As you no doubt have heard by now, Blizzard has confirmed that there will be no LAN support in StarCraft II, no doubt enraging the ten people in the US who refuse to pay for internet and send email by teaching their carrier pigeons how to get to a cyber cafe. The response from internet has been measured and reasonable, by which we mean most people seem to be ready to burn down Blizzard HQ and then drive their (parent's) cars over the rubble in order to finish off all survivors.

Blizzard, in a futile effort to make people on forums read something nuanced, offered this quote:

We don’t currently plan to support LAN play with StarCraft II, as we are building Battle.net to be the ideal destination for multiplayer gaming with StarCraft II and future Blizzard Entertainment games. While this was a difficult decision for us, we felt that moving away from LAN play and directing players to our upgraded Battle.net service was the best option to ensure a quality multiplayer experience with StarCraft II and safeguard against piracy.....Several Battle.net features like advanced communication options, achievements, stat-tracking, and more, require players to be connected to the service, so we’re encouraging everyone to use Battle.net as much as possible to get the most out of StarCraft II. We’re looking forward to sharing more details about Battle.net and online functionality for StarCraft II in the near future.

Ok, two things to glean from this quote. First, to those who are mad, this is why piracy is a bad thing. Not paying people for things, whether you get caught or not, still has its consequences and this is one of them. Second, stop and think for a second. Blizzard is arguably the only game company on earth that has a multi-million-dollar E-Sport based on its product. The idea that they are not going to introduce a severely low lag mode that just barely passes through the bnet servers is crazy. Flash, Best and other people who play this sport FOR MONEY need zero lag and I have no doubt Blizzard is going to provide. Let's all take a breath and wait until they actually talk about the online, and if it turns out the multi-player is bad we will still have time to kill everyone who works at Activision.