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Bnetd isn't the least of Blizzard's problems right now. If you haven't been following the Diablo saga, here's a short history.

Diablo I was quickly prone to excessive hacks because all character information was stored client-side.

Diablo II was released under the premise that character data was unhackable under a secure server. However, packet sending programs became capable of producing duplicates of godly items, and more recently hack into item properties, and bring characters up to essentially infinite skill levels. Essentially, Diablo I all over again (a big reason for this IMO is that Blizzard does not disallow the selling of game items and characters on ebay, as do the makers of Ultima Online and EverQuest).

After the most recent wave of hacks (typically a new hack is produced, and its use becomes so widespread that Blizzard has to patch it to get it's servers running again), Blizzard announced that it had deleted accounts found sending bogus packets.

Up to WarCraft III all Blizzard products have been free to play on Battle.Net. If they can't be more proactive in securing their servers, the prospects for World of WarCraft, their monthly payment MMORPG under development, does not instill one with confidence.

It won't do anything.

I hate to burst the /. reader's bubble, but the collective group of us boycotting a game will do *nothing* to hurt blizard.
Let's think about this: Slashdot has about a quarter million users. Of these, about 1/3 are zealots who don't run windows, not even for the little pleasures. Of the remaining, i would suspect fewer than 1/5 of them *EVER* buy software because they feel damnit it should be free (beer). And after that, I would say that 10% of the remaining windows users who don't pirate software actually play blizard games but would be still willing to participate in a boycot. The rest will go on buying the game anyway because it's going to be a good game.

So we're left with 3000 people that will take part in a boycot against the DCMA and Blizzard simultaneously. Oh Ouch. How many copies of diablo II have sold?
Well here's a guess. 2.75 Million copies. And again,
how about the expansion? Another million copies. Boycotting them will do no good.

Now, I was trying to figure out why they did this, and I was thinking "oh this is easy, there's a charge for playing on battle.net, that's their revenue model. But on battle.net i found this:
Battle.net provides an arena for Blizzard customers to chat, challenge opponents and initiate multiplayer games, at no cost to the user. There is no hourly or monthly fee to use Battle.net, and there is no startup charge. To play a supported game over the Internet with other players worldwide, simply select the Battle.net option from within the game.

So what gives, blizard? How is this helping you? Are there ads in battle.net? Do you use it for free market research somehow? Do you simply want to track ALL of the online blizard games going on? Throw me a bone here.

But let's be serious: I'm not going to boycott blizzard. They've only released 5 games in their history, yet they've ALL been fantastic smash hits that i've loved. So I'm just going to go do the exact same thing that every other casual windows user on slashdot is going to do. I'm going to wait for a copy of it to hit kopykatz or morpheus and download it.

Boo fucking hoo, boycot.

~z

Anyway - what about a carbonized version of Warcraft II? Like they did for Starcraft? That would be nice. Or (tada) a carbonized version of Diablo II? That would be really nice!

And, refering to this, is there a remedy for the Ati Rave problems? The last update (for 9.2) didn't change a thing. The game has still frequent little pauses in hardware accelerated mode on my otherwise freshly set up iMac.

Any Ati driver for Mac developers reading this?

Oh well, I still have D2 installed on my PC...

-Arnulf

Blizzard does.

Get it here.

• 
  
• $700 Diablo 2 II USWest LOD INSANE 344% MF BOW?! [ebay.com]
• $500 Diablo 2 II USWest Pally Paladin +6 Ring +6! [ebay.com]

• 
  
• $700 Diablo 2 II USWest LOD INSANE 344% MF BOW?! [ebay.com]
• $500 Diablo 2 II USWest Pally Paladin +6 Ring +6! [ebay.com]

"Um, that's perfect topazes, not diamonds. Current reports suggest that a magic find percentage over 200 doesn't do much good, so there's no need to go overboard."

In the most recent patch (v1.09) Blizzard implemented a Diminishing returns formula for items that added a % chance to find magic items (magic find). A full explanation of magic find is here at Blizzard's official strategy site. Items can drop normal (white colored), magical (blue), rare (yellow), part of an item set (green) or unique (gold). The diminishing returns formula is not posted on that site, but basically diminishing returns kick in bigtime for unique items around 200% increased MF, kick in later for set items and even later for rare items. If you're wearing items that give you a 400% increased chance to find a magical item, you only get like, a 220-230% increased chance of getting a unique.

