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Heres the blue-post (Blizzard statement)
http://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/5978861022?page=21#402

We’ve extensively tested for false positive situations, including replicating system setups for those who have posted claiming they were banned unfairly. We’ve not found any situations that could produce a false positive, have found that the circumstances for which they were banned were clear and accurate, and we are extremely confident in our findings.

Playing the game on Linux, although not officially supported, will not get you banned – cheating will.

Blizzard doesnt have a track record of cracking down on Wine usage, and its not like they dont know it exists.

Better rush to get those angry rager page views. Never mind anything else.

Xfire is a chat service closely comparable to Steam, although it has no store functionality; its primary selling point is that you can chat while in-game. If it represents any particular demographic, it would be a bias toward more veteran gamers, since it has mostly been displaced. That graph says that Diablo 3 players who use Xfire are now playing half of the hours per day that they were a month ago.

Here is a direct source for Inferno being unbeatable by Blizzard's playtesters.

Just to wrap up the Blizzard talk and defend my position: no, it's not a contradiction; the available statistics suggest that a lot of people bought the game, and then have failed to continue playing it. It sold very quickly at first, but now no one wants it. The hype sold it, but the game itself hasn't succeeded in holding onto that player base. Many of the patch changes nevertheless appear to correspond to the agenda put forth by Activision's new management in the aforementioned conspiracy theory, even if Activision doesn't actually have direct influence in Blizzard's management: continued nerfing despite promises not to do so, removing drops from destructible objects, and only slightly modifying the difficulty of Elite monsters all appear to imply that the company wants to force players to participate in the real money auction house in order to finish the game.

Even if you dismiss all of the above as circumstantial, and want to completely ignore the prospect that Blizzard is prioritizing profitability over not alienating their fan base, it's still very apparent that Diablo 3 doesn't have the same class flexibility as Diablo 2, and that a very vocal group of fans considers the game broken. I've heard that Blizzard's testers couldn't actually complete the game on the hardest difficulty, and that they knowingly shipped the game in that state. While a tiny number of people were able to complete Inferno difficulty, Blizzard still decided to patch it to be easier, which they rolled out just last Tuesday. To me, that sounds very much like bad planning (if not another attempt to force people to gear up in the auction house), and the sort of thing we should attribute to managerial failure.

At this point, with Microsoft, I really, truly believe that people are so conditioned to hate their products that they can't rightly succeed any more with their current brands. This is the fate of all greedy computer companies, I think.

Inherently with any software, there are sometimes bugs which is of course always going to be a frustration for support staff.

While your mileage may vary between the representative you speak to, most of the people I worked with were all passionate about the games and about giving the best support they could. I know this sounds cheesy, but it made my day when I managed to help someone out with a really obscure issue, or that I got a compliment on the service I gave.

I left the company to start a job in software development, which I am totally stoked about. And even though I tended to undervalue the job of a customer service representative before working there, I will tell you now that decent agents have pride in their work and from a personal sanity point of view I had to come home and feel good about myself and the best way to do that was knowing that the service I gave is the kind I would hope to be given.

I don't know enough about your particular issue to comment on the real cause, but as the launcher is working fine on my 64 bit win7 installation, it leads me to believe thisis only affecting a minority of those users meaning it could be a very hard one for the developers to track down. However, support requests costs them money and I would imagine people are being appropriately pestered to get it fixed.

I can offer some very generic advice, almost always, it was background program's or antivirus interfering with the game. Do try a selective startup with nothing else running in the background and see if it helps:
http://us.battle.net/support/en/article/shutting-down-background-applications

Also, keep in mind that for every forum post about that issue, there are likely 10, 20 or maybe a hundred other users with no problem at all and thus haven't posted there. It is one of those unfortunate thing about support forums, you tend to only see the problems and never all the other users with none.

In the Reddit AMAA the designers explicitly state that they did not design the game around auction house use. During their internal testing they did not have a big enough group to even test a design that revolved around auction house usage. Of course they may be lying, but I doubt it.

