"We want to eliminate griefing, we want to eliminate smurfing, we want to eliminate all these things. We want to give people that persistent character and the attachment to that character, so they're not going to misbehave. It's about community enforcement, and it's also about piracy and other things. "

If my brother is doing any of that stupid crap, I could walk over and punch him in the face.

So the new Battle.net is an always-connected experience. Well, LAN, if you think about it, LAN play underpins--now that you understand our design, and you understand what we're trying to do, hopefully it makes a little more sense--because it kind of undermines what we're trying to do with the always-connected experience.

In some context, I agree with this. But when you're lan is as small as ours, with friends, then we know who each other are, we know if you cheat, and apparently if one of my friends start playing SC, I won't forget who he is. No need for them to spend time and money on something like this.

"Shack: Maybe something where you connect once to Battle.net, but from that point on you'd only connect every now and then, and the connection would essentially act as a zero-ping LAN?"

Have a countdown for multiplayer. Tells you how long you can play until you have to reconnect to Bnet. Make it like every 30 days. That way, when we do a LAN, we all connect and update our counters before we connect to each other. If there's a disaster that lasts longer than a week, I could still play with my friends. If my internet just suddenly craps out, there's a buffer before I have to reconnect to Bnet.

I think 30 days is plenty of time to reconnect to Bnet. I'm sure if you moved and didn't have internet access for a month, you'd be SOL, but at this point, I'm willing to compromise. I'll ping to Bnet within a specified amount of time, as long as you give us LAN that does not require us to connect to Bnet at that very moment.

I just don't think it's necessary to have it ping out to the internet every damn time you play it multiplayer because when your connection to the internet dies, so does your games.