Starcraft 2 LAN – Starfriend Method is Very Real and it Works! However…
Revisions:
7-12-11: Initial Release.
7-18-11: Updated comments.
Starcraft 2 gamers, its time to celebrate! My youtube friend Hidraga told me of a new fan site called http://battle4sc2.com, and this is a portal/forum site that talks about the latest development of Starfriend, which is a TW client that allows you to play LAN online with other people. Yup, and you don’t need to use Hamachi, Tunngle, or any other program.
There is only one caveat though: As of today (7-12-11), you got to download the Chinese version of the game, then download all the associated patches, and then you are good to go.
Don’t worry though, its really easy, and there are tutorials on this already. To learn more about it, go the following links below to get up to speed:
http://battle4sc2.com
Tutorial for Starfriend 0.43 with game links and clients
Starfriend 0.44 with english links
It is unknown in the future if users will be able to use a new version of Starfriend to use with their existing English copies. Time will tell! Enjoy!
Update 7-18-11:
If you start to read the comments here on this blog, you really have to stop and question if the Chinese program is safe to use at all. The reason behind this move is that we know that China (just in general) is known to have caused global warefare in terms of cyber hacking. Although there is no proof yet that this Starfriend is corrupted, you just got to air on the side of caution. Since the program is closed source, you don’t really know what is underneath the hood.
As a skeptic, I may not believe what is truth or not in regards to the security of this Starfriend, and if it is trying to hoard my data in the background. Nonetheless, I am playing on LAN on a PC that has nothing to do with online financials and things of that nature, I will continue to use this program.
However, some of you might be weary of trying to play this, and I don’t blame you. If you do decide to try it out, then maybe what you want to do is keep an eye on your network activity and make sure nothing evil is coming in, or out of your PC. 😛
Posted on July 12, 2011, in Gaming, Tunngle and tagged battle4sc2, chinese, emulator, how to, lan, Starcraft 2, Tunngle, TW, VPN. Bookmark the permalink. 16 Comments.
Welcome to the Underground. 
on your own risk to loose everything!
1)this is a heavy modification that needs to be done from chinese to something like english version its not an actuall english crack! just modification of mpq files that try to make it look like English!(even the developer never said ok to darkblizz users with what they did)
also this will need extra knowledge from people to do and above all, most of us dont want to scrue our installation maybe because its also legel, just to try a lan mode. when something clean and english will be available that is not altering gamefiles or has at least a restore process, then we can talk about it.
2)and most important reason, all non chinese users should know that the 90% of stolen data and spam are comming from chincese related software!
we cant be anything but extreamly suspicious when using a closed, mysterious so called “server.exe” file, about what it does! i am not saying it doesn’t work in this tw version, ok it does but with what cost? how sure can you be when its not open source? (starcrack team was the best with it’s b.net emulator project), what else is gothering and transmitting too? maybe your real b.net account?your visa data? how can you be sure 100% its not a sleeping trojan that will wake and start manimulating your system and data!????
when some people like the Chinese developers have such a “reputation” on “stealing and cyberattack” and when lan for sc2 is all that most of the users want, its pretty damn sure that will find a LOT of positional VICTIMS!
a simple antivirus search will not prove anything!
its very easy to gather system information and open backdoors and no antivirus will ever detect it, because its a damn normal software!
none knows this chinese “developer” he never talked to anybody in english about this, he has no previous record of other successful software and proven reliability to trust him, he doest “cooperate” with anyone trust worthy, so its very risky and i think users should not be exposed. you wanna play with your data and system, do it with your own risk!
i hope you understand this is for your own good! 😉
Excellent point you bring up. But then again…everything I do on this machine is purely gaming machine. All online passwords are encrypted thanks to lastpass, so do I have to worry about a keylogger? Probably not. But you do bring up a very valid point that most gamers, including myself, may not even be aware of. Man, talk about scary!
Update: see official notes on this from Myst who knows his shit on SC2 LAN:
http://darkblizz.org/Forum2/sc2lan-general/is-starfriend-safe-security-wise-i-mean/
the kid called Myst knows Shit “literaly” about LAN and the only think he and his other teen friends can do , is hide behind a monitor and accuse others people proven reliable work, and trying to brink some visitors to his forgotten site!
nothing more!
and if you want to talk “technical” sneaking network pakages is nothing “hacky” to do and nothing also can be prooved to be safe for this LAN!
for God’s name, he even admits that it connects to a chinese server for “news!”
when we talk to a remote server we prove it our IP! and if our systems is weak, and not fully patched we are giving them AT LEAST a change to attack our IP any time they want no need to ran its software for that!
also the kids says extreamly stupid responses, like “the lan gives some 5 thread warnings, but the developer says its normal and its safe” LOL
i mean c on! what did you expect for the developer to say??? LOL
guys be smart! when a software is a SERVER-CLIENT like this one or like Battle.net service, why one of them is given you virus warning and the other not?