This post from a Blizard employee seems to state that they did tweak the general loot drop rate in response to the auction house. It's nowhere near "revolving around the auction house" (and hence nowhere near the conspiracy you replied to), but it does seem like the auction house was accounted for in the expected gear progression.

http://us.battle.net/support/en/article/exploitation-policy
Bug Exploitation is a bannable offense

"While bug exploitation involves the abuse of what is essentially a programming mistake, the abuse of game mechanics is the act of taking advantage of the limitations of the World of Warcraft game systems."

In other words, use common sense. They do give you warnings.

http://eu.battle.net/support/en/article/how-much-bandwidth-does-world-of-warcraft-use

As a rough guide, an hour of typical play will result in around 40MB of data being Downloaded, and 4MB being Uploaded.

Or, in other words this would eat through my mobile data usage limit of 250 MB in under 6 hours.

I'm not trolling but honestly looking for insight

Here's the insight: The server for the US zone are offline for "emergency maintenance." This means people who purchased Diablo III cannot play the game in any way shape or form, including launching a single player campaign.

I will repeat that again - On launch day, nobody in the US can play the game because of the DRM.

If you can't see the problem with that, I don't think you will ever see it.

You are, of course, severely late to the party; a lot of interesting discussion on this point happened way back in August. Here's the Slashdot conversation from then. I believe the consensus is that since this is Blizzard and not EA, no boycott like the one that marred Spore's release will transpire, and the loss of flexibility will simply be accepted.

Another controversy from about the same time (which didn't receive Slashdot attention) is that all gameplay-altering modifications are banned in D3, a somewhat harsher stance than the one Blizzard took with WoW interface mods. There has been some concern that DarkD3, a mod that diminishes the game's 'painted' look to make it clearer and crisper graphics may be cause for a ban, but so far the word is "probably not".

http://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/5007290816 Blizzard announced in their forums they will be allowing people to get a refund of the preorder amount when ordering digitally. Doesn't really help if you really wanted the collector's edition but seems like a decent move on their part when they weren't even the ones who took your money.

DOTA = "Defense of the Ancients".

The basics of the game are that you control a single unit (a hero), and you work with a team of people (normally 5 other players). So it becomes a 6 vs 6 battle where you are trying to destroy the other teams base. This game style has been dubbed ARTS (action real time strategy).

  It originally started as a Warcraft 3 mod. Since then, numerous companies have copied the style.

1) You have Blizzard creating a DOTA mod for Starcraft 2.
2) You have Valve creating DOTA 2. (note that Valve and Blizzard are having a trademark war right now over DOTA). Dota 2 is a stand-alone game.
3) LoL (League of Legends) is a DOTA style came released back in 2009. It's a stand-alone game with persistant characters.

Are you a business owner? I suspect not, and here's why:

Actually, I am a business owner. I would link the company, but since we mostly handle local customers it wouldn't be effective advertising anyway, but feel free to google my nick.

The primary focus of my business is CUSTOMER SATISFACTION, not profit.
If a customer isn't happy, they don't bring friends to your business. Meanwhile, 2 happy customers who know each other will attract other people in their social circle. ( It's called "Word of mouth advertising" for anyone watching from the sidelines. )

Blizzard's customer support has gone from moderately good to completely horrible over the few years since the merger.
This, combined with several other decisions, has left large portions of the original user base feeling ignored, and even worse, exploited.

They're CATERING TO THEIR MARKET.

They are catering to a new market, actually.

Activizzard at some point decided to stop catering to the long term players with 5 year subscriptions, and started catering to the "Instant gratification"/"reward addict" crowd instead.
To make the game more accessible, they tailored the content to be less demanding. Shorter dungeons, easier bosses, more use of different difficulty levels, higher drop rates, etc.
To cater to the "achievement addicts", they initiated actual achievements, guaranteed point rewards for playing content, and allowing higher level gear to be purchased from vendors.
Additionally, they added point caps to prevent player from gaining new items too quickly, and increased the power level of items dramatically.

This worked fairly well in the short term, blizzard brought in several MILLION new subscriptions from this new untapped player base, and initially only lost a few hundred thousand long term subscribers.
Overall, from a modern business standpoint, this time period was a smashing success.

However, this smashing success had it's drawbacks.

For example, Many of the long term "hardcore" players who left were the ones who made up the most vocal part of the social community.
These were the people who were willing to teach new players how the game worked, spent hours on end joking in the chat channels, ran leveling guilds like mine, and organized huge world events (like the 400 player raids on opposing capitol cities).

