I stopped playing when Blizzard made you create an online account to play your newly purchased single-player game.
and no lan play.
wonder if that kind of friction kills things.
and no lan play.
wonder if that kind of friction kills things.
The lesser known part is that most people there did not play the game on their home PCs, they played it at PC cafes (PC bangs). These establishments engaged in large scale piracy of the game, installing it on hundreds of PCs without a license. They used the LAN play feature to bypass Blizzard entirely. So the lack of LAN play and the account requirement are a direct response to mass piracy of their game in Korea.
If you didn't intend to play on Battle.Net or play the single player campaigns, you never needed more than the Spawn installation
I would seriously question if these were actually pirates copies at all ...
Or maybe they did, and people like you and me were just left behind. Maybe a cultural difference between those who experienced LAN parties and those who didn't.
I think this is it more than anything. If all you know is "quick match" matchmaking, it's hard to realize what you're missing. LAN parties were really awesome.
If I need permission from your server to play, then it's not really mine. And the whole thing with StarCraft for me and my friends is that this was our thing.
Several of us are now network engineers because we had to learn that skillset to play StarCraft at a LAN party without lag. The phone lines weren't cutting it.
Injecting blizzard servers into the loop, to be tolerated without recourse, totally ruined it for those of us who didn't live near a decent ISP. We were so excited about the sequel and it turned out to be pretty much unplayable online.
If you already need permission to even boot your PC, what more is it to need permission to start a game?
It’s a sad age we’re living in.