I'm really quite angry right now: half at Blizzard, and half at myself because I knew that I was going to get something like this and gave them my money anyway.
Starcraft II doesn't support LAN play. This is not just a case of needing to be online and authenticated with Battle.net to fire up a server. That would be annoying but could be poorly justified by the improved integration with your online profile.
No, Starcraft II goes out of its way to make playing on a LAN difficult even when everybody has purchased the game and has logged on to Battle.net.
Suppose you're at a LAN with a bunch of other dudes (or gals, let's be optimistic) and you're fortunate enough to have an Internet connection so that you can all get onto Battle.net. As best I can tell, you have two options for getting in a game together:
Option 1: Invitations
- Go around and find out each other's user names on Battle.net and add each other as "friends".
- Have the host start a private game and then invite all the relevant people to the game.
- Other players accept the invitation.
- Fingers crossed packets will actually get routed over the LAN (this has been hinted at but I haven't tested it.)
(update: a friend informs me that everything goes through Singapore. Yay.)
Option 2: Public and Pray
- Have the host start a public game, which allows anyone on Battle.net to join.
- Tell the players what map it is.
- Players try to connect and hope they get the right server.
- Host kicks other players who try to join because they figure it's a public game.
- Again, fingers crossed regarding routing.
This is seriously crap.
As the people who are reading this probably know, I help run LANs this year where we don't have Internet. I had a glorious plan to allow people to connect to Battle.net through my phone's 3G connection so that we could get some games happening, but nobody's going to want to go through all the above to make it work. Sure, I'd probably do it because I really like Starcraft but I would feel like a deluded fanatic saying "Hey you should play this game! It'll be great! We just have to do all this bullshit to make it work, but you know you want to!"
It's like a fricking iPhone. Sure, I could buy one and jailbreak it to do what I want. Sure, somebody's going to hack SC2 so it can be played on a LAN eventually. But I shouldn't have to do it. Antifeatures are lame. I may not have bought an iPhone but because of my lack of moral conviction Blizzard already has my money and they don't give a toss what I think from here on in.
I should learn to find Battle for Wesnoth exciting or something.