About the LAN quoth the Blizzard, Never more.

After debating this very topic with friends for the past week or so, I still find myself bitter and angry about this choice by Blizzard. The idea of not being able to play Starcraft without internet access bothers me quite a bit. Not that I can't play via battle.net, but because I prefer to play on a LAN. My experience with B.net has not really been good any time I've been on there. Between map hacks, spam bots, bad lag, and connection problems, I've never had a "good" time on battle.net. Now granted Blizzard claims that b.net2 will be worlds better, but I just don't agree with the change.

Not being able to play via LAN ruins a lot, in my opinion. Now I've got friends that disagree, and they bring up great points. Like, I've not played Starcraft on a LAN that did not have internet access since Radcon 2000 or so. When I play here at home, we have net access. When I play at friends house, we have net access. So frankly, there is no issue with not being able to connect to battle.net. But, I do find exception with the fact that I won't be able to play the game if say, our internet goes down. Or if Battle.net is having issues/updates. And these are just my personal reasons.

There are a lot more reasons that don't apply to me. Like, say, the college folks who's IT people have blocked all the ports needed to access online games. Or the places like Radcon, where they have a fairly decent LAN setup all weekend, but no internet access. These are all places that Starcraft and Brood Wars did amazingly well, and at this point in time, Starcraft 2 will be completely unplayable.

The Alpha testers have already stated that the Alpha was LAN compatible. Really Blizzard, this is something you should think long and hard about.