Blizzard probably implemented this because with the previous patch (1.08), magic find worked on all monsters, including bosses (who always drop at least magical items), so characters were loading themselves down with MF gear and "farming" the bosses over and over to get rares, sets and uniques to drop. (Normal monsters don't always drop, so it's simply more reliable to farm bosses for drops). So since people were abusing magic find, it was decreased in potency ("nerfed").

"And they 'balanced' telekenesis so that you can only pick up minor items (like potions). This is very annoying in single player mode, where there is no one to steal drops from..."

Actually, telekinesis (TK) was changed because someone (or a group of someones) wrote an "item-grabber" hack. The hack basically was a packet sniffer/sender, and when it registered that a rare, set, or unique item had dropped on the ground, it send a packet to the server saying "I picked that item up." Of course, the program could be configured to also grab gold, potions, scrolls, runes, anything. I don't recall if Blizzard broke the functionality of the hack in a patch before deciding to kill Telekinesis to solve the problem...but if they did it most likely took about two days for the people writing the hack to figure out the new packets and re-write the program. The program still works, but since TK is broken it only lets characters pick items up if they are right next to it (I think, there were rumors that players could send packets to make the server think they walked over to an item and picked it up when they didn't move, but that sounds fishy).

"Some moderately valuable items (like the Stone of Jordan ring or perfect skulls) became the new currency for a while. SoJs have become much more rare these days, and aren't used as currency as much."

The Stone of Jordan (SOJ) became a currency because it was a useful item, took up one inventory slot, and was relatively easy to get if you had enough gold (prior to patch 1.08 you could "gamble" for items. The Stone of Jordan is a unique ring. There are two other unique rings, but since before 1.08 uniques couldn't generate if one was already in the game, you could hold the other two rings and spend lots of easily obtainable gold gambling on rings and makes lots of SOJ's).

"Pskulls are an interesting currency, because they are constantly being generated, but also constantly being used up"

PSkulls used to be currency before patch 1.08. PSkulls could be used to "re-roll" the stats on a rare item (rare items have up to 6 modifiers, magic items only 2), and this reroll could produce ANY stat available, with better stats possible than any drop you could get from a monster. PSkulls were also rare, since gems dropped *very* infrequently from monsters, and the highest quality gem that could drop was a normal (3 normals make a flawless, 3 flawless make a perfect, or a gem shrine makes 1 normal go to 1 flawless, etc. there are also chipped and flawed under normal). Now, in 1.09, flawless gems (skulls are gems, technically) can drop, and do drop quite frequently, so they are much more common. Also, the main reason PSkulls plummeted in price was that the way to use 6 PSkulls and a Rare to reroll the rare had it's power decreased GREATLY. It can now produce items with stats 40% as powerful as the previous max (item level of 100 previously possible, max level of 40 available now).

Interestingly, gold (the currency inside the game) isn't often used for trading, because it isn't valuable enough!

That's because you lose a set percentage of your gold when you die, and you can only carry a certain amount of gold. There are other smaller reasons, but those are the main ones.

All in all, it's not too easy to base your economy on factors (like rarity) that can be changed at the whim of some programmers.

Then the programmers deliberately try to affect the economy. Right now new SOJ's are going up because no new ones are coming into the game, and all other items are being produced at an alarming rate. A few more weeks of this and the SOJ currency *might* break, but I doubt it, it's too ingrained in people's minds.

That's about all I can think of about the subject. Hope it helped.

~Moller

Actually, they're done already.
Look here for the explanation of the solution,
and go here for the all clear message.

Who is more foolish: the fool,
or the fool that follows him? (Obi-Wan Kenobi)

Actually, they're done already.
Look here for the explanation of the solution,
and go here for the all clear message.

Who is more foolish: the fool,
or the fool that follows him? (Obi-Wan Kenobi)

Blizzard has fixed the item loss issues and rolled the realm back to a state captured the previous day, resulting in all items being restored with a loss of under 48 hours of user playtime. See their Battle.Net Status post.

Looks like Blizz has found out the problem and according to this the disappearing items problem is going to the taken care of. We shall see I suppose.

Ruger

Looks like Blizz has found out the problem and according to this the disappearing items problem is going to the taken care of. We shall see I suppose.

Ruger

most of the posts are amsuing to read. Considering the Battle.net service is free, people still feel they have to complain, complain, complain. Perhaps they never bothered to look at the Battle.Net Terms of Usage.

most of the posts are amsuing to read. Considering the Battle.net service is free, people still feel they have to complain, complain, complain. Perhaps they never bothered to look at the Battle.Net Terms of Usage.

most of the posts are amsuing to read. Considering the Battle.net service is free, people still feel they have to complain, complain, complain. Perhaps they never bothered to look at the Battle.Net Terms of Usage.

most of the posts are amsuing to read. Considering the Battle.net service is free, people still feel they have to complain, complain, complain. Perhaps they never bothered to look at the Battle.Net Terms of Usage.