For a lot of less hardcore players (like myself), this community was an extremely large part of why they continued to play the game.
The completely random interactions with other players added uncertainty and excitement, and did an amazing job of keeping the same repetitive content from getting boring. Without those vocal and extroverted people, there is nothing to distract players from the "endless grind" portions of the game during the quiet times between content releases.


Secondly, the "instant gratification" crowd have short attention spans.
After these players have seen the content, they want something new to do. NOW. If the game doesn't cough up new content on a very rapid schedule, they start losing players to other "more interesting" games. ( Just look at the drop in numbers after the announcement that 4.3 was the last big content patch in Cataclysm)

Third, the reward addicts also need new content, better gear, more power, etc.
There is a huge post on the battle.net forums from a developer asking for input regarding the "item level squish" that they may have to do to handle the exponential increase in item power from the last expansion.
There's even a nice graph and everything. SOURCE

Lastly, Providing new content on a near constant basis is expensive. It costs more developer time, and it causes an inevitable loss in quality.
Blizzards motto for new game a

The banks are considering two-factor authentication? That's great! Now my bank account will finally be as secure as my World of Warcraft account!

http://us.battle.net/support/en/article/battle-net-mobile-authenticator-faq

(Seriously, my favorite online game has been offering two-factor authentication for years. Why is this a new revelation to banks?)

Parent isn't trolling. It's simple truth (granted, with a bit of exaggeration to make the point), as anyone who has been involved in end-game in each expansion should know. Here's the next stage in the devolution: In the next expansion they're doing away with talent trees all together (apparently it wasn't simple enough to force people to spec in only one tree). Now instead of talents and talent points you get tiers with 3 abilities per tier, one every 15 levels. You must choose one (and only one!) ability per tier. But don't take my word for it, go see for yourself. Here's the Death Knight "talent calculator": http://us.battle.net/wow/en/game/mists-of-pandaria/feature/talent-calculator#d. I almost couldn't believe it at first, but there it is.

If there was anything they could have done to ensure with absolute certainty that I will never return to the game, this is it.

> Conversely, I can't think of a SP/MP RPG where the multiplayer isn't simply the single-player game with increased difficulty.

Uh, Diablo 2

a) Uber Trist for Hellfire Torch
http://extreme-gamerz.org/diablo2/viewdiablo2/hellfirecharmquest

b) Diablo Clone for Annihilus Charm
http://extreme-gamerz.org/diablo2/viewdiablo2/annihiluscloneguide

c) Ladder only Runewords
http://classic.battle.net/diablo2exp/items/runewords-110.shtml

I wouldn't call this excellent execution. Unless, y'know, you're into that sort of thing.

But, I digress. What is more important is that it seems you are misreading genre as medium. Tepples comparison of Katamari Damacy to Bubbles is really spot on if you actually bother to look up what he's referring to. On the other hand, comparing the an internet forum to courier messaging (an odd reduction since a physical forum would seem to have been more fitting) is so obtuse I'm not really sure where to begin. To illustrate, let's take what you're implying Tepples was doing and apply it. The end result would be saying Call of Duty is basically the same as the historical battle of Thermopylae whereas Tepples' assertion was more along the lines of saying 'we haven't come up with many more innovative ways of killing each other since the atom bomb' if we want to stick with a morbid theme.

In other words, he was comparing genres as in Horror, SciFi, Mystery, Fantasy or Classical, Rock, Alternative, Jazz. (Notice that they all stay within their mode of expression.) Whereas you started comparing speaking to writing to printing to broadcasting or the individual stories within a genre but across different media.

The top guild that took down the lasts raid boss (I forget which guild) took 500+ tries to do it in.

Firelands raid was launched on June 28, 2011 with Patch 4.2.0. According to this post dated 6-29-2011, Ragnaros was killed in 5 hours but there was some dispute as the guild got practice on the PTR. I doubt they got 500 attempts in with less than 5 hours. Now heroic Ragnaros might have taken longer.

I know right? When they came up with the Pandaren Brewmaster for the Warcraft 3 expansion back in 2003 they sat on it for eight years, not seven.

