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I forgot about the absence of LAN in Starcraft II, which was utterly mind-blowing (good luck hosting a serious tournament). It's almost as if they built a busin

• ddtaylor 7y ago
  > good luck hosting a serious tournament And there have been many issues with this over the lifespan of SC2. In the early days it was insanely common to see semi finals or grand finals with dropped games to the point the screen that appears when a connection issue would occur became a meme. After around 2014 all the major tournaments had "partnered" with Blizzard in one way or another and an on-premise server is now used with a whole cloak-and-dagger system of ensuring the software on it never makes it out to the public. You have to pay Blizzard to operate the server on premise by their staff, essentially the same people who already have access to the Battle.net servers themselves. And then in the end the game became free to play in 2017 anyhow.