By the way, you missed this post where they explain they will repair it.

But if you investigated you would have found in the news that items got lost before the message of battle.net. i.e. here on US-WEST

But battle.net will explain here .....8-) why your "item" was not found.

---------- Damn. I just reacted to a troll. Mod me down for this! At least i could resist to the "Not pay" part.

By the way, you missed this post where they explain they will repair it.

But if you investigated you would have found in the news that items got lost before the message of battle.net. i.e. here on US-WEST

But battle.net will explain here .....8-) why your "item" was not found.

---------- Damn. I just reacted to a troll. Mod me down for this! At least i could resist to the "Not pay" part.

It sure is nice to see that when people talk about Battle.Net, they usually complain about problems with a game service that they don't even pay for while being too lazy to investigate the cause.

It sure is nice to see that when people talk about Battle.Net, they usually complain about problems with a game service that they don't even pay for while being too lazy to investigate the cause.

It sure is nice to see that when people talk about Battle.Net, they usually complain about problems with a game service that they don't even pay for while being too lazy to investigate the cause.

It sure is nice to see that when people talk about Battle.Net, they usually complain about problems with a game service that they don't even pay for while being too lazy to investigate the cause.

you can subscribe from 4 april to 11 april BUT only if you live in america or taiwan. That latest part make me wonder. How in the world can somebody in taiwan join be silly me in europe has no change at all....Why is Blizzard only accepting beta test applications from U.S. & Canadian residents? faq says: "Due to the differences in varying country time zones, we have decided to limit the test to U.S., Canada, and a small number of pre-selected cyber game cafés. " And since the CD will be mailed i can not work arround it. bummer. But maybe the cd will leak.....

Two words:

Neverwinter Nights

Dungeon Master, Wizardry, and like games, started a tradition of dungeon crawl RPGs that are currenly best explemfified by Diablo II on one end of the spectrum, and Baldur's Gate II on the other. But it looks like Bioware's Neverwinter Nights is about to take the crown.

Kudos to Jamie for investigating this further; the following was my original submission on this topic:

=======

The mind boggles. Police have apparently raided a student's dorm room due to his participation in a heavy metal music inspired gaming clan, "Bled For Days." The article goes to some length not to mention the exact game, including ominous references to a "war-like" "game of chess" where "it's not like we were going to kill you or anything". The game in question, of course, is the seminal Humans vs. Bugs vs. Yellow Psychic Aliens wargame, Starcraft. The presence of a web page listing in-game rivalries was apparently taken for death threats. For all the talk of "children" being unable to differentiate fake violence from the real thing, it seems to me that "adults" were the ones breaking into someone else's home, carrying loaded weapons, confiscating expensive goods while availing themselves of the opportunity to search for anything more valuable(i.e. drugs).

As hilariously pitiful as this seems, there's a real problem here. The tragedy is that, sooner or later, the credibility of authorities trying to fight real computer crime will be so stretched that even when society desperately requires their intervention, the police will find themselves unable to get even the slightest shreds of voluntary cooperation. A bizarre and ultimately truly dangerous attitude, the apathetic chuckle, has spawned over recent years by Zero Tolerance(and apparently, Intelligence, Accountability, or Political Responsibility) policies; the exact policies that have lead to first graders being suspended for pointing chicken at eachother and being expelled for kissing a girl on the cheek. People are willing to quickly accept these ridiculous and flagrantly neglectful abuse of power because "it's funny to laugh at...but I can't do something about it, isn't that someone else's job?"

This threatens the core legitimacy of what really are genuinely critical services; the police, the school, and the administrators all become jokes, not to be taken seriously. The immediate reaction my friends had to this incident at Kent State was, "The last time police at Kent State didn't understand what the students were up to, somebody won a Pulitzer Prize". Since the most damaging effect of any computer security violation is the long term degradation of trust in a given service, the ignorance these busts show eventually makes it harder to actually control and address genuine security issues, such as DDoS attacks. Instead of simply laughing and moving on, what can we, as a community do to prevent these kind of occurances in the future? Would something as simple as a confidential "reality check" group of experts, made available to law enforcement as consultants, be helpful? Would a set of guidelines, peer reviewed by the community, be useful? Instead of cursing the darkness, how can we praise the light?