They promised multiple raids per tier in cata to compensate for the new shared lockouts. Shorter raids and more of them. They claimed not enough time to finish the other 4.3 raid.

The void storage stripping everything off is a storage issue as in they do not want to keep those extra attributes. The keyring removal was explicitly stated as an issue of space http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/2548839953

The cata mantra was smaller faster patches with more content. So far were at best on par, and looking at 12 months of a single raid again.

Overall I still enjoy the game but it's looking like EQ post Sony where you got the sense of accountants running the roost not game developers.

False.

my twink

*snip* By a conservative estimate, lets say 100 dollars to buy the game, plus 15*12 = 280 dollars MINIMUM to play this game for a year.

It'd cost you much less than $100.00 to get the game and all of it's expansions now. About half that, actually.

With the newest patch, [ 4.2.0 ] - anyone who has a retail version of vanilla WOW ( The first CD ) is automatically upgraded to The Burning Crusade expansion now. see http://us.battle.net/wow/en/blog/2993743#technical ( last item under general patch notes ). And that first version of WoW is on sale often for about $ 10.00 these days.
So for $10 bucks if you catch it on sale, you get World of Warcraft and the first expansion ( The Burning Crusade ), which is now included. ( It downloads for you automatically when you begin playing ).

I found the Cataclysm expansion on sale at Buy.com during the month of May for $18.00 shipped.
So I'm up to $28.00, and just waiting for the WoLK expansion to go on sale somewhere. I figure I should be able to snag it for $20.00 or less. Making WoW - with all the expansions - cost about $48.00 for the software this year, or about the price of most other games on CD / DVD lately. Whether they be for PC, Mac, XBox, etc.

Just FYI :)

In Silent Hill 2, the main character wanders through a forest into the town of Silent Hill. Once in Silent Hill, if you enter a certain building, you're greeted with the following:

http://media.giantbomb.com/uploads/0/56/258639-sh2_neelybar_hole_super.jpg

If you happen across a 404 on Battle.Net's wow forums, you're greeted with the following:

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/d

and this part threw me for a loop:
" In the later part of the 90's I was working in a high stress industry that required long hours and a good part of my soul, but it paid really well. As friends of mine started to migrate away to new internet start up firms in droves, I was tempted to follow them for the promises of a better work environment and fat stacks of quick cash. Luckily, I had a fiancee..."

Um, how old is this guy? A 30 yr old would be in his teens in the later part of the 90s, not exactly fiancee age with friends joining internet firms.

This thread on a WoW forum has a Medawky (same name as author of this article) turning 35 back in 2008 making him 38 now. Medawky is also the name of a high level (82 is high, right?) WoW character which leads me to believe it's the same guy

Don't get me wrong, 38 isn't too old to be playing MMORPGs, but perhaps he's not the best judge of if the bubble is bursting or not. Perhaps the MMORPG bubble is bursting for almost 40-somethings like himself, the article would be more believable if it came from a 20-something with some actual numbers showing a decline in players

And also worth adding:

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/1568009046?page=1

Discussions regarding bittorrent throttling at Rogers affecting Warcraft from mid-December.

I don't play WOW myself but I hate selective service blocking...found this digging around for a couple of minutes:

Thank you for your letters of February 23rd and 25th, 2011 regarding the impact of Rogers Internet traffic management practices (ITMP) on the interactive game called World of Warcraft.

Our tests have determined that there is a problem with our traffic management equipment that can interfere with World of Warcraft. We have been in contact with the game manufacturer and we have been working with our equipment supplier to overcome this problem.

We recently introduced a software modification to solve the problems our customers are experiencing with World of Warcraft. However, there have been recent changes to the game, which has created new problems. A second software modification to address these new issues will not be ready until June.

We have determined that the problem occurs only when our customers are simultaneously using peer-to-peer file sharing applications and running the game. Therefore we recommend turning off the peer-to-peer setting in the World of Warcraft game and ensuring that no peer-to-peer applications are running on any connected computer. Rogers will engage our customers to ensure they are aware of these recommendations, while continuing to work on a longer term solution.

We sincerely regret the inconvenience that some of our customers have experienced in playing World of Warcraft and will continue to work with the game supplier and our technology supplier to solve the remaining problems as soon as possible. source

(I have doubts about that portion above in bold.)

