Last week a furor erupted over the news that Starcraft II would be cutting LAN play. The reasons were unknown, but it was made very clear that Blizzard didn't feel committed to providing the option in their RTS. Now, in a shocking (and yet slightly predictable) turn, rumors are rumbling that Diablo III may also lose LAN play as well.

On the Battle.net forums, Diablo III community manager Bashiok responsed to user's complaints about Starcraft II. The user commented that: "All removing LAN support does is hurt legitimate buyers, pirates will have LAN and their free game. It might take them a while to reverse engineer it, but they WILL have it."

Bashiok's reply was a bit cryptic (and was deleted soon after posting), but seems to hint that Diablo III might be lacking the feature as well.

"More so than overbearing/invasive anti-piracy measures that would affect everyone who buys the game regardless of how they're going to play it instead of just those that may want a LAN feature? I would doubt it.

I don't know a lot about it, Diablo III isn't really facing the brunt of the Battle.net 2.0 features just yet, but I think that removing LAN in an attempt to avoid more severe anti-piracy measures is pretty cool. We're saying "Hey, we're pretty sure you're going to love our game. The multiplayer is really the best part though. In order to get in on that that we'd just like to make sure you bought the game. Cool?"

Not cool. No. I'm not sure how people are buying that this is the same Blizzard that released Diablo II and Starcraft. Starcraft actually came with the option to install a free multiplayer-only version of the game on friends computers. Granted, the industry has changed a great deal since then, but cutting features so they don't need to worry about piracy doesn't make much sense. If anything, it deters gamers from supporting the product, especially when vital aspects are being left out. That said, LAN isn't nearly as important in Diablo as it is in Starcraft, but it's the principle of the thing, and this is an extremely slippery slope they're going down. Sure, I'm still getting in line, day one, to buy six copies of both games in question, but I'll have a scowl on my face when I swipe the credit card.

[Source]