Blizzard aren't being completely honest here. They aren't just making Battle.net so awesome people will want to pay for the game — they're specifically disabling LAN multiplayer so that people have no choice but to use Blizzard's servers for any real gameplay.
Fighting piracy by making people authenticate with a server just to use a feature that would otherwise work fine without an Internet connection? Back in my day, we called that "DRM."
Hopefully they are not so stupid as to "disable" LAN play. What they have probably done is to never have written LAN netcode in the first place. There is a very large difference between those two - one implies maliciousness, one implies that they didn't devote the manpower necessary to get it running anywhere other than Battle.net (which presumably is doing something more complex than connecting several IPs together for a net game).
I absolutely hate this drive of killing lan games in the name of DRM. 4 of us traditionally met up once or twice a year to play strat games like Starcraft, War 3, CoH, Dawn Of War on a LAN (2 copies usually hacked, £120 for a few nights play? You're having a laugh). Would any of us buy the game otherwise? No. Do ANY of us buy the games now that we can't play this way? No.
THQ say strat games are dead, I wonder whether the truth is that they killed them themselves. Dawn Of War 2 with the crapness that is Windows Live was horrid. DoW we played 3-4 years, all of us ended up with legit copies and expansion packs. DoW2 one of us has it, none of us have bought the upgrades, all because we couldn't play it socially.
Shot themselves in the foot imho. If they had any sense they'd enable LAN & allow distribution of temporary free keys on the same LAN. Totally one perspective I know, but I've met other people who play games this way, as a social thing, so I can't believe I'm the only gamer lamenting the frankly idiotic battle.net type solution. I care sod all about achievements in what I see as a social game.
It's like everyone having to bring their own box of Risk to be able to play it. Dumb.
What they've disabled is unauthenticated LAN games. The plan, at least this time last year, was to have connections try to go over the LAN if the players are within a LAN. All the players must however authenticate with the Battle.net server.
I asked Canessa whether the solution his team is working on might include a pseudo-LAN connection, where the game would only check in with Battle.net to authenticate before reverting to typical LAN behavior.
"Something like that," he replied. "Maintaining a connection with Battle.net, I don't know if it's once or periodically, but then also having a peer-to-peer connection between players to facilitate a very low-ping, high-bandwidth connection.. those are the things that we're working on."
Thank you for the source link - I stand corrected, but I will wait until I see it in action before passing judgement. In retrospect, it makes sense that they would have some way of running a game specifically for high-level competitive tournaments as a percent of their market (and a very vocal group) plays specifically with that in mind.
Fighting piracy by making people authenticate with a server just to use a feature that would otherwise work fine without an Internet connection? Back in my day, we called that "DRM."