My thoughts on the NO-LAN in Starcraft II controversy

Posted by Lipton on June 30th, 2009 filed in StarCraft News

Starcraft gamers everywhere are up in arms about the statement from Blizzard that there will not be LAN support in Starcraft II. Karune makes a statement about the issue in a reply to a Bnet forumer:

Development time for StarCraft II have far exceeded the original StarCraft in both the standard of quality and duration, to ensure the highest in quality RTS experience we can possibly create.
Not only is it free to play online, Battle.net 2.0 is designed with the new generation of online community and eSports in mind.
As long as there are people playing our games, we will continue to support them, and we have continued with this tradition with our legacy titles like the original StarCraft.
StarCraft II was created with eSports as a cornerstone in design philosophy. StarCraft evolved into an eSport.
Map Editor will be better than any we have ever released.
?? - will have to wait and see

For me personally- I loved LAN parties, but the direction in which Battle.net is headed, I would always choose to play on Battle.net > 99% of the time and even if for whatever reason I did decide to lug my computer to a friend's house in this day of age (<1%), I would still be playing with them on Battle.net against others at their place.

- Karune

Personally I'm looking at this whole situation from a stand point that Blizzard knows what it is doing and is purposely removing LAN from SC2 for reasons that we don't fully understand or know yet... However I believe this has some to do with Blizzard's new take on eSports.

Blizzard I feel wants to own Starcraft 2 eSports, what I mean by that is they may want to be a governing body of some sort; controlling the flow of media, broadcasting and the running of legitimate approved leagues and tournaments. This is somewhat evident with their recent partnership with GOMTV.net

GOMTV + Blizzard = eSports

Having everything take place online is one of the best ways to control that, so Battle.net 2.0 (which I'm sure will blow us all away) has to be an integeral part to the equation.

With the original Starcraft we all played on 56k modems (at least the oldest of us) LAN was needed for lag free fun with friends. However these days with high-speed broadband everywhere, T1-T3 lines, FiOS etc etc, there isn't any excuse not to play online.

I do see an issue with college campuses not being able to host the best in house tournaments or just normal LAN parties, however Blizzard is taking eSports serious now. Starcraft becoming the best RTS ever as well as first true eSport was all by accident. There are now hundreds of leagues, thousands of tournaments run by all kinds of people and organizations, out of that chaos we have Korean professional Starcraft.

With Starcraft 2, I believe Blizz wants to cast a much larger and grander net so to speak. This is exactly what the future of eSports needs imho, there are so many stigmas and sterotypes with gaming, dis-organization, badly run organizations (cough CPL cough) here...
One governing body ie: Blizzard leading the way for global eSports(Starcraft II) is the preferred situation imho.

From the very start I hoped that Blizzard would treat Starcraft II as an eSport first, game 2nd, this is what the competitive gaming comunity needs and wants, and will quickly get over missing LAN support. I'd like to add in closing that I doubt even 1% of the people crying about missing LAN support will not end up buying the game on day 1.