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New Details For Battle.net 2.0

Posted by Soulskill on from the upgrades dept.

The folks over at DIII.net combed through information from Blizzard employees about the revamped Battle.net that is slated to debut with Starcraft II. New features will include Achievements for various old and new Blizzard games, improved communication and community features, and better replay and spectating functionality.

26 of 96 comments (clear)

  1. So, GPG Online? by mr_mischief · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Seriously, isn't this what Microsoft and Sony have done for consoles and other game companies have already done for the PC? I wouldn't expect it to be big news that Starcraft 2 will be expected to keep up with features Battlefield 2, Team Fortress 2, and Supreme Commander have.

  2. It's like a dance! by Bieeanda · · Score: 5, Insightful

    ...Jay Wilson has even said that Diablo III won't even contain any other networking functionality besides Battle.net.

    One step forward, two steps back! Cha cha cha! Thanks guys, but some of us do, you know, LAN?

    1. Re:It's like a dance! by mcbridematt · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I look forward to the PvPGN folks setting Diablo III free.

    2. Re:It's like a dance! by mr_mischief · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Being rich doesn't preclude you from being compensated, but that's either a nice little straw man or an entirely mistaken reading of my post.

      What being rich from selling games should preclude is the attitude that the paying customers must jump through hoops because the rich development studios are going broke from people freeloading copies of the game. You can't be a big, profitable game company and be going broke from piracy at the same time. It's not possible.

    3. Re:It's like a dance! by AlphaGremlin · · Score: 4, Informative

      Not necessarily backwards as they are overcome some of the slowness of the old LAN days. Doesn't anyone else remember having to install IPX to get Starcraft to work? :)

      Having to install IPX hasn't been a problem for years, so that argument doesn't even make sense any more.

      We frequently have LAN parties with World of Warcraft with a single cable modem connection and can all play easily without a hitch.

      Not everybody has a decent connection like that. Plenty of people are stuck on ADSL, where you're lucky if you have 256kbps upload. I'm sure I'll be thanking Blizzard for dropping LAN play when I've saturated my connection and suffer horrible lag, not to mention the lag we already get here in AU when playing on US servers.

      The downside is having to have an internet connection, but the fact is internet is so ubiquitous these days it shouldn't make a difference.

      Not every situation where you'd want to play games includes an internet connection. I've been to many LAN games held in halls and schools with 200+ people where there's not an internet connection in sight, and that's exactly the sort of situation where you'd want to load up a game and have 8 or more people roll over the legions of hell. No LAN play makes it impossible.

      And this completely ignores the other benefit of LAN games, and that is hackable characters.

      If someone else wants to join a LAN game that is already in progress, you can simply copy your existing character, rename it and free up the skill points so they're all ready to drop in and start playing in minutes with all the quests and waypoints set. Or to make the game quicker we'd create an amulet with the maximum number of bonuses you could place on an item.

      Being able to edit the characters was one of the things that made it fun. We had competitions on who could hack up the best level 1 Hell-Difficulty character! Or we'd amp up the useless skills until you had level 200 Teeth and could one-shot bosses. It was stupid, silly fun, and that's part of what made the game last long after it should have gotten boring.

      Granted, allowing local characters online was foolish, and they should have never had open Battle.Net. But dropping LAN play will mean that I, and a lot of my friends, won't be buying it. It'll be just like Hellgate:London.

    4. Re:It's like a dance! by GaryPatterson · · Score: 4, Funny

      Pirating it will make it work on a LAN?

      Wow, these clever pirates!

    5. Re:It's like a dance! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      If you consider entering a 10-20 character key "jumping through hoops", you have serious typing deficiencies, and probably aren't the target audience for a PC game.

      But of course, on the other hand, if you think "not buying out of protest" and "illegally downloading for your own enjoyment" are the same thing, you have serious mental deficiencies, and not only aren't the target audience for the game, but probably would be better off in a padded cell without computer access at all.

      I mean, it's not like banks aren't rolling in money, what gives them the right to make me jump through hoops just so I can withdraw all the money from your account?

    6. Re:It's like a dance! by devman · · Score: 2, Informative

      I think your argument of hoops is really a stretch considering the fact that Battle.net has always been free, you just need a valid key, and it's not like you need to sign on to Battle.net to play single player. There are a bunch of reasons why LAN play might have been excluded piracy could just be a side effect, not having to bother coding or testing it is probably a bigger cost savings.

