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Comment by Razengan | Hacker News Reader

StarCraft 1 let you take your computer to anywhere and connect on the LAN with anyone, or even dial-up directly to your friend's phone number.

In StarCraft 2, Blizzard like every other corp wanted to see and control everything we do so you have to go all the way through the internet and lag even if you sit right next to each other. lol if the connection goes down!

Even on the PS5 when I hand a visiting guest the throwaway DualSense I have to bump through a clunky UI of choosing a user or "Quick Play" and wait while it spins up a whole new home screen and other crap for them, and then warnings about DLC or whatever in Mortal Kombat etc, just to have a short 2 minute beat-em-up session.

Sigh

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"Quick Match" and ranked queues destroyed multiplayer gaming for me.

To be fair, multiplayer via LAN is such a marginal feature nowadays that you can't really blame the companies for not supporting it. You don't really need "greedy corporate fucks" explanation for this; it's just that you don't want to develop, support and test features that maybe 0.1% of the user base is going to use.

This is not an accurate assessment in the StarCraft II case. It was released in 2010, and LAN play was definitely still popular. I remember because I was part of a University club/society that was running ~200 person ~3 day LAN parties at the time, and I recall the intense loathing we had for how incredibly difficult Blizzard had decided to make it to actually play the game you had paid for, on your own network.

If anything, LAN play became less popular because it was intentionally hampered by Blizzard and other companies.

> If anything, LAN play became less popular because it was intentionally hampered by Blizzard and other companies.

THIS!!! Such gaslighting: "Oh look fewer people are using the thing we said we wouldn't support"

Games like StarCraft, CounterStrike, Warcraft 3/DotA etc were definitely popular at the time of SC2's launch and still are played in "cybercafes" etc.

Hell that LAN environment WAS the reason StarCraft got so hugely popular in the first place, before Blizzard got jealous and wanted to have their fingers in everything, and people still continued to play Brood War after SC2's launch.

Now, when the servers inevitably get graveyarded permanently some day, how is anybody gonna play SC2 or any of the always-online games?

> it's just that you don't want to develop, support and test features

Just let one player's machine host some of the same server code they use for their internet services?

> multiplayer via LAN is such a marginal feature nowadays

WHY?? Literally everybody has phones now, but how many local multiplayer games are there? Imagine if you could just bop your phone to your friends' and immediately start playing something together. The technology and social saturation has never been more favorable than now, but as always it's corporate greed/spying which is the biggest antifun cancer everywhere.

jackbox.tv has some really fun party games for that, if you've got the audience for that.

To be fair, so is couch co-op and yet I always appreciate developers who go the extra mile of giving me the ability to play alongside a friend.

Every time I read something like "you can't blame companies for not supporting it" I think "I can blame companies for not letting me support it".

It was the "greedy corporate fucks" entirely though?

LANs empowered gamers with full ownership and a better ability to self organize player communities and tournaments. The always online model was heavily hamfisted by Activision Blizzard who wanted to launch their esports ambitions with SC2, seeing the KR broodwar scene as missed revenue. Look at the failed Overwatch League (OWL), Heroes of the Storm, Hearthstone and even reforges of classic RTS.

DOTA/League spawned from lan/bnet use map settings games and arguably Dota rise to success started in Lan cafes before hitting mainstream success on bnet.

I acknowledge that many likely don't ship Lan because it's being seen now of days as extra, but I think that's pointing to the consequence as the root cause what the major entities wanting control and ownership on their platforms. It didn't used to be an extra feature 0.1% used, we were pivoted into this to profit larger corps and it's not a tinfoil hat conspiracy, it's just following where the real money was and investors want to be middlemen on platforms.

> To be fair, multiplayer via LAN is such a marginal feature nowadays that you can't really blame the companies for not supporting it.

Yeah literally nobody has kids, siblings, friends. Those are all things of the past! (i'm being sarcastic)

Yeah, not to mention that you even needed to connect to their servers to play the fucking single player campaign. I hated that so much, and then it more or less became the standard for many AAA single player games to come...

I refused to purchase any Blizzard game or product after Legacy of the Void, until I made the mistake of getting Diablo 4 on the PS5, just because I wanted to play a polished overhead hack-&-slash with a gamepad, but it was so meh I have no interest in the D4 expansion or anything else by Blizzard again.

There's a security problem (and hence legal liability) when two people know each other's IP addresses.

There's also a complex networking situation when people are behind NATs, firewalls, etc.

These problems had been solved for a long time before publishers decided to needlessly kill self-hosted multiplayer. Don't let them gaslight you into believing that the online requirements are about anything else but their greed.

Also, I'm pretty sure players still know each other's IP addresses these days. I don't have any insider knowledge about this, but I'd be very surprised if today's multiplayer games took the latency hit of funneling actual game state through their servers, rather than just using them for matchmaking.

There's also the problem of cheating which creates a reputational issue for the game and frustrates players. Many multiplayer games suffer from cheating.

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