No LAN support for Starcraft 2

Is anyone that surprised though by Blizzard's actions with SC2 to this point? World of Warcraft has shown that there is a veritable gold mine to be harvested with the right amount of carrot/stick. Whether it breaks WC's terms of service or not, when you have a game that people are feverishly spending their own cash through ebay for upgrades or weapons they can't get (or situations like those Chinese gold farmers), the only winner here is Blizzard in the end. There's consumer loyalty and then there's consumer addiction & Blizzard I think are trying to shape the same thing for SC2.

The breaking of the SP campaign into 3 games & now the discontinuation of LAN does show that they want to turn it into a closed environment Blizzard can control & thus can dictate to the market how consumers use the product. It also belps when you have an entire country devoted to your game. However, that doesn't necessarily mean they are forsaking the quality of the game itself.

To be fair, from what I have seen of the SP campaign it does look fairly substantial. The plot looks interesting, cut-scenes semi-interactive which is a new idea & in a recent interview they said they wanted a campaign that wasn't the standard "build up your base and squash the enemy" type & were trying out some fun ideas.

I also think I read somewhere (a very recent interview that I think came with the latest Beta report) that the subsequent 2 games would be introducing new units, Brood War style so perhaps all is not as black as it first seems. Afterall, from what I remember, it was only with the introduction of Brood War that Starcraft 1 became the big multiplayer behemoth that it is today.

I would have been one of those people who balked at the 3 game idea, but watching the beta videos I'm slowly thinking that they're going to eventually realise a fairly enviable game. I like my traditional RTS games and SC2 looks as polished as they come.