No LAN for Diablo III Too?
Looks as though Blizzard is sticking to its guns in regards to making Battle.net the multiplayer destination for all of its games.
Recently Blizzard revealed that StarCraft II will not offer LAN support when the first installment hits the market by the end of the year. Although the company cited piracy and security problems, Blizzard's overall plan is to make Battle.net the multiplayer destination for all of its games. With that said, the news that Diablo III may not offer LAN support should not be quite as shocking. In fact, gamers should count on Blizzard not supporting LAN from now on.
Strangely enough, the comments made by Blizzard Community Manager "Bashiok" in regards to LAN support were deleted from the Blizzard forums. However, this website managed to grab the discussion before mysterious forces magically eradicated the topic. His response was actually sparked by one commenter complaining that removing LAN support only hurts legitimate buyers. After all, pirates will take the time to reverse engineer the game and enable LAN support anyway. Bashiok didn't seem to agree.
"More so than overbearing/invasive anti-piracy measures that would affect everyone who buys the game regardless of how they're going to play it instead of just those that may want a LAN feature?" Bashiok responded. "I would doubt it. I don't know a lot about it, Diablo III isn't really facing the brunt of the Battle.net 2.0 features just yet, but I think that removing LAN in an attempt to avoid more severe anti-piracy measures is pretty cool. We're saying 'Hey, we're pretty sure you're going to love our game. The multiplayer is really the best part though. In order to get in on that that we'd just like to make sure you bought the game. Cool?'"
While LAN is highly unlikely, Activision Blizzard made it perfectly clear that consumers who purchase StarCraft II (and more than likely Diablo III) will have the ability to play on Battle.net with no additional fee. Although Diablo and Diablo II offered LAN support, consumers who purchased either title could play multiplayer games online via Battle.net free without an additional fee.

So much for me buying starcraft 2/Diablo 3. Stop smoking the weed blizzard.
So much for me buying starcraft 2/Diablo 3. Stop smoking the weed blizzard.
They're not doing this for anti-piracy. If that was all they were worried about they could add an internet authentication method to the code but still allow LAN play. You'd still have to have an internet connection to LAN but once you authenticate you'd be fine. I agree with another poster, this is the first step towards some sort of pay service.
I get that it is a way to make pirating software harder but cant they just force you to i register at battle.net and verify before you are able to setup a local server?
This just forces me to create a dummy battle.net server and run from there which would be against the eula i guess.
However there is no way i want to stop hosting my LAN's and i would prefer to play (and therefore host) at least starcraft 2 there.
Anyone remember you could play starcraft with 1 cd for 3 players on a lan
I wanted to get it too, but it's been so long that I first heard about it that I just don't give a crap anymore.
what if your alarm went off every time you came home? no matter what? yet when a burglar came, they just switched off your power and stopped it from going off? would you be pissed off then? we get angry about DRM cause in general, it has more negative effects on legitimate buyers than pirates, at the very best, it just puts everyone in the same boat as pirates, effectively treating us all like criminals. most DRM solutions are the equivalent to "whats that? someone murdered someone with a gun? well, guns are illegal now. huh? a drink driver caused an accident? fine, will ban drinking... and cars..."
even more infuriating in this case, is that blizzard - which must be the richest company in the world cause of WoW - just wants everyone to connect to battlenet so they can make money off advertising, and control, or at least keep an eye on what everyone is doing. i mean, they are as bad as apple.
The twelve of you that might not buy it because it lacks LAN support will be far outweighed by the ten million people that are going to buy it regardless. It's not like they cut the real multiplayer or single player out. Blizzard learned a long time ago (when they released WoW) where the real cash is.