[inFeZa]

Stated in this interview: http://us.battle.net/sc2/en/blog/459...der_-3_12_2012

We have a number of updates and changes coming SoonTM to StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty and we wanted to share some of them with you.

The upcoming 1.5 patch will be our most feature-laden patch to date. This patch represents the first steps towards the release of our first expansion for StarCraft II, Heart of the Swarm, and will include numerous upgrades and fixes throughout the game. One of the most significant additions will be the all new Arcade feature which includes improved custom game visibility, ratings, reviews, game instructions, screenshot support, and more. Patch 1.5 will also include significant improvements throughout the overall user interface, streaming support, antialiasing, editor and modding upgrades, new art tools, and more. We’ll go into further details about these features in future developer updates. In this update, I would like to provide some insight into the thinking and motivation behind a few of the upcoming changes.

Sounds like some good changes are coming

First, we’ll allow players to resize their chat windows to fill a larger portion of the screen. We’ll also remember the chat channel you were in as well as the position of that chat channel on your screen for when you next return to the game. This will allow players who want to recreate something that feels a lot more like Warcraft III or the original StarCraft to build their own interface that looks a lot like those older games.

This sounds mediocre to me, still not good enough as WC3 and SC1 Chat.

We’re also working on a feature that will help players connect with other players and games that are near their location (connecting through the same IP). We believe this will primarily be used by people in internet gaming rooms, offices, dorm rooms, and local tournaments where you just want to find the guy sitting in the desk next to you. Although this may not be ready in time for the release of patch 1.5, we do intend to have this available by the time Heart of the Swarm ships.

I'm curious to see what this means, if it means LAN Latency or just hey, this guy is here - click on this button to join a party with him or something lame. Hope this is what we've all been waiting for?

[breadfan]

I am excited. Here's hoping the UI changes are chat-related

[Asrathiel]

Sounds shiny... and lol @ Coming SoonTM

Quick Comments

	PiG:	haha "within the next decade"
	MooZfY:

[Cute]

All of these sound really nice. Until you read into them further haha. I guess it's a start though

[rezyn8]

Still missing clan support

Quick Comments

	PiG:	yep! Such a massive hole in the system >.<
	Dox:	it's coming in hots
	TAScarecrow:
	MooZfY:
	asdfSchnitzel:
	Satu:

[Daboo]

That does seem like lan latency, and that is quite awesome. It's kinda cool that we're "progressing" towards a brood war like UI, one day we will get there

I wonder if they'll take the stream features from LoL, Might be worth it, because a lot of the casual players will return for heart of the swarm, and this will help get some of them into e-sports.

[Dox]

Originally Posted by SQL.inFeZa

I'm curious to see what this means, if it means LAN Latency or just hey, this guy is here - click on this button to join a party with him or something lame. Hope this is what we've all been waiting for?

It means that if you're on a local area network with another player, your game will not feed through battle.net. This means that if battle.net goes down, you only lose the ability to earn achievements, and you will have significantly lower ping.

Quick Comments

inFeZa:

If this is true it's amazing - Then i can stop yelling out BLIZZ LAN!!!~!~!~!~

[NvPinder]

Pretty much all great announcements which are pretty much the 3 most complained about things in the community (custom map list is currently bad, no lan/lan latency, not good enough social experience).

Blizzard pretty much hit the nail on the head with what they've posted here, its just a matter of them delivering now.

And for those who don't realize just how huge this paragraph is:

We’re also working on a feature that will help players connect with other players and games that are near their location (connecting through the same IP). We believe this will primarily be used by people in internet gaming rooms, offices, dorm rooms, and local tournaments where you just want to find the guy sitting in the desk next to you. Although this may not be ready in time for the release of patch 1.5, we do intend to have this available by the time Heart of the Swarm ships.

It means Australians will finally get to play the game without >150ms....

Quick Comments

ToRSpartaz:

whoally dam no 440 PING for Spartaz? :D

[Peleus]

Source dox?

I take it purely as the ability to find games with local people - it will still be relayed through b.net, lag and reliability included. Essentially what your describing is full blown LAN support which would also require a completely different architecture in SC2.

[breadfan]

Originally Posted by PeleusSPR

Source dox?

I take it purely as the ability to find games with local people - it will still be relayed through b.net, lag and reliability included. Essentially what your describing is full blown LAN support which would also require a completely different architecture in SC2.

I don't see the point to this. If this was what they were doing, why bother? It doesn't actually accomplish anything. I don't think it needs to be fully redesigned architecture. You still have to log in to battle.net, it's just the custom game is hosted locally rather than on b.net

[TCPLemminks]

Yay so something like LAN is coming^^.

Still want Clan support and maybe saving chat?

[d00fus]

Still no news about clan support, tags and a channel would be nice.

Quick Comments

Dox:

coming in hots

[Cute]

Originally Posted by PeleusSPR

Source dox?

I take it purely as the ability to find games with local people - it will still be relayed through b.net, lag and reliability included. Essentially what your describing is full blown LAN support which would also require a completely different architecture in SC2.

That's how I interpreted this too. Just another way to connect with friends on battlenet (like the facebook finder lol). If it actually does allow players to bypass bnet, then that's awesome.

