(shrugs) Time and time again the issue of piracy has come up as a reason why PC gaming companies are changing the way they do business and/or develop their products.
I'm just hoping that one day these simpletons who feel the need to steal will realize the insanely negative impact they're having.
I don't agree at all that piracy is the actual problem here. I believe that's only being used as a scapegoat for another agenda. They need a valid excuse to justify stripping out a rather enjoyed feature of their games, and piracy is the catch-all blame phrase. They use pirates as a scapegoat because they know it is difficult to argue against.
I don't condone piracy. It is theft, and it is you telling the developers and publishers behind a game that you don't feel their product is worth paying for. That said, changes to a game shouldn't be made from a "ruins it for the rest of us" standpoint.
I believe that platforms like STEAM are a step in the right direction, even though I am opposed in virtually every way to DRM. As to the unnamed guest who claimed that my suggestion was foolish, I would remind him to look at the numerous single player Steam games available. They require authentication once, or for newer titles, every "once in a while" - not every time you play them. It would be acceptable, in my eyes, for Blizzard to require a game be authenticated however many times per month in order to sustain LAN play.
However, Blizzard blaming piracy on a design change is just wrong. Thieves
will steal games regardless of the changes made to them. Third-party cracks and pirated copies will still surface for StarCraft II. There is nothing Blizzard can do to stop that - they know that as well. Removing LAN play as an option, in my opinion, has nothing to do with piracy.
So why remove it at all? I believe there's another reason. I can't tell you why, because I'm not on the inside, but I'd assume it has something to do with marketing. Statistics gathering. Profile generation. That's just my guess; Blizzard doesn't want people playing it on a LAN because they want to gather as much data about people playing the game as possible.
Paranoid? No, I'm not saying that data gathering is a bad thing. I'm just saying that logically it makes more sense than blaming it on piracy. If that's the case, though, I'd want them to be honest about it.