WoW... Yep, that is the reason I can't get any sleep.

You do realize Cow Clicker is cribbing from Diablo... poorly.

I was forced to change it. They reset it. I didn't.

I received two emails, the first was a notice that a reset request occured:

We've received a request to reset the password for this Battle.net account. Please click this link to reset your password:
https://us.battle.net/account/support/password-reset-confirm.xml?ticket=OBFUSCATED

If you no longer wish to make the above change, or if you did not initiate this request, please disregard and/or delete this e-mail.

If you have any questions regarding your Battle.net account, click here for answers to frequently asked questions and contact information for the Blizzard Billing & Account Services team.

Sincerely,
The Battle.net Account Team

The second was this friendly notice, confirming that they decided to do this on their own:

Greetings!

We’ve recently been informed that several Gawker Media websites have been compromised. These websites include Gawker, Gizmodo, Kotaku, Lifehacker, Jezebel, io9, Jalopnik, Deadspin, and Fleshbot. To help minimize the effects of this compromise and help keep your Battle.net account safe and secure, we’ve reset your account password. To complete the password reset, please log into Battle.net Account Management (https://us.battle.net/account/management) and follow the provided instructions.

If you are a registered commenter for any of these sites and used your Battle.net email address to sign up with Gawker Media, we also recommend that you update your Battle.net address as soon as possible via Account Management. If you are unable to complete this step or the password reset on your own and believe your account may be compromised, please contact our customer support staff by using the Account Recovery form (https://us.battle.net/account/support/account-recovery.html) and be sure to check out our Account Security Awareness guide (http://us.battle.net/en/security/) for additional security tips and suggestions.

For more information about this situation, please visit Gawker Media’s official announcement (http://gawker.com/5713056/gawker-security-breach-were-here-to-help) or Lifehacker’s comprehensive FAQ (http://lifehacker.com/5712785/faq-compromised-commenting-accounts-on-gawker-media).

Regards,
Blizzard Entertainment

So I navigated to battle.net using a trusted means, and completed the password reset. This appeared to work; I received no error notices. But when I attempted to actually log in to my battle.net account, I got a LOGIN FAILED result every time.

It was NOT necessary, or polite, or even really their business to do this without asking first . Especially when they can easily determine that I am using an authenticator.

I've been dealing with Blizzard customer service for 12 years, now, and they've continuously grown worse and worse and worse. About the time Wrath came out, it was pretty clear that their 'A' team had left for greener pastures/advanced projects and the 'B' team remained behind for the customers to deal with.

My latest correspondence with them over this issue was the worst yet. If the interaction I had with this 'person' that I dealt with was any indication, then he couldn't even pass a Turing test. Even the words "PLEASE ELEVATE" just got me another canned response to perform a password reset.

I swear, i was dealing with a script, and a half-assed one at that.

At some point, sometime between 36 and 48 hours later, someone behind the scenes untangled the mess that had been created, and the login began working again.

I suspect it was a "nested reset" condition. Blizzard initiated a reset, and sent me a link to complete the reset. But being a good phish-proof customer, I ignored the link and used a trusted bookmark to navigate to battle.net, and initiated another reset, without completing the first one. They should have anticipated this, though, because they've been telling us for years "do not follow links in emails to pages that request your password."

I decided look around again for better pricing. The best pricing I can find with limited searching on the blizzard site and on Amazon is $85

They claim it ended a week ago, but it's worth a shot. $20 for the ability to do everything except make a goblin or a worgen. End game content will cost another $40 after you've levelled up a bit.

Actually, I rather hope the deal is still in effect since I'm finally going to buy my kid his own account.

My god there are plenty of priests named placebo, I'm sure you're not the only one who has been doing that!

When I read they were introducing new map types and play modes, my first hope was that they'd bring back team melee.

And before someone says it's already in the game, it's not. It was a really innovative way to play RTS as a team, and it's a shame they haven't included it. If you don't remember the mode from the original, have a look at the thread on the forum asking for its return.

When I read they were introducing new map types and play modes, my first hope was that they'd bring back team melee.

And before someone says it's already in the game, it's not. It was a really innovative way to play RTS as a team, and it's a shame they haven't included it. If you don't remember the mode from the original, have a look at the thread on the forum asking for its return.

