Quote:
Originally Posted by 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or people who play with randoms from battle.net during a LAN, you need new friends, not for blizzard to support an outdated playstyle.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.
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Your missing a big part of the traditional lan party, the social part. Being in the same room or house as the people you are playing with. I "host" a traditional lan party at times because I happen to have the equipment needed on hand. 2 routers ( 1 on cable 1 on DSL), both get hooked to a freebsd box used as NAT/Firewall/DHCP. The freebsd box is hooked to a 3Com SuperStack II hub (10/100 24 port).
Overkill?
Nope, had all 24 ports filled with friends and friends of friends once or twice.
Fun?
OH HELL YEAH. We are not always paying the same game at the same time and at times some people will sit out an just watch or kibitz maybe trade some files amongst themselves.
Maybe show a buddy how to do that really hard spot in Half Life 2 EP3 (example) by firing up HL2 and playing it for a bit. Sometimes a little one on one with the rest crowded around cheering or talking some trash happens too, usually after a hard multiplayer battle...
Don't know about you but I don't buy all the games that come out, but when you get 15 or so gamers in the same room you get a very wide selection of whats available. Good time to maybe try that game you've been thinking about? Same goes with hardware since everyone brings their own system.
Need a bit of help computer related? Again, that many "old school geeks" in one place there is bound to be a few programing gurus or a hardcore hardware fan that could quite possibly know just what you need.
In other words if you have never been to a traditional style lan party man you've missed out on a lot of fun, even if it is just a homebrew one.