News Battle.net is effective anti-piracy tool

I have a friend who plays on an unofficial WoW server. She showed me some footage she recorded from a guild Naxx raid she went on. I have to admit I was highly impressed with the duplication of the encounter mechanics. It wasn't perfect but it sure was close enough for jazz.

Also, while I don't condone the whole enterprise as such, the server software is independently developed, not cracked or pirated. As an act of preemptive preservation, we may be very thankful for it when Blizzard close down the official servers (in a decade or so at this rate).

 

If you think that Activision has not influenced Blizzard's direction - everything from extra subscriptions, to splitting StarCraft II into three separate products, to premium microtransactions in World of Warcraft, to higher retail prices, to online-only gameplay, to forcing players into giving up their personal information in order to play (which is then sold to advertising companies, which never ever comes back to the user in the form of lower prices)... yeah, you'd have to be naive.

Activision itself may not be involved with Blizzard directly, but Blizzard is a subsidiary of Activision Blizzard, and Blizzard have to report to the same executives and the same shareholders as Activision... not to mention that companies like Disney are involved as well.

 

Keep burying your head in the sand, the better the game the more it gets pirated. Yoy saying SC2 is the only good game? Some of the best games ever were pirated to hell and back. People will pirate it because they can and have no fear of retribution.

 

I disagree, maybe static numbers but if you looked at percentages. Although obviously there will be exceptions.

 

Well done Blizzard, your so called anti-piracy measures have centrally prevented me from buying the game!

I'm glad that SC2 is proving a success for Blizzard but they wont be getting my cash while the following problems exist:

1. Cost - £35 for a PC game! Forget that, I'm not made of money

2. DRM - I have a personal objection on having to 'activate' a game on install, sign in at least once and every 30 days to play the single player portion of the game. Hell, no other industry takes your money and then demands that you prove your legitimacy to own the game every time you want to play the game.

3. No offline LAN

4. No ability to patch the game offline (i.e. download patch from another location and move to computer with game on via usb etc)

My Internet connection is crap (Not Blizzard's fault I know, but it influences my purchasing derisions). It's off for several days a week and has a very low (3GB per month) cap. This is due to the fact I live out in the middle of nowhere, therefore I'm not likely to buy anything that needs authorisation or online only patching as I want to play the game when I want not only when the Internet connection is working or Blizzard says I can.

Unless Blizzard fix these limitations or the game in its current state is in the bargain bin for less than 5 pound I won't be getting this. Pity as I still play the original SC with my brother over the LAN.

What's even worse is that all of this DRM rubbish has made sod all difference to the piracy rate. It was cracked on release day!

 

I was going to get this at the end of the month, didn't realise it had an always connected DRM scheme.

, Looks like I won't be getting/playing this then. Guess I'll have to stick with the first SC and BW expansion.

I was looking forward to the single player campaign and I've got very little to no interest in online play with it, as I know I'm not that good at RTS games on line.

 

HUH? Show me these phantom percentages, the more popular, the better the game the more torrent downloads, that's a fact. Saying it never got pirated because it was good? LMAO, SC2 is not the best game evar, many great games over the years got pirated to hell, fact. total BS.

People will download period, good game or not.

 

Lol @ everyone whining about it being £35......

And what's the big problem with the DRM either? How many of us here don't have broadband? I can see a reason to complain if you live in the middle of nowhere with 56k - yep, that would hack me off, but why the hell does anyone else care?

 

Well you can play the pirated version online and single player so I'm not so sure about this article.

 

1.5 millions of copies sold within 48 hours after release? Goddamn piracy, right. Pirates will download it, definitely. But others will buy it, if it's worth the money...Valve and Blizzard proved it's possible

 

They've said multiple times the reason for splitting it was because each product is a full self-contained game with a full-length campaign covering about 30 maps..



I haven't found a single issue with BNet so far, it's been fast, reliable, and easy-to-use. Much better than other "solutions" developers have tried to fight piracy.

 

im not burying my head in the sand. Im just saying cause a lot of my friends always pirates game. and for some reason they say "not this one im buying it, its sc2". And I felt the same way somehow. of course alot will still pirate it. but if you think about if you like a game. if you like a music album, personally you will buy it. If you didn't feel the same way about it. and 99% of all the people around dont really give shi*t about or respect good developers then point taken.

 

Stop.
Spreading.
Lies.

You can play single player in off line mode with your saved games.

 

Battle.net is nothing new, people like me who played the original starcraft and diablo and warcraft games online will all know Battle.net is oldschool. The only reason blizzard haven't had many pirate versions of WoW is because.. well it's an online only game, game pirates generally know that a pirate game will not work online, we sacrifice online play for a free game. (Side note there are LOTS of private WoW servers to allow players to play online for free)

The same goes for SC2 people are buying it simply because they want to play it online and they know the only way to be able to do this is purchase a legit copy. It's got buggerall to do with BNet.

 

You're supposed to be able to. Mine didn't want to though.

Not that it matters anymore, gave my copy to a friend (who DOESN'T have internet access at his house) due to lack of LAN. (How I missed that bit of information I have no idea) but needless to say, I wasn't impressed.

Replaying SC1 and SupCom... On a LAN. Without internet access. Screw BNet

 

I don't see signing on to BattleNet as any different to signing on to Steam (apart from the password not being remembered). If it doesn't work, you play in Offline mode.

 

The only thing I don't like about battle.net is that to have someone add you as a real buddy, you have to give them your battle.net account name, ie email. I would have prefered if there was an alternate email we can give out or if the battle.net account name was something else like a screenname.
There's lots of wow friends thats I would like to chat with, but I'm not so sure about giving out my battle.net account name like that.

 

Surely the point of the real id system is that it allows you to connect with your real life friends, i.e. those who you really shouldn't be worried about giving your email address to.

 

Check out my post here: http://forums.bit-tech.net/showthread.php?p=2388242

It'll show you just how "effective" battle.net really is...

 

As mush as I hate DRM it's been mentioned a couple of times that you can play the SP offline so there's no issue there then.

I haven't experienced any problems with BattleNet as yet (which I couldn't say the same of Steam at the beginning). There's a lot of content within SC2 so I'm more than happy with my purchase.