Frosstbyte

I cannot believe that this is a point of contention at this point in our technological progress. Internet connections are not what they were when SC came out. Computers are not what they were when SC came out. The number of people that this will really stop from playing SC 2 the way that they want to is so infinitesimally small as to be irrelevant, which is precisely why it's not supported. The LAN party as a concept lives on and lives on strong (as someone who does it rather often WoW). The LAN party as necessitating an actual LAN was slaughtered by fast, stable internet connections.

If you LAN with people who download terabytes of torrents and fuck your ping while they're not playing or people who play with randoms from battle.net during a LAN, you need new friends, not for blizzard to support an outdated playstyle. If you want to play by yourself with your own friends, make private, password protected games. Seriously, come on.

This is not some ridiculous DRM that horribly inconveniences the trustworthy to ineffectually inconvenience the people who will try to steal it anyway. This is a company who has provided (relatively) stable online play to millions of individuals and made untold millions of dollars doing so over the past five years. I think they felt confident they could provide a robust and stable system for everyone who wants to play SC2, too, without needing to add extra code to support old school geeks who want to have traditional LAN parties just to have traditional LAN parties.