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Diablo II: Knickknacks Nicked
Various people sent in complaints, and good old Anonymous Coward sent a link to the Diablo II Forums, where all and sundry are complaining that sunspots, or h4xx0rs, or Blizzard's incompetence have made all their hard-earned Diablo II items disappear into the aether from whence they came. Is it just me, or is it a bit odd to be reporting on the disappearance of items that never existed in the first place?
Well, seeing as though ALL my equipment was deleted off of several characters (only on the USEast server) and that I both do not trade, nor care about knowing how to dupe (if I did, don't you think it would be "easier" to be lame on the Open realms?), I think I have a fairly decent idea that all my gear was jacked in some nasty DB fault. Unless their dupe-finding-routine includes items you can gamble for, and find on the ground after killing Mephisto entirely too many times. :)
I just love the false sense of hope they give their regular players when they announce that they are taking USEast down to investigate. I mean technically speaking, unless its an issue with a server-side flub pertaining to joining games, most everyone's stuff is gone. You just won't know it until you join a game
Yes, yes it is.
My employer maintains a free chat & game-connection server for a PC product we released 3 years ago.
Besides a small number of users constantly clamoring for expansion packs (despite the original product not selling enough to break even on development costs, which is _only_ OK since a lot of the code rolled over into a next-generation game), any time the server goes down, even for 5 minutes, even if we've telegraphed this outage days in advance, we get deluged by email and voicemail from a handful of people.
Even though the server has had 99.99% uptime the past 3 years (pretty impressive for an NT server), they claim we're "sabotaging" the server, or various other wacko conspiracy theories. They refuse to acknowledge that 99% of their problems are caused by the users having horrible ISPs and antiquated systems with MAJOR driver/configuration problems.
The real fun begins when the building experiences a power outage of such a long duration that the T1 goes down, servers go down, etc. due to the batteries running out of juice. When this happens people online are notified of the situation, given a few minutes to start up games, etc. (once started, games are done peer-to-peer), then the server goes down until power is restored. Want to guess what we hear when the power comes back? Yep. Conspiracy theories. "There was no power outage! You're just trying to screw us!" etc.
It's people like this that make companies shut DOWN free services. If all they're going to do is bitch endlessly, what upside is there for companies to continue the service?
Remember, "Loose lips sink ships."
is it a bit odd to be reporting on the disappearance of items that never existed in the first place?
No. But it is odd to be reporting on Battle.net security/stability like it is a rare occurance.
...with a game service that they don't even pay for
Actually, they do pay for it. The game is advertised with battle.net, and many people buy it for that purpose. When you pay your $50, your buying the boxed game, and the right to play on their servers.
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I was playing last night the instant this first happened. (~ 11:30pm EST) Was playing, lost con, restarted, joined a game, found BOTH my chars completely stripped of ALL items.
I have NEVER traded for ANY items so don't give me that crap about the people complaining are the ones that had duped items.
If you meant, that Blizzard was running a dupe-checker-deleter and it had a BUG that deleted legit items as well, then that is the more likely story.
To all those others saying "what's the big deal":
Yes, it's JUST a game, but when I invest personal HOURS of fun into a (persistant world*) game, I tend to get a annoyed if the game world isn't persistant -- what's EVEN the point of playing then?! (Ask anyone who has experienced timewarps in UO)
Michael your comment about people complaining about items disapppearing would be more accurate if it mentioned "people complaining about virtual items dissappearing."
* Diablo only has persistant characters, the world is semi-persistant.
The category is probably a bit too large for a new editor to be accepted easily, but the subcategories would make a great place to apply. Even though it is fairly well maintained at this point, none of it has a listed editor. There are three more sites waiting in the unreviewed queue there too.
A developed enough technology is indistinguishable from magic. As Blizzard technology achieved this level recently, it worked like magic. All items magically disappeared. Nobody promised that a mature technology works like good magic ;-)
Computers make very fast, very accurate mistakes
Various people sent in complaints, and good old Anonymous Coward sent a link to the Diablo II Forums, where all and sundry are complaining that sunspots, or h4xx0rs, or Blizzard's incompetence have made all their hard-earned Diablo II items disappear into the aether from whence they came. Is it just me, or is it a bit odd to be reporting on the disappearance of items that never existed in the first place?
So the next time Hotmail crashes and a bunch of people lose all their e-mail, are you going to post "is it a bit odd to be reporting on the disappearance of items that never existed in the first place"?
Isn't it a bit odd that somebody at Slashdot is posting that information isn't "real".
