Your argument is that people want to play SC2, a $60 computer game with reasonably expensive hardware requirements, and can't access high speed internet? Nevermind the fact that even with dial-up you will be able to play over Battle.net, I have to sincerely ask if you're reading your own premises.
Some people don't live in an area where they offer high speed. I'm one of those people. Even if they did, why should I pay more just to support the massive bandwidth of a battle.net lan, its a waste of money with what should be offered as LAN. There's absolutely no good reason to remove it.
They claim it's because pirates installed virtual lans to play with their friends using the UDP ability. Well if the pirates took the time to find and install a virtual lan, then they're definitely going to take the time to find other methods like lan patches or emulated battle.net. which WILL exist.
"Blizzard is better at making games than anyone else so they should be okay with some people stealing their games."
Is that basically the gist of your argument here, based on that evidence? That's what I'm getting from it. If not, you need to give some evidence that might actually be remotely relevant.
Never said that. They're removing features that legitimate users like, because of pirates apparently. That's a load of BS, because it won't stop pirates, and if they don't want to pay for it, they'll find a way.
They aren't being greedy, they have over 50 no doubt very well-paid employees who have been working on StarCraft 2's game design for over 2 years, probably closer to 4 or 5, and that doesn't even include the Music, Cinematics, Graphics, or other paid teams which guess what: are separate from WoW. Any venture in capitalism is made for profit. If they are losing significant (read: ENORMOUS) amounts of money because of pirating, which shows no signs of slowing, why in the fucking world would you expect them not to do something about it? You seem to forget the fact that Blizzard doesn't work for people, they work for themselves and always have done so: this isn't anything new nor should anything else be expected.
There are other ways. A steam like system seems to be highly effective. When you remove key features of your game because of pirates, then you're altering the game for pirates and not for what your fanbase actually wants, therefore they're not making a game for their fans, they're making one for pirates. If they're doing this for themselves, then they've just joined the ranks of companies like EA, Epic, and so on. They pump out terrible games to meet a quota.
They have a problem, they are doing what they can to remedy it, and you're whining because you will have to plug an extra cable into the wall if you want to LAN? Boo fucking hoo. If it proves to be laggy to do so, then you might have room to complain. Given what I opened with in my first paragraph, I don't see that being the case, and you are arguing as if it's already true without any evidence of this whatsoever.
I'm complaining because it is now impossible for me to have more than 2-3 people at my house playing SC2 at one time. I was hoping for 8+ player games going, that simply isn't going to happen anymore. Evidently you don't even know why my argument is yet. I actually have whats called "real life friends" where we like games and actually do this thing called "see each other face to face" and sometimes play games side by side.
If you ever had a good number of real life friends that would LAN with you, you'd understand why people are so pissed.
Wasn't relevant to piracy, more to (as I said) cheating, abusing and what's becoming the next step forward in advancing the competitive nature of the multiplayer. Guess what: that takes money too. The less money Blizzard loses to pirates, the more they can invest in creating leagues, competitions, new games, etc. Big picture much?
You know of course, LAN has nothing to do with cheating. There's no real packet manipulation involved with starcraft hacks. Starcraft hacks work in single player, lan, battle.net, etc. You need figure out that hacks have zero relation to LAN. I don't understand how LANs abuse anything, either.
Definitely true, if Blizzard decides to use netcode that hasn't been improved in 12 years and they decide to do things differently than WC3 for some reason. If you want to base your argument on that without any experience with the new style of LAN, be my guest.
Huh? How is this relevant to anything? You can pretty much expect that there's going to be more data going back and forth during netplay, its a game coming out 12 years later.
Already gave evidence of my claims, waiting for yours. The only evidence you provided was a list of top selling games as if that has any relevance whatsoever to what Blizzard should be doing to resolve the huge issue of piracy.
What evidence? Like how the absence of a LAN feature is going to make all pirates all of a sudden go out and buy the game?
Clearly you're much more knowledgeable about networking than me.
I haven't messed around with it enough, nor do I know how much networking knowledge you have. But if your networking knowledge is anything like your knowledge on piracy, hacks and such works, then I'm guessing most of what you know is stuff you just made up.
None.