pre·clude/priˈklo͞od/
Verb:

Prevent from happening; make impossible.
(of a situation or condition) Prevent someone from doing something.

I'm not native English so maybe I'm using it wrong but I think it should work. I don't see why they wouldn't focus on online play? If I want to play with a friend it's 100 times more likely we'll both have internet capable computers ready for us to play together than it is for there to be a LAN setup we can use. It would require dragging around computers (like in the olden days) just to be able to play a game. (yes I don't have many laptop gamer friends)

Not only that but a lot of 'friends' these days are people you know from the internet. You can't even LAN with them because they simply don't live in your direct surroundings.

I personally think LAN is a pretty damn small market. Sure it's there, but Online is a lot bigger.

I don't think Online is 'significantly worse', but I admit I have a good internet connection and that not everyone necessarily has access to that at their home (yet)

Are you deliberately ignoring what he's saying, or is it just misunderstanding? From where I'm standing you're both saying the same thing: "Bandwidth doesn't matter". What hedwards is adding is: "... but latency does".

Which, to be fair, shouldn't be an issue if you're both on a 'LAN' party or something and are probably sharing the same network.

Ha, I have that guys autograph!

just to throw another rock into blizzard hating basket - open beta for diablo3 in this weekend. I tried many times to play it and always got disconnected and so i didnt had the chance to play the game at all.. the future of blizz games - online only games.. its like new genre oorpg, except d3 isnt rpg so it should be more like oohacknslash :D

It's an Open beta stresstest. They had lower caps to stresstest the servers and connection issues during the first day. I've pretty much been able to log in effortlessly since yesterday evening. Just tried and got straight in as well. Edit: Scratch that. Login yes, resume game no at the moment. Edit2: ow, now it worked.

... and this is somehow a big deal, or what?

i'll never get 'pro-gaming'.

That's what I said in my first post :)

I'd just like to add my 2 cents to the discussion since I have a slow connection that gets clogged a lot and decreases my playing experience a LOT.

I'm on an overpriced 1Mbps connection which is shared by our apartment building. The users actually number 4, however, so oftentimes when nobody else is really using the line, SC2 plays fine. But as you can imagine, an internet line shared by 4 people can't really be clear all the time, and when 1 person is surfing and loads an image-heavy page, I start lagging the other players down. When someone also has a download going, my ping skyrockets to anywhere from 600ms to 1200ms, sustained for hours!!!! This obviously lags the game to an unplayable level, and I end up leaving matches and either get off the computer or play a GOG.

I guess I'd agree with bandwidth not affecting gameplay directly until a certain low point, but I'd even disagree with 32kbps working fine because that's roughly 3.5? 4.0?KB/s and that WILL cause lag. My "3G" goes at 50kbps and it hardly manages to load modern webpages, much less handle even my measly 40APM.

I mean, I understand where Blizzard is coming from -- the number of people with no internet problems is getting larger, especially in urban areas, but LAN still does have its uses. I mean, even within South Korea, my co-workers and I played Brood War on LAN whenever possible, not on BNet. It's quicker and better in many ways.

Interesting fact, during the SC2 beta there before other countries were able to play, we were not able to play SC2 together because I had a Korean citizen number to register on BNet with, while my co-workers, being Canadian and American, could not play SC2 because BNet believed "they weren't Korean and therefore not in Korea" despite physically being there with me and having lived there for years. All registered internet cafes in Korea had legal access to SC2 beta at the time. Why do you even need a BNet account to play the game in an authorized country, on a registered internet cafe running legal copies of the game, working LAN, and the people are sitting so close to me we're sharing second-hand smoke?

Edit: Quick offtopic question, everyone watch the Iron Squid tourney? There are some amazing amazing games there, cast by TB and dApollo, downloadable from ironsquidgaming at Youtube if you have a downloader. I just started watching the old ones a couple days ago and the games are soooo goooooood. :)

You will when you're about to win $100,000 and your connection dies you will get it. :)

its not about testing stress servers.. its about mandatory online gaming connection..
everything that is mandatory is evil.. and when simple people start defenting big corporations that lan must not be implemented then there is real chaos.

*Sigh* these days everything gets more and more complicated.
Battlenet? Online-Connectivity? Routers? ISPs?
Man it's a 1-vs-1! In the good old days: 2 Network-Cards + 1 Crossover-Cable and u were ready to kick some ass.

No, it's still a good idea to throttle or disable it. Peoples' porn torrents will suck away all the bandwidth or some other stupid shit. if you have internet you typically limit it to one machine to pull down patches (though when you play well, you'll have the patches for the game on USB and ask everyone to come with a fresh install or the target patch version).

Consumer broadband isn't any faster than it was 8 years ago in the US and you can't just let 8 people, even if they're "friends", on your connection.
I feel bad for the guy who almost beat MarineKing, my understanding was it would have been a huge upset and he'd have probably pulled a sponsorship or something due to it. I don't follow SC2 competitive gaming but I loosely understand it, it kind of smells like a set-up to me...


I just don't get Blizzard, "We want to make a competitive game, we're even willing to make it less fun for 'normal' players in order to make it competition worthy."

"Hey, let's make it reliant on a spotless connection to Battle.net so it screws up at tourneys a lot!"

I hardly said LAN 'must not be implemented'. I'm arguing that it's a pretty small market.