Starcraft 2 "LAN" party coming up, anything I need to know?

[Spike]

So we are going to try and do a "lan" party for Starcraft 2. We have 4 or so real copies and many of the 7 hour guest passes so we are covered there. What I'm wondering about is having 8-12 people playing all on the same IP address. We will be doing AI and vs battles, nothing on battle.net, but due to the craptastic nature of the game we all have to be connected to battle.net anyway.

My only SC 2 "lan" experiment to date was playing with my brother in a 3 v 3 with AI and we had massive lag half-way through the match. I don't know if it was due to the battle.net connection or if it was a pc horsepower problem. I'm leaning towards battle.net as both pc's lagged at the same time and basically the same way but are vastly different in hardware (in my sig we were on my main pc and the lanbox).

What I'm worried about is massive lag when trying to play. If anyone else has experienced this is their a fix? Or did it play just fine? We can always go back to TF 2, CS:S, L4D, etc... but we wanted to give SC 2 a try in this enviroment.

Thanks for your help!

 

[nanobreath]

I think you'll be one of the first people I've heard of actually attempting a LAN party with SC2. Let us know how it goes!

I have a feeling the lag you experienced before was simple lag with BNET, nothing related to playing on the same connection as somebody else. Bnet has had shaky moments now and then, where everybody connected seems to get lag.

 

[shortylickens]

Whats your internet connection?
Cuz if you have basic broadband and a quality router, it shouldnt be an issue.

 

[KMFJD]

So we are going to try and do a "lan" party for Starcraft 2. We have 4 or so real copies and many of the 7 hour guest passes so we are covered there. What I'm wondering about is having 8-12 people playing all on the same IP address. We will be doing AI and vs battles, nothing on battle.net, but due to the craptastic nature of the game we all have to be connected to battle.net anyway.

Troll Troll Troll your boat...

My only SC 2 "lan" experiment to date was playing with my brother in a 3 v 3 with AI and we had massive lag half-way through the match. I don't know if it was due to the battle.net connection or if it was a pc horsepower problem. I'm leaning towards battle.net as both pc's lagged at the same time and basically the same way but are vastly different in hardware (in my sig we were on my main pc and the lanbox).


What I'm worried about is massive lag when trying to play. If anyone else has experienced this is their a fix? Or did it play just fine? We can always go back to TF 2, CS:S, L4D, etc... but we wanted to give SC 2 a try in this enviroment.

Thanks for your help!

Works fine for my brother and i when we play on the same connection, and we have a very shitty wireless isp...4v4's are no problem

 

[Spike]

Ok, hopefully it was just a screw up with Bnet that caused the problem last time. Right now we are looking at 8 people with 4 possibles so this should be interesting. The connection is comcast and actually faster than usual since their apartment is in a downtown core with a good connection. We will be using a 24 port switch for the connection sharing.

Wish us luck...

 

[JTsyo]

I think you'll be one of the first people I've heard of actually attempting a LAN party with SC2. Let us know how it goes!

I have a feeling the lag you experienced before was simple lag with BNET, nothing related to playing on the same connection as somebody else. Bnet has had shaky moments now and then, where everybody connected seems to get lag.

From my understanding BNET just finds the players, once the game starts bnet connection isn't used. Let me see if I can find a link.

 

[Glitchny]

From my understanding BNET just finds the players, once the game starts bnet connection isn't used. Let me see if I can find a link.

nah it doesn't work that way. It was thought to work like that but Blizzard has since stated that it doesn't form temp local net like that. It will go through bnet the entire time. It shouldn't be an issue though.

OP make sure to give us an update on how it goes.

 

[Ika]

nah it doesn't work that way. It was thought to work like that but Blizzard has since stated that it doesn't form temp local net like that. It will go through bnet the entire time. It shouldn't be an issue though.

OP make sure to give us an update on how it goes.

that stinks. that's how it worked in SC1, you used to be able to drop from battle.net without dropping from the game. if you disconnected yourself for like 40 seconds, you'd get dropped from bnet, but you might not get dropped from the game (45 second timer, I think). after you finished the game you'd get logged back in. oh well.

 

[Spike]

Dang, that would have been nice. I would hate to lag out on a game due to connection issues when all of us are in the same room on a gigabit switch... seems somewhat crazy.

I will update how it plays out and if we have any issues at all. One thing I did not try on my own connection was to play with ports though I assume that would not cause much of an issue. I believe we are going to be doing a direct switch to cable modem setup so we should have a pretty clean pathway.

 

[l0cke]

I had a 4 person SC2 LAN party on Monday, went fine. We did 2v2 and FFA locally, and later went online and did 4v4.

 

[Spike]

Well, it actually worked quite well. We had a total of 6 people there (3 bailed last min) and did all vs AI matches. There were moments of lag, and huge amounts if anyone alt-tabbed to windows, but in general it was quite smooth. It took a while to setup the game in such a way that we could get the alliances the way we wanted but the experience was quite fun. 5 of us had actual copies of the game and 1 person used a 7 hour guest pass which also worked flawlessly.

Overall I would say the experience was a positive one, especially finding friends via facebook. I would still prefer a true lan mode but this was the next best thing in terms of results. The next lan we hope to have the full 8 people and do some fun 4v4 matches.