Overly Positive Thoughts: No LAN For You!

So a good friend and one of my loyal 9 readers, Shouryu, happened to drop me a pseudo request on Facebook about writing on the distinct lack of LAN in Blizzard’s upcoming Starcraft II, and the ensuing fan movement to keep it in. Wow, I’ve never really received a request before! It’s like I’m a real blog or something! Well, all I have to say, Shour, is you asked for it.

So if you click the link above, and hopefully come back here to me, you’ll see that Blizzard removing the ability to LAN it up with your buddies has set off everyone’s favorite online cliche, the “internet petition”. Now guys (and those one or two gals that actually play Starcraft, so cute!), I do have to first off compliment you for giving that old school method a try. I mean, considering the wildly successful track record of online petitions and how effective they are at totally changing how the developers think, how could you not? There’s nothing like thousands of /signed posts with little to no content or reasoning to make a developer give pause, right?

But people – maybe you’re all being Eeyore on this shiz and you’re not looking at the potential benefits of not being able to play with your friends in the same room. Blizzard rep Karune talked about Battle.net being better, right? Don’t you guys want to  enjoy the clearly high quality community that has been affectionately labeled the “BNet kiddies”? You should relish the opportunity to clash guns and ships with people who have a clear handling of the colliquialism of the English language, like “n00b”, “roflol pwned”, and “fuk u hacker”. Expand your vocabulary – yet another  benefit to being completely on Battle.net.

Besides, Blizzard is trying to stop rampant piracy out there. They’re stamping out those pirated servers and hacked code because boy, that’d really cut into the millions-heavy money pie that Blizzard would be making on this game, and they want the whole pie, damnit. How can Blizzard execs swim in their profits properly if they’re short a million to fill a room? It’d be a travesty, and you should be more sensitive, petitioners.

This isn’t Diablo 2, either, oh no – surely the code will be ironclad and completely inpenetrable – pirate proof, dare I say. There’s no way that someone is totally going to hack up some way to enable LAN on modded code and distribute it anyway. No, Blizzard is the king of polish, and they’ll be polishing that code so hard you won’t even be able to see it all in one game, but three! Take that, pirates!

But let’s go back to how removing LAN shows that the Great Blue Hope of Blizzard is looking out for you. Do you really want to discuss your hopes and dreams, the way your day went, or talk about inside jokes with a bunch of people in the same room as you? No way! Blizzard is trying to save you from That Guy Who Prattles On About Shit You Care Nothing About, Attention Whore Gaming Girl, and Dude Who Probably Hasn’t Showered In Weeks – all people who definitely appear at LAN parties. When society fails you by throwing you into a room with these caricatures and not with real friends (since Blizzard knows you don’t have a few that would game with you, right) Blizzard is there to catch you and give you the Internet – a place where you can game in relative peace and quiet and talk all the crap you want about others without fear of getting punched in the face repeatedly. They’re so sensitive like that.

So get on the no-LAN train, Starcraft 2 fans, because Blizzard’s using it to make online play a better place for all of you. Don’t you feel better now?

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