By now it's common knowledge amongst Starcraft fans awaiting the release of Starcraft II that offline LAN support has been officially dropped from the game, citing warm fuzzy reasons like better-integrated community interaction or something which equally fails to hide the fact that they're worried about things like Hamachi and piracy at LANs causing them to lose revenue. Nobody's been fooled, and reports would suggest that they're trying to make a sucky idea suck at little as possible while still being a pain in the arse.
But is it that sucky an idea? It sure is for me. I think it sucks for a couple of reasons:
- I play Starcraft at LANs where there is no Internet connection. Battle.net authentication of any sort is simply going to be impossible.
- In principle, as a paying customer I am having my flexibility in how I want to play the game restricted because they're worried about the people who don't pay for the game. I consider that counter-productive and immoral.
The game is a long way out yet so I'm not going to make any definitive statements yet, but I'll probably buy the game anyway. Despite the fact that I don't like some of the things they're doing the game should still be of high quality and I'll pay for that and play it under the restrictions imposed.
I even suspect that these measures will be fairly effective in reducing piracy. Emulating an entire authenticated battle.net server and convincing the game to use it is like making a fake Steam server---it's not a small task and will take a lot of time and effort from the cracking community. Hacking direct LAN support into a game specifically designed not to have it will probably take even more effort.
Unfortunately my only way of protesting these measures is to not buy the game. Yet I think I will anyway. I'm damn sure that hundreds of thousands of others will too, particularly in countries where Internet is ubiquitous (including the Starcraft capital of the world, South Korea).
So Blizzard is not going to change a damn thing. They still get rich and they reassure their stakeholders that they're taking measures to prevent piracy. Those measures might even work, at the risk of pissing off some fraction of their userbase.
Blizzard wants to make a buck out of its games. They're making the game so they make the rules. If you don't like that you have a choice. You can either not buy the game, or you can buy it and implicitly accept what you're getting yourself into. By extension, if you do choose to buy the game you don't have the right to complain about restrictions you knew were going to be there.
If you want a game to support features not motivated by commercial interests you have to build one without commercial constraints. That means free and open source software. Do any of the existing RTS projects measure up to Starcraft II? Almost certainly not. In the FPS area some are up there with the commercial guys (Nexuiz and Urban Terror, for example).
If you want to be more constructive, find, contribute to or make some free games.
Just remember: actions speak louder than words. A vocal minority is just that. Vocal.