[Peleus]

Originally Posted by breadfan

I don't see the point to this. If this was what they were doing, why bother? It doesn't actually accomplish anything. I don't think it needs to be fully redesigned architecture. You still have to log in to battle.net, it's just the custom game is hosted locally rather than on b.net

Not seeing a point to it doesn't mean blizzard won't do it as others have said its more for 'friend finding' reasons than stability or anything else.

With regards to the custom game hosted locally that IS the full redesign of the architecture aka full blown LAN.

We will not get LAN for SC2 (piracy being one of the main factors).

[|Erasmus|]

Originally Posted by PeleusSPR

Not seeing a point to it doesn't mean blizzard won't do it as others have said its more for 'friend finding' reasons than stability or anything else.

With regards to the custom game hosted locally that IS the full redesign of the architecture aka full blown LAN.

We will not get LAN for SC2 (piracy being one of the main factors).

That issue is solved by having them log into battle.net so they're verified by the server then bypassing the server to play the game. The way it -sounds- like this works is that if they can detect you are on the same ISP (as they said) they can route packets properly to give you (pretty close to) lan ping. This still doesn't help those of us on ISPs such as Optus though, unless we are playing someone else on the same ISP (or it's more than just ISP it's detecting and managing to avoid going all the way to the server).

And because the finding game stuff is still done exactly the same way as normal (including custom games where you add people with the battle.net ids) there is no additional piracy risk at all.

[breadfan]

Originally Posted by PeleusSPR

Not seeing a point to it doesn't mean blizzard won't do it as others have said its more for 'friend finding' reasons than stability or anything else.

With regards to the custom game hosted locally that IS the full redesign of the architecture aka full blown LAN.

We will not get LAN for SC2 (piracy being one of the main factors).

Piracy isn't an issue with what I said? If it just allows a locally hosted p2p connection, but you still need to log into b.net to do so, problem solved. That's not a full redesign of architecture, I'm sorry.

Blizzard are a business, and I would stake my left nut on the fact that they would not take what is probably the number 1 community requested feature, and basically shit all over it and put in a "Players on your LAN" chat channel - if it even came up in a design meeting here's how it would go

"How do you think it will be received by the community?"
"..."
"So let's the arcade?"

[Peleus]

Originally Posted by |Erasmus|

That issue is solved by having them log into battle.net so they're verified by the server then bypassing the server to play the game. The way it -sounds- like this works is that if they can detect you are on the same ISP (as they said) they can route packets properly to give you (pretty close to) lan ping. This still doesn't help those of us on ISPs such as Optus though, unless we are playing someone else on the same ISP (or it's more than just ISP it's detecting and managing to avoid going all the way to the server).

And because the finding game stuff is still done exactly the same way as normal (including custom games where you add people with the battle.net ids) there is no additional piracy risk at all.

Same IP was announced, not same ISP. Huge difference.

[wTlzq]

They never even mention anything about clan support...

Quick Comments

Dox:

coming in hots (does anyone read these rep comments before posting?)

[Peleus]

Originally Posted by breadfan

Piracy isn't an issue with what I said? If it just allows a locally hosted p2p connection, but you still need to log into b.net to do so, problem solved. That's not a full redesign of architecture, I'm sorry.

Blizzard are a business, and I would stake my left nut on the fact that they would not take what is probably the number 1 community requested feature, and basically shit all over it and put in a "Players on your LAN" chat channel - if it even came up in a design meeting here's how it would go

"How do you think it will be received by the community?"
"..."
"So let's the arcade?"

Piracy is an issue, because you would only need to spoof the initial b.net authentication then you could play offline with full functionality instead of having to constantly remain authenticated. It makes it a huge amount easier for pirates, so it is an issue.

Secondly having p2p hosting is a huge redesign of their architecture, it's going from a centralized system to a distributed system, I can't see how that's even open to debate respectfully. It's like a website download as opposed to bit torrent.

Blizzard have constantly said that the number 1 feature request by the community (LAN) will not be implemented.

Quick Comments

Dox:

there is already a lan hack out there, has been for ages

[breadfan]

Originally Posted by PeleusSPR

Piracy is an issue, because you would only need to spoof the initial b.net authentication then you could play offline with full functionality instead of having to constantly remain authenticated. It makes it a huge amount easier for pirates, so it is an issue.

Secondly having p2p hosting is a huge redesign of their architecture, it's going from a centralized system to a distributed system, I can't see how that's even open to debate respectfully. It's like a website download as opposed to bit torrent.

Blizzard have constantly said that the number 1 feature request by the community (LAN) will not be implemented.

It's currently P2Blizzard2P (one of the peers hosts, just all connections are trafficked through Blizz servers). What about allowing players to play against players on the same subnet to just skip the Blizzard part of that is a huge redesign?

It's more like going from a remote third-party hosted connection to a direct one (imagine if your p2p file sharing client - not torrents since we're dealing with single holistic source at both ends - sent all files via a gateway that the other person could then access, but then with some sort of wizardry you were able to send data directly to other devices on your network when you didn't want to have the slowness of going over the internet). I too don't see how it's open to debate, respectfully.

Since it's limited this way, and you can currently choose to play as a guest and play against people you know anyway, there is no difference to piracy - they already give this access to you for free. So long as every time you load a campaign mission after whatever cutoff it is, or click on the multiplayer tab it re-authenticates you on b.net, you aren't getting full functionality by spoofing the login once.