New Details For Battle.net 2.0

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.

Comments

It's like a dance!

[Bieeanda]

...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?

Re:It's like a dance!

[mcbridematt]

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

Re:It's like a dance!

[mr_mischief]

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.

Re:It's like a dance!

[AlphaGremlin]

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.

Re:It's like a dance!

[GaryPatterson]

Pirating it will make it work on a LAN?

Wow, these clever pirates!

Re:OCD Compulsive Tidiness Achievement

[3p1ph4ny]

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.

Will they fix the security issues?

[felipekk]

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).

Why do people write this stuff?

[nobodyman]

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.

Re:Why do people write this stuff?

[Slow Smurf]

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.

Re:Achievement unlocked!

[thanatos_x]

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)