Originally Posted by rdrollins
I know Starcraft, Warcraft and Dioblo can be played without the CD in the drive.
Here are the instructions for Starcraft. The other games are done in much the same way.
They had to do this to be able to allow people to download the games. |
The Diablo 2, Warcraft and Starcraft clients that can be downloaded from Battle.net are fully patched up and include the official no-CD patch. Your Blizzard CDs can stay tucked away in a safe location. Clients downloaded from Battle.net use the Blizzard Downloader client that we know from installing so many WoW patches.
When you download and install game clients from Battle.net, you use the CD Key listed on Battle.net (not the ones on your physical CD even though they are stored on Battle.net once you add them) to install the games with.
This comes from first hand experience with installing and using the Starcraft client (I have Starcraft, Diablo 2 and Warcraft 3 attached to my Battle.net account). It's really quite easy and the install is much faster since you don't have to read from a CD. In addition, once installed, start-up and map loading is also faster since everything is stored on the hard drive and nothing has to be accessed from the CD.
Setting up my Battle.net account was quick and easy. The longest couple of bits where thinking up a good secure password and waiting for data transfer between me and Blizzard's servers. Likewise, merging my WoW account took all of five minutes and went smoothly.
My rating for Battle.net
Out of four possible
.