Dawn of war 2 was pretty good, IMHO 
Someone hasn’t played Supeme Commander, I see.
I guess it’s just a question of what you value more. Your principles or your entertainment. I don’t really see the value in compromising the former to play any given game. Maybe I’m just getting old and rigid, or maybe games just aren’t as important to me as they are to others.
I don’t see it as much as principles as it is an annoying change in how games are played. I play an MMO, I’m fine with registration and forced patches and constant online connections. I’m just not a fan of it when it happens to games that have a large offline component. SC2 allows me to play offline against the computer, so therefore I should not have to register or have patches forced in my face over it
“Principles” don’t enter into a decision about purchasing a frippery, unless it was manufactured by Botswanese flipper-babies who have to work on Sundays. If you dislike something about how they’re releasing their product, it’s an inconvenience, not a principle. Principles are about things that matter, like global warming and genocide and Sarah Palin’s ridiculous family, not about whether a computer game wants to talk to the internet when you play it.
IMO.
Actually, it’s the first step down the road to you never owning a game again. (Or maybe the second or third, but it’s another step down the path.)
If you feel strongly about actually owning software, as opposed to licensing it until the company decides you don’t deserve it anymore, it’s a principle.
On one hand this is a quaint complaint. As a steam user, I don’t even have a physical copy of most of my PC games anymore. I just pay with my cc and download them at my leisure.
On the other hand, the forced registration for bnet2.0 games is silly. It’s trivially easy to crack it. So what’s the point? I’d be more pissed off about no LAN. Making a supposed e-sport game without LAN is giving the community a huge middle finger.
Especially since the no LAN policy has already caused problems at several events.
Why did they do the no LAN thing? To prevent hamachi/virtual network “piracy” shenanigans?
My theory is that they’re retarded. Or that it was deemed “too much extra work” to have it phone home for authentication verification and then run the game engine/comm on the local net anyway. Or some such.
Or your perspective. It’s a video game, for god’s sake. It’s not like your staging the Montgomery Bus Boycott.
Yeah, they wanted to get people on Battle.net. Why they wanted that I couldn’t tell you. Maybe for micro transactions. Maybe to prevent a WC3-esque situation where more people are playing pirated copies over Garena (and DotA) than the real game. Maybe because they were so proud of Battle.net 2.0. Only they know.
Ah, that it was - I’m just not used to thinking of it as an RTS. I only played the single-player portion of it and it didn’t really fall into the category, inside my mind. But fair point!
Actually, that was the one I based my 4-year figure on. 
(It came out in Feb. 2007.)
But I’ll move my milestone back to 3 1/2 years, since World in Conflict came out in Sept. 2007.
As to principles, I never got that deep into the “vote with my dollar” mindset. I won’t re-vote for a disappointing politician or attend another private school, true, but for items of less seriousnes I’ll give multiple allowances for deviations. And once I got past the DRM - which in fairness only took me three minutes for every time I turned the computer off, which wasn’t often - Starcraft 2 was unsurprisingly another brilliant game.
As an aside, I hadn’t realized before that you don’t need the disc in to play the game, and hadn’t even realized that I had been doing so for the past week (I took it out before giving a presentation last week, and forgot to put it back in). So there’s at least some convenience in the trade-off.
I figure it’s because Blizzard wants more control over esports tournaments. I don’t know if that really stands up though. It seems like esports is a smallish potion of the user base, but those who would bother setting up a LAN party might be even smaller.
I initially was against the online DRM schemes, but Steam turned me around. In fact, it was the only one I used until this past Christmas when I got SC2 and Bioshock 2. Battle.net is annoy, but Games for Wndows Live is awful. Both could learn from Steam’s ability to stay out the way of playing the games.
I’m not a gamer, I haven’t purchased a game since War Craft 3, which sucked because they made you play an individual “hero” character instead of the game. I bought WC2 because I thought it was a throwback to the old style. I purchased, for $60.00, what I thought was a game. What I got for my $60.00 was not a game, in fact, I had purchased nothing. It wasn’t until I hooked up to the internet and registered was I able to get the game I had already bought, bullshit.
I’m sure Blizzard won’t give a rip because they are making millions, but because of Blizzard I’m will now never buy another game. Tower Defense games can give all the entertainment I need with none of the bullshit.
What about consoles? There’s still no internet activation on those?
For what it’s worth, I’m with Airk on this. My favorite way to play games is on a LAN or otherwise in the same room. I don’t see why all of the computers on a LAN should have to share an internet connection to bounce all of the signals off of Battle.net when they are fully capable of communicating through some 15 foot ethernet cables. So Diablo 3 isn’t going to be a LAN game, that’s fine. I’m just not willing to pay money for it if it isn’t.