[Shabaz]

What they've disabled is unauthenticated LAN games. The plan, at least this time last year, was to have connections try to go over the LAN if the players are within a LAN. All the players must however authenticate with the Battle.net server.

I asked Canessa whether the solution his team is working on might include a pseudo-LAN connection, where the game would only check in with Battle.net to authenticate before reverting to typical LAN behavior.

"Something like that," he replied. "Maintaining a connection with Battle.net, I don't know if it's once or periodically, but then also having a peer-to-peer connection between players to facilitate a very low-ping, high-bandwidth connection.. those are the things that we're working on."

From http://www.shacknews.com/onearticle.x/60156

[hazzen]

Thank you for the source link - I stand corrected, but I will wait until I see it in action before passing judgement. In retrospect, it makes sense that they would have some way of running a game specifically for high-level competitive tournaments as a percent of their market (and a very vocal group) plays specifically with that in mind.