Will Diablo 3 be sticking with the new model of requiring people to use real names to interact with other players significantly, or are they introducing some kind of way for people to pick a nickname?

Blizzard actually just barely released changes which makes Real ID optional. I got an email yesterday from Blizzard explaining the change and showing how to make changes to your profile so that Real ID is disabled, or to prevent friends of your Real ID friends from also seeing your full name.

I was happy to see the change, but two things still bother me about it. Why did it take them months after the retail release of the game to implement this? It should have been clear from day one that such a feature has as much potential for bad as good and should obviously be optional. Second, why is it so hard to make these changes? You have to go to the Battle.net webpage, log in to your profile, go to "communication settings" (less than obvious) and make the changes there. Why can't it just be a simple option in the game clients?

http://us.battle.net/sc2/en/forum/topic/374722023

some sort of social networking BS to masses of people in hopes of building it into something larger

I think you mean this.

Region locks

Just like WoW, with a net benefit in terms of latency. I don't want to hit the ladder button and get get a minimum of 400ms+ of latency (but I would like to be able to at least join a custom game with them).

"connectivity" with social networking sites

Given the SC2 playerbase, there are more people who have a facebook account than otherwise. I hate it personally, but generally speaking, it wasn't a stupid decision on their part.

no chat/clans/channels

All of which are coming in a future patch..

a single character name

While I do wish they had an option to reset your account and generate a new name, I really only see this as a positive change. A massive cut down on trolling, and bans meaning something.

Not that it matters much, SC2 ladder is compromised already due to rampant maphacking.

Sure there are indeed maphacks already, but calling their usage rampant is a bit of a stretch. Blizzard has never instantly banned people for "hacking." It comes in waves, like you know, these banning sprees of 7,700, 350,000, and then 320,000.




Just to reiterate:

Activision has nothing to do with anything they've done recently, and anyone who says otherwise is blaming something they don't like on a company of convinence.

look what they did to the custom map scene. They created that incredibly powerful editor that dwarfs anything that was done before but they pretty much killed it with ridiculous restrictions. Warcraft 3 thrived on map making, i suspect that half the people owning wc3 never bothered to play ladder matches.

http://eu.battle.net/sc2/en/forum/
look at popular topics section:
- Allow authors to cross-realm publish
yup, people can't publish their maps globally, they do it on their server only

- A short rant on SC2 and general censorship
list of censored words is very long and includes such words as suicide - if by any chance you want to write 'banelings suicide attack' somewhere in your map or words like bullshit that can be found in the single player, the map can be even banned. No idea if the words that are filtered out in other places like black, white trans(port), (g)rape cause problems but i think they do

- Want "Custom Game"? Go back to WC3 or SC1.
says all - despite primitive editors you enjoy more fun and freedom in the realm of custom games. You have the control over the rules and players that join and you, also you can name your game to broadcast rules (people playing dota add a lot of codes to the game name so people know what they join) or desired skill level. People have none of that in sc2 and maps are sorted by populatity (self perpetuating scheme, new maps can't get high enough to get noticed by more than a handful of people, good luck autofilling all player slots in a reasonable time)

- The new Custom Game system? (What is wrong with it)
other problems - without lan developing multiplayer scenarios is a chore after all debugging is all about running a map, finding a problem, trying to fix it, running a map again, wash rinse repeat. To do that you need to use bnet which adds considerable amount of time to the development process, testing from the editor level is not sufficient in all but the simpliest cases

- The Real Problem with Custom Maps

5 out of 10 most popular threads on the forum touch mapmaking/publishing alone. It shows how messed up it became thanks to the control freaks in actiblizz

you are 'encouraged' to be always online, you have to deal with authorizations to even dream about playing offline on some shitty guest account (your progress on your account and on guest are separate so you'd have to start campaign from scratch)

This doesn't appear to be true. From what I can tell by reading this thread, you are required to authenticate online initially and every 30 days after that. It appears there is/was a bug (they say they have a patch, but I don't know if it is released yet) that if your machine changes it's hostname when offline, the authentication doesn't stick.

Nothing Bliz has implemented in sc2 is lighting up my "do not play or buy" alarm.

