That rumbling noise you heard this morning?  That was Blizzard.  They broke the internet.

Rob Pardo, senior VP of game design at Blizzard Entertainment confirmed in an interview with IncGamers that the StarCraft II development team “don’t have any plans to support LAN,” and clarified saying “we will not support it.” The only multiplayer available will be on Battle.net.

Has this company ever heard of “damage control”?  The majority of human beings are fucking idiots.  Not surprisingly, a heavy portion of gamers are fucking idiots.  Right now, they’re flipping cars and breaking glass on the mean streets of the internet.  Where I say “Slow down, we don’t have all the information”, others go into rage mode.  Read the fine print, people:

IncGamers also got a clarification from Blizzard, shortly after the interview, saying the choice of excluding a LAN feature “is because of the planned technology to be incorporated into Battle.net,” a topic they will reveal more about at a later date.

Eliminating the ability to play Starcraft II through a Local Area Network does not mean you won’t be able to play the game through an equivalent.  You can’t cut through a Battle Report or Q&A Batch or Dustin’s Terrible Terrible Blogspot without having it drenched in e-sport.  Blizzard didn’t build the game for competition, for television, simply to decide we can’t fight it out latency free.  This is the sequel to gaming’s biggest spectator sport.

What we can say is that you will have to hook into the internet to play the game.  This is a piracy thing, and the Steam approach appears to be the compromise being offered by developers.  Ten years ago, a CD-Key was good enough.  Today, Blizzard does not want to get snakebit by another case of Garena, where hundreds of thousands play Defense of the Ancients with illegal copies of Warcraft III.  My guess is that Battle.net 2.0 will emulate Steam’s product.  Players looking to LAN will log into Battle.net to verify the game’s legitimacy, and then proceed to play on an emulated equivalent.

Yes, people will pirate it.  But the Steam approach doesn’t lie in flawless security; it’s designed to make piracy a bitch.  Steam works on three fronts: Cracking the game, cracking Steam, and actually finding other illegitimate users to play against.  It’s simply more trouble than it’s worth.  So while Hacker Ron may get the game working, 14-year-old Johnny will give up and beg his mom to buy it.  If it stops casual consumers from pirating the product, then Steam and Battle.net 2.0 are doing their job.

Until we find out what the “planned technology” actually is, there’s no point in speculating any further.

The current Blizzard “Community Manager” (a title as prestigious as “Ronald’s Playplace Security Guard”) is Kevin “Karune” Yu, a former member of the World of Warcraft community staff. His current legacy on the Battle.net forums is Clintonesque: while accepted and smiled upon by Starcraft players, no words can describe the hatred he gets from Warcraft III players. It’s obvious that World of Warcraft’s success has left their other projects strapped for resources. The Battle.net front page, for instance, is still advertising a map contest whose winners were announced nearly three months ago. Unfortunately for Karune, this situation gave him the envious duty of lying to the Warcraft III community about the long-awaited Patch 1.22.

(I’ll make this clear: Karune is not the man who lied to the Warcraft III community. That honor goes to the supervisor who told him to post the information, knowing Karune would take the blame. This man is merely guilty of being a suck-up “yes man” who didn’t want to test his superiors by second-guessing the information relayed his way.)

At year’s beginning, Karune unveiled a Patch/Announcements Updates thread on the Battle.net forums. This thread would keep people up to date on the status of the patch that he stated would, in June of 2007, be out by the “end of the year”. By now, most had given up on ever seeing this update. On March 4th, he gave the community a welcome announcement:

The culmination of two different massive gameplay suggestion threads and professional gamers was coming to fruition. On April 1st, Blizzard released the build notes for Patch 1.22. You can guess what the reaction was.

Two years of patience gave us this turd? The disappointment surprised everyone. If the patch was so bad, then why hadn’t any professional gamers come out and expressed their disappointment? Because none of them tested it. On April 4th, Karune gave us this incriminating evidence, which is now absent from the Warcraft III forums. Before Google becomes the perfect tool for the moden police state, we can still dig up statements that Community Managers don’t want us to see:

To surmise, we were informed said professional players would be the green light for public patch testing on March 14th. The patch notes were issued to the community on April 1st. The professional players started testing the patch on the night of April 3rd. On my planet, they call this “lying bullshit”. If you think I’m the crazy old man barking at traffic, here’s the April 10th look at what the pros thought about Patch 1.22, which includes the question: “Have you tested the patch yet?”

Don’t lie to your customers, Blizzard.