if they are just transmitting ONLY game data, why b.net that uses the same principals in TCP/IP and UDP like all other normal software in the world does, why this Chinese gives to some protection software 5 warnings?
why? the antivirus core is made in a way to warning users from actions like manipulating registry, windows files, chnages and redirecting pages, and similar stuff!
i would agree that in a Keygen file it could give a false positive alarm, because it generating and manipulating system resources!
in a client-server system there is no need for an antivirus-firewall-spyware to give any warnings (besides normal windows allow – denny firewall access) if its JUST a regular software like all blizzard games!!!!
what i am tlling you its not fro theories i am reading over wikipedias and other sites!
i am a profesional software engineer, and network administrator, and i am doing this for more than 12years, and i am not a kid playing starcraft and posting to a forum!
i even do reverse engineering.
i am only saying you people should be WAY MORE sceptic when it comes to this kind of software installed in your systems!they are way more ways to steal your info than to protect them, than you think my friends!
think twice!
is Myst, or any other like Myst willing to pay you and gurantee your system after all? he is nobody hidding behind his website at home. he doesnt give a shit about you!
worst case scenario he changes hes nickname and starts over 😛
p.s in defence of this v7 guy lan mode, nothing to do with this kind chinese, he is trying to achieve something completly different and safe and EULA OK!
this is way more hard but at least he knows his shit 😉 so lets not go down the flaming path and compare someones proven 1+year of work with a kid’s site like Myst.
i would like to apologies if any “hard” languages was used, but sometimes reading peoples posts that do not have a real clue on how software engineering and client server applications do work (and i am not talking about you @Versatile)
makes me really angry when those posts from those “ignorant” or misinformed people can miss lead so many casual computer users without a second thought!
so i apologies for some hard language there i didn’t want to offend this blog that i found out from a friend, nor his administrator. i do not wish to start any kind of flame war, after all i think we should all agree that there are some good solid questions that none can answer them and should make us think more than twice when using such software.
have a nice game.
I agree with your statement, and if you can’t convince Myst or his group to believe what you say, then so be it. It is the year 2011, and the world is such a different place than what it was 10 years ago. So even though I’ve been using this program offline in my own internal LAN, even that is not a guarantee to be even safe, for as you said, who knows if it is running a trojan or something in the background.
What is this 5 thread warnings that you speak of? I don’t recall ever seeing it. Thanks for trying to open the minds of others, which can be very hard in most cases. People refuse to hear what they don’t want to hear or believe. Yet, it is those skeptics that make a difference in this world.
thank you for understanding.
one more think to make you worry even more 😛
some people use this in a game only station for LAN, but in their LAN there is also and their work PC 😛 if its is something going to happen it will not be stopped in only one system 😉
after all it does provide LAN 🙂
o i forgot you asked about the 5 warnings, its something he posted over the link you gave above:
“The original virus scan which I did link in the chinese edition post, the report show 5 hits of suspcious activity. But the developer said those were false positives.”
now isn’t this ridiculousness?
don’t answer that its a rhetorical question. 😛
the “the developer said those were false positives..”…
yeap right ok! now i can sleep at night!
anyway i do not have to convince him or the others that are doing the mpqs, i had to give a warning to users and make them consider it more and not take it for granded!
that’s all.
dont work for me 😦
You failed. I am playing right now with starfriend 0.65
still not working for me what the heell
You are not doing it right. Using starfriend 0.65 and english version?
It works perfectly yep using starfriend 0.65. Nearly gave up but it is really easy now I know how.
Install english version or any language version of the game make sure you install the correct version of the 1.36 patch for you language eg Englsh = sc2 1.3.6 enGB or something like that.
Once installed takes a little while, unpack Starfriend anywhere you like does not have to be in the same folder as your sc2 install, download map cache v3 and unpack into the STARFRIEND folder so that you have in the starfriend folder Blizzard games/cache/ then the maps in the cache folder.
Launch starfriend and leave all settings as is but change the language via drop down box to your language. you can change your player name.
Launch server, wait for it to launch then click start game on starfriend. (also make sure that you browse to your starcraft 2 install with starfriend)
Battle net logon will open type username gg@gl.hf password gg
and you will smile!!!
All Campaigns available, single player multiplayer lan etc skirmish versus AI etc.
Its awesome all works because it thinks that you are login onto battle.net but you mare actually logong into a balle.net server emulated from YOUR pc in a loop lol
hence the 127.0.0.1 ip as the server ip in starfriend.
Host from your pc.
Absolutely amazing program.
Tell me what was the hardest part of it all trying to figure it out?
Great to read
Starfriendbattle4sc2.com doesn’t work at all wen’t their official page its says
This site can’t be reached Check if there is a typo in http://www.battle4sc2.com.
Is there anny other emmulator program that supports to play sc2 trilogy offline mode?