Well hello everyone, it's been a while since my last entry. Not only have I been busy with school, but I also haven't been able to come up with a blog topic...trust me, I've tried. Since my last post a lot has happened, safeBABI has taken off even more and was even featured at a summit by SafeKids.org, hopefully one day something will come of this.
I have also really taken on Starcraft, in fact I even wrote a research paper last semester on how Starcraft can be beneficial in a classroom environment. I have been watching GSL for the last three months, which considering it takes place in Korea it has really screwed up my sleep schedule, luckily on April 11th the North American Star League will start and I can get my daily dose of Starcraft II without staying up past 4 AM every night.
This last weekend I attended MLG Dallas, where I watched the pro players work magic with a keyboard and mouse. Unfortunately the players experienced the one thing that can screw over any player no matter how good they are...LAG!!! While we were at a convention center, a place where you would assume the internet would be able to handle a lot of internet traffic, the Starcraft players were still interrupted the whole weekend with issues from lag spikes to dropped games. But who is to blame, the convention center that is being used to stream live Starcraft, Halo and Call of Duty games to hundreds of thousands of fellow gamers, or Blizzard and their lack of LAN options.
I remember the first time that I played Warcraft III. I was a freshman in High School when one of my friends gave me a cracked version of the game and told me about DoTA. Like I said it was a cracked version so we couldn't play on Battle.net, instead we used Hamachi to simulate a LAN connection over the internet. I remember lan parties in which we all wired up to the router that was all the way down in my parents room and play DoTA all night. It was also the highlight of many school trips for a while. Unfortunately that means, I am one of the reasons LAN doesn't exist in Starcraft II. Blizzard is afraid to offer LAN because as soon as they do, Starcraft II will become a viable candidate for torrenting, so what do you do?
I understand Blizzard, you run the risk of losing a lot of money if you open up LAN, but there are multiple ways to do it. My proposal is to use an authentication method before you start a LAN connection. Just login to battle.net and then allow players to connect to each other. I don't feel like it's that complicated. Either that or just make a private distribution copy to tournament runners that enables LAN.
Like I said Blizzard, I know it's not an easy decision to make but this is the second tournament I have been to where battle.net has significantly delayed the events. The first time battle.net went down and the second time there was just so much latency issues that players were forced to almost 10 second delays. Hopefully Blizzard gets the message and does something to fix this growing issues, we don't have the luxury of Korea's internet.
I hope to start writing on a consistent basis again. I have been watching the showtime series Californication, the show about a messed up writer, and it has inspired me to start writing again. I do already have my next entry sort of planned out.
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