Kudos to Jamie for investigating this further; the following was my original submission on this topic:

=======

The mind boggles. Police have apparently raided a student's dorm room due to his participation in a heavy metal music inspired gaming clan, "Bled For Days." The article goes to some length not to mention the exact game, including ominous references to a "war-like" "game of chess" where "it's not like we were going to kill you or anything". The game in question, of course, is the seminal Humans vs. Bugs vs. Yellow Psychic Aliens wargame, Starcraft. The presence of a web page listing in-game rivalries was apparently taken for death threats. For all the talk of "children" being unable to differentiate fake violence from the real thing, it seems to me that "adults" were the ones breaking into someone else's home, carrying loaded weapons, confiscating expensive goods while availing themselves of the opportunity to search for anything more valuable(i.e. drugs).

As hilariously pitiful as this seems, there's a real problem here. The tragedy is that, sooner or later, the credibility of authorities trying to fight real computer crime will be so stretched that even when society desperately requires their intervention, the police will find themselves unable to get even the slightest shreds of voluntary cooperation. A bizarre and ultimately truly dangerous attitude, the apathetic chuckle, has spawned over recent years by Zero Tolerance(and apparently, Intelligence, Accountability, or Political Responsibility) policies; the exact policies that have lead to first graders being suspended for pointing chicken at eachother and being expelled for kissing a girl on the cheek. People are willing to quickly accept these ridiculous and flagrantly neglectful abuse of power because "it's funny to laugh at...but I can't do something about it, isn't that someone else's job?"

This threatens the core legitimacy of what really are genuinely critical services; the police, the school, and the administrators all become jokes, not to be taken seriously. The immediate reaction my friends had to this incident at Kent State was, "The last time police at Kent State didn't understand what the students were up to, somebody won a Pulitzer Prize". Since the most damaging effect of any computer security violation is the long term degradation of trust in a given service, the ignorance these busts show eventually makes it harder to actually control and address genuine security issues, such as DDoS attacks. Instead of simply laughing and moving on, what can we, as a community do to prevent these kind of occurances in the future? Would something as simple as a confidential "reality check" group of experts, made available to law enforcement as consultants, be helpful? Would a set of guidelines, peer reviewed by the community, be useful? Instead of cursing the darkness, how can we praise the light?

Kudos to Jamie for investigating this further; the following was my original submission on this topic:

=======

The mind boggles. Police have apparently raided a student's dorm room due to his participation in a heavy metal music inspired gaming clan, "Bled For Days." The article goes to some length not to mention the exact game, including ominous references to a "war-like" "game of chess" where "it's not like we were going to kill you or anything". The game in question, of course, is the seminal Humans vs. Bugs vs. Yellow Psychic Aliens wargame, Starcraft. The presence of a web page listing in-game rivalries was apparently taken for death threats. For all the talk of "children" being unable to differentiate fake violence from the real thing, it seems to me that "adults" were the ones breaking into someone else's home, carrying loaded weapons, confiscating expensive goods while availing themselves of the opportunity to search for anything more valuable(i.e. drugs).

As hilariously pitiful as this seems, there's a real problem here. The tragedy is that, sooner or later, the credibility of authorities trying to fight real computer crime will be so stretched that even when society desperately requires their intervention, the police will find themselves unable to get even the slightest shreds of voluntary cooperation. A bizarre and ultimately truly dangerous attitude, the apathetic chuckle, has spawned over recent years by Zero Tolerance(and apparently, Intelligence, Accountability, or Political Responsibility) policies; the exact policies that have lead to first graders being suspended for pointing chicken at eachother and being expelled for kissing a girl on the cheek. People are willing to quickly accept these ridiculous and flagrantly neglectful abuse of power because "it's funny to laugh at...but I can't do something about it, isn't that someone else's job?"

This threatens the core legitimacy of what really are genuinely critical services; the police, the school, and the administrators all become jokes, not to be taken seriously. The immediate reaction my friends had to this incident at Kent State was, "The last time police at Kent State didn't understand what the students were up to, somebody won a Pulitzer Prize". Since the most damaging effect of any computer security violation is the long term degradation of trust in a given service, the ignorance these busts show eventually makes it harder to actually control and address genuine security issues, such as DDoS attacks. Instead of simply laughing and moving on, what can we, as a community do to prevent these kind of occurances in the future? Would something as simple as a confidential "reality check" group of experts, made available to law enforcement as consultants, be helpful? Would a set of guidelines, peer reviewed by the community, be useful? Instead of cursing the darkness, how can we praise the light?

1) Hardcore players who died between Dec 19 and Jan 1 will be revived and reset to their December 19th status

2) There will be a way to "flag your character" to be restored to the December 19th status if you believed you lost items/gold unfairly

Both of these things will take place next monday, on the 8th of January apparently.

