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.

But is it that sucky an idea? It sure is for me. I think it sucks for a couple of reasons:

• I play Starcraft at LANs where there is no Internet connection. Battle.net authentication of any sort is simply going to be impossible.
• In principle, as a paying customer I am having my flexibility in how I want to play the game restricted because they're worried about the people who don't pay for the game. I consider that counter-productive and immoral.

The game is a long way out yet so I'm not going to make any definitive statements yet, but I'll probably buy the game anyway. Despite the fact that I don't like some of the things they're doing the game should still be of high quality and I'll pay for that and play it under the restrictions imposed.

I even suspect that these measures will be fairly effective in reducing piracy. Emulating an entire authenticated battle.net server and convincing the game to use it is like making a fake Steam server---it's not a small task and will take a lot of time and effort from the cracking community. Hacking direct LAN support into a game specifically designed not to have it will probably take even more effort.

Unfortunately my only way of protesting these measures is to not buy the game. Yet I think I will anyway. I'm damn sure that hundreds of thousands of others will too, particularly in countries where Internet is ubiquitous (including the Starcraft capital of the world, South Korea).

So Blizzard is not going to change a damn thing. They still get rich and they reassure their stakeholders that they're taking measures to prevent piracy. Those measures might even work, at the risk of pissing off some fraction of their userbase.

Blizzard wants to make a buck out of its games. They're making the game so they make the rules. If you don't like that you have a choice. You can either not buy the game, or you can buy it and implicitly accept what you're getting yourself into. By extension, if you do choose to buy the game you don't have the right to complain about restrictions you knew were going to be there.

If you want a game to support features not motivated by commercial interests you have to build one without commercial constraints. That means free and open source software. Do any of the existing RTS projects measure up to Starcraft II? Almost certainly not. In the FPS area some are up there with the commercial guys (Nexuiz and Urban Terror, for example).

If you want to be more constructive, find, contribute to or make some free games.

Just remember: actions speak louder than words. A vocal minority is just that. Vocal.