The data about the items, and which item belongs to which character is stored in a database. This data was slowly gathered by thousands of people using millions of man-hours (10000 people * 100 hours each = 1 million man/hours).
If this data is definitivly lost millions of man/hours get lost. If people were previously aware that this would happen, all or at least some of this time investment could've been used in other activities (like downloading p0rn or sleeping in front of the TV during another episode of the latest "reality show"), which in light of this data loss, would yielding a better return on investment (more enjoyment per time unit invested)
buying all your items on ebay - $9334
:)
spending hours adventuring to get the stuff - $1150 (@ $50/hr billable
spending hours cheating instead - $650
paying some 14 yr old in booze to do it for you - $70
the look on your face when Bliz takes it all away -
PRICELESS
(disclaimer: I don't play these or really any other games)
Looking for freelance Actionscript (Flash/Flex) or ColdFusion work and/or freelance developers. Email me, put Slashdot
1) You have to realize that diablo 2 items, characters, and accounts can be sold on ebay, and other such sites, for cold hard cash... granted, this cash could be virtual... but no more virtual than the use of a credit card.
2) People spend huge amounts of time with this stuff... I was on the low end of the addicts... and there were months were I spent 3 hours / day playing... imagine if you're a teenager, and you spend, literally, 8 hours / day playing a video game with security features to prevent cheating, so everyone knows everything you have is legitimate... then, suddenly, it's completely gone... That hurts...
3) the stuff is just stuff in a video game... but the entertainment value can be there (it's fun to have better stuff, to constantly improve your character (this is the secret to Diablo 2's success))... so if items can make a game more entertaining... then how are they really different from a game, in and of themselves (in that they may exist entirely in the vapor we call the internet... but they still provide tangible mental benefits that people consider worth paying for)... to put a finer point on it... what about expansion packs?
4) observation - others agree with me... I've seen an individual bow going for upwards of $1200 on ebay...
If you've lost your stuff, just go there and buy new equipment...
LFS. Have you built your system today?
I don't know. Would it be weird if you reported on a Paypal bug which resulted in some payments getting lost ?
Having said this, I must say I have little sympathy for users who lost stuff. It is a game, after all, and having played MUDs (mostly Isengard) for years, I know too well that the lords of these games frequently purge inventories and such, especially in response to rampant cheating. I remember one time when the game was loaded with high-level characters (including mine), the DMs were going to do a reinstall and they claimed they had to purge all players because (they claimed; I was skeptical) they were doing an upgrade and had no effective way to migrate characters (I believe they had to purge because of cloned items, too). I offered to write some scripts for them to save our characters but they demurred, and I lost a character whose name players today (and this is 5 years later) still grab whenever it comes available.
We all bitched to no end, swearing up and down that we would never come back. But surprises of surprises, almost everyone came back, and 3 weeks later everyone was pretty much back where they were. For my part, I am proud to say I stuck to my guns and pretty much gave up on MUDding.
People have to realize that this is a game, that certain shit will happen in the interests of game play over time, and sometimes for addicts shock-treatment is the only thing that will work. And if stuff like this diminishes player fanaticism just enough that people aren't spending ridiculous amounts of money on jacked up characters, or cloned items, this will all be a good thing. Maybe it will help bring a bit of perspective. I know it did for me.
As computer games advance, they allow users to descend into a reality of their choosing and completely immerse themselves within it. Networked RPGs like Ultima Online were the first generation then games like Asheron's Call and progressivlely more advanced games, each involving the user at a deeper level. There are people who spend their lives playing such games. They have become the Dungeons and Dragons of the technology era. Thankfully, we have not heard of kids killing themselves over computer games yet though.
The newest generation of networked RPGs out there go for complete immersion where the player will recieve faes phone calls and emails from game characters, and the games will effectively encroach on everyday life.
In short, no, I'm not suprised that players are upset about the loss of virtual posessions from a game universe (although I can see where the argument could be made that they paid for those posessions and should have tem returned). It's kind of a sad comentary on the human condition though.
--CTH
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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.
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.
this reminds me of the time when at the launch of the original diablo ii (not the expansion pack that just came out), hundreds of people's characters where hacked into by hacking groups who sought to take over peoples hardcore accounts who were leading the rank ladders and systematically killing them off for show. they'd make webpages showing the deaths and then pass around the urls. remember, hardcore characters die once, and that's it... once you're dead you can't play with that character anymore. it caused such a p.r. snafu that blizzard ended up rolling many people's accounts back to a backup of a few weeks prior once they fixed their security holes. -Super Kermit http://www.christopherwu.net/
-Christopher Wu
-Christopher Wu
http://www.christopherwu.net/