Slashdot Mirror
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?
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.
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".
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...
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.
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.