A question... Google seems to be giving me mixed answers, so please give me a straight one.

Does this game have LAN play?
I've heard that it has dedicated servers but you have to pay for them... or something.
I've also heard you can play LAN games but each PC needs a connection to Steam for verification, which makes sense, but the game itself is played over the LAN connection.

The ability to play on a LAN will tip the scales on the decision to buy the game, for both me and my friends. We usually have about 16 people at least at our LANs, and our connection is so bad that it's virtually unplayable if we all try to connect at once for an online game. We pretty much skipped MW2 for this reason.