    7. Re:It's like a dance! by Idiomatick · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Yes, yes they will. You can even setup WOW/WC3 to work on LAN if you pirate it and its an mmo not remotely setup to work that way. Obviously not much is known about the guts of d3s net setup but i'm sure it will be similar. You'll likely need to download a fairly light ap along with d2 to run the server on one machine and have everyone connect to it. Essentially battlenet will be hosted on your lan.

    8. Re:It's like a dance! by billcopc · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Entering a 20-character key once, that's fine.

      Having to authenticate to a remote server every time you want to play, and being locked out of your game if either your connection or the servers' goes down, is a wholly different beast.

      And as others have mentioned, LAN gaming should not involve remote authentication. In fact, a lot of LAN parties don't even have net access, especially if they're renting the venue, or sometimes you just don't feel like dicking with your iptables for a bunch of greasy IRC buddies who are likely to surf kiddie/horse/goatse pr0n.

      --
      -Billco, Fnarg.com
  3. Sounds like something I know... by kcbanner · · Score: 2

    Sounds alot like some software named after vaporized H2O!

    --
    Obligatory blog plug: http://www.caseybanner.ca/
  4. OCD Compulsive Tidiness Achievement by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

    Congratulations! You have unlocked the OCD Compulsive Tidiness Achievement for Diablo 2.

    You picked up every single pile of gold, potion, ring, scroll, armor and weapon from the Blood Moor all the way to the Throne of Baal.

    1. Re:OCD Compulsive Tidiness Achievement by 3p1ph4ny · · Score: 3, Funny

      Throne of Destruction. Baal is in the Worldstone Chamber.

      Sorry, as someone who has wasted literally thousands of hours of my life playing the game, I feel obligated to correct you.

    2. Re:OCD Compulsive Tidiness Achievement by 3p1ph4ny · · Score: 2

      > Apparently you didn't notice Baal and his throne on the final level of Worldstone Keep?
      I did. What's your point?

      > Protip: Baal runs don't usually involve killing Baal. :)
      You clearly haven't played to 99 since 1.10.

  5. Will they fix the security issues? by felipekk · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Currently, Warcraft III requires your password to be 3 characters long and is case insensitive (clod). Hopefully the newer version will include some revamped security...

    (I've only tested this with Warcraft III, not sure about other games).

    1. Re:Will they fix the security issues? by Nathanbp · · Score: 2, Informative

      WoW passwords are case insensitive as well. (Really, I'm not joking, they are.)

  6. Achievement unlocked! by SheepLauncher · · Score: 2, Funny

    Congrats You just Lurker rushed a noob! ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED!

    1. Re:Achievement unlocked! by thanatos_x · · Score: 4, Funny

      http://ctrlaltdel-online.com/comic.php?d=20080804

      Not sure if that was a reference or not...

      Also this was apparently news about a month ago. (At least achievements)

      --
      I am not an expert. If I am misled in something, please correct me.
  7. Why do people write this stuff? by nobodyman · · Score: 4, Interesting
    From the article (emphasis mine):

    As Blizzard is learning from WoW when it comes to server infrastructure where they are battling hackers and exploiters, the new Battle.net will be built on programming that prevent any form of hacking or cheating.

    I hope this is zealotry on behalf of the fansite rather than Blizzard developers actually claiming (with a straight face) that Diablo III will be unhackable. Diablo III will be hacked, in the same way that every Blizzard game has been hacked, in the same way that virtually every retail game on the market has been hacked. The true test will be how vigilant Blizzard is in policing this sort of thing, how quickly they can patch compromised releases, their ability to prevent cheaters from poisoning the community at-large.

    1. Re:Why do people write this stuff? by Slow+Smurf · · Score: 4, Informative

      Characters were stored on the realms(battle.net) even in diablo 2. This was the "Closed Realm" option. "Open Realms" let you play your character in single player etc, and were trivial to hack, by design.(the file was entirely plain hex values for hp and so forth)

      For the most part, the only "hack" on the closed realms was duplicated items.(though to quite an absurd degree at times) There were not many hacks other than a map hack, which wasn't THAT good.

    2. Re:Why do people write this stuff? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

      I vote a different system. Grab a hash of the BIOS ID or other machine serial numbers, and send that up. If a certain computer is used in a number of hacking or exploiting attempts, silently ban the computer by having accounts that are run on there automatically locked after a random period of time. Then, someone trying to exploit for profit will wonder why all his stuff is getting disabled, and not know why.

      What could possibly go wrong?