A mind is a terrible thing to taste.

A mind is a terrible thing to taste.

Blizzard's now saying the problem has been fixed. http://www.battle.net/forums/diablo2-realmstatus/p osts/ac/52.shtml

Take a look at the new Realm Status Update: http://www.battle.net/forums/diablo2-realmstatus/p osts/ac/52.shtml

It says that any hardcore characters that were killed will be restored, and any stolen items will also be restored to players.

Blizzard rocks!

Have a look here . They announced that the problem was fixed. Lets see if the "mechanism" to regain items will not be abused.

I think this and/or this shows that Blizzard may be dealing with the problem. Let's see where this goes...

I think this and/or this shows that Blizzard may be dealing with the problem. Let's see where this goes...

First of all, not all games are made for the 13 year old hyperactive destructive kid (and I don't believe all of that media bullshit which tells us that violent games make kids violent; you can tell what is real by the age of 3..). There are actually games which are calm, and require some thought. I'm not saying it's gonna make you a genius or be harder than your Robust Digital Signal Processing class, but they aren't made to be for the twitchy-fingered young-uns.

Second, you might notice who plays the games: there are actually a lot of people in their 20s or 30s who play games, and they play all kinds of games. However, I must say that it is true that most young gamers do play twitchy games....

Oh. And there are Barbie games, as well as, gasp, a Barbie printer! It's sooooooo cute!

Ahem.

Just tryin' to defend us gamers some... Hyuk....

Fnord.

Quake 3 Arena!

Diablo 2

Counter Strike!!!

The Elder Scrolls: Morrowind!

Maybe he can do something about how my Corsair which keeps getting shot down by Charon-boosted Goliaths and cloaked wraiths.

Actually, no, not 4, 3. Originally it might have been 4 CDs.. But take a look at this post by Blizzard employee Geoff Frazier.

You must be level 21 to enter Baghdad, but newbies are welcome to help overthrow Central American dictators.

Oh, and watch out for the pkillers.....

I'm a longtime regular on the Battle.net (aka Blizzard) forums, and I guess this means that someone was paying attention. Its quite a regular thing seeing requests posted in the War Room asking for Starcraft/Broodwar/Diablo II to be ported over. The usual answer they get is "When there is enough marketshare, I'm sure Blizzard will", because they always port stuff over to Mac, eveuntally. Honestly, Diablo II is one that seems a lot more likely then Starcraft, considering how old Starcraft is now. But its still the best RTS game out there, no matter how old it is. Does anyone remember the game that was supposed to kill it? No? It was called Tiberian something... well whatever it was called isn't important. The problem with porting Starcraft is that a lot of the playerbase of people who want it ported already have Windows versions and either dual boot or play in WINE. So are these people who are asking for it actually willing to buy it *again* just to have a native linux version? Thats the real question with Starcraft.. not how many new players you can get that way (which isn't enough), but how many existing ones will buy it again to get a linux version. Its the existing ones who ask for a port. Diablo II on the other hand is another story, and could very well get ported happily. (ps - I saw another post where someone complaiend about how long DII is taking... all I have in reply is this: Do you want a bug riddled game released now, or a kick ass one released later? Personally, I'd rather not have to download an 18mb patch just to make the game playable out of the box)

I went here and got this response:

They won't do it because it would be useless. Like 0.5% of PC users actually use Linux, what would they be getting out of it, 2 more copies of starcraft sold?

If we make a strong showing on the boards, maybe we can get some attention from Blizzard!

Yup all of 'em

• WarCraft III
• Diablo II
• StarCraft
• Diablo
• Warcraft II
• Warcraft

Now lets all go over and post on the Battle.net suggestion forums...

Diablo II is currently the only reason I still have a licence for Windows 98, but I don't want to have to reboot to play it.

They've got a Battle.net forum for suggestions for Diablo II, (at http://www.battle.net/forums/diab lo2-suggestions/), so I'm off to suggest that they port to Linux.

They are one of the best, if not *the* best, game company out there. If we can just get them to understand the benifiets of a Linux port, then I can ditch Windows and save myself 500 megabytes.

One thing you can do is make it crystal clear to Blizzard that your running a Linux-only box and want a Linux port.

Try the Suggestion forums on Battle.net to begin with. If we don't let them know there's a market, they won't have any reason to do the port.

If we all get together and post to the suggestion forums on Battle.net then mabie we can get Blizz to do the port themselves.

Not to insult Loki or anything, but could a Loki port realy be up to the standard of quality that is a Blizzard Game?