Starcraft II LAN Petition

As many of you know, Blizzard has decided to remove LAN functionality from Starcraft II. Well, if that bothers you at all, go ahead and sign up on the ever growing LAN in Starcraft 2 Please petition.

Now, I know the petition is really written and in the spirit of what gamers traditionally see Blizzard as being, company wise, but I think lots of people are going to be surprised at how Blizzard handles this one. I think things have changed quite a bit at how Blizzard has to approach issues like this.

For those of you who have been living in a air bubble underwater for the last year, Blizzard was basically purchased by Activision. When one company purchases another, they like results. If those results aren't met, usually something along the lines of a lawsuit occurs, like what happened with 3D-realms and Take-Two interactive over Duke Nukem Forever, even though that may be an extreme example.

Anyways, with the demand of results from a larger company, Blizzard likely isn't going to just sit around and wait for words like "downsizing" to start flying around. They are going to start making some decisions based on pure results, and removing LAN from Starcraft II is exactly that.

By nuking LAN, Blizzard will move all multiplayer activity for SC II to Battle.net. The choice to get rid of LAN is simply to try and avoid piracy and try and motivate people to buy legitimate copies of the game.

My personal feelings regarding this issue is that piracy will continue just as strong with Starcraft II as it did with the original Starcraft, despite this move. My main reason for this is that Battle.net is a pretty solid authentication system, and changing that up a little bit by killing one aspect of Multiplayer doesn't change the fact that, in order to get the most out of Starcraft II (LAN or not), you'll need a legitimate copy of the game. All getting rid of LAN does is hurt those users who will be paying full price for the item, and simply delay the inevitable as far as piracy goes.