Well, this is very disapointing.
On the plus side:
I said, "In-game advertising" - that's what the press release says, and it's what Massive specializes in. I didn't say boilerplate square ads at the launch pad or lobby like what you get now. In-game is in-game, and it's already happening (check the WoW mountain dew battle bots where if you want to use them, you need to go to an out of game website page full of ads, then back in game to see the bots consume the mountain dew). I don't think it's a very good idea to try to justify buying a game (and in the case of WoW) paying a subscription fee for the penalty of having to watch advertising. Does that sound like a good idea to you? Hopefully this will help you to understand why "People see that as a big deal."
When sitting at a friends house, with less than 5 people present, playing online isn't really a bad idea. However, going to a mass organised LAN with 150 people present, and stable internet access becomes an issue. There's a difference between LANs and LAN Parties; one is an organised event where hundreds of people come to play games together. The other is a bunch of friends at someones house eating junkfood and steam rolling other players online. By removing LAN from Starcraft 2, any LAN appeal the game may have had has been destroyed. Several of the major gaming Tournaments around the world are not played online.
The difference between five ping(usually the fake minimum latency used in lan) and fifty ping(reasonable for good connections in a multiplayer RTS) is rather noticable.
Why would you want to put up with 50 ping to play people in the same room? Restricting lan and direct connect is an annoyance for the customer, the pirate doesn't really matter.
Your game is also finished whenever the servers go off line. Yeah, maybe Blizzard will outlast their fan base. Maybe Activision will pull a really fucking stupid, go bankrupt the next year, and take Battlenet with them.
Adding extra layers into the list of things that can prevent you from using your purchase is never a good idea.
We need to tell Blizzard that there is no chance that we will buy this game unless they enable LAN and take the copy protection out. Here are my reasons.
#1. The pirates are going to pirate it anyways. The Developers waste money on it and lose profits.
#2. If Blizzard goes under or decides to kill battlenet then your game is now a piece of non-functional software. I still play games from the 1980's. People still play the first Starcraft. If Starcraft 2 is going to be very good, then I will add it to my long term gaming collection.
#3. Battlenet has been slow many times in the past. What if the servers crash for the weekend? What if you are on a road trip and have no network? Suppose you wanted to install the game on the road but can't "activate" it because of no connection?
#4. I don't want to "HAVE" to create a user account just to play a game. I am already getting upset with stardock doing much the same thing with Sins and updates. I will not do it with another game, because I had a sorry time trying to download the update. It took me several days to get it and I run on 20/20 FIOS. It is absolutly infuriating when your download goes slow, stops, fails, generates errors, or any other of weird trouble you can think of.
#5. If we keep allowing companies to install code on our machines, or software that gives them some ability to control our computers, then eventually the day will come where you will need to click okay to 3 EULA's just wipe your rear end and if natures calls at the wrong time of the day, your account gets turned off without any fair reason or warning and you are out the $$$ you just spent for your entertainment. We should not spend money on companies that introduce mechanisms that require "External/3rd Party" Authorization mechanizms. If we let the creeping corporate giants get into our machines it will be hard to get them back.
The game industry is full of flops because a game was rushed to release and still had several bugs that never got worked out because the company failed after producing the stupid flop.
I wont buy it anyway, generic rts games hold zero interest to me in my internet defunct state.
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