Given that offline play doesn't work - or is buggy as hell - there is at least one point where SC2 needs improvement. At least if you expect to play the game in places where you have no network.

Here is the link where Blizzard confirms the issue.

Looks like you folks experiencing this problem should

1. Clean any dust out of your system, and ensure proper ventilation
2. and then if you still experience problems, do as Blizzard recommends and add the config lines in.

Problem solved!

Actually, you have to authenticate with Battle.net once every 30 days or so to keep offline mode offline.

See http://us.battle.net/sc2/en/launch?ref=/sc2/en/forum/topic/112311280

Which I think is a stupid decision on Blizzard's part. I'd really like to see them only require online access once, otherwise offline mode is just a waste.

Although the article does seem biased, I do not mind as I agree with the sentiment that this move to eliminate anonymity is disturbing. This leads me to two questions:

• What do you think the "end-game" plan is for the governing body of China?
  • Full cutoff from the West?
  • Winning the hearts and minds of its citizens?
  • Encouraging foreign businesses?
  • Something else?

  Something seems a little backwards here...are they really all that naive to see that they may end up losing control?

• On a less serious note, isn't this a copyright violation of Blizzard's real id? I mean Blizzard's is voluntary, but maybe they could sue China for a copyright violation... (yes I am being sarcastic)

World of Warcraft is doing something similar with RealID ( http://us.battle.net/realid/index.html ). It is "completely voluntary"; at least for the moment. I suspect there will be a push for more accountability in all online endeavors soon in an attempt to slow down the horrors of internet anonymity.

http://us.battle.net/security/

Blizzard doesn't want to pay to have enough moderators to actually moderate. This idea was to gt around having to do that. Too bad it's based on a false premise.

That's not moderation you're advocating.

No authority should be encouraged to be that neck-deep in the business of people. Even if it's just people playing a game. Moderation isn't about having employees read every single stupid thing your customers say (and they do, you just try not to tell them). It's about being responsive to your customers' needs, taking to heart the stuff you need to benefit them (and through them yourself), and taking action when necessary to stop problems.

As to trolls, they're not going to complain; criminals don't stand up for their rights by admitting their crimes. Allowing only for legitimate complaints results in your false premise.

Also, you're just plain wrong as to intention. Blizzard's announcement specifically mentioned trolls and their place in the reason behind the intended change: (emphasis mine)

"The official forums have always been a great place to discuss the latest info on our games, offer ideas and suggestions, and share experiences with other players -- however, the forums have also earned a reputation as a place where flame wars, trolling, and other unpleasantness run wild. Removing the veil of anonymity typical to online dialogue will contribute to a more positive forum environment".

...According to Blizzard's Real ID page:

"Real ID is a completely voluntary and optional level of identity that keeps players connected across all of Battle.net."

      Unless Blizzard decides to make the Real ID "feature" mandatory for all account holders, one would simply not post on the forums if they didn't want their real names to be used.

        Of course, don't mistake this as my approval of Blizzard's change in policy for their forums. I think the concept of requiring real names to be used on their forums is breathtakingly stupid. While requiring the use of real names may silence the majority of the forum trolls out there, it just gives the more mentally unstable ones access to real names that could be used to "troll" someone in real life.

You’ll also begin seeing blue posters (i.e. Blizzard employees) posting by their real first and last names on our forums as well.

From http://eu.battle.net/realid/faq.html

I've already sent them an angry message via battle.net support pointing out how insane it is to 1) Require real names show when you add a RealID friend, 2) Allow friends of friends to also see your real name, 3) Show the real names on forums.

You can still play their games and not given the info away, but it means never posting on the forums or making use of RealID friending (you can still do per-game single-character friending).

Answer to your last question, no.

Originally Posted by Bashiok (Source)
One important point which I don't believe has been relayed yet is that the switch to showing RealID on the forums will only happen with the new forum systems we're launching for StarCraft II shortly before its release, and a new forum system for World of Warcraft launching shortly before the release of Cataclysm.

All posts here on the current World of Warcraft forums, or any of our classic Battle.net forums, will remain as-is. They won't (and can't) automatically switch to showing a real first and last name.

All posts in the future on the new forum systems will be an opt-in choice and ample warning will be given that you're posting with your real first and last name.

More info @: http://us.battle.net/realid/faq.html