    3. Re:Why do people write this stuff? by kesuki · · Score: 2, Interesting

      your solution although it sounds simple, is also simple to break. CRCs are very short, are easily tampered with (through hacked system drivers etc) and so on...

      but have you ever tried to connect to battle net with a no cd crack for a bliz title? sadly the b.net connection is refused, because to do no CD you need to remove software from the exe, that is easily checked for on connection to blizzard controlled servers.

      various cheats are often easily detected, although network sniffing based attacks on battle.net will never be fixable via any reasonable method (does everyone have the bandwidth, and CPU for a game to use 128 bit encryption on every single packet, when some 1,000 packets per second can be generated in a multiplayer game?)

      the type of data sent along the lan does include data (such as click locations) that would make a network sniff based undetectable map hack. the best part is all the data needed to generate such a sniffing tool is easily written by comparing network sniff data vs 'saved replay' data. along with a little hex editing, and basically rewriting the entire network stack of the game engine through reverse engineering..

      the plus side, is that once written, it doesn't need to be rewritten unless the main game changes how it parses data packets, and you can write nice USB usb drivers that allow keyboard and mouse movements from a 'irc bot' to be sent to a 'clean' unhacked PC running the game client... although certain keyboard/mouse commands are intentionally written buggy to make human bot distinction easy, and they could possibly intentionally create buggy packet formation that would screw up a bot, but not even be seen by a human...

      anyways, anything you can think of can be countered. there is no security.

      --
      https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
  8. Re:The most important feature... by HeronBlademaster · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I hope you mean 800x600. Or do you play with your monitor sideways?

    Seriously though, I've always been confused why they don't issue a quick patch to Diablo II to let us play it at a higher resolution. I can't think it would take very many changes...

  9. Re:The most important feature... by Moridineas · · Score: 2, Insightful

    What I'm surprised about is that they haven't done anything for Starcraft's resolution. The only thing I can figure is that at some point the game reached an "untouchable" status where they didn't feel it was right or fair to make such a sweeping change.

    I don't think they wanted to change the viewport size--can make a big difference.

  10. Interopability with BnetD? by apenzott · · Score: 2, Funny

    Does this work with BnetD?
    What features are not supported by this update?
    What backward compatibility is supported?
    When will BnetD be updated to work with Battle.net 2.0?

    --
    The Roman Rule: The one who says it cannot be done shall not interrupt the one who is doing it.
  11. Moderation is fighting words and libel/slander. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    HeronBlademaster,

    I didn't call anyone or even would label you a troll. I hear you easily because none have painted you.

    Who labeled that post as troll you think? If Slashdot was an open system, then it would actually display the moderations with the userID of the moderator. You speak of such an occurence of 'news' from a corporation that was never part of the "freedom of speech" clause. What entitled you ever to be a champertain or to hear the skirmish of someone that you aren't party with? That's not gospel on the tube you feed your eyes from, it's Your programming; to be more diametrically aware to your surroundings to the adjusted socially-comparative behavioral negation between Obamma and McCain. Why didn't you hear of the 1,000 other candidates that you didn't know about, that are more qualified than Paris Hilton?

    I've been hitting the books on this, and I posted enough website URL's to entice discussion, yet am labeled "troll" by an anonymous administrator wanting to push the thought aside. Here is how I see Vivendi/MTV's Blizzard Inc:
      (1)the 3 main/original developers have left the company, and are not on the corporate payroll, and evidence was they were not comfortable with what the company has become yet by non-compete clause can't speak their actual thoughts or will be sued.
      (2)every title feels like its Warcraft3 with improvements and image/environmental changes.
      (3)as all likeness to U.S., is evincing a service economy that will draw usability into a post-purchase fee that will never end.
      (4)the receipt from the store clerk doesn't represent the implication of Vivendi/MTV's Blizzard license that somehow forces the end-user to grant permission to Blizzard to administer the console computer through termination of accounting, exposure to lawsuits derived by use, non-payment of a service fee places an inferior use on the title and product independent of their domain, etc.
      (5)sporting events recognized throughout the world...that bleed into public exhibitions that are prohibited by same license agreement yet waived upon passage of large sums of cash.

    Blizzard has become a double standard. I'm satanic and look at how lame their representation of satan has somehow made its way into their lame Diablo title. People actually pay for this libel? Do you see me mis-representing the Catholic church as though they were a bunch of godly, god-fearing/loving people that don't intend any illwill or germ warfare on their neighbors? I just want to worship satan without a bunch of canibals dressing in Christian, Catholic, and Budhist clothing looking to devoure all that my kind have built up in universality.