily and probably without multiplayer support.
It's going to work and no petition will cause ActiBlizz to change their minds.
I will wager that 2/3 of the "outraged" people are actually going.
'You mean we're actually going to have to BUY it if we want to do something besides play the single player campaign'?